Читать книгу History of English Literature from "Beowulf" to Swinburne - Andrew Lang, Robert Kirk - Страница 62

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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.