Contemporary with GOWER and CHAUCER lived the singular author of "The
Visions of William concerning PIERS PLOUGHMAN;" singular in more
respects than one, for his subject, his style, and, we may add, for the
intrepidity and the force of his genius.
This extraordinary work is ascribed to one whose name is merely
traditional, to Robert Langland, a secular priest of Salop; when he
wrote, and where he died, are as dubious as his text, the authenticity
of which is often uncertain from the variations in all the manuscripts.
But the real life of an author, at least for posterity, lies beyond the
grave; and no writer is nameless whose volume has descended to us as one
of the most memorable in our ancient vernacular literature.
In character, in execution, and in design, "The Visions of William of
PIERS PLOUGHMAN" are wholly separated from the polished poems of GOWER
and CHAUCER; the work bears no trace of their manner, nor of their
refinement, nor of their versification; and it has baffled conjectural
criticism to assign the exact period of a composition which appears more
ancient than any supposed contemporary writings. Those who would decide
of the time in which an author wrote by his style, here are at a loss to
conceive that the splendid era of romantic chivalry, the age of Edward
the Third and his grandson, which produced the curious learning and the
easy rhymes of the "Confessio Amantis," and the pleasantry and the fine
discriminations of character of the "Canterbury Tales," could have given
birth to the antiquated Saxon and rustic pith of this genuine English
bard. Either his labour was concluded ere the writings of the court
poets had travelled to our obscure country priest in his seclusion in a
distant county, or else he disdained their exotic fancies, their
Latinisms, their Gallicisms, and their Italianisms, and their trivial
rhymes, that in every respect he might remain their astonishing
contrast, with no inferiority of genius. There was no philosophical
criticism in the censure of this poet by Warton, when he condemns him
for not having "availed himself of the rising and rapid improvements of
the English language," and censures him for his "affectation of obsolete
English." These rising improvements may never have reached our bard, or
if they had he might have disdained them; for the writer of the "Visions
concerning Piers Ploughman" was strictly a national poet; and there was
no "affectation of obsolete English" in a poet preserving the forms of
his native idiom, and avoiding all exotic novelties in the energy of his
Anglo-Saxon genius. His uncontaminated mind returned to or continued the
Anglo-Saxon alliterative metre and unrhymed verse; he trusted its
cadence to the ear, scorning the subjection of rhyme. WEBBE, a critic of
the age of Elizabeth, considered this poet as "the first who had
observed the quantity of our verse without the curiosity of rhyme."
It is useless to give the skeleton of a desultory and tedious
allegorical narrative. The last editor, Dr. Whitaker, imagined that "he
for the first time had shown that it was written after a regular and
consistent design," notwithstanding that he himself confesses, that "the
conclusion is singularly cold and comfortless and _leaves the inquirer,
after a long peregrination, still remote from the object of his
search_"--a conclusion where nothing is concluded! The visionist might
have been overtaken by sleep among the bushes of the Malvern Hills for
twenty cantos more, without at all deranging anything which he had said,
or inconveniencing anything which he might say. In truth, it is a heap
of rhapsodies, without any artifice of connexion or involution of plot,
or any sustained interest of one actor more than another among the
numerous ideal beings who flit along the dreamy scenes.
The true spirit of this imaginative work is more comprehensible than any
settled design. That mysterious or mythical personage, "Piers
Ploughman," is the representative of "the Universal Church," says Dr.
Whitaker; or "Christian life," says Mr. Campbell. What he may be is very
doubtful, for we have "True Religion," a fair lady, who puts in surely a
higher claim to represent "the Universal Church," or "Christian life,"
than "the Ploughman," who has to till his half-acre and save his idling
companions from "waste" and "wane." The most important personage is
"Mede," or bribery, who seems to exert an extraordinary influence over
the Bench, and the Bar, and the Church, and through every profession
which occurred to the poet.
The pearls in these waters lie not on the surface. The visionist had
deeper thoughts and more concealed feelings than these rhapsodical
phantoms. In a general survey of society, he contemplates on the court
and the clergy, glancing through all the diversified ranks of the laity,
not sparing the people themselves, as their awful reprover. It was a
voice from the wilderness in the language of the people. The children of
want and oppression had found their solitary advocate. The prelacy,
dissolved in the luxuriousness of papal pomp, and a barbarous
aristocracy, with their rapacious dependents, were mindless of the
morals or the happiness of those human herds, whose heads were counted,
but whose hearts they could never call their own.
We are curious to learn, in this disordered state of the Commonwealth,
the political opinions entertained by this sage. They are as mysterious
as Piers Ploughman himself.
Passive obedience to the higher powers is inculcated apparently rather
for its prudence than its duty. This we infer from his lively parable of
"the Cat of a Court," and "A Route of Ratones and Small Mice."
"Grimalkin, though sometimes apt to play the tyrant when appetite was
sharp, would often come laughing and leaping among them. A rat, a
whisker of renown, cunningly proposed to adorn the cat with an ornament,
like those which great lords use who wear chains and collars about their
necks; it should be a tinkling bell, which, if cats would fancy the
fashion, would warn us of their approach. We might then in security be
all lords ourselves, and not be in this misery of creeping under
benches. But not a raton of the whole rout, for the realm of France, or
to win all England, would bind the bell round the imperial neck. A
mouseling, who did not much like rats, concluded that if they should
even kill the cat, then there would come another to crunch us and our
kind; for men will not have their meal nibbled by us mice, nor their
nights disturbed by the clattering of roystering rats. Better for us to
let the cat alone! My old father said a kitten was worse. The cat never
hurt me; when he is in good-humour, I like him well,--and by my counsel
cat nor kitten shall be grieved. I will suffer and say nothing. The
beast who now chastiseth many, may be amended by misfortune. Are the
rats to be our governors? I tell ye, we would not rule ourselves!" The
poet adds, "What this means, ye men who love mirth interpret for me, for
I dare not!"
The parable seems sufficiently obvious. The ratons represent a haughty
aristocracy, and "the small mouse" is one of the people themselves, who
in his mouse-like wisdom preferred a single sovereign to many lords. But
the poet's own reflection, addressed to "the men of mirth," seems
enigmatic. Is he indulging a secret laugh at the passive obedience of
the prudential mouse?
Our author's indignant spirit, indeed, is vehemently democratic. He
dared to write what many trembled to whisper. Genius reflects the
suppressed feelings of its age. It was a stirring epoch. The spirit of
inquisition had gone forth in the person of Wickliffe; and wherever a
Wickliffe appears, as surely will there be a Piers Ploughman. When a
great precursor of novel opinions arises, it is the men of genius in
seclusion who think and write.
But our country priest, in his contemplative mood, was not less
remarkable for his prudence than for his bold freedom, aware that the
most corrupt would be the most vindictive. The implacable ecclesiastics,
by the dread discipline of the church, would doom the apostle of
humanity, but the apostate of his order, to perpetual silence--by the
spell of an anathema; and the haughty noble would crush his victim by
the iron arm of his own, or of the civil power. The day had not yet
arrived when the great were to endure the freedom of reprehension. The
sage, the satirist, and the seer, for prophet he proved to be, veiled
his head in allegory; he published no other names than those of the
virtues and the vices; and to avoid personality, he contented himself
with personification.
A voluminous allegory is the rudest and the most insupportable of all
poetic fictions; it originates in an early period of society--when its
circles are contracted and isolated, and the poet is more conversant
with the passions of mankind than with individuals. A genius of the
highest order alone could lead us through a single perusal of such a
poem, by the charm of vivifying details, which enables us to forget the
allegory altogether--the tedious drama of nonentities or abstract
beings. In such creative touches the author of Piers Ploughman displays
pictures of domestic life, with the minute fidelity of a Flemish
painting; so veracious is his simplicity! He is a great satirist,
touching with caustic invective or keen irony public abuses and private
vices; but in the depth of his emotions, and in the wildness of his
imagination, he breaks forth in the solemn tones and with the sombre
majesty of Dante.
But this rude native genius was profound as he was sagacious, and his
philosophy terminated in prophecy. At the era of the Reformation they
were startled by the discovery of an unknown writer, who, two centuries
preceding that awful change, had predicted _the fate of the religious
houses from the hand of a king_. The visionary seer seems to have fallen
on the principle which led Erasmus to predict that "_those who were in
power_" would seize on the rich shrines, because _no other class of men_
in society could mate with so mighty a body as the monks. Power only
could accomplish that great purpose, and hence our Vaticinator fixed on
the highest as the most likely; and the deep foresight of an obscure
country priest, which required two centuries to be verified, became a
great moral and political prediction.
Without, however, depreciating the sagacity of the predictor, there is
reason to suspect that the same thought was occurring to some of the
great themselves. The Reformation of Henry the Eighth may be dated from
the reign of Richard the Second. That mighty transition into a new order
of events in our history would then have occurred, for the stag was
started, and the hunt was up. It was an accidental and unexpected
circumstance which turned aside the impending event, which was to be
future and not immediate. Henry Bolingbroke, in the early part of his
life, seems to have entertained some free opinions respecting the
property of the church. He seemed not unfavourable to Wickliffe's
doctrines, and, when Earl of Derby, once declared that "princes had too
little, and religious houses too much." This unguarded expression, which
was not to be forgotten, we are told, occasioned one of the rebellions
during his reign. But when Henry Bolingbroke usurped the throne, age and
prudence might have come together; the monarch balanced the dread of a
turbulent aristocracy, and the uncertain tenure of dominion to be held
at their pleasure, against the security of sheltering the throne under
the broad alliance of a potent prelacy; a potent prelacy whose doom was
fixed, though the hour had not yet struck! The monarch affixed a bloody
seal to this political convention by granting a statute which made the
offence of heresy capital; a crime which heretofore in law was as
unknown as it seemed impossible to designate, and described only in
figurative terms, as something very alarming, but which any prudent
heretic might easily, if not explain, at least recant. To give it more
solemnity, the statute is delivered in Latin, and the punishment of
burning was to be inflicted "_corum populo, in eminente loco_."[1]
The "Visions of Piers Ploughman," when the day which his prescience
anticipated arrived, were eagerly received; it is said the work passed
through three editions in one year, about 1550, in the reign of the
youthful monarch of the Reformation; the readers at that early period of
printing would find many passages congenial to the popular sentiments,
and our nameless author was placed among the founders of a new era.
The "VISIONS OF PIERS PLOUGHMAN" will always offer studies for the
poetical artist. This volume, and not Gower's nor Chaucer's, is a well
of English undefiled. SPENSER often beheld these Visions; MILTON, in his
sublime description of the Lazar House, was surely inspired by a
reminiscence of Piers Ploughman. Even Dryden, whom we should not suspect
to be much addicted to black-letter reading beyond his Chaucer, must
have carefully conned our Piers Ploughman; for he has borrowed one very
striking line from our poet, and possibly may have taken others. BYRON,
though he has thrown out a crude opinion of Chaucer, has declared that
"the Ploughman" excels our ancient poets. And I am inclined to think
that we owe to Piers Ploughman an allegorical work of the same wild
invention, from that other creative mind, the author of the "Pilgrim's
Progress." How can we think of the one, without being reminded of the
other? Some distant relationship seems to exist between the Ploughman's
_Dowell_ and _Dobet_, and _Dobest_, Friar _Flatterer_, _Grace_ the
Portress of the magnificent Tower of _Truth_ viewed at a distance, and
by its side the dungeon of _Care_, _Natural Understanding_, and his lean
and stern wife _Study_, and all the rest of this numerous company, and
the shadowy pilgrimage of the "Immortal Dreamer" to "the Celestial
City." Yet I would mistrust my own feeling, when so many able critics,
in their various researches after a prototype of that singular
production, have hitherto not suggested what seems to me obvious.[2]
Why our rustic bard selected the character of a ploughman as the
personage adapted to convey to us his theological mysteries, we know not
precisely to ascertain; but it probably occurred as a companion fitted
to the humbler condition of the apostles themselves. Such, however, was
the power of the genius of this writer, that his successors were content
to look for no one of a higher class to personify their solemn themes.
Hence we have "The Crede of Piers Ploughman;" "The Prayer and Complaint
of the Ploughman;" "The Ploughman's Tale," inserted in Chaucer's volume;
all being equally directed against the vicious clergy of the day.
"The Crede of Piers Ploughman," if not written by the author of the
"Vision," is at least written by a scholar who fully emulates his
master; and Pope was so deeply struck with this little poem, that he has
very carefully analysed the whole.