So that it myhte noght be mored’ (vii. 4830 ff.),
a passage in which Gower, with his natural taste for simplicity, has again improved upon his classical authority, and may safely challenge comparison with Chaucer, who has followed Ovid more literally.
It is worth mention that Gower’s descriptions of storms at sea are especially vivid and true, so that we are led to suppose that he had had more than a mere literary acquaintance with such things. Such for instance is the account of the shipwreck of the Greek fleet, iii. 981 ff., and of the tempests of which Apollonius is more than once the victim, as viii. 604 ff., and in general nautical terms and metaphors, of some of which the meaning is not quite clear, seem to come readily from his pen.
Next to the simple directness of narrative style which distinguishes the stories themselves, we must acknowledge a certain attractiveness in the setting of them. The Lover decidedly engages our interest: we can understand his sorrows and his joys, his depression when his mistress will not listen to the verses which he has written for her, and his delight when he hears men speak her praises. We can excuse his frankly confessed envy, malice and hatred in all matters which concern his rivals in her love. His feelings are described in a very natural manner, the hesitation and forgetfulness in her presence, and the self-reproach afterwards, the eagerness to do her small services, to accompany her to mass, to lift her into her saddle, to ride by her carriage, the delight of being present in her chamber, of singing to her or reading her the tale of Troilus, or if no better may be, of watching her long and slender fingers at work on her weaving or embroidery. Sometimes she will not stay with him, and then he plays with the dog or with the birds in the cage, and converses with the page of her chamber—anything as an excuse to stay; and when it grows late and he must perforce depart, he goes indeed, but returns with the pretence of having forgotten something, in order that he may bid her good-night once more. He rises in the night and looks out of his window over the houses towards the chamber where she sleeps, and loses himself in imagination of the love-thefts which he would commit if by any necromancy he had the power. Yet he is not extravagantly romantic: he will go wherever his lady bids him, but he will not range the world in arms merely in order to gain renown, losing his lady perhaps in the meantime at home. We take his side when he complains of the Confessor’s want of feeling for a pain which he does not himself experience, and his readiness to prescribe for a wound of the heart as if it were a sore of the heel. Even while we smile, we compassionate the lover who is at last disqualified on account of age, and recommended to make a ‘beau retret’ while there is yet time.
But there is also another character in whom we are interested, and that is the lady herself. Gower certainly appreciated something of the delicacy and poetical refinement which ideal love requires, and this appreciation he shows also in his Balades; but here we have something more than this. The figure of the lady, which we see constantly in the background of the dialogue, is both attractive and human. We recognize in her a creature of flesh and blood, no goddess indeed, as her lover himself observes, but a charming embodiment of womanly grace and refinement. She is surrounded by lovers, but she is wise and wary. She is courteous and gentle, but at the same time firm: she will not gladly swear, and therefore says nay without an oath, but it is a decisive nay to any who are disposed to presume. She does not neglect her household duties merely because a lover insists upon hanging about her, but leaves him to amuse himself how he may, while she busies herself elsewhere. If she has leisure and can sit down to her embroidery, he may read to her if he will, but it must be some sound romance, and not his own rondels, balades, and virelays in praise of her. Custom allows him to kiss her when he takes his leave, but if he comes back on any pretext and takes his leave again, there is not often a second kiss permitted. She lets him lead her up to the offering in church, and ride by her side when she drives out, but she will take no presents from him, though with some of her younger admirers, whose passion she knows is a less serious matter, she is not so strict, but takes and gives freely. Even the description of her person is not offensive, as such descriptions almost always are. Her lover suspects that her soul may be in a perilous state, seeing that she has the power of saving a man’s life and yet suffers him to die, but he admits there is no more violence in her than in a child of three years old, and her words are as pleasant to him as the winds of the South. Usurious dealing is a vice of which he ventures to accuse her, seeing that he has given her his whole heart in return for a single glance of her eye, and she holds to the bargain and will not give heart for heart; but then, as the Confessor very justly replies, ‘she may be such that her one glance is worth thy whole heart many times over,’ and so he has sold his heart profitably, having in return much more than it is worth.
However, the literary characteristic which is perhaps most remarkable in the Confessio Amantis is connected rather with the form of expression than with the subject-matter. No justice is done to Gower unless it is acknowledged that the technical skill which he displays in his verse and the command which he has over the language for his own purposes is very remarkable. In the ease and naturalness of his movement within the fetters of the octosyllabic couplet he far surpasses his contemporaries, including Chaucer himself. Certain inversions of order and irregularities of construction he allows himself, and there are many stop-gaps of the conventional kind in the ordinary flow of his narrative; but in places where the matter requires it, his admirable management of the verse paragraph, the metrical smoothness of his lines, attained without unnatural accent or forced order of words, and the neatness with which he expresses exactly what he has to say within the precise limits which he lays down for himself, show a finished mastery of expression which is surprising in that age of half-developed English style, and in a man who had trained himself rather in French and Latin than in English composition. Such a sentence as the following, for example, seems to flow from him with perfect ease, there is no halting in the metre, no hesitation or inversion for the sake of the rhyme, it expresses just what it has to express, no more and no less:
’Til that the hihe king of kinges,
Which seth and knoweth alle thinges,
Whos yhe mai nothing asterte,—
The privetes of mannes herte