210 CHAUCER. 



familiar for ever. So wide is the difference between knowing a 

 great many men and that knowledge of human nature which 

 comes of sympathetic insight and not of observation alone. 



It is this power of sympathy which makes Chaucer s satire so 

 kindly more so, one is tempted to say, than the panegyric of 

 Pope. Intellectual satire gets its force from personal or moral 

 antipathy, and measures offences by some rigid conventional 

 standard. Its mouth waters over a galling word, and it loves to 

 say Tho-itj pointing out its victim to public scorn. Indignatio 

 facit versus, it boasts, though they might as often be fathered on 

 envy or hatred. But imaginative satire, warmed through and 

 through with the genial leaven of humour, smiles half sadly and 

 murmurs We. Chaucer either makes one knave betray another, 

 through a natural jealousy of competition, or else expose himself 

 with a naivete of good-humoured cynicism which amuses rather 

 than disgusts. In the former case the butt has a kind of claim 

 on our sympathy ; in the latter, it seems nothing strange if the 

 sunny atmosphere which floods that road to Canterbury should 

 tempt anybody to throw off one disguise after another without 

 suspicion. With perfect tact, too, the Host is made the choragus 

 in this diverse company, and the coarse jollity of his tempera 

 ment explains, if it does not excuse, much that would otherwise 

 seem out of keeping. Surely nobody need have any scruples 

 with him. 



Chaucer seems to me to have been one of the most purely 

 original of poets, as much so in respect of the world that is 

 about us as Dante in respect of that which is within us. There 

 had been nothing like him before, there has been nothing since. 

 He is original, not in the sense that he thinks and says what 

 nobody ever thought and said before, and what nobody can ever 

 think and say again, but because he is always natural ; because, 

 if not always absolutely new, he is always delightfully fresh, 

 because he sets before us the world as it honestly appeared to 

 Geoffrey Chaucer, and not a world as it seemed proper to 

 certain people that it ought to appear. He found that the poetry 

 which had preceded him had been first the expression of indivi 

 dual feeling, then of class feeling as the vehicle of legend and 

 history, and at last had well nigh lost itself in chasing the mirage 

 of allegory. Literature seemed to have passed through the 

 natural stages which at regular intervals bring it to decline. 

 Even the lyrics of \hejongleurs were all run in one mould, and 

 the Pastourelles of Northern France had become as artificial as 

 the Pastorals of Pope. The Romances of chivalry had been 



