The modern novel could have no beginning in a literature so far removed from ordinary life as the romances, so brief in narration, so pious in ideal as the Gesta. Something more of flesh and blood, something of coarser grain than dreams, on the one hand, and on the other something fuller fleshed than the skeletonic anecdote (however marrowy its bones) was needed to produce it. It needed men and women, and it needed a more delicate narrative form, portraiture, and the fine art of story-telling, Chaucer, and Boccaccio. Chaucer, for all that he wrote in verse, was not a _trouveur_ when he was at his best. Boccaccio was not a collector of anecdotes. The new classical learning had given them humaner outlooks. The attitude of the _Canterbury Tales_ is not that of the _Song of Roland_, or the _Morte Darthur_; the attitude of the _Decameron_ is not that of the Gesta. Chaucer and Boccaccio, sometimes at least, were plain men, pleasantly conscious of their humanity, telling stories to amuse their friends. Chaucer was a middle-class Englishman, Boccaccio a middle-class Italian. They both wrote in languages that were scarcely older than themselves, in languages that were rather popular than learned. They were both in a sense mediators between the classical culture and their own people. There the resemblance ends, and their personal characters begin to seal the impressions they made on their respective literatures. They represent two quite distinct advances in the art of story-telling, the one in material, the other in technique. In both of them there is a personal honesty of workmanship that makes their work their own. The names of the _trouveurs_ are lost, or, at least, not connected with what they did. They were workers on a general theme, and counted no more in the production of the whole than the thousand men who chiselled out each his piece of carving round the arches of Notre Dame. They were the tools of their nations. Chaucer and Boccaccio were men whose workmanship had its special marks, its private personality. They were artists in their own right and not artisans. [Illustration: GEOFFREY CHAUCER] [Chaucer.] Chaucer's was a fairly simple nature. He seems to have taken to Renaissance fashions just as he took to Renaissance learning, without in the least disturbing the solid Englishness of his foundation. He married a Damsell Philippa without letting his marriage interfere with an ideal and unrequited passion like that of Petrarch for Laura. He had Jean de Meung's own reverence for the classics. 'Go litel book, go litel my tragedie,' he says in '_Troilus and Criseyd_, 'And kiss the steppes, wher-as thou seest pace Virgil, Ovyde, Omer, Lucan, and Stace.' And yet few men have about them less of a classical savour. He may well have liked 'at his beddes heed 'Twenty bokes clad in blak or reed, Of Aristotle and his philosophye,'