CHAPTER X

POETIC ACHIEVEMENT IN VERNACULAR

NOTE. This chapter indicates the poetic animating certain

typical or outstanding literary developments in the vernaculars.

Its intention is both historical review in this single aspect

and suggestion of further study. Since it is thus selective

and suggestive, not attempting the impossible appraisal of

vernacular poetic as a whole, it offers no general list of

references. Particular references will be found in place.

A. LYRIC AND EPIC

Lyric, earliest medieval poetic achievement in Latin, shows full

development in the vernaculars. On this the widest Latin influence was of

course the hymns. The most distinct and conspicuous vernacular poetic,

that of the Provençal troubadours, is mainly a minute and elaborate

stanza technic. The fame of troubadour virtuosity gave vogue in other

vernaculars to metrical skill. This is its historical significance in the

development of medieval lyric. Lyric in any time, however, has a short

history. As in Greece, so again and again, having perfected its diction

and its metric, it comes to its own and abides. For more than any other

form of poetic it is timeless; not ancient, nor medieval, nor modern, but

perennial.

Germanic epic,[1] surviving as a strong influence in medieval English

romance, persisted as a distinct poetic among the Scandinavians. In

remote Iceland they developed an elaborate technic of verse epic, and

later a distinct art of prose epic. Not even the troubadour poetic in

the south is more detailed and elaborate than the epic doctrine of the

_Skáldskaparmál_.[2] No medieval stories have more force of narrative

directness than the prose sagas; and few have as much. In narrative

stripped and stark the chief medieval author, perhaps, is Snorri

Sturlasson. But in spite of Viking travels the Old Norse poetic of

verse and of prose remained apart from medieval habit. Bounded by its

own civilization, it was so little appropriated in the general medieval

development of narrative that its recovery in modern times was as

startling as that of the Etruscan sculpture at Perugia.

French epic, flowering later than Germanic, is already in the eleventh

century tinged with romance. The French _chansons de geste_ reflect

a society distinctly feudal; their communal sense is of a larger

community; and they constitute a first chapter in European vernacular

poetic. Epic still in characterization and in the youthful zest of their

combats against odds, they are swayed by new literary currents. The

physical environment is less sharply detailed than in Germanic epic,

perhaps because a kindlier nature was more taken for granted. A sharper

difference is in style. They have none of that Germanic conventional

elaboration which made epic diction a language apart. Much simpler,[3]

they are also more diffuse, in both respects nearer to common speech.

The movement in detail is of ten-syllable verses gathered into irregular

stanzas (_laisses_) by assonance. A more significant distinction is the

habit of narrative. _Roland_ presents substantially the same situation

as _Maldon_. In Anglo-Saxon it is focused by concentration; in French it

is approached as the culmination of a series. Habitually French epic is

more extended and fluent, expansive not descriptively but historically,

running through more events in a single composition. Whereas Anglo-Saxon

epic typically selects and intensifies a crisis, French epic tells the

whole story.

B. EXPERIMENT AND CONVENTION IN ROMANCE

1. Romance in Latin and in Vernacular

Medieval story-tellers in turning to the vernacular found wider

opportunity. The Latin poetic that they all studied in school, practised

in _historia_, _fabula_, _argumentum_, and at greater length in saint’s

legend, was too much absorbed in descriptive elaboration to teach them

much of narrative. Outside the cloister, at the regular stations of the

pilgrimage routes, waited audiences of increasing size and diversity;

and the development of feudalism established the castle hall as a social

center. The development of vernacular narrative answered with the more

social art of romance. The narrative future was increasingly for the

vernacular. Meantime Latin narrative continued not only for its more

special audience, but in various interplay. _Exempla_, sketched or summed

in Latin, were preached in vernacular. An ugly old legend of folklore,

moralized in Latin for an _exemplum_, Chaucer gave back to the wider

audience in the exquisite art of his Prioress. Romances and legends of

saints interpenetrated. The complicated development of the Grail legend

must be followed in both Latin and vernacular. Nevertheless poetic was

beckoned into new narrative paths mainly by the wider appeal through the

vernacular.

Something, of course, was carried over from the _poetriæ_,[4] oftenest

the conventional lore of style. By contrast we are made the more

sharply aware of the escape and adventure of individual bent and native

inspiration. _Aucassin et Nicolete_ has another appeal by another method.

Its style, in spite of occasional conformity, is not in the tradition of

the _poetriæ_. Chrétien, though conforming more, draws his psychology

rather from observation of social habits and even of individual character

than from the classified lore of appropriateness to type. Dante not only

commits the most serious enterprise of medieval poetic to the vernacular;

he utterly ignores the Latin school lore. At the end of the middle age,

the Renaissance already tinging his thought, Chaucer passes through a

whole course of Latin conventions, adapting critically as he goes, and

ranges beyond.

2. Walter Map and Marie

In the twelfth century Walter Map’s Latin notebook _De nugis

Curialium_[5] shows both the persistence of old forms and the stirring of

new in rendering new material. Some of his stories are clearly oriental.

Historical anecdotes and _exempla_, often given in mere lucid summary,

occasionally indicate narrative composition.[6] He tries a story in the

way of Ovid, or again in the Petronian way of the “Matron of Ephesus.”

Two longer tales show not only a firmer conciseness, a sharper vividness,

but what is more significant, grasp of narrative movement. The Friendship

of Sadius and Galo (III. ii)[7] and Sceva and Ollo (IV. xvi) are

enlivened in scene and furthered in plot by dialogue. Both are carried

through progressively to an issue. The former skilfully combines the

Orestes-Pylades motive of friendship with the Joseph-Zuleika motive of

the scorned queen. The latter turns the cynicism of its oriental source

to brisk social satire. Here in Latin are narrative experiments full of

promise. Looking over Walter’s shoulder, we can divine a new literary

stir.

More suggestive of response to a new interest of his audience is the

abundance of Celtic folklore. There are banshees, wandering dead, a

nicker, a pact with a demon. King Herla (I. xi), like Rip Van Winkle,

stays too long in fairyland. The fairy mistress appears four times. Once

(II. xi) the old tale is hardly more than notes. In Edric the Wild (II.

xii) the moonlight dance (_chorea feminarum_) keeps its ancient spell.

Meridiana (IV. xi) associates a different and longer version quite

disconcertingly with the great Gerbert. Though none of these brings the

tale to the sequence of Sadius and Galo, we feel an artist at work. Some

of these shorter tales may be Latin summaries, like the _exempla_ of the

collections, for telling in French. Whether he worked out his narrative

art in the vernacular we do not know. Though some critics have inferred

for him a considerable part in the development of the Grail legend, the

only surviving work that is certainly his is this artist’s sketch-book.

There are fewer suggestions of narrative experiment in the contemporary

French _lais_ of Marie.[8] Her _Yonec_ is satisfied with the rapid

summary of Latin tradition. Her charming _Honeysuckle_ is an episode of

the Tristram story. Iseult, finding a peeled wand by her way through

the wood, knew that Tristram was near. As much lyric as narrative, such

episodic poems suggest what the _lai_ may have been in its earliest

use of Celtic fairy adventure. _Lanval_ and _Eliduc_ handle with more

narrative progress what we now call a situation. Another rendering

of the former situation, the anonymous _Graalent_, shows by contrast

Marie’s discernment either in choosing a version narratively superior

or in herself reshaping. Generally her art is less of composition than

of style. Her habit with a situation is not the fluent onwardness of

_Aucassin et Nicolete_,[9] nor the intensive and progressive sequence of

the later _Chastelaine de Vergi_.[10] The technic of the latter, though

distinctly realized in the middle age, remained exceptional. It receives

little attention even in the _Decameron_; and it stands out among the

_Canterbury Tales_.

3. Chrétien de Troyes

A romance of five or six thousand lines, but still selective, was

developed by Chrétien de Troyes.[11] His _Erec_ tells the tale which

Lady Charlotte Guest translated in her _Mabinogion_ as _Geraint the

Son of Erbin_ from a later Welsh version. Enid is stricken with shame

that Geraint’s love of her should run to ignoble fondness. Her lament,

overheard and mistaken by Geraint, rouses his jealous pride to prove her

long and cruelly. This moment the Welsh writer sees in its setting.

And one morning in the summer time they were upon their couch,

and Geraint lay upon the edge of it. And Enid was without sleep

in the apartment, which had windows of glass. And the sun shone

upon the couch. And the clothes had slipped from off his arms

and his breast, and he was asleep. Then she gazed upon the

marvellous beauty of his appearance, and she said, “Alas! and

am I the cause that these arms and this breast have lost their

glory and the warlike fame which they once so richly enjoyed?”

And as she said this, the tears dropped from her eyes, and they

fell upon his breast.[12]

At such a point the Welsh writer’s abundance of description is not merely

pretty; it is fitting. What he thus dwells upon until we must feel it

because we can see it, is an important moment in the story. But in

general he blurs his story by spending equal elaboration on what is quite

subordinate, or even irrelevant. His incidents claim attention equally

in succession; Chrétien’s are lengthened or shortened with a sense of

their narrative values. For Chrétien, relying less on the traditional

picturesque description, has the better narrative. Using descriptive

detail less for itself, he uses it more to bring out character or give

to important moments salience. Instead of merely accumulating adventures

and telling each for what it is worth by itself, as is the habit of the

longer romances, he has selective art enough to bring out those that will

keep attention on the conquest of the proud, selfish devotion of the

husband by the nobler devotion of the wife. And at the end he impresses

the significance of the whole course of adventures, the meaning of the

story as a whole. He discerns, though he does not always achieve, the

narrative force of unified progress.

How far the art of such romances was studied in the middle age appears

again on comparison of the fourteenth-century _Ywain and Gawain_ with

its original, Chrétien’s _Chevalier au Lion_. The Englishman, without

losing anything of the plot, reduces the length one-third by compressing,

modifying, or even omitting Chrétien’s detail. And since Chrétien’s

detail is not merely added for richness, but spent to bring out character

or mood, a change here is a change in the total effect, a shifting of

interest from the persons to the events. Thus to Chrétien the central

situation is this. A widow forced to marry again, as medieval widows

were if they had property, accepts the slayer of her husband. How would

she feel? Might she not, from making a virtue of necessity, come to love

her second husband if he were young and brave? If, tiring of her riches

and ease, he would be off to his wars again, would she forgive him for

breaking his promise to return on a day? And might he not then, learning

from the loss of her to value her truly, devote himself to winning her

back by proving his better manhood? The situation is almost the reverse

of that in _Erec_. Such questions of character and feeling lead Chrétien

to dwell upon the scenes between Ywain and Alundyne, and even to comment

satirically now and then on their mental attitudes. Most of this the

English translator omits.

But that the omissions were deliberate appears in his throwing emphasis

upon what directly furthers the movement of the story. What makes a story

quick and strong he understands so well that he even quickens and varies

Chrétien’s pace by turning some of the indirect discourse into direct

dialogue. Nor was he insensible to Chrétien’s suggestions of character or

mood. At the final revelation, where Chrétien says simply that Alundyne

started (_la dame tresaut_), he renders:

Then went the lady far aback,

And long she stood ere that she spake

(3983-3984).

This is exactly in Chrétien’s habitual manner. Rendering with discernment

and spirit, then, keeping the plan and transitions that hold the tale

together, he bends the story in the direction of his own interest and

skill. He too knows something of narrative art. His simpler, more onward

version throws into relief Chrétien’s superiority not only in delicacy of

verse and style, but in those ampler and finer suggestions of character

which bring out of a situation its deeper narrative values.

The increasing audience for romance invited much mere retelling, many

versions inartistic or even unintelligent. But the scientific study of

sources, while it defines the diffusion of current tales and carries

their history back to folklore and myth, should not blur the history of

medieval narrative art. In the midst of almost impersonal transmission

were both artistic experiment and artistic achievement. Chrétien de

Troyes and a few others have survived by name. Nameless, but no less

convincing, is the narrative art of _Aucassin et Nicolete_, of the

_Chastelaine de Vergi_, of _Gawain and the Green Knight_.

4. Conventional Composition

Generally the artist is less clear, the impersonal processes of

transmission and the conventions of telling clearer, in the long

romances. Adventure, when fairyland was no longer new, was sometimes

supplied by mere aggregation. Love, presented mainly as wooing,

crystallized into the code of _amour courtois_. Chivalry, a motive even

more clearly ideal, could be no less presented as a code. Adventure,

love, chivalry, established as the three habitual motives of romance,

were readily combined in stock forms. Better artists vitalized them by

characterization; but since romance can be composed acceptably without

characterization, its journeywork, medieval or modern, tends to content

itself with types. The hero is “a very perfect gentle knight”; and his

action consists in having many adventures. The heroine is a beautiful

young lady, and needs no action at all. Both may be described at length

without being individualized. Even on these terms, much as they have

always amused satirists, romance may have charm of style and some of the

perennial appeal of youth. But it has no properly narrative vigor. Its

composition tends so easily to repeat that the stock adventures can be

assigned as well to one knight as to another.

In fact, the middle age saw adventures transferred from one hero to

another who had meantime become more popular. Thus Gawain, coming

straight out of fairyland, gradually lost more and more of his glory;

and the process is one of the ways in which there grew up cycles of

romance. The longer Lancelot stories are aggregations of many separate

adventures. One of the best remembered feats in Malory’s compilation is

the three-days’ tournament. Not only is this told of other knights in

other romances; it is found also by itself, as in the tale of Ipomedon.

Some medieval rewriter added it to his Lancelot; and there it stayed.

The Lancelot story was further swelled by adventures formerly ascribed

to Gawain, who had already lost some of his feats to Percival. Even

the winning of the Grail quest, which had early been transferred from

Gawain to Percival, went to Lancelot’s son Galahad. Finally the Lancelot

aggregation was attached to the cycle of Arthur.

Whether or not it was attached to one of the cycles, a conventional long

romance could thus aggregate. _Bevis of Hampton_ or _Guy of Warwick_

might be longer or shorter without the slightest narrative difference.

It is long because it is interminable. Even in better hands the medieval

long romance prevails part by part, as it was read. It was not composed

as a single narrative. Such singleness as the middle age cultivated in

romance must be sought in the parts considered as separate stories,

and will be found oftener in the shorter romances that remained by

themselves. For lack of it the most conventional long romances become

series of typical descriptions. The typical hero, typically equipped

without and within, has one typical encounter after another.

The difference between such aggregative transmission and narrative

progress can be discerned among the many versions of the Grail. A magic

talisman from folklore had been transmuted by the popular emotion focused

at Corpus Christi;[13] but it became a narrative goal only for those with

art enough to conceive the great quest as something more than a series of

adventures. Meeting an earlier form of it in his Balin and Balan, Malory

brought it into no distinct relation to that tragedy. Its recurrence in

his later books is similarly unharmonized and inconclusive. Wolfram von

Eschenbach, also using more than one version, had focused his _Parzival_

sufficiently to give a long romance some movement onward.

C. THE POETIC COMPOSITION OF THE _DIVINA COMMEDIA_

The solitary eminence of Dante is a perpetual reminder of the limits of

any lore of poetic. As for medieval lore, its approach to the _Divina

Commedia_ is hopelessly short. The ultimate reason, of course, for its

inadequacy is that the greatest poetic achievement of the middle age is

far more than medieval. It is for all time even more clearly than the

_Œdipus Rex_ or the _Æneid_ or _Othello_; and like them it derives its

greatness from something beyond poetic.

Nevertheless it is also medieval and also a great achievement of poetic

composition. So to consider it is to discern both more of its greatness

and more of medieval habit. In the current medieval lore the main

lack is seen by contrast to be in the larger movement of composition.

Medieval poetic carries us so short a distance toward the _Divina

Commedia_ because it is preoccupied with style. Vergil is currently

cited and quoted, but usually as an exemplar of the three styles.[14]

Medieval romances carried nationalism back to Troy for centuries without

discerning the larger art of the _Æneid_ in composition. For Dante Vergil

was guide not only in a deeper sense, but also in poetic.

This makes clearer why Dante turned his back on current lore. He knew

that lore, not only the elaborate technic of the troubadours, but the

Latin _poetria_. His ignoring of it is tantamount to an arraignment of

its cardinal weakness. It had too little technic for his main poetic

concern, the movement of the whole. It had too much schoolmasterly

fiddling with words to carry orchestration beyond a few conventional

modes. No one can study the history of poetic without finding this

deficiency exceptional only in degree. In kind it is historic. Here,

again and again, appears the gap between pedagogically formulated poetic

and poetry.

In Dante’s style the medieval _poetria_ is not merely outdistanced;

it is repudiated. Matthieu de Vendôme, Geoffroi de Vinsauf, John the

Englishman, might have tolerated figures of wrestlers and dogs in hell,

but hardly broth, cooks, oxen, and swine. They would have challenged

bellows in purgatory; they would have been shocked at rooks and a

fish-pool in heaven. The decorative descriptions of a rhetoricated poetic

seem nowhere else quite so futile as beside Dante’s figures of precise

geography.

As seems beetling Carisenda, when a cloud goes over it so as to

make it hang the other way, so seemed Antæus to me as I stood

watching to see him bend. I. xxxi. 136.[15]

As that stream which has its own path first from Monte Veso

toward the east on the left coast of Apennine, which is called

Acquaqueta above before it descends to its low bed, and at

Forlì has lost that name, reëchoes there over San Benedetto

from the alp, because its fall has a single leap where for

a thousand should be room, so down an abrupt bank we heard

resounding that turbid water. I. xvi. 94.

As for Paolo and Francesca, Ugolino, and a hundred other passages, with

those single lines that enrich memory,[16] no better praise can be

compassed than Matthew Arnold’s word “touchstones.” They tell us, better

than any definition, what poetry is. But the mere historical significance

of Dante’s luminous precision is its vindication of that true theory

of poetic diction which was formulated in the _De sublimitate_.[17]

The essential character of poetic style is not dilation, which belongs

to rhetoric; it is sublimation. Dante’s extraordinary conciseness,

austere, ascetic, is never bare; it is surcharged. For style too, as

well as for composition, he must have discerned that ancient critic’s

fine distinction: rhetoric and poetic must never be confused; but at high

temperatures they can be welded together.

Poetry conveyed vision oftener, perhaps, in the middle age than in any

other period. _Piers Plowman_ and _Pearl_ carry on in the next century a

persistent medieval preoccupation. The _Divina Commedia_, fulfilling this

aspiration, reveals man’s need, his quest, his attainment, of vision.

“Blessed are the pure in heart; for they shall see God.” Purity remains

negative to those who have no desire to see God. But Dante answers those

for whom it is positive and constructive.

Ye other few, who have lifted up your necks betimes to the

bread of angels, by which men live here, but with which none

cometh away sated. III. ii. 10.

The poetry of this “concreate and perpetual thirst” (III. ii. 19)

animates for all time a whole cosmogony antiquated merely as science, and

communicates the great philosophy of the middle age to the heart. The

_Divina Commedia_ achieved the high quest of the Grail romances. It is

_the_ vision poem.

The heaven of Dante’s vision transcends time and space.

And I was with him; but of my mounting I was no more aware

than is a man, ere his first thought, aware that it is coming.

Beatrice is she who thus discloses from good to better so

instantly that her act has no extent in time. III. x. 34.

Brother, thy high desire shall be fulfilled in the last sphere,

where all the rest are fulfilled, and mine.... For it is not in

space, nor hath it poles, and our ladder attains even so far.

III. xxii. 61.

But it is not reserved for rapt contemplatives.

Of the seraphim he who is most rapt, Moses, Samuel, or that

John whom thou choosest to take, nay, even Mary has not a seat

in another heaven than these spirits who but now appeared

to thee; nor have they to their being more or fewer years;

but all make beauteous the first circle, and have sweet life

differently as they feel more or less the eternal breath. III.

iv. 28.

For the _Divina Commedia_ ranges beyond the lyric exaltation of the

individual poet. It is suffused with social sense, as constantly aware

as the _Piers Plowman_ of the “fair field full of folk,” of the world

of striving men and women. Its vision begins with society gone bad

and frustrating itself; it arrives at society perfectly realized as

immediate intercommunion and interaction. So the Church, the heavenly

society, recurs constantly in communal echoes of hymns and canticles:

_Ave_, _Agnus Dei_, _Benedictus qui venit_, _Salve Regina_. In the same

spirit Cynewulf had composed his _Christ_ upon the seven great antiphons

of Advent.[18] Familiar gospels are recalled. Most frequent echoes,

as of symbols most suggestive of common human experience, are of the

Psalms.[19] The artistic harmony is based upon the medieval conception of

social history as the redemption of mankind.

The word allegory has come to suggest vagueness, or conventionalization,

or fancy. None of these has any place in the _Divina Commedia_.

Allegorical, indeed, it may be called in a sense large enough to include

_Piers Plowman_, the _Faerie Queene_, and the _Pilgrim’s Progress_;

but no other allegory is so large in scope, so consistent and complete

in composition. For such details as the sacred chariot, the eagle,

wolf, and dragon (II. xxxii) we search the carved capitals and the

windows; but including all these and ranging beyond them is the constant

interpretation of the whole sensible, transitory world as typical of the

eternal. Ephemeral matters, politics, even quarrels and grudges (I. xvi.

73), are interpreted permanently. The intensely specific realism is made

constantly to serve idealization. Human life is revealed _sub specie

æternitatis_.

For life beyond is seen as the prolongation of the line that we give to

life here and now. Its motive power throughout is love radiating from

God and leading men back to him. The disturbance of life is sin. The

horror of the _Inferno_ is of sin as perversion. The warpings of life

there tormenting Italians or ancients are typical to the fearsome degree

of revealing our own. Thus the course of the _Divina Commedia_ is of

ideas and principles of action so embodied as to lead emotion on. What

is familiar in lyric is here carried through a whole conception of life.

Theology is translated through vision into emotion and will, as if lyric

were carried through into drama.

Thus the persons are typical, not merely as wearing recognizable costumes

and uttering appropriate sentiments, but more intensely as acting in

our drama. The thieves transformed into serpents, which in turn absorb

them (I. xxv), are thus akin artistically to the sculpture of medieval

capitals. They are not pictorial imitation of the other arts, as are

the conventional descriptive pauses of the _Roman de la Rose_ and the

_poetriæ_; for they are narrated. There is no ecphrasis.[20] The method

is never static. The speaking flames move.

As a little cloud ascends, so moved each flame along the throat

of the chasm, none showing its theft, each stealing away a

sinner. I. xxvi. 39.

Such narrative progress in detail is integral with the progress of the

total symbolism toward culmination. The famous ascent in Paradise moves

both in and by itself and with the movement of the whole.

Now were my eyes fixed again on the face

of my lady, and my mind with them,

and from every other thought were removed.

And she smiled not; but “Were I to smile”,

she began, “thou wouldst fare

as Semele when she turned to ashes;

For my beauty, which up the stair

of the eternal palace kindleth more and more,

as thou hast seen, the higher it ascends,

Were it not tempered, is so radiant

that thy mortal power at its flash

would be foliage shriveled by thunderbolt.”

III. xxi. 1.

In method, as in degree, this is the individual achievement of a great

poet; in kind the symbolism is characteristically medieval. For in

detail and in total conception the _Divina Commedia_ starts not with the

individual event or person, not with Beatrice Portinari,[21] but with the

idea. Whether Dante recalls a youthful love is a question so subordinate

as to be artistically immaterial. He has not sublimated earthly passion

into heavenly. His conception is heavenly from the beginning, and

progressively throughout. He carries a single, controlling idea forward

imaginatively, stage by stage. Each stage is vivid with intensely

specific realism; but this realism, as that of the carved capitals, is

neither the object nor the occasion; it is only the imaginative means

to impress the idea. The idea is constant; it is beginning and end. The

final vision is not transformation; it is conclusion.

Such grasp of poetic movement doubtless owed much to Vergil. Dante’s

homage to the “courteous soul of Mantua” (I. ii. 58) is more than

conventional tribute.

Art thou then that Vergil and that spring which spreads so

large a stream of speech?... O poet’s honor and light, may the

long zeal avail me and the great love which made me search thy

volume. Thou art my master and my author, thou alone he from

whom I took the fair style that hath brought me honor. I. i.

79.[22]

The larger narrative movement of the _Æneid_, which quite escaped the

average medieval romancer, was not lost on so great a composer. Of all

the ancient art available in his time this alone could give him that

instruction. But if the _Æneid_ inspired him with its poetic scope and

reach, and gave him a sense of the poetic energy of onwardness, it did

not prescribe his method. The _Divina Commedia_ is not an imitation of

the _Æneid_. Its movement is both different and more compelling.

For the movement of the _Divina Commedia_ is at once logical and

imaginative, an extraordinary fusion of rhetoric and poetic. The first

canto closes with a forecast of the whole progress.

Lead me where thou hast said, that I may see the gate of St.

Peter. I. i. 134.

Throughout, the progress is so reasoned that it can be mapped and

briefed. None the less the _Divina Commedia_ is a great exemplar of

poetic movement. It arrives not at a demonstration, but at a catharsis.

Its conception, at once constant and widening, is carried forward

imaginatively. We move not from proposition to proposition, but from

scene to scene. The _Faerie Queene_, no less imaginative in detail,

has none of this force of imaginative composition. The _Christ_ in the

earliest middle age, the _Pearl_ in the latest, have far less scope. The

_Divina Commedia_ reveals the whole capacity of medieval symbolism by

sustained poetic movement.

So sustained a movement has no time for the conventional descriptive

pause. In spite of the abundance of its illustrations, the _Divina

Commedia_ is never merely pictorial.[23] Nor is the steady movement

monotonous. The transitions are beautifully various. _Purgatorio_

does not repeat the plan of _Inferno_; and it has more interaction.

As the action advances through _Purgatorio_ into _Paradiso_, there is

increasing exposition of ideas. There is even the Gothic variety that

enlivens the cathedrals. The grotesque devils of the twenty-second canto

of _Inferno_ are brothers to those on the capitals of Vézelay. At the

other pole of sentiment, the eleventh canto of _Purgatorio_ opens with a

poetic amplification of the Paternoster. The fifth canto of _Paradiso_

is Justinian’s summary of the history of Rome. But the variety is never

merely picturesque. Never merely aggregative, the variations of the

_Divina Commedia_ are more like those of Bourges than like those of

Chartres. They are still more like the variations in a symphony.

The logical order fused with this poetic movement is: _Inferno_,

the punishment of self-enslavement; _Purgatorio_, the progress of

self-mastery; _Paradiso_, the rapture of self-expression. From perversion

and frustration we pass through discipline to the liberation of

personality.

Then said my lady, “Let out the heat of thy desire, so that

thy utterance bear the print of the press within; not that our

knowledge may increase by thy speaking, but that thou mayst

learn how to tell thy thirst, that drink be given thee.” III.

xvii. 7.

It is through this liberation of personality that the human drama becomes

divine. “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have

it more abundantly.” For the _Divina Commedia_ is far more than a

vindication of free will; it is a vision of the progressive freeing of

the will. After the terrible revelation of hell as self-enslavement, free

will is asserted from purgatory as essential to divine justice.

Ye who are living refer every occasion only up to heaven, as if

all moved of itself by necessity. Were it so, in you would be

destroyed free will; and it would not be justice to have joy

for good, mourning for evil. II. xvi. 67.

But this liberty is not innate merely as are the physical impulses. God’s

gift of free will is a progressive energizing of man’s struggle to will

higher and higher till he attains perfect freedom.

Now in order that to this [will] every other may be reunited,

innate in you is the virtue that giveth counsel,[24] and ought

to guard the threshold of assent. This is the principle whence

is derived the scheme of desert in you according as it collects

and winnows good loves and guilty. Those whose scheme of life

went to the foundation became aware of this innate liberty, and

so left ethics to the world. III. xviii. 61.

So developed by the mutual response of God and man, free will becomes the

greatest gift (“lo maggior don,” III. v. 19). Heaven is the final release

and achievement of personality.

The culmination is quite beyond what is usually meant by

self-satisfaction. As personality can be progressively released and

achieved only through giving, so the self-expressive joy of _Paradiso_

contributes to the common joy. It is simultaneously giving and receiving,

utterance and response. No longer, as the poet of _Pearl_ discerned again

in the parable of the laborers, is giving and receiving frustrated by

competition. Immediately every joy is the joy of all, every expression of

personality is a gift and a response, in the creative activity of love.

As in a fish-pond that is still and clear the fishes draw to

what so comes from without that they deem it their food, so saw

I more than a thousand radiances draw toward us, and in each

was heard: “Lo! one who will increase our loves.” III. v. 100.

I saw more radiances, living and conquering, make of us a

center and of themselves a corona, sweeter in voice than lucent

to behold. III. x. 64.

The amazing figures in which this triumph is symbolized sum up also

Dante’s poetic: vividness of charged simplicity in expression carried

forward in a composition of progressive movement.

No other single work of medieval art conveys so much of the middle age;

for no other concedes so little to medieval convention. The centuries of

St. Bernard, Adam of St. Victor, and St. Thomas Aquinas, of Chrétien and

the _Roman de la Rose_, of Vézelay and Bourges, like other centuries,

had their artistic conventions. These, as too often in other centuries,

seemed to the makers of manuals to comprise the theory of art. Such

theory needs both correction and expansion from great artists.

D. THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL VERSE NARRATIVE IN CHAUCER

Chaucer, more clearly than most poets, shows the whole artistic progress

from expert verse translation through convention accepted and convention

modified to creation. From the _Roman de la Rose_ through his study of

Boccaccio to the _Canterbury Tales_ his work comprehends in itself much

of the history of medieval poetic. He was ahead of his time; that is,

he was artist enough to feel new currents of thought and new ventures

in expression, to bend toward these the received modes, and finally

to enlarge the scope and perfect the technic of medieval narrative.

The Renaissance movement, which he was quick to feel in Italy, he

could not communicate to England. It had to be brought again, and in

different ways. But the art of narrative, most popular of medieval

arts, he led from accepted poetic habits in new directions and to new

achievements. Consummate metrist, he knew what to do in English with

the richer couplet, the more fluent stanza, of Boccaccio. Composition

in the larger sense he learned more slowly. The road is long from the

leisurely conventions of the _Book of the Duchesse_ to the intensity

of the _Pardoner_ and the sustained poetic progress of the _Troilus

and Criseyde_. All the more clearly he illuminates the significance of

previous experiments by revealing what was vital in their technic. For

since he was a studious artist, and even a critic, as well as a genius,

his career epitomizes the progress of medieval verse narrative. Medieval

poetic may fairly be said to end with his death in 1400.

1. Poetic Conventions in the Earlier Poems

The first part of the _Roman de la Rose_, Chaucer’s literary point of

departure, represents the conventions and the mood of the fashionable

fiction of courtly love. Its allegory is simple personification carried

out by costume and attitude, less by speech and action, appropriate to

type. It is less narrative than descriptive. Relying mainly on style, it

has so little vigor of composition that in spite of its great medieval

vogue it has been long dead. Chaucer’s translation shows no small command

of diction and of verse. Though the French octosyllabic and the English

line of four stresses differed less then than later, translation had

much to teach a bilingual poet not only reading, but constantly hearing

and speaking two rhythms. It made him early aware both of the difference

between the two and of the directions of development for the English of

his choice. He has already found variations to evade the tendency of this

short couplet toward jingling monotony; and still more verse control is

evident in his catching one of the chief charms of the original, its easy

fluency.

His own _Book of the Duchesse_ uses the same magazine of courtly love:

rehearsal of a tale of Ovid, May-morning dream-vision, “love’s servant”

in “complaint,” praise of the lady, tapestry description, couplet of

facile fluency. How much poetry could still be conveyed through these

symbols he showed later in the pageant prologue to the _Legend of Good

Women_. Kittredge[25] finds the conventional dream manipulated in the

_Book of the Duchesse_ to give some sense of actual dreaming. Every

attentive reader has been relieved by the realism of the half-grown,

unbroken dog,

A whelp that fauned me as I stood,

That hadde y-folowed, and coude no good.

Hit com and creep to me as lowe,

Right as hit hadde me y-knowe,

Hild doun his heed and joyned his eres,

And leyde al smothe doun his heres.

389-394.[26]

The touch of individualizing stands out, indeed, because most of the

description is conventionally generalized and decorative; but it may be

significant as forecasting Chaucer’s later use of gesture, and as a means

of transition. There is an attempt at variety in the punctuation of the

long praise of the lady by dialogue; and the closing dialogue is really

rapid. An expert metrist in conventional modes, with originality enough

for pleasing variations—we can hardly read more of Chaucer into the _Book

of the Duchesse_. The Ovidian thin lucidity of narrative, the usual

aggregation, the involution, above all the stalling for description, show

that he was not yet giving his mind to narrative composition.

He was spurred to explore narrative by the timely stimulus of

Italy. First of English artists to learn there, he was among the

most responsive. The _Parlement of Foules_ shows immediate artistic

development and promises more. The verse is enriched. The five-stress

line, so near the beginning of its long English history, is realized not

only for variety, but for flexibility to the mood of speech. Most of its

typical variations, shift of cæsura, syncope, doubling of the unstress as

in anapest or dactyl, close on stress or on unstress, are here. Though

there is not yet that narrative fluency which makes the verse constantly

further the story, there is narrative stanza. Stanza, of course, was no

innovation. Such set lyric forms as _balade_ and _rondel_, which were

to hold their popularity into the sixteenth century, were exploring the

technic of refrain. Linking refrain, used simply in verse narrative,[27]

was carried in _Pearl_ to intricate harmonies. In French and in English,

stanza was an assured technic. But its narrative development owes much

to Chaucer. His adaptation of the Italian stanza in the _Parlement of

Foules_ opened the way toward that technical mastery which is one of the

characteristic achievements of his narrative.

The _Parlement of Foules_ shows development thus in detail. The total

composition, the movement of the whole, is still to seek. Here again

are conventional allegory, this time mainly from Alain de Lille,[28]

rehearsal from the medieval treasury, dream-vision, decorative

description, without any narrative progress. But the allegory is vivified

as in _Piers Plowman_. The classes are differentiated by the lively

speech of their representatives. The interaction, though elementary, is

more than mere _débat_. There is even approach to individual character in

distinguishing the second tercel from the first. In these modifications

there is promise[29] of a still more characteristic achievement, the

interludes of the _Canterbury Tales_.

2. Poetic Innovation in _Troilus and Criseyde_

The narrative stanza of _Troilus and Criseyde_ is a technical triumph.

Even the rich harmonies of The _Faerie Queene_ hardly dispute its

eminence; for they are adjusted rather to description. Chaucer’s stanza

is narrative in sure and fluent onwardness. It so furthers the movement

of the story as rarely to invite separate attention, so deftly merges

with the other means of narrative suggestion that its values transpire

not from quoting this stanza or that, but from reading on and on. No

other verse narrative is more satisfying to read aloud. The subtle

harmonies of _Pearl_ are adapted to lyric reflection. The easy movement

of _Childe Harold_ pauses again and again on picturesqueness. A fairer

comparison is Byron’s triumph of fluency, _Don Juan_. Those stanzas

have the same achievement of onwardness where Byron gives himself to

the story. Chaucer’s story, deeper, more consistent, more progressive,

is always his main concern. His distinction is in making his stanza

constantly serve this.

For _Troilus and Criseyde_ carries verse narrative beyond Boccaccio’s

scope and beyond his own habit.[30] Perhaps the challenge of the

_Filostrato_ was the more provocative because he already suspected

the ways of romance. Here was the perennial situation of romance with

a new emphasis. Passion, so little realized in French, was presented

convincingly; and the lover’s complaint was not the conventional tribute

of devotion, but the anguish of disillusionment. Passion, then, left dust

and ashes. The French literary lover had been forever wooing a literary

goddess; the Italian lover, smitten with the beauty of flesh and blood,

won it easily, held it in ecstasy, and could not recover from its loss.

As if divining here something truer, which yet was not the whole truth,

Chaucer planned one of the few great love-stories. What the romances

generally left out of Tristram and Iseult, what only the best of them saw

in Lancelot and Guenevere as motive, was the effect of illicit love on

character. Passion, stronger than _amour courtois_, was it stronger than

the whole social code? And what then? Chaucer lived to present love in

other aspects and in other ways; but first Boccaccio’s story moved him to

carry the passion of the noble and beautiful through to its bitter end.

He composed not at all a French romance, not the lyric Italian story, but

a verse narrative at once so realistic and so dramatic that we naturally

call it a novel.

_Amour courtois_, both conventional and feeble as plot, he relegated to

the setting as one of the fictions of high society. Troilus languishes

appropriately and writes a complaint. Cressid keeps a proper distance.

Pandarus makes allowance for moonshine. What Chrétien had found surely

appealing in social romance, the habit of society itself, is appropriated

as amply as in _Gawain and the Green Knight_. Medieval rendering of all

stories in contemporary terms is here carried into realism. Pandarus,

visiting Criseyde,

... fond two othere ladyes sete and she

Withinne a paved parlour; and they three

Herden a mayden reden hem the geste

Of the Sege of Thebes whyl hem leste.

Quod Pandarus, “Madame, god you see,

With al your book and al the companye.”

“Ey! uncle myn, welcome ywis”, quod she;

And up she roos and by the hond in hye

She took him faste, and seyde, “This night thrye—

To goode mote it turne—of yow I mette.”

And with that word she doun on bench him sette.

II. 81-91.

The dialogue is more than realistic; it gives leads for the story.

Quod tho Criseyde, “Lat me som wight calle.”

“Ey! God forbede that it sholde falle”,

Quod Pandarus, “that ye swich foly wroughte!

They mighte deme thing they never er thoughte.”

III. 760-763.

Description, too, is made to serve the narrative economy. The garden

setting (II. 813) combines with the song of Antigone to turn Criseyde’s

mood, which is then revealed in their brief dialogue. Setting in _Gawain

and the Green Knight_, equally distinct as social background, oftener

picturesque as scenery, is less forwarding, less woven into the texture

of the story. The clue to this advance in poetic is in Chaucer’s

accompaniment of significant speech by significant gesture. He often

indicates the stage “business.”

With this he stente and caste adoun the heed;

And she bigan to breste awepe anoon.

II. 407-408.

Finally dialogue is used to bring a scene to an issue. _Stage business_,

_scene_, _issue_, the terms are not too dramatic for the method of the

passage between Pandarus and Criseyde over the first love-letter.

“But for al that ever I may deserve,

Refuse it nought,” quod he, and hent hir faste,

And in hir bosom the lettre doun he thraste,

And seyde hir, “now cast it away anoon,

That folk may seen and gauren on us tweye.”

Quod she, “I can abyde til they be goon.”

And gan to smyle, and seyde him, “eem, I preye,

Swich answere as yow list yourself purveye;

For trewely I nil no lettre wryte.”

“No? than wol I,” quod he, “so ye endyte.”

Therwith she lough, and seyde, “go we dyne.”

II. 1153-1163.

The scene becomes a situation. The eleven lines are dramatic not only

in presenting the situation as spoken and acted, but in developing by

interaction both character and plot. Chaucer has found how to tell the

whole story of illicit love progressively by revealing in speech and

action not merely type, not merely situation, which had rarely been so

used to its full significance, but character moving to its issue. In this

larger movement, sustained and advanced by progressive characterization,

_Troilus and Criseyde_ is the great medieval love story.

The achievement of creation becomes the more conspicuous on review

of what the story had been.[31] Mere unrelated episodes of the older

sources, mere scattered incidents in Benoît’s huge _Roman de Troie_, had

kindled Boccaccio’s _Filostrato_. Of its 5512 lines Chaucer used 2730,

or about half, but carried his own story to 8239. His addition, most

of the first half of his story, is devoted to the gradual yielding of

Cressid. Boccaccio has no such approach because he has no such person.

His story is of Troilus; and his Cressid, remaining the typical fair

inconstant that he found in Benoît, falls as readily into the arms of

her first lover as into those of her second. Chaucer’s Cressid is the

first great character of English fiction. The characterization, delicate

enough to keep her graciousness even in ruin, and to give the unashamed

materialism of Pandarus engaging frankness and humor, is dynamic. It

gives the story motive. Cressid is always dominant, not in having more

space, but in bringing about before our eyes alike the heartbreak of

Troilus and her own degradation. This is Chaucer’s achievement of

narrative progress. Cressid, we say to ourselves, _would_ yield to

Diomed. But though dominated by Cressid, the movement is of all three

characters interacting, of characterization advancing by stages.[32] Thus

Chaucer’s refocusing is neither modification of Boccaccio’s story nor

such variation as had been already achieved; it is progressive motivation

toward a significant issue.

3. Criticism of the _Poetriæ_

The dramatic interaction effective in _Troilus and Criseyde_ is less

continuous, though no less striking, in the Canterbury interludes. It is

not drama, it remains subordinate to narrative, partly because the time

for drama was not ripe, more because Chaucer knew verse narrative for his

own art. The bent of his genius he followed in both experiment and study.

One of his first technical achievements, the weaving of description into

the action, appears not only in progressive mastery, but also as distinct

theory. Here evidently he discerned as a critic the deviation and the

insufficiency of the poetic that he had learned at school.[33]

Thise olde gentil Britons in hir dayes

Of diverse adventures maden layes

Rymeyed in hir firste Briton tonge,

Which layes with hir instruments they songe,

Or elles redden hem for hir plesaunce;

And oon of hem have I in remembraunce,

Which I shal seyn with good wil as I can.

But, sires, bycause I am a burel man,

At my biginning first I yow biseche

Have me excused of my rude speche.

I lerned never rethoryk certayn;

Thing that I speke, it moot be bare and pleyn.

I sleep never on the mount of Pernaso,

Ne lerned Marcus Tullius Cithero.

Colours ne knowe I none, withouten drede,

But swiche colours as growen in the mede,

Or elles swiche as men dye or peynte.

Colours of rethoryk ben to me queynte.

My spirit feleth noght of swich matere;

But if yow list, my tale shul ye here.

_Franklin’s Prologue_, F. 709-728.

Let me tell an old British tale in my own plain way; for I am unversed

in ornaments of style. This is all that the Franklin’s prologue means

on its surface. The connotation beneath is inviting. Are “aventures,”

“layes,” “rymeyed,” “instruments” intended precisely? How much grasp they

suggest of early medieval poetic is perhaps beyond our determination.[34]

But the term “colours of rethoryk” occurs also in the _Hous of Fame_.

The interlude before the Clerk’s Tale has a sarcasm of the Host against

these same “colours” in the same connection. The Squire’s disclaimer has

the same significant terms as the Franklin’s, and the same point as the

Clerk’s reply to the Host. The satire in the Tale of the Nun’s Priest on

Geoffroi de Vinsauf confirms the suspicion that in all these passages

Chaucer implies specific criticism of the _poetriæ_.

For the language of the Franklin’s prologue, in spite of his disclaimer,

is literary. Chaucer knew as well as Shakspere that he who announces “a

plain, unvarnished tale” may command a better art than the rhetoric that

he disclaims. It is worth while to explore, therefore, the mention of

rhetoric in connection with story-telling, the conjunction of Cicero and

Parnassus. As _Sir Thopas_ parodies not only the conventional motives

of romance, but also particular faults in its conventional technic, so

Chaucer’s references to “colours of rethoryk,” instead of being taken

as general disparagement of grandiloquence, may well be sounded for

their particular significance. In any age, indeed, the man of letters

contemplating the rules of his art laid down by pedagogues is moved to

sarcasm; but Chaucer’s sarcasms may suggest specifically wherein the

pedagogues that he knew went wide of the narrative art that he came to

comprehend as artist and as critic. His reference in the _Hous of Fame_

merely glances at “prolixitee.” The passages in the four Canterbury

tales, ampler and more specific, together suggest that the application of

“colours of rethoryk” to narrative is a perversion, that Cicero is out of

place on Parnassus.

The notion that the citing of “Pernaso” and “Cithero” in the same

breath is meant to exhibit the Franklin as “a burel man” is dispelled

by literary history. Cicero as a master of style had long been invoked

to teach poetry. _Poetria_, as conceived by the medieval manuals,

is essentially elaboration of style.[35] That it is a distinct mode

of composition is never even hinted. Focused on diction and devoted

to elaboration, it draws upon the ancient _colores_ until poetic is

indistinguishable from rhetoric. Either, then, Chaucer is merely

accepting this merger, without particular intention in his “Pernaso”

and “Cithero,” or he is hinting that the very conception hinders

straightforward narrative.

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the English word _rhetoric_

denoted style generally, whether in prose or in verse. So _rhetor_ or

_rhetorien_ meant master of style, and was freely applied to poets. The

familiar reference to Petrarch, therefore, is usually taken as general

praise.

Fraunceys Petrark, the laureat poete,

Highte this clerk, whos rethoryke swete

Enlumined al Itaille of poetrye.

_Clerk’s Prologue_, E. 31.

Nor should we pause over the conjunction of “rethoryke” and “poetrye,”

were it not identical with that of “Cithero” and “Pernaso.” Even if this

pairing, like that, merely reflects medieval habit without reflecting on

it, the Clerk’s prologue as a whole is sufficiently definite. Repeating

the Host’s term “heigh style,” it goes on to consider Petrarch in this

aspect. The Host had been quite precise.

Your termes, your colours, and your figures,

Kepe hem in stoor til so be ye endyte

Heigh style, as whan that men to kinges write.

_Clerk’s Prologue_, E. 16.

Whether or not “heigh style” is a misappropriation of a phrase of

Petrarch’s, its implication here is both definite and significant.

“As whan that men to kinges write” makes “endyte” refer unmistakably

to _dictamen_.[36] The Host deprecates the perversion of this to the

telling of a tale. His sarcasm is directed not vaguely at grandiloquence,

but specifically at the application of _dictamen_ to story-telling. To

measure its significance, one must read the doctrine pervading _poetria_

and _dictamen_ alike. That doctrine is rhetoric; it is nothing more and

nothing else.

The Clerk, taking up “heigh style,” admits that it is a hindrance in

Petrarch’s descriptive opening.

I seye that first with heigh style he endyteth,[37]

Er he the body of his tale wryteth,

A proheme, in the which discryveth he

Pemond and of Saluces the contree,

And speketh of Apennyn, the hilles hye

That been the boundes of West Lumbardye,

And of Mount Vesulus in special,

Where as the Poo, out of a welle smal,

Taketh his firste springing and his sours,

That estward ay encreseth in his cours

To Emelward, to Ferrare, and Venyse,

The whiche a long thing were to devyse.

And trewely, as to my Iugement,

Me thinketh it a thing impertinent.

_Clerk’s Prologue_, E. 41-54.

What the Clerk is made to challenge here in the application of “heigh

style” to a tale is the separable description. No device for dilation

was more magnified in the _poetriæ_. More than apostrophe, contrast, and

other “colours,” it was inculcated to give poetry what Chaucer’s eagle

calls

gret prolixitee

Of termes of philosophye,

Of figures of poetrye,

Or colours of rethoryke.

_Hous of Fame_, 856-859.

Chaucer’s _bête noire_ of “prolixitee” among these pedagogues was

Geoffroi de Vinsauf; and that brings us to the familiar sarcasms of

the Nun’s Priest.[38] They pursue not merely an ass, but still more a

perverted poetic. Chaucer pillories Geoffrey not merely because the

_Nova poetria_ is an Ovidian nightmare, but because its constant object,

alike in the rules and in the manufactured examples, is to inculcate the

stalling of composition by “colours.”[39]

The separable description challenged by the Clerk is challenged also by

the Squire, and in terms that confirm the significance of the Franklin’s.

A doghter hadde this worthy king also,

That yongest was, and highte Canacee.

But for to telle yow al hir beautee,

It lyth nat in my tonge, n’in my conning.

I dar nat undertake so heigh a thing.

Myn English eek is insufficient.

It moste been a rethor excellent

That coude his colours longing for that art,

If he sholde hir discryven every part.

F. 32-40.

The Squire’s later sarcasm is more open and more constructive. It may

well sum up Chaucer’s criticism of the deviation of poetic by rhetoric.

The knotte, why that every tale is told,

If it be taried til that lust be cold

Of hem that han it after herkned yore,

The savour passeth ever lenger the more

For fulsomnesse of his prolixitee.

And by the same reson thinketh me

I sholde to the knotte condescende,

And maken of hir walking sone an ende.

F. 401-408.

A rhetoricated poetic, though in other mouths than Geoffrey’s it has

often had a fairer sound, is always a perversion. The confusion of poetic

with rhetoric has always tended to obscure the imaginative value to

narrative of onward movement. The medieval pedagogues who reduced the

greatness of Vergil to mastery of all “three styles” of rhetoric would

doubtless have recommended embellishing the eloquences of _Aucassin et

Nicolete_ at the expense of the story, dilating the _Tombeor de Notre

Dame_, and making the _Chastelaine de Vergi_ static. Their conception of

narrative has no room for such composition as makes the Pardoner’s Tale a

fatal sequence.

Even Chaucer is too responsive to the taste of his time to abandon the

accepted means of dilation. Some of his own apostrophes differ from

Geoffrey’s to Friday[40] only in eloquence, not in method. But as early

as the House of Fame he was critically aware of the “prolixitee” inherent

in “colours of rethoryk.” The interpolated description, which he had

elaborated to make the Knight’s Tale magnificent,[41] he parodied in

_Sir Thopas_ and challenged through the Clerk and the Squire. In these

passages he reminds us that his achievement of narrative composition had

taught him to distrust rhetoric as a means of enhancing when the tale,

Pardoner’s, Squire’s, or Franklin’s, was really the thing. Further he

implies general denunciation of the staleness and ineptitude of medieval

rhetoric as poetic method.

4. The Poetic of the _Canterbury Tales_

Within the Canterbury frame narrative composition is widely various. The

early tale of the Man of Law follows the pattern of a saint’s legend;

the Clerk’s is rather iterative than progressive. In such cases Chaucer

has not recomposed; he has limited his art to style. What distinction he

could achieve even so is most conspicuous in the exquisite tale of the

Prioress. Without crisis, without even salience of moment, with no more

reshaping than the shift of focus from the horror of ancient superstition

to the beauty of childlike devotion, he wrought by adjustment of tone and

cadence a marvel of simplicity. The Merchant infuses into his _fableau_

realistic suggestions of senile sexuality; but the _fableaux_ generally,

Miller’s, Reeve’s, etc., are told in their typical form for their typical

values. Beast epic in the mouth of the Nun’s Priest, never livelier

and seldom so rich in suggestion, is little reshaped as a story. Even

the Wife of Bath tells her fairy mistress tale without originality of

composition.

The artistic interest of the narrative couplet in the Knight’s Tale has

been heightened by Dryden. Beneath the superficial differences which mark

each verse with its time is a difference of conception. Chaucer’s time

gave him easier variations; but he himself bent them narratively. The

larger movement of the Knight’s Tale conveys the magnificence of princely

chivalry less in action than in pageantry. Romance as story was not for

Chaucer, one might say but for the tale of the Franklin. Here he shapes a

plot complementary to that of _Troilus and Criseyde_ in briefer compass,

but with equal onwardness. The issue again is convincing because it is

reached by distinct stages. The fourth, for instance, culminates upon the

squire’s desperate triumph.

Doth as yow list; have your biheste in minde;

For quik or deed, right ther ye shul me finde.

In yow lyth al, to do me live or deye;

But wel I woot the rokkes been aweye.

F. 1385-1338.

And the next begins:

He taketh his leve; and she astonied stood.

In al hir face nas a drope of blood.

F. 1339-1340.

The crisis upon Dorigen’s taking all to her husband, thus fulfilling her

character while she flies in the face of the code of secrecy, is rendered

in dialogue of sharp interaction.

“Is ther oght elles, Dorigen, but this?”

“Nay, nay”, quod she, “God help me so, as wis;

This is to muche, and it were Goddes wille.”

“Ye, wyf”, quod he, “lat slepen that is stille.

It may be wel, paraventure, yet to-day.

Ye shul your trouthe holden, by my fay!

For God so wisly have mercy on me,

I hadde wel lever ystiked for to be,

For verray love which that I to yow have,

But if ye sholde your trouthe kepe and save.

Trouth is the hyeste thing that man may kepe.”

But with that word he brast anon to wepe.

F. 1469-1480.

No less eloquent is her reply to the squire at their meeting.

[He] asked of hir whiderward she wente.

And she answerde, half as she were mad,

“Unto the gardin, as myn housbond bad,

My trouthe for to holde, allas! allas!”

F. 1510-1513.

Such passages, as in _Troilus and Criseyde_, are narrative leads. The

last leads directly to the squire’s fine renunciation; for the tale of

generosity has been embodied in individuals working out its issue. Even

the illusion of the rocks is lifted above magic because they were first

an obsession of the anxious wife. An _exemplum_ and a tale of marvel have

been reconceived and recomposed in a moving story.

No triumph of Chaucer’s is more evident than the art of narrative

swiftness in the tale of the Pardoner. Verse narrative has nothing

more seizing, more breathless, more fatal. Yet even this is no greater

than the art that reveals the Pardoner himself. The tale is no more

triumphant than the interlude and the prologue. Rather they belong

together. So the ordinary romance told by the Wife of Bath is heard

amid the echoes of her brutal realism. The familiar story of the cock

and the fox takes both color and shape from the Nun’s Priest. Readers

opening their _Canterbury Tales_ for the second time, or the third or

the tenth, are as likely to turn to an interlude as to a tale. Even an

adequate account of the poetic of every tale would fall short of the

total artistic value. For the interludes play a part in a scheme more

ambitious than any other medieval “framework”. Gower’s plan in the

_Confessio Amantis_ is no more than a classified series. The preface

to the _Decameron_ proposes “a hundred tales ... told in ten days by a

noble company of seven ladies and three youths in the time of the late

pestilence ... in the which tales appear pleasant or rude chances of love

and other incidents of fortune happening as well in modern times as in

ancient.” After describing the plague in Florence, the “noble company”,

and the fair country house to which they withdrew for safety, Boccaccio

makes each of his ten persons tell a tale each day on the same general

theme. Thus he arranges ten groups of ten tales each, with charming

interludes of conversation, song, and description. But only the charm

of style saves the connective from monotony. The narrators are merely

mouthpieces; the interludes are not used, as by Chaucer, to bring about

contrast and interchange; the setting, though more attractive than the

allegorical fiction of the _Confessio Amantis_, is merely repeated with

variations. The ancient plan of _The Seven Sages_ remains inflexible

through all the versions. The king, stayed by the tale of the first

sage, finds the queen in tears, and is won back by her counter-tale to

reaffirm his sentence on the prince. With mere variation of the dialogue

this scene is repeated six times. Instead of being always different, as

in the _Canterbury Tales_, the interlude is always substantially the

same. Not only are the tales generally alike in form, being all by the

necessity of the plan _exempla_, but the plan itself is little more than

a vehicle.

The scheme of the _Canterbury Tales_ is at once more flexible and larger

in scope. The fiction of a traveling company offers more opportunity than

that of a confession, a trial, or even a house-party. But further the

interludes, instead of being pauses, whether pleasant as Boccaccio’s or

tedious as Gower’s, act upon the tales. They add an individualized teller

in action and interaction. The parody romance of _Sir Thopas_ gains in

point by the rude interruption of the host. Revenge for this may be meant

as excuse for the dulness of the following prose morality. At any rate,

the host’s rueful comparison between the wife of Melibeus and his own,

and the domestic comedy of Chantecler and Pertelote, suggest cues for the

marvelous prologue of the Wife of Bath; and her tale opens the way for

other _maistrye_ of women in marriage.[42] Though the grouping remains

conjectural because the scheme remained incomplete and the manuscripts

do not agree in the order, there is no doubt that Chaucer projected a

larger technic of dramatic setting. The general prologue describes each

teller by summary indications of make-up, costume, and personal style,

not in order to review medieval social classes, but to prepare for the

various interaction of the interludes. Far from exemplifying Chaucer’s

descriptive habit, it is specifically adjusted to a list of _dramatis

personæ_.

Medieval verse narrative was recited or read aloud. Chaucer had learned

early that setting need not interrupt its oral course. Making description

run instead in that course, he had learned further that inanimate

background is both less tractable orally and less significant narratively

than the environment of men and women. Dialogue, the most oral means of

liveliness, he pointed by gesture, and from mood and emotion advanced it

to interaction. Finally he staged his tales by characterizing the tellers

and suggesting their interplay with an audience. Though this is not often

carried out so dramatically as with the Pardoner, it is evident as a

narrative scheme. For the “framework” of the _Canterbury Tales_ is human.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] For Anglo-Saxon epic see above, Chapter V. E.

[2] For the Prose Edda as “a textbook for apprentice poets” see A.

G. Brodeur’s introduction to his translation (New York, 1916), which

includes the _Skáldskaparmál_ entire, and Gustav Necker’s introduction to

his German translation (Jena, 1925, vol. 20 of the series _Thule_). Parts

of the _Skáldskaparmál_ are included in R. B. Anderson’s translation,

_The Younger Edda_, Chicago, 1880.

[3] “Nulle intention littéraire, nul souci de l’effet ne gâtent l’absolue

simplicité du récit. Le style, tel quel, purement déclaratif, ne

s’interpose pas entre l’action et les vers.” Lanson, _Histoire de la

littérature française_, 25.

[4] For this see Faral, _Les arts poétiques du xiie et du xiiie siècle_,

93-97.

[5] Edited for the Camden Society by Thomas Wright, London, 1850;

reëdited by Montague Rhodes James in Anecdota Oxoniensia, Oxford, 1914;

translated and edited by James, Lloyd, and Hartland, London, 1923; by

Tupper and Ogle, London, 1924. See Hinton in _Studies in Philology_, 20:

448 (Oct., 1923).

[6] See the _exemplum_ quoted above, page 246.

[7] References are to the books and _distinctiones_ into which the

collection was grouped by some compiler, evidently not by Walter himself.

[8] The charm of Marie’s _lais_ as poetry is suggested by the metrical

versions of F. B. Luquiens, New York, 1911, which has a bibliography and

a valuable introduction. There are several prose translations.

[9] The appendix of adventures in _Aucassin et Nicolete_ seems to be

a later addition, not part of the original composition. Among the

translations, Andrew Lang’s keeps its distinction.

[10] Translation by Alice Kemp-Welch, London, 1903, with the French text.

[11] Prose translation of _Erec_, _Cligés_, _Yvain_, and _Lancelot_ by

W. W. Comfort, Everyman’s Library, 1914, with introduction, notes, and

bibliography. The fourteenth-century English translation of _Yvain_

(_Ywain and Gawain_) has been edited by G. Schleich with study of its

relation to the original, Oppeln and Leipzig, 1887.

[12] Lady Charlotte Guest, _The Mabinogion_ (1877), 162.

[13] See note 52 to Chapter VII, and Lizette A. Fisher, _The Mystic

vision in the Grail legend and in the Divine Comedy_, New York, 1917

(Columbia University Press).

[14] Book II of Dante’s unfinished _De vulgari eloquentia_ has several

passages suggestive of the preoccupations of his time and of his own

bent: “Si poesim recte consideremus: quæ nihil aliud est quam fictio

rethorica musicaque composita” (III, page 393 of the Oxford 1 vol.

text of the Works); “magister noster Horatius” (_ibid._); “grandiosa

modo vocabula sub prælato stilo digna consistere....” (VII. 395);

“ornativa vero dicimus omnia polysyllaba....” (VII. 396); “tota igitur

ars cantionis circa tria videtur consistere: ... cantus divisionem ...

partium habitudinem ... numerum carminum et syllabarum” (IX. 397).

For the three styles, see the indexes to ARP and to this volume.

[15] The references are to book, canto, and line. I refers to _Inferno_;

II, to _Purgatorio_; III, to _Paradiso_. The translations are adapted

from the convenient and familiar edition in Temple Classics.

[16] Tanto vilmente nel eterno esilio. I. xxiii. 125.

La concreata e perpetua sete. III. ii. 19.

E la sua volontate è nostra pace. III. iii. 85.

Non fu dal vel del cor giammai disciolta. III. iii. 117.

[17] See ARP, 128.

[18] See the introduction to Cook’s edition, Boston, 1900.

[19] See above, page 240.

[20] For ecphrasis, see the index.

[21] For the demonstration of this see Gratia Eaton Baldwin, _The new

Beatrice, or the virtue that counsels_, New York, Columbia University

Press, 1928.

Neglect of this medieval habit has hindered the interpretation of

_Pearl_. See the study of it by Sister M. Madaleva, New York, 1925.

[22] The passage refers specifically, though not in the usual medieval

terms, to Vergil’s diction. So do I. ii. 67, “la tua parola ornata”; and

II. vii. 16, “O gloria de’ Latin ... per cui mostrò ciò che potea la

lingua nostra.”

There are many references and allusions to specific passages; e.g., to

the fourth Eclogue, often interpreted symbolically in the middle age, in

II. xxii. 70; to Dido’s “Agnosco veteris vestigia flammæ” (_Æn._ IV. 23),

in II. xxx. 48.

Justinian’s vision of Rome in III. vi may be said to carry out the idea

of the _Æneid_ in having the same Romanism.

[23] See above, page 271. The sculptured reliefs in II. x, though

doubtless reminiscent, as many a medieval ecphrasis, of the wall-pictures

in Dido’s palace, are _exempla_, not decoration.

[24] See note 21 above. I owe to this book the interpretation of Dante’s

intention as the progressive freeing of the will.

[25] _Chaucer and his poetry_, Cambridge, 1915, page 58.

[26] A similar touch is added in the English _Ywain and Gawain_.

He bad his lyoun go to rest;

And he laid him sone onane

Doun byfore tham everilkane.

Bitwene his legges he layd his tail,

And so biheld to the batayl.

2592-2596.

[27] Lecoy de la Marche quotes from a versified morality on the Blessed

Virgin a passage exemplifying simple use of linking refrain.

Ne trova pas l’angeles vostre cuer vain ne vole,

Quand il semma an vos la saintisme parole;

Ne li fiz Deu meismes ne vos tint pas a fole,

Quant il sor totes femmes vos retint a s’escole.

A sor vos retint li verais gloriox ...

_La chaire française au moyen âge_, 284.

Thus it is used in the stanzaic _Morte Arthur_.

...

Lancelot sayd: “yiff I sayd nay,

I were wele worthy to be brent.

Brent to bene worthy I were”

...

3696-3698.

[28] _De planctu naturæ_, translated by D. M. Moffat, New York, 1908

(Yale Studies in English).

[29] “We have already here some of that variety of tone, that dramatic

briskness, that air of gaiety mingled with romance.” Legouis, _Chaucer_,

85.

[30] “From Italy, and primarily I think from Dante, came the inspiration

to tell the story of Troilus in the _bel stilo alto_, to write in the

vernacular with the dignity and elevation which mark the great ancients.”

Root, _The book of Troilus and Criseyde ..._ Princeton University Press,

1926, page xlv.

[31] For Chaucer’s sources see the critical summary in the introduction

to Root’s edition (Princeton University Press, 1926) and the

bibliography, pages 567-569.

[32] Price finds the movement typically dramatic: rising action with

suspense and complication to the climax in Book III, peripety in the

exchange of prisoners, falling action in the yielding to Diomed,

conclusion on the despair and death of Troilus. PMLA 11 (1896): 307-322.

[33] For Chaucer’s knowledge of the _poetriæ_ see J. M. Manly, _Chaucer

and the rhetoricians_, Warton Lecture on English Poetry XVII (read June

2, 1926), printed in Proceedings of the British Academy.

The following pages on Chaucer’s criticism of the _poetriæ_ are adapted

from my _Cicero on Parnassus_, PMLA 42: 106-112 (March, 1927).

For the _poetriæ_ see above, Chapter VII. B.

[34] It is advanced, however, by Tatlock’s interpretation of the evidence

as suggesting rather Chaucer’s adoption of the “lay” as a literary

form than his use of a particular “lay” as a source (_The Scene of the

Franklin’s Tale Visited_, London, Chaucer Society, 1914).

Skeat notes the reminiscence of the prologue (appearing in better

manuscripts as an epilogue) to the _Satires_ of Persius.

Nec fonte labra prolui caballino,

nec in bicipiti somniasse Parnaso

memini, ut repente sic poeta prodirem.

[35] See above, Chapter VII. B.

[36] The “heigh style” in the Squire’s joke may have the same reference.

Accordant to his wordes was his chere,

As techeth art of speche hem that it lere.

Albeit that I can nat soune his style,

Ne can nat climben over so heigh a style,

Yet seye I this, as to commune entente,

Thus muche amounteth al that ever he mente.

F. 103-108.

For _dictamen_ see above, Chapter VIII.

[37] If _endyteth_ here also refers to _dictamen_, Chaucer is underlining

Petrarch’s rhetoric. But the word is not necessarily technical.

[38] B. 4537, seq.

[39] The reference to romance which follows the Nun’s Priest’s sarcastic

dilation of truisms suggests that here too, as well as in the direct

reference to Geoffrey, Chaucer was glancing at rhetorication of narrative.

God woot that worldly joye is sone ago;

And if a rethor coude faire endyte,

He in a cronique saufly mighte it wryte,

As for a sovereyn notabilitee.

Now every wys man lat him herkne me.

This storie is also trewe, I undertake,

As is the book of Launcelot de Lake.

B. 4396-4402.

Perhaps also he was thinking of Geoffrey’s dilation on the instability of

“worldly joye” (277-291, _Quid gaudia tanta_).

[40] “O Veneris lacrimosa dies!” 375. Chaucer’s reference is at B 4531.

The Pardoner’s apostrophes (C 512, 534, 551, 895) are subtly tinged, as

everything else that he says, with demagogy. Those of the Nun’s Priest

(B 4416, 4529), of course, are played flat. But in other places (E 2056,

2242, G 1076) Chaucer’s use of this “colour” seems conventional.

[41] The rehearsal of all the conventionally appropriate _loci_ of

description at the funeral of Arcite (A 2919-2966) sounds to modern ears

impatient, if not sarcastic. But, after all, the whole long passage is

the “colour” _occupatio_ (præteritio). The shorter _occupatio_ in the

Squire’s Tale (F 63-75) suggests sarcasm less by itself than in its

connection with lines 32-40 and 401-408 quoted above.

[42] See W. W. Lawrence in _Modern Philology_, 11: no. 2 (October,

1913), with his references to Kittredge and Tatlock; and for a summary

of considerations of the order of the tales, R. K. Root, _The poetry of

Chaucer_, 153-159.

SYNOPTIC INDEX

[For further references see the alphabetical index following.]

MEDIEVAL RHETORIC

A. SOURCES

I. Inheritance of _declamatio_, as typically through Sidonius, 77-87

II. Authorities

1. _De inventione_ (_rhetorica prima_), 89, 152, 175

2. _Rhetorica ad Herennium_ (_rhetorica secunda_), 90, 181

3. _Ars poetica_, 86, 88, 129, 159

4. (secondary) Martianus Capella, 92-95, 179, 193

5. (occasional) Cicero, _De oratore_, 143; Quintilian, 169, 175

B. FIELDS [Of the three ancient fields, deliberative, forensic, and

occasional, the characteristically medieval use was of the

third.]

I. _Dictamen_, 206-227

II. _Preaching_, 51-73, 228-257

C. COMPONENTS

I. Investigation (_inventio_) largely transferred to _dialectica_

(which see, and also _judicium_, _status_, _topica_), 172,

182, 192

1. _inventio_ perverted, 187, 191

II. Order (_dispositio_) little taught, 171, 180, 196; perverted,

179

1. conventional items for encomium, 30-32, 187

2. natural order and artistic, 180

3. traditional parts

a. exordium (in _dictamen_), 215, 221

b. statement (_narratio_, in _dictamen_), 215, 222

(1) _narratio_ perverted to narrative, 193

(2) _fabula_, _historia_, _argumentum_, 161, 175

c. argument (_confirmatio_, _refutatio_) largely transferred

to _dialectica_

(1) _petitio_ (in _dictamen_), 215, 222

d. conclusion, 222

III. Style (elocutio)

1. diction

a. three styles (_tenue_, _medium_, _grande_), 68, 144, 216

(1) _Rota Virgili_, 192

(2) high style, 270, 292

b. elegance (with review of correctness), 82, 216

c. aptness

(1) conformity to type, 35, 159, 187

(2) in _dictamen_, especially important for _salutatio_, 220,

221

d. elaboration (_ornatus_, _dignitas_), 79, 82, 216, 219

(1) descriptive dilation (through _poetria_), 85, 174, 180,

186, 294

(2) figures (in _poetria_ and _dictamen_) from _Rhetorica

ad Herennium_

(a) _figuræ verborum_

1. _repetitio_, initial repetition

2. _conversio_, end repetition

3. _complexio_, 1 with 2

4. _traductio_, iteration

5. _contentio_, antithesis

6. _exclamatio_, exclamation

7. _interrogatio_, summary challenge

8. _ratiocinatio_, questioning oneself

9. _sententia_, apothegm

10. _contrarium_, putting the opposite

11. _membrum_, clause in relation

12. _articulus_, staccato

13. _continuatio_, closing series

14. _compar_, balance

15. _similiter cadens_, rime on inflections

16. _similiter desinens_, rime

17. _annominatio_, word-play

18. _subiectio_, suggestion of reply

19. _gradatio_, linking repetition

20. _definitio_, definition

21. _transitio_, linking summary

22. _correctio_, substitution

23. _occupatio_ (_occultatio_, _præteritio_) specifying

under cover of passing over

24. _disiunctio_, syntactical separation

25. _coniunctio_, syntactical combination

26. _adiunctio_, salient key-word

27. _conduplicatio_, iteration

28. _interpretatio_, repetition in other words

29. _commutatio_, chiasmus

30. _permissio_ (_concessio_), yielding

31. _dubitatio_, feigned hesitation

32. _expeditio_, logical exclusion

33. _dissolutio_, asyndeton

34. _præcisio_ (_aposiopesis_), unfinished sentence

35. _conclusio_, syllogistic summary

[the ten _tropi_]

36. _nominatio_, onomatopœia

37. _pronominatio_, title or epithet for name

38. _denominatio_, metonymy

39. _circuitio_, periphrasis

40. _transgressio_, hyperbaton

41. _superlatio_, hyperbole

42. _intellectio_, synecdoche

43. _abusio_, catachresis

44. _translatio_, metaphor

45. _permutatio_, allegorical or ironical allusion

(b) _figuræ sententiarum_

1. _distributio_, itemizing

2. _licentia_, boldness

3. _diminutio_, disparagement

4. _descriptio_, descriptive detail

5. _divisio_, dilemma

6. _frequentatio_, cumulation

7. _expolitio_, iteration

8. _sermocinatio_, direct discourse

9. _commoratio_, iteration

10. _contentio_, antithesis

11. _similitudo_, simile

12. _exemplum_, instance

13. _imago_, comparison

14. _effictio_, portrait

15. _notatio_, ethopœia

16. _conformatio_, prosopopœia

17. _significatio_, suggestion, insinuation

18. _brevitas_, rapid narration

19. _demonstratio_, ecphrasis

2. sentence movement (_compositio_), 83, 216

a. _prosaicum_ (_epistolare_), _metricum_, _rhythmicum_, 220

b. _stilus Aurelianensis_, _Hilarianus_, _Isidorianus_,

_Romanus_, _Tullianus_, 194, 217

c. _distinctiones_

(1) _dependens_ (_cæsum_), 218

(2) _constans_ (_membrum_), 218

(3) _periodus_ (_circuitus_), 219

d. euphony, 83, 218, 221

e. balance, 42-48, 80, 145, 252

(1) prose rime, 252, 253

(2) refrain, 254-257

f. cadence, 69, 70, 250

(1) _cursus_: _planus_, _tardus_, _velox_, 223-227

IV. Delivery (237) and V. Memory (163) little discussed

MEDIEVAL POETIC

A. POETICA IN SCHOOL

I. _Prælectio_, 88, 129, 160-164

II. Metric and Verse-writing, 87, 96, 129, 131, 184

1. coöperative and cumulative school verse, 141, 191

2. merging of poetic with rhetoric, 76, 186, 193

a. doctrine from _Ars poetica_, 86, 159

b. figures from _Rhetorica ad Herennium_ (see above)

III. Kinds of Poetry, 131, 175

B. LATIN POETRY

I. Ambrosian Development, 116-118, 132

II. _Corde natus_ Development, 119-121, 134, 201

III. Other Hymn Measures, 121, 122, 136-141

IV. Dactylic and Spondaic Effects, 122, 137, 198

V. Rime and Stanza, 141, 197-203

C. SYMBOLISM

I. Allegory, 92, 104, 172, 173

II. Type, Prefiguration, Mysticism, 120, 124, 203-205, 239-245,

273-276

D. VERNACULAR NARRATIVE

I. Epic: Germanic (intensive), 145-149; French (extensive), 259, 260

II. Romance

1. conventions of composition, 196, 261, 267, 281

2. salience and movement, 263, 268, 269, 275-277, 297

a. dialogue, 266, 286

3. characterization, 265-267, 287-289, 298

III. Oral Values and Habits, 245, 285, 301

GENERAL INDEX

A

Abbo of Fleury, 130, 144

Abelard, 138, 167

_Abjiciamus_, 236

Abrahams, P., 141

_abusio_, 305

accentual verse, 107-123, 133, 141, 148, 184, 189, 190, 191, 194,

195, 197-205, 220, 226, 281

_accentus_, 219

Achard of St. Victor, 252

Adam of St. Victor, 201-204

_Adesto, Christe, vocibus_, 133

_adjunctio_, 304

_Adnue, Christe, sæculorum Domine_, 136

_Adoro te devote_, 205

Advent antiphons, 203, 273

Æsop, 23, 190

_Agnus et leo, mitis et terribilis_, 136

Alain de Lille (Alanus de Insulis), 79, 104, 172-174, 175, 189, 190,

238, 239, 241, 254, 284

Alberic of Monte Cassino, 214, 219, 223

Alcuin, 127, 128, 130, 136, 140, 142

_Ales diei nuntius_, 117

Alexandre de Villedieu, 184-186, 190, 198, 219

Alexandrianism, 19, 20

allegory, 92, 104, 130, 172, 173, 174, 185, 237, 240, 273

_Alleluia, dulce carmen_, 135

Allen, P., 184

alliteration, 44, 47, 105, 144, 145, 148

allusion, 40, 77, 79-82, 86

Alphorabius, 175

Ambrose, St., 56, 71, 102, 107, 108, 116, 123, 125, 137, 250

Ambrosian hymns, 111, 112, 116, 117

Ameringer, T. E., 1, 17

Ammianus, 22

_amour courtois_, 267, 281, 282, 286

_anagoge_, 237, 240

Anderson, R. B., 259

_Angularis fundamentum_, 134

_annominatio_, 43, 304

Anselm, St., 151, 152, 229, 254

Anthony, St., of Padua, 234, 249

_Anticlaudianus_ (Alain de Lille), 79, 104, 172-174, 189, 190

antithesis, 6, 43, 47, 80, 81, 237, 252, 294, 304, 305

_apangelticon_, 131

Aphthonius, 23, 31

_Apollonii_, _Gesta_, 141

_apostrophe_, 42, 188, 239, 296

_Apotheosis_ (Prudentius), 105

_Apparebit repentina_, 111, 119

appropriateness to type, 33, 35, 78, 83, 159, 187, 191, 194, 215,

220, 235, 261, 268, 274, 281, 284

aptness, 54, 62, 64, 78, 159, 162, 187, 191, 194, 214, 215, 216, 219,

220

Aquila Romanus, 95

Aquinas, St. Thomas, 202, 204, 205, 229

Arabic versions, 153, 175

archaism, 40, 65, 86, 100, 110, 227, 250

_argumentum_, 161, 175, 193, 222, 260

Aristotle, 3-6, 8, 18, 39, 42, 48, 66, 88, 90, 93, 97, 98, 100, 132,

151, 165, 167, 168, 170, 171, 173, 177, 178, 182, 230, 238, 249

Arnim, H. von, 8

Arnold, M., 271

Arnold, T., 144

_ars notaria_, 213

_Ars Poetica_; see Horace

_Ars versificatoria_ (Matthieu de Vendôme), 185-187, 190

_artes liberales_, 91, 92, 95, 96, 128, 153, 155, 158-161, 172-181,

189, 245

_articulus_, 304

_A solis ortus cardine_, 106

_Assint nobis sublimia_, 133

Atticism, 9, 41

_attributa_, 187

Aubry, P., 112, 113, 183, 201, 204

_Aucassin et Nicolete_, 261, 263, 267, 295

_Auctores_, 189, 190

_Audi me, Deus, peccatorem_, 136

_Audite, fratres, famina_, 133

_Audite, omnes amantes_, 114

Augustine, St., 17, 41, 43, 51-73, 88, 123, 130, 141, 143, 164, 190,

194, 252

_Aurelianensis_, _stilus_, 194, 195, 208, 217, 223, 226

Ausonius, 75-78, 89

_Ave, Maria, salvatoris_, 220

_Ave, maris stella_, 135

B

Baker, W. J. V., 51

_balade_, 283

balance, 6, 21, 42-48, 54, 61, 76, 80, 81, 83, 144, 194, 251-254

Baldwin, G. E., 275

_Bangor antiphonary_, 113, 118, 120, 122

Barry, Sister M. Inviolata, 18, 43, 51, 52, 70

Basil, St., 22

_Bataille des sept arts_, 181

_Battle of Lewes_, 198

Baudry de Bourgeuil, 141, 197

Bec, 151, 152

Becker, H., 38

Bede, 105, 110-112, 117, 119, 120, 123, 127, 128, 130, 131, 133, 145,

151, 175, 185, 193

_Benchuir bona regula_, 115

Bene of Florence, 213

Bene of Lucca, 213

_benevolentiæ captatio_, 215, 221, 238

Benoît, 288

_Beowulf_, 145-147

Bergman, J., 104, 105

Bernard of Chartres, 160, 162-164, 167, 168, 171

Bernard, St. of Clairvaux, 229, 232, 236, 242, 243, 248, 250-252,

254-257

Bernard of Morlaix, 109, 198-200

Bernard Silvester, 153, 190

bestiaries, 235, 236

_Bevis of Hampton_, 268

Bickersteth, C., 51

Blume, C., 99, 107, 113-115, 117, 120, 122, 123, 126, 136, 183

Boccaccio, 263, 280, 281, 285, 286, 288, 289, 299

Boethius, 88, 98, 100-103, 108, 121, 122, 129, 131, 137, 141, 151,

153, 155, 165, 173

Boissier, G., 74

Bologna, 208

Bonaventure, St., 176-178

Boncompagno, 212, 213

Bonnard, Fourier, 154

Bordeaux, 9, 75-78

Bornecque, H., 206

Boulanger, A., 1, 8, 9, 10, 13, 23, 41

Bourgain, L., 228, 229, 232, 234, 236, 241, 247, 248, 254

breastplate verses (_lorica_), 121, 133

_brevitas_, 305

Britt, M., O. S. B., 99, 183

Brodeur, A. G., 259

Browne, Sir Thomas, 46

Brunetto Latini, 178-182, 189, 193

Bunyan, 229, 245, 246

Burgess, T. C., 1, 17, 21, 31, 33, 40

Butow, A., 206

Byrne, M. J., 75

Byron, 285

C

cadence, 48, 49, 54, 61, 63, 69, 79, 83, 95, 144, 145, 163, 194, 218,

223-227

Cæsarius of Arles, 117

_cæsum_ (_incisum_, _comma_), 61, 218

_cæsura_, 103, 119, 122, 148, 197, 199, 283

Campbell, J. M., 1, 9, 22, 43

_Candelabrum_, 213, 214, 216-223, 226

_Cantemus in omni die_, 135

_Carmen de S. Liudgero_ (Uffing), 141

_Carmen paschale_ (Sedulius), 106

Carolingians, 126-149, 151

Carré, G., 184, 190

Cassiodorus, 90, 92, 95

catachresis, 185, 305

cathedral schools, 127, 151

_Cathemerinon_ (Prudentius), 104, 119, 137

_Cathonet_ (_Distichs of Cato_), 190

Chabaille, P., 178

Chaix, L. A., 78

Chambers, R. W., 145, 147

chancery, Papal, 223

_chanson de geste_, 259-260

characterization, 34, 187, 245, 261, 265-267, 287-289, 298

Chartres, 89, 95, 130, 151-153, 160, 162-164, 168, 184, 237

Chase, W. J., 87

_Chastelaine de Vergi_, 263, 267, 295

Chaucer, 16, 109, 188, 196, 245, 246, 260, 261, 263, 280-301

_chiasmus_, 47

Chrétien de Troyes, 196, 261, 264-267, 286

_chria_, 26

_Christ_ (Cynewulf), 273, 277

_Christe, redemptor omnium_, 113

_Christe, salvator hominis_, 136

Christopher, J. P., 51

Cicero, 6, 39, 42, 43, 48, 51, 54, 55, 56, 60, 65, 68, 87-90, 93, 94,

97, 142, 143, 152, 153, 156, 157, 160, 161, 168, 174, 175, 178,

181, 189, 192, 193, 214, 217, 227, 291, 292

_circuitio_, 305

_circuitus_ (period), 61, 219

Cistercians, 172, 233

_Claras laudes ac salubres_, 134

Clark, A. C., 206, 223, 224

Clark, J. M., 126

Claudian, 100, 105, 113, 152

_clausula_ (cadence), 48, 49, 54, 79, 95, 144, 145, 163, 174

—(sentence), 218

Clerval, A., 130, 150-153, 156, 158, 160, 206, 237, 247

climax, 45, 47, 49, 61

_cœnon_, 132

cogency, 7, 20, 21, 39, 57, 70, 247-249

_collatio_, 231

_Collationes in hexaëmeron_ (St. Bonaventure), 177

collects, cadence in, 225

_colon_ (_membrum_), 61, 218

_colores_, 152, 161, 174, 180, 186, 188, 194, 195, 290-292, 294-296

Colson, F. H., 89, 152, 169, 175

_comedia_, 175, 176

Comfort, W. W., 264

_comma_ (_cæsum_, _incisum_), 61, 218

_commoratio_, 305

communal poetic, 108, 123, 125, 139, 146, 204, 259, 273, 279

_commutatio_ (_chiasmus_), 47, 304

_compar_, 304, and see balance

complaint, 282, 286

_complexio_, 304

_compositio_ (sentence rhythm), 6, 20, 44, 48, 49, 54, 61-64, 68-70,

83, 84, 144, 145, 163, 215-227, 250-254

_conclusio_, 215, 220, 222, 305

concrete, 19, 42, 101, 105, 149, 152, 171, 203, 245, 259, 270, 282,

284, 286-288, 301

_Conditor supernus orbis_, 134

_conduplicatio_, 304

_Confessio amantis_ (Gower), 299, 300

_conflictus_ (_débat_), 140, 284

_conformatio_, 305

_conjunctio_, 304

Conrad, _Summa de arte prosandi_, 212, 214, 219, 220

_Consors paterni luminis_, 113

_constans_, _distinctio_ (_membrum_), 218

_contentio_, 304, 305

_continuatio_, 304

_contrarium_, 304

_Contra Symmachum_ (Prudentius), 105, 137

_controversia_, 79, 82, 83, 84, 215

conventions of composition, 7, 10, 15, 21-38, 48, 73, 78, 180, 187,

196, 236, 261, 267, 270, 280-282, 284, 291, 296

_conversio_, 304

_Corde natus_, 104, 119, 124, 134, 201

Cornificians, 158

Cornificius, 90

_correctio_, 304

correctness, 64, 65, 86, 160, 213, 215, 216, 221

cosmogony, poetic, 124, 173, 204, 241, 242, 244, 272, 273, 274

couplet, 199, 282, 297

courtly love, 267, 281, 282, 286

Crane, T. F., 235

Croll, M. W., 206, 223, 224, 225

Cruel, R., 228, 233, 234, 247

_cursus_, 216-218, 223-227

Cynewulf, 273, 277

Cyprian, St., 56, 67, 71

D

dactylic effects in accentual verse, 115, 117, 118, 133, 137-139,

199, 283

—in prose, 226, 250, 251

Dalton, O. M., 78

Dante, 196, 205, 224, 242, 261, 269-280, 285

Dares, 190

_De arte metrica_ (Bede), 110, 111, 120, 131, 151

_débat_ (_conflictus_), 140, 284

_Decameron_, 263, 299

_declamatio_, 10-13, 54, 77, 79, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 94, 105, 129,

142, 188, 215

_De clericorum institutione_ (Rabanus), 142, 143

_declinatio_, 162, 163

_De consolatione philosophiæ_, 101-103, and see Boethius

_De contemptu mundi_ (Bernard of Morlaix), 198-200

decoration, 7, 18, 39, 40, 41, 100, 186, 195, 203, 271

_De doctrina christiana_ (St. Augustine), 51-73, 130, 143

_De eruditione prædicatorum_ (Humbert de Romans), 238

_De faciebus mundi_ (Guillaume d’Auvergne), 236

_definitio_, 304

_Dei gratia_, 220

_De incarnatione Christi_ (Alain de Lille), 241

_De inventione_ (Cicero), 89, 142, 143, 152, 153, 175, 179, 181,

182, 214

_delectare_ (_docere_, _movere_), 64-68, 72, 73

Delisle, L., 181

delivery, 16, 57, 64, 97, 237

_demonstratio_ (logic), 154, 157, 164, 165

—(description), 180, 189, 305

_denominatio_, 305

_De nugis curialium_; see Map

_De nuptiis Philologiæ et Mercurii_; see Martianus Capella

_dependens_ (_suspensiva_), _distinctio_ (_cæsum_, _incisum_,

_comma_), 218, 219

_De planctu naturæ_ (Alain de Lille), 172, 284

De Quincey, T., 19, 44-47, 49

_De reductione artium ad theologiam_ (St. Bonaventure), 176-178

_De rhetoricæ cognatione_, 152

_De schematibus et tropis sacræ scripturæ_ (Bede), 130

_descriptio_, 305

description, 17-19, 35, 41, 79-81, 92, 100, 104, 105, 149, 161, 174,

186, 259, 260, 264, 265, 271, 277, 278, 281-284, 287, 289,

294-296, 301

_De scripturis et scriptoribus sacris_ (Hugh of St. Victor), 241

Desilve, J., 130, 131

_De vulgari eloquentia_ (Dante), 270

_diacrisis_, 161

_dialectica_, 88-93, 95-98, 129, 141, 142, 151-182, 190, 238, 248, 249

dialogue, 132, 140, 245, 246, 262, 266, 282, 286, 287, 301

Dick, A., 92

Dickinson, J., 156

_dictamen_, 21, 79, 143-145, 152, 181, 191-195, 206-227, 293

_dictator_, 213, 217, 219

_dictio_, 175

_Dies iræ_, 201

_dignitas_, 216, 219; see _ornatus_

dilation, 17-20, 46, 77, 85, 86, 101, 161, 174, 180, 182, 186, 188,

189, 193, 195, 237, 271, 291, 294-296

dimeter, 108, 113, 116, 117

_diminutio_, 305

Dio Chrysostom, 13, 17

Diomedes, 92, 131, 132, 193

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 6

diplomatic, 213, 214

_disciplina_, 79, 85, 91, 155, 165, 166

_disjunctio_, 304

_dispositio_, 7, 20, 21, 94, 97, 171, 179, 180, 187, 192, 193, 196,

215, 247-249

_disserere_, 97, 155-157

_dissolutio_, 305

_distinctio_, 218

_Distinctiones_ (Pierre de Limoges), 234

_distributio_, 305

_Divina Commedia_, 205, 242, 269-280

_divisio_, 305

_docere_ (_delectare_, _movere_), 64-68, 72, 73

_Doctrinale_ (Alexandre de Villedieu), 184-186, 190, 198

Dominican preaching, 233, 236-238, 249

Donatus, 87, 97, 130, 151, 158

Douais, C., 228, 237

drama, 132, 176, 289

_dramaticon_, 131, 132

Dreves, G. M., 99, 116, 126, 183

Dryden, 297

_dubitatio_, 42, 305

Du Méril, E., 200

E

_Ecce iam noctis tenuatur umbra_, 121, 136

_ecclesiasticus_, _cursus_; see _tardus_

_ecphrasis_, 17-20, 35, 44, 104, 174, 188, 274, 294, 305

_Edda_, 145, 259

_Edric the wild_ (Walter Map), 262

_effictio_, 305

Ekkehard I of St. Gall, 145

elaboration, 17, 40-50, 142, 161, 259, 292

_electio_, 192

elegance, 19, 65, 82, 161, 213, 215-217

elegiacs, 105, 106, 140, 141, 189, 193

elementary exercises, 10, 23-38, 97, 129

_Eliduc_ (Marie), 263

Elinand, 253

_elocutio_, 39, 57, 94, 97, 142, 191, 215, 216

_eloquentia_, 128, 169

Elss, H., 106

_En cæli rutilant lumine splendido_, 138

encomium, 5, 21, 22, 30, 31, 44, 71, 78, 105, 187, 194, 236

Ennodius, 84

enthymeme, 152, 237

epic, 145-149, 258-260

epigram, 42, 48, 76, 81

_Erec_ (Chrétien), 264, 266

Ermini, F., 104, 126, 129, 141, 145, 214

_Eruditio didascalica_ (Hugh of St. Victor), 153-155

Eskredge, J. B., 55

_ethopœia_ (_ethica dictio_), 34, 83, 97

Étienne de Bourbon, 235

Étienne de Tournay, 156, 208

_Etymologiæ_; see Isidore

Eunapius, 14

euphony, 83, 217-221

Évrard de Béthune, 184, 190

Évrard l’allemand, 189-191, 194

_exclamatio_, 304

_exegematicon_, 131, 132

_exemplum_, 180, 192, 235-238, 246, 247, 260, 262, 298, 300

exordium, 57, 215, 220, 221

_expeditio_, 305

_explanatio_, 216

_expolitio_, 305

F

fable, 23, 132, 178

_fableau_, 297

_fabula_, 96, 129, 132, 161, 175, 186, 193, 222, 260

_Facetus_, 190

_Faerie Queene_, 273, 277, 284

fairy mistress, 262, 297

Farabi, 175

Faral, E., 160, 183, 185, 188, 189, 191, 196, 261

_Felix per omnes festum mundi cardines_, 137

_Festum nunc celebre magnaque gaudia_, 187

Fierville, C., 89, 184, 194, 206, 216, 218

figures, 4, 9, 40-42, 54, 62-64, 66, 79, 87, 94, 96, 130, 162, 174,

184-186, 188, 189, 191, 193-195, 214, 216, 219, 304, 305

_Filostrato_ (Boccaccio), 285, 286

_finalis_ (_finitiva_), _distinctio_ (_periodus_), 219

_Finnsburgh_, 145, 147

Fisher, L. A., 269

five parts of rhetoric, 39, 57, 94, 97, 174, 177, 179, 192, 215, 216

_Floretus_ (_Fleuret_), 190

folklore, 146, 147, 260, 262, 267, 297

form letters, 208

Fortunatianus, 87, 95

Fortunatus, 106, 107, 110, 119, 120, 124, 151

framework tales, 296-301

Franciscan sermons, 235, 238, 249

Francis de Sales, St., 236

Frater Peregrinus, 233, 234

_Fratres, alacri pectore_, 133

_frequentatio_, 305

Fulbert, 151, 152, 197, 234

Fulda, 127, 128

G

Gaiter, L., 178

_gallicus_, _stilus_ (_Aurelianensis_), 195, 223, 226

Gaskoin, C. J. B., 142

Gastoué, 113

Gaudenzi, A., 206, 212, 213

Gaul, schools of, 75-90, 142, 226, 252

_Gawain and the Green Knight_, 267, 286, 287

Geoffroi de Vinsauf, 187-189, 190, 217, 221, 270, 291, 294-296

Gerbert, 128, 130, 156, 262

Germanic epic, 145-149

Gerould, G. H., 144

_Gesta Apollonii_, 141

Gibbon, 75

Gilbert de la Porrée (Gilbertus Porretanus), 151, 153

_Gloria, laus et honor tibi sit_, 140

Glover, T. R., 74

Godescalc (Gottschalk), 139, 190

Goliardic verse, 191, 200

Gorgian figures, 9, 42-48, 86; and see balance

Gorgias, 8, 9, 13, 41, 97

Gower, 299, 300

_Graalent_, 263

_gradatio_, 61, 304

_Græcismus_ (Évrard de Béthune), 184, 190

Grail, 261, 263, 268

_grammatica_, 63, 79, 87, 88, 90-93, 96, 97, 110, 127-132, 151,

153-155, 157, 159-162, 164, 169-171, 173, 175-177, 182,

184-186, 189, 195, 214

_grammaticus_, 76, 130, 141, 160, 164

_grande_ (_genus_), 68, 70, 71, 192, 216; see three styles

Greek, 61, 97, 110, 128, 158

Greenough, J. B., 122

Greet, W. C., 184

_Gregorianus_, _stilus_, 194

Gregory the Great, St., 113, 122, 123

Gregory Nazianzen, St., 9, 12, 21, 52

Gregory of Nyssa, St., 52

grotesque, 278

Guest, C., 264

Guibert de Nogent, 236, 240

Guido Fava, 213, 221

Guignet, M., 1, 9, 17, 18, 21, 41, 43, 61

Guillaume, Maître, 226

Guillaume d’Auvergne, 236

Guy of Warwick, 268

H

Hahn, S. F., 206

Halm, K., 74, 126

_Hamartigenia_ (Prudentius), 105

Hamilton, G. L., 190

Harmon, A. M., 206

Harrington, K. P., 198

Hartland, E. S., 261

Haskins. C. H., 150, 151, 152, 160, 175, 190

Hauréau, B., 153, 252

Havet, J., 128

Havet, L., 206, 223

Henri d’Andeli, 181, 184, 190

_Heptateuchon_ (Thierry of Chartres), 153

_Herennium_, _Rhetorica ad_, 42, 90, 152, 153, 175, 181, 182, 191, 195,

214, 219, 221

Heribert of Eichstätt, 197

Hermagoras, 97

Hermogenes, 23-39, 49, 87

hexameter, 105, 140, 141, 145, 148, 173, 184, 190, 197-199

high style, 270, 285, 292, 293, 294; see _grande_ and three styles

_Hilarianus_, _stilus_, 194

Hilary of Poitiers, St., 120, 123, 125

_Hildebrand_, 145, 146, 147

Hilduin, 253

Hinton, J., 261

_historia_, 96, 161, 175, 193, 222, 260

_Historia pontificalis_ (John of Salisbury), 156

homiletic; see preaching

_Honeysuckle_ (Marie), 263

_Hora novissima_, 190, 199

Horace, _Ars Poetica_, 85, 86, 88, 129, 151, 159, 186, 188, 191, 214,

219, 270

Hrotsvitha, 141

Hubbell, H. M., 1, 6

Hucbald, 131

Hugh of St. Victor, 153-156, 165, 173, 177, 204, 241, 256

Humbert de Romans, 238

_Hymnum dicat turba fratrum_, 120, 125, 203

hymns, 104, 106, 107-125, 132-140, 194, 197-205, 258; and see first

lines

hyperbaton, 43, 47, 305

hyperbole, 44, 185, 305

hypothesis, 37, 166

I

iambic rhythms, 116-118, 132, 133

_Ignis Creator igneus_, 114, 117

_Ilias latina_, 190

_illustratio_, 161, 171

_imago_, 305

imitation, 55, 58, 64, 162, 163, 171

improvisation, 13-16

_incisum_ (_cæsum_, _comma_), 61, 218

individualizing detail; see concrete

_In natale Salvatoris_, 201, 202

_insinuatio_ (exordium), 221

_Institutiones_ (Cassiodorus), 95

_integritas_, 65

_intellectio_, 305

_intellectus_, 165, 168

_interpretatio_, 304

interpretation of Scripture, 237, 239-244; see symbolism

_interrogatio_, 42, 304

_invectio_, 175

_inventio_, 7, 56, 57, 91, 94, 97, 154-156, 164, 172, 182, 187, 191,

192, 196, 215, 237

Irish epic, 145

Irish hymns, 106, 113-115, 120, 121, 122, 133

Isidore, 90, 95-98, 141, 152, 156, 175

_Isidorianus_, _stilus_, 194

Isocrates, 5, 6, 43, 46

iteration, 43, 44, 61, 252-257

Ives of Chartres, St., 151

J

Jacques de Vitry, 234, 235, 238

Jæneke, J. F. G., 38

James, M. R., 261

Jean d’Antioche, 181

Jerome, St., 62

Jocelyn of Brakelond, 233

John of Gaetà, 223

John of Garlandia (Johannes Anglicus), 190, 191-195, 215, 270

John of Salisbury, 79, 89, 151, 152, 154-173, 177, 181, 190,

208-212, 221, 224

_judicium_, 154-156, 164, 172

Julian, 54

_junctura_, 186

K

Keil, H., 74, 99, 126

Kemp-Welch, A., 263

Kennedy, M. J., 22

Ker, W. P., 145, 148

Kittredge, G. L., 282, 300

Kleutgen, J., 26

L

_Laborintus_, 189-191

Labriolle, P. de, 74

_lai_, 263, 290

_laisse_, 260

Lanfranc, 151

Lanfranchi, V., 103

Lang, A., 263

Langlois, C. V., 207, 223, 233

Lanson, G., 259

_Lanval_ (Marie), 263

_latinitas_, 216

_Lauda Sion_, 202, 204, 205

_Laudes crucis attollamus_, 203

_Laus erumpat ex affectu_ (v), 202

Lawrence, W. W., 300

Lease, E. B., 103

Lecoy de la Marche, A., 228, 229, 231, 232, 234, 235, 237, 248, 283

Legouis, E., 284

Leonine hexameters, 190, 199

Leonine (prose), rhythm, 223

letters, 21, 78, 79, 128, 143-145, 152, 156, 181, 191-195, 206-227,

293

_Libellus de exordiis et incrementis_ (Walafrid Strabo), 181

_Liber de causis_ (Gilbert), 153

_Liber pontificalis_, 223

_Liber quo ordine sermo_ (Guibert de Nogent), 236, 240

_Liber sex principiorum_ (Gilbert), 153

liberal arts, 91, 92, 95, 96, 128, 153, 155, 158-161, 172-181, 189,

245

_licentia_, 305

_litteralis expositio_, 240

Little, A. G., 235

Lloyd, J. E., 261

_loci rhetorici_, 152, 175

logic, 88-93, 95-98, 129, 141, 142, 151-182, 196, 238, 248, 249

_logica_, 97, 98, 154, 155, 157-159, 164-167, 169, 173, 175, 177

_lorica_, 121, 133

Loup de Ferrières, 128-130, 143, 144

Lucan, 100, 162

Lucian, 13, 18, 19

Luquiens, F. B., 263

_Lustra sex qui jam peregit_, 120

lyric, 123, 258; see hymns

M

Mabillon, 229, 232

_Mabinogion_, 264

Maggini, F., 178

Maigret, F., 103

_Maldon_, 145, 260

Malory, Sir Thomas, 268, 269

Manacorda, G., 74, 150, 183, 207

Manitius, M., 74, 126, 143, 190

Manly, J. M., 188, 289

Map, Walter, 196, 200, 246, 247, 261-263

Mari, G., 183

_Mariage des sept arts_, 181

_Mariale_ (Bernard of Morlaix), 198

Marie, 196, 263

Martianus Capella, 91-95, 104, 151-153, 172, 179, 190, 193

martyr poems, 105, 124, 129, 140, 141

_materia_, 192, 213

Matthieu de Vendôme, 185-187, 190, 192, 194, 218, 270

Maurice de Sully, 234

Mearns, J., 99

_media_, _distinctio_ (_membrum_, _colon_), 61, 218, 219

_Mediæ noctis tempus est_, 118

Medica, 13, 40

_medium_, _genus_ (_mediocre_, _temperatum_), 68, 69, 71, 192, 216;

see three styles

_membrum_ (_colon_, _distinctio media_), 61, 218, 219

memory, 13, 15, 57, 68, 69, 97, 162, 163, 192

Menander Rhetor, 21, 31

Méridier, L., 1, 9, 13, 17, 18, 31, 41, 43, 49, 61

_Metalogicus_ (John of Salisbury), 79, 89, 152, 154-172, 190

metaphor, 237, 305

metonymy, 185, 305

Meyer, W., 115, 136, 144, 223, 224

Mignon, A., 150, 153

_mimeticon_, 131

Misset, E., 183, 201, 204

Moffat, D. M., 172

monastic schools, 127, 128, 151

Monceaux, P., 74

_moralis expositio_, 240, 243, 244

Morte d’Arthur, stanzaic, 283

Mosher, J. A., 235

_movere_ (_docere_, _delectare_), 64-68, 72, 73

mysticism, 241; see symbolism

N

_narratio_, 57, 179, 193, 215, 221, 222

narrative movement, 20, 196, 246, 259, 260, 262-270, 275-278, 283,

284, 286-289, 293-298, 301

narrative, verse, 100, 105, 188, 260, 264-301

Neale, J. M., 198

Necker, G., 259

_Nocte surgentes vigilemus omnes_, 122

_nominatio_, 305

Norden, E., 8, 73

_Nos dicamus Christo laudem_, 134

_notarii_, 213

_notatio_, 305

_numerus_, 112, 175

O

occasional oratory, 5, 73, 78, 79, 229-231

_occupatio_ (_occultatio,_ _præteritio_), 296, 304

Odo of Morimond, 234

_œconomia_, 163, 171

Ogle, M. B., 261

_O lux beata Trinitas_, 107

Onulf of Speier, 152

_O quam glorifica luce coruscas_, 137

_O quanta qualia sunt illa sabbata_, 138

oral narrative, 245, 285, 301

order;

logical, see _dispositio_;

—narrative, see narrative movement;

—natural or artistic, 179, 193, 196

_Ordiar unde tuos, sacer O Benedicte, triumphos_, 140

_O redemptor, sume carmen_, 135

oriental tales, 261, 262

_Origines_; see Isidore

Orléans, 151, 184, 185, 194, 195, 208, 217

_ornatus_, 142, 178, 216, 219, 233, 270, 276

_O Roma nobilis_, 138

_O salutaris_, 205

Ott, E., 213

Ovid, 19, 129, 140, 141, 151, 262, 282, 294

Owst, G. R., 228

P

Paetow, L. J., 184, 190, 207

panegyric; see encomium

_Pange, lingua, gloriosi_, 106, 119

_Pange, lingua, gloriosi corporis_, 205

Panicali da Cingoli, 87

_Parabolæ_ (Alain de Lille), 190

Paris, 151, 158, 154, 184, 234

Parker, H., 199

_paronomasia_, 43, 48

parts of a discourse, 193

_Parzival_ (Wolfram), 269

_passiones_, 129, 140, 141, 144

Pater, W., 19

Paul, St., 61, 67-70, 73

Paulinus of Aquileia, 134

Paulus Albarus, 137

Paulus Diaconus, 133, 134, 136, 140

_Pearl_, 272, 277, 279, 283, 285

Pecock, R., 87, 184

Perdrizet, P., 228, 241, 252

period (_periodus_, _circuitus_, _distinctio finalis_), 61, 62, 64,

219

Peripatetics, 164

_Peristephanon_ (Prudentius), 105, 119

_permissio_, 305

_permutatio_, 305

peroration, 70, 79; see _conclusio_

Persius, 239, 290

Petit de Julleville, L., 12

_petitio_ (of a letter), 215, 220, 222

Petrarch, 292, 293

Petronius, 262

Petrus Diaconus, 134

_philosophia_, divisions of, 98, 154-156, 164, 165, 176-178, 181

Philostratus, 8-23, 38, 49, 76

Pichon, R., 74

Pierre de Blois, 208, 223, 232

Pierre de Celles, 241, 247, 250

Pierre de Limoges, 234

_Piers Plowman_, 245, 272, 273, 284

_Pilgrim’s Progress_, 245, 246, 273

plan; see _dispositio_, order

_planus_, _cursus_, 223, 225

Plato, 2-7, 39, 50, 98, 165, 167

Pliny, 12, 15

_poetica_, 157, 159, 160, 161, 174, 184, 186, 189; see _prælectio_

poetic diction, 149, 161; and see foregoing

poetic merged with rhetoric, 24, 39, 76, 85, 86, 100, 132, 144, 159,

174-176, 179-181, 186, 193, 194, 196, 215, 219, 270, 292, 295,

296

_poetria_, 185-196, 203, 214, 222, 237, 260, 261, 270, 271, 274,

289-296

_Poetria_; see John of Garlandia

_Poetria nova_; see Geoffroi de Vinsauf

poetry, kinds of, 131, 175

Poggio, 143

Polheim, K., 207, 228, 234, 252

_Policraticus_ (John of Salisbury), 79, 156, 157

Ponce, 226

Poole, R. L., 150, 156, 207, 214, 223, 224

Porphyry, 88, 98, 129, 165, 167, 173

_præcisio_ (_aposiopesis_), 42, 305

_prælectio_, 88, 129, 131, 152, 160-164, 171, 184, 186, 195

preaching, 51-73, 214, 225, 228-257

prefiguration, symbolic, 203, 240, 242, 244

Price, T. R., 289

_Primo dierum_, 194

_principium_ (exordium), 221

Priscian, 87, 92, 130, 151-153, 184

_privilegia_, 213

_probabilis_, 154, 155, 157, 165

progymnasmata; see elementary exercises

_pronominatio_, 305

_pronuntiatio_; see delivery

_prosa_, 195

_prosopopœia_, 83, 97, 141, 215, 305

proverb, 27, 180, 191, 192, 221

Prudentius, 103-105, 117, 119, 123, 124, 137, 141, 151

_Psychomachia_ (Prudentius), 104, 105

Puech, A., 103, 105

punctuation, 219

Q

Quadrivium, 153-155, 158, 159, 161, 173

_quæstiones civiles_, 142, 178

Quintilian, 39, 41-43, 48, 77, 84, 89, 90, 95, 97, 143, 152, 154,

157, 160, 161, 164, 169, 170, 171, 175, 178, 182, 222

R

Rabanus, 128, 129, 131, 132, 134, 142, 143

Rabe, H., 23

Rand, E. K., 89, 100

_ratiocinatio_, 304

refrain, 45, 140, 254-257, 283

_Refulget omnis luce mundus aurea_, 136

Reichling, D., 184

Remi of Auxerre, 95, 128, 130, 152

Renaissance, 226, 227, 250, 252, 261

_repetitio_, 304

_Rerum Creator optime_, 113

_Rex æterne Domine_, 118

_rhetor_, 76, 93, 97, 292, 295

_rhetorica ecclesiastica_, 213

_Rhetorica novissima_ (Boncompagno), 212, 213

rhythm (prose), 4, 6, 19, 20, 40, 43-49, 61-64, 68, 69, 70, 83, 84,

144, 145, 163, 214, 216-219, 223-227, 250-254

_rhythmus_ (accentual verse), 96, 107-123, 132-140, 152, 189-191,

194, 195, 197-205, 214, 220

Richard l’Evêque, 151

Richard of St. Victor, 253

rime (verse), 102, 103, 106, 120, 133, 135, 141, 148, 190, 194,

197-205, 220;

—(prose) 6, 47, 144, 252-254, 304

Rockinger, L., 207

Roger, M., 74

Rohde, E., 8

_Roland_, 260

_Roman de la Rose_, 109, 245, 274, 281

_Roman de Troie_ (Benoît), 288

romance, 260-269, 285-289, 291, 297

_Romanus_, _stilus_, 194, 208, 217, 223, 225

rondel, 283

Root, R. K., 285, 288, 300

_Rota Virgili_, 192, 196

Rutilius Lupus, 42

S

_Sacris sollemniis_, 204, 205

_Sadius and Galo_ (Walter Map), 262

St. Amand school, 130, 131

St. Gall school, 127, 145

saints’ legend, 260, 261, 296; see martyr poems, _passiones_

St. Victor, abbey, 153, 154, 233, 240

_salutatio_, 220

_Salve, crux sancta_, 197

_Salve, dies dierum gloria_, 202

_Salvete, flores martyrum_, 117, 123

Samson, Abbot of St. Edmund’s, 233

_Sancti, venite_, 122, 123, 136

_Sanctorum meritis inclyta gaudia_, 137

Sandys, J. E., 23

sapphics, 106, 121, 122, 136, 139

_satira_, 175

Saturnian verse, 110

Scandinavian epic, 259

_Sceva and Ollo_ (Walter Map), 262

schemata (figures), 42, 94, 96, 97, 185

Schleich, G., 264

schools; see Chartres, etc.

school verse, 76, 141, 164, 184, 186, 187, 191, 194

_Scoti_, 127, 128, 131

Scott, Sir Walter, 49, 50

Sedulius, 105, 106, 151

Sedulius Scotus, 133, 134, 136, 137, 139

Seneca, 160

Seneca Rhetor, 82, 95, 161

sentences; see _compositio_, rhythm

_sententia_, 42, 76, 304

sequence; see order

sequence, liturgical, 202

_sermocinatio_, 305

sermon; see preaching

sermon digests, 234-236

_sermones ad clerum_, _ad populum_, 232, 234, 249, 250

_Sermones vulgares_ (Jacques de Vitry), 234, 235

seven liberal arts; see _artes_

_Seven Sages_, 299, 300

Sidonius, 78-87, 89, 152, 182, 188, 190

_significatio_, 305

_similiter cadens_, _desinens_, 304

_similitudo_, 305

situation, narrative, 263, 288

_Skáldskaparmál_, 259

Snorri Sturlasson, 259

social romance, 261, 262, 286, 287

_Song of Songs_, 132, 238, 241

sophistic, 2-54, 61, 65-67, 71, 73, 75, 79, 82, 187, 188, 189

_sophistica_ (logic), 154, 155, 157, 165, 166

_Speculum doctrinale_; see Vincent

_Speculum humanæ salvationis_, 228, 241

Speier, 129, 140, 141, 152, 184, 186

Spenser, 273

spondaic effects in accentual verse, 115, 117, 118, 122, 198, 226

_Stabat mater_, 202

stanza, 201-203, 258, 283-285

statement of the facts; see _narratio_

Statius, 85, 100, 151

_status_, 89, 91, 94, 95, 175, 179

staves, Anglo-Saxon, 148;

—Latin, 199

Sterne, L., 19

Stewart, H. F., 100

_stilus_; see _Aurelianus_, _Hilarianus_, _Isidorianus_, _Romanus_,

_Tullianus_

_subjectio_, 304

_Sublime_, treatise on the, 41, 50, 66, 101, 205, 271

_sublimis_, _stilus_; see _grande_

_submissum_, _genus_ (_humile_, _tenue_), 68, 71, 192, 216

_Suffragare, Trinitatis unitas_, 121

Sulpitius Verulanus, 184, 190

_Summa de arte prædicatoria_ (Alain de Lille), 238, 239

_Summa de arte prosandi_ (Conrad), 212, 214, 219, 220

_superlatio_, 305

_suspensiva, distinctio_ (_dependens_, _comma_, _cæsum_, _incisum_),

219

syllabic equality in accentual verse, 220

syllabic scansion, 220, 260, 281

syllogism, 152, 175

symbolism, 120, 124, 125, 130, 173, 203-205, 237, 239-244, 245, 273

syncope in accentual verse, 115, 117, 118, 122, 137, 283

synecdoche, 185, 305

T

Tacitus, 22

_Tantum ergo_, 205

_tardus_ (_ecclesiasticus_), _cursus_, 223-225

Tatlock, J. P. S., 290, 300

_Tellus ac æthra jubilent_, 118

_tenue_, _genus_ (_humile_, _submissum_), 68, 71, 192, 216

_Théodolet_, 190

Theodulf, 127, 140

_Theodulus_, 190

Theon, 23

Therèse, Sister, S. N. D., 51

thesaurus, sermon, 235, 236

thesis, 36, 166

Thierry of Chartres, 152, 153

Thomas Aquinas, St., 202, 204, 205, 229

Thomas of Capua, _Dictator_, 212

Thomas of Celano, 201

three fields of oratory, 5, 72, 97, 177, 230

three functions of oratory, 64-68, 72, 73, 221, 230

three kinds of composition (_metricum_, _rhythmicum_, _prosaicum_),

214

three styles, 56, 67-72, 97, 144, 190-192, 194, 216, 270, 295

Thurot, C., 184, 207, 208, 213, 219, 226

_Tobias_ (Matthieu de Vendôme), 190

_Tombeor de Notre Dame_, 295

_topica_, 89, 167, 168

Toulouse, 153

Tours, 127, 151

Toynbee, P., 207, 224

_Tractatus de diversis materiis prædicabilibus_ (Étienne de Bourbon),

235

_traductio_, 304

_tragedia_, 132, 175, 176, 194

tragedy, 148, 285, 288, 298

_transgressio_, 305

_transitio_, 304

_translatio_, 305

Traube, L., 138

_Trésor_; see Brunetto Latini

_trispondiacus_, _cursus_, 223

Tristram, 263, 285

Trivium, 90-98, 127-132, 141-144, 151-182

trochaic rhythms in accentual verse, 119-121, 134-136, 197, 201-203

Troica, 13

trope, 42, 96, 185, 305

_tropologia_, 237, 240

troubadours, 258, 270

_Tullianus_, _stilus_, 194, 217

Tupper, F., 261

type; see appropriateness, prefiguration

U

Uffing, 141

_Urbs beata Hierusalem_, 134

V

Vacandard, E., 207, 223, 225

Valla, L., 184

Valois, N., 207, 223

Varro, 91, 98

vehemence, 16, 49, 50, 86

_velox_, _cursus_, 223-225

_Veni Creator Spiritus_, 132

_Verbum Dei Spiritumque_, 197

_Verbum supernum_, 205

Vergil, 19, 100, 129, 132, 141, 144, 151, 162, 174, 189-192, 196,

270, 276, 277, 295

vernacular poetry, 258-301

vernacular sermons, 232, 234, 249

verse, Latin, 87, 96, 102-123, 131-140, 148, 160, 161, 173, 175, 176,

179, 184-205, 214, 220, 258, 280

_Versus Flavii ad Mandatum_, 118

_Vexilla regis_, 106

Victorinus, 87, 92, 111

Villani, 178

Vincent of Beauvais, 96, 159, 174-176, 189

vision poetry, 241, 242, 272, 282, 284

_Vita et passio S. Christophori_ (Walter of Speier), 129, 140

_Vox clara ecce intonat_, 113

W

Wahrmund, L., 213

Walafrid Strabo, 131, 142

Walden, J. W. H., 23

Walter of Speier, 129, 140, 141, 144, 190

_Waltharius_ (Ekkehard), 145

Warren, F. E., 113

Webb, C. C. I., 156

White, H. G. E., 75

Wilkins, A. S., 42

Wolfram von Eschenbach, 269

word-play, 43, 48, 67, 81, 103, 105, 187, 304

Wright, T., 172, 198, 261

Wright, W. C., 1, 6, 8, 23

Y

_Yonec_ (Marie), 263

York, 127, 130, 140

_Ysopet_, 190

_Yvain_ (Chrétien), 264-266

_Ywain and Gawain_, 265, 266, 282

Z

Zeno, 98, 173