"In la sua volontade è nostra pace ..."

is altogether beyond Chaucer's reach; we praise him, but we feel that
this accent is out of the question for him. It may be said that it was
necessarily out of the reach of any poet in the England of that stage of
growth. Possibly; but we are to adopt a real, not a historic, estimate
of poetry. However we may account for its absence, something is wanting,
then, to the poetry of Chaucer, which poetry must have before it can be
placed in the glorious class of the best. And there is no doubt what
that something is. It is the[Greek: spoudaiotaes] the high and
excellent seriousness, which Aristotle assigns as one of the grand
virtues of poetry. The substance of Chaucer's poetry, his view of things
and his criticism of life, has largeness, freedom, shrewdness,
benignity; but it has not this high seriousness. Homer's criticism of
life has it, Dante's has it, Shakespeare's has it. It is this chiefly
which gives to our spirits what they can rest upon; and with the
increasing demands of our modern ages upon poetry, this virtue of giving
us what we can rest upon will be more and more highly esteemed. A voice
from the slums of Paris, fifty or sixty years after Chaucer, the voice
of poor Villon[96] out of his life of riot and crime, has at its happy
moments (as, for instance, in the last stanza of _La Belle Heaulmière_
[97]) more of this important poetic virtue of seriousness than all the
productions of Chaucer. But its apparition in Villon, and in men like
Villon, is fitful; the greatness of the great poets, the power of their
criticism of life, is that their virtue is sustained.

To our praise, therefore, of Chaucer as a poet there must be this
limitation: he lacks the high seriousness of the great classics, and
therewith an important part of their virtue. Still, the main fact for us
to bear in mind about Chaucer is his sterling value according to that