PUBLIC LIBRARY ASTOR, LENOX AND The Vassar Miscellany Published monthly from October to June inclusive. Price, $2.00 a year. THE HIGH SERIOUSNESS OF CHAUCER The passion for pigeon-holing is the craze of the human mind. The little labels that are so convenient, the graded nitches that prove so tangible and so easy to defend they are the delight of mankind. Even poetry has been condemned to this classification, and generation after generation of critics has attempted to rank in due order the poets of the world. Perhaps no one, of late years, has become so popular a votary of this judicial attitude towards poetry as Matthew Arnold; especially in his essay on The Study of Poetry he has sketched the systematized science of poetry. We feel beneath his theories the cold gradings of per cents, the hard inflexibility of invariable laws. The classification, he says, of the really excellent poetry must be the fixed aim of all study of poetry. This really excellent poetry is distinguished by its high poetic truth and seriousness of manner and substance. Its high truth is given by a large, free, sound representation of things; high seriousness springs from an absolute sincerity, and, he mentions later in passing, it gives something for our spirits to rest upon. It is just this last quality of high poetic seriousness in manner and substance that Matthew Arnold denies to the poetry of Chaucer. The quality of high seriousness is extremely difficult for us to consider, because Matthew Arnold has so consciously refrained from explaining or interpreting it. Homer and Shakespeare, he tells us, among those who tell of the relations of man to man, possessed this high seriousness. The presence of it, he says elsewhere, is shown in Dante's line, "In la sua volantade è nostra pace;" and the lack of it in Chaucer's line, O martyr, souded in virginitee." But this is nearly all the help he gives us. Exactly what did he mean by this high seriousness? Did he mean the exclusion of all humorous or trivial aspects of life, and the conscious selection of only those which bear on the deeper, more serious significance of life? Dante certainly chose thus consciously the tragedies, the Nemesis of life;-but Shakespeare? No; and even Arnold does not deny to Shakespeare the high poetic seriousness. It is not enough, therefore, that our interpretation of Arnold's idea of high seriousness, should comprehend the Hell and the Purgatory of Dante; it must rather be large enough to contain also even the Midsummer Night's Dream and the Twelfth Night of Shakespeare. His idea of it is, perhaps, just that view of life which regards it, not as a monstrous joke whose end is "To eat and drink, for tomorrow we may die;" not as "a walking shadow,—a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, not as a bitter farce with "its hero, the Conqueror Worm;" but as an action, instinct with meaning, where every situation is full of stirring or impressive possibilities. The poet's worth then-if this is indeed the true meaning-will depend upon his power to see and interpret these dramatic possibilities of life. Accepting, therefore, this interpretation of high seriousness, was Arnold right in denying this to Chaucer? Let us consider first Chaucer's power of high, serious perception of life in his lighter, more humorous moods. Take, almost at random, these lines from the description of the Frere in the Prologue |