The company is sobered by this miracle, till the Host turns jokingly to Chaucer:

"What man artow?" quod he;

"Thou lokest as thou woldest finde an hare,

For ever upon the ground I see thee stare.
Approche neer, and loke up merily.

Now war yow, sirs, and lat this man have place;
He in the waast is shape as wel as I;
This were a popet in an arm t'enbrace
For any womman, smal and fair of face.
He semeth elvish by his contenaunce,
For unto no wight dooth he daliaunce.
Sey now somwhat, sin other folk han sayd;
Tel us a tale of mirthe, and that anoon.'

Thus adjured, Chaucer begins his tale of Sir Thopas, a parody on the romances of chivalry prevalent in his day. When the Host impatiently cuts him off, he offers to "telle a litel thing in prose." The "litel thing" turns out to be a long and tedious "moral tale vertuous" of Melibeus and his wife Prudence. One of the best of the tales is the Nun's Priest's story of the cock who has been seized by a fox and who escapes by flattering the fox into stopping to taunt his pursuers. The Wife of Bath, after a long prologue, tells a story already mentioned as occurring in Gower's Confessio Amantis. The Clerk of Oxford relates the pathetic story of Patient Griselda, which he had

Lerned at Padowe of a worthy clerk.

*

Fraunceys Petrark, the laureat poete,

Highte this clerk, whos rethoryke sweete
Enlumined al Itaille of poetrye.

The Tales conclude with a long and tedious prose sermon by the Parson. He began near sundown; and by the time he was through, most of his auditors must have been ready for bed. Perhaps Chaucer wished to make amends at the close of the day for any frivolity or ribaldry of which

he might have allowed his coarser characters to be guilty. We may well forgive him for his prosy ending, in view of the wonderful variety, fitness, narrative interest, and poetic power of his great collection of tales. In prose, he may be tedious and cumbersome; in poetry, and especially in narrative poetry, he is a consummate master.

Much of what is most characteristic in Chaucer's genius has already been suggested, and few words will serve by Character of way of summary. He was a strikingly original figure. In him were combined the competent

Chaucer's
Genius

ness.

a

man of affairs and the genuine poet. His love of nature crops out here and there all through his poetry; it was not conventional, but true and sincere. No man has shown greater delight in life, and few have had greater power of observation and insight. The Prologue alone would rank him as one of the greatest of humorists genial spirit, keenly satirical but with no touch of bitterHe loved beauty like a true poet, and he had that gift of creative imagination which makes a poet great. He was first of all a great narrator, with the power of telling either a romantic or a realistic tale in felicitous Few men have ever approached his skill in vivid and lifelike description. In the ability to create character, he ranks with the great dramatists. His work is objective and sound, the work of a great literary artist and of a thoroughly sane and healthy nature. He was emphatically a man of his age, but he is no less truly a man for all time.

verse.

REDUCED FACSIMILE PAGE FROM MALORY'S MORTE D'ARTHUR, 1529

CHAPTER VI

THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY (1400-1500)

AFTER the Age of Chaucer, the two streams of litera ture — religious and romantic—are hardly to be distin guished from each other; and the influences Decline of arising from the relations between the two races Literature have largely spent their force. Indeed, if this period stood by itself, it might be difficult to say that the influences of religion and romance were very clearly manifested as the guiding impulses of its literature. They are certainly not so in any fresh and vigorous way. Nevertheless, no new influences have as yet arisen to take their place; and as a consequence, literature rapidly sinks into that state of exhaustion and decay which marks the fifteenth century as one of the most barren tracts of all our literary history. Especially in the early part of the century, and more or less throughout its whole extent, literature is chiefly imitative of what went before; and so far as any vital forces are at work, they are the same as those which dominated the Age of Chaucer. In default, therefore, of any new and original impulses, and in view of the fact that the older impulses are still operative in weak and decadent form, we may still continue to speak of literature as growing out of the religious and the romantic spirit. Literary revival could come only with the advent of new and powerful quickening impulses; and toward the close of the century, we can feel the coming of those newer forces which are to exert so powerful an effect upon the literature of the sixteenth century.