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events which occupied public attention from time to time. The | enormous popularity of the subject is shown by the long vogue which it had, and by the empire which it exercised over generations of writers who differed from each other widely in style and temper. Nothing can be farther from the allegorical erudition, the political diatribes and the sermonizing moralities of the authors of Renart le Contre-fait than the sly naiveté of the writers of the earlier branches. Yet these and a long and unknown series of intermediate bards the fox-king pressed into his service, and it is scarcely too much to say that, during the two centuries of his reign, there was hardly a thought in the popular mind which, as it rose to the surface, did not find expression in an addition to the huge cycle of Renart.

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indeed there was more than one) appears to have been a clerk of Troyes.

Early Lyric Poetry.-Side by side with these two forms of literature, the epics and romances of the higher classes, and the fabliau, which, at least in its original, represented rather the feelings of the lower, there grew up a third kind, consisting of purely lyrical poetry. The song literature of medieval France is extremely abundant and beautiful. From the 12th to the 15th century it received constant accessions, some signed, some anonymous, some purely popular in their character, some the work of more learned writers, others again produced by members of the aristocracy. Of the latter class it may fairly be said that the catalogue of royal and noble authors boasts few if any names We shall not deal with the controversies which have been superior to those of Thibaut de Champagne, king of Navarre raised as to the origin of the poem and its central idea. The at the beginning of the 13th century, and Charles d'Orléans, the latter may have been a travestie of real persons and actual father of Louis XII., at the beginning of the 15th. Although events, or it may (and much more probably) have been an much of this lyric poetry is anonymous, the more popular part expression of thoughts and experiences which recur in every of it almost entirely so, yet M. Paulin Paris was able to enumerate generation. France, the Netherlands and Germany have some hundreds of French chansonniers between the 11th and the contended for the honour of producing Renart; French, Flemish, 13th century. The earliest song literature, chiefly known in the German and Latin for the honour of first describing him. It is delightful collection of Bartsch (Altfranzösische Romanzen und sufficient to say that the spirit of the work seems to be more Pastourellen), is mainly sentimental in character. The collector that of the borderland between France and Flanders than of any divides it under the two heads of romances and pastourelles, other district, and that, wherever the idea may have originally the former being usually the celebration of the loves of a noble arisen, it was incomparably more fruitful in France than in knight and maiden, and recounting how Belle Doette or Eglantine any other country. The French poems which we possess on the or Oriour sat at her windows or in the tourney gallery, or emsubject amount in all to nearly 100,000 lines, independently broidering silk and samite in her chamber, with her thoughts of mere variations, but including the different versions of Renart on Gerard or Guy or Henry,—the latter somewhat monotonous le Contre-fail. This vast total is divided into four different but naïve and often picturesque recitals, very often in the first poems The most ancient and remarkable is that edited by person, of the meeting of an errant knight or minstrel with a Méon under the title of Roman du Renart, and containing, with shepherdess, and his cavalier but not always successful wooing. some additions made by M. Chabaille, 37 branches and about With these, some of which date from the 12th century, may be 32,000 lines. It must not, however, be supposed that this total contrasted, at the other end of the medieval period, the more forms a continuous poem like the Aeneid or Paradise Lost. Part varied and popular collection dating in their present form from was pretty certainly written by Pierre de Saint-Cloud, but he the 15th century, and published in 1875 by M. Gaston Paris. was not the author of the whole. On the contrary, the separate In both alike, making allowance for the difference of their age branches are the work of different authors, hardly any of whom and the state of the language, may be noticed a charming lyrical are known, and, but for their community of subject and to some faculty and great skill in the elaboration of light and suitable extent of treatment, might be regarded as separate poems. metres. Especially remarkable is the abundance of refrains of The history of Renart, his victories over Isengrim, the wolf, an admirably melodious kind. It is said that more than 500 of Bruin, the bear, and his other unfortunate rivals, his family these exist, Among the lyric writers of these four centuries affection, his outwittings of King Noble the Lion and all the whose names are known may be mentioned Audefroi le Bastard rest, are too well known to need fresh description here. It is (12th century), the author of the charming song of Belle perhaps in the subsequent poems, though they are far less known Idoine, and others no way inferior, Quesnes de Bethune, Bastard. and much less amusing, that the hold which the idea of Renart the ancestor of Sully, whose song-writing inclines had obtained on the mind of northern France, and the ingenious to a satirical cast in many instances, the Vidame de Chartres, uses to which it was put, are best shown. The first of these Charles d'Anjou, King John of Brienne, the châtelain de Coucy, Le Couronnement Renart, a poem of between 3000 and 4000 Gace Bruslé, Colin Muset, while not a few writers mentioned lines, attributed, on no grounds whatever, to the poetess Marie clsewhere-Guyot de Provins, Adam de la Halle, Jean Bodel de France, and describing how the hero by his ingenuity got and others--were also lyrists. But none of them, except perhaps himself crowned king. This poem already shows signs of direct Audefroi, can compare with Thibaut IV. (1201-1253), moral application and generalizing. These are still more apparent who united by his possessions and ancestry a connexion in Renart le Nouvel, a composition of some 8000 lines, finished with the north and the south, and who employed the in the year 1288 by the Fleming Jacquemart Giélée. Here the methods of both districts but used the language of the personification, of which, in noticing the Roman de la rose, we north only. Thibaut was supposed to be the lover of Blanche shall soon have to give extended mention, becomes evident. of Castile, the mother of St Louis, and a great deal of his verse Instead of or at least beside the lively personal Renart who is concerned with his love for her. But while knights and nobles used to steal sausages, set Isengrim fishing with his tail, or make were thus employing lyric poetry in courtly and sentimental use of Chanticleer's comb for a purpose for which it was certainly verse, lyric forms were being freely employed by others, both of never intended, we have Renardie, an abstraction of guile and high and low birth, for more general purposes. Blanche and hypocrisy, triumphantly prevailing over other and better Thibaut themselves came in for contemporary lampoons, and both qualities. Lastly, as the Roman de la rose of William of Lorris at this time and in the times immediately following, a cloud of is paralleled by Renart le Nouvel, so its continuation by Jean de writers composed light verse, sometimes of a lyric sometimes of a Meung is paralleled by the great miscellany of Renart le Contre- narrative kind, and sometimes in a mixture of both. By far the fait, which, even in its existing versions, extends to fully 50,000 most remarkable of these is Rutebœuf (a name which Rutebœuf. lines. Here we have, besides floods of miscellaneous erudition is perhaps a nickname), the first of a long series of and discourse, political argument of the most direct and im- French poets to whom in recent days the title Bohemian has portant kind. The wrongs of the lower orders are bitterly urged. been applied, who passed their lives between gaiety and misery, They are almost openly incited to revolt; and it is scarcely too and celebrated their lot in both conditions with copious verse. much to say, as M. Lenient has said, that the closely following Rutebœuf is among the earliest French writers who tell us their Jacquerie is but a practical carrying out of the doctrines of the personal history and make personal appeals. But he does not anonymous satirists of Renart le Contre-fail, one of whom (if confine himself to these. He discusses the history of his times,

Audefroi

Thibaut de Champagne.

Adam de La Halle.

upbraids the nobles for their desertion of the Latin empire of | Constantinople, considers the expediency of crusading, inveighs against the religious orders, and takes part in the disputes between the pope and the king. He composes pious poetry too, and in at least one poem takes care to distinguish between the church which he venerates and the corrupt churchmen whom he lampoons. Besides Rutebœuf the most characteristic figure of his class and time (about the middle of the 13th century) is Adam de la Halle, commonly called the Hunchback of Arras. The earlier poems of Adam are of a sentimental character, the later ones satirical and somewhat ill-tempered. Such, for instance, is his invective against his native city. But his chief importance consists in his jeux, the Jeu de la feuillie, the Jeu de Robin et Marion, dramatic compositions which led the way to the regular dramatic form. Indeed the general tendency of the 13th century is to satire, fable and farce, even more than to serious or sentimental poetry. We should perhaps except the lais, the chief of which are known under the name of Marie de France. These lays are exclusively Breton in origin, though not in application, and the term seems originally to have had reference rather to the music to which they were sung than to the manner or matter of the pieces. Some resemblance to these lays may perhaps be traced in the genuine Breton songs published by M. Luzel. The subjects of the lais are indifferently taken from the Arthurian cycle, from ancient story, and from popular tradition, and, at any rate in Marie's hands, they give occasion for some passionate, and in the modern sense really romantic, poetry. The most famous of all is the Lay of the Honeysuckle, traditionally assigned to Sir Tristram.

Lais.

Saliric and Didactic Works.-Among the direct satirists of the middle ages, one of the earliest and foremost is Guyot de Provins, a monk of Clairvaux and Cluny, whose Bible, as he calls it, contains an elaborate satire on the time (the beginning of the 13th century), and who was imitated by others, especially Hugues de Brégy. The same spirit soon betrayed itself in curious travesties of the romances of chivalry, and sometimes invades the later specimens of these romances themselves. One of the earliest examples of this travesty is the remarkable composition entitled Audigier. This poem, half fabliau and half romance, is not so much an instance of the heroi-comic poems which afterwards found so much favour in Italy and elsewhere, as a direct and ferocious parody of the Carlovingian epic. The hero Audigier is a model of cowardice and disloyalty; his father and mother, Turgibus and Rainberge, are deformed and repulsive. The exploits of the hero himself are coarse and hideous failures, and the whole poem can only be taken as a counterblast to the spirit of chivalry. Elsewhere a trouvère, prophetic of Rabelais, describes a vast battle between all the nations of the world, the quarrel being suddenly atoned by the arrival of a holy man bearing a huge flagon of wine. Again, we have the history of a solemn crusade undertaken by the citizens of a country town against the neighbouring castle. As erudition and the fancy for allegory gained ground, satire naturally availed itself of the opportunity thus afforded it; the disputes of Philippe le Bel with the pope and the Templars had an immense literary influence, partly in the concluding portions of the Renart, partly in the Roman de la rose, still to be mentioned, and partly in other satiric allegories of which the chief is the romance of Fauvel, attributed to François de Rues. The hero of this is an allegorical personage, half man and half horse, signifying the union of bestial degradation with human ingenuity and cunning. Fauvel (the name, it may be worth while to recall, occurs in Langland) is a divinity in his way. All the personages of state, from kings and popes to mendicant friars, pay their court to him.

But this serious and discontented spirit betrays itself also in compositions which are not parodies or travesties in form. One of the latest, if not absolutely the latest (for Baudouin Cuvelier's still later Chronique de Du Guesclin is only a most interesting imitation of the chanson form adapted to recent events), of the chansons de geste is Baudouin de Sebourc, one of the members of the great romance or cycle of

de

Sebourc.

romances dealing with the crusades, and entitled Le Chevalier au Cygne. Baudouin de Sebourc dates from the early years of the 14th century. It is strictly a chanson de geste in form, and also in the general run of its incidents. The hero is dispossessed of his inheritance by the agency of traitors, fights his battle with the world and its injustice, and at last prevails over his enemy Gaufrois, who has succeeded in obtaining the kingdom of Friesland and almost that of France. Gaufrois has as his assistants two personages who were very popular in the poetry of the time,-viz., the Devil, and Money. These two sinister figures pervade the fabliaux, tales and fantastic literature generally of the time. M. Lenient, the historian of French satire, has well remarked that a romance as long as the Renart might be spun out of the separate short poems of this period which have the Devil for hero, and many of which form a very interesting transition between the fabliau and the mystery. But the Devil is in one respect a far inferior hero to Renart. He has an adversary in the Virgin, who constantly upsets his best-laid schemes, and who does not always treat him quite fairly. The abuse of usury at the time, and the exactions of the Jews and Lombards, were severely felt, and Money itself, as personified, figures largely in the popular literature of the time.

William of

Roman de la Rose.-A work of very different importance from all of these, though with seeming touches of the same spirit, a work which deserves to take rank among the most important of the middle ages, is the Roman de la rose, Lorris. -one of the few really remarkable books which is the work of two authors, and that not in collaboration but in continuation one of the other. The author of the earlier part was Guillaume de Lorris, who lived in the first half of the 13th century; the author of the later part was Jean de Meung, who was born about the middle of that century, and whose part in the Roman dates at least from its extreme end. This great poem exhibits in its two parts very different characteristics, which yet go to make up a not inharmonious whole. It is a love poem, and yet it is satire. But both gallantry and raillery are treated in an entirely allegorical spirit; and this allegory, while it makes the poem tedious to hasty appetites of to-day, was exactly what gave it its charm in the eyes of the middle ages. It might be described as an Ars amoris crossed with a Quodlibeta. This mixture exactly hit the taste of the time, and continued to hit it for two centuries and a half. When its obvious and gallant meaning was attacked by moralists and theologians, it was easy to quote the example of the Canticles, and to furnish esoteric explanations of the allegory. The writers of the 16th century were never tired of quoting and explaining it. Antoine de Baif, indeed, gave the simple and obvious meaning, and declared that "La rose c'est d'amours le guerdon gracieux "; but Marot, on the other hand, gives us the choice of four mystical interpretations, the rose being either the state of wisdom, the state of grace, the state of eternal happiness or the Virgin herself. We cannot here analyse this celebrated poem. It is sufficient to say that the lover meets all sorts of obstacles in his pursuit of the rose, though he has for a guide the metaphorical personage Bel-Accueil. The early part, which belongs to William of Lorris, is remarkable for its gracious and fanciful descriptions. Forty years after Lorris's death, Jean de Meung completed it in an entirely different spirit. He keeps the allegorical form, and indeed introduces two new personages of importance, Nature and Faux-semblant. In the mouths of these personages and of another, Raison, he puts the most extraordinary mixture of erudition and satire. At one time we have the history of classical heroes, at another theories against the hoarding of money, about astronomy, about the duty of mankind to increase and multiply. Accounts of the origin of loyalty, which would have cost the poet his head at some periods of history, and even communistic ideas, are also to be found here. In Faux-semblant we have a real creation of the theatrical hypocrite. All this miscellaneous and apparently incongruous material in fact explains the success of the poem. It has the one characteristic which has at all times secured the popularity of great works of literature. It holds the mirror up firmly and fully to its age. As we find in Rabelais

Jean de Meung.

the characteristics of the Renaissance, in Montaigne those of the sceptical reaction from Renaissance and reform alike, in Molière those of the society of France after Richelieu had tamed and levelled it, in Voltaire and Rousseau respectively the two aspects of the great revolt, so there are to be found in the Roman de la rose the characteristics of the later middle age, its gallantry, its mysticism, its economical and social troubles and problems, its scholastic methods of thought, its naïve acceptance as science of everything that is written, and at the same time its shrewd and indiscriminate criticism of much that the age of criticism has accepted without doubt or question. The Roman de la rose, as might be supposed, set the example of an immense literature of allegorical poetry, which flourished more and more until the Renaissance. Some of these poems we have already mentioned, some will have to be considered under the head of the 15th century. But, as usually happens in such cases and was certain to happen in this case, the allegory which has seemed tedious to many, even in the original, became almost intolerable in the majority of the imitations.

Early didactic verse.

|

forms of verse.

frequent and popular. The same century, moreover, which
witnessed these developments of well-intentioned if not always
judicious erudition witnessed also a considerable change
in lyrical poetry. Hitherto such poetry had chiefly Artificial
been composed in the melodious but unconstrained
forms of the romance and the pastourelle. In the
14th century the writers of northern France subjected themselves
to severer rules. In this age arose the forms which for so long
a time were to occupy French singers,-the ballade, the rondeau,
the rondel, the triolet, the chant royal and others. These
received considerable alterations as time went on.
We possess
not a few Artes poëticae, such as that of Eustache Deschamps
at the end of the 14th century, that formerly ascribed to Henri
de Croy and now to Molinet at the end of the 15th, and that
of Thomas Sibilet in the 16th, giving particulars of them, and
these particulars show considerable changes. Thus the term
rondeau, which since Villon has been chiefly limited to a poem of
15 lines, where the 9th and 15th repeat the first words of the first,
was originally applied both to the rondel, a poem of 13 or 14
lines, where the first two are twice repeated integrally, and to the
triolet, one of 8 only, where the first line occurs three times
and the second twice. The last is an especially popular metre,
and is found where we should least expect it, in the dialogue
of the early farces, the speakers making up triolets between them.
As these three forms are closely connected, so are the ballade
and the chant royal, the latter being an extended and more

of both being the identity of rhyme and refrain in the several stanzas. It is quite uncertain at what time these fashions were first cultivated, but the earliest poets who appear to have practised them extensively were born at the close of the 13th and the beginning of the 14th centuries. Of these Guillaume de Machault (c. 1300-1380) is the oldest. He has left us 80,000 verses, never yet completely printed. Eustache Deschamps (c. 1340c. 1410) was nearly as prolific, but more fortunate as more meritorious, the Société des anciens Textes having at last provided a complete edition of him. Froissart the historian (1333-1410) was also an agreeable and prolific poet. Deschamps, the most famous as a poet of the three, has left us nearly 1200 ballades and nearly 200 rondeaux, besides much other verse all manifesting very considerable poetical powers. Less known but not less noteworthy, and perhaps the earliest of all, is Jehannot de Lescurel, whose personality is obscure, and most of whose works are lost, but whose remains are full of grace. Froissart appears to have had many countrymen in Hainault and Brabant who devoted themselves to the art of versification; and the Livre des cent ballades of the Marshal Boucicault (1366-1421) and his friendsc. 1390-shows that the French gentleman of the 14th century was as apt at the ballade as his Elizabethan peer in England was at the sonnet.

We have observed that, at least in the later section of the Roman de la rose, there is observable a tendency to import into the poem indiscriminate erudition. This tendency is now remote from our poetical habits; but in its own day it was only the natural result of the use of poetry for all literary purposes. It was many centuries before prose became recognized as the proper vehicle for instruction, and at a very early date verse was used as well for educa-stately and difficult version of the former, and the characteristic tional and moral as for recreative and artistic purposes. French verse was the first born of all literary mediums in modern European speech, and the resources of ancient learning were certainly not less accessible in France than in any other country. Dante, in his De vulgari eloquio, acknowledges the excellence of the didactic writers of the Langue d'Oil. We have already alluded to the Bestiary of Philippe de Thaun, a Norman trouvère who lived and wrote in England during the reign of Henry Beauclerc. Besides the Bestiary, which from its dedication to Queen Adela has been conjectured to belong to the third decade of the 12th century, Philippe wrote also in French a Liber de creaturis, both works being translated from the Latin. These works of mystical and apocryphal physics and zoology became extremely popular in the succeeding centuries, and were frequently imitated. A moralizing turn was also given to them, which was much helped by the importation of several miscellanies of Oriental origin, partly tales, partly didactic in character, the most celebrated of which is the Roman des sept sages, which, under that title and the variant of Dolopathos, received repeated treatment from French writers both in prose and verse. The odd notion of an Ovide moralise used to be ascribed to Philippe de Vitry, bishop of Meaux (1291?-1391?), a person complimented by Petrarch, but is now assigned to a certain Chrétien Legonais. Art, too, soon demanded exposition in verse, as well as science. The favourite pastime of the chase was repeatedly dealt with, notably in the Roi Modus (1325), mixed prose and verse; the Deduits de la chasse (1387), of Gaston de Foix, prose; and the Tresor de Venerie of Hardouin (1394), verse. Very soon didactic verse extended itself to all the arts and sciences. Vegetius and his military precepts had found a home in French octosyllables as early as the 12th century; the end of the same age saw the ceremonies of knighthood solemnly versified, and napes (maps) du monde also soon appeared. At last, in 1245, Gautier of Metz translated from various Latin works into French verse a sort of encyclopaedia, while another, incongruous but known as L'Image du monde, exists from the same century. Profane knowledge was not the only subject which exercised didactic poets at this time. Religious handbooks and commentaries on the scriptures were common in the 13th and following centuries, and, under the title of Castoiements, Enseignements and Doctrimaux, moral treatises became common. The most famous of these, the Castoiement d'un père à son fils, falls under the class, already mentioned, of works due to oriental influence, being derived from the Indian Panchatantra. In the 14th century the influence of the Roman de la rose helped to render moral verse

and

Early Drama.-Before passing to the prose writers of the middle ages, we have to take some notice of the dramatic productions of those times-productions of an extremely interesting character, but, like the immense Mysteries majority of medieval literature, poetic in form. The miracles. origin or the revival of dramatic composition in France has been hotly debated, and it has been sometimes contended that the tradition of Latin comedy was never entirely lost, but was handed on chiefly in the convents by adaptations of the Terentian plays, such as those of the nun Hroswitha. There is no doubt that the mysteries (subjects taken from the sacred writings) and miracle plays (subjects taken from the legends of the saints and the Virgin) are of very early date. The mystery of the Foolish Virgins (partly French, partly Latin), that of Adam and perhaps that of Daniel, are of the 12th century, though due to unknown authors. Jean Bodel and Ruteboeuf, already mentioned, gave, the one that of Saint Nicolas at the confines of the 12th and 13th, the other that of Théophile later in the 13th itself. But the later moralities, soties, and farces seem to be also in part a very probable development of the simpler and earlier forms of the fabliau and of the tenson or jeuparti, a poem in simple dialogue much used by both troubadours

and trouvères. The fabliau has been sufficiently dealt with already. It chiefly supplied the subject; and some miracleplays and farces are little more than fabliaux thrown into dialogue. Of the jeux-partis there are many examples, varying from very simple questions and answers to something like regular dramatic dialogue; even short romances, such as Aucassin et Nicolelle, were easily susceptible of dramatization. But the Jeu de la feuillie (or feuillée) of Adam de la Halle seems to be the earliest piece, profane in subject, containing something more than mere dialogue. The poet has not indeed gone far for his subject, for he brings in his own wife, father and friends, the interest being complicated by the introduction of stock characters (the doctor, the monk, the fool), and of certain fairies-personages already popular from the later romances of chivalry. Another piece of Adam's, Le Jeu de Robin et Marion, also already alluded to, is little more than a simple throwing into action of an ordinary pastourelle with a considerable number of songs to music. Nevertheless later criticism has seen, and not unreasonably, in these two pieces the origin in the one case of farce, and thus indirectly of comedy proper, in the other of comic opera.

Moralities.

Soties.

disease, or anything else of the kind, which does not figure in these compositions. There is Bien Advisé and Mal Advisé, the good boy and the bad boy of nursery stories, who fall in respectively with Faith, Reason and Humility, and with Rashness, Luxury and Folly. There is the hero MangeTout, who is invited to dinner by Banquet, and meets after dinner very unpleasant company in Colique, Goutte and Hydropisie. Honte-de-dire-ses-Péchés might seem an anticipation of Puritan nomenclature to an English reader who did not remember the contemporary or even earlier personae of Langland's poem. Some of these moralities possess distinct dramatic merit; among these is mentioned Les Blasphémateurs, an early and remarkable presentation of the Don Juan story. But their general character appears to be gravity, not to say dullness. The Enfans sans Souci, on the other hand, were definitely satirical, and nothing if not amusing. The chief of the society was entitled Prince des Sots, and his crown was a hood decorated with asses' ears. The sotie was directly satirical, and only assumed the guise of folly as a stalking-horse for shooting wit. It was more Aristophanic than any other modern form of For a long time, however, the mystery and miracle-plays comedy, and like its predecessor, it perished as a result of its remained the staple of theatrical performance, and until the political application. Encouraged for a moment as a political 13th century actors as well as performers were more or less taken engine at the beginning of the 16th century, it was soon absolutely from the clergy. It has, indeed, been well pointed out that the forbidden and put down, and had to give place in one direction offices of the church were themselves dramatic performances, to the lampoon and the prose pamphlet, in another to forms of and required little more than development at the hands of the comic satire more general and vague in their scope. The farce, mystery writers. The occasional festive outbursts, such as the on the other hand, having neither moral purpose nor political Feast of Fools, that of the Boy Bishop and the rest, helped on intention, was a purer work of art, enjoyed a wider range of subthe development. The variety of mysteries and miracles was ject, and was in no danger of any permanent extinction. Farcical very great. A single manuscript contains forty miracles of the interludes were interpolated in the mysteries themselves; short Virgin, averaging from 1200 to 1500 lines each, written in octo- farces introduced and rendered palatable the moralities, while syllabic couplets, and at least as old as the 14th century, most the sotie was itself but a variety of farce, and all the kinds were of them perhaps much earlier. The mysteries proper, or plays sometimes combined in a sort of tetralogy. It was a short taken from the scriptures, are older still. Many of these are composition, 500 verses being considered sufficient, while the exceedingly long. There is a Mystère de l'Ancien Testament, morality might run to at least 1000 verses, the miracle-play to which extends to many volumes, and must have taken weeks nearly double that number, and the mystery to some 40,000 or to act in its entirety. The Mystère de la Passion, though not 50,000, or indeed to any length that the author could find in his quite so long, took several days, and recounts the whole history heart to bestow upon the audience, or the audience in their of the gospels. The best apparently of the authors of these patience to suffer from the author. The number of persons and pieces, which are mostly anonymous, were two brothers, Arnoul societies who acted these performances grew to be very large, and Simon Gréban (authors of the Actes des apôtres, and in the being estimated at more than 5000 towards the end of the 15th first case of the Passion), c. 1450, while a certain Jean Michel century. Many fantastic personages came to join the Prince des (d. 1493) is credited with having continued the Passion from Sots, such as the Empereur de Galilée, the Princes de l'Etrille, 30,000 lines to 50,000. But these performances, though they and des Nouveaux Mariés, the Roi de l'Épinette, the Recteur held their ground until the middle of the 16th century and des Fous. Of the pieces which these societies represented one extended their range of subject from sacred to profane history only, that of Matre Patelin, is now much known; but many legendary as in the Destruction de Troie, contemporary as in the are almost equally amusing. Patelin itself has an immense Siège d'Orléans-were soon rivalled by the more profane number of versions and editions. Other farces are too numerous Profane drama. performances of the moralities, the farces and the to attempt to classify; they bear, however, in their subjects, soties. The palmy time of all these three kinds is as in their manner, a remarkable resemblance to the fabliaux, the 15th century, while the Confrérie de la Passion itself, the their source. Conjugal disagreements, the unpleasantness of special performers of the sacred drama, only obtained the licence mothers-in-law, the shifty or, in the earlier stages, clumsy valet constituting it by an ordinance of Charles VI. in 1402. In order, and chambermaid, the mishaps of too loosely given ecclesiastics, however, to take in the whole of the medieval theatre at a glance, the abuses of relics and pardons, the extortion, violence, and we may anticipate a little. The Confraternity was not itself sometimes cowardice of the seigneur and the soldiery, the corthe author or performer of the profaner kind of dramatic perform-ruption of justice, its delays and its pompous apparatus, supply ance. This latter was due to two other bodies, the clerks of the Bazoche and the Enfans sans Souci. As the Confraternity was chiefly composed of tradesmen and persons very similar to Peter Quince and his associates, so the clerks of the Bazoche were members of the legal profession of Paris, and the Enfans sans Souci were mostly young men of family. The morality was the special property of the first, the sotie of the second. But as the moralities were sometimes decidedly tedious plays, though by no means brief, they were varied by the introduction of farces, of which the jeux already mentioned were the early germ, and of which L'Avocat Patelin, dated by some about 1465 and certainly about 200 years subsequent to Adam de la Halle, is the most famous example.

The morality was the natural result on the stage of the immense literary popularity of allegory in the Roman de la rose and its imitations. There is hardly an abstraction, a virtue, a vice, a

the subjects. The treatment is rather narrative than dramatic in most cases, as might be expected, but makes up by the liveliness of the dialogue for the deficiency of elaborately planned action and interest. All these forms, it will be observed, are directly or indirectly comic. Tragedy in the middle ages is represented only by the religious drama, except for a brief period towards the decline of that form, when the "profane "mysteries referred to above came to be represented. These were, however, rather "histories," in the Elizabethan sense, than tragedics proper.

Prose History.-In France, as in all other countries of whose literary developments we have any record, literature in prose is considerably later than literature in verse. We have certain glosses or vocabularies possibly dating as far chronicles. back as the 8th or even the 7th century; we have the Strassburg oaths, already described, of the 9th, and a commentary

Early

Ville

Bardouin.

on the prophet Jonas which is probably as early. In the roth | century there are some charters and muniments in the vernacular; of the 11th the laws of William the Conqueror are the most important document; while the Assises de Jérusalem of Godfrey of Bouillon date, though not in the form in which we now possess them, from the same age. The 12th century gives us certain translations of the Scriptures, and the remarkable Arthurian romances already alluded to; and thenceforward French prose, though long less favoured than verse, begins to grow in importance. History, as is natural, was the first subject which gave it a really satisfactory opportunity of developing its powers. For a time the French chroniclers contented themselves with Latin prose or with French verse, after the fashion of Wace and the Belgian, Philippe Mouskés (1215-1283). These, after a fashion universal in medieval times, began from fabulous or merely literary origins, and just as Wyntoun later carries back the history of Scotland to the terrestrial paradise, so does Mouskés start that of France from the rape of Helen. But soon prose chronicles, first translated, then original, became common; the earliest of all is said to have been that of the pseudo-Turpin, which thus recovered in prose the language which had originally clothed it in verse, and which, to gain a false appearance of authenticity, it had exchanged still earlier for Latin. Then came French selections and versions from the great series of historical compositions undertaken by the monks of St Denys, the so-called Grandes Chroniques de France from the date of 1274, when they first took form in the hands of a monk styled Primat, to the reign of Charles V., when they assumed the title just given. But the first really remarkable author who used French prose as a vehicle of historical expression is Geoffroi de Villehardouin, marshal of Champagne, who was born rather after the middle of the 12th century, and died in Greece in 1212. Under the title of Conquête de Constantinoble Villehardouin has left us a history of the fourth crusade, which has been accepted by all competent judges as the best picture extant of feudal chivalry in its prime. The Conquête de Constantinoble has been well called a chanson de geste in prose, and indeed in the surprising nature of the feats it celebrates, in the abundance of detail, and in the vivid and picturesque poetry of the narration, it equals the very best of the chansons. Even the repetition of the same phrases which is characteristic of epic poetry repeats itself in this epic prose; and as in the chansons so in Villehardouin, lew motives appear but religious fervour and the love of fighting, though neither of these excludes a lively appetite for booty and a constant tendency to disunion and disorder. Villehardouin was continued by Henri de Valenciennes, whose work is less remarkable, and has more the appearance of a rhymed chronicle thrown into prose, a process which is known to have been actually applied in some cases. Nor is the transition from Villehardouin to Jean de Joinville (considerable in point of time, for Joinville was not born till ten years after Villehardouin's death) in point of literary history immediate. The rhymed chronicles of Philippe Mouskés and Guillaume Guiart belong to this interval; and in prose the most remarkable works are the Chronique de Reims, a well-written history, having the interesting characteristics of taking the lay and popular side, and the great compilation edited (in the modern sense) by Baudouin d'Avesnes (1213-1289). Joinville (? 1224-1317), whose special subject is the Life of St Louis, is far more modern than even the half-century which separates him from Villehardouin would lead us to suppose. There is nothing of the knighterrant about him personally, notwithstanding his devotion to his bero. Our Lady of the Broken Lances is far from being his favourite saint. He is an admirable writer, but far less simple than Villehardouin; the good King Louis tries in vain to make him share his own rather high-flown devotion. Joinville is shrewd, practical, there is even a touch of the Voltairean about him; but he, unlike his predecessor, has political ideas and antiquarian curiosity, and his descriptions are often very creditable pieces of deliberate literature.

It is very remarkable that each of the three last centuries of feudalism should have had one specially and extraordinarily

Froissart

gifted chronicler to describe it. What Villehardouin is to the 12th and Joinville to the 13th century, that Jean Froissart (1337-1410) is to the 14th. His picture is the most famous as it is the most varied of the three, but it has special drawbacks as well as special merits. French critics have indeed been scarcely fair to Froissart, because of his early partiality to our own nation in the great quarrel of the time, forgetting that there was really no reason why he as a Hainaulter should take the French side. But there is no doubt that if the duty of an historian is to take in all the political problems of his time, Froissart certainly comes short of it. Although the feudal state in which knights and churchmen were alone of estimation was at the point of death, and though new orders of society were becoming important, though the distress and confusion of a transition state were evident to all, Froissart takes no notice of them. Society is still to him all knights and ladies, tournaments, skirmishes and feasts. He depicts these, not like Joinville, still less like Villehardouin, as a sharer in them, but with the facile and picturesque pen of a sympathizing literary onlooker. As the comparison of the Conquête de Constantinoble with a chanson de geste is inevitable, so is that of Froissart's Chronique with a roman d'aventures.

For Provençal Literature see the separate article under that heading.

15th Century. The 15th century holds a peculiar and somewhat disputed position in the history of French literature, as, indeed, it does in the history of the literature of all Europe, except Italy. It has sometimes been regarded as the final stage of the medieval period, sometimes as the earliest of the modern, the influence of the Renaissance in Italy already filtering through. Others again have taken the easy step of marking it as an age of transition. There is as usual truth in all these views. Feudality died with Froissart and Eustache Deschamps. The modern spirit can hardly be said to arise before Rabelais and Ronsard. Yet the 15th century, from the point of view of French literature, much more remarkable than its historians have been wont to confess. It has not the strongly marked and compact originality of some periods, and it furnishes only one name of the highest order of literary interest; but it abounds in names of the second rank, and the very difference which exists between their styles and characters testifies to the existence of a large number of separate forces working in their different manners on different persons. Its theatre we have already treated by anticipation, and to it we shall afterwards recur. It was the palmy time of the early French stage, and all the dramatic styles which we have enumerated then came to perfection. Of no other kind of literature can the same be said. The century which witnessed the invention of printing naturally devoted itself at first more to the spreading of old literature than to the production of new. Yet as it perfected the early drama, so it produced the prose tale. Nor, as regards individual and single names, can the century of Charles d'Orléans, of Alain Chartier, of Christine de Pisan, of Coquillart, of Comines, and, above all, of Villon, be said to lack illustrations.

Christine

First among the poets of the period falls to be mentioned the shadowy personality of Olivier Basselin. Modern criticism has attacked the identity of the jovial miller, who was once supposed to have written and perhaps de Pisan. invented the songs called vaux de vire, and to have also carried on a patriotic warfare against the English. But though Jean le Houx may have written the poems published under Basselin's name two centuries later, it is taken as certain that an actual Olivier wrote actual vaux de vire at the beginning of the 15th century. About Christine de Pisan (1363-1430) and Alain Chartier (1392-c. 1430) there is no such doubt. Christine was the daughter of an Italian astrologer who was patronized by Charles V. She was born in Italy but brought up in France, and she enriched the literature of her adopted country with much learning, good sense and patriotism. She Chartier. wrote history, devotional works and poetry; and though her literary merit is not of the highest, it is very far from despicable. Alain Chartier, best known to modern readers by

Alain

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