itude from this side the water, as it for the first time affords to Americans the opportunity of independent critical study and comparison. This beautiful work is fittingly inscribed to our countryman, Professor Child, of Harvard, a lover of Chaucer, "so proved by his wordes and his werke," who has done more for the great poet's memory than any man since Tyrwhitt. We earnestly hope that the Society may find enough support to print all the remaining manuscript texts of importance, for there can hardly be any one of them that may not help us to a valuable hint. The works of Mr. Sandras and Herr Hertzberg show that this is a matter of interest not merely or even primarily to English scholars. The introduction to the latter is one of the best essays on Chaucer yet written, while the former, which is an investigation of the French and Italian sources of the poet, supplies us with much that is new and worth having as respects his training, and the obstacles of fashion and taste through which he had to force his way before he could find free play for his native genius, or even so much as arrive at a consciousness thereof. Sandras is in every way a worthy pupil of the accomplished M. Victor Leclerc, and, though he lays perhaps a little too much stress on the indebtedness of Chaucer in particulars, shows a singularly intelligent and clear-sighted eye for the general grounds of his claim to greatness and originality. It is these grounds which I propose chiefly to examine here. M. The first question we put to any poet, nay, to any so-called national literature, is that which Farinata addressed to Dante, Chi fur li maggior tui? Here is no question of plagiarism, for poems are not made of words and thoughts and images, but of that something in the poet himself which can compel them to obey him and move to the rhythm of his nature. Thus it is that the new poet, however late he come, can never be forestalled, and the ship-builder who built the pinnace of Columbus has as much claim to the discovery of America as he who suggests a thought by which some other man opens new worlds to us has to a share in that achievement by him unconceived and inconceivable. Chaucer undoubtedly began as an imitator, perhaps as mere translator, serving the needful apprenticeship in the use of his tools. Children learn to speak by watching the lips and catching the words of those who know how already, and poets learn in the same way from their elders. They import their raw material from any and everywhere, and the question at last comes down to this, an author have original force enough to assimilate all he has acquired, or that be so overmastering as to assimilate him. If the poet turn out the stronger, we allow him to help himself from other people with wonderful equanimity. Should a man discover the art of transmuting metals and present us with a lump of gold as large as an ostrich-egg, would it be in human nature to inquire too nicely whether he had stolen the lead? whether Nothing is more certain than that great poets are not sudden prodigies, but slow results. As an oak profits by the foregone lives of immemorial vegetable races that have worked-over the juices of earth and air into organic life out of whose dissolution a soil might gather fit to maintain that nobler birth of nature, so we may be sure that the genius of every remembered poet drew the forces that built it up out of the decay of a long succession of forgotten ones. Nay, in proportion as the genius is vigorous and original will its indebtedness be greater, will its roots strike deeper into the past and grope in remoter fields for the virtue that must sustain it. Indeed, if the works of the great poets teach anything, it is to hold mere invention somewhat cheap. It is not the finding of a thing, but the making something out of it after it is found, that is of consequence. Accordingly, Chaucer, like Shakespeare, invented almost nothing. Wherever he found anything directed to Geoffrey Chaucer, he took it and made the most of it. It was not the subject treated, but himself, that was the new thing. Cela m'appartient de droit, Molière is reported to have said when accused of plagiarism. Chaucer pays that "usurious interest which genius," as Coleridge says, "always pays in borrowing." The characteristic touch is his own. In the famous passage about the caged bird, copied from the "Romaunt of the Rose," the "gon eten wormes was added by him. We must let him, if he will, eat the heart out of the literature that had preceded him, as we sacrifice the mulberryleaves to the silkworm, because he knows how to convert them into something richer and more last |