CHAUCER. 195 



musical instrument. If we should seek for a single word that 

 would define it most precisely, we should not choose simplicity, 

 but homeliness. There is more or less of this in all early 

 poetry, to be sure ; but I think it especially proper to English 

 poets, and to the most English among them, like Cowper, 

 Crabbe, and one is tempted to add Wordsworth where he 

 forget s Coleridge s private lectures. In reading such poets as 

 Langland, also, we are not to forget a certain charm of distance 

 in the very language they use, making it unhackneyed without 

 being alien. As it is the chief function of the poet to make the 

 familiar novel, these fortunate early risers of literature, who 

 gather phrases with the dew still on them, have their poetry 

 done for them, as it were, by their vocabulary. But in Chaucer, 

 as in all great poets, the language gets its charm from him. 

 The force and sweetness of his genius kneaded more kindly 

 together the Latin and Teutonic elements of our mother tongue, 

 and made something better than either. The necessity of 

 writing poetry, and not mere verse, made him a reformer 

 whether he would or no ; and the instinct of his finer ear was a 

 guide such as none before him or contemporary with him, nor 

 indeed any that came after him, till Spenser, could command. 

 Gower had no notion of the uses of rhyme except as a kind of 

 crease at the end of every eighth syllable, where the verse was 

 to be folded over again into another layer. He says, for 

 example, 



This maiden Canacee was hight, 

 Both in the day and eke by night, 



as if people commonly changed their names at dark. An:l he 

 could not even contrive to say this without the clumsy pleonasm 

 of both and eke. Chaucer was put to no such shifts of piecing 

 out his metre with loose- woven bits of baser stuff. He himself 

 says, in the Man of Law s Tale, 



Me lists not of the chaff nor of the straw 

 To make so long a tale as of the corn. 



One of the world s three or four great story-tellers, he was also 

 one of the best versifiers that ever made English trip and sing 

 with a gaiety that seems careless, but where every foot beats 

 time to the tune of the thought. By the skilful arrangement of 

 his pauses he evaded the monotony of the couplet, and gave to 

 the rhymed pentameter, which he made our heroic measure, 

 something of the architectural repose of blank verse. He found 

 our language lumpish, stiff, unwilling, too apt to speak Saxonly 

 in grouty monosyllables ; he left it enriched with the longer 



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