Amantis (The Confessions of a Lover) is a vast collection of tales, drawn from classical, French, and English sources, arranged to illustrate the deadly sins, and placed in the framework of a confession made by a lover to the priest of Venus. This allegorical setting follows a common medieval tyre, the court of love; the chief interest of the work to-day is in the stories. Though not comparable to Chaucer as a poet, Gower can yet tell his tale in a smooth and business-like if somewhat undistinguished fashion. There is little attempt at the drawing of character, little beauty of line or phrase; only a keen interest in incident, and, to a less extent, in the moral lesson. He would be a very prominent figure in fourteenth century literature had he not had the misfortune to be the contemporary of a great artist who overshadowed him.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER (1340?-1400)

Life. The greatest name in our literature before the age of Shakespeare is that of Geoffrey Chaucer. He was born in London about 1340, the son of a wine merchant. At this time there were two ways of education open to well-to-do youths, the university, which was chiefly for the training of priests, and service as page in a nobleman's household. "Chaucer chose the latter and was attached to the service of Edward III's son Lionel, Duke of Clarence. He went to France at nineteen on one of the campaigns of the Hundred Years' War, was taken prisoner, and ransomed by the king. On his return he became squire in the royal household and married a maid of honor to the queen. Several times he was sent to the Continent on diplomatic business, two of his missions taking him to Italy, with important results for his literary studies. At home he occupied various offices under the government, most important being that of Comptroller of Customs at London. He was elected member of Parliament for Kent in 1386. Yet with all these positions, his financial standing does not seem to have been

secure, and when his patron, John of Gaunt, was out of power he was in straits for money. One of his latest poems was a Complaint to his Empty Purse, addressed to the new king, Henry IV, Gaunt's son, in 1399. He died in 1400 and was buried in Westminster Abbey, the first occupant of "The Poets' Corner."

It thus appears that Chaucer was much more than a man of letters and a student. He saw service in war and diplomacy, was a courtier, an official, and a politician, and in the course of his life had opportunity to come into contact with men of all classes and in several countries. The result of this varied experience is seen in the great variety of kinds of people represented in his poems, in the astonishing breadth of his sympathies, and in the sanity and balance of his judgment.

Allegorical Poems. As was inevitable for a court poet in his day, Chaucer entered literature by the French door. The earliest of his works which has come down to us is the fragment of a translation of the famous French allegory, the Roman de la Rose, written in the thirteenth century by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung. This poem is the allegorical representation of a love affair, in which the lady is symbolized by a rose-bud which the lover desires to pluck, but which is kept beyond his reach for many thousand lines by various figures symbolizing such forces as her modesty and shyness, the opposition of her parents, jealousy, and envy, while he is aided by Good Looks, Idleness, Riches, and the like, and advised by Nature. The part of the poem written by the second author contains a great variety of matters, such as social satire, remote from the main allegory; and Chaucer, like hundreds of other medieval authors, quotes the poem in all sorts of connections throughout his works. It was the most popular and influential poetical work of the whole period.

The allegorical method exemplified by the Roman de la Rose continued to be employed by Chaucer through the first half of his career. There is a touch of it in the early Book of

the Duchess, which he wrote to commemorate the death of Blanche, first wife of his patron, John of Gaunt. It occurs also in the Parliament of Birds, a poem of considerable humor, in which three young eagles plead before the goddess Nature their claims to the possession of a young female eagle, in the presence of a great assemblage of the fowls of the earth. This is supposed to represent the wooing of Anne of Bohemia by Richard II of England and two of his continental rivals. The House of Fame is more or less allegorical throughout. Chaucer is borne by the golden eagle through the air to the palace of the goddess Fame, the conception of whom he borrowed largely from Virgil. He watches groups of petitioners come before the goddess and pray for good or bad reputation or obscurity, and receive sentences entirely inconsistent with one another and with the requests and the deserts of the petitioners — thus exhibiting the arbitrary and irrational nature of fame. Later he visits the House of Rumor and sees how false and half false news are produced. In this poem the effect of his Italian studies begins to be seen in hints and passages drawn from Dante.

The Legend of Good Women. The allegorical element in The Legend of Good Women is confined to the Prologue, in which the poet, who has gone into the fields in May to adore his favorite flower, the daisy, is found by the god of love, accompanied by the Greek heroine, Alcestis, and a great train of ladies. The deity reproaches him for having written poems like his translation of the Roman de la Rose and Troilus, where women are pictured as faithless in love; but, through the intercession of Alcestis, he is pardoned on condition that he compose a series on women who were true to their vows. The rest of the poem, which, like The House of Fame, is unfinished, consists of short accounts of eight notable ladies who died for love, such as Cleopatra, Dido, and Lucrece. The women are good" not from the point of view of ordinary morality or Christianity, but from that of the kingdom of Love; and the whole poem is called a legend,

since it is a sort of parallel to the collections of saints' legends, the women being regarded as "saints of Cupid."

These poems illustrate fairly enough some of the commoner uses of allegory in medieval literature. Allegory is the art of double meaning, and in poetry it usually takes the form of a story underneath which is hidden a second significance, usually didactic or satirical. It is used much in the Bible, the parables of the New Testament being the best examples. The early church fathers employed it freely, and it may be called the favorite form of the Middle Ages, only the romance rivaling it in popularity. It is an elaboration of the symbolism that runs through all medieval art and religion, and no form of expression escaped its influence. Thus in making so many of his works allegorical, Chaucer was only following the fashion of his time.

Troilus. The poem which most offended the god of love was Chaucer's treatment of an episode belonging to the medieval version of the story of Troy. This famous tale was known to the Middle Ages, not through Homer, but through various Latin and French accounts that tended to favor the Trojans rather than the Greeks. A French poet of the twelfth century, Benoît de Sainte More, had made a chivalrous romance out of the love of Priam's son Troilus for the daughter of a priest, only the merest hints of which are found in earlier versions; and the Italian Boccaccio had in his Filostrato greatly elaborated the affair. It was chiefly on the basis of Boccaccio's work that Chaucer wrote his long poetical novel, describing with great minuteness the wooing of Cressida by Troilus, her yielding, and her later desertion of Troilus for Diomede after she had been forced to follow her father to the Greek camp.

So far the poems by Chaucer we have described were largely imitative of other authors, Latin, French, and Italian, though they bore abundant evidences of Chaucer's individual quality and literary skill. Troilus, too, is a borrowed story; but in the manner of telling it, especially in the drawing of character