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| Style | Refined. precise, perspicuous, employing figures less for ornament than lucidity; flexible and graceful, varying in subtle response to the subject and the mood; the living voice, as it were, of nature, carrying a tone as original and divine as the music of her purling brooks; sometimes tedious from too great minuteness, as in other writers from too frequent digression; if somewhat artificial and disjointed in the earlier workmanship, simple and well-ordered in the latter. |
| Rank | First modeller of the heroic couplet, first of the modern versifiers,
whose melody and ease few, if any, have surpassed; whose variety and power
of diction not ten of his successors have been able to rival; like Shakespeare
– a borrower, but lending to all that he borrows the gentle luxuriance
of his own fancy, extracting from the old romances their sublime extravagances,
without their frivolous descriptions … retaining the gayety and critical
coolness of the French without its wearisome idleness, and tempering the
joyous carelessness of the Italian with the English seriousness.
Our first painter of Nature, who, haunting her solitudes, caught the glow of her skies and earth in his landscape … his scenery has the freshness of a perennial spring. Across five centuries its leaves are green, and its breezes fan our cheeks … Yet Chaucer is not one of the great classics whose imaginations revel equally in regions of mirth beauty and grandeur. He wants their high seriousness, which detecting the divine significance of things breathes the aspiration for something purer and lovelier, more thrilling and powerful, than real life affords, and with its prophetic vision helps faith to lay hold of the future life. He loves the fresh green of the panting spring, but has little sympathy with the sear and yellow of the mystical autumn. |
| Character | A man of letters and action, trained in books, war, courts, business,
travel. A poet and a logician, a student and an observer, a linguist and
a politician, a courtier of opulent tastes and a philosopher who surveyed
mankind in their widest sphere. He was a hard worker. By his own confession,
reading was his chief delight ... Happy among books, he was happy among
men. Scorning only hypocrisy, he loved many-colored life, -- its weakness
and its strength, its delicacy and its force, its laughter and its tears
...
I know of nothing like it, - this man of the world, of ceremonies and cavalcades, conversant with high and low, with gallant knights and bedizened ladies, far-travelled, tempest-tossed, and time worn, turning from the gorgeous imagery that filled his vision to find 'revel and solace' in the open-air world, and dwelling with the glad, sweet abandon of a child, on the springing flowers, the green fields, the budding woods, the singing of little birds ... Sensitive to every change of feeling in himself and others, his sympathies were as large as the nature of man. Bred among aristocrats, he thought the good desires and 'gentil dedes' were the only aristocracy ... His sympathies are with virtue. For subjects obscene and disgustful, he has no taste. It is not the filth he enjoys, but the fun ... He is a moralist, but a happy and humorous one; of an ethical temper, to indolent to make a reformer in the sense in which the fiery Langland or the stern Wycliffe was one. He was progressive without being revolutionary. |
| Influence | He rescued the native tongue from Babylonish confusion, and established a literary diction, banishing from Anglo-Saxon the superannuated and uncouth, and softening its churlish nature by the intermixture of words of Romance fancy.. He created, or introduced a new versification; exemplified the principle of syllabical regularity, which is now the law and practice of our poetry; and by the superior correctness, grace, elevation, and harmony of his style, became the first model to succeeding writers. He is an unfailing fount of joy and strength, to revive the relish of simple pleasures, to bring back the freshness that warmed the springtime of our being, to refine youthful love, to make us esteem better the gentle and noble, and to feel more kindly toward the rude and base. |
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