With such a careless force and forceless care,
As if that luck in very spite of cunning
Bad him win all.’
Chaucer attended chiefly to the real and natural, that is, to the involuntary and inevitable impressions on the mind in given circumstances; Shakespear exhibited also the possible and the fantastical,—not only what things are in themselves, but whatever they might seem to be, their different reflections, their endless combinations. He lent his fancy, wit, invention, to others, and borrowed their feelings in return. Chaucer excelled in the force of habitual sentiment; Shakespear added to it every variety of passion, every suggestion of thought or accident. Chaucer described external objects with the eye of a painter, or he might be said to have embodied them with the hand of a sculptor, every part is so thoroughly made out, and tangible:—Shakespear’s imagination threw over them a lustre
—‘Prouder than when blue Iris bends.’
Every thing in Chaucer has a downright reality. A simile or a sentiment is as if it were given in upon evidence. In Shakespear the commonest matter-of-fact has a romantic grace about it; or seems to float with the breath of imagination in a freer element. No one could have more depth of feeling or observation than Chaucer, but he wanted resources of invention to lay open the stores of nature or the human heart with the same radiant light that Shakespear has done. However fine or profound the thought, we know what is coming, whereas the effect of reading Shakespear is ‘like the eye of vassalage at unawares encountering majesty.’ Chaucer’s mind was consecutive, rather than discursive. He arrived at truth through a certain process; Shakespear saw every thing by intuition. Chaucer had a great variety of power, but he could do only one thing at once. He set himself to work on a particular subject. His ideas were kept separate, labelled, ticketed and parcelled out in a set form, in pews and compartments by themselves. They did not play into one another’s hands. They did not re-act upon one another, as the blower’s breath moulds the yielding glass. There is something hard and dry in them. What is the most wonderful thing in Shakespear’s faculties is their excessive sociability, and how they gossiped and compared notes together.
We must conclude this criticism; and we will do it with a quotation or two. One of the most beautiful passages in Chaucer’s tale is the description of Cresseide’s first avowal of her love.
‘And as the new abashed nightingale,
That stinteth first when she beginneth sing,
When that she heareth any herde’s tale,