Читать книгу A History of Story-telling - Arthur Ransome - Страница 9

'Then shall appear Jean Clopinel,

Joyous of heart, of body well

And fairly built: at Meun shall he

Be born where Loire flows peacefully.'[2]

I made up my mind to look at the old book again when I should have left the road, and be within reach of a larger library than my own manuscript and a single volume of Defoe.

Jean de Meung.

Jean de Meung, joyous of heart, belongs absolutely to the mediæval revival of learning. He was less of a poet than a scholar, more pleased with a display of knowledge than of beauty, and yet so far undamped by his learning as to be always ready to put plainly out such observations upon life as keep a reader smiling to-day at their shrewdness and applicability. His share of The Romance of the Rose is a strange and suggestive contrast with the beginning that was written by Guillaume de Lorris. The first part, earlier by forty years than the second, and about a fifth of the length, is a delicious allegory on love, with the sweetness and purity of Aucassin and Nicolete; the second opens solidly with a good round speech by Reason, filling something like two thousand lines, and ransacking antiquity to fit her wise saws with ancient instances according to the new fashion of the time.

Taine finds this garrulous Jean 'the most tedious of doctors'; but it is difficult not to throw yourself into his own delight in his new-won knowledge, hard not to enjoy his continual little revelations of character, as when you read:—

'Let one demand of some wise clerk

Well versed in that most noble work

"Of Consolation" foretime writ

By great Boethius, for in it

Are stored and hidden most profound

And learned lessons: 'twould redound

Greatly to that man's praise who should

Translate that book with masterhood,'

and know that he made the translation himself.

The world at school.

The very popularity of the book proves that the whole world was at school then, and eager to be taught. Lorris, poet though he is, reminds his readers that his embroidered tale hides something really valuable, that it is 'fair wit with wisdom closely wed,' knowing well that he could find no better bait to keep them with him to the end. And Jean, when it comes to his turn, admirably expresses the contemporary point of view. He has no doubts at all between the comparative worths of manner and matter. He justifies the classics by saying:—

'For oft their quip and crank and fable

Is wondrous good and profitable.'

One of the schoolmasters.

The permanent value of knowledge is always before him, and having learnt a great deal himself, what wonder that he should empty it all out, only now and again giving the tale a perfunctory prod forward before continuing his discourse? Knowledge comes always before culture, and knowledge taken with such abandon is almost inspiriting. I cannot be bored by a scholar who in the thirteenth century is so independent and so frank. Eager quarry work such as his had to precede the refined statuary of the Renaissance, and in The Romance of the Rose the pedagogue is far too human to be dismissed as a dealer in books alone. Wisdom and observation were not disunited in him, and there are in that rambling, various repository of learning promises enough of realistic story-telling and of the criticism of life, sufficiently valuable to excuse its atrocious narrative, even were that not justified by the classical allusion with which it is so abundantly loaded. It gives me pleasure to hear Jean Clopinel defend plain speaking, and, protesting against calling spades anything but spades, prepare the way for Rabelais. What matter if the romance suffer a little, and the Rose lie pressed beneath a weight of scholarship? Jean himself moves on unhampered. He talked of women's table-manners so well that Chaucer himself could do no better than borrow from him. He attacked womenkind in general so mercilessly (with the authority of the classics behind him) that he won a stern rebuke from Christine de Pisan, that popular authoress of a century later, just as Schopenhauer might be censured by Miss Corelli. He looks at kings, and, turning away, remarks that it is best, if a man wishes to feel respectful towards them, that he should not see them too close. Nor does he forget to let us know his views on astronomy, on immortality, or his preference of nature over art in sculpture and painting. This last opinion of his is an illustration of that good and honest Philistinism that he needed for his work. All these things and a thousand others he puts, without a shudder, into the continuation of a story on the art of loving, that begins with a spring morning account of a dreamer's vision of a rose and a garden, and Mirth and Idleness, Youth and Courtesy, dancing together as if in a picture by Botticelli.

In Meung six hundred years ago.

I went down that night just after sunset and crossed the river in the dusk. Resting in the middle of the bridge and looking over the dim reflections to the far-distant bank, with its grove of huge trees, and the tower of the church with the outline of the gateway on the hill behind just showing against the sky, I dreamed that I was back in the old days, when the minstrel was giving place to the scholar, and that up there on the hill, in the little town of Meung, was Jean, Doctor of Divinity, poring at his books. I remembered the bust by Desvergnes, that beautiful scholar's face, and thought how strong a personality his must have been, to leave after six hundred years and more the memory of himself and the feeling of his time so vividly impressed upon the town. For even now, though they do not read his book in Meung, they know all about it, and talk of him with that reverence in speaking that children use when they talk of a master whom they do not often see. I could not help feeling that their attitude was traditional. It has been the same for all these years, and perhaps long ago the townsfolk, passing in the narrow streets, hushed themselves before one door, and whispered, 'Yes; he is in there writing a book; there are not many who can do that,' while old Jean Clopinel inside nursed his lame leg and dipped from folio to folio, as he took gem and pebble from the dead tongue and put his vivid thought and gleeful knowledge in black letter on the parchment, in black-lettered French, the speech of his own people, that all might see how fine a thing it was to look into antiquity and to be wise.