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The tales in this volume are among the earliest examples of the French
short story that have come down to us. They grew up in that little
renaissance of the XII and XIII centuries, when the tradition that
literature must be epic, that it must tell of national heroes or the
history of some great house, was passing, and the trouvere was free to
take his matter where he found it and make of it what he would. Celtic
traditions, stories from the East or the classics, every day happenings,
old legends and new manners, all were turned to account, and woven, it
might be, into a long romance full of leisurely digressions, or retold
in a tale admirably compact.
The short stories, like most of the literature of the time, were
composed in octo-syllabic rhyming couplets, verse narratives for
minstrels to recite. Of their authors for the most part we know nothing.
Their very names have vanished save in the few cases where they were
wrought into prelude or epilogue, and made part of the text: and to none,
with the exception of Marie de France can more than one or two tales be
attributed. So impersonal, however, are the stories that their being
anonymous matters little. We look to them not for the flavour of any one
man's mind, but for an impression of the age in which they were
produced, its shows and fashions, its manners, its sentiments and
ideals, its inheritance of early legends, of old, word-of-mouth
story-telling, stories which the trouveres dressed anew and preserved
to us.
The tales fall into three main groups: _lais_, _fabliaux_, and _contes
devots_. The _lais_, like the romances to which they are close akin,
belong to the courtly literature of the time and found their audience in
hall and castle. Denis Pyramus, a contemporary, in writing of Marie de
France, tells us her lays were "beloved and held right dear by counts
and barons and knights," and that "ladies likewise took great joy and
delight in them." Like the romances which they helped to foster and
which superseded them, the lays tell of love and adventure, of enchantment
and strange happenings. In them side by side with the knights and
squires and ladies move fays and giants and werewolves. Their material
is that of folklore and fairy-tale. A knight hunting in the _lande
adventureuse_ meets a maiden in the forest who leads him to a castle
with green walls and shining towers. There he spends three days, and
when he would return home again, learns that three hundred years have
gone by, that the king, his uncle is dead and his cities have fallen,
and there lingers but a legend of the king's nephew who went out to hunt
the white boar and was lost in the forest. Often in such lays the old
fairy-tale simplicity, its matter-of-fact narration of the marvellous
survives; and yet in their somewhat spare brevity they have a grace and
charm that lets one feel the beauty, the wonder, or the tragedy of the
story.
But the interest in the lays is not always that of the land of faery;
sometimes it is human enough, as in The Two Lovers where, despite the
old-time test and the magic potion, our delight is all in the maid and
the damoiseau "who hath in him no measure." Sometimes, as in Eliduc, we
find old, rude material--here a primitive Celtic tale of a man with two
wives ill cloaked by its additions of mediaeval Christianity--retold with
a strange gentleness and sweetness, and turned at moments into a story
of emotion and scruple.
Both types occur in the lays of Marie de France,--the best that have
come down to us. Besides her lays she versified a collection of fables,
_Isopet_, and translated from the Latin _The Purgatory of Saint
Patrick_,--one of those other-world journeys that preceded the Divine
Comedy. Yet apart from her works we have no record of her life. She
herself in the prologue of her fables, tells her name: "I am called
Marie, and I am of France"; but that is all, and it is only the internal
evidence of her writings, their Anglo-Norman dialect, and a few chance
hints and phrases that have made scholars decide that she was a Norman,
or from that part of the Isle de France which borders upon Normandy,
that she lived and wrote in England in the second half of the twelfth
century, and that the unnamed king to whom she dedicated the lays was
Henry II.
Marie makes no claim to originality of theme; in her prologues she tells
us she is but rhyming anew the stories "whereof the Bretons have made
lays." Just what the source was of the Celtic matter used by Marie and
other French writers of the time is a point of dispute among scholars.
Some will have it the tales came wholly from the Celts of Brittany,
others that they are derived only from those of Wales. But there is
reason in both theories, and the tendency now is to unite them. The
Normans of the continent had not a little to do with their Breton
neighbors of Armorica; sometimes they fought as enemies and sometimes
as allies. Again, in England the Normans early settled in South Wales,
and intermarriages were frequent. In both regions, then, they may well
have learned to know the songs and tales of the folk about them.
But were they Welsh or Armorican, both history and romance bear
testimony to the popularity of Breton minstrels in France during the
twelfth century. No feast was complete without their music. Their lays
were sung to the accompaniment of a little harp called the _rote_, and
seem to have been given in their own tongue. But constantly in Marie and
other writers we find a distinction between the _lai_ and the _conte_,
and it seems probable that the songs were preceded by a short prose
narrative, or that prose and verse were interspersed after the manner of
_Aucassin and Nicolette_. In just what form the tales came to Marie, how
much she added to them, we cannot tell. We only know that her rendering
of them was to the liking of the time and was long popular. Denis
Pyramus tells us her writings were often repeated and often copied,
and we have manuscripts of them that date from a hundred years after
her time.
As the _lai_ was the favorite literature of the courts the _fabliau_ was
that of the bourgeoisie, the proper kind of tale for telling at fairs or
guild-hall feasts, at gatherings where women were not present. In time
they are a little later than the _lais_, for beginning in the twelfth,
the thirteenth century is their chief period. They deal not with the
fanciful and the sentimental, but with the real and the comic; they
forego magic and miracle for the happenings of every-day life. "When a
tale is historic," says M. de Montaiglon, who has given us a complete
edition of this type of story, "or when it is impossible, when it is
devout or didactic, when it is imaginative or romantic, lyric or poetic,
it can by no means be classed as a _fabliau_."
At their worst they are often gross, often puerile, mere _contes pour
rire_ from which the laughter has long ago faded; but at their best they
interest by the very fact that they mark an early venture into the real.
They show us plainly the figures of the time, knights that put their
lands in pawn that they might follow tourneys, the rich bourgeois riding
armed to one of the great fairs, the minstrel ready to recite a _chanson
de geste_ or carry a love message. Light and gay, always brief and to
the point, they tell good humoredly of the odd chances of life, they
satirize manners and morals. Unlike the lays that idealize women, they
ridicule them; and they are ready to mock the villein, the lords of the
earth, or the saints in heaven.
Often the story they tell is of eastern origin, often one of those
stories that reappear in all times and among many races. Sometimes it
is only a situation, a figure or two that they give us. Two minstrels
meet and mock one another; each boasts his skill and decries that of
the other, each enumerates his repertory, and in so doing hopelessly
confuses the names and incidents of well-known romances of the time:
"I know all about Kay the good knight; I know about Perceval of Blois,
and of Pertenoble le Gallois." Each, as he brags, sets before us the
stock in trade of the minstrel of the time; each shows his own utter
incompetence,--and that is all the story. If the tale has a moral, as in
_The Divided Blanket_, it is but the moral of common sense. If it tells
a romance, as in _The Gray Palfrey_, it is still kept within the solid
world of pounds and pence. We are told precisely concerning everybody's
income. The heroine shows herself as accurate in her knowledge of the
property of the hero's uncle as would one of the practical-minded damsels
of Balzac. Her rescue is brought about not by the help of magic or
knightly adventure, but by a lucky chance; the conclusion turns upon a
sleepy escort and a horse's eagerness for his stable. Time and place,
again, are definitely specified. In the lays it is usually, "Once upon a
time," or "Of old, there lived a king," but _The Divided Blanket_ begins:
"Some twenty years ago, a rich man of Abbeville left his home and came
up to Paris."
More limited in scope than the other tales of the period, they at least
accomplish their aim, that is, they give us a swift and entertaining
narrative. "A little tale wearies less than a long one," says one of
the prologues, and most of the _fabliaux_ contrive to tell their story
in four or five hundred lines. Peculiarly Gallic in character, they
influenced the literature of other countries less than did the French
lays and romances, they were less often imitated and translated. In
France they were popular for two hundred years; then we hear no more
of them. But in the fifteenth century, when printed books and the stage
were taking the place of the minstrel, we find, as M. de Montaiglon
points out, similar plots and situations, the same shrewd though not
deep observation, the same fashion of treating the every-day incidents
of life from the comic point of view recurring again in the farces.
The church in the middle ages looked askance upon the minstrels and
their stock in trade; the sermons of the time denounce their "ignoble
fables," their "tales all falsehood and lying." But the church did
not only censure, it tried to supplant, and produced within its own
boundaries, quite apart from its more learned work in Latin, a large
body of narrative literature in the vulgar tongue. These religious
stories were written by lay clerks or by monks in the monastery schools,
and like other tales were spread abroad by minstrels. Those who recited
them were shown some favour, and M. Petit de Julleville quotes a
_Somme de Penitence_ of the thirteenth century which would admit to
the sacraments those "jongleurs who sing the exploits of princes and
the lives of the saints, and use their instruments of music to console
men in their sadness and weariness."
Besides the lives of saints we have tales of miracles performed by Our
Lady, tales of penitence, tales of good counsel. As a whole they are
less interesting than the lay literature of the time. Written for
edification, many of them are rather bare little "examples" and their
authors show themselves more concerned with the lesson in point than
with the story. Others are told with more elaboration and skill and
give us good tale-telling. Sometimes, as in _The Angel and the Hermit_,
an ancient story is given a mediaeval setting. M. Gaston Paris, in
_La Poesie au Moyen Age_, has traced the history of this tale, which,
originally of Jewish invention, has travelled all over Europe; a tale
that was given a place in the _Koran_, and that was told both by Luther
and Voltaire, besides its good rendering by some unknown clerk of
France. Another story, _Theophilus_, gives a version of the Faust
legend, and tells the story of a man who has made a compact with the
devil, but who in this case is saved in the end by Our Lady.
But if among the _contes devots_ tales as vivid as that of the proud
knight on whom was laid the penance of the cask are rare, there are yet
not a few that charm us by their mere sincerity and simplicity, that
interest by revealing to us the superstitions and the beliefs of the
time. They show us how vividly present to men's minds was the triple
division of the world, how concrete that heaven and hell, whence issued
on the one side the demons, on the other the Virgin and the saints to
take share in the combat on earth for men's temptation and salvation.
To turn the pages of a collection of these stories is like looking up
at the dim, stiff figures of some early fresco, to see again, say, the
strife of angels and devils for souls in The Triumph of Death on the
walls of the Campo Santo in Pisa.
Just as the spirit of the _fabliaux_ is found again in the farces, so
that of the _contes devots_ continues in the miracle plays. But when,
in the fifteenth century, prose drives out verse narrative, all three
types of tale cease. In the renaissance and for long after they were
neglected. It was in the eighteenth century, with its curiosity
concerning the mediaeval, that men turned back to the manuscripts so long
disregarded. Barbazan brought out a collection of texts, and Legrand
d'Aussy published a collection of abridgments of twelfth and thirteenth
century tales. Since then, various editors, both French and German, have
made the best of the tales available to us.
Taken together, apart from the pleasure of the story for the story's
sake, they give us a fresh sense of the time in which they were written,
its feasts and tourneys bright with the gold and the vair; its wars, its
interrupted traffic and barter; its license, its asceticism; its prayers
and its visions. More than that, they interest us as standing midway
between the old and the new. In them one may look for fragments of
vanished stories, bits of myth and folklore, salvage of an age that told
its tales instead of writing them; and, at the same time, we find in
them the beginnings of modern literature, the first of that long and
goodly line, the French short story. For all their simplicity they show
the beginnings of a shrewd observation, of delicate description, and
above all of compact narrative where no words are wasted. Already there
is a conscious artistic pride; Marie de France tells us she has waked
many a night in rhyming her verses; and "Know ye," one of the _fabliaux_
charges us, "it is no light thing to tell a goodly tale."