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Sins addressed to Reason. At length Piers Plowman himself appears, not, as some have thought, the author himself, but a mystic figure, representing the ideal of conduct, and seeming gradually to assume the semblance of the Saviour. This is particularly apparent in the latter and more recent part of the poem, a series of visions intermixed with homilies, written from time to time as questions, secular or spiritual, forced themselves upon the poet. Universal love, good works, and the discouragement of earthly pride and spiritual imposture, are the burden of the whole, and the poem may be regarded as a commentary upon the aspects of the age as they presented themselves to a pious and high-minded man, a thorough Englishman in blood and intellect, and entirely unaffected by the Renaissance influences which were moulding men abroad. Piers Plowman showed that England could go high within her own limits, but also showed that much more was needed. ere her literature could become important beyond them.

Most of the poem was rewritten. The principal additions are the cantos entitled Do-well, Do-better, and Do-best. These are more mystical and allegorical than the commencement, and the poet's thought is often hard to follow. At the conclusion he awakes, leaving the castle of Unity erected by Piers Plowman besieged by Antichrist, and in imminent jeopardy. If this alludes to the Great Schism it is later than 1378. The alterations and additions seem to have been published about this date, and again about 1393. If, as is probable, Langland is the author of the unfinished poem which Professor Skeat has entitled Richard the Redeless (ill advised), he had returned to the West of England, for this piece appears to have been written at Bristol, which perhaps accounts for the number of nautical terms it contains. In it the poet, who had already admonished the wilful and erring Richard the Second, returns to the task, and seems to have found that it was too late, for the poem breaks off abruptly. Richard's deposition took place in September 1399, and it is not probable that Langland long survived it.

We have characterised the author of Piers Plowman as a satiric poet, and such he essentially is, although he is also much more. He has decided views on political and social questions; the feudal system is his ideal; he desires no change in the institutions of his days, and thinks that all would be well if the different orders of society would but do their duty. The ecclesiastics and the peasants are the worst offenders; the former by luxury and greed, the latter by indolence. Like Dante and Bunyan, he ennobles his satire by arraying it in a garb of allegory, and his resemblance to the latter, who can hardly have read him, is sometimes startling. Langland's inferiority is chiefly in his inability to realise abstractions; he must see a thing before he paints it, and his vision is not that of the inner eye. His imagery is rustic and homely: the blood of Christ is mortar, the Church a roof, Christianity a cart. But, writing of what is familiar to him, he is intensely real. His vigour and incisiveness when he depicts what he has actually got before him may be illustrated by his delineation of

GENERAL SPIRIT OF LANGLAND'S POEMS

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Envy, quoted with some curtailment from Miss Warren's admirable prose rendering :

"He was as pale as a pellet (stone bullet) and seemed in the palsy; and like a leek which has lain long in the sun, so he looked with his hollow cheeks and evil scowl. His body was well-nigh swollen to bursting for anger, so that he bit his lips and went along clenching his fist, and thought to avenge himself in deeds or in words when he saw his time."

[Envy, nevertheless, is sick of himself, and would repent if he knew how. After owning that he would rather hear of the misfortune of a neighbour than be himself enriched by "a wey of cheese," he proceeds.]

"When I come to the church, and should kneel to the Rood, and pray for the people as the priest teaches, then I ask on my knees that Christ would give them sorrow who bore away my bowl and tattered sheet. I turn my eye from the altar and see how Ellen has a new coat, and then I wish it were mine, and all it came from. And thus I live loveless like an evil dog, and all my body swelleth for the bitterness of my gall. I have not eaten as a man ought for many years, for envy and an evil will are hard to digest. Can no sugar nor sweet thing assuage my swelling? nor diapendion (emollient) drive it from my heart, nor neither shrift nor shame, except one scrape my maw?"

"Yes," readily said Repentance, and counselled him for the best. the salvation of souls."

"Sorrow for sins is

This is emphatically Piers Plowman's message, and his delivery of it is perhaps the first conspicuous instance in our history of Literature taking upon herself what had hitherto been the especial office of the Church.

The Creed of Piers Plowman, generally printed with The Vision, is an "Piers Plowimitation, which Professor Skeat has shown to be by the author of The man's Creed" Plowman's Tale, erroneously attributed to Chaucer. The writer is a follower of Wycliffe, and has much of his poetical model's spirit and graphic power. He represents himself as going from one order of friars to another in quest of the peace that passeth understanding, until, disgusted by their luxury and crediting all the aspersions which they cast upon each other, he at last betakes himself to the light yoke and easy burden of the Saviour.

AngloNorman literature

CHAPTER IV

ANGLO-NORMAN LITERATURE, ROMANCE, BALLAD, AND HISTORY

WE have in the last chapter traced the course of English literature from the period when, already from various causes in a languishing condition, it seemed all but annihilated by the catastrophe of foreign conquest, until the period of revival in the fourteenth century. At the time at which we have arrived it stands upon the verge of a renaissance as unforeseen as its fall; partly due to alliance with the other literature which had for a time threatened to overwhelm it, partly to that general awakening of the mind of Europe in which all the principal nations were beginning to participate.

Two characteristics of native English literature will have been remarked, its limited range and its general seriousness. One exceptional man, Layamon, has made an attempt to transplant the epic into English, but his example has hardly found an imitator. One or two metrical histories, and a faint dawn of lyrical poetry, remain to be noticed, but these will hardly affect the general impression that the intellectual interests of the Saxon mind of the period were mainly connected with religion. Nor is this interest inspired by theological or philosophical research; it is almost entirely confined to religion in its practical aspects. It must have seemed, up to the middle of the fourteenth century, as if English literature, so far as it was Saxon, might dwindle to the level of the most diminutive European literatures of our day-Breton, Basque, Romansch-and consist mainly of catechisms and manuals of devotion. Yet, as has been shown by extracts from Richard Rolle, the language had by the fourteenth century become capable of real eloquence in prose. The limitations of its literature were mainly to be ascribed to the paralysis of the national spirit by subjugation to the foreigner, which necessarily ceased when the foreigner himself had become absorbed into the Englishman. Awakening from its slumber, English literature, like Adam, found a companion by its side.

In the time of Edward the Confessor the Normans already possessed a literature derived from France, scarcely indeed extending beyond the domain of narrative poetry, yet active and progressive, while that of England lay sunk in torpor. Transplantation to England modified this literature in but one respect, the infusion of romantic feeling which it received from a closer contact with the sources of Celtic tradition, hitherto only accessible in Brittany. Otherwise

CONTRAST OF SAXON AND NORMAN

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the Norman poets and chroniclers continued to write as they would have written in Normandy, and owed as little to the Anglo-Saxons as these owed to them. The contrast between the two literatures is striking: the AngloSaxon, rustic, serious, homely, chiefly concerning itself with the next world; the Norman gay, gallant, secular, the minister and darling of a brilliant court. The same character of superior urbanity and polish applies equally to the Norman divines and the Norman historians, though this is less superficially apparent on account of their having mostly written in Latin. Everywhere, however, the Norman appears as pre-eminently the aristocratic literature, the instruction or the amusement of the classes distinguished by nobility of birth or superiority of education, while the Saxon creeps on in obscurity, the "treasure of the humble." That it should nevertheless become in process of time the dominant element, and absorb its rival, was a necessary consequence of the political conditions of the times, which happily favoured the peaceful amalgamation of the nations and the languages. The absolute extrusion of either element by the other would have been greatly to be deplored; and, taking a wide view, it must be allowed to have been far more for the interest of humanity that a language like modern English should arise, uniting the best elements of Romance and of Teutonic speech, than that either the Romanic or the Teutonic family should be augmented by yet another dialect. The part assigned to each of the amalgamating idioms corresponded to that filled by each respectively during the period of their estrangement. To the Norman, gay and courtly words expressive of luxury and refinement, and those concerned with the more subtle operations of the intellect to the Saxon, familiar terms, names of ordinary objects, article, pronoun, particle, whatever knits and binds a language. Nor must the great indirect influence of easier access to Latin be overlooked. Hitherto, except as regarded ecclesiastical terms, Latin had not been an important factor in the formation of English, but now Latin words began to enter freely without the ordeal of an intermediate stage of French.

These observations relate principally to the condition of the English language and literature about the middle of the fourteenth century, when, in Juvenal's phrase, the Orontes was beginning to flow into the Tiber. A great experiment was about to be tried. The Saxon speech by itself was clearly inadequate to the needs of the now united and fast expanding nation; but without a healthy national instinct there was great danger lest the national speech should degenerate into a formless jargon. We have seen how Langland dealt with it, and seen that his treatment was unsatisfactory, inasmuch as he adhered too strictly to the old vocabulary and old metrical forms. We shall see the course adopted by the other great writers who fortunately arose about this time. Before, however, coming to Chaucer, Gower, Wycliffe, and Mandeville, it will be convenient to investigate the Norman element now about to be incorporated with English, alike in its own history and in the character of the English writers, principally poets, who had arisen under its influence; and also with reference to the influence of Norman ideas and institutions in moulding the English mind.

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