Читать книгу History of English Literature (Vol. 1-3) - Taine Hippolyte - Страница 25

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So was modern English formed, by compromise, and the necessity of being understood. But we can well imagine that these nobles, even while speaking the rising dialect, have their hearts full of French tastes and ideas; France remains the home of their mind, and the literature which now begins, is but translation. Translators, copyists, imitators—there is nothing else. England is a distant province, which is to France what the United States were, thirty years ago, to Europe: she exports her wool, and imports her ideas. Open the "Voyage and Travaile of Sir John Maundeville,"[128] the oldest prose-writer, the Villehardouin of the country: his book is but the translation of a translation.[129] He writes first in Latin, the language of scholars; then in French, the language of society; finally he reflects, and discovers that the barons, his compatriots, by governing the Saxon churls, have ceased to speak their own Norman, and that the rest of the nation never knew it; he translates his manuscript into English, and, in addition, takes care to make it plain, feeling that he speaks to less expanded understandings. He says in French: "Il advint une fois que Mahomet allait dans une chapelle où il y avait un saint ermite. Il entra en la chapelle où il y avait une petite huisserie et basse, et était bien petite la chapelle; et alors devint la porte si grande qu'il semblait que ce fut la porte d'un palais."

He stops, corrects himself, wishes to explain himself better for his readers across the Channel, and says in English: "And at the Desertes of Arabye, he wente into a Chapelle where a Eremyte duelte. And whan he entred in to the Chapelle that was but a lytille and a low thing, and had but a lytill Dore and a low, than the Entree began to wexe so gret and so large, and so highe, as though it had ben of a gret Mynstre, or the Zate of a Paleys."[130] You perceive that he amplifies, and thinks himself bound to clinch and drive in three or four times in succession the same idea, in order to get it into an English brain; his thought is drawn out, dulled, spoiled in the process. Like every copy, the new literature is mediocre, and repeats what it imitates, with fewer merits and greater faults.

Let us see, then, what our Norman baron gets translated for him; first, the chronicles of Geoffroy Gaimar and Robert Wace, which consist of the fabulous history of England continued up to their day, a dull-rhymed rhapsody, turned into English in a rhapsody no less dull. The first Englishman who attempts it is Layamon,[131] a monk of Ernely, still fettered in the old idiom, who sometimes happens to rhyme, sometimes fails, altogether barbarous and childish, unable to develop a continuous idea, babbling in little confused and incomplete phrases, after the fashion of the ancient Saxons; after him a monk, Robert of Gloucester,[132] and a canon, Robert of Brunne, both as insipid and clear as their French models, having become gallicized, and adopted the significant characteristics of the race, namely, the faculty and habit of easy narration, of seeing moving spectacles without deep emotion, of writing prosaic poetry, of discoursing and developing, of believing that phrases ending in the same sounds form real poetry. Our honest English versifiers, like their preceptors in Normandy and Ile-de-France, garnished with rhymes their dissertations and histories, and called them poems. At this epoch, in fact, on the Continent, the whole learning of the schools descends into the street; and Jean de Meung, in his poem of "La Rose," is the most tedious of doctors. So in England, Robert of Brunne transposes into verse the "Manuel des péchés" of Bishop Grostête; Adam Davie,[133] certain Scripture histories; Hampole[134] composes the "Pricke of Conscience." The titles alone make one yawn: what of the text?

"Mankynde mad ys do Goddus wylle,

And alle Hys byddyngus to fulfille;

For of al Hys makyng more and les,

Man most principal creature es.

Al that He made for man hit was done,

As ye schal here after sone."[135]

There is a poem! You did not think so; call it a sermon, if you will give it its proper name. It goes on, well divided, well prolonged, flowing, but void of meaning; the literature which surrounds and resembles it bears witness of its origin by its loquacity and its clearness.

It bears witness to it by other and more agreeable features. Here and there we find divergences more or less awkward into the domain of genius; for instance, a ballad full of quips against Richard, King of the Romans, who was taken at the battle of Lewes. Sometimes, charm is not lacking, nor sweetness either. No one has ever spoken so bright and so well to the ladies as the French of the Continent, and they have not quite forgotten this talent while settling in England. You perceive it readily in the manner in which they celebrate the Virgin. Nothing could be more different from the Saxon sentiment, which is altogether biblical, than the chivalric adoration of the sovereign Lady, the fascinating Virgin and Saint, who was the real deity of the Middle Ages. It breathes in this pleasing hymn:

"Blessed beo thu, lavedi,

Ful of hovene blisse;

Swete flur of parais,

Moder of milternisse....

I-blessed beo thu, Lavedi,

So fair and so briht;

Al min hope is uppon the,

Bi day and bi nicht....

Bricht and scene quen of storre,

So me liht and lere.

In this false fikele world,

So me led and steore."[136]

There is but a short and easy step between this tender worship of the Virgin and the sentiments of the court of love. The English rhymesters take it; and when they wish to praise their earthly mistresses, they borrow, here as elsewhere, the ideas and the very form of French verse. One compares his lady to all kinds of precious stones and flowers; others sing truly amorous songs, at times sensual.

"Bytuene Mershe and Aueril,

When spray biginneth to springe.

The lutel foul hath hire wyl

On hyre lud to synge,

Ich libbe in loue longinge

For semlokest of alle thynge.

He may me blysse bringe,

Icham in hire baundoun.

An hendy hap ich abbe yhent,

Ichot from heuene it is me sent.

From alle wymmen my love is lent,

And lyht on Alisoun."[137]

Another sings:

"Suete lemmon, y preye the, of loue one speche,

Whil y lyue in world so wyde other nulle y seche.

With thy loue, my suete leof, mi bliss thou mihtes eche

A suete cos of thy mouth mihte be my leche."[138]

Is not this the lively and warm imagination of the south? they speak of springtime and of love, "the fine and lovely weather" like trouvères, even like troubadours. The dirty, smoke-grimed cottage, the black feudal castle, where all but the master lie higgledy-piggledy on the straw in the great stone hall, the cold rain, the muddy earth, make the return of the sun and the warm air delicious.

"Sumer is i-cumen in,

Lhude sing cuccu:

Groweth sed, and bloweth med,

And springeth the wde nu.

Sing cuccu, cuccu.

Awe bleteth after lomb,

Llouth after calue cu,

Bulluc sterteth, bucke verteth:

Murie sing cuccu,

Cuccu, cuccu.

Wel singes thu cuccu;

Ne swik thu nauer nu.

Sing, cuccu nu,

Sing, cuccu."[139]

Here are glowing pictures, such as Guillaume de Lorris was writing at the same time, even richer and more lifelike, perhaps because the poet found here for inspiration that love of country life which in England is deep and national. Others, more imitative, attempt pleasantries like those of Rutebeuf and the fabliaux, frank quips,[140] and even satirical, loose waggeries. Their true aim and end is to hit out at the monks. In every French country or country which imitates France, the most manifest use of convents is to furnish material for sprightly and scandalous stories. One writes, for instance, of the kind of life the monks lead at the abbey of Cocagne:

"There is a wel fair abbei,

Of white monkes and of grei.

Ther beth bowris and halles:

Al of pasteiis beth the wallis,

Of fleis, of fisse, and rich met,

The likfullist that man may et.

Fluren cakes beth the schingles alle.

Of cherche, cloister, boure, and halle.

The pinnes beth fat podinges

Rich met to princes and kinges....

Though paradis be miri and bright

Cokaign is of fairir sight,...

Another abbei is ther bi,

Forsoth a gret fair nunnerie....

When the someris dai is hote

The young nunnes takith a bote...

And doth ham forth in that river

Both with ores and with stere....

And each monk him takith on,

And snellich berrith forth har prei

To the mochil grei abbei,

And techith the nunnes an oreisun,

With iamblene up and down."

This is the triumph of gluttony and feeding. Moreover many things could be mentioned in the Middle Ages which are now unmentionable. But it was the poems of chivalry, which represented to him the bright side of his own mode of life, that the baron preferred to have translated. He desired that his trouvère should set before his eyes the magnificence which he displayed, and the luxury and enjoyments which he has introduced from France. Life at that time, without and even during war, was a great pageant, a brilliant and tumultuous kind of fête. When Henry II travelled, he took with him a great number of horsemen, foot-soldiers, baggage-wagons, tents, pack-horses, comedians, courtesans and their overseers, cooks, confectioners, posture-makers, dancers, barbers, go-betweens, hangers-on.[141] In the morning when they start, the assemblage begins to shout, sing, hustle each other, make racket and rout, "as if hell were let loose." William Longchamps, even in time of peace, would not travel without a thousand horses by way of escort. When Archbishop à Becket came to France, he entered the town with two hundred knights, a number of barons and nobles, and an army of servants, all richly armed and equipped, he himself being provided with four-and-twenty suits; two hundred and fifty children walked in front, singing national songs; then dogs, then carriages, then a dozen pack-horses, each ridden by an ape and a man; then equerries with shields and war-horses; then more equerries, falconers, a suit of domestics, knights, priests; lastly, the archbishop himself, with his private friends. Imagine these processions, and also these entertainments; for the Normans, after the Conquest, "borrowed from the Saxons the habit of excess in eating and drinking."[142] At the marriage of Richard Plantagenet, Earl of Cornwall, they provided thirty thousand dishes.[143] They also continued to be gallant, and punctiliously performed the great precept of the love courts; for in the Middle Ages the sense of love was no more idle than the others. Moreover, tournaments were plentiful; a sort of opera prepared for their own entertainment. So ran their life, full of adventure and adornment, in the open air and in the sunlight, with show of cavalcades and arms; they act a pageant, and act it with enjoyment. Thus the King of Scots, having come to London with a hundred knights, at the coronation of Edward I, they all dismounted, and made over their horses and superb caparisons to the people; as did also five English lords, imitating their example. In the midst of war they took their pleasure. Edward III, in one of his expeditions against the King of France, took with him thirty falconers, and made his campaign alternately hunting and fighting.[144] Another time, says Froissart, the knights who joined the army carried a plaster over one eye, having vowed not to remove it until they had performed an exploit worthy of their mistresses. Out of the very exuberancy of spirit they practised the art of poetry; out of the buoyancy of their imagination they made a sport of life. Edward III built at Windsor a hall and a round table; and at one of his tourneys in London, sixty ladies, seated on palfreys, led, as in a fairy tale, each her knight by a golden chain. Was not this the triumph of the gallant and frivolous French fashions? Edward's wife Philippa sat as a model to the artists for their Madonnas. She appeared on the field of battle; listened to Froissart, who provided her with moral-plays, love-stories, and "things fair to listen to." At once goddess, heroine, and scholar, and all this so agreeably, was she not a true queen of refined chivalry? Now, as also in France under Louis of Orleans and the Dukes of Burgundy, this most elegant and romanesque civilization came into full bloom, void of common sense, given up to passion, bent on pleasure, immoral and brilliant, but, like its neighbors of Italy and Provence, for lack of serious intention, it could not last.

Of all these marvels the narrators make display in their stories. Here is a picture of the vessel which took the mother of King Richard into England:

"Swlk on ne seygh they never non;

All it was whyt of huel-bon,

And every nayl with gold begrave:

Off pure gold was the stave.

Her mast was of yvory;

Off samyte the sayl wytterly.

Her ropes wer off tuely sylk,

Al so whyt as ony mylk.

That noble schyp was al withoute,

With clothys of golde sprede aboute;

And her loof and her wyndas,

Off asure forsothe it was."[145]

On such subjects they never run dry. When the King of Hungary wishes to console his afflicted daughter, he proposes to take her to the chase in the following style:

"To-morrow ye shall in hunting fare:

And ride, my daughter, in a chair;

It shall be covered with velvet red,

And cloths of fine gold all about your head,

With damask white and azure blue,

Well diapered with lilies new.

Your pommels shall be ended with gold,

Your chains enamelled many a fold,

Your mantle of rich degree,

Purple pall and ermine free.

Jennets of Spain that ben so light,

Trapped to the ground with velvet bright.

Ye shall have harp, sautry, and song,

And other mirths you among.

Ye shall have Rumney and Malespine,

Both hippocras and Vernage wine;

Montrese and wine of Greek,

Both Algrade and despice eke,

Antioch and Bastarde,

Pyment also and garnarde;

Wine of Greek and Muscadel,

Both clare, pyment, and Rochelle,

The reed your stomach to defy,

And pots of osey set you by.

You shall have venison ybake,

The best wild fowl that may be take;

A leish of harehound with you to streek,

And hart, and hind, and other like.

Ye shall be set at such a tryst,

That hart and hynd shall come to you fist,

Your disease to drive you fro,

To hear the bugles there yblow.

Homeward thus shall ye ride,

On hawking by the river's side,

With gosshawk and with gentle falcon,

With bugle-horn and merlion.

When you come home your menie among,

Ye shall have revel, dance, and song;

Little children, great and small,

Shall sing as does the nightingale.

Then shall ye go to your evensong,

With tenors and trebles among.

Threescore of copes of damask bright,

Full of pearls they shall be pight.

Your censors shall be of gold,

Indent with azure many a fold;

Your quire nor organ song shall want,

With contre-note and descant.

The other half on organs playing,

With young children full fain singing.

Then shall ye go to your supper,

And sit in tents in green arber,

With cloth of arras pight to the ground,

With sapphires set of diamond.

A hundred knights, truly told,

Shall play with bowls in alleys cold,

Your disease to drive away;

To see the fishes in pools play,

To a drawbridge then shall ye,

Th' one half of stone, th' other of tree;

A barge shall meet you full right,

With twenty-four oars full bright,

With trumpets and with clarion,

The fresh water to row up and down....

Forty torches burning bright

At your bridge to bring you light.

Into your chamber they shall you bring,

With much mirth and more liking.

Your blankets shall be of fustian,

Your sheets shall be of cloth of Rennes.

Your head sheet shall be of pery pight,

With diamonds set and rubies bright.

When you are laid in bed so soft,

A cage of gold shall hang aloft,

With long paper fair burning,

And cloves that be sweet smelling.

Frankincense and olibanum,

That when ye sleep the taste may come;

And if ye no rest can take,

All night minstrels for you shall wake."[146]

Amid such fancies and splendors the poets delight and lose themselves, and the woof, like the embroideries of their canvas, bears the mark of this love of decoration. They weave it out of adventures, of extraordinary and surprising events. Now it is the life of King Horn, who, thrown into a boat when a lad, is wrecked upon the coast of England, and, becoming a knight, reconquers the kingdom of his father. Now it is the history of Sir Guy, who rescues enchanted knights, cuts down the giant Colbrand, challenges and kills the Sultan in his tent. It is not for me to recount these poems, which are not English, but only translations; still, here as in France, there are many of them; they fill the imagination of the young society, and they grow in exaggeration, until, falling to the lowest depth of insipidity and improbability, they are buried forever by Cervantes. What would people say of a society which had no literature but the opera with its unrealities? Yet it was a literature of this kind which formed the intellectual food of the Middle Ages. People then did not ask for truth, but entertainment, and that vehement and hollow, full of glare and startling events. They asked for impossible voyages, extravagant challenges, a racket of contests, a confusion of magnificence and entanglement of chances. For introspective history they had no liking, cared nothing for the adventures of the heart, devoted their attention to the outside. They remained children to the last, with eyes glued to a series of exaggerated and colored images, and, for lack of thinking, did not perceive that they had learnt nothing.

What was there beneath this fanciful dream? Brutal and evil human passions, unchained at first by religious fury, then delivered up to their own devices, and, beneath a show of external courtesy, as vile as ever. Look at the popular king, Richard Cœur de Lion, and reckon up his butcheries and murders: "King Richard," says a poem, "is the best king ever mentioned in song."[147] I have no objection; but if he has the heart of a lion, he has also that brute's appetite. One day, under the walls of Acre, being convalescent, he had a great desire for some pork. There was no pork. They killed a young Saracen, fresh and tender, cooked and salted him, and the king ate him and found him very good; whereupon he desired to see the head of the pig. The cook brought it in trembling. The king falls a-laughing, and says the army has nothing to fear from famine, having provisions ready at hand. He takes the town, and presently Saladin's ambassadors come to sue for pardon for the prisoners. Richard has thirty of the most noble beheaded, and bids his cook boil the heads, and serve one to each ambassador, with a ticket bearing the name and family of the dead man. Meanwhile, in their presence, he eats his own with a relish, bids them tell Saladin how the Christians make war, and ask him if it is true that they fear him. Then he orders the sixty thousand prisoners to be led into the plain:

"They were led into the place full even.

There they heard angels of heaven;

They said: 'Seigneures, tuez, tuez!

Spares hem nought, and beheadeth these!'

King Richard heard the angels' voice,

And thanked God and the holy cross."

Thereupon they behead them all. When he took a town, it was his wont to murder everyone, even children and women. Such was the devotion of the Middle Ages, not only in romances, as here, but in history. At the taking of Jerusalem the whole population, seventy thousand persons, were massacred.

Thus even in chivalrous stories the fierce and unbridled instincts of the bloodthirsty brute break out. The authentic narratives show it. Henry II, irritated at a page, attempted to tear out his eyes.[148] John Lackland let twenty-three hostages die in prison of hunger. Edward II caused at one time twenty-eight nobles to be hanged and disemboweled, and was himself put to death by the insertion of a red-hot iron into his bowels. Look in Froissart for the debaucheries and murders in France as well as in England, of the Hundred Years' War, and then for the slaughters of the Wars of the Roses. In both countries feudal independence ended in civil war, and the Middle Age founders under its vices. Chivalrous courtesy, which cloaked the native ferocity, disappears like some hangings suddenly consumed by the breaking out of a fire; at that time in England they killed nobles in preference, and prisoners, too, even children, with insults, in cold blood. What, then, did man learn in this civilization and by this literature? How was he humanized? What precepts of justice, habits of reflection, store of true judgments, did this culture interpose between his desires and his actions, in order to moderate his passion? He dreamed, he imagined a sort of elegant ceremonial in order the better to address lords and ladies; he discovered the gallant code of little Jehan de Saintré. But where is the true education? Wherein has Froissart profited by all his vast experience? He was a fine specimen of a babbling child; what they called his poesy, the poèsie neuve, is only a refined gabble, a senile puerility. Some rhetoricians, like Christine de Pisan, try to round their periods after an ancient model; but all their literature amounts to nothing. No one can think. Sir John Maundeville, who travelled all over the world a hundred and fifty years after Villehardouin, is as contracted in his ideas as Villehardouin himself. Extraordinary legends and fables, every sort of credulity and ignorance, abound in his book. When he wishes to explain why Palestine has passed into the hands of various possessors instead of continuing under one government, he says that it is because God would not that it should continue longer in the hands of traitors and sinners, whether Christians or others. He has seen at Jerusalem, on the steps of the temple, the footmarks of the ass which our Lord rode on Palm Sunday. He describes the Ethiopians as a people who have only one foot, but so large that they can make use of it as a parasol. He instances one island "where be people as big as gyants, of 28 feet long, and have no clothing but beasts' skins"; then another island "where there are many evil and foul women, but have precious stones in their eyes, and have such force that if they behold any man with wrath, they slay him with beholding, as the basilisk doth." The good man relates; that is all: doubt and common-sense scarcely exist in the world he lives in. He has neither judgment nor reflection; he piles facts one on top of another, with no further connection; his book is simply a mirror which reproduces recollections of his eyes and ears. "And all those who will say a Pater and an Ave Maria in my behalf, I give them an interest and a share in all the holy pilgrimages I ever made in my life." That is his farewell, and accords with all the rest. Neither public morality nor public knowledge has gained anything from these three centuries of culture. This French culture, copied in vain throughout Europe, has but superficially adorned mankind, and the varnish with which it decked them is already tarnished everywhere or scales off. It was worse in England, where the thing was more superficial and the application worse than in France, where foreign hands laid it on, and where it could only half cover the Saxon crust, where that crust was worn away and rough. That is the reason why, during three centuries, throughout the whole first feudal age, the literature of the Normans in England, made up of imitations, translations, and clumsy copies, ends in nothing.