[Footnote 133: For these see the texts and editorial matter of Dolopathos, ed. Brunet and De Montaiglon (Bibliotheque Elzevirienne), Paris, 1856; and of Le Roman des Sept Sages, ed. G. Paris (Soc. des Anc. Textes), Paris, 1875. The English Seven Sages (in Weber, vol. iii.) has been thought to be of the thirteenth century. The Gesta Romanorum in any of its numerous forms is probably later.]

[Sidenote: Their licence.]

It presents, as we have said, the most striking and singular contrast to the Lyric poems which we have just noticed. The technical morality of these is extremely accommodating, indeed (in its conventional and normal form) very low. But it is redeemed by an exquisite grace and charm, by true passion, and also by a great decency and accomplishment of actual diction. Coarse language—very rare in the romances, though there are a few examples of it—is rarer still in the elaborate formal lyric of the twelfth and thirteenth century in French. In the fabliaux, which are only a very little later, and which seem not to have been a favourite form of composition very long after the fourteenth century had reached its prime, coarseness of diction, though not quite invariable, is the rule. Not merely are the subjects, in the majority of cases, distinctly "broad," but the treatment of them is broader still. In a few instances it is very hard to discern any wit at all, except a kind similar to that known much later in England as "selling bargains"; and almost everywhere the words which, according to a famous classical French tag, bravent l'honnetete, in Latin, the use of which a Roman poet has vaunted as Romana simplicitas, and which for some centuries have been left alone by regular literature in all European languages till very recently,—appear to be introduced on purpose as part of the game. In fact, it is in the fabliau that the characteristic which Mr Matthew Arnold selected as the opprobrium of the French in life and literature practically makes its first appearance. And though the "lubricity" of these poems is free from some ugly features which appear after the Italian wars of the late fifteenth century, it has never been more frankly destitute of shamefacedness.

[Sidenote: Their wit.]

It would, however, be extremely unfair to let it be supposed that the fabliaux contain nothing but obscenity, or that they can offer attractions to no one save those whom obscenity attracts. As in those famous English followings of them, where Chaucer considerably reduced the licence of language, and still more considerably increased the dose of wit—the Reeve's and Miller's sections of the Canterbury Tales—the lack of decency is very often accompanied by no lack of sense. And a certain proportion, including some of the very best in a literary point of view, are not exposed to the charge of any impropriety either of language or of subject.

[Sidenote: Definition and subjects.]

There is, indeed, no special reason why the fabliau should be "improper" (except for the greater ease of getting a laugh) according to its definition, which is capable of being drawn rather more sharply than is always the case with literary kinds. It is a short tale in verse—almost invariably octosyllabic couplets—dealing, for the most part from the comic point of view, with incidents of ordinary life. This naturally admits of the widest possible diversity of subject: indeed it is only by sticking to the condition of "ordinary life" that the fabliau can be differentiated from the short romance on one side and the allegoric beast-fable on the other. Even as it is, its most recent editors have admitted among their 157 examples not a few which are simple jeux d'esprit on the things of humanity, and others which are in effect short romances and nothing else. Of these last is the best known of all the non-Rabelaisian fabliaux, "Le Vair Palefroi," which has been Englished by Leigh Hunt and shortly paraphrased by Peacock, while examples of the former may be found without turning very long over even one of M. M. de Montaiglon and Raynaud's pretty and learned volumes. A very large proportion, as might be expected, draw their comic interest from satire on priests, on women, or on both together; and this very general character of the fabliaux (which, it must be remembered, were performed or recited by the very same jongleurs who conducted the publication of the chansons de geste and the romances) was no doubt partly the result and partly the cause of the persistent dislike and disfavour with which the Church regarded the profession of jonglerie. It is, indeed, from the fabliaux themselves that we learn much of what we know about the jongleurs; and one of not the least amusing[134] deals with the half-clumsy, half-satiric boasts of two members of the order, who misquote the titles of their repertoire, make by accident or intention ironic comments on its contents, and in short do not magnify their office in a very modern spirit of humorous writing.

[Footnote 134: "Les Deux Bordeors [bourders, jesters] Ribaux."]

Every now and then, too, we find, in the half-random and wholly scurrile slander of womankind, a touch of real humour, of the humour that has feeling behind it, as here, where a sufficiently ribald variation on the theme of the "Ephesian matron" ends—

"Por ce teng-je celui a fol Qui trop met en fame sa cure; Fame est de trop foible nature, De noient rit, de noient pleure, Fame aime et het en trop poi d'eure: Tost est ses talenz remuez, Qui fame croit, si est desves."

So too, again, in "La Housse Partie," a piece which perhaps ranks next to the "Vair Palefroi" in general estimation, there is neither purely romantic interest, as in the Palfrey, nor the interest of "the pity of it," as in the piece just quoted; but an ethical purpose, showing out of the mouth of babes and sucklings the danger of filial ingratitude.

But, as a general rule, there is little that is serious in these frequently graceless but generally amusing compositions. There is a curious variety about them, and incidentally a crowd of lively touches of common life. The fisherman of the Seine starts for his day's work or sport with oar and tackle; the smith plies the forge; the bath plays a considerable part in the stories, and we learn that it was not an unknown habit to eat when bathing, which seems to be an unwise attempt to double luxuries. A short sketch of mediaeval catering might be got out of the fabliaux, where figure not merely the usual dainties—capons, partridges, pies well peppered—but eels salted, dried, and then roasted, or more probably grilled, as we grill kippered salmon. Here we have a somewhat less grimy original—perhaps it was actually the original—of Skelton's "Tunning of Elinor Rumming"; and in many places other patterns, the later reproductions of which are well known to readers of Boccaccio and the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles of La Fontaine and his followers. Title after title—"Du Prestre Crucifie," "Du Prestre et d'Alison," &c.—tells us that the clergy are going to be lampooned. Sometimes, where the fun is no worse than childish, it is childish enough—plays on words, jokes on English mispronunciation of French, and so forth. But it very seldom, though it is sometimes intolerably nasty, approaches the sheer drivel which appears in some English would-be comic writing of the Middle Ages, or the very early Renaissance—such, for instance, as most of that in the prose "Pleasant Historie of Thomas of Reading,"[135] which the late Mr Thoms was pleased to call a romance. Yet the actual stuff of "Thomas of Reading" is very much of the nature of the fabliaux (except of course the tragical part, which happens to be the only good part), and so the difference of the handling is noteworthy. So it is also in English verse-work of the kind—the "Hunting of the Hare"[136] and the like—to take examples necessarily a little later than our time.

[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 competitors. 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 constitute 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 ingratitude, for instance—were not "engineered" or led up to in any way, but left to act in mass and by assault.

[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 coarse means indeed to very coarse nerves, in others by finer devices addressed to senses more tickle o' the sere. And so grew up that unsurpassed 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 assigned to the term. Yet the mediaeval languages, especially French and Latin, were by no means destitute 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 class in Romance) of Marie de France, the somewhat later Lyoner Ysopet (as its editor, Dr Foerster, 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 passing 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 distinguishing literary product of the thirteenth century as the romances proper—Carlovingian, Arthurian, and Classical—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. Foerster, 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 assistance, 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 Noble 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. Assisted 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 Noble 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 passages 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 passing 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 assigning to them human arts; or rather, to put the matter with more correctness, they pass 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 illustrations 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 coarseness 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 passage quoted on a former page will show with what completely fearless satire the trouveres treated Church and State, God 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 circumstance, 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 coarsely 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 Noble'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, coarse, 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 entitled "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 ambassadors 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 fashion, 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 butt, 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 Ass, 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 Noble is a philosophic husband as well as a good king, and sets about the funeral of Renart

("Jamais si bon baron n'avai,"

says he) with great earnestness. Hermeline and her orphans are fetched from Malpertuis, and the widow makes heartrending moan, as does Cousin Grimbart when the news is brought to him. The vigils of the dead are sung, and all the beasts who have hated Renart, and whom he has affronted in his lifetime, assemble in decent mourning and perform the service, with the ceremony of the most well-trained choir. Afterwards they "wake" the corpse through the night a little noisily; but on the morrow the obsequies are resumed "in the best and most orgilous manner," with a series of grave-side speeches which read like a designed satire on those common in France at the present day. A considerable part of the good Archpriest's own sermon is unfortunately not reproducible in sophisticated times; but every one can appreciate his tender reference to the deceased's prowess in daring all dangers—

"Pur avoir vostre ventre plaine, Et pour porter a Hermeline Vostre fame, coc ou geline Chapon, ou oie, ou gras oison"—

for, as he observes in a sorrowful parenthesis, "anything was in season if you could only get hold of it." Brichemer the Stag notes how Reynard had induced the monks to observe their vows by making them go to bed late and get up early to watch their fowls. But when Bruin the Bear has dug his grave, and holy water has been thrown on him, and Bruin is just going to shovel the earth—behold! Reynard wakes up, catches Chanticleer (who is holding the censer) by the neck, and bolts into a thick pleached plantation. Still, despite this resurrection, his good day is over, and a levee en masse of the Lion's people soon surrounds him, catches him up, and forces him to release Chanticleer, who, nothing afraid, challenges him to mortal combat on fair terms, beats him, and leaves him for dead in the lists. And though he manages to pay Rohart the Raven and his wife (who think to strip his body) in kind, he reaches Malpertuis dead-beat; and we feel that even his last shift and the faithful complaisance of Grimbart will never leave him quite the same Fox again.

The defects which distinguish almost all mediaeval poetry are no doubt discoverable here. There is some sophistication of the keeping in the episodes of Coart and Chanticleer, and the termination is almost too audacious in the sort of choice of happy or unhappy ending, triumph or defeat for the hero, which it leaves us. Yet this very audacity suits the whole scheme; and the part dealing with the death (or swoon) and burial is assuredly one of the best things of its kind in French, almost one of the best things in or out of it. The contrast between the evident delight of the beasts at getting rid of Renart and their punctilious discharge of ceremonial duties, the grave parody of rites and conventions, remind us more of Swift or Lucian than of any French writer, even Rabelais or Voltaire. It happened that some ten or twelve years had passed between the time when the present writer had last opened Renart (except for mere reference now and then) and the time when he refreshed his memory of it for the purposes of the present volume. It is not always in such cases that the second judgment exactly confirms the first; but here, not merely in the instance of this particular branch but almost throughout, I can honestly say that I put down the Roman de Renart with even a higher idea of its literary merit than that with which I had taken it up.

[Sidenote: The Romance of the Rose.]

The second great romance which distinguishes the thirteenth century in France stands, as we may say, to one side of the Roman de Renart as the fabliaux do to the other side. But, though complex in fewer pieces, the Roman de la Rose[142] is, like the Roman de Renart, a complex, not a single work; and its two component parts are distinguished from one another by a singular change of tone and temper. It is the later and larger part of the Rose which brings it close to Renart: the smaller and earlier is conceived in a spirit entirely different, though not entirely alien, and one which, reinforcing the satiric drift of the fabliaux and Renart itself, influenced almost the entire literary production in belles lettres at least, and sometimes out of them, for more than two centuries throughout Europe.

[Footnote 142: Ed. Michel. Paris, 1864. One of the younger French scholars, who, under the teaching of M. Gaston Paris, have taken in hand various sections of mediaeval literature, M. Langlois, has bestowed much attention on the Rose, and has produced a monograph on it, Origines et Sources du Roman de la Rose. Paris, 1890.]

At no time probably except in the Middle Ages would Jean de Meung, who towards the end of the thirteenth century took up the scheme which William of Lorris had left unfinished forty years earlier, have thought of continuing the older poem instead of beginning a fresh one for himself. And at no other time probably would any one, choosing to make a continuation, have carried it out by putting such entirely different wine into the same bottle. Of William himself little is known, or rather nothing, except that he must have been, as his continuator certainly was, a native of the Loire district; so that the Rose is a product of Central, not, like Renart, of Northern France, and exhibits, especially in the Lorris portion, an approximation to Provencal spirit and form.

The use of personification and abstraction, especially in relation to love-matters, had not been unknown in the troubadour poetry itself and in the northern verse, lyrical and other, which grew up beside or in succession to it. It rose no doubt partly, if not wholly, from the constant habit in sermons and theological treatises of treating the Seven Deadly Sins and other abstractions as entities. Every devout or undevout frequenter of the Church in those times knew "Accidia"[143] and Avarice, Anger and Pride, as bodily rather than ghostly enemies, furnished with a regular uniform, appearing in recognised circumstances and companies, acting like human beings. And these were by no means the only sacred uses of allegory.

[Footnote 143: "Sloth" is a rather unhappy substitute for Accidia ([Greek: akedeia]), the gloomy and impious despair and indifference to good living and even life, of which sloth itself is but a partial result.]

[Sidenote: William of Lorris and Jean de Meung.]

When William of Lorris, probably at some time in the fourth decade of the thirteenth century, set to work to write the Romance of the Rose, he adjusted this allegorical handling to the purposes of love-poetry with an ingenious intricacy never before attained. It has been the fashion almost ever since the famous Romance was rescued from the ignorant and contemptuous oblivion into which it had fallen, to praise Jean de Meung's part at the expense of that due to William of Lorris. But this is hard to justify either on directly aesthetic or on historical principles of criticism. In the first place, there can be no question that, vitally as he changed the spirit, Jean de Meung was wholly indebted to his predecessor for the form—the form of half-pictorial, half-poetic allegory, which is the great characteristic of the poem, and which gave it the enormous attraction and authority that it so long possessed. In the second place, clever as Jean de Meung is, and more thoroughly in harmony as he may be with the esprit gaulois, his work is on a much lower literary level than that of his predecessor. Jean de Meung in the latter and larger part of the poem simply stuffs into it stock satire on women, stock learning, stock semi-pagan morality. He is, it is true, tolerably actual; he shares with the fabliau-writers and the authors of Renart a firm grasp on the perennial rascalities and meannesses of human nature. The negative commendation that he is "no fool" may be very heartily bestowed upon him. But he is a little commonplace and more than a little prosaic. There is amusement in him, but no charm: and where (that is to say, in large spaces) there is no amusement, there is very little left. Nor, except for the inappropriate exhibition of learning and the strange misuse of poetical (at least of verse) allegory, can he be said to be eminently characteristic of his own time. His very truth to general nature prevents that; while his literary ability, considerable as it is, is hardly sufficient to clothe his universally true reflections in a universally acceptable form.

[Sidenote: The first part.]

The first four thousand and odd lines of the Romance, on the other hand—for beyond them it is known that the work of William of Lorris does not go—contain matter which may seem but little connected with criticism of life, arranged in a form completely out of fashion. But they, beyond all question, contain also the first complete presentation of a scheme, a mode, an atmosphere, which for centuries enchained, because they expressed, the poetical thought of the time, and which, for those who can reach the right point of view, can develop the right organs of appreciation, possess an extraordinary, indeed a unique charm. I should rank this first part of the Roman de la Rose high among the books which if a man does not appreciate he cannot even distantly understand the Middle Ages; indeed there is perhaps no single one which on the serious side contains such a master-key to their inmost recesses.

[Sidenote: Its capital value.]

To comprehend a Gothic cathedral the Rose should be as familiar as the Dies Irae. For the spirit of it is indeed, though faintly "decadent," even more the mediaeval spirit than that of the Arthurian legend, precisely for the reason that it is less universal, less of humanity generally, more of this particular phase of humanity. And as it is opposed to, rather than complementary of, the religious side of the matter in one direction, so it opposes and completes the satirical side, of which we have heard so much in this chapter, and the purely fighting and adventurous part, which we have dealt with in others, not excluding by any means in this half-reflective, half-contrasting office, the philosophical side also. Yet when men pray and fight, when they sneer and speculate, they are constrained to be very like themselves and each other. They are much freer in their dreams: and the Romance of the Rose, if it has not much else of life, is like it in this way—that it too is a dream.

As such it quite honestly holds itself out. The author lays it down, supporting himself with the opinion of another "qui ot nom macrobes," that dreams are quite serious things. At any rate he will tell a dream of his own, a dream which befell him in his twentieth year, a dream wherein was nothing

"Qui avenu trestout ne soit Si com le songes racantoit."

And if any one wishes to know how the romance telling this dream shall be called—

"Ce est li Rommanz de la Rose, Ou l'ars d'amorz est tote enclose."

[Sidenote: The rose-garden.]

The poem itself opens with a description of a dewy morn in May, a description then not so hackneyed as, chiefly from this very instance, it afterwards became, and in itself at once "setting," so to speak, the frame of gracious decorative imagery in which the poet works. He "threaded a silver needle" (an odd but not unusual mediaeval pastime was sewing stitches in the sleeve) and strolled, cousant ses manches, towards a river-bank. Then, after bathing his face and seeing the bright gravel flashing through the water, he continued his stroll down-stream, till he saw in front of him a great park (for this translates the mediaeval verger much better than "orchard"), on the wall of which were portrayed certain images[144]—Hatred, Felony, Villainy, Covetousness, Avarice, Envy, Sadness, Old Age, Hypocrisy, and Poverty. These personages, who strike the allegoric and personifying note of the poem, are described at varying length, the last three being perhaps the best. Despite these uninviting figures, the Lover (as he is soon called) desires violently to enter the park; but for a long time he can find no way in, till at length Dame Oyseuse (Idleness) admits him at a postern. She is a very attractive damsel herself; and she tells the Lover that Delight and all his Court haunt the park, and that he has had the ugly images made, apparently as skeletons at the feast, to heighten, not to dash, enjoyment. Entering, the Lover thinks he is in the Earthly Paradise, and after a time he finds the fair company listening to the singing of Dame Lyesse (Pleasure), with much dancing, music, and entertainment of jongleurs and jongleresses to help pass the time.

[Footnote 144: "Seven" says the verse chapter-heading, which is a feature of the poem; but the actual text does not mention the number, and it will be seen that there were in fact ten. The author of the headings was no doubt thinking of the Seven Deadly Sins.]

Courtesy asks him to join in the karole (dance), and he does so, giving full description of her, of Lyesse, of Delight, and of the God of Love himself, with his bow-bearer Sweet-Glances, who carries in each hand five arrows—in the right Beauty, Simpleness, Frankness, Companionship, Fair-Seeming; in the left Pride, Villainy,[145] Shame, Despair, and "New-Thought"—i.e., Fickleness. Other personages—sometimes with the same names, sometimes with different—follow in the train; Cupid watches the Lover that he may take shot at him, and the tale is interrupted by an episode giving the story of Narcissus. Meanwhile the Lover has seen among the flowers of the garden one rose-bud on which he fixes special desires. The thorns keep him off; and Love, having him at vantage, empties the right-hand quiver on him. He yields himself prisoner, and a dialogue between captive and captor follows. Love locks his heart with a gold key; and after giving him a long sermon on his duties, illustrated from the Round Table romances and elsewhere, vanishes, leaving him in no little pain, and still unable to get at the Rose. Suddenly in his distress there appears to him

"Un valet buen et avenant Bel-Acueil se faisoit clamer,"

and it seems that he was the son of Courtesy.

[Footnote 145: Vilenie is never an easy word to translate: it means general misconduct and disagreeable behaviour.]

[Sidenote: "Danger."]

Bialacoil (to give him his Chaucerian[146] Englishing) is most obliging, and through his help the Lover has nearly reached the Rose, when an ugly personage named Danger in turn makes his appearance. Up to this time there is no very important difficulty in the interpretation of the allegory; but the learned are not at one as to what "Danger" means. The older explanation, and the one to which I myself still incline as most natural and best suiting what follows, is that Danger is the representative of the beloved one's masculine and other guardians—her husband, father, brother, mother, and so forth. Others, however, see in him only subjective obstacles—the coyness, or caprice, or coquettishness of the Beloved herself. But these never troubled a true lover to any great extent; and besides they seem to have been provided for by the arrows in the left hand of Love's bow-bearer, and by Shame (v. infra). At any rate Danger's proceedings are of a most kill-joy nature. He starts from his hiding-place—

"Grans fu, et noirs et hericies, S'ot les iex rouges comme feus, Le nes froncie, le vis hideus, Et s'escrie comme forcenes."

[Footnote 146: I am well aware of everything that has been said about and against the Chaucerian authorship of the English Rose. But until the learned philologists who deny that authorship in whole or in part agree a little better among themselves, they must allow literary critics at least to suspend their judgment.]

He abuses Bialacoil for bringing the Lover to the Rose, and turns the Lover out of the park, while Bialacoil flies.

[Sidenote: "Reason."]

To the disconsolate suitor appears Reason, and does not speak comfortable words. She is described as a middle-aged lady of a comely and dignified appearance, crowned, and made specially in God's image and likeness. She tells him that if he had not put himself under the guidance of Idleness, Love would not have wounded him; that besides Danger, he has made her own daughter Shame his foe, and also Male-Bouche (Scandal, Gossip, Evil-Speaking), the third and most formidable guardian of the Rose. He ought never to have surrendered to Love. In the service of that power

"il a plus poine Que n'ont hermite ne blanc moine; La poine en est demesuree, Et la joie a courte duree."

The Lover does not take this sermon well. He is Love's: she may go about her business, which she does. He bethinks him that he has a companion, Amis (the Friend), who has always been faithful; and he will go to him in his trouble. Indeed Love had bidden him do so. The Friend is obliging and consoling, and says that he knows Danger. His bark is worse than his bite, and if he is spoken softly to he will relent. The Lover takes the advice with only partial success. Danger, at first robustious, softens so far as to say that he has no objection to the Lover loving, only he had better keep clear of his roses. The Friend represents this as an important point gained; and as the next step Pity and Frankness go as his ambassadresses to Danger, who allows Bialacoil to return to him and take him once more to see the Rose, more beautiful than ever. He even, assisted by Venus, is allowed to kiss his love.

[Sidenote: "Shame" and "Scandal."]

This is very agreeable: but it arouses the two other guardians of whom Reason has vainly warned him, Shame and Evil-Speaking, or Scandal. The latter wakes Jealousy, Fear follows, and Fear and Shame stir up Danger. He keeps closer watch, Jealousy digs a trench round the rose-bush and builds a tower where Bialacoil is immured: and the Lover, his case only made worse by the remembered savour of the Rose on his lips,[147] is left helpless outside. But as the rubric of the poem has it—

"Cyendroit trespassa Guillaume De Lorris, et n'en fist plus pseaulme."

[Footnote 147:

"Car ge suis a greignor meschief Por la joie que j'ai perdue. Que s'onques ne l'eussi eue."

Dante undoubtedly had this in his mind when he wrote the immortal Nessun maggior dolore. All this famous passage, l. 4557 sq., is admirable.]

[Sidenote: The later poem.]

[Sidenote: "False-Seeming."]

The work which forty years later Jean de Meung (some say at royal suggestion) added to the piece, so as to make it five times its former length, has been spoken of generally already, and needs less notice in detail. Jean de Meung takes up the theme by once more introducing Reason, whose remonstrances, with the Lover's answers, take nearly half as much room as the whole story hitherto. Then reappears the Friend, who is twice as long-winded as Reason, and brings the tale up to more than ten thousand lines already. At last Love himself takes some pity of his despairing vassal, and besieges the tower where Bialacoil is confined. This leads to the introduction of the most striking and characteristic figure of the second part, Faux-Semblant, a variety of Reynard. Bialacoil is freed: but Danger still guards the Rose. Love, beaten, invokes the help of his mother, who sends Nature and Genius to his aid. They talk more than anybody else. But Venus has to come herself before Danger is vanquished and the Lover plucks the Rose.

[Sidenote: Contrast of the parts.]

The appeal of this famous poem is thus twofold, though the allegorical form in which the appeal is conveyed is the same. In the first part all the love-poetry of troubadour and trouvere is gathered up and presented under the guise of a graceful dreamy symbolism, a little though not much sicklied o'er with learning. In the second the satiric tendency of the Fabliaux and Renart is carried still further, with an admixture of not often apposite learning to a much greater extent. Narcissus was superfluous where William of Lorris introduced him, but Pygmalion and his image, inserted at great length by Jean de Meung, when after twenty thousand lines the catastrophe is at length approaching, are felt to be far greater intruders.

[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 practitioners of the fable, and as the chief practitioner 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 class 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 entitled "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 Constantinoble," 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, assigned 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 shifted from romance to drama, from satire to lyric, just as their audience or their patrons might happen to demand, as their circumstances or their needs might happen to dictate.

[Footnote 150: Ed. Jubinal, 2d ed., Paris, 1874; or ed. Kressner, Wolfenbuettel, 1885.]

[Sidenote: Drama.]

The obscure but not uninteresting subject of the links between the latest stages of classical 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 classification 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. Palustre, 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 circumstances, 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 assigned 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 title almost sufficiently indicates, is a dramatised pastourelle; the former is less easy to classify, 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 fashion 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 finishing 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 passion 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 Hellequin, "troop of Hellequin" (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 Hellequin" 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 constituents. 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 Assises 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 Constantinoble,[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 embassy 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 God and on the terms of half-conquests; the death of the Count of Champagne (much wept by Geoffroy his marshal); and the substitution 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 assault 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 fashion 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 scraps 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 assembling 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 Godfrey 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 assigned 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 fashion. 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.]

There is no reason at all to question the sincerity of this faith. But Joinville was a shrewd and practical man, and when the kings of France and Navarre pressed him to take the cross a second time, he answered that their majesties' servants had during his first absence done him and his people so much harm that he thought he had better not go away again. Indeed it would be displeasing to God, "qui mit son corps pour son peuple sauver," if he, Joinville, abandoned his people. And he reports only in the briefest abstract the luckless "voie de Tunes," or expedition to Tunis. But of the earlier and not much less unlucky Damietta crusade, in which he took part, as well as of his hero's life till all but the last, he has written very fully, and in a fashion which is very interesting, though unluckily we have no manuscript representing the original text, or even near to it in point of time. The book, which has been thought to have been written in pieces at long intervals, has nothing of the antique vigour of Villehardouin. Joinville is something of a gossip, and though he evidently writes with a definite literary purpose, is not master of very great argumentative powers. But for this same reason he abounds in anecdote, and in the personal detail which, though it may easily be overdone, is undoubtedly now and then precious for the purpose of enabling us to conjure up the things and men of old time more fully and correctly. And there is a Pepysian garrulity as well as a Pepysian shrewdness about Joinville; so that, on the whole, he fills the position of ancestor in the second group of historians, the group of lively raconteurs, as well as Villehardouin leads that of inspired describers. For an instance of the third kind, the philosophical historian, France, if not Europe, had to wait two centuries, when such a one came in Comines.

It is almost unnecessary to say that when the secret of producing prose and its advantages over verse for certain purposes had been discovered, it was freely employed for all such purposes, scientific as science was understood, devotional, instructive, business (the Livre des Mestiers, or book of the guilds of Paris, is of the thirteenth century), and miscellaneous. But few of these things concern literature proper. It is otherwise with the application of prose to fiction.

[Sidenote: Fiction.]

This, as we have seen, had probably taken place in the case of the Arthurian romances as early as the middle of our period, and throughout the thirteenth century prose romances of length were not unknown, though it was later that all the three classes—Carlovingian, Arthurian, and Antique—were thrown indiscriminately into prose, and lengthened even beyond the huge length of their later representatives in verse. But for this reason or that, romance in prose was with rare exceptions unfavourable to the production of the best literature. It encouraged the prolixity which was the great curse of the Middle Ages, and the deficient sense of form and scanty presence of models prevented the observance of anything like a proper scheme.

[Sidenote: Aucassin et Nicolette.]

But among the numerous origins of this wonderful time the origin of the short prose tale, in which France was to hold almost if not quite the highest rank among European countries, was also included. It would not seem that the kind was as yet very frequently attempted—the fact that the verse fabliau was still in the very height of its flourishing-time, made this unlikely; nor was it till that flourishing-time was over that farces on the one hand, and prose tales on the other, succeeded as fruit the fabliau-flower. But it is from the thirteenth century that (with some others) we have Aucassin et Nicolette.[159] If it was for a short time rather too much of a fashion to praise (it cannot be over-praised) this exquisite story, no wise man will allow himself to be disgusted any more than he will allow himself to be attracted by fashion. This work of "the old caitiff," as the author calls himself with a rather Hibernian coaxingness, is what has been called a cantefable—that is to say, it is not only obviously written, like verse romances and fabliaux, for recitation, but it consists partly of prose, partly of verse, the music for the latter being also given. Mr Swinburne, Mr Pater, and, most of all, Mr Lang, have made it unnecessary to tell in any detailed form the story how Aucassin, the son of Count Garin of Beaucaire, fell in love with Nicolette, a Saracen captive, who has been bought by the Viscount of the place and brought up as his daughter; how Nicolette was shut up in a tower to keep her from Aucassin; how Count Bongars of Valence assailed Beaucaire and was captured by Aucassin on the faith of a promise from his father that Nicolette shall be restored to him; how the Count broke his word, and Aucassin, setting his prisoner free, was put in prison himself; how Nicolette escaped, and by her device Aucassin also; how the lovers were united; and how, after a comic interlude in the country of "Torelore," which could be spared by all but folk-lorists, the damsel is discovered to be daughter of the King of Carthage, and all ends in bowers of bliss.

[Footnote 159: Frequently edited: not least satisfactorily in the Nouvelles Francaises du XIIIme. Siecle, referred to above. In 1887 two English translations, by Mr Lang and Mr Bourdillon, the latter with the text and much apparatus, appeared: and Mr Bourdillon has recently edited a facsimile of the unique MS. (Oxford, 1896).]

But even the enthusiasm and the art of three of the best writers of English and lovers of literature in this half-century have not exhausted the wonderful charm of this little piece. The famous description of Nicolette, as she escapes from her prison and walks through the daisies that look black against her white feet, is certainly the most beautiful thing of the kind in mediaeval prose-work, and the equal of anything of the kind anywhere. And for original audacity few things surpass Aucassin's equally famous inquiry, "En Paradis qu'ai-je a faire?" with the words with which he follows it up to the Viscount. But these show passages only concentrate the charm which is spread all over the novelette, at least until its real conclusion, the union and escape of the lovers. Here, as in the earlier part of the Rose—to which it is closely akin—is the full dreamy beauty, a little faint, a little shadowy, but all the more attractive, of mediaeval art; and here it has managed to convey itself in prose no less happily and with more concentrated happiness than there in verse.



CHAPTER VIII.

ICELANDIC AND PROVENCAL.

RESEMBLANCES. CONTRASTS. ICELANDIC LITERATURE OF THIS TIME MAINLY PROSE. DIFFICULTIES WITH IT. THE SAGA. ITS INSULARITY OF MANNER. OF SCENERY AND CHARACTER. FACT AND FICTION IN THE SAGAS. CLASSES AND AUTHORSHIP OF THEM. THE FIVE GREATER SAGAS. 'NJALA.' 'LAXDAELA.' 'EYRBYGGJA.' 'EGLA.' 'GRETTLA.' ITS CRITICS. MERITS OF IT. THE PARTING OF ASDIS AND HER SONS. GREAT PASSAGES OF THE SAGAS. STYLE. PROVENCAL MAINLY LYRIC. ORIGIN OF THIS LYRIC. FORMS. MANY MEN, ONE MIND. EXAMPLE OF RHYME-SCHEMES. PROVENCAL POETRY NOT GREAT. BUT EXTRAORDINARILY PEDAGOGIC. THOUGH NOT DIRECTLY ON ENGLISH. SOME TROUBADOURS. CRITICISM OF PROVENCAL.

[Sidenote: Resemblances.]

These may seem at first to be no sufficient reason for treating together two such literatures as those named in the title of this chapter. But the connection, both of likeness and unlikeness, between them is too tempting to the student of comparative literature, and too useful in such a comparative survey of literature as that which we are here undertaking, to be mistaken or refused. Both attaining, thanks to very different causes, an extraordinarily early maturity, completely worked themselves out in an extraordinarily short time. Neither had, so far as we know, the least assistance from antecedent vernacular models. Each achieved an extraordinary perfection and intensity, Icelandic in spirit, Provencal in form.

[Sidenote: Contrasts.]

And their differences are no less fascinating, since they start from this very diversity of similar perfection. Icelandic, after a brief period of copying French and other languages, practically died out as a language producing literature; and, perhaps for that very reason, maintained itself in all the more continuity as a spoken language. Even its daughter—or at least successor—Norse tongues produced nothing worthy to take up the tradition of the Sagas and the Poems. It influenced (till the late and purely literary revival of it biassed to some extent the beginnings of the later Romantic revival in Western Europe, a hundred and fifty years ago) nothing and nobody. It was as isolated as its own island. To Provencal, on the other hand, though its own actual producing-time was about as brief, belongs the schooling, to no small extent, of the whole literature of Europe. Directly, it taught the trouveres of Northern France and the poets of Spain and Italy prosody, and a certain amount of poetical style and tone; indirectly, or directly through France, it influenced England and Germany. It started, indeed, none of the greater poetical kinds except lyric, and lyric is the true grass of Parnassus—it springs up naturally everywhere; but it started the form of all, or at least was the first to adapt from Latin a prosody suitable to all.

The most obvious, though not the least interesting, points of likeness in unlikeness have been left to the last. The contrasts between the hawthorn and nightingale of Provence, her "winds heavy with the rose," and the grey firths, the ice- and foam-fretted skerries of Iceland; between the remains of Roman luxury pushed to more than Roman effeminacy in the one, and the rough Germanic virtue exasperated to sheer ferocity in the other,—are almost too glaring for anything but a schoolboy's or a rhetorician's essay. Yet they are reproduced with an incredible—a "copy-book"—fidelity in the literatures. The insistence of experts and enthusiasts on the law-abiding character of the sagas has naturally met with some surprise from readers of these endless private wars, and burnings, and "heath-slayings," these feuds where blood flows like water, to be compensated by fines as regular as a water-rate, these methodical assassinations, in which it is not in the least discreditable to heroes to mob heroes as brave as themselves to death by numbers, in which nobody dreams of measuring swords, or avoiding vantage of any kind. Yet the enthusiastic experts are not wrong. Whatever outrages the Icelander may commit, he always has the law—an eccentric, unmodern, conventional law, but a real and recognised one—before his eyes, and respects it in principle, however much he may sometimes violate it in practice. To the Provencal, on the other hand, law, as such, is a nuisance. He will violate it, so to speak, on principle—less because the particular violation has a particular temptation for him than because the thing is forbidden. The Icelander may covet and take another man's wife, but it is to make her his own. The Provencal will hardly fall, and will never stay, in love with any one who is not another's. In savagery there is not so very much to choose: it requires a calculus, not of morals but of manners, to distinguish accurately between carving the blood-eagle on your enemy and serving up your rival's heart as a dish to his mistress. In passion also there may be less difference than the extreme advocates of both sides would maintain. But in all things external the contrast, the hackneyed contrast, of South and North never could have been exhibited with a more artistic completeness, never has been exhibited with a completeness so artistic. And these two contrasting parts were played at the very same time at the two ends of Europe. In the very same years when the domestic histories and tragedies (there were few comedies) of Iceland were being spun into the five great sagas and the fifty smaller ones, the fainter, the more formal, but the not less peculiar music of the gracious long-drawn Provencal love-song was sounding under the vines and olives of Languedoc. The very Icelanders who sailed to Constantinople in the intervals of making the subjects of these sagas, and sometimes of composing them, must not seldom have passed or landed on the coasts where cansos and tensos, lai and sirvente, were being woven, and have listened to them as the Ulyssean mariners listened to the songs of the sirens.