CHAUCER. 235 



It was not the subject treated, but himself, that was 

 the new thing. Cela m\ippartlerd de droit, Mohere is 

 reported to have said when accused of plagiarism. 

 Chaucer pays that " xisurious interest which genius," as 

 Coleridge says, " always pays in borrowing." The char- 

 acteristic touch is his own. In the famous passage 

 about the caged bird, copied from the " Romaunt of the 

 Rose," the "gon eten wormes" was added by him. We 

 must let him,- if he will, eat the heart out of the litera- 

 ture that had preceded him, as we sacrifice the mulbei-ry- 

 leaves to the silkworm, because he knows how to convert 

 them into something richer and more lasting. The 

 question of originality is not one of form, but of sub- 

 stance, not of cleverness, but of imaginative power. 

 Given your material, in other words the life in which 

 you live, how much can you see in it 1 For on that 

 depends how much you can make of it. Is it merely 

 an aiTangement of man's contrivance, a patchwork of 

 expediencies for temporaiy comfort and convenience, 

 good enough if it last your time, or is it so much of the 

 surfiice of that ever-flowing deity which we call Time, 

 wherein w^e catch such fleeting reflection as is possible 

 for us, of our relation to perdurable things? This is 

 what makes the difterence between ^Eschylus and Eurip- 

 ides, between Shakespeare and Fletcher, between Goethe 

 and Heine, between literature and rhetoric. Some- 

 thing of this depth of insight, if not in the fullest, yet 

 in no inconsiderable measure, characterizes Chaucer. 

 We must not let his playfulness, his delight in the world 

 as mere spectacle, mislead us into thinking that he was 

 incapable of serious purpose or insensible to the deeper 

 meanings of life. 



There are four principal sources from which Chaucer 

 may be presumed to have drawn for poetical suggestion 

 or literary culture, — the Latins, the Troubadours, the 



