“Eld the hoar
That was in the vauntward,
And bare the banner before death,”—
and he softens to a sweetness of sympathy beyond Chaucer when he speaks of the poor or tells us that Mercy is “sib of all sinful”; but to compare “Piers Ploughman” with the “Canterbury Tales” is to compare sermon with song.
Let us put a bit of Langland’s satire beside one of Chaucer’s. Some people in search of Truth meet a pilgrim and ask him whence he comes. He gives a long list of holy places, appealing for proof to the relics on his hat:—
“‘I have walked full wide in wet and in dry
And sought saints for my soul’s health.’
‘Know’st thou ever a relic that is called Truth?
Couldst thou show us the way where that wight dwelleth?’
‘Nay, so God help me,’ said the man then,
‘I saw never palmer with staff nor with scrip
Ask after him ever till now in this place.’”
This is a good hit, and the poet is satisfied; but, in what I am going to quote from Chaucer, everything becomes picture, over which lies broad and warm the sunshine of humorous fancy.
“In oldë dayës of the King Artour
Of which that Britouns speken gret honour,
All was this lond fulfilled of fayerie:
The elf-queen with her joly compaignie
Dancëd ful oft in many a grenë mede:
This was the old opinion as I rede;
I speke of many hundrid yer ago:
But now can no man see none elvës mo,
For now the gretë charite and prayëres
Of lymytours and other holy freres
That sechen every lond and every streem,
As thick as motis in the sonnëbeam,
Blessyng halles, chambres, kichenës, and boures,
Citees and burghës, castels hihe and toures,
Thorpës and bernes, shepnes and dayeries,
This makith that ther ben no fayeries.
For ther as wont to walken was an elf
There walkith none but the lymytour himself,
In undermelës and in morwenynges.
And sayth his matyns and his holy thinges,
As he goth in his lymytatioun.
Wommen may now go saufly up and doun;
In every bush or under every tre
There is none other incubus but he,
And he ne wol doon hem no dishonóur.”
How cunningly the contrast is suggested here between the Elf-queen’s jolly company and the unsocial limiters, thick as motes in the sunbeam, yet each walking by himself! And with what an air of innocent unconsciousness is the deadly thrust of the last verse given, with its contemptuous emphasis on the he that seems so well-meaning! Even Shakespeare, who seems to come in after everybody has done his best with a “Let me take hold a minute and show you how to do it,” could not have bettered this.
“Piers Ploughman” is the best example I know of what is called popular poetry,—of compositions, that is, which contain all the simpler elements of poetry, but still in solution, not crystallized around any thread of artistic purpose. In it appears at her best the Anglo-Saxon Muse, a first cousin of Poor Richard, full of proverbial wisdom, who always brings her knitting in her pocket, and seems most at home in the chimney-corner. It is genial; it plants itself firmly on human nature with its rights and wrongs; it has a surly honesty, prefers the downright to the gracious, and conceives of speech as a tool rather than a musical instrument. If we should seek for a single word that would define it most precisely, we should not choose simplicity, but homeliness. There is more or less of this in all early poetry, to be sure; but I think it especially proper to English poets, and to the most English among them, like Cowper, Crabbe, and one is tempted to add Wordsworth,—where he forgets Coleridge’s private lectures. In reading such poets as Langland, also, we are not to forget a certain charm of distance in the very language they use, making it unhackneyed without being alien. As it is the chief function of the poet to make the familiar novel, these fortunate early risers of literature, who gather phrases with the dew still on them, have their poetry done for them, as it were, by their vocabulary. But in Chaucer, as in all great poets, the language gets its charm from him. The force and sweetness of his genius kneaded more kindly together the Latin and Teutonic elements of our mother tongue, and made something better than either. The necessity of writing poetry, and not mere verse, made him a reformer whether he would or no; and the instinct of his finer ear was a guide such as none before him or contemporary with him, nor indeed any that came after him, till Spenser, could command. Gower had no notion of the uses of rhyme except as a kind of crease at the end of every eighth syllable, where the verse was to be folded over again into another layer. He says, for example,
“This maiden Canacee was hight,
Both in the day and eke by night,”
as if people commonly changed their names at dark. And he could not even contrive to say this without the clumsy pleonasm of both and eke. Chaucer was put to no such shifts of piecing out his metre with loose-woven bits of baser stuff. He himself says, in the “Man of Law’s Tale,”—