Adventures in Criticism | Page 3

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 painted that human nature which is, indeed, constant enough--a rogue in the fifteenth century being at heart what a rogue is in the nineteenth century and was in the twelfth; and an honest or knightly man being, in like manner, very similar to other such at any other time. And the work of these great idealists is, therefore, always universal: not because it is not portrait, but because it is complete portrait down to the heart, which is the same in all ages; and