Moder and maiden

Was never non but sche;

Well may swich a lady

Godes moder be.

In that we have a something which Chaucer, for all his grace and gifts, could not compass. Yet it remains true that with Chaucer, and not before Chaucer, the sun is up and the large long day of English poetry begins. By the men of his age his death was felt as the quenching of its most radiant star. From their unnumbered if not innumerous laments I select the following famous lines by Hoccleve.

Allas! my worthy maister honorable,

This londes verray tresour and richesse!
Dethe by thy dethe hath harm irreparable
Unto us done: hir vengeable duresse
Despoiled hath this lond of the swetnesse
Of rethoryk: for unto Tullius
Was never man so lyk amongės us.

Also who was heyr in philosofye

To Aristotle in our tunge but thou?
The steppes of Virgile in poesye

Thou folwedest eke, men wote wel ynow,
That combre-worldė that my maister slow-
Wolde I slayn were!-Dethe was to hastyf
To renne on thee and reve thee of thy lyf. . .
She might han tarried hir vengeance a whyle
Til some man hadde egal to thee be;
Nay, let be that! she wel knew that this yle
May never man forth bringe lyk to thee,
And her office needės do mote she:

God bade hir so, I truste as for the beste;
O maister, maister, God thy soule reste!

And this veneration endured-kept bright by the prac

tice of Scotland-until in time Spenser followed, who lies beside Chaucer now in Westminster Abbey. Spenser, attempting, in the second and third cantos of Book Four of The Faerie Queene, a conclusion of The Squieres Tale begs pardon for his pillage of

Dan Chaucer, well of English undefyled,

On Fames eternall beadroll worthie to be fyled.
Then pardon, O most sacred happie spirit,

That I thy labours lost may thus revive,
And steale from thee the meede of thy due merit,
That none durst ever whilest thou wast alive,
And being dead in vaine yet many strive:
Ne dare I like, but through infusion sweete
Of thine owne spirit, which doth in me survive,
I follow here the footing of thy feete,

That with thy meaning so I may the rather meete.

[T

AFTER CHAUCER

I

T has been, I believe, more than once remarkedbut I am thinking of a passage in Dr. Courthope's History of English Poetry, where he puts the remark, most appositely, almost in the forefront of his first volume that to us modern men the medieval mind is far stranger than the mind of an ancient Greek or an ancient Roman; that as men of the world we should feel much more at home if we found ourselves of a sudden listening to the talkers in Plato's Symposium, or with our arm in Horace's on the Sacred Way, than if we were as abruptly transported to a seat at Arthur's Round Table, or even at the high table of Jocelyn described in Carlyle's Past and Present. Our contribution to the talk with Socrates would doubtless be very small talk indeed; smaller even than that of his interlocutors as evoked by Plato. But we should understand the allusions, or most of them; the matter would be interesting; and, as it infected us, we might even catch some of the Socratic fire. By our library lamp, at any rate, we do hold easy communion with these souls so long departed, and recognise the truth of Cory's beautiful Invocation:

O dear divine Comatas, I would that thou and I Beneath this broken sunlight this leisure day might lie;

Where trees from distant forests, whose names were strange

to thee,

Should bend their amorous branches within thy reach to be, And flowers thine Hellas knew not, which art hath made

more fair,

Should shed their shining petals upon thy fragrant hair.

Then thou shouldest calmly listen with ever-changing looks To songs of younger minstrels and plots of modern books, And wonder at the daring of poets later born,

Whose thoughts are unto thy thoughts as noon-tide is to

morn;

And little shouldst thou grudge them their greater strength of soul,

Thy partners in the torch-race, though nearer to the goal.

Or in thy cedarn prison thou waitest for the bee: Ah, leave that simple honey, and take thy food from me. My sun is stooping westward. Entranced dreamer, haste; There's fruitage in my garden, that I would have thee taste. Now lift the lid a moment; now, Dorian shepherd, speak: Two minds shall flow together, the English and the Greek.

I do not think we could rely upon any such communion of spirit with any ghost out of the Middle Ages-unless perchance, it were Chaucer's. We should not feel any such familiar ease at a medieval board. We should only be horribly shy of "putting our foot in it"; an oppression of wonder at what on earth everyone was driving at. Without subscribing to the theorist who roundly accounted for the Middle Ages-as somebody will hereafter account for 1914-1917-by positing that everyone in Europe was mad just then, I confess to a shiver of uncanniness when brought in contact with the sort of mind that was ready to divide Christendom over the date of Easter and die in the last ditch for a fashion of the tonsure.

Dr. Courthope has his own conclusion on this:

Finally, the fact that we ourselves find more in common with the life of the Greeks and Romans than with the life of Europe in the Middle Ages, means that, in the city states of antiquity, as in our own times, civil standards of thought prevailed while in the medieval period the predominant cast of thought was feudal and ecclesiastical.

II

This is a part of the explanation, no doubt; though, I believe, not the whole. I may be deserting the disease for a symptom: but let me draw your attention to one point on which the men of the Middle Ages most curiously differed from us. I shall not be bold enough to speak of their painting, though in painting their contented acceptance of a limited range of religious subjects, endlessly repeated and improved, might support the theory. I admit the rapture and even the frolic of architecture in which these men let themselves go. But when it comes to any art that touched the human voice, chanted or spoken or written, by all our slight tradition of their music and on all the superabundant evidence of their prose and verse, they had a liking, even a passion for monotony.

It would perhaps be fairer to put it that our age has conceived a horror of monotony which they never felt. For monotony has lasted well down in our literature, and without consciousness of offence. The Faerie Queene, for all its beauty, is monotonous; so, for all its interruptions is Sidney's Arcadia; so, in mass, are the Sermons of the Golden Age of the Pulpit; so is almost any English novel down to Scott. By monotony I mean monotony: not length, nor tedium, nor dullness. We, reading in more vivacious days, from crowded