CHAUCER, 209 



the obtrusive weeds and grass-blades of the foreground which, 

 in looking at a real bit of scenery, we overlook ; but what a 

 sweep of vision is here ! and what happy generalisation in the 

 sixth verse as the poet turns away to the business of his story ! 

 The whole is full of open air. 



But it is in his characters, especially, that his manner is large 

 and free ; for he is painting history, though with the fidelity of 

 portrait. He brings out strongly the essential traits, character 

 istic of the genus rather than of the individual. The Merchant 

 who keeps so steady a countenance that 



There wist no wight that he was e er in debt, 



the Sergeant at Law, who seemed busier than he was/ the 

 Doctor of Medicine, whose study was but little on the Bible, 

 in all these cases it is the type and not the personage that fixes 

 his attention. William Blake says truly, though he expresses 

 his meaning somewhat clumsily, the characters of Chaucer s 

 Pilgrims are the characters which compose all ages and nations. 

 Some of the names and titles are altered by time, but the cha 

 racters remain for ever unaltered, and consequently they are the 

 physiognomies and lineaments of universal human life, beyond 

 which Nature never steps. Names alter, things never alter. 

 As Newton numbered the stars, and as Linnaeus numbered the 

 plants, so Chaucer numbered the classes of men/ In his out 

 side accessaries, it is true, he sometimes seems as minute as if 

 he were illuminating a missal. Nothing escapes his sure eye 

 for the picturesque the cut of the beard, the soil of armour on 

 the buff jerkin, the rust on the sword, the expression of the eye. 

 But in this he has an artistic purpose. It is here that he indi 

 vidualises, and, while every touch harmonises with and seems 

 to complete the moral features of the character, makes us feel 

 that we are among living men, and not the abstract images of 

 men. Crabbe adds particular to particular, scattering rather 

 than deepening the impression of reality, and making us feel as 

 if every man were a species by himself; but Chaucer, never for 

 getting the essential sameness of human nature, makes it pos 

 sible, and even probable, that his motley characters should meet 

 on a common footing, while he gives to each the expression that 

 belongs to him, the result of special circumstance or training. 

 Indeed, the absence of any suggestion of caste cannot fail to 

 strike any reader familiar with the literature on which he is sup 

 posed to have formed himself. No characters are at once so 

 broadly human and so definitely outlined as his. Belonging, 

 some of them, to extinct types, they continue contemporary and 



p 



