1St. Palaye, to whom we owe the ideal of chivalry, has truly observed, “Toutes les vertus recommandées par la Chevalerie tournoient au bien public, au profit de l’Etat.” It was when the causes of its institution ceased, and nothing remained but its forms without its motive, that altered manners could safely ridicule some noble qualities which, though now displaced, have not always found equal substitutes. In the advancement of society we may count some losses.2I recollect this trait in Chaucer. The Norway hawk was among the most valuable articles of property, valued at a sum equal to £300 of the present day.—Nicholls, “History of Leicestershire,” xxxix.3The Norman William punished men with loss of eyes for taking his venery.—Selden’s notes to “Drayton’s Polyolbion,” Song ii.An instant execution of two youths by the gamekeepers, at the command of their Lord, appears in an ancient romance recently published in France.—Journal des Savans, 1838.4A curious specimen of these “Household Books,” though of a later period, is that of the Northumberland family, printed by Bishop Percy. Many exist in manuscript, and contain particulars more valuable than the prices of commodities, for which they are usually valued; they offer striking pictures of the manners of their age. [The Wardrobe accounts of Edward the Fourth, the Privy Purse expenses of Edward IV. and Henry VIII., have been since published by Sir Harris Nicolas; and those of the Princess Mary, afterwards Queen, by Sir Frederick Madden. The judicious notes and dissertations of these editors render them of much use in illustration of the history of each era.—Ed.]5“Warton,” i. 94.6“Warton,” ii. 412.7Stowe’s “Survey by Strype,” book iii. 235. We might wish to learn the authority of Stowe for ascribing this “pleasant wit” to Rahere of the eleventh century! As the pen of venerable Stowe never moved idly, our antiquary must have had some information which is now lost. “The king’s minstrel” is also a doubtful designation: was the founder of this priory “a king of the minstrels?” an office which the French also had,Roy des Ménéstraulx, a governor instituted to keep order among all minstrels. Our Rahere, however “pleasant-witted,” seems to have fallen into penance for his “wit,” for he became the first prior.8Antiquités Nationales, par Millin, xli. Two plates exhibit this Gothic chapel and the various musical instruments.9Both these romantic tales may be considered as authentic narratives, though they have often been used by the writers of fiction.La Châtelaine de Vergyhas been sometimes confounded withLe Châtelaine de Coucy, the lover ofLa Dame du Fayel. The story of the Countess of Tergy (on which a romance of the thirteenth century is founded, Hist. Litt. de France, xviii. 779) has been a favourite with the tale-tellers—the Queen of Navarre, Bandello, and Belle Forest, and is elegantly versified in the “Fabliaux, or Tales,” of Way. That of the Dame du Fayel, one of the fathers of French literary history, old Fauchet, extracted it from a good old chronicle dated two centuries before he wrote. The story is also found in an ancient romance of the thirteenth century, in the Royal Library of France.—Hist. Litt. de la France, xiv. 589; xvii. 644. The story of Childe Waters in Percy’s Collection has all the pathetic simplicity of ancient minstrelsy, which is more forcibly felt when we compare it with the rifaccimento by a Mrs. Pye, in Evans’s Old Ballads.10Montaigne was so well acquainted with this practice, that he has used it as a familiar illustration of the obstinacy of some women—which I suppose the good man imagined could not be paralleled by instances from the masculine sex; however, his language must not be disguised by a modern version. “Celui qui forgea le conte de la femme qui, pour aucune correction de ménaces et bastonnades, ne cessait d’appeler son mari, Pouilleux, et qui, précipité dans l’eau, haussoit encore, en s’étouffant, les mains et faisoit au-dessus de sa tête signe de tuer des poux, forgea un conte duquel en vérité tous les jours on voit l’image expresse de l’opiniâtreté des femmes.”The punishment of our “Ducking-stool” for female brawlers possibly originated in this medieval practice of throwing women into the river: but this is but an innocuous baptism, while we find the obstinate wife here, who probably spoke true enough,s’étouffant,—merely for correcting the filthy lubbard, her lord and master.11Leland’s “Itinerary,” ii. 126.12Paston’s “Letters,” v. 17.13See the very curious chapter on the “Fetish Worship,” in that very original and learned work “The Doctor,” v. 133.
1St. Palaye, to whom we owe the ideal of chivalry, has truly observed, “Toutes les vertus recommandées par la Chevalerie tournoient au bien public, au profit de l’Etat.” It was when the causes of its institution ceased, and nothing remained but its forms without its motive, that altered manners could safely ridicule some noble qualities which, though now displaced, have not always found equal substitutes. In the advancement of society we may count some losses.
2I recollect this trait in Chaucer. The Norway hawk was among the most valuable articles of property, valued at a sum equal to £300 of the present day.—Nicholls, “History of Leicestershire,” xxxix.
3The Norman William punished men with loss of eyes for taking his venery.—Selden’s notes to “Drayton’s Polyolbion,” Song ii.
An instant execution of two youths by the gamekeepers, at the command of their Lord, appears in an ancient romance recently published in France.—Journal des Savans, 1838.
4A curious specimen of these “Household Books,” though of a later period, is that of the Northumberland family, printed by Bishop Percy. Many exist in manuscript, and contain particulars more valuable than the prices of commodities, for which they are usually valued; they offer striking pictures of the manners of their age. [The Wardrobe accounts of Edward the Fourth, the Privy Purse expenses of Edward IV. and Henry VIII., have been since published by Sir Harris Nicolas; and those of the Princess Mary, afterwards Queen, by Sir Frederick Madden. The judicious notes and dissertations of these editors render them of much use in illustration of the history of each era.—Ed.]
5“Warton,” i. 94.
6“Warton,” ii. 412.
7Stowe’s “Survey by Strype,” book iii. 235. We might wish to learn the authority of Stowe for ascribing this “pleasant wit” to Rahere of the eleventh century! As the pen of venerable Stowe never moved idly, our antiquary must have had some information which is now lost. “The king’s minstrel” is also a doubtful designation: was the founder of this priory “a king of the minstrels?” an office which the French also had,Roy des Ménéstraulx, a governor instituted to keep order among all minstrels. Our Rahere, however “pleasant-witted,” seems to have fallen into penance for his “wit,” for he became the first prior.
8Antiquités Nationales, par Millin, xli. Two plates exhibit this Gothic chapel and the various musical instruments.
9Both these romantic tales may be considered as authentic narratives, though they have often been used by the writers of fiction.La Châtelaine de Vergyhas been sometimes confounded withLe Châtelaine de Coucy, the lover ofLa Dame du Fayel. The story of the Countess of Tergy (on which a romance of the thirteenth century is founded, Hist. Litt. de France, xviii. 779) has been a favourite with the tale-tellers—the Queen of Navarre, Bandello, and Belle Forest, and is elegantly versified in the “Fabliaux, or Tales,” of Way. That of the Dame du Fayel, one of the fathers of French literary history, old Fauchet, extracted it from a good old chronicle dated two centuries before he wrote. The story is also found in an ancient romance of the thirteenth century, in the Royal Library of France.—Hist. Litt. de la France, xiv. 589; xvii. 644. The story of Childe Waters in Percy’s Collection has all the pathetic simplicity of ancient minstrelsy, which is more forcibly felt when we compare it with the rifaccimento by a Mrs. Pye, in Evans’s Old Ballads.
10Montaigne was so well acquainted with this practice, that he has used it as a familiar illustration of the obstinacy of some women—which I suppose the good man imagined could not be paralleled by instances from the masculine sex; however, his language must not be disguised by a modern version. “Celui qui forgea le conte de la femme qui, pour aucune correction de ménaces et bastonnades, ne cessait d’appeler son mari, Pouilleux, et qui, précipité dans l’eau, haussoit encore, en s’étouffant, les mains et faisoit au-dessus de sa tête signe de tuer des poux, forgea un conte duquel en vérité tous les jours on voit l’image expresse de l’opiniâtreté des femmes.”
The punishment of our “Ducking-stool” for female brawlers possibly originated in this medieval practice of throwing women into the river: but this is but an innocuous baptism, while we find the obstinate wife here, who probably spoke true enough,s’étouffant,—merely for correcting the filthy lubbard, her lord and master.
11Leland’s “Itinerary,” ii. 126.
12Paston’s “Letters,” v. 17.
13See the very curious chapter on the “Fetish Worship,” in that very original and learned work “The Doctor,” v. 133.
GOTHIC ROMANCES.
A newspecies of literature arose in the progress of that practical education which society had assumed; a literature addressed to the passions which rose out of the circumstances of the times; dedicated to war, to love, and to religion, when the business of life seemed restricted to the extreme indulgence of those ennobling pursuits. In too much love, too much war, too much devotion, it was not imagined that knights and ladies could ever err. If sometimes the loves were utterly licentious, wondrous tales are told of their immaculate purity; if their religion were then darkened by the grossest superstition, their faith was genuine, and would have endured martyrdom; and if the chivalric valour often exulted in its ferocity and its rapacity, its generous honour amid a lawless state of society maintained justice in the land, by the lance which struck the oppressor, and by the shield which covered the helpless.
Everything had assumed a more extended form: the pageantry of society had varied and multiplied; the banquet was prolonged; the festival day was frequent; the ballad narrative, or the spontaneous lyric, which had sufficed their ruder ancestors to allure attention, now demanded more volume and more variety; the romance with a deeper interest was to revolve in the entangling narrative of many thousand lines. There was a traditional store, a stock of fabling in hand, heroical panegyrics, satirical songs, and legendary ballads; all served as the stuff for the looms of mightier weavers of rhyme, whose predecessors had left them this inheritance. The marvellous of Romance burst forth, and this stupendous fabric of invention bewitched Europe during three centuries.
Romance, from the light fabliau to the voluminous fiction, has admitted, in the luxury of our knowledge and curiosity, not only of critical investigation, but of its invention, by tracing it to a single source. The origin of Romance has been made to hinge on a theoretical history;and by maintaining exclusive systems, mostly fanciful and partly true, it has been made complicate. Whether invention in the form ofRomancecame from the oriental tale-teller or the Scandinavian Scald, or whether the fictions of Europe be the growth of the Provençal or the Armorican soil, our learned inquirers have each told; nor have they failed in considerably diminishing the claims of each particular system opposed to their own; but the greatest error will be found in their mutual refutations.1While each stood entrenched in an exclusive system, they were only furnishing an integral portion of a boundless and complicate inquiry. They scrutinised with microscopic eyes into that vast fabric of invention, which the Gothic genius may proudly oppose to the fictions of antiquity, and they seemed at times forgetful of the vicissitudes which, at distant intervals, and by novel circumstances, enlarged and modified the changeful state of romantic fiction among every people.
In the attempt to retrace the Nile of Romance to a solitary source, in the eagerness of their discoveries they had not yet ascertained that this Nile bears many far-divided heads, and some from which Time shall never remove its clouds; for who dares assign an origin to the ancient Milesian tales, the tales and their origin being alike lost?2
Warton, encumbered by his theory of an Eastern origin, opened the map to track the voyage of an Arabian tale: he landed it at Marseilles, that port by which ancient Greece first held its intercourse with our Europe, and thence the tale was sent forwards through genial Italy, but forced to harbour in this voyage of Romance atthe distant shores of Brittany, that land of Romance and of the ancient Briton. The result of his system startled the literary world by his assumption, that “the British history” of Geoffry of Monmouth entirely consists of Arabian inventions! the real source of the airy existence of our British Arthur! Bishop Percy had been nearly as adventurous in his Gothic origin, by landing a number of the northern bards with the army of Rollo in Normandy; an event which contributed to infuse the Scaldic genius into the romances of chivalry, whose national hero is Charlemagne—the tutelary genius of France and Germany.
They had looked to the east, and to the north—and wherever they looked for the origin of Romance it was found. They had sought in a corner of the universe for that which is universal.
Romancesprang to birth in every clime, native wherever she is found, notwithstanding that she has been a wanderer among all lands, and as prodigal a dispenser as she has been free in her borrowings and artful in her concealments.
The art of fabling may be classed among the mimetic arts—it is an aptitude of the universal and plastic faculties of our nature; and man might not be ill defined and charactered as “a mimetic and fabling animal.”
The earliest Romances appear in a metrical form about the middle of the twelfth century. The first were “Estoires,” or pretended chronicles, like that of the Brut of Wace; the Romances of martial achievement then predominated, those of the Knights of Arthur, and the Paladins of Charlemagne; the adventures of love and gallantry were of a later epoch. In the mutability of taste an extraordinary transition occurred; after nearly two centuries passed in rhyming, all the verse was to be turned into prose. Whether voluminous rhymes satiate the public ear, or novelty in the form was sought even when they had but little choice, the writers of Romance, a very flexible gentry, who of all other writers servilely accommodate themselves to the public taste, with more fluent pens loitered into a more ample page; or, as they expressed themselves, “translatés de rime en prose,” or “mis en beau langage.” Many of the old French metricalRomances, in the fourteenth century, were disguised in this humbled form; but their “mensogne magnanime,” to use Tasso’s style, who loved them, lost nothing in number or in hardihood. On the discovery of the typographic art, in the fifteenth century, many of these prose Romances in manuscript received a new life by passing through the press; and these, in their venerable “lettres Gothiques,” are still hoarded for the solace of the curious in fictions of genuine antiquity, and of invention in its prime, both at home and abroad; and in a reduced form we find them surviving among the people on the Continent. It is singular that the metrical Romances seem never to have received the honours conferred on the prose.3
These Romances, in their manuscript state, were cherished objects;4the mighty tomes, sometimes consisting of forty or fifty thousand lines, described as those “great books of parchment,” or “the great book of Romances,” were usually embellished by the pen and the pencil with every ornament that fancy could suggest; bound in crimson velvet, guarded by clasps of silver, and studded with golden roses; profuse of gorgeous illuminations, and decorated with the most delicate miniatures, “lymned with gold of graver’s work” on an azure ground; or the purple page setting off the silvery letters;—objects then of perpetual attraction to the story-believing reader, and which now charm the eye which could not as patiently con the endless page. The fashions of the times are exactly shown in the dresses and the domestic furniture; as well as their instruments, military and musical.
Studies for the artist, as for the curious antiquary,5wemay view the plumage in a casque curved and falling with peculiar grace, and a lady’s robe floating in its amplitude; and ornaments of dress arranged, which our taste might emulate. A French amateur who possessedle Roman de la Violette, a romance of a fabulous Count of Nevers, was so deeply struck by its exquisite and faithful miniatures, that he employed the best artists to copy the most interesting, and placed them in his collection of the costume and fashions of the French nation; a collection preserved in the Royal Library of France.6If their hard outline does not always flow into grace, their imagination worked under the mysterious influence of the Romance through all their devoted labour. In a group of figures we may observe that the heads are not mechanically cast by one mould, but the distinct character looks as if the thoughtful artist had worked out his recollections on which he had meditated. In some of the heads, portraits of distinguished persons have been recognised. Not less observable are the arabesques often found on the margins, where the playful pencil has prodigally flung flowers and fruit, imitating the bloom, or insects which look as if they had lighted on the leaf. These margins, however, occasionally exhibit arabesques of a very different character; figures or subjects which often amused the pencil of the monastic limners, satirical strokes aimed at their brothers and sisters—the monks and the nuns! I have observed a wolf, in a monk’s frock and cowl, stretching its paw to bless a cock bending its submissive head; a cat, in the habit of an abbess, holding a platter in its paws to a mouse approaching to lick it, alluding to the allurements of abbesses to draw young women into the convents; and a sow, in a nun’s veil, mounted on stilts. A pope appears to be thrown by devils into a cauldron, and cardinals are roasting on spits. All these expressions of suppressed opinion must have been executed by the monks themselves. These reformers before the Reformation sympathised with the popular feeling against the haughty prelate and the luxurious abbot.
The great Romance of Alexander, preserved in theBodleian Library, reveals a secret of the cost of time freely bestowed on that single and mighty tome. The illuminator, by preserving the date when he had completed his own work compared with that of the transcriber when he had finished his part, appears to have employed nearly six years on the paintings which embellish this precious volume.7
Such a metrical Romance was a gift presented to royalty, when engrossed by the rapturous hand of the Romancer himself; the autograph, in a presentation copy, might count on the meed of “massy goblets” when the munificent patron found the new volume delectable to his taste, which indeed had been anticipated by the writer. This incident occurred to Froissart in presenting his Romance to Richard the Second, when, in reply to his majesty’s inquiry after the contents, the author exultingly told that “the book treated of Amour!”
To the writers of these ancient Romances we cannot deny a copious invention, a variegated imagination, and, among their rambling exuberances and their grotesque marvels, those enchanting enchantments which the Greeks and Romans only partially and coldly raised. We may often, too, discover that truth of human nature which is not always supposed to lie hid in these desultory compositions. Amid their peculiar extravagances, which at least may serve to raise an occasional smile, the strokes of nature are abundant, and may still form the studies of the writers of fiction, however they may hang on the impatience of the writers and the readers of our duodecimos. Ancient writers are pictorial: their very fault contributes to produce a remarkable effect—a fulness often overflowing, but which at least is not a scantiness leaving the vagueness of imperfect description. Their details are more circumstantial, their impressions are more vivid, and they often tell their story with the earnestness of persons who had conversed with the actors, or had been spectators of the scene. We may be wearied, as one might be at a protracted trial by the witnesses, but we are oftenstruck by an energetic reality which we sometimes miss in their polished successors. Their copiousness, indeed, is without selection; they wrote before they were critics, but their truth is not the less truth because it is given with little art.
The dilations of the metrical Romances into tomes of prose, Warton considered as a proof of the decay of invention. Was not this censure rather the feeling of a poet for his art, than the decision of a critic? for the more extended scenes of the Romances in prose required a wider stage, admitted of a fuller dramatic effect in the incidents, and a more perfect delineation of the personages through a more sustained action. If the prose Romances are not epics by the conventional code of the Stagyrite, at least they are epical; and some rude Homers sleep among these old Romancers, metrical or prosaic. A living poetic critic, one best skilled to arbitrate, for he is without any prepossessions in favour of our ancient writers, has honestly acknowledged their faithfulness to nature in their touching simplicity; “nor,” he adds, “do they less afford, by their bolder imagination, adequate subjects for the historical pencil.” And he has more particularly noticed “Le bone Florence de Rome,”—thus written by our ungrammatical minstrels. “Classical poetry has scarcely ever conveyed in shorter boundaries so many interesting and complicated events as may be found in this good old Romance.”8This indeed is so true, that we find these romantic tales were not only recited or read, but their subjects were worked into the tapestries which covered the walls of their apartments. The Bible and the Romance equally offered subjects to eyes learned in the “Estoires” never to be forgotten.
Our master poets have drawn their waters from these ancient fountains.Sidneymight have been himself one of their heroes, and was no unworthy rival of his masters:Spenserborrowed largely, and repaid with munificence:Miltonin his loftiest theme looked down with admiration on this terrestrial race,
————and what resoundsIn fable or romance of Uther’s son,Begirt with British or Armoric knights.
————and what resounds
In fable or romance of Uther’s son,
Begirt with British or Armoric knights.
“In ‘Amadis of Gaul,’” has said our true laureate, “may be found the Zelmane of the ‘Arcadia,’ the Masque of Cupid of the ‘Faery Queen,’ and the Florizel of the ‘Winter’s Tale.’ Sidney, Spenser, and Shakspeare imitated this book: was ever book honoured by three such imitators?”9
A great similarity is observable among these writers of fiction, both in their incidents and the identity of their phrases; an evidence that these inventors were often drawing from a common source. In these ages of manuscripts they practised without scruple many artifices, and might safely appropriate the happiest passages of their anonymous brothers.10One Romance would produce manyby variations; the same story would serve as the groundwork of another: and the later Romancer, to set at rest the scruples of the reader, usually found fault with his predecessors, who, having written the same story, had not given “the true one!” By this innocent imposture, or this ingenious impudence, they designed to confer on their Romance the dignity of History. The metrical Romances pretend to translate some ancient “Cronik” which might be consulted at Caerleon, the magical palace of the vanished Arthur: or they give their own original Romance as from some “Latyn auctour,” whose name is cautiously withheld; or they practise other devices, pretending to have drawn their work from “the Greek,” or “the English,” and even from an “unknown language.” In some Colophons of the prose Romances the names of real persons are assigned as the writers;11but the same Romance is equally ascribed to different persons, and works are given as translations which in fact are originals. Amid this prevailing confusion, and these contradictory statements, we must agree with the editor of Warton, that we cannot with any confidence name the author of any of these prose Romances.Ritsonhas aptly treated these pseudonymous translators as “men of straw.” We may say of them all as the antiquaryDouce, in the agony of his baffled researches after one of their favourite authorities, a Will o’ the Wisp named Lollius, exclaimed, somewhat gravely—“Of Lollius it will become every one to speak with diffidence.” Ariosto seems to have caught this bantering humour of mystifying his readers in his own Gothic Romance, gravely referring his extravagances to “the Chronicle of the pseudo Archbishop Turpin” for his voucher! What was with the Italian but a playful stroke of satire on the pretended verity of Turpin himself, may have covered a more serious design with these ancient romance-writers. Père Menestrier ascribed theseproductions to Heralds, who, he says, were always selected for their talents, their knowledge and their experience; qualifications not the most essential for romance-writing. “According to the bad taste of those ignorant ages,” he proceeds, “it is from them so many Romances on feats of arms and on chivalry issued, by which they designed to elevate their own office, and to celebrate their voyages in different lands.”12St. Palaye, in adopting this notion of these Heraldical Romancers, with more knowledge of the ancient Romancers than the good Father possessed, has added a more numerous body, theTrouvères, who, either in rehearsing or in composing these poetical narratives, might urge a stronger claim.
When Père Menestrier imagined that it was the intention of these Heralds, by these Romances, “to celebrate their voyages in different lands,” it seems to have escaped him that “the voyages” of these Romancers to the visionary Caerleon, to England, or to Macedonia, were but a geography of Fairy Land.
In the History of Literature we here discover a whole generation of writers, who, so far from claiming the honour of their inventions, or aspiring after the meed of fame, have even studiedly concealed their claims, and, with a modesty and caution difficult to comprehend, dropped into their graves without a solitary commemoration.
These idling works of idlers must have been the pleasant productions of persons of great leisure, with some tincture of literature, and to whom, by the peculiarity of their condition, fame was an absolute nullity. Who were these writers who thus contemned fame? Who pursued the delicate tasks of the illuminator and the calligrapher? Who adorned Psalters with a religious patience, and expended a whole month in contriving the vignette of an initial letter? Who were these artists who worked for no gain? In those ages the ecclesiastics were the only persons who answer to this character; and it would only be in the silence and leisure of the monastery that such imaginative genius and such refined art could find their dwelling-place. I have sometimes thoughtthat it was Père Hardouin’s conviction of all this literary industry of the monks which led him to indulge his extravagant conjecture, that the classical writings of antiquity were the fabrications of this sedentary brotherhood; and his “pseudo-Virgilius” and “pseudo-Horatius” astonished the world, though they provoked its laughter.
The Gothic mediæval periods were ages of imagination, when in art works of amazing magnitude were produced, while the artists sent down no claims to posterity. We know not who were the numerous writers of these voluminous Romances, but, what is far more surprising, we are nearly as unacquainted with those great and original architects who covered our land with the palatial monastery, the church, and the cathedral. In the religious societies themselves the genius of the Gothic architect was found: the bishop or the abbot planned while they opened their treasury; and the sculptor and the workmen were the tenants of the religious house. The devotion of labour and of faith raised these wonders, while it placed them beyond the unvalued glory which the world can give.13
We cannot think less than Père Hardouin that there were no poetical and imaginative monks—Homers in cowls, and Virgils who chanted vespers—who could compose in their unoccupied day more beautiful romances than their crude legends, or the dry annals of the Leiger book of their abbey. Some knowledge these writers had of the mythological, and even the Homeric and Virgilian fictions, for they often gave duplicates of the classical fables of antiquity. Circe was a fair sorceress, the one-eyed Polyphemus a dread giant, and Perseus bestrode a winged dragon, before they were reflected in romances. But what we discover peculiar in these works is a strange mixture of sacred and profane matters, always treated in a manner which scents of the cloister. Before he enters the combat, the knight is often on his knees, invoking his patron-saint; he proffers his vows on holy relics; while ladies placed in the last peril, or the most delicate positions, by their fervent repetitions of the sign of the cross, or a vowto found an abbey, are as certainly saved: and for another refined stroke of the monachal invention, the heroes often close their career in a monastery or a hermitage. The monkish morality which sat loosely about them was, however, rigid in its ceremonial discipline. Lancelot de Lac leaves the bed of the guilty Genevra, the Queen of the good king Arthur, at the ring of the matin-bell, to assist at mass; so scrupulous were such writers that even in criminal levities they should not neglect all the offices of the Church. The subject of one of these great romances is a search after the cup which held the real blood of Christ; and this history of theSang-realforms a series of romances. Who but a monk would have thought, and even dared to have written it down, that all the circumstances in this romance were not only certain, but were originally set down by the hand of Jesus himself? and further dared to observe, that Jesus never wrote but twice before—the Lord’s Prayer, and the sentence on the woman taken in adultery. Such a pious, or blasphemous fraud, was not unusual among the dark fancies of the monastic legendaries.
Some of these Homers must have left their lengthening Iliad, as Homer himself seems to have done, unfinished; tired, or tiring, for no doubt there was often a rehearsal, “the tale half told” was resumed by some Elisha who caught the mantle his more inspired predecessor had let fall. It appears evident that several were the continuators of a favourite romance; and from deficient attention or deficient skill a fatal discrepancy has been detected in the identical characters—the ordinary fate of those who write after the ideas of another, with indistinct conceptions, or with fancies going contrary to those of the first inventor.
These metrical romances in manuscript, and the printed prose in their original editions, are now very costly. By the antiquary and the poet these tomes may be often opened. With the antiquary they have served as the veritable registers of their ages. The French antiquaries, and Carte in England, have often illustrated by those ancient romances many obscure points in geography and history. Except in the mere machinery of their fancy,these writers had no motive to pervert leading facts, for these served to give a colour of authenticity to their pretended history, or to fix their locality. As they had not the erudition to display, nor were aware of the propriety of copying, the customs and manners of the age of their legendary hero, they have faithfully transmitted their own; we should never have had but for this lucky absurdity the “Tale of Thebes” turned into a story of the middle ages; while Alexander the Great is but the ideal of a Norman baron in the splendour and altitude of the conception of the writers. It was the ignorance of the illuminators of our Latin and Saxon manuscripts of any other country than their own which enabledStruttto place before the eye a pictorial exhibition of our Anglo-Saxon fathers. Compared with the realities of these originals, with all their faults of tediousness, the modern copiers of ancient times, in their mock scenes of other ages, too often reflect in the cold moonlight of their fancy a shadowy unsubstantial antiquity.
The influence of these fabulous achievements of unconquerable heroes and of self-devoted lovers over the intellect and the passions of men and women, during that vast interval of time when they formed the sole literature, was omnipotent. In the early romances of chivalry, when their genius was purely military, and directed to kindle a passion for joining the crusades, we rarely find adventures of the tender passion; but, since women cannot endure neglect, and the female character has all the pliancy of sympathy, and has performed her part in every age on the theatre of society, we discover the extraordinary fact that many ladies assumed the plumy helmet and dexterously managed the lance. The ladies rode amid armed knights resistless as themselves. It was subsequently, when we find that singularly fantastic institution of “The Courts of Love,” which delivered their “Arrets” in the style of a most refined jurisprudence, that these beautiful companions-at-arms were satisfied to conquer the conquerors by more legitimate seductions, and that the romances told of little but of loves. Ariosto and Tasso are supposed to have drawn their female warriors from the Amazonian Penthesilea and the Camilla of Homer and Virgil; butit would seem that the prototype of these feminine knights these poets also found among those old romances which they loved.
It is unquestionable that these martial romances of chivalry inflamed the restlessness of those numerous military adventurers who found an ample field for their chivalry after the crusades, in our continued incursions into France, of which country we were long a living plague, from the reign of Edward III. to that of Henry V., nearly a century of national tribulation. Many “a gentyl and noble esquyer,” if perchance the English monarch held a truce with France or Scotland, flew into some foreign service. Sir Robert Knolles was known to the French as “le véritable démon de la guerre;” and Sir John Hawkwood, when there was no fighting to be got at home, passed over into Italy, where he approved himself to be such a prodigy of “a man-at-arms,” that the grateful Florentines raised his statue in their cathedral; this image of English valour may still be proudly viewed. This chivalric race of romance-readers were not, however, always of the purest “order of chivalry.” If they were eager for enterprise, they were not less for its more prudential results. A castle or a ransom in France, a lordly marriage, or a domain in Italy, were the lees that lie at the bottom of their glory.
We continued long in this mixed state of glory clouded with barbarism; for at a time when literature and the fine arts were on the point of breaking out into the splendour of the pontificate of Leo the Tenth, in our own country the great Duke of Buckingham, about 1500, held the old romance of “The Knight of the Swan” in the highest estimation, because the translator maintained that our duke was lineally descended from that hero; the first peer of the realm was proud of deriving his pedigree from a fabulous knight in a romantic genealogy.
But all the inventions and fashions of man have their date and their termination. For three centuries these ancient romances, metrical or prose, had formed the reading of the few who read, and entranced the circle of eager listeners. The enchantment was on the wane; their admirers had become somewhat sceptical of “the true history” which had been so solemnly warranted; anothertaste in the more chastened writings of Roman and Grecian lore was now on the ascendant. One last effort was made in this decline of romantic literature, in that tesselated compilement where the mottled pieces drawn out of the French prose romances of chivalry were finely squared together by no unskilful workman, in SirThomas Malory, to the English lover of ancient romance well known by the title ofLa Morte d’Arthur. This last of these ancient romances was finished in the ninth year of the reign of Edward IV., about 1470.Caxtonexulted to print this epical romance; and at the same time he had the satisfaction of reproaching the “laggard” age. “What do ye now,” exclaimed the ancient printer, “but go to theBagnes, and play at dice? Leave this! leave it! and read these noble volumes.” Volumes which not many years after, when a new system of affairs had occurred to supplant this long-idolised “order of chivalry,”Roger Aschamplainly asserted only taught “open manslaughter and bold bawdry.” Such was the final fate of Love and Arms!
1Warton and Percy, Ritson and Leyden, Ellis and Turner and Price, and recently the late Abbé de la Rue.2A profound and poetic genius has thrown out a new suggestion on the origin of these Eastern tales. “I think it not unlikely that the ‘Milesian Tales’ contained the germs of many of thosenow in the‘Arabian Nights.’ The Greek empire must have left deep impressions on the Persian intellect—so also many of the Roman CatholicLegendsare taken fromApuleius. The exquisite story of Cupid and Psyche is evidently a philosophical attempt to parry Christianity with a quasi Platonic account of the fall and redemption of man.”—Coleridge’s “Literary Remains,” i. 180. Whatever were these “Milesian Tales,” they amused the Grecian sages in the earliest period of their history.3Ritson and Weber have elegantly printed some of the best English metrical romances. In France they have recently enriched literature with many of these manuscript romances. See “Gentleman’s Magazine,” Oct. 1839.4It is a curious fact, that in 1390 Sir James Douglas, of Dalkeith, the ancestor of the Earl of Morton, apparently valued them as about equal to the statutes of the realm; for he bequeathed in his will to his son, “Omnes libros meos tamStatutorumRegni Scocie quamRomancie.”—Laing’s “Early Metrical Tales,” Edinburgh, 1826.5A collection of these romances formed into three folio tomes in manuscript was enriched by seven hundred and forty-seven miniatures,avec les Initiales peintes en or et couleurs. 6093, Roxburgh Cat.6Cat. of the Duke de la Vallière, 4507. Strutt would have done as much for ourselves, but he worked in unrequited solitude with all the passion of the French amateur, but without his “best artists.”7This romance was composed about the year 1200; the present copy was made in 1338. There is also a splendid manuscript with rich and delicate illuminations of the ancient romance of Alexander in prose in the Brit. Mus., Bib. Reg. 15, E. 6.8Campbell’s “Essay on English Poetry.”9Our vernacular literature owes to the unremitting ardour of our laureate recent editions of “La Morte d’Arthur,” “Palmerin of England,” and a new translation from the Portuguese of “Amadis of Gaul.” For readers who are not antiquaries, and who may recoil from the prolixity of the ancient romances, there is a work of their species which may amply gratify their curiosity, and it is of easy acquisition. It is not an unskilful compilation from the romances of chivalry made byRichard Johnson, a noted bookwright in the reign of Elizabeth; it has passed through innumerable editions, and has at last taken its station in the popular library of our juvenile literature. I suspect that the style has been too often altered in the modern editions, which has injured its raciness. It is well known as “The Renowned History of the Seven Champions of Christendom.” The compiler has metamorphosed the Rowland, Oliver, Guy, Bevis, &c., into seven saints or champions of Christendom; but “he has preserved some of the most capital fictions of the old Arabian romance.”—Warton, iii. 63, Ed. 8vo. It may serve as a substitute for the old black-letter romances, being a compendium of their rich or their grotesque fancies; or, as Ritson observes with his accustomed energetical criticism, “It is a compound of superstition, and, as it were, all the lyes in Christendom in one lye, and is in many parts of the country believed at this day to be as true as the gospel.”—“Dissertation on Romance,” xxxiv.10One of the most celebrated romantic histories is “the Troy-book of Guido delle Colonne,” which has been considered as the original of all the later tales of Troy. On the acute suggestion of Tyrwhit, Douce ascertained that this fabulous history, by many regarded as original, is only a Latin translation of a Norman poet,* which Guido passes off as a history collected from Dares and other fictitious authorities, but disingenuously conceals the name of Benoit de Saint Maur, whose works he appears to have found when he came to England. It was a prevalent practice in the middle ages to appropriate a work by a cautious suppression of any mention of the original. Tiraboschi might now be satisfied that Guido delle Colonne was in England, which he doubted, since he now stands charged with only turning into Latin prose the poem of a Norman, that is, an English poet at the court of our Henry the Second.* Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakspeare.”11In the curious catalogue of these romances in the Roxburgh Library, the cataloguer announced three or four of these pretended authors as “names unknown to any literary historians,” and considered the announcement a literary discovery.12Père Menestrier, “Chevalerie Ancienne et Moderne,” chap. v. OnHeralds.13See Bentham’s “History and Antiquities of Ely,” 27.
1Warton and Percy, Ritson and Leyden, Ellis and Turner and Price, and recently the late Abbé de la Rue.
2A profound and poetic genius has thrown out a new suggestion on the origin of these Eastern tales. “I think it not unlikely that the ‘Milesian Tales’ contained the germs of many of thosenow in the‘Arabian Nights.’ The Greek empire must have left deep impressions on the Persian intellect—so also many of the Roman CatholicLegendsare taken fromApuleius. The exquisite story of Cupid and Psyche is evidently a philosophical attempt to parry Christianity with a quasi Platonic account of the fall and redemption of man.”—Coleridge’s “Literary Remains,” i. 180. Whatever were these “Milesian Tales,” they amused the Grecian sages in the earliest period of their history.
3Ritson and Weber have elegantly printed some of the best English metrical romances. In France they have recently enriched literature with many of these manuscript romances. See “Gentleman’s Magazine,” Oct. 1839.
4It is a curious fact, that in 1390 Sir James Douglas, of Dalkeith, the ancestor of the Earl of Morton, apparently valued them as about equal to the statutes of the realm; for he bequeathed in his will to his son, “Omnes libros meos tamStatutorumRegni Scocie quamRomancie.”—Laing’s “Early Metrical Tales,” Edinburgh, 1826.
5A collection of these romances formed into three folio tomes in manuscript was enriched by seven hundred and forty-seven miniatures,avec les Initiales peintes en or et couleurs. 6093, Roxburgh Cat.
6Cat. of the Duke de la Vallière, 4507. Strutt would have done as much for ourselves, but he worked in unrequited solitude with all the passion of the French amateur, but without his “best artists.”
7This romance was composed about the year 1200; the present copy was made in 1338. There is also a splendid manuscript with rich and delicate illuminations of the ancient romance of Alexander in prose in the Brit. Mus., Bib. Reg. 15, E. 6.
8Campbell’s “Essay on English Poetry.”
9Our vernacular literature owes to the unremitting ardour of our laureate recent editions of “La Morte d’Arthur,” “Palmerin of England,” and a new translation from the Portuguese of “Amadis of Gaul.” For readers who are not antiquaries, and who may recoil from the prolixity of the ancient romances, there is a work of their species which may amply gratify their curiosity, and it is of easy acquisition. It is not an unskilful compilation from the romances of chivalry made byRichard Johnson, a noted bookwright in the reign of Elizabeth; it has passed through innumerable editions, and has at last taken its station in the popular library of our juvenile literature. I suspect that the style has been too often altered in the modern editions, which has injured its raciness. It is well known as “The Renowned History of the Seven Champions of Christendom.” The compiler has metamorphosed the Rowland, Oliver, Guy, Bevis, &c., into seven saints or champions of Christendom; but “he has preserved some of the most capital fictions of the old Arabian romance.”—Warton, iii. 63, Ed. 8vo. It may serve as a substitute for the old black-letter romances, being a compendium of their rich or their grotesque fancies; or, as Ritson observes with his accustomed energetical criticism, “It is a compound of superstition, and, as it were, all the lyes in Christendom in one lye, and is in many parts of the country believed at this day to be as true as the gospel.”—“Dissertation on Romance,” xxxiv.
10One of the most celebrated romantic histories is “the Troy-book of Guido delle Colonne,” which has been considered as the original of all the later tales of Troy. On the acute suggestion of Tyrwhit, Douce ascertained that this fabulous history, by many regarded as original, is only a Latin translation of a Norman poet,* which Guido passes off as a history collected from Dares and other fictitious authorities, but disingenuously conceals the name of Benoit de Saint Maur, whose works he appears to have found when he came to England. It was a prevalent practice in the middle ages to appropriate a work by a cautious suppression of any mention of the original. Tiraboschi might now be satisfied that Guido delle Colonne was in England, which he doubted, since he now stands charged with only turning into Latin prose the poem of a Norman, that is, an English poet at the court of our Henry the Second.
* Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakspeare.”
11In the curious catalogue of these romances in the Roxburgh Library, the cataloguer announced three or four of these pretended authors as “names unknown to any literary historians,” and considered the announcement a literary discovery.
12Père Menestrier, “Chevalerie Ancienne et Moderne,” chap. v. OnHeralds.
13See Bentham’s “History and Antiquities of Ely,” 27.
ORIGIN OF THE VERNACULAR LANGUAGES OF EUROPE.
Thepredominance of the Latin language, during many centuries, retarded the cultivation of the vernacular dialects of Europe. When the barbarous nations had triumphed over ancient Rome, the language of the Latins remained unconquered; that language had diffused itself with the universal dominion, and, living in the minds of men, required neither legions nor consuls to maintain its predominance.
From accident, and even from necessity, the swarming hordes, some of whom seem to have spoken a language which had never been written, and were a roving people at a period prior to historical record, had adopted that single colloquial idiom which their masters had conveyed to them, attracted, if not by its beauty, at least by its convenience. This vulgar Latin was not, indeed, the Latin of the great writers of antiquity; but in its corrupt state; freed from a complex construction, and even from grammar, had more easily lent itself to the jargon of the ruder people. Teutonic terms, or Celtic words with corrupt latinisms, were called “the scum of ancient eloquence, and the rust of vulgar barbarisms,” by an indignant critic in the middle of the fifth century.1It was amid this confusion of races, of idioms, and of customs, that from this heterogeneous mass were hewed out thoseVERNACULAR DIALECTSof Europe which furnished each people with their own idiom, and which are now distinguished as theModern Languages.
In this transference and transfusion of languages, Italy retained the sonorous termination of her paternal soil, and Spain did not forget the majesty of the Latin accent; lands favoured by more genial skies, and men blessed with more flexible organs. But the Gothic and the Northern races barbarously abbreviated or disfigured their Latin words—to sounds so new to them they gave their ownrude inflections; there is but one organ to regulate the delicacy of orthoepy—a musical and a tutored ear. The Gaul,2in cutting his words down, contracted a nasal sharpness; and the Northmen, in the shock of their hard, redundant consonants, lost the vowelly confluence.
This vulgar or corrupt Latin, mingled with this diversity of jargons, was the vitiated mother of the sister-languages of Europe—sisters still bearing their family likeness, of the same homely origin, but of various fortunes, till some attained to the beauty and affluence of their Latin line. From the first the people themselves had dignified their spurious generation of language asRomans, orRomance, orRomaunt, still proud perhaps of its Roman source; but the critical Latins themselves had distinguished it asRustic, to indicate a base dialect used only by those who were far removed from the metropolis of the world.
But when these different nations had established their separate independence, this vernacular idiom was wholly left to the people; it was the image of their own barbaric condition, unworthy of the studies, and inadequate to the genius, of any writer. The universal language maintained its pre-eminence over the particular dialect, and as the course of human events succeeded in the overwhelming of ancient Rome, another Rome shadowed the world. Ecclesiastical Rome, whence the novel faith of Christianity was now to emanate, far more potent than military Rome, perpetuated the ancient language. The clergy, through the diversified realms of Europe, were held together in strict conformity, and by a common bond chained to the throne of the priesthood—one faith, one discipline, one language!
The Latin tongue, both in verse and prose, was domiciliated among people of the most opposite interests, customs, and characters. The primitive fathers, the later schoolmen, the monkish chroniclers, all alike composed in Latin; all legal instruments, even marriage-contracts, were drawn in Latin: and even the language of Christian prayer was that of abolished paganism.
The idiom of their father-land—or as we have affectionately called it, our “mother-tongue,” and as our ancient translator of the “Polychronicon” energetically terms it, “the birth-tongue”—those first human accents which their infant ear had caught, and which from their boyhood were associated with the most tender and joyous recollections, every nation left to fluctuate on the lips of the populace, rude and neglected. Whenever a writer, proposing to inform the people on subjects which more nearly interested them, composed in the national idiom, it was a strong impulse only which could induce him thus to submit to degrade his genius. One of the French crusaders, a learned knight, was anxious that the nation should become acquainted with the great achievements of the deliverers of Jerusalem; it was the command of his bishop that induced him to compose the narrative in the vernacular idiom; but the twelve years which he bestowed on his chronicle were not considered by him as employed for his glory, for he avows that the humiliating style which he had used was the mortifying performance of a religious penance.
All who looked towards advancement in worldly affairs, and were of the higher orders in society, cultivated the language of Rome. It is owing to this circumstance, observes a learned historian of our country, that “the Latin language and the classical writers were preserved by the Christian clergy from that destruction which has entirely swept from us the language and the writings of Phœnicia, Carthage, Babylon, and Egypt.”3We must also recollect that the influence of the Latin language became far more permanent when the great master-works of antiquity were gradually unburied from their concealments. In this resurrection of taste and genius, theyderived their immortality from the imperishable soul of their composition. All Europe was condemned to be copiers, or in despair to be plagiarists.
It is well known how the admirable literatures of Greece and Rome struck a fresh impulse into literary pursuits at that period which has been distinguished as the restoration of letters. The emigration of the fugitive Greeks conveyed the lost treasures of their more ancient literature to the friendly shores of Italy. Italy had then to learn a new language, and to borrow inspiration from another genius.
The occupation of disinterring manuscripts which had long been buried in dungeon-darkness, was carried on with an enthusiasm of which perhaps it would be difficult for us at this day to form an adequate conception. Many exhausted their fortunes in remote journeys, or in importations from the East; and the possession of a manuscript was considered not to have been too dearly purchased by the transfer of an estate, since only for the loan of one the pledge was nothing less.4The discovery of an author, perhaps heard of for the first time, was tantamount to the acquisition of a province; and when a complete copy of “Quintilian” was discovered, the news circulated throughout Europe. The rapture of collation, the restoration of a corrupt text, or the perpetual commentary, became the ambition of a life, even after the era of printing.
This was the useful age of critical erudition. It furnished the studious with honours and avocations; but they were reserved only for themselves: it withdrew them from the cultivation of all vernacular literature. They courted not the popular voice when a professorial chair or a dignified secretaryship offered the only profit or honour the literary man contemplated. Accustomed to the finished compositions of the ancients, the scholar turned away from the rudeness of the maternal language. There was no other public opinion than what was gathered from the writings of the Few who wrote to the Few who read; they transcribed as sacred what authority had long established; their arguments were scholastic and metaphysical, for they held little other communication with theworld, or among themselves, but through the restricted medium of their writings. This state was a heritage of ideas and of opinions, transmitted from age to age with little addition or diminution. Authority and quotation closed all argument, and filled vast volumes. University responded to university, and men of genius were following each other in the sheep-tracks of antiquity. Even to so late a period as the days of Erasmus, every Latin word was culled with a classical superstition; and a week of agony was exhausted on a page finely inlaid with a mosaic of phrases.5While this verbal generation flourished, some eminent scholars were but ridiculous apes of Cicero, and, in a cento of verses, empty echoes of Virgil. All native vigour died away in the coldness of imitation; and a similarity of thinking and of style deprived the writers of that raciness which the nations of Europe subsequently displayed when they cultivated their vernacular literature.
It is remarkable of those writers who had already distinguished themselves by their Latin works, that when they began to compose in their native language, those classical effusions on which they had confidently rested their future celebrity sank into oblivion; and the writers themselves ceased to be subjects either of critical inquiry or of popular curiosity, except in that language in which they had opened a vein of original thought, in a manner and diction the creation of their own feelings. Here their natural power and their freed faculties placed them at a secure interval from their imitators. Modern writers in Latin were doomed to find too many academical equals; but those who were inimitable in their vernacular idiom could dread no rival, and discovered how the productions of the heart, rather than those of the lexicon, were echoed to their authors in the voice of their contemporaries.
The people indeed were removed far out of the influence of literature. The people could neither become intelligent with the knowledge, nor sympathise with the emotions, concealed in an idiom which had long ceased to be spoken, and which exacted all the labour and the leisure of the cloistered student.
This state of affairs had not occurred among the Greeks, and hardly among the Romans, who had only composed their immortal works in their maternal tongue. Their arts, their sciences, and their literature were to be acquired by the single language which they used. It was the infelicity of their successors in dominion, to weary out the tenderness of youth in the repulsive labours of acquiring the languages of the two great nations whose empire had for ever closed, but whose finer genius had triumphed over their conquerors.
With the ancients, instruction did not commence until their seventh year; and till they had reached that period Nature was not disturbed in her mysterious workings: the virgin intellect was not doomed to suffer the violence of our first barren studies—that torture of learning a language which has ceased to be spoken by the medium of another equally unknown. Perhaps it was owing to this favourable circumstance that, among the inferior classes of society in the two ancient nations, their numerous slaves displayed such an aptitude for literature, eminent as skilful scribes, and even as original writers.
One of the earliest prose writers in our language when style was beginning to be cultivated, has aptly described, by a domestic but ingenious image, the effect of our youth gathering the burdens of grammatical faggots in the Sylva of antiquity. It is SirThomas Elyotwho speaks, in “The Boke of the Governor,” printed in 1531: “By that time the learner cometh to the most sweet and pleasant rendering of old authors, the sparks of fervent desire are extinct with the burthen of grammar, like as a little fire is even quenched with a great heap of small sticks, so that it can never come to the principal logs, where it should burn in a great pleasant fire.”
It was Italy, the Mother and the Nurse of Literature (as the filial zeal of her sons has hailed her), which first opened to the nations of Europe the possibility of eachcreating a vernacular literature, reflecting the image not of the Greeks and of the Romans, but of themselves.
Three memorable men, of the finest and most contrasted genius, appeared in one country and at one period. With that contempt for the language of the people in which the learned participated, busied as they were at the restoration of letters by their new studies and their progressive discoveries,Petrarchcontemned his own Italian “Rime,” and was even insensible to the inspiration of a mightier genius than his own,—that genius who, with a parental affection, had adopted the orphan idiom of his father-land; an orphan idiom, which had not yet found even a name; for it was then uncertain what was the true language of Italy.Dantehad at first proposed to write in Latin; but with all his adoration of his master Virgil, he rejected the verse of Virgil, and anticipated the wants of future ages. A peculiar difficulty, however, occurred to the first former of the vernacular literature of Italy. In the state of this unsettled language—composed of fragments of the latinity of a former populace, with the corruptions and novelties introduced by its new masters—deformed by a great variety of dialects—submitted, in the mouths of the people, to their caprices, and unstamped by the hand of a master—it seemed hopeless to fix on any idiom which, by its inherent nobleness, should claim the distinguished honour of being deemed Italian.Dantedenied this envied grace to any of the rival principalities of his country. The poet, however, mysteriously asserted that the true Italian “volgare” might be discovered in every Italian city; but being common to all, it could not be appropriated by any single one. Dante dignified the “volgare illustre” which he had conceived in his mind, by magnificent titles;—it was “illustrious,” it was “cardinal,” it was “aulic,” it was “courtly,” it was the language of the most learned who had composed in the vulgar idiom, whether in Sicily, in Tuscany, in Puglia, even in Lombardy, or in the marshes of Ancona! This fanciful description of the Italian language appeared enigmatical to the methodical investigations of the cold and cautiousTiraboschi. That grave critic submitted the interior feeling of the poet to the test of facts and dates. With more erudition than taste, he marked the mechanicalgradations—the stages of every language, from rudeness to refinement. The mere historical investigator could conceive no other style than what his chronology had furnished. But the spirit ofDantehad penetrated beyond the palpable substances of the explorer of facts, and the arranger of dates.Dante, in his musings, had thrown a mystical veil over the Italian language; but the poet presciently contemplated, amid the distraction of so many dialects, that an Italian style would arise which at some distant day would be deemed classical.Dantewrote, andDantewas the classic of his country.
The third great master of the vernacular literature of Italy wasBoccaccio, who threw out the fertility of his genius in thevolgareof nature herself. This Shakspeare of a hundred tales transformed himself into all the conditions of society; he touched all the passions of human beings, and penetrated into the thoughts of men ere he delineated their manners. Even two learned Greeks acknowledged that the tale-teller of Certaldo, in his variegated pages, had displayed such force and diversity in his genius, that no Greek writer could be compared with his “volgare eloquenza.”
The Italian literature thus burst into birth and into maturity; while it is remarkable of the other languages of Europe, that after their first efforts they fell into decrepitude. Our Saxon rudeness seems to have required more hewing and polishing to be modelled into elegance, and more volubility to flow into harmony, than even the genius of its earliest writers could afford. Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio were the contemporaries of Gower, of Chaucer, and of “the Ploughman;” they delight their nation after the lapse of many centuries; while the critics of the reign of Elizabeth complained that Piers Ploughman, Chaucer, and Gower then required glossaries; and so, at a later period, did Ronsard, Baif, and Marot in France. In prose we had no single author till the close of the sixteenth century who had yet constructed a style; and in France Rabelais and Montaigne had contracted the rust and the rudeness of antiquity, as it seemed to the refinement of the following generation.
It cannot be thought that the genius of the Italians always excelled that of other countries, but the materialwhich those artists handled yielded more kindly to their touch. The shell they struck gave a more melodious sound than the rough and scrannel pipe cut from the northern forests.
Custom and prejudice, however, predominated over the feelings of the learned even in Italy. Their epistolary correspondence was still carried on in Latin, and their first dramas were in the language of ancient Rome.Angelo Politianappears to have been the earliest who composed a dramatic piece, his “Orfeo,” in “stilo volgare,” and for which he assigns a reason which might have occurred to many of his predecessors—“perchè degli spettatori fusse meglio intesa,” that he might be better understood by the audience!
The vernacular idiom in Italy was still so little in repute, while the prejudice in favour of the Latin was so firmly rooted, that their youths were prohibited from reading Italian books. A curious anecdote of the times which its author has sent down to us, however, shows that their native productions operated with a secret charm on their sympathies; forVarchihas told the singular circumstance that his father once sent him to prison, where he was kept on bread and water, as a penance for his inveterate passion for reading works in the vernacular tongue.
The struggle for the establishment of a vernacular literature was apparent about the same period in different countries of Europe; a simultaneous movement to vindicate the honour and to display the merits of their national idiom.
Joachim de Bellay, of an illustrious literary family, resided three years with his relative the Cardinal at Rome; the glory of the great vernacular authors of Italy inflamed his ardour; and in one of his poems he developes the beauty of “composing in our native language,” by the deeper emotions it excites in our countrymen. Subsequently he published his “Defense et Illustration de la Langue Françoise,” in 1549, where eloquently and learnedly he would persuade his nation to write in their own language.Ferreira, the Portuguese poet, about the same time, with all the feelings of patriotism, resolved to give birth to a national literature; exhorting his countrymen to cultivate their vernacular idiom, which he purified andenriched. He has thus feelingly expressed this glorious sentiment—
Eu desta gloria so’ fico contenteQue a minha terra amei, e a minha gente.
Eu desta gloria so’ fico contente
Que a minha terra amei, e a minha gente.
In Scotland we find SirDavid Lyndsay, in 1553, writing his great work on “The Monarchie,” in his vernacular idiom, although he thought it necessary to apologise, by alleging the example of Moses, Aristotle, Plato, Virgil, and Cicero, who had all composed their works in their own language.
In our own country LordBernershad anticipated this general movement. In 1525, when he ventured on the toil of his voluminous and spirited Froissart, he described it as “translated out of Frenshe into ourmaternal English tongue;” an expression which indicates those filial yearnings of literary patriotism which were now to give us a native literature.
The predominant prejudice of writing in Latin was first checked in Germany, France, and England by the leaders of that great Revolution which opposed the dynasty of the tiara. It was one of the great results of the Reformation, that it taught the learned to address the people. The versions of the Scriptures seemed to consecrate the vernacular idiom of every nation in Europe. Peter Waldo began to use the vernacular language in his version, however coarse, of the Bible for the Vaudois, those earliest Reformers of the Church; and though the volume was suppressed and prohibited, a modern French literary historian deduces the taste for writing in the maternal tongue to this rude but great attempt to attract the attention of the people. The same incident occurred in our own annals; and it was the English Bible of Edward the Sixth which opened the sealed treasures of our native language to the multitude. Calvin wrote his great work. “The Institute of the Christian Religion,” at the same time in the Latin language and in the French; and thus it happens that both these works are alike original. Calvin deemed that to render the people intelligent their instructor should be intelligible; and that if books are written for a great purpose, they are only excellent in the degree that they are multiplied. Calvin addressed not a few erudite recluses, but a whole nation.
It is unquestionable that the Reformation began to diminish the veneration for the Latin language. Whether from the love of novelty, or rather by that transition to a new system of human affairs, the pedantry of ancient standing was giving way to the cultivation of a national tongue. A great revolution was fast approaching, which would give a new direction to the studies of the scholastic gentry, and introduce a new mode of addressing the people. It was a revolution alarming those who would have walled in public opinion by circumscribing all knowledge to a privileged class. A remarkable evidence of this disposition appears in an incident which occurred to SirThomas Wilson, the author of two English treatises on the arts of Logic and of Rhetoric. An emigrant in the days of the Papistic Mary, he was arraigned at Rome before the Inquisition, on the general charge of heresy, but especially for having written his “Arts of Logic” and “of Rhetoric” in a language which, at least we may presume, the whole conclave could not have criticised. The torture was not only shown to him, but he tells us that “he had felt some smart of it.” The dark inquisitors taught our critic a new canon in his own favourite arts; and our English Aristarchus soon discovered how far those perfidious arts of reasoning and of eloquence may betray the hapless orator, when his words are listened to by malicious judges, equally skilled in mutilating sentences, or catching at loose words. “They brought down my great heart by telling me plainly that mydefencehad put me into further peril.” Our baffled rhetorician saw that his only safety was to abstain from using the great instrument of his art, which was now locked up in silence. He was left, as he expresses himself, “without all help and without all hope, not only of liberty, but also of life.” He escaped by a strange incident. It would seem that in an insurrection of the populace they set fire to the prison, and in a burst of popular freedom, forgetful of their bigotry, or from the spirit of vengeance on their hateful masters, they suffered the heretics to creep out of their cells; an ebullition of public spirit in “the worthy Romans,” which the luckless English expounder of logic and rhetoric might well account as “an enterprise never before attempted.” On Wilson’s return to England be was solicited to revise his admirable“Art of Rhetoric,” but he strenuously refused to “meddle with it, either hot or cold.” Still smarting from the torture which his innocent progeny had occasioned, he seems to have alleviated his martyrdom with the quaint humour of a querulous prologue.
In these awful transitions from one state of society to another, even the most sagacious are predisposed to discover what they secretly wish. Erasmus foresaw that a great change was approaching; but although he has delivered a prediction, it seems doubtful whether he had discerned the object aright. “I see,” he writes, “a certain golden age ready to arise, which perhaps will not be my lot to partake of, yet I congratulate the world, and the younger sort I congratulate, in whose minds, however, Erasmus shall live and remain, by the remembrance of good offices he hath done.” These “good offices” were restricted to his ardent labours in classical literature; but did Erasmus foresee in the change the subversion of the papal system by which Luther had often terrified the timid quietness of our gentle recluse, or the rise of the vernacular literature which had yet no existence? Erasmus, indeed, was so little sensible of this approaching change, that his amusing Colloquies, and his Panegyric on Folly, whose satirical humour had been so happily adapted to open the minds of men, he confined to the lettered circles; as Sir Thomas More did his “Utopia,” which, had it been intelligible to the people, might have impressed them with some principles of political government. The Sage of Rotterdam imagined that the great movement of the age was to restore the classical pursuits of antiquity, and never dreamed of that which, in opposition to the ancient, soon obtained the distinction of “the New Learning,” as it is expressed by Roger Ascham—the knowledge which was adapted to the wants and condition of the people. Erasmus would have been startled at the truth, that the language of antiquity would even be neglected by the generality of writers; that every European nation would have classics of their own; and that the finest geniuses would make their appeals to the people in the language of the people.
The predilection for composing in the Roman language long continued among the most illustrious writers bothat home and abroad. A judicious critic in the reign of James I., Edmund Bolton, in his “Nero Cæsar,” recommends that the history of England should be composed in Latin by the classical pen of the learned Sir Henry Saville, the editor of “Chrysostom.” It is indeed a curious circumstance that when an English play was performed at the University of Cambridge before Queen Elizabeth, the Vice-Chancellor was called on to remonstrate with the ministers of Elizabeth against such a derogation of the learning and the dignity of the University. This very Vice-Chancellor, who had to protest against all English comedies, had, however, himself been the writer of “Gammer Gurton’s Needle,” which was long considered to be the first attempt at English comedy.6This conduct of the University offered no encouragement to men of learning and genius to compose in their vernacular idiom.
The genius ofVerulam, whose prescient views often anticipated the institutions and the discoveries of succeeding times, appears never to have contemplated the future miracles of his maternal tongue. LordBacondid not foresee that the English language would one day be capable of embalming all that philosophy can discover or poetry can invent; that his country, at length, would possess a national literature, and exult in models of its own. So little did Lord Bacon esteem the language of his country, that his favourite works are composed in Latin; and what he had written in English he was anxious to have preserved, as he expresses himself, in “that universal language which may last as long as books last.” It might have surprised Lord Bacon to have been told that the learned in Europe would one day study English authors to learn to think and write, and prefer his own “Essays,” in their living pith, to the colder transfusions of the Latin versions of his friends. The taste of the philosophical Chancellor was probably inferior to his invention. Our illustriousCamdenpartook largely of this reigning fatuity when he wrote the reign of Elizabeth—the history of his contemporaries, and the “Britannia”—the history of our country, in theLatin language; as didBuchananthat of Scotland, andDe Thouhis great history, which includes that of the Reformation in France. All these works, addressed to the deepest sympathies of the people, were not imparted to them.
There was a peculiar absurdity in composing modern history in the ancient language of a people alike foreigners to the feelings as well as to the nature of the transactions. The Latin had neither proper terms to describe modern customs, nor fitting appellatives for titles and for names and places. The fastidious delicacy of the writers of modern latinity could not endure to vitiate their classical purity by the Gothic names of their heroes, and of the barbarous localities where memorable transactions had occurred. These great authors, in their despair, actually preferred to shed an obscurity over their whole history, rather than to disturb the collocation of their numerous diction. Buchanan and De Thou, by a ludicrous play on words, translated the proper names of persons and of places. A Scottish worthy,Wiseheart, was dignified by Buchanan with a Greek denomination,Sophocardus; so that in a history of Scotland the name of a conspicuous hero does not appear, or must be sought for in a Greek lexicon, which, after all, may require a punster for a reader. The history of De Thou is thus frequently unintelligible; and two separate indexes of names and places, and the public stations which his personages held, do not always agree with the copy preserved in the family. The names of the persons are latinised according to their etymology, and all public offices are designated by those Roman ones which bore some fancied affinity. But the modern office was ill indicated by the ancient; the constable of France, a military charge, differed from themagister equitum, and the marshals of France from thetribunus equitum. His equivocal personages are not always recognised in this travesty of their Roman masquerade.