A work such as Professor Skeat’s Chaucer puts the critic into a frame of mind that lies about midway between modesty and cowardice.  One asks—­“What right have I, who have given but a very few hours of my life to the enjoying of Chaucer; who have never collated his MSS.; who have taken the events of his life on trust from his biographers; who am no authority on his spelling, his rhythms, his inflections, or the spelling, rhythms, inflections of his age; who have read him only as I have read other great poets, for the pleasure of reading—­what right have I to express any opinion on a work of this character, with its imposing commentary, its patient research, its enormous accumulation of special information?”

Nevertheless, this diffidence, I am sure, may be carried too far.  After all is said and done, we, with our average life of three-score years and ten, are the heirs of all the poetry of all the ages.  We must do our best in our allotted time, and Chaucer is but one of the poets.  He did not write for specialists in his own age, and his main value for succeeding ages resides, not in his vocabulary, nor in his inflections, nor in his indebtedness to foreign originals, nor in the metrical uniformities or anomalies that may be discovered in his poems; but in his poetry.  Other things are accidental; his poetry is essential.  Other interests—­historical, philological, antiquarian—­must be recognized; but the poetical, or (let us say) the spiritual, interest stands first and far ahead of all others.  By virtue of it Chaucer, now as always, makes his chief and his convincing appeal to that which is spiritual in men.  He appeals by the poetical quality of such lines as these, from Emilia’s prayer to Diana: 

    “Chaste goddesse, wel wostow that I
     Desire to been a mayden al my lyf,
     Ne never wol I be no love ne wyf.

     I am, thou woost, yet of thy companye,
     A mayde, and love hunting and venerye,
     And for to walken in the wodes wilde,
     And noght to been a wyf, and be with childe...”

Or of these two from the Prioresses’ Prologue: 

    “O moder mayde!  O mayde moder free! 
     O bush unbrent, brenninge in Moyses sighte...”

Or of these from the general Prologue—­also thoroughly poetical, though the quality differs: 

    “Ther was also a Nonne, a Prioresse,
     That of hir smyling was ful simple and coy;
     Hir gretteste ooth was but by seynt Loy;
     And she was cleped madame Eglentyne. 
     Ful wel she song the service divyne,
     Entuned in hir nose ful semely;
     And Frensh she spak ful faire and fetisly,
     After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe,
     For Frensh of Paris was to hir unknowe...”

Now the essential quality of this and of all very great poetry is also what we may call a universal quality; it appeals to those sympathies which, unequally distributed and often distorted or suppressed, are yet the common possessions of our species.  This quality is the real antiseptic of poetry:  this it is that keeps a line of Homer perennially fresh and in bloom:—­