[Footnote 135: _Early English Prose Romances_ (2d ed., London, 1858), i. 71. The text of this is only Deloney"s and sixteenth century, but much of the matter must be far earlier.]
[Footnote 136: Weber, iii. 177.]
[Sidenote: _Effect of the_ fabliaux _on language._]
For in these curious compositions the _esprit Gaulois_ found itself completely at home; indeed some have held that here it hit upon its most characteristic and peculiar development. The wonderful faculty for expression--for giving, if not the supreme, yet the adequate and technically masterly dress to any kind of literary production--which has been the note of French literature throughout, and which was never more its note than at this time, enabled the language, as we have seen and shall see, to keep as by an easy sculling movement far ahead of all its compet.i.tors. But in other departments, with one or two exceptions, the union of temper and craft, of inspiration and execution, was not quite perfect. Here there was no misalliance. As the language lost the rougher, fresher music which gives such peculiar attraction to the _chansons_, as it disused itself to the varied trills, the half-inarticulate warblings which const.i.tute the charm of the lyrics, so it acquired the precision, the flexibility, the _nettete_, which satiric treatment of the follies and evil chances of life, the oddities of manners and morals, require. It became bright, if a little hard, easy, if a little undistinguished, capable of slyness, of innuendo, of "malice," but not quite so capable as it had been of the finer and vaguer suggestions and aspirations.
[Sidenote: _And on narrative._]
Above all, these _fabliaux_ served as an exercise-ground for the practice in which French was to become almost if not quite supreme, the practice of narrative. In the longer romances, which for a century or a century and a half preceded the _fabliaux_, the art of narration, as has been more than once noticed, was little attended to, and indeed had little scope. The _chansons_ had a common form, or something very like it, which almost dispensed the _trouvere_ from devoting much pains to the individual conduct of the story. The most abrupt transitions were accustomed, indeed expected; minor incidents received very little attention; the incessant fighting secured the attention of the probable hearers by itself; the more grandiose and striking incidents--the crowning of Prince Louis and the indignation of William at his sister"s ingrat.i.tude, for instance--were not "engineered" or led up to in any way, but left to act in ma.s.s and by a.s.sault.
[Sidenote: _Conditions of_ fabliau-_writing._]
The smaller range and more delicate--however indelicate--argument of the _fabliaux_ not only invited but almost necessitated a different kind of handling. The story had to draw to point in (on an average) two or three hundred lines at most--there are _fabliaux_ of a thousand lines, and _fabliaux_ of thirty or forty, but the average is as just stated. The incidents had to be adjusted for best effect, neither too many nor too few. The treatment had to be mainly provocative--an appeal in some cases by very coa.r.s.e means indeed to very coa.r.s.e nerves, in others by finer devices addressed to senses more tickle o"
the sere. And so grew up that unsurpa.s.sed and hardly matched product the French short story, where, if it is in perfection, hardly a word is thrown away, and not a word missed that is really wanted.
[Sidenote: _The appearance of irony._]
The great means for doing this in literature is irony; and irony appears in the _fabliaux_ as it had hardly done since Lucian. Take, for instance, this opening of a piece, the rest of which is at least as irreverent, considerably less quotable, but not much less pointed:--
"Quant Dieus ot estore lo monde, Si con il est a la reonde, Et quanque il convit dedans, Trois ordres establir de genz, Et fist el siecle demoranz Chevalers, clers et laboranz.
Les chevalers toz asena As terres, et as clers dona Les aumosnes et les dimages; Puis asena les laborages As laborenz, por laborer.
Qant ce ot fet, sanz demeler D"iluec parti, et s"en ala."
What two orders were left, and how the difficulty of there being nothing left for them was got over, may be found by the curious in the seventy-sixth _fabliau_ of the third volume of the collection so often quoted. But the citation given will show that there is nothing surprising in the eighteenth-century history, literary or poetical, of a country which could produce such a piece, certainly not later than the thirteenth. Even Voltaire could not put the thing more neatly or with a more complete freedom from superfluous words.
[Sidenote: _Fables proper._]
It will doubtless have been observed that the _fabliau_--though the word is simply _fabula_ in one of its regular Romance metamorphoses, and though the method is sufficiently aesopic--is not a "fable" in the sense more especially a.s.signed to the term. Yet the mediaeval languages, especially French and Latin, were by no means dest.i.tute of fables properly so called. On the contrary, it would appear that it was precisely during our present period that the rather meagre aesopisings of Phaedrus and Babrius were expanded into the fuller collection of beast-stories which exists in various forms, the chief of them being the _Ysopet_ (the name generally given to the cla.s.s in Romance) of _Marie de France_, the somewhat later _Lyoner Ysopet_ (as its editor, Dr Forster, calls it), and the original of this latter, the Latin elegiacs of the so-called _Anonymus Neveleti_.[137] The collection of Marie is interesting, at least, because of the author, whose more famous Lais, composed, it would seem, at the Court of Henry III. of England about the meeting of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and forming a sort of offshoot less of the substance of the Arthurian story than of its spirit, are among the most delightful relics of mediaeval poetry. But the Lyons book perhaps exhibits more of the characteristic which, evident enough in the _fabliau_ proper, discovers, after pa.s.sing as by a channel through the beast-fable, its fullest and most famous form in the world-renowned _Romance of Reynard the Fox_, one of the capital works of the Middle Ages, and with the sister but contrasted _Romance of the Rose_, as much the distinguis.h.i.+ng literary product of the thirteenth century as the romances proper--Carlovingian, Arthurian, and Cla.s.sical--are of the twelfth.
[Footnote 137: Works of Marie; ed. Roquefort, Paris, 1820; or ed.
Warnke, Halle, 1885. The _Lyoner Ysopet_, with the _Anonymus_; ed.
Forster, Heilbronn, 1882.]
[Sidenote: Reynard the Fox.]
Not, of course, that the antiquity of the Reynard story itself[138]
does not mount far higher than the thirteenth century. No two things are more remarkable as results of that comparative and simultaneous study of literature, to which this series hopes to give some little a.s.sistance, than the way in which, on the one hand, a hundred years seem to be in the Middle Ages but a day, in the growth of certain kinds, and on the other a day sometimes appears to do the work of a hundred years. We have seen how in the last two or three decades of the twelfth century the great Arthurian legend seems suddenly to fill the whole literary scene, after being previously but a meagre chronicler"s record or invention. The growth of the Reynard story, though to some extent contemporaneous, was slower; but it was really the older of the two. Before the middle of this century, as we have seen, there was really no Arthurian story worthy the name; it would seem that by that time the Reynard legend had already taken not full but definite form in Latin, and there is no reasonable reason for scepticism as to its existence in vernacular tradition, though perhaps not in vernacular writing, for many years, perhaps for more than one century, earlier.
[Footnote 138: _Roman du_ (should be _de_) _Renart_: ed. Meon and Chabaille, 5 vols., Paris, 1826-35; ed. Martin, 3 vols. text and 1 critical observations, Strasburg, 1882-87. _Reincke de Vos_, ed.
Prien, Halle, 1887, with a valuable bibliography. _Reinaert_, ed.
Martin, Paderborn, 1874. _Reinardus Vulpes_, ed. Mone, Stuttgart, 1834. _Reinhart Fuchs_, ed. Grimm, Berlin, 1832. On the _story_ there is perhaps nothing better than Carlyle, as quoted _supra_.]
[Sidenote: _Order of texts._]
It was not to be expected but that so strange, so interesting, and so universally popular a story as that of King n.o.ble and his not always loving subjects, should have been made, as usual, the battle-ground of literary fancy and of that general tendency of mankind to ferocity, which, unluckily, the study of _belles lettres_ does not seem very appreciably to soften. a.s.sisted by the usual fallacy of antedating MSS. in the early days of palaeographic study, and by their prepossessions as Germans, some early students of the Reynard story made out much too exclusive and too early claims, as to possession by right of invention, for the country in which Reynard has no doubt, for the last four centuries or so, been much more of a really popular hero than anywhere else. Investigation and comparison, however, have had more healing effects here than in other cases; and since the acknowledgment of the fact that the very early Middle High German version of Henry the Glichezare, itself of the end of the twelfth century, is a translation from the French, there has not been much serious dispute about the order of the Reynard romances as we actually have them. That is to say, if the Latin _Isengrimus_--the oldest _Reinardus Vulpes_--of 1150 or thereabouts is actually the oldest _text_, the older branches of the French _Renart_ pretty certainly come next, with the High German following a little later, and the Low German _Reincke de Vos_ and the Flemish _Reinaert_ a little later still. The Southern Romance nations do not seem--indeed the humour is essentially Northern--to have adopted Reynard with as much enthusiasm as they showed towards the Romances; and our English forms were undoubtedly late adaptations from foreign originals.
[Sidenote: _Place of origin._]
If, however, this account of the texts may be said to be fairly settled, the same cannot of course be said as to the origin of the story. Here there are still champions of the German claim, whose number is increased by those who stickle for a definite "Low" German origin. Some French patriots, with a stronger case than they generally have, still maintain the story to be purely French in inception. I have not myself seen any reason to change the opinion I formed some fifteen years ago, to the effect that it seems likely that the original language of the epic is French, but French of a Walloon or Picard dialect, and that it was written somewhere between the Seine and the Rhine.
The character and accomplishment of the story, however, are matters of much more purely literary interest than the rather barren question of the probable--it is not likely that it will ever be the proved--date or place of origin of this famous thing. The fable in general, and the beast-fable in particular, are among the very oldest and most universal of the known forms of literature. A fresh and special development of it might have taken place in any country at any time.
It did, as a matter of fact, take place somewhere about the twelfth century or earlier, and somewhere in the central part of the northern coast district of the old Frankish empire.
[Sidenote: _The French form._]
As usual with mediaeval work, when it once took hold on the imagination of writers and hearers, the bulk is very great, especially in the French forms, which, taking them altogether, cannot fall much short of a hundred thousand lines. This total, however, includes developments--_Le Couronnement Renart_, _Renart le Nouvel_, and, later than our present period, a huge and still not very well-known thing called _Renart le Contrefait_, which are distinct additions to the first conception of the story. Yet even that first conception is not a story in the single sense. Its thirty thousand lines or thereabouts are divided into a considerable number of what are called _branches_, attributed to authors sometimes anonymous, sometimes named, but never, except in the one case of _Renart le Bestourne_, known.[139] And it is always difficult and sometimes impossible to determine in what relation these branches stand to the main trunk, or which of them _is_ the main trunk. The two editors of the _Roman_, Meon and Herr Martin, arrange them in different orders; and I do not think it would be in the least difficult to make out a good case for an order, or even a large number of orders, different still.[140]
[Footnote 139: This, which is not so much a branch as an independent _fabliau_, is attributed to Ruteboeuf, _v. infra_.]
[Footnote 140: The Teutonic versions are consolidated into a more continuous story. But of the oldest High German version, that of the Glichezare, we have but part, and _Reincke de Vos_ does not reach seven thousand verses. The French forms are therefore certainly to be preferred.]
By comparison, however, with the versions in other languages, it seems not very doubtful that the complaint of Isengrim the Wolf as to the outrages committed by Reynard on the complainant"s personal comfort, and the honour of Hersent his wife--a complaint laid formally before King n.o.ble the Lion--forms, so far as any single thing can be said to form it, the basis and beginning of the Reynard story. The multiplication of complaints by other beasts, the sufferings inflicted by Reynard on the messengers sent to summon him to Court, and his escapes, by mixture of fraud and force, when he is no longer able to avoid putting in an appearance, supply the natural continuation.
[Sidenote: _Its complications._]
But from this, at least in the French versions, the branches diverge, cross, and repeat or contradict each other with an altogether bewildering freedom. Sometimes, for long pa.s.sages together, as in the interesting fytte, "How Reynard hid himself among the Skins,"[141] the author seems to forget the general purpose altogether, and to devote himself to something quite different--in this case the description of the daily life and pursuits of a thirteenth-century sportsman of easy means. Often the connection with the general story is kept only by the introduction of the most obvious and perfunctory devices--an intrigue with Dame Hersent, a pa.s.sing trick played on Isengrim, and so forth.
[Footnote 141: Meon, iii. 82; Martin, ii. 43.]
[Sidenote: _Unity of spirit._]
[Sidenote: _The Rise of Allegory._]
Nevertheless the whole is knit together, to a degree altogether unusual in a work of such magnitude, due to many different hands, by an extraordinary unity of tone and temper. This tone and this temper are to some extent conditioned by the Rise of Allegory, the great feature, in succession to the outburst of Romance, of our present period. We do not find in the original _Renart_ branches the abstracting of qualities and the personification of abstractions which appear in later developments, and which are due to the popularity of the _Romance of the Rose_, if it be not more strictly correct to say that the popularity of the _Romance of the Rose_ was due to the taste for allegory. Jacquemart Gielee, the author of _Renart le Nouvel_, might personify _Renardie_ and work his beast-personages into knights of tourney; the clerk of Troyes, who later wrote _Renart le Contrefait_, might weave a sort of encyclopaedia into his piece. But the authors of the "Ancien Renart" knew better. With rare lapses, they exhibit wonderful art in keeping their characters beasts, while a.s.signing to them human arts; or rather, to put the matter with more correctness, they pa.s.s over the not strictly beast-like performances of Renart and the others with such entire unconcern, with such a perfect freedom from tedious after-thought of explanation, that no sense of incongruity occurs. The ill.u.s.trations of Meon"s _Renart_, which show us the fox painfully clasping in his forelegs a stick four times his own length, show the inferiority of the nineteenth century.
Renart may beat _le vilain_ (everybody beats the poor _vilain_) as hard as he likes in the old French text; it comes all naturally. A neat copper-plate engraving, in the best style of sixty or seventy years ago, awakes distrust.
[Sidenote: _The satire of_ Renart.]
The general fable is so familiar that not much need be said about it.
But it is, I think, not unfair to say that the German and Flemish versions, from the latter of which Caxton"s and all later English forms seem to be copied, are, if better adjusted to a continuous story, less saturated with the quintessence of satiric criticism of life than the French _Renart_. The fault of excessive coa.r.s.eness of thought and expression, which has been commented on in the _fabliaux_, recurs here to the fullest extent; but it is atoned for and sweetened by an even greater measure of irony. As to the definite purposes of this irony it would not be well to be too sure. The pa.s.sage quoted on a former page will show with what completely fearless satire the _trouveres_ treated Church and State, G.o.d and Man. It is certain that they had no love of any kind for the clergy, who were not merely their rivals but their enemies; and it is not probable they had much for the knightly order, who were their patrons. But it is never in the very least degree safe to conclude, in a mediaeval writer, from that satire of abuses, which is so frequent, to the distinct desire of reform or revolution, which is so rare. The satire of the _Renart_--and it is all the more delightful--is scarcely in the smallest degree political, is only in an interesting archaeological way of the time ecclesiastical or religious; but it is human, perennial, contemptuous of mere time and circ.u.mstance, throughout.
[Sidenote: _The Fox himself._]
It cannot, no doubt, be called kindly satire--French satire very rarely is. Renart, the only hero, though a hero sometimes uncommonly hard bested, is a furred and four-footed Jonathan Wild. He appears to have a creditable paternal affection for Masters Rovel, Percehaie, and the other cubs; and despite his own extreme licence of conjugal conduct, only one or two branches make Dame Hermeline, his wife, either false to him or ill-treated by him. In these respects, as in the other that he is scarcely ever outwitted, he has the advantage of Jonathan. But otherwise I think our great eighteenth-century _maufes_ was a better fellow than Renart, because he was much less purely malignant. I do not think that Jonathan often said his prayers; but he probably never went to bed, as Reynard did upon the hay-mow, after performing his devotions in a series of elaborate curses upon all his enemies. The fox is so clever that one never dislikes him, and generally admires him; but he is entirely compact of all that is worst, not merely in beast-nature but in humanity. And it is a triumph of the writers that, this being so, we at once can refrain from disliking him, and are not tempted to like him illegitimately.
[Sidenote: _His circle._]
The _trouveres_ did not trouble themselves to work out any complete character among the many whom they grouped round this great personage; but they left none without touches of vivification and verisimilitude.
The female beasts--Dame Fiere or Orgueilleuse, the lioness, Hersent, the she-wolf, Hermeline, the vixen, and the rest--are too much tinged with that stock slander of feminine character which was so common in the Middle Ages. And each is rather too much of a type, a fault which may be also found with their lords. Yet all of these--Bruin and Brichemer, Coart and Chanticleer, Tybert and Primaut, Hubert and Roonel--have the liveliest touches, not merely of the coa.r.s.ely labelling kind, but of the kind that makes a character alive. And, save as concerns the unfortunate capons and _gelines_ whom Renart consumes, so steadily and with such immunity, it cannot be said that their various misfortunes are ever incurred without a valid excuse in poetical justice. Isengrim, the chief of them all, is an especial case in point. Although he is Chief Constable, he is just as much of a rascal and a malefactor as Renart himself, with the additional crime of stupidity. One is disposed to believe that, if domiciliary visits were made to their various abodes, Malpertuis would by no means stand alone as a bad example of a baronial abode. Renart is indeed constantly spoken of as n.o.ble"s "baron." Yet it would be a great mistake to take this epic, as it has been sometimes taken, for a protest against baronial suppression. A sense of this, no doubt, counts--as do senses of many other oppressions that are done under the sun. But it is the satire on life as a whole that is uppermost; and that is what makes the poem, or collection of poems, so remarkable. It is hard, coa.r.s.e, prosaic except for the range and power of its fancy, libellous enough on humanity from behind its stalking-brutes. But it is true, if an exaggeration of the truth; and its constant hugging of the facts of life supplies the strangest possible contrast to the graceful but shadowy land of romance which we have left in former chapters. We all know the burial-scene of Launcelot--later, no doubt, in its finest form, but in suggestion and spirit of the time with which we are dealing. Let us now consider briefly the burial-scene of Renart.
[Sidenote: _The burial of Renart._]
When Meon, the excellent first editor of the collection, put, as was reason, the branch ent.i.tled "La Mort Renart" last, he was a little troubled by the consideration that several of the beasts whom in former branches Renart himself has brought to evil ends reappear and take part in his funeral. But this scarcely argued a sufficient appreciation of the true spirit of the cycle. The beasts, though perfectly lively abstractions, are, after all, abstractions in a way, and you cannot kill an abstraction. Nay, the author, with a really grand final touch of the pervading satire which is the key of the whole, gives us to understand at the last that Renart (though he has died not once, but twice, in the course of the _fytte_) is not really dead at all, and that when Dame Hermeline persuades the complaisant amba.s.sadors to report to the Lion-King that they have seen the tomb with Renart inscribed upon it, the fact was indeed true but the meaning false, inasmuch as it was another Renart altogether. Indeed the true Renart is clearly immortal.
Nevertheless, as it is his mission, and that of his poets, to satirise all the things of Life, so must Death also be satirised in his person and with his aid. The branch, though it is probably not a very early one, is of an admirable humour, and an uncompromising truth after a fas.h.i.+on, which makes the elaborate realism and pessimism of some other periods look singularly poor, thin, and conventional. The author, for the keeping of his story, begins by showing the doomed fox more than a little "failed"--the shadow of fate dwelling coldly beforehand on him.
He is badly mauled at the opening (though, it is true, he takes vengeance for it) by monks whose hen-roost he is robbing, and when he meets Coart the hare, _sur son destrier_, with a _vilain_ whom he has captured (this is a mark of lateness, some of the verisimilitude of the early time having been dropped), he plays him no tricks. Nay, when Isengrim and he begin to play chess he is completely worsted by his ancient b.u.t.t, who at last takes, in consequence of an imprudent stake of the penniless Fox, a cruel but appropriate vengeance for his former wrongs. Renart is comforted to some extent by his old love, Queen Fiere the lioness; but pain, and wounds, and defeat have brought him near death, and he craves a priest. Bernard the a.s.s, Court-Archpriest, is ready, and admonishes the penitent with the most becoming gravity and unction. The confession, as might be expected, is something impudent; and the penitent very frankly stipulates that if he gets well his oath of repentance is not to stand good. But it looks as if he were to be taken at the worse side of his word, and he falls into a swoon which is mistaken for death. The Queen laments him with perfect openness; but the excellent n.o.ble is a philosophic husband as well as a good king, and sets about the funeral of Renart
("Jamais si bon baron n"avai,"