1 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 sweets of delicate-hued ideas to the rose, of which the gentle odour embalms all the plain.' This refinement goes so far, that in Thibaut of Champagne and in Charles of Orléans it turns to affectation and insipidity. In them 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 fight, soft melancholy, uncertain reverie; they are as elegant as eloquent, 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 armour and amid the massacres of the middle ages as amid the salutations and the musk-scented, wadded clothes of the last court. You will find it in their colouring 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, ravishment, sudden oppression of heart which is displayed in the poetry of neighbouring nations; they say directly, 'She began to smile, which vastly became her.' They add, when they are in a descriptive humour, 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 delight in agreeable emotions, but are not fitted for deep sensations. The full rejuvenesence 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 pleasure, soon gone, like that which an April landscape affords. For an instant the author atoes at the mist of the streams rising about the willow trees, the Fasant vapour which imprisons the brightness of the morning; then, bumming a burden of a song, he returns to his narrative. He seeks insement, and herein lies his power. In life, as in literature, it is pleasure he aims at, not sensual sure or emotion. He is gay, not voluptuous; dainty, not a ton. He takes love for a pastime, not for an intoxication. It is pretty fruit which he plucks, tastes, and leaves. And we must yet further, that the best of the fruit in his eyes is the fact of being forbidden. He says to himself that he is duping a husban 1, hat 'he deceives a cruel woman, and thinks he ought to obtain Demark a pope's indulgence for the deed.' He wishes to be merry-it is the state he prefers, the end and aim of his life; and especially to laugh at another's expense. 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 of the same expressions and things; and the thing 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 name, especially in love matters; they let you guess it; they suppose you to be as sharp of intellect and as wary as themselves. Be sure that one might discriminate, embellish at times, even refine upon them, but that 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 Robart, who sings so well;' he praises his voice, 'so sweet and fine.' 'You would be the best singer in the world if you beware of nuts.' Renard is a Scapin, 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, smacks his lips and pretends to wax impatient against 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 is the same; the raillery never ceases, and never fails to be agreeable. Renard 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 and suggestive idea. The fabliaux are full of truths about men, and still more about women, about low conditions, and still more about high; it is La Fontaine, Contes, Richard Minutolo. Parler lui veut d'une besogne Où crois que peu con querréois A method of philosophising 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 hideous because it is cruel; on the contrary, it provckes good humour. One soon sees 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 quick 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 pungent? 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. IV. Consider, then, this Frenchman or Norman, this man from Anjou or Maine, who in his well-closed coat of mail, with sword and lance, came to seek his fortune in England. He took the manor of some slain Saxon, ard 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,1 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 support a complete horse or armour. 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 succour each other. They are an armed colony, and encamped in their dwellings, 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, unless they pay forty-seven marks as compensation; 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 1 At King Stephen's death there were 1115 castles. 6 Thus to them except as alms, or on condition of tribute, or by taking the oath of homage. Here a free Saxon proprietor is made a body-slave on his own estate.1 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 sou, or of two sous, according to the sum which they brought to 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, and their bones thrown without the gates. Another keeps men-at-arms, who reduce the 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." 'all the folk in the low country were at great pains to seem humble before Ives Taillebois, and only to address him with one knee on the ground; but although they made a point of paying him every honour, 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.' The Normans would not and could not borrow any idea or custom from such boors; 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. 3 It was then a French literature which was at this time domiciled across the Channel, 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 pre A. Thierry, Histoire de la Conquête de l'Angleterre, ii. " William of Malmesbury. A. Thierry, ii. 20, 122-203. 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.' 4 Warton, i. 5. serve them from barbarisms. For two hundred years,' says Higden,1 '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, who received an estate in the partition which followed the Conquest. The Norman who ridiculed 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,' you will only find Latin or French verses, Latin or French prose. What becomes of English? Obscure, de spised, 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.3 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 endeavour 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 ascendency which is moulding and oppressing them. Still, in the fifteenth censury, 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 1 Trevisa's translation of the Polycronycon. * Statutes of foundation of New College, Oxford. In the abbey of Glastonbury, in 1247: Liber de excidio Troja, gesta Ricardi regis, gesta Alexandri Magni, etc. In the abbey of Peterborough: Amys et Amelion, Sir Tristam, Guy de Bourgogne, gata Otuelis, les prophéties de Merlin, le Charlemagne de Turpin, la destruction de Troie, etc. Warton, ibidem. * In 1154. In 1400. 4 Warton, i. 72-78. Warton, ii. 248. Gower died in 1408; his French ballads be long to the end of the fourteenth century. |