CHA UCER. 229 



of order and proportion, sometimes well-nigh hardening into 

 mathematical precision and formalism a tendency which 

 at last brought the poetry of the Romanic races to a dead 

 lock of artifice and decorum. Chaucer, on the other hand, 

 drew from the South a certain airiness of sentiment and 

 expression, a felicity of phrase, and an elegance of turn 

 hitherto unprecedented and hardly yet matched in our 

 literature, but all the while kept firm hold of his native 

 soundness of understanding, and that genial humour which 

 seems to be the proper element of worldly wisdom. With 

 Dante, life represented the passage of the soul from a state 

 of nature to a state of grace ; and there would have been 

 almost an even chance whether (as Burns says) the Divina 

 Commedia had turned out a song or a sermon, but for the 

 wonderful genius of its author, which has compelled the 

 sermon to sing and the song to preach, whether they would 

 or no. With Chaucer, life is a pilgrimage, but only that 

 his eye may be delighted with the varieties of costume and 

 character. There are good morals to be found in Chaucer, 

 but they are always incidental. With Dante the main 

 question is the saving of the soul, with Chaucer it is the 

 conduct of life. The distance between them is almost that 

 between holiness and prudence. Dante applies himself to 

 the realities and Chaucer to the scenery of life, and the 

 former is consequently the more universal poet, as the 

 latter is the more truly national one. Dante represents the 

 justice of God, and Chaucer his loving-kindness. If there 

 is anything that may properly be called satire in the one, it 

 is like a blast of the Divine wrath, before which the 

 wretches cower and tremble, which rends away their cloaks 

 of hypocrisy and their masks of worldly propriety, and 

 leaves them shivering in the cruel nakedness of their shame. 

 The satire of the other is genial with the broad sunshine of 

 humour, into which the victims walk forth with a delightful 

 unconcern, laying aside of themselves the disguises that 

 seem to make them uncomfortably warm, till they have 

 made a thorough betrayal of themselves so unconsciously 

 that we almost pity while we laugh. Dante shows us the 



