A Short History of French Literature Part 17

_AUCa.s.sIN ET NICOLETTE._

Aucasins fu mis en prison si com vos aves, o et entendu, et Nicolete fu d'autre part en le canbre. Ce fu el tans d'este, el mois de mai, que li jor sont caut, lonc et cler, et les nuis coies et series. Nicolete jut une nuit en son lit, si vit la lune luire cler par une fenestre, et si o le lorseilnol canter en garding, se li sovint d'Aucasin son ami qu'ele tant amoit. ele se comenca a porpenser del conte Garin de Biaucaire qui de mort le haoit; si se pensa qu'ele ne remanroit plus ilec, que s'ele estoit acusee et li quens Garins le savoit, il le feroit de male mort morir. ele senti que li vielle dormoit qui aveuc li estoit. ele se leva, si vesti un blaut de drap de soie que ele avoit molt bon; si prist dras de lit et touailes, si noua l'un a l'autre, si fist une corde si longe conme ele pot, si le noua au piler de le fenestre, si s'avala contreval le gardin, et prist se vesture a l'une main devant et a l'autre deriere; si s'escorca por le rousee qu'ele vit grande sor l'erbe, si s'en ala aval le gardin. Ele avoit les caviaus blons et menus recerceles, et les ex vairs et rans, et le face traitice et le nes haut et bien a.s.sis, et les levretes vermelletes plus que n'est cerisse ne rose el tans d'este, et les dens blans et menus, et avoit les mameletes dures qui li souslevoient sa vesteure ausi com ce fuissent II nois gauges, et estoit graille parmi les flans, qu'en vos dex mains le peuscies enclorre; et les flors des margerites qu'ele ronpoit as ortex de ses pies, qui li gissoient sor le menuisse du pie par deseure, estoient droites noires avers ses pies et ses ganbes, tant par estoit blance la mescinete.

Ele vint au postic; si le deffrema, si s'en isci par mi les rues de Biaucaire par devers l'onbre, ear la lune luisoit molt clere, et erra tant qu'ele vint a le tor u ses amis estoit. Li tors estoit faele de lius en lius, et ele se quatist deles l'un des pilers. si s'estraint en son mantel, si mist sen cief par mi une creveure de la tor qui vielle estoit et anciienne, si o Aucasin qui la dedens pleuroit et faisoit mot grant dol et regretoit se douce amie que tant amoit. et quant ele l'ot a.s.ses escoute, si comenca a dire.

ALAIN CHARTIER.

La court, affin que tu l'entendes, est ung couvent de gens qui soubz faintise du bien commun sont a.s.semblez pour eulx interrompre; ear il n'y a gueres de gens qui ne vendent, achaptent ou eschangent aucunes foiz leurs rentes ou leurs propres vestemens; ear entre nous de la court nous sommes marchans affectez qui achaptons les autres gens et autresfoiz pour leur argent nous leur vendons nostre humanite preceuse. Nous leur vendons et achaptons autruy par flaterie ou par corrupcons; mais nous scavons tres bien vendre nous mesmes a ceulx qui ont de nous a faire. Combien donc y peus tu acquerir qui es certain sans doubte et sans peril? veulx tu aller a la court vendre ou perdre ce bien de vertu, que tu as acquis hors d'icelle court? Certes, frere, tu demandes ce que tu deusses reffuser, tu te fies en ce dont tu te deusses deffier et fiches ton esperance en ce que te tire a peril. Et se tu y viens, la court te servira de tant de mensonges controverses d'une part, et de l'autre de bailler tant de tours et de charges que tu auras dedans toy mesmes bataille continuelle et soussiz angoisseux et pour certain homme qui pourra bonnement dire que ceste vie fust bieneuree qui par tant de tempestes est achatee et en tant de contraretez esprouvee.

FOOTNOTES:

[142] Ed. Montaiglon. Paris, 1854.

[143] A good example of these is the _Saint Voyage de Jerusalem_ of the Seigneur d'Anglure (1385), edited by MM. Bonnardot and Longnon. Paris, 1878.

[144] _Nouvelles du 13'e et du 14'e siecle._ Ed. Moland et Hericault. 2 vols. Paris, 1856.

[145] Paris, 1876.

[146] Paris, 1858.

[147] Ed. Settegast. Halle, 1881.

[148] Ed. Guichard. Paris, 1843.

[149] Ed. Jannet. Paris, 1853; 2nd ed. 1857.

[150] Ed. Wright. Paris, 1858.

[151] Ed. Fournier, _Theatre Francais avant la Renaissance_. Paris, n. d.

[152] Ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, viii. 1-259.

INTERCHAPTER I.

SUMMARY OF MEDIAEVAL LITERATURE.

In the foregoing book a view has been given of the princ.i.p.al developments of mediaeval literature in France. The survey has extended, taking the extremest chronological limits, over some eight centuries.

But, until the end of the eleventh, the monuments of ancient French literature are few and scattered, and the actual ma.n.u.scripts which we possess date in hardly any case further back than the twelfth. In reality the history of mediaeval literature in France is the history of the productions of the twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries with a long but straggling introduction, ranging from the eighth or even the seventh. Its palmy time is unquestionably in the twelfth and the thirteenth. During these two hundred years almost every kind of literature is attempted. Vast numbers of epic poems are written; one great story, that of Arthur, exercises the imagination as hardly any other story has exercised it either in ancient or in modern times; the drama is begun in all its varieties of tragedy, comedy, and opera; lyric poetry finds abundant and exquisite expression; history begins to be written, not indeed from the philosophic point of view, but with vivid and picturesque presentment of fact; elaborate codes are drawn; vernacular homilies, not mere rude colloquial discourses, are composed; the learning of the age, such as it is, finds popular treatment; and in particular a satiric literature, more abundant and more racy if less polished than any that cla.s.sical antiquity has left us, is committed to writing. It is often wondered at and bewailed that this vigorous growth was succeeded by a period of comparative stagnation in which little advance was made, and in which not a little decided falling off is noticeable. Except the formal lyric poetry of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, and the multiplied dramatic energy of the latter, nothing novel or vigorous appears for some hundred and forty years, until the extreme verge of the period, when the subst.i.tution of the prose tale, as exemplified in the work attributed to Antoine de la Salle, for the verse Fabliau, opens a prospect which four centuries of progress have not closed. The early perfection of Italian, a language later to start than French, has been regretfully compared with this, and the blame has been thrown on the imperfection of mediaeval arrangements for educating the people. The complaint is mistaken, and almost foolish. It is not necessary to look much further than Italian itself to see the Nemesis of a too early development.

French, like English, which had a yet tardier literary growth, has pursued its course unhasting, unresting, to the present hour. Italian since the close of the sixteenth century has contributed not a single masterpiece to European literature, and not much that can be called good second-rate. It is not impossible that the political troubles of France--the Hundred Years' War especially--checked the intellectual development of the country, but if so, the check was in the long run altogether salutary. The middle ages were allowed to work themselves out--to produce their own natural fruit before the full influx of cla.s.sical literature. What is more, a breathing time was allowed after the exhaustion of the first set of influences, before the second was felt. Hence the French renaissance was a far more vigorous growth than the renaissance of Italy, which displays at once the signs of precocity and of premature decay. But we are more immediately concerned at the present moment with the literary results of the middle ages themselves.

It is only of late years that it has been possible fully to estimate these, and it is now established beyond the possibility of doubt that to France almost every great literary style as distinguished from great individual works is at this period due. The testimony of Brunetto Latini as to French being the common literary tongue of Europe in the thirteenth century has been quoted, and those who have read the foregoing chapters attentively will be able to recall innumerable instances of the literary supremacy of France. It must of course be remembered that she enjoyed for a long time the advantage of enlisting in her service the best wits of Southern England, of the wide district dominated by the Provencal dialects, and of no small part of Germany and of Northern Italy. But these countries took far more than they gave: the Chansons de Gestes were absorbed by Italy, the Arthurian Romances by Germany; the Fabliaux crossed the Alps to a.s.sume a prose dress in the Southern tongue; the mysteries and miracles made their way to every corner of Europe to be copied and developed. To the origination of the most successful of all artificial forms of poetry--the sonnet--France has indeed no claim, but this is almost a solitary instance. The three universally popular books (to use the word loosely) of profane literature in the middle ages, the epic of Arthur, the satire of Reynard the Fox, the allegorical romance of the Rose, are of French origin. In importance as in bulk no literature of these four centuries could dare to vie with French.

This astonis.h.i.+ng vigour of imaginative writing was however accompanied by a corresponding backwardness in the application of the vernacular to the use of the exacter and more serious departments of letters. Before Comines, the French chronicle was little more than gossip, though it was often the gossip of genius. No philosophical, theological, ethical, or political work deserving account was written in French prose before the beginning of the sixteenth century. The very language remained utterly unfitted for any such use. Its vocabulary, though enormously rich in mere volume, was dest.i.tute of terms of the subtlety and precision necessary for serious prose; its syntax was hardly equal to anything but a certain loose and flowing narration, which, when turned into the channel of argument, became either bald or prolix. The universal use of Latin for graver purposes had stunted and disabled it. At the same time great changes pa.s.sed over the language itself. In the fourteenth century it lost with its inflections not a little of its picturesqueness, and had as yet hit upon no means of supplying the want. The loose orthography of the middle ages had culminated in a fantastic redundance of consonants which was reproduced in the earliest printed books. This, as readers of Rabelais are aware, was an admirable a.s.sistance to grotesque effect, but it was fatal to elegance or dignity except in the omnipotent hands of a master like Rabelais himself. In the fifteenth century, moreover, the stereotyped forms of poetry were losing their freshness and grace while retaining their stately precision. The faculty of sustained verse narrative had fled the country, only to return at very long intervals and in very few cases. The natural and almost childish outspokenness of early times had brought about in all departments of comic literature a revolting coa.r.s.eness of speech. The farce and the prose tale almost outdo the more naf _fabliau_ in this.

Nothing like a critical spirit had yet manifested itself in matters literary, unless the universal following of a few accepted models may be called criticism. The very motives of the mediaeval literature, its unquestioning faith, its sense of a narrow circle of knowledge surrounded by a vast unknown, its acceptance of cla.s.ses and orders in church and state (tempered as this acceptance had been by the sharpest satire on particulars but by hardly any argument on general points), were losing their force. Everything was ready for a renaissance, and the next book will show how the Renaissance came and what it did.

BOOK II.

THE RENAISSANCE.

CHAPTER I.

VILLON, COMINES, AND THE LATER FIFTEENTH CENTURY.

[Sidenote: The Middle Ages and the Renaissance.]

[Sidenote: Characteristics of Fifteenth-century Literature.]

To determine at what period exactly mediaeval literature ceases in France and modern literature begins, is not one of the easiest problems of literary history. It has sometimes been solved by the obvious expedient of making out of the fifteenth century a period of transition, sometimes by continuing the cla.s.sification of 'mediaeval' until the time when Marot and Rabelais gave unmistakeable evidence of the presence and working of the modern spirit. Perhaps, however, there may, after all, have been something in the instinct which, in words clumsily enough chosen, made Boileau date modern French poetry from Villon[153], and there can hardly be any doubt that, as far as spirit if not form goes, modern French prose dates from Comines. These two contemporary authors, moreover, have in them the characteristic which perhaps more than any other distinguishes modern from mediaeval literature, the predominance of the personal element. In their works, especially if Villon be taken with the immediately preceding and partially contemporary Charles d'Orleans, a difference of the most striking kind is noticeable at once.

It is not that the prince who served the G.o.d Nonchaloir so piously is deficient in personal characteristics or personal attractiveness, but that his personality is still, so to speak, generic rather than individual. He is still the Trouvere of the n.o.bler cla.s.s, dallying with half-imaginary woes in the forms consecrated by tradition to the record of them. Not so the vagabond whose words after four centuries appeal directly to the spirit of the modern reader. That reader is cut off from Charles d'Orleans' world by a gulf across which he can only project himself by a great effort of study or of sympathetic determination. The barriers which separate him from Villon are slight enough, consisting mostly of trifling changes in language and manners which a little exertion easily overcomes.

The latter portion of the fifteenth century, or, to speak more correctly, its last two-thirds, have frequently been described as a 'dead season' in French literature. The description is not wholly just.

Even if, according to the plan just explained, we throw Charles d'Orleans and Antoine de la Salle, two names of great importance, back into the mediaeval period, and if we allow most of the chroniclers who preceded Comines to accompany them, there are still left, before the reign of Francis the First witnessed the definite blooming of the Renaissance in France, the two names of consummate importance which stand at the head of this chapter, a few minor writers of interest such as Coquillart, Baude, Martial d'Auvergne, an interesting group of literary or at least oratorical ecclesiastics, and a much larger and, from a literary point of view, more important group of elaborate versifiers, the so-called _grands rhetoriqueurs_ who preceded the Pleiade in endeavouring to Latinise the French tongue, and whose stiff verse produced by a natural rebound the easy grace of Clement Marot.

Each of these persons and groups will demand some notice, and the mention of them will bring us to the Renaissance of which the subjects of this chapter were the forerunners.

[Sidenote: Villon.]

Francois Villon[154], or Corbueil, or Corbier, or de Montcorbier, or des Loges, was certainly born at Paris in the year 1431. Of the date of his death nothing certain is known, some authorities extending his life towards the close of the century in order to adjust Rabelais' anecdotes of him[155], others supposing him to have died before the publication of the first edition of his works in 1489. That Villon was not his patronymic, whichsoever of his numerous aliases may really deserve that distinction, is certain. He was a citizen of Paris and a member of the university, having the status of _clerc_. But his youth was occupied in other matters than study. In 1455 he killed, apparently in self-defence, a priest named Philip Sermaise, fled from Paris, was condemned to banishment in default of appearance, and six months afterwards received letters of pardon. In 1456 a faithless mistress, Catherine de Vausselles, drew him into a second affray, in which he had the worst, and again he fled from Paris. During his absence a burglary committed in the capital put the police on the track of a gang of young good-for-nothings among whom Villon's name figured, and he was arrested, tried, tortured, and condemned to death. On appeal, however, the sentence was commuted to banishment. Four years after he was in prison at Meung, consigned thither by the Bishop of Orleans, but the king, Louis the Eleventh, set him free. Thenceforward nothing certain is known of him. He had at one time relations with Charles d'Orleans. Such are the bare facts of his singular life, to which the peculiar character of his work has directed perhaps disproportionate attention. This work consists of a poem in forty stanzas of eight octosyllabic lines (each rhymed a, b, a, b, b, c, b, c) called the _Pet.i.t Testament_[156]; of a poem in 173 similar stanzas called the _Grand Testament_, in which about a score of minor pieces, chiefly ballades or rondeaux, are inserted; of a _Codicil_ composed mainly of ballades; of a few separate pieces, and of some ballades in _argot_, collectively called _Le Jargon_. Besides these there are doubtful pieces, including a curious work called _Les Repues Franches_, which describes in octaves like those of the Testaments the swindling tricks of Villon and his companions, an excellent Dialogue between two characters, the Seigneurs de Mallepaye and Baillevent, and a still better Monologue ent.i.tled _Le Franc Archier de Bagnolet_. The Little Testament was written after the affair with Catherine de Vausselles, the Great Testament after his liberation from the Bishop's Prison at Meung. Many of the minor poems contain allusions which enable us to fix them to various events in the poet's life. The first edition of his works was, as has been said, published in 1489. In 1533 he had the honour of having Marot for editor, and up to the date of the Bibliophile Jacob's edition of 1854 (since when there have been several editions), the number had reached thirty-two.

The characteristics of Villon may be looked at either technically or from the point of view of the matter of his work. He had an extraordinary mastery of the most artificial forms of poetry which have ever been employed. The rondel, which Charles d'Orleans wrote with so much grace, he did not use, but his rondeaux are generally exquisite.

The ballade, however, was his special province. No writer has ever got the full virtue out of the recurrent rhymes and refrains, which are the special characteristics of the form, as Villon has. No one has infused into a mere string of names, such as his famous _Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis_ and others, such exquisitely poetical effects by dint of an epithet here and there and of a touching burden. But the matter of his verse is in many ways perfectly on a level with its manner. No one excels him in startling directness of phrase, in simple but infinite pathos of expression. Of the former, the sudden cry of the Belle Heaulmiere after the recital of her former triumphs--

Que m'en reste-t-il? honte et peche;

and the despairing conclusion of the lover of La Grosse Margot--

Je suis paillard, paillardise me suit--

are examples in point; of the latter the line in the rondeau to Death--

Deux etions et n'avions qu'un coeur.

No one has bolder strokes of the picturesque, as for instance--

De Constantin.o.ble L'emperier aux poings dores;

and no one can render the sombre horror of a scene better than Villon has rendered it in the famous epitaph of the gibbeted corpses--