Hire forme a man mai sen also,
Hou it is torned fleissh and bon
Into the figure of a Ston:
He was to neysshe and sche to hard.
Be war forthi hierafterward;
Ye men and wommen bothe tuo,
Ensampleth you of that was tho.’ (iv. 3674 ff.)
In a word, the author’s literary sphere may be a limited one, and his conception of excellence within that sphere may fall very far short of the highest standard, but such as his ideals are, he is able very completely to realize them. The French and English elements of the language, instead of still maintaining a wilful strife, as is so often the case in Chaucer’s metre, are here combined in harmonious alliance. More especially we must recognize the fact that in Gower’s English verse we have a consistent and for the moment a successful attempt to combine the French syllabic with the English accentual system of metre, and this without sacrificing the purity of the language as regards forms of words and grammatical inflexion. We shall see in our subsequent investigations how careful and ingenious he is in providing by means of elision and otherwise for the legitimate suppression of those weak terminations which could not find a place as syllables in the verse without disturbing its accentual flow, while at the same time the sense of their existence was not to be allowed to disappear. The system was too difficult and complicated to be possible except for a specially trained hand, and Gower found no successor in his enterprise; but the fact that the attempt was made is at least worthy of note.
With considerable merits both of plan and execution the Confessio Amantis has also no doubt most serious faults. The scheme itself, with its conception of a Confessor who as priest has to expound a system of morality, while as a devotee of Venus he is concerned only with the affairs of love (i. 237-280), can hardly be called altogether a consistent or happy one. The application of morality to matters of love and of love to questions of morality is often very forced, though it may sometimes be amusing in its gravity. The Confessor is continually forgetting one or the other of his two characters, and the moralist is found justifying unlawful love or the servant of Venus singing the praises of virginity. Moreover the author did not resist the temptation to express his views on society in a Prologue which is by no means sufficiently connected with the general scheme of the poem, though it is in part a protest against division and discord, that is to say, lack of love. Still worse is the deliberate departure from the general plan which we find in the seventh book, where on pretence of affording relief and recreation to the wearied penitent, the Confessor, who says that he has little or no understanding except of love, is allowed to make a digression which embraces the whole field of human knowledge, but more especially deals with the duties of a king, a second political pamphlet in fact, in which the stories of kings ruined by lust or insolence, of Sardanapalus, Rehoboam, Tarquin, and the rest, are certainly intended to some extent as an admonition of the author’s royal patron. The petition addressed to Rehoboam by his people against excessive taxation reads exactly like one of the English parliamentary protests of the period against the extravagant demands of the crown. Again, the fifth book, which even without this would be disproportionately long, contains an absolutely unnecessary account of the various religions of the world, standing there apparently for no reason except to show the author’s learning, and reaching the highest pitch of grotesque absurdity when the Confessor occupies himself in demolishing the claim of Venus to be accounted a goddess, and that too without even the excuse of having forgotten for the moment that he is supposed to be her priest. Minor excrescences of the same kind are to be found in the third book, where the lawfulness of war is discussed, and in the fourth, where there is a dissertation on the rise of the Arts, and especially of Alchemy. All that can be said is that these digressions were very common in the books of the age—the Roman de la Rose, at least in the part written by Jean de Meun, is one of the worst offenders.
Faults of detail it would be easy enough to point out. The style is at times prosaic and the matter uninteresting, the verse is often eked out with such commonplace expressions and helps to rhyme as were used by the writers of the time, both French or English. Sometimes the sentences are unduly spun out or the words and clauses are awkwardly transposed for the sake of the uninterrupted smoothness of the verse. The attainment of this object moreover is not always an advantage, and sometimes the regularity of the metre and the inevitable recurrence of the rhyme produces a tiresome result. On the whole however the effect is not unpleasing, ‘the ease and regularity with which the verse flows breathes a peaceful contentment, which communicates itself to the reader, and produces the same effect upon the ear as the monotonous but not wearisome splashing of a fountain[C].’ Moreover, as has already been pointed out, when the writer is at his best, the rhyme is kept duly in the background, and the paragraph is constructed quite independently of the couplet, so that this form of metre proves often to be a far better vehicle for the narrative than might have been at first supposed.