Wordsworth. In
our day, Mr. Browning takes after Chaucer, Mr. Tennyson takes after
Spenser.

Hazlitt, writing of the four great English poets, tells us, Chaucer's
characteristic is intensity, Spenser's remoteness, Milton's sublimity,
and Shakspeare's everything. The sentence is epigrammatic and
memorable enough; but so far as Chaucer is concerned, it requires a
little explanation. He is not intense, for instance, as Byron is
intense, or as Wordsworth is intense. He does not see man like the
one, nor nature like the other. He would not have cared much for
either of these poets. And yet, so far as straightforwardness in
dealing with a subject, and complete though quiet realisation of it
goes to make up intensity of poetic mood, Chaucer amply justifies his
critic. There is no wastefulness or explosiveness about the old
writer. He does his work silently, and with no appearance of effort.
His poetry shines upon us like a May morning; but the streak over the
eastern hill, the dew on the grass, the wind that bathes the brows of
the wayfarer, are not there by haphazard: they are the results of
occult forces, a whole solar system has had a hand in their production.
From the apparent ease with which an artist works, one does not readily
give him credit for the mental force he is continuously putting forth.
To many people, a chaotic "Festus" is more wonderful than a rounded,
melodious "Princess." The load which a strong man bears gracefully
does not seem so heavy as the load which the weaker man staggers under.
Incompletion is force fighting; completion is force quiescent, its work
done. Nature's forces are patent enough in some scarred volcanic moon
in which no creature can breathe; only the sage, in some soft green
earth, can discover the same forces reft of fierceness and terror, and
translated into sunshine, and falling dew, and the rainbow gleaming on
the shower. It is somewhat in this way that the propriety of Hazlitt's
criticism is to be vindicated. Chaucer is the most simple, natural,
and homely of our poets, and whatever he attempts he does thoroughly.
The Wife of Bath is so distinctly limned that she could sit for her
portrait. You can count the embroidered sprigs in the jerkin of the
squire. You hear the pilgrims laugh as they ride to Canterbury. The
whole thing is admirably life-like and seems easy, and in the seeming
easiness we are apt to forget the imaginative sympathy which bodies
forth the charact