GEOFFREY CHAUCER

Chaucer is admitted on all hands to be a great poet, but, by the general public at least, he is not frequently read.  He is like a cardinal virtue, a good deal talked about, a good deal praised, honoured by a vast amount of distant admiration, but with little practical acquaintance.  And for this there are many and obvious reasons.  He is an ancient, and the rich old mahogany is neglected for the new and glittering veneer.  He is occasionally gross; often tedious and obscure; he frequently leaves a couple of lovers, to cite the opinions of Greek and Roman authors; and practice and patience are required to melt the frost of his orthography, and let his music flow freely.  In the conduct of his stories he is garrulous, homely, and slow-paced.  He wrote in a leisurely world, when there was plenty of time for writing and reading, long before the advent of the printer’s devil or of Mr. Mudie.  There is little of the lyrical element in him.  He does not dazzle by sentences.  He is not quotable.  He does not shine in extracts so much as in entire poems.  There is a pleasant equality about his writing; he advances through a story at an even pace, glancing round him on everything with curious, humourous eyes, and having his say about everything.  He is the prince of story-tellers, and however much he may move others, he is not moved himself.  His mood is so kindly that he seems always to have written after dinner, or after hearing good news,—­that he had received from the king another grant of wine, for instance,—­and he discourses of love and lovers’ raptures, and the disappointments of life, half sportively, half sadly, like one who has passed through all, felt the sweetness and the bitterness of it, and been able to strike a balance.  He had his share of crosses and misfortune, but his was a nature which time and sorrow could only mellow and sweeten; and for all that had come and gone, he loved his “books clothed in black and red,” to sit at good men’s feasts; and if silent at table, as the Countess of Pembroke reported, the “stain upon his lip was wine.”  Chaucer’s face is to his writings the best preface and commentary; it is contented-looking, like one familiar with pleasant thoughts, shy and self-contained somewhat, as if he preferred his own company to the noisy and rude companionship of his fellows; and the outlines are bland, fleshy, voluptuous, as of one who had a keen relish for the pleasures that leave no bitter traces.  Tears and mental trouble, and the agonies of doubt, you cannot think of in connexion with it; laughter is sheathed in it, the light of a smile is diffused over it.  In face and turn of genius he differs in every respect from his successor, Spenser; and in truth, in Chaucer and Spenser we see the fountains of the two main streams of British song:  the one flowing through the drama and the humourous narrative, the other through the epic and the didactic poem.  Chaucer rooted