too uniform, as if the syllables had been counted off on the fingers, and suggesting the brook that "goes on forever." James Russell Lowell says: "Gower had no notion of the uses of rhyme except as a kind of crease at the end of every eighth syllable where the verse was to be folded over again into another layer. He says, for example, "This maiden Canacee was hight, Both in the day and eke by night,' as if people commonly changed their names at dark. And he could not contrive to say even this without the clumsy pleonasm of both and eke."-"My Study Windows." Gower had none of Chaucer's skill in type-painting and character-drawing, doubtless in part because his easy life had kept him from the close and earnest association with "all sorts and conditions of men," which had marked the busy and strenuous life of Chaucer. His verse is often easier to read just because he is not troubled with the strain of original thought but is abundantly content with mechanically jingling versification. Yet Gower was for a time among his contemporaries more popular than Chaucer. The Englishmen of that day, while strong in business, in statesmanship, and in war, were in their literary childhood. They wanted stories, and Gower gave them stories. He brought to them all that ordinary readers among them would ever know of the tales and legends of ancient days, and in an easy-going meter and rime that could be followed without study and almost without exertion of thought. The formative influence of his poetry must, therefore, have been very great, as numbers of people would read now one, now another, of his short stories in what was for them pleasing verse, and thus, by reading the commonplace, cultivating a linguistic sense that would qualify them to enjoy something better. The proportion of French and Latin derivatives in his poetry is about the same as in that of Chaucer. Like Chaucer, he used the East Midland dialect, his work helping to make that dialect what it has since become, the accepted standard of modern English. |