He were unwrast of His word that witness is of truth!' 'That is sooth,' said Satan 'but I me sore doubt, For thou got them with guile Against His love and His leave and His garden broke, on His land yedest3, Not in form of a fiend but in form of an adder; And enticedest Eve to eat by herself, And behightest her and him after to know, As two gods, with God both good and ill; Thus haddest thou them out and hither at the last. 9 It is not graithly gotten where guile is at the root. fetch; And, as thou beguiledest God's image in going of an adder, So hath God beguiled us all in going of a wy11? 'What lord art Thou?' quoth Lucifer a voice aloud said, 'The lord of might and of main that made all things. And those that our Lord loved with that light forth flew. ** Ashtoreth and all others hid them in hernes 14, They durst not look on our Lord the least of them all, Many hundreds of angels harped then and sang, Clarior est solito post maxima nebula Phebus, Post inimicitias clarior est et amor. 'After sharpest showers,' quoth Peace 'most sheen is the sun, Is no weather warmer than after watery clouds, Than after war and wrack when Love and Peace be masters. And Peace, through patience all perils stopped.' And then luted Love in a loud note, Ecce quam bonum et quam iocundum est habitare fratres in unum! Till the day dawned these damsels danced, That men rung to the resurrection and with that I awaked, And called Kitte my wife and Calote my daughter, God's resurrection, For God's blessed body it bare, for our boot1, 2 And it a-feareth the fiend; for such is the might, 1 help, remedy. • frightens away. which is grotesque if not dramatic, the poet thus describes the ringleaders of the insurrection : Watte vocat, cui Thomme venit, neque Symme retardat, Recteque Gibbe simul Hicke venire jubent: Colle furit, quem Geffe juvat, nocumenta parantes, Cum quibus ad damnum Wille coire vovet. Grigge rapit, dum Dawe strepit, comes est quibus Hobbe, The murder of Archbishop Sudbury by the rebels is described, but with little of that local or circumstantial colouring which we should desire. All that they succeeded in doing, says Gower, was to send him to heaven, 'Vivere fecerunt, quem mortificare putarunt; Quem tollunt mundo, non potuere Deo.' For several years before the rising of the commons the fame of Chaucer's English poetry must have been growing. Mere fashion could not hold out against the commanding power of that poetry; and Gower, when next he attempted a considerable work, found that he might as well write it in English. The Confessio Amantis was begun, he tells us, at the command of Richard II, who meeting him one day on the Thames, while the tide was flowing, called him into his barge, and bade him in the course of their talk to 'boke some newe thing.' Gower planned a work Whiche may be wisdom to the wise, And play to hem that list to play.' Thus incited, The long prologue is taken up with an account of the then state of the world, in which he repeats much of the censure on the various orders of men that he had introduced into the Vox Clamantis. He deplores the decline of virtue and good customs, and the general tendency of things to grow worse. Love itself is diseased, and no longer the pure passion that it once was. Starting from this point, he devotes the greater part of the voluminous poem which follows to an examination of the various ways in which men offend against the god of love. The seventh or penultimate book only is an exception to this remark, being a sketch of the philosophy of Aristotle. The lover is represented as a penitent, who, being half dead from a wound inflicted by Cupid, and resorting to Venus his mother, is recommended by the goddess to apply to Genius her priest, and confess to him all the sins that he has committed in the article of love. With the seven deadly sins, pride, anger, envy, &c., for his groundplan, the penitent confesses under the head of each his misdeeds as a lover, and the confessor consoles and directs him by relating the experiences of former lovers in pari materia. This strange medley of things human and divine, of which notable examples exist in the works of Chaucer and Boccaccio, does not mean the consecration of the world of passion by introducing religion into it, but the profanation of religion by degrading its rites and emblems to the service of earthly desire. But in this commingling of the morality of Christianity and the morality of Ovid, the two elements agree no better than fire and water; and the sense of this, forcing itself upon the consciences of the nobler spirits that thus offended, led to those 'Retractations' and palinodes which modern critics have regarded with so much wonder and disdain. Thus it was with Chaucer; thus with Boccaccio: to Gower perhaps, who wrote under the spell of fashion and in the groove of imitation, the precise character of the absurd confusion of ideas which reigns in his book was never sufficiently apparent to induce him to regret it. The quarrels of poets are not relevant to the purpose of this book; otherwise we might be tempted to enter on the muchdebated question of the relations between Chaucer and Gower, and the meaning of certain inserted or suppressed passages in their writings. We will only observe that since the discovery (in Trivet's Chronicle) of the common source of the story of Constance, told by Chaucer in the Man of Lawe's tale and by Gower in the second book of the Confessio Amantis, the chief reason for doubting the existence of a bitter feeling between the two poets has been removed. If Chaucer had, as Tyrwhitt and Warton thought, borrowed from Gower the story of Constance, it was hard to believe that he would speak roughly of him in the prologue to the very tale which attested the literary obligation. But no such obligation existed, and therefore the words may be taken in their natural bearing1. That Gower was timid and a timeserver is a conclusion which it is difficult to resist, when we consider the changes made in the Prologue to the Confessio Amantis. In its original shape, as we 'Speaking of the stories of Canace and of Appollinus of Tyre, told by Gower in his third and eighth books, Chaucer says 'Of suche corsed stories I seye fy,' and declares that not a word of this kind shall come from his pen. haye seen, it states that the poem was undertaken and made 'for kynge Richardes sake,' and prays 'that his corone longe stonde.' But in several MSS. all this is, not very skilfully, omitted or changed. In these the poem is dedicated to 'Henry of Lancaster,' and is said to have been composed in the sixteenth year of King Richard, i.e. in 1393. Henry, afterwards Henry IV, could not have been called Henry of Lancaster till after his father's death in February 1399. Soon after that date Richard II went over to Ireland; his unpopularity in England was great; the plot for supplanting him by Henry was set on foot, and with every month that passed the movement grew in strength. It was probably in the course of the summer of 1399 that Gower, perceiving how things were going, transformed his prologue so as to make it acceptable to the pretender whose success he anticipated. In the copies with the altered prologue he also omitted the lines of eulogy on Chaucer at the end, which the poem had originally contained. What could have prompted the omission but a feeling of estrangement? And for this estrangement the severity of the language just quoted from Chaucer supplies a probable motive. The last considerable work of our author was the Cronica Tripartita, a Latin poem in three books, giving a regular history of political incidents in England from 1387 to 1399. As might be expected, the writer bears hardly throughout the poem on the unfortunate Richard. He seems to know nothing of the common story as to the manner of his death. The deposed king died, he says, in prison, from grief, and because he refused to take food. Of Gower's shorter French poems, his Cinkante Balades, which exist in MS. in the library of the Duke of Sutherland, Warton has printed four. They are in stanzas of seven and eight lines, with refrains, and are written not without elegance; the opening of one of them is here printed. T. ARNOLD. |