CHAUCER. 213 



substance; not of cleverness, but of imaginative power. 

 Given your material, in other words the life in which you 

 live, how much can you see in it*? For on that depends 

 how much you can make of it. Is it merely an arrange 

 ment of man s contrivance, a patchwork of expediencies for 

 temporary comfort and convenience, good enough if it last 

 your time \ or is it so much of the surface of that ever- 

 flowing deity which we call Time, wherein we catch such 

 fleeting reflection as is possible for us, of our relation to 

 predurable things ? This is what makes the difference 

 between j^schylus and Euripides, between Shakespeare 

 and Fletcher, between Goethe and Heine, between literature 

 and rhetoric. Something of this depth of insight, if not in 

 the fullest, yet in no inconsiderable measure, characterises 

 Chaucer. We must not let his playfulness, his delight in 

 the world as mere spectacle, mislead us into thinking that 

 he was incapable of serious purpose or insensible to the 

 deeper meanings of life. 



There are four principal sources from which Chaucer may 

 be presumed to have drawn for poetical suggestion or 

 literary culture the Latins, the Troubadours, the Trouveres, 

 and the Italians. It is only the two latter who can fairly 

 claim any immediate influence in the direction of his 

 thought or the formation of his style. The only Latin 

 poet who can be supposed to have influenced the spirit of 

 mediaeval literature is Ovid. In his sentimentality, his love 

 of the marvellous and the picturesque, he is its natural 

 precursor. The analogy between his Fasti and the versified 

 legends of saints is more than a fanciful one. He was cer 

 tainly popular with the poets of the thirteenth and four 

 teenth centuries. Virgil had well-nigh become mythical. 

 The chief merit of the Provengal poets is in having been 

 the first to demonstrate that it was possible to write with 

 elegance in a modern dialect, and their interest for us is 

 mainly as forerunners, as indications of tendency. Their 

 literature is prophecy, not fulfilment. Its formal sentiment 

 culminated in Laura, its ideal aspiration in Beatrice. 

 Shakespeare s hundred and sixth sonnet, if, for the 



