CHAPTER II

Le Chèvrefeuille(The Honeysuckle), one of severallaisby a twelfth-century poetess, MARIE, living in England, but a native of France, tells gracefully of an assignation of Tristan and Iseut, their meeting in the forest, and their sorrowful farewell. Marie de France wrote with an exquisite sense of the generosities and delicacy of the heart, and with a skill in narrative construction which was rare among the poets of her time. InLes Deux Amants, the manly pride of passion, which in a trial of strength declines the adventitious aid of a reviving potion, is rewarded by the union in death of the lover and his beloved. InYonecand inLanvaltales of love and chivalry are made beautiful by lore of fairyland, in which the element of wonder is subdued to beauty. But the most admirable poem by Marie de France is unquestionably herEliduc. The Breton knight Eliduc is passionately loved by Guilliadon, the only daughter of the old King of Exeter, on whose behalf he had waged battle. Her tokens of affection, girdle and ring, are received by Eliduc in silence; for, though her passion is returned, he has left in Brittany, unknown to Guilliadon, a faithful wife. Very beautiful is the self-transcending love of the wife, who restores her rival from seeming death, and herself retires into a convent. The lovers are wedded, and live in charity to the poor, but with a trouble at the heart for the wrong that they have done. In the end they part; Eliduc embraces the religious life, and the two loving women are united as sisters in the same abbey.

Wace, in his romance of theBrut(1155), which renders into verse theHistoriaof Geoffrey of Monmouth, makes the earliest mention of the Round Table. Whether the Arthurian legends be of Celtic or of French origin—and the former seems probable—the French romances ofKing Arthur owe but the crude material to Celtic sources; they may be said to begin with CHRÉTIEN DETROYES, whose lost poem on Tristan was composed about 1160. Between that date and 1175 he wrote hisErec et Enide(a tale known to us through Tennyson's idyll of Geraint and Enid, derived from the WelshMabinogion),Cligès,Le Chevalier de la Charrette,Le Chevalier au Lion, andPerceval. InCligèsthe maidenhood of his beloved Fénice, wedded in form to the Emperor of Constantinople, is guarded by a magic potion; like Romeo's Juliet, she sleeps in apparent death, but, happier than Juliet, she recovers from her trance to fly with her lover to the court of Arthur. TheChevalier de la Charrette, at first unknown by name, is discovered to be Lancelot, who, losing his horse, has condescended, in order that he may obtain sight of Queen Guenièvre, and in passionate disregard of the conventions of knighthood, to seat himself in a cart which a dwarf is leading. After gallant adventures on the Queen's behalf, her indignant resentment of his unknightly conduct, estrangement, and rumours of death, he is at length restored to her favour.6WhilePercevalwas still unfinished, Chrétien de Troyes died. It was continued by other poets, and through this romance the quest of the holy graal became a portion of the Arthurian cycle. APercevalby ROBERT DEBORON, who wrote in the early part of the thirteenth century, has been lost; but a prose redaction of the romance exists, which closes with the death of King Arthur. The greatLancelotin prose—a vast compilation—(about 1220) reduces the various adventures of its hero and of other knights of the King to their definitive form; andhere the achievement of the graal is assigned, not to Perceval, but to the saintly knight Sir Galaad; Arthur is slain in combat with the revolter Mordret; and Lancelot and the Queen enter into the life of religion. Passion and piety are alike celebrated; the rude Celtic legends have been sanctified. The earlier history of the sacred vase was traced by Robert de Boron in hisJoseph d'Arimathie(or theSaint-Graal), soon to be rehandled and developed in prose; and he it was who, in hisMerlin—also presently converted into prose—on suggestions derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth, brought the great enchanter into Arthurian romance. By the middle of the thirteenth century the cycle had received its full development. Towards the middle of the fourteenth century, inPerceforest, an attempt was made to connect the legend of Alexander the Great with that of King Arthur.

6Chrétien de Troyes is the first poet to tell of the love of Lancelot for the Queen.

Beside the so-called Breton romances, theÉpopée courtoisemay be taken to include many poems of Greek, of Byzantine, or of uncertain origin, such as theRoman de la Violette, the tale of a wronged wife, having much in common with that novel of Boccaccio with which Shakespeare'sCymbelineis connected, theFloire et Blanchefleur; theParténopeus de Blois, a kind of "Cupid and Psyche" story, with the parts of the lovers transposed, and others. In the early years of the thirteenth century the prose romance rivalled in popularity the romance in verse. The exquisitechante-fableofAucassin et Nicolette, of the twelfth century, is partly in prose, partly in assonancedlaissesof seven-syllable verse. It is a story of the victory of love: the heir of Count Garin of Beaucaire is enamoured of a beautiful maiden of unknown birth, purchased from the Saracens, who provesto be daughter of the King of Carthage, and in the end the lovers are united. In one remarkable passage unusual sympathy is shown with the hard lot of the peasant, whose trials and sufferings are contrasted with the lighter troubles of the aristocratic class.

In general the poems of theÉpopée courtoiseexhibit much of the brilliant external aspect of the life of chivalry as idealised by the imagination; dramatic situations are ingeniously devised; the emotions of the chief actors are expounded and analysed, sometimes with real delicacy; but in the conception of character, in the recurring incidents, in the types of passion, in the creation of marvel and surprise, a large conventional element is present. Love is independent of marriage, or rather the relation of wedlock excludes love in the accepted sense of the word; the passion is almost necessarily illegitimate, and it comes as if it were an irresistible fate; the first advance is often made by the woman; but, though at war with the duty of wedlock, love is conceived as an ennobling influence, prompting the knight to all deeds of courage and self-sacrifice. Through the later translation of the SpanishAmadis des Gaules, something of the spirit of the mediæval romances was carried into the chivalric and pastoral romances of the seventeenth century.

LYRICAL POETRY—FABLES, AND RENARD THE FOX—FABLIAUX—THE ROMANCE OF THE ROSE

LYRICALPOETRY

Long before the date of any lyrical poems that have come down to us, song and dance were a part of the life of the people of the North as well as of the South of France; religious festivals were celebrated with a gaiety which had its mundane side; love and malicious sport demanded an expression as well as pious joy. But in tracing the forms of lyrical verse anterior to the middle of the twelfth century, when the troubadour influence from the South began to be felt, we must be guided partly by conjecture, derived from the later poetry, in which—and especially in the refrains—earlier fragments have been preserved.

The common characteristic which distinguishes the earlier lyrics is the presence in them of an objective element: they do not merely render an emotion; they contain something of a story, or they suggest a situation. In this literature of sentiment, the singer or imagined singer is commonly a woman. Thechanson d'histoireis also known aschanson de toile, for the songs were suchas suited "the spinsters and the knitters in the sun." Their inspiring motive was a girl's joy or grief in love; they lightly outline or suggest the facts of a miniature drama of passion, and are aided by the repeated lyrical cry of a refrain. As yet, love was an affair for the woman; it was she alone who made a confession of the heart. None of these poems are later than the close of the twelfth century. If the author be represented as actor or witness, the poem is rather achanson à personnagesthan achanson d'histoire; most frequently it is a wife who is supposed to utter to husband, or lover, or to the poet, her complaint of the grievous servitude of marriage. Theaubeis, again, a woman's song, uttered as a parting cry when the lark at daybreak, or the watcher from his tower, warns her lover to depart. In thepastourelle—a form much cultivated—a knight and a shepherdess meet; love proposals are made, and find a response favourable or the reverse; witnesses or companions may be present, and take a part in the action. Therondetis a dancing-song, in which the refrain corresponds with one of the movements of the dance; a solo-singer is answered by the response of a chorus; in the progress of time therondetassumed the precise form of the modern triolet; the theme was still love, at first treated seriously if not tragically, but at a later time in a spirit of gaiety. It is conjectured that all these lyrical forms had their origin in the festivities of May, when the return of spring was celebrated by dances in which women alone took part, a survival from the pagan rites of Venus.

Thepoésie courtoise, moulded in form and inspired in its sentiment by the Provençal lyrics, lies within the compass of about one hundred and thirty years, from1150 to 1280. The Crusade of 1147 served, doubtless, as a point of meeting for men of the North and of the South; but, apart from this, we may bear in mind the fact that the mediæval poet wandered at will from country to country and from court to court. In 1137, Louis VII. married Éléonore of Aquitaine, who was an ardent admirer of the poetry of courtesy. Her daughters inherited her taste, and themselves became patronesses of literature at the courts of their husbands, Henri de Champagne and Thibaut de Blois. From these courts, and that of Paris, this poetry of culture spread, and the earlier singers were persons of royal or noble rank and birth. The chief period of its cultivation was probably from 1200 to 1240. During the half-century before its sudden cessation, while continuing to be a fashion in courts and high society, it reached the wealthy bourgeoisie of the North. At Arras, where Jacques Bretel and Adam de la Halle, the hunchback, were eminent in song, it had its latest moments of splendour.

It is essentially a poetry of the intellect and of the imagination, dealing with an elaborated theory of love; the simple and spontaneous cry of passion is rarely heard. According to the amorous doctrine, love exists only between a married woman and the aspirant to her heart, and the art of love is regulated by a stringent code. Nothing can be claimed by the lover as a right; the grace of his lady, who is placed far above him, must be sought as a favour; for that favour he must qualify himself by all knightly virtues, and chief among these, as the position requires, are the virtues of discretion and patience. Hence the poet's ingenuities of adoration; hence often the monotony of artificial passion; hence, also, subtleties and curiosities of expression, andsought-out delicacies of style. In the earlier chansons some outbreak of instinctive feeling may be occasionally present; but, as the amorous metaphysics developed, what came to be admired was the skill shown in manipulating a conventional sentiment; the lady became an abstraction of exalted beauty, the lover an interpreter of the theory of love; the most personal of passions lost the character of individuality. Occasionally, as in the poems of the Châtelain de Couci, of Conon de Béthune, of Thibaut de Champagne, and of Adam de la Halle, something personal to the writer may be discerned; but in general the poetry is that of a doctrine and of a school.

In some instances the reputation of the lyrical trouvère was founded rather on his music than his verse. The metrical forms were various, and were gradually reduced to rule; theballette, of Provençal origin, was a more elaboraterondet, consisting of stanzas and refrain; theestampie(stampôn, to beat the ground with the foot) was a dancing-song; the lyriclai, virtually identical with thedescort, consisted of stanzas which varied in structure; themotet, a name originally applied to pieces of church music, was freer in versification, and occasionally dealt with popular themes. Among forms which cannot be included under the general title of chansons, are those in dialogue derived from the Provençal literature; in thetensonordébatthe two interlocutors put forth their opinions on what theme they may please; in thejeu partione of the imagined disputants proposes two contrary solutions of some poetical or amorous question, and defends whichever solution his associate refuses to accept; the earliestjeu parti, attributed to Gace Brulé and Count Geoffroi ofBrittany, belongs to the second half of the twelfth century. Theserventoiswere historical poems, and among them songs of the crusades, or moral, or religious, or satirical pieces, directed against woman and the worship of woman. To these various species we should add the songs in honour of the saints, the sorrows of the Virgin uttered at the foot of the cross, and other devout lyrics which lie outside thepoésie courtoise. With the close of the thirteenth century this fashion of artificial love-lyric ceased: a change passed over the modes of thought and feeling in aristocratic society, and other forms took the place of those found in thepoésie courtoise.

FABLES, ANDRENARD THEFOX

The desire of ecclesiastical writers in the Middle Ages to give prominence to that part of classical literature which seemed best suited to the purpose of edification caused the fables of Phædrus and Avianus to be regarded with special honour. Various renderings from the thirteenth century onwards were made under the title ofIsopets,1a name appropriated to collections of fables whether derived from Æsop or from other sources. The twelfth-century fables in verse of Marie de France, founded on an English collection, include apologues derived not only from classical authors but from the tales of popular tradition. A great collection made about 1450 by Steinhoewel, a physician of Ulm,was translated into French, and became the chief source of later collections, thus appearing in the remote ancestry of the work of La Fontaine. The æsthetic value of the mediæval fables, including those of Marie de France, is small; the didactic intention was strong, the literary art was feeble.

1The earlier "Romulus" was the name of the supposed author of the fables of Phædrus, while that of Phædrus was still unknown.

It is far otherwise with the famous beast-epic, the ROMAN DERENARD. The cycle consists of many parts or "branches" connected by a common theme; originating and obscurely developed in the North, in Picardy, in Normandy, and the Isle of France, it suddenly appeared in literature in the middle of the twelfth century, and continued to receive additions and variations during nearly two hundred years. The spirit of theRenardpoems is essentially bourgeois; the heroes of thechansons de gesteachieve their wondrous deeds by strength and valour; Renard the fox is powerful by skill and cunning; the greater beasts—his chief enemy the wolf, and others—are no match for his ingenuity and endless resources; but he is powerless against smaller creatures, the cock, the crow, the sparrow. The names of the personages are either significant names, such as Noble, the lion, and Chanticleer, the cock, or proper names, such as Isengrin, the wolf, Bruno, the bear, Tibert, the cat, Bernard, the ass; and as certain of these proper names are found in the eastern district, it has been conjectured that a poet of Lotharingia in the tenth century first told in Latin the wars of fox and wolf, and that through translations the epic matter, derived originally from popular tradition, reached the trouvères of the North. While in a certain degree typical figures, the beasts are at the same time individual; Renard is not the representative merely of a species; heis Renard, an individual, with a personality of his own; Isengrin is not merely a wolf, he is the particular wolf Isengrin; each is an epic individual, heroic and undying. Classical fable remotely exerted an influence on certain branches of the Romance; but the vital substance of the epic is derived from the stores of popular tradition in which material from all quarters—the North of Europe and the Eastern world—had been gradually fused. In the artistic treatment of such material the chief difficulty lies in preserving a just measure between the beast-character and the imported element of humanity. Little by little the anthropomorphic features were developed at the expense of verisimilitude; the beast forms became a mere masquerade; the romances were converted into a satire, and the satire lost rather than gained by the inefficient disguise.

The earliest branches of the cycle have reached us only in a fragmentary way, but they can be in part reconstructed from the LatinIsengrinusof Nivard of Ghent (about 1150), and from the GermanReinhart Fuchs, a rendering from the French by an Alsatian, Henri le Glichezare (about 1180). The wars of Renard and Isengrin are here sung, and the failure of Renard's trickeries against the lesser creatures; the spirit of these early branches is one of frank gaiety, untroubled by a didactic or satirical intention. In the branches of the second period the parody of human society is apparent; some of the episodes are fatiguing in their details; some are intolerably gross, but the poem known as the Branch of the Judgment is masterly—an ironical comedy, in which, without sacrifice of the primitive character of the beast-epic, the spirit of mediæval life is transported into the animal world. Isengrin, the accuser of Renard beforeKing Noble and his court, is for a moment worsted; the fox is vindicated, when suddenly enters a funeral cortège—Chanticleer and his four wives bear upon a litter the dead body of one of their family, the victim of Renard's wiles. The prayers for the dead are recited, the burial is celebrated with due honour, and Renard is summoned to justice; lie heaped upon lie will not save him; at last he humbles himself with pious repentance, and promising to seek God's pardon over-sea, is permitted in his pilgrim's habit to quit the court. It is this Judgment of Renard which formed the basis of theReineke Fuchs, known to us through the modernisation of Goethe.

From the date of the Branch of the Judgment the Renard Romances declined. The Judgment was imitated by inferior hands, and the beasts were more and more nearly transformed to men; the spirit of gaiety was replaced by seriousness or gloom; Renard ceased to be a light-footed and ingenious rogue; he became a type of human fraud and cruelty; whatever in society was false and base and merciless became a form of "renardie," and by "renardie" the whole world seemed to be ruled. Such is the temper expressed inLe Couronnement Renard, written in Flanders soon after 1250, a satire directed chiefly against the mendicant orders, in which the fox, turned friar for a season, ascends the throne.Renard le Nouveau, the work of a poet of Lille, Jacquemart Gelée, nearly half a century later, represents again the triumph of the spirit of evil; although far inferior in execution to theJudgment, it had remarkable success, to which the allegory, wearying to a modern reader, no doubt contributed at a time when allegory was a delight. The last of the Renard romances,Renard le Contrefait, was composed at Troyes before 1328, by an ecclesiastic who hadrenounced his profession and turned to trade. In his leisure hours he spun, in discipleship to Jean de Meun, his interminable poem, which is less a romance than an encyclopædia of all the knowledge and all the opinions of the author. This latestRenardhas a value akin to that of the second part ofLe Roman de la Rose; it is a presentation of the ideas and manners of the time by one who freely criticised and mocked the powers that be, both secular and sacred, and who was in sympathy with a certain movement or tendency towards social, political, and intellectual reform.

FABLIAUX

The namefabliauxis applied to short versified tales, comic in character, and intended rather for recitation than for song. Out of a far larger number about one hundred and fifty have survived. The earliest—Richeut—is of the year 1159. From the middle of the twelfth century, together with the heroic or sentimental poetry of feudalism, we find this bourgeois poetry of realistic observation; and even in thechansons de geste, in occasional comic episodes, something may be seen which is in close kinship with the fabliaux. Many brief humorous stories, having much in common under their various disguises, exist as part of the tradition of many lands and peoples. The theory which traces the French fabliaux to Indian originals is unproved, and indeed is unnecessary. The East, doubtless, contributed its quota to the common stock, but so did other quarters of the globe; such tales are ubiquitous and are undying, only theparticular form which they assume being determined by local conditions.

The fabliaux, as we can study them, belong especially to the north and north-east of France, and they continued to be put forth by their rhymers until about 1340, the close of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century being the period of their greatest popularity. Simple and obvious jests sufficed to raise a laugh among folk disposed to good humour; by degrees something of art and skill was attained. The misfortunes of husbands supplied an inexhaustible store of merriment; if woman and the love of woman were idealised in the romances, the fabliaux took their revenge, and exhibited her as the pretty traitress of a shameless comedy. If religion was honoured in the age of faith, the bourgeois spirit found matter of mirth in the adventures of dissolute priests and self-indulgent monks. Not a few of the fabliaux are cynically gross—ribald but not voluptuous. To literary distinction they made small pretence. It sufficed if the tale ran easily in the current speech, thrown into rhyming octosyllables; but brevity, frankness, natural movement are no slight or common merits in mediæval poetry, and something of the social life of the time is mirrored in these humorous narratives.

To regard them as a satire of class against class, inspired by indignation, is to misconceive their true character; they are rather miniature comedies or caricatures, in which every class in turn provides material for mirth. It may, however, be said that with the writers of the fabliaux to hold woman in scorn is almost an article of faith. Among these writers a few persons of secular rank or dignified churchmen occasionally appeared; butwhat we may call the professional rhymers and reciters were the humbler jongleurs addressing a bourgeois audience—degraded clerics, unfrocked monks, wandering students, who led a bohemian life of gaiety alternating with misery. In the early part of the fourteenth century these errant jongleurs ceased to be esteemed; the great lord attached a minstrel to his household, and poetry grew more dignified, more elaborate in its forms, more edifying in its intention, and in its dignity grew too often dull. Still for a time fabliaux were written; but the age of the jongleurs was over.Virelais,rondeaux,ballades,chants royauxwere the newer fashion; and the old versified tale of mirth and ribaldry was by the middle of the century a thing of the past.

THEROMANCE OF THEROSE

The most extraordinary production in verse of the thirteenth century is undoubtedlyLe Roman de la Rose. It is indeed no single achievement, but two very remarkable poems, written at two different periods, by two authors whose characters and gifts were not only alien, but opposed—two poems which reflect two different conditions of society. Of its twenty-two thousand octosyllabic lines, upwards of four thousand are the work of GUILLAUME DELORRIS; the remainder is the work of a later writer, JEAN DEMEUN.

Lorris is a little town situated between Orleans and Montargis. Here, about the year 1200, the earlier poet was born. He was a scholar, at least as far as knowledge of Latin extends, and learned above all in the lore oflove. He died young, probably before 1230, and during the five years that preceded his death the first part ofLe Roman de la Rosewas composed. Its subject is an allegorised tale of love, his own or imagined, transferred to the realm of dreams. The writer would fain win the heart of his beloved, and at the same time he would instruct all amorous spirits in the art of love. He is twenty years of age, in the May-morn of youth. He has beheld his beautiful lady, and been charmed by her fairness, her grace, her courtesy; she has received him with gentleness, but when he declares his love she grows alarmed. He gains at last the kiss which tells of her affection; but her parents intervening, throw obstacles between the lovers. Such, divested of ornament, allegory, and personification, is the theme of the poem.

To pluck the rose in the garden of delight is to win the maiden; her fears, her virgin modesty and pride, her kindness, her pity, are the company of friends or foes by whom the rose is surrounded; and to harmonise the real and the ideal, all the incidents are placed in the setting of a dream. Wandering one spring morning by the river-banks, the dreamer finds himself outside the walls of a fair orchard, owned by Déduit (Pleasure), of which the portress is Oiseuse (Idleness); on the walls are painted figures of Hatred, Envy, Sadness, Old Age, Poverty, and other evil powers; but unterrified by these, he enters, and finds a company of dancers on the turf, among whom is Beauty, led by the god of Love. Surrounded by a thorny hedge is the rosebud on which all his desire now centres. He is wounded by the arrows of Love, does homage to the god, and learns his commandments and the evils and the gains of love. Invited by Bel-Accueil, the son of Courtoisie, toapproach the rose, he is driven back by Danger and his companions, the guardians of the blossom. Raison descends from a tower and discourses against the service of Love; Ami offers his consolations; at length the lover is again admitted to the flowery precinct, finds his rosebud half unclosed, and obtains the joy of a kiss. But Jealousy raises an unscalable wall around the rose; the serviceable Bel-Accueil is imprisoned, and with a long lament of the lover, the poem (line 4068) closes.

Did Guillaume de Lorris ever complete his poem, or did he die while it was still but half composed? We may conjecture that it wanted little to reach some dénouement—perhaps the fulfilment of the lover's hopes; and it is not impossible that a lost fragment actually brought the love-tale to its issue. But even if the story remained without an end, we possess in Guillaume's poem a complete mediæval Art of Love; and if the amorous metaphysics are sometimes cold, conventional, or laboured, we have gracious allegories, pieces of brilliant description, vivid personifications, and something of ingenious analysis of human passion. Nevertheless the work of this Middle-Age disciple of Ovid and of Chrétien de Troyes owes more than half its celebrity to the continuation, conceived in an entirely opposite spirit, by his successor, Jean de Meun.

The contrast is striking: Guillaume de Lorris was a refined and graceful exponent of the conventional doctrine of love, a seemly celebrant in the cult of woman, an ingenious decorator of accepted ideas; Jean de Meun was a passionate and positive spirit, an ardent speculator in social, political, and scientific questions, one who cared nothing for amorous subtleties, and held woman in scorn.Guillaume addressed an aristocratic audience, imbued with the sentiments of chivalry; Jean was a bourgeois, eager to instruct, to arouse, to inflame his fellows in a multitude of matters which concerned the welfare of their lives. He was little concerned for the lover and his rose, but was deeply interested in the condition of society, the corruptions of religion, the advance of knowledge. He turned from ideals which seemed spurious to reason and to nature; he had read widely in Latin literature, and found much that suited his mood and mind in Boethius'De Consolatione Philosophiæand in theDe Planctu Naturæof the "universal doctor" of the twelfth century, Alain de Lille, from each of which he conveyed freely into his poem. Of his life we know little; Jean Clopinel was born at Meun on the Loire about the year 1240; he died before the close of 1305; his continuation of Guillaume'sRomanwas made about 1270. His later poems, aTestament, in which he warned and exhorted his contemporaries of every class, theCodicille, which incited to almsgiving, and his numerous translations, prove the unabated energy of his mind in his elder years.

The rose is plucked by the lover in the end; but lover and rose are almost forgotten in Jean's zeal in setting forth his views of life, and in forming an encyclopædia of the knowledge of his time. Reason discourses on the dangers of passion, commends friendship or universal philanthropy as wiser than love, warns against the instability of fortune and the deceits of riches, and sets charity high above justice; if love be commendable, it is as the device of nature for the continuation of the species. The way to win woman and to keep her loyalty is now the unhappy way of squandered largess; formerlyit was not so in the golden age of equality, before private property was known, when all men held in common the goods of the earth, and robber kings were evils of the future. The god of Love and his barons, with the hypocrite monk Faux-Semblant—a bitter satirist of the mendicant orders—besiege the tower in which Bel-Accueil is imprisoned, and by force and fraud an entrance is effected. The old beldame, who watches over the captive, is corrupted by promises and gifts, and frankly exposes her own iniquities and those of her sex. War is waged against the guardians of the rose, Venus, sworn enemy of chastity, aiding the assailants. Nature, devoted to the continuance of the race, mourns over the violation of her laws by man, unburdens herself of all her scientific lore in a confession to her chaplain Génius, and sends him forth to encourage the lover's party with a bold discourse against the crime of virginity. The triumph of the lover closes the poem.

The graceful design of the earlier poet is disregarded; the love-story becomes a mere frame for setting forth the views of Jean de Meun, his criticism of the chivalric ideal, his satire upon the monkish vices, his revolutionary notions respecting property and government, his advanced opinions in science, his frank realism as to the relations of man and woman. He possesses all the learning of his time, and an accomplished judgment in the literature which he had studied. He is a powerful satirist, and passages of narrative and description show that he had a poet's feeling for beauty; he handles the language with the strength and skill of a master. On the other hand, he lacks all sense of proportion, and cannot shape an imaginative plan; his prolixity wearies the reader, and it cannot be denied that as a moral reformer hesometimes topples into immorality. The success of the poem was extraordinary, and extended far beyond France. It was attacked and defended, and up to the time of Ronsard its influence on the progress of literature—encouraging, as it did, to excess the art of allegory and personification—if less than has commonly been alleged, was unquestionably important.

DIDACTIC LITERATURE—SERMONS—HISTORY

DIDACTICLITERATURE

The didactic literature, moral and scientific, of the Middle Ages is abundant, and possesses much curious interest, but it is seldom original in substance, and seldom valuable from the point of view of literary style. In great part it is translated or derived from Latin sources. The writers were often clerks or laymen who had turned from the vanities of youth—fabliau or romance—and now aimed at edification or instruction. Science in the hands of the clergy must needs be spiritualised and moralised; there were sermons to be found in stones, pious allegories in beast and bird; mystic meanings in the alphabet, in grammar, in the chase, in the tourney, in the game of chess. Ovid and Virgil were sanctified to religious uses. The earliest versified Bestiary, which is also a Volucrary, a Herbary, and a Lapidary, that of Philippe de Thaon (before 1135), is versified from the LatinPhysiologus, itself a translation from the work of an Alexandrian Greek of the second century. In its symbolic zoology the lion and the pelican are emblems of Christ; the unicorn is God; the crocodile is the devil; the stones "turrobolen," which blaze when they approach eachother, are representative of man and woman. ABestiaire d'Amourwas written by Richard de Fournival, in which the emblems serve for the interpretation of human love. A Lapidary, with a medical—not a moral—purpose, by Marbode, Bishop of Rennes, was translated more than once into French, and had, indeed, an European fame.

Bestiaries and Lapidaries form parts of the vast encyclopædias, numerous in the thirteenth century, which were known by such names asImage du Monde,Mappe-monde,Miroir du Monde. Of these encyclopædias, the only one which has a literary interest is theTrésor(1265), by Dante's master, Brunetto Latini, who wrote in French in preference to his native Italian. In it science escapes not wholly from fantasy and myth, but at least from the allegorising spirit; his ethics and rhetoric are derived from Latin originals; his politics are his own. TheSomme des Vices et des Vertus, compiled in 1279 by Friar Lorens, is a well-composedtrésorof religion and morals. Part of its contents has become familiar to us through the Canterbury discourse of Chaucer's parson. The moral experience of a man of the world is summed up in the prose treatise on "The Four Ages of Man," by Philippe de Novare, chancellor of Cyprus. With this edifying work may be grouped the so-calledChastiements, counsels on education and conduct, designed for readers in general or for some special class—women, children, persons of knightly or of humble rank; studies of the virtues of chivalry, the rules of courtesy and of manners.1Other writings, theÉtats duMonde, present a view of the various classes of society from a standpoint ethical, religious, or satirical, with warnings and exhortations, which commonly conclude with a vision of the last judgment and the pains of hell. With such a scene of terror closes the interestingPoème Moralof Étienne de Fougères, in which the life of St. Moses, the converted robber, serves as an example to monks, and that of the converted Thaïs to ladies who are proud of their beauty. Its temper of moderation contrasts with the bitter satire in theBibleby Guiot de Provins, and with many shorter satirical pieces directed against clerical vices or the infirmities of woman. TheBesant de Dieu, by Guillaume le Clerc, a Norman poet (1227), preaches in verse, with eloquence and imaginative power, the love of God and contempt of the world from the texts of two Scripture parables—that of the Talents and that of the Bridegroom; Guillaume anticipates the approaching end of the world, foreshown by wars, pestilence, and famine, condemns in the spirit of Christian charity the persecution of the Albigenses, and mourns over the shame that has befallen the Holy Sepulchre.

1Two works of the fourteenth century, interesting in the history of manners and ideas, may here be mentioned—theLivre du Chevalier de la Tour-Landry(1372), composed for the instruction of the writer's daughters, and theMénagier de Paris, a treatise on domestic economy, written by a Parisian bourgeois for the use of his young wife.

Among the preacher poets of the thirteenth century the most interesting personally is the minstrel RUTEBEUF, who towards the close of his gay though ragged life turned to serious thoughts, and expressed his penitent feelings with penetrating power. Rutebeuf, indeed—the Villon of his age—deployed his vivid and ardent powers in many directions, as a writer of song and satire, of allegory, of fabliaux, of drama. On each and all he impressed his own personality; the lyric note, imaginative fire, colour, melody, these were gifts that compensated the poet's poverty, his conjugal miseries, his lost eye, hisfaithless friends, his swarming adversaries. The personification of vices and virtues, occasional in theBesantand other poems, becomes a system in theSonge d'Enfer, a pilgrim's progress to hell, and theVoie de Paradis, a pilgrim's progress to heaven, by Raoul de Houdan (after 1200). ThePèlerinage de la Vie Humaine—another "way to Paradise"; thePèlerinage de l'Âme—a vision of hell, purgatory, and heaven; and thePèlerinage de Jésus-Christ—a narrative of the Saviour's life, by Guillaume de Digulleville (fourteenth century), have been imagined by some to have been among the sources of Bunyan's allegories. Human life may be represented in one aspect as a pilgrimage; in another it is a knightly encounter; there is a great strife between the powers of good and evil; inLe Tornoiement Antecrist, by Huon de Méri, Jesus and the Knights of the Cross, among whom, besides St. Michael, St. Gabriel, Confession, Chastity, and Alms, are Arthur, Launcelot, and Gawain, contend against Antichrist and the infernal barons—Jupiter, Neptune, Beelzebub, and a crowd of allegorical personages. But the battles anddébatsof a chivalric age were not only religious; there are battles of wine and water, battles of fast and feasting, battles of the seven arts. A disputation between the body and the soul, a favourite subject for separate treatment by mediæval poets, is found also in one of the many sermons in verse; theDébat des Trois Morts et des Trois Vifsrecalls the subject of the memorable painting in the Campo Santo at Pisa.

SERMONS

The Latin sermons of the Middle Ages were countless; but it is not until Gerson and the close of the fourteenth century that we find a series of discourses by a known preacher written and pronounced in French. It is maintained that these Latin sermons, though prepared in the language of the Church, were delivered, when addressed to lay audiences, in the vernacular, and that those composite sermons in the macaronic style, that is, partly in French, partly in Latin, which appear in the thirteenth century and are frequent in the fifteenth, were the work of reporters or redactors among the auditory. On the other hand, it is argued that both Latin and French sermons were pronounced as each might seem suitable, before the laity, and that the macaronic style was actually practised in the pulpit. Perhaps we may accept the opinion that the short and simple homilies designed for the people, little esteemed as compositions, were rarely thought worthy of preservation in a Latin form; those discourses which remain to us, if occasionally used before an unlearned audience, seem to have been specially intended for clerkly hearers. The sermons of St. Bernard, which have been preserved in Latin and in a French translation of the thirteenth century, were certainly not his eloquent popular improvisations; they are doctrinal, with crude or curious allegorisings of Holy Scripture. Those of Maurice de Sully, Archbishop of Paris, probably also translated from the Latin, are simpler in manner and more practical in theirteaching; but in these characteristics they stand apart from the other sermons of the twelfth century.

It was not until the mendicant orders, Franciscans and Dominicans, began their labours that preaching, as preserved to us, was truly laicised and popularised. During the thirteenth century the work of the pulpit came to be conceived as an art which could be taught; collections of anecdotes and illustrations—exempla—for the enlivening of sermons, manuals for the use of preachers were formed; rules and precepts were set forth; themes for popular discourse were proposed and enlarged upon, until at length original thought and invention ceased; the preacher's art was turned into an easy trade. The effort to be popular often resulted in pulpit buffoonery. When GERSONpreached at court or to the people towards the close of the fourteenth century, gravely exhorting high and low to practical duties, with tender or passionate appeals to religious feeling, his sermons were noble exceptions to the common practice. And the descent from Gerson to even his more eminent successors is swift and steep. The orators of the pulpit varied their discourse from burlesque mirth or bitter invective to gross terrors, in which death and judgment, Satan and hell-fire were largely displayed. The sermons of Michel Menot and Olivier Maillard, sometimes eloquent in their censure of sin, sometimes trivial or grotesque, sometimes pedantic in their exhibition of learning, have at least an historical value in presenting an image of social life in the fifteenth century.

A word must be said of the humanism which preceded the Renaissance. Scholars and students there were in France two hundred years before the days of Erasmus and of Budé; but they were not scholars inspired bygenius, and they contented themselves with the task of translators, undertaken chiefly with a didactic purpose. If they failed to comprehend the spirit of antiquity, none the less they did something towards quickening the mind of their own time and rendering the French language less inadequate to the intellectual needs of a later age. All that was then known of Livy's history was rendered into French in 1356 by the friend of Petrarch, Pierre Berçuire. On the suggestion of Charles V., Nicole Oresme translated from the Latin the Ethics, Politics, and Economics of Aristotle. It was to please the king that the aged Raoul de Presles prepared his version of St. Augustine'sDe Civitate Dei, and Denis Foulechat, with very scanty scholarship, set himself to render thePolycraticusof John of Salisbury. The dukes of Bourbon, of Berry, of Burgundy, were also patrons of letters and encouraged their translators. We cannot say how far this movement of scholarship might have progressed, if external conditions had favoured its development. In Jean de Montreuil, secretary of Charles VI., the devoted student of Cicero, Virgil, and Terence, we have an example of the true humanist before the Renaissance. But the seeming dawn was a deceptive aurora; the early humanism of France was clouded and lost in the tempests of the Hundred Years' War.

HISTORY

While the mediæval historians, compilers, and abbreviators from records of the past laboured under all the disadvantages of an age deficient in the critical spirit,and produced works of little value either for their substance or their literary style, the chroniclers, who told the story of their own times, Villehardouin, Joinville, Froissart, Commines, and others, have bequeathed to us, in living pictures or sagacious studies of events and their causes, some of the chief treasures of the past. History at first, as composed for readers who knew no Latin, was comprised in thosechansons de gestewhich happened to deal with matter that was not wholly—or almost wholly—the creation of fancy. Narrative poems treating of contemporary events came into existence with the Crusades, but of these the earliest have not survived, and we possess only rehandlings of their matter in the style of romance. What happened in France might be supposed to be known to persons of intelligence; what happened in the East was new and strange. But England, like the East, was foreign soil, and the Anglo-Norman trouvères of the eleventh and twelfth centuries busied themselves with copious narratives in rhyme, such as Gaimar'sEstorie des Engles(1151), Wace'sBrut(1155) and hisRoman de Rou, which, if of small literary importance, remain as monuments in the history of the language. The murder of Becket called forth the admirable life of the saint by Garnier de Pont-Sainte-Maxence, founded upon original investigations; Henry II.'s conquest of Ireland was related by an anonymous writer; his victories over the Scotch (1173-1174) were strikingly described by Jordan Fantosme. But by far the most remarkable piece of versified history of this period, remarkable alike for its historical interest and its literary merit, is theVie de Guillaume le Maréchal—William, Earl of Pembroke, guardian of Henry III.—a poem of nearly twenty thousand octosyllabic lines by anunknown writer, discovered by M. Paul Meyer in the library of Sir Thomas Phillipps. "The masterpiece of Anglo-Norman historiography," writes M. Langlois, "is assuredly this anonymous poem, so long forgotten, and henceforth classic."

Prose, however, in due time proved itself to be the fitting medium for historical narrative, and verse was given over to the extravagances of fantasy. Compilations from the Latin, translations from the pseudo-Turpin, from Geoffrey of Monmouth, from Sallust, Suetonius, and Cæsar were succeeded by original record and testimony. GEOFFROY DEVILLEHARDOUIN, born between 1150 and 1164, Marshal of Champagne in 1191, was appointed eight years later to negotiate with the Venetians for the transport of the Crusaders to the East. He was probably a chief agent in the intrigue which diverted the fourth Crusade from its original destination—the Holy Land—to the assault upon Constantinople. In the events which followed he had a prominent part; before the close of 1213 Villehardouin was dead. During his last years he dictated the unfinished Memoirs known as theConquête de Constantinople, which relate the story of his life from 1198 to 1207. Villehardouin is the first chronicler who impresses his own personality on what he wrote: a brave leader, skilful in resource, he was by no means an enthusiast possessed by the more extravagant ideas of chivalry; much more was he a politician and diplomatist, with material interests well in view; not, indeed, devoid of a certain imaginative wonder at the marvels of the East; not without his moments of ardour and excitement; deeply impressed with the feeling of feudal loyalty, the sense of the bond between the suzerain and hisvassal; deeply conscious of the need of discipline in great adventures; keeping in general a cool head, which could calculate the sum of profit and loss.

It is probable that Villehardouin knew too much of affairs, and was too experienced a man of the world to be quite frank as a historian: we can hardly believe, as he would have us, that the diversion of the crusading host from its professed objects was unpremeditated; we can perceive that he composes his narrative so as to form an apology; his recital has been justly described as, in part at least, "un mémoire justificatif." Nevertheless, there are passages, such as that which describes the first view of Constantinople, where Villehardouin's feelings seize upon his imagination, and, as it were, overpower him. In general he writes with a grave simplicity, sometimes with baldness, disdaining ornament, little sensible to colour or grace of style; but by virtue of his clear intelligence and his real grasp of facts his chronicle acquires a certain literary dignity, and when his words become vivid we know that it is because he had seen with inquisitive eyes and felt with genuine ardour. Happily for students of history, while Villehardouin presents the views of an aristocrat and a diplomatist, the incidents of the same extraordinary adventure can be seen, as they struck a simple soldier, in the record of Robert de Clari, which may serve as a complement and a counterpoise to the chronicle of his more illustrious contemporary. The unfinishedHistoire de l'Empereur Henri, which carries on the narrative of events for some years subsequent to those related by Villehardouin, the work of Henri de Valenciennes, is a prose redaction of what had originally formed achanson de geste.

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