not the universal virtues of her sex. The value of such evidence as the
mind of a great poet speaking in his works furnishes for a knowledge of
the times to which he belongs is inestimable. For it shows us what has
survived, as well as what was doomed to decay, in the life of the nation
with which that mind was in sensitive sympathy. And it therefore seemed
not inappropriate to approach, in the first instance, from this point of
view the subject of this biographical essay,--Chaucer, "the poet of the
dawn." For in him there are many things significant of the age of
transition in which he lived; in him the mixture of Frenchman and
Englishman is still in a sense incomplete, as that of their language is in
the diction of his poems. His gaiety of heart is hardly English; nor is
his willing (though, to be sure, not invariably unquestioning) acceptance
of forms into the inner meaning of which he does not greatly vex his soul
by entering; nor his airy way of ridiculing what he has no intention of
helping to overthrow; nor his light unconcern in the question whether he
is, or is not, an immoral writer. Or, at least, in all of these things he
has no share in qualities and tendencies, which influences and conflicts
unknown to and unforeseen by him may be safely said to have ultimately
made characteristic of Englishmen. But he IS English in his freedom and
frankness of spirit; in his manliness of mind; in his preference for the
good in things as they are to the good in things as they might be; in his
loyalty, his piety, his truthfulness. Of the great movement which was to
mould the national character for at least a long series of generations he
displays no serious foreknowledge; and of the elements already preparing
to affect the course of that movement he shows a very incomplete
consciousness. But of the health and strength which, after struggles many
and various, made that movement possible and made it victorious, he, more
than any one of his contemporaries, is the living type and the speaking
witness. Thus, like the times to which he belongs, he stands half in and
half out of the Middle Ages, half in and half out of a phase of our