then, will make use of plain
English, "naked wordes in English"; he will employ the national
language, the king's English--"the king that is lord of this
langage."[549] And he will use it, as in truth he did, to express
exactly his thoughts and not to embellish them; he hates travesty, he
worships truth; he wants words and things to be in the closest possible
relation:

The wordes mote be cosin to the dede.[550]

The same wisdom is again the cause why Chaucer does not spend himself in
vain efforts to attempt impossible reforms, and to go against the
current. It has been made a subject of reproach to him in our day; and
some, from love of the Saxon past, have been indignant at the number of
French words Chaucer uses; why did he not go back to the origins of the
language? But Chaucer was not one of those who, as Milton says, think
"to pound up the crows by shutting their park gates;" he employed the
national tongue, as it existed in his day; the proportion of French
words is not greater with him than with the mass of his contemporaries.
The words he made use of were living and fruitful, since they are still
alive, they and their families; the proportion of those that have
disappeared is wonderfully small, seeing the time that has elapsed. As
to the Anglo-Saxons, he retained, as did the nation, but without being
aware of it, something of their grave and powerful genius; it is not his
fault if he ignored these ancestors; every one in his day ignored them,
even such thinkers as Langland, in whom lived again with most force the
spirit of the ancient Germanic race. The tradition was broken; in the
literary past one went back to the Conquest, and thence without
transition to "thise olde gentil Britons." In his enumeration of
celebrated bards, Chaucer gives a place to Orpheus, to Orion, and to the
"Bret Glascurion"; but no author of any "Beowulf" is named by him.
Shakespeare, in the same manner, will derive inspiration from the
national past; he will go back to the time of the Roses, to the time of
the Plantagenets, to the time of Magna Charta, and, passing over the
Anglo-Saxon period, he will take from the Britons the stories of Lear
and of Cymbeline.

The brilliancy with which Chaucer used this new tongue, the instant fame
of his works, the clear proof afforded by his writings that English
could fit the highest and the lowest themes, assured to that idiom its
definitive place among the great literary languages. English