ALLEGORY, FABLIAU, AND PROSE STORY OF COMMON LIFE
[Sidenote: The connection with prose fiction of allegory.]
It was shown in the last chapter that fiction, and even prose fiction,
of very varied character began to develop itself in French during the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. By the fifteenth the development
was very much greater, and the "disrhyming" of romances, the beginnings
of which were very early, came to be a regular, not an occasional,
process; while, by its latter part, verse had become not the usual, but
the exceptional vehicle of romance, and prose romances of enormous
length were popular. But earlier there had still been some obstacles in
the way of the prose novel proper. It was the period of the rise and
reign of Allegory, and France, preceptress of almost all Europe in most
literary kinds, proved herself such in this with the unparalleled
example of the _Roman de la Rose_. But the _Roman de la Rose_ was itself
in verse--the earlier part of it at least in real poetry--and most of
its innumerable imitations were in verse likewise. Moreover, though
France again had been the first to receive and to turn to use the riches
of Eastern apologue, the most famous example of which is _The Seven Wise
Masters_, these rather serious matters do not seem to have especially
commended themselves to the French people. The place of composition of
the most famous of all, the _Gesta Romanorum_, has been fairly settled
to be England, though the original language of composition is not likely
to have been other than Latin. At any rate, the style of serious
allegory, in prose which should also be literature, never really caught
hold of the French taste.
Comic tale-telling, on the other hand, was germane to the very soul of
the race, and had shown itself in _chanson_ and _roman_ episodes at a
very early date. But it had been so abundantly, and in so popular a
manner, associated with verse as a vehicle in those pieces, in the great
beast-epic of _Renart_, and above all in the _fabliaux_ and in the
earliest farces, that the connection was hard to separate. None of the
stories discussed in the last chapter has, it may be noticed, the least
comic touch or turn.
[Sidenote: And of the _fabliaux_.]
As we go on we must disengage ourselves more and more (though with
occasional returns to it) from attention to verse; and the two great
compositions in that form, the _Romance of the Rose_ and the _Story of
the Fox_, especially the former, hardly require much writing about to
any educated person. They are indeed most strongly contrasted examples
of two modes of tale-telling, both in a manner allegoric, but in other
respects utterly different. The mere story of the _Rose_, apart from the
dreamy or satiric digressions and developments of its two parts and the
elaborate descriptions of the first, can be told in a page or two. An
abstract of the various _Renart_ books, to give any idea of their real
character, would, on the other hand, have to be nearly as long as the
less spun-out versions themselves. But the verse _fabliaux_ can hardly
be passed over so lightly. Many of them formed the actual bases of the
prose _nouvelles_ that succeeded them; not a few have found repeated
presentation in literature; and, above all, they deserve the immense
praise of having deliberately introduced ordinary life, and not
conventionalised manners, into literary treatment. We have taken some
pains to point out touches of that life which are observable in Saint's
Life and Romance, in _chanson_ and early prose tale. But here the case
is altered. Almost everything is real; a good deal is what is called, in
one of the senses of a rather misused word, downright "realism."
Few people who have ever heard of the _fabliaux_ can need to be told
that this realism in their case implies extreme freedom of treatment,
extending very commonly to the undoubtedly coarse and not seldom to the
merely dirty. There are some--most of them well known by modern
imitations such as Leigh Hunt's "Palfrey"--which are quite guiltless in
this respect; but the great majority deal with the usual comic farrago
of satire on women, husbands, monks, and other stock subjects of
raillery, all of which at the time invited "sculduddery." To translate
some of the more amusing, one would require not merely Chaucerian
licence of treatment but Chaucerian peculiarities of dialect in order to
avoid mere vulgarity. Even Prior, who is our only modern English
_fabliau_-writer of real literary merit--the work of people like Hanbury
Williams and Hall Stevenson being mostly mere pornography--could hardly
have managed such a piece as "Le Sot Chevalier"--a riotously "improper"
but excessively funny example--without running the risk of losing that
recommendation of being "a lady's book" with which Johnson rather
capriciously tempered his more general undervaluation. Sometimes, on the
other hand, the joke is trivial enough, as in the English-French
word-play of _anel_ for _agnel_ (or _-neau_), which substitutes "donkey"
for "lamb"; or, in the other, on the comparison of a proper name,
"Estula," with its component syllables "es tu la?" But the important
point on the whole is that, proper or improper, romantic or trivial,
they all exhibit a constant improvement in the mere art of telling; in
discarding of the stock phrases, the long-winded speeches, and the
general _paraphernalia_ of verse; in sticking and leading up smartly to
the point; in coining sharp, lively phrase; in the co-ordination of
incident and the excision of superfluities. Often they passed without
difficulty into direct dramatic presentation in short farces. But on the
whole their obvious destiny was to be "unrhymed" and to make their
appearance in the famous form of the _nouvelle_ or _novella_, in regard
to which it is hard to say whether Italy was most indebted to France
for substance, or France to Italy for form.
[Sidenote: The rise of the _nouvelle_ itself.]
It was not, however, merely the intense conservatism of the Middle Ages
as to literary form which kept back the prose _nouvelle_ to such an
extent that, as we have seen, only a few examples survive from the two
whole centuries between 1200 and 1400, while not one of these is of the
kind most characteristic ever since, or at least until quite recent
days, of French tale-telling. The French octosyllabic couplet, in which
the _fabliaux_ were without exception or with hardly an exception
composed, can, in a long story, become very tiresome because of its want
of weight and grasp, and the temptations it offers to a weak rhymester
to stuff it with endless tags. But for a short tale in deft hands it can
apply its lightness in the best fashion, and put its points with no lack
of sting. The _fabliau_-writer or reciter was not required--one imagines
that he would have found scant audiences if he had tried it--to spin a
long yarn; he had got to come to his jokes and his business pretty
rapidly; and, as La Fontaine has shown to thousands who have never
known--perhaps have never heard of--his early masters, he had an
instrument which would answer to his desires perfectly if only he knew
how to finger it.
At the same time, both the lover of poetry and the lover of tale must
acknowledge that, though alliance between them is not in the least an
unholy one, and has produced great and charming children, the best of
the poetry is always a sort of extra bonus or solace to the tale, and
the tale not unfrequently seems as if it could get on better without the
poetry. The one can only aspire somewhat irrelevantly; the other can
never attain quite its full development. So it was no ill day when the
prose _nouvelle_ came to its own in France.
[Sidenote: _Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles._]
The first remarkable collection was the famous _Cent Nouvelles
Nouvelles_, traditionally attributed to Louis XI. when Dauphin and an
exile in Brabant, with the assistance of friends and courtiers, but
more recently selected by critics that way minded as part of the baggage
they have "commandeered" for Antoine de la Salle. The question of
authorship is of scarcely the slightest importance to us; though the
point last mentioned is worth mentioning, because we shall have to
notice the favoured candidate in this history again. There are certainly
some of the hundred that he might have written.
In the careless way in which literary history used to be dealt with, the
_Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ were held to be mere imitation of the
_Decameron_ and other Italian things. It is, of course, much more than
probable that the Italian _novella_ had not a little to do with the
precipitation of the French _nouvelle_ from its state of solution in the
_fabliau_. But the person or persons who, in imitating the _Decameron_,
produced the _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ had a great deal more to do--and
did a great deal less--than this mere imitation of their original. As
for a group of included tales, the already-mentioned _Seven Wise
Masters_[80] was known in France much before Boccaccio's time. The title
was indeed admittedly Italian, but such an obvious one as to require no
positive borrowing, and there is in the French book no story-framework
like that of the plague and the country-house visit; no cheerful
personalities like Fiammetta or Dioneo make not merely the intervals but
the stories themselves alive with a special interest. Above all, there
is nothing like the extraordinary mixture of unity and variety--a pure
gift of genius--which succeeds in making the _Decameron_ a real book as
well as a bundle of narratives. Nor is there anything like the literary
brilliancy of the actual style and handling.
Nevertheless, _Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ is a book of great interest
and value, despite serious defects due to its time generally and to its
place in the history of fiction in particular. Its obscenity, on which
even Sir Walter Scott, the least censorious or prudish-prurient of men,
and with Southey, the great witness against false squeamishness, has
been severe,[81] is unfortunately undeniable. But it is to be doubted
whether Sir Walter knew much of the _fabliaux_; if he had he would have
seen first, that this sort of thing had become an almost indispensable
fashion in the short story, and secondly, that there is here
considerable improvement on the _fabliaux_ themselves, there being much
less mere schoolboy crudity of dirty detail and phrase, though the
situations may remain the same. It suffers occasionally from the heavy
and rhetorical style which beset all European literature (except
Italian, which itself did not wholly escape) in the fifteenth century.
But still one can see in it that improvement of narrative method and
diction which has been referred to: and occasionally, amid the crowd of
tricky wives, tricked husbands, too obliging and too hardly treated
chambermaids, ribald priests and monks, and the like, one comes across
quite different things and persons, which are, as the phrase goes,
almost startlingly modern, with a mixture of the _un_modern heightening
the appeal. One of the most striking of these--not very likely to be
detected or suspected by a careless reader under its sub-title of "La
Demoiselle Cavaliere," and by no means fully summarised in the quaint
short argument which is in all cases subjoined--may be briefly analysed.
[Sidenote: Analysis of "La Demoiselle Cavaliere".]
In one of the great baronial households of Brabant there lived, after
the usual condition of gentle servitude, a youth named Gerard, who fell
in love, after quite honourable and seemly fashion, with Katherine, the
daughter of the house--a fact which, naturally, they thought known only
to themselves, when, as naturally, everybody in the Court had become
aware of it. "For the better prevention of scandal," an immediate
marriage being apparently out of the question because of Gerard's
inferiority in rank to his mistress, it is decided by the intervention
of friends that Gerard shall take his leave of the Brabantine "family."
There is a parting of the most laudable kind, in which Katherine
bestows on her lover a ring, and a pledge that she will never marry any
one else, and he responds suitably. Then he sets out, and on arriving at
Bar has no difficulty in establishing himself in another great
household. Katherine meanwhile is beset with suitors of the best rank
and fortune; but will have nothing to say to any of them, till one day
comes the formidable moment when a mediaeval father determines that his
daughter shall marry a certain person, will she nill she. But if
mediaeval fatherhood was arbitrary, mediaeval religion was supreme, and
a demand to go on pilgrimage before an important change of life could
hardly be refused. In fact, the parents, taking the proposal as a mere
preliminary of obedience, consent joyfully, and offer a splendid suite
of knights and damsels, "Nous lui baillerons ung tel gentilhomme et une
telle demoiselle, Ysabeau et Marguerite et Jehanneton." But "no," says
Mistress Katherine sagely. The road to St. Nicolas of Warengeville is
not too safe for people travelling with a costly outfit and a train of
women. Let her, dressed as a man, and a bastard uncle of hers (who is
evidently the "Will Wimble" of the house) go quietly on little horses,
and it will save time, trouble, money, and danger. This the innocent
parents consider to show "great sense and good will," and the pair start
in German dress--Katherine as master, the uncle as man,--comfortably,
too, as one may imagine (for uncles and nieces generally get on well
together, and the bend sinister need do no harm). They accomplish their
pilgrimage (a touch worth noticing in Katherine's character), and then
only does she reveal her plan to her companion. She tells him, not
without a little bribery, that she wants to go and see Gerard _en
Barrois_, and to stay there for a short time; but he is to have no doubt
of her keeping her honour safe. He consents, partly with an eye to the
future main chance (for she is her father's sole heir), and partly
because _elle est si bonne qu'il n'y fault guere guet sur elle_.
Katherine, taking the name of Conrad, finds the place, presents herself
to the _maitre_ _d'ostel_, an ancient squire, as desirous of
entertainment or _re_tainment, and is very handsomely received. After
dinner and due service done to the master, the old squire having heard
that Katherine--Conrad--is of Brabant, naturally introduces her
countryman Gerard to her. He does not in the least recognise her, and
what strikes her as stranger, neither during their own dinner nor after
says a word about Brabant itself. Conrad is regularly admitted to
Monseigneur's service, and, as a countryman, is to share Gerard's room.
They are perfectly good friends, go to see their horses together, etc.,
but still the formerly passionate lover says not a word of Brabant or
his Brabanconian love, and poor Katherine concludes that she has been
"put with forgotten sins"--not a bad phrase, though it might be
misconstrued. Being, however, as has been already seen, both a plucky
girl and a clever one, she determines to carry her part through. At
last, when they go to their respective couches in the same chamber, she
herself faces the subject, and asks him if he knows any persons in
Brabant. "Oh yes." "Does he know" her own father, his former master?
"Yes." "They say," said she, "that there are pretty girls there: did you
not know any?" "Precious few," quoth he, "and I cared nothing about
them. Do let me go to sleep! I am dead tired." "What!" said she, "can
you sleep when there is talk of pretty girls? _You_ are not much of a
lover." But he slept "like a pig."
Nevertheless, Katherine does not give up hope, though the next day
things are much the same, Gerard talking of nothing but hounds and
hawks, Conrad of pretty girls. At last the visitor declares that he
[she] does not care for the Barrois, and will go back to Brabant. "Why?"
says Gerard, "what better hunting, etc., can you get there than here?"
"It has nothing," says Conrad, "like the women of Brabant," adding, in
reply to a jest of his, an ambiguous declaration that she is actually in
love. "Then why did you leave her?" says Gerard--about the first
sensible word he has uttered. She makes a fiery answer as to Love
sometimes banishing from his servants all sense and reason. But for the
time the subject again drops. It is, however, reopened at night, and
some small pity comes on one for the recreant Gerard, inasmuch as she
keeps him awake by wailing about her love. At last she "draws" the
sluggard to some extent. "Has not _he_ been in love, and does not he
know all about it? But he was never such a fool as Conrad, and he is
sure that Conrad's lady is not such either." Another try, and she gets
the acknowledgment of treason out of him. He tells her (what she knows
too well) how he loved a noble damsel in Brabant and had to leave her,
and it really annoyed him for a few days (it is good to imagine
Katherine's face, even in the dark, at this), though of course he never
lost his appetite or committed any folly of that sort. But he knew his
Ovid (he tells her), and as soon as he came to Bar he made love to a
pretty girl there who was quite amiable to him, and now he never thinks
of the other. There is more talk, and Katherine insists that he shall
introduce her to his new lady, that she may try this remedy of
counter-love. He consents with perfect nonchalance, and is at last
allowed to go to sleep. No details are given of the conversation with
the rival,[82] except the bitterness of Katherine's heart at the fact,
and at seeing the ring she had given to Gerard on his hand. This she
actually has the pluck to play with, and, securing it, to slip on her
own. But the man being obviously past praying or caring for, she
arranges with her uncle to depart early in the morning, writes a letter
telling Gerard of the whole thing and renouncing him, passes the night
silently, leaves the letter, rises quietly and early, and departs, yet
"weeping tenderly," not for the man, but for her own lost love. The pair
reach home safely, and says the tale-teller, with an agreeable dryness
often found here,[83] "There were some who asked them the adventures of
their journey, but whatever they answered they did not boast of the
chief one." The conclusion is so spirited and at the very end so scenic
and even modern (or, much better, universal), that it must be given in
direct translation, with a few _chevilles_ (or pieces of padding) left
out.
As for Gerard, when he woke and found his companion gone, he
thought it must be late, jumped up in haste, and seized his
jerkin: but, as he thrust his hand in one of the sleeves,
there dropped out a letter which surprised him, for he
certainly did not remember having put any there. He picked
it up and saw it subscribed "To the disloyal Gerard." If he
was startled before he was more so now: but he opened it at
last, and saw the signature "Katherine, surnamed Conrad."
Even yet he knew not what to think of it: but as he read the
blood rose to his face and his heart fluttered, and his
whole manner was changed. Still, he read it through, and
learnt how his disloyalty had come to the knowledge of her
who had wished him so well; and that not at second hand, but
from himself to herself; what trouble she had taken to find
him; and how (which stung him most) he had slept three
nights in her company after all. [_After thinking some time
he decides to follow her, and arrives in Brabant on the very
day of her marriage: for she has, in the circumstances, kept
her word to her parents._] Then he tried to go up to her and
salute her, and make some wretched excuse for his fault. But
he was not allowed, for she turned her shoulder on him, and
he could never manage to speak to her all through the day.
He even stepped forward once to lead her out to dance, but
she refused him flatly before all the company, many of whom
heard her. And immediately afterwards another gentleman
came, who bade the minstrels strike up, and she stepped down
from her dais in full view of Gerard and went to dance with
him. And so did the disloyal lover lose his lady.
Now whether this, as the book asserts and as is not at all improbable,
is a true story or not, cannot matter to any sensible person one
farthing. What does matter is that it is a by no means badly told story,
that it resorts to no illegitimate sources or seasonings of interest,
and that it offers opportunities for amplification and "diversity of
administration" to almost any extent. One can fancy it told, at much
greater length and with more or less adjustment to different times, by
great novelists of the most widely varying classes--by Scott and by
Dumas, by Charles Reade and by George Meredith, to mention no living
writer, as might easily be done. Both hero and heroine have more
character between them than you could extract out of fifty of the usual
_nouvelles_, and each lends him or herself to endless further
development. Not a few of the separate scenes--the good parents fussing
over their daughter's intended cavalcade and her thrifty and ingenious
objections; the journey of the uncle and niece (any of the first three
of the great novelists mentioned above would have made chapters of
this); the dramatic and risky passages at the castle _en Barrois_; the
contrast of Katherine's passion and Gerard's sluggishness; and the
fashion in which this latter at once brings on the lout's defeat and
saves the lady from danger at his hands--all this is novel-matter of
almost the first class as regards incident, with no lack of
character-openings to boot. Nor could anybody want a better "curtain"
than the falling back of the scorned and baffled false lover, the
concert of the minstrels, and Katherine's stately stepping down the dais
to complete the insult by dancing with another.
[Sidenote: The interest of _named_ personages.]
One more general point may be noticed in connection with the superiority
of this story, and that is the accession of interest, at first sight
trivial but really important, which comes from the _naming_ of the
personages. Both in the earlier _fabliaux_ and in these _Nouvelles_
themselves, by far the larger number of the actors are simply called by
class-names--a "knight," a "damsel," a "merchant and his wife," a
"priest," a "varlet." It may seem childish to allow the mere addition of
a couple of names like Gerard and Katherine to make this difference of
interest, but the fact is that there is a good deal of childishness in
human nature, and especially in the enjoyment of story.[84] Only by
very slow degrees were writers of fiction to learn the great difference
that small matters of this kind make, and how the mere "anecdote," the
dry argument or abstract of incident, can be amplified, varied,
transformed from a remainder biscuit to an abundant and almost
inexhaustible feast, by touches of individual character, setting of
interiors, details of conversation, description, nomenclature, and what
not. Quite early, as we saw in the case of the _St. Alexis_, persons of
narrative gift stumbled upon things of the kind; but it was only after
long delays, and hints of many half-conscious kinds, that they became
part of recognised craft. Even with such a master of that craft as
Boccaccio before them, not all the Italian novelists could catch the
pattern; and the French, perhaps naturally enough, were slower still.
It must be remembered, in judging the fifteenth-century French tale,
that just as it was to some extent hampered by the long continuing
popularity of the verse _fabliau_ on the one hand, so it was, as we may
say, "bled" on the other by the growing popularity of the farce, which
consists of exactly the same material as the _fabliaux_ and the
_nouvelles_ themselves, with the additional liveliness of voice and
action. These later additions imposed not the smallest restraint on the
license which had characterised and was to characterise the plain verse
and prose forms,[85] and no doubt the result was all the more welcome to
the taste of the time. But for that very reason the appetites and
tastes, which could glut themselves with the full dramatic
representation, might care less for the mere narrative, on the famous
principle of _segnius irritant_. Nor was the political state of France
during the time very favourable to letters. There are, however, two
separate fifteenth-century stories which deserve notice. One of them is
the rather famous, though probably not widely read, _Petit Jehan de
Saintre_ of the already mentioned Antoine de la Salle, a certain work
of his this time. The other is the pleasant, though to Englishmen
intentionally uncomplimentary, _Jehan de Paris_ of an unknown writer. La
Salle's book must belong to the later middle of the century, though, if
he died in or about 1461, not to a very late middle. _Jehan de Paris_
has been put by M. de Montaiglon nearer the close.
[Sidenote: _Petit Jehan de Saintre._]
The history of "little John of Saintre and the Lady of the Beautiful
Cousins"[86] has not struck all judges, even all English judges,[87] in
the same way. Some have thought it mawkish, rhetorical, clumsily
imitative of the manners of dead chivalry, and the like. Others,
admitting it to be a late and "literary" presentation of the stately
society it describes, rank it much higher as such. Its author was a
bitter enough satirist if he wrote, as he most probably did, the famous
_Quinze Joyes de Mariage_, one of the most unmitigated pieces of
unsweetened irony--next to _A Tale of a Tub_ and _Jonathan Wild_--to be
found in literature; but not couched in narrative form. The same quality
appears of course in the still more famous farce of _Pathelin_, which
few good judges deny very stoutly to him, though there is little
positive evidence. In the _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ again, as has been
said, he certainly had a hand, and possibly a great hand, as well as
perhaps elsewhere. The satiric touch appears even in _Petit Jehan_
itself; for, after all the gracious courtship of the earlier part, the
_dame des belles Cousines_, during an absence of her lover on service,
falls a by no means, as it would seem, very reluctant victim to the
vulgar viciousness of a rich churchman, just like the innominatas of the
_nouvelles_ themselves. But the earlier part _is_ gracious--a word
specifically and intensively applicable to it. It may be a little
unreal; does not the secondary form and sense which has been fastened
upon reality--"realism"--show that, in the opinion of many people at
least, reality is _not_ gracious? The Foozles of this world who "despise
all your kickshaws," the Dry-as-dusts who point out--not in the least
seeing the real drift of their argument--that the fifteenth century was,
in the greater part of Europe if not the whole, at a new point of morals
and manners, may urge these things. But the best part of _Petit Jehan_
remains a gracious sort of dream for gracious dreamers--a picture of a
kind of Utopia of Feminism, when Feminism did not mean votes or anything
foolish, but only adoration of the adorable.
[Sidenote: _Jehan de Paris._]
It would be impossible to find or even to imagine anything more
different than the not much later _Jehan de Paris_, an evident
folk-tale[88] of uncertain origin, which very quickly became a popular
chapbook and lasted long in that condition. Although we Englishmen
provide the fun, he is certainly no Englishman who resents the fact or
fails to enjoy the result, not to mention that we "could tell them tales
with other endings." It is, for instance, not quite historically
demonstrable that in crossing a river many English horsemen would be
likely to be drowned, while all the French cavaliers got safe through;
nor that, in scouring a country, the Frenchmen would score all the game
and all the best beasts and poultry, while the English bag would consist
of starvelings and offal. But no matter for that. The actual tale tells
(with the agreeable introductory "How," which has not yet lost its zest
for the right palates in chapter-headings) the story of a King and Queen
of Spain who have, in recompense for help given them against turbulent
barons, contracted their daughter to the King of France for his son; how
they forgot this later, and betrothed her to the King of England, and
how that King set out with his train, through France itself, to fetch
his bride. As soon as the Dauphin (now king, for his father is dead)
hears of their coming, he disguises himself under the name of John of
Paris, with a splendid train of followers, much more gorgeous than the
English (the "foggy islander" of course cannot make this out), and sets
of _quiproquos_ follow, in each of which the Englishman is outdone and
baffled generally, till at last "John of Paris" enters Burgos in state,
reveals himself, and carries off the Englishman's bride, with the
natural effect of making him _bien marry et courrouce_, though no fight
comes off.
The tale is smartly and succinctly told (there are not many more than a
hundred of the small-sized and large-printed pages of the _Collection
Jannet-Picard_), and there is a zest and _verve_ about it which ought to
please any mood that is for the time in harmony with the much talked of
Comic Spirit. But it certainly does not lose attraction, and it as
certainly does not fail to lend some, when it is considered side by side
with the other "John," especially if both are again compared with the
certainly not earlier and probably later "Prose Romances" in English, to
which that rather ambitious title was given by Mr. Thoms. There is
nothing in these in the very remotest degree resembling _Jehan de
Saintre_: you must get on to the _Arcadia_ or at least to _Euphues_
before you come anywhere near that. There is, on the other hand, in our
stuff, a sort of distant community of spirit with _Jehan de Paris_; but
it works in an altogether lower and less imaginative sphere and fashion;
no sense of art being present, and very little of craft. It is
astonishing that a language which had had, if only in verse, such an
unsurpassable tale-teller as Chaucer, should have been so backward. But
then the whole conditions of the fifteenth century, especially in
England, become only the more puzzling the longer one studies them. Even
in France, it will be observed, the output of Tale is by no means
large.[89] Nor shall we find it very greatly increased even in the next
age, though there is one masterpiece in quantity as well as quality.
But, for our purpose, the _Cent Nouvelles_ and the two separate pieces
just discussed continue, and in more and more striking manner, to show
the vast possibilities when the way shall have been clearly found and
the feet of the wayfarers firmly set in it.
FOOTNOTES:
[80] Prose as well as verse.
[81] In the very delightful imaginative introduction to _Quentin
Durward_.
[82] This is one of the points which a modern novelist would certainly
have seized; but whether to advantage or not is another question.
[83] And of course recognised by the "Antonians" as peculiar to La
Salle.
[84] Only contrast "_Tom, Tom_, the piper's son," with "_There was once_
a piper's son," or think how comparatively uninteresting the enormities
of another hero or not-hero would have been if he had been anonymous
instead of being called "Georgy-Porgy Pudding-and-Pie!" ["Puddenum" is,
or used to be, the preferred if corrupt nursery form.] In more elaborate
and adorned narrative the influence, not merely of the name but of the
beautiful name, comes in, and that of the name itself remains. In that
tragic story of Ludlow Castle which was given above (Chap. iv. pp.
84-6), something, for the present writer at least, would have been lost
if the traitor had been merely "a knight" instead of Sir Ernault Lisle
and the victim merely "a damsel" instead of Marion de la Briere. And
would the _bocca bacciata_ of Alaciel itself be as gracious if it was
merely anybody's?
[85] The amazing farce-insets of Lyndsay's _Satire of the Three Estates_
could be paralleled, and were no doubt suggested, by French farces of
older date.
[86] Nobody seems to be entirely certain what this odd title means:
though there have been some obvious and some far-fetched guesses. But it
has, like other _rhetoriqueur_ names of 1450-1550, such as "Traverser of
Perilous Ways" and the like, a kind of fantastic attraction for some
people.
[87] If I remember rightly, my friend the late R. L. Stevenson was wont
to abuse it.
[88] As such, the substance is found in other languages. But the French
itself has been traced by some to an earlier _roman d'aventure_, _Blonde
d'Oxford_, in which an English heiress is carried off by a French
squire.
[89] Perhaps one should guard against a possible repetition of a not
uncommon critical mistake--that of inferring ignorance from absence of
mention. I am quite aware that no exhaustive catalogue of known French
stories in prose has been given; and the failure to supplement a former
glance at the late prose versions of romance is intentional. They have
nothing new in romance-, still less in novel-_character_ for us. The
_Bibliotheque Elzevirienne_ volumes have been dwelt upon, not as a
_corpus_, but because they appear to represent, without any unfair
manipulation or "window-dressing," the kind at the time with a
remarkable combination of interest both individual and contrasted.