In the art of construction, in the
invention and the arrangement of incident, these dramatists and
novelists may have been left behind by others; in the creation of
character they are on the whole without rivals in their respective
branches of literature. To the earlier at least of these growths
Chaucer may be said to have pointed the way. His personages, more
especially of course, as has been seen, those who are assembled
together in the "Prologue" to the "Canterbury Tales," are not mere
phantasms of the brain, or even mere actual possibilities, but real
human beings, and types true to the likeness of whole classes of men
and women, or to the mould in which all human nature is cast. This is
upon the whole the most wonderful, as it is perhaps the most generally
recognised of Chaucer's gifts. It would not of itself have sufficed to
make him a great dramatist, had the drama stood ready for him as a
literary form into which to pour the inspirations of his genius, as it
afterwards stood ready for our great Elizabethans. But to it were
added in him that perception of a strong dramatic situation, and that
power of finding the right words for it, which have determined the
success of many plays, and the absence of which materially detracts
from the completeness of the effect of others, high as their merits may
be in other respects. How thrilling, for instance, is that rapid
passage across the stage, as one might almost call it, of the unhappy
Dorigen in the "Franklin's Tale!" The antecedents of the situation, to
be sure, are, as has been elsewhere suggested, absurd enough; but who
can fail to feel that spasm of anxious sympathy with which a powerful
dramatic situation in itself affects us, when the wife, whom for
truth's sake her husband has bidden be untrue to him, goes forth on her
unholy errand of duty? "Whither so fast?" asks the lover:

And she made answer, half as she were mad:
"Unto the garden, as my husband bade,
My promise for to keep, alas! alas!"

Nor, as the abbreviated prose version of the "Pardoner's Tale" given
above will suffice to show, was Chaucer deficient in the art of
dramatically arranging a story; while he is not excelled by any of our
non-dramatic poets in the spirit and movement of his dialogue. The
"Book of the Duchess" and the "House of Fame," but more especially
"Troilus and Cressid" and the connecting passages between some of the
"Canterbury Tales," may be referred to in various illus