'Car quant Guillaume cessera
Jehan le continuera
Après sa mort que je ne mente
Anns trespassés plus de quarente.'
So that if we fix the date of Jean de Meung, we have that of Guillaume
de Lorris. Now, there is nothing to help us, except a tradition that
Guillaume died in the middle of the thirteenth century, and whatever
internal evidence the book itself affords. Most writers, because the
order of Knights Templars is mentioned as still existing, have been
content to date the book at about 1306, the year before the
destruction of the fraternity; but the poet mentions Charles of Anjou
as King of Sicily. We have, therefore, a much lower limit, viz., the
year 1282. Perhaps on closer examination, a range of years might
easily be found in which the book was written. It is, however,
sufficient for our purpose to date its authorship about 1280, and that
of Guillaume de Lorris at 1240.
It is not all certain that the poet was very young when he feigned his
dream. The hero of the poem is necessarily a young man. Early manhood
is the period of vehement desire and passion. Twenty is the typical
age of early manhood; that age may have very well been selected as the
one best fitted for dreams of love and the adventures of a lover. We
are, however, inclined to believe, on the whole, that the poem was
written in quite early manhood. A tradition which only recalls one
fact is generally true, and the one fact recorded of the poet is that
he died quite young. Internal evidence, too, appears to support this
view. His style bears marks which seem, though one may here be very
easily mistaken, those of inexperience. His imaginative faculty is
abundant, and even luxuriant. His descriptive power, fully employed in
his portraits of abstract personifications, is very much above the
average. He revels in picturesque accessories and details which his
copious fancy has conjured up; and his pictures, if they have not
always the _tone_, have all the vividness, with the wealth of work,
which belongs to a young poet's early style. The versification,
moreover, is cold, regular, and monotonous; there is nothing to
indicate the possession of experience or the presence of passion. He
had read Ovid, and used him freely to suit his own purposes; but he
wants Ovid's sympathetic power, and tries to supply its place by a
certain cold and mannered grace; his faults being attributable, in the
assumption of his early death, more to inexperience and youth, than to
any defects which years would not have removed. Considered in this
light, his work remains an unfinished monument of early genius,
chiefly redeemed from mediocrity by its collections of curiously
constructed allegorical portraits, a work which would never have been
rescued from oblivion but for the splendour of light thrown on it by
Jean de Meung.
Chaucer's translation is exceedingly accurate, giving line for line,
and almost word for word, save when he sometimes adds a line to
enforce its meaning, or to make it clear. Thus, when translating the
famous
'La robe ne faict pas la moyne,'
he says--
'Habite ne makyth monk no frere;
But clene life and devocioun,
Makyth gode men of religioun.'
The saying itself (for nothing in the 'Romance of the Rose' appears to
be original), may be traced to Neckham, who died at Cirencester in
1217.
'Non tonsura facit monachum, nec horrida vestis,
Sed virtus animi, perpetuusque vigor.'
The great ease of the translation makes it read almost like an
original work, though we cannot agree with those who think that the
translator has improved on his model. No literal translation, not even
the very best, can be free from a certain stiffness and constraint.
The felicity with which difficult passages are occasionally rendered
may be judged by the following lines, which contain a touch almost
worthy of Shirley. It is, if our own experience be worth anything,
excessively hard to translate. We subjoin original and translation,
side by side.
'Les yex gros et si envoisiés,
Qu'il rioient tousjors avant
Que la bouchette par couvant.'
'Hir eyen greye and glad also,
That laugheden ay in hir semblaunt,
First or the mouth by couvenant.'
That is, her eyes began to laugh before her lips.
We must, as briefly as possible, set forth the action of the poem. It
begins, like De Guilleville's 'Pilgrimage of Grace,' Chaucer's 'Court
of Love' (borrowed, of course, from this), Alain de l'Isle's
'Complaint of Nature,' and so many other mediæval works, with a dream.
In the month of May,--that season when the earth forgets the poverty
of winter, and grows proud of her renewed beauty, clothing herself in
a robe of flowers of a hundred colours; when the birds, silent during
the long cold months, awake again, and are so joyous that they are
fain, _per force_, to sing,--the youth of twenty summers wanders forth
and comes upon the Garden of Delight (_Déduit_). We may remark here,
how the walled garden, secured from the outer world, is the mediæval
writer's only idea of scenery. Perhaps our modern craving for the
picturesque would be greatly modified if we were uncertain, as our
ancestors were, about wolves, bears, and brigands, whose admiration
for wild scenes induces them to inhabit them.
The wall of the garden is painted with figures of all evil passions,
such as Envy, Hatred, Avarice, and Hypocrisy (_Papelardie_), with
those of Sorrow, Age, and Poverty. The youth is admitted at a wicket
by the Lady Oyseuse (_Idlesse_), and wanders about, admiring the rows
of strange trees, the birds and flowers, the peace and safety of the
place. Presently he comes upon _Déduit_ himself, whom Chaucer calls
Myrthe.
'Ful fayre was Myrthe, ful long and high:
A fayrer man I never sigh.'
With him are all his courtiers, including _Léesce_ (Joy).
'And wot ye who came with them there?
The Lady Gladness, bright and fair.'
With the company was the God of Love, accompanied by _Doux Regard_,
bearing two bows: one of them was crooked and misshapen; the other
straight, and beautifully wrought. This shows the different
impressions of love, or its opposite, produced by the eyes. He had,
too, ten arrows (the idea is borrowed from Ovid), five belonging to
Love, viz., Beauty, Simplicity, Frankness, Company, and Fair
Semblance; and five to Dislike, viz., Pride, Villany, Shame, Despair,
and New Thought. Love was followed as well by Beauty, whose attendants
were Riches, Largesse, Franchise, and Courtesy, as _Dames_
_d'honneur_, each of whom had with her a lover, that of Largesse being
'sib to Arthur Duke of Bretaigne.' This is intended, of course, to
show how different qualities attract love.
The garden is square; it contains all sorts of fruit trees, 'brought
from the country of the Saracens;' these are set five or six fathoms
apart; wells, fountains, and streams, soft grass and turf, and flowers
of every kind. Round the stone-work of one fountain he finds written,
'Here died the fair Narcissus,'--an accident which enables the poet to
narrate at length the full history of that unfortunate swain. Getting
over his digression, the youth discovers a rosebush laden with roses
and rosebuds, one of which he desires incontinently to pluck. Here his
troubles begin. Love shoots at him with five arrows, and when he is
sick and faint with wounds, calls upon him to surrender, and become
his vassal. This he does, giving Love as a gage of fealty his heart,
and receiving in return a code of rules which have been imitated by
many subsequent poets, notably by Chaucer, in the 'Court of Love,' and
by Charles of Orleans. He also receives as a mark of especial favour,
Hope, Doux Penser, Doux Parler, and Doux Regard--Sweet-Thought,
Sweet-Speech, and Sweet-Looks--as companions. He makes a rash and
ill-considered attempt upon his Rosebud. But Danger is there with
Malebouche, Shame (child of Trespass and Reason), and Chastity, the
daughter of Shame. He is driven away, loaded with reproaches. His
companions leave him, and while he is sitting dejected and despairing,
Reason comes to him and argues on the folly of love.
'Love is but madness! I tell you true;
The man who loves can nothing do.
He has no profit from the earth:
If he is clerk, he forgets his learning:
If anything else, whatever his worth,
Great is his labour and little his earning.
Long and unmeasured and deep the pain:
Short is the joy; the fruition vain.'
But the pleading of Reason, as generally happens in such cases, is
quite useless. The lover
'For still within my heart there glows
The breath divine of that sweet Rose,'
goes next to a Friend (Ami), from whom he gets small sympathy, but
much practical relief. Acting on his counsel, he begs pardon of
Danger, who grants it sulkily. Danger in most mediæval allegories
stands for the husband, but there is nothing to show that Guillaume de
Lorris meant him to be understood in this sense, and we may without
any violence take him to represent the natural guardian of the
damsel. Getting Bel Accueil to accompany him, he goes once more to see
his Rosebud, which he finds greatly improved. Venus obtains for him
the privilege of a kiss. Shame, Jealousy, and Malebouche, are alarmed,
and interfere. Danger turns everybody out. Jealousy builds a high
tower, in which Bel Accueil is shut up, a prisoner, with Danger and
Malebouche to guard him. Outside the tower sits the disconsolate
lover, lamenting his misfortunes, and the mutability of love's
favours, which he compares to those of Fortune, of whom he says:
'In heart of man,
Malice she plants, and labour, and pain;
One hour caresses, and smiles, and plays;
Then as suddenly changes her face:
Laughs one moment, the next she mourns;
Round and round her wheel she turns,
All at her own caprice and will.
The lowest ascends, and is raised, until
He who was highest was low on the ground,
And the wheel of Fortune has quite turned round.'
And at this point the poet died--'trespassa Guillaume de Lorris.' Had
he lived to complete his work we should had a complete Ars Amoris,
fashioned on the precepts of Ovid, and clothed in an allegory--cold,
monotonous, bloodless--though graceful, fanciful, and not devoid of
poetic taste.
Perhaps we should have had more than this. In its simple, first
meaning, it is not difficult for anyone to make out. Idleness or
Leisure alone makes Pleasure possible; through Idleness we enter into
the garden of Delight, where love wanders. Youth is the season of
love, and Spring is an emblem of youth. The escort of Love is the
collection of qualities which belong to the time of youth, and make it
happy, such as beauty, wealth, and courtesy. What has Reason to do
with Love? Who can advise but an experienced friend? The only
possession that the vassal can give to Love the suzerain is his own
heart; the chief aid to success is Bel Accueil--'fair welcome'--while
Envy, Shame (for fear of Malebouche--Calumny), Jealousy, and Chastity
protect the maiden.
So far all is clear and easy to be read. Was there not, however, under
an interpretation as easy as that of Bunyan's Holy War, a second and a
deeper meaning? It is a question not easy to answer. Molinet, the dull
and laborious Molinet, who published, towards the end of the fifteenth
century, an edition of the book in prose,
'Le Roman de la Rose
Moralisé cler et net
Translaté en rime et prose
Par votre humble Molinet,'
pretends not only that there is a hidden meaning, but also to discover
what this hidden meaning was. 'The young man,' he tells us, 'who
awakens from his dream is the child born to the light: he is born in
the month of May, when the birds sing: the _singing of the birds is
the preaching of holy doctors_ (!)' He dresses, in his dreams, to go
out. This is the entrance of the child into the world, enveloped in
human miseries: the river represents Baptism: the orchard is the
Cloister of Religion; outside it, because they cannot enter therein,
or have no share or part in paradise, are the figures of human vices.
_Déduit_ is our Lord; Léesce is the Church; Love is the Holy Spirit;
the eight doves of Venus's chariot are the eight Beatitudes; and the
combat between Love and the guardians of Bel Accueil is the perpetual
conquest between good and evil. Even the story of Narcissus is not
without its meaning; and the pine which shades the fountain is the
tree of the Cross, while the fountain itself is the overflowing stream
of mercy. Love, again, in the latter part, stands for our Saviour;
homage to him is the profession of faith of a novice; the commandments
of Love are the vows of chastity and poverty. Even the legend of
Virginia is an allegory; the maiden being the soul, and Appius the
world. This position he strengthens by deriving, after the fashion of
the philologists of the period, the name of Appius from _a_,
privative, and _pius_.
Clement Marot, on the other hand, in his edition, where he turned the
language into French of his own day, and thereby utterly spoiled it,
finds an interpretation of his own, quite as ingenious and quite as
improbable as that of Molinet. The Rose is the state of wisdom, 'bien
et justement conforme à la Rose pour les valeurs, doulours, et odours
qui en elle sont: la quelle moult est à avoir difficile pour les
empeschements interposez.' It was a Papal Rose, made of gold, and
scented with musk and balm; of gold, on account of the honour and
reverence due to God; scented with musk to symbolize the duties of
fidelity and justice to our neighbours; and with balm because we ought
to hold our own souls clear and precious above all worldly things.
Or, the Rose is the state of Grace, difficult for the sinner to arrive
at, and fitly symbolized by the flowers which had sufficient virtue to
transform Apuleius from an ass back to his human shape.
Or, again, the Rose was the Virgin Mary--the Rose of Jericho, pure and
spotless, and not to be touched by human hands.
Fourthly: it was the rose which the Queen of Sheba gave to Solomon,
which signified eternal happiness. The interpretations of Molinet and
Marot are both manifestly absurd, and represent the pedantic trifling
of a time when the taste for double allegories had been carried to a
ridiculous extent. And as for Jean de Meung's part, there are plenty
of touches in it which show that the writer, though no heretic, had
little sympathy with church matters; and would certainly not be
disposed to spend his time in laboriously concocting a riddle of
twenty thousand lines, the answer to which was to be found in the
Romish creed. And in Guillaume de Lorris himself, it is difficult to
find a word for or against the Church.
He was, no doubt, mindful of the stern lesson read to heretics in the
crusade of Provence, fresh in all men's recollection. But he had been
nurtured and fed on the poetry of the troubadours; the form of his
verse and the turn of his thought were Provençal. Was it likely that
so young a writer should escape the spirit of the literature while he
studied its form? And since in a time of violent religious excitement,
he can find no word of sympathy for a church which persecutes, is it
not probable that his sympathies are, if not with the Church
persecuted, at least with the people? The probability, moreover, of
there being a double allegory in the 'Romance of the Rose,' as planned
originally by Guillaume de Lorris, appears to us to be strengthened by
a further consideration of the Provençal literature and the line of
its development.
Love, in a time when life had few pleasures and distractions to
offer--when these were generally only to be snatched in the intervals
of fighting--became not only the symbol of all life's joy, but grew
into a kind of religion. It had its own ritual, its ceremonies, its
sacraments, its lessons, and its hymns. Aged poets were its bishops,
the guardians of its forms; young poets its priests; instead of the
images of saints, were living women, and instead of the procession and
the chant, were the love song and the dance. It was nothing new to the
Provençal to celebrate the religious worship with a dance. He alone,
among Christians, preserved a custom handed down from old pagan times,
and as late as the sixteenth century, the worthy people of Marseilles
welcomed Christmas in this way.
The other sex would naturally offer few obstacles to a homage which,
though it sometimes destroyed their virtue, always flattered their
vanity, and invested them with a power which was beyond that of kings.
Princes, indeed, might make men rich, but women alone could make men
happy. An accurate knowledge of love's ceremonies became part of the
education of a gentleman; these were reduced, like those of chivalry,
to a sort of code; questions of law, so to speak, arose, which were
tried with great solemnity at courts of law where ladies were judges;
appeals from these decisions were often made to higher courts, and
there is every reason to believe that the _Arrêts d'Amour_, numerous
examples of which are given in the work of Martial d'Auvergne, were
courts as serious and as gravely disputed in times of peace, as those
which decided other differences of opinion. From being, therefore, the
legitimate end of a young man's hope, the chief solace of his life,
love grew gradually to be surrounded by all sorts of restrictions and
ceremonies, and losing its charm of spontaneity and freedom, was
idealized until it lost itself, and became the mere shadow of a poetic
dream. As every idea, pushed beyond its legitimate limits, provokes
some kind of rebellion, two streams of thought presently diverged from
the main channel, one of them, with which we have nothing to do,
satirical, cynical, earthly and gross; the other, religious. Sexual
love is only possible, or is strongest when life is young and the
blood is strong and hopeful; as years creep on and the end of things
approaches, its insufficiency to satisfy the cravings of the soul must
become, even to its most ardent votary, more and more deeply apparent.
The days when a smile from his mistress made him, according to the
rules of the craft, happy, or a frown miserable, would leave behind
them, when they had passed away, an increased sense of the real
seriousness of life; while at the best of times, the art of love would
not be felt as anything but elegant trifling, and the passion which it
excited, transitory. Women, too, the object of all this homage, were
really, though they might not know it, degraded by what was intended
to do them honour. And let those who lament the subjection of the sex,
own that the extravagant honour paid to ladies in the Middle Ages has
had something, at least, to do with it. From some such feelings as the
above, we believe it came to pass that the poet began first to
imagine, and then to contrive, for his love songs a deeper and a
mystical meaning. The sentiment of nearly all the Provençal poets, as
regards women, was delicate, elevating to themselves, and
enthusiastic. Women are to men, in the poet's imagination, what heaven
is to earth; their gentleness contrasts with man's ferocity, their
weakness with his strength, their strength with his weakness. Love is
the principle of all honour and merit, the mainspring of every noble
action; its desires and its pleasures are only legitimate, inasmuch
as they are as a stimulus to the painful duties of chivalry; the
springs of poetry are in love; without love there is nothing that
civilizes, softens, or elevates. But earthly love, so high, so pure,
so separated from the common instincts of the world, is but a type of
that infinitely higher and purer heavenly love. All the allegories of
the poets are to be read in a deeper sense by those who are initiated
into the mysteries, and when a poet sings songs of love, he is singing
songs of a mysterious religion.
That this was the case with all the troubadours, or even with most of
them, we do not affirm; that it was at one time believed to be true of
all of them seems tolerably clear. And no doubt many an honest bard,
quite simply putting down his thoughts about his mistress's lips, or
the tangles of her hair, would have been astonished to hear that he
was preaching the glories of the Virgin, or advocating a free and
Pope-less Church. On the supposition that Guillaume de Lorris was one
of those who had learned from the troubadours the art of double
allegory, and that he conveyed religious teaching under this disguise,
we should expect to find the key to his poem in the religious
difficulties of his time. It is not, at least, difficult to get at
these.
The people of Provence[51] had always mixed freely with the educated
Mahometans of Spain, and the wealthy Jews who lived among them: their
own Christianity sat lightly upon them, as a cloak, the fashion of
which might at any time be altered; theology was held in universal
disesteem, and the priesthood, taken from the lowest strata of
society, were objects of pity and contempt: a widespread heresy
existed, which does not appear to have had much, if anything to do
with modern Protestantism, holding 'erroneous views' on Baptism and
the Eucharist, rejecting the Old Testament, denying the authority and
necessity of the priesthood, and even repudiating, in some cases,
marriage itself. It was growing rapidly not only in Switzerland and
Languedoc but also in the _Nord_, in England, and in Germany, by means
of wandering bards, who scattered their new doctrines broadcast
wherever they went. By local persecutions and burnings, attempts were
made to stop it, but in vain; and Rome saw with consternation a
province the most cultivated, the most richly endowed with genius, the
most wealthy, that from which the greatest help for the Church was to
be expected, a prey to free thought of the most unbridled kind.
As soon as persecution began, or even suspicion of the truth, the
poets would see the necessity for veiling their thoughts under
carefully-constructed allegories, and while they chanted a monotonous
refrain on one of the many rules of love, secretly inculcated a code
of doctrines more subversive than any the Church had yet combated.
Occasionally we hear a voice which speaks aloud, and plainly enough,
to let us know the kind of thing that was whispered. Thus Fauriel
gives the following from Pierre Cardinal.[52] He is considering the
insoluble problem of suffering and evil, and cries, with a boldness
that has more despair than blasphemy in it--'At the Last Day I shall
say, myself, to God that He fails in His duty to His children if He
thinks to destroy them and plunge them into Hell.... God ought to use
gentleness and to keep His souls from trespass.'
Voluptuous, loose in morals, satirical, and careless as these poets
were, they yet have the merit of boldly using thought, and carrying
conviction to its logical and legitimate end. They anticipated the
movement of the fifteenth century, without its knowledge and higher
light: their penalty was extermination, thorough and complete. The
land was destroyed; its cities burned; the people massacred; Pope and
kings combined to make a desert, and to call it peace.
What could the Church do more? What indeed, could she do less? For the
war was a struggle for existence, and the heresies of Provence were
only the most formidable in a general movement of free thought which
shook the powers of Rome to its very foundations. But one thing the
Church could not do. The flame of insubordination and opposition could
be handed down in secret. Things that could not be attacked openly,
might be attacked secretly. There were secret societies in the Middle
Ages, which had a real and definite object, the danger and the terror
of the Church.[53] And to this day Rome excommunicates the members of
all secret societies, whether the mild and convivial Freemason or the
bloodthirsty Fenian. The Society of Jesus is the only secret society
to which a Roman Catholic may belong. Guillaume de Lorris belongs to a
time when doctrine was secretly assailed; his successor, Jean de
Meung, to a time when practice was openly assailed. For men very soon
left off attacking their enemies by allegory, and Guillaume de Lorris,
if he was indeed one of that school, was one of its last disciples.
Whether he was, or was not, can never now be satisfactorily answered.
He left his poem unfinished, hardly, perhaps, begun. Whatever has to
be said on the subject of its original plan, must be necessarily
conjectural. We incline, on the whole, to believe that he did have a
religious purpose, which was not understood by Jean de Meung; that one
who bears in mind the religious history of Provence as well as the
character of its situation, may well construct an interpretation of
the work of Guillaume de Lorris far more probable and consistent than
that of Molinet or of Marot.
Jean de Meung, so-called because he was born at the little town of
Meung, in the department of Loiret--
'De Jean de Meung, s'enfle le cours de Loire.'
Jean Clopinel, Limping John, because he was lame, finding himself,
some forty years later, with his head stuffed full of all the learning
of his time, and nearly bursting with sentiments, convictions, and
opinions, on religion, politics, social economy, and science, began,
one may suppose, to cast about for some means of getting rid of his
burden. Lighting on the unfinished and half-forgotten work of
Guillaume de Lorris, he conceived the idea of finishing the allegory,
and making it the medium of popularizing his own opinions. He could
hardly have hit upon a readier plan. It was not yet a time for popular
science; there were no treatises in the vernacular on history,
theology, and political economy, and the only way of getting at people
was by means of rhyme. But Jean de Meung was no allegorist, and no
storyteller. He took up the tale, indeed, where his predecessor left
it, and carried it on, it is true, but in so languid a manner, with so
many digressions, turns and twists, that what little interest was
originally in it goes clean out. Nothing can well be more tedious than
those brief portions devoted to the conduct of the story. It finishes,
somehow. Love calls his barons together, is defeated, sends an embassy
to his mother, Venus, who comes to his assistance; the fortress is
taken, Bel Accueil is released, and the Rose is plucked. In the course
of the poem, Malebouche gets his tongue cut out, Déduit, Doux Regard,
Léesce, Doux Penser, and others drop out of the allegory altogether;
the Garden is forgotten; all the little careful accessories of
Guillaume de Lorris, such as the arrows of Love and his commandments,
are contemptuously ignored. Those that remain are changed, the Friend
in the second part being very different from the Friend in the first,
while _Richesse_ appears with a new function. Every incident is made
the peg for a digression, and every digression leads to a dozen
others. The losses of the old characters are made up by the creation
of new ones, and, in Faux Semblant, the hypocrite and monk, Jean de
Meung anticipates Rabelais and surpasses Erasmus.
Between Guillaume de Lorris and his successor there is a great gulf
hardly represented by the forty years of interval. Men's thoughts had
widely changed. The influence of Provençal poetry was finally and
completely gone, and its literature utterly fallen, to be revived
after many centuries only by the scholar and the antiquarian. More
than this, the thoughts and controversies of men which had turned
formerly upon the foundations of the Christian faith, now turned
either on special points of doctrine, or on the foundation and
principles of society.
No writers, so far as we remember, have noticed the entire separation
between the two parts of the romance. They are independent works. Even
the allegory changes form, and the idea of the _trouvère_, Guillaume,
was lost and forgotten when his successor professed to carry it on.
In passing from one to the other, the transition is like that from a
clear, cold, mountain stream to a turbid river, whose waters are
stained with factory refuse, and whose banks are lined with busy
towns. The mystic element suddenly disappears. Away from the woodland
and the mountains and among the haunts of men, it cannot live. The
idea of love becomes gross and vulgar. The fair, clear voice of the
poet grows thick and troubled; his gaze drops from the heavens to the
earth. It is no longer a _trouvère_ bent on developing a hidden
meaning, and wrapping mighty secrets of religious truth in a cold and
careful allegory; it is a man, eager and impetuous, alive to all the
troubles and sorrows of humanity, with a supreme contempt for love,
and for woman, the object of love, and a supreme carelessness for the
things that occupied the mind of his predecessor. We have said that
new characters were introduced. The boundaries of the old allegory
were, indeed, too narrow. Jean de Meung had to build, so to speak, the
walls of his own museum. It was to be a museum which should contain
all knowledge of the time; to hold miscellaneous collections of facts,
opinions, legends, and quotations, than which nothing can be more
bewildering, nothing more unmethodical, nothing more _bizarre_.
As a poet he is superior, we think, to his predecessor, though
Guillaume de Lorris can only be reckoned as a second-rate versifier.
He is diffuse, apt to repeat himself, generally monotonous, and
sometimes obscure. His imagination is less vivid, and his style less
clear, than those of Guillaume de Lorris. Occasionally, however,
passages of beauty occur. The following, for example, diffuse as it
is, appears to us to possess some of the elements of real poetry. The
poet is describing a tempest followed by fair weather. Nature weeps at
the wrath of the winds:--
'The air itself, in truth, appears
To weep for this in flooded tears.
The clouds such tender pity take,
Their very clothing they forsake:
And for the sorrow that they bear,
Put off the ornaments they wear.
* * * * *
'So much they mourn, so much they weep,
Their grief and sorrow are so deep,
They make the rivers overflow,
And war against the meadows low:
Then is the season's promise crossed;
The bread made dear, the harvest lost,
And honest poor who live thereby,
Mourn hopes that only rose to die.
* * * * *
'But when the end arrives at last,
And fair times come, and bad are passed;
When from the sky, displeased and pale,
Fair weather robs its rain and hail,
And when the clouds perceive once more
The thunder gone, the tempest o'er--
Then they rejoice, too, as they may,
And to be comely, bright, and gay,
Put on their glorious robes anew,
Varied with every pleasant hue;
They hang their fleeces out to dry,
Carding and combing as they fly;
Then take to spinning, and their thread
Abroad through all the heavens spread,
With needles white and long, as though
Their feathery gauntlets they would sew--
Harness their steeds, and mount and fly
O'er valleys deep and mountains high.'
It is needless, after what has been said, to pursue any further the
story of the romance. There is not much lost by this omission, because
the work has really little or nothing to do with the allegory, and
might simply be called, 'The Opinions of Jean de Meung.' Our object is
to show what actually were the opinions of a scholar of liberal views
in the thirteenth century.
They may be divided into four classes, foremost of which, in his own
mind, stands his hatred of monks. In religion he was not an infidel,
or even a heretic; he was simply in opposition. He writes, not against
sacerdotalism, but against the inversion of recognised order by the
vagabond friars. Order, indeed, he would insist upon as strenuously as
Hooker himself; but order he would subordinate to what he deems the
most essential thing, personal holiness. To decry, deride, and hurl
contempt on the monastic orders: to put into the strongest possible
words the inarticulate popular hatred of these was, we believe, his
leading thought when he began his book.
His second idea was to make an angry, almost furious protest against
the extravagant respect paid to women, and an onslaught on their
follies and vices. It is very curious, and shows how little he was
trammelled by his allegory, that he fails altogether to see how
entirely out of place is such an attack in the 'Romance of the Rose.'
He had two other principal ideas: one to communicate in the common
tongue as much science as the world could boast; and the other, to
circulate certain principles of vague socialism and hesitating
republicanism which were then beginning to take the place of those
religious speculations which occupied men's minds in the early part of
the century.
Jean de Meung's was not the only book of the time which aimed at being
an encyclopædia, but it was by far the best known and the most widely
_répandu_. There were written towards the close of the thirteenth
century certain collections called _trésors_, which were designed to
contain everything that was to be learned, _quicquid scibile_, in
mathematics, physics, astronomy, alchemy, music, speculative
philosophy, and theology. They were generally in verse; one of the
best of them being by a monk, called 'Mainfroi,' which professedly
contained the Arabic learning, borrowed from the Moors in Spain.
Probably Jean de Meung had access to this. Readers of old English
literature will also remember that dreariest of dreary books, Gower's
'Confessio Amantis,' into which the hapless student plunges without
hope, and emerges without profit, having found nothing but vapid
imitation, monotonous repetition, and somnolent platitudes. The
'Confessio' is a _trésor_, and designed to contain all the science of
the time. It is adapted, so far as the science goes, from a _trésor_
called the _Secretum Secretorum_.
Let us, then, gather some of the opinions of our author, classifying
them according to this fourfold division. It may be premised that the
division was not thought of by the poet, from whom, indeed, sequence
and method are not to be expected.
Liberal thought, in the time of Jean de Meung, did not attack the
domain of doctrine, partly, perhaps, from an unwillingness to meet
the probable consequences of a charge of heresy; indeed, when doctrine
came in its way, it seems to have leaned in the direction of
orthodoxy. Thus we find Jean de Meung siding with Guillaume de St.
Amour in an attack on the 'Eternal Gospel,' that most extraordinary
book, ascribed to Joachim, Abbot of Flora,[54] which was intended to
have the same relation to Christianity which Christianity bears to
Judaism, to be at once its fulfilment and its abolition, which was to
inaugurate the third and last, the perfect age, that of the Holy
Spirit. The mendicants, an ignorant, credulous body, quite incapable
of appreciating cause or consequence of teaching, espoused the cause
of the book; Guillaume de St. Amour arraigned them, not only of the
ordinary vices attributed to them--vices entirely contrary to their
vows--but as preachers of doctrines pernicious, false, and heretical.
Probably Jean de Meung was actuated by _esprit de corps_, Guillaume de
St. Amour being a champion of the University of Paris, as well as by
hatred to the monks, and, in spite of his hard words, was not moved
strongly by any specially inimical feeling towards the book. Following
the instincts of his time, however, he flatly ascribes its authorship
to the Devil, the alleged author of so many theological books.
Partizanship in those days, as in ours, meant, to be effective, a
good, sound, honest hatred, and much command of language. In his
description of hell, Jean anticipates the realistic horrors of Dante.
'What guerdon,' he asks, 'can the wicked man look for, save
the cord which will hang him to the dolorous gibbet of
hell? There will he be rivetted with everlasting fetters
before the prince of devils; there will he be boiled in
cauldrons; roasted before and behind; set to revolve, like
Ixion, on cutting wheels turned by the paws of devils;
tormented with hunger and thirst, and mocked with fruit and
water, like Tantalus, or set to roll stones for ever up
hill, like Sysyphus.'
One thing seems here worthy of remark. The place of punishment for the
wicked man, in the Middle Ages, was the torture-chamber of their own
criminal courts, intensified by imagination. Their punishment was
through the senses. Of mental agony they had no conception. Yet,
strangely enough, their heaven _was never a heaven of the senses_; and
it shows how deeply they were penetrated with the feeling of Christ's
holiness that while every temptation seemed set to make the mass
believe in a paradise like that of Mahomet, the heaven of Christendom
has always offered, as its chief charm, the worship and praise of a
present God. 'There, by the fountain of mercy,' says Jean de Meung,
'shall ye sit.'
'There shall ye taste that spring so fair;
(Bright are its waters, pure and clear),
And never more from death shall shrink,
If only of that fount you drink.
But ever still, untired, prolong
The days with worship, praise, and song.'[55]
The poet reserves, however, his chief strength and the main exposition
of his views for his character of Faux Semblant--False seeming--the
hypocrite. There is a dramatic art of the very highest kind in the way
in which Faux Semblant draws and develops his own character,
pronounces, as it were, the apology of hypocrisy. His painting of the
vices of the mendicant orders cannot approach those of Walter de
Mapes, of Erasmus, and of Buchanan, in savage ferocity; but it is more
satirical and more subtly venomous than any of those, and has the
additional bitterness that it is spoken as from _within_ the body
which he attacks. The others, standing _outside_ the monastic orders,
point the finger of scorn at them. Jean de Meung makes one of
themselves, an unblushing priest, with a candour which almost belongs
to an approving conscience, with a chuckling self-complacency and an
entire unconsciousness of the contrast between his life and his
profession, which rises to the very first order of satirical writing,
depict his own life, and take credit for villanies which he takes care
to inform us are common to his order. He has been compared with Friar
John; but the animalism and lusty vigour of this holy man lead him to
a life of jovial sensuality through sheer ignorance; whereas Faux
Semblant, his conscience seared with a hot iron, sins against the
light. We may compare, too, the attacks made by Jean de Meung's
contemporaries and immediate successors. They never even attempt
satire.[56] It was an instrument whose use they could not comprehend.
Their line is invective, as when Rutebeuf says, in his straightforward
way--
'Papelart et Beguin,
Ont le siècle honi.'
or, as Eustache Deschamps attacks the pluralists--
'Prestres et clers qui tenez vos monciaulx
De chapelles, vous autres curiaulx,
Des povres clers ayez compassion:
Repartez leur ces biens ecclesiaulx,
Afin que Dieu vous soit propiciaulx:
Vous les tenez à vo dampnacion.'
Faux Semblant, in his sermon, or address, a small part only of which
we consider, begins by telling his hearers that he lives, by
preference, in obscurity, and may, therefore, chiefly be found where
this is most readily obtained, viz., under a religious habit. With the
habit, however, he does not put on the reality of religion. He
attaches himself to powerful patrons; he goes about preaching poverty,
but living on the best of everything; nothing can be more contrary to
his experience than that religion is to be found at all under the robe
of a monk; nor does it follow that men and women lead bad lives
because they wear a worldly garb; very many, indeed, of the saints
have been married, were parents of children, and men and women of the
world.
He tells how he changes his habit from time to time; how, out of the
religious life, he 'takes the grain and leaves the straw;' how he
hears confession and grants absolution, as well as any parish priest;
but how, unlike the parish priest, he will hear the confessions only
of the rich, who can afford to pay; 'let me have the fat sheep, and
the pastors shall have the lean.' So with the poor; he will not help
any.
'Let dying beggars cry for aid,
Naked and cold on dunghill laid:
There stands the hospital, with door
Wide open to receive the poor.
Thither let all who please repair,
For help nor money can I spare:
No use for me to save their life:
_What can he give who sucks his knife?_'
Now, with the rich it is different; and the mendicant, while he takes
the alms of those whose sins he has heard, may glow with conscious
virtue, reflecting that the rich are much more exposed to temptation,
and therefore, as a rule, more grievously weighed down with a sense of
guilt than the poor. When relief can be given, surely it should first
be bestowed on those who need it most.
Mendicancy, Faux Semblant acknowledges with an engaging candour, is
only right when a man has not learned and cannot learn a trade. Monks,
according to the teaching of Saint Augustine, ought to earn their
bread by labour, and when we are commanded to give all to the poor, it
is not meant that we should take it back by begging, but that we
should work for our living. But the world, neglecting this among other
wholesome rules, has set itself to rob, plunder, and despoil, every
man trying to get whatever he can from his neighbour. As for himself,
his business, and that of his brethren, is to rob the robber: to spoil
the spoiler.
The mendicants keep up their own power by union; if a man does one of
them an injury, they all conspire to effect his ruin: if one hates,
all hate: if one is refused, all are refused, and revenge is taken: if
any man is conspicuous for good deeds, they claim him as their own
disciple, and in order to get the praise of people and inspire
confidence, they ask, wherever they go, for letters which may testify
to their virtue, and make people believe that all goodness abounds in
them.
He says that he leaves others to retire into hermitages and caves,
preferring to be called the Antichrist of robbers and hypocrites: he
proclaims himself a cheat, a rogue, a liar, and a thief: he boasts
that his father, Treachery, and himself rule in every realm, and that
in the security of a religious disguise, where no one is likely to
suspect him, he contrives various means to charm and deceive the
world. Set forth in this bold fashion, the discourse of Faux Semblant
loses all its dramatic force. It is fair, however, to state that this
is chiefly found in detached passages, and that the sermon is entirely
spoiled by the many digressions, notably that on the 'Eternal Gospel,'
which are found in it. Chaucer's rendering of this portion appears to
us to be far less happy than the rest of his work.
Another long and very curious dissertation, into which there is no
space here to enter, is that on Predestination, where he arrives at
the conclusion that the doctrine must be accepted as a dogma in
Christian faith, but that it need not affect the Christian life--
'For every man, except a fool,
May guide himself by virtue's rule.'
A conclusion which seems almost to anticipate the conclusion arrived
at in the Article of the Church of England.
The sum of Jean de Meung's religious teaching is to be found in the
sermon of Genius--
'And, Lords and Ladies, this be sure,
That those who live good lives and pure;
Nor from their work and duty shrink,
Shall of this fountain freely drink.--
* * * * *
To honour Nature never rest,
_By labour is she honoured best_;
If others goods are in your hands,
Restore them all--so God commands.
From murder let all men abstain;
Spotless keep hands, and mouth keep clean.
Be loyal and compassionate,
So shall ye pass the heavenly gate.'
The one thing insisted on by Jean de Meung is the absolute necessity
of a pure life. A profound sense of the beauty of a pure life is,
indeed, the key-note to all mediæval heresies and religious
excitements.[57] The uncleanness of the clergy was the most terrible
weapon wielded by the heresiarchs. Thus Peter de Brueys compelled
monks to marry. Henry the Deacon taught that the Church could exist
without priests. Tanchelin of Antwerp held that the validity of the
sacraments depended on the holiness of him who administered them.
Peter Waldo sent out his disciples two by two, to preach the
subversive doctrine that every virtuous man was his own priest; while
the _Cathari_ went gladly to the stake in defence of their principle
that absolute personal purity was the one thing acceptable to God. The
more ignorant the age, the wider is religious speculation; but in the
most ignorant ages, there rises up from time to time a figure with a
spiritual insight far beyond that of more learned times. Protestantism
in its noblest form has found nothing more sublime than this
conception of a Church where every good man is a priest; and there is
nothing in the history of religious thought more saddening than these
efforts of the people, ever hopeless, ever renewed, to protest against
dogma, creed, perfunctory and vicarious religion, and to proclaim a
religion of personal holiness alone.
Let us turn to the second division. We find the book teeming with a
misogyny, bitter enough to make us believe that there must have been
some personal cause for it. 'What is love?' he asks. 'It is a _maladie
de pensée_--the dream of a sick fancy.... There is a far higher and
nobler thing in the friendship of men.' And it is after narrating the
stories of 'Penelope' and 'Lucretia,' that he puts into the mouth of
Jealousy the famous couplet--
'Toutes estes, serez, ou fustes,
De faict ou de voulenté, putes.'
Of course it may be urged that these are the words of jealousy, and
not of the poet; but, unfortunately, there are so many indications of
the author's entire approval of the sentiment, that the plea is hardly
worth much. Take, for instance, the dramatic scene, when the wife
worms out her husband's secret; or that of the old woman's lesson to
Bel Accueil, where, as in the case of Faux Semblant, he puts woman's
condemnation in her own mouth. She teaches him the art of love almost
in Ovid's own words; she prefaces her lesson by a lament over the past
days of youth and beauty; her regrets are not for a life of sin and
deceit, but for the past bad days that can come no more. She is
steeped in wickedness and intrigue; she can see no happiness, except
in love and luxury.
'My days of gladness are no more;
Your joyous time is all before;
Hardly can I, through age and pain,
With staff and crutch, my knees sustain.
Almost a child, you hardly know
What thing you have to bear and do.
Yet, well I wot, the torch that all
Burns soon or late, on you will fall;
And in that fount where Venus brings
Her maidens, will you drench love's wings.
But ere you headlong enter, pause,
Listen to one who knows Love's laws.
Perilous are its waters clear;
He risks his life who plunges here
Without a guide. Who follows me
Safe and successful shall he be.'
She tells of her vanished youth and all the pleasant follies of her
young days; how she threw away her affections on a scoundrel, who only
robbed and ill-treated her; how she wasted her money and neglected her
chances; how she grew old, and her old friends ceased to knock at her
door.
'But ah! my child, no one can know
Save him who feels the bitter woe,
What grief and dolour me befell
At losing what I loved so well.
The honeyed words, the soft caress,
The sweet delight, the sweet embrace;
The kisses sweet--so quickly sped,
The joyous time so quickly fled.
Fled! and I left alone to mourn.
Fled! never, never to return.'
The whole passage is full of the truest touches of nature, and is
written with a _verve_ quite extraordinary. Villon has imitated it in
his ballad of the _Belle Heaulmière_,--
'Avis m'est que j'oy regretter
La belle qui fust Heaulmière;
Soy jeune fille souhaiter
Et parler en ceste manière.
* * * * *
Qu'est devenu ce front poly,
Ces cheveulx blonds, sourcils voultiz,
Grant entr'oeil, le regard joly,
Dont prenoye les plus subtils;
Ce beau nez ni grand ni petit;
Ces petites joinctes oreilles;
Menton fourchu, cler vis, traictiz
Et ces belles lèvres vermeilles?'