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[Transcriber's Notes: To improve readability, dashes between entries
in the Table of Contents and in chapter subheadings have been
converted to periods. The Anglo-Saxon yogh symbol is here represented
by [y].]
Periods of European Literature
EDITED BY
PROFESSOR SAINTSBURY
II.
THE TWELFTH AND THIRTEENTH CENTURIES
PERIODS OF EUROPEAN LITERATURE.
EDITED BY PROFESSOR SAINTSBURY.
"_The criticism which alone can much help us for the future
is a criticism which regards Europe as being, for
intellectual and spiritual purposes, one great
confederation, bound to a joint action and working to a
common result._"
--MATTHEW ARNOLD.
In 12 Crown 8vo Volumes. Price 5s. net each.
The DARK AGES Professor W.P. KER.
The FLOURISHING OF ROMANCE
AND THE RISE OF ALLEGORY THE EDITOR.
The FOURTEENTH CENTURY F.J. SNELL.
The TRANSITION PERIOD
The EARLIER RENAISSANCE
The LATER RENAISSANCE DAVID HANNAY.
The FIRST HALF OF 17TH CENTURY
The AUGUSTAN AGES OLIVER ELTON.
The MID-EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
The ROMANTIC REVOLT EDMUND GOSSE.
The ROMANTIC TRIUMPH WALTER H. POLLOCK.
The LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY THE EDITOR.
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & SONS, EDINBURGH AND LONDON.
THE
FLOURISHING OF ROMANCE
AND THE
RISE OF ALLEGORY
BY
GEORGE SAINTSBURY, M.A.
PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF
EDINBURGH
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
MDCCCXCVII
PREFACE.
As this volume, although not the first in chronological order, is
likely to be the first to appear in the Series of which it forms part,
and of which the author has the honour to be editor, it may be well to
say a few words here as to the scheme of this Series generally. When
that scheme was first sketched, it was necessarily objected that it
would be difficult, if not impossible, to obtain contributors who
could boast intimate and equal knowledge of all the branches of
European literature at any given time. To meet this by a simple denial
was, of course, not to be thought of. Even universal linguists, though
not unknown, are not very common; and universal linguists have not
usually been good critics of any, much less of all, literature. But it
could be answered that if the main principle of the scheme was
sound--that is to say, if it was really desirable not to supplant but
to supplement the histories of separate literatures, such as now exist
in great numbers, by something like a new "Hallam," which should take
account of all the simultaneous and contemporary developments and
their interaction--some sacrifice in point of specialist knowledge of
individual literatures not only must be made, but might be made with
little damage. And it could be further urged that this sacrifice might
be reduced to a minimum by selecting in each case writers thoroughly
acquainted with the literature which happened to be of greatest
prominence in the special period, provided always that their general
literary knowledge and critical habits were such as to render them
capable of giving a fit account of the rest.
In the carrying out of such a scheme occasional deficiencies of
specialist dealing, or even of specialist knowledge, must be held to
be compensated by range of handling and width of view. And though it
is in all such cases hopeless to appease what has been called "the
rage of the specialist" himself--though a Mezzofanti doubled with a
Sainte-Beuve could never, in any general history of European
literature, hope to satisfy the special devotees of Roumansch or of
Platt-Deutsch, not to mention those of the greater languages--yet
there may, I hope, be a sufficient public who, recognising the
advantage of the end, will make a fair allowance for necessary
shortcomings in the means.
As, however, it is quite certain that there will be some critics, if
not some readers, who will not make this allowance, it seemed only
just that the Editor should bear the brunt in this new Passage
Perilous. I shall state very frankly the qualifications which I think
I may advance in regard to this volume. I believe I have read most of
the French and English literature proper of the period that is in
print, and much, if not most, of the German. I know somewhat less of
Icelandic and Provençal; less still of Spanish and Italian as regards
this period, but something also of them: Welsh and Irish I know only
in translations. Now it so happens that--for the period--French is,
more than at any other time, the capital literature of Europe. Very
much of the rest is directly translated from it; still more is
imitated in form. All the great subjects, the great _matières_, are
French in their early treatment, with the exception of the national
work of Spain, Iceland, and in part Germany. All the forms, except
those of the prose saga and its kinsman the German verse folk-epic,
are found first in French. Whosoever knows the French literature of
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, knows not merely the best
literature in form, and all but the best in matter, of the time, but
that which all the time was imitating, or shortly about to imitate,
both in form and matter.
Again, England presents during this time, though no great English work
written "in the English tongue for English men," yet the spectacle,
unique in history, of a language and a literature undergoing a
sea-change from which it was to emerge with incomparably greater
beauty and strength than it had before, and in condition to vie
with--some would say to outstrip--all actual or possible rivals.
German, if not quite supreme in any way, gives an interesting and
fairly representative example of a chapter of national literary
history, less brilliant and original in performance than the French,
less momentous and unique in promise than the English, but more normal
than either, and furnishing in the epics, of which the _Nibelungenlied_
and _Kudrun_ are the chief examples, and in the best work of the
Minnesingers, things not only of historical but of intrinsic value in
all but the highest degree.
Provençal and Icelandic literature at this time are both of them of
far greater intrinsic interest than English, if not than German, and
they are infinitely more original. But it so happens that the
prominent qualities of form in the first, of matter and spirit in the
second, though intense and delightful, are not very complicated,
various, or wide-ranging. If monotony were not by association a
question-begging word, it might be applied with much justice to both:
and it is consequently not necessary to have read every Icelandic saga
in the original, every Provençal lyric with a strictly philological
competence, in order to appreciate the literary value of the
contributions which these two charming isolations made to European
history.
Yet again, the production of Spain during this time is of the
smallest, containing, perhaps, nothing save the _Poem of the Cid_,
which is at once certain in point of time and distinguished in point
of merit; while that of Italy is not merely dependent to a great
extent on Provençal, but can be better handled in connection with
Dante, who falls to the province of the writer of the next volume. The
Celtic tongues were either past or not come to their chief
performance; and it so happens that, by the confession of the most
ardent Celticists who speak as scholars, no Welsh or Irish _texts_
affecting the capital question of the Arthurian legends can be
certainly attributed to the twelfth or early thirteenth centuries. It
seemed to me, therefore, that I might, without presumption, undertake
the volume. Of the execution as apart from the undertaking others must
judge. I will only mention (to show that the book is not a mere
compilation) that the chapter on the Arthurian Romances summarises,
for the first time in print, the result of twenty years' independent
study of the subject, and that the views on prosody given in chapter
v. are not borrowed from any one.
I have dwelt on this less as a matter of personal explanation, which
is generally superfluous to friends and never disarms foes, than in
order to explain and illustrate the principle of the Series. All its
volumes have been or will be allotted on the same principle--that of
occasionally postponing or antedating detailed attention to the
literary production of countries which were not at the moment of the
first consequence, while giving greater prominence to those that were:
but at the same time never losing sight of the _general_ literary
drift of the whole of Europe during the whole period in each case. It
is to guard against such loss of sight that the plan of committing
each period to a single writer, instead of strapping together bundles
of independent essays by specialists, has been adopted. For a survey
of each time is what is aimed at, and a survey is not to be
satisfactorily made but by one pair of eyes. As the individual study
of different literatures deepens and widens, these surveys may be more
and more difficult: they may have to be made more and more "by
allowance." But they are also more and more useful, not to say more
and more necessary, lest a deeper and wider ignorance should accompany
the deeper and wider knowledge.
The dangers of this ignorance will hardly be denied, and it would be
invidious to produce examples of them from writings of the present
day. But there can be nothing ungenerous in referring--_honoris_, not
_invidiæ causa_--to one of the very best literary histories of this or
any century, Mr Ticknor's _Spanish Literature_. There was perhaps no
man of his time who was more widely read, or who used his reading with
a steadier industry and a better judgment, than Mr Ticknor. Yet the
remarks on assonance, and on long mono-rhymed or single-assonanced
tirades, in his note on Berceo (_History of Spanish Literature_, vol.
i. p. 27), show almost entire ignorance of the whole prosody of the
_chansons de geste_, which give such an indispensable light in
reference to the subject, and which, even at the time of his first
edition (1849), if not quite so well known as they are to-day,
existed in print in fair numbers, and had been repeatedly handled by
scholars. It is against such mishaps as this that we are here doing
our best to supply a guard.[1]
[Footnote 1: One of the most difficult points to decide concerned the
allowance of notes, bibliographical or other. It seemed, on the whole,
better not to overload such a Series as this with them; but an attempt
has been made to supply the reader, who desires to carry his studies
further, with references to the best editions of the principal texts
and the best monographs on the subjects of the different chapters. I
have scarcely in these notes mentioned a single book that I have not
myself used; but I have not mentioned a tithe of those that I have
used.]
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
THE FUNCTION OF LATIN.
Reasons for not noticing the bulk of mediæval Latin literature.
Excepted divisions. Comic Latin literature. Examples of its verbal
influence. The value of burlesque. Hymns. The _Dies Iræ_. The rhythm
of Bernard. Literary perfection of the Hymns. Scholastic Philosophy.
Its influence on phrase and method. The great Scholastics 1
CHAPTER II.
CHANSONS DE GESTE.
European literature in 1100. Late discovery of the _chansons_. Their
age and history. Their distinguishing character. Mistakes about them.
Their isolation and origin. Their metrical form. Their scheme of
matter. The character of Charlemagne. Other characters and
characteristics. Realist quality. Volume and age of the _chansons_.
Twelfth century. Thirteenth century. Fourteenth, and later. _Chansons_
in print. Language: _oc_ and _oïl_. Italian. Diffusion of the
_chansons_. Their authorship and publication. Their performance.
Hearing, not reading, the object. Effect on prosody. The _jongleurs_.
_Jongleresses_, &c. Singularity of the _chansons_. Their charm.
Peculiarity of the _geste_ system. Instances. Summary of the _geste_
of William of Orange. And first of the _Couronnement Loys_. Comments
on the _Couronnement_. William of Orange. The earlier poems of the
cycle. The _Charroi de Nîmes_. The _Prise d'Orange_. The story of
Vivien. _Aliscans._ The end of the story. Renouart. Some other
_chansons_. Final remarks on them 22
CHAPTER III.
THE MATTER OF BRITAIN.
Attractions of the Arthurian Legend. Discussions on their sources. The
personality of Arthur. The four witnesses. Their testimony. The
version of Geoffrey. Its _lacunæ_. How the Legend grew. Wace. Layamon.
The Romances proper. Walter Map. Robert de Borron. Chrestien de
Troyes. Prose or verse first? A Latin Graal-book. The Mabinogion. The
Legend itself. The story of Joseph of Arimathea. Merlin. Lancelot. The
Legend becomes dramatic. Stories of Gawain and other knights. Sir
Tristram. His story almost certainly Celtic. Sir Lancelot. The minor
knights. Arthur. Guinevere. The Graal. How it perfects the story.
Nature of this perfection. No sequel possible. Latin episodes. The
Legend as a whole. The theories of its origin. Celtic. French.
English. Literary. The Celtic theory. The French claims. The theory of
general literary growth. The English or Anglo-Norman pretensions.
Attempted hypothesis 86
CHAPTER IV.
ANTIQUITY IN ROMANCE.
Oddity of the Classical Romance. Its importance. The Troy story. The
Alexandreid. Callisthenes. Latin versions. Their story. Its
developments. Alberic of Besançon. The decasyllabic poem. The great
_Roman d'Alixandre_. Form, &c. Continuations. _King Alexander._
Characteristics. The Tale of Troy. Dictys and Dares. The Dares story.
Its absurdity. Its capabilities. Troilus and Briseida. The _Roman de
Troie_. The phases of Cressid. The _Historia Trojana_. Meaning of the
classical romance 148
CHAPTER V.
THE MAKING OF ENGLISH AND THE SETTLEMENT OF EUROPEAN PROSODY.
Special interest of Early Middle English. Decay of Anglo-Saxon. Early
Middle English Literature. Scantiness of its constituents. Layamon.
The form of the _Brut_. Its substance. The _Ormulum_: Its metre, its
spelling. The _Ancren Riwle_. The _Owl and the Nightingale_. Proverbs.
Robert of Gloucester. Romances. _Havelok the Dane._ _King Horn._ The
prosody of the modern languages. Historical retrospect. Anglo-Saxon
prosody. Romance prosody. English prosody. The later alliteration. The
new verse. Rhyme and syllabic equivalence. Accent and quantity. The
gain of form. The "accent" theory. Initial fallacies, and final
perversities thereof 187
CHAPTER VI.
MIDDLE HIGH GERMAN POETRY.
Position of Germany. Merit of its poetry. Folk-epics: The
_Nibelungenlied_. The _Volsunga saga_. The German version. Metres.
Rhyme and language. _Kudrun._ Shorter national epics. Literary poetry.
Its four chief masters. Excellence, both natural and acquired, of
German verse. Originality of its adaptation. The Pioneers: Heinrich
von Veldeke. Gottfried of Strasburg. Hartmann von Aue. _Erec der
Wanderære_ and _Iwein_. Lyrics. The "booklets." _Der Arme Heinrich._
Wolfram von Eschenbach. _Titurel._ _Willehalm._ _Parzival._ Walther
von der Vogelweide. Personality of the poets. The Minnesingers
generally 225
CHAPTER VII.
THE 'FOX,' THE 'ROSE,' AND THE MINOR CONTRIBUTIONS OF FRANCE.
The predominance of France. The rise of Allegory. Lyric. The _Romance_
and the _Pastourelle_. The _Fabliaux_. Their origin. Their licence.
Their wit. Definition and subjects. Effect of the _fabliaux_ on
language. And on narrative. Conditions of _fabliau_-writing. The
appearance of irony. Fables proper. _Reynard the Fox._ Order of texts.
Place of origin. The French form. Its complications. Unity of spirit.
The Rise of Allegory. The satire of _Renart_. The Fox himself. His
circle. The burial of Renart. The _Romance of the Rose_. William of
Lorris and Jean de Meung. The first part. Its capital value. The
rose-garden. "Danger." "Reason." "Shame" and "Scandal." The later
poem. "False-Seeming." Contrast of the parts. Value of both, and charm
of the first. Marie de France and Ruteboeuf. Drama. Adam de la
Halle. _Robin et Marion._ The _Jeu de la Feuillie_. Comparison of
them. Early French prose. Laws and sermons. Villehardouin. William of
Tyre. Joinville. Fiction. _Aucassin et Nicolette_ 265
CHAPTER VIII.
ICELANDIC AND PROVENÇAL.
Resemblances. Contrasts. Icelandic literature of this time mainly
prose. Difficulties with it. The Saga. Its insularity of manner. Of
scenery and character. Fact and fiction in the sagas. Classes and
authorship of them. The five greater sagas. _Njala._ _Laxdæla._
_Eyrbyggja._ _Egla._ _Grettla._ Its critics. Merits of it. The parting
of Asdis and her sons. Great passages of the sagas. Style. Provençal
mainly lyric. Origin of this lyric. Forms. Many men, one mind. Example
of rhyme-schemes. Provençal poetry not great. But extraordinarily
pedagogic. Though not directly on English. Some troubadours. Criticism
of Provençal 333
CHAPTER IX.
THE LITERATURE OF THE PENINSULAS.
Limitations of this chapter. Late Greek romance. Its difficulties as a
subject. Anna Comnena, &c. _Hysminias and Hysmine._ Its style. Its
story. Its handling. Its "decadence." Lateness of Italian. The
"Saracen" theory. The "folk-song" theory. Ciullo d'Alcamo. Heavy debt
to France. Yet form and spirit both original. Love-lyric in different
European countries. Position of Spanish. Catalan-Provençal.
Galician-Portuguese. Castilian. Ballads? The _Poema del Cid_. A
Spanish _chanson de geste_. In scheme and spirit. Difficulties of its
prosody. Ballad-metre theory. Irregularity of line. Other poems.
Apollonius and Mary of Egypt. Berceo. Alfonso el Sabio 375
CHAPTER X.
CONCLUSION 412
INDEX 427
THE FLOURISHING OF ROMANCE
AND THE
RISE OF ALLEGORY.
CHAPTER I.
THE FUNCTION OF LATIN.
REASONS FOR NOT NOTICING THE BULK OF MEDIÆVAL LATIN
LITERATURE. EXCEPTED DIVISIONS. COMIC LATIN LITERATURE.
EXAMPLES OF ITS VERBAL INFLUENCE. THE VALUE OF BURLESQUE.
HYMNS. THE "DIES IRÆ." THE RHYTHM OF BERNARD. LITERARY
PERFECTION OF THE HYMNS. SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHY. ITS
INFLUENCE ON PHRASE AND METHOD. THE GREAT SCHOLASTICS.
[Sidenote: _Reasons for not noticing the bulk of mediæval Latin
literature._]
This series is intended to survey and illustrate the development of
the vernacular literatures of mediæval and Europe; and for that
purpose it is unnecessary to busy ourselves with more than a part of
the Latin writing which, in a steadily decreasing but--until the end
of the last century--an always considerable proportion, served as the
vehicle of literary expression. But with a part of it we are as
necessarily concerned as we are necessarily compelled to decline the
whole. For not only was Latin for centuries the universal means of
communication between educated men of different languages, the medium
through which such men received their education, the court-language,
so to speak, of religion, and the vehicle of all the literature of
knowledge which did not directly stoop to the comprehension of the
unlearned; but it was indirectly as well as directly, unconsciously as
well as consciously, a schoolmaster to bring the vernacular languages
to literary accomplishment. They could not have helped imitating it,
if they would; and they did not think of avoiding imitation of it, if
they could. It modified, to a very large extent, their grammar; it
influenced, to an extent almost impossible to overestimate, the
prosody of their finished literature; it supplied their vocabulary; it
furnished models for all their first conscious literary efforts of the
more deliberate kind, and it conditioned those which were more or less
spontaneous.
But, even if we had room, it would profit us little to busy ourselves
with diplomatic Latin or with the Latin of chronicles, with the Latin
of such scientific treatises as were written or with the Latin of
theology. All these except, for obvious reasons, the first, tended
away from Latin into the vernaculars as time went on, and were but of
lesser literary moment, even while they continued to be written in
Latin. Nor in _belles lettres_ proper were such serious performances
as continued to be written well into our period of capital
importance. Such a book, for instance, as the well-known _Trojan War_
of Joseph of Exeter,[2] though it really deserves much of the praise
which it used to receive,[3] can never be anything much better than a
large prize poem, such as those which still receive and sometimes
deserve the medals and the gift-books of schools and universities.
Every now and then a man of irrepressible literary talent, having no
vernacular or no public in the vernacular ready to his hand, will
write in Latin a book like the _De Nugis Curialium_,[4] which is good
literature though bad Latin. But on the whole it is a fatal law of
such things that the better the Latin the worse must the literature
be.
[Footnote 2: Included with Dictys and Dares in a volume of Valpy's
Delphin Classics.]
[Footnote 3: Cf. Warton, _History of English Poetry_. Ed. Hazlitt, i.
226-292.]
[Footnote 4: Gualteri Mapes, _De Nugis Curialium Distinctiones
Quinque_. Ed. T. Wright: Camden Society, 1850.]
[Sidenote: _Excepted divisions._]
We may, however, with advantage select three divisions of the Latin
literature of our section of the Middle Ages, which have in all cases
no small literary importance and interest, and in some not a little
literary achievement. And these are the comic and burlesque Latin
writings, especially in verse; the Hymns; and the great body of
philosophical writing which goes by the general title of Scholastic
Philosophy, and which was at its palmiest time in the later portion of
our own special period.
[Sidenote: _Comic Latin literature._]
It may not be absolutely obvious, but it does not require much thought
to discover, why the comic and burlesque Latin writing, especially in
verse, of the earlier Middle Ages holds such a position. But if we
compare such things as the _Carmina Burana_, or as the Goliardic poems
attributed to or connected with Walter Map,[5] with the early
_fabliaux_, we shall perceive that while the latter, excellently
written as they sometimes are, depend for their comedy chiefly on
matter and incident, not indulging much in play on words or subtle
adjustment of phrase and cadence, the reverse is the case with the
former. A language must have reached some considerable pitch of
development, must have been used for a great length of time seriously,
and on a large variety of serious subjects, before it is possible for
anything short of supreme genius to use it well for comic purposes.
Much indeed of this comic use turns on the existence and degradation
of recognised serious writing. There was little or no opportunity for
any such use or misuse in the infant vernaculars; there was abundant
opportunity in literary Latin. Accordingly we find, and should expect
to find, very early parodies of the offices and documents of the
Church,--things not unnaturally shocking to piety, but not perhaps to
be justly set down to any profane, much less to any specifically
blasphemous, intention. When the quarrel arose between Reformers and
"Papists," intentional ribaldry no doubt began. But such a thing as,
for example, the "Missa de Potatoribus"[6] is much more significant of
an unquestioning familiarity than of deliberate insult. It is an
instance of the same bent of the human mind which has made very
learned and conscientious lawyers burlesque law, and which induces
schoolboys and undergraduates to parody the classics, not at all
because they hate them, but because they are their most familiar
literature.
[Footnote 5: _Carmina Burana_, Stuttgart, 1847; _Political Songs of
England_ (1839), and _Latin Poems attributed to Walter Mapes_ (1841),
both edited for the Camden Society by T. Wright.]
[Footnote 6: Wright and Halliwell's _Reliquiæ Antiquæ_ (London, 1845),
ii. 208.]
At the same time this comic degradation, as may be seen in its
earliest and perhaps its greatest practitioner Aristophanes--no bad
citizen or innovating misbeliever--leads naturally to elaborate and
ingenious exercises in style, to a thorough familiarity with the
capacities of language, metre, rhyme. And expertness in all these
things, acquired in the Latin, was certain sooner or later to be
transferred to the vernacular. No one can read the Latin poems which
cluster in Germany round the name of the "Arch-Poet,"[7] in England
round that of Map, without seeing how much freer of hand is the Latin
rhymer in comparison with him who finds it "hard only not to stumble"
in the vernacular. We feel what a gusto there is in this graceless
catachresis of solemn phrase and traditionally serious literature; we
perceive how the language, colloquially familiar, taught from infancy
in the schools, provided with plentiful literary examples, and having
already received perfect licence of accommodation to vernacular
rhythms and the poetical ornaments of the hour, puts its stammering
rivals, fated though they were to oust it, out of court for the time
by its audacious compound of experience and experiment.
[Footnote 7: On this Arch-Poet see Scherer, _History of German
Literature_ (Engl. ed., Oxford, 1886), i. 68.]
[Sidenote: _Examples of its verbal influence._]
The first impression of any one who reads that exceedingly delightful
volume the Camden Society's _Poems attributed to Walter Mapes_ may be
one of mere amusement, of which there are few books fuller. The
agreeable effrontery with which the question "whether to kiss Rose or
Agnes" is put side by side with that "whether it is better to eat
flesh cooked in the cauldron or little fishes driven into the net;"
the intense solemnity and sorrow for self with which Golias discourses
in trochaic mono-rhymed _laisses_ of irregular length, _De suo
Infortunio_; the galloping dactylics of the "Apocalypse"; the
concentrated scandal against a venerated sex of the _De Conjuge non
Ducenda_, are jocund enough in themselves, if not invariably edifying.
But the good-for-nothing who wrote
"Fumus et mulier et stillicidia
Expellunt hominem a domo propria,"
was not merely cracking jokes, he was exercising himself, or his
countrymen, or at farthest his successors, in the use of the
vernacular tongues with the same lightness and brightness. When he
insinuated that
"Dulcis erit mihi status
Si prebenda muneratus,
Reditu vel alio,
Vivam, licet non habunde,
Saltem mihi detur unde
Studeam de proprio,"--
he was showing how things could be put slyly, how the stiffness and
awkwardness of native speech could be suppled and decorated, how the
innuendo, the turn of words, the _nuance_, could be imparted to
dog-Latin. And if to dog-Latin, why not to genuine French, or English,
or German?
[Sidenote: _The value of burlesque._]
And he was showing at the same time how to make verse flexible, how to
suit rhythm to meaning, how to give freedom, elasticity, swing. No
doubt this had in part been done by the great serious poetry to which
we shall come presently, and which he and his kind often directly
burlesqued. But in the very nature of things comic verse must supple
language to a degree impossible, or very seldom possible, to serious
poetry: and in any case the mere tricks with language which the
parodist has to play, familiarise him with the use of it. Even in
these days of multifarious writing, it is not absolutely uncommon to
find men of education and not devoid of talent who confess that they
have no notion how to put things, that they cannot express themselves.
We can see this tying of the tongue, this inability to use words, far
more reasonably prevalent in the infancy of the vernacular tongues;
as, for instance, in the constant presence of what the French call
_chevilles_, expletive phrases such as the "sikerly," and the "I will
not lie," the "verament," and the "everidel," which brought a whole
class of not undeserving work, the English verse romances of a later
time, into discredit. Latin, with its wide range of already
consecrated expressions, and with the practice in it which every
scholar had, made recourse to constantly repeated stock phrases at
least less necessary, if necessary at all; and the writer's set
purpose to amuse made it incumbent on him not to be tedious. A good
deal of this comic writing may be graceless: some of it may, to
delicate tastes, be shocking or disgusting. But it was at any rate an
obvious and excellent school of word-fence, a gymnasium and
exercising-ground for style.
[Sidenote: _Hymns._]
And if the beneficial effect in the literary sense of these light
songs is not to be overlooked, how much greater in every way is that
of the magnificent compositions of which they were in some cases the
parody! It will be more convenient to postpone to a later chapter of
this volume a consideration of the exact way in which Latin sacred
poetry affected the prosody of the vernacular; but it is well here to
point out that almost all the finest and most famous examples of the
mediæval hymn, with perhaps the sole exception of _Veni, Sancte
Spiritus_, date from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.[8] Ours are
the stately rhythms of Adam of St Victor, and the softer ones of St
Bernard the Greater. It was at this time that Jacopone da Todi, in the
intervals of his eccentric vernacular exercises, was inspired to write
the _Stabat Mater_. From this time comes that glorious descant of
Bernard of Morlaix, in which, the more its famous and very elegant
English paraphrase is read beside it, the more does the greatness and
the beauty of the original appear. And from this time comes the
greatest of all hymns, and one of the greatest of all poems, the _Dies
Iræ_. There have been attempts--more than one of them--to make out
that the _Dies Iræ_ is no such wonderful thing after all: attempts
which are, perhaps, the extreme examples of that cheap and despicable
paradox which thinks to escape the charge of blind docility by the
affectation of heterodox independence. The judgment of the greatest
(and not always of the most pious) men of letters of modern times may
confirm those who are uncomfortable without authority in a different
opinion. Fortunately there is not likely ever to be lack of those who,
authority or no authority, in youth and in age, after much reading or
without much, in all time of their tribulation and in all time of
their wealth, will hold these wonderful triplets, be they Thomas of
Celano's or another's, as nearly or quite the most perfect wedding of
sound to sense that they know.
[Footnote 8: A few more precise dates may be useful. St Bernard,
1091-1153; Bernard of Morlaix, exact years uncertain, but twelfth
century; Adam of St Victor, _ob. cir._ 1190; Jacopone da Todi, _ob._
1306; St Bonaventura, 1221-1274; Thomas of Celano, _fl. c._ 1226. The
two great storehouses of Latin hymn-texts are the well-known books of
Daniel, _Thesaurus Hymnologicus_, and Mone, _Hymni Latini Medii Ævi_.
And on this, as on all matters connected with hymns, the exhaustive
_Dictionary of Hymnology_ (London, 1892) of the Rev. John Julian will
be found most valuable.]
[Sidenote: _The_ Dies Iræ.]
It would be possible, indeed, to illustrate a complete dissertation on
the methods of expression in serious poetry from the fifty-one lines
of the _Dies Iræ_. Rhyme, alliteration, cadence, and adjustment of
vowel and consonant values,--all these things receive perfect
expression in it, or, at least, in the first thirteen stanzas, for the
last four are a little inferior. It is quite astonishing to reflect
upon the careful art or the felicitous accident of such a line as
"Tuba mirum spargens sonum,"
with the thud of the trochee[9] falling in each instance in a
different vowel; and still more on the continuous sequence of five
stanzas, from _Judex ergo_ to _non sit cassus_, in which not a word
could be displaced or replaced by another without loss. The climax of
verbal harmony, corresponding to and expressing religious passion and
religious awe, is reached in the last--
"Quærens me sedisti lassus,
Redemisti crucem passus:
Tantus labor non sit cassus!"--
where the sudden change from the dominant _e_ sounds (except in the
rhyme foot) of the first two lines to the _a_'s of the last is simply
miraculous, and miraculously assisted by what may be called the
internal sub-rhyme of _sedisti_ and _redemisti_. This latter effect
can rarely be attempted without a jingle: there is no jingle here,
only an ineffable melody. After the _Dies Iræ_, no poet could say that
any effect of poetry was, as far as sound goes, unattainable, though
few could have hoped to equal it, and perhaps no one except Dante and
Shakespeare has fully done so.
[Footnote 9: Of course no one of the four is a pure classical trochee;
but all obey the trochaic _rhythm_.]
Beside the grace and the grandeur, the passion and the art, of this
wonderful composition, even the best remaining examples of mediæval
hymn-writing may look a little pale. It is possible for criticism,
which is not hypercriticism, to object to the pathos of the _Stabat_,
that it is a trifle luscious, to find fault with the rhyme-scheme of
_Jesu dulcis memoria_, that it is a little faint and frittered; while,
of course, those who do not like conceits and far-fetched
interpretations can always quarrel with the substance of Adam of St
Victor. But those who care for merits rather than for defects will
never be weary of admiring the best of these hymns, or of noticing
and, as far as possible, understanding their perfection. Although the
language they use is old, and their subjects are those which very
competent and not at all irreligious critics have denounced as
unfavourable to poetry, the special poetical charm, as we conceive it
in modern days, is not merely present in them, but is present in a
manner of which few traces can be found in classical times. And some
such students, at least, will probably go on to examine the details of
the hymn-writers' method, with the result of finding more such things
as have been pointed out above.
[Sidenote: _The rhythm of Bernard._]
Let us, for instance, take the rhythm of Bernard the Englishman (as he
was really, though called of Morlaix). "Jerusalem the Golden" has made
some of its merits common property, while its practical discoverer,
Archbishop Trench, has set those of the original forth with a
judicious enthusiasm which cannot be bettered.[10] The point is, how
these merits, these effects, are produced. The piece is a crucial one,
because, grotesque as its arrangement would probably have seemed to
an Augustan, its peculiarities are superadded to, not substituted
for, the requirements of classical prosody. The writer does not avail
himself of the new accentual quantification, and his other licences
are but few. If we examine the poem, however, we shall find that,
besides the abundant use of rhyme--interior as well as final--he
avails himself of all those artifices of what may be called
word-music, suggesting beauty by a running accompaniment of sound,
which are the main secret of modern verse. He is not satisfied, ample
as it may seem, with his double-rhyme harmony. He confines himself to
it, indeed, in the famous overture-couplet--
"Hora novissima, tempora pessima sunt, vigilemus!
Ecce! minaciter imminet arbiter ille supremus."
[Footnote 10: _Sacred Latin Poetry_ (2d ed., London, 1864), p. 304.
This admirable book has not been, and from its mixture of taste and
learning is never likely to be, superseded as an introduction to, and
chrestomathy of, the subject. Indeed, if a little touch of orthodox
prudery had not made the Archbishop exclude the _Stabat_, hardly a
hymn of the very first class could be said to be missing in it.]
But immediately afterwards, and more or loss throughout, he redoubles
and redoubles again every possible artifice--sound-repetition in the
_imminet, imminet_, of the third line, alliteration in the _recta
remuneret_ of the fourth, and everywhere trills and _roulades_, not
limited to the actually rhyming syllables of the same vowel--
"Tunc nova gloria pectora sobria clarificabit...
Candida lilia, viva monilia, sunt tibi Sponsa...
Te peto, te colo, te flagro, te volo, canto, saluto."
He has instinctively discovered the necessity of varying as much as
possible the cadence and composition of the last third of his verse,
and carefully avoids anything like a monotonous use of his only
spondee; in a batch of eighteen lines taken at random, there are only
six end-words of two syllables, and these only once rhyme together.
The consequence of these and other devices is that the whole poem is
accompanied by a sort of swirl and eddy of sound and cadence,
constantly varying, constantly shifting its centres and systems, but
always assisting the sense with grateful clash or murmur, according as
it is loud or soft, of word-music.
[Sidenote: _Literary perfection of the Hymns._]
The vernacular languages were not as yet in case to produce anything
so complicated as this, and some of them have never been quite able to
produce it to this day. But it must be obvious at once what a standard
was held up before poets, almost every one of whom, even if he had but
small Latin in a general way, heard these hymns constantly sung, and
what means of producing like effects were suggested to them. The most
varied and charming lyric of the Middle Ages, that of the German
Minnesingers, shows the effect of this Latin practice side by side, or
rather inextricably mingled, with the effects of the preciser French
and Provençal verse-scheme, and the still looser but equally musical,
though half-inarticulate, suggestions of indigenous song. That English
prosody--the prosody of Shakespeare and Coleridge, of Shelley and
Keats--owes its origin to a similar admixture the present writer at
least has no doubt at all, while even those who deny this can hardly
deny the positive literary achievement of the best mediæval hymns.
They stand by themselves. Latin--which, despite its constant
colloquial life, still even in the Middle Ages had in profane use many
of the drawbacks of a dead language, being either slipshod or
stiff,--here, owing to the millennium and more during which it had
been throughout Western Europe the living language and the sole living
language of the Church Universal, shakes off at once all artificial
and all doggerel character. It is thoroughly alive: it comes from the
writers' hearts as easily as from their pens. They have in the fullest
sense proved it; they know exactly what they can do, and in this
particular sphere there is hardly anything that they cannot do.
[Sidenote: _Scholastic Philosophy._]
The far-famed and almost more abused than famed Scholastic
Philosophy[11] cannot be said to have added to positive literature any
such masterpieces in prose as the hymn-writers (who were very commonly
themselves Scholastics) produced in verse. With the exception of
Abelard, whose interest is rather biographical than strictly literary,
and perhaps Anselm, the heroes of mediæval dialectic, the Doctors
Subtle and Invincible, Irrefragable and Angelic, have left nothing
which even on the widest interpretation of pure literature can be
included within it, or even any names that figure in any but the
least select of literary histories. Yet they cannot but receive some
notice here in a history, however condensed, of the literature of the
period of their chief flourishing. This is not because of their
philosophical importance, although at last, after much bandying of not
always well-informed argument, that importance is pretty generally
allowed by the competent. It has, fortunately, ceased to be
fashionable to regard the dispute about Universals as proper only to
amuse childhood or beguile dotage, and the quarrels of Scotists and
Thomists as mere reductions of barren logomachy to the flatly absurd.
Still, this importance, though real, though great, is not directly
literary. The claim which makes it impossible to pass them over here
is that excellently put in the two passages from Condorcet and
Hamilton which John Stuart Mill (not often a scholastically minded
philosopher) set in the forefront of his _Logic_, that, in the
Scottish philosopher's words, "it is to the schoolmen that the vulgar
languages are indebted for what precision and analytical subtlety they
possess;" and that, as the Frenchman, going still further, but hardly
exaggerating, lays it down, "logic, ethics, and metaphysics itself owe
to Scholasticism a precision unknown to the ancients themselves."
[Footnote 11: I should feel even more diffidence than I do feel in
approaching this proverbially thorny subject if it were not that many
years ago, before I was called off to other matters, I paid
considerable attention to it. And I am informed by experts that though
the later (chiefly German) Histories of Philosophy, by Ueberweg,
Erdmann, Windelband, &c., may be consulted with advantage, and though
some monographs may be added, there are still no better guides than
Hauréau, _De la Philosophie Scolastique_ (revised edition) and Prantl,
_Geschichte der Logik im Abendlande_, who were our masters
five-and-twenty years ago. The last-named book in especial may be
recommended with absolute confidence to any one who experiences the
famous desire for "something craggy to break his mind upon."]
[Sidenote: _Its influence on phrase and method._]
There can be no reasonable or well-informed denial of the fact of
this: and the reason of it is not hard to understand. That constant
usage, the effect of which has been noted in theological verse, had
the same effect in philosophico-theological prose. Latin is before all
things a precise language, and the one qualification which it lacked
in classical times for philosophic use, the presence of a full and
exact terminology, was supplied in the Middle Ages by the fearless
barbarism (as pedants call it) which made it possible and easy first
to fashion such words as _aseitas_ and _quodlibetalis_, and then,
after, as it were, lodging a specification of their meaning, to use
them ever afterwards as current coin. All the peculiarities which
ignorance or sciolism used to ridicule or reproach in the
Scholastics--their wiredrawnness, their lingering over special points
of verbal wrangling, their neglect of plain fact in comparison with
endless and unbridled dialectic--all these things did no harm but much
positive good from the point of view which we are now taking. When a
man defended theses against lynx-eyed opponents or expounded them
before perhaps more lynx-eyed pupils, according to rules familiar to
all, it was necessary for him, if he were to avoid certain and
immediate discomfiture, to be precise in his terms and exact in his
use of them. That it was possible to be childishly as well as
barbarously scholastic nobody would deny, and the famous sarcasms of
the _Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum_, two centuries after our time, had
been anticipated long before by satirists. But even the logical
fribble, even the logical jargonist, was bound to be exact. Now
exactness was the very thing which languages, mostly young in actual
age, and in all cases what we may call uneducated, unpractised in
literary exercises, wanted most of all. And it was impossible that
they should have better teachers in it than the few famous, and even
than most of the numerous unknown or almost unknown, philosophers of
the Scholastic period.
[Sidenote: _The great Scholastics._]
It has been said that of those most famous almost all belong specially
to this our period. Before it there is, till its very latest eve,
hardly one except John Scotus Erigena; after it none, except Occam, of
the very greatest. But during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
there is scarcely a decade without its illustration. The first
champions of the great Realist and Nominalist controversy, Roscellinus
and William of Champeaux, belong to the eleventh century in part, as
does their still more famous follower, Abelard, by the first twenty
years of his life, while almost the whole of that of Anselm may be
claimed by it.[12] But it was not till the extreme end of that century
that the great controversy in which these men were the front-fighters
became active (the date of the Council of Soissons, which condemned
the Nominalism of Roscellinus as tritheistic is 1092), and the
controversy itself was at its hottest in the earlier part of the
succeeding age. The Master of the Sentences, Peter Lombard, belongs
wholly to the twelfth, and the book which gives him his scholastic
title dates from its very middle. John of Salisbury, one of the
clearest-headed as well as most scholarly of the whole body, died in
1180. The fuller knowledge of Aristotle, through the Arabian writers,
coincided with the latter part of the twelfth century: and the curious
outburst of Pantheism which connects itself on the one hand with the
little-known teaching of Amaury de Bène and David of Dinant, on the
other with the almost legendary "Eternal Gospel" of Joachim of Flora,
occurred almost exactly at the junction of the twelfth and thirteenth.
As for the writers of the thirteenth century itself, that great period
holds in this as in other departments the position of palmiest time of
the Middle Ages. To it belong Alexander Hales, who disputes with
Aquinas the prize for the best example of the Summa Theologiæ;
Bonaventura, the mystic; Roger Bacon, the natural philosopher; Vincent
of Beauvais, the encyclopædist. If, of the four greatest of all,
Albert of Bolstadt, Albertus Magnus, the "Dumb Ox of Cologne," was
born seven years before its opening, his life lasted over four-fifths
of it; that of Aquinas covered its second and third quarters; Occam
himself, though his main exertions lie beyond us, was probably born
before Aquinas died; while John Duns Scotus hardly outlived the
century's close by a decade. Raymond Lully (one of the most
characteristic figures of Scholasticism and of the mediæval period,
with his "Great Art" of automatic philosophy), who died in 1315, was
born as early as 1235. Peter the Spaniard, Pope and author of the
_Summulæ Logicales_, the grammar of formal logic for ages, died in
1277.
[Footnote 12: Some exacter dates may be useful. Anselm, 1033-1109;
Roscellin, 1050?-1125; William of Champeaux, ?-1121; Abelard,
1079-1142; Peter Lombard, _ob._ 1164; John of Salisbury, ?-1180;
Alexander of Hales, ?-1245; Vincent of Beauvais, ?-1265?; Bonaventura,
1221-1274; Albertus Magnus, 1195-1280; Thomas Aquinas, 1225?-1274;
Duns Scotus, 1270?-1308?; William of Occam, ?-1347; Roger Bacon,
1214-1292; Petrus Hispanus, ?-1277; Raymond Lully, 1235-1315.]
Of the matter which these and others by hundreds put in forgotten
wealth of exposition, no account will be expected here. Even yet it is
comparatively unexplored, or else the results of the exploration exist
only in books brilliant, but necessarily summary, like that of
Hauréau, in books thorough, but almost as formidable as the original,
like that of Prantl. Even the latest historians of philosophy complain
that there is up to the present day no "ingoing" (as the Germans say)
monograph about Scotus and none about Occam.[13] The whole works of
the latter have never been collected at all: the twelve mighty volumes
which represent the compositions of the former contain probably not
the whole work of a man who died before he was forty. The greater part
of the enormous mass of writing which was produced, from Scotus
Erigena in the ninth century to Gabriel Biel in the fifteenth, is only
accessible to persons with ample leisure and living close to large and
ancient libraries. Except Erigena himself, Anselm in a few of his
works, Abelard, and a part of Aquinas, hardly anything can be found in
modern editions, and even the zealous efforts of the present Pope have
been less effectual in divulging Aquinas than those of his
predecessors were in making Amaury of Bena a mystery.[14] Yet there
has always, in generous souls who have some tincture of philosophy,
subsisted a curious kind of sympathy and yearning over the work of
these generations of mainly disinterested scholars who, whatever they
were, were thorough, and whatever they could not do, could think. And
there have even, in these latter days, been some graceless ones who
have asked whether the Science of the nineteenth century, after an
equal interval, will be of any more positive value--whether it will
not have even less comparative interest than that which appertains to
the Scholasticism of the thirteenth.
[Footnote 13: Rémusat on Anselm and Cousin on Abelard long ago
smoothed the way as far as these two masters are concerned, and Dean
Church on Anselm is also something of a classic. But I know no other
recent monograph of any importance by an Englishman on Scholasticism
except Mr R.L. Poole's _Erigena_. Indeed the "Erin-born" has not had
the ill-luck of his country, for with the Migne edition accessible to
everybody, he is in much better case than most of his followers two,
three, and four centuries later.]
[Footnote 14: The Amalricans, as the followers of Amaury de Bène were
termed, were not only condemned by the Lateran Council of 1215, but
sharply persecuted; and we know nothing of the doctrines of Amaury,
David, and the other northern Averroists or Pantheists, except from
later and hostile notices.]
However this may be, the claim, modest and even meagre as it may seem
to some, which has been here once more put forward for this
Scholasticism--the claim of a far-reaching educative influence in mere
language, in mere system of arrangement and expression, will remain
valid. If, at the outset of the career of modern languages, men had
thought with the looseness of modern thought, had indulged in the
haphazard slovenliness of modern logic, had popularised theology and
vulgarised rhetoric, as we have seen both popularised and vulgarised
since, we should indeed have been in evil case. It used to be thought
clever to moralise and to felicitate mankind over the rejection of the
stays, the fetters, the prison in which its thought was mediævally
kept. The justice or the injustice, the taste or the vulgarity, of
these moralisings, of these felicitations, may not concern us here.
But in expression, as distinguished from thought, the value of the
discipline to which these youthful languages were subjected is not
likely now to be denied by any scholar who has paid attention to the
subject. It would have been perhaps a pity if thought had not gone
through other phases; it would certainly have been a pity if the
tongues had all been subjected to the fullest influence of Latin
constraint. But that the more lawless of them benefited by that
constraint there can be no doubt whatever. The influence of form which
the best Latin hymns of the Middle Ages exercised in poetry, the
influence in vocabulary and in logical arrangement which Scholasticism
exercised in prose, are beyond dispute: and even those who will not
pardon literature, whatever its historical and educating importance
be, for being something less than masterly in itself, will find it
difficult to maintain the exclusion of the _Cur Deus Homo_, and
impossible to refuse admission to the _Dies Iræ_.