Chapter 5 - Gower. Thomas Usk
I
The artistry of the Confessio Amantis has not always been recognized. Gower has told us that his design was to
go the middel weie
And wryte a bok betwen the tweie,
Somewhat of lust, somewhat of lore,
—that is, in more familiar critical language, to combine ‘profit with delight’. Delight, for a fourteenth-century poet, almost inevitably meant courtly love, and ‘lore’ would naturally include both ethical diatribe and information, both wisdom and knowledge. The work is to be moral, yet also encyclopedic, and the whole is somehow or other to be given a courtly and amatory colouring. In other words, Gower is proposing to do for his countrymen what Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun had already done in France, and the impulse behind his work is the same which drove Chaucer to undertake a translation of the Roman itself. It is by considering the Romance of the Rose as Gower’s original that we first become conscious of the technical problem involved in the Confessio Amantis and of the success—imperfect indeed but none the less astonishing—with which Gower has solved it. For in his original all was in confusion. The design of the first writer was incomplete; and, in the continuation, the amatory, satiric, pedagogic, and religious interests jostled with one another untidily and unprofitably. If Gower had been nothing more than the mere man of his own age with a talent for verse which he is sometimes supposed to have been, he would have been content to reproduce this confusion; for architectonics were not the strong point of the Middle Ages. But Gower everywhere shows a concern for form and unity which is rare at any time and which, in the fourteenth century in England, entitles him to all but the highest praise. He is determined to get in all the diversity of interests which he found in his model, and even to add to them his own new interest of tale-telling; but he is also determined to knit all these together into some semblance of a whole. And he almost succeeds.
The key to Gower’s solution of the problem is to be found in Andreas. It will be remembered that Andreas had extended the erotic code so that it almost coincided with the real ethical code. Except on certain obviously untractable points, the virtues of a good lover were indistinguishable from those of a good man; the commandments of the god of Love for the most part were mere repetitions of the commandments of the Church. The special courtly and amatory ethic—whose exposition forms a natural part of a medieval love poem—was not so very ‘special’ after all. If the exposition of this code, from being an episode, were enlarged to become the framework of the whole book, then you would in effect have something which was always ostensibly (and sometimes actually) a treatment of courtly love, but which could at any moment pass into serious moralizing with no excessive strain on the fabric of the poem. Sloth in love is a vice by Cupid’s law; but Sloth simpliciter is a vice by the moral law. But it is permissible—nay, it is logical—to precede your account of the species ‘Sloth in Love’ by an account of the genus ‘Sloth’. Thus at one stroke the main problem is solved, and all the serious ‘sentence’ can be dovetailed into a poem on love without discrepancy. Furthermore, an old and reasonable homiletic tradition exemplified in such a work as Handling Synne, justified the illustration of the virtues and vices by exemplary tales. Thus Gower can bring in his stories, and another problem is solved. It still remains to find some plausible reason for tabulating the virtues and vices. A sermon, or a confession, naturally suggests itself; and the confession is clearly the better device of the two. A sermon would leave Love, or his representative, the sole speaker: in a confession the Lover can speak as well, and tell his own love story. The choice of Genius as the confessor is obvious, for Genius has already been made a priest by Alanus and Jean de Meun. The scheme in its essentials is now complete. It only remains to variegate it with a few episodes or digressions—in which some ‘lore’ hitherto unused can be accommodated—and to add a prologue at the beginning, and a recantation or palinode at the end. Both these are to serve as transitions between the world of courtly love and that ordinary world which the reader is living in before he begins to read and to which he returns again when he has finished the book. In the prologue, therefore, we are introduced to Love, but not yet to Love in its sexual sense. Gower traces the condition of the world to the fact that Division has ousted Love. In the epilogue he effects his withdrawal from the court of love, as we shall see, in a very charming and original manner.
It will be obvious that the device of the lover’s confession is the master-stroke which organizes the whole of Gower’s material. It is, as far as I know, entirely Gower’s own, and he has seldom received full credit for it. It may be urged that the unity which he gains by it is, after all, an external and mechanical unity: that the poem shows rather the cleverness of a Chinese puzzle than the organic life of a work of art. I might grant both points and yet claim for Gower a higher place than has usually been accorded him. After being so long the ‘moral’ Gower, to be even the ‘clever’ Gower, would be no bad exchange; and if we thought him artificial we should at least have outgrown the misunderstanding which represents him as naïve. But I am far from granting so much. The unity of Gower’s poem is not dramatic, for he was not writing drama. But it is not merely external—not merely one of those abstract excellences which critics can detect while readers fail to feel them. His work is more pleasurable because he has laboured to arrange it well; that is, to arrange it plausibly and with variety. It has, in places, merits of an even higher order; but the beauty of the architectonics is constant.
One can say almost as much of the style—almost, but not quite, for Gower can be prosaic. He is our first considerable master of the plain style in poetry, and he has the qualities and defects that go with such a style. He can be dull: he can never be strident, affected, or ridiculous. He stands almost alone in the centuries before our Augustans in being a poet perfectly well bred. When I read Chaucer I am tossed to and fro between rich and racy imitations of the speech of taverns on the one hand, and, on the other, the heights of a newly discovered poetic diction. Often a single line such as
Singest with vois memorial in the shade
seems to contain within itself the germ of the whole central tradition of high poetical language in England. It is not so much poetical, as ‘English poetry’ itself—or what Englishmen most easily recognize as poetry; and the diction of the Chaucerians in the century that followed is a blundering witness to the fact. There is nothing of this in Gower. In him we seem rather to be listening to the speech of ‘ladies dead’—the language of our ancestors not as they spoke in the street or in the field, but as they spoke in polite and easy society. The politeness, to be sure, is that of the Middle Ages, not of the eighteenth century: it is noble rather than urbane, of the castle not of the town: the speech of a society in which courtiers still ‘went upon the carole’, and rode hawking along the river banks. It thus has a sweetness and freshness which we do not find in the ‘polite’ style at later periods. Often a couplet in Gower sounds like a snatch of song—
The daies gon, the yeres pass,
The hertes waxen lasse and lasse.
Fy on the bagges in the kiste!
I hadde ynogh, if I hire kiste.
Who dar do thing which Love ne dar?
These effects are not striven for. They are the natural reward of a direct and genuine language and a metre well controlled. They rise only by the smallest perceptible eminence above the verse that surrounds them, and yet they rise. When something songful is to be said, Gower finds himself singing. Nor is it only in such hints of song that the unexpected powers of his simple diction reveal themselves. Again and again, in gnomic or pathetic passages, he astonishes us by the memorable precision and weight of his lines. As in this—
The hevene wot what is to done,
Bot we that duelle under the mone
Stonde in this world upon a weer.
Or in this complaint to heaven, spoken by a girl over the body of her lover:
For he your heste hath kept and served,
And was yong and I bothe also:
Helas, why do ye with ous so?
Of a country laid waste he writes:
To se the wilde beste wone
Wher whilom duelte a mannes sone.
A princess sees her knight going into danger:
Sche preide, and seide ‘O God him spede
The kniht which hath mi maidenhiede?’
In all these—and there are many more—the poetry is so pure in its own kind that no analysis can resolve it into elements. They seem, to the inexperienced, to be what any one would, and could, have said; yet to have said more would be to have marred all. Sometimes this art of omission becomes more explicit, and even the dullest reader can see what Gower is leaving out. It is almost a rule with him not to tell us what his people thought—and a very good rule for certain kinds of poetry. Alcestis, after her great decision, returns to the husband for whom she is to die:
Into the chambre and whan sche cam
Hire housebonde anon sche nam
In bothe hire armes and him kiste,
And spak unto him what hire liste.
Lucrece lies sleeping as Tarquin approaches her bed, ‘but what sche mette, God wot.’ Of the princess who has fallen in love with Apollonius we are told that
forto thenken al hir fille
Sche hield hire ofte times stille
Withinne her chambre.
Who wishes to know, or to know further, what she thought when she had closed the door? So in the story of Rosiphilee we are content to learn that when she came to the forest-clearing,
It thoghte hir fair, and seide, ‘Here
I wole abide under the schawe’,
And bad hire wommen to withdrawe,
And ther sche stod al one stille
To thenke what was in hir wille.
The silence of the poet enables us to hear the silence of that wood; for we have all done what Rosiphilee was doing.
All plain styles, except the very greatest, raise a troublesome problem for the critic. Are they the result of art or of accident? If we were sure that Gower was himself unconscious of the beauties I have quoted, that he said so little only because he had little in his mind, our enjoyment of his poetry would not be impaired, but our judgement of the poet would be different. The question is perhaps ill put. Not all that is unconscious in art is therefore accidental. If seemingly plain statements rise to poetry, where the subject is imaginary, this shows at least that the writer had his eye on the object; that he was thinking not of himself but of his tale, and that he saw this latter clearly and profoundly; and such vision is a poetical, as well as a moral, excellence. That Gower always, or often, calculated—as Stevenson might have calculated—those reticences which delight us in his poetry, is very unlikely. But there is evidence that he knew, in his own way, what he was about. The famous line
The beaute faye upon her face
attained its present form only by successive revisions—revisions which demonstrate, so far as such things can be demonstrated, the working of a fine, and finely self-critical, poetic impulse. The first version—
The beaute of hire face schon
Wel bryhtere than the cristall ston,
—is just what would have contented the ordinary ‘unconscious’ spinner of yarns in rhyme; but it did not content Gower. Nor am I persuaded that the plain style of the Confessio Amantis was the only style he could compass. An element of choice came to aid his natural propensity. There are indications that he could have assumed a different manner if he had so desired.
Ferst to Nature if that I me compleigne,
Ther finde I hou that every creature
Som time ayer hath love in his demeine,
So that the litel wrenne in his mesure
Hath yit of kinde a love under his cure;
And I bot on desire, of which I misse:
And thus, bot I, hath every kinde his blisse.
I do not think it would be easy, at sight, to attribute this to Gower. No doubt, the different quality of these lines is largely due to the different metre; but if Gower can thus adapt himself with equal felicity to the two metres, and use two differing styles, then the style of his octosyllabics is art, not nature—or is nature in such a way as not to be the less art. The movement of the stanza I have quoted, and the rhetorical building of the clauses, are as perfect in their own way as anything in Gower’s narratives: more perfect than some of Chaucer’s stanza work. Elsewhere in the Confessio, and this time in octosyllabics, Gower writes successfully in a manner slightly different from his wont. The beautiful alba put into the mouth of Cephalus is too long to quote in full; but a few selections will show the heightening that I refer to:
And thus whan that thi liht is faded
And Vesper scheweth him alofte,
And that the nyht is long and softe,
Under the cloudes derke and stille
Thanne hath this thing most of his wille . . .
Withdrawgh the banere of thin armes,
And let thi lyhtes ben unborn,
And in the signe of Capricorn,
The hous appropred to Satorne,
I preie that thou wolt sojorne,
Where ben the nihtes derke and longe . . .
That thou thi swifte hors restreigne
Lowe under erthe in Occident,
That thei towardes Orient
Be cercle go the longe weie.
The whole passage is interesting, for it seems to have been a sort of holiday for Gower. The whole ‘tale of Cephalus’ is nothing but Cephalus’ alba, and is all, apparently, original.
To some, Gower’s poetry seems lacking in imagery. The glittering of the golden fleece ‘bright and hot’ as Jason rows back with it from the dangerous island, or the beards of the three beggars which were white ‘as a bush that is besnewed’, may serve to show that he is not wholly lacking in this respect. But they are admittedly not typical of Gower. The pictorial imagination finds little to feed on in the Confessio Amantis; but often this is because imagination of another kind, and a kind perhaps more proper to narrative, is brought into play. Gower does not dwell on shapes and colours; but this does not mean that he keeps his eyes shut. What he sees is movement, not groups and scenes, but actions and events. In so far as he approximates to the visible arts at all, it is a cinematograph rather than a painting that he suggests. When Elda returns to the room where his wife lies murdered, we are not told what the scene looked like; but we are told that
stille with a prive lyht
As he that wolde noght awake
His wif, he hath his weie take
Into the chambre.
King Philip, at the wars, is informed in a dream of the love which the god Amos has cast upon the queen. Here again there is no attempt to build up a picture; what is added is significant action and event:
And tho began the king awake
And sigheth for his wyves sake
Wher as he lay . . .
Medea sends her maid to Jason in secret, and the maid returns to tell her how she sped. We can all imagine how Spenser or Keats would have dealt with the blushes and beauty of Medea. Gower, on the other hand, has nothing to say of how she looked. But he knows what she did—‘sche for joie hire maide kiste’—and the whole scene is alive in six words. When Apollonius embarks to take vengeance upon the land of Tharse, the pageantry of the embarkation—which Chaucer or Marlowe might so happily have dwelled on—is passed over with the bald statement that the king took ‘a strong pouer’. Then follows the couplet that Chaucer perhaps would scarcely have thought of:
Up to the sky he caste his lok
And syh the wind was covenable.
That first line is businesslike, but it is poetry. It might come from a traveller who wrote thinking of anything rather than literature: it might also come from a ballad: it might come from Homer. Ships and the sea, indeed, are always good in Gower; not only in such full-length passages as the storm (in the story of King Namplus), but also in the two lines that make the vision of Alceone as vivid as a remembered dream of our own (‘The tempeste of the blake cloude, The wode see, the wyndes loude’), and even in such a brisk bit of ordinary connecting narrative as
The wynd was good, the schip was yare,
Thei tok here leve, and forth thei fare . . .
—which looks easier to do than it is. This excellence in Gower’s sea-pieces has led some to suppose that he was familiar with sea travel—as he may well have been; but it is, in fact, only one manifestation of his devotion to movement and progression, his preoccupation with things that change as you watch them. If he is to speak of knight errantry, he imagines his knight ‘somtime in Prus, somtime in Rodes’, and the heralds cry out,
Vailant, vailant, lo, wher he goth!
The appearance of Nebuchadnezzar, transformed into a beast, is passed over; but we hear how he beheld himself and sighed. The death of Ulysses is not described—but ‘every man The King! The King! Began to crie’. In the story of the Courtiers and the Fool Gower paints no interior, but the King and the two lords
stoden be the cheminee
Togedre spekende alle three,
while the fool sat by the fire ‘as he that with his babil pleide’. When Progne receives the fatal sampler on which her sister has woven the story of their common ruin, she faints: but afterwards ‘Eft aros and gan to stonde And eft she takth the cloth on honde’. When the Lover dances with his mistress—
Me thenkth I touche noght the flor;
The Ro which renneth on the mor
Is thanne noght so lyht as I.
If we have few set pictures in Gower it is sometimes because the poet nods; more often it is because he is wide awake and on the move.
This ever-present movement is the strength of Gower as a narrative poet. It is in this capacity alone that he is usually praised, and deservedly; but in speaking of his Tales we must beware of some false opinions. They are not, as has been supposed, the only part of the Confessio Amantis which deserves reading. They are not the sole end and aim of the poem, for which all the rest exists. The love allegory in which they are set, the moral, and even the scientific, digressions by which they are interrupted, are just as interesting to Gower as the tales themselves, and often just as capable of giving pleasure to the reader. To read the tales alone, or the framework alone, is to miss the variety which the poet has taken pains to provide for us; and then ‘it dulleth ofte a mannes wit’. Nor is it by any means certain that the Tales, as a whole, constitute Gower’s best work. They contain, perhaps, his best work; but certainly they also contain his worst; for story-telling is a function which brings out the defects as well as the qualities of the plain style. It does not follow that a tale which avoids all the characteristic faults of Chaucer—the rhetoric, the digression, and the occasional rigmarole—is therefore a good tale. Perhaps it makes no faults because it makes nothing; certainly there are tales in Gower so concise that they read not like narrative poems but like metrical arguments for narrative poems still to be written. Such are the Sirens, Capaneus, the Beggars and the Pasties, and many others. Even where this fault is avoided Gower can still fail. The humorous tale of Hercules and Faunus is flat; and possibly no other narrator ever allowed a story to get under weigh, as Gower does in Acis and Galatea, before telling us—and then in a most casual parenthesis—that one of the three characters involved, and already set in action, is a Giant.
Even when we have ruled out the failures—which are, after all, in the minority—it remains, from the very nature of the case, a difficult matter to assess Gower’s skill. In this kind of narrative, so spare, so direct, and so concentrated on the event, it is not easy to distinguish the merit of the telling from the intrinsic merit of the story. We sometimes suspect that Gower succeeds only when he has a good story to tell, and fails only when he has a bad one. This does not, of course, detract from his value; but it modifies the critic’s judgement. Stories, or stories of this kind, are not matter but already form: Gower’s art is rather to liberate the beauty of this form, to find this Hercules in the marble, than to add it. And of his art, so conceived, we may say, I think, that it is nearly always on the same level of achievement—always somewhere beneath the highest, yet very high. What changes is his discretion in selecting the tales. The stories of Constance or of the Education of Achilles are not worse told than those of Florent or Apollonius: Gower’s error lay in telling them at all. Here, as everywhere in medieval literature, we must try to repress our modern conception of the poet as the sole source of his poetry: we must think more of the intrinsic and impersonal beauty or ugliness of matters, plots, and sentiments which retain their own living continuity as they pass from writer to writer. Trouvere as well as maker is the name for a poet.
If we are speaking of the art of narration in its strictest sense, this is as far as we can go. But of course there are qualities not strictly narrative, though properly manifested in narrations, which are really characteristic of Gower. The account of Medea’s sorceries (Thus it befell upon a nyht, &c.) seems to have stuck in the mind of every reader from Shakespeare down; and the beaute faye upon the faces of the dead in Rosiphilee, which I have already referred to, is quoted as often as any line in the whole poem. Both passages have a common quality, and it is this quality, perhaps, which marks Gower’s point of maximum differentiation as a poet. For Gower is ‘romantic’ in the nineteenth-century meaning of the word. He excels in strange adventure, in the remote and the mysterious: like his own Jason, him
sore alongeth
To se the strange regiouns
And knowe the condiciouns
Of othre marches.
He loves to tell us, in the story of Nectanabus,
Hou fro the hevene cam a lyht
Which al hir chambre made lyht.
His strangely vivid, because strangely ambiguous, description of the dream in Ulysses and Telegonus is almost among the great dreams of English poetry. And this quality in Gower is worth noticing because it is rare in the Middle Ages. It is indeed what many expect to find in medieval literature, but we do not often find it. It is not in the Romance of the Rose; it is not in Chrétien, nor in Langland, nor Alanus; it is rare in the metrical romance; and it is, in places, even painfully lacking in Chaucer. Gower’s use of this neglected, yet characteristically English, vein of poetry, entitles him to the praise of independence. No doubt it is possible to overrate—as perhaps the present writer does—‘the fairy way of writing’. But it has its own function. In this dim medium the shocking tale of Tereus acquires a bittersweet beauty not otherwise attainable. Like all romantics Gower builds a bridge between the conscious and the unconscious mind.
A consideration of the Confessio Amantis falls naturally into three divisions—the tales (of which I shall say no more), the didactic passages (religious, moral, and scientific), and the love allegory in which all the rest are set. As a didactic poet in general Gower does not stand very high. I do not mean by this that accidents of time have rendered his alchemy, astronomy, and anthropology uninteresting; that is the sort of thing which the good reader can overcome by an effort of historical imagination. I mean that we find in Gower no such real grasp of conceptual thought, and no such power of felicitous popularization, as we find in Jean de Meun. Contemporary readers could, I fancy, have got all that Gower has to tell them, and got it better, elsewhere. His euhemeristic account of the pagan deities descends to mere abuse. The following description of Apollo, with its flat and grumbling expostulation, seems to me irresistibly funny:
He was an hunte upon the helles;
Ther was in him no vertue elles
Wherof that enye bokes karpe
Bot only that he kouthe harpe . . .
Sometimes he falls into mere absurdity, as where he tells of a certain star:
Nature on him his name caste
And clepeth him Botercadent;
yet time, which obliterates so many beauties, creates some, and if much of Gower’s ‘doctrine’ has lost whatever merits it once had, parts of it have acquired a quaintness which only very sophisticated readers can fail to enjoy. It must be a hard heart that can resist geography of this kind:
Fro that unto the worldes ende
Estward, Asie it is algates
Til that men come unto the gates
Of Paradis, and there Ho!
As a moral and religious poet, on the other hand, Gower is often excellent, and that not only in explicitly didactic passages. His ethics and his piety, now stern, now tender, and now again satiric, colour the whole work, and always for the better. Sometimes they colour it without the author’s knowledge. The heathen theogamies which form the pivot of Mundus and Paulina and Nectanabus are conceived in the light of the Christian sentiment that surrounds the story of the Annunciation:
Glad was hir innocence tho
Of suche wordes as sche herde,
With humble chere and thus answerde . . .
This is not art, for doubtless Gower never dreamed of envisaging the story otherwise; but it makes the story better. At the opposite end of the scale we have those passages where Gower shows, unexpectedly, his powers as a humorist—the picture of the drunkard who wakes next morning (unlike his weak successors in our own day) with the stirring cry, ‘O whiche a sorwe it is a man be drinkeles’—or the longer, and even funnier, passage in which the faithless husband gives his wife an account of his day’s sport. But neither tenderness nor satire is Gower’s highest reach as a moralist. His true quality comes out rather in the ring of such a line as
The newe schame of sennes olde,
where we are surprised at this element of iron in a poet elsewhere so gentle, so fanciful, and so at peace. Yet we find it again and again. The noble description of the Last Judgement in Book II:
That dai mai no consail availe,
The pledour and the plee schal faile;
the lines on the insight of God into ‘the privites of mannes herte’, which
speke and sounen His ere
As thogh thei lowde wyndes were;
and the paragraph in Book V which begins ‘Whan Peter, fader of the feith’—all these serve to remind us in how worthy a sense (and how unlike the sneering modern interpretation) he deserves the name of ‘moral’ Gower. Above all, the vision of the elements sickening with the Fall of Man, in the Prologue, which is not the offspring of platitude and conformity, but of a stern, and passionate, and highly imaginative impulse, rises to a climax that is nothing short of the sublime—
The Lond, the See, the firmament,
Thei axen alle jugement
Ayein the man and make him werre—
—lines which are as far outside Chaucer’s range as the Milleres Tale is outside Gower’s.
But it is time to turn to the Love Allegory itself, which forms the framework of the whole Confessio, and which concerns the present study most nearly. I have already protested against the view which treats Gower’s allegory as nothing more than the thread on which his stories are strung. Gower comes before us as a poet of courtly love; and I think he makes good his claim. He has not indeed written a love poem comparable to Troilus or to the first part of the Romance of the Rose. But he has his own contribution to make. In his own way he works side by side with Chaucer to realize what Guillaume de Lorris had rendered possible.
The story is simple. The poet, ‘Wisshinge and wepinge al min one’, and wandering in the usual May morning, meets Venus and is handed over by her to the priest Genius, to confess himself as regards the code of love. The confessor—availing himself, as I said above, of the parallelism between the erotic and the moral law—goes through six of the seven deadly sins, illustrating them with stories, and eliciting replies from his penitent. He digresses twice on a large scale, once to give an account of the religions of the world, and once to give a general scheme of education: minor digressions deal with Crusading and with Great Inventors. The seventh deadly sin, in a moral work, ought to have been Luxury, which naturally cannot be a sin against Venus; its place is taken by Incest, agreeably with the doctrine of Andreas.
It is at once apparent that we have here no allegorical conduct of a complex love story, as we had in Guillaume de Lorris. But this does not mean that we have no presentation of love; on the contrary, in the replies of the poet to the questions put by Genius, we have his life as a lover presented directly and without allegory. These replies make no inconsiderable part of the poem; for the historian, even if they had no intrinsic beauty, they would have great importance; for in them Gower is doing, after his own fashion, what Chaucer did in Troilus—presenting directly, in terms of tolerably realistic fiction, what he has learned from the allegory of the Roman. Guillaume de Lorris has taught Gower, as well as Chaucer, to look within; and now that the lesson has been learned it is possible to look outwards again. Hence it comes that the lover’s speeches are full of the movement of the actual world. We see the ‘yonge lusty route’ of his rivals surrounding his mistress: we see Gower himself bowing and proffering his service, conducting her to church, playing with her dog, and riding beside her chariot: we see the lady at her needlework, or at the dice, dancing, or listening to the story of Troilus as he reads aloud. We see Gower postponing the moment of leave-taking, and, after he has gone, rising at night to look across the housetops to his lady’s window.
To those who find allegory difficult this direct method will doubtless come as a relief; but it is not only the method that deserves attention. The content may claim to be a ‘just representation of general nature’—and therefore, as seldom fails, of individual nature too. The experience of the lover is presented with a truth that convinces us, and with much mingling of humour and pathos. Gower is not the slave of any mere convention. When he conforms, his heart goes with it. When he writes a full-length paean in the praise of Love—
It makth curteis of the vilein &c—
he repeats what his predecessors have said. But he wishes to repeat it, and is not the less a poet because he agrees with the common experience of gentle hearts. His humility, perhaps, smacks more of that age, and less of all time; though it may be argued that his cowering like ‘the yonge whelp’ at his mistress’s rebuke is rather disagreeable than incredible. But we forgive even this when he pierces to the spiritual reality behind all this tradition of humility and thus reminds us of the sense in which courtly love is no convention and cannot die:
So lowe couthe I nevere bowe
To feigne humilite withoute,
That me ne leste betre loute
With alle the thoghtes of myn herte.
In the light of such a passage we can understand and approve the remark of Genius:
Sche mai be such, that hire o lok
Is worth thin herte manyfold—
and while we read we feel that this is but reason. We feel it the more easily because such devoutnesses exist in Gower side by side with much shrewdness and realism. He explicitly rejects that part of the code which demands that a lover should be a knight-errant.
Forto slen the hethen alle
I not what good ther mihte falle . . .
What scholde I winne over the see
If I mi ladi loste at hom?
He is too good a moralist to have any delusions about himself. Gower the poet handles Gower the lover with a somewhat sour, half-smiling, detachment. He knows that he does not offer his mistress a virgin heart, or body. He ‘has tasted in many a place’, with no higher purpose than ‘forto drive forth the dai’. He can claim that he has been always sincere towards his lady; but ‘as touchende othre’ he cannot say so much. The lover confesses with naïveté—which assuredly argues no naïveté in the poet—that he is spiteful and a backbiter. He cannot help telling the lady discreditable stories about the young men who visit her, and his excuse for doing so is delicious:
So fayne I wolde that sche wiste.
Equally true, and equally comic, is the confusion of mind which enables him to feel a moral indignation against his rivals who busy themselves
Al to deceive an innocent.
We have the picture of a very ordinary kind of human heart—‘A nothing that would be something if it could’. It is only in his love that the Lover is transfigured. This can cast him into a waking trance, in which
Me thenkth as thogh I were aslepe
And that I were in Goddes barm.
This can make him lighter than the roe when his lady dances; and her words are ‘as the wyndes of the South’. It is this which has penetrated him so deeply that its eradication, if ever it were eradicated, would leave but little of the man to survive,
For liche unto the greene tree
If that men toke his rote aweie
Richt so myn herte scholde deie.
It is this love which teaches him, though simple, to surprise his Confessor with an answer of unerring and subtle truth. Genius has been speaking of the sin of Ravine, whose counterpart in the code of love is Rape. Is the penitent guilty in this matter? The question is shocking in this context of courtly love. We wonder what indignation, what protests of courtesy and humility, what rhetoric or what exaggeration will be sufficient to meet it. But there is that in the poet’s heart which enables him to neglect all these, and to make a reply that exhausts the subject for good and all. It is in nine short words—
Certes, fader, no:
For I mi ladi love so.
If Gower’s heroine is but a pale shadow beside Cryseide, his hero is at times a worthy rival to Troilus.
There is some danger of monotony in the continued failure of this lover’s suit; and though the tales and other digressions relieve this, the poem would be unsatisfactory if it left the lover’s history where it found it. But Gower has a story to tell. He has, perhaps, no very striking beginning; but he has a middle and an end—one of the best ends, indeed, in medieval poetry. For the Confessio Amantis tells the story of the death of love. The lines about the green tree which must die without its root are beautiful in themselves; but they gain incalculably when we discover that the green tree actually is to lose its root, and that this indeed is the primary subject of the poem. At the beginning we may suspect that the ill success of the lover is merely conventional, that the ‘cruelty’ of the lady serves only to delay a happy ending. But even from the first there are indications that this is not what Gower intends to do. The words of Venus, at her first appearing, strike cold:
With that hir lok on me sche caste,
And seide, ‘In aunter if thou live!
Mi will is ferst that thou be shrive’.
Long afterwards we learn the reason. This lover is separated by a fatal barrier from the ‘yonge lusti route’ of his rivals. He is old. The Confessio Amantis, written by an old poet, in failing health, appropriately tells the story of an old man’s unsuccessful love for a young girl. It is a subject that lends itself with equal ease to a rather brutal kind of comedy or a sentimental kind of tragedy: finer and truer than either of these is Gower’s conception in which the aged lover at last reconciles himself to the reality of the situation and wakes from his long illusion, ‘in calm of mind, all passion spent’. The handling of this quiet close is so beautiful, and the thing itself so wisely and beautifully imagined that it constitutes Gower’s highest claim as a poet; and that not only for its content, but for its artistry.
It is worth our while here to pause and consider Gower’s ending simply as the solution of a technical problem. I have tried to show how the very nature of courtly love demanded that the perfect love poem should end with a recantation. The claims of the objective moral law—of Resoun as the Middle Ages said—must, in the end, be faced. Hence the last Book of Andreas, and the conclusion of Troilus and Cryseide. Gower, as well as another, is faced with this necessity. For him, as for Chaucer, the love which he celebrates is a sin, and in the lover Will has usurped dominion over Resoun. Gower is not enough of a philosopher to achieve, like Dante, or even to attempt, like Alanus, any reconciliation between the claims of his two worlds: but he is much too careful and sincere an artist to be content with some formal palinode which would stultify the whole of the rest of his poem. He solves the problem by keeping his eye on the object. He finds in his own experience—the experience of an old man—how Life itself manages the necessary palinode; and then manages his in the same way. It is Old Age which draws the sting of love, and his poem describes the process of this disappointing mercy. Venus promises the lover that he will find peace
Noght al per chance as ye it wolden,
Bot so as ye be reson scholden.
—lines which describe, perhaps unconsciously, the very nature of life’s discipline in this, as in a thousand other matters, and which might even express the promise kept by Venus to successful lovers. This is the deepest note in Gower; but though it is heard distinctly only at the end, its influence is over the whole poem. For when once he has hit upon the theme ‘Love cured by Age’, he has no more need for the clumsy device of a separate palinode: the whole story becomes a palinode, and yet remains a love story—a pathetic, yet not dismaying, picture of Passion at war with Time, while more than half aware that Reason sides with Time against it. It is this latter, this half-awareness, that saves the Confessio Amantis from the spiritual shallowness of a mere lament over the vanished pleasures of youth. It also explains certain places in the poem which are commonly misunderstood. Critics smile when Genius, priest of Venus, denounces Venus herself as one of the false deities; and if we insist on the original significance of Genius (the god of reproduction) there may be some absurdity. But it is not quite the kind of absurdity that we are tempted to suppose. Gower has not blundered into it by an oversight. He knows very well what he is doing, and goes out of his way to underline what we consider the inconsistency. Genius himself is well aware of it. He is forced against his will to pass sentence on the very powers that he serves. His penitent presses the question on him, demanding
The godd and the goddesse of love
Of whom ye nothing hier above
Have told, ne spoken of her fare,
That ye me wolden now declare
Hou thei ferst comen to that name,
and the Priest replies
Mi sone, I have it left for schame.
He would have kept silence if he could: but if you press him, he must confess that the whole world which he represents, Venus and Cupid and the court of Love, are but idle dreams and feigned consecrations of human infirmities. In all this there is some clumsiness: but there is also something very far from absurdity. Genius here stands for Love—for that whole complex in the lover’s mind which he calls his ‘love’, and of which he has made his deity and his father confessor: and in these lines we have the poetic history of that strange moment—familiar in the history of other passions as well as of love—wherein a man, laying his ear close to his own heart, first hears the master passion itself there speaking with a doubtful voice, and presently hinting that it knows (the conscious will shouting it down in vain)—that it knows itself to be all other than the tongue claims for it—that its foundations are crumbling—that its superstructure is but a tissue of illusions and decaying habits, soon to dissolve and leave us face to face with inner emptiness. In the curious tergiversations of Genius we see love itself betraying the Lover, though for a long time yet he cannot—lest his Green Tree lose its root—cease, in some sense, to love. I do not say that all this was present in Gower’s mind in the same conceptual form which I have been compelled to give it. But some such significance is implicit in these lines, and becomes almost explicit in the eighth Book. By then the game is almost played out. Genius has ceased to speak for the Love-deities who were originally his patrons. He is simply the lover’s deepest ‘heart’, telling him bitter truths, now no longer avoidable; and the change is marked by the words,
Mi sone, unto the trouthe wende
Now wol I for the love of thee,
And lete all other trufles be,
and the passage ends with the grave lines
For I can do to thee nomore
Bot teche thee the rihte weie:
Now ches if thou wolt live or deie.
It is difficult to speak of what follows without seeming to over-praise a poet so neglected, and in some respects so negligible, as Gower. We have here one of those rare passages in which medieval allegory rises to myth, in which the symbols, though fashioned to represent mere single concepts, take on new life and represent rather the principles—not otherwise accessible—which unite whole classes of concepts. All is shot through with meanings which the author may never have been aware of; and, on this level, it does not matter whether he was or not. The two-edged promise of Venus I have already quoted. Is this an allegorical presentation of the death of love—or of love only? Or is it the voice of Life itself? The answer is that it is both: for doubtless it is a rule in poetry that if you do your own work well, you will find you have done also work you never dreamed of. And so with all the other elements in Gower’s closing scene; the deadly cold that quenches the lover’s heart, the companies of singing Youth and singing Age whom he sees in his trance, the figure of Cupid as he stoops over his body to pull out the long-embedded dart, the ointment ‘mor cold than eny keie’ with which the wound is healed, and the beads, given him by Venus, which bear the inscription Por reposer. All these images tell the story of this particular lover, and this death of love, to admiration; but it is of death in many other senses that our minds are full while we read, and we rise from the book, as the Lover rose from his trance, ‘thenkende thoghtes fele’. But not of death as evil; rather of death as new life, with a clarity which this conception rarely attains in profane writings. ‘Foryet it thou, and so wol I’, says Genius when all the ritual has been undergone; and Venus bids the poet ‘go where vertu moral duelleth’. The words strike ghost-like on some modern ears. But no one can miss the heartfelt peace of the line—so simple in itself, so perfect in its context—
Homward a softe pas I went.
If Gower had known to stop here he would have made an ending worthy to stand beside that of the Iliad or of Samson Agonistes.
Unfortunately he did not. He adds a long and unsuccessful coda; and I am half glad to close on a note of censure, lest the beauties I have described should carry our critical judgement too far captive. Gower has risen to great poetry, but he is not a great poet. The restraint which is visible in single lines and short passages innumerable deserts him in the conduct of the poem as a whole. He says too much, not at this point or that, but too much simpliciter. Often the plain style sinks to prose. He has told, along with his good stories, many bad ones. But he has merits which render all his faults forgivable. Inferior to Chaucer in the range, and sometimes (not always) in the power, of his genius, he is almost Chaucer’s equal as a craftsman. In the content of his work it is interesting to notice that he is profoundly English. His romanticism, and his choice of the theme of Time and Age—both these look back to the Anglo-Saxons and forward to the nineteenth century. Yet his form is French. The heart is insular and romantic, the head cool and continental: it is a good combination.
II
In addition to the poetry of Chaucer and Gower, the fourteenth century has left us one other work in the same tradition—the Testament of Love by Thomas Usk. The comparative mediocrity of Usk’s talent, and the political or biographical problems to which the Testament gives rise, have somewhat obscured its importance in the history of literature. This importance depends upon its form; for the Testament of Love is written in prose. The medium is unusual for most subjects in Chaucer’s time, and for the erotic allegory at all times; and Usk deserves the praise of originality for attempting it. Certainly the use of prose for matter the reverse of utilitarian marks a phase in the coming of age of our language. The medium long consecrated to official or homiletic uses is beginning to invade new fields. Usk is trying to write prose which shall have wings like verse—coloured and tunable prose—Kunstprosa, in a word. He thinks that English may be taught to do what Latin has done in the hands of Alanus; and he deserves from posterity more sympathy and indulgence than he has usually received. That his results should be more interesting than beautiful is only what we should expect. But sometimes he succeeds; and many of his failures must be laid at the door of Chaucer’s Boethius—a radically vicious model which Usk excusably followed because it had, in his time, no rivals.
The Testament takes the form of a conversation, held in prison, between the author and a lady who personifies Love. It is closely modelled on the conversation—which was also held in prison—between Boethius and Philosophy, not only in its general conception but in the detail of its arguments. In style it is indebted to Chaucer’s translation of Boethius, and indebted so deeply that Dr. Skeat doubted whether Usk had ever read the original Latin. It is questionable whether we can draw any such conclusion from the fact that he chose to follow—as who would not?—the only specimen of high rhetorical prose which the vernacular afforded him; but the influence of Chaucer, and not only of Chaucer’s prose, is certainly very obvious throughout the Testament. Usk repays his debt in the third book by the eulogy of Chaucer which I have already quoted. The substance of the Testament has baffled many readers. In the earlier chapters it deals, or seems to deal, with the author’s love for a certain Margaryte. Love encourages Usk in his ‘service’ and warns and instructs him in the manner that is now familiar. It is true that Margaryte sometimes ceases to be a woman and becomes a pearl; but this will confuse no reader who has understood the Romance of the Rose. As we proceed, however, we find that we are concerned less with Margarite than with a certain ‘blisse’ for which all are seeking by ‘kyndly intencion’ and which is called the ‘knot in the hert’; and this bliss or knot turns out to have all the characters of Boethius’ bonum. It is plain that we have slid over from profane to sacred love, and from the enjoyment of a mistress to the bliss of heaven.
The author himself attempts to explain his allegory in the last paragraph of the book, but the explanation is not very easy to follow. I will quote his words in full:
‘Also I praye, that every man parfitly mowe knowe thorow what intencion of herte this tretys have I drawe. How was it, that sightful manna in deserte to children of Israel was spiritual meate? Bodily also it was, for mennes bodies it norissheth; and yet never the later Christ it signifyed. Right so a jewel betokeneth a gemme, and that is a stone vertuous or els a perle. Margarite, a woman, betokeneth grace, lerning, or wisdom of god, or els holy church.’
And in a previous passage he has told us that his ‘perle’ signifies ‘Philosophie’ with her three species, that is natural and moral and reasonable. It was from these passages that Dr. Skeat concluded that Margarite ‘never means a live woman, nor represents even an imaginary object of natural human affection’; and he interpreted the words ‘Margarite, a woman’, as meaning ‘Margarite, a woman’s name’. One of the distinctions here introduced we may dismiss at once: whether the mistress in a book of love be ‘real’ in the sense of being historical, is a question that can seldom be answered and ought never to be asked. I willingly obey Usk’s own request; ‘for goddes love, no man wonder why or how this question come to my mynde.’ But it matters very much whether Margarite is to be imagined as a woman or not. For my own part, I cannot agree with Dr. Skeat’s interpretation. I do not see how the words ‘Margarite, a woman’ can mean ‘Margarite, a woman’s name’. I think it more agreeable to the nature of the English language, to interpret them ‘Margarite, though a woman’, or ‘Margarite, besides being a woman’: and we shall find that this is more agreeable to the context too. In the passage quoted, I must confess that I do not quite understand the sentence beginning ‘Right so a jewel’, but the rest seems plain enough. The manna had a spiritual significacio, but ‘bodily also it was’; it did not cease to be food by becoming a symbol of Christ. In the same way, Margaret does not cease to be a woman by becoming a symbol of grace. On the contrary, ‘Margarite, a woman, betokeneth grace’. The conception is not, perhaps, entirely easy to the modern reader; but I do not think any contemporary of Usk’s would have found a moment’s difficulty in it. When you accepted the exodus of Israel from Egypt as a type of the soul’s escape from sin, you did not on that account abolish the exodus as a historical event. Usk treats courtly love as a symbol of divine love; but, for that reason, he does not cease to treat courtly love. It is a mischievous error to suppose that in an allegory the author is ‘really’ talking about the thing symbolized, and not at all about the thing that symbolizes; the very essence of the art is to talk about both. And for this particular conjunction, of divine and sexual love, Usk has precedent in the two gardens of Jean de Meun, in the Beatrice of the Divine Comedy, and in the Song of Songs. A modern may profitably study the same thing in the poetry of Coventry Patmore.
We must, therefore, expect to find in the Testament a double ambiguity. On the one hand, Margarite will be sometimes a mortal woman, and at other times the Church or Philosophy. On the other hand, the lady Love will be now Venus from the courts of Love, now Divine Love. And this is just what we do find. Thus Margarite is a woman when her lover is sad ‘to think on thing that may not, at my wil, in armes me hente’: she is the church when ‘bothe professe and regular arn obediencer and bounden to this Margarite-perle’. When Love says, ‘Poore clerkes, for witte of schoole, I sette in churches, and made such persones to preche’, she speaks in her divine character; but she is courtly love when she says ‘When any of my servauntes ben alone in solitary places, I have . . . taught hem to make songes of playnte and of blisse, and to endyten letters of rhethorike in queynt understondinges and to bethinke hem in what wyse they might best their ladies in good service plese’. When she warns the lover not to offend his Margarite ‘in asking of thinges that strecchen into shame’, and goes on to repeat Pandarus’ advice against ‘queynt’ words which will arouse suspicion, we are wholly in the court of Love. But she is Divine Love in the following:
‘O, quod she, there is a melodye in heven, whiche clerkes clepen Armony . . . it is written by grete clerkes and wyse, that in erthly thinges lightly by studye and by travayle the knowinge may be geten: but of such hevenly melody, mokel travayle wol bringe out in knowing right litel. Swetenesse of this paradyse hath you ravisshed; it semeth ye slepten, rested from al other diseses: so kyndely is your herte therein y-grounded.’
But in the very next sentence she continues, ‘Blisse of two hertes in ful love knitte, may not aright ben imagined’, which is equivocal. Sometimes the author brings both the roles of Love together as if there were no distinction at all;
‘Hast thou not rad how kinde I was to Paris, Priamus sone of Troy? How Jason me falsed for al his false behest? How Cesars swinke, I lefte it for no tene til he was troned in my blisse for his service? What! quod she, Most of al, maked I not a loveday bytwene God and mankynde, and chees a mayde to be nompere, to putte the quarel at ende?’
It is this coming and going between the natural and the allegorical senses of his ‘love’ that makes Usk so profoundly interesting to the historian of sentiment. Immeasurably below Dante, and even below Alanus, as an artist, he yet falls into line with them in his attempt at integration: he is not content with that water-tight division of human desires which satisfied Andreas.
Of love in the earthly sense he has written, in places, well enough to convince us that he uses this tradition by right and has not merely adopted it as a means of gilding the pill. When he is first shown the Margarite-perle in the island of Venus he says simply, ‘and with that I held my pees a greet while’. In praise of women he writes thus:
‘For goodnesse, of mans propre body were they maked, after the sawes of the bible, rehersing goddes wordes in this wyse, It is good to mankynde that we make to him an helper. . . . Lo! in paradyse for your helpe was this tree graffed, out of whiche al linage of man discendeth. If a man be noble frute, of noble frute it is sprongen: the blisse of paradyse, to mennes sory hertes, yet in this tree abydeth.’
Human love means to him, essentially, the marriage of true minds: and he is more aware of the mystery in this, less apt to take it for granted, than many medieval writers. It is ‘a thing enclosed under secretnesse of privyte, why twey persons entremellen hertes after a sight’. And again:
‘What! Trowest thou every ideot wot the meninge and the privy entent of these thinges? They wene, forsothe, that suche accord may not be but the rose of maydenhede be plucked. Do way, do way; they knowe nothing of this. For consent of two hertes alone maketh the fasteninge of the knotte; neither lawe of kynde ne mannes lawe determineth, neither the age ne the qualite of persones, but only accord bitwene thilke twaye.’
Every one is familiar with the paradox of the chivalrous ideal as Sir Ector expressed it over the body of Launcelot: the meekness in hall and the sternness in battle. Usk’s treatment of the same theme uses a more conscious rhetoric than Malory’s, but is not unworthy to be set beside it. Love’s servants are
‘Lyons in the felde and lambes in chambre: egles at assaute and maydens in halle: foxes in counsayle, stille in their dedes; and their protection is graunted, redy to ben a bridge; and their baner is arered, like wolves in the felde.’
The structure of the paragraph I have just quoted is clearly that of a deliberate artist. The first three sentences are antitheses, each with four stresses, and all in falling rhythm. The last two make up a single antithesis between them, and are both in rising rhythm, and almost exactly balanced to the ear. It is at once plain that we are dealing with an example of Kunstprosa, and it is perhaps the style that is the most important thing in the Testament. I have already suggested that Usk’s place in the history of our prose has been obscured by the dullness of his matter: for dull his matter mostly is. The good things which I have quoted occur fairly often—it would have been easy to quote more—but they do not occur often enough. The greater part of the book is filled with unoriginal philosophical argument. It is not indeed, inevitable that borrowed argument should be dull: when we have a good popularizer, such as Jean de Meun, he may add some felicity of expression or illustration which sets the old truth in a new light; at the very least, he can improve on his original in clarity. But Usk remains, even when we have made every allowance for a corrupt text, a clumsy and sometimes an unintelligible dialectician. All that he has to say can be found, much better, elsewhere. But his style deserves consideration.
The predominant influence is, of course, that of Chaucer’s Boethius. I do not know whether the disturbances of natural English word-order in Usk are all to be traced thither, or whether, in Chaucer, they are all to be traced to the influence of the original Latin. It is possible that both Chaucer and Usk believed such inversions to be a beauty. Whether, indeed, Chaucer is Usk’s only teacher, whether he was not also influenced by Alanus and other foreign models, is a problem that could only be solved by a very detailed study of all the relevant texts. I abandon it to those whose primary subject is style. My only concern is with the result, the actual quality of Usk’s writing. There is much in it to disgust a modern reader. The word-order is unnatural, the sentences are too full, and the mechanism by which the effects are obtained is too visible. Sometimes we recognize a far-off anticipation of Euphues. ‘Made not mekenesse so lowe the hye heven?’ asks Love. And again, ‘Fyr and if he yeve non hete, for fyre is not demed. The sonne, but he shyne, for sonne is not accompted. Water, but it wete, the name shall ben chaunged. Vertue, but it werche, of goodnesse doth it fayle.’ And perhaps the following simile has some likeness to Lyly’s dramatic style:
‘As the water of Siloe, whiche evermore floweth with stilnesse and privy noyse til it come nighe the brinke, and than ginneth it so out of measure to bolne with novelleries of chaunging stormes, that in course of every renning it is in pointe to spille al his circuit of bankes.’
But these things are not, after all, the essence of Usk’s style. The really surprising thing about him is the extent to which he remains vigorous even in his fetters. There is a homely, and English, and even a manly quality which struggles through, and sometimes avails itself of, the rhetoric. He follows (unconsciously) Aelfred’s excellent precedent of using native examples side by side with those he borrows from Boethius. Thus we are told that the dignity of King John nearly destroyed all England, or that Henry Curtmantil died miserably; and when Usk has asked ‘Where is now the lyne of Alisaundre the noble or els of Hector of Troye?’ he continues, ‘Who is discended of right bloode of lyne fro King Artour?’ He quotes, inaccurately, from Piers Plowman. Sometimes, on his own account, he catches the alliterative rhythm, as when ‘by woodes that large stretes wern in, by smale pathes that swyn and hogges haden made, as lanes with ladels their maste to seche, I walked thinking alone a wonder greet whyle’. If the coming of winter is, in one passage, accompanied by ‘Boreas’ and other literary phenomena, yet a few pages later it is the time ‘whan bernes ben ful of goodes as is the nut on every halke’. The lover’s resolution is expressed in words not unworthy of Launcelot:
‘Although I might hence voyde, yet wolde I not: I wolde abyde the day that destenee hath me ordeyned, which I suppose is without amendement; so sore is my herte bounden that I may thinken non other.’
This is honest work, and makes us hear the speaking voice. Equally good is the description of the seasons in Book II, chapter viii; and though I have already quoted too much I cannot refrain from adding this description of Man, both for its sentiment and its rhythm:
‘He hath under god principalite above al thinges. Now is his soule here, now a thousand myle hence; now fer, now nigh; now hye, now lowe; as fer in a moment as in mountenaunce of ten winter; and al this is in mannes governaunce and disposicion.’
Except for certain passages Usk hardly deserves to be read twice, but he is not a wholly negligible author. In so far as he shows us what lesser men than Chaucer and Gower were making of the love tradition in Chaucer’s and Gower’s day, he is interesting to the historian. But he has his place, too, by absolute standards. His interweaving of divine and human love, if sometimes confusing, has an original turn, and gives rise to great beauties of sentiment; and in his style, while the faults are largely those of the models, the merits are his own. He would have been happy if he had kept clear of politics and moderated his philosophical ambitions.