It is easier to say what the Goliardi wrote about than who the writers
were, and what they felt and thought than by what names they were
baptised. The mass of their literature, as it is at present known to
us, divides into two broad classes. The one division includes poems
on the themes of vagabond existence, the truant life of these
capricious students; on spring-time and its rural pleasure; on love in
many phases and for divers kinds of women; lastly, on wine and on the
dice-box. The other division is devoted to graver topics; to satires
on society, touching especially the Roman Court, and criticising
eminent ecclesiastics in all countries; to moral dissertations, and to
discourses on the brevity of life.
Of the two divisions, the former yields by far the livelier image of
the men we have to deal with. It will therefore form the staple of my
argument. The latter blends at so many points with medieval literature
of the monastic kind, that it is chiefly distinguished by boldness of
censure and sincerity of invective. In these qualities the serious
poems of the Goliardi, emanating from a class of men who moved behind
the scenes and yet were free to speak their thoughts, are unique.
Written with the satirist's eye upon the object of his sarcasm, tinged
with the license of his vagabondage, throbbing with the passionate and
nonchalant afflatus of the wine-cup, they wing their flight like
poisoned arrows or plumed serpents with unerring straightness at
abuses in high places.
The wide space occupied by Nature in the secular poems of the Goliardi
is remarkable. As a background to their love-songs we always find the
woods and fields of May, abundant flowers and gushing rivulets,
lime-trees and pines and olive-trees, through which soft winds are
blowing. There are rose-bowers and nightingales; fauns, nymphs, and
satyrs dancing on the sward. Choirs of mortal maidens emerge in the
midst of this Claude-landscape. The scene, meanwhile, has been painted
from experience, and felt with the enthusiasm of affection. It
breathes of healthy open air, of life upon the road, of casual joys
and wayside pleasure, snatched with careless heart by men whose tastes
are natural. There is very little of the alcove or the closet in this
verse; and the touch upon the world is so infantine, so tender, that
we are indulgent to the generalities with which the poets deal.
What has been said about popular poetry applies also to popular
painting. In the landscapes of Goliardic literature there is nothing
specific to a single locality--no name like Vaucluse, no pregnant
touch that indicates one scene selected from a thousand. The landscape
is always a background, more northern or more southern as the case may
be, but penetrated with the feeling of the man who has been happy or
has suffered there. This feeling, broadly, sensuously diffused, as in
a masterpiece of Titian, prepares us for the human element to be
exhibited.
The foreground of these pictures is occupied by a pair of lovers
meeting after the long winter's separation, a dance upon the village
green, a young man gazing on the mistress he adores, a disconsolate
exile from his home, the courtship of a student and a rustic beauty,
or perhaps the grieved and melancholy figure of one whose sweetheart
has proved faithless. Such actors in the comedy of life are defined
with fervent intensity of touch against the leafy vistas of the
scene. The lyrical cry emerges clear and sharp in all that concerns
their humanity.
The quality of love expressed is far from being either platonic or
chivalrous. It is love of the sensuous, impulsive, appetitive kind, to
which we give the name of Pagan. The finest outbursts of passion are
emanations from a potent sexual desire. Meanwhile, nothing indicates
the character or moral quality of either man or woman. The student and
the girl are always _vis-a-vis_, fixed characters in this lyrical
love-drama. He calls her Phyllis, Flora, Lydia, Glycerion, Caecilia.
He remains unnamed, his physical emotion sufficing for personal
description. The divinity presiding over them is Venus. Jove and
Danae, Cupid and the Graces, Paris and Helen, follow in her train. All
the current classical mythology is laid under cheap contribution. Yet
the central emotion, the young man's heart's desire, is so vividly
portrayed, that we seem to be overhearing the triumphant ebullition or
the melancholy love-lament of a real soul.