:284 CHAUCER. 



jerkin, the rust on the sword, the expression of the eye. 

 But in this he has an artistic purpose. It is here that 

 he individuaUzes, and, while every touch harmonizes 

 with and seems to complete the moral features of the 

 character, makes us feel that we are among living men, 

 and not the abstracted images of men. Crabbe adds 

 particular to particular, scattering rather than deepening 

 the impression of reality, and making us feel as if every 

 man were a species by himself; but Chaucer, never for- 

 getting the essential sameness of human nature, makes 

 it jjossible, and even probable, that his motley characters 

 should meet on a common footing, while he gives to 

 each the expression that belongs to him, the result of 

 special circumstance or training. Indeed, the absence of 

 any suggestion of caste cannot fail to strike any reader 

 familiar with the literature on which he is supposed 

 to have formed himself. No characters are at once so 

 broadly human and so definitely outlined as his. Belong- 

 ing, some of them, to extinct types, they continue con- 

 temporary and familiar forever. So wide is the difference 

 between knowing a great many men and that knowledge 

 of human nature which comes of sympathetic insight and 

 not of observation alone. 



It is this power of sympathy which makes Chaucer's 

 satire so kindly, — more so, one is tempted to say, than 

 the panegyric of Pope. Intellectual satire gets its force 

 from personal or moral antipathy, and measures offences 

 by some rigid conventional standard. Its mouth waters 

 over a galling word, and it loves to say Thou, pointing 

 out its victim to public scorn. Indignatio facit versus, 

 it boasts, though they might as often be fathered on 

 envy or hatred. But imaginative satire, warmed through 

 and through with the genial leaven of humor, smiles 

 half sadl}^ and murmurs We. Chaucer either makes one 

 knave betray another, through a natural jealousy of 



