LIBRARY NIV5RSITY OF *AN DIEGO MEDIEVAL LITERATURE Essays on Medieval literature BY w. P. IKER ilcntion MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED NEW YORK : THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1905 AH rights rtscived : . PREFACE THESE Essays have all been printed before. The first of them served as an introduction to the first volume of Sir Henry Craik's English Prose Selections (Macmillan, 1893). The "Similes of Dante" appeared in the Modern Quarterly for March 1898. " Boccaccio " was read as a Taylorian lecture at Oxford, and published, in most honourable company, with other lectures of the same foundation Studies in European Literature at the Clarendon Press, 1 900. " Chaucer " (part of a review of Mr. Skeat's edition) and the article on Mr. Macaulay's Gower are from the Quarterly Review, April 1895 and April 1903. The essay on Froissart (and on his English translator) was written at the request of Mr. W. E. Henley for the new edition of Lord Berners The Cronykle of Syr John Froissart in the Tudor Translations (Nutt, 1901-3). The last essay, in memory of Gaston Paris, is from the Quarterly vi MEDIEVAL LITERATURE Review, July 1904. I have to offer my thanks to all concerned with those several publications for leave to reprint the essays. Nothing has been added, and little altered : here and there they have been trimmed, very slightly, in the phrasing, so as not to disagree with their present form. I am again indebted to my friend Mr. Paget Toynbee for his kindness in reading my proofs. W. P. K. LONDON, June 9, 1905. CONTENTS PAGE THE EARLIER HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE i HISTORICAL NOTES ON THE SIMILES OF DANTE . 32 BOCCACCIO . . . . . . . . 52 CHAUCER ......... 76 GOWER ......... 101 FROISSART . . . . . . . . 135 GASTON PARIS . . . . . . . -239 vn TH EARLIER HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE A/ THE attraction of medieval literature comes perhaps more strongly from some other countries than from England. In France and Provence, in Germany and Iceland, there were literary adventurers more daring and achievements more distinguished. It was not in England that the most wonderful things were produced ; there is nothing in old English that takes hold of the mind with that masterful and subduing power which still belongs to the lyrical stanzas of the troubadours and minnesingers, to Welsh romance, or to the epic prose of the Iceland histories. The Norman Conquest degraded the English language from its literary rank, and brought in a new language for the politer literature. It did not destroy in one sense it did not absolutely interrupt English literature ; but it took away the English literary standard, and threw the country back into the condition of Italy before Dante an anarchy 2 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE of dialects. When a new literary language was established in the time of Chaucer, the Middle Ages were nearly over : and so it happened that for the greatest of the medieval centuries, the twelfth and thirteenth, the centuries of the Crusades, of the Hohenstaufen Emperors, of St. Francis, St. Dominic, and St. Louis, there is in English no great repre- sentative work in prose or rhyme. There are better things, it is true, than the staggering rhythms of Layamon, or the wooden precision of Orm : the Ancren Riwle is better. But there is no one who can be taken, as some of the writers in other countries can Crestien de Troies, for instance, or Walther von der Vogelweide, or Villehardouin there is no one in England who can be taken for a representative poet or orator, giving out what can be recognised at once, and is recognised instinctively, as the best possible literary work of its own day and its own kind. The beauty of medieval poetry and prose is not to be found in England, or only in a faint reflected way. England did not possess the heart of the mystery. To spend much time with the worthy clerks who promoted Christian and useful knowledge in the thirteenth and fourteenth century dialects of Lincoln or Yorkshire, Kent or Dorset, is to acquire an invincible appetite for the glory of other countries not quite so tame, for the pride of life of the castles and gardens of Languedoc or ENGLISH PROSE 3 Swabia, for the winds of the forest of Broceliande. Not in the English tongue were the great stories told. Almost everything in the literature of the Middle Ages that is out of the common, that is in any sense magical or inspired, comes from beyond the English borders. For all this want of distinction there is some & compensation. The early English literature, if not representative of what is keenest and strongest, or most exalted, in the intellect of Europe in these times, is admirably fitted to convey to after genera- tions both the common sense and the commonplaces of Western civilisation, from the ninth century on- ward. A study of English literature alone would give a very false and insufficient idea of the heights attained in the progress of European literature as a whole : for there were worlds of imagination and poetical art which were open to some of the other nations, and not at all or very imperfectly to the English. But English literature contains and pre- serves, in a better and completer form than elsewhere, the common ideas, the intellectual and educational ground-work of the Middle Ages ; and that is something. The average mind at any rate is well represented. Prose and its development can be observed very fully and satisfactorily from a very early date. One of the chief interests of the early literature is that it reflects the process by which the 4 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE native Teutonic civilisation of the English became metamorphosed by the intrusion of alien ideas, either Latin or transmitted through Latin ; by the struggles of the English mind to overcome and assimilate the civilisation of the Roman Empire. Sometimes it is easy, sometimes not so easy, to distinguish the two kinds of thinking, native and foreign. The alliterative heroic poetry of the Anglo-Saxons is in- herited, not imported ; it is the product of centuries during which the German tribes were educating themselves, and making experiments in poetry (among other things) till they gradually formed the estab- lished epic type, which in essentials, in style and phrasing, and even in subject-matter, is common to Continental Germany and Scandinavia, in early times, along with England. It may be compared, even by temperate critics, to the Homeric poetry of Greece, and the comparison need not be misleading. The Anglo-Saxon prose, on the other hand, much of which is contemporaneous with the heroic poetry, is generally derivative and Latin in spirit, repeating and adapting ideas that are very far removed from simplicity. While on the one hand there are ana- logies with the Homeric age and the Homeric poems in Anglo-Saxon society and poetry, on the other hand there are many things in the work of the Anglo-Saxon writers which make one think of the way European ideas are now being taken up, with- ENGLISH PROSE 5 out preparation, in the East of the wholesale modern progress of Japan, and its un-Hellenic confusion. The spectacle is sometimes painful ; it cannot be called dull. The same sort of thing, the conflict of the two realms of ideas, German and Latin, went on in all modern nations, beginning in the first encounter of the Northern tribes with the intellectual and spiritual powers of Rome. This conflict is really the whole matter of early modern history. In England its character is brought out more plainly than elsewhere, and, in spite of the Norman Conquest and other interfering circumstances, the process or progress is continuous. For which reason, if for nothing else, it is convenient to begin at the beginning in dealing with the history of English poetry or prose. The work for which prose was needed first of all was mainly that of instruction ; and of the early didactic prose a great part is translation or adapta- tion. From the time of Ulfilas to the time of Wycliffe and the time of Caxton, and since, there has been ceaseless activity of the workers who have had to quarry into, and break up, and make portable and useful, the great mass left by the older civilisa- tions for the Goths and their successors to do their best with. The early English literature is strong in transla- tions. Translations were the books most necessary 6 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE for people who wanted to know about things, and who knew that the most important questions had already been answered by the Latin authors, so that it was a waste of time for the English or other simple folk to try to find out things for themselves. The quarry of Latin learning was worked zealously, and the evidences left by that activity are more than respectable. The Anglo-Saxon Bible versions, and Alfred's library of text -books Orosius, Boethius, Gregory, and the translation of Bede's history are works which in point of style have attained the virtues of plain narration or exposition, and even something more ; and the matter of them is such as was not antiquated for many centuries after Alfred. It was long before the other nations were as well provided in their own languages with useful hand- books of instruction. Besides the translations, there were other didactic works in different departments. There is a considerable stock of sermons some of them imaginative and strong in narrative, like the one on the Harrowing of Hell in the Blickling Homilies, and others, like the Sermones Catholici of ^Elfric, more soft and gentle in their tone more finished in their rhetoric. These may not appeal to every reader ; but the same might be said of the works of many later divines than JElfnc. The old English educational literature hand- books and homilies had merits that were of lasting ENGLISH PROSE 7 importance. The history of English prose cannot afford to ignore the books which, whatever may have been their shortcomings, established good habits of composition, made it fairly easy, for those who would, to put English words together into sentences, and gave more than one good pattern of sentence for students to copy. The rhetorical value of the didactic prose will be rated high by any one who values a sound convention or tradition of ordinary prose style for ordinary useful purposes. There are higher kinds of literature than the useful ; but it is some- thing to have different kinds of useful prose at one's command, and this in the tenth century was singular and exceptional among the vernacular tongues of the North and West. In so far as the intellectual problem for the early English prose writers was the reproduction of Latin learning, they took the right way to solve it, and were more than fortunate in the machinery they invented and used to adapt and work up the old Latin materials. The difficulty of the problem may easily be under- estimated. There were many things to hinder the adoption of a decent prose convention. There was, on the one hand, the danger .of a close and slavish imitation of the foreign models. One is reminded by a clumsy participle absolute here and there that the temptation which was too much for Ulfilas also beset the Anglo-Saxons, who for the most part resisted 8 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE successfully the temptations of foreign grammatical constructions, comparing well in this respect not only with the Grecisms of Ulfilas, but with the distracted participles of the Wycliffite Bible. The Latinism of the Anglo-Saxon prose is to be found mainly in the use of conditional clauses and a closer bracing of the parts of the sentence than comes naturally in primitive essays. There was another danger besides that of helpless and slavish admiration of Latin syntax, a danger perhaps greater, which was not so well evaded, the tendency, namely, to get beyond the tones of prose altogether into something half poetical. Prose is more difficult than verse in some stages of literature, and where a good deal of prose was made to be read or recited, where the homilist was the rival of the poet or the story-teller, there is small wonder that often the sermons fell into a chanting tone, and took over from the poets their alliteration and other ornaments. This propensity to recitative of different sorts is common to the whole of medieval prose, and is worth considering later. Meantime there is matter for congratulation in the fact that so much of the Anglo-Saxon didactic literature should have escaped the two perils of concessions to Latin syntax on the one hand and to the popular taste for poetical decora- tion on the other. The edifying and educational derivative prose is ENGLISH PROSE 9 what bulks largest, but it is not the only prose written in Anglo-Saxon times. There is another sort, and a higher, though the amount of it is woe- fully small. If one is justified in discriminating what may be called the primitive or native element from the Latin or adventitious element in the old literature and the old civilisation, then one may put certain Anglo- Saxon prose works along with the remains of the heroic poetry, along with the lays of Finnesburh and Maldon, as showing what could be done without the aid of Southern learning in dealing with lively matters of experience, and the lives and adventures of kings and chieftains. If there were nothing to take account of except the translations and the sermons, there would still be room for satisfaction at the literary skill and promise shown in them ; but it would be impossible to claim for the Anglo-Saxon prose more than the merit of being a vehicle for the common ideas of Christendom. But there is more than that ; there are, besides the borrowed views and ideas, a set of notes taken at first hand from the living world, which have a different value from the homilies. The best of ^Elfric's homilies are as good as the best of their kind anywhere. But that kind is the expository literature which sets forth ideas, not the author's own, for the benefit of listeners on a lower level than the author his sheep, his pupils. io MEDIEVAL LITERATURE That is not the highest kind, and there is a higher to be found in the Chronicles, and in the narratives of the northern voyages brought in by King Alfred as an original contribution to his Orosius. The record of the Danish Wars, the voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan, are literature of a more difficult kind than jElfric's homilies, and literature in a sense that could never be applicable to any translation. Of no old English prose can it be said that it is wholly free from Latin influence ; but in some of the varying styles employed in the Chronicles, and in the narratives of the voyages, one comes as near as one may in early English to natural prose prose of the sort that might have been written by men who had nothing but natural English syntax, no Latin models of composition, to guide them. Prose such as one gets there is of the rarest near the beginnings of a literature. The last thing people think of is to put down in writing the sort of things they talk about, and in a talking style. These particular passages, and the navigators' stories especially, are good talk about interesting things, and, what is more, about new things. They are full of life, and strong ; there is nothing in them to suggest the school or the pulpit ; the people who composed them were, for the time, emancipated from the Latin authority, out of sight of land, the old land of traditional ideas and inherited learning. Here is to be seen what they ENGLISH PROSE n could do when left to themselves ; here is the true beginning of independent explorations and discoveries in literature. There is one sense in which it might be no paradox to say that these passages, as compared with j^lfric, for instance, are modern literature ; being plain and clear accounts of real things, in which there are no great corrections to be made on account of any t disturbing prejudices. The region of JElfncs homilies is distant and unfamiliar, but no one feels any sense of strangeness in listening to Ohthere. There is a clear northern light on his reindeer and walruses, and the northern moors and lakes ; the air is free from all the Idols of the Forum and the Theatre. It was a happy inspiration that gave Ohthere and Wulfstan their place in Hakluyt's collection ; and indeed many of Hakluyt's men are more old-fashioned in their style, and carry more rhetorical top-hamper than Ohthere. There were great opportunities for prose of this sort prose written in the tone of the speaking voice, and describing the visible world and the things going on in it. It is idle to inquire why there is so little of such writing. One might have expected more, perhaps ; for the literary talent of the Teutonic nations, as far as one may judge from their poetry, was all in the direction of clear and realistic narrative, with no more superstitious accidents than were con- venient in the lives of epic heroes, and no Celtic 12 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE vagueness or airiness, but a sense of solidity and matter of fact about the very witches and warlocks, as well as the hero and champion, their enemy. It may have been that in England, where the old epic style survived with wonderfully little modification to a late date, there was the less need felt for any epic prose. The poem on the Battle of Maldon (A.D. 991) has all the strong virtues of a dramatic prose history, and its poetic graces are consistent with prose sobriety. Perhaps if this close-knit and masterly style, this old simple epic tradition, had not maintained itself, if the English war poetry had been dissolved, like its kindred in Norway and Iceland, into pure formalism and periphrasis, then perhaps the history of the Battle of Maldon and the fall of Byrhtnoth might have survived as a prose history, with all its epic details and all its various individual personages. Byrhtnoth's adversary and conqueror, Olaf Trygg- vason, had his life written in that way, and the prose story of his last battle has more likeness to the methods of epic poetry than to such unimaginative history as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. But not much is to be gained by theorising in this direction, and the unrealised possibilities may be left to dispose of themselves. Only, in illustration of the prose genius latent in the old English poetry, one passage of the Chronicle may be remembered the episode of Cyneheard and Cynewulf given under the date 755. ENGLISH PROSE 13 It is rude and harsh in its phrasing, but dramatic, with its dialogue admirably calculated and its sequence of events well managed : this passage is probably a prose rendering of some ballad. The situation is one that occurs again and again in heroic poetry and prose ; it is the story of kings fighting for their lives against their beleaguering enemies, the story that never fails of an audience, whether the hero be named Cynewulf, Cyneheard, Byrhtnoth, or Roland. There is a great resemblance in general outline to the history of Maldon ; there is the same loyalty and self- devotion of the companions after their lord is killed. What is remarkable about this entry in the Chronicle, if it is really based on a poem, is that it has got rid of every vestige of poetical style which would have been discordant, and has kept only those poetical qualities, qualities of passion or sentiment, which are as well fitted for prose as for verse, or better. There is little enough of such prose as this, but there is enough to take hold of. Together with such poetry as the poem of Maldon it forms the strongest part of the pre-Norman literature " the stalk of carl-hemp " in it, compared with which the rhetorical excellences of /Elfric are light and unsubstantial. Contumely sometimes falls on the unreason, the vapidity, the garrulity of medieval discourses, and it is sometimes merited. At least it is difficult to refute the critic who says that he is bored by the conven- i 4 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE tional homilies and saints' lives. But for some things a strong defence may be made ; for all the old literature that " shows the thing right as it was," and gives adventures like those of Alfred and his men in the great match played against Haesten, or natural history like that of the Finns and Esthonians. Medieval literature is not all monotonous recitative of traditional phrases ; some of it is fresh, strong, natural, and sane, and speaks in a tone of plain good sense. This has sometimes been forgotten or ignored, both by those who have an affection for medieval literature, and by others. So many things in the Middle Ages are quaint and exaggerated and over- strained, and therefore interesting, that the sober reason and plain sense of those same times are in a fair way to be forgotten. There is more fascination at first in medieval romance than in medieval ration- ality ; the romance is beyond question, the rationality is sometimes doubtful. It is worth while to look out for places, like those already cited, where there is no trace of what is usually associated with the term medieval, no strained or feverish sentiment, no effusive and tautologous phrasing. And strong protest should be made against all attempts to over- lay, in translations or criticisms or otherwise, any of the colours of romance upon the simple fabric of plain stories. There is enough and to spare of ENGLISH PROSE 15 romance ; true histories are not so common in the Middle Ages. They ought, whether in translations or merely in the reader's impression of them as he reads, to be purged of all unnecessary quaintness, where such quaintness as they possess is due merely to the old language, and not, as in much of medieval literature, to a real element of fancifulness in the author*. The two classes of early English prose, the deri- vative educational and the original narrative litera- ture, are alike in this, that at their best they keep clear of all unnatural intonations, and at less than their best fall into chanting or recitative of one kind or other. In the edifying literature there are, as examples of the false style, the alliterative Saints 1 Lives of .ZElfric ; in the other kind of prose the Chronicles themselves give a striking example of the change of tone. They come to an end with the lamentation of the Peterborough monk over the miseries of the reign of Stephen. It is simple and sincere, and in its way good literature, though it is another way of writing history from that of the voyage of Ohthere. Some of it may perhaps be quoted again, well known as it is. " Was never yet more wretchedness in the land, nor ever did the heathen men worse than these men did. For never anywhere did they spare either church or churchyard, but took all the wealth that 1 6 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE was therein, and afterwards burned the church and all together. Nor did they forbear from bishop's lands, or abbot's, or priest's, but plundered monks and clerks, and every man another, wherever he might. If two men or three came riding to a township, all fled before them and took them for robbers. The bishops and priests cursed them con- tinually, but they took no heed of that, for they were all accursed utterly, and forsworn, and cast away. " Wheresoever there was tillage, the earth would bear no corn, for the land was wasted with such deeds ; and they said openly that Christ slept and His saints. Such and more than we can say we en- dured nineteen years for our sins." The pathetic and appealing tone of this marks it at once as different in kind from the firmer and more impersonal history of the times of Alfred and his sons, and brings it into relation with all the medieval literature in which the prevailing mood is elegiac. So widely diffused is this melancholy, that one is inclined often to take it for the dominant and almost universal character of the Middle Ages, as expressed in books. It belongs to devotional works and to romances, to the Quest of the Holy Grail, to the Romance of the Rose ; and even the strongest and manliest writers writers like Villehardouin and Joinville are often apt to lose their self-possession, ENGLISH PROSE 17 and let their voices break and tremble. Pathos was a strong solvent in the Middle Ages. It belongs especially, though not exclusively, to the later Middle Ages, to the romantic, not the epic age ; not to the matter of fact and stubborn people who fought on foot with swords and battle-axes, but to the showy knights of the Crusades, and the times when the world was full of ideals and fantasies. In England there is one curious instance of the way in which pathos might be multiplied upon pathos. The Ancren Riwle (thirteenth century) is a practical book of instruction and advice addressed to a small household of nuns. It is not at all mono- tonous ; a good deal of it is kindly, humorous, and homely ; some of it is merely technical, dealing with the order of religious services ; some of it is moralis- ing ; some of it is devotional. One part of it, the Wooing of the Soul, is beyond all praise for its pathetic grace and beauty. It was not left alone in its seriousness and its reserve. The theme was taken up again and treated with a dissolute ostentation of sentiment, with tears and outcries. The Wooing of our Lord, as compared with the passage in the Ancren Riwle, may stand as one indication of the sensibility and its accompanying rhetoric that corrupted late medieval literature in many ways. There is so much good prose in Europe between the time of Alfred and the time of Elizabeth that c 1 8 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE one may easily forget the enormous difficulties that stood in the way of it. Long after Alfred there still remained, as a disturbing force, the natural antipathy of the natural man to listen to any continuous story except in verse. The dismal multitude of versified encyclopedias, the rhyming text -books of science, history, and morality, are there to witness of the reluctance with which prose was accepted to do the ordinary prose drudgery. The half-poetical prose of j there is no form or mood, no fashion of all the vanities, that is not in some way or other represented there. GOWER. GOWER has not lacked praise in his day ; few authors have a better record. To be ranked along with Chaucer, " superlative as poets laureate," to receive, along with Chaucer, the homage of all the notable English and Scottish poets for more than a century, and still to be remembered with esteem in the days of Shakespeare this is the reward of Gower's learn- ing and diligence. Naturally there is much to set off on the other side. If he was equalled with Chaucer, so was Lydgate, as in Dunbar's Lament for the Makers, speaking of the triumph of Death, He has done peteouslie devour The noble Chaucer of makaris flour, The Monk of Bery and Gower all thre. And the fame of Gower, which from the first had something conventional and fashionable about it, became more and more shadowy, till at last his reputation settled down into a place merely respect- able in the history of English literature, as a sort of foil to Chaucer. He is taken to represent the ideals 102 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE and the learning of Chaucer without his genius ; he is the average educated man of the fourteenth century at his best, brought by training and industry to the accomplishment of a large amount of literary work, but essentially commonplace and dull for all his polite literature. Such, it may be said, is the established opinion about Gower, where he is re- membered at all. Before Mr. Macaulay's, 1 there was no complete edition of Gower. His English book, the Confesssio Amantis^ had never been well edited ; his French book, the Speculum Meditantis, was lost. Mr. Macaulay has discovered the Speculum Meditantis ; he has made a good text of the English poem. These are the chief things. It is something to have found a lost work of an old English poet, in a language so interesting historically as Gower's French ; and the text of the Confessio Amantis needed revision as much as anything in the docu- ments of that time. Besides, Mr. Macaulay has given the Latin poems and the French balades of Gower, and provided for all his matter a thoroughly sound apparatus of history, philology, and criticism. Few books are easier to review ; everything that can be wanted has been foreseen. It is a pleasure to 1 The Complete Works of John Cower. Edited from the Manuscripts, with Introductions, Notes, and Glossaries. By G. C. Macaulay. Four vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899-1902. GOWER 103 look at Mr. Macaulay's workmanship. He has mastered his subject ; he has not grudged the most laborious scrutiny of details ; l and his good sense and discretion are shown equally in explaining his author's grammar, in deciding on the text, and in estimating the value of the poetry. That Mr. Macaulay's judgment is to be trusted on points of taste has been shown in his little book on Francis Beaumont (1883). In dealing with Gower he has been compelled to turn to many things less attractive than the purely literary criticism of his author ; he has proved that good sense in one department of literature is no disqualification for other kinds of study ; and though he has probably less liking for philological investigation than for the historical point of view, he gives the same steady attention to both. The old allegory of the wedding of Mercury and Philology has been too often belied by numerous relations of the lady ; it is satisfactory to find the parties, Wit and Learning, so well reconciled as here. The new edition will make no revolutionary change in the general estimate of Gower. He remains what he was before, in the common opinion 1 One curious point is decided by Mr. Macaulay. Why does Gower refer to " Civile " (the civil law) as authority for the fable of the " Dog in the Manger " ? Because the " Lex Furia Caninia " had been repealed as in though it has some merits of style, moving freely enough in a difficult stanza, is far below the Confessio Amantis. The Latin elegiacs of the Vox Clamantis are generally detestable verse, dressed up in tags from Ovid and other poets, which Mr. Macaulay has carefully marked and referred to their proper authors. The substance of the Vox Clamantis has some value, chiefly in the account of Wat Tyler's rebellion, with which it begins. No Latin verses of Gower are better than those which are oftenest quoted from this part : rapit dum Datoe strepit comes est quibus Hobbe, Lorkjn et in medio non minor esse putat, Hudde ferit quos "Judde terit dum Tebbe minatur, Jakke domos que viros vellit et ense necat, etc. The rest of the book settles down to a thorough K 1 30 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE criticism of life, with the common medieval pleasure in discovering corruption. Like other work of the sort, it is a source of historical information about manners. The Cronica Tripertita, three books of leonine hexameters on the reign of Richard II., or rather on two separate portions of it, is naturally of historical value ; and the editor's commentary here has made it ready for use. But the Latin works alto- gether add nothing to Gower's literary reputation, except that they show, like the English and French poems, a talent for remembering words. Gower is as copious in Latin as in his other languages, but his finer skill of expression fails him. The French Ealades stand by themselves as almost the only work of Gower's not meant to be large and comprehensive, though even here his love of system is active, and he makes them look as dignified as he can. The balade in those days was the favourite form for any theme that could be made to fit into it ; Eustache Deschamps and Froissart had written a great number, and new authors were to follow with more. Chaucer in English had perhaps done as much as any of them, with a very few experiments ; at least two of his balades Absolon and Rosemounde are among the best pieces in his poetry. Gower did not follow Chaucer here ; his Cinkante Balade s, dedicated to Henry IV., are in French. They were written when he was an old man, and might pass well enough GOWER 131 for the poetical works of Tithonus, with their im- personal amatory sentiment, their pallid rhetoric, if only one did not know what a strange demand there still was for the abstract art of love. Gower makes one more concession to " the tune of the time " in these poems, and they add another block of the polished commonplace to his literary monument. Still, there is a flutter of life in them ; and it is pleasant to find the old favourite toys again doing service, the phoenix of Araby, the chameleon living on air, and so on, with the old tricks of phrase (" wofull prosperite " again) : Pour vous, ma dame, en peine m'esbanoie, Jeo ris en plour et en sante languis, Jeue en tristour et en seurte m'esfroie, Ars en gelee et en chalour fremis. Indeed, when one remembers that these same things pleased the Elizabethans, that Euphues made his fortune out of the same old natural history as pro- vided the similes of Gower, it really becomes difficult to affirm that the Ealades are so conventional after all. No one has ever yet explained the enduring vogue of all the stock ideas of court poetry ; and Gower's commonplaces are found still current after many revolutions of taste. Sometimes he has some- thing better, as when he takes up again the story of Alcyone : Pour remembrer jadis celle aventure De Alceonc et Celx ensement, 1 32 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE Com dieus muoit en oisel lour figure, Ma volente serroit tout tielement, Qe sanz envie et danger de la gent Nous porroions ensemble par loisir Voler tout francs en nostre esbatement : U li coers est, le corps fait obei'r. Which is not unlike the motive of Dante's sonnet to Guido Cavalcanti : Upon a barque with all the winds that blow Across all seas at our good will to hie. Besides the Cinkante Balades there is another series on loyalty in marriage, which deals more largely in historical examples, as was common with the French school. Many of Gower's are repeated from the Confessio Amantis Jason and Medea, Mundus and Paulina, Alboin and Rosamund. But in nothing except the use of historical names do they come near to Chaucer's balade in the Legend of Good Women : Hyd, Absolon, thy gilte tresses clere ; nor to Froissart in the same poetical form. Mr. Macaulay's life of Gower, in his fourth volume, is one of his many pieces of careful investigation and criticism. The results, as he says, are chiefly nega- tive, clearing away some traditional errors and some too hasty inferences. John Gower, Esquire, was a friend of Chaucer, and received a power of attorney from him in 1378, to be used during Chaucer's absence abroad ; in 1382 the manors of Feltwell GOWER 133 in Norfolk and Multon in Suffolk were granted to him. About the same time, along with " the philosophical Strode," he received the dedication of Chaucer's Troilus ; in 1393 "Henry of Lancaster presented John Gower, Esquire, with a collar " ; in 1398 Gower married Agnes Groundolf; his will was proved in October 1408 ; and he is buried in St. Savjour's Church. These are almost the only facts discovered, apart from what may be got from his writings. The Speculum Meditantis is assigned by Mr. Macaulay to the years 1376-79 ; the Confessio Amantis was certainly complete in 1390, and revised with some alterations by 1393 ; the Vox Clamantis was begun not long after the rebellion of 1381 ; the Cronica Tripertita (like the Cinkante Balades) is dated by its dedication to Henry IV., as well as by the matter of the history. Mr. Macaulay's work may be praised without reserve, except as to small points which do not matter. He has not spared himself. Much of his time must have been taken up with things of small apparent interest ; his author's wisdom must have been sometimes more than sufficient during the pro- cess of editing and commenting. That the work was worth doing cannot be questioned. Gower, with all his commonplaces, is not like any other writer ; and his English poem is still fresh, its simple colours unfaded. Probably it will not be much read : there 134 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE are other things to read ; and the public which is content not to know Crabbe's stories is hardly likely to take up the Confessio Amantis. But in leisurely bookish places Gower may recover some of the attention he used to get from the lovers of poetry. One fact about his reputation is worth particular mention. The Confessio Amantis was translated into Portuguese by Robert Payn, Canon of Lisbon, apparently in Gower's lifetime ; his work survives in a Castilian version, to which Mr. Macaulay's attention was called by Mr. Fitzmaurice Kelly, and from which he gives two quotations, one from the preface " for king Richardes sake " the other the greeting to Chaucer. The Portuguese was probably, like the Castilian version, in prose. It is a pleasant literary memorial of the old alliance and sympathy between England and Portugal perhaps one good result of the Duke of Lancaster's expedition to the Peninsula. Gower, we would say, was well selected for translation. Spanish literature in the fifteenth century, for all its Italian studies, was not far advanced beyond the learning of Gower ; the Marquis of Santillana, for example, moves in almost the same order of ideas and subjects. FROISSART THE Chronicles of Froissart is among the books which have received the fullest share of honour of all kinds, from their own day to the present, without any grudging voice being raised against their triumph, or any sensible diminution of their renown. Frois- sart is still the name that stands for chivalrous adventure in the minds of all readers of history ; he is accepted without question as the author from whom the portraiture of that age is to be sought. The signs of his fame are everywhere : in the great libraries, in glorious manuscripts like the Harleian one, in the old printed copy that Lord Hunsdon used as a family Bible to record on its fly-leaf the births of his children, in a thousand testimonies from writers of all sorts, among which chiefly those of Gray and of Scott are memorable. Gray called him " the Herodotus of a barbarous age," and re- commended him to his correspondents. Scott, whose French visitors found that he talked the language of the old chronicles when he was at a loss for modern 136 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE words in speaking to them, has put the praise of Froissart in the mouth of Claverhouse, and has expressed it in this indirect way, in Old Mortality, more vividly than in a review or an historical essay. Lord Berners was happily led in his undertaking to translate the Chronicles, though indeed one may believe that with his tastes it was hardly possible for him to do otherwise. This book of Lord Berners is one that put the English tongue in possession of something on which the whole Western world, for generations past, had relied for information about itself and its manners. That Froissart should be turned into English before the last reflection of the age of Froissart had died away in the new era of the sixteenth century, that the courtly poet and historian of the times of Edward III. should be brought by translation into a closer partnership with Chaucer, was a thing to be desired more than most of the literary things provided under the reign of Henry VIII. ; and it was fortunately accomplished by the man whose mission it might seem to have been to rescue as much as he could of the treasures of the Middle Ages before they were overwhelmed by new learning. He translated Froissart, he translated Huon of Bordeaux. FROISSART 137 I Lord Earners is a follower of Chaucer and Malory as an interpreter in English of some of the courtly French literature which was for the most part so imperfectly understood, though so generously admired, in the island of Britain. What the English had been deprived of by the accidents of their history was the peculiar glory of the Middle Ages ; they had no proper courtly romance, no chivalrous stories in their own language of the same temper as those of France. Many things are attainable in a literature like that of England between the Norman Conquest and the Revival of Learning ; but what was not attainable before Chaucer, and very feebly remem- bered after him, was precisely that sort of grace which belongs to a Court, to a refined affected mode of sentiment, like that of the Romaunt of the Rose. Before Chaucer and Gower acquired it, the English had not the right of entry to that world ; and in most of their persevering studies of the way to be gentle, they are little better than the ambitious gallants in Elizabethan comedy whose education has been neglected, the Gullios who learn manners by the book of compliments. Nothing in history is more desperate than the attempts of English writers under the Plantagenets to master the secret of French courtli- ness. Sometimes the failure is ludicrous, as in the 138 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE " rime doggerel " of the ordinary minstrels ; some- times there is success of another sort, as in the great alliterative poems, which are not courtly in the French manner, though they are magnificent. Meantime, the days go by and the fashion changes, and but for Chaucer and a few others there might have been nothing left in English with the character most distinctive of those times the singular quality of beauty found in the medieval literature of France. Later, when the medieval forms were still nearer their vanishing, at the hour " when all the lights grow dim," the most notable work of French romance, in which all the graces, and not those of the Courts only, are included, the stories of Lancelot, Tristram, the Quest of the Grail and the Mort Artus, were rendered by Sir Thomas Malory in language that remains among the most wonderful things of the world. The reproach of England was taken away, though late and with difficulty. Nothing could give to England of the time of Henry III. such poems and stories as were written in other lands in those days ; but under Edward IV. it was not yet impossible to recover from the past, out of " the French book," a version of the stories that had been too high for the landward-bred and simple-minded English authors to copy fairly, in the bygone times when " the French book " was still new. What happened with Froissart was something of the same FROISSART 139 kind. There was not enough of the fourteenth century represented in English literature. Even after all that Chaucer had done, there was something left to do. Chaucer had gone beyond his age in many respects ; he is greater than Froissart ; but in the same measure that he surpasses him in imagination and in art he leaves room for the other man with his other, mode of regarding and rendering the world. Froissart's mode is more peculiarly and thoroughly the property of the fourteenth century than Chaucer's, through his very want of those affinities with Shakespeare and Cervantes that are found in the variety of Chaucer's workmanship and in his more liberal genius. Just as England, so long im- peded and depressed by the historical accidents of its language, obtained from Malory some of the riches of the thirteenth century, which at the time when they were first produced it had no skill to make its own, so from Lord Berners it received back Frois- sart, not too late to make amends for the loss it had suffered through the want of such a chronicler in the native tongue. It was by an injustice of fortune that England had been refused in the Middle Ages an historian writing English as other tongues were written by the French, Italian, and Spanish authors, by Villehardouin, Joinville, Froissart, by Villani, by Ayala, by Ramon Muntaner, by the Provencal biographers of the poets. What could be done to 1 40 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE redress this grievance was done by Lord Berners for history, as by Malory for romance ; and the four- teenth century, illustrious in the English language by so many things of a different kind, by Troilus and the Canterbury Tales, by the poems of Sir Gawain and of Piers Plowman, to name no more, was now presented with a new author, who belonged even more closely and intimately to the reign of Edward III. than Chaucer himself: an author whose whole business, it might be said, was to live in the fourteenth century and tell what he saw there. Lord Berners is not among the greatest of trans- lators his rank is nearer Caxton than Malory but his version of Froissart is a true version : it is really Froissart in English, and in English that sounds like Froissart. As Malory gives in English (with much of his own besides) the tone of the old French language of the Qjieste del St. Graal, so the sentences of Lord Berners' translation are of the fourteenth century and not of the sixteenth. He tried occasionally to write a style of his own, and was proud of it, no doubt : it appears in his prefaces, a style rhetorical and cultivated. He also translated, besides these Chronicles and the stories of Sir Huon and Arthur of Little Britain^ two modern works, one of which, the Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius, written in Spanish by Guevara, has a reputation as the parent of Euphues, while the FROISSART 141 other, also Spanish, of an earlier generation, the Prison of Love, by Diego de San Pedro, has the same Euphuistic syntax, and probably did a great deal to establish the new fashion of prose that was taken up long afterwards by Lyly and his contem- poraries. Two opposite kinds of prose are repre- sented in the works translated by Lord Berners. On the one hand are the writers who write because they have something to say, whether it be the story of the wars of England, France, Scotland, and Spain, or the wanderings of Sir Huon in Fairyland. On the other are the Spanish Euphuists explaining, to a world that runs its clauses into one another, endlessly, the counter doctrine of precise constructions and elegant phrases. Rhetoric flourished under the Tudors, along with religious controversy, in the silence of the poets ; it put many honest people out of conceit with their old-fashioned romances. Lord Berners does not allow it to vitiate his Froissart. His Euphuist translations came later than his Froissart for one thing, and he does not seem to have had any particular affection for that variety of prose, though his preface to Froissart shows that other kinds of rhetorical display had an occasional attraction for him. Such things are kept out of his translation of the history : the body of his Froissart bears hardly a trace of the rhetoric that illuminates the Prologue. The good taste of Lord Berners, which is not con- i 4 2 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE spicuous in his few original paragraphs, is shown in his devotion to his author, and in his refusal to let the original style be misrepresented. His very want of literary ambition saves him : he trusts in the matter of the story, and the right words find them- selves translating the right words of the French. It is not always the case that a writer is saved by his subject : there are many historians, from Ammianus Marcellinus to Saxo Grammaticus, who have told good stories in extravagant words, with a dictionary broken loose and rampant over their pages. But it happens sometimes that the matter prescribes the form, and this was the case with Lord Berners, as it may have been with Froissart himself. The history has no grammar or forms of sentence that in any way interrupt the narrative. It is in the old style the style of the French medieval historian. The fourteenth century is not defrauded in this transla- tion by the imposition of any Tudor order of rhetoric on the clear outlines of the structure. It is with Lord Berners as with King James's translators of the Bible : in the Preface they indulge themselves, but their main work is different and contains nothing the least resembling " that bright occidental star " which shines in the Dedication to the King, FROISSART 143 II Sir John Bourchier, 1 second Lord Berners, was born about 1467, and succeeded his grandfather, the first Baron, in 1474. " A martial man, well seen in all military discipline," is the phrase in which Fuller describes him among the Worthies of Hertfordshire ; and the record of his life, which is not full, is that of a loyal servant of the king. He took part in the discomfiture of the Cornish rebels at Blackheath in 1496 and in other warfare later, as at the capture of Terouenne in 1513. He went in an embassy to Spain in 1518, and suffered from want of money through the winter that followed ; he borrowed afterwards from King Henry VIII., and left the king his creditor at the end of his life. His career is a good deal like that of Sir Thomas Wyatt, with less adventure in it, and nothing comparable to Wyatt's heroic encounter with the Emperor Charles, but showing the same devotion to the service in which he was engaged. In December 1520 Lord Berners was made deputy of Calais, and held the office till his death in March 1 The life of Lord Berners has been written by Mr. Sidney Lee in his Introduction to the Boke of Duke Huon of Burdeux (Early English Text Society, 1882-1887) and in the Dictionary of National Biography, and by Mr. G. C. Macaulay in his Introduction to Berners' Froissart in the Globe Edition, i 4 4 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE 1533. It was at Calais, probably, that all his writing was done, and his writing for those years must have been a chief part of his occupation. The public interest was not neglected by him, but one may judge from the bulk of his writings the Chronicles of Froissart, Huon of Bordeaux, Arthur of Little Britain how large an amount of time must have been spent at the desk in matters not belonging to the office of governor. The Chronicles of Froissart was published in 1523 and 1525 two volumes, " imprinted at London in Fletestrete by Richarde Pynson, printer to the kinges moost noble grace." From this work Lord Berners went on to his trans- lation of romances. It is not known whether or not the Boke of Duke Huon of Burdeux was published in his lifetime that is, before March of 1533. The earliest extant copy of Huon of Burdeux, accord- ing to Mr. Lee's judgment in his edition of the romance, was printed about 1534, probably by Wynkyn de Worde. The hystory of the moost noble and valyaunt knyght Arthur of lytell brytayne, trans- lated out of fr ens she in to englushe by the noble Johan Bourghcher knyght lorde Earners was printed by Robert Redborne, without date. Whatever the order in which these works were translated, they probably came after Froissart and before the smaller books taken (indirectly) from the Spanish : the Castell of Love and the Golden Boke of Marcus FROISSART 145 Aurelius Emperour and eloquent oratour. The colo- phon of the latter gives its date of composition ; in the uncertainty of Lord Berners' literary history the dates of Froissart and of the Golden Book are fairly well determined : " Thus endeth the volume of Marke Aurelie emperour, otherwise called the golden boke, translated out of Frenche into englyshe by John Bourchier knyghte lorde Earners, deputie generall of the kynges toune of Caleis and marches of the same, at the instant desire of his neuewe syr Francis Bryan knyghte, ended at Caleys the tenth day of Marche in the yere of the Reygne of our souerayn lorde kynge HENRY the viii. the XXIII." So in the edition of 1536 and most others; the first edition of 1534 is said to read xxiiii. The twenty-third year of King Henry is 1532, the twenty-fourth is 1533; and according to this the Golden Book was finished by Lord Berners six days before his death, for he died on the i6th of March in 1533, and the book was finished on the roth. It is probably vain to suppose that the transition from romance to courtly rhetoric, shown in the selection of Guevara after Huon of Bordeaux, is significant of any progress or change of taste in the translator. Lord Berners, with all his literary skill, is careless about distinctions of kinds : he is not critical nor scrupulous. His choice of the Golden 146 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE Book does not mean that he was tired of history or romance ; it does not mean that he had been con- vinced of the laxity of old-fashioned syntax, and was bent on living cleanly according to the rules of the point-device grammarians. It means only that the Golden Book was in favour, as Huon had been and continued to be, and that Lord Berners, with his love of stories undiminished, was yet willing to take up another kind of book in which gentlefolk found pleasure and entertainment. That Lord Berners is not to be trusted for critical appreciation is shown in his attention to Arthur of Little Britain. For the story of Huon of Bordeaux, at least for the earlier part, there is nearly as much to be said as for the adventures of the Morte jy Arthur itself, considered as a specimen of authentic romance, such as was current in the best ages, and was fitted to be read by the author of the Faery Queene. But Arthur of Little Britain is a different story, not among the best, but one of the mechanical rearrangements of the common matter that repeated the old stock incidents and sentiments wearily, a book that one would save, indeed, from the judg- ment of the curate and the barber, but more for the honour of its ancestry and for the noble language, than for any merit in the author's imagination. The translation may be reckoned among the fine achieve- ments of Lord Berners : its style is that of his FROISSART 147 Froissart, and is enough to make one repent of having spoken harshly about the story of the Petit Artus de Bretaigne. The preface of the translator reveals the mind of Lord Berners more clearly than anything else in the scanty sum of his personal utter- ances. He is not an acute, discreet rhetorician : he is immersed in the matter of old chronicles so that he cannot^ tell the waking from the dreaming vision ; so much absorbed in the charm of narrative that any narrative has power to draw him. He plunges into the story of Arthur of Little Britain before he knows where he is or what it is about ; only when he has gone some way there comes a shock of misgiving, and he repents that he has engaged upon " a fayned mater wherin semeth to be so many unpossybylytees." However, he is in it and may as well go on ; urceus exit ; if it will not do for a sober chronicle, it is a story, at any rate ; and there are others, much respected, in which there are equally wonderful things. But the whole Preface must be quoted, and it hardly needs a commentary to explain what was in the mind of Lord Berners when he wrote it ; his good faith, his perfectly sincere delight in narrative, his secondary regard, by an afterthought, for the author's " vertuous entent " ; his admiration, with- out the heat of a competitor, for proficiency in " fresh ornate polished English " and the " facundi- ous art of rhetoric." 148 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE Here foloweth the Translator's Prologue : For as moche as it is delectable to all humayne nature to rede and to here these atmcient noble hystoryes of the chyvalrous feates and marciall prowesses of the vyctoryous knyghtes of tymes paste, whose tryumphaunt dedes, yf wrytynge were not, sholde be had clene oute of remembraunce ; and also by- cause that ydelnesse is reputed to be the moder of al vices ; wherfore somwhat in eschewynge therof, and in the waye of lowli erudycyon and learnynge, I John Bourghchere knyghte lorde Berners have enterprysed to translate out of Frensshe in to our maternall tongue a noble hystory, makynge men- cyon of the famous dedes of the ryght valyaunt knyght Arthur sonne and heyre to the noble duke of Brytayne, and of the fayre lady Florence, doughter and heyre to the myghty Emendus, kynge of the noble realme of Soroloys, and of the grete trouble that they endured, or they attayned to the perfourmance of theyr vertuous amorous desyers ; for fyrste they overcame many harde and straunge adventures, the whiche as to our humayne reason sholde seme to be incredible. Wherfore after that I had begon this sayd processe I had determined to have left and gyven up my laboure, for I thoughte it sholde have ben reputed but a folye in me to translate be seming suche a fayned mater, wherin semeth to be so many unpossybylytees. How be it than I called agayne to my remembraunce that I had redde and seen many a sondrye volume of dyverse noble hystoryes wherin were contayned the redoubted dedes of the auncyent invynsyble conquerours and of other ryght famous knyghtes who acheved many a straunge and wonderfull adventure, the whyche by playne letter as to our understandynge sholde seme in a maner to be supernaturall : wherfore I thought that this presennt treatyse myght as well be reputed for trouth as some of those, and also I doubted not but that the first auctour of this boke devysed it not with out some maner of trouthe or vertuous entent. The whyche [con- FROISSART 149 syderacyons, and other, gave me agayne audacyte to contynue forth my fyrste purpose tyll I had fynysshed this sayd boke, not presumynge that I have reduced it in to fresshe ornate polysshed Englysshe, for I know myself insufficient in the facondyous arte of rethoryke, nor also I am but a lerner of the language of Frensshe. How be it, I truste my symple reason hath ledde to the understandynge of the true sentence of the mater, accordinge to the whiche I have folowed as nere as I coude, desyrynge all the reders and herers therof to take this my rude translacion in gre, and yf any faute be, to laye it to myn unconnynge and derke ingnor- aunce, and to mynysshe, adde or augment as they shall fynde cause requysyte. And in theyr so doynge I shall praye to God that after this vayne and transytory lyfe he may brynge them unto the perdurable joye of heven. Amen. Thus endeth the Transla tour's Prologue. Lord Berners is a fortunate writer, whatever mistakes he may have made about Arthur of Little Britain. He was not turned aside by vanities : " the facundious art of rhetoric " did not corrupt him beyond a few innocent traces of ornamental language in his preliminary discourses. It was not his genius to do " any eclipsing thing," like Euphues ; while he had the instinct for sound language in con- tinuous narration, of the kind that does not glare or flash, and may easily escape notice for its goodness till some occasion comes to test it. How well the ordinary sentences of Berners will come through examination has been shown by Sir Henry Craik in his comparison of Berners' Froissart with Johnes's. 1 1 English Prose Selections, i. 123 iq. 150 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE The excellence of Lord Berners is nothing dazzling or astounding ; it comes from a secure command of the right words, in plenty sufficient for all his purposes, with an easy syntax, easily corresponding to his French originals, and turning them into English without any grammatical heaviness or sign of labour. As compared to Malory there is a want of volume and variety in Lord Berners, due no doubt in part to the character of the text he was translating ; for Froissart, with all his glory, is not like Malory's " French book " in opportunities for splendid diction, and Huon's ally, Oberon, is too substantial and sensible a personage for the enchanted twilight of the Morte D' 'Arthur. But, failing the greatest qualities of Malory's prose, there is nothing wanting to Lord Berners in the kind of literature he has chosen. He comes at the end of the Middle Ages in a reign not distinguished by much good writing, when poetry in England is nearly dead, and when prose is threatened by a recurrence of the old ornamental pedantries of " facondyous rethoryke," with the alternative of a rather prim correctness under the rule of classical scholars. His success consists in his steady following of the old fashion, the medieval fashion, of composition, with a regard for just such excellences of form as are convenient in such a mode of writing. Lord Berners used the medieval syntax so as to give few openings for FROISSART 151 censure, even from exacting critics ; and before the confused Elizabethan time, when prose seemed capable of most things except self-command, he showed how clearness, simplicity, an even and con- tinuous discourse, might be obtained without depart- ing ostensibly from the syntax of the fourteenth century. Any sentences from his Froissart will exhibit this plain, straightforward style in its sim- plicity' and security : Thus at the beginnynge the Frenchmen and they of Aragon fought valiantly, so that the good knightes of Englande endured moche payne. That day Sir Johan Chandos was a good knight, and dyde under his baner many a noble feate of armes ; he adventured himselfe so farre that he was closed in amonge his enemyes, and so sore overpressed that he was felled downe to the erthe. And on him there felle a great and a bigge man of Castell, called Martyne Ferrant, who was gretly renomed of hardynesse amonge the Spanyardes, and he dyde his entent to have slayne Sir Johan Chandos, who lay under him in great danger. Than Sir Johan Chandos remembered of a knyfe that he had in his bosome, and drewe it out, and strake this Martyne so in the backe and in the sydes that he wounded him to dethe as he lay on him. Than Sir Johan Chandos tourned hym over, and rose quickely on his fete ; and his men were there aboute hym, who had with moche payne broken the prease to come to hym, wher as they saw him felled. There is nothing remarkable about this sort of English except that it cannot be bettered. There is no particular formula for it : only, it shows a care 152 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE for rhythm such as was not always found along with the care for classical periods in the writers of that time. The grammar of Lord Berners is one that pays attention to the right spacing of phrases accord- ing to their weighty syllables : when this is assured, there is less need for the grammatical complications of clauses in their right order and degree ; the easy constructions of the old style leave it free to the author to tune his syllables to his own mind. The grammatical pattern of the classical schools has little attraction for him when he is taken up with the other device, of free enunciation with no broken, confused, or jarring sounds to break the tenor of it. There is nothing in Lord Berners like the ex- orbitant fondness for novel and emphatic words, splendid or swaggering, such as are noted in some of the Elizabethan translators. He has a rich and full vocabulary, but it does not blaze out in single gems. It corresponds to the vocabulary of Froissart, the beauty of which, as of all good French, and not least in the French medieval prose, lies in the harmony between the single words and the syntactic idiom. The prose is not a new invention ; it is natural, in the sense that it is founded upon the usages of conversation, quick and expressive, well provided with plenty of words for interesting things, unimpeded by drawling rhetoric, and free from any anxiety or curiosity about rules of good taste, FROISSART 153 because it had good taste to begin with, and did not need to think about it. The speech of Aymerigot Marcel, for instance, which may be pondered word for word and phrase for phrase as an infallible piece of good syntax and good diction, is expressed altogether in common and well-established forms, from the beginning, " Ha ! a ! du traiteur vieillart, dist Aymerigot," to the end, " comment qu'il prende ne adviegne du nouvel." This is rendered not quite fully by Lord Berners, but in the right manner of the original, with the same security and absence of constraint : Than tydinges came to Aymergot Marcell, where he was purchasyng of frendes to have reysed the siege before the fortresse of Vandoys, that it was gyven up. Whan he herde therof he demaunded howe it fortuned : it was shewed hym howe it was by reason of a skrymysshe, and by the issuying out of his uncle Guyot du Sail unadvysedly. Ah, that olde traytour, quod Aymergot ; by saynte Marcell, if I had hym here nowe, I shulde sle hym with myne owne handes ; he hath dyshonoured me and all my companyons. At my departynge I straytely enjoyned hym that for no maner of assaute or skrymysshe made by the Frenchmen he shulde in no wyse open the barryers, and he hath done the contrary : this domage is nat to be recovered, nor I wote nat whether to go. They of Caluset and they of Donsac wyll kepe the peace, and my companyons be spredde abrode lyke men dyscomfyted ; they dare never assemble agayne togyther ; and though I had them togyther, yet I wote nat whyder to bring them. Thus, all thynge consydred, I am in a harde parte, for I have gretly dyspleased the French 154 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE kynge, the duke of Berrey, and the lordes of Auvergne, and all the people of the countrey, for I have made them warre the peace durynge : I had trusted to have won, but I am nowe in a great adventure to lese, nor I wotte nat to whom to resorte to axe counsayle. I wolde nowe that I and my goodes with my wyfe were in Englande ; there I shulde be in surety ; but howe shulde I get thyder and cary all my stufe with me ? I shulde be robbed twenty tymes or I coulde gette to the see, for all the passages in Poictou, in Rochell, in Fraunce, in Normandy and in Pycardy are straytely kept ; it wyll be harde to scape fro takyng : and if I be taken, I shall be sente to the Frenche kynge, and so I shall be loste and all myne. I thynke the surest way for me were to drawe to Burdeaulx, and lytell and lytell to get my good thyder, and to abyde there tyll the warre renewe agayne, for I have good hoope that after this treuce warre shall be open agayne bytwene Englande and Fraunce. Thus Aymergot Marcell debated the matter in hymselfe ; he was hevy and sorowfull, and wyste nat what waye to take, outher to recover some fortresse in Auvergne, or els to go to Burdeaux, and to sende for his wife thider, and for his goodes lytell and lytell secretely. If he hadde done so, he had taken the surest waye ; but he dyde contrary, and therby lost all, lyfe and godes. Thus fortune payeth the people whan she hath sette them on the highest parte of her whele, for sodainly she reverseth them to the lowest parte, ensample by this Aymergotte. It was sayde he was well worthe a hundred thousande frankes, and all was lost on a daye ; wherfore I may well saye that fortune hath played her pagiaunt with hym, as she hath done with many mo, and shall do. The French is better and more lively, breaking out, for instance, in exclamation after the reference to the truce (" apres ces trieves, mat fuissent elles FROISSART 155 primes ne venues, entre France et Angleterre ") ; but the English, though less mercurial, is the language of one who is free-born, and who has not had to pay the price of the weary rhetorical schools for his command of phrases. There are blemishes, of course, in Lord Berners' Froissart. There are mistranslations and confusions. But these hardly affect the reputation of the book as a history well written and pleasant to read. " It might have been better, if the author had taken more pains " this respectable formula comes to mind rather too often in the presence of Lord Berners' easy-going translations, which sometimes recall the humours of the Ayenbite of Inwyt, " mills- to-the-wind " and such like. But the mistakes are not enough to spoil the story, any more than the Psalms have been spoilt in Coverdale's version, and others, by similar failures. It is something against the vogue of Lord Berners a small thing that he lived in a time when English spelling had contrived to make the language look other than beautiful. It is unfortunate that his clear phrases should be muffled in the misplaced and useless spellings that seem exactly the right dress for the shambling verse of the poets of that day. "Barkesse" and " marchesse " (for "barks" and " marches "), " physycyon," " pertaynynge," " cherys- shynge," " concludedde," and so forth, are well 156 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE enough for decrepit Chaucerian allegories, and for such moral interludes as make desolate the Tudor reigns for more than half the century ; but we could have wished Lord Berners a habit better fitted for his mode of narrative, something less cumbrous, like the spelling of Chaucer or of Dunbar. Unhappily to this grievance, if such it be, Lord Berners has added considerably partly through the fault of his French text, partly through the original and acquired ineptitude of the printer, but with more than can be fairly put down to their discredit by his unqualified neglect of the historical names. It is beyond all language of complaint. The man who has been led into the intricate fallacies of the names in Berners' Froissart is only too glad to escape in silence. Ill The Castell of Love and the Golden Boke of Marcus Aurelius are different in kind from the other translations of Lord Berners, as well as much less im- posing in size. What they want in bulk they make up in pretensions of another sort : it is in these that Lord Berners shows himself aEuphuist, and the Golden Boke especially has had ascribed to it by some critics the honour of having first introduced the rhetorical antithetic manner into English. It is impossible to say, in our ignorance about the shadowy character of FROISSART 157 Lord Berners, what motives led him to these books, or whether he really saw much good in their contrasted kinds of vanity. The Castell of Love is an allegory of the school of the Romaunt of the Rose ; the Golden Boke, so called by its author, is a pompous exercise in ornamental sentences by a disciple of the new learning. There is no need to think of the Chronicles of Froissart in order to show up the tenuity of the one and the inanity of the other ; the history of Arthur of Little Britain by comparison to either of them looks almost as substantial and as full of vitality as Don Quixote. Of course, as Froissart himself has proved, and Chaucer also, it is possible for a man to love at one and the same time the history of real characters and the phantoms of allegory ; but in the careless versions of the Carcel de Amor and the Libra Aureo there is no sign of any strong affection for either work. We may be sure that Lord Berners was fond of stories ; it is not proved that he had a liking either for the old courtly manner of allegory or for the new pedantry of moralising. In default of other theories about his literary taste, we may accept the statement of these two books as exactly true : they were done to order, " at the instance of the Lady Elizabeth Carew," who asked for the Castell of Love, and " at the instant desire of his nephew Sir Francis Brian, knight," who admired the Libro Aureo. Both books were much in favour, and 158 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE Lord Berners, whatever may be said against his Euphuistic clients, has the advantage, if that be anything, of having kept his English readers well abreast of contemporary literature in translating them. They were what every one in Italy, Spain, and France was reading, or wishing to read, or ashamed to be supposed not to have read. Most probably he cared very little for them himself. The two rhetorical books are very much unlike one another except in the common taste for a par- ticular kind of sentence. It is quite possible to fall into the idle mood for which the simple allegory of the Carcel de Amor seems occupation enough, and with nothing strained or absurd in its gentle, honour- able sentiments. For the sake of the Garden of the Rose, and Chaucer's Anelida, and " the floure of hem that maken in France," and all the great company of the chivalrous poets, it may be granted to this late author of the Castell of Love to show the way back over seldom-trodden ground into the old pleasances, the dreamy air, the vanishing courts and temples of the Hollow Land. " Many are the Mighty Ones," and there is still some power in those shadows of old poetry, though few steps wander now into the region of their enchantment. Perhaps now and then a careless bibliographer, when he thinks least of danger, may find himself caught by the spell. FROISSART 159 There is no such danger and no such charm in the Golden Boke, however much it may have prided itself, and called itself the Dial of Princes, and made the Emperor Marcus Aurelius help in the furtherance of its pretentious conceit. The Golden Book so styled is really a Brazen Calf, of the pattern invented specially for the Renaissance and its idolaters. The author, Antonio Guevara, Bishop of Guadix and of Mondofiedo, had a taste for sounding moral sen- tences, and for criticism of life in the r manner of Polonius. He included also in his theory the principles of lago's moral essay on the Characters of Women^ which are not those of the Castell of Love. Nothing could be more unlike the chivalry of Diego de San Pedro than the brisk remarks about the inferiority of women in the other Euphuist ; both authors seem to have been equally popular, though the points of view are hardly reconcilable, except through the rhetorical taste that the two writers have in common. The casuistry of the amorist San Pedro is expressed in the same manner of writing as " the answere of M. themperour whan Faustyne his wife demaunded the key of his study," a lecture to in- quisitive females which is not now so well known as it deserves to be. That the Spanish authors were the first to give currency to the antithetic way of phrasing adopted by Euphues seems to be proved, and in the history 160 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE of this kind of prose Diego de San Pedro comes before Guevara. It was of course a very old device, as Plato bears witness ; l but it was in Spain at the end of the fifteenth century that it was established as the proper manner of good composition, and the Carcel de Amor was one of the books that taught it. 2 1 The speech of Agathon in the Symposium is pure Euphues, and is reported by Plato with the same motive and the same zest as Shakespeare had in his rhetorical parodies in Love's Labour's Lost and elsewhere : oCros 5 ^jitas dXXorpt6T7;roj fj.ev Kevoi, o(/cet6rijros 5 irXijpol, rets rotdcrSe w<55ous /J.er' d\\r)\(av Trdcras ridels vvifrou, tv eoprats, tv xopois, Iv Ovalais yiyv6/j.evos i)ye/j.ui> TrpabryTa. fit? iroptfav, dypi6Tr)Ta $' tijoplfav, os 8vff/j.eveias, etc., Symp, 197 D. Earlier in the same dialogue the fashionable mode is touched upon, " for in this way the learned instruct me to keep the balance of syllables " : TLa.vffa.vlov 8k jravo-a.fj.frov, 8i8d(TKOv(n yap jj.e foa \4yciv ovruffl ol ffotfiol, 185 C. 2 Composed by Diego de San Pedro, at the request of Diego Hernandez, master of the pages (alcayde de los donzeles) and of other gentlemen of the Court. Printed by " The Four Companions " at Seville in 1492, and by " Fadrique aleman de Basilea" (Frederick of Basle) at Burgos in 1496. A Catalan version, Barcelona, Johan Rosenbach, is dated 1493. Diego de San Pedro repented of his very innocent vanity, and wrote a palinode confessing the blindness and errors of the Carcel de Amor . reprinted from the Candonero General, Valencia, 1511, by Bb'hl de Faber, Floresta de Rtmas Antiguas Castel- lanas, i. p. 152. The Carcel de Amor has alternative conclusions, the second written by Nicolas Nunez : this addition is found in Berners' Castell of Love. Thus England comes into some slight relation with the poets of the court of Castile, who might have given better enter- tainment than is provided in their treatises and allegories, if Lord Berners had gone to the Candonero instead of to their prose. Nicolas Nunez has a beautiful poem to Our Lady, written in the measure which was not accepted in England till long after : O Virgen que a Dios pariste y nos diste a todos tan gran victoria, torname alegre de triste pues podiste tornar nuestra pena en gloria. Floresta, i. p. 7. FROISSART 161 A crucial instance to show this may be found in the dedications of different versions of the book. It was translated from Spanish into Italian, from Italian into French, from French into English. The dedi- cations are different in the different languages, but one Euphuistic sentence is common to them all, and in the Italian and the French especially it stands out in t contrast with what may be supposed the natural style, or rather the favourite affectations, of the translators : " Como quiera que primero que me determinasse estuve en grandes dubdas ; vista vuestra discrecion temia, mirada vuestra virtud osava ; en lo uno hallava el miedo, y en lo otro buscava la seguridad ; y en fin escogf lo mas danoso para mi verguenca, y lo mas provechoso para lo que devia." Car eel de Amor, 1496. " E ben che io stessi in gran dubio prima ch' io me determinassi, perche vedendo la sublimita e intellegentia sua io temevo, mirando la prudentia e virtute io havevo ardire ; in P una trovavo il timore, ne 1' altra cercavo la sicurezza ; in fine elessi il piu dannoso per la mia vergogna e '1 piu utile per il mio debito." Career a" Amore del magnified Meser Leelio de 1 Man- fredi. Venice, 1514. " Pour laquelle chose premier que en ce labeur cultiver me determinasse en grande dubiosite" et diversitd d'ymagina- tions me trouvay. Car voyant la sublimit et intelligence de ton esperit ie craignoye, et premeditant la prudence et vertu m'enhardissoye et prenoye vigueur tres grande. En 1'ung trouvoye la timeur et en 1'autre seurete' et hardyesse. M 1 62 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE En fin ie esleuz le plus dommageable pour ma vergogne et le plus utile pour mon devoir." La Prison tf Amours^ laquelle traicte de Famour de Lerlano et de Laureate^ faict en Espaignol, puis translat^ en tusquan, et nagueres en langage francois. Paris, 1526. " For or I first entred into this rude laboure, I was brought into great doubtfulnes, and founde myself in dyvers ymaginacions. For seyng the quycke intelligence of your spirite I feared, and againe the remembraunce of your vertue and prudence gave me audacite. In the one I founde feare, and in the other suertie and hardynes. Fynally, I did chose the moste unvaylable for myne owne shame and most utylitie. . . ." After this in Lord Earners' text there is some confusion, due either to his habit of abridging, which sometimes interferes with the sense in Froissart, or to a printer's error. It does not matter much. The striking thing is that this passage of Euphuism is the only thing directly translated from the Spanish pro- logue in the Italian, and therefore, as the French translator had not the Spanish to work from, the only sentence of San Pedro's represented in the French dedication ; and it is quite different in rhetorical form from the Italian and the French contexts, which again are different from one another. Lelio de' Manfredi of Ferrara uses another kind of ornament altogether, the language of Don Adrian o or Sir Piercy Shafton, and not of the authentic Euphues : " flattery and fustian," quite unlike the FROISSART 163 neat syntactical play of the Spaniard. The Italian author, when left to himself, writes as follows : " Che havendo con non pocha diligentia e faticha ridutto questo picciol volume da lo externo idioma in nostra vernacula lingua a V. Excellentia (vivo lume de la virtute ; sola belta de 1' unica bellezza ; verita aperta del vero ; equale bilancia de la iustitia ; splendida grandezza de la liberalitade ; ferma columna de la dementia ; stabile fortezza del casto pensiero ; lucida gemma in oro nitido e pretioso ; amenissimo fonte in florido giardino ; micante luce nelle tenebre ; guida, governo, albergo e habitaculo de le nove muse) 1' ho dedicate ; havendo forsi habiuto mancho rispetto a la grossezza del mio ingiegno e la ineptie de la lingua, che a la altezza sua." The French translator, Rene Berthault de la Grise, does not borrow or imitate this enthusiasm. His style admits some of the vocabulary of Panta- gruel's Limousin ; no more than the Italian's is it to be called properly Euphuistic, though it is sometimes under the influence of the balanced phrase : " Et voyant que d'assez belles matieres traictoit mesmes pour ieunes dames Fentreprins mettre et translater dudit ytalien en nostre vernacule et familiere langue francoise." . . . " Et ie prie pour le surplus le plas- mateur de la cause premiere longuement te conserver heureuse et prospere." The Spanish sentence is marked at once as something of a different school. 164 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE It is very doubtful how far Lord Berners went himself in approval of the antithetic pattern. His dedication of the Castell of Love, which is mainly from the French, is more Euphuistic than the French, chiefly through the omission of a long sentence, where the French translator having facts to state broke down into mere ordinary hazardous grammar : " Ce petit livret iadis converty de langue castil- lanne et espaignolle en tusquan florentin par ung Ferraroys mon bon et singulier amy, des mains duquel en ce premier voyage que le treschrestien roy Francois premier de ce nom mon souverain seigneur a fait en Lombardie pour la conqueste de son estat ultramontain ay recouvert." But it re- mains uncertain whether or not Lord Berners ever thought much about this grammatical business : at any rate he is utterly destitute of the literary character belonging properly to Euphuists, as he never thinks it worth while to utter anything of his own, and does not ask for admiration. There can be no question of the influence of the Golden Boke and the Castell of Love as examples of English prose. " The fysher goth not to take dyvers fyshes of the river with one baite, nor the mariner with one nette entreth into the see. I promise you the depenesse of good wylles ought to be wonne with the depenesse of the harte, some with gyftes, some with wordes, some with promises, and FROISSART 165 some with favours." So Lord Berners translates Guevara, and so the tune was given out for a large company of authors who were more anxious to profit by it than ever Lord Berners himself had been. The Carcel de Amor^ with its different story, gave the same example of style : " Dexar el camino que llevava parecia me desvario ; no fazer el ruego de aqyel que alii padescia figurava se me inhumani- dad ; en seguille havia peligro, y en dexalle flaqueza," etc. But that is not really the taste of Lord Berners. He thinks, indeed, that prefaces and dedications should be ornamental ; but even here, as the dedica- tions of Froissart and the romance of Arthur prove, when he was outside the danger of the Castell of Love he chose a different kind of language. In these prologues he makes experiments in decoration, but they are not Euphuistic in the strict sense of the term : that is, they do not consist in the antithetic arrangement of phrases as that was practised by San Pedro and Guevara. The device that falls in most completely with his taste is that of amplification : especially in the Prologue to Froissart, where his use of triple synonyms has often been remarked " eschewe, avoyde, and utterly flye " ; " trouble, sorowe, and great adversyte " ; " right profitable, necessarie, and behovefull for the humayne lyfe." The usage was nothing new, and it is not to be put 1 66 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE down to the influence of the revival of learning : it was a piece of rhetoric common in the Middle Ages. The Anglo-Saxon translation of Bede puts regularly two synonyms for one word of the original, 1 and in the course of his Froissart Lord Berners might have come upon instances of triplets, as in some of the documents quoted by Froissart : " the sayde thynges to holde and kepe and accomplysshe," " his subjectes, alies, and adherentes," " our officers, ser- geauntes, or publike persones," in " the fourme and tenor of the letter on the peas made before Charters bitwene the kynges of Englande and Fraunce." Froissart himself writes : " Comment il peuissent prendre, eskieller, et embler villes, chastiaus, et fortereces." In the Prologue to Arthur of Little Britain the synonyms are not scattered so freely ; and as there is less appearance of a mechanical repetition, the style of this piece of Lord Berners' writing has some advantage over the others. That he should speak of " fresshe ornate polysshed Englysshe," and confess his failure in " the facondyous arte of rethoryke," shows that he knew of the more ambitious methods of composition, and that there is something of literary criticism in his choice of language, though he makes no great parade of it. 1 J. M. Hart, Rhetoric in the Translation of Bede, in An English Mis- cellany. Oxford, 1901. FROISSART 167 It is evident that he does not greatly care for such discourses as the praise of History with which he begins his Froissart. He might have written more, he says, but he was afraid that he might " too sore torment " the reader ; wherefore he will " briefly come to a point." His real business is with the translation, which may stand on its own merits ; and it is in the translation of history that Lord Berners has d6ne great things, in comparison to which his small original prefaces and his divagations into the Spanish rhetoric are unimportant. As a translator he has many faults. Want of scholarship is shown in all his books : he is easily taken in by the first impression of a sentence, and does not wait to see that it is grammar, and not always if it make sense. For instance, in the Golden Boke he is thrown out by a simple inversion, and confounds subject and object in this way : " I have redde in bokes and have proved it by myselfe, that the love of subjectes, the suretie of the prince, the dignitie of the empire, and the honour of the Senate, do conserve the prince, not with rigour but with gentyll conversation " ; where the French has " les conservent les princes " princes keep the love of their subjects, and so forth, not by rigour but by affability. Some of his mistakes, it is true, are not of his own making. The French translator of Guevara (1531) had apparently 1 68 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE before Lord Berners turned pretor en los exercitos, " praetor in the armies," into preteur es exercices, which becomes in English pretour in exercises. The Castell of Love, in spite of its title-page, was evidently taken from the French version ; and if Lord Berners and his printer between them place the opening scene " in a shadowed darke valey in the mountayne called Serva de Marenus in the countrey of Mase- donia," it is because the French author before him had turned the Sierra Morena into " Sierre de Moriene." Lord Berners had some knowledge of what the French books might do in disfiguring proper names, and in the Prologue to Froissart gives up the attempt to rectify them. He is not to be blamed indiscriminately for the cruel travesties of names in Froissart, though he might have done more to find out what the wonderful misspellings of the French printers really meant. Most of the names in Pynson's text are the result of an elaborate process of disfigurement. Froissart probably took some care, but he had no talent for spelling : he was con- tent to write I 'amour -eus Tubulus, meaning Tibullus, and Oleus for Aeolus, and Supernascus for Parnassus ; hence it is no wonder that English names were altered in his writing of them. Then came the copying scribes and the French printers, whose work Lord Berners had before him. Souegne and Melbegue, for Sweden and Norway, in Berners, chapter Ixxiv., FROISSART 169 are derived from the French text, and may stand as an example of the difficulties which the translator found too many for him. They were increased by the English printers, whose work was left uncorrected by Lord Berners, and who made additional nonsense of their own. But apart from his neglect of the proper names, this translator shows a want of conscience in his attention to the meaning. Such mistakes as have been quoted from his Golden Boke are found in his Froissart also. " Thus Jaques Dartvell endedde his dayes who had ben a great maister in Flanders poore man first mounteth up, and unhappy man sleeth them at the ende " (chapter cxv.) : this stands for " povres gens 1'amonterent premierement et meschans gens le tuerent en le par fin " ; that is, " poor men uplifted him at the first, and wicked men slew him in the end." " Par eschielles de cordes et graves d'acier " " rope-ladders and steel - grap- plings " is translated " with helpe of the archers." Achier^ the spelling in the text which he was using, was enough to set him on this bold but unnecessary and misleading version, which rather confuses a spirited account of an escalade, though it is picked up and well continued after this : " And first there entred, raumpynge uppe lyke a catte, Bernard de la Salle, who in his tyme hadde scaled dyvers forter- esses," and so on. i yo MEDIEVAL LITERATURE IV It is difficult to exaggerate the merits of Froissart as a narrator, taking a reasonable view of his circumstances and intentions. But it is possible to praise him wrongly. It is well understood now that much of the fame of the Chronicles is due to Jean le Bel, the real author of the greater part of the First Book ; and apart from those large debts that can be verified by a comparison of Froissart with the recovered history of Jean le Bel, there is much in the common estimate of Froissart that is really due to the Middle Ages in general, and the traditional spirit of story-telling of which Froissart had his share. His forms of composition are inherited, and other writers have described before him all the pageant of which he is the accomplished master : the movements of armies, the shock of battle, the valour of this knight and that knight, and how they severally bore themselves in the press, and so forth. So far from being singular in his command of stories, Froissart appears as one of a numberless multitude of historians, who have all of them Froissart's interest in events, and in various degrees the power of setting them out in a narrative. Instead of admiring Froissart, one is often inclined to wonder at the commonness of this gift of story-telling ; and when Froissart is praised for his sieges, adventures, FROISSART 171 ambushes, and all the rest of it, there crowd into the court where he is getting his reward, who shall say how many captains, voyagers, chaplains, and common soldiers with journals and memoirs that might stand along with Froissart's Cressy, if spirited actions, described as they took place, be what is wanted in a chronicler ? Of all the things in literature for which grace is to be said, there is none that is at once so plentiful in quantity and so inexhaustible in attraction as this kind of writing. It flourishes in any season and any climate. The Epic may wither and the Tragedy fail, but there is seldom want of the good bread of Chronicles, Journals, Memoirs, Narratives, whatever they may be called, and there is as little weariness in them as in any things composed by men. The shortness of life may perhaps have its advan- tages, as various philosophers have explained ; but it leaves a regret that there is hardly time in any ordinary life for all the memoirs of France. And there are other languages, even the despised medieval Latin, as Carlyle discovered in his Jocelyn of Brake- londe. The writing in Jocelyn's Chronicle is not so good as Froissart's ; but if mere lively sketching of an incident be what is wanted, why should not Jocelyn claim his own ? Those who wish to see past things as they were, will think as fondly of the streets of St. Edmund's Bury, and the old wives protesting against taxes with their distaffs, as of the 172 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE Court of Gaston de Foix in Froissart's Chronicles. At least they will not care to stop and choose between one and the other. Jocelyn of Brakelonde lets them have a picture of something happening, and again, as Carlyle has sufficiently brought out, he can give the impression of a person's character and how it strikes a contemporary ; and what can Froissart or Horace Walpole give more? Many things, no doubt ; but not things of the same essential, satisfy- ing flavour as the picture of events, in which the monk of St. Edmunds, and many a ship-captain in Hakluyt, might compete with Froissart ! The gift of narrative, like the gift of courage, is always and everywhere something near a miracle ; but these miraculous qualities are pretty widely distributed among the human race. Perhaps the tendencies of education and culture have been rather to conceal the merits of the chroniclers by directing attention to moralists and philosophers instead ; also the beaten ground of Livy, and the school historians writing mechanical sentences with the ablative absolute, are known to have produced an unfortunate aversion from history which has probably checked explorers. Dr. Johnson, who was sick of the Second Punic War, would surely have found the medieval chroniclers as well worth reading as the romances in Dr. Percy's library. He was not a friend of Gray, or he might have been guided differently ; FROISSART 173 but, as it was, Gray had few companions in his taste for the historians of chivalry. The love or the respect for great authors has naturally left out of notice the simple authors who make a record of events in any grammar that comes handy. The absorption of the schools in science and abstract philosophy, and the pretensions of the moral essayists (with half a dozen historical examples in their stock to enliven their account of human nature), pre- vented a right appreciation of old chronicles. Hence, the brilliancy of Froissart, who happens to be generally known or at any rate famous, has perhaps been too emphatically acknowledged, with too much isolation of Froissart from the other French historians, and also with not enough recogni- tion of the common and widespread faculty of good story-telling. Froissart has been praised for what belongs to Villehardouin, and for qualities that he shares with any one who has been in lively places and can give an account of them, or who can repeat with spirit the stories of adventure, or even of mere com- monplace occurrences, that he has heard from others. It would be easy to find in any age of literature any number of brilliant passages of narrative and descrip- tion in writers who have no pretence to fame as his- torians. Perhaps one must except the great classical ages of Greece and Rome ; for the ancients, or the Fates on their behalf, seem to have cleared away the 174 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE less successful writers to let Homer and Herodotus live at ease in their room. But the Gothic Ages have been less thorough in their pruning ; and from the days of St. Jerome to the last soldier's letter about this year's war there is an endless supply of the kind of history that stirs the reader of Froissart. It is very commonly disregarded by most of the human race, and perhaps most of all by the best educated, but it has its reward. When a chronicler of this kind is read for the first time, he has the same effect as Baruch had on La Fontaine. The discoverer goes about asking his friends : " Have you read Jocelyn of Brakelonde ? " Because Jocelyn has worked a miracle for him, in showing him visions of the past and things as they actually happened ! The praise of Froissart, the stock comparison to Herodotus, might have provoked opposition before this from the friends of the less famous writers. Have you read Giraldus Cambrensis ? or Galfridus Malaterra ? or Dino Compagni ? Have you read Pitscottie ? Do you know the real character of King Stephen, as shown when he sat playing at " chevaliers " with the boy William, that was afterwards Marshal and Earl of Pembroke ? Do you know the youth of Mark Alexander Boyd, " playing the loon on the Sabbath Day," and waiting at night in the Glasgow street to have the life of the Professor whose discipline was not agreeable ? The Professor, Mr. James Melville, FROISSART 175 has given his account of this part of the Renaissance in his Diary, and of other things as lively. Is his impression of what happened, and [his record of it, less vivid than Froissart's ? Has Froissart any- thing truer, anything more courteous, more absolutely sufficient in every way, than Melville's interview with Don Juan Gomez ? Froissart in such things is equalled by his two chief predecessors in French history, to name no more. He does not come nearer to the very truth of the thing than Villehar- douin. The approach to Constantinople and the thrill of apprehension and resolution mingling at the sight of the place they had come to take, the chief city of the world, the solemnity of this, the sudden revelation of the place, and the immediate shock of surprise, all the difference between what you have thought about and what you see before you, Villehardouin has put into one magnificent sentence : Quant il virent ces haus murs et ces riches tours dont ele estoit close et ces riches palais et ces hautes yglises dont il avoit tant que nus nel pust croire s'il ne le v&st propre- ment a 1'ueil, et il virent le lone et le 16 de la vile qui de toutes autres estoit souveraine, sachis qu'il n'i ot si hardi a qui le char ne fremesist : et ce ne fu mie merveille s'il s'en esmaierent, quar onques si grans afaires ne fu empris de nulle gent puis que li mons fu estores. And as much in his own different way has been done by Joinville. Among the shadows and the bodiless 176 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE voices of the House of Fame, the knights of Mansourah, as Joinville saw and remembered them, are still possessed of their human life and their own proper character. There is Count Peter of Brittany, hustled from the field by his men, and showing how little he thought of them as he spat the blood from his mouth and cursed them ; holding on to the saddle-bow to keep the rout from unseating him : " Bien sembloit que il les prisast pou." And among all the many good things that have been said on the battle-field, from the days of Sarpedon downward, we may doubt whether anything is better than the speech of the good Count of Soissons : " Li bons cuens de Soissons, en ce point la ou nous estiens, se moquoit a moy et me disoit : Seneschaus, laissons huer ceste chiennaille ; que par la Quoife Dieu ! (ainsi comme il juroit) encore en parlerons nous entre vous et moi de ceste journee es chambres de dames." Froissart has also gained credit for a simplicity and directness of style which is really common to his age, to all the Middle Ages, more or less. This is very pleasantly brought out by one of his French editors, who chanced to be drawn to Froissart not in the ordinary way. M. Buchon did not take up Froissart at first because of Froissart's reputation as a medieval historian : he had read other historians first, in Portuguese ; it was from admiration of FROISSART 177 Fernan Lopes, he says, that he turned to look for something corresponding in his own language, and so came upon Froissart. But with most readers the case is different. They have not read Fernan Lopes, perhaps no medieval prose at all, and they are apt to take as the peculiar beauty of Froissart that charm of simple phrases which belongs even to the weakest medieval writings in the vulgar tongue, to the Petit Anus, to the Reali di Francia, and not exclusively to the great books like the Quest of the Holy Grail. There is as wide an interval between the masters and the botchers in the thirteenth or the fourteenth century as at any other time, and Froissart is as far removed from the incompetent medieval proser as Gibbon is from Russell's Modern Europe. But there is this difference : that, while the useless prose of later times is neither fit for the land nor yet for the dunghill, there is generally something even in the feeblest of medieval writings which has not wholly lost its savour, something that attracts even a man of the eighteenth century, as Dr. Johnson was taken captive by Palmer in of England. It does not belong to the great books only, to Froissart or Malory ; but even the commonest hackwork of chivalry has a power of attraction in some of its phrases. All the weariness, all the respectability of well-educated books are unavailing with a certain class of readers if they only hear such opening words as " Or dist li N i y8 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE contes," and " Now torne we fro this mater and speke we of Sir Tristrem." Phrases like these kill the phrasing of modern historians e.g. " the arts as well as arms of his subtle enemy," or " foiled in his design, the weak but unscrupulous monarch," etc. If you test this sort of good grammar along with common phrases such as may be found easily enough at any opening of the books of chivalry " Now shewethe the story that anone, after that Huon was enteryd into the chapell " it is certain that some readers will consider this last the more admirable. What is beyond question is, that the dulness of the Middle Ages is redeemed by that grace of simplicity, and by the command of phrases that even in the poorest context yet bear witness to their gentle ancestry. Medieval prose calls up the thought, at any rate, of something different from the grammar- school ; and the grammar-school, with Holofernes for its teacher, is what is suggested by most of the polite literature that has been composed since the Renaissance, once its day is over. Of all the languages French had gone furthest in tuning the common medieval prose to effects of pathos, making the most of the contrast between deep meaning and innocent-looking words. No language written by grown men ever comes near the old French in giving a tone to narrative like the awe -stricken voice of a child. The old French FROISSART 179 writers must appeal to you for pity and wonder, must call out " how great the loss," and add in the next breath, " but there was no help for it, so they had to let it be " (" mais amender ne le porent " ). In old French literature the individual strength or levity of a writer's character seldom does much to modify this hereditary trait of style ; the most worldly and the strongest minded talk in this way ; there' is little irony known, and tears come quickly to the eyes over the common fortunes of the race. Jean le Bel and Froissart are gentle-hearted men, in different degrees, and both of them were poets and lovers of romance. They use this sort of language, and they use the formulas of romance to bring a thing vividly before the mind : " He that had seen this, had been filled with wonder." " Qui done veist hommes, les femmes et enfans de chiaus plorer et tordre leurs mains et criier a haulte vois tres amerement, il n'est si durs coers ou monde qui n'en euist pite " ; " There was nat so hard a hert if they had sene them but that wolde have had great pytie of them " : so the sorrow of Calais is represented by Lord Berners, cap. cxlvi., but he does not convey the full association of the original phrase with the formulas of the heroic poetry. " La veisies fier estor esbaudir " ; " there might you see fierce stour of battle raging, lances shivered, shields broken, the coats of mail torn through and i8o MEDIEVAL LITERATURE rent." It was in such phrases of the chansons de geste that the earliest French historians learned their ways of appealing to an audience. And it is the epic manner again that has determined the fashion of a sentence like this in the beginning of one of the chapters on Cressy : " Ceste bataille, ce samedi, entre la Broie et Creci, fu moult felenesse et tres horrible." It is used again for Najera in 1367 : " Che samedi au matin entre Nazres et Navaret " ; and it recalls the magnificent opening of the old heroic poem in the cycle of William of Orange : A icel jor que la dolor fu grans Et la bataille orible en Aliscans. It has the epic way of making the time and the place seem notable, as if they partook in the action. Such is the habit of the old French writers of history. V The most probable date of Froissart's birth is 1338 ; his life l is nearly contemporary with Chaucer's. Between the fortunes of the two writers there are many close resemblances : Froissart appears to have been, like Chaucer, sprung from a prosperous towns- man's family, and, like Chaucer, he found it not 1 The Life of Froissart, by Mme. Darmesteter, in the series of " Great Writers of France," has made it easy to follow his career, and not so easy to say anything fresh about it. FROISSART 181 difficult to get access to courts and noble houses. He had not Chaucer's imagination, nor his full sym- pathy with different conditions of men, but his birth and his good temper saved him from the exclusive preference of courtly and chivalrous affairs that has sometimes been attributed to him. A man of Hainault, a townsman of Valenciennes, had no right to look down upon respectable burgesses. In the notes on his own life in his poems he makes no pretence of great dignity for himself: he takes something like the humorous view of his own modest rank that Chaucer presents in the House of Fame and in the interludes before and after Sir Thopas. Froissart coming back from Scotland, with his one horse Grisel carrying him and his saddle-bag, is a traveller of less magnificence than Jean le Bel, and there is no affectation of courtliness in the con- fessions of the Dit du florin , how his money went in the taverns of Lestines. There was not the sharp division between knights and burgesses that is some- times supposed for example, in Claverhouse's de- scription of him to Henry Morton. Eustache de St. Pierre, of the town of Calais, is one of the heroes of Jean le Bel and of Froissart, and Froissart notes the death of a " valiant burgess of Abbeville " in a "brunt" of battle in 1369, "the which was great damage," just as if he had been a knight. He has given an account of his schooldays and 1 82 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE his early love affairs in the poem of /' Espinette amoureuse. This is his Vita Nuova ; but while Dante's story is made as solemn as the prophetic books that he quotes in it, and filled with the quintessence of the old idealist worship, Froissart's poem varies easily between the formulas of the alle- gorical tradition and a literal account of the way he spent his youth in Valenciennes, from the time when his amusements were like those of Gray at Eton or Cowper at Westminster to the incidents of his unsuccessful courtship. The fourteenth century was quite capable of such personal notes and such urbane confessions as are common in less " Gothic " periods. Froissart was a memoir-writer as well as an author of songs and virelays. His " memoire ymaginative," as he calls it in the Trhor amoureux, was employed in his own small adventures at school, before he turned to the chronicles of the "Prowess " of Christendom. The record of his life contains little besides his travels and his literary works, the travels being generally for the sake of his history. He went to England in 1361 to present a book of his to Queen Philippa, and spent about five years at the English Court. In 1365 the Queen sent him with good credentials to Scotland. He stayed fifteen days at Dalkeith, in the house of the Earl Douglas, and saw there his son, the Douglas who fell at Otter- FROISSART 183 bourne : " a fair young child, and a sister of his called the lady Blanche." In his account of Otterbourne, Froissart mentions that in his youth he had ridden " nigh over all the realme of Scotland" ; King David took him with him on a progress through the country, and he "searched all the realm to the wild Scots." In his travels he noted not only such things as were told him about Robert the Bruce and afoout the manners of the Scots (to verify Jean le Bel's descriptions), but also, more fancifully, the names that he used in composing the scenery of his tale of Meliador, such as Snowdon, which is the name of Stirling in romance. On his return, which is the subject of one of the pleasantest of his shorter poems, he seems to have spent some time with the young Lord Despencer, whose father-in-law, Bartholomew Burghersh, comes often into his story. Passages of conversation with Despencer are among the additions made by Froissart to his last redaction of the First Book. They have not the same extent as his report of the talk on the way to Beam in 1388, but they are significant : Despencer pointing out the towns that his family had lost through "the ill queen." Froissart was at Berkeley Castle along with him in 1366, and heard the story of it from an old squire : he asked questions, he says, to "justify " his history. Then he went to Brussels, where he was befriended by Wenceslas of Brabant for the sake of Queen 184 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE Philippa, and then to the Black Prince at Bordeaux. He was at Bordeaux on Twelfth Night, 1367, when Richard, son of the Black Prince was born ; and, being known as a chronicler, was bidden to write down the fact for his book. After a short visit to England again, he went out along with Despencer to accompany Lionel of Clarence to his wedding at Milan. The journey had a bad ending in the death of the bridegroom not long after the marriage. Froissart went on to Rome, about which he has nothing to say. He seems to have preferred Stirling, in his " Gothic " taste. Queen Philippa died in 1369, and Froissart came back to his own country of Hainault, where he must have worked hard at his Chronicles, with such diversions as are indicated in the Dit du Florin^ a poem written twenty years later. In an earlier poem, le Joli buisson de Jomce, which dates itself the 3Oth of November 1373, he gives a pleasant account of his own fortunes and of those who have befriended him : Queen Philippa, the Duchess Blanche of Lancaster, for whose early death he makes his lament, Isabel, Lady of Coucy, her father King Edward, her husband (Sir Enguerrand), and many others ; the Duke and Duchess of Brabant, the Duke Aubert, the three lords of Blois, Lewis, John, and Guy, especially Guy ; the Count Amadeus of Savoy ; last of all, his Scottish friends, whom he ought to have FROISSART 185 mentioned before the King, and the Earls of Douglas, Mar, March, Sutherland, and Fife : Haro ! que fai ! je me bescoce J'ai oublie le roy d'Escoce Et le bon Conte de Duglas Avec qui j'ai mene grant glas : Bel me re9urent en leur marce Cils de Mare et cils de la Marce Cils de Surlant et cils de Fi. 1 He dees not here mention Robert of Namur, for whom the First Book was composed. Froissart set out on his adventures when he left Hainault for England in 1361, to offer to Queen Philippa his first essay in history : " Howbeit I took on me, as soon as I came from school, to write and recite the said book, and bare the same compiled into England, and presented the volume thereof to my lady Philippa of Hainault, noble queen of England, who right amiably received it to my great profit and advancement." Berners does not quite rightly give the original meaning : " Ce non obstant si emprins je assez hardiement, moy yssu de Tescolle, a dittier et a rimer les guerres dessus dites." The book presented to the Queen of England was not any part of the present Chronicle, but a rhyming history, such as are found in plenty, though this one of Froissart's is lost. 2 It was doubtless in the 1 Buisson de Jonece, 1. 363 sq. (Scheler, Po fries de Froissart, t. ii. p. n). 2 Something has been saved : thirty-six octosyllabic verses on the 1 86 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE ordinary verse of romance, such as was used in the Life of William the Marshal long before this, and in Chandos Herald's Life of the Black Prince later ; and in a book that claims remembrance in connection with Froissart and Jean le Bel, by John Barbour, the historian of the Bruce. Froissart had from the first the right historical sense that made him go about asking questions and taking notes, but he was not at first, apparently, drawn to the methods of Villehar- douin and Joinville. He preferred the old mode of utterance, in rhyme : as in the days when prose was not thought fit for a gentleman to read, or rather to have read to him. Prose was enjoined upon him when he made up his mind to continue Jean le Bel, and to sacrifice his first attempt, or at any rate to disregard it. What happened to his plans is clearly enough explained in his Prologue, though it is not clearly brought out by Berners. He had, of his own motion and through his natural interest in the subject, gathered material for a history of the wars of England and France, chiefly about the battle of events of 1357, apparently from Froissart's poem, have been found in two parchment slips used for binding, and published by M. L. Delisle in the BibliothZque de VEcole des Chartes, LX. pp. 611-616. M. Long- non, in calling attention to this at the end of the third volume of his Meliador (p. 368), observes that it is most probably this early historical poem of Froissart's which is mentioned in the library catalogue of King Charles V. : La guerre du roy de France et du ray d ^Angleterre, et les faiz du roy de Navarre et de ceulz de Parts quant ilz furent contre le roy . . . escript enfranfoys de lettre forme'e, et rymf, a deux colombes. FROISSART 187 Poitiers and what followed, for the earlier history was rather too far back for his own memory to serve him well. This history he compiled into metre and presented to the queen. Then, as he went on with his researches, he found that it would not stand, and that he had not rightly made out the actors in the story and their proper exploits. He had the motive of heroic literature strongly at work in his mind namely, the desire to honour the great deeds of champions in war ; and he found that somehow or other his rhyming chronicle had gone wrong or come short in its attribution of glory to the different knights. So he fell back on the Chronicles of Jean le Bel of Liege, made these the foundation and the first part of his work, and continued them, starting in his new undertaking from about the time when he may have begun to suspect and criticise the book presented to the queen, which was about the time when Jean le Bel comes to an end : " Therefore to acquit me in that behalf and in following the truth as near as I can, I, John Froissart, have enterprised this history on the foresaid ordinance and true foundation, at the instance and request of a dear lord of mine, Robert of Namur, knight, lord of Beaufort, to whom entirely I owe love and obeisance, and God grant me to do that thing that may be to his pleasure." The life of Froissart is determined by the favour 1 88 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE of his patrons, and so are his opinions. This has been shown most clearly by M. Simeon Luce in his investigation of Froissart's ways of working and the processes by which the different redactions of his First Book were brought about. The English sym- pathies of the First Version (which is the most popular in manuscripts, and which was taken as material for the early printed copies, and therefore was translated by Lord Berners), -the English accounts of Cressy and Poitiers, are due to Frois- sart's attachment to the English party in his early life, to the favour of Queen Philippa, and the pro- tection of Robert of Namur. Robert of Namur came back from journeys like those of Chaucer's Knight in Pruce and the Holy Land, and offered his services to King Edward at Calais in 1346 ; although he was not constant altogether in his support of the English, he was more for that side than for the French. Froissart dedicates to him the First Book of the Chronicles, written from the English point of view. But before 1373, when he became curate of Lestines, under the patronage of Gui de Blois, Froissart's opinions began to change. Queen Philippa had died in 1369 ; he had come to be more and more closely drawn to the court of Brabant, where Wenceslas of Bohemia, husband of the duchess, gave his countenance to Froissart, and made him the confidential friend to whom he gave FROISSART 189 his poems. Wenceslas, son of King John of Bohemia who fell at Cressy, naturally had other sympathies in connection with the war than those which Froissart had represented ; while Gui de Chatillon, Count of Blois, was nephew of that saintly Charles of Blois who had died at Auray (cap. ccxxvi.), maintaining his right in Brittany against the English supporters of the rival claim, and his father too had died at Cressy *on the French side. For Gui de Blois the Second Redaction appears to have been made between 1376 and 1383 : it is found in two manuscripts, the chief of which, at Amiens, is thought by M. Luce to have been copied from Froissart's own writing, and from writing done in haste and not very easy to read. Gui de Blois, a good knight, who was hostage in England when King John was set free from his captivity, who like Robert of Namur had made journeys in " Pruce," who fought against the English in Guienne, and commanded the French rearguard at Roosebecke in 1382, was the chief patron of Froissart in the rest of his life : the Third Book was written about 1390 for his good master and lord, Gui, Count of Blois, and in the Prologue of the Fourth Book Froissart describes himself as " chaplain to his dear lord above named," as well as treasurer and Canon of Chimay and of Lille in Flanders. Gui de Blois died in 1397, before the Chronicles came 1 90 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE to an end, and before the last redaction of the First Book. Froissart probably drew away from Robert of Namur owing to a coolness between Robert of Namur and Wenceslas in 1371 ; down to the death of Wenceslas in 1383 Froissart was his friend and associate in poetical studies. His romance of Meliador, long lost but now recovered, and lately published, was written to introduce in it the lyrics of Wenceslas poems for which Mr. R. L. Steven- son's review of Charles of Orleans has said by implication everything most to the purpose. Their music is the thinnest that human senses can appre- hend, yet they are true and graceful in their own way, though there is no substance in them. Their author was gently born, and the piety of Froissart was well bestowed in honouring and preserving his- poems. The First Book was finished about the time when Froissart went to Lestines, about 1373 ; it was revised for Gui de Blois (the Second Redaction) between 1376 and 1383, and in these years and later Froissart was occupied with his Second Book, great part of which is the chronicle of Flanders. After 1381, when Gui succeeded his brother John as Count of Blois, Froissart was made his chaplain and became Canon of Chimay. Between Blois and the Low Countries he saw some more of the world, and towards the end of 1388, in order to get fresh FROISSART 191 material, he made the journey to Beam that rightly takes up so much room in his memoirs and in every account of his life and character. Froissart's Third Book begins x with the matters, from 1382 onward, that he learned at Orthez in 1388, concerning "the business of the realms of Castile, Portugal, Navarre, and Aragon, yea, and of the realm of England and country of Bourbonnois and Gascoyne." In telling about these things he gives not only the substance but the way in which the stories came to him in his journey southward, and also the conversations at the house of " the high and mighty prince Gaston, Earl of Foix and Beam." He brought with him his romance of Meliador^ con- taining the poems of Wenceslas of Brabant, " the songs, ballads, rondels, and virelays which the gentle duke had made in his time," and read the book aloud for the night's entertainment. Apart from historical criticism, no comment on this part of Froissart's life can do much more than repeat his own story, and that is unnecessary : his story may be read in its proper place, as he wrote, or as Lord Berners has translated it. There is no need for any chorus to the tragedy of the house of Gaston Phcebus " the piteous death of Gaston, the earl's son," and as little for the less solemn passages, where Froissart told the story of Acteon, as possibly help- 1 At the xxi. chapter of Berners' Second Volume (1525). 1 92 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE ing to explain the strange disease of Sir Peter of Beam, or where he listened to the squire's tale " how a spirit called Horton served the lord of Corasse a long time, and brought him ever tidings from all parts of the world." From this date his manner of writing history changes : there is more of his personal memoirs, a greater freedom of discourse and of digression. It was not that he acquired new powers, or that he learned the art of making his journal interesting ; for his poems, it will be found, show much the same faculty of dealing with personal matters as the conversations of Orthez, and Froissart had of course from the first been a writer of reminiscences. But he certainly increased his freedom ; and, when he went back in his old age to revise his First Book, he added many circum- stances " beneath the dignity of history," and gave, for example, not only the results of his early in- quiries in England, but in some cases the way in which his researches were carried out : for instance, in the talk with Despencer already quoted. And his later visit to England is recorded, not in the style of the First Book, but like the visit to Orthez : the conversations are fully reported, and the circumstances noted. Besides the information given by Sir Richard Stury at Eltham, it is told, in one of the memorable expressions of Froissart's quick sense for what was about him, that he and Sir FROISSART 193 Richard were walking up and down in the shade of a vine-trellis, while his old acquaintance of four-and- twenty years back explained to him the condition of England. Unfortunately this sentence did not come into Lord Berners' Froissart : " Et toutes les parties qui sont icy dessus contenues, celluy vaillant chevallier anchien messire Richard Stury les me diet et racompta mot a mot en gambiant les galleries de 1'ostel a Eltem ou il faisoit moult bel et moult plaisant et umbru, car icelles galleries pour lors estoient toutes couvertes de vignes." Froissart throve at Orthez : the generous life there and the favour shown to him and to his book, " the Meliador" gave him an exhilaration that does not seem to have passed away. He left Orthez in March 1389 in the train of the young Duchess of Berry. At Avignon (where he lost his purse) he wrote the Dit du florin^ a poem about himself and his own fortunes, in which he shows the same kind of spirit as in his prose memoirs of the same date. On his way back to Hainault he met his old friend and patron, " mon tres chier et grant seigneur," he calls him, " monseigneur Enguerran Seigneur de Coucy," whose life and fate (after Nicopolis) were so well in harmony with the legendary sorrows and the chivalrous reputation of the name he bore. From Enguerrand de Coucy he got news of English affairs. After a visit to Valenciennes and to Gui, " the Earl o 1 94 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE of Blois," he returned to Paris in time to see the entry of Queen Isabel on Sunday the 2Oth of June 1389 ; he gives a very full account of all the shows, pageants, and devices made in her honour. Later, at Bruges, he collected Portuguese intelligence from Don John Pacheco, and finished his Third Book, the whole of which must have been written at high pressure and with great zest and spirit. In 1390 the Fourth Book was begun, and dedicated, like the others, to Gui de Blois. But Gui de Blois was not quite able to keep all Froissart's old devotion. He died in 1397, ruined by extravagance and " accidie," having had to sell his estate of Blois ; and the latter part of the Chronicles is somewhat overcast by the shadow of his decline. He is not mentioned among the patrons whom Froissart consulted before his visit to England in 1394. Froissart applied for aid and countenance to Albert of Bavaria, Count of Hainault, Holland, and Zealand, and Lord of Friesland, to his son William of Ostrevant, to the Duchess of Brabant, and to the Lords of Coucy and of Gommegines. Gui de Blois is remembered at his death as an honourable lord who had been liberal in his help to Froissart and in his encouragement of the Chronicles, but before his death his wealth had shrunk, and the historian had to turn elsewhere for a patron. There was nothing exactly disloyal in this, and Albert of Bavaria was no new friend to Froissart ; but all the FROISSART 195 same there is something rather sad in the passing of Gui de Chatillon and in Froissart's acceptance of the new conditions. Albert of Bavaria and his son were Knights of the Garter, and attached to England in their sympathies, and Froissart had begun to think again of a still older debt than that which he owed to Chatillon his obligation to Queen Philippa and her children. He returned to England in July 1394- Naturally in this visit there was the common disappointment ; the old nests had other birds in them. At Canterbury Froissart stood by the tomb of the Prince of Wales ; he had not seen Richard, King of England, since the day when the child was held at the font in the church of Bordeaux. His old acquaintances were mostly dead. But he found Sir Richard Stury, whom he had seen last in 1370 at the court of Wenceslas at Brussels, and he was well received by the king, who accepted graciously his richly bound and jewelled volume of poems, " in a fair book, well enlumined, all the matters of amours and moralities that in four and twenty years before I had made and compiled." There is no attempt in these chapters of Froissart to keep merely to public history. It is in this part of his memoirs that the passages occur to which Gray calls attention in his letter to Wharton (January 23, 1760) : " Pray, are you come to the four Irish 196 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE Kings, that went to school to K. Richard the 2d.'s Master of the Ceremonies ; and the man who informed Froissard of all he had seen in S. Patrick's Purgatory?" Froissart in England in these latter days heard the grumbling of the nation, from Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, down to the popu- lace of London, against the misgovernment of the king ; and he takes notice in his own way of the same things as were expressed in a different manner by his contemporary, the alliterative poet, in his complaint and admonition to Richard the Redeless. He left England late in 1395. Not much is known of the rest of his life. He appears to have lived mostly in his own country of Hainault, working at his books. His history ends tragically, with the ruinous defeat at Nicopolis, and with the death of King Richard. But this was not the last of his memoirs. After 1400, though he did not continue his history beyond the accession of Henry of Lancaster, he went back again to the First Book, and began re-writing it in an original way, making his own that part of his Chronicles which had mainly been due to Jean le Bel. This revision the Third Redaction, extant in the one manuscript of Rome goes down to 1350, and is very different in style from both the other versions. The tone, which in many places had been flattened a little through the transference of Jean le Bel's original FROISSART 197 narrative to the copy of his work in Froissart, is now freshened again by means of digressions, remarks, and reminiscences of Froissart's own. The earlier history conies out in this last version more im- pressively through Froissart's indignation and distress at the fall of King Richard ; the character of the English nation as he describes it in the manuscript of Rome is determined by what he had himself observed, not in 1365, but thirty years later. Nothing definite is known of Froissart after this, and the year of his death is uncertain. VI The French poets of the fourteenth century, the masters and the contemporaries of Chaucer, have not received the same attention from literary historians that has been given to the earlier medieval schools. No one has set himself to explain and characterise them as M. Gaston Paris and his pupils have described the triumphs of the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries, the Arthurian Romances, Reynard, the Fabliaux, the early lyrical poetry of France, the Romaunt of the Rose. And they are still too medieval Guillaume de Machaut, Eustache Deschamps, and Froissart for the professors of modern literature, who regard the Middle Ages as merely a preserve for philologists and antiquarians, and who find that one chanson de geste is the same as 198 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE another, and none of them really worth much notice from an educated taste or a serious historian. Fortunately the texts of these poets have not been neglected, though their value has not been fully estimated for the history of literature. One can form one's own opinion, with the scholarly editions of the poetry of Froissart and of Eustache Des- champs, easily accessible as they are, and with Chaucer's earlier poetry to help one to an under- standing of their motives. Nor should the essay of M. Sandras be omitted, 1 in which he tries to reduce Chaucer to the rank of a mere dependant on his French instructors, and does no harm to Chaucer thereby, while he illustrates Machaut and Deschamps, and gives a clue to some of the mazes of that Garden of the Rose in which the French poets were fond of walking. All the poets of that school were servants of the Rose, believers in the Romaunt of the Rose, and their office might be regarded as a kind of lyrical varia- tion or descant on the themes given out in the authoritative text of Guillaume de Lorris, from which, as from a perennial fountain, their jets of ballades and virelays are refreshed and supplied : The God of Love, a ! benedicite, How mighty and how great a lord is he ! 1 Etude sur G. Chaucer, comidM comme imitateur des trouvtres. Paris, 1859. FROISSART 199 These poets, with Chaucer in his youth, are of the household of that lord, and find their way to his Garden in the dream of a May morning ; and their poems have the dreamy charm of the place, so indescribable, yet so distinct even from the things that are most like it, such as the Provencal poems, or those of Petrarch, which are akin to the Rose indeed, but not in the same close degree as the makings of Machaut, Froissart, and Chaucer. This common bond of loyalty, however, does not explain everything in that fellowship of poets, and Froissart, like Chaucer, has more than one way. It has perhaps been too often and too hastily taken for granted that in the French school of the four- teenth century there was nothing more than the lyrical repetition of the old conventional amatory motives in the form of ballades, rondels, and chansons royales, having great beauty of poetical form, in narrow limits, but without variety or 'novelty apart ' from the systems of the rhythms and the rhymes. If there had been nothing more, there would still have been Chaucer's Complaint to Pity and " Hyd Absolon thy gilte tresses clere " ; and also that most exquisite deliverance of Chaucer's finest poetical sense, the lament of Anelida. But there would not have been the dialogue in the Parliament of Birds ; and even the Book of the Duchess, closely as it con- forms in most respects to the tradition of the Rose, 200 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE is not altogether a dream. It is not strange that Chaucer should very early have found the ways of the French tradition too strait for him. But the French authors also, though they had not the same poetical career before them, are free to go beyond the limits of the Rose ; the poetry of Froissart and Deschamps, if there be nothing in it like the Canter- bury Pilgrims, is at least as free as the Parliament of Birds or the House of Fame ; and besides the beauty of their ballades and rondels (which any churlish classical person may disparage if he choose) there is an amount of humorous and satirical poetry that is hardly recognised by those who think the Middle Ages wanting in the modern qualities of wit and worldly elegance. The passages where Froissart tells things about his own life are as sound, as clear, as free from " Gothic " encumbrance as even Swift's autobiographical verses. What is most of all to our purpose, they illustrate the Chronicles. The motive of Froissart in the Chronicles is not altogether purely the love of exploits and prowess or the desire to praise famous men. Happily, in many parts of his work, especially in the latter part of the Chronicles, as has been seen, the memoir-writer gets the better of politics and the art of war, and reveals the true extent of this theme, which is nothing less than human experience as understood and remembered by himself. Froissart declares himself at last in the FROISSART 201 chapters on his visit to Beam, so very different from the history of the wars. In the first part of his work he does not talk about himself, and report conversations with the same fulness. He does not, unluckily, report the talk by the way during his visit to Scotland as he does the conversations with Sir Espaing de Lyon on their journey to Orthez. The earlier notes are given without their setting. Stirling and Dalkeith and the evening's entertainment there are not described in the same manner as the nights at Orthez in the house of the Count of Foix. The new method that he adopts for 1388, and had not used for 1365, is not to be ascribed merely to " the tattling quality of age," nor yet altogether to a maturing of his style, an enlargement of his scope, a growing freedom from the dignity of history. No doubt there was a development of this sort going on : he felt that there might be enough of battles, sieges, and ambuscades ; why should he not indulge his genius ? But his genius had found its way before this in the memoir notes that he put into various poems, and his poems show him as he really is more intimately than the more important historical pieces of his Chronicles, a man pleased with the recollection of anything that has happened to him, an average good-humoured Epicurean temperament quickened into something finer by his sense of a continuous excitement in the mere process of living, 202 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE and with a gift of expression in which his memoirs shape themselves for narrative. The short poem on his horse Grisel and his greyhound coming back from Scotland is a specimen of Froissart's mind. It is like a poem for a child, telling how the horse and the dog exchanged remarks on life and on their master. " See what hard work I have," says the horse, " with so much to carry, while you run free ! " " But consider," says the grey- hound, " how well our master cares for you, how he goes to see that you are fed, how you are given a comfortable lodging and a bed of straw or fern, while I am tied up at the door or anywhere to keep watch " ; and so on. In all which, besides the fluent verse, there is nothing remarkable, except that Froissart on his travels should have amused himself by thinking into rhyme the common trials of his companions he was fond of animals and the common charities of the road. There is no height- ening nor idealising nor ornamentation of the subject ; nothing much more than a pleasant appreciation of what is happening about him in an ordinary day's journey ; without any epithet or any poetical diction he draws toward his inn. Froissart has set down in verse, using his horse and dog to speak for him, his record of the fact that his heart leaps up when he beholds the church spire at the end of the day's stage, and knows that it means an inn not very far FROISSART 203 off. This is outside the allegorical garden, and it reveals the same good-tempered and frank enjoyment of life that carried Froissart through so much. Life is generally so interesting to him that he has no time to l>e wearied. Though the mass of his writing is large, it never looks like task-work. Tristitia was one of the Seven Sins for which he had no inclina- tion. Hence his writings move most easily ; he is never preoccupied, and has always time to spare. The romance of Meliador which, to be sure, is not a very substantial work, for all its length would seem to have been turned out as a sort of amuse- ment, a relaxation from the claims of history. In the same way that other good-natured man, Froissart's contemporary, Boccaccio "John of the Tranquillities " might lapse into Tuscan verse or prose as a relief from his serious labour at the Genealogy of the Gods or the history of the Falls of Princes. Chaucer was less mercurial than his French and Italian compeers, and shows more sign of study in his writings, and less levity. But Froissart, Chaucer, and Boccaccio deserve to be remembered together in honour of the century in which they lived as the three great writers who have least of the writer's melancholy. At the first glance there is a temptation to think of Froissart's poetry and his Chronicles as roughly corresponding to the difference between Chaucer's 204 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE earlier and later poems : as though the Chronicles and all Froissart's historical researches implied the same kind of turning towards real life, the same kind of discontent with the shadows of the Rose, as may be found in Chaucer's literary progress in the difference between the Complaint to Pity (for example) and the Canterbury Prologue. Froissart, we might imagine, like Chaucer, grew weary of the allegorical landscape and the visionary actors, of Beau-Sem- blant, Bel-Accueil, and Franc-Vouloir, even of the heroes and heroines, Paris and Helen, Tristram and Iseult, " Polixena et Dame Equo," and the other gentle ghosts of the Lovers' Paradise. But this anticipation is hardly borne out by the facts of Froissart's nature or the succession of his works. It is not exactly true of Chaucer that he ever gave up anything : the pageant of the Legend of Good Women is later than the strong life of his Troilus and Criseyde. Of Froissart it is even less to be affirmed that he intentionally withdrew from the artifice of the fashionable poetry because he was tired of it and wanted something more real to break his mind upon. His occupation (or his diversion) with the romance of Meliador shows that he kept up both interests at once. But besides this it has to be remembered that the courtly school itself allowed its poets to deal pretty freely with real life. The rules of their Paradise were not so strict as in the time of FROISSART 205 Tannhauser : they could go in and out much as they chose. It is easy to distinguish the poems or the parts of their poems in which they keep to the full ritual of the old observance of the Rose, and agayi the poems where cheerfulness is seen breaking in, where the light is daylight, where the tone is that of urbane conversation, or at least as near it as was possible for a fourteenth century author of moral essays in verse. In the scope of his poetry Froissart is not very different from Clement Marot. The wit and good humour of poems like the Dit du florin are the proper things for what was originally called Satire by its Roman inventors, and the old Horatian tag upon Lucilius, the Boswellian motto, is not out of place in connection with the poetry of Froissart ; for though much of it belongs to the schools of the medieval amorists, its character as a whole is rather that of confessions, impressions, notes, and criticisms of life : Quo fit ut omnis Votiva pateat veluti descripta tabella Vita senis. His poems got some share of his confidences, his prose memoirs had the rest, and the life of " Sir John Froissart of the country of Hainault " is shown in them like a picture. 206 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE VII The original author of most of Froissart's First Book is Jean le Bel, canon of St. Lambert of Liege, who, according to the chronicler Jean d'Outre- meuse of the same city and of the canon's household, " placed great care and all good diligence in this matter, and continued it all his life as justly as he could, and much it cost him to collect and gain it." Jean le Bel died about 1370, over eighty years old. Along with his brother Henry he took part in the expedition of Jean de Beaumont in 1327, which brought him to York, Northumberland, and Scot- land, along with the army of King Edward. He appears in Berners (cap. xv.) as " syr John de Libeaux," among the Hesbegnons of Hesbaye. Jean de Hemricourt, in the Miroir des nobles de Hesbaye, gives an account of Jean le Bel and his way of life that shows him to have possessed the virtue of magnificence, besides his faculty of writing sound history. He was one of the most splendid persons of his time, " of frank and noble conditions, and richly dressed," " grand et hauz et personables de riches habits et stoffes," with ermine, sendal, and precious stones ; " the fashion of his house was this, and he had in this way instructed his squires of honour, that without consulting their master, if they saw any gentle stranger, whether prelate or knight or FROISSART 207 squire, they invited him forthwith to dinner or supper, and any prince who visited Liege was brought to dine with Jean le Bel. When he went to church on holidays there was as large a following as for the Bishop of Liege, forty or fifty in his train, who all came to dinner with him afterwards ; he was looked up to as their head by his kinsfolk and friends, and took care of their advancement. He had good natural sense and good demeanour more than most men ; he was blithe and gay and glad, and could make songs and virelays, and followed mirth and pastime ; and in this course of life he obtained both heritages and pensions. By the grace of God he lived all his days in prosperity and good health, and was more than eighty years old when he died, and according to his rank were his obsequies reverently and costly carried out. He left great possessions to two sons twins named John and Giles, who were born to him when he was old of a damsel of good family belonging to the house of Des Prez." The description of Jean le Bel's magnificence might make one a little anxious about his talent for literature it is consistent with florid I tastes ; but of these there is no sign in his Chronicles, and his narrative has less affinity with the ermine and sendal and the rich dis- play of his household than with the habits of warfare which he learned in following his lord Jean de Beau- mont. His client, Jean de Hemricourt, has said not 208 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE a word too much in praising the liberal mind of his master : Jean le Bel had a clear head and a frank bearing, and his Chronicles are not affected by any touch of vainglory. He had imagination, among other things, and was a lover of heroic poetry ; though it is not so pronounced as in some of the earlier French historical prose, there is in Jean le Bel the tone of the epic language, the phrasing of the chansons de geste ; it has been noted also in Froissart. In Jean le Bel's expedition in England with John of Hainault the places that belonged to King Arthur gain his attention, and he is pleased when he writes the name of " Carduel in Wales which was in the days of Arthur," or " a white abbey which in the days of King Arthur was called the Blanche Lande" and again, " the castle of Windsor that King Arthur built, and where the Table Round was first estab- lished." He remembers the famous sieges made by Charlemagne, Alexander, and Godfrey, and com- pares the valour shown at Neville's Cross to that of Roland and Oliver. He has the same motive as Froissart in bringing out the prowess of good knights and in 'recording the grans apertises d'armes. At the same time his judgment is unclouded by any of the magic mists of romance ; the vigour of his story is not sophisticated, and indeed his story was begun in a sort of protest against the marvellous exaggera- tions of common minstrels, the "jongliours et en- FROISSART 209 chantours en place," as Froissart calls them in his reference to Jean le Bel's antipathy for their fables. He writes for " persons of reason and understand- ing," gens de raison et cT entendement ^ in order to displace the bourdes confrouvees, " the multitude of words invented and repeated to embellish the rhyme, and the crowd of wonderful achievements told of certain knights and other persons," all out of measure, and more likely to discredit the subjects of them by their impossibility than in any way to do them honour. This pursuit of a true method is justified by the talents of Jean le Bel ; his praise of " sooth- fastness " is by no means a conventional opening or a hackneyed depreciation of rival authors. Nor does it mean anything prosaic or dull : such things are far removed from the generous heart whose ways were described by Jean de Hemricourt. He is the author of some of the best known and most highly honoured things in Froissart : the chapters on the surrender of Calais and the devotion of Eustache de St. Pierre, and on the death of the Bruce. He wrote the often-quoted account of the Scots and their warfare, from his own observation ; and Froissart, though he studied the same subject on the same ground, did not cancel the report of Jean le Bel in favour of any newer notes of his own. One chapter he struck out, because he would not believe it true ; but true or not, it remains as one of the p 210 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE finest things in old French prose the tragic story of the Countess of Salisbury, the dishonour of King Edward, and the sentence spoken on him by the wronged earl, more lofty, more magnanimous, and more impressive in its power of condemnation than the revenge taken upon Tarquin. Jean le Bel, who can use with good effect the ordinary easy con- versational language of medieval French chroniclers, can also rise to the height of a tragic argument in phrases of as much severity and dignity as any Roman author would have found appropriate for such a theme. Froissart has left out other things also which are worth reading in the original Chronicle. Jean le Bel has a character of his own ; and though Froissart's editing is most judicious for his own purposes, it is not quite the same thing as Jean le Bel speaking in his own person. Jean le Bel was at York in 1327 and Froissart was not ; so naturally there is a difference in the two versions. Froissart keeps everything that he can, but he cannot keep the directness and immediate force of the older historian's remarks on what he actually saw : " Incontinent after dinner there began a great fray between some of the grooms and pages of the strangers and the archers of England who were lodged among them in the said suburbs." Froissart gives all this, but he cannot speak of it as Jean le Bel FROISSART 211 goes on to do : " And I myself, who was there present, could not. enter my lodging to arm me, myself and my companions, so many English did I find about our doors in a mind to wreck and plunder at t large ; and we saw the arrows flying so thick upon us that it behoved us to withdraw to another place and wait the event along with the others." And " we fell into the hatred of all the country except the great lords ; the people hated us worse than the Scots who were burning their country." The narrator who can say " we " has an advantage over one who says " they " ; and Jean le Bel, who saw the smoke of the Scottish fires with his own eyes, is worth listening to apart from Froissart. The smoke of an invading enemy seems to have dwelt in his imagination, for he brings it in vividly in his account of 1 346, and Froissart here has not kept the touch that emphasises the weakness of the French king : " How was it that King Philip who was at Paris a bare seven leagues away, with all his power of lords and men at arms that he had summoned for defence of the country, how was it that he did not fall upon those enemies who were making their smoke and flames fly over his head in Paris, or why did he not at least defend the passage of the river ? " Jean le Bel's criticism of the two kings is also left out by Froissart, but it is a fine piece of historical censure. Room may be found for it here, not simply 212 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE as an historical note on the matters contained in the First Book of Froissart, but rather to show the independent value of Jean le Bel's historical judg- ment and his gift of plain speaking : Some who shall hear this history read will wonder why I call the King of England " the noble King Edward," but the other simply " King Philip of France " ; so they might think and imagine that I maintained a side and a party. With due respect, I do not write thus out of party leanings, but I do it to honour him who in this history bears himself most nobly : that is the noble King Edward, for whom no honour is too great ; for in all his needs he has always taken good counsel, and listened to his people, knights, and squires, and honoured each in his degree, and well defended his realm against his enemies, and made large conquests upon them, and ventured his own body at home and forth of his realm along with his men unwavering, and has well paid his soldiers and allies, and freely given of his own : therefore he ought to be willingly served by all and everywhere have the name of noble king. Not thus has the King of France acted, but has let his land in many marches be exiled and wasted, and has in all places kept himself so as to ease his person and keep from danger ; and has always trusted poor counsel of clerks and prelates, and even of those who said to him, " Sir, be not dismayed and run no risk of your life, for hardly will you guard against treason ; who can tell that any man is loyal ? But let this young King of England waste his time in folly and spend his substance ; his smoke will not take the kingdom from you, and when he has spent all he must go back ; he has not yet conquered Boulogne, Amiens, or Saint Omer ; when he is gone you may easily make good your losses." Such counsellors King Philip followed, not the lords and barons of his country ; but some he put to shameful death, and their heirs disherited. The FROISSART 213 less should be his praise and honour among all men. Withal, he sore oppressed his country under taxes, and the churches with tithes, and forged bad money in different places, and again called it in and uttered better, and again debased it, so that in trade there was no certainty. And the soldiers were never well paid, but often had to spend of tneir own, in fault of payment, and also had often to sell their horse and armour before they found the paymasters. A prince who thus behaves himself ought to have the less love from his men ; and it is great pity and loss when by ill counsel the realm of France that had surmounted all the world in honour, wit, learning, chivalry, merchandise, and all good things is thus tormented and to this mischief brought by its enemies and itself, that he who ought to be lord of it is captive, and nearly all the lords and knights of the land are dead or in prison. Verily I believe it is by miracle that God suffers it so to be. And now I will leave off, I can say no more than this, and will return to our matter to speak of the noble King Edward, whom all should love, praise, and honour, for well he has deserved it ; God be praised. (Chap. LXX.) The recovery and publication of Jean le Bel's authentic work 1 is a gain not so much of new material for French history as of an author with a mind and style of his own, who now has his proper place among the masters of the French tongue. He has not the variety nor the wide range of Froissart. But he writes like a man of honour and a man of good sense, acquainted with great affairs and able to find the right words for them. 1 Les Vrayet chroniques de Meaire Jehan le Bel. Edited in two volumes by M. L. Polain : Brussels, 1863. 2i 4 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE Incidentally, and apart from the matter of his book, Jean Je Bel will always be interesting through the contrast between the quiet tone of his narrative and the apparent pomp and glory of his manner of living. It must perplex a moralist to find this very unaffected story coming from a man of such splendid ways as those described by the clerk of Hesbaye ; while it might also puzzle an economist to explain how the revenue of Jean le Bel was increased under those conditions, which look so much like mere ostentation and prodigality. Such resolution and independence are not easily found in so rich a house. The contrast is like that in the case of Chaucer's Monk, from whom, as he is described in the Prologue, one would not expect the " Tragedies " that he after- wards recites, nor the gravity of his mood and disposition. VIII Froissart's Chronicles have been found wanting in many respects, and their credit has been damaged in several places by exact historical criticism ; but these blemishes, even from the scientific point of view, are small in comparison to his merits and the great amount of news of all sorts that he has collected and exhibited. Was it possible for him to have done more than he did by way of "justifying" his his- tory ? The wonder is that he could have done so FROISSART 215 much, when we consider what a great mass of writing is published as his work, in prose and verse. And not all of his work is extant. There was hardly time for him to do more. Between his researches, his taking of notes, his composition of new chapters for his Chronicles, and his revision of old work, besides his songs and virelays, his moral poems, and the leisurely romance of Meliador, he can seldom have been idle. He was not negligent, though he may have made mistakes ; and it is hard to see how he could have spent his time better than he did, if he was to accomplish the enormous labour he had set himself to get through. Was he the historian of a declining age, of false chivalry ? He has been so represented, but it is not easy to accept this opinion about him. He is spoken of sometimes as if his Chronicles were a romance of chivalry, without substance or gravity, as if all the life in it were a pageant or a tournament. But is this really so ? Froissart has the French character of the four- teenth century. He notes, by the way, that the English think every one French who uses the Gallic tongue ; but although he would not call himself French, there is no injustice in giving him the common qualities of the French courtly authors in the time in which he lived. French literature in the fourteenth century had undoubtedly not a little 2i6 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE vanity in it. The court poetry of Froissart and his contemporaries, including Chaucer, was living on ideas and imaginations that had begun to lose their youth and freshness even before the days of Guillaume de Lorris, a hundred years and more before Froissart was born. The motives of the old French heroic romances were exhausted, and Meliador is the dream of a shadow ; the old lyric motives of Provence and of the Provencal schools in other languages had been repeated for generations before the poets of ballades and rondels adopted new metrical forms without changing the spirit or the common ideas of the old tradition. Meliador, both in Froissart's narrative couplets and in the rondels and virelays of Duke Wenceslas, is all reminiscence and repetition of conventional common forms, and Meliador is a representative book : if one wishes to know what chivalrous poetry had come to in 1380, it is to be found there. It has graces indeed, but there is no strength in it. The strength of poetry is elsewhere at that time, in the Italian study of classical litera- ture and in Chaucer's following of the Italians. But this does not dispose of Froissart's Chronicles, and even Froissart's poetry, it has been seen, is not all convention and repetition. It is true that in many respects his age was one of literary exhaustion, and it is true also that Froissart remained all his life insensible to the chief new sources of literary strength FROISSART 217 that were accessible in his time : he had no interest in what was being done in Italy, and in spirit he came no nearer to his contemporary Petrarch than if they had been living in separate worlds or with a thousand years between them. Italy made no impression on him when he travelled there, and is incomparably less valuable to him than Spain, which he had never seen. He notes the fortunes of Sir John Hawkwood and his companies in Italy, and some of the business of the Papacy, and with some detail and in his best manner the rise of the Visconti at Milan ; but he did not know nor care what Petrarch and Boccaccio were about, and he brought back from his Italian travels nothing in the smallest degree resembling the acquisitions of Chaucer. He was made for the world he lived in ; and the meteors that were flickering here and there as intimations of a change that was drawing on, the restlessness, the misgivings by which the spirit of Petrarch was disquieted, had no effect on Froissart, and lay beyond his consciousness. Froissart's soul was at ease : Coer qui refoit en bon gre Ce que le temps li envoie En bien, en plaisance, en joie, Son cage use en sant, Partout dire 1'oseroie. 1 These moral sentiments of Froissart express his own 1 U Espinette, \. 1021 ; virelay. 2i 8 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE mind thoroughly : he took in good part whatever Time sent him, and spent his life happily quite at home in the world where he found himself. No one would go to him for anything like those intimations of vast unachieved discoveries in literature such as perplex and disturb the life of Petrarch, " dreaming on things to come," and make him what he is for every one who has been drawn under his influence. If Froissart had known the letters of Petrarch he would not have liked nor understood them ; he would have dismissed them with another of his moral verses, in which the old proverbial judgment is reiterated against those who look for better bread than is made of wheat : C'est grant folie de querir Meilleur pain que de bon froment. 1 But if Froissart, compared to Petrarch, be wanting in depth and originality, wanting in perception for anything beyond the ordinary ranges of life, it is not just to put him down as limited or partial in his treat- ment of his own proper ground. If his work be superficial, and this is what is alleged against him, at any rate there is a good extent of surface, and many things come into the picture besides the vainglory of the age of chivalry. To judge from some accounts of him, one might imagine 1 Tre'sor amoureux : Po/sies, Ed. Scheler, iii. p. 1 6 1 . FROISSART 219 that there was a tournament on every second page, and that the matter of the Chronicles was the same as that of Meliador, where indeed the vanities have their own way, and ample room to display themselves. The knight-errant, it is true, is there, as he is in Chaucer's Prologue, come back from Pruce or Gernade. But Robert of Namur or Guy of Chatillon is no more fantastic than Chaucer's Knight ; and as for tournaments, if they are a sign of decay, then the age of chivalry was already far gone long before this, for tournaments are made more of in the sober biography of William the Marshall than in Froissart's Chronicles. When it is said that Froissart writes as if the whole of life were one long holiday for lords and knights, is there not some confusion between the temper of the historian and the things he writes about ? Undoubtedly Froissart takes the whole of life with enjoyment, and his Chronicles , in spite of the falls of princes, are not depressing to read. Nor is the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire : it was written by an historian with the same invincibly happy temperament as Froissart. But the contented minds of Froissart and Gibbon do not misrepresent the facts by leaving out afflictions and distresses. Though Froissart may be kept alive for his fifty years of chronicle-writing by an equanimity of nature that protects him from the strain of tragic emotions and from melancholy, and though his 220 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE demeanour, like Gibbon's, may be too placid for readers with a taste for gloom and fire in historical pictures, he does not cover up the miseries of life or cry peace when there is no peace. It is not a theatrical or unreal life in his pages : it is not the less real because it is showy in some of its aspects ; and most of the fighting in it is not showy, but grim enough. Froissart is no more ostentatious with his banners and pennons waving in the wind than the Books of Moses are, when they go into details about knops and bowls and lavers, and ram-skins dyed red. And much of the warfare in Froissart, as in Jean le Bel, is chivalrous just in the sense that any war may be chivalrous where there is courage and heroism. It would not be grossly misleading to say of Froissart that life as he represents it is all ambuscades and surprises, hungry and heavy marching in pursuit of invisible enemies, all weariness, wounds, death, and captivity of good knights. The end of Chandos was rather wretched : "he slode and fell down at the joining with his enemies," and a squire gave him his death-wound with a stroke coming on his blind side, for he had only one eye. The Captal died in prison, and Sir Enguerrand of Coucy broken-hearted in captivity among the Turks, after he had seen the butchery at Nicopolis, the most pitiful and shameful ruin of the best knighthood of Christendom. FROISSART 221 It would be easier to prove Froissart a writer of sad stories than a chronicler of the false splendours of chivalry, if one were set down with his book before one to find illustrative passages by turning over his pages. William Morris in his poems from Froissart (in the Defence of Guinevere volume) has discovered more of the spirit of his history than the professed historians who complain of his levity and cheerfulness. Froissart, it is true, does not dwell too long on themes like those of Sir Peter Harpdon's End or Concerning Geoffrey Teste Noire ; but he knows the cruelty of war, and if he had wanted knowledge of such griefs, and of the way human beings are wrung by them, he might have learned from Jean le Bel's heroic work what such things are. But he did not need this instruction. Froissart's wars are no doubt influenced by the chivalrous ideal, which counted for something in the life of the fourteenth century. Don Quixote, if he had lived in the time of Chaucer's Knight, would have been considered sound in his principles and not remarkably extravagant in his manner of expressing himself. He might have justified himself by the example of the English knights- bachelors in 1337, who went to win their ladies' grace in the fields of France, each with a patch over one eye. He might have quoted the com- panion of Ywain of Wales, on the French side 222 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE in 1369, who was commonly called the Pursuivant of Love. King John of France founded the Com- pany of the Star, which was to be like the Round Table of King Arthur ; and Chandos and a French lord disputed before Poitiers because u each of them bare one manner of device, a blue lady embroidered in a sunbeam above on their apparel." But if this be vanity, it is not all that Froissart has to tell : the battle of Poitiers was a real battle, and not a mere thing in a story-book. Froissart understands the gentlemen who went into war " their bodies to advance," to win honour ; but it is no design of his to turn them into absolute romantic knights. Frois- sart, who could write verse about a small boy making dams in "running water at Valenciennes, was not offended by real things, and never tried to alter the reports he got (from James Audley and others) in order to make his Chronicles look more like the adventures of Meliador. He shows no preference for the kind of fighting which is most like tourna- ments. Joinville praises a battle in which there is nothing but clean strokes in the mellay, no interfer- ence of bolts or arrows ; but Froissart knows many different kinds of fighting, and does not disparage any of them for the sake of that which was of course the noblest. His great captains and his other valiant men are not reduced to the abstract type of chivalry. Bertrand du Guesclin is perhaps not treated with full FROISSART 223 justice by Froissart, but at any rate he is one of the " prowest," and he is very different from the con- ventional romantic hero. Froissart understands the practical hard-working military man, from Edward the Black Prince, Sir Walter Manny, Sir John Chandos, Bertrand du Guesclin, Oliver Clisson, to the less eminent ranks of Sir Robert Knolles and Sir John Hawkwood, and lower than these the chiefs of brigands, Bacon, Crokart, Geoffrey Teste Noire, and Aymerigot Marcel. The adventures are varied, the men engaged in them are not all alike. Froissart's story resembles Barbour's in many places not only where they are telling of the same matter in the same order, as in the scene of the death of the Bruce, but where the same kind of incident is found in different places. The " sleights " of Barbour are like the " subtilties " of Froissart, especially where there are fortresses to be taken. Any one who has been told that Froissart is all tournaments and vanity should read the story of the ingenious person who won the city and castle of Evreux, " the which as than was French," in Berners, cap. clxxvi. : how he talked pleasantly to the captain and got into the castle, with authentic news that the kings of Denmark and Ireland had made an alliance and were going to destroy all England. It might have had a place among the "interludes and jeopardies" of the Bruce, along 224 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE with the story of William Bunnock at Linlithgow or the " trains " made by Sir James Douglas. Some of the liveliest of Froissart's episodes did not find their way into the vulgate text, and so did not reach Lord Berners. One of these is the game of chess between King Edward and the Countess of Salisbury ; another is the story of Oliver de Mauny at the siege of Rennes. They are worth considerably more than most commentaries and criticisms, and the readers of Froissart may be left to form their own judgment upon them, as upon the rest of the book to which these omitted chapters belong. This is the story of the king's game of chess. In Berners, cap. Ixxvii., it reads, "All that day the kyng taryed ther," and so forth, with nothing about the game. From that point the fuller version goes on as follows, unhappily not in the English of Lord Berners : After dinner the tables were removed. Then the king sent lord Reynold Cobham and lord Richard Stamford to the host and the companions who were lodged under the castle to know how they did, and that they should make ready, for he wished to ride on and follow the Scots, and that they should send on all the carriages and the munitions, and by the evening he would be with them. And he ordered the Earl of Pembroke to make the rear-guard with five hundred lances, and that they should wait for him on the field till he should come, and all the rest should ride forward. The two barons did all as he commanded. And he remained still in the castle with the lady, and FROISSART 225 hoped that before his departure he would have response more agreeable than he had had as yet. So he called for chess, and the lady had it brought in. Then the king asked the lady to play with him, and she consented gladly, for she made him all the good cheer that she might. And well was she bound thereto, for the king had done her a fair service in raising the siege of the Scots before the castle, and again she was obliged because the king was her right and natural lord in fedlty and homage. At the outset of the game of chess, the king, who wished that something of his might be won by the lady, challenged her, laughing, and said, " Madam, what will your stake be at the game ? " And she answered : " And yours, sir ? " Then the king set down on the board a fair ring that he wore with a large ruby. Then said the countess, "Sir, sir, I have no ring so rich as yours is." "Madam," said the king, "that which you have, set it down, and consider not so narrowly." Then the countess to please the king drew from her finger a light ring of gold of no great worth. And they played at chess together, the lady with all the wit and skill she could, that the king might not hold her for too simple and ignorant ; and the king played false, and would not play as well as he knew. And there was scarce pausing between the moves but the king looked so hard on the lady that she was all put out of countenance, and made mistakes in her play. And when the king saw that she had lost a rook or a knight or what not, he would lose also to restore the lady's game. They played on till at last the king lost, and was check- mate with a bishop. Then the lady rose and called for the wine and comfits, for the king, as it seemed, was about to depart. And she took her ring and put it on her finger, and she would fain have had the king take back his own again, and presented it to him and said : " Sir, it is not meet that in my house I should take anything of yours, but Q 226 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE rather you should take of mine." " Nay, madam," said the king, " but the game has made it so, and if I had won be assured that I should have carried yours away." The countess would not press the king further, but went to one of her damsels, and gave her the ring, and said : " When you shall see that the king has gone out, and taken leave of me, and is about to mount his horse, do you go forward and render him his ring again, courteously, and say that in no wise will I retain it, for it is not mine." And the damsel answered that so she would readily do. At this the wine and the comfits came in. And the king would not take of them before the lady, nor the lady before him, and there was there a great debate all in mirth between them. Finally it was agreed, to make it short, that it should be together, as soon the one as the other. After this, and when the king's knights had all drunk, the king took leave of the lady, and said to her aloud, so that no one should comment upon it : " Madam, you abide in your house, and I will go to follow my enemies." The lady at these words courtesied low before the king. And the king freely took her by the hand and pressed it a little, to his contentment, in sign of love. And the king watched until knights and damsels were busy taking leave of one another ; then he came forward again to say two words alone : " My dear lady, to God I commend you till I return again, praying you to advise you otherwise than you have said to me." "My dear lord," answered the lady, " God the Father glorious be your conduct, and put you out of all base and dishonourable thoughts, for I am and ever shall be ready to serve you to your honour and mine." Then the king went out of the room, and the countess also, who conveyed him to the hall where his palfrey was. Then the king said that he would not mount while the lady was there, so to make it short the countess took her full and FROISSART 227 final leave of the king and his knights and returned to her bower with her maidens. When the king was about to mount, the damsel whom the countess had instructed came to the king and knelt ; and when the king saw her he raised her up very speedily, and thought that she would have spoken of another matter than she did. Then she said : "My lord, here is the ring which my lady returns to you, and prays you not to hold it as discourtesy, for she wishes not to have it remaining with her. You have done so much for her in other manners that she is bound, she says, to be your servant always." The king, when he heard the damsel and saw his ring that she had, and was told of the wish and the excuse of the countess, was all amazed. Nevertheless he made up his mind quickly according to his own will ; and in order that the ring might remain in that house as he had intended, he answered briefly, for long speech was needless, and said : "Mistress, since your lady likes not the little gain that she won of me, let it stay in your keeping." Then he mounted quickly and rode out of the castle to the lawn where his knights were, and found the Earl of Pembroke waiting him with five hundred lances and more. Then they set out all together and followed the host. And the damsel returned and told the king's answer, and gave back the ring that the king had lost at chess. But the countess would not have it and claimed no right to it : the king had given it to the damsel, let her take it and welcome. So the king's ring was left with the damsel. The story of Oliver de Mauny at the siege of Rennes, and of John Bolton and the partridges, belongs to 1357, and would have appeared in Berners, cap. clxxv., where he gives the coming of the young bachelor " Bertrande of Glesquyne," but not of his cousin : 228 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE And there were newly come to the siege two young bachelors, cousins german, who were afterwards much renowned in the realm of France and the realm of Spain, as you will hear further on in this history. These two cousins were named Bertrand du Guesclin and Oliver de Mauny. And the said Bertrand during the siege fought in single combat with an English knight, likewise renowned, called Sir Thomas Dagworth ; and the combat was appointed for three courses with a lance, three strokes of an axe, and three strokes of a dagger. And these two champions acquitted themselves valiantly to their great honour ; howbeit the said Bertrand gave such a stroke of his axe to the said Englishman that he smote him to the ground with violence. And there it ended. And they were eagerly watched by those within and also by those without : then they left the field without great hurt to either. So the Duke Henry of Lancaster kept his siege before Rennes a long time, and made many assaults, but nothing gained there. Now it happened one day during the siege that an English knight, Sir John Bolton, a man of valour in war, had been for sport to the fields with his sparrowhawk, and had taken six partridges. He mounted his horse, armed at all points, with his partridges in his hand, and came before the barriers of the city and began calling to the townsmen that he wished to speak with Sir Bertrand du Guesclin. Now it chanced that Oliver de Mauny was standing above the gate to watch the condition of the English host ; and he perceived and was aware of the Englishman with his partridges, and asked him what he wanted and whether he would sell or give his partridges to the ladies who were in the place besieged. " By my faith," answered the English knight to Oliver, "if you dare bring your bargain nearer and come and fight with me, you have found your chap- man." "In God's name," said Oliver, "yea, wait for me and I will pay you on the nail." Then he came down from FROISSART 229 the walls to the ditches, which were all full of water, and plunged in and swam, and crossed them, armed at all points save the harness of the legs and his gauntlets, and came to his chapman who was waiting for him. Then they fought, valiantly and long, and quite near to the host of the Duke of Lancaster, who looked on well pleased, and forbade any one going forth to them. And also those of the town and the ladies who were there took great delight in watching therrf. The two valiant men fought on, and the end of it was that Sir Oliver de Mauny overcame his chapman, Sir John Bolton, with his partridges, and carried him off without his leave and sore wounded across the ditches and into the town, and presented him to the ladies with the said partridges, and they received him gladly and did him great honour. It was not long afterwards that Oliver felt his wounds paining him sore, and could not get the herbs that he knew would cure him. So he called upon his prisoner courteously and said : " Sir John, I am hard wounded ; and I know some herbs out there which with the help of God would cure and restore me. Now, I will tell what you shall do : you shall go out from here and go to the Duke of Lancaster your lord, and bring me a safe-conduct for myself and three men for a month till I am healed ; and if you can obtain it for me I will let you go free, and if not, then you will return here to be my prisoner as before." At this news Sir John Bolton was well pleased, and went away to the English court, where he was gladly welcomed by all, and by the Duke of Lancaster no less, who rallied him well about the partridges. And then he made his request and the Duke granted it, and gave him the safe-conduct written and sealed. Sir John returned at once with the safe-conduct, and gave it to his captor, Sir Oliver de Mauny, who said that he had done admirably, and forthwith freed him from his captivity. And they set out together from the good city of Rennes 230 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE and came to the host of the Duke of Lancaster, who was glad to see them, and received them heartily and showed great kindness to Oliver. And the Duke said that he had a noble heart, and proved that he would yet be a valiant man and of great prowess, " when to get my safe-conduct and a few simples he had released a prisoner who might well have paid him ten thousand florins of gold." After this the Duke appointed a room to lodge Oliver de Mauny, and ordered it to be richly hung and furnished, and every one to give and afford him all that he might require. There was Oliver housed in the camp of the Duke, and the surgeons and physicians of the Duke attended him and visited him every day; and also the Duke came often to see him and cheer him. And he stayed there and was healed of his wounds ; then he took his leave of the Duke of Lancaster, and thanked him much for the great honour he had done him ; and also he took leave of the other gentlemen and of Sir John Bolton, his prisoner that had been. But at his going the Duke of Lancaster gave him some fine plate in a present and said to him : " Mauny, I pray you commend me to the ladies, and tell them that we have often wished for partridges for them." With this Sir Oliver departed and came to the city of Rennes, where he was joyfully received by every one great and small, and by the ladies, for whom he had plenty of news ; and more especially to his cousin Bertrand de Guesclin he told the whole of his adventure, and they had much ^mirth of it between them, for they loved one another well, and afterwards till their death, as you shall hear recounted later in this story. Chaucer was harder than he need have been to the two cousins in his Monk's Tragedy of Peter of Spain : whatever " cursedness " they may have brewed later for the ally of the Black Prince, this episode FROISSART 231 would make one think well of Mauny, " wicked nest" though Chaucer calls him. Another passage of Chaucer comes to mind in another way to illustrate the history of Froissart : the battle of Actium in the Legend of Cleopatra, saint and martyr, has its com- panion, if not its original, in Froissart's sea battle at La Rochelle on St. John's Eve, 1372 (Berners, cap. ccxcvii.-ccxcix.), when the Earl of Pembroke was taken. The Spaniards are not said to have thrown pease on the hatches to make them " slidder," as was done at Actium ; but the nature of the business is the same in both, and no more and no less chivalrous in either than the affair of the Shannon and the Chesapeake. Description with Froissart is seldom employed for the mere sake of ornament. He has not in his prose, and not very noticeably in his poetry, the common taste of the Middle Ages for elaborate cata- logues of furniture and minute descriptions of works of art, such as the sculptures at the beginning of the Romaunt of the Rose, or the pictures of the sEneid in Chaucer's temple of Venus in the first book of the House of Fame. When he takes up this kind of work, as in the pageants for the queen's entry into Paris in 1389, he does it with a will, but he does not introduce such things irrelevantly. Generally it will be found that where he is most brilliant with his scenery and properties he is also most dramatic : 232 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE they accompany the action, and do not impede one's view of it. He is very particular about the way things appeared on the blazing day when King Charles VI. fell into his frenzy (Berners, u. clxxxvii.) : The French King rode upon a fair plain in the heat of the sun, which was as then of a marvellous height, and the King had on a jack of black velvet, which sore chafed him, and on his head a single bonnet of scarlet, and a chaplet of great pearls which the Queen had given him at his de- parture, and he had a page that rode behind him bearing on his head a chapeau of Montauban bright and clear shining against the sun, and behind that page rode another bearing the King's spear painted red and fringed with silk, with a sharp head of steel j the Lord de la River had brought a dozen of them with him from Toulouse, and that was one of them ; he had given the whole dozen to the King, and the King had given three of them to his brother the Duke of Orleans and three to the Duke of Bourbon. And as they rode thus forth the page that bare the spear, whether it were by negligence or that he fell asleep, he let the spear fall on the other page's head that rode before him, and the head of the spear made a great clash on the bright chapeau of steel. The King, who rode but afore them, with the noise suddenly started, and his heart trembled, and into his imagination ran the impression of the words of the man that stopped his horse in the forest of Mans, and it ran into his thought that his enemies ran after him to slay and destroy him, and with that abusion he fell out of his wit by feebleness of his head, and dashed his spurs to his horse and drew out the sword and turned to his pages, having no knowledge of any man, weening himself to be in a battle enclosed with his enemies, and lift up his sword to strike, he FROISSART 233 cared not where, and cried and said : " On, on upon these traitors ! " Here no doubt an educated taste would blame the excessive notice of particulars, as Dante was criticised by Warton for relating things " circumstantially and without rejection." But Froissart does not always write so vividly, and here the circumstances are given " without rejection," because he is leading up to the event that gives them all their right proportion ; his mind is not like that of the conventional poets who were accustomed to put in a description of a king's pavilion or of pictures in a hall when they could not think of anything better to fill out their story. Froissart's descriptive passages are not the lazy intervals in his history, like the pauses for orna- mental catalogues of precious things in the old French romances, not to speak of other and more classical kinds of poem. Froissart's mode of descrip- tion varies with the dramatic interest of the scene taking " dramatic " to mean generally whatever belongs to the action. He is never still for a moment. He does not put down blocks of inani- mate detail between 'his passages of adventure. His writing is made what it is principally through his sense of time that is, his sense of the way things change their appearance as the plot develops itself. There is another chapter which shows this plainly enough : the description of Edward III., as admiral, 234 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE waiting for the Spanish fleet in 1350 an addition of Froissart's own to the matter he borrowed from Jean le Bel, and an example of the strength of his early work even before he had come to rely entirely on his own materials. Unfortunately this did not come into Lord Berners' copy, the early French editions having a bad text about that part, confused, abridged, and padded with extracts from other chronicles : The King of England, who was at sea with his fleet, had given order fully for all that was to be done and for the manner of engaging the enemy, and had made my Lord Robert of Namur captain of a ship, which was called La Sale du Roy^ where all his household was. And the King sat on the quarter-deck of his ship, wearing a jack of black velvet, and on his head a black beaver hat that became him well. And as I was told by those who were with him that day, he was as merry as he had ever been in his life, and made his minstrels play before him a dance of Almayne that Sir John Chandos, who was with him, had newly brought over. And further for his pastime he made the said knight sing to the minstrels' music, and took great delight in it. And ever he looked aloft, for he had set a watch in the topcastle of his ship to give warning when the Spaniards came on. Now when the King was taking his pleasure thus, and all the knights very glad to see him of such good cheer, the watch that saw the Spaniards heave in sight said : " Ho ! I see a ship, and it looks like a ship of Spain." Then the minstrels ceased ; and he was asked if he saw more. Not long after he answered and said, " Yes, I see two and three and four." And then when he saw the main fleet : " I see so many, God help me, that I cannot FROISSART 235 tell them all." Then the King and his people knew that it was the Spaniards. Then he bade sound his trumpets, and all their ships drew in to be more in order and better for defence, for they knew that they should have battle since the Spaniards came in so large a fleet. By this time it was late, upon the hour of vespers or thereabout ; and the King called for wine and drank, as also did all his knights, and put his basnet on his head, and so did the others. Froissart has so often been praised for picturesque work, that it is allowable to refine a little about the excellence of this, and to observe that it is plainly dramatic, and only picturesque in an incidental way, the imaginative vision of Froissart being wakened to the picturesque things in the scene as in that other of the madness of the King of France by his sym- pathy with the dramatic life in it. The figure of the king would be nothing much without the suspense of the adventure approaching. What Froissart feels most vividly and with most delight is not the charm of the king's majesty nor yet the accompaniment of Chandos's Almain, the minstrels and the song, but the movement of the hour as it passes, and its effect on the king's mind. The gesture of the king, as his eyes shift to the look-out on the maintop, is what really makes the value of Froissart's description, and the other points in the story are lively because of this interest in the future event. There is nothing very deep or very far fetched in the art of Froissart, but it is not untrue or irrelevant. It aims at the 236 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE centre, and is kept to its task and carried through it by an instinctive pleasure in the dramatic motives, though these are little elaborated or analysed. Thus with all his defects he is one of the chief medieval writers, and his work is the culmination of a great medieval school, the school of adventurous history, which begins in those heroic poems of France, whose old forms were still available in Froissart's time for the epic of Bertrand du Guesclin. 1 That poem, however, was the last of its heroic race, and prose had come to be more generally convenient for historical work, as Froissart found in his youth. It had learned some of its capabilities before Froissart began ; indeed, he added little to the school of historical prose except his wider range and his indefatigable spirit. He had models in his pre- decessors for almost everything he did, and he is inferior to some of them in some things. He cannot have more dignity than Villehardouin, more weight of expression than Jean le Bel ; Joinville had more intimate knowledge of the life he wrote about, and his reminiscences come from a deeper source. Froissart completes the older school, however, in a way that was scarce possible later. He carried on the medieval love of adventure and the old simple 1 La Vie du ature classique ? (Ib.) Then Gaston Paris brings out the peculiar ex- cellence of the romantic poetry of France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, so seldom understood beyond the borders by the Teutonic nations who imported French novels and adapted them. La tendance a crer des types, plut6t qu'a essayer de faire vivre des individus dans toute leur complexity changeante, n'exclut pas 1'analyse psychologique ; au contraire. Les sentiments humains sont Studies en eux-mmes, dans leur Evolution logique et leurs conflits, tels que, dans des con- ditions donnes, ils doivent se produire, chez tout homme dfini d'une certaine facon ; et ceux qui les prouvent aiment a se les expliquer a eux-me'mes . . . pour Pinstruc- tion des autres. Cette analyse psychologique, la litteVature francaise y a excell dans tous les temps. On pourrait citer tel morceau de Chretien de Troyes qui ne le cede pas en vrit6, en ingniosite, parfois en subtilit, aux plus celebres monologues de nos tragedies, aux pages les plus fouilles de nos romans contemporains. (Ib.) Following which comes a note on the Romance of the Rose, r epopee psychologique^ as it were the ghost or shadow of all the sentiment in the school of Chretien de Troyes, disembodied " states of mind " moving about as persons in a story. The discussion of French medieval style, after this, is equally sure of its ground, and in the same way impartial ; setting down all the common faults, platitude, triviality, 252 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE but not concealing the delight with which the critic turns to the ancient writers, nor ignoring the true beauty of their work. Mais leur langue n'est pas seulement claire : elle a souvent une justesse, une 16geret, une aisance naturelle qui font penser aux meilleurs morceaux de notre litterature des deux derniers siecles. Us voient bien et savent dire avec nettete ce qu'ils ont vu ; leur parole les amuse et nous amuse avec eux. Beaucoup d'entre eux sont d'aimables causeurs, un peu babillards, qui se laissent d'autant plus volontiers aller a leur verve qu'ils voient que leurs auditeurs y prennent plaisir ; d'autres sont d'excellents raisonneurs, qui cherchent serieuse- ment a convaincre ou a int6resser leur public, et qui y r^ussissent par la simplicite et la precision de leur exposition ; d'autres encore ont su imprimer a leurs discours de la grandeur, de la sensibilite ou de la finesse. (/) Gaston Paris himself, in his writing, had that instinctive clearness which he finds constant in French literature that same regard for his hearers which, in the earliest authors of his nation, as he points out, distinguished the even, plain discourse of the chansons de geste from the more high-flown heroic poetry of other nations. At the same time his literary judg- ment, moving so freely among generalisations, was always based on particulars a different thing from the peremptory opinions of less patient critics. Popular literary history, working at some distance from its subject, may pronounce that one chanson de geste is just like any other chanson de geste. Gaston Paris, with complete appreciation of all the habitual ways, the GASTON PARIS 253 repetitions, the want of care, the ready use of com- mon forms and stop-gaps (decourageantes chevilles}, in Old French epic, knew well also that under super- ficial uniformity there were differences of genius and temper clearly marked ; and that to confound Balzac and Stendhal, or Corneille and Racine, on account of their common qualities would be hardly a stronger proof of critical incompetence than (for example) a refusal to distinguish the merits of Roland and Raoul de Cambrai. He treated old French poetry with the same conscience and the same discernment as the greatest critics have given to the greatest masters. He did not exaggerate the value of his authors ; but the fact that they did not belong to the seven- teenth or the nineteenth century was for him no reason to treat them under different rules or with less precision. Perhaps the essays in which he showed his learn- ing and his critical power to best advantage are those on the Arthurian romances, in Romania and the Histoire litter aire (tome xxx.). He had to discover their sources and trace their development a business sometimes pursued without much regard for qualities of literature. Gaston Paris, studying the transmission of popular tales from obscure Celtic origins to the schools of French poetry in the twelfth century, did not keep to what is called folklore, though this was a large part of his work. It was not enough for him 254 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE to trace the progress of a fable through different stages, or merely to verify the fact that similar plots, incidents, characters, or names were found in different versions, in different languages. Along with this he watched the literary motives of the poets, the in- fluences of fashion or of individual temper that made them change and remould the folklore substance. An example of his procedure may be found in the description of Guinglain, a poem of Renaud de Beaujeu, in which the simple fairy-tale of " Li beaux Desconus " is incongruously decorated to indulge the rhetorical and sentimental taste of an ambitious liter- ary man. Problems much more complex are solved in the essay on Le Chevalier de la Charrette^ i.e. the Lancelot of Chretien de Troyes (Romania^ vol. x. p. 459 et seq.\ Peculiar insight and judgment were re- quired to distinguish the shadows in this illusory realm : the result, which proves the dependence of Lancelot on the doctrine of the troubadours, and establishes the relation between the narrative poetry of France and the lyric of Provence, is gained by a masterly use of every available instrument. Historical study of the facts (e.g. of the part taken by Marie de Champagne in bringing Provencal ideas to the north) is completed and enlightened by critical intuition and sympathy. Another talent is displayed in the short history of medieval French literature. This is a book for the GASTON PARIS 255 schools, compact and positive, with little room either for eloquence or for historical detail. Yet, along with its serried names and dates, it presents, at the smallest cost of words, a critical estimate of every matter it touches. On a larger scale the Villon, one of the author's latest works, is perhaps the finest example of his powers. In the description of Villon's poetry, and more especially, perhaps, in the account of his poetical education, there is the fruit of a whole lifetime of research and reflection. Villon and his age are shown in their relation to the poetry of the preceding centuries : the decline of the earlier litera- ture, the strange obliteration of the older poetry, the rise and decay of new schools in the fourteenth century, the vacancy and vanity of the fifteenth, are all brought out, in the author's inimitably simple manner, as a setting for the new genius of Villon. Often and well as Villon has been praised, this mode of approaching his work was needed ; and no one else could have used it to the same effect, with so sure a control of all the history. Many of the friends of Gaston Paris have written lately about his personal influence. Such regret as they feel was felt and expressed by Gaston Paris him- self in the memorial notices that he wrote on James Darmesteter and Renan passages of meditation, full of dignity, not effusive, which perhaps convey as much as a stranger need seek to know about his 256 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE more intimate thoughts. It may not be out of place to mention here the generous phrase in his Villon, returning thanks for the liberal gift of his friend Marcel Schwob, who, surrendering the interests of his own book, made over the results of his inde- pendent researches to be used in the biography. And further, there is one aspect of the private life of Gaston Paris which it is well to remember the grace and rectitude of his dealing with scholars outside of France. He believed strongly in his own country, and hardly less strongly in the community of learn- ing over all the world. Two papers of his, composed during the Franco-Prussian war, illustrate the two loyalties, which he was able to reconcile without diluting either of them. One is the lecture on "Roland," in December 1870, repeating the old prayer Ne placet Deu ne ses saintismes angles Que ja par mei perdet sa valor France ! The other is one of his more technical pieces (on a Latin poem about Frederick Barbarossa), written during the siege of Paris. 1 It mentions calmly his regret that he is prevented from consulting German 1 The war interrupted the work of a young German scholar in Paris, Julius Brakelmann, who had to leave half printed the Corpus of Old French lyric poetry which he was editing. He was killed, righting against the French, at Mars la Tour, in July 1870 ; the fragment of his book was published in 1891 as he had left it, with a note simply stating the facts, more impressive than any rhetoric. GASTON PARIS 257 scholars : " They are separated from us by their armies and our ramparts, or engaged perhaps in the preparations for an attack upon our city." Gaston Paris knew to the full the claims of patriotism and of learning, and tampered with neither when they were accidentally opposed. , In England he had many personal friends, besides many more who were indebted to him through his writings attracted almost unconsciously by the char- acter as well as the matter of his work. There was no display, no emphasis in his style. But every- thing he wrote gave the impression of efficiency and sincerity, or rather of an intellectual magnanimity in which all the other excellences are included. INDEX ic, 6, 9, 15, 1 8 Alfred, King, 6, 10, 14, 19, 29 Aliscans, 1 80 Ameto, 67 Ancren R'rwle (ed. Camden Society), 17 Anelida and the false Arcite, 82 sq. Apolloniui of Tyre, 19 Arthur of Little Britain, 146 sqq. Astre'e, of Honore d'Urfe, a pastoral romance, 67 Ayenbite oflmvyt, 155 Aymerigot Marcel, 153 Baladcs of Gower, 126, 130 sqq. Barbour, John, no, 223 Bavaria, Albert of, Count of Hainanlt, 194 Beaumont, Jean de, 206 sq. Bede, Anglo-Saxon translation of, 166 Benoit de Sainte-More, his Roman de Troie, 108, 121 Bernart de Ventadorn, 44 :j. Berners, John Bourchier, Lord, 27, 136-169 Berry, Duchess of, 193 Bertran de Born, 51 Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster, 184 (see Duckets) Blickling Homilies, 6 Blois, Guy, Count of, 184, 188 sqq., 194 Boccaccio, 21, 25, 33, 52-75, 84, 87 sqq., 112, 203 Boethius, 18, 20, 92 Bolton, Sir John, and the partridges, 227 Boyd, Mark Alexander, 174 Brakelmann, 256 n. Buch, Captal de, 220 Buchon, M., 176 Buisson de jfonece, le Jolt, 114, 184 Byrhtnoth, see Maldon Canterbury Tales, 94 sqq. Casibus yirorum Illustrium, De, 70 Cast ell of Love, 156 sqq. Caxton, 23 Cervantes, 67, 99 Champagne, Marie de, 254 Chandos, Sir John, 151, 220, 234 Charles VI. of France, 232 Chaucer, 20, 25, 32, 34, 69, 71 sq., 76-100, 112, 117 sqq., 139, l8l, 190, 203 sq., 230 Chrestien de Troyes, 108, 251, 254 Chronicle, Anglo-Saxon, 12, 15 Claris Mulieribus, De, 70 Clerk's Tale, 99 Complaint of Venus, 80 Confesdo Amantis, 104 sqq. Coucy, Enguerrand de, 184, 193 sq., 220 Craik, Sir Henry, 149 Cursor Mundi, 1 8 Cynewulf and Cyneheard, in the Anglo- Saxon Chronicle, A.D. 755, 12 Dag worth, Sir Thomas, 228 Dante, 32-51, 58 sqq n 68, 77, 132, 233 Darmesteter, Mme., on Froissart, 1 80 n. Decameron, 65 Delisle, L., 186 n. Demaison, M., 245 Deschamps, Eustache, 80, 108, 130, 197 Despenser, Lord, 183 Diez, Friedrich, 240 Dit du Florin , 184, 193 259 260 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE Douglas, Earl, and his family at Dal- keith, 182 Diana of Montemayor, a pastoral romance, 67 Diego de San Pedro, 141, 160 sqq. Dryden, 100, 120 Duchess, Book of the, 118 Dunbar, William, 101 Edward III., 184, 206, 210 sqj., 224 *?!> 2 33 *? Edward the Black Prince, 184, 186, 195 Ellis, George, 28, 244 Espinette amour euse, 114, 182, 217 Eupbues, 43, 131, 140 Fauriel, 243 Fiammetta, 66 Filocolo, 66 Filostrato, 33, 71, 84 Fiorio e Biancifiore, Cantare di, quoted, 74 Flaubert, 244 Fletcher, The Two Noble Kinsmen, 89 sqq. Florii and Blanchefioure, 66 Foix, Gaston de, 191 Folquet of Marseilles, 46 Fortescue, Sir John, 22 Fournival, Richard de, his Bestiaire d' Amour, 43 Franklin's Tale, 99 Froissart, 108, 112 sqq., 125, 129 sqq., 135-238 Galatea of Cervantes, 67 Gar in le Loherain, 38, 243 n, Genealogia Deorum, De, 62, 70 Golden Boke of Marcus Aurelius, 156 sqq. Gower, John, 101-134 Granson, Oton de, 80 Gray, 28, 135, 195 Gregory, St., the Great, 62 Grise, Rend Berthault de la, 163 Grisel, Froissart's horse, 202 Guesclin, Bertrand du, 222, 227, 236 Guevara, 140, 159 Guido Cavalcanti, 44, 132 Guido delle Colonne, 122 Guinglain, 254 Hakluyt, n Harry the Minstrel, 126 Hart, Professor J. M., 166 . Hawkwood, Sir John, 217 Heine, 94 Heliodorus, 19, 67 Hemricourt, Jean de, 206 sqq. Henry IV., 125 Henry VIII., 143 Hernani and the " point of honour," 99 Herodotus, 25, 135 Histoire litter air e de la France, 246 Homer, his similes compared with Dante's, 39 sqq. Horace, quoted, 205 Horton, a spirit, 192 House of Fame, 71, 81, 93, 117, 231 Hugo, Victor, 245 Huon of Bordeaux, 143 sqq. Husen, Her Friderich von, his heroic verse, 128 sq. Inghilfredi Siciliano, 42 Jean d'Outremeuse, 206 Jean le Bel, 170, 187, 206-214 Jocelyn of Brakelonde, 171 John, King of France, 222 Johnson, Dr., 27, 172, 177 Joinville, 16, 175 sq. Kelly, Mr. James Fitzmaurice, 134 Knight's Tale, 89 sq., 98 Lancaster, Blanche, Duchess of, 184 Henry, Duke of, 228 sq. John, Duke of, 134 Landor, 58 Lang, Mr. Andrew, 121 . Layamon, 2 Le Clerc, Victor, 244 n. Lee, Mr. Sidney, 143 sq. Legend of Good JVomen, 82, 231 Lelio de' Manfredi, 161 Lemaitre, M. Jules, 247 Longnon, M., 186 n. Lopes, Fernan, 177 Luce, M. Simeon, 188 Lucian, 62 Lydgate, his Bochas, 70, 101, in Lyndesay, Sir David, 18 Lyon, Sir Espaing de, 201 INDEX 261 Macaulay, Mr. G. C., his edition of Gower, 102 sqq. on Lord Berners, 143 n. Machaut, Guillaume de, 80, 197 Maldon, Anglo-Saxon poem on the battle of, 12 Malory, 22 sqq. 138, 150 Man of Law's Tale, 96 sq. Mandeville, 20 Marshal, William, Earl of Pembroke, no, 174, 186, 219 Mauny, Oliver de, 227 sqq. Meliador, 183, 186, 190 sq., 193, 203, 216 Melibeus, 72, 98 Melville, Mr. James, 174 iq. Mirour de FOmme, 125 ; see Speculum M.editantis Montaigne, 60, 238 Montaudon, Monk of, Provencal poet, 48 Morris, William, 87, 221 Namur, Robert of, 185, 187 iqq. Nicholas of Guildford, 109 Nicholas Nunez, 160 n, Ohthere, his narrative, and Wulfstan's, in King Alfred's Orosius, 10 iqq. Orm, 2 Orosius, 1 8 Ostrevant, William of, 194 Ovid, 121 Owl, The, and the Nightingale, 109 Pacheco, D. JoSo, 194 Pardoner, 91 Payn, Robert, Canon of Lisbon, 134 Paris, Gaston, 115, 197, 239-257 Paris, Paulin, 240 sqq. Pecock, his Repressour, 20 Petit de Julleville, 115 ., 249 Petrarch, 42, 52 sqq., 217 sq. Philip, King of France, 211 iqq. Philippa, Queen, 182, 183, 188 Plato, his parodies of Euphuism, 160 n. Pons de Capdoill, 48 Provenfal poetry, similes in, 41 iqq. Puttenham, 126 Queste del Saint Graal, 23, 177 Rehearsal, The, 36, 99 Richard II., 106, 184, 195 sqq. Richart de Berbezill, 5 1 Roland, Chanson de, 256 Rose, Romaunt of the, 198, 251, fassim Rosiphelee, 115 Russell's Modern Europe, 177 St. Evremond, 249 Salisbury, Countess of, 210, 224 iqq. Sandras, M., 198 Santillana, Marquis of, Spanish poet, 134 Schwob, Marcel, 256 Scott, 135 sq., 244 Shakespeare, 85, 160 . Sidney, Sir Philip, 27, 63, 67, 73 Skeat, Professor, his edition of Chaucer, 9 Solinus, 43 ;;. Speculum Meditantis, 102, 104 Stury, Sir Richard, 192, 195 Tasso, 67, 73 Teseide, 67, 71, 88 Tre'sor amour eux, 182, 218 Troilus and Criseyde, 71, 83 sqq., passim Ulfilas, 7 Villehardouin, 2, 16, 175 Villon, 255 Virgil, in Boccaccio's lectures, 70 Visconti, 56 sq., 217 Vox Clamant is, 129 Wales, Ywain of, 221 Waltkarius, by Ekkehard, 38 n. Warton, 28, 233, 242 Wenceslas of Brabant, 183, 188 sq. Wife of Bath, 91, 195 William of Orange, 51, 180 Wooing of our Lord (ed. Morris, Old English Homilies'), 17 Wulfstan, see Ohthere Wycliffe, 8, 20 Young, Dr., quoted, 106 Printed bv R. & R. 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