CHAUCER. 191 



by the vehicle of vulgar commerce between man and man. 

 What he instinctively felt was, that there was the living heart of 

 all speech, without whose help the brain were powerless to send 

 will, motion, meaning, to the limbs and extremities. But it is 

 true that a language, as respects the uses of literature, is liable 

 to a kind of syncope. No matter how complete its vocabulary 

 may be, how thorough an outfit of .inflections and case-endings 

 it may have, it is a mere dead body without a soul till some man 

 of genius set its arrested pulses once more athrob, and show 

 what wealth of sweetness, scorn, persuasion, and passion lay 

 there awaiting its liberator. In this sense it is hardly too much 

 to say that Chaucer, like Dante, found his native tongue a dialect 

 and left it a language. But it was not what he did with deliberate 

 purpose of reform, it was his kindly and plastic genius that 

 wrought this magic of renewal and inspiration. It was not the 

 new words he introduced,* but his way of using the old ones, 

 that surprised them into grace, ease, and dignity in their own 

 despite. In order to feel fully how much he achieved, let any 

 one subject himself to a penitential course of reading in his 

 contemporary, Gower, who worked in a material to all intents 

 and purposes the same, or listen for a moment to the barbarous 

 jangle which Lydgate and Occleve contrive to draw from the 

 instrument their master had tuned so deftly. Gower has posi 

 tively raised tediousness to the precision of science, he has made 

 dulness an heirloom for the students of our literary history. As 

 you slip to and fro on the frozen levels of his verse, which give 

 no foothold to the mind, as your nervous ear awaits the inevi 

 table recurrence of his rhyme, regularly pertinacious as the tick 

 of an eight-day clock and reminding you of Wordsworth s 



Once more the ass did lengthen out 

 The hard, dry, seesaw of his horrible bray, 



you learn to dread, almost to respect, the powers of this in 

 defatigable man. He is the undertaker of the fair mediaeval 

 legend, and his style has the hateful gloss, the seemingly unna 

 tural length, of a coffin. Love, beauty, passion, nature, art, life, 

 the natural and theological virtues, there is nothing beyond 

 his power to disenchant, nothing out of which the tremendous 

 hydraulic press of his allegory (or whatever it is. for I am not 

 sure if it be not something even worse) will not squeeze all 

 feeling and freshness and leave it a juiceless pulp. It matters 

 not where you try him, whether his story be Christian or pagan, 

 borrowed from history or fable, you cannot escape him. Dip in 



* I think he tried one now and then, like eyen columbine. 



