Medieval English Literature
by W. P. Ker · English · Gutenberg #37342 · 314,178 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Medieval English Literature
Author: W. P. Ker
Release date: September 7, 2011 [eBook #37342]
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Language: English
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_THE HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE_
43
MEDIEVAL
ENGLISH LITERATURE
_EDITORS OF
The Home University Library
of Modern Knowledge_
GILBERT MURRAY, O.M., D.C.L., F.B.A.
G. N. CLARK, LL.D., F.B.A.
G. R. DE BEER, D.SC., F.R.S.
_United States_
JOHN FULTON, M.D., PH.D.
HOWARD MUMFORD JONES, LITT.D.
WILLIAM L. LANGER, PH.D.
_Medieval
English Literature_
W. P. KER
_Geoffrey Cumberlege_
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO
_First published in_ 1912, _and reprinted in_ 1925, 1926, 1928 (_twice_),
1932, _and_ 1942
_Reset in_ 1945 _and reprinted in_ 1948
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I INTRODUCTION 7
II THE ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD 16
III THE MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD (1150-1500) 43
IV THE ROMANCES 76
V SONGS AND BALLADS 107
VI COMIC POETRY 124
VII ALLEGORY 137
VIII SERMONS AND HISTORIES, IN VERSE AND PROSE 150
IX CHAUCER 163
NOTE ON BOOKS 187
SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE _by_ R. W. CHAMBERS 188
INDEX 190
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
Readers are drawn to medieval literature in many different ways, and it
is hardly possible to describe all the attractions and all the approaches
by which they enter on this ground. Students of history have to learn the
languages of the nations with whose history they are concerned, and to
read the chief books in those languages, if they wish to understand
rightly the ideas, purposes and temper of the past ages. Sometimes the
study of early literature has been instigated by religious or
controversial motives, as when the Anglo-Saxon homilies were taken up and
edited and interpreted in support of the Reformation. Sometimes it is
mere curiosity that leads to investigation of old literature—a wish to
find out the meaning of what looks at first difficult and mysterious.
Curiosity of this sort, however, is seldom found unmixed; there are
generally all sorts of vague associations and interests combining to lead
the explorer on. It has often been observed that a love of Gothic
architecture, or of medieval art in general, goes along with, and helps,
the study of medieval poetry. Chatterton’s old English reading and his
imitations of old English verse were inspired by the Church of St. Mary
Redcliffe at Bristol. The lives of Horace Walpole, of Thomas Warton, of
Sir Walter Scott, and many others show how medieval literary studies may
be nourished along with other kindred antiquarian tastes.
Sometimes, instead of beginning in historical or antiquarian interests,
or in a liking for the fashions of the Middle Ages in general, it happens
that a love of medieval literature has its rise in one particular author,
e.g. Dante or Sir Thomas Malory. The book, the _Divina Commedia_ or _Le
Morte d’Arthur_, is taken up, it may be, casually, with no very distinct
idea or purpose, and then it is found to be engrossing and
captivating—what is often rightly called ‘a revelation of a new world’.
For a long time this is enough in itself; the reader is content with
Dante or with the _Morte d’Arthur_. But it may occur to him to ask about
‘the French book’ from which Malory got his adventures of the Knights of
King Arthur; he may want to know how the legend of the Grail came to be
mixed up with the romances of the Round Table; and so he will be drawn
on, trying to find out as much as possible and plunging deeper and deeper
into the Middle Ages. The same kind of thing happens to the reader of
Dante; Dante is found all through his poem acknowledging obligations to
earlier writers; he is not alone or independent in his thought and his
poetry; and so it becomes an interesting thing to go further back and to
know something about the older poets and moralists, and the earlier
medieval world in general, before it was all summed up and recorded in
the imagination of the Divine Comedy. Examples of this way of reading may
be found in the works of Ruskin and in Matthew Arnold. Matthew Arnold,
rather late in his life (in the introductory essay to T. H. Ward’s
_English Poets_), shows that he has been reading some old French authors.
He does not begin with old French when he is young; evidently he was
brought to it in working back from the better known poets, Dante and
Chaucer. Ruskin’s old French quotations are also rather late in the
series of his writings; it was in his Oxford lectures, partly published
in _Fors Clavigera_, that he dealt with _The Romance of the Rose_, and
used it to illustrate whatever else was in his mind at the time.
Thus it is obvious that any one who sets out to write about English
literature in the Middle Ages will find himself addressing an audience
which is not at all in agreement with regard to the subject. Some will
probably be historical in their tastes, and will seek, in literature, for
information about manners and customs, fashions of opinion, ‘typical
developments’ in the history of culture or education. Others may be on
the look-out for stories, for the charm of romance which is sometimes
thought to belong peculiarly to the Middle Ages, and some, with ambitions
of their own, may ask for themes that can be used and adapted in modern
forms, as the Nibelung story has been used by Wagner and William Morris
and many others; perhaps for mere suggestions of plots and scenery, to be
employed more freely, as in Morris’s prose romances, for example. Others,
starting from one favourite author—Dante or Chaucer or Malory—will try to
place what they already know in its right relation to all its
surroundings—by working, for instance, at the history of religious
poetry, or the different kinds of story-telling. It is not easy to write
for all these and for other different tastes as well. But it is not a
hopeless business, so long as there is some sort of interest to begin
with, even if it be only a general vague curiosity about an unknown
subject.
There are many prejudices against the Middle Ages; the name itself was
originally an expression of contempt; it means the interval of darkness
between the ruin of ancient classical culture and the modern revival of
learning—a time supposed to be full of ignorance, superstition and bad
taste, an object of loathing to well-educated persons. As an example of
this sort of opinion about the Middle Ages, one may take what Bentham
says of our ‘barbarian ancestors’—‘few of whom could so much as read, and
those few had nothing before them that was worth the reading’. ‘When from
their ordinary occupation, their order of the day, the cutting of one
another’s throats, or those of Welshmen, Scotchmen or Irishmen, they
could steal now and then a holiday, how did they employ it? In cutting
Frenchmen’s throats in order to get their money: this was active
virtue:—leaving Frenchmen’s throats uncut was indolence, slumber,
inglorious ease.’
On the other hand, the Middle Ages have been glorified by many writers;
‘the Age of Chivalry’, the ‘Ages of Faith’ have often been contrasted
with the hardness of the age of enlightenment, rationalism, and material
progress; they are thought of as full of colour, variety, romance of all
sorts, while modern civilization is represented as comparatively dull,
monotonous and unpicturesque. This kind of view has so far prevailed,
even among people who do not go to any extremes, and who are not
excessively enthusiastic or romantic, that the term ‘Gothic’, which used
to be a term of contempt for the Middle Ages, has entirely lost its
scornful associations. ‘Gothic’ was originally an abusive name, like
‘Vandalism’; it meant the same thing as ‘barbarian’. But while
‘Vandalism’ has kept its bad meaning, ‘Gothic’ has lost it. It does not
now mean ‘barbarous’, and if it still means ‘unclassical’ it does not
imply that what is ‘unclassical’ must be wrong. It is possible now to
think of the Middle Ages and their literature without prejudice on the
one side or the other. As no one now thinks of despising Gothic
architecture simply because it is not Greek, so the books of the Middle
Ages may be read in a spirit of fairness by those who will take the
trouble to understand their language; they may be appreciated for what
they really are; their goodness or badness is not now determined merely
by comparison with the work of other times in which the standards and
ideals of excellence were not the same.
The language is a difficulty. The older English books are written in the
language which is commonly called Anglo-Saxon; this is certainly not one
of the most difficult, but no language is really easy to learn.
Anglo-Saxon poetry, besides, has a peculiar vocabulary and strange forms
of expression. The poetical books are not to be read without a great deal
of application; they cannot be rushed.
Later, when the language has changed into what is technically called
Middle English—say, in the thirteenth century—things are in many ways no
better. It is true that the language is nearer to modern English; it is
true also that the language of the poetical books is generally much
simpler and nearer that of ordinary prose than was the language of the
Anglo-Saxon poets. But on the other hand, while Anglo-Saxon literature is
practically all in one language, Middle English is really not a language
at all, but a great number of different tongues, belonging to different
parts of the country. And not only does the language of Yorkshire differ
from that of Kent, or Dorset, or London, or Lancashire, but within the
same district each author spells as he pleases, and the man who makes a
copy of his book also spells as he pleases, and mixes up his own local
and personal varieties with those of the original author. There is
besides an enormously greater amount of written matter extant in Middle
English than in Anglo-Saxon, and this, coming from all parts of the
country, is full of all varieties of odd words. The vocabulary of Middle
English, with its many French and Danish words, its many words belonging
to one region and not to another, is, in some ways, more difficult than
that of Anglo-Saxon.
But luckily it is not hard, in spite of all these hindrances, to make a
fair beginning with the old languages—in Anglo-Saxon, for example, with
Sweet’s _Primer_ and _Reader_, in Middle English with Chaucer or _Piers
Plowman_.
The difference in language between Anglo-Saxon and Middle English
corresponds to a division in the history of literature. Anglo-Saxon
literature is different from that which follows it, not merely in its
grammar and dictionary, but in many of its ideas and fashions,
particularly in its fashion of poetry. The difference may be expressed in
this way, that while the older English literature is mainly English, the
literature after the eleventh century is largely dependent on France;
France from 1100 to 1400 is the chief source of ideas, culture,
imagination, stories, and forms of verse. It is sometimes thought that
this was the result of the Norman Conquest, but that is not the proper
explanation of what happened, either in language or in literature. For
the same kind of thing happened in other countries which were not
conquered by the Normans or by any other people speaking French. The
history of the German language and of German literature in the Middle
Ages corresponds in many things to the history of English. The name
Middle English was invented by a German philologist (Grimm), who found in
English the same stages of development as in German; Anglo-Saxon
corresponds to Old German in its inflexions; Middle English is like
Middle German. The change, in both languages, is a change from one kind
of inflexion to another. In the ‘Old’ stage (say, about the year 900) the
inflexions have various clearly pronounced vowels in them; in the
‘Middle’ stage (about 1200) the terminations of words have come to be
pronounced less distinctly, and where there is inflexion it shows most
commonly one vowel, written _e_, where the ‘Old’ form might have _a_ or
_o_ or _u_. Changes of this kind had begun in England before the Norman
Conquest, and would have gone on as they did in Germany if there had been
no Norman Conquest at all. The French and the French language had nothing
to do with it.
Where the French were really important was in their ideas and in the
forms of their poetry; they made their influence felt through these in
all Western Christendom, in Italy, in Denmark, and even more strongly in
Germany than in England. Indeed it might be said that the Norman Conquest
made it less easy for the English than it was for the Germans to employ
the French ideas when they were writing books of their own in their own
language. The French influence was too strong in England; the native
language was discouraged; many Englishmen wrote their books in French,
instead of making English adaptations from the French. The Germans, who
were independent politically, were not tempted in the same way as the
English, and in many respects they were more successful than the English
as translators from the French, as adapters of French ‘motives’ and
ideas. But whatever the differences might be between one nation and
another, it is certain that after 1100 French ideas were appreciated in
all the countries of Europe, in such a way as to make France the
principal source of enlightenment and entertainment everywhere; and the
intellectual predominance of France is what most of all distinguishes the
later medieval from the earlier, that is, from the Anglo-Saxon period, in
the history of English literature.
The leadership of France in the literature of Europe may be dated as
beginning about 1100, which is the time of the First Crusade and of many
great changes in the life of Christendom. About 1100 there is an end of
one great historical period, which began with what is called the
Wandering of the German nations, and their settlement in various parts of
the world. The Norman Conquest of England, it has been said, is the last
of the movements in the wandering of the nations. Goths and Vandals,
Franks, Burgundians, Lombards, Angles, Jutes and Saxons, Danes and
Northmen, had all had their times of adventure, exploration, conquest and
settlement. One great event in this wandering was the establishment of
the Norwegian settlers in France, the foundation of Normandy; and the
expeditions of the Normans—to Italy as well as to England—were nearly the
last which were conducted in the old style. After the Norman Conquest
there are new sorts of adventure, which are represented in Chaucer’s
Knight and Squire—the one a Crusader, or Knight errant, the other (his
son) engaged in a more modern sort of warfare, England against France,
nation against nation.
The two forms of the English language, Anglo-Saxon and Middle English,
and the two periods of medieval English literature, correspond to the two
historical periods of which one ends and the other begins about 1100, at
the date of the First Crusade. Anglo-Saxon literature belongs to the
older world; Anglo-Saxon poetry goes back to very early times and keeps a
tradition which had come down from ancient days when the English were
still a Continental German tribe. Middle English literature is cut off
from Anglo-Saxon, the Anglo-Saxon stories are forgotten, and though the
old alliterative verse is kept, as late as the sixteenth century, it is
in a new form with a new tune in it; while instead of being the one great
instrument of poetry it has to compete with rhyming couplets and stanzas
of different measure; it is hard put to it by the rhymes of France.
CHAPTER II
THE ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD
In dealing with Anglo-Saxon literature it is well to remember first of
all that comparatively little of it has been preserved; we cannot be
sure, either, that the best things have been preserved, in the poetry
especially. Anglo-Saxon poetry was being made, we know, for at least five
hundred years. What now exists is found, chiefly, in four manuscript
volumes,[1] which have been saved, more or less accidentally, from all
sorts of dangers. No one can say what has been lost. Many manuscripts, as
good as any of these, may have been sold as old parchment, or given to
the children to cut up into tails for kites. One Anglo-Saxon poem,
_Waldere_, is known from two fragments of it which were discovered in the
binding of a book in Copenhagen. Two other poems were fortunately copied
and published about two hundred years ago by two famous antiquaries; the
original manuscripts have disappeared since then. Who can tell how many
manuscripts have disappeared without being copied? The obvious conclusion
is that we can speak about what we know, but not as if we knew everything
about Anglo-Saxon poetry.
With the prose it is rather different. The prose translations due to King
Alfred are preserved; so is the English Chronicle; so are a fair number
of religious works, the homilies of Ælfric and others; it does not seem
likely from what we know of the conditions of authorship in those times
that any prose work of any notable or original value has disappeared.
With the poetry, on the other hand, every fresh discovery—like that of
the bookbinding fragments already mentioned—makes one feel that the
extent of Anglo-Saxon poetry is unknown. Anything may turn up. We cannot
say what subjects were not treated by Anglo-Saxon poets. It is certain
that many good stories were known to them which are not found in any of
the extant manuscripts.
The contents of Anglo-Saxon literature may be divided into two sections,
one belonging to the English as a Teutonic people who inherited along
with their language a form of poetry and a number of stories which have
nothing to do with Roman civilization; the other derived from Latin and
turning into English the knowledge which was common to the whole of
Europe.
The English in the beginning—Angles and Saxons—were heathen Germans who
took part in the great movement called the Wandering of the Nations—who
left their homes and emigrated to lands belonging to the Roman empire,
and made slaves of the people they found there. They were barbarians; the
civilized inhabitants of Britain, when the English appeared there,
thought of them as horrible savages. They were as bad and detestable as
the Red Indians were to the Colonists in America long afterwards.
But we know that the early English are not to be judged entirely by the
popular opinion of the Britons whom they harried and enslaved, any more
than the English of Queen Elizabeth’s time are to be thought of simply
according to the Spanish ideas about Sir Francis Drake. There were
centuries of an old civilization behind them when they settled in
Britain; what it was like is shown partially in the work of the Bronze
and the early Iron Age in the countries from which the English came. The
_Germania_ of Tacitus tells more, and more still is to be learned from
the remains of the old poetry.
Tacitus was not quite impartial in his account of the Germans; he used
them as examples to point a moral against the vices of Rome; the German,
in his account, is something like the ‘noble savage’ who was idealized by
later philosophers in order to chastise the faults of sophisticated
modern life. But Tacitus, though he might have been rather inclined to
favour the Germans, was mainly a scientific observer who wished to find
out the truth about them, and to write a clear description of their
manners and customs. One of the proofs of his success is the agreement
between his _Germania_ and the pictures of life composed by the people of
that race themselves in their epic poetry.
The case of the early English is very like that of the Danes and Northmen
four or five hundred years later. The Anglo-Saxons thought and wrote of
the Danes almost exactly as the Britons had thought of their Saxon
enemies. The English had to suffer from the Danish pirates what the
Britons had suffered from the English; they cursed the Danes as their own
ancestors had been cursed by the Britons; the invaders were utterly
detestable and fiendish men of blood. But luckily we have some other
information about those pirates. From the Norwegian, Danish and Icelandic
historians, and from some parts of the old Northern poetry, there may be
formed a different idea about the character and domestic manners of the
men who made themselves so unpleasant in their visits to the English and
the neighbouring coasts. The pirates at home were peaceful country
gentlemen, leading respectable and beneficent lives among their poorer
neighbours. The Icelandic histories—including the history of Norway for
three or four centuries—may be consulted for the domestic life of the
people who made so bad a name for themselves as plunderers abroad. They
appear there, several varieties of them, as members of a reasonable,
honourable community, which could have given many lessons of civilization
to England or France many centuries later. But the strangest and most
convincing evidence about the domestic manners of the Northmen is found
in English, and is written by King Alfred himself. King Alfred had many
foreigners in his service, and one of them was a Norwegian gentleman from
the far North, named Ohthere (or Ottárr, as it would be in the Norse
tongue rather later than King Alfred’s time). How he came into the King’s
service is not known, but there are other accounts of similar cases which
show how easy it was for Northmen of ability to make their way in the
world through the patronage of kings. Ohthere belonged exactly to the
class from which the most daring and successful rovers came. He was a
gentleman of good position at home in Halogaland (now called Helgeland in
the north of Norway), a landowner with various interests, attending to
his crops, making a good deal out of trade with the Finns and Lapps; and
besides that a navigator, the first who rounded the North Cape and sailed
into the White Sea. His narrative, which is given by Alfred as an
addition to his translation of Orosius, makes a pleasant and amusing
contrast to the history of the Danish wars, which also may have been
partly written by King Alfred himself for their proper place in the
English Chronicle.
As the Icelandic sagas and Ohthere’s narrative and other documents make
it easy to correct the prejudiced and partial opinions of the English
about the Danes, so the opinions of the Britons about the Saxons are
corrected, though the evidence is not by any means so clear. The Angles
and Saxons, like the Danes and Northmen later—like Sir Francis Drake, or
like Ulysses, we might say—were occasionally pirates, but not restricted
to that profession. They had many other things to do and think about.
Before everything, they belonged to the great national system which
Tacitus calls _Germania_—which was never politically united, even in the
loosest way, but which nevertheless was a unity, conscious of its
separation from all the foreigners whom it called, in a comprehensive
manner, Welsh. In England the Welsh are the Cambro-Britons; in Germany
Welsh means sometimes French, sometimes Italian—a meaning preserved in
the name ‘walnut’ (or ‘walsh-note’, as it is in Chaucer)—the ‘Italian
nut’. Those who are not Welsh are ‘Teutonic’—which is not a mere modern
pedantic name, but is used by old writers in the same way as by modern
philologists, and applied to High or Low Dutch indifferently, and also to
English. But the unity of _Germania_—the community of sentiment among the
early German nations—does not need to be proved by such philological
notes as the opposition of ‘Dutch’ and ‘Welsh’. It is proved by its own
most valuable results, by its own ‘poetical works’—the heroic legends
which were held in common by all the nations of _Germania_. If any one
were to ask, ‘What does the old English literature _prove_?’ the answer
would be ready enough. It proves that the Germanic nations had a
reciprocal free trade in subjects for epic poems. They were generally
free from local jealousy about heroes. Instead of a natural rivalry among
Goths, Burgundians and the rest, the early poets seem to have had a
liking for heroes not of their own nation, so long as they were members
of one of the German tribes. (The Huns, it may be here remarked, are
counted as Germans; Attila is not thought of as a barbarian.) The great
example of this common right in heroes is Sigfred, Sigurd the Volsung,
Siegfried of the _Nibelungenlied_. His original stock and race is of no
particular interest to any one; he is a hero everywhere, and everywhere
he is thought of as belonging, in some way or other, to the people who
sing about him. This glory of Sigurd or Siegfried is different from the
later popularity of King Arthur or of Charlemagne in countries outside of
Britain or France. Arthur and Charlemagne are adopted in many places as
favourite heroes without any particular thought of their nationality, in
much the same way as Alexander the Great was celebrated everywhere from
pure love of adventurous stories. But Siegfried or Sigurd, whether in
High or Low Germany, or Norway or Iceland, is always at home. He is not
indeed a national champion, like the Cid in Spain or the Wallace in
Scotland, but everywhere he is thought of, apart from any local
attachment, as the hero of the race.
One of the old English poems called _Widsith_ (the Far Traveller) is an
epitome of the heroic poetry of _Germania_, and a clear proof of the
common interest taken in all the heroes. The theme of the poem is the
wandering of a poet, who makes his way to the courts of the most famous
kings: Ermanaric the Goth, Gundahari the Burgundian, Alboin the Lombard,
and many more. The poem is a kind of _fantasia_, intended to call up, by
allusion, the personages of the most famous stories; it is not an epic
poem, but it plays with some of the plots of heroic poetry familiar
throughout the whole Teutonic region. Ermanaric and Gundahari, here
called Eormanric and Guthhere, are renowned in the old Scandinavian
poetry, and the old High German. Guthhere is one of the personages in the
poem of _Waldere_; what is Guthhere in English is Gunnar in Norse,
Gunther in German—the Gunther of the _Nibelungenlied_. Offa comes into
Widsith’s record, an English king; but he has no particular mark or
eminence or attraction to distinguish him in the poet’s favour from the
Goth or the Lombard; he is king of ‘Ongle’, the original Anglia to the
south of Jutland, and there is no room for doubt that the English when
they lived there and when they invaded Britain had the stories of all the
Teutonic heroes at their command to occupy their minds, if they chose to
listen to the lay of the minstrel. What they got from their minstrels was
a number of stories about all the famous men of the Teutonic race—stories
chanted in rhythmical verse and noble diction, presenting tragic themes
and pointing the moral of heroism.
Of this old poetry there remains one work nearly complete. _Beowulf_,
because it is extant, has sometimes been over-valued, as if it were the
work of an English Homer. But it was not preserved as the _Iliad_ was, by
the unanimous judgement of all the people through successive generations.
It must have been of some importance at one time, or it would not have
been copied out fair as a handsome book for the library of some
gentleman. But many trashy things have been equally honoured in
gentlemen’s libraries, and it cannot be shown that _Beowulf_ was nearly
the best of its class. It was preserved by an accident; it has no right
to the place of the most illustrious Anglo-Saxon epic poem. The story is
commonplace and the plan is feeble. But there are some qualities in it
which make it (accidentally or not, it hardly matters) the best worth
studying of all the Anglo-Saxon poems. It is the largest extant piece in
any old Teutonic language dealing poetically with native Teutonic
subjects. It is the largest and fullest picture of life in the order to
which it belongs; the only thing that shows incontestably the power of
the old heroic poetry to deal on a fairly large scale with subjects taken
from the national tradition. The impression left by _Beowulf_, when the
carping critic has done his worst, is that of a noble manner of life, of
courtesy and freedom, with the dignity of tragedy attending it, even
though the poet fails, or does not attempt, to work out fully any proper
tragic theme of his own.
There is a very curious likeness in many details between _Beowulf_ and
the _Odyssey_; but quite apart from the details there is a real likeness
between them in their ‘criticism of life‘—i.e. in their exhibition of
human motives and their implied or expressed opinions about human
conduct. There is the same likeness between the _Odyssey_ and the best of
the Icelandic Sagas—particularly the _Story of Burnt Njal_; and the
lasting virtue of _Beowulf_ is that it is bred in the same sort of world
as theirs. It is not so much the valour and devotion of the hero; it is
the conversation of the hosts and guests in the King’s hall, the play of
serious and gentle moods in the minds of the freeborn, that gives its
character to the poem. _Beowulf_, through its rendering of noble manners,
its picture of good society, adds something distinct and unforgettable to
the records of the past. There is life in it, and a sort of life which
would be impossible without centuries of training, of what Spenser called
‘vertuous and gentle discipline’.
_Beowulf_ is worth studying, among other reasons, because it brings out
one great difference between the earlier and later medieval poetry,
between Anglo-Saxon and Middle English taste in fiction. _Beowulf_ is a
tale of adventure; the incidents in it are such as may be found in
hundreds of other stories. Beowulf himself, the hero, is a champion and a
slayer of monsters. He hears that the King of the Danes is plagued in his
house by the visits of an ogre, who night after night comes and carries
off one of the King’s men. He goes on a visit to Denmark, sits up for the
ogre, fights with him and mortally wounds him. That does not end the
business, for the ogre’s mother comes to revenge her son, and Beowulf has
a second fight and kills her too, and is thanked and goes home again.
Many years afterwards when he is king in his own country, Gautland (which
is part of modern Sweden), a fiery dragon is accidentally stirred up from
a long sleep and makes itself a pest to the country. Beowulf goes to
attack the dragon, fights and wins, but is himself killed by the poison
of the dragon. The poem ends with his funeral. So told, in abstract, it
is not a particularly interesting story. Told in the same bald way, the
story of Theseus or of Hercules would still have much more in it; there
are many more adventures than this in later romances like _Sir Bevis of
Southampton_ or _Sir Huon of Bordeaux_. What makes the poem of _Beowulf_
really interesting, and different from the later romances, is that it is
full of all sorts of references and allusions to great events, to the
fortunes of kings and nations, which seem to come in naturally, as if the
author had in his mind the whole history of all the people who were in
any way connected with Beowulf, and could not keep his knowledge from
showing itself. There is an historical background. In romances, and also
in popular tales, you may get the same sort of adventures as in
_Beowulf_, but they are told in quite a different way. They have nothing
to do with reality. In _Beowulf_, the historical allusions are so many,
and given with such a conviction of their importance and their truth,
that they draw away the attention from the main events of the story—the
fights with the ogre Grendel and his mother, and the killing of the
dragon. This is one of the faults of the poem. The story is rather thin
and poor. But in another way those distracting allusions to things apart
from the chief story make up for their want of proportion. They give the
impression of reality and weight; the story is not in the air, or in a
fabulous country like that of Spenser’s _Faerie Queene_; it is part of
the solid world. It would be difficult to find anything like this in
later medieval romance. It is this, chiefly, that makes _Beowulf_ a true
_epic_ poem—that is, a narrative poem of the most stately and serious
kind.
The history in it is not English history; the personages in it are Danes,
Gauts, and Swedes. One of them, Hygelac, the king whom Beowulf succeeded,
is identified with a king named by the Frankish historian Gregory of
Tours; the date is about A.D. 515. The epic poem of _Beowulf_ has its
source pretty far back, in the history of countries not very closely
related to England. Yet the English hearers of the poem were expected to
follow the allusions, and to be interested in the names and histories of
Swedish, Gautish, and Danish kings. As if that was not enough, there is a
story within the story—a poem of adventure is chanted by a minstrel at
the Danish Court, and the scene of this poem is in Friesland. There is no
doubt that it was a favourite subject, for the Frisian story is mentioned
in the poem of Widsith, the Traveller; and more than that, there is an
independent version of it among the few remains of Anglo-Saxon heroic
poetry—_The Fight at Finnesburh_. Those who listened to heroic songs in
England seem to have had no peculiar liking for English subjects. Their
heroes belong to _Germania_. The same thing is found in Norway and
Iceland, where the favourite hero is Sigurd. His story, the story of the
Volsungs and Niblungs, comes from Germany. In _Beowulf_ there is a
reference to it—not to Sigfred himself, but to his father Sigemund.
Everywhere and in every possible way the old heroic poets seem to escape
from the particular nation to which they belong, and to look for their
subjects in some other part of the Teutonic system. In some cases,
doubtless, this might be due to the same kind of romantic taste as led
later authors to place their stories in Greece, or Babylon, or anywhere
far from home. But it can scarcely have been so with _Beowulf_; for the
author of _Beowulf_ does not try to get away from reality; on the
contrary, he buttresses his story all round with historical tradition and
references to historical fact; he will not let it go forth as pure
romance.
The solid foundation and epic weight of _Beowulf_ are not exceptional
among the Anglo-Saxon poems. There are not many other poems extant of the
same class, but there is enough to show that _Beowulf_ is not alone. It
is a representative work; there were others of the same type; and it is
this order of epic poetry which makes the great literary distinction of
the Anglo-Saxon period.
It is always necessary to remember how little we know of Anglo-Saxon
poetry and generally of the ideas and imaginations of the early English.
The gravity and dignity of most of their poetical works are
unquestionable; but one ought not to suppose that we know all the
varieties of their poetical taste.
It is probable that in the earlier Middle Ages, and in the Teutonic
countries, there was a good deal of the fanciful and also of the comic
literature which is so frequent in the later Middle Ages (after 1100) and
especially in France. One proof of this, for the fanciful and romantic
sort of story-telling, will be found in the earlier part of the Danish
history written by Saxo Grammaticus. He collected an immense number of
stories from Danes and Icelanders—one of them being the story of
Hamlet—and although he was comparatively late (writing at the end of the
twelfth century), still we know that his stories belong to the North and
are unaffected by anything French; they form a body of Northern romance,
independent of the French fashions, of King Arthur and Charlemagne. The
English historians—William of Malmesbury, e.g.—have collected many things
of the same sort. As for comic stories, there are one or two in careful
Latin verse, composed in Germany in the tenth century, which show that
the same kind of jests were current then as in the later comic poetry of
France, in the _Decameron_ of Boccaccio, and in the _Canterbury Tales_.
The earlier Middle Ages were more like the later Middle Ages than one
would think, judging merely from the extant literature of the Anglo-Saxon
period on the one hand and of the Plantagenet times on the other. But the
differences are there, and one of the greatest is between the Anglo-Saxon
fashion of epic poetry and the popular romances of the time of Edward I
or Edward III.
The difference is brought out in many ways. There is a different choice
of subject; the earlier poetry, by preference, is concentrated on one
great battle or combat—generally in a place where there is little or no
chance of escape—inside a hall, as in _The Fight at Finnesburh_, and in
the slaughter ‘grim and great’ at the end of the _Nibelungenlied_; or, it
may be, in a narrow place among rocks, as in the story of Walter of
Aquitaine, which is the old English _Waldere_. This is the favourite sort
of subject, and it is so because the poets were able thus to hit their
audience again and again with increasing force; the effect they aimed at
was a crushing impression of strife and danger, and courage growing as
the danger grew and the strength lessened. In _Beowulf_ the subjects are
different, but in _Beowulf_ a subject of this sort is introduced, by way
of interlude, in the minstrel’s song of _Finnesburh_; and also _Beowulf_,
with a rather inferior plot, still manages to give the effect and to
bring out the spirit of deliberate heroic valour.
Quite late in the Anglo-Saxon period—about the year 1000—there is a poem
on an English subject in which this heroic spirit is most thoroughly
displayed: the poem on the Battle of Maldon which was fought on the Essex
shore in 993 between Byrhtnoth, alderman of East Anglia, and a host of
vikings whose leader (though he is not mentioned in the poem) is known as
Olaf Tryggvason. By the end of the tenth century Anglo-Saxon poetry had
begun to decay. Yet the Maldon poem shows that it was not only still
alive, but that in some respects it had made very remarkable progress.
There are few examples anywhere of poetry which can deal in a
satisfactory way with contemporary heroes. In the Maldon poem, very
shortly after the battle, the facts are turned into poetry—into poetry
which keeps the form of the older epic, and which in the old manner works
up a stronger and stronger swell of courage against the overwhelming
ruin. The last word of the heroic age is spoken, five hundred years after
the death of Hygelac (above, p. 26), by the old warrior who, like the
trusty companion of Beowulf, refused to turn and run when his lord was
cut down in the battle:
Thought shall be the harder, heart the keener,
Mood the more, as our might lessens.
It is one of the strange things in the history of poetry that in another
five hundred years an old fashion of poetry, near akin to the
Anglo-Saxon, comes to an end in a poem on a contemporary battle The last
poem in the Middle English alliterative verse, which was used for so many
subjects in the fourteenth century—for the stories of Arthur and
Alexander and Troy, and for the Vision of Piers Plowman—is the poem of
_Scottish Field_ A.D. 1513, on the battle of Flodden.
This alliterative verse, which has a history of more than a thousand
years, is one of the things that are carried over in some mysterious way
from the Anglo-Saxon to the later medieval period. But though it survives
the great change in the language, it has a different sound in the
fourteenth century from what it has in _Beowulf_; the older verse has a
manner of its own.
The Anglo-Saxon poetical forms are difficult at first to understand. The
principal rule of the verse is indeed easy enough; it is the same as in
the verse of _Piers Plowman_; there is a long line divided in the middle;
in each line there are _four_ strong syllables; the first _three_ of
these are generally made alliterative; i.e. they begin with the same
consonant—
Wæs se grimma gæst Grendel haten
mære mearcstapa, se the móras heold
fen and fæsten.
Was the grievous guest Grendel namèd
mighty mark-stalker, and the moors his home
fen and fastness.
or they all begin with _different_ vowels—
Eotenas and ylfe and orcneas.
Etins and elves and ogres too.
But there is a variety and subtilty in the Anglo-Saxon measure which is
not found in the Middle English, and which is much more definitely under
metrical rules. And apart from the metre of the single line, there is in
the older alliterative poetry a skill in composing long passages, best
described in the terms which Milton used about his own blank verse: ‘the
sense variously drawn out from one line to another’. The Anglo-Saxon
poets, at their best, are eloquent, and able to carry on for long periods
without monotony. Their verse does not fall into detached and separate
lines. This habit is another evidence of long culture; Anglo-Saxon
poetry, such as we know it, is at the end of its progress; already
mature, and with little prospect in front of it except decay.
The diction of Anglo-Saxon poetry is a subject of study by itself. Here
again there is a great difference between Anglo-Saxon and Middle English
poetry. Middle English poetry borrows greatly from French. Now in all the
best French poetry, with very few exceptions, the language is the same as
that of prose; and even if there happen to be a few poetical words (as in
Racine, for example, _flammes_ and _transports_ and _hymenée_) they do
not interfere with the sense. Middle English generally copies French, and
is generally unpretentious in its vocabulary. But Anglo-Saxon poetry was
impossible without a poetical dictionary. It is very heavily ornamented
with words not used in prose, and while there are hardly any similes, the
whole tissue of it is figurative, and most things are named two or three
times over in different terms. This makes it often very tiresome, when
the meaning is so encrusted with splendid words that it can scarcely
move; still more, when a poet does not take the trouble to invent his
ornaments, and only repeats conventional phrases out of a vocabulary
which he has learned by rote. But those extravagances of the Anglo-Saxon
poetry make it all the more interesting historically; they show that
there must have been a general love and appreciation of fine language,
such as is not commonly found in England now, and also a technical skill
in verse, something like that which is encouraged in Wales at the modern
poetical competitions, though certainly far less elaborate. Further,
these curiosities of old English verse make it all the more wonderful and
admirable that the epic poets should have succeeded as they did with
their stories of heroic resistance and the repeated waves of battle and
death-agony. Tremendous subjects are easily spoilt when the literary
vogue is all for ornament and fine language. Yet the Anglo-Saxon poets
seldom seem to feel the encumbrances of their poetic language when they
are really possessed with their subject. The eloquence of their verse
then gets the better of their ornamental diction.
The subjects of Anglo-Saxon poetry were taken from many different sources
besides the heroic legend which is summarized by Widsith, or contemporary
actions like the battle of Maldon.
The conversion of the English to Christianity brought with it of course a
great deal of Latin literature. The new ideas were adopted very readily
by the English, and a hundred years after the coming of the first
missionary the Northumbrian schools and teachers were more than equal to
the best in any part of Europe.
The new learning did not always discourage the old native kind of poetry.
Had that been the case, we should hardly have had anything like
_Beowulf_; we should not have had the poem of Maldon. Christianity and
Christian literature did not always banish the old-fashioned heroes.
Tastes varied in this respect. The Frankish Emperor Lewis the Pious is
said to have taken a disgust at the heathen poetry which he had learned
when he was young. But there were greater kings who were less delicate in
their religion. Charles the Great made a collection of ‘the barbarous
ancient poems which sung the wars and exploits of the olden time’. Alfred
the Great, his Welsh biographer tells us, was always ready to listen to
Saxon poems when he was a boy, and when he was older was fond of learning
poetry by heart. That the poems were not all of them religious, we may
see from some things in Alfred’s own writings. He was bold enough to
bring in a Northern hero in his translation of the Latin philosophical
book of Boethius. Boethius asks, ‘Where are the bones of Fabricius the
true-hearted?’ In place of the name Fabricius, Alfred writes, ‘Where are
now the bones of Wayland, and who knows where they be?’ Wayland Smith,
who thus appears, oddly, in the translation of Boethius, is one of the
best-known heroes of the Teutonic mythology. He is the original craftsman
(like Daedalus in Greece), the brother of the mythical archer Egil and
the harper Slagfinn—the hero of one of the finest of the old Scandinavian
poems, and of many another song and story.
The royal genealogies in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle are an example of the
conservative process that went on with regard to many of the old beliefs
and fancies—a process that may be clearly traced in the poem of
_Beowulf_—by means of which pre-Christian ideas were annexed to
Christianity. The royal house of England, the house of Cerdic, still
traces its descent from Woden; and Woden is thirteenth in descent from
Noah. Woden is kept as a king and a hero, when he has ceased to be a god.
This was kindlier and more charitable than the alternative view, that the
gods of the heathen were living devils.
There was no destruction of the heroic poetry through the conversion of
the English, but new themes were at once brought in, to compete with the
old ones. Bede was born (672) within fifty years of the baptism of King
Edwin of Northumbria (625), and Bede is able to tell of the poet Cædmon
of Whitby who belonged to the time of the abbess Hild, between 658 and
670, and who put large portions of the Bible history into verse.
Cædmon the herdsman, turning poet late in life by a special gift from
Heaven and devoting himself exclusively to sacred subjects, is a
different sort of minstrel from that one who is introduced in _Beowulf_
singing the lay of Finnesburh. His motive is different. It is partly the
same motive as that of King Alfred in his prose translations. Cædmon made
versions of Bible history for the edification of Christian people.
Anglo-Saxon poetry, which had been heathen, Teutonic, concerned with
traditional heroic subjects was drawn into the service of the other world
without losing its old interests. Hence comes, apart from the poetical
value of the several works, the historical importance of Anglo-Saxon
poetry, as a blending of _Germania_, the original Teutonic civilization,
with the ideas and sentiments of Christendom in the seventh century and
after.
Probably nothing of Cædmon’s work remains except the first poem, which is
paraphrased in Latin by Bede and which is also preserved in the original
Northumbrian. But there are many Bible poems, _Genesis_, _Exodus_, and
others, besides a poem on the Gospel history in the Saxon language of the
Continent—the language of the ‘Old Saxons’, as the English called
them—which followed the example and impulse given by Cædmon, and which
had in common the didactic, the educational purpose, for the promotion of
Christian knowledge.
But while there was this common purpose in these poems, there were as
great diversities of genius as in any other literary group or school.
Sometimes the author is a dull mechanical translator using the
conventional forms and phrases without imagination or spirit. Sometimes
on the other hand he is caught up and carried away by his subject, and
the result is poetry like the _Fall of the Angels_ (part of _Genesis_),
or the _Dream of the Rood_. These are utterly different from the regular
conventional poetry or prose of the Middle Ages. There is no harm in
comparing the _Fall of the Angels_ with Milton. The method is nearly the
same: narrative, with a concentration on the character of Satan, and
dramatic expression of the character in monologue at length. The _Dream
of the Rood_ again is finer than the noblest of all the Passion Plays. It
is a vision, in which the Gospel history of the Crucifixion is so
translated that nothing is left except the devotion of the young hero (so
he is called) and the glory; it is not acted on any historical scene, but
in some spiritual place where there is no distinction between the Passion
and the Triumph. In this way the spirit of poetry does wonderful things;
transforming the historical substance. It is quite impossible to dismiss
the old English religious poetry under any summary description. Much of
it is conventional and ordinary; some of it is otherwise, and the
separate poems live in their own way.
It is worth remembering that the manuscripts of the _Dream of the Rood_
have a history which is typical of the history in general, the progress
of Anglo-Saxon poetry, and the change of centre from Northumberland to
Wessex. Some verses of the poem are carved in runic letters on the
Ruthwell Cross (now in the Parish Church of Ruthwell in Dumfriesshire) in
the language of Northumberland, which was the language of Cædmon and
Bede. The Ruthwell Cross with the runic inscription on it is thus one of
the oldest poetical manuscripts in English, not to speak of its
importance in other ways.
The Ruthwell verses are Northumbrian. They were at first misinterpreted
in various ways by antiquaries, till John Kemble the historian read them
truly. Some time after, an Anglo-Saxon manuscript was found at Vercelli
in the North of Italy—a regular station on the old main road which
crosses the Great St. Bernard and which was commonly used by Englishmen,
Danes, and other people of the North when travelling to Rome. In this
Vercelli book the _Dream of the Rood_ is contained, nearly in full, but
written in the language of Wessex—i.e. the language commonly called
Anglo-Saxon—the language not of Bede but of Alfred. The West Saxon verses
of the _Rood_ corresponding to the old Anglian of the Ruthwell Cross are
an example of what happened generally with Anglo-Saxon poetry—the best of
it in early days was Anglian, Northumbrian; when the centre shifted to
Wessex, the Northern poetry was preserved in the language which by that
time had become the proper literary English both for verse and prose.
Cynewulf is an old English poet who has signed his name to several poems,
extant in West Saxon. He may have been the author of the _Dream of the
Rood_; he was probably a Northumbrian. As he is the most careful artist
among the older poets, notable for the skill of his verse and phrasing,
his poetry has to be studied attentively by any one who wishes to
understand the poetical ideals of the age between Bede and King Alfred,
the culmination of the Northumbrian school. His subjects are all
religious, from the Gospel (_Crist_) or the lives of saints (_Guthlac_,
_Juliana_, _Elene_, probably _Andreas_ also). The legendary subjects may
be looked on as a sort of romance; Cynewulf in many ways is a romantic
poet. The adventure of St. Andrew in his voyage to rescue St. Matthew
from the cannibals is told with great spirit—a story of the sea. Cynewulf
has so fine a sense of the minor beauties of verse and diction that he
might be in danger of losing his story for the sake of poetical ornament;
but though he is not a strong poet he generally manages to avoid the
temptation, and to keep the refinements of his art subordinate to the
main effect.
There is hardly anything in Anglo-Saxon to be called lyrical. The epic
poetry may have grown out of an older lyric type—a song in chorus, with
narrative stuff in it, like the later choral ballads. There is one old
poem, and a very remarkable one, with a refrain, _Deor’s Lament_, which
may be called a dramatic lyric, the utterance of an imaginary personage,
a poet like Widsith, who comforts himself in his sorrow by recalling
examples of old distresses. The burden comes after each of these records:
That ancient woe was endured, and so may mine.
_Widsith_ in form of verse is nearer to this lyric of _Deor_ than to the
regular sustained narrative verse of _Beowulf_. There are some fragments
of popular verse, spells against disease, which might be called songs.
But what is most wanting in Anglo-Saxon literature is the sort of poetry
found at the close of the Middle Ages in the popular ballads, songs and
carols of the fifteenth century.
To make up for the want of true lyric, there are a few very beautiful
poems, sometimes called by the name of elegies—akin to lyric, but not
quite at the lyrical pitch. The _Wanderer_, the _Seafarer_, the _Ruin_,
the _Wife’s Complaint_—they are antique in verse and language but modern
in effect, more than most things that come later, for many centuries.
They are poems of reflective sentiment, near to the mood of a time when
the bolder poetical kinds have been exhausted, and nothing is left but to
refine upon the older themes. These poems are the best expression of a
mood found elsewhere, even in rather early Anglo-Saxon days—the sense of
the vanity of life, the melancholy regret for departed glories—a kind of
thought which popular opinion calls ‘the Celtic spirit’, and which indeed
may be found in the Ossianic poems, but not more truly than in the _Ruin_
or the _Wanderer_.
When the language of Wessex became the literary English, it was naturally
used for poetry—not merely for translations of Northumbrian verse into
West Saxon. The strange thing about this later poetry is that it should
be capable of such strength as is shown in the Maldon poem—a perpetual
warning against rash conclusions. For poetry had seemed to be exhausted
long before this, or at any rate to have reached in Cynewulf the
dangerous stage of maturity. But the Maldon poem, apart from some small
technical faults, is sane and strong. In contrast, the earlier poem in
the battle of Brunanburh is a fair conventional piece—academic laureate
work, using cleverly enough the forms which any accomplished gentleman
could learn.
Those forms are applied often most ingeniously, in the Anglo-Saxon
riddles; pieces, again, which contradict ordinary opinion. Few would
expect to find in Anglo-Saxon the curious grace of verbal workmanship,
the artificial wit, of those short poems.
The dialogue of _Salomon and Saturnus_ is one of the Anglo-Saxon things
belonging to a common European fashion; the dialogue literature, partly
didactic, partly comic, which was so useful in the Middle Ages in
providing instruction along with varying degrees of amusement. There is
more than one Anglo-Saxon piece of this sort, valuable as expressing the
ordinary mind; for, generally speaking, there is a want of merely popular
literature in Anglo-Saxon, as compared with the large amount later on.
The history of prose is continuous from the Anglo-Saxon onwards; there is
no such division as between Anglo-Saxon and Middle English poetry. In
fact, Middle English prose at first is the continuation of the English
Chronicle, and the transcription of the homilies of Ælfric into the later
grammar and spelling.
The English had not the peculiar taste for prose which seems to be dealt
by chance to Hebrews and Arabs, to Ireland and Iceland. As in Greece and
France, the writing of prose comes after verse. It begins by being
useful; it is not used for heroic stories. But the English had more
talent for prose than some people; they understood it better than the
French; and until the French influence came over them did not habitually
degrade their verse for merely useful purposes.
Through the Chronicle, which probably began in King Alfred’s time, and
through Alfred’s translations from the Latin, a common available prose
was established, which had all sorts of possibilities in it, partly
realized after a time. There seems no reason, as far as language and
technical ability are concerned, why there should not have been in
English, prose stories as good as those of Iceland. The episode of King
Cynewulf of Wessex, in the Chronicle, has been compared to the Icelandic
sagas, and to the common epic theme of valorous fighting and loyal
perseverance. In Alfred’s narrative passages there are all the elements
of plain history, a style that might have been used without limit for all
the range of experience.
Alfred’s prose when he is repeating the narratives of his sea-captains
has nothing in it that can possibly weary, so long as the subject is
right. It is a perfectly clean style for matter of fact.
The great success of Anglo-Saxon prose is in religious instruction. This
is various in kind; it includes the translation of Boethius which is
philosophy, and fancy as well; it includes the Dialogues of Gregory which
are popular stories, the homilies on Saints’ Lives which are often prose
romances, and which often are heightened above prose, into a swelling,
chanting, alliterative tune, not far from the language of poetry. The
great master of prose in all its forms is Ælfric of Eynsham, about the
year 1000. Part of his work was translation of the Bible, and in this,
and in his theory of translation, he is more enlightened than any
translator before Tyndale. The fault of Bible versions generally was that
they kept too close to the original. Instead of translating like free men
they construed word for word, like the illiterate in all ages. Ulphilas,
who is supposed by some to have written Gothic prose, is really a slave
to the Greek text, and his Gothic is hardly a human language. Wycliffe
treats his Latin original in the same way, and does not think what
language he is supposed to be writing. But Ælfric works on principles
that would have been approved by Dryden; and there is no better evidence
of the humanities in those early times than this. Much was lost before
the work of Ælfric was taken up again with equal intelligence.
CHAPTER III
THE MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD, 1150-1500
INTRODUCTORY
Anglo-Saxon and Middle English literature had many things in common. The
educational work of King Alfred was continued all through the Middle
Ages. Chaucer translates Boethius, five hundred years after King Alfred’s
translation. The same authors are read and adapted. The sermons of
Ælfric, A.D. 1000, have the same sort of matter as those of the
thirteenth or the fourteenth century, and there is no very great
difference of tone. Many of the literary interests of the Plantagenet
times are found already among the Anglo-Saxons. The Legends of the Saints
are inexhaustible subjects of poetical treatment in the earlier as well
as the later days. The poetical expression is, of course, very greatly
changed, but earlier or later the Saints’ Lives are used as material for
literature which is essentially romantic, whatever its other qualities
may be. There are other sources of romance open, long before the French
influence begins to be felt in England; particularly, the wonders of the
East appear in the Anglo-Saxon version of Alexander’s letter to
Aristotle; and later Greek romance (through the Latin) in the Anglo-Saxon
translation of _Apollonius of Tyre_.
The great difference between the two ages is made by the disappearance of
the old English poetry. There is nothing in the Plantagenet reigns like
_Beowulf_ or the Maldon poem; there is nothing like the _Fall of the
Angels_ and the dramatic eloquence of Satan. The pathos of the later
Middle Ages is expressed in a different way from the _Wanderer_ and the
_Ruin_. The later religious poetry has little in it to recall the
finished art of Cynewulf. Anglo-Saxon poetry, whether derived from
heathendom or from the Church, has ideas and manners of its own; it comes
to perfection, and then it dies away. The gravity and thought of the
heroic poetry, as well as the finer work of the religious poets, are
unlike the strength, unlike the graces, of the later time. Anglo-Saxon
poetry grows to a rich maturity, and past it; then, with the new forms of
language and under new influences, the poetical education has to start
again.
Unfortunately for the historian, there are scarcely any literary things
remaining to show the progress of the transition. For a long time before
and after 1100 there is a great scarcity of English productions. It is
not till about 1200 that Middle English literature begins to be at all
fully represented.
This scantiness is partly due, no doubt, to an actual disuse of English
composition. But many written things must have perished, and in poetry
there was certainly a large amount of verse current orally, whether it
was ever written down or not. This is the inference drawn from the
passages in the historian William of Malmesbury to which Macaulay refers
in his preface to the _Lays of Ancient Rome_, and which Freeman has
studied in his essay on _The Mythical and Romantic Elements in Early
English History_. The story of Hereward the Wake is extant in Latin; the
story of Havelock the Dane and others were probably composed in English
verse much earlier than the thirteenth century, and in much older forms
than those which have come down to us.
There is a gap in the record of alliterative poetry which shows plainly
that much has been lost. It is a curious history. Before the Norman
conquest the old English verse had begun to go to pieces, in spite of
such excellent late examples as the Maldon poem. About 1200 the
alliterative verse, though it has still something of its original
character, is terribly broken down. The verse of Layamon’s _Brut_ is
unsteady, never to be trusted, changing its pace without warning in a
most uncomfortable way. Then suddenly, as late as the middle of the
fourteenth century, there begins a procession of magnificent alliterative
poems, in regular verse—_Sir Gawayne_, the _Morte Arthure_, _Piers
Plowman_; in regular verse, not exactly with the same rule as _Beowulf_,
but with so much of the old rule as seemed to have been hopelessly lost
for a century or two. What is the explanation of this revival, and this
sudden great vogue of alliterative poetry? It cannot have been a new
invention, or a reconstruction; it would not in that case have copied, as
it sometimes does, the rhythm of the old English verse in a way which is
unlike the ordinary rhythms of the fourteenth century. The only
reasonable explanation is that somewhere in England there was a tradition
of alliterative verse, keeping in the main to the old rules of rhythm as
it kept something of the old vocabulary, and escaping the disease which
affected the old verse elsewhere. The purer sort of verse must have been
preserved for a few hundred years with hardly a trace of it among the
existing documents to show what it was like till it breaks out
‘three-score thousand strong’ in the reign of Edward III.
In the Middle Ages, early and late, there was very free communication all
over Christendom between people of different languages. Languages seem to
have given much less trouble than they do nowadays. The general use of
Latin, of course, made things easy for those who could speak it; but
without Latin, people of different nations appear to have travelled over
the world picking up foreign languages as they went along, and showing
more interest in the poetry and stories of foreign countries than is
generally found among modern tourists. Luther said of the people of
Flanders that if you took a Fleming in a sack and carried him over France
or Italy, he would manage to learn the tongues. This gift was useful to
commercial travellers, and perhaps the Flemings had more of it than other
people. But in all the nations there seems to have been something like
this readiness, and in all it was used to translate the stories and adapt
the poetry of other tongues. This intercourse was greatly quickened in
the twelfth century through a number of causes, the principal cause being
the extraordinary production of new poetry in France, or rather in the
two regions, North and South, and the two languages, French and
Provençal. Between these two languages, in the North and the South of
what is now France, there was in the Middle Ages a kind of division of
labour. The North took narrative poetry, the South took lyric; and French
narrative and Provençal lyric poetry in the twelfth century between them
made the beginning of modern literature for the whole of Europe.
In the earlier Middle Ages, before 1100, as in the later, the common
language is Latin. Between the Latin authors of the earlier time—Gregory
the Great, or Bede—and those of the later—Anselm, or Thomas Aquinas—there
may be great differences, but there is no line of separation.
In the literature of the native tongues there is a line of division about
1100 more definite than any later epoch; it is made by the appearance of
French poetry, bringing along with it an intellectual unity of
Christendom which has never been shaken since.
The importance of this is that it meant a mutual understanding among the
laity of Europe, equal to that which had so long obtained among the
clergy, the learned men.
The year 1100, in which all Christendom is united, if not thoroughly and
actively in all places, for the conquest of the Holy Sepulchre, at any
rate ideally by the thought of this common enterprise, is also a year
from which may be dated the beginning of the common lay intelligence of
Europe, that sympathy of understanding by which ideas of different sorts
are taken up and diffused, outside of the professionally learned bodies.
The year 1100 is a good date, because of the first Provençal poet,
William, Count of Poitiers, who was living then; he went on the Crusade
three years later. He is the first poet of modern Europe who definitely
helps to set a fashion of poetry not only for his own people but for the
imitation of foreigners. He is the first modern poet; he uses the kind of
verse which every one uses now.
The triumph of French poetry in the twelfth century was the end of the
old Teutonic world—an end which had been long preparing, though it came
suddenly at last. Before that time there had been the sympathy and
informal union among the Germanic nations out of which the old heroic
poems had come; such community of ideas as allowed the Nibelung story to
be treated in all the Germanic tongues from Austria to Iceland, and even
in Greenland, the furthest outpost of the Northmen. But after the
eleventh century there was nothing new to be got out of this. Here and
there may be found a gleaner, like Saxo Grammaticus, getting together all
that he can save out of the ancient heathendom, or like the Norwegian
traveller about fifty years later, who collected North German ballads of
Theodoric and other champions, and paraphrased them in Norwegian prose.
The really great achievement of the older world in its last days was in
the prose histories of Iceland, which had virtue enough in them to change
the whole world, if they had only been known and understood; but they
were written for domestic circulation, and even their own people scarcely
knew how good they were. Germania was falling to pieces, the separate
nations growing more and more stupid and drowsy.
The languages derived from Latin—commonly called the Romance
languages—French and Provençal, Italian and so on—were long of declaring
themselves. The Italian and Spanish dialects had to wait for the great
French outburst before they could produce anything. French and Provençal,
which are well in front of Spanish and Italian, have little of importance
to show before 1100. But after that date there is such profusion that it
is clear there had been a long time of experiment and preparation. The
earlier French epics have been lost; the earliest known Provençal poet is
already a master of verse, and must be indebted to many poetical
ancestors whose names and poems have disappeared. Long before 1100 there
must have been a common literary taste in France, fashions of poetry well
understood and appreciated, a career open for youthful poets. In the
twelfth century the social success of poetry in France was extended in
different degrees over all Europe. In Italy and Spain the fashions were
taken up; in Germany they conquered even more quickly and thoroughly; the
Danes and Swedes and Norwegians learned their ballad measures from the
French; even the Icelanders, the only Northern nation with a classical
literature and with minds of their own, were caught in the same way.
Thus French poetry wakened up the sleepy countries, and gave new ideas to
the wakeful; it brought the Teutonic and Romance nations to agree and,
what was much more important, to produce new works of their own which
might be original in all sorts of ways while still keeping within the
limits of the French tradition. Compared with this, all later literary
revolutions are secondary and partial changes. The most widely
influential writers of later ages—e.g. Petrarch and Voltaire—had the
ground prepared for them in this medieval epoch, and do nothing to alter
the general conditions which were then established—the intercommunication
among the whole laity of Europe with regard to questions of taste.
It seems probable that the Normans had a good deal to do as agents in
this revolution. They were in relation with many different people. They
had Bretons on their borders in Normandy; they conquered England, and
then they touched upon the Welsh; they were fond of pilgrimages; they
settled in Apulia and Sicily, where they had dealings with Greeks and
Saracens as well as Italians.
It is a curious thing that early in the twelfth century names are found
in Italy which certainly come from the romances of King Arthur—the name
Galvano, e.g. which is the same as Gawain. However it was brought there,
this name may be taken for a sign of the process that was going on
everywhere—the conversion of Europe to fashions which were prescribed in
France.
The narrative poetry in which the French excelled was of different kinds.
An old French poet, in an epic on Charlemagne’s wars against the Saxons,
has given a classification which is well known, dividing the stories
according to the historical matter which they employ. There are three
‘matters’, he says, and no more than three, which a story-teller may take
up—the matter of France, the matter of Britain, the matter of Rome the
Great. The old poet is right in naming these as at any rate the chief
groups; since ‘Rome the Great’ might be made to take in whatever would
not go into the other two divisions, there is nothing much wrong in his
refusal to make a fourth class. The ‘matter of France’ includes all the
subjects of the old French national epics—such as Roncevaux, or the song
of Roland; Reynold of Montalban, or the Four Sons of Aymon; Ferabras;
Ogier the Dane. The matter of Britain includes all the body of the
Arthurian legend, as well as the separate stories commonly called Breton
lays (like Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale). The matter of Rome is not only
Roman history, but the whole of classical antiquity. The story of Troy,
of course, is rightly part of Roman history, and so is the Romance of
Eneas. But under Rome the Great there fall other stories which have much
slighter connexion with Rome—such as the story of Thebes, or of
Alexander.
Many of those subjects were of course well known and popular before the
French poets took them up. The romantic story of Alexander might, in part
at any rate, have been familiar to Alfred the Great; he brings the
Egyptian king ‘Nectanebus the wizard’ into his translation of
Orosius—Nectanebus, who is the father of Alexander in the apocryphal book
from which the romances were derived. But it was not till the French
poets turned the story of Alexander into verse that it really made much
impression outside of France. The tale of Troy was widely read, in
various authors—Ovid and Virgil, and an abstract of the _Iliad_, and in
the apocryphal prose books of Dares the Phrygian and Dictys the Cretan,
who were supposed to have been at the seat of war, and therefore to be
better witnesses than Homer. These were used and translated some times
apart from any French suggestion. But it was the French _Roman de Troie_,
written in the twelfth century, which spread the story everywhere—the
source of innumerable Troy Books in all languages, and of Chaucer’s and
Shakespeare’s _Troilus_.
The ‘matter of Britain’ also was generally made known through the works
of French authors. There are exceptions; the British history of Geoffrey
of Monmouth was written in Latin. But even this found its way into
English by means of a French translation; the _Brut_ of Layamon, a long
poem in irregular alliterative verse, is adapted from a French rhyming
translation of Geoffrey’s History. The English romances of Sir Perceval,
Sir Gawain and other knights are founded on French poems.
There is an important distinction between the ‘matter of France’ and the
‘matters’ of Britain and Rome; this distinction belongs more properly to
the history of French literature, but it ought not to be neglected here.
The ‘matter of France’, which is exemplified in the song of Roland,
belongs to an earlier time, and was made into French poetry earlier than
the other subjects. The poems about Charlemagne and his peers, and others
of the same sort, are sometimes called the old French epics; the French
name for them is _chansons de geste_. Those epics have not only a
different matter but a different form from the French Arthurian romances
and the French _Roman de Troie_. What is of more importance for English
poetry, there is generally a different tone and sentiment. They are
older, stronger, more heroic, more like _Beowulf_ or the Maldon poem; the
romances of the ‘matter of Britain’, on the other hand, are the
fashionable novels of the twelfth century; their subjects are really
taken from contemporary polite society. They are long love-stories, and
their motive chiefly is to represent the fortunes, and, above all, the
sentiments of true lovers. Roughly speaking, the ‘matter of France’ is
action, the ‘matter of Britain’ is sentiment. The ‘matter of Rome’ is
mixed; for while the _Roman de Troie_ (with the love-story of Troilus,
and with courteous modern manners throughout) is like the romances of
Lancelot and Tristram, Alexander, in the French versions, is a hero like
those of the national epics, and is celebrated in the same manner as
Charlemagne.
The ‘matter of France’ could not be popular in England as it was in its
native country. But Charlemagne and Roland and his peers were well known
everywhere, like Arthur and Alexander, and the ‘matter of France’ went to
increase the stories told by English minstrels. It was from an English
version, in the thirteenth century, that part of the long Norwegian prose
history of Charlemagne was taken; a fact worth remembering, to illustrate
the way in which the exportation of stories was carried on. Of course,
the story of Charlemagne was not the same sort of thing in England or
Norway that it was in France. The devotion to France which is so intense
in the song of Roland was never meant to be shared by any foreigner. But
Roland as a champion against the infidels was a hero everywhere. There
are statues of him in Bremen and in Verona; and it is in Italy that the
story is told of the simple man who was found weeping in the
market-place; a professional story-teller had just come to the death of
Roland and the poor man heard the news for the first time. A traveller in
the Faroe Islands not long ago, asking in the bookshop at Thorshavn for
some things in the Faroese language, was offered a ballad of
Roncesvalles.
The favourite story everywhere was _Sir Ferabras_, because the centre of
the plot is the encounter between Oliver the Paladin and Ferabras the
Paynim champion. Every one could understand this, and in all countries
the story became popular as a sound religious romance.
Naturally, the stories of action and adventure went further and were more
widely appreciated than the cultivated sentimental romance. The English
in the reign of Edward I or Edward III had often much difficulty in
understanding what the French romantic school was driving at—particularly
when it seemed to be driving round and round, spinning long monologues of
afflicted damsels, or elegant conversations full of phrases between the
knight and his lady. The difficulty was not unreasonable. If the French
authors had been content to write about nothing but sentimental
conversations and languishing lovers, then one would have known what to
do. The man who is looking at the railway bookstall for a good detective
story knows at once what to say when he is offered the Diary of a Soul.
But the successful French novelists of the twelfth century appealed to
both tastes, and dealt equally in sensation and sentiment; they did not
often limit themselves to what was always their chief interest, the moods
of lovers. They worked these into plots of adventure, mystery, fairy
magic; the adventures were too good to be lost; so the less refined
English readers, who were puzzled or wearied by sentimental
conversations, were not able to do without the elegant romances. They
read them; and they skipped. The skipping was done for them, generally,
when the romances were translated into English; the English versions are
shorter than the French in most cases where comparison is possible. As a
general rule, the English took the adventurous sensational part of the
French romances, and let the language of the heart alone. To this there
are exceptions. In the first place it is not always true that the French
romances are adventurous. Some of them are almost purely
love-stories—sentiment from beginning to end. Further, it is proved that
one of these, _Amadas et Ydoine_—a French romance written in England—was
much liked in England by many whose proper language was English; there is
no English version of it extant, and perhaps there never was one, but it
was certainly well known outside the limited refined society for which it
was composed. And again there may be found examples where the English
adapter, instead of skipping, sets himself to wrestle with the
original—saying to himself, ‘I will _not_ be beaten by this culture; I
will get to the end of it and lose nothing; it shall be made to go into
the English language’. An example of this effort is the alliterative
romance of _William and the Werwolf_, a work which does not fulfil the
promise of its title in any satisfactory way. It spends enormous trouble
over the sentimental passages of the original, turning them into the form
worst suited to them, viz. the emphatic style of the alliterative poetry
which is so good for battle pieces, satire, storms at sea, and generally
everything except what it is here applied to. Part of the success of
Chaucer and almost all the beauty of Gower may be said to be their
mastery of French polite literature, and their power of expressing in
English everything that could be said in French, with no loss of effect
and no inferiority in manner. Gower ought to receive his due alongside of
Chaucer as having accomplished what many English writers had attempted
for two hundred years before him—the perfect adoption in English verse of
everything remarkable in the style of French poetry.
The history of narrative poetry is generally easier than the history of
lyric, partly because the subjects are more distinct and more easily
traceable. But it is not difficult to recognize the enormous difference
between the English songs of the fourteenth century and anything known to
us in Anglo-Saxon verse, while the likeness of English to French lyrical
measures in the later period is unquestionable. The difficulty is that
the history of early French lyric poetry is itself obscure and much more
complicated than the history of narrative. Lyric poetry flourished at
popular assemblies and festivals, and was kept alive in oral tradition
much more easily than narrative poetry was. Less of it, in proportion,
was written down, until it was taken up by ambitious poets and composed
in a more elaborate way.
The distinction between popular and cultivated lyric is not always easy
to make out, as any one may recognize who thinks of the songs of Burns
and attempts to distinguish what is popular in them from what is
consciously artistic. But the distinction is a sound one, and especially
necessary in the history of medieval literature—all the more because the
two kinds often pass into one another.
A good example is the earliest English song, as it is sometimes called,
which is very far from the earliest—
Sumer is icumen in
lhude sing cuccu.
It sounds like a popular song; an anonymous poem from the heart of the
people, in simple, natural, spontaneous verse. But look at the original
copy. The song is written, of course, for music. And the Cuckoo song is
said by the historians of music to be remarkable and novel; it is the
first example of a canon; it is not an improvisation, but the newest kind
of art, one of the most ingenious things of its time. Further, the words
that belong to it are Latin words, a Latin hymn; the Cuckoo song, which
appears so natural and free, is the result of deliberate study; syllable
for syllable, it corresponds to the Latin, and to the notes of the music.
Is it then _not_ to be called a popular song? Perhaps the answer is that
all popular poetry, in Europe at any rate for the last thousand years, is
derived from poetry more or less learned in character, or, like the
Cuckoo song, from more or less learned music. The first popular songs of
the modern world were the hymns of St. Ambrose, and the oldest fashion of
popular tunes is derived from the music of the Church.
The learned origin of popular lyric may be illustrated from any of the
old-fashioned broadsheets of the street ballad-singers: for example _The
Kerry Recruit_—
As I was going up and down, one day in the month of August,
All in the town of sweet Tralee, I met the recruiting serjeant—
The metre of this is the same as in the _Ormulum_—
This book is nemned Ormulum, for thy that Orm hit wroughtè.
It is derived through the Latin from the Greek; it was made popular first
through Latin rhyming verses which were imitated in the vernacular
languages, Provençal, German, English. As it is a variety of ‘common
metre’, it is easily fitted to popular tunes, and so it becomes a regular
type of verse, both for ambitious poets and for ballad-minstrels like the
author quoted above. It may be remembered that a country poet wrote the
beautiful song on Yarrow from which Wordsworth took the verse of his own
Yarrow poems—
But minstrel Burne cannot assuage
His grief, while life endureth,
To see the changes of this age
Which fleeting time procureth—
verse identical in measure with the _Ormulum_, and with the popular Irish
street ballad, and with many more. So in the history of this type of
verse we get the following relations of popular and literary poetry:
first there is the ancient Greek verse of the same measure; then there
are the Latin learned imitations; then there is the use of it by scholars
in the Middle Ages, who condescend to use it in Latin rhymes for
students’ choruses. Then comes the imitation of it in different languages
as in English by Orm and others of his day (about 1200). It was very much
in favour then, and was used often irregularly, with a varying number of
syllables. But Orm writes it with perfect accuracy, and the accurate type
survived, and was just as ‘popular’ as the less regular kind. Minstrel
Burne is as regular as the _Ormulum_, and so, or very nearly as much, is
the anonymous Irish poet of The _Kerry Recruit_.
What happened in the case of the _Ormulum_ verse is an example of the
whole history of modern lyric poetry in its earlier period. Learned men
like St. Ambrose and St. Augustine wrote hymns for the common people in
Latin which the common people of that time could understand. Then, in
different countries, the native languages were used to copy the Latin
measures and fit in to the same tunes—just as the English Cuckoo song
corresponds to the Latin words for the same melody. Thus there were
provided for the new languages, as we may call them, a number of poetical
forms or patterns which could be applied in all sorts of ways. These
became common and well understood, in the same manner as common forms of
music are understood, e.g. the favourite rhythms of dance tunes; and like
those rhythms they could be adapted to any sort of poetical subject, and
used with all varieties of skill.
Many strange things happened while the new rhyming sort of lyric poetry
was being acclimatized in England, and a study of early English lyrics is
a good introduction to all the rest of English poetry, because in those
days—in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—may be found the origin of
the most enduring poetical influences in later times.
One of the strange things was that the French lyrical examples affected
the English in two opposite ways. As foreign verse, and as belonging
especially to those who were acquainted with courts and good society, it
had the attraction which fashionable and stylish things generally have
for those who are a little behind the fashion. It was the newest and most
brilliant thing; the English did all they could to make it their own
whether by composing in French themselves or by copying the French style
in English words. But besides this fashionable and courtly value of
French poetry, there was another mode in which it appealed to the
English. Much of it was closely related not to the courts but to popular
country festivals which were frequent also in towns, like the games and
dances to celebrate the coming of May. French poetry was associated with
games of that sort, and along with games of that sort it came to England.
The English were hit on both sides. French poetry was more genteel in
some things, more popular and jovial in others, than anything then
current in England. Thus the same foreign mode of composition which gave
a new courtly ideal to the English helped also very greatly to quicken
their popular life. While the distinction between courtly and popular is
nowhere more important than in medieval literature, it is often very hard
to make it definite in particular cases, just for this reason. It is not
as if there were a popular native layer, English in character and origin,
with a courtly foreign French layer above it. What is popular in Middle
English literature is just as much French as English; while, on the other
hand, what is native, like the alliterative verse, is as often as not
used for ambitious works. _Sir Gawayne and the Greene Knight_ and the
poem of the _Morte Arthure_ are certainly not ‘popular’ in the sense of
‘uneducated’ or ‘simple’ or anything of that kind, and though they are
written in the old native verse they are not intended for the people who
had no education and could not speak French.
The great manifestation of French influence in the common life of the
Middle Ages was through the fashion of the dance which generally went by
the name of _Carole_. The _carole_—music, verse and dance
altogether—spread as a fashion all over Europe in the twelfth century;
and there is nothing which so effectively marks the change from the
earlier to the later Middle Ages. It _is_ in fact a great part of the
change, with all that is implied in it; which may be explained in the
following way.
The _carole_ was a dance accompanied by a song, the song being divided
between a leader and the rest of the chorus; the leader sang the
successive new lines, while the rest of the dancers holding hands in a
ring all joined in the refrain. Now this was the fashion most in favour
in all gentle houses through the Middle Ages, and it was largely through
this that the French type of lyric was transported to so many countries
and languages. French lyric poetry was part of a graceful diversion for
winter evenings in a castle or for summer afternoons in the castle
garden. But it was also thoroughly and immediately available for all the
parish. In its origin it was popular in the widest sense—not restricted
to any one rank or class; and though it was adopted and elaborated in the
stately homes of England and other countries it could not lose its
original character. Every one could understand it and enjoy it; so it
became the favourite thing at popular festivals, as well as at the
Christmas entertainments in the great hall. Particularly, it was a
favourite custom to dance and sing in this way on the vigils or eves of
Saints’ days, when people assembled from some distance at the church
where the day was to be observed. Dancing-parties were frequent at these
‘wakes’; they were often held in the churchyard. There are many stories
to show how they were discouraged by the clergy, and how deplorable was
their vanity: but those moral examples also prove how well established
the custom was; some of them also from their date show how quickly it had
spread. The best is in Giraldus Cambrensis, ‘Gerald the Welshman’, a most
amusing writer, who is unfortunately little read, as he wrote in Latin.
In his _Gemma Ecclesiastica_ he has a chapter against the custom of using
churches and churchyards for songs and dances. As an illustration, he
tells the story of a wake in a churchyard, somewhere in the diocese of
Worcester, which was kept up all night long, the dancers repeating one
refrain over and over; so that the priest who had this refrain in his
ears all night could not get rid of it in the morning, but repeated it at
the Mass—saying (instead of _Dominus vobiscum_) ‘Sweet Heart, have pity!’
Giraldus, writing in Latin, quotes the English verse: _Swete lemman, thin
arè_. _Are_, later _ore_, means ‘mercy’ or ‘grace’, and the refrain is of
the same sort as is found, much later, in the lyric poetry of the time of
Edward I. Giraldus wrote in the twelfth century, in the reign of Henry
II, and it is plain from what he tells that the French fashion was
already in full swing and as thoroughly naturalized among the English as
the Waltz or the Lancers in the nineteenth century. The same sort of
evidence comes from Denmark about the same time as Giraldus; ring-dances
were equally a trouble and vexation to religious teachers there—for,
strangely, the dances seem everywhere to have been drawn to churches and
monasteries, through the custom of keeping religious wakes in a cheerful
manner. Europe was held together in this common vanity, and it was
through the _caroles_ and similar amusements that the poetical art of
France came to be dominant all over the North, affecting the popular and
unpretending poets no less than those of greater ambition and conceit.
The word ‘Court’ and its derivations are frequently used by medieval and
early modern writers with a special reference to poetry. The courts of
kings and great nobles were naturally associated with the ideas of polite
education; those men ‘that has used court and dwelled therein can Frankis
and Latin’, says Richard Rolle of Hampole in the fourteenth century; the
‘courtly maker’ is an Elizabethan name for the accomplished poet, and
similar terms are used in other languages to express the same meaning.
This ‘courtly’ ideal was not properly realized in England till the time
of Chaucer and Gower; and a general view of the subject easily leads one
to think of the English language as struggling in the course of three
centuries to get rid of its homeliness, its rustic and parochial
qualities. This period, from about 1100 to 1400, closes in the full
attainment of the desired end. Chaucer and Gower are unimpeachable as
‘courtly makers’, and their success in this way also implies the
establishment of their language as pure English; the competition of
dialects is ended by the victory of the East Midland language which
Chaucer and Gower used. The ‘courtly poets’ make it impossible in England
to use any language for poetry except their own.
But the distinction between ‘courtly’ and ‘vulgar’, ‘popular’, or
whatever the other term may be, is not very easy to fix. The history of
the _carole_ is an example of this difficulty. The _carole_ flourishes
among the gentry and it is a favourite amusement as well among the common
people. ‘Courtly’ ideas, suggestions, phrases, might have a circulation
in country places, and be turned to literary effect by authors who had no
special attachment to good society. A hundred years before Chaucer there
may be found in the poem of _The Owl and the Nightingale_, written in the
language of Dorset, a kind of good-humoured ironical satire which is very
like Chaucer’s own. This is the most _modern_ in tone of all the
thirteenth-century poems, but there are many others in which the rustic,
or popular, and the ‘courtly’ elements are curiously and often very
pleasantly mixed.
In fact, for many purposes even of literary history and criticism the
medieval distinction between ‘courtly’ and popular may be neglected.
There is always a difficulty in finding out what is meant by ‘the
People’. One has only to remember Chaucer’s Pilgrims to understand this,
and to realize how absurd is any fixed line of division between ranks,
with regard to their literary taste. The most attentive listener and the
most critical among the Canterbury Pilgrims is the Host of the Tabard.
There was ‘culture’ in the Borough as well as in Westminster. The
Franklin who apologizes for his want of rhetorical skill—he had never
read Tullius or Cicero—tells one of the ‘Breton lays’, a story elegantly
planned and finished, of the best French type; and the Wife of Bath,
after the story of her own life, repeats another romance of the same
school as the Franklin’s Tale. The average ‘reading public’ of Chaucer’s
time could understand a great many different varieties of verse and
prose.
But while the difference between ‘courtly’ and ‘popular’ is often hard to
determine in particular cases, it is none the less important and
significant in medieval history. It implies the chivalrous ideal—the
self-conscious withdrawal and separation of the gentle folk from all the
rest, not merely through birth and rank and the fashion of their armour,
but through their ways of thinking, and especially through their theory
of love. The devotion of the true knight to his lady—the motive of all
the books of chivalry—began to be the favourite subject in the twelfth
century; it was studied and meditated in all manner of ways, and it is
this that gives its character to all the most original, as well as to the
most artificial, poetry of the later Middle Ages. The spirit and the
poetical art of the different nations may be estimated according to the
mode in which they appropriated those ideas. For the ideas of this
religion of chivalrous love were _literary_ and _artistic_ ideas; they
went along with poetical ambitions and fresh poetical invention—they led
to the poetry of Dante, Petrarch and Spenser, not as ideas and
inspirations simply, but through their employment of definite poetical
forms of expression, which were developed by successive generations of
poets.
Stories of true love do not belong peculiarly to the age of chivalrous
romance. The greatest of them all, the story of Sigurd and Brynhild, has
come down from an older world. The early books of the Danish History of
Saxo Grammaticus are full of romantic themes. ‘A mutual love arose
between Hedin and Hilda, the daughter of Hogne, a maiden of most eminent
renown. For though they had not yet seen one another, each had been
kindled by the other’s glory. But when they had a chance of beholding one
another, neither could look away; so steadfast was the love that made
their eyes linger’. This passage (quoted from Oliver Elton’s translation)
is one of the things which were collected by Saxo from Danish tradition;
it is quite independent of anything chivalrous, in the special sense of
that word. Again, Chaucer’s _Legend of Good Women_, the story of Dido, or
of Pyramus and Thisbe, may serve as a reminder how impossible it is to
separate ‘romantic’ from ‘classical’ literature. A great part of medieval
romance is nothing but a translation into medieval forms, into French
couplets, of the passion of Medea or of Dido. Even in the fresh discovery
which made the ideal of the ‘courtly’ schools, namely, the lover’s
worship of his lady as divine, there is something traceable to the Latin
poets. But it was a fresh discovery, for all that, a new mode of thought,
whatever its source might be. The devotion of Dante to Beatrice, of
Petrarch to Laura, is different from anything in classical poetry, or in
the earlier Middle Ages. It is first in Provençal lyric verse that
something like their ideas may be found; both Dante and Petrarch
acknowledge their debt to the Provençal poets.
Those ideas can be expressed in lyric poetry; not so well in narrative.
They are too vague for narrative, and too general; they are the utterance
of any true lover, his pride and his humility, his belief that all the
joy and grace of the world, and of Heaven also, are included in the
worshipful lady. There is also along with this religion a firm belief
that it is not intended for the vulgar; and as the ideas and motives are
noble so must the poetry be, in every respect. The refinement of the idea
requires a corresponding beauty of form; and the lyric poets of Provence
and their imitators in Germany, the Minnesingers, were great inventors of
new stanzas and, it should be remembered, of the tunes that accompanied
them. It was not allowable for one poet to take another poet’s stanza.
The new spirit of devotion in love-poetry produced an enormous variety of
lyrical measures, which are still musical, and some of them still
current, to this day.
It was an artificial kind of poetry, in different senses of the term. It
was consciously artistic, and ambitious; based upon science—the science
of music—and deliberately planned so as to make the best effect. The
poets were competitors—sometimes in actual competition for a prize, as in
the famous scene at the Wartburg, which comes in _Tannhäuser_, or as at a
modern Welsh _eisteddfod_; the fame of a poet could not be gained without
the finest technical skill, and the prize was often given for technical
skill, rather than for anything else. Besides this, the ideas themselves
were conventional; the poet’s amatory religion was often assumed; he
chose a lady to whom he offered his poetical homage. The fiction was well
understood, and was highly appreciated as an honour, when the poetry was
successful. For example, the following may be taken from the Lives of the
Troubadours—
‘Richard of Barbezieux the poet fell in love with a lady, the wife of a
noble lord. She was gentle and fair, and gay and gracious, and very
desirous of praise and honour; daughter of Jeffrey Rudel, prince of
Blaye. And when she knew that he loved her, she made him fair semblance
of love, so that he got hardihood to plead his suit to her. And she with
gracious countenance of love treasured his praise of her, and accepted
and listened, as a lady who had good will of a poet to make verses about
her. And he composed his songs of her, and called her _Mielhs de Domna_
(‘Sovran Lady’) in his verse. And he took great delight in finding
similitudes of beasts and birds and men in his poetry, and of the sun and
the stars, so as to give new arguments such as no poet had found before
him. Long time he sang to her; but it was never believed that she yielded
to his suit.’
Provençal poetry cannot be shown to have had any direct influence upon
English, which is rather strange considering the close relations between
England and the districts where the Provençal language—the _langue
d’oc_—was spoken. It had great indirect influence, through the French.
The French imitated the Provençal lyric poetry, as the Germans and the
Italians did, and by means of the French poets the Provençal ideas found
their way to England. But this took a long time. The Provençal poets were
‘courtly makers’; so were the French who copied them. The ‘courtly maker’
needs not only great houses and polite society for his audience; not only
the fine philosophy ‘the love of honour and the honour of love’, which is
the foundation of chivalrous romance. Besides all this, he needs the
reward and approbation of success in poetical art; he cannot thrive as an
anonymous poet. And it is not till the time of Chaucer and Gower that
there is found in England any poet making a great name for himself as a
master of the art of poetry, like the Provençal masters Bernart de
Ventadour or Arnaut Daniel in the twelfth century, or like the German
Walther von der Vogelweide at the beginning of the thirteenth.
Lyric poetry of the Provençal kind was a most exacting and difficult art;
it required very peculiar conditions before it could flourish and be
appreciated, and those conditions did not exist in England or in the
English language. At the same time the elaborate lyrics of Provence, like
those of the Minnesingers in Germany, are pretty closely related to many
‘popular’ forms and motives. Besides the idealist love-poetry there were
other kinds available—simple songs of lament, or of satire—comic
songs—lyrics with a scene in them, such as the very beautiful one about
the girl whose lover has gone on the Crusade. In such as these, though
they have little directly to do with English poetry, may be found many
illustrations of English modes of verse, and rich examples of that most
delightful sort of poetry which refuses to be labelled either ‘courtly’
or ‘popular’.
In French literature, as distinct from Provençal, there was a ‘courtly’
strain which flourished in the same general conditions as the Provençal,
but was not so hard to understand and had a much greater immediate effect
on England.
The French excelled in narrative poetry. There seems to have been a
regular exchange in poetry between the South and the North of France.
French stories were translated into Provençal, Provençal lyrics were
imitated in the North of France. Thus French lyric is partly Provençal in
character, and it is in this way that the Provençal influence is felt in
English poetry. The French narrative poetry, though it also is affected
by ideas from the South, is properly French in origin and style. It is by
means of narrative that the French ideal of courtesy and chivalry is made
known, to the French themselves as well as to other nations.
In the twelfth century a considerable change was made in French poetry by
the rise and progress of a new romantic school in succession to the old
_chansons de geste_—the epic poems on the ‘matter of France’. The old
epics went down in the world, and gradually passed into the condition of
merely ‘popular’ literature. Some of them survive to this day in roughly
printed editions, like the _Reali di Francia_, which is an Italian prose
paraphrase of old French epics, and which seems to have a good sale in
the markets of Italy still, as _The Seven Champions of Christendom_ used
to have in England, and _The Four Sons of Aymon_ in France. The decline
of the old epics began in the twelfth century through the competition of
more brilliant new romances.
The subjects of these were generally taken either from the ‘matter of
Britain’, or from antiquity, the ‘matter of Rome the Great’, which
included Thebes and Troy. The new romantic school wanted new subjects,
and by preference foreign subjects. This, however, was of comparatively
small importance; it had long been usual for story-tellers to go looking
for subjects to foreign countries; this is proved by the Saints’ Lives,
and also by the story of Alexander the Great, which appeared in French
before the new school was properly begun.
In form of verse the new romances generally differed from the _chansons
de geste_, but this again is not an exact distinction. Apart from other
considerations, the distinction fails because the octosyllabic rhyming
measure, the short couplet, which was the ordinary form for fashionable
romances, was also at the same time the ordinary form for everything
else—for history, for moral and didactic poetry, and for comic stories
like Reynard the Fox. The establishment of this ‘short verse’ (as the
author of _Hudibras_ calls it) in England is one of the most obvious and
one of the largest results of the literary influence of France, but it is
not specially due to the romantic school.
The character of that school must be sought much more in its treatment of
motives, and particularly in its use of sentiment. It is romantic in its
fondness for strange adventures; but this taste is nothing new. The real
novelty and the secret of its greatest success was its command of pathos,
more especially in the pathetic monologues and dialogues of lovers. It is
greatly indebted for this, as has been already remarked, to the Latin
poets. The _Aeneid_ is turned into a French romance (_Roman d’Eneas_);
and the French author of the _Roman de Troie_, who gives the story of the
Argonauts in the introductory part of his work, has borrowed much from
Ovid’s Medea in the _Metamorphoses_. Virgil’s Dido and Ovid’s Medea had
an immense effect on the imagination of the French poets and their
followers. From Virgil and Ovid the medieval authors got the suggestion
of passionate eloquence, and learned how to manage a love-story in a
dramatic way—allowing the characters free scope to express themselves
fully. Chivalrous sentiment in the romances is partly due to the example
of the Latin authors, who wrote long passionate speeches for their
heroines, or letters like that of Phyllis to Demophoon or Ariadne to
Theseus and the rest of Ovid’s _Heroides_—the source of Chaucer’s _Legend
of Good Women_. The idea of the lover as the servant of his mistress was
also taken first of all from the Latin amatory poets. And the success of
the new romantic school was gained by the working together of those ideas
and examples, the new creation of chivalrous and courteous love out of
those elements.
The ideas are the same in the lyric as in the narrative poetry; and it is
allowable to describe a large part of the French romantic poems as being
the expression in narrative of the ideas which had been lyrically uttered
in the poetry of Provence—
The love of honour and the honour of love.
The well-known phrase of Sidney is the true rendering of the Provençal
spirit; it is found nearly in the same form in the old language—
Quar non es joys, si non l’adutz honors,
Ni es honors, si non l’adutz amors.
(There is no joy, if honour brings it not; nor is there honour, if love
brings it not.)
The importance of all this for the history of Europe can scarcely be
over-estimated. It was the beginning of a classical renaissance through
the successful appropriation of classical ideas in modern languages and
modern forms. It is true that the medieval version of the _Aeneid_ or of
the story of the Argonauts may appear exceedingly quaint and ‘Gothic’ and
childish, if it be thought of in comparison with the original; but if it
be contrasted with the style of narrative which was in fashion before it,
the _Roman d’Eneas_ comes out as something new and promising. There is
ambition in it, and the ambition is of the same sort as has produced all
the finer sentimental fiction since. If it is possible anywhere to trace
the pedigree of fashions in literature, it is here. All modern novelists
are descended from this French romantic poetry of the twelfth century,
and therefore from the classical poets to whom so much of the life of the
French romances can be traced. The great poets of the Renaissance carry
on in their own way the processes of adaptation which were begun in the
twelfth century, and, besides that, many of them are directly
indebted—Ariosto and Spenser, for example—to medieval romance.
Further, all the chivalrous ideals of the modern world are derived from
the twelfth century. Honour and loyalty would have thriven without the
chivalrous poets, as they had thriven before them in every nation on
earth. But it is none the less true that the tradition of honour was
founded for the sixteenth century and the eighteenth and the present day
in Europe by the poets of the twelfth century.
The poetical doctrine of love, which is so great a part of chivalry, has
had one effect both on civilization in general and on particular schools
of poetry which it is hard to sum up and to understand. It is sometimes a
courtly game like that described in the life of the troubadour quoted
above; the lady pleased at the honour paid her and ready to accept the
poet’s worship; the lady’s husband either amused by it all, or otherwise,
if not amused, at any rate prevented by the rules of polite society from
objecting; the poet enamoured according to the same code of law, with as
much sincerity as that law and his own disposition might allow;
thoroughly occupied with his own craft of verse and with the new
illustrations from natural or civil history by means of which he hoped to
make a name and go beyond all other poets. The difficulty is to know how
much there is of pretence and artifice in the game. It is certain that
the Provençal lyric poetry, and the other poetry derived from it in other
languages, has many excellences besides the ingenious repetition of stock
ideas in cleverly varied patterns of rhyme. The poets are not all alike,
and the poems of one poet are not all alike. The same poem of Bernart de
Ventadour contains a beautiful, true, fresh description of the skylark
singing and falling in the middle of the song through pure delight in the
rays of the sun; and also later an image of quite a different sort: the
lover looking in the eyes of his mistress and seeing himself reflected
there is in danger of the same fate as Narcissus, who pined away over his
own reflection in the well. Imagination and Fancy are blended and
interchanged in the troubadours as much as in any modern poet. But apart
from all questions of their value, there is no possible doubt that the
Provençal idealism is the source, though not the only source, to which
all the noblest lyric poetry of later times and other nations may be
referred for its ancestry. The succession of schools (or whatever the
right name may be) can be traced with absolute certainty through Dante
and Petrarch in the fourteenth century to Ronsard and Spenser in the
sixteenth, and further still.
The society which invented good manners and the theory of honour, which
is at the beginning of all modern poetry and of all novels as well, is
often slighted by modern historians. The vanity, the artifice, the
pedantry can easily be noted and dismissed. The genius of the several
writers is buried in the difficulty and unfamiliarity of the old
languages, even where it has not been destroyed and lost in other ways.
But still the spirit of Provençal lyric and of old French romance can be
proved to be, at the very lowest estimate, the beginning of modern
civilization, as distinct from the earlier Middle Ages.
CHAPTER IV
THE ROMANCES
All through the time between the Norman Conquest and Chaucer one feels
that _the Court_ is what determines the character of poetry and prose.
The English writers almost always have to bear in mind their inferiority
to French, and it is possible to describe their efforts during three
centuries (1100-1400) as generally directed towards the ideal of French
poetry, a struggle to realize in English what had been already achieved
in French, to make English literature polite.
In the history of the English romances this may be tested in various
ways. To begin with, there is the fact that many writers living in
England wrote French, and that some French romances, not among the worst,
were composed in England. It can hardly be doubted that such was the case
with the famous love-story of _Amadas and Ydoine_; it is certain that the
romance of _Ipomedon_ was composed by an Englishman, Hue de Rotelande.
Those two works of fiction are, if not the noblest, at any rate among the
most refined of their species; _Amadas and Ydoine_ is as perfect a
romance of true love as _Amadis of Gaul_ in later days—a history which
possibly derived the name of its hero from the earlier Amadas. _Ipomedon_
is equally perfect in another way, being one of the most clever and
successful specimens of the conventionally elegant work which was
practised by imitative poets after the fashion had been established.
There is no better romance to look at in order to see what things were
thought important in the ‘school’, i.e. among the well-bred unoriginal
writers who had learned the necessary style of verse, and who could turn
out a showy piece of new work by copying the patterns they had before
them. Both _Ipomedon_ and _Amadas and Ydoine_ are in the best possible
style—the genteelest of tunes. The fact is clear, that in the twelfth
century literary refinement was as possible in England as in France, so
long as one used the French language.
It must not be supposed that everything written in French, whether in
France or England, was courtly or refined. There is plenty of rough
French written in England—some of it very good, too, like the prose story
of Fulk Fitzwaryn, which many people would find much more lively than the
genteel sentimental novels. But while French could be used for all
purposes, polite or rude, English was long compelled to be rude and
prevented from competing on equal terms with the language of those ‘who
have used court’.
It is very interesting to see how the English translated and adapted the
polite French poems, because the different examples show so many
different degrees of ambition and capacity among the native English. In
the style of the English romances—of which there are a great many
varieties—one may read the history of the people; the romances bring one
into relation with different types of mind and different stages of
culture. What happened to _Ipomedon_ is a good illustration. First there
is the original French poem—a romantic tale in verse written in the
regular French short couplets of octosyllabic lines—well and correctly
written by a man of English birth. In this production Hue de Rotelande,
the author, meant to do his best and to beat all other competitors. He
had the right sort of talent for this—not for really original
imagination, but for the kind of work that was most in fashion in his
time. He did not, like some other poets, look for a subject or a
groundwork in a Breton lay, or an Arabian story brought from the East by
a traveller; instead of that he had read the most successful romances and
he picked out of them, here and there, what suited him best for a new
combination. He took, for example, the idea of the lover who falls in
love with a lady he has never seen (an idea much older than the French
romantic school, but that does not matter, for the present); he took the
story of the proud lady won by faithful service; he took from one of the
Arthurian romances another device which is older than any particular
literature, the champion appearing, disguised in different colours, on
three successive days. In _Ipomedon_, of course, the days are days of
tournament, and the different disguises three several suits of armour.
The scene of the story is Apulia and Calabria, chosen for no particular
reason except perhaps to get away from the scene of the British romances.
The hero’s name, Hippomedon, is Greek, like the names in the _Romance of
Thebes_, like Palamon and Arcita, which are taken from the Greek names
Palæmon and Archytas. Everything is borrowed, and nothing is used
clumsily. _Ipomedon_ is made according to a certain prescription, and it
is made exactly in the terms of the prescription—a perfect example of the
regular fashionable novel, well entitled to its place in any literary
museum. This successful piece was turned into English in at least two
versions. One of these imitates the original verse of _Ipomedon_, it is
written in the ordinary short couplets. In every other respect it fails
to represent the original. It leaves things out, and spoils the
construction, and misses the point. It is one of our failures. The other
version is much more intelligent and careful; the author really was doing
as much as he could to render his original truly. But he fails in his
choice of verse; he translates the French couplets of _Ipomedon_ into a
form of stanza, like that which Chaucer burlesques in _Sir Thopas_. It is
a very good kind of stanza, and this anonymous English poet manages it
well. But it is the wrong sort of measure for that kind of story. It is a
dancing, capering measure, and ill suited to translate the French verse,
which is quiet, sedate, and not emphatic. These two translations show how
the English were apt to fail. Some of them were stupid, and some of them
had the wrong sort of skill.
It may be an accident that the English who were so fond of translating
from the French should (apparently) have taken so little from the chief
French poet of the twelfth century. This was Chrestien de Troyes, who was
in his day everything that Racine was five hundred years later; that is
to say, he was the successful and accomplished master of all the
subtleties of emotion, particularly of love, expressed in the newest,
most engaging and captivating style—the perfect manner of good society.
His fine narrative poems were thoroughly appreciated in Germany, where
German was at that time the language of all the courts, and where the
poets of the land were favoured and protected in the same way as poets in
France and Provence. In English there is only one romance extant which is
translated from Chrestien de Troyes; and the character of the translation
is significant: it proves how greatly the circumstances and conditions of
literature in England differed from those of France and Germany. The
romance is _Ywain and Gawain_, a translation of Chrestien’s _Yvain_,
otherwise called _Le Chevalier au Lion_. It is a good romance, and in
style it is much closer to the original than either of the two versions
of _Ipomedon_, lately mentioned; no other of the anonymous romances comes
so near to the standard of Chaucer and Gower. It is good in manner; its
short couplets (in the language of the North of England) reproduce very
well the tone of French narrative verse. But the English writer is
plainly unable to follow the French in all the effusive passages; he
thinks the French is too long, and he cuts down the speeches. On the
other hand (to show the difference between different countries), the
German translator Hartmann von Aue, dealing with the same French poem,
admires the same things as the French author, and spins out his
translation to a greater length than the original. Another historical
fact of the same sort is that the English seem to have neglected the
_Roman d’Eneas_; while German historians note that it was a translation
of this French poem, the _Eneide_ of Heinrich van Valdeke, which first
introduced the courteous literary form of romance into Germany. German
poetry about the year 1200 was fully the equal of French, in the very
qualities on which the French authors prided themselves. England was
labouring far behind.
It is necessary to judge England in comparison with France, if the
history of medieval poetry is to be written and studied at all. But the
comparison ought not to be pressed so far as to obliterate all the
genuine virtues of the English writers because they are not the same as
the French. There is another consideration also which ought not to be
left out. It is true that the most remarkable thing in the French
romances was their ‘language of the heart’, their skill in rendering
passion and emotion—their ‘sensibility’, to use an eighteenth-century
name for the same sort of disposition. But this emotional skill, this
ingenious use of passionate language in soliloquies and dialogues, was
not the only attraction in the French romances. It was the most important
thing at the time, and historically it is what gives those romances, of
Chrestien de Troyes and others, their rank among the poetical ideas of
the world. It was through their sensibility that they enchanted their own
time, and this was the spirit which passed on from them to later
generations through the prose romances of the fourteenth century, such as
_Amadis of Gaul_, to those of the seventeenth century, such as the _Grand
Cyrus_ or _Cassandra_. To understand what the works of Chrestien de
Troyes meant for his contemporaries one cannot do better than read the
letters in which Dorothy Osborne speaks of her favourite characters in
the later French prose romances, those ‘monstrous fictions’, as Scott
called them, ‘which constituted the amusement of the young and the gay in
the age of Charles II’. Writing to Sir William Temple she says: ‘Almanzor
is as fresh in my memory as if I had visited his tomb but yesterday. . .
. You will believe I had not been used to great afflictions when I made
his story such an one to me as I cried an hour together for him, and was
so angry with Alcidiana that for my life I could never love her after
it’. Almanzor and Alcidiana, and the sorrows that so touched their gentle
readers in the age of Louis XIV and Charles II, were the descendants of
Chrestien de Troyes in a direct line; they represent what is enduring and
inexhaustible in the spirit of the older polite literature in France.
Sentiment in modern fiction can be traced back to Chrestien de Troyes. It
is a fashion which was established then and has never been extinguished
since; if there is to be any history of ideas at all, this is what has to
be recorded as the principal influence in French literature in the
twelfth century. But it was not everything, and it was not a simple
thing. There are many varieties of sentiment, and besides sentiment there
are many other interests in the old French romantic literature. The works
of Chrestien de Troyes may be taken as examples again. In one, _Cliges_,
there are few adventures; in _Perceval_ (the story of the Grail), his
last poem, the adventures are many and wonderful. In his _Lancelot_, the
sentimental interest is managed in accordance with the rules of the
Provençal poetry at its most refined and artificial height; but his story
of _Enid_ is in substance the same as Tennyson’s, a romance which does
not need (like Chrestien’s _Lancelot_) any study of a special code of
behaviour to explain the essence of it. The lovers here are husband and
wife (quite against the Provençal rules), and the plot is pure comedy, a
misunderstanding cleared away by the truth and faithfulness of the
heroine.
Further, although it is true that adventure is not the chief interest
with Chrestien de Troyes and his followers, it is not true that it is
neglected by them; and besides, although they were the most fashionable
and most famous and successful authors of romance, they were not the only
story-tellers nor was their method the only one available. There was a
form of short story, commonly called _lai_ and associated with Brittany,
in which there was room for the same kind of matter as in many of the
larger romances, but not for the same expression and effusion of
sentiment. The best known are those of Marie de France, who dedicated her
book of stories to King Henry of England (Henry II). One of the best of
the English short romances, _Sir Launfal_, is taken from Marie de France;
her stories have a beauty which was not at the time so enthralling as the
charm of the longer stories, and which had nothing like the same
influence on the literature of the future, but which now, for those who
care to look at it, has much more freshness, partly because it is nearer
to the fairy mythology of popular tradition. The longer romances are
really modern novels—studies of contemporary life, characters and
emotions, mixed up with adventures more or less surprising. The shorter
_lais_ (like that of _Sir Launfal_) might be compared to the stories of
Hans Christian Andersen; they are made in the same way. Like many of
Andersen’s tales, they are borrowed from folk-lore; like them, again,
they are not mere transcripts from an uneducated story-teller. They are
‘old wives’ tales’, but they are put into fresh literary form. This new
form may occasionally interfere with something in the original
traditional version, but it does not, either with Marie de France or with
Andersen, add too much to the original. Curiously, there is an example in
English, among the shorter rhyming romances, of a story which Andersen
has told in his own way under the title of the _Travelling Companion_.
The English _Sir Amadace_ is unfortunately not one of the best of the
short stories—not nearly as good as _Sir Launfal_—but still it shows how
a common folk-lore plot, the story of the Grateful Dead, might be turned
into literary form without losing all its original force and without
being transformed into a mere vehicle for modern literary ambitions.
The relations between folk-lore and literature are forced on the
attention when one is studying the Middle Ages, and perhaps most of all
in dealing with this present subject, the romances of the age of
chivalry. In Anglo-Saxon literature it is much less to the fore, probably
not because there was little of it really, but because so little has been
preserved. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries there was a great
stirring-up of popular mythology in a number of countries, so that it
came to be noticed, and passed into scores of books, both in the form of
plots for stories, and also in scientific remarks made by investigators
and historians. Giraldus Cambrensis is full of folk-lore, and about the
same time Walter Map (in his _De Nugis Curialium_) and Gervase of Tilbury
(in his _Otia Imperialia_) were taking notes of the same sort. Both
Giraldus and Walter Map were at home in Wales, and it was particularly in
the relation between the Welsh and their neighbours that the study of
folk-lore was encouraged; both the historical study, as in the works of
these Latin authors just named, and the traffic in stories to be used for
literary purposes in the vernacular languages whether French or English.
The ‘matter of Britain’ in the stories of Tristram, Gawain, Perceval and
Lancelot came to be associated peculiarly with the courteous sentimental
type of romance which had such vogue and such influence in the Middle
Ages. But the value of this ‘matter’—the Celtic stories—was by no means
exclusively connected with the ambitious literary art of Chrestien and
others like him. Apart from form altogether, it counts for something that
such a profusion of stories was sent abroad over all the nations. They
were interesting and amusing, in whatever language they were told. They
quickened up people’s imaginations and gave them something to think
about, in the same way as the Italian novels which were so much read in
the time of Shakespeare, or the trashy German novels in the time of
Shelley.
It is much debated among historians whether it was from Wales or Brittany
that these stories passed into general circulation. It seems most
probable that the two Welsh countries on both sides of the Channel gave
stories to their neighbours—to the Normans both in France and England,
and to the English besides on the Welsh borders. It seems most probable
at any rate that the French had not to wait for the Norman Conquest
before they picked up any Celtic stories. The Arthurian names in Italy
(mentioned already above, p. 50) are found too early, and the dates do
not allow time for the stories to make their way, and find favour, and
tempt people in Lombardy to call their children after Gawain instead of a
patron saint. It is certain that both in Brittany—Little Britain—and in
Wales King Arthur was a hero, whose return was to put all things right.
It was to fulfil this prophecy that Geoffrey Plantagenet’s son was called
Arthur, and a Provençal poet hails the child with these auspices: ‘Now
the Bretons have got their Arthur’. Other writers speak commonly of the
‘Breton folly’—this hope of a deliverer was the Breton vanity, well known
and laughed at by the more practical people across the border.
Arthur, however, was not the proper hero of the romantic tales, either in
their shorter, more popular form or in the elaborate work of the courtly
school. In many of the _lais_ he is never mentioned; in most of the
romances, long or short, early or late, he has nothing to do except to
preside over the feast, at Christmas or Whitsuntide, and wait for
adventures. So he is represented in the English poem of _Sir Gawayn and
the Grene Knyght_. The stories are told not about King Arthur, but about
Gawain or Perceval, Lancelot or Pelleas or Pellenore.
The great exception to this general rule is the history of Arthur which
was written by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the first half of the twelfth
century as part of his Latin history of Britain. This history of Arthur
was of course translated wherever Geoffrey was translated, and sometimes
it was picked out for separate treatment, as by the remarkable author of
the _Morte Arthure_, one of the best of the alliterative poems. Arthur
had long been known in Britain as a great leader against the Saxon
invaders; Geoffrey of Monmouth took up and developed this idea in his own
way, making Arthur a successful opponent not of the Saxons merely but of
Rome; a conqueror of kingdoms, himself an emperor before whom the power
of Rome was humbled. In consequence of which the ‘Saxons’ came to think
of their country as Britain, and to make Arthur their national hero, in
the same way as Charlemagne was the national hero in France. Arthur also,
like Charlemagne, came to be generally respected all over Christendom, in
Norway and Iceland, as well as Italy and Greece. Speaking generally,
whenever Arthur is a great conquering hero like Alexander or Charlemagne
this idea of him is due to Geoffrey of Monmouth; the stories where he
only appears as holding a court and sending out champions are stories
that have come from popular tradition, or are imitations of such stories.
But there are some exceptions. For one thing, Geoffrey’s representation
of Arthur is not merely a composition after the model of Alexander the
Great or Charlemagne; the story of Arthur’s fall at the hands of his
nephew is traditional. And when Layamon a ‘Saxon’ turned the French
rhyming version of Geoffrey into English—Layamon’s _Brut_—he added a
number of things which are neither in the Latin nor the French, but
obtained by Layamon himself independently, somehow or other, from the
Welsh. Layamon lived on the banks of the Severn, and very probably he may
have done the same kind of note-taking in Wales or among Welsh
acquaintances as was done by Walter Map a little earlier. Layamon’s
additions are of great worth; he tells the story of the passing of
Arthur, and it is from Layamon, ultimately, that all the later
versions—Malory’s and Tennyson’s—are derived.
None of the English authors can compete with the French poets as elegant
writers dealing with contemporary manners. But apart from that kind of
work almost every variety of interest may be found in the English
stories. There are two, _King Horn_ and _Havelok the Dane_, which appear
to be founded on national English traditions coming down from the time of
the Danish wars. _King Horn_ is remarkable for its metre—short rhyming
couplets, but not in the regular eight-syllable lines which were imitated
from the French. The verse appears to be an adaptation of the old native
English measure, fitted with regular rhymes. Rhyme was used in
continental German poetry, and in Icelandic, and occasionally in
Anglo-Saxon, before there were any French examples to follow; and _King
Horn_ is one thing surviving to show how the English story-tellers might
have got on if they had not paid so much attention to the French
authorities in rhyme. The story of Havelok belongs to the town of Grimsby
particularly and to the Danelaw, the district of England occupied by
Danish settlers. The name Havelok is the Danish, or rather the Norwegian,
Anlaf or Olaf, and the story seems to be a tradition in which two
historical Olafs have been confused—one the Olaf who was defeated at the
battle of Brunanburh, the other the Olaf who won the battle of
Maldon—Olaf Tryggvason, King of Norway. _Havelok_, the English story, is
worth reading as a good specimen of popular English poetry in the
thirteenth century, a story where the subject and the scene are English,
where the manners are not too fine, and where the hero, a king’s son
disinherited and unrecognized, lives as a servant for a long time and so
gives the author a chance of describing common life and uncourtly
manners. And he does this very well, particularly in the athletic sports
where Havelok distinguishes himself—an excellent piece to compare with
the funeral games which used to be a necessary part of every regular epic
poem. _Horn_ and _Havelok_, though they belong to England, are scarcely
to be reckoned as part of the ‘matter of Britain’, at least as that was
understood by the French author who used the term. There are other
stories which will not go easily into that or into either of the two
other divisions. One of these is the story of _Floris and Blanchefleur_,
which was turned into English in the thirteenth century—one of the oldest
among the rhyming romances. This is one of the many stories that came
from the East. It is the history of two young lovers who are separated
for a time—a very well known and favourite type of story. This is the
regular plot in the Greek prose romances, such as that of Heliodorus
which was so much admired after the Renaissance. This story of _Floris
and Blanchefleur_, however, does not come from Greece, but from the same
source as the _Arabian Nights_. Those famous stories, the Thousand and
One Nights, were not known in Europe till the beginning of the eighteenth
century, but many things of the same sort had made their way in the
Middle Ages into France, and this was the best of them all. It is found
in German and Dutch, as well as in English; also in Swedish and Danish,
in the same kind of short couplets—showing how widely the fashions of
literature were prescribed by France among all the Teutonic races.
How various the styles of romance might be is shown by two poems which
are both found in the famous _Auchinleck_ manuscript in Edinburgh, _Sir
Orfeo_ and _Sir Tristrem_. The stories are two of the best known in the
world. _Sir Orfeo_ is Orpheus. But this version of Orpheus and Eurydice
is not a translation from anything classical; it is far further from any
classical original than even the very free and distinctly ‘Gothic’
rendering of Jason and Medea at the beginning of the old French tale of
Troy. The story of Orpheus has passed through popular tradition before it
turns into _Sir Orfeo_. It shows how readily folk-lore will take a
suggestion from book-learning, and how easily it will make a classical
fable into the likeness of a Breton lay. Orfeo was a king, and also a
good harper:
He hath a queen full fair of price
That is clepèd Dame Erodys.
One day in May Queen Erodys slept in her orchard, and when she awoke was
overcome with affliction because of a dream—a king had appeared to her,
with a thousand knights and fifty ladies, riding on snow-white steeds.
The king had a crown on his head
It was no silver, ne gold red,
All it was of precious stone,
As bright as sun forsooth it shone.
He made her ride on a white palfrey to his own land, and showed her
castles and towers, meadows, fields and forests; then he brought her
home, and told her that the next day she would be taken away for ever.
The king kept watch on the morrow with two hundred knights; but there was
no help; among them all she was fetched away ‘with the faerie’. Then King
Orfeo left his kingdom, and went out to the wilderness to the ‘holtes
hoar’ barefoot, taking nothing of all his wealth but his harp only.
In summer he liveth by hawès
That on hawthorne groweth by shawès,
And in winter by root and rind
For other thing may he none find.
No man could tell of his sore
That he suffered ten year and more,
He that had castle and tower,
Forest, frith, both field and flower,
Now hath he nothing that him liketh
But wild beasts that by him striketh.
Beasts and birds came to listen to his harping—
When the weather is clear and bright,
He taketh his harp anon right;
Into the wood it ringeth shrill
As he could harpè at his will:
The wildè bestès that there beth
For joy about him they geth
All the fowlès that there were
They comen about him there
To hear harping that was fine
So mickle joy was therein.
. . .
Oft he saw him beside
In the hotè summer tide
The king of Fayré with his rout
Came to hunt all about.
. . .
Sometimes he saw the armed host of the Faerie; sometimes knights and
ladies together, in bright attire, riding an easy pace, and along with
them all manner of minstrelsy. One day he followed a company of the Fairy
ladies as they were hawking by the river (or rather the _rivere_—i.e. the
bank of the stream) at
Pheasant heron and cormorant;
The fowls out of the river flew
Every falcon his game slew.
King Orfeo saw that and laughed and rose up from his resting-place and
followed, and found his wife among them; but neither might speak with the
other—
But there might none with other speak
Though she him knew and he her, eke.
But he took up his harp and followed them fast, over stock and stone, and
when they rode into a hillside—‘in at the roche’—he went in after them.
When he was into the roche y-go
Well three mile, and some deal mo
He came to a fair countray
Was as bright as any day.
There in the middle of a lawn he saw a fair high castle of gold and
silver and precious stones.
No man might tell ne think in thought
The riches that therein was wrought.
The porter let him in, as a minstrel, and he was brought before the king
and queen. ‘How do you come here?’ said the king; ‘I never sent for you,
and never before have I known a man so hardy as to come unbidden.’ Then
Sir Orfeo put in a word for the minstrels; ‘It is our manner’, he said,
‘to come to every man’s house unbidden’,
‘And though we nought welcome be
Yet we must proffer our game or glee.’
Then he took his harp and played, and the king offered him whatever he
should ask.
‘Minstrel, me liketh well thy glee.’
Orfeo asked for the lady bright. ‘Nay’, said the king, ‘that were a foul
match, for in her there is no blemish and thou art rough and black’.
‘Fouler still’, said Orfeo, ‘to hear a leasing from a king’s mouth’; and
the king then let him go with good wishes, and Orfeo and Erodys went
home. The steward had kept the kingdom truly; ‘thus came they out of
care’.
It is all as simple as can be; a rescue out of fairyland, through the
power of music; the ideas are found everywhere, in ballads and stories.
The ending is happy, and nothing is said of the injunction not to look
back. It was probably left out when Orpheus was turned into a fairy tale,
on account of the power of music; the heart of the people felt that
Orpheus the good harper ought not to be subjected to the common plot. For
there is nothing commoner in romance or in popular tales than
forgetfulness like that of Orpheus when he lost Eurydice; the plot of
_Sir Launfal_ e.g. turns on that; he was warned not to speak of his fairy
wife, but he was led, by circumstances over which he had no control, to
boast of her—
To speke ne mightè he forgo
And said the queen before:
‘I have loved a fairer woman
Than thou ever laidest thine eye upon,
This seven year and more!’
The drama of _Lohengrin_ keeps this idea before the public (not to speak
of the opera of _Orfeo_), and _Lohengrin_ is a medieval German romance.
The Breton lay of Orpheus would not have been in any way exceptional if
it had kept to the original fable; the beauty of it loses nothing by the
course which it has preferred to take, the happy ending. One may refer to
it as a standard, to show what can be done in the medieval art of
narrative, with the simplest elements and smallest amount of decoration.
It is minstrel poetry, popular poetry—the point is clear when King Orfeo
excuses himself to the King of Faerie by the rules of his profession as a
minstrel; that was intended to produce a smile, and applause perhaps,
among the audience. But though a minstrel’s poem it is far from rude, and
it is quite free from the ordinary faults of rambling and prosing, such
as Chaucer ridiculed in his _Geste of Sir Thopas_. It is all in good
compass, and coherent; nothing in it is meaningless or ill-placed.
_Sir Tristrem_ is a great contrast to _Sir Orfeo_; not an absolute
contrast, for neither is this story rambling or out of compass. The
difference between the two is that _Sir Orfeo_ is nearly perfect as an
English representative of the ‘Breton lay’—i.e. the short French romantic
story like the _Lais_ of Marie de France; while _Sir Tristrem_ represents
no French style of narrative poetry, and is not very successful (though
technically very interesting) as an original English experiment in
poetical form. It is distinctly clever, as it is likewise ambitious. The
poet intends to do finer things than the common. He adopts a peculiar
stanza, not one of the easiest—a stanza more fitted for lyric than
narrative poetry, and which is actually used for lyrical verse by the
poet Laurence Minot. It is in short lines, well managed and effective in
their way, but it is a thin tinkling music to accompany the tragic story.
Ysonde bright of hewe
Is far out in the sea;
A wind again them blew
That sail no might there be;
So rew the knightes trewe,
Tristrem, so rew he,
Ever as they came newe
He one again them three
Great swink—
Sweet Ysonde the free
Asked Brengwain a drink.
The cup was richly wrought,
Of gold it was, the pin;
In all the world was nought
Such drink as there was in;
Brengwain was wrong bethought
To that drink she gan win
And sweet Ysonde it betaught;
She bad Tristrem begin
To say:
Their love might no man twin
Till their ending day.
The stage is that of a little neat puppet-show; with figures like those
of a miniature, dressed in bright armour, or in scarlet and vair and
grey—the rich cloth, the precious furs, grey and ermine, which so often
represent the glory of this world in the old romances—
Ysonde of highe pris,
The maiden bright of hewe,
That wered fow and gris
And scarlet that was newe;
In warld was none so wis
Of crafte that men knewe.
There is a large group of rhyming romances which might be named after
Chaucer’s _Sir Thopas_—the companions of _Sir Thopas_. Chaucer’s
burlesque is easily misunderstood. It is criticism, and it is ridicule;
it shows up the true character of the common minstrelsy; the rambling
narrative, the conventional stopgaps, the complacent childish vanity of
the popular artist who has his audience in front of him and knows all the
easy tricks by which he can hold their attention. Chaucer’s _Rime of Sir
Thopas_ is interrupted by the voice of common sense—rudely—
This may well be rime doggerel, quoth he.
But Chaucer has made a good thing out of the rhyme doggerel, and
expresses the pleasant old-fashioned quality of the minstrels’ romances,
as well as their absurdities.
His parody touches on the want of plan and method and meaning in the
popular rhymes of chivalry; it is also intended as criticism of their
verse. That verse, of which there are several varieties—there is more
than one type of stanza in _Sir Thopas_—is technically called _rime
couée_ or ‘tail-rhyme’, and like all patterns of verse it imposes a
certain condition of mind, for the time, on the poets who use it. It is
not absolutely simple, and so it is apt to make the writer well pleased
with himself when he finds it going well; it very readily becomes
monotonous and flat—
Now cometh the emperour of price,
Again him rode the king of Galice
With full mickle pride;
The child was worthy under weed
And sat upon a noble steed
By his father side;
And when he met the emperour
He valed his hood with great honour
And kissed him in that tide;
And other lords of great valour
They also kissèd Segramour
In heart is not to hide. (_Emaré._)
For that reason, because of the monotonous beat of the tail-rhymes in the
middle and at the end of the stanza, it is chosen by the parodists of
Wordsworth in the _Rejected Addresses_ when they are aiming at what they
think is flat and insipid in his poetry. But it is a form of stanza which
may be so used as to escape the besetting faults; the fact that it has
survived through all the changes of literary fashion, and has been used
by poets in all the different centuries, is something to the credit of
the minstrels, as against the rude common-sense criticism of the Host of
the Tabard when he stopped the Rime of _Sir Thopas_.
Chaucer’s catalogue of romances is well known—
Men speken of romances of prys
Of Horn Child and of Ypotys
Of Bevis and Sir Gy,
Of Sir Libeux and Pleyndamour,
But Sir Thopas he bereth the flour
Of royal chivalry.
In this summary, the name of _Pleyndamour_ is still a difficulty for
historians; it is not known to what book Chaucer was referring. _Ypotis_
is curiously placed, for the poem of _Ypotis_ is not what is usually
reckoned a romance. ‘Ypotis’ is Epictetus the Stoic philosopher, and the
poem is derived from the old moralizing dialogue literature; it is
related to the Anglo-Saxon dialogue of Solomon and Saturn. The other four
are well known. _Horn Childe_ is a later version, in stanzas, of the
story of _King Horn_. Bevis of Southampton and Guy of Warwick are among
the most renowned, and most popular, of all the chivalrous heroes. In
later prose adaptations they were current down to modern times; they were
part of the favourite reading of Bunyan, and gave him ideas for the
_Pilgrim’s Progress_. _Guy of Warwick_ was rewritten many times—Chaucer’s
pupil, Lydgate, took it up and made a new version of it. There was a
moral and religious strain in it, which appealed to the tastes of many;
the remarkable didactic prose romance of _Tirant the White_, written in
Spain in the fifteenth century, is connected with _Guy of Warwick_. Sir
Bevis is more ordinary and has no particular moral; it is worth reading,
if any one wishes to know what was regularly expected in romances by the
people who read, or rather who listened to them. The disinherited hero,
the beautiful Paynim princess, the good horse Arundel, the giant
Ascapart—these and many other incidents may be paralleled in other
stories; the history of Sir Bevis has brought them all together, and all
the popular novelist’s machinery might be fairly catalogued out of this
work alone.
_Sir Libeaus_—Le Beau Desconnu, the Fair Knight unknown—is a different
thing. This also belongs to the School of Sir Thopas—it is minstrels’
work, and does not pretend to be anything else. But it is well done. The
verse, which is in short measure like that of _Sir Tristrem_, but not in
so ambitious a stanza, is well managed—
That maide knelde in halle
Before the knightes alle
And seide: My lord Arthour!
A cas ther is befalle
Worse withinne walle
Was never non of dolour.
My lady of Sinadoune
Is brought in strong prisoun
That was of great valour;
Sche praith the sende her a knight
With herte good and light
To winne her with honour.
This quotation came from the beginning of the story, and it gives the one
problem which has to be solved by the hero. Instead of the mixed
adventures of Sir Bevis, there is only one principal one, which gives
occasion to all the adventures by the way. The lady of Sinodoun has
fallen into the power of two enchanters, and her damsel (with her dwarf
attendant) comes to the court of King Arthur to ask for a champion to
rescue her. It is a story like that of the Red Cross Knight and Una. If
Sir Bevis corresponds to what one may call the ordinary matter of
Spenser’s _Faerie Queen_, the wanderings, the separations, the dangerous
encounters, _Sir Libeaus_ resembles those parts of Spenser’s story where
the plot is most coherent. One of the most beautiful passages in all his
work, Britomart in the house of the enchanter Busirane, may have been
suggested by _Sir Libeaus. Sir Libeaus_ is one example of a kind of
medieval story, not the greatest, but still good and sound; the Arthurian
romance in which Arthur has nothing to do except to preside at the
beginning, and afterwards to receive the conquered opponents whom the
hero sends home from successive stages in his progress, to make
submission to the king. Sir Libeaus (his real name is Guinglain, the son
of Gawain) sets out on his journey with the damsel and the dwarf; at
first he is scorned by her, like Sir Gareth of Orkney in another story of
the same sort, but very soon he shows what he can do at the passage of
the Pont Perilous, and in the challenging of the gerfalcon, and many
other trials. Like other heroes of romance, he falls under the spell of a
sorceress who dazzles him with ‘fantasm and faerie’, but he escapes after
a long delay, and defeats the magicians of Sinodoun and rescues the lady
with a kiss from her serpent shape which the enchanters have put upon
her. Compared with Spenser’s house of Busirane, the scene of Sir Libeaus
at Sinodoun is a small thing. But one does not feel as in _Sir Tristrem_
the discrepancy between the miniature stage, the small bright figures,
and the tragic meaning of their story. Here the story is not tragic; it
is a story that the actors understand and can play rightly. There are no
characters and no motives beyond the scope of a fairy tale—
Sir Libeaus, knight corteis
Rode into the paleis
And at the halle alighte;
Trompes, homes, schalmeis,
Before the highe dais,
He herd and saw with sight;
Amid the halle floor
A fire stark and store
Was light and brende bright;
Then farther in he yede
And took with him his steed
That halp him in the fight.
Libeaus inner gan pace
To behold each place,
The hales in the halle; _niches_
Of main more ne lasse
Ne saw he body ne face
But menstrales clothed in palle;
With harpe, fithele and rote,
And with organes note,
Great glee they maden alle,
With citole and sautrie,
So moche menstralsie
Was never withinne walle.
As if to show the range and the difference of style in English romance,
there is another story written like _Sir Libeaus_ in the reign of Edward
III, taken from the same Arthurian legend and beginning in the same way,
which has scarcely anything in common with it except the general
resemblance in the plot. This is _Sir Gawain and the Green Knight_, one
of the most original works in medieval romance. It is written in
alliterative blank verse, divided into irregular periods which have
rhyming tailpieces at the end of them—
As hit is stad and stoken
In story stif and stronge
With leal letters loken
In land so has been longe.
While the story of _Sir Libeaus_ is found in different languages—French,
Italian, German—there is no other extant older version of _Gawain and the
Green Knight_. But the separate incidents are found elsewhere, and the
scene to begin with is the usual one: Arthur at his court, Arthur keeping
high festival and waiting for ‘some main marvel’. The adventure comes
when it is wanted; the Green Knight on his green horse rides into the
king’s hall—half-ogre, by the look of him, to challenge the Round Table.
What he offers is a ‘jeopardy’, a hazard, a wager. ‘Will any gentleman
cut off my head’, says he, ‘on condition that I may have a fair blow at
him, and no favour, in a twelvemonth’s time? Or if you would rather have
it so, let me have the first stroke, and I promise to offer my neck in
turn, when a year has gone’. This is the beheading game which is spoken
of in other stories (one of them an old Irish comic romance) but which
seems to have been new at that time to the knights of King Arthur. It is
rightly considered dangerous; and so it proved when Sir Gawain had
accepted the jeopardy. For after Gawain had cut off the stranger’s head,
the Green Knight picked it up by the hair, and held it up, and it spoke
and summoned Gawain to meet him at the Green Chapel in a year’s space,
and bide the return blow.
This is more surprising than anything in _Sir Bevis_ or _Sir Guy_. Not
much is done by the writer to explain it; at the same time nothing is
left vague. The author might almost have been a modern novelist with a
contempt for romance, trying, by way of experiment, to work out a
‘supernatural’ plot with the full strength of his reason; merely
accepting the fabulous story, and trying how it will go with accessories
from real life, and with modern manners and conversation. There is none
of the minstrel’s cant in this work, none of the cheap sensations, the
hackneyed wonders such as are ridiculed in _Sir Thopas_. Only, the
incident on which the whole story turns, the device of the beheading
game, is a piece of traditional romance. It is not found in every
language, but it is fairly well known. It is not as common as the lady
turned into a serpent, or the man into a werewolf, but still it is not
invented, it is borrowed by the English poet, and borrowed for a work
which always, even in the beheading scenes, is founded on reality.
It is probable that the author of _Sir Gawain_ is also the author of
three other poems (not romances) which are found along with it in the
same manuscript—the _Pearl_, _Cleanness_, and _Patience_. He is a writer
with a gift for teaching, of a peculiar sort. He is not an original
philosopher, and his reading appears to have been the usual sort of thing
among fairly educated men. He does not try to get away from the regular
authorities, and he is not afraid of commonplaces. But he has great force
of will, and a strong sense of the difficulties of life; also high
spirits and great keenness. His memory is well supplied from all that he
has gone through. The three sporting episodes in _Sir Gawain_, the
deer-hunt (in Christmas week, killing the hinds), the boar-hunt and the
fox-hunt, are not only beyond question as to their scientific truth; the
details are remembered without study because the author has lived in
them, and thus, minute as they are, they are not wearisome. They do not
come from a careful notebook; they are not like the descriptions of rooms
and furniture in painstaking novels. The landscapes and the weather of
_Sir Gawain_ are put in with the same freedom. The author has a talent
especially for winter scenes. ‘Grim Nature’s visage hoar’ had plainly
impressed his mind, and not in a repulsive way. The winter ‘mist hackles’
(copes of mist) on the hills, the icicles on the stones, the swollen
streams, all come into his work—a relief from the too ready illustrations
of spring and summer which are scattered about in medieval stories.
The meaning of the story is in the character of Gawain. Like some other
romances, this is a chivalrous _Pilgrim’s Progress_. Gawain, so much
vilified by authors who should have known better, is for this poet, as he
is for Chaucer, the perfection of courtesy. He is also the servant of Our
Lady, and bears her picture on his shield, along with the pentangle which
is the emblem of her Five Joys, as well as the Five Wounds of Christ. The
poem is the ordeal of Gawain; Gawain is tried in courage and loyalty by
his compact with the Green Knight; he is tried in loyalty and temperance
when he is wooed by the wanton conversation of the lady in the castle.
The author’s choice of a plot is justified, because what he wants is an
ordeal of courage, and that is afforded by the Green Knight’s ‘jeopardy’.
The alliterative poetry is almost always stronger than the tales in
rhyme, written with more zest, not so much in danger of droning and
sleepiness as the school of Sir Thopas undoubtedly is. But there is a
great difference among the alliterative romances. _William of Palerne_,
for example, is vigorous, but to little purpose, because the author has
not understood the character of the French poem which he has translated,
and has misapplied his vigorous style to the handling of a rather
sophisticated story which wanted the smooth, even, unemphatic, French
style to express it properly. _The Wars of Alexander_ is the least
distinguished of the group; there was another alliterative story of
Alexander, of which only fragments remain. The _Chevelere Assigne_, the
‘Knight of the Swan,’ is historically interesting, as giving the romantic
origin of Godfrey the Crusader, who is the last of the Nine Worthies.
Though purely romantic in its contents, the _Chevalier au Cygne_ belongs
to one of the French narrative groups usually called epic—the epic of
_Antioch_, which is concerned with the first Crusade. The _Gest historial
of the Destruction of Troy_ is of great interest; it is the liveliest of
all the extant ‘Troy Books’, and it has all the good qualities of the
fourteenth-century alliterative school, without the exaggeration and
violence which was the common fault of this style, as the contrary fault
of tameness was the danger of the rhyming romances. But the alliterative
poem which ranks along with _Sir Gawayne_ as an original work with a
distinct and fresh comprehension of its subject is the _Morte Arthure_.
This has some claim to be called an epic poem, an epic of the modern
kind, composed with a definite theory. The author takes the heroic view
of Arthur given by Geoffrey of Monmouth, and turns his warfare into a
reflection of the glory of King Edward III; not casually, but following
definite lines, with almost as much tenacity as the author of _Sir
Gawayne_, and, of course, with a greater theme. The tragedy of Arthur in
Malory to some extent repeats the work of this poet—whose name was
Huchoun of the Awle Ryale; it may have been Sir Hugh of Eglinton.
CHAPTER V
SONGS AND BALLADS
King Canute’s boat-song has some claim to be the earliest English song in
rhyme—
Merie sungen the muneches binnen Ely
Tha Knut king rew therby:
Roweth, knihtes, ner the land
And here we thes muneches sang.
If this claim be disallowed, then the first is St. Godric, the hermit of
Finchale in the reign of Henry II—his hymn to Our Lady and the hymn to
St. Nicholas. These are preserved along with the music (like the Cuckoo
song which comes later); the manuscript of the poems of Godric is copied
in the frontispiece to Saintsbury’s _History of English Prosody_; it
proves many interesting things. It is obvious that musical notation is
well established; and it seems to follow that with a good musical
tradition there may be encouragement for lyric poetry apart from any such
‘courtly’ circumstances as have been described in another chapter. There
is no doubt about this. While it is certain on the one hand that the
lyrical art of the Middle Ages was carried furthest in courtly society by
the French, Provençal, German and Italian poets, it is equally certain
that the art of music flourished also in out-of-the-way places. And as in
those days musical and poetical measures, tunes and words, generally went
together, the development of music would mean the development of poetical
forms, of lyric stanzas. Music flourished in England most of all in
Godric’s country, the old Northumbria. Giraldus Cambrensis, who has been
quoted already for his story of the wake and the English love-song, gives
in another place a remarkable description of the part-singing which in
his time was cultivated where it is most in favour at the present day—in
Wales, and in England north of the Humber. Where people met to sing in
parts, where music, therefore, was accurate and well studied, there must
have been careful patterns of stanza. Not much remains from a date so
early as this, nor even for a century after the time of Godric and
Giraldus. But towards the end of the reign of Edward I lyric poems are
found more frequently, often careful in form. And in judging of their art
it is well to remember that it is not necessary to refer them to the
courtly schools for their origin. Country people might be good judges of
lyric; they might be as exacting in their musical and poetical criticisms
as any persons of quality could be. Hence while it is certain that
England before the time of Chaucer was generally rustic and provincial in
its literary taste, it does not follow that the rustic taste was
uninstructed or that the art was poor. The beauty of the English songs
between 1300 and 1500 is not that of the nobler lyric as it was (for
example) practised and described by Dante. But the beauty is undeniable,
and it is the beauty of an art which has laws of its own; it is poetry,
not the primitive elements of poetry. In art, it is not very far from
that of the earlier Provençal poets. For everywhere, it should be
remembered, the noble lyric poetry was ready to draw from the popular
sources, to adapt and imitate the rustic themes; as on the other hand the
common people were often willing to take up the courtly forms.
The earliest rhyming songs are more interesting from their associations
than their own merits; though Canute and St. Godric are certainly able to
put a good deal of meaning into few words. Godric’s address to St.
Nicholas is particularly memorable for its bearing on his own history.
Godric had been a sea captain in his youth (like another famous author of
hymns, the Rev. John Newton) and St. Nicholas is the patron saint of
sailors. Godric, whose operations were in the Levant, had often prayed to
St. Nicholas of Bari, and he brings the name of the saint’s own city into
his hymn, by means of a sacred pun. ‘Saint Nicholas’, he says, ‘build us
a far sheen house—
At thi burch at thi bare
Sainte Nicholaes bring us wel thare.
‘Bare’ here means shrine, literally, but Godric is thinking also of the
name of the ‘burgh’, the city of Bari to which the relics of the saint
had been lately brought.
Religious lyric poetry is not separate from other kinds, and it
frequently imitates the forms and language of worldly songs. The _Luve
Ron_ of the Friar Minor Thomas de Hales is one of the earliest poems of a
type something between the song and the moral poem—a lyric rather far
away from the music of a song, more like the lyrics of modern poets,
meant to be read rather than sung, yet keeping the lyrical stave. One
passage in it is on the favourite theme of the ‘snows of yester year’—
Where is Paris and Heleyne
That were so bright and fair of blee!
This is earlier in date than the famous collection in the Harleian MS.,
which is everything best worth remembering in the old lyrical poetry—
Betwene Mersche and Averil
When spray beginneth to springe.
The lyrical contents of this book (there are other things besides the
songs—a copy of _King Horn_, e.g.)—the songs of this Harleian MS.—are
classified as religious, amatory and satirical; but a better division is
simply into songs of love and songs of scorn. The division is as old and
as constant as anything in the world, and the distinction between
‘courtly’ and ‘popular’ does not affect it. In the older court poetry of
Iceland, as in the later of Provence and Germany, the lyric of scorn and
the lyric of praise were equally recognized. The name ‘Wormtongue’ given
to an Icelandic poet for his attacking poems would do very well for many
of the Provençals—for Sordello, particularly, whose best-known poem is
his lyrical satire on the Kings of Christendom. It depends, of course, on
fashion how the lyrical attack shall be developed. In England it could
not be as subtle as in the countries of Bertran de Born or Walter von der
Vogelweide, where the poet was a friend and enemy of some among the
greatest of the earth. The political songs in the Harleian manuscript are
anonymous, and express the heart of the people. The earliest in date and
the best known is the song of Lewes—a blast of laughter from the
partisans of Simon de Montfort following up the pursuit of their defeated
adversaries—thoroughly happy and contemptuous, and not cruel. It is
addressed to ‘Richard of Almain’, Richard the king’s brother, who was
looked on as the bad counsellor of his nephew Edward—
Sir Simon de Montfort hath swore by his chin,
Hadde he now here the Erl of Warin
Sholde he never more come to his inn
With shelde, ne with spere, ne with other gin
To helpe of Windesore!
_Richard! thah thou be ever trichard,_
_Trichen shalt thou never more!_
This very spirited song is preserved together with some others dealing
with later events in the life of Edward. One of them is a long poem of
exultation over the death of the King’s Scottish rebels, Sir William
Wallace and Sir Simon Fraser; the author takes great pleasure in the
treatment of Wallace by the King and the hangman—
Sir Edward oure King, that full is of pité
The Waleis’ quarters sende to his owne countré
On four half to honge, here mirour to be
Ther upon to thenche, that monie mihten see
And drede:
Why nolden hie be war,
Of the bataile of Donbar
How evele hem con spede?
The same poet gibes at a Scottish rebel who was then still living and
calls him a ‘king of summer’ and ‘King Hob’—
Nou kyng Hobbe in the mures gongeth.
This King Hob of the moors was Robert the Bruce, wandering, as Barbour
describes him, over the land. There is another very vigorous and rather
long piece on a recent defeat of the French by the Flemings at Courtrai—
The Frenshe came to Flaundres so light so the hare
Er hit were midnight, hit fell hem to care
Hie were caught by the net, so bird is in snare
With rouncin and with stede:
The Flemishe hem dabbeth on the hed bare,
Hie nolden take for hem raunsoun ne ware
Hie doddeth off here hevedes, fare so hit fare,
And thare to haveth hie nede.
This style of political journalism in rhyme was carried on later with
much spirit, and one author is well known by name and has had his poems
often edited—Lawrence Minot, a good workman who is sometimes undervalued.
Lawrence Minot has command of various lyrical measures; he has the clear
sharp phrasing which belongs generally to his northern dialect, and he
can put contempt into his voice with no recourse to bad language. After
describing the threats and boasting of the French, when Minot remarks
And yet is England as it was,
the effect is just where it ought to be, between wind and water; the
enemy is done for. It is like Prior’s observation to Boileau, in the
_Ode_ on the taking of Namur, and the surrender of the French garrison—
Each was a Hercules, you tell us,
Yet out they marched like common men.
Besides the songs of attack, there are also comic poems, simply amusing
without malice—such is the excellent Harleian piece on the _Man in the
Moon_, which is the meditation of a solitary reveller, apparently
thinking out the problem of the Man and his thorn-bush and offering
sympathy: ‘Did you cut a bundle of thorns, and did the heyward come and
make you pay? Ask him to drink, and we will get your pledge redeemed’.
If thy wed is y-take, bring home the truss;
Set forth thine other foot, stride over sty!
We shall pray the heyward home to our house,
And maken him at ease, for the maistry!
Drink to him dearly of full good bouse,
And our dame Douce shall sitten him by;
When that he is drunk as a dreynt mouse
Then we shall borrow the wed at the bailie!
A Franciscan brother in Ireland, Friar Michael of Kildare, composed some
good nonsensical poems—one of them a rigmarole in which part of the joke
is the way he pretends to rhyme and then sticks in a word that does not
rhyme, asking all through for admiration of his skill in verse. As a
poetical joke it is curious, and shows that Brother Michael was a critic
and knew the terms of his art. There are many literary games in the
Middle Ages, nonsense rhymes of different sorts; they are connected with
the serious art of poetry which had its own ‘toys and trifles’—such feats
of skill in verse and rhyming as Chaucer shows in his _Complaint of
Anelida_. Tricks of verse were apt to multiply as the poetic imagination
failed—a substitute for poetry; but many of the strongest poets have used
them occasionally. Among all the artistic games one of the most curious
is where a Welsh poet (in Oxford in the fifteenth century) gives a
display of Welsh poetical form with English words—to confute the ignorant
Saxon who had said there was no art of poetry in Wales.
The stanza forms in the Harleian book are various, and interesting to
compare with modern stanzas. There is an example of the verse which has
travelled from William of Poitiers, about the year 1100, to Burns and his
imitators. Modern poetry begins with William of Poitiers using the verse
of Burns in a poem on _Nothing_—
The song I make is of no thing,
Of no one, nor myself, I sing,
Of joyous youth, nor love-longing,
Nor place, nor time;
I rode on horseback, slumbering:
There sprang this rhyme!
Two hundred years after, it is found in England—
Her eye hath wounded me, y-wisse,
Her bende browen that bringeth blisse;
Her comely mouth that mightè kisse
In mirth he were;
I woldè chaungè mine for his
That is her fere!
The romance stanza is used also in its original lyrical way, with a
refrain added—
For her love I cark and care
For her love I droop and dare
For her love my bliss is bare
And all I waxè wan;
For her love in sleep I slake,
For her love all night I wake
For her love mourning I make
More than any man.
_Blow, northern wind!_
_Send thou me my sweeting!_
_Blow, northern wind!_
_Blow! blow! blow!_
Technically, it is to be noted that some of those poems have the
combination of a six-line with a four-line passage which is frequent in
French lyrics of all ages, which is also found in the verse of _The
Cherrie and the Slae_ (another of Burns’s favourite measures), and also
in some of Gray’s simpler odes. It is found in one of the religious
poems, with the six lines first, and the four lines after, as in Burns.
The common French pattern arranges them the other way round, and so does
Gray, but the constituent parts are the same.
Now shrinketh rose and lily flower
That whilom bare that sweete savour,
In summer, that sweete tide;
Ne is no queene so stark ne stour,
Ne no lady so bright in bower
That death ne shall by glide;
Whoso will flesh-lust forgon,
And heaven bliss abide,
On Jesu be his thought anon,
That thirled was his side.
This poem is a good text to prove the long ancestry of modern verse, and
the community of the nations, often very remote from definite intercourse
between them. And there is one phrase in this stanza which goes back to
the older world: ‘bright in bower’ is from the ancient heroic verse; it
may be found in Icelandic, in the Elder Edda.
The fifteenth century, which is so dismal in the works of the more
ambitious poets (Lydgate, and Occleve, e.g.), is rich in popular carols
which by this time have drawn close to the modern meaning of the name.
They are Christmas carols, and the name loses its old general application
to any song that went with dancing in a round. In the carols, the art is
generally much more simple than in the lyrics which have just been
quoted; they belong more truly to the common people, and their authors
are less careful. Yet the difference is one of degree. The only
difference which is really certain is between one poem and another.
Speaking generally about the carols one may say truly they are unlike the
work of the Chaucerian school; the lyrics of the Harleian book in the
reign of Edward I are nearer the Chaucerian manner. It is hardly worth
while to say more, for the present.
And it is not easy to choose among the carols. Some of them are well
known to-day—
When Christ was born of Mary free
In Bethlehem that fair city
Angels sang loud with mirth and glee
_In excelsis gloria_.
Ballads in the ordinary sense of the term—ballads with a story in them,
like _Sir Patrick Spens_ or _The Milldams of Binnorie_—are not found in
any quantity till late in the Middle Ages, and hardly at all before the
fifteenth century. But there are some early things of the kind. A rhyme
of _Judas_ (thirteenth century) is reckoned among the ballads by the
scholar (the late Professor Child) who gave most time to the subject, and
whose great collection of the English and Scottish Popular Ballads has
brought together everything ascertainable about them.
By some the ballads are held to be degenerate romances; and they appear
at a time when the best of romance was over, and when even the worst was
dying out. Also, it is quite certain that some ballads are derived from
romances. There is a ballad of the young _Hynd Horn_ which comes from the
old narrative poem of _King Horn_ or of _Horn Childe_. There is a ballad
version of _Sir Orfeo_, the ‘Breton lay’ which has been described in
another chapter. But there are great difficulties in the way of this
theory. In the first place, there are many ballads which have no romance
extant to correspond to them. That may not prove much, for many old
romances have been lost. But if one is to make allowance for chances of
this sort, then many old ballads may have been lost also, and many extant
ballads may go back to the thirteenth century or even earlier for their
original forms. Again, there are ballads which it is scarcely possible to
think of as existing in the shape of a narrative romance. The form of the
ballad is lyrical; all ballads are lyrical ballads, and some of them at
any rate would lose their meaning utterly if they were paraphrased into a
story. What would the story of _Sir Patrick Spens_ be worth if it were
told in any other way—with a description of the scenery about
Dunfermline, the domestic establishment of the King of Norway, and the
manners at his Court? Further, the theory that the ballads are degenerate
romances is unfair to those ballads which are known to be descended from
romances. The ballad of _Hynd Horn_ may be derived from an older
narrative poem, but it is not a _corruption_ of any old narrative; it is
a different thing, in a lyrical form which has a value of its own.
‘Corruption’, ‘degeneracy’, does not explain the form of the ballads, any
more than the Miracle Plays are explained by calling them corruptions of
the Gospel.
The proper form of the ballads is the same as the _carole_, with
narrative substance added. Anything will do for a ring dance, either at a
wake in a churchyard, or in a garden like that of the _Roman de la Rose_,
or at Christmas games like those described in _Sir Gawayne and the Green
Knight_. At first, a love-song was the favourite sort, with a refrain of
_douce amie_, and so on. But the method was always the same; there was a
leader who sang the successive verses, the fresh lines of the song, while
the other dancers came in with the refrain, most often in two parts, one
after the first verse, the second after the second—
When that I was and a little tiny boy
_With a heigh-ho, the wind and the rain_,
A foolish thing was but a toy
_And the rain it raineth every day_.
The narrative ballad was most in favour where people were fondest of
dancing. The love-song or the nonsense verses could not be kept up so
long; something more was wanted, and this was given by the story; also as
the story was always dramatic, more or less, with different people
speaking, the entertainment was all the better. If this is not the whole
explanation, it still accounts for something in the history, and it is
certainly true of some places where the ballad has flourished longest.
The _carole_ has lasted to the present day in the Faroe Islands, together
with some very ancient types of tune; and there the ballads are much
longer than in other countries, because the dancers are unwearied and
wish to keep it up as long as may be. So the ballads are spun out,
enormously.
The history of ballad poetry in Western Europe, if one dates it from the
beginning of the French _carole_ fashion—about 1100—is parallel to the
history of pure lyric, and to the history of romance. It is distinct from
both, and related to both. There are many mysterious things in it. The
strangest thing of all is that it often seems to repeat in comparatively
modern times—in the second half of the Middle Ages—what has been
generally held to be the process by which epic poetry begins. There is
reason for thinking that epic poetry began in concerted lyric, something
like the ballad chorus. The oldest Anglo-Saxon heroic poem, _Widsith_, is
near to lyric; _Deor’s Lament_ is lyric, with a refrain. The old Teutonic
narrative poetry (as in _Beowulf_) may have grown out of a very old sort
of ballad custom, where the narrative elements increased and gradually
killed the lyric, so that recitation of a story by the minstrel took the
place of the dancing chorus. However that may be, it is certain that the
ballads of Christendom in the Middle Ages are related in a strange way to
the older epic poetry, not by derivation, but by sympathy. The ballad
poets think in the same manner as the epic poets and choose by preference
the same kind of plot. The plots of epics are generally the plots of
tragedies. This is one of the great differences between the Anglo-Saxon
heroic poetry and the later romances. It is a difference also between the
romances and the ballads. Few of the romances are tragical. The story of
Tristram and the story of King Arthur are tragical; but the romantic
poets are beaten by the story of Tristram, and they generally keep away
from the tragedy of Arthur. The ballads often have happy endings, but not
nearly so often as the romances; in the best of the ballads there is a
sorrowful ending; in many there is a tragical mistake; in many (and in
how few of the romances!) there is a repetition of the old heroic scene,
the last resistance against the enemy as in Roncevaux or in the
_Nibelunge Nôt_. _Chevy Chase_ is the ballad counterpart of _Maldon_;
_Parcy Reed_ or _Johnny of Braidislee_ answers in the ballad form to the
fight at _Finnesburgh_, a story of a treacherous onset and a good
defence. Parcy Reed, beset and betrayed, is more like a northern hero
than a knight of romance.
The mystery is that the same kind of choice should be found in all the
countries where ballads were sung. The English and Scottish ballads, like
the English romances, are related to similar things in other lands. To
understand the history of the ballads it is necessary, as with the
romances, to compare different versions of the same matter—French or
German, Italian, Danish.
Many curious things have been brought out by study of this
sort—resemblances of ballad plots all over Christendom. But there is a
sort of resemblance which no amount of ‘analogues’ in different languages
can explain, and that is the likeness in temper among the ballad poets of
different languages, which not only makes them take up the same stories,
but makes them deal with fresh realities in the same way. How is it that
an English ballad poet sees the death of Parcy Reed in a certain manner,
while a Danish poet far off will see the same poetical meaning in a
Danish adventure, and will turn it into the common ballad form? In both
cases it is the death of a hero that the poet renders in verse; deaths of
heroes are a subject for poetry, it may be said, all over the world. But
how is it that this particular form should be used in different countries
for the same kind of subject, not conventionally, but with imaginative
life, each poet independently seizing this as the proper subject and
treating it with all the force of his mind?
The medieval ballad is a form used by poets with their eyes open upon
life, and with a form of thought in their minds by which they comprehend
a tragic situation. The medieval romance is a form used originally by
poets with a certain vein of sentiment who found that narrative plots
helped them to develop their emotional rhetoric; then it passed through
various stages in different countries, sinking into chapbooks or rising
to the _Orlando_ or the _Faerie Queene_—but never coming back to the old
tragic form of imagination, out of which the older epics had been
derived, and which is constantly found in the ballads.
Probably the old ballad chorus in its proper dancing form was going out
of use in England about 1400. Barbour, a contemporary of Chaucer, speaks
of girls singing ballads ‘at their play’; Thomas Deloney in the time of
Elizabeth describes the singing of a ballad refrain; and the game lives
happily still, in songs of _London Bridge_ and others. But it became more
and more common for ballads to be sung or recited to an audience sitting
still; ballads were given out by minstrels, like the minstrel of _Chevy
Chase_. Sometimes ballads are found swelling into something like a
narrative poem; such is the famous ballad of _Adam Bell, Clim o’ the
Clough, and William of Cloudeslee_, which has a plot of the right sort,
the defence of a house against enemies. _The Little Geste of Robin Hood_
seems to be an attempt to make an epic poem by joining together a number
of ballads. The ballad of _Robin Hood’s Death_ is worth reading as a
contrast to this rather mechanical work. _Robin Hood’s Death_ is a ballad
tragedy; again, the death of a hero beset by traitors. Red Roger stabbed
Robin with a grounden glave (‘grounden’ comes from the oldest poetic
vocabulary). Robin made ‘a wound full wide’ between Roger’s head and his
shoulders. Then he asks Little John for the sacrament, the housel of
earth (he calls it ‘moud’, i.e. ‘mould’) which could be given and taken
by any Christian man, in extremity, without a priest—
‘Now give me moud,’ Robin said to Little John,
‘Now give me moud with thy hand;
I trust to God in heaven so high
My housel will me bestand.’
And he refuses to let Little John burn the house of the treacherous
Prioress where he had come by his death. This is heroic poetry in its
simplest form, and quite true to its proper nature.
The beauty of the ballads is uncertain and often corrupted by
forgetfulness and the ordinary accidents of popular tradition. It is not
always true that the right subject has the best form. But the grace of
the ballads is unmistakable; it is unlike anything in the contemporary
romances, because it is lyrical poetry. It is often vague and intangible.
It is never the same as narrative romance.
He’s tane three locks o’ her yellow hair,
_Binnorie, O Binnorie!_
And wi’ them strung his harp so fair
_By the bonny mill-dams o’ Binnorie_.
It is the singing voice that makes the difference; and it is a difference
of thought as well as of style.
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 th
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