226 CHAUCER. 



bread ; less than anything will he have this smeared with 

 that Barmecide butter of fair words. This is the lovely 

 and noble side of his character. Indignation at this will 

 make him forget crops and cattle : and this, after so many 

 centuries, will give him at last a poet in the monk of Eisle- 

 ben, who shall cut deep on the memory of mankind that 

 brief creed of conscience &quot; Here am I : God help me : I 

 cannot otherwise.&quot; This, it seems to me, with dogged 

 sense of justice both results of that equilibrium of thought 

 which springs from clear-sighted understanding makes the 

 beauty of the Saxon nature. 



He believes in another world, and conceives of it without 

 metaphysical subtleties as something very much after the 

 pattern of this, but infinitely more desirable. Witness the 

 vision of John Bunyan. Once beat it into him that his 

 eternal well-being, as he calls it, depends on certain con 

 ditions, that only so will the balance in the ledger of 

 eternity be in his favour, and the man who seemed wholly 

 of this world will give all that he has, even his life, with a 

 superb simplicity and scorn of the theatric, for a chance in 

 the next. Hard to move, his very solidity of nature makes 

 him terrible when once fairly set agoing. He is the man 

 of all others slow to admit the thought of revolution ; but 

 let him once admit it, he will carry it through and make it 

 stick a secret hitherto undiscoverable by other races. 



But poetry is not made out of the understanding ; that is 

 not the sort of block out of which you can carve wing-footed 

 Mercuries. The question of common- sense is always, &quot; What 

 is it good for ? &quot; a question which would abolish the rose 

 and be answered triumphantly by the cabbage. The danger 

 of the prosaic type of mind lies in the stolid sense of 

 superiority which blinds it to everything ideal, to the use of 

 anything that does not serve the practical purposes of life. 

 Do we not remember how the all-observing and all-fathom 

 ing Shakespeare has typified this in Bottom, the weaver 1 

 Surrounded by all the fairy creations of fancy, he sends one 

 to fetch him the bag of a humble-bee, and can find no better 

 employment for Mustard-seed than to help Cavalero Cobweb 



