left upon an alien mind by the quaint, picturesque features of a way of
life which seemed neither quaint nor picturesque to the men who lived it,
but only to the man who turns to it for relief form the prosaic, or at
least familiar, conditions of the modern world. The offspring of the
modern imagination, acting upon medieval material, may be a perfectly
legitimate, though not an original, form of art. It may even have a
novel charm of its own, unlike either parent, but like Euphorion, child
of Faust by Helen of Troy, a blend of Hellas and the Middle Age. Scott's
verse tales are better poetry than the English metrical romances of the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Tennyson has given a more perfect
shape to the Arthurian legends than Sir Thomas Malory, their compiler, or
Walter Map and Chrestien de Troyes, their possible inventors. But, of
course, to study the Middle Ages, as it really was, one must go not to
Tennyson and Scott, but to the "Chanson de Roland," and the "Divine
Comedy," and the "Romaunt of the Rose," and the chronicles of
Villehardouin, Joinville, and Froissart.

And the farther such study is carried, the more evident it becomes that
"mediaeval" and "romantic" are not synonymous. The Middle Ages was not,
at all points, romantic: it is the modern romanticist who makes, or
finds, it so. He sees its strange, vivid peculiarities under the glamour
of distance. Chaucer's temper, for instance, was by no means romantic.
This "good sense" which Dryden mentions as his prominent trait; that "low
tone" which Lowell praises in him, and which keeps him close to the
common ground of experience, pervade his greatest work, the "Canterbury
Tales," with an insistent realism. 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