Adventures in Criticism | Page 3

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:--
+"Hos phato tous d' ede katechen physizoos aia en Lakedaimoni authi,
phile en patridi gaie."+
These lines live because they contain something which is also
permanent in man: they depend confidently on us, and will as
confidently depend on our great-grandchildren. I was glad to see this
point very courageously put the other day by Professor Hiram Corson,
of Cornell University, in an address on "The Aims of Literary
Study"--an address which Messrs. Macmillan have printed and
published here and in America. "All works of genius," says Mr. Corson,
"render the best service, in literary education, when they are first
assimilated in their absolute character. It is, of course, important to
know their relations to the several times and places in which they were
produced; but such knowledge is not for the tyro in literary study. He

must first know literature, if he is constituted so to know it, in its
absolute character. He can go into the philosophy of its relationships
later, if he like, when he has a true literary education, and when the
'years that bring the philosophic mind' have been reached. Every great
production of genius is, in fact, in its essential character, no more
related to one age than to another. It is only in its phenomenal character
(its outward manifestations) that it has a special relationship." And Mr.
Corson very appositely quotes Mr. Ruskin on Shakespeare's historical
plays--
"If it be said that Shakespeare wrote perfect historical plays on subjects
belonging to the preceding centuries, I answer that they are perfect
plays just because there is no care about centuries in them, but a life
which all men recognize for the human life of all time; and this it is, not
because Shakespeare sought to give universal truth, but because,
painting honestly and completely from the men about him, he