The Course of English Poetry – 1 67if we ask from it nothing more than it has to offer. Chaucer
had captured the secret of ease, grace and lucidity from French
romance poetry and had learned from the great Italians more
force and compactness of expression than French verse had yet
attained, a force diluted and a compactness lightened for his
purpose. But neither his poetic speech nor his rhythm has any-
thing of the plastic greatness and high beauty of the Italians. It is
an easy, limpid and flowing movement, a well-spring of natural
English utterance without depths in it, but limpid and clear and
pure. It is a form just fitted for the clear and pleasing poetic
presentation of external life as if in an unsoiled mirror. At times
it rises into an apt and pointed expression, but for the most
part is satisfied with a first primitive power of poetic speech; a
subdued and well-tempered even adequacy is its constant gift.
Only once or twice does Chaucer, as if by accident, strike out
a really memorable line of poetry; yet Dante and Petrarch were
among his masters.
No other great poetical literature has had quite such a
beginning. Others also started with a poetry of external life,
Greek with the poetry of Homer, Latin with the historical epic
of Ennius, French with the feudal romances of the Charlemagne
cycle and the Arthurian cycle. But in none of these was the
artistic aim simply the observant accurate presentation of Greek
or Roman or feudal life. Homer gives us the life of man always
at a high intensity of impulse and action and without subjecting
it to any other change he casts it in lines of beauty and in divine
proportions; he deals with it as Phidias dealt with the human
form when he wished to create a god in marble. When we read
the Iliad and the Odyssey, we are not really upon this earth, but
on the earth lifted into some plane of a greater dynamis of life,
and so long as we remain there we have a greater vision in a
more lustrous air and we feel ourselves raised to a semi-divine
stature. Ennius’ object was to cast into poetical utterance the
masculine and imperial spirit of Rome. So the spirit of catholic
and feudal Europe transmutes life in the French romances and
gives in its own way an ideal presentation of it which only
misses greatness by the inadequacy of its speech and rhythmic