Читать книгу History of English Literature (Vol. 1-3) - Taine Hippolyte - Страница 35

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Beneath every literature there is a philosophy. Beneath, every work of art is an idea of nature and of life; this idea leads the poet. Whether the author knows it or not, he writes in order to exhibit it; and the characters which he fashions, like the events which he arranges, only serve to bring to light the dim creative conception which raises and combines them. Underlying Homer appears the noble life of heroic paganism and of happy Greece. Underlying Dante, the sad and violent life of fanatical Catholicism and of the much-hating Italians. From either we might draw a theory of man and of the beautiful. It is so with others; and this is how, according to the variations, the birth, blossoms, decline, or sluggishness of the master-idea, literature varies, is born, flourishes, degenerates, comes to an end. Whoever plants the one, plants the other: whoever undermines the one, undermines the other. Place in all the minds of any age a new grand idea of nature and life, so that they feel and produce it with their whole heart and strength, and you will see them, seized with the craving to express it, invent forms of art and groups of figures. Take away from these minds every grand new idea of nature and life, and you will see them, deprived of the craving to express all-important thoughts, copy, sink into silence, or rave.

What has become of all these all-important thoughts? What labor worked them out? What studies nourished them? The laborers did not lack zeal. In the twelfth century the energy of their minds was admirable. At Oxford there were thirty thousand scholars. No building in Paris could contain the crowd of Abelard's disciples; when he retired to solitude, they accompanied him in such a multitude that the desert became a town. No difficulty repulsed them. There is a story of a young boy, who, though beaten by his master, was wholly bent on remaining with him, that he might still learn. When the terrible encyclopædia of Aristotle was introduced, though disfigured and unintelligible it was devoured. The only question presented to them, that of universals, so abstract and dry, so embarrassed by Arabic obscurities and Greek subtitles, during centuries, was seized upon eagerly. Heavy and awkward as was the instrument supplied to them, I mean syllogism, they made themselves masters of it, rendered it still more heavy, plunged it into every object and in every direction. They constructed monstrous books, in great numbers, cathedrals of syllogism, of unheard-of architecture, of prodigious finish, heightened in effect by intensity of intellectual power, which the whole sum of human labor has only twice been able to match.[244] These young and valiant minds thought they had found the temple of truth; they rushed at it headlong, in legions, breaking in the doors, clambering over the walls, leaping into the interior, and so found themselves at the bottom of a moat. Three centuries of labor at the bottom of this black moat added not one idea to the human mind.

For consider the questions which they treat of. They seem to be marching, but are merely marking time. People would say, to see them moil and toil, that they will educe from heart and brain some great original creed, and yet all belief was imposed upon them from the outset. The system was made; they could only arrange and comment upon it. The conception comes not from them, but from Constantinople. Infinitely complicated and subtle as it is, the supreme work of Oriental mysticism and Greek metaphysics, so disproportioned to their young understanding, they exhaust themselves to reproduce it, and moreover burden their unpractised hands with the weight of a logical instrument which Aristotle created for theory and not for practice, and which ought to have remained in a cabinet of philosophical curiosities, without being ever carried into the field of action. "Whether the divine essence engendered the Son, or was engendered by the Father; why the three persons together are not greater than one alone; attributes determine persons, not substance, that is, nature; how properties can exist in the nature of God, and not determine it; if created spirits are local and can be circumscribed; if God can know more things than He is aware of";[245]—these are the ideas which they moot: what truth could issue thence? From hand to hand the chimera grows, and spreads wider its gloomy wings. "Can God cause that, the place and body being retained, the body shall have no position, that is, existence in place?—Whether the impossibility of being engendered is a constituent property of the First Person of the Trinity—Whether identity, similitude, and equality are real relations in God."[246] Duns Scotus distinguishes three kinds of matter: matter which is firstly first, secondly first, thirdly first. According to him, we must clear this triple hedge of thorny abstractions in order to understand the production of a sphere of brass. Under such a regimen, imbecility soon makes its appearance. Saint Thomas himself considers, "whether the body of Christ arose with its wounds—whether this body moves with the motion of the host and the chalice in consecration—whether at the first instant of conception Christ had the use of free judgment—whether Christ was slain by himself or by another?" Do you think you are at the limits of human folly? Listen. He considers "whether the dove in which the Holy Spirit appeared was a real animal—whether a glorified body can occupy one and the same place at the same time as another glorified body—whether in the state of innocence all children were masculine?" I pass over others as to the digestion of Christ, and some still more untranslatable.[247] This is the point reached by the most esteemed doctor, the most judicious mind, the Bossuet of the Middle Ages. Even in this ring of inanities the answers are laid down. Roscellinus and Abelard were excommunicated, exiled, imprisoned, because they swerved from it. There is a complete minute dogma which closes all issues; there is no means of escaping; after a hundred wriggles and a hundred efforts you must come and tumble into a formula. If by mysticism you try to fly over their heads, if by experience you endeavor to creep beneath, powerful talons await you at your exit. The wise man passes for a magician, the enlightened man for a heretic. The Waldenses, the Catharists, the disciples of John of Parma, were burned; Roger Bacon died only just in time, otherwise he might have been burned. Under this constraint men ceased to think; for he who speaks of thought, speaks of an effort at invention, an individual creation, an energetic action. They recite a lesson, or sing a catechism; even in paradise, even in ecstasy and the divinest raptures of love, Dante thinks himself bound to show an exact memory and a scholastic orthodoxy. How then with the rest? Some, like Raymond Lully, set about inventing an instrument of reasoning to serve in place of the understanding. About the fourteenth century, under the blows of Occam, this verbal science began to totter; they saw that its entities were only words; it was discredited. In 1367, at Oxford, of thirty thousand students, there remained six thousand;[248] they still set their "Barbara and Felapton," but only in the way of routine. Each one in turn mechanically traversed the petty region of threadbare cavils, scratched himself in the briers of quibbles, and burdened himself with his bundle of texts; nothing more. The vast body of science which was to have formed and vivified the whole thought of man, was reduced to a text-book.

So, little by little, the conception which fertilized and ruled all others, dried up; the deep spring, whence flowed all poetic streams, was found empty; science furnished nothing more to the world. What further works could the world produce? As Spain, later on, renewing the Middle Ages, after having shone splendidly and foolishly by her chivalry and devotion, by Lope de Vega and Calderon, Loyola and St. Theresa, became enervated through the Inquisition and through casuistry, and ended by sinking into a brutish silence; so the Middle Ages, outstripping Spain, after displaying the senseless heroism of the Crusades, and the poetical ecstasy of the cloister, after producing chivalry and saintship, Francis of Assisi, St. Louis, and Dante, languished under the Inquisition and the scholastic learning, and became extinguished in idle raving and inanity.

Must we quote all these good people who speak without having anything to say? You may find them in Warton;[249] dozens of translators, importing the poverties of French literature, and imitating imitations; rhyming chroniclers, most commonplace of men, whom we only read because we must accept history from every quarter, even from imbeciles; spinners and spinsters of didactic poems, who pile up verses on the training of falcons, on heraldry, on chemistry; editors of moralities, who invent the same dream over again for the hundredth time, and get themselves taught universal history by the goddess Sapience. Like the writers of the Latin decadence, these folk only think of copying, compiling, abridging, constructing in text-books, in rhymed memoranda, the encyclopædia of their times.

Listen to the most illustrious, the grave Gower—"morall Gower," as he was called![250] Doubtless here and there he contains a remnant of brilliancy and grace. He is like an old secretary of a Court of Love, André le Chapelain or any other, who would pass the day in solemnly registering the sentences of ladies, and in the evening, partly asleep on his desk, would see in a half-dream their sweet smile and their beautiful eyes.[251] The ingenious but exhausted vein of Charles of Orléans still flows in his French ballads. He has the same fondling delicacy, almost a little affected. The poor little poetic spring flows yet in thin, transparent streamlets over the smooth pebbles, and murmurs with a babble, pretty, but so low that at times you cannot hear it. But dull is the rest! His great poem, "Confessio Amantis," is a dialogue between a lover and his confessor, imitated chiefly from Jean de Meung, having for object, like the "Roman de la Rose," to explain and classify the impediments of love. The superannuated theme is always reappearing, covered by a crude erudition. You will find here an exposition of hermetic science, lectures on the philosophy of Aristotle, a treatise on politics, a litany of ancient and modern legends gleaned from the compilers, marred in the passage by the pedantry of the schools and the ignorance of the age. It is a cartload of scholastic rubbish; the sewer tumbles upon this feeble spirit, which of itself was flowing clearly, but now, obstructed by tiles, bricks, plaster, ruins from all quarters of the globe, drags on darkened and sluggish. Gower, one of the most learned of his time,[252] supposed that Latin was invented by the old prophetess Carmentis; that the grammarians, Aristarchus, Donatus, and Didymus, regulated its syntax, pronunciation, and prosody; that it was adorned by Cicero with the flowers of eloquence and rhetoric; then enriched by translations from the Arabic, Chaldæan, and Greek; and that at last, after much labor of celebrated writers, it attained its final perfection in Ovid, the poet of love. Elsewhere he discovered that Ulysses learned rhetoric from Cicero, magic from Zoroaster, astronomy from Ptolemy, and philosophy from Plato. And what a style! so long, so dull,[253] so drawn out by repetitions, the most minute details, garnished with references to his text, like a man who, with his eyes glued to his Aristotle and his Ovid, a slave of his musty parchments, can do nothing but copy and string his rhymes together. Schoolboys even in old age, they seem to believe that every truth, all wit, is their great wood-bound books; that they have no need to find out and invent for themselves; that their whole business is to repeat; that this is, in fact, man's business. The scholastic system had enthroned the dead letter, and peopled the world with dead understandings.

After Gower come Occleve and Lydgate.[254] "My father Chaucer would willingly have taught me," says Occleve, "but I was dull, and learned little or nothing." He paraphrased in verse a treatise of Egidius, on government; these are moralities. There are others, on compassion, after Augustine, and on the art of dying; then love-tales; a letter from Cupid, dated from his court in the month of May. Love and moralities,[255] that is, abstractions and affectation, were the taste of the time; and so, in the time of Lebrun, of Esménard, at the close of contemporaneous French literature,[256] they produced collections of didactic poems, and odes to Chloris. As for the monk Lydgate, he had some talent, some imagination, especially in high-toned descriptions: it was the last flicker of a dying literature; gold received a golden coating, precious stones were placed upon diamonds, ornaments multiplied and made fantastic; as in their dress and buildings, so in their style.[257] Look at the costumes of Henry IV and Henry V, monstrous heart-shaped or horn-shaped head-dresses, long sleeves covered with ridiculous designs, the plumes, and again the oratories, armorial tombs, little gaudy chapels, like conspicuous flowers under the naves of the Gothic perpendicular. When we can no more speak to the soul, we try to speak to the eyes. This is what Lydgate does, nothing more. Pageants or shows are required of him, "disguisings" for the company of goldsmiths; a mask before the king, a May entertainment for the sheriffs of London, a drama of the creation for the festival of Corpus Christi, a masquerade, a Christmas show; he gives the plan and furnishes the verses. In this matter he never runs dry; two hundred and fifty-one poems are attributed to him. Poetry thus conceived becomes a manufacture; it is composed by the yard. Such was the judgment of the Abbot of St. Albans, who, having got him to translate a legend in verse, pays a hundred shillings for the whole, verse, writing, and illuminations, placing the three works on a level. In fact, no more thought was required for the one than for the others. His three great works, "The Fall of Princes, The Destruction of Troy," and "The Siege of Thebes," are only translations or paraphrases, verbose, erudite, descriptive, a kind of chivalrous processions, colored for the twentieth time, in the same manner, on the same vellum. The only point which rises above the average, at least in the first poem, is the idea of Fortune,[258] and the violent vicissitudes of human life. If there was a philosophy at this time, this was it. They willingly narrated horrible and tragic histories; gather them from antiquity down to their own day; they were far from the trusting and passionate piety which felt the hand of God in the government of the world; they saw that the world went blundering here and there like a drunken man. A sad and gloomy world, amused by eternal pleasures, oppressed with a dull misery, which suffered and feared without consolation or hope, isolated between the ancient spirit in which it had no living hope, and the modern spirit whose active science it ignored. Fortune, like a black smoke, hovers over all, and shuts out the sight of heaven. They picture it as follows:

"Her face semyng cruel and terrible

And by disdaynè menacing of loke,...

An hundred handes she had, of eche part...

Some of her handes lyft up men alofte,

To hye estate of worldlye dignitè;

Another hande griped ful unsofte,

Which cast another in grete adversite."[259]

They look upon the great unhappy ones, a captive king, a dethroned queen, assassinated princes, noble cities destroyed,[260] lamentable spectacles as exhibited in Germany and France, and of which there will be plenty in England; and they can only regard them with a harsh resignation. Lydgate ends by reciting a commonplace of mechanical piety, by way of consolation. The reader makes the sign of the cross, yawns, and goes away. In fact, poetry and religion are no longer capable of suggesting a genuine sentiment. Authors copy, and copy again. Hawes[261] copies the "House of Fame" of Chaucer, and a sort of allegorical amorous poem, after the "Roman de la Rose." Barclay[262] translates the "Mirror of Good Manners" and the "Ship of Fools." Continually we meet with dull abstractions, used up and barren; it is the scholastic phase of poetry. If anywhere there is an accent of greater originality, it is in this "Ship of Fools," and in Lydgate's "Dance of Death," bitter buffooneries, sad gayeties, which, in the hands of artists and poets, were having their run throughout Europe. They mock at each other, grotesquely and gloomily; poor, dull, and vulgar figures, shut up in a ship, or made to dance on their tomb to the sound of a fiddle, played by a grinning skeleton. At the end of all this mouldy talk, and amid the disgust which they have conceived for each other, a clown, a tavern Triboulet,[263] composer of little jeering and macaronic verses, Skelton[264] makes his appearance, a virulent pamphleteer, who, jumbling together French, English, Latin phrases, with slang, and fashionable words, invented words, intermingled with short rhymes, fabricates a sort of literary mud, with which he bespatters Wolsey and the bishops. Style, metre, rhyme, language, art of every kind, is at an end; beneath the vain parade of official style there is only a heap of rubbish. Yet, as he says,

"Though my rhyme be ragged,

Tattered and gagged,

Rudely rain-beaten,

Rusty, moth-eaten,

Yf ye take welle therewithe,

It hath in it some pithe."

It is full of political animus, sensual liveliness, English and popular instincts; it lives. It is a coarse life, still elementary, swarming with ignoble vermin, like that which appears in a great decomposing body. It is life, nevertheless, with its two great features which it is destined to display: the hatred of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, which is the Reformation; the return to the senses and to natural life, which is the Renaissance.

[193]Born between 1328 and 1345, died in 1400.

[194]Renan, "De l'Art au Moyen Age."

[195]See Froissart, his life with the Count of Foix and with King Richard II.

[196]"Knight's Tale," II. p. 59, lines 1957-1964.

[197]"Knight's Tale," II. p. 59, lines 1977-1996.

[198]Ibid., p. 61, lines 2043-2050.

[199]"Knight's Tale," II. p. 63, lines 2120-2188.

[200]The House of Fame.

[201]André le Chapelain, 1170.

[202]Also the "Court of Love," and perhaps "The Assemble of Ladies" and "La Belle Dame sans Merci."

[203]"Troilus and Cressida," vol, V. bk. 3, p. 12.

[204]"Troilus and Cressida," vol. V. bk. 3, p. 40.

[205]Ibid. p. 4.

[206]"Troilus and Cressida," vol. IV. bk. 2, p. 292.

[207]Ibid. vol. V. bk. 4, p. 97.

[208]"Troilus and Cressida," vol. V. bk. 5, p. 119 et passim.

[209]"The Flower and the Leaf," VI. p. 244, lines 6-32.

[210]Ibid. p. 245, line 33.

[211]Ibid. VI. p. 246, lines 78-133.

[212]"The Cuckow and Nightingale," VI. p. 121, lines 67-85.

[213]Ibid. p. 126, lines 230-241.

[214]Stendhal, "On Love: the difference of Love-taste and Love-passion."

[215]"The Court of Love," about 1353, et seq. See also the "Testament of Love."

[216]"Troilus and Cressida," vol. V. III. pp. 44, 45.

[217]The story of the pear-tree (Merchant's Tale), and of the cradle (Reeve's Tale), for instance, in the "Canterbury Tales."

[218]"Canterbury Tales" prologue, p. 10, line 323.

[219]Ibid. p. 12, line 373.

[220]"Canterbury Tales," prologue, p. 21, line 688.

[221]Ibid. II. prologue, p. 14, line 460.

[222]"Canterbury Tales," II., Wife of Bath's Prologue, p. 168, lines 5610-5739.

[223]Ibid. p. 179, lines 5968-6072.

[224]"Canterbury Tales," II., Wife of Bath's Prologue, p. 185, lines 6177-6188.

[225]Ibid, prologue, II. p. 7, line 208 et passim.

[226]"Canterbury Tales," The Sompnoures Tale, II. p. 220, lines 7319-7340.

[227]Ibid. p. 221, line 7366.

[228]Ibid. p. 221, line 7384.

[229]Ibid. p. 222, line 7389.

[230]"Canterbury Tales," II., The Sompnoures Tale, p. 222, lines 7397-7429.

[231]Ibid. p. 223, lines 7450-7460.

[232]Ibid. p. 226, lines 7536-7544.

[233]"Canterbury Tales," II., The Sompnoures Tale, p. 226, lines 7545-7553.

[234]Ibid. p. 230, lines 7685-7695.

[235]"Canterbury Tales," II., The Sompnoures Prologue, p. 217, lines 7254-7279.

[236]See in "The Canterbury Tales" the Rhyme of Sir Topas, a parody on the chivalric histories. Each character there seems a precursor of Cervantes.

[237]Prologue to "Canterbury Tales," II. p. 3, lines 68-72.

[238]Prologue to "Canterbury Tales," II. p. 3, lines 79-100.

[239]Prologue to "Canterbury Tales," II. p. 4, lines 118-141.

[240]Ibid. p. 5, lines 142-150.

[241]Ibid. p. 5, lines 151-162.

[242]Tennyson, in his "Dream of Fair Women," sings: "Dan Chaucer, the first warbler, whose sweet breath Preluded those melodious bursts, that fill The spacious times of great Elizabeth With sounds that echo still."—Tr.

[243]Speaking of Cressida, IV. book I. p. 236, he says: "Right as our first letter is now an a, In beautie first so stood she makeles, Her goodly looking gladed all the prees, Nas never seene thing to be praised so derre, Nor under cloude blacke so bright a sterre."

[244]Under Proclus and under Hegel. Duns Scotus, at the age of thirty-one, died, leaving beside his sermons and commentaries, twelve folio volumes, in a small close handwriting, in a style like Hegel's, on the same subject as Proclus treats of. Similarly with Saint Thomas and the whole train of schoolmen. No idea can be formed of such a labor before handling the books themselves.

[245]Peter Lombard, "Book of Sentences." It was the classic of the Middle Ages.

[246]Duns Scotus, ed. 1639.

[247]Utrum angelus diligat se ipsum dilectione naturali vel electiva? Utrum in statu innocentiæ fuerit generatio per coitum? Utrum omnes fuissent nati in sexu masculino? Utrum cognitio angeli posset dici matutina et vespertina? Utrum martyribus aureola debeatur? Utrum virgo Maria fuerit virgo in concipiendo? Utrum remanserit virgo post partum? The reader may look out in the text the reply to these last two questions. (S. Thomas, "Summa Theologica," ed. 1677.)

[248]The Rev. Henry Anstey, in his Introduction to "Munimenta Academica," Lond. 1868, says that "the statement of Richard of Armagh that there were in the thirteenth century 30,000 scholars at Oxford is almost incredible." P. XLVIII.—Tr.

[249]"History of English Poetry," vol. II.

[250]Contemporary with Chaucer. The "Confessio Amantis" dates from 1393.

[251]"History of Rosiphele. Ballads."

[252]Warton, II. 240.

[253]See, for instance his description of the sun's crown, the most poetical passage in book VII.

[254]1420, 1430.

[255]This is the title Froissart (1397) gave to his collection when presenting it to Richard II.

[256]Lebrun, 1729-1807; Esménard, 1770-1812.

[257]Lydgate, "The Destruction of Troy"—description of Hector's chapel. Especially read the Pageants or Solemn Entries.

[258]See the Vision of Fortune, a gigantic figure. In this painting he shows both feeling and talent.

[259]Lydgate, "Fall of Princes." Warton, II. 280.

[260]The War of the Hussites, The Hundred Years' War, and The War of the Roses.

[261]About 1506. "The Temple of Glass. Passetyme of Pleasure."

[262]About 1500.

[263]The court fool in Victor Hugo's drama of "Le Roi s'amuse."—Tr.

[264]Died 1529; Poet-Laureate 1489. His "Bouge of Court," his "Crown of Laurel," his "Elegy on the Death of the Earl of Northumberland," are well written, and belong to official poetry.