CHAUCER. 285 



competition, or else expose himself with a naivete of 

 good-humored cynicism which amuses rather than dis- 

 gusts. In the fomier case the butt has a kind of claim 

 on our sympathy ; in the latter, it seems nothing strange 

 if the sunny atmosphere which floods that road to Can- 

 terbury should tempt anybody to tlu'ow off one disguise 

 after another without suspicion. With perfect tact, too, 

 the Host is made the choragm in this diverse company, 

 and the coarse jollity of his temperament explains, if it 

 does not excuse, much that would otherwise seem out of 

 keeping. Surely nobody need have any scruples with 

 him. 



Chaucer seems to me to have been one of the most 

 purely original of poets, as much so in respect of the 

 world that is about us as Dante in respect of that which 

 is within us. There had been nothing like him before, 

 there has been nothing since. He is original, not in the 

 sense that he thinks and says what nobody ever thought 

 and said before,' and what nobody can ever think and 

 say again, but because he is always natiu-al, because, 

 if not always absolutely new, he is always delightfully 

 fresh, because he sets before us the world as it honestly 

 appeared to Geofii-ey Chaucer, and not a woi'ld as it 

 seemed proper to cei'tain people that it ought to appear. 

 He found that the poetry which had preceded him had 

 been first the expression of individual feeling, then of 

 class feeling as the vehicle of legend and history, and 

 at last had wellnigh lost itself in chasing the mirage of 

 allegory. Literature seemed to have passed through 

 the natural stages wdiich at regular intervals bring it to 

 decline. Even the lyrics of the jongletirs were all run 

 in one mould, and the Pastourelles of Northern France 

 had become as artificial as the Pastorals of Pope. The 

 Romances of chivalrj^ had been made over into prose, 

 and the Melusine of his contemporary Jehan d' Arras \a- 



