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.'

[Sidenote: _The predominance of France._]

The contributions of France to European literature mentioned in the

three chapters (II.-IV.) which deal with the three main sections of

Romance, great as we have seen them to be, by no means exhausted the

debt which literature owes to her during this period. It is indeed not

a little curious that the productions of this time, long almost

totally ignored in France itself, and even now rather grudgingly

acknowledged there, are the only periodic set of productions that

justify the claim, so often advanced by Frenchmen, that their country

is at the head of the literary development of Europe. It was not so in

the fourteenth century, when not only Chaucer in England, but Dante,

Petrarch, and Boccaccio in Italy, attained literary heights to which

none of their French contemporaries even approached. It was not so in

the fifteenth, when France, despite Villon and others, was the very

School of Dulness, and even England, with the help of the Scottish

poets and Malory, had a slight advantage over her, while she was far

outstripped by Italy. It was not so in the sixteenth, when Italy

hardly yet fell behind, and Spain and England far outwent her: nor,

according to any just estimate, in the seventeenth. In the eighteenth

her pale correctness looks faint enough, not merely beside the massive

strength of England, but beside the gathering force of Germany: and if

she is the equal of the best in the nineteenth, it is at the very most

a bare equality. But in the twelfth and thirteenth France, if not

Paris, was in reality the eye and brain of Europe, the place of origin

of almost every literary form, the place of finishing and polishing,

even for those forms which she did not originate. She not merely

taught, she wrought--and wrought consummately. She revived and

transformed the fable; perfected, if she did not invent, the

beast-epic; brought the short prose tale to an exquisite completeness;

enlarged, suppled, chequered, the somewhat stiff and monotonous forms

of Provençal lyric into myriad-noted variety; devised the

prose-memoir, and left capital examples of it; made attempts at the

prose history; ventured upon much and performed no little in the

vernacular drama; besides the vast performance, sometimes inspired

from elsewhere but never as literature copied, which we have already

seen, in her fostering if not mothering of Romance. When a learned and

enthusiastic Icelander speaks of his patrimony in letters as "a native

literature which, in originality, richness, historical and artistic

worth, stands unrivalled in modern Europe," we can admire the patriot

but must shake our heads at the critic. For by Dr Vigfusson's own

confession the strength of Icelandic literature consists in the sagas,

and the sagas are the product of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

At that very time France, besides the _chansons de geste_--as native,

as original, as the sagas, and if less rich, far more artistic in

form--France has to show the great romances proper, which Iceland

herself, like all the world, copied, a lyric of wonderful charm and

abundance, the vast comic wealth of the _fabliaux_, and the

_Fox_-epic, prose not merely of laws and homilies and rudimentary

educational subjects, but of every variety, drama, history,

philosophy, allegory, dream.

[Sidenote: _The rise of Allegory._]

To give an account of these various things in great detail would not

merely be impossible here, but would injure the scheme and thwart the

purpose of this history. We must survey them in the gross, or with a

few examples--showing the lessons taught and the results achieved,

from the lyric, which was probably the earliest, to the drama and the

prose story, which were pretty certainly the latest of the French

experiments. But we must give largest space to the singular growth of

Allegory. This, to some extent in the beast-epic, to a far greater in

one of the most epoch-making of European books, the _Romance of the

Rose_, set a fashion in Europe which had hardly passed away in three

hundred years, and which, latterly rather for the worse, but in the

earlier date not a little for the better, coloured not merely the work

directly composed in imitation of the great originals, but all

literary stuff of every kind, from lyric to drama, and from sermons to

prose tales.

[Sidenote: _Lyric._]

It has been said elsewhere that the shaping of a prosody suitable for

lyric was the great debt which Europe owes to the language of

Provence. And this is not at all inconsistent with the undoubted

critical fact that in a _Corpus Lyricorum_ the best songs of the

northern tongues would undoubtedly rank higher, according to all sound

canons of poetical criticism, than the best lyrics of the southern.

For, as it happens, we have lyrics in at least two most vigorous

northern tongues before they had gone to school to southern prosody,

and we can see at once the defects in them. The scanty remains of

Anglo-Saxon lyric and the more copious remains of Icelandic display,

with no little power and pathos, and plenty of ill-organised "cry," an

almost total lack of ability to sing. Every now and then their natural

genius enables them to hit, clumsily and laboriously, on

something--the refrain of the _Complaint of Deor_, the stepped stanzas

of the _Lesson of Loddfafni_--resembling the more accomplished methods

of more educated and long-descended literatures. But the poets are

always in a Robinson Crusoe condition, and worse: for Robinson had at

least seen the tools and utensils he needed, if he did not know how to

make them. The scôps and scalds were groping for the very pattern of

the tools themselves.

The _langue d'oc_, first of all vernacular tongues, borrowed from

Latin, as Latin had borrowed from Greek, such of the practical

outcomes of the laws of lyric harmony in Aryan speech as were suitable

to itself; and passed the lesson on to the _trouvères_ of the north of

France--if indeed these did not work out the transfer for themselves

almost independently. And as there was much more northern admixture,

and in particular a less tyrannous softness of vowel-ending in the

_langue d'oïl_, this second stage saw a great increase of suppleness,

a great emancipation from monotony, a wonderful freshness and wealth

of colour and form. It has been said, and I see no reason to alter the

saying, that the French tongue in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries

was actually better suited for lyrical poetry, and did actually

produce lyrical poetry, as far as prosody is concerned, of a fresher,

freer, more spontaneous kind, from the twelfth century to the

beginning of the fifteenth than has ever been the case since.[124]

[Footnote 124: This is not inconsistent with allowing that no single

French lyric poet is the equal of Walther von der Vogelweide, and that

the exercises of all are hampered by the lack--after the earliest

examples--of trisyllabic metres.]

M. Alfred Jeanroy has written a learned and extensive monograph on

_Les Origines de la Poesie Lyrique en France_, which with M. Gaston

Raynaud's _Bibliographie des Chansonniers Français_, and his

collection of _Motets_ of our present period, is indispensable to the

thorough student of the subject.[125] But for general literary

purposes the two classics of the matter are, and are long likely to

be, the charming _Romancero Français_[126] which M. Paulin Paris

published in the very dawn of the study of mediæval literature in

France, and the admirable _Romanzen und Pastourellen_[127] which Herr

Karl Bartsch collected and issued a quarter of a century ago. Here as

elsewhere the piecemeal system of publication which has been the bane

of the whole subject is to be regretted, for with a little effort and

a little division of labour the entire _corpus_ of French lyric from

the tenth to the fourteenth century might have been easily set before

the public. But the two volumes above mentioned will enable the reader

to judge its general characteristics with pretty absolute sureness;

and if he desires to supplement them with the work of a single author,

that of Thibaut of Champagne or Navarre,[128] which is easily

accessible, will form an excellent third.

[Footnote 125: M. Jeanroy, as is also the case with other writers of

monographs mentioned in this chapter, has contributed to M. Petit de

Julleville's _Histoire_ (_v._ p. 23) on his subject.]

[Footnote 126: Paris, 1833.]

[Footnote 127: Leipzig, 1870.]

[Footnote 128: Rheims, 1851.]

[Sidenote: _The_ Romance _and the_ Pastourelle.]

In this northern lyric--that is to say, northern as compared with

Provençal[129]--we find all or almost all the artificial forms which

are characteristic of Provençal itself, some of them no doubt rather

sisters than daughters of their analogues in the _langue d'oc_.

Indeed, at the end of our present period, and still more later, the

ingenuity of the _trouvères_ seems to have pushed the strictly formal,

strictly artificial part of the poetry of the troubadours to almost

its furthest possible limits in varieties of _triolet_ and _rondeau_,

_ballade_ and _chant royal_. But the _Romances_ and the _Pastourelles_

stand apart from these, and both are recognised by authorities among

the troubadours themselves as specially northern forms. The

differentia of each is in subject rather than in form, the "romance"

in this sense being a short love-story, with little more than a single

incident in it sometimes, but still always possessing an incident; the

_Pastourelle_, a special variety of love-story of the kind so

curiously popular in all mediæval languages, and so curiously alien

from modern experience, where a passing knight sees a damsel of low

degree, and woos her at once, with or without success, or where two

personages of the shepherd kind sue and are sued with evil hap or

good. In other words, the "romance" is supremely presented in English,

and in the much-abused fifteenth century, by the _Nut-Browne Maid_,

the "pastourelle" by Henryson's _Robene and Makyne_. Perhaps there is

nothing quite so good as either in the French originals of both;

certainly there is nothing like the union of metrical felicity,

romantic conduct, sweet but not mawkish sentiment, and never-flagging

interest in the anonymous masterpiece which the ever-blessed Arnold

preserved for us in his _Chronicle_. But the diffused merits--the

so-to-speak "class-merits"--of the poems in general are very high

indeed: and when the best of the other lyrics--_aubades_, _débats_,

and what not--are joined to them, they supply the materials of an

anthology of hardly surpassed interest, as well for the bubbling music

of their refrains and the trill of their metre, as for the fresh mirth

and joy of living in their matter. The "German paste in our

composition," as another Arnold had it, and not only that, may make us

prefer the German examples; but it must never be forgotten that but

for these it is at least not improbable that those would never have

existed.

[Footnote 129: This for convenience' sake is postponed to chap. viii.]

To select capital examples from so large a body is no easy task. One

or two, indeed, have "made fortune," the most famous of them being the

great _aubade_ (chief among its kind, as "En un vergier sotz folha

d'albespi" is among the Provençal albas), which begins--

"Gaite de la tor,

Gardez entor

Les murs, si Deus vos voie;"[130]

and where the _gaite_ (watcher) answers (like a Cornish watcher of the

pilchards)--

"Hu! et hu! et hu! et hu!"

[Footnote 130: _Romancero Français_, p. 66.]

Then there is the group, among the oldest and the best of all,

assigned to Audefroy le Bâtard--a most delectable garland, which tells

how the loves of Gerard and Fair Isabel are delayed (with the refrain

"et joie atent Gerars"), and how the joy comes at last; of "belle

Ydoine" and her at first ill-starred passion for "li cuens [the Count]

Garsiles"; of Béatrix and Guy; of Argentine, whose husband better

loved another; of Guy the second, who _aima Emmelot de foi_--all

charming pieces of early verse. And then there are hundreds of others,

assigned or anonymous, in every tone, from the rather unreasonable

request of the lady who demands--

"Por coi me bast mes maris?

laysette!"

immediately answering her own question by confessing that he has found

her embracing her lover, and threatening further justification;

through the less impudent but still not exactly correct morality of

"Henri and Aiglentine," to the blameless loves of Roland and "Bele

Erembors" and the _moniage_ of "Bele Doette" after her lover's death,

with the words--

"Tant mar i fustes, cuens Do, frans de nature,

por vostre aor vestrai je la haire

ne sur mon cors n'arai pelice vaire."

This conduct differs sufficiently from that of the unnamed heroine of

another song, who in the sweetest and smoothest of verse bids her

husband never to mind if she stays with her lover that night, for the

night is very short, and he, the husband, shall have her back

to-morrow!

And besides the morality, perverse or touching, the quaint manners,

the charming unusual names or forms of names, Oriour, Oriolanz,

Ysabiaus, Aigline,--there are delightful fancies, borrowed often

since:--

"Li rossignox est mon père,

Qui chante sur la ramée

el plus haut boscage;

La seraine ele est ma mère,

qui chante en la mer salée

el plus haut rivage."

Something in the very sound of the language keeps for us the freshness

of the imagery--the sweet-briar and the hawthorn, the mavis and the

oriole--which has so long become _publica materies_. It is not

withered and hackneyed by time and tongues as, save when genius

touches it, it is now. The dew is still on all of it; and, thanks to

the dead language, the dead manners, it will always be on. All is just

near enough to us for it to be enjoyed, as we cannot enjoy antiquity

or the East; and yet the "wall of glass" which seven centuries

interpose, while hiding nothing, keeps all intact, unhackneyed,

strange, _fresh_. There may be better poetry in the world than these

twelfth and thirteenth century French lyrics: there is certainly

higher, grander, more respectable. But I doubt whether there is any

sweeter or, in a certain sense, more poignant. The nightingale and

the mermaid were justified of their children.

It is little wonder that all Europe soon tried to imitate notes so

charming, and in some cases, though other languages were far behind

French in development, tried successfully. Our own "Alison,"[131] the

first note of true English lyric, is a "romance" of the most genuine

kind; the songs of Walther von der Vogelweide, of which we have also

spoken, though they may rise higher, yet owe their French originals

service, hold of them, would either never or much later have come into

existence but for them. An astonishing privilege for a single nation

to have enjoyed, if only for a short time; a privilege almost more

astonishing in its reception than even in itself. France could point

to the _chansons_ and to the _romances_, to Audefroy le Bastard and

Chrestien of Troyes, to Villehardouin and Thibaut, to William of

Lorris and John of Meung, to the _fabliaux_ writers and the cyclists

of _Renart_, in justification of her claims. She shut them up; she

forgot them; she sneered at them whenever they were remembered; and

she appointed as her attorneys in the court of Parnassus Nicolas

Boileau-Despréaux and François Arouet de Voltaire!

[Footnote 131: See p. 210.]

[Sidenote: _The_ Fabliaux.]

No more curious contrast, but also none which could more clearly show

the enormous vigour and the unique variety of the French genius at

this time, can be imagined than that which is presented by the next

division to which we come--the division occupied by the celebrated

poems, or at least verse-compositions, known as _fabliaux_. These,

for reasons into which it is perhaps better not to inquire too

closely, have been longer and better known than any other division of

old French poetry. They were first collected and published a hundred

and forty years ago by Barbazan; they were much commented on by Le

Grand d'Aussy in the last years of the last century, were again

published in the earlier years of the present by Méon, and recently

have been re-collected, divested of some companions not strictly of

their kind, and published in an edition desirable in every respect by

M. Anatole de Montaiglon and M. Gaston Raynaud.[132] Since this

collection M. Bédier has executed a monograph upon them which stands

to the subject much as that of M. Jeanroy does to the Lyrics. But a

great deal of it is occupied by speculations, more interesting to the

folk-lorist than to the student of literature, as to the origin of the

stories themselves. This, though a question of apparently

inexhaustible attraction to some people, must not occupy us very long

here. It shall be enough to say that many of these subjects are hardy

perennials which meet us in all literatures, and the existence of

which is more rationally to be accounted for by the supposition of a

certain common form of story, resulting partly from the conditions of

human life and character, partly from the conformation of the human

intellect, than by supposing deliberate transmission and copying from

one nation to another. For this latter explanation is one of those

which, as has been said, only push ignorance further back; and in

fact, leave us at the last with no alternative except that which we

might have adopted at the first.

[Footnote 132: 6 vols. Paris, 1872-90.]

[Sidenote: _Their origin._]

That, however, some assistance may have been given to the general

tendency to produce the same forms by the literary knowledge of

earlier, especially Eastern, collections of tales is no extravagant

supposition, and is helped by the undoubted fact that actual

translations of such collections--_Dolopathos_, the _Seven Sages of

Rome_,[133] and so forth--are found early in French, and chiefly at

second-hand from the French in other languages. But the general

tendency of mankind, reinforced and organised by a certain specially

literary faculty and adaptability in the French genius, is on the

whole sufficient to account for the _fabliau_.

[Footnote 133: For these see the texts and editorial matter of

_Dolopathos_, ed. Brunet and De Montaiglon (Bibliothèque

Elzévirienne), Paris, 1856; and of _Le Roman des Sept Sages_, ed. G.

Paris (_Soc. des Anc. Textes_), Paris, 1875. The English _Seven Sages_

(in Weber, vol. iii.) has been thought to be of the thirteenth

century. The _Gesta Romanorum_ in any of its numerous forms is

probably later.]

[Sidenote: _Their licence._]

It presents, as we have said, the most striking and singular contrast

to the Lyric poems which we have just noticed. The technical morality

of these is extremely accommodating, indeed (in its conventional and

normal form) very low. But it is redeemed by an exquisite grace and

charm, by true passion, and also by a great decency and accomplishment

of actual diction. Coarse language--very rare in the romances, though

there are a few examples of it--is rarer still in the elaborate formal

lyric of the twelfth and thirteenth century in French. In the

_fabliaux_, which are only a very little later, and which seem not to

have been a favourite form of composition very long after the

fourteenth century had reached its prime, coarseness of diction,

though not quite invariable, is the rule. Not merely are the subjects,

in the majority of cases, distinctly "broad," but the treatment of

them is broader still. In a few instances it is very hard to discern

any wit at all, except a kind similar to that known much later in

England as "selling bargains"; and almost everywhere the words which,

according to a famous classical French tag, _bravent l'honnêteté_, in

Latin, the use of which a Roman poet has vaunted as _Romana

simplicitas_, and which for some centuries have been left alone by

regular literature in all European languages till very recently,--appear

to be introduced on purpose as part of the game. In fact, it is in the

_fabliau_ that the characteristic which Mr Matthew Arnold selected as

the opprobrium of the French in life and literature practically makes

its first appearance. And though the "lubricity" of these poems is

free from some ugly features which appear after the Italian wars of

the late fifteenth century, it has never been more frankly destitute

of shamefacedness.

[Sidenote: _Their wit._]

It would, however, be extremely unfair to let it be supposed that the

_fabliaux_ contain nothing but obscenity, or that they can offer

attractions to no one save those whom obscenity attracts. As in those

famous English followings of them, where Chaucer considerably reduced

the licence of language, and still more considerably increased the

dose of wit--the Reeve's and Miller's sections of the _Canterbury

Tales_--the lack of decency is very often accompanied by no lack of

sense. And a certain proportion, including some of the very best in a

literary point of view, are not exposed to the charge of any

impropriety either of language or of subject.

[Sidenote: _Definition and subjects._]

There is, indeed, no special reason why the _fabliau_ should be

"improper" (except for the greater ease of getting a laugh) according

to its definition, which is capable of being drawn rather more sharply

than is always the case with literary kinds. It is a short tale in

verse--almost invariably octosyllabic couplets--dealing, for the most

part from the comic point of view, with incidents of ordinary life.

This naturally admits of the widest possible diversity of subject:

indeed it is only by sticking to the condition of "ordinary life" that

the _fabliau_ can be differentiated from the short romance on one side

and the allegoric beast-fable on the other. Even as it is, its most

recent editors have admitted among their 157 examples not a few which

are simple _jeux d'esprit_ on the things of humanity, and others which

are in effect short romances and nothing else. Of these last is the

best known of all the non-Rabelaisian _fabliaux_, "Le Vair Palefroi,"

which has been Englished by Leigh Hunt and shortly paraphrased by

Peacock, while examples of the former may be found without turning

very long over even one of M. M. de Montaiglon and Raynaud's pretty

and learned volumes. A very large proportion, as might be expected,

draw their comic interest from satire on priests, on women, or on

both together; and this very general character of the _fabliaux_

(which, it must be remembered, were performed or recited by the very

same _jongleurs_ who conducted the publication of the _chansons de

geste_ and the romances) was no doubt partly the result and partly the

cause of the persistent dislike and disfavour with which the Church

regarded the profession of jonglerie. It is, indeed, from the

_fabliaux_ themselves that we learn much of what we know about the

_jongleurs_; and one of not the least amusing[134] deals with the

half-clumsy, half-satiric boasts of two members of the order, who

misquote the titles of their _répertoire_, make by accident or

intention ironic comments on its contents, and in short do _not_

magnify their office in a very modern spirit of humorous writing.

[Footnote 134: "Les Deux Bordeors [bourders, jesters] Ribaux."]

Every now and then, too, we find, in the half-random and wholly

scurrile slander of womankind, a touch of real humour, of the humour

that has feeling behind it, as here, where a sufficiently ribald

variation on the theme of the "Ephesian matron" ends--

"Por ce teng-je celui à fol

Qui trop met en fame sa cure;

Fame est de trop foible nature,

De noient rit, de noient pleure,

Fame aime et het en trop poi d'eure:

Tost est ses talenz remuez,

Qui fame croit, si est desvès."

So too, again, in "La Housse Partie," a piece which perhaps ranks next

to the "Vair Palefroi" in general estimation, there is neither purely

romantic interest, as in the Palfrey, nor the interest of "the pity of

it," as in the piece just quoted; but an ethical purpose, showing out

of the mouth of babes and sucklings the danger of filial ingratitude.

But, as a general rule, there is little that is serious in these

frequently graceless but generally amusing compositions. There is a

curious variety about them, and incidentally a crowd of lively touches

of common life. The fisherman of the Seine starts for his day's work

or sport with oar and tackle; the smith plies the forge; the bath

plays a considerable part in the stories, and we learn that it was not

an unknown habit to eat when bathing, which seems to be an unwise

attempt to double luxuries. A short sketch of mediæval catering might

be got out of the _fabliaux_, where figure not merely the usual

dainties--capons, partridges, pies well peppered--but eels salted,

dried, and then roasted, or more probably grilled, as we grill

kippered salmon. Here we have a somewhat less grimy original--perhaps

it was actually the original--of Skelton's "Tunning of Elinor

Rumming"; and in many places other patterns, the later reproductions

of which are well known to readers of Boccaccio and the _Cent

Nouvelles Nouvelles_ of La Fontaine and his followers. Title after

title--"Du Prestre Crucifié," "Du Prestre et d'Alison," &c.--tells us

that the clergy are going to be lampooned. Sometimes, where the fun is

no worse than childish, it is childish enough--plays on words, jokes

on English mispronunciation of French, and so forth. But it very

seldom, though it is sometimes intolerably nasty, approaches the

sheer drivel which appears in some English would-be comic writing of

the Middle Ages, or the very early Renaissance--such, for instance, as

most of that in the prose "Pleasant Historie of Thomas of

Reading,"[135] which the late Mr Thoms was pleased to call a romance.

Yet the actual stuff of "Thomas of Reading" is very much of the nature

of the _fabliaux_ (except of course the tragical part, which happens

to be the only good part), and so the difference of the handling is

noteworthy. So it is also in English verse-work of the kind--the

"Hunting of the Hare"[136] and the like--to take examples necessarily

a little later than our time.

[Footnote 135: _Early English Prose Romances_ (2d ed., London, 1858),

i. 71. The text of this is only Deloney's and sixteenth century, but

much of the matter must be far earlier.]

[Footnote 136: Weber, iii. 177.]

[Sidenote: _Effect of the_ fabliaux _on language._]

For in these curious compositions the _esprit Gaulois_ found itself

completely at home; indeed some have held that here it hit upon its

most characteristic and peculiar development. The wonderful faculty

for expression--for giving, if not the supreme, yet the adequate and

technically masterly dress to any kind of literary production--which

has been the note of French literature throughout, and which was never

more its note than at this time, enabled the language, as we have seen

and shall see, to keep as by an easy sculling movement far ahead of

all its competitors. But in other departments, with one or two

exceptions, the union of temper and craft, of inspiration and

execution, was not quite perfect. Here there was no misalliance. As

the language lost the rougher, fresher music which gives such peculiar

attraction to the _chansons_, as it disused itself to the varied

trills, the half-inarticulate warblings which constitute the charm of

the lyrics, so it acquired the precision, the flexibility, the

_netteté_, which satiric treatment of the follies and evil chances of

life, the oddities of manners and morals, require. It became bright,

if a little hard, easy, if a little undistinguished, capable of

slyness, of innuendo, of "malice," but not quite so capable as it had

been of the finer and vaguer suggestions and aspirations.

[Sidenote: _And on narrative._]

Above all, these _fabliaux_ served as an exercise-ground for the

practice in which French was to become almost if not quite supreme,

the practice of narrative. In the longer romances, which for a century

or a century and a half preceded the _fabliaux_, the art of narration,

as has been more than once noticed, was little attended to, and indeed

had little scope. The _chansons_ had a common form, or something very

like it, which almost dispensed the _trouvère_ from devoting much

pains to the individual conduct of the story. The most abrupt

transitions were accustomed, indeed expected; minor incidents received

very little attention; the incessant fighting secured the attention of

the probable hearers by itself; the more grandiose and striking

incidents--the crowning of Prince Louis and the indignation of William

at his sister's ingratitude, for instance--were not "engineered" or

led up to in any way, but left to act in mass and by assault.

[Sidenote: _Conditions of_ fabliau-_writing._]

The smaller range and more delicate--however indelicate--argument of

the _fabliaux_ not only invited but almost necessitated a different

kind of handling. The story had to draw to point in (on an average)

two or three hundred lines at most--there are _fabliaux_ of a thousand

lines, and _fabliaux_ of thirty or forty, but the average is as just

stated. The incidents had to be adjusted for best effect, neither too

many nor too few. The treatment had to be mainly provocative--an

appeal in some cases by very coarse means indeed to very coarse

nerves, in others by finer devices addressed to senses more tickle o'

the sere. And so grew up that unsurpassed and hardly matched product

the French short story, where, if it is in perfection, hardly a word

is thrown away, and not a word missed that is really wanted.

[Sidenote: _The appearance of irony._]

The great means for doing this in literature is irony; and irony

appears in the _fabliaux_ as it had hardly done since Lucian. Take,

for instance, this opening of a piece, the rest of which is at least

as irreverent, considerably less quotable, but not much less

pointed:--

"Quant Dieus ot estoré lo monde,

Si con il est à la reonde,

Et quanque il convit dedans,

Trois ordres establir de genz,

Et fist el siecle demoranz

Chevalers, clers et laboranz.

Les chevalers toz asena

As terres, et as clers dona

Les aumosnes et les dimages;

Puis asena les laborages

As laborenz, por laborer.

Qant ce ot fet, sanz demeler

D'iluec parti, et s'en ala."

What two orders were left, and how the difficulty of there being

nothing left for them was got over, may be found by the curious in the

seventy-sixth _fabliau_ of the third volume of the collection so often

quoted. But the citation given will show that there is nothing

surprising in the eighteenth-century history, literary or poetical, of

a country which could produce such a piece, certainly not later than

the thirteenth. Even Voltaire could not put the thing more neatly or

with a more complete freedom from superfluous words.

[Sidenote: _Fables proper._]

It will doubtless have been observed that the _fabliau_--though the

word is simply _fabula_ in one of its regular Romance metamorphoses,

and though the method is sufficiently Æsopic--is not a "fable" in the

sense more especially assigned to the term. Yet the mediæval

languages, especially French and Latin, were by no means destitute of

fables properly so called. On the contrary, it would appear that it

was precisely during our present period that the rather meagre

Æsopisings of Phædrus and Babrius were expanded into the fuller

collection of beast-stories which exists in various forms, the chief

of them being the _Ysopet_ (the name generally given to the class in

Romance) of _Marie de France_, the somewhat later _Lyoner Ysopet_ (as

its editor, Dr Förster, calls it), and the original of this latter,

the Latin elegiacs of the so-called _Anonymus Neveleti_.[137] The

collection of Marie is interesting, at least, because of the author,

whose more famous Lais, composed, it would seem, at the Court of Henry

III. of England about the meeting of the twelfth and thirteenth

centuries, and forming a sort of offshoot less of the substance of the

Arthurian story than of its spirit, are among the most delightful

relics of mediæval poetry. But the Lyons book perhaps exhibits more of

the characteristic which, evident enough in the _fabliau_ proper,

discovers, after passing as by a channel through the beast-fable, its

fullest and most famous form in the world-renowned _Romance of Reynard

the Fox_, one of the capital works of the Middle Ages, and with the

sister but contrasted _Romance of the Rose_, as much the

distinguishing literary product of the thirteenth century as the

romances proper--Carlovingian, Arthurian, and Classical--are of the

twelfth.

[Footnote 137: Works of Marie; ed. Roquefort, Paris, 1820; or ed.

Warnke, Halle, 1885. The _Lyoner Ysopet_, with the _Anonymus_; ed.

Förster, Heilbronn, 1882.]

[Sidenote: Reynard the Fox.]

Not, of course, that the antiquity of the Reynard story itself[138]

does not mount far higher than the thirteenth century. No two things

are more remarkable as results of that comparative and simultaneous

study of literature, to which this series hopes to give some little

assistance, than the way in which, on the one hand, a hundred years

seem to be in the Middle Ages but a day, in the growth of certain

kinds, and on the other a day sometimes appears to do the work of a

hundred years. We have seen how in the last two or three decades of

the twelfth century the great Arthurian legend seems suddenly to fill

the whole literary scene, after being previously but a meagre

chronicler's record or invention. The growth of the Reynard story,

though to some extent contemporaneous, was slower; but it was really

the older of the two. Before the middle of this century, as we have

seen, there was really no Arthurian story worthy the name; it would

seem that by that time the Reynard legend had already taken not full

but definite form in Latin, and there is no reasonable reason for

scepticism as to its existence in vernacular tradition, though perhaps

not in vernacular writing, for many years, perhaps for more than one

century, earlier.

[Footnote 138: _Roman du_ (should be _de_) _Renart_: ed. Méon and

Chabaille, 5 vols., Paris, 1826-35; ed. Martin, 3 vols. text and 1

critical observations, Strasburg, 1882-87. _Reincke de Vos_, ed.

Prien, Halle, 1887, with a valuable bibliography. _Reinaert_, ed.

Martin, Paderborn, 1874. _Reinardus Vulpes_, ed. Mone, Stuttgart,

1834. _Reinhart Fuchs_, ed. Grimm, Berlin, 1832. On the _story_ there

is perhaps nothing better than Carlyle, as quoted _supra_.]

[Sidenote: _Order of texts._]

It was not to be expected but that so strange, so interesting, and so

universally popular a story as that of King Noble and his not always

loving subjects, should have been made, as usual, the battle-ground of

literary fancy and of that general tendency of mankind to ferocity,

which, unluckily, the study of _belles lettres_ does not seem very

appreciably to soften. Assisted by the usual fallacy of antedating

MSS. in the early days of palæographic study, and by their

prepossessions as Germans, some early students of the Reynard story

made out much too exclusive and too early claims, as to possession by

right of invention, for the country in which Reynard has no doubt, for

the last four centuries or so, been much more of a really popular hero

than anywhere else. Investigation and comparison, however, have had

more healing effects here than in other cases; and since the

acknowledgment of the fact that the very early Middle High German

version of Henry the Glichezare, itself of the end of the twelfth

century, is a translation from the French, there has not been much

serious dispute about the order of the Reynard romances as we actually

have them. That is to say, if the Latin _Isengrimus_--the oldest

_Reinardus Vulpes_--of 1150 or thereabouts is actually the oldest

_text_, the older branches of the French _Renart_ pretty certainly

come next, with the High German following a little later, and the Low

German _Reincke de Vos_ and the Flemish _Reinaert_ a little later

still. The Southern Romance nations do not seem--indeed the humour is

essentially Northern--to have adopted Reynard with as much enthusiasm

as they showed towards the Romances; and our English forms were

undoubtedly late adaptations from foreign originals.

[Sidenote: _Place of origin._]

If, however, this account of the texts may be said to be fairly

settled, the same cannot of course be said as to the origin of the

story. Here there are still champions of the German claim, whose

number is increased by those who stickle for a definite "Low" German

origin. Some French patriots, with a stronger case than they generally

have, still maintain the story to be purely French in inception. I

have not myself seen any reason to change the opinion I formed some

fifteen years ago, to the effect that it seems likely that the

original language of the epic is French, but French of a Walloon or

Picard dialect, and that it was written somewhere between the Seine

and the Rhine.

The character and accomplishment of the story, however, are matters of

much more purely literary interest than the rather barren question of

the probable--it is not likely that it will ever be the proved--date

or place of origin of this famous thing. The fable in general, and the

beast-fable in particular, are among the very oldest and most

universal of the known forms of literature. A fresh and special

development of it might have taken place in any country at any time.

It did, as a matter of fact, take place somewhere about the twelfth

century or earlier, and somewhere in the central part of the northern

coast district of the old Frankish empire.

[Sidenote: _The French form._]

As usual with mediæval work, when it once took hold on the imagination

of writers and hearers, the bulk is very great, especially in the

French forms, which, taking them altogether, cannot fall much short of

a hundred thousand lines. This total, however, includes

developments--_Le Couronnement Renart_, _Renart le Nouvel_, and, later

than our present period, a huge and still not very well-known thing

called _Renart le Contrefait_, which are distinct additions to the

first conception of the story. Yet even that first conception is not a

story in the single sense. Its thirty thousand lines or thereabouts

are divided into a considerable number of what are called _branches_,

attributed to authors sometimes anonymous, sometimes named, but never,

except in the one case of _Renart le Bestourné_, known.[139] And it is

always difficult and sometimes impossible to determine in what

relation these branches stand to the main trunk, or which of them _is_

the main trunk. The two editors of the _Roman_, Méon and Herr Martin,

arrange them in different orders; and I do not think it would be in

the least difficult to make out a good case for an order, or even a

large number of orders, different still.[140]

[Footnote 139: This, which is not so much a branch as an independent

_fabliau_, is attributed to Ruteboeuf, _v. infra_.]

[Footnote 140: The Teutonic versions are consolidated into a more

continuous story. But of the oldest High German version, that of the

Glichezare, we have but part, and _Reincke de Vos_ does not reach

seven thousand verses. The French forms are therefore certainly to be

preferred.]

By comparison, however, with the versions in other languages, it seems

not very doubtful that the complaint of Isengrim the Wolf as to the

outrages committed by Reynard on the complainant's personal comfort,

and the honour of Hersent his wife--a complaint laid formally before

King Noble the Lion--forms, so far as any single thing can be said to

form it, the basis and beginning of the Reynard story. The

multiplication of complaints by other beasts, the sufferings inflicted

by Reynard on the messengers sent to summon him to Court, and his

escapes, by mixture of fraud and force, when he is no longer able to

avoid putting in an appearance, supply the natural continuation.

[Sidenote: _Its complications._]

But from this, at least in the French versions, the branches diverge,

cross, and repeat or contradict each other with an altogether

bewildering freedom. Sometimes, for long passages together, as in the

interesting fytte, "How Reynard hid himself among the Skins,"[141] the

author seems to forget the general purpose altogether, and to devote

himself to something quite different--in this case the description of

the daily life and pursuits of a thirteenth-century sportsman of easy

means. Often the connection with the general story is kept only by the

introduction of the most obvious and perfunctory devices--an intrigue

with Dame Hersent, a passing trick played on Isengrim, and so forth.

[Footnote 141: Méon, iii. 82; Martin, ii. 43.]

[Sidenote: _Unity of spirit._]

[Sidenote: _The Rise of Allegory._]

Nevertheless the whole is knit together, to a degree altogether

unusual in a work of such magnitude, due to many different hands, by

an extraordinary unity of tone and temper. This tone and this temper

are to some extent conditioned by the Rise of Allegory, the great

feature, in succession to the outburst of Romance, of our present

period. We do not find in the original _Renart_ branches the

abstracting of qualities and the personification of abstractions which

appear in later developments, and which are due to the popularity of

the _Romance of the Rose_, if it be not more strictly correct to say

that the popularity of the _Romance of the Rose_ was due to the taste

for allegory. Jacquemart Giélée, the author of _Renart le Nouvel_,

might personify _Renardie_ and work his beast-personages into knights

of tourney; the clerk of Troyes, who later wrote _Renart le

Contrefait_, might weave a sort of encyclopædia into his piece. But

the authors of the "Ancien Renart" knew better. With rare lapses, they

exhibit wonderful art in keeping their characters beasts, while

assigning to them human arts; or rather, to put the matter with more

correctness, they pass over the not strictly beast-like performances

of Renart and the others with such entire unconcern, with such a

perfect freedom from tedious after-thought of explanation, that no

sense of incongruity occurs. The illustrations of Méon's _Renart_,

which show us the fox painfully clasping in his forelegs a stick four

times his own length, show the inferiority of the nineteenth century.

Renart may beat _le vilain_ (everybody beats the poor _vilain_) as

hard as he likes in the old French text; it comes all naturally. A

neat copper-plate engraving, in the best style of sixty or seventy

years ago, awakes distrust.

[Sidenote: _The satire of_ Renart.]

The general fable is so familiar that not much need be said about it.

But it is, I think, not unfair to say that the German and Flemish

versions, from the latter of which Caxton's and all later English

forms seem to be copied, are, if better adjusted to a continuous

story, less saturated with the quintessence of satiric criticism of

life than the French _Renart_. The fault of excessive coarseness of

thought and expression, which has been commented on in the _fabliaux_,

recurs here to the fullest extent; but it is atoned for and sweetened

by an even greater measure of irony. As to the definite purposes of

this irony it would not be well to be too sure. The passage quoted on

a former page will show with what completely fearless satire the

_trouvères_ treated Church and State, God and Man. It is certain that

they had no love of any kind for the clergy, who were not merely their

rivals but their enemies; and it is not probable they had much for the

knightly order, who were their patrons. But it is never in the very

least degree safe to conclude, in a mediæval writer, from that satire

of abuses, which is so frequent, to the distinct desire of reform or

revolution, which is so rare. The satire of the _Renart_--and it is

all the more delightful--is scarcely in the smallest degree political,

is only in an interesting archæological way of the time ecclesiastical

or religious; but it is human, perennial, contemptuous of mere time

and circumstance, throughout.

[Sidenote: _The Fox himself._]

It cannot, no doubt, be called kindly satire--French satire very

rarely is. Renart, the only hero, though a hero sometimes uncommonly

hard bested, is a furred and four-footed Jonathan Wild. He appears to

have a creditable paternal affection for Masters Rovel, Percehaie, and

the other cubs; and despite his own extreme licence of conjugal

conduct, only one or two branches make Dame Hermeline, his wife,

either false to him or ill-treated by him. In these respects, as in

the other that he is scarcely ever outwitted, he has the advantage of

Jonathan. But otherwise I think our great eighteenth-century _maufès_

was a better fellow than Renart, because he was much less purely

malignant. I do not think that Jonathan often said his prayers; but he

probably never went to bed, as Reynard did upon the hay-mow, after

performing his devotions in a series of elaborate curses upon all his

enemies. The fox is so clever that one never dislikes him, and

generally admires him; but he is entirely compact of all that is

worst, not merely in beast-nature but in humanity. And it is a triumph

of the writers that, this being so, we at once can refrain from

disliking him, and are not tempted to like him illegitimately.

[Sidenote: _His circle._]

The _trouvères_ did not trouble themselves to work out any complete

character among the many whom they grouped round this great personage;

but they left none without touches of vivification and verisimilitude.

The female beasts--Dame Fière or Orgueilleuse, the lioness, Hersent,

the she-wolf, Hermeline, the vixen, and the rest--are too much tinged

with that stock slander of feminine character which was so common in

the Middle Ages. And each is rather too much of a type, a fault which

may be also found with their lords. Yet all of these--Bruin and

Brichemer, Coart and Chanticleer, Tybert and Primaut, Hubert and

Roonel--have the liveliest touches, not merely of the coarsely

labelling kind, but of the kind that makes a character alive. And,

save as concerns the unfortunate capons and _gelines_ whom Renart

consumes, so steadily and with such immunity, it cannot be said that

their various misfortunes are ever incurred without a valid excuse in

poetical justice. Isengrim, the chief of them all, is an especial case

in point. Although he is Chief Constable, he is just as much of a

rascal and a malefactor as Renart himself, with the additional crime

of stupidity. One is disposed to believe that, if domiciliary visits

were made to their various abodes, Malpertuis would by no means stand

alone as a bad example of a baronial abode. Renart is indeed

constantly spoken of as Noble's "baron." Yet it would be a great

mistake to take this epic, as it has been sometimes taken, for a

protest against baronial suppression. A sense of this, no doubt,

counts--as do senses of many other oppressions that are done under the

sun. But it is the satire on life as a whole that is uppermost; and

that is what makes the poem, or collection of poems, so remarkable. It

is hard, coarse, prosaic except for the range and power of its fancy,

libellous enough on humanity from behind its stalking-brutes. But it

is true, if an exaggeration of the truth; and its constant hugging of

the facts of life supplies the strangest possible contrast to the

graceful but shadowy land of romance which we have left in former

chapters. We all know the burial-scene of Launcelot--later, no doubt,

in its finest form, but in suggestion and spirit of the time with

which we are dealing. Let us now consider briefly the burial-scene of

Renart.

[Sidenote: _The burial of Renart._]

When Méon, the excellent first editor of the collection, put, as was

reason, the branch entitled "La Mort Renart" last, he was a little

troubled by the consideration that several of the beasts whom in

former branches Renart himself has brought to evil ends reappear and

take part in his funeral. But this scarcely argued a sufficient

appreciation of the true spirit of the cycle. The beasts, though

perfectly lively abstractions, are, after all, abstractions in a way,

and you cannot kill an abstraction. Nay, the author, with a really

grand final touch of the pervading satire which is the key of the

whole, gives us to understand at the last that Renart (though he has

died not once, but twice, in the course of the _fytte_) is not really

dead at all, and that when Dame Hermeline persuades the complaisant

ambassadors to report to the Lion-King that they have seen the tomb

with Renart inscribed upon it, the fact was indeed true but the

meaning false, inasmuch as it was another Renart altogether. Indeed

the true Renart is clearly immortal.

Nevertheless, as it is his mission, and that of his poets, to satirise

all the things of Life, so must Death also be satirised in his person

and with his aid. The branch, though it is probably not a very early

one, is of an admirable humour, and an uncompromising truth after a

fashion, which makes the elaborate realism and pessimism of some other

periods look singularly poor, thin, and conventional. The author, for

the keeping of his story, begins by showing the doomed fox more than a

little "failed"--the shadow of fate dwelling coldly beforehand on him.

He is badly mauled at the opening (though, it is true, he takes

vengeance for it) by monks whose hen-roost he is robbing, and when he

meets Coart the hare, _sur son destrier_, with a _vilain_ whom he has

captured (this is a mark of lateness, some of the verisimilitude of

the early time having been dropped), he plays him no tricks. Nay, when

Isengrim and he begin to play chess he is completely worsted by his

ancient butt, who at last takes, in consequence of an imprudent stake

of the penniless Fox, a cruel but appropriate vengeance for his former

wrongs. Renart is comforted to some extent by his old love, Queen

Fière the lioness; but pain, and wounds, and defeat have brought him

near death, and he craves a priest. Bernard the Ass, Court-Archpriest,

is ready, and admonishes the penitent with the most becoming gravity

and unction. The confession, as might be expected, is something

impudent; and the penitent very frankly stipulates that if he gets

well his oath of repentance is not to stand good. But it looks as if

he were to be taken at the worse side of his word, and he falls into a

swoon which is mistaken for death. The Queen laments him with perfect

openness; but the excellent Noble is a philosophic husband as well as

a good king, and sets about the funeral of Renart

("Jamais si bon baron n'avai,"

says he) with great earnestness. Hermeline and her orphans are fetched

from Malpertuis, and the widow makes heartrending moan, as does Cousin

Grimbart when the news is brought to him. The vigils of the dead are

sung, and all the beasts who have hated Renart, and whom he has

affronted in his lifetime, assemble in decent mourning and perform the

service, with the ceremony of the most well-trained choir. Afterwards

they "wake" the corpse through the night a little noisily; but on the

morrow the obsequies are resumed "in the best and most orgilous

manner," with a series of grave-side speeches which read like a

designed satire on those common in France at the present day. A

considerable part of the good Archpriest's own sermon is unfortunately

not reproducible in sophisticated times; but every one can appreciate

his tender reference to the deceased's prowess in daring all dangers--

"Pur avoir vostre ventre plaine,

Et pour porter à Hermeline

Vostre fame, coc ou geline

Chapon, ou oie, ou gras oison"--

for, as he observes in a sorrowful parenthesis, "anything was in

season if _you_ could only get hold of it." Brichemer the Stag notes

how Reynard had induced the monks to observe their vows by making them

go to bed late and get up early to watch their fowls. But when Bruin

the Bear has dug his grave, and holy water has been thrown on him, and

Bruin is just going to shovel the earth--behold! Reynard wakes up,

catches Chanticleer (who is holding the censer) by the neck, and bolts

into a thick pleached plantation. Still, despite this resurrection,

his good day is over, and a levée _en masse_ of the Lion's people soon

surrounds him, catches him up, and forces him to release Chanticleer,

who, nothing afraid, challenges him to mortal combat on fair terms,

beats him, and leaves him for dead in the lists. And though he manages

to pay Rohart the Raven and his wife (who think to strip his body) in

kind, he reaches Malpertuis dead-beat; and we feel that even his last

shift and the faithful complaisance of Grimbart will never leave him

quite the same Fox again.

The defects which distinguish almost all mediæval poetry are no doubt

discoverable here. There is some sophistication of the keeping in the

episodes of Coart and Chanticleer, and the termination is almost too

audacious in the sort of choice of happy or unhappy ending, triumph or

defeat for the hero, which it leaves us. Yet this very audacity suits

the whole scheme; and the part dealing with the death (or swoon) and

burial is assuredly one of the best things of its kind in French,

almost one of the best things in or out of it. The contrast between

the evident delight of the beasts at getting rid of Renart and their

punctilious discharge of ceremonial duties, the grave parody of rites

and conventions, remind us more of Swift or Lucian than of any French

writer, even Rabelais or Voltaire. It happened that some ten or twelve

years had passed between the time when the present writer had last

opened _Renart_ (except for mere reference now and then) and the time

when he refreshed his memory of it for the purposes of the present

volume. It is not always in such cases that the second judgment

exactly confirms the first; but here, not merely in the instance of

this particular branch but almost throughout, I can honestly say that

I put down the _Roman de Renart_ with even a higher idea of its

literary merit than that with which I had taken it up.

[Sidenote: _The_ Romance of the Rose.]

The second great romance which distinguishes the thirteenth century in

France stands, as we may say, to one side of the _Roman de Renart_ as

the _fabliaux_ do to the other side. But, though complex in fewer

pieces, the _Roman de la Rose_[142] is, like the _Roman de Renart_, a

complex, not a single work; and its two component parts are

distinguished from one another by a singular change of tone and

temper. It is the later and larger part of the _Rose_ which brings it

close to _Renart_: the smaller and earlier is conceived in a spirit

entirely different, though not entirely alien, and one which,

reinforcing the satiric drift of the _fabliaux_ and _Renart_ itself,

influenced almost the entire literary production in _belles lettres_

at least, and sometimes out of them, for more than two centuries

throughout Europe.

[Footnote 142: Ed. Michel. Paris, 1864. One of the younger French

scholars, who, under the teaching of M. Gaston Paris, have taken in

hand various sections of mediæval literature, M. Langlois, has

bestowed much attention on the _Rose_, and has produced a monograph on

it, _Origines et Sources du Roman de la Rose_. Paris, 1890.]

At no time probably except in the Middle Ages would Jean de Meung, who

towards the end of the thirteenth century took up the scheme which

William of Lorris had left unfinished forty years earlier, have

thought of continuing the older poem instead of beginning a fresh one

for himself. And at no other time probably would any one, choosing to

make a continuation, have carried it out by putting such entirely

different wine into the same bottle. Of William himself little is

known, or rather nothing, except that he must have been, as his

continuator certainly was, a native of the Loire district; so that the

_Rose_ is a product of Central, not, like _Renart_, of Northern

France, and exhibits, especially in the Lorris portion, an

approximation to Provençal spirit and form.

The use of personification and abstraction, especially in relation to

love-matters, had not been unknown in the troubadour poetry itself and

in the northern verse, lyrical and other, which grew up beside or in

succession to it. It rose no doubt partly, if not wholly, from the

constant habit in sermons and theological treatises of treating the

Seven Deadly Sins and other abstractions as entities. Every devout or

undevout frequenter of the Church in those times knew "Accidia"[143]

and Avarice, Anger and Pride, as bodily rather than ghostly enemies,

furnished with a regular uniform, appearing in recognised

circumstances and companies, acting like human beings. And these were

by no means the only sacred uses of allegory.

[Footnote 143: "Sloth" is a rather unhappy substitute for _Accidia_

([Greek: akêdeia]), the gloomy and impious despair and indifference to

good living and even life, of which sloth itself is but a partial

result.]

[Sidenote: _William of Lorris and Jean de Meung._]

When William of Lorris, probably at some time in the fourth decade of

the thirteenth century, set to work to write the _Romance of the

Rose_, he adjusted this allegorical handling to the purposes of

love-poetry with an ingenious intricacy never before attained. It has

been the fashion almost ever since the famous Romance was rescued from

the ignorant and contemptuous oblivion into which it had fallen, to

praise Jean de Meung's part at the expense of that due to William of

Lorris. But this is hard to justify either on directly æsthetic or on

historical principles of criticism. In the first place, there can be

no question that, vitally as he changed the spirit, Jean de Meung was

wholly indebted to his predecessor for the form--the form of

half-pictorial, half-poetic allegory, which is the great

characteristic of the poem, and which gave it the enormous attraction

and authority that it so long possessed. In the second place, clever

as Jean de Meung is, and more thoroughly in harmony as he may be with

the _esprit gaulois_, his work is on a much lower literary level than

that of his predecessor. Jean de Meung in the latter and larger part

of the poem simply stuffs into it stock satire on women, stock

learning, stock semi-pagan morality. He is, it is true, tolerably

actual; he shares with the _fabliau_-writers and the authors of

_Renart_ a firm grasp on the perennial rascalities and meannesses of

human nature. The negative commendation that he is "no fool" may be

very heartily bestowed upon him. But he is a little commonplace and

more than a little prosaic. There is amusement in him, but no charm:

and where (that is to say, in large spaces) there is no amusement,

there is very little left. Nor, except for the inappropriate

exhibition of learning and the strange misuse of poetical (at least of

verse) allegory, can he be said to be eminently characteristic of his

own time. His very truth to general nature prevents that; while his

literary ability, considerable as it is, is hardly sufficient to

clothe his universally true reflections in a universally acceptable

form.

[Sidenote: _The first part._]

The first four thousand and odd lines of the Romance, on the other

hand--for beyond them it is known that the work of William of Lorris

does not go--contain matter which may seem but little connected with

criticism of life, arranged in a form completely out of fashion. But

they, beyond all question, contain also the first complete

presentation of a scheme, a mode, an atmosphere, which for centuries

enchained, because they expressed, the poetical thought of the time,

and which, for those who can reach the right point of view, can

develop the right organs of appreciation, possess an extraordinary,

indeed a unique charm. I should rank this first part of the _Roman de

la Rose_ high among the books which if a man does not appreciate he

cannot even distantly understand the Middle Ages; indeed there is

perhaps no single one which on the serious side contains such a

master-key to their inmost recesses.

[Sidenote: _Its capital value._]

To comprehend a Gothic cathedral the _Rose_ should be as familiar as

the _Dies Iræ_. For the spirit of it is indeed, though faintly

"decadent," even more the mediæval spirit than that of the Arthurian

legend, precisely for the reason that it is less universal, less of

humanity generally, more of this particular phase of humanity. And as

it is opposed to, rather than complementary of, the religious side of

the matter in one direction, so it opposes and completes the satirical

side, of which we have heard so much in this chapter, and the purely

fighting and adventurous part, which we have dealt with in others, not

excluding by any means in this half-reflective, half-contrasting

office, the philosophical side also. Yet when men pray and fight, when

they sneer and speculate, they are constrained to be very like

themselves and each other. They are much freer in their dreams: and

the _Romance of the Rose_, if it has not much else of life, is like it

in this way--that it too is a dream.

As such it quite honestly holds itself out. The author lays it down,

supporting himself with the opinion of another "qui ot nom macrobes,"

that dreams are quite serious things. At any rate he will tell a dream

of his own, a dream which befell him in his twentieth year, a dream

wherein was nothing

"Qui avenu trestout ne soit

Si com le songes racantoit."

And if any one wishes to know how the romance telling this dream shall

be called--

"Ce est li Rommanz de la Rose,

Ou l'ars d'amorz est tote enclose."

[Sidenote: _The rose-garden._]

The poem itself opens with a description of a dewy morn in May, a

description then not so hackneyed as, chiefly from this very instance,

it afterwards became, and in itself at once "setting," so to speak,

the frame of gracious decorative imagery in which the poet works. He

"threaded a silver needle" (an odd but not unusual mediæval pastime

was sewing stitches in the sleeve) and strolled, _cousant ses

manches_, towards a river-bank. Then, after bathing his face and

seeing the bright gravel flashing through the water, he continued his

stroll down-stream, till he saw in front of him a great park (for this

translates the mediæval _verger_ much better than "orchard"), on the

wall of which were portrayed certain images[144]--Hatred, Felony,

Villainy, Covetousness, Avarice, Envy, Sadness, Old Age, Hypocrisy,

and Poverty. These personages, who strike the allegoric and

personifying note of the poem, are described at varying length, the

last three being perhaps the best. Despite these uninviting figures,

the Lover (as he is soon called) desires violently to enter the park;

but for a long time he can find no way in, till at length Dame Oyseuse

(Idleness) admits him at a postern. She is a very attractive damsel

herself; and she tells the Lover that Delight and all his Court haunt

the park, and that he has had the ugly images made, apparently as

skeletons at the feast, to heighten, not to dash, enjoyment. Entering,

the Lover thinks he is in the Earthly Paradise, and after a time he

finds the fair company listening to the singing of Dame Lyesse

(Pleasure), with much dancing, music, and entertainment of _jongleurs_

and _jongleresses_ to help pass the time.

[Footnote 144: "Seven" says the verse chapter-heading, which is a

feature of the poem; but the actual text does not mention the number,

and it will be seen that there were in fact _ten_. The author of the

headings was no doubt thinking of the Seven Deadly Sins.]

Courtesy asks him to join in the _karole_ (dance), and he does so,

giving full description of her, of Lyesse, of Delight, and of the God

of Love himself, with his bow-bearer Sweet-Glances, who carries in

each hand five arrows--in the right Beauty, Simpleness, Frankness,

Companionship, Fair-Seeming; in the left Pride, Villainy,[145] Shame,

Despair, and "New-Thought"--_i.e._, Fickleness. Other personages--sometimes

with the same names, sometimes with different--follow in the train;

Cupid watches the Lover that he may take shot at him, and the tale is

interrupted by an episode giving the story of Narcissus. Meanwhile the

Lover has seen among the flowers of the garden one rose-bud on which

he fixes special desires. The thorns keep him off; and Love, having

him at vantage, empties the right-hand quiver on him. He yields

himself prisoner, and a dialogue between captive and captor follows.

Love locks his heart with a gold key; and after giving him a long

sermon on his duties, illustrated from the Round Table romances and

elsewhere, vanishes, leaving him in no little pain, and still unable

to get at the Rose. Suddenly in his distress there appears to him

"Un valet buen et avenant

Bel-Acueil se faisoit clamer,"

and it seems that he was the son of Courtesy.

[Footnote 145: _Vilenie_ is never an easy word to translate: it means

general misconduct and disagreeable behaviour.]

[Sidenote: _"Danger."_]

Bialacoil (to give him his Chaucerian[146] Englishing) is most

obliging, and through his help the Lover has nearly reached the Rose,

when an ugly personage named Danger in turn makes his appearance. Up

to this time there is no very important difficulty in the

interpretation of the allegory; but the learned are not at one as to

what "Danger" means. The older explanation, and the one to which I

myself still incline as most natural and best suiting what follows, is

that Danger is the representative of the beloved one's masculine and

other guardians--her husband, father, brother, mother, and so forth.

Others, however, see in him only subjective obstacles--the coyness, or

caprice, or coquettishness of the Beloved herself. But these never

troubled a true lover to any great extent; and besides they seem to

have been provided for by the arrows in the left hand of Love's

bow-bearer, and by Shame (_v. infra_). At any rate Danger's

proceedings are of a most kill-joy nature. He starts from his

hiding-place--

"Grans fu, et noirs et hericiés,

S'ot les iex rouges comme feus,

Le nés froncié, le vis hideus,

Et s'escrie comme forcenés."

[Footnote 146: I am well aware of everything that has been said about

and against the Chaucerian authorship of the English _Rose_. But until

the learned philologists who deny that authorship in whole or in part

agree a little better among themselves, they must allow literary

critics at least to suspend their judgment.]

He abuses Bialacoil for bringing the Lover to the Rose, and turns the

Lover out of the park, while Bialacoil flies.

[Sidenote: _"Reason."_]

To the disconsolate suitor appears Reason, and does not speak

comfortable words. She is described as a middle-aged lady of a comely

and dignified appearance, crowned, and made specially in God's image

and likeness. She tells him that if he had not put himself under the

guidance of Idleness, Love would not have wounded him; that besides

Danger, he has made her own daughter Shame his foe, and also

Male-Bouche (Scandal, Gossip, Evil-Speaking), the third and most

formidable guardian of the Rose. He ought never to have surrendered

to Love. In the service of that power

"il a plus poine

Que n'ont hermite ne blanc moine;

La poine en est démesurée,

Et la joie a courte durée."

The Lover does not take this sermon well. He is Love's: she may go

about her business, which she does. He bethinks him that he has a

companion, Amis (the Friend), who has always been faithful; and he

will go to him in his trouble. Indeed Love had bidden him do so. The

Friend is obliging and consoling, and says that he knows Danger. His

bark is worse than his bite, and if he is spoken softly to he will

relent. The Lover takes the advice with only partial success. Danger,

at first robustious, softens so far as to say that he has no objection

to the Lover loving, only he had better keep clear of his roses. The

Friend represents this as an important point gained; and as the next

step Pity and Frankness go as his ambassadresses to Danger, who allows

Bialacoil to return to him and take him once more to see the Rose,

more beautiful than ever. He even, assisted by Venus, is allowed to

kiss his love.

[Sidenote: _"Shame" and "Scandal."_]

This is very agreeable: but it arouses the two other guardians of whom

Reason has vainly warned him, Shame and Evil-Speaking, or Scandal. The

latter wakes Jealousy, Fear follows, and Fear and Shame stir up

Danger. He keeps closer watch, Jealousy digs a trench round the

rose-bush and builds a tower where Bialacoil is immured: and the

Lover, his case only made worse by the remembered savour of the Rose

on his lips,[147] is left helpless outside. But as the rubric of the

poem has it--

"Cyendroit trespassa Guillaume

De Lorris, et n'en fist plus pseaulme."

[Footnote 147:

"Car ge suis a greignor meschief

Por la joie que j'ai perdue.

Que s'onques ne l'éussi éue."

Dante undoubtedly had this in his mind when he wrote the immortal

_Nessun maggior dolore_. All this famous passage, l. 4557 _sq._, is

admirable.]

[Sidenote: _The later poem._]

[Sidenote: _"False-Seeming."_]

The work which forty years later Jean de Meung (some say at royal

suggestion) added to the piece, so as to make it five times its former

length, has been spoken of generally already, and needs less notice in

detail. Jean de Meung takes up the theme by once more introducing

Reason, whose remonstrances, with the Lover's answers, take nearly

half as much room as the whole story hitherto. Then reappears the

Friend, who is twice as long-winded as Reason, and brings the tale up

to more than ten thousand lines already. At last Love himself takes

some pity of his despairing vassal, and besieges the tower where

Bialacoil is confined. This leads to the introduction of the most

striking and characteristic figure of the second part, _Faux-Semblant_,

a variety of Reynard. Bialacoil is freed: but Danger still guards the

Rose. Love, beaten, invokes the help of his mother, who sends Nature

and Genius to his aid. They talk more than anybody else. But Venus has

to come herself before Danger is vanquished and the Lover plucks the

Rose.

[Sidenote: _Contrast of the parts._]

The appeal of this famous poem is thus twofold, though the allegorical

form in which the appeal is conveyed is the same. In the first part

all the love-poetry of troubadour and _trouvère_ is gathered up and

presented under the guise of a graceful dreamy symbolism, a little

though not much sicklied o'er with learning. In the second the satiric

tendency of the _Fabliaux_ and _Renart_ is carried still further, with

an admixture of not often apposite learning to a much greater extent.

Narcissus was superfluous where William of Lorris introduced him, but

Pygmalion and his image, inserted at great length by Jean de Meung,

when after twenty thousand lines the catastrophe is at length

approaching, are felt to be far greater intruders.

[Sidenote: _Value of both, and charm of the first._]

The completeness of the representation of the time given by the poem

is of course enormously increased by this second part, and the

individual touches, though rather lost in the wilderness of "skipping

octosyllables," are wonderfully sharp and true at times. Yet to some

judgments at any rate the charm of the piece will seem mostly to have

vanished when Bialacoil is once shut up in his tower. In mere poetry

Jean de Meung is almost infinitely the inferior of William of Lorris:

and though the latter may receive but contemptuous treatment from

persons who demand "messages," "meanings," and so forth, others will

find message and meaning enough in his allegorical presentation of the

perennial quest, of "the way of a man with a maid," and more than

enough beauty in the pictures with which he has adorned it. He is

indeed the first great word-painter of the Middle Ages, and for

long--almost to the close of them--most poets simply copied him, while

even the greatest used him as a starting-point and source of

hints.[148] Also besides pictures he has music--music not very

brilliant or varied, but admirably matching his painting, soft,

dreamy, not so much monotonous as uniform with a soothing uniformity.

Few poets deserve better than William of Lorris the famous hyperbole

which Greek furnished in turn to Latin and to English. He is indeed

"softer than sleep," and, as soft sleep is, laden with gracious and

various visions.

[Footnote 148: The following of the Rose would take a volume, even

treated as the poem itself is here. The English version has been

referred to: Italian naturalised it early in a sonnet cycle, _Il

Fiore_. Every country welcomed it, but the actual versions are as

nothing to the imitations and the influence.]

[Sidenote: _Marie de France and Ruteboeuf._]

The great riches of French literature at this time, and the necessity

of arranging this history rather with a view to "epoch-making" kinds

and books than to interesting individual authors, make attention to

many of these latter impossible here. Thus Marie de France[149] yields

to few authors of our two centuries in charm and interest for the

reader; yet for us she must be regarded chiefly as one of the

practitioners of the fable, and as the chief practitioner of the

_Lai_, which in her hands is merely a subdivision of the general

romance on a smaller scale. So, again, the _trouvère_ Ruteboeuf, who

has been the subject of critical attention, a little disproportionate

perhaps, considering the vast amount of work as good as his which has

hardly any critical notice, but still not undeserved, must serve us

rather as an introducer of the subject of dramatic poetry than as an

individual, though his work is in the bulk of it non-dramatic, and

though almost all of it is full of interest in itself.

[Footnote 149: See note above, p. 286.]

Ruteboeuf[150] (a name which seems to be a professional _nom de

guerre_ rather than a patronymic) was married in 1260, and has devoted

one of his characteristic poems, half "complaints," half satires, to

this not very auspicious event. For the rest, it is rather conjectured

than known that his life must have filled the greater part, if not the

whole, of the last two-thirds of the thirteenth century, thus

including the dates of both parts of the _Rose_ within it. The

tendencies of the second part of the great poem appear in Ruteboeuf

more distinctly than those of the earlier, though, like both, his work

shows the firm grip which allegory was exercising on all poetry, and

indeed on all literature. He has been already referred to as having

written an outlying "branch" of _Renart_; and not a few of his other

poems--_Le Dit des Cordeliers_, _Frère Denise_, and others--are of the

class of the _Fabliaux_: indeed Ruteboeuf may be taken as the type

and chief figure to us of the whole body of _fabliau_-writing

_trouvères_. Besides the marriage poem, we have others on his personal

affairs, the chief of which is speakingly entitled "La Pauvreté

Ruteboeuf." But he has been even more, and even more justly, prized

as having left us no small number of historical or political poems,

not a few of which are occupied with the decay of the crusading

spirit. The "Complainte d'Outremer," the "Complainte de

Constantinoble," the "Débat du Croisé et du Décroisé" tell their own

tale, and contain generous, if perhaps not very long-sighted or

practical, laments and indignation over the decadence of adventurous

piety. Others are less religious; but, on the whole, Ruteboeuf, even

in his wilder days, seems to have been (except for that dislike of the

friars, in which he was not alone) a religiously minded person, and we

have a large body of poems, assigned to his later years, which are

distinctly devotional. These deal with his repentance, with his

approaching death, with divers Lives of Saints, &c. But the most

noteworthy of them, as a fresh strand in the rope we are here weaving,

is the Miracle-play of _Théophile_. It will serve as a text or

starting-point on which to take up the subject of the drama itself,

with no more about Ruteboeuf except the observation that the varied

character of his work is no doubt typical of that of at least the

later _trouvères_ generally. They were practically men of letters, not

to say journalists, of all work that was likely to pay; and must have

shifted from romance to drama, from satire to lyric, just as their

audience or their patrons might happen to demand, as their

circumstances or their needs might happen to dictate.

[Footnote 150: Ed. Jubinal, 2d ed., Paris, 1874; or ed. Kressner,

Wolfenbüttel, 1885.]

[Sidenote: _Drama._]

The obscure but not uninteresting subject of the links between the

latest stages of classical drama and the earliest stages of mediæval

belong to the first volume of this series; indeed by the eleventh

century (or before the period, properly speaking, of this book opens)

the vernacular drama, as far as the sacred side of it is concerned,

was certainly established in France, although not in any other

country. But it is not quite certain whether we actually possess

anything earlier than the twelfth century, even in French, and it is

exceedingly doubtful whether what we have in any other vernacular is

older than the fourteenth. The three oldest mystery plays wherein any

modern language makes its appearance are those of _The Ten

Virgins_,[151] mainly in Latin, but partly in a dialect which is

neither quite French nor quite Provençal; the Mystery of _Daniel_,

partly Latin and partly French; and the Mystery of _Adam_,[152] which

is all French. The two latter, when first discovered, were as usual

put too early by their discoverers; but it is certain that they are

not younger than the twelfth century, while it is all but certain that

the _Ten Virgins_ dates from the eleventh, if not even the tenth. In

the thirteenth we find, besides Ruteboeuf's _Théophile_, a _Saint

Nicolas_ by another very well-known _trouvère_, Jean Bodel of Arras,

author of many late and probably rehandled _chansons_, and of the

famous classification of romance which has been adopted above.

[Footnote 151: Ed. Monmerqué et Michel, _Théâtre Français au Moyen

Age_. Paris, 1874. This also contains _Théophile_, _Saint Nicolas_,

and the plays of Adam de la Halle.]

[Footnote 152: Ed. Luzarches, Tours, 1854; ed. Palustre, Paris, 1877.]

It was probably on the well-known principle of "not letting the devil

have all the best tunes" that the Church, which had in the patristic

ages so violently denounced the stage, and which has never wholly

relaxed her condemnation of its secular use, attempted at once to

gratify and sanctify the taste for dramatic performances by adopting

the form, and if possible confining it to pious uses. But there is a

school of literary historians who hold that there was no direct

adoption of a form intentionally dramatic, and that the modern sacred

drama--the only drama for centuries--was simply an expansion of or

excrescence from the services of the Church herself, which in their

antiphonal character, and in the alternation of monologue and chorus,

were distinctly dramatic in form. This, however, is one of those

numerous questions which are only good to be argued, and can never

reach a conclusion; nor need it greatly trouble those who believe that

all literary forms are more or less natural to man, and that man's

nature will therefore, example or no example, find them out and

practise them, in measure and degree according to circumstances,

sooner or later.

At any rate, if there was any hope in the mind of any ecclesiastical

person at any time of confining dramatic performances to sacred

subjects, that hope was doomed to disappointment, and in France at

least to very speedy disappointment. The examples of Mystery or

Miracle plays which we have of a date older than the beginning of the

fourteenth century are not numerous, but it is quite clear that at an

early time the necessity for interspersing comic interludes was

recognised; and it is needless to say to any one who has ever looked

even slightly at the subject that these interludes soon became a

regular part of the performance, and exhibited what to modern ideas

seems a very indecorous disregard of the respect due to the company in

which they found themselves. The great Bible mysteries, no less and no

more than the miracle plays of the Virgin[153] and the Saints, show

this characteristic throughout, and the Fool's remark which pleased

Lamb, "Hazy weather, Master Noah!" was a strictly legitimate and very

much softened descendant of the kind of pleasantries which diversify

the sacred drama of the Middle Ages in all but its very earliest

examples.

[Footnote 153: Several of these miracles of the Virgin will be found

in the volume by Monmerqué and Michel referred to above: the whole

collection has been printed by the Société des Anciens Textes. The MS.

is of the fourteenth century, but some of its contents may date from

the thirteenth.]

It was certain, at any rate in France, that from comic interludes in

sacred plays to sheer profane comedy in ordinary life the step would

not be far nor the interval of time long. The _fabliaux_ more

particularly were farces already in the state of _scenario_, and some

of them actually contained dialogue. To break them up and shape them

into actual plays required much less than the innate love for drama

which characterises the French people, and the keen literary sense and

craft which characterised the French _trouvères_ of the thirteenth

century.

[Sidenote: _Adam de la Halle._]

The honour of producing the first examples known to us is assigned to

Adam de la Halle, a _trouvère_ of Arras, who must have been a pretty

exact contemporary of Ruteboeuf, and who besides some lyrical work

has left us two plays, _Li Jus de la Feuillie_ and _Robin et

Marion_.[154] The latter, as its title almost sufficiently indicates,

is a dramatised _pastourelle_; the former is less easy to classify,

but it stands in something like the same relation to the personal

poems, of which, as has just been mentioned in the case of Ruteboeuf

himself, the _trouvères_ were so fond. For it introduces himself, his

wife (at least she is referred to), his father, and divers of his

Arras friends. And though rough in construction, it is by no means a

very far-off ancestor of the comedy of manners in its most developed

form.

[Footnote 154: Besides the issue above noted these have been

separately edited by A. Rambeau. Marburg, 1886.]

[Sidenote: Robin et Marion.]

It may be more interesting to give some account here of these two

productions, the parents of so numerous and famous a family, than to

dwell on the early miracle plays, which reached their fullest

development in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and then for

the most part died away. The play (_Jeu_ is the general term, and the

exact, though now in French obsolete, equivalent of the English word)

of _Robin et Marion_ combines the general theme of the earlier lyric

_pastourelle_, as explained above, with the more general pastoral

theme of the love of shepherd and shepherdess. The scene opens on

Marion singing to the burden "Robins m'a demandée, si m'ara." To her

the Knight, who inquires the meaning of her song, whereupon she avows

her love for Robin. Nevertheless he woos her, in a fashion rather

clumsy than cavalier, but receives no encouragement. Robin comes up

after the Knight's departure. He is, to use Steerforth's words in

_David Copperfield_, "rather a chuckle-headed fellow for the girl,"

but is apparently welcome. They eat rustic fare together and then

dance; but more company is desired, and Robin goes to fetch it. He

tells the friends he asks that some one has been courting Marion, and

they prudently resolve to bring, one his great pitchfork and another

his good blackthorn. Meanwhile the Knight returns, and though Marion

replies to his accost--

"Pour Dieu, sire, alez vo chemin,

Si ferès moult grant courtoisie,"

he renews his suit, but is again rejected. Returning in a bad temper

he meets Robin and cuffs him soundly, a correction which Robin does

not take in the heroic manner. Marion runs to rescue him, and the

Knight threatens to carry her off--which Robin, even though his

friends have come up, is too cowardly to prevent. She, however, is

constant and escapes; the piece finishing by a long and rather tedious

festival of the clowns. Its drawbacks are obvious, and are those

natural to an experiment which has no patterns before it; but the

figure of Marion is exceedingly graceful and pleasing, and the whole

has promise. It is essentially a comic opera; but that a _trouvère_ of

the thirteenth century should by himself, so far as we can see, have

founded comic opera is not a small thing.

[Sidenote: _The_ Jeu de la Feuillie.]

The _Jus de la Feuillie_ ("the booths"), otherwise _Li Jus Adam_, or

Adam's play, is more ambitious and more complicated, but also more

chaotic. It is, as has been said, an early sketch of a comedy of

manners; but upon this is grafted in the most curious way a fairy

interlude, or rather after-piece. Adam himself opens the piece and

informs his friends with much coolness that he has tried married life,

but intends to go back to "clergy" and then set out for Paris, leaving

his father to take care of his wife. He even replies to the

neighbours' remonstrances by enlarging in the most glowing terms on

the passion he has felt for his wife and on her beauty, adding, with a

crude brutality which has hardly a ghost of atoning fun in it, that

this is all over--

"Car mes fains en est apaiés."

His father then appears, and Adam shows himself not more dutiful as a

son than he is grateful as a husband. But old Henri de la Halle, an

easy-going father, has not much reproach for him. The piece, however,

has hardly begun before it goes off into a medley of unconnected

scenes, though each has a sort of _fabliau_ interest of its own. A

doctor is consulted by his clients; a monk demands alms and offerings

in the name of Monseigneur Saint Acaire, promising miracles; a madman

succeeds him; and in the midst enters the _Mainie Hellequin_, "troop

of Hellequin" (a sort of Oberon or fairy king), with Morgue la fée

among them. The fairies end with a song, and the miscellaneous

conversation of the men of Arras resumes and continues for some time,

reaching, in fact, no formal termination.

[Sidenote: _Comparison of them._]

In this odd piece, which, except the description of Marie the

deserted wife, has little poetical merit, we see drama of the

particular kind in a much ruder and vaguer condition than in the

parallel instance of _Robin et Marion_. There the very form of the

_pastourelle_ was in a manner dramatic--it wanted little adjustment to

be quite so; and though the _coda_ of the rustic merry-making is

rather artless, it is conceivably admissible. Here we are not far out

of Chaos as far as dramatic arrangement goes. Adam's announced

desertion of his wife and intended journey to Paris lead to nothing:

the episodes or scenes of the doctor and the monk are connected with

nothing; the fool or madman and his father are equally independent;

and the "meyney of Hellequin" simply play within the play, not without

rhyme, but certainly with very little reason. Nevertheless the piece

is almost more interesting than the comparatively regular farces (into

which rather later the _fabliaux_ necessarily developed themselves)

and than the miracle plays (which were in the same way dramatic

versions of the Lives of the Saints), precisely because of this

irregular and pillar-to-post character. We see that the author is

trying a new kind, that he is endeavouring to create for himself. He

is not copying anything in form; he is borrowing very little from any

one in material. He has endeavoured to represent, and has not entirely

failed in representing, the comings and goings, the ways and says, of

his townsmen at fair and market. The curiously desultory character of

this early drama--the character hit off most happily in modern times

by _Wallenstein's Lager_--naturally appears here in an exaggerated

form. But the root of the matter--the construction of drama, not on

the model of Terence or of anybody, but on the model of life--is here.

It will be for my successor to show the wide extension of this

dramatic form in the succeeding period. Here it takes rank rather as

having the interest of origins, and as helping to fill out the picture

of the marvellously various ability of Frenchmen of letters in the

thirteenth century, than for the positive bulk or importance of its

constituents. And it is important to repeat that it connects itself in

the general literary survey both with _fabliau_ and with allegory. The

personifying taste, which bred or was bred from allegory, is very

close akin to the dramatic taste, and the _fabliau_, as has been said

more than once, is a farce in the making, and sometimes far advanced

towards being completely made.

[Sidenote: _Early French prose._]

All the matter hitherto discussed in this chapter, as well as all that

of previous chapters as far as French is concerned, with the probable

if not certain exception of the Arthurian romances, has been in verse.

Indeed--still with this exception, and with the further and more

certain exceptions of a few laws, a few sermons, &c.--there was no

French prose, or none that has come down to us, until the thirteenth

century. The Romance tongues, as contradistinguished from Anglo-Saxon

and Icelandic, were slow to develop vernacular prose; the reason,

perhaps, being that Latin, of one kind or another, was still so

familiar to all persons of any education that, for purposes of

instruction and use, vernacular prose was not required, while verse

was more agreeable to the vulgar.

[Sidenote: _Laws and sermons._]

Yet it was inevitable that prose should, sooner or later, make its

appearance; and it was equally inevitable that spoken prose sermons

should be of the utmost antiquity. Indeed such sermons form, by

reasonable inference, the subject of the very earliest reference[155]

to that practically lost _lingua romana rustica_ which formed the

bridge between Latin and the Romance tongues. But they do not seem to

have been written down, and were no doubt extempore addresses rather

than regular discourses. Law appears to have had the start of divinity

in the way of providing formal written prose; and the law-fever of the

Northmen, which had already shaped, or was soon to shape, the

"Gray-goose" code of their northernmost home in Iceland, expressed

itself early in Normandy and England--hardly less early in the famous

_Lettres du Sépulcre_ or _Assises de Jérusalem_, the code of the

Crusading kingdom, which was drawn up almost immediately after its

establishment, and which exists, though not in the very oldest form.

Much uncertainty prevails on the question when the first sermons in

French vernacular were formally composed, and by whom. It has been

maintained, and denied, that the French sermons of St Bernard which

exist are original, in which case the practice must have come in

pretty early in the twelfth century. There is, at any rate, no doubt

that Maurice de Sully, who was Archbishop of Paris for more than

thirty years, from 1160 onwards, composed sermons in French; or at

least that sermons of his, which may have been written in Latin, were

translated into French. For this whole point of early prose,

especially on theological subjects, is complicated by the uncertainty

whether the French forms are original or not. There is no doubt that

the feeling expressed by Ascham in England nearly four centuries

later, that it would have been for himself much easier and pleasanter

to write in Latin, must at the earlier date have prevailed far more

extensively.

[Footnote 155: The often-quoted statement that in 659 Mummolinus or

Momolenus was made Bishop of Noyon because of his double skill in

"Teutonic" and "Roman" (_not_ "Latin") speech.]

[Sidenote: _Villehardouin._]

Still prose made its way: it must have received an immense accession

of vogue if the prose Arthurian romances really date from the end of

the twelfth century; and by the beginning of the thirteenth it found a

fresh channel in which to flow, the channel of historical narrative.

The earliest French chronicles of the ordinary compiling kind date

from this time; and (which is of infinitely greater importance) it is

from this time (_cir._ 1210) that the first great French prose book,

from the literary point, appears--that is to say, the _Conquête de

Constantinoble_,[156] or history of the Fourth Crusade, by Geoffroy de

Villehardouin, Marshal of Champagne and Romanie, who was born about

1160 in the first-named province, and died at Messinople in Greece

about 1213.

[Footnote 156: Ed. Natalis de Wailly. Paris, 1872.]

This deservedly famous and thoroughly delightful book, which has more

than one contemporary or slightly younger parallel, though none of

these approaches it in literary interest, presents the most striking

resemblance to a _chanson de geste_--in conduct, arrangement (the

paragraphs representing _laisses_), and phraseology. But it is not, as

some other early prose is, merely verse without rhyme, and with broken

rhythm; and it is impossible to read it without astonished admiration

at the excellence of the medium which the writer, apparently by

instinct, has attained. The list of the crusaders; their embassy to

"li dux de Venise qui ot à nom Henris Dandolo et etait mult sages et

mult prouz"; their bargain, in which the business-like Venetian, after

stipulating for 85,000 marks of transport-money, agrees to add fifty

armed galleys without hire, for the love of God _and_ on the terms of

half-conquests; the death of the Count of Champagne (much wept by

Geoffroy his marshal); and the substitution after difficulties of

Boniface, Marquis of Montserrat;--these things form the prologue. When

the army is actually got together the transport-money is unfortunately

lacking, and the Venetians, still with the main chance steadily before

them, propose that the crusaders shall recover for them, from the King

of Hungary, Zara, "Jadres en Esclavonie, qui est une des plus forz

citez du monde." Then we are told how Dandolo and his host take the

cross; how Alexius Comnenus, the younger son of Isaac, arrives and

begs aid; how the fleet set out ("Ha! Dex, tant bon destrier i ot

mis!"); how Zara is besieged and taken; of the pact made with Alexius

to divert the host to Constantinople; of the voyage thither after the

Pope's absolution for the slightly piratical and not in the least

crusading _prise de Jadres_ has been obtained; of the dissensions and

desertions at Corfu, and the arrival at the "Bras St Georges," the Sea

of Marmora. This is what may be called the second part.

The third part opens with debates at San Stefano as to the conduct of

the attack. The emperor sends soft words to "la meillor gens qui soent

sanz corone" (this is the description of the chiefs), but they reject

them, arrange themselves in seven battles, storm the port, take the

castle of Galata, and then assault the city itself. The fighting

having gone wholly against him, the emperor retires by the open side

of the city, and the Latins triumph. Some show is made of resuming, or

rather beginning, a real crusade; but the young Emperor Alexius, to

whom his blind father Isaac has handed over the throne, bids them

stay, and they do so. Soon dissensions arise, war breaks out, a

conspiracy is formed against Isaac and his son by Mourzufle, "et

Murchufles chauça les houses vermoilles," quickly putting the former

owners of the scarlet boots to death. A second siege and capture of

the city follows, and Baldwin of Flanders is crowned emperor, while

Boniface marries the widow of Isaac, and receives the kingdom of

Salonica.

It has seemed worth while to give this abstract of the book up to a

certain point (there is a good deal more of confused fighting in

"Romanie" before, at the death of Boniface, Villehardouin gives up

the pen to Henri of Valenciennes), because even such a bare argument

may show the masterly fashion in which this first of modern vernacular

historians of the great literary line handles his subject. The parts

are planned with judgment and adjusted with skill; the length allotted

to each incident is just enough; the speeches, though not omitted, are

not inserted at the tyrannous length in which later mediæval and even

Renaissance historians indulged from corrupt following of the

ancients. But no abstract could show--though the few scraps of actual

phrase purposely inserted may convey glimpses of it--the vigour and

picturesqueness of the recital. That Villehardouin was an eyewitness

explains a little, but very little: we have, unfortunately, libraries

full of eyewitness-histories which are duller than any ditch-water.

Nor, though he is by no means shy of mentioning his own performances,

does he communicate to the story that slightly egotistic interest of

gossip and personal detail of which his next great successor is

perhaps the first example. It is because, while writing a rather

rugged but completely genuine and unmetrical though rhythmical prose,

Villehardouin has the poet's eye and grasp that he sees, and therefore

makes us see, the events that he relates. These events do not form

exactly the most creditable chapter of modern history; for they simply

come to this, that an army assembling for a crusade against the

infidel, allows itself to be bribed or wheedled into two successive

attacks on two Christian princes who have given it not the slightest

provocation, never attacks the infidel at all, and ends by a

filibustering seizure of already Christian territory. Nor does

Villehardouin make any elaborate disguise of this; but he tells the

tale with such a gust, such a _furia_, that we are really as much

interested in the success of this private piracy as if it had been the

true crusade of Godfrey of Bouillon himself.

[Sidenote: _William of Tyre._]

[Sidenote: _Joinville._]

The earlier and more legitimate crusades did not lack fitting

chroniclers in the same style, though none of them had the genius of

Villehardouin. The _Roman d'Eracles_ (as the early vernacular

version[157] of the Latin chronicle of William of Tyre used to be

called, for no better reason than that the first line runs, "Les

anciennes histoires dient qu'Eracles [Heraclius] qui fu mout bons

crestiens gouverna l'empire de Rome") is a chronicle the earlier part

of which is assigned to a certain Bernard, treasurer of the Abbey of

Corbie. It is a very extensive relation, carrying the history of Latin

Palestine from Peter the Hermit's pilgrimage to about the year 1190,

composed probably within ten or fifteen years after this later date,

and written, though not with Villehardouin's epic spirit, in a very

agreeable and readable fashion. Not much later, vernacular chronicles

of profane history in France became common, and the celebrated

_Grandes Chroniques_ of St Denis began to be composed in French. But

the only production of this thirteenth century which has taken rank in

general literary knowledge with the work of the Marshal of Champagne

is that[158] of Jean de Joinville, also a Champenois and Seneschal of

the province, who was born about ten years after Villehardouin's

death, and who died, after a life prolonged to not many short of a

hundred years, in 1319. Joinville's historical work seems to have been

the occupation of his old age; but its subject, the Life and Crusading

misfortunes of Saint Louis, belongs to the experiences of his youth

and early middle life. Besides the _Histoire de Saint Louis_, we have

from him a long _Credo_ or profession of religious faith.

[Footnote 157: Ed. Paulin Paris. Paris, 1879.]

[Footnote 158: Ed. Natalis de Wailly. Paris, 1874.]

There is no reason at all to question the sincerity of this faith. But

Joinville was a shrewd and practical man, and when the kings of France

and Navarre pressed him to take the cross a second time, he answered

that their majesties' servants had during his first absence done him

and his people so much harm that he thought he had better not go away

again. Indeed it would be displeasing to God, "qui mit son corps pour

son peuple sauver," if he, Joinville, abandoned _his_ people. And he

reports only in the briefest abstract the luckless "voie de Tunes," or

expedition to Tunis. But of the earlier and not much less unlucky

Damietta crusade, in which he took part, as well as of his hero's life

till all but the last, he has written very fully, and in a fashion

which is very interesting, though unluckily we have no manuscript

representing the original text, or even near to it in point of time.

The book, which has been thought to have been written in pieces at

long intervals, has nothing of the antique vigour of Villehardouin.

Joinville is something of a gossip, and though he evidently writes

with a definite literary purpose, is not master of very great

argumentative powers. But for this same reason he abounds in anecdote,

and in the personal detail which, though it may easily be overdone, is

undoubtedly now and then precious for the purpose of enabling us to

conjure up the things and men of old time more fully and correctly.

And there is a Pepysian garrulity as well as a Pepysian shrewdness

about Joinville; so that, on the whole, he fills the position of

ancestor in the second group of historians, the group of lively

_raconteurs_, as well as Villehardouin leads that of inspired

describers. For an instance of the third kind, the philosophical

historian, France, if not Europe, had to wait two centuries, when such

a one came in Comines.

It is almost unnecessary to say that when the secret of producing

prose and its advantages over verse for certain purposes had been

discovered, it was freely employed for all such purposes, scientific

as science was understood, devotional, instructive, business (the

_Livre des Mestiers_, or book of the guilds of Paris, is of the

thirteenth century), and miscellaneous. But few of these things

concern literature proper. It is otherwise with the application of

prose to fiction.

[Sidenote: _Fiction._]

This, as we have seen, had probably taken place in the case of the

Arthurian romances as early as the middle of our period, and

throughout the thirteenth century prose romances of length were not

unknown, though it was later that all the three classes--Carlovingian,

Arthurian, and Antique--were thrown indiscriminately into prose, and

lengthened even beyond the huge length of their later representatives

in verse. But for this reason or that, romance in prose was with rare

exceptions unfavourable to the production of the best literature. It

encouraged the prolixity which was the great curse of the Middle Ages,

and the deficient sense of form and scanty presence of models

prevented the observance of anything like a proper scheme.

[Sidenote: Aucassin et Nicolette.]

But among the numerous origins of this wonderful time the origin of

the short prose tale, in which France was to hold almost if not quite

the highest rank among European countries, was also included. It would

not seem that the kind was as yet very frequently attempted--the fact

that the verse _fabliau_ was still in the very height of its

flourishing-time, made this unlikely; nor was it till that

flourishing-time was over that farces on the one hand, and prose tales

on the other, succeeded as fruit the _fabliau_-flower. But it is from

the thirteenth century that (with some others) we have _Aucassin et

Nicolette_.[159] If it was for a short time rather too much of a

fashion to praise (it cannot be over-praised) this exquisite story, no

wise man will allow himself to be disgusted any more than he will

allow himself to be attracted by fashion. This work of "the old

caitiff," as the author calls himself with a rather Hibernian

coaxingness, is what has been called a _cantefable_--that is to say,

it is not only obviously written, like verse romances and _fabliaux_,

for recitation, but it consists partly of prose, partly of verse, the

music for the latter being also given. Mr Swinburne, Mr Pater, and,

most of all, Mr Lang, have made it unnecessary to tell in any detailed

form the story how Aucassin, the son of Count Garin of Beaucaire, fell

in love with Nicolette, a Saracen captive, who has been bought by the

Viscount of the place and brought up as his daughter; how Nicolette

was shut up in a tower to keep her from Aucassin; how Count Bongars of

Valence assailed Beaucaire and was captured by Aucassin on the faith

of a promise from his father that Nicolette shall be restored to him;

how the Count broke his word, and Aucassin, setting his prisoner free,

was put in prison himself; how Nicolette escaped, and by her device

Aucassin also; how the lovers were united; and how, after a comic

interlude in the country of "Torelore," which could be spared by all

but folk-lorists, the damsel is discovered to be daughter of the King

of Carthage, and all ends in bowers of bliss.

[Footnote 159: Frequently edited: not least satisfactorily in the

_Nouvelles Françaises du XIIIme. Siècle_, referred to above. In 1887

two English translations, by Mr Lang and Mr Bourdillon, the latter

with the text and much apparatus, appeared: and Mr Bourdillon has

recently edited a facsimile of the unique MS. (Oxford, 1896).]

But even the enthusiasm and the art of three of the best writers of

English and lovers of literature in this half-century have not

exhausted the wonderful charm of this little piece. The famous

description of Nicolette, as she escapes from her prison and walks

through the daisies that look black against her white feet, is

certainly the most beautiful thing of the kind in mediæval

prose-work, and the equal of anything of the kind anywhere. And for

original audacity few things surpass Aucassin's equally famous

inquiry, "En Paradis qu'ai-je à faire?" with the words with which he

follows it up to the Viscount. But these show passages only

concentrate the charm which is spread all over the novelette, at least

until its real conclusion, the union and escape of the lovers. Here,

as in the earlier part of the _Rose_--to which it is closely akin--is

the full dreamy beauty, a little faint, a little shadowy, but all the

more attractive, of mediæval art; and here it has managed to convey

itself in prose no less happily and with more concentrated happiness

than there in verse.