Chapter 1 - Page 2

essential, the eternal,
and it directs itself to the shows of things. Such periods may embody
in their literatures a large amount of thought, -- thought which is
conversant with the externality of things; but that of itself
will not constitute a noble literature, however perfect
the forms in which it may be embodied, and the general sense
of the civilized world, independently of any theories of literature,
will not regard such a literature as noble. It is made up of what
must be, in time, superseded; it has not a sufficiently large element
of the essential, the eternal, which can be reached only through
the assimilating life of the spirit. The spirit may be
so "cabined, cribbed, confined" as not to come to any consciousness
of itself; or it may be so set free as to go forth and recognize
its kinship, respond to the spiritual world outside of itself, and,
by so responding, KNOW what merely intellectual philosophers
call the UNKNOWABLE.

To turn now to the line of English poets who may be said to have
passed the torch of spiritual life, from lifted hand to hand,
along the generations. And first is

"the morning star of song, who made
His music heard below:

"Dan Chaucer, the first warbler, whose sweet breath
Preluded those melodious bursts that fill
The spacious times of great Elizabeth
With sounds that echo still."

Chaucer exhibits, in a high degree, this life of the spirit,
and it is the secret of the charm which his poetry possesses for us
after a lapse of five hundred years. It vitalizes, warms, fuses,
and imparts a lightsomeness to his verse; it creeps and kindles
beneath the tissues of his thought. When we compare Dryden's
modernizations of Chaucer with the originals, we see the difference
between the verse of a poet, with a healthy vitality of spirit, and,
through that healthy vitality of spirit, having secret dealings
with things, and verse which is largely the product of the rhetorical
or literary faculty. We do not feel, when reading the latter,
that any unconscious might co-operated with the conscious powers
of the writer. But we DO feel this when we read Chaucer's verse.

All of the Canterbury Tales have originals or analogues,
most of which have been reproduced by the London Chaucer Society.
Not one of the tales is of Chaucer's own invention. And yet they may
all be said to be original, in the truest, deepest sense of the word.
They have been vitalized from the poet's own soul. He has infused
his own personality, his own spirit-life, into his originals;
he has "created a soul under the ribs of death." It is this
infused vitality which will constitute the charm of
the Canterbury Tales for all generations of English