Digital Book booking

Chaucer has not their helplessness; he has gained the power to survey
the world from a central, a truly human point of view. We have only to
call to mind the Prologue to _The Canterbury Tales_. The right comment
upon it is Dryden's: "It is sufficient to say, according to the proverb,
that _here is God's plenty_."[93] And again: "He is a perpetual fountain
of good sense." It is by a large, free, sound representation of things,
that poetry, this high criticism of life, has truth of substance; and
Chaucer's poetry has truth of substance.
Of his style and manner, if we think first of the romance-poetry and
then of Chaucer's divine liquidness of diction, his divine fluidity of
movement, it is difficult to speak temperately. They are irresistible,
and justify all the rapture with which his successors speak of his "gold
dew-drops of speech." Johnson misses the point entirely when he finds
fault with Dryden for ascribing to Chaucer the first refinement of our
numbers, and says that Gower[94] also can show smooth numbers and easy
rhymes.


Pages:
129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153