"PIERS PLOWMAN." GOWER.
Contemporary with Chaucer, and in perfect contrast with Chaucer,
whom he probably never met, was the author of the alliterative "rum,
ram, ruff," poem "Piers Plowman". This author is generally supposed
to have been named William Langley or Langland. By piecing together
many detached pieces of evidence the conjecture is reached that
William first saw the light at Cleobury in Shropshire or at Wychwood
in Oxfordshire, about the year 1332, was well educated, was in minor
orders, and a married man. But if everything that the author of "Piers
Plowman" makes his dreamer say about himself is also true of the
author, he must have been a strange and unhappy character.
His poem, following the convention of dreams and allegories, is the
record of dreams into which he fell, first on the Malvern hills;
later, wherever he chanced to be. The poem exists in three forms (A,
B, C), and, from the allusions to contemporary events (such as the
peace of Bretigny, with France (1360), and a great tempest of January,
1362), the A version may have been composed in 1362. The B version,
much altered and enlarged, is dated, from its allusions to events, in
1377; and the C version, also enlarged, from its references to the
unpopularity of Richard II, must be later than 1392.
If the poet drew his dreamer and narrator from study of his own
character, he must have been, in some ways, not unlike Mr. Thomas
Carlyle. Though he had a noble appreciation of the dignity and duty
of manual labour,--the honest and pious ploughman was his favourite
character,--he never did toil with his hands. In reply to the
remonstrances of Reason, he says:--
I am too weak to work with sickle or with scythe.
Over-education in youth has sapped his manhood: and, since his friends
who paid for his schooling died, he has never joyed. He praised the
country, but, as Dr. Johnson said, "hung loose upon the town," a man of
a modern type.
"Ich live _in_ Londone, and _on_ Londone both," he writes. The
instruments of his craft are not sickle and scythe, but the
_paternoster_, the psalter, "and my seven psalms," that "I sing
for men's souls". In return for such services he picks up a bare
livelihood. Clerks like himself should "come of franklins and freemen,"
not of bondmen. The sons of serfs, he thinks, should do manual labour,
and should not be admitted to Holy Orders. This was the view of the
English House of Commons, under Richard II, and it may be that the poet
is rather satirizing their exclusiveness, and the hand-to-mouth lazy
life of poor clerks, than describing himself. The narrator, after the
sermon preached at him by Reason, goes to Church in a penitent mood,
and beats his breast, but does not change his course of life.
The poem (or, as some think, the series of poems by various hands)
represents in the most vivid way, the unrest, discontent, and doubt
which came over Western Europe towards the end of the fourteenth
century. The cruel and endless wars, the brigands, the ravages of the
Black Death (which caused demand for higher wages because so few were
left to work) drove the poor into revolts like that of Wat Tyler.
There were frightful cruelties and terrible reprisals. The wealth
and licentiousness of the regular Orders of clergy caused them to be
hated and despised. The people called Lollards advocated a kind of
evangelical Protestantism, and something very like modern Socialism.
All these things Chaucer passed by or treated lightly, but whoever
wrote "Piers Plowman" threw into his picture of the age his vivid
and fiery but lurid and confused genius. He paints himself as poor,
discontented, powerless, and always angry.
The dreamer states that he went about London,--a tall lonely
discontented man,--"loath to reverence lords and ladies," and never
saluting the great, and the well clad, nor doing any courtesy, so that
"folk deemed me a fool". He describes taverns full of bad company, as
if he were familiar with them. He states the doubts that arise in
clerkly minds. Why should the penitent thief have been allowed to go
straight to Paradise? "Who was worse than David, or the Apostle Paul,"
when he breathed out threatenings against the earliest Christians?
Beset by such questionings, and by the scepticism which haunted the
Ages of Faith, clerks may curse the hour when they learned more than
their creed.
The narrator seems to know a good deal about law, and despises men who
draw up charters ill, and in bad Latin; he speaks as if he may have
eked out his livelihood as a scrivener. He says that he dresses like
a "Loller" (however they may have dressed), but he is _not_ a Loller,
which may mean either an idle loiterer or a heretical Lollard, who was
apt to be a kind of evangelical socialist, entertaining advanced ideas
about property.
The poet himself, in the spirit of the contemporary House of Commons,
denounces the foreigners who obtain benefices in England, and the
Englishmen who buy them from Rome. He would not throw off all
allegiance to the Pope, but the Pope ought to follow the example,
not of St. Peter, a very human character, but of the divine Master
of St. Peter. He hates the Friars as much as John Knox did, who
called them "fiends, not freres". He denounces the lawless rapacity
of "maintained," the liveried followers of great lords; in fact his
poem is often an alliterative rendering of the complaints of the House
of Commons preserved in the Rolls of Parliament: For Parliamentary
institutions he has the highest respect and admiration, he is the warm
advocate of peace with France, and opposes the idea of settling the
Eastern Question by a Crusade. If he is the author of "Richard the
Redeless," he gave good advice, in a severe tone, and too late, to
Richard II, when that Prince set himself, like Charles II and James
II, to govern England without a Parliament, and was near his fall. The
dreamer, or the poet, was no friend of Revolution, but his works were
quoted by John Ball, priest and agitator, who was hanged some time
after Wat Tyler was done to death.
Chaucer was a poet who did not write on political, social, and
ecclesiastical reform. Langley or Langland, wrote about little else:
he is for reforming a world full of inequality and injustice. In his
time the Revolution stirred in its sleep, as it were, like the great
subterranean reptile of Australian mythology, and caused the crust of
society to tremble, and the spires of the Church to rock. He professed
that a reforming King is to come
And thanne shal the Abbot of Abyndoun
And all his issue for evere
Have a knokke of a Kynge, and
Incurable the wounde.
The prediction was fulfilled by Henry VIII, but the poor, in whose
interests Langland wrote, were none the better but much the worse for
"The Great Pillage" of the Tudor King.
We cannot, let it be repeated, feel certain that the dreamer's
description of himself, as a moody, idle, discontented clerk, spoiled
for work by much study, and unable to find a market for his science;
striding angrily and enviously through the London streets where he
has not a friend, is the poet's description of himself, a satire on
himself; or whether it is a dramatic study of an imaginary character.
We cannot be certain that he has lived much at or near Malvern; where
the hills, overlooking the vast plain, form the natural scene for his
Vision of the "sad pageant of men's miseries"; of poverty and toil,
of wealth and injustice and oppression. Of the poet we really learn
nothing, even his name,--whether Langley or Langland, or neither,--is
matter of conjecture. We only know that his heart burned within him at
the many evils which he was impotent to cure, and that he had a kind of
apocalyptic faculty for visions of good and evil. As readers usually
take the narrator and preacher in the poem to be a portrait of the
poet himself, he appears as a character neither happy nor the cause
of happiness in others. He is not so much a poet as a prophet in the
Hebrew sense of the word; the world owes to him no such gratitude and
love as it owes and pays to the kind, happy Geoffrey Chaucer.
The Visions of Langland are visionary; now the dream is luminous and
distinct; now it merges, as dreams do, into shadowy shapes of things
half-realized. In sleep the poet first sees a vast plain; on the
eastern side is a tower, westward is the den of Death. In a field full
of folk some laboured; others, gaily clad, took their ease; some were
hermits in cells, others were merchants, and there were minstrels
who hate work, "swink not, nor sweat," but make mirth. The poet, like
the author of the "Cursor Mundi," detests minstrels. There were sham
hermits with their women; pilgrims with leave to lie, from Rome;
pardoners who took money from men for remission of their sins; parish
priests who seek gold in London as the Black Death has impoverished
their people. To them all Conscience preaches at great length,
denouncing idolatrous priests in the manner of John Knox. Then follows
a version of the fable of "belling the cat," told with some vigour and
political point.
Holy Church now appears as a stately lady, explaining that Truth dwells
in the tower to the east; and _she_ preaches at much length on the
functions of Kings (which were not fulfilled in any godly sense by
the aged Edward III), and on the nature of Conscience, and the duty
of "having ruth on the poor". Now appears a magnificent lady, "Meed,"
that is Recompense. In the poet's opinion, some people get far more
than their due recompense; others do not get half enough, like the
poor labourers; and Meed, or Reward, on the whole, is won by bribery
and corruption. Meed is to be married to Falsehood: Simony, Liar,
Civil Law, and so forth, are of the wedding party, with the Count of
Covetousness, the Earl of Envy, the Lord of Lechery, and the rest of
them.
All this, we must remember, was written by the poet for his own age,
which was insatiably fond of allegory devoid of the human merits of
Bunyan's immortal dream.
How Theology forbids the banns between Falsehood and Meed; how Meed
goes to town, and wins all hearts; how she is taken to Court, and
offered as a bribe to Conscience, who refuses her hand; all this the
poet narrates. He is very firm on the iniquity of writing the names of
the donors on windows in churches: _now_ the historian would be glad to
know who the donors were.
The King, who has Meed's marriage to arrange, listens to Reason, and
so ends the first Vision. How Reason, later, admonishes the narrator
for this way of life, has already been described. The Deadly Sins make
their confessions, and Repentance gives them good advice: as does Piers
the Plowman, who describes to these rude pilgrims the nature of the
road which they must tread; here there is a considerable resemblance to
the "Pilgrim's Progress". Piers directs the industry of the pilgrims,
aided by the Knight; and always and every day Piers preaches without
stint. A realistic picture of the life of poor laborious women in
cottages is drawn (C. Passus X. 1. 77):--
Al-so hem-selve suffren muche hunger,
And we in winter-tyme, with wakynge a nyghtes
To ryse to the ruel, to rocke the cradel,
Bothe to karde and to kembe, to clouten and to washe,
To rubbe and to rely, russhes to pilie,
That reuthe is to rede, othere in ryme shewe
The we of these women that woneth in cotes.
It is an old over-true tale, a tale not told by Chaucer. Pity for
the poor, earnest, clear-sighted, not to be controlled, is the most
admirable point in the nature of Langland. He returns to his complaint
that men give gifts and gold to minstrels, while the poor suffer cold
and hunger, and "lollers" (idle "loafers"), gain money in the abused
name of Charity. Yet the poet is not so revolutionary as to attack the
Game Laws! In irony or in earnest, he bids Lords to hunt every day in
the week but Sunday, to hunt foxes, wolves, and other beasts. That
is what Lords are fit for; it amuses them, and is of service to the
farmer. Bishops are the cause of most of the mischief: "their dogs,"
the priests, "dare not bark". With Knox, two centuries later, the
bishops themselves are the "dumb dogs".
The dream ends, another begins about Do-well, Do-better, Do-best.
Do-well (good conduct) is better than Indulgences, as Luther preached
later. The poet sets off on the quest of Do-well, who has a castle
somewhere. The poet rather leans to heresy when he introduces the
Emperor Trajan, boasting that, though a heathen, he was saved "without
singing of Mass To Trajan he keeps returning. "Reason rules all beasts,
but not men, and why not?" Reason declines to answer.
Finally, after giving a summary of Christian morals, the Plowman
vanishes away: he returns later, but, whoever comes or goes, the
sermons and the satire go on for ever with the same illustrations. The
friars are drubbed from end to end, and when at length the narrator
awakes, he finds things just as they were, while Conscience goes off to
seek Piers Plowman.
Probably the most famous and singular part of the poem is the
reappearance of Piers Plowman, or of One like him, riding on an ass,
barefoot, without spurs or spear, but looking like a knight. Faith
peers forth from a window, and cries, "Ah, son of David!" as heralds do
when knights ride to tournaments. Jesus is to joust with Satan: then
the crucifixion is described, and the terror of Satan, who calls his
forces out, places his bronze guns, and orders calthrops to be thrown
on the ground under the walls of his castle.[1] The idea of the guns
was used by Milton, in a lapse of his genius, in "Paradise Lost".
The conclusion is that Righteousness and Peace kiss each other; the
dreamer awakes, for the last time, and with Kytte his wife, and
Kalote his daughter, creeps to the Cross, and gives thanks for the
Resurrection.
It may be remarked that the style of "Piers Plowman" could be easily
imitated; any man who chose could prolong a poem so lacking in
organization and plan. Consequently, in compliance with the habit of
contradicting all tradition and denying to authors the books with which
they have from the first been credited, efforts are made to prove that
much of "Piers Plowman" is the work of other hands; not of the author
of the shortest and earliest version A. In this case critics discover
"differences in diction, in metre... in power of visualizing objects
and scenes presented, in topics of interest to the author and in views
on social, theological, and various miscellaneous questions".[2]
The other, the usual theory, is that the author kept adding to and
altering his poem through some thirty years. In that time new topics
would interest him; his views on all questions would change with his
moods; his alterations, meant for the better, might turn out for the
worst (as in the case of Wordsworth and other poets); and his powers,
of course, would not always be at the same level.
It is true that the first eight _passus_, or cantos, or books of
version A are more distinct, better organized, more consecutive, more
brilliant than the rest of the book; while _passus_ IX-XII, are perhaps
more allegorical and less orderly; more vague, more controversial,
and one John But is said "to have made this end, because he meddles
with verse-making". The author of B is supposed to be a new hand,
working over and altering the A version of his predecessor, and often
misunderstanding him, while C misunderstands B. It is quite certain
that in some MSS. of the fifteenth century the whole poem is attributed
to William Langland (or Langley?), and also that the whole poem at
its longest, was composed between 1362 and 1392 and was very popular
because it turned over and over, in every light, all the political,
social, and theological problems that vexed the minds of men. Whether
it is all by one hand or not' is a question of very little importance.
Many men could have written various parts of it.
Most can raise the flowers now,
For all have got the seed.
The poem retains an historical value which would not be diminished if
much of it were cut out. In style it led nowhere; the rather careless
versification, the ancient unrhymed alliterative rhythm were doomed
to disappear. The moral advice was wasted on Lancastrian England,
which rushed into the madness of the fifteenth century; the burning
of Lollards; the attempt to conquer France--as vain as unjust,--the
burning of Joan of Arc; the twenty years of defeat and disgrace which
followed and avenged that crime; the fury of the Wars of the Roses, the
butcheries, the murders, and, accompanying all this, the dull prolix
stuff that did duty for poetry and literature.
Gower.
Chaucer's other prominent contemporary "the moral Gower," in Chaucer's
own phrase, was a far more commonplace character than Langland. John
Gower was entitled to write himself Esquire, and owned lands in Norfolk
and Suffolk; he died in 1408, and his tomb, with his three great books
under his head, exists in St. Saviour's church, in Southwark. Chaucer
was a friend of Gower and, during one of his missions abroad, left
Gower in charge of his affairs. At the close of "Troilus and Criseyde"
he writes:--
O moral Gower, this book I directe
To thee, and to the philosophical Strode,
To vouchen-sauf, ther nede is, to correcte.
Strode is unknown, and we need not examine conjectures about him.
Gower was not ungrateful for Chaucer's compliment, and in the earlier
version of his "Lover's Confession" ("Confessio Amantis") he repaid
it, very prettily. Venus bids Gower's poems greet Chaucer well "as my
disciple and my poet, who, in his youth filled the land with ditties
and glad songs which he made for my sake". This passage was later
omitted by Gower: who, it has been suggested, was annoyed by some words
in the Prologue to the Man of Law's Tale (in Chaucer's "Canterbury
Tales"). At the same time, Gower may have removed the compliment to
Chaucer merely to make room for more matter. If not, literary people
have quarrelled bitterly over smaller things than the criticism by the
Man of Law.
With Gower's French and Latin poems we have little to do. His Fifty
Ballades, in French, to his lady, are very pleasing examples of
that old formal verse, with its difficult rhymes; and but for the
grammatical liberties which the Anglo-French writer took, would secure
for Gower a high place among the French versifiers of his age.
In French he wrote "Le Mirour de l'Omme," "Man's Mirror," which has a
curious history.[3]
The "Mirour," in French, and the "Speculum" in Latin, deal
allegorically with virtues, vices, and the way of salvation; they
contain many stories from all quarters, which are retold by Gower in
English, in his immense "Lover's Confession".
In his Latin "Vox Clamantis" (1381) ("The Voice of one crying") and in
his "Mirour de l'Omme," but especially in the former, Gower had given
his testimony against the sins of the age, and had impartially rebuked
all sorts and conditions of men. He described the peasant rising,
under Wat Tyler and others, of 1381, exculpating King Richard, who was
only a brave boy. But, as time went on, and dissatisfaction increased,
Gower turned from Richard, and, very early, to the son of John of
Gaunt, later Henry IV. Gower transferred his affections so early to
Henry, that it would be unfair to call him a venal turncoat: he saw no
hope for English liberty except in the Lancastrian cause.
Probably about 1390, and at the suggestion of Richard II himself, Gower
abandoned unmitigated sermonizing in verse: renounced the ambition
to reform the world by rhyme, and mingled, as he says, pleasure with
morality in the endless "Lover's Confession," the work on which his
reputation as an English poet rests. He professes his desire to make a
work for England's sake, and, in early versions, declares that Richard
II called him into his barge on the Thames, and set him to the task.
It was to be "some new thing" readable by his Majesty. After a moral
prologue Gower tells how he met Venus, in May of course, and how she
gave him her chaplain, Genius, as a confessor. To Genius Gower makes
his confessions as a lover, and Genius preaches to him, illustrating
every homily with a tale. It is by the tales, and by some pretty
passages descriptive of true love, that the poem survives. Most of
the stories are borrowed from Roman literature. The Greek reader is
surprised to find that the Sirens had fishes' tails, a fact unknown
to Homer, or to Greek art; which usually represented them as birds
with the heads of women. The Trojan horse is of bronze, whereas it
was notoriously of wood. The tale of Alboin and Rosamund, and the cup
made of her father's skull, is told pleasantly, but the truly tragic
situation is slurred over and lost; and the tale of Hercules and
Deianira, and the fatal garment of Nessus the Centaur, is also far from
worthy of the tragic Greet theme; of the pity and terror of the legend.
Perhaps Shakespeare admired Gower's "Pyramus and Thisbe," which the
Athenian craftsmen dramatize in "A Midsummer Night's Dream". The "Jason
and Medea" is one of the best tales; but Gower did not know the Greek
version by Apollonius Rhodius, or the "Medea" of Euripides; and his own
genius rises to no such picture of a maiden's love as Apollonius draws,
to no such tragic passion as Euripides conceives, while he has little
or none of the humour of Chaucer.
None the less here was a book of many thousand lines, full of the
material of old romance, mediaeval or classical: here the verse ran
easily, copiously, and sweetly, for Gower was a master of the rhymed
octosyllabic couplets, through his knowledge of and practice in
versification both French and English. Indeed his style, soon to be
lost by English versifiers, is his main virtue.
At last he confesses to Venus that he knows not the true nature of
Love. She gives him a black rosary of beads--like that which Chaucer
holds in his portrait,--with the motto in gold, _por reposer_, "Take
thy rest". He is to write of Love no more, no more to come to Venus's
Court, so, in 1398, the foolish veteran did make love, and married
Agnes Groundolf! He survived this unseasonable wooing for ten years,
when Agnes came into his property.
The reputation of Gower, for long, was very high; people spoke of
Chaucer and Gower as we speak of Browning and Tennyson, or of Shelley
and Keats. But no longer with Chaucer is Gower "equalled in renown,"
and his most enduring monument is Shakespeare's introduction of him in
"Pericles, Prince of Tyre".
[1] Calthrops, used at Bannockburn, were iron sets of spikes; Joan of
Arc was wounded by a calthrop at the siege of Orleans.
[2] Professor Manley of Chicago, in "Cambridge History of English
Literature".
[3] It was lost, but, in 1895, when Mr. G. C. Macaulay was editing
Gower's enormous English poem, "Confessio Amantis" ("The Lover's
Confession") he remarked to Mr. Jenkinson, Librarian of the Cambridge
University Library, that if ever Gower's French "Speculum Meditantis"
("The Contemplative Man's Mirror") were found, it would probably be
under the Latin name, "Speculum Hominis" ("Man's Mirror"). Now Mr.
Jenkinson had just bought and presented to the Library, a French
manuscript, "Mirour de l'Omme," "Man's Mirror". This was proved to be
Gower's lost French poem. It had lain in some farm-house, in 1745,
and had been scribbled on by a rustic hand, while a manuscript of the
Ballades had been given, in 1656, by a very old man, Charles Gedde, of
St. Andrews, to Lord Fairfax; at the time of the English conquest of
Scotland by Cromwell.