CHAUCER. 233 



us toward a juster estimate of Chaucer by showing what 

 the mere language was capable of, and that all it wanted 

 was a poet to put it through its paces. For though the 

 poems I have quoted be, in their present form, later than he, 

 they are, after all, but modernised versions of older copies, 

 which they doubtless reproduce with substantial fidelity. 



It is commonly assumed that Chaucer did for English 

 what Dante is supposed to have done for Italian and 

 Luther for German, that he, in short, in some hitherto 

 inexplicable way, created it. But this is to speak loosely 

 and without book. Languages are never made in any such 

 fashion, still less are they the achievement of any single 

 man, however great his genius, however powerful his indi 

 viduality. They shape themselves by laws as definite as 

 those which guide ^nd limit the growth of other living 

 organisms. Dante, indeed, has told us that he chose to 

 write in the tongue that might be learned of nurses and 

 chafferers in the market. His practice shows that he knew 

 perfectly well that poetry has needs which cannot be 

 answered by the vehicle of vulgar commerce between man 

 and man. What he instinctively felt was, that there was 

 the living heart of all speech, without whose help the brain 

 were powerless to send will, motion, meaning, to the limbs 

 and extremities. But it is true that a language, as respects 

 the uses of literature, is liable to a kind of syncope. No 

 matter how complete its vocabulary may be, how thorough 

 an outfit of inflections and case-endings it may have, it is a 

 mere dead body without a soul till some man of genius set 

 its arrested pulses once more athrob, and show what wealth 

 of sweetness, scorn, persuasion, and passion lay there 

 awaiting its liberator. In this sense it is hardly too much 

 to say that Chaucer, like Dante, found his native tongue a 

 dialect and left it a language. But it was not what he did 

 with deliberate purpose of reform, it was his kindly and 

 plastic genius that wrought this magic of renewal and 

 inspiration. It was not the new words he introduced,* 

 but his way of using the old ones, that surprised them into 

 * I think he tried one now and then, like &quot;eyen columbine.&quot; 



