Ver.10/04/01*END*
Scanned and proofed by Alfred J. Drake (www.ajdrake.com)
THE RENAISSANCE: STUDIES IN ART AND POETRY
WALTER HORATIO PATER
London: 1910. (The Library Edition.)
NOTES BY THE E-TEXT EDITOR:
Notes: The 1910 Library Edition employs footnotes, a
style inconvenient in an electronic edition. I have therefore
placed an asterisk immediately after each of Pater's footnotes
and a + sign after my own notes, and have listed each chapter's
notes at that chapter's end.
Pagination and Paragraphing: To avoid an unwieldy electronic copy,
I have transferred original pagination to brackets. A bracketed
numeral such as [22] indicates that the material immediately
following the number marks the beginning of the relevant page. I
have preserved paragraph structure except for first-line indentation.
Hyphenation: I have not preserved original hyphenation since an
e-text does not require line-end or page-end hyphenation.
Greek typeface: For this full-text edition, I have transliterated
Pater's Greek quotations. If there is a need for the original Greek, it
can be viewed at my site, http://www.ajdrake.com/etexts, a Victorianist
archive that contains the complete works of Walter Pater and many other
nineteenth-century texts, mostly in first editions.
THE RENAISSANCE: STUDIES IN ART AND POETRY
WALTER HORATIO PATER
CONTENTS
Preface: vii-xv
Two Early French Stories: 1 -29
Pico della Mirandola: 30-49
Sandro Botticelli: 50-62
Luca della Robbia: 63-72
The Poetry of Michelangelo: 73-97
Leonardo da Vinci: 98-129
The School of Giorgione: 130-154
Joachim du Bellay: 155-176
Winckelmann: 177-232
Conclusion: 233-end
DEDICATION
To C.L.S
February 1873
PREFACE
[vii] Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to
define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general
terms, to find some universal formula for it. The value of these
attempts has most often been in the suggestive and penetrating
things said by the way. Such discussions help us very little to
enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate
between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use
words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise
meaning than they would otherwise have. Beauty, like all other
qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the
definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to
its abstractness. To define beauty, not in the most abstract but in
the most concrete terms possible, to find not its universal
formula, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or
that [viii] special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student
of aesthetics.
"To see the object as in itself it really is," has been justly said to
be the aim of all true criticism whatever, and in aesthetic
criticism the first step towards seeing one's object as it really is,
is to know one's own impression as it really is, to discriminate it,
to realise it distinctly. The objects with which aesthetic criticism
deals--music, poetry, artistic and accomplished forms of human
life--are indeed receptacles of so many powers or forces: they
possess, like the products of nature, so many virtues or qualities.
What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented
in life or in a book, to me? What effect does it really produce on
me? Does it give me pleasure? and if so, what sort or degree of
pleasure? How is my nature modified by its presence, and under
its influence? The answers to these questions are the original
facts with which the aesthetic critic has to do; and, as in the study
of light, of morals, of number, one must realise such primary data
for one's self, or not at all. And he who experiences these
impressions strongly, and drives directly at the discrimination
and analysis of them, has no need to trouble himself with the
abstract question what beauty is in itself, or what its exact
relation to truth or [ix] experience--metaphysical questions, as
unprofitable as metaphysical questions elsewhere. He may pass
them all by as being, answerable or not, of no interest to him.
The aesthetic critic, then, regards all the objects with which he
has to do, all works of art, and the fairer forms of nature and
human life, as powers or forces producing pleasurable sensations,
each of a more or less peculiar or unique kind. This influence he
feels, and wishes to explain, by analysing and reducing it to its
elements. To him, the picture, the landscape, the engaging
personality in life or in a book, La Gioconda, the hills of Carrara,
Pico of Mirandola, are valuable for their virtues, as we say, in
speaking of a herb, a wine, a gem; for the property each has of
affecting one with a special, a unique, impression of pleasure.
Our education becomes complete in proportion as our
susceptibility to these impressions increases in depth and variety.
And the function of the aesthetic critic is to distinguish, to
analyse, and separate from its adjuncts, the virtue by which a
picture, a landscape, a fair personality in life or in a book,
produces this special impression of beauty or pleasure, to indicate
what the source of that impression is, and under what conditions
it is experienced. His end is reached when he has disengaged that
[x] virtue, and noted it, as a chemist notes some natural element,
for himself and others; and the rule for those who would reach
this end is stated with great exactness in the words of a recent
critic of Sainte-Beuve:--De se borner à connaître de près les
belles choses, et à s'en nourrir en exquis amateurs, en
humanistes accomplis.
What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a
correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain
kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the
presence of beautiful objects. He will remember always that
beauty exists in many forms. To him all periods, types, schools
of taste, are in themselves equal. In all ages there have been
some excellent workmen, and some excellent work done. The
question he asks is always:--In whom did the stir, the genius, the
sentiment of the period find itself? where was the receptacle of
its refinement, its elevation, its taste? "The ages are all equal,"
says William Blake, "but genius is always above its age."
Often it will require great nicety to disengage this virtue from the
commoner elements with which it may be found in combination.
Few artists, not Goethe or Byron even, work quite cleanly,
casting off all débris, and leaving us only what the heat of their
imagination has wholly [xi] fused and transformed. Take, for
instance, the writings of Wordsworth. The heat of his genius,
entering into the substance of his work, has crystallised a part,
but only a part, of it; and in that great mass of verse there is much
which might well be forgotten. But scattered up and down it,
sometimes fusing and transforming entire compositions, like the
Stanzas on Resolution and Independence, or the Ode on the
Recollections of Childhood, sometimes, as if at random,
depositing a fine crystal here or there, in a matter it does not
wholly search through and transmute, we trace the action of his
unique, incommunicable faculty, that strange, mystical sense of a
life in natural things, and of man's life as a part of nature,
drawing strength and colour and character from local influences,
from the hills and streams, and from natural sights and sounds.
Well! that is the virtue, the active principle in Wordsworth's
poetry; and then the function of the critic of Wordsworth is to
follow up that active principle, to disengage it, to mark the degree
in which it penetrates his verse.
The subjects of the following studies are taken from the history
of the Renaissance, and touch what I think the chief points in that
complex, many-sided movement. I have explained in the first of
them what I understand by the word, [xii] giving it a much wider
scope than was intended by those who originally used it to denote
that revival of classical antiquity in the fifteenth century which
was only one of many results of a general excitement and
enlightening of the human mind, but of which the great aim and
achievements of what, as Christian art, is often falsely opposed to
the Renaissance, were another result. This outbreak of the human
spirit may be traced far into the middle age itself, with its motives
already clearly pronounced, the care for physical beauty, the
worship of the body, the breaking down of those limits which the
religious system of the middle age imposed on the heart and the
imagination. I have taken as an example of this movement, this
earlier Renaissance within the middle age itself, and as an
expression of its qualities, two little compositions in early
French; not because they constitute the best possible expression
of them, but because they help the unity of my series, inasmuch
as the Renaissance ends also in France, in French poetry, in a
phase of which the writings of Joachim du Bellay are in many
ways the most perfect illustration. The Renaissance, in truth, put
forth in France an aftermath, a wonderful later growth, the
products of which have to the full that subtle and delicate
sweetness which belongs to a refined and comely [xiii]
decadence, just as its earliest phases have the freshness which
belongs to all periods of growth in art, the charm of ascêsis, of
the austere and serious girding of the loins in youth.
But it is in Italy, in the fifteenth century, that the interest of the
Renaissance mainly lies,--in that solemn fifteenth century which
can hardly be studied too much, not merely for its positive results
in the things of the intellect and the imagination, its concrete
works of art, its special and prominent personalities, with their
profound aesthetic charm, but for its general spirit and character,
for the ethical qualities of which it is a consummate type.
The various forms of intellectual activity which together make
up the culture of an age, move for the most part from different
starting-points, and by unconnected roads. As products of the
same generation they partake indeed of a common character, and
unconsciously illustrate each other; but of the producers
themselves, each group is solitary, gaining what advantage or
disadvantage there may be in intellectual isolation. Art and
poetry, philosophy and the religious life, and that other life of
refined pleasure and action in the conspicuous places of the
world, are each of them confined to its own circle of ideas, and
those who prosecute either of them are generally little [xiv]
curious of the thoughts of others. There come, however, from
time to time, eras of more favourable conditions, in which the
thoughts of men draw nearer together than is their wont, and the
many interests of the intellectual world combine in one complete
type of general culture. The fifteenth century in Italy is one of
these happier eras, and what is sometimes said of the age of
Pericles is true of that of Lorenzo:--it is an age productive in
personalities, many-sided, centralised, complete. Here, artists
and philosophers and those whom the action of the world has
elevated and made keen, do not live in isolation, but breathe a
common air, and catch light and heat from each other's thoughts.
There is a spirit of general elevation and enlightenment in which
all alike communicate. The unity of this spirit gives unity to all
the various products of the Renaissance; and it is to this intimate
alliance with the mind, this participation in the best thoughts
which that age produced, that the art of Italy in the fifteenth
century owes much of its grave dignity and influence.
I have added an essay on Winckelmann, as not incongruous with
the studies which precede it, because Winckelmann, coming in
the eighteenth century, really belongs in spirit to an earlier age.
By his enthusiasm for the things of the intellect [xv] and the
imagination for their own sake, by his Hellenism, his life-long
struggle to attain the Greek spirit, he is in sympathy with the
humanists of a previous century. He is the last fruit of the
Renaissance, and explains in a striking way its motive and
tendencies.
1873.
TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES
Yet shall ye be as the wings of a dove.
[1] THE history of the Renaissance ends in France, and carries us
away from Italy to the beautiful cities of the country of the Loire.
But it was in France also, in a very important sense, that the
Renaissance had begun. French writers, who are fond of
connecting the creations of Italian genius with a French origin,
who tell us how Saint Francis of Assisi took not his name only,
but all those notions of chivalry and romantic love which so
deeply penetrated his thoughts, from a French source, how
Boccaccio borrowed the outlines of his stories from the old
French fabliaux, and how Dante himself expressly connects the
origin of the art of miniature-painting with the city of Paris, have
often dwelt on this notion of a Renaissance in the end of the
twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century, a Renaissance
within the limits of the middle age itself--a brilliant, but in part
abortive effort to do for human life and the human mind what
was afterwards done in the fifteenth. The word Renaissance,
indeed, is now generally used to denote not [2] merely the revival
of classical antiquity which took place in the fifteenth century,
and to which the word was first applied, but a whole complex
movement, of which that revival of classical antiquity was but
one element or symptom. For us the Renaissance is the name of
a many-sided but yet united movement, in which the love of the
things of the intellect and the imagination for their own sake, the
desire for a more liberal and comely way of conceiving life, make
themselves felt, urging those who experience this desire to search
out first one and then another means of intellectual or imaginative
enjoyment, and directing them not only to the discovery of old
and forgotten sources of this enjoyment, but to the divination of
fresh sources thereof--new experiences, new subjects of poetry,
new forms of art. Of such feeling there was a great outbreak in
the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the following century.
Here and there, under rare and happy conditions, in Pointed
architecture, in the doctrines of romantic love, in the poetry of
Provence, the rude strength of the middle age turns to sweetness;
and the taste for sweetness generated there becomes the seed of
the classical revival in it, prompting it constantly to seek after the
springs of perfect sweetness in the Hellenic world. And coming
after a long period in which this instinct had been crushed, that
true "dark age," in which so many sources of intellectual and
imaginative enjoyment had [3] actually disappeared, this
outbreak is rightly called a Renaissance, a revival.
Theories which bring into connexion with each other modes of
thought and feeling, periods of taste, forms of art and poetry,
which the narrowness of men's minds constantly tends to oppose
to each other, have a great stimulus for the intellect, and are
almost always worth understanding. It is so with this theory of a
Renaissance within the middle age, which seeks to establish a
continuity between the most characteristic work of that period,
the sculpture of Chartres, the windows of Le Mans, and the work
of the later Renaissance, the work of Jean Cousin and Germain
Pilon, thus healing that rupture between the middle age and the
Renaissance which has so often been exaggerated. But it is not
so much the ecclesiastical art of the middle age, its sculpture and
painting--work certainly done in a great measure for pleasure's
sake, in which even a secular, a rebellious spirit often betrays
itself--but rather its profane poetry, the poetry of Provence, and
the magnificent after-growth of that poetry in Italy and France,
which those French writers have in view when they speak of this
medieval Renaissance. In that poetry, earthly passion, with its
intimacy, its freedom, its variety--the liberty of the heart--makes
itself felt; and the name of Abelard, the great scholar and the
great lover, connects the expression of this liberty of heart with
the free [4] play of human intelligence around all subjects
presented to it, with the liberty of the intellect, as that age
understood it.
Every one knows the legend of Abelard, a legend hardly less
passionate, certainly not less characteristic of the middle age,
than the legend of Tannhäuser; how the famous and comely
clerk, in whom Wisdom herself, self-possessed, pleasant, and
discreet, seemed to sit enthroned, came to live in the house of a
canon of the church of Notre-Dame, where dwelt a girl, Heloïse,
believed to be the old priest's orphan niece; how the old priest
had testified his love for her by giving her an education then
unrivalled, so that rumour asserted that, through the knowledge
of languages, enabling her to penetrate into the mysteries of the
older world, she had become a sorceress, like the Celtic
druidesses; and how as Abelard and Heloïse sat together at home
there, to refine a little further on the nature of abstract ideas,
"Love made himself of the party with them." You conceive the
temptations of the scholar, who, in such dreamy tranquillity, amid
the bright and busy spectacle of the "Island," lived in a world of
something like shadows; and that for one who knew so well how
to assign its exact value to every abstract thought, those restraints
which lie on the consciences of other men had been relaxed. It
appears that he composed many verses in the vulgar tongue:
already the young men sang them on the quay below the house.
Those songs, says M. de Rémusat, [5] were probably in the taste
of the Trouvères, "of whom he was one of the first in date, or, so
to speak, the predecessor." It is the same spirit which has
moulded the famous "letters," written in the quaint Latin of the
middle age.
At the foot of that early Gothic tower, which the next generation
raised to grace the precincts of Abelard's school, on the
"Mountain of Saint Geneviève," the historian Michelet sees in
thought "a terrible assembly; not the hearers of Abelard alone,
fifty bishops, twenty cardinals, two popes, the whole body of
scholastic philosophy; not only the learned Heloïse, the teaching
of languages, and the Renaissance; but Arnold of Brescia--that is
to say, the revolution." And so from the rooms of this shadowy
house by the Seine side we see that spirit going abroad, with its
qualities already well defined, its intimacy, its languid sweetness,
its rebellion, its subtle skill in dividing the elements of human
passion, its care for physical beauty, its worship of the body,
which penetrated the early literature of Italy, and finds an echo
even in Dante.
That Abelard is not mentioned in the Divine Comedy may appear
a singular omission to the reader of Dante, who seems to have
inwoven into the texture of his work whatever had impressed him
as either effective in colour or spiritually significant among the
recorded incidents of actual life. Nowhere in his great poem do
we find the name, nor so much as an allusion to the story of [6]
one who had left so deep a mark on the philosophy of which
Dante was an eager student, of whom in the Latin Quarter, and
from the lips of scholar or teacher in the University of Paris,
during his sojourn among them, he can hardly have failed to hear.
We can only suppose that he had indeed considered the story and
the man, and abstained from passing judgment as to his place in
the scheme of "eternal justice."
In the famous legend of Tannhäuser, the erring knight makes his
way to Rome, to seek absolution at the centre of Christian
religion. "So soon," thought and said the Pope, "as the staff in
his hand should bud and blossom, so soon might the soul of
Tannhäuser be saved, and no sooner"; and it came to pass not
long after that the dry wood of a staff which the Pope had carried
in his hand was covered with leaves and flowers. So, in the
cloister of Godstow, a petrified tree was shown of which the nuns
told that the fair Rosamond, who had died among them, had
declared that, the tree being then alive and green, it would be
changed into stone at the hour of her salvation. When Abelard
died, like Tannhäuser, he was on his way to Rome. What might
have happened had he reached his journey's end is uncertain; and
it is in this uncertain twilight that his relation to the general
beliefs of his age has always remained. In this, as in other things,
he prefigures the character of the Renaissance, that movement in
[7] which, in various ways, the human mind wins for itself a new
kingdom of feeling and sensation and thought, not opposed to but
only beyond and independent of the spiritual system then actually
realised. The opposition into which Abelard is thrown, which
gives its colour to his career, which breaks his soul to pieces, is a
no less subtle opposition than that between the merely
professional, official, hireling ministers of that system, with their
ignorant worship of system for its own sake, and the true child of
light, the humanist, with reason and heart and senses quick, while
theirs were almost dead. He reaches out towards, he attains,
modes of ideal living, beyond the prescribed limits of that
system, though in essential germ, it may be, contained within it.
As always happens, the adherents of the poorer and narrower
culture had no sympathy with, because no understanding of, a
culture richer and more ample than their own. After the
discovery of wheat they would still live upon acorns--après
l'invention du blé ils voulaient encore vivre du gland; and would
hear of no service to the higher needs of humanity with
instruments not of their forging.
But the human spirit, bold through those needs, was too strong
for them. Abelard and Heloïse write their letters--letters with a
wonderful outpouring of soul--in medieval Latin; and Abelard,
though he composes songs in the vulgar tongue, writes also in
Latin those [8] treatises in which he tries to find a ground of
reality below the abstractions of philosophy, as one bent on
trying all things by their congruity with human experience, who
had felt the hand of Heloïse, and looked into her eyes, and tested
the resources of humanity in her great and energetic nature. Yet
it is only a little later, early in the thirteenth century, that French
prose romance begins; and in one of the pretty volumes of the
Bibliothèque Elzevirienne some of the most striking fragments of
it may be found, edited with much intelligence. In one of these
thirteenth-century stories, Li Amitiez de Ami et Amile, that free
play of human affection, of the claims of which Abelard's story is
an assertion, makes itself felt in the incidents of a great
friendship, a friendship pure and generous, pushed to a sort of
passionate exaltation, and more than faithful unto death. Such
comradeship, though instances of it are to be found everywhere,
is still especially a classical motive; Chaucer expressing the
sentiment of it so strongly in an antique tale, that one knows not
whether the love of both Palamon and Arcite for Emelya, or of
those two for each other, is the chiefer subject of the Knight's
Tale--
He cast his eyen upon Emelya,
And therewithal he bleynte and cried, ah!
As that he stongen were unto the herte.
What reader does not refer something of the [9] bitterness of that
cry to the spoiling, already foreseen, of the fair friendship, which
had made the prison of the two lads sweet hitherto with its daily
offices?
The friendship of Amis and Amile is deepened by the romantic
circumstance of an entire personal resemblance between the two
heroes, through which they pass for each other again and again,
and thereby into many strange adventures; that curious interest of
the Doppelgänger, which begins among the stars with the
Dioscuri, being entwined in and out through all the incidents of
the story, like an outward token of the inward similitude of their
souls. With this, again, is connected, like a second reflection of
that inward similitude, the conceit of two marvellously beautiful
cups, also exactly like each other--children's cups, of wood, but
adorned with gold and precious stones. These two cups, which
by their resemblance help to bring the friends together at critical
moments, were given to them by the Pope, when he baptized
them at Rome, whither the parents had taken them for that
purpose, in gratitude for their birth. They cross and recross very
strangely in the narrative, serving the two heroes almost like
living things, and with that well-known effect of a beautiful
object, kept constantly before the eye in a story or poem, of
keeping sensation well awake, and giving a certain air of
refinement to all the scenes into which it enters. That sense of
fate, which [10] hangs so much of the shaping of human life on
trivial objects, like Othello's strawberry handkerchief, is thereby
heightened, while witness is borne to the enjoyment of beautiful
handiwork by primitive people, their simple wonder at it, so that
they give it an oddly significant place among the factors of a
human history.
Amis and Amile, then, are true to their comradeship through all
trials; and in the end it comes to pass that at a moment of great
need Amis takes the place of Amile in a tournament for life or
death. "After this it happened that a leprosy fell upon Amis, so
that his wife would not approach him, and wrought to strangle
him. He departed therefore from his home, and at last prayed his
servants to carry him to the house of Amile"; and it is in what
follows that the curious strength of the piece shows itself:--
"His servants, willing to do as he commanded, carried him to the
place where Amile was; and they began to sound their rattles
before the court of Amile's house, as lepers are accustomed to
do. And when Amile heard the noise he commanded one of his
servants to carry meat and bread to the sick man, and the cup
which was given to him at Rome filled with good wine. And
when the servant had done as he was commanded, he returned
and said, Sir, if I had not thy cup in my hand, I should believe
that the cup which the sick man has was thine, for they are alike,
the [11] one to the other, in height and fashion. And Amile said,
Go quickly and bring him to me. And when Amis stood before
his comrade Amile demanded of him who he was, and how he
had gotten that cup. I am of Briquain le Chastel, answered Amis,
and the cup was given to me by the Bishop of Rome, who
baptized me. And when Amile heard that, he knew that it was his
comrade Amis, who had delivered him from death, and won for
him the daughter of the King of France to be his wife. And
straightway he fell upon him, and began weeping greatly, and
kissed him. And when his wife heard that, she ran out with her
hair in disarray, weeping and distressed exceedingly, for she
remembered that it was he who had slain the false Ardres. And
thereupon they placed him in a fair bed, and said to him, Abide
with us until God's will be accomplished in thee, for all we have
is at thy service. So he and the two servants abode with them.
"And it came to pass one night, when Amis and Amile lay in one
chamber without other companions, that God sent His angel
Raphael to Amis, who said to him, Amis, art thou asleep? And
he, supposing that Amile had called him, answered and said, I am
not asleep, fair comrade! And the angel said to him, Thou hast
answered well, for thou art the comrade of the heavenly citizens.-
-I am Raphael, the angel of our Lord, and am come to tell thee
how thou mayest be [12] healed; for thy prayers are heard. Thou
shalt bid Amile, thy comrade, that he slay his two children and
wash thee in their blood, and so thy body shall be made whole.
And Amis said to him, Let not this thing be, that my comrade
should become a murderer for my sake. But the angel said, It is
convenient that he do this. And thereupon the angel departed.
"And Amile also, as if in sleep, heard those words; and he awoke
and said, Who is it, my comrade, that hath spoken with thee?
And Amis answered, No man; only I have prayed to our Lord, as
I am accustomed. And Amile said, Not so! but some one hath
spoken with thee. Then he arose and went to the door of the
chamber; and finding it shut he said, Tell me, my brother, who it
was said those words to thee to-night. And Amis began to weep
greatly, and told him that it was Raphael, the angel of the Lord,
who had said to him, Amis, our Lord commands thee that thou
bid Amile slay his two children, and wash thee in their blood, and
so thou shalt be healed of thy leprosy. And Amile was greatly
disturbed at those words, and said, I would have given to thee my
man-servants and my maid-servants and all my goods, and thou
feignest that an angel hath spoken to thee that I should slay my
two children. And immediately Amis began to weep, and said, I
know that I have spoken to thee a terrible thing, but constrained
thereto; I pray thee cast me not away [13] from the shelter of thy
house. And Amile answered that what he had covenanted with
him, that he would perform, unto the hour of his death: But I
conjure thee, said he, by the faith which there is between me and
thee, and by our comradeship, and by the baptism we received
together at Rome, that thou tell me whether it was man or angel
said that to thee. And Amis answered again, So truly as an angel
hath spoken to me this night, so may God deliver me from my
infirmity!
"Then Amile began to weep in secret, and thought within
himself: If this man was ready to die before the king for me, shall
I not for him slay my children? Shall I not keep faith with him
who was faithful to me even unto death? And Amile tarried no
longer, but departed to the chamber of his wife, and bade her go
hear the Sacred Office. And he took a sword, and went to the bed
where the children were lying, and found them asleep. And he
lay down over them and began to weep bitterly and said, Hath
any man yet heard of a father who of his own will slew his
children? Alas, my children! I am no longer your father, but
your cruel murderer.
"And the children awoke at the tears of their father, which fell
upon them; and they looked up into his face and began to laugh.
And as they were of the age of about three years, he said, Your
laughing will be turned into tears, for your innocent blood must
now be shed, [14] and therewith he cut off their heads. Then he
laid them back in the bed, and put the heads upon the bodies, and
covered them as though they slept: and with the blood which he
had taken he washed his comrade, and said, Lord Jesus Christ!
who hast commanded men to keep faith on earth, and didst heal
the leper by Thy word! cleanse now my comrade, for whose love
I have shed the blood of my children.
"Then Amis was cleansed of his leprosy. And Amile clothed his
companion in his best robes; and as they went to the church to
give thanks, the bells, by the will of God, rang of their own
accord. And when the people of the city heard that, they ran
together to see the marvel. And the wife of Amile, when she saw
Amis and Amile coming, asked which of the twain was her
husband, and said, I know well the vesture of them both, but I
know not which of them is Amile. And Amile said to her, I am
Amile, and my companion is Amis, who is healed of his sickness.
And she was full of wonder, and desired to know in what manner
he was healed. Give thanks to our Lord, answered Amile, but
trouble not thyself as to the manner of the healing.
"Now neither the father nor the mother had yet entered where the
children were; but the father sighed heavily, because they were
dead, and the mother asked for them, that they might rejoice
together; but Amile said, Dame! let [15] the children sleep. And
it was already the hour of Tierce. And going in alone to the
children to weep over them, he found them at play in the bed;
only, in the place of the sword-cuts about their throats was as it
were a thread of crimson. And he took them in his arms and
carried them to his wife and said, Rejoice greatly, for thy children
whom I had slain by the commandment of the angel are alive,
and by their blood is Amis healed."
There, as I said, is the strength of the old French story. For the
Renaissance has not only the sweetness which it derives from the
classical world, but also that curious strength of which there are
great resources in the true middle age. And as I have illustrated
the early strength of the Renaissance by the story of Amis and
Amile, a story which comes from the North, in which a certain
racy Teutonic flavour is perceptible, so I shall illustrate that other
element, its early sweetness, a languid excess of sweetness even,
by another story printed in the same volume of the Bibliothèque
Elzevirienne, and of about the same date, a story which comes,
characteristically, from the South, and connects itself with the
literature of Provence.
The central love-poetry of Provence, the poetry of the Tenson and
the Aubade, of Bernard de Ventadour and Pierre Vidal, is poetry
for the few, for the elect and peculiar people of the [16] kingdom
of sentiment. But below this intenser poetry there was probably a
wide range of literature, less serious and elevated, reaching, by
lightness of form and comparative homeliness of interest, an
audience which the concentrated passion of those higher lyrics
left untouched. This literature has long since perished, or lives
only in later French or Italian versions. One such version, the
only representative of its species, M. Fauriel thought he detected
in the story of Aucassin and Nicolette, written in the French of
the latter half of the thirteenth century, and preserved in a unique
manuscript, in the national library of Paris; and there were
reasons which made him divine for it a still more ancient
ancestry, traces in it of an Arabian origin, as in a leaf lost out of
some early Arabian Nights.* The little book loses none of its
interest through the criticism which finds in it only a traditional
subject, handed on by one people to another; for after passing
thus from hand to hand, its outline is still clear, its surface
untarnished; and, like many other stories, books, literary and
artistic conceptions of the middle age, it has come to [17] have in
this way a sort of personal history, almost as full of risk and
adventure as that of its own heroes. The writer himself calls the
piece a cantefable, a tale told in prose, but with its incidents and
sentiment helped forward by songs, inserted at irregular intervals.
In the junctions of the story itself there are signs of roughness and
want of skill, which make one suspect that the prose was only put
together to connect a series of songs--a series of songs so moving
and attractive that people wished to heighten and dignify their
effect by a regular framework or setting. Yet the songs
themselves are of the simplest kind, not rhymed even, but only
imperfectly assonant, stanzas of twenty or thirty lines apiece, all
ending with a similar vowel sound. And here, as elsewhere in
that early poetry, much of the interest lies in the spectacle of the
formation of a new artistic sense. A novel art is arising, the
music of rhymed poetry, and in the songs of Aucassin and
Nicolette, which seem always on the point of passing into true
rhyme, but which halt somehow, and can never quite take flight,
you see people just growing aware of the elements of a new
music in their possession, and anticipating how pleasant such
music might become.
The piece was probably intended to be recited by a company of
trained performers, many of whom, at least for the lesser parts,
were probably children. The songs are introduced by the rubric,
[18] Or se cante (ici on chante); and each division of prose by
the rubric, Or dient et content et fabloient (ici on conte). The
musical notes of a portion of the songs have been preserved; and
some of the details are so descriptive that they suggested to M.
Fauriel the notion that the words had been accompanied
throughout by dramatic action. That mixture of simplicity and
refinement which he was surprised to find in a composition of the
thirteenth century, is shown sometimes in the turn given to some
passing expression or remark; thus, "the Count de Garins was old
and frail, his time was over"--Li quens Garins de Beaucaire
estoit vix et frales; si avoit son tans trespassè. And then, all is so
realised! One sees the ancient forest, with its disused roads
grown deep with grass, and the place where seven roads meet--u
a forkeut set cemin qui s'en vont par le païs; we hear the light-
hearted country people calling each other by their rustic names,
and putting forward, as their spokesman, one among them who is
more eloquent and ready than the rest--li un qui plus fu enparlés
des autres; for the little book has its burlesque element also, so
that one hears the faint, far-off laughter still. Rough as it is, the
piece certainly possesses this high quality of poetry, that it aims
at a purely artistic effect. Its subject is a great sorrow, yet it
claims to be a thing of joy and refreshment, to be entertained not
for its matter only, but chiefly for its manner, it is cortois, it tells
us, et bien assis.
[19] For the student of manners, and of the old French language
and literature, it has much interest of a purely antiquarian order.
To say of an ancient literary composition that it has an
antiquarian interest, often means that it has no distinct aesthetic
interest for the reader of to-day. Antiquarianism, by a purely
historical effort, by putting its object in perspective, and setting
the reader in a certain point of view, from which what gave
pleasure to the past is pleasurable for him also, may often add
greatly to the charm we receive from ancient literature. But the
first condition of such aid must be a real, direct, aesthetic charm
in the thing itself. Unless it has that charm, unless some purely
artistic quality went to its original making, no merely antiquarian
effort can ever give it an aesthetic value, or make it a proper
subject of aesthetic criticism. This quality, wherever it exists, it
is always pleasant to define, and discriminate from the sort of
borrowed interest which an old play, or an old story, may very
likely acquire through a true antiquarianism. The story of
Aucassin and Nicolette has something of this quality. Aucassin,
the only son of Count Garins of Beaucaire, is passionately in love
with Nicolette, a beautiful girl of unknown parentage, bought of
the Saracens, whom his father will not permit him to marry. The
story turns on the adventures of these two lovers, until at the end
of the piece their mutual fidelity is rewarded. These [20]
adventures are of the simplest sort, adventures which seem to be
chosen for the happy occasion they afford of keeping the eye of
the fancy, perhaps the outward eye, fixed on pleasant objects, a
garden, a ruined tower, the little hut of flowers which Nicolette
constructs in the forest whither she escapes from her enemies, as
a token to Aucassin that she has passed that way. All the charm
of the piece is in its details, in a turn of peculiar lightness and
grace given to the situations and traits of sentiment, especially in
its quaint fragments of early French prose.
All through it one feels the influence of that faint air of
overwrought delicacy, almost of wantonness, which was so
strong a characteristic of the poetry of the Troubadours. The
Troubadours themselves were often men of great rank; they
wrote for an exclusive audience, people of much leisure and great
refinement, and they came to value a type of personal beauty
which has in it but little of the influence of the open air and
sunshine. There is a languid Eastern deliciousness in the very
scenery of the story, the full-blown roses, the chamber painted in
some mysterious manner where Nicolette is imprisoned, the cool
brown marble, the almost nameless colours, the odour of plucked
grass and flowers. Nicolette herself well becomes this scenery,
and is the best illustration of the quality I mean--the beautiful,
weird, foreign girl, whom the [21] shepherds take for a fay, who
has the knowledge of simples, the healing and beautifying
qualities of leaves and flowers, whose skilful touch heals
Aucassin's sprained shoulder, so that he suddenly leaps from the
ground; the mere sight of whose white flesh, as she passed the
place where he lay, healed a pilgrim stricken with sore disease, so
that he rose up, and returned to his own country. With this girl
Aucassin is so deeply in love that he forgets all knightly duties.
At last Nicolette is shut up to get her out of his way, and perhaps
the prettiest passage in the whole piece is the fragment of prose
which describes her escape:--
"Aucassin was put in prison, as you have heard, and Nicolette
remained shut up in her chamber. It was summer-time, in the
month of May, when the days are warm and long and clear, and
the nights coy and serene.
"One night Nicolette, lying on her bed, saw the moon shine clear
through the little window, and heard the nightingale sing in the
garden, and then came the memory of Aucassin, whom she so
much loved. She thought of the Count Garins of Beaucaire, who
mortally hated her, and, to be rid of her, might at any moment
cause her to be burned or drowned. She perceived that the old
woman who kept her company was asleep; she rose and put on
the fairest gown she had; she took the bed-clothes [22] and the
towels, and knotted them together like a cord, as far as they
would go. Then she tied the end to a pillar of the window, and let
herself slip down quite softly into the garden, and passed straight
across it, to reach the town.
"Her hair was yellow in small curls, her smiling eyes blue-green,
her face clear and feat, the little lips very red, the teeth small and
white; and the daisies which she crushed in passing, holding her
skirt high behind and before, looked dark against her feet; the girl
was so white!
"She came to the garden-gate and opened it, and walked through
the streets of Beaucaire, keeping on the dark side of the way to be
out of the light of the moon, which shone quietly in the sky. She
walked as fast as she could, until she came to the tower where
Aucassin was. The tower was set about with pillars, here and
there. She pressed herself against one of the pillars, wrapped
herself closely in her mantle, and putting her face to a chink of
the tower, which was old and ruined, she heard Aucassin crying
bitterly within, and when she had listened awhile she began to
speak."
But scattered up and down through this lighter matter, always
tinged with humour and often passing into burlesque, which
makes up the general substance of the piece, there are morsels of
a different quality, touches of some intenser sentiment, coming it
would seem from [23] the profound and energetic spirit of the
Provençal poetry itself, to which the inspiration of the book has
been referred. Let me gather up these morsels of deeper colour,
these expressions of the ideal intensity of love, the motive which
really unites together the fragments of the little composition.
Dante, the perfect flower of ideal love, has recorded how the
tyranny of that "Lord of terrible aspect" became actually
physical, blinding his senses, and suspending his bodily forces.
In this, Dante is but the central expression and type of
experiences known well enough to the initiated, in that passionate
age. Aucassin represents this ideal intensity of passion--
Aucassin, le biax, li blons,
Li gentix, li amorous;--
the slim, tall, debonair, dansellon, as the singers call him, with
his curled yellow hair, and eyes of vair, who faints with love, as
Dante fainted, who rides all day through the forest in search of
Nicolette, while the thorns tear his flesh, so that one might have
traced him by the blood upon the grass, and who weeps at
eventide because he has not found her, who has the malady of his
love, and neglects all knightly duties. Once he is induced to put
himself at the head of his people, that they, seeing him before
them, might have more heart to defend themselves; then a song
relates how the sweet, grave figure goes forth to battle, in dainty,
tight-laced [24] armour. It is the very image of the Provençal
love-god, no longer a child, but grown to pensive youth, as Pierre
Vidal met him, riding on a white horse, fair as the morning, his
vestment embroidered with flowers. He rode on through the
gates into the open plain beyond. But as he went, that great
malady of his love came upon him. The bridle fell from his
hands; and like one who sleeps walking, he was carried on into
the midst of his enemies, and heard them talking together how
they might most conveniently kill him.
One of the strongest characteristics of that outbreak of the reason
and the imagination, of that assertion of the liberty of the heart, in
the middle age, which I have termed a medieval Renaissance,
was its antinomianism, its spirit of rebellion and revolt against
the moral and religious ideas of the time. In their search after the
pleasures of the senses and the imagination, in their care for
beauty, in their worship of the body, people were impelled
beyond the bounds of the Christian ideal; and their love became
sometimes a strange idolatry, a strange rival religion. It was the
return of that ancient Venus, not dead, but only hidden for a time
in the caves of the Venusberg, of those old pagan gods still going
to and fro on the earth, under all sorts of disguises. And this
element in the middle age, for the most part ignored by those
writers who have treated it pre-eminently as the [25] "Age of
Faith"--this rebellious and antinomian element, the recognition of
which has made the delineation of the middle age by the writers
of the Romantic school in France, by Victor Hugo for instance in
Notre-Dame de Paris, so suggestive and exciting--is found alike
in the history of Abelard and the legend of Tannhäuser. More
and more, as we come to mark changes and distinctions of temper
in what is often in one all-embracing confusion called the middle
age, that rebellion, that sinister claim for liberty of heart and
thought, comes to the surface. The Albigensian movement,
connected so strangely with the history of Provençal poetry, is
deeply tinged with it. A touch of it makes the Franciscan order,
with its poetry, its mysticism, its "illumination," from the point of
view of religious authority, justly suspect. It influences the
thoughts of those obscure prophetical writers, like Joachim of
Flora, strange dreamers in a world of flowery rhetoric of that
third and final dispensation of a "spirit of freedom," in which law
shall have passed away. Of this spirit Aucassin and Nicolette
contains perhaps the most famous expression: it is the answer
Aucassin gives when he is threatened with the pains of hell, if he
makes Nicolette his mistress. A creature wholly of affection and
the senses, he sees on the way to paradise only a feeble and worn-
out company of aged priests, "clinging day and night to the
chapel altars," barefoot or [26] in patched sandals. With or even
without Nicolette, "his sweet mistress whom he so much loves,"
he, for his part, is ready to start on the way to hell, along with
"the good scholars," as he says, and the actors, and the fine
horsemen dead in battle, and the men of fashion,* and "the fair
courteous ladies who had two or three chevaliers apiece beside
their own true lords," all gay with music, in their gold, and silver,
and beautiful furs--"the vair and the grey."