A Picture of England His Piers the Plowman from the lines of his masterwork. The most widely popular poet of his time, he nevertheless, so far as we know, provoked not a single contemporary mention. From scattered autobiographical fragments of his poem we construct a vague picture of the author: a tall, gaunt man-" Long Will "-with the tonsure and the bearing of a minor ecclesiastic; abstracted, taciturn, striding down London streets without a word or a nod to the gay nobles and gallants, yet noting with fierce heart all of their vanities; a man from the people, who knew the homes and the life of the poor, who recognized what few of his day even dreamed, "that a man's a man for a' that," —a medieval Burns; picking up the few pence required for his simple needs by singing at the funerals of the rich and by writing in the courts of law; a man with open eyes, who saw more clearly than any other of his time the condition of his age. To his masterpiece, The Vision Concerning Piers the Plowman, Langland gave his entire life. He revised it and added to it from year to year. He poured into it, as did our own Whitman into Leaves of Grass, the observations, the reflections, the philosophy, the dreams of his best years. It is a biography of the heart-life of its author and his times. As a work of art it is extremely faulty: it is mystical and vague, it has little coherence, it is as uncouth as the people for whom it was written. It tells no well-rounded story as do Chaucer's tales; it is a series of chaotic pictures, glimpses of rugged fields through openings in the mist. The poem opens, as do the Canterbury Tales, with a prologue which presents to us every class of English society: Corruption of the Church A Voice of Protest Barons, burgesses, and bond-men also, He shows us the monk, the friar, the parson, the poor priest, the pardoner, just as we see them in Chaucer's procession. But it is not Langland's method to point at particular figures. He deals with society, Chaucer with the individual; he shows the forest, Chaucer the tree. His characters become mere symbols with which to work his problems, and his poem is an allegory, more and more mystical. The field of folks sets out to find Truth. A palmer, who knows the shrines of all saints, becomes the guide, but he leads them astray. Piers, a plowman, is found, who discloses the falseness of clerical leaders, and points out the true way himself. This, then, is the moral: the people seek truth; the Church has become a blind guide; guidance must come from the people themselves. To get the lessons of the poem one must read between the lines; every page is bitter with satire, but it is veiled and ambiguous. To those, however, who most needed the lesson it was plainly in evidence. It was not safe in Langland's day to speak too clearly. He gives the picture; you must interpret. He tells the fable of 66 the mice who would bell the cat, but he drives no moral home; his reader must guess it. Divine ye," cries the author," for I ne dare." The poem is a voice of protest, a cry from the poor. Its pathetic pictures of oppressed poverty even now stir the feelings. Its influence upon the peasants was great; it was an incentive to the great revolt that finally liberated John Gower His Attitude toward the Peasants the working class. It is not to be wondered at that it became the book of the masses, that upwards of forty manuscripts of it survive, all of them unilluminated and plain. It was an English poem from an English pen, the first significant native note since the Conquest. REQUIRED READING. The Prologue to Piers Plowman, Morris' Ed. See also Baldwin, Famous Allegories. 2. John Gower (c. 1330-1408) To turn from this apostle of the poor to Gower, the court poet of the period, is to go from the squalid hut into the brilliant hall. As we read the pages of Langland we see England from the standpoint of the plowman, -from that of the life all toil, the life bowed down by the burden of centuries of hopeless oppression. When we turn to Gower's Vox Clamantis we see the same England from the standpoint of the aristocrat. To him the bitter cry of the poor beneath their heavy burden was but the hee-aw of a herd of asses that had refused to carry their rightful burdens, and that were rushing about, terrifying honest people, and demanding to be lodged and curried like horses. The maddened and desperate throng under Wat Tyler was to Gower a herd of unclean swine possessed by the devil, and their leader was a furious wild boar. They should be hunted down and rings put into their noses. He has not a word of pity; these turbulent masses belong to an utterly different world; he will be in perfect sympathy with the torturing and maiming and murdering of the thousands of wretched victims after the revolt has failed. In all this, however, Gower was sincere and honest. His Use of Three Languages His Influence Small He realized that something was radically wrong in the state, and he set forth courageously to find the evil. He meant the Vox Clamantis to be the voice of one crying in the social wilderness, "Make straight the ways of the Lord." He divided society into its three classes, represented by the clergy, the soldiers, and the plowmen, and he carefully studied each of them. He found the root of the evil in the corruptions of the Church, and he assailed it as fearlessly as did Langland. His search for evils reveals to us the actual conditions of England in a most realistic way; there is no better preparation for the Canterbury Tales than a reading of Piers Plowman and Vox Clamantis. The works of Gower afford a striking illustration of the linguistic conditions of his time. His amatory ballads, his roundels à la mode, and his long philosophic poem, Speculum Meditantis, now lost, were written in French, and his Vox Clamantis, which was meant to be his masterwork, was written in Latin, the only language then considered permanent. In his old age, however, influenced by the great success of Chaucer, he lapsed into English, and amused the idle court with the interminable drone of the Confessio Amantis. Gower invented nothing and he ornamented little that he borrowed; yet he was the fashionable singer of his generation. His influence upon later writers is inappreciable. His poems have but little value; they are wellnigh unreadable to-day. The Vox Clamantis is a valuable document in the history of the English people, but it has little merit as a literary work. Over the grave of Gower at St. Saviour's, Southwark, rests a marble figure of the poet, his head upon three books of stone, symbolic perhaps of the heaviness of the author's three masterpieces. CHAPTER X THE AGE OF CHAUCER (II) 3. Geoffrey Chaucer (1340–1400) The last of the trouvères.-Minto. Authorities. Skeat's Works of Chaucer in six volumes is the most scholarly and complete edition of the poet; the Aldine is an excellent working edition; the Globe is the best single-volume edition. The best edition of the "Prologue" and the" Knight's Tale" is Morris', Clarendon Press Series. The most helpful works on the general subject of Chaucer are Pollard, Chaucer, Literature Primer Series; Browne, Chaucer's England; Ten Brink, Vol. ii., Part i.; and Lounsbury, Studies in Chaucer, 3 vols., an excellent work for reference. The most helpful Life of Chaucer is Ward's in the English Men of Letters Series; that by Nicolas prefixed to the Aldine edition of the poet's works is of great value. For a bibliography of Chaucer authorities, see Welsh, English Masterpiece Course. The wave of romantic song that had started during the ninth century among the troubadours of Provence, that had rolled northward awakening the trouvères, that had crossed the Channel and had swept over the ancient Saxon landmarks, was in the twelfth century spending its ebbing energies in an interminable welter of feeble imitation. Then arose, as so often happens at the close of periods of decadence, a master who rescued all that was best from the wreckage, who bound it into a unity, who added new elements gathered from wide fields, who |