1 90 CHAUCER. 



more passage occurs to me, almost incomparable in its simple 

 straightforward force and choice of the right word. 



Sir Graysteel to his-death thus thraws, 



He welters [wallows] and the grass updraws ; 



A little while then lay he still, 

 (Friends that saw him liked full ill,) 

 And bled into his armour bright. 



The last line, for suggestive reticence, almost deserves to be put 

 beside the famous 



Quel giorno plu non vi leggemmo avante 



of the great master of laconic narration. In the same poem* 

 the growing love of the lady, in its maidenliness of unconscious 

 betrayal, is touched with a delicacy and tact as surprising as 

 they are delightful. But such passages, which are the despair 

 of poets who have to work in a language that has faded into 

 diction, are exceptional. They are to be set down rather to good 

 luck than to art. Even the stereotyped similes of these fortunate 

 alliterates, like weary as water in a weir/ or glad as grass is 

 of the rain, are new, like nature, at the thousandth repetition. 

 Perhaps our palled taste overvalues the wild flavour of these 

 wayside treasure-troves. They are wood- strawberries, prized 

 in proportion as we must turn over more leaves ere we find 

 one. This popular literature is of value in helping us toward 

 a juster estimate of Chaucer by showing what the mere lan 

 guage was capable of, and that all it wanted was a poet to put 

 it through its paces. For though the poems I have quoted be, 

 in their present form, later than he, they are, after all, but 

 modernised versions of older copies, which they doubtless re 

 produce with substantial fidelity. 



It is commonly assumed that Chaucer did for English what 

 Dante is supposed to have done for Italian and Luther for 

 German, that he, in short, in some hitherto inexplicable way, 

 created it. But this is to speak loosely and without book. Lan 

 guages are never made in any such fashion, still less are they the 

 achievement of any single man, however great his genius, how 

 ever powerful his individuality. They shape themselves by 

 laws as definite as those which guide and limit the growth of 

 other living organisms. Dante, indeed, has told us that he 

 chose to write in the tongue that might be learned of nurses 

 and chafferers in the market. His practice shows that he knew 

 perfectly well that poetry has needs which cannot be answered 



* Sir Eger and Sir Grine in the Percy Folio 1 he passage quoted is from Ellis. 



