Chaucer discovered his own powers. The command of the queen that he should write a lectionary of Cupid's saints forced him back in the Legend of Good Women on uncongenial themes, and in the Squire's Tale he made one more attempt at being his own plotter. But henceforth he knew that if he followed a story he had read or heard he could realize the characters in it for himself and know how they would talk and the details of the action by which they would carry out the plot. He had realized Palamon and Arcite and Theseus right nobly, Pandarus with consummate

art and humour, Criseyde with a great humanity. He needed to keep no book in front of him while he wrote; all he needed was a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, which he could rehandle in his own way. In the Canterbury Tales, stories told by pilgrims on the road to and from Canterbury, he gave scope to his gift for minute description in the Prologue, in which he tells of the assembling of a score and a half of travellers at the Tabard Inn at Southwark, of their agreement for the tale-telling, and their start for Canterbury. We may search literature for such another gallery of pictures in so small a space. When he lets his pilgrims talk on the road, as a change from tale-telling, the talks (unhappily incomplete) are inimitable in their ease and life. The whole poem is an historical document,

unsurpassable as evidence of the feeling and cultivation of Englishmen of the time.

Outlook on Life. It is sometimes regretted that so much of the brilliant craftsmanship in Chaucer's later work was bestowed on very gross stories. But the stories are told so frankly that it is difficult to believe that any imagination has been stained by them, and it is clearly indicated that the exploits are the exploits of churls to which gentlefolk would only be attracted as illustrating how churls live. Chaucer himself was interested in how every one lived, was eager to speak to them, watch how they behaved, and note their clothes and the beasts they rode. He had learnt to use his eyes, and he liked using them at his leisure. It was no part of his plan to check the confidences of his fellow-travellers by untimely criticism. He was ready to call every rascal "a good felawe" if he would sit for his portrait. He admires goodness unstintedly-witness his sketches of the Knight, the poor Parson and his Ploughman brother, and the Clerk of Oxford; but he was too much interested in his rascals, as in every one else, to condemn them save by a side-stroke here and there. Rather he is pleased to have met such clever rogues. They form part of a various and delightful world, on which he looks with all-including sympathy.

No Dramatist. The life of Chaucer's world is distinguished by its happiness. There is pain in it, and perplexity, but there is neither agony nor rebellion. Fortune is fickle and all-powerful, but it is a good world and a field of joys. It follows that this poet could never have been a tragedian. To him, as to his Monk,

Tragedie is non other maner thing..
But for that Fortune alway wot assaile
With unwar strook the regnès that been proude.

Canterbury Tales, B. 3,950.

Of moral or spiritual tragedies, in the full sense, he knows nothing, but only of the material ones which Fortune can bring about, and to the victims of these he is very pitiful. It is no accident that the line "For pitee renneth sore in gentil herte " is three times adapted from Dante for his stories. The deep sense of tears in human life is constantly with him, and is always perfectly expressed-in the sorrow of Griselda at parting with her children, in the sorrow of Constance when her babe must share her danger, in the anguish of Ugolino when he cannot save his children from his own fate :

Allas, Fortune! it was greet crueltee
Swiche briddes for to put in swiche a cage.

Canterbury Tales, B. 3,603.

or in the grief of the little choir-boy's mother when she searches for her son " with moodres pitee in her herte enclosed." Most piercing of all, perhaps, are the dying words of Arcite to his love:

Allas, myn hertes quene! allas, my wyf!

Myn hertes lady, endere of my lyf !

What is this world? What asketh men to have?
Now with his love, now in his colde grave

Allone, withouten any companye.

In a similar way he may be said to excel in comedy, as Meredith defines it: "the singular scene of charity issuing of disdain under the stroke of honourable laughter." But his comedy is not the art of the stage. "The true dramatist has a special relation to his personages; he has not merely observed them, he has made them, begotten them, endowed them with the very blood and breath by which he himself lives. However widely they may differ from him in character, part of him is reproduced in each of them; and it is in those reproductions alone that he is visible to his audience. Between Chaucer and the persons in his stories this relation does not exist; they do not always share his life, and he is never content to be lost and found in them. He is often simply a reporter, and always personally present with the audience. In short, his genius is essentially narrative."

SUPPLEMENTARY READING LIST

Texts.-Complete Works, ed. W. W. Skeat (6 vols., Clarendon Press, 1894); Student's Chaucer, ed. W. W. Skeat (Clarendon Press, 1895); Works, ed. A. W. Pollard, etc. (Globe ed., Macmillan, 1898); Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, ed. A. W. Pollard (Macmillan, 1920, 6th ed.).

Studies. HAMMOND, E. P.: Chaucer: a Bibliographical Handbook (Macmillan, 1908).-LOUNSBURY, T. R. Studies in Chaucer (3 vols., Osgood, 1891).—POLLARD, A. W.: Chaucer (Macmillan's Literature Primers, 1919, 6th ed.).-WARD, Sir A. W.: Chaucer (English Men of Letters, Macmillan, 1896).NEWBOLT, Sir HENRY: A New Study of English Poetry (Constable, 1917).-QUILLER-COUCH, Sir A. T. : Studies in Literature (C.U.P. 1922).

CHAPTER 3. PIERS PLOWMAN

Fourteenth-century England produced one of the great religious poems of all time. Noble in plan, vigorous in style, lofty in diction, Piers Plowman discloses the heart of a 14th-century scholar, earnest and pious, a reformer yet a good Catholic, an idealist yet a keen observer of reality, in a manner which has no parallel save in the Divine Comedy. The multitude and diversity of the manuscripts which are still extant, testify to the value placed upon the poem during the close of the Middle Ages. But while the author yet wrote, the old alliterative verse was dying, and the classicism which was to render his work archaic was at hand. And so, except to a few scholars and poets, his great work passed into an oblivion from which only the research of our own day has begun to rescue it.

The Author. Of the author we know with certainty only what he has revealed incidentally in his work; and the extent of such knowledge is limited, for it is not yet settled how far we should interpret certain allusions as references to the personal history of the poet. He was certainly called William-he tells us so repeatedly; and from his tallness he got the nickname of "Long Will." Two 15th-century notes, and a number of 16th-century authorities, tell us his surname was Langland. From the most detailed of these notes, we learn that Langland was not his father's name, but that he belonged to the Rokayle family, which held land under the Despencers at Shipton, in Oxfordshire: and this early note is probably trustworthy, as the details it gives about the Rokayle family can be confirmed from other sources. The 16th-century tradition that the poet was born at Cleobury Mortimer, on the Welsh border, fifty miles from Shipton, may also be true, for the author may well have been born in the troubled times when the lands of adherents of the Despencers were being harried, and when there may have been the strongest reasons for the Rokayle family being from home. He knew London, and there is much in the character of the poem to confirm the statement made in the latest version that the poet was a chantry-clerk, making his living by singing placebo and dirige.

Character. The dreamer tells us that he was loath to reverence lords and ladies, persons dressed in fur and wearing silver pendants; and that he never made obeisance with a "God save you" to the lawyers whom he met so that folk held him a fool. "It requires no great stretch of imagination," says Skeat, “to picture to ourselves the tall gaunt figure of Long Will, in his long robes and with his shaven head, striding along Cornhill, saluting no man by the way, minutely observant of the gay dresses to which he paid no outward reverence."

His Work: A-Version.-The date of the first, or A-Version, of "The Vision of William concerning Piers Plowman," is fixed by internal evidence as 1362, or shortly after. This version consists of 12 (in three MSS. 13) sections. Of these the first 9 (Prologue and Passus I-VIII) form one complete work, to which may be given the

title The Field of Folk. Part II. (The Vision of Do-well, Do-bet, and Do-best) was unfinished the last three sections are accordingly but a fragment of the yet greater poem which was to be completed many years later.

We know the reasons for William's temporary abandonment of Part II. He had