CHAUCER. 255 



one other English writer coeval with himself who de- 

 serves 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 re- 

 former, 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 is no 

 touch of cynicism in all he wrote. Dante's brush seems 

 sometimes to have been smeared with the burning pitch 

 of his own fiery lake. Chaucer's pencil is dipped in the 

 cheerful color-box of the old illuminators, and he has 

 their patient delicacy of touch, with a freedom far be- 

 yond their somewhat mechanic brilliancy. 



English narrative poetry, as Chaucer found it, though 

 it had not altogether escaped from the primal curse of 

 long-windedness so painfully characteristic of its pro- 

 totype, the French Romance of Chivalry, had certainly 

 shown a feeling for the picturesque, a sense of color, a 

 directness of phrase, and a simplicity of treatment which 

 give it graces of its own and a turn peculiar to itself. 

 In the easy knack of story-telling, the popular minstrels 

 cannot compare with Marie de France. The lightsome- 

 ness of fancy, that leaves a touch of sunshine and is 

 gone, is painfully missed in them all. Their incidents 



