Part 12

Besides the lives of saints we have tales of miracles performed by Our Lady, tales of penitence, tales of good counsel. As a whole they are less interesting than the lay literature of the time. Written for edification, many of them are rather bare little "examples" and their authors show themselves more concerned with the lesson in point than with the story. Others are told with more elaboration and skill and give us good tale-telling. Sometimes, as in _The Angel and the Hermit_, an ancient story is given a mediaeval setting. M. Gaston Paris, in _La Poesie au Moyen Age_, has traced the history of this tale, which, originally of Jewish invention, has travelled all over Europe; a tale that was given a place in the _Koran_, and that was told both by Luther and Voltaire, besides its good rendering by some unknown clerk of France. Another story, _Theophilus_, gives a version of the Faust legend, and tells the story of a man who has made a compact with the devil, but who in this case is saved in the end by Our Lady.

But if among the _contes devots_ tales as vivid as that of the proud knight on whom was laid the penance of the cask are rare, there are yet not a few that charm us by their mere sincerity and simplicity, that interest by revealing to us the superstitions and the beliefs of the time. They show us how vividly present to men's minds was the triple division of the world, how concrete that heaven and hell, whence issued on the one side the demons, on the other the Virgin and the saints to take share in the combat on earth for men's temptation and salvation. To turn the pages of a collection of these stories is like looking up at the dim, stiff figures of some early fresco, to see again, say, the strife of angels and devils for souls in The Triumph of Death on the walls of the Campo Santo in Pisa.

Just as the spirit of the _fabliaux_ is found again in the farces, so that of the _contes devots_ continues in the miracle plays. But when, in the fifteenth century, prose drives out verse narrative, all three types of tale cease. In the renaissance and for long after they were neglected. It was in the eighteenth century, with its curiosity concerning the mediaeval, that men turned back to the manuscripts so long disregarded. Barbazan brought out a collection of texts, and Legrand d'Aussy published a collection of abridgments of twelfth and thirteenth century tales. Since then, various editors, both French and German, have made the best of the tales available to us.

Taken together, apart from the pleasure of the story for the story's sake, they give us a fresh sense of the time in which they were written, its feasts and tourneys bright with the gold and the vair; its wars, its interrupted traffic and barter; its license, its asceticism; its prayers and its visions. More than that, they interest us as standing midway between the old and the new. In them one may look for fragments of vanished stories, bits of myth and folklore, salvage of an age that told its tales instead of writing them; and, at the same time, we find in them the beginnings of modern literature, the first of that long and goodly line, the French short story. For all their simplicity they show the beginnings of a shrewd observation, of delicate description, and above all of compact narrative where no words are wasted. Already there is a conscious artistic pride; Marie de France tells us she has waked many a night in rhyming her verses; and "Know ye," one of the _fabliaux_ charges us, "it is no light thing to tell a goodly tale."

Bibliography

List of Texts followed in These Translations

The Lay of the Bird, _Le Lai de l'Oiselet_, edited by Gaston Paris, Paris, 1884. Privately printed.

The Two Lovers, The Woful Knight (Chaitivel), Eliduc: _Die Lais der Marie de France_, edited by Karl Warnke, Halle, 1900.

Melion, _Lai d'Ignaures, Suivi des Lais de Melion et du Trot_, edited by Monmerque et Francisque Michel, Paris, 1832.

The Lay of the Horn: _Le Lai du Cor_, edited by F. Wulf, Lunt, 1888. Also Tobler's notes on the same, _Zeitschrift fuer Romanische Philologie_, XII., 266.

Of the Churl who Won Paradise, The Divided Blanket, The Gray Palfrey: _Recueil des Fabliaux des xii^e et xiii^e Siecles_, edited by A. de Montaiglon and G. Raynaud, 6 vols., Paris, 1872-90.

The Knight of the Little Cask: _Zwei Altfranzoesische Dichtungen_, _La Chastelaine de Saint Gille_, _Du Chevalier au Barisel_, edited by O. Schultzgora, Halle, 1889.

The Angel and the Hermit: _Nouveau Recueil de Fabliaux et Contes_, edited by M. Meon, 2 vols. Paris, 1823.

The Jousting of Our Lady: Chrestomatie de l'ancien francais, Karl Bartsch, Leipzig, 1880.

The Order of Chivalry: _Fabliaux et Contes_, edited by E. Barbazan, and revised by M. Meon, 4 vols., Paris, 1808.

Translator's Note

NOTE.--In recent years, in various small books, a number of mediaeval French tales, chiefly the lays, have been rendered accessible to English readers, but no attempt has been made to bring together in a single collection examples of the different types of tales. The translator has tried within a small compass to show something of the range and scope of the Old French short story, and at the same time to choose, as far as might be, tales that had not been previously translated.

Three of those included in the volume have, however, already been done into English. _The Two Lovers_ and _Eliduc_ appeared in _Seven Lays of Marie de France_, by Edith Rickert, London, 1901; and a metrical translation by William Morris of _The Order of Chivalry_ was printed in the Kelmscott Press edition of Caxton's _Order of Chivalry_. Of the others, I believe, no complete English version has been made. Condensed renderings, however, of _The Order of Chivalry_ and _The Lay of the Bird_ occur in Way's Selections of Fabliaux and Tales, London, 1796 and 1800. Also Leigh Hunt used the plot of _Le Vair Palefroi_ for his poem _The Palfrey_; and in Parnell's _Hermit_ an often told story is again repeated, and the anchorite and his divine comrade move, strange figures, through the ordered, eighteenth century landscape.

Many of the Old French tales have been preserved to us in but a single manuscript, with the result we have few critical texts. Such excellent editions as Warnke's _Lais of Marie de France_ are rare, and the translator often encounters difficulties by the way. Some of the readings must perforce be conjectural, and others can but reproduce the ambiguities of the original. At the end of _The Gray Palfrey_ I have omitted altogether a long but incomplete sentence that begins to tell us what happened next between the hero and his uncle. Zorak's text of _Melion_ (_Zeitsckrift fuer Romanische philologie_, vol. vi.) unfortunately did not come to my notice until these translations were in press, too late to do more than borrow a few readings where Michel is most unsatisfactory.

A word should be said as to the grouping of the tales. The types are not so distinct but that there is a borderland between the _lai_ and the _fabliau_ in which are found a few examples with the characteristics of each. _The Lay of the Bird_ is a case in point. Gaston Paris, in his _Litterature Francaise au Moyen Age_, classes it as a _fabliau_ because the story is not of Celtic but Eastern origin; yet M. de Montaiglon does not admit it to his complete edition of the _Fabliaux_. Indeed, the enchanted orchard, the talking bird, the sentiments, the praise of love are all in the manner of the courtly poetry. It is therefore, on account of its accessories, here included among the _lais_.

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