. It is true that Chaucer shared the
beliefs and influences of his time and was a follower of its literary
fashions. In his version of the "Romaunt of the Rose," his imitations of
Machault, and his early work in general he used the mediaeval machinery
of allegory and dreams. In "Troilus and Cresseide" and the tale of
"Palamon and Arcite," he carries romantic love and knightly honor to a
higher pitch than his model, Boccaccio. But the shrewdly practical
Pandarus of the former poem--a character almost wholly of Chaucer's
creation--is the very embodiment of the anti-romantic attitude, and a
remarkable anticipation of Sancho Panza; while the "Rime of Sir Thopas"
is a distinct burlesque of the fantastic chivalry romances.[2] Chaucer's
pages are picturesque with tournament, hunting parties, baronial feasts,
miracles of saints, feats of magic; but they are solid, as well, with the
everyday life of fourteenth-century England. They have the _naivete_ and
garrulity which are marks of mediaeval work, but not the quaintness and
grotesquerie which are held to be marks of romantic work. Not archaic
speech, but a certain mental twist constitutes quaintness. Herbert and
Fuller are quaint; Blake is grotesque; Donne and Charles Lamb are
willfully quaint, subtle, and paradoxical. But Chaucer is always
straight-grained, broad, and natural.

Even Dante, the poet of the Catholic Middle Ages; Dante, the mystic, the
idealist, with his intense spirituality and his passion for symbolism,
has been sometimes called classic, by virtue of the powerful construction
of his great poem, and his scholastic rigidity of method.

The relation between modern romanticizing literature and the real
literature of the Middle Ages, is something like that between the
literature of the renaissance and the ancient literatures of Greece and
Rome. But there is this difference, that, while the renaissance writers
fell short of their pattern, the modern schools of romance have outgone
their masters--not perhaps in the intellectual--but certainly in the
artistic value of their product. Mediaeval literature, wonderful and
stimulating as a whole and beautiful here and there in details of
execution, affords few models of technical perfection. The civilization
which it reflected, though higher in its possibilities than the classic
civilization, had not yet arrived at an equal grade of development, was
inferior in intelligence and the natured results of long cultur