Adventures in Criticism | Page 7

Queene." I might
bring several recent editors and critics to testify that, after the first
shock of the archaic spelling and the final "e," an intelligent public will
soon come to terms with Chaucer; but the unconscious testimony of the

intelligent public itself is more convincing. Chaucer is read year after
year by a large number of men and women. Spenser, in many respects a
greater poet, is also read; but by far fewer. Nobody, I imagine, will
deny this. But what is the reason of it?
The first and chief reason is this--Forms of language change, but the
great art of narrative appeals eternally to men, and its rules rest on
principles older than Homer. And whatever else may be said of
Chaucer, he is a superb narrator. To borrow a phrase from another
venerable art, he is always "on the ball." He pursues the story--the story,
and again the story. Mr. Ward once put this admirably--
"The vivacity of joyousness of Chaucer's poetic temperament ... make
him amusingly impatient of epical lengths, abrupt in his transitions, and
anxious, with an anxiety usually manifested by readers rather than by
writers, to come to the point, 'to the great effect,' as he is wont to call it.
'Men,' he says, 'may overlade a ship or barge, and therefore I will skip
at once to the effect, and let all the rest slip.' And he unconsciously
suggests a striking difference between himself and the great
Elizabethan epic poet who owes so much to him, when he declines to
make as long a tale of the chaff or of the straw as of the corn, and to
describe all the details of a marriage-feast seriatim:
'The fruit of every tale is for to say: They eat and drink, and dance and
sing and play.'
This may be the fruit; but epic poets, from Homer downward, have
been generally in the habit of not neglecting the foliage. Spenser in
particular has that impartial copiousness which we think it our duty to
admire in the Ionic epos, but which, if truth were told, has prevented
generations of Englishmen from acquiring an intimate personal
acquaintance with the 'Fairy Queen.' With Chaucer the danger certainly
rather lay in the opposite direction."
Now, if we are once interested in a story, small difficulties of speech or
spelling will not readily daunt us in the time-honored pursuit of "what
happens next"--certainly not if we know enough of our author to feel
sure he will come to the point and tell us what happens next with the

least possible palaver. We have a definite want and a certainty of being
satisfied promptly. But with Spenser this satisfaction may, and almost
certainly will, be delayed over many pages: and though in the
meanwhile a thousand casual beauties may appeal to us, the main
thread of our attention is sensibly relaxed. Chaucer is the minister and
Spenser the master: and the difference between pursuing what we want
and pursuing we-know-not-what must affect the ardor of the chase.
Even if we take the future on trust, and follow Spenser to the end, we
cannot look back on a book of the "Faerie Queene" as on part of a good
story: for it is admittedly an unsatisfying and ill-constructed story. But
my point is that an ordinary reader resents being asked to take the
future on trust while the author luxuriates in casual beauties of speech
upon every mortal subject but the one in hand. The first principle of
good narrative is to stick to the subject; the second, to carry the
audience along in a series of small surprises--satisfying expectation and
going just a little beyond. If it were necessary to read fifty pages before
enjoying Chaucer, though the sum of eventual enjoyment were as great
as it now is, Chaucer would never be read. We master small difficulties
line by line because our recompense comes line by line.
Moreover, it is as certain as can be that we read Chaucer to-day more
easily than our fathers read him one hundred, two hundred, three
hundred years ago. And I make haste to add that the credit of this does
not belong to the philologists.
The Elizabethans, from Spenser onward, found Chaucer distressingly
archaic. When Sir Francis Kynaston, temp. Charles I., translated
"Troilus and Criseyde," Cartwright congratulated him that he had at
length made it possible to read Chaucer without a dictionary. And from
Dryden's time to Wordsworth's he was an "uncouthe unkiste" barbarian,
full of wit, but only tolerable in polite paraphrase. Chaucer himself
seems to have foreboded this, towards the close of his "Troilus and
Criseyde," when he addresses his "litel book"--
"And for there is so great diversitee In English, and in wryting of our
tonge, So preye I God that noon