remoulding it nearer to the heart's desire.' His moral nature, indeed, was
easy-going; he was the appropriate poet of the Court circle, with very much
of the better courtier's point of view. At the day's tasks he worked long
and faithfully, but he also loved comfort, and he had nothing of the
martyr's instinct. To him human life was a vast procession, of boundless
interest, to be observed keenly and reproduced for the reader's enjoyment
in works of objective literary art. The countless tragedies of life he
noted with kindly pity, but he felt no impulse to dash himself against the
existing barriers of the world in the effort to assure a better future for
the coming generations. In a word, Chaucer is an artist of broad artistic
vision to whom art is its own excuse for being. And when everything is said
few readers would have it otherwise with him; for in his art he has
accomplished what no one else in his place could have done, and he has left
besides the picture of himself, very real and human across the gulf of half
a thousand years. Religion, we should add, was for him, as for so many men
of the world, a somewhat secondary and formal thing. In his early works
there is much conventional piety, no doubt sincere so far as it goes; and
he always took a strong intellectual interest in the problems of medieval
theology; but he became steadily and quietly independent in his philosophic
outlook and indeed rather skeptical of all definite dogmas.

Even in his art Chaucer's lack of the highest will-power produced one
rather conspicuous formal weakness; of his numerous long poems he really
finished scarcely one. For this, however, it is perhaps sufficient excuse
that he could write only in intervals hardly snatched from business and
sleep. In 'The Canterbury Tales' indeed, the plan is almost impossibly
ambitious; the more than twenty stories actually finished, with their
eighteen thousand lines, are only a fifth part of the intended number. Even
so, several of them do not really belong to the series; composed in stanza
forms, they are selected from his earlier poems and here pressed into