The drinking-songs are equally spontaneous and fresh. Anacreon pales
before the brilliancy of the Archipoeta when wine is in his veins, and
the fountain of the Bacchic chant swells with gushes of strongly
emphasised bold double rhymes, each throbbing like a man's firm
stroke upon the strings of lyres. A fine audacity breathes through the
praises of the wine-god, sometimes rising to lyric rapture, sometimes
sinking to parody and innuendo, but always carrying the bard on
rolling wheels along the paths of song. The reality of the inspiration
is indubitable. These Bacchanalian choruses have been indited in the
tavern, with a crowd of topers round the poet, with the rattle of the
dice-box ringing in his ears, and with the facile maidens of his
volatile amours draining the wine-cup at his elbow.
Wine is celebrated as the source of pleasure in social life,
provocative of love, parent of poetry:[26]--
"Bacchus forte superans
Pectora virorum
In amorem concitat
Animos eorum.
"Bacchus saepe visitans
Mulierum genus
Facit eas subditas
Tibi, O tu Venus!"
From his temple, the tavern, water-drinkers and fastidious persons are
peremptorily warned:[27]--
"Qui potare non potestis,
Ite procul ab his festis;
Non est hic locus modestis:
Devitantur plus quam pestis."
The tavern is loved better than the church, and a bowl of wine than
the sacramental chalice:[28]--
"Magis quam ecclesiam
Diligo tabernam."
"Mihi sapit dulcius
Vinum de taberna,
Quam quod aqua miscuit
Praesulis pincerna."
As in the love-songs, so in these drinking-songs we find no lack of
mythological allusions. Nor are the grammatical quibbles, which might
also have been indicated as a defect of the erotic poetry, conspicuous
by absence. But both alike are impotent to break the spell of evident
sincerity. We discount them as belonging to the euphuism of a certain
epoch, and are rather surprised than otherwise that they should not be
more apparent. The real and serious defect of Goliardic literature is
not affectation, but something very different, which I shall try to
indicate in the last Section of this treatise. Venus and Helen, Liber
and Lyaeus, are but the current coin of poetic diction common to the
whole student class. These Olympian deities merge without a note of
discord into the dim background of a medieval pothouse or the sylvan
shades of some ephemeral amour, leaving the realism of natural
appetite in either case untouched.
It is by no means the thin and conventional sprinkling of classical
erudition which makes these poems of the Goliardi pagan, and reminds
the student of Renaissance art. Conversely, the scholastic plays on
words which they contain do not stamp them out as medieval. Both of
these qualities are _rococo_ and superficial rather than essential and
distinctive in their style. After making due allowances for either
element of oddity, a true connoisseur will gratefully appreciate the
spontaneous note of enjoyment, the disengagement from ties and duties
imposed by temporal respectability, the frank animalism, which
connects these vivid hymns to Bacchus and Venus with past Aristophanes
and future Rabelais. They celebrate the eternal presence of
mirth-making powers in hearts of men, apart from time and place and
varying dogmas which do not concern deities of Nature.