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Thus doing, your soul shall be placed with Dante's Beatrix, or Virgil's Anchises. The Preface is memorable for its critical judgments on Homer, Virgil, and Ovid, still more memorable for its glowing praise of Chaucer. It closes as it was fitting that the last work of Dryden should close, with an apology, full of manliness and dignity, for the licentiousness of his comedies.
New forces of thought and feeling which were destined to tell on every age of our later history broke their way through the crust of feudalism in the socialist revolt of the Lollards, and a sudden burst of military glory threw its glamour over the age of Crécy and Poitiers. It is this new gladness of a great people which utters itself in the verse of Geoffrey Chaucer.
There is the same difficulty when we come to literature. What would Chaucer or Spenser have thought of Browning or Swinburne? Would such poetry have seemed to them like an inspired product of art, or a delirious torrent of unintelligible verbiage?
Twice recently when I have startled one in an enclosed pool it has darted hither and thither in extreme excitement, even passing between my legs without offering any violence or venom, and has eventually disappeared in a miniature maelstrom of mud, as the reptile often does. Like that lively fellow of whom Chaucer tells: "He is heer and there, He is so variant, he bideth nowhere."
Yet I firmly believe that the poetical performance of Wordsworth is, after that of Shakespeare and Milton, of which all the world now recognizes the worth, undoubtedly the most considerable in our language from the Elizabethan age to the present time. Chaucer is anterior; and on other grounds, too, he cannot well be brought into the comparison.
But consider where Chaucer would be but for the work of the Chaucer clubs, and what an effect upon the universal progress of things is produced by the associate concentration upon the poet of so many minds. A cynic says that clubs and circles are for the accumulation of superficial information and unloading it on others, without much individual absorption in anybody.
At the same time, the labour which was expended upon the "Canterbury Tales" by their author manifestly obliges us to conclude that their composition occupied several years, with inevitable interruptions; while the gaiety and brightness of many of the stories, and the exuberant humour and exquisite pathos of others, as well as the masterly effectiveness of the "Prologue," make it almost certain that these parts of the work were written when Chaucer was not only capable of doing his best, but also in a situation which admitted of his doing it.
I desired him to retrace the poem, and with his pen confirm and denote those which were congenial with his own feeling and judgment. These two circumstances, connected with the literary career of this cherished object of his friend's esteem and love, have stamped a priceless value upon that friend's miniature 18mo copy of Chaucer.
But by this time Everard had the book in his hand. "Lucretius?" he said; "no, Master Bletson, this is not Lucretius, but a fitter comforter in dread or in danger Why should you be ashamed of it? Only, Bletson, instead of resting your head, if you can but anchor your heart upon this volume, it may serve you in better stead than Lucretius or Chaucer either."
No writer of that age, except perhaps Froissart, paints the connection of chivalry with the graces of the soul and the moral beauty which poetry associates with the female sex as Chaucer does. The aristocratic woman of chivalry, while delighting in martial sports, and hence masculine and haughty, is also condescending, tender, and gracious.
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