seriousness, which Aristotle assigns as one of the grand
virtues of poetry. The substance of Chaucer's poetry, his view of
things and his criticism of life, has largeness, freedom, shrewdness,
benignity; but it has not this high seriousness. Homer's criticism of
life has it, Dante's has it, Shakespeare's has it. It is this chiefly
which gives to our spirits what they can rest upon; and with the
increasing demands of our modern ages upon poetry, this virtue of
giving us what we can rest upon will be more and more highly esteemed.
A voice from the slums of Paris, fifty or sixty years after Chaucer,
the voice of poor Villon out of his life of riot and crime, has at its
happy moments (as, for instance, in the last stanza of _La Belle
Heaulmiere_[10]) more of this important poetic virtue of seriousness
than all the productions of Chaucer. But its apparition in Villon, and
in men like Villon, is fitful; the greatness of the great poets, the
power of their criticism of life, is that their virtue is sustained.

To our praise, therefore, of Chaucer as a poet there must be this
limitation; he lacks the high seriousness of the great classics, and
therewith an important part of their virtue. Still, the main fact for
us to bear in mind about Chaucer is his sterling value according to
that real estimate which we firmly adopt for all poets. He has poetic
truth of substance, though he has not high poetic seriousness, and
corresponding to his truth of substance he has an exquisite virtue of
style and manner. With him is born our real poetry.

For my present purpose I need not dwell on our Elizabethan poetry, or
on the continuation and close of this poetry in Milton. We all of us
profess to be agreed in the estimate of this poetry: we all of us
recognise it as great poetry, our greatest, and Shakespeare and Milton
as our poetical classics. The real estimate, here, has universal
currency. With the next age of our poetry divergency and difficulty
begin. An historic estimate of that poetry has established itself; and
the question is, whether it will be found to coincide with the real
estimate.

The age of Dryden, together with our whole eighteenth century which
followed it, sincerely believed itself to have produced poetical
classics of its own, and even to have made advance, in poetry, beyond
all its predecessors. Dryden regards as not seriously disputable the
opinion 'that the sweetness of English verse was never understood