it, but only to the man who turns to it for relief form the prosaic, or at least familiar, conditions of the modern world.  The offspring of the modern imagination, acting upon medieval material, may be a perfectly legitimate, though not an original, form of art.  It may even have a novel charm of its own, unlike either parent, but like Euphorion, child of Faust by Helen of Troy, a blend of Hellas and the Middle Age.  Scott’s verse tales are better poetry than the English metrical romances of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.  Tennyson has given a more perfect shape to the Arthurian legends than Sir Thomas Malory, their compiler, or Walter Map and Chrestien de Troyes, their possible inventors.  But, of course, to study the Middle Ages, as it really was, one must go not to Tennyson and Scott, but to the “Chanson de Roland,” and the “Divine Comedy,” and the “Romaunt of the Rose,” and the chronicles of Villehardouin, Joinville, and Froissart.

And the farther such study is carried, the more evident it becomes that “mediaeval” and “romantic” are not synonymous.  The Middle Ages was not, at all points, romantic:  it is the modern romanticist who makes, or finds, it so.  He sees its strange, vivid peculiarities under the glamour of distance.  Chaucer’s temper, for instance, was by no means romantic.  This “good sense” which Dryden mentions as his prominent trait; that “low tone” which Lowell praises in him, and which keeps him close to the common ground of experience, pervade his greatest work, the “Canterbury Tales,” with an insistent realism.  It is true that Chaucer shared the beliefs and influences of his time and was a follower of its literary fashions.  In his version of the “Romaunt of the Rose,” his imitations of Machault, and his early work in general he used the mediaeval machinery of allegory and dreams.  In “Troilus and Cresseide” and the tale of “Palamon and Arcite,” he carries romantic love and knightly honor to a higher pitch than his model, Boccaccio.  But the shrewdly practical Pandarus of the former poem—­a character almost wholly of Chaucer’s creation—­is the very embodiment of the anti-romantic attitude, and a remarkable anticipation of Sancho Panza; while the “Rime of Sir Thopas” is a distinct burlesque of the fantastic chivalry romances.[2] Chaucer’s pages are picturesque with tournament, hunting parties, baronial feasts, miracles of saints, feats of magic; but they are solid, as well, with the everyday life of fourteenth-century England.  They have the naivete and garrulity which are marks of mediaeval work, but not the quaintness and grotesquerie which are held to be marks of romantic work.  Not archaic speech, but a certain mental twist constitutes quaintness.  Herbert and Fuller are quaint; Blake is grotesque; Donne and Charles Lamb are willfully quaint, subtle, and paradoxical.  But Chaucer is always straight-grained, broad, and natural.

Even Dante, the poet of the Catholic Middle Ages; Dante, the mystic, the idealist, with his intense spirituality and his passion for symbolism, has been sometimes called classic, by virtue of the powerful construction of his great poem, and his scholastic rigidity of method.