That the story chosen by Chaucer to present to Anne as a greeting at the completion of her long journey to her betrothed husband should be the story of Æneas would, in any case, be odd enough; that, in telling it, he should dismiss in a single line (i, 458) the sole feature which constitutes the point of telling the Æneas story on this occasion, namely, the winning of a mate, would be a serious indictment of his intelligence; that he should devote nearly the whole story to the unfaithfulness of Æneas to Dido, emphasize this by a recital of other stories of man's perfidy and woman's weakness, and finally warn Anne, who had come so far to wed a king she had never seen, that she was acting foolishly,

Lo, how a woman doth amys

To love him that unknowen is (i, 269),

would convict Chaucer of a lack of taste and courtesy incredible in a courtier and poet. Imelmann, to be sure, thinks this was all a jest for the benefit of the initiated. Anne, of course, might not have understood these English lines, and so might not have been troubled by the implied comparison of herself to Dido or by the warning against "laying to her eye an herb of unknown properties" (i, 291 f.); but Richard would have understood at once and Anne would surely have understood later. We have no evidence that Chaucer enjoyed the privileges of a licensed jester, nowhere in his poems is there any hint of the fool's cap and bells and flapstick, unless we admit that his compliments were such as some of his interpreters believe them to be.

That, in L G W, Chaucer was to present to the queen legends involving the fickleness and unfaithfulness of man cannot be cited in favor of the supposition that he welcomed her to England with stories of man's perfidy, for in HF the emphasis is entirely on man's perfidy while in L G W it is on woman's faithfulness.

If HF was written to celebrate the arrival of Anne, and Dido's sister Anna was in any sense a connecting link between the Æneas-Dido story and the Richard-Anne story, it is certainly remarkable that Chaucer gives the name Anna no more prominence than he does in H F, where she receives, in Bk. i, 366-371, the bare mention required by the story. If Chaucer was given to making these sly, scarcely noticeable allusions, why does he never use the names Richard and John in such a way as to suggest the king or John of Gaunt, his supposed patrons ?

The theory that Chaucer was to hear (and tell) the story of Anne and Richard is, then, so out of harmony with the details of the poem as to be untenable. Whether ii, 136-143, necessarily imply, as they certainly suggest, that what Chaucer was to hear was news of his own day, we may be unable to determine; it is certainly the strongest point of Imelmann's theory.

But interpreted with no greater strictness than Imelmann applies to this passage, the later lines, ii, 164–190, imply that the poet is to hear (and tell) many love stories of the most varied character :

For truste wel, that thou shalt here,
When we be comen ther I seye,
Mo wonder thinges, dar I leye,
Of Loves folke mo tydinges,
Bothe soth-sawes and lesinges;
And mo loves newe begonne,
And longe y-served loves wonne,
And mo loves casuelly

That been betid, no man wot why,
But as a blind man stert an hare;
And more Iolytee and fare,
Whyl that they finde love of stele,
As thinketh hem, and over-al wele;
Mo discords and mo Ielousyes,

Mo murmurs and mo novelryes,

And mo dissimulaciouns,

And feyned reparaciouns;

And mo berdes in two houres
Withoute rasour or sisoures
Y-maad, then greynes be of sondes;
And eke mo holdinge in hondes,

And also mo renovelaunces

Of olde forleten aqueyntaunces;

Mo love-dayes and acordes

Then on instruments ben cordes ;

And eke of loves mo eschaunges

170

180

Than ever cornes were in graunges. 190

And this impression is borne out by what is said in iii, 1031 ff., of the stories and the bearers of them in the house of Rumor (or Fame).

I am therefore disposed to believe that this poem was intended to herald or announce a group of love stories and to serve as a sort of prologue to them. As the attachment between the poem and the stories announced was loose, — looser perhaps than that between the legends of good women and the prologue to them, the poem might well have been cited in L G Was a complete poem although it lacked the stories it was to introduce. Until a better theory is suggested, I shall therefore regard the Hous of Fame as the first of the series of experiments in grouping stories of which the Legend of Goode Women was the second member and the Canterbury Tales the final and satisfactory outcome.

THE MODERNNESS OF DANTE

JEFFERSON B. FLETCHER

Puffed up with the pride of the New Learning, a certain Italian humanist of the fifteenth century once exclaimed, "What we humanists write we write not for ourselves, we write for humanity." Perhaps that was the trouble with him, one reason at least why he is forgotten except by other scholars. Humanity as a whole has few interests and a short memory. To write for nobody in particular is usually to be read by nobody in particular. To speak at one time for all time is to speak to no time.

There is truth in these quibbling phrases, truth which modern historical criticism is, if anything, inclined to exaggerate. Historical critics to-day grow impatient when it is declared that Shakspere "wrote for all time." They emphasize rather his dependence on contemporary stage conditions, his appeal to an Elizabethan, nay, a London audience. He kept, they contend, his eye on the pit and never turned it on posterity. M. Jusserand would reduce Edmund Spenser to a purveyor of perishable intellectual dainties to an ephemeral courtly taste at Greenwich and Hampton in the year of our Lord 1590. Milton's business, we are told, is to represent a precise moment in the history of English Puritan theology and of the pseudo-classic epic.

No doubt this scrupulous adherence to historical perspective has been salutary as a corrective against loose talk. We have put ourselves back, so to say, among the author's immediate audience, and can better understand him as he meant to be understood. Wanting this just perspective, critics in the Middle Ages totally misread antique literature, forcibly wresting pagan meanings into impossible compliance with Christian and feudal conditions. And perhaps the romantic critics in the early nineteenth century who used to talk about a philosophic Shakspere writing "for all time" were as fantastic.

But there is another side to the story. A literary masterpiece is not merely the mouthpiece of its maker. Once born, it has a voice of its own; and to them who lovingly hold communion with it, it speaks a various language. The ideas it contains live, and are fertilized by contact with ideas, distantly akin, of later generations. If, by rigidly sticking to what an author actually had in mind when writing, we may in some measure put ourselves back among his original audience; so, by considering what he may mean for us of another time, we in so far bring him himself back to life, and set him talking to us, as he might have talked, of our affairs. This is no doubt what in a sense medieval critics

did with the classics, and we condemn them for it; but I think there is a distinction to be drawn. It is one thing to try the ideas of a past writer by ours, another thing to dye his ideas with ours. Resemblances shown by the first method are illuminating, by the second only confusing.

So, while realizing the critical risk, I mean to try certain ideas of Dante's by certain of ours, to ask what Dante has to say, if anything, anent certain larger issues of to-day. I can only hope that in so "interviewing" the great Florentine I may not to invert one of Byron's titles - merely present Dante as the transformed deformed.'

Dante is still for most people -the grim poet of the Inferno, the black dreamer he appeared to those women of Verona, with visage seamed and hair crisped from the fires of hell. Not long ago in New York City I heard a moving-picture showman explaining a film of the Inferno. On one grotesquegrisly representation of certain sinners stuck heads down in pits, their protruding wiggling legs aflame, he remarked deprecatingly:" It is presumed — Dant' was a paræsthetic. No sane man 'd 'a' dreamed such queer an' awful visions." Maybe the worthy barker meant 'paranoiac.' It is a good word, is 'paræsthetic' for some æsthetes, say for 'Cubists' and 'Futurists' in art; but it is plainly a libel on Dante.

My Broadway commentator, however, was really expressing, after all, only the very common opinion of the poet of hell as of course a great genius (for the books say so), but decidedly queer and nightmarish to the plain citizen. Yet I must in justice add that my showman found at least one kind of modernness in the Inferno. As to these upside-down sinners — " It is presumed," he said, "these were unfair business men." And he found a subtle fitness in the mode of their punishment. "It is presumed—only their limbs were let free because the only honest part of 'em were their limbs."

The majority have their Dante of the dread Inferno.' But besides this majority of the small minority who have any Dante at all, there is another more refined and knowing set of readers who ignore or deprecate the things Dante most cared about, to extol if not his 'paræsthetic,' at any rate his pure æsthetic power. The poet Carducci once sonnetized this view. I translate as best I can :

Dante, whence comes it that I, reverent, bear

My votive homage to thy shrine sublime?

That me the sun leaves bending o'er the rime

That made thee gaunt, and dawn still finds me there?

For me St. Lucy prays not, nor the fair
Matilda laves away my spirit's grime,
And Beatrice and her chaste lover climb
Godward in vain along the starry stair.

I hate thy Holy Empire; and my sword

Gladly from thy good Frederick's head had cleft