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In the present chapter we shall endeavour to treat two divisions of actual novel- or at least fiction-writing—strikingly opposed to each other in character; and a third subject, to include which in the title would have made that title too long, and which is not strictly a branch of novel-writing, but which had perhaps as important an influence on the progress of the novel itself as anything mentioned or to be mentioned in all this History. The first division is composed of the followers—sometimes in the full, always in the chronological sense—of Rabelais, a not very strong folk as a rule, but including one brilliant example of co-operative work, and two interesting, if in some degree problematical, persons. The second, strikingly contrasting with the general if not the universal tendency of the first, is the great translated group of Amadis romances, which at once revived romance of the older kind itself, and exercised a most powerful, if not an actually generative, influence on newer forms which were themselves to pass into the novel proper. The third is the increasing body of memoir- and anecdote-writers who, with Brantôme at their head, make actual personages and actual events the subjects of a kind of story-telling, not perhaps invariably of unexceptionable historic accuracy, but furnishing remarkable situations of plot and suggestions of character, together with abundant new examples of the "telling" faculty itself.

Subsidiary importance of Brantôme and other character-mongers.

The last point, as an apparent digression but really a most important contribution to the History, may perhaps be discussed and dismissed first. All persons who have even a slight knowledge of French literature must be aware how early and how remarkable are its possessions in what is vaguely called the "Memoir" department. There is nothing at the time, in any modern literature known to the present writer, similar to Villehardouin, or a little later to Joinville—one might almost say that there is nothing in any literature at any time superior, if there be anything equal, in its kind to Froissart. In the first two cases there is pure personal experience; in the third there is, of course, a certain amount of precedent writing on the subject for guidance, and a large gathering of information by word of mouth. But in all these, and to a less extent in others up to the close of the fifteenth century, there is the indefinable gift of treatment—of "telling a story." In Villehardouin this gift may be almost wholly, and in principle very mainly, limited to the two great subjects which made the mediaeval end as far as profane matters were concerned—fighting and counselling; but this is by no means the case in Froissart, whom one is sometimes tempted to regard as a Sir Walter Scott thrown away upon base reality.

With the sixteenth century this gift once more burgeoned and spread itself out—dealing, indeed, very mainly with the somewhat ungrateful subject of the religious disputes and wars, but flowering or fruiting into the unsurpassable gossip—though gossip is too undignified a word—of Pierre de Bourdeilles, Abbé de Brantôme, that Froissart and Pepys in one, with the noble delight in noble things of the first, inextricably united to the almost innocent shamelessness of the second, and a narrative gift equal to that of either in idiosyncrasy, and ranging beyond the subjects of both. Himself a soldier and a courtier (his abbacy, like many others, was purely titular and profitable—not professional in the least), his favourite subjects in literature, and obviously his idols in life, were great soldiers and fair ladies, "Bayard and the two Marguerites," as some one has put it. And his vivid irregular fashion of writing adapts itself with equal ease to a gallant feat of arms and a ferocious, half-cut-throat duel, to an exquisite piece of sentimental passion like that which tells us the story how the elder Queen of Navarre rebuked the lover carelessly stepping over the grave of his dead mistress, and to an unquotable anecdote to parallel the details of which, in literature of high rank, one must go to Rabelais himself, to Martial, or to Aristophanes. But, whatever the subject, the faculty of lively communication remains unaltered, and the suggestion of its transference from fact (possibly a little coloured) to pure fiction becomes more and more possible and powerful.[110]

The Heptameron.

No book has been more subject to the "insupportable advances" of the "key"-monger than the Heptameron, and the rage for identifying has gone so far that the pretty old name of "Emarsuite" for one of the characters has been discarded for an alleged and much uglier "Ennasuite," which is indeed said to have MS. authority, but which is avowedly preferred because it can be twisted into "Anne à Suite" ("Anne in Waiting"), and so can be fastened to an actual Maid of Honour of Marguerite's. It is only fair, however, to admit that something of the kind is at least suggested by the book itself. Even by those who do not trouble themselves in the least about the personages who may or may not have been disguised under the names of Nomerfide (the Neifile of this group) and Longarine, Saffredent and Dagoucin and Gebron (Geburon they call him now), admit the extreme probability of the Queen having invited identification of herself with Parlamente, the younger matron of the party, and of Hircan her husband with the King of Navarre.[111] But some (among whom is the present writer) think that this delightful and not too well-fated type of Renaissance amorousness, letteredness, and piety combined made a sort of dichotomy of herself here, and intended the personage of Oisille, the elder duenna (though by no means a very stern one) of the party, to stand for her as well as Parlamente—to whom one really must give the Italian pronunciation to get her out of the abominable suggestion of our "talking-machine."

Character and "problems."

A much more genuinely literary question has been raised and discussed as to the exact authorship of the book. That it is entirely Marguerite's, not the most jealous admirers of the Queen need for a moment contend. She is known to have had a sort of literary court from Marot and Rabelais downwards, some of the members of which were actually resident with her, and not a few of whom—such as Boaistuau and Le Maçon, the translators of Bandello and Boccaccio, and Bonaventure Despériers (v. inf.)—were positive experts in the short story. Moreover, the custom of distributing these collections among different speakers positively invited collaboration in writing. The present critic and his friend, Mr. Arthur Tilley of King's College, Cambridge, who has long been our chief specialist in the literature of the French Renaissance, are in an amicable difference as to the part which Despériers in particular may have played in the Heptameron; but this is of no great importance here, and though Marguerite's other literary work is distinctly inferior in style, it is not impossible that the peculiar tone of the best parts of it, especially as regards the religious-amorous flavour, was infused by her or under her direct influence. The enthusiasm of Rabelais and Marot; the striking anecdote already mentioned which Brantôme, whose mother had been one of Marguerite's maids of honour, tells us, and one or two other things, suggest this; for Despériers was more of a satirist than of an amorist, and though the charges of atheism brought against him are (v. inf. again) scarcely supported by his work, he was certainly no pietist. I should imagine that he revised a good deal and sometimes imparted his nervous and manly, but, in his own Contes, sometimes too much summarised style. But some striking phrases, such as "l'impossibilité de nostre chair,"[112] may be hers, and the following remarkable speech of Parlamente probably expresses her own sentiments pretty exactly. It is very noteworthy that Hircan, who is generally represented as "taking up" his wife's utterances with a certain sarcasm, is quite silent here.

Parlamente on human and divine love.

"Also," said Parlamente, "I have an opinion that never will a man love God perfectly if he has not perfectly loved some of God's creatures in this world." "But what do you call 'perfect loving'?" said Saffredent. "Do you reckon as perfect lovers those who are transis,[113] and who adore ladies at a distance, without daring to make their wishes known?" "I call perfect lovers," answered Parlamente, "those who seek in what they love some perfection—be it beauty, kindness, or good grace—always striving towards virtue; and such as have so high and honourable a heart, that they would not, were they to die for it, take for their object the base things which honour and conscience disapprove: for the soul, which is only created that it may return to its Sovereign Good, does naught while it is in the body but long for the attainment of this. But because the senses by which alone it can acquire information are darkened and made carnal by the sin of our first father, they can only show her the visible things which approach closest to perfection—and after these the soul runs, thinking to find in outward beauty, in visible grace, and in moral virtue, grace, beauty, and virtue in sovereign degree. But when she has sought them and tried them, and finds not in them Him whom she loves, she leaves them alone,[114] just as a child, according to his age, likes dolls and other trivialities, the prettiest he sees, and thinks a collection of pebbles actual riches, but as he grows up prefers his dolls alive, and gets together the goods necessary for human life. Yet when he knows, by still wider experience, that in earthly things there is neither perfection nor felicity, he desires to seek the Creator and the Source of these. Nevertheless, if God open not the eye of faith in him he would be in danger of becoming, instead of a merely ignorant man, an infidel philosopher.[115] For Faith alone can demonstrate and make receivable the good that the carnal and animal man cannot understand."

This gives the better Renaissance temper perhaps as well as anything to be found, and may, or should in fairness, be set against the worser tone of mere libertinage in which some even of the ladies indulge here, and still more against that savagery which has been noticed above. This undoubtedly was in Milton's mind when he talked of "Lust hard by Hate," and it makes Hircan coolly observe, after a story has been told in which an old woman successfully interferes to save a girl's chastity, that in the place of the hero he should certainly have killed the hag and enjoyed the girl. This is obviously said in no bravado, and not in the least humorously: and the spirit of it is exemplified in divers not in the least incredible anecdotes of Brantôme's in the generation immediately following, and of Tallemant des Réaux in the next. The religiosity displayed is of a high temper of Christian Platonism, and we cannot, as we can elsewhere, say what the song says of something else, that "it certainly looks very queer." The knights and ladies do go to mass and vespers; but to say that they go punctually would be altogether erroneous, for Hircan makes wicked jokes on his and Parlamente's being late for the morning office, and, on one occasion at least, they keep the unhappy monks of the convent where they are staying (who do not seem to dare to begin vespers without them) waiting a whole hour while they are finishing not particularly edifying stories. The less complaisant casuists, even of the Roman Church, would certainly look askance at the piety of the distinguished person (said by tradition to have been King Francis himself) who always paid his respects to Our Lady on his way to illegitimate assignations, and found himself the better therefor on one occasion of danger. But the tone of our extract is invariably that of Oisille and Parlamente. The purer love part of the matter is a little, as the French themselves say, "alembicated." But still the whole is graceful and fascinating, except for a few pieces of mere passionless coarseness, which Oisille generally reproves. And it is scarcely necessary to say what large opportunities these tones and colours of fashion and "quality," of passion and manners, give to the future novelist, whose treatment shall stand to them very much as they stand to the shorter and sometimes almost shorthand written tales of Despériers himself.

Despériers.

With the Cymbalum Mundi of this rather mysterious person we need have little to do. It is, down to the dialogue-form, an obvious imitation of Lucian—a story about the ancient divinities (especially Mercury) and a certain "Book of Destiny" and talking animals, and a good deal of often rather too transparent allegory. It has had, both in its own day and since, a very bad reputation as being atheistical or at least anti-Christian, and seems really to have had something to do with the author's death, by suicide or otherwise. There need, however, be very little harm in it; and there is not very much good as a story, nor, therefore, much for us. It does not carry the art of its particular kind of fiction any further than Lucian himself, who is, being much more of a genius, on the whole a much better model, even taking him at that rather inferior rate. The Contes et Joyeux Devis, on the other hand, though the extreme brevity of some has perhaps sometimes prejudiced readers against them, have always seemed to the present writer to form the most remarkable book, as literature, of all the department at the time except Gargantua and Pantagruel and the Heptameron, and to supply a strong presumption that their author had more than a minor hand in the Heptameron itself. It must, of course, be admitted that the fashion in which they are delivered may not only offend in one direction, but may possibly mislead in another. One may read too much into the brevity, and so fall into the error of that other Englishman who was beguiled by the mysterious signs of Despériers' greatest contemporary's most original creation. But a very large and long experience of literary weighing and measuring ought to be some safeguard against the mistake of Thaumast.

Contes et Joyeux Devis.

One remarkable difference which may seem, at first sight, to be against the theory of Despériers having had a large share in the Heptameron is the contrasted and, as it may seem again at first sight, antagonistic tone of the two. There are purely comic and even farcical passages in Marguerite's book, but the general colour, as has been said, is religious-sentimental or courtly-amatory, with by no means infrequent excursions into the purely tragical. The Contes et Joyeux Devis, on the other hand, in the main continue the wholly jocular tone of the old fabliaux. But Despériers must have been, not only not the great man of letters which the somewhat exaggerated zeal of his editor, M. Louis Lacour, ranked him as being, but a very weak and feeble writer, if he could not in this way write comedy in one book and tragedy in another. In fact Rabelais gives us (as the greatest writers so often do) what is in more senses than one a master-key to the contrast. Despériers has in the Contes constant ironic qualifications and asides which may even have been directly imitated from his elder and greater contemporary; Marguerite has others which pair off in the same way with the most serious Rabelaisian "intervals," to which attention has been drawn in the last chapter. One point, however, does seem, at least to me, to emerge from the critical consideration of these two books with the other works of the Queen on the one hand and the other works of Despériers[116] on the other. It is that the latter had a much crisper and stronger style than Marguerite's own, and that he had a faculty of grave ironic satire, going deeper and ranging wider than her "sensibility" would allow. There is one on the fatal and irremediable effects of disappointing ladies in their expectations, wherein there is something more than the mere grivoiserie, which in other hands it might easily have remained. The very curious Novel XIII.—on King Solomon and the philosopher's stone and the reason of the failure of alchemy—is of quite a different type from most things in these story-collections, and makes one regret that there is not more of it, and others of the same kind. For sheer amusement, which need not be shocking to any but the straitest-laced of persons, the story (XXXIV.) of a curate completely "scoring off" his bishop (who did not observe the caution given by Ophelia to Laertes) has not many superiors in its particular kind.

Other tale-collections.

The fancy for these collections of tales spread widely in the sixteenth century, and a respectable number of them have found a home in histories of literature. Sometimes they present themselves honestly as what they are, and sometimes under a variety of disguises, the most extravagant of which is the title of the rather famous work of Henri Estienne, Apologie pour Hérodote. Others, more or less fantastic, are the Propos Rustiques and Baliverneries of Noël Du Fail, a Breton squire (as we should say), and his later Contes d'Eutrapel; the Escraignes Dijonnaises and other books of Tabourot des Accords; the Matinées and Après Dinées of Cholières, and, the largest collection of all, the Sérees [Soirées] of the Angevin Guillaume Bouchet,[117] while after the close of the actual century, but probably representing earlier work, appeared the above-mentioned Moyen de Parvenir, by turns attributed and denied to Béroalde de Verville. In all these, without exception, the imitation of Rabelais, in different but unmistakable ways, is to be found; and in not a few, that of the Heptameron and of Despériers; while not unfrequently the same tales are found in more than one collection. The fatrasie character—that is to say, the stuffing together of all sorts of incongruous matter in more or less burlesque style—is common to all of them; the licence of subject and language to most; and there are hardly any, except a few mere modernisings of old fabliaux, in which you will not find the famous farrago of the Renaissance—learning, religious partisanship, war, law, love, almost everything. All the writers are far below their great master,[118] and none of them has the appeal of the Heptameron. But the spirit of tale-telling pervades the whole shelf-ful, and there is one more special point of importance "for us."

The "provincial" character of these.

It will be observed that some of them actually display in their titles (such as that of Tabouret's book as quoted) the fact that they have a definite provinciality in no bad sense: while Bouchet is as clearly Angevin and Du Fail as distinctly Breton as Des Accords is Burgundian and as the greatest of all had been Tourangeau. It can scarcely be necessary to point out at great length what a reinforcement of vigour and variety must have been brought by this plantation in the different soils of those provinces which have counted for so much—and nearly always for so much good[119]—in French literature and French things generally. The great danger and defect of mediaeval writing had been its tendency to fall into schools and ruts, and the "printed book" (especially such a printed book as Rabelais) was, at least in one way, by no means unlikely to exercise this bad influence afresh. To this the provincial differences opposed a salutary variety of manners, speech, local colour, almost everything. Moreover, manners themselves generally—one of the fairest and most fertile fields of the novel-kingdom—became thus more fully and freely the object and subject of the tale-teller. Character, in the best and most extensive and intensive sense of the word, still lagged behind; and as the drama necessarily took that up, it was for more reasons than one encouraged, as we may say, in its lagging. But meanwhile Amyot and Calvin[120] and Montaigne were getting the language more fully ready for the prose-writer's use, and the constant "sophistication" of literature with religion, politics, knowledge of the physical world in all ways, commerce, familiarity with foreign nations—everything almost that touched on life—helped to bring on the slow but inevitable appearance of the novel itself. But it had more influences to assimilate and more steps to go through before it could take full form.

The Amadis romances.

No more curious contrast (except, perhaps, the not very dissimilar one which will meet us in the next chapter) is to be found in the present History, or perhaps in any other, than that of the matter just discussed with the great body of Amadis romance which, at this same time, was introduced into French literature by the translation or adaptation of Nicolas Herberay des Essarts and his continuators. That Herberay[121] deserves, according to the best and most catholic students of French, a place with the just-mentioned writers among the formers or reformers of the French tongue, is a point of some importance, but, for us, minor. Of the controversial part of the Amadis subject it must, as in other cases, be once more unnecessary for us to say much. It may be laid down as certain, on every principle of critical logic and research, that the old idea of the Peninsular cycle being borrowed direct from any French original is hopelessly absurd. There is, notoriously, no external evidence of any such original ever having existed, and there is an immense improbability against any such original ever having existed. Further, the internal characteristics of the Spanish romances, though, undoubtedly, they might never have come into existence at all but for the French, and though there is a very slight "catch-on" of Amadis itself to the universally popular Arthurian legend, are not in the least like those of French or English. How the actual texts came into that existence; whether, as used to be thought at first, after some expert criticism was turned on them, the actual original was Portuguese, and the refashioned and prolific form Spanish, is again a question utterly beyond bounds for us. The quality of the romances themselves—their huge vogue being a matter of fact—and the influence which they exercised on the future development of the novel—these are the things that concern us, and they are quite interesting and important enough to deserve a little attention.

Their characteristics.

What is certain is that these Spanish romances themselves—which, as some readers at any rate may be presumed to know, branch out into endless genealogies in the Amadis and Palmerin lines, besides the more or less outside developments which fared so hardly with the censors of Don Quixote's library—as well as the later French examples of a not dissimilar type, the capital instance of which, for literature, is Lord Berners's translation of Arthur of Little Britain—do show the most striking differences, not merely from the original twelfth- and thirteenth-century Charlemagne and Arthur productions, but also from intermediate variants and expansions of these. The most obvious of these discrepancies is the singular amplification of the supernatural elements. Of course these were not absent in the older romance literature, especially in the Arthurian cycle. But there they had certain characteristics which might almost deserve the adjective "critical"—little criticism proper as there was in the Middle Ages. They were very generally religious, and they almost always had what may be called a poetic restraint about them. The whole Graal-story is deliberately modelled on Scriptural suggestions; the miracle of reconciliation and restoration which concludes Amis and Amiles is the work of a duly commissioned angel. There are giants, but they are introduced moderately and equipped in consonance. The Saint's Life, which, as it has been contended, exercised so large an influence on the earlier romance, carried the nature, the poetry, the charm of its supernatural elements into the romance itself.

Extravagance in incident, nomenclature, etc.

In the Amadis cycle and in romances like Arthur of Little Britain all this undergoes a change—not by any means for the better. What has been unkindly, but not perhaps unjustly, called the "conjuror's supernatural" takes the place of the poet's variety. One of the personages of the Knight of the Sun is a "Bedevilled Faun," and it is really too much not to say that most of such personages are bedevilled. In Arthur of (so much the Lesser) Britain there is, if I remember rightly, a giant whose formidability partly consists in his spinning round on a sort of bedevilled music-stool: and his class can seldom be met with without three or seven heads, a similarly large number of legs and hands, and the like. This sort of thing has been put down, not without probability, to the Oriental suggestion which would come so readily into Spain. It may be so or it may not. But it certainly imports an element of puerility into romance, which is regrettable, and it diminishes the dignity and the poetry of the things rather lamentably. Whether it diminishes, and still more whether it originally diminished the readability of these same things, is quite another question.

Closely connected with it is the fancy for barbaric names of great length and formidable sound, such as Famongomadan, Pintiquinestra, and the like—a trait which, if anybody pleases, may be put down to the distorted echo of more musical[122] appellations in Arabic and other Eastern tongues, or to a certain childishness, for there is no doubt that the youthful mind delights, and always has delighted, in such things. The immense length of these romances even in themselves, and still more with continuations from father to son and grandson, and trains of descendants sometimes alternately named, can be less charged as an innovation, though there is no doubt that it established a rule which had only been an exception before. But, as will have been seen earlier, the continuation of romance genealogically had been not uncommon, and there had been a constant tendency to lengthen from the positively terse Roland to the prolix fifteenth-century forms. In fact this went on till the extravagant length of the Scudéry group made itself impossible, and even afterwards, as all readers of Richardson know, there was reluctance to shorten.

The "cruel" heroine.

We have, however, still to notice another peculiarity, and the most important by far as concerns the history of the novel: this is the ever-increasing tendency to exaggerate the "cruelty" of the heroine and the sufferings of the lovers. This peculiarity is not specially noticeable in the earliest and best of the group itself. Amadis suffers plentifully; yet Oriana can hardly be called "cruel." But of the two heroines of Palmerin, Polisarda does play the part to some extent, and Miraguarda (whose name it is not perhaps fantastic to interpret as "Admire her but beware of her") is positively ill-natured. Of course the thing was no more a novelty in literature than it was in life. The lines—

And cruel in the New

As in the Old one,

may certainly be transferred from the geographical world to the historical. But in classical literature "cruelty" is attributed rather indiscriminately to both sexes. The cliff of Leucas knew no distinction of sex, and Sappho can be set against Anaxarete. Indeed, it was safer for men to be cruel than for women, inasmuch as Aphrodite, among her innumerable good qualities, was very severe upon unkind girls, while one regrets to have to admit that no particular male deity was regularly "affected" to the business of punishing light o' love men, though Eros-Cupid may sometimes have done so. The Eastern mistress, for obvious reasons, had not much chance of playing the Miraguarda part as a rule, though there seems to me more chance of the convention coming from Arab and Hebrew poetry than from any other source. But in the Arabian Nights at least, though there are lustful murderesses—eastern Margarets of Burgundy, like Queen Labé of the Magicians—there is seldom any "cruelty," or even any tantalising, on the part of the heroines.

A hasty rememberer of the sufferings of Lancelot and one or two other heroes of the early and genuine romance might say, "Why go further than this?" But on a little examination the cases will be found very different. Neither Iseult nor Guinevere is cruel to her lover; Orgueilleuse has a fair excuse in difference of rank and slight acquaintance; persons like Tennyson's Ettarre, still more his Vivien, are "sophisticated"—as we have pointed out already. Besides, Vivien and Ettarre are frankly bad women, which is by no means the case with the Polisardas and Miraguardas. They, if they did not introduce the thing—which is, after all, as the old waterman in Jacob Faithful says, "Human natur',"—established and conventionalised the Silvius and Phoebe relation of lover and mistress. If Lancelot is banished more than once or twice, it is because of Guinevere's real though unfounded jealousy, not of any coquettish "cruelty" on her part; if Partenopeus nearly perishes in his one similar banishment, it is because of his own fault—his fault great and inexcusable. But the Amadisian heroes, as a rule—unless they belong to the light o' love Galaor type, which would not mind cruelty if it were exercised, but would simply laugh and ride away—are almost painfully faithful and deserving; and their sojourns in Tenebrous Isles, their encounters with Bedevilled Fauns, and the like, are either pure misfortunes or the deliberate results of capricious tyranny on the part of their mistresses.

Now of course this is the sort of thing which may be (and as a matter of fact it no doubt was) tediously abused; but it is equally evident that in the hands of a novelist of genius, or even of fair talent and craftsmanship, it gives opportunity for extensive and ingenious character-drawing, and for not a little "polite conversation." If la donna è mobile generally, she has very special opportunities of exhibiting her mobility in the exercise of her caprice: and if it is the business of the lover (as it is of minorities, according to a Right Honourable politician) to suffer, the amoureux transi who has some wits and some power of expression can suffer to the genteelest of tunes with the most ingenious fugues and variations. A great deal of the actual charm of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry in all languages comes from the rendering in verse of this very relation of woman and man. We owe to the "dear Lady Disdain" idea not merely Beatrice, but Beatrix long after her, and many another good thing both in verse and in prose between Shakespeare and Thackeray.

In the Amadis group (as in its slightly modernised successor, that of the Grand Cyrus), the handling is so preposterously long and the reliefs of dialogue and other things frequently managed with so little skill, that, except for sheer passing of time, the books have been found difficult to read. The present writer's knowledge of Spanish is too sketchy to enable him to read them in the original with full comfort. Amadis and Palmerin are legible enough in Southey's translations, made, as one would expect from him, with all due effort to preserve the language of the old English versions where possible. But Herberay's sixteenth-century French is a very attractive and perfectly easy language, thoroughly well suited to the matter. And if anything that has been said is read as despite to these romances, the reading is wrong. They have grave faults, but also real delights, and they have no small "place i' the story."[123]