THE MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD, 1150-1500
INTRODUCTORY
Anglo-Saxon and Middle English literature had many things in common. The
educational work of King Alfred was continued all through the Middle
Ages. Chaucer translates Boethius, five hundred years after King Alfred’s
translation. The same authors are read and adapted. The sermons of
Ælfric, A.D. 1000, have the same sort of matter as those of the
thirteenth or the fourteenth century, and there is no very great
difference of tone. Many of the literary interests of the Plantagenet
times are found already among the Anglo-Saxons. The Legends of the Saints
are inexhaustible subjects of poetical treatment in the earlier as well
as the later days. The poetical expression is, of course, very greatly
changed, but earlier or later the Saints’ Lives are used as material for
literature which is essentially romantic, whatever its other qualities
may be. There are other sources of romance open, long before the French
influence begins to be felt in England; particularly, the wonders of the
East appear in the Anglo-Saxon version of Alexander’s letter to
Aristotle; and later Greek romance (through the Latin) in the Anglo-Saxon
translation of _Apollonius of Tyre_.
The great difference between the two ages is made by the disappearance of
the old English poetry. There is nothing in the Plantagenet reigns like
_Beowulf_ or the Maldon poem; there is nothing like the _Fall of the
Angels_ and the dramatic eloquence of Satan. The pathos of the later
Middle Ages is expressed in a different way from the _Wanderer_ and the
_Ruin_. The later religious poetry has little in it to recall the
finished art of Cynewulf. Anglo-Saxon poetry, whether derived from
heathendom or from the Church, has ideas and manners of its own; it comes
to perfection, and then it dies away. The gravity and thought of the
heroic poetry, as well as the finer work of the religious poets, are
unlike the strength, unlike the graces, of the later time. Anglo-Saxon
poetry grows to a rich maturity, and past it; then, with the new forms of
language and under new influences, the poetical education has to start
again.
Unfortunately for the historian, there are scarcely any literary things
remaining to show the progress of the transition. For a long time before
and after 1100 there is a great scarcity of English productions. It is
not till about 1200 that Middle English literature begins to be at all
fully represented.
This scantiness is partly due, no doubt, to an actual disuse of English
composition. But many written things must have perished, and in poetry
there was certainly a large amount of verse current orally, whether it
was ever written down or not. This is the inference drawn from the
passages in the historian William of Malmesbury to which Macaulay refers
in his preface to the _Lays of Ancient Rome_, and which Freeman has
studied in his essay on _The Mythical and Romantic Elements in Early
English History_. The story of Hereward the Wake is extant in Latin; the
story of Havelock the Dane and others were probably composed in English
verse much earlier than the thirteenth century, and in much older forms
than those which have come down to us.
There is a gap in the record of alliterative poetry which shows plainly
that much has been lost. It is a curious history. Before the Norman
conquest the old English verse had begun to go to pieces, in spite of
such excellent late examples as the Maldon poem. About 1200 the
alliterative verse, though it has still something of its original
character, is terribly broken down. The verse of Layamon’s _Brut_ is
unsteady, never to be trusted, changing its pace without warning in a
most uncomfortable way. Then suddenly, as late as the middle of the
fourteenth century, there begins a procession of magnificent alliterative
poems, in regular verse—_Sir Gawayne_, the _Morte Arthure_, _Piers
Plowman_; in regular verse, not exactly with the same rule as _Beowulf_,
but with so much of the old rule as seemed to have been hopelessly lost
for a century or two. What is the explanation of this revival, and this
sudden great vogue of alliterative poetry? It cannot have been a new
invention, or a reconstruction; it would not in that case have copied, as
it sometimes does, the rhythm of the old English verse in a way which is
unlike the ordinary rhythms of the fourteenth century. The only
reasonable explanation is that somewhere in England there was a tradition
of alliterative verse, keeping in the main to the old rules of rhythm as
it kept something of the old vocabulary, and escaping the disease which
affected the old verse elsewhere. The purer sort of verse must have been
preserved for a few hundred years with hardly a trace of it among the
existing documents to show what it was like till it breaks out
‘three-score thousand strong’ in the reign of Edward III.
In the Middle Ages, early and late, there was very free communication all
over Christendom between people of different languages. Languages seem to
have given much less trouble than they do nowadays. The general use of
Latin, of course, made things easy for those who could speak it; but
without Latin, people of different nations appear to have travelled over
the world picking up foreign languages as they went along, and showing
more interest in the poetry and stories of foreign countries than is
generally found among modern tourists. Luther said of the people of
Flanders that if you took a Fleming in a sack and carried him over France
or Italy, he would manage to learn the tongues. This gift was useful to
commercial travellers, and perhaps the Flemings had more of it than other
people. But in all the nations there seems to have been something like
this readiness, and in all it was used to translate the stories and adapt
the poetry of other tongues. This intercourse was greatly quickened in
the twelfth century through a number of causes, the principal cause being
the extraordinary production of new poetry in France, or rather in the
two regions, North and South, and the two languages, French and
Provençal. Between these two languages, in the North and the South of
what is now France, there was in the Middle Ages a kind of division of
labour. The North took narrative poetry, the South took lyric; and French
narrative and Provençal lyric poetry in the twelfth century between them
made the beginning of modern literature for the whole of Europe.
In the earlier Middle Ages, before 1100, as in the later, the common
language is Latin. Between the Latin authors of the earlier time—Gregory
the Great, or Bede—and those of the later—Anselm, or Thomas Aquinas—there
may be great differences, but there is no line of separation.
In the literature of the native tongues there is a line of division about
1100 more definite than any later epoch; it is made by the appearance of
French poetry, bringing along with it an intellectual unity of
Christendom which has never been shaken since.
The importance of this is that it meant a mutual understanding among the
laity of Europe, equal to that which had so long obtained among the
clergy, the learned men.
The year 1100, in which all Christendom is united, if not thoroughly and
actively in all places, for the conquest of the Holy Sepulchre, at any
rate ideally by the thought of this common enterprise, is also a year
from which may be dated the beginning of the common lay intelligence of
Europe, that sympathy of understanding by which ideas of different sorts
are taken up and diffused, outside of the professionally learned bodies.
The year 1100 is a good date, because of the first Provençal poet,
William, Count of Poitiers, who was living then; he went on the Crusade
three years later. He is the first poet of modern Europe who definitely
helps to set a fashion of poetry not only for his own people but for the
imitation of foreigners. He is the first modern poet; he uses the kind of
verse which every one uses now.
The triumph of French poetry in the twelfth century was the end of the
old Teutonic world—an end which had been long preparing, though it came
suddenly at last. Before that time there had been the sympathy and
informal union among the Germanic nations out of which the old heroic
poems had come; such community of ideas as allowed the Nibelung story to
be treated in all the Germanic tongues from Austria to Iceland, and even
in Greenland, the furthest outpost of the Northmen. But after the
eleventh century there was nothing new to be got out of this. Here and
there may be found a gleaner, like Saxo Grammaticus, getting together all
that he can save out of the ancient heathendom, or like the Norwegian
traveller about fifty years later, who collected North German ballads of
Theodoric and other champions, and paraphrased them in Norwegian prose.
The really great achievement of the older world in its last days was in
the prose histories of Iceland, which had virtue enough in them to change
the whole world, if they had only been known and understood; but they
were written for domestic circulation, and even their own people scarcely
knew how good they were. Germania was falling to pieces, the separate
nations growing more and more stupid and drowsy.
The languages derived from Latin—commonly called the Romance
languages—French and Provençal, Italian and so on—were long of declaring
themselves. The Italian and Spanish dialects had to wait for the great
French outburst before they could produce anything. French and Provençal,
which are well in front of Spanish and Italian, have little of importance
to show before 1100. But after that date there is such profusion that it
is clear there had been a long time of experiment and preparation. The
earlier French epics have been lost; the earliest known Provençal poet is
already a master of verse, and must be indebted to many poetical
ancestors whose names and poems have disappeared. Long before 1100 there
must have been a common literary taste in France, fashions of poetry well
understood and appreciated, a career open for youthful poets. In the
twelfth century the social success of poetry in France was extended in
different degrees over all Europe. In Italy and Spain the fashions were
taken up; in Germany they conquered even more quickly and thoroughly; the
Danes and Swedes and Norwegians learned their ballad measures from the
French; even the Icelanders, the only Northern nation with a classical
literature and with minds of their own, were caught in the same way.
Thus French poetry wakened up the sleepy countries, and gave new ideas to
the wakeful; it brought the Teutonic and Romance nations to agree and,
what was much more important, to produce new works of their own which
might be original in all sorts of ways while still keeping within the
limits of the French tradition. Compared with this, all later literary
revolutions are secondary and partial changes. The most widely
influential writers of later ages—e.g. Petrarch and Voltaire—had the
ground prepared for them in this medieval epoch, and do nothing to alter
the general conditions which were then established—the intercommunication
among the whole laity of Europe with regard to questions of taste.
It seems probable that the Normans had a good deal to do as agents in
this revolution. They were in relation with many different people. They
had Bretons on their borders in Normandy; they conquered England, and
then they touched upon the Welsh; they were fond of pilgrimages; they
settled in Apulia and Sicily, where they had dealings with Greeks and
Saracens as well as Italians.
It is a curious thing that early in the twelfth century names are found
in Italy which certainly come from the romances of King Arthur—the name
Galvano, e.g. which is the same as Gawain. However it was brought there,
this name may be taken for a sign of the process that was going on
everywhere—the conversion of Europe to fashions which were prescribed in
France.
The narrative poetry in which the French excelled was of different kinds.
An old French poet, in an epic on Charlemagne’s wars against the Saxons,
has given a classification which is well known, dividing the stories
according to the historical matter which they employ. There are three
‘matters’, he says, and no more than three, which a story-teller may take
up—the matter of France, the matter of Britain, the matter of Rome the
Great. The old poet is right in naming these as at any rate the chief
groups; since ‘Rome the Great’ might be made to take in whatever would
not go into the other two divisions, there is nothing much wrong in his
refusal to make a fourth class. The ‘matter of France’ includes all the
subjects of the old French national epics—such as Roncevaux, or the song
of Roland; Reynold of Montalban, or the Four Sons of Aymon; Ferabras;
Ogier the Dane. The matter of Britain includes all the body of the
Arthurian legend, as well as the separate stories commonly called Breton
lays (like Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale). The matter of Rome is not only
Roman history, but the whole of classical antiquity. The story of Troy,
of course, is rightly part of Roman history, and so is the Romance of
Eneas. But under Rome the Great there fall other stories which have much
slighter connexion with Rome—such as the story of Thebes, or of
Alexander.
Many of those subjects were of course well known and popular before the
French poets took them up. The romantic story of Alexander might, in part
at any rate, have been familiar to Alfred the Great; he brings the
Egyptian king ‘Nectanebus the wizard’ into his translation of
Orosius—Nectanebus, who is the father of Alexander in the apocryphal book
from which the romances were derived. But it was not till the French
poets turned the story of Alexander into verse that it really made much
impression outside of France. The tale of Troy was widely read, in
various authors—Ovid and Virgil, and an abstract of the _Iliad_, and in
the apocryphal prose books of Dares the Phrygian and Dictys the Cretan,
who were supposed to have been at the seat of war, and therefore to be
better witnesses than Homer. These were used and translated some times
apart from any French suggestion. But it was the French _Roman de Troie_,
written in the twelfth century, which spread the story everywhere—the
source of innumerable Troy Books in all languages, and of Chaucer’s and
Shakespeare’s _Troilus_.
The ‘matter of Britain’ also was generally made known through the works
of French authors. There are exceptions; the British history of Geoffrey
of Monmouth was written in Latin. But even this found its way into
English by means of a French translation; the _Brut_ of Layamon, a long
poem in irregular alliterative verse, is adapted from a French rhyming
translation of Geoffrey’s History. The English romances of Sir Perceval,
Sir Gawain and other knights are founded on French poems.
There is an important distinction between the ‘matter of France’ and the
‘matters’ of Britain and Rome; this distinction belongs more properly to
the history of French literature, but it ought not to be neglected here.
The ‘matter of France’, which is exemplified in the song of Roland,
belongs to an earlier time, and was made into French poetry earlier than
the other subjects. The poems about Charlemagne and his peers, and others
of the same sort, are sometimes called the old French epics; the French
name for them is _chansons de geste_. Those epics have not only a
different matter but a different form from the French Arthurian romances
and the French _Roman de Troie_. What is of more importance for English
poetry, there is generally a different tone and sentiment. They are
older, stronger, more heroic, more like _Beowulf_ or the Maldon poem; the
romances of the ‘matter of Britain’, on the other hand, are the
fashionable novels of the twelfth century; their subjects are really
taken from contemporary polite society. They are long love-stories, and
their motive chiefly is to represent the fortunes, and, above all, the
sentiments of true lovers. Roughly speaking, the ‘matter of France’ is
action, the ‘matter of Britain’ is sentiment. The ‘matter of Rome’ is
mixed; for while the _Roman de Troie_ (with the love-story of Troilus,
and with courteous modern manners throughout) is like the romances of
Lancelot and Tristram, Alexander, in the French versions, is a hero like
those of the national epics, and is celebrated in the same manner as
Charlemagne.
The ‘matter of France’ could not be popular in England as it was in its
native country. But Charlemagne and Roland and his peers were well known
everywhere, like Arthur and Alexander, and the ‘matter of France’ went to
increase the stories told by English minstrels. It was from an English
version, in the thirteenth century, that part of the long Norwegian prose
history of Charlemagne was taken; a fact worth remembering, to illustrate
the way in which the exportation of stories was carried on. Of course,
the story of Charlemagne was not the same sort of thing in England or
Norway that it was in France. The devotion to France which is so intense
in the song of Roland was never meant to be shared by any foreigner. But
Roland as a champion against the infidels was a hero everywhere. There
are statues of him in Bremen and in Verona; and it is in Italy that the
story is told of the simple man who was found weeping in the
market-place; a professional story-teller had just come to the death of
Roland and the poor man heard the news for the first time. A traveller in
the Faroe Islands not long ago, asking in the bookshop at Thorshavn for
some things in the Faroese language, was offered a ballad of
Roncesvalles.
The favourite story everywhere was _Sir Ferabras_, because the centre of
the plot is the encounter between Oliver the Paladin and Ferabras the
Paynim champion. Every one could understand this, and in all countries
the story became popular as a sound religious romance.
Naturally, the stories of action and adventure went further and were more
widely appreciated than the cultivated sentimental romance. The English
in the reign of Edward I or Edward III had often much difficulty in
understanding what the French romantic school was driving at—particularly
when it seemed to be driving round and round, spinning long monologues of
afflicted damsels, or elegant conversations full of phrases between the
knight and his lady. The difficulty was not unreasonable. If the French
authors had been content to write about nothing but sentimental
conversations and languishing lovers, then one would have known what to
do. The man who is looking at the railway bookstall for a good detective
story knows at once what to say when he is offered the Diary of a Soul.
But the successful French novelists of the twelfth century appealed to
both tastes, and dealt equally in sensation and sentiment; they did not
often limit themselves to what was always their chief interest, the moods
of lovers. They worked these into plots of adventure, mystery, fairy
magic; the adventures were too good to be lost; so the less refined
English readers, who were puzzled or wearied by sentimental
conversations, were not able to do without the elegant romances. They
read them; and they skipped. The skipping was done for them, generally,
when the romances were translated into English; the English versions are
shorter than the French in most cases where comparison is possible. As a
general rule, the English took the adventurous sensational part of the
French romances, and let the language of the heart alone. To this there
are exceptions. In the first place it is not always true that the French
romances are adventurous. Some of them are almost purely
love-stories—sentiment from beginning to end. Further, it is proved that
one of these, _Amadas et Ydoine_—a French romance written in England—was
much liked in England by many whose proper language was English; there is
no English version of it extant, and perhaps there never was one, but it
was certainly well known outside the limited refined society for which it
was composed. And again there may be found examples where the English
adapter, instead of skipping, sets himself to wrestle with the
original—saying to himself, ‘I will _not_ be beaten by this culture; I
will get to the end of it and lose nothing; it shall be made to go into
the English language’. An example of this effort is the alliterative
romance of _William and the Werwolf_, a work which does not fulfil the
promise of its title in any satisfactory way. It spends enormous trouble
over the sentimental passages of the original, turning them into the form
worst suited to them, viz. the emphatic style of the alliterative poetry
which is so good for battle pieces, satire, storms at sea, and generally
everything except what it is here applied to. Part of the success of
Chaucer and almost all the beauty of Gower may be said to be their
mastery of French polite literature, and their power of expressing in
English everything that could be said in French, with no loss of effect
and no inferiority in manner. Gower ought to receive his due alongside of
Chaucer as having accomplished what many English writers had attempted
for two hundred years before him—the perfect adoption in English verse of
everything remarkable in the style of French poetry.
The history of narrative poetry is generally easier than the history of
lyric, partly because the subjects are more distinct and more easily
traceable. But it is not difficult to recognize the enormous difference
between the English songs of the fourteenth century and anything known to
us in Anglo-Saxon verse, while the likeness of English to French lyrical
measures in the later period is unquestionable. The difficulty is that
the history of early French lyric poetry is itself obscure and much more
complicated than the history of narrative. Lyric poetry flourished at
popular assemblies and festivals, and was kept alive in oral tradition
much more easily than narrative poetry was. Less of it, in proportion,
was written down, until it was taken up by ambitious poets and composed
in a more elaborate way.
The distinction between popular and cultivated lyric is not always easy
to make out, as any one may recognize who thinks of the songs of Burns
and attempts to distinguish what is popular in them from what is
consciously artistic. But the distinction is a sound one, and especially
necessary in the history of medieval literature—all the more because the
two kinds often pass into one another.
A good example is the earliest English song, as it is sometimes called,
which is very far from the earliest—
Sumer is icumen in
lhude sing cuccu.
It sounds like a popular song; an anonymous poem from the heart of the
people, in simple, natural, spontaneous verse. But look at the original
copy. The song is written, of course, for music. And the Cuckoo song is
said by the historians of music to be remarkable and novel; it is the
first example of a canon; it is not an improvisation, but the newest kind
of art, one of the most ingenious things of its time. Further, the words
that belong to it are Latin words, a Latin hymn; the Cuckoo song, which
appears so natural and free, is the result of deliberate study; syllable
for syllable, it corresponds to the Latin, and to the notes of the music.
Is it then _not_ to be called a popular song? Perhaps the answer is that
all popular poetry, in Europe at any rate for the last thousand years, is
derived from poetry more or less learned in character, or, like the
Cuckoo song, from more or less learned music. The first popular songs of
the modern world were the hymns of St. Ambrose, and the oldest fashion of
popular tunes is derived from the music of the Church.
The learned origin of popular lyric may be illustrated from any of the
old-fashioned broadsheets of the street ballad-singers: for example _The
Kerry Recruit_—
As I was going up and down, one day in the month of August,
All in the town of sweet Tralee, I met the recruiting serjeant—
The metre of this is the same as in the _Ormulum_—
This book is nemned Ormulum, for thy that Orm hit wroughtè.
It is derived through the Latin from the Greek; it was made popular first
through Latin rhyming verses which were imitated in the vernacular
languages, Provençal, German, English. As it is a variety of ‘common
metre’, it is easily fitted to popular tunes, and so it becomes a regular
type of verse, both for ambitious poets and for ballad-minstrels like the
author quoted above. It may be remembered that a country poet wrote the
beautiful song on Yarrow from which Wordsworth took the verse of his own
Yarrow poems—
But minstrel Burne cannot assuage
His grief, while life endureth,
To see the changes of this age
Which fleeting time procureth—
verse identical in measure with the _Ormulum_, and with the popular Irish
street ballad, and with many more. So in the history of this type of
verse we get the following relations of popular and literary poetry:
first there is the ancient Greek verse of the same measure; then there
are the Latin learned imitations; then there is the use of it by scholars
in the Middle Ages, who condescend to use it in Latin rhymes for
students’ choruses. Then comes the imitation of it in different languages
as in English by Orm and others of his day (about 1200). It was very much
in favour then, and was used often irregularly, with a varying number of
syllables. But Orm writes it with perfect accuracy, and the accurate type
survived, and was just as ‘popular’ as the less regular kind. Minstrel
Burne is as regular as the _Ormulum_, and so, or very nearly as much, is
the anonymous Irish poet of The _Kerry Recruit_.
What happened in the case of the _Ormulum_ verse is an example of the
whole history of modern lyric poetry in its earlier period. Learned men
like St. Ambrose and St. Augustine wrote hymns for the common people in
Latin which the common people of that time could understand. Then, in
different countries, the native languages were used to copy the Latin
measures and fit in to the same tunes—just as the English Cuckoo song
corresponds to the Latin words for the same melody. Thus there were
provided for the new languages, as we may call them, a number of poetical
forms or patterns which could be applied in all sorts of ways. These
became common and well understood, in the same manner as common forms of
music are understood, e.g. the favourite rhythms of dance tunes; and like
those rhythms they could be adapted to any sort of poetical subject, and
used with all varieties of skill.
Many strange things happened while the new rhyming sort of lyric poetry
was being acclimatized in England, and a study of early English lyrics is
a good introduction to all the rest of English poetry, because in those
days—in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—may be found the origin of
the most enduring poetical influences in later times.
One of the strange things was that the French lyrical examples affected
the English in two opposite ways. As foreign verse, and as belonging
especially to those who were acquainted with courts and good society, it
had the attraction which fashionable and stylish things generally have
for those who are a little behind the fashion. It was the newest and most
brilliant thing; the English did all they could to make it their own
whether by composing in French themselves or by copying the French style
in English words. But besides this fashionable and courtly value of
French poetry, there was another mode in which it appealed to the
English. Much of it was closely related not to the courts but to popular
country festivals which were frequent also in towns, like the games and
dances to celebrate the coming of May. French poetry was associated with
games of that sort, and along with games of that sort it came to England.
The English were hit on both sides. French poetry was more genteel in
some things, more popular and jovial in others, than anything then
current in England. Thus the same foreign mode of composition which gave
a new courtly ideal to the English helped also very greatly to quicken
their popular life. While the distinction between courtly and popular is
nowhere more important than in medieval literature, it is often very hard
to make it definite in particular cases, just for this reason. It is not
as if there were a popular native layer, English in character and origin,
with a courtly foreign French layer above it. What is popular in Middle
English literature is just as much French as English; while, on the other
hand, what is native, like the alliterative verse, is as often as not
used for ambitious works. _Sir Gawayne and the Greene Knight_ and the
poem of the _Morte Arthure_ are certainly not ‘popular’ in the sense of
‘uneducated’ or ‘simple’ or anything of that kind, and though they are
written in the old native verse they are not intended for the people who
had no education and could not speak French.
The great manifestation of French influence in the common life of the
Middle Ages was through the fashion of the dance which generally went by
the name of _Carole_. The _carole_—music, verse and dance
altogether—spread as a fashion all over Europe in the twelfth century;
and there is nothing which so effectively marks the change from the
earlier to the later Middle Ages. It _is_ in fact a great part of the
change, with all that is implied in it; which may be explained in the
following way.
The _carole_ was a dance accompanied by a song, the song being divided
between a leader and the rest of the chorus; the leader sang the
successive new lines, while the rest of the dancers holding hands in a
ring all joined in the refrain. Now this was the fashion most in favour
in all gentle houses through the Middle Ages, and it was largely through
this that the French type of lyric was transported to so many countries
and languages. French lyric poetry was part of a graceful diversion for
winter evenings in a castle or for summer afternoons in the castle
garden. But it was also thoroughly and immediately available for all the
parish. In its origin it was popular in the widest sense—not restricted
to any one rank or class; and though it was adopted and elaborated in the
stately homes of England and other countries it could not lose its
original character. Every one could understand it and enjoy it; so it
became the favourite thing at popular festivals, as well as at the
Christmas entertainments in the great hall. Particularly, it was a
favourite custom to dance and sing in this way on the vigils or eves of
Saints’ days, when people assembled from some distance at the church
where the day was to be observed. Dancing-parties were frequent at these
‘wakes’; they were often held in the churchyard. There are many stories
to show how they were discouraged by the clergy, and how deplorable was
their vanity: but those moral examples also prove how well established
the custom was; some of them also from their date show how quickly it had
spread. The best is in Giraldus Cambrensis, ‘Gerald the Welshman’, a most
amusing writer, who is unfortunately little read, as he wrote in Latin.
In his _Gemma Ecclesiastica_ he has a chapter against the custom of using
churches and churchyards for songs and dances. As an illustration, he
tells the story of a wake in a churchyard, somewhere in the diocese of
Worcester, which was kept up all night long, the dancers repeating one
refrain over and over; so that the priest who had this refrain in his
ears all night could not get rid of it in the morning, but repeated it at
the Mass—saying (instead of _Dominus vobiscum_) ‘Sweet Heart, have pity!’
Giraldus, writing in Latin, quotes the English verse: _Swete lemman, thin
arè_. _Are_, later _ore_, means ‘mercy’ or ‘grace’, and the refrain is of
the same sort as is found, much later, in the lyric poetry of the time of
Edward I. Giraldus wrote in the twelfth century, in the reign of Henry
II, and it is plain from what he tells that the French fashion was
already in full swing and as thoroughly naturalized among the English as
the Waltz or the Lancers in the nineteenth century. The same sort of
evidence comes from Denmark about the same time as Giraldus; ring-dances
were equally a trouble and vexation to religious teachers there—for,
strangely, the dances seem everywhere to have been drawn to churches and
monasteries, through the custom of keeping religious wakes in a cheerful
manner. Europe was held together in this common vanity, and it was
through the _caroles_ and similar amusements that the poetical art of
France came to be dominant all over the North, affecting the popular and
unpretending poets no less than those of greater ambition and conceit.
The word ‘Court’ and its derivations are frequently used by medieval and
early modern writers with a special reference to poetry. The courts of
kings and great nobles were naturally associated with the ideas of polite
education; those men ‘that has used court and dwelled therein can Frankis
and Latin’, says Richard Rolle of Hampole in the fourteenth century; the
‘courtly maker’ is an Elizabethan name for the accomplished poet, and
similar terms are used in other languages to express the same meaning.
This ‘courtly’ ideal was not properly realized in England till the time
of Chaucer and Gower; and a general view of the subject easily leads one
to think of the English language as struggling in the course of three
centuries to get rid of its homeliness, its rustic and parochial
qualities. This period, from about 1100 to 1400, closes in the full
attainment of the desired end. Chaucer and Gower are unimpeachable as
‘courtly makers’, and their success in this way also implies the
establishment of their language as pure English; the competition of
dialects is ended by the victory of the East Midland language which
Chaucer and Gower used. The ‘courtly poets’ make it impossible in England
to use any language for poetry except their own.
But the distinction between ‘courtly’ and ‘vulgar’, ‘popular’, or
whatever the other term may be, is not very easy to fix. The history of
the _carole_ is an example of this difficulty. The _carole_ flourishes
among the gentry and it is a favourite amusement as well among the common
people. ‘Courtly’ ideas, suggestions, phrases, might have a circulation
in country places, and be turned to literary effect by authors who had no
special attachment to good society. A hundred years before Chaucer there
may be found in the poem of _The Owl and the Nightingale_, written in the
language of Dorset, a kind of good-humoured ironical satire which is very
like Chaucer’s own. This is the most _modern_ in tone of all the
thirteenth-century poems, but there are many others in which the rustic,
or popular, and the ‘courtly’ elements are curiously and often very
pleasantly mixed.
In fact, for many purposes even of literary history and criticism the
medieval distinction between ‘courtly’ and popular may be neglected.
There is always a difficulty in finding out what is meant by ‘the
People’. One has only to remember Chaucer’s Pilgrims to understand this,
and to realize how absurd is any fixed line of division between ranks,
with regard to their literary taste. The most attentive listener and the
most critical among the Canterbury Pilgrims is the Host of the Tabard.
There was ‘culture’ in the Borough as well as in Westminster. The
Franklin who apologizes for his want of rhetorical skill—he had never
read Tullius or Cicero—tells one of the ‘Breton lays’, a story elegantly
planned and finished, of the best French type; and the Wife of Bath,
after the story of her own life, repeats another romance of the same
school as the Franklin’s Tale. The average ‘reading public’ of Chaucer’s
time could understand a great many different varieties of verse and
prose.
But while the difference between ‘courtly’ and ‘popular’ is often hard to
determine in particular cases, it is none the less important and
significant in medieval history. It implies the chivalrous ideal—the
self-conscious withdrawal and separation of the gentle folk from all the
rest, not merely through birth and rank and the fashion of their armour,
but through their ways of thinking, and especially through their theory
of love. The devotion of the true knight to his lady—the motive of all
the books of chivalry—began to be the favourite subject in the twelfth
century; it was studied and meditated in all manner of ways, and it is
this that gives its character to all the most original, as well as to the
most artificial, poetry of the later Middle Ages. The spirit and the
poetical art of the different nations may be estimated according to the
mode in which they appropriated those ideas. For the ideas of this
religion of chivalrous love were _literary_ and _artistic_ ideas; they
went along with poetical ambitions and fresh poetical invention—they led
to the poetry of Dante, Petrarch and Spenser, not as ideas and
inspirations simply, but through their employment of definite poetical
forms of expression, which were developed by successive generations of
poets.
Stories of true love do not belong peculiarly to the age of chivalrous
romance. The greatest of them all, the story of Sigurd and Brynhild, has
come down from an older world. The early books of the Danish History of
Saxo Grammaticus are full of romantic themes. ‘A mutual love arose
between Hedin and Hilda, the daughter of Hogne, a maiden of most eminent
renown. For though they had not yet seen one another, each had been
kindled by the other’s glory. But when they had a chance of beholding one
another, neither could look away; so steadfast was the love that made
their eyes linger’. This passage (quoted from Oliver Elton’s translation)
is one of the things which were collected by Saxo from Danish tradition;
it is quite independent of anything chivalrous, in the special sense of
that word. Again, Chaucer’s _Legend of Good Women_, the story of Dido, or
of Pyramus and Thisbe, may serve as a reminder how impossible it is to
separate ‘romantic’ from ‘classical’ literature. A great part of medieval
romance is nothing but a translation into medieval forms, into French
couplets, of the passion of Medea or of Dido. Even in the fresh discovery
which made the ideal of the ‘courtly’ schools, namely, the lover’s
worship of his lady as divine, there is something traceable to the Latin
poets. But it was a fresh discovery, for all that, a new mode of thought,
whatever its source might be. The devotion of Dante to Beatrice, of
Petrarch to Laura, is different from anything in classical poetry, or in
the earlier Middle Ages. It is first in Provençal lyric verse that
something like their ideas may be found; both Dante and Petrarch
acknowledge their debt to the Provençal poets.
Those ideas can be expressed in lyric poetry; not so well in narrative.
They are too vague for narrative, and too general; they are the utterance
of any true lover, his pride and his humility, his belief that all the
joy and grace of the world, and of Heaven also, are included in the
worshipful lady. There is also along with this religion a firm belief
that it is not intended for the vulgar; and as the ideas and motives are
noble so must the poetry be, in every respect. The refinement of the idea
requires a corresponding beauty of form; and the lyric poets of Provence
and their imitators in Germany, the Minnesingers, were great inventors of
new stanzas and, it should be remembered, of the tunes that accompanied
them. It was not allowable for one poet to take another poet’s stanza.
The new spirit of devotion in love-poetry produced an enormous variety of
lyrical measures, which are still musical, and some of them still
current, to this day.
It was an artificial kind of poetry, in different senses of the term. It
was consciously artistic, and ambitious; based upon science—the science
of music—and deliberately planned so as to make the best effect. The
poets were competitors—sometimes in actual competition for a prize, as in
the famous scene at the Wartburg, which comes in _Tannhäuser_, or as at a
modern Welsh _eisteddfod_; the fame of a poet could not be gained without
the finest technical skill, and the prize was often given for technical
skill, rather than for anything else. Besides this, the ideas themselves
were conventional; the poet’s amatory religion was often assumed; he
chose a lady to whom he offered his poetical homage. The fiction was well
understood, and was highly appreciated as an honour, when the poetry was
successful. For example, the following may be taken from the Lives of the
Troubadours—
‘Richard of Barbezieux the poet fell in love with a lady, the wife of a
noble lord. She was gentle and fair, and gay and gracious, and very
desirous of praise and honour; daughter of Jeffrey Rudel, prince of
Blaye. And when she knew that he loved her, she made him fair semblance
of love, so that he got hardihood to plead his suit to her. And she with
gracious countenance of love treasured his praise of her, and accepted
and listened, as a lady who had good will of a poet to make verses about
her. And he composed his songs of her, and called her _Mielhs de Domna_
(‘Sovran Lady’) in his verse. And he took great delight in finding
similitudes of beasts and birds and men in his poetry, and of the sun and
the stars, so as to give new arguments such as no poet had found before
him. Long time he sang to her; but it was never believed that she yielded
to his suit.’
Provençal poetry cannot be shown to have had any direct influence upon
English, which is rather strange considering the close relations between
England and the districts where the Provençal language—the _langue
d’oc_—was spoken. It had great indirect influence, through the French.
The French imitated the Provençal lyric poetry, as the Germans and the
Italians did, and by means of the French poets the Provençal ideas found
their way to England. But this took a long time. The Provençal poets were
‘courtly makers’; so were the French who copied them. The ‘courtly maker’
needs not only great houses and polite society for his audience; not only
the fine philosophy ‘the love of honour and the honour of love’, which is
the foundation of chivalrous romance. Besides all this, he needs the
reward and approbation of success in poetical art; he cannot thrive as an
anonymous poet. And it is not till the time of Chaucer and Gower that
there is found in England any poet making a great name for himself as a
master of the art of poetry, like the Provençal masters Bernart de
Ventadour or Arnaut Daniel in the twelfth century, or like the German
Walther von der Vogelweide at the beginning of the thirteenth.
Lyric poetry of the Provençal kind was a most exacting and difficult art;
it required very peculiar conditions before it could flourish and be
appreciated, and those conditions did not exist in England or in the
English language. At the same time the elaborate lyrics of Provence, like
those of the Minnesingers in Germany, are pretty closely related to many
‘popular’ forms and motives. Besides the idealist love-poetry there were
other kinds available—simple songs of lament, or of satire—comic
songs—lyrics with a scene in them, such as the very beautiful one about
the girl whose lover has gone on the Crusade. In such as these, though
they have little directly to do with English poetry, may be found many
illustrations of English modes of verse, and rich examples of that most
delightful sort of poetry which refuses to be labelled either ‘courtly’
or ‘popular’.
In French literature, as distinct from Provençal, there was a ‘courtly’
strain which flourished in the same general conditions as the Provençal,
but was not so hard to understand and had a much greater immediate effect
on England.
The French excelled in narrative poetry. There seems to have been a
regular exchange in poetry between the South and the North of France.
French stories were translated into Provençal, Provençal lyrics were
imitated in the North of France. Thus French lyric is partly Provençal in
character, and it is in this way that the Provençal influence is felt in
English poetry. The French narrative poetry, though it also is affected
by ideas from the South, is properly French in origin and style. It is by
means of narrative that the French ideal of courtesy and chivalry is made
known, to the French themselves as well as to other nations.
In the twelfth century a considerable change was made in French poetry by
the rise and progress of a new romantic school in succession to the old
_chansons de geste_—the epic poems on the ‘matter of France’. The old
epics went down in the world, and gradually passed into the condition of
merely ‘popular’ literature. Some of them survive to this day in roughly
printed editions, like the _Reali di Francia_, which is an Italian prose
paraphrase of old French epics, and which seems to have a good sale in
the markets of Italy still, as _The Seven Champions of Christendom_ used
to have in England, and _The Four Sons of Aymon_ in France. The decline
of the old epics began in the twelfth century through the competition of
more brilliant new romances.
The subjects of these were generally taken either from the ‘matter of
Britain’, or from antiquity, the ‘matter of Rome the Great’, which
included Thebes and Troy. The new romantic school wanted new subjects,
and by preference foreign subjects. This, however, was of comparatively
small importance; it had long been usual for story-tellers to go looking
for subjects to foreign countries; this is proved by the Saints’ Lives,
and also by the story of Alexander the Great, which appeared in French
before the new school was properly begun.
In form of verse the new romances generally differed from the _chansons
de geste_, but this again is not an exact distinction. Apart from other
considerations, the distinction fails because the octosyllabic rhyming
measure, the short couplet, which was the ordinary form for fashionable
romances, was also at the same time the ordinary form for everything
else—for history, for moral and didactic poetry, and for comic stories
like Reynard the Fox. The establishment of this ‘short verse’ (as the
author of _Hudibras_ calls it) in England is one of the most obvious and
one of the largest results of the literary influence of France, but it is
not specially due to the romantic school.
The character of that school must be sought much more in its treatment of
motives, and particularly in its use of sentiment. It is romantic in its
fondness for strange adventures; but this taste is nothing new. The real
novelty and the secret of its greatest success was its command of pathos,
more especially in the pathetic monologues and dialogues of lovers. It is
greatly indebted for this, as has been already remarked, to the Latin
poets. The _Aeneid_ is turned into a French romance (_Roman d’Eneas_);
and the French author of the _Roman de Troie_, who gives the story of the
Argonauts in the introductory part of his work, has borrowed much from
Ovid’s Medea in the _Metamorphoses_. Virgil’s Dido and Ovid’s Medea had
an immense effect on the imagination of the French poets and their
followers. From Virgil and Ovid the medieval authors got the suggestion
of passionate eloquence, and learned how to manage a love-story in a
dramatic way—allowing the characters free scope to express themselves
fully. Chivalrous sentiment in the romances is partly due to the example
of the Latin authors, who wrote long passionate speeches for their
heroines, or letters like that of Phyllis to Demophoon or Ariadne to
Theseus and the rest of Ovid’s _Heroides_—the source of Chaucer’s _Legend
of Good Women_. The idea of the lover as the servant of his mistress was
also taken first of all from the Latin amatory poets. And the success of
the new romantic school was gained by the working together of those ideas
and examples, the new creation of chivalrous and courteous love out of
those elements.
The ideas are the same in the lyric as in the narrative poetry; and it is
allowable to describe a large part of the French romantic poems as being
the expression in narrative of the ideas which had been lyrically uttered
in the poetry of Provence—
The love of honour and the honour of love.
The well-known phrase of Sidney is the true rendering of the Provençal
spirit; it is found nearly in the same form in the old language—
Quar non es joys, si non l’adutz honors,
Ni es honors, si non l’adutz amors.
(There is no joy, if honour brings it not; nor is there honour, if love
brings it not.)
The importance of all this for the history of Europe can scarcely be
over-estimated. It was the beginning of a classical renaissance through
the successful appropriation of classical ideas in modern languages and
modern forms. It is true that the medieval version of the _Aeneid_ or of
the story of the Argonauts may appear exceedingly quaint and ‘Gothic’ and
childish, if it be thought of in comparison with the original; but if it
be contrasted with the style of narrative which was in fashion before it,
the _Roman d’Eneas_ comes out as something new and promising. There is
ambition in it, and the ambition is of the same sort as has produced all
the finer sentimental fiction since. If it is possible anywhere to trace
the pedigree of fashions in literature, it is here. All modern novelists
are descended from this French romantic poetry of the twelfth century,
and therefore from the classical poets to whom so much of the life of the
French romances can be traced. The great poets of the Renaissance carry
on in their own way the processes of adaptation which were begun in the
twelfth century, and, besides that, many of them are directly
indebted—Ariosto and Spenser, for example—to medieval romance.
Further, all the chivalrous ideals of the modern world are derived from
the twelfth century. Honour and loyalty would have thriven without the
chivalrous poets, as they had thriven before them in every nation on
earth. But it is none the less true that the tradition of honour was
founded for the sixteenth century and the eighteenth and the present day
in Europe by the poets of the twelfth century.
The poetical doctrine of love, which is so great a part of chivalry, has
had one effect both on civilization in general and on particular schools
of poetry which it is hard to sum up and to understand. It is sometimes a
courtly game like that described in the life of the troubadour quoted
above; the lady pleased at the honour paid her and ready to accept the
poet’s worship; the lady’s husband either amused by it all, or otherwise,
if not amused, at any rate prevented by the rules of polite society from
objecting; the poet enamoured according to the same code of law, with as
much sincerity as that law and his own disposition might allow;
thoroughly occupied with his own craft of verse and with the new
illustrations from natural or civil history by means of which he hoped to
make a name and go beyond all other poets. The difficulty is to know how
much there is of pretence and artifice in the game. It is certain that
the Provençal lyric poetry, and the other poetry derived from it in other
languages, has many excellences besides the ingenious repetition of stock
ideas in cleverly varied patterns of rhyme. The poets are not all alike,
and the poems of one poet are not all alike. The same poem of Bernart de
Ventadour contains a beautiful, true, fresh description of the skylark
singing and falling in the middle of the song through pure delight in the
rays of the sun; and also later an image of quite a different sort: the
lover looking in the eyes of his mistress and seeing himself reflected
there is in danger of the same fate as Narcissus, who pined away over his
own reflection in the well. Imagination and Fancy are blended and
interchanged in the troubadours as much as in any modern poet. But apart
from all questions of their value, there is no possible doubt that the
Provençal idealism is the source, though not the only source, to which
all the noblest lyric poetry of later times and other nations may be
referred for its ancestry. The succession of schools (or whatever the
right name may be) can be traced with absolute certainty through Dante
and Petrarch in the fourteenth century to Ronsard and Spenser in the
sixteenth, and further still.
The society which invented good manners and the theory of honour, which
is at the beginning of all modern poetry and of all novels as well, is
often slighted by modern historians. The vanity, the artifice, the
pedantry can easily be noted and dismissed. The genius of the several
writers is buried in the difficulty and unfamiliarity of the old
languages, even where it has not been destroyed and lost in other ways.
But still the spirit of Provençal lyric and of old French romance can be
proved to be, at the very lowest estimate, the beginning of modern
civilization, as distinct from the earlier Middle Ages.