A History of French Literature Part 2

War is waged against the guardians of the rose, Venus, sworn enemy of chast.i.ty, aiding the a.s.sailants. Nature, devoted to the continuance of the race, mourns over the violation of her laws by man, unburdens herself of all her scientific lore in a confession to her chaplain Genius, and sends him forth to encourage the lover's party with a bold discourse against the crime of virginity. The triumph of the lover closes the poem.

The graceful design of the earlier poet is disregarded; the love-story becomes a mere frame for setting forth the views of Jean de Meun, his criticism of the chivalric ideal, his satire upon the monkish vices, his revolutionary notions respecting property and government, his advanced opinions in science, his frank realism as to the relations of man and woman. He possesses all the learning of his time, and an accomplished judgment in the literature which he had studied.

He is a powerful satirist, and pa.s.sages of narrative and description show that he had a poet's feeling for beauty; he handles the language with the strength and skill of a master. On the other hand, he lacks all sense of proportion, and cannot shape an imaginative plan; his prolixity wearies the reader, and it cannot be denied that as a moral reformer he sometimes topples into immorality. The success of the poem was extraordinary, and extended far beyond France. It was attacked and defended, and up to the time of Ronsard its influence on the progress of literature--encouraging, as it did, to excess the art of allegory and personification--if less than has commonly been alleged, was unquestionably important.

CHAPTER III DIDACTIC LITERATURE--SERMONS--HISTORY

I DIDACTIC LITERATURE

The didactic literature, moral and scientific, of the Middle Ages is abundant, and possesses much curious interest, but it is seldom original in substance, and seldom valuable from the point of view of literary style. In great part it is translated or derived from Latin sources. The writers were often clerks or laymen who had turned from the vanities of youth--fabliau or romance--and now aimed at edification or instruction. Science in the hands of the clergy must needs be spiritualised and moralised; there were sermons to be found in stones, pious allegories in beast and bird; mystic meanings in the alphabet, in grammar, in the chase, in the tourney, in the game of chess. Ovid and Virgil were sanctified to religious uses. The earliest versified Bestiary, which is also a Volucrary, a Herbary, and a Lapidary, that of Philippe de Thaon (before 1135), is versified from the Latin _Physiologus_, itself a translation from the work of an Alexandrian Greek of the second century. In its symbolic zoology the lion and the pelican are emblems of Christ; the unicorn is G.o.d; the crocodile is the devil; the stones "turrobolen," which blaze when they approach each other, are representative of man and woman. A _Bestiaire d'Amour_ was written by Richard de Fournival, in which the emblems serve for the interpretation of human love. A Lapidary, with a medical--not a moral--purpose, by Marbode, Bishop of Rennes, was translated more than once into French, and had, indeed, an European fame.

Bestiaries and Lapidaries form parts of the vast encyclopaedias, numerous in the thirteenth century, which were known by such names as _Image du Monde_, _Mappe-monde_, _Miroir du Monde_. Of these encyclopaedias, the only one which has a literary interest is the _Tresor_ (1265), by Dante's master, Brunetto Latini, who wrote in French in preference to his native Italian. In it science escapes not wholly from fantasy and myth, but at least from the allegorising spirit; his ethics and rhetoric are derived from Latin originals; his politics are his own. The _Somme des Vices et des Vertus_, compiled in 1279 by Friar Lorens, is a well-composed _tresor_ of religion and morals. Part of its contents has become familiar to us through the Canterbury discourse of Chaucer's parson. The moral experience of a man of the world is summed up in the prose treatise on "The Four Ages of Man," by Philippe de Novare, chancellor of Cyprus. With this edifying work may be grouped the so-called _Chastiements_, counsels on education and conduct, designed for readers in general or for some special cla.s.s--women, children, persons of knightly or of humble rank; studies of the virtues of chivalry, the rules of courtesy and of manners.[1] Other writings, the _etats du Monde_, present a view of the various cla.s.ses of society from a standpoint ethical, religious, or satirical, with warnings and exhortations, which commonly conclude with a vision of the last judgment and the pains of h.e.l.l.

With such a scene of terror closes the interesting _Poeme Moral_ of etienne de Fougeres, in which the life of St. Moses, the converted robber, serves as an example to monks, and that of the converted Thas to ladies who are proud of their beauty. Its temper of moderation contrasts with the bitter satire in the _Bible_ by Guiot de Provins, and with many shorter satirical pieces directed against clerical vices or the infirmities of woman. The _Besant de Dieu_, by Guillaume le Clerc, a Norman poet (1227), preaches in verse, with eloquence and imaginative power, the love of G.o.d and contempt of the world from the texts of two Scripture parables--that of the Talents and that of the Bridegroom; Guillaume antic.i.p.ates the approaching end of the world, foreshown by wars, pestilence, and famine, condemns in the spirit of Christian charity the persecution of the Albigenses, and mourns over the shame that has befallen the Holy Sepulchre.

[Footnote 1: Two works of the fourteenth century, interesting in the history of manners and ideas, may here be mentioned--the _Livre du Chevalier de la Tour-Landry_ (1372), composed for the instruction of the writer's daughters, and the _Menagier de Paris_, a treatise on domestic economy, written by a Parisian bourgeois for the use of his young wife.]

Among the preacher poets of the thirteenth century the most interesting personally is the minstrel RUTEBEUF, who towards the close of his gay though ragged life turned to serious thoughts, and expressed his penitent feelings with penetrating power. Rutebeuf, indeed--the Villon of his age--deployed his vivid and ardent powers in many directions, as a writer of song and satire, of allegory, of fabliaux, of drama. On each and all he impressed his own personality; the lyric note, imaginative fire, colour, melody, these were gifts that compensated the poet's poverty, his conjugal miseries, his lost eye, his faithless friends, his swarming adversaries. The personification of vices and virtues, occasional in the _Besant_ and other poems, becomes a system in the _Songe d'Enfer_, a pilgrim's progress to h.e.l.l, and the _Voie de Paradis_, a pilgrim's progress to heaven, by Raoul de Houdan (after 1200). The _Pelerinage de la Vie Humaine_--another "way to Paradise"; the _Pelerinage de l'ame_--a vision of h.e.l.l, purgatory, and heaven; and the _Pelerinage de Jesus-Christ_--a narrative of the Saviour's life, by Guillaume de Digulleville (fourteenth century), have been imagined by some to have been among the sources of Bunyan's allegories. Human life may be represented in one aspect as a pilgrimage; in another it is a knightly encounter; there is a great strife between the powers of good and evil; in _Le Tornoiement Antecrist_, by Huon de Meri, Jesus and the Knights of the Cross, among whom, besides St. Michael, St.

Gabriel, Confession, Chast.i.ty, and Alms, are Arthur, Launcelot, and Gawain, contend against Antichrist and the infernal barons--Jupiter, Neptune, Beelzebub, and a crowd of allegorical personages. But the battles and _debats_ of a chivalric age were not only religious; there are battles of wine and water, battles of fast and feasting, battles of the seven arts. A disputation between the body and the soul, a favourite subject for separate treatment by mediaeval poets, is found also in one of the many sermons in verse; the _Debat des Trois Morts et des Trois Vifs_ recalls the subject of the memorable painting in the Campo Santo at Pisa.

II SERMONS

The Latin sermons of the Middle Ages were countless; but it is not until Gerson and the close of the fourteenth century that we find a series of discourses by a known preacher written and p.r.o.nounced in French. It is maintained that these Latin sermons, though prepared in the language of the Church, were delivered, when addressed to lay audiences, in the vernacular, and that those composite sermons in the macaronic style, that is, partly in French, partly in Latin, which appear in the thirteenth century and are frequent in the fifteenth, were the work of reporters or redactors among the auditory. On the other hand, it is argued that both Latin and French sermons were p.r.o.nounced as each might seem suitable, before the laity, and that the macaronic style was actually practised in the pulpit. Perhaps we may accept the opinion that the short and simple homilies designed for the people, little esteemed as compositions, were rarely thought worthy of preservation in a Latin form; those discourses which remain to us, if occasionally used before an unlearned audience, seem to have been specially intended for clerkly hearers. The sermons of St.

Bernard, which have been preserved in Latin and in a French translation of the thirteenth century, were certainly not his eloquent popular improvisations; they are doctrinal, with crude or curious allegorisings of Holy Scripture. Those of Maurice de Sully, Archbishop of Paris, probably also translated from the Latin, are simpler in manner and more practical in their teaching; but in these characteristics they stand apart from the other sermons of the twelfth century.

It was not until the mendicant orders, Franciscans and Dominicans, began their labours that preaching, as preserved to us, was truly laicised and popularised. During the thirteenth century the work of the pulpit came to be conceived as an art which could be taught; collections of anecdotes and ill.u.s.trations--_exempla_--for the enlivening of sermons, manuals for the use of preachers were formed; rules and precepts were set forth; themes for popular discourse were proposed and enlarged upon, until at length original thought and invention ceased; the preacher's art was turned into an easy trade.

The effort to be popular often resulted in pulpit buffoonery. When GERSON preached at court or to the people towards the close of the fourteenth century, gravely exhorting high and low to practical duties, with tender or pa.s.sionate appeals to religious feeling, his sermons were n.o.ble exceptions to the common practice. And the descent from Gerson to even his more eminent successors is swift and steep.

The orators of the pulpit varied their discourse from burlesque mirth or bitter invective to gross terrors, in which death and judgment, Satan and h.e.l.l-fire were largely displayed. The sermons of Michel Menot and Olivier Maillard, sometimes eloquent in their censure of sin, sometimes trivial or grotesque, sometimes pedantic in their exhibition of learning, have at least an historical value in presenting an image of social life in the fifteenth century.

A word must be said of the humanism which preceded the Renaissance.

Scholars and students there were in France two hundred years before the days of Erasmus and of Bude; but they were not scholars inspired by genius, and they contented themselves with the task of translators, undertaken chiefly with a didactic purpose. If they failed to comprehend the spirit of antiquity, none the less they did something towards quickening the mind of their own time and rendering the French language less inadequate to the intellectual needs of a later age.

All that was then known of Livy's history was rendered into French in 1356 by the friend of Petrarch, Pierre Bercuire. On the suggestion of Charles V., Nicole Oresme translated from the Latin the Ethics, Politics, and Economics of Aristotle. It was to please the king that the aged Raoul de Presles prepared his version of St. Augustine's _De Civitate Dei_, and Denis Foulechat, with very scanty scholarship, set himself to render the _Polycraticus_ of John of Salisbury. The dukes of Bourbon, of Berry, of Burgundy, were also patrons of letters and encouraged their translators. We cannot say how far this movement of scholarship might have progressed, if external conditions had favoured its development. In Jean de Montreuil, secretary of Charles VI., the devoted student of Cicero, Virgil, and Terence, we have an example of the true humanist before the Renaissance. But the seeming dawn was a deceptive aurora; the early humanism of France was clouded and lost in the tempests of the Hundred Years' War.

III HISTORY

While the mediaeval historians, compilers, and abbreviators from records of the past laboured under all the disadvantages of an age deficient in the critical spirit, and produced works of little value either for their substance or their literary style, the chroniclers, who told the story of their own times, Villehardouin, Joinville, Froissart, Commines, and others, have bequeathed to us, in living pictures or sagacious studies of events and their causes, some of the chief treasures of the past. History at first, as composed for readers who knew no Latin, was comprised in those _chansons de geste_ which happened to deal with matter that was not wholly--or almost wholly--the creation of fancy. Narrative poems treating of contemporary events came into existence with the Crusades, but of these the earliest have not survived, and we possess only rehandlings of their matter in the style of romance. What happened in France might be supposed to be known to persons of intelligence; what happened in the East was new and strange. But England, like the East, was foreign soil, and the Anglo-Norman trouveres of the eleventh and twelfth centuries busied themselves with copious narratives in rhyme, such as Gaimar's _Estorie des Engles_ (1151), Wace's _Brut_ (1155) and his _Roman de Rou_, which, if of small literary importance, remain as monuments in the history of the language. The murder of Becket called forth the admirable life of the saint by Garnier de Pont-Sainte-Maxence, founded upon original investigations; Henry II.'s conquest of Ireland was related by an anonymous writer; his victories over the Scotch (1173-1174) were strikingly described by Jordan Fantosme. But by far the most remarkable piece of versified history of this period, remarkable alike for its historical interest and its literary merit, is the _Vie de Guillaume le Marechal_--William, Earl of Pembroke, guardian of Henry III.--a poem of nearly twenty thousand octosyllabic lines by an unknown writer, discovered by M.

Paul Meyer in the library of Sir Thomas Phillipps. "The masterpiece of Anglo-Norman historiography," writes M. Langlois, "is a.s.suredly this anonymous poem, so long forgotten, and henceforth cla.s.sic."

Prose, however, in due time proved itself to be the fitting medium for historical narrative, and verse was given over to the extravagances of fantasy. Compilations from the Latin, translations from the pseudo-Turpin, from Geoffrey of Monmouth, from Sall.u.s.t, Suetonius, and Caesar were succeeded by original record and testimony.

GEOFFROY DE VILLEHARDOUIN, born between 1150 and 1164, Marshal of Champagne in 1191, was appointed eight years later to negotiate with the Venetians for the transport of the Crusaders to the East. He was probably a chief agent in the intrigue which diverted the fourth Crusade from its original destination--the Holy Land--to the a.s.sault upon Constantinople. In the events which followed he had a prominent part; before the close of 1213 Villehardouin was dead. During his last years he dictated the unfinished Memoirs known as the _Conquete de Constantinople_, which relate the story of his life from 1198 to 1207. Villehardouin is the first chronicler who impresses his own personality on what he wrote: a brave leader, skilful in resource, he was by no means an enthusiast possessed by the more extravagant ideas of chivalry; much more was he a politician and diplomatist, with material interests well in view; not, indeed, devoid of a certain imaginative wonder at the marvels of the East; not without his moments of ardour and excitement; deeply impressed with the feeling of feudal loyalty, the sense of the bond between the suzerain and his va.s.sal; deeply conscious of the need of discipline in great adventures; keeping in general a cool head, which could calculate the sum of profit and loss.

It is probable that Villehardouin knew too much of affairs, and was too experienced a man of the world to be quite frank as a historian: we can hardly believe, as he would have us, that the diversion of the crusading host from its professed objects was unpremeditated; we can perceive that he composes his narrative so as to form an apology; his recital has been justly described as, in part at least, "un memoire justificatif." Nevertheless, there are pa.s.sages, such as that which describes the first view of Constantinople, where Villehardouin's feelings seize upon his imagination, and, as it were, overpower him. In general he writes with a grave simplicity, sometimes with baldness, disdaining ornament, little sensible to colour or grace of style; but by virtue of his clear intelligence and his real grasp of facts his chronicle acquires a certain literary dignity, and when his words become vivid we know that it is because he had seen with inquisitive eyes and felt with genuine ardour. Happily for students of history, while Villehardouin presents the views of an aristocrat and a diplomatist, the incidents of the same extraordinary adventure can be seen, as they struck a simple soldier, in the record of Robert de Clari, which may serve as a complement and a counterpoise to the chronicle of his more ill.u.s.trious contemporary. The unfinished _Histoire de l'Empereur Henri_, which carries on the narrative of events for some years subsequent to those related by Villehardouin, the work of Henri de Valenciennes, is a prose redaction of what had originally formed a _chanson de geste_.

The versified chronicle or history in the thirteenth century declined among Anglo-Norman writers, but was continued in Flanders and in France. Prose translations and adaptations of Latin chronicles, ancient and modern, were numerous, but the literary value of many of these is slight. In the Abbey of Saint-Denis a corpus of national history in Latin had for a long while been in process of formation.

Utilising this corpus and the works from which it was constructed, one of the monks of the Abbey--perhaps a certain Primat--compiled, in the second half of the century, a History of France in the vernacular--the _Grandes Chroniques de Saint-Denis_--with which later additions were from time to time incorporated, until under Charles V. the _Grandes Chroniques de France_ attained their definitive form.[2] Far more interesting as a literary composition is the little work known as _Recits d'un Menestrel de Reims_ (1260), a lively, graceful, and often dramatic collection of traditions, anecdotes, dialogues, made rather for the purposes of popular entertainment than of formal instruction, and expressing the ideas of the middle cla.s.ses on men and things. Forgotten during several centuries, it remains to us as one of the happiest records of the mediaeval spirit.

[Footnote 2: The _Chroniques_ were continued by lay writers to the accession of Louis XI.]

But among the prose narratives to which the thirteenth century gave birth, the _Histoire de Saint Louis_, by JEAN DE JOINVILLE, stands pre-eminent. Joinville, born about 1224, possessed of such literary culture as could be gained at the Court of Thibaut IV. of Champagne, became a favoured companion of the chivalric and saintly Louis during his six years' Crusade from 1248 to 1254. The memory of the King remained the most precious possession of his follower's elder years.

It is probable that soon after 1272 Joinville prepared an autobiographic fragment, dealing with that period of his youth which had been his age of adventure. When he was nearly eighty, Jeanne of Navarre, wife of Philippe le Bel, invited the old seneschal to put on record the holy words and good deeds of Saint Louis. Joinville willingly acceded to the request, and incorporating the fragment of autobiography, in which the writer appeared in close connection with his King, he had probably almost completed his work at the date of Queen Jeanne's death (April 2, 1305); to her son, afterwards Louis X., it was dedicated. His purpose was to recite the pious words and set forth the Christian virtues of the royal Saint in one book of the History, and to relate his chivalric actions in the other; but Joinville had not the art of construction, he suffered from the feebleness of old age, and he could not perfectly accomplish his design; in 1317 Joinville died. Deriving some of his materials from other memoirs of the King, especially those by Geoffroy de Beaulieu and Guillaume de Nangis, he drew mainly upon his own recollections.

Unhappily the most authoritative ma.n.u.scripts of the _Histoire de Saint Louis_ have been lost; we possess none earlier than the close of the fourteenth century; but by the learning and skill of a modern editor the text has been substantially established.

We must not expect from Joinville precision of chronology or exact.i.tude in the details of military operations. His recollections crowd upon him; he does not marshal them by power of intellect, but abandons himself to the delights of memory. He is a frank, amiable, spirited talker, who has much to tell; he succeeds in giving us two admirable portraits--his own and that of the King; and unconsciously he conveys into his narrative both the chivalric spirit of his time, and a sense of those prosaic realities which tempered the ideals of chivalry. What his eyes had rested on lives in his memory, with all its picturesque features, all its lines and colours, undimmed by time; and his curious eyes had been open to things great and small. He appears as a brave soldier, but, he confesses, capable of mortal fear; sincerely devout, but not made for martyrdom; zealous for his master's cause, but not naturally a chaser of rainbow dreams; one who enjoys good cheer, who prefers his wine unallayed with water, who loves splendid attire, who thinks longingly of his pleasant chateau, and the children awaiting his return; one who will decline future crusading, and who believes that a man of station may serve G.o.d well by remaining in his own fields among his humble dependants. But Joinville felt deeply the attraction of a nature more under the control of high, ideal motives than was his own; he would not himself wash the feet of the poor; he would rather commit thirty mortal sins than be a leper; but a kingly saint may touch heights of piety which are unattainable by himself. And, at the same time, he makes us feel that Louis is not the less a man because he is a saint. Certain human infirmities of temper are his; yet his magnanimity, his sense of justice, his ardent devotion, his charity, his pure self-surrender are made so sensible to us as we read the record of Joinville that we are willing to subscribe to the sentence of Voltaire: "It is not given to man to carry virtue to a higher point."

During the fourteenth century the higher spirit of feudalism declined; the old faith and the old chivalry were suffering a decay; the bourgeoisie grew in power and sought for instruction; it was an age of prose, in which learning was pa.s.sing to the laity, or was adapted to their uses. Yet, while the inner life of chivalry failed day by day, and self-interest took the place of heroic self-surrender, the external pomp and decoration of the feudal world became more brilliant than ever. War was a trade practised from motives of vulgar cupidity; but it was adorned with splendour, and had a show of gallantry. The presenter in literature of this glittering spectacle is the historian JEAN FROISSART. Born in 1338, at Valenciennes, of bourgeois parents, Froissart, at the age of twenty-two, a disappointed lover, a tonsured clerk, and already a poet, journeyed to London, with his ma.n.u.script on the battle of Poitiers as an offering to his countrywoman, Queen Philippa of Hainault. For nearly five years he was the _ditteur_ of the Queen, a sharer in the life of the court, but attracted before all else to those "ancient knights and squires who had taken part in feats of arms, and could speak of them rightly."

His patroness encouraged Froissart's historical inquiries. In the _Chroniques_ of Jean le Bel, canon of Liege, he found material ready to his hand, and freely appropriated it in many of his most admirable pages; but he also travelled much through England and Scotland, noting everything that impressed his imagination, and gathering with delight the testimony of those who had themselves been actors in the events of the past quarter of a century. He accompanied the Black Prince to Aquitaine, and, later, the Duke of Clarence to Milan. The death of Queen Philippa, in 1369, was ruinous to his prospects. For a time he supported himself as a trader in his native place. Then other patrons, kinsfolk of the Queen, came to his aid. The first revised redaction of the first book of his Chronicles was his chief occupation while cure of Lestinnes; it is a record of events from 1325 to the death of Edward III., and its brilliant narrative of events still recent or contemporary insured its popularity with aristocratic readers. Under the influence of Queen Philippa's brother-in-law, Robert of Namur, it is English in its sympathies and admirations. Unhappily Froissart was afterwards moved by his patron, Gui de Blois, to rehandle the book in the French interest; and once again in his old age his work was recast with a view to effacing the large debt which he owed to his predecessor, Jean le Bel. The first redaction is, however, that which won and retained the general favour.

If his patron induced Froissart to wrong his earlier work, he made amends, for it is to Gui de Blois that we owe the last three books of the history, which bring the tale of events down to the a.s.sa.s.sination of Richard II. Still the cure of Lestinnes and the canon of Chimai pursued his early method of travel--to the court of Gaston, Count of Foix, to Flanders, to England--ever eager in his interrogation of witnesses. It is believed that he lived to the close of 1404, but the date of his death is uncertain.

Froissart as a poet wrote gracefully in the conventional modes of his time. His vast romance _Meliador_, to which Wenceslas, Duke of Brabant, contributed the lyric part--famous in its day, long lost and recently recovered--is a construction of external marvels and splendours which lacks the inner life of imaginative faith. But as a brilliant scene-painter Froissart the chronicler is unsurpa.s.sed.

His chronology, even his topography, cannot be trusted as exact; he is credulous rather than critical; he does not always test or control the statements of his informants; he is misled by their prejudices and pa.s.sions; he views all things from the aristocratic standpoint; the life of the common people does not interest him; he has no sense of their wrongs, and little pity for their sufferings; he does not study the deeper causes of events; he is almost incapable of reflection; he has little historical sagacity; he accepts appearances without caring to interpret their meanings. But what a vivid picture he presents of the external aspects of fourteenth-century life! What a joy he has in adventure! What an eye for the picturesque!

What movement, what colour! What a dramatic--or should we say theatrical?--feeling for life and action! Much, indeed, of the vividness of Froissart's narrative may be due to the eye-witnesses from whom he had obtained information; but genius was needed to preserve--perhaps to enhance--the animation of their recitals. If he understood his own age imperfectly, he depicted its outward appearance with incomparable skill; and though his moral sense was shallow, and his knowledge of character far from profound, he painted portraits which live in the imagination of his readers.

The fifteenth century is rich in historical writings of every kind--compilations of general history, domestic chronicles, such as the _Livre des Faits du bon Messire Jean le Maingre, dit Bouciquaut_, official chronicles both of the French and Burgundian parties, journals and memoirs. The Burgundian Enguerrand de Monstrelet was a lesser Froissart, faithful, laborious, a transcriber of doc.u.ments, but without his predecessor's genius. On the French side the so-called _Chronique Scandaleuse_, by Jean de Roye, a Parisian of the time of Louis XI., to some extent redeems the mediocrity of the writers of his party.

In PHILIPPE DE COMMINES we meet the last chronicler of the Middle Ages, and the first of modern historians. Born about 1445, in Flanders, of the family of Van den Clyte, Commines, whose parents died early, received a scanty education; but if he knew no Latin, his acquaintance with modern languages served him well. At first in the service of Charles the Bold, in 1472 he pa.s.sed over to the cause of Louis XI.

His treason to the Duke may be almost described as inevitable; for Commines could not attach himself to violence and folly, and was naturally drawn to the counsels of civil prudence. The bargain was as profitable to his new master as to the servant. On the King's death came a reverse of fortune for Commines: for eight months he was cramped in the iron cage; during two years he remained a prisoner in the Conciergerie (1487-89), with enforced leisure to think of the preparation of his _Memoires_.[3] Again the sunshine of royal favour returned; he followed Charles VIII. to Italy, and was engaged in diplomatic service at Venice. In 1511 he died.

[Footnote 3: Books I.-VI., written 1488-94; Books VII., VIII., written 1494-95.]

The _Memoires_ of Commines were composed as a body of material for a projected history of Louis XI. by Archbishop Angelo Cato; the writer, apparently in all sincerity, hoped that his unlearned French might thus be translated into Latin, the language of scholars; happily we possess the Memoirs as they left their author's mind. And, though Commines rather hides than thrusts to view his own personality, every page betrays the presence of a remarkable intellect. He was no artist either in imaginative design or literary execution; he was before all else a thinker, a student of political phenomena, a searcher after the causes of events, an a.n.a.lyst of motives, a psychologist of individual character and of the temper of peoples, and, after a fashion, a moralist in his interpretation of history. He cared little, or not at all, for the coloured surface of life; his chief concern is to seize the master motive by which men and events are ruled, to comprehend the secret springs of action. He is aristocratic in his politics, monarchical, an advocate for the centralisation of power; but he would have the monarch enlightened, const.i.tutional, and pacific. He values solid gains more than showy magnificence; and knowing the use of astuteness, he knows also the importance of good faith. He has a sense of the balance of European power, and antic.i.p.ates Montesquieu in his theory of the influence of climates on peoples.

There is something of pity, something of irony, in the view which he takes of the joyless lot of the great ones of the earth. Having ascertained how few of the combinations of events can be controlled by the wisest calculation, he takes refuge in a faith in Providence; he finds G.o.d necessary to explain this entangled world; and yet his morality is in great part that which tries good and evil by the test of success. By the intensity of his thought Commines sometimes becomes striking in his expression; occasionally he rises to a grave eloquence; occasionally his irony is touched by a bitter humour. But in general he writes with little sentiment and no sense of beauty, under the control of a dry and circ.u.mspect intelligence.

CHAPTER IV LATEST MEDIaeVAL POETS--THE DRAMA

I LATEST MEDIaeVAL POETS

The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries form a period of transition from the true Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The national epopee was dead; the Arthurian tales were rehandled in prose; under the influence of the _Roman de la Rose_, allegory was highly popular, and Jean de Meun had shown how it could be applied to the secularisation of learning; the middle cla.s.ses were seeking for instruction. In lyric poetry the free creative spirit had declined, but the technique of verse was elaborated and reduced to rule; ballade, chant royal, lai, virelai, rondeau were the established forms, and lyric verse was often used for matter of a didactic, moral, or satirical tendency. Even Ovid was tediously moralised (_c_. 1300) in some seventy thousand lines by Chretien Legouais. Literary societies or _puys_[1] were inst.i.tuted, which maintained the rules of art, and awarded crowns to successful compet.i.tors in poetry; a formal ingenuity replaced lyrical inspiration; poetry accepted proudly the name of "rhetoric." At the same time there is gain in one respect--the poets no longer conceal their own personality behind their work: they instruct, edify, moralise, express their real or simulated pa.s.sions in their own persons; if their art is mechanical, yet through it we make some acquaintance with the men and manners of the age.

[Footnote 1: _Puy_, mountain, eminence, signifying the elevated seat of the judges of the artistic compet.i.tion.]

The chief exponent of the new art of poetry was GUILLAUME DE MACHAUT.

Born about 1300, he served as secretary to the King of Bohemia, who fell at Crecy. He enjoyed a tranquil old age in his province of Champagne, cultivating verse and music with the applause of his contemporaries. The ingenuities of gallantry are deployed at length in his _Jugement du Roi de Navarre_; he relates with dull prolixity the history of his patron, Pierre de Lusignan, King of Cyprus, in his _Prise d'Alexandrie_; the _Voir dit_ relates in varying verse and prose the course of his s.e.xagenarian love for a maiden in her teens, Peronne d'Armentieres, who gratified her coquetry with an old poet's adoration, and then wedded his rival.

In the forms of his verse EUSTACHE DESCHAMPS, also a native of Champagne (_c_. 1345-1405), was a disciple of Machaut: if he was not a poet, he at least interests a reader by rhymed journals of his own life and the life of his time, written in the spirit of an honest bourgeois, whom disappointed personal hopes and public misfortune had early embittered. Eighty thousand lines, twelve hundred ballades, nearly two hundred rondeaux, a vast unfinished satire on woman, the _Miroir de Mariage_, fatigued even his own age, and the official court poet of France outlived his fame. He sings of love in the conventional modes; his historical poems, celebrating events of the day, have interest by virtue of their matter; as a moralist in verse he deplores the corruption of high and low, the cupidity in Church and State, and, above all, applies his wit to expose the vices and infirmities of women. The earliest Poetic in French--_L'art de dictier et de fere chancons, balades, virelais, et rondeaulx_ (1392)--is the work of Eustache Deschamps, in which the poet, by no means himself a master of harmonies, insists on the prime importance of harmony in verse.

The exhaustion of the mediaeval sources of inspiration is still more apparent in the fifteenth-century successors of Deschamps. But already something of the reviving influence of Italian culture makes itself felt. CHRISTINE DE PISAN, Italian by her parentage and place of birth (_c_. 1363), was left a widow with three young children at the age of twenty-five. Her sorrow, uttered in verse, is a genuine lyric cry; but when in her poverty she practised authorship as a trade, while she wins our respect as a mother, the poetess is too often at once facile and pedantic. Christine was zealous in maintaining the honour of her s.e.x against the injuries of Jean de Meun; in her prose _Cite des Dames_ she celebrates the virtues and heroism of women, with examples from ancient and modern times; in the _Livre des Trois Vertus_ she instructs women in their duties. When advanced in years, and sheltered in the cloister, she sang her swan-song in honour of Joan of Arc. Admirable in every relation of life, a patriot and a scholar, she only needed one thing--genius--to be a poet of distinction.

A legend relates that the Dauphiness, Margaret of Scotland, kissed the lips of a sleeper who was the ugliest man in France, because from that "precious mouth" had issued so many "good words and virtuous sayings." The sleeper was Christine's poetical successor, ALAIN CHARTIER. His fame was great, and as a writer of prose he must be remembered with honour, both for his patriotic ardour, and for the harmonious eloquence (modelled on cla.s.sical examples) in which that ardour found expression. His first work, the _Livre des Quatre Dames_, is in verse: four ladies lament their husbands slain, captured, lost, or fugitive and dishonoured, at Agincourt. Many of his other poems were composed as a distraction from the public troubles of the time; the t.i.tle of one, widely celebrated in its own day, _La Belle Dame sans Mercy_, has obtained a new meaning of romance through its appropriation by Keats. In 1422 he wrote his prose _Quadrilogue Invectif_, in which suffering France implores the n.o.bles, the clergy, the people to show some pity for her miserable state. If Froissart had not discerned the evils of the feudal system, they were patent to the eyes of Alain Chartier. His _Livre de l'Esperance_, where the oratorical prose is interspersed with lyric verse, spares neither the clergy nor the frivolous and dissolute gentry, who forget their duty to their country in wanton self-indulgence; yet his last word, written at the moment when Joan of Arc was leaving the pastures for battle, is one of hope. His _Curial_ (_The Courtier_) is a satire on the vices of the court by one who had acquaintance with its corruption. The large, harmonious phrase of Alain Chartier was new to French prose, and is hardly heard again until the seventeenth century.

The last grace and refinements of chivalric society blossom in the poetry of CHARLES D'ORLeANS, "la grace exquise des choses freles."

He was born in 1391, son of Louis, Duke of Orleans, and an Italian mother, Valentine of Milan. Married at fifteen to the widow of Richard II. of England, he lost his father by a.s.sa.s.sination, his mother by the stroke of grief, his wife in childbirth. From the battlefield of Agincourt he pa.s.sed to England, where he remained a prisoner, closely guarded, for twenty-five years. It seems as if events should have made him a tragic poet; but for Charles d'Orleans poetry was the brightness or the consolation of his exile. His elder years at the little court of Blois were a season of delicate gaiety, when he enjoyed the recreations of age, and smiled at the pa.s.sions of youth.