Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres Part 19

"Auca.s.sins, biax amis dox, "En quel tere en irons nous?"

"Douce amie, que sai jou?

"Moi ne caut u nous aillons, "En forest u en destor "Mais que je soie aveuc vous."

Pa.s.sent les vaus et les mons, Et les viles et les bors A la mer vinrent au jor, Si descendent u sablon Les le rivage.

Auca.s.sins, the brave, the fair, Courteous knight and gentle lover, From the forest dense came forth; In his arms his love he bore On his saddle-bow before; Her eyes he kisses and her mouth, And her forehead and her chin.

She brings him back to earth again: "Auca.s.sins, my love, my own, "To what country shall we turn?"

"Dearest angel, what say you?

"I care nothing where we go, "In the forest or outside, "While you on my saddle ride."

So they pa.s.s by hill and dale, And the city, and the town, Till they reach the morning pale, And on sea-sands set them down, Hard by the sh.o.r.e.

There we will leave them, for their further adventures have not much to do with our matter. Like all the romans, or nearly all, "Auca.s.sins" is singularly pure and refined. Apparently the ladies of courteous love frowned on coa.r.s.eness and allowed no licence. Their power must have been great, for the best romans are as free from grossness as the "Chanson de Roland" itself, or the church gla.s.s, or the illuminations in the ma.n.u.scripts; and as long as the power of the Church ruled good society, this decency continued. As far as women were concerned, they seem always to have been more clean than the men, except when men painted them in colours which men liked best.

Perhaps society was actually cleaner in the thirteenth century than in the sixteenth, as Saint Louis was more decent than Francis I, and as the bath was habitual in the twelfth century and exceptional at the Renaissance. The rule held good for the bourgeoisie as well as among the dames cortoises. Christian and Thibaut, "Auca.s.sins" and the "Roman de la Rose," may have expressed only the tastes of high- born ladies, but other poems were avowedly bourgeois, and among the bourgeois poets none was better than Adam de la Halle. Adam wrote also for the court, or at least for Robert of Artois, Saint Louis's nephew, whom he followed to Naples in 1284, but his poetry was as little aristocratic as poetry could well be, and most of it was cynically--almost defiantly--middle-cla.s.s, as though the weavers of Arras were his only audience, and recognized him and the objects of his satire in every verse. The bitter personalities do not concern us, but, at Naples, to amuse Robert of Artois and his court, Adam composed the first of French comic operas, which had an immense success, and, as a pastoral poem, has it still. The Idyll of Arras was a singular contrast to the Idyll of Beaucaire, but the social value was the same in both; Robin and Marion were a pendant to Auca.s.sins and Nicolette; Robin was almost a burlesque on Auca.s.sins, while Marion was a Northern, energetic, intelligent, pastoral Nicolette.

"Li Gieus de Robin et de Marion" had little or no plot. Adam strung together, on a thread of dialogue and by a group of suitable figures, a number of the favourite songs of his time, followed by the favourite games, and ending with a favourite dance, the "tresca." The songs, the games, and the dances do not concern us, but the dialogue runs along prettily, with an air of Flemish realism, like a picture of Teniers, as unlike that of "courtoisie"

as Teniers was to Guido Reni. Underneath it all a tone of satire made itself felt, good-natured enough, but directed wholly against the men.

The scene opens on Marion tending her sheep, and singing the pretty air: "Robin m'aime, Robin ma'a," after which enters a chevalier or esquire, on horseback, and sings: "Je me repairoie du tournoiement."

Then follows a dialogue between the chevalier and Marion, with no other object than to show off the charm of Marion against the masculine defects of the knight. Being, like most squires, somewhat slow of ideas in conversation with young women, the gentleman began by asking for sport for his falcon. Has she seen any duck down by the river?

Mais veis tu par chi devant Vers ceste riviere nul ane?

"Ane," it seems, was the usual word for wild duck, the falcon's prey, and Marion knew it as well as he, but she chose to misunderstand him:--

C'est une bete qui recane; J'en vis ier iii sur che quemin, Tous quarchies aler au moulin.

Est che chou que vous demandes?

"It is a beast that brays; I saw three yesterday on the road, all with loads going to the mill. Is that what you ask?" That is not what the squire has asked, and he is conscious that Marion knows it, but he tries again. If she has not seen a duck, perhaps she has seen a heron:--

Hairons, sire? par me foi, non!

Je n'en vi nesun puis quareme Que j'en vi mengier chies dame Eme Me taiien qui sorit ches brebis.

"Heron, sir! by my faith, no! I've not seen one since Lent when I saw some eaten at my grandmother's--Dame Emma who owns these sheep."

"Hairons," it seems, meant also herring, and this wilful misunderstanding struck the chevalier as carrying jest too far:--

Par foi! or suis j'ou esbaubis!

N'ainc mais je ne fui si gabes!

"On my word, I am silenced! never in my life was I so chaffed!"

Marion herself seems to think her joke a little too evident, for she takes up the conversation in her turn, only to conclude that she likes Robin better than she does the knight; he is gayer, and when he plays his musette he starts the whole village dancing. At this, the squire makes a declaration of love with such energy as to spur his horse almost over her:--

Aimi, sirel ostez vo cheval!

A poi que il ne m'a blechie.

Li Robin ne regiete mie Quand je voie apres se karue.

"Aimi!" is an exclamation of alarm, real or affected: "Dear me, sir!

take your horse away! he almost hurt me! Robin's horse never rears when I go behind his plough!" Still the knight persists, and though Marion still tells him to go away, she asks his name, which he says is Aubert, and so gives her the catchword for another song:--"Vos perdes vo paine, sire Aubert!"--which ends the scene with a duo. The second scene begins with a duo of Marion and Robin, followed by her giving a softened account of the chevalier's behaviour, and then they lunch on bread and cheese and apples, and more songs follow, till she sends him to get Baldwin and Walter and Peronette and the pipers, for a dance. In his absence the chevalier returns and becomes very pressing in his attentions, which gives her occasion to sing:-

J'oi Robin flagoler Au flagol d'argent.

When Robin enters, the knight picks a quarrel with him for not handling properly the falcon which he has caught in the hedge; and Robin gets a severe beating. The scene ends by the horseman carrying off Marion by force; but he soon gets tired of carrying her against her will, and drops her, and disappears once for all.

Certes voirement sui je beste Quant a ceste beste m'areste.

Adieu, bergiere!

Bete the knight certainly was, and was meant to be, in order to give the necessary colour to Marion's charms. Chevaliers were seldom intellectually brilliant in the mediaeval romans, and even the "Chansons de Geste" liked better to talk of their prowess than of their wit; but Adam de la Halle, who felt no great love for chevaliers, was not satisfied with ridiculing them in order to exalt Marion; his second act was devoted to exalting Marion at the expense of her own boors.

The first act was given up to song; the second, to games and dances.

The games prove not to be wholly a success; Marion is bored by them, and wants to dance. The dialogue shows Marion trying constantly to control her clowns and make them decent, as Blanche of Castile had been all her life trying to control her princes, and Mary of Chartres her kings. Robin is a rustic counterpart to Thibaut. He is tamed by his love of Marion, but he has just enough intelligence to think well of himself, and to get himself into trouble without knowing how to get out of it. Marion loves him much as she would her child; she makes only a little fun of him; defends him from the others; laughs at his jealousy; scolds him on occasion; flatters his dancing; sends him on errands, to bring the pipers or drive away the wolf; and what is most to our purpose, uses him to make the other peasants decent. Walter and Baldwin and Hugh are coa.r.s.e, and their idea of wit is to shock the women or make Robin jealous. Love makes gentlemen even of boors, whether n.o.ble or villain, is the constant moral of mediaeval story, and love turns Robin into a champion of decency. When, at last, Walter, playing the jongleur, begins to repeat a particularly coa.r.s.e fabliau, or story in verse, Robin stops him short--

Ho, Gautier, je n'en voeil plus! fi!

Dites, seres vous tous jours teus!

Vous estes un ors menestreus!

"Ho, Walter! I want no more of that: Shame! Say! are you going to be always like that? You're a dirty beggar!" A fight seems inevitable, but Marion turns it into a dance, and the whole party, led by the pipers, with Robin and Marion at the head of the band, leave the stage in the dance which is said to be still known in Italy as the "tresca." Marion is in her way as charming as Nicolette, but we are less interested in her charm than in her power. Always the woman appears as the practical guide; the one who keeps her head, even in love:--

Elle l'a mis a raison: "Auca.s.sins, biax amis dox, En quele tere en irons nous?"

"Douce amie, que sai jou?

Moi ne caut ou nous aillons."

The man never cared; he was always getting himself into crusades, or feuds, or love, or debt, and depended on the woman to get him out.

The story was always of Charles VII and Jeanne d'Arc, or Agnes Sorel. The woman might be the good or the evil spirit, but she was always the stronger force. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries were a period when men were at their strongest; never before or since have they shown equal energy in such varied directions, or such intelligence in the direction of their energy; yet these marvels of history,--these Plantagenets; these scholastic philosophers; these architects of Rheims and Amiens; these Innocents, and Robin Hoods and Marco Polos; these crusaders, who planted their enormous fortresses all over the Levant; these monks who made the wastes and barrens yield harvests;--all, without apparent exception, bowed down before the woman.

Explain it who will! We are not particularly interested in the explanation; it is the art we have chased through this French forest, like Auca.s.sins hunting for Nicolette; and the art leads always to the woman. Poetry, like the architecture and the decoration, harks back to the same standard of taste. The specimens of Christian of Troyes, Thibaut, Tristan, Auca.s.sins, and Adam de la Halle were mild admissions of feminine superiority compared with some that were more in vogue, If Thibaut painted his love-verses on the walls of his castle, he put there only what a more famous poet, who may have been his friend, set on the walls of his Chateau of Courteous Love, which, not being made with hands or with stone, but merely with verse, has not wholly perished. The "Roman de la Rose"

is the end of true mediaeval poetry and goes with the Sainte- Chapelle in architecture, and three hundred years of more or less graceful imitation or variation on the same themes which followed.

Our age calls it false taste, and no doubt our age is right;--every age is right by its own standards as long as its standards amuse it;--but after all, the "Roman de la Rose" charmed Chaucer,--it may well charm you. The charm may not be that of Mont-Saint-Michel or of Roland; it has not the grand manner of the eleventh century, or the jewelled brilliancy of the Chartres lancets, or the splendid self- a.s.sertion of the roses: but even to this day it gives out a faint odour of Champagne and Touraine, of Provence and Cyprus. One hears Thibaut and sees Queen Blanche.

Of course, this odour of true sanct.i.ty belongs only to the "Roman"

of William of Lorris, which dates from the death of Queen Blanche and of all good things, about 1250; a short allegory of courteous love in forty-six hundred and seventy lines. To modern taste, an allegory of forty-six hundred and seventy lines seems to be not so short as it might be; but the fourteenth century found five thousand verses totally inadequate to the subject, and, about 1300, Jean de Meung added eighteen thousand lines, the favourite reading of society for one or two hundred years, but beyond our horizon. The "Roman" of William of Lorris was complete in itself; it had shape; beginning, middle, and end; even a certain realism, action,--almost life!

The Rose is any feminine ideal of beauty, intelligence, purity, or grace,--always culminating in the Virgin,--but the scene is the Court of Love, and the action is avowedly in a dream, without time or place. The poet's tone is very pure; a little subdued; at times sad; and the poem ends sadly; but all the figures that were positively hideous were shut out of the court, and painted on the outside walls:--Hatred; Felony; Covetousness; Envy; Poverty; Melancholy, and Old Age. Death did not appear. The pa.s.sion for representing death in its horrors did not belong to the sunny atmosphere of the thirteenth century, and indeed jarred on French taste always, though the Church came to insist on it; but Old Age gave the poet a motive more artistic, foreshadowing Death, and quite sad enough to supply the necessary contrast. The poet who approached the walls of the chateau and saw, outside, all the unpleasant facts of life conspicuously posted up, as though to shut them out of doors, hastened to ask for entrance, and, when once admitted, found a court of ideals. Their names matter little. In the mind of William of Lorris, every one would people his ideal world with whatever ideal figures pleased him, and the only personal value of William's figures is that they represent what he thought the thirteenth- century ideals of a perfect society. Here is Courtesy, with a translation long thought to be by Chaucer:-

Apres se tenoit Cortoisie Qui moult estoit de tous prisie.

Si n'ere orgueilleuse ne fole.

C'est cele qui a la karole, La soe merci, m'apela, Ains que nule, quand je vins la.

Et ne fut ne nice n'umbrage, Mais sages auques, sans outrage, De biaus respons et de biaus dis, Onc nus ne fu par li laidis, Ne ne porta nului rancune, Et fu clere comme la lune Est avers les autres estoiles Qui ne resemblent que chandoiles.

Faitisse estoit et avenant; Je ne sai fame plus plaisant.

Ele ert en toutes cors bien digne D'estre empereris ou roine.