206 CHAUCER. 



all is said in saying that he has style at all, for that consists 

 mainly in the absence of undue emphasis and exaggeration, in 

 the clear uniform pitch which penetrates our interest and retains 

 it, where mere loudness would only disturb and irritate. 



Not that Chaucer cannot be intense, too, on occasion ; but it 

 is with a quiet intensity of his own, that comes in as it were by 

 accident 



Upon a thicke palfrey, paper-white, 



With saddle red embroidered with delight, 



Sits Dido : 



And she is fair as is the brighte morrow 



That healeth sicke folk of nightes sorrow. 



Upon a courser startling as the fire, 



^Eneas sits. 



Pandarus, looking at Troilus, 



Took up a light and found his countenance 

 As for to look upon an old romance. 



With Chaucer it is always the thing itself and not the descrip 

 tion of it that is the main object. His picturesque bits are 

 incidental to the story, glimpsed in passing ; they never stop the 

 way. His key is so low that his high lights are never obtrusive. 

 His imitators, like Leigh Hunt, and Keats in his Endymion/ 

 missing the nice gradation with which the master toned every 

 thing down, become streaky. Hogarth, who reminds one of him 

 in the variety and natural action of his figures, is like him also 

 in the subdued brilliancy of his colouring. When Chaucer con 

 denses, it is because his conception is vivid. He does not need 

 to personify Revenge, for personification is but the subterfuge of 

 unimaginative and professional poets ; but he embodies the very 

 passion itself in a verse that makes us glance over our shoulder 

 as if we heard a stealthy tread behind us : 



The smiler with the knife hid under the cloak.* 



And yet how unlike is the operation of the imaginative faculty 

 in him and Shakespeare ! When the latter describes, his epi 

 thet simply always an impression on the moral sense (so to 

 speak) of the person who hears or sees. The sun flatters the 

 mountain-tops with sovereign eye ; the bending weeds lacquey 

 the dull stream; the shadow of the falcon coucheth the fowl 

 below; the smoke is helpless; when Tarquin enters the 

 chamber of Lucrece the threshold grates the door to have him 

 heard/ His outward sense is merely a window through which 

 the metaphysical eye looks forth, and his mind passes over at 

 once from the simple sensation to the complex meaning of it 



* Compare this with the Mumbo- Jumbo Revenge in Collins s Ode. 



