【单选题】

Nothing more unlucky, I sometimes think,

could have befallenChaucer than that he should
have been christened "the father ofEnglish
Line poetry." For "father" in such a context conveys to
(5) most of us, I fear, a faint suggestion of vicarious
glory—the derivative celebrity of parents, other-
wise obscure, who shine, moon-like, in the
reflected luster of their sons. What else than
progenitors were the fathers of Plato, orCaesar,
(10) or Shakespeare, or NapoleonAnd so to call
Chaucer the father ofEnglish poetry is often tan-
tamount to dismissing him, not unkindly, as the
estimable but archaic ancestor of a brilliant line.
ButChaucer—if I may risk the paradox—is him-
(15) self the very thing he begat. He isEnglish poetry
incarnate, and only two, perhaps, of all his sons
outshine his fame. It is withChaucer himself,
then, and not save incidentally with his ancestral
eminence that we shall be concerneD、
(20)But five hundred and thirty-three years have
passed sinceChaucer dieD、And to overleap five
centuries is to find ourselves in another world, a
world at once familiar and strange. Its determin-
ing concepts are implicit in all thatChaucer, who
(25) was of it, thought and wrote.And, woven as they
are into his web, they at once lend to it and gain
from it flesh significance. To us they are obso-
lete; in theCanterbury Tales, and the Troilus, and
the House of Fame they are current and alive.
(30)And it is in their habit as they lived, and not as
mere curious lore, that I mean to deal with them.
Let me begin with the very tongue which
Chaucer spoke—a speech at once our own and
not our own. "You know," he wrote—and for the
(35) moment I rudely modernize lines as liquid in their
rhythm as smooth-sliding brandy—"you know
that in a thousand years there is change in the
forms of speech, and words which were then
judged apt and choice now seem to us wondrous
(40) quaint and strange, and yet they spoke them so,
and managed as well in love with them as men
now do."And to us, after only half a thousand
years, those very lines are an embodiment of what
they state:
(45) Ye knowe eek, that in forme of speche is
chaunge
Withinne a thousand yeer, and words tho
That hadden prys, now wonder nyce and
straunge
(50)Us thinketh hem; and yet they spake hem so,
And spedde as wel in love as men now do.
But it is not onlyChaucer’s speech which has
undergone transformation. The change in his
world is greater still.And the situation which
(55) confronts us is this. InChancer’s greatest work
we have to do with timeless creations upon a
time-determined stage.And it is one of the
inescapable ironies of time that creations of the
imagination which are at once of no time and for
(60) all time must nevertheless think and speak and act
in terms and in ways which are as transient as
they themselves are permanent. Their world—the
stage on which they play their parts, and in terms
of which they think—has become within a few
(65) lifetimes strange and obsolete, and must be deci-
phered before it can be reaD、For the immortal
puts on mortality when great conceptions are
clothed in the only garment ever possible—in
terms whose import and associations are fixed by
(70) the form and pressure of an in