The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory Part 1

The Flouris.h.i.+ng of Romance and the Rise of Allegory.

by George Saintsbury.

PREFACE.

As this volume, although not the first in chronological order, is likely to be the first to appear in the Series of which it forms part, and of which the author has the honour to be editor, it may be well to say a few words here as to the scheme of this Series generally. When that scheme was first sketched, it was necessarily objected that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to obtain contributors who could boast intimate and equal knowledge of all the branches of European literature at any given time. To meet this by a simple denial was, of course, not to be thought of. Even universal linguists, though not unknown, are not very common; and universal linguists have not usually been good critics of any, much less of all, literature. But it could be answered that if the main principle of the scheme was sound--that is to say, if it was really desirable not to supplant but to supplement the histories of separate literatures, such as now exist in great numbers, by something like a new "Hallam," which should take account of all the simultaneous and contemporary developments and their interaction--some sacrifice in point of specialist knowledge of individual literatures not only must be made, but might be made with little damage. And it could be further urged that this sacrifice might be reduced to a minimum by selecting in each case writers thoroughly acquainted with the literature which happened to be of greatest prominence in the special period, provided always that their general literary knowledge and critical habits were such as to render them capable of giving a fit account of the rest.

In the carrying out of such a scheme occasional deficiencies of specialist dealing, or even of specialist knowledge, must be held to be compensated by range of handling and width of view. And though it is in all such cases hopeless to appease what has been called "the rage of the specialist" himself--though a Mezzofanti doubled with a Sainte-Beuve could never, in any general history of European literature, hope to satisfy the special devotees of Roumansch or of Platt-Deutsch, not to mention those of the greater languages--yet there may, I hope, be a sufficient public who, recognising the advantage of the end, will make a fair allowance for necessary shortcomings in the means.

As, however, it is quite certain that there will be some critics, if not some readers, who will not make this allowance, it seemed only just that the Editor should bear the brunt in this new Pa.s.sage Perilous. I shall state very frankly the qualifications which I think I may advance in regard to this volume. I believe I have read most of the French and English literature proper of the period that is in print, and much, if not most, of the German. I know somewhat less of Icelandic and Provencal; less still of Spanish and Italian as regards this period, but something also of them: Welsh and Irish I know only in translations. Now it so happens that--for the period--French is, more than at any other time, the capital literature of Europe. Very much of the rest is directly translated from it; still more is imitated in form. All the great subjects, the great _matieres_, are French in their early treatment, with the exception of the national work of Spain, Iceland, and in part Germany. All the forms, except those of the prose saga and its kinsman the German verse folk-epic, are found first in French. Whosoever knows the French literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, knows not merely the best literature in form, and all but the best in matter, of the time, but that which all the time was imitating, or shortly about to imitate, both in form and matter.

Again, England presents during this time, though no great English work written "in the English tongue for English men," yet the spectacle, unique in history, of a language and a literature undergoing a sea-change from which it was to emerge with incomparably greater beauty and strength than it had before, and in condition to vie with--some would say to outstrip--all actual or possible rivals.

German, if not quite supreme in any way, gives an interesting and fairly representative example of a chapter of national literary history, less brilliant and original in performance than the French, less momentous and unique in promise than the English, but more normal than either, and furnis.h.i.+ng in the epics, of which the _Nibelungenlied_ and _Kudrun_ are the chief examples, and in the best work of the Minnesingers, things not only of historical but of intrinsic value in all but the highest degree.

Provencal and Icelandic literature at this time are both of them of far greater intrinsic interest than English, if not than German, and they are infinitely more original. But it so happens that the prominent qualities of form in the first, of matter and spirit in the second, though intense and delightful, are not very complicated, various, or wide-ranging. If monotony were not by a.s.sociation a question-begging word, it might be applied with much justice to both: and it is consequently not necessary to have read every Icelandic saga in the original, every Provencal lyric with a strictly philological competence, in order to appreciate the literary value of the contributions which these two charming isolations made to European history.

Yet again, the production of Spain during this time is of the smallest, containing, perhaps, nothing save the _Poem of the Cid_, which is at once certain in point of time and distinguished in point of merit; while that of Italy is not merely dependent to a great extent on Provencal, but can be better handled in connection with Dante, who falls to the province of the writer of the next volume. The Celtic tongues were either past or not come to their chief performance; and it so happens that, by the confession of the most ardent Celticists who speak as scholars, no Welsh or Irish _texts_ affecting the capital question of the Arthurian legends can be certainly attributed to the twelfth or early thirteenth centuries. It seemed to me, therefore, that I might, without presumption, undertake the volume. Of the execution as apart from the undertaking others must judge. I will only mention (to show that the book is not a mere compilation) that the chapter on the Arthurian Romances summarises, for the first time in print, the result of twenty years' independent study of the subject, and that the views on prosody given in chapter v. are not borrowed from any one.

I have dwelt on this less as a matter of personal explanation, which is generally superfluous to friends and never disarms foes, than in order to explain and ill.u.s.trate the principle of the Series. All its volumes have been or will be allotted on the same principle--that of occasionally postponing or antedating detailed attention to the literary production of countries which were not at the moment of the first consequence, while giving greater prominence to those that were: but at the same time never losing sight of the _general_ literary drift of the whole of Europe during the whole period in each case. It is to guard against such loss of sight that the plan of committing each period to a single writer, instead of strapping together bundles of independent essays by specialists, has been adopted. For a survey of each time is what is aimed at, and a survey is not to be satisfactorily made but by one pair of eyes. As the individual study of different literatures deepens and widens, these surveys may be more and more difficult: they may have to be made more and more "by allowance." But they are also more and more useful, not to say more and more necessary, lest a deeper and wider ignorance should accompany the deeper and wider knowledge.

The dangers of this ignorance will hardly be denied, and it would be invidious to produce examples of them from writings of the present day. But there can be nothing ungenerous in referring--_honoris_, not _invidiae causa_--to one of the very best literary histories of this or any century, Mr Ticknor's _Spanish Literature_. There was perhaps no man of his time who was more widely read, or who used his reading with a steadier industry and a better judgment, than Mr Ticknor. Yet the remarks on a.s.sonance, and on long mono-rhymed or single-a.s.sonanced tirades, in his note on Berceo (_History of Spanish Literature_, vol.

i. p. 27), show almost entire ignorance of the whole prosody of the _chansons de geste_, which give such an indispensable light in reference to the subject, and which, even at the time of his first edition (1849), if not quite so well known as they are to-day, existed in print in fair numbers, and had been repeatedly handled by scholars. It is against such mishaps as this that we are here doing our best to supply a guard.[1]

[Footnote 1: One of the most difficult points to decide concerned the allowance of notes, bibliographical or other. It seemed, on the whole, better not to overload such a Series as this with them; but an attempt has been made to supply the reader, who desires to carry his studies further, with references to the best editions of the princ.i.p.al texts and the best monographs on the subjects of the different chapters. I have scarcely in these notes mentioned a single book that I have not myself used; but I have not mentioned a t.i.the of those that I have used.]

CHAPTER I.

THE FUNCTION OF LATIN.

REASONS FOR NOT NOTICING THE BULK OF MEDIaeVAL LATIN LITERATURE. EXCEPTED DIVISIONS. COMIC LATIN LITERATURE.

EXAMPLES OF ITS VERBAL INFLUENCE. THE VALUE OF BURLESQUE.

HYMNS. THE "DIES IRae." THE RHYTHM OF BERNARD. LITERARY PERFECTION OF THE HYMNS. SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHY. ITS INFLUENCE ON PHRASE AND METHOD. THE GREAT SCHOLASTICS.

[Sidenote: _Reasons for not noticing the bulk of mediaeval Latin literature._]

This series is intended to survey and ill.u.s.trate the development of the vernacular literatures of mediaeval and Europe; and for that purpose it is unnecessary to busy ourselves with more than a part of the Latin writing which, in a steadily decreasing but--until the end of the last century--an always considerable proportion, served as the vehicle of literary expression. But with a part of it we are as necessarily concerned as we are necessarily compelled to decline the whole. For not only was Latin for centuries the universal means of communication between educated men of different languages, the medium through which such men received their education, the court-language, so to speak, of religion, and the vehicle of all the literature of knowledge which did not directly stoop to the comprehension of the unlearned; but it was indirectly as well as directly, unconsciously as well as consciously, a schoolmaster to bring the vernacular languages to literary accomplishment. They could not have helped imitating it, if they would; and they did not think of avoiding imitation of it, if they could. It modified, to a very large extent, their grammar; it influenced, to an extent almost impossible to overestimate, the prosody of their finished literature; it supplied their vocabulary; it furnished models for all their first conscious literary efforts of the more deliberate kind, and it conditioned those which were more or less spontaneous.

But, even if we had room, it would profit us little to busy ourselves with diplomatic Latin or with the Latin of chronicles, with the Latin of such scientific treatises as were written or with the Latin of theology. All these except, for obvious reasons, the first, tended away from Latin into the vernaculars as time went on, and were but of lesser literary moment, even while they continued to be written in Latin. Nor in _belles lettres_ proper were such serious performances as continued to be written well into our period of capital importance. Such a book, for instance, as the well-known _Trojan War_ of Joseph of Exeter,[2] though it really deserves much of the praise which it used to receive,[3] can never be anything much better than a large prize poem, such as those which still receive and sometimes deserve the medals and the gift-books of schools and universities.

Every now and then a man of irrepressible literary talent, having no vernacular or no public in the vernacular ready to his hand, will write in Latin a book like the _De Nugis Curialium_,[4] which is good literature though bad Latin. But on the whole it is a fatal law of such things that the better the Latin the worse must the literature be.

[Footnote 2: Included with Dictys and Dares in a volume of Valpy's Delphin Cla.s.sics.]

[Footnote 3: Cf. Warton, _History of English Poetry_. Ed. Hazlitt, i.

226-292.]

[Footnote 4: Gualteri Mapes, _De Nugis Curialium Distinctiones Quinque_. Ed. T. Wright: Camden Society, 1850.]

[Sidenote: _Excepted divisions._]

We may, however, with advantage select three divisions of the Latin literature of our section of the Middle Ages, which have in all cases no small literary importance and interest, and in some not a little literary achievement. And these are the comic and burlesque Latin writings, especially in verse; the Hymns; and the great body of philosophical writing which goes by the general t.i.tle of Scholastic Philosophy, and which was at its palmiest time in the later portion of our own special period.

[Sidenote: _Comic Latin literature._]

It may not be absolutely obvious, but it does not require much thought to discover, why the comic and burlesque Latin writing, especially in verse, of the earlier Middle Ages holds such a position. But if we compare such things as the _Carmina Burana_, or as the Goliardic poems attributed to or connected with Walter Map,[5] with the early _fabliaux_, we shall perceive that while the latter, excellently written as they sometimes are, depend for their comedy chiefly on matter and incident, not indulging much in play on words or subtle adjustment of phrase and cadence, the reverse is the case with the former. A language must have reached some considerable pitch of development, must have been used for a great length of time seriously, and on a large variety of serious subjects, before it is possible for anything short of supreme genius to use it well for comic purposes.

Much indeed of this comic use turns on the existence and degradation of recognised serious writing. There was little or no opportunity for any such use or misuse in the infant vernaculars; there was abundant opportunity in literary Latin. Accordingly we find, and should expect to find, very early parodies of the offices and doc.u.ments of the Church,--things not unnaturally shocking to piety, but not perhaps to be justly set down to any profane, much less to any specifically blasphemous, intention. When the quarrel arose between Reformers and "Papists," intentional ribaldry no doubt began. But such a thing as, for example, the "Missa de Potatoribus"[6] is much more significant of an unquestioning familiarity than of deliberate insult. It is an instance of the same bent of the human mind which has made very learned and conscientious lawyers burlesque law, and which induces schoolboys and undergraduates to parody the cla.s.sics, not at all because they hate them, but because they are their most familiar literature.

[Footnote 5: _Carmina Burana_, Stuttgart, 1847; _Political Songs of England_ (1839), and _Latin Poems attributed to Walter Mapes_ (1841), both edited for the Camden Society by T. Wright.]

[Footnote 6: Wright and Halliwell's _Reliquiae Antiquae_ (London, 1845), ii. 208.]

At the same time this comic degradation, as may be seen in its earliest and perhaps its greatest pract.i.tioner Aristophanes--no bad citizen or innovating misbeliever--leads naturally to elaborate and ingenious exercises in style, to a thorough familiarity with the capacities of language, metre, rhyme. And expertness in all these things, acquired in the Latin, was certain sooner or later to be transferred to the vernacular. No one can read the Latin poems which cl.u.s.ter in Germany round the name of the "Arch-Poet,"[7] in England round that of Map, without seeing how much freer of hand is the Latin rhymer in comparison with him who finds it "hard only not to stumble"

in the vernacular. We feel what a gusto there is in this graceless catachresis of solemn phrase and traditionally serious literature; we perceive how the language, colloquially familiar, taught from infancy in the schools, provided with plentiful literary examples, and having already received perfect licence of accommodation to vernacular rhythms and the poetical ornaments of the hour, puts its stammering rivals, fated though they were to oust it, out of court for the time by its audacious compound of experience and experiment.

[Footnote 7: On this Arch-Poet see Scherer, _History of German Literature_ (Engl. ed., Oxford, 1886), i. 68.]

[Sidenote: _Examples of its verbal influence._]

The first impression of any one who reads that exceedingly delightful volume the Camden Society's _Poems attributed to Walter Mapes_ may be one of mere amus.e.m.e.nt, of which there are few books fuller. The agreeable effrontery with which the question "whether to kiss Rose or Agnes" is put side by side with that "whether it is better to eat flesh cooked in the cauldron or little fishes driven into the net;"

the intense solemnity and sorrow for self with which Golias discourses in trochaic mono-rhymed _laisses_ of irregular length, _De suo Infortunio_; the galloping dactylics of the "Apocalypse"; the concentrated scandal against a venerated s.e.x of the _De Conjuge non Ducenda_, are jocund enough in themselves, if not invariably edifying.

But the good-for-nothing who wrote

"Fumus et mulier et stillicidia Expellunt hominem a domo propria,"

was not merely cracking jokes, he was exercising himself, or his countrymen, or at farthest his successors, in the use of the vernacular tongues with the same lightness and brightness. When he insinuated that

"Dulcis erit mihi status Si prebenda muneratus, Reditu vel alio, Vivam, licet non habunde, Saltem mihi detur unde Studeam de proprio,"--

he was showing how things could be put slyly, how the stiffness and awkwardness of native speech could be suppled and decorated, how the innuendo, the turn of words, the _nuance_, could be imparted to dog-Latin. And if to dog-Latin, why not to genuine French, or English, or German?

[Sidenote: _The value of burlesque._]

And he was showing at the same time how to make verse flexible, how to suit rhythm to meaning, how to give freedom, elasticity, swing. No doubt this had in part been done by the great serious poetry to which we shall come presently, and which he and his kind often directly burlesqued. But in the very nature of things comic verse must supple language to a degree impossible, or very seldom possible, to serious poetry: and in any case the mere tricks with language which the parodist has to play, familiarise him with the use of it. Even in these days of multifarious writing, it is not absolutely uncommon to find men of education and not devoid of talent who confess that they have no notion how to put things, that they cannot express themselves.

We can see this tying of the tongue, this inability to use words, far more reasonably prevalent in the infancy of the vernacular tongues; as, for instance, in the constant presence of what the French call _chevilles_, expletive phrases such as the "sikerly," and the "I will not lie," the "verament," and the "everidel," which brought a whole cla.s.s of not undeserving work, the English verse romances of a later time, into discredit. Latin, with its wide range of already consecrated expressions, and with the practice in it which every scholar had, made recourse to constantly repeated stock phrases at least less necessary, if necessary at all; and the writer's set purpose to amuse made it inc.u.mbent on him not to be tedious. A good deal of this comic writing may be graceless: some of it may, to delicate tastes, be shocking or disgusting. But it was at any rate an obvious and excellent school of word-fence, a gymnasium and exercising-ground for style.

[Sidenote: _Hymns._]

And if the beneficial effect in the literary sense of these light songs is not to be overlooked, how much greater in every way is that of the magnificent compositions of which they were in some cases the parody! It will be more convenient to postpone to a later chapter of this volume a consideration of the exact way in which Latin sacred poetry affected the prosody of the vernacular; but it is well here to point out that almost all the finest and most famous examples of the mediaeval hymn, with perhaps the sole exception of _Veni, Sancte Spiritus_, date from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.[8] Ours are the stately rhythms of Adam of St Victor, and the softer ones of St Bernard the Greater. It was at this time that Jacopone da Todi, in the intervals of his eccentric vernacular exercises, was inspired to write the _Stabat Mater_. From this time comes that glorious descant of Bernard of Morlaix, in which, the more its famous and very elegant English paraphrase is read beside it, the more does the greatness and the beauty of the original appear. And from this time comes the greatest of all hymns, and one of the greatest of all poems, the _Dies Irae_. There have been attempts--more than one of them--to make out that the _Dies Irae_ is no such wonderful thing after all: attempts which are, perhaps, the extreme examples of that cheap and despicable paradox which thinks to escape the charge of blind docility by the affectation of heterodox independence. The judgment of the greatest (and not always of the most pious) men of letters of modern times may confirm those who are uncomfortable without authority in a different opinion. Fortunately there is not likely ever to be lack of those who, authority or no authority, in youth and in age, after much reading or without much, in all time of their tribulation and in all time of their wealth, will hold these wonderful triplets, be they Thomas of Celano's or another's, as nearly or quite the most perfect wedding of sound to sense that they know.

[Footnote 8: A few more precise dates may be useful. St Bernard, 1091-1153; Bernard of Morlaix, exact years uncertain, but twelfth century; Adam of St Victor, _ob. cir._ 1190; Jacopone da Todi, _ob._ 1306; St Bonaventura, 1221-1274; Thomas of Celano, _fl. c._ 1226. The two great storehouses of Latin hymn-texts are the well-known books of Daniel, _Thesaurus Hymnologicus_, and Mone, _Hymni Latini Medii aevi_.

And on this, as on all matters connected with hymns, the exhaustive _Dictionary of Hymnology_ (London, 1892) of the Rev. John Julian will be found most valuable.]

[Sidenote: _The_ Dies Irae.]