"Gower has positively raised tediousness to the precision of science; he has made dullness an heirloom for the students of our literary history. As you slip to and fro on the frozen levels of his verse, which give no foothold to the mind; as your nervous ear awaits the inevitable recurrence of his rhyme, regularly pertinacious as the tick of an eight-day clock, and reminding you of Wordsworth's
'Once more the ass did lengthen out
The hard dry seesaw of his horrible bray,'
you learn to dread, almost to respect, the powers of this indefatigable man. He is the undertaker of the fair mediæval legend, and his style has the hateful gloss, the seemingly unnatural length, of a coffin."
Yet hear Morley:—
"To this day we hear among our living countrymen, as was to be heard in Gower's time and long before, the voice passing from man to man, that in spite of admixture with the thousand defects incident to human character, sustains the keynote of our literature, and speaks from the soul of our history the secret of our national success. It is the voice that expresses the persistent instinct of the English mind to find out what is unjust among us and undo it, to find out duty to be done and do it, as God's bidding.... In his own Old English or Anglo-Saxon way he tries to put his soul into his work. Thus in the 'Vox Clamantis' we have heard him asking that the soul of his book, not its form, be looked to; and speaking the truest English in such sentences as that 'the eye is blind and the ear deaf, that convey nothing down to the heart's depth; and the heart that does not utter what it knows is as a live coal under ashes. If I know little, there may be another whom that little will help.... But to the man who believes in God, no power is unattainable if he but rightly feels his work; he ever has enough, whom God increases.' This is the old spirit of Cædmon and of Bede; in which are laid, while the earth lasts, the strong foundations of our literature. It was the strength of such a temper in him that made Gower strong. 'God knows,' he says again, 'my wish is to be useful; that is the prayer that directs my labor.' And while he thus touches the root of his country's philosophy, the form of his prayer—that what he has written may be what he would wish it to be—is still a thoroughly sound definition of good English writing. His prayer is that there may be no word of untruth, and that 'each word may answer to the thing it speaks of, pleasantly and fitly; that he may flatter in it no one, and seek in it no praise above the praise of God.'"
The part of Gower's writing here brought before the reader is the quaintly told and charming story of Petronella, from 'Liber Primus' of the 'Confessio.' It may be evidence that all the malediction upon the poet above quoted is not deserved.
The 'Confessio Amantis' has been edited and collated with the best manuscripts by Dr. Reinhold Pauli (1857). The 'Vox Clamantis' was printed for the first time in 1850, under the editorship of H. O. Coxe and for the Roxburghe Club. The 'Balades and Other Poems' are also included in the publication of the Roxburghe Club. Other sources of information regarding Gower are 'Illustrations of the Lives and Writings of Gower and Chaucer' by Henry J. Todd (1810); Henry Morley's reviews in 'English Writers'; and various short articles.