[Sidenote: _Value of both, and charm of the first._]
The completeness of the representation of the time given by the poem is of course enormously increased by this second part, and the individual touches, though rather lost in the wilderness of "skipping octosyllables," are wonderfully sharp and true at times. Yet to some judgments at any rate the charm of the piece will seem mostly to have vanished when Bialacoil is once shut up in his tower. In mere poetry Jean de Meung is almost infinitely the inferior of William of Lorris: and though the latter may receive but contemptuous treatment from persons who demand "messages," "meanings," and so forth, others will find message and meaning enough in his allegorical presentation of the perennial quest, of "the way of a man with a maid," and more than enough beauty in the pictures with which he has adorned it. He is indeed the first great word-painter of the Middle Ages, and for long--almost to the close of them--most poets simply copied him, while even the greatest used him as a starting-point and source of hints.[148] Also besides pictures he has music--music not very brilliant or varied, but admirably matching his painting, soft, dreamy, not so much monotonous as uniform with a soothing uniformity.
Few poets deserve better than William of Lorris the famous hyperbole which Greek furnished in turn to Latin and to English. He is indeed "softer than sleep," and, as soft sleep is, laden with gracious and various visions.
[Footnote 148: The following of the Rose would take a volume, even treated as the poem itself is here. The English version has been referred to: Italian naturalised it early in a sonnet cycle, _Il Fiore_. Every country welcomed it, but the actual versions are as nothing to the imitations and the influence.]
[Sidenote: _Marie de France and Ruteboeuf._]
The great riches of French literature at this time, and the necessity of arranging this history rather with a view to "epoch-making" kinds and books than to interesting individual authors, make attention to many of these latter impossible here. Thus Marie de France[149] yields to few authors of our two centuries in charm and interest for the reader; yet for us she must be regarded chiefly as one of the pract.i.tioners of the fable, and as the chief pract.i.tioner of the _Lai_, which in her hands is merely a subdivision of the general romance on a smaller scale. So, again, the _trouvere_ Ruteboeuf, who has been the subject of critical attention, a little disproportionate perhaps, considering the vast amount of work as good as his which has hardly any critical notice, but still not undeserved, must serve us rather as an introducer of the subject of dramatic poetry than as an individual, though his work is in the bulk of it non-dramatic, and though almost all of it is full of interest in itself.
[Footnote 149: See note above, p. 286.]
Ruteboeuf[150] (a name which seems to be a professional _nom de guerre_ rather than a patronymic) was married in 1260, and has devoted one of his characteristic poems, half "complaints," half satires, to this not very auspicious event. For the rest, it is rather conjectured than known that his life must have filled the greater part, if not the whole, of the last two-thirds of the thirteenth century, thus including the dates of both parts of the _Rose_ within it. The tendencies of the second part of the great poem appear in Ruteboeuf more distinctly than those of the earlier, though, like both, his work shows the firm grip which allegory was exercising on all poetry, and indeed on all literature. He has been already referred to as having written an outlying "branch" of _Renart_; and not a few of his other poems--_Le Dit des Cordeliers_, _Frere Denise_, and others--are of the cla.s.s of the _Fabliaux_: indeed Ruteboeuf may be taken as the type and chief figure to us of the whole body of _fabliau_-writing _trouveres_. Besides the marriage poem, we have others on his personal affairs, the chief of which is speakingly ent.i.tled "La Pauvrete Ruteboeuf." But he has been even more, and even more justly, prized as having left us no small number of historical or political poems, not a few of which are occupied with the decay of the crusading spirit. The "Complainte d"Outremer," the "Complainte de Constantin.o.ble," the "Debat du Croise et du Decroise" tell their own tale, and contain generous, if perhaps not very long-sighted or practical, laments and indignation over the decadence of adventurous piety. Others are less religious; but, on the whole, Ruteboeuf, even in his wilder days, seems to have been (except for that dislike of the friars, in which he was not alone) a religiously minded person, and we have a large body of poems, a.s.signed to his later years, which are distinctly devotional. These deal with his repentance, with his approaching death, with divers Lives of Saints, &c. But the most noteworthy of them, as a fresh strand in the rope we are here weaving, is the Miracle-play of _Theophile_. It will serve as a text or starting-point on which to take up the subject of the drama itself, with no more about Ruteboeuf except the observation that the varied character of his work is no doubt typical of that of at least the later _trouveres_ generally. They were practically men of letters, not to say journalists, of all work that was likely to pay; and must have s.h.i.+fted from romance to drama, from satire to lyric, just as their audience or their patrons might happen to demand, as their circ.u.mstances or their needs might happen to dictate.
[Footnote 150: Ed. Jubinal, 2d ed., Paris, 1874; or ed. Kressner, Wolfenb.u.t.tel, 1885.]
[Sidenote: _Drama._]
The obscure but not uninteresting subject of the links between the latest stages of cla.s.sical drama and the earliest stages of mediaeval belong to the first volume of this series; indeed by the eleventh century (or before the period, properly speaking, of this book opens) the vernacular drama, as far as the sacred side of it is concerned, was certainly established in France, although not in any other country. But it is not quite certain whether we actually possess anything earlier than the twelfth century, even in French, and it is exceedingly doubtful whether what we have in any other vernacular is older than the fourteenth. The three oldest mystery plays wherein any modern language makes its appearance are those of _The Ten Virgins_,[151] mainly in Latin, but partly in a dialect which is neither quite French nor quite Provencal; the Mystery of _Daniel_, partly Latin and partly French; and the Mystery of _Adam_,[152] which is all French. The two latter, when first discovered, were as usual put too early by their discoverers; but it is certain that they are not younger than the twelfth century, while it is all but certain that the _Ten Virgins_ dates from the eleventh, if not even the tenth. In the thirteenth we find, besides Ruteboeuf"s _Theophile_, a _Saint Nicolas_ by another very well-known _trouvere_, Jean Bodel of Arras, author of many late and probably rehandled _chansons_, and of the famous cla.s.sification of romance which has been adopted above.
[Footnote 151: Ed. Monmerque et Michel, _Theatre Francais au Moyen Age_. Paris, 1874. This also contains _Theophile_, _Saint Nicolas_, and the plays of Adam de la Halle.]
[Footnote 152: Ed. Luzarches, Tours, 1854; ed. Pal.u.s.tre, Paris, 1877.]
It was probably on the well-known principle of "not letting the devil have all the best tunes" that the Church, which had in the patristic ages so violently denounced the stage, and which has never wholly relaxed her condemnation of its secular use, attempted at once to gratify and sanctify the taste for dramatic performances by adopting the form, and if possible confining it to pious uses. But there is a school of literary historians who hold that there was no direct adoption of a form intentionally dramatic, and that the modern sacred drama--the only drama for centuries--was simply an expansion of or excrescence from the services of the Church herself, which in their antiphonal character, and in the alternation of monologue and chorus, were distinctly dramatic in form. This, however, is one of those numerous questions which are only good to be argued, and can never reach a conclusion; nor need it greatly trouble those who believe that all literary forms are more or less natural to man, and that man"s nature will therefore, example or no example, find them out and practise them, in measure and degree according to circ.u.mstances, sooner or later.
At any rate, if there was any hope in the mind of any ecclesiastical person at any time of confining dramatic performances to sacred subjects, that hope was doomed to disappointment, and in France at least to very speedy disappointment. The examples of Mystery or Miracle plays which we have of a date older than the beginning of the fourteenth century are not numerous, but it is quite clear that at an early time the necessity for interspersing comic interludes was recognised; and it is needless to say to any one who has ever looked even slightly at the subject that these interludes soon became a regular part of the performance, and exhibited what to modern ideas seems a very indecorous disregard of the respect due to the company in which they found themselves. The great Bible mysteries, no less and no more than the miracle plays of the Virgin[153] and the Saints, show this characteristic throughout, and the Fool"s remark which pleased Lamb, "Hazy weather, Master Noah!" was a strictly legitimate and very much softened descendant of the kind of pleasantries which diversify the sacred drama of the Middle Ages in all but its very earliest examples.
[Footnote 153: Several of these miracles of the Virgin will be found in the volume by Monmerque and Michel referred to above: the whole collection has been printed by the Societe des Anciens Textes. The MS.
is of the fourteenth century, but some of its contents may date from the thirteenth.]
It was certain, at any rate in France, that from comic interludes in sacred plays to sheer profane comedy in ordinary life the step would not be far nor the interval of time long. The _fabliaux_ more particularly were farces already in the state of _scenario_, and some of them actually contained dialogue. To break them up and shape them into actual plays required much less than the innate love for drama which characterises the French people, and the keen literary sense and craft which characterised the French _trouveres_ of the thirteenth century.
[Sidenote: _Adam de la Halle._]
The honour of producing the first examples known to us is a.s.signed to Adam de la Halle, a _trouvere_ of Arras, who must have been a pretty exact contemporary of Ruteboeuf, and who besides some lyrical work has left us two plays, _Li Jus de la Feuillie_ and _Robin et Marion_.[154] The latter, as its t.i.tle almost sufficiently indicates, is a dramatised _pastourelle_; the former is less easy to cla.s.sify, but it stands in something like the same relation to the personal poems, of which, as has just been mentioned in the case of Ruteboeuf himself, the _trouveres_ were so fond. For it introduces himself, his wife (at least she is referred to), his father, and divers of his Arras friends. And though rough in construction, it is by no means a very far-off ancestor of the comedy of manners in its most developed form.
[Footnote 154: Besides the issue above noted these have been separately edited by A. Rambeau. Marburg, 1886.]
[Sidenote: Robin et Marion.]
It may be more interesting to give some account here of these two productions, the parents of so numerous and famous a family, than to dwell on the early miracle plays, which reached their fullest development in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and then for the most part died away. The play (_Jeu_ is the general term, and the exact, though now in French obsolete, equivalent of the English word) of _Robin et Marion_ combines the general theme of the earlier lyric _pastourelle_, as explained above, with the more general pastoral theme of the love of shepherd and shepherdess. The scene opens on Marion singing to the burden "Robins m"a demandee, si m"ara." To her the Knight, who inquires the meaning of her song, whereupon she avows her love for Robin. Nevertheless he woos her, in a fas.h.i.+on rather clumsy than cavalier, but receives no encouragement. Robin comes up after the Knight"s departure. He is, to use Steerforth"s words in _David Copperfield_, "rather a chuckle-headed fellow for the girl,"
but is apparently welcome. They eat rustic fare together and then dance; but more company is desired, and Robin goes to fetch it. He tells the friends he asks that some one has been courting Marion, and they prudently resolve to bring, one his great pitchfork and another his good blackthorn. Meanwhile the Knight returns, and though Marion replies to his accost--
"Pour Dieu, sire, alez vo chemin, Si feres moult grant courtoisie,"
he renews his suit, but is again rejected. Returning in a bad temper he meets Robin and cuffs him soundly, a correction which Robin does not take in the heroic manner. Marion runs to rescue him, and the Knight threatens to carry her off--which Robin, even though his friends have come up, is too cowardly to prevent. She, however, is constant and escapes; the piece finis.h.i.+ng by a long and rather tedious festival of the clowns. Its drawbacks are obvious, and are those natural to an experiment which has no patterns before it; but the figure of Marion is exceedingly graceful and pleasing, and the whole has promise. It is essentially a comic opera; but that a _trouvere_ of the thirteenth century should by himself, so far as we can see, have founded comic opera is not a small thing.
[Sidenote: _The_ Jeu de la Feuillie.]
The _Jus de la Feuillie_ ("the booths"), otherwise _Li Jus Adam_, or Adam"s play, is more ambitious and more complicated, but also more chaotic. It is, as has been said, an early sketch of a comedy of manners; but upon this is grafted in the most curious way a fairy interlude, or rather after-piece. Adam himself opens the piece and informs his friends with much coolness that he has tried married life, but intends to go back to "clergy" and then set out for Paris, leaving his father to take care of his wife. He even replies to the neighbours" remonstrances by enlarging in the most glowing terms on the pa.s.sion he has felt for his wife and on her beauty, adding, with a crude brutality which has hardly a ghost of atoning fun in it, that this is all over--
"Car mes fains en est apaies."
His father then appears, and Adam shows himself not more dutiful as a son than he is grateful as a husband. But old Henri de la Halle, an easy-going father, has not much reproach for him. The piece, however, has hardly begun before it goes off into a medley of unconnected scenes, though each has a sort of _fabliau_ interest of its own. A doctor is consulted by his clients; a monk demands alms and offerings in the name of Monseigneur Saint Acaire, promising miracles; a madman succeeds him; and in the midst enters the _Mainie h.e.l.lequin_, "troop of h.e.l.lequin" (a sort of Oberon or fairy king), with Morgue la fee among them. The fairies end with a song, and the miscellaneous conversation of the men of Arras resumes and continues for some time, reaching, in fact, no formal termination.
[Sidenote: _Comparison of them._]
In this odd piece, which, except the description of Marie the deserted wife, has little poetical merit, we see drama of the particular kind in a much ruder and vaguer condition than in the parallel instance of _Robin et Marion_. There the very form of the _pastourelle_ was in a manner dramatic--it wanted little adjustment to be quite so; and though the _coda_ of the rustic merry-making is rather artless, it is conceivably admissible. Here we are not far out of Chaos as far as dramatic arrangement goes. Adam"s announced desertion of his wife and intended journey to Paris lead to nothing: the episodes or scenes of the doctor and the monk are connected with nothing; the fool or madman and his father are equally independent; and the "meyney of h.e.l.lequin" simply play within the play, not without rhyme, but certainly with very little reason. Nevertheless the piece is almost more interesting than the comparatively regular farces (into which rather later the _fabliaux_ necessarily developed themselves) and than the miracle plays (which were in the same way dramatic versions of the Lives of the Saints), precisely because of this irregular and pillar-to-post character. We see that the author is trying a new kind, that he is endeavouring to create for himself. He is not copying anything in form; he is borrowing very little from any one in material. He has endeavoured to represent, and has not entirely failed in representing, the comings and goings, the ways and says, of his townsmen at fair and market. The curiously desultory character of this early drama--the character hit off most happily in modern times by _Wallenstein"s Lager_--naturally appears here in an exaggerated form. But the root of the matter--the construction of drama, not on the model of Terence or of anybody, but on the model of life--is here.
It will be for my successor to show the wide extension of this dramatic form in the succeeding period. Here it takes rank rather as having the interest of origins, and as helping to fill out the picture of the marvellously various ability of Frenchmen of letters in the thirteenth century, than for the positive bulk or importance of its const.i.tuents. And it is important to repeat that it connects itself in the general literary survey both with _fabliau_ and with allegory. The personifying taste, which bred or was bred from allegory, is very close akin to the dramatic taste, and the _fabliau_, as has been said more than once, is a farce in the making, and sometimes far advanced towards being completely made.
[Sidenote: _Early French prose._]
All the matter hitherto discussed in this chapter, as well as all that of previous chapters as far as French is concerned, with the probable if not certain exception of the Arthurian romances, has been in verse.
Indeed--still with this exception, and with the further and more certain exceptions of a few laws, a few sermons, &c.--there was no French prose, or none that has come down to us, until the thirteenth century. The Romance tongues, as contradistinguished from Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic, were slow to develop vernacular prose; the reason, perhaps, being that Latin, of one kind or another, was still so familiar to all persons of any education that, for purposes of instruction and use, vernacular prose was not required, while verse was more agreeable to the vulgar.
[Sidenote: _Laws and sermons._]
Yet it was inevitable that prose should, sooner or later, make its appearance; and it was equally inevitable that spoken prose sermons should be of the utmost antiquity. Indeed such sermons form, by reasonable inference, the subject of the very earliest reference[155]
to that practically lost _lingua romana rustica_ which formed the bridge between Latin and the Romance tongues. But they do not seem to have been written down, and were no doubt extempore addresses rather than regular discourses. Law appears to have had the start of divinity in the way of providing formal written prose; and the law-fever of the Northmen, which had already shaped, or was soon to shape, the "Gray-goose" code of their northernmost home in Iceland, expressed itself early in Normandy and England--hardly less early in the famous _Lettres du Sepulcre_ or _a.s.sises de Jerusalem_, the code of the Crusading kingdom, which was drawn up almost immediately after its establishment, and which exists, though not in the very oldest form.
Much uncertainty prevails on the question when the first sermons in French vernacular were formally composed, and by whom. It has been maintained, and denied, that the French sermons of St Bernard which exist are original, in which case the practice must have come in pretty early in the twelfth century. There is, at any rate, no doubt that Maurice de Sully, who was Archbishop of Paris for more than thirty years, from 1160 onwards, composed sermons in French; or at least that sermons of his, which may have been written in Latin, were translated into French. For this whole point of early prose, especially on theological subjects, is complicated by the uncertainty whether the French forms are original or not. There is no doubt that the feeling expressed by Ascham in England nearly four centuries later, that it would have been for himself much easier and pleasanter to write in Latin, must at the earlier date have prevailed far more extensively.
[Footnote 155: The often-quoted statement that in 659 Mummolinus or Momolenus was made Bishop of Noyon because of his double skill in "Teutonic" and "Roman" (_not_ "Latin") speech.]
[Sidenote: _Villehardouin._]
Still prose made its way: it must have received an immense accession of vogue if the prose Arthurian romances really date from the end of the twelfth century; and by the beginning of the thirteenth it found a fresh channel in which to flow, the channel of historical narrative.
The earliest French chronicles of the ordinary compiling kind date from this time; and (which is of infinitely greater importance) it is from this time (_cir._ 1210) that the first great French prose book, from the literary point, appears--that is to say, the _Conquete de Constantin.o.ble_,[156] or history of the Fourth Crusade, by Geoffroy de Villehardouin, Marshal of Champagne and Romanie, who was born about 1160 in the first-named province, and died at Messinople in Greece about 1213.
[Footnote 156: Ed. Natalis de Wailly. Paris, 1872.]
This deservedly famous and thoroughly delightful book, which has more than one contemporary or slightly younger parallel, though none of these approaches it in literary interest, presents the most striking resemblance to a _chanson de geste_--in conduct, arrangement (the paragraphs representing _laisses_), and phraseology. But it is not, as some other early prose is, merely verse without rhyme, and with broken rhythm; and it is impossible to read it without astonished admiration at the excellence of the medium which the writer, apparently by instinct, has attained. The list of the crusaders; their emba.s.sy to "li dux de Venise qui ot a nom Henris Dandolo et etait mult sages et mult prouz"; their bargain, in which the business-like Venetian, after stipulating for 85,000 marks of transport-money, agrees to add fifty armed galleys without hire, for the love of G.o.d _and_ on the terms of half-conquests; the death of the Count of Champagne (much wept by Geoffroy his marshal); and the subst.i.tution after difficulties of Boniface, Marquis of Montserrat;--these things form the prologue. When the army is actually got together the transport-money is unfortunately lacking, and the Venetians, still with the main chance steadily before them, propose that the crusaders shall recover for them, from the King of Hungary, Zara, "Jadres en Esclavonie, qui est une des plus forz citez du monde." Then we are told how Dandolo and his host take the cross; how Alexius Comnenus, the younger son of Isaac, arrives and begs aid; how the fleet set out ("Ha! Dex, tant bon destrier i ot mis!"); how Zara is besieged and taken; of the pact made with Alexius to divert the host to Constantinople; of the voyage thither after the Pope"s absolution for the slightly piratical and not in the least crusading _prise de Jadres_ has been obtained; of the dissensions and desertions at Corfu, and the arrival at the "Bras St Georges," the Sea of Marmora. This is what may be called the second part.
The third part opens with debates at San Stefano as to the conduct of the attack. The emperor sends soft words to "la meillor gens qui soent sanz corone" (this is the description of the chiefs), but they reject them, arrange themselves in seven battles, storm the port, take the castle of Galata, and then a.s.sault the city itself. The fighting having gone wholly against him, the emperor retires by the open side of the city, and the Latins triumph. Some show is made of resuming, or rather beginning, a real crusade; but the young Emperor Alexius, to whom his blind father Isaac has handed over the throne, bids them stay, and they do so. Soon dissensions arise, war breaks out, a conspiracy is formed against Isaac and his son by Mourzufle, "et Murchufles chauca les houses vermoilles," quickly putting the former owners of the scarlet boots to death. A second siege and capture of the city follows, and Baldwin of Flanders is crowned emperor, while Boniface marries the widow of Isaac, and receives the kingdom of Salonica.
It has seemed worth while to give this abstract of the book up to a certain point (there is a good deal more of confused fighting in "Romanie" before, at the death of Boniface, Villehardouin gives up the pen to Henri of Valenciennes), because even such a bare argument may show the masterly fas.h.i.+on in which this first of modern vernacular historians of the great literary line handles his subject. The parts are planned with judgment and adjusted with skill; the length allotted to each incident is just enough; the speeches, though not omitted, are not inserted at the tyrannous length in which later mediaeval and even Renaissance historians indulged from corrupt following of the ancients. But no abstract could show--though the few sc.r.a.ps of actual phrase purposely inserted may convey glimpses of it--the vigour and picturesqueness of the recital. That Villehardouin was an eyewitness explains a little, but very little: we have, unfortunately, libraries full of eyewitness-histories which are duller than any ditch-water.
Nor, though he is by no means shy of mentioning his own performances, does he communicate to the story that slightly egotistic interest of gossip and personal detail of which his next great successor is perhaps the first example. It is because, while writing a rather rugged but completely genuine and unmetrical though rhythmical prose, Villehardouin has the poet"s eye and grasp that he sees, and therefore makes us see, the events that he relates. These events do not form exactly the most creditable chapter of modern history; for they simply come to this, that an army a.s.sembling for a crusade against the infidel, allows itself to be bribed or wheedled into two successive attacks on two Christian princes who have given it not the slightest provocation, never attacks the infidel at all, and ends by a filibustering seizure of already Christian territory. Nor does Villehardouin make any elaborate disguise of this; but he tells the tale with such a gust, such a _furia_, that we are really as much interested in the success of this private piracy as if it had been the true crusade of G.o.dfrey of Bouillon himself.
[Sidenote: _William of Tyre._]
[Sidenote: _Joinville._]
The earlier and more legitimate crusades did not lack fitting chroniclers in the same style, though none of them had the genius of Villehardouin. The _Roman d"Eracles_ (as the early vernacular version[157] of the Latin chronicle of William of Tyre used to be called, for no better reason than that the first line runs, "Les anciennes histoires dient qu"Eracles [Heraclius] qui fu mout bons crestiens gouverna l"empire de Rome") is a chronicle the earlier part of which is a.s.signed to a certain Bernard, treasurer of the Abbey of Corbie. It is a very extensive relation, carrying the history of Latin Palestine from Peter the Hermit"s pilgrimage to about the year 1190, composed probably within ten or fifteen years after this later date, and written, though not with Villehardouin"s epic spirit, in a very agreeable and readable fas.h.i.+on. Not much later, vernacular chronicles of profane history in France became common, and the celebrated _Grandes Chroniques_ of St Denis began to be composed in French. But the only production of this thirteenth century which has taken rank in general literary knowledge with the work of the Marshal of Champagne is that[158] of Jean de Joinville, also a Champenois and Seneschal of the province, who was born about ten years after Villehardouin"s death, and who died, after a life prolonged to not many short of a hundred years, in 1319. Joinville"s historical work seems to have been the occupation of his old age; but its subject, the Life and Crusading misfortunes of Saint Louis, belongs to the experiences of his youth and early middle life. Besides the _Histoire de Saint Louis_, we have from him a long _Credo_ or profession of religious faith.
[Footnote 157: Ed. Paulin Paris. Paris, 1879.]
[Footnote 158: Ed. Natalis de Wailly. Paris, 1874.]