CHAPTER VII.

THE 'FOX,' THE 'ROSE,' AND THE MINOR CONTRIBUTIONS OF FRANCE.

THE PREDOMINANCE OF FRANCE. THE RISE OF ALLEGORY. LYRIC. THE "ROMANCE" AND THE "PASTOURELLE." THE "FABLIAUX." THEIR ORIGIN. THEIR LICENCE. THEIR WIT. DEFINITION AND SUBJECTS. EFFECT OF THE "FABLIAUX" ON LANGUAGE. AND ON NARRATIVE. CONDITIONS OF "FABLIAU"-WRITING. THE APPEARANCE OF IRONY. FABLES PROPER. 'REYNARD THE FOX.' ORDER OF TEXTS. PLACE OF ORIGIN. THE FRENCH FORM. ITS COMPLICATIONS. UNITY OF SPIRIT. THE RISE OF ALLEGORY. THE SATIRE OF 'RENART.' THE FOX HIMSELF. HIS CIRCLE. THE BURIAL OF RENART. THE 'ROMANCE OF THE ROSE.' WILLIAM OF LORRIS AND JEAN DE MEUNG. THE FIRST PART. ITS CAPITAL VALUE. THE ROSE-GARDEN. "DANGER." "REASON." "SHAME" AND "SCANDAL." THE LATER POEM. "FALSE-SEEMING." CONTRAST OF THE PARTS. VALUE OF BOTH, AND CHARM OF THE FIRST. MARIE DE FRANCE AND RUTEBOEUF. DRAMA. ADAM DE LA HALLE. "ROBIN ET MARION." THE "JEU DE LA FEUILLIE." COMPARISON OF THEM. EARLY FRENCH PROSE. LAWS AND SERMONS. VILLEHARDOUIN. WILLIAM OF TYRE. JOINVILLE. FICTION. 'AUCASSIN ET NICOLETTE.'

[Sidenote: _The predominance of France._]

The contributions of France to European literature mentioned in the three chapters (II.-IV.) which deal with the three main sections of Romance, great as we have seen them to be, by no means exhausted the debt which literature owes to her during this period. It is indeed not a little curious that the productions of this time, long almost totally ignored in France itself, and even now rather grudgingly acknowledged there, are the only periodic set of productions that justify the claim, so often advanced by Frenchmen, that their country is at the head of the literary development of Europe. It was not so in the fourteenth century, when not only Chaucer in England, but Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio in Italy, attained literary heights to which none of their French contemporaries even approached. It was not so in the fifteenth, when France, despite Villon and others, was the very School of Dulness, and even England, with the help of the Scottish poets and Malory, had a slight advantage over her, while she was far outstripped by Italy. It was not so in the sixteenth, when Italy hardly yet fell behind, and Spain and England far outwent her: nor, according to any just estimate, in the seventeenth. In the eighteenth her pale correctness looks faint enough, not merely beside the massive strength of England, but beside the gathering force of Germany: and if she is the equal of the best in the nineteenth, it is at the very most a bare equality. But in the twelfth and thirteenth France, if not Paris, was in reality the eye and brain of Europe, the place of origin of almost every literary form, the place of finishing and polishing, even for those forms which she did not originate. She not merely taught, she wrought--and wrought consummately. She revived and transformed the fable; perfected, if she did not invent, the beast-epic; brought the short prose tale to an exquisite completeness; enlarged, suppled, chequered, the somewhat stiff and monotonous forms of Provençal lyric into myriad-noted variety; devised the prose-memoir, and left capital examples of it; made attempts at the prose history; ventured upon much and performed no little in the vernacular drama; besides the vast performance, sometimes inspired from elsewhere but never as literature copied, which we have already seen, in her fostering if not mothering of Romance. When a learned and enthusiastic Icelander speaks of his patrimony in letters as "a native literature which, in originality, richness, historical and artistic worth, stands unrivalled in modern Europe," we can admire the patriot but must shake our heads at the critic. For by Dr Vigfusson's own confession the strength of Icelandic literature consists in the sagas, and the sagas are the product of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. At that very time France, besides the _chansons de geste_--as native, as original, as the sagas, and if less rich, far more artistic in form--France has to show the great romances proper, which Iceland herself, like all the world, copied, a lyric of wonderful charm and abundance, the vast comic wealth of the _fabliaux_, and the _Fox_-epic, prose not merely of laws and homilies and rudimentary educational subjects, but of every variety, drama, history, philosophy, allegory, dream.

[Sidenote: _The rise of Allegory._]

To give an account of these various things in great detail would not merely be impossible here, but would injure the scheme and thwart the purpose of this history. We must survey them in the gross, or with a few examples--showing the lessons taught and the results achieved, from the lyric, which was probably the earliest, to the drama and the prose story, which were pretty certainly the latest of the French experiments. But we must give largest space to the singular growth of Allegory. This, to some extent in the beast-epic, to a far greater in one of the most epoch-making of European books, the _Romance of the Rose_, set a fashion in Europe which had hardly passed away in three hundred years, and which, latterly rather for the worse, but in the earlier date not a little for the better, coloured not merely the work directly composed in imitation of the great originals, but all literary stuff of every kind, from lyric to drama, and from sermons to prose tales.

[Sidenote: _Lyric._]

It has been said elsewhere that the shaping of a prosody suitable for lyric was the great debt which Europe owes to the language of Provence. And this is not at all inconsistent with the undoubted critical fact that in a _Corpus Lyricorum_ the best songs of the northern tongues would undoubtedly rank higher, according to all sound canons of poetical criticism, than the best lyrics of the southern. For, as it happens, we have lyrics in at least two most vigorous northern tongues before they had gone to school to southern prosody, and we can see at once the defects in them. The scanty remains of Anglo-Saxon lyric and the more copious remains of Icelandic display, with no little power and pathos, and plenty of ill-organised "cry," an almost total lack of ability to sing. Every now and then their natural genius enables them to hit, clumsily and laboriously, on something--the refrain of the _Complaint of Deor_, the stepped stanzas of the _Lesson of Loddfafni_--resembling the more accomplished methods of more educated and long-descended literatures. But the poets are always in a Robinson Crusoe condition, and worse: for Robinson had at least seen the tools and utensils he needed, if he did not know how to make them. The scôps and scalds were groping for the very pattern of the tools themselves.

The _langue d'oc_, first of all vernacular tongues, borrowed from Latin, as Latin had borrowed from Greek, such of the practical outcomes of the laws of lyric harmony in Aryan speech as were suitable to itself; and passed the lesson on to the _trouvères_ of the north of France--if indeed these did not work out the transfer for themselves almost independently. And as there was much more northern admixture, and in particular a less tyrannous softness of vowel-ending in the _langue d'oïl_, this second stage saw a great increase of suppleness, a great emancipation from monotony, a wonderful freshness and wealth of colour and form. It has been said, and I see no reason to alter the saying, that the French tongue in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was actually better suited for lyrical poetry, and did actually produce lyrical poetry, as far as prosody is concerned, of a fresher, freer, more spontaneous kind, from the twelfth century to the beginning of the fifteenth than has ever been the case since.[124]

[Footnote 124: This is not inconsistent with allowing that no single French lyric poet is the equal of Walther von der Vogelweide, and that the exercises of all are hampered by the lack--after the earliest examples--of trisyllabic metres.]

M. Alfred Jeanroy has written a learned and extensive monograph on _Les Origines de la Poesie Lyrique en France_, which with M. Gaston Raynaud's _Bibliographie des Chansonniers Français_, and his collection of _Motets_ of our present period, is indispensable to the thorough student of the subject.[125] But for general literary purposes the two classics of the matter are, and are long likely to be, the charming _Romancero Français_[126] which M. Paulin Paris published in the very dawn of the study of mediæval literature in France, and the admirable _Romanzen und Pastourellen_[127] which Herr Karl Bartsch collected and issued a quarter of a century ago. Here as elsewhere the piecemeal system of publication which has been the bane of the whole subject is to be regretted, for with a little effort and a little division of labour the entire _corpus_ of French lyric from the tenth to the fourteenth century might have been easily set before the public. But the two volumes above mentioned will enable the reader to judge its general characteristics with pretty absolute sureness; and if he desires to supplement them with the work of a single author, that of Thibaut of Champagne or Navarre,[128] which is easily accessible, will form an excellent third.

[Footnote 125: M. Jeanroy, as is also the case with other writers of monographs mentioned in this chapter, has contributed to M. Petit de Julleville's _Histoire_ (_v._ p. 23) on his subject.]

[Footnote 126: Paris, 1833.]

[Footnote 127: Leipzig, 1870.]

[Footnote 128: Rheims, 1851.]

[Sidenote: _The_ Romance _and the_ Pastourelle.]

In this northern lyric--that is to say, northern as compared with Provençal[129]--we find all or almost all the artificial forms which are characteristic of Provençal itself, some of them no doubt rather sisters than daughters of their analogues in the _langue d'oc_. Indeed, at the end of our present period, and still more later, the ingenuity of the _trouvères_ seems to have pushed the strictly formal, strictly artificial part of the poetry of the troubadours to almost its furthest possible limits in varieties of _triolet_ and _rondeau_, _ballade_ and _chant royal_. But the _Romances_ and the _Pastourelles_ stand apart from these, and both are recognised by authorities among the troubadours themselves as specially northern forms. The differentia of each is in subject rather than in form, the "romance" in this sense being a short love-story, with little more than a single incident in it sometimes, but still always possessing an incident; the _Pastourelle_, a special variety of love-story of the kind so curiously popular in all mediæval languages, and so curiously alien from modern experience, where a passing knight sees a damsel of low degree, and woos her at once, with or without success, or where two personages of the shepherd kind sue and are sued with evil hap or good. In other words, the "romance" is supremely presented in English, and in the much-abused fifteenth century, by the _Nut-Browne Maid_, the "pastourelle" by Henryson's _Robene and Makyne_. Perhaps there is nothing quite so good as either in the French originals of both; certainly there is nothing like the union of metrical felicity, romantic conduct, sweet but not mawkish sentiment, and never-flagging interest in the anonymous masterpiece which the ever-blessed Arnold preserved for us in his _Chronicle_. But the diffused merits--the so-to-speak "class-merits"--of the poems in general are very high indeed: and when the best of the other lyrics--_aubades_, _débats_, and what not--are joined to them, they supply the materials of an anthology of hardly surpassed interest, as well for the bubbling music of their refrains and the trill of their metre, as for the fresh mirth and joy of living in their matter. The "German paste in our composition," as another Arnold had it, and not only that, may make us prefer the German examples; but it must never be forgotten that but for these it is at least not improbable that those would never have existed.

[Footnote 129: This for convenience' sake is postponed to chap. viii.]

To select capital examples from so large a body is no easy task. One or two, indeed, have "made fortune," the most famous of them being the great _aubade_ (chief among its kind, as "En un vergier sotz folha d'albespi" is among the Provençal albas), which begins--

"Gaite de la tor, Gardez entor Les murs, si Deus vos voie;"[130]

and where the _gaite_ (watcher) answers (like a Cornish watcher of the pilchards)--

"Hu! et hu! et hu! et hu!"

[Footnote 130: _Romancero Français_, p. 66.]

Then there is the group, among the oldest and the best of all, assigned to Audefroy le Bâtard--a most delectable garland, which tells how the loves of Gerard and Fair Isabel are delayed (with the refrain "et joie atent Gerars"), and how the joy comes at last; of "belle Ydoine" and her at first ill-starred passion for "li cuens [the Count] Garsiles"; of Béatrix and Guy; of Argentine, whose husband better loved another; of Guy the second, who _aima Emmelot de foi_--all charming pieces of early verse. And then there are hundreds of others, assigned or anonymous, in every tone, from the rather unreasonable request of the lady who demands--

"Por coi me bast mes maris? laysette!"

immediately answering her own question by confessing that he has found her embracing her lover, and threatening further justification; through the less impudent but still not exactly correct morality of "Henri and Aiglentine," to the blameless loves of Roland and "Bele Erembors" and the _moniage_ of "Bele Doette" after her lover's death, with the words--

"Tant mar i fustes, cuens Do, frans de nature, por vostre aor vestrai je la haire ne sur mon cors n'arai pelice vaire."

This conduct differs sufficiently from that of the unnamed heroine of another song, who in the sweetest and smoothest of verse bids her husband never to mind if she stays with her lover that night, for the night is very short, and he, the husband, shall have her back to-morrow!

And besides the morality, perverse or touching, the quaint manners, the charming unusual names or forms of names, Oriour, Oriolanz, Ysabiaus, Aigline,--there are delightful fancies, borrowed often since:--

"Li rossignox est mon père, Qui chante sur la ramée el plus haut boscage; La seraine ele est ma mère, qui chante en la mer salée el plus haut rivage."

Something in the very sound of the language keeps for us the freshness of the imagery--the sweet-briar and the hawthorn, the mavis and the oriole--which has so long become _publica materies_. It is not withered and hackneyed by time and tongues as, save when genius touches it, it is now. The dew is still on all of it; and, thanks to the dead language, the dead manners, it will always be on. All is just near enough to us for it to be enjoyed, as we cannot enjoy antiquity or the East; and yet the "wall of glass" which seven centuries interpose, while hiding nothing, keeps all intact, unhackneyed, strange, _fresh_. There may be better poetry in the world than these twelfth and thirteenth century French lyrics: there is certainly higher, grander, more respectable. But I doubt whether there is any sweeter or, in a certain sense, more poignant. The nightingale and the mermaid were justified of their children.

It is little wonder that all Europe soon tried to imitate notes so charming, and in some cases, though other languages were far behind French in development, tried successfully. Our own "Alison,"[131] the first note of true English lyric, is a "romance" of the most genuine kind; the songs of Walther von der Vogelweide, of which we have also spoken, though they may rise higher, yet owe their French originals service, hold of them, would either never or much later have come into existence but for them. An astonishing privilege for a single nation to have enjoyed, if only for a short time; a privilege almost more astonishing in its reception than even in itself. France could point to the _chansons_ and to the _romances_, to Audefroy le Bastard and Chrestien of Troyes, to Villehardouin and Thibaut, to William of Lorris and John of Meung, to the _fabliaux_ writers and the cyclists of _Renart_, in justification of her claims. She shut them up; she forgot them; she sneered at them whenever they were remembered; and she appointed as her attorneys in the court of Parnassus Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux and François Arouet de Voltaire!

[Footnote 131: See p. 210.]

[Sidenote: _The_ Fabliaux.]

No more curious contrast, but also none which could more clearly show the enormous vigour and the unique variety of the French genius at this time, can be imagined than that which is presented by the next division to which we come--the division occupied by the celebrated poems, or at least verse-compositions, known as _fabliaux_. These, for reasons into which it is perhaps better not to inquire too closely, have been longer and better known than any other division of old French poetry. They were first collected and published a hundred and forty years ago by Barbazan; they were much commented on by Le Grand d'Aussy in the last years of the last century, were again published in the earlier years of the present by Méon, and recently have been re-collected, divested of some companions not strictly of their kind, and published in an edition desirable in every respect by M. Anatole de Montaiglon and M. Gaston Raynaud.[132] Since this collection M. Bédier has executed a monograph upon them which stands to the subject much as that of M. Jeanroy does to the Lyrics. But a great deal of it is occupied by speculations, more interesting to the folk-lorist than to the student of literature, as to the origin of the stories themselves. This, though a question of apparently inexhaustible attraction to some people, must not occupy us very long here. It shall be enough to say that many of these subjects are hardy perennials which meet us in all literatures, and the existence of which is more rationally to be accounted for by the supposition of a certain common form of story, resulting partly from the conditions of human life and character, partly from the conformation of the human intellect, than by supposing deliberate transmission and copying from one nation to another. For this latter explanation is one of those which, as has been said, only push ignorance further back; and in fact, leave us at the last with no alternative except that which we might have adopted at the first.

[Footnote 132: 6 vols. Paris, 1872-90.]

[Sidenote: _Their origin._]

That, however, some assistance may have been given to the general tendency to produce the same forms by the literary knowledge of earlier, especially Eastern, collections of tales is no extravagant supposition, and is helped by the undoubted fact that actual translations of such collections--_Dolopathos_, the _Seven Sages of Rome_,[133] and so forth--are found early in French, and chiefly at second-hand from the French in other languages. But the general tendency of mankind, reinforced and organised by a certain specially literary faculty and adaptability in the French genius, is on the whole sufficient to account for the _fabliau_.

[Footnote 133: For these see the texts and editorial matter of _Dolopathos_, ed. Brunet and De Montaiglon (Bibliothèque Elzévirienne), 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'honnêteté_, 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 _répertoire_, 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 à 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 desvès."

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 mediæval 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 Crucifié," "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 _netteté_, 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 _trouvère_ 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 estoré lo monde, Si con il est à 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 Æsopic--is not a "fable" in the sense more especially assigned to the term. Yet the mediæval 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 Æsopisings of Phædrus 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 Förster, 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 mediæval 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. Förster, 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. Méon 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 palæographic 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 mediæval 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 Bestourné_, 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_, Méon 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: Méon, 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 Giélée, 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 encyclopædia 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 Méon'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 _trouvères_ 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 mediæval 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 archæological 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 _maufès_ 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 _trouvères_ 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 Fière 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 Méon, 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 Fière 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 s