Medieval English Literature Part 4

There in the middle of a lawn he saw a fair high castle of gold and silver and precious stones.

No man might tell ne think in thought The riches that therein was wrought.

The porter let him in, as a minstrel, and he was brought before the king and queen. 'How do you come here?' said the king; 'I never sent for you, and never before have I known a man so hardy as to come unbidden.' Then Sir Orfeo put in a word for the minstrels; 'It is our manner', he said, 'to come to every man's house unbidden',

'And though we nought welcome be Yet we must proffer our game or glee.'

Then he took his harp and played, and the king offered him whatever he should ask.

'Minstrel, me liketh well thy glee.'

Orfeo asked for the lady bright. 'Nay', said the king, 'that were a foul match, for in her there is no blemish and thou art rough and black'.

'Fouler still', said Orfeo, 'to hear a leasing from a king's mouth'; and the king then let him go with good wishes, and Orfeo and Erodys went home. The steward had kept the kingdom truly; 'thus came they out of care'.

It is all as simple as can be; a rescue out of fairyland, through the power of music; the ideas are found everywhere, in ballads and stories.

The ending is happy, and nothing is said of the injunction not to look back. It was probably left out when Orpheus was turned into a fairy tale, on account of the power of music; the heart of the people felt that Orpheus the good harper ought not to be subjected to the common plot. For there is nothing commoner in romance or in popular tales than forgetfulness like that of Orpheus when he lost Eurydice; the plot of _Sir Launfal_ e.g. turns on that; he was warned not to speak of his fairy wife, but he was led, by circ.u.mstances over which he had no control, to boast of her-

To speke ne mighte he forgo And said the queen before: 'I have loved a fairer woman Than thou ever laidest thine eye upon, This seven year and more!'

The drama of _Lohengrin_ keeps this idea before the public (not to speak of the opera of _Orfeo_), and _Lohengrin_ is a medieval German romance.

The Breton lay of Orpheus would not have been in any way exceptional if it had kept to the original fable; the beauty of it loses nothing by the course which it has preferred to take, the happy ending. One may refer to it as a standard, to show what can be done in the medieval art of narrative, with the simplest elements and smallest amount of decoration.

It is minstrel poetry, popular poetry-the point is clear when King Orfeo excuses himself to the King of Faerie by the rules of his profession as a minstrel; that was intended to produce a smile, and applause perhaps, among the audience. But though a minstrel's poem it is far from rude, and it is quite free from the ordinary faults of rambling and prosing, such as Chaucer ridiculed in his _Geste of Sir Thopas_. It is all in good compa.s.s, and coherent; nothing in it is meaningless or ill-placed.

_Sir Tristrem_ is a great contrast to _Sir Orfeo_; not an absolute contrast, for neither is this story rambling or out of compa.s.s. The difference between the two is that _Sir Orfeo_ is nearly perfect as an English representative of the 'Breton lay'-i.e. the short French romantic story like the _Lais_ of Marie de France; while _Sir Tristrem_ represents no French style of narrative poetry, and is not very successful (though technically very interesting) as an original English experiment in poetical form. It is distinctly clever, as it is likewise ambitious. The poet intends to do finer things than the common. He adopts a peculiar stanza, not one of the easiest-a stanza more fitted for lyric than narrative poetry, and which is actually used for lyrical verse by the poet Laurence Minot. It is in short lines, well managed and effective in their way, but it is a thin tinkling music to accompany the tragic story.

Ysonde bright of hewe Is far out in the sea; A wind again them blew That sail no might there be; So rew the knightes trewe, Tristrem, so rew he, Ever as they came newe He one again them three Great swink- Sweet Ysonde the free Asked Brengwain a drink.

The cup was richly wrought, Of gold it was, the pin; In all the world was nought Such drink as there was in; Brengwain was wrong bethought To that drink she gan win And sweet Ysonde it betaught; She bad Tristrem begin To say: Their love might no man twin Till their ending day.

The stage is that of a little neat puppet-show; with figures like those of a miniature, dressed in bright armour, or in scarlet and vair and grey-the rich cloth, the precious furs, grey and ermine, which so often represent the glory of this world in the old romances-

Ysonde of highe pris, The maiden bright of hewe, That wered fow and gris And scarlet that was newe; In warld was none so wis Of crafte that men knewe.

There is a large group of rhyming romances which might be named after Chaucer's _Sir Thopas_-the companions of _Sir Thopas_. Chaucer's burlesque is easily misunderstood. It is criticism, and it is ridicule; it shows up the true character of the common minstrelsy; the rambling narrative, the conventional stopgaps, the complacent childish vanity of the popular artist who has his audience in front of him and knows all the easy tricks by which he can hold their attention. Chaucer's _Rime of Sir Thopas_ is interrupted by the voice of common sense-rudely-

This may well be rime doggerel, quoth he.

But Chaucer has made a good thing out of the rhyme doggerel, and expresses the pleasant old-fas.h.i.+oned quality of the minstrels' romances, as well as their absurdities.

His parody touches on the want of plan and method and meaning in the popular rhymes of chivalry; it is also intended as criticism of their verse. That verse, of which there are several varieties-there is more than one type of stanza in _Sir Thopas_-is technically called _rime couee_ or 'tail-rhyme', and like all patterns of verse it imposes a certain condition of mind, for the time, on the poets who use it. It is not absolutely simple, and so it is apt to make the writer well pleased with himself when he finds it going well; it very readily becomes monotonous and flat-

Now cometh the emperour of price, Again him rode the king of Galice With full mickle pride; The child was worthy under weed And sat upon a n.o.ble steed By his father side; And when he met the emperour He valed his hood with great honour And kissed him in that tide; And other lords of great valour They also kissed Segramour In heart is not to hide. (_Emare._)

For that reason, because of the monotonous beat of the tail-rhymes in the middle and at the end of the stanza, it is chosen by the parodists of Wordsworth in the _Rejected Addresses_ when they are aiming at what they think is flat and insipid in his poetry. But it is a form of stanza which may be so used as to escape the besetting faults; the fact that it has survived through all the changes of literary fas.h.i.+on, and has been used by poets in all the different centuries, is something to the credit of the minstrels, as against the rude common-sense criticism of the Host of the Tabard when he stopped the Rime of _Sir Thopas_.

Chaucer's catalogue of romances is well known-

Men speken of romances of prys Of Horn Child and of Ypotys Of Bevis and Sir Gy, Of Sir Libeux and Pleyndamour, But Sir Thopas he bereth the flour Of royal chivalry.

In this summary, the name of _Pleyndamour_ is still a difficulty for historians; it is not known to what book Chaucer was referring. _Ypotis_ is curiously placed, for the poem of _Ypotis_ is not what is usually reckoned a romance. 'Ypotis' is Epictetus the Stoic philosopher, and the poem is derived from the old moralizing dialogue literature; it is related to the Anglo-Saxon dialogue of Solomon and Saturn. The other four are well known. _Horn Childe_ is a later version, in stanzas, of the story of _King Horn_. Bevis of Southampton and Guy of Warwick are among the most renowned, and most popular, of all the chivalrous heroes. In later prose adaptations they were current down to modern times; they were part of the favourite reading of Bunyan, and gave him ideas for the _Pilgrim's Progress_. _Guy of Warwick_ was rewritten many times-Chaucer's pupil, Lydgate, took it up and made a new version of it. There was a moral and religious strain in it, which appealed to the tastes of many; the remarkable didactic prose romance of _Tirant the White_, written in Spain in the fifteenth century, is connected with _Guy of Warwick_. Sir Bevis is more ordinary and has no particular moral; it is worth reading, if any one wishes to know what was regularly expected in romances by the people who read, or rather who listened to them. The disinherited hero, the beautiful Paynim princess, the good horse Arundel, the giant Ascapart-these and many other incidents may be paralleled in other stories; the history of Sir Bevis has brought them all together, and all the popular novelist's machinery might be fairly catalogued out of this work alone.

_Sir Libeaus_-Le Beau Desconnu, the Fair Knight unknown-is a different thing. This also belongs to the School of Sir Thopas-it is minstrels'

work, and does not pretend to be anything else. But it is well done. The verse, which is in short measure like that of _Sir Tristrem_, but not in so ambitious a stanza, is well managed-

That maide knelde in halle Before the knightes alle And seide: My lord Arthour!

A cas ther is befalle Worse withinne walle Was never non of dolour.

My lady of Sinadoune Is brought in strong prisoun That was of great valour; Sche praith the sende her a knight With herte good and light To winne her with honour.

This quotation came from the beginning of the story, and it gives the one problem which has to be solved by the hero. Instead of the mixed adventures of Sir Bevis, there is only one princ.i.p.al one, which gives occasion to all the adventures by the way. The lady of Sinodoun has fallen into the power of two enchanters, and her damsel (with her dwarf attendant) comes to the court of King Arthur to ask for a champion to rescue her. It is a story like that of the Red Cross Knight and Una. If Sir Bevis corresponds to what one may call the ordinary matter of Spenser's _Faerie Queen_, the wanderings, the separations, the dangerous encounters, _Sir Libeaus_ resembles those parts of Spenser's story where the plot is most coherent. One of the most beautiful pa.s.sages in all his work, Britomart in the house of the enchanter Busirane, may have been suggested by _Sir Libeaus. Sir Libeaus_ is one example of a kind of medieval story, not the greatest, but still good and sound; the Arthurian romance in which Arthur has nothing to do except to preside at the beginning, and afterwards to receive the conquered opponents whom the hero sends home from successive stages in his progress, to make submission to the king. Sir Libeaus (his real name is Guinglain, the son of Gawain) sets out on his journey with the damsel and the dwarf; at first he is scorned by her, like Sir Gareth of Orkney in another story of the same sort, but very soon he shows what he can do at the pa.s.sage of the Pont Perilous, and in the challenging of the gerfalcon, and many other trials. Like other heroes of romance, he falls under the spell of a sorceress who dazzles him with 'fantasm and faerie', but he escapes after a long delay, and defeats the magicians of Sinodoun and rescues the lady with a kiss from her serpent shape which the enchanters have put upon her. Compared with Spenser's house of Busirane, the scene of Sir Libeaus at Sinodoun is a small thing. But one does not feel as in _Sir Tristrem_ the discrepancy between the miniature stage, the small bright figures, and the tragic meaning of their story. Here the story is not tragic; it is a story that the actors understand and can play rightly. There are no characters and no motives beyond the scope of a fairy tale-

Sir Libeaus, knight corteis Rode into the paleis And at the halle alighte; Trompes, homes, schalmeis, Before the highe dais, He herd and saw with sight; Amid the halle floor A fire stark and store Was light and brende bright; Then farther in he yede And took with him his steed That halp him in the fight.

Libeaus inner gan pace To behold each place, The hales in the halle; _niches_ Of main more ne la.s.se Ne saw he body ne face But menstrales clothed in palle; With harpe, fithele and rote, And with organes note, Great glee they maden alle, With citole and sautrie, So moche menstralsie Was never withinne walle.

As if to show the range and the difference of style in English romance, there is another story written like _Sir Libeaus_ in the reign of Edward III, taken from the same Arthurian legend and beginning in the same way, which has scarcely anything in common with it except the general resemblance in the plot. This is _Sir Gawain and the Green Knight_, one of the most original works in medieval romance. It is written in alliterative blank verse, divided into irregular periods which have rhyming tailpieces at the end of them-

As. .h.i.t is stad and stoken In story stif and stronge With leal letters loken In land so has been longe.

While the story of _Sir Libeaus_ is found in different languages-French, Italian, German-there is no other extant older version of _Gawain and the Green Knight_. But the separate incidents are found elsewhere, and the scene to begin with is the usual one: Arthur at his court, Arthur keeping high festival and waiting for 'some main marvel'. The adventure comes when it is wanted; the Green Knight on his green horse rides into the king's hall-half-ogre, by the look of him, to challenge the Round Table.

What he offers is a 'jeopardy', a hazard, a wager. 'Will any gentleman cut off my head', says he, 'on condition that I may have a fair blow at him, and no favour, in a twelvemonth's time? Or if you would rather have it so, let me have the first stroke, and I promise to offer my neck in turn, when a year has gone'. This is the beheading game which is spoken of in other stories (one of them an old Irish comic romance) but which seems to have been new at that time to the knights of King Arthur. It is rightly considered dangerous; and so it proved when Sir Gawain had accepted the jeopardy. For after Gawain had cut off the stranger's head, the Green Knight picked it up by the hair, and held it up, and it spoke and summoned Gawain to meet him at the Green Chapel in a year's s.p.a.ce, and bide the return blow.

This is more surprising than anything in _Sir Bevis_ or _Sir Guy_. Not much is done by the writer to explain it; at the same time nothing is left vague. The author might almost have been a modern novelist with a contempt for romance, trying, by way of experiment, to work out a 'supernatural' plot with the full strength of his reason; merely accepting the fabulous story, and trying how it will go with accessories from real life, and with modern manners and conversation. There is none of the minstrel's cant in this work, none of the cheap sensations, the hackneyed wonders such as are ridiculed in _Sir Thopas_. Only, the incident on which the whole story turns, the device of the beheading game, is a piece of traditional romance. It is not found in every language, but it is fairly well known. It is not as common as the lady turned into a serpent, or the man into a werewolf, but still it is not invented, it is borrowed by the English poet, and borrowed for a work which always, even in the beheading scenes, is founded on reality.

It is probable that the author of _Sir Gawain_ is also the author of three other poems (not romances) which are found along with it in the same ma.n.u.script-the _Pearl_, _Cleanness_, and _Patience_. He is a writer with a gift for teaching, of a peculiar sort. He is not an original philosopher, and his reading appears to have been the usual sort of thing among fairly educated men. He does not try to get away from the regular authorities, and he is not afraid of commonplaces. But he has great force of will, and a strong sense of the difficulties of life; also high spirits and great keenness. His memory is well supplied from all that he has gone through. The three sporting episodes in _Sir Gawain_, the deer-hunt (in Christmas week, killing the hinds), the boar-hunt and the fox-hunt, are not only beyond question as to their scientific truth; the details are remembered without study because the author has lived in them, and thus, minute as they are, they are not wearisome. They do not come from a careful notebook; they are not like the descriptions of rooms and furniture in painstaking novels. The landscapes and the weather of _Sir Gawain_ are put in with the same freedom. The author has a talent especially for winter scenes. 'Grim Nature's visage h.o.a.r' had plainly impressed his mind, and not in a repulsive way. The winter 'mist hackles'

(copes of mist) on the hills, the icicles on the stones, the swollen streams, all come into his work-a relief from the too ready ill.u.s.trations of spring and summer which are scattered about in medieval stories.

The meaning of the story is in the character of Gawain. Like some other romances, this is a chivalrous _Pilgrim's Progress_. Gawain, so much vilified by authors who should have known better, is for this poet, as he is for Chaucer, the perfection of courtesy. He is also the servant of Our Lady, and bears her picture on his s.h.i.+eld, along with the pentangle which is the emblem of her Five Joys, as well as the Five Wounds of Christ. The poem is the ordeal of Gawain; Gawain is tried in courage and loyalty by his compact with the Green Knight; he is tried in loyalty and temperance when he is wooed by the wanton conversation of the lady in the castle.

The author's choice of a plot is justified, because what he wants is an ordeal of courage, and that is afforded by the Green Knight's 'jeopardy'.

The alliterative poetry is almost always stronger than the tales in rhyme, written with more zest, not so much in danger of droning and sleepiness as the school of Sir Thopas undoubtedly is. But there is a great difference among the alliterative romances. _William of Palerne_, for example, is vigorous, but to little purpose, because the author has not understood the character of the French poem which he has translated, and has misapplied his vigorous style to the handling of a rather sophisticated story which wanted the smooth, even, unemphatic, French style to express it properly. _The Wars of Alexander_ is the least distinguished of the group; there was another alliterative story of Alexander, of which only fragments remain. The _Chevelere a.s.signe_, the 'Knight of the Swan,' is historically interesting, as giving the romantic origin of G.o.dfrey the Crusader, who is the last of the Nine Worthies.

Though purely romantic in its contents, the _Chevalier au Cygne_ belongs to one of the French narrative groups usually called epic-the epic of _Antioch_, which is concerned with the first Crusade. The _Gest historial of the Destruction of Troy_ is of great interest; it is the liveliest of all the extant 'Troy Books', and it has all the good qualities of the fourteenth-century alliterative school, without the exaggeration and violence which was the common fault of this style, as the contrary fault of tameness was the danger of the rhyming romances. But the alliterative poem which ranks along with _Sir Gawayne_ as an original work with a distinct and fresh comprehension of its subject is the _Morte Arthure_.

This has some claim to be called an epic poem, an epic of the modern kind, composed with a definite theory. The author takes the heroic view of Arthur given by Geoffrey of Monmouth, and turns his warfare into a reflection of the glory of King Edward III; not casually, but following definite lines, with almost as much tenacity as the author of _Sir Gawayne_, and, of course, with a greater theme. The tragedy of Arthur in Malory to some extent repeats the work of this poet-whose name was Huchoun of the Awle Ryale; it may have been Sir Hugh of Eglinton.

CHAPTER V SONGS AND BALLADS

King Canute's boat-song has some claim to be the earliest English song in rhyme-

Merie sungen the muneches binnen Ely Tha Knut king rew therby: Roweth, knihtes, ner the land And here we thes muneches sang.

If this claim be disallowed, then the first is St. G.o.dric, the hermit of Finchale in the reign of Henry II-his hymn to Our Lady and the hymn to St. Nicholas. These are preserved along with the music (like the Cuckoo song which comes later); the ma.n.u.script of the poems of G.o.dric is copied in the frontispiece to Saintsbury's _History of English Prosody_; it proves many interesting things. It is obvious that musical notation is well established; and it seems to follow that with a good musical tradition there may be encouragement for lyric poetry apart from any such 'courtly' circ.u.mstances as have been described in another chapter. There is no doubt about this. While it is certain on the one hand that the lyrical art of the Middle Ages was carried furthest in courtly society by the French, Provencal, German and Italian poets, it is equally certain that the art of music flourished also in out-of-the-way places. And as in those days musical and poetical measures, tunes and words, generally went together, the development of music would mean the development of poetical forms, of lyric stanzas. Music flourished in England most of all in G.o.dric's country, the old Northumbria. Giraldus Cambrensis, who has been quoted already for his story of the wake and the English love-song, gives in another place a remarkable description of the part-singing which in his time was cultivated where it is most in favour at the present day-in Wales, and in England north of the Humber. Where people met to sing in parts, where music, therefore, was accurate and well studied, there must have been careful patterns of stanza. Not much remains from a date so early as this, nor even for a century after the time of G.o.dric and Giraldus. But towards the end of the reign of Edward I lyric poems are found more frequently, often careful in form. And in judging of their art it is well to remember that it is not necessary to refer them to the courtly schools for their origin. Country people might be good judges of lyric; they might be as exacting in their musical and poetical criticisms as any persons of quality could be. Hence while it is certain that England before the time of Chaucer was generally rustic and provincial in its literary taste, it does not follow that the rustic taste was uninstructed or that the art was poor. The beauty of the English songs between 1300 and 1500 is not that of the n.o.bler lyric as it was (for example) practised and described by Dante. But the beauty is undeniable, and it is the beauty of an art which has laws of its own; it is poetry, not the primitive elements of poetry. In art, it is not very far from that of the earlier Provencal poets. For everywhere, it should be remembered, the n.o.ble lyric poetry was ready to draw from the popular sources, to adapt and imitate the rustic themes; as on the other hand the common people were often willing to take up the courtly forms.

The earliest rhyming songs are more interesting from their a.s.sociations than their own merits; though Canute and St. G.o.dric are certainly able to put a good deal of meaning into few words. G.o.dric's address to St.

Nicholas is particularly memorable for its bearing on his own history.

G.o.dric had been a sea captain in his youth (like another famous author of hymns, the Rev. John Newton) and St. Nicholas is the patron saint of sailors. G.o.dric, whose operations were in the Levant, had often prayed to St. Nicholas of Bari, and he brings the name of the saint's own city into his hymn, by means of a sacred pun. 'Saint Nicholas', he says, 'build us a far sheen house-