CHAPTER INARRATIVE RELIGIOUS POETRY—THE NATIONAL EPIC—THE EPIC OF ANTIQUITY—ROMANCES OF LOVE AND COURTESY The literature of the Middle Ages is an expression of the spirit of feudalism and of the genius of the Church. From the union of feudalism and Christianity arose the chivalric ideals, the new courtesy, the homage to woman. Abstract ideas, ethical, theological, and those of amorous metaphysics, were rendered through allegory into art. Against these high conceptions, and the overstrained sentiment connected with them, the positive intellect and the mocking temper of France reacted; a literature of satire arose. By degrees the bourgeois spirit encroached upon and overpowered the chivalric ideals. At length the mediÆval conceptions were exhausted. Literature dwindled as its sources were impoverished; ingenuities and technical formalities replaced imagination. The minds of men were prepared to accept the new influences of the Renaissance and the Reformation. INARRATIVE RELIGIOUS POETRY The oldest monument of the French language is found in the Strasburg Oaths (842); the oldest French poem possessing literary merit is the Vie de Saint Alexis, of which a redaction belonging to the middle of the eleventh century survives. The passion of piety and the passion of combat, the religious and the warrior motives, found early expression in literature; from the first arose the Lives of Saints and other devout writings, from the second arose the chansons de geste. They grew side by side, and had a like manner of development. If one takes precedence of the other, it is only because by the chances of time Saint Alexis remains to us, and the forerunners of the Chanson de Roland are lost. With each species of poetry cantilÈnes—short lyrico-epic poems—preceded the narrative form. Both the profane and what may be called the religious chanson de geste were sung or recited by the same jongleurs—men of a class superior to the vulgar purveyors of amusement. Gradually the poems of both kinds expanded in length, and finally prose narrative took the place of verse. The Lives of Saints are in the main founded on Latin originals; the names of their authors are commonly unknown. Saint Alexis, a tale of Syriac origin, possibly the work of Tedbalt, a canon of Vernon, consists of 125 stanzas, each of five lines which are bound together by a single assonant rhyme. It tells of the chastity and poverty of the saint, who flies from his virgin bride, lives among beggars, returns unrecognised to his father's More than fifty of these Lives of Saints are known, composed generally in octosyllabic verse, and varying in length from some hundreds of lines to ten thousand. In the group which treats of the national saints of France, an element of history obscured by errors, extravagances, and anachronisms may be found. The purely legendary matter occupies a larger space in those derived from the East, in which the religious ideal is that of the hermit life. The celebrated Barlaam et Joasaph, in which Joasaph, son of a king of India, escaping from his father's restraints, fulfils his allotted life as a Christian A body of short poems, inspired by religious feeling, and often telling of miracles obtained by the intercession of the Virgin or the saints, is known as Contes pieux. Many of these were the work of Gautier de Coinci (1177-1236), a Benedictine monk; he translates from Latin sources, but with freedom, adding matter of his own, and in the course of his pious narratives gives an image, far from flattering, of the life and manners of his own time. It is he who tells of the robber who, being accustomed to commend himself in his adventures to our Lady, was supported on the gibbet for three days by her white hands, and received his pardon; and of the illiterate monk who suffered shame because he knew no more than his Ave Maria, but who, when dead, was proved a holy man by the five roses that came from his mouth in honour of the five letters of Maria's name; IITHE NATIONAL EPIC Great events and persons, a religious and national spirit, and a genius for heroic narrative being given, epic literature arises, as it were, inevitably. Short poems, In Charlemagne, champion of Christendom against Islam, a great epic figure appeared; on his person converged the epic interest; he may be said to have absorbed into himself, for the imagination of the singers and the people, the persons of his predecessors, and even, at a later time, of his successors; their deeds became his deeds, their fame was merged in his; he stood forth as the representative of France. We may perhaps regard the ninth century as the period of the transformation of the cantilÈnes into the chansons de geste; in the fragment of Latin prose of the tenth
The oldest surviving chanson de geste is the SONG OF ROLAND, and it is also the best. The disaster of More than any other poem, the Chanson de Roland deserves to be named the Iliad of the Middle Ages. On August 15, 778, the rearguard of Charlemagne's army, returning from a successful expedition to the north of Spain, was surprised and destroyed by Basque mountaineers in the valley of Roncevaux. Among those who fell was Hrodland (Roland), Count of the march of Brittany. For Basques, the singers substituted a host of Saracens, who, after promise of peace, treacherously attack the Franks, with the complicity of Roland's enemy, the traitor Ganelon. By Roland's side is placed his companion-in-arms, Olivier, brave but prudent, brother of Roland's betrothed, la belle Aude, who learns her lover's death, and drops dead at the feet of Charlemagne. In fact but thirty-six years of age, Charlemagne is here a majestic old man, À la barbe fleurie, still full of heroic
Naturally the chansons which celebrated the achievements of one epic personage or one heroic family fell into a group, and the idea of cycles of songs having arisen, the later poets forced many independent subjects to enter into the so-called cycle of the king (Charlemagne), or that of William of Orange, or that of Doon of Mayence. The second of these had, indeed, a genuine cyclic character: it told of the resistance of the south of France to the Mussulmans. The last cycle to develop was that of the Crusades. Certain poems or groups of poems may be distinguished as gestes of the provinces, including the Geste des Lorrains, that of the North (Raoul de Cambrai), that of Burgundy, and others.4 Among these may be placed the beautiful tale of Amis et Amiles, a glorification of friendship between man and man, which endures all trials and self-sacrifices. Other poems, again, are unconnected with any of these cycles; and, indeed, the cyclic division is more a convenience of classification than a fact in the spontaneous development of this form of art. The entire period of the evolution of epic song extends from the tenth or eleventh to the fifteenth century, or, we might say, from the Chanson de Roland to the Chronique de Bertrand Duguesclin. The eleventh century produced the most admirable work;
The style in which the chansons de geste are written is something traditional, something common to the people and to the time, rather than characteristic of the individual authors. They show little of the art of arranging or composing the matter so as to produce an unity of effect: the narrative straggles or condenses itself as if by accident; skill in transitions is unknown. The study of character is rude and elementary: a man is either heroic or dastard, loyal or a traitor; wholly noble, or absolutely base. Yet certain types of manhood and womanhood are presented with power and beauty. The feeling for external nature, save in some traditional formulÆ, hardly appears. The passion for the marvellous is everywhere present: St. Maurice, St. George, and a shining company, mounted on white steeds, will of a sudden bear down the hordes of the infidel; an angel stands glorious behind the throne of Charlemagne; or in narrative of Celtic origin angels may be mingled with fays. God, the great suzerain, to whom even kings owe homage, rules over all; Jesus and Mary are watchful of the soldiers of the cross; Paradise receives the souls of the faithful. As for earth, there is no land so gay or so dear as la douce France. The Emperor is above all the servant and protector of the Church. As the influence of the great feudal lords increased, they are magnified often at the expense of the monarchy; yet even when in high rebellion, they secretly feel the duty of loyalty. The recurring poetic epithet The popularity of the French epopee extended beyond France. Every country of Europe translated or imitated the chansons de geste. Germany made the fortunate choice of Roland and Aliscans. In England two of the worst examples, Fierabras and Otinel, were special favourites. In Norway the chansons were applied to the purpose of religious propaganda. Italy made the tales of Roland, Ogier, Renaud, her own. Meanwhile the national epopee declined in France; a breath of scepticism touched and withered the leafage and blossom of imagination; it even became possible to parody—as in Audigier—the heroic manner. The employment of rhyme in place of assonance, and of the alexandrine in place of the decasyllabic line, encouraged what may be called poetical padding. The influence of the Breton romances diverted the chansons de geste into ways of fantasy; "We shall never know," writes M. LÉon Gautier, "the harm which the Round Table has done us." Finally, verse became a weariness, and was replaced by prose. The decline had progressed to a fall. IIITHE EPIC OF ANTIQUITY Later to develop than the national epopee was that which formed the cycle of antiquity. Their romantic matter made the works of the Greco-Roman decadence even more attractive than the writings of the great classical authors to poets who would enter into rivalry with the singers of the chansons de geste. These poems, which mediÆvalise ancient literature—poems often of portentous length—have been classified in three groups—epic romances, historical or pseudo-historical romances, and mythological tales, including the imitations of Ovid. The earliest in date of the first group (about 1150-1155) is the ROMANCE OF THEBES, the work of an unknown author, founded upon a compendium of the Thebaid of Statius, preceded by the story of OEdipus. It opened the way for the vast ROMANCE OF TROY, written some ten years later, by Benoit de Sainte-More. The chief sources of Benoit were versions, probably more or less augmented, of the famous records of the Trojan war, ascribed to the Phrygian Dares, an imaginary defender of the city, and the Cretan Dictys, one of the besiegers. Episodes were added, in which, on a slender suggestion, Benoit set his own inventive faculty to work, and among these by far the most interesting and admirable is the story of Troilus and Briseida, known better to us by her later name of Cressida. Through Boccaccio's Il Filostrato this tale reached our English Chaucer, and through Chaucer it Again, ten years later, an unknown poet was adapting Virgil to the taste of his contemporaries in his Eneas, where the courtship of the Trojan hero and Lavinia is related in the chivalric manner. All these poems are composed in the swift octosyllabic verse; the Troy extends to thirty thousand lines. While the names of the personages are classical, the spirit and life of the romances are wholly mediÆval: Troilus, and Hector, and Æneas are conceived as if knights of the Middle Ages; their wars and loves are those of gallant chevaliers. The Romance of Julius CÆsar (in alexandrine verse), the work of a certain Jacot de Forest, writing in the second half of the thirteenth century, versifies, with some additions from the Commentaries of CÆsar, an earlier prose translation by Jehan de Thuin (about 1240) of Lucan's Pharsalia—the oldest translation in prose of any secular work of antiquity. CÆsar's passion for Cleopatra in the Romance is the love prescribed to good knights by the amorous code of the writer's day, and Cleopatra herself has borrowed something of the charm of Tristram's Iseult. If Julius CÆsar may be styled historical, the ROMAN D'ALEXANDRE, a poem of twenty thousand lines (to the form of which this romance gave its name—"alexandrine" verse), the work of Lambert le Tort and Alexandre de Bernay, can only be described as legendary. All—or nearly all—that was written during the Middle Ages in French on the subject of Alexander may be traced back to Latin versions of a Greek compilation, perhaps of the first century, ascribed to Callisthenes, the companion of Alexander on his Asiatic
Of classical poets, Ovid ranked next to Virgil in the esteem of the Middle Ages. The mythology of paganism was sanctified by the assumption that it was an allegory of Christian mysteries, and thus the stories might first be enjoyed by the imagination, and then be expounded in their spiritual meaning. The Metamorphoses supplied ChrÉtien de Troyes with the subject of his Philomena; other writers gracefully dealt with the tales of Piramus and of Narcissus. But the most important work founded upon Ovid was a versified translation of the Metamorphoses (before 1305) by a Franciscan monk, ChrÉtien Legouais de Sainte-Maure, with appended IVROMANCES OF LOVE AND COURTESY Under the general title of the ÉpopÉe courtoise—the Epopee of Courtesy—may be grouped those romances which are either works of pure imagination or of uncertain origin, or which lead us back to Byzantine or to Celtic sources. They include some of the most beautiful and original poems of the Middle Ages. Appearing first about the opening of the twelfth century, later in date than the early chansons de geste, and contemporary with the courtly lyric poetry of love, they exhibit the chivalric spirit in a refined and graceful aspect; their marvels are not gross wonders, but often surprises of beauty; they are bright in colour, and varied in the play of life; the passions which they interpret, and especially the passion of love, are felt with an exquisite delicacy and a knowledge of the workings of the heart. They move lightly in their rhymed or assonanced verse; even when they passed into the form of prose they retained something of their charm. Breton harpers wandering through France and England made Celtic themes known through their lais; the fame of King Arthur was spread abroad by these singers and by the History of Geoffrey of Monmouth. French poets welcomed the new matter of romance, infused into it their own chivalric The romances of Tristan may certainly be named as of Celtic origin. About 1150 an Anglo-Norman poet, BÉROUL, brought together the scattered narrative of his adventures in a romance, of which a large fragment remains. The secret loves of Tristan and Iseut, their woodland wanderings, their dangers and escapes, are related with fine imaginative sympathy; but in this version of the tale the fatal love-philtre operates only for a period of three years; Iseut, with Tristan's consent, returns to her husband, King Marc; and then a second passion is born in their hearts, a passion which is the offspring not of magic but of natural attraction, and at a critical moment of peril the fragment closes. About twenty years later (1170) the tale was again sung by an Anglo-Norman named THOMAS. Here—again in a fragment—we read of Tristan's marriage, a marriage only in name, to the white-handed Iseut of Brittany, his fidelity of heart to his one first love, his mortal wound and deep desire to see the Queen of Cornwall, the device of the white or black sails to announce the result of his entreaty that she should come, his deception, and the death of his true love upon her lover's corpse. Early in the thirteenth century was composed a long prose romance, often rehandled and expanded, upon the same subject, in which Iseut and Tristan meet at the last moment and die in a close embrace. Le ChÈvrefeuille (The Honeysuckle), one of several lais by a twelfth-century poetess, MARIE, living in England, but a native of France, tells gracefully of an assignation of Tristan and Iseut, their meeting in the forest, and their sorrowful farewell. Marie de France wrote with an exquisite sense of the generosities and delicacy of the heart, and with a skill in narrative construction which was rare among the poets of her time. In Les Deux Amants, the manly pride of passion, which in a trial of strength declines the adventitious aid of a reviving potion, is rewarded by the union in death of the lover and his beloved. In Yonec and in Lanval tales of love and chivalry are made beautiful by lore of fairyland, in which the element of wonder is subdued to beauty. But the most admirable poem by Marie de France is unquestionably her Eliduc. The Breton knight Eliduc is passionately loved by Guilliadon, the only daughter of the old King of Exeter, on whose behalf he had waged battle. Her tokens of affection, girdle and ring, are received by Eliduc in silence; for, though her passion is returned, he has left in Brittany, unknown to Guilliadon, a faithful wife. Very beautiful is the self-transcending love of the wife, who restores her rival from seeming death, and herself retires into a convent. The lovers are wedded, and live in charity to the poor, but with a trouble at the heart for the wrong that they have done. In the end they part; Eliduc embraces the religious life, and the two loving women are united as sisters in the same abbey. Wace, in his romance of the Brut (1155), which renders into verse the Historia of Geoffrey of Monmouth, makes the earliest mention of the Round Table. Whether the Arthurian legends be of Celtic or of French origin—and the former seems probable—the French romances of
Beside the so-called Breton romances, the ÉpopÉe courtoise may be taken to include many poems of Greek, of Byzantine, or of uncertain origin, such as the Roman de la Violette, the tale of a wronged wife, having much in common with that novel of Boccaccio with which Shakespeare's Cymbeline is connected, the Floire et Blanchefleur; the PartÉnopeus de Blois, a kind of "Cupid and Psyche" story, with the parts of the lovers transposed, and others. In the early years of the thirteenth century the prose romance rivalled in popularity the romance in verse. The exquisite chante-fable of Aucassin et Nicolette, of the twelfth century, is partly in prose, partly in assonanced laisses of seven-syllable verse. It is a story of the victory of love: the heir of Count Garin of Beaucaire is enamoured of a beautiful maiden of unknown birth, purchased from the Saracens, who proves In general the poems of the ÉpopÉe courtoise exhibit much of the brilliant external aspect of the life of chivalry as idealised by the imagination; dramatic situations are ingeniously devised; the emotions of the chief actors are expounded and analysed, sometimes with real delicacy; but in the conception of character, in the recurring incidents, in the types of passion, in the creation of marvel and surprise, a large conventional element is present. Love is independent of marriage, or rather the relation of wedlock excludes love in the accepted sense of the word; the passion is almost necessarily illegitimate, and it comes as if it were an irresistible fate; the first advance is often made by the woman; but, though at war with the duty of wedlock, love is conceived as an ennobling influence, prompting the knight to all deeds of courage and self-sacrifice. Through the later translation of the Spanish Amadis des Gaules, something of the spirit of the mediÆval romances was carried into the chivalric and pastoral romances of the seventeenth century. CHAPTER II
ILYRICAL POETRY Long before the date of any lyrical poems that have come down to us, song and dance were a part of the life of the people of the North as well as of the South of France; religious festivals were celebrated with a gaiety which had its mundane side; love and malicious sport demanded an expression as well as pious joy. But in tracing the forms of lyrical verse anterior to the middle of the twelfth century, when the troubadour influence from the South began to be felt, we must be guided partly by conjecture, derived from the later poetry, in which—and especially in the refrains—earlier fragments have been preserved. The common characteristic which distinguishes the earlier lyrics is the presence in them of an objective element: they do not merely render an emotion; they contain something of a story, or they suggest a situation. In this literature of sentiment, the singer or imagined singer is commonly a woman. The chanson d'histoire is also known as chanson de toile, for the songs were such The poÉsie courtoise, moulded in form and inspired in its sentiment by the ProvenÇal lyrics, lies within the compass of about one hundred and thirty years, from It is essentially a poetry of the intellect and of the imagination, dealing with an elaborated theory of love; the simple and spontaneous cry of passion is rarely heard. According to the amorous doctrine, love exists only between a married woman and the aspirant to her heart, and the art of love is regulated by a stringent code. Nothing can be claimed by the lover as a right; the grace of his lady, who is placed far above him, must be sought as a favour; for that favour he must qualify himself by all knightly virtues, and chief among these, as the position requires, are the virtues of discretion and patience. Hence the poet's ingenuities of adoration; hence often the monotony of artificial passion; hence, also, subtleties and curiosities of expression, and In some instances the reputation of the lyrical trouvÈre was founded rather on his music than his verse. The metrical forms were various, and were gradually reduced to rule; the ballette, of ProvenÇal origin, was a more elaborate rondet, consisting of stanzas and refrain; the estampie (stampÔn, to beat the ground with the foot) was a dancing-song; the lyric lai, virtually identical with the descort, consisted of stanzas which varied in structure; the motet, a name originally applied to pieces of church music, was freer in versification, and occasionally dealt with popular themes. Among forms which cannot be included under the general title of chansons, are those in dialogue derived from the ProvenÇal literature; in the tenson or dÉbat the two interlocutors put forth their opinions on what theme they may please; in the jeu parti one of the imagined disputants proposes two contrary solutions of some poetical or amorous question, and defends whichever solution his associate refuses to accept; the earliest jeu parti, attributed to Gace BrulÉ and Count Geoffroi of IIFABLES, AND RENARD THE FOX The desire of ecclesiastical writers in the Middle Ages to give prominence to that part of classical literature which seemed best suited to the purpose of edification caused the fables of PhÆdrus and Avianus to be regarded with special honour. Various renderings from the thirteenth century onwards were made under the title of Isopets,1 a name appropriated to collections of fables whether derived from Æsop or from other sources. The twelfth-century fables in verse of Marie de France, founded on an English collection, include apologues derived not only from classical authors but from the tales of popular tradition. A great collection made about 1450 by Steinhoewel, a physician of Ulm,
It is far otherwise with the famous beast-epic, the ROMAN DE RENARD. The cycle consists of many parts or "branches" connected by a common theme; originating and obscurely developed in the North, in Picardy, in Normandy, and the Isle of France, it suddenly appeared in literature in the middle of the twelfth century, and continued to receive additions and variations during nearly two hundred years. The spirit of the Renard poems is essentially bourgeois; the heroes of the chansons de geste achieve their wondrous deeds by strength and valour; Renard the fox is powerful by skill and cunning; the greater beasts—his chief enemy the wolf, and others—are no match for his ingenuity and endless resources; but he is powerless against smaller creatures, the cock, the crow, the sparrow. The names of the personages are either significant names, such as Noble, the lion, and Chanticleer, the cock, or proper names, such as Isengrin, the wolf, Bruno, the bear, Tibert, the cat, Bernard, the ass; and as certain of these proper names are found in the eastern district, it has been conjectured that a poet of Lotharingia in the tenth century first told in Latin the wars of fox and wolf, and that through translations the epic matter, derived originally from popular tradition, reached the trouvÈres of the North. While in a certain degree typical figures, the beasts are at the same time individual; Renard is not the representative merely of a species; he The earliest branches of the cycle have reached us only in a fragmentary way, but they can be in part reconstructed from the Latin Isengrinus of Nivard of Ghent (about 1150), and from the German Reinhart Fuchs, a rendering from the French by an Alsatian, Henri le Glichezare (about 1180). The wars of Renard and Isengrin are here sung, and the failure of Renard's trickeries against the lesser creatures; the spirit of these early branches is one of frank gaiety, untroubled by a didactic or satirical intention. In the branches of the second period the parody of human society is apparent; some of the episodes are fatiguing in their details; some are intolerably gross, but the poem known as the Branch of the Judgment is masterly—an ironical comedy, in which, without sacrifice of the primitive character of the beast-epic, the spirit of mediÆval life is transported into the animal world. Isengrin, the accuser of Renard before From the date of the Branch of the Judgment the Renard Romances declined. The Judgment was imitated by inferior hands, and the beasts were more and more nearly transformed to men; the spirit of gaiety was replaced by seriousness or gloom; Renard ceased to be a light-footed and ingenious rogue; he became a type of human fraud and cruelty; whatever in society was false and base and merciless became a form of "renardie," and by "renardie" the whole world seemed to be ruled. Such is the temper expressed in Le Couronnement Renard, written in Flanders soon after 1250, a satire directed chiefly against the mendicant orders, in which the fox, turned friar for a season, ascends the throne. Renard le Nouveau, the work of a poet of Lille, Jacquemart GelÉe, nearly half a century later, represents again the triumph of the spirit of evil; although far inferior in execution to the Judgment, it had remarkable success, to which the allegory, wearying to a modern reader, no doubt contributed at a time when allegory was a delight. The last of the Renard romances, Renard le Contrefait, was composed at Troyes before 1328, by an ecclesiastic who had IIIFABLIAUX The name fabliaux is applied to short versified tales, comic in character, and intended rather for recitation than for song. Out of a far larger number about one hundred and fifty have survived. The earliest—Richeut—is of the year 1159. From the middle of the twelfth century, together with the heroic or sentimental poetry of feudalism, we find this bourgeois poetry of realistic observation; and even in the chansons de geste, in occasional comic episodes, something may be seen which is in close kinship with the fabliaux. Many brief humorous stories, having much in common under their various disguises, exist as part of the tradition of many lands and peoples. The theory which traces the French fabliaux to Indian originals is unproved, and indeed is unnecessary. The East, doubtless, contributed its quota to the common stock, but so did other quarters of the globe; such tales are ubiquitous and are undying, only the The fabliaux, as we can study them, belong especially to the north and north-east of France, and they continued to be put forth by their rhymers until about 1340, the close of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century being the period of their greatest popularity. Simple and obvious jests sufficed to raise a laugh among folk disposed to good humour; by degrees something of art and skill was attained. The misfortunes of husbands supplied an inexhaustible store of merriment; if woman and the love of woman were idealised in the romances, the fabliaux took their revenge, and exhibited her as the pretty traitress of a shameless comedy. If religion was honoured in the age of faith, the bourgeois spirit found matter of mirth in the adventures of dissolute priests and self-indulgent monks. Not a few of the fabliaux are cynically gross—ribald but not voluptuous. To literary distinction they made small pretence. It sufficed if the tale ran easily in the current speech, thrown into rhyming octosyllables; but brevity, frankness, natural movement are no slight or common merits in mediÆval poetry, and something of the social life of the time is mirrored in these humorous narratives. To regard them as a satire of class against class, inspired by indignation, is to misconceive their true character; they are rather miniature comedies or caricatures, in which every class in turn provides material for mirth. It may, however, be said that with the writers of the fabliaux to hold woman in scorn is almost an article of faith. Among these writers a few persons of secular rank or dignified churchmen occasionally appeared; but IVTHE ROMANCE OF THE ROSE The most extraordinary production in verse of the thirteenth century is undoubtedly Le Roman de la Rose. It is indeed no single achievement, but two very remarkable poems, written at two different periods, by two authors whose characters and gifts were not only alien, but opposed—two poems which reflect two different conditions of society. Of its twenty-two thousand octosyllabic lines, upwards of four thousand are the work of GUILLAUME DE LORRIS; the remainder is the work of a later writer, JEAN DE MEUN. Lorris is a little town situated between Orleans and Montargis. Here, about the year 1200, the earlier poet was born. He was a scholar, at least as far as knowledge of Latin extends, and learned above all in the lore of To pluck the rose in the garden of delight is to win the maiden; her fears, her virgin modesty and pride, her kindness, her pity, are the company of friends or foes by whom the rose is surrounded; and to harmonise the real and the ideal, all the incidents are placed in the setting of a dream. Wandering one spring morning by the river-banks, the dreamer finds himself outside the walls of a fair orchard, owned by DÉduit (Pleasure), of which the portress is Oiseuse (Idleness); on the walls are painted figures of Hatred, Envy, Sadness, Old Age, Poverty, and other evil powers; but unterrified by these, he enters, and finds a company of dancers on the turf, among whom is Beauty, led by the god of Love. Surrounded by a thorny hedge is the rosebud on which all his desire now centres. He is wounded by the arrows of Love, does homage to the god, and learns his commandments and the evils and the gains of love. Invited by Bel-Accueil, the son of Courtoisie, to Did Guillaume de Lorris ever complete his poem, or did he die while it was still but half composed? We may conjecture that it wanted little to reach some dÉnouement—perhaps the fulfilment of the lover's hopes; and it is not impossible that a lost fragment actually brought the love-tale to its issue. But even if the story remained without an end, we possess in Guillaume's poem a complete mediÆval Art of Love; and if the amorous metaphysics are sometimes cold, conventional, or laboured, we have gracious allegories, pieces of brilliant description, vivid personifications, and something of ingenious analysis of human passion. Nevertheless the work of this Middle-Age disciple of Ovid and of ChrÉtien de Troyes owes more than half its celebrity to the continuation, conceived in an entirely opposite spirit, by his successor, Jean de Meun. The contrast is striking: Guillaume de Lorris was a refined and graceful exponent of the conventional doctrine of love, a seemly celebrant in the cult of woman, an ingenious decorator of accepted ideas; Jean de Meun was a passionate and positive spirit, an ardent speculator in social, political, and scientific questions, one who cared nothing for amorous subtleties, and held woman in scorn. The rose is plucked by the lover in the end; but lover and rose are almost forgotten in Jean's zeal in setting forth his views of life, and in forming an encyclopÆdia of the knowledge of his time. Reason discourses on the dangers of passion, commends friendship or universal philanthropy as wiser than love, warns against the instability of fortune and the deceits of riches, and sets charity high above justice; if love be commendable, it is as the device of nature for the continuation of the species. The way to win woman and to keep her loyalty is now the unhappy way of squandered largess; formerly The graceful design of the earlier poet is disregarded; the love-story becomes a mere frame for setting forth the views of Jean de Meun, his criticism of the chivalric ideal, his satire upon the monkish vices, his revolutionary notions respecting property and government, his advanced opinions in science, his frank realism as to the relations of man and woman. He possesses all the learning of his time, and an accomplished judgment in the literature which he had studied. He is a powerful satirist, and passages of narrative and description show that he had a poet's feeling for beauty; he handles the language with the strength and skill of a master. On the other hand, he lacks all sense of proportion, and cannot shape an imaginative plan; his prolixity wearies the reader, and it cannot be denied that as a moral reformer he CHAPTER IIIDIDACTIC LITERATURE—SERMONS—HISTORY
IDIDACTIC LITERATURE The didactic literature, moral and scientific, of the Middle Ages is abundant, and possesses much curious interest, but it is seldom original in substance, and seldom valuable from the point of view of literary style. In great part it is translated or derived from Latin sources. The writers were often clerks or laymen who had turned from the vanities of youth—fabliau or romance—and now aimed at edification or instruction. Science in the hands of the clergy must needs be spiritualised and moralised; there were sermons to be found in stones, pious allegories in beast and bird; mystic meanings in the alphabet, in grammar, in the chase, in the tourney, in the game of chess. Ovid and Virgil were sanctified to religious uses. The earliest versified Bestiary, which is also a Volucrary, a Herbary, and a Lapidary, that of Philippe de Thaon (before 1135), is versified from the Latin Physiologus, itself a translation from the work of an Alexandrian Greek of the second century. In its symbolic zoology the lion and the pelican are emblems of Christ; the unicorn is God; the crocodile is the devil; the stones "turrobolen," which blaze when they approach each Bestiaries and Lapidaries form parts of the vast encyclopÆdias, numerous in the thirteenth century, which were known by such names as Image du Monde, Mappe-monde, Miroir du Monde. Of these encyclopÆdias, the only one which has a literary interest is the TrÉsor (1265), by Dante's master, Brunetto Latini, who wrote in French in preference to his native Italian. In it science escapes not wholly from fantasy and myth, but at least from the allegorising spirit; his ethics and rhetoric are derived from Latin originals; his politics are his own. The Somme des Vices et des Vertus, compiled in 1279 by Friar Lorens, is a well-composed trÉsor of religion and morals. Part of its contents has become familiar to us through the Canterbury discourse of Chaucer's parson. The moral experience of a man of the world is summed up in the prose treatise on "The Four Ages of Man," by Philippe de Novare, chancellor of Cyprus. With this edifying work may be grouped the so-called Chastiements, counsels on education and conduct, designed for readers in general or for some special class—women, children, persons of knightly or of humble rank; studies of the virtues of chivalry, the rules of courtesy and of manners.1 Other writings, the États du
Among the preacher poets of the thirteenth century the most interesting personally is the minstrel RUTEBEUF, who towards the close of his gay though ragged life turned to serious thoughts, and expressed his penitent feelings with penetrating power. Rutebeuf, indeed—the Villon of his age—deployed his vivid and ardent powers in many directions, as a writer of song and satire, of allegory, of fabliaux, of drama. On each and all he impressed his own personality; the lyric note, imaginative fire, colour, melody, these were gifts that compensated the poet's poverty, his conjugal miseries, his lost eye, his IISERMONS The Latin sermons of the Middle Ages were countless; but it is not until Gerson and the close of the fourteenth century that we find a series of discourses by a known preacher written and pronounced in French. It is maintained that these Latin sermons, though prepared in the language of the Church, were delivered, when addressed to lay audiences, in the vernacular, and that those composite sermons in the macaronic style, that is, partly in French, partly in Latin, which appear in the thirteenth century and are frequent in the fifteenth, were the work of reporters or redactors among the auditory. On the other hand, it is argued that both Latin and French sermons were pronounced as each might seem suitable, before the laity, and that the macaronic style was actually practised in the pulpit. Perhaps we may accept the opinion that the short and simple homilies designed for the people, little esteemed as compositions, were rarely thought worthy of preservation in a Latin form; those discourses which remain to us, if occasionally used before an unlearned audience, seem to have been specially intended for clerkly hearers. The sermons of St. Bernard, which have been preserved in Latin and in a French translation of the thirteenth century, were certainly not his eloquent popular improvisations; they are doctrinal, with crude or curious allegorisings of Holy Scripture. Those of Maurice de Sully, Archbishop of Paris, probably also translated from the Latin, are simpler in manner and more practical in their It was not until the mendicant orders, Franciscans and Dominicans, began their labours that preaching, as preserved to us, was truly laicised and popularised. During the thirteenth century the work of the pulpit came to be conceived as an art which could be taught; collections of anecdotes and illustrations—exempla—for the enlivening of sermons, manuals for the use of preachers were formed; rules and precepts were set forth; themes for popular discourse were proposed and enlarged upon, until at length original thought and invention ceased; the preacher's art was turned into an easy trade. The effort to be popular often resulted in pulpit buffoonery. When GERSON preached at court or to the people towards the close of the fourteenth century, gravely exhorting high and low to practical duties, with tender or passionate appeals to religious feeling, his sermons were noble exceptions to the common practice. And the descent from Gerson to even his more eminent successors is swift and steep. The orators of the pulpit varied their discourse from burlesque mirth or bitter invective to gross terrors, in which death and judgment, Satan and hell-fire were largely displayed. The sermons of Michel Menot and Olivier Maillard, sometimes eloquent in their censure of sin, sometimes trivial or grotesque, sometimes pedantic in their exhibition of learning, have at least an historical value in presenting an image of social life in the fifteenth century. A word must be said of the humanism which preceded the Renaissance. Scholars and students there were in France two hundred years before the days of Erasmus and of BudÉ; but they were not scholars inspired by IIIHISTORY While the mediÆval historians, compilers, and abbreviators from records of the past laboured under all the disadvantages of an age deficient in the critical spirit, Prose, however, in due time proved itself to be the fitting medium for historical narrative, and verse was given over to the extravagances of fantasy. Compilations from the Latin, translations from the pseudo-Turpin, from Geoffrey of Monmouth, from Sallust, Suetonius, and CÆsar were succeeded by original record and testimony. GEOFFROY DE VILLEHARDOUIN, born between 1150 and 1164, Marshal of Champagne in 1191, was appointed eight years later to negotiate with the Venetians for the transport of the Crusaders to the East. He was probably a chief agent in the intrigue which diverted the fourth Crusade from its original destination—the Holy Land—to the assault upon Constantinople. In the events which followed he had a prominent part; before the close of 1213 Villehardouin was dead. During his last years he dictated the unfinished Memoirs known as the ConquÊte de Constantinople, which relate the story of his life from 1198 to 1207. Villehardouin is the first chronicler who impresses his own personality on what he wrote: a brave leader, skilful in resource, he was by no means an enthusiast possessed by the more extravagant ideas of chivalry; much more was he a politician and diplomatist, with material interests well in view; not, indeed, devoid of a certain imaginative wonder at the marvels of the East; not without his moments of ardour and excitement; deeply impressed with the feeling of feudal loyalty, the sense of the bond between the suzerain and his It is probable that Villehardouin knew too much of affairs, and was too experienced a man of the world to be quite frank as a historian: we can hardly believe, as he would have us, that the diversion of the crusading host from its professed objects was unpremeditated; we can perceive that he composes his narrative so as to form an apology; his recital has been justly described as, in part at least, "un mÉmoire justificatif." Nevertheless, there are passages, such as that which describes the first view of Constantinople, where Villehardouin's feelings seize upon his imagination, and, as it were, overpower him. In general he writes with a grave simplicity, sometimes with baldness, disdaining ornament, little sensible to colour or grace of style; but by virtue of his clear intelligence and his real grasp of facts his chronicle acquires a certain literary dignity, and when his words become vivid we know that it is because he had seen with inquisitive eyes and felt with genuine ardour. Happily for students of history, while Villehardouin presents the views of an aristocrat and a diplomatist, the incidents of the same extraordinary adventure can be seen, as they struck a simple soldier, in the record of Robert de Clari, which may serve as a complement and a counterpoise to the chronicle of his more illustrious contemporary. The unfinished Histoire de l'Empereur Henri, which carries on the narrative of events for some years subsequent to those related by Villehardouin, the work of Henri de Valenciennes, is a prose redaction of what had originally formed a chanson de geste. The versified chronicle or history in the thirteenth century declined among Anglo-Norman writers, but was continued in Flanders and in France. Prose translations and adaptations of Latin chronicles, ancient and modern, were numerous, but the literary value of many of these is slight. In the Abbey of Saint-Denis a corpus of national history in Latin had for a long while been in process of formation. Utilising this corpus and the works from which it was constructed, one of the monks of the Abbey—perhaps a certain Primat—compiled, in the second half of the century, a History of France in the vernacular—the Grandes Chroniques de Saint-Denis—with which later additions were from time to time incorporated, until under Charles V. the Grandes Chroniques de France attained their definitive form.2 Far more interesting as a literary composition is the little work known as RÉcits d'un MÉnestrel de Reims (1260), a lively, graceful, and often dramatic collection of traditions, anecdotes, dialogues, made rather for the purposes of popular entertainment than of formal instruction, and expressing the ideas of the middle classes on men and things. Forgotten during several centuries, it remains to us as one of the happiest records of the mediÆval spirit.
But among the prose narratives to which the thirteenth century gave birth, the Histoire de Saint Louis, by JEAN DE JOINVILLE, stands pre-eminent. Joinville, born about 1224, possessed of such literary culture as could be gained at the Court of Thibaut IV. of Champagne, became a favoured companion of the chivalric and saintly Louis during his six years' Crusade from 1248 to 1254. The memory of the King remained the most precious We must not expect from Joinville precision of chronology or exactitude in the details of military operations. His recollections crowd upon him; he does not marshal them by power of intellect, but abandons himself to the delights of memory. He is a frank, amiable, spirited talker, who has much to tell; he succeeds in giving us During the fourteenth century the higher spirit of feudalism declined; the old faith and the old chivalry were suffering a decay; the bourgeoisie grew in power Froissart as a poet wrote gracefully in the conventional modes of his time. His vast romance MÉliador, to which Wenceslas, Duke of Brabant, contributed the lyric part—famous in its day, long lost and recently recovered—is a construction of external marvels and splendours which lacks the inner life of imaginative faith. But as a brilliant scene-painter Froissart the chronicler is unsurpassed. His chronology, even his topography, cannot be trusted as exact; he is credulous rather than critical; he does not always test or control the statements of his informants; he is misled by their prejudices and passions; he views The fifteenth century is rich in historical writings of every kind—compilations of general history, domestic chronicles, such as the Livre des Faits du bon Messire Jean le Maingre, dit Bouciquaut, official chronicles both of the French and Burgundian parties, journals and memoirs. The Burgundian Enguerrand de Monstrelet was a lesser Froissart, faithful, laborious, a transcriber of documents, but without his predecessor's genius. On the French side the so-called Chronique Scandaleuse, by Jean de Roye, a Parisian of the time of Louis XI., to some extent redeems the mediocrity of the writers of his party. In PHILIPPE DE COMMINES we meet the last chronicler
The MÉmoires of Commines were composed as a body of material for a projected history of Louis XI. by Archbishop Angelo Cato; the writer, apparently in all sincerity, hoped that his unlearned French might thus be translated into Latin, the language of scholars; happily we possess the Memoirs as they left their author's mind. And, though Commines rather hides than thrusts to view his own personality, every page betrays the presence of a remarkable intellect. He was no artist either in imaginative design or literary execution; he was before all else a thinker, a student of political phenomena, a searcher after the causes of events, an analyst of motives, a psychologist of individual CHAPTER IV
ILATEST MEDIÆVAL POETS The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries form a period of transition from the true Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The national epopee was dead; the Arthurian tales were rehandled in prose; under the influence of the Roman de la Rose, allegory was highly popular, and Jean de Meun had shown how it could be applied to the secularisation of learning; the middle classes were seeking for instruction. In lyric poetry the free creative spirit had declined, but the technique of verse was elaborated and reduced to rule; ballade, chant royal, lai, virelai, rondeau were the established forms, and lyric verse was often used for matter of a didactic, moral, or satirical tendency. Even Ovid was tediously moralised (c. 1300) in some seventy thousand lines by ChrÉtien Legouais. Literary societies or puys1 were instituted, which maintained the rules of art, and awarded crowns to successful competitors in poetry; a formal ingenuity replaced lyrical inspiration; poetry accepted proudly the name of "rhetoric." At the same
The chief exponent of the new art of poetry was GUILLAUME DE MACHAUT. Born about 1300, he served as secretary to the King of Bohemia, who fell at CrÉcy. He enjoyed a tranquil old age in his province of Champagne, cultivating verse and music with the applause of his contemporaries. The ingenuities of gallantry are deployed at length in his Jugement du Roi de Navarre; he relates with dull prolixity the history of his patron, Pierre de Lusignan, King of Cyprus, in his Prise d'Alexandrie; the Voir dit relates in varying verse and prose the course of his sexagenarian love for a maiden in her teens, Peronne d'ArmentiÈres, who gratified her coquetry with an old poet's adoration, and then wedded his rival. In the forms of his verse EUSTACHE DESCHAMPS, also a native of Champagne (c. 1345-1405), was a disciple of Machaut: if he was not a poet, he at least interests a reader by rhymed journals of his own life and the life of his time, written in the spirit of an honest bourgeois, whom disappointed personal hopes and public misfortune had early embittered. Eighty thousand lines, twelve hundred ballades, nearly two hundred rondeaux, a vast unfinished satire on woman, the Miroir de Mariage, fatigued even his own age, and the official court poet of France outlived his fame. He sings of love in the conventional modes; his historical poems, celebrating events of the day, have interest by virtue of their matter; The exhaustion of the mediÆval sources of inspiration is still more apparent in the fifteenth-century successors of Deschamps. But already something of the reviving influence of Italian culture makes itself felt. CHRISTINE DE PISAN, Italian by her parentage and place of birth (c. 1363), was left a widow with three young children at the age of twenty-five. Her sorrow, uttered in verse, is a genuine lyric cry; but when in her poverty she practised authorship as a trade, while she wins our respect as a mother, the poetess is too often at once facile and pedantic. Christine was zealous in maintaining the honour of her sex against the injuries of Jean de Meun; in her prose CitÉ des Dames she celebrates the virtues and heroism of women, with examples from ancient and modern times; in the Livre des Trois Vertus she instructs women in their duties. When advanced in years, and sheltered in the cloister, she sang her swan-song in honour of Joan of Arc. Admirable in every relation of life, a patriot and a scholar, she only needed one thing—genius—to be a poet of distinction. A legend relates that the Dauphiness, Margaret of Scotland, kissed the lips of a sleeper who was the ugliest man in France, because from that "precious mouth" had issued so many "good words and virtuous sayings." The sleeper was Christine's poetical successor, ALAIN The last grace and refinements of chivalric society blossom in the poetry of CHARLES D'ORLÉANS, "la grÂce exquise des choses frÊles." He was born in 1391, son of Louis, Duke of Orleans, and an Italian mother, Valentine of Milan. Married at fifteen to the widow of Richard II. of England, he lost his father by assassination, his mother In the close of the mediÆval period, when old things were passing away and new things were as yet unborn, the minds of men inclined to fill the void with mockery and satire. Martin Lefranc (c. 1410-61) in his Champion des Dames—a poem of twenty-four thousand lines, in which there is much spirit and vigour of versification—balances one against another the censure and the praise Amid such mockery of life and love, the horror of death was ever present to the mind of a generation from which hope and faith seemed to fail; it was the time of the Danse MacabrÉ; the skeleton became a grim humourist satirising human existence, and verses written for the dance of women were ascribed in the manuscript which preserves them to Martial d'Auvergne. Passion and the idea of death mingle with a power at once realistic and romantic in the poetry of FRANÇOIS VILLON. He was born in poverty, an obscure child of the capital, in 1430 or 1431; he adopted the name of his early protector, Villon; obtained as a poor scholar his bachelor's degree in 1449, and three years later became a maÎtre Ès arts; but already he was a master of arts less creditable than those of the University. In 1455 Villon—or should we call him Monterbier, Montcorbier, Corbueil, Desloges, Mouton (aliases convenient for vagabondage)?—quarrelled with a priest, and killed his adversary; he While he handles with masterly ease certain of the fifteenth-century forms of verse—in particular the ballade—Villon is a modern in his abandonment of the traditional machinery of the imagination, its convention of allegories and abstractions, and those half-realised moralisings which were repeated from writer to writer; he is modern in the intensity of a personal quality which is impressed upon his work, in the complexity of his feelings, passing from mirth to despair, from beauty to horror, from cynical grossness to gracious memories or aspirations; he is modern in his passion for the real, and in those gleams of ideal light which are suddenly dashed across the vulgar surroundings of his sorry existence. While he flings out his scorn and indignation against those whom he regarded as his ill-users, In his direct inspiration from life, co-operating with an admirable skill and science in literary form, Villon stands alone. For others—Georges Chastelain, Meschinot, Molinet, CrÉtin—poetry was a cumbrous form of rhetoric, regulated by the rules of those arts of poetry which during the fifteenth century appeared at not infrequent intervals. The grands rhÉtoriqueurs with their complicated measures, their pedantic diction, their effete allegory, their points and puerilities, testify to the exhaustion of the Middle Ages, and to the need of new creative forces for the birth of a living literature. There is life, however, in the work of one remarkable prose-writer of the time—ANTOINE DE LA SALLE. His residence in Rome (1422) had made him acquainted with the tales of the Italian novellieri; he was a friend of the learned and witty Poggio; RenÉ of Anjou entrusted to him the education of his son; when advanced IITHE DRAMA The mediÆval drama in France, though of early origin, attained its full development only when the Middle Ages were approaching their term; its popularity continued during the first half of the sixteenth century. It waited for a public; with the growth of industry, the The religious drama had its origin in the liturgical offices of the Church. At Christmas and at Easter the birth and resurrection of the Saviour were dramatically recited to the people by the clergy, within the consecrated building, in Latin paraphrases of the sacred text; but, as yet, neither Jesus nor His mother appeared as actors in the drama. By degrees the vernacular encroached upon the Latin and displaced it; the scene passed from the church to the public place or street; the action developed; and the actors were priests supported by lay-folk, or were lay-folk alone. The oldest surviving drama written in French (but with interspersed liturgical sentences of Latin) is of the twelfth century—the ReprÉsentation d'Adam: the fall of man, and the first great crime which followed—the death of Abel—are succeeded by the procession of Messianic prophets. It was enacted outside the church, and the spectators were alarmed or diverted by demons who darted to and fro amidst the crowd. Of the thirteenth century, only two religious pieces remain. Jean Bodel, of Arras, was the author of Saint Nicholas. The poet, himself about to assume the cross, exhibits a handful of Crusaders in combat with the Mussulmans; all but one, a supplicant of the saint, die gloriously, with angelic applause and pity; whereupon the feelings of the audience are relieved by the mirth and quarrels of drinkers in a tavern, who would rob St. Nicholas of the The fifteenth-century Mystery exhibits the culmination of the mediÆval sacred drama. The word mystÈre,2 first appropriated to tableaux vivants, is applied to dramatic performances in the royal privilege which in 1402 conferred upon the association known as the ConfrÉrie de la Passion the right of performing the plays of our Redemption. Before this date the Blessed Virgin and the infant Jesus had appeared upon the scene. The Mystery presents the course of sacred story, derived from the Old and the New Testaments, together with the lives of the saints from apostolic times to the days
For a hundred years, from 1450 onwards, an unbounded enthusiasm for the stage possessed the people, not of Paris merely, but of all France. The ConfrÈres de la Passion, needing a larger repertoire, found in young ARNOUL GREBAN, bachelor in theology, an author whose vein was copious. His Passion, written about the middle of the fifteenth century, embraces the entire earthly life of Christ in its thirty-four thousand verses, which required one hundred and fifty performers and four crowded days for the delivery. Its presentation was an unprecedented event in the history of the theatre. The work of Greban was rehandled and enlarged by Jean Michel, and great was the triumph when it was given at Angers in 1486. Greban was not to be outdone either by his former self or by another dramatist; in collaboration with his brother Simon, he composed the yet more enormous Actes des ApÔtres, in sixty-two thousand lines, demanding the services of five hundred performers. When presented at Bourges as late as 1536, the happiness of the spectators was extended over no fewer than forty days. The Mystery of the Old Testament, selecting whatever was supposed to typify or foreshadow the coming of the Messiah, is only less vast, and is not less incoherent. Taken together, the Mysteries comprise over a million verses, and what remains is but a portion of what was written. Though the literary value of the Mysteries is slight, except in occasional passages of natural feeling or just characterisation, their historical importance was great; Comedy, unlike the serious drama, suffered no breach of continuity during its long history. The jongleurs of the Middle Ages were the immediate descendants of the Roman mimes and histrions; their declamations, accompanied by gestures, at least tended towards the dramatic form. Classical comedy was never wholly forgotten in the schools; the liturgical drama and the The Moralities, of which sixty-five survive, dating, almost all, from 1450 to 1550, differed from the Mysteries in the fact that their purpose was rather didactic than religious; as a rule they handled neither historical nor legendary matter; they freely employed allegorical personification after the fashion of the Roman de la Rose. The general type is well exemplified in Bien-AvisÉ, Mal-AvisÉ, a kind of dramatic Pilgrim's Progress, with two pilgrims—one who is instructed in the better way by all the personified powers which make for righteousness; the other finding his companions on the primrose path, and arriving at the everlasting bonfire. Certain Moralities attack a The sottie, like the Morality, was a creation of the fifteenth century. Whether it had its origin in a laicising of the irreverent celebration of the Feast of Fools, or in that parade of fools which sometimes preceded a Mystery, it was essentially a farce, but a farce in which A dramatic monologue or a sermon joyeux was commonly interposed between the sottie and the Morality or miracle which followed. The sermon parodied in verse the pulpit discourses of the time, with text duly announced, the customary scholastic divisions, and an incredible licence in matter and in phrase. Among the dramatic monologues of the fifteenth century is found at least one little masterpiece, which has been ascribed on insufficient grounds to Villon, and which would do no discredit to that poet's genius—the Franc-Archer de Bagnolet. The francs-archers of Charles VII.—a rural militia—were not beloved of the people; the miles If the Mystery served to fill the void left by the national epopee, the farce may be regarded as to some extent the dramatic inheritor of the spirit of the fabliau. It aims at mirth and laughter for their own sakes, without any purpose of edification; it had, like the fabliau, the merit of brevity, and not infrequently the fault of unabashed grossness. But the very fact that it was a thing of little consequence allowed the farce to exhibit at times an audacity of political or ecclesiastical criticism which transformed it into a dramatised pamphlet. In general it chose its matter from the ludicrous misadventures of private life: the priest, the monk, the husband, the mother-in-law, the wife, the lover, the roguish servant are the agents in broadly ludicrous intrigues; the young wife lords it over her dotard husband, and makes mockery of his presumptive heirs, in La Cornette of Jean d'Abondance; in Le Cuvier, the husband, whose many household duties have been scheduled, has his revenge—the list, which he deliberately recites while his wife flounders helpless in the great washing-tub, does not include the task of effecting her deliverance. Amid much that is trivial and much that is indecent, one farce stands out pre-eminent, and may indeed be called a comedy of manners and of character—the merry misfortunes of that learned advocate, MaÎtre Pierre Pathelin. The date is doubtless about 1470; the author, probably a Parisian and a member of the Basoche, is unknown. With all his toiling and The actors in mediÆval comedy, as in the serious drama, were amateurs. The members of the academic puys were succeeded by the members of guilds, or confrÉries, or sociÉtÉs joyeuses. Of these societies the most celebrated was that of the Parisian Enfants sans Souci. With this were closely associated the Basochiens, the corporation of clerks to the procureurs of the Parlement of Paris.3 It may be that the sots of the capital were only members of the basoche, assuming for the occasion the
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