The punctuation is the work of the editor throughout; that of the MS., where it exists, is of a very uncertain character.
Contractions, &c., are marked in the printed text by italics, except in the case of the word et, which in the MS. is hardly ever written in full except at the beginning of a line. In such words as ꝑest, ꝑfit, ꝑfaire, there may be doubt sometimes between per and par, and the spelling of some of them was certainly variable. Attention must be called especially to the frequently occurring -o̅n̅ as a termination. It has been regularly written out as -oun, and I have no doubt that this is right. In Bozon’s Contes Moralizés the same abbreviation is used, alternating freely with the full form -oun, and it is common in the MSS. of the Confessio Amantis and in the Ellesmere MS. of the Canterbury Tales (so far as I have had the opportunity of examining it), especially in words of French origin such as devocioun, contricioun. In the French texts this mode of writing is applied also very frequently to the monosyllables mon, ton, son, bon, don, non, as well as to bonté, nonpas, noncertein, &c. The scribe of the Mirour writes doun in full once (24625) with do̅n̅ in the same stanza, in Bal. xxi. 4 noun is twice fully written, and in some MSS. of the Traitié (e.g. Bodley 294) the full form occurs frequently side by side with the abbreviation. A similar conclusion must be adopted as regards a̅n̅ (annum), also written aun, gla̅n̅, da̅n̅cer, and the termination -a̅n̅ce, which is occasionally found.
BALADES.
The existence of the Cinkante Balades was first made known to the public by Warton in his History of English Poetry, Sect. xix, his attention having been drawn to the MS. which contains them by its possessor, Lord Gower. After describing the other contents of this MS., he says: ‘But the Cinkante Balades or fifty French Sonnets above mentioned are the curious and valuable part of Lord Gower’s manuscript. They are not mentioned by those who have written the Life of this poet or have catalogued his works. Nor do they appear in any other manuscript of Gower which I have examined. But if they should be discovered in any other, I will venture to pronounce that a more authentic, unembarrassed, and practicable copy than this before us will not be produced.... To say no more, however, of the value which these little pieces may derive from being so scarce and so little known, they have much real and intrinsic merit. They are tender, pathetic and poetical, and place our old poet Gower in a more advantageous point of view than that in which he has hitherto been usually seen. I know not if any even among the French poets themselves of this period have left a set of more finished sonnets; for they were probably written when Gower was a young man, about the year 1350. Nor had yet any English poet treated the passion of love with equal delicacy of sentiment and elegance of composition. I will transcribe four of these balades as correctly and intelligibly as I am able; although, I must confess, there are some lines which I do not exactly comprehend.’ He then quotes as specimens Bal. xxxvi, xxxiv, xliii, and xxx, but his transcription is far from being correct and is often quite unintelligible.
Date.—The date at which the Cinkante Balades were composed cannot be determined with certainty. Warton, judging apparently by the style and subject only, decided, as we have seen, that they belonged to the period of youth, and we know from a passage in the Mirour (27340) that the author composed love poems of some kind in his early life. Apart from this, however, the evidence is all in favour of assigning the Balades to the later years of the poet’s life. It is true, of course, that the Dedication to King Henry IV which precedes them, and the Envoy which closes them, may have been written later than the rest; but at the same time it must be noted that the second balade of the Dedication speaks distinctly of a purpose of making poems for the entertainment of the royal court, and the mutilated title which follows the Dedication confirms this, so far as it can be read. Again, the prose remarks which accompany Bal. v and vi make it clear that the circumstances of the poems are not personal to the author, seeing that he there divides them into two classes, those that are appropriate for persons about to be married, and those that are ‘universal’ and have application to all sorts and conditions of lovers. Moreover, several of these last, viz, xli-xliv and also xlvi, are supposed to be addressed by ladies to their lovers. It is evident that the balades are only to a very limited extent, if at all, expressive of the actual feelings of the author towards a particular person. As an artist he has set himself to supply suitable forms of expression for the feelings of others, and in doing so he imagines their variety of circumstances and adapts his composition accordingly. For this kind of work it is not necessary, or perhaps even desirable, to be a lover oneself; it is enough to have been a lover once: and that Gower could in his later life express the feelings of a lover with grace and truth we have ample evidence in the Confessio Amantis. No doubt it is possible that these balades were written at various times in the poet’s life, and perhaps some persons, recognizing the greater spontaneity and the more gracefully poetical character (as it seems to me) of the first thirty or so, as compared with the more evident tendency to moralize in the rest, may be inclined to see in this an indication of earlier date for the former poems. In fact however the moralizing tendency, though always present, grew less evident in Gower’s work with advancing years. There is less of it in the Confessio Amantis than in his former works, and this not by accident but on principle, the author avowing plainly that unmixed morality had not proved effective, and accepting love as the one universally interesting subject. When Henry of Lancaster, the man after his own heart, was fairly seated on the throne, he probably felt himself yet more free to lay aside the self-imposed task of setting right the world, and to occupy himself with a purely literary task in the language and style which he felt to be most suitable for a court. In any case it seems certain that some at least of the balades were composed with a view to the court of Henry IV, and the collection assumed its present shape probably in the year of his accession, 1399, for we know that either in the first or the second year of Henry IV the poet became blind and ceased to write.
Form and Versification.—The collection consists of a Dedication addressed to Henry IV, fifty-one (not fifty) balades of love (one number being doubled by mistake), then one, unnumbered, addressed to the Virgin, and a general Envoy. The balades are written in stanzas of seven or eight lines, exactly half of the whole fifty-four (including the Dedication) belonging to each arrangement. The seven-line stanza rhymes ab ab bcc with Envoy bc bc, or in three instances ab ab baa, Envoy ba ba; the eight-line stanza ordinarily ab ab bc bc with Envoy bc bc, but also in seven instances ab ab ba ba with Envoy ba ba. The form is the normal one of the balade, three stanzas with rhymes alike and an Envoy; but in one case, Bal. ix, there are five stanzas with Envoy, and in another, xxxii, the Envoy is wanting. Also the balade addressed to the Virgin, which is added at the end, is without Envoy, and there follows a general Envoy of seven lines, rhyming independently and referring to the whole collection.
The balade form is of course taken from Continental models, and the metre of the verse is syllabically correct like that of the Mirour. As was observed however about the octosyllabic line of the Mirour, so it may be said of the ten-syllable verse here, that the rhythm is not exactly like that of the French verse of the Continent. The effect is due, as before remarked, to the attempt to combine the English accentual with the French syllabic measure. This is especially visible in the treatment of the caesura. In the compositions of the French writers of the new poetry—Froissart, for example—the ten- (or eleven-) syllable line has regularly a break after the fourth syllable. This fourth syllable however may be either accented or not, that is, either as in the line,
‘Se vous voulez aucune plainte faire,’
or as in the following,
‘Prenez juge qui soit de noble afaire.’