234 CHAUCER. 



him imconceived and inconceivable. Chaucer undoubt- 

 edly began as an imitator, perhaps as mere translator, 

 serving the needful apprenticeship in the use of his 

 tools. Children learn to speak by watching the lips and 

 catching the words of those who know how already, and 

 poets learn in the same way from their elders. They 

 import their raw material from any and everywhere, and 

 the question at last conies down to this, whether an 

 author have original force enough to assimilate all he 

 has acquired, or that be so overmastering as to assimi- 

 late him. If the poet turn out the stronger, we allow 

 him to help himself from other people with wonderful 

 equanimity. Should a man discover the art of trans- 

 muting metals and present us with a lump of gold as 

 large as an ostrich-egg, would it be in human nature to 

 inquire too nicely whether he had stolen the lead 1 



Nothing is more certain than that great poets are not 

 sudden prodigies, but slow results. As an oak profits 

 by the foregone lives of immemorial vegetable races 

 that have worked-over the juices of earth and air into 

 organic life out of whose dissolution a soil might gather 

 fit to maintain that nobler birth of nature, so we may 

 be sure that the genius of every remembered poet drew 

 the forces that built it up out of the decay of a long 

 succession of forgotten ones. Nay, in proportion as the 

 genius is vigorous and original will its indebtedness be 

 greater, will its roots strike deeper into the past and 

 grope in remoter fields for the virtue that must sustain 

 it. Indeed, if the works of the great poets teach any- 

 thing, it is to hold mere invention somewhat cheap. It 

 is not the finding of a thing, but the making something 

 out of it after it is found, that is of consequence. Ac- 

 cordingly, Chaucer, like Shakespeare, invented almost 

 nothing. Wherever he found anything directed to 

 Geoffrey Chaucer, he took it and made the most of it 



