that is really their main triumph as a broad picture of manners and character. There, with dignified carriage, are seen the type of men and women whose sensibilities were trained to appreciate the tender refinement of Chaucer, and who allowed themselves more boisterous entertainment only under decorous pretexts, listening without participating. Side by side, following their own humours with noisy independence, are their vulgar associates, stopping at every alestake to eat and drink, half choked with ribald laughter, finding in the contrast between themselves and the reserved gentles an additional incentive to their gross open mirth. The Canterbury Tales' embody two veins of feeling that powerfully influenced the literature of the fifteenth century—— the sentiment that fed on chivalrous romances, and the appetite for animal laughter that received among other gratifications the grotesque literature of miracle-plays.

If we fail to perceive this contrast between the serious and the ludicrous side of the Canterbury pilgrimage, if we miss the poet's reconciliation of the two without repression of either, Chaucer's genius, in so far as regards manners and character, has laboured for us in vain. A dead weight flattens his figures into the page. The exquisite delicacy of his delineation is confused. We drag down the Knight and the Prioress by involving them in the responsibility of the Miller's Tale: we crush the life out of the Miller and the Summoner, and reduce them to wretched tameness by supposing them to fraternise with the Knight in a certain amount of decorous restraint. The pilgrimage becomes a muddled, jumbled, incoherent, unintelligible thing.

We must not, however, allow our attention to two large divisions, however much that may be the key to a right understanding of the 'Canterbury Tales,' to make us overlook the varied types that lie within these divisions. Every character, indeed, is typical-Knight, Squire, Yeoman, Prioress, Monk, Friar, Merchant, Clerk, Sergeant of Law, Franklin, Cheapside Burgess, Cook, Shipman, Doctor of Physic, Wife of Bath, Parson, Ploughman, Miller, Manciple, Reeve, Summoner, Pardoner: and the characteristics of

their various lines of life are drawn as no other generation has been in equal space. I shall not attempt to pick out supreme examples of Chaucer's skill. The compression of masterly touches in that Prologue can hardly be spoken of in sane language: there is not one of the seven or eight hundred lines but contains something to admire.

Apart from the skill of the delineation, one typical individual is specially interesting from his relations to the time, and that is the poor Parson. He cannot be said to belong, in rank at least, to the gentle class: he is of poor extraction, the brother of the Ploughman. He represents the serious element among the lower classes. During the riot of the pilgrimage, he is put down and silenced. He ventures to rebuke the Host for his profane language, and is jeered at and extinguished by that worthy as a Lollard. But when the ribald intoxication of the road has exhausted itself, his grave voice is heard and respected: and he brings the pilgrims into Canterbury with a tale more in harmony with the ostensible object of their journey.

59

CHAPTER II.

CHAUCER'S CONTEMPORARIES AND

SUCCESSORS.

I. ENGLISH CONTEMPORARIES.

(1332-1400?)

1. WILLIAM LANGLAND-Piers the Plowman.

THIS chapter deals with second-rate, third-rate, and fourthrate poets or versifiers who flourished from the time of Chaucer down to the early part of the sixteenth century. Chaucer had no worthy rival among his contemporaries, and no English poet worthy to be placed by his side appeared before the time of Spenser. Still, it is well to characterise the poets of this sober interval, however humble. The task may be dreary, but we cannot always live with the great minds, and we are rewarded by the study of mediocrities with a more vivid sense of the beauty and strength of their betters.

The most noteworthy of Chaucer's contemporaries was William Langland, author of the Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman,' commonly known as the 'Vision of Piers Plowman.' Not much is ascertained about his life. Mr Skeat1 considers it probable that he was born about 1332, at Cleobury Mortimer; that he wrote the first version of his poem (the A-text) in 1362, the second version

1 See his elaborate Introduction to the Clarendon Press selection, and his editions of the various texts for the Early English Text Society.

(the B-text) in 1377, and the last version (the C-text) between 1380 and 1390; that he wrote a poem on the Deposition of Richard II.; and that he did not long survive the accession of Henry IV. He is generally supposed to have been a secular priest. It is obvious that he was familiar with London; and it may be inferred, from his mention of the Malvern Hills, that he lived in their neighbourhood.

Langland wrote in the old English alliterative metre; but he went to the fashionable modern poetry for the machinery of dream and allegory. He walks abroad on a May morning, like any poet of the period, lays himself down by a stream under a broad bank, and as he looks into the water, is lulled to sleep by the merry sound. He then dreams, and sees an allegorical field, full of folk; an allegorical tower, and an allegorical dale, with a dungeon. He is visited by a supernaturally lovely allegorical lady, who explains the meaning of what he sees. He is next witness of an allegorical drama; an allegorical marriage is proposed, the banns are forbidden, the whole party is carried before the king; and, after several symbolical incidents, judgment is pronounced. Wishing now to change the scene, the poet awakes his dreamer, and presently sends him asleep again, and opens up to him the vision of the Seven Deadly Sins, and of Piers the Plowman. The same artifice for changing the scene is used nine other times in the course of the poem.

But though the machinery of the poem reminds us that Langland had read in the same school of poetry as Chaucer, there is a considerable change of climate from the "Court of Love" or the 'Canterbury Tales' to the 'Vision of Piers the Plowman.' Between the Court of Love, indeed, and Piers the Plowman, comparison brings to light only irreconcilable and deadly antagonism: they typify the conflict between sensuous art and puritanism. What the one approves and makes battle for, the other condemns and strives to extirpate. Langland is not a rabid Puritan-he is not a rabid man; but he regards the votaries of the lust of the flesh and

the lust of the eyes mournfully as deluded victims, and he denounces all minstrels and mirth-makers as heartless insulters of the miseries of the world. Philogenet, as the author of songs and ditties that might be sung in honour of the Queen of Love, would have come under Langland's fierce scorn, among "japers and janglers, Judas' children, that feign them fantasies, and make themselves fools." 1 Langland would have used even stronger language towards the "Court of Love" than Milton used towards Sir Philip Sidney's "Arcadia," when he called it "a vain amatorious poem." He makes no distinction between wandering minstrels and other purveyors for idle luxury he scorns them collectively with no less vehemence than the Puritans of the seventeenth century scorned the strolling player. Langland was far from having Milton's genius to tempt him into violations of his own doctrine; but he had some difficulty in reconciling even the modest flights of his muse with his paramount and imperious moral earnestness. He had qualms about "meddling with makings," when he might have been saying his psalter or praying for his benefactors; and had to reassure himself by quoting the example of Cato and other holy men, who played a little that they might be more perfect in many places.

The contrast between Piers and the 'Canterbury Tales' is still more instructive. We have seen that, though Chaucer does not represent his pilgrims as being perfect, he exhibits their shortcomings in a genial light. He introduces us to a company of people on the whole happy and self-satisfied, and alleges no reason why they should be otherwise. He is, in short, an artist of manners and character, who chooses a moment when his personages are seen to advantage, and when their imperfections are amusing without being painfully offensive. Langland writes with a very different purpose. His aim is, not to seize the happy moment in things as they are, but to make a stern comparison of things as 1 In the prologue, Mr Skeat renders "japers and janglers," jesters and slanderers; but I doubt whether the notion of slander is intended. See Passus, x. 1. 31 (Text-B), "And japers and jugglers and janglers of gests."