BOB YEAGER's PUBLICATION OF Gower's French Balades, together with an English translation, has given us all a chance to take another look at two collections of poems that have otherwise been available only in Macaulay's edition of Gower's Complete Works, both of which have remained relatively unstudied both by Gower scholars and by readers of fourteenth-century French poetry. The Traitié pour essampler les amantz marietz merits interest if only for Gower's adoption of the ballade form for the purpose of a single extended argument, on fidelity in marriage. More varied and more accomplished are the Cinkante Balades, fifty-two separate poems on the vicissitudes of love that reveal Gower's deep immersion in the lyric poetry of Guillaume de Machaut and his French successors. Gower's debt to these poets has not always been assumed, and it has become more evident only as their works too have become better known. Ardis Butterfield has done the most to place Gower's ballades in relation to this tradition, tracing “their idiom, tightly constrained vocabulary, and argumentative structure” to the example set by Gower's French predecessors as part of her more general study of the re-use of conventional language in the international literary culture to which Gower belonged. At the same time, however, each of the major poets that followed Machaut also sought to put his own signature upon the lyric tradition that he inherited, and just as interesting as the evidence of shared language are the poems in which they introduce new themes and turn to other sources for their diction and imagery. One set of poems that deserves closer attention in this regard consists of the five ballades that Gower wrote in which the speaker is a woman.

Together, these five poems illustrate some of the diversity of Gower's collection, and they also provide a test case on how he both exploited and departed from the models provided by his predecessors that can have implications for the remainder of his ballades, as well. They occur together near the end of the Cinkante Balades, numbers 41–44 and 46.

Both the title and the contents of Gower's Cinkante Balades firmly situate the work in the dominant strand of the French courtly lyric of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, as it was practiced and defined by the major poets of the era—Machaut, Deschamps, and Froissart—and as it was sustained by their many followers, including, among Gower's contemporaries, Oton de Granson, who spent much of his career in England; Christine de Pizan, who may have begun writing ballades at about the same time as Gower; the aristocratic poets who contributed to the Livre des cent balades, to whose work Gower probably makes a bow in his choice of the round number cinkante; and also many anonymous writers, such as the poets whose works appear alongside those of their better-known peers in the Pennsylvania chansonnier, which was copied at just about the same time as the manuscript in which the Cinkante Balades is contained. Gower's relation to this tradition is complex. While he clearly adopted many of the most recognizable conventions of form, diction, and theme, he equally clearly made his own choices, some with an eye to the design of his collection as a whole, some as part of an ongoing dialogue with the poets whose works he knew, and some because of his own understanding of the expressive function of the lyric. There is a great deal of variety in the Cinkante Balades for anyone who reads them closely, but because of the choices that Gower made, the work also has some distinctive qualities that set it apart from every earlier collection of ballades.

The date and the order of composition of the poems that now make up the Cinkante Balades must remain unknown, but there is evidence that, like the contents of the manuscript in which they appear, their present arrangement is the result of at least some effort to give shape and order to the collection. The ordering is particularly evident at the end. The last four poems (48–51) switch from personal address to more general reflections on the nature of love, the last three in the voice of the poet, and the last of these turns to a different sort of love entirely as the poet speaks of his affection for the Blessed Virgin in what was clearly intended as the conclusion.

Some of the best of the recent published criticism of the Confessio Amantis has given us some challenging new ways of understanding both the structure of the poem and the nature of Gower's moral project. To cite only three examples: we have James Simpson's recasting of the entire dialogue between Amans and Genius as a kind of psychomachia between Will and Imagination; Diane Watt's argument, in Amoral Gower, that instead of advocating a single stable morality the poem actually offers a sustained critique of the possibility of any consistent moral principles; and J. Allen Mitchell's argument that what morality is provided in the poem is all contingent and conditional, depending as it does upon the circumstances and upon the active participation of the reader. These are three very different claims and in many ways they would be difficult to reconcile, but they do have some common threads. First, they are fundamentally ironic in nature: things are not what they seem in the Confessio; more specifically, they offer alternatives to reading the poem as a series of straightforward moral lessons addressed by a priest to his penitent. And, like earlier ironic readings, which saw Genius simply as a flawed priest offering a false morality, they are based upon the same perceived problems in the poem, notably what are viewed as its inconsistencies, either in its overall structure (comparing, for instance, the beginning to the end), or between lessons, or even within single passages, which are interpreted as reflecting either the inadequacies of Genius as moral instructor or as either the inability or the refusal of Gower himself to advance a coherent morality.

The charge of inconsistency is itself worth examining. The apparent contradictions may not be so great if one reads with a clear eye for distinctions and with a sensitivity to the argument that Genius presents, both about the nature of sin and about the bases of moral conduct, and while they may render that argument somewhat more complex, they do not for that reason necessarily undermine it. But it is also necessary to give some consideration to the justification for inferring a conceptual structure so different from the one that Genius himself presents.

INTRODUCTION

In Britain, the period from 1870 to 1914 was one of a general movement, both in politics and in philosophical reflection on it, from individualism to collectivism (Collini 1979: ch. 1; Gaus 1983: ch. 1; Greenleaf 1983; Bellamy 1992: ch. 1). These are loose and disputed terms (M. Taylor 1996). Roughly, individualism meant leaving the individual as free as possible to pursue his own interests as he saw fit, society being simply a collection of individuals and a means to their ends. Collectivism was more or less the opposite, holding that individuals are not isolated atoms but social beings with shared interests, and that society may act through the state to promote them. Collectivism ranged in degree from occasional government action to effect particular social reforms, to state socialism’s control of the means of production and restructuring of society.

The dominant political theory, Liberalism, adapted itself to the new political conditions. Earlier in the nineteenth century, Liberalism had sought to maximise individual freedom and assumed that this entailed minimising state action. It restricted state action to what was unavoidable because all state action was by its very nature an interference with individual liberty and therefore intrinsically bad, and also bad in its effects, especially by reducing individuals' self-reliance. But later many Liberals accepted state action. They realised that for most individuals freedom from interference was worthless because they lacked the means to utilise it. State action could secure those means, and thus was not necessarily opposed to individual liberty.