The two poets together, different as they are in genius, work in common under the same conditions of education to gain for England the rank that had been gained earlier by the other countries—France and Provence, Germany and Italy. Without them, English poetry would have possessed a number of interesting, a number of beautiful medieval works, but nothing quite in the pure strain of the finest medieval art. English poetry would still have reflected in its mirror an immense variety of life, a host of dreams; but it would have wanted the vision of that peculiar courteous grace in which the French excelled. Chaucer and Gower made up what was lacking in English medieval poetry; the Middle Ages did not go by without a proper rendering of their finer spirit in English verse.
But a great many ages had passed before Chaucer and Gower appeared, and considered as spokesmen for medieval ideas they are rather belated. England never quite made up what was lost in the time of depression, in the century or two after the Norman Conquest. Chaucer and Gower do something like what was done by the authors of French romance in the twelfth century, such as Chrestien de Troyes, the author of _Enid_, or Benoît de Sainte More, the author of the _Romance of Troy_. But their writings do not alter the fact that England had missed the first freshness of chivalrous romance. There were two hundred years between the old French romantic school and Chaucer. Even the _Roman de la Rose_ is a hundred years old when Chaucer translates it. The more recent French poets whom Chaucer translates or imitates are not of the best medieval period. Gower, who is more medieval than Chaucer, is a little behind his time. He is mainly a narrative poet, and narrative poetry had been exhausted in France; romances of adventure had been replaced by allegories (in which the narrative was little worth in comparison with the decoration), or, more happily, by familiar personal poems like those in which Froissart describes various passages in his own life. Froissart, it is true, the contemporary of Chaucer, wrote a long romance in verse in the old fashion; but this is the exception that proves the rule: Froissart’s _Meliador_ shows plainly enough that the old type of romance was done. It is to the credit of Gower that although he wrote in French a very long dull moralizing poem, he still in English kept in the main to narrative. It may have been old-fashioned, but it was a success.