personal acquaintance with the 'Fairy
Queen.' With Chaucer the danger certainly rather lay in the
opposite direction."

Now, if we are once interested in a story, small difficulties of
speech or spelling will not readily daunt us in the time-honored
pursuit of "what happens next"--certainly not if we know enough of our
author to feel sure he will come to the point and tell us what happens
next with the least possible palaver. We have a definite want and a
certainty of being satisfied promptly. But with Spenser this
satisfaction may, and almost certainly will, be delayed over many
pages: and though in the meanwhile a thousand casual beauties may
appeal to us, the main thread of our attention is sensibly relaxed.
Chaucer is the minister and Spenser the master: and the difference
between pursuing what we want and pursuing we-know-not-what must
affect the ardor of the chase. Even if we take the future on trust,
and follow Spenser to the end, we cannot look back on a book of the
"Faerie Queene" as on part of a good story: for it is admittedly an
unsatisfying and ill-constructed story. But my point is that an
ordinary reader resents being asked to take the future on trust while
the author luxuriates in casual beauties of speech upon every mortal
subject but the one in hand. The first principle of good narrative is
to stick to the subject; the second, to carry the audience along in a
series of small surprises--satisfying expectation and going just a
little beyond. If it were necessary to read fifty pages before
enjoying Chaucer, though the sum of eventual enjoyment were as great
as it now is, Chaucer would never be read. We master small
difficulties line by line because our recompense comes line by line.

Moreover, it is as certain as can be that we read Chaucer to-day more
easily than our fathers read him one hundred, two hundred, three
hundred years ago. And I make haste to add that the credit of this
does not belong to the philologists.

The Elizabethans, from Spenser onward, found Chaucer distressingly
archaic. When Sir Francis Kynaston, _temp_. Charles I., translated
"Troilus and Criseyde," Cartwright congratulated him that he had at
length made it possible to read Chaucer without a dictionary. And from
Dryden's time to Wordsworth's he was an "uncouthe unkiste" barbarian,
full of wit, but only tolerable in polite paraphrase. Chaucer himself
seems to have foreboded this, towards the close of his "Troilus and