212 CHAUCER. 



whether an author have original force enough to assimilate 

 all he has acquired, or that be so over-mastering as to 

 assimilate him. If the poet turn out the stronger, we 

 allow him to help himself from other people with wonderful 

 equanimity. Should a man discover the art of transmuting 

 metals, and present us with a iHmp of gold as large as 

 an ostrich-egg, would it be in human nature to inquire too 

 nicely whether he had stolen the lead ? 



Nothing is more certain than that great poets are not 

 sudden prodigies, but slow results. As an oak profits by the 

 foregone lives of immemorial vegetable races that have 

 worked-over the juices of earth and air into organic life out 

 of whose dissolution a soil might gather fit to maintain that 

 nobler birth of nature, so we may be sure that the genius of 

 every remembered poet drew the forces that built it up out 

 of the decay of a long succession of forgotten ones. Nay, 

 in proportion as the genius is vigorous and original will its 

 indebtedness be greater, will its roots strike deeper into the 

 past and grope in remoter fields for the virtue that must 

 sustain it. Indeed, if the works of the great poets teach 

 anything, it is to hold mere invention somewhat cheap. It 

 is not the finding of a thing, but the making something out 

 of it after it is found, that is of consequence. Accordingly, 

 Chaucer, like Shakespeare, invented almost nothing. 

 Wherever he found anything directed to Geoffrey 

 Chaucer, he took it and made the most of it. It was 

 not the subject treated, but himself, that was the new 

 thing. Cela m appartient de droit, Moliere is reported to 

 have said when accused of plagiarism. Chaucer pays that 

 &quot; usurious interest which genius,&quot; as Coleridge says, &quot; always 

 pays in borrowing.&quot; The characteristic touch is his own. 

 In the famous passage about the caged bird, copied from 

 the &quot; Romaunt of the Rose,&quot; the &quot; gon eten wormes &quot; was 

 added by him. We must let him, if he will, eat the heart 

 out of the literature that had preceded him, as we sacrifice 

 the mulberry-leaves to the silkworm, because he knows how 

 to convert them into something richer and more lasting. 

 The question of originality is not one of form, but of 



