CHAPTER VI

COMIC POETRY

France sets the model for comic as well as romantic poetry, in the Middle Ages. In romance the English were not able for a long time—hardly before Chaucer and Gower—to imitate the French style properly; the French sentiment was beyond them, not appreciated; they took the stories, the action and adventures, and let the sentiment alone, or abridged it. The reasons for this are obvious. But there seems to be no reason, except accident, for the way in which the English writers in those times neglected the French comic literature of the twelfth century. Very little of it is represented in the English of the following centuries; yet what there is in English corresponding to the French _fabliaux_ and to Reynard the Fox is thoroughly well done. The English wit was quite equal to the French in matters such as these; there were no difficulties of style or caste in the way, such as prevented the English minstrels from using much of the French romantic, sentimental rhetoric. There might have been a thirteenth-century English _Reynard_, as good as the High or Low German _Reynards_; that is proved by the one short example (295 lines) in which an episode of the great medieval comic epic is told by an English versifier—the story of _The Vox and the Wolf_. This is one of the best of all the practical jokes of Reynard—the well-known story of the Fox and the Wolf in the well. It is told again, in a different way, among the Fables of the Scottish poet Robert Henryson; it is also one of the stories of Uncle Remus.

A vox gan out of the wodè go,

and made his way to a hen-roost, where he got three hens out of five, and argued with Chauntecler the cock, explaining, though unsuccessfully, that a little blood-letting might be good for him; thence, being troubled with thirst, he went to the well. The well had two buckets on a rope over a pulley; the Fox ‘ne understood nought of the gin’ and got into one of the buckets and went down to the bottom of the well; where he repented of his gluttony. The comic epic is as moral as Piers Plowman; that is part of the game.

Then (‘out of the depe wode’) appeared the Wolf, Sigrim (Isengrim), also thirsty, and looking for a drink; he heard the lamentations of his gossip Reneuard, and sat down by the well and called to him. Then at last the Fox’s wit returned and he saw how he might escape. There was nothing (he said) he would have prayed for more than that his friend should join him in the happy place: ‘here is the bliss of Paradise’. ‘What! art thou dead?’ says the Wolf: ‘this is news; it was only three days ago that thou and thy wife and children all came to dine with me.’ ‘Yes! I am dead’, says the Fox. ‘I would not return to the world again, for all the world’s wealth. Why should I walk in the world, in care and woe, in filth and sin? But this place is full of all happiness; here is mutton, both sheep and goat.’ When the Wolf heard of this good meat his hunger overcame him and he asked to be let in. ‘Not till thou art shriven’, says the Fox; and the Wolf bends his head, sighing hard and strong, and makes his confession, and gets forgiveness, and is happy.

Nou ich am in clene live Ne recche ich of childe ne of wive.

‘But tell me what to do.’ ‘Do!’ quoth the Fox, ‘leap into the bucket, and come down.’ And the Wolf going down met the Fox half-way; Reynard, ‘glad and blithe’ that the Wolf was a true penitent and in clean living, promised to have his soul-knell rung and masses said for him.

The well, it should be said, belonged to a house of friars; Aylmer the ‘master curtler’ who looked after the kitchen-garden came to the well in the morning; and the Wolf was pulled out and beaten and hunted; he found no bliss and no indulgence of blows.

The French story has some points that are not in the English; in the original, the two buckets on the pulley are explained to Isengrim as being God’s balance of good and evil, in which souls are weighed. Also there is a more satisfactory account of the way Reynard came to be entrapped. In the English story the failure of his wit is rather disgraceful; in the French he takes to the bucket because he thinks he sees his wife Hermeline in the bottom of the well; it is a clear starlight night, and as he peers over the rim of the well he sees the figure looking up at him, and when he calls there is a hollow echo which he takes for a voice answering. But there is no such difference of taste and imagination here between the French and the English Reynard as there is between the French and the English chivalrous romances.

The _Roman de Renart_ is generally, and justly, taken as the ironical counterpart of medieval epic and romance; an irreverent criticism of dignitaries, spiritual and temporal, the great narrative comedy of the Ages of Faith and of Chivalry. The comic short stories usually called _fabliaux_ are most of them much less intelligent; rhyming versions of ribald jokes, very elementary. But there are great differences among them, and some of them are worth remembering. It is a pity there is no English version of the _jongleur_, the professional minstrel, who, in the absence of the devils, is put in charge of the souls in Hell, but is drawn by St. Peter to play them away at a game of dice—the result being that he is turned out; since then the Master Devil has given instructions: No Minstrels allowed within.

There are few English _fabliaux_; there is perhaps only one preserved as a separate piece by itself, the story of _Dame Sirith_. This is far above the ordinary level of such things; it is a shameful practical joke, but there is more in it than this; the character of Dame Sirith, in her machinations to help the distressed lover of his neighbour’s wife, is such as belongs to comedy and to satire, not to the ordinary vulgar ‘merry tale’.

It is hard to find any other separate tale of this class in English; but the stories of the Seven Wise Masters, the Seven Sages of Rome, are many of them impossible to distinguish from the common type of the French _fabliaux_, though they are often classed among the romances. There are many historical problems connected with the medieval short stories. Although they do not appear in writing to any large extent before the French rhyming versions, they are known to have been current long before the twelfth century and before the French language was used in literature. There are Latin versions of some of them composed in Germany before the _fabliaux_ had come into existence; one of them in substance is the same as Hans Andersen’s story of Big Claus and Little Claus, which also is found as one of the _fabliaux_. Evidently, there are a number of comic stories which have been going about for hundreds (or thousands) of years without any need of a written version. At any time, in any country, it may occur to some one to put one of those stories into literary language. Two of the German-Latin comic poems are in elaborate medieval verse, set to religious tunes, in the form of the _Sequentia_—a fact which is mentioned here only to show that there was nothing popular in these German experiments. They were not likely to found a school of comic story-telling; they were too difficult and exceptional; literary curiosities. The French _fabliaux_, in the ordinary short couplets and without any literary ornament, were absolutely popular; it needed no learning and not much wit to understand them. So that, as they spread and were circulated, they came often to be hardly distinguishable from the traditional stories which had been going about all the time in spoken, not written, forms. It was one of the great popular successes of medieval French literature; and it was due partly to the French stories themselves, and partly to the example which they set, that comic literature was cultivated in the later Middle Ages. The French stories were translated and adapted by Boccaccio and many others; and when the example had once been given, writers in different languages could find stories of their own without going to the _fabliaux_.

Does it matter much to any one where these stories came from, and how they passed from oral tradition into medieval (or modern) literary forms? The question is more reasonable than such questions usually are, because most of these stories are trivial, they are not all witty, and many of them are villainous. But the historical facts about them serve to bring out, at any rate, the extraordinary talent of the French for making literary profit out of every kind of material. Any one might have thought of writing out these stories which every one knew; but, with the exception of the few Latin experiments, this was done by nobody till the French took it up.

Further, those ‘merry tales’ come into the whole subject of the relations between folk-lore and literature, which is particularly important (for those who like that sort of inquiry) in the study of the Middle Ages. All the fiction of the Middle Ages, comic or romantic, is full of things which appear in popular tales like those collected by Grimm in Germany or by Campbell of Islay in the West Highlands. So much of medieval poetry is traditional or popular—the ballads especially—that folk-lore has to be studied more carefully than is needful when one is dealing with later times. With regard to short comic tales of the type of the _fabliaux_, part of the problem is easy enough, if one accepts the opinion that stories like _Big Claus and Little Claus_, which are found all over the world, and which can be proved to have been current orally for centuries, are things existing, and travelling, independently of written books, which may at any time be recorded in a written form. The written form may be literary, as when the story is written in Latin verse by an early German scholar, or in French medieval verse by a minstrel or a minstrel’s hack, or in fine Danish prose by Hans Andersen. Or it may be written down by a scientific collector of folk-lore keeping closely to the actual phrasing of the unsophisticated story-teller; as when the plot is found among the Ananzi stories of the negroes in the West Indies. The life of popular stories is mysterious; but it is well known in fact, and there is no difficulty in understanding how the popular story which is perennial in every climate may any day be used for the literary fashion of that day.

It is rather strange that while there is so much folk-lore in medieval literature there should be so few medieval stories which take up exactly the plots of any of the popular traditional tales. And it is a curious coincidence that two of the plots from folk-lore which are used in medieval literature, distinctly, by themselves, keeping to the folk-lore outlines, should also appear in literary forms equally distinct and no less true to their traditional shape among the Tales of Andersen. One is that which has just been mentioned, _Big Claus and Little Claus_, which comes into English rather late in the Middle Ages as the _Friars of Berwick_. The other is the _Travelling Companion_, which in English rhyming romance is called _Sir Amadace_. There is something fortunate about those two stories which has gained for them more attention than the rest. They both come into the Elizabethan theatre, where again it is curiously rare to find a folk-lore plot. One is Davenport’s _New Trick to Cheat the Devil_; the other, the _Travelling Companion_, is Peele’s _Old Wives’ Tale_.

With most of the short stories it is useless to seek for any definite source. To ask for the first author of _Big Claus and Little Claus_ is no more reasonable than to ask who was the inventor of High Dutch and Low Dutch. But there is a large section of medieval story-telling which is in a different condition, and about which it is not wholly futile to ask questions of pedigree. _The Seven Sages of Rome_ is the best example of this class; it has been remarked already that many things in the book are like the _fabliaux_; but unlike most of the _fabliaux_ they have a literary origin which can be traced. The Book of the Seven Wise Masters of Rome (which exists in many different forms, with a variety of contents) is an Oriental collection of stories in a framework; that is to say, there is a plot which leads to the telling of stories, as in the _Arabian Nights_, the _Decameron_, the _Canterbury Tales_. The _Arabian Nights_ were not known in the West till the beginning of the eighteenth century, but the Oriental plan of a group of stories was brought to Europe at least as early as the twelfth century. The plot of the _Seven Sages_ is that the son of the Emperor of Rome is falsely accused by his stepmother, and defended by the Seven Masters, the Empress and the Masters telling stories against one another. As the object of the Masters is to prove that women are not to be trusted, it may be understood that their stories generally agree in their moral with the common disrespectful ‘merry tales’. Among the lady’s stories are some of a different complexion; one of these is best known in England through W. R. Spencer’s ballad of the death of Gelert, the faithful hound who saved the child of his lord, and was hastily and unjustly killed in error. Another is the story of the Master Thief, which is found in the second book of Herodotus—the treasure of Rhampsinitus, king of Egypt.

One of those Oriental fables found among the old French short stories comes into English long afterwards in the form of Parnell’s _Hermit_.

Although the _fabliaux_ are not very largely represented in medieval English rhyme, there is a considerable amount of miscellaneous comic verse. One of the great differences between Middle English and Anglo-Saxon writings (judging from what is extant) is that in Middle English there is far more jesting and nonsense. The best of the comic pieces is one that might be reckoned along with the _fabliaux_ except that there is no story in it; the description of the _Land of Cockayne_, sometimes called the land of Readymade, where the geese fly about roasted—

Yet I do you mo to wit The geese y-roasted on the spit Fleeth to that abbey, Got it wot And gredeth: Geese all hot, all hot!

The land of Cockayne is a burlesque Paradise ‘far in the sea by West of Spain’.

There beth rivers great and fine Of oil, milk, honey and wine; Water serveth there to no thing, But to sight and to washing.

This piece, and _Reynard and Isengrim (The Fox and the Wolf)_, and others, show that fairly early, and before the French language had given way to English as the proper speech for good society, there was some talent in English authors for light verse, narrative or descriptive, for humorous stories, and for satire. The English short couplets of those days—of the time of Henry III and Edward I—are at no disadvantage as compared with the French. Anything can be expressed in that familiar verse which is possible in French—anything, except the finer shades of sentiment, for which as yet the English have no mind, and which must wait for the authors of the _Confessio Amantis_ and the _Book of the Duchess Blanche_.

But there is one early poem—a hundred, it may be a hundred and fifty, years before Chaucer—in which not the sentiment but something much more characteristic of Chaucer is anticipated in a really wonderful way. _The Owl and the Nightingale_ is an original poem, written in the language of Dorset at a time when nothing English was considered ‘courteous’. Yet it is hard to see what is wanting to the poem to distinguish it from the literature of polite society in the Augustan ages. What is there provincial in it, except the language? And why should the language be called, except in a technical and literal sense, rustic, when it is used with a perfect command of idiom, with tact and discretion, with the good humour that comprehends many different things and motives at once, and the irony which may be a check on effusive romance, but never a hindrance to grace and beauty? Urbanity is the right word, the name one cannot help using, for the temper of this rustic and provincial poem. It is urbane, like Horace or Addison, without any town society to support the author in his criticism of life. The author is like one of the personages in his satire, the Wren, who was bred in the greenwood, but brought up among mankind—in the humanities:

For theih heo were ybred a wolde Heo was ytowen among mankenne, And hire wisdom broughte thenne.

_The Owl and the Nightingale_ is the most miraculous piece of writing, or, if that is too strong a term, the most contrary to all preconceived opinion, among the medieval English books. In the condition of the English language in the reign of Henry III, with so much against it, there was still no reason why there should not be plenty of English romances and a variety of English songs, though they might not be the same sort of romances and songs as were composed in countries like France or Germany, and though they might be wanting in the ‘finer shades’. But all the chances, as far as we can judge, were against the production of humorous impartial essays in verse. Such things are not too common at any time. They were not common even in French polite literature in the thirteenth century. In the century after, Froissart in French, Gower and of course Chaucer in English have the same talent for light familiar rhyming essays that is shown by Prior and Swift. The early English poet had discovered for himself a form which generally requires ages of training and study before it can succeed.

His poem is entitled in one of the two MSS. _altercatio inter Philomenam et Bubonem_: ‘A debate between the Nightingale and the Owl.’ Debates, contentions, had been a favourite literary device for a long time in many languages. It was known in Anglo-Saxon poetry. It was common in France. There were contentions of Summer and Winter, of the Soul and the Body, the Church and the Synagogue, of Fast and Feasting; there were also (especially in the Provençal school) debates between actual men, one poet challenging another. The originality of _The Owl and the Nightingale_ argument is that it is not, like so many of those poetical disputations, simply an arrangement of all the obvious commonplaces for and against one side and the other. It is a true comedy; not only is the writer impartial, but he keeps the debate alive; he shows how the contending speakers feel the strokes, and hide their pain, and do their best to face it out with the adversary. Also, the debate is not a mere got-up thing. It is Art against Philosophy; the Poet meeting the strong though not silent Thinker, who tells him of the Immensities and Infinities. The author agrees with Plato and Wordsworth that the nightingale is ‘a creature of a fiery heart’, and that the song is one of mirth and not lamentation. Yet it is not contrasted absolutely with the voice of the contemplative person. If it were, the debate would come to an end, or would turn into mere railing accusations—of which there is no want, it may be said, along with the more serious arguments. What makes the dispute worth following, what lifts it far above the ordinary medieval conventions, is that each party shares something of the other’s mind. The Owl wishes to be thought musical; the Nightingale is anxious not to be taken for a mere worldling.