SWAT'S "PIERS THE PLOWMAN."
IN these two portly.volumes, furnished forth with the hand- somest liberality of the Clarendon Press, Professor Skeat has collected the mature results of a good quarter of a century's study of William Langland'a very remarkable poems. It is more than twenty years, indeed, since Professor Skeat clearly demonstrated, in a tract printed as No. 17 of the original series of the Early English Text Society (reprinted in an improved form in 1886)—what Price had in 1840 divined— that the number of distinct versions of Piers the Plowman is really three, and not two only, as previous editors had believed. He also showed how to distinguish from each other the MSS. of the different texts, there being twenty-nine different MSS. at that tune; whereas now there are at least forty-five, most of them dating from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. From this single circumstance may be inferred some idea of the complication and laborious nature of the editor's task. The main object of the present edition is to set forth in parallel columns the three texts of the poem, so as to exhibit on the same page, for convenient comparison, the corresponding passages of each. The so-called "A " text (or " Vernon " text, as being based on the Vernon MS. in the Bodleian Library), being the earliest draft, is printed along the top of the successive pages so far as it goes, that is to say, a little more than half-way ; and under it (so long as it lasts), are printed on opposite pages the corresponding passages of the enlarged texts—the " B " text (or " Crowley " text, from the Laud MS., 851, in the Bodleian), and the " C " text (or " Whitaker " text, from the Phillips MS., 8,231)—deviations from the chief MSS. being noted elaborately at the bottom of the page. When at last the " A " text gives out, the " B " text and the " C " text occupy the whole length of the opposite pages. The text of Richard the Redeless—a comparatively short poem of some eight or nine hundred (double) lines— concludes the first volume. This is simply a reprint of the edition prepared by Professor Skeat for the Early English Text Society in 1873. There does not seem to be any sufficient reason to dissent from the attribution of the authorship of Richard the Redeless to the author of Piers the Plowman ; and we are of opinion that Professor Skeet is entirely justified in including it in the present publication.
The second volume is devoted to comment,—introduction, notes, and glossary. No point that can reasonably be sup- posed to require elucidation will be found to be neglected. The form of the poem, its meaning, its dialect, its metre, the classification and description of the MSS., the relations of the three chief texts,—all these matters are examined in the preface with characteristic lucidity and fullness and despatch. The notes are copious, and very seldom can they be regarded as unnecessary ; while there is scattered lavishly throughout them a wealth of curious and pertinent illustration, historical and social as well as philological. The editor's critical judgments can but seldom be safely disputed, resting, as they always do, upon an exceptional command of the forms and sources of the language, upon full knowledge of what other scholars have done in the same and similar fields, and unusual stores of collateral information. The glossarial index we have found to be elaborate, accurate, and ever helpful in need. It is particularly pleasant to observe Professor Skeat's generous appreciation of other workers, and the total absence of indica- tions of jealousy of other students and masters. In one place, indeed, he deliberately goes out of his way to gibbet a "menda- cious and spiteful note" upon Whitaker's edition. Of course, he can well afford it ; but, unfortunately, ability to afford is not always in literary matters a synonym for generosity. At the same time, he puts forward his own views with a frank inde- pendence and businesslike plainness which are wholly com- mendable. Substantially, indeed, those views had already been made known ; but in the present form they are more likely to reach the general reader than in the uniform of a most useful Society of specialists (the Early English Text Society).
Popular, in the ordinary sense, these poems can never become, in any imaginable educational millennium. Still, it may easily be that some not inconsiderable portion of their intense moral fervour may be directed through suitable channels to influence the thought and life of these times.
• The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman, in Three Parallel Texts : together with Richard the Bedeless. By William Langland. Edited by the Rev. Walter W. Skeet, Litt.D., LL.D. Oxford : Clarendon Press.
With such helps as Professor Skeat has provided, no moderately cultivated person need have any difficulty in mastering the uncouth forms to which the lapse of five centuries has reduced the language and method of the poet. The appearance of difficulty is very much beyond the reality. Nor are the bracing tone of the thought of Langland, and the linguistic specialities of his diction, his only important claims to consideration.
These poems are full of historical interest, and particularly of that illumination of social conditions whioh has come to be recognised as of much higher value than the mere record of Kings and battles. For the romance of action, Langland has no regard. He has none of the mediaeval vigour of delight in the hard blows of physical battle, nor yet is his mind inclined to the fleshly joyaunce of eating and drinking, and conquering the world by letting the world slide. With him life is real, life is earnest,—the moral and religious life. Unlike his great contemporary, the comfortable and joyous Chaucer, Lang- land dwells on the cheerless side of the work-a-day world. He moves among the men and women of the multitude whose lot it is to slave and to suffer and to sin. He marks their distresses, —the toil and moil of their sordid life, the oppression of their masters, the inevitable burdens that are laid on them by their own ignorance and infatuation, or, it may be, by the in- explicable ordination of an overruling power. The natural leaders of the people, King and Pope, nobles and clergy, are all alike wrong-headed and wrong-hearted. " Ye prelates," as Professor Skeat summarises one passage, "ye prelates suffer laymen to live and die in such misbelief, because it is profitable to you to pnrseward." To Langland, indeed, it seems, morally, as if there " grew great tracts of wilderness,
Wherein the beast was ever more and more,
But man was less and less,"
and no regenerating Arthur had come, or had even had his advent heralded, to drive the heathen, to slay the beast, and to fell the forest, letting in the sun. The only glint of light in the poet's outlook, his sole star of hope, is an invincible trust in the righteousness of the inscrutable ways of Heaven. He is a lone, earnest soul, crying vehemently for a moral reforma- tion. There is no political conspiracy, no ecclesiastical agita- tion, no attempt to combine a party on particular changes in the State or in the Church ; hardly even an appeal to the individual, except indirectly, through the intense yearning of the poet for the submission of all conduct to the supreme test of holiness and charity. " The Vision," says Mr. Marsh justly, " was a calm allegorical exposition of the corruptions of the State, of the Church, and of social life, designed not to rouse the people to violent resistance or bloody vengeance, but to reveal to than the true causes of the evils under which they were suffering, and to secure the reformation of those grievous abuses, by a united exertion of the moral influence which-generally accom- panies the possession of superior physical strength." Notwith- standing the changes of five centuries of advance, there is remarkable scope for applying to these times the graphic realistic descriptions of Langland, with their startling flashes of grim, broad humour, alternating with vehement moral censure or persuasion. In this, it may be, lies a certain universality of appropriateness, stamping his poems with the quality of greatness. In any case, no one can rise from the perusal of these volumes without confessing the moral power of the poet, and acknowledging gratefully the services of Professor Skeat, whose interpretation brings his author within the easy acquaintance of all serious students.
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