“In la sua volontade e nostra pace ...”

is altogether beyond Chaucer’s reach; we praise him, but we feel that this accent is out of the question for him.  It may be said that it was necessarily out of the reach of any poet in the England of that stage of growth.  Possibly; but we are to adopt a real, not a historic, estimate of poetry.  However we may account for its absence, something is wanting, then, to the poetry of Chaucer, which poetry must have before it can be placed in the glorious class of the best.  And there is no doubt what that something is.  It is the[Greek:  spoudaiotaes] the high and excellent seriousness, which Aristotle assigns as one of the grand virtues of poetry.  The substance of Chaucer’s poetry, his view of things and his criticism of life, has largeness, freedom, shrewdness, benignity; but it has not this high seriousness.  Homer’s criticism of life has it, Dante’s has it, Shakespeare’s has it.  It is this chiefly which gives to our spirits what they can rest upon; and with the increasing demands of our modern ages upon poetry, this virtue of giving us what we can rest upon will be more and more highly esteemed.  A voice from the slums of Paris, fifty or sixty years after Chaucer, the voice of poor Villon[96] out of his life of riot and crime, has at its happy moments (as, for instance, in the last stanza of La Belle Heaulmiere [97]) more of this important poetic virtue of seriousness than all the productions of Chaucer.  But its apparition in Villon, and in men like Villon, is fitful; the greatness of the great poets, the power of their criticism of life, is that their virtue is sustained.

To our praise, therefore, of Chaucer as a poet there must be this limitation:  he lacks the high seriousness of the great classics, and therewith an important part of their virtue.  Still, the main fact for us to bear in mind about Chaucer is his sterling value according to that real estimate which we firmly adopt for all poets.  He has poetic truth of substance, though he has not high poetic seriousness, and corresponding to his truth of substance he has an exquisite virtue of style and manner.  With him is born our real poetry.

For my present purpose I need not dwell on our Elizabethan poetry, or on the continuation and close of this poetry in Milton.  We all of us profess to be agreed in the estimate of this poetry; we all of us recognize it as great poetry, our greatest, and Shakespeare and Milton as our poetical classics.  The real estimate, here, has universal currency.  With the next age of our poetry divergency and difficulty begin.  An historic estimate of that poetry has established itself; and the question is, whether it will be found to coincide with the real estimate.