In calling Chaucer _genial_ I chose the word with forethought. This geniality made it impossible that his satire should be intellectual. The satire of the intellect deals with the outside only, trying the thing satirized by a rigid standard. But it results from Chaucer’s genial temperament that justice in him is so equipoised by love that it becomes mercy, which is the point of rest between absolute law and human frailty. Therefore Chaucer, properly speaking, is not a satirist but a humorist; in other words, his satire is imaginative, and thus, in perfect subordination to narrative (though not to dramatic) art, he makes his characters satirize themselves. I suppose that no humorist ever makes anybody so thoroughly an object of satire as himself--but then one always satirizes himself kindly because he sees all sides. Falstaff is an example of this. Now this is just the character of imaginative or humorous satire, that the humorist enters his subject, assumes his consciousness, and works wholly from within. Accordingly when Chaucer makes his Frere or Pardoner expose all his own knaveries, we feel not as if he said, “See what a precious scamp this fellow is,” but “This is the way _we_ poor devils play fantastic tricks before high heaven.” The butt of the humorist is Man (including himself and us); the butt of the satirist is always individual man. The humorist says _we_; the moralist and satirist, _thou_. Here is the strength of the great imaginative satirist of modern times, Mr. Thackeray. In satire, the antithesis of Chaucer is Pope; as a painter of life and manners, Crabbe, who had great powers of observation without imagination. Therefore what is simplicity in Chaucer is poverty in Crabbe. Chaucer is the first great poet who held up a mirror to contemporary life in its objectivity, and for the mere sake of its picturesqueness--that is, he is the first great poet who has treated To-day as if it were as good as Yesterday. Dante wrote life also, but it was his own life, and what is more, his own interior life. All his characters are represented in their relation to _that_. But Chaucer reflected life in its large sense--the life of _men_, from the knight to the ploughman. Thus it is that he always quietly and naturally rises above the Conventional into the Universal. And so his great poem lives forever in that perennial contemporaneousness which is the great privilege of genius. Thus the man of genius has a double immortality--in heaven and on earth at the same time; and this is what makes it good to _be_ a genius at all, that their beauty and their goodness live after them, and every generation of men can say of them--They are _our_ friends also. I know not how to sum up what we feel about Chaucer except by saying, what would have pleased him most, that we _love_ him. I would write on the first page of his volume the inscription which he puts over the gate in his “Assembly of Fowls”: