Chapter XXI: Part 21

It is not all certain that the poet was very young when he feigned his dream. The hero of the poem is necessarily a young man. Early manhood is the period of vehement desire and passion. Twenty is the typical age of early manhood; that age may have very well been selected as the one best fitted for dreams of love and the adventures of a lover. We are, however, inclined to believe, on the whole, that the poem was written in quite early manhood. A tradition which only recalls one fact is generally true, and the one fact recorded of the poet is that he died quite young. Internal evidence, too, appears to support this view. His style bears marks which seem, though one may here be very easily mistaken, those of inexperience. His imaginative faculty is abundant, and even luxuriant. His descriptive power, fully employed in his portraits of abstract personifications, is very much above the average. He revels in picturesque accessories and details which his copious fancy has conjured up; and his pictures, if they have not always the _tone_, have all the vividness, with the wealth of work, which belongs to a young poet's early style. The versification, moreover, is cold, regular, and monotonous; there is nothing to indicate the possession of experience or the presence of passion. He had read Ovid, and used him freely to suit his own purposes; but he wants Ovid's sympathetic power, and tries to supply its place by a certain cold and mannered grace; his faults being attributable, in the assumption of his early death, more to inexperience and youth, than to any defects which years would not have removed. Considered in this light, his work remains an unfinished monument of early genius, chiefly redeemed from mediocrity by its collections of curiously constructed allegorical portraits, a work which would never have been rescued from oblivion but for the splendour of light thrown on it by Jean de Meung.

Chaucer's translation is exceedingly accurate, giving line for line, and almost word for word, save when he sometimes adds a line to enforce its meaning, or to make it clear. Thus, when translating the famous

'La robe ne faict pas la moyne,'

he says--

'Habite ne makyth monk no frere;
But clene life and devocioun,
Makyth gode men of religioun.'

The saying itself (for nothing in the 'Romance of the Rose' appears to be original), may be traced to Neckham, who died at Cirencester in 1217.

'Non tonsura facit monachum, nec horrida vestis,
Sed virtus animi, perpetuusque vigor.'

The great ease of the translation makes it read almost like an original work, though we cannot agree with those who think that the translator has improved on his model. No literal translation, not even the very best, can be free from a certain stiffness and constraint.

The felicity with which difficult passages are occasionally rendered may be judged by the following lines, which contain a touch almost worthy of Shirley. It is, if our own experience be worth anything, excessively hard to translate. We subjoin original and translation, side by side.

'Les yex gros et si envoisiés,
Qu'il rioient tousjors avant
Que la bouchette par couvant.'

'Hir eyen greye and glad also,
That laugheden ay in hir semblaunt,
First or the mouth by couvenant.'

That is, her eyes began to laugh before her lips.

We must, as briefly as possible, set forth the action of the poem. It begins, like De Guilleville's 'Pilgrimage of Grace,' Chaucer's 'Court of Love' (borrowed, of course, from this), Alain de l'Isle's 'Complaint of Nature,' and so many other mediæval works, with a dream. In the month of May,--that season when the earth forgets the poverty of winter, and grows proud of her renewed beauty, clothing herself in a robe of flowers of a hundred colours; when the birds, silent during the long cold months, awake again, and are so joyous that they are fain, _per force_, to sing,--the youth of twenty summers wanders forth and comes upon the Garden of Delight (_Déduit_). We may remark here, how the walled garden, secured from the outer world, is the mediæval writer's only idea of scenery. Perhaps our modern craving for the picturesque would be greatly modified if we were uncertain, as our ancestors were, about wolves, bears, and brigands, whose admiration for wild scenes induces them to inhabit them.

The wall of the garden is painted with figures of all evil passions, such as Envy, Hatred, Avarice, and Hypocrisy (_Papelardie_), with those of Sorrow, Age, and Poverty. The youth is admitted at a wicket by the Lady Oyseuse (_Idlesse_), and wanders about, admiring the rows of strange trees, the birds and flowers, the peace and safety of the place. Presently he comes upon _Déduit_ himself, whom Chaucer calls Myrthe.

'Ful fayre was Myrthe, ful long and high:
A fayrer man I never sigh.'

With him are all his courtiers, including _Léesce_ (Joy).

'And wot ye who came with them there?
The Lady Gladness, bright and fair.'

With the company was the God of Love, accompanied by _Doux Regard_, bearing two bows: one of them was crooked and misshapen; the other straight, and beautifully wrought. This shows the different impressions of love, or its opposite, produced by the eyes. He had, too, ten arrows (the idea is borrowed from Ovid), five belonging to Love, viz., Beauty, Simplicity, Frankness, Company, and Fair Semblance; and five to Dislike, viz., Pride, Villany, Shame, Despair, and New Thought. Love was followed as well by Beauty, whose attendants were Riches, Largesse, Franchise, and Courtesy, as _Dames_ _d'honneur_, each of whom had with her a lover, that of Largesse being 'sib to Arthur Duke of Bretaigne.' This is intended, of course, to show how different qualities attract love.

The garden is square; it contains all sorts of fruit trees, 'brought from the country of the Saracens;' these are set five or six fathoms apart; wells, fountains, and streams, soft grass and turf, and flowers of every kind. Round the stone-work of one fountain he finds written, 'Here died the fair Narcissus,'--an accident which enables the poet to narrate at length the full history of that unfortunate swain. Getting over his digression, the youth discovers a rosebush laden with roses and rosebuds, one of which he desires incontinently to pluck. Here his troubles begin. Love shoots at him with five arrows, and when he is sick and faint with wounds, calls upon him to surrender, and become his vassal. This he does, giving Love as a gage of fealty his heart, and receiving in return a code of rules which have been imitated by many subsequent poets, notably by Chaucer, in the 'Court of Love,' and by Charles of Orleans. He also receives as a mark of especial favour, Hope, Doux Penser, Doux Parler, and Doux Regard--Sweet-Thought, Sweet-Speech, and Sweet-Looks--as companions. He makes a rash and ill-considered attempt upon his Rosebud. But Danger is there with Malebouche, Shame (child of Trespass and Reason), and Chastity, the daughter of Shame. He is driven away, loaded with reproaches. His companions leave him, and while he is sitting dejected and despairing, Reason comes to him and argues on the folly of love.

'Love is but madness! I tell you true;
The man who loves can nothing do.
He has no profit from the earth:
If he is clerk, he forgets his learning:
If anything else, whatever his worth,
Great is his labour and little his earning.
Long and unmeasured and deep the pain:
Short is the joy; the fruition vain.'

But the pleading of Reason, as generally happens in such cases, is quite useless. The lover

'For still within my heart there glows
The breath divine of that sweet Rose,'

goes next to a Friend (Ami), from whom he gets small sympathy, but much practical relief. Acting on his counsel, he begs pardon of Danger, who grants it sulkily. Danger in most mediæval allegories stands for the husband, but there is nothing to show that Guillaume de Lorris meant him to be understood in this sense, and we may without any violence take him to represent the natural guardian of the damsel. Getting Bel Accueil to accompany him, he goes once more to see his Rosebud, which he finds greatly improved. Venus obtains for him the privilege of a kiss. Shame, Jealousy, and Malebouche, are alarmed, and interfere. Danger turns everybody out. Jealousy builds a high tower, in which Bel Accueil is shut up, a prisoner, with Danger and Malebouche to guard him. Outside the tower sits the disconsolate lover, lamenting his misfortunes, and the mutability of love's favours, which he compares to those of Fortune, of whom he says:

'In heart of man,
Malice she plants, and labour, and pain;
One hour caresses, and smiles, and plays;
Then as suddenly changes her face:
Laughs one moment, the next she mourns;
Round and round her wheel she turns,
All at her own caprice and will.
The lowest ascends, and is raised, until
He who was highest was low on the ground,
And the wheel of Fortune has quite turned round.'

And at this point the poet died--'trespassa Guillaume de Lorris.' Had he lived to complete his work we should had a complete Ars Amoris, fashioned on the precepts of Ovid, and clothed in an allegory--cold, monotonous, bloodless--though graceful, fanciful, and not devoid of poetic taste.

Perhaps we should have had more than this. In its simple, first meaning, it is not difficult for anyone to make out. Idleness or Leisure alone makes Pleasure possible; through Idleness we enter into the garden of Delight, where love wanders. Youth is the season of love, and Spring is an emblem of youth. The escort of Love is the collection of qualities which belong to the time of youth, and make it happy, such as beauty, wealth, and courtesy. What has Reason to do with Love? Who can advise but an experienced friend? The only possession that the vassal can give to Love the suzerain is his own heart; the chief aid to success is Bel Accueil--'fair welcome'--while Envy, Shame (for fear of Malebouche--Calumny), Jealousy, and Chastity protect the maiden.

So far all is clear and easy to be read. Was there not, however, under an interpretation as easy as that of Bunyan's Holy War, a second and a deeper meaning? It is a question not easy to answer. Molinet, the dull and laborious Molinet, who published, towards the end of the fifteenth century, an edition of the book in prose,

'Le Roman de la Rose
Moralisé cler et net
Translaté en rime et prose
Par votre humble Molinet,'

pretends not only that there is a hidden meaning, but also to discover what this hidden meaning was. 'The young man,' he tells us, 'who awakens from his dream is the child born to the light: he is born in the month of May, when the birds sing: the _singing of the birds is the preaching of holy doctors_ (!)' He dresses, in his dreams, to go out. This is the entrance of the child into the world, enveloped in human miseries: the river represents Baptism: the orchard is the Cloister of Religion; outside it, because they cannot enter therein, or have no share or part in paradise, are the figures of human vices. _Déduit_ is our Lord; Léesce is the Church; Love is the Holy Spirit; the eight doves of Venus's chariot are the eight Beatitudes; and the combat between Love and the guardians of Bel Accueil is the perpetual conquest between good and evil. Even the story of Narcissus is not without its meaning; and the pine which shades the fountain is the tree of the Cross, while the fountain itself is the overflowing stream of mercy. Love, again, in the latter part, stands for our Saviour; homage to him is the profession of faith of a novice; the commandments of Love are the vows of chastity and poverty. Even the legend of Virginia is an allegory; the maiden being the soul, and Appius the world. This position he strengthens by deriving, after the fashion of the philologists of the period, the name of Appius from _a_, privative, and _pius_.

Clement Marot, on the other hand, in his edition, where he turned the language into French of his own day, and thereby utterly spoiled it, finds an interpretation of his own, quite as ingenious and quite as improbable as that of Molinet. The Rose is the state of wisdom, 'bien et justement conforme à la Rose pour les valeurs, doulours, et odours qui en elle sont: la quelle moult est à avoir difficile pour les empeschements interposez.' It was a Papal Rose, made of gold, and scented with musk and balm; of gold, on account of the honour and reverence due to God; scented with musk to symbolize the duties of fidelity and justice to our neighbours; and with balm because we ought to hold our own souls clear and precious above all worldly things.

Or, the Rose is the state of Grace, difficult for the sinner to arrive at, and fitly symbolized by the flowers which had sufficient virtue to transform Apuleius from an ass back to his human shape.

Or, again, the Rose was the Virgin Mary--the Rose of Jericho, pure and spotless, and not to be touched by human hands.

Fourthly: it was the rose which the Queen of Sheba gave to Solomon, which signified eternal happiness. The interpretations of Molinet and Marot are both manifestly absurd, and represent the pedantic trifling of a time when the taste for double allegories had been carried to a ridiculous extent. And as for Jean de Meung's part, there are plenty of touches in it which show that the writer, though no heretic, had little sympathy with church matters; and would certainly not be disposed to spend his time in laboriously concocting a riddle of twenty thousand lines, the answer to which was to be found in the Romish creed. And in Guillaume de Lorris himself, it is difficult to find a word for or against the Church.

He was, no doubt, mindful of the stern lesson read to heretics in the crusade of Provence, fresh in all men's recollection. But he had been nurtured and fed on the poetry of the troubadours; the form of his verse and the turn of his thought were Provençal. Was it likely that so young a writer should escape the spirit of the literature while he studied its form? And since in a time of violent religious excitement, he can find no word of sympathy for a church which persecutes, is it not probable that his sympathies are, if not with the Church persecuted, at least with the people? The probability, moreover, of there being a double allegory in the 'Romance of the Rose,' as planned originally by Guillaume de Lorris, appears to us to be strengthened by a further consideration of the Provençal literature and the line of its development.

Love, in a time when life had few pleasures and distractions to offer--when these were generally only to be snatched in the intervals of fighting--became not only the symbol of all life's joy, but grew into a kind of religion. It had its own ritual, its ceremonies, its sacraments, its lessons, and its hymns. Aged poets were its bishops, the guardians of its forms; young poets its priests; instead of the images of saints, were living women, and instead of the procession and the chant, were the love song and the dance. It was nothing new to the Provençal to celebrate the religious worship with a dance. He alone, among Christians, preserved a custom handed down from old pagan times, and as late as the sixteenth century, the worthy people of Marseilles welcomed Christmas in this way.

The other sex would naturally offer few obstacles to a homage which, though it sometimes destroyed their virtue, always flattered their vanity, and invested them with a power which was beyond that of kings. Princes, indeed, might make men rich, but women alone could make men happy. An accurate knowledge of love's ceremonies became part of the education of a gentleman; these were reduced, like those of chivalry, to a sort of code; questions of law, so to speak, arose, which were tried with great solemnity at courts of law where ladies were judges; appeals from these decisions were often made to higher courts, and there is every reason to believe that the _Arrêts d'Amour_, numerous examples of which are given in the work of Martial d'Auvergne, were courts as serious and as gravely disputed in times of peace, as those which decided other differences of opinion. From being, therefore, the legitimate end of a young man's hope, the chief solace of his life, love grew gradually to be surrounded by all sorts of restrictions and ceremonies, and losing its charm of spontaneity and freedom, was idealized until it lost itself, and became the mere shadow of a poetic dream. As every idea, pushed beyond its legitimate limits, provokes some kind of rebellion, two streams of thought presently diverged from the main channel, one of them, with which we have nothing to do, satirical, cynical, earthly and gross; the other, religious. Sexual love is only possible, or is strongest when life is young and the blood is strong and hopeful; as years creep on and the end of things approaches, its insufficiency to satisfy the cravings of the soul must become, even to its most ardent votary, more and more deeply apparent. The days when a smile from his mistress made him, according to the rules of the craft, happy, or a frown miserable, would leave behind them, when they had passed away, an increased sense of the real seriousness of life; while at the best of times, the art of love would not be felt as anything but elegant trifling, and the passion which it excited, transitory. Women, too, the object of all this homage, were really, though they might not know it, degraded by what was intended to do them honour. And let those who lament the subjection of the sex, own that the extravagant honour paid to ladies in the Middle Ages has had something, at least, to do with it. From some such feelings as the above, we believe it came to pass that the poet began first to imagine, and then to contrive, for his love songs a deeper and a mystical meaning. The sentiment of nearly all the Provençal poets, as regards women, was delicate, elevating to themselves, and enthusiastic. Women are to men, in the poet's imagination, what heaven is to earth; their gentleness contrasts with man's ferocity, their weakness with his strength, their strength with his weakness. Love is the principle of all honour and merit, the mainspring of every noble action; its desires and its pleasures are only legitimate, inasmuch as they are as a stimulus to the painful duties of chivalry; the springs of poetry are in love; without love there is nothing that civilizes, softens, or elevates. But earthly love, so high, so pure, so separated from the common instincts of the world, is but a type of that infinitely higher and purer heavenly love. All the allegories of the poets are to be read in a deeper sense by those who are initiated into the mysteries, and when a poet sings songs of love, he is singing songs of a mysterious religion.

That this was the case with all the troubadours, or even with most of them, we do not affirm; that it was at one time believed to be true of all of them seems tolerably clear. And no doubt many an honest bard, quite simply putting down his thoughts about his mistress's lips, or the tangles of her hair, would have been astonished to hear that he was preaching the glories of the Virgin, or advocating a free and Pope-less Church. On the supposition that Guillaume de Lorris was one of those who had learned from the troubadours the art of double allegory, and that he conveyed religious teaching under this disguise, we should expect to find the key to his poem in the religious difficulties of his time. It is not, at least, difficult to get at these.

The people of Provence[51] had always mixed freely with the educated Mahometans of Spain, and the wealthy Jews who lived among them: their own Christianity sat lightly upon them, as a cloak, the fashion of which might at any time be altered; theology was held in universal disesteem, and the priesthood, taken from the lowest strata of society, were objects of pity and contempt: a widespread heresy existed, which does not appear to have had much, if anything to do with modern Protestantism, holding 'erroneous views' on Baptism and the Eucharist, rejecting the Old Testament, denying the authority and necessity of the priesthood, and even repudiating, in some cases, marriage itself. It was growing rapidly not only in Switzerland and Languedoc but also in the _Nord_, in England, and in Germany, by means of wandering bards, who scattered their new doctrines broadcast wherever they went. By local persecutions and burnings, attempts were made to stop it, but in vain; and Rome saw with consternation a province the most cultivated, the most richly endowed with genius, the most wealthy, that from which the greatest help for the Church was to be expected, a prey to free thought of the most unbridled kind.

As soon as persecution began, or even suspicion of the truth, the poets would see the necessity for veiling their thoughts under carefully-constructed allegories, and while they chanted a monotonous refrain on one of the many rules of love, secretly inculcated a code of doctrines more subversive than any the Church had yet combated. Occasionally we hear a voice which speaks aloud, and plainly enough, to let us know the kind of thing that was whispered. Thus Fauriel gives the following from Pierre Cardinal.[52] He is considering the insoluble problem of suffering and evil, and cries, with a boldness that has more despair than blasphemy in it--'At the Last Day I shall say, myself, to God that He fails in His duty to His children if He thinks to destroy them and plunge them into Hell.... God ought to use gentleness and to keep His souls from trespass.'

Voluptuous, loose in morals, satirical, and careless as these poets were, they yet have the merit of boldly using thought, and carrying conviction to its logical and legitimate end. They anticipated the movement of the fifteenth century, without its knowledge and higher light: their penalty was extermination, thorough and complete. The land was destroyed; its cities burned; the people massacred; Pope and kings combined to make a desert, and to call it peace.

What could the Church do more? What indeed, could she do less? For the war was a struggle for existence, and the heresies of Provence were only the most formidable in a general movement of free thought which shook the powers of Rome to its very foundations. But one thing the Church could not do. The flame of insubordination and opposition could be handed down in secret. Things that could not be attacked openly, might be attacked secretly. There were secret societies in the Middle Ages, which had a real and definite object, the danger and the terror of the Church.[53] And to this day Rome excommunicates the members of all secret societies, whether the mild and convivial Freemason or the bloodthirsty Fenian. The Society of Jesus is the only secret society to which a Roman Catholic may belong. Guillaume de Lorris belongs to a time when doctrine was secretly assailed; his successor, Jean de Meung, to a time when practice was openly assailed. For men very soon left off attacking their enemies by allegory, and Guillaume de Lorris, if he was indeed one of that school, was one of its last disciples.

Whether he was, or was not, can never now be satisfactorily answered. He left his poem unfinished, hardly, perhaps, begun. Whatever has to be said on the subject of its original plan, must be necessarily conjectural. We incline, on the whole, to believe that he did have a religious purpose, which was not understood by Jean de Meung; that one who bears in mind the religious history of Provence as well as the character of its situation, may well construct an interpretation of the work of Guillaume de Lorris far more probable and consistent than that of Molinet or of Marot.

Jean de Meung, so-called because he was born at the little town of Meung, in the department of Loiret--

'De Jean de Meung, s'enfle le cours de Loire.'

Jean Clopinel, Limping John, because he was lame, finding himself, some forty years later, with his head stuffed full of all the learning of his time, and nearly bursting with sentiments, convictions, and opinions, on religion, politics, social economy, and science, began, one may suppose, to cast about for some means of getting rid of his burden. Lighting on the unfinished and half-forgotten work of Guillaume de Lorris, he conceived the idea of finishing the allegory, and making it the medium of popularizing his own opinions. He could hardly have hit upon a readier plan. It was not yet a time for popular science; there were no treatises in the vernacular on history, theology, and political economy, and the only way of getting at people was by means of rhyme. But Jean de Meung was no allegorist, and no storyteller. He took up the tale, indeed, where his predecessor left it, and carried it on, it is true, but in so languid a manner, with so many digressions, turns and twists, that what little interest was originally in it goes clean out. Nothing can well be more tedious than those brief portions devoted to the conduct of the story. It finishes, somehow. Love calls his barons together, is defeated, sends an embassy to his mother, Venus, who comes to his assistance; the fortress is taken, Bel Accueil is released, and the Rose is plucked. In the course of the poem, Malebouche gets his tongue cut out, Déduit, Doux Regard, Léesce, Doux Penser, and others drop out of the allegory altogether; the Garden is forgotten; all the little careful accessories of Guillaume de Lorris, such as the arrows of Love and his commandments, are contemptuously ignored. Those that remain are changed, the Friend in the second part being very different from the Friend in the first, while _Richesse_ appears with a new function. Every incident is made the peg for a digression, and every digression leads to a dozen others. The losses of the old characters are made up by the creation of new ones, and, in Faux Semblant, the hypocrite and monk, Jean de Meung anticipates Rabelais and surpasses Erasmus.

Between Guillaume de Lorris and his successor there is a great gulf hardly represented by the forty years of interval. Men's thoughts had widely changed. The influence of Provençal poetry was finally and completely gone, and its literature utterly fallen, to be revived after many centuries only by the scholar and the antiquarian. More than this, the thoughts and controversies of men which had turned formerly upon the foundations of the Christian faith, now turned either on special points of doctrine, or on the foundation and principles of society.

No writers, so far as we remember, have noticed the entire separation between the two parts of the romance. They are independent works. Even the allegory changes form, and the idea of the _trouvère_, Guillaume, was lost and forgotten when his successor professed to carry it on.

In passing from one to the other, the transition is like that from a clear, cold, mountain stream to a turbid river, whose waters are stained with factory refuse, and whose banks are lined with busy towns. The mystic element suddenly disappears. Away from the woodland and the mountains and among the haunts of men, it cannot live. The idea of love becomes gross and vulgar. The fair, clear voice of the poet grows thick and troubled; his gaze drops from the heavens to the earth. It is no longer a _trouvère_ bent on developing a hidden meaning, and wrapping mighty secrets of religious truth in a cold and careful allegory; it is a man, eager and impetuous, alive to all the troubles and sorrows of humanity, with a supreme contempt for love, and for woman, the object of love, and a supreme carelessness for the things that occupied the mind of his predecessor. We have said that new characters were introduced. The boundaries of the old allegory were, indeed, too narrow. Jean de Meung had to build, so to speak, the walls of his own museum. It was to be a museum which should contain all knowledge of the time; to hold miscellaneous collections of facts, opinions, legends, and quotations, than which nothing can be more bewildering, nothing more unmethodical, nothing more _bizarre_.

As a poet he is superior, we think, to his predecessor, though Guillaume de Lorris can only be reckoned as a second-rate versifier. He is diffuse, apt to repeat himself, generally monotonous, and sometimes obscure. His imagination is less vivid, and his style less clear, than those of Guillaume de Lorris. Occasionally, however, passages of beauty occur. The following, for example, diffuse as it is, appears to us to possess some of the elements of real poetry. The poet is describing a tempest followed by fair weather. Nature weeps at the wrath of the winds:--

'The air itself, in truth, appears
To weep for this in flooded tears.
The clouds such tender pity take,
Their very clothing they forsake:
And for the sorrow that they bear,
Put off the ornaments they wear.

* * * * *

'So much they mourn, so much they weep,
Their grief and sorrow are so deep,
They make the rivers overflow,
And war against the meadows low:
Then is the season's promise crossed;
The bread made dear, the harvest lost,
And honest poor who live thereby,
Mourn hopes that only rose to die.

* * * * *

'But when the end arrives at last,
And fair times come, and bad are passed;
When from the sky, displeased and pale,
Fair weather robs its rain and hail,
And when the clouds perceive once more
The thunder gone, the tempest o'er--
Then they rejoice, too, as they may,
And to be comely, bright, and gay,
Put on their glorious robes anew,
Varied with every pleasant hue;
They hang their fleeces out to dry,
Carding and combing as they fly;
Then take to spinning, and their thread
Abroad through all the heavens spread,
With needles white and long, as though
Their feathery gauntlets they would sew--
Harness their steeds, and mount and fly
O'er valleys deep and mountains high.'

It is needless, after what has been said, to pursue any further the story of the romance. There is not much lost by this omission, because the work has really little or nothing to do with the allegory, and might simply be called, 'The Opinions of Jean de Meung.' Our object is to show what actually were the opinions of a scholar of liberal views in the thirteenth century.

They may be divided into four classes, foremost of which, in his own mind, stands his hatred of monks. In religion he was not an infidel, or even a heretic; he was simply in opposition. He writes, not against sacerdotalism, but against the inversion of recognised order by the vagabond friars. Order, indeed, he would insist upon as strenuously as Hooker himself; but order he would subordinate to what he deems the most essential thing, personal holiness. To decry, deride, and hurl contempt on the monastic orders: to put into the strongest possible words the inarticulate popular hatred of these was, we believe, his leading thought when he began his book.

His second idea was to make an angry, almost furious protest against the extravagant respect paid to women, and an onslaught on their follies and vices. It is very curious, and shows how little he was trammelled by his allegory, that he fails altogether to see how entirely out of place is such an attack in the 'Romance of the Rose.'

He had two other principal ideas: one to communicate in the common tongue as much science as the world could boast; and the other, to circulate certain principles of vague socialism and hesitating republicanism which were then beginning to take the place of those religious speculations which occupied men's minds in the early part of the century.

Jean de Meung's was not the only book of the time which aimed at being an encyclopædia, but it was by far the best known and the most widely _répandu_. There were written towards the close of the thirteenth century certain collections called _trésors_, which were designed to contain everything that was to be learned, _quicquid scibile_, in mathematics, physics, astronomy, alchemy, music, speculative philosophy, and theology. They were generally in verse; one of the best of them being by a monk, called 'Mainfroi,' which professedly contained the Arabic learning, borrowed from the Moors in Spain. Probably Jean de Meung had access to this. Readers of old English literature will also remember that dreariest of dreary books, Gower's 'Confessio Amantis,' into which the hapless student plunges without hope, and emerges without profit, having found nothing but vapid imitation, monotonous repetition, and somnolent platitudes. The 'Confessio' is a _trésor_, and designed to contain all the science of the time. It is adapted, so far as the science goes, from a _trésor_ called the _Secretum Secretorum_.

Let us, then, gather some of the opinions of our author, classifying them according to this fourfold division. It may be premised that the division was not thought of by the poet, from whom, indeed, sequence and method are not to be expected.

Liberal thought, in the time of Jean de Meung, did not attack the domain of doctrine, partly, perhaps, from an unwillingness to meet the probable consequences of a charge of heresy; indeed, when doctrine came in its way, it seems to have leaned in the direction of orthodoxy. Thus we find Jean de Meung siding with Guillaume de St. Amour in an attack on the 'Eternal Gospel,' that most extraordinary book, ascribed to Joachim, Abbot of Flora,[54] which was intended to have the same relation to Christianity which Christianity bears to Judaism, to be at once its fulfilment and its abolition, which was to inaugurate the third and last, the perfect age, that of the Holy Spirit. The mendicants, an ignorant, credulous body, quite incapable of appreciating cause or consequence of teaching, espoused the cause of the book; Guillaume de St. Amour arraigned them, not only of the ordinary vices attributed to them--vices entirely contrary to their vows--but as preachers of doctrines pernicious, false, and heretical. Probably Jean de Meung was actuated by _esprit de corps_, Guillaume de St. Amour being a champion of the University of Paris, as well as by hatred to the monks, and, in spite of his hard words, was not moved strongly by any specially inimical feeling towards the book. Following the instincts of his time, however, he flatly ascribes its authorship to the Devil, the alleged author of so many theological books. Partizanship in those days, as in ours, meant, to be effective, a good, sound, honest hatred, and much command of language. In his description of hell, Jean anticipates the realistic horrors of Dante.

'What guerdon,' he asks, 'can the wicked man look for, save
the cord which will hang him to the dolorous gibbet of
hell? There will he be rivetted with everlasting fetters
before the prince of devils; there will he be boiled in
cauldrons; roasted before and behind; set to revolve, like
Ixion, on cutting wheels turned by the paws of devils;
tormented with hunger and thirst, and mocked with fruit and
water, like Tantalus, or set to roll stones for ever up
hill, like Sysyphus.'

One thing seems here worthy of remark. The place of punishment for the wicked man, in the Middle Ages, was the torture-chamber of their own criminal courts, intensified by imagination. Their punishment was through the senses. Of mental agony they had no conception. Yet, strangely enough, their heaven _was never a heaven of the senses_; and it shows how deeply they were penetrated with the feeling of Christ's holiness that while every temptation seemed set to make the mass believe in a paradise like that of Mahomet, the heaven of Christendom has always offered, as its chief charm, the worship and praise of a present God. 'There, by the fountain of mercy,' says Jean de Meung, 'shall ye sit.'

'There shall ye taste that spring so fair;
(Bright are its waters, pure and clear),
And never more from death shall shrink,
If only of that fount you drink.
But ever still, untired, prolong
The days with worship, praise, and song.'[55]

The poet reserves, however, his chief strength and the main exposition of his views for his character of Faux Semblant--False seeming--the hypocrite. There is a dramatic art of the very highest kind in the way in which Faux Semblant draws and develops his own character, pronounces, as it were, the apology of hypocrisy. His painting of the vices of the mendicant orders cannot approach those of Walter de Mapes, of Erasmus, and of Buchanan, in savage ferocity; but it is more satirical and more subtly venomous than any of those, and has the additional bitterness that it is spoken as from _within_ the body which he attacks. The others, standing _outside_ the monastic orders, point the finger of scorn at them. Jean de Meung makes one of themselves, an unblushing priest, with a candour which almost belongs to an approving conscience, with a chuckling self-complacency and an entire unconsciousness of the contrast between his life and his profession, which rises to the very first order of satirical writing, depict his own life, and take credit for villanies which he takes care to inform us are common to his order. He has been compared with Friar John; but the animalism and lusty vigour of this holy man lead him to a life of jovial sensuality through sheer ignorance; whereas Faux Semblant, his conscience seared with a hot iron, sins against the light. We may compare, too, the attacks made by Jean de Meung's contemporaries and immediate successors. They never even attempt satire.[56] It was an instrument whose use they could not comprehend. Their line is invective, as when Rutebeuf says, in his straightforward way--

'Papelart et Beguin,
Ont le siècle honi.'

or, as Eustache Deschamps attacks the pluralists--

'Prestres et clers qui tenez vos monciaulx
De chapelles, vous autres curiaulx,
Des povres clers ayez compassion:
Repartez leur ces biens ecclesiaulx,
Afin que Dieu vous soit propiciaulx:
Vous les tenez à vo dampnacion.'

Faux Semblant, in his sermon, or address, a small part only of which we consider, begins by telling his hearers that he lives, by preference, in obscurity, and may, therefore, chiefly be found where this is most readily obtained, viz., under a religious habit. With the habit, however, he does not put on the reality of religion. He attaches himself to powerful patrons; he goes about preaching poverty, but living on the best of everything; nothing can be more contrary to his experience than that religion is to be found at all under the robe of a monk; nor does it follow that men and women lead bad lives because they wear a worldly garb; very many, indeed, of the saints have been married, were parents of children, and men and women of the world.

He tells how he changes his habit from time to time; how, out of the religious life, he 'takes the grain and leaves the straw;' how he hears confession and grants absolution, as well as any parish priest; but how, unlike the parish priest, he will hear the confessions only of the rich, who can afford to pay; 'let me have the fat sheep, and the pastors shall have the lean.' So with the poor; he will not help any.

'Let dying beggars cry for aid,
Naked and cold on dunghill laid:
There stands the hospital, with door
Wide open to receive the poor.
Thither let all who please repair,
For help nor money can I spare:
No use for me to save their life:
_What can he give who sucks his knife?_'

Now, with the rich it is different; and the mendicant, while he takes the alms of those whose sins he has heard, may glow with conscious virtue, reflecting that the rich are much more exposed to temptation, and therefore, as a rule, more grievously weighed down with a sense of guilt than the poor. When relief can be given, surely it should first be bestowed on those who need it most.

Mendicancy, Faux Semblant acknowledges with an engaging candour, is only right when a man has not learned and cannot learn a trade. Monks, according to the teaching of Saint Augustine, ought to earn their bread by labour, and when we are commanded to give all to the poor, it is not meant that we should take it back by begging, but that we should work for our living. But the world, neglecting this among other wholesome rules, has set itself to rob, plunder, and despoil, every man trying to get whatever he can from his neighbour. As for himself, his business, and that of his brethren, is to rob the robber: to spoil the spoiler.

The mendicants keep up their own power by union; if a man does one of them an injury, they all conspire to effect his ruin: if one hates, all hate: if one is refused, all are refused, and revenge is taken: if any man is conspicuous for good deeds, they claim him as their own disciple, and in order to get the praise of people and inspire confidence, they ask, wherever they go, for letters which may testify to their virtue, and make people believe that all goodness abounds in them.

He says that he leaves others to retire into hermitages and caves, preferring to be called the Antichrist of robbers and hypocrites: he proclaims himself a cheat, a rogue, a liar, and a thief: he boasts that his father, Treachery, and himself rule in every realm, and that in the security of a religious disguise, where no one is likely to suspect him, he contrives various means to charm and deceive the world. Set forth in this bold fashion, the discourse of Faux Semblant loses all its dramatic force. It is fair, however, to state that this is chiefly found in detached passages, and that the sermon is entirely spoiled by the many digressions, notably that on the 'Eternal Gospel,' which are found in it. Chaucer's rendering of this portion appears to us to be far less happy than the rest of his work.

Another long and very curious dissertation, into which there is no space here to enter, is that on Predestination, where he arrives at the conclusion that the doctrine must be accepted as a dogma in Christian faith, but that it need not affect the Christian life--

'For every man, except a fool,
May guide himself by virtue's rule.'

A conclusion which seems almost to anticipate the conclusion arrived at in the Article of the Church of England.

The sum of Jean de Meung's religious teaching is to be found in the sermon of Genius--

'And, Lords and Ladies, this be sure,
That those who live good lives and pure;
Nor from their work and duty shrink,
Shall of this fountain freely drink.--

* * * * *

To honour Nature never rest,
_By labour is she honoured best_;
If others goods are in your hands,
Restore them all--so God commands.
From murder let all men abstain;
Spotless keep hands, and mouth keep clean.
Be loyal and compassionate,
So shall ye pass the heavenly gate.'

The one thing insisted on by Jean de Meung is the absolute necessity of a pure life. A profound sense of the beauty of a pure life is, indeed, the key-note to all mediæval heresies and religious excitements.[57] The uncleanness of the clergy was the most terrible weapon wielded by the heresiarchs. Thus Peter de Brueys compelled monks to marry. Henry the Deacon taught that the Church could exist without priests. Tanchelin of Antwerp held that the validity of the sacraments depended on the holiness of him who administered them. Peter Waldo sent out his disciples two by two, to preach the subversive doctrine that every virtuous man was his own priest; while the _Cathari_ went gladly to the stake in defence of their principle that absolute personal purity was the one thing acceptable to God. The more ignorant the age, the wider is religious speculation; but in the most ignorant ages, there rises up from time to time a figure with a spiritual insight far beyond that of more learned times. Protestantism in its noblest form has found nothing more sublime than this conception of a Church where every good man is a priest; and there is nothing in the history of religious thought more saddening than these efforts of the people, ever hopeless, ever renewed, to protest against dogma, creed, perfunctory and vicarious religion, and to proclaim a religion of personal holiness alone.

Let us turn to the second division. We find the book teeming with a misogyny, bitter enough to make us believe that there must have been some personal cause for it. 'What is love?' he asks. 'It is a _maladie de pensée_--the dream of a sick fancy.... There is a far higher and nobler thing in the friendship of men.' And it is after narrating the stories of 'Penelope' and 'Lucretia,' that he puts into the mouth of Jealousy the famous couplet--

'Toutes estes, serez, ou fustes,
De faict ou de voulenté, putes.'

Of course it may be urged that these are the words of jealousy, and not of the poet; but, unfortunately, there are so many indications of the author's entire approval of the sentiment, that the plea is hardly worth much. Take, for instance, the dramatic scene, when the wife worms out her husband's secret; or that of the old woman's lesson to Bel Accueil, where, as in the case of Faux Semblant, he puts woman's condemnation in her own mouth. She teaches him the art of love almost in Ovid's own words; she prefaces her lesson by a lament over the past days of youth and beauty; her regrets are not for a life of sin and deceit, but for the past bad days that can come no more. She is steeped in wickedness and intrigue; she can see no happiness, except in love and luxury.

'My days of gladness are no more;
Your joyous time is all before;
Hardly can I, through age and pain,
With staff and crutch, my knees sustain.
Almost a child, you hardly know
What thing you have to bear and do.
Yet, well I wot, the torch that all
Burns soon or late, on you will fall;
And in that fount where Venus brings
Her maidens, will you drench love's wings.
But ere you headlong enter, pause,
Listen to one who knows Love's laws.
Perilous are its waters clear;
He risks his life who plunges here
Without a guide. Who follows me
Safe and successful shall he be.'

She tells of her vanished youth and all the pleasant follies of her young days; how she threw away her affections on a scoundrel, who only robbed and ill-treated her; how she wasted her money and neglected her chances; how she grew old, and her old friends ceased to knock at her door.

'But ah! my child, no one can know
Save him who feels the bitter woe,
What grief and dolour me befell
At losing what I loved so well.
The honeyed words, the soft caress,
The sweet delight, the sweet embrace;
The kisses sweet--so quickly sped,
The joyous time so quickly fled.
Fled! and I left alone to mourn.
Fled! never, never to return.'

The whole passage is full of the truest touches of nature, and is written with a _verve_ quite extraordinary. Villon has imitated it in his ballad of the _Belle Heaulmière_,--

'Avis m'est que j'oy regretter
La belle qui fust Heaulmière;
Soy jeune fille souhaiter
Et parler en ceste manière.

* * * * *

Qu'est devenu ce front poly,
Ces cheveulx blonds, sourcils voultiz,
Grant entr'oeil, le regard joly,
Dont prenoye les plus subtils;
Ce beau nez ni grand ni petit;
Ces petites joinctes oreilles;
Menton fourchu, cler vis, traictiz
Et ces belles lèvres vermeilles?'

And Béranger sings in the same key,--

'Combien je regrette
Mon bras si dodu,
Ma jambe bien faite,
Et le temps perdu.'

Jean de Meung's old woman is no more reformed than her successors. And she tells Bel Accueil all that Ovid had to impart.

It is quite possible that in putting an imitation of the 'Art of Love' into the old woman's mouth, Jean de Meung catered to the lowest tastes of the age, and courted a popularity from this part of his work which he might not have obtained from the rest. The same sort of defence--no defence at all, but another and a worse charge--has been set up in the cases of Rabelais and Swift. All such offenders we are told, deferred to popular opinion, and wrote what they inwardly disapproved. This surely is worse. To be yourself so far depraved as to take delight in things impure is bad; to deliberately lay yourself out to please others with things impure is surely infinitely more wicked. It is _possible_ that Jean de Meung, Rabelais, and Swift, did this; but we do not think it probable. In the case of the poet whom we are now considering, there seems every reason to believe that he had formed the lowest possible ideas of love and women; that from the depths of a corrupted morality, which permitted him the same pleasure in impurity which the common herd of the vulgar and illiterate shared, he had eager yearnings for that purity of life which alone as he felt and preached, could bring one to taste of the heavenly spring. That a man could at the same time grovel so low and look so high, that his gaze upwards was so clear and bright, while his eyes were so often turned earthward, is a singular phenomenon; but it is not a solitary one. Other great men have been as degraded as they were exalted. Perhaps when Christiana and her children saw that vision of the man with the muck-rake, while the angel, unregarded, held the crown of glory over his head, had they looked much longer, they might have seen him drop his rake and gaze upwards, with streaming eyes, upon the proffered glory. Jean de Meung was the man with the muck-rake who sometimes looked upwards.

The poet feels it necessary to apologize for his severity against the sex. 'If,' he says, 'you see anything here against womankind, blame not the poet.'

'All this was for instruction writ,
Here are no words of idle wit.
No jealousy inspired the song;
No hatred bears the lines along.
Bad are their hearts, if such there live,
Who villainie to women give.
Only, if aught your sense offend,
Think that to know yourself is good,
And that, with this intent, your friend,
I write what else might seem too rude.'

He thinks it right, too, to make a sort of apology for the severity of his attack on monks.

'I strung my bow: I bent it well;
And though no saint, the truth to tell
I let my random arrows fly,
In lowly town and cloister high.
For what cared I where'er they lit?
The folk that Christ called hypocrite,
Who here and there are always found,
Who keep their Lent the whole year round,

* * * * *

But feed on live men's flesh the while
With teeth of envy and of guile,
These were my mark; no other aim
Was mine except to blot their fame.'

Let us pass to what is perhaps the most curious part of the book, and the richest for the student of mediæval ideas, that in which he gives us his views on the growth and principles of society. Here are advanced theories of an audacity and apparent originality which make one curious to know how far they penetrated into the lower strata of France; whether they were the speculations of a dreamer, or the tenets of a school; whether there was any connection--it is more than possible--between this kind of teaching and the frantic revolt of the peasantry; whether, in fact, Jean de Meung was a prophet with a following, or a visionary without disciples. Read, for instance, his account, somewhat abridged, of the Golden Age:--