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CHAPTER II.

CHAUCER'S CONTEMPORARIES AND

SUCCESSORS.

I.-ENGLISH CONTEMPORARIES.

(1332-1400?)

1. WILLIAM LANGLAND-Piers the Plowman.

THIS chapter deals with second-rate, third-rate, and fourthrate poets or versifiers who flourished from the time of Chaucer down to the early part of the sixteenth century. Chaucer had no worthy rival among his contemporaries, and no English poet worthy to be placed by his side appeared before the time of Spenser. Still, it is well to characterise the poets of this sober interval, however humble. The task may be dreary, but we cannot always live with the great minds, and we are rewarded by the study of mediocrities with a more vivid sense of the beauty and strength of their betters.

The most noteworthy of Chaucer's contemporaries was William Langland, author of the 'Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman,' commonly known as the 'Vision of Piers Plowman.' Not much is ascertained about his life. Mr Skeat1 considers it probable that he was born about 1332, at Cleobury Mortimer; that he wrote the first version of his poem (the A-text) in 1362, the second version

1 See his elaborate Introduction to the Clarendon Press selection, and his editions of the various texts for the Early English Text Society.

(the B-text) in 1377, and the last version (the C-text) between 1380 and 1390; that he wrote a poem on the Deposition of Richard II. ; and that he did not long survive the accession of Henry IV. He is generally supposed to have been a secular priest. It is obvious that he was familiar with London; and it may be inferred, from his mention of the Malvern Hills, that he lived in their neighbourhood.

Langland wrote in the old English alliterative metre; but he went to the fashionable modern poetry for the machinery of dream and allegory. He walks abroad on a May morning, like any poet of the period, lays himself down by a stream under a broad bank, and as he looks into the water, is lulled to sleep by the merry sound. He then dreams, and sees an allegorical field, full of folk; an allegorical tower, and an allegorical dale, with a dungeon. He is visited by a supernaturally lovely allegorical lady, who explains the meaning of what he sees. He is next witness of an allegorical drama; an allegorical marriage is proposed, the banns are forbidden, the whole party is carried before the king; and, after several symbolical incidents, judgment is pronounced. Wishing now to change the scene, the poet awakes his dreamer, and presently sends him asleep again, and opens up to him the vision of the Seven Deadly Sins, and of Piers the Plowman. The same artifice for changing the scene is used nine other times in the course of the poem.

But though the machinery of the poem reminds us that Langland had read in the same school of poetry as Chaucer, there is a considerable change of climate from the "Court of Love" or the 'Canterbury Tales' to the 'Vision of Piers the Plowman.' Between the Court of Love, indeed, and Piers the Plowman, comparison brings to light only irreconcilable and deadly antagonism: they typify the conflict between sensuous art and puritanism. What the one approves and makes battle for, the other condemns and strives to extirpate. Langland is not a rabid Puritan-he is not a rabid man; but he regards the votaries of the lust of the flesh and

the lust of the eyes mournfully as deluded victims, and he denounces all minstrels and mirth-makers as heartless insulters of the miseries of the world. Philogenet, as the author of songs and ditties that might be sung in honour of the Queen of Love, would have come under Langland's fierce scorn, among "japers and janglers, Judas' children, that feign them fantasies, and make themselves fools."1 Langland would have used even stronger language towards the "Court of Love" than Milton used towards Sir Philip Sidney's" Arcadia," when he called it "a vain amatorious poem." He makes no distinction between wandering minstrels and other purveyors for idle luxury: he scorns them collectively with no less vehemence than the Puritans of the seventeenth century scorned the strolling player. Langland was far from having Milton's genius to tempt him into violations of his own doctrine; but he had some difficulty in reconciling even the modest flights of his muse with his paramount and imperious moral earnestness. He had qualms about "meddling with makings," when he might have been saying his psalter or praying for his benefactors; and had to reassure himself by quoting the example of Cato and other holy men, who played a little that they might be more perfect in many places.

The contrast between Piers and the 'Canterbury Tales' is still more instructive. We have seen that, though Chaucer does not represent his pilgrims as being perfect, he exhibits their shortcomings in a genial light. He introduces us to a company of people on the whole happy and self-satisfied, and alleges no reason why they should be otherwise. He is, in short, an artist of manners and character, who chooses a moment when his personages are seen to advantage, and when their imperfections are amusing without being painfully offensive. Langland writes with a very different purpose. His aim is, not to seize the happy moment in things as they are, but to make a stern comparison of things as 1 In the prologue, Mr Skeat renders "japers and janglers," jesters and slanderers; but I doubt whether the notion of slander is intended. See Passus, x. 1. 31 (Text-B), "And japers and jugglers and janglers of gests."

they are with things as they ought to be-to place the existing state of society side by side with a lofty ideal, and elevate the depraved by energetic reproof and exhortation. What renders the difference in spirit between the two poets all the more remarkable is, that they treat of the same period; and that, when we reflect independently on the substance of what they convey to us, we draw from both the same conclusions regarding the prevalent state of society. There is, indeed, one exception. Langland gives us no idea of the refinement of sentiment among the gentle folks: he includes them in the general censure of ribald amusements; and, on the other hand, Chaucer, in his portrait of the "very perfect gentle knight," drew an ideal rarely realised, and suppressed the fact that knights very often treated their vassals with scant justice, and tyrannised over them like a cat among mice. Concerning the lower classes, we gather from them substantially the same facts. We learn from Chaucer, as well as from Langland, that merchants, millers, and cooks cheated their customers; that reeves (or stewards) cheated their masters; that doctors and lawyers were bent upon making money; that monks were more conversant with field-sports than religious duties; that friars were unconscionable beggars; that pardoners told atrocious lies, and made audacious extortions from the credulous vulgar ; and that, amidst considerable drunkenness, waste, and ribaldry, there lived also men of honest industry and sincere piety. And if we look beneath the surface of Langland's invective, we see that poor people were not reduced to a state of uninterrupted wretchedness by the oppression of the rich, and their own intemperance. We reflect that, though their recreations were not to the poet's taste, their life must have been occasionally brightened by these japers and jugglers and janglers of jests. But so different are Chaucer and Langland in the spirit of their pictures, that it needs an effort of reflection to discover the shadows of the one and the lights of the other.

Take a few details of Langland's picture of the life of England. In the "fair field of folk," described in his pro

logues, he sees all manner of men moving about, the mean and the rich, "working and wandering as the world asketh." As Chaucer puts the knight in the foreground, so Langland gives the first place to his ideal of humble virtue-the hard-working honest ploughman—

"Some putten them to the plough, played full seld,
In setting and in sowing swonken1 full hard,

And wonnen that wasters with gluttony destroyeth."

The sight of conscientious labour at once arouses the moralist's anger at unprofitable indolence. He places in immediate contrast a form of immorality most despicable in his eyes, and most pardonable in the eyes of the artist— "And some putten them to pride, apparelled them thereafter In countenance of clothing comen disguised."

In this category he would probably have placed Chaucer's youthful squire, embroidered as a mead. After his ideal of active life, with the unproductive display that consumes its fruits, comes an ideal of contemplative life

"In prayers and in penance putten them many;

All for love of our lord liveden full strait,

In hope for to have heavenric bliss;

As anchorites and hermits, that holden them in their cells,
And coveten not in country to kairen2 about,

For no lickerish livelihood their likam3 to please."

Then follow various contrasts: Thriving merchants—“ as it seemeth to our sight that such men thriveth"—minstrels, beggars, palmers, hermits, friars, pardoners, absentee parish priests; idle and dishonest men—

"Bidders and beggars fast about gede,

With their belly and their bags of bread full y-crammed ; Faiteden for their food, foughten at ale;

In gluttony, God it wot, gone they to bed,

And risen with ribaldry the Roberdes knaves;

1 Toiled.

2 Carry themselves, gad.

4 Synonym for beggars.
6 Made up tales-used false pretences.

3 Body.

5 Goed-went.