from the Origins To the Renaissance (continued 6)

Blows abound in stories of that kind, and the personages go off with "their back as limp as their belly," as we read in one of the narratives from which Chaucer drew his inspiration.

Next to these great scenes of noise there are little familiar scenes, marvellously observed, and described to perfection; scenes of home-life that might tempt the pencil of a Dutch painter; views of the mysterious laboratory where the alchemist, at once duped and duping, surrounded with retorts, "cucurbites and alembykes," his clothes burnt to holes, seeks to discover the philosopher's stone. They heat, they pay great attention, they stir the mixture;

Then they discuss; it is the fault of the pot, of the fire, of the metal; it is just as I thought;

A fourth discovers a fourth cause: "Our fyr was nat maad of beech." What wonder, with so many causes for a failure, that it failed? We will begin over again.[536]

Or else, we have representations of those interested visits that mendicant friars paid to the dying. The friar, low, trivial, hypocritical, approaches:

He lays down his staff, wallet, and hat; he takes a seat, the cat was on the bench, he makes it jump down; he settles himself; the wife bustles about, he allows her to, and even encourages her. What could he eat? Oh! next to nothing, a fowl's liver, a pig's head roasted, the lightest repast; his "stomak is destroyed;"

He thereupon delivers to the sick man a long and interested sermon, mingled with Latin words, in which the verb "to give" comes in at every line: whatever you do, don't give to others, give to me; give to my convent, don't give to the convent next door:

Pay then, give then, give me this, or only that; Thomas gives less still.

Familiar scenes, equally true but of a more pleasing kind, are found in other narratives, for instance in the story of Chauntecleer the cock, so well localised with a few words, in a green, secluded country nook:

Her stable, her barn-yard are described; we hear the lowing of the cows and the crowing of the cock; the tone rises little by little, and we get to the mock-heroic style. Chauntecleer the cock,

He had a black beak, white "nayles," and azure legs; he reigned unrivalled over the hens in the barn-yard. One of the hens was his favourite, the others filled subalternate parts. One day—

—he was looking for "a boterflye," and what should he see but a fox! "Cok, cok!" he cries, with a jump, and means to flee.

says the good fox; I came only to hear you sing; you have the family talent:

sang so well; but you sing better still. To sing better still, the cock shuts his eye, and the fox bears him off. Most painful adventure! It was a Friday: such things always befall on Fridays.

Great commotion in the barn-yard; and here we find a picture charming for its liveliness: "Out! harrow! and weyl-away! Ha, ha, the fox!" every one shrieks, yells, runs; the dogs bark,

the ducks scream,

and the bees come out of their hives. The prisoner is set free; he will be more prudent another time; order reigns once more in the domains of Chauntecleer.

Side by side with such tales of animals, we have elegant stories of the Round Table, borrowed from the lays of "thise olde gentil Britons," and which carry us back to a time when,

oriental legends, which the young squire will relate, with enchantments, magic mirrors, a brass horse that transports its rider through the air, here or there according as one touches a peg in its ears, an ancestor doubtless of "Clavilegno," the steed of Don Quixote in the Duchesse's park; biographies of Appius and Virginia, of Cæsar, of Nero, of Holophernes, of Hugolino in the tower of hunger, taken from Roman history, the Bible and Dante; adventures of chivalry, in which figures Theseus, duke of Athens, where blood flows profusely, with all the digressions and all the embellishments which still continued to please great men and great ladies, and that is why the story is told by the knight, and Chaucer retains purposely all the faults of that particular sort of story. In opposition to his usual custom, he contents himself here with lending a little life to illuminations of manuscripts.[539]

Grave personages relate grave stories, like canticles or sermons, coloured as with the light of stained glass, perfumed with incense, accompanied by organ music: story of the pious Constance, of St. Cecilia, of a child killed by the Jews; dissertations of dame Prudence (a tale of wondrous dulness,[540] which Chaucer modestly ascribes to himself); story of the patient Griselda; discourse of the poor parson. A while ago we were at the inn; now we are in church; in the Middle Ages striking colours and decided contrasts were best liked; the faded tints that have since been in fashion, mauve, cream, old-green, did not touch any one; and we know that Chaucer, when he was a page, had a superb costume, of which one leg was red and the other black. Laughter was inextinguishable; it rose and fell and rose again, rebounding indefinitely; despair was immeasurable; the sense of measure was precisely what was wanting; its vulgarisation was one of the results of the Renaissance. Panegyrics and satires were readily carried to the extreme. The logical spirit, propagated among the learned by a scholastic education, was producing its effect: writers drew apart one single quality or characteristic and descanted upon it, neglecting all the rest. Thus it is that Griselda becomes Patience, and Janicola Poverty, and that by an easy and imperceptible transition the abstract personages of novels and the drama are created: Cowardice, Valiance, Vice. Those typical beings, whose names alone make us shudder, were considered perfectly natural; and, indeed, they bore a striking resemblance to Griselda, Janicola, and many other heroes of the most popular stories.

The success of Griselda is the proof of it. That poor girl, married to the marquis of Saluces, who repudiates her in order to try her patience, and then gives her back her position of wife, enjoyed an immense popularity. Boccaccio had related her misfortunes in the "Decameron"; Petrarch thought the story so beautiful that it appeared to him worthy of that supreme honour, a Latin translation: Chaucer translated it in his turn from Latin into English, and made of it his Clerk of Oxford's tale;[541] it was turned several times into French.[542] Pinturicchio represented the adventures of Griselda in a series of pictures, now preserved in the National Gallery; the story furnished the subject of plays in Italy, in France, and in England.[543] These exaggerated descriptions were just what went to the very heart; people wept over them in the fourteenth century as over Clarissa in the eighteenth. Petrarch, writing to Boccaccio about Griselda, uses almost the same terms as Lady Bradshaigh, writing to Richardson about Clarissa:

"Had you seen me, I surely should have moved your pity. When alone, in agonies would I lay down the book, take it up again, walk about the room, let fall a flood of tears, wipe my eyes, read again—perhaps not three lines—throw away the book, crying out: 'Excuse me, good Mr. Richardson, I cannot go on; it is your fault, you have done more than I can bear.'"[544]

I made "one of our mutual friends from Padua," writes Petrarch, "a man of elevated mind and vast learning, read this story. He had hardly got half through, when suddenly he stopped, choking with tears; a moment after, having composed himself, he took up the narrative once more to continue reading, and, behold, a second time sobs stopped his utterance. He declared it was impossible for him to continue, and he made a person of much instruction, who accompanied him, finish the reading." About that time, in all probability, Petrarch, who, as we see in the same letter, liked to renew the experience, gave the English poet and negotiator, who had come to visit him in his retreat, this tale to read, and Chaucer, for that very reason less free than with most of his other stories, scarcely altered anything in Petrarch's text. With him as with his model, Griselda is Patience, nothing more; everything is sacrificed to that virtue; Griselda is neither woman nor mother; she is only the patient spouse, Patience made wife. They take her daughter from her, to be killed, as they tell her, by order of the marquis. So be it, replies Griselda:

Whereupon every one goes into ecstasies, and is greatly affected. The idea of entreating her husband, of throwing herself at his feet, of trying to move him, never enters her mind; she would no longer be playing her part, which is not to be a mother, but to be: Patience.

Chaucer left his collection of tales uncompleted; we have less than the half of it; but he wrote enough to show to the best his manifold qualities. There appear in perfect light his masterly gifts of observation, of comprehension, and of sympathy; we well see with what art he can make his characters stand forth, and how skilfully they are chosen to represent all contemporaneous England. The poet shows himself full of heart, and at the same time full of sense; he is not without suspicion that his pious stories, indispensable to render his picture complete, may offend by their monotony and exaggerated good sentiments. In giving them place in his collection, he belongs to his time and helps to make it known; but a few mocking notes, scattered here and there, show that he is superior to his epoch, and that, in spite of his long dissertations and his digressions, he has, what was rare at that period, a certain notion, at least theoretical, of the importance of proportion. He allows his heroes to speak, but he is not their dupe; in fact he is so little their dupe that sometimes he can stand their talk no longer, and interrupts them or laughs at them to their very face. He laughs in the face of the tiresome Constance, on the night of her wedding; he shows us his companions riding drowsily on their horses to the sound of the monk's solemn stories, and hardly preserved from actual slumber by the noise of the horse's bells. He allows the host abruptly to interrupt him when, to satirise the romances of chivalry, he relates, in "rym dogerel," the feats of arms and marvellous adventures of the matchless Sir Thopas.[546] Before we could even murmur the word "improbable," he warns us that the time of Griseldas has passed, and that there exist no more such women in our day. As the pilgrims draw near Canterbury, and it becomes seemly to finish on a graver note, he causes his poor parson to speak, and the priest announces beforehand that his discourse will be a sermon, a real sermon, with a text from Scripture: "Incipit sermo," says one of the manuscripts. He will speak in prose, as in church:

All agree, and it is with the assent of his companions, who become more serious as they approach the holy city, that he commences, for the good of their souls, his ample "meditation." The coarse story told by the miller had been justified by excuses no less appropriate to the person and to the circumstances; the person was a clown, and chanced to be drunk; now the person is a saint, and, as it happens, they are just nearing the place of pilgrimage.

The good sense which caused the poet to write his "Canterbury Tales" according to a plan so conformable to reason and to nature, is one of the most eminent of Chaucer's qualities. It reveals itself in the details as in the whole scheme, and inspires him, in the midst of his most fanciful inventions, with reassuring remarks which show that earth and real life are not far away, and that we are not in danger of falling from the clouds. He reminds us at an opportune moment that there is a certain nobility, the highest of all, which cannot be bequeathed in a will; that the corrupt specimens of a social class should not cause the whole class to be condemned:

that, in the education of children, parents should be careful not to treat them too soon as men; if one takes them to merry-makings before time, they become "to sone rype and bold, ... which is ful perilous." He expresses himself very freely about great captains, each of whom would have been called "an outlawe or a theef" had they done less harm.[548] This last idea is put forth in a few lines of a humour so truly English that it is impossible not to think of Swift and Fielding; and, indeed, Fielding can the more appropriately be named here as he has devoted all his novel of "Jonathan Wild the Great" to the expounding of exactly the same thesis.

Finally, we owe to this same common sense of Chaucer's a thing more remarkable yet: namely, that with his knowledge of Latin and of French, and living in a circle where those two languages were in great favour, he wrote solely in English. His prose, like his verse, his "Treatise on the Astrolabe" like his tales, are in English. He belongs to the English nation, and that is why he writes in that language; a reason of that sort is sufficient for him: "Suffyse to thee thise trewe conclusiouns in English, as wel as suffyseth to thise noble clerkes Grekes thise same conclusiouns in Greek, and to Arabians in Arabik, and to Jewes in Ebrew, and to the Latin folk in Latin." Chaucer, then, will make use of plain English, "naked wordes in English"; he will employ the national language, the king's English—"the king that is lord of this langage."[549] And he will use it, as in truth he did, to express exactly his thoughts and not to embellish them; he hates travesty, he worships truth; he wants words and things to be in the closest possible relation:

The same wisdom is again the cause why Chaucer does not spend himself in vain efforts to attempt impossible reforms, and to go against the current. It has been made a subject of reproach to him in our day; and some, from love of the Saxon past, have been indignant at the number of French words Chaucer uses; why did he not go back to the origins of the language? But Chaucer was not one of those who, as Milton says, think "to pound up the crows by shutting their park gates;" he employed the national tongue, as it existed in his day; the proportion of French words is not greater with him than with the mass of his contemporaries. The words he made use of were living and fruitful, since they are still alive, they and their families; the proportion of those that have disappeared is wonderfully small, seeing the time that has elapsed. As to the Anglo-Saxons, he retained, as did the nation, but without being aware of it, something of their grave and powerful genius; it is not his fault if he ignored these ancestors; every one in his day ignored them, even such thinkers as Langland, in whom lived again with most force the spirit of the ancient Germanic race. The tradition was broken; in the literary past one went back to the Conquest, and thence without transition to "thise olde gentil Britons." In his enumeration of celebrated bards, Chaucer gives a place to Orpheus, to Orion, and to the "Bret Glascurion"; but no author of any "Beowulf" is named by him. Shakespeare, in the same manner, will derive inspiration from the national past; he will go back to the time of the Roses, to the time of the Plantagenets, to the time of Magna Charta, and, passing over the Anglo-Saxon period, he will take from the Britons the stories of Lear and of Cymbeline.

The brilliancy with which Chaucer used this new tongue, the instant fame of his works, the clear proof afforded by his writings that English could fit the highest and the lowest themes, assured to that idiom its definitive place among the great literary languages. English still had, in Chaucer's day, a tendency to resolve itself into dialects; as, in the time of the Conquest, the kingdom had still a tendency to resolve itself into sub-kingdoms. Chaucer knew this, and was concerned about it; he was anxious about those differences of tongue, of orthography, and of vocabulary; he did all in his power to regularise these discordances; he had set ideas on the subject; and, what was rare in those days, the whims of copyists made him shudder. Nothing shows better the faith he had in the English tongue, as a literary language, than his reiterated injunctions to the readers and scribes who shall read his poems aloud or copy them. He experiences already, concerning his work, the anxieties of the poets of the Renaissance:

Chaucer himself looked over the transcriptions done from his original manuscripts by his amanuensis Adam; he corrected with minute care every fault; he calls down all manner of woe upon the "scriveyn's" head, if, copying once more "Boece" or "Troilus," he leaves as many errors again.[552] We seem to hear Ronsard himself addressing his supplications to the reader: "I implore of you one thing only, reader, to pronounce well my verses and suit your voice to their passion ... and I implore you again, where you will see this sign: (!) to raise your voice a little, to give grace to what you read."[553]

Chaucer's efforts were not exercised in vain; they assisted the work of concentration. After him, the dialects lost their importance; the one he used, the East Midland dialect, has since become the language of the nation.

His verse, too, is the verse of the new literature, formed by a compromise between the old and the new prosody. Alliteration, which is not yet dead, and which is still used in his time, he does not like; its jingle seems to him ridiculous:

Ridiculous, too, in his eyes is the "rym dogerel" of the popular romances of which "Sir Thopas" is the type. His verse is the rhymed verse, with a fixed number of accents or beats, and a variable number of syllables. Nearly all the "Tales" are written in heroic verse, rhyming two by two in couplets and containing five accentuated syllables.

The same cheerful, tranquil common sense which made him adopt the language of his country and the usual versification, which prevented him from reacting with excess against received ideas, also prevented his harbouring out of patriotism, piety, or pride, any illusions about his country, his religion, or his time. He belonged to them, however, as much as any one, and loved and honoured them more than anybody. Still the impartiality of judgment of this former prisoner of the French is wonderful, superior even to Froissart's, who, the native of a border-country, was by birth impartial, but who, as age crept on, showed in the revision of his "Chronicles" decided preferences. Towards the close of the century Froissart, like the Limousin and the Saintonge, ranked among the conquests recovered by France. Chaucer, from the beginning to the end of his career, continues the same, and the fact is all the more remarkable because his turn of mind, his inspiration and his literary ideal, become more and more English as he grows older. He remains impartial, or, rather, outside the great dispute, in which, however, he had actually taken part; his works do not contain a single line directed against France, nor even any praise of his country in which it is extolled as the successful rival of its neighbour.

For this cause Des Champs, a great enemy of the English, who had not only ravaged the kingdom in general but burnt down his own private country house, made an exception in his hatred, and did homage to the wisdom and genius of the "noble Geoffrey Chaucer," the ornament of the "kingdom of Eneas," England.

V.

The composition of the "Canterbury Tales" occupied the last years of Chaucer's life. During the same period he also wrote his "Treatise on the Astrolabe" in prose, for the instruction of his son Lewis,[555] and a few detached poems, melancholy pieces in which he talks of shunning the world and the crowd, asks the prince to help him in his poverty, retreats into his inner self, and becomes graver and more and more resigned:

In spite of this melancholy, he was at that time the uncontested king of English letters; a life-long friendship bound him to Gower[557]; the young poets, Hoccleve, Scogan, Lydgate, came to him and proclaimed him their master. His face, the features of which are known to us, thanks to the portrait we owe to Hoccleve, had gained an expression of gentle gravity; he liked better to listen than to talk, and, in the "Canterbury Tales," the host rallies him on his pensive air and downcast eyes:

Age had bestowed on him a corpulency which made him a match for Harry Bailey himself.[558]

When Henry IV. mounted the throne, within the four days that followed his accession, he doubled the pension of the poet (Oct. 3, 1399), who then hired, for two pounds thirteen shillings and four pence a year, a house in the garden of St. Mary's, Westminster. The lease is still preserved in the archives of the Abbey.[559] He passed away in the following year, in that tranquil retreat, and was interred at Westminster, not far from the sepulchres where slept his patrons, Edward III. and Richard II., in that wing of the transept which has since been called the Poets' Corner, where lately we saw Browning's coffin lowered, and where, but yesterday, Tennyson's was laid.

No English poet enjoyed a fame more constantly equal to itself. In the fifteenth century writers did scarcely anything but lament and copy him: "Maister deere," said Hoccleve,

At the time of the Renaissance Caxton printed his works twice,[561] and Henry VIII. made an exception in their favour in his prohibition of "printed bokes, printed balades, ... and other fantasies."[562] Under Elizabeth, Thynne annotated them,[563] Spenser declared that he "of Tityrus," that is of Chaucer, "his songs did lere,"[564] and Sidney exalted him to the skies.[565] In the seventeenth century Dryden rejuvenates his tales, in the eighteenth century the admiration is universal, and extends to Pope and Walpole.[566] In our time the learned men of all countries have applied themselves to the task of commentating his works and of disentangling his biography, a Society has been founded to publish the best texts of his writings,[567] and but lately his "Legend of Good Women" inspired with an exquisite poem the Laureate who sleeps to-day close to the great ancestor, beneath the stones of the famous Abbey.

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER III.

THE GROUP OF POETS.

The nation was young, virile, and productive. Around Chaucer was a whole swarm of poets; he towers above them as an oak towers above a coppice; but the oak is not isolated like the great trees that are sometimes seen beneath the sun, alone in the midst of an open country. Chaucer is without peer but not without companions; and, among those companions, one at least deserves to be ranked very near him.

He has companions of all kinds, nearly as diverse as those with whom he had associated on the road to Canterbury. Some are continuators of the old style, and others are reformers; some there are, filled with the dreamy spirit of the Anglo-Saxons; there are others who care little for dreams and theories, who are of the world, and will not leave the earth; some who sing, others who hum, others who talk. Certain poems are like clarions, and celebrate the battle of Crécy, of which Chaucer had not spoken; others resemble lovers' serenades; others a dirge for the dead.

I.

The old styles are continued; the itinerant poets, jugglers, and minstrels have not disappeared; on the contrary, they are more numerous than ever. "Merry England" favours them; they continue to play, as under the first Angevins,[568] a very considerable and multiple part, which it is difficult to estimate. Those people, with their vast memory, are like perambulating libraries; they instruct, they amuse, they edify. Passing from county to county, hawking news, composing satirical songs, they fill also the place of a daily gazette; they represent public opinion, sometimes create it, and often distort it; they are living newspapers; they furnish their auditors with information about the misdeeds of the Government, which, from time to time, seizes the most talkative, and imprisons them to keep them silent. The king has minstrels in his service; they are great personages in their way, pensioned by the prince and despising the others. The nobles also keep some in their pay, which does not prevent their welcoming those who pass; they feast them when they have sung well, and give them furred robes and money.[569]

They continue to prosper in the following century. We see at that time the king of England's minstrels, people clever and of good instruction, protesting against the increasing audacity of sham minstrels, whose ignorance casts discredit on the profession. "Uncultured peasants," says the king in a vengeful statute, "and workmen of different kinds in our kingdom of England ... have given themselves out to be our own minstrels."[570] Without any experience or understanding of the art, they go from place to place on festival days, and gather all the money that should have enriched the true artists, those who really devote themselves to their profession and ply no manual craft. Vain efforts; decline was imminent; minstrels were not to recover their former standing. The Renaissance and the Reformation came; and, owing to the printing-press, gay scavoir found other means of spreading through the country. In the sixteenth century, it is true, minstrels still abound, but they are held in contempt; right-minded people, like Philip Stubbes, have no terms strong enough to qualify "suche drunken sockets and bawdye parasits as range the cuntreyes, ryming and singing of uncleane, corrupt, and filthie songes in tavernes, ale-houses, innes, and other publique assemblies.... Every towne, citie, and countrey is full of these minstrelles to pype up a dance to the devill; but of dyvines, so few there be as they maye hardly be seene."[571]

Before this awful time comes for them, however, the minstrels thrive under the last Plantagenets. Their bill is a varied one, and includes the best and the worst; they sometimes recite the "Troilus" of Chaucer,[572] and sometimes the ancient romances of chivalry, altered, spoiled, shorn of all their poetry. Chaucer had ridiculed these versions of the old heroic stories, written in tripping verses, but in vain. Throughout his life, after as well as before "Sir Thopas," he could wonder and laugh at the success of stories, composed in the very style of his own burlesque poem, about heroes who, being all peerless, are necessarily all alike: one is "stalworthe and wyghte," another "hardy and wyght," a third also "hardy and wyght"; and the fourth, fifth, and hundredth are equally brave and invincible. They are called Isumbras, Eglamour, Degrevant[573]; but they differ in their names and in nothing more. The booksellers of the Renaissance who printed their histories could make the same woodcut on the cover serve for all their portraits. By merely altering the name beneath, they changed all there was to change; one and the same block did duty in turn for Romulus or Robert the Devil.[574] Specimens of this facile art swarm indefinitely; they are scattered over the country, penetrate into hamlets, find their way into cottages, and make the people acquainted with the doughty deeds of Eglamour and Roland. We now find ourselves really in the copse.

In the middle of the copse are trees of finer growth. Some among the poets, while conforming to the old style, improve upon their models as they proceed; they add an original note of their own, and on that account deserve to be listened to. Far above those empty, tripping metrical stories, and superior even to "Morte Arthure" and to "William of Palerne,"[575] written in English verse at the time of Chaucer, ranks "Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight,"[576] being incomparably the best specimen of the style. Instead of puppets with jerky movements, and wooden joints that we hear crack, the English poet shows in this work real men and women, with supple limbs and red lips; elegant, graceful, and charming to behold. These knights and ladies in their well-fitting armour or their tight dresses, whom we see stretched in churches on their fourteenth-century tombs, have come back to life once more; and now they move, they gaze on each other, they love again.

On Christmas day, in presence of Arthur and his whole Court, Sir Gawayne cuts off the head of the Green Knight. This giant knight is doubtless an enchanter, for he stoops, picks up his head, and, remounting his horse, bids Sir Gawayne meet him a year hence at the Green Chapel, where he will give him blow for blow.

The year passes. Gawayne leaves the Court with his horse "Gringolet," and without quitting England, rides through unknown lands, having no one to speak to save God. He reaches the gate of a splendid castle, and is welcomed by a knight of ordinary stature, under whose present appearance he does not recognise his adversary the giant. Three days are left before the date of the tryst; they are spent in amusements. The knight goes daily to hunt; he agrees to give all his game to his guest, who remains at home with the lady of the castle, the most beautiful woman ever seen, on condition that Gawayne, in his turn, will give him what he has taken during his absence. Every night they gaily sup in the hall; a bright light burns on the walls, the servants set up wax torches, and serve at table. The meal is cheered by music and "caroles newe,"[577] jests, and the laughter of ladies.[578] At three o'clock each morning the lord of the castle rises, hears mass, and goes a-hunting. Gawayne is awakened from sleep by his hostess; she enters his room, with easy and graceful movements, dressed in a "mery mantyle" and furred gown, trailing on the floor, but very low in the neck:

She goes to the window, opens it, and says, "with hir riche wordes":

She seats herself, and refuses to go. Gawayne is assailed by terrible temptations. The thought of the Green Chapel, fortunately, helps him to overcome them, and the first, second, and third night his fair friend finds him equally coy. She kisses him once, twice, thrice, and jeers at him for forgetting each day what she had taught him on the previous one, namely, to kiss. When the hunter returns in the evening, Gawayne gives him the kisses he has received in exchange for the spoils of the chase: a buck, a boar, and a fox. He had, however, accepted besides a marvellous belt, which protected the wearer from all danger, but he says nothing about this, and puts it on: "Aux grands cœurs donnez quelques faiblesses," our author obviously thinks, with Boileau.

On the fourth day Gawayne starts with a guide, and reaches the Green Chapel; the Green Giant is there, ready to give him back the blow received a year before. Gawayne stoops his head under the dreadful axe, and just as it falls cannot help bending his shoulders a little. You are not that Gawayne, says the giant, held in such high esteem. At this, Arthur's knight straightens himself; the giant lifts his axe again and strikes, but only inflicts a slight wound. All is now explained: for the kisses Gawayne should have received mortal blows, but he gave them back; he kept the belt, however, and this is why he will bear through life a scar on his neck. Vexed, he throws away the belt, but the giant returns it to him, and consoles him by admitting that the trial was a superhuman one, that he himself is Bernlak de Haut-Désert, and that his guest has been the sport of "Morgan the fairy," the companion of his hostess:

Gawayne declares that should he ever be tempted by pride, he need only look at the belt, and the temptation will vanish. He rejoins Arthur and his peers, and tells his adventures, which afford food both for laughter and for admiration.

The poem is anonymous. The same manuscript contains another, on a totally different subject, which seems to be by the same author. This poem has been called "The Pearl;"[580] it is a song of mourning. It must have been written some time after the sad event which it records, when the bitterness of sorrow had softened. The landscape is bathed in sunlight, the hues are wonderfully bright. The poet has lost his daughter, his pearl, who is dead; his pearl has fallen in the grass, and he has been unable to find it; he cannot tear himself away from the spot where she had been. He entered in that arbour green; it was August, that sunny season, when the corn has just fallen under the sickle; there the pearl had "trendeled doun" among the glittering, richly-coloured plants, gilly-flowers, gromwell seed, and peonies, splendid in their hues, sweeter in their smell.[581] He sees a forest, rocks that glisten in the sun, banks of crystal; birds sing in the branches, and neither cistern nor guitar ever made sweeter music. The sound of waters, too, is heard; a brook glides over pebbles shining like the stars in a winter's night, at the hour when the weary sleep.[582]

So great is the beauty of the place that the father's grief is soothed, and he has a marvellous vision. On the opposite side of the stream he sees a maiden clothed in white; and as he gazes he suddenly recognises her: O pearl art thou in sooth my pearl, so mourned and wept for through so many nights? Touching and consoling is the answer: Thou hast lost no pearl, and never hadst one; that thou lost was but a rose, that flowered and faded; now only has the rose become a pearl for ever.[583] The father follows his child to where a glimpse can be caught of the Celestial City, with its flowers and jewels, the mystic lamb, and the procession of the elect; it seems as if the poet were describing beforehand, figure by figure, Van Eyck's painting at St. Bavon of Ghent.

II.

An immense copse surrounds the oak. About Chaucer swarm innumerable minstrels, anonymous poets, rhyming clerks, knightly ballad makers.[584] The fragile works of these rhyming multitudes are for the most part lost, yet great quantities of them still exist. They are composed by everybody, and written in the three languages used by the English; some being in French, some in English, some in Latin.

The Plantagenets were an art-loving race. Edward III. never thought of cost when it came to painting and gilding the walls of St. Stephen's Chapel; Richard II. disliked a want of conformity in architectural styles, and, having the conscience of an artist, gave an example of a rare sort in the Middle Ages, for he continued Westminster Abbey in the style of Henry III. Members of the royal family were known to write verses. The hero of Poictiers inserted in his will a piece of poetry in French, requesting that the lines should be graven on his tomb, where they can still be read in Canterbury Cathedral: "Such as thou wast, so was I; of death I never thought so long as I lived. On earth I enjoyed ample wealth, and I used it with great splendour, land, houses, and treasure, cloth, horses, silver and gold; but now I am poor and bereft, I lie under earth, my great beauty is all gone.... And were you to see me now, I do not think you would believe that ever I was a man."[585]

The nobles followed suit; they put their passions into verse; but all had not sufficient skill for such delicate pastimes. Many contented themselves with copying some of those ready-made ballads, of which professional poets supplied ready-made collections; just as sermons were written for the benefit of obtuse parish priests, under the significant title of "Dormi Secure"[586] (Sleep in peace, tomorrow's sermon is ready). We find also in English manuscripts rubrics like the following: "Loo here begynnethe a Balade whiche that Lydegate wrote at the request of a squyer y^t served in Love's court."[587] In their most elegant language, with all the studied refinement of the flowery style, the poets, writing to order, amplified, embellished, and spoilt: "ce mot, le mot des dieux et des hommes: je t'aime!" We are not even in the copse now, and we must stoop close to earth in order to see these blossoms of a day.

Among men of the people, and plain citizens, as well as at Court, the taste for ballads and songs imported from France became general in the fourteenth century. In the streets of London, mere craftsmen could be heard singing French burdens: for in spite of the progress of the national tongue, French was not yet entirely superseded in Great Britain. Langland in his Visions has London workmen who sing: "Dieu vous sauve dame Emma."[588] Chaucer's good parson bears witness to the popularity of another song, and declares in the course of his sermon: "Wel may that man that no good werke ne dooth, singe thilke newe Frenshe song: "J'ay tout perdu mon temps et mon labour."[589]

In imitation of what was done in the northern provinces of France, a Pui had been founded in London, that is an association established for the purpose of encouraging the art of the chanson, which awarded prizes to the authors of the best verses and the best music.[590] In the fourteenth century the Pui of London was at the height of its prosperity; it included both foreign and English merchants. It had been instituted so that "jolity, peace, courtesy, gentleness, debonairity, and love without end might be maintained, all good promoted, and evil prevented." These merchants of divers countries evidently agreed in thinking that music softens the manners, and tried to extinguish their quarrels by songs. At the head of the Pui was a "prince" surrounded by twelve "compaignouns," elected by the brotherhood, whose mission included the duty of pacifying the squabblers. Each year a new prince was chosen and solemnly enthroned. On the appointed day "the old prince and his companions must go from one end of the hall to the other, singing; the old prince will bear on his head the crown of the Pui, and have in his hand a gilt cup full of wine. And when they shall have gone all round, the old prince must give the one they have elected to drink, and also give him the crown, and that one shall be prince."

To pass judgment on chansons is no trifle, and the deed is surrounded by every precaution befitting so important a sentence. The decision rests with the old prince and the new, assisted by about fifteen "of the most knowing among the companions," who are all obliged to take a solemn oath: "They must find which is the best song, to the best of their capacity, under oath that they will not fail for love, for hate, for favour, for promise, for neighbourhood, for lineage, for any tie old or new, or for any reason whatsoever." Moreover, two or three judges shall be appointed "who are skilled in singing and music," to examine the tune of the song: "For unless it be accompanied by music, a written text cannot be called a chanson, neither can a chanson royale be crowned unless it be accompanied with the sweetness of melodious singing." The winner is to receive the crown, and his composition, copied and fairly written out, will be posted up in the hall, under the prince's coat of arms: "The prince shall cause to be fastened under his coat of arms the song crowned on the day he was chosen to be the new prince, clearly written, and correctly, without fault."

At one time the Pui society was nearly ruined, owing to the expense incurred for decking the hall. In future it will be more moderate: "It is agreed henceforth that part of the hall where the feast of the Pui is held, be not hung with silk or cloth of gold, neither shall the hall itself be draped, but only fairly garnished with green boughs, the floor strewn with rushes, benches prepared, as befits such a feast royal; only the seat for the singers who are to sing the chansons royales shall be covered with cloth of gold."

After the competition, all dine together. Here is the bill of fare for the feast: "And the bill of fare is thus ordained; be all the companions liberally served, the poorest as well as the richest, after this fashion, to wit, that to them be served good bread, good ale and good wine, and then potage and a course of strong meat, and after that a double roast in a dish, and cheese, and nothing else." Women were not admitted to these gatherings, and so that slanderers might not say it was for fear of quarrels, or worse, we are told by the society itself that it was to teach the members to "honour, cherish, and praise them as much in their absence as in their presence."

No feast was complete in the Middle Ages without a procession or progress through the streets; the amusement was thus shared by the people. The members of the Pui did not fail in this: "As soon as they shall have given the crown to the best singer, they shall mount their horses and ride through the town, and then accompany their new prince to his hostel, and there all get down, and dance before departing; and drink once, and return each to his hostel." With its songs and music, its kind purpose, its crowns and green branches, this association seems like a peaceful and verdant corner of Arcadia in the midst of London City, peaceful and merry in spite of mercantile jealousies and international hatreds.

This oasis is all the more charming to the sight because it is only an oasis. Such sentiments were too courteous to be very common. While our friends of the Pui endeavour to cherish and praise women even in their absence, other makers of songs follow another mediæval tradition and satirise them mercilessly. Triads were dedicated to them, which were nothing but slanderous litanies:

So the litany continues, very different from the litany of the beauties of woman sung in the same period, perhaps by the same men. Friars, monks, and fops who adopt absurd fashions, and wear hose so tight that they cannot stoop for fear of bursting them,[592] are, with women, the subjects of these satirical songs:

An account follows of doings, studies, and prayers, by no means edifying, and which recalls Chaucer rather than St. Francis.

III.

The tone becomes more elevated; and then we have forest songs in honour of the outlaw Robin Hood.[594] The satire ceases to be simply mocking; the singer's laughter no longer consoles him for abuses; he wants reforms; he chides and threatens. In his speech to the rebel peasants in 1381, the priest John Ball takes from a popular song the burden that comprises his whole theory:

The anonymous poet makes the dumb peasant speak, describe his woes, and draw up a list of his complaints. By way of reply, anonymous clerks compose songs, half English and half Latin, a favourite mixture at that time, in which they express their horror of the rebels.[596] Others sound the praises of the English heroes of the Hundred Years' War.

Contrary to what might be supposed, the number of these last songs is not great, and their inspiration not exalted. The war, as has been seen, was a royal and not a national one; and it happened, moreover, that none of the famous poets of the time saw fit to celebrate Crécy and Poictiers. We have, therefore, nothing but rough sketches, akin to popular prints, barbarous in design, and coarse in colouring, but of strong intent. Clerks, in their Latin, pursue France and Philip de Valois, with opprobrious epithets:

Such is France according to them, and as to her king, his fate is predicted in the following pun:

To which the French replied:

But both countries have survived, for other quarrels, other troubles, and other glories.

The battles of Edward III. were also celebrated in a series of English poems, that have been preserved for us in a single manuscript, together with the name of their author, Laurence Minot,[599] concerning whom nothing is known. In his rude verse, where alliteration is sometimes combined with rhyme, both being very roughly handled, Minot follows Edward step by step, and extols his prowess with the best will, but in the worst poetry. Grand subjects do not need magnifying; and when magnified by unskilful artists they run the risk of recalling the Sir Thopas example: this risk Edward incurs at the hands of Laurence Minot. On the other hand absurd and useless expletives, "suth to saine," "i-wis," and especially "both day and night" continually help Minot to eke out his rhymes; and the reader is sorely tempted uncourteously to agree with him when he exclaims:

Besides these war-songs, and at the same time, laments are heard, as in former days, sad and desponding accents. Defeats have succeeded to victories, and they contribute to raise doubts as to the validity of Edward's claims.[601] What if, after all, this ruinous war, the issue of which is uncertain, should turn out to be an unjust war as well? Verses are even composed on the subject of wrongs done to inoffensive people in France: "Sanguis communitatis Franciæ quæ nihil ei nocebat quæritur apud Deum."[602]

In war literature the Scots did not fare better than the French at the hands of their neighbours. At this time, and for long after, they were still the foe, just as the Irish or French were. Following the example given by the latter, the Scots replied; several of their replies, being in English, belong to the literature of England. The most energetic is the semi-historical romance called "The Bruce"; it is the best of the patriotic poems deriving their inspiration from the wars of the fourteenth century.

"The Bruce," composed about 1375 by John Barbour,[603] is divided into twenty books; it is written in the dialect spoken in the south of Scotland from Aberdeen to the frontier, the dialect employed later by James I. and Sir David Lyndesay, who, like Barbour himself, called it "inglis." Barbour's verse is octo-syllabic, forming rhymed couplets; it is the same as Chaucer's in his "Hous of Fame."

Barbour's intention is to write a true history; he thus expects, he says, to give twofold pleasure: firstly because it is a history, secondly because it is a true one. But where passion has a hold it is rare that Truth reigns paramount, and Barbour's feeling for his country is nothing short of passionate love; so much so that, when a legend is to the credit of Scotland, his critical sense entirely disappears, and miracles become for him history. Thus with monotonous uniformity, throughout his poem a handful of Scotchmen rout the English multitudes; the highlanders perform prodigies, and the king still surpasses them in valour; everything succeeds with him as in a fairy tale. This love of the soil, of its rocks and its lochs, of its clans and their chieftains, brings to mind the most illustrious of the literary descendants of Barbour, Walter Scott, who more than once borrowed from "The Bruce" the subjects of his stories.[604]

Besides the love of their land, the two compatriots have in common a taste for picturesque anecdotes, and select them with a view of making their heroes popular; the sense of humour is not developed to an equal degree, but it is of the same quality in both; and the same kind of happy answers are enjoyed by the two. Barbour delights, and with good reason, in preserving the account of the fight in which the king, traitorously attacked by three men while alone in the mountains, "by a wode syde," smites them "rigorously," and kills them all, and, when congratulated on his return:

Barbour likes to show the king, simple, patriarchal and valorous, stern to his foes, and gentle to the weak. He makes him halt his army in Ireland, because the screams of a woman have been heard; it is a poor laundress in the pangs of child-birth; the march is interrupted; a tent is spread, under which the poor creature is delivered in peace.[606]

To England's threats Barbour replies by challenges, and by his famous apostrophe to liberty:

Some people, continues the good archdeacon, who cannot long keep to the lyric style, have compared marriage to bondage, but they are unexperienced men who know nothing about it; of course marriage is the worst state in which it is possible to live, the thing is beyond discussion; but in bondage one cannot live, one dies.

IV.

A little above the copse another head rises; that of Chaucer's great friend, John Gower. Unlike Chaucer in this, Gower hated and despised common people; when he allows them room in his works, the place assigned to them is an unenviable one. He is aristocratic and conservative by nature, so that he belongs to old England as much as to the new nation, and is the last in date of the recognisable representatives of Angevin Britain. Like the latter, Gower hesitates between several idioms; he is not sure that English is the right one; he is tri-lingual, just as England had been; he writes long poems in Latin and English, and when he addresses himself to "the universality of all men" he uses French. He writes French "of Stratford," it is true; he knows it and confesses it; but nothing shows better how truly he belongs to the England of times gone, the half-French England of former days: he excuses himself and persists. "And if I stumble in my French, forgive me my mistakes; English I am; and beg on this plea to be excused."[608]

Unlike Chaucer, Gower was rich and of good family. His life was a long one; born about 1325, he died in 1408. He was related to Sir Robert Gower; he owned manors in the county of Kent and elsewhere; he was known to the king, and to the royal family, but undertook no public functions. To him as we have seen, and to Strode, Chaucer dedicated his "Troilus":

Gower, in his turn, represents Venus addressing him as follows:

Gower was exceedingly pious. When old age came he retired with his wife to the priory of St. Mary Overy's (now St. Saviour), in that same suburb of Southwark where Chaucer preferred to frequent the "Tabard," and spent his last years there in devout observances. He became blind in 1400, and died eight years after. He bequeathed to his wife three cups, two salt-cellars, twelve silver spoons, all his beds and chests, and the income of two manors; he left a number of pious legacies in order to have lamps kept burning, and masses said for his soul. He gave the convent two chasubles of silk, a large missal, a chalice, a martyrology he had caused to be copied for this purpose, and begged that in exchange he might be buried in the chapel of St. John the Baptist at St. Mary Overy's; which was done. His tomb, restored and repainted, still exists. He is represented lying with his hands raised as if for prayer, his thick locks are bound by a fillet adorned with roses. The head of the plump, round-cheeked poet rests on his three principal works; he wears about his neck a collar of interwoven SS, together with the swan, emblem of Henry IV. of England.[611]

The worthy man wrote immoderately, and in especial three great poems: the "Speculum Meditantis," in French; the "Vox Clamantis," in Latin; the "Confessio Amantis," in English. The first is lost; only an analysis of it remains, and it shows that Gower treated there of the vices and virtues of his day.[612] The loss is not very great: Gower has told pretty clearly elsewhere what he thought of the vices of his time, and, even had he not, it would have been easy to guess, for he was too right-minded a man not to have thought of them all the evil possible.

Some French works of Gower have, however, come down to us; they are ballads and madrigals, for imaginary Iris,[613] Court poems, imitations of Petrarch,[614] the light verses of a well-taught man. He promises eternal service to his "douce dame"; his "douce dame" being no one in particular. He writes for others, and they are welcome to draw from his works: "The love-songs thus far are composed specially for those who expect love favours through marriage.... The ballads from here to the end of the book are common to all, according to the properties and conditions of lovers who are diversely wrought upon by fickle love."[615] Here and there some fine similes are found in which figure the chameleon, for instance, who was supposed to live on air alone, or the hawk: "Chameleon a proud creature is, that lives upon air without more; thus may I say in similar fashion only through the love hopes which I entertain is my soul's life preserved."[616]

He excused himself, as we have seen, for the mistakes in his French works, but neglected to do the same for his Latin poems: in which he was wrong. The principal one, the "Vox Clamantis,"[617] was suggested to him by the great rising of 1381, which had imperilled the Crown and the whole social order. Gower, being a landowner in Kent, was in the best situation fully to appreciate the danger.

In order to treat this terrible subject, Gower, who is not inventive, adopts the form of a dream, just as if it were a new "Romaunt of the Rose." It is springtime, and he falls asleep. Let us not mind it overmuch, we shall soon do likewise; but our slumber will be a broken one; in the midst of the droning of his sermon, Gower suddenly screams, roars, flies into a passion—"Vox Clamantis!" His hearers open an eye, wonder where they are, recognise Gower, and go off to sleep again.

Gower heaps up enormous and vague invectives; he fancies his style resembles that of the apostle in Patmos. Animals and monsters fight and scream; the common people have been turned into beasts, oxen, hogs, dogs, foxes, flies, frogs; all are hideous or dangerous. Cursing as he goes along, Gower drives before him, with hissing distichs, the strange herd of his monsters, who "dart sulphureous flames from the cavern of their mouth."[618]

These disasters are caused by the vices of the time, and Gower lengthily, patiently, complacently, draws up an interminable catalogue of them. A University education has taught him the importance of correct divisions; he divides and subdivides according to the approved scholastic methods. Firstly, there are the vices of churchmen; these vices are of different kinds, as are ecclesiastics themselves; he re-divides and re-subdivides. Some parsons "give Venus the tithes that belong to God"; others are the terror of hares: "lepus visa pericla fugit," and hearken to no chime but the "vociferations" of the hounds[619]; others trade. Knights are too fond of women "with golden locks"; peasants are slothful; merchants rapacious and dishonest; they make "false gems out of glass."[620] The king himself does not escape a lecture: let him be upright, pious, merciful, and choose his ministers with care; let him beware of women: "Thou art king, let one sole queen suffice thee."[621]

In one particular, however, this sermon is a remarkable one. What predominates in these long tirades of poor verses is an intense feeling of horror and dismay; the quiet Gower, and the whole community to which he belonged, have suddenly been brought face to face with something unusual and terrifying even for that period. The earth shook, and a gulf opened; hundreds of victims, an archbishop of Canterbury among them, disappeared, and the abyss still yawns; the consternation is general, and no one knows what remedy to expect. Happily the two edges of the chasm have at last united; it has closed again, hiding in its depths a heaving sea of lava, the rumblings of which are still heard, and give warning that it may burst forth at some future day. Gower, in the meantime, scans his distichs.

Chaucer wrote in English, naturally, his sole reason being that it was the language of the country. Gower, when he uses this idiom,[622] offers explanations:

He has no idea to what extent this apology, so common a hundred years before, is now out of place after the "Troilus" of Chaucer. His English book is a lengthy compilation, written at the request of the young King Richard,[624] wherein Gower seeks both to amuse and to instruct, giving as he does,

In his turn, and after Boccaccio, he invents a plot that will allow him to insert a whole series of tales and stories into one single work; compositions of this sort being the fashion. Gower's collection contains a hundred and twelve short stories, two or three of which are very well told; one, the adventure of Florent, being, perhaps, related even better than in Chaucer.[625] The rest resembles the Gower of the "Vox Clamantis."

What will be the subject of this philosopher's talk? He will tell us of a thing:

In order to treat of this subject, and of many others, Boccaccio had conceived the idea of his gathering in the villa near Florence, and Chaucer that of his pilgrimage. Moral Gower remains true to his character, and imagines a confession. The lover seeks a priest of Venus, a worthy and very learned old man, called Genius, who had already figured as confessor in the "Roman de la Rose"[627]: "Benedicite," says the priest; "Dominus," answers the lover; and a miniature shows the lover in a pink gown, kneeling in a meadow at the feet of Genius, a tonsured monk in frock and cowl.[628]

We find ourselves again among vices and virtues, classifications, divisions, and subdivisions. Genius condemns the vices (those of his goddess included, for he is a free speaking priest). He hates, above all things, Lollardry, "this new tapinage," and he commends the virtues; the stories come in by way of example: mind what your eyes do, witness Actæon; and your ears, witness the Sirens. He passes on to the seven deadly sins which were apparently studied in the seminary where this priest of Venus learnt theology. After the deadly sins the mists and marvels of the "Secretum Secretorum" fill the scene. At last the lover begs for mercy; he writes Venus a letter: "with the teres of min eye in stede of inke." Venus, who is a goddess, deciphers it, hastens to the spot, and scornfully laughs at this shivering lover, whom age and wrinkles have left a lover. Gower then decides to withdraw, and make, as he says, "beau retraite." In a last vision, the poor "olde grisel" gazes upon the series of famous loving couples, who give themselves up to the delight of dancing, in a paradise, where one could scarcely have expected to find them together: Tristan and Iseult, Paris and Helen, Troilus and Cressida, Samson and Dalila, David and Bathsheba, and Solomon the wise who has for himself alone a hundred or so of "Jewes eke and Sarazines."

In spite of the immense difference in their merit, the names of Chaucer and Gower were constantly coupled; James of Scotland, Skelton, Dunbar, always mention them together; the "Confessio" was printed by Caxton; under Elizabeth we find Gower on the stage; he figures in "Pericles," and recites the prologue of this play, the plot of which is borrowed from his poem.

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER IV.

WILLIAM LANGLAND AND HIS VISIONS.

Gower's books were made out of books. Chaucer's friend carries us in imagination to the paradise of Eros, or to a Patmos of his own invention, from whence he foretells the end of the world; but whatever he does or says we are always perfectly aware of where we are: we are in his library.

It is quite different with another poet of this period, a mysterious and intangible personage, whose very name is doubtful, whose writings had great influence, and that no one appears to have seen, concerning whom we possess no contemporaneous information. Like Gower, strong ties bind him to the past; but Gower is linked to Angevin England, and William Langland, if such be really his name, to the remote England of the Saxons and Scandinavians. His books are not made out of books; they are made of real life, of things seen, of dreams dreamt, of feelings actually experienced. He is the exact opposite of Gower, he completes Chaucer himself. When the "Canterbury Tales" are read, it seems as though all England were described in them; when the Visions of Langland are opened, it is seen that Chaucer had not said everything. Langland is without comparison the greatest poet after Chaucer in the mediæval literature of England.[629]

I.

His Visions have been preserved for us in a considerable number of manuscripts. They differ greatly among each other; Langland appears to have absorbed himself in his work, continually remodelling and adding to it. No poem has been more truly lived than this one; it was the author's shelter, his real house, his real church; he always came back there to pray, to tell his sorrows—to live in it. Hence strange incoherencies, and at the same time many unexpected lights. The spirit by which Langland is animated is the spirit of the Middle Ages, powerful, desultory, limitless. A classic author makes a plan, establishes noble proportions, conceives a definite work, and completes it; the poet of the Middle Ages, if he makes a plan, rarely keeps to it; he alters it as he goes along, adding a porch, a wing, a chapel to his edifice: a cathedral in mediæval times was never finished. Some authors, it is true, were already touched by classic influence, and had an idea of measure; such was the case with Chaucer, but not with Langland; anything and everything finds place in his work. By collecting the more characteristic notes scattered in his poem, sketch-books full of striking examples might be formed, illustrative of English life in the fourteenth century, to compare with Chaucer's, of the political and religious history of the nation, and also of the biography of the author.

Allusions to events of the day which abound in the poem enable us to date it. Three principal versions exist,[630] without counting several intermediate remodellings; the first contains twelve cantos or passus, the second twenty, the third twenty-three; their probable dates are 1362-3, 1376-7, and 1398-9.[631]

The numerous allusions to himself made by the author, principally in the last text of his poem, when, according to the wont of old men, he chose to tell the tale of his past life, allow us to form an idea of what his material as well as moral biography must have been. He was probably born in 1331 or 1332, at Cleobury Mortimer, as it seems, in the county of Shrewsbury, not far from the border of Wales. He was (I think) of low extraction, and appears to have escaped bondage owing to the help of patrons who were pleased by his ready intelligence. From childhood he was used to peasants and poor folk; he describes their habits as one familiarised with them, and their cottages as one who knows them well. His life oscillated chiefly between two localities, Malvern and London. Even when he resides in the latter place, his thoughts turn to Malvern, to its hills and verdure; he imagines himself there; for tender ties, those ties that bind men to mother earth, and which are only formed in childhood, endear the place to him. A convent and a school formerly existed at Malvern, and there in all likelihood Langland first studied.

The church where he came to pray still exists, built of red sandstone, a structure of different epochs, where the Norman style and perpendicular Gothic unite. Behind the village rise steep hills, covered with gorse, ferns, heather, and moss. Their highest point quite at the end of the chain, towards Wales, is crowned by Roman earthworks. From thence can be descried the vast plain where flows the Severn, crossed by streams bordered by rows of trees taking blue tints in the distance, spotted with lights and shadows, as the clouds pass in the ever-varying sky. Meadows alternate with fields of waving grain; the square tower of Worcester rises to the left, and away to the east those mountains are seen that witnessed the feats of Arthur. This wide expanse was later to give the poet his idea of the world's plain, "a fair feld ful of folke," where he will assemble all humanity, as in a Valley of Jehoshaphat. He enjoys wandering in this "wilde wildernesse," attracted by "the layes the levely foules made."

From childhood imagination predominates in him; his intellectual curiosity and facility are very great. He is a vagabond by nature, both mentally and physically; he roams over the domains of science as he did over his beloved hills, at random, plunging into theology, logic, law, astronomy, "an harde thynge"; or losing himself in reveries, reading romances of chivalry, following Ymagynatyf, who never rests: "Idel was I nevere." He studies the properties of animals, stones, and plants, a little from nature and a little from books; now he talks as Euphues will do later, and his natural mythology will cause a smile; and now he speaks as one country-bred, who has seen with his own eyes, like Burns, a bird build her nest, and has patiently watched her do it. Sometimes the animal is a living one, that leaps from bough to bough in the sunlight; at others, it is a strange beast, fit only to dwell among the stone foliage of a cathedral cornice.

He knows French and Latin; he has some tincture of the classics; he would like to know everything:

But, in that as in other things, his will is not on a par with his aspirations: this inadequacy was the cause of numberless disappointments. Thou art, Clergye says most appropriately, one of those who want to know but hate to study:

Even in early youth his mind seems to lack balance; being as yet a boy, he is already a soul in trouble.

His dreams at this time were not all dark ones; radiant apparitions came to him. Thou art young and lusty, said one, and hast years many before thee to live and to love; look in this mirror, and see the wonders and joys of love. I shall follow thee, said another, till thou becomest a lord, and hast domains.[634] But one by one the lights faded around him; his patrons died, and this was the end of his ambitions; for he was not one of those men able by sheer strength of will to make up for outside help when that fails them. His will was diseased; an endless grief began for him. Being dependent on his "Clergye" for a livelihood, he went to London, and tried to earn his daily bread by means of it, of "that labour" which he had "lerned best."[635]

Religious life in the Middle Ages had not those well-defined and visible landmarks to which we are accustomed. Nowadays one either is or is not of the Church; formerly, no such obvious divisions existed. Religious life spread through society, like an immense river without dykes, swollen by innumerable affluents, whose subterranean penetrations impregnated even the soil through which they did not actually flow. From this arose numerous situations difficult to define, bordering at once on the world and on the Church, a state of things with which there is no analogy now, except in Rome itself, where the religious life of the Middle Ages still partly continues.

Numerous semi-religious and slightly remunerative functions were accessible to clerks, who were not, however, obliged to renounce the world on that account. The great thing in the hour of death being to ensure the salvation of the soul, men of fortune continued, and sometimes began, their good works at that hour. They endeavoured to win Paradise by proxy; they left directions in their will that, by means of lawful hire, soldiers should be sent to battle with the infidel; and they also founded what were called "chantries." A sum of money was left by them in order that masses, or the service for the dead, or both, should be chanted for the repose of their souls.

The number of these chantries was countless; every arch in the aisles of the cathedrals contained some, where the service for the dead was sung; sometimes separate edifices were built with this view. A priest celebrated masses when the founder had asked for them; and clerks performed the office of choristers, having, for the most part, simply received the tonsure, and not being necessarily in holy orders. It was, for them all, a career, almost a trade; giving rise to discussions concerning salaries, and even to actual strikes. These services derived the name under which they commonly went from one of the words of the liturgy sung; they were called Placebos and Diriges. The word "dirge" has passed into the English language, and is derived from the latter.

To psalmody for money, to chant the same words from day to day and from year to year, transforming into a mere mechanical toil the divine gift and duty of prayer, could not answer the ideal of life conceived by a proud and generous soul filled with vast thoughts. Langland, however, was obliged to curb his mind to this work; Placebo and Dirige became his tools:

Like many others whose will is diseased, he condemned the abuse and profited by it. The fairies at his birth had promised riches, and he was poor; they had whispered of love, and an unsatisfactory marriage had closed the door on love, and debarred him from preferment to the highest ecclesiastical ranks. Langland lives miserably with his wife Catherine and his daughter Nicolette, in a house in Cornhill, not far from St. Paul's, the cathedral of many chantries,[637] and not far from that tower of Aldgate, to which about this time that other poet, Chaucer, directed his steps, he, too, solitary and lost in dreams.

Langland has depicted himself at this period of his existence a great, gaunt figure, dressed in sombre garments with large folds, sad in a grief without end, bewailing the protectors of his childhood and his lost illusions, seeing nothing but clouds on the horizon of his life. He begins no new friendships; he forms ties with no one; he follows the crowded streets of the city, elbowing lords, lawyers, and ladies of fashion; he greets no one. Men wearing furs and silver pendants, rich garments and collars of gold, brush past him, and he knows them not. Gold collars ought to be saluted, but he does not do it; he does not say to them: "God loke yow Lordes!" But then his air is so absent, so strange, that instead of quarrelling with him people shrug their shoulders, and say: He is "a fole"; he is mad.[638] Mad! the word recurs again and again under his pen, the idea presents itself incessantly to his mind, under every shape, as though he were possessed by it: "fole," "frantyk," "ydiote!" He sees around him nothing but dismal spectres: Age, Penury, Disease.

To these material woes are added mental ones. In the darkness of this world shines at least a distant ray, far off beyond the grave. But, at times, even this light wavers; clouds obscure and apparently extinguish it. Doubts assail the soul of the dreamer; theology ought to elucidate, but, on the contrary, only darkens them:

How is it possible to reconcile the teachings of theology with our idea of justice? And certain thoughts constantly recur to the poet, and shake the edifice of his faith; he drives them away, they reappear; he is bewitched by them and cannot exorcise these demons. Who had a more elevated mind than Aristotle, and who was wiser than Solomon? Still they are held by Holy-Church "bothe ydampned!" and on Good Friday, what do we see? A felon is saved who had lived all his life in lies and thefts; he was saved at once "with-outen penaunce of purgatorie." Adam, Isaiah, and all the prophets remained "many longe yeres" with Lucifer, and—

He wishes he had thought less, learnt less, "conned" fewer books, and preserved for himself the quiet, "sad bileve" of "plowmen and pastoures"; happy men who can

In the midst of these trials and sorrows, Langland had one refuge: his book. His poem made up for those things which life had denied him. Why make verses, why write, said Ymagynatyf to him; are there not "bokes ynowe?"[3] But without his book, Langland could not have lived, like those fathers whose existence is bound up in that of their child, and who die if he dies. When he had finished it, and though his intention was never to touch it again, for in it he announced his own death, he still began it over again, once, twice; he worked at it all his life.

What was the end of that life? No one knows. Some indications tend to show that in his later years he left London, where he had led his troubled life to return to the Western country.[642] There we should like to think of him, soothed, healed, resigned, and watching that sun decline in the west which he had seen rise, many years before, "in a somere seyson."

II.

In this summer season, in the freshness of the morning, to the musical sound of waters, "it sowned so murrie," the poet, lingering on the summit of Malvern hills, falls asleep, and the first of his visions begins. He contemplates

and, in an immense plain, a "feld ful of folke," he notices the bustle and movements of mankind,

Mankind is represented by typical specimens of all sorts: knights, monks, parsons, workmen singing French songs, cooks crying: Hot pies! "Hote pyes, hote!" pardoners, pilgrims, preachers, beggars, janglers who will not work, japers and "mynstralles" that sell "glee." They are, or nearly so, the same beings Chaucer assembled at the "Tabard" inn, on the eve of his pilgrimage to Canterbury. This crowd has likewise a pilgrimage to make, not, however, on the sunny high-road that leads from Southwark to the shrine of St. Thomas. No, they journey through abstract countries, and have to accomplish, some three hundred years before Bunyan's Christian, their pilgrim's progress in search of Truth and of Supreme Good.

A lady appears, who explains the landscape and the vision; she is Holy-Church. Yonder tower is the tower of Truth. This castle is the "Castel of Care" that contains "Wronge." Holy-Church points out how mankind ought to live, and teaches kings and knights their duties with regard to Truth.

Here comes Lady Meed, a lady of importance, whose friendship means perdition, yet without whom nothing can be done, and who plays an immense part in the world. The monosyllable which designates her has a vague and extended signification; it means both reward and bribery. Disinterestedness, the virtue of noble minds, being rare in this world, scarcely anything is undertaken without hope of recompense, and what man, toiling solely with a view to recompense, is quite safe from bribery? So Lady Meed is there, beautiful, alluring, perplexing; to get on without her is impossible, and yet it is hard to know what to do with her. She is about to marry "Fals"; the friends and witnesses have arrived, the marriage deed is drawn up; the pair are to have the "Erldome of Envye," and other territories that recall the worst regions of the celebrated map of the Tendre. Opposition is made to the marriage, and the whole wedding party starts for Westminster, where the cause is to be determined; friends, relations, bystanders; on foot, on horseback, and in carriages; a singular procession!

The king, notified of the coming of this cortège, publicly declares he will deal justice to the knaves, and the procession melts away; most of the friends disappear at a racing pace through the lanes of London. The poet hastens to lodge the greatest scoundrels with the people he hates, and has them received with open arms. "Gyle" is welcomed by the merchants, who dress him as an apprentice, and make him wait on their customers. "Lyer" has at first hard work to find shelter; he hides in the obscure holes of the alleys, "lorkynge thorw lanes"; no door opens, his felonies are too notorious. At last, the pardoners "hadden pite and pullede hym to house"; they washed him and clothed him and sent him to church on Sundays with bulls and seals appended, to sell "pardons for pans" (pence). Then leeches send him letters to say that if he would assist them "waters to loke," he should be well received; spicers have an interview with him; minstrels and messengers keep him "half a yere and eleve dayes"; friars dress him as a friar, and, with them, he forms the friendliest ties of all.[643]

Lady Meed appears before the king's tribunal; she is beautiful, she looks gentle, she produces a great effect; she is Phryne before her judges with the addition of a garment. The judges melt, they cheer her, and so do the clerks, the friars, and all those that approach her. She is so pretty! and so kind! Anything you will, she wills it too; no one feels bashful in her presence; she is indeed so kind! A friar offers her the boon of an absolution, which he will grant her "himself"; but she must do good to the brotherhood: We have a window begun that will cost us dear; if you would pay for the stained glass of the gable, your name should be engraved thereon, and to heaven would go your soul. Meed is willing. The king appears and examines her; he decides to marry her, not to Fals, but to the knight Conscience. Meed is willing; she is always willing.

The knight comes, refuses, and lays bare the ill-practices of Meed, who corrupts all the orders of the kingdom, and has caused the death of "yowre fadre" (your father, King Edward II.). She would not be an amiable spouse; she is as "comune as the cart-wey." She connives with the Pope in the presentation to benefices; she obtains bishoprics for fools, "theighe they be lewed."

Meed weeps, which is already a good answer; then, having recovered the use of speech, she defends herself cleverly. The world would fall into a torpor without Meed; knights would no longer care for kings; priests would no longer say masses; minstrels would sing no more songs; merchants would not trade; and even beggars would no longer beg.

The knight tartly replies: There are two kinds of Meed; we knew it; there is reward, and there is bribery, but they are always confounded. Ah! if Reason reigned in this world instead of Meed, the golden age would return; no more wars; no more of these varieties of tribunals, where Justice herself gets confused. At this Meed becomes "wroth as the wynde."[644]

Enough, says the king; I can stand you no longer; you must both serve me:

the knight answers, and the quarrel continues. They send for Reason to decide it. Reason has his horses saddled; they have interminable names, such as "Suffre-til-I-see-my-time." Long before the day of the Puritans, our visionary employs names equivalent to sentences; we meet, in his poem, with a little girl, called Behave-well-or-thy-mother-will-give-thee-a-whipping,[646] scarcely a practical name for everyday life; another personage, Evan the Welshman, rejoices in a name six lines long.

Reason arrives at Court; the dispute between Meed and Conscience is dropped and forgotten, for another one has arisen. "Thanne come Pees into Parlement;" Peace presents a petition against Wrong, and enumerates his evil actions. He has led astray Rose and Margaret; he keeps a troup of retainers who assist him in his misdeeds; he attacks farms, and carries off the crops; he is so powerful that none dare stir or complain. These are not vain fancies; the Rolls of Parliament, the actual Parliament that was sitting at Westminster, contain numbers of similar petitions, where the real name of Wrong is given, and where the king endeavours to reply, as he does in the poem, according to the counsels of Reason.

Reason makes a speech to the entire nation, assembled in that plain which is discovered from the heights of Malvern, and where we found ourselves at the beginning of the Visions.

Then a change of scene. These scene-shiftings are frequent, unexpected, and rapid as in an opera. "Then, ..." says the poet, without further explanation: then the scene shifts; the plain has disappeared; a new personage, Repentance, now listens to the Confession of the Deadly Sins. This is one of the most striking passages of the poem; in spite of their abstract names, these sins are tangible realities; the author describes their shape and their costumes; some are bony, others are tun-bellied; singular abstractions with warts on their noses! We were just now in Parliament, with the victims of the powerful and the wicked; we now hear the general confession of England in the time of the Plantagenets.[647]

That the conversion may be a lasting one, Truth must be sought after. Piers Plowman appears, a mystic personage, a variable emblem, that here simply represents the man of "good will," and elsewhere stands for Christ himself. He teaches the way; gates must be entered, castles encountered, and the Ten Commandments will be passed through. Above all, he teaches every one his present duties, his active and definite obligations; he protests against useless and unoccupied lives, against those who have since been termed "dilettante," for whom life is a sight, and who limit their function to being sight-seers, to amusing themselves and judging others. All those who live upon earth have actual practical duties, even you, lovely ladies:

All must defend, or till, or sow the field of life. The ploughing commences, but it is soon apparent that some pretend to labour and labour not; they are lazy or talkative, and sing songs. Piers succeeds in mastering them by the help of Hunger. Thanks to Hunger and Truth, distant possibilities are seen of a reform, of a future Golden Age, an island of England that shall be similar to the island of Utopia, imagined later by another Englishman.

The vision rises and fades away; another vision and another pilgrimage commence, and occupy all the remainder of the poem, that is, from the eleventh to the twenty-third passus (C. text). The poet endeavours to join in their dwellings Dowel, Dobet, and Dobest; in other terms: Good-life, Better-life, and Best-life. All this part of the book is filled with sermons, most of them energetic, eloquent, spirited, full of masterly touches, leaving an ineffaceable impression on the memory and the heart: sermon of Study on the Bible and on Arts and Letters; sermons of Clergye and of Ymagynatyf; dialogue between Hawkyn (active life) and Patience; sermons of Faith, Hope, and Charity. Several visions are intermingled with these sermons: visions of the arrival of Christ in Jerusalem, and of the Passion; visions of hell attacked by Jesus, and defended by Satan and Lucifer with guns, "brasene gonnes," a then recent invention, which appeared particularly diabolical. Milton's Satan, in spite of having had three hundred years in which to improve his tactics, will find nothing better; his batteries are ranged in good order; a seraph stands behind each cannon with lighted match; at the first discharge, angels and archangels fall to the ground:

They are not killed, but painfully suffer from a knowledge that they look ridiculous: "an indecent overthrow," they call it. The fiends, exhilarated by this sight, roar noisily, and it is hard indeed for us to take a tragical view of the massacre.[648]

In the Visions, Christ, conqueror of hell, liberates the souls that await his coming, and the poet awakes to the sounds of bells on Easter morning.

The poem ends amid doleful apparitions; now comes Antichrist, then Old Age, and Death. Years have fled, death draws near; only a short time remains to live; how employ it to the best advantage? (Dobet). Advise me, Nature! cries the poet. "Love!" replies Nature:

III.

Chaucer, with his genius and his manifold qualities, his gaiety and his gracefulness, his faculty of observation and that apprehensiveness of mind which enables him to sympathise with the most diverse specimens of humanity, has drawn an immortal picture of mediæval England. In certain respects, however, the description is incomplete, and one must borrow from Langland some finishing touches.

We owe to Chaucer's horror of vain abstractions the individuality of each one of his personages; all classes of society are represented in his works; but the types which impersonate them are so clearly characterised, their singleness is so marked, that on seeing them we think of them alone and of no one else. We are so absorbed in the contemplation of this or that man that we think no more of the class, the ensemble, the nation.

The active and actual passions of the multitude, the subterranean lavas which simmer beneath a brittle crust of good order and regular administration, all the latent possibilities of volcanoes which this inward fire betokens, are, on the contrary, always present to the mind of the visionary; rumblings are heard, and they herald the earthquake. The vehement and passionate England that produced the great rising of 1381, and the heresy of Wyclif, that later on will give birth to the Cavaliers and Puritans, is contained in essence in Langland's work; we divine, we foresee her. Chaucer's book is, undoubtedly, not in contradiction to that England, but it screens and allows her to be forgotten. In their anger Chaucer's people exchange blows on the highway; Langland's crowds in their anger sack the palace of the Savoy, and take the Tower of London.

Langland thus shows us what we find in none of his contemporaries: crowds, groups, classes, living and individualised; the merchant class, the religious world, the Commons of England. He is, above all, the only author who gives a sufficient and contemporaneous idea of that grand phenomenon, the power of Parliament. Chaucer who was himself a member of that assembly, sends his franklin there; he mentions the fact, and nothing more; the part played by the franklin in that group, amid that concourse of human beings, is not described. On the other hand, an admirable picture represents him keeping open house, and ordering capons, partridges, and "poynant sauce" in abundance. At home, his personality stands out in relief; but yonder, at Westminster, the franklin was doubtless lost in the crowd; and crowds had little interest for Chaucer.

In two documents only does that power appear great and impressive as it really was, and those documents are: the Rolls wherein are recorded the acts of Parliament, and the poem of William Langland. No one before him, none of his contemporaries, had seen so clearly how the matter stood. The whole organisation of the English State is summed up in a line of admirable conciseness and energy, in which the poet shows the king surrounded by his people:

The power of the Commons is always present to the mind of Langland; he observes the impossibility of doing without them. When the king is inclined to stretch his prerogative beyond measure, when he gives in his speeches a foretaste of the theory of divine right, when he speaks as did Richard II. a few years after, and the Stuarts three centuries later, when he boasts of being the ruler of all, of being "hed of lawe," while the Clergy and Commons are but members of the same, Langland stops him, and through the mouth of Conscience, adds a menacing clause:

The deposition of Richard, accused of having stated, nearly in the same terms, "that he dictated from his lips the laws of his kingdom,"[651] and the fall of the Stuarts, are contained, so to say, in these almost prophetic words.

On nearly all the questions which agitate men's minds in the fourteenth century, Langland agrees with the Commons, and, as we follow from year to year the Rolls of Parliament, petitions or decisions are found inspired by the same views as those Langland entertained; his work at times reads like a poetical commentary of the Rolls. Langland, as the Commons, is in favour of the old division of classes, of the continuance of bondage, and of the regulation of wages by the State; he feels nothing but hatred for Lombard and Jew bankers, for royal purveyors, and forestallers. In the same way as the Commons, he is in favour of peace with France; his attention is concentrated on matters purely English; distant wars fill him with anxiety. He would willingly have kept to the peace of Brétigny, he hopes the Crusades may not recommence. He is above all insular. Like the Commons he recognises the religious authority of the Pope, but protests against the Pope's encroachments, and against the interference of the sovereign-pontiff in temporal matters. The extension of the papal power in England appears to him excessive; he protests against appeals to the Court of Rome; he is of opinion that the wealth of the Church is hurtful to her; he shares the sentiments of the Commons of the Good Parliament towards what they do not hesitate to term the sinful town of Avignon: "la peccherouse cité d'Avenon."[652] He is indignant with the bishops, masters, and doctors that allow themselves to become domesticated, and: