To give an account of these various things in great detail would not merely be impossible here, but would injure the scheme and thwart the purpose of this history. We must survey them in the gross, or with a few examples--showing the lessons taught and the results achieved, from the lyric, which was probably the earliest, to the drama and the prose story, which were pretty certainly the latest of the French experiments. But we must give largest s.p.a.ce to the singular growth of Allegory. This, to some extent in the beast-epic, to a far greater in one of the most epoch-making of European books, the _Romance of the Rose_, set a fas.h.i.+on in Europe which had hardly pa.s.sed away in three hundred years, and which, latterly rather for the worse, but in the earlier date not a little for the better, coloured not merely the work directly composed in imitation of the great originals, but all literary stuff of every kind, from lyric to drama, and from sermons to prose tales.
[Sidenote: _Lyric._]
It has been said elsewhere that the shaping of a prosody suitable for lyric was the great debt which Europe owes to the language of Provence. And this is not at all inconsistent with the undoubted critical fact that in a _Corpus Lyricorum_ the best songs of the northern tongues would undoubtedly rank higher, according to all sound canons of poetical criticism, than the best lyrics of the southern.
For, as it happens, we have lyrics in at least two most vigorous northern tongues before they had gone to school to southern prosody, and we can see at once the defects in them. The scanty remains of Anglo-Saxon lyric and the more copious remains of Icelandic display, with no little power and pathos, and plenty of ill-organised "cry," an almost total lack of ability to sing. Every now and then their natural genius enables them to hit, clumsily and laboriously, on something--the refrain of the _Complaint of Deor_, the stepped stanzas of the _Lesson of Loddfafni_--resembling the more accomplished methods of more educated and long-descended literatures. But the poets are always in a Robinson Crusoe condition, and worse: for Robinson had at least seen the tools and utensils he needed, if he did not know how to make them. The scops and scalds were groping for the very pattern of the tools themselves.
The _langue d"oc_, first of all vernacular tongues, borrowed from Latin, as Latin had borrowed from Greek, such of the practical outcomes of the laws of lyric harmony in Aryan speech as were suitable to itself; and pa.s.sed the lesson on to the _trouveres_ of the north of France--if indeed these did not work out the transfer for themselves almost independently. And as there was much more northern admixture, and in particular a less tyrannous softness of vowel-ending in the _langue d"ol_, this second stage saw a great increase of suppleness, a great emanc.i.p.ation from monotony, a wonderful freshness and wealth of colour and form. It has been said, and I see no reason to alter the saying, that the French tongue in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was actually better suited for lyrical poetry, and did actually produce lyrical poetry, as far as prosody is concerned, of a fresher, freer, more spontaneous kind, from the twelfth century to the beginning of the fifteenth than has ever been the case since.[124]
[Footnote 124: This is not inconsistent with allowing that no single French lyric poet is the equal of Walther von der Vogelweide, and that the exercises of all are hampered by the lack--after the earliest examples--of trisyllabic metres.]
M. Alfred Jeanroy has written a learned and extensive monograph on _Les Origines de la Poesie Lyrique en France_, which with M. Gaston Raynaud"s _Bibliographie des Chansonniers Francais_, and his collection of _Motets_ of our present period, is indispensable to the thorough student of the subject.[125] But for general literary purposes the two cla.s.sics of the matter are, and are long likely to be, the charming _Romancero Francais_[126] which M. Paulin Paris published in the very dawn of the study of mediaeval literature in France, and the admirable _Romanzen und Pastourellen_[127] which Herr Karl Bartsch collected and issued a quarter of a century ago. Here as elsewhere the piecemeal system of publication which has been the bane of the whole subject is to be regretted, for with a little effort and a little division of labour the entire _corpus_ of French lyric from the tenth to the fourteenth century might have been easily set before the public. But the two volumes above mentioned will enable the reader to judge its general characteristics with pretty absolute sureness; and if he desires to supplement them with the work of a single author, that of Thibaut of Champagne or Navarre,[128] which is easily accessible, will form an excellent third.
[Footnote 125: M. Jeanroy, as is also the case with other writers of monographs mentioned in this chapter, has contributed to M. Pet.i.t de Julleville"s _Histoire_ (_v._ p. 23) on his subject.]
[Footnote 126: Paris, 1833.]
[Footnote 127: Leipzig, 1870.]
[Footnote 128: Rheims, 1851.]
[Sidenote: _The_ Romance _and the_ Pastourelle.]
In this northern lyric--that is to say, northern as compared with Provencal[129]--we find all or almost all the artificial forms which are characteristic of Provencal itself, some of them no doubt rather sisters than daughters of their a.n.a.logues in the _langue d"oc_.
Indeed, at the end of our present period, and still more later, the ingenuity of the _trouveres_ seems to have pushed the strictly formal, strictly artificial part of the poetry of the troubadours to almost its furthest possible limits in varieties of _triolet_ and _rondeau_, _ballade_ and _chant royal_. But the _Romances_ and the _Pastourelles_ stand apart from these, and both are recognised by authorities among the troubadours themselves as specially northern forms. The differentia of each is in subject rather than in form, the "romance"
in this sense being a short love-story, with little more than a single incident in it sometimes, but still always possessing an incident; the _Pastourelle_, a special variety of love-story of the kind so curiously popular in all mediaeval languages, and so curiously alien from modern experience, where a pa.s.sing knight sees a damsel of low degree, and woos her at once, with or without success, or where two personages of the shepherd kind sue and are sued with evil hap or good. In other words, the "romance" is supremely presented in English, and in the much-abused fifteenth century, by the _Nut-Browne Maid_, the "pastourelle" by Henryson"s _Robene and Makyne_. Perhaps there is nothing quite so good as either in the French originals of both; certainly there is nothing like the union of metrical felicity, romantic conduct, sweet but not mawkish sentiment, and never-flagging interest in the anonymous masterpiece which the ever-blessed Arnold preserved for us in his _Chronicle_. But the diffused merits--the so-to-speak "cla.s.s-merits"--of the poems in general are very high indeed: and when the best of the other lyrics--_aubades_, _debats_, and what not--are joined to them, they supply the materials of an anthology of hardly surpa.s.sed interest, as well for the bubbling music of their refrains and the trill of their metre, as for the fresh mirth and joy of living in their matter. The "German paste in our composition," as another Arnold had it, and not only that, may make us prefer the German examples; but it must never be forgotten that but for these it is at least not improbable that those would never have existed.
[Footnote 129: This for convenience" sake is postponed to chap. viii.]
To select capital examples from so large a body is no easy task. One or two, indeed, have "made fortune," the most famous of them being the great _aubade_ (chief among its kind, as "En un vergier sotz folha d"albespi" is among the Provencal albas), which begins--
"Gaite de la tor, Gardez entor Les murs, si Deus vos voie;"[130]
and where the _gaite_ (watcher) answers (like a Cornish watcher of the pilchards)--
"Hu! et hu! et hu! et hu!"
[Footnote 130: _Romancero Francais_, p. 66.]
Then there is the group, among the oldest and the best of all, a.s.signed to Audefroy le Batard--a most delectable garland, which tells how the loves of Gerard and Fair Isabel are delayed (with the refrain "et joie atent Gerars"), and how the joy comes at last; of "belle Ydoine" and her at first ill-starred pa.s.sion for "li cuens [the Count]
Garsiles"; of Beatrix and Guy; of Argentine, whose husband better loved another; of Guy the second, who _aima Emmelot de foi_--all charming pieces of early verse. And then there are hundreds of others, a.s.signed or anonymous, in every tone, from the rather unreasonable request of the lady who demands--
"Por coi me bast mes maris?
laysette!"
immediately answering her own question by confessing that he has found her embracing her lover, and threatening further justification; through the less impudent but still not exactly correct morality of "Henri and Aiglentine," to the blameless loves of Roland and "Bele Erembors" and the _moniage_ of "Bele Doette" after her lover"s death, with the words--
"Tant mar i fustes, cuens Do, frans de nature, por vostre aor vestrai je la haire ne sur mon cors n"arai pelice vaire."
This conduct differs sufficiently from that of the unnamed heroine of another song, who in the sweetest and smoothest of verse bids her husband never to mind if she stays with her lover that night, for the night is very short, and he, the husband, shall have her back to-morrow!
And besides the morality, perverse or touching, the quaint manners, the charming unusual names or forms of names, Oriour, Oriolanz, Ysabiaus, Aigline,--there are delightful fancies, borrowed often since:--
"Li rossignox est mon pere, Qui chante sur la ramee el plus haut boscage; La seraine ele est ma mere, qui chante en la mer salee el plus haut rivage."
Something in the very sound of the language keeps for us the freshness of the imagery--the sweet-briar and the hawthorn, the mavis and the oriole--which has so long become _publica materies_. It is not withered and hackneyed by time and tongues as, save when genius touches it, it is now. The dew is still on all of it; and, thanks to the dead language, the dead manners, it will always be on. All is just near enough to us for it to be enjoyed, as we cannot enjoy antiquity or the East; and yet the "wall of gla.s.s" which seven centuries interpose, while hiding nothing, keeps all intact, unhackneyed, strange, _fresh_. There may be better poetry in the world than these twelfth and thirteenth century French lyrics: there is certainly higher, grander, more respectable. But I doubt whether there is any sweeter or, in a certain sense, more poignant. The nightingale and the mermaid were justified of their children.
It is little wonder that all Europe soon tried to imitate notes so charming, and in some cases, though other languages were far behind French in development, tried successfully. Our own "Alison,"[131] the first note of true English lyric, is a "romance" of the most genuine kind; the songs of Walther von der Vogelweide, of which we have also spoken, though they may rise higher, yet owe their French originals service, hold of them, would either never or much later have come into existence but for them. An astonis.h.i.+ng privilege for a single nation to have enjoyed, if only for a short time; a privilege almost more astonis.h.i.+ng in its reception than even in itself. France could point to the _chansons_ and to the _romances_, to Audefroy le b.a.s.t.a.r.d and Chrestien of Troyes, to Villehardouin and Thibaut, to William of Lorris and John of Meung, to the _fabliaux_ writers and the cyclists of _Renart_, in justification of her claims. She shut them up; she forgot them; she sneered at them whenever they were remembered; and she appointed as her attorneys in the court of Parna.s.sus Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux and Francois Arouet de Voltaire!
[Footnote 131: See p. 210.]
[Sidenote: _The_ Fabliaux.]
No more curious contrast, but also none which could more clearly show the enormous vigour and the unique variety of the French genius at this time, can be imagined than that which is presented by the next division to which we come--the division occupied by the celebrated poems, or at least verse-compositions, known as _fabliaux_. These, for reasons into which it is perhaps better not to inquire too closely, have been longer and better known than any other division of old French poetry. They were first collected and published a hundred and forty years ago by Barbazan; they were much commented on by Le Grand d"Aussy in the last years of the last century, were again published in the earlier years of the present by Meon, and recently have been re-collected, divested of some companions not strictly of their kind, and published in an edition desirable in every respect by M. Anatole de Montaiglon and M. Gaston Raynaud.[132] Since this collection M. Bedier has executed a monograph upon them which stands to the subject much as that of M. Jeanroy does to the Lyrics. But a great deal of it is occupied by speculations, more interesting to the folk-lorist than to the student of literature, as to the origin of the stories themselves. This, though a question of apparently inexhaustible attraction to some people, must not occupy us very long here. It shall be enough to say that many of these subjects are hardy perennials which meet us in all literatures, and the existence of which is more rationally to be accounted for by the supposition of a certain common form of story, resulting partly from the conditions of human life and character, partly from the conformation of the human intellect, than by supposing deliberate transmission and copying from one nation to another. For this latter explanation is one of those which, as has been said, only push ignorance further back; and in fact, leave us at the last with no alternative except that which we might have adopted at the first.
[Footnote 132: 6 vols. Paris, 1872-90.]
[Sidenote: _Their origin._]
That, however, some a.s.sistance may have been given to the general tendency to produce the same forms by the literary knowledge of earlier, especially Eastern, collections of tales is no extravagant supposition, and is helped by the undoubted fact that actual translations of such collections--_Dolopathos_, the _Seven Sages of Rome_,[133] and so forth--are found early in French, and chiefly at second-hand from the French in other languages. But the general tendency of mankind, reinforced and organised by a certain specially literary faculty and adaptability in the French genius, is on the whole sufficient to account for the _fabliau_.
[Footnote 133: For these see the texts and editorial matter of _Dolopathos_, ed. Brunet and De Montaiglon (Bibliotheque Elzevirienne), Paris, 1856; and of _Le Roman des Sept Sages_, ed. G.
Paris (_Soc. des Anc. Textes_), Paris, 1875. The English _Seven Sages_ (in Weber, vol. iii.) has been thought to be of the thirteenth century. The _Gesta Romanorum_ in any of its numerous forms is probably later.]
[Sidenote: _Their licence._]
It presents, as we have said, the most striking and singular contrast to the Lyric poems which we have just noticed. The technical morality of these is extremely accommodating, indeed (in its conventional and normal form) very low. But it is redeemed by an exquisite grace and charm, by true pa.s.sion, and also by a great decency and accomplishment of actual diction. Coa.r.s.e language--very rare in the romances, though there are a few examples of it--is rarer still in the elaborate formal lyric of the twelfth and thirteenth century in French. In the _fabliaux_, which are only a very little later, and which seem not to have been a favourite form of composition very long after the fourteenth century had reached its prime, coa.r.s.eness of diction, though not quite invariable, is the rule. Not merely are the subjects, in the majority of cases, distinctly "broad," but the treatment of them is broader still. In a few instances it is very hard to discern any wit at all, except a kind similar to that known much later in England as "selling bargains"; and almost everywhere the words which, according to a famous cla.s.sical French tag, _bravent l"honnetete_, in Latin, the use of which a Roman poet has vaunted as _Romana simplicitas_, and which for some centuries have been left alone by regular literature in all European languages till very recently,--appear to be introduced on purpose as part of the game. In fact, it is in the _fabliau_ that the characteristic which Mr Matthew Arnold selected as the opprobrium of the French in life and literature practically makes its first appearance. And though the "lubricity" of these poems is free from some ugly features which appear after the Italian wars of the late fifteenth century, it has never been more frankly dest.i.tute of shamefacedness.
[Sidenote: _Their wit._]
It would, however, be extremely unfair to let it be supposed that the _fabliaux_ contain nothing but obscenity, or that they can offer attractions to no one save those whom obscenity attracts. As in those famous English followings of them, where Chaucer considerably reduced the licence of language, and still more considerably increased the dose of wit--the Reeve"s and Miller"s sections of the _Canterbury Tales_--the lack of decency is very often accompanied by no lack of sense. And a certain proportion, including some of the very best in a literary point of view, are not exposed to the charge of any impropriety either of language or of subject.
[Sidenote: _Definition and subjects._]
There is, indeed, no special reason why the _fabliau_ should be "improper" (except for the greater ease of getting a laugh) according to its definition, which is capable of being drawn rather more sharply than is always the case with literary kinds. It is a short tale in verse--almost invariably octosyllabic couplets--dealing, for the most part from the comic point of view, with incidents of ordinary life.
This naturally admits of the widest possible diversity of subject: indeed it is only by sticking to the condition of "ordinary life" that the _fabliau_ can be differentiated from the short romance on one side and the allegoric beast-fable on the other. Even as it is, its most recent editors have admitted among their 157 examples not a few which are simple _jeux d"esprit_ on the things of humanity, and others which are in effect short romances and nothing else. Of these last is the best known of all the non-Rabelaisian _fabliaux_, "Le Vair Palefroi,"
which has been Englished by Leigh Hunt and shortly paraphrased by Peac.o.c.k, while examples of the former may be found without turning very long over even one of M. M. de Montaiglon and Raynaud"s pretty and learned volumes. A very large proportion, as might be expected, draw their comic interest from satire on priests, on women, or on both together; and this very general character of the _fabliaux_ (which, it must be remembered, were performed or recited by the very same _jongleurs_ who conducted the publication of the _chansons de geste_ and the romances) was no doubt partly the result and partly the cause of the persistent dislike and disfavour with which the Church regarded the profession of jonglerie. It is, indeed, from the _fabliaux_ themselves that we learn much of what we know about the _jongleurs_; and one of not the least amusing[134] deals with the half-clumsy, half-satiric boasts of two members of the order, who misquote the t.i.tles of their _repertoire_, make by accident or intention ironic comments on its contents, and in short do _not_ magnify their office in a very modern spirit of humorous writing.
[Footnote 134: "Les Deux Bordeors [bourders, jesters] Ribaux."]
Every now and then, too, we find, in the half-random and wholly scurrile slander of womankind, a touch of real humour, of the humour that has feeling behind it, as here, where a sufficiently ribald variation on the theme of the "Ephesian matron" ends--
"Por ce teng-je celui a fol Qui trop met en fame sa cure; Fame est de trop foible nature, De noient rit, de noient pleure, Fame aime et het en trop poi d"eure: Tost est ses talenz remuez, Qui fame croit, si est desves."
So too, again, in "La Housse Partie," a piece which perhaps ranks next to the "Vair Palefroi" in general estimation, there is neither purely romantic interest, as in the Palfrey, nor the interest of "the pity of it," as in the piece just quoted; but an ethical purpose, showing out of the mouth of babes and sucklings the danger of filial ingrat.i.tude.
But, as a general rule, there is little that is serious in these frequently graceless but generally amusing compositions. There is a curious variety about them, and incidentally a crowd of lively touches of common life. The fisherman of the Seine starts for his day"s work or sport with oar and tackle; the smith plies the forge; the bath plays a considerable part in the stories, and we learn that it was not an unknown habit to eat when bathing, which seems to be an unwise attempt to double luxuries. A short sketch of mediaeval catering might be got out of the _fabliaux_, where figure not merely the usual dainties--capons, partridges, pies well peppered--but eels salted, dried, and then roasted, or more probably grilled, as we grill kippered salmon. Here we have a somewhat less grimy original--perhaps it was actually the original--of Skelton"s "Tunning of Elinor Rumming"; and in many places other patterns, the later reproductions of which are well known to readers of Boccaccio and the _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ of La Fontaine and his followers. t.i.tle after t.i.tle--"Du Prestre Crucifie," "Du Prestre et d"Alison," &c.--tells us that the clergy are going to be lampooned. Sometimes, where the fun is no worse than childish, it is childish enough--plays on words, jokes on English misp.r.o.nunciation of French, and so forth. But it very seldom, though it is sometimes intolerably nasty, approaches the sheer drivel which appears in some English would-be comic writing of the Middle Ages, or the very early Renaissance--such, for instance, as most of that in the prose "Pleasant Historie of Thomas of Reading,"[135] which the late Mr Thoms was pleased to call a romance.
Yet the actual stuff of "Thomas of Reading" is very much of the nature of the _fabliaux_ (except of course the tragical part, which happens to be the only good part), and so the difference of the handling is noteworthy. So it is also in English verse-work of the kind--the "Hunting of the Hare"[136] and the like--to take examples necessarily a little later than our time.