CHAPTER VIII

THE EPICAL SCHOOL OF CHAUCER-GOWER, LYDGATE,

OCCLEVE

IN one respect the course of English poetry presents a singular contrast to the parallel development of the art in Greece and Rome. It may seem strange that when poetry in England had made with Chaucer such characteristic beginnings in so many different directions, nearly two centuries should have passed before his work was in any way advanced. When Eschylus began his improvements, Attic tragedy was rapidly carried by his successors through all the further stages of which it was capable. When Ennius had given the first indications of the harmonies inherent in Latin, one poet after another followed in his steps, until the versification of the language was perfected by the skill of Virgil and Horace. But in England, between Chaucer and Surrey, scarcely a writer appeared who can by a stretch of indulgence be regarded as a poet of the first or even of the second class. After the death of the former those peculiarly modern notes which his muse had sounded died away, and were not heard again until Shakespeare and his contemporaries revived them on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage.

Nevertheless English poetry, though a tree of slow growth, furnishes in its history groups of well-marked phenomena which illustrate the law of its progress. At long intervals we may observe a remarkable efflorescence of genius among poets and novelists resembling each other in their aims and endowments; and these periods

of inspiration are invariably followed by times of comparative torpor in which the power of imaginative production seems almost to have ceased. Such epochs of action and subsequent reaction are found at the close of the reign of Edward III., and through the reign of Richard II., when the chief representatives of English poetry were Langland and Chaucer; at the end of the reign of Elizabeth, and through the reign of James I., when the drama reached the zenith of its glory; in the reigns of Anne and George I., the "Augustan" period of wit and correctness; and in the last years of the reign of George III., and in the reign of George IV., which witnessed the revival of the Romantic school. There is too much regularity in these appearances to allow us to ascribe them simply to the fortuitous influence of individual genius; and indeed, when they are examined, it is seen that they correspond closely with the ebb and flow of moral and intellectual movements in the life of the nation at large.

For it will be observed that, in English history, the periods of greatest activity in literature do not coincide precisely with the most glorious periods of political action; the harvest of thought and expression follows the mental exaltation arising from great deeds, and comes to a close as the energy and enthusiasm of the national movement exhaust themselves, or are counteracted by the tide of opposing forces. Thus, to take the examples with which we have become familiar in the course of this history, the poetry of Langland represents the sum of all those feelings which had been working in the mind of the more reflective part of English society, and particularly in its Anglo-Saxon element, since the times of John and Henry III.; the national dislike of the interference of a foreign ecclesiastical power with domestic affairs; the shock given to the general conscience by the violent contrasts between religious profession and religious practice, especially in the monastic orders; the attempt to constitute an ideal of life for all orders of the community founded on practical principles

of piety and justice. These sentiments, thrown into dogmatic shape by Wycliffe and his followers, translated into exaggerated action by John Ball, Jack Straw, and the revolting villeins, find their highest form of poetical expression in the Vision of Piers the Plowman; the ebb of the movement is marked partly by the reaction against the Lollards under Henry IV. and Henry V., reflected in a literary form in the poetry of Occleve; and partly by the revival of strict orthodoxy among the ruling classes, which derived poetical nourishment from the numerous devotional treatises in metre produced by John Lydgate, the monk of Bury St. Edmunds.

Again, the poetry of Chaucer represents the highwater mark of the movement in the direction of municipal self-government among the middle classes, which is so plainly visible in France, Flanders, and England during the fourteenth century, embodying itself in such characters as the Van Arteveldts or Etienne Marcel, and in such political organisms as the parliaments of Richard II. The Canterbury pilgrimage, as has been already said, is a kind of poetical microcosm, in which all the orders of English society are seen mixing in the freedom of daily intercourse, criticising each other's conduct, and delivering their own opinions on religion, morals, and taste. Then comes the ebb in poetry as well as in politics. As the growth of the power of Parliament, prematurely rapid during the reign of Richard II., was checked first by the strong character of his immediate successors, and afterwards by the agony of dynastic feudalism in the Wars of the Roses; so, when the social springs of inspiration failed, did the dramatic spirit and artistic judgment of Chaucer disappear from the work of those who called themselves his disciples. The forces of feudalism are seen to resume their sway. Instead of the stories of common life developed from the fabliau; instead of the moving adventures of Griselda and Constance anticipating the pathetic action of the later drama; the reader finds himself again in the exhausted regions of romance, travelling under the direction of Lydgate through the thrice

told tales of Thebes and Troy, in the midst of narratives of Paladins of the class of Sir Thopas; or wandering, in later times, with Stephen Hawes through labyrinths of courtly allegory, constructed after the models of Guillaume de Lorris. The appearance above the horizon of the sun of the Renaissance with all its light, freshness, and human interest, has been no longer than a February day in the Polar regions.

It is a significant fact that, until the appearance of Dryden's famous criticism, the causes of Chaucer's superiority to all the poets of his time seem never to have been rightly understood. He was regarded either as one of the early improvers of our language, as a successful story-teller, or as an allegorical poet of the Court of Love; and in these various capacities we find him generally ranked by his contemporaries, as well as by his successors up to the middle of the seventeenth century, with Gower. There is good reason for believing that Chaucer himself felt strongly the injustice of this verdict; but he would not have demurred to the general grounds on which it was based; and as the question is one which throws considerable light on the progress of our poetry, I propose to examine in some detail the relations existing between these two poets.

Chaucer and Gower were originally friends. When the former had completed his Troilus and Criseyde he dedicated it to the "philosophical Strode and moral Gower"; and Gower paid a compliment to Chaucer through the mouth of Venus towards the close of the first version of his Confessio Amantis :

VOL. I

And grete wel Chaucer whan ye mete,

As my disciple and my poete.
For in the floure of his youth,
In sundry wise, as he wel couth,
Of ditties and of songes glade,
The which he for my sake made,
The lond fulfilled is over all;
Whereof to him in speciall
Above all other I am most holde.

Forthy now in his daies olde

Thou shalt him telle this message,
That he upon his later age,

X

To sette an end of all his werke,
As he which is min owne clerke,
Do make his testament of love,
As thou hast do thy shrifte above,
So that my court it may recorde.1

There is nothing to show when these lines were composed, but in 1393 ("the sixteethe yere of King Richard") Gower produced a new edition of the Confessio Amantis from which the compliment to Chaucer was removed. Chaucer, on his side, inserted before the "Man of Law's Tale" in the Canterbury pilgrimage, which must have been published shortly before or after the date just mentioned, a Prologue containing a severe reflection on the morality of two of the tales in the Confessio Amantis; and not content with this criticism, he returned to the attack in the tale itself, and blamed Gower, though without mentioning him by name, for misrepresenting a particular incident recorded in it.

The only plausible suggestion that has been offered for the suppression of the lines in the Confessio Amantisnamely, that Chaucer was at the time in political disgrace2 besides being discreditable to Gower, is inconsistent with the fact that his poem is dedicated to Henry of Lancaster, the son of John of Gaunt, Chaucer's old friend and patron. Nor is it easy to see why Chaucer should have gone out of his way to find an opportunity for censuring Gower, unless he were under the influence of some strong personal feeling. For not merely does his Prologue insist on the impropriety of telling stories like those of Canace and Apollonius of Tyre, but it asserts, without any manifest necessity for such a digression, the transcendent merits of Chaucer as a voluminous story-teller. The whole combination of circumstances, in fact, can only be explained by assuming the existence of professional jealousy between the two poets. On this hypothesis the facts of the case are easily intelligible. Chaucer had been the first to show how the English language

1 Confessio Amantis (Carisbrooke Library), p. 442.

2 Confessio Amantis of John Gower. By Dr. Reinhold Pauli. Introductory Essay, p. xv.