HOI'KINS: CHAKACTER AND OPINIONS uK WII.LIA.M I.ANGLANIj. 279 



Obseiiritie^i. In its final form, the poem contains many obscurities 

 due to various causes; some of them grammatical merely and due to 

 carelessness or oversight. One passage seems faulty in every text 

 (C, IV., 77-89, and parallels) because of the omission of the chief 

 verb; but the fault in this case does not lead to obscurity. Lack of 

 consistency in characterization is another source of difficulty; another 

 seems due to sheer forgetfulness, as when the author goes to sleep on 

 Malvern Hills and wakes up in London; in interpolating a pas- 

 sage he has neglected to ascertain what was the scene of the part 

 into which it was interpolated. Lastly may be mentioned the riddles. 

 What is intended as a puzzle may not be open to criticism because it 

 is puzzling, but at least one of these is now inexplicable (B, XIII., 

 150-T56; Skeat, Notes, 196) because of the impossibility of tracing 

 the contemporary references. But Langland's puzzles and inconsist- 

 encies are not greater than those of Gower, who introduces into his 

 work matters irrelevant or contradictory and illustrations that fit "as 

 the fist does the eye" (Ten Brink, Eng. Lit., p. 135); and if Gower 

 represents uninspired scholarship, Langland's humble inspiration 

 without scholarship is preferable. 



The Spirit of the Poem. 



Inflnences Fp- Langland is distinguished from his great contempor- 

 011 the Poem. a,-jeg g^g being of the priesthood and people, but not of 

 the court; and this might be inferred from his language. Latin is 

 used freely, while French appears but seldom, and French influence 

 is slight, appearing about equally in language and subject matter. 

 The growing lack of appreciation of French and the French people 

 among the lower classes is clearly reflected, although Langland prob- 

 ably did not share in it himself. With regard to his subject, there 

 was no other than a religious one for Langland with his narrower 

 horizon when even Gower and Chaucer with their wider range' of 

 thought were constrained to treat it: Chaucer lightly and satirically, 

 a touch here and there, Gower with all the intensity of which he 

 was capable in the "Vox Clamantis." For Langland living in the 

 fourteenth century and close to the hearts of the people as well as to 

 their unhappy lives there was but one voice, the same voice of one 

 crying in the wilderness, uttered in the language of the people. How 

 far-reaching were the results of this utterance we may only infer from 

 the popular uprisings that accompanied and the Reformation that 

 followed it, though both uprisings and Reformation were led by 

 others. Its poetic form was that usually chosen by those who had a 

 message for the people not to be delivered from the pulpit; the form 



