pril 6, 1895.

Why is Chaucer so easy to read? At a first glance a page of the
"Canterbury Tales" appears more formidable than a page of the "Faerie
Queene." As a matter of fact, it is less formidable; or, if this be
denied, everyone will admit that twenty pages of the "Canterbury
Tales" are less formidable than twenty pages of the "Faerie Queene." I
might bring several recent editors and critics to testify that, after
the first shock of the archaic spelling and the final "e," an
intelligent public will soon come to terms with Chaucer; but the
unconscious testimony of the intelligent public itself is more
convincing. Chaucer is read year after year by a large number of men
and women. Spenser, in many respects a greater poet, is also read; but
by far fewer. Nobody, I imagine, will deny this. But what is the
reason of it?

The first and chief reason is this--Forms of language change, but the
great art of narrative appeals eternally to men, and its rules rest on
principles older than Homer. And whatever else may be said of Chaucer,
he is a superb narrator. To borrow a phrase from another venerable
art, he is always "on the ball." He pursues the story--the story, and
again the story. Mr. Ward once put this admirably--

"The vivacity of joyousness of Chaucer's poetic temperament ...
make him amusingly impatient of epical lengths, abrupt in his
transitions, and anxious, with an anxiety usually manifested by
readers rather than by writers, to come to the point, 'to the
great effect,' as he is wont to call it. 'Men,' he says, 'may
overlade a ship or barge, and therefore I will skip at once to
the effect, and let all the rest slip.' And he unconsciously
suggests a striking difference between himself and the great
Elizabethan epic poet who owes so much to him, when he declines
to make as long a tale of the chaff or of the straw as of the
corn, and to describe all the details of a marriage-feast
_seriatim_:

'The fruit of every tale is for to say:
They eat and drink, and dance and sing and play.'

This may be the fruit; but epic poets, from Homer downward, have
been generally in the habit of not neglecting the foliage.
Spenser in particular has that impartial copiousness which we
think it our duty to admire in the Ionic epos, but which, if
truth were told, has prevented generations of Englishmen from
acquiring an intimate