Boccaccio develops the story, adds characters, and makes of
it a romance, an elegant tale in which young Italian noblemen, equally
handsome, youthful, amorous, and unscrupulous, win ladies' hearts, lose
them, and discourse subtly about their desires and their mishaps.[508]

Chaucer appropriates the plot,[509] transforms the personages, alters
the tone of the narrative, breaks the monotony of it, introduces
differences of age and disposition, and moulds in his own way the
material that he borrows, like a man now sure of himself, who dares to
judge and to criticise; who thinks it possible to improve upon a romance
even of Boccaccio's. The literary progress marked by this work is
astonishing, not more so, however, than the progress accomplished in
the same time by the nation. With the Parliament of Westminster as with
Chaucer's poetry, the real definitive England is beginning.

In Chaucer, indeed, as in the new race, the mingling of the origins has
become intimate and indissoluble. In "Troilus and Criseyde" the Celt's
ready wit, gift of repartee, and sense of the dramatic; the care for the
form and ordering of a narrative, dear to the Latin races; the Norman's
faculty of observation, are allied to the emotion and tenderness of the
Saxon. This fusion had been brought about slowly, when however the time
came, its realisation was complete all at once, almost sudden. Yesterday
authors of English tongue could only lisp; to-day, no longer content to
talk, they sing.

In its semi-epic form, the poem of "Troilus and Criseyde" is connected
with the art of the novel and the art of the drama, to the development
of which England was to contribute so highly. It is already the English
novel and drama where the tragic and the comic are blended; where the
heroic and the trivial go side by side, as in real life; where Juliet's
nurse interrupts the lovers leaning over the balcony of the Capulets,
where princesses have no confidants, diminished reproductions of their
own selves, invented to give them their cue; where sentiments are
examined closely, with an attentive mind, friendly to experimental
psychology; and where, nevertheless, far from holding always to subtile
dissertations, all that is material fact is clearly exposed to view, in
a good light, and not merely talked about. The vital parts of the drama
are all exhibited before our eyes and not concealed behind the scenes;
heroes are not all spirit, neither are they mere images; we ar