230 CHAUCER. 



punishment of sins against God and one s neighbour, in order 

 that we may shun them, and so escape the doom that awaits 

 them in the other world. Chaucer exposes the cheats of 

 the transmuter of metals, of the begging friars, and of the 

 pedlars of indulgences, in order that we may be on our 

 guard against them in this world. If we are to judge of 

 what is national only by the highest and most characteristic 

 types, surely we cannot fail to see in Chaucer the true 

 forerunner and prototype of Shakespeare, who, with an 

 imagination of far deeper grasp, a far wider reach of thought, 

 yet took the same delight in the pageantry of the actual 

 world, and whose moral is the moral of worldly wisdom 

 only heightened to the level of his wide-viewing mind, and 

 made typical by the dramatic energy of his plastic nature. 



Yet if Chaucer had little of that organic force of life 

 which so inspires the poem of Dante that, as he himself 

 says of the heavens, part answers to part with mutual 

 interchange of light, he had a structural faculty which 

 distinguishes him from all other English poets, his con 

 temporaries, and which indeed is the primary distinction of 

 poets properly so called. There is, to be sure, only one 

 other English writer coeval with himself who deserves in 

 any way to be compared with him, and that rather for 

 contrast than for likeness. 



With the single exception of Langland, the English poets, 

 his contemporaries, were little else than bad versifiers of 

 legends classic or mediaeval, as happened, without selection 

 and without art. Chaucer is the first who broke away from 

 the dreary traditional style, and gave not merely stories, 

 but lively pictures of real life as the ever-renewed substance 

 of poetry. He was a reformer, too, not only in literature, 

 but in morals. But as in the former his exquisite tact 

 saved him from all eccentricity, so in the latter the 

 pervading sweetness of his nature could never be betrayed 

 into harshness and invective. He seems incapable of 

 indignation. He mused good-naturedly over the vices and 

 follies of men, and, never forgetting that he was fashioned 

 of the same clay, is rather apt to pity than condemn. There 



