COMIC POETRY
France sets the model for comic as well as romantic poetry, in the Middle
Ages. In romance the English were not able for a long time—hardly before
Chaucer and Gower—to imitate the French style properly; the French
sentiment was beyond them, not appreciated; they took the stories, the
action and adventures, and let the sentiment alone, or abridged it. The
reasons for this are obvious. But there seems to be no reason, except
accident, for the way in which the English writers in those times
neglected the French comic literature of the twelfth century. Very little
of it is represented in the English of the following centuries; yet what
there is in English corresponding to the French _fabliaux_ and to Reynard
the Fox is thoroughly well done. The English wit was quite equal to the
French in matters such as these; there were no difficulties of style or
caste in the way, such as prevented the English minstrels from using much
of the French romantic, sentimental rhetoric. There might have been a
thirteenth-century English _Reynard_, as good as the High or Low German
_Reynards_; that is proved by the one short example (295 lines) in which
an episode of the great medieval comic epic is told by an English
versifier—the story of _The Vox and the Wolf_. This is one of the best of
all the practical jokes of Reynard—the well-known story of the Fox and
the Wolf in the well. It is told again, in a different way, among the
Fables of the Scottish poet Robert Henryson; it is also one of the
stories of Uncle Remus.
A vox gan out of the wodè go,
and made his way to a hen-roost, where he got three hens out of five, and
argued with Chauntecler the cock, explaining, though unsuccessfully, that
a little blood-letting might be good for him; thence, being troubled with
thirst, he went to the well. The well had two buckets on a rope over a
pulley; the Fox ‘ne understood nought of the gin’ and got into one of the
buckets and went down to the bottom of the well; where he repented of his
gluttony. The comic epic is as moral as Piers Plowman; that is part of
the game.
Then (‘out of the depe wode’) appeared the Wolf, Sigrim (Isengrim), also
thirsty, and looking for a drink; he heard the lamentations of his gossip
Reneuard, and sat down by the well and called to him. Then at last the
Fox’s wit returned and he saw how he might escape. There was nothing (he
said) he would have prayed for more than that his friend should join him
in the happy place: ‘here is the bliss of Paradise’. ‘What! art thou
dead?’ says the Wolf: ‘this is news; it was only three days ago that thou
and thy wife and children all came to dine with me.’ ‘Yes! I am dead’,
says the Fox. ‘I would not return to the world again, for all the world’s
wealth. Why should I walk in the world, in care and woe, in filth and
sin? But this place is full of all happiness; here is mutton, both sheep
and goat.’ When the Wolf heard of this good meat his hunger overcame him
and he asked to be let in. ‘Not till thou art shriven’, says the Fox; and
the Wolf bends his head, sighing hard and strong, and makes his
confession, and gets forgiveness, and is happy.
Nou ich am in clene live
Ne recche ich of childe ne of wive.
‘But tell me what to do.’ ‘Do!’ quoth the Fox, ‘leap into the bucket, and
come down.’ And the Wolf going down met the Fox half-way; Reynard, ‘glad
and blithe’ that the Wolf was a true penitent and in clean living,
promised to have his soul-knell rung and masses said for him.
The well, it should be said, belonged to a house of friars; Aylmer the
‘master curtler’ who looked after the kitchen-garden came to the well in
the morning; and the Wolf was pulled out and beaten and hunted; he found
no bliss and no indulgence of blows.
The French story has some points that are not in the English; in the
original, the two buckets on the pulley are explained to Isengrim as
being God’s balance of good and evil, in which souls are weighed. Also
there is a more satisfactory account of the way Reynard came to be
entrapped. In the English story the failure of his wit is rather
disgraceful; in the French he takes to the bucket because he thinks he
sees his wife Hermeline in the bottom of the well; it is a clear
starlight night, and as he peers over the rim of the well he sees the
figure looking up at him, and when he calls there is a hollow echo which
he takes for a voice answering. But there is no such difference of taste
and imagination here between the French and the English Reynard as there
is between the French and the English chivalrous romances.
The _Roman de Renart_ is generally, and justly, taken as the ironical
counterpart of medieval epic and romance; an irreverent criticism of
dignitaries, spiritual and temporal, the great narrative comedy of the
Ages of Faith and of Chivalry. The comic short stories usually called
_fabliaux_ are most of them much less intelligent; rhyming versions of
ribald jokes, very elementary. But there are great differences among
them, and some of them are worth remembering. It is a pity there is no
English version of the _jongleur_, the professional minstrel, who, in the
absence of the devils, is put in charge of the souls in Hell, but is
drawn by St. Peter to play them away at a game of dice—the result being
that he is turned out; since then the Master Devil has given
instructions: No Minstrels allowed within.
There are few English _fabliaux_; there is perhaps only one preserved as
a separate piece by itself, the story of _Dame Sirith_. This is far above
the ordinary level of such things; it is a shameful practical joke, but
there is more in it than this; the character of Dame Sirith, in her
machinations to help the distressed lover of his neighbour’s wife, is
such as belongs to comedy and to satire, not to the ordinary vulgar
‘merry tale’.
It is hard to find any other separate tale of this class in English; but
the stories of the Seven Wise Masters, the Seven Sages of Rome, are many
of them impossible to distinguish from the common type of the French
_fabliaux_, though they are often classed among the romances. There are
many historical problems connected with the medieval short stories.
Although they do not appear in writing to any large extent before the
French rhyming versions, they are known to have been current long before
the twelfth century and before the French language was used in
literature. There are Latin versions of some of them composed in Germany
before the _fabliaux_ had come into existence; one of them in substance
is the same as Hans Andersen’s story of Big Claus and Little Claus, which
also is found as one of the _fabliaux_. Evidently, there are a number of
comic stories which have been going about for hundreds (or thousands) of
years without any need of a written version. At any time, in any country,
it may occur to some one to put one of those stories into literary
language. Two of the German-Latin comic poems are in elaborate medieval
verse, set to religious tunes, in the form of the _Sequentia_—a fact
which is mentioned here only to show that there was nothing popular in
these German experiments. They were not likely to found a school of comic
story-telling; they were too difficult and exceptional; literary
curiosities. The French _fabliaux_, in the ordinary short couplets and
without any literary ornament, were absolutely popular; it needed no
learning and not much wit to understand them. So that, as they spread and
were circulated, they came often to be hardly distinguishable from the
traditional stories which had been going about all the time in spoken,
not written, forms. It was one of the great popular successes of medieval
French literature; and it was due partly to the French stories
themselves, and partly to the example which they set, that comic
literature was cultivated in the later Middle Ages. The French stories
were translated and adapted by Boccaccio and many others; and when the
example had once been given, writers in different languages could find
stories of their own without going to the _fabliaux_.
Does it matter much to any one where these stories came from, and how
they passed from oral tradition into medieval (or modern) literary forms?
The question is more reasonable than such questions usually are, because
most of these stories are trivial, they are not all witty, and many of
them are villainous. But the historical facts about them serve to bring
out, at any rate, the extraordinary talent of the French for making
literary profit out of every kind of material. Any one might have thought
of writing out these stories which every one knew; but, with the
exception of the few Latin experiments, this was done by nobody till the
French took it up.
Further, those ‘merry tales’ come into the whole subject of the relations
between folk-lore and literature, which is particularly important (for
those who like that sort of inquiry) in the study of the Middle Ages. All
the fiction of the Middle Ages, comic or romantic, is full of things
which appear in popular tales like those collected by Grimm in Germany or
by Campbell of Islay in the West Highlands. So much of medieval poetry is
traditional or popular—the ballads especially—that folk-lore has to be
studied more carefully than is needful when one is dealing with later
times. With regard to short comic tales of the type of the _fabliaux_,
part of the problem is easy enough, if one accepts the opinion that
stories like _Big Claus and Little Claus_, which are found all over the
world, and which can be proved to have been current orally for centuries,
are things existing, and travelling, independently of written books,
which may at any time be recorded in a written form. The written form may
be literary, as when the story is written in Latin verse by an early
German scholar, or in French medieval verse by a minstrel or a minstrel’s
hack, or in fine Danish prose by Hans Andersen. Or it may be written down
by a scientific collector of folk-lore keeping closely to the actual
phrasing of the unsophisticated story-teller; as when the plot is found
among the Ananzi stories of the negroes in the West Indies. The life of
popular stories is mysterious; but it is well known in fact, and there is
no difficulty in understanding how the popular story which is perennial
in every climate may any day be used for the literary fashion of that
day.
It is rather strange that while there is so much folk-lore in medieval
literature there should be so few medieval stories which take up exactly
the plots of any of the popular traditional tales. And it is a curious
coincidence that two of the plots from folk-lore which are used in
medieval literature, distinctly, by themselves, keeping to the folk-lore
outlines, should also appear in literary forms equally distinct and no
less true to their traditional shape among the Tales of Andersen. One is
that which has just been mentioned, _Big Claus and Little Claus_, which
comes into English rather late in the Middle Ages as the _Friars of
Berwick_. The other is the _Travelling Companion_, which in English
rhyming romance is called _Sir Amadace_. There is something fortunate
about those two stories which has gained for them more attention than the
rest. They both come into the Elizabethan theatre, where again it is
curiously rare to find a folk-lore plot. One is Davenport’s _New Trick to
Cheat the Devil_; the other, the _Travelling Companion_, is Peele’s _Old
Wives’ Tale_.
With most of the short stories it is useless to seek for any definite
source. To ask for the first author of _Big Claus and Little Claus_ is no
more reasonable than to ask who was the inventor of High Dutch and Low
Dutch. But there is a large section of medieval story-telling which is in
a different condition, and about which it is not wholly futile to ask
questions of pedigree. _The Seven Sages of Rome_ is the best example of
this class; it has been remarked already that many things in the book are
like the _fabliaux_; but unlike most of the _fabliaux_ they have a
literary origin which can be traced. The Book of the Seven Wise Masters
of Rome (which exists in many different forms, with a variety of
contents) is an Oriental collection of stories in a framework; that is to
say, there is a plot which leads to the telling of stories, as in the
_Arabian Nights_, the _Decameron_, the _Canterbury Tales_. The _Arabian
Nights_ were not known in the West till the beginning of the eighteenth
century, but the Oriental plan of a group of stories was brought to
Europe at least as early as the twelfth century. The plot of the _Seven
Sages_ is that the son of the Emperor of Rome is falsely accused by his
stepmother, and defended by the Seven Masters, the Empress and the
Masters telling stories against one another. As the object of the Masters
is to prove that women are not to be trusted, it may be understood that
their stories generally agree in their moral with the common
disrespectful ‘merry tales’. Among the lady’s stories are some of a
different complexion; one of these is best known in England through W. R.
Spencer’s ballad of the death of Gelert, the faithful hound who saved the
child of his lord, and was hastily and unjustly killed in error. Another
is the story of the Master Thief, which is found in the second book of
Herodotus—the treasure of Rhampsinitus, king of Egypt.
One of those Oriental fables found among the old French short stories
comes into English long afterwards in the form of Parnell’s _Hermit_.
Although the _fabliaux_ are not very largely represented in medieval
English rhyme, there is a considerable amount of miscellaneous comic
verse. One of the great differences between Middle English and
Anglo-Saxon writings (judging from what is extant) is that in Middle
English there is far more jesting and nonsense. The best of the comic
pieces is one that might be reckoned along with the _fabliaux_ except
that there is no story in it; the description of the _Land of Cockayne_,
sometimes called the land of Readymade, where the geese fly about
roasted—
Yet I do you mo to wit
The geese y-roasted on the spit
Fleeth to that abbey, Got it wot
And gredeth: Geese all hot, all hot!
The land of Cockayne is a burlesque Paradise ‘far in the sea by West of
Spain’.
There beth rivers great and fine
Of oil, milk, honey and wine;
Water serveth there to no thing,
But to sight and to washing.
This piece, and _Reynard and Isengrim (The Fox and the Wolf)_, and
others, show that fairly early, and before the French language had given
way to English as the proper speech for good society, there was some
talent in English authors for light verse, narrative or descriptive, for
humorous stories, and for satire. The English short couplets of those
days—of the time of Henry III and Edward I—are at no disadvantage as
compared with the French. Anything can be expressed in that familiar
verse which is possible in French—anything, except the finer shades of
sentiment, for which as yet the English have no mind, and which must wait
for the authors of the _Confessio Amantis_ and the _Book of the Duchess
Blanche_.
But there is one early poem—a hundred, it may be a hundred and fifty,
years before Chaucer—in which not the sentiment but something much more
characteristic of Chaucer is anticipated in a really wonderful way. _The
Owl and the Nightingale_ is an original poem, written in the language of
Dorset at a time when nothing English was considered ‘courteous’. Yet it
is hard to see what is wanting to the poem to distinguish it from the
literature of polite society in the Augustan ages. What is there
provincial in it, except the language? And why should the language be
called, except in a technical and literal sense, rustic, when it is used
with a perfect command of idiom, with tact and discretion, with the good
humour that comprehends many different things and motives at once, and
the irony which may be a check on effusive romance, but never a hindrance
to grace and beauty? Urbanity is the right word, the name one cannot help
using, for the temper of this rustic and provincial poem. It is urbane,
like Horace or Addison, without any town society to support the author in
his criticism of life. The author is like one of the personages in his
satire, the Wren, who was bred in the greenwood, but brought up among
mankind—in the humanities:
For theih heo were ybred a wolde
Heo was ytowen among mankenne,
And hire wisdom broughte thenne.
_The Owl and the Nightingale_ is the most miraculous piece of writing,
or, if that is too strong a term, the most contrary to all preconceived
opinion, among the medieval English books. In the condition of the
English language in the reign of Henry III, with so much against it,
there was still no reason why there should not be plenty of English
romances and a variety of English songs, though they might not be the
same sort of romances and songs as were composed in countries like France
or Germany, and though they might be wanting in the ‘finer shades’. But
all the chances, as far as we can judge, were against the production of
humorous impartial essays in verse. Such things are not too common at any
time. They were not common even in French polite literature in the
thirteenth century. In the century after, Froissart in French, Gower and
of course Chaucer in English have the same talent for light familiar
rhyming essays that is shown by Prior and Swift. The early English poet
had discovered for himself a form which generally requires ages of
training and study before it can succeed.
His poem is entitled in one of the two MSS. _altercatio inter Philomenam
et Bubonem_: ‘A debate between the Nightingale and the Owl.’ Debates,
contentions, had been a favourite literary device for a long time in many
languages. It was known in Anglo-Saxon poetry. It was common in France.
There were contentions of Summer and Winter, of the Soul and the Body,
the Church and the Synagogue, of Fast and Feasting; there were also
(especially in the Provençal school) debates between actual men, one poet
challenging another. The originality of _The Owl and the Nightingale_
argument is that it is not, like so many of those poetical disputations,
simply an arrangement of all the obvious commonplaces for and against one
side and the other. It is a true comedy; not only is the writer
impartial, but he keeps the debate alive; he shows how the contending
speakers feel the strokes, and hide their pain, and do their best to face
it out with the adversary. Also, the debate is not a mere got-up thing.
It is Art against Philosophy; the Poet meeting the strong though not
silent Thinker, who tells him of the Immensities and Infinities. The
author agrees with Plato and Wordsworth that the nightingale is ‘a
creature of a fiery heart’, and that the song is one of mirth and not
lamentation. Yet it is not contrasted absolutely with the voice of the
contemplative person. If it were, the debate would come to an end, or
would turn into mere railing accusations—of which there is no want, it
may be said, along with the more serious arguments. What makes the
dispute worth following, what lifts it far above the ordinary medieval
conventions, is that each party shares something of the other’s mind. The
Owl wishes to be thought musical; the Nightingale is anxious not to be
taken for a mere worldling.