Round About Chaucer: John Gower

From Legouis and Cazamian's History of English Literature (1937)

Chaucer to the Renascence. 1. Round about Chaucer: 7) The Dialect of the East Midlands of King's English. John Gower. 

However important literary production, in the dialects we have reviewed, may have been, no one of them triumphed over the others. Victory fell to the speech of the east midlands, the district of London and the two universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and that in which the king had his residence. For this reason that language has been called the King's English. Its pre-eminence was established once for all in the end of the fourteenth century.

Although to-day this victory seems quite natural, since social forces were already making London the political and social centre, the universities the intellectual centre of the nation, the dialect of the east midlands was perhaps, when it was on the very eve of becoming English like none other, the poorest, the most completely disinherited of literature. Since Anglo-Saxon times, almost all English poetry had been produced apart from it. It could boast of hardly a poem besides the romance of Havelock and Robert Manning's Handlyng Sinne.  Reflection shows that the fact is not astonishing, for it was in the neighbourhood of the court and the universities that the English language was most degraded and existed most precariously, that it was always subordinate either to Latin or to French or rather Anglo-Norman. King, nobles, and clerks despised it. French, long the only tongue of those ouside the vulgar herd, had its natural stronghold in this district, and was more tenacious of life here than elsewhere. Men better endowed than their fellows avoided the common language or had recourse to it only for practical ends. Their literary ambitions did not find scope in a tongue which was so meanly prized.

The case of John Gower (1) is very representative of prevalent conditions. He used Latin and French in turn, and reached the point of writing in English only late, probably under the influence of Chaucer's success. The date of his birth is unknown. Was he, as was long believed, some ten years older than Chaucer, or was his junior? He died eight years after him, in 1408, and was probably his exact contemporary. The works of the two poets grew side by side, and, although Gower is not without merit of his own, he is chiefly valuable because he serves to measure the greatness of his rival.

He was a Kentish man, but this origin had only a slight effect on his language, which is hardly at all different from that of London and the court. He was a gentleman, possibly a clerk who did not take major orders. He was well read, and his library, if the word may be used, seems to have contained much the same French and Latin books as Chaucer's.

Undoubtedly he was once young for he wrote love ballades in English-French, ballades which lack fire but are not without a certain grace. This was a lover on the courtly model, seeking in vain to touch an unfeeling heart:

En le douls temps ma fortune est amière
Le mois de Maij sest en yverne mué;
Lurtie truis si jeo la Rose quière
Vous êtes franche et jeo suis fort lié. (2)

 (Ballade XXXVII.)

The third line at least needs translation—

I find the nettle when I look for the rose—

for its language is not Parisian. He is aware of the fact and excuses himself for it:

Et si je n'ai du français la faconde
Pardonnez-moi que je de ce fors voie, (3)
Je suis Anglais; si quiers par telle voie (4)
Être excusé. . . .

The very rhythm of his French verse tends to be Anglicized, to beat time to the iambic measure. In spite of his effort after correctness, Gower proves better than any one else how artificial was this uprooted language, at once learned and corrupt. He reminds us of Chaucer's Prioress:

And Frensch she spak ful faire and fetysly
After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe,
For Frensch of Paris was to hire unknowe.

Gower is the last in date of the Anglo-Norman poets. He deserves to rank among them less by a few little love-pieces than by his long poem or rather his long sermon in verse which is called Speculum Meditantis, or Miroir de l'Homme, and has recently been rediscovered. It is a sermon against the immorality of the age, and it justifies Chaucer's epithet of 'moral Gower' which was to cling to his friend's name for ever. This clerk, concerned especially to note and display the vices of his generation, was indeed much more a moralist than a poet. He is without a trace of that joy in life and pleasure and observing it which are so vivid in Chaucer. He compares what he sees with his ideal, that of a pious clerk and a student, finds all abominable, and condemns unreservedly.

Thus it was with his most remarkable work, Vox Clamantis, which was inspired by the Peasant's Rising of 1381 and which he elected to write in Latin. It is a very substantial poem written by a member of the wealthy class, by a frightened landlord whose misfortune it was to live in Kent, the county in which the formidable rebellion broke out. Gower's terror gives these verse a strength and emphasis which are lacking in his other work.

The rising under Wat Tyler and Jack Straw began near Gower's land, and more than one of his tenants was doubtless among the rebels. It was during the first years of the minority of Richard II. The impoverishment of the Treasury, the levy of new subsidies for an unfortunate war, and the insolence of the farmers of the taxes had provoked popular anger and rebellion. Several tax-collectors were put to death, and after them lawyers, courtiers, and partisans of the real regent, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. The number of the rebels increased. One hundred thousand men marched on London, demanding the abolition of serfdom and the reduction of rents. A true social revolution had been let loose in the country, and for a moment the insurgents were masters of London, where they sacked the palaces of the Archbishop of Canterbury and John of Gaunt. They destroyed but they did not steal: they even hanged a man in their own ranks for theft. Then the king rode out to meet them, and Wat Tyler, while in parley with him, was slain by the mayor. The king procured the dispersal of the rebels by promising redress of their grievances, then revoked his promise, and the rising was ended by cruel repressive measures.

Gower, now in his fifties, was haunted by this rebellion as by a nightmare. His interests were all on the side of the landlords. He had no sympathy with the popular cause, yet considered the ills of society to be the outcome of social vices which were ruining the state. His alarms and his grievances are voiced in the Latin distichs of Vox Clamantis. 

The poet first has a vision of a crowd of members of the populace changed into wild beasts and uncurbed by reason—asses, fierce as lions, who will bear no more burdens, oxen who refuse to draw the plough, dows who bark at huntsmen, cats who have reverted to wildness. A jay, who stands for Wat Tyler, harangues them, to the sound of 'Down with honour! Perish the law!' and at the tail of their company John Ball, an excommunicate priest, preaches on the text: 

When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?

The swarming mass of people lays Troynovant, or London, waste. Its strength is broken by the death of the jay, but the ship of the state is still adrift and puts in at the island of Disorder. Then a voice from heaven advises Gower to write down what he has seen in his nightmare. 

The rest of his poem contains his waking thoughts and is entirely didactic. The misfortunes of the age spring from the general corruption. There are three classes of society, the clerks, the warriors, otherwise knights and nobles, and the third estate, namely the villeins and labourers, the traders and the lawyers. All are riddled with vice. The court is a meeting-place for everything abominable. 

The poem ends with a prayer to the young king, Richard II, to bring virtue back to the court, and with an appeal to all men to mend their ways, remembering how short is earthly life. Gower declares his love for his cournty: he has wished, he says, that men should hear not only what he himself feels to be true, but also the voice of the people which is often the voice of God. 

It is a great pity that this work, into which Gower has put the best of himself, his utmost sincerity of thought, vehemence of satire, and depths of narrow but coherent morality, should have received the dress of a dead language, while on the one occasion when he used the speech of his country he worked against the grain of his temperament and talent, and wrote an entirely artificial poem.

For he did finally make up his mind to write in English, perhaps incited by the growing reputation of Chaucer, who had already produced most of his works and was soon to begin The Canterbury Tales. It was about 1383 or 1384 that Gower composed his single English poem, his Confessio Amantis, an immense compilation of stories extending to forty thousand octosyllabic lines. He tells us he did it at the bidding of King Richard, who charged him that 'some newe thing I shuldë boke,' and thus he excuses his use of the vulgar tongue:

And for that fewë men endite
In oure Enslisshe, I thenkë make
A bok for King Richardës sake.

He has the credit of having sought, a little before Chaucer, a thread on which to string some hundred stories. The idea was not quite new: it had been exemplified in the Speculum Historiale of Vincent de Beauvais, the Gesta Romanorum, and the Sept Sages, to which the Decameron would have to be added, were it not clearly unknown to Gower as to Chaucer. The idea was a happy one, but how awkwardly Gower executed it!

He tells us with a sigh that he is going to sing of love, rather than follow his own taste and write a moral book. Love is the last subject he would choose for himself, but something must be conceded to the reader who prefers amusement to wisdom:

For thilkë cause, if that ye rede,
I wolde go the middel wey
And write a boke betwene the twey,
Somwhat of lust, somwhat of lore.

I happens that Venus, who has little fondness for him, advises him one day in May to make his confession to her priest Genius.  The obedient poet goes to the confessional and asks Genius to question him, point by point, thus sounding his conscience in the article of love. Genius consents, but declares that, in order that the confession may be complete, he will be obliged, in the course of the examination, to speak of the different vices. He will explain each of them by means of a story, so that the lover may know whether or not he have the same guilt on his conscience. When the confession has ended, Venus mocks this superannuated lover, who decides to withdraw. 

The device allows the seven deadly sins, subdivided into many secondary sins, to defile thorugh seven books. Genius has received a complete scholastic education, but he ceases to excel when he endeavours to adapt his examples to his precepts. To illustrate hypocrisy he tells the tale of the deceiving Trojan Horse. To show that murder, an effect of anger, is to be condemned, he relates the story of Pyramus and Thisbe: Pyramus kills himself out of despair, which is anger, when he believes that Thisbe has been the lion's victim, and the moral is that nothing should be done in a hurry. The proof that carelessness is injurious to love is found in the story of Phaeton, who drove his father's chariot carelessly, freezing and burning the earth by turns, so that Phebus caused him, as a punishment, to fall from the chariot and be drowned.

The connection of these stories with the morality of love is so absurd that, after praising Gower for attempting a unified plan, we are tempted to regret that he did not write his little stories haphazard, without trying to give them a frame. For as a a narrator he is abundant and clear, and since he has read much, he has had no difficulty in finding curious and sometimes attractive studies among his books. Several of his tales recur in Chaucer, who sometimes preceded and sometimes followed him in selecting them. Once or twice Gower was inspired by a better original than Chaucer, as when he took the story of the Knight Florent which corresponds to the tale of the Wife of Bath.

This is as much as can be claimed for Gower. An almost immeasurable distance separates him from Chaucer. He is doing penance when he obliges himself to treat of love, undertaking a task so ungrateful and so contrary to his nature that he could have discharged it well only with the help of the sense of humour he lacked deplorably. Like him, Chaucer posed as despised by Venus and ill-used by Cupid, but—not to speak of his unrivalled and unfailing power to awaken sympathy for lovers—his confession of impotence is delightful because it is wrapped in humour. In Gower, there are, or seem to be, velleities of humour, but they are invariably abortive. There is too much reality in the awkwardness with which this poet resigns himself to his distasteful subject. Once and again, a sigh excapes him because he cannot return to the moral teaching natural to him, and these regrets are the sincerest part of his poem. He is indeed, as Chaucer said, 'moral Gower', and it is unfortunate that he ever forsook his role. Venus was right when she told him:

And tarie thou mi court nomore
but go ther vertu moral dwelleth,
Where ben thi bokes, as men telleth,
Which of long time thou hast write.

And we are grateful to Gower for having made the goddess own Chaucer for her true disciple and poet. 

Of dites and songës glad
The which he for my sakë made
The land fulfilled is over al.

Gower, learned, industrious, and copious, is the typical average poet of his century. His writings are what Chaucer's might have been without Chaucer's genius.

Notes

(1). Complete edition in four volumes of his work, ed. by G. C. Macaulay (Clarendon Press, 1899-1902); Confessio Amantis, ed. by Henry Morley (1899).

(2) In the sweet season, my fate is bitter
     The month of May has changed into winter
      I find the nettle when I look for the rose;
     You are free whereas I am fast bound.

(3) I go astray.

(4) And therefore I beg.

 

 

 

 

 

Geoffrey Chaucer: The Founder of Our Language

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