Of Gower and Froissart.
But I must not leave Chaucer’s immediate times, without speaking of other men who belonged there: the first is John Gower—a poet whom I name from a sense of duty rather than from any special liking for what he wrote. He was a man of learning for those days—having a good estate too, and living in an orderly Kentish home, to which he went back and forth in an eight-oared barge upon the Thames. He wrote a long Latin poem Vox Clamantis, in which like Langlande he declaimed against the vices and pretensions of the clergy; and he also treated in the high-toned conservative way of a well-to-do country gentleman, the social troubles of the time, which had broken out into Wat Tyler and Jack Straw rebellions;—people should be wise and discreet and religious; then, such troubles would not come.
A better known poem of Gower—because written in English—was the Confessio Amantis: Old Classic, and Romance tales come into it, and are fearfully stretched out; and there are pedagogic Latin rubrics at the margin, and wearisome repetitions, with now and then faint scent of prettinesses stolen from French fabliaux: but unless your patience is heroic, you will grow tired of him; and the monotonous, measured, metallic jingle of his best verse is provokingly like the “Caw-caw” of the prim, black raven. He had art, he had learning, he had good-will; but he could not weave words into the thrush-like melodies of Chaucer. Even the clear and beautiful type of the Bell & Daldy edition[54] does not make him entertaining. You will tire before you are half through the Prologue, which is as long, and stiff as many a sermon. And if you skip to the stories, they will not win you to liveliness: Pauline’s grace, and mishaps are dull; and the sharp, tragic twang about Gurmunde’s skull, and the vengeance of Rosemunde (from the old legend which Paul the Deacon tells) does not wake one’s blood.
In his later years he was religiously inclined; was a patron and, for a time, resident of the Priory which was attached to the church, now known as St. Saviour’s, and standing opposite to the London Bridge Station in Southwark. In that church may now be found the tomb of Gower and his effigy in stone, with his head resting on “the likeness of three books which he compiled.”
Perhaps I have no right to speak of Froissart, because he was a Fleming, and did not write in English; but Lord Berners’ spirited translation of his Chronicle (1523) has made it an English classic:[55] moreover, Froissart was very much in London; he was a great pet of the Queen of Edward III.; he had free range of the palace; he described great fêtes that were given at Windsor, and tournaments on what is now Cheapside; a reporter of our day could not have described these things better: he went into Scotland too—the Queen Philippa giving him his outfit—and stayed with the brave Douglas “much time,” and tells us of Stirling and of Melrose Abbey. Indeed, he was a great traveller. He was at Milan when Prince Clarence of England married one of the great Visconti (Chaucer possibly there also, and Petrarch of a certainty); he was at Rome, at Florence, at Bordeaux with the Black Prince, when his son Richard II. was born; was long in the household of Gaston de Foix: we are inclined to forget, as we read him, that he was a priest, and had his parochial charge somewhere along the low banks of the Scheldt: in fact, we suspect that he forgot it himself.
He not only wrote Chronicles, but poems; and he tells us, that on his last visit to England, he presented a copy of these latter—beautifully illuminated, engrossed by his own hand, bound in crimson velvet, and embellished with silver clasps, bosses, and golden roses—to King Richard II.; and the King asked him what it was all about; and he said—“About Love;” whereat, he says, the King seemed much pleased, and dipped into it, here and there—for “he could read French as well as speak it.”
Altogether, this rambling, and popular Froissart was, in many points, what we should call an exquisite fellow; knowing, and liking to know, only knights and nobles, and flattering them to the full; receiving kindly invitations wherever he went; overcome with the pressure of his engagements; going about in the latest fashion of doublet; somewhiles leading a fine greyhound in leash, and presenting five or six of the same to his friend the Comte de Foix (who had a great love for dogs); never going near enough to the front in battle to get any very hard raps; ready with a song or a story always; pulling a long bow with infinite grace. Well—the pretty poems he thought so much of, nobody knows—nobody cares for: they have never, I think, been published in their entirety:[56] But, his Journal—his notes of what he saw and heard, clapped down night by night, in hostelries or in tent—perhaps on horseback—are cherished of all men, and must be reckoned the liveliest, if not the best of all chronicles of his time. He died in the first decade of that fifteenth century on which we open our British march to-day; and, at the outset, I call attention to a little nest of dates, which from their lying so close together, can be easily kept in mind. Richard II. son of the Black Prince, died—a disgraced prisoner—in 1400. John of Gaunt, his uncle, friend of Chaucer, died the previous year: while Chaucer, Froissart and John Gower all died in less than ten years thereafter; thus, the century opens with a group of great deaths.