A Short History of French Literature Part 9

_Note to Third Edition._--M. Gaston Paris has expressed some surprise at my remarks on metre (p. 63). This from so accomplished a scholar is a curious instance of the difficulty which Frenchmen seem to feel in appreciating quant.i.ty. To an English eye and ear which have been trained to cla.s.sical prosody the trochaic rhythm of, for instance, the Pastourelle quoted on p. 65, is unmistakable, and there are anapaestic metres to be found here and there in early poems of the same kind.

Indeed, all French poetry is easily scanned quant.i.tatively, though the usual authorities protest against such scansion. Voltaire, it is said, took Turgot's hexameters for prose, and the significance of this is the same whether the mistake, as is probable, was mischievous or whether it was genuine.

FOOTNOTES:

[67] Leipsic, 1870.

[68] See note at end of chapter.

[69] This miscellaneous lyric for the most part awaits collection and publication. M. G. Raynaud has given a valuable _Bibliographie des Chansonniers Francais des XIII'e et XIV'e siecles_. 2 vols., Paris, 1884. Also a collection of _motets_. Paris, 1881.

[70] Philippe Mouskes. This is it:

La terre fut pis en cest an Quar li vieux Quesnes estoit mors.

[71] The best edition is in Scheler's _Trouveres Belges_. Brussels, 1876.

[72] Rheims, 1851.

[73] The most convenient place to look for Adam's history and work is _Le Theatre Francais au Moyen Age_. Par Monmerque et Michel. Paris, 1874. There are also separate editions of him by Coussemaker, and more recently by A. Rambeau. Marburg, 1886.

[74] By A. Jubinal. 2nd edition. 3 vols. Paris, 1874.

[75] Ed. Roquefort. 2 vols. Paris, 1820. The first volume contains the lays; the later the fables, which have been noticed in the last chapter.

Later edition, Warnke. Halle, 1885. Marie also wrote a poem on the Purgatory of St. Patrick. Three other lays, _Tidorel_, _Gringamor_, and _Tiolet_ have been attributed to her, and are printed in _Romania_, vol.

viii.

[76] _Lays of France_, London, 1872.

CHAPTER VII.

SERIOUS AND ALLEGORICAL POETRY.

In consequence of the slowness with which prose was used for any regular literary purpose in France, verse continued to do duty for it until a comparatively late period in almost all departments of literature. By the very earliest years of the twelfth century, and probably much earlier (though we have no certain evidence of this latter fact), doc.u.ments of all kinds began to be written in verse of various forms.

Among the earliest serious verse that was written rank, as we might expect, verse chronicles. It was not till 1200 at soonest that long translations from the Latin in French prose were made, but such translations, and original works as well, were written in French verse long before.

[Sidenote: Verse Chronicles.]

The rhymed Chronicles were numerous, but, with rare exceptions, they cannot be said to be of any very great literary importance. Whether they were imitated directly from the Chansons de Gestes, or _vice versa_, is a question which, as it happens, can be settled without difficulty. For they are almost all in octosyllabic couplets, a metre certainly later than the a.s.sonanced decasyllabics of the earliest Chansons. The latter form and the somewhat later dodecasyllable or Alexandrine are rarely used for Verse Chronicles, the most remarkable exception being the spirited _Combat des Trente_[77], which is however very late, and the _Chronique de du Guesclin_ of the same date. There are earlier examples of history in Alexandrines (some are found in the twelfth century, such as the account of Henry the Second's Scotch Wars by Jordan Fantome, Chancellor of the diocese of Winchester), but they are not numerous or important. It is not unworthy of notice that the majority of the early Verse Chronicles are English or Anglo-Norman. The first of importance is that of Geoffrey Gaymar, whose Chronicle of English history was written about 1146. Gaymar was followed by a much better known writer, the Jerseyman Wace[78], who not only, as has been mentioned, versified Geoffrey of Monmouth into the _Brut_[79], but produced the important _Roman de Rou_[80], giving the history of the Dukes of Normandy and of the Conquest of England. The date of the _Brut_ is 1155, of the _Rou_ 1160. This latter is the better of the two, though Wace was not a great poet. It consists chiefly of octosyllabics, with a curious insertion of Alexandrines in rhymed not a.s.sonanced _laisses_. Wace was followed by Benoist de Sainte-More, who extended his Chronicle of the Dukes of Normandy to more than forty thousand verses. The 'Life of St. Thomas'

(Becket), by Garnier de Pont St. Maxence, also deserves notice, as does an anonymous poem on the English wars in Ireland. But the most interesting of this group is probably the history[81] of William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, who died in 1219 and who during his life played a great part in England. It abounds in pa.s.sages of historical interest and literary value. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the practice of writing history in verse gradually died out, yet some of the most important examples date from this time. Such are the Chronicles of Philippe Mouskes[82], a Fleming, in more than thirty thousand verses, extending from the Siege of Troy to the year 1243.

Mouskes is of some importance in literary history, because of the great extent to which he has drawn on the Chansons de Gestes for his information. In 1304 Guillaume Guiart, a native of Orleans, wrote in twelve thousand verses a Chronicle of the thirteenth century, including a few years earlier and later. There are a large number of other Verse Chronicles, but few of them are of much importance historically, and fewer still of any literary interest.

History, however, was by no means the only serious subject which took this incongruous form in the middle ages. The amount of miscellaneous verse written during the period between the end of the eleventh and the beginning of the fifteenth century is indeed enormous. Only a very small portion of it has ever been printed, and the mere summary description of the ma.n.u.scripts which contain it is as yet far from complete. If it be said generally that, during the greater part of these three hundred years, the first impulse of any one who wished to write, no matter on what subject, was to write in verse, and that the popular notion of the want of literary tastes in the middle ages is utterly mistaken, some idea may be formed of the vast extent of literature, poetical in form, which was then produced. Much no doubt of this literature is not in the least worthy of detailed notice; much, whether worthy or not, must from mere considerations of s.p.a.ce and proportion remain unnoticed here. What is possible, is to indicate briefly the chief forms, authors, and subjects, which fall under the heading of this chapter, and to give a somewhat detailed account of the great serious poem of mediaeval France, the _Roman de la Rose_. Peculiarities of metre and so forth will be indicated where it is necessary, but it may be said generally that the great ma.s.s of this literature is in octosyllabic couplets.

[Sidenote: Miscellaneous Satirical Verse.]

It has already been observed in discussing the Fabliaux that the first enquirers into old French literature were led to include a very miscellaneous a.s.sortment of poems under that head; and it may now be added that this miscellaneous a.s.sortment with much else const.i.tutes the _farrago_ of the present chapter. The two great poems of the _Roman du Renart_ and the _Roman de la Rose_ stand as representatives of the more or less serious poetry of the time, and everything else may be said to be included between them. Beginning nearest to the _Roman du Renart_ and its kindred Fabliaux, we find a vast number of half-satirical styles of poetry, many, if not most of them, known (according to what has been noted in the preface as characteristic of mediaeval literature) by distinctive form-names. Of these _dits_ and _debats_ have already been noticed, but it is not easy to give a notion of the number of the existing examples, or of the extraordinary diversity of subjects to which both, and especially the _dits_, extend. Perhaps some estimate may be formed from the fact that the _dits_ of three Flemish poets alone, Baudouin de Conde, Jean de Conde, and Watriquet de Couvin, fill four stout octavo volumes[83]. The subjects of these and of the large number of _dits_ composed by other writers and anonymous are almost innumerable. The earliest are for the most part simple enumerations of the names of streets, of street cries, of guilds, of coins, and such-like things. By degrees they become more definitely didactic, and at last allegorical moralising masters them as it does almost every other kind of poetry in the fourteenth century. The _debat_, sometimes called _dispute_, or _bataille_, is an easily understood variety of the _dit_. Ruteboeuf's princ.i.p.al _debat_ has been named; another in a less serious spirit is that between _Charlot et le Barbier_. There is a _Bataille des Vins_, a _Bataille de Careme et de Charnage_, a _Debat de l'Hiver et l'ete_, etc., etc. Another name much used for half-satirical, half-didactic verse was that of _Bible_, of which the most famous (probably because it was the first known) is that of Guyot de Provins,--a violent onslaught on the powers that were in Church and State by a discontented monk. An extract from it will ill.u.s.trate this division of the subject as well as anything else:--

Des fisicens me merveil: de lor huevre et de lor conseil rai ge certes mont grant merveille, nule vie ne s'apareille a la lor, trop par est diverse et sor totes autres perverse.

bien les nomme li communs nons; mais je ne cuit qu'i ne soit hons qui ne les doie mont douter.

il ne voudroient ja trover nul home sanz aucun mehaing.

maint oingnement font e maint baing ou il n'a ne senz ne raison, cil eschape d'orde prison qui de lor mains puet eschaper.

qui bien set mentir et guiler et faire n.o.ble contenance, tout ont trove fors la creance que les genz ont lor fait a bien.

tiex mil se font fisicen qui n'en sevent voir nes que gie.

li plus maistre sont mont changie de grant ennui, n'il n'est mestiers dont il soit tant de mencongiers.

il ocent mont de la gent: ja n'ont ne ami ne parent que il volsissent trover sain; de ce resont il trop vilain.

mont a d'ordure en ces lens.

qui en main a fisicens, se met par els. il m'ont eu entre lor mains: onques ne fu, ce cuit, nule plus orde vie.

je n'aim mie lor compaignie, si m'at dex, qant je sui sains: honiz est qui chiet en lor mains.

par foi, qant je malades fui, moi covint soffrir lor ennui.

_Testaments_ of the satirical kind, chiefly noteworthy for the brilliant use which Villon made of the tradition of composing them, _resveries_ and _fatrasies_ (nonsense poems with a more or less satirical drift), parodies of the offices of the Church, of its sermons, of the miracle plays, are the chief remaining divisions of the poetry which, under a light and scoffing envelope, conceals a serious purpose.

[Sidenote: Didactic verse. Philippe de Thaun.]

Such things have at all times been composed in verse, and the reason is sufficiently obvious. In the first place, the intention of the writers is to a certain extent masked, and in the second, the reader's attention is attracted. But the middle ages by no means confined the use of verse to such cases. Downright instruction was, as often as not, the object of the verse writer in those days. The earliest, and as such the most curious of didactic poems, are those of Philippe de Thaun, an Englishman of Norman extraction, who wrote in the first quarter of the twelfth century. His two works are a _Comput_, or Chronological Treatise, dedicated to an uncle of his, who was chaplain to Hugh BiG.o.d, Earl of Norfolk, and a _Bestiary_, or Zoological Catalogue, dedicated to Adela of Louvain, the wife of Henry the First. Written before the vogue of the versified Arthurian Romances had consecrated the octosyllable, these poems are in couplets of six syllables. Their great age, and to a certain extent their literary merit, deserve an extract:--

Monosceros est beste, un corn ad en la teste, pur ceo ad si a nun.

de buc ele ad facun.

par pucele eat prise, or oez en quel guise, quant hom le volt cacer et prendre et enginner, si vent horn al orest u sis repaires est; la met une pucele hors de sein sa mamele, e par odurement monosceros la sent; dune vent a la pucele, si baiset sa mamele, en sun devant se dort, issi vent a sa mort; li hom survent atant, ki l'ocit en dormant, u trestut vif le prent, si fait puis sun talent.

grant chose signefie, ne larei nel vus die.

Monosceros griu est, en franceis un-corn est: beste de tel baillie Jhesu Crist signefie; un deu est e serat e fud e parmaindrat; en la virgine se mist, e pur hom charn i prist, e pur virginited, pur mustrer casteed, a virgine se parut e virgine le conceut.

virgine est e serat e tuz jurz parmaindrat.

ores oez brefment le signefement.

Ceste beste en verte nus signefie de; la virgine signefie, sacez, sancte Marie; par sa mamele entent sancte eglise ens.e.m.e.nt; e puis par le baiser ceo deit signefer, que hom quant il se dort en semblance est de mort: des c.u.m home dormi, ki en cruiz mort sufri, ert sa destructun nostre redemptun, e sun traveillement nostre repos.e.m.e.nt.

si deceut des dable par semblant cuvenable; anme e cors sunt un, issi fud des et hum, e iceo signefie beste de tel baillie.

_Bestiaries_ and _Computs_ (the French t.i.tle of the Chronologies) were for some time the favourites with didactic verse writers, but before long the whole encyclopaedia, as it was then understood, was turned into verse. Astrology, hunting, geography, law, medicine, history, the art of war, all had their treatises; and latterly _Tresors_, or complete popular educators, as they would be called nowadays, were composed, the best-known of which is that of Walter of Metz in 1245.

[Sidenote: Moral and Theological verse.]

All, or almost all, these works, written as they were in an age sincerely pious, if somewhat grotesque in its piety, and theoretically moral, if somewhat loose in its practice, contained not only abundant moralising, but also more or less theology of the mystical kind. It would therefore have been strange if ethics and theology themselves had wanted special exponents in verse. Before the middle of the twelfth century Samson of Nanteuil (again an Englishman by residence) had versified the Proverbs of Solomon, and in the latter half of the same century vernacular lives of the saints begin to be numerous. Perhaps the most popular of these was the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat, of which the fullest poetical form has been left us by an English trouvere of the thirteenth century named Chardry, by whom we have also a verse rendering of the 'Seven Sleepers,' and some other poems[84]. Somewhat earlier, Hermann of Valenciennes was a fertile author of this sort of work, composing a great _Bible de Sapience_ or versification of the Old Testament, and a large number of lives of saints. Of books of Eastern origin, one of the most important was the _Castoiement d'un Pere a son Fils_, which comes from the _Panchatantra_, though not directly. The translated work had great vogue, and set the example of other _Castoiements_ or warnings. The monk Helinand at the end of the twelfth century composed a poem on 'Death,' and a vast number of similar poems might be mentioned. The commonest perhaps of all is a dialogue _Des trois Morts et des trois Vifs_, which exists in an astonis.h.i.+ng number of variants. Gradually the tone of all this work becomes more and more allegorical. _Dreams, Mirrors, Castles_, such as the 'Castle of Seven Flowers,' a poem on the virtues, make their appearance.

[Sidenote: Allegorical verse.]

[Sidenote: The Roman de la Rose.]

The question of the origin of this habit of allegorising and personification is one which has been often incidentally discussed by literary historians, but which has never been exhaustively treated. It is certain that, at a very early period in the middle ages, it makes its appearance, though it is not in full flouris.h.i.+ng until the thirteenth century. It seems to have been a reflection in light literature of the same att.i.tude of mind which led to the development of the scholastic philosophy, and, as in the case of that philosophy, Byzantine and Eastern influences may have been at work. Certain it is that in some of the later Greek romances[85], something very like the imagery of the _Roman de la Rose_ is discoverable. Perhaps, however, we need not look further than to the natural result of leisure, mental activity, and literary skill, working upon a very small stock of positive knowledge, and restrained by circ.u.mstances within a very narrow range of employment. However this may be, the allegorising habit manifests itself recognisably enough in French literature towards the close of the twelfth century. In the _Meraugis de Portlesguez_ of Raoul de Houdenc, the pa.s.sion for arguing out abstract questions of lovelore is exemplified, and in the _Roman des Eles_ of the same author the knightly virtues are definitely personified, or at least allegorised. At the same time some at all events of the Troubadours, especially Peire Wilhem, carried the practice yet further. _Merci_, _Pudeur_, _Loyaute_, are introduced by that poet as persons whom he met as he rode on his travels. In Thibaut de Champagne a still further advance was made. The representative poem of this allegorical literature, and moreover one of the most remarkable compositions furnished by the mediaeval period in France, is the _Roman de la Rose_[86]. It is doubtful whether any other poem of such a length has ever attained a popularity so wide and so enduring. The _Roman de la Rose_ extends to more than twenty thousand lines, and is written in a very peculiar style; yet it maintained its vogue, not merely in France but throughout Europe, for nearly three hundred years from the date of its commencement, and for more than two hundred from that of its conclusion. The history of the composition of the poem is singular. It was begun by William of Lorris, of whom little or nothing is known, but whose work must, so far as it is easy to make out, have been done before 1240, and is sometimes fixed at 1237. This portion extends to 4670 lines, and ends quite abruptly. About forty years later, Jean de Meung, or Clopinel, afterwards one of Philippe le Bel's paid men of letters, continued it without preface, taking up William of Lorris' cue, and extended it to 22,817 verses, preserving the metre and some of the personages, but entirely altering the spirit of the treatment. The importance of the poem requires that such brief a.n.a.lysis as s.p.a.ce will allow shall be given here. Its general import is sufficiently indicated by the heading,--

Ci est le Rommant de la Rose Ou l'art d'amors est tote enclose;

though the rage for allegory induced its readers to moralise even its allegorical character, and to indulge in various far-fetched explanations of it. In the twentieth year of his age, the author says, he fell asleep and dreamed a dream. He had left the city on a fair May morning, and walked abroad till he came to a garden fenced in with a high wall. On the wall were portrayed figures, Hatred, _Felonnie_, _Villonie_, Covetousness, Avarice, Envy, Sadness, Old Age, _Papelardie_ (Hypocrisy), Poverty--all of which are described at length. He strives to enter in, and at last finds a barred wicket at which he is admitted by Dame Oiseuse (Leisure), who tells him that Deduit (Delight) and his company are within. He finds the company dancing and singing, Dame Liesse (Enjoyment) being the chief songstress, while Courtesy greets him and invites him to take part in the festival. The G.o.d of love himself is then described, with many of his suite--Beauty, Riches, etc. A further description of the garden leads to the fountain of Narcissus, whose story is told at length. By this the author, who is thenceforth called the lover, sees and covets a rosebud. But thorns and thistles bar his way to it, and the G.o.d of love pierces him with his arrows. He does homage to the G.o.d, who accepts his service, and addresses a long discourse to him on his future duties and conduct. The prospect somewhat alarms him, when a new personage, Bel Acueil (Gracious Reception), comes up and tenders his services to the lover, the G.o.d having disappeared.

Almost immediately, however, Dangier[87] makes his appearance, and drives both the lover and Bel Acueil out of the garden. As the former is bewailing his fate, Reason appears and remonstrates with him. He persists in his desire, and parleys with Dangier, both directly and by amba.s.sadors, so that in the end he is brought back by Bel Acueil into the garden and allowed to see but not to touch the rose. Venus comes to his aid, and he is further allowed to kiss it. At this, however, Shame, Jealousy, and other evil agents reproach Dangier. Bel Acueil is immured in a tower, and the lover is once more driven forth.