2O8 CHAUCER. 



who comes in winner after a steady pull with wind and muscle 

 to spare. Chaucer never shows any signs of effort, and it is a 

 main proof of his excellence that he can be so inadequately 

 sampled by detached passages by single lines taken away from 

 the connection in which they contribute to the general effect. 

 He has that continuity of thought, that evenly prolonged power, 

 and that delightful equanimity, which characterise the higher 

 orders of mind. There is something in him of the disinterested 

 ness that made the Greeks masters in art. His phrase is never 

 importunate. His simplicity is that of elegance, not of poverty. 

 The quiet unconcern with which he says his best things is pecu 

 liar to him among English poets, though Goldsmith, Addison, 

 and Thackeray have approached it in prose. He prattles inad 

 vertently away, and all the while, like the princess in the story, 

 lets fall a pearl at every other word. It is such a piece of good 

 luck to be natural ! It is the good gift which the fairy godmother 

 brings to her prime favourites in the cradle. If not genius, it is 

 alone what makes genius amiable in the arts. If a man have 

 it not, he will never find it, for when it is sought it is gone. 



When Chaucer describes anything, it is commonly by one of 

 those simple and obvious epithets or qualities that are so easy to 

 miss. Is it a woman? He tells us she \s fresh; that she has 

 glad eyes ; that every day her beauty newed : that 



Methought all fellowship as naked 

 Withouten her that I saw once, 

 As a cordne without the stones. 



Sometimes he describes amply by the merest hint, as where the 

 Friar, before setting himself softly down, drives away the cat. 

 We know without need of more words that he has chosen the 

 snuggest corner. In some of his early poems he sometimes, it 

 is true, falls into the catalogue style of his contemporaries ; but 

 after he had found his genius he never particularises too much 

 a process as deadly to all effect as an explanation to a pun. The 

 first stanza of the * Clerk s Tale gives us a landscape whose 

 stately choice of objects shows a skill in composition worthy of 

 Claude, the last artist who painted nature epically: 



There is at the west ende of Itaile, 

 Down at the foot of Vesulus the cold, 

 A lusty plain abundant of vitaile, 

 Where many a tower and town thou may st behold 

 That founded were in time of fathers old, 

 And many another delitablc sight; 

 And Saluce s this noble country hight. 



The Pre-Raphaelite style of landscape entangles the eye among 



