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 classes 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 class, the _ensemble_, the nation.

The active and actual passions of the multitude, 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 passionate 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, classes, living and individualised; the merchant class, 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 assembly, 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 documents only does that power appear great and impressive as it really was, and those documents 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, petitions 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 classes, 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 hell, 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 pass 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 class that is content to perform its duties imperfectly and without sincerity, that fulfils them without eagerness, without passion, 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 class 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.