One of the finest passages in English criticism of poetry is Dryden’s estimate of Chaucer in the Preface to the _Fables_. Chaucer is taken by Dryden, in the year 1700, as an example of that sincerity and truth to Nature which makes the essence of classical poetry. In this classical quality, Dryden thinks that Ovid is far inferior to Chaucer. Dryden makes allowance for Chaucer’s old-fashioned language, and he did not fully understand the beauty of Chaucer’s verse, but still he judges him as a modern writer with respect to his imagination; to no modern writer does he give higher praise than to Chaucer.
This truth to Nature, in virtue of which Chaucer is a classic, will be found to be limited in some of his works by conventions which are not always easy to understand. Among these should not be reckoned the dream allegory. For though it may appear strange at first that Chaucer should have gone back to this in so late a work as the Prologue to the _Legend of Good Women_, yet it does not prevent him from speaking his mind either in earlier or later poems. In the _Book of the Duchess_, the _Parliament of Birds_, the Prologue to the _Legend_, one feels that Chaucer is dealing with life, and saying what he really thinks, in spite of the conventions. The _Hous of Fame_, which is a dream poem, might almost have been written for a wager, to show that he could bring in everything traditional, everything most common in the old artificial poetry, and yet be original and fresh through it all. But there are some stories—the _Clerk’s Tale_, and the _Franklin’s Tale_—in which he uses conventions of another sort and is partially disabled by them. These are stories of a kind much favoured in the Middle Ages, turning each upon one single obligation which, for the time, is regarded as if it were the only rule of conduct. The patience of Griselda is absolute; nothing must be allowed to interfere with it, and there is no other moral in the story. It is one of the frequent medieval examples in which the author can only think of one thing at a time. On working out this theme, Chaucer is really tried as severely as his heroine, and his patience is more extraordinary, because if there is anything certain about him it is that his mind is never satisfied with any one single aspect of any matter. Yet here he carries the story through to the end, though when it is finished he writes an epilogue which is a criticism on the strained morality of the piece. The plot of the _Franklin’s Tale_ is another of the favourite medieval type, where the ‘point of honour’, the obligation of a vow, is treated in the same uncompromising way; Chaucer is here confined to a problem under strict rules, a drama of difficulties without character.