Epic and Romance Part 22

The story of Enid in Chrestien is very unlike the other stories of distressed and submissive wives; it has none of the ineradicable falsity of the story of Griselda. How much is due to Chrestien for this can hardly be reckoned, in our ignorance of the materials he used. But taking into account the other pa.s.sages, like that of the girl reading in the garden, where Chrestien shows a distinct original appreciation of certain aspects of life, it cannot be far wrong to consider Chrestien's picture of Enid as mainly his own; and, in any case, this picture is one of the finest in medieval romance. There is no comparison between Chrestien of Troyes and Homer, but it is not impious to speak of Enid along with Nausicaa, and there are few other ladies of romance who may claim as much as this. The adventure of the Sparrowhawk, one of the finest pieces of pure romance in the poetry of this century, is also one of the finest in the old French, and in many ways very unlike the commonplaces of chivalry, in the simplicity of the household where Enid waits on her father's guest and takes his horse to the stable, in the sincerity and clearness with which Chrestien indicates the gentle breeding and dignity of her father and mother, and the pervading spirit of grace and loyalty in the whole scene.[87]

[Footnote 87: The Welsh version has the advantage here in noting more fully than Chrestien the beauty of age in Enid's mother: "And he thought that there could be no woman fairer than she must have been in the prime of her youth." Chrestien says merely (at the end of his story, l. 6621):--

Bele est Enide et bele doit Estre par reison et par droit, Que bele dame est mout sa mere Bel chevalier a an son pere.]

In the story of Enid, Chrestien has a subject which recommends itself to modern readers. The misunderstanding between Enid and her husband, and the reconciliation, are not peculiarly medieval, though the adventures through which their history is worked out are of the ordinary romantic commonplace.

Indeed the relation of husband and wife in this story is rather exceptionally divergent from the current romantic mode, and from the conventional law that true love between husband and wife was impossible. Afterwards, in his poem of _Lancelot_ (_le Chevalier de la Charrette_), Chrestien took up and worked out this conventional and pedantic theory, and made the love of Lancelot and the Queen into the standard for all courtly lovers. In his _Enid_, however, there is nothing of this. At the same time, the courtly and chivalrous mode gets the better of the central drama in his _Enid_, in so far as he allows himself to be distracted unduly from the pair of lovers by various "hyperboles" of the Romantic School; there are a number of unnecessary jousts and encounters, and a mysterious exploit of Erec in a magic garden, which is quite out of connexion with the rest of the story. The final impression is that Chrestien wanted strength of mind or inclination to concentrate himself on the drama of the two lovers.

The story is taken too lightly.

In _Cliges_, his next work, the dramatic situation is much less valuable than in _Enid_, but the workmanship is far more careful and exact, and the result is a story which may claim to be among the earliest of modern novels, if the Greek romances, to which it has a close relation, are not taken into account. The story has very little "machinery"; there are none of the marvels of the Faerie in it. There is a Thessalian witch (the heroine's nurse), who keeps well within the limits of possible witchcraft, and there is the incident of the sleeping-draught (familiar in the ballad of the _Gay Goshawk_), and that is all. The rest is a simple love-story (or rather a double love-story, for there is the history of the hero's father and mother, before his own begins), and the personages are merely true lovers, undistinguished by any such qualities as the sulkiness of Erec or the discretion of Enid. It is all pure sensibility, and as it happens the sensibility is in good keeping--not overdriven into the pedantry of the more quixotic troubadours and minnesingers, and not warped by the conventions against marriage. It is explained at the end that, though Cliges and Fenice are married, they are lovers still:--

De s'amie a feite sa fame, Mais il l'apele amie et dame, Que por ce ne pert ele mie Que il ne l'aint come s'amie, Et ele lui autresi Con l'an doit feire son ami: Et chascun jor lor amors crut, N'onques cil celi ne mescrut, Ne querela de nule chose.

_Cliges_, l. 6753.

This poem of Chrestien's is a collection of the finest specimens of medieval rhetoric on the eternal theme. There is little incident, and sensibility has it all its own way, in monologues by the actors and digressions by the author, on the nature of love. It is rather the sentiment than the pa.s.sion that is here expressed in the "language of the heart"; but, however that may be, there are both delicacy and eloquence in the language. The pensive Fenice, who debates with herself for nearly two hundred lines in one place (4410-4574), is the ancestress of many later heroines.

Meis Fenice est sor toz pansive; Ele ne trueve fonz ne rive El panser dont ele est anplie, Tant li abonde et mouteplie.

_Cliges_, l. 4339.

In the later works of Chrestien, in _Yvain_, _Lancelot_, and _Perceval_, there are new developments of romance, more particularly in the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. But these three later stories, unlike _Cliges_, are full of the British marvels, which no one would wish away, and yet they are enc.u.mbrances to what we must regard as the princ.i.p.al virtue of the poet--his skill of a.n.a.lysis in cases of sentiment, and his interest in such cases. _Cliges_, at any rate, however far it may come short of the _Chevalier de la Charrette_ and the _Conte du Graal_ in variety, is that one of Chrestien's poems, it might be said that one of the twelfth-century French romances, which best corresponds to the later type of novel. It is the most modern of them; and at the same time it does not represent its own age any the worse, because it also to some extent antic.i.p.ates the fashions of later literature.

In this kind of romance, which reduces the cost of the "machinery,"

and does without enchanters, dragons, magic mists, and deadly castles, there are many other examples besides _Cliges_.

A hundred years after Chrestien, one of his cleverest pupils wrote the Provencal story of _Flamenca_,[88] a work in which the form of the novel is completely disengaged from the unnecessary accidents of romance, and reaches a kind of positive and modern clearness very much at variance in some respects with popular ideas of what is medieval.

The Romance of the medieval Romantic School attains one of its highest and most distinctive points in _Flamenca_, and shows what it had been aiming at from the beginning--namely, the expression in an elegant manner of the ideas of the _Art of Love_, as understood in the polite society of those times. _Flamenca_ is nearly contemporary with the _Roman de la Rose_ of Guillaume de Lorris. Its inspiring ideas are the same, and though its influence on succeeding authors is indiscernible, where that of the _Roman de la Rose_ is widespread and enduring, _Flamenca_ would have as good a claim to be considered a representative masterpiece of medieval literature, if it were not that it appears to be breaking loose from medieval conventions where the _Roman de la Rose_ makes all it can out of them. _Flamenca_ is a simple narrative of society, with the indispensable three characters--the husband, the lady, and the lover. The scene of the story is princ.i.p.ally at the baths of Bourbon, in the then present day; and of the miracles and adventures of the more marvellous and adventurous romances there is nothing left but the very pleasant enumeration of the names of favourite stories in the account of the minstrelsy at Flamenca's wedding. The author knew all that was to be known in romance, of Greek, Latin, or British invention--Thebes and Troy, Alexander and Julius Caesar, Samson and Judas Maccabeus, Ivain and Gawain and Perceval, Paris and Tristram, and all Ovid's _Legend of Good Women_--but out of all these studies he has retained only what suited his purpose. He does not compete with the Greek or the British champions in their adventures among the romantic forests. Chrestien of Troyes is his master, but he does not try to copy the magic of the Lady of the Fountain, or the Bridge of the Sword, or the Castle of the Grail. He follows the doctrine of love expounded in Chrestien's _Lancelot_, but his hero is not sent wandering at random, and is not made to display his courtly emotions among the ruins and shadows of the lost Celtic mythology, like Lancelot in Chrestien's poem. The life described in _Flamenca_ is the life of the days in which it was composed; and the hero's task is to disguise himself as a clerk, so as to get a word with the jealously-guarded lady in church on Sundays, while giving her the Psalter to kiss after the Ma.s.s. _Flamenca_, is really the triumph of Ovid, with the _Art of Love_, over all his Gothic compet.i.tors out of the fairy tales. The Provencal poet has discarded everything but the essential dominant interests, and in so doing has gone ahead of his master Chrestien, who (except in _Cliges_) allowed himself to be distracted between opposite kinds of story, between the school of Ovid and the school of Blethericus; and who, even in _Cliges_, was less consistently modern than his Provencal follower.

[Footnote 88: Ed. Paul Meyer, 1865, and, again, 1901.]

_Flamenca_ is the perfection and completion of medieval romance in one kind and in one direction. It is all sentiment; the ideal courtly sentiment of good society and its poets, made lively by the author's knowledge of his own time and its manners, and his decision not to talk about anything else. It is perhaps significant that he allows his heroine the romance of _Flores and Blanchefleur_ for her reading, an older story of true lovers, after the simpler pattern of Greek romance, which the author of _Flamenca_ apparently feels himself ent.i.tled to refer to with the condescension of a modern and critical author towards some old-fashioned prettiness. He is completely self-possessed and ironical with regard to his story. His theme is the idle love whose origin is explained by Ovid; his personages are nothing to him but the instruments of the symphony which he composes and directs: _sopra lor vanita che par persona_, over and through their graceful inanity, pa.s.ses the stream of sentiment, the shifting, flickering light which the Provencal author has borrowed from Ovid and transferred for his own purposes to his own time. It is perhaps the first complete modern appropriation of cla.s.sical examples in literary art; for the poem of _Flamenca_ is cla.s.sical in more than one sense of the term--cla.s.sical, not only because of its comprehension of the spirit of the Latin poet and his code of manners and sentiment, but because of its clear proportions and its definite abstract lines of composition; because of the self-possession of the author and his subordination of details and rejection of irrelevances.

Many things are wanting to _Flamenca_ which it did not suit the author to bring in. It was left to other greater writers to venture on other and larger schemes with room for more strength and individuality of character, and more stress of pa.s.sion, still keeping the romantic framework which had been designed by the masters of the twelfth century, and also very much of the sentimental language which the same masters had invented and elaborated.

The story of the _Chastelaine de Vergi_[89] (dated by its editor between 1282 and 1288) is an example of a different kind from _Flamenca_; still abstract in its personages, still sentimental, but wholly unlike _Flamenca_ in the tragic stress of its sentiment and in the pathos of its incidents. There is no plot in _Flamenca_, or only just enough to display the author's resources of eloquence; in the _Chastelaine de Vergi_ there is no rhetorical expansion or effusion, but instead of that the coherent closely-reasoned argument of a romantic tragedy, with nothing in it out of keeping with the conditions of "real life." It is a moral example to show the disastrous result of breaking the first law of chivalrous love, which enjoins loyal secrecy on the lover; the tragedy in this case arises from the strong compulsion of honour under which the commandment is transgressed.

[Footnote 89: Ed. G. Raynaud, _Romania_, xxi. p. 145.]

There was a knight who was the lover of the Chastelaine de Vergi, unknown to all the world. Their love was discovered by the jealous machinations of the d.u.c.h.ess of Burgundy, whom the knight had neglected. The d.u.c.h.ess made use of her knowledge to insult the Chastelaine; the Chastelaine died of a broken heart at the thought that her lover had betrayed her; the knight found her dead, and threw himself on his sword to make amends for his unwilling disloyalty. Even a summary like this may show that the plot has capabilities and opportunities in it; and though the scheme of the short story does not allow the author to make use of them in the full detailed manner of the great novelists, he understands what he is about, and his work is a very fine instance of sensitive and clearly-executed medieval narrative, which has nothing to learn (in its own kind, and granting the conditions a.s.sumed by the author) from any later fiction.

The story of the _Lady of Vergi_ was known to Boccaccio, and was repeated both by Bandello and by Queen Margaret of Navarre.

It is time to consider how the work of the medieval romantic schools was taken up and continued by many of the most notable writers of the period which no longer can be called medieval, in which modern literature makes a new and definite beginning; especially in the works of the two modern poets who have done most to save and adapt the inheritance of medieval romance for modern forms of literature--Boccaccio and Chaucer.

The development of romance in these authors is not always and in all respects a gain. Even the pathetic stories of the _Decameron_ (such as the _Pot of Basil_, _Tancred and Gismunda_, _William of Cabestaing_) seem to have lost something by the adoption of a different kind of grammar, a more learned rhetoric, in comparison with the best of the simple French stories, like the _Chastelaine de Vergi_. This is the case in a still greater degree where Boccaccio has allowed himself a larger scale, as in his version of the old romance of _Flores and Blanchefleur_ (_Filocolo_), while his _Teseide_ might be taken as the first example in modern history of the pernicious effect of cla.s.sical studies. The _Teseide_ is the story of Palamon and Arcita. The original is lost, but it evidently was a French romance, probably not a long one; one of the favourite well-defined cases or problems of love, easily understood as soon as stated, presenting the rivalry of the two n.o.ble kinsmen for the love of the lady Emily. It might have been made into one of the stories of the _Decameron_, but Boccaccio had other designs for it. He wished to write a cla.s.sical epic in twelve books, and not very fortunately chose this simple theme as the groundwork of his operations. The _Teseide_ is the first of the solemn row of modern epics; "reverend and divine, abiding without motion, shall we say that they have being?" Everything is to be found in the _Teseide_ that the best cla.s.sical traditions require in epic--Olympian machinery, catalogues of armies, descriptions of works of art to compete with the Homeric and Virgilian shields, elaborate battles, and epic similes, and funeral games. Chaucer may have been at one time tempted by all this magnificence; his final version of the story, in the _Knight's Tale_, is a proof among other things of his critical tact. He must have recognised that the _Teseide_, with all its ambition and its brilliancy of details, was a failure as a story; that this particular theme, at any rate, was not well fitted to carry the epic weight. These personages of romance were not in training for the heavy cla.s.sical panoply. So he reduced the story of Palamon and Arcita to something not very different from what must have been its original scale as a romance. His modifications of Boccaccio here are a lesson in the art of narrative which can hardly be overvalued by students of that mystery.

Chaucer's procedure in regard to his romantic subjects is often very difficult to understand. How firm and unwavering his critical meditations and calculations were may be seen by a comparison of the _Knight's Tale_ with its Italian source. At other times and in other stories he appears to have worked on different principles, or without much critical study at all. The _Knight's Tale_ is a complete and perfect version of a medieval romance, worked out with all the resources of Chaucer's literary study and reflexion; tested and considered and corrected in every possible way. The story of _Constance_ (the _Man of Law's Tale_) is an earlier work in which almost everything is lacking that is found in the mere workmanship of the _Knight's Tale_; though not, of course, the humanity, the pathos, of Chaucer. The story of _Constance_ appears to have been taken by Chaucer from one of the least artificial specimens of medieval romance, the kind of romance that worked up in a random sort of way the careless sequence of incidents in a popular traditional tale. Just as the tellers of the stories in Campbell's _Highland Tales_, and other authentic collections, make no scruple about proportion where their memory happens to fail them or their irrelevant fancy to distract them, but go on easily, dropping out a symmetrical adventure here and there, and repeating a favourite "machine" if necessary or unnecessary; so the story of _Constance_ forgets and repeats itself.

The voice is the voice of Chaucer, and so are the thoughts, but the order or disorder of the story is that of the old wives' tales when the old wives are drowsy. All the princ.i.p.al situations occur twice over; twice the heroine is persecuted by a wicked mother-in-law, twice sent adrift in a rudderless boat, twice rescued from a churl, and so on. In this story the poetry of Chaucer appears as something almost independent of the structure of the plot; there has been no such process of design and reconstruction as in the _Knight's Tale_.

It is almost as strange to find Chaucer in other stories, as in the _Franklin's Tale_ and the _Clerk's Tale_, putting up with the most abstract medieval conventions of morality; the Point of Honour in the _Franklin's Tale_, and the unmitigated virtue of Griselda, are hopelessly opposed to anything like dramatic truth, and very far inferior as motives to the ethical ideas of many stories of the twelfth century. The truth of _Enid_ would have given no opportunity for the ironical verses in which Chaucer takes his leave of the Clerk of Oxford and his heroine.

In these romances Chaucer leaves some old medieval difficulties unresolved and unreconciled, without attempting to recast the situation as he found it in his authorities, or to clear away the element of unreason in it. He takes the framework as he finds it, and embroiders his poetry over it, leaving an obvious discrepancy between his poetry and its subject-matter.

In some other stories, as in the _Legend of Good Women_, and the tale of Virginia, he is content with pathos, stopping short of vivid drama.

In the _Knight's Tale_ he seems to have deliberately chosen a compromise between the pathetic mood of pure romance and a fuller dramatic method; he felt, apparently, that while the contrast between the two rivals admitted of drama, the position of the lady Emily in the story was such as to prevent a full dramatic rendering of all the characters. The plot required that the lady Emily should be left without much share of her own in the action.

The short and uncompleted poem of _Anelida_ gains in significance and comes into its right place in Chaucer's works, when it is compared with such examples of the older school as the _Chastelaine de Vergi_.

It is Chaucer's essay in that delicate abstract fashion of story which formed one of the chief accomplishments of the French Romantic School.

It is his acknowledgment of his debt to the artists of sensibility, the older French authors, "that can make of sentiment," and it proves, like all his writings, how quick he was to save all he could from the teaching of his forerunners, for the profit of "that fair style that has brought him honour." To treat a simple problem, or "case," of right and wrong in love, was a favourite task of medieval courtly poetry, narrative and lyric. Chaucer in his _Anelida_ takes up this old theme again, treating it in a form between narrative and lyric, with the pure abstract melody that gives the mood of the actors apart from any dramatic individuality. He is one of the Extractors of Quintessence, and his _Anelida_ is the formal spirit, impalpable yet definite, of the medieval courtly romance.

It is not here, but in a poem the opposite of this in fulness and richness of drama, that Chaucer attains a place for himself above all other authors as the poet who saw what was needed to transform medieval romance out of its limitations into a new kind of narrative.

Chaucer's _Troilus and Criseyde_ is the poem in which medieval romance pa.s.ses out of itself into the form of the modern novel. What Cervantes and what Fielding did was done first by Chaucer; and this was the invention of a kind of story in which life might be represented no longer in a conventional or abstract manner, or with sentiment and pathos instead of drama, but with characters adapting themselves to different circ.u.mstances, no longer obviously breathed upon by the master of the show to convey his own ideas, but moving freely and talking like men and women. The romance of the Middle Ages comes to an end, in one of the branches of the family tree, by the production of a romance that has all the freedom of epic, that comprehends all good and evil, and excludes nothing as common or unclean which can be made in any way to strengthen the impression of life and variety. Chaucer was not tempted by the phantasm of the Epic Poem like Boccaccio, and like so many of the great and wise in later generations. The substance of Epic, since his time, has been appropriated by certain writers of history, as Fielding has explained in his lectures on that science in _Tom Jones_. The first in the line of these modern historians is Chaucer with his _Troilus and Criseyde_, and the wonder still is as great as it was for Sir Philip Sidney:--

Chaucer undoubtedly did excellently in his _Troylus_ and _Cresseid_; of whom, truly I know not whether to mervaile more, either that he in that mistie time could see so clearely, or that wee in this cleare age walke so stumblingly after him.

His great work grew out of the French Romantic School. The episode of Troilus and Briseide in Benoit's _Roman de Troie_ is one of the best pa.s.sages in the earlier French romance; light and unsubstantial like all the work of that School, but graceful, and not untrue. It is all summed up in the monologue of Briseide at the end of her story (l.

20,308):--

Dex donge bien a Troylus!

Quant nel puis amer ne il mei A cestui[90] me done et otrei.

Molt voldreie aveir cel talent Que n'eusse remembrement Des ovres faites d'en arriere: co me fait mal a grant maniere!

[Footnote 90: _i.e._ Diomede.]

Boccaccio took up this story, from the Latin version of the Tale of Troy, the _Historia Trojana_ of Guido. His _Filostrato_ is written on a different plan from the _Teseide_; it is one of his best works. He did not make it into an epic poem; the _Filostrato_, Boccaccio's _Troilus and Cressida_, is a romance, differing from the older French romantic form not in the design of the story, but in the new poetical diction in which it is composed, and its new poetical ideas. There is no false cla.s.sicism in it, as there is in his _Palamon and Arcita_; it is a novel of his own time, a story of the _Decameron_, only written at greater length, and in verse. Chaucer, the "great translator," took Boccaccio's poem and treated it in his own way, not as he had dealt with the _Teseide_. The _Teseide_, because there was some romantic improbability in the story, he made into a romance. The story of Troilus he saw was strong enough to bear a stronger handling, and instead of leaving it a romance, graceful and superficial as it is in Boccaccio, he deepened it and filled it with such dramatic imagination and such variety of life as had never been attained before his time by any romancer; and the result is a piece of work that leaves all romantic convention behind. The _Filostrato_ of Boccaccio is a story of light love, not much more substantial, except in its new poetical language, than the story of _Flamenca_. In Chaucer the pa.s.sion of Troilus is something different from the sentiment of romance; the changing mind of Cressida is represented with an understanding of the subtlety and the tragic meaning of that life which is "Time's fool."

Pandarus is the other element. In Boccaccio he is a personage of the same order as Troilus and Cressida; they all might have come out of the Garden of the _Decameron_, and there is little to choose between them. Chaucer sets him up with a character and a philosophy of his own, to represent the world outside of romance. The Comic Genius claims a share in the tragedy, and the tragedy makes room for him, because the tragic personages, "Tragic Comedians" as they are, can bear the strain of the contrast. The selection of personages and motives is made in another way in the romantic schools, but this poem of Chaucer's is not romance. It is the fulfilment of the prophecy of Socrates, just before Aristophanes and the tragic poet had to be put to bed at the end of the _Symposium_, that the best author of tragedy is the best author of comedy also. It is the freedom of the imagination, beyond all the limits of partial and conventional forms.

NOTES AND ILl.u.s.tRATIONS

APPENDIX

NOTE A (p. 133)

_Rhetoric of the Western and Northern Alliterative Poems_

Any page of the Anglo-Saxon poets, and of the "Elder Edda," will show the difference between the "continuous" and the "discrete"--the Western and the Northern--modes of the alliterative verse. It may be convenient to select some pa.s.sages here for reference.

(1) As an example of the Western style ("the sense variously drawn out from one verse to another"), the speech of the "old warrior" stirring up vengeance for King Froda (_Beowulf_, l. 2041 _sq._; see above, p.

70):--