book I. verse 242, etc.) One would think that he must have had some

knowledge of Cædmon from the translation of Junius.]

[Footnote 87: Thorpe, "Cædmon," IV. p. 23.]

[Footnote 88: They themselves feel their impotence and decrepitude. Bede, dividing the history of the world into six periods, says that the fifth, which stretches from the return out of Babylon to the birth of Christ, is the senile period; the sixth is the present, "ætas decrepita, totius morte sæculi consummanda."]

[Footnote 89: Died in 901; Adhelm died 709, Bede died 735, Alcuin lived under Charlemagne, Erigena under Charles the Bald (843-877).]

[Footnote 90: Fox's "Alfred's Boethius," chap. 35, sec. 6, 1864.]

[Footnote 91: All these extracts are taken from Ingram's "Saxon Chronicle," 1823.]

[Footnote 92: William of Malmesbury's expression.]

[Footnote 93: Primitus (pantorum procerum prætorumque pio potissimum paternoque præsertim privilegio) panegyricum poemataque passim prosatori sub polo promulgantes, stridula vocum symphonia ac melodiæ cantilenæque carmine modulaturi hymnizemus.]

[Footnote 94: In Iceland, the country of the fiercest sea-kings, crimes are unknown; prisons have been turned to other uses; fines are the only punishment.]

[Footnote 95: Following Doomsday Book, Mr. Turner reckons at three hundred thousand the heads of families mentioned. If each family consisted of five persons, that would make one million five hundred thousand people. He adds five hundred thousand for the four northern counties, for London and several large towns, for the monks and provincial clergy not enumerated.... We must accept these figures with caution. Still they agree with those of Mackintosh, George Chalmers, and several others. Many facts show that the Saxon population was very numerous, and quite out of proportion to the Norman population.]

[Footnote 96: Warton, "History of English Poetry," 1840, 3 vols., Preface.]

CHAPTER SECOND

The Normans

SECTION I.--The Feudal Man

A century and a half had passed on the Continent since, amid the universal decay and dissolution, a new society had been formed, and new men had risen up. Brave men had at length made a stand against the Norsemen and the robbers. They had planted their feet in the soil, and the moving chaos of the general subsidence had become fixed by the effort of their great hearts and of their arms. At the mouths of the rivers, in the defiles of the mountains, on the margin of the waste borders, at all perilous passes, they had built their forts, each for himself, each on his own land, each with his faithful band; and they had lived like a scattered but watchful army, encamped and confederate in their castles, sword in hand in front of the enemy. Beneath this discipline a formidable people had been formed, fierce hearts in strong bodies,[97] intolerant of restraint, longing for violent deeds, born for constant warfare because steeped in permanent warfare, heroes and robbers, who, as an escape from their solitude, plunged into adventures, and went, that they might conquer a country or win Paradise, to Sicily, to Portugal, to Spain, to Palestine, to England.

SECTION II.--Normans and Saxons Contrasted

On September 27, 1066, at the mouth of the Somme, there was a great sight to be seen; four hundred large sailing vessels, more than a thousand transports, and sixty thousand men, were on the point of embarking.[98] The sun shone splendidly after long rain; trumpets sounded, the cries of this armed multitude rose to heaven; as far as the eye could see, on the shore, in the wide-spreading river, on the sea which opens out thence broad and shining, masts and sails extended like a forest; the enormous fleet set out wafted by the south wind.[99] The people which it carried were said to have come from Norway, and they might have been taken for kinsmen of the Saxons, with whom they were to fight; but there were with them a multitude of adventurers, crowding from all quarters, far and near, from north and south, from Maine and Anjou, from Poitou and Brittany, from Ile-de-France and Flanders, from Aquitaine and Burgundy;[100] and, in short, the expedition itself was French.

How comes it that, having kept its name, it had changed its nature? and what series of renovations had made a Latin out of a German people? The reason is, that this people, when they came to Neustria, were neither a national body, nor a pure race. They were but a band; and as such, marrying the women of the country, they introduced foreign blood into their children. They were a Scandinavian band, but swelled by all the bold knaves and all the wretched desperadoes who wandered about the conquered country;[101] and as such they received foreign blood into their veins. Moreover, if the nomadic band was mixed, the settled band was much more so; and peace by its transfusions, like war by its recruits, had changed the character of the primitive blood. When Rollo, having divided the land amongst his followers, hung the thieves and their abettors, people from every country gathered to him. Security, good stern justice, were so rare, that they were enough to repeople a land.[102] He invited strangers, say the old writers, "and made one people out of so many folk of different natures." This assemblage of barbarians, refugees, robbers, immigrants, spoke Romance or French so quickly, that the second Duke, wishing to have his son taught Danish, had to send him to Bayeux, where it was still spoken. The great masses always form the race in the end, and generally the genius and language. Thus this people, so transformed, quickly became polished; the composite race showed itself of a ready genius, far more wary than the Saxons across the Channel, closely resembling their neighbors of Picardy, Champagne, and Ile-de-France. "The Saxons," says an old writer,[103] "vied with each other in their drinking feats, and wasted their income by day and night in feasting, whilst they lived in wretched hovels; the French and Normans, on the other hand, living inexpensively in their fine, large houses, were besides refined in their food and studiously careful in their dress." The former, still weighted by the German phlegm, were gluttons and drunkards, now and then aroused by poetical enthusiasm; the latter, made sprightlier by their transplantation and their alloy, felt the cravings of the mind already making themselves manifest. "You might see amongst them churches in every village, and monasteries in the cities, towering on high, and built in a style unknown before," first in Normandy, and later in England.[104] Taste had come to them at once--that is, the desire to please the eye, and to express a thought by outward representation, which was quite a new idea: the circular arch was raised on one or on a cluster of columns; elegant mouldings were placed about the windows; the rose window made its appearance, simple, yet, like the flower which gives it its name "_rose des buissons_"; and the Norman style unfolded itself, original yet proportioned between the Gothic, whose richness it foreshadowed, and the Romance, whose solidity it recalled.

With taste, just as natural and just as quickly, was developed the spirit of inquiry. Nations are like children; with some the tongue is readily loosened, and they comprehend at once; with others it is loosened with difficulty, and they are slow of comprehension. The men we are here speaking of had educated themselves nimbly, as Frenchmen do. They were the first in France who unravelled the language, regulating it and writing it so well, that to this day we understand their codes and their poems. In a century and a half they were so far cultivated as to find the Saxons "unlettered and rude."[105] That was the excuse they made for banishing them from the abbeys and all valuable ecclesiastical offices. And, in fact, this excuse was rational, for they instinctively hated gross stupidity. Between the Conquest and the death of King John, they established five hundred and fifty-seven schools in England. Henry Beauclerk, son of the Conqueror, was trained in the sciences; so were Henry II and his three sons; Richard, the eldest of these, was a poet. Lanfranc, first Norman Archbishop of Canterbury, a subtle logician, ably argued the Real Presence; Anselm, his successor, the first thinker of the age, thought he had discovered a new proof of the existence of God, and tried to make religion philosophical by adopting as his maxim, "_Crede ut intelligas._" The notion was doubtless grand, especially in the eleventh century; and they could not have gone more promptly to work. Of course the science I speak of was but scholastic, and these terrible folios slay more understandings than they confirm. But people must begin as they can; and syllogism, even in Latin, even in theology, is yet an exercise of the mind and a proof of the understanding. Among the continental priests who settled in England, one established a library; another, founder of a school, made the scholars perform the play of Saint Catherine; a third wrote in polished Latin, "epigrams as pointed as those of Martial." Such were the recreations of an intelligent race, eager for ideas, of ready and flexible genius, whose clear thought was not clouded, like that of the Saxon brain, by drunken hallucinations and the vapors of a greedy and well-filled stomach. They loved conversations, tales of adventure. Side by side with their Latin chroniclers, Henry of Huntingdon, William of Malmesbury, thoughtful men already, who could not only relate, but criticise here and there, there were rhyming chronicles in the vulgar tongue, as those of Geoffroy Gaimar, Bénoît de Sainte-Maure, Robert Wace. Do not imagine that their verse-writers were sterile of words or lacking in details. They were talkers, tale-tellers, speakers above all, ready of tongue, and never stinted in speech. Not singers by any means; they speak--this is their strong point, in their poems as in their chronicles. They were the earliest who wrote the "Song of Roland"; upon this they accumulated a multitude of songs concerning Charlemagne and his peers, concerning Arthur and Merlin, the Greeks and Romans, King Horn, Guy of Warwick, every prince and every people. Their minstrels (_trouvères_), like their knights, draw in abundance from Welsh, Franks, and Latins, and descend upon East and West in the wide field of adventure. They address themselves to a spirit of inquiry, as the Saxons to enthusiasm, and dilute in their long, clear, and flowing narratives the lively colors of German and Breton traditions; battles, surprises, single combats, embassies, speeches, processions, ceremonies, huntings, a variety of amusing events, employ their ready and wandering imaginations. At first, in the "Song of Roland," it is still kept in check; it walks with long strides, but only walks. Presently its wings have grown; incidents are multiplied; giants and monsters abound, the natural disappears, the song of the jongleur grows a poem under the hands of the _trouvère_; he would speak, like Nestor of old, five, even six years running, and not grow tired or stop. Forty thousand verses are not too much to satisfy their gabble; a facile mind, copious, inquisitive, descriptive, such is the genius of the race. The Gauls, their fathers, used to delay travellers on the road to make them tell their stories, and boasted, like these, "of fighting well and talking with ease."

With chivalric poetry, they are not wanting in chivalry; principally, it may be, because they are strong, and a strong man loves to prove his strength by knocking down his neighbors; but also from a desire of fame, and as a point of honor. By this one word honor the whole spirit of warfare is changed. Saxon poets painted war as a murderous fury, as a blind madness which shook flesh and blood, and awakened the instincts of the beast of prey; Norman poets describe it as a tourney. The new passion which they introduce is that of vanity and gallantry; Guy of Warwick dismounts all the knights in Europe, in order to deserve the hand of the prude and scornful Félice. The tourney itself is but a ceremony, somewhat brutal I admit, since it turns upon the breaking of arms and limbs, but yet brilliant and French. To show skill and courage, display the magnificence of dress and armor, be applauded by and please the ladies--such feelings indicate men of greater sociality, more under the influence of public opinion, less the slaves of their own passions, void both of lyric inspiration and savage enthusiasm, gifted by a different genius, because inclined to other pleasures.

Such were the men who at this moment were disembarking in England to introduce their new manners and a new spirit, French at bottom, in mind and speech, though with special and provincial features; of all the most matter-of-fact, with an eye to the main chance, calculating, having the nerve and the dash of our own soldiers, but with the tricks and precautions of lawyers; heroic undertakers of profitable enterprises; having gone to Sicily and Naples, and ready to travel to Constantinople or Antioch, so it be to take a country or bring back money; subtle politicians, accustomed in Sicily to hire themselves to the highest bidder, and capable of doing a stroke of business in the heat of the Crusade, like Bohémond, who, before Antioch, speculated on the dearth of his Christian allies, and would only open the town to them under condition of their keeping it for himself; methodical and persevering conquerors, expert in administration, and fond of scribbling on paper, like this very William, who was able to organize such an expedition, and such an army, and kept a written roll of the same, and who proceeded to register the whole of England in his Domesday Book. Sixteen days after the disembarkation, the contrast between the two nations was manifested at Hastings by its visible effects.

The Saxons "ate and drank the whole night. You might have seen them struggling much, and leaping and singing," with shouts of laughter and noisy joy.[106] In the morning they packed behind their palisades the dense masses of their heavy infantry, and with battle-axe hung round their neck awaited the attack. The wary Normans weighed the chances of heaven and hell, and tried to enlist God upon their side. Robert Wace, their historian and compatriot, is no more troubled by poetical imagination than they were by warlike inspiration; and on the eve of the battle his mind is as prosaic and clear as theirs.[107] The same spirit showed itself in the battle. They were for the most part bowmen and horsemen, well skilled, nimble, and clever. Taillefer, the _jongleur_, who asked for the honor of striking the first blow, went singing, like a true French volunteer, performing tricks all the while.[108] Having arrived before the English, he cast his lance three times in the air, then his sword, and caught them again by the handle; and Harold's clumsy foot-soldiers, who only knew how to cleave coats of mail by blows from their battle-axes, "were astonished, saying to one another that it was magic." As for William, amongst a score of prudent and cunning actions, he performed two well-calculated ones, which, in this sore embarrassment, brought him safe out of his difficulties. He ordered his archers to shoot into the air; the arrows wounded many of the Saxons in the face and one of them pierced Harold in the eye. After this he simulated flight; the Saxons, intoxicated with joy and wrath, quitted their entrenchments, and exposed themselves to the lances of his horsemen. During the remainder of the contest they only make a stand by small companies, fight with fury, and end by being slaughtered. The strong, mettlesome, brutal race threw themselves on the enemy like a savage bull; the dexterous Norman hunters wounded them adroitly, knocked them down, and placed them under the yoke.

SECTION III.--French Forms of Thought

What then is this French race, which by arms and letters make such a splendid entrance upon the world, and is so manifestly destined to rule, that in the East, for example, their name of Franks will be given to all the nations of the West? Wherein consists this new spirit, this precocious pioneer, this key of all Middle-Age civilization? There is in every mind of the kind a fundamental activity which, when incessantly repeated, moulds its plan, and gives it its direction; in town or country, cultivated or not, in its infancy and its age, it spends its existence and employs its energy in conceiving an event or an object. This is its original and perpetual process; and whether it change its region, return, advance, prolong, or alter its course, its whole motion is but a series of consecutive steps; so that the least alteration in the size, quickness, or precision of its primitive stride transforms and regulates the whole course, as in a tree the structure of the first shoot determines the whole foliage, and governs the whole growth.[109] When the Frenchman conceives an event or an object, he conceives quickly and distinctly; there is no internal disturbance, no previous fermentation of confused and violent ideas, which, becoming concentrated and elaborated, end in a noisy outbreak. The movement of his intelligence is nimble and prompt, like that of his limbs; at once and without effort he seizes upon his idea. But he seizes that alone; he leaves on one side all the long entangling off-shoots whereby it is entwined and twisted amongst its neighboring ideas; he does not embarrass himself with nor think of them; he detaches, plucks, touches but slightly, and that is all. He is deprived, or if you prefer it, he is exempt from those sudden half-visions which disturb a man, and open up to him instantaneously vast deeps and far perspectives. Images are excited by internal commotion; he, not being so moved, imagines not. He is only moved superficially; he is without large sympathy; he does not perceive an object as it is, complex and combined, but in parts, with a discursive and superficial knowledge. That is why no race in Europe is less poetical. Let us look at their epics; none are more prosaic. They are not wanting in number: "The Song of Roland, Garin le Loherain," "Ogier le Danois,"[110] "Berthe aux grands Pieds." There is a library of them. Though their manners are heroic and their spirit fresh, though they have originality, and deal with grand events, yet, spite of this, the narrative is as dull as that of the babbling Norman chroniclers. Doubtless when Homer relates he is as clear as they are, and he develops as they do: but his magnificent titles of rosy-fingered Morn, the wide-bosomed Air, the divine and nourishing Earth, the earth-shaking Ocean, come in every instant and expand their purple bloom over the speeches and battles, and the grand abounding similes which interrupt the narrative tell of a people more inclined to enjoy beauty than to proceed straight to fact. But here we have facts, always facts, nothing but facts; the Frenchman wants to know if the hero will kill the traitor, the lover wed the maiden; he must not be delayed by poetry or painting. He advances nimbly to the end of the story, not lingering for dreams of the heart or wealth of landscape. There is no splendor, no color, in his narrative; his style is quite bare, and without figures; you may read ten thousand verses in these old poems without meeting one. Shall we open the most ancient, the most original, the most eloquent, at the most moving point, the "Song of Roland," when Roland is dying? The narrator is moved, and yet his language remains the same, smooth, accentless, so penetrated by the prosaic spirit, and so void of the poetic! He gives an abstract of motives, a summary of events, a series of causes for grief, a series of causes for consolation.[111] Nothing more. These men regard the circumstance or the action by itself, and adhere to this view. Their idea remains exact, clear, and simple, and does not raise up a similar image to be confused with the first, to color or transform itself. It remains dry; they conceive the divisions of the object one by one, without ever collecting them, as the Saxons would, in an abrupt, impassioned, glowing semi-vision. Nothing is more opposed to their genius than the genuine songs and profound hymns, such as the English monks were singing beneath the low vaults of their churches. They would be disconcerted by the unevenness and obscurity of such language. They are not capable of such an access of enthusiasm and such excess of emotion. They never cry out, they speak, or rather they converse, and that at moments when the soul, overwhelmed by its trouble, might be expected to cease thinking and feeling. Thus Amis, in a mystery-play, being leprous, calmly requires his friend Amille to slay his two sons, in order that their blood may heal him of his leprosy; and Amille replies still more calmly.[112] If ever they try to sing, even in heaven, "a roundelay high and clear," they will produce little rhymed arguments, as dull as the dullest talk.[113] Pursue this literature to its conclusion; regard it, like that of the Skalds, at the time of its decadence, when its vices, being exaggerated, display, like those of the Skalds, only still more strongly the kind of mind which produced it. The Skalds fall off into nonsense; it loses itself into babble and platitude. The Saxon could not master his craving for exaltation; the Frenchman could not restrain the volubility of his tongue. He is too diffuse and too clear; the Saxon is too obscure and brief. The one was excessively agitated and carried away; the other explains and develops without measure. From the twelfth century the Gestes spun out degenerate into rhapsodies and psalmodies of thirty or forty thousand verses. Theology enters into them; poetry becomes an interminable, intolerable litany, where the ideas, expounded, developed, and repeated _ad infinitum_, without one outburst of emotion or one touch of originality, flow like a clear and insipid stream, and send off their reader, by dint of their monotonous rhymes, into a comfortable slumber. What a deplorable abundance of distinct and facile ideas! We meet with it again in the seventeenth century, in the literary gossip which took place at the feet of men of distinction; it is the fault and the talent of the race. With this involuntary art of perceiving, and isolating instantaneously and clearly each part of every object, people can speak, even for speaking's sake, and forever.

Such is the primitive process; how will it be continued? Here appears a new trait in the French genius, the most valuable of all. It is necessary to comprehension that the second idea shall be contiguous to the first; otherwise that genius is thrown out of its course and arrested; it cannot proceed by irregular bounds; it must walk step by step, on a straight road; order is innate in it; without study, and in the first place, it disjoints and decomposes the object or event, however complicated and entangled it may be, and sets the parts one by one in succession to each other, according to their natural connection. True, it is still in a state of barbarism; yet its intelligence is a reasoning faculty, which spreads, though unwittingly. Nothing is more clear than the style of the old French narratives and of the earliest poems: we do not perceive that we are following a narrator, so easy is the gait, so even the road he opens to us, so smoothly and gradually every idea glides into the next; and this is why he narrates so well. The chroniclers Villehardouin, Joinville, Froissart, the fathers of prose, have an ease and clearness approached by none, and beyond all, a charm, a grace, which they had not to go out of their way to find. Grace is a national possession in France, and springs from the native delicacy which has a horror of incongruities; the instinct of Frenchmen avoids violent shocks in works of taste as well as in works of argument; they desire that their sentiments and ideas shall harmonize, and not clash. Throughout they have this measured spirit, exquisitely refined.[114] They take care, on a sad subject, not to push emotion to its limits; they avoid big words. Think how Joinville relates in six lines the death of the poor sick priest who wished to finish celebrating the mass, and "nevermore did sing, and died." Open a mystery-play, "Théophilus," or that of the "Queen of Hungary," for instance: when they are going to burn her and her child, she says two short lines about "this gentle dew which is so pure an innocent," nothing more. Take a fabliau, even a dramatic one: when the penitent knight, who has undertaken to fill a barrel with his tears, dies in the hermit's company, he asks from him only one last gift: "Do but embrace me, and then I'll die in the arms of my friend." Could a more touching sentiment be expressed in more sober language? We must say of their poetry what is said of certain pictures: This is made out of nothing. Is there in the world anything more delicately graceful than the verses of Guillaume de Lorris? Allegory clothes his ideas so as to dim their too great brightness; ideal, figures, half transparent, float about the lover, luminous, yet in a cloud, and lead him amidst all the delicate and gentle-hued ideas to the rose, whose "sweet odor embalms all the plain." This refinement goes so far, that in Thibaut of Champagne and in Charles of Orleans it turns to affectation and insipidity. In them all impressions grow more slender; the perfume is so weak that one often fails to catch it; on their knees before their lady they whisper their waggeries and conceits; they love politely and wittily, they arrange ingeniously in a bouquet their "painted words," all the flowers of "fresh and beautiful language"; they know how to mark fleeting ideas in their flight, soft melancholy, vague reverie; they are as elegant as talkative, and as charming as the most amiable abbés of the eighteenth century. This lightness of touch is proper to the race, and appears as plainly under the armor and amid the massacres of the Middle Ages as mid the courtesies and the musk-scented, wadded coats of the last court. You will find it in their coloring as in their sentiments. They are not struck by the magnificence of nature, they see only her pretty side; they paint the beauty of a woman by a single feature, which is only polite, saying, "She is more gracious than the rose in May." They do not experience the terrible emotion, ecstasy, sudden oppression of heart which is displayed in the poetry of neighboring nations; they say discreetly, "She began to smile, which vastly became her." They add, when they are in a descriptive humor, "that she had a sweet and perfumed breath," and a body "white as new-fallen snow on a branch." They do not aspire higher; beauty pleases, but does not transport them. They enjoy agreeable emotions, but are not fitted for deep sensations. The full rejuvenescence of being, the warm air of spring which renews and penetrates all existence, suggests but a pleasing couplet; they remark in passing, "Now is winter gone, the hawthorn blossoms, the rose expands," and so pass on about their business. It is a light gladsomeness, soon gone, like that which an April landscape affords. For an instant the author glances at the mist of the streams rising about the willow trees, that pleasant vapor which imprisons the brightness of the morning; then, humming a burden of a song, he returns to his narrative. He seeks amusement, and herein lies his power.

In life, as in literature, it is pleasure he aims at, not sensual pleasure or emotion. He is lively, not voluptuous; dainty, not a glutton. He takes love for a pastime, not for an intoxication. It is a pretty fruit which he plucks, tastes, and leaves. And we must remark yet further, that the best of the fruit in his eyes is the fact of its being forbidden. He says to himself that he is duping a husband, that "he deceives a cruel woman, and thinks he ought to obtain a pope's indulgence for the deed."[115] He wishes to be merry--it is the state he prefers, the end and aim of his life; and especially to laugh at other people. The short verse of his fabliaux gambols and leaps like a schoolboy released from school, over all things respected or respectable; criticising the Church, women, the great, the monks. Scoffers, banterers, our fathers have abundance both of expression and matter; and the matter comes to them so naturally, that without culture, and surrounded by coarseness, they are as delicate in their raillery as the most refined. They touch upon ridicule lightly, they mock without emphasis, as it were innocently; their style is so harmonious, that at first sight we make a mistake, and do not see any harm in it. They seem artless; they look so very demure; only a word shows the imperceptible smile: it is the ass, for example, which they call the high priest, by reason of his padded cassock and his serious air, and who gravely begins "to play the organ." At the close of the history, the delicate sense of comicality has touched you, though you cannot say how. They do not call things by their names, especially in love matters; they let you guess it; they assume that you are as sharp and knowing as themselves.[116] A man might discriminate, embellish at times, perhaps refine upon them, but their first traits are incomparable. When the fox approaches the raven to steal the cheese, he begins as a hypocrite, piously and cautiously, and as one of the family. He calls the raven his "good father Don Rohart, who sings so well"; he praises his voice, "so sweet and fine. You would be the best singer in the world if you kept clear of nuts." Reynard is a rogue, an artist in the way of invention, not a mere glutton; he loves roguery for its own sake; he rejoices in his superiority, and draws out his mockery. When Tibert, the cat, by his counsel hung himself at the bell-rope, wishing to ring it, he uses irony, enjoys and relishes it, pretends to wax impatient with the poor fool whom he has caught, calls him proud, complains because the other does not answer, and because he wishes to rise to the clouds-and visit the saints. And from beginning to end this long epic of Reynard the Fox is the same; the raillery never ceases, and never fails to be agreeable. Reynard has so much wit that he is pardoned for everything. The necessity for laughter is national--so indigenous to the French, that a stranger cannot understand, and is shocked by it. This pleasure does not resemble physical joy in any respect, which is to be despised for its grossness; on the contrary, it sharpens the intelligence, and brings to light many a delicate or ticklish idea. The fabliaux are full of truths about men, and still more about women, about people of low rank, and still more about those of high rank; it is a method of philosophizing by stealth and boldly, in spite of conventionalism, and in opposition to the powers that be. This taste has nothing in common either with open satire, which is offensive because it is cruel; on the contrary, it provokes good humor. We soon see that the jester is not ill-disposed, that he does not wish to wound: if he stings, it is as a bee, without venom; an instant later he is not thinking of it; if need be, he will take himself as an object of his pleasantry; all he wishes is to keep up in himself and in us sparkling and pleasing ideas. Do we not see here in advance an abstract of the whole French literature, the incapacity for great poetry, the sudden and durable perfection of prose, the excellence of all the moods of conversation and eloquence, the reign and tyranny of taste and method, the art and theory of development and arrangement, the gift of being measured, clear, amusing, and piquant? We have taught Europe how ideas fall into order, and which ideas are agreeable; and this is what our Frenchmen of the eleventh century are about to teach their Saxons during five or six centuries, first with the lance, next with the stick, next with the birch.

SECTION IV.--The Normans in England

Consider, then, this Frenchman or Norman, this man from Anjou or Maine, who in his well-knit coat of mail, with sword and lance, came to seek his fortune in England. He took the manor of some slain Saxon, and settled himself in it with his soldiers and comrades, gave them land, houses, the right of levying taxes, on condition of their fighting under him and for him, as men-at-arms, marshals, standard-bearers; it was a league in case of danger. In fact, they were in a hostile and conquered country, and they have to maintain themselves. Each one hastened to build for himself a place of refuge, castle or fortress,[117] well fortified, of solid stone, with narrow windows, strengthened with battlements, garrisoned by soldiers, pierced with loopholes. Then these men went to Salisbury, to the number of sixty thousand, all holders of land, having at least enough to maintain a man with horse or arms. There, placing their hands in William's they promised him fealty and assistance; and the king's edict declared that they must be all united and bound together like brothers in arms, to defend and succor each other. They are an armed colony, stationary, like the Spartans amongst the Helots; and they make laws accordingly. When a Frenchman is found dead in any district, the inhabitants are to give up the murderer, or failing to do so, they must pay forty-seven marks as a fine; if the dead man is English, it rests with the people of the place to prove it by the oath of four near relatives of the deceased. They are to beware of killing a stag, boar, or fawn; for an offence against the forest-laws they will lose their eyes. They have nothing of all their property assured to them except as alms, or on condition of paying tribute, or by taking the oath of allegiance. Here a free Saxon proprietor is made a body-slave on his own estate.[118] Here a noble and rich Saxon lady feels on her shoulder the weight of the hand of a Norman valet, who is become by force her husband or her lover. There were Saxons of one sol, or of two sols, according to the sum which they gained for their masters; they sold them, hired them, worked them on joint account, like an ox or an ass. One Norman abbot has his Saxon predecessors dug up, their bones thrown without the gates. Another keeps men-at-arms, who bring his recalcitrant monks to reason by blows of their swords. Imagine, if you can, the pride of these new lords, conquerors, strangers, masters, nourished by habits of violent activity, and by the savagery, ignorance, and passions of feudal life. "They thought they might do whatsoever they pleased," say the old chroniclers. "They shed blood indiscriminately, snatched the morsel of bread from the mouth of the wretched, and seized upon all the money, the goods, the land."[119] Thus "all the folk in the low country were at great pains to seem humble before Ivo Taillebois, and only to address him with one knee on the ground; but although they made a point of paying him every honor, and giving him all and more than all which they owed him in the way of rent and service, he harassed, tormented, tortured, imprisoned them, set his dogs upon their cattle, ... broke the legs and backbones of their beasts of burden, ... and sent men to attack their servants on the road with sticks and swords."[120] The Normans would not and could not borrow any idea or custom from such boors;[121] they despised them as coarse and stupid. They stood amongst them, as the Spaniards amongst the Americans in the sixteenth century, superior in force and culture, more versed in letters, more expert in the arts of luxury. They preserved their manners and their speech. England, to all outward appearance--the court of the king, the castles of the nobles, the palaces of the bishops, the houses of the wealthy--was French; and the Scandinavian people, of whom sixty years ago the Saxon kings used to have poems sung to them, thought that the nation had forgotten its language, and treated it in their laws as though it were no longer their sister.

It was a French literature, then, which was at this time domiciled across the channel,[122] and the conquerors tried to make it purely French, purged from all Saxon alloy. They made such a point of this that the nobles in the reign of Henry II sent their sons to France, to preserve them from barbarisms. "For two hundred years," says Higden,[123] "children in scole, agenst the usage and manir of all other nations beeth compelled for to leve hire own langage, and for to construe hir lessons and hire thynges in Frensche." The statutes of the universities obliged the students to converse either in French or Latin. "Gentilmen children beeth taught to speke Frensche from the tyme that they bith rokked in hire cradell; and uplondissche men will likne himself to gentylmen, and fondeth with greet besynesse for to speke Frensche." Of course the poetry is French. The Norman brought his minstrel with him; there was Taillefer, the _jongleur_, who sang the "Song of Roland" at the battle of Hastings; there was Adeline, the _jongleuse_, received an estate in the partition which followed the Conquest. The Norman who ridicules the Saxon kings, who dug up the Saxon saints and cast them without the walls of the church, loved none but French ideas and verses. It was into French verse that Robert Wace rendered the legendary history of the England which was conquered, and the actual history of the Normandy in which he continued to live. Enter one of the abbeys where the minstrels come to sing, "where the clerks after dinner and supper read poems, the chronicles of kingdoms, the wonders of the world,"[124] you will only find Latin or French verses, Latin or French prose. What becomes of English? Obscure, despised, we hear it no more, except in the mouths of degraded franklins, outlaws of the forest, swineherds, peasants, the lowest orders. It is no longer, or scarcely written; gradually we find in the Saxon Chronicle that the idiom alters, is extinguished; the Chronicle itself ceases within a century after the Conquest.[125] The people who have leisure or security enough to read or write are French; for them authors devise and compose; literature always adapts itself to the taste of those who can appreciate and pay for it. Even the English[126] endeavor to write in French: thus Robert Grostête, in his allegorical poem on Christ; Peter Langtoft, in his "Chronicle of England," and in his "Life of Thomas à Becket"; Hugh de Rotheland, in his poem of "Hippomedon"; John Hoveden, and many others. Several write the first half of the verse in English, and the second in French; a strange sign of the ascendancy which is moulding and oppressing them. Even in the fifteenth century[127] many of these poor folk are employed in this task; French is the language of the court, from it arose all poetry and elegance; he is but a clodhopper who is inapt at that style. They apply themselves to it as our old scholars did to Latin verses; they are gallicized as those were latinized, by constraint, with a sort of fear, knowing well that they are but schoolboys and provincials. Gower, one of their best poets, at the end of his French works, excuses himself humbly for not having "_de Français la faconde. Pardonnez moi_," he says, "_que de ce je forsvoie; je suis Anglais._"

And yet, after all, neither the race nor the tongue has perished. It is necessary that the Norman should learn English, in order to command his tenants; his Saxon wife speaks it to him, and his sons receive it from the lips of their nurse; the contagion is strong, for he is obliged to send them to France, to preserve them from the jargon which on his domain threatens to overwhelm and spoil them. From generation to generation the contagion spreads; they breathe it in the air, with the foresters in the chase, the farmers in the field, the sailors on the ships: for these coarse people, shut in by their animal existence, are not the kind to learn a foreign language; by the simple weight of their dullness they impose their idiom on their conquerors, at all events such words as pertain to living things. Scholarly speech, the language of law, abstract and philosophical expressions--in short, all words depending on reflection and culture may be French, since there is nothing to prevent it. This is just what happens; these kind of ideas and this kind of speech are not understood by the commonalty, who, not being able to touch them, cannot change them. This produces a French, a colonial French, doubtless perverted, pronounced with closed mouth, with a contortion of the organs of speech, "after the school of Stratford-atte-Bow"; yet it is still French. On the other hand, as regards the speech employed about common actions and visible objects, it is the people, the Saxons, who fix it; these living words are too firmly rooted in his experience to allow of being parted with, and thus the whole substance of the language comes from him. Here, then, we have the Norman who, slowly and constrainedly, speaks and understands English, a deformed, gallicized English, yet English, in sap and root; but he has taken his time about it, for it has required two centuries. It was only under Henry III that the new tongue is complete, with the new constitution; and that, after the like fashion, by alliance and intermixture; the burgesses come to take their seats in Parliament with the nobles, at the same time that Saxon words settle down in the language side by side with French words.

SECTION V.--The English Tongue--Early English Literary Impulses

So was modern English formed, by compromise, and the necessity of being understood. But we can well imagine that these nobles, even while speaking the rising dialect, have their hearts full of French tastes and ideas; France remains the home of their mind, and the literature which now begins, is but translation. Translators, copyists, imitators--there is nothing else. England is a distant province, which is to France what the United States were, thirty years ago, to Europe: she exports her wool, and imports her ideas. Open the "Voyage and Travaile of Sir John Maundeville,"[128] the oldest prose-writer, the Villehardouin of the country: his book is but the translation of a translation.[129] He writes first in Latin, the language of scholars; then in French, the language of society; finally he reflects, and discovers that the barons, his compatriots, by governing the Saxon churls, have ceased to speak their own Norman, and that the rest of the nation never knew it; he translates his manuscript into English, and, in addition, takes care to make it plain, feeling that he speaks to less expanded understandings. He says in French: "_Il advint une fois que Mahomet allait dans une chapelle où il y avait un saint ermite. Il entra en la chapelle où il y avait une petite huisserie et basse, et était bien petite la chapelle; et alors devint la porte si grande qu'il semblait que ce fut la porte d'un palais._"

He stops, corrects himself, wishes to explain himself better for his readers across the Channel, and says in English: "And at the Desertes of Arabye, he wente into a Chapelle where a Eremyte duelte. And whan he entred in to the Chapelle that was but a lytille and a low thing, and had but a lytill Dore and a low, than the Entree began to wexe so gret and so large, and so highe, as though it had ben of a gret Mynstre, or the Zate of a Paleys."[130] You perceive that he amplifies, and thinks himself bound to clinch and drive in three or four times in succession the same idea, in order to get it into an English brain; his thought is drawn out, dulled, spoiled in the process. Like every copy, the new literature is mediocre, and repeats what it imitates, with fewer merits and greater faults.

Let us see, then, what our Norman baron gets translated for him; first, the chronicles of Geoffroy Gaimar and Robert Wace, which consist of the fabulous history of England continued up to their day, a dull-rhymed rhapsody, turned into English in a rhapsody no less dull. The first Englishman who attempts it is Layamon,[131] a monk of Ernely, still fettered in the old idiom, who sometimes happens to rhyme, sometimes fails, altogether barbarous and childish, unable to develop a continuous idea, babbling in little confused and incomplete phrases, after the fashion of the ancient Saxons; after him a monk, Robert of Gloucester,[132] and a canon, Robert of Brunne, both as insipid and clear as their French models, having become gallicized, and adopted the significant characteristics of the race, namely, the faculty and habit of easy narration, of seeing moving spectacles without deep emotion, of writing prosaic poetry, of discoursing and developing, of believing that phrases ending in the same sounds form real poetry. Our honest English versifiers, like their preceptors in Normandy and Ile-de-France, garnished with rhymes their dissertations and histories, and called them poems. At this epoch, in fact, on the Continent, the whole learning of the schools descends into the street; and Jean de Meung, in his poem of "La Rose," is the most tedious of doctors. So in England, Robert of Brunne transposes into verse the "Manuel des péchés" of Bishop Grostête; Adam Davie,[133] certain Scripture histories; Hampole[134] composes the "Pricke of Conscience." The titles alone make one yawn: what of the text?

"Mankynde mad ys do Goddus wylle, And alle Hys byddyngus to fulfille; For of al Hys makyng more and les, Man most principal creature es. Al that He made for man hit was done, As ye schal here after sone."[135]

There is a poem! You did not think so; call it a sermon, if you will give it its proper name. It goes on, well divided, well prolonged, flowing, but void of meaning; the literature which surrounds and resembles it bears witness of its origin by its loquacity and its clearness.

It bears witness to it by other and more agreeable features. Here and there we find divergences more or less awkward into the domain of genius; for instance, a ballad full of quips against Richard, King of the Romans, who was taken at the battle of Lewes. Sometimes, charm is not lacking, nor sweetness either. No one has ever spoken so bright and so well to the ladies as the French of the Continent, and they have not quite forgotten this talent while settling in England. You perceive it readily in the manner in which they celebrate the Virgin. Nothing could be more different from the Saxon sentiment, which is altogether biblical, than the chivalric adoration of the sovereign Lady, the fascinating Virgin and Saint, who was the real deity of the Middle Ages. It breathes in this pleasing hymn:

"Blessed beo thu, lavedi, Ful of hovene blisse; Swete flur of parais, Moder of milternisse.... I-blessed beo thu, Lavedi, So fair and so briht; Al min hope is uppon the, Bi day and bi nicht.... Bricht and scene quen of storre, So me liht and lere. In this false fikele world, So me led and steore."[136]

There is but a short and easy step between this tender worship of the Virgin and the sentiments of the court of love. The English rhymesters take it; and when they wish to praise their earthly mistresses, they borrow, here as elsewhere, the ideas and the very form of French verse. One compares his lady to all kinds of precious stones and flowers; others sing truly amorous songs, at times sensual.

"Bytuene Mershe and Aueril, When spray biginneth to springe. The lutel foul hath hire wyl On hyre lud to synge, Ich libbe in loue longinge For semlokest of alle thynge. He may me blysse bringe, Icham in hire baundoun. An hendy hap ich abbe yhent, Ichot from heuene it is me sent. From alle wymmen my love is lent, And lyht on Alisoun."[137]

Another sings:

"Suete lemmon, y preye the, of loue one speche, Whil y lyue in world so wyde other nulle y seche. With thy loue, my suete leof, mi bliss thou mihtes eche A suete cos of thy mouth mihte be my leche."[138]

Is not this the lively and warm imagination of the south? they speak of springtime and of love, "the fine and lovely weather" like _trouvères_, even like _troubadours._ The dirty, smoke-grimed cottage, the black feudal castle, where all but the master lie higgledy-piggledy on the straw in the great stone hall, the cold rain, the muddy earth, make the return of the sun and the warm air delicious.

"Sumer is i-cumen in, Lhude sing cuccu: Groweth sed, and bloweth med, And springeth the wde nu. Sing cuccu, cuccu. Awe bleteth after lomb, Llouth after calue cu, Bulluc sterteth, bucke verteth: Murie sing cuccu, Cuccu, cuccu. Wel singes thu cuccu; Ne swik thu nauer nu. Sing, cuccu nu, Sing, cuccu."[139]

Here are glowing pictures, such as Guillaume de Lorris was writing at the same time, even richer and more lifelike, perhaps because the poet found here for inspiration that love of country life which in England is deep and national. Others, more imitative, attempt pleasantries like those of Rutebeuf and the fabliaux, frank quips,[140] and even satirical, loose waggeries. Their true aim and end is to hit out at the monks. In every French country or country which imitates France, the most manifest use of convents is to furnish material for sprightly and scandalous stories. One writes, for instance, of the kind of life the monks lead at the abbey of Cocagne:

"There is a wel fair abbei, Of white monkes and of grei. Ther beth bowris and halles: Al of pasteiis beth the wallis, Of fleis, of fisse, and rich met, The likfullist that man may et. Fluren cakes beth the schingles alle. Of cherche, cloister, boure, and halle. The pinnes beth fat podinges Rich met to princes and kinges.... Though paradis be miri and bright Cokaign is of fairir sight,... Another abbei is ther bi, Forsoth a gret fair nunnerie.... When the someris dai is hote The young nunnes takith a bote... And doth ham forth in that river Both with ores and with stere.... And each monk him takith on, And snellich berrith forth har prei To the mochil grei abbei, And techith the nunnes an oreisun, With iamblene up and down."

This is the triumph of gluttony and feeding. Moreover many things could be mentioned in the Middle Ages which are now unmentionable. But it was the poems of chivalry, which represented to him the bright side of his own mode of life, that the baron preferred to have translated. He desired that his _trouvère_ should set before his eyes the magnificence which he displayed, and the luxury and enjoyments which he has introduced from France. Life at that time, without and even during war, was a great pageant, a brilliant and tumultuous kind of fête. When Henry II travelled, he took with him a great number of horsemen, foot-soldiers, baggage-wagons, tents, pack-horses, comedians, courtesans and their overseers, cooks, confectioners, posture-makers, dancers, barbers, go-betweens, hangers-on.[141] In the morning when they start, the assemblage begins to shout, sing, hustle each other, make racket and rout, "as if hell were let loose." William Longchamps, even in time of peace, would not travel without a thousand horses by way of escort. When Archbishop à Becket came to France, he entered the town with two hundred knights, a number of barons and nobles, and an army of servants, all richly armed and equipped, he himself being provided with four-and-twenty suits; two hundred and fifty children walked in front, singing national songs; then dogs, then carriages, then a dozen pack-horses, each ridden by an ape and a man; then equerries with shields and war-horses; then more equerries, falconers, a suit of domestics, knights, priests; lastly, the archbishop himself, with his private friends. Imagine these processions, and also these entertainments; for the Normans, after the Conquest, "borrowed from the Saxons the habit of excess in eating and drinking."[142] At the marriage of Richard Plantagenet, Earl of Cornwall, they provided thirty thousand dishes.[143] They also continued to be gallant, and punctiliously performed the great precept of the love courts; for in the Middle Ages the sense of love was no more idle than the others. Moreover, tournaments were plentiful; a sort of opera prepared for their own entertainment. So ran their life, full of adventure and adornment, in the open air and in the sunlight, with show of cavalcades and arms; they act a pageant, and act it with enjoyment. Thus the King of Scots, having come to London with a hundred knights, at the coronation of Edward I, they all dismounted, and made over their horses and superb caparisons to the people; as did also five English lords, imitating their example. In the midst of war they took their pleasure. Edward III, in one of his expeditions against the King of France, took with him thirty falconers, and made his campaign alternately hunting and fighting.[144] Another time, says Froissart, the knights who joined the army carried a plaster over one eye, having vowed not to remove it until they had performed an exploit worthy of their mistresses. Out of the very exuberancy of spirit they practised the art of poetry; out of the buoyancy of their imagination they made a sport of life. Edward III built at Windsor a hall and a round table; and at one of his tourneys in London, sixty ladies, seated on palfreys, led, as in a fairy tale, each her knight by a golden chain. Was not this the triumph of the gallant and frivolous French fashions? Edward's wife Philippa sat as a model to the artists for their Madonnas. She appeared on the field of battle; listened to Froissart, who provided her with moral-plays, love-stories, and "things fair to listen to." At once goddess, heroine, and scholar, and all this so agreeably, was she not a true queen of refined chivalry? Now, as also in France under Louis of Orleans and the Dukes of Burgundy, this most elegant and romanesque civilization came into full bloom, void of common sense, given up to passion, bent on pleasure, immoral and brilliant, but, like its neighbors of Italy and Provence, for lack of serious intention, it could not last.

Of all these marvels the narrators make display in their stories. Here is a picture of the vessel which took the mother of King Richard into England:

"Swlk on ne seygh they never non; All it was whyt of huel-bon, And every nayl with gold begrave: Off pure gold was the stave. Her mast was of yvory; Off samyte the sayl wytterly. Her ropes wer off tuely sylk, Al so whyt as ony mylk. That noble schyp was al withoute, With clothys of golde sprede aboute; And her loof and her wyndas, Off asure forsothe it was."[145]

On such subjects they never run dry. When the King of Hungary wishes to console his afflicted daughter, he proposes to take her to the chase in the following style:

"To-morrow ye shall in hunting fare: And ride, my daughter, in a chair; It shall be covered with velvet red, And cloths of fine gold all about your head, With damask white and azure blue, Well diapered with lilies new. Your pommels shall be ended with gold, Your chains enamelled many a fold, Your mantle of rich degree, Purple pall and ermine free. Jennets of Spain that ben so light, Trapped to the ground with velvet bright. Ye shall have harp, sautry, and song, And other mirths you among. Ye shall have Rumney and Malespine, Both hippocras and Vernage wine; Montrese and wine of Greek, Both Algrade and despice eke, Antioch and Bastarde, Pyment also and garnarde; Wine of Greek and Muscadel, Both clare, pyment, and Rochelle, The reed your stomach to defy, And pots of osey set you by. You shall have venison ybake, The best wild fowl that may be take; A leish of harehound with you to streek, And hart, and hind, and other like. Ye shall be set at such a tryst, That hart and hynd shall come to you fist, Your disease to drive you fro, To hear the bugles there yblow. Homeward thus shall ye ride, On hawking by the river's side, With gosshawk and with gentle falcon, With bugle-horn and merlion. When you come home your menie among, Ye shall have revel, dance, and song; Little children, great and small, Shall sing as does the nightingale. Then shall ye go to your evensong, With tenors and trebles among. Threescore of copes of damask bright, Full of pearls they shall be pight. Your censors shall be of gold, Indent with azure many a fold; Your quire nor organ song shall want, With contre-note and descant. The other half on organs playing, With young children full fain singing. Then shall ye go to your supper, And sit in tents in green arber, With cloth of arras pight to the ground, With sapphires set of diamond. A hundred knights, truly told, Shall play with bowls in alleys cold, Your disease to drive away; To see the fishes in pools play, To a drawbridge then shall ye, Th' one half of stone, th' other of tree; A barge shall meet you full right, With twenty-four oars full bright, With trumpets and with clarion, The fresh water to row up and down.... Forty torches burning bright At your bridge to bring you light. Into your chamber they shall you bring, With much mirth and more liking. Your blankets shall be of fustian, Your sheets shall be of cloth of Rennes. Your head sheet shall be of pery pight, With diamonds set and rubies bright. When you are laid in bed so soft, A cage of gold shall hang aloft, With long paper fair burning, And cloves that be sweet smelling. Frankincense and olibanum, That when ye sleep the taste may come; And if ye no rest can take, All night minstrels for you shall wake."[146]

Amid such fancies and splendors the poets delight and lose themselves, and the woof, like the embroideries of their canvas, bears the mark of this love of decoration. They weave it out of adventures, of extraordinary and surprising events. Now it is the life of King Horn, who, thrown into a boat when a lad, is wrecked upon the coast of England, and, becoming a knight, reconquers the kingdom of his father. Now it is the history of Sir Guy, who rescues enchanted knights, cuts down the giant Colbrand, challenges and kills the Sultan in his tent. It is not for me to recount these poems, which are not English, but only translations; still, here as in France, there are many of them; they fill the imagination of the young society, and they grow in exaggeration, until, falling to the lowest depth of insipidity and improbability, they are buried forever by Cervantes. What would people say of a society which had no literature but the opera with its unrealities? Yet it was a literature of this kind which formed the intellectual food of the Middle Ages. People then did not ask for truth, but entertainment, and that vehement and hollow, full of glare and startling events. They asked for impossible voyages, extravagant challenges, a racket of contests, a confusion of magnificence and entanglement of chances. For introspective history they had no liking, cared nothing for the adventures of the heart, devoted their attention to the outside. They remained children to the last, with eyes glued to a series of exaggerated and colored images, and, for lack of thinking, did not perceive that they had learnt nothing.

What was there beneath this fanciful dream? Brutal and evil human passions, unchained at first by religious fury, then delivered up to their own devices, and, beneath a show of external courtesy, as vile as ever. Look at the popular king, Richard Cœur de Lion, and reckon up his butcheries and murders: "King Richard," says a poem, "is the best king ever mentioned in song."[147] I have no objection; but if he has the heart of a lion, he has also that brute's appetite. One day, under the walls of Acre, being convalescent, he had a great desire for some pork. There was no pork. They killed a young Saracen, fresh and tender, cooked and salted him, and the king ate him and found him very good; whereupon he desired to see the head of the pig. The cook brought it in trembling. The king falls a-laughing, and says the army has nothing to fear from famine, having provisions ready at hand. He takes the town, and presently Saladin's ambassadors come to sue for pardon for the prisoners. Richard has thirty of the most noble beheaded, and bids his cook boil the heads, and serve one to each ambassador, with a ticket bearing the name and family of the dead man. Meanwhile, in their presence, he eats his own with a relish, bids them tell Saladin how the Christians make war, and ask him if it is true that they fear him. Then he orders the sixty thousand prisoners to be led into the plain:

"They were led into the place full even. There they heard angels of heaven; They said: 'Seigneures, tuez, tuez! Spares hem nought, and beheadeth these!' King Richard heard the angels' voice, And thanked God and the holy cross."

Thereupon they behead them all. When he took a town, it was his wont to murder everyone, even children and women. Such was the devotion of the Middle Ages, not only in romances, as here, but in history. At the taking of Jerusalem the whole population, seventy thousand persons, were massacred.

Thus even in chivalrous stories the fierce and unbridled instincts of the bloodthirsty brute break out. The authentic narratives show it. Henry II, irritated at a page, attempted to tear out his eyes.[148] John Lackland let twenty-three hostages die in prison of hunger. Edward II caused at one time twenty-eight nobles to be hanged and disemboweled, and was himself put to death by the insertion of a red-hot iron into his bowels. Look in Froissart for the debaucheries and murders in France as well as in England, of the Hundred Years' War, and then for the slaughters of the Wars of the Roses. In both countries feudal independence ended in civil war, and the Middle Age founders under its vices. Chivalrous courtesy, which cloaked the native ferocity, disappears like some hangings suddenly consumed by the breaking out of a fire; at that time in England they killed nobles in preference, and prisoners, too, even children, with insults, in cold blood. What, then, did man learn in this civilization and by this literature? How was he humanized? What precepts of justice, habits of reflection, store of true judgments, did this culture interpose between his desires and his actions, in order to moderate his passion? He dreamed, he imagined a sort of elegant ceremonial in order the better to address lords and ladies; he discovered the gallant code of little Jehan de Saintré. But where is the true education? Wherein has Froissart profited by all his vast experience? He was a fine specimen of a babbling child; what they called his poesy, the _poèsie neuve_, is only a refined gabble, a senile puerility. Some rhetoricians, like Christine de Pisan, try to round their periods after an ancient model; but all their literature amounts to nothing. No one can think. Sir John Maundeville, who travelled all over the world a hundred and fifty years after Villehardouin, is as contracted in his ideas as Villehardouin himself. Extraordinary legends and fables, every sort of credulity and ignorance, abound in his book. When he wishes to explain why Palestine has passed into the hands of various possessors instead of continuing under one government, he says that it is because God would not that it should continue longer in the hands of traitors and sinners, whether Christians or others. He has seen at Jerusalem, on the steps of the temple, the footmarks of the ass which our Lord rode on Palm Sunday. He describes the Ethiopians as a people who have only one foot, but so large that they can make use of it as a parasol. He instances one island "where be people as big as gyants, of 28 feet long, and have no clothing but beasts' skins"; then another island "where there are many evil and foul women, but have precious stones in their eyes, and have such force that if they behold any man with wrath, they slay him with beholding, as the basilisk doth." The good man relates; that is all: doubt and common-sense scarcely exist in the world he lives in. He has neither judgment nor reflection; he piles facts one on top of another, with no further connection; his book is simply a mirror which reproduces recollections of his eyes and ears. "And all those who will say a Pater and an Ave Maria in my behalf, I give them an interest and a share in all the holy pilgrimages I ever made in my life." That is his farewell, and accords with all the rest. Neither public morality nor public knowledge has gained anything from these three centuries of culture. This French culture, copied in vain throughout Europe, has but superficially adorned mankind, and the varnish with which it decked them is already tarnished everywhere or scales off. It was worse in England, where the thing was more superficial and the application worse than in France, where foreign hands laid it on, and where it could only half cover the Saxon crust, where that crust was worn away and rough. That is the reason why, during three centuries, throughout the whole first feudal age, the literature of the Normans in England, made up of imitations, translations, and clumsy copies, ends in nothing.

SECTION VI.--Feudal Civilization

Meantime, what has become of the conquered people? Has the old stock, on which the brilliant Continental flowers were grafted, engendered no literary shoot of its own? Did it continue barren during all this time under the Norman axe, which stripped it of all its buds? It grew very feebly, but it grew nevertheless. The subjugated race is not a dismembered nation, dislocated, uprooted, sluggish, like the populations of the Continent, which, after the long Roman oppression, were given up to the unrestrained invasion of barbarians; it increased, remained fixed in its own soil, full of sap: its members were not displaced; it was simply lopped in order to receive on its crown a cluster of foreign branches. True, it had suffered, but at last the wound closed, the saps mingled. Even the hard, stiff ligatures with which the Conqueror bound it, henceforth contributed to its fixity and vigor. The land was mapped out; every title verified, defined in writing;[149] every right or tenure valued; every man registered as to his locality, and also his condition, duties, descent, and resources, so that the whole nation was enveloped in a network of which not a mesh would break. Its future development had to be within these limits. Its constitution was settled, and in this positive and stringent enclosure men were compelled to unfold themselves and to act. Solidarity and strife; these were the two effects of the great and orderly establishment which shaped and held together, on one side the aristocracy of the conquerors, on the other the conquered people; even as in Rome the systematic fusing of conquered peoples into the plebs, and the constrained organization of the patricians in contrast with the plebs, enrolled the private individuals in two orders, whose opposition and union formed the state. Thus, here as in Rome, the national character was moulded and completed by the habit of corporate action, the respect for written law, political and practical aptitude, the development of combative and patient energy. It was the Domesday Book which, binding this young society in a rigid discipline, made of the Saxon the Englishman of our own day.

Gradually and slowly, amidst the gloomy complainings of the chroniclers, we find the new man fashioned by action, like a child who cries because steel stays, though they improve his figure, give him pain. However reduced and downtrodden the Saxons were, they did not all sink into the populace. Some,[150] almost in every county, remained lords of their estates, on the condition of doing homage for them to the king. Many became vassals of Norman barons, and remained proprietors on this condition. A greater number became socagers, that is, free proprietors, burdened with a tax, but possessed of the right of alienating their property; and the Saxon villeins found patrons in these, as the plebs formerly did in the Italian nobles who were transplanted to Rome. The patronage of the Saxons who preserved their integral position was effective, for they were not isolated: marriages from the first united the two races, as it had the patricians and plebeians of Rome;[151] a Norman brother-in-law to a Saxon, defended himself in defending him. In those turbulent times, and in an armed community, relatives and allies were obliged to stand shoulder to shoulder in order to keep their ground. After all, it was necessary for the new-comers to consider their subjects, for these subjects had the heart and courage of men: the Saxons, like the plebeians at Rome, remembered their native rank and their original independence. We can recognize it in the complaints and indignation of the chroniclers, in the growling and menaces of popular revolt, in the long bitterness with which they continually recalled their ancient liberty, in the favor with which they cherished the daring and rebellion of outlaws. There were Saxon families at the end of the twelfth century who had bound themselves by a perpetual vow to wear long beards from father to son in memory of the national custom and of the old country. Such men, even though fallen to the condition of socagers, even sunk into villeins, had a stiffer neck than the wretched colonists of the Continent, trodden down and moulded by four centuries of Roman taxation. By their feelings as well as by their condition, they were the broken remains, but also the living elements, of a free people. They did not suffer the extremities of oppression. They constituted the body of the nation, the laborious, courageous body which supplied its energy. The great barons felt that they must rely upon them in their resistance to the king. Very soon, in stipulating for themselves, they stipulated for all freemen,[152] even for merchants and villeins. Thereafter "No merchant shall be dispossessed of his merchandise, no villein of the instruments of his labor; no freeman, merchant, or villein shall be taxed unreasonably for a small crime; no freeman shall be arrested, or imprisoned, or disseized of his land, or outlawed, or destroyed in any manner, but by the lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land." Thus protected they raise themselves and act. In each county there was a court, where all freeholders, small or great, came to deliberate about the municipal affairs, administer justice, and appoint tax-assessors. The red-bearded Saxon, with his clear complexion and great white teeth, came and sat by the Norman's side; these were franklins like the one whom Chaucer describes:

"A Frankelein was in this compagnie; White was his herd, as is the dayesie. Of his complexion he was sanguin, Wel loved he by the morwe a sop in win. To liven in delit was ever his wone, For he was Epicures owen sone, That held opinion that plein delit Was veraily felicite parfite. An housholder, and that a grete was he, Seint Julian he was in his contree. His brede, his ale, was alway after on; A better envyned man was no wher non. Withouten bake mete never his hous, Of fish and flesh, and that so plenteous, It snewed in his hous of mete and drinke, Of all deintees that men coud of thinke; After the sondry sesons of the yere, So changed he his mete and his soupere. Ful many a fat partrich had he in mewe, And many a breme, and many a luce in stewe. Wo was his coke but if his sauce were Poinant and sharpe, and redy all his gere. His table, dormant in his halle alway Stode redy covered alle the longe day. At sessions ther was he lord and sire. Ful often time he was knight of the shire. An anelace and a gipciere all of silk, Heng at his girdle, white as morwe milk. A shereve hadde he ben, and a contour. Was no wher swiche a worthy vavasour."[153]

With him occasionally in the assembly, oftenest among the audience, were the yeomen, farmers, foresters, tradesmen, his fellow-countrymen, muscular and resolute men, not slow in the defence of their property, and in supporting him who would take their cause in hand, with voice, fist and weapons. Is it likely that the discontent of such men to whom the following description applies could be overlooked?

"The Miller was a stout carl for the nones, Ful bigge he was of braun and eke of bones; That proved wel, for over all ther he came, At wrastling he wold bere away the ram. He was short shuldered brode, a thikke gnarre, Ther n'as no dore, that he n'olde heve of barre, Or breke it at a renning with his hede. His berd as any sowe or fox was rede, And therto brode, as though it were a spade. Upon the cop right of his nose he hade A wert, and thereon stode a tufte of heres, Rede as the bristles of a sowes eres: His nose-thirles blacke were and wide. A swerd and bokeler bare he by his side. His mouth as wide was as a forneis, He was a jangler and a goliardeis, And that was most of sinne, and harlotries. Wel coude he stelen corne and tollen thries. And yet he had a thomb of gold parde. A white cote and a blew hode wered he. A baggepipe wel coude he blowe and soune, And therwithall he brought us out of toune."[154]

Those are the athletic forms, the square build, the jolly John Bulls of the period, such as we yet find them, nourished by meat and porter, sustained by bodily exercise and boxing. These are the men we must keep before us, if we will understand how political liberty has been established in this country. Gradually they find the simple knights, their colleagues in the county court, too poor to be present with the great barons at the royal assemblies, coalescing with them. They become united by community of interests, by similarity of manners, by nearness of condition; they take them for their representatives, they elect them.[155] They have now entered upon public life, and the advent of a new reinforcement gives them a perpetual standing in their changed condition. The towns laid waste by the Conquest are gradually repeopled. They obtain or exact charters; the townsmen buy themselves out of the arbitrary taxes that were imposed on them; they get possession of the land on which their houses are built; they unite themselves under mayors and aldermen. Each town now, within the meshes of the great feudal net, is a power. The Earl of Leicester, rebelling against the king, summons two burgesses from each town to Parliament,[156] to authorize and support him. From that time the conquered race, both in country and town, rose to political life. If they were taxed, it was with their consent; they paid nothing which they did not agree to. Early in the fourteenth century their united deputies composed the House of Commons; and already, at the close of the preceding century, the Archbishop of Canterbury, speaking in the name of the king, said to the pope, "It is the custom of the kingdom of England, that in all affairs relating to the state of this kingdom, the advice of all who are interested in them should be taken."

SECTION VII.--Persistence of Saxon Ideas

If they have acquired liberties, it is because they have obtained them by force; circumstances have assisted, but character has done more. The protection of the great barons and the alliance of the plain knights have strengthened them; but it was by their native roughness and energy that they maintained their independence. Look at the contrast they offer at this moment to their neighbors. What occupies the mind of the French people? The fabliaux, the naughty tricks of Reynard, the art of deceiving Master Isengrin, of stealing his wife, of cheating him out of his dinner, of getting him beaten by a third party without danger to one's self; in short, the triumph of poverty and cleverness over power united to folly. The popular hero is already the artful plebeian, chaffing, light-hearted, who, later on, will ripen into Panurge and Figaro, not apt to withstand you to your face, too sharp to care for great victories and habits of strife, inclined by the nimbleness of his wit to dodge round an obstacle; if he but touch a man with the tip of his finger, that man tumbles into the trap. But here we have other customs: it is Robin Hood, a valiant outlaw, living free and bold in the green forest, waging frank and open war against sheriff and law.[157] If ever a man was popular in his country, it was he. "It is he," says an old historian, "whom the common people love so dearly to celebrate in games and comedies, and whose history, sung by fiddlers, interests them more than any other." In the sixteenth century he still had his commemoration day, observed by all the people in the small towns and in the country. Bishop Latimer, making his pastoral tour, announced one day that he would preach in a certain place. On the morrow, proceeding to the church, he found the doors closed, and waited more than an hour before they brought him the key. At last a man came and said to him, "Syr, thys ys a busye day with us; we cannot heare you: it is Robyn Hoodes Daye. The parishe are gone abrode to gather for Robyn Hoode.... I was fayne there to geve place to Robyn Hoode."[158] The bishop was obliged to divest himself of his ecclesiastical garments and proceed on his journey, leaving his place to archers dressed in green, who played on a rustic stage the parts of Robin Hood, Little John, and their band. In fact, he was the national hero. Saxon in the first place and waging war against the men of law, against bishops and archbishops, whose sway was so heavy; generous, moreover, giving to a poor ruined knight clothes, horse, and money to buy back the land he had pledged to a rapacious abbot; compassionate too, and kind to the poor, enjoining his men not to injure yeomen and laborers; but above all, rash, bold, proud, who would go and draw his bow before the sheriff's eyes and to his face; ready with blows, whether to give or take. He slew fourteen out of fifteen foresters who came to arrest him; he slays the sheriff, the judge, the town gatekeeper; he is ready to slay as many more as like to come; and all this joyously, jovially, like an honest fellow who eats well, has a hard skin, lives in the open air, and revels in animal life.

"In somer when the shawes be sheyne, And leves be large and long, Hit is fulle mery in feyre foreste To here the foulys song."

That is how many ballads begin; and the fine weather, which makes the stags and oxen butt with their horns, inspires them with the thought of exchanging blows with sword or stick. Robin dreamed that two yeomen were thrashing him, and he wants to go and find them, angrily repelling Little John, who offers to go first:

"Ah John, by me thou settest noe store, And that I farley finde: How offt send I my men before, And tarry myselfe behinde?

"It is no cunnin a knave to ken, An a man but heare him speake; An it were not for bursting of my bowe, John, I thy head wold breake."[159]...

He goes alone, and meets the robust yeoman, Guy of Gisborne,

"He that had neyther beene kythe nor kin, Might have seen a full fayre fight, To see how together these yeomen went With blades both browne and bright,

"To see how these yeomen together they fought Two howres of a summer's day; Yett neither Robin Hood nor sir Guy Them fettled to flye away."[160]

You see Guy the yeoman is as brave as Robin Hood; he came to seek him in the wood, and drew the bow almost as well as he. This old popular poetry is not the praise of a single bandit, but of an entire class, the yeomanry. "God haffe mersy on Robin Hodys solle, and saffe all god yemanry." That is how many ballads end. The brave yeoman, inured to blows, a good archer, clever at sword and stick, is the favorite. There were also, redoubtable, armed townsfolk, accustomed to make use of their arms. Here they are at work:

"'O that were a shame,' said jolly Robin, 'We being three, and thou but one,' The pinder[161] leapt back then thirty good foot, 'Twas thirty good foot and one.

"He leaned his back fast unto a thorn, And his foot against a stone, And there he fought a long summer's day, A summer's day so long.

"Till that their swords on their broad bucklers Were broke fast into their hands."[162]

Often even Robin does not get the advantage:

"'I pass not for length,' bold Arthur reply'd, 'My staff is of oke so free; Eight foot and a half, it will knock down a calf, And I hope it will knock down thee.'

"Then Robin could no longer forbear, He gave him such a knock, Quickly and soon the blood came down Before it was ten a clock.

"Then Arthur he soon recovered himself, And gave him such a knock on the crown, That from every side of bold Robin Hood's head The blood came trickling down.

"Then Robin raged like a wild boar, As soon as he saw his own blood: Then Bland was in hast, he laid on so fast, As though he had been cleaving of wood.

"And about and about and about they went, Like two wild bores in a chase, Striving to aim each other to maim, Leg, arm, or any other place.

"And knock for knock they lustily dealt, Which held for two hours and more, Till all the wood rang at every bang, They ply'd their work so sore.

"Hold thy hand, hold thy hand,' said Robin Hood, 'And let thy quarrel fall; For here we may thrash our bones all to mesh, And get no coyn at all.

"And in the forrest of merry Sherwood, Hereafter thou shalt be free.' 'God a mercy for nought, my freedom I bought, I may thank my staff, and not thee.'"[163]...

"Who are you, then?" says Robin:

"'I am a tanner,' bold Arthur reply'd, 'In Nottingham long I have wrought; And if thou'lt come there, I vow and swear, I will tan thy hide for nought.'

"'God a mercy, good fellow,' said jolly Robin, 'Since thou art so kind and free; And if thou wilt tan my hide for nought, I will do as much for thee.'"[164]

With these generous offers, they embrace; a free exchange of honest blows always prepares the way for friendship. It was so Robin Hood tried Little John, whom he loved all his life after. Little John was seven feet high, and being on a bridge, would not give way. Honest Robin would not use his bow against him, but went and cut a stick seven feet long; and they agreed amicably to fight on the bridge until one should fall into the water. They fall to so merrily that "their bones ring." In the end Robin falls, and he feels only the more respect for Little John. Another time, having a sword with him, he was thrashed by a tinker who had only a stick. Full of admiration, he gives him a hundred pounds. Again he was thrashed by a potter, who refused him toll; then by a shepherd. They fight to amuse themselves. Even nowadays boxers give each other a friendly grip before setting to; they knock one another about in this country honorably, without malice, fury, or shame. Broken teeth, black eyes, smashed ribs, do not call for murderous vengeance: it would seem that the bones are more solid and the nerves less sensitive in England than elsewhere. Blows once exchanged, they take each other by the hand, and dance together on the green grass:

"Then Robin took them both by the hands, And danc'd round about the oke tree. 'For three merry men, and three merry men, And three merry men we be.'"

Moreover, these people, in each parish, practised the bow every Sunday, and were the best archers in the world; from the close of the fourteenth century the general emancipation of the villeins multiplied their number greatly, and you can now understand how, amidst all the operations and changes of the great central powers, the liberty of the subject survived. After all, the only permanent and unalterable guarantee, in every country and under every constitution, is this unspoken declaration in the heart of the mass of the people, which is well understood on all sides: "If any man touches my property, enters my house, obstructs or molests me, let him beware. I have patience, but I have also strong arms, good comrades, a good blade, and, on occasion, a firm resolve, happen what may, to plunge my blade up to its hilt in his throat."

SECTION VIII.--The English Constitution

Thus thought Sir John Fortescue, Chancellor of England under Henry VI, exiled in France during the Wars of the Roses, one of the oldest prose-writers, and the first who weighed and explained the constitution of his country.[165] He says:

"It is cowardise and lack of hartes and corage that kepeth the Frenchmen from rysyng, and not povertye;[166] which corage no Frenche man hath like to the English man. It hath ben often seen in Englond that iij or iv thefes, for povertie, hath sett upon vij or viij true men, and robbyd them al. But it hath not ben seen in Fraunce, that vij or viij thefes have ben hardy to robbe iij or iv true men. Wherfor it is right seld that Frenchmen be hangyd for robberye, for that they have no hertys to do so terryble an acte. There be therfor mo men hangyd in Englond, in a yere, for robberye and manslaughter, than ther be hangid in Fraunce for such cause of crime in vij yers."[167]

This throws a startling and terrible light on the violent condition of this armed community, where sudden attacks are an every-day matter, and everyone, rich and poor, lives with his hand on his sword. There were great bands of malefactors under Edward I, who infested the country, and fought with those who came to seize them. The inhabitants of the towns were obliged to gather together with those of the neighboring towns, with hue and cry, to pursue and capture them. Under Edward III there were barons who rode about with armed escorts and archers, seizing the manors, carrying off ladies and girls of high degree, mutilating, killing, extorting ransoms from people in their own houses, as if they were in an enemy's land, and sometimes coming before the judges at the sessions in such guise and in so great force that the judges were afraid and dared not administer justice.[168] Read the letters of the Paston family, under Henry VI and Edward IV, and you will see how private war was at every door, how it was necessary for a man to provide himself with men and arms, to be on the alert for defence of his property, to be self-reliant, to depend on his own strength and courage. It is this excess of vigor and readiness to fight which, after their victories in France, set them against one another in England, in the butcheries of the Wars of the Roses. The strangers who saw them were astonished at their bodily strength and courage, at the great pieces of beef "which feed their muscles, at their military habits, their fierce obstinacy, as of savage beasts."[169] They are like their bulldogs, an untamable race, who in their mad courage "cast themselves with shut eyes into the den of a Russian bear, and get their head broken like a rotten apple." This strange condition of a militant community, so full of danger, and requiring so much effort, does not make them afraid. King Edward having given orders to send disturbers of the peace to prison without legal proceedings, and not to liberate them, on bail or otherwise, the Commons declared the order "horribly vexatious"; resist it, refuse to be too much protected. Less peace, but more independence. They maintain the guarantees of the subject at the expense of public security, and prefer turbulent liberty to arbitrary order. Better suffer marauders whom they could fight, than magistrates under whom they would have to bend.

This proud and persistent notion gives rise to, and fashions Fortescue's whole work:

"Ther be two kynds of kyngdomys, of the which that one ys a lordship callid in Latyne Dominium regale, and that other is callid Dominium politicum et regale."

The first is established in France, and the second in England.

"And they dyversen in that the first may rule his people by such lawys as he makyth hymself, and therefor, he may set upon them talys, and other impositions, such as he wyl hymself, without their assent. The secund may not rule hys people by other laws than such as they assenten unto; and therfor he may set upon them non impositions without their own assent."[170]

In a state like this, the will of the people is the prime element of life. Sir John Fortescue says further:

"A king of England cannot at his pleasure make any alterations in the laws of the land, for the nature of his government is not only regal, but political."

"In the body politic, the first thing which lives and moves is the intention of the people, having in it the blood, that is, the prudential care and provision for the public good, which it transmits and communicates to the head, as to the principal part, and to all the rest of the members of the said body politic, whereby it subsists and is invigorated. The law under which the people is incorporated may be compared to the nerves or sinews of the body natural.... And as the bones and all the other members of the body preserve their functions and discharge their several offices by the nerves, so do the members of the community by the law. And as the head of the body natural cannot change its nerves or sinews, cannot deny to the several parts their proper energy, their due proportion and aliment of blood, neither can a king who is the head of the body politic change the laws thereof, nor take from the people what is theirs by right, against their consents.... For he is appointed to protect his subjects in their lives, properties, and laws, for this very end and purpose he has the delegation of power from the people."

Here we have all the ideas of Locke in the fifteenth century, so powerful is practice to suggest theory! so quickly does man discover, in the enjoyment of liberty, the nature of liberty! Fortescue goes further; he contrasts, step by step, the Roman law, that inheritance of all Latin peoples, with the English law, that heritage of all Teutonic peoples: one the work of absolute princes, and tending altogether to the sacrifice of the individual; the other the work of the common will, tending altogether to protect the person. He contrasts the maxims of the imperial jurisconsults, who accord "force of law to all which is determined by the prince," with the statutes of England, which "are not enacted by the sole will of the prince,... but with the concurrent consent of the whole kingdom, by their representatives in Parliament,... more than three hundred select persons." He contrasts the arbitrary nomination of imperial officers with the election of the sheriff, and says:

"There is in every county a certain officer, called the king's sheriff, who, amongst other duties of his office, executes within his county all mandates and judgments of the king's courts of justice: he is an annual officer; and it is not lawful for him, after the expiration of his year, to continue to act in his said office, neither shall he be taken in again to execute the said office within two years thence next ensuing. The manner of his election is thus: Every year, on the morrow of All-Souls, there meet in the King's Court of Exchequer all the king's counsellors, as well lords spiritual and temporal, as all other the king's justices, all the barons of the Exchequer, the Master of the Rolls, and certain other officers, when all of them, by common consent, nominate three of every county knights or esquires, persons of distinction, and such as they esteem fittest qualified to bear the office of sheriff of that county for the year ensuing. The king only makes choice of one out of the three so nominated and returned, who, in virtue of the king's letters patent, is constituted High Sheriff of that county."

He contrasts the Roman procedure, which is satisfied with two witnesses to condemn a man, with the jury, the three permitted challenges, the admirable guarantees of justice with which the uprightness, number, repute, and condition of the juries surround the sentence. About the juries he says:

"Twelve good and true men being sworn, as in the manner above related, legally qualified, that is, having, over and besides their movables, possessions in land sufficient, as was said, wherewith to maintain their rank and station; neither inspected by, nor at variance with either of the parties; all of the neighborhood; there shall be read to them, in English, by the Court, the record and nature of the plea."[171]

Thus protected, the English commons cannot be other than flourishing. Consider, on the other hand, he says to the young prince whom he is instructing, the condition of the commons in France. By their taxes, tax on salt, on wine, billeting of soldiers, they are reduced to great misery. You have seen them on your travels....

"The same Commons be so impoverishid and distroyyd, that they may unneth lyve. Thay drink water, thay eate apples, with bred right brown made of rye. They eate no fleshe, but if it be selden, a litill larde, or of the entrails or heds of bests sclayne for the nobles and merchants of the land. They weryn no wollyn, but if it be a pore cote under their uttermost garment, made of grete convass, and cal it a frok. Their hosyn be of like canvas, and passen not their knee, wherfor they be gartrid and their thyghs bare. Their wifs and children gone bare fote. ... For sum of them, that was wonte to pay to his lord for his tenement which he hyrith by the year a scute payth now to the kyng, over that scute, fyve skuts. Wher thrugh they be artyd by necessite so to watch, labour and grub in the ground for their sustenance, that their nature is much wasted, and the kynd of them brought to nowght. Thay gone crokyd and ar feeble, not able to fight nor to defend the realm; nor they have wepon, nor monye to buy them wepon withal.... This is the frute first of hyre Jus regale.... But blessed be God, this land ys rulid under a better lawe, and therfor the people thereof be not in such penurye, nor therby hurt in their persons, but they be wealthie and have all things necessarie to the sustenance of nature. Wherefore they be myghty and able to resyste the adversaries of the realms that do or will do them wrong. Loo, this is the fruit of Jus politicum et regale, under which we lyve."[172] "Everye inhabiter of the realme of England useth and enjoyeth at his pleasure all the fruites that his land or cattel beareth, with al the profits and commodities which by his owne travayle, or by the labour of others, hae gaineth; not hindered by the iniurie or wrong deteinement of anye man, but that hee shall bee allowed a reasonable recompence.[173]... Hereby it commeth to passe that the men of that lande are riche, havying aboundaunce of golde and silver, and other thinges necessarie for the maintenaunce of man's life. They drinke no water, unless it be so, that some for devotion, and uppon a zeale of penaunce, doe abstaine from other drinks. They eate plentifully of all kindes of fleshe and fishe. They weare fine woolen cloth in all their apparel; they have also aboundaunce of bed-coveringes in their houses, and of all other woolen stuffe. They have greate store of all hustlementes and implementes of householde, they are plentifully furnished with al instruments of husbandry, and all other things that are requisite to the accomplishment of a quiet and wealthy lyfe, according to their estates and degrees. Neither are they sued in the lawe, but onely before ordinary iudges, where by the lawes of the lande they are iustly intreated. Neither are they arrested or impleaded for their moveables or possessions, or arraigned of any offence, bee it never so great and outragious, but after the lawes of the land, and before the iudges aforesaid."[174]

All this arises from the constitution of the country and the distribution of the land. Whilst in other countries we find only a population of paupers, with here and there a few lords, England is covered and filled with owners of lands and fields; so that "therein so small a thorpe cannot bee founde, wherein dwelleth not a knight, an esquire, or suche a housholder as is there commonly called a franklayne, enryched with greate possessions. And also other freeholders, and many yeomen able for their livelodes to make a jurye in fourme afore-mentioned. For there bee in that lande divers yeomen, which are able to dispend by the yeare above a hundred poundes."[175] Harrison says:[176]

"This sort of people, have more estimation than labourers and the common sort of artificers, and these commonlie live wealthilie, keepe good houses, and travell to get riches. They are for the most part farmers to gentlemen," and keep servants of their own. "These were they that in times past made all France afraid. And albeit they be not called master, as gentlemen are, or sir, as to knights apperteineth, but onelie John and Thomas, etc., yet have they beene found to have done verie good service; and the kings of England, in foughten battels, were wont to remaine among them (who were their footmen) as the French kings did among their horssemen: the prince thereby showing where his chiefe strength did consist."

Such men, says Fortescue, might form a legal jury, and vote, resist, be associated, do everything wherein a free government consists; for they were numerous in every district; they were not down-trodden like the timid peasants of France; they had their honor and that of their family to maintain; "they be well provided with arms; they remember that they have won battles in France."[177] Such is the class, still obscure, but more rich and powerful every century, which, founded by the down-trodden Saxon aristocracy, and sustained by the surviving Saxon character, ended, under the lead of the inferior Norman nobility and under the patronage of the superior Norman nobility, in establishing and settling a free constitution, and a nation worthy of liberty.

SECTION IX.--Piers Plowman and Wyclif

When, as here, men are endowed with a serious character, have a resolute spirit, and possess independent habits, they deal with their conscience as with their daily business, and end by laying hands on church as well as state. Already for a long time the exactions of the Roman See had provoked the resistance of the people,[178] and the higher clergy became unpopular. Men complained that the best livings were given by the pope to non-resident strangers; that some Italian, unknown in England, possessed fifty or sixty benefices in England; that English money poured into Rome; and that the clergy, being judged only by clergy, gave themselves up to their vices, and abused their state of immunity. In the first years of Henry III's reign there were nearly a hundred murders committed by priests then alive. At the beginning of the fourteenth century the ecclesiastical revenue was twelve times greater than the civil; about half the soil was in the hands of the clergy. At the end of the century the commons declared that the taxes paid to the church were five times greater than the taxes paid to the crown; and some years afterwards,[179] considering that the wealth of the clergy only served to keep them in idleness and luxury, they proposed to confiscate it for the public benefit. Already the idea of the Reformation had forced itself upon them. They remembered how in the ballads Robin Hood ordered his folk to spare the yeomen, laborers, even knights, if they are good fellows, but never to let abbots or bishops escape. The prelates were grievously oppressing the people by means of their privileges, ecclesiastical courts, and tithes; when suddenly, amid the pleasant banter or the monotonous babble of the Norman versifiers, we hear the indignant voice of a Saxon, a man of the people and a victim of oppression, thundering against them.

It is the vision of Piers Plowman, written, it is supposed, by a secular priest of Oxford.[180] Doubtless the traces of French taste are perceptible. It could not be otherwise; the people from below can never quite prevent themselves from imitating the people above, and the most unshackled popular poets, Burns and Béranger, too often preserve an academic style. So here a fashionable machinery, the allegory of the Roman de la Rose, is pressed into service. We have Do-well, Covetousness, Avarice, Simony, Conscience, and a whole world of talking abstractions. But, in spite of these vain foreign phantoms, the body of the poem is national, and true to life. The old language reappears in part; the old metre altogether; no morer rhymes, but barbarous alliterations; no more jesting, but a harsh gravity, a sustained invective, a grand and sombre imagination, heavy Latin texts, hammered down as by a Protestant hand. Piers Plowman went to sleep on the Malvern hills, and there had a wonderful dream:

"Thanne gan I meten--a merveillous swevene, That I was in a wildernesse--wiste I nevere where; And as I biheeld into the eest,--an heigh to the sonne, I seigh a tour on a toft,--trieliche y-maked, A deep dale bynethe--a dongeon thereinne With depe diches and derke--and dredfulle of sighte. A fair feeld ful of folk--fond I ther bitwene, Of alle manere of men,--the meene and the riche, Werchynge and wandrynge--as the world asketh. Some putten hem to the plough,--pleiden ful selde, In settynge and sowynge--swonken ful harde, And wonnen that wastours--with glotonye dystruyeth."[181]

A gloomy picture of the world, like the frightful dreams which occur so often in Albert Durer and Luther. The first reformers were persuaded that the earth was given over to evil; that the devil had on it his empire and his officers; that Antichrist, seated on the throne of Rome, displayed ecclesiastical pomps to seduce souls and cast them into the fire of hell. So here Anti-christ, with raised banner, enters a convent; bells are rung; monks in solemn procession go to meet him, and receive with congratulations their lord and father.[182] With seven great giants, the seven deadly sins, he besieges Conscience; and the assault is led by Idleness, who brings with her an army of more than a thousand prelates: for vices reign, more hateful from being in holy places, and employed in the church of God in the devil's service.

"Ac now is Religion a rydere--a romere aboute, A ledere of love-dayes--and a lond-buggere, A prikere on a palfrey--fro manere to manere.... And but if his knave knele--that shal his coppe brynge, He loureth on hym, and asketh hym--who taughte hym curteisie."[183]

But this sacrilegious show has its day, and God puts His hand on men in order to warn them. By order of Conscience, Nature sends forth a host of plagues and diseases from the planets:

"Kynde Conscience tho herde,--and cam out of the planetes, And sente forth his forreyours--feveres and fluxes, Coughes and cardiaclescrampes and tooth-aches, Reumes and radegundes,--and roynous scabbes, Biles and bocches,--and brennynge agues, Frenesies and foule yveles,--forageres of kynde.... There was 'Harrow! and Help!--Here cometh Kynde! With Deeth that is dredful--to undo us alle!' The lord that lyved after lust--tho aloud cryde.... Deeth cam dryvynge after,--and al to duste passhed Kynges and knyghtes,--kaysers and popes,... Manye a lovely lady--and lemmans of knyghtes, Swowned and swelted for sorwe of hise dyntes."[184]

Here is a crowd of miseries, like those which Milton has described in his vision of human life; tragic pictures and emotions, such as the reformers delight to dwell upon. There is a like speech delivered by John Knox, before the fair ladies of Mary Stuart, which tears the veil from the human corpse just as coarsely, in order to exhibit its shame. The conception of the world, proper to the people of the north, all sad and moral, shows itself already. They are never comfortable in their country; they have to strive continually against cold or rain. They cannot live there carelessly, lying under a lovely sky, in a sultry and clear atmosphere, their eyes filled with the noble beauty and happy serenity of the land. They must work to live; be attentive, exact, keep their houses wind and water tight, trudge doggedly through the mud behind their plough, light their lamps in their shops during the day. Their climate imposes endless inconvenience, and exacts endless endurance. Hence arise melancholy and the idea of duty. Man naturally thinks of life as of a battle, oftener of black death which closes this deadly show, and leads so many plumed and disorderly processions to the silence and the eternity of the grave. All this visible world is vain; there is nothing true but human virtue--the courageous energy with which man attains to self-command, the generous energy with which he employs himself in the service of others. On this view, then, his eyes are fixed; they pierce through worldly gauds, neglect sensual joys, to attain this. By such inner thoughts and feelings the ideal model is displaced; a new source of action springs up--the idea of righteousness. What sets them against ecclesiastical pomp and insolence is neither the envy of the poor and low, nor the anger of the oppressed, nor a revolutionary desire to experimentalize abstract truth, but conscience. They tremble lest they should not work out their salvation if they continue in a corrupt church; they fear the menaces of God, and dare not embark on the great journey with unsafe guides. "What is righteousness?" asked Luther, anxiously, "and how shall I obtain it?" With like anxiety Piers Plowman goes to seek Dowell, and asks each one to show him where he shall find him. "With us," say the friars. "Contra quath ich, _Septies in die cadit justus_, and ho so syngeth certys doth nat wel;" so he betakes himself to "study and writing," like Luther; the clerks at table speak much of God and of the Trinity, "and taken Bernarde to witnesse, and putteth forth presompcions... ac the carful mai crie and quaken atte gate, bothe a fyngred and a furst, and for defaute spille ys non so hende to have hym yn. Clerkus and knyghtes carpen of God ofte, and haveth hym muche in hure mouthe, ac mene men in herte;" and heart, inner faith, living virtue, are what constitute true religion. This is what these dull Saxons had begun to discover. The Teutonic conscience, and English good-sense, too, had been aroused, as well as individual energy, the resolution to judge and decide alone, by and for one's self. "Christ is our hede that sitteth on hie, Heddis ne ought we have no mo," says a poem, attributed to Chaucer, and which, with others, claims independence for Christian consciences.[185]

"We ben his membres bothe also, Father he taught us call him all, Maisters to call forbad he tho; Al maisters ben wickid and fals."

No other mediator between man and God. In vain the doctors state that they have authority for their words; there is a word of greater authority, to wit, God's. We hear it in the fourteenth century, this grand "word of God." It quitted the learned schools, the dead languages, the dusty shelves on which the clergy suffered it to sleep, covered with a confusion of commentators and Fathers.[186] Wycliff appeared and translated it like Luther, and in a spirit similar to Luther's. "Cristen men and wymmen, olde and yonge, shulden studie fast in the Newe Testament, for it is of ful autorite, and opyn to undirstonding of simple men, as to the poyntis that be moost nedeful to salvacioun."[187] Religion must be secular, in order to escape from the hands of the clergy, who monopolize it; each must hear and read for himself the word of God; he will then be sure that it has not been corrupted; he will feel it better, and, more, he will understand it better, for

"ech place of holy writ, both opyn and derk, techit mekenes and charite; and therfore he that kepith mekenes and charite hath the trewe undirstondyng and perfectioun of al holi writ.... Therfore no simple man of wit be aferd unmesurabli to studie in the text of holy writ... and no clerk be proude of the verrey undirstondyng of holy writ, for whi undirstonding of hooly writ with outen charite that kepith Goddis heestis, makith a man depper dampned... and pride and covetise of clerkis is cause of her blindees and eresie, and priveth them fro verrey undirstondyng of holy writ."[188]

These are the memorable words that began to circulate in the markets and in the schools. They read the translated Bible, and commented on it; they judged the existing Church after it. What judgments these serious and untainted minds passed upon it, with what readiness they pushed on to the true religion of their race, we may see from their petition to Parliament.[189] One hundred and thirty years before Luther, they said that the pope was not established by Christ, that pilgrimages and image-worship were akin to idolatry, that external rites are of no importance, that priests ought not to possess temporal wealth, that the doctrine of transubstantiation made a people idolatrous, that priests have not the power of absolving from sin. In proof of all this they brought forward texts of Scripture. Fancy these brave spirits, simple and strong souls, who began to read at night in their shops, by candle-light; for they were shopkeepers--tailors, skinners, and bakers--who, with some men of letters, began to read, and then to believe, and finally got themselves burned.[190] What a sight for the fifteenth century, and what a promise! It seems as though, with liberty of action, liberty of mind begins to appear; that these common folk will think and speak; that under the conventional literature, imitated from France, a new literature is dawning; and that England, genuine England, half-mute since the Conquest, will at last find a voice.

She had not yet found it. King and peers ally themselves to the Church, pass terrible statutes, destroy books, burn heretics alive, often with refinement of torture--one in a barrel, another hung by an iron chain around his waist. The temporal wealth of the clergy had been attacked, and therewith the whole English constitution; and the great establishment above crushed out with its whole weight the revolutionists from below. Darkly, in silence, while the nobles were destroying each other in the Wars of the Roses, the commons went on working and living, separating themselves from the established Church, maintaining their liberties, amassing wealth, but not going further.[191] Like a vast rock which underlies the soil, yet crops up here and there at distant intervals, they barely show themselves. No great poetical or religious work displays them to the light. They sang; but their ballads, first ignored, then transformed, reach us only in a late edition. They prayed; but beyond one or two indifferent poems, their incomplete and repressed doctrine bore no fruit. We may well see from the verse, tone, and drift of their ballads that they are capable of the finest poetic originality,[192] but their poetry is in the hands of yeomen and harpers. We perceive, by the precocity and energy of their religious protests, that they are capable of the most severe and impassioned creeds; but their faith remains hidden in the shop-parlors of a few obscure sectaries. Neither their faith nor their poetry has been able to attain its end or issue. The Renaissance and the Reformation, those two national outbreaks, are still far off; and the literature of the period retains to the end, like the highest ranks of English society, almost the perfect stamp of its French origin and its foreign models.

[Footnote 97: See, amidst other delineations of their manners, the first accounts of the first Crusade. Godfrey clove a Saracen down to his waist. In Palestine, a widow was compelled, up to the age of sixty, to marry again, because no fief could remain without a defender. A Spanish leader said to his exhausted soldiers after a battle, "You are too weary and too much wounded, but come and fight with me against this other band; the fresh wounds which we shall receive will make us forget those which we have." At this time, says the General Chronicle of Spain, kings, counts, and nobles, and all the knights, that they might be ever ready, kept their horses in the chamber where they slept with their wives.]

[Footnote 98: For difference in numbers of the fleet and men see Freeman, "History of the Norman Conquest," 3 vols., 1867, III. 381, 387.--Tr.]

[Footnote 99: For all the details see "Anglo-Norman Chronicles," III. 4, as quoted by Aug. Thierry. I have myself seen the locality and the country.]

[Footnote 100: Of three columns of attack at Hastings, two were composed of auxiliaries. Moreover, the chroniclers are not at fault upon this critical point; they agree in stating that England was conquered by Frenchmen.]

[Footnote 101: It was a Rouen fisherman, a soldier of Rollo, who killed the Duke of France at the mouth of the Eure. Hastings, the famous' sea-king, was a laborer's son from the neighborhood of Troyes.]

[Footnote 102: "In the tenth century," says Stendhal, "a man wished for two things: First, not to be slain; second, to have a good leather coat." See Fontenelle's "Chronicle."]

[Footnote 103: William of Malmesbury.]

[Footnote 104: Churches in London, Sarum, Norwich, Durham, Chichester Peterborough, Rochester, Hereford, Gloucester, Oxford, etc.--William of Malmesbury.]

[Footnote 105: Ordericus Vitalis.]

[Footnote 106: Robert Wace, "Roman du Rou."]

[Footnote 107: Ibid. Et li Normanz et li Franfceiz Tote nuit firent oreisons, Et furent en aflicions. De lor péchiés confèz se firent As proveires les regehirent, Et qui n'en out proveires prèz, A son veizin se fist confèz, Pour ço ke samedi esteit Ke la bataille estre debveit. Unt Normanz a pramis e voé, Si com li cler l'orent loé, Ke à ce jor mez s'il veskeient, Char ni saunc ne mangereient Giffrei, éveske de Coustances. A plusors joint lor pénitances. Cli reçut li confessions Et dona l' béneiçons.]

[Footnote 108: Robert Wace, "Roman du Rou" Taillefer ki moult bien cantout Sur un roussin qui tot alout Devant li dus alout cantant De Kalermaine e de Rolant, E d'Oliver et des vassals Ki moururent à Roncevals. Quant ils orent chevalchié tant K'as Engleis vindrent aprismant: "Sires! dist Taillefer, merci! Je vos ai languement servi. Tut mon servise me debvez, Hui, si vos plaist, me le rendez Por tout guerredun vos requier, Et si vos voil forment preier, Otreiez-mei, ke jo n'i faille, Li primier colp de la bataille." Et li dus répont: "Je l'otrei." Et Taillefer point à desrei; Devant toz li altres se mist, Un Englez féri, si l'ocist. De sos le pis, parmie la pance, Li fist passer ultre la lance, A terre estendu l'abati. Poiz trait l'espée, altre féri. Poiz a crié: "Venez, venez! Ke fetes-vos? Férez, férez!" Done l'unt Englez avironé, Al secund colp k'il ou doné.]

[Footnote 109: The idea of types is applicable throughout all physical and moral nature.]

[Footnote 110: Danois is a contraction of le d'Ardennois, from the Ardennes.--Tr.]

[Footnote 111: Genin, "Chanson de Roland": Co sent Rollans que la mort le trespent, Devers la teste sur le quer li descent; Desuz un pin i est alet curant, Sur l'herbe verte si est culchet adenz; Desuz lui met l'espée et l'olifan; Turnat sa teste vers la paîene gent, Pour ço l'at fait que il voelt veirement Que Carles diet e trestute sa gent; Li gentilz quens, qu'il fut mort cunquérant. Cleimet sa culpe, e menut e suvent, Pur ses pecchez en puroffrid lo guant. Li quens Rollans se iut desuz un pin, Envers Espaigne en ad turnet sun vis, De plusurs choses a remembrer le prist. De tantes terres cume li bers cunquist, De dulce France des humes de sun lign, De Carlemagne sun seignor ki l'nurrit. Ne poet muer n'en plurt et ne susprit. Mais lui meisme ne volt mettre en ubli. Cleimet sa culpe, si priet Dieu mercit: "Veire paterne, ki unques ne mentis, Seint Lazaron de mort resurrexis, Et Daniel des lions guaresis, Guaris de mei l'arome de tuz perilz, Pur les pecchez que en ma vie fis." Sun destre guant à Deu en puroffrit. Seint Gabriel de sa main l'ad pris. Desur sun bras teneit le chef enclin, Juntes ses mains est alet à sa fin. Deus i tramist sun angle cherubin, Et seint Michel qu'on cleimet del péril Ensemble ad els seint Gabriel i vint, L'anme del cunte portent en pareis.]

[Footnote 112: Mon trés-chier ami débonnaire, Vous m'avez une chose ditte Oui n'est pas à faire petite Mais que l'on doit moult rersongnier. Et nonpourquant, sanz eslongnier, Puisque garison autrement Ne povez avoir vraiement, Pour vostre amour les occiray, Et le sang vous apporteray.]

[Footnote 113: Vraiz Diex, moult est excellente, Et de grant charité plaine, Vostre bonté souveraine. Car vostre grâce présente, A toute personne humaine, Vraix Diex, moult est excellente, Puisqu'elle a cuer et entente, Et que a ce desir l'amaine Que de vous servir se paine.]

[Footnote 114: See H. Taine, "La Fontaine and His Fables," p. 15.]

[Footnote 115: La Fontaine, "Contes, Richard Minutolo."]

[Footnote 116: Parler lui veut d'une besogne Où crois que peu conquerrérois Si la besogne vous nommois.]

[Footnote 117: At King Stephen's death there were 1,115 castles.]

[Footnote 118: A. Thierry, "Histoire de la Conquête de l'Angleterre," II.]

[Footnote 119: William of Malmesbury. A. Thierry, II. 20, 122-203.]

[Footnote 120: A. Thierry.]

[Footnote 121: "In the year 652," says Warton, I. 3, "it was the common practice of the Anglo-Saxons to send their youth to the monasteries of France for education; and not only the language but the manners of the French were esteemed the most polite accomplishments."]

[Footnote 122: Warton, I. 5.]

[Footnote 123: Trevisa's translation of the Polycronycon.]

[Footnote 124: Statutes of foundation of New College, Oxford. In the abbey of Glastonbury, in 1247: Liber de excidio Trojæ, gesta Ricardi regis, gesta Alexandri Magni, etc. In the abbey of Peterborough: Amys et Amelion, Sir Tristam, Guy de Bourgogne, gesta Otuclis les prophéties de Merlin, le Charlemagne de Turpin, la destruction de Troie, etc. Warton, ibid.]

[Footnote 125: In 1154.]

[Footnote 126: Warton, I. 72-78.]

[Footnote 127: In 1400. Warton, II. 248. Gower died in 1408; his French ballads belong to the end of the fourteenth century.]

[Footnote 128: He wrote in 1356, and died in 1372.]

[Footnote 129: "And for als moche as it is longe time passed that ther was no generalle Passage ne Vyage over the See, and many Men desiren for to here speke of the holy Lond, and han thereof gret Solace and Comfort, I, John Maundevylle, Knyght, alle be it I be not worthi, that was born in Englond, in the town of Seynt-Albones, passed the See in the Zeer of our Lord Jesu-Crist 1322, in the Day of Seynt Michelle, and hidreto have been longe tyme over the See, and have seyn and gon thorghe manye dyverse londes, and many Provynces, and Kingdomes, and Iles."

"And zee shulle undirstonde that I have put this Boke out of Latyn into Frensche, and translated it azen out of Frensche, into Englyssche, that every Man of my Nacioun may undirstonde it."--Sir John Maundeville's "Voyage and Travaile," ed. Halliwell, 1866, prologue, p. 4.]

[Footnote 130: Sir John Maundeville's "Voyage and Travaile," ed. Halliwell, 1866, XII., p. 139. It is confessed that the original on which Wace depended for his ancient "History of England" is the Latin compilation of Geoffrey of Monmouth.]

[Footnote 131: Extract from the account of the proceedings at Arthur's coronation given by Layamon, in his translation of Wace, executed about 1180. Madden's "Layamon," 1847, II. p. 625 et passim: Tha the king igeten hafde And al his mon-weorede, Tha bugen ut of burhge Theines swithe balde. Alle tha kinges, And heore here-thringes. Alle tha biscopes, And alle tha clærckes, All the eorles, And alle tha beornes. Alle the theines, Alle the sweines, Feire iscrudde, Helde geond felde. Summe heo gunnen æruen, Summe heo gunnen urnen, Summe heo gunnen lepen, Summe heo gunnen sceoten, Summe heo wræstleden And wither-gome makeden, Summe heo on uelde Pleouweden under scelde, Summe heo driven balles Wide geond tha feldes. Monianes kunnes gomen Ther heo gunnen driuen. And wha swa mihte iwinne Wurthscipe of his gomene, Hine me ladde mid songe At foren than leod kinge; And the king, for his gomene, Gaf him geven gode. Alle tha quene The icumen weoren there. And alle tha lafdies, Leoneden geond walles. To bihalden the dugethen. And that folc plæie. This ilæste threo dæges, Swulc gomes and swulc plæges, Tha, at than veorthe dæie The king gon to spekene And agæf his goden cnihten All heore rihten; He gef seolver, he gæf gold, He gef hors, he gef lond, Castles, and clœthes eke; His monnen he iquende.]

[Footnote 132: After 1297.]

[Footnote 133: About 1312.]

[Footnote 134: About 1349.]

[Footnote 135: Warton, II. 36.]

[Footnote 136: Time of Henry III., "Reliquiae Antiquæ," edited by Messrs. Wright and Halliwell, I. 102.]

[Footnote 137: About 1278. Warton, I. 28.]

[Footnote 138: Ibid., I. 31.]

[Footnote 139: Ibid. I. 30.]

[Footnote 140: "Poem of the Owl and Nightingale," who dispute as to which has the finest voice.]

[Footnote 141: Letter of Peter of Blois.]

[Footnote 142: William of Malmesbury.]

[Footnote 143: At the installation feast of George Nevill, Archbishop of York, the brother of Guy of Warwick, there were consumed 104 oxen and 6 wild bulls, 1000 sheep, 304 calves, as many hogs, 2000 swine, 500 stags, bucks, and does, 204 kids, 22,802 wild or tame fowl, 300 quarters of corn, 300 tuns of ale, 100 of wine, a pipe of hypocras, 12 porpoises and seals.]

[Footnote 144: These prodigalities and refinements grew to excess under his grandson Richard II.]

[Footnote 145: Warton, I. 156.]

[Footnote 146: Warton, I. 176, spelling modernized.]

[Footnote 147: Warton, I. 123: "In Fraunce these rhymes were wroht, Every Englyshe ne knew it not."]

[Footnote 148: See Lingard's "History," II. 55, note 4.--Tr.]

[Footnote 149: Domesday Book. Froude's "History England", 1858, 1. 13: "Through all these arrangements a single aim is visible, that every man in England should have his definite place and definite duty assigned to him, and that no human being should be at liberty to lead at his own pleasure an unaccountable existence. The discipline of an army was transferred to the details of social life."]

[Footnote 150: Domesday Book, "tenants-in-chief."]

[Footnote 151: According to Ailred (temp. Hen. II), "a king, many bishops and abbots, many great earls and noble knights descended both from English and Norman blood, constituted a support to the one and an honor to the other. At present," says another author of the same period, "as the English and Normans dwell together, and have constantly intermarried, the two nations are so completely mingled together, that at least as regards freemen, one can scarcely distinguish who is Norman and who English.... The villeins attached to the soil," he says again, "are alone of pure Saxon blood."]

[Footnote 152: Magna Charta, 1215.]

[Footnote 153: "Chaucer's Works," ed. Sir H. Nicholas, 6 vols., 1845, "Prologue to the Canterbury Tales," II. p. 11, line 333.]

[Footnote 154: Prologue to "The Canterbury Tales," II. p. 17, line 547.]

[Footnote 155: From 1214, and also in 1225 and 1254. Guizot, "Origin of the Representative System in England," pp. 297-299.]

[Footnote 156: In 1264.]

[Footnote 157: Aug. Thierry, IV. 56. Ritson's "Robin Hood," 1832.]

[Footnote 158: Latimer's "Sermons," ed. Arber, 6th Sermon, 1869, p. 173.]

[Footnote 159: Ritson, "Robin Hood Ballads," I. IV. verses 41-48.]

[Footnote 160: Ibid, verses 145-152.]

[Footnote 161: A pinder's task was to pin the sheep in the fold, cattle in the penfold or pound (Richardson).--Tr.]

[Footnote 162: Ritson, II. 3, verses 17-26.]

[Footnote 163: Ibid. II. 6, verses 58-89.]

[Footnote 164: Ritson, verses 94-101.]

[Footnote 165: "The Difference between an Absolute and Limited Monarchy--A learned Commendation of the Politic Laws of England" (Latin). I frequently quote from the second work, which is more full and complete.]

[Footnote 166: The courage which finds utterance here is coarse; the English instincts are combative and independent. The French race, and the Gauls generally, are perhaps the most reckless of life of any.]

[Footnote 167: "The Difference," etc., 3d ed. 1724, ch. XIII. p. 98. There are nowadays in France 42 highway robberies as against 738 in England. In 1843, there were in England four times as many accusations of crimes and offences as in France, having regard to the number of inhabitants (Moreau de Jonnès).]

[Footnote 168: Statute of Winchester, 1285; Ordinance of 1378.]

[Footnote 169: Benvenuto Cellini, quoted by Froude, I. 20, "History of England." Shakespeare, "Henry V," conversation of French lords before the battle of Agincourt.]

[Footnote 170: "The Difference." etc.]

[Footnote 171: The original of this very famous treatise, "de Laudibus Legum Angliæ," was written in Latin between 1464 and 1470, first published in 1537, and translated into English in 1775 by Francis Gregor. I have taken these extracts from the magnificent edition of Sir John Fortescue's works published in 1869 for private distribution, and edited by Thomas Fortescue, Lord Clermont. Some of the pieces quoted, left in the old spelling, are taken from an older edition, translated by Robert Mulcaster in 1567.--Tr.]

[Footnote 172: "Of an Absolute and Limited Monarchy," 3d ed. 1724, ch. III. p. 15.]

[Footnote 173: Commines bears the same testimony.]

[Footnote 174: "De Laudibus," etc., ch. XXXVI.]

[Footnote 175: "The might of the realme most stondyth upon archers which be not rich men." Compare Hallam, II. 482. All this takes us back as far as the Conquest, and farther. "It is reasonable to suppose that the greater part of those who appear to have possessed small freeholds or parcels of manors were no other than the original nation.... A respectable class of free socagers, having in general full right of alienating their lands, and holding them probably at a small certain rent from the lord of the manor, frequently occurs in the Domesday Book." At all events, there were in Domesday Book Saxons "perfectly exempt from villenage." This class is mentioned with respect in the treatises of Glanvil and Bracton. As for the villeins, they were quickly liberated in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, either by their own energies or by becoming copyholders. The Wars of the Roses still further raised the commons; orders were frequently issued, previous to a battle, to slay the nobles and spare the commoners.]

[Footnote 176: "Description of England," 275.]

[Footnote 177: The following is a portrait of a yeoman, by Latimer, in the first sermon preached before Edward VI, March 8, 1549: "My father was a yeoman, and had no lands of his own; only he had a farm of £3 or £4 by year at the uttermost, and hereupon he tilled so much as kept half-a-dozen men. He had walk for a hundred sheep, and my mother milked thirty kine. He was able, and did find the king a harness, with himself and his horse; while he came to the place that he should receive the king's wages. I can remember that I buckled his harness when he went unto Blackheath field. He kept me to school, or else I had not been able to have preached before the King's Majesty now. He married my sisters with £5 or 20 nobles a-piece, so that he brought them up in godliness and fear of God; he kept hospitality for his poor neighbours, and some alms he gave to the poor; and all this did he of the said farm. Where he that now hath it payeth £16 by the year, or more, and is not able to do anything for his prince, for himself, nor for his children, or give a cup of drink to the poor."

This is from the sixth sermon, preached before the young king, April 12, 1549: "In my time my poor father was as diligent to teach me to shoot as to learn (me) any other thing; and so, I think, other men did their children. He taught me how to draw, how to lay my body in my bow, and not to draw with strength of arms, as other nations do, but with strength of the body. I had my bows bought me according to my age and strength; as I increased in them, so my bows were made bigger and bigger; for men shall never shoot well except they be brought up in it. It is a goodly art, a wholesome kind of exercise, and much commended in physic."]

[Footnote 178: In 1246, 1376. Thierry, III. 79.]

[Footnote 179: 1404-1409. The commons declared that with these revenues the king would be able to maintain 15 earls, 1500 knights, 6,200 squires, and 100 hospitals; each earl receiving annually 300 marks; each knight 100 marks, and the produce of four ploughed lands; each squire 40 marks, and the produce of two ploughed lands.]

[Footnote 180: About 1362.]

[Footnote 181: "Piers Ploughman's Vision and Creed," ed. T. Wright, 1856, I. p. 2, lines 21-44.]

[Footnote 182: The Archdeacon of Richmond, on his tour in 1216, came to the priory of Bridlington with ninety-seven horses, twenty-one dogs, and three falcons.]

[Footnote 183: "Piers Ploughman's Vision," I. p. 191, lines 6,217-6,228.]

[Footnote 184: Ibid. II. Last book, p. 430, lines 14,084-14,135.]

[Footnote 185: "Piers Plowman's Crede; the Plowman's Tale," first printed in 1550. There were three editions in one year, it was so manifestly Protestant.]

[Footnote 186: Knighton, about 1400, wrote thus of Wyclif: "Transtulit de Latino in anglicam linguam, non angelicam. Unde per ipeum fit vulgare, et magis apertum laicis et mulieribus legere scientibus quam solet esse clericis admodum litteratis, et bene intelligentibus. Et sic evangelica margerita spargitur et a porcis conculcatur... (ita) ut laicis commune æternum quod ante fuerat clericis et ecolesiæ doctoribus talentum supernum."]

[Footnote 187: Wyclif's Bible, ed. Forshall and Madden, 1850, preface to Oxford edition, p. 2.]

[Footnote 188: Ibid.]

[Footnote 189: In 1395.]

[Footnote 190: 1401, William Sawtré, the first Lollard burned alive.]

[Footnote 191: Commines, v. ch. 19 and 20: "In my opinion, of all kingdoms of the world of which I have any knowledge, where the public weal is best observed, and least violence is exercised on the people, and where no buildings are overthrown or demolished in war, England is the best; and the ruin and misfortune falls on them who wage the war.... The kingdom of England has this advantage beyond other nations, that the people and the country are not destroyed or burnt, nor the buildings demolished; and ill-fortune falls on men of war, and especially on the nobles."]

[Footnote 192: See the ballads of "Chevy Chase, The Nut-Brown Maid," etc. Many of them are admirable little dramas.]

CHAPTER THIRD

The New Tongue

SECTION I.--The First Great Poet

Amid so many barren endeavors, throughout the long impotence of Norman literature, which was content to copy, and of Saxon literature, which bore no fruit, a definite language was nevertheless formed, and there was room for a great writer. Geoffrey Chaucer appeared, a man of mark, inventive though a disciple, original though a translator, who by his genius, education, and life, was enabled to know and to depict a whole world, but above all to satisfy the chivalric world and the splendid courts which shone upon the heights.[193] He belonged to it, though learned and versed in all branches of scholastic knowledge; and he took such a share in it that his life from beginning to end was that of a man of the world, and a man of action. We find him by turns in King Edward's army, in the king's train, husband of a maid of honor to the queen, a pensioner, a placeholder, a member of Parliament, a knight, founder of a family which was hereafter to become allied to royalty. Moreover, he was in the king's council, brother-in-law of John of Gaunt, employed more than once in open embassies or secret missions at Florence, Genoa, Milan, Flanders, commissioner in France for the marriage of the Prince of Wales, high up and low down on the political ladder, disgraced, restored to place. This experience of business, travel, war, and the court, was not like a book-education. He was at the Court of Edward III, the most splendid in Europe, amidst tourneys, grand receptions, magnificent displays; he took part in the pomps of France and Milan; conversed with Petrarch, perhaps with Boccaccio and Froissart; was actor in, and spectator of, the finest and most tragical of dramas. In these few words, what ceremonies and cavalcades are implied! what processions in armor, what caparisoned horses, bedizened ladies! what display of gallant and lordly manners! what a varied and brilliant world, well suited to occupy the mind and eyes of a poet! Like Froissart, and better than he, Chaucer could depict the castles of the nobles, their conversations, their talk of love, and anything else that concerned them, and please them by his portraiture.

SECTION II.--The Decline of the Middle Ages

Two notions raised the Middle Ages above the chaos of barbarism: one religious, which had fashioned the gigantic cathedrals, and swept the masses from their native soil to hurl them upon the Holy Land; the other secular, which had built feudal fortresses, and set the man of courage erect and armed, within his own domain: the one had produced the adventurous hero, the other the mystical monk; the one, to wit, the belief in God, the other the belief in self. Both, running to excess, had degenerated by the violence of their own strength: the one had exalted independence into rebellion, the other had turned piety into enthusiasm: the first made man unfit for civil life, the second drew him back from natural life: the one, sanctioning disorder, dissolved society; the other, enthroning infatuation, perverted intelligence. Chivalry had need to be repressed because it issued in brigandage; devotion restrained because it induced slavery. Turbulent feudalism grew feeble, like oppressive theocracy; and the two great master passions, deprived of their sap and lopped of their stem, gave place by their weakness to the monotony of habit and the taste for worldliness, which shot forth in their stead and flourished under their name.

Gradually, the serious element declined, in books as in manners, in works of art as in books. Architecture, instead of being the handmaid of faith, became the slave of fantasy. It was exaggerated, became too ornamental, sacrificing general effect to detail, shot up its steeples to unreasonable heights, decorated its churches with canopies, pinnacles, trefoiled gables, open-work galleries. "Its whole aim was continually to climb higher, to clothe the sacred edifice with a gaudy bedizenment, as if it were a bride on her wedding morning."[194] Before this marvellous lacework, what emotion could one feel but a pleased astonishment? What becomes of Christian sentiment before such scenic ornamentations? In like manner literature sets itself to play. In the eighteenth century, the second age of absolute monarchy, we saw on one side finials and floriated cupolas, on the other pretty _vers de societé_, courtly and sprightly tales, taking the place of severe beauty-lines and noble writings. Even so in the fourteenth century, the second age of feudalism, they had on one side the stone fretwork and slender efflorescence of aërial forms, and on the other finical verses and diverting stories, taking the place of the old grand architecture and the old simple literature. It is no longer the overflowing of a true sentiment which produces them, but the craving for excitement. Consider Chaucer, his subjects, and how he selects them. He goes far and wide to discover them, to Italy, France, to the popular legends, the ancient classics. His readers need diversity, and his business is to "provide fine tales": it was in those days the poet's business.[195] The lords at table have finished dinner, the minstrels come and sing, the brightness of the torches falls on the velvet and ermine, on the fantastic figures, the motley, the elaborate embroidery of their long garments; then the poet arrives, presents his manuscript, "richly illuminated, bound in crimson velvet, embellished with silver clasps and bosses, roses of gold": they ask him what his subject is, and he answers "Love."

SECTION III.--The Poetry of Chaucer

In fact, it is the most agreeable subject, fittest to make the evening hours pass sweetly, amid the goblets filled with spiced wine and the burning perfumes. Chaucer translated first that great storehouse of gallantry, the "Roman de la Rose." There is no pleasanter entertainment. It is about a rose which the lover wished to pluck: the pictures of the May months, the groves, the flowery earth, the green hedgerows, abound and display their bloom. Then come portraits of the smiling ladies, Richesse, Fraunchise, Gaiety, and by way of contrast, the sad characters, Daunger and Travail, all fully and minutely described, with detail of features, clothing, attitude; they walk about, as on a piece of tapestry, amid landscapes, dances, castles, among allegorical groups, in lively sparkling colors, displayed, contrasted, ever renewed and varied so as to entertain the sight. For an evil has arisen, unknown to serious ages--_ennui_; novelty and brilliancy followed by novelty and brilliancy are necessary to withstand it; and Chaucer, like Boccaccio and Froissart, enters into the struggle with all his heart. He borrows from Boccaccio his history of Palamon and Arcite, from Lollius his history of Troilus and Cressida, and rearranges them. How the two young Theban knights, Arcite and Palamon, both fall in love with the beautiful Emily, and how Arcite, victorious in tourney, falls and dies, bequeathing Emily to his rival; how the fine Trojan knight Troilus wins the favor of Cressida, and how Cressida abandons him for Diomedes--these are still tales in verse, tales of love. A little tedious they may be; all the writings of this age, French, or imitated from French, are born of too prodigal minds; but how they glide along! A winding stream, which flows smoothly on level sand, and sparkles now and again in the sun, is the only image we can compare it to. The characters speak too much, but then they speak so well! Even when they dispute we like to listen, their anger and offences are so wholly based on a happy overflow of unbroken converse. Remember Froissart, how slaughters, assassinations, plagues, the butcheries of the Jacquerie, the whole chaos of human misery, disappears in his fine ceaseless humor, so that the furious and grinning figures seem but ornaments and choice embroideries to relieve the skein of shaded and colored silk which forms the groundwork of his narrative! but, in particular, a multitude of descriptions spread their gilding over all. Chaucer leads you among arms, palaces, temples, and halts before each beautiful thing. Here:

"The statue of Venus glorious for to see Was naked fleting in the large see, And fro the navel doun all covered was With wawes grene, and bright as any glas. A citole in hire right hand hadde she, And on hire hed, ful semely for to see, A rose gerlond fressh, and wel smelling, Above hire hed hire doves fleckering."[196]

Further on, the temple of Mars:

"First on the wall was peinted a forest, In which ther wonneth neyther man ne best, With knotty knarry barrein trees old Of stubbes sharpe and hidous to behold; In which ther ran a romble and a swough As though a storme shuld bresten every bough: And dounward from an hill under a bent. Ther stood the temple of Mars armipotent, Wrought all of burned stele, of which th' entree Was longe and streite, and gastly for to see. Aud therout came a rage and swiche a vise, That it made all the gates for to rise. The northern light in at the dore shone, For window on the wall ne was ther none, Thurgh which men mighten any light discerne. The dore was all of athamant eterne, Yclenched overthwart and endelong With yren tough, and for to make it strong, Every piler the temple to sustene Was tonne-gret, of yren bright and shene."[197]

Everywhere on the wall were representations of slaughter; and in the sanctuary

"The statue of Mars upon a carte stood Armed, and loked grim as he were wood,... A wolf ther stood beforne him at his fete With eyen red, and of a man he ete."[198]

Are not these contrasts well designed to rouse the imagination? You will meet in Chaucer a succession of similar pictures. Observe the train of combatants who come to joust in the tilting field for Arcite and Palamon:

"With him ther wenten knightes many on. Som wol ben armed in an habergeon And in a brestplate, and in a gipon; And som wol have a pair of plates large; And som wol have a Pruce sheld, or a targe, Som wol ben armed on his legges wele, And have an axe, and som a mace of stele.... Ther maist thou se coming with Palamon Licurge himself, the grete king of Trace: Blake was his berd, and manly was his face. The cercles of his eyen in his hed They gloweden betwixen yelwe and red, And like a griffon loked he about, With kemped heres on his browes stout; His limmes gret, his braunes hard and stronge, His shouldres brode, his armes round and longe. And as the guise was in his contree, Ful highe upon a char of gold stood he, With foure white bolles in the trais. Instede of cote-armure on his harnais, With nayles yelwe, and bright as any gold, He hadde a beres skin, cole-blake for old. His longe here was kempt behind his bak, As any ravenes fether it shone for blake. A wreth of gold arm-gret, of huge weight, Upon his hed sate ful of stones bright, Of fine rubins and of diamants. About his char ther wenten white alauns, Twenty and mo, as gret as any stere, To hunten at the leon or the dere, And folwed him, with mosel fast ybound, Colered with gold, and torettes filed round. An hundred lordes had he in his route, Armed ful wel, with hertes sterne and stoute. With Arcita, in stories as men find, The gret Emetrius the king of Inde, Upon a stede bay, trapped in stele, Covered with cloth of gold diapred wele, Came riding like the god of armes Mars. His cote-armure was of a cloth of Tars, Couched with perles, white, and round and grete. His sadel was of brent gold new ybete; A mantelet upon his shouldres hanging Bret-ful of rubies red, as fire sparkling. His crispe here like ringes was yronne, And that was yelwe, and glitered as the sonne. His nose was high, his eyen bright citrin, His lippes round, his color was sanguin.... And as a leon he his loking caste. Of five and twenty yere his age I caste. His berd was well begonnen for to spring; His vois was a trompe thondering. Upon his hed he wered of laurer grene A gerlond fresshe and lusty for to sene. Upon his hond he bare for his deduit An egle tame, as any lily whit. An hundred lordes had he with him there, All armed save hir hedes in all hir gere, Ful richely in alle manere things.... About this king ther ran on every part Ful many a tame leon and leopart."[199]

A herald would not describe them better nor more fully. The lords and ladies of the time would recognize here their tourneys and masquerades.

There is something more pleasant than a fine narrative, and that is a collection of fine narratives, especially when the narratives are all of different colorings. Froissart gives us such under the name of Chronicles; Boccaccio still better; after him the lords of the _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_; and, later still, Marguerite of Navarre. What more natural among people who meet, talk and wish to amuse themselves? The manners of the time suggest them; for the habits and tastes of society had begun, and fiction thus conceived only brings into books the conversations which are heard in the hall and by the wayside. Chaucer describes a troop of pilgrims, people of every rank, who are going to Canterbury; a knight, a sergeant of law, an Oxford clerk, a doctor, a miller, a prioress, a monk, who agree to tell a story all round:

"For trewely comfort ne mirthe is non, To riden by the way domb as the ston."

They tell their stories accordingly; and on this slender and flexible thread all the jewels of feudal imagination, real or false, contribute one after another their motley shapes to form a necklace, side by side with noble and chivalrous stories: we have the miracle of an infant whose throat was cut by Jews, the trials of patient Griselda, Canace and marvellous fictions of Oriental fancy, obscene stories of marriage and monks, allegorical or moral tales, the fable of the cock and hen, a list of great unfortunate persons: Lucifer, Adam, Samson, Nebuchadnezzar, Zenobia, Crœsus, Ugolino, Peter of Spain. I leave out some, for I must be brief. Chaucer is like a jeweller with his hands full: pearls and glass beads, sparkling diamonds and common agates, black jet and ruby roses, all that history and imagination had been able to gather and fashion during three centuries in the East, in France, in Wales, in Provence, in Italy, all that had rolled his way, clashed together, broken or polished by the stream of centuries, and by the great jumble of human memory, he holds in his hand, arranges it, composes therefrom a long sparkling ornament, with twenty pendants, a thousand facets, which by its splendor, variety, contrasts, may attract and satisfy the eyes of those most greedy for amusement and novelty.

He does more. The universal outburst of unchecked curiosity demands a more refined enjoyment: reverie and fantasy alone can satisfy it; not profound and thoughtful fantasy as we find it in Shakespeare, nor impassioned and meditative reverie as we find it in Dante, but the reverie and fantasy of the eyes, ears, external senses, which in poetry as in architecture call for singularity, wonders, accepted challenges, victories gained over the rational and probable, and which are satisfied only by what is crowded and dazzling. When we look at a cathedral of that time, we feel a sort of fear. Substance is wanting; the walls are hollowed out to make room for windows, the elaborate work of the porches, the wonderful growth of the slender columns, the thin curvature of arches--everything seems to menace us; support has been withdrawn to give way to ornament. Without external prop or buttress, and artificial aid of iron clamp-work, the building would have crumbled to pieces on the first day; as it is, it undoes itself; we have to maintain on the spot a colony of masons continually to ward off the continual decay. But our sight grows dim in following the wavings and twistings of the endless fretwork; the dazzling rose-window of the portal and the painted glass throw a checkered light on the carved stalls of the choir, the gold-work of the altar, the long array of damascened and glittering copes, the crowd of statues, tier above tier; and amid this violet light, this quivering purple, amid these arrows of gold which pierce the gloom, the entire building is like the tail of a mystical peacock. So most of the poems of the time are barren of foundation; at most a trite morality serves them for mainstay: in short, the poet thought of nothing else than displaying before us a glow of colors and a jumble of forms. They are dreams or visions; there are five or six in Chaucer, and you will meet more on your advance to the Renaissance. But the show is splendid. Chaucer is transported in a dream to a temple of glass,[200] on the walls of which are figured in gold all the legends of Ovid and Vergil, an infinite train of characters and dresses, like that which, on the painted glass in the churches, occupied then the gaze of the faithful. Suddenly a golden eagle, which soars near the sun, and glitters like a carbuncle, descends with the swiftness of lightning, and carries him off in his talons above the stars, dropping him at last before the House of Fame, splendidly built of beryl, with shining windows and lofty turrets, and situated on a high rock of almost inaccessible ice. All the southern side was graven with the names of famous men, but the sun was continuously melting them. On the northern side, the names, better protected, still remained. On the turrets appeared the minstrels and "gestiours," with Orpheus, Arion, and the great harpers, and behind them myriads of musicians, with horns, flutes, bagpipes, and reeds, on which they played, and which filled the air; then all the charmers, magicians, and prophets. He enters, and in a high hall, plated with gold, embossed with pearls, on a throne of carbuncle, he sees a woman seated, a "noble quene," amidst an infinite number of heralds, whose embroidered cloaks bore the arms of the most famous knights in the world, and heard the sounds of instruments, and the celestial melody of Calliope and her sisters. From her throne to the gate was a row of pillars, on which stood the great historians and poets; Josephus on a pillar of lead and iron; Statius on a pillar of iron stained with tiger's blood; Ovid, "Venus's clerk," on a pillar of copper; then, on one higher than the rest, Homer and Livy, Dares the Phrygian, Guido Colonna, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and the other historians of the war of Troy. Must I go on copying this phantasmagoria, in which confused erudition mars picturesque invention, and frequent banter shows signs that the vision is only a planned amusement? The poet and his reader have imagined for half-an-hour decorated halls and bustling crowds; a slender thread of common-sense has ingeniously crept along the transparent golden mist which they amuse themselves with following. That suffices; they are pleased with their fleeting fancies, and ask no more.

Amid this exuberancy of mind, amid these refined cravings, and this insatiate exaltation of imagination and the senses, there was one passion, that of love, which, combining all, was developed in excess, and displayed in miniature the sickly charm, the fundamental and fatal exaggeration, which are the characteristics of the age, and which, later, the Spanish civilization exhibits both in its flower and its decay. Long ago, the courts of love in Provence had established the theory. "Each one who loves," they said, "grows pale at the sight of her whom he loves; each action of the lover ends in the thought of her whom he loves. Love can refuse nothing to love."[201] This search after excessive sensation had ended in the ecstasies and transports of Guido Cavalcanti, and of Dante; and in Languedoc a company of enthusiasts had established themselves, love-penitents, who, in order to prove the violence of their passion, dressed in summer in furs and heavy garments, and in winter in light gauze, and walked thus about the country, so that several of them fell ill and died. Chaucer, in their wake, explained in his verses the craft of love,[202] the Ten Commandments, the twenty statutes of love; and praised his lady, his "daieseye," his "Margarite," his "vermeil rose"; depicted love in ballads, visions, allegories, didactic poems, in a hundred guises. This is chivalrous, lofty love, as it was conceived in the Middle Ages; above all, tender love. Troilus loves Cressida like a troubadour; without Pandarus, her uncle, he would have languished, and ended by dying in silence. He will not reveal the name of her he loves. Pandarus has to tear it from him, perform all the bold actions himself, plan every kind of stratagem. Troilus, however, brave and strong in battle, can but weep before Cressida, ask her pardon, and faint. Cressida, on her side, has every delicate feeling. When Pandarus brings her Troilus's first letter, she begins by refusing it, and is ashamed to open it: she opens it only because she is told the poor knight is about to die. At the first words "all rosy hewed tho woxe she"; and though the letter is respectful, she will not answer it. She yields at last to the importunities of her uncle, and answers Troilus that she will feel for him the affection of a sister. As to Troilus, he trembles all over, grows pale when he sees the messenger return, doubts his happiness, and will not believe the assurance which is given him:

"But right so as these holtes and these hayis That han in winter dead ben and dry, Revesten hem in grene, whan that May is.... Right in that selfe wise, sooth for to sey, Woxe suddainly his herte full of joy."[203]

Slowly, after many troubles, and thanks to the efforts of Pandarus, he obtains her confession; and in this confession what a delightful charm!

"And as the newe abashed nightingale, That stinteth first, whan she beginneth sing, Whan that she heareth any heerdes tale, Or in the hedges any wight stearing, And after siker doeth her voice outring: Right so Creseide, whan that her drede stent, Opened her herte and told him her entent."[204]

He, as soon as he perceived a hope from afar,

"In chaunged voice, right for his very drede, Which voice eke quoke, and thereto his manere, Goodly abasht, and now his hewes rede, Now pale, unto Cresseide his ladie dere, With looke doun cast, and humble iyolden chere, Lo, the alderfirst word that him astart Was twice: 'Mercy, mercy, O my sweet herte!'"[205]

This ardent love breaks out in impassioned accents, in bursts of happiness. Far from being regarded as a fault, it is the source of all virtue. Troilus becomes braver, more generous, more upright, through it; his speech runs now on love and virtue; he scorns all villany; he honors those who possess merit, succors those who are in distress; and Cressida, delighted, repeats all day, with exceeding liveliness, this song, which is like the warbling of a nightingale:

"Whom should I thanken but you, god of love, Of all this blisse, in which to bathe I ginne? And thanked be ye, lorde for that I love, This is the right life that I am inne, To flemen all maner vice and sinne: This doeth me so to vertue for to entende That daie by daie I in my will amende. And who that saieth that for to love is vice,... He either is envious, or right nice, Or is unmightie for his shreudnesse To loven.... But I with all mine herte and all my might, As I have saied, woll love unto my last, My owne dere herte, and all mine owne knight, In whiche mine herte growen is so fast, And his in me, that it shall ever last."[206]

But misfortune comes. Her father Calchas demands her back, and the Trojans decide that they will give her up in exchange for prisoners. At this news she swoons, and Troilus is about to slay himself. Their love at this time seems imperishable; it sports with death, because it constitutes the whole of life. Beyond that better and delicious life which it created, it seems there can be no other:

"But as God would, of swough she abraide, And gan to sighe, and Troilus she cride, And he answerde: 'Lady mine, Creseide, Live ye yet?' and let his swerde doun glide: 'Ye herte mine, that thanked be Cupide,' (Quod she), and therwithal she sore sight, And he began to glade her as he might.

"Took her in armes two and kist her oft, And her to glad, he did al his entent, For which her gost, that flikered aie a loft, Into her wofull herte ayen it went: But at the last, as that her eye glent Aside, anon she gan his sworde aspie, As it lay bare, and gan for feare crie.

"And asked him why had he it out draw, And Troilus anon the cause her told, And how himself therwith he wold have slain, For which Creseide upon him gan behold, And gan him in her armes faste fold, And said: 'O mercy God, lo which a dede! Alas, how nigh we weren bothe dede!'"[207]

At last they are separated, with what vows and what tears! and Troilus, alone in his chamber, murmurs:

"'Where is mine owne lady lefe and dere? Where is her white brest, where is it, where? Where been her armes, and her eyen clere That yesterday this time with me were?'... Nor there nas houre in al the day or night, Whan he was ther as no man might him here, That he ne sayd: 'O lovesome lady bright, How have ye faren sins that ye were there? Welcome ywis mine owne lady dere!'... Fro thence-forth he rideth up and doune, And every thing came him to remembraunce, As he rode forth by the places of the toune, In which he whilom had all his pleasaunce: 'Lo, yonder saw I mine owne lady daunce, And in that temple with her eien clere, Me caught first my right lady dere. And yonder have I herde full lustely My dere herte laugh, and yonder play Saw her ones eke ful blisfully, And yonder ones to me gan she say, "Now, good sweete, love me well I pray." And yonde so goodly gan she me behold, That to the death mine herte is to her hold, And at the corner in the yonder house Herde I mine alderlevest lady dere, So womanly, with voice melodiouse, Singen so wel, so goodly, and so clere, That in my soule yet me thinketh I here The blissful sowne, and in that yonder place, My lady first me toke unto her grace.'"[208]

None has since found more true and tender words. These are the charming "poetic branches" which flourished amid gross ignorance and pompous parades. Human intelligence in the Middle Age had blossomed on that side where it perceived the light.

But mere narrative does not suffice to express his felicity and fancy; the poet must go where "shoures sweet of rain descended soft."

"And every plaine was clothed faire With new greene, and maketh small floures To springen here and there in field and in mede, So very good and wholsome be the shoures, That it renueth that was old and dede, In winter time; and out of every sede Springeth the hearbe, so that every wight Of this season wexeth glad and light.... In which (grove) were okes great, streight as a line, Under, the which the grasse so fresh of hew Was newly sprong, and an eight foot or nine Every tree well fro his fellow grew."

He must forget himself in the vague felicity of the country, and, like Dante, lose himself in ideal light and allegory. The dreams love, to continue true, must not take too visible a form, nor enter into a too consecutive history; they must float in a misty distance; the soul in which they hover can no longer think of the laws of existence; it inhabits another world; it forgets itself in the ravishing emotion which troubles it, and sees its well-loved visions rise, mingle, come and go, as in summer we see the bees on a hill-slope flutter in a haze of light, and circle round and round the flowers.

"One morning,"[209] a lady sings, "at the dawn of day, I entered an oak-grove"

"With branches brode, laden with leves new, That sprongen out ayen the sunne-shene, Some very red, and some a glad light grenc....[210]

"And I, that all this pleasaunt sight sie, Thought sodainly I felt so sweet and aire Of the eglentere, that certainely There is no hert, I deme, in such dispaire, Ne with thoughts froward and contraire, So overlaid, but it should soone have bote, If it had ones felt this savour sote.

"And as I stood, and cast aside mine eie, I was ware of the fairest medler tree That ever yet in all my life I sie, As full of blossomes as it might be; Therein a goldfinch leaping pretile Fro bough to bough; and, as him list, he eet Here and there of buds and floures sweet....

"And as I sat, the birds harkening thus, Methought that I heard voices sodainly, The most sweetest and most delicious That ever any wight, I trow truly, Heard in their life, for the armony And sweet accord was in so good musike, That the voice to angels most was like."[211]

Then she sees arrive "a world of ladies... in surcotes white of velvet... set with emerauds... as of great pearles round and orient, and diamonds fine and rubies red." And all had on their head "a rich fret of gold... full of stately riche stones set," with "a chapelet of branches fresh and grene... some of laurer, some of woodbind, some of agnus castus"; and at the same time came a train of valiant knights in splendid array, with harness of red gold, shining in the sun, and noble steeds, with trappings "of cloth of gold, and furred with ermine." These knights and ladies were the servants of the Leaf, and they sate under a great oak, at the feet of their queen.

From the other side came a bevy of ladies as resplendent as the first, but crowned with fresh flowers. These were the servants of the Flower. They alighted, and began to dance in the meadow. But heavy clouds appeared in the sky, and a storm broke out. They wished to shelter themselves under the oak, but there was no more room; they ensconced themselves as they could in the hedges and among the brushwood; the rain came down and spoiled their garlands, stained their robes, and washed away their ornaments; when the sun returned, they went to ask succor from the queen of the Leaf; she, being merciful, consoled them, repaired the injury of the rain, and restored their original beauty. Then all disappears as in a dream.

The lady was astonished, when suddenly a fair dame appeared and instructed her. She learned that the servants of the Leaf had lived like brave knights, and those of the Flower had loved idleness and pleasure. She promises to serve the Leaf, and came away.

Is this an allegory? There is at least a lack of wit. There is no ingenious enigma; it is dominated by fancy, and the poet thinks only of displaying in quiet verse the fleeting and brilliant train which had amused his mind, and charmed his eyes.

Chaucer himself, on the first of May, rises and goes out into the meadows. Love enters his heart with the balmy air; the landscape is transfigured, and the birds begin to speak:

"There sate I downe among the faire flours, And saw the birds trip out of hir bours, There as they rested them all the night, They were so joyfull of the dayes light, They began of May for to done honours.

"They coud that service all by rote, There was many a lovely note, Some song loud as they had plained, And some in other manner voice yfained And some all out with the ful throte.

"The proyned hem and made hem right gay, And daunceden, and lepten on her spray, And evermore two and two in fere, Right so as they had chosen hem to yere, In Feverere upon saint Valentines day.

"And the river that I sate upon, It made such a noise as it ron, Accordaunt with the birdes armony, Methought it was the best melody That might ben yheard of any mon."[212]

This confused harmony of vague noises troubles the sense; a secret languor enters the soul. The cuckoo throws his monotonous voice like a mournful and tender sigh between the white ash-tree boles; the nightingale makes his triumphant notes roll and ring above the leafy canopy; fancy breaks in unsought, and Chaucer hears them dispute of Love. They sing alternately an antistrophic song, and the nightingale weeps for vexation to hear the cuckoo speak in depreciation of Love. He is consoled, however, by the poet's voice, seeing that he also suffers with him:

"'For love and it hath doe me much wo.' 'Ye use' (quod she) 'this medicine Every day this May or thou dine Go looke upon the fresh daisie, And though thou be for wo in point to die, That shall full greatly lessen thee of thy pine.

"'And looke alway that thou be good and trew, And I wol sing one of the songes new, For love of thee, as loud as I may crie:' And than she began this song full hie, 'I shrewe all hem that been of love untrue.'"[213]

To such exquisite delicacies love, as with Petrarch, had carried poetry; by refinement even, as with Petrarch, it is lost now and then in its wit, conceits, clinches. But a marked characteristic at once separates it from Petrarch. If over-excited, it is also graceful, polished, full of archness, banter, fine sensual gayety, somewhat gossipy, as the French always paint love. Chaucer follows his true masters, and is himself an elegant speaker, facile, ever ready to smile, loving choice pleasures, a disciple of the "Roman de la Rose," and much less Italian than French.[214] The bent of French character makes of love not a passion, but a gay banquet, tastefully arranged, in which the service is elegant, the food exquisite, the silver brilliant, the two guests in full dress, in good humor, quick to anticipate and please each other, knowing how to keep up the gayety, and when to part. In Chaucer, without doubt, this other altogether worldly vein runs side by side with the sentimental element. If Troilus is a weeping lover, Pandarus is a lively rascal, who volunteers for a singular service with amusing urgency, frank immorality, and carries it out carefully, gratuitously, thoroughly. In these pretty attempts Chaucer accompanies him as far as possible, and is not shocked. On the contrary, he makes fun out of it. At the critical moment, with transparent hypocrisy, he shelters himself behind his "author." If you find the particulars free, he says, it is not my fault; "so writen clerks in hir bokes old," and "I mote, aftir min auctour, telle...." Not only is he gay, but he jests throughout the whole tale. He sees clearly through the tricks of feminine modesty; he laughs at it archly, knowing full well what is behind; he seems to be saying, finger on lip: "Hush! let the grand words roll on, you will be edified presently." We are, in fact, edified; so is he, and in the nick of time he goes away, carrying the light: "For ought I can aspies, this light nor I ne serven here of nought. Troilus," says uncle Pandarus, "if ye be wise, sweveneth not now, lest more folke arise." Troilus takes care not to swoon; and Cressida at last, being alone with him, speaks wittily and with prudent delicacy; there is here an exceeding charm, no coarseness. Their happiness covers all, even voluptuousness, with a profusion and perfume of its heavenly roses. At most a slight spice of archness flavors it: "and gode thrift he had full oft." Troilus holds his mistress in his arms: "with worse hap God let us never mete." The poet is almost as well pleased as they: for him, as for the men of his time, the sovereign good is love, not damped, but satisfied; they ended even by thinking such love a merit. The ladies declared in their judgments, that when people love, they can refuse nothing to the beloved. Love has become law; it is inscribed in a code; they combine it with religion; and there is a sacrament of love, in which the birds in their anthems sing matins.[215] Chaucer curses with all his heart the covetous wretches, the business men, who treat is as a madness:

"As would God, tho wretches that despise Service of love had eares al so long As had Mida, ful of covetise,... To teachen hem, that they been in the vice And lovers not, although they hold hem nice, ... God yeve hem mischaunce, And every lover in his trouth avaunce."[216]

He clearly lacks severity, so rare in southern literature. The Italians in the Middle Ages made a virtue of joy; and you perceive that the world of chivalry, as conceived by the French, expanded morality so as to confound it with pleasure.

SECTION IV.--Characteristics of the Canterbury Tales

There are other characteristics still more gay. The true Gallic literature crops up; obscene tales, practical jokes on one's neighbor, not shrouded in the Ciceronian style of Boccaccio, but related lightly by a man in good humor;[217] above all, active roguery, the trick of laughing at your neighbor's expense. Chaucer displays it better than Rutebeuf, and sometimes better than La Fontaine. He does not knock his men down; he pricks them as he passes, not from deep hatred or indignation, but through sheer nimbleness of disposition, and quick sense of the ridiculous; he throws his gibes at them by handfuls. His man of law is more a man of business than of the world:

"No wher so besy a man as he ther n'as, And yet he semed besier than he was."[218]

His three burgesses:

"Everich, for the wisdom that he can Was shapelich for to ben an alderman. For catel hadden they ynough and rent, And eke hir wives wolde it wel assent."[219]

Of the mendicant Friar he says:

"His wallet lay beforne him in his lappe, Bret-ful of pardon come from Rome al hote."[220]

The mockery here comes from the heart, in the French manner, without effort, calculation, or vehemence. It is so pleasant and so natural to banter one's neighbor! Sometimes the lively vein becomes so copious that it furnishes an entire comedy, indelicate certainly, but so free and life-like! Here is the portrait of the Wife of Bath, who has buried five husbands:

"Bold was hire face, and fayre and rede of hew, She was a worthy woman all hire live; Housbondes at the chirche dore had she had five, Withouten other compagnie in youthe.... In all the parish wif ne was ther non, That to the offring before hire shulde gon, And if ther did, certain so wroth was she. That she was out of alle charitee."[221]

What a tongue she has! Impertinent, full of vanity, bold, chattering, unbridled, she silences everybody, and holds forth for an hour before coming to her tale. We hear her grating, high-pitched, loud, clear voice, wherewith she deafened her husbands. She continually harps upon the same ideas, repeats her reasons, piles them up and confounds them, like a stubborn mule who runs along shaking and ringing his bells, so that the stunned listeners remain open-mouthed, wondering that a single tongue can spin out so many words. The subject was worth the trouble. She proves that she did well to marry five husbands, and she proves it clearly, like a woman who knew it, because she had tried it:

"God bad us for to wex and multiplie; That gentil text can I wel understond; Eke wel I wot, he sayd, that min husbond Shuld leve fader and moder, and take to me; But of no noumbre mention made he, Of bigamie or of octogamie; Why shuld men than speke of it vilanie? Lo here the wise king dan Solomon, I trow he hadde wives mo than on, (As wolde God it leful were to me To be refreshed half so oft as he,) Which a gift of God had he for alle his wives?... Blessed be God that I have wedded five. Welcome the sixthe whan that ever he shall.... He (Christ) spake to hem that wold live parfitly, And lordings (by your leve), that am nat I; I wol bestow the flour of all myn age In th' actes and the fruit of mariage.... An husbond wol I have, I wol not lette, Which shal be both my dettour and my thrall, And have his tribulation withall Upon his flesh, while that I am his wif."[222]

Here Chaucer has the freedom of Molière, and we possess it no longer. His good wife justifies marriage in terms just as technical as Sganarelle. It behooves us to turn the pages quickly, and follow in the lump only this Odyssey of marriages. The experienced wife, who has journeyed through life with five husbands, knows the art of taming them, and relates how she persecuted them with jealousy, suspicion, grumbling, quarrels, blows given and received; how the husband, checkmated by the continuity of the tempest, stooped at last, accepted the halter, and turned the domestic mill like a conjugal and resigned ass:

"For as an hors, I coude bite and whine; I coude plain, and I was in the gilt.... I plained first, so was our werre ystint. They were ful glad to excusen hem ful blive Of thing, the which they never agilt hir live.... I swore that all my walking out by night Was for to espien wenches that he dight.... For though the pope had sitten hem beside, I wold not spare hem at hir owen bord.... But certainly I made folk swiche chere, That in his owen grese I made him frie For anger, and for veray jalousie. By God, in erth I was his purgatorie, For which I hope his soule be in glorie."[223]

She saw the fifth first at the burial of the fourth:

"And Jankin oure clerk was on of tho: As helpe me God, whan that I saw him go Aftir the bere, me thought he had a paire Of legges and of feet, so clene and faire, That all my herte I yave unto his hold. He was, I trow, a twenty winter old, And I was fourty, if I shal say soth.... As helpe me God, I was a lusty on, And faire, and riche, and yonge, and well begon."[224]

"Yonge," what a word! Was human delusion ever more happily painted? How life-like is all, and how easy the tone. It is the satire of marriage. You will find it twenty times in Chaucer. Nothing more is wanted to exhaust the two subjects of French mockery than to unite with the satire of marriage the satire of religion.

We find it here; and Rabelais is not more bitter. The monk whom Chaucer paints is a hypocrite, a jolly fellow, who knows good inns and jovial hosts better than the poor and the hospitals:

"A Frere there was, a wanton and a mery... Ful wel beloved, and familier was he With frankeleins over all in his contree, And eke with worthy wimmen of the toun... Full swetely herde he confession, And pleasant was his absolution. He was an esy man to give penance, Ther as he wiste to han a good pitance: For unto a poure ordre for to give Is signe that a man is wel yshrive.... And knew wel the tavernes in every toun, And every hosteler and gay tapstere, Better than a lazar and a beggere.... It is not honest, it may not avance, As for to delen with no swich pouraille, But all with riche and sellers of vitaille.... For many a man so hard is of his herte, He may not wepe, although him sore smerte. Therfore in stede of weping and praieres, Men mote give silver to the poure freres."[225]

This lively irony had an exponent before in Jean de Meung. But Chaucer pushes it further, and gives it life and motion. His monk begs from house to house, holding out his wallet:

"In every hous he gan to pore and prie, And begged mele and chese, or elles corn.... 'Yeve us a bushel whete, or malt, or reye, A Goddes kichel, or a trippe of chese, Or elles what you list, we may not chese; A Goddes halfpeny, or a masse peny; Or yeve us of your braun, if ye have any, A dagon of your blanket, leve dame, Our suster dere (lo here I write your name).'... And whan that he was out at dore, anon, He planed away the names everich on."[226]

He has kept for the end of his circuit, Thomas, one of his most liberal clients. He finds him in bed, and ill; here is excellent fruit to suck and squeeze:

"'God wot,' quod he, 'laboured have I ful sore. And specially for thy salvation, Have I sayd many a precious orison.... I have this day ben at your chirche at messe... And ther I saw our dame, a, wher is she?'"[227]

The dame enters:

"This frere ariseth up ful curtisly, And hire embraceth in his armes narwe, And kisseth hire swete and chirketh as a sparwe."[228]...

Then, in his sweetest and most caressing voice, he compliments her, and says:

"'Thanked be God that you yaf soule and lif, Yet saw I not this day so faire a wif In all the chirche, God so save me.'"[229]

Have we not here already Tartuffe and Elmire? But the monk is with a farmer, and can go to work more quickly and directly. When the compliments ended, he thinks of the substance, and asks the lady to let him talk alone with Thomas. He must inquire after the state of his soul:

"'I wol with Thomas speke a litel throw: Thise curates ben so negligent and slow To gropen tendrely a conscience.... Now, dame,' quod he, 'jeo vous die sanz doute, Have I nat of a capon but the liver, And of your white bred nat but a shiver, And after that a rosted pigges hed (But I ne wolde for me no beest were ded), Than had I with you homly suffisance. I am a man of litel sustenance, My spirit hath his fostring in the Bible. My body is ay so redy and penible To waken, that my stomak is destroied.'"[230]

Poor man, he raises his hands to heaven, and ends with a sigh.

The wife tells him her child died a fortnight before. Straightway he manufactures a miracle; how could he earn his money in any better way? He had a revelation of this death in the "dortour" of the convent; he saw the child carried to paradise; he rose with his brothers, "with many a tere trilling on our cheke," and they sang a _Te Deum_:

"'For, sire and dame, trusteth me right wel, Our orisons ben more effectuel, And more we seen of Cristes secree thinges Than borel folk, although that they be kinges. We live in poverte, and in abstinence, And borel folk in richesse and dispence.... Lazer and Dives liveden diversely, And divers guerdon hadden they therby.'"[231]

Presently he spurts out a whole sermon, in a loathsome style, and with an interest which is plain enough. The sick man, wearied, replies that he has already given half his fortune to all kinds of monks, and yet he continually suffers. Listen to the grieved exclamation, the true indignation of the mendicant monk, who sees himself threatened by the competition of a brother of the cloth to share his client, his revenue, his booty, his food-supplies:

"The frere answered: 'O Thomas, dost thou so? What nedeth you diverse freres to seche? What nedeth him that hath a parfit leche, To sechen other leches in the toun? Your inconstance is your confusion. Hold ye than me, or elles our covent, To pray for you ben insufficient? Thomas, that jape n' is not worth a mite, Your maladie is for we han to lite.'"[232]

Recognize the great orator; he employs even the grand style to keep the supplies from being cut off:

"'A, yeve that covent half a quarter otes; And yeve that covent four and twenty grotes; And yeve that frere a peny, and let him go: Nay, nay, Thomas, it may no thing be so. What is a ferthing worth parted on twelve? Lo, eche thing that is oned in himself Is more strong, than whan it is yscatered... Thou woldest han our labour al for nought.'"[233]

Then he begins again his sermon in a louder tone, shouting at each word, quoting examples from Seneca and the classics, a terrible fluency, a trick of his trade, which, diligently applied, must draw money from the patient. He asks for gold, "to make our cloistre,"

"... 'And yet, God wot, uneth the fundament Parfourmed is, ne of our pavement N' is not a tile yet within our wones; By God, we owen fourty pound for stones. Now help Thomas, for him that harwed helle, For elles mote we oure bokes selle, And if ye lacke oure predication, Than goth this world all to destruction. For who so fro this world wold us bereve, So God me save, Thomas, by your leve, He wold bereve out of this world the sonne.'"[234]

In the end, Thomas in a rage promises him a gift, tells him to put his hand in the bed and take it, and sends him away duped, mocked, and covered with filth.

We have descended now to popular farce; when amusement must be had at any price, it is sought, as here, in broad jokes, even in filthiness. We can see how these two coarse and vigorous plants have blossomed in the dung of the Middle Ages. Planted by the sly fellows of Champagne and Ile-de-France, watered by the _trouvères_, they were destined fully to expand, speckled and ruddy, in the large hands of Rabelais. Meanwhile Chaucer plucks his nosegay from it. Deceived husbands, mishaps in inns, accidents in bed, cuffs, kicks, and robberies, these suffice to raise a loud laugh. Side by side with noble pictures of chivalry, he gives us a train of Flemish grotesque figures, carpenters, joiners, friars, summoners; blows abound, fists descend on fleshy backs; many nudities are shown; they swindle one another out of their corn, their wives; they pitch one another out of a window; they brawl and quarrel. A bruise, a piece of open filthiness, passes in such society for a sign of wit. The summoner, being rallied by the friar, gives him tit for tat:

"'This Frere bosteth that he knoweth helle, And, God it wot, that is but litel wonder, Freres and fendes ben but litel asonder. For parde, ye han often time herd telle How that a Frere ravished was to helle In spirit ones by a visoun, And as an angel lad him up and doun, To shewen him the peines that ther were,... And unto Sathanas he lad him doun. (And now hath Sathanas,' saith he, 'a tayl Broder than of a Carrike is the sayl.) Hold up thy tayl, thou Sathanas, quod he, ....... and let the Frere see Wher is the nest of Freres in this place. And er than half a furlong way of space, Right so as bees out swarmen of an hive, Out of the devils... ther gonnen to drive. A twenty thousand Freres on a route, And thurghout hell they swarmed all aboute, And com agen, as fast as they may gon.'"[235]

Such were the coarse buffooneries of the popular imagination.

SECTION V.--The Art of Chaucer

It is high time to return to Chaucer himself. Beyond the two notable characteristics which settle his place in his age and school of poetry, there are others which take him out of his age and school. If he was romantic and gay like the rest, it was after a fashion of his own. He observes characters, notes their differences, studies the coherence of their parts, endeavors to describe living individualities--a thing unheard of in his time, but which the renovators in the sixteenth century, and first among them Shakespeare, will do afterwards. Is it already the English positive common-sense and aptitude for seeing the inside of things which begins to appear? A new spirit, almost manly, pierces through, in literature as in painting, with Chaucer as with Van Eyck, with both at the same time; no longer the childish imitation of chivalrous life[236] or monastic devotion, but the grave spirit of inquiry and craving for deep truths, whereby art becomes complete. For the first time, in Chaucer as in Van Eyck, the character described stands out in relief; its parts are connected; it is no longer an unsubstantial phantom. You may guess its past and foretell its future action. Its externals manifest the personal and incommunicable details of its inner nature, and the infinite complexity of its economy and motion. To this day, after four centuries, that character is individualjzed and typical; it remains distinct in our memory, like the creations of Shakespeare and Rubens. We observe this growth in the very act. Not only does Chaucer, like Boccaccio, bind his tales into a single history; but in addition--and this is wanting in Boccaccio--he begins with the portrait of all his narrators, knight, summoner, man of law, monk, bailiff or reeve, host, about thirty distinct figures, of every sex, condition, age, each painted with his disposition, face, costume, turns of speech, little significant actions, habits, antecedents, each maintained in his character by his talk and subsequent actions, so that we can discern here, sooner than in any other nation, the germ of the domestic novel as we write it to-day. Think of the portraits of the franklin, the miller, the mendicant friar, and wife of Bath. There are plenty of others which show the broad brutalities, the coarse, tricks, and the pleasantries of vulgar life, as well as the gross and plentiful feastings of sensual life. Here and there honest old swashbucklers, who double their fists, and tuck up their sleeves; or contented beadles, who, when they have drunk, will speak nothing but Latin. But by the side of these there are some choice characters; the knight, who went on a crusade to Granada and Prussia, brave and courteous:

"And though that he was worthy he was wise, And of his port as meke as is a mayde. He never yet no vilanie ne sayde In alle his lif, unto no manere wight, He was a veray parfit gentil knight."[237]

"With him, ther was his sone, a yonge Squier, A lover, and a lusty bacheler, With lockes crull as they were laide in presse. Of twenty yere of age he was I gesse. Of his stature he was of even lengthe, And wonderly deliver, and grete of strengthe. And he hadde be somtime in chevachie, In Flaundres, in Artois, and in Picardie, And borne him wel, as of so litel space, In hope to stonden in his ladies grace. Embrouded was he, as it were a mede Alle ful of fresshe floures, white and rede. Singing he was, or floyting alle the day, He was as fresshe, as is the moneth of May. Short was his goune, with sieves long and wide. Wel coude he sitte on hors, and fayre ride. He coude songes make, and wel endite, Juste and eke dance, and wel pourtraie and write. So hote he loved, that by nightertale He slep no more than doth the nightingale. Curteis he was, lowly and servisable, And carf befor his fader at the table."[238]

There is also a poor and learned clerk of Oxford; and finer still, and more worthy of a modern hand, the Prioress, "Madame Eglantine," who as a nun, a maiden, a great lady, is ceremonious, and shows signs of exquisite taste. Would a better be found nowadays in a German chapter, amid the most modest and lively bevy of sentimental and literary canonesses?

"Ther was also a Nonne, a Prioresse, That of hire smiling was ful simple and coy Hire gretest othe n'as but by Seint Eloy; And she was cleped Madame Eglentine. Ful wel she sange the service devine, Entuned in hire nose ful swetely; And Frenche she spake ful fayre and fetisly After the scole of Stratford-atte-bowe, For Frenche of Paris was to hire unknowe. At mete was she wel ytaughte withalle; So lette no morsel from hire lippes falle, No wette hire fingres in hire sauce depe. Wel coude she carie a morsel, and wel kepe, Thatte no drope ne fell upon hire brest. In curtesie was sette ful moche hire lest. Hire over lippe wiped she so clene, That in hire cuppe was no ferthing sene Of grese, whan she dronken hadde hire draught, Ful semely after hire mete she raught. And sikerly she was of grete disport And ful plesant, and amiable of port, And peined hire to contrefeten chere Of court, and ben estatelich of manere, And to ben holden digne of reverence."[239]

Are you offended by these provincial affectations? Not at all; it is delightful to behold these nice and pretty ways, these little affectations, the waggery and prudery, the half-worldly, half-monastic smile. We inhale a delicate feminine perfume, preserved and grown old under the stomacher:

"But for to speken of hire conscience, She was so charitable and so pitous, She wolde wepe if that she saw a mous Caughte in a trappe, if it were ded or bledde. Of smale houndes hadde she, that she fedde With rosted flesh, and milk, and wastel brede. But sore wept she if on of hem were dede, Or if men smote it with a yerde smert: And all was conscience and tendre herte."[240]

Many elderly ladies throw themselves into such affections as these for lack of others. Elderly! what an objectionable word have I employed! She was not elderly:

"Ful semely hire wimple ypinched was, Hire nose tretis; hire eyen grey as glas; Hire mouth ful smale, and therto soft and red; But sikerly she hadde a fayre forehed. It was almost a spanne brode I trowe; For hardily she was not undergrowe. Ful fetise was hire cloke, as I was ware. Of small corall aboute hire arm she bare A pair of bedes, gauded al with grene; And thereon heng a broche of gold ful shene, On whiche was first ywritten a crouned A, And after, Amor vincit omnia."[241]

A pretty ambiguous device, suitable either for gallantry or devotion; the lady was both of the world and the cloister: of the world, you may see it in her dress; of the cloister, you gather it from "another Nonne also with hire hadde she, that was hire chapelleine, and Preestes thre"; from the Ave Maria which she sings, the long edifying stories which she relates. She is like a fresh, sweet, and ruddy cherry, made to ripen in the sun, but which, preserved in an ecclesiastical jar, has become candied and insipid in the syrup.

Such is the power of reflection which begins to dawn, such the high art. Chaucer studies here, rather than aims at amusement; he ceases to gossip, and thinks; instead of surrendering himself to the facility of flowing improvisation, he plans. Each tale is suited to the teller; the young squire relates a fantastic and Oriental history; the tipsy miller a loose and comical story; the honest clerk the touching legend of Griselda. All these tales are bound together, and that much better than by Boccaccio, by little veritable incidents, which spring from the characters of the personages, and such as we light upon in our travels. The horsemen ride on in good humor, in the sunshine, in the open country; they converse. The miller has drunk too much ale, and will speak, "and for no man forbere." The cook goes to sleep on his beast, and they play practical jokes on him. The monk and the summoner getup a dispute about their respective lines of business. The host restores peace, makes them speak or be silent, like a man who has long presided in the inn parlor, and who has often had to check brawlers. They pass judgment on the stories they listen to: declaring that there are few Griseldas in the world; laughing at the misadventures of the tricked carpenter; drawing a lesson from the moral tale. The poem is no longer, as in the contemporary literature, a mere procession, but a painting in which the contrasts are arranged, the attitudes chosen, the general effect calculated, so that it becomes life and motion; we forget ourselves at the sight, as in the case of every lifelike work; and we long to get on horseback on a fine sunny morning, and canter along green meadows with the pilgrims to the shrine of the good saint of Canterbury.

Weigh the value of the words "general effect." According as we plan it or not, we enter on our maturity or infancy! The whole future lies in these two words. Savages or half savages, warriors of the Heptarchy or knights of the Middle Ages; up to this period, no one had reached to this point. They had strong emotions, tender at times, and each expressed them according to the original gift of his race, some by short cries, others by continuous babble. But they did not command or guide their impressions; they sang or conversed by impulse, at random, according to the bent of their disposition, leaving their ideas to present themselves as they might, and when they hit upon order, it was ignorantly and involuntarily. Here for the first time appears a superiority of intellect, which at the instant of conception suddenly halts, rises above itself, passes judgment, and says to itself, "This phrase tells the same thing as the last--remove it; these two ideas are disjointed—connect them; this description is feeble--reconsider it." When a man can speak thus he has an idea, not learned in the schools, but personal and practical, of the human mind, its process and needs, and of things also, their composition and combinations; he has a style, that is, he is capable of making everything understood and seen by the human mind. He can extract from every object, landscape, situation, character, the special and significant marks, so as to group and arrange them, in order to compose an artificial work which surpasses the natural work in its purity and completeness. He is capable, as Chaucer was, of seeking out in the old common forest of the Middle Ages, stories and legends, to replant them in his own soil, and make them send out new shoots. He has the right and the power, as Chaucer had, of copying and translating, because by dint of retouching he impresses on his translations and copies his original mark; he re-creates what he imitates, because through or by the side of worn-out fancies and monotonous stories, he can display, as Chaucer did, the charming ideas of an amiable and elastic mind, the thirty master-forms of the fourteenth century, the splendid freshness of the verdurous landscape and spring-time of England. He is not far from conceiving an idea of truth and life. He is on the brink of independent thought and fertile discovery. This was Chaucer's position. At the distance of a century and a half, he has affinity with the poets of Elizabeth[242] by his gallery of pictures, and with the reformers of the sixteenth century by his portrait of the good parson.

Affinity merely. He advanced a few steps beyond the threshold of his art, but he paused at the end of the vestibule. He half opens the great door of the temple, but does not take his seat there; at most, he sat down in it only at intervals. In "Arcite and Palamon," in "Troilus and Cressida," he sketches sentiments, but does not create characters; he easily and naturally traces the winding course of events and conversations, but does not mark the precise outline of a striking figure. If occasionally, as in the description of the temple of Mars, after the "Thebaid" of Statius, feeling at his back the glowing breeze of poetry, he draws out his feet, clogged with the mud of the Middle Ages, and at a bound stands upon the poetic plain on which Statius imitated Vergil and equalled Lucan, he, at other times, again falls back into the childish gossip of the _trouvères_, or the dull gabble of learned clerks--to "Dan Phebus or Apollo-Delphicus." Elsewhere, a commonplace remark on art intrudes in the midst of an impassioned description. He uses three thousand verses to conduct Troilus to his first interview. He is like a precocious and poetical child, who mingles in his love-dreams quotations from his grammar and recollections of his alphabet.[243] Even in the "Canterbury Tales" he repeats himself, unfolds artless developments, forgets to concentrate his passion or his idea. He begins a jest, and scarcely ends it. He dilutes a bright coloring in a monotonous stanza. His voice is like that of a boy breaking into manhood. At first a manly and firm accent is maintained, then a shrill sweet sound shows that his growth is not finished, and that his strength is subject to weakness. Chaucer sets out as if to quit the Middle Ages; but in the end he is there still. To-day he composes the "Canterbury Tales"; yesterday he was translating the "Roman de la Rose." To-day he is studying the complicated machinery of the heart, discovering the issues of primitive education or of the ruling disposition, and creating the comedy of manners; to-morrow he will have no pleasure but in curious events, smooth allegories, amorous discussions, imitated from the French, or learned moralities from the ancients. Alternately he is an observer and a _trouvère_; instead of the step he ought to have advanced, he has but made a half-step.

Who has prevented him, and the others who surround him? We meet with the obstacle in the tales he has translated of Melibeus, of the Parson, in his "Testament of Love" in short, so long as he writes verse, he is at his ease; as soon as he takes to prose, a sort of chain winds around his feet and stops him. His imagination is free, and his reasoning a slave. The rigid scholastic divisions, the mechanical manner of arguing and replying, the ergo, the Latin quotations, the authority of Aristotle and the Fathers, come and weigh down his budding thought. His native invention disappears under the discipline imposed. The servitude is so heavy that even in the work of one of his contemporaries, the "Testament of Love," which, for a long time, was believed to be written by Chaucer, amid the most touching plaints and the most smarting pains, the beautiful ideal lady, the heavenly mediator who appears in a vision, Love, sets her theses, establishes that the cause of a cause is the cause of the thing caused, and reasons as pedantically as they would at Oxford. In what can talent, even feeling, end, when it is kept down by such shackles? What succession of original truths and new doctrines could be found and proved, when in a moral tale, like that of Melibeus and his wife Prudence, it was thought necessary to establish a formal controversy, to quote Seneca and Job, to forbid tears, to bring forward the weeping Christ to authorize tears, to enumerate every proof, to call in Solomon, Cassiodorus, and Cato; in short, to write a book for schools? The public cares only for pleasant and lively thoughts; not serious and general ideas; these latter are for a special class only. As soon as Chaucer gets into a reflective mood, straightway Saint Thomas, Peter Lombard, the manual of sins, the treatise on definition and syllogism, the army of the ancients and of the Fathers, descend from their glory, enter his brain, speak in his stead; and the _trouvère's_ pleasant voice becomes the dogmatic and sleep-inspiring voice of a doctor. In love and satire he has experience, and he invents; in what regards morality and philosophy he has learning, and copies. For an instant, by a solitary leap, he entered upon the close observation, and the genuine study of man; he could not keep his ground, he did not take his seat, he took a poetic excursion; and no one followed him. The level of the century is lower; he is on it himself for the most part. He is in the company of narrators like Froissart, of elegant speakers like Charles of Orléans, of gossipy and barren verse-writers like Gower, Lydgate, and Occleve. There is no fruit, but frail and fleeting blossoms, many useless branches, still more dying or dead branches; such is this literature. And why? Because it had no longer a root; after three centuries of effort, a heavy instrument cut it underground. This instrument was the Scholastic Philosophy.

SECTION VI.--Scholastic Philosophy

Beneath every literature there is a philosophy. Beneath, every work of art is an idea of nature and of life; this idea leads the poet. Whether the author knows it or not, he writes in order to exhibit it; and the characters which he fashions, like the events which he arranges, only serve to bring to light the dim creative conception which raises and combines them. Underlying Homer appears the noble life of heroic paganism and of happy Greece. Underlying Dante, the sad and violent life of fanatical Catholicism and of the much-hating Italians. From either we might draw a theory of man and of the beautiful. It is so with others; and this is how, according to the variations, the birth, blossoms, decline, or sluggishness of the master-idea, literature varies, is born, flourishes, degenerates, comes to an end. Whoever plants the one, plants the other: whoever undermines the one, undermines the other. Place in all the minds of any age a new grand idea of nature and life, so that they feel and produce it with their whole heart and strength, and you will see them, seized with the craving to express it, invent forms of art and groups of figures. Take away from these minds every grand new idea of nature and life, and you will see them, deprived of the craving to express all-important thoughts, copy, sink into silence, or rave.

What has become of all these all-important thoughts? What labor worked them out? What studies nourished them? The laborers did not lack zeal. In the twelfth century the energy of their minds was admirable. At Oxford there were thirty thousand scholars. No building in Paris could contain the crowd of Abelard's disciples; when he retired to solitude, they accompanied him in such a multitude that the desert became a town. No difficulty repulsed them. There is a story of a young boy, who, though beaten by his master, was wholly bent on remaining with him, that he might still learn. When the terrible encyclopædia of Aristotle was introduced, though disfigured and unintelligible it was devoured. The only question presented to them, that of universals, so abstract and dry, so embarrassed by Arabic obscurities and Greek subtitles, during centuries, was seized upon eagerly. Heavy and awkward as was the instrument supplied to them, I mean syllogism, they made themselves masters of it, rendered it still more heavy, plunged it into every object and in every direction. They constructed monstrous books, in great numbers, cathedrals of syllogism, of unheard-of architecture, of prodigious finish, heightened in effect by intensity of intellectual power, which the whole sum of human labor has only twice been able to match.[244] These young and valiant minds thought they had found the temple of truth; they rushed at it headlong, in legions, breaking in the doors, clambering over the walls, leaping into the interior, and so found themselves at the bottom of a moat. Three centuries of labor at the bottom of this black moat added not one idea to the human mind.

For consider the questions which they treat of. They seem to be marching, but are merely marking time. People would say, to see them moil and toil, that they will educe from heart and brain some great original creed, and yet all belief was imposed upon them from the outset. The system was made; they could only arrange and comment upon it. The conception comes not from them, but from Constantinople. Infinitely complicated and subtle as it is, the supreme work of Oriental mysticism and Greek metaphysics, so disproportioned to their young understanding, they exhaust themselves to reproduce it, and moreover burden their unpractised hands with the weight of a logical instrument which Aristotle created for theory and not for practice, and which ought to have remained in a cabinet of philosophical curiosities, without being ever carried into the field of action. "Whether the divine essence engendered the Son, or was engendered by the Father; why the three persons together are not greater than one alone; attributes determine persons, not substance, that is, nature; how properties can exist in the nature of God, and not determine it; if created spirits are local and can be circumscribed; if God can know more things than He is aware of";[245]--these are the ideas which they moot: what truth could issue thence? From hand to hand the chimera grows, and spreads wider its gloomy wings. "Can God cause that, the place and body being retained, the body shall have no position, that is, existence in place?--Whether the impossibility of being engendered is a constituent property of the First Person of the Trinity--Whether identity, similitude, and equality are real relations in God."[246] Duns Scotus distinguishes three kinds of matter: matter which is firstly first, secondly first, thirdly first. According to him, we must clear this triple hedge of thorny abstractions in order to understand the production of a sphere of brass. Under such a regimen, imbecility soon makes its appearance. Saint Thomas himself considers, "whether the body of Christ arose with its wounds--whether this body moves with the motion of the host and the chalice in consecration--whether at the first instant of conception Christ had the use of free judgment--whether Christ was slain by himself or by another?" Do you think you are at the limits of human folly? Listen. He considers "whether the dove in which the Holy Spirit appeared was a real animal--whether a glorified body can occupy one and the same place at the same time as another glorified body--whether in the state of innocence all children were masculine?" I pass over others as to the digestion of Christ, and some still more untranslatable.[247] This is the point reached by the most esteemed doctor, the most judicious mind, the Bossuet of the Middle Ages. Even in this ring of inanities the answers are laid down. Roscellinus and Abelard were excommunicated, exiled, imprisoned, because they swerved from it. There is a complete minute dogma which closes all issues; there is no means of escaping; after a hundred wriggles and a hundred efforts you must come and tumble into a formula. If by mysticism you try to fly over their heads, if by experience you endeavor to creep beneath, powerful talons await you at your exit. The wise man passes for a magician, the enlightened man for a heretic. The Waldenses, the Catharists, the disciples of John of Parma, were burned; Roger Bacon died only just in time, otherwise he might have been burned. Under this constraint men ceased to think; for he who speaks of thought, speaks of an effort at invention, an individual creation, an energetic action. They recite a lesson, or sing a catechism; even in paradise, even in ecstasy and the divinest raptures of love, Dante thinks himself bound to show an exact memory and a scholastic orthodoxy. How then with the rest? Some, like Raymond Lully, set about inventing an instrument of reasoning to serve in place of the understanding. About the fourteenth century, under the blows of Occam, this verbal science began to totter; they saw that its entities were only words; it was discredited. In 1367, at Oxford, of thirty thousand students, there remained six thousand;[248] they still set their "Barbara and Felapton," but only in the way of routine. Each one in turn mechanically traversed the petty region of threadbare cavils, scratched himself in the briers of quibbles, and burdened himself with his bundle of texts; nothing more. The vast body of science which was to have formed and vivified the whole thought of man, was reduced to a text-book.

So, little by little, the conception which fertilized and ruled all others, dried up; the deep spring, whence flowed all poetic streams, was found empty; science furnished nothing more to the world. What further works could the world produce? As Spain, later on, renewing the Middle Ages, after having shone splendidly and foolishly by her chivalry and devotion, by Lope de Vega and Calderon, Loyola and St. Theresa, became enervated through the Inquisition and through casuistry, and ended by sinking into a brutish silence; so the Middle Ages, outstripping Spain, after displaying the senseless heroism of the Crusades, and the poetical ecstasy of the cloister, after producing chivalry and saintship, Francis of Assisi, St. Louis, and Dante, languished under the Inquisition and the scholastic learning, and became extinguished in idle raving and inanity.

Must we quote all these good people who speak without having anything to say? You may find them in Warton;[249] dozens of translators, importing the poverties of French literature, and imitating imitations; rhyming chroniclers, most commonplace of men, whom we only read because we must accept history from every quarter, even from imbeciles; spinners and spinsters of didactic poems, who pile up verses on the training of falcons, on heraldry, on chemistry; editors of moralities, who invent the same dream over again for the hundredth time, and get themselves taught universal history by the goddess Sapience. Like the writers of the Latin decadence, these folk only think of copying, compiling, abridging, constructing in text-books, in rhymed memoranda, the encyclopædia of their times.

Listen to the most illustrious, the grave Gower--"morall Gower," as he was called![250] Doubtless here and there he contains a remnant of brilliancy and grace. He is like an old secretary of a Court of Love, André le Chapelain or any other, who would pass the day in solemnly registering the sentences of ladies, and in the evening, partly asleep on his desk, would see in a half-dream their sweet smile and their beautiful eyes.[251] The ingenious but exhausted vein of Charles of Orléans still flows in his French ballads. He has the same fondling delicacy, almost a little affected. The poor little poetic spring flows yet in thin, transparent streamlets over the smooth pebbles, and murmurs with a babble, pretty, but so low that at times you cannot hear it. But dull is the rest! His great poem, "Confessio Amantis," is a dialogue between a lover and his confessor, imitated chiefly from Jean de Meung, having for object, like the "Roman de la Rose," to explain and classify the impediments of love. The superannuated theme is always reappearing, covered by a crude erudition. You will find here an exposition of hermetic science, lectures on the philosophy of Aristotle, a treatise on politics, a litany of ancient and modern legends gleaned from the compilers, marred in the passage by the pedantry of the schools and the ignorance of the age. It is a cartload of scholastic rubbish; the sewer tumbles upon this feeble spirit, which of itself was flowing clearly, but now, obstructed by tiles, bricks, plaster, ruins from all quarters of the globe, drags on darkened and sluggish. Gower, one of the most learned of his time,[252] supposed that Latin was invented by the old prophetess Carmentis; that the grammarians, Aristarchus, Donatus, and Didymus, regulated its syntax, pronunciation, and prosody; that it was adorned by Cicero with the flowers of eloquence and rhetoric; then enriched by translations from the Arabic, Chaldæan, and Greek; and that at last, after much labor of celebrated writers, it attained its final perfection in Ovid, the poet of love. Elsewhere he discovered that Ulysses learned rhetoric from Cicero, magic from Zoroaster, astronomy from Ptolemy, and philosophy from Plato. And what a style! so long, so dull,[253] so drawn out by repetitions, the most minute details, garnished with references to his text, like a man who, with his eyes glued to his Aristotle and his Ovid, a slave of his musty parchments, can do nothing but copy and string his rhymes together. Schoolboys even in old age, they seem to believe that every truth, all wit, is their great wood-bound books; that they have no need to find out and invent for themselves; that their whole business is to repeat; that this is, in fact, man's business. The scholastic system had enthroned the dead letter, and peopled the world with dead understandings.

After Gower come Occleve and Lydgate.[254] "My father Chaucer would willingly have taught me," says Occleve, "but I was dull, and learned little or nothing." He paraphrased in verse a treatise of Egidius, on government; these are moralities. There are others, on compassion, after Augustine, and on the art of dying; then love-tales; a letter from Cupid, dated from his court in the month of May. Love and moralities,[255] that is, abstractions and affectation, were the taste of the time; and so, in the time of Lebrun, of Esménard, at the close of contemporaneous French literature,[256] they produced collections of didactic poems, and odes to Chloris. As for the monk Lydgate, he had some talent, some imagination, especially in high-toned descriptions: it was the last flicker of a dying literature; gold received a golden coating, precious stones were placed upon diamonds, ornaments multiplied and made fantastic; as in their dress and buildings, so in their style.[257] Look at the costumes of Henry IV and Henry V, monstrous heart-shaped or horn-shaped head-dresses, long sleeves covered with ridiculous designs, the plumes, and again the oratories, armorial tombs, little gaudy chapels, like conspicuous flowers under the naves of the Gothic perpendicular. When we can no more speak to the soul, we try to speak to the eyes. This is what Lydgate does, nothing more. Pageants or shows are required of him, "disguisings" for the company of goldsmiths; a mask before the king, a May entertainment for the sheriffs of London, a drama of the creation for the festival of Corpus Christi, a masquerade, a Christmas show; he gives the plan and furnishes the verses. In this matter he never runs dry; two hundred and fifty-one poems are attributed to him. Poetry thus conceived becomes a manufacture; it is composed by the yard. Such was the judgment of the Abbot of St. Albans, who, having got him to translate a legend in verse, pays a hundred shillings for the whole, verse, writing, and illuminations, placing the three works on a level. In fact, no more thought was required for the one than for the others. His three great works, "The Fall of Princes, The Destruction of Troy," and "The Siege of Thebes," are only translations or paraphrases, verbose, erudite, descriptive, a kind of chivalrous processions, colored for the twentieth time, in the same manner, on the same vellum. The only point which rises above the average, at least in the first poem, is the idea of Fortune,[258] and the violent vicissitudes of human life. If there was a philosophy at this time, this was it. They willingly narrated horrible and tragic histories; gather them from antiquity down to their own day; they were far from the trusting and passionate piety which felt the hand of God in the government of the world; they saw that the world went blundering here and there like a drunken man. A sad and gloomy world, amused by eternal pleasures, oppressed with a dull misery, which suffered and feared without consolation or hope, isolated between the ancient spirit in which it had no living hope, and the modern spirit whose active science it ignored. Fortune, like a black smoke, hovers over all, and shuts out the sight of heaven. They picture it as follows:

"Her face semyng cruel and terrible And by disdaynè menacing of loke,... An hundred handes she had, of eche part... Some of her handes lyft up men alofte, To hye estate of worldlye dignitè; Another hande griped ful unsofte, Which cast another in grete adversite."[259]

They look upon the great unhappy ones, a captive king, a dethroned queen, assassinated princes, noble cities destroyed,[260] lamentable spectacles as exhibited in Germany and France, and of which there will be plenty in England; and they can only regard them with a harsh resignation. Lydgate ends by reciting a commonplace of mechanical piety, by way of consolation. The reader makes the sign of the cross, yawns, and goes away. In fact, poetry and religion are no longer capable of suggesting a genuine sentiment. Authors copy, and copy again. Hawes[261] copies the "House of Fame" of Chaucer, and a sort of allegorical amorous poem, after the "Roman de la Rose." Barclay[262] translates the "Mirror of Good Manners" and the "Ship of Fools." Continually we meet with dull abstractions, used up and barren; it is the scholastic phase of poetry. If anywhere there is an accent of greater originality, it is in this "Ship of Fools," and in Lydgate's "Dance of Death," bitter buffooneries, sad gayeties, which, in the hands of artists and poets, were having their run throughout Europe. They mock at each other, grotesquely and gloomily; poor, dull, and vulgar figures, shut up in a ship, or made to dance on their tomb to the sound of a fiddle, played by a grinning skeleton. At the end of all this mouldy talk, and amid the disgust which they have conceived for each other, a clown, a tavern Triboulet,[263] composer of little jeering and macaronic verses, Skelton[264] makes his appearance, a virulent pamphleteer, who, jumbling together French, English, Latin phrases, with slang, and fashionable words, invented words, intermingled with short rhymes, fabricates a sort of literary mud, with which he bespatters Wolsey and the bishops. Style, metre, rhyme, language, art of every kind, is at an end; beneath the vain parade of official style there is only a heap of rubbish. Yet, as he says,

"Though my rhyme be ragged, Tattered and gagged, Rudely rain-beaten, Rusty, moth-eaten, Yf ye take welle therewithe, It hath in it some pithe."

It is full of political animus, sensual liveliness, English and popular instincts; it lives. It is a coarse life, still elementary, swarming with ignoble vermin, like that which appears in a great decomposing body. It is life, nevertheless, with its two great features which it is destined to display: the hatred of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, which is the Reformation; the return to the senses and to natural life, which is the Renaissance.

[Footnote 193: Born between 1328 and 1345, died in 1400.]

[Footnote 194: Renan, "De l'Art au Moyen Age."]

[Footnote 195: See Froissart, his life with the Count of Foix and with King Richard II.]

[Footnote 196: "Knight's Tale," II. p. 59, lines 1957-1964.]

[Footnote 197: "Knight's Tale," II. p. 59, lines 1977-1996.]

[Footnote 198: Ibid., p. 61, lines 2043-2050.]

[Footnote 199: "Knight's Tale," II. p. 63, lines 2120-2188.]

[Footnote 200: The House of Fame.]

[Footnote 201: André le Chapelain, 1170.]

[Footnote 202: Also the "Court of Love," and perhaps "The Assemble of Ladies" and "La Belle Dame sans Merci."]

[Footnote 203: "Troilus and Cressida," vol, V. bk. 3, p. 12.]

[Footnote 204: "Troilus and Cressida," vol. V. bk. 3, p. 40.]

[Footnote 205: Ibid. p. 4.]

[Footnote 206: "Troilus and Cressida," vol. IV. bk. 2, p. 292.]

[Footnote 207: Ibid. vol. V. bk. 4, p. 97.]

[Footnote 208: "Troilus and Cressida," vol. V. bk. 5, p. 119 et passim.]

[Footnote 209: "The Flower and the Leaf," VI. p. 244, lines 6-32.]

[Footnote 210: Ibid. p. 245, line 33.]

[Footnote 211: Ibid. VI. p. 246, lines 78-133.]

[Footnote 212: "The Cuckow and Nightingale," VI. p. 121, lines 67-85.]

[Footnote 213: Ibid. p. 126, lines 230-241.]

[Footnote 214: Stendhal, "On Love: the difference of Love-taste and Love-passion."]

[Footnote 215: "The Court of Love," about 1353, et seq. See also the "Testament of Love."]

[Footnote 216: "Troilus and Cressida," vol. V. III. pp. 44, 45.]

[Footnote 217: The story of the pear-tree (Merchant's Tale), and of the cradle (Reeve's Tale), for instance, in the "Canterbury Tales."]

[Footnote 218: "Canterbury Tales" prologue, p. 10, line 323.]

[Footnote 219: Ibid. p. 12, line 373.]

[Footnote 220: "Canterbury Tales," prologue, p. 21, line 688.]

[Footnote 221: Ibid. II. prologue, p. 14, line 460.]

[Footnote 222: "Canterbury Tales," ii., Wife of Bath's Prologue, p. 168, lines 5610-5739.]

[Footnote 223: Ibid. p. 179, lines 5968-6072.]

[Footnote 224: "Canterbury Tales," ii., Wife of Bath's Prologue, p. 185, lines 6177-6188.]

[Footnote 225: Ibid, prologue, II. p. 7, line 208 et passim.]

[Footnote 226: "Canterbury Tales," The Sompnoures Tale, II. p. 220, lines 7319-7340.]

[Footnote 227: Ibid. p. 221, line 7366.]

[Footnote 228: Ibid. p. 221, line 7384.]

[Footnote 229: Ibid. p. 222, line 7389.]

[Footnote 230: "Canterbury Tales," II., The Sompnoures Tale, p. 222, lines 7397-7429.]

[Footnote 231: Ibid. p. 223, lines 7450-7460.]

[Footnote 232: Ibid. p. 226, lines 7536-7544.]

[Footnote 233: "Canterbury Tales," II., The Sompnoures Tale, p. 226, lines 7545-7553.]

[Footnote 234: Ibid. p. 230, lines 7685-7695.]

[Footnote 235: "Canterbury Tales," II., The Sompnoures Prologue, p. 217, lines 7254-7279.]

[Footnote 236: See in "The Canterbury Tales" the Rhyme of Sir Topas, a parody on the chivalric histories. Each character there seems a precursor of Cervantes.]

[Footnote 237: Prologue to "Canterbury Tales," II. p. 3, lines 68-72.]

[Footnote 238: Prologue to "Canterbury Tales," II. p. 3, lines 79-100.]

[Footnote 239: Prologue to "Canterbury Tales," II. p. 4, lines 118-141.]

[Footnote 240: Ibid. p. 5, lines 142-150.]

[Footnote 241: Ibid. p. 5, lines 151-162.]

[Footnote 242: Tennyson, in his "Dream of Fair Women," sings: "Dan Chaucer, the first warbler, whose sweet breath Preluded those melodious bursts, that fill The spacious times of great Elizabeth With sounds that echo still."--Tr.]

[Footnote 243: Speaking of Cressida, IV. book I. p. 236, he says: "Right as our first letter is now an a, In beautie first so stood she makeles, Her goodly looking gladed all the prees, Nas never seene thing to be praised so derre, Nor under cloude blacke so bright a sterre."]

[Footnote 244: Under Proclus and under Hegel. Duns Scotus, at the age of thirty-one, died, leaving beside his sermons and commentaries, twelve folio volumes, in a small close handwriting, in a style like Hegel's, on the same subject as Proclus treats of. Similarly with Saint Thomas and the whole train of schoolmen. No idea can be formed of such a labor before handling the books themselves.]

[Footnote 245: Peter Lombard, "Book of Sentences." It was the classic of the Middle Ages.]

[Footnote 246: Duns Scotus, ed. 1639.]

[Footnote 247: Utrum angelus diligat se ipsum dilectione naturali vel electiva? Utrum in statu innocentiæ fuerit generatio per coitum? Utrum omnes fuissent nati in sexu masculino? Utrum cognitio angeli posset dici matutina et vespertina? Utrum martyribus aureola debeatur? Utrum virgo Maria fuerit virgo in concipiendo? Utrum remanserit virgo post partum? The reader may look out in the text the reply to these last two questions. (S. Thomas, "Summa Theologica," ed. 1677.)]

[Footnote 248: The Rev. Henry Anstey, in his Introduction to "Munimenta Academica," Lond. 1868, says that "the statement of Richard of Armagh that there were in the thirteenth century 30,000 scholars at Oxford is almost incredible." P. XLVIII.--Tr.]

[Footnote 249: "History of English Poetry," vol. II.]

[Footnote 250: Contemporary with Chaucer. The "Confessio Amantis" dates from 1393.]

[Footnote 251: "History of Rosiphele. Ballads."]

[Footnote 252: Warton, II. 240.]

[Footnote 253: See, for instance his description of the sun's crown, the most poetical passage in book VII.]

[Footnote 254: 1420, 1430.]

[Footnote 255: This is the title Froissart (1397) gave to his collection when presenting it to Richard II.]

[Footnote 256: Lebrun, 1729-1807; Esménard, 1770-1812.]

[Footnote 257: Lydgate, "The Destruction of Troy"--description of Hector's chapel. Especially read the Pageants or Solemn Entries.]

[Footnote 258: See the Vision of Fortune, a gigantic figure. In this painting he shows both feeling and talent.]

[Footnote 259: Lydgate, "Fall of Princes." Warton, II. 280.]

[Footnote 260: The War of the Hussites, The Hundred Years' War, and The War of the Roses.]

[Footnote 261: About 1506. "The Temple of Glass. Passetyme of Pleasure."]

[Footnote 262: About 1500.]

[Footnote 263: The court fool in Victor Hugo's drama of "Le Roi s'amuse."--Tr.]

[Footnote 264: Died 1529; Poet-Laureate 1489. His "Bouge of Court," his "Crown of Laurel," his "Elegy on the Death of the Earl of Northumberland," are well written, and belong to official poetry.]