258 CHAUCER. 



imaginative satire, warmed through and through with the 

 genial leaven of humour, smiles half sadly and murmurs 

 We. Chaucer either makes one knave betray another, 

 through a natural jealousy of competition, or else expose 

 himself with a naivete of good-humoured cynicism which 

 amuses rather than disgusts. In the former case the butt 

 has a kind of claim on our sympathy ; in the latter, it 

 seems nothing strange if the sunny atmosphere which floods 

 that road to Canterbury should tempt anybody to throw oiF 

 one disguise after another without suspicion. With per 

 fect tact, too, the Host is made the choragus in this diverse 

 company, and the coarse jollity of his temperament explains, 

 if it does not excuse, much that would otherwise seem out 

 of keeping. Surely nobody need have any scruples with 

 him. 



Chaucer seems to me to have been one of the most purely 

 original of poets, as much so in respect of the world that is 

 about us as Dante in respect of that which is within us. 

 There had been nothing like him before, there has been 

 nothing since. He is original, not in the sense that he 

 thinks and says what nobody ever thought and said before, 

 and what nobody can ever think and say again, but because 

 he is always natural ; because, if not always absolutely 

 new, he is always delightfully fresh, because he sets before 

 us the world as it honestly appeared to Geoffrey Chaucer, 

 and not a world as it seemed proper to certain people 

 that it ought to appear. He found that the poetry 

 which had preceded him had been first the expression 

 of individual feeling, then of class feeling as the vehicle 

 of legend and history, and at last had well-nigh lost 

 itself in chasing the mirage of allegory. Literature 

 seemed to have passed through the natural stages which 

 at regular intervals bring it to decline. Even the lyrics 

 of the jongleurs were all run in one mould, and the Pas- 

 tourelles of Northern France had become as artificial as 

 the Pastorals of Pope. The Romances of chivalry had been 

 made over into prose, and the Melusine of his contemporary 

 Jehan d Arras is the forlorn hope of the modern novel. 



