Any description of Chaucer's style is complicated by the two distinct and conflicting meanings the term 'style' now has. The first of these is a product of Romanticism and can be described as the belief that word forms and grammars are aspects of human character. Where 'the attunement of the soul' is thought to 'exer[t] a particular influence upon the language', as Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) believed, languages will seem to differ from one another in the very same ways, and in the very forms, as people differ. When developed as a method of literary analysis, as it was by philologists such as Leo Spitzer (1887-1960), this view can also discover the 'soul of the artist' in the smallest linguistic detail (the habitual use of a conjunction, for example). Although we do not understand ourselves to be thinking along these lines now, we still employ this theory every time we say that a line of poetry, or a particular turn of phrase, is 'Chaucerian'. For the subtle but sure consequence of assuming that language and 'the artist' are equivalent is the belief that a writer's work is as cohesive as personhood (its parts are so integral that they form an indivisible whole) and just as distinctive (entirely unlike the work of any other person). In the case of Chaucer, such 'style' is the 'peculiar complexity' which sets his writing apart as if it were itself an individual. It is 'the meanings and values that make him Chaucer'.