ly plundered to enrich its
prosperous neighbours on either side; and having thus credited to other
generations all its little claims to distinction, our literary
historians fixed their glance sternly on the court poetry, which is its
weakest feature, and made the case of Hoccleve and Lydgate more pitiful
than it need be by cruelly comparing them with Chaucer. To be
inconvenient to historians is not perhaps of itself a mark of greatness,
but Chaucer's professed lovers may take pleasure in observing how
largely he shares this characteristic with Shakespeare himself. To give
each of them a separate chapter is but a respectful subterfuge, thinly
concealing how unconscionably these two sudden elevations interfere with
that orderly progression which the historian loves. It would be much
easier to tell the story of the Elizabethan-Jacobean drama from rise to
fall if Shakespeare could be left out of it; and if there had been no
Chaucer, how gentle, how almost mathematical, would have been the
progression from the _Cursor Mundi_ and the _Handlyng Synne_ to Gower's
_Confessio Amantis_, from Gower to Lydgate and Hoccleve, and from
Lydgate and Hoccleve to Stephen Hawes! The Italian influence would have
come in for the first time with Surrey and Wyatt, and the whole sequence
would have been just what a plain man would expect. Not only by his
inconvenient possession of genius, but also by his great, if fitful
industry, and by what we can hardly call by any name but good luck,
Chaucer shoots up suddenly between Gower and his natural successors, and
thus revolutionises the standard of poetry by which the next century is
inevitably judged. The effect of his sudden uprising is almost as
confusing to our judgments of his own poetry as of that of his unhappy
'successors.' Brought up, as most of us poor middle-aged critics have
been, on textbooks which grudgingly devoted a scanty thirty or forty
pages to all that happened ere Surrey and Wyatt began to write an
English which literary historians could read without taking any trouble,
we inevitably got it into our heads that with Chaucer we were at the
very beginning; that he was really, as he was called, the Father of
English Poetry, and represented the first blossoming of its spring. The
spring had come and was fast fading when Chaucer began to write. It had
come with the first blossoming of the romances, and with such lyrics as

'Lenten[1] is come with love to town,
With blossoms and wi