Medieval English Literature

by W. P. Ker

The Pearl, one of the most beautiful of the English medieval poems, is an allegory which begins in this same way; the Vision of Piers Plowman is another. Neither of these has otherwise much likeness to the Rose; it was by Chaucer and his school that the authority of the Rose was established. The Pearl and Piers Plowman are original works, each differing very considerably from the French style which was adopted by Chaucer and Gower.

The Pearl is written in a lyrical stanza, or rather in groups of stanzas linked to one another by their refrains; the measure is unlike French verse. The poem itself, which in many details resembles many other things, is altogether quite distinct from anything else, and indescribable except to those who have read it. Its resemblance to the Paradiso of Dante is that which is less misleading than any other comparison. In the English poem, the dreamer is instructed as to the things of heaven by his daughter Marjory, the Pearl that he had lost, who appears to him walking by the river of Paradise and shows him the New Jerusalem; like Dante’s Beatrice at the end she is caught away from his side to her place in glory.

But it is not so much in these circumstances that the likeness is to be found—it is in the fervour, the belief, which carries everything with it in the argument, and turns theology into imagination. As with Dante, allegory is a right name, but also an insufficient name for the mode of thought in this poem.

In the Pearl there is one quite distinct and abstract theory which the poem is intended to prove; a point of theology (possibly heretical): that all the souls of the blessed are equal in happiness; each one is queen or king. In Sir Gawayne, which is probably by the same author, there is the same kind of definite thought, never lost or confused in the details. Piers Plowman, on the other hand, though there are a number of definite things which the author wishes to enforce, is wholly different in method. The method often seems as if it were nothing at all but random association of ideas. The whole world is in the author’s mind, experience, history, doctrine, the estates and fortunes of mankind, ‘the mirror of middle-earth’; all the various elements are turned and tossed about, scenes from Bartholomew Fair mixed up with preaching or philosophy. There is the same variety, it may be said, in The Pilgrim’s Progress. But there is not the same confusion. With Bunyan, whatever the conversation may be, there is always the map of the road quite clear. You know where you are; and if ever the talk is abstract it is the talk of people who eat and drink and wear clothes—real men, as one is accustomed to call them. In Piers Plowman there is as much knowledge of life as in Bunyan; but the visible world is seen only from time to time. It is not merely that some part of the book is comic description and some of it serious discourse, but the form of thought shifts in a baffling way from the pictorial to the abstract. It is tedious to be told of a brook named ‘Be buxom of speech’, and a croft called ‘Covet not men’s cattle nor their wives’, when nothing is made of the brook or the croft by way of scenery; the pictorial words add nothing to the moral meaning; if the Ten Commandments are to be turned into allegory, something more is wanted than the mere tacking on to them of a figurative name. The author of Piers Plowman is too careless, and uses too often a mechanical form of allegory which is little better than verbiage.

But there is more than enough to make up for that, both in the comic scenes like the Confession of the Seven Deadly Sins, and in the sustained passages of reasoning, like the argument about the righteous heathen and the hopes allowable to Saracens and Jews. The Seven Sins are not abstractions nor grotesque allegories; they are vulgar comic personages such as might have appeared in a comedy or a novel of low life, in London taverns or country inns, figures of tradesmen and commercial travellers, speaking the vulgar tongue, natural, stupid, ordinary people.

Also there is beauty; the poem is not to be dismissed as a long religious argument with comic interludes, though such a description would be true enough, as far as it goes. The author is no great artist, for he lets his meaning overpower him and hurry him, and interrupt his pictures and his story. But he is a poet, for all that, and he proves his gift from the outset of his work ‘in a May morning, on Malvern hilles’; and with all his digressions and seemingly random thought the argument is held together and moves harmoniously in its large spaces. The secret of its construction is revealed in the long triumphant passage which renders afresh the story of the Harrowing of Hell, and in the transition to what follows, down to the end of the poem. The author has worked up to a climax in what may be called his drama of the Harrowing of Hell. This is given fully, and with a sense of its greatness, from the beginning when the voice and the light together break in upon the darkness of Hell and on the ‘Dukes of that dim place’—Attollite portas: ‘be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors’. After the triumph, the dreamer awakes and hears the bells on Easter morning—

That men rongen to the resurrexioun, and right with that I waked

And called Kitte my wyf and Kalote my doughter:

Ariseth and reverenceth Goddes resurrexioun,

And crepeth to the crosse on knees, and kisseth it for a juwel,