Amenities of Literature Part 8

[3] The Norman William punished men with loss of eyes for taking his venery.--Selden's notes to "Drayton's Polyolbion," Song ii.

An instant execution of two youths by the gamekeepers, at the command of their Lord, appears in an ancient romance recently published in France.--_Journal des Savans_, 1838.

[4] A curious specimen of these "Household Books," though of a later period, is that of the Northumberland family, printed by Bishop Percy. Many exist in ma.n.u.script, and contain particulars more valuable than the prices of commodities, for which they are usually valued; they offer striking pictures of the manners of their age.

[The Wardrobe accounts of Edward the Fourth, the Privy Purse expenses of Edward IV. and Henry VIII., have been since published by Sir Harris Nicolas; and those of the Princess Mary, afterwards Queen, by Sir Frederick Madden. The judicious notes and dissertations of these editors render them of much use in ill.u.s.tration of the history of each era.--ED.]

[5] "Warton," i. 94.

[6] "Warton," ii. 412.

[7] Stowe's "Survey by Strype," book iii. 235. We might wish to learn the authority of Stowe for ascribing this "pleasant wit" to Rahere of the eleventh century! As the pen of venerable Stowe never moved idly, our antiquary must have had some information which is now lost. "The king's minstrel" is also a doubtful designation: was the founder of this priory "a king of the minstrels?" an office which the French also had, _Roy des Menestraulx_, a governor inst.i.tuted to keep order among all minstrels. Our Rahere, however "pleasant-witted," seems to have fallen into penance for his "wit," for he became the first prior.

[8] _Antiquites Nationales_, par Millin, xli. Two plates exhibit this Gothic chapel and the various musical instruments.

[9] Both these romantic tales may be considered as authentic narratives, though they have often been used by the writers of fiction. _La Chatelaine de Vergy_ has been sometimes confounded with _Le Chatelaine de Coucy_, the lover of _La Dame du Fayel_. The story of the Countess of Tergy (on which a romance of the thirteenth century is founded, Hist. Litt. de France, xviii. 779) has been a favourite with the tale-tellers--the Queen of Navarre, Bandello, and Belle Forest, and is elegantly versified in the "Fabliaux, or Tales,"

of Way. That of the Dame du Fayel, one of the fathers of French literary history, old Fauchet, extracted it from a good old chronicle dated two centuries before he wrote. The story is also found in an ancient romance of the thirteenth century, in the Royal Library of France.--Hist. Litt. de la France, xiv. 589; xvii. 644. The story of Childe Waters in Percy's Collection has all the pathetic simplicity of ancient minstrelsy, which is more forcibly felt when we compare it with the rifaccimento by a Mrs. Pye, in Evans's Old Ballads.

[10] Montaigne was so well acquainted with this practice, that he has used it as a familiar ill.u.s.tration of the obstinacy of some women--which I suppose the good man imagined could not be paralleled by instances from the masculine s.e.x; however, his language must not be disguised by a modern version. "Celui qui forgea le conte de la femme qui, pour aucune correction de menaces et bastonnades, ne cessait d'appeler son mari, Pouilleux, et qui, precipite dans l'eau, haussoit encore, en s'etouffant, les mains et faisoit au-dessus de sa tete signe de tuer des poux, forgea un conte duquel en verite tous les jours on voit l'image expresse de l'opiniatrete des femmes."

The punishment of our "Ducking-stool" for female brawlers possibly originated in this medieval practice of throwing women into the river: but this is but an innocuous baptism, while we find the obstinate wife here, who probably spoke true enough, _s'etouffant_,--merely for correcting the filthy lubbard, her lord and master.

[11] Leland's "Itinerary," ii. 126.

[12] Paston's "Letters," v. 17.

[13] See the very curious chapter on the "Fetish Worship," in that very original and learned work "The Doctor," v. 133.

GOTHIC ROMANCES.

A new species of literature arose in the progress of that practical education which society had a.s.sumed; a literature addressed to the pa.s.sions which rose out of the circ.u.mstances of the times; dedicated to war, to love, and to religion, when the business of life seemed restricted to the extreme indulgence of those enn.o.bling pursuits. In too much love, too much war, too much devotion, it was not imagined that knights and ladies could ever err. If sometimes the loves were utterly licentious, wondrous tales are told of their immaculate purity; if their religion were then darkened by the grossest superst.i.tion, their faith was genuine, and would have endured martyrdom; and if the chivalric valour often exulted in its ferocity and its rapacity, its generous honour amid a lawless state of society maintained justice in the land, by the lance which struck the oppressor, and by the shield which covered the helpless.

Everything had a.s.sumed a more extended form: the pageantry of society had varied and multiplied; the banquet was prolonged; the festival day was frequent; the ballad narrative, or the spontaneous lyric, which had sufficed their ruder ancestors to allure attention, now demanded more volume and more variety; the romance with a deeper interest was to revolve in the entangling narrative of many thousand lines. There was a traditional store, a stock of fabling in hand, heroical panegyrics, satirical songs, and legendary ballads; all served as the stuff for the looms of mightier weavers of rhyme, whose predecessors had left them this inheritance. The marvellous of Romance burst forth, and this stupendous fabric of invention bewitched Europe during three centuries.

ROMANCE, from the light fabliau to the voluminous fiction, has admitted, in the luxury of our knowledge and curiosity, not only of critical investigation, but of its invention, by tracing it to a single source.

The origin of Romance has been made to hinge on a theoretical history; and by maintaining exclusive systems, mostly fanciful and partly true, it has been made complicate. Whether invention in the form of ROMANCE came from the oriental tale-teller or the Scandinavian Scald, or whether the fictions of Europe be the growth of the Provencal or the Armorican soil, our learned inquirers have each told; nor have they failed in considerably diminishing the claims of each particular system opposed to their own; but the greatest error will be found in their mutual refutations.[1] While each stood entrenched in an exclusive system, they were only furnishing an integral portion of a boundless and complicate inquiry. They scrutinised with microscopic eyes into that vast fabric of invention, which the Gothic genius may proudly oppose to the fictions of antiquity, and they seemed at times forgetful of the vicissitudes which, at distant intervals, and by novel circ.u.mstances, enlarged and modified the changeful state of romantic fiction among every people.

In the attempt to retrace the Nile of Romance to a solitary source, in the eagerness of their discoveries they had not yet ascertained that this Nile bears many far-divided heads, and some from which Time shall never remove its clouds; for who dares a.s.sign an origin to the ancient Milesian tales, the tales and their origin being alike lost?[2]

Warton, enc.u.mbered by his theory of an Eastern origin, opened the map to track the voyage of an Arabian tale: he landed it at Ma.r.s.eilles, that port by which ancient Greece first held its intercourse with our Europe, and thence the tale was sent forwards through genial Italy, but forced to harbour in this voyage of Romance at the distant sh.o.r.es of Brittany, that land of Romance and of the ancient Briton. The result of his system startled the literary world by his a.s.sumption, that "the British history" of Geoffry of Monmouth entirely consists of Arabian inventions!

the real source of the airy existence of our British Arthur! Bishop Percy had been nearly as adventurous in his Gothic origin, by landing a number of the northern bards with the army of Rollo in Normandy; an event which contributed to infuse the Scaldic genius into the romances of chivalry, whose national hero is Charlemagne--the tutelary genius of France and Germany.

They had looked to the east, and to the north--and wherever they looked for the origin of Romance it was found. They had sought in a corner of the universe for that which is universal.

ROMANCE sprang to birth in every clime, native wherever she is found, notwithstanding that she has been a wanderer among all lands, and as prodigal a dispenser as she has been free in her borrowings and artful in her concealments.

The art of fabling may be cla.s.sed among the mimetic arts--it is an apt.i.tude of the universal and plastic faculties of our nature; and man might not be ill defined and charactered as "a mimetic and fabling animal."

The earliest Romances appear in a metrical form about the middle of the twelfth century. The first were "Estoires," or pretended chronicles, like that of the Brut of Wace; the Romances of martial achievement then predominated, those of the Knights of Arthur, and the Paladins of Charlemagne; the adventures of love and gallantry were of a later epoch.

In the mutability of taste an extraordinary transition occurred; after nearly two centuries pa.s.sed in rhyming, all the verse was to be turned into prose. Whether voluminous rhymes satiate the public ear, or novelty in the form was sought even when they had but little choice, the writers of Romance, a very flexible gentry, who of all other writers servilely accommodate themselves to the public taste, with more fluent pens loitered into a more ample page; or, as they expressed themselves, "translates de rime en prose," or "mis en beau langage." Many of the old French metrical Romances, in the fourteenth century, were disguised in this humbled form; but their "mensogne magnanime," to use Ta.s.so's style, who loved them, lost nothing in number or in hardihood. On the discovery of the typographic art, in the fifteenth century, many of these prose Romances in ma.n.u.script received a new life by pa.s.sing through the press; and these, in their venerable "lettres Gothiques," are still h.o.a.rded for the solace of the curious in fictions of genuine antiquity, and of invention in its prime, both at home and abroad; and in a reduced form we find them surviving among the people on the Continent. It is singular that the metrical Romances seem never to have received the honours conferred on the prose.[3]

These Romances, in their ma.n.u.script state, were cherished objects;[4]

the mighty tomes, sometimes consisting of forty or fifty thousand lines, described as those "great books of parchment," or "the great book of Romances," were usually embellished by the pen and the pencil with every ornament that fancy could suggest; bound in crimson velvet, guarded by clasps of silver, and studded with golden roses; profuse of gorgeous illuminations, and decorated with the most delicate miniatures, "lymned with gold of graver's work" on an azure ground; or the purple page setting off the silvery letters;--objects then of perpetual attraction to the story-believing reader, and which now charm the eye which could not as patiently con the endless page. The fashions of the times are exactly shown in the dresses and the domestic furniture; as well as their instruments, military and musical.

Studies for the artist, as for the curious antiquary,[5] we may view the plumage in a casque curved and falling with peculiar grace, and a lady's robe floating in its amplitude; and ornaments of dress arranged, which our taste might emulate. A French amateur who possessed _le Roman de la Violette_, a romance of a fabulous Count of Nevers, was so deeply struck by its exquisite and faithful miniatures, that he employed the best artists to copy the most interesting, and placed them in his collection of the costume and fashions of the French nation; a collection preserved in the Royal Library of France.[6] If their hard outline does not always flow into grace, their imagination worked under the mysterious influence of the Romance through all their devoted labour. In a group of figures we may observe that the heads are not mechanically cast by one mould, but the distinct character looks as if the thoughtful artist had worked out his recollections on which he had meditated. In some of the heads, portraits of distinguished persons have been recognised. Not less observable are the arabesques often found on the margins, where the playful pencil has prodigally flung flowers and fruit, imitating the bloom, or insects which look as if they had lighted on the leaf. These margins, however, occasionally exhibit arabesques of a very different character; figures or subjects which often amused the pencil of the monastic limners, satirical strokes aimed at their brothers and sisters--the monks and the nuns! I have observed a wolf, in a monk's frock and cowl, stretching its paw to bless a c.o.c.k bending its submissive head; a cat, in the habit of an abbess, holding a platter in its paws to a mouse approaching to lick it, alluding to the allurements of abbesses to draw young women into the convents; and a sow, in a nun's veil, mounted on stilts. A pope appears to be thrown by devils into a cauldron, and cardinals are roasting on spits. All these expressions of suppressed opinion must have been executed by the monks themselves.

These reformers before the Reformation sympathised with the popular feeling against the haughty prelate and the luxurious abbot.

The great Romance of Alexander, preserved in the Bodleian Library, reveals a secret of the cost of time freely bestowed on that single and mighty tome. The illuminator, by preserving the date when he had completed his own work compared with that of the transcriber when he had finished his part, appears to have employed nearly six years on the paintings which embellish this precious volume.[7]

Such a metrical Romance was a gift presented to royalty, when engrossed by the rapturous hand of the Romancer himself; the autograph, in a presentation copy, might count on the meed of "ma.s.sy goblets" when the munificent patron found the new volume delectable to his taste, which indeed had been antic.i.p.ated by the writer. This incident occurred to Froissart in presenting his Romance to Richard the Second, when, in reply to his majesty's inquiry after the contents, the author exultingly told that "the book treated of Amour!"

To the writers of these ancient Romances we cannot deny a copious invention, a variegated imagination, and, among their rambling exuberances and their grotesque marvels, those enchanting enchantments which the Greeks and Romans only partially and coldly raised. We may often, too, discover that truth of human nature which is not always supposed to lie hid in these desultory compositions. Amid their peculiar extravagances, which at least may serve to raise an occasional smile, the strokes of nature are abundant, and may still form the studies of the writers of fiction, however they may hang on the impatience of the writers and the readers of our duodecimos. Ancient writers are pictorial: their very fault contributes to produce a remarkable effect--a fulness often overflowing, but which at least is not a scantiness leaving the vagueness of imperfect description. Their details are more circ.u.mstantial, their impressions are more vivid, and they often tell their story with the earnestness of persons who had conversed with the actors, or had been spectators of the scene. We may be wearied, as one might be at a protracted trial by the witnesses, but we are often struck by an energetic reality which we sometimes miss in their polished successors. Their copiousness, indeed, is without selection; they wrote before they were critics, but their truth is not the less truth because it is given with little art.

The dilations of the metrical Romances into tomes of prose, Warton considered as a proof of the decay of invention. Was not this censure rather the feeling of a poet for his art, than the decision of a critic?

for the more extended scenes of the Romances in prose required a wider stage, admitted of a fuller dramatic effect in the incidents, and a more perfect delineation of the personages through a more sustained action.

If the prose Romances are not epics by the conventional code of the Stagyrite, at least they are epical; and some rude Homers sleep among these old Romancers, metrical or prosaic. A living poetic critic, one best skilled to arbitrate, for he is without any prepossessions in favour of our ancient writers, has honestly acknowledged their faithfulness to nature in their touching simplicity; "nor," he adds, "do they less afford, by their bolder imagination, adequate subjects for the historical pencil." And he has more particularly noticed "Le bone Florence de Rome,"--thus written by our ungrammatical minstrels.

"Cla.s.sical poetry has scarcely ever conveyed in shorter boundaries so many interesting and complicated events as may be found in this good old Romance."[8] This indeed is so true, that we find these romantic tales were not only recited or read, but their subjects were worked into the tapestries which covered the walls of their apartments. The Bible and the Romance equally offered subjects to eyes learned in the "Estoires"

never to be forgotten.

Our master poets have drawn their waters from these ancient fountains.

SIDNEY might have been himself one of their heroes, and was no unworthy rival of his masters: SPENSER borrowed largely, and repaid with munificence: MILTON in his loftiest theme looked down with admiration on this terrestrial race,

-----------and what resounds In fable or romance of Uther's son, Begirt with British or Armoric knights.

"In 'Amadis of Gaul,'" has said our true laureate, "may be found the Zelmane of the 'Arcadia,' the Masque of Cupid of the 'Faery Queen,' and the Florizel of the 'Winter's Tale.' Sidney, Spenser, and Shakspeare imitated this book: was ever book honoured by three such imitators?"[9]

A great similarity is observable among these writers of fiction, both in their incidents and the ident.i.ty of their phrases; an evidence that these inventors were often drawing from a common source. In these ages of ma.n.u.scripts they practised without scruple many artifices, and might safely appropriate the happiest pa.s.sages of their anonymous brothers.[10] One Romance would produce many by variations; the same story would serve as the groundwork of another: and the later Romancer, to set at rest the scruples of the reader, usually found fault with his predecessors, who, having written the same story, had not given "the true one!" By this innocent imposture, or this ingenious impudence, they designed to confer on their Romance the dignity of History. The metrical Romances pretend to translate some ancient "Cronik" which might be consulted at Caerleon, the magical palace of the vanished Arthur: or they give their own original Romance as from some "Latyn auctour," whose name is cautiously withheld; or they practise other devices, pretending to have drawn their work from "the Greek," or "the English," and even from an "unknown language." In some Colophons of the prose Romances the names of real persons are a.s.signed as the writers;[11] but the same Romance is equally ascribed to different persons, and works are given as translations which in fact are originals. Amid this prevailing confusion, and these contradictory statements, we must agree with the editor of Warton, that we cannot with any confidence name the author of any of these prose Romances. RITSON has aptly treated these pseudonymous translators as "men of straw." We may say of them all as the antiquary DOUCE, in the agony of his baffled researches after one of their favourite authorities, a Will o' the Wisp named Lollius, exclaimed, somewhat gravely--"Of Lollius it will become every one to speak with diffidence." Ariosto seems to have caught this bantering humour of mystifying his readers in his own Gothic Romance, gravely referring his extravagances to "the Chronicle of the pseudo Archbishop Turpin" for his voucher! What was with the Italian but a playful stroke of satire on the pretended verity of Turpin himself, may have covered a more serious design with these ancient romance-writers. Pere Menestrier ascribed these productions to Heralds, who, he says, were always selected for their talents, their knowledge and their experience; qualifications not the most essential for romance-writing. "According to the bad taste of those ignorant ages," he proceeds, "it is from them so many Romances on feats of arms and on chivalry issued, by which they designed to elevate their own office, and to celebrate their voyages in different lands."[12] St. Palaye, in adopting this notion of these Heraldical Romancers, with more knowledge of the ancient Romancers than the good Father possessed, has added a more numerous body, the _Trouveres_, who, either in rehearsing or in composing these poetical narratives, might urge a stronger claim.

When Pere Menestrier imagined that it was the intention of these Heralds, by these Romances, "to celebrate their voyages in different lands," it seems to have escaped him that "the voyages" of these Romancers to the visionary Caerleon, to England, or to Macedonia, were but a geography of Fairy Land.

In the History of Literature we here discover a whole generation of writers, who, so far from claiming the honour of their inventions, or aspiring after the meed of fame, have even studiedly concealed their claims, and, with a modesty and caution difficult to comprehend, dropped into their graves without a solitary commemoration.

These idling works of idlers must have been the pleasant productions of persons of great leisure, with some tincture of literature, and to whom, by the peculiarity of their condition, fame was an absolute nullity. Who were these writers who thus contemned fame? Who pursued the delicate tasks of the illuminator and the calligrapher? Who adorned Psalters with a religious patience, and expended a whole month in contriving the vignette of an initial letter? Who were these artists who worked for no gain? In those ages the ecclesiastics were the only persons who answer to this character; and it would only be in the silence and leisure of the monastery that such imaginative genius and such refined art could find their dwelling-place. I have sometimes thought that it was Pere Hardouin's conviction of all this literary industry of the monks which led him to indulge his extravagant conjecture, that the cla.s.sical writings of antiquity were the fabrications of this sedentary brotherhood; and his "pseudo-Virgilius" and "pseudo-Horatius" astonished the world, though they provoked its laughter.

The Gothic mediaeval periods were ages of imagination, when in art works of amazing magnitude were produced, while the artists sent down no claims to posterity. We know not who were the numerous writers of these voluminous Romances, but, what is far more surprising, we are nearly as unacquainted with those great and original architects who covered our land with the palatial monastery, the church, and the cathedral. In the religious societies themselves the genius of the Gothic architect was found: the bishop or the abbot planned while they opened their treasury; and the sculptor and the workmen were the tenants of the religious house. The devotion of labour and of faith raised these wonders, while it placed them beyond the unvalued glory which the world can give.[13]

We cannot think less than Pere Hardouin that there were no poetical and imaginative monks--Homers in cowls, and Virgils who chanted vespers--who could compose in their unoccupied day more beautiful romances than their crude legends, or the dry annals of the Leiger book of their abbey. Some knowledge these writers had of the mythological, and even the Homeric and Virgilian fictions, for they often gave duplicates of the cla.s.sical fables of antiquity. Circe was a fair sorceress, the one-eyed Polyphemus a dread giant, and Perseus bestrode a winged dragon, before they were reflected in romances. But what we discover peculiar in these works is a strange mixture of sacred and profane matters, always treated in a manner which scents of the cloister. Before he enters the combat, the knight is often on his knees, invoking his patron-saint; he proffers his vows on holy relics; while ladies placed in the last peril, or the most delicate positions, by their fervent repet.i.tions of the sign of the cross, or a vow to found an abbey, are as certainly saved: and for another refined stroke of the monachal invention, the heroes often close their career in a monastery or a hermitage. The monkish morality which sat loosely about them was, however, rigid in its ceremonial discipline.

Lancelot de Lac leaves the bed of the guilty Genevra, the Queen of the good king Arthur, at the ring of the matin-bell, to a.s.sist at ma.s.s; so scrupulous were such writers that even in criminal levities they should not neglect all the offices of the Church. The subject of one of these great romances is a search after the cup which held the real blood of Christ; and this history of the _Sang-real_ forms a series of romances.

Who but a monk would have thought, and even dared to have written it down, that all the circ.u.mstances in this romance were not only certain, but were originally set down by the hand of Jesus himself? and further dared to observe, that Jesus never wrote but twice before--the Lord's Prayer, and the sentence on the woman taken in adultery. Such a pious, or blasphemous fraud, was not unusual among the dark fancies of the monastic legendaries.

Some of these Homers must have left their lengthening Iliad, as Homer himself seems to have done, unfinished; tired, or tiring, for no doubt there was often a rehearsal, "the tale half told" was resumed by some Elisha who caught the mantle his more inspired predecessor had let fall.

It appears evident that several were the continuators of a favourite romance; and from deficient attention or deficient skill a fatal discrepancy has been detected in the identical characters--the ordinary fate of those who write after the ideas of another, with indistinct conceptions, or with fancies going contrary to those of the first inventor.

These metrical romances in ma.n.u.script, and the printed prose in their original editions, are now very costly. By the antiquary and the poet these tomes may be often opened. With the antiquary they have served as the veritable registers of their ages. The French antiquaries, and Carte in England, have often ill.u.s.trated by those ancient romances many obscure points in geography and history. Except in the mere machinery of their fancy, these writers had no motive to pervert leading facts, for these served to give a colour of authenticity to their pretended history, or to fix their locality. As they had not the erudition to display, nor were aware of the propriety of copying, the customs and manners of the age of their legendary hero, they have faithfully transmitted their own; we should never have had but for this lucky absurdity the "Tale of Thebes" turned into a story of the middle ages; while Alexander the Great is but the ideal of a Norman baron in the splendour and alt.i.tude of the conception of the writers. It was the ignorance of the illuminators of our Latin and Saxon ma.n.u.scripts of any other country than their own which enabled STRUTT to place before the eye a pictorial exhibition of our Anglo-Saxon fathers. Compared with the realities of these originals, with all their faults of tediousness, the modern copiers of ancient times, in their mock scenes of other ages, too often reflect in the cold moonlight of their fancy a shadowy unsubstantial antiquity.

The influence of these fabulous achievements of unconquerable heroes and of self-devoted lovers over the intellect and the pa.s.sions of men and women, during that vast interval of time when they formed the sole literature, was omnipotent. In the early romances of chivalry, when their genius was purely military, and directed to kindle a pa.s.sion for joining the crusades, we rarely find adventures of the tender pa.s.sion; but, since women cannot endure neglect, and the female character has all the pliancy of sympathy, and has performed her part in every age on the theatre of society, we discover the extraordinary fact that many ladies a.s.sumed the plumy helmet and dexterously managed the lance. The ladies rode amid armed knights resistless as themselves. It was subsequently, when we find that singularly fantastic inst.i.tution of "The Courts of Love," which delivered their "Arrets" in the style of a most refined jurisprudence, that these beautiful companions-at-arms were satisfied to conquer the conquerors by more legitimate seductions, and that the romances told of little but of loves. Ariosto and Ta.s.so are supposed to have drawn their female warriors from the Amazonian Penthesilea and the Camilla of Homer and Virgil; but it would seem that the prototype of these feminine knights these poets also found among those old romances which they loved.