Читать книгу Amenities of Literature - Disraeli Isaac - Страница 7

THE PAGE, THE BARON, AND THE MINSTREL.

When learning was solely ecclesiastical and scholastical, there were no preceptors for mankind. The monastery and the university were far removed from the sympathies of daily life; all knowledge was out of the reach of the layman. It was then that the energies of men formed a course of practical pursuits, a system of education of their own. The singular institution of chivalry rose out of a combination of circumstances where, rudeness and luxury mingling together, the utmost refinement was found compatible with barbaric grandeur, and holy justice with generous power. In lawless times they invented a single law which included a whole code—the law of knightly honour. L’Ordenne de Chevalerie is the morality of knighthood, and invests the aspirant with every moral and political virtue as every military qualification.1

Destitute of a national education, the higher orders thus found a substitute in a conventional system of manners. Circumstances, perhaps originally accidental, became customs sealed with the sign of honour. In this moral chaos order marshalled confusion, as refinement adorned barbarism. A mighty spirit lay as it were in disguise, and it broke out in the forms of imagination, passion, and magnificence, seeking their objects or their semblance, and if sometimes mistaken, yet still laying the foundations of social order and national glory in Europe.

A regular course of practical pursuits was assigned to the future noble “childe” from the day that he left the parental roof for the baronial hall of his patron. In these “nurseries of nobility,” as Jonson has well described such an institution, in his first charge as varlet or page, the boy of seven years was an attendant at the baron’s table, and it was no humiliating office when the youth grew to be the carver and the cupbearer. He played on the viol or danced in the brawls till he was more gravely trained in “the mysteries of woods and rivers,” the arts of the chase, and the sciences of the swanery, and the heronry, and the fishery; the springal cheerily sounded a blast of venery, or the falconer with his voice caressed his attentive hawk, which had not obeyed him had he neglected that daily flattery.

At fourteen the varlet became an esquire, vaulting on his fiery steed, and perfecting himself in all noble exercises, nicely adroit in the science of “courtesie,” or the etiquette of the court; and already this “servant of love” was taught to elect La dame de ses pensées, and wore her favour and her livery for “the love of honour, or the honour of love,” as Sir Philip Sydney in the style of chivalry expressed it.

At the maturity of twenty and one years the late varlet, and now the esquire, stood forth a candidate to blazon his shield by knighthood—the accomplished gentleman of these Gothic days, and right learned too, if he can con his Bible and read his romance. Enchanting mirror of all chivalry! if he invent songs and set them to his own melodies. Yet will the gentle “batchelor” he dreaming on some gallant feat of arms, or some martial achievement, whereby “to win his spurs.” On his solemn entrance into the church, laying his sword upon the altar, he resumed it by the oath which for ever bound him to defend the church and the churchmen. Thus all human affairs then were rounded by the ecclesiastical orbit, out of which no foot dared to stray. All began and all ended as the romances which formed his whole course of instruction—with the devotion which seemed to have been addressed to man as much as to Heaven.

After the termination of the Crusades, the grand incident in the life of the Baron was a pilgrimage to the holy city of Jerusalem; what the penitent of the Cross had failed to conquer, it seemed a consolation to kneel at and to weep over: a custom not obsolete so late as the reigns of our last Henries; and still, though less publicly avowed, the melancholy Jerusalem witnesses the Hebrew and the Christian performing some secret vow, to grieve with a contrition which it seems they do not feel at home.

In these peregrinations a lordly Briton might chance to find some French or Italian knight as rash and as haughty; it was a law in chivalry that a knight should not give way to any man who demanded it as a right, nor decline the single combat with any knight under the sun; a challenge could not therefore be avoided. But a pas d’armes was not always a friendly invitation, for often under the guise of chivalry was concealed the national hostility of the parties.

But when no crusade nor pilgrimage in the East, nor predatory excursion in the West, nor even the blazonry of a tournament, which fed his eyes with a picture of battle, summoned to put on his mail-coat, how was the vacant Lord to wear out his monotonous days in his castle of indolence? The domestic fool stood beside him, archly sad, or gravely mirthful, as his master willed, with a proverb or a quip; and, with his licensed bauble, was the most bitterly wisest man in the castle. Patron of the costly manuscript which he could not himself read, the romancer of his household awaited his call; the great then had fabulators or tale-tellers, as royalty has now, by title of their office—its readers. But this Lord was too vigorous for repose, and the tranquillity of chess was too trying for his brain; the chess-board was often broken about the head of some mute dependent, or perchance on one who returned the dagger for the board. There was little peace for his restlessness, when, weary in his seat, his priceless Norway hawk perched above his head,2 and his idle hounds spread over the floor, ceaselessly reminded him of those wide and frowning forests which were continually encroaching on the tillage of the contemned agriculturist, offering a mimetic war, not only against the bird and the beast, but man himself; for the lairs of the forest concealed the deer he chased, and often the bandit who chased the Lord—the terrible Lord of this realm of wood and water, where, whoever would fowl a bird or strike a buck, might have his eyes torn from their sockets, or on the spot of his offence mount the instant gallows.3

There was a disorderly grandeur about the castellated mansion which should have required the ukase of this Sovereign of many leagues, surrounded by many hundreds of his retainers; but rarely the cry of the oppressed was allowed to disturb the Lord, while all within were exact in their appointments, as clock-work movements which were wound up in the government of these immense domestic establishments. Great families had their “household books,” and in some the illegible hand of the lordly master himself, when the day arrived that even barons were incited to scriptural attempts, may yet be seen.4 These nobles, it appears, were more select in their falconer and their chef de cuisine than in their domestic tutor, for such there was among the retainers of the household. This humiliated sage, indeed, in his own person was a model for the young varlets, on whom it was his office to inculcate that patient suppleness and profound reverence for their Lord and their superiors, which seemed to form the single principle of their education. At this period we find a domestic proverb which evidently came from the buttery. As then eight or ten tables were to be daily covered, it is probable the chivalric epicures sometimes found their tastes disappointed by the culinary artists; it would seem that this put them into sudden outbreakings of ill-humour, for the proverb records that “the minstrels are often beaten for the faults of the cooks.”

Too much leisure, too many loungers, and the tedium of prolonged banquets, a want of the pleasures of the luxurious sedentary would be as urgent as in ages more intellectual and refined; those pleasures in which we participate though we are passive, receiving the impressions without any exertion of our own—pleasures which make us delighted auditors or spectators. The theatre was not yet raised, but the listlessness of vacuity gave birth to all the variegated artists of revelry. If they had not comedy itself, they abounded with the comic, and without tragedy the tragic often moved their emotions. Nor were they even then without their scenical illusions, marvels which came and vanished, as the Tregetour clapped his hands—enchantments! which though Chaucer opined to be only “natural magic,” all the world tremblingly enjoyed as the work of devils; a sensation which we have totally lost in the necromancy of our pantomimes. And thus it was that in the illumed hall of the feudal Lord we discover a whole dramatic company; which, however dissimilar in their professional arts, were all enlisted under the indefinite class of Minstrels; for in the domestic state of society we are now recalling, the poetic minstrel must be separated from those other minstrels of very different acquirements, with whom, however, he was associated.

There were minstrels who held honourable offices in the great households, sometimes chosen for their skill and elocution to perform the dignified service of heralds, and were in the secret confidence of their Lord; these were those favourites of the castle, whose guerdon was sometimes as romantic as any incident in their own romance.

No festival, public or private, but there the minstrel poet was its crowning ornament. They awakened national themes in the presence of assembled thousands at the installation of an abbot, or the reception of a bishop.5 Often, in the Gothic hall, they resounded some lofty “Geste,” or some old “Breton” lay, or with some gayer Fabliau, indulging the vein of an improvvisatore, altering the old story when wanting a new one. Delightful rhapsodists, or amusing tale-tellers, combining the poetic with the musical character, they displayed the influence of the imagination over a rude and unlettered race—

——They tellen Tales Both of WEEPYING and of Game.

Chaucer has portrayed the rapture of a minstrel excited by his harp, a portrait evidently after the life.

Somewhat he lisped for his wantonness To make the English swete upon his tonge; And in his Harping when that he had songe, His Eyen twinkled in his Hed aright, As don the Sterrés in a frosty night.

The minstrel more particularly delighted “the Lewed,” or the people, when, sitting in their fellowship, the harper stilled their attention by some fragment of a chronicle of their fathers and their father-land. The family harper touched more personal sympathies; the ancestral honours of the baron made even the vassal proud—domestic traditions and local incidents deepened their emotions—the moralising ditty softened their mind with thought, and every county had its legend at which the heart of the native beat. Of this minstrelsy little was written down, but tradition lives through a hundred echoes, and the “reliques of ancient English poetry,” and the minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, and some other remains, for the greater part have been formed by so many metrical narratives and fugitive effusions.

There were periods in which the minstrels were so highly favoured that they were more amply rewarded than the clergy—a circumstance which induced Warton to observe with more truth than acuteness, that “in this age, as in more enlightened times, the people loved better to be pleased than to be instructed.”6 Such was their fascination and their passion for “Largesse!” that they were reproached with draining the treasury of a prince. It is certain that this thoughtless race have suffered from the evil eye of the monkish chroniclers, who looked on the minstrels as their rivals in sharing the prodigality of the great; yet even their monkish censors relented whenever these revellers appeared. It was a festive day among so many joyless ones when the minstrel band approached the lone monastery. Then the sweet-toned Vielle, or the merry Rebeck, echoed in the hermit-hearts of the slumbering inmates; vaulters came tumbling about, jugglers bewitched their eyes, and the grotesque Mime, who would not be outdone by his tutored ape. Then came the stately minstrel, with his harp borne before him by his smiling page, usually called “The Minstrel’s Boy.” One of the brotherhood has described the strolling troop, who

Walken fer and wyde, Her, and ther, in every syde, In many a diverse londe.

The easy life of these ambulatory musicians, their ample gratuities, and certain privileges which the minstrels enjoyed both here and among our neighbours, corrupted their manners, and induced the dissipated and the reckless to claim those privileges by assuming their title. A disorderly rabble of minstrels crowded every public assembly, and haunted the private abode. At different periods the minstrels were banished the kingdom, in England and in France; but their return was rarely delayed. The people could not be made to abandon these versatile dispensers of solace, amid their own monotonous cares.

At different periods minstrels appear to have been persons of great wealth—a circumstance which we discover by their votive religious acts in the spirit and custom of those days. The Priory of St. Bartholomew in Smithfield, in 1102, was founded by “Rahere,” the king’s minstrel, who is described as “a pleasant-witted gentleman,” such as we may imagine a wealthy minstrel, and moreover “the king’s,” ever to have been.7 In St. Mary’s Church at Beverley, in Yorkshire, stands a noble column covered with figures of minstrels, inscribed, “This Pillar made the Minstrels;” and at Paris, a chapel dedicated to St. Julian of the Minstrels, was erected by them, covered with figures of minstrels bearing all the instruments of music used in the middle ages, where the violin or fiddle is minutely sculptured.8

If in these ages of romance and romancers the fair sex were rarely approached without the devotion of idolatry, whenever “the course of true love” altered—when the frail spirit loved too late and should not have loved, the punishment became more criminal than the crime; for there was more of selfish revenge and terrific malignity than of justice, when autocratical man became the executioner of his own decree. The domestic chronicles of these times exhibit such harrowing incidents as those of La Châtelaine de Vergy, where suddenly a scene of immolation struck through the devoted household; or that of “La Dame du Fayel,”9 who was made to eat her lover’s heart. And those who had not to punish, but to put to trial, the affections of women who were in their power, had their terrible caprices, a ferocity in their barbarous loves. Year after year the Gothic lord failed to subdue the immortalised patience of Griselda, and such was our “Childe Waters,” who put to such trials of passion, physical and mental, the maiden almost a mother. In the fourteenth century, one century later than the histories of the “Châtelaine” and the “Dame,” either the female character was sometimes utterly dissolute, or the tyranny of husbands utterly reckless, when we find that it was no uncommon circumstance that women were strangled by masked assassins, or walking by the riverside were plunged into it. This drowning of women gave rise to a popular proverb—“It is nothing! only a woman being drowned.” La Fontaine, probably without being aware of this allusion to a practice of the fourteenth century, has preserved the proverbial phrase in his “La Femme noyée,” beginning,

Je ne suis pas de ceux qui disent ce n’est rien, C’est une Femme qui se noye!10

The personages and the manners here imperfectly sketched, constituted the domestic life of our chivalric society from the twelfth century to the first civil wars of England. In this long interval few could read; even bishops could not always write; and the Gothic baron pleaded the privilege of a layman for not doing the one nor the other.

The intellectual character of the nation can only be traced in the wandering minstrel and the haughty ecclesiastic. The minstrel mingling with all the classes of society reflected all their sympathies, and in reality was one of the people themselves; but the ecclesiastic stood apart, too sacred to be touched, while his very language was not that either of the noble or of the people.

A dense superstition overshadowed the land from the time of the first crusade to the last. It may be doubtful whether there was a single Christian in all Christendom, for a new sort of idolatry was introduced in shrines, and relics, and masses; holy wells, awful exorcisms, saintly vigils, month’s minds, pilgrimages afar and penances at home; lamp-lighting before shrines decked with golden images, and hung with votive arms and legs of cripples who recovered from their rheumatic ails. The enthusiasm for the figure of the cross conferred a less pure sanctity on that memorial of pious tribulation. Everywhere it was placed before them. The crusader wore that sign on his right shoulder, and when his image lay extended on his tomb, the crossed legs were reverently contemplated. They made the sign of the cross by the motion of their hand, in peril or in pleasure, in sorrow and in sin, and expected no happy issue in an adventure without frequently signing themselves with the cross. The cross was placed at the beginning and at the end of their writings and inscriptions, and it opened and closed the alphabet. The mystical virtues of the cross were the incessant theme of the Monachal Orders, and it was kissed in rapture on the venal indulgence expedited by the papal Hierophant. As even in sacred things novelty and fashion will perversely put in their claim, we find the writers and sculptors varying the appearance of the cross; its simple form became inclosed in a circle , and again varied by dots .11 The guardian cross protected a locality; and in England, at the origin of parishes, the cross stood as the hallowed witness which marked the boundaries, and which it had been sacrilege to disturb. It was no unusual practice to place the sign at the head of private letters, however trivial the contents, as we find it in charters and other public documents. In one of the Paston letters, the piety of the writer at a much later period could not detail the ordinary occurrences of the week without inserting the sacred letters I.H.S.; and similar invocations are found in others.12

The material symbol of Christianity had thus been indiscriminately adopted without conveying with it the virtues of the Gospel. The cross was a myth—the cross was the Fetish13 of an idolatrous Christianity—they bowed before it, they knelt to it, they kissed it, they kissed a palpable and visible deity; never was the Divinity rendered more familiar to the gross understandings of the vulgar; and in these ages of unchristian Christianity, the cross was degraded even to a vulgar mark, which conveniently served for the signature of some unlettered baron.

1 St. Palaye, to whom we owe the ideal of chivalry, has truly observed, “Toutes les vertus recommandées par la Chevalerie tournoient au bien public, au profit de l’Etat.” It was when the causes of its institution ceased, and nothing remained but its forms without its motive, that altered manners could safely ridicule some noble qualities which, though now displaced, have not always found equal substitutes. In the advancement of society we may count some losses.

2 I recollect this trait in Chaucer. The Norway hawk was among the most valuable articles of property, valued at a sum equal to £300 of the present day.—Nicholls, “History of Leicestershire,” xxxix.

3 The Norman William punished men with loss of eyes for taking his venery.—Selden’s notes to “Drayton’s Polyolbion,” Song ii.

An instant execution of two youths by the gamekeepers, at the command of their Lord, appears in an ancient romance recently published in France.—Journal des Savans, 1838.

4 A curious specimen of these “Household Books,” though of a later period, is that of the Northumberland family, printed by Bishop Percy. Many exist in manuscript, and contain particulars more valuable than the prices of commodities, for which they are usually valued; they offer striking pictures of the manners of their age. [The Wardrobe accounts of Edward the Fourth, the Privy Purse expenses of Edward IV. and Henry VIII., have been since published by Sir Harris Nicolas; and those of the Princess Mary, afterwards Queen, by Sir Frederick Madden. The judicious notes and dissertations of these editors render them of much use in illustration of the history of each era.—Ed.]

5 “Warton,” i. 94.

6 “Warton,” ii. 412.

7 Stowe’s “Survey by Strype,” book iii. 235. We might wish to learn the authority of Stowe for ascribing this “pleasant wit” to Rahere of the eleventh century! As the pen of venerable Stowe never moved idly, our antiquary must have had some information which is now lost. “The king’s minstrel” is also a doubtful designation: was the founder of this priory “a king of the minstrels?” an office which the French also had, Roy des Ménéstraulx, a governor instituted to keep order among all minstrels. Our Rahere, however “pleasant-witted,” seems to have fallen into penance for his “wit,” for he became the first prior.

8 Antiquités Nationales, par Millin, xli. Two plates exhibit this Gothic chapel and the various musical instruments.

9 Both these romantic tales may be considered as authentic narratives, though they have often been used by the writers of fiction. La Châtelaine de Vergy has been sometimes confounded with Le Châtelaine de Coucy, the lover of La Dame du Fayel. The story of the Countess of Tergy (on which a romance of the thirteenth century is founded, Hist. Litt. de France, xviii. 779) has been a favourite with the tale-tellers—the Queen of Navarre, Bandello, and Belle Forest, and is elegantly versified in the “Fabliaux, or Tales,” of Way. That of the Dame du Fayel, one of the fathers of French literary history, old Fauchet, extracted it from a good old chronicle dated two centuries before he wrote. The story is also found in an ancient romance of the thirteenth century, in the Royal Library of France.—Hist. Litt. de la France, xiv. 589; xvii. 644. The story of Childe Waters in Percy’s Collection has all the pathetic simplicity of ancient minstrelsy, which is more forcibly felt when we compare it with the rifaccimento by a Mrs. Pye, in Evans’s Old Ballads.

10 Montaigne was so well acquainted with this practice, that he has used it as a familiar illustration of the obstinacy of some women—which I suppose the good man imagined could not be paralleled by instances from the masculine sex; however, his language must not be disguised by a modern version. “Celui qui forgea le conte de la femme qui, pour aucune correction de ménaces et bastonnades, ne cessait d’appeler son mari, Pouilleux, et qui, précipité dans l’eau, haussoit encore, en s’étouffant, les mains et faisoit au-dessus de sa tête signe de tuer des poux, forgea un conte duquel en vérité tous les jours on voit l’image expresse de l’opiniâtreté des femmes.”

The punishment of our “Ducking-stool” for female brawlers possibly originated in this medieval practice of throwing women into the river: but this is but an innocuous baptism, while we find the obstinate wife here, who probably spoke true enough, s’étouffant—merely for correcting the filthy lubbard, her lord and master.

11 Leland’s “Itinerary,” ii. 126.

12 Paston’s “Letters,” v. 17.

13 See the very curious chapter on the “Fetish Worship,” in that very original and learned work “The Doctor,” v. 133.

GOTHIC ROMANCES.

A new species of literature arose in the progress of that practical education which society had assumed; a literature addressed to the passions which rose out of the circumstances of the times; dedicated to war, to love, and to religion, when the business of life seemed restricted to the extreme indulgence of those ennobling pursuits. In too much love, too much war, too much devotion, it was not imagined that knights and ladies could ever err. If sometimes the loves were utterly licentious, wondrous tales are told of their immaculate purity; if their religion were then darkened by the grossest superstition, their faith was genuine, and would have endured martyrdom; and if the chivalric valour often exulted in its ferocity and its rapacity, its generous honour amid a lawless state of society maintained justice in the land, by the lance which struck the oppressor, and by the shield which covered the helpless.

Everything had assumed a more extended form: the pageantry of society had varied and multiplied; the banquet was prolonged; the festival day was frequent; the ballad narrative, or the spontaneous lyric, which had sufficed their ruder ancestors to allure attention, now demanded more volume and more variety; the romance with a deeper interest was to revolve in the entangling narrative of many thousand lines. There was a traditional store, a stock of fabling in hand, heroical panegyrics, satirical songs, and legendary ballads; all served as the stuff for the looms of mightier weavers of rhyme, whose predecessors had left them this inheritance. The marvellous of Romance burst forth, and this stupendous fabric of invention bewitched Europe during three centuries.

Romance, from the light fabliau to the voluminous fiction, has admitted, in the luxury of our knowledge and curiosity, not only of critical investigation, but of its invention, by tracing it to a single source. The origin of Romance has been made to hinge on a theoretical history; and by maintaining exclusive systems, mostly fanciful and partly true, it has been made complicate. Whether invention in the form of Romance came from the oriental tale-teller or the Scandinavian Scald, or whether the fictions of Europe be the growth of the Provençal or the Armorican soil, our learned inquirers have each told; nor have they failed in considerably diminishing the claims of each particular system opposed to their own; but the greatest error will be found in their mutual refutations.1 While each stood entrenched in an exclusive system, they were only furnishing an integral portion of a boundless and complicate inquiry. They scrutinised with microscopic eyes into that vast fabric of invention, which the Gothic genius may proudly oppose to the fictions of antiquity, and they seemed at times forgetful of the vicissitudes which, at distant intervals, and by novel circumstances, enlarged and modified the changeful state of romantic fiction among every people.

In the attempt to retrace the Nile of Romance to a solitary source, in the eagerness of their discoveries they had not yet ascertained that this Nile bears many far-divided heads, and some from which Time shall never remove its clouds; for who dares assign an origin to the ancient Milesian tales, the tales and their origin being alike lost?2

Warton, encumbered by his theory of an Eastern origin, opened the map to track the voyage of an Arabian tale: he landed it at Marseilles, that port by which ancient Greece first held its intercourse with our Europe, and thence the tale was sent forwards through genial Italy, but forced to harbour in this voyage of Romance at the distant shores of Brittany, that land of Romance and of the ancient Briton. The result of his system startled the literary world by his assumption, that “the British history” of Geoffry of Monmouth entirely consists of Arabian inventions! the real source of the airy existence of our British Arthur! Bishop Percy had been nearly as adventurous in his Gothic origin, by landing a number of the northern bards with the army of Rollo in Normandy; an event which contributed to infuse the Scaldic genius into the romances of chivalry, whose national hero is Charlemagne—the tutelary genius of France and Germany.

They had looked to the east, and to the north—and wherever they looked for the origin of Romance it was found. They had sought in a corner of the universe for that which is universal.

Romance sprang to birth in every clime, native wherever she is found, notwithstanding that she has been a wanderer among all lands, and as prodigal a dispenser as she has been free in her borrowings and artful in her concealments.

The art of fabling may be classed among the mimetic arts—it is an aptitude of the universal and plastic faculties of our nature; and man might not be ill defined and charactered as “a mimetic and fabling animal.”

The earliest Romances appear in a metrical form about the middle of the twelfth century. The first were “Estoires,” or pretended chronicles, like that of the Brut of Wace; the Romances of martial achievement then predominated, those of the Knights of Arthur, and the Paladins of Charlemagne; the adventures of love and gallantry were of a later epoch. In the mutability of taste an extraordinary transition occurred; after nearly two centuries passed in rhyming, all the verse was to be turned into prose. Whether voluminous rhymes satiate the public ear, or novelty in the form was sought even when they had but little choice, the writers of Romance, a very flexible gentry, who of all other writers servilely accommodate themselves to the public taste, with more fluent pens loitered into a more ample page; or, as they expressed themselves, “translatés de rime en prose,” or “mis en beau langage.” Many of the old French metrical Romances, in the fourteenth century, were disguised in this humbled form; but their “mensogne magnanime,” to use Tasso’s style, who loved them, lost nothing in number or in hardihood. On the discovery of the typographic art, in the fifteenth century, many of these prose Romances in manuscript received a new life by passing through the press; and these, in their venerable “lettres Gothiques,” are still hoarded for the solace of the curious in fictions of genuine antiquity, and of invention in its prime, both at home and abroad; and in a reduced form we find them surviving among the people on the Continent. It is singular that the metrical Romances seem never to have received the honours conferred on the prose.3

These Romances, in their manuscript state, were cherished objects;4 the mighty tomes, sometimes consisting of forty or fifty thousand lines, described as those “great books of parchment,” or “the great book of Romances,” were usually embellished by the pen and the pencil with every ornament that fancy could suggest; bound in crimson velvet, guarded by clasps of silver, and studded with golden roses; profuse of gorgeous illuminations, and decorated with the most delicate miniatures, “lymned with gold of graver’s work” on an azure ground; or the purple page setting off the silvery letters;—objects then of perpetual attraction to the story-believing reader, and which now charm the eye which could not as patiently con the endless page. The fashions of the times are exactly shown in the dresses and the domestic furniture; as well as their instruments, military and musical.

Studies for the artist, as for the curious antiquary,5 we may view the plumage in a casque curved and falling with peculiar grace, and a lady’s robe floating in its amplitude; and ornaments of dress arranged, which our taste might emulate. A French amateur who possessed le Roman de la Violette, a romance of a fabulous Count of Nevers, was so deeply struck by its exquisite and faithful miniatures, that he employed the best artists to copy the most interesting, and placed them in his collection of the costume and fashions of the French nation; a collection preserved in the Royal Library of France.6 If their hard outline does not always flow into grace, their imagination worked under the mysterious influence of the Romance through all their devoted labour. In a group of figures we may observe that the heads are not mechanically cast by one mould, but the distinct character looks as if the thoughtful artist had worked out his recollections on which he had meditated. In some of the heads, portraits of distinguished persons have been recognised. Not less observable are the arabesques often found on the margins, where the playful pencil has prodigally flung flowers and fruit, imitating the bloom, or insects which look as if they had lighted on the leaf. These margins, however, occasionally exhibit arabesques of a very different character; figures or subjects which often amused the pencil of the monastic limners, satirical strokes aimed at their brothers and sisters—the monks and the nuns! I have observed a wolf, in a monk’s frock and cowl, stretching its paw to bless a cock bending its submissive head; a cat, in the habit of an abbess, holding a platter in its paws to a mouse approaching to lick it, alluding to the allurements of abbesses to draw young women into the convents; and a sow, in a nun’s veil, mounted on stilts. A pope appears to be thrown by devils into a cauldron, and cardinals are roasting on spits. All these expressions of suppressed opinion must have been executed by the monks themselves. These reformers before the Reformation sympathised with the popular feeling against the haughty prelate and the luxurious abbot.

The great Romance of Alexander, preserved in the Bodleian Library, reveals a secret of the cost of time freely bestowed on that single and mighty tome. The illuminator, by preserving the date when he had completed his own work compared with that of the transcriber when he had finished his part, appears to have employed nearly six years on the paintings which embellish this precious volume.7

Such a metrical Romance was a gift presented to royalty, when engrossed by the rapturous hand of the Romancer himself; the autograph, in a presentation copy, might count on the meed of “massy goblets” when the munificent patron found the new volume delectable to his taste, which indeed had been anticipated by the writer. This incident occurred to Froissart in presenting his Romance to Richard the Second, when, in reply to his majesty’s inquiry after the contents, the author exultingly told that “the book treated of Amour!”

To the writers of these ancient Romances we cannot deny a copious invention, a variegated imagination, and, among their rambling exuberances and their grotesque marvels, those enchanting enchantments which the Greeks and Romans only partially and coldly raised. We may often, too, discover that truth of human nature which is not always supposed to lie hid in these desultory compositions. Amid their peculiar extravagances, which at least may serve to raise an occasional smile, the strokes of nature are abundant, and may still form the studies of the writers of fiction, however they may hang on the impatience of the writers and the readers of our duodecimos. Ancient writers are pictorial: their very fault contributes to produce a remarkable effect—a fulness often overflowing, but which at least is not a scantiness leaving the vagueness of imperfect description. Their details are more circumstantial, their impressions are more vivid, and they often tell their story with the earnestness of persons who had conversed with the actors, or had been spectators of the scene. We may be wearied, as one might be at a protracted trial by the witnesses, but we are often struck by an energetic reality which we sometimes miss in their polished successors. Their copiousness, indeed, is without selection; they wrote before they were critics, but their truth is not the less truth because it is given with little art.

The dilations of the metrical Romances into tomes of prose, Warton considered as a proof of the decay of invention. Was not this censure rather the feeling of a poet for his art, than the decision of a critic? for the more extended scenes of the Romances in prose required a wider stage, admitted of a fuller dramatic effect in the incidents, and a more perfect delineation of the personages through a more sustained action. If the prose Romances are not epics by the conventional code of the Stagyrite, at least they are epical; and some rude Homers sleep among these old Romancers, metrical or prosaic. A living poetic critic, one best skilled to arbitrate, for he is without any prepossessions in favour of our ancient writers, has honestly acknowledged their faithfulness to nature in their touching simplicity; “nor,” he adds, “do they less afford, by their bolder imagination, adequate subjects for the historical pencil.” And he has more particularly noticed “Le bone Florence de Rome,”—thus written by our ungrammatical minstrels. “Classical poetry has scarcely ever conveyed in shorter boundaries so many interesting and complicated events as may be found in this good old Romance.”8 This indeed is so true, that we find these romantic tales were not only recited or read, but their subjects were worked into the tapestries which covered the walls of their apartments. The Bible and the Romance equally offered subjects to eyes learned in the “Estoires” never to be forgotten.

Our master poets have drawn their waters from these ancient fountains. Sidney might have been himself one of their heroes, and was no unworthy rival of his masters: Spenser borrowed largely, and repaid with munificence: Milton in his loftiest theme looked down with admiration on this terrestrial race,

————and what resounds In fable or romance of Uther’s son, Begirt with British or Armoric knights.

“In ‘Amadis of Gaul,’ ” has said our true laureate, “may be found the Zelmane of the ‘Arcadia,’ the Masque of Cupid of the ‘Faery Queen,’ and the Florizel of the ‘Winter’s Tale.’ Sidney, Spenser, and Shakspeare imitated this book: was ever book honoured by three such imitators?”9

A great similarity is observable among these writers of fiction, both in their incidents and the identity of their phrases; an evidence that these inventors were often drawing from a common source. In these ages of manuscripts they practised without scruple many artifices, and might safely appropriate the happiest passages of their anonymous brothers.10 One Romance would produce many by variations; the same story would serve as the groundwork of another: and the later Romancer, to set at rest the scruples of the reader, usually found fault with his predecessors, who, having written the same story, had not given “the true one!” By this innocent imposture, or this ingenious impudence, they designed to confer on their Romance the dignity of History. The metrical Romances pretend to translate some ancient “Cronik” which might be consulted at Caerleon, the magical palace of the vanished Arthur: or they give their own original Romance as from some “Latyn auctour,” whose name is cautiously withheld; or they practise other devices, pretending to have drawn their work from “the Greek,” or “the English,” and even from an “unknown language.” In some Colophons of the prose Romances the names of real persons are assigned as the writers;11 but the same Romance is equally ascribed to different persons, and works are given as translations which in fact are originals. Amid this prevailing confusion, and these contradictory statements, we must agree with the editor of Warton, that we cannot with any confidence name the author of any of these prose Romances. Ritson has aptly treated these pseudonymous translators as “men of straw.” We may say of them all as the antiquary Douce, in the agony of his baffled researches after one of their favourite authorities, a Will o’ the Wisp named Lollius, exclaimed, somewhat gravely—“Of Lollius it will become every one to speak with diffidence.” Ariosto seems to have caught this bantering humour of mystifying his readers in his own Gothic Romance, gravely referring his extravagances to “the Chronicle of the pseudo Archbishop Turpin” for his voucher! What was with the Italian but a playful stroke of satire on the pretended verity of Turpin himself, may have covered a more serious design with these ancient romance-writers. Père Menestrier ascribed these productions to Heralds, who, he says, were always selected for their talents, their knowledge and their experience; qualifications not the most essential for romance-writing. “According to the bad taste of those ignorant ages,” he proceeds, “it is from them so many Romances on feats of arms and on chivalry issued, by which they designed to elevate their own office, and to celebrate their voyages in different lands.”12 St. Palaye, in adopting this notion of these Heraldical Romancers, with more knowledge of the ancient Romancers than the good Father possessed, has added a more numerous body, the Trouvères, who, either in rehearsing or in composing these poetical narratives, might urge a stronger claim.

When Père Menestrier imagined that it was the intention of these Heralds, by these Romances, “to celebrate their voyages in different lands,” it seems to have escaped him that “the voyages” of these Romancers to the visionary Caerleon, to England, or to Macedonia, were but a geography of Fairy Land.

In the History of Literature we here discover a whole generation of writers, who, so far from claiming the honour of their inventions, or aspiring after the meed of fame, have even studiedly concealed their claims, and, with a modesty and caution difficult to comprehend, dropped into their graves without a solitary commemoration.

These idling works of idlers must have been the pleasant productions of persons of great leisure, with some tincture of literature, and to whom, by the peculiarity of their condition, fame was an absolute nullity. Who were these writers who thus contemned fame? Who pursued the delicate tasks of the illuminator and the calligrapher? Who adorned Psalters with a religious patience, and expended a whole month in contriving the vignette of an initial letter? Who were these artists who worked for no gain? In those ages the ecclesiastics were the only persons who answer to this character; and it would only be in the silence and leisure of the monastery that such imaginative genius and such refined art could find their dwelling-place. I have sometimes thought that it was Père Hardouin’s conviction of all this literary industry of the monks which led him to indulge his extravagant conjecture, that the classical writings of antiquity were the fabrications of this sedentary brotherhood; and his “pseudo-Virgilius” and “pseudo-Horatius” astonished the world, though they provoked its laughter.

The Gothic mediæval periods were ages of imagination, when in art works of amazing magnitude were produced, while the artists sent down no claims to posterity. We know not who were the numerous writers of these voluminous Romances, but, what is far more surprising, we are nearly as unacquainted with those great and original architects who covered our land with the palatial monastery, the church, and the cathedral. In the religious societies themselves the genius of the Gothic architect was found: the bishop or the abbot planned while they opened their treasury; and the sculptor and the workmen were the tenants of the religious house. The devotion of labour and of faith raised these wonders, while it placed them beyond the unvalued glory which the world can give.13

We cannot think less than Père Hardouin that there were no poetical and imaginative monks—Homers in cowls, and Virgils who chanted vespers—who could compose in their unoccupied day more beautiful romances than their crude legends, or the dry annals of the Leiger book of their abbey. Some knowledge these writers had of the mythological, and even the Homeric and Virgilian fictions, for they often gave duplicates of the classical fables of antiquity. Circe was a fair sorceress, the one-eyed Polyphemus a dread giant, and Perseus bestrode a winged dragon, before they were reflected in romances. But what we discover peculiar in these works is a strange mixture of sacred and profane matters, always treated in a manner which scents of the cloister. Before he enters the combat, the knight is often on his knees, invoking his patron-saint; he proffers his vows on holy relics; while ladies placed in the last peril, or the most delicate positions, by their fervent repetitions of the sign of the cross, or a vow to found an abbey, are as certainly saved: and for another refined stroke of the monachal invention, the heroes often close their career in a monastery or a hermitage. The monkish morality which sat loosely about them was, however, rigid in its ceremonial discipline. Lancelot de Lac leaves the bed of the guilty Genevra, the Queen of the good king Arthur, at the ring of the matin-bell, to assist at mass; so scrupulous were such writers that even in criminal levities they should not neglect all the offices of the Church. The subject of one of these great romances is a search after the cup which held the real blood of Christ; and this history of the Sang-real forms a series of romances. Who but a monk would have thought, and even dared to have written it down, that all the circumstances in this romance were not only certain, but were originally set down by the hand of Jesus himself? and further dared to observe, that Jesus never wrote but twice before—the Lord’s Prayer, and the sentence on the woman taken in adultery. Such a pious, or blasphemous fraud, was not unusual among the dark fancies of the monastic legendaries.

Some of these Homers must have left their lengthening Iliad, as Homer himself seems to have done, unfinished; tired, or tiring, for no doubt there was often a rehearsal, “the tale half told” was resumed by some Elisha who caught the mantle his more inspired predecessor had let fall. It appears evident that several were the continuators of a favourite romance; and from deficient attention or deficient skill a fatal discrepancy has been detected in the identical characters—the ordinary fate of those who write after the ideas of another, with indistinct conceptions, or with fancies going contrary to those of the first inventor.

These metrical romances in manuscript, and the printed prose in their original editions, are now very costly. By the antiquary and the poet these tomes may be often opened. With the antiquary they have served as the veritable registers of their ages. The French antiquaries, and Carte in England, have often illustrated by those ancient romances many obscure points in geography and history. Except in the mere machinery of their fancy, these writers had no motive to pervert leading facts, for these served to give a colour of authenticity to their pretended history, or to fix their locality. As they had not the erudition to display, nor were aware of the propriety of copying, the customs and manners of the age of their legendary hero, they have faithfully transmitted their own; we should never have had but for this lucky absurdity the “Tale of Thebes” turned into a story of the middle ages; while Alexander the Great is but the ideal of a Norman baron in the splendour and altitude of the conception of the writers. It was the ignorance of the illuminators of our Latin and Saxon manuscripts of any other country than their own which enabled Strutt to place before the eye a pictorial exhibition of our Anglo-Saxon fathers. Compared with the realities of these originals, with all their faults of tediousness, the modern copiers of ancient times, in their mock scenes of other ages, too often reflect in the cold moonlight of their fancy a shadowy unsubstantial antiquity.

The influence of these fabulous achievements of unconquerable heroes and of self-devoted lovers over the intellect and the passions of men and women, during that vast interval of time when they formed the sole literature, was omnipotent. In the early romances of chivalry, when their genius was purely military, and directed to kindle a passion for joining the crusades, we rarely find adventures of the tender passion; but, since women cannot endure neglect, and the female character has all the pliancy of sympathy, and has performed her part in every age on the theatre of society, we discover the extraordinary fact that many ladies assumed the plumy helmet and dexterously managed the lance. The ladies rode amid armed knights resistless as themselves. It was subsequently, when we find that singularly fantastic institution of “The Courts of Love,” which delivered their “Arrets” in the style of a most refined jurisprudence, that these beautiful companions-at-arms were satisfied to conquer the conquerors by more legitimate seductions, and that the romances told of little but of loves. Ariosto and Tasso are supposed to have drawn their female warriors from the Amazonian Penthesilea and the Camilla of Homer and Virgil; but it would seem that the prototype of these feminine knights these poets also found among those old romances which they loved.

It is unquestionable that these martial romances of chivalry inflamed the restlessness of those numerous military adventurers who found an ample field for their chivalry after the crusades, in our continued incursions into France, of which country we were long a living plague, from the reign of Edward III. to that of Henry V., nearly a century of national tribulation. Many “a gentyl and noble esquyer,” if perchance the English monarch held a truce with France or Scotland, flew into some foreign service. Sir Robert Knolles was known to the French as “le véritable démon de la guerre;” and Sir John Hawkwood, when there was no fighting to be got at home, passed over into Italy, where he approved himself to be such a prodigy of “a man-at-arms,” that the grateful Florentines raised his statue in their cathedral; this image of English valour may still be proudly viewed. This chivalric race of romance-readers were not, however, always of the purest “order of chivalry.” If they were eager for enterprise, they were not less for its more prudential results. A castle or a ransom in France, a lordly marriage, or a domain in Italy, were the lees that lie at the bottom of their glory.

We continued long in this mixed state of glory clouded with barbarism; for at a time when literature and the fine arts were on the point of breaking out into the splendour of the pontificate of Leo the Tenth, in our own country the great Duke of Buckingham, about 1500, held the old romance of “The Knight of the Swan” in the highest estimation, because the translator maintained that our duke was lineally descended from that hero; the first peer of the realm was proud of deriving his pedigree from a fabulous knight in a romantic genealogy.

But all the inventions and fashions of man have their date and their termination. For three centuries these ancient romances, metrical or prose, had formed the reading of the few who read, and entranced the circle of eager listeners. The enchantment was on the wane; their admirers had become somewhat sceptical of “the true history” which had been so solemnly warranted; another taste in the more chastened writings of Roman and Grecian lore was now on the ascendant. One last effort was made in this decline of romantic literature, in that tesselated compilement where the mottled pieces drawn out of the French prose romances of chivalry were finely squared together by no unskilful workman, in Sir Thomas Malory, to the English lover of ancient romance well known by the title of La Morte d’Arthur. This last of these ancient romances was finished in the ninth year of the reign of Edward IV., about 1470. Caxton exulted to print this epical romance; and at the same time he had the satisfaction of reproaching the “laggard” age. “What do ye now,” exclaimed the ancient printer, “but go to the Bagnes, and play at dice? Leave this! leave it! and read these noble volumes.” Volumes which not many years after, when a new system of affairs had occurred to supplant this long-idolised “order of chivalry,” Roger Ascham plainly asserted only taught “open manslaughter and bold bawdry.” Such was the final fate of Love and Arms!