She is there, solid, garrulous, herself. She does not get husbands because she is a worshipped goddess, but because she is a practical woman. Bold indeed would be the lady who in imagination played her part. The Wife is no empty fancy dress in which we move and live; she is well filled out with her own flesh, and we watch her from outside as we would watch a neighbour. Hers is no veil of dreams, but a good and costly one, bought at Bristol Fair by one or other of her five husbands whom she has badgered into getting it. Story-tellers before Chaucer seemed scarcely to have realised that men were more than good or bad, brave or coward. You hated a man, or you loved him, laughed at, or admired him; it never occurred to you to observe him. Every man was man, every woman woman. It was not until the Renaissance that modern story-telling found one of its motives, which is, that there are as many kinds of man and woman as there are men and women in the world. Then, at last, character and individuality became suddenly important. Passion, reverence, charm had existed before in story-telling. To these was now added another possibility of the art in portrait painting. So was the modern world differentiated from the dark ages; blinking in the unaccustomed light, men began to look at one another. In painting, almost simultaneously with literature, the new power found expression. The Van Eycks were alive before Chaucer was dead, and in the careful, serene painting of 'John Arnolfini and his Wife,' is the observant spirit of the _Canterbury Tales_. That woman standing there in her miraculously real green robe, her linen neat upon her head, her hand laid in her husband's, and her eyes regarding his pious, solemn gesture as if she had consented in her own mind to see him painted as he wished, and not betray her sense of humour, the man, the pattens on the floor, the little dog, and the detailed chandelier, are all painted as if in Chaucer's verse. The identity of them is the amazing thing; their difference from all the other men and women of the town, the difference of their room from all other rooms, and their little dog from all other little dogs. To compare that married couple with any knight and lady carved in stone, hands folded over breasts, on a tomb in an old church, is to compare the modern with the mediæval, and the Wife of Bath with Guenevere or the Wife of Sir Segwarides. [Prose and verse.]