Chapter VI: Other Influences Summarized 216 (5)

(5) More distinguishable and pronounced effects upon the literature of western Europe were produced by a backward invasion of the Celtic themes and temperament. There was much Celtic blood in northern Italy and in Spain, still more in France and the British Islands. When once the Celtic temperament emerged in literature it was sure of a ready and wide response. Perhaps no such emergence would have happened if it had not been that in the Dark Ages the Christian scholars—the only authors of that epoch—were especially cultured and ardent in Wales and Ireland. The racial and patriotic feelings of the British Celts were pathetic and intense, and, whether among those in western Britain, or among the emigrants to Brittany, the exploits of their race were celebrated in song marked by a high spirit of pride, as well as by a peculiar mysticism and a remarkable sentiment of chivalry and romance. The actual contributions of the Celts to our own literary making are the subject of brief remark elsewhere.

(6) The influence of the East during the period before the first Renaissance was of no small importance. The language through which it came, but not often the language in which it originated, was the Arabic of the Saracens, whether as invaders of Spain or of Sicily. It is precisely while the literary state of Europe was at its lowest that the Saracenic culture was at its height. Into Spain, where the Moors had established themselves in splendour and opulence, there followed all the learning of the Semitic East, in philosophy, natural science, and medicine, together with the literary forms of the Arabs and the music of their accompaniments. Though the western Saracens were politically altogether separate from the Caliphate of Bagdad, the literary language was common to the Moslem world, and men of learning and artistic gift—whether Arabs or Jews—were equally welcome at either end. In the reign of Abd-ur-Rahman, in the early part of the tenth century, there particularly flourished in Moorish Spain the light verse of love and its gay surroundings. Meanwhile Cordova developed what was practically a University, to which congregated all manner of Oriental talent, and in which studies in science and philosophy were prosecuted with zeal. Nor was the diffusion of all this culture restricted to the Arabs or their Spanish subjects. Many Christians from other parts of western Europe sought a knowledge of mathematics or medicine at Cordova, nor were these severer accomplishments all that the visitor would acquire.

To literature proper the true Arabs would have contributed little. In their original home their poetry had mostly taken the shape of the _qasîda_, a loosely connected ode, in which an introduction concerning the forsaken camping ground was regularly followed by reflections on the singer’s love affairs, and these by thoughts concerning his desert wanderings, his steed, and finally his chief. Of most importance to us, perhaps, is the fact that this Arabic verse was in rhyme, and that short odes, or _ghazels_, of fourteen lines, appear to anticipate the sonnet, a form which arose in Sicily in a court frequented by cultured Moslems.

After the establishment of Islam, the new religion at first exercised a cramping effect, but the same fondness for rhyme (which, indeed, was associated with notions of sacred or magic power) introduced it even into the prose of the Koran. When the Saracen conquest had extended widely and included Persia, the superior culture of the Persians gave them, from about A.D. 750, a predominating influence at the court of the Abbasids at Bagdad. Arabic literature, therefore, widened its forms and themes, and its poetry now embraced lyrics of love and wine, satires and elegies, largely of Persian origin. Of this poetry in general it may be said that it is marked by a peculiar predilection for sententious wisdom in the shape of proverbs and aphorisms, and for fables and allegories which convey similar maxims. These, we shall find, appear in full force in Spain, where they are converted into part of the earliest literature in Spanish. For the collection of such fables the Arabs and Persians could reach a hand in either direction. From the west they could take the Greek fables of Aesop and convert them into the Arabic fables of Loqman; from the east they could gather the Indian fables of Pilpay (or Bidpai), translated first from the Indian _Pancatantra_ into the Middle Persian (better called Pehlevi), and thence by Muqaffa into the Arabic _Kalila and Dimna_. In this collection the actions of the beasts serve subtly to convey to a prince rules of wise conduct, more moral than the later principles of Macchiavelli. The Orientals showed an equal passion for purely romantic stories, provided that they contained wonderful and magical occurrences, much prowess, and luscious suggestions of magnificence and pleasure. _The Thousand and One Nights_, better known as the _Arabian Nights_, form an immense body of such compositions, which have been perpetually translated and re-translated, and which are still among the standard books of the world.

But the Saracens were by no means sunk in sententiousness or frivolity. They were impassioned for philosophy and science, especially the sciences of mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and chemistry. For their acquirements in these directions they were indebted to the Greeks, and chiefly through the Syrians of Mesopotamia. Here Hellenism, introduced by Alexander, had grown into peculiar strength, nor was the Greek blood itself inconsiderable. From the Syrians the Arabs derived their knowledge both of Aristotle and of Plato, although, from their practical turn of mind, it was the Aristotelian philosophy which they mainly affected, and which passed into the famous Arabic translation of Averrhoes. Carried to Cordova, much of this learning, and particularly that derived from Aristotle, was disseminated through western Europe. The Arabic influence on thought, reflected from Greece, was therefore great. From a more purely literary point of view, we must reckon with the introduction of Oriental apologues and tales, although many of these, as will be seen immediately, come in also from eastern Europe through a Greek medium.

In point of form it is impossible not to conclude that the minstrelsy and poetry which prevailed in Moorish Spain contributed liberally to the fashioning of the troubadour poetry of Provence. The itinerant Arab minstrel was not welcomed solely by Moors; he played his part among the true Spaniards, and Spaniards themselves turned minstrels after the same fashion. The eastern, or Catalonian, part of Spain was in language virtually identical with the neighbouring south of France, and no border separated the Catalonian minstrelsy from the Provençal districts. In 1112 the Count of Barcelona became the ruler of Provence, and in his train followed all the poetry and song which had grown familiar in Catalonia. It is dangerous to attempt to decide the more and less of direct borrowing; but the manner of the troubadour, his rhymes, his themes of the _tenso_, the _planh_, and the morning and evening songs, so closely recall the machinery and devices of the Saracens, that the affiliation can hardly be denied.

(7) Direct effect of Greece upon Europe to the West was in abeyance from the fall of Rome till the Renaissance. Occasionally indeed, but very seldom, we hear of scholars who read some Greek, and Theodore of Tarsus actually visited and taught in Anglo-Saxon England in the later seventh century. But such influence of Greek work as appears during the dark and mediaeval times comes only in circuitous ways and from inferior writers of inferior matter. It for the most part appears in stories derived from the post-classical Greek romances, or from Oriental tales first translated into Greek and then recast into Latin.

Greek romance itself—beginning as early as the second century, but mostly produced at uncertain dates from the fourth century onwards—at once betrays an Oriental atmosphere. Its genesis is not so much in the Greek mind as in the eastern mind, with which the empire of Alexander had brought the Greeks into contact. The writers commonly hail from Asia Minor or Alexandria, and the scenes and adventures are apt to be Babylonian, Syrian, or Egyptian. Their chief features are much the same. A number of unlikely and inconsequent adventures, comprising separations and stratagems of lovers, travels, voyages, dangers, pirates, magic, murders, descriptions, and dreams, are tediously repeated with unessential variations. One of the first examples, it is true, deals with wanderings in the north and west, among Celts and Cimmerians. This is the _Marvels beyond Thule_ of Antonius Diogenes. But the Babylonica of Iamblichus and the _Aethiopica_ (or _Theagenes and Chariclea_) of Heliodorus have their _mise-en-scène_ in the east, with events and wonders in the Oriental style. The latter work enjoyed a special vogue, and portions of its contents were not scorned even in comparatively late times by Italians like Tasso and Guarini, and Frenchmen like Hardy and Racine. This, together with the _Leucippe and Cleitophon_ of Achilles Tatius, and the pastoral romance of _Daphnis and Chloe_ by Longus, played no small part in the conception of the French sentimental romances of the seventeenth century, beginning with D’Urfé and carried on by Scudéry and La Calprenède. The work of Longus is on the whole the most important, since it contains the new element of pastoral setting and description and some novelty of simple sentiment. In the Dark Ages themselves we cannot tell how far these productions were known in any direct form in the west, but at least we know that nothing travels more quickly than stories. Another romance, with the usual elements of love and adventure, and with the addition of “recognition of the long-lost,” was the famous story of _Apollonius of Tyre_, of which we possess only the Latin version, through which the tale was passed westward. This work was favourite reading in the age with which we are here concerned. It was translated even into Anglo-Saxon, and later came in again as an English version of a French rendering.

Of a different character was the _Barlaam and Josaphat_ of John of Damascus, an ecclesiastical writer of the eighth century. The story is derived from Buddhist sources in India. Though magic plays its part, the whole is naturally of a moral and theological turn. The mediaeval world found it vastly interesting, for after its conversion into Latin by Vincent of Beauvais in the thirteenth century, it passed into nearly every European language which could pretend to a literature.

Meanwhile, through Greek versions, there came in tales of purely non-Greek construction. Chief among these was the work known to more modern times as the _Seven Wise Masters_, originally an Indian production, styled the _Parables of Sandabar_. This was turned into Persian or Arabic, then into Greek under the name of _Syntipas_, thence, in the thirteenth century, into Latin as _Dolopathos_, and thence again versified into French.

All this material appears and reappears in the _fabliaux_ of France, in the earliest _novelle_ of the Italians, and naturally in Boccaccio.

Other productions popular in the Dark Ages, of special note as the storehouse upon which the French _trouvères_ in particular drew for their classical cycles of romances (to be dealt with in the chapter on French literature), were those attributed to “Dares Phrygius,” “Dictys Cretensis,” and “Callisthenes.” If we place the two former under the head of Greek work, it is because of their ascription to Greek writers and their possible derivation, at least in part, from lost Greek sources. They deal with the story of Troy, ostensibly from complementary points of view—a Trojan and a Greek. That there actually was some sort of history by Dares of Phrygia appears from a passage in Aelian; but the book _On the Destruction of Troy_, in which mediaeval readers put their simple trust, is a Latin production of a date probably not earlier than the sixth century A.D., although it pretends to be a translation of Dares by the classical writer Nepos. Similarly an actual Greek Dictys of Crete apparently did write an account of the Trojan war and the Greek heroes, but the book in actual use was but a fourth-century production in Latin, asserting itself to be a translation. Portions of these two compilations were versified, transfused, and invested with an atmosphere of mediaeval chivalry, by Trouvères, including the Norman-English Benoît de Sainte-More, whom again Guido Colonna, in the thirteenth century, exploited for his Latin _History of the Trojan War_, a work which became the standard reference for “matter of Troy” as it appears in Chaucer, Lydgate (_Troy Book_), and Gower. It is not from Homer, but from these pseudo-classical accounts, that we derive such episodes as those of Troilus and Cressida.

For the cycle of Alexander the same generation of Trouvères and their English followers were indebted to a late Byzantine writer, who pretended to be the Greek Callisthenes, contemporary of the great Macedonian. In point of fact his _History of Alexander_ is an imaginative mixture of passages culled from history with eastern stories and marvels. It is, of course, in a Latin version that this farrago became known to the authors of the _romans_.

We must not forget the vogue during these ages, devoted as they were to tale and apologue, of the fables of “Aesop.” Of these there were in mediaeval times various versions and collections, some derived directly from the Latin Phaedrus, who had versified from the Greek; others from the later Greek remodelling by Babrius; others again from an Arabic collection, which combined a compilation of the Greek with a compilation from the Indian Fables of Bidpai (or Pilpay). One early version, of uncertain provenance, was that of King Alfred; and it was apparently a general massing of all this material which, after passing through German and French hands, became the famous _Esope_ of Caxton.

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To all that literary matter which pretended to classical antiquity the Middle Ages, entirely lacking historical perspective, gave the comprehensive name of “Roman.” How freely that term was used, and how miscellaneous had been the sources of legend, is manifested in the strange medley of the thirteenth or fourteenth century, known as the _Gesta Romanorum_, in which fragments of classical history, legends of saints, and Oriental stories, are combined without the least notion of their relations or contradictions. To the _Gesta_ every writer, whether in England, beginning with Chaucer, or in Italy, beginning with Boccaccio, had free recourse for the matter of his poems or his plots.

IV

FRENCH LITERATURE AND ENGLISH

It will be remembered that the influence of the literature of Greece upon that of England has been exerted in various ways, direct and indirect, and at various epochs; and that it continues still to operate upon us rather more than less, affecting both the matter and the form of what is written in our midst. The literature of Latin, again, has always exercised an influence on every generation, Latin forms and thoughts being imbedded in our English writings beyond all enucleation or analysis. The literature of mediaeval and Renaissance Italy, we shall find, had indeed much to do with shaping and polishing the literature of England during the three hundred years from the time of Chaucer to the time of Milton, but since the last-named period it has played little part in determining what our authors shall say, or how they shall say it.

Prior in date and influence to that of Italy comes the literature of France, with the debts in substance or in manner which we are bound to acknowledge to our neighbours across the Channel. Our purpose does not require that we should pretend to traverse the whole history of French literature. If we dwell upon a certain number of salient topics or famous names, it is because they in particular represent the chief types in the development of French literary history, and either directly or indirectly affect the evolution of our own.

France has, during civilized times, been politically and socially, as well as geographically, so near to us; Englishmen and Englishwomen have been generally so well acquainted with the French language and French books, that it is beyond possibility to determine exactly what effect French models have had and are having upon us, just as on the other hand it is beyond possibility to analyse exactly the effect which English models have had and are having upon France. But, without aiming at this impossible exactitude, we may at least make ourselves aware of such periods and manners of French influence as yield themselves readily to the student’s survey.

It will be found that, though the influence of French literature has been felt in every generation, there are two great periods in particular during which the creations and the critical principles of Frenchmen have dominated those of our own authors. The one is the period between the Conquest and the rise of Chaucer; the second is the period which began in the seventeenth century with writers of the age of Waller and Dryden, and continued till towards the end of the eighteenth century, that is to say, till the time of Cowper and Burns. Approximate dates are, perhaps, necessary here, and the following may roughly serve. From about the year 1100 till about the year 1370, and from about the year 1660 till 1780, England took its cue in many departments of literary work from the matter, the form, and the critical principles of contemporary France. Doubtless at all times there have been borrowings to and fro, but these are the periods when the borrowings have been most one-sided and most palpable. The interval from the maturity of Chaucer till the earlier part of the seventeenth century was more especially the era of Italian influence, introducing and supporting that mightier influence from pagan Greece and pagan Rome which began in what is justly styled the Renaissance. Again, since the latter part of the eighteenth century, the time heralded by Cowper and crowned by Burns, the English have emancipated themselves from direct literary imitation of the French, although, as is briefly stated at the end of this chapter, there have been no few currents of French influence upon various classes of our writers, and, from them, upon the reading public.

Let it then be repeated that two periods especially concern us—the period of the Norman and Plantagenet kings preceding and reaching up to Chaucer, and that period which embraces the literature of the reigns of Charles II, James II, William III, Anne, and the first two Georges; or, to put the latter period more plainly and more suitably in a literary connection, the age of Dryden, of the “Social School,” of the comedy of Wycherley and Congreve, of the essays of Addison and the _Spectator_, of the verse of Pope, of the prose of David Hume and Samuel Johnson.

The former period corresponds to the era of influence from the Provençal Troubadours and the Northern French Trouvères, from the epic _chansons de gestes_, the several kinds and cycles of “romances,” the allegories, _fabliaux_, and other creations of which we must take some special account. The second period answers in particular to the names of Corneille, Racine, Molière, Boileau, Voltaire, and of a number of famous French novelists, letter-writers, and critics. How and in what manner these authors came to tyrannize so completely and so long over English literature will require some terse statement. For the rest, in the period from the writers of the _romans_ and allegories down to Corneille, and again in the period from Rousseau to the present, we shall speak of French authors only as links in the chain of French development in itself, with a passing reference to any value they may have individually for the literature of England.

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The greater part of the land of Gaul—the modern France—was at an early date occupied mainly by Celts, akin to, though not precisely identical with, the present Bretons of the north-west corner of the country. There were also Germans in the north-east, and Euskarians in the south-west. Under the Roman empire the land was gradually overrun with Roman settlers, Roman merchants, and Roman soldiers, and Latin naturally became the official language, the language of high society, of literature, and of education.

The mixed people in process of time thus came to speak a provincial Latin, and to call themselves “Romans.” In reality they were very far from being true Romans, and their speech almost was as far from being true Latin. It was both corrupted and also broken up into local dialects. It was, in fact, a blend of Latin with influences from the various native peculiarities. Early in the fifth century a body of Franks, a German people and speaking a German language, invaded the heart of Gaul and permanently held its northern half. It is from them, the Franks, that the whole country obtained the name of “France.” These conquerors brought many a German word—mostly of war and feudalism—into the language of the conquered, and likewise hastened the corruption of their “Latin” syntax. The old Latin of culture became more and more widely severed from everyday speech, and hence “Romance,” the corrupted language of these modern “Romans” of Gaul, was regularly used as a term in direct opposition to the old and literary “Latin.” It came, in fact, to mean the vulgar tongue. It was about the year 800 that, in the northern half of Gaul, the popular or Romance speech was formally recognized. In the tenth century, the Northmen descended on much of this region, and became its masters. Meanwhile the southern half of Gaul, which had been subdued by other German peoples, the Visigoths and Burgundians, was forming its own particular corruption of the Latin, and, among the dialects which arose in that division, the dialect of Provence, in the south-east, took earliest shape and clearest predominance.

* * * * *

Before entering upon any account of “French” literature, we must remove from our minds the conception of France and French as they are, and try to see them as they were in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. North of the Loire are various provinces and a distinctly marked Romance language, the _langue d’oïl_, or “French.” A Celtic attachment, which has immigrated from Great Britain, exists in Brittany, much Norman blood in the north, and a Frankish influence has modified the Gallo-Roman staple. South of the Loire are other states, and, for the most part, another Romance language, the _langue d’oc_, or “Provençal,” with leanings rather to an Italian kindred on one side, and a Catalonian-Spanish on the other. Strictly speaking, the _langue d’oc_ extended over the country south of a line drawn from about Charente to the Alps, while Provençal is properly the language of the south-eastern portion of that area. Corresponding to the two divisions of Gaul there arose two different forms and two different spirits of literature, one “French,” one “Provençal.” Later it was a joining of these two forms and spirits (though with a very distinct predominance of the northern) which produced modern French literature, or “French literature” in the ordinary sense; and it was both of them, though chiefly the northern, which largely controlled England during two centuries before Chaucer, and so contributed to the making of that poet and his age.

There is a fact too often forgotten by students of English writing and even of English history. It is that until Chaucer’s time England was only a portion of the King of England’s dominions; the rest was on the continent, in France. Under Henry II, King of England in the later twelfth century, more than half of modern France, namely, Normandy and other provinces north of the Loire, Poitou, Aquitaine and Gascony south of it, were part of an English or Franco-English empire. At the peace of Brétigny in 1360, Poitou, Guienne, and Gascony were still left a portion of the realms of Edward III. This fact of the oneness of England and much of France is of very great importance to early English literature. The court and official tongue, and, in a large degree, the literary language, of England were in any case French. The intercourse between England and the _langue d’oïl_, and (though less continued) between England and the _langue d’oc_, was, moreover, intimate and frequent. The writers and minstrels were, in a considerable measure, common to England and to both northern and southern France. No few of the writers belonging to old literature in French, _e.g._, Walter Map, and Benoît de Ste. More, had their homes in England; among them was Marie de France. The channels of communication were constantly open, and the current flowing and ebbing through.

* * * * *

A concise account must first be given of the two Gallic literatures, “French” and Provençal. Provençal flourished early, and enjoyed but a brief life. We may, therefore, trace this branch first, then the northern French, and afterwards compare and combine the two.

Though northern France had its song of Roland and other _chansons_ at as early a date as the love lyrics of Provence, yet, if literature implies conscious art and system, Provençal composition is—with the exception of Anglo-Saxon—the first real literature of modern Europe; it stimulated Spain on the one hand, and Italy on the other; but it was in advance of either. It is earlier than Dante, and, although it is appreciably indebted to Ovid, and in some degree to Virgil, it is anterior to the influence of the classical forms or spirit of the first Renaissance. It began, helped by Moorish or “Arabian” impulses and lessons, in the eleventh century, enjoyed a brilliant existence for two hundred years, and died with the dying _langue d’oc_. Though it was never enriched and made immortal by the work of any one transcendent genius, it can boast a large number of composers possessed at least of talent and taste. Provençal verses became models for all neighbouring countries. Frederick Barbarossa in Germany, Richard Cœur-de-Lion in Anglo-French England, Alfonso II in Aragon, Frederick II in Sicily, these royal personages went out of their way to compose in the fashionable style and rhythm of Provence. They became, in fact, _troubadours_. The terms needs some explanation. A troubadour is not properly a wandering minstrel carrying a guitar. That itinerant minstrel is an inferior order of person, the _jongleur_ (in Provençal _joglar_). He stands to the troubadour as the Anglo-Saxon “gleeman” to the “maker.” The troubadour was the “finder,” the poet, generally a noble, a knight, sometimes even a prince. It is no doubt true that the jongleur, who originally sang the troubadour’s ditties, was fain, like other inferiors, to assume the higher rank, try his own hand at composing variations, and call himself a troubadour, and so the title became degraded. It is true also that the real troubadours frequently chanted their own songs of love and glory, and so helped to cause confusion between themselves and the mere jongleur minstrels. But the troubadour proper was one who travelled sumptuously mounted and attired, to be the honoured guest of _châtelains_ and princes.

Nearly all this Provençal literature of three centuries of troubadours is lyric, not epic. It is generally singing, not narrating, and its theme is chiefly personal feelings. Rhymes, which had, it is true, been sparsely employed in monkish compositions in Latin, were then novel things in European literature, although long and universally used by the Saracens. The Provençal poets cultivated rhymes which grew more and more varied and complicated; with careful elaboration of soft and harmonious sounds they sang of two things, and almost only of two, to wit, love and glory, gallantry and chivalry in both senses and connections. The verses were love verses or martial verses, celebrating loyalty in love and valour in arms. As a class they are without pretension to any profoundness of imagination or to any sublimity. Their excellence is their music, not any translatable substance of thought. It must be confessed that the songs and subjects lacked variety; the same tricks of expression and “conceits,” the same nouns and adjectives, the same situations, the same “fantastic sentimentality,” would reappear monotonously, and would inevitably suggest the artificial and unreal. One could hardly be expected to read extensively in the _cansos_, or love-songs, of those who called themselves the “gentle troubadours,” without a feeling of satiety. The serenade (_serena_), the morning greeting (_alba_), the dispute of lovers (_tenso_ or _joc parti_), the lament (_planh_), which were recognized species of troubadour effort, inevitably suffered from exhaustion of material. Nevertheless one cannot but be impressed with the chivalrous idea of love which many of the Provençal poets professed, and according to which they nearly always treat that passion, vaunting a devoted tenderness and a delicate and sentimental worship. The influence of this idea, as still further refined and ennobled in Tuscany, is palpable in the attitude of Dante towards Beatrice, and of Petrarch towards Laura; there are many traces of its influence in Chaucer and his contemporaries. Through the Petrarchist sonneteers it again reaches England in the Elizabethan age.

It must be enough merely to mention the names of Bernard de Ventadour, Bertran de Born, Pierre Vidal, and Arnaud Daniel, among famous troubadours. But a word may be said of that remarkable institution, the “Court of Love,” to which a poem of Chaucer (or more probably of some one with a large share of Chaucer’s mind) owes its conception and its title. During the later generations of the “gentle troubadours,” the way to speak and think of love and gallantry was reduced to a system. It was made a science—called _el gai saber_, “the gay science”—which every poet was supposed to understand and to have at his finger-ends. One favourite form of poetry was the _tenso_, a dispute or altercation between troubadours upon delicate questions and scruples of behaviour and feeling in affairs of love. It became the fashion for noble ladies in those idle, rather frivolous, but doubtless not unhappy days to hold mock courts, in which poets sang one against the other, like opposing advocates; whereafter the court gave its decision, or _arrêt d’amour_, and awarded prizes to that troubadour whose arguments and verse were most in keeping with the code prescribed by the gay science. “Is it a greater grief to lose a lover by death or by unfaithfulness?” may serve as an example of the subjects particularly favoured in these poetical courts of the ladies of Gascony, of the Countess of Champagne, or of Queen Eleanor.

Such, briefly, was the genuine Provençal literature—lyrics of love and bravery, with here and there a pastoral, and here and there a poem of censure or satirical criticism. But true epics and romances of adventure, sustained allegories, witty tales of common life, they had practically none. For these we must look to northern France, to the land not of the troubadours, but of the Trouvères. _Trouvère_ is the French form corresponding to the Provençal _troubadour_, and equally means the “finder,” who is indeed the “poet.” But in northern France there existed different social conditions and a different clime; there was also the sterner stuff which belongs to Franks and Normans, while in Brittany there was the Celt, with all his melancholy fire and imaginative and mystical emotion. The lyric literature of the north blossomed, indeed, somewhat later than that of Provence, and is largely an imitation of it. The romances of the trouvères are also distinctly infused with the ideas and style of the lyric south. Nevertheless the great mass of the poetry of northern France is of its own creation in both matter and spirit. It is the poetry of the epic, the allegory, and the tale; the poetry of the romance of heroic adventures, of satirical teaching, and of stories to amuse; in other words, it produced the _chanson de geste_, the _roman_, and the _fabliau_. It is in every way stronger than the creations of the south, in seriousness, in vigour, in variety, in invention. According to Ten Brink, _prouesse_, the masculine side of chivalry, is more northern, while _courtoisie_, the feminine side, is more Provençal. But the difference goes much deeper than any pair of terms can express it.

The old French poems of heroic adventure, blent with more or less of that other-world imaginative quality known as “romance,” fall into three main cycles of subjects. They deal with Charlemagne and his Paladins (in which case they are more truly epic in character, and are called _chansons de geste_, a term properly thus restricted to incidents in supposed French history), or with King Arthur and his knights (together with the once independent legends of Tristram), or with classical heroes, whether of the Trojan legend or, like Alexander, of actual history. These three cycles have been named the “Carlovingian” (or “French”), the “Arthurian” (or “British”), and the “classical” (or “Grecian”). Or we may make four by subdividing the last into “Trojan” and “Alexandrian.” At the time of their composition the cycle which dealt with the classical subjects of antiquity was said to deal with “matter of Rome.” All antiquity was “Rome,” and all ancient heroes “Romans.” We find, then, songs of Roland and Oliver, romances of Tristram or Launcelot, romances of Alexander the Great, and many more. Some _romans_, called _d’aventures_, are independent of any cycle and make no pretence at all to be history. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries are rich in the poetical narratives which tell of heroic feats, or miracles of devotion and loyalty, mixed with much of the supernatural withal. This was the day of the Crusades, of conquests of the Saracens, single combats, adventures in distant lands, where dwarfs and enchanters, dragons and giants, were supposed to dwell; and nothing pleased the venturous barons more than to be told such tales to the music of the itinerant jongleurs. A further variety of these songs of exploit was the _lai_, which is too short and too lyrical to be an epic or a _roman_, and is rather the song of an epic episode. The allegorical poems—which they also called _romans_, as being similarly akin to epic and written in the vulgar tongue—long and tedious as they are to us, were not disdained by Chaucer, and gave the cue to several conspicuous works of the Chaucerians down to the sixteenth century. That most famous of all, the _Roman de la Rose_, was translated by our master of English undefiled. This poem, begun by Guillaume de Lorris as an “Art of Love,” after the manner of Ovid (as filtered through Provence), was continued a generation later by Jean de Meung as a satirical miscellany of learning and legend. It is all about a lover who sought to pluck a rose, about his difficulties in reaching it, about the abstract qualities which help or hinder him, about personified virtues and vices, such as Dame Idleness, who lets him into the garden, Avarice, Meanness, Hatred, who stand in his way, Fair-Seeming, who has much to say in the matter, and numerous others. Thanks to these agencies, it takes that unhappy youth some 23,000 verses before he attains to plucking the object of his affections. Yet it was this reading which inspired the earliest efforts of our Chaucer, and which, in his first stage, he fell to imitating. It was this literature which the cultivated Norman English delighted hugely to hear. Allegorical, also, and purely satirical is the prolonged beast-fable known as the _Roman de Renard_ (“the fox”), which enjoyed an immense vogue throughout Europe, and provoked countless imitations.

One chief species of composition, and a highly important one, yet remains. This was the _fabliau_, the amusing tale in verse, the one kind of writing to let us know that the world was not wholly made of doughty knights and gentle damosels. The _fabliau_ is a tale of real or possible adventure in ordinary life, generally of a humorous kind. It is, in fact, a sort of novelette. Chaucer’s _Canterbury Tales_ are often _fabliaux_. From France the _fabliau_ was borrowed by the _Novellieri_ of Italy. It was taken up and developed by Boccaccio, and both directly from France and indirectly through Italy it made its way into the general stock of European narrative material. Had it not been for _fabliaux_, one might have thought that in those days there was nothing else for men to do but fight and love. Yet the great ordinary mass of mankind existed all the time, doing its sober work in towns and country places. And it was time for this great stratum to find recognition in _bourgeois_ story.

Thus in northern France we have chiefly epics and romances of heroic adventures, allegories more or less satirical and didactic, and amusing tales; in southern France we have chiefly lyrics of love and chivalry. As time goes on, each half moves closer to the other, although during the whole epoch of the northern romances the Provençal spirit had combined with the Celtic to pervade them with a peculiar tone of chivalric sentiment. In 1249 the two geographical divisions became one kingdom. Before the middle of the fourteenth century the Provençal tongue begins to die, and its literature to perish. The story of French literature thenceforward is one and undivided.

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While the troubadour and trouvère literatures were thus flourishing in the two halves of France, the cultivated circles of Norman and Plantagenet England found those literatures sufficiently adapted to their needs. The ordinary language of these circles was identical with that of the trouvères, and at the same time the English possessions in Languedoc, including the cultured centre Bordeaux (gained by the marriage of Henry II with Eleanor of Guienne and Poitou), brought the Court into direct communication with the lyrics of the troubadours. Henry’s son, Richard Cœur-de-Lion, was himself a troubadour and the friend of troubadours, in particular of Bertran de Born. But better suited to the Anglo-Norman temperament, and, of course, completely intelligible to the French-speaking barons and gentry, were the romances, _lais_ and _fabliaux_ of the trouvères. The work of the Norman Wace (_Geste des Bretons_) in 1155 was as much intended for England as for France. So also was the _Roman de Troie_ (1160) of Benoît de Ste. More, which included the story of Troilus. The French _Saint Grael_ stories of Walter Map (1180) and the _lais_ of Marie de France (1210) were produced in our island, and were the common property of England and Norman France. The jongleurs wandered from baron’s court to baron’s court, and the stories of Arthur,

Of Greece and Troy the strongë stryf,
There many a man lost his lyf;
Of Brute that baron bold of hand,
The first conqueroure of Engeland;
Of King Arthur, that was so riche,
Was not in his tyme him liche;
How Kyng Charles and Rowland fought,
With Sarazens nold they be caught;
Of Tristrem and Ysoude the swete,
How they with love first gan mete;
Of King John and of Isumbras,
Of Ydoine and of Amadas;
Stories of diverse thinges,
Of princes, prelates and kinges;
Many songes of divers rhyme,
As Engelish, French and Latyne.

Before French literature could make much further advance, it must pass, after that of Italy, under pupilage to the Renaissance. As in England of the fifteenth century, there is first a period of stagnation, and then one during which France is borrowing and assimilating to its utmost lessons in thought and style, in form and substance, from the lately recovered classical masterpieces of Greece and Rome, as well as from the Italian writers who first enjoyed and exploited these treasures. During these stagnant and growing stages of French literature it exercises comparatively little effect upon our own.

The Renaissance naturally reached France before it extended to England, and the Renaissance meant in France what it had meant in Italy, and what it afterwards came to mean in England, namely, the widening of the intellectual and moral horizon, broader knowledge and broader views, a shaking off of old and dry traditions. And therewith it also meant greater variety of subjects in literature and the reign of better models of thought and expression. The effect of the Renaissance on French literature was to draw the thoughts of authors away from the old monotonous round of romances and allegories, and at the same time away from the old monotonous expressions and phrases; to make them attack all interesting subjects of thought, and meanwhile to adapt and polish the instrument of language which expressed them. This it was which the recovery of the Greek and Latin classics accomplished for Italians, Frenchmen, and Englishmen alike, supplying them with new range and scope, with new patterns and principles.

But as in England, so in France, this new birth and literary reformation did not exercise its full effect immediately. In England it gradually culminated in the Elizabethan age, in France it only attained its full development in the seventeenth century. That is to say, it was actually slower of progress in France than in our own literature.

For a time, while the first influences of the Renaissance were being felt, the effect in France was, as in England, a severance from the old subjects and methods, without a full adoption of the classical subjects and principles. The classical influence acts as a solvent before it comes to act as a crystallizing agent. There is, in fact, a transition period, during which writing is left free to attempt various forms. If a man of natural genius arises in such an epoch, he will give us his natural self, and so may create us prose or verse which, despite a deficiency in knowledge, will be immortal through its own truth and strength. If on the other hand at such a transition period men who write are lacking in native power, they will write much worse when they follow no models and adhere to no principles. In England, during the transition from the epoch of Chaucer to the time of Wyatt and Surrey, there appeared no distinguished poetic genius, and, except among Scottish writers like Dunbar, little more than tiresome production. In France, on the contrary, there were two distinguished poets, Villon (fifteenth century) and Marot (early sixteenth). These were stimulated by the new ideas, but were not yet dominated by the new classical models. They were freed from the mediaeval shackles, and not yet fettered in the bonds of misapprehended and misapplied “classical” principles.

François Villon wrote during the latter half of the fifteenth century, and is principally known by his ballads, which were something quite new to French literature, and have, one may venture to say, remained unique therein. From the old artificial romances and allegories he breaks clean away. He is as original and independent as our poet Burns, whom, by the way, he somewhat resembled in personal character. His merit, like that of the Greeks whom he did not know, lies in his truth, in the candid expression of his own personal emotions, in his naive confessions, in his sincere pathos. We all sympathize with emotions and confessions of this nature, and therefore Villon, like Burns, possesses a permanent and a universal value. And not only is he true in sentiment, he is clear and direct in his phrase, and musical in his verse.

Clément Marot opens the sixteenth century. He has been called the father of modern French poetry. If this means that he wrote with an ease and sprightliness, and a vein of urbane satire, which are usually associated with the _esprit gaulois_, but which skim rather along the surface of things, it is true. But if it means that he is the consummation of the Renaissance, and that the critical principles of French poetry were established in his time, it is without truth. For Marot, like Villon, is a poet and an artist without following the despotic rules which afterwards came to prevail in France, and he furthermore sought his themes rather in the old French subjects, the romances and the _fabliaux_, than in realms of classical antiquity. The Italian influence, however, touches him and leads him into pastorals, which, we must note, were known to Spenser.

Villon and Marot are both of the transition period, and not wholly of the Renaissance. They both fell short in one great respect; they lacked depth and elevation. This is a vice to which all French verse is prone, setting, as it does, so special a value on form; but it was the more discoverable in these two poets, because the rich intellectual nutriment of antiquity had not yet been assimilated by them, because their minds laboured under the intellectual poverty of mediaevalism, because, in other words, they lacked the substance with which the best ancient literature is crammed. Their poetry has many blossoms, but bears little fruit. Yet they mark one great step in progress. They are emancipated from the old mediaeval artificiality.

While Villon and Marot were thus emancipated, there were others during this transition time who were not by any means so. On the one hand they allegorized, like the trouvères, to the utmost; their subjects were obsolete and unreal; on the other, their language was trivial and their contents uneven. Verse literature seemed to need bracing and correction in the light of advancing study of the Greek and Latin masterpieces, and it is to the administering of such correction that we come in what is known as the _Pléiade_.

The _Pléiade_, or constellation of the seven stars, was the term applied to seven men of letters, who formed themselves into a coterie or league about the year 1550, with the professed resolve of reforming the French language and French literary methods. The conception is very French. This cool manner of looking at language and literary expression as subject to definite laws of art, which may be codified by a league or academy, is contrary to English notions. Not so with the French. They have no desire for impulsive and perhaps erratic individuality. This is one of their clearest characteristics. Of the _Pléiade_ the two greatest names are Ronsard, the poet, and Du Bellay, who was both poet and manifesto-writer. Their object, as stated by themselves, was to bring French literature nearer to the classical models of Greece and Rome, and to create a nobler form and use of the language for literary purposes. And while Du Bellay was to write his manifesto, Ronsard was to give a practical illustration of the theory, by himself composing odes and sonnets in the proper style. The attempt was bold, and it was successful. For fifty years all French literature “Ronsardized.” Here are a few sentences of the manifesto concerning the _Défense et Illustration de la Langue Française_. “Our ancestors have left us our language so poor and bare, that it stands in need of the ornaments, and, so to speak, the features of other people.... By what means can we hasten its development? By the imitation of the ancients.... Translating is not a sufficient means of elevating our vulgar tongue to an equality with the most famous. What must we do? Imitate! Imitate the Romans as they did the Greeks!... We must digest the best authors and convert them into blood and nutriment.... You that mean to be a poet, read and re-read the Greek and Latin models. Then leave all those old French _rondeaux_, _ballades_, _virelais_, _chants royaux_, _chansons_ and other such vulgarities (_épiceries_), which corrupt the taste of our tongue, and only serve to testify to our ignorance. Throw yourself on those witty epigrams in imitation of Martial!... Distil with a flowing style tender elegies after the manner of Ovid and Tibullus!... Sing me some of those odes as yet unknown to the French tongue ... and let there be nothing in which does not appear some trace of rare and ancient learning.”

We need not agree with all this breezy advice. It is impossible to re-create a language all at once. If there is not inspiration, there cannot be good poetry, though one may have infinite good models to follow. Nevertheless the new school was a success for half a century, and both Ronsard and Du Bellay, though often mechanical and often flat, have left a few imperishable sonnets and other pieces. Our own Elizabethans not only read Marot and his contemporary Saint-Gelais (who introduced the Petrarchan sonnet into France), they also read Du Bellay, who finally established the sonnet and at the same time served as a pattern for English writers. One writer of the Ronsardist school, Du Bartas, was a writer of real religious conviction, and his _Semaine_ or _Week of Creation_, translated by Sylvester, gained no small currency in England.

What calls for particular notice in this connection is the deliberate way in which French writers and critics can contemplate and formulate the principles and methods of good literature. The English, to whom so much of French verse is cold and mechanical, may perhaps think that it is this same formulating which has done incalculable harm to poetry, a thing in its nature as incapable of regulation as are our emotions and our thoughts. But the French are of another opinion, and it is at least fair to say that, if writing by rules hampers the flight of genius and prevents creations of the sublime, it on the other hand checks the production of that utter doggerel which has been so often inflicted on readers of English literature. We shall do best to complete at once the history of this formulation, and then retrace our steps.

Early in the seventeenth century flourished the man to whom first were due those definite and despotic critical principles which were fully developed by Boileau and which came to tyrannize in England after the restoration of Charles II, subsequently reaching their perfection in Pope and his eighteenth-century school. It is true that Malherbe represents a movement which was simultaneously proceeding in Italy, and was also being begun in England by Waller and his follower Denham. But he was destined to exert a peculiar influence. François Malherbe was by nature critic, and not creator. He, like the _Pléiade_, offers himself as a deliberate reformer of literature. His thoughts are fixed on style and its correctness. His notion of verses is that they should be “beautiful as prose,” without any of the bold irregularities of a Pindar or the sentimental vagaries of a Petrarch. He measures words and syllables, toils laboriously over every line he writes, and prunes down metaphors and hazardous expressions with the deliberate knife of cold reason. What he compasses is conciseness and preciseness of phrase, and what he revels in is the sense, not of a profound thought or keen emotion expressed, but of a technical difficulty overcome. He is the true parent of all that verse, in reality but brilliant rhyming prose, which prevailed in France for two centuries, and which also reigned in England for at least one. It is he who taught Corneille and Racine how to form a verse, and Boileau how to criticize one. It was Boileau who passed on the word to our English Pope, Parnell, Gay, and Johnson. Dryden was doubtless the intermediate step, but it is to Boileau that Pope expressly resorts. But for Boileau, Pope’s _Essay on Criticism_ would not have existed.

Nicolas Boileau, who flourished and dictated the principles of criticism in his _Art Poétique_ during the life of Dryden, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, was long called in France the “law-giver of Parnassus.” There is little doubt that the title was justified. His bent and character were almost identical with those of Pope. He was a keen satirist, acute critic, and clever reviewer, but he was no true “poet.” His avowed object was to remove uncertainty of taste and to establish criticism on a basis of mathematical finality, to set forth a positive doctrine of literary judgement. And what his doctrine amounts to is that reason and good sense must decide against all spontaneity of taste. This means that poetry must attempt no audacious flights of fancy, must restrain its metaphors, must avoid complexity, and be sheer, plain, good sense, admirably expressed. And who that has read French poetry thenceforth until the rise of Victor Hugo, or who that has read English poetry from Dryden down to Cowper, will not perceive that the result of this doctrine was disaster to poetry, and that it produced, as Matthew Arnold expresses it, instead of so many classics of our poetry, just so many classics of our prose writing in verse? Poetry cannot be judged by “common sense,” nor written by “common sense.” It is an imaginative art, and therefore requires uncommon sense.

When, after the Restoration, the second great influence from French literature came distinctly over England, it came in this shape, one which was, on the whole, to be regretted.

There is one particular department of French verse of the seventeenth century which deserves a special note for students of English literature. In this department there flourished between Malherbe and Boileau sundry minor poets who had their representatives and pupils in the English Court of the restored Charles II. These were the poets of amusement and diversion, the writers of society verses on the one hand, and of drinking songs on the other. The art of expression elaborated by Malherbe told on these. Voiture, with his _vers de société_, and St. Amant, with his Anacreontic poems, compose in a polished style worthy of the literary reform which Malherbe and Boileau brought to pass. When Charles II came back from France to England, his court was entertained by “society verses” and by convivial songs written on the French pattern. Such, among others, are verses and songs of Dorset, Roscommon, Sedley, and some of those of Waller.

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