rr! nVK'.y.^.^.^lLX Of" CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO ni"'ii"r!!iiiiii 3 1822 00544 5499 •^ ":? O ^ Jj //, CENTRAL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY University of California, San Diego DATE DUE PPP n 1 iQQi ^m 9 199] a 59 VCSD Libr. A GENERAL SKETCH OF EUROPEAN LITERATURE IN THE CENTURIES OF ROMANCE BT THE SAME AUTHOR THE THIRD GREAT WAR IN RELATION TO MODERN HISTORY. Bristol, Arrow- smith ; New York, Putnam. INTRODUCTION TO POETRY. 2nd Edition ; 2nd Impression. London, John Murray ; New York, Dutton. A GENERAL SKETCH OF EUROPEAN LITERATURE IN THE CENTURIES OF ROMANCE BY LAURIE MAGNUS LONDON KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO, LTD. BROADWAY HOUSE, 68-74, CARTER LANE, E.C. 4. 1918 PKIMTBD IN GREAT BRITAIM BY THE ANCHOR PRESS LTD. TIPTREE ESSEX TO THE SPIRIT OF FRANCE which quickens these leaves with ehqiience not theirs ' Had I my way in the teaching of English literature, I would have the student start with a " General Sketch of European Litera- ture," somewhat resembling Mr. Freeman's General Sketch of European History in its aim and scope and manner of treatment. . . . Such a " General Sketch of European Literature " I would fix once and for all, as an outline map, in the brain of the young student. ... It is essential that he should know where were the headquarters of literature in each successive period. . . . When Boccaccio is spoken of in connection with Chaucer, when Tasso or Ariosto is spoken of in connection with Spenser, or Boileau in connection with Dryden or Pope, or Goethe in connection with Carlyle, he ought at least to be able to place Boccaccio and Tasso and Ariosto and Boileau and Goethe aright in the general movement of European literature, and in the same measure to conceive aright the relation of each to the literary movement in our own country.' ^E. DOWDEN. ' Literature enables nations to understand one another.' — W. Baobhot. PREFACE This book, though complete in itself, is intended to be the first of three volumes, telling the story of European literature from the twelfth century to the twentieth. A break, as legitimate as any in an uninterrupted consecution, is made here at 1637, the year of the foundation of the French Academy and of Richelieu's enrolment of Corneille. This limit is extended at one end to include the deaths of Milton and Calderon, and at the other to exclude the writers, starting with Malherbe, whose work contributed to the foundation of VAcademie. The succeeding volumes, which are partially prepared and now await more leisurely days, will deal with the epochs of bon sens and of romance revived respectively. The collection of material has been the work of many years. I had hoped at first to write the book as a ' sketch ' in one volume, thus conforming more closely with Prof. Dowden's design in the passage quoted on the opposite page. But Dowden's death in 1913, just before I was to have the advantage of consulting him on some chapters written to that scale 1, caused me to lay the book temporarily aside ; and, later, when I was revising the work on a rather more generous scale, military duties at home made the task of writing very slow. The present 1 ' I shall be able to report with truth the impression of one who, like yourself, loves literature', he wrote to me on March 25, 1913. viii. PREFACE instalment of the ' sketch ' is now published in the hope that Bagehot is right (the quotation faces this preface), and that a literary record of the centuries of old chivalry and new learning, when all Europe went to school together, may help a little to restore lost values and vanished ideals. In a short study of a great subject, any elaborate bibliography would be pretentious. The main thing is, to read the men of letters, in their own languages, if the student can, and, if not, in the version which he finds easiest. My own resources are strictly limited, but I know two or three languages and can tap my w^ay through two or three more ; and, where an English translation is not available, a French or German serves in lieu. Some references to inter- mediate obligations will be found in the footnotes. For the rest, the student, if he desires it, will find no difficulty in collecting further books. There are excellent monographs in English on the history of the literature of the chief countries, such as Saintsbury or Lanson (French) for France, Ticknor or Fitz- maurice-Kelly (French) for Spain, J. G. Robertson for Germany, Maurice Baring for Russia, Symonds for the Renaissance in Italy, and an ample choice for England. There are a few comparative studies in English, such as Sir Sidney Lee's French Renaissance in England and Herford's Literary Relations of England and Germany in the Sixteenth Century. Composite literary history should be sought in Hallam for the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, in Brandes [Main Currents, English translation) for the nineteenth century, and, generally, in chapters or paragraphs of the Cambridge Modern History, and in PREFACE ix. ' the new Hallam ', as Prof. Saintsbui y would have us call the twelve volumes of Periods of European Literature, which he edited and partly wrote. I should advise every student to learn almost by heart the Harvard Lectures on the Revival of Learning, by Sir John E. Sandys. The learned doctor's more extensive History of Classical Scholarship, like Courthope's History of English Poetry, Saintsbury's History of Criticism and one or two other special studies, will be found better for reference than for reading. The student will be well advised, too, to make friends with the Epic and Romance and the Essays oti Medieval Literature by Prof. W. P. Ker ; with From Gerson to Qrotius by Dr. J. N. Figgis, a particularly fascinat- ing volume ; with the Foreign Debt of English Litera- ture by Dr. T. G. Tucker, of Melbourne, ornamented with ingenious diagrams ; with the Oxford lectures on English Literature and the Classics ; with recent studies of Erasmus and Rabelais ; and, if he can get hold of them, with some of the publications of the British Academy and the English Association. I omit French and German authorities : this catalogue pas raisonne is already leading me too far ; but I would make an exception of Faguet's little Initiation litteraire. And I should like to be allowed to add a line of ver}^ grateful acknowledgment to the lifelong work of Prof. George Saintsbury in helping toilers in this field. His ubiquity is a constant surprise. Apart from his opera majora, including a History of the French Novel, now in course of appearance, he has written, edited, and caused to be written so many books that his authority is stamped on the whole subject. Even a trifle like his First Book of English X. PREFACE Literature (Macmillan, 1914), is inlorming and refresh- ing, and as full of meat as an egg. I cannot close this list of obligations without thanking my wife for her constant encouragement and practical help. L. M. Thk Athenaeum, Pall Mall, London, S.W.I. March, 1918. CONTENTS Page PREFACE - - _ . . vii. CHAPTER I STORY-MATTERS AND STORY WRITERS I. EAST AND WEST. The Armament of Igor - - - 3 El Cicl - - . - 4 II. CHARLEMAGNE. Cbarlemagne - - - -6 Chanson de Roland - - - 8 Huon of Bordeaux - - - 10 The Jongleur and the Trouvire - - 11 III. ARTHUR. Growth of the Arthuriad - - - 13 Morte Darthur - - - 16 Amadis of Gdul - - - 17 IV. ANTIQUITY. Alexander - - - - 18 Roman de Troie - - - 19 Statius and Ovid - - - 21 V. SOME OF THE WRITERS. Chretien de Troyes - - - 33 Marie de France - - - 24 Wolfram von Eschenbach - - - 24 Gottfried von Strassburg - - - 25 Hartmann von Aue - - - 25 Walther von der Vogelweide - - 26 Bobert of Gloucester - - - 28 Matthew Paris - - - 28 Saxo the Grammarian - - - 28 Geoffroi de Villehardouin - - - 29 Sire de Joinville - - - 29 VI. GERMANIA. Nibelungenlied - - - 30 Oudrun - - - - 32 VII. THE SAGAS. Mythological Group - - - 33 Historical Group - - - 34 Snorri's Edda - - - 38 VIII. PROVENCAL SONG. The Troubadours - - 42 Albigensian Crusade - - - 43 xii. CONTENTS CHAPTER II THE AGE OF DANTE Pag* Bertrand de Born - - - 45 I. LOVE-LYRIC. Some Forms of Verse - - - 47 Guide Guinicelli - - - 48 Guido Cavalcanti - - - 49 Cino of Pistoja - - - 50 II. THE SCHOOLMEN. Religious Orders - - - 51 Boetbius - - - - 52 Jews and Arabs - - - 53 III. POLITICS. Guelfs and Ghibel lines - - - 54 Frederick Barbarossa - - - 55 Popes Boniface and Clement - - 56 IV. ALLEGORY AND DREAM. Personification - - - 58 Prudentius - - - - 59 Macrobius - - - - 60 V. SATIRISTS AND MORALISTS. Ruteboeuf - - - - 61 Adam de la Halle - - - 61 Some German Writers - - - 62 Jacob von Maerlant - - - 63 King Alfonso the Wise - - - 63 VI. THE ROMANCE OF THE ROSE. Roman de la Rose - - - 65 VII. THE ROMANCE OF REYNARD. Roman de Reiuirt - - - 69 VIII. DANTE ALIGHIERI. His Works - - - - 73 Metres - - - - 74 Vita Niiova and Commedia - - 75 His Influence - - - 78 IX. PIERS PLOWMAN. Langland . - - 79 CHAPTER III THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY I. GENERAL SURVEY. Classification of Writers - - - 81 The Black Death - - - 82 II. JEAN FROISSART. The Jacquerie in History - - - 85 The Jacquerie in Economics - - 8ft The Jacquerie in Froissart's Chronicle - -86 CONTENTS xiii. Page III. AY ALA, JUAN RUIZ, DON JUAN MANUEL. Pedro Lopez de Ayala - - - 90 Ruiz, Archpriest of Hita - - - 91 Don Juan Manuel - - - 92 IV. GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO. 'Fiammetta' - - - - 94 Deccuiieron - - - - 97 Other Writings - - - 100 V. GEOFFREY CHAUCER. Chaucer and Boccaccio - - - 101 Troilus and Criseyde _ . . 102 Metres - - - - 105 Canterbury Tales ... loe VI. PETRARCH. ' Laura ' - - - - 109 Rienzi _ . . . nx Humanism - - - . 112 Petrarch and Boccaccio . - . 114 VII. CHAUCERIANS AND OTHERS. John Gower - - - - 114 Lydgate, Occleve, Hawes - - - 115 Richard de Bury - - - 116 Matteo Bandello - - - 116 Courtiers of John II of Castile - - 117 CHAPTER IV 1374-1492 I. SOWERS OF HUMANISM IN ITALY. Greek Teachers and Italian Pupils - - 121 Dead Books and New Learning - - 125 The Medici Family - - - 126 Lorenzo de Medici ... 127 II. THE FIRST LITERARY HARVEST. Politian ... 129 Mantuan .... 131 Luigi Pulci - - - . 131 Boiardo .... 134 Sannazzaro . . - - 137 The Fifteenth Century in Italy - - 140 Pico Delia Mirandola - - - 141 Lorenzo Valla - - - 142 Philology - - - - 143 Nicholas V and Pius II - - - 144 Alberti - - - - 145 Vittorino da Feltre - - - 146 III. HUMANISM ACROSS THE ALPS. Home-coming Humanista - - - 147 Reuchlin - - - - 148 1492 - - - - 150 Epistolae Obscurorum Virorv.m - - 153 xiv. CONTENTS CHAPTER V THE TRANSIT THROUGH 1492 I. TRANSITION WRITERS. Page Villon - - - - 15T Skelton - - - - 161 Manriqne . - - . 162 Commines - - - . 163 Machiavelli . - - - 164 Virtu and Kultur - - - 169 Machlavellism - - - 170 Ariosto . - - . 171 II. KINDS OF LITERATURE. Meistersinger - - - - 178 Hans Sachs - - - 179 'The Rhetoricians' . - . isi Folly - - - - 183 Folkbooks - ■ - - 185 Faust and Fortunatus - - 187 BaUad - - - - 188 Drama - - - - 191 Latin University Playg - - 193 Italian Sacred Drama - - 195 Pathelin . - . igg Celestina - - - 199 Conclusion - - - 201 CHAPTER VI EUROPE AT SCHOOL I. LATER HUMANISTS. Vettori - - - - a03 Vida - - - - 305 Castelvetro - - - - 206 * The Unities ' - - - SJ07 Erasmus .... 208 Bude - - - - 216 Colet - - - - 218 More - - - - 219 Pope Leo X - - - 223 Emperor Maximilian I - - - 223 Juan Luifl de Viyes - - - 224 Elyot - - - 235 Cujaa - - - - ^25 Caxton and Tory - - - 226 II. THE REFORMERS. The Reformation - - - 927 Luther - - 229 Calvin - - - - 235 Beza - - - - 236 CHAPTER VII EUROPE AT LARGE EUROPE AT LARGE. Queen Margaret of Navarre - - 340 Marot - - 343 Alamanni - - - - 844 Rabelais - - - - 245 Montaigne - - - - *! CONTENTS XV. _ .... Pagb Politics - - . . 255 Hotman, Erastus - - . 25g Marnix, Mariana - - . 257 Bodin, Buchanan - - . 258 Middlemen of Culture - - - 259 Amyot, Tottel, Painter - . ggi Sturm, Ascham, Valdes - . 263 Gesner - . . oe* Theology - . . . |f liuis Ponce d« Leon - - 264 Santa Teresa - - - ijfi'; CourtlyWit - - . - ass Castiglione - - . - I73 Guevara - - . - 274 ' Amadis of G»ul ' - _ - 275 Montemayor, Camoens - . . 277 Boscan - - . . otjO Garcilasso de la Veca - - o«o Wyatt - - . 1^3 Lord Surrey - - . - 285 Bonsard - - , .ir,^ The Pleiad - . . 7,gl Satyre Menimyee - . . .Tqk DuBartas - - . oX^ Sir Philip Sidney - . - '96 Lazarillo de Tonnes - . . 309 Mateo Aleman • - . on-l Drama - - . .^03 Kueda - - . . !a« Conclusion Bacon CHAPTER IX THE AGE OF MILTON Milton's first Period GERMANY. Hardy - - . I |^ 30S CHAPTER VIII THE MATURITY OF ROMANCE THE MATURITY OF ROMANCE. Classification - - . ,,r^ Tasso - . . ' 'iii Spenser - . . " qi^ Cervantes - . . ' o[q Shakespeare- - - . ' tot Marlowe - . . ' I.^q Lope lie Vega and Calderou - . - 336 The Pa'ising of Spanish Literature - 345 347 351 Pietism - - ^ Moscherosch, Logau - . ' «« Grimmelshausen - . "or? Opitz - . . ' Bl German Academies - . ' tia Leibniz - . . ' o^„ xvi. CONTENTS II. SPAIN. Pagk Molinos ... - 361 Gracian . . _ - a&i Guillen de Castro - - - 363 Spanish Drama - - - 364 III. ENGLAND. Nash - - - - 365 Ben Jonson - - - - 366 Songs - - - - 367 Herrick - - - - 369 Prose-writers - - - - 371 Waller, Marvell - - - 572 Bunyan - - - - 373 IV. SCANDINAVIA. .\rrebo, Brynjolf - - - 374 V. THE NETHERLANDS. Grotius - - - ■ 3'f Voss, Gruter - - - - 376 Saumaise - - - - 377 Queen Christina of Sweden - - - 377 Coster's Academy - - - 378 Tesselschade Visscher - - - 379 Hooft, Bredero - - " olx Huyghens, Cats - - - 380 Vondel - - - - 381 VI. MILTON. His Second Period - - - 382 Hellenism and Hebraism - - - 383 The Classicists - - "15^ The Junction of the Streams - - 386 Milton's Epics - - - 38T Samson Agonistea - - - 389 CHAPTER X I. THE WATERSHED OF 1637. France and England - - - 391 The New Approach to Nature - - 393 II. CONCLUSION. A Definition - - - " o^ A Warning - - ■ " 395 INDEX - - - - .397 A GENERAL SKETCH OF EUROPEAN LITERATURE IN THE CENTURIES OF ROMANCE CHAPTER I. Story-Matters and Story- Writers. What to write and How to write it are the two parts of the art of literature ; their harmonious fusion is the whole. In the beginning, matter was scarce and style was crude and unadorned. A great leader's deeds in battle were the first and favourite subject, and the favourite manner of telling them was in short para- graphs of verse. There was no rhyme in early epic. Its effect was poorly represented, not by the blank- verse rhythm of later rhymeless epic poetry, but by a repetition of letters at the beginning, or of sounds at the end of words. The first of these devices is called alliteration, the second is called assonance ; and the latter is the commonest feature of primitive lays de geste ^. Narrative verse of this kind is found in most early literatures, and has a charm rather in excess of its actual qualities as poetry. It is old, and loyal, and pious ; it has a fresh sensibility to nature ; and it bears witness to the heroic character of the brave peoples who sang their leaders' fame. Thus, the English Song of Maldon, written in 991, when Ethelred the Unready was king, has the true epic ring * L«tin gesla (deeds), whence the French geste and Einglish jest. B 2 EUROPEAN LITERATURE in certain passages ; notably in the dying speech of old Byrhtwold of Essex, who — ' shook his ashen spear, and taught courage to them that fought, saying : " Thought shall be the harder, heart the keener, and mood shall be the more as our might lessens " '. No leader of a forlorn hope would wish to be moved to finer utterance. Similar notes are heard in other poems, though none of them reached the level of the Iliad of the ancient master, whose works, so familiar to-day as a standard of comparison, were available then only in bad summaries or worse travesties. Still, hero-worship was not a monopoly of the Greeks, and the local heroes found their singers. Indeed, it may fairly be urged that the touches of Homer's spirit in writers ignorant of Homer afford proof, to those competent to weigh evidence, of the dependence of style on matter. I. EAST AND WEST. The heroic voice rang out in many places, even in some where it might least have been expected. One of these was Kiev, in South-East Russia, for centuries a nest of pett}^ fighting along the waterways of commerce to Constantinople. Thither had come the hardy Norsemen in the far-away days, when ' piracy ', we are told, ' was the exercise, the trade, the glory, and the virtue of the Scandinavian youth ' ^. The piratical fighting round Kiev began in 862, when Rurik, a chieftain oi' Scandinavia, came roving from the North, seeking whom he might exploit. There he founded a dynasty, which lasted about seven hundred years ; and in its eighth generation the monotonous Chronicle of his line was broken by a 1 Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap. 55. EAST AND WEST 8 prose-poem, or lay, known in English as The Arma- ment of Igor \ and embalming, in the words of a French critic, ' the promise of all the lyric poetry of Russia in the nineteenth centm'y ' ^ . It is a big claim for a lay of the twelfth century, when the poetic art was rudimentary and warriors' manners were rude ; and how it happened that the anonymous epicist was touched to such rare expression, no one can say to-day. None ever can say how it happens that a seemingly inconspicuous geste should strike the imagination of contemporaries. We know a good story or a good song, but why we are privileged to know it is the secret of epicist and balladist, of the story-teller and song-writer. So it was with Igor at Kiev. When history has pieced together the fragmentary records of his career (1151-1202), he seems pathetic rather than heroic among the maraud- ing chieftains of his race. He went out to battle, but he always failed, as was said of the Celts in olden times ; and his foray of April, 1185, was no exception to the rule. Yet, though quite an insignificant epi- sode in the Kiev cycle of desultory warfare, somebody saw its telling quality, and Igor's poet struck the authentic note. A national appeal always thrills. We change or adopt the current symbol, and realize the meaning in our own hearts ; and, equally, heroic action touches universal sympathy. These chords were within Igor's compass, and the early Russian epic-teller knew how to add the revealing epithets, the natural magic, and the fighting-man's joy. The later history of the Armament is interesting. The lay vanished for six centuries, and it was im- printed only just in time for a few copies of the editio princeps to escape the fire of Moscow in 1812, ^ The Tale of the Armmneut of Igor. a.d. 1185. A Russian Historical Epic. Edited and translated by Leonard A. Magnus. (Philological Society.) Oxford. * Vicomte E. M. de Vogue, le Roman Russe. 4 EUROPEAN LITERATURE in which the MS perished. A second MS was dis- covered in 1864. We pass to the other end of Europe. About fifty years earlier than the composition of Igor, a Spanish writer, likewise unnamed, composed a more notable epic poem on a more famous hero of Castile. El Cid, Lord Roderick, the Champion, was a very real personage in his day. He was named Ruy Diaz de Bivar, and men called him Campeador, or Champion, and el Cid {=Sidi), the Lord. The dates of his birth and death are 1040 and 1099. The Cid's lordship was over Valencia, which he besieged in 1092 and con- quered in 1094. Thus, Lord Roderick's place in Castile is far more securely fixed than Prince Igor's in Kiev. But was it so much more eminent ? His- tory is partial on this subject. We note that Cer- vantes asked the question ^, and we note, too, that Ruy Diaz was twice idealized by poets out of all likeness to the part he played on earth. First came this Poema del Cid, the anonymous Spanish epic of the twelfth century, and, next, in the seventeenth century, came Corneille's French drama, le Cid. The Castilian teller knew Roderick by repute, perhaps even had seen him personally. The French dramatist saw his tragic hero through the nimbus which veiled the Middle Ages, and neither presentment is probably the true Cid. Accordingly, we are to judge the Spanish version, with which we are immediately concerned, as poetry, not as histoVy. It is history checked by art, and the art of epopee at that date had reached the height of its perfection. The rough edges of the hero Avere trimmed to the pattern of Christ's captain against the infidel. The noble savage was reformed into the ideal Spaniard. The fighting lord of Valencia became a symbol of the Divine Lord, and was embellished by his poet accordingly. Spiritual 1 Don Quixote, i, -49. EAST AND WEST 5 and national aims, always congenial to the proud Spanish temper, were invoked to qualify and heighten the rude, soldierly virtues which Ruy Diaz displayed so valiantly ; and the Cid is unique as an example of a native hero invented by poetic skill, while his geste was still within memory. Neither Cid nor Igor stood alone, and neither is complete as it stands ^. Each has come down to us imperfect, as the survivor of and witness to others, less fortunate, if not less deserving. Thus, the Russian Chronicle of Nestor is even older than the Igor lay, and is still our chief authority for the coming of the Northmen to the East. Spain, too, had her chronicle-cycles, compiled during two or thiee centuries after the outstanding Poema del Cid. Apart from miscellaneous specimens, four such series are distinguished — 1. Cronica General, commonly known as Primera (the first) ; inaugurated between 1260 and 1268 by King Alfonso the Wise of Castile, whom we shall meet later on as the founder of Spanish law and constitution. 2. Cronica General Segunda (second), revised, with additions from Primera, in 1344. 3. A fresh revision, now not extant. 4. Cronica General Tercera (third) ; derived from No. 3, and dated from about the beginning of the fifteenth century. Another offspring of No. 3 was the Cronica de Castilla, from which proceeded in turn a Cronica particular del Cid, first published in 1512 but composed in the previous century. To the same prolific fifteenth century belongs a very valuable compilation, known ^ R. Southey (1774-1843) translated the Cid into English. Igor was the theme of an opera by Borodin (1834-87), the Russimn composer. 6 EUROPEAN LITERATURE as the ' Chronicle of his Most Serene Majesty King John the Second of Castile ', who was a notable begetter of Spanish letters. His Cronica was printed in 1517, and was based on an historical sketch by Alvar Garcia de Santa Maria (died 1460), member of a well-known Jewish family of men of letters in Spain. Among single eminent examples of the chronicler's art, the famous Passo Honroso (' Pass of Honour '), the title of which suggests its contents, and the ' Oath of Tordesillas ' may specially be selected for mention. But really the number is legion. The writing of Cronicas was practised right away into the sixteenth century, and it supplied endless material to the busy song-smiths, playwrights, and romancers, whose names enrich Spanish literature. Meanwhile, in Europe, East and West, Russia's Igor and the Spanish Cid are available for common reading as typical specimens in the twelfth century of an art which was to prove so reproductive. II. CHARLEMAGNE. The great clearing-house of the ^es^e- works was France. Even the writer of the Cid is said on trust- worthy evidence to have used a French model ; and in the sjDlendid history of epopee France was foremost in invention and adaptation. The native French story-matter, like the Russian and the Spanish, was historical. Like them, it passed into legend on the lips of too loyal adherents ; but behind all the tales of French chansons ^ is the figure of a king among men : *'>vo.^ dvdpojv, Charlemagne. Some kings achieve literature, others have litera- ture thrust upon them. Charles, surnamedthe Great ^ The equivalent terms should be noted — French, Chanson ; Russian, Bylina (pi., Byliny) ; Spanish, Cantor ; German, Lied (pi., Lieder) ; Icelandic, Saga. CHARLEMAGNE 7 (Carolus Magnus, Charlemagne), would seem to belong to both classes. When Pippin, his father, died, in 768, he left a comparatively small kingdom, which Charles extended by force of arms from the Danube to the Ebro and from the Elbe to the Po. Pope Leo III at Rome invested him with the Crown of the Frankish Empire, and 800, the year of that ceremony, ranks, accordingly, as the date of the foundation of the Holy Roman Empire ^. Like King Alfred in our own country, the Emperor Charles encouraged the fine arts, and especially busied himself with a collection of old legends, associated with ' Germania ' and the Rhine. By a fate not peculiar to medieval fathers, his son destroyed them as relics of barbarism. Like Alfred again, Charles invited scholars to his Court (the English deacon Alcuin among them), for the instruction and improvement of his people ; and his use of monasteries and their inmates as the deposit- ories and guardians of precious MSS was a further boon to literature, with wide results in future years, when Humanists ransacked these treasuries and Reformers uprooted them. So much and more Charlemagne did, and all honour to his memory, as an active supporter of learning in the ninth century, a.d. His passive part in later centuries was even more important and effective. He strides through his chansons de geste, ripe in years, with long, flowing beard, the chieftain of doughty paladins, and a holy terror to the infidel. Gradually, as the legends grew, and each of the paladins of Charlemagne acquired his own legend- ^ Its history has been told by Lord Bryce. It lasted one thousand and six years, and was evacuated at the beginning of last century by the Emperor Francis II, when Napoleon styled himself Emperor of the French. Francis II took the style of first Emperor of Austria, and was grand-uncle to the Emperor Francis Joseph, who died in 1916. The title of German Emperor (new series) was first assumed by King William I of Prussia after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. 8 EUROPEAN LITERATURE cycle, the central figure of the Emperor was sub- ordinated to the figures of his knights, ' His beard and his credulity grew long together * ^, wrote the first Italian romance-epicist, and the touch of con- tempt is characteristic of the monarch's place in his own legend. It was the old man who went down to history : the old king suspicious of his courtiers, the old father jealous of his sons, the old leader mumbling his past triumphs ^. Noble, the Lion, king of beasts, deceived by the nimble wit of Reynard, was the form in which fable and satire presented Charlemagne in romance. But, though they reduced his true stature, the story -^vr iters knew their business. Literally, it suited their book to contract the leader's scope. It left the stage free for his paladins. By exchanging one hero for many, they acquired the dramatic motive of an empire parted among its heirs. The first of these heirs in romance was Roland, nephew of Charlemagne. Historically, Hruotland, or Roland, was Warden of the Breton marches, and he was killed in 778 at the head of a rearguard action against Basque hillsmen at Roncesvalles in Northern Spain. Except for the makers of epopee, this bare statement of facts would be more than enough to commemorate a little episode of obscure fighting long ago. But Roland, like Igor and Roderick, and like Arthur, to whom we shall come, was greater in fiction than in fact. For this disaster to Charle- magne's lieutenant appealed to popular imagination, and the romancers' art was set to work to adorn Roland for their tales. They took him out of his narrow surroundings. They promoted the Basques to Saracens, traditional foemen of the Cross, thus raising Roland at a stroke to the rank of a Christian hero. ^ Puici, Morgante Maggiore. * The personal history of Charlemagne was confuaed with the decline of his dynasty. CHARLEMAGNE 9 They changed the modest ruse-de-guerre by which Hruotland had been cut off in the defile into a base act of treachery by a Frankish accomplice of the Saracens. They invented Ganelon (or Ganilo) as villain of the plot, and represented him in one version as stepfather to his victim. They set Oliver, the Wise, by the side of Roland, le preux, and enhanced, or invented, the fair Aude, Oliver's sister and Roland's lover. And when the battle had been lost, and the tragedy was done, and the clear, clean blade of Durendal, Roland's invincible sword, had pierced its last Pagan, and Roland, on the summit of a peak, had turned his eyes towards Spain, and had stretched to God his gauntleted right hand, and the Angels of Heaven had encompassed him about, then the poets invented the reprisals. The third part of the Chanson de Roland narrates Charlemagne's vengeance on the Saracens, and his slaying of their leader in single combat. So this tale of a skirmish at Roncesvalles, where ' the mountains were oh ! so high, and the valleys oh ! so deep, and the torrents oh ! so swift *, was embellished by French romance into the im- mortal story of Sir Roland, who fought the good fight for God and France, as gallant Frenchmen have fought it to this day — ' Jamais le comte Roland n'aima les l&ohes, Ni les orgueilleux, ni les m^chants, Ni les chevaliers qui ne sont pas bons vassaux ' *. Always he sought the thickest of the fray — ' Ah ! si vous aviez vu Roland jeter un mort sur un autre mort, Et le sang tout clair inondant le sol ! Roland est rouge de sang ; rouge est son haubert, rouges sont ses bras, Rouges sont ses epaules et le cou de son cheyal'. ^ From the modern French rersion of La Chanson de Koland. . . Par Leon Gautier. 17th edit., 1888, 10 EUROPEAN LITERATURE And always he chose the honourable part, as became a paladin of ' sweet France ' — ' C'est ici, c'est ici que nous serons martyrs. Maintenant, je sais bien que nous n'avons plus longtemps a vivre ; Mais maudit celui que ne se vendra cherement ! Disputez bien votre mort, votre vie, Et surtout que France la douce ne soit pas deshonor6e. Quand Charles men seigneur viendra sur le champ de bataille, Quand il verra le massacre des Sarrasins, Quand pour un des notres il en trouvera quinze d'entre eux parmi les morts, L'empereur ne pourra pas ne point nous btoir'. The success of the poem was immediate and enduring. No chanson de geste has thrilled larger audiences than Roland. Roland and Oliver have become a proverb. Roland's war-song is said to have been chanted by Taillefer, the fighting herald, at the Battle of Hastings, 1066. Roland supplied the model for el Cid ; and Roland, naturalized as Orlando, will be found in later chapters of this book as the chief figure in the Carlovingian romances of Italian poets, including Ariosto. Of course, there was another side to his story ; the Spanish side of the victors, that is to say. But the honours of romance are with the French, and the tales and ballads of the valorous Spaniard, Don Hernando del Carpio, who slew ' Roldan ', the invader, are no better authenticated than Roland's chanson, and have enjoyed less fame. A second great Carlovingian story was that of Huon of Bordeaux. The emperor of this tale is a patriarch, at last entering his dotage. At the age of a hundred and twenty-five years he is still busy with affairs of State, and is induced to believe a false charge brought against Huon by his enemies. He condemns the unhappy knight to expiate his crime in Babylon, and Huon takes ship for the East. Here the poet's genius displays itself. Brindisi, from which Huon sets sail, became a port of embarkation into wonder- CHARLEMAGNE 11 land, and the knight quits the known world for realms of Oriental magic. Oberon, king of the fairies, enters literature by this gate, set wide by early French romancers to Shakespearean fancy and imagination. We cannot traverse all the Charlemagne-cycle. French scholarship, working on the remains, enum- erates fom* main groups — 1. National or royal chansons, including the Emperor's Saxon campaign, his fabled ex- pedition against the Saracens, the Enfances (early exploits) of Ogier the Dane, and Charlemagne's visit to Palestine. This last is mainly in burlesque. 2. Feudal chansons, including Huon de Bo7'deaux. 3. Biographical chansons, with genealogies, etc., affording later romancers ample scope for topical references and local colour ; and 4. Adventitious chansons, derived from sources outside the main repertory. Summarily, this mass of romances took shape between 1050 and 1350. The tales were composed at first to a simple musical accompaniment. The singer or reciter was the jongleur, the inventor or retriever was the trouvere (troubadour), and he retrove from various sources. Chiefly, of course, he took them down from the lips of guardians of tombs and of sacred relics in the churches, where a constant stream of pilgrims evoked then, as ever, loquacious guides. The jongleur'' s well-paid business was to collect as many chansons as he could, and to recite them at any resort where he could ply his trade. He might deal with his repertory as he chose. There was no copy- right to be considered, and a clever jongleur would be careful to polish and embellish his wares, without spending money in renewing them. Thus, the contents of the chansons departed further and further 12 EUROPEAN LITERATURE from verisimilitude. Adventure and romance were accumulated, and even the form was modified in the competition for popular applause. The four- or five- foot iambic line, arranged in blocks (French, laisses or tirades) of verses, spread to the twelve-foot Alexan- drine. The laisses were broken into stanzas ; vowel - assonance was varied with rhyme, and the disuse of the lyre or harp led on the one part to more elaborate versification and on the other to a beginning of prose- narration. These technical features of composition, which practice constantly improved, are common to all the romances derived by early French writers from the mass of local epic-cycles, and we repass from the manner to the matters. The native matiere de France was supplied by Charlemagne ; and second only, if second, in importance, was the so-called matiere de Bretagne, hewn from the Breton legends of III. ARTHUR. Flos regum Arthurus, King Arthur of the Welsh ^ hills, is even more remote than Charlemagne from the uses of history and biography. He is reputed a leader of the Britons in their struggle during the fifth century against Teuton invaders ; and, while the first account of this warfare comes from the pen of Gildas, a clerk, who lived shortly after the events, the first mention of Arthur by name occurs in the tenth century in the course of a Latin book by Nennius, who extolled him as victor in twelve battles. Celtic poetry and fairy-tales set to work on these slender traditions, and some fragmentary prose-tales in Welsh, known as Mabinogion, and dating, probably, from the thirteenth century, survive as eloquent * The French name for Wales is Galles (Gaul). Hence one branch of the Arthur-cycle is known as Amadis uj Gaul. See p. 16. ARTHUR 13 witnesses to the growth of the Arthur-story. But it had become a legend, and nothing more. As Matthew Arnold said in Celtic Literature : ' The medieval story-teller is pillaging an antiquity of which he does not fully possess the secret '. So we part from King Arthur in the flesh. Like Don Roderick and Count Roland, he is lost in the wreaths of his own mists, and, haply, he inspired another Welshman to save us anew from the invader. ' I will not say it shall be so ', it is written of Arthur's return, ' but rather I will say, Here in this world he changed his life ' ^. King Arthur of fiction took his place, and it happened in the course of the centuries that the three most exquisite versions of the tales of his first coming were inscribed by three Englishmen : Thomas Malory, Edmund Spenser, and Alfred Tenny- son. Before the tales reached Malory, however, in his Morte Darthur of 1469, many rich additions had been made, chiefly by Latin and French writers, to the primitive narrative of Gildas the clerk. Even Malory himself, by the testimony of his printer, William Caxton, took his copy ' out of certain books of French and reduced it into English ' ; an anticipa- tion of the entente cordiale, which we meet again in the age of Ronsard. We may distinguish three main stages in the gradual development of the Arthuriad from the fifth to the fifteenth century. First, Celtic magic overlaid it with the wild and melancholy charm which haunts the genius of the race. Next, our Angevin kings, for the aggrandisement of their own dynasty, employed political historians (the type has not been unknown in later days) to trace the descent of King Arthur from Aeneas of Troy, and so infuse Roman blood in British kings. Brut (Brutus) was discovered as the great-grandson of Aeneas, and the name Britain was 1 From Malory, Morte Darlhur. 14 EUROPEAN LITERATURE derived from him. This mission was faithfully discharged by the Latin histories of Geoffrey of Monmouth (c. 1136) ; and, professing to draw from native sources, which he omitted to specify, Geoffrey introduced Merlin, or Myrrdhin, a famous wizard of old Wales, as the prophet of Arthur's birth and death. The sin of Modred with Guenevere, Arthur's mortal wound in his last battle, his departure to Avalon and his return, were all handed on for elaboration to the eager romancers who came after. Other tales, too, of early Britain, Shakespeare's Lear and Cymbeline among them, would have meant less to us, or nothing, save for Geoffrey of Monmouth's Latin book. Thus, the glamour of Celtic magic and the glory of Roman descent were both added to Arthur in the Middle Ages. The third and greatest was still wanting : his con- secration to the Cross ; and this, too, was a boon of the twelfth century. It came in a curious way, characteristic of the uncritical times. In the accepted story of Britain's conversion to Christianity, Joseph of Arimathea had exhibited on a round table the grail ^, or dish, in which he had caught the falling drops of the Saviour's blood. In the tale of Peredur (Perceval) in the Mabinogion, we read of a grail, or dish, which that valiant knight had to find in order to break an enchanter's spell. An Anglo-French writer called Wace was the first to seize this opportunity. His Brut of 1155 was a clever poetic revision of Geoffrey's history of British kings, and he enhanced the splen- dour of the dynasty by annexing for Arthur's knights the Table Round of the sacred legend, never after- wards separated from the story. Next, in a series of three tales, Joseph of Arimathea, Merlin, and Perceval, Robert de Boron, a French romancer, represented the ^ Old French, graal. The etymology is unknown. Better known is the later confusion between San Great ( = holy dish) and Sang Real ( = true blood). ARTHUR 15 two grails as one, and identified the Celtic talisman with the Christian relic of the Cross. Thus, the Quest of the Grail was raised out of the region of Pagan magic into an emblem of Christian faith and a symbol of knightly valour. Lancelot and Galahad in turn took Perceval's place as Grail -hero. Tristan, lover of Isolt, and Lohengrin, Knight of the Swan, were assimilated to the main stock ; and an immense mass of rornans Bretons avenged the disappearance of the Celtic kingdom by conquering the imagination of all Europe. We need not follow any further the ' French books ' read by Malory for the copy which Caxton imprinted, and in which, as he said, ' may be seen noble chivalry, courtesy, humanity, friendliness, hardiness, love, friendship, cowardice, hate, virtue, and sin. Do after the good ', he added, ' and leave the evil, and it shall bring you to good fame and renommee '. There were those in after times (Roger Ascham, Queen Elizabeth's tutor, was among them), for whose taste these tales of the Arthuriad were too full of ' war and wantonness ', in the epithets used by Tennyson, to be admitted as moral reading. The reproach would not be unjust, if the king and his knights could be divested of all the magic and the virtue which poets and romancers have bestowed on them during more than fourteen hundred years. But the poetry cannot be unsung, the romances cannot be untold. ' Amongst us Englishmen ', as Caxton wrote, Arthur is ' most to be remembered before all other Christian kings ' ; and to us, as to Spenser, he still presents ' the image of a brave knight, perfected in the twelve moral virtues '. He is still the warrior- prince, whose epic Milton meditated before he wrote Paradise Lost ; and still, his name, ' A ghost Streams like a cloud, man-shaped, from mountain-peak, And cleaves to cairn and cronilech ', as in the last lines of the Idylls of the King. 1« EUROPEAN LITERATURE There is nothing to add to these praises of the old tales, preserved in early centuries by Anglo-French chroniclers and poets. But if any question their high judgments, or share the schoolmaster's doubt, let him open Malory's Morte Darthur, and turn first to book xviii, chapter 25, which tells us of young love in May — ' And thus it passed on from Candlemas till after Easter, and the month of May was come, when every lusty heart beginneth to blossom and to bring forth fruit ; for like as herbs and trees bring forth fruit and flourish in May, in like wise every lusty heart, that is in any manner a lover, springeth and flourisheth in lusty deeds. For it giveth unto all lovers courage, that lusty month of May, in some thing to constrain him to some manner of thing, more in that month than in any other month, for divers causes. For then all herbs and trees renew a man and woman, and in like wise lovers call again to their mind old gentleness and old service. . . . Therefore, like as May month flowereth and flourisheth in many gardens, so in like wise let every man of worship flourish his heart in this world, first unto God, and next unto the joy of them that he promised his faith unto. For there was never worshipful man nor worshipful woman, but they loved one better than another : and worship in arms may never be foiled ; but first reserve the honour to God, and secondly the quarrel must come of thy lady : and such love I call virtuous love '. And the burden of proof is upon him who says otherwise. Before leaving Arthur and the Arthuriad, mention is due to a branch of his many-branching story known as Amadis of Gaul (Gaula, Wales). Its hero came from the same hills whence the romans Bretons ARTHUR 17 descended, and passed through the same romantic treatment. But at an early date he was adopted in Spain and Portugal, and there his adventures enter- tained King Francis I of France during the campaigns of the sixteenth century. By royal command they were rendered into French, thus returning after many years to the country of their first adoption. The success of Amadis at his second coming belongs to a later chapter of French literature, and we shall reach it in due course. Here we have only to remark the derivation of the tale from the Arthur-cycle. Caxton's fine preface to Malory names nine pre- eminent heroes : three Christians, three Jews, and three Pagans ; and he joined to Charlemagne and Arthur the name of Godfrey of Boulogne (Bouillon) as the third in the first class. To Godfrey, too, we return in a later chapter, for Tasso, the great Italian poet, retold his romantic story in Jerusalem Delivered, and drew material for this epic-romance from many an older tale, right away back to the twelfth century, Antioch, again, like Jerusalem, was a Holy City of romance for valiant knights of chivalry who set sail from Brindisi for the East ^. It would be an endless task, however, to enumerate severally by name the romantic sites and heroes of old-time story and song. We may quote a memorable couplet by Jean Bodel, a French trouvere, who admirably classified the common repertory in three groups — ' Ne sont que trois matieres a mil homme entendant, — De France, et de Bretagne, et de Rome la Grant ' . The matter of France was Charlemagne, the matter of Bretagne was Arthur. What was the matter of great Rome ? We may call it, summarily, ^ The epithet Flos regum Arthurus, which Tennyson prefixed to lii« Idylls of the King, first occurs in an epic romance on the Siege of Antioch, by Joseph of Exeter (twelfth century). C 18 EUROPEAN LITERATURE IV. ANTIQUITY. Jean Bodel called it ' Rome ', because the thir- teenth century, in which he wrote, lived under the sign of the Roman Church ; and the name of Rome is preserved in the romans which it inspired. But the chief hero of the matiere de Rome, its Charlemagne or Arthur, so to say, was not a Roman, but a Greek : Alexander the Great of Macedon. Not the Alexander known in Greek history, diligently proved and documented, but a marvellous, magical Alexander, a hero of glamorous adventures in the land of the rising sun. The conqueror of all the known world who still sought new worlds to conquer, and died, unglutted of conquest, at an age when most men start their career, appealed irresistibly to the imagination of the chival- rous knights of the Middle Ages, who were always seeking a new grail, unaware of the secret of modern faith, that the Quest and the Grail are one. And this wonder-king of French chansons was not derived from sober Greek historians. The main source of the story-tellers was a Greek book composed at Alexandria in the second century, a.d., by a writer unkindly known as pseudo-Kallisthenes, and his narrative, we must admit, was as unveracious as his name. A Latin version was compiled from it in the fourth century, epitomized again in the ninth, and it was this epitome which inspired the first chanson de geste of Alexander, written by Alberic de Besan9on. So far removed from reality Avas Besancon's picture of the Macedonian, that he was represented as a feudal monarch, sur- rounded by barons and knights. Next came the roman d'Alixaundre, some time towards the close of the twelfth century, and its authors used as metre an elongated verse of twelve syllables, famous ever after as the Alexandrine. Thus, the last of Alexander's conquests was the national measure of French verse. ANTIQUITY 19 Among these poets of the Alexandriad, three are mentioned by name : Lambert le Tort de Chateaudun, Alexandre de Bernay de Paris, and Pierre de St. Cloud. They used as additional source-books Alexander's reputed correspondence with Aristotle, the philoso- pher, and Dindimus, King of the Brahmins, and likewise an Iter Paradisce of Alexander's sojourn in Paradise. The conqueror's Indian campaign was the topic of a further romance by Jacques de Longuyon (c. 1312), and there we first meet the nine notables, three Christians, three Jews, and three Pagans, so popular in after-literature. Alexander did not exhaust Antiquity. The siege of Troy and its episodes were too close to the sym- pathy of besiegers of Antioch and Jerusalem to fail to find modern romancers ; and there was further the foible of Western monarchs to trace their descent from Trojan chieftains. The * descendants ' of Brutus and Aeneas were concerned for their ancestors' re- nown. But here, too, true authorities were missing. Homer, as we saw, was unavailable, and these fervid national story-tellers had to retrieve their history of Troy from two source-books of the sixth century, ascribed to ' Dictys ' and ' Dares ', who, with admir- able impartiality, had espoused respectively the Greek and the Trojan sides. We may skip the development of these chronicles. The Trojan tale acquired European interest when a French clerk, Benoit de Ste. More (Ste. More was not far from Tours) wrote a roman de Troie in more than thirty thousand verses. Its date was c. 1160, and it was dedicated to Queen Eleanor, consort to Louis VII. Benoit's tale was characteristic of its kind. He conformed the Greek setting to modern manners. Calchas appeared as a Christian bishop, and Hector was beloved by a fay. Next came a Sicilian redaction by Guido delle Colonne, and Gower, Boccaccio, 20 EUROPEAN LITERATURE Chaucer, and Lydgate all followed Guido to Troy. A Recuyell (Collection) of the Historyes of Troy c was the first book imprintedinEngland by William Caxton,1474. Of the tale of Troilus and Criseyde, which Chaucer inscribed to ' moral Gower ', and in which he had ' for successors all the dramatists and novelists of all the modern tongues ' ^, including Shakespeare himself, there is no need to speak. It had been told by Dares and Dictys, it was retold by Benoit de Ste.-More ; Guido took it from Benoit, and Boccaccio and Chaucer handed it on. Troilus was the son of Priam, King of Troy, and his ' matter ', as Chaucer calls it, is perhaps the most moving of all matters which romance took from Antiquity — ' In which ye may the double sorwes hear, Of Troilus, in loving of Criseyde, And how that she forsooke him er she deyde '. Thebes, too, yielded its riches, not less romantic than Troy's, and chief of the Theban matters was the love-tale of Palamon and Arcite, retold by Boccaccio in his Teseide, by Chaucer in his KnighVs Tale, and, later, in the Two Noble Kinsmen, 1634, of John Fletcher, in which Shakespeare may have collaborated. Another popular love-tale was that of Flores (Florio, Floire) and Blanchefleur (Biancafiore), which Boccaccio related in his Filocolo. A charming variant of it is found in a French romance, Aucassin et Nicolete, which was written in the twelfth century, and which Andrew Lang rendered into English in the nineteenth. Since it is told partly in verse and partly in prose, it is called a cantefable, or song-story, and as story or song it is equally fresh and delicate — ' 'Tis how two young lovers met, Aucassin and Nicolete, Of the pains the lover bore And the sorrows he outwore, For the goodness and the grace Of his love, so fair of face. * W. P. Ker, Essays on Medieval Literature. ANTIQUITY 21 ' Sweet the song, the story sweet, There is no man hearkens it, No man living 'neath the sun, So outwearied, so fordone, Sick and woful, worn and sad, But is healed, but is glad 'Tis so sweet ' . Not unlike Aucassin is Flamenca, dating from the mid-thirteenth century, and interesting, too, for its list (verses 609-701) of the source-books of medieval romance. We must not linger at these fountains. It is no diminishment of the originality of Boccaccio and Chaucer, and of the earlier romancers whom they drew upon, to refer to the Thebais of Statins, a Latin poet of the first century, a.d., as the prime authority for the tales of Thebes. Traces, too, of the influence of Greek novelists, Longus, Heliodorus, and others, are found in Aucassin and other tales, and these traces became more prominent at the time of the Amadis revival. But of all the source-books of the matter of ' Rome la grant ', or, as we prefer to describe it, Antiquity, the fullest and the most abiding was Ovid ; Publius Ovidius Naso, who died a.d. 17. Through Ovid's poems, more than through any medium, the gods and heroes of old Greek myth found their way into modern verse, and the way was made wonderfully smooth by the inimitable grace of his Latinity. Ovid's ruling deity was Cupid ; to Love as master and magician, and to the sway of Love over men and women, all his skill and talent were devoted. His Ars amatoria was ransacked for the code of me- dieval courts-of-love, and dictated the laws of chivalry and the manners of the Table Round. His Heroides and his Metamorphoses (' a sort of Bible of antique Paganism ' ^) were at the same time pumped dry for story-matter. His tales of Pyramus and Thisbe, of ^ W. S. Lilly, in the Fortnightly Review, Jan., 1917. 82 EUROPEAN LITERATURE Dido, Medea, Orpheus, Ariadne, Philomela, Nar- cissus, became part of the common stock of romance. Dante was so much impressed by them, that, with true twilight timidity, he called for an allegorical interpretation, and this was presently forthcoming in a French anonymous poem, which explained the theological significance of each O vidian tale to the patient intellect of the fourteenth century. A second ' moral Ovid ' was written in Latin by Pierre Bersuire, translator of Livy's histories, who died in 1362, In mine host's ' words to the compan}^ ' which introduce Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale, we are assured that Chaucer ' Hath told of lovers up and down More than Ovid made of mention ', and a long list is given of the English poet's debts to the Roman. * Trans ego tellurem, trans altas audiar undas ', (across the land, across the deep seas my name shall be heard), wrote Ovid of liimself, in one of those mo- ments of individualism which appealed so strongly to Renaissance scholars. The prophecy is just. His fame flew in every country, and the signal example of Shakespeare may be cited as summary proof. Arthur Golding's Metamorphoses, 1565-67, and Turberville's Heroides, 1567, were both well known to him, and his Rape of Lucrece ^ is cited, among other presumptive evidence, to prove his acquaintance with the Latin text. Truly might Francis Meres wi'ite, 1598 : ' The sweet, witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare '. ^ From Ovid, Fasti, ii, then not yet translated. SOME OF THE WRITERS 28 V. SOME OF THE WRITERS. We have examined, briefly enough, the three story-matters of Western literature, of France, of Bretagne, and of ' Rome ' ; Charlemagne, Arthur, and Antiquity. Before we look further north and further south, we shall mention, no less briefly, a few of the major ^Titers who piloted the themes through the Middle Ages. Chief of those who have survived the perils of time and anonymity is Chretien de Troyes, of the second half of the twelfth century. He was a clever and prolific trouvere at the court of the Countess Marie de Champagne, daughter of King Louis VII and Queen Eleanor of France. He translated the Ars amatoria, to which we referred just now, as an essential hand- book of method ; but in effect he was a Celtic revivalist, in whose hands the Celtic legends were reborn. It was the business of the craftsmen of this age to romanticize the old heroic tales. They rendered them to sophisticated audiences, trained in the chivalric tradition. The old wine was poured into new bottles, shaped — the shaping was the thing — according to the pattern of Ovid and other love- professors. Ego sum preceptor amoris, the Roman master had said, and medieval romancers delighted to make his precepts real. So, Arthur emerged from his Welsh hills as a peer in chivalry with Charle- magne. So, Charlemagne laid away his rudeness, and gave noble laws to Christian paladins. So, Alexander of Macedon was furnished with a feudal retinue ; and so, as we saw, the gates of faery were set wide to travellers eastward-ho ! This was Chretien's method with his ' matters ', in Percival and other great romances ; and, if a little of the Celtic magic was spilled in his tales of Norman chivalry, if the process completed by Tennyson was begun by his long-ago 24 EUROPEAN LITERATURE predecessor, still the work was set in forward lines. The very labour of transfusion helped French litera- ture to develop, and to transmit to other tongues, its always characteristic qualities of grace, deftness, and lucidity. A second famous romancer was Marie de France, 1154-89. Her Breton lais were dedicated in England to King Henry II, who had married Queen Eleanor, the widow of Chretien's Louis VII of France. Beyond her name and her lays and her familiarity with the neighbourhood of Rouen, little personal is known of her. She wrote an Ysopet (Little ^Esop) as well as contributions to the Arthuriad. Chretien and Marie together helped to inspire a Spanish romance, the Cavallero Cifar, or ' History of the Knight of God called Cifar ', which was written at Toledo about 1290. It is particularly interesting for its invention of the picaro, or rogue, as a romantic hero, extended in many directions by later novelists in Spain. Next in merit to the French inventors were the German continuators of these tales. Indeed, their talents were so admirable as to constitute almost a new beginning. Wolfram von Eschenbach, for ex- ample, whose dates have been roughly fixed at 1170 to 1220, was a poor knight of Bavaria, who enjoyed the princely patronage of Count Hermann of Thu- ringia. It is said that he could neither read nor wTite, but somehow he had a wide acquaintance with the epic recitals of his day, and was among the first of his countrymen to appreciate Chretien de Troyes. Wolfram's Arthurian Parzival, on which we should like to dwell, displayed one feature pre-eminently which characterizes German literature throughout. He delineated a struggle in the soul, thus raising to spiritual planes the old conflict of heroic action. Percival's Twifcl (=- Doubt i) is defeated by Saelde 1 Modern German, Zweifel. SOME OF THE WRITERS 25 (= Blessedness ^), and the indication of this inner tumult makes noble numbers of the chivalric Court- epos. Gottfried von Strassburg, who flourished at the same period, is often contrasted with Wolfram as representing a decline of the chivalric ideal from the summit to which Wolfram had raised it. But if Gottfried was less deeply imbued with a sense of the permanence of knightly virtue, he surpassed his contemporaries in tuneful devotion to what Tennyson has called ' the maiden passion for a maid '. The Minne of Teuton love-lyrists (the exact meaning of Minne is mindful-love, whether of man for woman or of humanity for God) has never been delineated more purely than in the Tristan of 1210, by which Gottfried enriched the Arthuriad — ' 'Twas love alone that set the theme : A lover and a lover's dream ; A man, a woman : woman, man ; Tristan — Isold : Isold — Tristan ! ' Hartmann von Aue (c. 1170-c. 1215), a Swabian by birth, was poet and Crusader. Like Wolfram, he was an early disciple of Chretien de Troyes, and his Erec and Iwein showed traces of the debt. More notably, Hartmann went to the archives of his feudal lord at Aue for the subject of his finest romance, Der arme Heinrich (' Poor Henry '). Tra- dition told of a Heinrich von Aue, who had the misfortune to be struck with leprosy, and who was only to be cured of his disease by the voluntary sacrifice of a maiden willing to marry him. Out of this dramatic motive the court-poet wove a moving tale, duly rewarded, doubtless, by his patron. Long- fellow, the American poet, deemed the legend ' to surpass all others in beauty and significance ', and retold it in his Golden Legend, 1851. It may be added ^ Seligkeit. 26 EUROPEAN LITERATURE that Heinrich's epic-idyll was the first of the class of poems which culminated in Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea. The fourth of these great contemporaries and in many respects the greatest was Walther von der Vogelweide (c. 1170-1228). He learned his craft from Reimar von Hagenau (c. 1160-121C). Prof. Saintsbury, who is never dithyrambic, has described Walther as ' the mouthpiece of the half-inarticulate, all -suggesting music that is at once the very soul and the inseparable garment of romance '. His own countrymen have compared him with Petrarch, and the comparison, though not fully apt, is valid in at least one particular. Both poets brought to bear on common life a fresh, bright power of observation, and a keen sense of human sympathy. Of Walther'a biography little definite is known ; he spent some years in travel, meeting Wolfram in Thuringia and residing for some time in Vienna, His fame rests on his love-verse, or Minnesong, and, though Uhland generously declared that ' Minnesong sprang in the valleys of Provence, the child of love and spring ', its Southern origin should not disguise the fact that in certain aspects of beauty the Teuton poets surpassed the Provengal. To the literature of Provence we come at the close of the present chapter. Here we may note that the Minnesinger introduced a more spiritual note into the sensuous lyric of Southern France. Partly, the difference is climatic ; there was less open-air love-making in the North, less serenading under the moon, and, consequently, more reflection. There was less jealousy in Minnesong ; less brave colours, perhaps, but a fuller heart. Minnesong died very quickly, but it numbered hundreds of prac- titioners, drawn chiefly from the knightly caste, and of these Walther was the foremost. He was known to his countrymen as the Nightingale, but liis own SOME OF THE WRITERS 27 sweet-sounding name of Bird's-meadow (Vogelweide) suggests even more directly the pure, true, flute-like strain which he poured into Europe's choir of voices. The sounds are so remote from current speech that quotation and illustration are not easy. A typical maxim may be cited, which contains the Minnesinger's whole creed — ' Swer guotes wibes minne hat, Der sch£\mt sich aller missetat ' — * He that hath a good woman's love is ashamed of every misdeed '. And we may try to render the words and spirit of a few lines of Walther's song in spring- tide, of which echoes are heard adown the ages — * When the flowerets from the grass are springing, Just as if they laugh'd up to the sun, On an early morning in the May, And the httle birds begin their singing At the best that ever they have done, How delicious may our life be ! Nay, 'Tis very half of Heaven '. But ' love and spring ' made songs everywhere in that age. English lyric at the same date, both secular and sacred, hardly fell below the Gottesminne and Frauenminne (love of God and love of women) of Teuton example. Two brief specimens may be selected from a collection made c. 1310, and preserved in a MS known as Harleian 2253. They will be familiar by later imitation. (1) The following refrain occurs in a love-song — ' Blow, northern wind. Send thou me my sweeting : Blow, northern Avind, Blow, blow, blow ', and (2) the following verse inspired one of Tennyson's later lyrics — ' Summer is y-comen in, loud€ sing cuckoo ! Groweth seed and bloweth mead and springeth the woode now. Sing cuckoo ! ' The ' smale foule ', or the ' litel foule ', or the ' glad 28 EUROPEAN LITERATURE foule ', carols through all these Mayings, and marks the birth-time of poets' wonder. Lastly, in this section, we observe that in other countries, as in Spain, the chroniclers marched with the romancers. We saw how English historians, in their books of kings' deeds (de gestis rcgum), traced back the Angevin dynasty through Arthur to Aeneas. Thus, Robert of Gloucester, towards the close of the thirteenth century, completed such a verse-chronicle of English history, which, though possibly not homogeneous in authorship, marks an interesting development in language, metre, and treatment. In its earlier portions, from ' Brutus ' to the Conquest, through King Lear, King Arthur, and other heroes, the chronicler relies on his predecessors, of whom Geoffrey of Monmouth was the chief. In the later passages of the story the value and the originality increase. The descriptions of the town-and-gown riot at Oxford in 1263, of the battle of Evesham, and the death of Simon de Montfort are recognized as masterly and authoritative. A greater name is that of Matthew Paris, who died in 1259, and whose office of chronicler to the monastery of St. Albans afforded him welcome opportunities of learning the history which he wrote from the lips of eminent visitors to the shiine. Paris's Chronica Majora, or annals of his own time, extend from 1235 to the year of his death, and their value as contemporary evidence to occurrences and opinions is enhanced by the brightness of the style. Paris enjoyed royal favour, and was sent on a mission to King Hacon of Norway, whose name we shall meet in the last section of the present chapter. In Denmark, Saxo the Grammarian (c. 1150-1206), who was Latin Secretary to the Archbishop of Lund, wrote a Danorum Regum Heroumque Hisioria in Latin hexameter verses, likewise partly inspired by the SOME OF THE WRITERS 29 histories of Geoffrey of Monmouth. Saxo's work has two great moments of interest to English literature. First, it narrates the tales of the old Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf (a short Odyssey of adventure on the Northern mainland which was the cradle of our race) ; and, secondly, it tells the story of the Prince of Denmark immortalized in Hamlet. Saxo's history was imprinted at Copenhagen, 1514, under the scholarly care of Pedersen, and Anders Vedel, the philologer, translated it into Danish, 1579. The foremost French chronicler of this age, and contemporary with Saxo, was Geoffroi de Ville- hardouin, who died in 1213, after a full and interesting life. He took part in the diplomac}^ which preceded the Fourth Crusade, and he was present at the capture of Constantinople. Villehardouin dictated his memoirs, 1207-12, and it is this work of the evening of a busy life which is now known as la Conquete de Constantinople. A chanson de geste in prose, the prose-instrument raises it to history ; and as history written by a statesman it is a document of first-rate importance in the development of that art. Ville- hardouin's statecraft was governed by the idea of feudal honour. Any offence against that code ranked as an anti-social act. But he shared Chretien's taste for adventure-description for its own sake, and his sense of method and design, his brief and pithy characterizations, and his even balance and reserve of judgment entitle him to the fame of the earliest prose-historian of France. Nearer the close of the thirteenth century, the Sire de Joinville (1224-1317) wrote in prose a soldier's life of King Louis IX of France (St. Louis, the knightly crusader) whose religious biography was written by Geoffroi de Beaulieu, a Dominican. De Joinville's memoir, which has recently been rendered into 80 EUROPEAN LITERATURE English 1, is an extraordinarily vivid and convincing account of what he ' saw and heard during the six years ' that he accompanied Louis on his pilgrimage and after their return. There are some delightful touches in it too. King Louis loved his people so well that he enjoined upon his son — ' I would rather that a Scot should come out of Scotland and rule the people of the Kingdom well and justly, than that thou shouldst govern them iir. And he loved truth so much ' that he would not play even the Saracens false ' : ' as hereafter you shall hear ', adds de Joinville, with the genuine touch of the practised story-teller. VI. GERMANIA. We go back from the makers to the matters, and turn next to a consideration of the books collected by the Emperor Charlemagne, and destroyed, as we saw, by his son. What was this legendary lore which the Prankish king, who was himself to become a legend, sought to gather for his people ? It was a mixture of old songs and tales, derived from a remote pagan past, and clinging, like wreaths of river-mist, to the Danube and the Rhine. The German word for mist is Nebel, and these lays of the Teuton mist-dwellers were ultimately woven into the romance of the Nibelungenlied. The reputed author is an Austrian poet whose date is fixed between 1190 and 1220. Properly, there are two parts to his poem. The older is the Fate {Not) of the Nibelungs, and the later is their Lament (Klage), consisting of about two thousand lines. The ' By Ethel Wwdywood. Murray, 190G. GERMANIA 81 Fate is written in four-line strophes of eight-syllable verses, rhymed in pairs, with a metrical pause (ccESura) in each verse. The Lament moves more rapidly to the sound of the survivors' grief at the tragedy which overtook their heroic race. We are not to look for history in the Nibelungen- lied. ' The great historical names which appear in the old German heroic poetry are seldom found there in anything like their historical character, and not once in their chief historical aspect as adversaries of the Roman Empire. In the main, the story of the Nibelungs is independent of history, in respect of its matter ; in its meaning and effect as a poetical story it is absolutely free from history ' '. Thus, it differs constructively from such poems as the Cid or Roland or the chansons which were to make the Morte Darthur. Remote as these were from the facts on which their romance was founded, they preserved at least a verisimilitude. The Nibelungenlied is pure romance. Its folk-lore of wood and river is overlaid with the manners of Norman chivalry, which is not always quite fully reconciled with the primitive passions of Huns, Burgundians, and Franks. Jealousy, love, and hate are the governing motives of the story, and both parts of the epic are dominated by Kriemhild, the Burgundian princess of Worms. Her first husband is Siegfried, son of a Netherlander king, and the resources of myth and chivalry are exhausted to idealize their marriage. But it comes to a violent end. The Siegfried-tragedy takes its appointed course, and the Nibelung-tragedy comes after it. Thirteen years after Siegfried's death, his widow is wedded to Etzd, or Attila, King of the Huns. But Attila's dark- browed wife, deeply brooding on revenge, is awfully changed from the romantic maiden whom Siegfried took to his heart ; and the poet touches Homeric * VV. p. Ker, Epic and Romance. 32 EUROPEAN LITERATURE heights when he relates with terror and pathos the scenes of Kriemhild's vengeance. Discrepancies and obscurities there are in plenty in this poem, but its singleness of purpose raises it far above the lays and songs out of which it was composed, and which Charlemagne had diligently collected. The South German poet succeeded in an eminent degree in preserving for seven hundred years (witness Richard Wagner) the fascination of the old themes. He incorporated all that went before him in the matter known as ' Germania ' : the lay of Hildebrand, armourer to Theodoric, valorous King of the East Goths, Beowulf of the Northern mainland, Maldon of our own coasts, and similar heroic poems in rhymeless alliterative metres from the outlying lands and islands within the sphere of Teutonic speech. In the national sentiment of Germany, the Nibelungenlied fills the place which the Iliad filled for the Greeks. They see in it their faith in faith (Treue), their destiny, their courage, their desire ; and it has passed into the life-blood of the people to whom it primarily belongs. The minor romance of Gudrun, likewise South German by authorship, was composed c. 1200. Gudrun's story belongs to Scandinavia, to which we immediately come, and her tale, ' twice wedded, widowed, and wooed of Kiartan ', is retold in The Earthly Paradise by William Morris, Like the greater lay in the same cycle, it is crammed full of love and fighting. VII. THE SAGAS. Gudrun b:ings us direct to the 5fl^a-literature of Iceland, whose merchant-venturers, we saw, came roving to Kiev in the ninth century. While descend- ants of Rurik the Norseman were inspiring song and THE SAGAS 33 chronicle in Russia, the hardy race from which he sprang was living the heroic life at home. Saga means simply story, and the golden age of the sagas lasted roughly from 1100 to 1300, unless we date their decline more precisely at 1263, shortly after Matthew Paris's embassy, when Iceland submitted to Norway, and passed into centuries of silence. We are to distinguish two groups of sagas: (1) the mythological, and (2) the historical. The first, founded on the matter of ' Germania ', which we have just examined, consists mainly of five stories — (a) Njala, the story of Burnt Njal. This has been translated into English by Sir George Webbe Dasent, editor of the Norse Fairy Tales. (b) Laxdcela, the dwellers in Laxdale. This is the basis of Morris's ' The Lovers of Gudrun '. (c) Eyrbyggja, and {d) Egla, the story of Egil. These two were retold by Sir Walter Scott. (e) Grettla, the story of Grettir. This has been translated into English by Morris and Mag- nusson. We shall not discuss this group, which is known chiefly in modern versions ; nor shall we anticipate here the deliberate Icelandic revival by Macpherson, Percy, and Gray in the eighteenth century in England ; by Tegner and, later, by Ibsen in Scandinavia. Through these or similar channels of the renewal of ' Germania ' in modern Europe, readers ignorant of the originals have been familiarized almost in their nurseries with the Viking of romantic literature. He is mainly a literary product, and how far his familiar figure corresponds with his prototype in early Iceland is a question of comparative manners which does not D 84 EUROPEAN LITERATURE affect his charm. The foreign influences encouraged by King Hacon (1217-63) led at an early date to sophistication, and it has even shrewdly been suspected that the Viking had begun to be artificial before he ceased to be genuine. Passing to the historical group of sagas, we are arrested at once by Hacon's name. The king's death (1263) marks the close of Icelandic history. With Iceland's submission to Norway, the ' Kings' Lives ' in Icelandic letters came to an end. We are not concerned with the causes why Iceland submitted, nor with her chief poet's share in the diplomacy of the events which he narrated in his sagas. We are not even overmuch concerned with the miniature renais- sance at King Hacon's court, which gave a welcome, as we saw, to Matthew Paris, King Henry Ill's ambassador from England, and which contaminated the pure wells of sa^a-literature with the Ovidian love-lore of Chretien de Troyes. History and criti- cism must settle the exact bearing of these con- siderations. Our business is to make acquaintance with a very few leading Icelanders and with at most two Norse kings, and our whole interest is centred on the years 1067 to 1263. The two kings of Norway who concern us are Sverre, who died in 1202, and Hacon, his grandson. The first of the eminent Icelanders is Ari Thor- gilsson, 1067-1148 ; the rest are members of the Sturlung family. This family has been compared with that of the Douglas in Scotland, which threw up Gavin Douglas, the poet, among its fighters and barons. Or they may be compared with the Medici in Florence, whose blood still flows in royal veins. The characterization of a Romanes lecturer will fit either house, whether the Icelandic in the thirteenth or the Italian in the sixteenth century — THE SAGAS 35 This family was one of the most ambitious, and did as much as any to spoil the old balance of the Commonwealth. The strange thing about them is that, with all their dangerous, showy qualities, they provided some of the finest literature ' ^. The Sturlung tree is as follows — STURLA OF HVAMM. Founder of the Sturlung House THORD SNORRI I (1178-1241) STURLA (c. 1214-84) Our ' Who's Who ' is now complete for the second great group of Icelandic sagas, founded on history, not myth, and written in prose, not verse. The history was that of the Norse kings to the death of Hacon in 1263 ; the prose was that of the fighting writers who took part in the tales which they told. Snorri's part, indeed, has been described as very much less noble than his prose ; and his assassination in 1241 at the hands of his own son-in-law, and possibly by the instigation of King Hacon, may have been the fate of his intrigues at the Norwegian court. The known works in this group are five — (a) Life of King Sverre, dictated by the royal adventurer to an abbot. (6) Ari Thorgilsson's Lives of the Kings of Norway ; now lost. (c) The Heimskringla, containing an abridgement of Snorri's new Lives of the Kings of Norway, more or less founded on Ari's. (d) Sturla's Sturlunga Saga. (e) Sturla's Life of King Hacon. ^ W. p. Ker, Sturla the Hutorian. Oxford, 1906. 36 EUROPEAN LITERATURE It will be observed that Sturla was Snorri's nephew, and he wrote his uncle's life. Next, taking these sagas in order — (a) King Sverre was an early exponent of the doctrine, later so famous and so fatal, of the Divine right of kings. He commended the doctrine in a pious testament, and he exemplified it in his adventurous lifetime by the terror of a band of warriors, who were known locally as Birkiheiner (birch-legs), in reference to their greaves of birchen bark. [h) Ari's Lives, as noted, are not extant. Critics differ considerably as to the use which Snorri made of them in the Lives contained in an abridgement in the Heimskringla. The point is not very imjDortant at this date, and we may be content to conclude, with the high authority of Vigfusson and York Powell, ' that Ari was the author of the first draft of the Kings'' Lives down to Magnus Bareleg, and that Snorri Sturluson re-edited this work, putting into dramatic form, with great beauty, pathos, and humour, those stories which have made the Heimskringla so justly famous ' 1. (c) Snorri's work, whether wholly or partly his own, is a fine piece of heroic prose, glowing with zest of adventure and life, and full of inoving incidents by sea and land. One episode at least, the last sea-fight of King 01 af, is of a piece with the story of Grenville and the Revenge, as told by Sir Walter Raleigh in the sixteenth century. {d) and (e), Sturla's great sagas, close the line, and with them closes the history of the free Common- wealth of Iceland. The national fight for independ- ence was the family history of the Sturlungs, and the * The chief English authorities are Corpus Poeticum Boreale and Sturlunga Saga, both edited at Oxford by G. Vigfusson and F. York Powell. Prof. Ker's writings are mentioned in previous notes with grateful appreciation. THE SAGAS 37 Sturlunga Saga relates with extraordinarj^ vividness the events of those fateful years. National, even local, in its setting, despite the many points of contact between Iceland and other countries, free Iceland speaks to us still out of these annals of her fighting chiefs, and bespeaks universal sympathy for the heroic past which they enshrine. Sturla's life- time, it will be observed, coincided with that of the Sire de Joinville, who wrote the life of King Louis IX of France. But there is a remarkable contrast, as has been often pointed out, between de Joinville's Vie de Louis and Sturla's Hakonarsaga. The French book is subjective, partial, and filled with the author's personality. The Icelandic book aims at and achieves almost a passive objectivity. The saga-sty\e imposed its own conditions, and epic writers of the Norse kings' lives, or of the lives of the heroic Icelanders who opposed them, fulfilled those conditions till the end. With their passing, the mind of Iceland ceased to be vocal among the nations. With their passing, the floodgates were opened to the invasion of foreign romance-models, and the softer tones of rimur, or rhymed chronicles, succeeded to the stately saga--^TOse. Ari and Snorri were both writers of other books than those mentioned above. The taste and piety of Hauk Erlendsson, a book-lover of the fourteenth century, preserved Ari's Landndmabok, which is a history of the Norse settlement in Iceland, and has, accordingly, exceptional interest for students of what may be called the national and psychological forces behind the fighting and diplomacy of the Sturlung period. This work, first printed in 1688, has been appropriately characterized as ',a Domesday-book tm-ned into literature '. More general interest attaches to the Edda S 1 Edited by Prof. A. C. Brodeur. New York and Oxford, 1916. My quotations are from the translation in tliis edition. 38 EUROPEAN LITERATURE known as the Prose Edda. Its author was the same Snorri Sturluson who wrote the Kings'' Lives con- tained in the Heimskringla. Whatever Snorri's faults as a man, and even more as a statesman, his Edda has lived for nearly seven hundred years to prove his surpassing skill as an instructor of poets. Before considering the book as a work of literature, we have first to clear away the rubble which has gathered round its name. What Edda means we do not know : it is probably ' Earth ' (or ' Mother '), in the sense in which George Meredith used that term ; and Edda may be no more than a reasonably fanciful name for a book on Icelandic poetic origins, or the mother-wit of Icelandic poetry. Rather more probably, however, critics incline to the following view. A certain Saemund, surnamed the Wise, had a school in the latter part of the twelfth century at a certain place called Oddi. Saemund either wrote, or he did not write, a collection of old Icelandic poems ; at any rate, the book was in his library, which Snorri frequented in his boyhood. This book, located at Oddi, would be known as the Edda or Odda bok ; and when Snorri paraphrased its contents in Part I of his poetics and quoted copiously from the Odda bok, he called his own work the prose-Edda, as distinct from the -poetic-Edda. It may be. Bishop Brynjolf (1605- 75) argued from Snorri's Edda to an older poetic Edda behind it, and supported the view of Saemund's authorship ; and this theory suited scholars' hopes in the years of the Norse renaissance ^. We must leave the critics' problem where we find it. On one point all are agreed : it is an immense convenience to describe Snorri's book as the Younger or Prose Edda, and to refer to the corpus of Icelandic poetry on which 1 The Codex Itrgius of Snorri's Edda was discovered by Brynjolf in l(i42, and was sent by him from Iceland to Denmark, where it is housed in the King's Library at Copenhagen. THE SAGAS 39 he obviously depended as the Elder or Poetic Edda. These names, accordingly, we retain. The Younger Edda consists of three Parts - 1. A dialogue, examining the old myths. It is herein that the Elder Edda was so freely used. 2. ' The Poesy of Skalds ' ; a handbook to poetic words and phrases. 3. A treatise on metres, taught by examples, with a running commentary. There is also a Prologue, which takes shape as an intro- duction to Scandinavian mythology. Thus, Snorri's book, from start to finish, is a guide or handbook for the poets of the age, ' a text-book for apprentice poets ', as it has been called ; and its charm and value are immensely increased by the rational, ironic tone which Snorri introduced into his treatise. The style, or, rather, the attitude, which Snorri adopted in his Edda may be judged by one of the passages in Part II, ' The Poesy of Skalds '. Snorri is suggesting to young poets the various peri- phrases which they may use in place of a god's actual name, which might grow monotonous by repetition. Thus, Freyja, he says, may be called — ' Daughter of Njordr, Sister of Freyr, Wife of Odr, Mother of Hnoss, Possessor of the Slain, Goddess Beautiful in Tears ', and so forth. All the goddesses, he remarks, ' may be periphrased thus : by calling them by the name of another, and naming them in terms of their possessions or their works or their kindred '. We recall from Elizabethan poetry the lines (1641) to Mary Countess of Pembroke — ' Underneath this sable hearse Lies the subject of all verse, Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother '. 40 EUROPEAN LITERATURE ' Sister of Freyr, Mother of Hnoss '. The great artificers beckon across the centuries. But Snorri was not content with saying how repetition might be avoided ; he would also explain the why. Thus, he tells us — ' Idunn is also called Spoil of the Giant Thjazi, according to the tale that has been told before, how he took her away from the ^sir. Thjodolfr of Hvin composed verses after that tale in the Haustlong \ And then he quotes for our delight about a hundred lines from the Haustlong, derived, no doubt, from that Elder Poetic Edda which the seventeenth century yearned to find. A dozen of the elder skalds are drawn upon for periphrases of Heaven, in order to prove a poetic patent for ' Wain's Road ', ' Winds' Wide Basin ', ' Ruler of the World-Tent ', etc. ; and Earth, Sea, Sun, the Seasons, Man, Woman, and the rest are similarly treated. So — ' Woman should be periphrased with reference to all female garments, gold and jewels, ale or wine or any other drink, or to that which she dispenses or gives ; likewise with reference to ale-vessels, and to all those things which it becomes her to perform or to give. It is correct to periphrase her thus : by calling her giver or user of that of which she partakes ^. But the words for " giver " and " user " are also names of trees ; therefore woman is called in metaphorical speech by all feminine tree-names. Woman is periphrased with reference to jewels or agates tor this reason : in heathen times what was called a " stone-necklace ", which they wore about the neck, was a part of a woman's ^ Lady ( = loaf-giver) will be recalled. PROVENCAL SONG 41 apparel. Now it is used figuratively in such a way as to periphrase woman with stones and all names of stones. Woman is also metaphorically called by the names of the Asynjur or the Valkyrs or Norns or w'omen of supernatural kind. It is also correct to periphrase woman in terms of all her conduct or property or family '. We like to imagine the young skalds ot the thir- teenth century in Iceland weighing the relative values of the poetic figm'cs and devices, displayed with such profusion of examples by the romantic warrior- statesman of the fighting family of the Sturlungs. VIII. PROVENQAL SONG. We turn from the agitated, isolated North to the warm, communicative South. The stories of Pro- vence were written in song ; and here, again, in the dawn of modern history, a few definitions are necessary. We are to distinguish, for example, between Langue d'oc and Langue (Toil, and to recall that France in the twelfth century was divided into two parts, with the river Loire as dividing-line. North of that line were the people who wrote oil (Latin, illud) for ' yes ' ; south of it were the Languedocians, who wrote oc (Latin, hoc) ^. The Langue d'o'il was French proper ; frangais had gradually swallowed the weaker dialects of the North. It was soon to swallow the Southern, too ; but meanwhile, for a brief, sweet flowering-time, the Limousin dialect of Provence made a literary language for itself. In that land of sunshine and song, with its Moorish affinities of blood, ^ Dante, in his treatise de Vulgari Eloquentia, called Italian the langue de ' si\ and discussed the literary precedence of the three languages, thus differentiated. 42 EUROPEAN LITERATURE its natural buoyancy and blithesomeness, and its receptive and fertile genius, Proven9al literature gre^r up and was cut off before the spirit of the Renaissance was breathed into the common life of Europe. Many factors conspired to produce it : the sun, the scenery, the Moors, chivalry, Ovid, light-heartedness, wander- ing scholars from the North, a sense of freedom which was cruelly punished, and an innate instinct for musie and form. The outcome was a burst of love-lyric which still makes the Troubadour of Provence a synonym for passion and romance. Passion, indeed, is the key-word. The conditions of society in Southern France enthroned the Madonna in the home. Love and worship were equal parts of love. Every Court was a synod of song-birds ; the singers danced to the songs which they sang ; and still the songs which they danced to are filled with Proven9al sunshine, as a shell with the sea. The patriarch of the Troubadours was Count William IX of Poitiers, Duke of Aquitaine (1086- 1127). Among his troubadouring descendants were Eleanor, his granddaughter, wife of Louis VII of France and afterwards of Henry II of England ; Eleanor's daughter, Marie of Champagne, and Marie's son. King Richard Cocur-de-Lion. In the same melodious company were monarchs as distant as Frederick Barbarossa in Germany and Alfonso II in Aragon. The royal lead was naturally contagious, and nearly five hundred Troubadours in all the higher ranks of life can even now be counted by name. The best known is Bertrand de Born (c. 1140-c. 1215), whom Dante sent to hell for his busy political mischief. ' Modern writers ', we are told, ' go to the other extreme, and see in him the incarnation of French patriotism and the forerunner of Joan of Arc ' ^. It is his poetry, not his politics, which matters, and 1 M. J. Chaytor, The Troubadours of Dante. PROVENgAL SONG 48 Bertrand's songs and odes are among the greatest of their kind. It was Bertrand who fastened on Coem--de-Lion the famous name of Richard Yea-and-Nay {Oc e No) — ' And tell the Lord of Yes and No That Peace already has been too long '. Another Provencal Troubadour was Robert Browning's Sordello, who died about 1269. Yet neither Dante nor Browning did more to characterize Provencal poetry than Tennyson effected in six lines of his Idylls of the King-r- ' I knew Of no more subtle master under heaven, Than is the maiden passion for a maid. Not only to keep down the base in man. But teach high thought, and amiable words, And courtliness, and the desire of fame. And love of truth, and all that makes a man '. The English laureate of the nineteenth century went straight back to Provence in the twelfth and thir- teenth for the idea which informs these verses. The music vibrates in men's memory, but why did the sweet voices die ? There was a town on the Tarn called Albi, a little east of Toulouse, which is famous in literary history as a stronghold of heresy. What form this heresy took, and why it was known as Manichean, and how it travelled to the South on the lips of Abelard's disciples, are matters pertaining to the history of Chmch and free-thought rather than to literature proper. What we know is, that the Albigeois (or Albigenses, inhabitants of Albi) helped to spread the heretical doctrine through Toulouse and Provence, and that in 1207 Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse, suffered sentence of excommunication by Pope Innocent III. Next year a Crusade was preached against him, and it stands on record that the Pope, ' in extending the benefits of a Crusade to Cliristians fighting against Christians, handed on a precedent which was soon fatally abused by his 44 EUROPEAN LITERATURE successors ' ^. To the victims of the Albigensian Crusade this distinction of precedence was immaterial. Their lot was the horror of persecution. They knew that their days were numbered, and that King Philip Augustus of Northern France was waiting stealtliily at the gate till events should have set it open for him. A Frenchman, Simon de Montfort, replaced Raymond as Count of Toulouse, 1213, and Raymond's son was glad to retain the empty title of Marquis of Provence. A few years later, de Montfort's successes paved the way for Philip Augustus, and before the king's death in 1223 the North had conquered the South, and Langue (Toll had ousted Langue d'oc. So perished the heretics of Albi. But with them Pope Innocent exterminated the indigenous culture of Provence. Literally, exterminated it, or di'ove it beyond the borders of Languedoc. Provengal literature might linger in el gai saber (' the gay science ') of courts-of-love, in Floral Games at Toulouse and Barcelona, and right away on to Mistral in the nineteenth century. But its true life was not in its decline. Fire and sword had destroyed it, and its abiding influence was communicated, not by formal practitioners and fitful revivalists, but by those who preserved the scattered seeds and brought them to flower : in France proper, Sicily, Tuscany, Germany, Spain, England. The Minnesinger were Troubadours all. Dante, love of Beatrice, was a sublimated Troubadour. Petrarch continued the tradition. Chaucer brought it to our shores. Ronsard renewed it in France, Boscan and Garcilasso in Spain, Wyatt and Surrey in Tudor England. This brief springtide of Provence, though none write in Langue d'oc to-day, is a spring of everlasting passion in the poetry of every tongue in Europe. Every lover in May is a Provengal Troubadour at heart, ^ T. F. Tout, The Empire and the Papacy. CHAPTER II. The Age of Dante. Bertrand de Born, as we saw, was committed by Dante to hell. ' The beautiful Spring delights me well, When flowers and leaves are growing ; And it pleases my heart to hear the swell Of the birds' sweet chorus, flowing In the echoing wood ; And I love to see, all scatter'd around. Pavilions and tents on the martial ground ; And my spirit finds it good To see, on the level plains beyond, Gay knights and steeds caparison'd '. So wrote de Born in his pride, and so wrote, or tried to write, many scores of the fighting Troubadom's, whose poetic ichor flowed in Dante's veins. Yet Dante, parcelling hell into deep trenches of narrow circles of torment, placed de Born in the ninth trench of the eishth circle — ' I truly saw, and still I seem to see it, A trunk Avithout a head walk in like manner As walked the other of the mournful herd. And by the hair it held the head dissevered. Hung from the hand in fashion of a lantern. And that upon us gazed and said " O me ! " It of itself made to itself a lamp, And they were two in one, and one in two ; How that can be, He knows who so ordains it. When it was come close to the bridge's foot. It lifted high its arm with all the head, To bring more closely unto us its words. Which were : " Behold now the sore penalty, 4« EUROPEAN LITERATURE Thou who dost breathing go the dead beholding ; Behold if any be as great as this. And so that thou may carry news of me, Know that Bertran de Born am I, the same Who gave to the Young King the evil comfort *' ' *. Why, we ask, was this harsh and headless fate reserved by Dante for de Born ? A complete answer is not possible. Dante's Inferno was peopled accord- ing to a mandate of his own, and no present-day court of inquiry can investigate all the considerations, personal, historical, and political, which weighed with Dante in his lifetime. But a clue may be sought in the last verse. De Born gave the ' young king ' (Henry, twice crowned during the reign of his father, King Henry II of England) evil counsel, and the evil counsellors of princes were doubly damned in Dante's eyes. They practised ' machinations and covert ways ', and injured both the princes and their peoples. So the poet, however brilliant a Troubadour, who encouraged mischief in the State and sowed seeds of political dissension, was tried, convicted, and sen- tenced by the last and greatest of the Troubadours. For ' the spirit of the age is changing ', writes a close and an accurate observer. ' Never before have we had so many poets to satirize the stains upon the garment of humanity, which does not necessarily prove that the stains are deeper, but certainly suggests that the poets are more moral ' 2. There at present we must leave this matter. The ' more moral ' tone of Dante's age will appear from an examination of its products, when something, too, will be said of Dante's dark historical background. 1 Dante, Inferno, XXVIII, 118-35. The translation is Long- fellow's, and I use it throughout this chapter. As indicated below, Longfellow misses the effect of Dante's rhymes. The terza-rima, or hnked triplets, of the original is rhymed as follows : aba, bob, cdc, ded, efe, fgf, and so on. But Longfellow is spirited and fairly literal. - E. Dale, National Life and Character in the Mirror of Early English Literature. LOVE-LYRIC 47 I. LOVE-LYRIC. First, of the forms of verse, which were cultivated intensively by love-lyrists. The stanza just quoted from de Born occurs in a poem of a kind known to the Troubadours as a sirvente. Literally, a ' song of service ', it passed into French as serventois and into Italian as serventese or sermintese. The service might be to God or man, and didactic poets used this lyric form for moral or social themes. It played a con- spicuous part in popularizing the Crusades, and, later, satirists employed it with a sting directed against women. Dante tells us in Vita Nuova that he had * put together the names of sixty of the most beautiful ladies in that city where God had placed my own lady, and these names I introduced into an epistle in the form of a sirvente '. Villon's Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis was a sirvente, as we shall see, of the fifteenth century, and Tennyson's Palace of Art may be said to have revived the kind in the nineteenth. Another form of Troubadour poetry was the retroencha (rotrouenge), or song with refrain, such as Richard Coeur-de-Lion sang from the casement of his German prison. There were, further, the alba (au- bade), or morning-farewell, and the serena, or evening- farewell ; the balada, pastorela, canso, and planh (lament) ; the rondeau and rondel, the vireli and villanelle, and many others. The Provengal tengon, or lovers' dispute, became the jeu parti of France, and was also known as debat or estrif (strife). This kind is important to later literature, apart from the attraction of its specimens, on account of the stimulus which it gave to dramatic composition. Akin to the debat was the pastourelle, probably Northern French in origin, which treated the encounter of a 48 EUROPEAN LITERATURE knight with a shepherdess and his success or other- wise in wooing her. Since the lady commonly had a husband, the dramatic interest was ready made. De Born wrote aplanh for the ' young king ', who died in 1183, and a favourable specimen of the debat is found in The Owl and the Nightingale, an anonymous English poem, written c. 1220. The debat had two interlocutors. When Wiclif added a third person, he called the resulting poem a trial ogue, by a confusion between dialogue and duologue. Some writers, too, may be enumerated. They are not major names, perhaps, but where so much has been lost or forgotten, and where our debt to the beginners is so immense, relative degrees of greatness are difficult to estimate in perspective. Thus, the Court of Thibaut IV (1201-1253), Count of Champagne and King of Navarre, was a mission-station for Troubadour poetry in its journey outwards from Provence. Its next resting-place was Sicily, and thence it crossed to the Italian mainland. The period of its passage across the straits is described as its Tuscanization (Toscanaggiamento), and the earliest Tuscan love-lyrist was Guido Guinicelli of Bologna (c. 1230-1276). Dante acknowledged Guido as ' father of me and of my betters ', and attributed to him a ' sweet, new style ' (dolce stil nuovo) in lyric songs, which would ' make for ever dear their very ink '. The sweetness was in places a little cloying, and its newness mainly consisted in applying Plato's theory of ideas to the conception of human love. Through one man's love for one woman, the lover was wrought upon to seek the mystic ' idea ' of love, whose pattern was laid up in Heaven. This not very easy quest of love sublimated and woman spiritualized was sung by Guido and his successors in a style sweet enough but far from simple : Guido's ode of the LOVE-LYRIC 49 Gentle Heart, in D. G. Rossetti's version, is often quoted — ' The sun strikes full upon the mud all day : It remains vile, nor the sun's worth is less. " By race I am gentle," the proud man doth say ; He is the mud, the sun is gentleness. Let no man predicate That aught the name of gentleness should have, Even in a king's estate, Except the heart there be a gentle man's. The star-beam lights the wave, — Heaven holds the star and the star's radiance *. This stanza enfolds, as in a cradle, the future gentle- man of the Renaissance. To Guido Guinicelli succeeded Guido Cavalcanti (1255-1300)— ' So has one Guido from the other taken The glory of our tongue, and he perchance Is born, who from the nest shall chase them both ', wrote Dante of the two Guides, and no one disputes to-day Dante's superiority in Tuscan song to his friends and immediate predecessors. With him and them we associate a philosophic vision of love, which, though rare in expression, persisted from age to age. Founded on love of mortal woman, it released itself more and more from a bondage to the flesh, and gradually was more and more attuned to purely intellectual perceptions. Shelley's Epipsychidion, written in 1821, and described by Addington Symonds as ' the most unintelligible of all his poems to those who have not assimilated the spirit of Plato's Symposium and Dante's Vita Nuova ', is the chief modern link in the lyric chain which goes back to Dante and the Guidos, and, through them, to Sicily and Provence. To Dante's contributions we shall return. Here we may note an impression which Shelley did not fail to mark, that language itself is 50 EUROPEAN LITERATURE too gross for the impalpable essence of this kind of poesy— ' Woe is me ! The winged words on which my soul would pierce Into the height of Love's rare Universe, Are chains of lead around its flight of fire '. A type of the simpler lyric poets, who continued the note of the Troubadom's in the Italian tongue, and handed on models for imitation to Petrarch and his followers, was Cino of Pistoja (c. 1270-1837). He, too, was Dante's friend, but the greater poet did not seduce him into the rare cult of the dolce stil nuovo. Cino was content to be intelligible, even at the expense of the ideal ; and in a sonnet, translated by Rossetti, he admits his failure as a Dantesque lover — * Dante, since I from my own native place In heavy exile have turned wanderer, Far distant from the purest joy which e'er Had issued from the Fount of joy and grace, I have gone weeping through the world's dull space, And me proud Death, as one too mean, doth spare ; Yet meeting Love, Death's neighbour, I declare That still his arrows hold my heart in chase. Nor from his pitiless aim can I get free. Nor from the hope which comforts my weak ^^ill, Though no true aid exists which I could share. One pleasure ever binds and looses me ; That so, by one same Beauty lured, I still Dehght in many women here and there '. 11. THE SCHOOLMEN. Morality is largely a teacher's matter, and the ' more moral ' tone discerned by critics in Dante's age is, partly, at least, to be sought in the philosophic doctrine of the schools. Here we note, at the outset, that the hand of ecclesiasticism lay heavily upon them. The tide of education had ebbed from the monasteries which Charlemagne founded in pleasant THE SCHOOLMEN 51 rural surroundings, and younger universities began to cluster round cathedral-schools in big cities. Thus, Salerno, Montpellier, Bologna, Paris, Oxford, Cam- bridge, Padua, Salamanca, Toulouse, all date from the beginning of the thiiteenth century. Pisa, Florence, Perugia, and others, and Prague, the first German university, rose in the fourteenth ; and all these early seats of learning had ' fundamentally an ecclesiastical type ' ^. Differences in degree of course there were, according to the closeness of the control ; and, later, as we shall see, such differences led to important cleavages at the Reformation. But generally, and particularly at the outset, intellectual freedom was almost unknown, and the entrenchment in the fore- courts of the universities of settlements by the great religious Orders was a further obstruction to the light. Here, too, though the disputations of theologians are of little present value to literature, we must differentiate degrees. Among the religious Orders the Franciscans (founded at Assisi, 1220) were less rigidly orthodox, we are told, than the Dominicans, founded five years earlier at Toulouse, and this fact, too, had its influence on the Reformation in Germany. But Franciscans and Dominicans alike, when once their Orders had been founded, filled the ranks of scholastic philosophy ; and, as the well-miderstood function of medieval Schoolmen was to reproduce ' ancient philosophy under the control of ecclesiastical doctrine ' -, or to make Aristotle a prophet of the Roman church, the dead hand was an ever-present burden. Scholasticism, as a system of thought, existed before the Schoolmen. The first impulse was lent to it by Boethius, a philosopher-martyr of the sixth centmy. To modern readers Boethius is known for ^ Ullmann, Reformers Before the Reformation. ' Sir J. E. Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship. 52 EUROPEAN LITERATURE the charm of his Latin poetic dialogue on ' The Consolation of Philosophy '. It was translated into every tongue ; into English by King Alfred, and Geoffrey Chaucer, and Queen Elizabeth, among others. It consoled Sir Thomas More in the Tower of London, as it had consoled its author in his confine- ment in the Tower of Pavia. Gibbon called it a * golden volume not unworthy of the leisure of Plato ', and described Boethius in stately words as ' the last of the Romans whom Cato or Tully could have acknowledged for their countryman '. So fares Boethius in modern eyes. To medieval Schoolmen, however, he wore the garb of another character. He was Aristotle's translator and commentator. He begat the interminable duel between Nominalists and Realists, which vexed with such dire ingenuity the learning of succeeding generations ; and ' from martyrdom and banishment ' Dante (in Paradiso, X) exalted Boethius to the fourth of his ten heavens. Further we need not follow him. Nor shall we pause at the doctrine of ' Dionysius the Areopagite ', who enumerated for Dante and the mystics the order of the heavenly hierarchy. The distant music of those spheres helped Milton to forget his blindness, and it is for Dante's sake and Milton's that the memory of these doctors is worth disturbing. For Dante, the latest and greatest of medieval writers, ' thought and reasoned in the terms and assumptions of scholastic philosophy ' ^. So we come to the mighty lights of the thirteenth century : the Franciscans — Alexander of Hales (died 1245), Robert Grosseteste (died 1253), Bonaventura (died 1274) ; the Dominicans — Vincent de Beauvais (died 1264), Albertus Magnus (died 1280), Thomas Aquinas (died 1274) ; and Roger Bacon (c. 1214-1294), the liberal theologian, who wrought and thought in ^ H. Taylor, The Medieval Mind. THE SCHOOLMEN 53 advance of his own times, and whose brilliant and forward teaching has been rescued in later days from his evil repute as a necromancer. Dante knew these all : Books X to XIII of his Paradiso are filled with allusive praises and closely-reasoned appreciations of the dominant Christian Aristotelians. Nor did he omit the foreign doctors, chiefly Jews and Arabs of Spanish birth, who kept bright the torch of learning when it was burning low among the Gentiles. Solomon ben Judah ibn Gebirol (died 1070), known in the Schools as Avicebron and among scholars as the Jewish Plato, was the admitted master of Duns Scotus (died 1308). Abul Hamid Mohammed ibn Ahmed ibn Roshd (died 1198), known in the Schools as Averroes, was a foremost commentator on Aris- totle. Aristotle himself, of course, was committed by Dante to ' the abysmal valley dolorous ' {Inferno, IV) of the first circle of hell : the limbo of ' sorrow with- out torment ' reserved for the dead who had ' merit ' but not baptism. ' For such defects, and not for other guilt, Lost are we, and are only so far punished, That without hope we live on in desire '. However high their disciples might mount, however proudly Dante ranged himself sixth with Homer, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan, yet these, being before Christianity, were not admitted to the light. There, with infinite respect, but with very definite theology, Dante located Aristotle, 'the Master of those who know '. If we reconstruct after Dante's pattern the fabric of scholastic philosophy, we note that its significance to learning does not reside in its wi'itten books. Even Roger Bacon's Compendium and his Opus majus, Opus minus, and Opus tertium, gather dust on our shelves to-day. No ; the Schoolmen's contact with modern literature is mainly at two points. First, 54 ETJROPEAN LITERATURE they helped to introduce system, order, and method into the chaos of ideas. They arranged thought compartmentally. By their grammars and other aids to study they evolved such measure of accurate reasoning as the limits of inquiry allowed. Secondly, they conti-olled the channels of what we now call chemistry and physics. All investigation of causes, all speculation and research, lay in the Schoolmen's hands, and every Schoolman, we remember, followed either wSt. Dominic or St. Francis. III. POLITICS. Dante sang like a Troubadour. Dante reasoned like a Schoolman. A third factor in his making was the politics of his age. Politics might well seem remote from the pleas- aunce of European literature, but their influence has not been unknown even more recently than the thirteenth century, and the early manhood of Dante was spent in the shadow of history. We go back for a moment to Charlemagne, and to the sons who burnt his library and disputed his inheritance. In the long struggle which ensued at the death of the Emperor Charles, the royal Houses of Suabia and Bavaria were rivals for the Imperial crown. The former were the Guelfs and the latter the Ghibellines (Weiblingen), and their family names were presently transferred to the two parties to the conflict for temporal and spiritual supremacy which was waged between the Emperors in the North and the Popes in tlie South. The Guelf or Papal cause was represented as pojiular or demo- cratic ; the Imperial or Ghibelline as aristocratic by right of birth. Adherents of both parties were found in most cities of the Empire. Especially in Italian city-states, where commercial and trading interests POLITICS 55 raised the middle-classes to civic self-esteem, they acquired disastrous significance. There were factions even within a party, and Dante, a Prior of Florence, was proscribed in 1302 and sentenced to exile for life in a feud between the Black Guelfs and the White. A significant date in this struggle is 1152. In that year Frederick I, 'Barbarossa', a descendant from both high houses, had hoped to compose their rivalry and to wear Charlemagne's purple as his reward. The reigning Pope was Hadrian IV, notable as the only Englishman who has ever occupied the Holy See. Hadrian's peace was affronted by the activity in Rome of a reforming preacher, Arnold of Brescia, and Arnold's boldness was Barbarossa's opportunity. In 1154 the Emperor crossed the Alps. He proffered the support of his presence to the distracted Papal Court, and his overtures were gratefully accepted. Arnold of Brescia was burnt at the stake, and Bar- barossa's Imperial crown was placed on his head by Hadrian's freed hands. But the truce between Papacy and Empire proved of short duration. Frederic the Ambitious died, and was succeeded by his infant grandson, Frederic II, ' The Magnificent ', later famous for his encourage- ment of Provencal poetry in Sicily. To him was appointed guardian (1198) Pope Innocent III : a great statesman, as Stephen Langton's record stands to witness in English history ; a merciless hunter of heresy, as we saw in the Albigensian Crusade. In- nocent died in 1216, and his Imperial w^ard, grown to manhood, lost no time in claiming his inheritance. So the struggle broke out afresh, and so bitter became the conflict between Ghibelline Empire and Guelf Papacy that Pope Innocent IV (1243-54-) even granted Crusaders' privileges to those who fought on his side. And this time the Pope Avas to win. Fate conspired 56 EUROPEAN LITERATURE with authority. The Magnificent and his son died young, and at Benevento in 1266 the remnant of their forces was destroyed. Once more the scene is shifted. The Papal triumph proved short-lived. For the power of France had been growing while these wars were being waged beyond the Rhine (how new all these old tales sound !), and the French King Philip the Fair (Philip IV, 1285-1814) found himself strong enough to nominate a Pope of his own selection. He chose Clement V to replace Boniface VIII, who had sentenced Dante to exile ; and in 1309 Clement paid the price of his election by removing, at Philip's behest, the seat and machinery of Papal rule — great Rome herself, as it seemed — to Avignon. There, in ' Babylonian cap- tivity ', as Luther was later to phrase it, the Papacy lingered for more than seventy years. And this happened in Dante's very lifetime. He was born in 1265, the year before Benevento. He grew up amid memories of the events which we have sketched so hastily and imperfectly. The spirit of an older ordinance. ' Thou shalt show thy son in that day, saying, This is because of that which the Lord did unto me when / came out of Egypt ', was the spirit of direct participation which he poured into his anti-Papal zeal. In his own person he had suffered banishment. He knew ' how savoureth of salt The bread of others, and how hard a road The going up and down another's stair ' . —Paradiso, XVII. In Purgatorio, XXXII, he represented his oppressor, Pope Boniface, as a harlot wantoning with Philip the Fair, and driven in wrath across the forest. In Inferno, XIX, he committed Boniface and Clement to the third trench of the eighth circle of hell — POLITICS 57 ' Dost thou stand there already, Dost thou stand there already, Boniface ? By many years the record lied to me. Art thou so early satiate with that wealth, For which thou didst not fear to take by fraud The beautiful lady, and then work her woe ? ' And in Paradiso, XXXII, the angelic choir reddened with wrath at St. Peter's denunciation of Boniface — ' He who usurps upon the earth my place, My place, my place, which vacant had become. Before the presence of the Son of God, Has of my cemetery made a sewer Of blood and stench, whereby the Perverse One, Who fell from here, below there is appeased I ' But the history which Dante read and lived inspired him to more than invective poetry. His instinctive passion for Italy, and his belief in the coming of an Italian prince who would set right the woe of all the world, swallowed up vengeance and vindictiveness. Dante schooled himself to a state- craft above party. If he despised the weakness of the Guelfs, he hated the cruelty of the Ghibellines. He traversed in his poems the cities of Italy, and found no peace in them. In the true city of God on earth, Caesar should govern his temporalities in the pattern of the Divine economy ; and Dante, the new Virgil of Rome reborn,would create the utterance of his lips — ' Ah ! servile Italy, grief's hostelry ! A ship without a pilot in great tempest ! No Lady thou of Provinces, but brothel ! . . . Search, wretched one, all round about the shores, Thy seaboard, and then look within thy bosom, If any part of thee enjoyeth peace ! What boots it, that for thee Justinian The bridle mend, if empty be the saddle ? Withouten this, the shame would be the less . . . Come and behold thy Rome, that is lamenting. Widowed, alone, and calleth day and night : " My Caesar, why hast thou forsaken me ? " Come and behold how loving are the people ; And if for us no pity moveth thee. Come and be made ashamed of thy renown ! . . . For all the towns of Italy are full Of tyrants '. — Purgatorio, VI. 58 EUROPEAN LITERATURE IV. ALLEGORY AND DREAM. The fascination of contemporary politics and the increasing perception of moral issues were not open to free discussion by poets of the thirteenth century. They might hint at these things by allusion, and represent them by figures of speech ; they might adapt to worldlier topics the modes invented by romance ; but in an era of ecclesiastical dominion, unrayed by any modern light, satire, criticism, and malice were compelled to conform to the old rules. Thus, Dante opened his epic poem with the following verses {Inferno, I) — ' Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost. Ah me ! how hard a thing it is to say What was this forest, savage, rough and stern, Which in the very thought renews the fear'. The dark forest is understood to refer to Florentine politics as well as to the jungle of human life. It was a phrase selected by an allegorist for the sake of its obscurity, and the poet was secure in the knowledge that it would appeal to those for whom he wrote. A present-day poet, even more a present-day journalist, anxious to launch his shafts of satire at the failings and crimes of politicians, would drive straighter, though he might not hit harder. The aim and the result may be the same, but we have to deal with a different method of attack. Poets do not write in Dante's way to-day ; and, before discussing any book written in Dante's generation, two factors common to all the books may profitably be considered. The first is personification. Charlemagne, Arthur, Alexander, and all the panoply of medieval courts- of-love were receding a little from pu})lic interest. Sounds from the world outside, from the market- places and village -greens, began to break those ALLEGORY AND DREAM 59 mannered conventions. But busy purveyors of fiction were not yet ready to supply elements of drama from real life. They began to feel their way towards this great consummation by inventing ideal or abstract characters, lifelike instead of living per- sonages. They insulated certain human qualities and represented them in place of the whole man. Instead of a frail or virtuous woman, they personified Frailty or Virtue ; instead of a miser, Avarice ; and they even extended this practice, and employed the symbol of an animal to typify the quality of the man. Thus, in the first fifty lines of the Inferno, a panther stands for the pleasure-seeking policy of Florentine factions, a lion for the ambition of the French king, and a she- wolf for the greed of the Papal court. The example of the Hebrew Prophets is obvious : ' A lion out of the forest shall slay them, a wolf of the evenings shall spoil them, a leopard shall watch over their cities ', cried Jeremiah in his wrath. But the literary device of personification traced its immediate descent from Prudentius, a Christian Latin writer in Spain, who died about a.d. 400. Prudentius freely employed it in a poem on ' The Battle of the Soul ' {Psycho- machia), in which Faith contended with Idolatry, Patience with Anger, Shame with Passion, Humility and others with Pride, till at last victorious Faith built a temple to Christ. This great medieval exemplar was eagerly consulted ; and, though much that was frigid and insipid was written in its likeness, yet it served the cause of character-description and in- creased the resources of style. Later, the more famous works of Brandt, Bunyan, and Swift revealed in Allegory, full-grown, all the possibilities of per- sonification. The essential business of Allegory is to convey a meaning to the reader secondary to the literal meaning of his images and words. Dante was not in a forest, nor was Christian in the Valley of 60 EUROPEAN LITERATURE Humiliation ; or, rather, life is not a jungle, nor is difficulty a hill. For Allegory is in effect an elaborate system of metaphor, worked out in all its relations ; and deeply imaginative writers, such as Dante in verse and Bunyan in prose, used it to heighten and transform the superficial appearances of things. A second favourite device which helped the illusion of Allegory was that of the Dream. Many medieval poems opened action in dreamland, which proved a convenient refuge from arbitrary kings and warring popes. The criticism which the Church prohibited and which the State discouraged, as Dante's exile stands to witness, might range more freely in the realm, where, as Chaucer wrote in The House of Fame, the most Dantesque of his poems — ' Spirits have the might To make folk to dream a-night ' . Once more an early Christian Latinist is to be credited with the origination of the device. It is derived directly from Macrobius, who flourished about a.d. 400, and whose further title to literary repute is his belief, adopted by Dante, in the infallible guidance of Virgil. Macrobius wrote in prose a commentary on a fragment of Cicero's ' Republic ', entitled ' The Dream of Scipio ' {Somnium Scipionis), and it is a curious fate, which Cicero's vanity would have appreciated, that this extract from his lost de Republica should have become the chief source of the dream -convention in the poetry of the Christian Middle Ages. An early- twelfth- century dialogue between the Body and the Soul, which found hundreds of imitators, started with the poet's dream of a soul suddenly confronted by the body which it had recently quitted, and this idea was gradually embellished and improved into variants of the iter Paradisce, or road to Paradise, so popular with medieval fabulists. A famous instance SATIRISTS AND MORALISTS 61 of this type was the Voie de Paradis of Guiilauine de Digulleville (died c. 1360), and here, too, we see the beginnings of Bunyan's more perfect Pilgrim's Progress. V. SATIRISTS AND MORALISTS. We return here with greater confidence to the suggestion noted above, that the writers became * more moral ' as the thirteenth century grew to manhood. Take Ruteboeuf in France, for example. His name was probably a nickname, and of his biography nothing is known, except that he was alive in 1230 and 1285, and that he was married in Paris, 1260. Yet Ruteboeuf emerges from his poems with clear and strongly -marked personality, the first Parisian pur-sang. He showed up the seamier side of the bright garment woven by de Joinville in his Life of Louis IX, the Crusader-saint. He wrote his own Voie de Paradis, lives of Saints Mary and Elizabeth, and a miracle-play called Theophile. all in the medieval tradition. More direct of his personal genius were his ' complaints ' of Poverty and Marriage, and a dramatic debat on the pros and cons of Crusad- ing, with a bias to the side of the conscientious objectors. The dramatic instinct was pronounced in a French poet, Adam de la Halle, of the second half of the thirteenth century. He was called le Bossu, the Hunchback, of Arras, which fixes the place of his residence. Adam's jeu parti or debat of Robin and Marian was a pastoral dialogue, which was recited at Naples in 1283. A year or two later it was revived as lejeu du Pelerin at Arras. As an early experiment in rustic opera, this dialogue belongs to the beginnings of European diama. Robin and Marian, it is to be 62 EUROPEAN LITERATURE noted, were conventional names for the French shepherd and shepherdess. Later, the English forest- hero, Robin Hood, with his merry men, was identified with the French Robin, and Maid Marian was adopted into English folk-lore. Crossing the boundary of the Rhine, so bitterly disputed in arms, so graciously bridged by art, we find a dozen or more names. Neidhart von Reuental (c. 1180-1250), for example, was one of many German writers who transposed the key of knightly verse. He fitted rustic themes to the chivalric models, thus extending the scope and refreshing the appeal of Minnesong. Wernher, sur- named the Gardener, effected a like transposition in the region of romance. His Meyer Helmhrecht (c. 1240) was a tale of the village, and the first to deal with common life in preference to the repertory of the legend-cycles. Of like realistic stamp were the writings of Konrad von Wiirzburg, who died in 1287 ; and the name of Heinrich von Meissen (c. 1250-1318), who preferred the word Frau to Weib, as the epithet for woman, and was therefore known as Frauenlob (Women's Praise), should be added to this roll. The Minnesinger known as Tannhauser, a name im- mortalized by Wagner, enjoyed light-o'-love adven- tures which made him the hero of the fabled Venus- berg. His songs and satires of rural amours helped Minnesong to glide into folk-song. Ulrich von Liechtenstein (c. 1200-76) even caricatured the fading worship of Minne in a mock chivalric Frauen- dienst (' Service of Women '), and Steinmar von Klingenau (1251-93) was similarly interested to trace the social changes. A writer known as Freidank, signifying literally Free-thought, brought home from the Crusade of 1228 a manual of worldly-wise philo- sophy in the form of a moral poem entitled Bescheidenheit (^^discrimination), which had a long SATIRISTS AND MORALISTS 68 and an honourable vogue. Johannes Hadloub (c. 1300) is named as the last of the old type of Minne- singer, and Oswald von Wolkenstein (1367-1445) as the last Minnesinger of all. Rudolf von Ems (1220-54) was the author of a conventional Alexandriad, but he made a notable departure in his apologues and tales versified from monkish chronicles. Especially popular for its moral application was Rudolf's Barlaatn and Josaphat, which he adapted from Buddhistic lore, and in which he depicted the gracious influence of a hermit on a wealthy and worldly prince. Moral, too, in purpose and achievement was a Dutch poet, Jacob von Maerlant (1235-c. 1300), who after graduating in the themes of Alexander, Merlin, and Troy, made an independent departure in three poems entitled Martin. To Martin he opened his heart on most of the problems of his day : religion, politics, society ; and Maerlant's poetry forms a good part of a MS, now at Leyden, which is known as ' The Mirror of History ' (Spieghel hisiorice), and might even pass as early journalism. A minor Maerlant at the begin- ning of the fourteenth century was Lodewijk van Velthem. A like interest in current affairs and a like moral and conscientious purpose are found in the Spanish writings of King Alfonso X of Castile, w^ho reigned from 1252-84. Contemporaries called him the Wise, but Mariana, the Spanish historian of the sixteenth century, wrote of him more irreverently, that ' he was fitter for letters than for government ; he studied the heavens and watched the stars, but lost the earth '. King Alfonso seems to have said, as more foolish people have said since, that, had he been consulted at the Creation, he would have spared the Creator some absurdities ; and this pretension was derided by Fontenelle in his Pluralite des Mondes, «4 EUROPEAN LITERATURE 1686, and again by Byron in his Vision of Judgment, 1822— ' I settle all these things by intuition, Times present, past, to come — Heaven — Hell — and all, Like King Alfonso. When I thus see double, I save the Deity some worlds of trouble '. The wise king, thus rebuked by Mariana, Fontenelle, and Byron, has doubtless repented his temerity. It never detracted from the real benefits which he conferred on the young literature of Spain. We noted in Chapter I that the First General Chronicle was inspired and encouraged by Alfonso. Still more important was his work on Spanish constitutional law, which he called Siete Partidas, or the Seven Divisions of the Constitution (1256-63). The number seven was rather arbitrary. There were seven letters in the King's name, and there were seven subjects of instruction in the old ordnance-survey of the sciences, viz., grammar, logic, rhetoric (these formed the Trivio), music, astrology, physics, metaphysics (these formed the Qiiadrivio). It seemed appropriate to the medieval mind to adopt this magical seven for the framework of a scheme codifying the legal systems then current in Castile. As a sign of interest in social studies King Alfonso's Siete Partidas is a notable work of the age, and its fine literary taste and distinguished public idealism add to its permanent value. The royal jurist was also a poet, and writers as recent as Heine in Germany, Merimee in France, and Adelaide Procter in England testify to the worth of the Cantigas de Santa Maria (sacred poems, chiefly on the Virgin Mary), which Alfonso partly wrote and partly caused to be written. THE ROMANCE OF THE ROSE 65 VI. THE ROMANCE OF THE ROSE. Many of these resources were utilized in the Roman de la Rose, the most popular poem of the Middle Ages, in many respects its most complete mirror, and an indispensable apprentice-poem for later writers. Dream was there — ' En Mai estoie, ce songoie, El terns amoreus plain de joie '. ' That it was May, thus dremed me In time of Love and Jollity ' *. Young Love was there — * Lors estuet jones gens entendre A estre gais et amoreus Por le terns bel et doucereus. Moult a dur cuer qui en Mai n'aime, Quant il ot chanter sus la raime As oisiaus les dous chans piteus '. ' Than yonge folk entenden ay For to ben gay and amorous, The time is than so savorous. Hard is his herte that loveth nought In May, whan al this mirth is wrought ; Whan he may on these braunches here The smale briddes singen clere '. Personification was there — ' Pres de Biaut6 se tent Richece, Une dame de grant hautdce, De grant pris et de grant affaire. Qui k li ne as siens meffaire Osast riens par fais, ou par dis, II fust moult fiers et moult hardis ; Qu'ele puet moult nuire et aidier Ce n'est mie ne d'ui ne d'ier Que riches gens ont grant poissance De faire ou aide ou grevance '. ' Bisyde Beaute yede Richesse, An high lady of greet noblesse, And greet of prys in every place. But who-so durste to hir trespace, Or til hir folk, in worde or dede, He were ful hardy, out of drede ; ^ Chaucer's translation ; text and translation in Skeat's Chaucer, \o\. i. 66 EUROPEAN LITERATURE For bothe she heipe and hindre may : And that is nought of yisterday That riche folk liave ful gret might To helpe and eek to greve a wight '. Allegory was there, and satire, and social criticism, and the new moral tone of the new poetry of that day. For it happened by a very fortunate accident that the Rose was written by two authors, whose successive periods of receptivity corresponded to the change of sentiment which occurred in the course of the thirteenth century. Part I (4,070 verses) was written by Guillaume de Lorris (Lorris is in the valley of the Loire), and was published in 1237. Part II (18,004 verses) was added by Jean de Meun in or about 1277. In the English version which was form.erly ascribed to Chaucer, and of which, according to Prof. Skeat, the first 1,705 lines are Chaucer's and the rest are by two unknown translators, the conclusion of Guii- laume's share is at the following words — ' And if that thou foryete me (forget) Myn herte shal never in lyking be ; Nor elles-where finde solace, If I be put out of your grace, As it shal never been, I hope ; Than shulde I fallen in wanhope '. (despair) Forty years afterwards his work, interrupted, pro- bably, by early death, was completed, if completion is the right term for a continuation more than four times the length of the original, by Jean le Clopinel, Lame John, of Meun. Jean reopened the poem on the same note which had been struck by Guillaume 's last word — ' Alias, in wanhope ? — nay, pardee I ' But he quickly left ' wanhope ' behind — ' For I wol never despeired be. If Hope me faile, then am I Ungracious and unworthy ; In Hope I wol comforted be, For Love, when he bitaught hir me, Seide, that Hope, wher-so I go, Shulde ay be relees to my wo '. THE ROMANCE OF THE ROSE 67 The new lines breathed the spirit of the new age, and the two writers were different by temperament as well as by time. Guillaume had the sweeter fancy, Jean the sturdier imagination ; and it may have been the fault of his lameness, or it may have been the spirit of the age, but when he took over Guillaume's fragment, the rose was shattered at his touch. Why he took it over we do not know. His main industry was translation (including Boethius's ' Consolation of Philosophy'), and his Testament, 1296, is a medieval medley of sentiment and satire. But the Rose was popular and handy, and, looked at merely as a sequel, Jean's contribution of Part II was as audacious as any on record. Guillaume's Love-dream in a Garden had been designed as an allegory of fancy — ' It is the Romance of the Rose, In which al the art of Love I close '. Amant, the lover, was met by Sir Mirth, Fair Wel- come, Lady Gladness, Wanhope, Courtesy, Shame, Sweet-Seeming, Beauty, and others, who helped or hindered his intention to find the Lady of the Rose. Jean, a scholar of parts, and plainly a freethinker, enlarged the scope of this allegory to a politico-social attack on the institutions of his day. He greatly extended the role of Reason, and he introduced Nature, False-Seeming, and other elements of discord. Reason discourses at length on the old, chivalric tales, and points a satiric moral for the confusion of love -idealists. Natm-e riddles the systems which ranked as philosophy in the thirteenth century, and the exposure of False-Seeming's hypocrisy gives further occasion for long harangues. Thus, the ' Romance of the Rose ' drew together by the accident of its dual authorship the main threads of medieval genius. Guillaume's chief contribution was the 68 EUROPEAN LITERATURE Ovidian psychology of love. Jean incorporated in it the stories of the chansons de geste, laughed at the pretensions of the Schoolmen, and pricked the con- science of the public as to priests' faith and women's honour. The poem has good qualities in both kinds, and its influence was immediate and permanent. It was multiplied by copyists. The clergy quoted from it as from the Bible. Purists assailed its morality, and stylists extolled its art. It was translated into every foreign tongue, and was frequently edited to suit the taste of later generations. It is still supreme as a picture of the parti-coloured life of the Middle Ages, and to most of us its music still appeals, with far more force than its satire, as a faint, clear prelude to the orchestra, which, to vary a well-known phrase, has made poetic Europe what it is. VII. THE ROMANCE OF REYNARD THE FOX. The moral hinted at in Allegory was emphasized in Fable. De te fabula, ' the point of the fable is directed at you ', is a phrase which has become pro- verbial ; and we can trace the modern Fable back to the Fabliau of Northern France, where it flourished at the time of the growth of social consciousness and of the emergence of the middle-class to self- expression ; roughly, from 1250 to 1350. In ten or more polished couplets of verses in eight syllables, the Fable-writer would tell a tale of the common day's ordinary concerns, with the laughter turned against a human foible. The weakness of women's virtue or the shallowness of clerical holiness was the favourite butt, and a spice of esprit Gaulois was inherent in them all. They illumined a section of society remote from knights' camps and ladies' bowers, and, geographically, too, they were of the THE ROMANCE OF REYNARD THE FOX 69 centre. A trustworthy historian bids us look for the home of the French Fable — ' at the very heart of French soil, in Champagne and Picardy, in all the jolly towns and villages where no man could escape social contact with his neighbours. There is the classic land of the Fable, and there at all epochs flourished naughty tales, natty quips, bold satires, directed at husbands, wives, and priests ' ^. The naughtiness is not to be denied. But French taste has the deftness to deflect, at the pen's point, as it were, the worse offence of coarseness ; a native delicacy of form redeems the indelicacy of matter ; and we could ill spare these little tales, in which, point by point, the worshipful heroine of chivalry steps out of the veil of romance, and is revealed a' true woman of the people, ready of wit, quick to deceive, ill to be deceived, so familiar throughout French literature. In the French Fabliau of the late thirteenth century we realize the succession of Jean de Meun, the social satirist, to Guillaume de Lorris, the fanciful allegorist. We shall come to a revival of Fable, or, perhaps, more properly, to its consummation, in La Fontaine in the eighteenth century. In our present period we are concerned with a certain species of this genre, which had a big vogue from the start, and which inspired a middle-class roman almost contemporary with the Roman de la Rose. The species was the Animal-Fable, and the romance was the Roman de Renart. Students of origins are aware that the Beast-tale, or Bestiary, had a long and honourable descent. It went back from the Christian Middle Ages to the first and second centuries, a.d., when Phaedrus, a Roman, ^ G. Lanson, Histoire de la Litter aiure frangaise. 70 EUROPEAN LITERATURE and Babrius, a Greek, made collections of fables about animals. Drawing partly from these collections, Marie de France, the writer of Breton lays, wrote her Ysopet, mentioned in Chapter I. But the title of her book suggests an even remoter source, and this we discover in JEsop, whose collection dates from the sixth century, B.C. ; while ^sop, the Samian slave, had drawn on Eastern sources, including the Birth- tales of Buddha and the Fables of Bidpai. Among other source-books available in the Middle Ages were the ' Natural History ' of Pliny (the Elder, fl. a.d. 70), and a long series known as Physiologi, w^ith an Egyptian Physiologus at their head : a kind of sacred natural-history books, inculcating moral virtues by observation of animal life. The ' Book of Secrets ' by Albertus Magnus, a leading savant of the thirteenth century, is also to be mentioned in this context. But the multiplication of models is unnecessary. Briefly, the vogue is to be traced to a very common human practice, as simple as it is instinctive. The habit of comparison between a busy man and a bee, a subtle man and a serpent, a stupid man and an ass, an industrious man and an ant, a greedy man and a pig, may be observed in every present nursery, and was doubtless familiar in the childhood of the human race. More important than the origins are the specimens, and mention may be made by anticipation of the fascination exercised by these source-books on the antiquaries and wits of a later date. The old bestiaries, herbaries, volucraries (bird-tales), lapi- daries (precious stone-tales), etc., were ransacked for their quaint lore and for their yet more curious images. To these aspects we shall return in due course. Meanwhile, in the thirteenth century, gleaners in the field of plenty found their labour facilitated by two external causes, not unconnected with each other. THE ROMANCE OF REYNARD THE FOX 71 One was the enlargement of the social circle and the shifting of its centre away from court and camp to civic mart and rural green, with a consequent readi- ness of opinion to test and revise moral values. The other was the striking analogy, seized by what was then the new criticism, between types of the animal creation and the heroes of the Carlovingian legend. Everyone knew Charlemagne. Everyone knew the old tales of the king's crafty barons and needy monks, his powerful fangs worn to decay, his authority flouted and set at nought, his credulity as long as his beard, and his empire parted among his heirs. The chansons de geste of Charlemagne were familiar in every feudal tongue, and feudal society in those days reproduced again and again the ex- periences narrated in the chansons. A baron home from the war might find a rival in his castle. A knight might be worsted in encounter with a self- seeking steward of his property. A homely country- man might be fleeced by a clever man about town. The Fox and the Lion met in many relations of life, and the folk-lore of animal life which ^sop, Bab- rius and Phaedrus had handed down to a hundred practitioners was exploited by satirists of society in imitation of the Charlemagne tales. Noble the Lion was the old king, outwitted by Reynard the Fox, and all the menagerie of beasts was used, as the Fable grew, to point under transparent disguises the universal moral of nimble wits and empty crowns. The satire was imposed upon the folk-tale, and the vast and ramified Beast-epic known as the Roman de Renart was the result. We need not quote from it to-day. Thomas Carlyle, a hundred years ago, wrote that ' the story, more than any other, is a truly European perform- ance : for some centuries the universal Household 72 EUROPEAN LITERATURE Possession and Secular Bible, read everywhere, in the palace and the hut '. In its first completed form it ranged through the world of man-like beasts in more than a hundred thousand verses. France and Ger- many sent their contributions, and modern writers enumerate twenty-seven branches of the story, composed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Caxton in 1481 imprinted the Fable in English. Goethe in 1792 wrote a version of Reinecke Fuchs. But it is distracting to dwell on the anatomy of what was written wholly for delight. Whatever its origin and later history, the true home of the roman is France. The names of the animals are French, French wit enlivens the recital, and sundry indications point to Picardy as the first home of the Fable. Before Reynard had finished his adventures he had proved his aptness for anything that offered itself. He reconciled warring theologians. He went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He told tales of the Alexandriad. He became Confessor to Lion the King. In a word, or, most appropriately, in the words of Ste.-Beuve, the greatest French critic, this romance of Reynard the Fox v^^as ' the satirical masterpiece of the thirteenth century. It echoes the rancour of the small against the great, and expresses the political or religious daring of statesmen, jongleurs, monks, and scholars. Moreover, it is animated with that imperious spirit against women, which is so sharply and repugnantly emphasized in many of the fabliaux '. We come through the satirists and fabulists, through the allegorists, the Schoolmen and the Troubadours, to the greatest writer of the Middle Ages, perhaps the greatest Italian poet, DANTE ALIGHIERI (1265-1321) 78 Vm. DANTE ALIGHIERI (1265-1321), who drew inspiration from them all. Dante's works, to pass at once to these, may be enumerated as follows — 1. De Vulgari Eloquentia, a Latin treatise on the ' vulgar ' (Italian) tongue, which, in the early stages of its foliation in Tuscany, Dante had the courage and the foresight to describe as ' illustrious '. His choice of it as the medium of his own poetry, and the extra- ordinary triumphs which he won in it, conferred an obligation on his fellow-countrymen which they have always loyally acknowledged. Prof. Saintsbury, in his History of Criticism, describes this treatise of the thirteenth century as ' on a line with the very greatest critical documents of all history ', and we have referred elsewhere to Dante's brilliant and con- venient classification of the Langues cfOc, d'OU, and de Si, for Northern and Southern French and Italian respectively. 2. De Monarchia, another Latin treatise, which students interested in the development of the theory of government should read in conjunction with Dante's epistle (c. 1309) ' To all the Kings in Italy, Senators, Dukes and Peoples '. It was, alas, a plurality of kings which was Italy's trouble in those days, and Dante, as an exiled patriot, hugged the far-off hope that the Emperor Henry VII would prove the single saviour and regenerator. He ex- pounded, in terms of the highest idealism, his con- ception of the true aim of Italian governance, when Caesar should be just and Peter should be wise. 3. II Convito, ' The Banquet ', in Italian prose. The title was taken from Plato's Symposium, but the prose, a new organ of Italian style, was a little tenta- tive and immature. The attraction of the treatise 74 EUROPEAN LITERATURE lies in its account of the poet's surrender to philo- sophy, and in the discourses on love and virtue with which he adorned his theme. 4. Canzoniere, ' Songs '. These were the poems of Dante's youth, written in his Troubadour days, when, as we saw above, the new ' glory of our tongue ' passed from the keeping of the two Guidos to him whose fuller songtide would ' chase them both from the nest '. We saw then what kind of songs they were which Guinicelli, Cavalcanti, and Dante poured out successively to love : how rare in sentiment, how rapturous in adoration, how mystical in communion with the spirit beyond the flesh. We need not adduce fresh evidence. Here it is more appropriate to explain that the Italian canzone is a lyrical poem arranged in strophes of a carefully complicated design. The Sonnet, new in this epoch, was a single strophe of a canzone. Its fourteen lines were an octave and a sestet (eight lines and six), with the rhymes disposed as follows — Octave, abbaabba ; Sestet, abcabc, or abccba. or abbacc. or ababcc, with other possible variations. The sonnet-form became a test of the quality of lyric poets, and it passed through Petrarch, as we shall see, into the inheritance of the Renaissance in France, Spain, England, and other countries. Another lyric measure was the Madrigal, arranged in triplets and couplets, as an offshoot of pastoral song. Special mention is due to the Italian metres with linked rhymes {rime incatenate, a chain of rhymes) which were practised mainly in two sorts, viz. — i. Terza rima, of which the rhyme-scheme is aha, bcb, cdc, ded . . . , and which Dante used in his Commedia; DANTE ALIGHIERI (1265-1321) 75 ii. Ottava rima, of which the rhyme-scheme is abababcc. It will be noted that the ottava rima stanza is identical with one of the variants of the sestet of the sonnet. It is akin to, though not identical with, the metres invented in England by Chaucer and Spenser, and it found its practitioners in Spain. Terza rima, on the contrary, never struck deep roots outside Italy. Next, in 5, La Vita Nuova, ' The New Life ', and 6, La Commedia, ' The Comedy ', which posterity agreed to call ' Divine ', we come to the essential Dante. To certain aspects of the greatness of these works a few more words must be given. And, first : If hate lit the fires and froze the ice in Dante's hell, it was love, lyric-love finely spiritu- alized, which ' moved the sun and the other stars ' in his heaven. For Dante, above all, was the ideal lover. Through all his experiences and travail, whether of body or soul, he sought and followed and cherished one only and one always, the Beatrice of his single adoration. Who she was matters little to- day ; whether Bice Portinari (died 1290) or another ; nor how often or seldom they met in the society in which they moved. The veritable Beatrice is the Beatrice in literature, the divine lady of compassion, who took Virgil's place as guide when the shades of Purgatory were fading in the purest light of inmost Heaven, and not even the greatest of Pagan poets might enter the Paradise of the Blest. There Theology wore Beatrice's shape, and Reason spoke with Beatrice's voice, and the three were inextricably one, and at last the perplexities of mortality were resolved in perfect love and perfect knowledge — ' Ever the Love which quieteth this Heaven Welcomes unto itself with such salute. To make the candle ready for the flame '. —Paradiso, XXX. 76 EUROPEAN LITERATURE Dante's candle was ready betimes. He was nine years of age, he tells us, when Beatrice first crossed his path, and — ' From that time forward Love quite governed my soul. . . . And albeit her image, that was with me always, was an exultation of Love to subdue me, it was yet of so perfect a quality that it never allowed me to be overruled by Love without the faithful counsel of reason, whensoever such counsel was useful to be heard ' ^. Do we believe it ? We must. The Divina Corn- media confirms it in accents of love-making more sublime than any spoken by mortal man to mortal woman — ' Unto the loving accents of my comfort I turned me round, and then what love I saw Within those holy eyes I here relinquish ; Not only that my language I distrust, But that my mind cannot return so far Above itself, unless another guide it. This much upon that point can I repeat, That, her again beholding, my affection From every other longing was released. While the eternal pleasure, which direct Kayed upon Beatrice, from her fair face Contented me with its reflected aspect. Conquering me with the radiance of a smile, She said to me — Turn thee about and listen ; Not in mine eyes alone is Paradise ' . —Paradiso XVIII. So the new life in Love's service began on a May Day, 1274, when Bice Portinari, wearing a dress of ' a subdued and goodly crimson, girdled and adorned in such sort as best suited with her very tender age ', was ' at the beginning of her ninth year almost, and I saw her almost at the end of my ninth year '. The rest was the storj^ of his soul's espousal, purified of all earthly dross. Such love, surpassing any Trouba- dour's, was revealed to the rapturous eyes of the ^ Vita Nuova ; D. G. Rossetti's translation. DANTE ALIGHIERI (1265-1321) 77 storm-tossed exile from Florence. Such reason, sur- passing any Schoolman's, Dante excogitated from love. By an allegory within an allegory, the poet and his passion alike passed through the Inferno of desire and the Purgatory of suffering into the Paradise of fortitude and renunciation. The Beatrice of temporal conditions became the ' beata Beatrix ' of the ever- lasting mystery of God. And if Dante's Paradise is delineated a little less clearly than his Inferno, we remember that supreme anguish is more easily imaginable than supreme bliss, and that the frescoes and paintings in Italian churches, to which the Commedia owed some of its word-pictures, were bound by like limitations of experience. But the impression of light and colour and the pervading radiancy of love are conveyed with unmatched skill. There are other aspects to be noted, which we must pass more rapidly in review. The fascination of numbers, for example, so characteristic of the Middle Ages, which we remarked in the Siete Partidas of King Alfonso of Castile. The key -numbers for Dante were three and nine. He was nine years old when he met Beatrice. There are nine circles in his hell. There are three parts of the Commedia. Each part has thirty-three cantos. The metre is terza-rima, or linked threes. Next, we are to note for admiration Dante's landscapes and seascapes, which Ruskin (in Modern Painters) taught the nineteenth century to appreciate ; liis vividness, which inspired Sir Joshua Reynolds to paint the Ugolino episodes, and which render Flaxman's designs a transposition as well as illustration ; his wild bitterness, which alienated Voltaire and the taste of the eighteenth century, with the honourable exception of Gray ; his Platonism ; his intense individualism ; his ' beautiful style ', which he faithfully ascribed to Virgil, magician and prophet of the Middle Ages, the first poet-visitant of 78 EUROPEAN LITERATURE hell [Aeneid, VI) and Dante's guide to the forecourts of Paradise ; his epic similes, derived from Homer, which Dante was the first to employ in modern literature ; his metre, which he made a national possession ; his symbolism, from the ' forest ' of Inferno, I, to the last vision of Paradiso, XXXIII ; his allusiveness ; his sublimity ; his tenderness. A volume might be written on every aspect, and indeed the Dante bibliography is vast. Vaster than his actual influence, perhaps. For Dante founded no school, and left no disciples. He was early recognized as the final product of forces which had passed away. A Dante chair was estab- lished in Florence as early as 1373, with Boccaccio as its first occupant ; and Dante students and societies have multiplied. But, outside Italy, at any rate, and except in Milton's epic poetry, there was no serious Dante revival till the beginning of the last century. Then Coleridge acutely called him ' a link between religion and philosophy ', such a link as the Schoolmen had sought to forge ; and Gary's English translation, 1814, stimulated a wholesome revival, and subjected Shelley, Leigh Hunt, and Carlyle to Dante's ennobling discipline. The new Romantic movement in Europe, recalling art to the Middle Ages, brought Dante back to renown, and Schlegel in Germany, Carducci in Italy, Rossetti in England, were foremost among his restorers. Rhetoric, archaeology, theology, all have drawn from Dante's wells, and mystic love cannot aim beyond his mark. So the Divine Comedy holds its appointed place, and hosts of readers subscribe to Carlyle's verdict, in his lecture on The Hero as Poet : ' Europe has made much : great cities ; great empires, encyclopedias, creeds, bodies of opinion and practice ; but it has made little of the class of Dante's thought '. PIERS PLOWMAN 79 IX. PIERS PLOWMAN. A small share of that little was vouchsafed to a poet born about 1330 on a Malvern hillside in England some ten years after Dante's death. Between the polished triads of the Divina Commedia and the alliterative verse of the Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman there is a gulf of artistic achieve- ment : hardly less is the spiritual difference between the remote, sublime, metapltysical, scholastic Floren- tine exile and the practical, homely, social, Biblical English countryman. Yet something of Dante's impassioned truth and something, too, of his vocal hope were manifest in ' the tall, gaunt figure of Langland, passing through the jostling crowds of London streets to pray for the rich men's souls, and yet living his life in a world apart, a world of ideals of what ought to be ' ^. Both sought just government on earth ; Dante from the King of kings, Langland from England's king. ' Were I king ', Langland urged, * no wrong should go unpunished or get grace by bribes, and Love should rule all '. The parallelism with Dante, rather than Dante's direct influence, is plain. The poet's name, William Langland, or Langley, depends on an uncertain conjecture ^. But con- venience suggests the conclusion that the name be adopted for general use. After all, it is the poem 1 E. Dale, op. cit. * Prof. J. M. Manly of Chicago, in Cambridge History of English Literature, ii (1908), decided against the earlier conclusions of Skeat and Jusserand in favour of five several authors, of whom one only is known by name, John But. Prof. Snell, in Periods of European Literature, iii (1899), accepted the one-author view. Prof. Courthope, in History of English Poetry, i (1895), agreed that Langland left in his poem an anagrammatical clue to his own identity in the line— ' " I have lived in Londe," quod I, " my name is Longe Wille " ' (which is further typical of the poet's scheme of metre and allitera tion) ; but deprecated the introduction of ' even the appearance of scientific reasoning into what must necessarily always remain a region of nebular hypothesis.' Mr. A. Lang, in History of English Literature (1912), mentioned Langland's name as a matter of ' general snpposition '. 80 EUROPEAN LITERATURE that counts. We know that it was composed in three instalments : the first about 1362, after the Peace of Bretigny, and the great tempest of January 15th in that year ; the second about 1377 ; and the third in the last decade of the fourteenth century. We recognize that the writer of the third differs from the writer of the first by an excess of pedantry and a defect of imagination. But these facts do not dis- prove the single authorship of William Langland. William Wordsworth's writings reveal even wider discrepancies of temperament over a period of thirty to forty years. Piers the Plowman, who is Peter the Church, starts in the character of a just man, and is gradually spiritualized into a symbol of Chiist. His original dream in the Malvern hills slides, as dreams are apt to do, especially literary dreams derived through Picardy from Macrobius, into visions within visions. Therein the philosophy of virtue is ex- pounded by the counsels of Dowel, Dobet, and Dobest (do well, do better, do best), like a Scholastic treatise beaten into allegory, and it is observed that the social note which predominates at the opening of the poem takes a deeper religious tone as years advance and verses increase. The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plow- man was supplemented by a shorter and more prac- tical poem, which bears no title of its own, but which English editors have designated The Deposition of Richard II or Richard the Redeless. A Piers Plow- man^s Creed and a Plowman^s Tale (once wrongly attributed to Chaucer) belong to the Piers cycle but not to the author of the Vision. They testify to the wide popularity and real national significance of Langland's social and moral allegory, which, though little read to-day, ranks, like the English Bible of John Wiclif (c. 1320-84), in the list of the few supreme books of the fourteenth century which contained the promise of the Reformation. CHAPTER III. The Fourteenth Century. I. GENERAL SURVEY. It is always somewhat illusory, an illusion of space and time, to review under any one aspect an age diversified, like all others, by differences of class and climate, of temperament, creed, and will. We adopted that method in the age of Dante, because Dante's star-like radiance was unique in his genera- tion. But even a star has other attributes than its shining, despite the limitations of the human eye, and we shall not insist on a likeness between talents so obviously distinct as those which illumined the fom'teenth century in France, Spain, England, and the Netherlands. There is no single figm-e in literature round whom the writers may be grouped. There is no single movement of culture which spread its influence around. We might sort the writers into classes, as chroniclers, story-tellers, and divines — Chroniclers — Ayala (1332-1407). Froissart (1337-c. 1410). Story-Tellers — Juan Ruiz (c. 1280-c. 1350). Boccaccio (1313-75). Chaucer (c. 1340-1400). 82 EUROPEAN LITERATURE Divines — Langland (c. 1330-c. 1400). Wiclif (c. 1320-84). Dutch Mystics, leading to Thomas a Kempis (1379-1471), and put Petrarch (1304-74) in a class by himself, as a poet and an inspirer of poets. But no assortment is wholl}^ satisfactory. Just as Langland chose to tell a story, though the purpose of his allegory was reform, so the three chief story-tellers in this century, the Spaniard, the Italian, and the Englishman, were likewise active as poets, and were affiliated by many close ties to the innovating poetic genius of Petrarch. A sounder procedure is to start from some of the happenings of the times, and to leave the writers to reveal to us their separate methods of approach. Certain events in the fourteenth century could not fail to strike everyone's imagination. The Black Death, for example, whether it originated on battle- fields or in sewers, spread with fatal facility, and communicated views on life and death which were repeated from nation to nation. It killed in 1348 two ladies celebrated in literature : Petrarch's Laura and Boccaccio's Fiammetta. The battlefields them- selves were common ground ; for an epoch of a Hundred Years' War was bound to produce like conditions in the belligerent countries. Trade, again, was a medium of exchange in ideas as well as in commodities, and helped immenselj^ to stimulate the rise of an independent middle-class. The dislocation of labour, due to war and disease, and the partial failure of authority to devise remedies and relief, evoked problems common to all climes. In Florence, Boccaccio retired from them. Supported by an ' honourable company of seven ladies and three GENERAL SURVEY 88 young men ', as he wrote in the Proem of his Decam- eron, he fled from the plague-stricken capital and passed the time in telling stories and singing songs ; and, though ' the whole place was a sepulchre ', he invented a garden of delight. In the North there were also retired companies, though moved by a different aim. Holy livers such as Eckhart (died 1327), Tauler (1360), Suso (1365), Groot (1384) and Rade- wyns (1400) formed themselves into the community of the Brethren of the Common Lot, and founded at Deventer and Hertogenbosch schools of thought and doctrine which grew to Reformation vigour. The supreme expression of their sentiment is found in the Imitatio Christi of St. Thomas a Kempis (the name came from Kempen, by Cologne), whose complete acquiescence in the bliss of a cloistral seclusion was as remote from Dutch art as from German politics. The heart-piercing ^ quality of the Imitation rings more truly in the author's fervid Latin than in any of the many languages into which it has often been rendered. Its other-worldliness is its most obvious characteristic, as worldliness is the mark of the Decameron ; and, looking backward, we see the Reformation wrapped up in the spiritual appeal, which summoned Thomas to the cloister prepared for him by the Brethren of the Common Lot ^. Looking backward, again, from Boccaccio's garden, we see the Renaissance wrapped up in the Florentine lovers' resolve, not to yield to darkness and despair, but to oppose the prevailing gloom with all the resources of the human senses. The objects were the same, South and North, however different the means that were chosen. The common * The epithet is Hallam's. * See Ullmann, op. cit. : ' Shall this quiet mystic, wholly immersed in the contem])lation of Divine things, be placed in the ranks of th'jse who paved the way for the Reformation ? We boldly answer, Yes. Between tJie childlike, humble Thomas, and tlie heroic, independent Luther, there is a deep, inward aifinity '. 84 EUROPEAN LITERATURE purpose was to forget and to repair ; to forget the ravages of wrong, the evils of the world which they had left, and to repair by inner resources the broken spirit of medieval man. ' There ', cried the lady of the Decameron, defending her retreat to rural scenes, ' There we shall hear the chant of birds, have sight of green hills and plains, of cornfields waving like the sea, of trees of a thousand sorts. There also we shall have a larger view of the heavens, which, however harsh to us-ward, yet deny not their eternal beauty ; things fairer far for eye to rest upon than the desolate walls of our city '. And not otherwise did Thomas a Kempis seek to forget the desolation, and to repair its wrack, by solitary communion with God. We perceive this likeness across the centuries. We see more clearly than the writers how both equally were moved by experience of pestilence and war. But the common problems presented in the fourteenth century should never induce us to neglect the difference of the individual replies. Florence and Deventer alike were mourning the effects of the Black Death, yet Boccaccio wrote the Decameron and a Kempis the Imitatio Christi. We may look at the matter in another way. This search for likeness in difference, this attempt to credit a past age with perceptions vaster than its knowledge, is sometimes more fascinating than profitable. Take II. JEAN FROISSART, the French chronicler, for example. His birth, like Langland's, coincided with the outbreak of the Hundred Years' War. The successive defeats of French arms at Cregy, Calais, and Poitiers, and the peasants' revolt known as La Jacquerie, all occurred JEAN FROISSART 85 before he was twenty. No French youth of genius could see these events with sluggish blood. Yet what was Froissart's point of view ? From what angle of vision did he survey them ? Let us listen first to Sir Walter Scott, above all a sympathetic witness to the value of the chivalric tradition. Froissart's ' beauti- ful expressions of sorrow ', Scott wrote in Old Mor- tality ^, were reserved for ' the pearl of knighthood ', while ' for sweeping from the face of the earth a few hundreds of villain churls, who were born but to plough it, the liigh-born and inquisitive historian has marvellous little sympathy '. Time has been on the side of the ' churls ', and Froissart, careless of a future in which the dreams of Piers Plowman would come true, did not try to anticipate time. He did not attempt to write his chronicle with the pen of the sociologist. He did not know the social point of view, so admirably rendered by the historian — ' When Feudalism was fully established, society assumed a hierarchical gradation of classes, the strong man at the top as lord, the weak and conquered beneath as serfs. . . . Society was stable ; men were in fixed relations to other men, and though there were higher and lower, strong and weak, there was little dissatisfaction ; the morrow was sm-e to all, even to the destitute few. During the decline of Feudalism and after it, we find a different state of things. Society again became fluid and disorganized. We find risings of the people in England, France, and Germany, the three leading nations ; risings of the Commonalty in England, Peasant Wars in Germany, Jacquerie in France, from the same common cause in each case ' 2 ^ Claverhouse is speaking. * W, Graham, Socialism, p. 28 (' International Scientific Series '). 86 EUROPEAN LITERATURE Nor did Froissart attempt to write his chronicle from the economist's point of view. We may doubt, again, if he knew it — ' Criticism on the existing system was uttered more forcibly in the fourteenth century by those who regarded the affairs of the times as plain men, exercising their common sense. There was a sharp contrast between the recognized duty of labour, — of accepting work as a personal discipline,- — and the lives of the friars who lived in idleness as beggars. . . . The exactions of the monasteries from their serfs, as from the townsmen, who were their neighbours, gave continual cause for complaint and were the excuse for occasional outbursts ' ^. Both high authorities agiee that the Jacquerie in France was an outward sign and effect of social and economic causes, described by one as ' common ' and by the other as ' continual '. Now hear Jean Frois- sart on the same subject — ' Anon after the deliverance of the king of Navarre there began a marvellous tribulation in the realm of France, as in Beauvoisin, in Brie, on the river of Marne, in Laonnois, and about Soissons. For certain people of the conunon villages, without any head or ruler, assembled together in Beauvoisin. In the beginning they passed not a hundred in number : they said how the noblemen of the realm of France, knights and squires, shamed the realm, and that it should be a great wealth to destroy them all ; and each of them said it was true, and said all with one voice : " Shame have he that doth not his power to destroy all the gentlemen of the realm ! " ^ W. Cunningliam, Western Civilization, p. 142 ( ' Cambridge Historical Series '). JEAN FROISSART 87 ' Thus they gathered together without any other counsel, and without any armour saving with staves and knives, and so went to the house of a knight dwelling thereby, and brake up his house and slew the knight and the lady and all his children great and small and brent his house. And then they went to another castle, and took the knight thereof and bound him fast to a stake, and then violated his wife and his daughter before his face and then slew the lady and his daughter and all his other children, and then slew the knight by great torment and brent and beat down the castle. And so they did to divers other castles and good houses ; and they multiplied so that they were a six thousand, and ever as they went forward they increased, for such like as they were fell ever to them, so that every gentleman fled from them and took their wives and children with them, and fled ten or twenty leagues off to be in surety, and left their houses void and their goods therein. ' These mischievous people thus assembled without captain or armour robbed, brent and slew all gentlemen that they could lay hands on, and forced and ravished ladies and damosels, and did such shameful deeds that no human creature ought to think on any such, and he that did most mischief was most praised with them and greatest master. I dare not write the horrible deeds that they did to ladies and damosels : among other they slew a knight and after did put him on a broach and roasted him at the fire in the sight of the lady his wife and his children ; and after the lady had been enforced and ravished with a ten or twelve, they made her perforce to eat of her husband and after made her to die an evil death and all her children. They made among them a king, one of Clermont in Beauvoisin : thev chose him that was the most 88 EUROPEAN LITERATURE ungraciousest of all other and they called him king Jaques Goodman, and so thereby they were called companions of the Jaquery. They destroyed and brent in the country of Beauvoisin about Corbie, Amiens and Mont-didier more than threescore good houses and strong castles. In like manner these unhappy people were in Brie and Artois, so that all the ladies, knights and squires of that country were fain to fly away to Meaux in Brie, as well the duchess of Normandy and the duchess of Orleans as divers other ladies and damosels, or else they had been violated and after murdered. Also there were a certain of the same ungracious people between Paris and Noyon and between Paris and Soissons, and all about in the land of Coucy, in the county of Valois, in the bishopric of Laon, Noyon and Soissons. There were brent and destroyed more than a hundred castles and good houses of knights and squires in that country ', — Chap. 182. There is no sense of the common or the continuous, no foreground, background, or distance, in the impressions registered by Froissart of this ' mar- vellous tribulation ' of ' mischievous people without captain or armour ', who ' did such shameful deeds that no human creature ought to think on any such '. There is no perception in his recital of the serious thought on those deeds by professors of economics and sociology more than five hundred years afterwards. Je siiis un historien, Froissart wrote ; but his history takes its place in succession to the chansons de geste and to the chi'onicles in the chivalric tradition. More directly, he enjoyed the advantage of following Jean le Bel (1326-60), a chronicler of his own time and country, whose fine gifts of picturesque narration missed nothing of the pageantry of warfare. Frois- sart 's Chronicle falls into four Parts, of which the first JEAN FROISSART 89 version of Part I (1325-78) was little more than a paraphrase from le Bel. Later, he rewrote it more than once, as he checked the facts by travel and inquiry, and he adapted its tone to his own easier, confidential style. Parts II, III, and IV respectively covered the years 1378-85, 1385-88, and 1388-1400 ; and the Tudor translation by Lord Berners, completed in 1525, is still the best English presentation. A large share of the permanent value of Frois- sart's chronicle of the fourteenth century is due to the fact that the writer, as Scott noted in two words, was ' high-born and inquisitive '. He trained his chivalric pen on courtly virelis and pastourelles, and, after the Peace of Bretigny, he paid a visit to England. There, at Queen Philippa's court, his fastidious eyes were spared the sight, which was moving Langland to realism, of the disbanded soldiery begging their bread along the countryside. Most of his busy days were spent with princes and potentates, and it is idle to ask how far this experience suits the impartial muse of history. To Froissart, the writing of war-chronicles was the prose-art of a poet of old romance, and he practised the verse-art all his life, composing at great length through many years a romantic Meliador, in the poetic cycle of the Arthuriad. Next to the advantage of high birth came Froissart 's zest for personal inquiry. His acquaintance among states- men and diplomatists were plied with diligent inter- rogatories, and he pieced the evidence together, with a skill worthy of Herodotus. He possessed, too, a prodigious memory ; and his keen eye for detail and the wealth and colour of his narrative produced such a record of the fourteenth century as Langland could never have composed. Posterity can but return thanks that the picture has been drawn from both aspects, 90 EUROPEAN LITERATURE III. AYALA, JUAN RUIZ, DON JUAN MANUEL. Chronicle, again, was the chief industry of Frois- sart's Spanish contemporary, Pedro Lopez de Ayala. After various adventures in diplomacy and arms, inevitable to his rank and generation, Ayala settled down as Grand Chancellor of Castile, 1398. He had been a prisoner in Portugal, and also in England, 1367 ; and he was a better statesman than Froissart owing to his wider experience of men. Ayala's Cronica of Spanish annals from 1350 to 1396 was distinguished by a sense of responsibility and of direct participation in the events which he narrated. They were wild times in Spain in his day. Kings Peter the Cruel and Henry II, John I and Henry III were Spanish monarchs whose reigns were marked by every grave characteristic of the centur}^, and nothing is more noteworthy than the trouble which Ayala took to sift the tangles of evidence, and the smooth- ness with which he unravelled them. He had translated Livy into Spanish from the French of Bersuire, and this apprentice -work may have trained him in his effective device of heightening his narrative by direct speeches. His personal acquaintance with the speakers added considerably to the dramatic illusion. Ayala, like Froissart, was a poet. He was one of the earliest admirers of the Amadis tales of the Arthuriad, naturalized, as we saw, on Spanish soil between their Breton origin and their French revival. He was one of the first to practise the new Spanish arte mayor, the ' superior kind ' of native measure, which corresponded to and partly reproduced the Italian ottava rhna, or stanza in eight verses with double rhymes. He translated the Sicilian ' Troy- book ' by Guido dclle Colonne, thus enriching Spanish AYALA, JUAN RUIZ, DON JUAN MANUEL 91 poetry with the story -matters of Theseus and Helen. He introduced Boccaccio to his fellow-countrymen, and he wrote a series of Castilian poems, known as the ' Palace Rhymes '. These Rimados de Palacio were mainly composed in foreign prisons, and they ex- pressed a saeva indignatio, a bitter personal resent- ment, which enlivens their satire on courts and kings. Since Ayala was a very human person, as his Cronica shows, it is natural enough that this tone was con- siderably mollified after his return to Spain. The ' Palace Rhymes ' had two antecedents. The first notable poet in this vein was the ^vi'iter known by his office as the Archpriest of Hita, and by name as Juan Ruiz. He was born about 1280, and died at about seventy years of age. Except for a rumour of his imprisonment at the hands of the Archbishop of Toledo, his life is to be sought in his poems. These survive now in about seven thousand verses on the fashionable topic of true love {Libro de burn Amor). We noted the clerk of Toledo who wrote (c. 1290) a tale of Cifar, Knight of God, and invented therein the romantic type of the picaro, or rogue-hero ; and we observed at the time that the rogue, or chevalier d'industrie, was to grow to important proportions in the history of fiction in Spain. Juan Ruiz enhanced his stature. He added a female companion to the male type of the pwaro, and her disreputable calling was as malodorous as his. She is known as trota- conventos, literally, a convent-runner ; and her well- paid business was to contrive a breach of convent discipline, and to play the go-between for demvu'C novices and ardent youths, Juliet's nurse in Romeo and Juliet is a typical trota-conventos, and her trade was not unknown to Roman Ovid and the French authors of the Roman de la Rose. We shall see in a later chapter how fully the character was developed in a Spanish novel, Celestina, 1499. But it first 92 EUROPEAN LITERATURE entered modern fiction through Juan Ruiz, and the invention characterizes the man. His racy verse, his wide sympathy, and his shrewdness all make him excellent company, though he cannot be cleansed of dirt. In his ample borrowings from the repertories of romantic fathers in France, the Archpriest seized on many a tale which a more delicate taste would have rejected ; but not the most fastidious reader can fail to appreciate the individual touches which raised Ruiz far above the level of makers of romantic rechaujfee. Critics compare his geniality with Chaucer's, the Spanish Archpriest's younger con- temporary, and there was more than an accidental likeness in their ways of approach to modern life. Ayala's second forerunner was Don Juan Manuel of Castile (1282-1348). This prince was nephew to King Alfonso, surnamed, as we saw, the Wise, and was Regent (1312-22) during the minority of Alfonso XI. With his wars and intrigues we are not con- cerned. As a Spanish man of letters he issued a scholarly abridgement of his uncle's Cronica Generaly and his own masterpiece in literature was the Libro de los Enexiemplos del Conde Lucanor et de Patronio, commonly known more briefly as ' Count Lucanor '. Don Juan wrote it in 1328-35, and it was imprinted in 1575. The first and most notable of its four divisions consists of fifty-one chapters of Castilian Nights' Entertainments, in w^hich the pleasure-loving prince played the part of Caliph Count Lucanor. Don Juan drew on the source-books of Oriental fable, thus anticipating Boccaccio by a score of years, and his Castilian prose was as new, and masterly, and as full of promise for the future, as were the Archpriest of Hita's verse-forms. Don Juan ranks as the founder of prose-fiction in Spain, and some of his tales supplied hints to Shakespeare (in the Taming of the Shrew), Calderon, Lesage, and others, GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO 98 The way to Boccaccio and Chaucer, and thiough them to the triumphs of modern letters, was set by the decoctors of romance, among whom the Archpriest of Hita and Don Juan Manuel were eminent. Froissart and Langland each held up his own mirror to the fourteenth century, and if the one reflected more light and the other more shadow, if the one was a son of the Knights and the other a father of the Re- formers, this was a matter of climate and tempera- ment, and does not detract from our gratitude to either. But the final measure of art is its emotional appeal. Writers who dragged the wells of legend, faery, and fable for imaginative invention in the realm of prose-fiction were forging an implement of literature, unexhausted, even inexhaustible, in power. The first great master in that art was IV. GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO, (1313-75). Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch were all Florentine by descent, though none of them spent his life in Florence ; and it is pleasant to look back across the centuries, and to remember that Boccaccio, Petrarch's friend, was the first incumbent of the first lectureship established in Dante's honour in his native city. Boccaccio was a love-child, born in Paris ; and there his mother, Jeanne, remained behind when little Jean (Giovanni) was taken home to Florence by his banker -father. He seems to have had an unhappy childhood and rather a wild youth. After failures at law and trade, Giovanni settled down to love and letters, finding his inevitable lady (Dante's example spread) in Maria d' Aquino, wife of a Nea- politan noble and natural daughter of King Robert of Naples. He served several years of mingled impatience and adoration, singing and sighing to 94 EUROPEAN LITERATURE ' Fiammetta ', and he did not return from Naples to Florence till after 1348, when Donna Maria died of the plague. Boccaccio's early heroines were fashioned in the likeness of his liege-lady. His Filocolo in Italian prose told the old tale of Florio and Biancafiore (Floire and Blanchefleur), which was the tale of Boccaccio and Fiammetta. His Filostrato in Italian octave stanzas told the old tale of Troilus and Cressida, which was the tale of Boccaccio and Fiammetta. His Teseide, a Virgilian epic with the same number of verses as the Aeneid, told the old tale of Palamon and Arcite and of their love for Emilia, which was the tale of Boc- caccio and Fiammetta. His Ameio, a pastoral romance, revealed Fiammetta in every glade. His Amorosa Visione in terza-rima ^vas an amorous vision of Fiammetta ; and his Fiammetta, the last of this series, confessed its inspiration in its name. Is it monotonous ? Yes and No. The iteration offends modern taste and even repels modern credence. We suspect imposture in the grown man who turns every story which he tells to the praise of the ' im- possible She ' who had won his adoration in youth. But still we are grateful to Fiammetta. Her hold on Boccaccio's devotion, however mechanical it became, was the real and vivifying spark which changed the art-tale of chivalry into the form of the modern novel. We have traced the descent of those art -tales. We have seen how the siege of Troy was related by Dictys and Dares, and how the medieval romancers hewed out their stories from the mass. We have mentioned the Sicilian ' Troy-book ' and French Benoit's Roman de Troie, and we have noted the growing chivalrization (if the epithet may be in- vented) of the old heroic Greek myths. Now we note a new phase in this development. A liesh-and-blood heroine is introduced, in the person of Donna Maria, GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO 95 whose place in Boccaccio's affections is present to him whenever he repairs to the old matiere de Rome. He is always aware of Fiammetta. She is his Blanchefleur, his Criseyde, his Emilia, and we cannot estimate too highly the value to fiction, as an art, of this intrusion of the living he and she into the records of myth and chivalry. The insistent recurrence of Fiammetta is at the same time the occurrence of ' the first novel of psychology ever written in Europe ^, and the end justifies the means. When we reach the first novel of psychology, we have passed a significant milestone on the road from medieval to modern literature. Tales to tell there had always been in plenty, and tellers of tales had never failed since the first trouvere supplied the first jongleur with the first story in his repertory. But how to tell a tale effectively, how to make the progress of the action express the characters of the actors, and to convince the reader's intelligence while his sense of adventure was being indulged — this was the novelist's appointed task. We have marked some stages in his preparation. We have seen the reaction of taste from the stock apparatus of the romancers, with their situations consecrated by tradition and their diction regulated by Ovid. We have watched this tradition wearing thin, and this diction losing its illusion. The thrusts and shafts of the Reynardists pierced the fabric of court-sentiment. Minnesong sought inspiration from the love of common man for common woman. Jean de Meun invaded the Garden and shattered the petals of the Rose. Juan Ruiz plucked ruder blossoms from the hedgerows of the countryside. But the reaction had strenuous op- ponents. When Chivalry ceased to be a creed, it became a very powerful cult. Thus, at Toulouse, as early as 1323, a ' very gay company ' was established * E. Hutton, Giovanni Boccaccio. (John Lane.) 96 EUROPEAN LITERATURE to conserve the letter and spirit of the Provencal Troubadours, They danced and sang on May the First, and contended at Floral Games for emblematic prizes of minstrelsy : a golden violet, a silver eglan- tine, a silver marigold. A statue to Clemence Isaure, a renowned benefactress of the Games, was erected in 1557, and the Academy was still flourishing in the eighteenth century. The movement spread to Barcelona, More than one King of Aragon encour- aged the cult of el gai saber, which had its college and its professors and its primer, the Arte de Trobar, written by Don Enrique de Villena (1384-1434). The suc- cession of Castilian to Aragonese, as the master- dialect of Spanish literature, and the consequent succession of Saragossa to Barcelona, belong to a later chapter of Spanish literature. Meanwhile, Bar- celona's primacy and her long stand in the old ways are attested by the fact that the first book ever printed on Spanish soil bore the name and date — ' Barcelona, 1468 '. But the old tunes were forgotten, and the old landmarks were removed. Not all the revivalists and conservatives, interesting and notable though they were, could stay the tide of innovation. Even criticism, as we shall see, was gathering strength and courage in attack. The trota-conventos of real life destroyed the illusion of madonna. The ' blind mouths ' of an esurient priesthood were made a laughing-stock in fiction long before they became an object-lesson of the transition from agriculture to industry. The prerogatives of birth were failing. The middle classes were coming into their own. Satirists ranged at liberty through the ancient haunts of romance, and Toulouse and Barcelona faded into a vision of the past. More and more it was a story- teller's business to reveal character and motives while he unfolded his plots. More and more the cunning GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO 97 of the novelist reinforced the charm of the romancer. This was Boccaccio's part in the ' Hundred Novels, or Fables, or Parables, or Stories, as we may please to call them, which were related in ten days by an honom'able company of seven ladies and three young men in the time of the late mortal pestilence, as also some Canzonets sung by the said ladies for their delectation '. To the hundred tales, thus defined in the Proem, Boccaccio gave the title of ' The Ten Days ', II Decamerone, which were enlivened by the telling of them ; and the seven ladies and three young men, who each led the revels for a day, were called Pampina, Neifile, Filomena, Fiammetta, Emilia, Lauretta, Elisa, Filostrato, Pamfilo, Dioneo. Quite frankly, as we saw at the beginning of the present chapter, they sought distraction and forgetfulness from the Black Death of 1348, of which Donna Maria had been a victim ; and no breath of pity or terror, after a ' brief exordium of woe ', ever dimmed the radiance of the atmosphere which the ten created around them. Let one example stand for many. The tenth tale of the third day had been told, ' And now at its close the queen, seeing the term of her sovereignty come, took the laurel wreath from her head, and with mien most debonair, set it on the brow of Filostrato '. The retiring and elective sovereigns for the day exchange appropriate quips, and — ' Filostrato, perceiving that there was a scythe for each of his arrows, gave up jesting, and addressed himself to the governance of his kingdom. He called the seneschal, and held him strictly to account in every particular ; he then judiciously H 98 EUROPEAN LITERATURE ordered all matters as he deemed would be best and most to the satisfaction of the company while his sovereignty should last ; and having so done, he turned to the ladies ', and sketched the programme for the morrow — ' " Wherefore I am minded that to-morrow our discourse be of no other topic than that which is most germane to my condition, to wit, of those whose loves had a disastrous close : because mine, I expect, will in the long run be most disastrous ; nor for other cause was the name ^ by which you address me given me by one that well knew its signification ". ' Which said, he arose, and dismissed them all until supper-time. ' So fair and delightsome was the garden that none saw fit to quit it, and seek diversion else- where. . . . Dioneo and Fiammetta fell a-singing. . . . Filomena and Pamfilo sat them down to a game of chess ' ; After supper, ' When the tables were removed, Filostrato, being minded to follow in the footsteps of his fair pre- decessors in sway, bade Lauretta lead a dance and sing a song. ... So encouraged, Lauretta, with dulcet voice, but manner somewhat languishing, raised the ensuing strain '. Then follows one of the Canzonets, referred to on the title-page of the Decameron, and ' Some more songs followed by command of the king, who caused torches not a few to be lighted and ranged about the flowery mead ; and so the ^ Filostrato = prostrate-in-Iove. GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO 99 night was prolonged until the last star that had arisen had begun to set ' ^. And so to the Fourth Day, ' in which, under the rule of Filostrato, discourse is had of those whose loves had a disastrous close '. It makes an attractive picture in the midst of the plague at Florence ; and, while it is fanciful to argue from the insouciance of the Decameron to a debased standard of social consciousness, and still more fanciful to trace in the escape of the Ten any deliberate allusion to the release of thought from medievalism, we admit that the Ten Days' revels were sensuous, even voluptuous. Not the soft names invented for the company, nor the ingenious shifts of lovers' trickeries, can conceal or modify their idle selfishness. They met to enjoy and to forget, and their swift, hard strokes of comic irony were driven relentlessly home. The illusion of insolent youth was sustained in the valley of the shadow. Yet this, if we think of it, was a great feat. We know from recent experience how hard it is to put by the presence of general danger, and to act or think as if it were not ; how few books written in wartime are neither pro-war nor cow-war, but won-war. Yet Boccaccio, in a smaller world than ours, and presumably, therefore, more concentrated, contrived a literary retirement into a non-plague Florence, though Fiammetta herself had fallen a victim to the plague. Not without reason he was called Giovanni de la Tranquillita, Giovanni the Indifferent, the Easeful. And why did he resent the imputation ? Surely, from unconsciousness of the fault. He did not write his Decameron out of bravado, nor in order to flout propriet}-, but as the faithful expression of something true to Florentine experience ; as a sincere work of art, that is to say. ' The whole ^ The translation is by J. M. Rigg. (Routledge's reprint, 1905.) 100 EUROPEAN LITERATURE book glows with the joyousness of a race discarding dreams for reaUties, scorning the terrors of a bygone creed, revelling in nature's liberty, proclaiming the empire of the senses with a frankness Avhich passes over into licence '. And it is described as ' an undesigned revolt against the sum of medieval doctrine ' ^. This is its moral defence, its apologia for not being moral. This is the reply of the fourteenth century to the Dantesque gloom of the thirteenth. But observe that the revolt was ' undesigned '. Boccaccio was no doctrinaire modernist. His whole design in the Decameron was to present a hundred tales, out of the vast material behind him, more human, more con- vincing, more artistic, better written, and more harmoniously composed than any that had yet been made. He succeeded admirably in this design. He ' was the founder of the novel in the fourteenth century ' ^, and the pious memory of the founder (not less pious, indeed, for his fear- less exposure of false pietism) is always to be held in honour. To Boccaccio's influence as a novelist and to the fiction founded on his tales these pages will bring repeated evidence. Painter's Palace of Pleasure was particularly indebted to him in 1566, and Shakespeare was a creditor of Painter, As a scholar, too, Giovanni the Indifferent was a patient and an earnest worker, and he wrote several useful Latin works, well- thumbed by later inquirers. Among these were ' Genealogies of the Gods ', a kind of Snorri's Edda of Western myth, ' The Falls {Casus, Happenings) of Illustrious Men ', ' Fair Women ', ' A Life of Dante ', and others. An engaging aspect of his scholarship belongs to his friendship with Petrarch, ^ J. A. Symonds, Renaissance in Italy. '■^ Sir S. Lee, French Renaissance in England. GEOFFREY CHAUCER 101 to whom we shall shortly come. Here it is ap- propriate to turn from Italy to England ; from Boccaccio to V. GEOFFREY CHAUCER. For ' there is nothing more exhilarating in literary history ', we are told, ' than the wa}^ in which Chaucer caught the secret of Boccaccio's work, and used it for his own purposes ' ^. Chaucer caught Boccaccio's secret. This is the best way, perhaps, of appraising a literary debt, or of stating a literary likeness, which must not be judged by modern standards. When we learn on Prof. Skeat's authority that, out of 8,239 lines in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, 2,583 were taken from Boc- caccio's Filostrato, our first impulse is to exclaim, What a lot ! But the wiser critic is surprised at the moderation, not the extent, of his borrowing. There were 5,704 lines available, with none of which Chaucer's audience was acquainted. Few could read them in the original. Yet Chaucer's moderation was content to borrow rather less than half. He wrote his Troilus and Criseyde in 8,239 lines, and not a third were taken from Boccaccio. Where did the other two-thirds come from ? Partly from Boethius (Boece), whose ' Consolation of Philosophy ' Chaucer had translated or was translating, partly from Benoit de Ste. More, partly from Guido delle Colonne, whose debt to Benoit we have noted, and partly — the most important part of all — from the poet's own sense of fitness. Chaucer's originality in the Trojan tale was a matter of selection and combination. Not what a writer took, but how he used it, is the measure of literary art, when copyright and plagiary were not. ^ W. P. Ker, Essays on Medieval Literature, 102 EUROPEAN LITERATURE Everyone could tell any story, d nul homme entendant, as Bodel said. One only could tell it in the right way ; and Chaucer, starting to write Troilus a few years later than Filostrato, caught Boccaccio's secret, which Fiammetta had whispered in his ear, and still found the recipe inadequate to the needs of the tale as he conceived it. He saw in it more than Boc- caccio had seen, and much more than Benoit and Guido. He saw in it Pandar's part, enlarged almost irrecognizably from the hints of previous romancers. He saw the com]:)lexities of character, the humour and pathos of novel situations ; and, thus seeing, he summoned to his aid all the resources of interpreta- tion : songs from Italian lyrists, dreams from Latin allegorists, counsels from Greek philosophers, and love, and life, and hate, and death. In this study of art's increase, as in every record of growth, lies the exhilaration spoken of above ; and, appropriately enough, Chaucer closed his poem, thus edified and heightened, with an appeal to all ' young, fresh folks, he or she ', to abandon worldly vanity and to acknowledge the sovereignty of love, knowing that ' All nis but a fair, This world, that passeth soon as flowers fair '. And he inscribed the recital to two friends, who would appreciate his purpose and his ' form of old clerk's speech in poetry ' — ' O moral Gower, this book I direct To thee, and to the philosophical Strode, To vouchensafe, there need is, to correct. Of your benignites and zeles good '. To John Gower, a follower of Langland, we shall return very briefly later on ; but neither he nor Ralph Strode, a Schoolman and a colleague of Wiclif, shared Chaucer's emancipation from the gloom of the previous century, nor his privity to Boccaccio's GEOFFREY CHAUCER 103 secret. Chaucer met Boccaccio in Florence, which he visited in 1372 on a diplomatic mission for King Edward III, and we like to think of the meeting between the great Italian and the great Englishman, and to imagine with Savage Landor Chaucer's generous exclamation — ' I will attempt to show Englishmen what Italians are ; how much deeper in thought, intenser in feeling, and richer in imagination, than ever formerly : and I will try whether we cannot raise poetry under our fogs, and merriment among our marshes ' ^. But far more significant than their actual encounter was the meeting of the spirits of the craftsmen on the heights of artistic endeavour. In this sense, Chaucer and Boccaccio, Petrarch, Froissart and Ayala were joined in an ideal communion. Geoffrey Chaucer made a good use of the chances which came his way. He was page to the Duke of Clarence, and married a lady-in-waiting. He fought in France, was a prisoner of war, and received sundry pensions and rewards. At one time he seems to have been out of favour, but, if so, ample compensation was forthcoming from Kings Richard II and Henry IV, and Westminster Abbey received him at the end. French and Latin were as familiar to him as English, and he was the best Italian scholar of his day. He had a thorough knowledge of the Bible, then as now invaluable to style, and a working knowledge of Latin versions of Greek writers. Thus equipped, he took the safe road to literary eminence at that time. He translated The Consolation of Philosophy and a part of The Romance of the Rose ; and though the latter * Imaginary Conversations (Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Petrarch). Despite this finely imagined conversation, it is doubtful if Chancer met Petrarch. 104 EUROPEAN LITERATURE was completed by other hands, the discipline served as graduation in the art which he was to practise all his life. We must admit that Chaucer began several works which he failed to finish. The Rose translation was one. Another was a poem on Genghis Khan, or more probably Kubla Khan, the Grand Khan of the Eastern tale of Marco Polo, a Venetian voyager of the thirteenth century. And if Chaucer thus, in Milton's words — ' left untold The story of Cambuscan bold ', a more serious loss to English literature is partly a matter of conjecture. It is possible that he had planned to write a complete Troy history in English verse. The theme was rendered attractive by the legendary association of Britain with Brutus, and Lydgate and Caxton were to complete what old Geoffrey of Monmouth had begun. Chaucer con- tented himself, however, with the single tale of Troilus and Criseyde. In his Knight's Tale, again, he confined his treatment of the Theban cycle to the limits of Boccaccio's Teseide. His House of Fame and his Legend of Fair Women were likewise incom-plete, and the Canterbury Tales themselves were designed on a larger scale than they attained. If any conclusion is to be drawn from this not unusual method of composition, M^e may say that, consciously or not, Chaucer was casting about for the right medium of expression. If Landor is right, and he was trying to ' raise poetry under our fogs and merriment among our marshes ', he may Avell have passed through an apprenticeship to the Roman de la Rose, and through a more fertile discipleship to Boccaccio, before he devised the setting of the English countryside, and retold his new-old tales at the merry bidding of the host of the Tabard Inn in Southwark. For Chaucer was not content to be a translator. His GEOFFREY CHAUCER 105 purpose was clear and steady, to assimilate and to transform the story-matters, drawn from all times and places, and to establish them firmly in English poetry. He re-shaped the verse and prose as well as the contents of the tales. His rhyme-royal, of Troilus and Criseyde and of parts of the Canterbury Tales, is by adoption and absorption an English metre. The stanza consists of seven verses, ten syllables in length, rhyming ababbcc. It was a variant, of course, of the ottava rima founded by Boccaccio on the canzone schemes of the singers of Provence and Sicily, But rhyme-royal counts its English masters from Chaucer to William Morris, and chief in mastery is the pioneer. Even more English by use is the rhymed couplet of decasyllabic verses, known as heroic verse, first employed in the Canterbury Tales. It became England's national measure, second only in importance to the more splendid record of blank verse. Pope used the heroic couplet for his Iliad, though Milton's epics were written in blank verse ; and, later even than Pope, Keats and other poets preserved and revived Chaucer's metre. They over- ran the boundary of the couplet, jealously guarded by Pope, and produced a blank verse effect by de- emphasizing the rhymes. But they were Chaucerian metrists in their experiments. Chaucer, by his bril- liant skill in the invention of English measures, even more notably by contrast with the alliterative sing-song of Piers Plowman, falls into line with Europe's poets as a decoctor of chivalric romance ; and he fronts the morning of English literature as the first layman in our history who wrote poetry to serve no other end than the free expression of his own poetic consciousness. We cannot pause to analyse the Tales. April 16, 1387, was the day of the start of the Pilgrimage, and it is a golden date in English fiction. Each pilgrim 106 EUROPEAN LITERATURE was to have told four tales, two going and two returning, and, though the programme was modified to one apiece, even so the allowance was not reached. There were more pilgrims than tales. Still, these run to over seventeen thousand verses, with, ad- ditionally, two tales in prose. It were ungrateful to ask for more. It were even more ungrateful not to observe the vividness and spontaneity which Chaucer, trained as we have seen, brought to the writing of his master- piece. We think of April as an English month. It was the birth-month of Shakespeare and Words- worth, the two most characteristic English poets, and its changing tears and laughter are of the very soul of the English climate. The note of opening in April is struck by Chaucer's first verse in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales — ' Whan that Aprille with his shoures sole (sweet) The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote ', and thereafter we never quit the life and soil of our own country. The universal pricking of the spring is brought home to the gardenland of Kent — ' And specially, from every shires ende Of Engeland, to Canterbury they wende '. Who went that way from Southwark in April, 1387 ? First, the ' verray parfit gentil Knight ', who had lately come back from his voyage, undertaken, as was the wont of worthy knights, for love of ' Chivalrye, Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisye '. Next, his son, the young squire, ' a lover and a lusty bacheler ', who had been in Flanders, Artois, and Picardy, as many a valiant squire has been since, and who ' was as fresh as is the month of May '. A GEOFFREY CHAUCER 107 prioress, by name Madam Eglantine, whose French was ' After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe, For French of Paris was to hir unknowe ', and whose table manners were so elegant withal, that ' She leet no morsel from hit lippes falle '. Manners made woman then, as now ; for the prioress was ' all conscience and tender heart ', and ' so charitable and so pitous. She wolde wepe, if that she sawe a mous Caught in a trappe '. A monk Avho loved a fat roast swan ; a friar who was an easy man to give penance — ' Ther was no man ne-wher so vertuoiis ; He was the beste beggere in his hous ! ' There was a merchant with his forked beard ; a threadbare clerk of Oxford ; a Serjeant of the law, ' ware and wise ' ; a franklin, with his daisy-white beard — ' An Haberdasshei' and a Carpenter, A Webbe, a Dyere, and a Tapicer ' ; a cook ; a shipman from Dartmouth ; a physician, who ' knew the cause of evericli maladye, Were it of hoot or cold, or moiste, or drye ' ; a goodwife of Bath, who ' passed them of Ypres and of Ghent ' in her skill at cloth-making, and had travelled as far as Jerusalem ; a parson, a farmer, ' a Eeve and a Millere, (bailiff) A Somnour and a Pardoner, also (apparitor) A Mnunciple, and my-self '. (coliege-steward) Truly a goodly company, assembled to take good cheer before setting out on their pilgrimage to the shrine of the Blessed Martyr at Canterbury. They elected their host to be master of the revels, for, 108 EUROPEAN LITERATURE indeed, ' a fairer burgess is there none in Chepe ' ; and under his merry and impartial rule the Canterbury Tales were told. Not the knight alone was held in honour. Not any one class of pilgrims, but men and women of all kinds and degrees took their parts in this busy, moving picture of Plantagenet England awake. A sly, shrewd tongue, and a keen, kind eye were Chaucer's gifts from the gods, and no man ever put them to better use. In Book I of his Troilus and Criseyde occurs a song (stanzas 58-60) which is directly translated from a sonnet by VI. PETRARCH. ' If no love is, O god, what fele I so ? And if love is, what thing and whiche is he ? If love be good, from whennes comes my wo ? If it be wikke, a wonder thinketli me, Whenne every torment and adversitee That cometh of him, may to me savory thinke ; For ay thurst I, the more that I it drinke. . . . Alias ! what is this wonder maladye ? For hete of cold, for cold of hete, I deye ', Thus, even in Petrarch's lifetime, foreign poets began the practice, which has not ceased at this day, of seeking Petrarch's inspiration for their love-songs. Ronsard in France repaired to him, Boscan in Spain, Wyatt and Surrey in England, and Byron in 1818 wrote of him simply as a lover — ' There is a tomb in Arqua ; — reared in air, Pillared in their sarcophagus repose The bones of Laura's lover : here repair Many familiar with his well-sung woes, The Pilgrims of his Genius '. — Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, IV, 30. His ' invention is pure love itself ', wrote an Eliza- bethan enthusiast ; his ' elocution pure beauty itself. ... All the noblest Italian, French, and Spanish poets have in their several veins Petrarchized ; PETRARCH 109 and it is no dishonour for the daintiest or divinest Muse to be his scholar ' ^. So Petrarch's name has been associated for nearly six hundred years with the thought of love and Laura. The golden day in his lover's calendar was April 6, 1327, when he saw Laura for the first time ; and she died twenty-one years later, a victim of the plague in Florence. This is all that we need know about her. Her rank as Countess de Sade, the tale of her many children, and her chilly remoteness from the poet, belong to the view expressed by Gibbon — ' The merits of the lover I am still less qualified to appreciate : nor am I deeply interested in a metaphysical passion for a nymph so shadowy, that her existence has been questioned ; for a matron so prolific, that she was delivered of eleven legitimate children, while her amorous swain sighed and sung at the fountain of Vaucluse ' ^. But with all respect to the historian, who never shone as a lover, Petrarch's passion for Laura was a real force in the making of lyric verse. They were all in love in the fourteenth century, in love with young love itself in the first May -time of modern lovers, and Francesco Petracca, or Petrarca, was no exception to the rule. He has even been classed as a Troubadour, and the epithet may be admitted, if we think of the simpler muse of Cino de Pistoja, and not of the complex love-lore of singers in the ' sweet, new style '. The uneartlily detachment of the super-lover, if a current phi'ase may be applied to old songs, lay a little outside Petrarch's range. It was not till after Laura's death that this more unsubstantial strain crept into the music of his worship. Till then, 1 Gabriel Harvey, in his Pierces Supererogation (1593), quoted by Sir S. Lee, Life of William Shakespeare, p. 170, n. 2. * Decline and Fall of tlie Eomaii Empire, chap. 70. 110 EUROPEAN LITERATURE though he had never attempted the frank sensuous- ness of Boccaccio, he had seldom, if ever, touched the height of Dante's impersonal sublimity. He was in love with the thought of Laura, with her hair which he never touched, her hands which he never clasped, her eyes which he never looked into ; and thus his sonnets and songs were constant models for lovers, suited to their every mood. So, too, the death of Laura was rather a breaking-down of barriers and a summons to love beyond the grave than a severance of mortal bonds — ' Ocean and air and earth her dirge should sing To the dull world, without her, which is made A flowerless meadow and a gemless ring. It knew her not while still on earth she stay'd ; I knew her, who in grief yet linger here, And heav'n, who, in my loss, more beauteous doth appear', Laura's death unsealed her lover's lips, and Petrarch's ' Triumph of Death ', which is one of a series of Trionji, composed in Dante's linked triads, is Laura's splendid memorial and Petrarch's most highly-finished poem. Petrarch was not only a love-lyrist. In his own estimation, indeed, his Italian love-verse was a negligible product, and he based his expectation of immortality on his activities as a scholar and a patriot. To these aspects of his genius we now come, but too much has been made of the distinction between the lover of Laura and of Italy, and between the scholar and the poet. There was always a confusion in Petrarch's mind between Laura and the laurel, which he prized as the highest reward of learning. And, apart from the play upon a name, so charac- teristic of the age, his love of Laura, albeit not requited, was but one sign of the individualism, clearly marked in the patriot and the scholar. Two episodes stand out in Petrarch's life, and both are wholly in tune with the personal idealism by which he transformed Laura de Sade, The first was in 1341. PETRARCH 111 when, after long negotiations, he was crowned Poet Laureate at Rome. The ceremony took place in the Capitol, and was accompanied by ancient Latin rites which had been in abeyance for thirteen hundred years. The second was in 1348, when Rienzi's brief spell of glory as ' the last of the Tribunes ' gave Petrarch another opportunity of testifying to the past in the present. For the sake of Rienzi he dis- owned his former patrons and friends, even flouting the family of the Colonna, to whom he had owed so much. He merged his own ambition in his country's — • Oh, my Italia ! tho' words are vain The mortal wounds to close, Unnumbered, that thy beauteous bosom stain, Yet it may soothe my pain To sigh forth Tiber's woes. . . . Ah ! is not this the soil my foot first pressed ! And here in cradled rest Was I not softly hush'd, here fondly rear'd ! Ah ! is not this my country, so endear'd By every filial tie. In whose lap shrouded both my parents lie ! Oh, by tliis tender thought, Your torpid bosoms to compassion wrought, Look on the people's grief. Who, after God, of you expect relief ! And, if ye but relent, Virtue shall rouse her in embattled might. Against blind fury bent. Nor long shall doubtful hang th' unequal fight ; For no ! the ancient flame Is not extinguished yet, that raised Italia's name '. So enduring was the appeal of this ode that even Machiavelli quoted it at the conclusion of his treatise on The Prince ; and in Petrarch's own generation it was irresistible. The redeemer came to Rome in the guise of Rienzi from the wash-tub, and Petrarch hailed him as Spirto gentil ! the heroic liberator of his ancient race. True, when the tribune-adventurer, a Napoleon on a smaller scale, became senator and tyrant, Petrarch as readily recanted and retransferred his allegiance. 112 EUROPEAN LITERATURE But the point is, Petrarch's power of idealism. Those who contemn the coronation and condemn the poHtical vagaries, miss the ardom- which consecrated both, and inspired Laura's lover to deathless song. This belief in a revival of a new Rome worthy of ffhe old, and this sense of individual virttc (virtue and manliness in one) which was to build a bridge across the darkened centuries, led Petrarch straight back to Cicero. A basis of philosophic argument for the new ideas springing in Europe was urgently sought by thoughtful minds. In default of it, weeds grew unchecked, hopes withered for lack of solid nourish- ment, and a dead weight of outworn authority cum- bered the toiling earth. To the Italian patriot-poet, Cicero's name and record, and the fame of his yet unrecovered works, were the symbol of release and liberation. So Petrarch spent many long days in stiff climbs to secluded monasteries, searching among dusty parchments, and many laborious nights in deciphering his finds. His chief rewards were the speech pro Archia and the letters ad Atticum in 1339 and 1345. He wrote, too, original Latin letters, five hundred and fifty-nine in all, and Latin essays on moral philosophy, exalting the joys of learning and the value of the studious life. ' I devoted myself singly, amid a multitude of subjects, to the knowledge of Antiquity ', wrote the author of the Rienzi-ode and of the Laura-poems. ' As I could not live without your Cicero, and could find no one to copy the book, I turned from outward to inward resources, and set my own tired fingers and used-up pen upon the work ', he wrote to a citizen of Florence. ' Father supreme of Roman eloquence ! Yours are the springs from wliich we water our meadows ; yours the light that shines upon our way ', ^vas his apostrophe to ' my Cicero ' in another letter. In all history there is nothing quite so virginal as Petrarcli's jcn- in Ciceio. PETRARCH 113 We must try to realize this point of view. The key to the situation is Rome. Marcus Tullius Cicero was a Roman orator, statesman, letter-writer, and philosopher in the first century B.C. More than a millennium had passed, and Rome, the capital of Italy, again urgently required oratory, statesman- ship, letters, philosophy. Were not her citizens exiles, her Pope a pawn of the French king, her chief cities divided by faction, her very language a re- proach ? The intense Roman feeling of Petrarch and his keen sense of oneness with the Latin past made him view the restoration of Cicero as the revelation of an oracle to modern Rome. This attitude did not lack authority. Even before 1300 Cicero had been a name of marvel. He had seduced saints from their orisons. His essay ' on Friendship ' had consoled Dante when Beatrice died. His ' Dream of Scipio ', as we saw, was a powerful motive in medieval letters. In this sense, Petrarch was a Humanist, the first of the Humanists, in fact. Humanism, the Revival of Learning, or the New Learning, as it is called, was a revival of much more besides. By its outlook on life it was philosophy ; by its origin in Italy it was patriotism ; by its sense of form it was beauty ; by its freedom of knowledge it was truth. ' Human- ism ', says a recent writer, ' is the effort of men to think, to feel, and to act for themselves, and to abide by the logic of results ' ^. We may accept the definition for Petrarch. The first man to make this effort, the first modern man, as Renan called him, was the poet-antiquary of Vaucluse and Arqua, who died in his library in 1374. He loved learning as a patriot, and Italy as a scholar ; and if the Renaissance, as we are told, ' was the work of Cicero's spirit ' ^, then Petrarch ushered in the Renaissance. ^ G. Scott, The Architecture of Humanism. ' * English Literature and the Classics. (Oxford Essays.) I 114 EUROPEAN LITERATURE There is little to add to this record. Petrarch studied Greek as well as Latin, and there is a touching story of his affection for a Greek manuscript of Homer, which he could never read in the original. His country home made him dependent on the assistance of friends more conveniently placed than himself, and Petrarch went for his Greek to Boccaccio, who had sought him out in 1350. This friendship between the two great Italians resembled in certain features the later friendship between Coleridge and Wordsworth. Boccaccio was Vun qui aime, and Petrarch V autre qui se laisse aimer. Only the Human- ism of Boccaccio found a way to Petrarch's rarer sympathy ; and, mainly to gratify his friend, Boc- caccio opened his house in Florence to a Greek fugitive from Calabria, by name Leontius Pilatus, whom he employed to translate the Iliad into Latin. Leontius's manner with his patron seems to have resembled Silas Wegg's, at the readings of Gibbon with Mr. Boffin ; but he ranks as the first of the wandering scholars who brought Greek culture to the West, and his employer was the first Italian Homeric student. VII. CHAUCERIANS AND OTHERS. We turn from these major writers to some of their successors and disciples. John Gower (c. 1325-1408) lingers in memory as the ' moral ' poet of Chaucer's apostrophe. He was thirteenth-century to the backbone, and was con- spicuously lacking in the humour exhibited by Juan Ruiz in Spain and by Chaucer in England. His moral note was struck in Vox Clamantis (' The Voice of him who cries '), a Latin poem on human wrongs and divine remedies, akin in scope to the Vision of Piers Plowman. His Miroir d'Omme was written in CHAUCERIANS AND OTHERS 115 French, and is known in Latin as Speculum Medi- tantis. French, too, were Gower's love-ballads, com- posed after Provencal models, and his only English work was entitled Confessio Amantis. This so-called * Lover's Confession ' took shape as a string of tales, which anticipated by a little the formal setting of Chaucer's masterpiece. Some jealousy is said to have arisen between Chaucer and Gower on this account, but it does not concern us now. A very interesting point about Gower is the evidence he affords to the linguistic versatility required by writers in his time. John Lydgate (c. 1370-1421) was always content to be known as Chaucer's disciple. He was at his best in unambitious verse, written to please his patron, Humphrey, ' the Good ' Duke of Gloucester (1391- 1447). Duke Humphrey, the youngest son of King Henry IV, was a savant and lover of books, who bequeathed his library to the University of Oxford. Supported by this royal encouragement, Lydgate spent a happy and an industrious life on a middle level of poetic achievement. He wrote a complete ' History of Troy ', after the model of Guido delle Colonne ; a Falls of Princes, on the same lines as Boccaccio's de Casibus Illustrium Virorum, and a Story of Thebes in continuation of the greater poet's Canterbury Tales. A third follower of Chaucer is mainly memorable for a drawing of the master which he included in his Governail of Princes. The writer was Thomas Occleve, or Hoccleve, who died c. 1450. Stephen Hawes (c. 1470-1524) was a more notable writer, who did as much as any poet before Spenser to promote the Chaucerian principles of prosody and diction. But his invention was wooden and mechani- cal, and the very titles of his poems. The Example of Virtue and The Pastime of Pleasure, have^been forgotten long since. Still, he wrote one memorable 116 EUROPEAN LITERATURE couplet, which outUves many more ambitious poems, and for which anthologists are always grateful — ' For though the day be never so long At last the bell ringeth to evensong '. Richard Aungerville, commonly known as De Bury after his birthplace at Bury St. Edmunds, served as tutor to the royal prince who became King Edward III. He was on a mission to the Pope at Avignon when he met Petrarch, his contemporary, and the two writers found common interests in scholarship and letters. De Bury founded the library of Trinity (formerly Durham) College, Oxford, which was merged at a later date in the Duke of Gloucester's bequest, and he became successively Bishop of Durham, Lord Chancellor, and High Treasurer. De Bury's eminence as a statesman enabled him to gratify his tastes as connoisseur and bibliophil more fully than Petrarch could contrive in his modest and more secluded circumstances. The tastes were quite genuine, however, and De Bury's Latin Philobiblon on the love of and care for books is an attractive and businesslike pamphlet in twenty chapters with a prologue. It was first imprinted in 1473 at Cologne. The writers in Italy and Spain who continued the vein of the Decameron need not detain us long. The best of them was Matteo Bandello (1480-1561), who died as Bishop of Agen, but whose episcopal lawn seems singularly incongruous with the indecency of the tales which he told. His collection, sifted and scoured, yields entertaining reading. Belleforest pre- sented it in French, 1565, and William Painter's English rendering of the French passed into Shake- speare's repertory. The names of Sacchetti and Masaccio also occur in this connection, the former in Florence and the latter in Naples ; and we may CHAUCERIANS AND OTHERS 117 legitimately argue from the licentious tone of their novelle to the vice and luxury of the coui'ts at which they lived. Our infinite debt to Boccaccio for his invention of the novel-type in letters does not require us to be hospitable to the earliest of his heirs. Joint heirsliip to Boccaccio and Juan Ruiz may be claimed by a group of Spanish writers at the court of King John II of Castile, The King's Constable was Alvaro de Luna, his Chaplain Alfonso Martinez de Toledo, his Latin Secretary Juan de Mena, and one of his most prominent courtiers was Inigo Lopez de Mendoza (1398-1458), created Marquis de Santillana. With the high politics of this circle we are not other- wise concerned than to note that Santillana's relations with de Luna, who fell in 1452, introduced a Spanish word into English literature. Santillana wrote a philippic against favourites, entitled Doctrinal de Privados, and Lord Bacon, in his essay Of Friendshij), wrote that ' the modern languages give unto such persons the name of Favorites or Privadoes '. Nor are we much concerned with the books that adorned King John's com-t. The Constable's ' Beautiful and Virtuous Women ' was adapted from Boccaccio's Latin compilation, thus going back to Ovid and the Rose. The Chaplain, who used as his pen-name his title of Archpriest of Talavera, reminds us of the Archpriest of Hita in his prose-work on women's frailties, which had a considerable vogue. The Latin Secretary, a kind of Stephen Hawes, wrote a poem, ' The Labyrinth of Fortune ', better esteemed for tech- nical qualities than for intrinsic worth. Lastly, in connection with this little group, Santillana patronized poets. He accepted the dedication of an 'Art of Poetry ', written by Enrique de Villena, and of poetic versions of the Aeneid and Commedia, thus introducing Italian models to the Spanish muse. The innovation bore fruit at a later date, when it was gratefully 118 EUROPEAN LITERATURE recalled that Santillana was one of the first Spanish writers to compose sonnets al Italico modo. We conclude the present chapter on that note. The Italian manner was to prevail. Petrarch, the first of the Humanists, spread in Italy and other countries the humanizing grace of his perception, that art is a discipline of life, that fame is worthy of endeavour, and that to serve oneself is also to serve God. CHAPTER IV. 1374-1492. Petrarch died in 1374. But out of his ' tomb in Arqua ' arose a branching tree of Hfe, which critics agree to call Humanism. The charter of Humanism spread. As a Humanist of recent date expresses it : ' The Pagan view was once more proclaimed, that man was made not only to toil and suffer but to enjoy ' ^. It was the dayspring of life and love ; the dawn of the Renaissance in modern Europe. Boccaccio felt it in his garden, when he closed the gate against the Plague, and Chaucer drew its brighter air on the road from Southwark to Canterbury. The human fran- chise of joy was reclaimed from the ' blind mouths ' which had denied it. Some took their joy im- moderately, at first greedily sampling the novel licence of the senses, later revelling in filth. Some wore it like a white flower, sweetening sheltered ways, and so won the name of Christian Humanists. Some heard beyond its siren voices a sterner summons to mend and to reform. For then, as always, equal opportunities were shaped by character to diverse acts. First in time and honour among the I. SOWERS OF HUMANISM IN ITALY were the welcome strangers from the East who followed Leontius Pilatus. Even before 1453, when Constantinople fell to the Turk, though more fre- quently after that event, these Greek missionaries of ^ Sir Richard Jebb in the Cambridge Modern History, i. 120 EUROPEAN LITERATURE culture brought their wares across the sea to Italy . Rich princes of rival city-states bought their precious merchandise of manuscripts, and poor scholars saved every penny to buy their dictionaries and grammars. We speak of the freedom of learning, and count the steps of its advance ; but few, if any, remember the immense, incalculable debt which we owe to its pioneers in Europe. The heirs of Bude and Erasmus, to whose names we are coming in due course, forget that the path of the Renaissance was prepared by votaries of culture, whose keenness, zeal, and en- thusiasm put all later records in the shade. Petrarch, the ardent Ciceronian, knew, as we saw, no Greek. He was shut out of his spiritual home for want of a common Greek-Italian lexicon, such as his countrymen may buy for a couple of lire to-day. We are all Hellenists nowadays. We all have a smattering of the scholarship which Petrarch painfully acquired from Latin versions imperfectly rendered from imperfectly deciphered Greek texts. ' Meanwhile, who fished the murex up ? ' Who taught Greek to the teachers of Europe ? Common piety demands that we should not pass over the dead names. The dead names and the spent enthusiasm. For the reception of these strangers from the East is a remarkable episode in the history of civilization in the W^st. The eagerness for knowledge among peoples who had not yet discovered the New World, and to whom the New Learning was still a sealed book, is a fact which fires the imagination and stirs the blood of sated men. It can never recur, that experience. It lies away back in the fifteenth century, buried deep with evils that have been cured and with conditions which we would not see repeated. But those golden moments in the Italian city-states irradiate all the darker hours. SOWERS OF HUMANISM IN ITALY 121 We set ill parallel rolls of honour nine names of teachers and of taught — Greek Teachers. Italian Pupils. 1. Manuel Chrysoloras. 1. Coluccio Salutati (1330-1406). 2. George of Trebizond. 2. Giovanni diConversino (1347-1406). 3. Theodorus Gaza. 3. Niccolo de Niccoli (136.3-1437). 4. Gregorio Tifernas. 4. Giovanni Aurispa (1369-14.59). 5. Joannes Ai-gyropoulos. 5. Lionardo Bruni (1369-1444). 6. Demetrios Chalcondyles. 6. Piero Vergerio (c. 1370-c. 1445). 7. Bessarion. 7. Uberto Decembrio (1370-1427). 8. Georgios Gemistos (Pletho). 8. Guarino of Verona (1374-1460). 9. Maxim. 9. Poggio Bracciolini (1380-14.59). A few notes may be appended to each roll. In the Greek column : (1) Chrysoloras arrived at Venice in 1393 as an envoy from Constantinople to solicit help against the Turks, He was induced to stay in Italy by even more urgent solicitations on behalf of the cause of humane learning. His lectures at Pavia were attended by many youthful Italians aflame with the new Hellenism, and his acceptance of a chair at Florence ' secured the future of Greek erudition in Europe ' ^. His Erotemata, a Greek grammar, was printed in 1484. (3) Gaza's Greek grammar was used by Bude and Erasmus, and is thus the truly-laid corner-stone of Hellenic culture in the West. He died in 1475. (5) Argyropoulos lectured in Rome, and counted Johann Reuchlin among his pupils. Reuchlin was so diligent a student that his tutor sped him back to Germany with the brilliant testimonial : Ecce, Grcecia nostra exsilio transvolavit Alpes : ' Lo ! Greece by our exile has flown across the Alps '. Let us bear the saying in mind. We shall return in a later section to this young German missionary of culture, who carried Hellenism north- wards, and helped to shape the course of civilization. (6) Chalcondyles lectured at Padua and Florence, where he published, 1488, the editio princeps of the Greek text of Homer, more than a hundred years after Petrarch's death. (7) Bessarion (1403-72) was ^ J. A. Symonds, op. cit. 122 EUROPEAN LITERATURE Greek Archbishop of Nic£ea, before Pope Eugenius IV created him a Cardinal at Rome. His Roman palace offered a welcome for his countrymen fleeing from Constantinople, and it became the home of the famous library, now housed at St. Mark's in Venice. Bessarion took a leading part in the dreary con- troversy of the day which raged (for scholars were irascible, and invective was an art in itself) round the respective claims of Aristotle and Plato, and it is refreshing to be assured by a modern scholar that ' throughout all the tangles of this complicated con- troversy a thread of gold is inwoven by the serene and imperturbable temper of the great patron of the Greeks in Italy, the Cardinal Bessarion ' ^. (8) Even rarer personal magnetism distinguished Gemistos, a Byzantine, who was eighty-three years of age when he came in 1439 to the Council of Florence. There he left theology to the theologians, ' Instead of attend- ing the Council ', we are told, ' he poured forth his Platonic lore, and uttered dark sentences to a circle of eager Florentines ' 2. The Platonic Academy at Florence was founded in the first flush of this ecstasy, and the grand old scholar indulged his admirers by using the Greek name Pletho, equivalent to and in lieu of Gemistos, for the sake of its likeness to Plato, whose foremost exponent he became. A Greek work entitled ' The Laws ' is Pletho's chief contribution to literature apart from the contagion of his example as a Hellenist in Florence, where he died in 1450. (9) Maxim sowed his precious seeds in the colder regions of Muscovy. He reached Moscow in 1518, after a long sojourn with the Florentines. There he helped to found schools, to introduce the new art of printing, and to encourage the few and timid scholars who dared to gather to his standard. Unfortunately, late ^ Sir J. E. Sandys, op. cit. * Creighton, History of the Papacy. SOWERS OF HUMANISM IN ITALY 123 as he was, Maxim arrived before his time. ' We kiss yom- chains, as if they were a Saint's ', he was told by the Patriarch of the Moscow Church ; but he wore the chains for thirty years, and is honourably accounted the first martyr of learning in Russia. Turning next to the column of Italian names, we find the ability to teach matched by a readiness to learn. (4) Aurispa, for example, a rich Sicilian, was tireless in collecting manuscripts, and is said to have rescued tv/o hundred and thirty-eight from Con- stantinople for Florence ; these are now housed in the Laurentian Library. (8) Guarino opened a school, which he established finally at Verona. His son wrote a treatise on its methods which forms a valuable document of humanistic education. (1) Salutati, (2) Conversino, and (3) Niccoli were all members of the Santo Spirito, a modest academy of learning which preceded the Platonic Academy. They walked in their fathers' ways. Conversino had been Petrarch's secretary. Salutati had edited Petrarch's Africa, the Latin epic which he had nursed through many years, but never published in his lifetime. Niccoli, another grand old Florentine, recruited younger men to learning, and inspired them, we are told, like a new Socrates in a new Athens. (5) Bruni, (6) Vergerio, and (7) Decembrio were all pupils of Chrysoloras : Bruni, perhaps, the most eminent. He rose from a humble origin to the rank of Chancellor of the Republic, and his monument in Sta. Croce declares, ' History mourns, Eloquence is mute '. (9) Poggio trod in less tranquil ways. He was attached to the Papal Court, and earned his pay from the Pope by his brilliant talent for learned controversy. He is alleged on contemporary evidence to have ' displayed such vehemence that the whole world was afraid of him ', but his exhibition of frightfulness does not stay the world to-day. Nor is posterity much better 124 EUROPEAN LITERATURE impressed by the spectacle of Poggio at ease. His Latin volume of Faccticc (' Diversions '), a collection of ribald tales, as scrurrilous as they were indecent, was directed against frocked hypocrisy. That they were read by Pope Nicholas V without prejudice to Poggio's preferment is a somewhat illuminating fact. More worthy of esteem among the Humanists was Poggio, the book-lover and scholar, as diligent almost as Petrarch in ransacking monasteries for manu- scripts. Poggio had the good fortune to find Quin- tilian's Institutio Oratorica in the convent of St. Gallen, ' covered with dust ', as he announced, ' and filthy with neglect '. He continued the Florentine history which won Bruni his epitaph, and composed an elegant dialogue (the epithet is Gibbon's) on ' The Fickleness of Fortune '. It would be pleasant to linger in this circle, and to re-people Florence in imagination with the learned men and the learners who saw the fourteenth century out. They came such a little while after Petrarch, and yet they possessed so much of what he had ardently desired. We might sort them into groups, and call Poggio a Pagan Humanist, Niccoli a Christian Humanist, and Lorenzo Valla (1407-57), to whom we shall come, a forerunner of the Humanists of the Reformation. But in these earlier days of learning no exact classification is appropriate. They formed a society of scholars, all eager to teach and to learn, and the very fact of their intercourse, with new ideas to exchange and ready means for exchanging them, points the contrast between the new social age and the solitary manhood of Petrarch, alone in his library or on his journeys or with his imaginary letters to the dead. The lonely man's passion for learning, his intense ambition to re-acquire in the Italy of his own day and generation the Latin culture of the past, had become the fashion of academies and schools in SOWERS OF HUMANISM IN ITALY 125 the leading Italian city-states. It went out from Italy with immense force. To the impetus lent by the Greeks who had brought their wares from Con- stantinople was added the new verse and prose contributed by their pupils in Italy. And over all was spread the canopy of the brilliant Medicean Court. We shall come in a moment to that Court. Mean- while, it is proper to ask : What was the ultimate aim of all this business with dead books ? Why was Salutati not ashamed to be known as ' Cicero's ape ' ? Why were the banquets on Plato's birthday celebrated with almost religious rites in the new Florentine Academy ? Why was it worth while for Popes to hire assassins as champions of Plato or of Aristotle ? Why was Niccoli's influence on young pleasure-seekers acclaimed with the joy as at a conversion ? The New Learning, let us never forget, for we, after all, are its beneficiaries, was always a means to a further end. Take it up where we will, it was the same story. They were all schoolmasters of the spirit. As Ciriaco, the antiquary, expressed it, they went to awaken the dead. Deep in Italy's dead language lay the folded forms of living speech ; deep in Italy's dead history lay the noble models of living statecraft, and deep in Italy's dead liberties lay the splendid promise of living freedom. With a pas- sionate, patriotic faith, they sought from Virgil, as Tennyson took from Wordsworth, a ' laurel greener from the brow Of him who uttered nothing base '. It could not fade, this laurel-wreath of Italy. It typified the glory that had been, and it served as a perpetual reminder of a new glory still to be — ' che I'antico valore Negli Italici cuor non e ancor morto ' ; for (as Petrarch had written) the ancient valour of the Italian heart is not yet dead. 126 EUROPEAN LITERATURE So we come to the house of the Medici, without whom the Italian Renaissance might have been of much slower growth. The family-tree is as follows — GIOVANNI DE MEDICI (1360-1428) Merchant-banker ; founder of the dynasty COSIMO DE MEDICI (1389-1464) ' Pater Patriae ' PIERO DE MEDICI (d. 1469) LORENZO DE MEDICI (1448-92) ' The Magnificent ' PIERO II (1471-1503) GIOVANNI (1475-1521) Expelled from Florence, 1495 Pope Leo X LORENZO II (1492-1519) Machiavelli's patron CATHERINE (1519-89) m. (1533) King Henry II of France — Massacre of Si. Bartholomew, 1572. Three names stand out most conspicuously : Lorenzo ; his son, the Pope ; and his great-grand- daughter, the Queen-Mother of France ; verily a remarkable issue from a banker's parlour in Florence. ;It was Cosimo de Medici, son of the founder of the house, who made the encouragement of Humanism a part of the policy of the Republic. Cosimo was so much enthralled by Pletho's eloquence at the Council of 1439, that he founded the Platonic Academy in succession to the old Santo Spirito. His choice of first president of the Academy fell on Marsilio Ficino (1433-99), whose Introduction to Plato's Symposium SOWERS OF HUMANISM IN ITALY 127 preserves an attractive account of the annual dinners held in honour of the Master. Another of Cosimo's endowments was the great library known as the Medicean ; and the title ' Father of the Fatherland ', accorded to him in 1464, shows how powerfully he had extended the shrewdly laid fortunes of his family. Cosimo's grandson, Lorenzo the Magnificent, confirmed and completed the structure. Lorenzo's Life has been written by an English scholar, William Roscoe (1753-1831), and his pleasant pages should be consulted for the roll of illustrious men who were proud to throng Lorenzo's Court. They brought to it art and learning in profuse variety of taste, and they found in the prince at its head a genius responsive and provocative, commanding a bottomless exchequer, endless occasions for pageantry, and a retinue of copyists and secretaries. No happier combination could be devised for the fulfilment of the hopes of the Humanists ; and Italian literature, as it was reformed out of the broken dreams of Petrarch, owes its renaissance, its new birth, to Lorenzo. By precept even more than by example, and with genuinely statesmanlike sagacity, this Florentine son of Latin Italy sought to fit to modern uses the forms of the old mother-tongue. By encouraging scholars to display their mastery of classic form and diction in carnival songs, dramatic interludes, and light verses of satire or love, all composed in the native Tuscan speech, and adapted to the taste of the populace, Lorenzo de Medici broke down the last barriers remaining between the two greatest epochs of the Latin race, Pagan Rome and Humanistic Italy. In his reign, so justly termed magnificent, and largely by his personal efforts as a poet and a patron of poets, the seeds of Greek and Latin culture, sown by the scholars and the Humanists, were raised in his own 128 EUROPEAN LITERATURl^ Florence and beyond it to the fine flower of Italian literature. So we come to II. THE FIRST LITERARY HARVEST. They were bi-lingual in those days. Cicero's sedulous apes did not readily forgo their practice of Cicero's tongue. They argued in Latin, they rea- soned in Latin, they taught in Latin ; but, gradually, Lorenzo the Magnificent, ably backed by his courtiers and associates, accustomed the literate world to sing in the soft Italian speech. The line between Latin and Italian was never very closely drawn ; the point was that Lorenzo's example, building on Dante and Petrarch, restored the cultivation of the native language which the first zeal of classical study had interrupted. We must not pause at Lorenzo's own poems. His biographer makes the most of them, especially praising his sonnets, and appropriately remarks that he stimulated ' his countrymen to the pursuit of literature. The restorer of the lyric poetry of Italy, the promoter of the dramatic, the founder of the satiric, rustic, and other modes of composition, he is not merely entitled to the rank of a poet, but may justly be placed among the distinguished few, who, by native strength, have made their way through paths before untrodden ' ^. This considered judgment may stand for the verdict of posterity. But the brilliance of Lorenzo in his own day outshone such sober estimates, and we cite, like- * W. Roscoe, op. cit., chap. v. THE FIRST LITERARY HARVEST 129 wise from Roscoe's pages, a translation of a portion of a Latin eulogy written by Angelo Ambrogini Poliziano (1454-94), commonly known as Politian. Politian served as tutor to the Medici children, and proved a valuable supporter of the literary policy of the court. His works included a Latin version of Iliad, Books I-V (how much Petrarch would have enjoyed it !), which earned him Ficino's praises as ' Homericus juvenis '. More famous, and readable still, are the Latin verse- declamations which he wrote to set off his lectures on ancient and modern literature ; and we can readily conceive the enthusiasm of his pupils, who included Grocyn, Linacre, and Reuchlin, at the music of these rolling hexameters. Four such poems by Politian survive, on Virgil, Hesiod, Homer, and Nutricia (1486), or the modern poetry which had nurtured him. The last closed with the eloquent panegyric on his patron, Lorenzo de Medici, rendered by Roscoe in heroic couplets — ' And thou, Lorenzo, rushing forth to fame. Support of Cosmo's and of Piero's name ! Safe in whose shadow Arno hears from far, And smiles to hear, the thunder of the war ; Endowed with arts the listening throng to move, The senate's wonder, and the people's love, Chief of the tuneful train ! thy praises hear, If praise of mine can charm thy cultured ear. . . . But who shall all thy varying strains disclose. As sportive fancy prompts, or passion glows ? When to tliine aid thou call'st the solar beams, And all their dazzling lustre round thee flames ; Or sing'st of Clytie, sunward still inclined ; Or the dear nymph, whose image fills thy mind ; Or dreams of love, and love's extremest joy ; Or vows of truth, and endless constancy ; . . . These the delights thy happiest moments share, Thy dearest lenitive of public care ; Blest in thy genius, thy capacious mind — Not to one science, nor one theme, confined — By grateful interchange fatigue beguiles, In private studies and in public toils'. K 180 EUROPEAN LITERATURE On the whole, no ruler in history has better deserved such high praise. Politian's Italian poetry included a fashionable celebration of the ' Joust ' (Giostra) led by Giugliano de Medici, Lorenzo's younger brother. It was written in the octave stanzas which were Boccaccio's favourite metre. The tournament seems to have occurred when Politian was fourteen years old (1468), but the poem is hardly to be dated prior to 1476. The novel spectacle and the youthful prince tempted Politian to indulge in languorous stanzas of romance, full of promise for the future of Italian poetry ; and in the Giostra, and even more in his Orfeo, an operatic play on the Ovidian Orpheus, Politian helped to build a bridge between Petrarch and Boccaccio on the one side, and Ariosto and Tasso on the other. One specimen of his muse may be given, for we have the advantage of quoting it from a version by Addington Symonds — ' White is the maid, and white the robe around her, With buds and roses and thin grasses pied ; Enwreathed folds of golden tresses crowned her, Shadowing her forehead fair wth modest pride : The wild wood smiled ; the thicket, where he found her, To ease his anguish, bloomed on every side : Serene she sits, with gesture queenly mild, And with her brow tempers the tempest wild. . . . Reclined he found her on the swarded grass In jocund mood ; and garlands she had made Of every flower that in the meadow was, Or on her robe of many hues displayed ; But when she saw the youth before her pass. Raising her timid head awhile she stayed ; Then with her white hand gathered up her dress, And stood, lap full of flowers, in loveliness '. Truly, as the translator says, ' all the defined idealism, the sweetness and the purity of Tuscan portraiture are in these stanzas ' ^. ^ J. A. Symonds, op. cit. THE FIRST LITERARY HARVEST 131 The poems of Battista Spagnuoli (1448-1516), commonly known as Mantuan after his birthplace Mantua, are chiefly interesting to modern readers because they formed one of the few Tudor school- books used by Shakespeare at Stratford-on-Avon. Spagnuoli 's inspiration, like his name, was derived from Virgil, the greater Mantuan. A general of the Carmelite order, he employed no other tongue save Latin, and his pastoral eclogues in that language acquired an extraordinary vogue. These it was which were used as a reading-book, and Holofernes, in Love's Labour Lost (IV, ii), quoted their opening verse — ' Fauste, precor gelida quando pecus omne sub umbra Runiinat, — and so forth. Ah, good old Mantuan ! . . . Who understandeth thee not, loves thee not '. The Tudor version of Mantuan was effected by George Turberville, whose graceful imagery and diction are clearly to be traced in Edmund Spenser and other English poets. More intimately of Lorenzo's circle, and more akin in talent to Politian, was LuiGi PuLCi (1432-84), a member of a cultured family, and a direct fore- runner of poets greater than himself. What was missing till now is originality. In the manifold literary activity of the Latin-Italian Humanists, who had sat at the feet of the Greek exiles, the nearest approach to a novel theme, or to novel treatment of an old theme, had been reached by Politian in his 182 EUROPEAN LITERATURE Giostra. There he turned the occasion of a civic tournament into a discursive idyl, and connected his mythological researches with the tastes for Diana and Venus of the youthful Julian de Medici. The next step was fairly obvious, and Pulci took it in a stride which crossed the dividing-line between poetic experi- ment and poetry. The purpose of the Florentine writers (we have remarked it before) was to make their native tongue capable of the literary demands imposed by Latin style and diction. Hitherto, and hardly excepting Politian, this aim had been achieved in occasional songs and stanzas, and in poems with more form than body. But the proof of literature is the book ; and the first true book of Italian verse, since the recent dawn of the New Learning, was Luigi Pulci 's Morgante Maggiore, with which he delighted Lorenzo and the Court. Pulci aimed at permanent delight. Thus aiming, he took leave to ignore any intermediate object dear to Humanists in Florence. He was a poet, not an amateur of poetry. ' Where shall I find Luigi Pulci ? ' asked Lorenzo de Medici in one of his poems ; and the reply came promptly — ' Oh, in the wood there. Gone, depend upon it. To vent some fancy of his brain — some whim That will not let him rest till it's a sonnet ' ^. And Pulci himself confessed, with a shrewd hit at the Platonic Academy — ' Erewhile my Academe and my Gymnasia Were in the solitary woods I love, Whence I can see at wll Afric or Asia ; There nymphs with baskets tripping through the grove Shower jonquils at my feet or colocasia : Far from the town's vexations there I'd rove, Haunting no more your Areopagi, Where folk delight in calumny and lie ' *. ^ Translated by Leigh Hunt. • Translated by Addington Symonds. THE FIRST LITERARY HARVEST 133 For Pulci was a poet, first and last. He took nothing seriously except his art ; least of all the pretensions of the Hellenists or the piety of the theologians. His Morgante {maggiore means simply ' longer ', and implies that the poem had been written in two instalments) is a romance of Roland, whose chanson de geste we examined in the heroic cycle of Charlemagne. The treachery of Gano at Ron- cesvalles and the rout of Count Roland in the pass had never been wholly dropped out of the repertories of street-minstrels ; and a dull compilation in prose, known as the Reali de Francia, saved Pulci all the trouble of research. He employed the epic octave stanza, already nationalized by Boccaccio ; and, thus equipped with a hero and a metre, the two essentials of subject and form, Pulci's genius broke away from the tentative poetizing of his contemporaries. He reinvented Roland as Orlando ; he invented Mor- gante, a giant, captured and converted in the first canto, to aid and adorn the knight's prowess ; he added Margutte, a second giant, as an unredeemed foil to the first ; he introduced Malagigi, the magician, and Astarotte, the devil, to relieve the gloom of Dante's hell ; he reduced the stature of Charlemagne, increasing his credulousness with his beard ; and, through all, he sought deliberately to entertain rather than to instruct. The prevailing note of Morgante is its humour, tending sometimes to satire and burlesque. Pulci could rise in places to the height of the old, tragic theme of honour triumphant over death, in the valley of the shadow at Ronces- valles. But chiefly his purpose was set, to make an agreeable tale for the amusement of the Medicean court, and to preserve in all sections of his romance the unity of its artistic aim. Pulci, like Tennyson after him, in however different a sphere, de- precated the standard of ' a larger lay '. In the 134 EUROPEAN LITERATURE admirable version of Addington Symonds, he warns us — ' I ask not for that wreath of bay or laurel Which on Greek brows or Roman proudly shone : With this plain quill and style I do not quarrel, Nor have I sought to sing of Helicon : My Pegasus is but a rustic sorrel ; Untutored mid the groves I still pipe on : Leave me to chat with Corydon and Thrysis ; I'm no good shepherd, and can't mend my verses. . . . ' A nobler bard shall rise and win the payment Fame showers on loftier styles and worthier lays : While I mid beechwoods and plain herdsmen dwell. Who love the rural muse of Pulci well '. We must forgo the pleasure of illustration, for we shall meet Count Orlando again in the romance-epics oi later Italian poets. But Ave may note that Pulci's modest prophecy was fulfilled in all its parts. The ' nobler bard ' arose in Ariosto, and he won the rewards of fame. Yet in Pulci's honour be it noted, too, that an Italian critic assures us : ' You will adore Ariosto, you will admire Tasso, but you will love Pulci '. When we reach in a later chapter of this history the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto, we shall find that its splendid success depended far less on Pulci's Morgante than on the contemporary Orlando Innamorato of Matteo Maria Boiardo (1434-94). Indeed, it is a proof of that dependence, that Pulci's poem is still remembered, while Boiardo's is forgotten and submerged, despite its popular revision by Fran- cesco Berni (1497-1535). This submersion was due, be it stated, to the excellence of Ariosto much more than to Boiardo's defects. All Boiardo's advantages were repeated in a higher degree by Ariosto, who possessed the supreme advantage of all, of finding ready to his hand the poem which Boiardo had left unfinished at Book III, canto ix. Sccurus judical THE FIRST LITERARY HARVEST 135 orbis terrarum : the merit of Ariosto's Orlando is attested by the judgment of the world ; but in fairness to the elder writer, whom he succeeded and surpassed, we may quote the opinions of Hallam and of Symonds. ' In point of novel invention and just keeping of character, especially the latter ', says Hallam, ' Pulci has not been surpassed by his illus- strious follower '. ' Without the Innamorato \ says Symonds, ' the Furioso is meaningless. The handling and structure of the romance, the characters of the heroes and heroines, the conception of Love and Arms as the double theme of romantic poetry, the interpolation of novelle in the manner of Boccaccio, and the magic machinery by which the plot is con- ducted, are due to the originality of Boiardo. . . . Did he so contrive that the contemporary repute of the Innamorato should serve to float his Furioso and then be forgotten by posterity ? If so, he calculated wisely '. One advantage of Boiardo over Pulci was his distance from the Medicean Com-t. Pulci, as we saw, was inclined to laugh at the earnestness of the academicians, and Boiardo, Count of Scandiano, a Ferrarese nobleman by descent, and Governor of Reggio and Modena, was even further removed by birth and association from the professional Florentine savants. The glamour of chivalry was in his blood, and his acquaintance with romantic conditions was hereditary rather than acquired. ' Such forces met not, nor so wide a camp, When Agrican, with all his northern powers, Besieged Albracca, as romances tell, The city of Gallaphrone, from thence to win The fairest of her sex, Angelica, His daughter, sought by many prowest knights, Both Paynim and the peers of Charlemain ' . So Milton wrote in Paradise Regained (III, 338) and the first of the ' romances ' he referred to is Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato. Thus, though it is agreed that 136 EUROPEAN LITERATURE the inventor of Orlando's love for Angelica was far behind Ariosto in softness of sentiment and diction, yet Boiardo's success can scarcely be exaggerated. To a medieval theme he married the style of classical poetry, revealing in the Italian language powers and beauties unsuspected before — * Far more than health, far more than strength is worth, Nay, more than pleasure, more than honour vain. Is friendship tried alike in dole and mirth : For when one love doth join the hearts of twain, Their woes are halved, their joys give double birth To joy, by interchange of grief and pain ; And when doubts rise, with free and open heart Each calls his friend, who gladly bears a part. ' What profit is there in much pearls and gold, Or power, or proud estate, or royal reign ? Lacking a friend mere wealth is frosty gold : He who loves not, and is not loved again, From Iiim true joys their perfect grace withhold : And this I say, since now across the main Brave Brandimarte drives his flying ship To help Orlando, drawn by comradeship '. — Orlando Innamorato, III, vii *. If the spirit of ancient Rome were to be renewed in Cicero's descendants, they should find in Boiardo's epic-romance a poem of the new time not unworthy of the old. So the New Learning fathered a new literature. The epic was not the only form to which men of letters paid their homage. Modern drama, harnessed to the car of Lorenzo de Medici's Carnivals, was to be tried by the ordeal of the theatre ; and, shortly before his death, Boiardo produced a play on the subject (afterwards Shakespearean) of Timon, the misanthrope of Athens. Written in Dante's linked triplets, and enacted on a stage in two tiers, the higher accommo- dating the deities and the lower the earth-born characters, Timonc is chiefly interesting as a stepping- stone from the morality-play to comedy. It has all the familiar features of moral discourse and abstract ^ Translated by Addington Symonds. THE FIRST LITERARY HARVEST 137 personages ; and, though notable historically, its dramatic value is nil. More intrinsic excellence may be affirmed of a work in another branch of letters. To the prose-fiction of Boccaccio and the epic-romance of Boiardo, which were both to prove so fruitful, we may add the pastoral -idyl, now first invented in modern literature by Jacopo Sannazzaro (1458-1530). Sir Philip Sidney, writing in 1595 of Edmund Spenser's recent Shepherd's Calendar, declared that it had ' much Poetry in its Eclogues ; indeed worthy the reading if I be not deceived. That same framing of its style to an old rustic language I dare not allow, since neither Theocritus in Greek, Virgil in Latin, nor Sanazar in Italian did affect it '. But Sidney was a member of an Areopagus, or literary clique, even more rigid in its purism than that which Pulci had derided ; and Spenser's fame has never suffered by Sidney's academic prohibitions. What is more to the point in this quotation is the joining of Sannazzaro with Theocritus and Virgil as a pastoral writer of equal honour ; and we learn without surprise that Sannazzaro, born in Naples (Parthenope), where Virgil's ashes were laid, was always a devout Virgilian. After two experiments in Latin verse, ' On the Birth of the Virgin ' and ' Piscatorial Eclogues ', he recalled the rural muse to Italy in his Arcadia, 1504. This first of literary Arcadias had fifty-nine editions in its own century. It was translated and imitated outside Italy, and it forged a second and much stronger link in the chain begun by Boccaccio's Ameto between Theocritus in 138 EUROPEAN LITERATURE antiquity and Montemayor, Cervantes, and Sidney in Portugal, Spain, and England. Even Rousseau's ' return to Nature ' and such a poem as Wordsworth's Michael trace descent through Sannazzaro. What was this literary Arcady ? The Arcadia of geographical fact was the Switzerland of Greece, and its race of hardy mountaineers were alternately laughed at for their rusticity and envied for their simplicity. Thus, Greek poets referred to Arcadia as the realm of pastoral innocence and of bucolic happi- ness. Gods haunted its hills, and music murmured through its groves. The ' happy melodist ' of Keats, ' for ever pijDing songs for ever new ', goes straight back through Sidney's ' shepherd boy, piping as though he should never be old ' to the groves of this fabled happy land, which Theocritus handed on to Virgil, and Sannazzaro took over from both. Arcades ambo were Thyrsis and Corydon in the fourth line of Virgil's seventh Eclogue, and they entered modern literature under that name. The New Learning adopted Arcadia, and passed it on to the uses of the new literature, as the present ideal of bliss ; and Virgil, Dante's guide in hell, and Boiardo's model for romance-epic, became Sannazzaro's touchstone for excellence in the pastoral style. The muses of Sicily, invoked in the first verse of Virgil's fourth Eclogue, were the muses of modern Italy as of ancient Rome, and their revelation of the golden age, ' Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo ', was greeted as an oracle of the Renaissance by the ardent sons of Italian Humanists. It was on a corner of that world of gold that Sannazzaro lifted the veil when he wrote his Arcadia in Naples. He repaired to a courtiers' country, a country garnished and swept, with no noise or dust from the stricken fields where Piers Plowman had THE FIRST LITERARY HARVEST 139 driven his team and Jacques Bonhomme had lighted his fires. In that land of imaginary borders, where, in the last words of Sannazzaro's prose-poem, a man might ' live without envy of another's greatness in modest contentment with his lot ', lovers disported as nymphs and swains, and innocence had not learned to blush at the manners of sophisticated society. There never were such shepherds and shepherdesses, such alternations of bright sun and bosky shade, such artless ambuscades of love, such white and woolly fleeces, such ribboned crooks and dulcet pipes, as Arcadian writers depict to us. The type was artificial from the start, and, though a meretricious interest was sometimes added to it by allusions to prominent persons in real life under pastoral disguises, it became more insipid as time went on. Greater writers than Sannazzaro continued his new-old design, but his Arcadia of 1504 stands at the head of a branch of letters which owed its revival in modern Europe to the exemplars explored by Italian Humanists, and which still gratifies an illusion, as old, and as young, as man himself. Sannazzaro might have said with his master, in the last verses of the fourth Georgic — ' Illo Virgilium me tempore dulcis alebat Parthenope, studiis florentem ignobilis oti, Carmina qui lusi pastorum, audaxque juventa, Tityre, te patulae cecini sub tegraine fagi ' ^. So the seeds were sown, and the harvest was reaped, and sowers and reapers alike were laid in the fields which they had tilled. ' Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath ' ; and it happened to the Humanists of Italy that a sudden term was set to the 1 Time was when, in sweet Naples foster'd, I, Treading the flowery ways of learned ease, Play'd shepherds' songs, and sang, O saucy youth. Thee, Tityrus, beneath thy beechen shade. 140 EUROPEAN LITERATURE labours which they loved. Alfieri (1749-1803), a great Italian writer, in a striking and memorable phrase, called the fifteenth centmy sgrammaticava, a solecism ; and its notable departure in Italian literature from all wonted standards of composition was pointed by the manner of its end. Guided by Petrarch into the ways of classical Latinity, which were likewise the ways of re-animate patriotism, Petrarch's countrymen in Florence, at the court of Lorenzo the Magnificent, sought to conquer in one assault the forms of Cicero and Virgil and the matters of modern romance. How far they succeeded we have marked, in the epical experiments of Pulci and Boiardo, in Politian's and Lorenzo's lyric stanzas, and in the pastoral Arcadia of Sannazzaro. Always they feared the failure, not of their springs of inspiration, but of their tether of authority. Not ' is this true ? ' but ' is this per- missible ? ' was the constant preoccupation of conscious stylists ; and the Greek rule persisted, we noted, right down to the era of Sir Philip Sidney, who ' dare not allow ' Edmund Spenser to break the conventions of Theocritus. Later chapters will show more clearly how fruitful and formidable at once was the classical tradition in modern literature. Here we are more concerned to note the sudden end of the quattrocentiste (the fifteenth-century men) in Italy. Political causes which we need not examine, and which are linked with Italian histor}^ from the time of Dante and before it, led to the unopposed entry into Florence on November 17, 1494, of the invader, King Charles VIII of France. That date, which began a new age, closed the solecistic experiments in Italian literature. Lorenzo de Medici had died in 1492 ; Luigi Pulci in 1484 ; Ficino died in 1499 ; Politian and Boiardo in 1494 itself ; and in the same year, on the very day of the French king's entry into Florence, died THE FIRST LITERARY HARVEST 141 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, a young Florentine of rare gifts and promise. He was just over thirty years of age, and by all con- temporary records he combined intellectual talents and the purest moral force with physical beauty and rare personal fascination. Ficino's address of wel- come to him, when he was elected to the Platonic Academy, is among the most graceful memorials of the Humanistic era. Remarkable in his own lifetime, he vividly impressed later Humanists, from Sir Thomas More in the sixteenth to Walter Pater in the nineteenth century. Mirandola's mind had a deeply mystic tinge. Always at the back of his thoughts, inspiring and unifying his studies, was the Schoolmen's medieval dream, how to reconcile Christ with Plato in a single synthesis of revelation. He studied Hebrew as well as Greek, and his influence on his fellow-student, Reuchlin, then a favourite pupil of Argyropoulos, later the leading Hebraist in the North, gave the impulse to that criticism of the text of the Old Testament which bore such bitter fruit in the Refor- mation. But nothing so harsh as textual criticism clouded Mirandola's musings. These were all vision and speculation, at the back of the hinterland of thought ; the dissolving views of an Italian scholar in the ' impossible ' fifteenth century. ' It is because his life is so perfect a parallel to the attempt made in his A\Titings to reconcile Christianity wdth the ideas of Paganism, that Pico ', Pater tells us, ' in spite of the scholastic character of these writings, is so interest- ing '. There we must leave him to his dreams, between the types of Paganism and Christianity which adorned his unique generation : Lorenzo de Medici and Savonarola. 142 EUROPEAN LITERATURE More direct in ascent to the Reformers who changed the religious map of Europe was Lorenzo Valla (1407-57). He left Italy at the age of twenty-eight for the Court of King Alfonso of Aragon, and from the safer vantage-ground of Naples he launched the first shafts of the New Criticism. Already he had published in Latin a Ciceronian dialogue ' on Pleasure ' {de Voluptate, 1431) which recalls by its title and contents the remark quoted at the opening of the present chapter, that Humanism meant a renewal of the old Pagan view : ' man was meant not only to suffer but to enjoy '. Petrarch would have appreciated that point of view, and would have rejoiced at Valla's Latinity ; but one wonders if Petrarch would have discerned the danger to peace and to authority which lurked in the riches of the dialogue. ' What Nature has formed and created cannot but be holy and admirable '. Excellent doctrine, no doubt, and a very valuable perception, at the dawn of the age of discovery in physical and geographical science. But what of Nature's vested interpreters in the schools and churches of the day ? What of the ' holy ' by authority, which chastened the ' holy ' by nature ? What if the church disapproved of Valla's audacious axiom ? And what when the logic of the North should drive it to active conclusions in the rebellious hands of Martin Luther ? Lorenzo Valla himself was not afraid of his conclusions. As little as Pico della Mirandola, he foresaw the use to the Reformation of the spirit of scrutiny and inquiry applied to theological sanc- tities. He applied them where opportunity offered, and his pampMet, issued at Naples, on ' the Donation of Constantine ' raised constitutional questions which THE FIRST LITERARY HARVEST 143 the Reformers refused to put by. The Emperor Constantine in the eighth century had conveyed to Pope Silvester certain sovereign rights in Italy, which were or were not valid. To insinuate doubts as to the legality of the temporal possessions of the Holy See was a new feature of Humanism in Italy, and Valla's brilliance in attack was too valuable to be lost by the Pope. Valla received an invitation to Rome, where he was made an apostolic writer, and Pope Nicholas V was well advised in turning his critic into an ally. Under so tactful a master, Valla spent many useful and busy years, and he roared as gently as a sucking- dove in his ' Elegances of the Latin Language '. It passed through fifty-nine editions in sixty-six years and marks an epoch in the history of rhetoric. ' If those have done most for any science who have carried it farthest from the point whence they set out, philology ', Hallam tells us, ' seems to owe quite as much to Valla as to anyone who has come since '. After all, it was Philology which was wanted, if Petrarch's dream was to come true, and the liberal spirit of Cicero was to be renewed on Latin soil. For philology held the key to other disciplines than style. The vast, new deposits of edited and annotated texts, the commentaries, grammars, and translations, the eager exercises in original composition, all the apeing of Cicero and his compeers, all the erudite and spiritual travail which went to the interpretation of Plato, all the pains- taking, brilliant beginnings of palaeography, criti- cism, archaeology, even the noise and firew^orks which accompanied them, were an essential preliminary to a recovery of the liberty of learning and the freedom of will and conscience. They sowed the seeds of modern 144 EUROPEAN LITERATURE literature and founded the grammar of modern life. Take Lorenzo Valla's Pope, for example. Tommaso Parentucelli (1398-1455) succeeded Eugenius IV under the style of Pope Nicholas V in 1447. Six years later Constantinople fell, and Nicholas was more eager to ensure the rescue of MSS from destruction than to punish the destroyers. Catholic historians are disposed to explain away his Humanistic leanings, but Gibbon's verdict may stand : ' The character of the man prevailed over the interests of the pope, and he sharpened those weapons which were soon pointed against the Roman church '. George of Trebizond, Bessarion, Gaza, and a crowd of native Italian scholars were employed by Nicholas to prepare a library of Latin versions of Greek writers, which should open out Hellenism to all comers. Xenophon, Thucydides, Herodotus, Polybius, Appian, Theophrastus, Strabo, parts of Plato and Aristotle, Eusebius, and the Greek fathers were among the authors thus translated, and Nicholas is justly ranked as the founder of the Vatican Library in Rome. The successor to Nicholas V was Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (1405-64), who reigned as Pope Pius II. His enlightened attitude towards the Humanists may be judged by a maxim from his own pen : ' Neither the morning-star nor the evening-star is fairer than the wisdom that is won by love of letters '. But his devotion to learning did not lead him to neglect the claims of the Church Militant, and he died at Ancona at the head of his Crusade against the Turk. Pope Pius is chiefly to be remembered for his admirable epistle on ' The Education of Children ', in which he defended the study of Latin, taught on humanistic THE FIRST LITERARY HARVEST 145 principles, against the timid reactionaries in his own fold. We cannot count the roll of the philologers, some of whom were distinguished writers too, Leo Bat- tista Alberti (c. 1407-72), for example, was remarkable even in that age for the profusion of his gifts as scholar, architect, musician, painter, mechanic, poet. Venetian by birth, he belonged to Florence by his family's exile from that city, to which they returned in 1434. There he took a part corresponding to his talents in many movements of Tuscan culture, and he wrote valuable manuals of several of the arts which he practised. His tales and dialogues were widely read, and he was gifted with a genuine sensibility for children, animals, travel, and scenery. Alberti's best known work was entitled della Famiglia (The Family), and gives an excellent account of the commercial aristocracy of Florence. Book III of this work (Economico) was nearly identical with a della Famiglia by Agnolo Pandolfini (1360-1446), but experts agree that Alberti was first in the field, Alberti figured in a dialogue written in 1480 by Cristofero Landino (1424-1504) and entitled the ' Camaldolese Discourses ' (Disputationes Camaldu- lenses). This work, which was founded on Cicero's ' Tusculan Orations ', took shape as an inquiry into the comparative value of the active and contemplative life. Alberti is the chief champion of the latter, and the main support of the former was entrusted to Lorenzo de Medici, to whom Landino had been tutor. This kii\d of imaginary conversation by eminent persons of the hour was a common feature of con- temporary letters. Bruni and Niccoli, for instance, figured in Valla's dialogue ' on Pleasure ' as a Stoic and an Ascetic respectively, wliile the Epicurean point of view was presented by Antonio Beccadilli (1394- 1471), a very graceful wTiter of foul poems. L 146 EUROPEAN LITERATURE Lives of Pope Nicholas V, of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio were written by Gianozzo Manetti (1396- 1459), and a volume of ' Illustrious Men ' by the first modern bookseller, Vespasiano, forms a valuable pendant to our authorities for the circle of Florentine savants. Lastly, honour is due to the gracious memory of Vittorino da Feltre (1378-1446), whose Giocosa, or ' Pleasaunce ', at Mantua, ' was ', we are told, ' an ideal school, and, so far as a school ever may be, an ideal home. ... As in Petrarch we recognize, in M. Renan's words, " the first modern man ", so with no less truth may we claim for the founder of the Mantuan School the significant title of " the first modern Schoolmaster " ' i. His practice and doc- trine belong to the history of education, not of literature ; but our review of the century after Petrarch in the land which he loved and adorned may fitly close with Vittorino. For to apprentice Europe to the New Learning was the common aim of philologers and poets. III. HUMANISM ACROSS THE ALPS. How fared that aim in other lands ? What was the course and fortune of the Humanists who re- crossed the Alps ? They had come to Italy as students. They returned as missionaries of culture, eagerly, piously anxious to spread the knowledge they had acquired. But how quickly the glad, young scholars found that learning brings cares as well as joys. In Italy it had been all joy. Neither Mirandola nor Valla had broken utterly with the Church of Rome. The one had mused on the Creation, and had sought to prove * VV. H. Woodward, Vittorino da Feltre and other Humanist Educators. HUMANISM ACROSS THE ALPS 147 a congruity between the narratives in Genesis, Book i, and in Plato's Timceus. The other, with bolder lance, had attacked an ancient Papal title-deed. Yet each made his atonement with Rome. For all the spread of scepticism and irreligion, and despite the vehemence and the invective, Italian Humanists never seriously assailed the established strongholds of the Church. But when the friends of Valla and Mirandola went back to their homes beyond the Alps, a difference is almost at once apparent. Humanism outside Italy seemed to change its cnaracter with the climate. It encountered more positive conditions. The Northern temperament was less responsive to the beauty of sensuousness ; more disposed to apply the new canons to matters of conscience and belief ; less apt at Greek art and aesthetics than at Greek criticism and logic ; at sifting opinions, founding schools, emending texts ; always proving, building, even destroying. Into this keener air, which Martin Luther was to fan to stronger winds, there came home the future headmasters : William Lily, first High- master of St. Paul's School, founded by Colet in 1509 ; Alexander Hegius, who reigned at Deventer, in the school of the Dutch Brethren of the Common Lot ; and Jacob Wimpheling, the Hegius of South Germany, who kept school at ScUettstadt in Alsace. Came also Conrad Celtes, famed as the Ovid of the North, who spread the gospel of the New Learning from Erfurt to Cracow ; Johann of Trittenheim (Trithemius), his eminent disciple ; Rudolph Huys- mann, known as Agricola, who taught at Heidelberg and Worms ; Johann Miiller, known as Regiomon- tanus, ' the greatest mathematician of the fifteenth century ' ^ ; Hartmann Schedel, antiquary at Niirem- berg, and Rudolph von Langen, schoolmaster at ^ Hallam, Literature of Europe. 148 EUROPEAN LITERATURE Miinster. By the same road across the Alps travelled William Grocyn, Politian's pupil, who was to lecture on Greek at Oxford, and Thomas Linacre, a foremost founder of the English College of Physicians. Linacre loved Italy so well that he marked his homeward journey by dedicating an altar ' to Italy ' at the top of the Alpine pass. Back to Spain went the future Cardinal, Ximenez de Cimeros, founder of the College of Alcala, where he organized the prepara- tion of the first great Polyglot Bible. His chief assistant was Antonio de Lebrixa (Lebrissensis), who taught at Salamanca what he had learned at Bologna, and who became as famous for his dictionary of the Spanish language as for his reform of the pronuncia- tion of Greek. Hungary reclaimed Joannes Vitez, afterwards Cardinal Archbishop and Chancellor to King Matthias Corvinus. Nor, in this brief list of scholars, to whom Italy had given welcome and god- speed, should the name be forgotten of Janus Lascaris, a Greek exile in Florence, who resided in Rome under Pope Leo X and in Paris under King Francis I. He was employed by the Humanist king to found the royal library at Fontainebleau, and, as Greek reader to Guillaume Bude, he helped to mould the foremost Hellenist of his age. To the fate of some of these missionaries, or of the disciples whom they inspired, we shall return in later pages. Here we may cross the mountain-barrier, and seek the keener air on the other side, in the brilliant company of JoHANN Reuchlin (1455-1522). We read what his Greek tutor said of him : Ecce, Grcecia nostro cxsilio transvolavit Alpes : ' lo ! Greece by our exile has flown across the Alps ', and the saying may stand to express what was really HUMANISM ACROSS THE ALPS 149 happening at this time. These ardent stepsons of Italian Humanism were carrying Greece across the Alps ; and because Italy was their stepmother, not their mother, though, like Linacre, they built altars to Italy, they did not, like Petrarch before them, identify the New Learning with Italian patriotism. Their outlook was more positive and more detached. The splendid visions of Mirandola, whom Reuchlin had met in the South, disappeared with the talk they had exchanged. Mirandola had sought to unite the threefold systems of philosophy, Hebraic, Pauline, and Platonic, and had inscribed to Lorenzo de Medici his Heptajjlus, or ' Seven Days of the Creation '. Reuchlin, restored to Germany, and to German thoroughness and practicality, let go the elusive mirage and tested the solid ground behind it. He took the first, obvious step of learning Hebrew from a Jew. ' The language of the Hebrews ', Reuchlin wrote, ' is simple, uncorrupted, holy, terse, and vigorous. God confers in it direct with men, and men with angels, without interpreters, face to face, as one friend converses with another ' ^. Thus taught and thus inspired, Reuchlin published in 1506 a little manual of Hebrew grammar, which he drove like a pier into the sands of fanciful, fashion- able mysticism. No longer to imagine a heavenly mansion where Hebrew and Greek culture should dissolve in the final revelation of Christianity, but first to study the Old Testament by the dry light of Hebrew grammar, was the object of Reuchlin's book ; and German scholarship, naturally inclined to approach the humanities through religion, was at once armed with a powerful weapon of doctrinal attack and reform. For if Hebrew could be articu- lated, it could be translated ; and if Humanists had ^ Reuchlin, de Verho Mirifico (1494) ; quoted by Graetz, History of the Jews (Engl, transln.). 150 EUROPEAN LITERATURE the right and power to translate the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, as their tutors had translated the Pagan Classics, how was the Church of Rome to guard its ancient prerogatives and to conserve the authority of the Latin Vulgate ? The German translation of the Bible did not come till the year of Reuchlin's death. But meanwhile the future translator was supplied with the necessary tool for prising open the sealed treasury. A Hebrew grammar had been written : a far more formidable force than Miran- dola's speculative musings ; and ' the event which took the Old Testament out of the hand of phantasy and turned it into an instrument of reform ' ^ was Reuchlin's Rudimenta Hebraica, which ushered in the Protestant Reformation. So the year 1492, chosen as the terminus of the present chapter, was a year of closure in Italy and of beginning beyond the Alps. In that year died Lorenzo de Medici, who v^as swiftly followed to the grave by the most distinguished of his courtiers and by his fondest national hopes. In that year Colum- bus, the Navigator, sailing in the service of the King of Spain, opened a New World to Europe. In that year Spain conquered Granada and overthrew the Moors. In that year, or shortly before it, a new world of culture was opened by the use of the printer's art, invented at Mayence by Johann Gutenberg in the third quarter of the fifteenth century. The new presses were established in the 'seventies in most great European cities ; at Westminster, in England, by William Caxton (c. 1422-91). Especially Aldo Manuzio (1449-1515), founder of the Aldine Press at Venice, and of the Hellenic Academy, is to be remem- bered for his ninety-six volumes of editiones principes of Greek books. In that year Erasmus was ordained ^ Cambridge Modern History, ii. HUMANISM ACROSS THE ALPS 151 in the Order of St. Augustine, and Reuchlin was taught Hebrew by a Jew. The mind of Europe, lavishly prepared, had to pass through the straits of the Renaissance. We shall not attempt to weigh the relative significance to civilization of the works of the Humanists beyond the Alps. To one the discovery of America, to another the invention of Printing, to a third the translation of the Bible, will seem the transcendent sign, and all three are partial aspects of some formula still to be devised for ' that solemn fifteenth century, which can hardly be studied too much, not merely for its positive results in the things of the intellect and the imagina- tion, its concrete works of art, its special and prominent personalities with their profound aesthe- tic charm, but for its general spirit and character, for the ethical qualities of which it is a consummate type ' K But to those who regard the Reformation, with its vast and ramified effects, as the greatest single movement, or the greatest movement described by a single name, Avhich can be traced, link by link, to the initiative of Petrarch, ' the first modern Man ', a few lines in conclusion to this chapter, though they over- run its terminus, are due to the immediate results of Reuchlin's Hebrew lessons in 1492. Such a conclusion is more appropriate because those results are to be studied not merely in history but in literature. They are available in pure book- form, and the book in which they are to be found took shape as an extraordinarily vivid satire, written by the Humanists against the Church, or by the re- formers of the future against the defenders of the ^ W. Pater, The Renaissance. 152 EUROPEAN LITERATURE past ; in a word, by the poets against the monks. The issue which Valla had evaded, and which Miran- dola's dreams had never visualized, was joined at the earliest opportunity by the adversaries of Reuchlin's new cut. In 1492 Reuchlin was learning Hebrew. Two years later he issued his pamphlet, de Verbo Mirifico, in which Baruchias, a rabbi, and Capnio (Reuclilin's scholar's-name), a Christian, discoursed on the wonders of the Hebrew tongue. In 1506 appeared his Hebrew grammar, and from that date the die was cast. The first outbreak of hostilities came from an unexpected quarter. A Jewish pervert, Johann Pfefferkorn, ' a vile Jew who became a viler Christian ', as Erasmus shrewdly described him, regretting his apostasy, perhaps, now that Hebrew promised to be profitable, saw a chance of conciliating his new friends by defaming his old. He got hold of the religious sister of the Humanist Emperor Maxi- milian, and, backed by her powerful influence, he made his voice heard in Rome. The clerical party took action with a petition to suppress Hebrew books (with the sole exception of the Bible), as subversive to faith and morals, and Reuchlin's Oriental studies were thus threatened at their source. Of Pfefferkorn's interviews with Reuchlin, and the scholar's exposure of the sciolist, we cannot pause to write at length. There were many side-issues to the conflict, but virtually it was resolved into a long-drawn duel between Reuchlin and Rome. For Reuchlin was quick to see that the true objective of the anti- Semites was then, as so often, not Judaism but Humanism. The liberty of learning was assailed by the attack on Semitic culture. The Humanists rallied to Reuchlin's side. ' The powers of light stood marshalled against the powers of darkness ' ; and among the first to make an effective move was a little group of Erfurt dons, known as the HUMANISM ACROSS THE ALPS 153 poets of the university, who had a long score to pay off against the Dominican monks of Cologne. Reuch- lin had circulated a sheaf of ' Letters of Illustrious Men ', who had written in support of his cause ; and it occurred to one or two of the Erfurt wits to play devil's advocate for the prosecution with a series (two series, eventually) of ' Letters of Obscure Men '. Ostensibly written by the monks on behalf of the Inquisitor at Cologne, actually these letters revealed the sordid ignorance and squalor of the ecclesiastical rout, ignobly content to be obscure, who, at the bidding of a Jewish apostate, sought authority from Rome to suppress Hebrew scholarship and culture. Half the satire is in the language : the dog-Latin of the cloister, which its clerical patrons deemed efficient to withstand the rising tide of Humanism. Here we have the advantage of availing ourselves of a recent racy English version ^. In Book I, Epistle 25, Magister Philipp Steinmetz sends greeting to Magister Ortwin Gratius, one of the professors at Cologne — ' Sicut scripsi vobis saepe, ego habeo molestiam quod ipsa ribaldria, scilicet facultas poetarum, fit communis et augetur per omnes provincias et regiones. Tempore meo fuit tantum unus poeta qui vocatus fuit Samuel. Et nunc solum in ista civitate sunt bene viginti, et vexant nos omnes qui tenemus cum antiquis. . . . Dicitur hie quod omnes poetae volunt stare cum doctore Reuchlin contra Theologos. . . . Ego scio quod etiam habetis multas vexas ab istis poetis saecularibus. Quamvis enim vos estis etiam poeta, tamen non estis talis * Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum ad Venerabilem virum Magis- trum Ortuinum Gratium Daventriensem . . . variis et locis et tem- poribus missae, ac demum in volumen coactae. Part i, 1514 ; Part ii, 1517. The quotations are taken from Mr. F. G. Stokes's valuable edition of ' The Latin Text, with an English Rendering, Notes, and an Historical Introduction'. Chatto and Windus, 1909. 154 EUROPEAN LITERATURE poeta. Sed vos tenetis cum Ecclesia, et cum hoe estis bene fundatus in Theologia. Et quando compilatis carmina, tunc non sunt de vanitatibus, sed de laudibus sanctorum ' ^. In the next Epistle, Anton Rubenstadt propounds the delicate question, ' whether, namely, a Doctor of Laws is bound to make obeisance to a Magister-noster who weareth not his rightful habit '. The jurists of Frankfort differed, and Rubenstadt urges Gratius — ' But, I pray you, unfold your opinion, and if of yourself you cannot tell, there are jurists and theologians in the University of Cologne with whom to take counsel. I would fain know the truth, for God is truth, and whoso loveth truth loveth God also '. And this preoccupation with trifles was on the eve of the Reformation in Germany ! In Epistle 60 of Book II Magister Wernher Stomp ff sends much the same greeting to Ortwin Gratius — ' You tell me that the cause of the Faith fareth ill at Rome. Gadzookers ! What can we say ? Those Jurists and Poets will overthrow the whole faculty of the Artists and Theologians ; for even here, in our University, they would fain browbeat the Magisters and the Divines. A fellow here claimed of late that a Bachelor of Law should take ^ ' As I have ofttimes told you, I chafe bitterly because that wild ruff, to wit the Faculty of Poets, groweth and extendeth throughout every province and region. In my time there was only one poet — and liis name was Samuel — but now in a single burg a good score may be found to harass us who cling to the ancients. . . . The rumour gees that all the Poets here will take Doctor Reuchlin's part against the Theologians. ... I know that these profane poets harass you greatly, notwithstanding that you are a poet yourself — but not of that kind : for you hold with the church, and are more- over well grounded in Theology. When you indite verses, they deal not with vanities, but with the praises of the Saints '. HUMANISM ACROSS THE ALPS 156 precedence of a Master of Arts. Then quoth I, " That is impossible, I can prove that Masters of Art rank higher than Doctors of Law. Doctors of Law are learned in one science only — namely Jurisprudence ; but Magisters are masters of the Seven Liberal Arts, and therefore are the more learned ". " Go to Italy ", said he, " and tell them that you are a Magister of Leipsic, and see how they will bait you ! " But I made answer that I could defend my Mastership as well as any that cometh out of Italy. And so I departed, thinking within myself that our faculty is sorely maligned, and this is a crying shame. For it is the Masters of Arts who should rule the Universities, and now the Jurists claim to govern them, which is a thing most indecent. But I bid you be of good cheer, and call not in question the victory of the Cause of the Faith ... so long as Pfefferkorn abideth a Christian ', and so forth. But not by such aid nor with cham- pions like these {non tali auxsilio nee defensoribus istis) was ' The Cause of the Faith ' to be saved from the inrushing flood of the Renaissance. The Reuchlin case was dragged on at Rome, and solemn judgments were pronounced at great length, till no one quite knew to which side the judges leaned. But public opinion in Europe never doubted who was right. Solvuntur risu tabulce. The mock monks' letters found their mark, and Reuchlin's victory over the Obscurantists forms an important landmark in the history of Humanism beyond the Alps. Of Konrad Muth (Mutianus), leader of the Erfurt poets, and a stalwart hater of the Theologians ; of Johann Jager (Crotus Rubianus), who wrote the first forty-one Epistles ; of the gallant and learned knight, Ulrich von Hutten, who completed Part I 156 EUROPEAN LITERATURE and wrote the whole of Part II, no other memorial is required. The ' Letters of Obscure Men ' is one of the world's great satires. Composed on the eve of the tremendous warfare which the ' Poets ' were to wage against the ' Theologians ' with German weapons on German soil, it is the protest of Italian Humanism against the immobility of the Chm-ch of Rome. The conflict was of cultures, as of wits. Ecce, Grcecia nostro exsilio transvolavit Alpes ; but Greece on the German side, Greece speaking through Reuchlin, who had sat at the feet of Argyropoulos, encountered the deep antagonism of ' obscure men ' armed with authority. So the path of the German Renaissance led through the Wars of the Reformation. CHAPTER V. The Transit through 1492. I. TRANSITION WRITERS. Not every man of letters in the fifteenth century carried his quarrel, like Reuchlin, to the ears of the Pope. The Renaissance was big with discoveries, the Reformation was big with wars, but the change from medieval to modern conditions did not come suddenly or in a night. We can track it here and there, in a tenderer sense of passion, in a graver note of responsibility, in a deeper impatience of wrong. But life at home did not stand still, while the Humanists went and came ; the sun and the stars still shone ; the savour of spring was sweet, and regret dyed the falling leaf. One poet of life's common day occurs particu- larly to memory, as we try to measure the road by which men travelled out of the fifteenth century. Midway between Froissart and Rabelais, the type and anti-type of French feudalism, occurs the brief and troubled lifetime of the Frenchman known as FRAN901S Villon (1431- ?). He did not live till the year of fate, 1492. He was outlawed in 1463, when, on January 8th, ' he walked off into the unknown ' ^. Yet he belongs to the modern world, precisely because he overheard ' that ^ H. de Vere Stacpoole, Frangois Villon : His Life and Times (Hutchinson, 1916). I have ventured to quote some translations from thia biographical monograph. 158 EUROPEAN LITERATURE human ending to night-wind ', which a poet's ear catches quicker than a pope's. Let us listen to this poet of the fifteenth century whom the spirit of the Humanists passed by. His finest ballad is familiar in D. G. Rossetti's translation, and we submit the French and English versions — BALLADE DES DAMES DU TEMPS JADIS. ' Dictes-moy, oti, n'en quel pays, Est Flora, la belle Romaine ? Archipiade, ne Thais, Qiii fut sa cousine germaine ? Echo, parlant quand bruyt ou maine, Dessus riviere ou sus estan, Qui beaulte est trop plus qu' humaine ? . . . Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan ! * Ou est la tres-sage Helois Pour qui fut chastre et puis moyne Pierre Esbaillart, a Sainct-Denys ? Pour son amour eut cest essojTie. Semblablenient, ou est la Royne Qui commanda que Buridan Fust jette en ung sac en Seine ? . . . Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan ! ' La Royne Blanche comme ung lys. Qui chantoit a voix de seraine, Berthe au grand pied, Beatrix, Allys, Haremburges, qui tint le Mayne, Et Jehanne, la bonne Lorraine, Qu'Anglois bruslerent a Rouen : Ou sont-ilz, Vierge souveraine ? . . . Mais oil sont les neiges d'antan ! Envoi. ' Prince, n'enquerez, de sepmaine. Oil elles sont, ne de cest an. Car ce refrain le vous remaine : Mais oil sont les neiges d'antan ! ' THE BALLAD OF DEAD LADIES. ' Tell me now, in what hidden way is Lady Flora, the lovely Roman ? Where's Hipparchia, and where is Thais, Neither of them the fairer woman ? Where is Echo, beheld of no man. Only heard on river and mere, — She whose beauty was more than human ? . . . But where are the snows of yester-year ! TRANSITION WRITERS 159 * Where's Heloise, the learned nun, For whose sake Abeillard, I ween, Lost manhood and put priesthood on (From Love he won such dule and teen !) And where, I pray you, is the Queen Who willed that Buridan should steer Sewed in a sack's mouth down the Seine ? . . . But where are the snows of yester-year ! ' White Queen Blanche, like a queen of lilies, With a voice like any mermaiden, — Bertha Broadfoot, Beatrice, Alice, And Ermengarde, the lady of Maine, — And that good Joan, whom Englishmen At Rouen doomed and burned her there, — Mother of God, where are they then ? . . . But where are the snows of yester-year ? Envoi. ' Nay, never ask this week, fair lord, WTiere they are gone, nor yet this year, Except with this for an overword, — But where are the snows of yester-year ! ' What can we say of this poem which has not been better said before ? Its beauty is not enhanced by referring to the experience of the Black Death, which directed men's thoughts to the grave. We gain nothing by calUng it a cry of medieval mortality projected into le lyrisme of a later age. Formally, though we trace its refrain back through lineal ancestors to early Latin hymnody ; spiritually, though it ascends right up to Heine and Verlaine, yet Villon's note was unique and his own. Somehow, he touched the hem of truth, through all ignoble works and days. He thieved, and drank, and brawled. He was familiar with a felon's prison, he was even sen- tenced to be hanged. He haunted the stews of Paris till his final sentence of banishment ; but, as Swinburne royally acknowledged, Villon's lyric verses defy time — ' From thy feet now death hath washed the mire, Love reads out first at head of all our quire, Villon, our sad, bad, glad, mad brother's name '. For Villon saw the light in darkness. He could tunc a stave to earn pence from the gay King Rene of 160 EUROPEAN LITERATURE Anjou, but he cherished no illusions as to the per- manence of kings. After all, it was interpretation which was wanted, if the new life was to be lived in the old world ; and Villon, though he went to earth and disappeared finally from ken, succeeded in building a firm bridge between the old and the new — between the old-time Garden of the Rose, which we visited with Guillaume de Lorris, and the new-time excursions in criticism, on which we shall accompany the Sieur de Montaigne. Villon's poetic machinery was old-fashioned. He hit out blindly in a fight against outworn sanctions of authority and pro- hibitions without compensating boons. Yet the artist in Villon was sincere. In a sense, it is even true to say of him, and of his passionate, impotent aims, that ' There has been no greater artist in French verse, as there has been no greater poet ; and the main part of the history of poetry in France is the record of a long forgetting of all that Villon found out for himself ' ^. How and where Villon lived does not matter. His was always a hand-to-mouth existence — from another's hand to his own mouth. Nor is posterity much interested in the fact that he wrote a Petit Testament in forty stanzas of ottava rima and a Grand Testament in one hundred and seventy-three. The testament was one of the common forms affected by poets in the Middle Ages, and Villon, who took it as he found it, transformed it by the passion of his lyre. His great ballads were integral parts of it, like the songs in Tennyson's Princess. We have already quoted the most famous. Among others which Villon composed were the terrible Ballade des Pendus (we said that he narrowly escaped hanging, and what poetic mind save Dostoevsky's has been thrilled by a like experience?), the verses translated by Rossetti * Arthur Symons, Figures of Several Centuries. TRANSITION WRITERS lei as ' His Mother's Service to Our Lady ', and a few more hardly less moving. It is a relief from Villon's sorry story to turn back to his words that burn — * A pitiful poor woman, shrunk and old, I am, and nothing learn'd in letter-lore. Within my parish-cloister I behold A painted Heaven where harps and lutes adore. And eke an Hell whose damned folk seethe full sore : One bringeth fear, the other joy to me. That joy, great Goddess, make thou mine to be, — Thou of whom all must ask it even as I ; And that which faith desires, that let it see. For in this faith I choose to live and die '. There were poets akin to Villon in their perception of change, especially in Scotland and Spain. Thus, William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas, at the head of a group of Scottish poets, filled the gap between Chaucer and Spenser with allegorical verses, composed in the Rose tradition, which yet manifested a con- sciousness of the pressure of the new time on the old. John Skelton, too, their East Anglian contemporary, commanded a vein of social satire and a taste for the seamy side of life, which recall Villon's point of view. Moreover, he tried metrical experiments, based partly on French examples ; and, departing from Chaucer's models, as Villon did not depart from medieval forms, Skelton particularly affected a short, packed, staccato measure, which is still described as Skeltonical. He would seem to have owed the suggestion to a French writer. Martial d'Auvergne (died 1508), in his Vigiles de la Mori de Charles Sept — ' Though my rime be ragged. Tattered and jagged. If ye take well therewith, It hath in it some pith ' Skelton claimed ; and his pith, though partaking of rag-time and burlesque, was distinctly a promising innovation. Satire, again, was the note of some Spanish poets M 162 EUROPEAN LITERATURE in this period. We may select the anonymous writer of Mingo Revulgo (1472), a dialogue in thirty -two stanzas of nine octosyllabic verses between Domingo Vulgus, the plebeian, and Cil Arribato, the aristocrat. It is a sign of the times worth remarking, that social types were now chosen for the dramatic interplay of character, instead of abstract qualities of vice and virtue. Or we may select the contemporary coplas (stanzas) of Jorge Manrique (c. 1440-1474), who, like so many Spanish men of letters, was soldier and writer too. Manrique's memorial verses to his father have won immortal renown, in the original language, in Latin verse, in a musical setting, and in Longfellow's spirited translation, from which we quote a few lines — ' Where is the King, Don Juan ? Where Each royal prince and noble heir Of Aragon ? . . . Where are the high-born dames, and where Their gay attire and jewell'd hair, And odours sweet ? . . , O World ! so few the years we live. Would that the life which thou dost give Were hfe indeed ! ' In this cry of the Spanish captain there is the same ' pith ' and essence of individualism as in Skelton's ' ragged rime ' or Villon's ' sad, mad ' lyrics. Note particularly his apostrophe to the ' World ', and his demand that, within this world itself, and not in Heaven or Utopia, human life shall find its fulfilment. The keynote of all this poetry is a sense of arisen personality, and of the struggle of the spirit of man to outstep the limits of medieval sympathy. We spoke of Villon's lifetime as midway between Froissart and Rabelais, Still more typical of the transition, in however different a sphere, was the contemporary work of the French prose -historian, TRANSITION WRITERS 168 Philippe de Commines (c. 1447-1511). No kind of intercourse is conceivable between the roystering gallows-bird, who poured his soul out in song, and the grave, dignified diplomatist, as remote from Villon's vices as from his haunts. Yet Paris had room for both in the fifteenth century, and each was in advance of his own times. Commines, like Froissart, was un historien, but an historian of a new type in Europe. Hitherto, historical writers, building deep on the chanson and the chronicle, had been partial and one-sided. Villehardouin, as we saw, wrote a chanson de geste in prose. The Sire de Join- ville and Stm'la depicted contemporary heroes. Froissart's feudal annals were the work of a feudal knight. But Commines was a diplomatist writing history, such history as Wolsey might have written if he had published Ms diaries. He was the first of a long line of opportunists in the higher walks of states- manship. Though he was bound to the crumbling Middle Ages by a hundred ties of instinct and style, his intellect reached out to the Renaissance ; and the German Humanist known as Melanchthon joined Commines with Sallust and Caesar in a syllabus for the instruction of princes. His personal career in the French State was marked by ambition and prudence, which brought their appropriate rewards, and a like coldness of perception distinguished his Chronique de Louis XI and his two books of the Chronique de Charles VIII. He turned away from the glamour of events to the political meanings behind them. Battles interested him for their causes and results ; not for the battle-pictures which stirred Froissart's fighting-man's blood. Forces, influences, tendencies, personal factors, he carefully measured and weighed by a standard of practical value, which gave him a novel power of generalization. He used judgment, a 164 EUROPEAN LITERATURE hardly explored faculty ; and, within the limits of his circumstances and of the age, Commines may fairly be said to have anticipated the political method of the greater statesman-author in Italy, NiccoLO Di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (1469-1527), whom he met in 1505 at Florence. Machiavelli, like Commines, was a member of a good family, filled several high offices of State, and was introduced by diplomacy and intrigue to various capitals of Europe. His first-hand knowledge of secret policy was formidable and extensive, and he far surpassed Commines in sheer literary ability. His terse and vigorous Italian prose was especially notable in its time for a freedom from the medieval snares of over-ornament and prolixity. Moreover, he was not a one-book writer. Eight volumes of ' Florentine History ', a treatise on ' The Art of War ', lectures on Livy, delivered in Florence to crowded and distinguished audiences, and minor biographies and monographs, still bear witness to the seriousness of his studies ; while Machiavelli's prose- comedies of Florentine life, especially his Cligia and Mandragola, were well thumbed by Ben Jonson and later dramatists, and prove the versatility of his talents. But Machiavelli's blackened reputation rests first and last on 11 Principe, a little study of the making of a prince, which is unique in its after- history, and which, in clearness and conciseness, in mastery of arrangement and subordination, and in economy of verbiage and rhetoric, achieved an advance in skill at once real and considerable. Omitting for a moment its after-history, what is, or was, // Principe of Machiavelli ? Quite simply, the purpose of the treatise was to supply the future ruler of Florence, the long-sought heir of Lorenzo the Magnificent, with a manual of political expediency. TRANSITION WRITERS 165 which, in the belief of a past master of diplomacy, would save his subjects and his crown. Since it was the writer's fixed purpose, as he declared, ' to indite a matter which shall be useful to him who apprehends it, it appears to me more appropriate to follow up the real truth of a thing than the imagination of it. For many have pictured re- publics and principalities which in fact have never been known or seen, because how one lives is so far distant from how one ought to live, that he who neglects what is done for what ought to be done, sooner effects his ruin than his preservation. . . . Hence it is necessary for a prince wishing to hold his own to know how to do wrong ' ^. Here, surely, the perception of contrast and disparity is essentially the same as in the verses which we quoted from Jorge Manrique — ' O World ! so few the years we live, Would that the life which thou dost give Were life indeed ! ' The same, again, though scorning the self-delusion, as in Villon's lines on 'His Mother's Service to Our Lady ' — ' I behold A painted Heaven where harps and lutes adore . . . That joy, great Goddess, make thou mine to be, . . . For in this faith 1 choose to live and die '. The difference is, that Machiavelli was logical. He tore down the veil from that faith which Villon saw but did not share, and pushed to a further conclusion the pious aspiration of Manrique. In the real world of Florence in his day he would teach a malleable prince so to secure his throne as to ensure his people's 1 Chap. XV. The quotations from II Principe are taken from the version by Mr. W. K. Marriott. Dent, 1908. (Everyman's Library.) 166 EUROPEAN LITERATURE prosperity. Towards the mere instruments of policy Machiavelli's attitude of detachment was as cold and positive as that of Commines. The outside of things did not interest him, except to make sure that his Prince was never robbed of profit or renown by the greed or stupidity of others. For him, too, the pomp and circumstance, even the romance and humanity of statecraft, were strictly subordinated to the end in view, which was to preserve the ruler's power, as the sole condition of the safety of the State. His real Prince would be ' sufficiently prudent to avoid the reproach of those vices which would lose him the State ' ; for Florence, since Dante's time, had known the evil of weak rulers. But the prudent Prince, though he should avoid them if he could, ' need not make himself uneasy at incurring a reproach for those vices without which the State can only be saved with difficulty. For, if every- thing is considered carefully, it will be found that something which looks like virtue, if followed, would be his ruin ; while something else, which looks like vice, if followed, brings him security and prosperity ' ^. The seat of Machiavelli's trouble was, that Florence wanted stable government. A private man's vice might be virtuous in the ruler whom Florence desiderated — ' Every one admits how praiseworthy it is in a prince to keep faith, and to live with integrity and not with craft. Nevertheless, our experience has been that those princes who have done great things ^ Chap. XV. TRANSITION WRITERS 167 have held good faith of little account, and have known how to circumvent the intellect of men by craft. . . . Therefore a wise lord cannot, nor ought he to, keep faith when such observance may be turned against him, and when the reasons that caused him to pledge it exist no longer ' i. These politic teachings have an ominous modern sound. We find them almost verbally reproduced, nearly four hundred years after, in Bismarck's Thoughts and Recollections, and we regretfully concur with the dictum of the first Baron Acton, that Machiavelli ' is more rationally intelligible when illustrated by lights falling not only from the centmy he wrote in, but from our own ' ^. Indeed, if we fully seize the point, and seek a light from 1914, we shall agree with another Cambridge historian, that ' it is impossible to understand Machiavelli without com- paring him with Nietzsche ' ^. We need not press the comparison. Machiavelli's doctrine, we iterate in his defence, was devised for his own time and place, when Florentine government was a shuttlecock between Savonarola's theocratic visions and the hopes based on a restoration of the Medici. Unfortunately, the prince a la Machiavelli was never forthcoming in the flesh. Though Machiavelli set up a dummy, and dressed him in robe and crown, and put the sceptre in his hand, and furnished him with a pocket-guide to kinghood, yet Lorenzo II was but a painted image of his grandfather. The Magnificent. If Lorenzo II had satisfied Florentine hopes, or if, from another point of view, his uncle, Pope Leo X, had trusted Machia- velli less and had honoured Martin Luther more . . . But the ifs of history are vain. The Reformation ^ Chap, xviii. ^ L. A. Burd (ed.), II Principe : with Introduction by Lord Acton. 3 J. N. Figgis, From Gerson to Grotius. 168 EUROPEAN LITERATURE took its appointed course, and the concatenation is clear. The descent from Petrarch to Nietzsche led through the purgatory of Machiavellism. At the risk of anticipating a little, we may number the links in order— 1. Pagan ideas and institutions found complete and artistic expression in the works of Cicero and Virgil. 2. The light of these ' two eyes of learning ' was turned on the authority and altruism of medieval ideas by, chiefly, Petrarch, the father of the Humanists. (Humanism ^ worldliness, as distinct from other- worldliness.) 3. The revival of pagan learning encouraged the individual to assert his own rights and responsi- bilities. Navigation and physical science reinforced this tendency, and printing distributed its results. 4. Esthetic Humanism gave birth to Criticism, which was extended from the texts of pagan writers to the sacred archives of the Church. (L. Valla disputed the Donation of Constantine.) 5. Reuchlin followed Mirandola as Orientalist. His Hebrew grammar of 1506 led to Luther's transla- tion of the Old Testament. 6. Religious differences issued in territorial wars. The distribution of creeds by territories enlarged the ground of neighbours' quarrels, and 7. Personal individualism of the pagan type was merged in a civic consciousness, tending perforce to become subordinate to the practical need of the safety of the State (or Prince). 8. The problem of the legitimate degree of subordination in this conflict between Individualism and Absolutism was discussed by Machiavelli in 11 Principe with special reference to the exceptional circumstances obtaining in Florence in his day. TRANSITION WRITERS 169 That this consecution is correct may be proved (or it is at least made probable) by the conclusion to II Principe, in which Machiavelli apostrophized Lorenzo II — ' This opportunity therefore ought not to be allowed to pass for letting Italy at last see her liberator appear. What door would be closed to him ? What envy would hinder him ? What Italian would refuse him homage ? To all of us this foreign dominion stinks. Let, therefore, your illustrious House take up this charge, so that under its standard our native country may be ennobled, and under its auspices may be verified the saying of Petrarch — " Virtii contro al Furore Prendera I'arme, e fia il combatter corto : Che I'antico valore Negli italici cuor non e ancor morto " '^. We quoted these lines in a former chapter, and submit a fresh translation here — ' Virtue airainst blind Might Shall take up arms, nor long will be the fight ; The fire that burn'd of old In ev'ry Italian heart is not yet cold '. But Petrarch's stirring appeal, voiced in his noble ode to Italy, was urged now too late — or too soon. Meeting the lines in their present context, at the close of Machiavelli's Prince, which they served to adorn and to exalt, we reflect with sorrow on the degradation of the Virtii, or Individualism, of Petrarch into the Kultur, or State-Absolutism, of Nietzsche. How this decline galloped, we are aware ; how it started, is of interest to literature as much as to history, and our remarks on this fascinating treatise may fitly close with a note on its after-history. An ' all-powerful influence ' is ascribed, on the ^ Chap. xxvi. 170 EUROPEAN LITERATURE high authority of Prof. Court hope, to Machiavelli's writings, ' separated from their actual object of merely local circumstances, in the realm of European imagination '^. If we enter that realm only half a century after Machiavelli's death, we shall find that the event which extracted Machiavellism from Machiavelli (and which derived ' old Nick ' from Niccolo) was the imputation of the Massacre of the Huguenots on St. Bartholomew's Day, 1572, under King Henry IV of France and his consort Catherine de Medici, to the direct influence of // Principe. This occurred in a little book, written in 1576 by a French Protestant, Innocent Gentillet, and commonly known by its short title, Anti-Machiavel. With the religious and political issues, and with the dynastic prejudice against the French queen, we are not here concerned. Literature is interested in the record that an English version of the pamplilet, which enjoyed an extra- ordinary vogue, was published in 1577. The trans- lator was one Simon Patericke, and he had the good luck to find, not one market only, but two. Apart from politics and fanaticism, both pro and contra Machiavelli, the book made an instant appeal to students of morals and character. Villainy had dramatic value, and the rising masters of the Eliza- bethan stage were qviick to seize its acting qualities. The significance of the Machiavellian hero to the theatre of Marlowe and Shakespeare has been made the subject of special studies 2, and will recur for notice on a later page. Here we would cite two verses from the Prologue to Christopher Marlowe's Jew of Malta — ' Albeit the world thinks Machiavel is dead, Yet was his soul but flown across the Alps '. The words have a familiar ring : Grcecia transvolavit ^ W. J. Courthope, History of English Poetry, ii. * See, e.g., V. Boyer, Tlte Villain as Hero in Elizabethan Tragedy. TRANSITION WRITERS 171 Alpes, Greece has flown across the Alps ; we remem- ber how Reuclilin's tutor sent his favourite pupil home to Germany with this godspeed ringing in his ears. Mirandola and Reuchlin at Florence had talked the stars to bed, and the Florentine nights of Humanism slid into the heat of the Reformation. Yet a few more years of religious warfare, a few more experiments in princes' treaties, a few more phases of the ideal, and Marlowe extends his welcome to Machiavelli's soul across the Alps. How dire a spiritual change in the biief span since Reuchlin died, or since Doctor Thomas Linacre built his altar to Italy on an Alpine pass ! The positive statecraft of Machiavelli was matched by the philosophy of Pomponazzi (1462-1525), whose Latin treatise on immortality had the honour of being burned by the Inquisition, and by the historical method of Francesco Guicciardini (1482-1560). But there was another soul of Italy, which dwelt apart. To this trinity of Italian thinkers a striking contrast is afforded by the incurious attitude of their con- temporary and countryman, the great poet LuDovico Giovanni Ariosto (1474-1533). ' Of Dames, of Knights, of arms, of love's delight, Of courtesies, of high attempts I speak, Then when the Moors transported all their might On Africk seas, the force of France to break: Incited by the youthful heat and spight Of Agramant, their King, that vowed to wrea The death of King Trayano (lately slain) Upon the Roman Emperor Charlemain ' ^. There was nothing positive in this programme of the first lines of the Orlando Furioso, and we learn without overmuch surprise that the Cardinal Ippolito d'Este, to whom the poem was shown in manuscript, asked 1 From the English Tudor translation by Sir John Hariugton. 172 EUROPEAN LITERATURE Ariosto where he had found so big a bundle of trash. 'The magic and marvels of romance, the restless movement of knight-errantry, the love of peril and adventure for their own sake, the insane appetite for combat, the impractical virtues no less than the capricious wilfulness of Paladins and Saracens, presented to the age and race of men like Guicciardini nothing but a mad unprofitable medley ' ^. We learn, too, without surprise, that the race of men like Machiavelli and Guicciardini left Ariosto unmoved. What odds, he asked, in a Latin poem in 1496, if the French King threaten Italian turrets with all the engines of war ; ' let Philiroe sing to her lute, while I lie beneath the arbutus-tree beside the sound of running water, and no care will disturb me ' — ' Qiiid Galliarum navibus aut equis Paret minatus Carolus, asperi Furore militis tremendo, Turribus Ausoniis ruinam ? Rursus quid hostis prospiciat sibi, Me nulla tangat cura, sub arbuto Jacentem aquae ad murmur cadentis '. . . . The burden of servitude was the same, whether imposed on this flank or on that ; and, though Ariosto had his lot of fighting in the endless struggles of the times, and could describe a battlefield from his own experience (there was one where the dead were so close together that for many miles no path was left save over the corpses), yet his soldiership never preoccupied him, and, on the whole, he passed through 1492 and the distractions of the succeeding years unperturbed by anything more serious than crises of his affections and changes in his patrons' favours. His headquarters was Ferrara, where he spent about fifteen years at the court of the in- appreciative Cardinal. In 1518 he transferred his allegiance to Ippolito's brother, the reigning Duke, ^ J. A. Symonds, op. cit. TRANSITION WRITERS 178 and he was posted for three miserable years to administer the affairs of the swampy province of Garfagnana. The task was wholly uncongenial, and, greatly to the poet's satisfaction, as, possibly, to that of the provincials, he was recalled to Ferrara. There he built himself a house, inscribed with the famous couplet — ' Parva, sed apta mihi, sed nulli obnoxia, sed non Sordida, parta meo sed taraen aere domus '. (' A little house, but suited to me, but obstructive to none, but not poor, but yet bought by my own earnings '.) (The last words convey the meaning that the Orlando Furioso was proving lucrative.) There, too, like Goethe at Weimar, Ariosto managed the ducal theatre, and produced some comedies of his own in the manner, almost the letter, of Terence. It was a tranquil evening to an easeful life, and he acquired without any difficulty the habit of relieving its tediousness by satirizing in private the prince whom he flattered officially. Flattery, plagiary, and irregularity are the three, and the only three, faults which the unkindest critics (since the Cardinal) have ever found in Orlando Furioso : flattery of the d'Este family, which Ippo- lito, more than any, might have condoned ; plagiary of Matteo Boiardo ; and irregularity of structure and design. We may frankly admit all thi'ee. (1) To flatter the reigning prince on whose favour a poet depended was a Court-convention of the period, which is neither in good taste nor in bad taste, but in changing taste. Geoffrey of Monmouth began it, when he linked up the kings of England with Aeneas of Troy and Arthur of Whales ; even Lord Tennyson practised it, when he linked up the virtues of Prince Albert with those of the king of his Idylls ; and Ariosto, ' king of Court-poets ', as Mr. Edmund 174 EUROPEAN LITERATURE Gardner aptly calls liiin, was thoroughly in the vogue when he sought to render illustrious the origins of the d'Este family, and consequently to exalt the reigning Duke. Tasso and Spenser, as we shall see, did the same by a later Duke of Ferrara and Queen Elizabeth. (2) The continuation, or rifacimento (re-fake is a literal rendering) of Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso is likewise a matter of changing taste, which cannot be settled by modern principles. Jean de Meun, as we saw, took over from dead Guillaume de Lorris and transformed the Roman de la Rose. Careful students of Shakespeare are aware of the extent of his borrowings. French drama, again, in the grand siecle, was almost im- measurably indebted to the prior work of Spanish playwrights. Moreover, the subject of Count Roland in the old matiere de France was every man's property (' a nul homme entendant ', as we have seen), and Ariosto could urge, in plea of plagiary, that he found Boiardo's broken cantos and turned them into a finished Italian poem. (3) Admittedly, his poem is a poetic medley with no clear plan or design, and its com'se is interrupted, or embellished, by verse-tales {novelle) in its own metre, the national ottava rima. It is for Ariosto's readers to judge if this planlessness makes for beauty or the reverse. Against these three alleged faults w^e may set with confidence the three virtues discovered by Hallam in the Orlando Furioso. These are ' purity of taste ', ' grace of language ', and ' harmony of versification '. A fourth virtue is ingenuity of invention. Precisely those qualities were sought by successive generations of Italian Humanists in their long and painstaking labom's, partly reviewed in the last chapter, to render the tongue of modern Italy capable of the beauties of ancient Latin. So at last a Virgil reappeared, not speaking the Latin tongue, nor TRANSITION WRITERS 175 revolving the Latin theme— ^antoe molis erat Romanam condcre gentem — but singing in the new octave stanzas, swept by a master's hand into undulating waves of flawless rhythm and perfect cadence, the romantic love which drove to madness Roland, paladin of Charlemagne. This was Ariosto's boon, his largess to poets to be. He left for the emulation of modern Europe the perfect model of a romance-epic. How sedulously he was imitated we shall discover. Spenser, Shakespeare, Byron were all partially in debt to him, and his Cantos 34 and 35, with Astolfo's Journey to the Moon and all the irony and sadness of that limbo foi vain, unwanted things, were not over- looked by Milton in Paradise Lost, Book III — ' Store hereafter from the Earth Up liither hke aerial vapours flew Of all things transitory and vain, when sin With vanity had filled the works of men— Both all things vain, and all who in vain things Built their fond hopes of glory or lasting fame, Or happiness in tliis or the other life. . . . All the unaccomplished works of Nature's hand, Abortive, monstrous, or unkindly mixed. Dissolved on Earth, fleet hither, and in vain. Till final dissolution, wander here — Not in the neighbouring Moon, as some have dreamed \ But the contents of the dream were the same — ' Then might ye see Cowls, hoods, and habits, with their wearers, tost And fluttered into rags ; then reliques, beads, Indulgences, dispenses, pardons, bulls, The sport of \vinds : all these, upwhirled aloft. Fly o'er the backside of the World, far off Into a Limbo large and broad, since called The Paradise of Fools '. Dames, knights, arms, loves, courtesies, and adventm'es, combined in poetry of supreme expression, and inset with exquisite tales, might seem enough for delight. But there were those who came after Ariosto who asked for more than he had proffered. Northern 176 EUROPEAN LITERATURE Italianate writers not long after the Italian poet's death were ready either to read too much into him or to restrict their own flight to his compass. They made the generous mistake of confusing their more practical purpose with Ariosto's purely artistic aim. Thus, in 1591, Sir John Harington, his English translator, insisted that Orlando Furioso was a mine of moral allegory ; and Edmund Spenser, writing to Sir Walter Raleigh, endowed Orlando with the qualities of ' a good governour and a vertuous man '. It may be. Or they may have misread him. For Ariosto himself was innocent of these sublimities — ' Between Orlando and Rinaldo late There fell about Angelica some brawl, And each of them began the tother hate, This lady's love had made them both so thrall. But Charles, who much dislikes that such debate Between such friends should rise, on cause so small. To Namus of Buvier in keeping gave her, And suffered neither of them both to have her. ' But promised he would presently bestow The damsel fair on him that, in that fight, The plainest proof should of his prowess show, And danger most the Pagans with his might.' This w^as all that Ariosto undertook to sing ; and because he sang his theme with such surpassing skill, his rare gifts of external grace moved later poets to envy and despair, and even threatened, as we shall see, to retard the original springs of the genius of Elizabethan poetry. They dig in vain who dig for moral allegory in Boiardo's more perfect successor. Art, not morality, set the standard of Ariosto's romance of Roland mad. ' All the affinities of its style ', says Addington Symonds, ' are with the ruling art of Italy [painting] ; and the poet [Ariosto] is less a singer uttering his soul forth to the world in song, than an artist painting a multitude of images with words instead of colours. KINDS OF LITERATURE 177 His power of delineation never fails him. Through the lucid medium of exquisitely chosen language we see the object as clearly as he saw it. . . . The stage is never empty ; scene melts into scene without breathing-space or interruption ; but lest the show should weary by its continuity, the curtain is let down upon each canto's closing, and the wizard who evolves these phantoms for our pleasure stands before it for a moment and dis- courses wit and wisdom to his audience. It is this all-embracing universally illuminating faculty of vision that justifies Galileo's epithet of the Divine for Ariosto ' ^. Re-crossing the Alps once more, and, turning northwards from Italy, let us consider, in the place ot individual writers, some of the II. KINDS OF LITERATURE which flourished in this age. A time was to come in the eighteenth century when Count Roland's trumpet-call sounded the romantic reveille, and Wieland, for example, in Germany cried in the very spirit of Ariosto — ' Now once more saddle me my hippogriff, o ye Muses, And away to the old romantical land ! ' But that new dawn of wonder was not yet. Orlando's romantic madness, the magic, the adventure, the enchantment, the love of Bradamante for Ruggiero, Angelica at the Court of Cathay, Astolfo's journey ings in Moonland, all Ariosto's courtesies and arms, were removed by leagues of difference from the homelier and more familiar ways by which writers outside Italy were travelling out of the Middle Ages. ^ Renaissance in Italy, Part II, chap. ix. 178 EUROPEAN LITERATURE Thus, a smell not of moonlight but of lamplight was exhaled by a certain school of poets, known in Germany as Meistersinger, Mastersingers, and as Rhetoricians in the Netherlands and France (Rederijkers, Rhetoriqueurs). Far be- hind Ariosto in invention, they were like him in their devotion to the cultivation of the native tongues, and in their incurious attitude towards the world without. We noted on an earlier page how the courtly Minne- song of Germany gradually changed its tone. The centre of social gravity shifted from the knights to the burghers, and little songs of rustic amours and little satires of town life began to oust the monopoly and monotony of ' A man, a woman — woman, man : Tristan, Isold — Isold, Tristan ! ' A certain Heinrich of Mayence, who died in 1318, was the first of the line of knightly Minnesingers to acknowledge a master -Minnesinger as the head of his choir, and thus to admit the recognition of a singing- guild with members and rules. The recognition implied a common meeting-place, and convenience itself ordained that the singing-guilds and the trade- guilds should coincide, so that gradually the Meister- singer-diploma was derived from a trade-qualification, such as that of master-smith, master-weaver, and so forth. The wandering minstrel of former days, who went from castle to castle, or who was attached to a baronial court, gave way, as intercourse developed, to the craftsman moving from town to town, and finding hospitality and entertainment in the circle of his own trade. These trade-guilds of Mastersong spread. The Mayence school was still flourishing at the end of the eighteenth century, and there were even later KINDS OF LITERATURE 179 survivors. But their period of chief activity under a strict code of laws was between 1450 and 1650. They admitted five classes of membership, graded according to proficiency : apprentices, associates, singers, com- posers, masters. The masters elected the com- mittee, who appointed a marker and assessors, charged with guarding the Tablatur (code of laws), and symbolic prizes of chains and wreaths were awarded according to their judgment. Beer-gardens after working hours and the town-hall on Sunday after- noons were the chief scenes of Meistersong displays, which plainly promoted good-fellowship, decent music, a taste for letters, and even a wholesome competition between trades and towns. Mastersong first broke its bounds and passed into the realm of literature in the pleasant, homely writings of Hans Sachs (1494-1 570). Sachs was a cobbler-poet, familiar on the stage in Wagner's opera, who spent a long and happj^ life on the sunny side of an old street in Nuremberg. There he brought up a large family by two wives, and plied his last and his lyre. His distance from the big events moving to fulfilment in Germany may be measured by his reference to Martin Luther in 1523 as ' the nightingale of Wittenberg ' ; surely the boldest nightingale that ever sang out of covert at noonday. Sachs typifies the amiable complacency and the well-nigh anti-social faith, which it was Luther's mission to destroy, and his writings were as tranquil as his life. There is sound sense in the unkind epigram of a German critic : Sachs made a poem out of everything, but made nothing into a poem. According to his own com- putation, his ' mastersongs ' numbered 4,275 ; his tales and fables over 1,700 ; his Biblical plays, interludes and battle-pieces (which he called comedies and tragedies), 208 ; and there were miscellaneous verses besides. 180 EUROPEAN LITERATURE Selection out of this plenty is difficult. Sachs ransacked all the romance-quarries, and drew his chief inspiration from the Bible. So far, Luther was justified. But Sachs's treatment of the Bible proved that he had something to learn of holiness as well as homeliness in beauty. We may exemplify the play (Sachs's stage-talent was rudimentary) which he contrived out of the legend of Eve's favourite children {die ungleichen Kinder Evas). The story had attracted several Humanists. Melanchthon had told it in Germany, Mantuan in Italy, and Alexander Barclay, a Scottish poet, to whose labours on foreign literature we shall have occasion to return, had told it again in an eclogue. The Citizen and the Uplandman, 1514. What Sachs brought was a new way of telling : dramatic touches, a jog-trot measure, and a sense of ease with God. He shows us Adam and Eve sur- rounded by a troop of children on a German upland farm. One day notice arrives that God, a sort of landlord-overseer, is to pay them a visit, and Adam fussily superintends Eve's housewifely preparations. The good children are dressed and drilled, and the naughty are kept in the background. When the rewards of good behaviour have been distributed. Eve, seeing the Lord so gracious, ventures to bring in the naughty lot too. God is heartily amused at their rough manners and unkempt appearance. He allots these to menial callings in various trades and crafts, and the parents, disappointed at the difference in the blessings bestowed, are reminded that all service is equal in His eyes. The moral is excellent, and it accords with old-time sentiment and taste ; but neither in matter nor manner did the most eminent Meister- singer of Germany show that he was stirred at all deeply by the forces moving in his day. It is an effort to imagine Sachs as the contemporary of Machiavelli and Ariosto, and of Rabelais, to whom we shall come. KINDS OF LITERATURE 181 Yet, if Sachs is disappointing in his range, he was at least a lovable writer and a good type of inglenook poet. Nothing half as sensible or durable came out of the cult of The ' Rhetoricians '. The Dutch Kamers, or chambers, of Rhetoric were formed on the pattern of German schools of Master- song, and they did good work for the encouragement of poets. The name of Anna Bijns (1493-1595), for example, may be mentioned as a venerable kind of Hans Sachs in Holland. We may select, too, the Oude (Old) Kamer, known as the Eglantine of Am- sterdam, for the sake of the part w hich it was to take in the development of the national drama. To this we return in a later chapter. But, on the whole, these guilds were content to play a modest role, with a taste for convivial gatherings, and with a very distinct tendency to make too much of form and authority in composition. Their vices were still more prominent in the French grands rhetoriqueurs. The name first occurs in a set of verses by Guillaume Coquillart (died 1570), and it suits as well as any other a class of sciolists who wrote down to the false creed that how they said it was more important than what they said. Mechanical singing-birds by trade, they gathered at the sheltered Courts of Charles VIII and Louis XII of France, and were as ready to lay down rules as to illustrate them by poetic exercises. They were steeped in the old tradition of the Roman de la Rose, and, now that its running-power was exhausted, they took down the engine and polished the parts to look like new. This process was called aureation, for the polish was a kind of Latin gilding which glittered but w^as not gold. A French critic of our day admirably characterizes 182 EUROPEAN LITERATURE Rhetorique as the fine art of saying nothing ^, and points out that its tormented rhyme-systems, its regular meanderings of alliteration, and its verbal audacities were brought to so high a pitch that a poem might appeal to eye or ear in twenty different ways without carrying a meaning to the brain. We need not linger in these twisted paths. It was high time for the Pleiad to get at work and straighten out the resources of the French language ; high time, too, for Rabelais to drive before him the whole crew of affected poetasters with one blast of irresistible ridicule. The names are very insignificant. A native model was the Frenchman, Alain Chartier (c. 1394-c. 1450), whose life has the meretricious interest of a tale retold by Alfred de Musset. Chartier served his country as ambassador to Scotland, and it is related that the Princess Margaret, who afterwards married King Louis XI of France, kissed the poet asleep in his chair, explaining that she saluted the golden words, not the ugly lips which had uttered them. It may be. The gold and the lips mingle their dust to-day. Neither Chartier's Curial (Court-Life), which Caxton translated, nor his pedantic ballads and rondels survive poet or princess. A little more literary interest attaches to Guillaume Cretin (died 1525), historical poet to King Francis I. The epithet ' Cretinism ' has been given to the class of poetry which he wrote, and he is identified ^viih. the ' old French poet ' of Rabelais (Pantagriiel, III, 21), who seared him and his like under the name of Raminagrobis. He wrote ballades, chants-royaux, and other ' sweet- shop stuff ' {epiccries, later satire called it) with ^ ' Rhetorique : art de bicn dire. Pour eux bien dire c'est dire autrement que le vulgaire ; plus on sera ingenieux et coiiipliqu6, plus on sera loin de vulgaire et niieux on aura dit. Les sons et les mots avant tout, la pcnsee ensuite ; leur art de bien dire devient ainsi, la plupart du temps, un art de ne rien dire.' — Jusserand, Ronsard, p. 31. KINDS OF LITERATURE 183 complexities of rhyme and metre of the utmost rhetorical ingenuity. The last of these writers whom we shall mention is Pierre Gringore (or Gringoire), who was about twenty-five years of age at the century's turn. Apart from his exercises in allegory which tarred him with the brush of Cretinism, Grin- gore was a strolling actor-manager and a sort of general pamphleteer. In his former capacity he deserved well of the rudimentary art out of which the new drama was being hatched, and, in the latter, his Folks Entre- prises have been described as embryonic journalism. We come back for a moment to Hans Sachs. There were not wanting moralists in Europe who deplored the spread of shallow learning and sought to restore the old paths. Was there luxury ? Lead the simple life. W^re riches sought ? Poverty was more honourable. W^ere professors tedious ? Con the Bible. Particularly, this moral attitude of reaction- ary reform had a vogue in the German middle- classes, who offered a stout opposition to the pre- tensions of theology and the speculations of science. That the middle way made mediocre literatureis proved by the homely poet who cobbled shoes at Nuremberg for sixt}^ years. For Sachs might have said with Wordsworth, if he had had an equal sense of form — ' The homely beauty of the good old cause Is gone, our peace, our fearful innocence. And pure religion breathing household laws ' . Meanwhile, the fashion arose of postponing the defeat of the ' old cause ' by satirizing the new. Champions of blissful ignorance represented learning as vanity, and the Hans Sachs type was exalted by deriding the rest as fools. This temporary literature of Folly acquired importance and popularity ; and an ex- cellent start was made by Sebastian Brandt (1458, 1521), whose Narrenschiff, or ' shipload of Fools,' 184 EUROPEAN LITERATURE appeared iu 1494. Brandt had the happy thought of sending his fools afloat on one of those voyages of discovery so attractive in the age of Navigation. His shipload, it must be acknowledged, was a fairly miscellaneous crew, collected mainly from Scriptural ports, and herded indiscriminately on board. But by impressing actual men and women in preference to the abstract vices beloved by medieval allegorists, he took a step in advance, which rose by natural gradations to the ' essay ' of a Bacon and the cha- racter-sketch of a La Bruyere. Moreover, the text had woodcuts, and the draughtsman's art pointed and adorned the didactic purpose of the satirist. Humanists quickly saw the value of this product of middle-class sentiment ; and the relation of Brandt's Narrenschiff, soon translated into Latin verse, to the exposure of monkish folly in the Erfurt ' Letters of Obscure Men ' is palpable and direct. There were other German satirists in this epoch, so rich in the contrasts of experience on which the art of satire battens ; Thomas Murner (1475-1537), for example, wrote a Gauchmaite (' Fools -mead ') and a ' Great Lutheran Fool ' (1522), which earned him considerable notoriety. And the cult spread from Germany to other countries. Locher's Latin version of the Narrenschiff was rendered into English by Barclay, whose acquisitiveness, as we saw, was valuable, and a Cock LorelVs Boat (c. 1510) was an English variant on the same theme. Even Erasmus wrote a Folly-book {Encomium Moriae), 1511. He dedicated it to Sir Thomas More, and, later, it was illustrated by Diirer ; and these emblem-books, as they came to be called when they grew into a distinct branch of literature, are associated from the first with the Folly vogue. Obviously, there was scope for rough humour as well as for plain speaking in Folly-satire. Humanists KINDS OF LITERATURE 185 seized it as a weapon to attack pedantry and ignor- ance, while less sophisticated readers were attracted chiefly by the horseplay. A similar double appeal is made by Aristophanes and Dean Swift, and, on a rather different plane, by Lewis Carroll's Alice books. It was the coarser element, on the whole, which was developed in this age by the FOLKBOOKS, or Volksbiicher, native to German soil ; and some of the popular tales, afloat in legends of the countryside, were now worked up into moral versions. A typical folk-tale hero was Tyll, a merry Saxoa boor, whose rogue's odyssey of adventure became the Eulenspiegel of 1483. The name means, literally. Owl -glass, and was so used in the English translation effected by William Copland ; and the glass, whatever its further meaning, was held up to the rougher aspects of common life in German workshops and beer-shops. There is very little fun in it to-day, but the countryman's shrewd mother-wit split the fat sides of German burghers at the close of the fifteenth century. Passing over The Parson of Kalenborow (from the Pfarrcr von Kalenberg), c. 1510, and Papa Amis (from Pfajfe Amis), a few words of recognition are due to a singularly unpleasant folk-hero, known for two centuries as Grobian. Grobe Leute is German for rude people, and Brandt's Ship had invented Gro- bianus as patron-saint of this fraternity. In 1538 appeared a treatise on Grobian's table-manners. Eleven years later a Latin Grobianus was composed by Friedrich Dedekind, and it gained nothing in savour by a German translation, 1556. Then Dede- kind rewrote it all in German, under the title Grobianus und Grobiana, and in this complete manual 186 EUROPEAN LITERATURE of the subject no known aspect of grossness was left to be explored. The type and the name caught on. It was an age when courtiers' manners were more than half the wealth of courts, and French and English variants on the theme (Thomas Dekker's GulVs Hornbook, for example) found readers and applause. As late as 1739 a Grobianus, or The Com- plete Booby, was inscribed to Swift by Roger Bull, and the Verdant Green books of yesterday (or the day before) are really in the line of descent from the adventures of the first Grobian among the exquisites. Roger Bacon, the learned Schoolman, under the style of Friar Bacon, supplied a jest-book of Alchemy. A geste of the greenwood was furnished by tales of Robin Hood and Maid Marian (the Robin et Marion of old French pastorals), and a strange little folk-book was written round the adventures of the Mass. Dialogues on the sickness, death, last will and testa- ment of the Mass Avere hawked around German towns in the first third of the sixteenth century, and show to how low a level religious quarrels had degraded literary taste. More permanent interest belongs to three folk- tales of local origin. (1) Almost since the dawn of Christianity the tale was told of the shoemaker, Ahasuerus, who had refused a moment's rest to the Saviour as he watched the procession to Calvary. Since he had denied rest to Christ, Christ laid on him the curse never more to rest on earth ; and once and again he had been seen on his endless, objectless pilgrimage. It was at Hamburg in 1547 that the ewige Jude was recognized by a Bishop of Sclileswig, and the ' Wonderful Report ' was quickly spread on German soil. Later versions of ' The Wandering Jew ' followed in various tongues, and the legend KINDS OF LITERATURE 187 exemplified the moral that no exceptional exemp- tion from normal conditions of time and space is competent to confer true happiness. (2) The same moral adorns the tale, more definitely German in origin, of the learned adventm'er. Dr. Faust. The alleged doctor's date is given between 1500 and 1530, and it is obvious that Luther's fame, blackened by evil report, went to the making of the story. The first Faw^^book was published in 1587 at Frankfort- on-Main, as ' The History of Dr. Johann Faust, the much-travelled Magician and Black-Artist, how he made a pact with the Devil for a certain period, what adventures he encountered and wi'ought during that time, and how at last he received his well -merited reward '—in hell. German, French, and English poets, the last including Marlowe and Greene, con- tinued the treatment of the legend, which was finally utilized by Goethe to depict the Faust-hunger of the soul. Principally on Faust's account Germany ranked in the sixteenth century in popular English opinion as the home of magic and bedevilment, and the motive of a diabolic pact was added to the stock of dramatic plots. (3) Thirdly, the folk-book of Fortunatus was worked up in Germany out of native material grafted on to Italian novelle, and, maybe, some Spanish romances. It first took definite shape at Augsburg, 1509, and, again, 1530 ; and, crossing France and the Netherlands, it was treated in England by Thomas Dekker. Fortunatus is a fascinating tale of the adventures of a favourite of fortune and his son under the benevolent spell of the Black Art of alchemy ; and the moral again held good that happiness thus founded does not endure. A sweeter and lovelier kind, which, like Aphrodite, sprang full-grown from the foam of romance, was 188 EUROPEAN LITERATURE known in Germany as Volkslied, in Spain as Romance, and in England and Scotland as the Ballad. ' Where were the ballads before they were made ? ' ^ is a question answered by experts with diminishing dogmatism as to the antiquity of the genre. They flourished in most countries in this age, and the theory that the ballads of Denmark, Spain, France, Britain, Germany, and the Scandinavian lands and islands were merely chips from the mass of old epic and chronicle, planed and chiselled to ballad form, is a very unlikely conclusion from the art of their shaping and their method of approach to the story-matters. Some of the romances of Castile, represented in Lockhart's Spanish Ballads, may have originated in this way ; but, generally, the ballad- writer, within the freemasonry of his craft, had his own angle of vision, and the ballad is to be ranked as a class apart from longer narratives in verse or prose. It is separate from them by an instinct of selection, then most conspicuously displayed when it happens to treat of the same plot. A high authority tells us of ballads, that ' From one vice of modern literature they are free : they have no " thinking about thinking ", no feeling about feeling. They can tell a good tale. They are fresh with the open air ; wind and sunsliine play through them, and the distinction, old as criticism itself, which assigns them to nature rather than to art, is practical and sound ' ^. The essence of a ballad, we infer, lies in the manner ^ Special reference should be made to a paper On the History of the Ballads, 1100-1500, by W. P. Ker, in the Proceedings of the British Academy, December 15, 1909. The spontaneity of the Ballad as a brancli of literature is an unmistakable characteristic. 2 F. B. Gummere, in Cambridge History of English Literature, ii. KINDS OF LITERATURE 189 of its telling ; and this special manner of the ballad, so nearly and remarkably identical in so many different tongues ; this faculty of transmuting a story-matter and of showing it under a different aspect, gives the ballad its place and name in the literature of Europe. One example, well reed, will suffice. The Ballad of Baby Lon belongs by subject to no country. In the Scottish version it runs as follows — BABY LON. There were three ladies lived in a bower, Eh vow bonnie. And they went out to pull a flower On the bonny banks o' Fordie. They hadna pu'ed a flower but ane, WTien up started to them a banisht man. He's taen the first sister by the hand, And he's turned her round and made her stand. ' It's whether will ye be a rank robber's wife. Or will ye die by my wee pen-knife ? ' ' It's I'll not be a rank robber's wife, But I'll rather die by your wee pen-knife '. He's killed this may, and he's laid her by, (maid) For to bear the red rose company. He's taen the second ane by the hand, And he's turned her round and made her stand. * It's whether will ye be a rank robber's wife, Or will ye die by my wee pen-knife ? ' ' I'll not be a rank robber's wife. But I'll rather die by your wee pen-knife '. He's killed this may, and he's laid her by, For to keep the red rose company. He's taen the yoimgest ane by the hand. And he's turned her round and made her stand. Says, ' Will ye be a rank robber's wife. Or wll ye die by my wee pen-knife ? ' ' I'll not be a rank robber's wife, Nor will I die by your wee pen-knife. For I hae a brother in this wood. And gin ye kill me, it's he'll kill thee '. ' What's thy brother's name, come tell to me '. ' My brother's name is Baby Lon '. ' O Sister, Sister, what have I done ! O have I done this ill to thee ! O since I've done this evil deed. Good sail never be seen o' me ' . He's taken out liis wee pen-knife, Eh vow bonnie ! And he's twyned himsel o' liis ain sweet life, On the bonnie banks o' Fordie. 190 EUROPEAN LITERATURE To annotate a ballad is to spoil it, but the reader will observe, among common features of the kind, the brevity and condensation of treatment, the heightening of emphasis by repetition, the charac- teristic ballad-burden or refrain, and the haunting music of the whole composition. The directness of narration is obvious. There is neither preparation nor commentary in the effects prepared by ballad- writers. All the romance of outlawry is in the epithet ' a banisht man '. Chapters of family history are contained in the act of recognition, ' O sister, sister '. There is no interval between thought and speech in the statement, ' He's killed this may and laid her by ' ; and it is superfluous to remark on the singular beauty of the line — ' For to keep the red rose company '. Verses like this are natural to the ballad. They are struck out of the heart of song, like a jet of water from a rock. We may call the ballad a folk-tale in verse, but no definition is quite adequate to a form of literature which has kept the mystery of its origin as well as the secret of its charm. It has kept, too, the secret of its authorship. The ballads are nearly always anony- mous. They treat of familiar topics in the stock of European romance, or in the separate national repertories. The story had to be familiar, for so much of its background was taken for granted. Especially, perhaps, the border-fighting on the Hispano-Moorish or Anglo-Scottish frontier, with its appeal to riven domestic sentiment, supplied favourite episodes to ballad-writers. But nothing came amiss to their art. They seized a new or an old theme, provided always that it was popular, and transformed it in size and scope to the hidden purpose of the ballad. KINDS OF LITERATURE 191 The bibliography is interesting. Specimens of Danish ballads were collected by Vedel in the six- teenth, by Sy V in the seventeenth, and by Grundvig in the nineteenth century. Spanish collections were made in the Romancero general of 1600 (Madrid) and in similar subsequent compilations, much aided by the researches of such eminent scholars as Hegel, Grimm, Southey, Lockhart, and Wolf in the past, Menendez of Pelayo, Foulche-Delbosc and Fitzmaurice-Kelly in the recent present. Nor should the Spanish song- books, starting with a Cancionero by Juan Alfonso de Baena, c. 1450, be forgotten as ballad-material. Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 1882-98, is still the chief source-book for our own country, and Scottish writers, notably Scott and Andrew Lang, have always been eager exponents. Valuable col- lections and commentaries have been made, too, in France and Germany, the poet Uhland being con- spicuous in his own country ; and there is a vast Russian ballad-literature still awaiting systematic exploration. Lastly, we come to a kind of writings, composed in the vernacular tongues during the transit of literature through 1492, which differs conspicuously from the ballad by its long (and somewhat tedious) initiation. There is no real beginning to modern Drama. A recent critic, Mr. Edmund Gardner, tells us that the birthday of Italian drama was January 25, 1486, and his statement is supported by good evidence at the Duke of Ferrara's Court. But elements of drama pre-existed in the pastourelle of the French Trouba- dours, where a knight made love to a shepherd's wife ; in the debat, or jeu parti, or ' strife ', which 192 EUROPEAN LITERATURE passed into ' dialogues ' in prose and verse ; in the prt'gunta, or question-and-answer of popular Spanish poetry, and in a score of different modes by which the imitative faculty, always inherent in mankind, sought literary expression. How to get the interplay of characters on to an actual stage, however rudely furnished for representation, was a problem solved ambulando by village carpenters and strolling players, wholly unconscious, no doubt, that they were in- venting dramatic art. In the Latin-Italian age, inaugurated by Lorenzo the Magnificent, the prince-patrons encouraged the court-poets to organize masques and pageants ; and we saw that Machiavelli at Florence, Ariosto at Ferrara, and others, including writers at the Spanish Court of Naples, produced on improvised stages dramatic scenes adapted from Latin comedies. These served to familiarize modern audiences with the situation-plots of Terence and Plautus, and with clear outlines of the characters on which changes of comedy were rung. The heavy father, the nimble- witted servant, the persecuted lovers, and the un- scrupulous go-between were regular and recurring types. Roman tragedy, too, was drawn upon. Chiefly, Seneca was the favourite model, and, consequently, a taste was engendered for baths of blood and whole- sale slaughter, not wholly disused by Shakespeare in the concluding Act of Hamlet. An early Italian writer in this kind was Giovanni Rucellai (1475-1525), who had the honour of producing a play, with the appropriate five Acts and a Chorus, before Pope Leo X on his visit to Florence in 1515. The name of this tragedy was Rosinunda, and Rucellai was so faitliful to the Senecan tradition, that his drama is said on high authority to have ' led the way to those accumulations of horrible and disgusting KINDS OF LITERATURE 193 circumstances, which deformed the European stage for a centmy afterwards ' ^. A more important feature of Rosmunda was the use of blank verse {versi sciolti, loose or released verse), now first applied in a modern language to dramatic or narrative poetry. Almost simultaneous with Rosmunda was the Sofonisba of Giovanni Trissino (1478-1550), likewise composed without rhymes. Trissino, who wrote a dreary epos known as Italia Liber ata, and whose name we shall meet on a later page among the writers on poetics, went for dramatic inspiration to the Greek tragedians as well as to Seneca, and so avoided a part of the worse faults of that model. Yet another dramatic experiment was the Latin university-play, which employed especially the talents of leading Humanists in the North. It rang variations on the theme of the Prodigal Son, for the edification of youthful students and for the rough humour of the whipping-scenes. The Stylpho, 1470, of Wimpheling, the German schoolmaster, was among the earliest of this kind ; the Rebelles of Georg Langveldt (c. 1475- 1558), a Dutchman, commonly known as Macropedius, was among the most amusing ; and the Acolastus (unchastised) of Willem Voider (1493-1558), another Dutchman, known as Fullonius or Gnapheus, was amongst the most famous, and was rendered into English by John Palsgrave. Other writers in this class included George Buchanan, Reuchlin, and Sixt Birck, a schoolmaster at Basle, whose scholar's name was Betuleius, and whose Christian-Terentian plays dealt with Susannah, Judith, and Eva — ^the Eve who made favourites among her children. More notable in a vanished kind was the Latin playwright, Thomas Kirchmayer (1511-63), a Thu- ringian pastor, commonly known as Neogeorg. The ^ Hallam, op. eit. O 194 EUROPEAN LITERATURE name was derived from his new Georgics, or ' Book of Spiritual Husbandry ' {Agricultura sacra), 1550. His militant drama, Pammachius, which was dedi- cated to the Archbishoj) of Canterbury, has been described as a typical Reformation play. It had the crudely novel device of leaving Act V, the second coming of the Saviour, to the sympathetic imagination of the audience. To the same imagination, sympathetic or the reverse, we may commit the whole class of these Latin plays. We look in another direction, for- wards, instead of backwards to the Classics, for a more spontaneous response to a more popular taste for drama. Not at universities and courts, but in market-places and on village-greens, and chiefly at times of public holiday when folk were ready to be amused, showmen sought that gallery applause, on wliich every play in every age depends finally for success. Learned societies contributed something ; classical models contributed something more, and a number of rules, as we shall see, Avere derived by Italian critics from Aristotle's theory of poetics. But the true origin of drama, it is of prime importance to remember, was popular, even plebeian, and its chief inspiration was sought by the simple test of what pleased. Popular, even plebeian. But these words, before the Reformation, implied a third epithet — ecclesi- astical. The pleasures of the people in the Middle Ages arose out of and were bound up with the Church. Public holidays were almost necessarily Church festivals ; and if we can imagine British drama tied to the car of a religious Lord Mayor's Show, we shall see how Church-pageantry and music gave birth to drama in the South. Instead of London in November, imagine Florence at midsummer. On St. John's Day, June 22, KINDS OF LITERATURE 195 spectacular tableaux were organized by the princes of the Florentine Republic, and the laudi, or sacred hymns of praise, were gradually developed into divozioni, with mingled dialogue and action, and so into sacre rappresentazioni, or scenes from Biblical stories. The first of such Italian sacred plays which is known by author and subject is Feo Belcari's Abraham and Isaac, 1449. More interesting is Santa Uliva, an anonymous specimen, written probably a hundred years earlier than its first printed edition, 1568. Uliva was a late saint, and her introduction in a sacra rappresentazione is a significant proof of the widening hospitality of the kind. Chaucer and Gower wrote of Uliva, who came from the legends of Court-chivalry, and whose later halo w as the meed of the pity which the sorrows of her lifetime inspired. Thus, the spectacular element was more important than the sacred. In the eyes of the religious brotherhoods, who undertook to run these performances, the play was the thing from the start ; and, provided the story was efi'ective, a thin coating of pietism satisfied the requirements of the Church. We have to realize the universality of the Church, its presence and im- manence in all experience, in order to see how it happened that laj^ or secular, drama lay so long in an ecclesiastical cradle. It was like an infant Hercules struggling to get free ; and the ' glaring contrast ' which Addington Symonds pointed out ' between the professed asceticism of the [dramatic] fraternities and the futm-e conduct of their youthful members in the world of the Renaissance ', however nauseating to observe, w^as not unwholesome in the circumstances. If playwrights were to win release from the sacred surroundings of their origin, a contrast of this kind was hardly avoidable. The sacre rappresentazioni died out at last in painted pageants ; but they gave 196 EUROPEAN LITERATURE hospitality in their ilow eriiig-tiiiie to nivich scenic talent of future promise and to some excellent dramatic dialogue in octave stanzas. Even narrower was the border-line between sacred and profane in the analogous passion-plays of Germany. In ' Eve's favourite children ' we sa-vr how quickly German wit seized the humour of the homelier Bible stories ; and Noah and similar cha- racters provided other examples. The narrow passage was bridged by the Fastnachtspiel, or Shrovetide- play, which the excellent Hans Sachs would write you as easily as cobble your shoe ; and in this slight and artless composition the Scriptural element was reduced to a minimum. It just served to keep German drama on the right side of authority, while allowing ample room for mundane wit and worldly wisdom. Strolling players, known as mimes or histrions, took a selection of plays (like the bag of the old jongleurs) from village to village at Shi'ovetide, and their entertainment, best described as jolly, enjoyed the protection of the Church. In France, too, the Confrerie de la Passion, with its headquarters in Paris, performed much the same function as the religious-dramatic brotherhoods in Florence. They had a theatre at the Hopital de la Ste. Trinite from 1402 to 1539, when it passed into abler hands ; but even before the latter date its managers were glad to ally themselves with the so- called Enfants sans Soiici, otherwise known as les Sots, whose business was to write sottie francaise, or pure farce unadulterated with piety. From the various groups of French dramatists at least one comedy emerged, not unworthy of the art which Moliere was to adorn. Maitre Pierre Paihelin, more commonly known as Pathelin, has been ascribed doubtfully to Antoine de la Salle, and was imprinted at Lyons in 1485, The play is written in verses of KINDS OF LITERATURE 197 eight syllables, and its bright and amusing plot turns on a practical joke. A country lawyer advises his client to try bleating like a sheep when at loss for a better answer, and the jest is turned against the lawyer when he comes for his fee. The judge's ' revenons a nos moutons ' is a familiar tag from this play, which enjoyed and deserved long esteem, and which was modernized in the seventeenth century as UAvocat Pathelin. Its legal setting suggests its origin in a dramatic society, the Basoche, founded for mutual entertainment by the clerks of the Paris Law Courts. The German Fastnachtspiel was the Spanish Auto {— actum, or Act of the Sacrament), still in vogue in 1765, when it was prohibited by royal decree. Its long and splendid career in the country farthest from the Reformation attracted the greatest writers in Spain, and Calderon, as we shall see, ranked as its new creator. Briefly, the Auto took shape as a one-act dramatic presentation of the Mystery of the Holy Eucharist, and it was played in the open air on Corpus Christi day. It ranged from the rude per- formances furnished by pious village folk to the most magnificent masque which Church and State could organize in Madrid. Three names occur in the present period, worth}^ of mention in ascent to Calderon. (1) Juan Escriva, a native of Valencia, and a well- known songsmith of his age, wrote ' A Complaint by his Lady against the God of Love ', which ranks high among dramatic beginnings. (2) Juan del Enzina (1469-c. 1530) played in the chapel of Pope Leo X at Rome. His dramatic eclogues or representacioneg were dramas in the vital sense that they were put on a stage and enacted in the year 1492 and onwards. Slight and insipid as they appear in their treatment of the conventional topics of the Passion, Christmas, etc., yet they form an important landmark in the 198 EUROPEAN LITERATURE history of the art. (3) Bartolome de Torres Naharro also resided at Rome, till a lampoon on the Papal Com't caused him to move to Naples. There he wrote eight Spanish comedies which were played on private stages and afterAvards put into print, though it does not appear that they actually reached the theatre. Their importance is literary rather than dramatic. Naharro worked out for his own guidance a complete theory of his craft. He adopted from Horace the division of a play into five parts (he called them days, jornadas, not acts), and he limited his personages to not less than six nor more than twelve. He was a skilful, even an elaborate metrist, and a like elabora- tion is observed in his employment of appropriate dialects. Naharro classified plays into comedies a noticia (founded on knowledge) and comedies a fantasia (founded on fancy) : a distinction admirably pointed in Milton's well-knov.ai verses — ' If Jonson's learned soek be on. Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's cliild, Warble his native >vood-notes wild'. Naharro, too, may claim the invention — certainly he first made it famous — of the part of the gracioso, or confidential servant, of social comedy, perfected in the Figaro of Beaumarchais. Another stage- innovation, which traces descent from Naharro, was the dramatic punctilio, or point of honour, binding characters to a conventional course of action, whatever its personal consequences, and this feature governed the theatre of the greater Spanish masters, Lope de Vega and Calderon. In Spain, as in France, in this age, at least one play was written which contained the seed of future triumphs. The prose comedy of Calisto and Melibea dates roughly from 1490, and is thus contemporary with Pathelin. An edition vvas published at Seville KINDS OF LITERATURE 199 in 1501. A few years later it was reissued as a ' tragi-comedy ', which more aptly describes its scope ; and an Italian edition, 1519, re-entitled the tragi-comedy Celestina, after the name of its principal character. Celestina is not a pleasant play. The dramatis personae enlighten us as to its topics — Calisto, a young enamoured Celestina, an old bawd. gentleman. Crito, a pander. Melibea, daughter to Pleberio. Lucrecia, jnaid to Pleberio. Pleberio, father to Melibea. Elicia ) . ^ , Alisa, mother to Melibea. Arkusa )' *" ^'■"" * emp^y- Parmeno ] Centurio, a rufjian. Sempronio r servants to Calisto. Sosia, servant to Calisio. Tristan j James Mabbe, who wrote an English version as early as 1631, declared that it contained ' profitable in- structions necessary for the younger sort ', who were to ' learn thereby to distinguish between good and bad, and praise the author though not the practice ; for these things are written more for reprehension than for imitation '. It is a specious argument, but not particularly convincing. Celestina, let us say at once, brought down the setting of romance, as Villon had brought it down in France, from the region of chivalry and fable to the common earth on which we dwell. Calisto and Melibea, tragic lovers, were own children to old Juan Ruiz, and were in the straight line of ascent to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. The comic element was supplied by the ' old bawd ', and she, too, traced descent from Juan Ruiz's convent go-between, and reappeared in Juliet's nurse. Her racy idioms passed into current speech, and, despite her libertine tongue, the realism and roguery of her part found frequent and diligent imitators. We may pass over some questions of bibliography. The author of Celestina is not known. Opinion inclines to the claim of Fernando de Rojas, whose 200 EUROPEAN LITERATURE name occurs in a sentence (' The bachelor Fernando de Rojas completed the comedy of Calisto and Melibea and he was born in the town of Montalvan '), constructed out of the first letters of the eighty-eight verses prefixed to the Seville edition. If so, Celestina, like Pathelin, was written by a lawyer ; and, since Rojas was a Jew, v/e should in this case ' be pre- sented with a striking triumph of the Jewish genius ' ^. A subsidiary problem arises out of the word ' com- pleted '. There were sixteen acts in the 1501 edition, and five more were subsequently added, and separate authors have been attributed to Act I, Acts II to XVI, and Acts XVII to XXI, with sundry details of dovetailing. It has, further, an after-bibliography. A Spanish poet, Pedro Manuel de Urrea, published a song-book in 1518, which contained a verse-rendering of Act I of Celestina. In the following year he wrote in prose a Peniiencia de Amor, which covered Celestina's naked realism with a cloak of antique chivalry. Another of Celestina's moral lovers was John Rastell, an English printer, who died in 1536. Rastell married Elizabeth, sister to Sir Thomas More. Their daughter Elizabeth was married to John Heywood, and Heywood's daughter Elizabeth was married to John Donne. This triple relationship in letters enhances the interest of Rastell 's work in the early history of romantic drama. In 1530 he published ' A New Comedy in English, in manner of an Interlude, right 1 J .Y\t%m2Mnce-Ke\\y,LiMrature espa^nole,\>.17Q. Prof . Kelly is disposed to accept the attribution of Celestina to Rojas. The great authority of M. Foiilche-Delbosc {Revue hispnnique, vi, 1900, resumed 1902) arrived at three conclusions : («) that the original sixteen acts were all written by one author ; (b) that this author cannot be identified ; and (c) that he did not wTite the later ad- ditions. H. Warner Allen {Celestina, 1908) reverts to the Rojas authorship of (a) ; and, as to the five later acts, Prof, Kelly reminds us: ' Les retouches d'un auteur sont souvent malheureuses'. On the whole, it is convenient to accept a view which was unshaken from 1501 to 1900. KINDS OF LITERATURE 201 elegant and full of craft of rhetoric, wherein i, in Italy, 121, 123 ; develop- ment of, in Northern Europe, 146-156 ; and the Church, in Italy, 146, 147 ; point of view of teachers of, in Northern Europe, 148, 149 ; later ex- ponents of, 203-226 ; and scholarship, 203, 204, 205 Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, 115 Huon of Bordeaux, 10, 11 Hutten, Ulrich von, 155, 156, 233 Huyghens, Christian, 380 Huyghens, Constantine, 380 Huysmann, Rudolph (Agricola), 147 Ibsen, Hendrik, 33 Idylls of the King, quoted, 15, 43 ; motto of, 17 n. Igor, The Armament of, 3, 4; 5, 6, 8 Iliad, Homer's, 32 ' Illustrious Men ', Vespas- iano's, 146 II Principe, Machiavelli's, pur- pose of, 164, 165 ; its modern tone, 167 ; influence of, 170 Imaginary conversations, lit- erary form of, in early Re- naissance, 145 hnitatio Christi, importance of the, 83, 84 Innocent III, Pope, 43, 44, 55 Innocent IV, Pope, 55 Italy, troubadour poetry in, 48-50 Iter ParadiscB, 19 404 INDEX Jacques de Longuyon, 19 Jager, Johann (Crotus Ru- bianus), 155 Jane Eyre, 276 Jebb, Sir Richard, 212, 226 Jerusalem Delivered, Tasso''s, source of, 17 Jews, learning of the medieval Spanish, 53 ; Reuchlin's in- tercourse with, in Gernmanv, 149 Jodelle, Etienne, 291, 307 John II, King of Castile, writers at the Court of, 117 Johnson, Dr., on the ' meta- physical ' poets, 368 Joinville, Sire de, his life of Louis IX of France, 29-30; 37, 61, 163 Jovgkur. business of the, 11 Jonson, Ben, quoted, 39; 303, 366, 367 ; his lyrics, 368, 369 Jusserand, J. J., on Langland, 79 n. ; on the Dictionary of the French Acadenay, 293 K Kejipis, Thomas a, 228, 264 Ker, Prof. W. P., on influence of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, 20 ; 36 n. ; on Chaucer's debt to Boccaccio, 101 ; on ballads, 188 and n. Kiev, the early home of Russian poetry, 2, 3 Kinjo, Thomas, 374, 375 Kirchmayer, Thomas (Neo- georg), 193, 194 Konrad, von Wiirzburg, 62 Kyd, Thomas, and Hamlet, 329, 330 Labe, Louise, 243 La Boetie, Etienne de, 256 La Fontaine, 69 L'' Allegro, Milton's, 351 Lambert, le Tort de Chateau- dun, 19 Lambin, Denys, 259 Landino, Cristofero, ' Camal- dolese Discourses ' of, 145 Landor, Walter Savage, on Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Petrarch, 103 Lang, Andrew, his translation of ' Aucassin and Nicolete ', 20 ; on Langland, 79 n. ; on Walton's ' Angler % 372 Langen, Rudolph von, 147, 148 Langland, William, 80 Langton, Stephen, 55 Languedoc, 44 Langue d'oc explained, 41 ; 44 Languc d'oil explained, 41, 42 ; 44 Languet, Hubert, 257 Langveldt, Georg (Macropedius), 193 La Ramee, Pierre de (Ramus), 217, 218 Larivey, Pierre, 307 Lascaris, Janus, and Francis I of France, 148 Las Casas, Bartolome de, 278 Latimer, Hugh, 210 Laxdaela, saga of, 33 Lazarillo des Tormes, 302 ' Le beau tenebreux ', vogue of, 276 Le Bel, Jean, 88, 89 Lee, Sir Sidney, 293 ; on Shakespeare, 329, 331, 332 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 360, 361 Leo III, Pope, and Charle- magne, 7 Leo X, Pope, 167 ; his patron- age of art and letters, 223 Leon, Ponce de, 362, 388 Leonora, Princess, d'Este, and Tasso, 310, 311 Leontiu , Pilatus, 114 Leroy, Pierre, 294 ' Letters of Obscure Men ', the Erfurt poets, 153-156 Lesage, Alain Rene, 302, 322 Lessing, and Logau, 356, 357 Lilly, W. S., on Ovid, 21 Lily, William, 147 Linacre, Thomas, 148, 210 Lipsius, Justus, 260 Lodge, Thomas, 366 Logau, Friedrich von, 356, 357, 374 Lohenstcin, Daniel Caspar von, 360 INDEX 405 Longus, 21 Lopez de Ayala, Pedro, Cronica of, 90 ; poems and transla- tions of, 91 Lorenzo II, 167 Lorenzo de Medici, the Magnifi- cent, 126, 127 ; his influence on hteratiire, 128, 129 Lorris, Guillaume de, 66, 67, 09 Louvain, as centre of culture, 243, 260 Lovelace, Richard, 369 Loyola, Ignatius, 239 Luna, Alvaro de, 117 Luther, Martin, 147, 215, 229- 235 ; his German translation of the Bible, 229, 230, 233, 234 ; his visit to Rome, 230, 231 ; at the Diet of Worms, 232, 233 ; at the Wartburg, 233 ; his ' Table-talk ', 233 ; his hymns, 234 Lycidas, Milton's, 353, 354, 355, 390, 391 Lydgate, John, 20, 115 Lyly, John, 268 ; his Euphues, 269-272 ; as dramatist, 304 ; 367 Lyons, Court of, 240-245 passim ; as centre of culture, 243 M Mabbe, James, his English version of Celestina, 199, 303 n. MabinogUm, the, 12, 14 Macaulay, Lord, and euphuism, 272 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 164-171 ; his principles compared with those of Nietzsche, 167, 168, 169 ; influence of his writings, 170, 171 Macpherson, James, 33 Macrobius, originator of the literary device of the Dream, 60 Maerlant, Jacob van, 63 Magnusson, his translation of Grettla, 33 Maine, Sir Henry, 212 Maitre Pathelin, 196, 197, 198, 200 Malherbe, Francois de, 292, 309, 391 Malory, Sir Thomas, his Morlc Darthur, 13, 15 ; quoted, 16 Manetti, Gianozzo, 146 Manly, Prof. J. M., on Langland, 79 «. Manrique, Jorge, 162 Manuel, Juan, works of, 92, 93 Manuzio, Aldo, founder of Al- dine Press, 150, 210, 226 Margaret of Navarre, Court of, 240, 242, 243 ; and the Heptameron, 241, 242 Mariana, Juan de, 257, 258, 259 Marie de Champagne, 42 Marie de France, 70 ; her Breton lais, 24 Marini, Giambattista, 273 Marinism, 273 Marlowe, Christopher, 170, 171, 187, 218, 304, 307, 309, 332- 336 ; characteristics of the work of, 332, 333, 334, 335 ; his eloquence, 336, 337, 368, 369 Marnix, Philip, 257 Marot, Clement, 242-244 Marston, John, 370 Martinez de Toledo, Alfonso, 117 Marvell, Andrew, 372, 373 Masaccio, 116, 117 Massinger, Pliilip, 370 Maxim, 121, 122, 123 Maximilian I, liis patronage of art and letters, 223 ; his Teuerdank, 224 Medici, the, 125 ; family-tree of, 126 Meistersingers, the, 178-181 ; origin of, 178, 179 Melanchthon, 163, 180, 225, 233 Meliador, Froissart's poem of, 89 Mena, Juan de, 117 Mendoza, Hartado de, 278 Meredith, George, 38, 298 Meres, Francis, quoted, 22 Meung, Jean de, 66, 67, 69 Meynell, Mrs., 368 Mill, John Stuart, 263 Mingo Revulgo, the satire of, 162 Minnesingers and Minnesong, 26-28 406 INDEX Milton, John, 15, 52, 295, 309 ; his influence on public affairs, 351-355; 370, 371, 373; his debt to Grotius, 375 ; and Salmasius, 377 ; and his European literary contem- poraries, 382-384 ; his Para- dise Lost, 384-388 ; his blind- ness, 387, 388, 389 ; his Samson Agonistes, 389, 391 ; his great achievement, 390 Minturno, Antonio Sebastiano, 205 Miranda, Francisco de Saa dc, 283 Miscellany, Tottel's, 261 Mistral, Frederic, 44 Moliere, Jean Poquelin, 307, 309 Molina, Tirso de (Gabriel Tel- lez), 364 Molinos, Miguel de, 361, 362 Molza, Francesco Maria, 245, 313 Monluc, Blaise de, 280 Montaigne, Michel de, 251-255 Montalvo, Rodriguez de, 276 Montemayor, Jorge de, 277, 300 More, Sir* Thomas, 52, 141, 184, 200, 210 ; his JJUipia, 212, 218-222 ; his career, 219 ; 238, 395 Morgante Maggiore, Pulci's, 132, 133, 134 Morris, William, his Lovers of Gudrun, 33 Moscherosch, Hans Michael, 356 Motteux, Peter Anthony, 246 Mountain scenerj^, love of, first expressed in literature, 262,263 Miiller, Johann (Regiornon- tanus), 147 Munday, Anthony, 307 Murner, Thomas, 184 Musset, Alfred de, 182 Muth, Konrad (Mutianus), 155 Mysticism, Dutch, 83 ; German, influence and force of, 227, 228, 229 N Naharro, Bartolome de Torres, 198, 304 Nash, Thomas, 365, 367 Nature, the new approach to, in the seventeenth century, 392, 393 Navagero, Andrea, 205, 225, 280, 281, 282 Nebrissensis, 212 Neidhart von Reuental, 62 Nennius, his mention of Arthur, 12 Newton, Sir Isaac, 360 Nibelungenlied, the, 30-32 Niccoli, Niccolo de, 121, 123, 124, 125 Nicholas V, Pope, 143 ; his rescue of classical MSS. after Fall of Constantinople, Gibbon on, 144 Nietzsche, and Machiavelli, 167, 108, 169 Njala, saga of, 33 Normanby, Duke of, 368 North, Sir Thomas, his transla- tion of Amyot's Plutarch, 261 Novel, the, founded by Boc- caccio, 94, 100 ; first intro- duction of psychology into, 95 ; Chaucer's contribution to, 105 ; early examples of, in Spain, 275, 276, 277 ; first introduction of characterisa- tion into, 300 ; picaresque form of, 302, 303, 305 O OccLETE (or Hoccleve), 115 Ogier the Dane, 11 Oliphant, Mrs., on Cei'vantes,325 Oliver, the wise, 9, 10 Olivetan, Pierre Robert, 236 Opitz, Martin, 358, 359, 374 Orlando Furioso, Ariosto'-J, Car- dinal Ippolito d'Este and, 171, 172 ; Machiavelli and, 172 ; Guicciardini and, 172 ; faults of, 173, 174 ; virtues of, 174, 175 ; influence of, 175, 176 ; general criticism of, 176, 177 Orlando Innamoraia, Boiardo's, 134, 135, 136 Oswald von Wolkenstein, 63 Oude Kamer of the Eglantine, 181, 378 Ovid, influence of, in European literature, 21, 22 ; Eliza- bethan translations of, 22 Oviedo of Valdes, Gonzola, 278 Owl and the Nightingale, 48 INDEX 407 Painter, William, 261, 262 Palace of Art, Tennyson's, 47 Palace of Pleasure, Painter's, his debt to Boccaccio, 100; 261, 262 Palissy, Bernard, 261 Palladius, Peter, 234 Palmerin stories, 276 Palsgrave, John, 193, 260 Pandolfini, Agnolo, 145 Paradise Lost, 15 ; verse of, 384, 385, 386 ; treatment of the theme of, 386, 387 ; greatness of, 388 Paradise Regained, 388, 389 Paris, Matthew, his Chronica Majora, 28 ; 34 Pasqualigo, Luigi, 307 Pastoral poetry, 137 Pastor Fido, Guarini's, 311 Passerat, Jean, 294 Pater, Walter, 141 ; on the fifteenth century, 151 ; quoted, 395 Patericke, Simon, his translation of Gentillet's Anti-Machiavel, 170 Pedersen, Christian, 234 Pels, Andries, 380 Pembroke, Countess of, 299, 307 Pepys, Samuel, on Othello, 364 Percy, Bishop, 33 Personification in medieval lit- erature, 58, 59, 60 Peterrsen, Lars, 234 Peterrsen, Olaf, 234 Petrarch, 82; 108-114; his European influence, 108 ; Laura and, 109, 110 ; Gibbon on, 109 ; liis love-songs, 109, 110 ; crowned Poet Laureate, 111 ; Riengi and. 111, 112 ; his classical studies, 112, 114 ; the first Humanist, 113, 119, 120; his lonehness, 124; 168, 169, 263, 388 Petrarquistas, the, 282 Pettis, George, 262 Pfefferkorn, Johann, 152 Phaedrus, 69, 70, 71 Philip IV of France, 56 Philip Augustus, ffing of France, 44 Phillips, Stephen, influence of Marlowe on, 335; 368 Philology, necessity of study of, in early Renaissance, 143, 144 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 141, 146, 147, 149, 152, 171, 227 Pierre de St. Cloud, 19 Piers Plowman, 79-80 Pietism, German, 356 Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan's, 61, 363, 373, 374 Pippin, father of Charlemagne, 7 Pitt, Christopher, 205 Pius II (Aeneas Sylvius Picco- lomini), and the Humanists, 144, 145 Plantin, printer of Antwerp, 259 Plato, 73, 125 Plays, sacred, in Italy, 195, 196 ; in Germany, 196 ; in France, 196 Pleiad, the, 182, 267, 280, 288 ; aims of, 289, 290, 291 ; achievement of, 292 ; 293, 295, 296 Pletho, 126 Pluralite des Mondes, Fon- tenelle's, 63 Plutarch, Amyot's translation of, 261 ' Poesy of the Skalds ', Snorri's, 39, 40 Politian (Angelo Ambrogini Poliziano), 129-130; 131, 132 Politics, influence of, on medie- val European literature, 54- 57 ; on sixteenth-century literature, 255, 256 Pomponazzi, 171 Ponce de Leon, Luis, 264 ; as editor of the remains of Sta. Teresa, 265 Ponet, John, 256 Pope, Alexander, 205 Powell, F. York, 36 and n. Printers and publishers, Re- naissance of, 259 Printing, invention of, 150 ' Privadoes ', origin of the word, 117 Provencal literature, Moorish affinities of, 42 Proven9al song, 41-44 408 INDEX Prudentius, originator of liter- ary device of personification, 59' Pseudo-Kallisthenes, 18 Psycliology, German, 229 Pufendorf, Samuel, 361 Pulci, Luigi, 131-134, 309 Q QuEVEDO, Gomez de, 356, 364 R Rabelais, Frangois, 180, 182 ; and More's TJiopia, 222 ; 245- 251 ; his forerunners and successors, 250, 251 ; 322, 388 Racine, Jean, 307, 309 Radewyns, 83 Raleigh, Prof. Sir Walter, on Milton, 390 and n. Raleigh, Sir Walter, his story of the Revenge, 36 ; 278 ; his works, 279 ; 369, 394 Rastell, John, his family con- nections, 200 ; his works, 201 Raj'mond VI, Count of Tou- louse, 43, 44 Rebelles, Langveldt's, 193 Rederijkers, 178, 181 Reformation, the, 151, 227 et seq. ; elTects of the German, in Europe, 239, 240 Reformers, the, 226-238 ; and the Bible, 227 ; in Germany, 227, 228, 229 Reimar von Hagenau, 26 Reinecke Fuchs, Goethe's version of, 72 Renaissance, the task of a philosopher in, 347 Renaissance Courts, influence of, on literary style, 266, 267, 268 Renaissance writers, object of, discussed, 325, 326 Reuchlin, Johann, 121, 141; 148-156 ; his Hebrew studies, 149, 150, 152 ; his con- troversies, 152-155 ; 157, 171, 193, 227 Reynard the Fox, Romance of, 68-72 Rhenanus, Beatus, 225 'Rhetoricians', the, 178, 181 Rhetoriqueurs, the, 178, 181-183 Richard Coeur-de-Lion, 42, 43, 47 Richardson, Samuel, 300 Richelieu, Cardinal, and Cor- neille, 391 Robertelli, Francesco, 205 ' Robin Hood ', 186 Robinson Crusoe, 363 Rodenberg, Theodore, 380 Roderick, Lord, the Champion (El Cid), 4, 8, 13 Rojas, Fernando de, 199, 200 Roland, Song of, 8-10 Roland (Hruotland), the man, 8, 13 Rolland, Remain, on Tasso and opera, 311 Roman de Renart, 69, 71, 72 Romance, discussion of the term, 394 ; themes of, 394, 395 ; classical forms of, 395 ; course of in European litera- ture, 393, 394, 395 Romance of the Rose, the, 65- 68 ; English translation of, 66 ; authors of, 60, 67 ; description and criticism of, 67, 68 ; 69, 181 Ronsard, Pierre de, 13, 243, 280 ; 287-291 ; his paganism, 289 ; his poems, 290 ; his language and style, 291, 292, 293, 294, 358 Roscoe, William, his life of Lorenzo de Medici, 127, 128 Rose, the, in poetry, 287, 288, 313, 314 Rosmunda, Rucellai's, 192, 193 Rossetti, D. G., translations by, 49, 50 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 263 Royal Society, the, 392 Rucellai, Giovanni, his tragedy of Rosmunda, 192, 193; 245 Rudolf von Ems, 63 Rueda, Lope de, dramas of, 304, 305 Ruiz, Juan, 91,92 Rurik, founder of dynasty at Kiev, 2 Ruskin. John, and euphuism, 272 Ruteboeuf, poems of, 61 INDEX 409 Sacchetti, 116, 117 Sachs, Hans, 179-180; 183, 215 Sadoleta, Cardinal Jacopo, 225 Saemund the Wise, and the Edda, 38 Sagas, the, 32-41 ; groups of the, 33-37 St. Paul's School, foundation of, by Colet, 147, 213, 218 St. Sorlin, Jean de, 385 St. Thomas k Kempis, 83, 84 Sainte-Beuve, on the Roman de Renart, 72 Saintsbury, Prof. G., on Walther von der Vogelvveide, 26 ; on Dante, 73 ; on Renaissance criticism, 204 ; on Rabelais' Panurge, 247 ; on Opitz, 358 Salmatius (Claude de Saumaise), 377 Salutati, Coluccio, 121, 123, 125 Sandys, Sir John, on the func- tion of medieval Schoolmen, 51 ; on Petrus Victorius, 203, 204 Sannazzaro, Jacopo, 137-140 ; 297, 298 Santa Teresa, mysticism of, 265, 266; 362 Santa TJliva, sacred Italian play of, 195 Santillana, Marquis de, 117 Satirists, in medieval European literature, 61-64 ; German, in seventeenth century, 356- 358 Satyre Menippee, 295 Saxo the Grammarian (Gram- maticus), 28 ; liis History of the Danes and English literature, 29 Scaliger, Jacob Justus, the younger, 260, 377 Scaliger, Julius Csesar, the elder, 205 Sceve, Maurice, 243 Schedel, Hartmann, 147 SchefHer, Johann (Angelus Silesius), 356, 361 Schlegel, August von, on Cal- deron, 344 Scholars, Arab, of Spanish birth, 53 Scholasticism, Boethius and, 51, 52 Schoolmen, the, 50-54 ; influence of on St. Dominic and St. Francis, 54 Scott, Robert, the Arctic ex- plorer, 394 Scott, Sir Walter, 33 ; on Froissart, 85, 89; 321 Shakespeare, William, sources of his Lear and Cymbeline, 14 ; his debt to Ovid, 22 ; 307, 309, 318 ; 325-332 ; his supremacy in literature, 325, 326 ; his special achievement, 320, 327, 328 ; his Hamlet, 328-330 ; his way with his material, 331, 332 ; and Marlowe, 332, 333, 335; 337, 340; and Bacon, 350 Shelley, on Ariosto and Tasso, 310 n. ; on Cervantes, 320 ; 339 Shepherd's Calendar, Spenser's, 137, 297 Shortiiouse, Henry, and Mol- inos, 362 Skeat, Prof., 66 Skelton, John, 161 Sibilet, Thomas, 244 Sickingen, Franz von, 233 Sidney, Sir Pliilip, 137, 140, 218, 257, 274, 295; 296-301 ; his education and tastes, 296, 297 ; his Apolo^ie for Poet- rie, 297, 298 ; his Stella and Astrophel, 298, 299 ; his Ar- cadia, 299-301 Simon de Monfort, and the Albigensian Crusade, 44 Skeat, Prof., on Langland, 79 n. Smith, Alexander, on Bacon's Essays, 350 Snell, Prof., on Langland, 79 n. Snorri, 35, 36, 37, 38, .39 Sofonisba, Trissino's, 193 So7ig of Maldon, 1, 2 Songs, Elizabethan, 367-371 Sonnet, the, Italian origin of, 74 ; naturalisation of, in Spain, 282 ; in England, 284 Sordello, the Troubadour, 43 Soma, Duchess of, Boscan's letter to, 230, 231 Southey, Robert, on Lope de Vega, 337, 340 EE 410 INDEX Spagniioli, Battista (Shake- speare's ' good old Mantuan '), 131 Spanish Ballads, Lockhart's, 188 Spanish hterature, effective period of, 345, 346, 347 Spec, Friedrich von, 356 Spenser, Edmund, 13, 15, 140 ; and Ariosto, 176; 309, 313; 315-318 ; his Shepherd's Calendar, 315, 316 ; his Faerie Queene, 316-318 Spenserian stanza, the, 317, 318 Stacpoole, H. de Vere, on Villon, 157 Steinmar von Klingenau, 62 Stephen, Sir Leslie, 263 Sternhjelm, Jorge, 378 Stories, forms of, 1 ; subjects of, 1-22 ; writers of early, 23-30 Story-tellers, fourteenth-cen- tury, 81 Straparola, the ' Pleasant Nights 'of, 242 Strode, Ralph, 102 Sturla of Hvamm, 35, 36, 163 Sturlung family, 34, 35 ; group of sagas, 35-37 Sturm, Johann, 262 Style and matter, interde- pendence of, 1, 2 Suckling, Sir John, 369 Surrey, Earl of, 261, 280, 285 ; and blank verse, 286 ; 358 Suso, 83 Sverre,Kjng of Norway, 34, 35,36 Swift, Jonathan, 59 Symonds, John Addington, 49 ; on the Decameron, 99, 100 ; on Ariosto, 176, 177 ; on ecclesiastical drama, 195 Symons, Arthur, on Villon, 160 T Taillefer, 10 Tannhauser, the Minnesinger, 62 Tasso, Torquato, 309; 310-314 ; his career, 310, 311 ; his Aminta, 311 ; his Gerusa- lemme Liberata, 311-314 ; 316, 388 Tauler, 83 Tausen, Hans, 234 Taylor, Henry Osborn, on Dante, 52 Taylor, Jercmv, 372 Tegner, Elof, 33 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 13, 27 ; and Provencal poetry, 43 ; 396 Tetzel, Johann, and Luther, 231 Thehais, Statius', 21 Theocritus, 137, 138, 297 Theology, sixteenth-century writers on, 264-268 Thibaut IV, King of Navarre, 48 Thord, 35 Thoughts and Recollections, Bis- marck's, and teaching of Machiavelli, 167 Timone, Boiardo's play of, 136, 137 Torquato Tasso, Goethe's drama of, 310 Tory, Geoff roi, 226 Toscanaggiamento, 48 Tottel's Miscellany, 261 Toulouse, floral games at, 44, 95, 96 Toussain, Jacques, 217 Tout, Prof. T. F., on Crusade against Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse, 43, 44 Translations, importance of, 226 Translators and editors. Re- naissance, 261, 262 Trench, Archbishop, 339 Trissino, Giovanni, 193, 205 Trittenheim, Johann (Trithe- mius), 147 Troilus and Criseyde, popularity of the tale of, 20 Troubadours, the, and their continuators, 44 Troubadour poetry, forms of, 47, 48 Troy, European literary interest in the legends of, 19, 20 Turnebus, Adrian, 259 and n. Two Gentlemen of Verona, its debt to Montemayor, 277 ; to Pasqualigo's Fidele, 307 Tyard, Pontus de, 292 Tyndale, William, 234 U Uhland, 26 Ulrich von Liechtenstein, 62 Universities, foundation of Euro- pean, and their ecclesi- astical type, 51 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY AA 001 353 531 411 University plav, the Latin, 193, 194 Urquhart, Sir Thomas, 246 Urrea, Pedro Manuel de, 200 Utopia, More's, importance of in regard to modern fiction, 220, 221 ; translations of, 221, 222; 325 V Valdes, Juan de, 262 Valla, Lorenzo, 124; 142-143; 145, 146, 147, 152, 227 Vaughan, Henrv, 370 Vaux, Lord, 286, 287 Vedel, Anders, translator of Saxo's History, 29 Vega, Garcilasso,de la, 280 ; his soldier career, 282 ; his poems, 283 Vega, Lope de, 198, 307, 309; 336-341 ; translators of, 339 ; 342, 346 Velthem, Lodewijk van, 63 Vergerio, Piero, 121, 123 Verse-forms of the Troubadours, 47, 48 Vettori, Piero (Petrus Victorius), 203, 204 Vicente, Gil, 304 ' Victorian Age', Italy's, 204, 205 Vida, Marco Girolamo, his Ars Poeiica, 205, 206 Vigfusson, G., 36 and n. Villehardouin, Geoffroi de, French Chronicler, 29 Villena, Enrique de, his ' Art of Poetrv ', 117 Villon, Francois, 47 ; 157-162 ; his ' Ballad of Dead Ladies ', 158, 159 ; his importance in the evolution of literature, 160 Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, authorship of the, 257 Virgil, Italian translators and imitators of, 244, 245 Vision of Judgment, Byron's, quoted, 64 Visscher, Roemer, 378 Visscher, Tesselschade, 378, 379, 380 Vita Nuova, Dante's, 47 ; great- ness of, 75, 76 Vitez, Joannes, 148 Vittorino da Feltre, ' the first modern schoolmaster ', 146 Vives, Juan Luis de, 224 Vogiie, Vicomte E. de, on Prince Igor, 3 Voider, Willem (Fullonius or Gnapheus), 193 Voltaire, on Tasso, 314 Vondel, Joost von den, 380, 381 ; his Lucifer, 382 ; 384, 386 Vossius, Isaac, 376 Vossius (Jan Voss), 376 W Wagner, Richard, and the Nibelungenlied, 32 ; and the Meistersinger, 179 Waller, Edmund, 372, 373 Walther von der Vogelweide, 26 Walton, Izaak, 372 Wandering Jew, tale of the, 186, 187 War and travel as subjects of hterature, 278, 279, 280 War-time, literature in, 99 Warton's History of Poetry quoted, 238 Watson, Sir William, on Words- worth, 314 Webster, John, 370 Wernher, the Gardener, 62 Wliibley, C, on Spanish drama, 340 WicUf, 48, 80 William IX of Poitiers, Count, the patriarch of the Trou- badours ; his poetic descend- ants, 42 Wilson, Thomas, 260 Wimpheling, Jacob, 147 ; his Latin play, Stylpho, 193 Wolfram von Eschenbach, 24, 25 Wolsey, Cardinal, 163 Woodward, W. H., on Vittorino da Feltre, 146 Wordsworth, William, 80, 295 Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 280, 283 ; and the Sonnet, 284, 285 ; 358 X XiMENEZ de Cimeros, 148 ; 215 Young, Bartholomew, his trans- lation of Diana, 277 Z Zasius, Uhich, 225