CHAUCER. 253 



were of mixed race, Dante certainly, Chaucer presum- 

 ably so. Dante seems to have inherited on tlie Teutonic 

 side the strong moral sense, the almost nervous irrita- 

 bility of conscience, and the tendency to mysticism which 

 made him the first of Christian poets, — first in point 

 of time and first in point of greatness. From the other 

 side he seems to have received almost in overplus a feel- 

 ing of order and proportion, sometimes wellnigh harden- 

 ing into mathematical precision and formalism, — a 

 tendency which at last brought the poetry of the Ro- 

 manic races to a dead-lock of artifice and decorum. 

 Chaucer, on the other hand, drew from the South a 

 certain airiness of sentiment and expression, a felicity of 

 phrase, and an elegance of turn hitherto unprecedented 

 and hardly yet matched in our literature, but all the 

 while kept firm hold of his native soundness of under- 

 standing, and that genial humor which seems to be the 

 proper element of worldly wisdom. With Dante, life 

 represented the passage of the soul from a state of na- 

 ture to a state of grace ; and there would have been 

 almost an even chance whether (as Burns sa3"s) the 

 Divina Commedia had turned out a song or a sermon, 

 but for the wonderful genius of its author, which has 

 comj^elled the sermon to sing and the song to preach, 

 whether they would or no. With Chaucer, life is a pil- 

 grimage, but only that his eye may be delighted with 

 the varieties of costume and character. There are good 

 morals to be found in Chaucer, but they are always inci- 

 dental. With Dante the main question is the saving of 

 the soul, with Chaucer it is the conduct of life. The 

 distance between them is almost that between holiness 

 and prudence. Dante applies himself to the realities 

 and Chaucer to the scenery of life, and the former is 

 consequently the more universal poet, as the latter is 

 the more truly national one. Dante represents the 



