Part 20

There are four principal sources from which Chaucer may be presumed to have drawn for poetical suggestion or literary culture,--the Latins, the Troubadours, the Trouvères, and the Italians. It is only the two latter who can fairly claim any immediate influence in the direction of his thought or the formation of his style. The only Latin poet who can be supposed to have influenced the spirit of mediæeval literature is Ovid. In his sentimentality, his love of the marvellous and the picturesque, he is its natural precursor. The analogy between his Fasti and the versified legends of saints is more than a fanciful one. He was certainly popular with the poets of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Virgil had wellnigh become mythical. The chief merit of the Provençal poets is in having been the first to demonstrate that it was possible to write with elegance in a modern dialect, and their interest for us is mainly as forerunners, as indications of tendency. Their literature is prophecy, not fulfilment. Its formal sentiment culminated in Laura, its ideal aspiration in Beatrice. Shakespeare’s hundred and sixth sonnet, if, for the imaginary mistress to whom it was addressed, we substitute the muse of a truer conception and more perfected utterance, represents exactly the feeling with which we read Provençal poetry:--

“When in the chronicle of wasted Time I see descriptions of the fairest wights And beauty making beautiful old rhyme In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights,

* * * * *

I see their antique pen would have expressed Even such a beauty as you master now; So all their praises are but prophecies Of this our time, all you prefiguring, And, for they looked but with divining eyes, They had not skill enough your worth to sing.”

It is astonishing how little of the real life of the time we learn from the Troubadours except by way of inference and deduction. Their poetry is purely lyric in its most narrow sense, that is, the expression of personal and momentary moods. To the fancy of critics who take their cue from tradition, Provençe is a morning sky of early summer, out of which innumerable larks rain a faint melody (the sweeter because rather half divined than heard too distinctly) over an earth where the dew never dries and the flowers never fade. But when we open Raynouard it is like opening the door of an aviary. We are deafened and confused by a hundred minstrels singing the same song at once, and more than suspect that the flowers they welcome are made of French cambric spangled with dewdrops of prevaricating glass. Bernard de Ventadour and Bertrand de Born are wellnigh the only ones among them in whom we find an original type. Yet the Troubadours undoubtedly led the way to refinement of conception and perfection of form. They were the conduit through which the failing stream of Roman literary tradition flowed into the new channel which mediæval culture was slowly shaping for itself. Without them we could not understand Petrarca, who earned the manufacture of artificial bloom and fictitious dew-drop to a point of excellence where artifice, if ever, may claim the praise of art. Without them we could not understand Dante, in whom their sentiment for woman was idealized by a passionate intellect and a profound nature, till Beatrice becomes a half-human, half-divine abstraction, a woman still to memory and devotion, a disembodied symbol to the ecstasy of thought. The Provençal love-poetry was as abstracted from all sensuality as that of Petrarca, but it stops short of that larger and more gracious style of treatment which has secured him a place in all gentle hearts and refined imaginations forever. In it also woman leads her servants upward, but it is along the easy slopes of conventional sentiment, and no Troubadour so much as dreamed of that loftier region, native to Dante, where _the_ woman is subtilized into _das Ewig-Weibliche_, type of man’s finer conscience and nobler aspiration made sensible to him only through her.

On the whole, it would be hard to find anything more tediously artificial than the Provençal literature, except the reproduction of it by the Minnesingers. The _Tedeschi lurchi_ certainly _did_ contrive to make something heavy as dough out of what was at least light, if not very satisfying, in the canorous dialect of Southern Gaul. But its doom was inevitably predicted in its nature and position, nay, in its very name. It was, and it continues to be, a strictly _provincial_ literature, imprisoned within extremely narrow intellectual and even geographical limits. It is not race or language that can inflict this leprous isolation, but some defect of sympathy with the simpler and more universal relations of human nature. You cannot shut up Burns in a dialect bristling with archaisms, nor prevent Béranger from setting all pulses a-dance in the least rhythmic and imaginative of modern tongues. The healthy temperament of Chaucer, with its breadth of interest in all ranks and phases of social life, could have found little that was sympathetic in the evaporated sentiment and rhetorical punctilios of a school of poets which, with rare exceptions, began and ended in courtly dilettantism.

The refined formality with which the literary product of Provençe is for the most part stamped, as with a trademark, was doubtless the legacy of Gallo-Roman culture, itself at best derivative and superficial. I think, indeed, that it may well be doubted whether Roman literature, always a half-hardy exotic, could ripen the seeds of living reproduction. The Roman genius was eminently practical, and far more apt for the triumphs of politics and jurisprudence than of art. Supreme elegance it could and did arrive at in Virgil, but, if I may trust my own judgment, it produced but one original poet, and that was Horace, who has ever since continued the favorite of men of the world, an apostle to the Gentiles of the mild cynicism of middle-age and an after-dinner philosophy. Though in no sense national, he was, more truly than any has ever been since, till the same combination of circumstances produced Béranger, an urbane or city poet. Rome, with her motley life, her formal religion, her easy morals, her spectacles, her luxury, her suburban country-life, was his muse. The situation was new, and found a singer who had wit enough to turn it to account. There are a half-dozen pieces of Catullus unsurpassed (unless their Greek originals should turn up) for lyric grace and fanciful tenderness. The sparrow of Lesbia still pecks the rosy lips of his mistress, immortal as the eagle of Pindar. One profound imagination, one man, who with a more prosperous subject might have been a great poet, lifted Roman literature above its ordinary level of tasteful common-sense. The invocation of Venus, as the genetic force of nature, by Lucretius, seems to me the one sunburst of purely poetic inspiration which the Latin language can show. But this very force, without which _neque fit lœtum neque amabile quicquam_ was wholly wanting in those poets of the post-classic period, through whom the literary influences of the past were transmitted to the romanized provincials. The works of Ausonius interest us as those of our own Dwights and Barlows do. The “Conquest of Canaan” and the “Columbiad” were Connecticut epics no doubt, but still were better than nothing in their day. If not literature, they were at least memories of literature, and such memories are not without effect in reproducing what they regret. The provincial writers of Latin devoted themselves with a dreary assiduity to the imitation of models which they deemed classical, but which were truly so only in the sense that they were the more decorously respectful of the dead form in proportion as the living spirit had more utterly gone out of it. It is, I suspect, to the traditions of this purely rhetorical influence, indirectly exercised, that we are to attribute the rapid passage of the new Provençal poetry from what must have been its original popular character to that highly artificial condition which precedes total extinction. It was the alienation of the written from the spoken language (always, perhaps, more or less malignly operative in giving Roman literature a cold-blooded turn as compared with Greek), which, ending at length in total divorce, rendered Latin incapable of supplying the wants of new men and new ideas. The same thing, I am strongly inclined to think, was true of the language of the Troubadours. It had become literary, and so far dead. It is true that no language is ever so far gone in consumption as to be beyond the great-poet-cure. Undoubtedly a man of genius can out of his own super-abundant vitality compel life into the most decrepit vocabulary. But it is by the infusion of his own blood, as it were, and not without a certain sacrifice of power. No such rescue came for the _langue d’oc_, which, it should seem, had performed its special function in the development of modern literature, and would have perished even without the Albigensian war. The position of the Gallo-Romans of the South, both ethical and geographical, precluded them from producing anything really great or even original in literature, for that must have its root in a national life, and this they never had. After the Burgundian invasion their situation was in many respects analogous to our own after the Revolutionary War. They had been thoroughly romanized in language and culture, but the line of their historic continuity had been broken. The Roman road, which linked them with the only past they knew, had been buried under the great barbarian land-slide. In like manner we, inheriting the language, the social usages, the literary and political traditions of Englishmen, were suddenly cut adrift from our historical anchorage. Very soon there arose a demand for a native literature, nay, it was even proposed that, as a first step toward it, we should adopt a lingo of our own to be called the Columbian or Hesperian. This, to be sure, was never accomplished, though our English cousins seem to hint sometimes that we have made very fair advances toward it; but if it could have been, our position would have been precisely that of the Provençals when they began to have a literature of their own. They had formed a language which, while it completed their orphanage from their imperial mother, continually recalled her, and kept alive their pride of lineage. Such reminiscences as they still retained of Latin culture were pedantic and rhetorical,[9] and it was only natural that out of these they should have elaborated a code of poetical jurisprudence with titles and subtitles applicable to every form of verse and tyrannous over every mode of sentiment. The result could not fail to be artificial and wearisome, except where some man with a truly lyrical genius could breathe life into the rigid formula and make it pliant to his more passionate feeling. The great service of the Provençals was that they kept in mind the fact that poetry was not merely an amusement, but an art, and long after their literary activity had ceased their influence reacted beneficially upon Europe through their Italian pupils. They are interesting as showing the tendency of the Romanic races to a scientific treatment of what, if it be not spontaneous, becomes a fashion and erelong an impertinence. Fauriel has endeavored to prove that they were the first to treat the mediæval heroic legends epically, but the evidence is strongly against him. The testimony of Dante on this point is explicit,[10] and moreover not a single romance of chivalry has come down to us in a dialect of the pure Provencal.

The Trouvères, on the other hand, are apt to have something naive and vigorous about them, something that smacks of race and soil. Their very coarseness is almost better than the Troubadour delicacy, because it was not an affectation. The difference between the two schools is that between a culture pedantically transmitted and one which grows and gathers strength from natural causes. Indeed, it is to the North of France and to the Trouvères that we are to look for the true origins of our modern literature. I do not mean in their epical poetry, though there is something refreshing in the mere fact of their choosing native heroes and legends as the subjects of their song. It was in their _Fabliaux_ and _Lais_ that, dealing with the realities of the life about them, they became original and delightful in spite of themselves. Their _Chansons de Geste_ are fine specimens of fighting Christianity, highly inspiring for men like Peire de Bergerac, who sings

“Bel m’es can aug lo resso Que fai l’ausbercs ab l’arso, Li bruit e il crit e il masan Que il corn e las trombas fan”;[11]

but who after reading them--even the best of them, the Song of Roland--can remember much more than a cloud of battle-dust, through which the paladins loom dimly gigantic, and a strong verse flashes here and there like an angry sword? What are the _Roman d’avantures_, the cycle of Arthur and his knights, but a procession of armor and plumes, mere spectacle, not vision like their Grecian antitype, the Odyssey, whose pictures of life, whether domestic or heroic, are among the abiding consolations of the mind? An element of disproportion, of grotesqueness,[12] earmark of the barbarian, disturbs us, even when it does not disgust, in them all. Except the _Roland_, they all want adequate motive, and even in that we may well suspect a reminiscence of the Iliad. They are not without a kind of dignity, for manliness is always noble, and there are detached scenes that are striking, perhaps all the more so from their rarity, like the combat of Oliver and Fierabras, and the leave-taking of Parise la Duchesse. But in point of art they are far below even Firdusi, whose great poem is of precisely the same romantic type. The episode of Sohrab and Rustem as much surpasses the former of the passages just alluded to in largeness and energy of treatment, in the true epical quality, as the lament of Tehmine over her son does the latter of them in refined and natural pathos. In our revolt against pseudo-classicism we must not let our admiration for the vigor and freshness which are the merit of this old poetry tempt us to forget that our direct literary inheritance comes to us from an ancestry who would never have got beyond the Age of Iron but for the models of graceful form and delicate workmanship which they found in the tombs of an earlier race.

I recall but one passage (from _Jourdain de Blaivies_) which in its simple movement of the heart can in any way be compared with Chaucer. I translate it freely, merely changing the original assonance into rhyme. Eremborc, to save the son of her liege-lord, has passed-off her own child for his, only stipulating that he shall pass the night before his death with her in the prison where she is confined by the usurper Fromond. The time is just as the dreaded dawn begins to break.

“‘Garnier, fair son,’ the noble lady said, ‘To save thy father’s life must thou be dead; And mine, alas, must be with sorrow spent, Since thou must die, albeit so innocent! Evening thou shalt not see that see’st the morn! Woe worth the hour that I beheld thee born, Whom nine long months within my side I bore! Was never babe desired so much before. Now summer will the pleasant days recall When I shall take my stand upon the wall And see the fair young gentlemen thy peers That come and go, and, as beseems their years Run at the quintain, strive to pierce the shield, And in the tourney keep their sell or yield; Then must my heart be tearswoln for thy sake That’t will be marvel if it do not break.’ At morning, when the day began to peer, Matins rang out from minsters far and near, And the clerks sang full well with voices high. ‘God,’ said the dame, ‘thou glorious in the sky, These lingering nights were wont to tire me so! And this, alas, how swift it hastes to go! These clerks and cloistered folk, alas, in spite So early sing to cheat me of my night!’”

The great advantages which the _langue d’oil_ had over its sister dialect of the South of France were its wider distribution, and its representing the national and unitary tendencies of the people as opposed to those of provincial isolation. But the Trouvères had also this superiority, that they gave a voice to real and not merely conventional emotions. In comparison with the Troubadours their sympathies were more human, and their expression more popular. While the tiresome ingenuity of the latter busied itself chiefly in the filigree of wiredrawn sentiment and supersubtilized conceit, the former took their subjects from the street and the market as well as from the chateau. In the one case language had become a mere material for clever elaboration; in the other, as always in live literature, it was a soil from which the roots of thought and feeling unconsciously drew the coloring of vivid expression. The writers of French, by the greater pliancy of their dialect and the simpler forms of their verse, had acquired an ease which was impossible in the more stately and sharply angled vocabulary of the South. Their octosyllabics have not seldom a careless facility not unworthy of Swift in his best mood. They had attained the highest skill and grace in narrative, as the lays of Marie de France and the _Lai de l’Oiselet_ bear witness[13]. Above all, they had learned how to brighten the hitherto monotonous web of story with the gayer hues of fancy.

It is no improbable surmise that the sudden and surprising development of the more strictly epical poetry in the North of France, and especially its growing partiality for historical in preference to mythical subjects, were due to the Normans. The poetry of the Danes was much of it authentic history, or what was believed to be so; the heroes of their Sagas were real men, with wives and children, with relations public and domestic, on the common levels of life, and not mere creatures of imagination, who dwell apart like stars from the vulgar cares and interests of men. If we compare Havelok with the least idealized figures of Carlovingian or Arthurian romance, we shall have a keen sense of this difference. Manhood has taken the place of caste, and homeliness of exaggeration. Havelok says,--

“Godwot, I will with thee gang For to learn some good to get; Swinken would I for my meat; It is no shame for to swinken.”

This Dane, we see, is of our own make and stature, a being much nearer our kindly sympathies than his compatriot Ogier, of whom we are told,

“Dix piès de lonc avoit le chevalier.”

But however large or small share we may allow to the Danes in changing the character of French poetry and supplanting the Romance with the Fabliau, there can be little doubt either of the kind or amount of influence which the Normans must have brought with them into England. I am not going to attempt a definition of the Anglo-Saxon element in English literature, for generalizations are apt to be as dangerous as they are tempting. But as a painter may draw a cloud so that we recognize its general truth, though the boundaries of real clouds never remain the same for two minutes together, so amid the changes of feature and complexion brought about by commingling of race, there still remains a certain cast of physiognomy which points back to some one ancestor of marked and peculiar character. It is toward this type that there is always a tendency to revert, to borrow Mr. Darwin’s phrase, and I think the general belief is not without some adequate grounds which in France traces this predominant type to the Kelt, and in England to the Saxon. In old and stationary communities, where tradition has a chance to take root, and where several generations are present to the mind of each inhabitant, either by personal recollection or transmitted anecdote, everybody’s peculiarities, whether of strength or weakness, are explained and, as it were, justified upon some theory of hereditary bias. Such and such qualities he got from a grandfather on the spear or a great-uncle on the spindle side. This gift came in a right line from So-and-so; that failing came in by the dilution of the family blood with that of Such-a-one. In this way a certain allowance is made for every aberration from some assumed normal type, either in the way of reinforcement or defect, and that universal desire of the human mind to have everything accounted for--which makes the moon responsible for the whimsies of the weathercock--is cheaply gratified. But as mankind in the aggregate is always wiser than any single man, because its experience is derived from a larger range of observation and experience, and because the springs that feed it drain a wider region both of time and space, there is commonly some greater or smaller share of truth in all popular prejudices. The meteorologists are beginning to agree with the old women that the moon _is_ an accessary before the fact in our atmospheric fluctuations. Now, although to admit this notion of inherited good or ill to its fullest extent would be to abolish personal character, and with it, all responsibility, to abdicate freewill, and to make every effort at self-direction futile, there is no inconsiderable alloy of truth in it, nevertheless. No man can look into the title-deeds of what may be called his personal estate, his faculties, his predilections, his failings,--whatever, in short, sets him apart as a capital I,--without something like a shock of dread to find how much of him is held in mortmain by those who, though long ago mouldered away to dust, are yet fatally alive and active in him for good or ill. What is true of individual men is true also of races, and the prevailing belief in a nation as to the origin of certain of its characteristics has something of the same basis in facts of observation as the village estimate of the traits of particular families. _Interdum vulgus rectum videt._