Medieval English Literature Part 6

And he refuses to let Little John burn the house of the treacherous Prioress where he had come by his death. This is heroic poetry in its simplest form, and quite true to its proper nature.

The beauty of the ballads is uncertain and often corrupted by forgetfulness and the ordinary accidents of popular tradition. It is not always true that the right subject has the best form. But the grace of the ballads is unmistakable; it is unlike anything in the contemporary romances, because it is lyrical poetry. It is often vague and intangible.

It is never the same as narrative romance.

He's tane three locks o' her yellow hair, _Binnorie, O Binnorie!_ And wi' them strung his harp so fair _By the bonny mill-dams o' Binnorie_.

It is the singing voice that makes the difference; and it is a difference of thought as well as of style.

CHAPTER VI COMIC POETRY

France sets the model for comic as well as romantic poetry, in the Middle Ages. In romance the English were not able for a long time-hardly before Chaucer and Gower-to imitate the French style properly; the French sentiment was beyond them, not appreciated; they took the stories, the action and adventures, and let the sentiment alone, or abridged it. The reasons for this are obvious. But there seems to be no reason, except accident, for the way in which the English writers in those times neglected the French comic literature of the twelfth century. Very little of it is represented in the English of the following centuries; yet what there is in English corresponding to the French _fabliaux_ and to Reynard the Fox is thoroughly well done. The English wit was quite equal to the French in matters such as these; there were no difficulties of style or caste in the way, such as prevented the English minstrels from using much of the French romantic, sentimental rhetoric. There might have been a thirteenth-century English _Reynard_, as good as the High or Low German _Reynards_; that is proved by the one short example (295 lines) in which an episode of the great medieval comic epic is told by an English versifier-the story of _The Vox and the Wolf_. This is one of the best of all the practical jokes of Reynard-the well-known story of the Fox and the Wolf in the well. It is told again, in a different way, among the Fables of the Scottish poet Robert Henryson; it is also one of the stories of Uncle Remus.

A vox gan out of the wode go,

and made his way to a hen-roost, where he got three hens out of five, and argued with Chauntecler the c.o.c.k, explaining, though unsuccessfully, that a little blood-letting might be good for him; thence, being troubled with thirst, he went to the well. The well had two buckets on a rope over a pulley; the Fox 'ne understood nought of the gin' and got into one of the buckets and went down to the bottom of the well; where he repented of his gluttony. The comic epic is as moral as Piers Plowman; that is part of the game.

Then ('out of the depe wode') appeared the Wolf, Sigrim (Isengrim), also thirsty, and looking for a drink; he heard the lamentations of his gossip Reneuard, and sat down by the well and called to him. Then at last the Fox's wit returned and he saw how he might escape. There was nothing (he said) he would have prayed for more than that his friend should join him in the happy place: 'here is the bliss of Paradise'. 'What! art thou dead?' says the Wolf: 'this is news; it was only three days ago that thou and thy wife and children all came to dine with me.' 'Yes! I am dead', says the Fox. 'I would not return to the world again, for all the world's wealth. Why should I walk in the world, in care and woe, in filth and sin? But this place is full of all happiness; here is mutton, both sheep and goat.' When the Wolf heard of this good meat his hunger overcame him and he asked to be let in. 'Not till thou art shriven', says the Fox; and the Wolf bends his head, sighing hard and strong, and makes his confession, and gets forgiveness, and is happy.

Nou ich am in clene live Ne recche ich of childe ne of wive.

'But tell me what to do.' 'Do!' quoth the Fox, 'leap into the bucket, and come down.' And the Wolf going down met the Fox half-way; Reynard, 'glad and blithe' that the Wolf was a true penitent and in clean living, promised to have his soul-knell rung and ma.s.ses said for him.

The well, it should be said, belonged to a house of friars; Aylmer the 'master curtler' who looked after the kitchen-garden came to the well in the morning; and the Wolf was pulled out and beaten and hunted; he found no bliss and no indulgence of blows.

The French story has some points that are not in the English; in the original, the two buckets on the pulley are explained to Isengrim as being G.o.d's balance of good and evil, in which souls are weighed. Also there is a more satisfactory account of the way Reynard came to be entrapped. In the English story the failure of his wit is rather disgraceful; in the French he takes to the bucket because he thinks he sees his wife Hermeline in the bottom of the well; it is a clear starlight night, and as he peers over the rim of the well he sees the figure looking up at him, and when he calls there is a hollow echo which he takes for a voice answering. But there is no such difference of taste and imagination here between the French and the English Reynard as there is between the French and the English chivalrous romances.

The _Roman de Renart_ is generally, and justly, taken as the ironical counterpart of medieval epic and romance; an irreverent criticism of dignitaries, spiritual and temporal, the great narrative comedy of the Ages of Faith and of Chivalry. The comic short stories usually called _fabliaux_ are most of them much less intelligent; rhyming versions of ribald jokes, very elementary. But there are great differences among them, and some of them are worth remembering. It is a pity there is no English version of the _jongleur_, the professional minstrel, who, in the absence of the devils, is put in charge of the souls in h.e.l.l, but is drawn by St. Peter to play them away at a game of dice-the result being that he is turned out; since then the Master Devil has given instructions: No Minstrels allowed within.

There are few English _fabliaux_; there is perhaps only one preserved as a separate piece by itself, the story of _Dame Sirith_. This is far above the ordinary level of such things; it is a shameful practical joke, but there is more in it than this; the character of Dame Sirith, in her machinations to help the distressed lover of his neighbour's wife, is such as belongs to comedy and to satire, not to the ordinary vulgar 'merry tale'.

It is hard to find any other separate tale of this cla.s.s in English; but the stories of the Seven Wise Masters, the Seven Sages of Rome, are many of them impossible to distinguish from the common type of the French _fabliaux_, though they are often cla.s.sed among the romances. There are many historical problems connected with the medieval short stories.

Although they do not appear in writing to any large extent before the French rhyming versions, they are known to have been current long before the twelfth century and before the French language was used in literature. There are Latin versions of some of them composed in Germany before the _fabliaux_ had come into existence; one of them in substance is the same as Hans Andersen's story of Big Claus and Little Claus, which also is found as one of the _fabliaux_. Evidently, there are a number of comic stories which have been going about for hundreds (or thousands) of years without any need of a written version. At any time, in any country, it may occur to some one to put one of those stories into literary language. Two of the German-Latin comic poems are in elaborate medieval verse, set to religious tunes, in the form of the _Sequentia_-a fact which is mentioned here only to show that there was nothing popular in these German experiments. They were not likely to found a school of comic story-telling; they were too difficult and exceptional; literary curiosities. The French _fabliaux_, in the ordinary short couplets and without any literary ornament, were absolutely popular; it needed no learning and not much wit to understand them. So that, as they spread and were circulated, they came often to be hardly distinguishable from the traditional stories which had been going about all the time in spoken, not written, forms. It was one of the great popular successes of medieval French literature; and it was due partly to the French stories themselves, and partly to the example which they set, that comic literature was cultivated in the later Middle Ages. The French stories were translated and adapted by Boccaccio and many others; and when the example had once been given, writers in different languages could find stories of their own without going to the _fabliaux_.

Does it matter much to any one where these stories came from, and how they pa.s.sed from oral tradition into medieval (or modern) literary forms?

The question is more reasonable than such questions usually are, because most of these stories are trivial, they are not all witty, and many of them are villainous. But the historical facts about them serve to bring out, at any rate, the extraordinary talent of the French for making literary profit out of every kind of material. Any one might have thought of writing out these stories which every one knew; but, with the exception of the few Latin experiments, this was done by n.o.body till the French took it up.

Further, those 'merry tales' come into the whole subject of the relations between folk-lore and literature, which is particularly important (for those who like that sort of inquiry) in the study of the Middle Ages. All the fiction of the Middle Ages, comic or romantic, is full of things which appear in popular tales like those collected by Grimm in Germany or by Campbell of Islay in the West Highlands. So much of medieval poetry is traditional or popular-the ballads especially-that folk-lore has to be studied more carefully than is needful when one is dealing with later times. With regard to short comic tales of the type of the _fabliaux_, part of the problem is easy enough, if one accepts the opinion that stories like _Big Claus and Little Claus_, which are found all over the world, and which can be proved to have been current orally for centuries, are things existing, and travelling, independently of written books, which may at any time be recorded in a written form. The written form may be literary, as when the story is written in Latin verse by an early German scholar, or in French medieval verse by a minstrel or a minstrel's hack, or in fine Danish prose by Hans Andersen. Or it may be written down by a scientific collector of folk-lore keeping closely to the actual phrasing of the unsophisticated story-teller; as when the plot is found among the Ananzi stories of the negroes in the West Indies. The life of popular stories is mysterious; but it is well known in fact, and there is no difficulty in understanding how the popular story which is perennial in every climate may any day be used for the literary fas.h.i.+on of that day.

It is rather strange that while there is so much folk-lore in medieval literature there should be so few medieval stories which take up exactly the plots of any of the popular traditional tales. And it is a curious coincidence that two of the plots from folk-lore which are used in medieval literature, distinctly, by themselves, keeping to the folk-lore outlines, should also appear in literary forms equally distinct and no less true to their traditional shape among the Tales of Andersen. One is that which has just been mentioned, _Big Claus and Little Claus_, which comes into English rather late in the Middle Ages as the _Friars of Berwick_. The other is the _Travelling Companion_, which in English rhyming romance is called _Sir Amadace_. There is something fortunate about those two stories which has gained for them more attention than the rest. They both come into the Elizabethan theatre, where again it is curiously rare to find a folk-lore plot. One is Davenport's _New Trick to Cheat the Devil_; the other, the _Travelling Companion_, is Peele's _Old Wives' Tale_.

With most of the short stories it is useless to seek for any definite source. To ask for the first author of _Big Claus and Little Claus_ is no more reasonable than to ask who was the inventor of High Dutch and Low Dutch. But there is a large section of medieval story-telling which is in a different condition, and about which it is not wholly futile to ask questions of pedigree. _The Seven Sages of Rome_ is the best example of this cla.s.s; it has been remarked already that many things in the book are like the _fabliaux_; but unlike most of the _fabliaux_ they have a literary origin which can be traced. The Book of the Seven Wise Masters of Rome (which exists in many different forms, with a variety of contents) is an Oriental collection of stories in a framework; that is to say, there is a plot which leads to the telling of stories, as in the _Arabian Nights_, the _Decameron_, the _Canterbury Tales_. The _Arabian Nights_ were not known in the West till the beginning of the eighteenth century, but the Oriental plan of a group of stories was brought to Europe at least as early as the twelfth century. The plot of the _Seven Sages_ is that the son of the Emperor of Rome is falsely accused by his stepmother, and defended by the Seven Masters, the Empress and the Masters telling stories against one another. As the object of the Masters is to prove that women are not to be trusted, it may be understood that their stories generally agree in their moral with the common disrespectful 'merry tales'. Among the lady's stories are some of a different complexion; one of these is best known in England through W. R.

Spencer's ballad of the death of Gelert, the faithful hound who saved the child of his lord, and was hastily and unjustly killed in error. Another is the story of the Master Thief, which is found in the second book of Herodotus-the treasure of Rhampsinitus, king of Egypt.

One of those Oriental fables found among the old French short stories comes into English long afterwards in the form of Parnell's _Hermit_.

Although the _fabliaux_ are not very largely represented in medieval English rhyme, there is a considerable amount of miscellaneous comic verse. One of the great differences between Middle English and Anglo-Saxon writings (judging from what is extant) is that in Middle English there is far more jesting and nonsense. The best of the comic pieces is one that might be reckoned along with the _fabliaux_ except that there is no story in it; the description of the _Land of c.o.c.kayne_, sometimes called the land of Readymade, where the geese fly about roasted-

Yet I do you mo to wit The geese y-roasted on the spit Fleeth to that abbey, Got it wot And gredeth: Geese all hot, all hot!

The land of c.o.c.kayne is a burlesque Paradise 'far in the sea by West of Spain'.

There beth rivers great and fine Of oil, milk, honey and wine; Water serveth there to no thing, But to sight and to was.h.i.+ng.

This piece, and _Reynard and Isengrim (The Fox and the Wolf)_, and others, show that fairly early, and before the French language had given way to English as the proper speech for good society, there was some talent in English authors for light verse, narrative or descriptive, for humorous stories, and for satire. The English short couplets of those days-of the time of Henry III and Edward I-are at no disadvantage as compared with the French. Anything can be expressed in that familiar verse which is possible in French-anything, except the finer shades of sentiment, for which as yet the English have no mind, and which must wait for the authors of the _Confessio Amantis_ and the _Book of the d.u.c.h.ess Blanche_.

But there is one early poem-a hundred, it may be a hundred and fifty, years before Chaucer-in which not the sentiment but something much more characteristic of Chaucer is antic.i.p.ated in a really wonderful way. _The Owl and the Nightingale_ is an original poem, written in the language of Dorset at a time when nothing English was considered 'courteous'. Yet it is hard to see what is wanting to the poem to distinguish it from the literature of polite society in the Augustan ages. What is there provincial in it, except the language? And why should the language be called, except in a technical and literal sense, rustic, when it is used with a perfect command of idiom, with tact and discretion, with the good humour that comprehends many different things and motives at once, and the irony which may be a check on effusive romance, but never a hindrance to grace and beauty? Urbanity is the right word, the name one cannot help using, for the temper of this rustic and provincial poem. It is urbane, like Horace or Addison, without any town society to support the author in his criticism of life. The author is like one of the personages in his satire, the Wren, who was bred in the greenwood, but brought up among mankind-in the humanities:

For theih heo were ybred a wolde Heo was ytowen among mankenne, And hire wisdom broughte thenne.

_The Owl and the Nightingale_ is the most miraculous piece of writing, or, if that is too strong a term, the most contrary to all preconceived opinion, among the medieval English books. In the condition of the English language in the reign of Henry III, with so much against it, there was still no reason why there should not be plenty of English romances and a variety of English songs, though they might not be the same sort of romances and songs as were composed in countries like France or Germany, and though they might be wanting in the 'finer shades'. But all the chances, as far as we can judge, were against the production of humorous impartial essays in verse. Such things are not too common at any time. They were not common even in French polite literature in the thirteenth century. In the century after, Froissart in French, Gower and of course Chaucer in English have the same talent for light familiar rhyming essays that is shown by Prior and Swift. The early English poet had discovered for himself a form which generally requires ages of training and study before it can succeed.

His poem is ent.i.tled in one of the two MSS. _altercatio inter Philomenam et Bubonem_: 'A debate between the Nightingale and the Owl.' Debates, contentions, had been a favourite literary device for a long time in many languages. It was known in Anglo-Saxon poetry. It was common in France.

There were contentions of Summer and Winter, of the Soul and the Body, the Church and the Synagogue, of Fast and Feasting; there were also (especially in the Provencal school) debates between actual men, one poet challenging another. The originality of _The Owl and the Nightingale_ argument is that it is not, like so many of those poetical disputations, simply an arrangement of all the obvious commonplaces for and against one side and the other. It is a true comedy; not only is the writer impartial, but he keeps the debate alive; he shows how the contending speakers feel the strokes, and hide their pain, and do their best to face it out with the adversary. Also, the debate is not a mere got-up thing.

It is Art against Philosophy; the Poet meeting the strong though not silent Thinker, who tells him of the Immensities and Infinities. The author agrees with Plato and Wordsworth that the nightingale is 'a creature of a fiery heart', and that the song is one of mirth and not lamentation. Yet it is not contrasted absolutely with the voice of the contemplative person. If it were, the debate would come to an end, or would turn into mere railing accusations-of which there is no want, it may be said, along with the more serious arguments. What makes the dispute worth following, what lifts it far above the ordinary medieval conventions, is that each party shares something of the other's mind. The Owl wishes to be thought musical; the Nightingale is anxious not to be taken for a mere worldling.

CHAPTER VII ALLEGORY

Allegory is often taken to be the proper and characteristic mode of thought in the Middle Ages, and certainly there is no kind of invention which is commoner. The allegorical interpretation of Scripture was the regular, the universal method employed by preachers and commentators.

Anglo-Saxon religious writings are full of it. At the Revival of Learning, five hundred years after aelfric, the end of the Middle Ages is marked by a definite attack upon the allegorical method, an attack carried on by religious reformers and cla.s.sical scholars, who held that allegory perverted and destroyed the genuine teaching of Scripture, and the proper understanding of Virgil and Ovid.

The book in which this medieval taste is most plainly exhibited is the _Gesta Romanorum_, a collection of stories, in Latin prose, drawn from many different sources, each story having the moral interpretation attached to it, for the use of preachers.

One of the most popular subjects for moral interpretation was natural history. There is a book called _Physiologus_-'the Natural Philosopher'-which went through all the languages in the same way as the story of Alexander or the book of the Seven Wise Masters. There are fragments of an Anglo-Saxon rendering, in verse-the _Whale_, and the _Panther_, favourite examples. The Whale is the Devil; the Whale lying in the sea with his back above water is often mistaken by sailors for an island; they land on his back to rest, and the Whale goes down with them to the depths. The common name for these natural histories (versions or adaptations of _Physiologus_) is 'Bestiary'; there is an English _Bestiary_ of the beginning of the thirteenth century, most of it in the irregular alliterative verse which seems to have been common at that date; some of it is in fairly regular rhyme.

Allegorical interpretation of Scripture, or of stories, or of natural history is not the same thing as allegorical invention. This is sometimes forgotten, but it is clear enough that an allegory such as the _Pilgrim's Progress_ has a quite different effect on the mind, and requires a different sort of imagination, from the allegorical work which starts from a given text and spins out some sort of moral from it. Any one with a little ingenuity can make an allegorical interpretation of any matter.

It is a different thing to invent and carry on an allegorical story. One obvious difference is that in the first case-for example in the _Bestiary_-the two meanings, literal and allegorical, are separate from one another. Each chapter of the _Bestiary_ is in two parts; first comes the _nature_ of the beast-_natura leonis, etc._-the natural history of the lion, the ant, the whale, the panther and so forth; then comes the _signification_. In the other kind of allegory, though there is a double meaning, there are not two separate meanings presented one after the other to the mind. The signification is given along with, or through, the scene and the figures. Christian in the _Pilgrim's Progress_ is not something different from the Christian man whom he represents allegorically; Mr. Greatheart, without any interpretation at all, is recognized at once as a courageous guide and champion. So when the Middle Ages are blamed for their allegorical tastes it may be well to distinguish between the frequently mechanical allegory which forces a moral out of any object, and the imaginative allegory which puts fresh pictures before the mind. The one process starts from a definite story or fact, and then destroys the story to get at something inside; the other makes a story and asks you to accept it and keep it along with its allegorical meaning.

Thus allegorical invention, in poetry like Spenser's, or in imaginative prose like Bunyan's, may be something not very different from imaginative work with no conscious allegory in it at all. All poetry has something of a representative character in it, and often it matters little for the result whether the composer has any definite symbolical intention or not.

_Beowulf_ or _Samson Agonistes_ might be said to 'stand for' heroism, just as truly as the Red Cross Knight in Spenser, or Mr. Valiant for Truth in the _Pilgrim's Progress_. So in studying medieval allegories either in poetry, painting or sculpture, it seems advisable to consider in each case how far the artist has strained his imagination to serve an allegorical meaning, or whether he has not succeeded in being imaginative with no proper allegorical meaning at all.

By far the best known and most influential of medieval allegories is the _Romance of the Rose_. Both in France and in England it kept its place as a poetical example and authority from the thirteenth century till well on in the sixteenth. It is the work of two authors; the later, Jean Clopinel or Jean de Meung, taking up the work of Guillaume de Lorris about 1270, forty years after the death of the first inventor. The part written by Jean Clopinel is a rambling allegorical satire, notorious for its slander against women. The earlier part, by Guillaume de Lorris, is what really made the fame and spread the influence of the _Roman de la Rose_, though the second part was not far below it in importance.

Guillaume de Lorris is one of those authors, not very remarkable for original genius, who put together all the favourite ideas and sentiments of their time in one book from which they come to be distributed widely among readers and imitators. His book is an allegory of all the spirit and doctrine of French romantic poetry for the past hundred years; and as the French poets had taken all they could from the lyric poets of Provence, the _Roman de la Rose_ may be fairly regarded as an abstract of the Provencal lyrical ideas almost as much as of French sentiment. It was begun just at the time when the Provencal poetry was ended in the ruin of the South and of the Southern chivalry, after the Albigensian crusade.

No apology is needed for speaking of this poem in a discourse on English literature. Even if Chaucer had not translated it, the _Roman de la Rose_ would still be a necessary book for any one who wishes to understand not only Chaucer but the poets of his time and all his successors down to Spenser. The influence of the _Roman de la Rose_ is incalculable. It is acknowledged by the poet whose style is least like Chaucer's, except for its liveliness, among all the writers in the reign of Edward III-by the author of the alliterative poem on _Purity_, who is also generally held to be the author of the _Pearl_ and of _Sir Gawayne_, and who speaks with respect of 'Clopyngel's clene rose'.

It is thoroughly French in all its qualities-French of the thirteenth century, using ingeniously the ideas and the form best suited to the readers whom it sought to win.

One of the t.i.tles of the _Roman de la Rose_ is the _Art of Love_. The name is taken from a poem of Ovid's which was a favourite with more than one French poet before Guillaume de Lorris. It appealed to them partly on account of its subject, and partly because it was a didactic poem. It suited the common medieval taste for exposition of doctrine, and the _Roman de la Rose_ which follows it and copies its t.i.tle is a didactic allegory. In every possible way, in its plan, its doctrine, its sentiment, its decoration and machinery, the _Roman de la Rose_ collects all the things that had been approved by literary tradition and conveys them, with their freshness renewed, to its successors. It concludes one period; it is a summary of the old French romantic and sentimental poetry, a narrative allegory setting forth the ideas that might be extracted from Provencal lyric. Then it became a storehouse from which those ideas were carried down to later poets, among others to Chaucer and the Chaucerian school. Better than anything else, the descriptive work in the _Roman de la Rose_ brings out its peculiar success as an intermediary between earlier and later poets. The old French romantic authors had been fond of descriptions, particularly descriptions of pictorial subjects used as decoration, in painting or tapestry, for a magnificent room. The _Roman de la Rose_, near the beginning, describes the allegorical figures on the outside wall of the garden, and this long and elaborate pa.s.sage, of the same kind as many earlier descriptions, became in turn, like everything else in the book, an example for imitation. How closely it is related to such arts as it describes was proved in Ruskin's _Fors Clavigera_, where along with his notes on the _Roman de la Rose_ are ill.u.s.trations from Giotto's allegorical figures in the chapel of the Arena at Padua.

The 'formal garden' of the Rose is equally true, inside the wall-