A Literary History of the English People Part 44

Reason makes a speech to the entire nation, a.s.sembled in that plain which is discovered from the heights of Malvern, and where we found ourselves at the beginning of the Visions.

Then a change of scene. These scene-shiftings are frequent, unexpected, and rapid as in an opera. "Then, ..." says the poet, without further explanation: then the scene shifts; the plain has disappeared; a new personage, Repentance, now listens to the Confession of the Deadly Sins.

This is one of the most striking pa.s.sages of the poem; in spite of their abstract names, these sins are tangible realities; the author describes their shape and their costumes; some are bony, others are tun-bellied; singular abstractions with warts on their noses! We were just now in Parliament, with the victims of the powerful and the wicked; we now hear the general confession of England in the time of the Plantagenets.[647]

That the conversion may be a lasting one, Truth must be sought after.

Piers Plowman appears, a mystic personage, a variable emblem, that here simply represents the man of "good will," and elsewhere stands for Christ himself. He teaches the way; gates must be entered, castles encountered, and the Ten Commandments will be pa.s.sed through. Above all, he teaches every one his present duties, his active and definite obligations; he protests against useless and unoccupied lives, against those who have since been termed "dilettante," for whom life is a sight, and who limit their function to being sight-seers, to amusing themselves and judging others. All those who live upon earth have actual practical duties, even you, lovely ladies:

And ye lovely ladyes with youre longe fyngres.

All must defend, or till, or sow the field of life. The ploughing commences, but it is soon apparent that some pretend to labour and labour not; they are lazy or talkative, and sing songs. Piers succeeds in mastering them by the help of Hunger. Thanks to Hunger and Truth, distant possibilities are seen of a reform, of a future Golden Age, an island of England that shall be similar to the island of Utopia, imagined later by another Englishman.

The vision rises and fades away; another vision and another pilgrimage commence, and occupy all the remainder of the poem, that is, from the eleventh to the twenty-third pa.s.sus (C. text). The poet endeavours to join in their dwellings Dowel, Dobet, and Dobest; in other terms: Good-life, Better-life, and Best-life. All this part of the book is filled with sermons, most of them energetic, eloquent, spirited, full of masterly touches, leaving an ineffaceable impression on the memory and the heart: sermon of Study on the Bible and on Arts and Letters; sermons of Clergye and of Ymagynatyf; dialogue between Hawkyn (active life) and Patience; sermons of Faith, Hope, and Charity. Several visions are intermingled with these sermons: visions of the arrival of Christ in Jerusalem, and of the Pa.s.sion; visions of h.e.l.l attacked by Jesus, and defended by Satan and Lucifer with guns, "brasene gonnes," a then recent invention, which appeared particularly diabolical. Milton's Satan, in spite of having had three hundred years in which to improve his tactics, will find nothing better; his batteries are ranged in good order; a seraph stands behind each cannon with lighted match; at the first discharge, angels and archangels fall to the ground:

By thousands, Angel on Archangel rolled.

They are not killed, but painfully suffer from a knowledge that they look ridiculous: "an indecent overthrow," they call it. The fiends, exhilarated by this sight, roar noisily, and it is hard indeed for us to take a tragical view of the ma.s.sacre.[648]

In the Visions, Christ, conqueror of h.e.l.l, liberates the souls that await his coming, and the poet awakes to the sounds of bells on Easter morning.

The poem ends amid doleful apparitions; now comes Antichrist, then Old Age, and Death. Years have fled, death draws near; only a short time remains to live; how employ it to the best advantage? (Dobet). Advise me, Nature! cries the poet. "Love!" replies Nature:

"Lerne to love," quod Kynde "and leve of alle othre."

III.

Chaucer, with his genius and his manifold qualities, his gaiety and his gracefulness, his faculty of observation and that apprehensiveness of mind which enables him to sympathise with the most diverse specimens of humanity, has drawn an immortal picture of mediaeval England. In certain respects, however, the description is incomplete, and one must borrow from Langland some finishing touches.

We owe to Chaucer's horror of vain abstractions the individuality of each one of his personages; all cla.s.ses of society are represented in his works; but the types which impersonate them are so clearly characterised, their singleness is so marked, that on seeing them we think of them alone and of no one else. We are so absorbed in the contemplation of this or that man that we think no more of the cla.s.s, the _ensemble_, the nation.

The active and actual pa.s.sions of the mult.i.tude, the subterranean lavas which simmer beneath a brittle crust of good order and regular administration, all the latent possibilities of volcanoes which this inward fire betokens, are, on the contrary, always present to the mind of the visionary; rumblings are heard, and they herald the earthquake.

The vehement and pa.s.sionate England that produced the great rising of 1381, and the heresy of Wyclif, that later on will give birth to the Cavaliers and Puritans, is contained in essence in Langland's work; we divine, we foresee her. Chaucer's book is, undoubtedly, not in contradiction to that England, but it screens and allows her to be forgotten. In their anger Chaucer's people exchange blows on the highway; Langland's crowds in their anger sack the palace of the Savoy, and take the Tower of London.

Langland thus shows us what we find in none of his contemporaries: crowds, groups, cla.s.ses, living and individualised; the merchant cla.s.s, the religious world, the Commons of England. He is, above all, the only author who gives a sufficient and contemporaneous idea of that grand phenomenon, the power of Parliament. Chaucer who was himself a member of that a.s.sembly, sends his franklin there; he mentions the fact, and nothing more; the part played by the franklin in that group, amid that concourse of human beings, is not described. On the other hand, an admirable picture represents him keeping open house, and ordering capons, partridges, and "poynant sauce" in abundance. At home, his personality stands out in relief; but yonder, at Westminster, the franklin was doubtless lost in the crowd; and crowds had little interest for Chaucer.

In two doc.u.ments only does that power appear great and impressive as it really was, and those doc.u.ments are: the Rolls wherein are recorded the acts of Parliament, and the poem of William Langland. No one before him, none of his contemporaries, had seen so clearly how the matter stood.

The whole organisation of the English State is summed up in a line of admirable conciseness and energy, in which the poet shows the king surrounded by his people:

Knyghthod hym ladde, Might of the comunes made hym to regne.[649]

The power of the Commons is always present to the mind of Langland; he observes the impossibility of doing without them. When the king is inclined to stretch his prerogative beyond measure, when he gives in his speeches a foretaste of the theory of divine right, when he speaks as did Richard II. a few years after, and the Stuarts three centuries later, when he boasts of being the ruler of all, of being "hed of lawe,"

while the Clergy and Commons are but members of the same, Langland stops him, and through the mouth of Conscience, adds a menacing clause:

"In condicioun," quod Conscience, "that thow konne defende And rule thi rewme in resoun right wel, and in treuth."[650]

The deposition of Richard, accused of having stated, nearly in the same terms, "that he dictated from his lips the laws of his kingdom,"[651]

and the fall of the Stuarts, are contained, so to say, in these almost prophetic words.

On nearly all the questions which agitate men's minds in the fourteenth century, Langland agrees with the Commons, and, as we follow from year to year the Rolls of Parliament, pet.i.tions or decisions are found inspired by the same views as those Langland entertained; his work at times reads like a poetical commentary of the Rolls. Langland, as the Commons, is in favour of the old division of cla.s.ses, of the continuance of bondage, and of the regulation of wages by the State; he feels nothing but hatred for Lombard and Jew bankers, for royal purveyors, and forestallers. In the same way as the Commons, he is in favour of peace with France; his attention is concentrated on matters purely English; distant wars fill him with anxiety. He would willingly have kept to the peace of Bretigny, he hopes the Crusades may not recommence. He is above all _insular_. Like the Commons he recognises the religious authority of the Pope, but protests against the Pope's encroachments, and against the interference of the sovereign-pontiff in temporal matters. The extension of the papal power in England appears to him excessive; he protests against appeals to the Court of Rome; he is of opinion that the wealth of the Church is hurtful to her; he shares the sentiments of the Commons of the Good Parliament towards what they do not hesitate to term the sinful town of Avignon: "la peccherouse cite d'Avenon."[652] He is indignant with the bishops, masters, and doctors that allow themselves to become domesticated, and:

... serven as servantz lordes and ladyes, And in stede of stuwardes sytten and demen.[653]

Going down in this manner, step by step, Langland reaches the strange, grimacing, unpardonable herd of liars, knaves, and cheats who traffic in holy things, absolve for money, sell heaven, deceive the simple, and appear as if they "hadden leve to lye al here lyf after."[654] In this nethermost circle of his h.e.l.l, where he scourges them with incessant raillery, the poet confines pell-mell all these glutted unbelievers.

Like hardy parasitical plants, they have disjoined the tiles and stones of the sacred edifice, so that the wind steals in, and the rain penetrates: shameless pardoners they are, friars, pilgrims, hermits, with nothing of the saint about them save the garb, whose example, unless a stop is put to it, will teach the world to despise clerical dress, those who wear it, and the religion, even, that tolerates and supports them.

At this depth, and in the dim recesses where he casts the rays of his lantern, Langland spares none; his ferocious laugh is reverberated by the walls, and the scared night-birds take to flight. His mirth is not the mirth of Chaucer, itself less light than the mirth of France; not the joyous peal of laughter which rang out on the Canterbury road, welcoming the discourses of the exhibitor of relics, and the far from disinterested sermons of the friar to sick Thomas. It is a woful and terrible laugh, harbinger of the final catastrophe and doom. What they have heard in the plain of Malvern, the accursed ones will hear again in the Valley of Jehoshaphat.

They have now no choice, but must come out of their holes; and they come forward into the light of day, hideous and grotesque, saturated with the moisture of their dismal vaults; the sun blinds them, the fresh air makes them giddy; they present a sorry figure. Unlike the pilgrims of Canterbury, they derive no benefit from the feelings of indulgence that softens our hearts on a gay April morn; they will learn to know the difference between the laugh that pardons and the laugh that kills.

Langland takes them up, lets them fall, and takes them up again; he never wearies of this cruel sport; he presents them to us now separately, and now collectively: packs of pilgrims, "eremytes on an hep," pilgrims that run to St. James's in Spain, to Rome, to Rocamadour in Guyenne, who have paid visits to every saint. But have they ever sought for St. Truth? No, never! Will they ever know the real place where they might find St. James? Will they suspect that St. James should

be souht ther poure syke lyggen (he) In prisons and in poore cotes?[655]

They seek St. James in Spain, and St. James is at their gates; they elbow him each day, and they recognise him not.

What sight can comfort us for these sad things? That of the poor and disinterested man, of the honest and courageous labourer. Langland here shows himself truly original: the guide he has chosen differs as much from the Virgil of Dante as from the Lover that Guillaume de Lorris follows through the paths of the Garden of the Rose. The English visionary is led by Piers Plowman; Piers is the mainspring of the State; he realises that ideal of disinterestedness, conscience, reason, which fills the soul of our poet; he is the real hero of the work. Bent over the soil, patient as the oxen that he goads, he performs each day his sacred task; the years pa.s.s over his whitening head, and, from the dawn of life to its twilight, he follows ceaselessly the same endless furrow, pursuing behind the plough his eternal pilgrimage.

Around him the idle sleep, the careless sing; they pretend to cheer others by their humming; they trill: "Hoy! troly lolly!" Piers shall feed every one, except these useless ones; he shall not feed "Jakke the jogeloure and Jonet ... and Danyel the dys-playere and Denote the baude, and frere the faytoure, ..." for, all whose name is entered "in the legende of lif" must take life seriously.[656] There is no place in this world for people who are not in earnest; every cla.s.s that is content to perform its duties imperfectly and without sincerity, that fulfils them without eagerness, without pa.s.sion, without pleasure, without striving to attain the best possible result and do better than the preceding generation, will perish. So much the more surely shall perish the cla.s.s that ceases to justify its privileges by its services: this is the great law propounded in our own day by Taine. Langland lets loose upon the indolent, the careless, the busybodies who talk much and work little, a foe more terrible and more real then than now: Hunger. Piers undertakes the care of all sincere people, and Hunger looks after the rest. All this part of the poem is nothing but an eloquent declaration of man's duties, and is one of the finest pages of this "Divine Comedy" of the poor.

IV.

Langland speaks as he thinks, impetuously; a sort of dual personality exists in him; he is the victim and not the master of his thought. And his thought is so completely a separate ent.i.ty, with wishes opposed to his desires, that it appears to him in the solitudes of Malvern; and the melody of lines heard not long ago occurs to the memory:

Je marchais un jour a pas lents Dans un bois, sur une bruyere; Au pied d'un arbre vint s'a.s.seoir Un jeune homme vetu de noir Qui me ressemblait comme un frere ...[657]

Filled with a similar feeling, the wandering dreamer had met, five hundred years before, in a "wilde wildernesse and bi a wode-syde," a "moche man" who looked like himself; who knew him and called him by name:

And thus I went wide-where walkyng myne one (alone), By a wilde wildernesse and bi a wode-syde ...

And under a lynde uppon a launde lened I a stounde ...

A moche man, as me thoughte and lyke to my-selve Come and called me by my kynde name, "What artow," quod I tho (then) "that thow my name knowest?"

"That thow wost wel," quod he "and no wyghte bettere."

"Wote I what thow art?" "Thought," seyde he thanne, "I have suwed (followed) the this sevene yere sey thow me no rather (sooner)?"[658]

"Thought" reigns supreme, and does with Langland what he chooses.

Langland is unconscious of what he is led to; his visions are for him real ones; he tells them as they rise before him; he is scarcely aware that he invents; he stares at the sight, and wonders as much as we do; he can change nothing; his personages are beyond his reach. There is therefore nothing prepared, artistically arranged, or skilfully contrived, in his poem; the deliberate hand of a man of the craft is nowhere to be seen. He obtains artistic effects, but without seeking for them; he never selects or co-ordinates; he is suddenly led, and leads us, from one subject to another, without any better transition than an "and thanne" or a "with that." And "thanne" we are carried a hundred miles away, among entirely different beings, and frequently we hear no more of the first ones. Or sometimes, even, the first reappear, but they are no longer the same; Piers Plowman personifies now the honest man of the people, now the Pope, now Christ. Dowel, Dobet and Dobest have two or three different meanings. The art of transitions is as much dispensed with in his poem as at the opera: a whistle of the scene-shifter--an "and thanne" of the poet--the palace of heaven fades away, and we find ourselves in a smoky tavern in Cornhill.

Clouds pa.s.s over the sky, and sometimes sweep by the earth; their thickness varies, they take every shape: now they are soft, indolent mists, lingering in mountain hollows, that will rise towards noon, laden with the scent of flowering lindens; now they are storm-clouds, threatening destruction and rolling with thunder. Night comes on, and suddenly the blackness is rent by so glaring a light that the plain a.s.sumes for an instant the hues of mid-day; then the darkness falls again, deeper than before.

The poet moves among realities and abstractions, and sometimes the first dissolve in fogs, while the second condense into human beings, tangible and solid. On the Malvern hills, the mists are so fine, it is impossible to say: here they begin and here they end; it is the same in the Visions.

In the world of ethics, as among the realities of actual life, Langland excels in summing up in one sudden memorable flash the whole doctrine contained in the nebulous sermons of his abstract preachers; he then attains to the highest degree of excellence, without striving after it.

In another writer, the thing would have been premeditated, and the result of his skill and cunning; here the effect is as unexpected for the author as for the reader. He so little pretends to such felicities of speech that he never allows the grand impressions thus produced to last any time; he utilises them, he is careful to make the best of the occasion. It seems as if he had conjured the lightning from the clouds unawares, and he thinks it his duty to turn it to use. The flash had unveiled the uppermost summits of the realm of thought, and there will remain in our hands a flickering rushlight that can at most help us upstairs.

The pa.s.sionate sincerity which is the predominant trait of Langland's character greatly contributed to the lasting influence of his poem. Each line sets forth his unconquerable aversion for all that is mere appearance and show, self-interested imposture; for all that is antagonistic to conscience, abnegation, sincerity. Such is the great and fundamental indignation that is in him; all the others are derived from this. For, while his mind was impressed with the idea of the seriousness of life, he happened to live when the mediaeval period was drawing to its close; and, as usually happens towards the end of epochs, people no longer took in earnest any of the faiths and feelings which had supplied foregoing generations with their strength and motive power. He saw with his own eyes knights preparing for war as if it were a hunt; learned men consider the mysteries of religion as fit subjects to exercise one's minds in after-dinner discussions; the chief guardians of the flock busy themselves with their "owelles" only to shear, not to feed them. Meed was everywhere triumphant; her misdeeds had been vainly denounced; her reign had come; under the features of Alice Perrers she was now the paramour of the king!

At all such men and at all such things, Langland thunders anathema. Lack of sincerity, all the shapes and sorts of "faux semblants," or "merveilleux semblants," as Rutebeuf said, fill him with inextinguishable hatred. In shams and "faux semblants" he sees the true source of good and evil, the touchstone of right and wrong, the main difference between the worthy and the unworthy. He constantly recurs to the subject by means of his preachings, epigrams, portraits, caricatures; he broadens, he magnifies and multiplies his figures and his precepts, so as to deepen our impression of the danger and number of the adherents of "Fals-Semblant." By such means, he hopes we shall at last hate those whom he hates. Endlessly, therefore, in season and out of season, among the mists, across the streets, under the porches of the church, to the drowsy chant of his orations, to the whistle of his satires, ever and ever again, he conjures up before our eyes the hideous grinning face of "Fals-Semblant," the insincere. Fals-Semblant is never named by name; he a.s.sumes all names and shapes; he is the king who reigns contrary to conscience, the knight perverted by Lady Meed, the heartless man of law, the merchant without honesty, the friar, the pardoner, the hermit, who under the garment of saints conceal hearts that will rank them with the accursed ones. Fals-Semblant is the pope who sells benefices, the histrion, the tumbler, the juggler, the adept of the vagrant race, who goes about telling tales and helping his listeners to forget the seriousness of life. From the unworthy pope down to the lying juggler, all these men are the same man. Deceit stands before us; G.o.d's vengeance be upon him! Whenever and wherever Langland detects Fals-Semblant, he loses control over himself; anger blinds him; it seems as if he were confronted by Antichrist.

No need to say whether he is then master of his words, and able to measure them. With him, in such cases, no _nuances_ or extenuations are admissible; you are with or against Fals-Semblant; there is no middle way; a compromise is a treason; and is there anything worse than a traitor? And thus he is led to sum up his judgment in such lines as this: