It is this power of making characters at once typical and individual which marks true dramatic genius. Browning's men and women reveal their innermost souls to us, we see them with a passionate vividness which is almost startling in its brilliancy, but all the while we are conscious of the intensity of their individuality. The conspicuous thing about them is that which marks them out from the rest of the world. The commonplace novelist or dramatist, on the other hand, gives us mere types of vice and virtue. Mr. Jerome's gallery of Stageland characters--the hero, the heroine, the comic Irishman, the good old man, and the rest--is scarcely caricature. It is hardly necessary to give them names, the same types have been recurring again and again for many a long year, and are likely to continue to recur as long as there are cheap books and cheap theatres. But the great masters of character-drawing contrive to show us the individual at once as a unit and as part of the whole. We see the peculiar idiosyncrasies of this or that person, and we are conscious, not only of a subtle bond between ourselves and them which enables us to see things from their point of view, but of their relation to human nature in general and to their own class in particular. CHAPTER V CHAUCER'S HUMOUR Critics may be divided in opinion as to Chaucer's right to be called the Father of English poetry, but there can be no question that he is the first great English humorist. As far back as Henry III's reign fabliaux had been imported from France, but they took no real root in English soil, and though their coarse jests and indecent situations were fully appreciated by thirteenth- and fourteenth-century readers, they never rose above the level of collections of "merrie tales" and made no pretensions to originality or literary style. The same stories were repeated again and again, with slight variations, and are often to be found in Indian or Arabian versions as well as in French and English. Chaucer alone, showed that it was possible to see in them a revelation of human nature. The romances, as has been said, were far more French than English, and, even so, comparatively few of them show any flicker of humour. _Aucassin and Nicolette_ stands out as a conspicuous exception, but this is pure French, and the more English romances, such as _Guy of Warwick_ or _Bevis of Hampton_, take everything with intense seriousness. It is true that the Continental animal epic had begun to make its influence felt in England, but it was still the Continental epic: it belonged to the days of literary free-trade before the national spirit made itself felt in literature. Satire, it is true, had long since made its appearance in England, but except for rude popular rhymes and an occasional poem of greater pretensions--such as the _Land of Cokaygne_--it was in Latin, and had nothing distinctively English about it. In the Miracle Plays, it is true,