Untitled

This is a reproduction of a library book that was digitized
by Google as part of an ongoing effort to preserve the

information in books and make it universally accessible.
https://books.google.com
Lit 485.23 B
LEIRI
TAST
HARVARD
COLLEGE
LIBRARY
1
1
i
1
MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
Essays on
Medieval Literature
BY
W. P. KER
London
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
NEW YORK : THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1905
All rights reserved

Lit 485.23
B
HARVARD
(COLLEGE
45
LIONARY
* 310
PREFACE
These Essays have all been printed before. The

first of them served as an introduction to the first
volume of Sir Henry Craik's English Prose Selections
(Macmillan, 1893). The “Similes of Dante "
appeared in the Modern Quarterly for March 1898 .
“ Boccaccio ” was read as a Taylorian lecture at
Oxford, and published, in most honourable company,
with other lectures of the same foundation Studies
in European Literature — at the Clarendon Press,
1900. “ Chaucer ” (part of a review of Mr. Skeat's
edition) and the article on Mr. Macaulay's Gower
are from the Quarterly Review, April 1895 and
April 1903. The essay on Froissart (and on his
English translator ) was written at the request of
Mr. W. E. Henley for the new edition of Lord
Berners — The Cronykle of Syr John Froissart — in the
Tudor Translations (Nutt, 1901-3 ). The last essay,
in memory of Gaston Paris, is from the Quarterly
V
vi MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
Review , July 1904. I have to offer my thanks to

all concerned with those several publications for
leave to reprint the essays. Nothing has been
added, and little altered : here and there they have
been trimmed , very slightly , in the phrasing , so as
not to disagree with their present form . I am
again indebted to my friend Mr. Paget Toynbee for
his kindness in reading my proofs.
W. P. K.
LONDON , June 9, 1905 .

CONTENTS
PAGE
THE EARLIER HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE I
བ
HISTORICAL NOTES ON THE SIMILES OF DANTE 32
BOCCACCIO 52
CHAUCER 76
Gower IOI
FROISSART 135
GASTON Paris 239
vii
THE EARLIER HISTORY OF ENGLISH
PROSE
The attraction of medieval literature comes perhaps

more strongly from some other countries than from
England. In France and Provence, in Germany and
Iceland, there were literary adventurers more daring
and achievements more distinguished. It was not
in England that the most wonderful things were
produced ; there is nothing in old English that
takes hold of the mind with that masterful and
subduing power which still belongs to the lyrical
stanzas of the troubadours and minnesingers, to
Welsh romance, or to the epic prose of the Iceland
histories.
The Norman Conquest degraded the English
language from its literary rank, and brought in a
new language for the politer literature. It did not
destroy — in one sense it did not absolutely interrupt
-English literature ; but it took away the English
literary standard, and threw the country back into
the condition of Italy before Dante —
- an anarchy
B
2 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
of dialects. When a new literary language was
established in the time of Chaucer, the Middle Ages
were nearly over : and so it happened that for the
greatest of the medieval centuries, the twelfth and
thirteenth, the centuries of the Crusades, of the
Hohenstaufen Emperors, of St. Francis, St. Dominic,
and St. Louis, there is in English no great repre
sentative work in prose or rhyme. There are better
things, it is true, than the staggering rhythms of
Layamon, or the wooden precision of Orm : the
Ancren Riwle is better. But there is no one who
can be taken, as some of the writers in other countries
can-Crestien de Troies, for instance, or Walther
von der Vogelweide, or Villehardouin — there is no
one in England who can be taken for a representative
poet or orator, giving out what can be recognised
at once, and is recognised instinctively, as the best
possible literary work of its own day and its own
kind. The beauty of medieval poetry and prose is
not to be found in England, or only in a faint
reflected way. England did not possess the heart
of the mystery . To spend much time with the
worthy clerks who promoted Christian and useful
knowledge in the thirteenth and fourteenth century
dialects of Lincoln or Yorkshire, Kent or Dorset,
is to acquire an invincible appetite for the glory of
other countries not quite so tame, for the pride of
life of the castles and gardens of Languedoc or
ENGLISH PROSE 3
Swabia, for the winds of the forest of Broceliande.

Not in the English tongue were the great stories
told .Almost everything in the literature of the
Middle Ages that is out of the common, that is in
any sense magical or inspired, comes from beyond
the English borders.
For all this want of distinction there is some
compensation. The early English literature, if not
representative of what is keenest and strongest, or
most exalted, in the intellect of Europe in these
times, is admirably fitted to convey to after genera
tions both the common sense and the commonplaces
of Western civilisation, from the ninth century on
ward . A study of English literature alone would
give a very false and insufficient idea of the heights
attained in the progress of European literature as a
whole : for there were worlds of imagination and
poetical art which were open to some of the other
nations, and not at all or very imperfectly to the
English. But English literature contains and pre
serves, in a better and completer form than elsewhere,
the common ideas, the intellectual and educational
ground -work of the Middle Ages ; and that is
something. The average mind at any rate is well
represented . Prose and its development can be
observed very fully and satisfactorily from a very
early date. One of the chief interests of the early
literature is that it reflects the process by which the
native Teutonic civilisation of the English became
metamorphosed by the intrusion of alien ideas, either
Latin or transmitted through Latin ; by the struggles
of the English mind to overcome and assimilate the
civilisation of the Roman Empire. Sometimes it
is easy , sometimes not so easy, to distinguish the
two kinds of thinking, native and foreign. The
alliterative heroic poetry of the Anglo - Saxons is in
herited, not imported ; it is the product of centuries
during which the German tribes were educating
themselves, and making experiments in poetry (among
other things) till they gradually formed the estab
lished epic type, which in essentials, in style and
phrasing, and even in subject-matter, is common to
Continental Germany and Scandinavia, in early times,
along with England. It may be compared, even
by temperate critics, to the Homeric poetry of
Greece, and the comparison need not be misleading.
The Anglo -Saxon prose, on the other hand, much
of which is contemporaneous with the heroic poetry,
is generally derivative and Latin in spirit, repeating
and adapting ideas that are very far removed from
simplicity. While on the one hand there are ana
logies with the Homeric age and the Homeric poems
in Anglo-Saxon society and poetry, on the other
hand there are many things in the work of the
Anglo - Saxon writers which make one think of the
way European ideas are now being taken up, with
ENGLISH PROSE 5
out preparation, in the East — of the wholesale modern

progress of Japan, and its un - Hellenic confusion.
The spectacle is sometimes painful ; it cannot be
called dull. The same sort of thing, the conflict of
the two realms of ideas, German and Latin , went
on in all modern nations, beginning in the first
encounter of the Northern tribes with the intellectual
and spiritual powers of Rome. This conflict is
really the whole matter of early modern history.
In England its character is brought out more
plainly than elsewhere, and, in spite of the Norman
Conquest and other interfering circumstances, the
process or progress is continuous. For which reason ,
if for nothing else, it is convenient to begin at the
beginning in dealing with the history of English
poetry or prose.
The work for which prose was needed first of all
was mainly that of instruction ; and of the early
didactic prose a great part is translation or adapta
tion. From the time of Ulfilas to the time of
Wycliffe and the time of Caxton, and since, there
has been ceaseless activity of the workers who have
had to quarry into, and break up, and make portable
and useful, the great mass left by the older civilisa
tions for the Goths and their successors to do their
best with .
The early English literature is strong in transla
tions . Translations were the books most necessary
for people who wanted to know about things, and

who knew that the most important questions had
already been answered by the Latin authors, so that
it was a waste of time for the English or other simple
folk to try to find out things for themselves. The
quarry of Latin learning was worked zealously, and
the evidences left by that activity are more than
respectable. The Anglo -Saxon Bible versions, and
Alfred's library of text -books — Orosius, Boethius,
Gregory, and the translation of Bede's history — are
works which in point of style have attained the
virtues of plain narration or exposition, and even
something more ; and the matter of them is such as
was not antiquated for many centuries after Alfred .
It was long before the other nations were as well
provided in their own languages with useful hand
books of instruction . Besides the translations, there
were other didactic works in different departments.
There is a considerable stock of sermons—some of
them imaginative and strong in narrative, like the
one on the Harrowing of Hell in the Blickling
Homilies, and others, like the Sermones Catholici of
Ælfric, more soft and gentle in their tone — more
finished in their rhetoric. These may not appeal to
every reader ; but the same might be said of the
works of many later divines than Ælfric.
The old English educational literature — hand
books and homilies — had merits that were of lasting
ENGLISH PROSE 7
importance . The history of English prose cannot

afford to ignore the books which , whatever may have
been their shortcomings , established good habits of
composition , made it fairly easy, for those who would,
to put English words together into sentences, and
gave more than one good pattern of sentence for
students to copy. The rhetorical value of the didactic
prose will be rated high by any one who values a
sound convention or tradition of ordinary prose style
for ordinary useful purposes. There are higher
kinds of literature than the useful ; but it is some
thing to have different kinds of useful prose at one's
command, and this in the tenth century was singular
and exceptional among the vernacular tongues of
the North and West. In so far as the intellectual
problem for the early English prose writers was the
reproduction of Latin learning , they took the right
way to solve it, and were more than fortunate in the
machinery they invented and used to adapt and work
up the old Latin materials .
The difficulty of the problem may easily be under
estimated . There were many things to hinder the
adoption of a decent prose convention. There was,
on the one hand, the danger of a close and slavish
imitation of the foreign models. One is reminded by
a clumsy participle absolute here and there that the
temptation which was too much for Ulfilas also beset
the Anglo-Saxons, who for the most part resisted
successfully the temptations of foreign grammatical

constructions, comparing well in this respect not
only with the Grecisms of Ulfilas, but with the
distracted participles of the Wycliffite Bible. The
Latinism of the Anglo -Saxon prose is to be found
mainly in the use of conditional clauses and a closer
bracing of the parts of the sentence than comes
naturally in primitive essays.
There was another danger besides that of helpless
and slavish admiration of Latin syntax,—a danger
perhaps greater, which was not so well evaded , the
tendency, namely, to get beyond the tones of prose
altogether into something half poetical. Prose is
more difficult than verse in some stages of literature,
and where a good deal of prose was made to be read
or recited, where the homilist was the rival of the
poet or the story -teller, there is small wonder that
often the sermons fell into a chanting tone, and took
over from the poets their alliteration and other
ornaments. This propensity to recitative of different
sorts is common to the whole of medieval prose, and

is worth considering later. Meantime there is matter
for congratulation in the fact that so much of the
Anglo-Saxon didactic literature should have escaped
the two perils of concessions to Latin syntax on the
1
one hand and to the popular taste for poetical decora

tion on the other.
The edifying and educational derivative prose is
ENGLISH PROSE 9
what bulks largest, but it is not the only prose

written in Anglo -Saxon times. There is another
sort, and a higher, though the amount of it is woe
fully small.
If one is justified in discriminating what may be
called the primitive or native element from the Latin
or adventitious element in the old literature and the
old civilisation, then one may put certain Anglo
Saxon prose works along with the remains of the
heroic poetry, along with the lays of Finnesburh and
Maldon, as showing what could be done without the
aid of Southern learning in dealing with lively matters
of experience, and the lives and adventures of kings
and chieftains. If there were nothing to take
account of except the translations and the sermons,
there would still be room for satisfaction at the
literary skill and promise shown in them ; but it
would be impossible to claim for the Anglo-Saxon
prose more than the merit of being a vehicle for the
common ideas of Christendom. But there is more
than that ; there are, besides the borrowed views and
ideas, a set of notes taken at first hand from the
living world, which have a different value from the
homilies. The best of Ælfric's homilies are as good
as the best of their kind anywhere. But that kind
is the expository literature which sets forth ideas, not
the author's own , for the benefit of listeners on a
lower level than the author - his sheep, his pupils.
1ο MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
That is not the highest kind, and there is a higher to

be found in the Chronicles, and in the narratives of
the northern voyages brought in by King Alfred as
an original contribution to his Orosius. The record
of the Danish Wars, the voyages of Ohthere and
Wulfstan , are literature of a more difficult kind than
Ælfric's homilies, and literature in a sense that could
never be applicable to any translation.
Of no old English prose can it be said that it is
wholly free from Latin influence ; but in some of the
varying styles employed in the Chronicles, and in the
narratives of the voyages, one comes as near as one
may in early English to natural prose — prose of the
sort that might have been written by men who had
nothing but natural English syntax, no Latin models
of composition, to guide them. Prose such as one
gets there is of the rarest near the beginnings of a
literature. The last thing people think of is to put
down in writing the sort of things they talk about,
and in a talking style. These particular passages,
and the navigators' stories especially, are good talk
about interesting things, and, what is more, about
new things. They are full of life, and strong ; there
is nothing in them to suggest the school or the
pulpit ; the people who composed them were, for the
time, emancipated from the Latin authority, out of
sight of land, the old land of traditional ideas and
inherited learning. Here is to be seen what they
ENGLISH PROSE II
could do when left to themselves ; here is the true

beginning of independent explorations and discoveries
in literature. There is one sense in which it might
be no paradox to say that these passages, as compared
with Ælfric, for instance, are modern literature ;
being plain and clear accounts of real things, in which
there are no great corrections to be made on account
of any disturbing prejudices. The region of Ælfric's
homilies is distant and unfamiliar, but no one feels
any sense of strangeness in listening to Ohthere.
There is a clear northern light on his reindeer and
walruses, and the northern moors and lakes ; the air
is free from all the Idols of the Forum and the
Theatre. It was a happy inspiration that gave
Ohthere and Wulfstan their place in Hakluyt's
collection ; and indeed many of Hakluyt’s men are
more old - fashioned in their style, and carry more
rhetorical top-hamper than Ohthere.
There were great opportunities for prose of this
sort - prose written in the tone of the speaking voice,
and describing the visible world and the things going
on in it. It is idle to inquire why there is so little
of such writing. One might have expected more,
perhaps ; for the literary talent of the Teutonic
nations, as far as one may judge from their poetry,
was all in the direction of clear and realistic narrative,
with no more superstitious accidents than were con
venient in the lives of epic heroes, and no Celtic
vagueness or airiness, but a sense of solidity and

matter of fact about the very witches and warlocks,
as well as the hero and champion, their enemy. It
may have been that in England, where the old epic
style survived with wonderfully little modification to
a late date, there was the less need felt for any epic
prose. The poem on the Battle of Maldon (A.D.
991 ) has all the strong virtues of a dramatic prose
history, and its poetic graces are consistent with prose
sobriety. Perhaps if this close - knit and masterly
style, this old simple epic tradition, had not maintained
itself,—if the English war poetry had been dissolved,
like its kindred in Norway and Iceland, into pure
formalism and periphrasis,—then perhaps the history
of the Battle of Maldon and the fall of Byrhtnoth
might have survived as a prose history, with all its
epic details and all its various individual personages.
Byrhtnoth's adversary and conqueror, Olaf Trygg
vason, had his life written in that way, and the
prose story of his last battle has more likeness to the
methods of epic poetry than to such unimaginative
history as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. But not
much is to be gained by theorising in this direction,
and the unrealised possibilities may be left to dispose
of themselves. Only, in illustration of the prose
genius latent in the old English poetry, one passage
>
of the Chronicle may be remembered —the

— episode of
Cyneheard and Cynewulf given under the date 755 .
ENGLISH PROSE 13
It is rude and harsh in its phrasing, but dramatic,

with its dialogue admirably calculated and its sequence
of events well managed : this passage is probably a
prose rendering of some ballad. The situation is one
that occurs again and again in heroic poetry and
prose ; it is the story of kings fighting for their lives
against their beleaguering enemies,—the story that
never fails of an audience, whether the hero be named
Cynewulf, Cyneheard, Byrhtnoth, or Roland. There
is a great resemblance in general outline to the history
of Maldon ; there is the same loyalty and self
devotion of the companions after their lord is killed .
What is remarkable about this entry in the Chronicle,
if it is really based on a poem, is that it has got rid
of every vestige of poetical style which would have
been discordant, and has kept only those poetical
qualities, qualities of passion or sentiment, which are
as well fitted for prose as for verse, or better.
There is little enough of such prose as this, but
there is enough to take hold of. Together with such
poetry as the poem of Maldon it forms the strongest
part of the pre-Norman literature— “ the stalk of
carl-hemp ” in it, compared with which the rhetorical
excellences of Ælfric are light and unsubstantial.
Contumely sometimes falls on the unreason , the
vapidity, the garrulity of medieval discourses, and it
is sometimes merited. At least it is difficult to refute
the critic who says that he is bored by the conven
tional homilies and saints' lives. But for some things

a strong defence may be made ; for all the old
literature that “shows the thing right as it was, ”
and gives adventures like those of Alfred and his
men in the great match played against Hæsten, or
natural history like that of the Finns and Esthonians.
Medieval literature is not all monotonous recitative
of traditional phrases ; some of it is fresh , strong,
natural, and sane, and speaks in a tone of plain good
sense .
This has sometimes been forgotten or ignored,

both by those who have an affection for medieval
literature, and by others. So many things in the
Middle Ages are quaint and exaggerated and over
strained, and therefore interesting, that the sober
reason and plain sense of those same times are in a
fair way to be forgotten. There is more fascination
at first in medieval romance than in medieval ration
ality ; the romance is beyond question, the rationality
is sometimes doubtful. It is worth while to look
out for places, like those already cited, where there
is no trace of what is usually associated with the
term medieval, no strained or feverish sentiment,
no effusive and tautologous phrasing. And strong
protest should be made against all attempts to over
lay, in translations or criticisms or otherwise, any of
the colours of romance upon the simple fabric of
plain stories. There is enough and to spare of
ENGLISH PROSE 15
romance ; true histories are not so common in the

Middle Ages. They ought, whether in translations
or merely in the reader's impression of them as he
reads, to be purged of all unnecessary quaintness,
where such quaintness as they possess is due merely
to the old language, and not, as in much of medieval
literature, to a real element of fancifulness in the
author .
The two classes of early English prose, the deri
vative educational and the original narrative litera
ture, are alike in this, that at their best they keep
clear of all unnatural intonations, and at less than
their best fall into chanting or recitative of one
kind or other. In the edifying literature there are,
as examples of the false style, the alliterative Saints'
Lives of Ælfric ; in the other kind of prose the
Chronicles themselves give a striking example of the
change of tone. They come to an end with the
lamentation of the Peterborough monk over the
miseries of the reign of Stephen. It is simple and
sincere, and in its way good literature, though it is
another way of writing history from that of the
voyage of Ohthere. Some of it may perhaps be
quoted again, well known as it is.
“Was never yet more wretchedness in the land,
nor ever did the heathen men worse than these men
did . For never anywhere did they spare either
church or churchyard, but took all the wealth that
was therein, and afterwards burned the church and

all together. Nor did they forbear from bishop's
lands, or abbot's, or priest's, but plundered monks
and clerks, and every man another, wherever he
might. If two men or three came riding to a
township, all fled before them and took them for
robbers. The bishops and priests cursed them con
tinually, but they took no heed of that, for they
were all accursed utterly, and forsworn, and cast
away.
“ Wheresoever there was tillage, the earth would
bear no corn, for the land was wasted with such
deeds ; and they said openly that Christ slept and
His saints. Such and more than we can say we en
dured nineteen years for our sins. ”
The pathetic and appealing tone of this marks it
at once as different in kind from the firmer and
more impersonal history of the times of Alfred and
his sons, and brings it into relation with all the
medieval literature in which the prevailing mood is
elegiac. So widely diffused is this melancholy, that
one is inclined often to take it for the dominant and
almost universal character of the Middle Ages, as
expressed in books. It belongs to devotional works
and to romances, to the Quest of the Holy Grail, to
the Romance of the Rose ; and even the strongest
and manliest writers—writers like Villehardouin and
Joinville—are often apt to lose their self-possession,
ENGLISH PROSE 17
and let their voices break and tremble. Pathos was

a strong solvent in the Middle Ages. It belongs
especially , though not exclusively , to the later
Middle Ages, to the romantic , not the epic age ; not
to the matter of fact and stubborn people who fought
on foot with swords and battle-axes, but to the
showy knights of the Crusades , and the times when
the world was full of ideals and fantasies.
In England there is one curious instance of the
way in which pathos might be multiplied upon
pathos. The Ancren Riwle (thirteenth century) is a
practical book of instruction and advice addressed to
a small household of nuns. It is not at all mono
tonous ; a good deal of it is kindly, humorous, and
homely ; some of it is merely technical, dealing with
the order of religious services ; some of it is moralis
ing ; some of it is devotional. One part of it, the
Wooing of the Soul, is beyond all praise for its
pathetic grace and beauty. It was not left alone in
its seriousness and its reserve. The theme was taken
up again and treated with a dissolute ostentation of
sentiment, with tears and outcries. The Wooing of
our Lord, as compared with the passage in the Ancren
Riwle, may stand as one indication of the sensibility
and its accompanying rhetoric that corrupted late
medieval literature in many ways.
There is so much good prose in Europe between
the time of Alfred and the time of Elizabeth that
с
one may easily forget the enormous difficulties that

stood in the way of it. Long after Alfred there still
remained, as a disturbing force, the natural antipathy
of the natural man to listen to any continuous story
except in verse. The dismal multitude of versified
encyclopedias , the rhyming text -books of science,
history, and morality, are there to witness of the
reluctance with which prose was accepted to do the
ordinary prose drudgery. The half-poetical prose of
Ælfric's Lives of Saints is to be explained as a conces
sion to the sort of popular taste which, later, gave a
hearing to prodigies like the Cursor Mundi, or, to
take the last of the rhyming encyclopedias , written
by a man who ought to have known better, the
Monarchy of Sir David Lyndesay. The audience
expected something finer than spoken language, and
the taste that accepted the alliterative homilies may
be compared with that which preserves the gaudy
poetical patches in the Celtic traditional fairy stories,
or that which requires from Welsh preachers that
half of each sermon should be sung
Besides the popular disrelish for plain prose, there
were other distracting and degrading influences. The
Latin models were not always as good as Boethius
or Bede. Even Orosius, guiltless as he is of any
brilliant extravagance, has his tirades of complaint,
helping to spread the sentimental contagion ; and
even Boethius, by providing pieces of verse for King
ENGLISH PROSE 19
Alfred to turn into prose, encouraged an over

poetical manner of phrasing. The Latin Bible also,
by its prose versions of poetical books, its parallelism
of construction, its solemn rhythms, its profusion of
metaphor, did much, unfortunately , to embolden
the rhetoricians of the Church. The secular Latin
literature, though it showed marvellous powers of
recovering its decorum, yet was always prone to fall
back into the wantonness that attacked it after the
close of the Augustan age, when the poetical treasury
was profaned and ransacked by magnificent prodigals
like Apuleius. Even the later Greek Euphuism of
the Greek romances found its way to England,
2
and ensnared an Anglo-Saxon man of letters, just as ?
Heliodorus attracted the novelists of France, Eng
land, and Spain five hundred years later. The
wonder is that any simplicity remained at all.
It is a long way from the tenth or thirteenth
century to the sixteenth, yet in the age of Elizabeth
the general conditions determining the growth of
prose were not greatly different from those that
obtained at the beginning. Latin literature was
still the model, and still, in some cases, the too
absorbing model of prose. Still there remained the
old temptation to excess of ornament, to poetical
gaudiness ; and though the Elizabethan rhetoric is
different from Ælfric's, there is more than a chance
likeness between the Anglo -Saxon Apollonius and

the sugared descriptions of the Euphuists. And it
was still possible for a strong -minded original man
like Latimer to discard the conventions of bookish
tradition and write the spoken language.
A great deal of prose was written between the
Ancren Riwle and the Repressour, between the
Repressour and the Ecclesiastical Polity, but the
general conditions do not greatly alter. There was
always Latin literature at the back of everything,
with Boethius coming clear through the Middle
Ages, to be translated by Queen Elizabeth in her
turn, after Chaucer and King Alfred . There was
always French literature to control and give direction
to the English
A volume of selections, beginning in the four
teenth century with Wycliffe, Chaucer, and the
book called Mandeville, does not begin with any
early improvisings of a style. The style of these
writers is fully formed — a common pattern of style
-common over all the countries of Europe. The
reason for beginning here and not earlier is a reason
not of style, but of vocabulary. The fourteenth
century is not in prose what it is in poetry. There
is no great revolution, like that which through the
agency of Chaucer brought English poetry out of its
corners and by-ways, and made it fit to be presented
at the King's court. English prose, which had been
ENGLISH PROSE 21
decent and respectable hundreds of years before

Chaucer, continued to be respectable after him.
Prose was not affected in Chaucer's time by the
revival of classical taste in Italy. The lessons of
artistic construction which Chaucer learned from the
poems of Boccaccio were not paralleled by any
imitations in his prose of the classical elegances
of the Decameron . The styles of Wycliffe and
Mandeville are to be taken as specimens of that
general level of composition which was the property
of medieval Christendom , and one of the outward
signs of the uniformity of its culture.
In the fourteenth century one need not be sur
prised to find that a good deal of the prose of all
the countries of Europe is a little monotonous and
jaded. For the general character of progress had
been a levelling down of national distinctions, and a
distribution over the whole field of the same com
monplaces, so that one finds the same books current
everywhere, the same stories : the popular learning
in the vernacular tongues became almost as clear of
any national or local character as the philosophy of
the schools. Naturally, there was some loss of vigour
in the process, and the later medieval writers are
exhausting, sometimes, with their want of distinctive
peculiarities, their contented rehearsals of old matter
in a hackneyed phraseology. Prose literature taught
and preached so much that it lost all spring and
freshness ; it suffered from an absorbing interest in

the weaker brethren, and became too condescendingly
simple. The childlike simplicity of medieval prose
is sometimes a little hypocritical and fawning. Prose
had been too long accustomed to talk down to its
audiences .
In the fifteenth centurythere is something more
than repetition of old forms. There are two argu
mentative books which are fresh and new - Bishop
Pecock's Repressour and Sir John Fortescue on the
Governance of England. It is a relief to come to
these books which require thinking, after all the
homilies and moral treatises which require merely to
be listened to. The great prose achievement of the
fifteenth century, and indeed of the whole time
before the Advancement of Learning, is a book in
many ways less original than those of Pecock
and Fortescue. But Sir Thomas Malory's Morte
D'Arthur, antique though its matter be, is singular
in its qualities of style ; and if the books of the
Bishop and the Judge are remarkable for the modern
good sense of their arguments, the Morte D'Arthur
has its own place apart from them in a region of
high imaginative prose.
Many things about the Morte D'Arthur are per
plexing and even irritating. It is a free version of
some of the finest stories ever made, and is based on
versions of the multiform Arthurian romance, which
ENGLISH PROSE 23
in some respects are beyond comparison the best.

Yet Malory has rejected some of the best things in
the “ French book ” which he followed . There is
nothing in Malory corresponding to the truth and
the dramatic sincerity of the first interview between
Lancelot and the Queen — the passage which Dante
could not forget. Malory never rises, as his original
here does, out of romance into drama. His refusal
to finisł the story of Tristram is as hard to under
stand as to forgive, and as hard to forgive as the
Last Tournament. But when all is said that the
Devil's advocate can say, it all goes for nothing
compared with what remains in Malory untouched
and unblenished by any hint of dispraise.
Malory ccomplished one of the hardest things in
literature. le had to rewrite in English some of
the finest of nedieval French prose, full of romance,
and of the stangest harmonies between the spirit of
romance and the spirit of confessors, saints, and
pilgrims. Wat could be done in those days by
adapters and ibridgers one knows well enough.
Caxton himselftried his hand on some others of the
Nine Worthies they did not fare as Arthur did.
To know what Ialory really is, it is enough to turn
to Caxton's Lyf f Charles the Grete or Recuyell of the
Histories of Troy. Malory kept in English all the
beauty of the Quite del St. Graal, that strange con
fusion of Celtic myh with Christian dreams, the most
24 MEDIEVAL LITERATUR
E
representative among all the books of the thirteenth
century. The story suffers no wrong in the English
version1 ; there as well as in the French may be heard
the melancholy voices of the adventurers who follow
the radiance of Heaven across the land of Morgai le
Fay. The time in which Malory wrote was not

favourable to pure imaginative literature — poetry was
all but extinguished—yet Malory was able to revive,
by some wonderful gift, the aspirations nd the
visionary ardour of the youth of Christendon — little
in agreement, one might fancy, with the poitive and 3
selfish world described in the Paston leters. He

did more than this also, as may be seen by a com
parison of the French book, or books, wih his own
writing. The style of his original has tle graces of
early art ; the pathos, the simplicity of the early
French prose at its best, and always hat haunting
elegiac tone or undertone which never fails in romance
or homily to bring its sad suggestions of the vanity
and transience of all things, of the passing away of
pomp and splendour, of the falls of princes. In
Malory, while this tone is kept, tiere is a more
decided and more artistic command of rhythm than
in the Lancelot or the Tristan . They are even
throughout — one page very much like another in
general character : Malory has splendid passages to
which he rises, and from which he falls back into the
even tenour of his discourse. In the less distinguished
ENGLISH PROSE 25
parts of his book, besides, there cannot fail to be
noted a more careful choice of words and testing of
sounds than in the uncalculating spontaneous elo
quence of his original.
Malory has been compared to Herodotus, and in
this the resemblance may be made out ; while, in
both authors, the groundwork of their style is the
natural, simple story -teller's loose fabric of easy -going
clauses, in both there is aa further process of rhetoric
embroidering the plain stuff. Neither Herodotus
nor Malory can be taken for the earliest sort of prose
artist. Both of them are already some way from the
beginning of their art, and though in both of them
the primitive rhetoric may be found by analysis, they
are not novices. Though they have preserved many
of the beauties of the uncritical childhood of literature,
they are both of them sophisticated ; it is their craft,
or their good genius, that makes one overlook the
critical and testing processes, the conscious rhetoric,
without which they could not have written as they
did. Malory's prose, and not Chaucer's, is the prose
analogue of Chaucer's poetry,-summing up as it does
some of the great attainments of the earlier Middle
Ages, and presenting them in colours more brilliant,
with a more conscious style, than they had possessed
in their first rendering. The superiority of Chaucer's
Troilus over the early version of the Norman trouvère
is derived through Boccaccio from aa school that had
begun to be critical and reflective. Malory, in a similar

way, rewrites his “ French book ” with an ear for new
varieties of cadence, and makes the book his own, in
virtue of this art of his. Much of the “ French
book ” has the common fault of medieval literature
the want of personal character in the style ; like so
many medieval books, it is thought of as belonging
to a class rather than a personal author, as if it were
one of many similar things turned out by a company
with common trade methods. This is the case with
some, not with the whole, of Malory's original ; it is
not the case with Malory. He is an author and an
artist, and his style is his own.
Malory, in much the same way as Chaucer, is one
of the moderns. He is not antiquated ; he is old
fashioned , perhaps—a different thing, for so are
Bacon and Jeremy Taylor old -fashioned, and Addison ,
and Fielding The modern and intelligible and
generally acceptable nature of Malory's book may
serve to prove, if that were necessary, how very far 1
from true or adequate is the belief that the beginning
of the modern world was a revolt against the Middle
Ages. The progress out of the Middle Ages had its
revolutionary aspects, as when Duns Scotus was torn
up in the New College quadrangle, and Florismarte
of Hyrcania delivered to the secular arm in Don
Quixote's backyard. But in literature, as a general
rule, progress was made in a direct and continuous
ENGLISH PROSE 27
line, by taking up what was old and carrying it on.

This at least was the method of Ariosto and Spenser,
of Shakespeare and Cervantes‫ ;ܪ‬and their predecessors
in this were Chaucer and Malory. It is impossible
to draw any dividing line. There was no Protestant
schism in literature. One cannot separate the Morte
D'Arthur from the old romances on the one hand,
nor from the Elizabethans on the other. Malory
is succeeded by Lord Berners with his Froissart and
his Huon of Bordeaux, and Lord Berners is a link
with Thomas North, Euphues, and Sir Philip Sidney.
Innumerable classical and foreign influences went to
make the new world, but among them all the old
!
currents from the old well-springs kept on flowing.
If any apology is needed for concerning oneself
with the older English literature it must be this,
that the older literature has never been cut off by
any partition wall from the newer. Even the writers
least in sympathy with Goths and monks and
superstitions had at one time or other made excur
sions into the enchanted ground. One finds evidence
enough of the favour shown to old books and old
styles of literature in days when there was no want
of brilliant new books. The Countess of Pembroke's
Arcadia kept its place in rooms to which the
Spectator found his way, and Dr. Johnson himself
(who accomplished the adventure of the Loingtaines
Isles) could be heartily interested in Amadis or
Palmerin. Perhaps the historians of literature have

paid too little attention to the effect on the upper
literary currents of this underflow of popular
romance . At any rate this popular appreciation of
old books will explain in part the success which
attended the labours of Gray, Warton, and Percy,
and go far to prove that the taste for medieval
scholarship is not an imported fashion, and not
anything to be ashamed of. Scholars like Gray,
Warton , and Percy, like Scott and Ellis, had not to
create the taste, for every one who read at all had
passed through the stage of the Seven Champions
and the Seven Wise Masters ; all they had to do was
to clear up people's views of the importance of such
like childish books, and display more and more fully
the rich world to which they properly belonged , and
from which they had come down. If any one objects
now to the very early beginning of English literature ,
he may lay the blame on the nature of things ; for
it is no capricious choice, no antiquarian perversity ,
that prevents this study from beginning comfortably
with the Elizabethans .
There are grounds of expediency, indeed,
making it best to set out, at first, with Chaucer.
They are not reasons which affect the history of
prose, or of English literature generally ; for the
literature does not begin, any more than the con
stitution, in the reign of Edward III. It is con
ENGLISH PROSE 29
venient to begin where the language has come into

something like its modern form , so as to get rid of
the need for any large apparatus of glossary or notes.
But the pedigree of English prose goes back beyond
Wycliffe and Chaucer. It is not quite as long as
that of the royal family of England i; it stops short
of Noah and Woden and Cerdic ; but at any rate
it goes back to Ælfred Æthelwulfing. That great
king has been frequently threatened with ostracism,
yet neither the political nor the literary history can
do without him, and the literary like the political
history of England is continuous.
In a book of specimens, which might be compared
to a sculptured procession in bas-relief of orators
and sages, one is forced to take a historical view, to
consider the writers in their general relations to one
another and to the whole of English history. Else
where and at other times they may be studied more
minutely, each for his own individual sake. There
are many dangers attendant on both kinds of criti
cism , and the critic who deals in generalities has not
always the easiest time of it. Books of selections
rightly made, from prose authors and poets, ought
to clear away some of the difficulties. The characters
of the several authors, and of the schools or fashions
of thinking and phrasing to which they belong,
are set out in such a way that they illustrate one
another, and represent, page after page, the changing
moods of the national life. These books do the
historian's work for him Ibetter than he can do it
himself. There are sceptics and nominalists who say
that it is an abstract futility to talk of the “ progress
of poesy,” or the history of English thought ; that
the real existences are not poesy , or thought, but
poets and thinkers ; that the historian , when he tries
to be philosophical and bring in his cunning apparatus,
his “ evolution ” and his “ environment,” is merely
setting his petards to an open door. If those sceptics
are wrong and to be confuted, they will be con
futed, not by argument from the philosophical his
torian (to which they will not listen ), but by the
gradual and tentative creation, in the minds of
readers, of a picture of literary succession , —such a
picture as may be sketched out in an anthology,
where one author is set off against his fellow , and
where groups of authors compare themselves with
other groups .
It is not perhaps of much importance to have
a theory of literary history stated in fine terms, but
it is a poor thing to lose appreciation of the different
tracts and levels over which literature has passed — to
be without the perspective of literature.
It is in the earlier periods especially that a truer
perspective is wanted. The earlier stages have been
left too much to themselves and to the specialists,
with the natural result that the value of the later
WE
ENGLISH PROSE 31
stages has been wrongly judged, most of all in the

case of Tudor literature, bordering as it does im
mediately on the terra incognita. The revolutions
SS
and innovations, the glory and the rapture and the
daring of the Elizabethans,—these things have been
recognised ; not so fully their indebtedness to the
es poetry, the rhetoric, the literary skill of the Middle
, Ages. The Elizabethans are praised at the expense
of older writers : they were not the first to whom
beauty seemed beautiful; the humanities were not
7 brought into the island of Britain first of all in the
5 Tudor times, nor are the humanities exclusively
ne
Greek or Italian. The Elizabethans lose nothing,
but gain, on the contrary, by rendering their due to
their ancestors—to the older practical writers who
kept their senses unclouded by mists of allegory or
superstition, and described the real world clearly,
to the visionaries who went before Sidney or Spenser.
1
0
1
‫ܕ‬
!
HISTORICAL NOTES ON THE SIMILES
OF DANTE
1
Dante is the first modern poet to make a consistent
use, in narrative poetry, of the epic simile as derived
from Homer through Virgil and the Latin poets ;
and it is not too much to say that the use of this
device in all the modern tongues may be traced back
to Dante. It was from him first of all that it came
into English poetry through Chaucer—both from
Chaucer's own reading of Dante, and also indirectly
through the influence of Dante on Boccaccio. For
example, Troilus, ii. st. 139 :
But right as floures, thorugh the colde of night
Yclosed stouping on hir stalkes lowe,
Redressen hem agein the sonne bright,
And spreden on hir kinde cours by rowe,
Right so gan tho his eyen up to throwe
This Troilus, etc.
This is exactly the simile in Inf. ii. 127 :
Quali i fioretti dal notturno gelo
Chinati e chiusi poi che 'l Sol gl' imbianca,
Si drizzan tutti aperti in loro stelo,
Tal mi fec ' io di mia virtute stanca .
32 1
NOTES ON THE SIMILES OF DANTE 33
Chaucer, however, does not take it from Dante : he
had the Filostrato of Boccaccio before him, and there
the passage is appropriated by Boccaccio almost word
for word (iii. 13, ed . 1789 ; ï . 80, ed. 1831 ) :
Come fioretto dal notturno gelo
Chinato e chiuso, poi che 'l sol l’imbianca,
S'apre e si leva dritto sopra il stelo
Cotal si fece alla novella franca
Allora Troilo .
In the Teseide (ix. 28 ) Boccaccio varies the lan

guage :
Qual i fioretti rinchiusi ne' prati
Per lo notturno freddo tutti quanti
S'apron come dal sol son riscaldati
E’l prato fanno con più be' sembianti
Rider fra l ' erbe verdi mescolati
Dimostrandosi belli a' riguardanti
Cotal si fece vedendola Arcita.
It was in that way, sometimes by mere copying,

sometimes by more original imitation, that this
poetical device was made a commonplace in modern
poetry ; and although, of course, later poets had
access to the Latin authors whom Dante knew, and
to Homer, whom he did not, still Dante can never
be left out of account in reckoning up the obliga
tions of later writers on this score. The authors
chiefly studied by Spenser, for example — Chaucer in

English, Ariosto and Tasso in Italian - are all in this
respect the disciples of Dante.
D
The instance first cited has nothing peculiarly dis

tinctive about it : it belongs to the common form ,
though it is not commonplace to the same extent
as the epic similes of lions among deer, or wolves
among sheep, which must have been of old standing
long before Homer. A different kind of simile
may be quoted from Chaucer to prove a different
kind of poetical influence upon the disciples of Dante
-the example of Dante's vivid imagination moving
his scholar, not to borrow directly, but to think in a
similar way :
Have ye nat seyn som tyme a pale face
Among a prees of him that hath be lad
Toward his deeth, wheras him gat no grace,
And swich a colour in his face hath had
Men mighte knowe his face that was bistad
Amonges alle the faces in that route :
So stant Custance, and loketh hir aboute.
Man of Law's Tale, 1. 547 seq.
There is nothing that exactly corresponds to this

in Dante, but the character of Dante is stamped upon
it ; it has the quality of Dante's imagination , as
shown whenever he has to translate his emotional
meaning into a pictorial image, and chooses to do
so without going very far from his subject. This
comparison in Chaucer of the anguish of Constance
to the anguish of a man led to execution, whose face
is dignified and made remarkable among the indis
tinct faces of the crowd, is not a simile from alien
matter, like those in which an army is compared to

cranes or to flies : it is a repetition of the same kind
of situation , a case of another person under the same
sort of distress. A large number of Dante's com
parisons are of this sort : not analogies from some
thing superficially different, but very close repetitions
of the original, in which the poetic effect is produced
by detaching and emphasising one particular aspect
of the subject without alteration of its features. So
in the simile of the gamesters at the beginning of
Purg. vi. , both the original and its illustration belong
to the same order of things. The picture of Dante
saving himself from the crowd of spirits thronging
about him is of the same kind as that of the lucky
gamester escaping from his importunate friends. At
a distance, one might mistake the one scene for the
other, and the imaginative value does not consist in
any ingenious analogy, but in the vividness with
which one aspect, one gesture, is singled out and
brought before the mind :
Quando si parte il giuoco della zara,

Colui che perde si riman dolente,
Ripetendo le volte, e tristo impara :
Con l'altro se ne va tutta la gente :
Qual va dinanzi, e qual di retro il prende,
E qual da lato gli si reca a mente.
Ei non s' arresta, e questo e quello intende ;
A cui porge la man più non fa pressa ;
E cosi dalla calca si difende.
RE
36 MEDIEVAL LITERATU
It is the great virtue of the Homeric simile — the

simile of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton — that
although it has often been made stale and ridiculous,
though it lends itself to any bad poet, and is fair
game for every parodist, it is always able to recover
itself. It is among the most commonplace of literary
formulas, and still its freshness, its power of new
life, is unimpaired. Not the Rehearsal, not even
The Tragedy of Tom Thumb the Great, has spoilt the
Homeric simile for the Idylls of the King, or for
Sohrab and Rustum . In Dante's use of it, and in its
1
effect upon his successors, is to be found one of the
best proofs of the vitality of classical poetry in its
influence upon the moderns. It is through the
classical similes—capable of the most abject degra
dation , but also ready to spring up afresh in the
mind of every new poet—among the oldest fashions
in literature, yet inexhaustible—that the influence of
Dante as the first scholarly poet, and the mediator
between ancient and modern poetry, has been most
clearly exerted. Dante's use of similes has been ,
directly and indirectly, a fructifying influence in
modern poetry, akin to the influence of Homer ;
keeping alive what is old in the tradition of poetry,
but at the same time using the old forms in such a
way that they act as stimulants to original imagina
tion, and not as pedantic restrictions. Was he
himself at all indebted to earlier vernacular authors,
in translating the Homeric simile into modern
poetical usage ?
It is rather strange that there should have been
so little imitation of the classical methods before
Dante, except in the medieval Latin poetry, which
made use of similes as a matter of course, as it made
use, to the best of its power, of the classical vocabu
lary. In spite of the diffusion of Latin poetry, and
a very general interest in grammar and rhetoric,
there was for long a want of intercourse between
the forms of classical and vernacular poetry. Ideas
might be borrowed , the facts of history or myth
ology might be transferred from Latin into French
or German verse, but the form of early poetry
in the vulgar tongues is generally independent of
classical influence. Similes, of course , there are, but
similes were not invented by Homer ; they have a
larger range than literature — they come by nature
more easily than reading and writing. It is not the
simile that is in question, but the Homeric expansion
of the simile — that which makes it into a distinct
piece of ornament, a picture in the margin of the
narrative. Comparisons such as Homer might have
used are common in the old French epic poetry, of
which Dante probably knew more than he has
expressly stated. But they are not used in the
Homeric way. They are not made into pictorial
passages ; they do not tend, like the Homeric similes,
E
and like many in Dante, to go beyond the exact

point of contact, into particulars that have nothing
to do with the likeness. Bolts fly like fine rain in
April,' warriors discomfit their enemies like a wolf
among sheep, or a falcon among small birds ; but
with that the comparison is ended : there are no
conventional set pieces, no “ ac veluti,” or “ so have
I seen .” One remarkable exception may be noted,
both on its own account and because of its corre
spondence to a Homeric simile on the one hand
and to Dante on the other. In the poem of Garin
le Loherain, a warrior goes through the ranks of his
opponents “ like an otter through a fish pond , when
he makes the fishes hide in the water pipe ” :
Ensement va com loutre par vivier
Quant les poissons fait en la dois mucier. 2
The same kind of terrified rush for shelter is ren

dered by Dante in his own way ( Inf. ix. 76 ) :
Come le rane innanzi alla nimica
Biscia per l'acqua si dileguan tutte,
Fin che alla terra ciascuna s' abbica.
This simile is preceded by another one describing the

vehement onset :
1
1 In Ekkehard's Latin poem of Waltharius Manufortis a comparison

of this sort is treated with an amplification which, we may be sure, was
:
wanting in his German original : “ Ac veluti Boreae sub tempore nix
glomerata Spargitur, haud alias saevas jecere sagittas ” (Waltharius, 188) .
2 Ed. Paulin Paris, 1833, t. i. p. 264.
E già venia su per le torbid' onde
Un fracasso d'un suon pien di spavento,
Per cui tremavano ambedue le sponde ;
Non altrimenti fatto che d'un vento
Impetuoso per gli avversi ardori.
The Homeric simile is rather nearer to the particulars

of the French instance than Dante's simile of the
frogs ; in fact, the French simile might almost be
taken as a translation of Homer into the terms of
common life in the twelfth century. In Homer,
instead of the fish - pond (vivarium ), with its pipes,
there is a harbour, and the invader is a dolphin,
scattering the fish into the corners :
As before a dolphin of the sea the other fishes are
crowded into the nooks of aa fair haven, stricken with fear,
for verily he will devour them if he find them, so the
Trojans huddled under the banks along by the stream of
the grim water . — Il. xxi. 22.
Just before this there is another simile in the
same matter, which is more like Dante's, and not
so like the French :
As under the stress of fire the locusts are wafted to the

river ; and burning with indomitable flame it suddenly
comes upon them and they shrink into the flood ; so before
Achilles the stream of the deep -welling Xanthus was filled
with the rout and noise of horses and of men.
The French simile has only one line of expansion,

but even that is exceptional in the chansons de geste
-an exception which proves the rule. Both Homer
and Dante need two similes to express what they
mean, and the similes correspond to one another,
each to each : Homer's fire and Dante's storm,
Homer's dolphin and little fishes, Dante's snake and
frogs. They have the same way of looking at the
event, beginning with the tempestuous rush of the
conqueror, and ending with the disgrace of the
vanquished. The French poet sees clearly, and his
picture is true, but it is not his habit to spend
much on that kind of decoration . His one line
of explanation is already more than was generally
approved by those of his school .
In the modern poetry, which was of more import
ance to Dante than the French , -in the courtly lyrical
poetry, Provençal and Italian , —he probably found a
good deal that helped him, consciously or otherwise,
in his adaptation of classical methods. In this kind
of verse , unlike the French epic, there was some
definite attempt to secure the Latin art of poetry
for the benefit of the illustrious vulgar tongue .
There were, however, several things that told against
the classical simile in the courtly lyric. The simile
belongs to epic, not to lyric ; and though some of
the lyric poets in both the tongues show powers of
imagination akin to Dante's, they are of course
limited by their conventional subject. Their senti
mental experiences afford no opportunity, or very
little, for pictures like those of the Divine Comedy.
Further, they were in command of an order of

metaphor quite unlike the Homeric similes, and
this kind of metaphor was almost as much a part
of their conventional apparatus as the sentimental
casuistry of their Art of Love. The distinction
between the courtly lyric metaphor and the epic
simile runs through the whole of modern poetry ;
the two kinds seem to have nearly equal vitality,
and they are seldom reconciled. The metaphors of
the Provençal poets and the early Italians survive in
Petrarch and all the Petrarchists, in all the courtly
schools, in the “ metaphysical ” poets. Unlike the
Homeric similes which spring up fresh from experi
ence in Dante and Chaucer, the conceits of the
courtly poets are handed down like heirlooms from
one generation to another. As they were, so they
continue ; the same in Cowley as in Petrarch, the
same in Petrarch as in any poet of the first Italian
century, or in any of the Provençals. They may
be known at once : the similes of fire and ice, winds
and floods — not those of the Iliad, but those of the
despairing lyrist and the cruel fair one !_similes
from certain parts of mythology, especially the
Metamorphoses— Narcissus, Echo, Pyramus and the
mulberry tree- similes from natural history, such
as the moth (sometimes called a butterfly) and the
1 Flames, sighs, and tears were of much more importance in Italy,
especially after Petrarch, than in Provence.
candle - the Phoenix — the turtle — the

-
basilisk .
These are among the oldest things in modern poetry
—at least they are found in the first courtly poets
of Provence ; but although they are so old , they come
again in every new school that has any pretensions
to be more refined in sentiment than its neighbours.
They distinguish Petrarch from Dante more than
anything else that is obviously demonstrable on the
surface of their poetry . Petrarch, with all his
modern ambitions, is quite content with these ancient
poetical jewels. His poetry was not of a kind that
perpetually demanded fresh illustrations from study
and experiences like those of Dante. The matter of
one of Petrarch's Canzoni (xiv.) is of the same kind
as in one by Inghilfredi Siciliano ?_each verse devoted
to one of the favourite idols. Petrarch chooses the
Phænix ; the Loadstone Rock ; the Catobleb, an
innocent creature with lethal eyes ; the fountain that
boils at night and freezes by day ; the fountain in
Epirus that kindles the quenched torch ; the two
fountains of the Fortunate Isles. Inghilfredi's selec
tion is the Salamander, the Phænix, the Tiger which
is pacified by a mirror, and the Panther.
Dante was, of course,, a freeman of this guild, and
knew all their mystery as well as any of them. In
the Divine Comedy, however, he separates himself
almost wholly from their manner of thinking. Yet
1 Poeti del primo secolo, i. 136 ; Nannucci, Manuale, i. p. 57.

there are traces of the old school even here ; it is
true that he shows his divergence from it even when
he makes use of its properties. The Phænix comes
into the Comedy, but not in the same character.
Ovid supplies a number of comparisons–Pyramus,
Echo,, the spear of Achilles, and others — but not in
the old context, though the simile of Glaucus has
some affinity with the lyrical allusions, Par. i. 65 .
One of the very few metaphors used in the old way
is that of the emeralds
Posto t'avem dinanzi agli smeraldi,
Purg. xxxi . 116.
--where the allusion is evidently to the properties of

the smaragdus in the old natural history : it is the
1
most joyous of all precious stones. This comparison
may be reckoned along with those derived from
Physiologus and similar authorities by the lyrical
poets, some of which were classified and explained
didactically by Fournival in the Bestiaire d'Amour,
long before the fashion was revived in Euphues.
While the conventional established imagery was
cherished and preserved by the Amourists in their
lyrical verse, there were at the same time some of
them who tried occasionally to get away from it.
Among the Provençal poets there were some whose
1 Nihil his jucundius, nihil utilius vident oculi ... deinde obtutus
fatigatos coloris reficiunt lenitate, nam visus quos alterius gemmae
fulgor retuderit, smaragdi recreant (Solinus, 15, 24).
genius led them towards freedom , and some of the

Italians, even under lyrical restrictions, anticipate the
similes of the Divine Comedy in their vivid observa
tion and their original record of experience, —for-
instance, Guido Cavalcanti, in the line

E bianca neve scender senza venti,
which is compared by Nannucci with Inf. xiv. 29–

dilatate falde,
Come di neve in alpe senza vento.
Guido's vivid line, it may be remarked , occurs in a

sonnet of aa very well-known type — that in which the
beauty of the lady is described by comparison with
all sorts of excellences in nature and art : one of the
most favourite forms of praise in all the courtly
schools. The lines of Guido and of Dante, though
so much alike, have a quite different poetical function.
In Guido the comparison is meant to enhance the
beauty and grace of the lady ; in Dante it is to
define and explain part of the adventure which he
is narrating : the flakes of fire that he saw were
like that.
One of the poems of Bernart de Ventadorn may

be cited as showing both the direct original observa
tion which is like Dante, and the ingenious learned
analogy which is in the manner of Petrarch and the
“ metaphysical ” schools. It begins
Quan vei la laudeta mover
De joi las alas contral rai,
Que s'oblid'es laissa cazer
Per la doussor qu’al cor li vai,
Ailas, quals enveja m'en ve
De cui qu'eu veja jauzion !
Maravilhas ai car desse
Lo cors de desirier nom fon .
“ When I see the lark moving her wings in joy

against the light of the sun, and she forgets herself
and lets herself sink, by reason of the sweet pleasure
that goes to her heart ; ah me, how great is the
envy that comes upon me when I look on any joyous
being ! I marvel that my heart is not melted within
me for longing ."
The opening of this (which is not exactly a simile )
must have been in Dante's mind when he wrote of
the lark :
Quale allodetta che in aere si spazia

Prima cantando, e poi tace contenta
Dell'ultima dolcezza che la sazia.
Par . xx. 73
It is not quite the same thing, but it is observed

in the same way as Bernart's, and rendered almost
in the same tone. But when Bernart in the third
stanza of this same poem complains that looking in
the mirror of his lady's eyes he is in danger of the
fate that befell Narcissus, the mood is changed alto
gether : Petrarch or Cowley would recognise their
L U RE
A AT
EV R
DI TE
86 ME LI
ancestor here, but this kind of imagination has little

in common with Dante.
A poem of Folquet of Marseilles presents a
similar contrast between the two kinds of imagery.
The first stanza begins :
Now that I am made aware thus late, like him that has
lost everything, and swears he will play no more, I may
well reckon it great good fortune, for now I know the guile
that was practised by Love against me.
The second stanza offers one of the many instances
of the moth and the candle—a conventional elegant
simile following on a plainer and less hackneyed
comparison.
The Provençal poetry gives proof that the authors
would have made more use of the simile if they had
had more room for it : they were limited by their
forms of sentiment, and could not illustrate the whole
of experience from itself, but only the sentimental
part : all their similes are applied either to the poet,
or to the lady, or to the sentimental relation between
them . While they are thus debarred from the wide
region of narrative heroic poetry, with its succession
of various adventures calling for illustration, they
are nevertheless able to develop a kind of simile—a
variation of the Homeric-Virgilian simile — which is
taken up by Dante, and which makes one of the
i Sitot me sui a tart aperceubutz.
BARTSCH, Chrest. Prov. 123 .
characteristic differences between his poetry and the
common form of epic. The Provençal poets did the
best they could to illustrate their own sentimental
dispositions and circumstances by means of similes.
The kind of illustration that they found most con
venient was that derived from the Saints' Lives of
Cupid, the history of true lovers in the past, Paris
and Helen, Tristan and Ysolt, or from the traditional
natural history with its moral signification. Besides
this, however, they occasionally tried to vary their
poetry with other and more original comparisons,
modelled upon those of Latin heroic poetry. They
had to bring the Homeric simile into the service of
lyric poetry, to illustrate the fortunes and the moods
of distressed lovers. Here Dante followed them,
while he followed the freer narrative poets as well.
Like the epic poets he uses similes for any adventure
that may fall to be described : like the Provençal
lyric poets he uses the simile for the changes in his
mind. His poem is not purely epic ; it is descended
in one line from the sirventes, the lyrical satire of
the Provençals, and in so far as the mind of the poet
is the subject of the poem, so far is the Provençal
lyrical simile applicable. Hence the great number
of similes that follow the pattern of the first in
the book.
E come quei che con lena affannata, etc.
The instance from Folquet quoted already is one
RE
EVAL RATU
48 MEDI LITE
of this sort, and there are others of different kinds.

Four of the poems of the Monk of Montaudon begin
“ Aissi com cel,” or “ aissi com om ,” which answers
precisely to the Italian “ come quei.” 1
In all these cases the subject is the poet himself.
“ As one who has lived long in peace on his own
freehold without a lord, and afterwards is by an evil
lord put under constraint. "
“ As one who is losing a bad case at law, and
dare not hear the judgment, and willingly would
leave it all to two friends to bring about a
good agreement, so would I fain do in the pleas
of love. "
“ As one who is in an ill lordship, and gets no
grace, but is taxed and tolled, and would gladly
change his estate, so gladly would I escape from her
dominion who has taken my life.”
“ Even as one who is persecuted by his lord, and
begs for mercy, but his lord will have no mercy, and
holds him fast till he has paid his ransom .”
Other instances of a similar kind might be found
without much difficulty ; 1.g., Pons de Capdoill :
Aissi m'es pres con sellui que cerquan
Vai bon seignor, etc.
1 Aissi com cel qu'a estat ses seignor (p. 10).

Aissi com cel qu' a plait mal ee sobrier (p. 14).
Aissi com cel qu'es en mal seignoratge (p. 20) .
Aissi com om que seigner ochaizona (p. 28).
Ed. Philippson , 1873.
These all resemble Dante's similes about himself,
and differ from the common run of conceits in their
evident intention of bringing out the literal meaning
of what they illustrate. They are not extravagant
or far -fetched ; as ornament they have little to take
the fancy ; they are quite unlike the ornamental work
composed of the Phænix and the Basilisk . The poet
keeps close to his subject, and the reality is too strong
to be dissipated in imagery.
The similes of the Divine Comedy might be
classified according to their greater or less variation
from the ordinary epic type. Some keep very closely
to the old form , like that of the snake and frogs
already noticed, which illustrates part of the action
of the poem in a way that has every right to the
name Homeric. The first step of divergence from
this type is due to the difference between Dante's
poem and all other epics. The business of his poem
is not the common matter of feasting and fighting
and parliaments : he requires fewer similes in order
to give variety to familiar scenes : his object is to
give clearness of detail to a personal narrative : hence
the great number of similes which give the right,
accurate description of a thing, and not a comparison
with something else : e.g. the famous passage about
the pitch in Malebolge is Homeric in its digression,
its description of what goes on in the arsenal at
Venice, but the central part of the simile is unlike
E
Homer, for it is merely meant to tell you what the

pitch exactly was, not what it poetically resembled.
When Homer compares the wound on Mene
laus's thigh to the purple stain on ivory,' the work
of aa Mæonian or a Carian woman, and then goes on
to think of the uses to which the ivory may be put
as an ornament for harness, the digression may appear
to have the same sort of value as Dante's description
of the dockyard : neither has anything to do with
the story. But the original motive is quite different :
Homer is moving away from the subject — he does
not wish to make you see the blood more clearly,
but to translate it poetically into something different ;
whereas for Dante the meaning of the comparison is
in the matter of fact which it contains : Venetian
pitch is not an illustration, but, as near as may be,
an equivalent for the thing which he wishes to bring
as exactly as possible before the mind.
To this class belong the great number of local com
parisons in the Inferno : there are hardly any in the
Purgatorio, and none in the Paradiso : 2 because the
country in the Inferno is more varied and difficult,
and requires some notes from more familiar scenery
in order to explain as clearly as possible what it is like.
1 Il. iv . 141 599 .
2 None, at any rate, of the same kind as those most usual in the 1
Inferno. The Chiana is introduced in the Paradiso (xiii. 23), but merely
for the slowness of its stream , as an example of slowness, and an
illustration of what is not in the poet's vision.
Much greater deviation from Homer is occasioned
by the need for illustrations of the changes in the
mind of the narrator , and it is here that Dante may
possibly have derived some hints from the practice
of the lyrical poets in the vulgar tongue. They also
provided him with one very considerable class of
illustrations, for any kind of subject, by their fond
ness for references to Ovid and other poets ; not
excluding the contemporary romances . Bertran de
Born, in one poem, refers both to Gawain and to
the story of William of Orange ; and a less famous
poet, Richart de Berbezill, makes a beginning, in
one case , by comparing himself to Percival, who was
silent when he should have spoken, and failed to ask
the meaning of the Lance and of the Grail. The
literary similes of Dante, as well as those arising
from his own states and changes of mind, may be
put down pretty certainly to the credit of his Pro
vençal studies.
1 « Atressi com Persavaus. ”
Parnasse Occitanien, p. 276 .
BOCCACCIO
To many readers it has appeared as if the friendship

of Petrarch and Boccaccio made the first comfort
able resting-place in the history of literature, on this
side of the Dark Ages. On the other side, farther back,
there are no doubt many marvellous and admirable
things, the enchantments and sublimities of “ Gothic '
art ; but there is little rest there for those who are
accustomed to the manners of the earlier literature.
There are interesting things, there are beautiful things
in the literature of the Middle Ages ; poems and stories
that have character and worth of their own, and cannot
be displaced or annulled by anything the Renaissance
or the march of intellect may have produced in later
times. But there is one defect in the Middle Ages :
they are not comfortable. There is no leisurely
rational conversation . Many civilised and educated
persons feel on being asked to consider medieval
literature , to pay attention to the poets of Provence
or to the Minnesingers , the same sort of reluctance ,
the same need for courage, that Dr. Johnson may
52
BOCCACCIO
53
have felt in setting out for the Isle of Skye. Even

to speak of Dante is not always safe with the less
adventurous sort of pilgrims ; it is like recommend
ing a good mountain to a traveller who is anxious
about his inn. Boccaccio and Petrarch come much
nearer to their readers and take them into their con
fidence ; they make friends for themselves as only
modern authors can, or authors who belong to an age
like that of Cicero or Horace, in which there is con
versation and correspondence and a vivid interest
in the problems of literature. The reader who is
acquainted with the Epistles of Horace may be
pleased to think that in the society of Petrarch and
Boccaccio he has escaped from the Goths — he has
arrived at the familiar world where there is an
intelligent exchange of literary opinions. Petrarch
and Boccaccio have made this sort of reputation for
themselves. It may be fallacious in some respects ;
the explorer who goes to the Letters of Petrarch
will do well for his happiness if he forgets to
compare them with the letters of Cicero or of
Swift. But the impression is not altogether
wrong ; Petrarch and Boccaccio, in their con
versation, are more like the age of Lewis XIV.
or of Queen Anne than any authors in the
thousand years before their day.
Those two Italian poets have the advantage— an
unfair advantage possibly-over older writers that
-
they do not depend for their fame altogether on the

present value of their writings. They have imposed
their story on the world, their hopes, interests, am
bitions, and good intentions. Like Erasmus and
Rousseau, they are known to the world, and esteemed
by the world , without very much direct and
immediate knowledge of their writings. There
is a traditional legend of their quest for the
sources of learning, and for perfection in literature.
Also there is, apart from their individual works,
the historical and dramatic interest of their contrasted
characters . The merest fragments of knowledge
about the two Italian poets, the traditional story of 1
Laura, the garden of the Decameron, may set one's
fancy to work on a story of two scholarly friends who
were brought together by their genius and their
ambition, and eternally kept from understanding one
another through a difference of humour in their
natures. It is a situation such as is familiar in
comedy. There are two men who are friends and
associates : one of them, Petrarch , is an enthusiast,
full of sensibility, full of anxiety, troubled about his
soul, troubled about his fame, vexed with distracting
interests, and with a mind never safe from the keen
ness of its own thoughts—an unhappy man from the
hour of his birth. The other, Boccaccio, is equable
and sanguine, takes the world lightly, is not inclined
to make grievances for himself nor to remember
BOCCACCIO 55
them ; at the same time aa hard worker, yet not dis

tressing himself about his work ; possessed of those
happy virtues of which Bacon speaks, for which it is
difficult to find an appropriate name. “ The Spanish
name disemboltura partly expresseth them, when
there be not stonds nor restiveness in a man's
nature, but that the wheels of his mind keep way
with the wheels of his fortune.” He acknowledged
himself the pupil and follower of Petrarch. He was
more even -tempered and happier than his master, but
far inferior to him in scholarship and insight. Boc
caccio recognised this, and did his best to profit by
Petrarch's example and instruction . His Latin prose
and verse must have seemed doubtful to Petrarch ;
one can only guess what pain the better scholar
suffered and dissembled in reading the essays of
Boccaccio. That is part of the comedy ; the best
part of it is that both the personages retain their
separate characters unspoilt and uncompromised in
what might seem to have been a remarkably hazard
ous exchange of sentiments and opinions. To the end
the relations are maintained between them : Petrarch
is always the master, and never entirely at liberty,
never contented ; Boccaccio always acknowledges
that he is a pupil, and is always unconstrained .
Two of the differences between them, which might
seem promising occasions for a downright quarrel, but
really turn out quite otherwise, are to be found in
VAL ATURE
56 MEDIE LITER
Boccaccio's expostulation with Petrarch on his resi

dence at Milan with the Visconti, which he regarded
very naturally as a surrender to a tyranny, and in his
letter accompanying a copy of Dante's poem. To
explain to your friend and master that he is selling
his soul, to remind Petrarch of the genius of Dante,
these ventures might be thought to be dangerous ; it
is difficult to see any good answer to a friend who
tells you ever so considerately that you are turning
against your principles.
As to the shamefulness of Petrarch's yielding to
the attractions of Milan, he had no good answer
ready ; what defence he tried to make must be
reckoned among the least admirable things in his
history. He had not to meet Boccaccio only, but
a host of other critics. Boccaccio (in 1353 ) had put
the case as gently as he could, in the form of an
allegory, but his touch was not light. Italy,
neglected and betrayed, is represented as Amaryllis,
and the Archbishop of Milan, Petrarch's friend, as
Aegon priest of Pan , who has abandoned his
rural worship and made himself into a captain
of thieves. It is with this renegade that Silvanus
(Petrarch's own name for himself in the eclogue to
his brother) has allowed himself to betray the Muses
and the Peneian Daphne (that is, Laura) , and what
is he doing there ? It is not indeed to be thought
that, along with Aegon, he is glad to hear of murder
BOCCACCIO 57
and rapine, the shame and desolation of his native

land ; yet what is the friend of solitude, of virtuous
freedom and of poverty, what is Silvanus doing in
that tyrannical house ?
The allegory does not do much to soften the
accusation . What Petrarch said to Boccaccio in
answer is not known, but the lines of his defence are
found in letters to other correspondents . They are
not good. The power of the great to command
obedience, the vanity of human wishes,—these are
-
made his excuse . There may have been insincerity

on both sides ; it is probable that Boccaccio did not
feel the shame of submission as vehemently as he
was able to express it. Yet, however it is taken, the
situation is characteristic of both parties, and so is
the result. Boccaccio is on the side of the obvious
and superficial truth ; the man who praised solitude,
independence , and poverty, and who has wished, in
immortal verse, that he could awaken Italy from
her lethargy of servitude, is not the man to accept
any patronage from the Visconti. Petrarch, on the
other hand, finds himself driven from the plain
ground into sophistical apologies. He has to make
himself believe what he wishes, and in the fluctuations
of his life he supports himself on the commonplaces
of the moralists. There is no quarrel, but the men
are different.
The difference comes out much more distinctly,
E
E VAL R ATUR
58 MEDI LITE
and we may say the danger of a breach between them

is very much greater, in the case of the letter about
Dante. A matter of personal conduct was never
very serious to Boccaccio, where it did not touch his
own interests, and not always then ; but on some
questions of taste he would venture a good deal. It
is unlikely that he would have stood a long examina
tion on the rack ; but one of the last things he would
have renounced was his admiration for the Divine
Comedy. The words put in his mouth by Landor,
in the imaginary conversation with Petrarch about
Dante ( Pentameron, First Day) , are perfect as a
summary of his ways of thinking. Petrarch says to
him : “ You are the only author who would not rather
demolish another's work than his own, especially if
he thought it better — a thought which seldom goes
beyond suspicion.” And Boccaccio answers, in terms
that really represent his character : “ I am not jealous
of any one ; I think admiration pleasanter. ”
He sent a copy of Dante's poem to Petrarch in
1359 , with some Latin verses,, the purport of them
being to inquire why Petrarch was unjust to Dante.
He does not say as much as this explicitly, but the
meaning is plain enough. It is a common incident.
Imagine a zealous admirer of Mr. Browning's poetry
sending a copy of The Ring and the Book to a severe
and critical friend. “ You must read this : · Because,
you spend your life in praising, to praise you search
BOCCACCIO 59
the wide world over ' ; how have you been able to
go on for years without saying a word about this
glorious poem ? ” And the recipient of these benefits,
when he has time to spare, goes calmly and writes a
letter more or less like Petrarch's answer to Boccaccio ,
and is the cause of grief and surprise in the mind of
the enthusiast. “You are mistaken in supposing that
I ever undervalued your poet ; on the contrary , I
have always consistently pitied him, on account of
the wrong done to him by his foolish admirers. It
is true that I never read much of him, for at the
usual age for such things I was on other lines, and
had to be careful about desultory reading. Now, of
course, I shall take your advice and look into him
again, I hope with good results. I need not say" —
and so forth.
It is much in that way that Petrarch thanks Boc
caccio for his present ; and still they were friends.
Some historians have found that Petrarch is cleared
by his letter from the suspicion of envy, but it is not
easy to find any very sincere good will to Dante or his
poem . It was impossible for Petrarch to share Boc
caccio's honest, unreserved delight ; he had prejudices
and preoccupations ; he was obliged to criticise.
Boccaccio has no hesitations, doubts, or scruples ;
his fortunate disposition makes him a thorough
going partisan of what he feels to be good. He does
not criticise : he thinks admiration pleasanter.
These two authors, so unlike in most things, were

brought together by friendship and common interests,
and have their place together in history ; they are
among the first of the moderns in every account of
the revival of learning, and they are reverenced as
among the first explorers and discoverers by most
writers who have to describe the emancipation of
humanity from the superstitions of the Middle Ages.
It may be suggested that possibly the historians of
the Renaissance have been .a little too much inclined
to interpret the fourteenth century by their know
ledge of the sixteenth, to read Petrarch by the light
of Montaigne. Montaigne is what it all ends in, no
doubt,-in Montaigne, or in Shakespeare . There at
last, in the prose author and in the poet, is the ex
planation and solution of those difficulties in which
the life of Petrarch is involved ; and Petrarch takes the
first stages in a progress that is to lead from superstition
(that is to say, the traditional and conventional morali
ties of the Dark Ages) to the free and unembarrassed
study of human nature. It is impossible to understand
Petrarch without the sixteenth century. But Petrarch
did not travel the whole course ; though all his life
is an effort to get freedom , he never fully escapes
from the ancient ways . It is a mistake in history to
represent him as conscious of the full meaning and
\ import of his reforms in learning and in poetry. Many
things he saw clearly, but he was never free from the
BOCCACCIO 61
medieval hindrances, and he feels them more than

those who have no glimmering of any other world
outside their medieval cave. In Boccaccio there are
like contradictions, but here the difference of temper
in the two men comes and helps the more sanguine
of the two . Boccaccio does not feel the contradic
tions in the same degree as Petrarch, and does not
fret about them .
Where the weight of medieval convention is most
obvious in the writings of Petrarch and Boccaccio, is
perhaps in their theories of poetry. The work of
Petrarch in Italian verse is often described, and justly,
as if it were a victory ofform and poetic style, of pure
art not distracted from its own proper aims. But there
is no hint of this sort of view in Petrarch's own
descriptions of the poetical office. On this subject
he speaks out quite distinctly ; he has no hesitation at
all, nothing but unqualified and uncompromising ad
herence to the doctrine that all poetry is allegory (Fam .
X. 41 , to his brother)—the doctrine that filled the
Middle Ages with their most tedious fictions and
conventionalities, the doctrine that provokes more
scorn and invective than any other from the leaders
of the new schools, equally in religion and in learning.
Tindale the reformer speaks of it in terms not very
different from those of Rabelais.
Boccaccio holds this medieval doctrine also, but
he holds it in his own characteristic way. He is
fond of it, and especially fond of a quotation from

St. Gregory the Great, the chief authority on the
allegoric method. St. Gregory, in the preface to his
Moralia, explains that the Holy Scripture is not for
one order of mind only—that it may be read by
simple people in the obvious sense as well as by
great clerks in the allegorical. Boccaccio adopts
St. Gregory's illustration , and speaks of poetry, and
incidentally of his own Commentary on Dante, as
giving both the easy and the difficult meaning. “ It
is like a river in which there are both easy fords and
deep pools, in which both the lamb may wade and
the elephant may swim ” -un fiume piano e profondo,
nel quale l' agnello puote andare, e il leofante notare .
But while Petrarch holds to this doctrine painfully,
and expounds the Aeneid as an allegory of man's
soul, and his own eclogue to his brother Gerard the
Carthusian , minutely, point for point, as an allegory
of his studies, it never is allowed to trouble Boccaccio.
His apology for poetry in the De Genealogia Deorum ,
though it keeps to this medieval commonplace about
the allegorical mystery of poetry, is full of life and
spirit. One of the best pieces of satire since Lucian
discussed the professional philosophers is Boccaccio's
account of the way the schoolmen on the one hand
and the friars on the other go depreciating poetry and
crying up their own wares instead. Who are the men
There is
who revile the Muses ? There race, he says,
is aa race,
BOCCACCIO 63
who think themselves philosophers, or at any rate

would be glad to be thought so, who say that poetry
is all very well for children in their grammar schools ;
they are men grave in language and ponderous in
their manners, who trade in words that they have
gathered from glances at books — words that do not
touch reality ; who trouble learned men with their
problems, and when they are answered, shake their
heads and smile at the rest of the company , as if it
were nothing but respect for the years of their
instructor that prevented them from crushing him ;
then they will go and make use of what they have
heard and give it out as their own, if they can get
any one to listen to them, musing and sighing as if
they were in deep contemplation , or as if they were
drawing true oracles direct from their most divine
and mysterious sources. The allegorical theory of
poetry does not look so formidable when Boccaccio is
explaining it. His defence of poetry is much the same
as Sir Philip Sidney's, and seems to have been called
out by the samekind of puritan depreciation as Sidney
had to refute . Once in his life, it is true, Boccaccio
was seriously frightened and made to doubt whether
a lover of poetry could be saved ,—through a warning
from the deathbed of a certain religious man, who had
a vision of Petrarch and Boccaccio, and sent them
notice of their probable fate if they persisted in carnal
learning and poetry. Petrarch had to encourage him,
64 MEDI LITE
EVAL RATU
RE
and advised him not to be seriously troubled. In this
distress the allegorical theory may have been a comfort
to Boccaccio. But practically it has very little effect
on his work ; and many poets of a much later day,,
like Tasso , allow it a much more important place in
their poetical designs.
It is hardly possible to make too much of the
influence of Petrarch and Boccaccio on the literature
of Europe. Both of them depended upon the older
medieval poets for much of their own writing :
Petrarch on the earlier schools of courtly verse,
Provençal and Italian ; Boccaccio on French romances,
on the Divine Comedy, and on the popular narrative
poetry of his own country ; but while both were
largely in debt, both made such use of what they
borrowed that they gave their own character to the
medieval forms ; and so everywhere in later ages
the form of courtly lyric is mainly Petrarchian, not
in Italy only, but in all the Latin nations and in
England, with Ronsard, with Camoens, with the
Elizabethans ; while the most successful forms of
narrative poetry are those which Boiardo, Ariosto,
and Tasso derived from the work of Boccaccio, and
handed on to Spenser. Petrarch and Boccaccio de
termined the course of the principal streams of poetry
in all the languages of Europe for more than two
centuries after their lifetime, and, in some important
respects, even to the present day.
BOCCACCIO 65
As aa successful inventor of definite literary forms,
as the founder of literary schools, Boccaccio may
claim respect for all his works, and not for his one ,
great book, the Decameron, only. Even if the
Decameron had never been written, there would still
remain a great variety of things in prose and verse,,
each with some original value of its own, and all,
even the least successful of them, productive and
stimulating in the schools of poetry.
The Decameron has perhaps had less influence in
this way, as a pattern of literary design and execution,
than some ofthe other works of Boccaccio—the Teseide
for instance. The Decameron has provided matter for
a great number of authors — Dryden in the Fables,
Keats's Isabella, and later still ; but the form and the
expression of the Decameron, which are its great ex
cellence, have not been copied to the same extent, or
at any rate in the same obvious and acknowledged
manner. It doubtless made the first great and decisive
change from the naïve and unstudied fashions of
medieval composition to the elaborate harmonies of
prose ; and again, wherever in later comedy the
vernacular of vulgar speech is liberally used, there
may be found something to recall the rich idioms of
Bruno and Buffalmacco, and the other Florentine
ruffians of the Decameron. Yet the Decameron is not
followed in the same way as some of the less famous
works of Boccaccio. The Filocolo, the Filostrato, the
F
Teseide, the Fiammetta, the Ameto, are each a new

kind of fiction, showing later writers some of the
promising ways in which their ideas might be
arranged and developed.
The Filocolo and the Fiammetta — works which
have their faults — are among the most ingenious and
dexterous examples of literary tact. They are types
of prose romance which were wanted in modern
literature. Boccaccio discovered these new and
promising varieties of story, apparently without
any trouble or labour. The Fiammetta is the first
of the prose romances in which the heroine is
made the narrator, and in which vicissitudes of
sentiment are the matter of the story. He had
certain models to work upon ; chiefly, no doubt, as
one of his biographers explains, the Heroides of Ovid ;
he may also have known the Epistles of Heloisa, and
sentiment of the kind he deals with is common and
familiar stuff for all the medieval varieties of courtly
poetry. But this does not greatly detract from Boc
caccio's originality as an inventor of one of the
principal types of the modern novel. The Filocolo ,
his earliest work, is even more remarkable. Boc
caccio takes an old French story, one of the best

known and one of the most attractive — the story of
the true lovers, Floris and Blanchefloure. This he
writes out in prose, in his own way, with all the
rhetoric, all the classical ornament he can find room
BOCCACCIO 67
for : the result is exactly like one of those Greek

rhetorical romances which Boccaccio had never seen ,
and which were to have such enormous influence two
centuries later. The Greek romance of Theagenes
and Chariclea had, in the sixteenth and the seven
teenth century, a value like that of the Iliad and the
Aeneid : Sir Philip Sidney, Tasso, and Cervantes are
among the followers of Heliodorus, and speak of
him as one of the most honourable names in litera
ture. Boccaccio knew nothing about Heliodorus ;
so he invented him. His Filocolo is a literary form
in which most of the things provided by Helio
dorus were anticipated, generations before the Greek
romances came to be a power in the West.
The Ameto is the first pastoral romance in prose,
with poems interspersed , -a form not now much in
request, but which was long regarded as an admirable
kind of fiction . The catalogue of these romances is
a long one ; and though the readers are not many, >
it is no ignoble company that includes the Diana of

Montemayor , the Galatea of Cervantes, the Astrée.
The Teseide has a higher eminence in the history of
poetry. It is the first attempt, in a modern language,
to reproduce the classical epic poem. Boccaccio is
the first adventurer in that long line of poets, in all the
nations, who have tried for the prize of the epic, “ not
without dust and heat,” and with so many failures,
with such vast heaps of wreckage, piles of similes,
broken “ machines,” battered and dingy masks of the

gods and goddesses of Olympus ; yet it is not all
waste, for Paradise Lost is one of the successors of
Boccaccio's Teseide. Paradise Lost was written with
the same kind of ambition, to show that the epic
forms of the ancients could be reproduced, and filled
afresh, by a modern imagination using a modern
tongue. Renaissance has some meaning as applied to
the works of Boccaccio. The contents of the ancient
poems had of course never been ignored, and were of
as much importance in the twelfth century as in the
fourteenth or the sixteenth. But Boccaccio is one of
the first of modern writers to try for the form and
spirit of classical literature.
He is not absolutely the first, for Dante was
before him . Dante was the first to realise the value
and the possibilities of the ancient devices in modern
poetry ; and some part, not a small part , of Boccaccio's
work is to popularise the methods of Dante ; for
instance in that use of the epic simile which was in
troduced in English poetry by Chaucer, and which
Chaucer learned from Dante and Boccaccio.
The talent of Boccaccio for finding out new kinds
of literature, and making the most of them, is like
the instinct of a man of business for profitable open
ings. The works of Boccaccio, other than the
Decameron, are full of all kinds of faults, from pomp
ous rhetoric to the opposite extreme of mere flatness
BOCCACCIO 69
and negligence ; but nothing impairs his skill in dis
covering the lines on which he is going to proceed,
the ease and security with which he takes up his point
of view, decides on his method, and sets to work.
The execution may be scamped , may be trivial in one
place and emphatic in another, without good reason ,
but it seldom does much to spoil the good effect of
the first design . This intuition of the right lines of
a story was what Chaucer learned from Boccaccio.
There is nothing more exhilarating in literary history
than the way in which Chaucer caught the secret of
Boccaccio's work, and used it for his own purposes.
There is more of instinct than of study in Boc
caccio's power of designing. He did not sit down,
like some later poets, to think about the poetical
forms of Greek and Latin poetry, and try to repro
duce them . He copied the epic model, it is true,
but it does not need much reading to find out that
an epic should have a descriptive catalogue of armies,
and, if possible, one book of funeral games. The
problems of the unities are different from this, and
there does not seem to have been anything the least
like the theory of the unities in Boccaccio's narrative
art, though the narrative unities are there in his
compositions. He might say like M. Jourdain :
Cependant je n'ai point étudié, et j'ai fait cela tout
du premier coup.” He took no pains about the
study of classical forms ;; his classical researches were
of another kind. He liked the matter of ancient

learning ; his learned works are encyclopedias ; the
Genealogies of the Gods, a kind of dictionary of
mythology intended for the use of poets, to keep
them right in their noble ornamental passages ; De
Casibus Virorum Illustrium ( The Falls of Princes, as it
is called in the English version, Lydgate's “ Bochas " ) ;
De Claris Mulieribus ; and an appendix to the
classical dictionary of the gods, providing additional
useful information for the poets “ concerning Mount
ains, Woods, Wells, Lakes, Rivers, Pools and
Marshes, and concerning the Names of the Sea .”
He was not troubled about rhetorical principles,
and says nothing much about his art, beyond his
explanation of the allegorical theory. His account of
Virgil is characteristic. Boccaccio was a professor in
his old age ; when he came to Virgil in his Dante
lectures he had nothing to tell his audience about
Virgil's diction nor about the idea of an Heroic
Poem ; he told them that Virgil was an astrologer
who lived at Naples, and who made a brazen fly and
a bronze horse and the two heads, one weeping and
the other laughing, set up at the two sides of the
Porta Nolana. But while he neglected the theory of
poetical composition he was making discoveries and
inventions in literary form , and establishing literary
principles in a practical way. He has no criticism in
him, but he does more than the work of criticism by
BOCCACCIO 71
the examples he sets. Chaucer, equally without any

explicit reflection on the principles of construction,
shows how he had made out for himself what Boc
caccio was driving at. Chaucer had all the medieval
tastes, the taste for exorbitant digressions and
irrelevances, the love of useful information , the want
of proportion and design. But he read Boccaccio and
discovered his secret without any lectures on criticism
and without saying much about his discovery. He
wrote, in imitation of Boccaccio, the stories of the
Filostrato and the Teseide.He changed them both ;
he added substance to Boccaccio's light and graceful
form of the story of Troilus ; he threw away the
epic decorations of Palamon and Arcita. In both he
retained, from his original, the narrative unity and
coherence. How much he learned from Boccaccio,
and how little it was in agreement with his own
natural proclivities, may be seen in his House ofFame.
He has just finished his Troilus and Criseyde, his
greatest work, and one of the greatest imaginative
works in English poetry,—a poem which, for sheer
strength and firmness of design, not to speak of its
other qualities, may stand comparison with anything
in the great Elizabethan age, even with Milton him
self. When he has finished this piece of work,
Chaucer thinks he has earned a holiday, and writes
the House of Fame — a rambling, unfinished, round
about paper, with every good old medieval vanity
in it — long descriptions, popular scientific lectures,

allegories, moralisings, everything that he knew to
be wrong, everything that was most familiar and
delightful to him from his school-days, and most
repugnant to a correct and educated taste. Wherever
Chaucer sets himself to do strong work, there is the
influence of Boccaccio ; he unbends his mind after
wards, in a plunge among the medieval incon
gruities ; sometimes with libertine recklessness, as
when he imposed the tale of Melibeus on the Canter
bury pilgrims ; Melibeus the ineffable, the unlimited,
the hopeless embodiment of everything in the Middle
Ages most alien to life. The reaction shown in
Melibeus may prove how strong the contrary in
fluence was —the lesson of restraint and coherence
which Chaucer acquired from Boccaccio.
In his relation to English literature, as the master
of Chaucer, Boccaccio may seem to have the character
of an academic and scholarly person prescribing rules.
This is illusion. Boccaccio had a natural gift for
story -telling, and for coherence in story-telling. His
talent for composition, design, arrangement, gives
him his rank among literary reformers. But this
talent remains always natural, and half unconscious.
There are pedantries in Boccaccio, but not the
academic and formal pedantry of the sixteenth
century literary men. He does not lecture on the
principles of composition. He has not Dante's
BOCCACCIO 73
affection for philology ; he would not have had much

sympathy for Tasso's painful defences and explana
tions about the plan and details of his epic.
Boccaccio has his strength from the land of Italy,
like Virgil, Horace, and Ovid . He has the old
pieties of the country people. The best things in his
great classical dictionary are the references to the
undying popular beliefs and rituals. Though he did
not get on well with his father, he remembers with
affection the old religion of the New Year's Eve,
when his father used to repeat the old country
observance, and pour a libation on the burning log
for the gods of the household. In the same temper
as Sidney's praise of the ballads, he finds the spirit of
poetry in the old wives ' fairy tales at the fireside in
the winter nights. One
One of his greatest achievements
in poetry, the confirmation of the octave stanza as
the Italian heroic measure, is due to his trust in Italian
manners and traditions. The ottava rima is a popu
lar, not a learned, form of verse. It is not a rude
or barbarous measure ; it is ultimately derived no
doubt from the courtly schools ; but still it is popu
lar, because the common people of Italy, and more
especially of Tuscany, have chosen to make it so.
The stanzas of the early popular romances of Tuscany
show distinctly their relation to the lyrical form of
the rispetti, which are to this day, it would seem, the
favourite form among the Tuscan villagers. Thus
the following example from the Cantare di Fiorio e

Biancifiore, shows the same device of repetition
(ripresa) which is obligatory in the lyrical rispetti :
Alora dise Fiorio : E io vi vo' andare,
e metere mi voglio per la via,
e cercaragio la terra e lo mare,
con tutta quanta la Saracinia ;
e giamai non credo in quà tornare
s' io non ritruovo la speranza mia ;
giamai a voi io non ritorneraggio,
s' io non riveggio 'l suo chiaro visaggio.
The mode of the rispetti is this :
Non ti maravigliar se tu sei bella,
Perchè sei nata accanto alla marina ;
L' acqua del mar ti mantien fresca e bella
Come la rosa in sulla verde spina :
Se delle rose ce n'è nel rosaio,
Nel tuo viso ci sono di gennaio ;
Se delle rose nel rosaio ne fosse,
Nel tuo viso ci sono bianche e rosse .
Boccaccio, in adopting this popular stanza for

his romantic and epic verse, was acknowledging his
reliance on the genius of the popular poetry. This ,
together with his command of the vulgar idiom in his
prose, gives him his authority in Italian literature at
the beginning of the new age. It is the good fortune
of Italian poetry that at a time when there was so
much danger of pedantry and formalism , of mere
classical imitation, Boccaccio was there to set the
i Tigri, Canti Popolari Toscani ( 1856), p. 15 .
BOCCACCIO 75
force of his example and influence against the

encroachments of fanatic precisians. He had too
much learning, too strong a faculty for design, too
great variety and liveliness of elocution, to be ignored
by any scholar. He could not be dismissed as a
barbarian ; and he was too ingenuous, too fond of the
Tuscan earth, the Tuscan air, to admit the sterile
blight of the false classicism. In his own way and
degree he did what Catullus and Lucretius, Virgil
and Ovid, had done before him—by taking all he
could get from the universal sources of learning,
while he kept his loyalty to the native genius of
Italy. Thus he appears at the beginning of the
Renaissance well protected against some of its most
insidious vanities, —just as the great Latin poets were
saved by the same Italian genius from the dangers of
a too absolute subservience to Greece.
CHAUCER
There is hardly any author of whom so many

commonplaces are true, and by whom so many
commonplaces are proved to be inept and ridiculous.
The commonplaces of historical origin and environ
ment, of the conditions of literary production, of the
evolution of literary forms, and all the rest of them,
are verified and illustrated in the life of Chaucer .
“ The poet as representative of his age is made
ready for the preacher in the volumes of Chaucer.
The author of Typical Developments might find his
booty in those early poems of Chaucer that seem at
first to be the product wholly of some “ tendency, ”
some “ spirit of the age,” without any admixture of
any particular character from the man who took the
trouble to write them. And it is not one tendency
only , or one taste or study, that is embodied in
Chaucer's writings, but all the ideas, all the pre
possessions, all the fashions, all the vanities of the
world , from courtly rhyming to importunate mor
alities ; all the learning, from the trivial arts to the
76
CHAUCER 77
heights of Astronomy, and beyond the primum

mobile. He comes out of the Middle Ages like
Glaucus from the sea, in the tenth book of the
Republic, where the real man , or god, is unrecognis
able in the overgrowth of shells and tangle. The
rich chaotic and formless life, the ooze and wrack
of the medieval depths, are indeed left behind and
cleared away when Chaucer comes to his own. But
no great poet has retained in so large a part of his
extant work the common “ form and pressure
of his own time and the generation immediately
before his own .
Dante had as large a share of medieval learning,

and in his earlier writings is almost as much subject
as Chaucer was to the prevalent fashions. There is
not, however, in the progress of Dante from the
earlier poetical conventions and from the learning of
the schools, the same paradoxical element as in the
history of Chaucer's poetry. Dante in one way is a
“ representative ” of medieval habits of thought and

imagination, shared by him with unnumbered name
less scholars and metaphysical poets. But he always
wears the common habit with some difference of his
own , and, more than that, he carries up all the
commonplaces of his reading and his early experi
ments into the “ heaven of his invention,” in the
Divine Comedy. Whereas Chaucer is again and
again content to remain simply on the level of his
L URE
78 MEDIEVA LITERAT
own time : one large fragment of the Canterbury

Tales is an undistinguished and unmanageable block
of the most hopeless commonplace : the Tale of
Melibeus is a thing incapable of life, under any
process of interpretation, a lump of the most inert
“ first matter ” of medieval pedantry, which is yet
introduced by Chaucer in his own person, in com
pany with his latest and finest work, for the enter
tainment of the Canterbury pilgrims. In many of
his poems, though in these always with some grace
of form and never with anything like the oppression
of Melibeus, Chaucer repeats the common tunes, the
idle sequences of phrases and rhymes in fashion
among the most abstract and most unsubstantial of
all the schools of poetry. In his great poems, in
Troilus, in the Legend of Good Women , in the most
notable parts of the Canterbury Tales, he has carried
on the commonplace matter to a higher form , and
has given individuality to the commonplace without
destroying its generic character altogether ; as, in
his own way, Dante always, in the most exalted parts
of his poetry in the Commedia, retains some of the
features of the Vita Nuova and the Convivio.
Chaucer, however, in his collected writings is encum
bered, unlike Dante, with a crowd of miscellaneous
pieces of work ; sketches, fragments, translations,
exercises, the product of hours in which he had no
call to do anything else or anything better than a
CHAUCER 79
journalist or an ordinary person might do. He

could escape, when he thought good, from the
restrictions of the medieval habit ; he could turn
the medieval fashion into something incomparably
bright and lively ; he could give body and strength
to the dreams and the echoes of the garden of the
Rose. But very often, and that to the very end of
his life, he found it easier and more comfortable to
take the traditional conventions as he found them,
and to use them as they were used by people of
no importance and no remarkable power of their
own.
It is this relation of Chaucer to the medieval

commonplaces that gives room for any amount of
historical commentary. Mr. Lowell asks, at the
beginning of his essay, “ Will it do to say anything
more about Chaucer ? Can any one hope to say
anything, not new, but even fresh, on a topic so
well -worn ? ” It is no less fair a problem to inquire
whether there can ever be any end to the illustra
tion of a writer who is in such sympathy with the
common moods of his contemporaries and his prede
cessors that every new discovery or new opinion
about the literary wealth of the Middle Ages must
inevitably have some bearing, more or less direct, on
the study of his writings. It is still a long way to
the end, and not so very far from the beginning of
the criticism of the French poets whom Chaucer
read. It is only the other day that the poems of
Oton de Granson were discovered , — “ Graunson flour

of hem that maken in France , ”—and among them the
original of Chaucer's Complaint of Venus. There is
not yet any good edition of Machault, and the
edition of Eustache Deschamps is not yet completed
for the Société des anciens Textes. It is still open to
any one to make his own critical judgment of the
works of those authors ; there has been little dicta
tion of any formal or established opinion on the
subject. Those authors are included in the great
host of amatory poets whose common qualities are so
common , and whose distinctive characters are so hard
to fix and to describe. Little has yet been done to
seize the volatile essence of that courtly poetry which
takes so many forms in different countries , and all of
them so shadowy . So long as the spirit of those i
French poets is still undetected and undescribed,
except in the most general terms, by the literary
historian , it cannot be said that the criticism of
Chaucer is exhausted.
It is easily possible to be tired of the historical
criticism that plies its formulas over the sources and
origins of poetry, and attempts to work out the
spiritual pedigree of a genius. It cannot, however,
be seriously argued that inquiries of this sort are
inept in the case of Chaucer, whose obligations to his
1 Written in 1895 : the edition was finished ( 11 volumes) in 1903.
CHAUCER 81
ancestors are manifest in every page, not to speak

of those debts that are less obvious. If the result,
in most instances, is to bring out Chaucer's inde
pendence more in relief by the subtraction of his
loans, and to prove the limitations of this historical
method when it is made to confront the problems of
original and underived imagination, there is no great
harm done, but the contrary. It is the result to be
looked for.
With one of Chaucer's poems the inquiry into
origins has scored a conspicuous success, and in
an equal degree has found its limits and proved its
inability, after all, to analyse the inexplicable. The
House of Fame has been subjected to laborious study,
and one important set of facts has been brought to
evidence about it. The relation of the poem to the
Divine Comedy has been considered and discussed by
Sandras, Ten Brink, Mr. Skeat, and other scholars.
The proof is decisive. There is no remnant of
doubt that Chaucer had been reading Dante when
he wrote the House of Fame ; that he derived from
the suggestions of Dante the images and the pageants
of his dream, and many of the phrases in which it is
narrated . Here, however, the proof comes to an
end. The historical inquiry can do no more . And
when all is said and done, the House of Fame still
stands where it stood — a poem inexplicable by any
references to the poem from which it was borrowed
G
a poem as different from the Divine Comedy as it

is possible to find in any Christian tongue. The
true criticism of the poem has to begin where the
historical apparatus leaves off. If its quiddity is to
be extracted, the House of Fame must be taken, first
of all, as the poem it is, not as the poem from which
it is derived.
It is in this way that the works of Chaucer afford
the most delightful tests of ingenuity and of the
validity and right use of the methods of criticism .
No task is more dangerous for a critic who has his
own private device for the solution of all problems.
The problems in Chaucer are continually altering,
and the ground is one that calls for all varieties of
skill if it is to be tracked out and surveyed in all its
changes of level.
The Canterbury Tales, which include so much, do
not include the whole of Chaucer. Some of his
masterpieces are there, and there is nothing like the
Prologue anywhere else ; but outside of the group
of the Tales is to be found the finest work of
Chaucer in the more abstract and delicate kind of
poetry, Anelida ; the most massive and the richest
of his compositions, which is Troilus; and the most
enthralling and most musical of all his idylls, in the
Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, with the
balade of Alcestis, “ sung in carolwise ” :
Hyd, Absolon, thy gilte tresses clere.
CHAUCER 83
The poem of Anelida and the False Arcite, it may

be suspected, is too often and too rashly passed over.
It has a good deal of the artificial and exquisite
qualities of the court poetry ; it appears to be
wanting in substance. Yet for that very reason the
fineness of the style in this unfinished poetical essay
gives it rank among the greater poems, to prove
what elegance might be attained by the strong hand
of the artist, when he chose to work in a small scale.
Further, and apart from the elaboration of the style,
the poem is Chaucer's example of the abstract way of
story -telling. It is the light ghost of a story, the
antenatal soul of a substantial poem. The characters
are merely types, the situation is a mathematical
theorem ; yet this abstract drama, of the faithless
knight who leaves his true love for the sake of a
wanton shrew, is played as admirably, in its own
way, as the history of the two Noble Kinsmen, or
the still nobler Troilus.
It is difficult to speak temperately of Chaucer's
Troilus. It is the first great modern book in that
kind where the most characteristic modern triumphs
of the literary art have been won—in the kind to
which belong the great books of Cervantes, of
Fielding, and of their later pupils,—that form of
story which is not restricted in its matter in any way,
but is capable of taking in comprehensively all or
any part of the aspects and humours of life. No
84 MEDIE LITERA
VAL TURE
other medieval poem is rich and full in the same
way as Troilus is full of varieties of character and
mood. It is a tragic novel, and it is also strong
enough to pass the scrutiny of that Comic Muse who
detects the impostures of inflated heroic and romantic
poetry. More than this, it has the effective aid of
the Comic Muse in that alliance of tragedy and
comedy which makes an end of all the old distinctions
and limitations of narrative and drama.
The original of Troilus, the Filostrato of Boccaccio,
is scarcely more substantial in its dramatic part,
though it is longer and has a more elaborate plot,
than Chaucer's Anelida. The three personages of
the one poem are not more definite than the three
of the other. The Filostrato is not merely “ done
into English ” in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde.
Chaucer has done much more than that for the
original poem ; he has translated it from one form
-
of art into another, — from the form of a light

romantic melody, vague and graceful, into the form
of a story of human characters, and of characters
strongly contrasted and subtly understood by the
author. The difference is hardly less than that
between the Italian novels and the English tragedies
of Romeo or Othello, as far at least as the representa
tion of character is concerned . Chaucer learned from
Boccaccio the art of construction : the design of the
Filostrato is, in the main outline, the design of
!
1
85
CHAUCER
Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde ; but in working out

his story of these “tragic comedians,” the English
poet has taken his own way—a way in which he had
no forerunners that he knew of, and for successors
all the dramatists and novelists of all the modern
tongues.
No other work of Chaucer's has the same dignity
or the same commanding beauty. It would be
difficult to find in any language, in any of the
thousand experiments of the modern schools of
novelists, a story so perfectly proportioned and com
posed — a method of narrative so completely adequate.
Of the dramatic capacities of the original plot, con
sidering the use made of it in Shakespeare's Troilus
and Cressida, there is little need to say anything.
Boccaccio chose and shaped the plot of his story with
absolute confidence and success : there is nothing to
break the outline. The general outline is kept by
Chaucer, who thus obtains for his story a plan com
pared with which the plan of Fielding's greatest novel
is ill - devised, awkward , and irregular : ; while the
symmetry and unity of Chaucer's story are compatible
with a leisure and a profusion in the details not less
than Shakespeare's, and in this case more suitably
bestowed than in Shakespeare's Troilus. There is
nothing in the art of any narrative more beautiful
than Chaucer's rendering of the uncertain , faltering,
and transient moods that go to make the graceful
and mutable soul of Cressida ; nothing more perfect

in its conception and its style than his way of
rendering the suspense of Troilus ; the slowly rising
doubt and despair keeping pace in the mind of
Troilus with the equally gradual and inevitable with
drawal and alteration of love in the mind of his lady,
till he comes to the end of his love-story in Cressida's
weak and helpless letter of defence and deprecation .
Besides the triumph of art in the representation
of the characters, there are more subsidiary beauties
in Troilus than anywhere else in Chaucer — as in the
effective details of the less important scenes, the
ladies reading the romance of Thebes together, the
amateur medical advice for the fever of Troilus,
the visit of Helen the queen, the very Helen of the
Odyssey, to show kindness to Troilus in his sickness.
There are other poems of Chaucer — the Knight's Tale
for instance - in which Chaucer relies more con
sistently throughout on the spell of pure romance,
without much effort at strong dramatic composition .
But it is in Troilus, where the art of Chaucer was
set to do all its utmost in the fuller dramatic form
of story, that the finest passages of pure romance
are also to be found , -in Troilus, and not in the
story of Palamon and Arcite, or of Constance, or
of Cambuscan, or any other. At least itit may be
At least
imagined that few readers who remember the most
memorable passage of pure narrative in Troilus, —his
CHAUCER 87
entrance into Troy from the battle without,—will be

inclined to dispute the place of honour given to it by
Chaucer's last disciple, in his profession of allegiance
in the Life and Death of Jason. The “ tragedie
of the lovers is embellished with single jewels more
than can be easily reckoned ; with scenes and
pictures of pure romance ; with the humours and the
“ ensamples " and opinions of Pandarus ; with verses
of pure melody, that seem to have caught beforehand
all the music of Spenser :
And as the newe abaysshed nightingale
That stinteth first whan she biginnith singe ;
with many other passages from which the reader

receives the indefinable surprise that is never ex
hausted by long acquaintance, and that makes the
reader know he is in the presence of one of the
adepts. But all these single and separable beauties
are nothing in comparison with the organic and
structural beauty of the poem, in the order of its
story, and in the life of its personages.
Chaucer is always at his best when he is put on
his mettle by Boccaccio. He is well enough content
in other instances to borrow a story ready -made. In
his appropriation of Boccaccio he is compelled by his
sense of honour to make something as good if he can,
in a way of his own . He learns from the Italian the
lesson of sure and definite exposition ; he does not
copy the Italian details or the special rhetorical pre

scriptions. The story of Palamon and Arcite, on
which Chaucer appears to have spent so much of his
time, is a different sort of thing from Troilus ; the
problems are different ; the result is no less fortunate
in its own way . The Teseide, the original of the
Knight's Tale, is reduced in compass under Chaucer's
treatment, as much as the Filostrato is strengthened
and enlarged. The Teseide, unlike the Filostrato, is
an ambitious experiment, no less than the first poem
in the solemn procession of modern epics according
to the rules of the ancients,-an epic poem written
correctly, in twelve books, with epic similes, Olympian
machinery, funeral games, and a catalogue of the
forces sent into the field — all according to the best
examples. Chaucer brings it down to the form of
a romance, restoring it, no doubt, to the form of
Boccaccio's lost original, whatever that may have
been ; at any rate to the common scale of the less
involved and less extravagant among the French
romances of the twelfth or thirteenth century. For
Boccaccio's Theseid, with all its brilliance, is somewhat
tedious, as an epic poem may be ; it is obviously out
of condition, and overburdened in its heroic accoutre
ments . The Knight's Tale is well designed, and
nothing in it is superfluous. There are some well
known instances in it of the success with which
Chaucer has changed the original design : reducing
CHAUCER 89
the pompous and unwieldy epic catalogue of heroes
to the two famous contrasted pictures “ in the Gothic
manner,” the descriptions of Lycurgus and Emetreus,
and rejecting Boccaccio's awkward fiction in the
account of the prayers of Palamon, Arcita, and
Emilia. But the most significant part of Chaucer's
work in this story is the deliberate evasion of any
thing like the drama of Troilus and Cressida .
The Knight's Tale is a romance and nothing more
-a poem, a story, in which the story and the melody
of the poem are more than the personages.. Chaucer
saw that the story would not bear a strong dramatic
treatment. The Comic Muse was not to be bribed :
neither then, nor later, when the rash experiment
of Fletcher in the Two Noble Kinsmen proved how
well the elder poet was justified in refusing to give
this story anything like the burden of Troilus. The
Lady Emilia, most worshipful and most shadowy
lady in the romance, is too cruelly put to the ordeal
of tragedy : the story is refuted as soon as it is made
to bear the weight of tragic passion or thought.
Chaucer, who found the story of Troilus capable of
bearing the whole strength of his genius, deals gently
with the fable of the Theseid : the characters are not
brought forward ; instead of the drama of Troilus,
there is a sequence of pictures ; the landscapes of
romance, the castles and the gardens, are more than
the figures that seem to move about among them.
There is pathos in the Knight's Tale, but there is

no true tragedy. How admirably Chaucer tells the
pathetic story may be seen at once by comparing the
meeting of Palamon and Arcite in the wood with the
corresponding scene in Fletcher's play :
Ther nas no good day, ne no saluing ;
But streight, withouten word or rehersing,
Everich of hem halp for to armen other,
As freendly as he were his owne brother.
This simplicity of style is the perfection of mere

narrative, as distinguished from the higher and more
elaborate forms of epic poetry or prose. The situa
tion here rendered is one that does not call for any
dramatic fulness or particularity : the characters of
Palamon and Arcite in any case are little qualified
for impressive drama. But the pathos of the meet
ing, and of the courtesy rendered to one another by
the two friends in their estrangement, is a pathos
almost wholly independent of any delineation of their
characters. The characters are nothing : it is “ any
friend to any friend,” an abstract formula, used by
Chaucer in this place with an art for which he found
no suggestion in Boccaccio, nor obtained any recog
nition from Fletcher. In the Teseide the rivals meet
and argue with one another before the duel in which
they are interrupted by Theseus ; in the play of the
Two Noble Kinsmen they converse without any
apparent strain . In Chaucer's poem the division
CHAUCER 91
between them is made deeper, and indicated with

greater effect in four lines, than in the eloquence of
his Italian master or his English pupil.
Such is the art of Chaucer in the Knight's Tale :
perfect in its own kind, but that kind not the
greatest. It needs the infinitely stronger fable of his
Troilus and Criseyde to bring out the strength of his
imagination. Troilus, to use a familiar term of
Chaucer's own, cannot but “distain ” by comparison
the best of the Canterbury Tales. Troilus is not a
romance, but a dramatic story, in which the characters
speak for themselves, in which the elements that in
the Canterbury Tales are dissipated or distributed
among a number of tales and interludes are all
brought together and made to contribute in due
proportion to the total effect of the poem. In the
Canterbury Tales the comic drama is to be found at
its best outside of the stories — best of all in the
dramatic monologues of the Wife of Bath and the
Pardoner. It takes nothing away from the glory of
those dramatic idylls to maintain that Chaucer's
Pandarus belongs to a higher and more difficult
form of comic imagination. The Wife of Bath and
the Pardoner are left to themselves as much, or
very nearly as much, as the Northern Farmer or
Mr. Sludge the Medium . Pandarus has to acquit him
self as well as he may on the same stage as other and
more tragic personages, in a story where there are
other interests besides that of his humour and his

proverbial philosophy. This is not a question of
tastes and preferences, but a question of the distinc
tion between different kinds and varieties of narrative
poetry. It is open to any one to have any opinion
he pleases about the value of Chaucer's poetry. But
the question of value is one thing : the question of
kinds is another. The value may be disputed
indefinitely : the kind may be ascertained and
proved. The kind of poetry to which Troilus
belongs is manifestly different from that of each and
all of the Canterbury Tales, and manifestly a richer
and more fruitful kind ; and for this reason alone
the poem of Troilus would stand out from among all
the other poems of its author.
The problems regarding Chaucer's methods of
composition are inexhaustible. They are forced on
the attention, naturally, by Mr. Skeat's edition of his
writings, in which the contradictions and paradoxes
of Chaucer's life appear more obvious and striking
than they ever were before. Boece and Troilus, which
are mentioned together by Chaucer himself, are here
associated in the same volume : the Treatise on the
Astrolabe goes along with the Legend of Good Women .
Of all the critical problems offered by this great
collection of the works of a great master there is
none more fascinating and none more hopeless than
the task of following his changes of mood and his
CHAUCER 93
changes of handling. Troilus is followed by the
House of Fame — a caprice, a fantasy, the poet's com
pensation to himself for the restraint and the applica
tion bestowed on his greater poem. “ Ne jompre
eek no discordant thing yfere” is the advice of a
literary critic in the book of Troilus itself : the critic
knew the medieval temptation to drag in "termes
of physik ” and other natural sciences, whether they
were required or not. The House of Fame is an
indulgence, after Troilus, in all the medieval vanities
that had been discouraged by the ambitious and
lordly design of that poem . Allegory, description,
painted walls, irrelevant science, pageants and pro
cessions of different kinds, everything that the
average medieval book makes play with,—these are
the furniture of the House of Fame ; and, in addition
to these and through all these, there is the irony of
the dream, and the humorous self-depreciation which
gives to the House of Fame the character of a personal
confession . It is one of the most intimate as well as
one of the most casual of all his works, -a rambling
essay in which all the author's weaknesses of taste
are revealed, all his fondness for conformity with his
age and its manners, while at the same time there is
no other poem of Chaucer's so clear and so ironical
in its expression of his own view of himself. On
the one hand , it is related to all the dreariest and
stalest medieval fashions; on the other, to the
liveliest moods of humorous literature. The temper

of Chaucer in his tedious description of the pictures
from the Æneid, in the first book, is in accord
with all the most monotonous and drawling poets of
the medieval schools ; his wit in the colloquy with
the eagle in the second book is something hardly to
be matched except in literature outside the medieval
conventions altogether. The disillusion of the poet,
when he imagines that he is going to heaven to be
stellified,” and is undeceived by his guide, is like
nothing in the world so much as the conversation
with Poseidon in Heine's Nordsee, where the voyager
has his fears removed in a manner equally patronising
and uncomplimentary .
The contradictions and the problems of the House
of Fame, in respect of its composition and its poetical
elements, are merely those that are found still more
profusely and more obviously in the Canterbury Tales.
There is little need for anyone to say more than
Dryden has said, or to repeat what every reader can
find out for himself, about the liveliness of the livelier
parts of the collection. The Prologue, the Interludes
of conversation and debate, the Host's too masterful
good humour, the considerate and gentle demeanour
of the Monk, the Shipman's defence of true religion,
the confessions of the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner,
the opinions of the Canon's Yeoman, —of all this,
and of everything of this sort in the book, it is
CHAUCER 95
hopeless to look for any terms of praise that will not

sound superfluous to people with eyes and wits of
their own . It is not quite so irrelevant to inquire
into the nature of the separate tales, and to ask how
it is that so many of them have so little of the
character of Chaucer, if Chaucer is to be judged by
the Prologue and the Interludes.
Some of the Tales are early works, and that
explains something of the mystery. Still the fact
remains that those early works were adopted and
ratified by Chaucer in the composition of his great
work, when he made room for the Life of St. Cecilia,
and expressly set himself to bespeak an audience for
the gravity of Melibeus. Here again , though on a
still larger scale, is the contradiction of the elements
of the House of Fame, the discord between the out
worn garment of the Middle Ages and the new web
from which it is patched.
There is nothing in all the Canterbury Tales to set
against the richly varied story of Troilus and Criseyde.
There are, however, certain of the Canterbury Tales
which are not less admirable in respect of mere
technical beauty of construction, though the artistic
skill is not shown in the same material as in Troilus.
The Knight's Tale preserves the epic, or rather the
romantic unities of narrative, as admirably as the
greater poem. The Nun's Priest's Tale is equally
perfect in its own way, and that way is one in which
L URE
96 MEDIEVA LITERAT
Chaucer has no rival. The story of Virginia,, the

story of the fairy bride, the story of the revellers who
went to look for Death, and many others, are planned
without weakness or hesitation in the design. There
are others which have an incurable fault in construc
tion, a congenital weakness, utterly at variance from
the habit of Chaucer as shown elsewhere, and from
the critical principles which he had clearly mastered
for his own guidance in his study of Boccaccio.
The Man of Law's Tale, the story of Constance, is
a comparatively early work, which Chaucer apparently
did not choose to alter as he altered his first version
of Palamon and Arcite. At any rate, the story
declares itself as part of a different literary tradition
from those in which Chaucer has taken his own way
with the proportions of the narrative. The story of
Constance has hardly its equal anywhere for nobility
of temper ; but in respect of unity and harmony of
design it is as weak and uncertain as the Knight's
Tale is complete, continuous, and strong. Chaucer,
whose modifications of Boccaccio are proof of intense
critical study and calculation of the dimensions of his
stories, here admits, to rank with his finished work,
a poem beautiful for everything except those con
structive excellences on which he had come to set
so much account in other cases. The story of
Constance follows the lines of a dull original . It
has the defects, or rather the excesses, of most
CHAUCER 97
popular traditional fairy -tales. Chaucer, who after

wards refused to translate Boccaccio literally, here
follows closely the ill -designed plot of a writer who
was not in the least like Boccaccio. The story
repeats twice over, with variations in detail, the ad
venture of the princess suffering from the treacherous
malice of a wicked mother - in -law ; and, also twice
over, her voyage in a rudderless boat ; the incident
of her deliverance from a villain, the Northumbrian
caitiff in the first instance, the heathen lord's steward
in the second, is also repeated ; while the machinery
of the first false charge made against Constance by
the Northumbrian adversary goes some way to spoil
the effect of the subsequent false charge made by
the queen -mother, Donegild. The poem has beauties
enough to make any one ashamed of criticism i; yet
it cannot be denied that its beauties are often the
exact opposite of the virtues of Chaucer's finished
work, being beauties of detail and not beauties of
principle and design. The Man of Law's Tale with
all the grace of Chaucer's style has also the char
acteristic unwieldiness of the common medieval
romance ; while the Knight's Tale, which is no finer
in details, is as a composition finished and coherent ,
with no unnecessary or irrelevant passages.
Besides the anomalies of construction in the
Canterbury Tales, and not less remarkable than the
difference between the neatness and symmetry of
H
E
E VAL R ATUR
98 MEDI LITE
the Knight's Tale and the flaccidity of the Man of

Law's, there is an anomaly of sentiment and of
mood. Melibeus may be left out of account, as a
portent too wonderful for mortal commentary : there
are other problems and distresses in the Canterbury
Tales, and they are singular enough, though not
altogether inexplicable or “out of all whooping,”
like that insinuating “ little thing in prose ” by which 1
Sir Thopas was avenged on his detractors.

The Knight's Tale is an artifice, wholly successful,
but not to be tampered with in any way, and above
all things not to be made into a drama, except for
the theatre of the mind . Chaucer refused to give
to Emilie and her rival lovers one single spark of
that imaginative life which makes his story of Troilus
one of the great narrative poems of the world , with
out fear of comparison with the greatest stories in
verse or prose. By the original conception of the
Knight's Tale, the Lady Emilie is forbidden to take
any principal part in the story. This is an initial
fallacy, a want of dramatic proportion, which renders
the plot impossible for the strongest forms of novel
or of tragedy. But Chaucer saw that the fable, too
weak, too false for the stronger kind, was exactly right
when treated in the fainter kind of narrative which
may be called romance, or by any other name that
will distinguish it from the order of Troilus, from the
stronger kind of story in which the characters are true.
CHAUCER 99
In some of the other Tales the experiment is

more hazardous, the success not quite so admirable.
What is to be said of the Clerk's Tale ? what of the
Franklin's ? That the story of Griselda should have
been chosen by the author of Troilus for an honour
able place in his Canterbury Tales is almost as
pleasant as the publication of Persiles and Sigismunda
by the author of Don Quixote. Chaucer had good
authority for the patience of Griselda ; by no author
has the old story been more beautifully and pathetic
ally rendered, and his Envoy saves him from the
suspicion of too great solemnity : but no considera
tion will ever make up for the disparity between the
monotonous theme and the variety of Chaucer's
greater work— between this formal virtue of the
pulpit and the humanities outside. In the Franklin's
Tale again, in a different way, Chaucer has committed
himself to superstitions of which there is no vestige
in the more complex parts of his poetry. As
Griselda represents the abstract and rectilinear virtue
of medieval homilists, the Franklin's Tale revolves
about the point of honour, no less gallantly than
Prince Prettyman in the Rehearsal. The virtue of
patience, the virtue of truth, are there impaled, crying
out for some gentle casuist to come and put them
out of their torment. Many are the similar victims,
from Sir Amadace to Hernani : “ the horn of the
old Gentleman ” has compelled innumerable romantic
heroes to take unpleasant resolutions for the sake of

a theatrical effect. That the point of honour, the
romantic tension between two abstract opposites,
should appearin Chaucer , the first of modern poets
to give a large, complete, and humorous representa
tion of human action, is merely one of the many
surprises which his readers have to accept as best
they may . It is only one of his thousand and one
caprices : the only dangerous mistake to which it
could possibly lead would be an assumption that the
Franklin's Tale can stand as a sample of Chaucer's
art in its fullest expression ; and the danger of such
an error is small. The beginning of right acquaint
ance with Chaucer is the conviction that nothing
represents him except the whole body of his writings.
So one is brought round to Dryden's comfortable
and sufficient formula : “ Here is God's plenty.”
From the energy and the volume of his Trojan story, >
as glorious as his Trojan river :

And thou, Simoys, that as an arwe clere
Through Troie rennest ay downward to the se ;
from the passion and the music of that “ tragedie

to the doleful voices of Melibeus, there is no form
or mood, no fashion of all the vanities, that is not
in some way or other represented there.
GOWER.
Gower has not lacked praise in his day ; few authors

have a better record. To be ranked along with
Chaucer, “ superlative as poets laureate,” to receive,
along with Chaucer, the homage of all the notable
English and Scottish poets for more than a century,
and still to be remembered with esteem in the days
of Shakespeare—this is the reward of Gower's learn
ing and diligence. Naturally there is much to set
off on the other side. If he was equalled with
Chaucer, so was Lydgate, as in Dunbar's Lament
for the Makers, speaking of the triumph of Death,
He has done peteouslie devour
The noble Chaucer of makaris flour,
The Monk of Bery and Gower all thre.
And the fame of Gower, which from the first had

something conventional and fashionable about it,
became more and more shadowy, till at last his
reputation settled down into a place merely respect
able in the history of English literature, as a sort of
foil to Chaucer. He is taken to represent the ideals
IOI
and the learning of Chaucer without his genius ; he

is the average educated man of the fourteenth
century at his best, brought by training and industry
to the accomplishment of a large amount of literary
work, but essentially commonplace and dull for all
his polite literature. Such, it may be said, is the
established opinion about Gower, where he is re
membered at all.
1
Before Mr. Macaulay's , there was no complete
edition of Gower. His English book, the Confesssio
Amantis, had never been well edited ; his French
book, the Speculum Meditantis, was lost. Mr.
Macaulay has discovered the Speculum Meditantis ;
he has made a good text of the English poem .
These are the chief things. It is something to have
found a lost work of an old English poet, in a
language so interesting historically as Gower's
French ; and the text of the Confessio Amantis
needed revision as much as anything in the docu
ments of that time . Besides, Mr. Macaulay has
given the Latin poems and the French balades of
Gower, and provided for all his matter a thoroughly
sound apparatus of history, philology, and criticism.
Few books are easier to review ; everything that can
be wanted has been foreseen . It is a pleasure to
1 The Complete Works of John Gower. Edited from the Manuscripts,

with Introductions, Notes, and Glossaries. By G. C. Macaulay. Four
vols. Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1899-1902 .
GOWER 103
look at Mr. Macaulay's workmanship. He has

mastered his subject; he has not grudged the most
laborious scrutiny of details ; ) and his good sense
and discretion are shown equally in explaining his
author's grammar, in deciding on the text, and in
estimating the value of the poetry.
That Mr. Macaulay's judgment is to be trusted
on points of taste has been shown in his little book
on Francis Beaumont ( 1883 ) . In dealing with
Gower he has been compelled to turn to many things
less attractive than the purely literary criticism of his
author ; he has proved that good sense in one
department of literature is no disqualification for
other kinds of study ; and though he has probably
less liking for philological investigation than for the
historical point of view, he gives the same steady
attention to both. The old allegory of the wedding
of Mercury and Philology has been too often belied
by numerous relations of the lady ; it is satisfactory
to find the parties, Wit and Learning, so well
reconciled as here.
The new edition will make no revolutionary
change in the general estimate of Gower. He
remains what he was before, in the common opinion
1 One curious point is decided by Mr. Macaulay. Why does Gower
refer to “ Civile ” (the civil law) as authority for the fable of the “ Dog
in the Manger " ? Because the “ Lex Furia Caninia ” had been repealed
as invida, and was generally misconstrued as “ Lex Canina.” (See the
note on Conf. Amant. ii. 83.)
of most critics — an industrious and fluent writer,

a steady moralist, fully possessed of all the avail
able doctrine, and all the usual illustrations and
examples, that were at the service of any preacher.
Mr. Macaulay, by his discovery of aa large , new
portion of the works of Gower, has even done some
thing to deepen the impression that Gower's talent
is commonplace ; for the Speculum Meditantis,
the Mirour de l'Omme, contains thirty thousand
lines of flat moralising, every page of it full of
the things that every one knew, a mirror of the
medieval doctrine which belonged to no one in
particular.
At the same time, without any paradox or any
attempt to find unappreciated genius in Gower, Mr.
Macaulay's remarks on his literary character have
brought out more clearly the very considerable merit
of his style ; and the result is that Gower, though
somewhat heavily weighted with the addition of
his long French poem, comes out with increased
distinction as a “ correct poet. “ Correctness ”
is his poetical virtue, his title of honour. It has
been recognised before ; but in the newly established
text of the Confessio Amantis the art of Gower is
shown to have been greater than was supposed when
his text was still troubled with small inaccuracies.
Now it has been restored and burnished ; and
Gower, in spite of all his heavy matter, appears as a
GOWER 105
poet with aa distinct and individual grace, still to be

read with pleasure. The spirit of poetry has seldom
had to contend with so large a mass of prose as the
contents of Gower's moral encyclopedias, but it has
not been defeated . It is hardly discernible in Gower
except in the ease of his style ; but this is in its way
as truly poetical as the stronger powers of imagina
tion or lyric passion, which Gower did not possess.
It may seem a slender gift when compared with the
wealth of Chaucer, but it is no less sincere and true.
He takes the ear with his unaffected flowing verse ;
it steals into the mind before the art of it is con
sciously noted, “ the sense variously drawn out from
one line to another, ” the accents varied in a way that
has become traditional in English short verse of this
kind. Apart from the ancient language, Gower's
melody is that of modern English poetry, or rather
of no particular age at all.
Bot for men sein, and soth it is,

That who that al of wisdom writ
It dulleth ofte a mannes wit
To him that schal it aldai rede,
For thilke cause, if that ye rede,
I wolde go the middel weie,
And wryte a bok betwen the tweie,
Somwhat of lust, somwhat of lore,
That of the lasse or of the more
Som man mai lyke of that I wryte :
And for that fewe men endite
In oure englissch, I thenke make
A bok for king Richardes sake,

To whom belongeth my ligeance
With al myn hertes obeissance
In al that evere a liege man
Unto his king may doon or can.
The progress of poesy ” since these lines were
written has been in anything but a straight course ,
and many great and many prosperous poets have
come short of the point reached by Gower's style.
Who has a right to say that Gower is quaint, or
even “ medieval ” ? Spenser is less secure than
Gower ; most of the Elizabethans are loud and
affected compared with him. As to the good taste
of the eighteenth century, it is perhaps enough to say
that it is something different from the courtesy of
Chaucer's time ; in poetry it allowed some things
which to Gower would have seemed violent. Is
Gower more antiquated in style than Dr. Young ?
Which is nearer the centre — the passage just quoted,
or the following from the moralist of Queen Anne's 1
reign, versifying the Day of Judgment ? 1
Now charnels rattle ; scatter'd limbs, and all
The various bones, obsequious to the call,
Self mov’d, advance ; the neck, perhaps, to meet
The distant head ; the distant legs the feet.
Dreadful to view, see through the dusky sky
Fragments of bodies in confusion fly,
To distant regions journeying, there to claim
Deserted members and compleat the frame.
There is nothing unreasonable in the opinion,

GOWER 107
which seems naturally suggested by these invidious

comparisons, that Gower had a quality of style for
which there is no better term than “ natural. ” It is
an old fallacious term in criticism , but it expresses
what people mean. Gower “ followed Nature,”
inasmuch as he did not overload, or bluster, or , at
any rate in his English work, go raking for orna
mental phrases out of books. Like Chaucer's
Franklin , he cared nothing for “Marcus, Tullius ne
Cithero .” 1
Colours of rethoryk ben me to queynte.
But his natural utterance is the result of a long

process, in which the study of rhetoric had its place,
during the generations that formed the courteous art
of poetry in France. The beauty of it was that the
rhetoric had been thoroughly assimilated and the

school processes forgotten before Gower took in hand
to write. Young's contemporaries were most of them

still conscious of their lessons and anxious to do what
the grammar schools had taught them . Gower's
language is never strained, and it is never anything
but gentle. Wordsworth’s ideal of poetical expression
might be exemplified from Gower, and justified ; for
though Gower's vocabulary is not taken from the
1 Gower really thought there were two of them :
And thilke time at Rome also
Was Tullius with Cithero. - C.A. iv. 2647.
“ humble and rustic life” which Wordsworth re

commended, it is natural and unaffected ; there is no
artificial rhetoric in his phrasing, there are no orna
mental words daubed over his page ; there is, in short,
nothing remarkable about his diction. It is attractive
purely through its simplicity and ease, “ as clean as
hill -well water. ”
Gower invented nothing, either in style or matter .
The merit of his style is that it accomplishes in Eng
lish what had been attained long before and practised
for many generations in France. He belongs to the
French courtly school. Everything that is said in
praise of Gower's style might be repeated with little
variation about many French poets from the twelfth
century downward—Benoit de Sainte-More, Chrestien
de Troyes and his followers ; the authors of the
Romaunt of the Rose in the thirteenth century ;
Eustache Deschamps and Froissart, Gower's con
temporaries. It was in France, and especially in
French short verse, that the style was first employed
which Chaucer and Gower made their own in English.
It is all French : the simple eloquence, utterly incap
able of forced language, utterly different from the
old English standard of poetical expression, which
still survived in Gower's day in the emphatic
splendours of the alliterative poems. It is this
quality of style, this perfect ease and freshness, that
makes old French literature what it is—a land of
GOWER 109
rest and solace, where nothing glares, nothing dazzles

or stuns the sense ,—where the weary reading man
may escape from the thunderings and trumpetings of
more vehement literary schools.
It was to this that English literature was drawn,
from a time long before Gower and Chaucer ; not,
indeed, in any unanimous way (otherwise nothing
would have remained for Gower to do) , but occa
sionally, tentatively, in the works of writers who
kept themselves from the ordinary English faults of
misrule and awkwardness, and followed the French
example of a proper literary demeanour. Particularly
in one poem of the thirteenth century, The Owl and
the Nightingale (noted by Mr. Macaulay in one place
on account of its versification ), the new model seems
to have been studied , with full appreciation of its
meaning and value, in the same original and free way
that Chaucer followed in his transactions with foreign
literature. The Owl and the Nightingale is a humor
ous poem, written in octosyllabic verse as correct as
Chaucer's, with the same ironical self -possession, the
same urbanity. Here evidently the phrasing and
versification, the correct, unimpeded, fluent style, the
poetical good manners, are due to a close knowledge
of French literature, and to something more than a
mere copying of the external features.
Nicholas of Guildford , the author of The Owl
and the Nightingale, understood the intentions of the
IIO MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
French authors as Chaucer or, we might say, chang

ing the reference, as Dryden understood them. He
was in sympathy with them before he copied their
style ; which means that, so early as the thirteenth
century, it was possible for an Englishman to compete
in English with the elegances of French courtly verse ;
to escape, on the one hand, from the hindrances of
the common boorish doggerel ; to refuse, on the other,
the temptations of the nobler alliterative poetry, and
to begin aa tradition of polite literature, after the mode
of France, without any slavish subjection to the
foreigner.
Again, the style of Barbour, though less correct
than his contemporary, Gower, proves how well the
spirit and manner of France had been appropriated.
The Bruce is a poem of the same kind as the French
life of William Marshall ; in verse, in grammar and
diction, it follows the French school ; it has the same
simplicity of language, the same ease of narrative as the
Roman de Thèbes or any other of the romances that
Barbour loved .
Chaucer, being a man of genius, made much more
than Gower out of his study of his masters ; but
Gower, by the side of Chaucer, shows that there was
something in the time which encouraged the art of
poetry. The end of the fourteenth century saw the
culmination of a long process. The correct verse of
Chaucer and Gower was required by the conditions
1
GOWER III
of the age in which they lived ; or, to put it more

positively , they followed a number of early writers
who had tried for correctness, and they were obliged
to try harder and gain more.
The decline of English poetry in the fifteenth
century, with the shambling verse of Lydgate and
the other degenerate Chaucerians, is difficult to
understand and explain. Whatever the cause may
have been, Lydgate, at any rate, serves to bring out
the value of Gower and to mark the period of 1400,
the age of Chaucer, as a time of cultivated literary
taste in which Chaucer was not alone. The latter
half of the fourteenth century is more consciously
artistic, more secure in command of its resources,
than any other period till the time of Pope ; and it
may be doubted whether even Pope is more of an
artist than Gower.
“ The spirit of the age ” is rightly regarded with
some diffidence by most sober readers when brought
forward to explain any particular facts in literary or
any other history ; but that is no reason why one
should refuse to acknowledge the “general tendencies”
of an historical period. The fourteenth century has
a distinct character, peculiarly interesting as coming
between the medieval and the modern world, not
merely in the hackneyed part of “ an age of
transition , ” but as achieving certain things which no
later progress has surpassed, such as the Chronicles of
I I2 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
Froissart, the prose of Boccaccio, the poems of Dante,

Petrarch, and Chaucer. The Italian authors do not
concern Gower ; but he is pretty fully in sympathy
with Froissart, and shares with him the characteristic
fourteenth - century habit of mind.
The fourteenth century was too late for that
medieval ferment of invention and exploration, that
great romantic movement which, in the twelfth cen
tury, had discovered and put into shape an infinity
of stories for the whole of Christendom to enjoy and to
repeat ; all the old “ matters of Rome and of Britain ,"
the tales of Troy and of Thebes, of Arthur and
Alexander. In the fourteenth there was not much to
be done in the way of new subject-matter, except in
contemporary history, like Froissart's. The artists,
like Boccaccio and Chaucer, were chiefly engaged in
recasting old material, with a definite resolve to make
the form expressive and valuable for its own sake.
Literary reflection and criticism (though these had
not been wanting in the earlier days among the
French and Provençal poets) were now more self
conscious and ambitious. The artists came to their
themes in a modern critical spirit, weighing and
choosing, deliberating over alternative modes of
treatment, bent on finding the right arrangement and
proportion. Chaucer's procedure in his adaptations
from Boccaccio shows this clearly. Troilus and
Criseyde, with all its copious detail and all its
GOWER 113
freedom , is, from one point of view, to put it at its

lowest terms, an exercise in composition, a lesson of
the workshop. Every page of it, if compared with
the Italian original, proves the fine critical sense of
Chaucer ; there is no better example in English, if
there is any in the world, of studious literary art,
which at the same time is perfectly fresh and spirited.
Chaucer had the entry of Italian schools of poetry
which were not open to Gower. Gower's masters
were French ; and French literature had not the
same faculties as Italian.
But the French poets also were growing out of the
Middle Ages . Compared with the Italians, they are
no doubt old -fashioned . They never learned the skill
of arrangement, of ordonnance, of poetical logic, which
came naturally to Boccaccio, and was learned from
him, and improved, by Chaucer. They are desultory
and diffuse ; and they also keep, unlike the Italians,
the simple medieval phrasing, the innocent, garrulous
language, which makes Old French sound like the
conversation of the Golden Age. At the same time,
fourteenth - century French, while in many respects
retaining its primitive and unsophisticated grace, was
becoming modern in its ideas. Froissart, in his verse
even more than his prose, represents the new
“ urbanity ” of the later Middle Ages, the Horatian
interest in contemporary manners, which naturally
requires a different kind of literature from the old
I
forms of romance or courtly lyric. Froissart's Buisson

de Jeunesse and Espinette Amoureuse are disguised by
their old language and their medieval illustrations ;
in reality, great part of them belongs to the same
class as the Epistles of Horace.
Chaucer had his favourite French poets before
him when he wrote polite verse on modern subjects,
and his humorous tone is not a new thing: ; he shares
it with Froissart and Deschamps , just as there is a
common manner of speaking and thinking among
French and English poets in the time of Dryden or
of Pope. Too much has been made of the conven
tionality of the French school to which Chaucer and
Gower belonged . Chaucer is often represented as
escaping from the French conventional tradition
found, for instance, in the Book of the Duchess — to
an independent , humorous view of life in the Canter,
bury Tales. There is less of a contrast between the
Book of the Duchess and the Canterbury Tales than is
sometimes supposed . The Book of the Duchess has
plenty of life in it ; and much of its freedom , its
versatility, its gentle changes of tone between the
satirical and the elegiac , might be matched in the
French poetry of the day. Chaucer got more from
the French than their stock devices, such as the
allegorical dream and the May morning pageant.
And here Gower is Chaucer's ally, his equal , wherever
it is possible to compare them, in the polite simplicity ,
GOWER 115
the perfect ease of conversation, which was the

peculiar gift of the French poets. It is not purely
literary, but depends on an understanding between
the poet and his readers, —a social sympathy, as
M. Gaston Paris has explained so admirably in his
essay on the general character of French literature.
Gower and Chaucer, unlike as they are in genius,
have more of this than most English writers ; Gower
has little else to distinguish him besides this indefin
able graceof manner and the elegance of verse which
goes along with it.
Gower's versification has been studied by his editor,
and deserves the care he has bestowed on it. In tenui
labor ; it is thin enough, in one sense, but thin like
the music of the clavichord . Gower's art of poetry
is as thorough as if he were using the louder instru
ments. Fluent as his verse is, there is no “ fatal
facility” ; the cadences are tested, the syllables chosen .
An example to which Mr. Macaulay calls attention is
in the vision of ladies in the story of Rosiphelee
( Conf. Amant. iv. 1315 sq . ) :
In kertles and in copes riche
Thei weren clothed, alle liche,
Departed evene of whyt and blew ;
With alle lustes that sche knew
Thei were enbrouded overal.
Here bodies weren long and smal,
1 In the Preface ( 1896) to the Histoire de la Langue et de la Littérature
française, edited by Petit de Julleville.
The beaute faye upon her face

Non erthly thing it may desface ;
Corones on here hed thei beere,
As ech of hem a qweene weere,
That al the gold of Cresus halle
The leste coronal of alle
Ne mihte have boght after the worth :
Thus come thei ridende forth .
Here it is noted that an earlier version read :
The beaute of hire face schon

Wel bryhtere than the cristall ston.
And it may be added that the change to the new

reading— “ The beaute faye upon her face ” (i.e.
“ The fairy beauty on their faces " )—is characteristic
of Gower's style, both in the choice of the term , the
alliteration, and the harmony of the vowels. It is
not easy without long quotations to show how good
Gower can be ; one cannot tell the beauty of a stream
from looking at a selected inch or two. But the
following short passage from a lover's soliloquy will
prove that Gower, as a “ courtly maker,” had little
to learn (Conf. Amant. iv. 605 sq. ) :
Whi hast thou drede of so good on,
Whom alle vertu hath begon,
That in hire is no violence
Bot goodlihiede and innocence
Withouten spot of eny blame ?
Ha, nyce herte, fy for schame !
GOWER 117
Ha, couard herte of love unlered,

Wherof art thou so sore afered,
That thou thi tunge soffrest frese,
And wolt thi goode wordes lese,
Whan thou hast founde time and space ?
Much of Chaucer's lighter verse, especially in the
House of Fame, is, as Mr. Macaulay points out, less
regular than Gower’s. There is some fallacy, per
haps, in the comparison . The House of Fame was
not written with the same motives as the Confessio
Amantis, though it belongs to the same medieval
world and takes pleasure in the same sort of learning.
The House of Fame is not honest. The medieval
pedantry in it is meant ironically ; it is not like
Gower's good faith . Chaucer was amusing himself,
in the House of Fame, after the exacting work of his pcbatly
before
Troilus. In that poem , Pandarus— who no doubt
represents the Italian ideal of culture — had expressly
forbidden the comfortable, easy - going, medieval
fashion of bundling all sorts of discordant things
together. Chaucer knew what he was about when
he proceeded to disregard the prescriptions of
Pandarus ; and so, when he acknowledges in the
House of Fame that the rhyme is “ light and lewd ,”
the plain certainty is that he meant it to be so. The
House of Fame is not a specimen of Chaucer's art ;
hardly more so, indeed, than the Rime of Sir Thopas.
And still, even when the deliberate artlessness of the
House ofFame is left out of account, when Gower and
Chaucer are matched on equal terms, it may appear

that Gower is the more correct poet within his own
compass. That there is a larger harmony of com
position rather than of phrasing, where Gower does
not come into the field against Chaucer, is sufficiently
obvious. But in the Book of the Duchess Chaucer
may be compared with Gower ; the two poets are
here in the same school, and Chaucer has not yet the
ideas and the ambitions which he got from Italy. !
Both writers have rendered from Ovid the tale of
Ceyx and Alcyone ; and Mr. Macaulay thinks that
Chaucer has been less successful in reproducing the
story than Gower. It may be doubted whether this
is so .Chaucer's phrasing, even in this early conven
tional work, is more “ quick and forgetive ” than
Gower's ; for instance, in the description of the valley
of sleep :
That stant betwixe roches tweye
Ther never yet grew corn ne gras,
Ne tre, ne no thing that ought was,
Best ne man, ne no wiht elles,
Save ther were a fewe welles
Came renning fro the cliffes adoun ,
That made a deedly sleping soun,
And ronnen doun riht by a cave
That was under aa rokke y-grave
Amidde the valey, wonder depe.
This passage has one line with the English license in

it, dropping a syllable at the beginning
Best ne man, ne no wiht elles 1
GOWER 119
according to the tradition which is found more fully

developed in the short verse of Fletcher's Faithful
Shepherdess, and after that in L'Allegro. It is one
mark of the difference between Chaucer and Gower ;
Gower is more precise, and does not like this varia
tion from the French standard . His description is
more detailed, and it has no such beauties as the
“ deedly sleping soun " of Chaucer's wells ; yet it is
good writing :
And forto speke of that withoute,
Ther stant no gret tree nyh aboute
Wher on ther myhte crowe or pie
Alihte, forto clepe or crie :
Ther is no cok to crowe day,
Ne beste non which noise may
The hell, bot al aboute round
Ther is growende upon the ground
Popi, which berth the sed of slep,
With othre herbes suche an hep.
A stille water for the nones
Rennende upon the smale stones,
Which hihte of Lethes the rivere,
Under that hell in such manere
Ther is, which yifth gret appetit
To slepe . And thus full of delit
Slep hath his hous ; and of his couche
Withinne his chambre if I schal touche ,
Of hebenus that slepi tree
The bordes al aboute be,
And for he scholde slepe softe,
Upon a fethrebed alofte
He lith with many a pilwe of doun .
It seems no injustice to Gower to say that this is
I 20 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
less good than Chaucer. But in a way it is more 1

correct. Chaucer's irregularity of verse is not
allowed by Gower ; and this is only one proof of the
literary conscience which kept watch over all Gower's
writing, and is justified by the continuous, yet subtly
varied eloquence of his narrative.
Gower has no approach to the imaginative world
of Chaucer's Troilus ; it is as far beyond him as
Shakespeare is. But he has great skill in giving the
right shape to a story, on his own scale and with his
own light way of treating dramatic problems. His
editor has noted many places in which Gower's
judgment is found working to better effect than
his masters ; he does not follow tamely. In some
stories he has improved on Ovid ; at any rate, a
good case can be made out for him. But his stories
are always kept to the simplest terms; there is no
drama, except the most elementary. Indeed, it is
part of the charm of his stories that they are so
simple, so well within the author's powers. Naturally,
there is no chance in them for the rich workmanship 1
of Chaucer. They do not touch the mind in the
same way. But as pure narrative they are generally
admirable. Many examples might be quoted ; the
story of Rosiphelee, already referred to, is well suited
for an illustration of Gower's talent, because it is
more or less the same story as Dryden's Theodore
and Honoria, though the cruel beauty in the
GOWER I 21
Confessio Amantis is less severely punished. Gower

will bear comparison both with Dryden and
Boccaccio. The skill with which the story is worked
out could only be proved by full quotation. What
the style is like has been shown in the quotation
given above ; and it needs no long consideration to
find out that there Gower has succeeded .
His version of Medea and Jason is worth some
attention for various reasons.
The story is one in
which medieval writers had great chances and some
times took them , because the story is romantic, one
might say medieval, from the beginning. Nothing
is better fitted for romance than the plot ofthe king's
daughter helping the adventurer with her magic.
Gower has gone for his incidents to the first medieval
author who told the story as a romance of chivalry,
-
Benoit de Sainte- More, in the Roman de Troie.

It cannot be said that he has surpassed the French
poet, for the author of the Roman de Troie was
as elegant a poet as Gower, and much stronger in
explaining motives ; also, he worked on a larger
scale. But it is pleasant to see how Gower acknow
ledges the lasting authority of the early French
romantic school by going to the poet of the twelfth
century rather than to their common authority, Ovid,
for advice ; and how well he keeps the clear, simple
lines of the story untroubled by details. As Mr.
1 Cf. A. Lang, “ A Far-travelled Tale,” in Custom and Myth.

Macaulay shows, Gower revised the incidents so as to
keep the most effective parts of the story. He leaves
out the earlier tale of Jason (the malignant policy
of his uncle sending him on a deadly adventure),
because he was not writing a long story, and this
part of the plot was not necessary. He passes lightly
over the voyage of the Argonauts, and selects the two
important things — first, the love of Medea and Jason,
with her help in the winning of the Fleece, and
secondly, the treachery of Jason, and Medea’s revenge.
He does not rely for his story on the dull and pre
tentious Latin of Guido delle Colonne, like Chaucer
and the author of the alliterative Troy Book. It
was a right instinct that led him to the old
French .
Gower has, indeed, almost as much in common

with twelfth - century French as with Froissart..
-
Although he is in many ways modern in style, in

his matter it is otherwise. He is easily contented
with what has been long established ; neither his
stories nor his moralisings are different in kind from
what had been current in France two hundred years
before ; and his persevering zeal for classification ,
however admirable to a medieval taste, would at no
time have been applauded for any novelty of spirit or
principle. Not that he is remarkably old - fashioned,
for along with new ambitions in France at this time
there was a rather dismal reproduction of old wares,
1
GOWER 123
an increasing trade in commonplaces, as the works of

Alain Chartier and Christine de Pisan show.
The parts of the Confessio Amantis that are
not story-telling have generally been thought the
most monotonous, on account of the formalism of
the Confessor's teaching, and his prosaic division
of the subject under heads like a text-book. Mr.
Macaulay has done justice to this portion of Gower's
work. The Lover's account of himself is no mere
repetition of old literary formulas ; and the lady
is not the abstract divinity of the old lyric con
vention :
And if hir list to riden oute
On pelrinage or other stede,
I come, thogh I be noght bede
And take hire in min arm alofte
And sette hire in hire sadel softe,
And so forth lede hire be the bridel,
For that I wolde noght ben ydel.
And if hire list to ride in char,
And thanne I mai therof be war,
Anon I schape me to ryde
Riht evene be the chares side ;
And as I mai, I speke among,
And otherwhile I singe a song,
Which Ovide in his bokes made,
And seide, “ O whiche sorwes glade,
O which wofull prosperite
Belongeth to the proprete
Of love, who so wole him serve !
And yit therfro mai noman swerve,
That he ne mot his lawe obeie . ”
(Conf. Amant, iv. 1198, sq. )
The ' wofull prosperite ' of the last sentence is

from the traditional rhetoric ; all the poets were
fond of this figure, and it is still in use long after
Gower. But what goes before (and there is much
besides what has been quoted) is freshly studied, and
with some humour. The editor has not neglected
the satirical strain in Gower, which is better and
more Chaucerian in the Confessio Amantis than
in the forced invectives of the Latin poem. Mr.
Macaulay has noted among other passages one which
Chaucer might have written ; it goes to confirm what
has been said already, that the ironical quality which
is most associated with Chaucer's name is largely a
property of the age, as it is also in the days of Steele
and Addison. Gower as a moralist takes note of a
gentleman's amatory digressions, and touches off his
genial conversation with his wife when he comes
home again. The pastoral motive, naturally, is not
introduced by the husband :
Bot therof wot nothing the wif
At hom, which loveth as hir lif
Hir lord, and sitt alday wisshinge
After hir lordes hom comynge :
Bot whan that he comth hom at eve,
Anon he makth his wif beleve,
For sche noght elles scholde knowe :
He telth hire hou his hunte hath blowe,
And hou his houndes have wel runne,
And hou ther schon a merye sunne ,
And hou his haukes flowen wel ;
But he wol telle her nevere a diel
GOWER 125
Hou he to love untrewe was,
Of that he robbede in the pas,
And tok his lust under the schawe
Ayein love and ayein his lawe.
(Conf. Amant, v. 6123, sq .)
Even in graver passages Gower shows that the

moralist need not fall into prose. The dialogue
between the Confessor and the Lover about chivalrous
adventures beyond sea, and their value, is not one
sided , but aa fair debate between two different standards
of virtue. Gower was sceptical regarding the expedi
tions that young gentlemen made (Henry of Lancaster
among them) “ their bodies to advance,” as Froissart
puts it. He does not approve of these “ hastyf
rodes " :
Sometime in Prus, sometime in Rodes,
And sometime into Tartarie .
Especially he refuses to believe that they ought to

give advantage in love :
What scholde I winne over the se,
If I mi ladi loste at hom ?
The same matter had been discussed in the Mirour de

l'Omme, and there also with some spirit.
Gower makes little use of heroic verse—the ten
syllable line ; but his stanzas in Book VIII. of the
Confessio Amantis, and the poem addressed to Henry
IV.. in “ rhyme-royal,” show that he followed the
same laws as Chaucer , particularly in his neglect of
the French and Provençal rule — the obligatory pause

after the fourth syllable. This is observed by other
writers at different times, e.g. by the Scottish minstrel,
Blind Harry, in his Wallace ; in the sixteenth century
some theorists upheld it, as Puttenham in the Arte of
English Poesie ( 1589 ) :
The meeter of ten sillables is very stately and heroicall, and
must have his Cesure fall upon the fourth sillable, and leave
sixe behinde him thus :
“ I serve at ease, and governe all with woe.” .
Chaucer does not recognise this as binding, nor do

the Italians. This agreement in practice between the
English and the Italian poets is not due to borrowing,
but to natural affinity. Gower apparently knew no
Italian, and his usage is the same as Chaucer's. Even
in his French decasyllabic verse in the Balades he
admits many lines that are incorrect as French verse
and right according to the Chaucerian principle ; for
example :
La tresplus belle q'unqes fuist humeine,
which has the common English cesura after the fifth

syllable,, and is consequently irregular. The fact that
Gower, with all his strong French sympathies, his
careful art, and his fondness for precision, should not
have enforced the strict law in English is to the credit
1
of his judgment. Along with Chaucer, he is the
GOWER 127
founder of heroic verse in English, with the laws and

the licenses that are equally familiar to Shakespeare,
Milton, Pope, and Tennyson :
My lord, in whom hath evere yit be founde
Pite withoute spot of violence,
Kep thilke pes alwei withinne bounde,
Which god hath planted in thi conscience :
So schal the cronique of thi pacience
Among the seintz be take into memoire
To the loenge of perdurable gloire.
This, like Gower's octosyllabics, is modern English

verse , for the character of the measure is not affected
by the antique words and grammar. It is as correct
as Pope. Gower's rhyme-royal is not inferior to
Chaucer's in any formal respect. It is not only
careful : it has the Chaucerian freedom and variety :
Upon miself is thilke tale come,
Hou whilom Pan, which is the god of kinde,
With love wrastlede and was overcome :
For evere I wrastle and evere I am behinde,
That I no strengthe in al min herte finde,
Wherof that I mai stonden eny throwe ;
So fer mi wit with love is overthrowe.
The agreement between Chaucer and Gower as to

the rules of heroic verse makes it all the more
difficult to understand the failure of this measure
after Lydgate's day, the persistent want of sense
among the Chaucerians ( except in Scotland) for the
chief rhythms of their master, and the extraordinary
labour Wyatt had to go through before he made out,

if he ever thoroughly made out, what the decasyllabic
line was meant for. It is not as if Chaucer had been
a lonely and unappreciated artist. In some things,
indeed, he was far beyond the range of his time ; but
in this he had a companion ; and the heroic verse , so
far as the mere mechanism is concerned, was as well
understood by Gower as by himself. This, like
everything else in the evidence, shows how momentous
for literary development the last years of the four
teenth century were, and how utterly their lesson
was thrown away in the fifteenth . What the fif
teenth century wanted was not only a genius like
Chaucer's, but men of taste like Gower, who might
have carried on the forms of poetry for the benefit
of more productive ages. As it turned out, Wyatt
and Surrey, the refiners of English verse, had to
begin at the beginning again — not where Chaucer
and Gower left off, but far back among the
beggarly elements.
It may be observed, by the way, that decasyllabic
verse of what one may call the English type seems to
come naturally in the Teutonic languages, when they
are imitating the Romance measures. The earliest
High German line of this sort, two hundred years
before Chaucer, is nearer to Chaucer, or Goethe, than
to the Provençal models which Hêr Friderich von
Hûsen had before him when he wrote :
GOWER 129
O wê wie sol ez armen dir ergân !

Wie torstest eine an solhe nôt ernenden ?
Wer sol dir dîne sorge helfen enden
Mit solhen trouwen als ich hân getân ?
Curiously enough, Froissart is not accurate through

out as the French reckon accuracy ; he writes :
Comme le papillon à la chandelle,
and
La premerainne roe qui y loge,
verses which would have been accepted by Gower, but

do not keep the strict rules of the game.
The platitude of Gower's French and Latin works
has little to relieve it. The Mirour de l’Omme, though
it has some merits of style, moving freely enough in
a difficult stanza, is far below the Confessio Amantis.
The Latin elegiacs of the Vox Clamantis are generally
detestable verse, dressed up in tags from Ovid and
other poets, which Mr. Macaulay has carefully marked
authors. The substance
and referred to their proper authors.
of the Vox Clamantis has some value, chiefly in the
account of Wat Tyler's rebellion, with which it
begins. No Latin verses of Gower are better than
those which are oftenest quoted from this part :
Grigge rapit dum Dawe strepit comes est quibus Hobbe,
Lorkyn et in medio non minor esse putat,
Hudde ferit quos J udde terit dum Tebbe minatur,
Jakke domos que viros vellit et ense necat, etc.
r The rest of the book settles down to a thorough

K
criticism of life, with the common medieval pleasure

in discovering corruption. Like other work of the
sort, it is a source of historical information about
manners. The Cronica Tripertita, three books of
leonine hexameters on the reign of Richard II. , or
rather on two separate portions of it, is naturally of
historical value ; and the editor's commentary here
has made it ready for use. But the Latin works alto
gether add nothing to Gower's literary reputation,
except that they show, like the English and French
poems, a talent for remembering words. Gower is
as copious in Latin as in his other languages, but his
finer skill of expression fails him.
The French Balades stand by themselves as almost
the only work of Gower's not meant to be large and
comprehensive, though even here his love of system
is active, and he makes them look as dignified as he
can . The balade in those days was the favourite
form for any theme that could be made to fit into it ;
Eustache Deschamps and Froissart had written a
great number, and new authors were to follow with
more. Chaucer in English had perhaps done as much
as any of them, with a very few experiments ; at least
two of his balades—Absolon and Rosemounde - are
among the best pieces in his poetry. Gower did not
follow Chaucer here ; his Cinkante Balades, dedicated
to Henry IV., are in French. They were written
when he was an old man, and might pass well enough
GOWER 131
for the poetical works of Tithonus, with their im

personal amatory sentiment, their pallid rhetoric, if
only one did not know what a strange demand there
still was for the abstract art of love. Gower makes
one more concession to “ the tune of the time ” in
these poems, and they add another block of the
polished commonplace to his literary monument.
Still, there is a futter of life in them ; and it is
pleasant to find the old favourite toys again doing
service, the phenix of Araby, the chameleon living
on air, and so on, with the old tricks of phrase
( “ wofull prosperite ” again) :
Pour vous, ma dame, en peine m'esbanoie,
Jeo ris en plour et en santé languis,
Jeue en tristour et en seurté m'esfroie,
Ars en gelée et en chalour fremis.
Indeed, when one remembers that these same things
pleased the Elizabethans, that Euphues made his
fortune out of the same old natural history as pro
vided the similes of Gower, it really becomes difficult
to affirm that the Balades are so conventional after
all. No one has ever yet explained the enduring
vogue of all the stock ideas of court poetry ; and
Gower's commonplaces are found still current after
many revolutions of taste. Sometimes he has some
thing better, as when he takes up again the story
of Alcyone :
Pour remembrer jadis celle aventure
De Alceone et Ceix ensement,
Com dieus muoit en oisel lour figure,

Ma volenté serroit tout tielement,
Qe sanz envie et danger de la gent
Nous porroions ensemble par loisir
Voler tout francs en nostre esbatement :
U li coers est, le corps falt obeïr.
Which is not unlike the motive of Dante's sonnet to
Guido Cavalcanti :
Upon a barque with all the winds that blow

Across all seas at our good will to hie.
Besides the Cinkante Balades there is another series
on loyalty in marriage, which deals more largely in
historical examples, as was common with the French
school. Many of Gower's are repeated from the
Confessio Amantis— Jason and Medea, Mundus and
Paulina, Alboin and Rosamund. But in nothing
except the use of historical names do they come near
to Chaucer's balade in the Legend of Good Women :
Hyd, Absolon, thy gilte tresses clere ;
nor to Froissart in the same poetical form .

Mr. Macaulay's life of Gower, in his fourth volume,
is one of his many pieces of careful investigation and
criticism. The results, as he says, are chiefly nega
tive, clearing away some traditional errors and some
too hasty inferences. John Gower, Esquire, was a
friend of Chaucer, and received a power of attorney
from him in 1378 , to be used during Chaucer's
absence abroad ; in 1382 the manors of Feltwell
GOWER 133
in Norfolk and Multon in Suffolk were granted
to him. About the same time, along with " the
philosophical Strode,” he received the dedication of
Chaucer's Troilus ; in 1393 “Henry of Lancaster
presented John Gower, Esquire, with a collar” ; in
1398 Gower married Agnes Groundolf ; his will
was proved in October 1408 ; and he is buried in
St. Saviour's Church. These are almost the only
facts discovered, apart from what may be got from
his writings. The Speculum Meditantis is assigned by
Mr. Macaulay to the years 1376-79 ; the Confessio
Amantis was certainly complete in 1390, and revised
with some alterations by 1393 ; the Vox Clamantis
was begun not long after the rebellion of 1381 ; the
Cronica Tripertita (like the Cinkante Balades) is dated
by its dedication to Henry IV., as well as by the
matter of the history.
Mr. Macaulay's work may be praised without
reserve, except as to small points which do not
matter. He has not spared himself. Much of his
time must have been taken up with things of small

apparent interest ; his author's wisdom must have
been sometimes more than sufficient during the pro
cess of editing and commenting. That the work was
worth doing cannot be questioned. Gower, with all
his commonplaces, is not like any other writer ; and
his English poem is still fresh, its simple colours
unfaded . Probably it will not be much read : there
are other things to read ; and the public which is

content not to know Crabbe's stories is hardly likely
to take up the Confessio Amantis. But in leisurely
bookish places Gower may recover some of the
attention he used to get from the lovers of poetry.
One fact about his reputation is worth particular
mention . The Confessio Amantis was translated into
Portuguese by Robert Payn, Canon of Lisbon,
apparently in Gower's lifetime ; his work survives in
a Castilian version, to which Mr. Macaulay's attention
was called by Mr. Fitzmaurice Kelly, and from which
he gives two quotations, one from the preface—" for
king Richardes sake ” —the other the greeting to
Chaucer. The Portuguese was probably, like the
Castilian version, in prose. It is a pleasant literary
memorial of the old alliance and sympathy between
England and Portugal—perhaps one good result of
the Duke of Lancaster's expedition to the Peninsula.
Gower, we would say, was well selected for translation.
Spanish literature in the fifteenth century, for all its
Italian studies, was not far advanced beyond the
learning of Gower ; the Marquis of Santillana, for
example, moves in almost the same order of ideas
and subjects.
FROISSART
The Chronicles of Froissart is among the books

which have received the fullest share of honour of all
kinds , from their own day to the present, without
any grudging voice being raised against their triumph,
or any sensible diminution of their renown.Frois
sart is still the name that stands for chivalrous
adventure in the minds of all readers of history ; he
is accepted without question as the author from
whom the portraiture of that age is to be sought.
The signs of his fame are everywhere : in the great
libraries, in glorious manuscripts like the Harleian
one, in the old printed copy that Lord Hunsdon
used as a family Bible to record on its fly -leaf the
births of his children, in a thousand testimonies
from writers of all sorts, among which chiefly those
of Gray and of Scott are memorable . Gray called
him “ the Herodotus of a barbarous age,” and re
commended him to his correspondents. Scott, whose
French visitors found that he talked the language of
the old chronicles when he was at a loss for modern
135
E
words in speaking to them, has put the praise of

Froissart in the mouth of Claverhouse, and has
expressed it in this indirect way, in Old Mortality,
more vividly than in a review or an historical essay.
Lord Berners was happily led in his undertaking
to translate the Chronicles, though indeed one may
believe that with his tastes it was hardly possible for
him to do otherwise. This book of Lord Berners is
one that put the English tongue in possession of
something on which the whole Western world, for
generations past, had relied for information about
itself and its manners . That Froissart should be
turned into English before the last reflection of the
age of Froissart had died away in the new era of the
sixteenth century, that the courtly poet and historian
of the times of Edward III. should be brought by
translation into a closer partnership with Chaucer,
was a thing to be desired more than most of the
literary things provided under the reign of Henry
VIII . ; and it was fortunately accomplished by the
man whose mission it might seem to have been to
rescue as much as he could of the treasures of the
Middle Ages before they were overwhelmed by new
learning. He translated Froissart, he translated
Huon of Bordeaux.
FROISSART 137
Lord Berners is a follower of Chaucer and

Malory as an interpreter in English of some of the
courtly French literature which was for the most
part so imperfectly understood, though so generously
admired, in the island of Britain. What the English
had been deprived of by the accidents of their history
was the peculiar glory of the Middle Ages ; they
had no proper courtly romance, no chivalrous stories
in their own language of the same temper as those of
France. Many things are attainable in a literature
like that of England between the Norman Conquest
and the Revival of Learning ; but what was not
attainable before Chaucer, and very feebly remem
bered after him, was precisely that sort of grace
which belongs to a Court, to a refined affected mode
of sentiment, like that of the Romaunt of the Rose.
Before Chaucer and Gower acquired it, the English
had not the right of entry to that world ; and in most
of their persevering studies of the way to be gentle,
they are little better than the ambitious gallants
in Elizabethan comedy whose education has been
neglected, the Gullios who learn manners by the book
of compliments. Nothing in history is more desperate
than the attempts of English writers under the
Plantagenets to master the secret of French courtli
ness . Sometimes the failure is ludicrous, as in the
“ rime doggerel ” of the ordinary minstrels ; some

times there is success of another sort, as in the great
alliterative poems, which are not courtly in the
French manner, though they are magnificent.
Meantime, the days go by and the fashion changes,
and but for Chaucer and a few others there might
have been nothing left in English with the character
most distinctive of those times—the singular quality
of beauty found in the medieval literature of France.
Later, when the medieval forms were still nearer
their vanishing, at the hour “ when all the lights
grow dim ,” the most notable work of French
romance, in which all the graces, and not those of
the Courts only, are included, the stories of Lancelot,
Tristram, the Quest of the Grail and the Mort
Artus, were rendered by Sir Thomas Malory in
language that remains among the most wonderful
things of the world. The reproach of England was
taken away, though late and with difficulty. Nothing
could give to England of the time of Henry III .
such poems and stories as were written in other lands
in those days ; but under Edward IV. it was not yet
impossible to recover from the past, out of “ the
French book ," a version of the stories that had been
too high for the landward-bred and simple-minded
English authors to copy fairly, in the bygone times
when " the French book was still new. What
happened with Froissart was something of the same
FROISSART 139
kind. There was not enough of the fourteenth
century represented in English literature. Even
after all that Chaucer had done, there was something
left to do.. Chaucer had gone beyond his age in
many respects ; he is greater than Froissart ; but in
the same measure that he surpasses him in imagination
and in art he leaves room for the other man with his
other mode of regarding and rendering the world .
Froissart's mode is more peculiarly and thoroughly
the property of the fourteenth century than
Chaucer's, through his very want of those affinities
with Shakespeare and Cervantes that are found in
the variety of Chaucer's workmanship and in his
more liberal genius. Just as England, so long im
peded and depressed by the historical accidents of its
language, obtained from Malory some of the riches
of the thirteenth century, which at the time when
they were first produced it had no skill to make its
own , so from Lord Berners it received back Frois
sart, not too late to make amends for the loss it had
suffered through the want of such a chronicler in the
native tongue. It was by an injustice of fortune
that England had been refused in the Middle Ages
an historian writing English as other tongues were
written by the French, Italian, and Spanish authors,
by Villehardouin , Joinville, Froissart, by Villani, by
Ayala, by Ramon Muntaner, by the Provençal
biographers of the poets. What could be done to
redress this grievance was done by Lord Berners for

history, as by Malory for romance ; and the four
teenth century, illustrious in the English language
by so many things of a different kind, by Troilus
and the Canterbury Tales, by the poems of Sir
Gawain and of Piers Plowman, to name no more,
was now presented with a new author, who belonged
even more closely and intimately to the reign of
Edward III . than Chaucer himself : an author whose
whole business, it might be said, was to live in the
fourteenth century and tell what he saw there .
Lord Berners is not among the greatest of trans
lators — his rank is nearer Caxton than Malory — but
his version of Froissart is a true version : it is really
Froissart in English, and in English that sounds like
Froissart. As Malory gives in English (with much
of his own besides) the tone of the old French
language of the Queste del St. Graal, so the sentences
of Lord Berners' translation are of the fourteenth
century and not of the sixteenth. He tried
occasionally to write a style of his own, and
was proud of it, no doubt : it appears in his
prefaces , - a style rhetorical and cultivated. He
also translated, besides these Chronicles and the
stories of Sir Huon and Arthur of Little Britain,
two modern works, one of which, the Golden Book of
Marcus Aurelius, written in Spanish by Guevara, has
a reputation as the parent of Euphues, while the
FROISSART 141
other, also Spanish, of an earlier generation, the

Prison of Love, by Diego de San Pedro, has the
same Euphuistic syntax, and probably did a great
deal to establish the new fashion of prose that was
taken up long afterwards by Lyly and his contem
poraries. Two opposite kinds of prose are repre
sented in the works translated by Lord Berners. On
the one hand are the writers who write because they
have something to say, whether it be the story of the
wars of England, France, Scotland, and Spain , or the
wanderings of Sir Huon in Fairyland. On the other
are the Spanish Euphuists explaining, to a world that
runs its clauses into one another, endlessly, the
counter doctrine of precise constructions and elegant
phrases. Rhetoric flourished under the Tudors,
along with religious controversy, in the silence of
the poets ; it put many honest people out of conceit
with their old - fashioned romances. Lord Berners
does not allow it to vitiate his Froissart. His
Euphuist translations came later than his Froissart
for one thing, and he does not seem to have had any
particular affection for that variety of prose, though
his preface to Froissart shows that other kinds of
rhetorical display had an occasional attraction for him.
Such things are kept out of his translation of the
history : the body of his Froissart bears hardly a
trace of the rhetoric that illuminates the Prologue.
The good taste of Lord Berners, which is not con
spicuous in his few original paragraphs, is shown in

his devotion to his author, and in his refusal to let
the original style be misrepresented. His very want
of literary ambition saves him : he trusts in the
matter of the story, and the right words find them
selves translating the right words of the French. It
is not always the case that a writer is saved by his
subject : there are many historians, from Ammianus
Marcellinus to Saxo Grammaticus, who have told
good stories in extravagant words, with a dictionary
broken loose and rampant over their pages. But
it happens sometimes that the matter prescribes the
form , and this was the case with Lord Berners, as it
may have been with Froissart himself. The history
has no grammar or forms of sentence that in any
way interrupt the narrative.. It is in the old style
the style of the French medieval historian. The
fourteenth century is not defrauded in this transla
tion by the imposition of any Tudor order of rhetoric
on the clear outlines of the structure. It is with
Lord Berners as with King James's translators of the
Bible : in the Preface they indulge themselves, but
their main work is different and contains nothing
the least resembling “ that bright occidental star
which shines in the Dedication to the King.
FROISSART 143
II
1
Sir John Bourchier,' second Lord Berners, was
born about 1467 , and succeeded his grandfather, the
first Baron , in 1474 . “ A martial man, well seen in
all military discipline,” is the phrase in which Fuller
describes him among the Worthies of Hertfordshire ;
and the record of his life, which is not full, is that of
a loyal servant of the king. He took part in the
discomfiture of the Cornish rebels at Blackheath in
1496 and in other warfare later, as at the capture of
Terouenne in 1513. He went in an embassy to
Spain in 1518, and suffered from want of money
through the winter that followed ; he borrowed
afterwards from King Henry VIII . , and left the
king his creditor at the end of his life. His career
is aa good deal like that of Sir Thomas Wyatt, with
less adventure in it, and nothing comparable to
Wyatt's heroic encounter with the Emperor Charles,
but showing the same devotion to the service in
which he was engaged .
In December 1520 Lord Berners was made deputy
of Calais, and held the office till his death in March
1 The life of Lord Berners has been written by Mr. Sidney Lee in
his Introduction to the Boke of Duke Huon of Burdeux (Early English
Text Society, 1882-1887) and in the Dictionary of National Biography,
and by Mr. G. C. Macaulay in his Introduction to Berners' Froissart in
the Globe Edition.
1533. It was at Calais, probably, that all his writing

>
was done, and his writing for those years must have
been a chief part of his occupation. The public
interest was not neglected by him, but one may judge
from the bulk of his writings — the Chronicles of
Froissart, Huon of Bordeaux , Arthur of Little Britain
-how large an amount of time must have been
spent at the desk in matters not belonging to the
office of governor. The Chronicles of Froissart
was published in 1523 and 1525 — two volumes,
“imprinted at London in Fletestrete by Richarde
Pynson, printer to the kinges moost noble grace.”
From this work Lord Berners went on to his trans
lation of romances . It is not known whether or not
the Boke of Duke Huon of Burdeux was published
in his lifetime -
that is, before March of 1533.
The earliest extant copy of Huon of Burdeux, accord
ing to Mr. Lee's judgment in his edition of the
romance, was printed about 1534, probably by
Wynkyn de Worde. The hystory of the moost noble
and valyaunt knyght Arthur of lytell brytayne, trans
lated out of frensshe in to englushe by the noble Johan
Bourghcher knyght lorde Barners was printed by
Robert Redborne, without date. Whatever the
order in which these works were translated, they
probably came after Froissart and before the smaller
books taken (indirectly) from the Spanish : the
Castell of Love and the Golden Boke of Marcus
FROISSART 145
Aurelius Emperour and eloquent oratour . The colo
phon of the latter gives its date of composition ; in
the uncertainty of Lord Berners' literary history the
dates of Froissart and of the Golden Book are fairly
well determined :- “ Thus endeth the volume of
Marke Aurelie emperour, otherwise called the golden
boke, translated out of Frenche into englyshe by
John Bourchier knyghte lorde Barners, deputie
generall of the kynges toune of Caleis and marches
of the same, at the instant desire of his neuewe syr
Francis Bryan knyghte, ended at Caleys the tenth
day of Marche in the yere of the Reygne of
our souerayn lorde kynge HENRY the viii . the
XXIII.” So in the edition of 1536 and most
others ; the first edition of 1534 is said to read
xxiiii . The twenty-third year of King Henry is
1532, the twenty -fourth is 1533 ; and according to
this the Golden Book was finished by Lord Berners six
days before his death, for he died on the 16th of
March in 1533 , and the book was finished on
the roth.
It is probably vain to suppose that the transition
from romance to courtly rhetoric, shown in the
selection of Guevara after Huon of Bordeaux, is
significant of any progress or change of taste in the
translator. Lord Berners, with all his literary skill,
is careless about distinctions of kinds : he is not
critical nor scrupulous. His choice of the Golden
L
Book does not mean that he was tired of history or

romance ; it does not mean that he had been con
vinced of the laxity of old - fashioned syntax, and
was bent on living cleanly according to the rules of
the point-device grammarians. It means only that
the Golden Book was in favour, as Huon had been and
continued to be, and that Lord Berners, with his
love of stories undiminished, was yet willing to
take up another kind of book in which gentlefolk
found pleasure and entertainment. That Lord
Berners is not to be trusted for critical appreciation
is shown in his attention to Arthur of Little Britain.
For the story of Huon of Bordeaux, at least for
the earlier part, there is nearly as much to be said
as for the adventures of the Morte D'Arthur itself,
considered as a specimen of authentic romance,
such as was current in the best ages, and was
fitted to be read by the author of the Faery

Queene. But Arthur of Little Britain is a different
story, not among the best, but one of the mechanical
rearrangements of the common matter that repeated
the old stock incidents and sentiments wearily,—a
book that one would save, indeed, from the judg
ment of the curate and the barber, but more for the
honour of its ancestry and for the noble language,
than for any merit in the author's imagination . The
translation may
be reckoned among the fine achieve
ments of Lord Berners : its style is that of his
FROISSART 147
Froissart, and is enough to make one repent of

having spoken harshly about the story of the Petit
Artus de Bretaigne. The preface of the translator
reveals the mind of Lord Berners more clearly than
anything else in the scanty sum of his personal utter
ances . He is not an acute, discreet rhetorician : he
is immersed in the matter of old chronicles so that he
cannot tell the waking from the dreaming vision ;
so much absorbed in the charm of narrative that any
narrative has power to draw him. He plunges into
the story of Arthur of Little Britain before he knows
where he is or what it is about ; only when he has
gone some way there comes a shock of misgiving,
and he repents that he has engaged upon “ a fayned
mater wherin semeth to be so many unpossybylytees.”
However, he is in it and may as well go on ; urceus
exit ; if it will not do for a sober chronicle, it is a
story, at any rate ; and there are others, much
respected, in which there are equally wonderful
things. But the whole Preface must be quoted, and
it hardly needs a commentary to explain what was in
the mind of Lord Berners when he wrote it ; his
good faith, his perfectly sincere delight in narrative,
his secondary regard , by an afterthought, for the
author's “vertuous entent " ; his admiration, with
out the heat of a competitor, for proficiency in
“ fresh ornate polished English ” and the “ facundi
ous art of rhetoric."
Here foloweth the Translatour's Prologue : For as moche

as it is delectable to all humayne nature to rede and to here
these auncient noble hystoryes of the chyvalrous feates and
marciall prowesses of the vyctoryous knyghtes of tymes
paste, whose tryumphaunt dedes, yf wrytynge were not,
sholde be had clene oute of remembraunce ; and also by
cause that ydelnesse is reputed to be the moder of al vices ;
wherfore somwhat in eschewynge therof, and in the waye of
lowli erudycyon and learnynge, I John Bourghchere knyghte
lorde Berners have enterprysed to translate out of Frensshe
in to our maternall tongue a noble hystory, makynge men
cyon of the famous dedes of the ryght valyaunt knygh
Arthur sonne and heyre to the noble duke of Brytayne, and
of the fayre lady Florence, doughter and heyre to the
myghty Emendus, kynge of the noble realme of Soroloys,
and of the grete trouble that they endured, or they attayned
to the perfourmance of theyr vertuous amorous desyers ; for
fyrste they overcame many harde and straunge adventures,
the whiche as to our humayne reason sholde seme to be
incredible. Wherfore after that I had begon this sayd
processe I had determined to have left and gyven up my
laboure, for I thoughte it sholde have ben reputed but a
folye in me to translate be seming suche a fayned mater,
wherin semeth to be so many unpossybylytees. How be it
than I called agayne to my remembraunce that I had redde
and seen many a sondrye volume of dyverse noble hystoryes
wherin were contayned the redoubted dedes of the auncyent
invynsyble conquerours and of other ryght famous knyghtes
who acheved many a straunge and wonderfull adventure, the
whyche by playne letter as to our understandynge sholde
seme in a maner to be supernaturall : wherfore I thought
that this presennt treatyse myght as well be reputed for
trouth as some of those, and also I doubted not but that the
first"auctour 'of this boke devysed it not with out some
maner of trouthe or vertuous entent. The whyche con
FROISSART 149
syderacyons, and other, gave me agayne audacyte to contynue

forth my fyrste purpose tyll I had fynysshed this sayd boke,
not presumynge that I have reduced it in to fresshe ornate
polysshed Englysshe, for I know myself insufficient in the
facondyous arte of rethoryke, nor also I am but aa lerner of
the language of Frensshe. How be it, I truste my symple
reason hath ledde to the understandynge of the true sentence
of the mater, accordinge to the whiche I have folowed
as nere as I coude, desyrynge all the reders and herers
therof to take this my rude translacion in gre, and yf any
faute be, to laye it to myn unconnynge and derke ingnor
aunce, and to mynysshe, adde or augment as they shall fynde
cause requysyte. And in theyr so doynge I shall praye to
God that after this vayne and transytory lyfe he may brynge
them unto the perdurable joye of heven. Amen .
Thus endeth the Translatour's Prologue.
Lord Berners is a fortunate writer, whatever
mistakes he may have made about Arthur of Little
Britain . He was not turned aside by vanities :
“ the facundious art of rhetoric ” did not corrupt
him beyond a few innocent traces of ornamental
language in his preliminary discourses. It was not
his genius to do “ any eclipsing thing,” like Euphues ;
while he had the instinct for sound language in con
tinuous narration, of the kind that does not glare or
flash, and may easily escape notice for its goodness
till some occasion comes to test it . How well the
ordinary sentences of Berners will come through
examination has been shown by Sir Henry Craik in
1
his comparison of Berners' Froissart with Johnes's."
1 English Prose Selections, i. 123 sq.
The excellence of Lord Berners is nothing dazzling
or astounding ; it comes from a secure command of
the right words, in plenty sufficient for all his
purposes, with an easy syntax, easily corresponding
to his French originals, and turning them into
English without any grammatical heaviness or sign
of labour. As compared to Malory there is a want
of volume and variety in Lord Berners, due no
doubt in part to the character of the text he was
translating ; for Froissart, with all his glory, is not
like Malory's “ French book ” in opportunities for
splendid diction, and Huon's ally, Oberon, is too
substantial and sensible a personage for the enchanted
twilight of the Morte D'Arthur. But, failing the
greatest qualities of Malory's prose, there is nothing
wanting to Lord Berners in the kind of literature he
has chosen. He comes at the end of the Middle
Ages in a reign not distinguished by much good
writing, when poetry in England is nearly dead, and
when prose is threatened by a recurrence of the old
ornamental pedantries of “ facondyous rethoryke,”
with the alternative of a rather prim correctness
under the rule of classical scholars. His success
consists in his steady following of the old fashion,
the medieval fashion, of composition, with a regard
for just such excellences of form as are convenient
in such a mode of writing. Lord Berners used the
medieval syntax so as to give few openings for
FROISSART 151
censure, even from exacting critics ; and before the

confused Elizabethan time, when prose seemed
capable of most things except self - command, he
showed how clearness, simplicity, an even and con
tinuous discourse, might be obtained without depart
ing ostensibly from the syntax of the fourteenth
century. Any sentences from his Froissart will
exhibit this plain, straightforward style in its sim
plicity and security :
Thus at the beginnynge the Frenchmen and they of
Aragon fought valiantly, so that the good knightes of
Englande endured moche payne. That day Sir Johan
Chandos was a good knight, and dyde under his baner many
a noble feate of armes ; he adventured himselfe so farre that
he was closed in amonge his enemyes, and so sore overpressed
that he was felled downe to the erthe. And on him there
felle a great and a bigge man of Castell, called Martyne
Ferrant, who was gretly renomed of hardynesse amonge the
Spanyardes, and he dyde his entent to have slayne Sir Johan
Chandos, who lay under him in great danger. Than Sir
Johan Chandos remembered of a knyfe that he had in his
bosome, and drewe it out, and strake this Martyne so in the
backe and in the sydes that he wounded him to dethe as he
lay on him. Than Sir Johan Chandos tourned hym over,
and rose quickely on his fete ; and his men were there aboute
hym, who had with moche payne broken the prease to come
to hym , wher as they saw him felled.
There is nothing remarkable about this sort of

English except that it cannot be bettered . There
is no particular formula for it : only, it shows a care
:
.

.
for rhythm such as was not always found along with

the care for classical periods in the writers of that
time. The grammar of Lord Berners is one that
pays attention to the right spacing of phrases accord
ing to their weighty syllables : when this is assured,
there is less need for the grammatical complications
of clauses in their right order and degree ; the easy
constructions of the old style leave it free to the
author to tune his syllables to his own mind. The
grammatical pattern of the classical schools has little
attraction for him when he is taken up with the
other device, of free enunciation with no broken,
confused, or jarring sounds to break the tenor of it.
There is nothing in Lord Berners like the ex
orbitant fondness for novel and emphatic words,
splendid or swaggering, such as are noted in some of
the Elizabethan translators. He has a rich and full
vocabulary, but it does not blaze out in single gems.
It corresponds to the vocabulary of Froissart, the
beauty of which, as of all good French, and not
least in the French medieval prose, lies in the
harmony between the single words and the syntactic
idiom. The prose is not a new invention ; it is
natural, in the sense that it is founded upon the
usages of conversation, quick and expressive, well
provided with plenty of words for interesting things,
unimpeded by drawling rhetoric, and free from any
anxiety or curiosity about rules of good taste,
FROISSART 153
because it had good taste to begin with, and did not
need to think about it. The speech of Aymerigot
Marcel, for instance, which may be pondered word
for word and phrase for phrase as an infallible piece
of good syntax and good diction, is expressed
altogether in common and well -established forms,
from the beginning, “ Ha ! a ! du traiteur vieillart,
dist Aymerigot,” to the end, “ comment qu'il prende
ne adviegne du nouvel .” This is rendered not quite
fully by Lord Berners, but in the right manner of
the original, with the same security and absence of
constraint :
Than tydinges came to Aymergot Marcell, where he was

purchasyng of frendes to have reysed the siege before the
fortresse of Vandoys, that it was gyven up. Whan he
herde therof he demaunded howe it fortuned : it was shewed
hym howe it was by reason of a skrymysshe, and by the
issuying out of his uncle Guyot du Sall unadvysedly. Ah,
that olde traytour, quod Aymergot ; by saynte Marcell, if I
had hym here nowe, I shulde sle hym with myne owne
handes ; he hath dyshonoured me and all my companyons.
At my departynge I straytely enjoyned hym that for no
maner of assaute or skrymysshe made by the Frenchmen he
shulde in no wyse open the barryers, and he hath done the
contrary : this domage is nat to be recovered, nor I wote
nat whether to go. They of Caluset and they of Donsac
wyll kepe the peace, and my companyons be spredde abrode
lyke men dyscomfyted ; they dare never assemble agayne
togyther ; and though I had them togyther, yet I wote nat
whyder to bring them. Thus, all thynge consydred, I am
in a harde parte, for I have gretly dysp.eased the French
kynge, the duke of Berrey, and the lordes of Auvergne, and

all the people of the countrey, for I have made them warre
the peace durynge : I had trusted to have won , but I am
nowe in a great adventure to lese, nor I wotte nat to whom
to resorte to axe counsayle. I wolde nowe that I and my
goodes with my wyfe were in Englande ; there I shulde
be in surety ; but howe shulde I get thyder and cary all
my stufe with me ? I shulde be robbed twenty tymes
or I coulde gette to the see, for all the passages in Poictou,
in Rochell, in Fraunce, in Normandy and in Pycardy are
straytely kept ; it wyll be harde to scape fro takyng : and if
I be taken, I shall be sente to the Frenche kynge, and so I
shall be loste and all myne. I thynke the surest way for
me were to drawe to Burdeaulx, and lytell and lytell to get
my good thyder, and to abyde there tyll the warre renewe
agayne, for I have good hoope that after this treuce warre
shall be open agayne bytwene Englande and Fraunce.
Thus Aymergot Marcell debated the matter in hymselfe ;
he was hevy and sorowfull, and wyste nat what waye to
take, outher to recover some fortresse in Auvergne, or els to
go to Burdeaux, and to sende for his wife thider, and for his
goodes lytell and lytell secretely. If he hadde done so, he
had taken the surest waye ; but he dyde contrary, and
therby lost all, lyfe and godes. Thus fortune payeth the
people whan she hath sette them on the highest parte of her
whele, for sodainly she reverseth them to the lowest parte,
ensample by this Aymergotte. It was sayde he was well
worthe a hundred thousande frankes, and all was lost on a
daye ; wherfore I may well saye that fortune hath played
her pagiaunt with hym, as she hath done with many mo,
and shall do.
The French is better and more lively, breaking out,

for instance, in exclamation after the reference to
the truce (" après ces trièves, mal fuissent elles
FROISSART 155
prinses ne venues, entre France et Angleterre" ) ;

but the English, though less mercurial, is the
language of one who is free-born , and who has not
had to pay the price of the weary rhetorical schools
for his command of phrases.
There are blemishes, of course, in Lord Berners'
Froissart. There are mistranslations and confusions.
But these hardly affect the reputation of the book as
a history well written and pleasant to read. - It
might have been better, if the author had taken
more pains ” —this respectable formula comes to
mind rather too often in the presence of Lord
Berners' easy-going translations, which sometimes
recall the humours of the Ayenbite of Inwyt, “mills
to - the-wind ” and such like. But the mistakes are
not enough to spoil the story, any more than the
Psalms have been spoilt in Coverdale's version , and
others, by similar failures.
It is something against the vogue of Lord
Berners — a small thing—that he lived in a time when
English spelling had contrived to make the language
look other than beautiful. It is unfortunate that his
clear phrases should be muffled in the misplaced and
useless spellings that seem exactly the right dress for
the shambling verse of the poets of that day.
“ Barkesse ” and “ marchesse ” ( for “ barks ” and
»
“ marches ” ), “ physycyon ,” “ pertaynyng e , “ cherys
pertaynynge,”
shynge,” “ concludedde,” and so forth, are well
enough for decrepit Chaucerian allegories, and for

such moral interludes as make desolate the Tudor
reigns for more than half the century ; but we could
have wished Lord Berners a habit better fitted for
his mode of narrative, something less cumbrous, like
the spelling of Chaucer or of Dunbar. Unhappily 1
to this grievance, if such it be, Lord Berners has
added considerably—partly through the fault of his
French text, partly through the original and acquired
ineptitude of the printer, but with more than can be
fairly put down to their discredit — by his unqualified
neglect of the historical names. It is beyond all
language of complaint. The man who has been led
into the intricate fallacies of the names in Berners'
Froissart is only too glad to escape in silence.
III
The Castell of Love and the Golden Boke of

Marcus Aurelius are different in kind from the other
translations of Lord Berners, as well as much less im
posing in size. What they want in bulk they make up
in pretensions of another sort : it is in these that
Lord Berners shows himself aEuphuist, and the Golden
Boke especially has had ascribed to it by some critics
the honour of having first introduced the rhetorical
antithetic manner into English. It is impossible to
say, in our ignorance about the shadowy character of
FROISSART 157
Lord Berners, what motives led him to these books, or
whether he really saw much good in their contrasted
kinds of vanity. The Castell of Love is an allegory of
the school of the Romaunt of the Rose ; the Golden
Boke, so called by its author, is a pompous exercise
in ornamental sentences by a disciple of the new
learning. There is no need to think of the Chronicles
of Froissart in order to show up the tenuity of the
one and the inanity of the other ; the history of
Arthur of Little Britain by comparison to either of
them looks almost as substantial and as full of vitality
as Don Quixote. Of course, as Froissart himself has
proved, and Chaucer also, it is possible for a man to
love at one and the same time the history of real
characters and the phantoms of allegory ; but in the
careless versions of the Carcel de Amor and the Libro
Aureo there is no sign of any strong affection for
either work. We may be sure that Lord Berners
was fond of stories ; it is not proved that he had a
liking either for the old courtly manner of allegory
or for the new pedantry of moralising. In default
of other theories about his literary taste, we may
accept the statement of these two books as exactly
true : they were done to order, “ at the instance of
the Lady Elizabeth Carew , ” who asked for the
Castell of Love, and “ at the instant desire of his
nephew Sir Francis Brian, knight,” who admired the
Libro Aureo. Both books were much in favour, and
Lord Berners, whatever may be said against his

Euphuistic clients, has the advantage, if that be
anything, of having kept his English readers well
abreast of contemporary literature in translating
them. They were what every one in Italy, Spain,
and France was reading, or wishing to read, or
ashamed to be supposed not to have read. Most
probably he cared very little for them himself.
The two rhetorical books are very much unlike
one another except in the common taste for a par
ticular kind of sentence. It is quite possible to fall
into the idle mood for which the simple allegory of
the Carcel de Amor seems occupation enough, and
with nothing strained or absurd in its gentle, honour
able sentiments. For the sake of the Garden of the
Rose, and Chaucer's Anelida, and “ the floure of
hem that maken in France,” and all the great
company of the chivalrous poets,, it may be granted
to this late author of the Castell of Love to show the
way back over seldom -trodden ground into the old
pleasances, the dreamy air, the vanishing courts and
temples of the Hollow Land. “ Many are the
Mighty Ones, " and there is still some power in
those shadows of old poetry, though few steps
wander now into the region of their enchantment.
Perhaps now and then a careless bibliographer, when
he thinks least of danger, may find himself caught
by the spell.
FROISSART 159
There is no such danger and no such charm in

the Golden Boke, however much it may have prided
itself, and called itself the Dial of Princes, and made
the Emperor Marcus Aurelius help in the furtherance
of its pretentious conceit. The Golden Book so
styled is really a Brazen Calf, of the pattern invented
specially for the Renaissance and its idolaters. The
author, Antonio Guevara, Bishop of Guadix and of
Mondoñedo, had a taste for sounding moral sen
tences, and for criticism of life in the manner of
Polonius. He included also in his theory the
principles of Iago's moral essay on the Characters of
Women , which are not those of the Castell of Love.
Nothing could be more unlike the chivalry of Diego
de San Pedro than the brisk remarks about the
inferiority of women in the other Euphuist ; both
authors seem to have been equally popular, though
the points of view are hardly reconcilable, except
through the rhetorical taste that the two writers have
in common. The casuistry of the amorist San Pedro
is expressed in the same manner of writing as “ the
answere of M. themperour whan Faustyne his wife
demaunded the key of his study,” a lecture to in
quisitive females which is not now so well known as
it deserves to be.
That the Spanish authors were the first to give
currency to the antithetic way of phrasing adopted
by Euphues seems to be proved, and in the history
of this kind of prose Diego de San Pedro comes

before Guevara. It was of course a very old device,
1
as Plato bears witness ; ? but it was in Spain at the
end of the fifteenth century that it was established
as the proper manner of good composition , and the
Carcel de Amor was one of the books that taught it.?

1 The speech of Agathon in the Symposium is pure Euphues, and is
reported by Plato with the same motive and the same zest as Shakespeare
had in his rhetorical parodies in Love's Labour's Lost and elsewhere
ούτος δε ημάς αλλοτριότητος μέν κενοί, οικειότητος δε πληροί , τας τoιάσδε
ξυνόδους μετ ' αλλήλων πάσας τιθείς ξυνιέναι, έν εορταϊς, εν χορούς , εν
θυσίαις γιγνόμενος ηγεμών πραότητα μεν πορίζων , αγριότητα δ' εξορίζων,
φιλόδωρος ευμενείας , άδωρος δυσμενείας , etc., Symp . 197 D. Earlier in the
same dialogue the fashionable mode is touched upon, “for in this way
the learned instruct me to keep the balance of syllables ” : -Ilavoavlov
δε παυσαμένου, διδάσκουσι γάρ με ίσα λέγειν ούτωσι οι σοφοί , 185 C.
2 Composed by Diego de San Pedro, at the request of Diego
Hernandez, master of the pages (alcayde de los donzeles) and of other
gentlemen of the Court. Printed by “ The Four Companions” at
Seville in 1492, and by “ Fadrique aleman de Basilea ” ( Frederick of
Basle) at Burgos in 1496. A Catalan version, Barcelona, Johan
Rosenbach, is dated 1493. Diego de San Pedro repented of his very
innocent vanity, and wrote a palinode confessing the blindness and
errors of the Carcel de Amor :. reprinted from the Cancionero General,
Valencia, 1511 , by Böhl de Faber, Floresta de Rimas Antiguas Castel
lanas, i. p. 152. The Carcel de Amor has alternative conclusions, the
second written by Nicolas Nuñez : this addition is found in Berners'
Castell of Love. Thus England comes into some slight relation with
the poets of the court of Castile, who might have given better enter
tainment than is provided in their treatises and allegories, if Lord
Berners had gone to the Cancionero instead of to their prose. Nicolas
Nuñez has a beautiful poem to Our Lady, written in the measure which
was not accepted in England till long after
O Virgen que a Dios pariste
y nos diste
a todos tan gran victoria,
torname alegre de triste
pues podiste
tornar nuestra pena en gloria .-—- Floresta, i. p. 7.
FROISSART 161
A crucial instance to show this may be found in the

dedications of different versions of the book. It
was translated from Spanish into Italian, from Italian
into French, from French into English. The dedi
cations are different in the different languages, but
one Euphuistic sentence is common to them all, and
in the Italian and the French especially it stands
out in contrast with what may be supposed the
natural style, or rather the favourite affectations, of
the translators :
“ Como quiera que primero que me determinasse estuve

en grandes dubdas ; vista vuestra discrecion temia, mirada
vuestra virtud osava ; en lo uno hallava el miedo, y en lo
otro buscava la seguridad ; y en fin escogí lo mas dañoso
para mi verguença, y lo mas provechoso para lo que devia . ”
Carcel de Amor, 1496 .
“ E ben che io stessi in gran dubio prima ch' io me

determinassi, perche vedendo la sublimità e intellegentia sua
io temevo , mirando la prudentia ee virtute io havevo ardire
in luna trovavo il timore, ne l'altra cercavo la sicurezza ; in
fine elessi il più dannoso per la mia vergogna e 'l più utile
per il mio debito . ”
Carcer d'Amore del magnifico Meser Lælio de Man
fredi. Venice, 1514.
“ Pour laquelle chose premier que en ce labeur cultiver
me determinasse en grande dubiosité et diversité d'ymagina
tions me trouvay. Car voyant la sublimité et intelligence
de ton esperit ie craignoye, et premeditant la prudence et
vertu m'enhardissoye et prenoye vigueur tres grande. En
l’ung trouvoye la timeur et en l'autre seureté et hardyesse.
M
En fin ie esleuz le plus dommageable pour ma vergogne et

le plus utile pour mon devoir . "
La Prison d'Amours, laquelle traicte de l'amour de
Leriano et de Laureole, faict en Espaignol, puis
translaté en tusquan, et nagueres en langage
francois. Paris, 1526.
“ For or I first entred into this rude laboure, I was
brought into great doubtfulnes, and founde myself in dyvers
ymaginacions. For seyng the quycke intelligence of your
spirite I feared, and againe the remembraunce of your
vertue and prudence gave me audacite . In the one I
founde feare, and in the other suertie and hardynes. Fynally,
I did chose the moste unvaylable for myne owne shame and
>
most utylitie.
After this in Lord Berners' text there is some
confusion , due either to his habit of abridging, which

sometimes interferes with the sense in Froissart, or to
a printer's error. It does not matter much. The
striking thing is that this passage of Euphuism is the
only thing directly translated from the Spanish pro
logue in the Italian, and therefore, as the French
translator had not the Spanish to work from , the
only sentence of San Pedro's represented in the
French dedication ; and it is quite different in
rhetorical form from the Italian and the French
contexts, which again are different from one another.
Lelio de' Manfredi of Ferrara uses another kind of
ornament altogether, the language of Don Adriano
or Sir Piercy Shafton, and not of the authentic
Euphues : “flattery and fustian, ” quite unlike the
FROISSART 163
neat syntactical play of the Spaniard. The Italian
author, when left to himself, writes as follows :
“ Che havendo con non pocha diligentia e faticha
ridutto questo picciol volume da lo externo idioma
in nostra vernacula lingua a V. Excellentia (vivo
lume de la virtute ; sola beltà de l'unica bellezza ;
verità aperta del vero ; equale bilancia de la iustitia ;
splendida grandezza de la liberalitade ; ferma
columna de la clementia ;‫ ܪ‬stabile fortezza del casto
pensiero ; lucida gemma in oro nitido e pretioso ;
amenissimo fonte in florido giardino ; micante luce
nelle tenebre ; guida, governo, albergo e habitaculo
de le nove muse) l’ho dedicato ; havendo forsi
habiuto mancho rispetto a la grossezza del mio
ingiegno e la ineptie de la lingua, che a la altezza
sua. The French translator, René Berthault de la
Grise, does not borrow or imitate this enthusiasm.
His style admits some of the vocabulary of Panta
gruel's Limousin ; no more than the Italian’s is it to
be called properly Euphuistic, though it is sometimes
under the influence of the balanced phrase : — “ Et
voyant que d'assez belles matieres traictoit mesmes
pour ieunes dames l'entreprins mettre et translater
dudit ytalien en nostre vernacule et familiere langue
francoise.” 0 “ Et ie prie pour le surplus le plas
.
mateur de la cause premiere longuement te conserver

heureuse et prospere. The Spanish sentence is
marked at once as something of aa different school.
It is very doubtful how far Lord Berners went

himself in approval of the antithetic pattern. His
dedication of the Castell of Love, which is mainly
from the French, is more Euphuistic than the French,
chiefly through the omission of a long sentence,
where the French translator having facts to state
broke down into mere ordinary hazardous grammar :
_ “ Ce petit livret iadis converty de langue castil
lanne et espaignolle en tusquan florentin par ung
Ferraroys mon bon et singulier amy, des mains
duquel en ce premier voyage que le treschrestien
roy François premier de ce nom mon souverain
seigneur a fait en Lombardie pour la conqueste de
son estat ultramontain ay recouvert.” But it re
mains uncertain whether or not Lord Berners ever
thought much about this grammatical business : at
any rate he is utterly destitute of the literary
character belonging properly to Euphuists, as he
never thinks it worth while to utter anything of his
own, and does not ask for admiration.
There can be no question of the influence of the
Golden Boke and the Castell of Love as examples of
English prose . “ The fysher goth not to take
dyvers fyshes of the river with one baite, nor the
mariner with one nette entreth into the see. I
promise you the depenesse of good wylles ought to
be wonne with the depenesse of the harte, some with
gyftes, some with wordes, some with promises, and
FROISSART 165
some with favours.” So Lord Berners translates
Guevara , and so the tune was given out for a large
company of authors who were more anxious to
profit by it than ever Lord Berners himself had
been. The Carcel de Amor, with its different story,
gave the same example of style : - “ Dexar el camino
que llevava parecia me desvario ; no fazer el ruego
de aquel que alli padescia figurava se me inhumani
dad ; en seguille havia peligro, y en dexalle
flaqueza,” etc.
But that is not really the taste of Lord Berners.
He thinks, indeed, that prefaces and dedications
should be ornamental ; but even here, as the dedica
tions of Froissart and the romance of Arthur prove,
when he was outside the danger of the Castell of
Love he chose a different kind of language. In
these prologues he makes experiments in decoration,
but they are not Euphuistic in the strict sense of the
term : that is, they do not consist in the antithetic
arrangement of phrases as that was practised by San
Pedro and Guevara . The device that falls in most
completely with his taste is that of amplification :
especially in the Prologue to Froissart, where his use
of triple synonyms has often been remarked
“ eschewe, avoyde, and utterly flye ” ; “ trouble,
sorowe, and great adversyte ” ; “ right profitable,
necessarie, and behovefull for the humayne lyfe.”
The usage was nothing new, and it is not to be put
down to the influence of the revival of learning : it

was a piece of rhetoric common in the Middle Ages.
The Anglo -Saxon translation of Bede puts regularly
two synonyms for one word of the original," and
in the course of his Froissart Lord Berners might
have come upon instances of triplets, as in some of
the documents quoted by Froissart : - " the sayde
thynges to holde and kepe and accomplysshe, " " his
subjectes, alies, and adherentes,” our officers, ser
geauntes, or publike persones,” in “ the fourme and
tenor of the letter on the peas made before Charters
bitwene the kynges of Englande and Fraunce.'
Froissart himself writes : - “ Comment il peuissent
prendre, eskieller,, et embler villes, chastiaus, et
fortereces.'
In the Prologue to Arthur of Little Britain the
synonyms are not scattered so freely ; and as there
is less appearance of a mechanical repetition, the
style of this piece of Lord Berners' writing has
some advantage over the others. That he should
speak of “ fresshe ornate polysshed Englysshe," and
confess his failure in “ the facondyous arte of
rethoryke, ” shows that he knew of the more
ambitious methods of composition, and that there is
something of literary criticism in his choice of
language, though he makes no great parade of it.
J. M. Hart, Rhetoric in the Translation of Bede, in An English Mis
cellany. Oxford, 1901 .
FROISSART 167
It is evident that he does not greatly care for such
discourses as the praise of History with which he
begins his Froissart. He might have written more,
he says, but he was afraid that he might “ too sore
torment ” the reader ; wherefore he will “ briefly
come to a point.” His real business is with the
translation, which may stand on its own merits ; and
it is in the translation of history that Lord Berners
has done great things, in comparison to which his
small original prefaces and his divagations into the
Spanish rhetoric are unimportant.
As a translator he has many faults. Want of
scholarship is shown in all his books : he is easily
taken in by the first impression of a sentence, and
does not wait to see that it is grammar, and not
always if it make sense. For instance, in the Golden
Boke he is thrown out by a simple inversion, and
confounds subject and object in this way : - “ I have
redde in bokes and have proved it by myselfe, that
the love of subjectes, the suretie of the prince, the
dignitie of the empire, and the honour of the
Senate, do conserve the prince, not with rigour but
with gentyll conversation ” ; where the French has
“ les conservent les princes ” —- princes keep the
love of their subjects, and so forth , not by
rigour but by affability. Some of his mistakes,
it is true, are not of his own making. The
French translator of Guevara ( 1531 ) had apparently
before Lord Berners turned pretor en los exercitos,

praetor in the armies,” into preteur es exercices,
which becomes in English pretour in exercises. The
Castell of Love, in spite of its title-page, was evidently
taken from the French version ; and if Lord Berners
and his printer between them place the opening
scene “ in aa shadowed darke valey in the mountayne
called Serva de Marenus in the countrey of Mase
donia,” it is because the French author before him
had turned the Sierra Morena into “ Sierre de
Moriene .” Lord Berners had some knowledge of
what the French books might do in disfiguring
proper names, and in the Prologue to Froissart gives
up the attempt to rectify them. He is not to be
blamed indiscriminately for the cruel travesties of
names in Froissart, though he might have done more
to find out what the wonderful misspellings of the
French printers really meant. Most of the names
in Pynson's text are the result of an elaborate process
of disfigurement. Froissart probably took some
care, but he had no talent for spelling : he was con
tent to write l'amoureus Tubulus, meaning Tibullus ,
and Oleus for Aeolus, and Supernascus for Parnassus;
hence it is no wonder that English names were
altered in his writing of them . Then came the
copying scribes and the French printers , whose work
Lord Berners had before him. Souegne and Melbegue,
for Sweden and Norway, in Berners, chapter lxxiv. ,
FROISSART 169
are derived from the French text, and may stand as
an example of the difficulties which the translator
found too many for him. They were increased by
the English printers, whose work was left uncorrected
by Lord Berners, and who made additional nonsense
of their own .
But apart from his neglect of the proper names,
this translator shows a want of conscience in his
attention to the meaning. Such mistakes as have
been quoted from his Golden Boke are found in his
Froissart also . “ Thus Jaques Dartvell endedde his
dayes who had ben a great maister in Flanders ·
poore man first mounteth up, and unhappy man
sleeth them at the ende ” (chapter cxv. ) : this
stands for “ povres gens l’amontèrent premièrement
et meschans gens le tuèrent en le par fin ” ; that is,
poor men uplifted him at the first, and wicked men
slew him in the end.” “ Par eschielles de cordes et
gravés d'acier - “ rope-ladders and steel -- grap
plings ” —is translated “ with helpe of the archers ."
Achier, the spelling in the text which he was using,
was enough to set him on this bold but unnecessary
and misleading version , which rather confuses a
spirited account of an escalade , though it is picked
up and well continued after this : - . “ And first there
entred, raumpynge uppe lyke a catte, Bernard de la
Salle, who in his tyme hadde scaled dyvers forter
esses,” and so on .
IV
It is difficult to exaggerate the merits of Froissart

as a narrator, taking a reasonable view of his
circumstances and intentions. But it is possible to
praise him wrongly. It is well understood now that
much of the fame of the Chronicles is due to Jean le
Bel, the real author of the greater part of the First
Book ; and apart from those large debts that can
be verified by a comparison of Froissart with the
recovered history of Jean le Bel, there is much in
the common estimate of Froissart that is really due
to the Middle Ages in general, and the traditional
spirit of story-telling of which Froissart had his
share. His forms of composition are inherited, and
other writers have described before him all the
pageant of which he is the accomplished master :
the movements of armies, the shock of battle, the
valour of this knight and that knight, and how
they severally bore themselves in the press, and so
forth. So far from being singular in his command of
stories, Froissart appears as one of a numberless
multitude of historians, who have all of them
Froissart's interest in events, and in various degrees
the power of setting them out in аa narrative. Instead
of admiring Froissart, one is often inclined to wonder
at the commonness of this gift of story-telling ; and
when Froissart is praised for his sieges, adventures,
FROISSART 171
ambushes, and all the rest of it, there crowd into the
court where he is getting his reward, who shall say
how many captains, voyagers, chaplains, and common
soldiers with journals and memoirs that might stand
along with Froissart's Cressy, if spirited actions,
described as they took place, be what is wanted in a
chronicler ? Of all the things in literature for which
grace is to be said, there is none that is at once so
plentiful in quantity and so inexhaustible in attraction
as this kind of writing. It flourishes in any season
and any climate. The Epic may wither and the
Tragedy fail, but there is seldom want of the good
bread of Chronicles, Journals, Memoirs, Narratives,
whatever they may be called, and there is as little
weariness in them as in any things composed by men.
The shortness of life may perhaps have its advan
tages, as various philosophers have explained ; but it
leaves a regret that there is hardly time in any
ordinary life for all the memoirs of France. And
there are other languages, even the despised medieval
Latin, as Carlyle discovered in his Jocelyn of Brake
londe. The writing in Jocelyn's Chronicle is not so
good as Froissart's ; but if mere lively sketching of
an incident be what is wanted, why should not
Jocelyn claim his own ? Those who wish to see
past things as they were, will think as fondly of the
streets of St. Edmund's Bury, and the old wives
protesting against taxes with their distaffs, as of the
Court of Gaston de Foix in Froissart's Chronicles.
At least they will not care to stop and choose between
one and the other. Jocelyn of Brakelonde lets them
have a picture of something happening, and again,
as Carlyle has sufficiently brought out, he can give
the impression of a person's character and how it
strikes a contemporary ; and what can Froissart or
Horace Walpole give more ? Many things, no
doubt ; but not things of the same essential, satisfy
ing flavour as the picture of events, in which the
monk of St. Edmunds, and many a ship - captain in
Hakluyt, might compete with Froissart! The gift
of narrative, like the gift of courage, is always and
everywhere something near a miracle ; but these
miraculous qualities are pretty widely distributed
among the human race. Perhaps the tendencies of
education and culture have been rather to conceal
the merits of the chroniclers by directing attention
to moralists and philosophers instead. ; also the beaten
ground of Livy, and the school historians writing
mechanical sentences with the ablative absolute, are
known to have produced an unfortunate aversion
from history which has probably checked explorers.
Dr. Johnson , who was sick of the Second Punic
War, ' would surely have found the medieval
chroniclers as well worth reading as the romances
in Dr. Percy's library. He was not a friend of
Gray , or he might have been guided differently ;
FROISSART 173
but, as it was, Gray had few companions in his taste

for the historians of chivalry. The love or the
respect for great authors has naturally left out of
notice the simple authors who make a record of
events in any grammar that comes handy. The
absorption of the schools in science and abstract
philosophy, and the pretensions of the moral essayists
(with half a dozen historical examples in their stock
to enliven their account of human nature) , pre
vented a right appreciation of old chronicles.
Hence, the brilliancy of Froissart, who happens to
be generally known or at any rate famous, has
perhaps been too emphatically acknowledged , with
too much isolation of Froissart from the other
French historians, and also with not enough recogni
tion of the common and widespread faculty of good
story-telling. Froissart has been praised for what
belongs to Villehardouin, and for qualities that he
shares with any one who has been in lively places and
can give an account of them, or who can repeat with
spirit the stories of adventure, or even of mere com
monplace occurrences, that he has heard from others.
It would be easy to find in any age of literature any
number of brilliant passages of narrative and descrip
tion in writers who have no prétence to fame as his
torians. Perhaps one must except the great classical
ages of Greece and Rome ; for the ancients, or the
Fates on their behalf, seem to have cleared away the
less successful writers to let Homer and Herodotus

live at ease in their room. But the Gothic Ages have
been less thorough in their pruning ; and from the
days of St. Jerome to the last soldier's letter about
this year's war there is an endless supply of the kind
of history that stirs the reader of Froissart. It is
very commonly disregarded by most of the human
race, and perhaps most of all by the best educated ,
but it has its reward . When a chronicler of this
kind is read for the first time, he has the same effect
as Baruch had on La Fontaine . The discoverer goes
about asking his friends : “ Have you read Jocelyn
of Brakelonde ? " Because Jocelyn has worked a
miracle for him, in showing him visions of the past
and things as they actually happened ! The praise
of Froissart, the stock comparison to Herodotus,
might have provoked opposition before this from the
friends of the less famous writers. Have you read
Giraldus Cambrensis ? or Galfridus Malaterra ? or
Dino Compagni? Have you read Pitscottie ? Do
you know the real character of King Stephen, as
shown when he sat playing at “ chevaliers ” with the
boy William, that was afterwards Marshal and Earl
of Pembroke ? Do you know the youth of Mark
Alexander Boyd, “ playing the loon on the Sabbath
Day," and waiting at night in the Glasgow street to
have the life of the Professor whose discipline was
not agreeable ? The Professor, Mr. James Melville,
FROISSART 175
has given his account of this part of the Renaissance

in his Diary, and of other things as lively. Is
his impression of what happened, and 'his record of
it, less vivid than Froissart's ? Has Froissart any
thing truer, anything more courteous, more absolutely
sufficient in every way, than Melville's interview
with Don Juan Gomez ? Froissart in such things is
equalled by his two chief predecessors in French
history, to name no more. He does not come
nearer to the very truth of the thing than Villehar
douin . The approach to Constantinople and the
thrill of apprehension and resolution mingling at
the sight of the place they had come to take, the
chief city of the world, the solemnity of this, the
sudden revelation of the place, and the immediate
shock of surprise, all the difference between what
you have thought about and what you see before
you, Villehardouin has put into one magnificent
sentence :
Quant il virent ces haus murs et ces riches tours dont

ele estoit close et ces riches palais et ces hautes yglises dont
il avoit tant que nus nel péust croire s'il ne le véist propre
ment à l'ueil, et il virent le lonc et le lé de la vile qui
de toutes autres estoit souveraine, sachiés qu'il n'i ot si
hardi à qui le char ne fremesist : et ce ne fu mie merveille
s'il s'en esmaierent, quar onques si grans afaires ne fu
empris de nulle gent puis que li mons fu estorés.
And as much in his own different way has been done
by Joinville. Among the shadows and the bodiless
voices of the House of Fame, the knights of

Mansourah, as Joinville saw and remembered them,
are still possessed of their human life and their own
proper character. There is Count Peter of Brittany,
hustled from the field by his men, and showing how
little he thought of them as he spat the blood from
his mouth and cursed them ; holding on to the
saddle -bow to keep the rout from unseating him :
“ Bien sembloit que il les prisast pou .” And among
all the many good things that have been said on the
battle -field , from the days of Sarpedon downward,
we may doubt whether anything is better than the
speech of the good Count of Soissons : - “ Li bons
cuens de Soissons, en ce point là où nous estiens, se
moquoit à moy et me disoit : Seneschaus, laissons
huer ceste chiennaille ; que par la Quoife Dieu !
(ainsi comme il juroit) encore en parlerons nous
entre vous et moi de ceste journée ès chambres de
dames. ”
Froissart has also gained credit for a simplicity
and directness of style which is really common to his
age, to all the Middle Ages, more or less. This is
very pleasantly brought out by one of his French
editors, who chanced to be drawn to Froissart not in
the ordinary way. M. Buchon did not take up
Froissart at first because of Froissart's reputation as
a medieval historian : he had read other historians
first, in Portuguese ; it was from admiration of
FROISSART 177
Fernan Lopes, he says, that he turned to look for

something corresponding in his own language, and so
came upon Froissart. But with most readers the
case is different. They have not read Fernan Lopes,
perhaps no medieval prose at all, and they are apt to
take as the peculiar beauty of Froissart that charm
of simple phrases which belongs even to the weakest
medieval writings in the vulgar tongue, to the Petit
Artus, to the Reali di Francia , and not exclusively
to the great books like the Quest of the Holy Grail.
There is as wide an interval between the masters
and the botchers in the thirteenth or the fourteenth
century as at any other time, and Froissart is as far
removed from the incompetent medieval proser as
Gibbon is from Russell's Modern Europe. But there
is this difference : that, while the useless prose of
later times is neither fit for the land nor yet for the
dunghill, there is generally something even in the
feeblest of medieval writings which has not wholly
lost its savour,—something that attracts even a man of
the eighteenth century, as Dr. Johnson was taken
captive by Palmerin of England . It does not belong
to the great books only, to Froissart or Malory ;
but even the commonest hackwork of chivalry has
a power of attraction in some of its phrases. All
the weariness, all the respectability of well-educated
books are unavailing with a certain class of readers
if they only hear such opening words as “ Or dist li
N
contes , and “ Now torne we fro this mater and

speke we of Sir Tristrem .” Phrases like these kill
the phrasing of modern historians — e.g. “ the arts as
well as arms of his subtle enemy,” or “ foiled in his
design, the weak but unscrupulous monarch ,” etc.
Ifyou test this sort of good grammar along with
common phrases such as may be found easily enough
at any opening of the books of chivalry— “ Now
shewethe the story that anone, after that Huon was
enteryd into the chapell” -it is certain that some
readers will consider this last the more admirable.
What is beyond question is, that the dulness of the
Middle Ages is redeemed by that grace of simplicity ,
and by the command of phrases that even in the
poorest context yet bear witness to their gentle
ancestry. Medieval prose calls up the thought, at
any rate, of something different from the grammar
school ; and the grammar-school, with Holofernes
for its teacher, is what is suggested by most of the
polite literature that has been composed since the
Renaissance, once its day is over.
Of all the languages French had gone furthest
in tuning the common medieval prose to effects of
pathos, making the most of the contrast between
deep meaning and innocent-looking words. No
language written by grown men ever comes near the
old French in giving a tone to narrative like the
awe - stricken voice of a child. The old French
FROISSART 179
writers must appeal to you for pity and wonder,

must call out “ how great the loss,” and add in the
next breath, “ but there was no help for it, so they
had to let it be ” ( “ mais amender ne le porent " ).
In old French literature the individual strength or
levity of a writer's character seldom does much to
modify this hereditary trait of style ; the most
worldly and the strongest minded talk in this way ;
there is little irony known, and tears come quickly
to the eyes over the common fortunes of the race.
Jean le Bel and Froissart are gentle -hearted men,
in different degrees, and both of them were poets
and lovers of romance. They use this sort of
language, and they use the formulas of romance
to bring a thing vividly before the mind : - “ He
that had seen this, had been filled with wonder .”
CC
Qui donc veist hommes, les femmes et enfans de
chiaus plorer et tordre leurs mains et criier à
haulte vois très amèrement, il n'est si durs coers ou
monde qui n'en euist pité " ; “ There was nat so
hard a hert if they had sene them but that wolde
have had great pytie of them ” :--so the sorrow of
Calais is represented by Lord Berners, cap. cxlvi. ,
but he does not convey the full association of the
original phrase with the formulas of the heroic poetry .
“ Là véisiés fier estor esbaudir " ; — “ there might
you see fierce stour of battle raging, lances shivered,
shields broken , the coats of mail torn through and
rent. It was in such phrases of the chansons de geste
that the earliest French historians learned their ways
of appealing to an audience. And it is the epic
manner again that has determined the fashion of aa
sentence like this in the beginning of one of the
chapters on Cressy : - “ Ceste bataille, ce samedi,
entre la Broie et Creci , fu moult felenesse et très
horrible .” It is used again for Najera in 1367 :
“ Che samedi au matin entre Nazres et Navaret ” ;
and it recalls the magnificent opening of the old heroic
poem in the cycle of William of Orange :
A icel jor que la dolor fu grans
Et la bataille orible en Aliscans.
It has the epic way of making the time and the place
seem notable, as if they partook in the action . Such
is the habit of the old French writers of history.
The most probable date of Froissart's birth is

1338 ; his life " is nearly contemporary with Chaucer’s.
Between the fortunes of the two writers there are
many close resemblances : Froissart appears to have
been, like Chaucer, sprung from a prosperous towns
man's family, and, like Chaucer, he found it not
1 The Life of Froissart, by Mme. Darmesteter, in the series of
“ Great Writers of France,” has made it easy to follow his career , and
not so easy to say anything fresh about it.
FROISSART 181
difficult to get access to courts and noble houses.

He had not Chaucer's imagination, nor his full sym
pathy with different conditions of men, but his birth
and his good temper saved him from the exclusive
preference of courtly and chivalrous affairs that
has sometimes been attributed to him. A man of
Hainault, a townsman of Valenciennes, had no right
to look down upon respectable burgesses. In the
notes on his own life in his poems he makes no
pretence of great dignity for himself : he takes
something like the humorous view of his own
modest rank that Chaucer presents in the House of
Fame and in the interludes before and after Sir
Thopas. Froissart coming back from Scotland, with
his one horse Grisel carrying him and his saddle-bag,
is a traveller of less magnificence than Jean le Bel,
and there is no affectation of courtliness in the con
fessions of the Dit du florin , how his money went in
the taverns of Lestines. There was not the sharp
division between knights and burgesses that is some
times supposed - for example, in Claverhouse's de
scription of him to Henry Morton. Eustache de
St. Pierre, of the town of Calais, is one of the
heroes of Jean le Bel and of Froissart, and Froissart
notes the death of a “ valiant burgess of Abbeville ”
in aa “ brunt ” of battle in 1369 , — “ the which was
great damage,"—just as if he had been a knight.
He has given an account of his schooldays and
his early love affairs in the poem of l' Espinette

amoureuse . This is his Vita Nuova ; but while
Dante's story is made as solemn as the prophetic
books that he quotes in it, and filled with the
quintessence of the old idealist worship , Froissart's
poem varies easily between the formulas of the alle
gorical tradition and a literal account of the way he
spent his youth in Valenciennes, from the time when
his amusements were like those of Gray at Eton
or Cowper at Westminster to the incidents of his
unsuccessful courtship. The fourteenth century
was quite capable of such personal notes and such
urbane confessions as are common in less “ Gothic ”
periods . Froissart was a memoir -writer as well as
an author of songs and virelays . His “ mémoire
ymaginative ,” as he calls it in the Trésor amoureux ,
was employed in his own small adventures at school,
before he turned to the chronicles of the “ Prowess
of Christendom .
The record of his life contains little besides his
travels and his literary works, the travels being
generally for the sake of his history. He went
to England in 1361 to present a book of his to
Queen Philippa, and spent about five years at the
English Court. In 1365 the Queen sent him with
good credentials to Scotland. He stayed fifteen days
at Dalkeith, in the house of the Earl Douglas, and
saw there his son, the Douglas who fell at Otter
FROISSART 183
bourne : “ a fair young child, and a sister of his called

the lady Blanche. ” In his account of Otterbourne,
Froissart mentions that in his youth he had ridden
“ nigh over all the realme of Scotland ” ; King David
took him with him on a progress through the
country, and he “ searched all the realm to the
wild Scots. " In his travels he noted not only such
things as were told him about Robert the Bruce
and about the manners of the Scots (to verify Jean
le Bel's descriptions), but also, more fancifully, the
names that he used in composing the scenery of his
tale of Meliador, such as Snowdon, which is the name
of Stirling in romance. On his return, which is the
subject of one of the pleasantest of his shorter poems,
he seems to have spent some time with the young
Lord Despencer, whose father -in - law , Bartholomew
Burghersh, comes often into his story. Passages of
conversation with Despencer are among the additions
made by Froissart to his last redaction of the First
Book. They have not the same extent as his report
of the talk on the way to Bearn in 1388 , but they
are significant : Despencer pointing out the towns
that his family had lost through “ the ill queen.
Froissart was at Berkeley Castle along with him in
1366, and heard the story of it from an old squire :
he asked questions, he says, to “ justify ” his history.
Then he went to Brussels, where he was befriended
by Wenceslas of Brabant for the sake of Queen
184 MEDIEVA LITERAT
L URE
Philippa, and then to the Black Prince at Bordeaux.
He was at Bordeaux on Twelfth Night, 1367, when
Richard, son of the Black Prince was born ; and,
being known as a chronicler, was bidden to write
down the fact for his book. After a short visit to
England again, he went out along with Despencer
to accompany Lionel of Clarence to his wedding at
Milan. The journey had a bad ending in the death
of the bridegroom not long after the marriage.
Froissart went on to Rome, about which he has
nothing to say. He seems to have preferred
>
Stirling, in his “ Gothic ” taste. Queen Philippa

died in 1369, and Froissart came back to his own
country of Hainault, where he must have worked
hard at his Chronicles, with such diversions as are
indicated in the Dit du Florin, a poem written
twenty years later. In an earlier poem, le Joli
buisson de Jonece, which dates itself the 30th of
November 1373 , he gives a pleasant account of his
own fortunes and of those who have befriended him :
Queen Philippa , the Duchess Blanche of Lancaster,
for whose early death he makes his lament , Isabel,
Lady of Coucy , her father King Edward , her
husband (Sir Enguerrand ) , and many others ; the
Duke and Duchess of Brabant , the Duke Aubert ,
the three lords of Blois, Lewis, John, and Guy,
especially Guy ; the Count Amadeus of Savoy ; last
of all, his Scottish friends, whom he ought to have
FROISSART 185
mentioned before -- the King, and the Earls of

Douglas, Mar, March, Sutherland, and Fife :
Haro ! que fai ! je me bescoce
J'ai oublié le roy d'Escoce
Et le bon Conte de Duglas
Avec qui j'ai mené grant glas :
Bel me reçurent en leur marce
Cils de Mare et cils de la Marce
Cils de Surlant et cils de Fi.1
He does not here mention Robert of Namur, for

whom the First Book was composed.
Froissart set out on his adventures when he left
Hainault for England in 1361 , to offer to Queen
Philippa his first essay in history : -_.““ Howbeit I
took on me, as soon as I came from school, to write
and recite the said book, and bare the same compiled
into England, and presented the volume thereof to
my lady Philippa of Hainault, noble queen of
England, who right amiably received it to my great
profit and advancement.” Berners does not quite
rightly give the original meaning : « Ce non
obstant si emprins je assez hardiement , moy yssu de
>
l’escolle , à dittier et à rimer les guerres dessus dites.”

The book presented to the Queen of England was
not any part of the present Chronicle, but a rhyming
history, such as are found in plenty , though this one
of Froissart's is lost.2 It was doubtless in the
1 Buisson de Jonece, l. 363 sq. (Scheler, Poésies de Froissart, t. ii .
p. 11 ) .
2 Something has been saved : thirty-six octosyllabic verses on the
ordinary verse of romance, such as was used in the

Life of William the Marshal long before this, and
in Chandos Herald's Life of the Black Prince later ;
and in aa book that claims remembrance in connection
with Froissart and Jean le Bel, by John Barbour, the
historian of the Bruce. Froissart had from the first
the right historical sense that made him go about
asking questions and taking notes, but he was not at
first, apparently, drawn to the methods of Villehar
douin and Joinville. He preferred the old mode of
utterance, in rhyme : as in the days when prose was
not thought fit for aa gentleman to read , or rather to
have read to him. Prose was enjoined upon him
when he made up his mind to continue Jean le Bel,
and to sacrifice his first attempt, or at any rate to
disregard it. What happened to his plans is clearly
enough explained in his Prologue, though it is not
clearly brought out by Berners. He had, of his
own motion and through his natural interest in the
subject, gathered material for a history of the wars
of England and France, chiefly about the battle of
events of 1357, apparently from Froissart's poem, have been found in
two parchment slips used for binding, and published by M. L. Delisle
in the Bibliothèque de l'École des Chartes, lx. pp. 611-616. M. Long
non, in calling attention to this at the end of the third volume of his
Meliador (p. 368), observes that it is most probably this early historical
poem of Froissart's which is mentioned in the library catalogue of King
Charles V. :-La guerre du roy de France et du roy d'Angleterre, et les
.
faiz du roy de Navarre et de ceulz de Paris quant ilz furent contre le

roy escript en françoys de lettreformée, et rymé, a deux colombes.
FROISSART 187
Poitiers and what followed , for the earlier history was

rather too far back for his own memory to serve
him well. This history he compiled into metre and
presented to the queen. Then, as he went on with
his researches, he found that it would not stand, and
that he had not rightly made out the actors in the
exploits . He had the motive
proper exploits.
story and their proper
of heroic literature strongly at work in his mind
namely , the desire to honour the great deeds of
champions in war ; and he found that somehow or
other his rhyming chronicle had gone wrong or
come short in its attribution of glory to the different
knights. So he fell back on the Chronicles of Jean
le Bel of Liége, made these the foundation and the
first part of his work, and continued them, starting
in his new undertaking from about the time when he
may have begun to suspect and criticise the book
presented to the queen, which was about the time
when Jean le Bel comes to an end :- ““ Therefore
to acquit me in that behalf and in following the
truth as near as I can, I, John Froissart, have
enterprised this history on the foresaid ordinance
and true foundation, at the instance and request of
a dear lord of mine, Robert of Namur, knight,
lord of Beaufort, to whom entirely I owe love and
obeisance, and God grant me to do that thing that
may be to his pleasure.”
The life of Froissart is determined by the favour
of his patrons, and so are his opinions. This has

been shown most clearly by M. Siméon Luce in his
investigation of Froissart's ways of working and the
processes by which the different redactions of his
First Book were brought about. The English sym
pathies of the First Version (which is the most
popular in manuscripts , and which was taken as
material for the early printed copies , and therefore
was translated by Lord Berners ), — the English
accounts of Cressy and Poitiers ,—are due to Frois
sart's attachment to the English party in his early
life, to the favour of Queen Philippa , and the pro
tection of Robert of Namur . Robert of Namur
came back from journeys like those of Chaucer's
Knight in Pruce and the Holy Land , and offered
his services to King Edward at Calais in 1346 ;
although he was not constant altogether in his
support of the English , he was more for that side
than for the French . Froissart dedicates to him the
First Book of the Chronicles , written from the
English point of view . But before 1373 , when he
became curate of Lestines, under the patronage of
Gui de Blois, Froissart's opinions began to change.
Queen Philippa had died in 1369 ; he had come to 1
be more and more closely drawn to the court of
Brabant , where Wenceslas of Bohemia , husband of
the duchess , gave his countenance to Froissart, and
made him the confidential friend to whom he gave
FROISSART 189
his poems. Wenceslas, son of King John of Bohemia
who fell at Cressy, naturally had other sympathies in
connection with the war than those which Froissart
had represented ; while Gui de Châtillon, Count of
Blois, was nephew of that saintly Charles of Blois
who had died at Auray (cap. ccxxvi. ), maintaining
his right in Brittany against the English supporters
of the rival claim, and his father too had died at
Cressy on the French side. For Gui de Blois the
Second Redaction appears to have been made between
1376 and 1383 : it is found in two manuscripts, the
chief of which, at Amiens, is thought by M. Luce to
have been copied from Froissart's own writing, and
from writing done in haste and not very easy to read.
Gui de Blois, a good knight, who was hostage in
England when King John was set free from his
captivity, who like Robert of Namur had made
>
, who fought against the
Pruce,”
journeys in “ Pruce
English in Guienne, and commanded the French
rearguard at Roosebecke in 1382 , was the chief
patron of Froissart in the rest of his life : the
Third Book was written about 1390 for his
good master and lord, Gui, Count of Blois, and
in the Prologue of the Fourth Book Froissart
describes himself as “ chaplain to his dear lord
above named,” as well as treasurer and Canon
of Chimay and of Lille in Flanders. Gui de
Blois died in 1397 , before the Chronicles came
to an end , and before the last redaction of the

First Book.
Froissart probably drew away from Robert of
Namur owing to a coolness between Robert of
Namur and Wenceslas in 1371 ; down to the death
of Wenceslas in 1383 Froissart was his friend and
associate in poetical studies. His romance of
Meliador, long lost but now recovered, and lately
published, was written to introduce in it the lyrics
of Wenceslas—poems for which Mr. R. L. Steven
son's review of Charles of Orleans has said by
implication everything most to the purpose. Their
music is the thinnest that human senses can appre
hend, yet they are true and graceful in their own
way, though there is no substance in them. Their
author was gently born, and the piety of Froissart was
well bestowed in honouring and preserving his poems.
The First Book was finished about the time when
Froissart went to Lestines, about 1373 ; it was
revised for Gui de Blois (the Second Redaction )
between 1376 and 1383 , and in these years and
later Froissart was occupied with his Second Book,
great part of which is the chronicle of Flanders.
After 1381 , when Gui succeeded his brother John as
Count of Blois, Froissart was made his chaplain and
became Canon of Chimay. Between Blois and the
Low Countries he saw some more of the world, and
towards the end of 1388 , in order to get fresh
FROISSART 191
material, he made the journey to Bearn that rightly

takes up so much room in his memoirs and in every
account of his life and character.
1
Froissart's Third Book begins with the matters,
from 1382 onward, that he learned at Orthez in
1388 , concerning “ the business of the realms of
Castile, Portugal, Navarre, and Aragon, yea, and of
the realm of England and country of Bourbonnois
and Gascoyne.” In telling about these things he
gives not only the substance but the way in which
the stories came to him in his journey southward,
and also the conversations at the house of “ the high
and mighty prince Gaston, Earl of Foix and Bearn . ”
He brought with him his romance of Meliador, con
taining the poems of Wenceslas of Brabant, “ the
songs, ballads, rondels, and virelays which the gentle
duke had made in his time,” — and read the book
aloud for the night's entertainment. Apart from
historical criticism, no comment on this part of
Froissart's life can do much more than repeat his
own story, and that is unnecessary : his story may
be read in its proper place, as he wrote, or as Lord
Berners has translated it. There is no need for any
chorus to the tragedy of the house of Gaston Phæbus
- “ the piteous death of Gaston , the earl's son ,”
and as little for the less solemn passages , where
Froissart told the story of Acteon , as possibly help
1 At the xxi. chapter of Berners' Second Volume ( 1525) .
ing to explain the strange disease of Sir Peter of

Bearn, or where he listened to the squire's tale “ how
a spirit called Horton served the lord of Corasse a
long time, and brought him ever tidings from all
parts of the world .” From this date his manner
of writing history changes : there is more of his
personal memoirs, a greater freedom of discourse
and of digression. It was not that he acquired new
powers, or that he learned the art of making his
journal interesting ; for his poems, it will be found,
show much the same faculty of dealing with personal
matters as the conversations of Orthez, and Froissart
had of course from the first been a writer of
reminiscences. But he certainly increased his
freedom ; and, when he went back in his old age
to revise his First Book, he added many circum
stances “ beneath the dignity of history,” and gave,
for example, not only the results of his early in
quiries in England, but in some cases the way in
which his researches were carried out : for instance,
in the talk with Despencer already quoted. And
his later visit to England is recorded, not in the
style of the First Book, but like the visit to
Orthez : the conversations are fully reported, and
the circumstances noted. Besides the information
given by Sir Richard Stury at Eltham, it is told, in
one of the memorable expressions of Froissart's
quick sense for what was about him, that he and Sir
FROISSART 193
Richard were walking up and down in the shade of

a vine -trellis, while his old acquaintance of four-and
twenty years back explained to him the condition
of England. Unfortunately this sentence did not
come into Lord Berners' Froissart : - “ Et toutes les
parties qui sont icy dessus contenues, celluy vaillant
chevallier anchien messire Richard Stury les me dict
et racompta mot à mot en gambiant les galleries
de l'ostel à Eltem où il faisoit moult bel et moult
plaisant et umbru, car icelles galleries pour lors
estoient toutes couvertes de vignes .”
Froissart throve at Orthez : the generous life
there and the favour shown to him and to his book,
“ the Meliador,” gave him an exhilaration that does
not seem to have passed away. He left Orthez in
March 1389 in the train of the young Duchess of
Berry. At Avignon (where he lost his purse) he
wrote the Dit du florin, a poem about himself and
his own fortunes, in which he shows the same kind
of spirit as in his prose memoirs of the same date.
On his way back to Hainault he met his old friend
and patron, “ mon tres chier et grant seigneur,” he
calls him, “ monseigneur Enguerran Seigneur de
Coucy,” whose life and fate ( after Nicopolis) were so
well in harmony with the legendary sorrows and the
chivalrous reputation of the name he bore. From
Enguerrand de Coucy he got news of English affairs.
After aa visit to Valenciennes and to Gui, “ the Earl
of Blois,” he returned to Paris in time to see the

entry of Queen Isabel on Sunday the 20th of June
1389 ; he gives a very full account of all the shows, 1
pageants, and devices made in her honour. Later,

at Bruges, he collected Portuguese intelligence from
Don John Pacheco, and finished his Third Book, the
whole of which must have been written at high
pressure and with great zest and spirit. In 1390
the Fourth Book was begun, and dedicated , like the
others, to Gui de Blois. But Gui de Blois was not
quite able to keep all Froissart's old devotion. He
died in 1397 , ruined by extravagance and “ accidie,”
having had to sell his estate of Blois ; and the latter
part of the Chronicles is somewhat overcast by the
shadow of his decline. He is not mentioned among
the patrons whom Froissart consulted before his visit
to England in 1394. Froissart applied for aid and
countenance to Albert of Bavaria, Count of Hainault,
Holland, and Zealand, and Lord of Friesland, to his
son William of Ostrevant, to the Duchess of Brabant,
and to the Lords of Coucy and of Gommegines.
Gui de Blois is remembered at his death as an
honourable lord who had been liberal in his help to
Froissart and in his encouragement of the Chronicles,
but before his death his wealth had shrunk, and the
historian had to turn elsewhere for a patron . There
was nothing exactly disloyal in this, and Albert of 1
Bavaria was no new friend to Froissart ; but all the
1
FROISSART 195
same there is something rather sad in the passing of

Gui de Châtillon and in Froissart's acceptance of the
new conditions. Albert of Bavaria and his son
were Knights of the Garter, and attached to England
in their sympathies, and Froissart had begun to
think again of a still older debt than that which he
owed to Châtillon-his obligation to Queen Philippa
and her children . He returned to England in July
1394 .
Naturally in this visit there was the common
disappointment; the old nests had other birds in
them . At Canterbury Froissart stood by the tomb
of the Prince of Wales ; he had not seen Richard,
King of England , since the day when the child was
held at the font in the church of Bordeaux. His
old acquaintances were mostly dead. But he found
Sir Richard Stury, whom he had seen last in 1370 at
the court of Wenceslas at Brussels, and he was well
received by the king, who accepted graciously his
richly bound and jewelled volume of poems, — “ in
a fair book, well enlumined, all the matters of
amours and moralities that in four and twenty years
before I had made and compiled . ” There is no
attempt in these chapters of Froissart to keep
merely to public history. It is in this part of his
memoirs that the passages occur to which Gray calls
attention in his letter to Wharton (January 23 ,
1760) :-“Pray, are you come to the four Irish
Kings, that went to school to K. Richard the 2d.'s

Master of the Ceremonies ; and the man who
informed Froissard of all he had seen in S. Patrick's
Purgatory ? ” Froissart in England in these latter
days heard the grumbling of the nation, from
Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, down to the popu
lace of London, against the misgovernment of the
king ; and he takes notice in his own way of the
same things as were expressed in a different manner
by his contemporary, the alliterative poet, in his
complaint and admonition to Richard the Redeless.
He left England late in 1395. Not much is
known of the rest of his life. He appears to
have lived mostly in his own country of Hainault,
working at his books. His history ends tragically,
with the ruinous defeat at Nicopolis, and with the
death of King Richard. But this was not the
last of his memoirs. After 1400, though he did
not continue his history beyond the accession of
Henry of Lancaster, he went back again to the First
Book, and began re-writing it in an original way,
making his own that part of his Chronicles which had
mainly been due to Jean le Bel. This revision
the Third Redaction, extant in the one manuscript
of Rome - goes down to 1350, and is very different
in style from both the other versions. The tone,
which in many places had been flattened a little
through the transference of Jean le Bel's original
FROISSART 197
narrative to the copy of his work in Froissart, is now

freshened again by means of digressions, remarks,
and reminiscences of Froissart's own. The earlier
history comes out in this last version more im
pressively through Froissart's indignation and distress
at the fall of King Richard ; the character of the
English nation as he describes it in the manuscript of
Rome is determined by what he had himself observed ,
not in 1365, but thirty years later. Nothing definite
is known of Froissart after this, and the year of his
death is uncertain.
VI
The French poets of the fourteenth century, the

masters and the contemporaries of Chaucer, have not
received the same attention from literary historians
that has been given to the earlier medieval schools.
No one has set himself to explain and characterise
them as M. Gaston Paris and his pupils have
described the triumphs of the thirteenth and the
fourteenth centuries, the Arthurian Romances,
Reynard, the Fabliaux, the early lyrical poetry of
France, the Romaunt of the Rose. And they are still
too medieval — Guillaume de Machaut, Eustache
Deschamps, and Froissart — for the professors of
modern literature, who regard the Middle Ages as
merely a preserve for philologists and antiquarians,
and who find that one chanson de geste is the same as
another, and none of them really worth much notice

from an educated taste or a serious historian .
Fortunately the texts of these poets have not been
neglected, though their value has not been fully
estimated for the history of literature. One can
form one's own opinion, with the scholarly editions
of the poetry of Froissart and of Eustache Des
champs, easily accessible as they are, and with
Chaucer's earlier poetry to help one to an under
standing of their motives. Nor should the essay
of M. Sandras be omitted, in which he tries to
reduce Chaucer to the rank of a mere dependant on
his French instructors, and does no harm to Chaucer
thereby, while he illustrates Machaut and Deschamps,
and gives a clue to some of the mazes of that
Garden of the Rose in which the French poets were
fond of walking
All the poets of that school were servants of the
Rose, believers in the Romaunt of the Rose, and their
office might be regarded as a kind of lyrical varia
tion or descant on the themes given out in the
authoritative text of Guillaume de Lorris, from
which, as from a perennial fountain, their jets of
ballades and virelays are refreshed and supplied :
The God of Love, a ! benedicite,
How mighty and how great a lord is he !
i Étude sur G. Chaucer, considéré comme imitateur des trouvères.
Paris , 1859
FROISSART 199
These poets, with Chaucer in his youth, are of the

household of that lord, and find their way to his
Garden in the dream of a May morning ; and their
poems have the dreamy charm of the place, so
indescribable, yet so distinct even from the things
that are most like it, such as the Provençal poems,
or those of Petrarch, which are akin to the Rose
indeed, but not in the same close degree as the
makings of Machaut, Froissart, and Chaucer. This
common bond of loyalty, however, does not explain
everything in that fellowship of poets, and Froissart,
like Chaucer, has more than one way. It has
perhaps been too often and too hastily taken
for granted that in the French school of the four
teenth century there was nothing more than the
lyrical repetition of the old conventional amatory
motives in the form of ballades, rondels, and chansons
royales, having great beauty of poetical form , in
narrow limits, but without variety or novelty apart
from the systems of the rhythms and the rhymes.
If there had been nothing more, there would still
have been Chaucer's Complaint to Pity and “ Hyd
Absolon thy giltë tresses clere ” ; and also that most
exquisite deliverance of Chaucer's finest poetical
sense , the lament of Anelida. But there would not
have been the dialogue in the Parliament of Birds ;
and even the Book of the Duchess, closely as it con
forms in most respects to the tradition of the Rose,
is not altogether a dream. It is not strange that

Chaucer should very early have found the ways of
the French tradition too strait for him. But the
French authors also, though they had not the same
poetical career before them , are free to go beyond
the limits of the Rose ; the poetry of Froissart and
Deschamps, if there be nothing in it like the Canter
bury Pilgrims, is at least as free as the Parliament of
Birds or the House of Fame ; and besides the beauty
of their ballades and rondels (which any churlish
classical person may disparage if he choose) there is
an amount of humorous and satirical poetry that is
hardly recognised by those who think the Middle
Ages wanting in the modern qualities of wit and
worldly elegance. The passages where Froissart tells
things about his own life are as sound, as clear, as
free from “ Gothic ” encumbrance as even Swift's
autobiographical verses. What is most of all to our
purpose, they illustrate the Chronicles. The motive
of Froissart in the Chronicles is not altogether purely
the love of exploits and prowess or the desire to
praise famous men. Happily, in many parts of his
work, especially in the latter part of the Chronicles,
as has been seen, the memoir - writer gets the better
of politics and the art of war, and reveals the true
extent of this theme, which is nothing less than
human experience as understood and remembered by
himself. Froissart declares himself at last in the
FROISSART 201
chapters on his visit to Bearn, so very different from

the history of the wars. In the first part of his
work he does not talk about himself, and report
conversations with the same fulness. He does not,
unluckily, report the talk by the way during his
visit to Scotland as he does the conversations with
Sir Espaing de Lyon on their journey to Orthez.
The earlier notes are given without their setting.
Stirling and Dalkeith and the evening's entertainment
there are not described in the same manner as the
nights at Orthez in the house of the Count of Foix.
The new method that he adopts for 1388 , and had
not used for 1365 , is not to be ascribed merely to
“ the tattling quality of age," nor yet altogether to
a maturing of his style, an enlargement of his scope,
a growing freedom from the dignity of history.
No doubt there was a development of this sort
going on : he felt that there might be enough of
battles, sieges, and ambuscades ; why should he not
indulge his genius ? But his genius had found its
way before this in the memoir notes that he put into
various poems, and his poems show him as he really
is more intimately than the more important historical
pieces of his Chronicles, -a man pleased with the
recollection of anything that has happened to him,
an average good -humoured Epicurean temperament
quickened into something finer by his sense of a
continuous excitement in the mere process of living,
and with a gift of expression in which his memoirs

shape themselves for narrative. The short poem on
his horse Grisel and his greyhound coming back
from Scotland is a specimen of Froissart's mind.
It is like a poem for a child, telling how the
horse and the dog exchanged remarks on life and
on their master. “ See what hard work I have , ”
says the horse, “ with so much to carry, while
you run free ! ” “ But consider,” says the grey
hound, “ how well our master cares for you, how
he goes to see that you are fed, how you are
given a comfortable lodging and a bed of straw or
fern, while I am tied up at the door or anywhere to
keep watch ” ; and so on . In all which, besides the
fluent verse, there is nothing remarkable , except that
Froissart on his travels should have amused himself
by thinking into rhyme the common trials of his
companions — he was fond of animals — and the
common charities of the road. There is no height
ening nor idealising nor ornamentation of the subject ;
nothing much more than a pleasant appreciation of
what is happening about him in an ordinary day's
journey ; without any epithet or any poetical diction
he draws toward his inn . Froissart has set down in
verse, using his horse and dog to speak for him, his
record of the fact that his heart leaps up when he
beholds the church spire at the end of the day's
stage, and knows that it means an inn not very far
FROISSART 203
off. This is outside the allegorical garden, and it

reveals the same good -tempered and frank enjoyment
of life that carried Froissart through so much. Life
is generally so interesting to him that he has no time
to be wearied. Though the mass of his writing is
large, it never looks like task -work. Tristitia was
one of the Seven Sins for which he had no inclina
tion. Hence his writings move most easily ; he is
never preoccupied, and has always time to spare.
The romance of Meliador — which, to be sure, is not
a very substantial work, for all its length - would
seem to have been turned out as a sort of amuse
ment, a relaxation from the claims of history. In
the same way that other good-natured man ,
Froissart's contemporary , Boccaccio— “ John of the
Tranquillities ”—might lapse into Tuscan verse or
prose as a relief from his serious labour at the
Genealogy of the Gods or the history of the Falls of
Princes. Chaucer was less mercurial than his French
and Italian compeers, and shows more sign of study
in his writings, and less levity. But Froissart,
Chaucer, and Boccaccio deserve to be remembered
together in honour of the century in which they
lived as the three great writers who have least of the
writer's melancholy .
At the first glance there is a temptation to think
of Froissart's poetry and his Chronicles as roughly
corresponding to the difference between Chaucer's
earlier and later poems : as though the Chronicles

and all Froissart's historical researches implied the
same kind of turning towards real life, the same
kind of discontent with the shadows of the Rose, as
may be found in Chaucer's literary progress — in the
difference between the Complaint to Pity (for example)
and the Canterbury Prologue. Froissart, we. might
imagine, like Chaucer, grew weary of the allegorical
landscape and the visionary actors, of Beau-Sem
blant, Bel-Accueil, and Franc -Vouloir, even of the
heroes and heroines, Paris and Helen, Tristram and
Iseult, “ Polixena et Dame Equo,” and the other
gentle ghosts of the Lovers' Paradise. But this
anticipation is hardly borne out by the facts of
Froissart's nature or the succession of his works.
It is not exactly true of Chaucer that he ever gave
up anything : the pageant of the Legend of Good
Women is later than the strong life of his Troilus and
Criseyde. Of Froissart it is even less to be affirmed
that he intentionally withdrew from the artifice of
the fashionable poetry because he was tired of it and
wanted something more real to break his mind upon .
His occupation ( or his diversion) with the romance
of Meliador shows that he kept up both interests at
once . But besides this it has to be remembered that
the courtly school itself allowed its poets to deal
pretty freely with real life. The rules of their
Paradise were not so strict as in the time of
FROISSART 205
Tannhäuser : they could go in and out much as

they chose. It is easy to distinguish the poems or
the parts of their poems in which they keep to the
full ritual of the old observance of the Rose, and
again the poems where cheerfulness is seen breaking
in, where the light is daylight, where the tone is
that of urbane conversation, or at least as near it
as was possible for a fourteenth century author of
moral essays in verse. In the scope of his poetry
Froissart is not very different from Clément Marot.
The wit and good humour of poems like the Dit du
florin are the proper things for what was originally
called Satire by its Roman inventors, and the old
Horatian tag upon Lucilius , the Boswellian motto, is
not out of place in connection with the poetry of
Froissart ; for though much of it belongs to the
schools of the medieval amorists, its character as
a whole is rather that of confessions, impressions,
notes, and criticisms of life :
Quo fit ut omnis
Votiva pateat veluti descripta tabella
Vita senis.
His poems got some share of his confidences, his

prose memoirs had the rest, and the life of “ Sir John
Froissart of the country of Hainault ” is shown in
them like a picture.
VII
The original author of most of Froissart's First

Book is Jean le Bel, canon of St. Lambert of
Liége, who, according to the chronicler Jean d'Outre
meuse of the same city and of the canon's household,
placed great care and all good diligence in this
matter, and continued it all his life as justly as he
could, and much it cost him to collect and gain it. ”
Jean le Bel died about 1370, over eighty years old.
Along with his brother Henry he took part in the
expedition of Jean de Beaumont in 1327 , which
brought him to York, Northumberland, and Scot
land, along with the army of King Edward. He
appears in Berners (cap. xv.) as “ syr John de
Libeaux, ” among the Hesbegnons of Hesbaye.
Jean de Hemricourt, in the Miroir des nobles de
Hesbaye, gives an account of Jean le Bel and his way
of life that shows him to have possessed the virtue
of magnificence, besides his faculty of writing sound
history . He was one of the most splendid persons
of his time, “ of frank and noble conditions, and
richly dressed , ” “ grand et hauz et personables de
riches habits et stoffes,” with ermine, sendal, and
precious stones ; " the fashion of his house was this,
and he had in this way instructed his squires of
honour, that without consulting their master, if they
saw any gentle stranger, whether prelate or knight or
FROISSART 207
squire, they invited him forthwith to dinner or

supper, and any prince who visited Liége was brought
to dine with Jean le Bel. When he went to church
on holidays there was as large a following as for the
Bishop of Liége, forty or fifty in his train , who all
came to dinner with him afterwards ; he was looked
up to as their head by his kinsfolk and friends,
and took care of their advancement. He had good
natural sense and good demeanour more than most
men ; he was blithe and gay and glad, and could
make songs and virelays, and followed mirth and
pastime ; and in this course of life he obtained both
heritages and pensions. By the grace of God he
lived all his days in prosperity and good health , and
was more than eighty years old when he died, and
according to his rank were his obsequies reverently
and costly carried out. He left great possessions to
two sons — twins — named John and Giles, who were
born to him when he was old of a damsel of good
family belonging to the house of Des Prez .” The
description of Jean le Bel’s magnificence might make
one a little anxious about his talent for literature
it is consistent with floridi tastes ; but of these there
is no sign in his Chronicles, and his narrative has less
affinity with the ermine and sendal and the rich dis
play of his household than with the habits of warfare
which he learned in following his lord Jean de Beau
mont. His client, Jean de Hemricourt, has said not
a word too much in praising the liberal mind of his

master : Jean le Bel had a clear head and a frank
bearing, and his Chronicles are not affected by any
touch of vainglory. He had imagination, among
other things, and was a lover of heroic poetry ;
though it is not so pronounced as in some of the
earlier French historical prose, there is in Jean le Bel
the tone of the epic language, the phrasing of the
chansons de geste ‫ ;ܪ‬it has been noted also in Froissart.
In Jean le Bel's expedition in England with John of
Hainault the places that belonged to King Arthur
gain his attention, and he is pleased when he writes
the name of “ Carduel in Wales which was in the
days of Arthur, ” or “ a white abbey which in the
days of King Arthur was called the Blanche Lande,'
and again, “ the castle of Windsor that King Arthur
built, and where the Table Round was first estab
lished .” He remembers the famous sieges made
by Charlemagne, Alexander, and Godfrey, and com
pares the valour shown at Neville's Cross to that of
Roland and Oliver . He has the same motive as
Froissart in bringing out the prowess of good knights
and in recording the grans apertises d'armes. At
the same time his judgment is unclouded by any of
the magic mists of romance ; the vigour of his story
is not sophisticated, and indeed his story was begun
in a sort of protest against the marvellous exaggera
tions of common minstrels, the “ jongliours et en
FROISSART 209
chantours en place,” as Froissart calls them in his

reference to Jean le Bel's antipathy for their fables.
He writes for “ persons of reason and understand
ing,” gens de raison et d'entendement, in order to
displace the bourdes controuvées, “ the multitude of
words invented and repeated to embellish the rhyme,
and the crowd of wonderful achievements told of
certain knights and other persons,” all out of measure,
and more likely to discredit the subjects of them by
their impossibility than in any way to do them
honour. This pursuit of a true method is justified
by the talents of Jean le Bel ; his praise of “ sooth
fastness ” is by no means a conventional opening or a
hackneyed depreciation of rival authors. Nor does
it mean anything prosaic or dull : such things are
far removed from the generous heart whose ways
were described by Jean de Hemricourt. He is the
author of some of the best known and most highly
honoured things in Froissart : the chapters on the
surrender of Calais and the devotion of Eustache de
St. Pierre, and on the death of the Bruce. He
wrote the often - quoted account of the Scots and
their warfare, from his own observation ; and
Froissart, though he studied the same subject on the
same ground, did not cancel the report of Jean le
Bel in favour of any newer notes of his own. One
chapter he struck out, because he would not believe
it true ; but true or not, it remains as one of the
P
finest things in old French prose — the tragic story

of the Countess of Salisbury, the dishonour of King
Edward, and the sentence spoken on him by the
wronged earl, more lofty, more magnanimous, and
more impressive in its power of condemnation than
the revenge taken upon Tarquin. Jean le Bel, who
can use with good effect the ordinary easy con
versational language of medieval French chroniclers,
can also rise to the height of a tragic argument in
phrases of as much severity and dignity as any
Roman author would have found appropriate for
such a theme.
Froissart has left out other things also which are
worth reading in the original Chronicle. Jean le Bel
has a character of his own ; and though Froissart's
editing is most judicious for his own purposes, it is
not quite the same thing as Jean le Bel speaking in
his own person. Jean le Bel was at York in 1327
and Froissart was not ; so naturally there is a
difference in the two versions. Froissart keeps
everything that he can, but he cannot keep the
directness and immediate force of the older historian's
remarks on what he actually saw : — -“ Incontinent
after dinner there began a great fray between
some of the grooms and pages of the strangers
and the archers of England who were lodged
among them in the said suburbs.” Froissart gives
all this, but he cannot speak of it as Jean le Bel
FROISSART 21I
goes on to do : - “ And I myself, who was there

present, could not enter my lodging to arm me,
myself and my companions, so many English did I
find about our doors in aa mind to wreck and plunder
at large: ; and we saw the arrows flying so thick upon
us that it behoved us to withdraw to another place
and wait the event along with the others.” And
we fell into the hatred of all the country except
the great lords; the people hated us worse than
the Scots who were burning their country.” The
narrator who can say “ we” has an advantage over
one who says “ they ” ; and Jean le Bel, who saw the
smoke of the Scottish fires with his own eyes, is
worth listening to apart from Froissart. The smoke
of an invading enemy seems to have dwelt in his
imagination , for he brings it in vividly in his account
of 1346 , and Froissart here has not kept the touch
that emphasises the weakness of the French king
“ How was it that King Philip who was at Paris a
bare seven leagues away , with all his power of lords
and men at arms that he had summoned for defence
of the country,—how was it that he did not fall upon
those enemies who were making their smoke and
flames fly over his head in Paris, or why did he not
at least defend the passage of the river ? ”
Jean le Bel's criticism of the two kings is also left
out by Froissart, but it is a fine piece of historical
censure. Room may be found for it here, not simply
1
2 12 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
as an historical note on the matters contained in the

First Book of Froissart, but rather to show the
independent value of Jean le Bel's historical judg
ment and his gift of plain speaking
Some who shall hear this history read will wonder why I
call the King of England “ the noble King Edward, ” but
the other simply “ King Philip of France ” ; so they might
think and imagine that I maintained a side and a party.
With due respect, I do not write thus out of party leanings,
but I do it to honour him who in this history bears himself
most nobly : that is the noble King Edward, for whom no
honour is too great ; for in all his needs he has always taken
good counsel, and listened to his people, knights, and squires,
and honoured each in his degree, and well defended his
realm against his enemies, and made large conquests upon
them, and ventured his own body at home and forth of his
realm along with his men unwavering, and has well paid his
soldiers and allies, and freely given of his own : therefore he
ought to be willingly served by all and everywhere have the
name of noble king. Not thus has the King of France
acted, but has let his land in many marches be exiled and
wasted, and has in all places kept himself so as to ease his
person and keep from danger ; and has always trusted poor
counsel of clerks and prelates, and even of those who said to
him, “ Sir, be not dismayed and run no risk of your life, for
hardly will you guard against treason ; who can tell that
any man is loyal ? But let this young King of England
waste his time in folly and spend his substance ; his smoke
will not take the kingdom from you, and when he has spent
all he must go back ; he has not yet conquered Boulogne,
Amiens, or Saint Omer ; when he is gone you may easily
make good your losses.” Such counsellors King Philip
followed , not the lords and barons of his country ; but some
he put to shameful death, and their heirs disherited. The
FROISSART 213
less should be his praise and honour among all men .

Withal, he sore oppressed his country under taxes, and the
churches with tithes, and forged bad money in different
places, and again called it in and uttered better, and again
debased it, so that in trade there was no certainty. And
the soldiers were never well paid, but often had to spend of
their own, in fault of payment, and also had often to sell
their horse and armour before they found the paymasters.
A prince who thus behaves himself ought to have the less
love from his men ; and it is great pity and loss when by ill
counsel the realm of France that had surmounted all the
world in honour, wit, learning, chivalry, merchandise, and
all good things is thus tormented and to this mischief
brought by its enemies and itself, that he who ought to be
lord of it is captive, and nearly all the lords and knights of
the land are dead or in prison. Verily I believe it is by
miracle that God suffers it so to be. And now I will leave
off, I can say no more than this, and will return to our
matter to speak of the noble King Edward, whom all should
love, praise, and honour, for well he has deserved it ; God
be praised. ( Chap. LXX. )
The recovery and publication of Jean le Bel's
authentic work is a gain not so much of new
material for French history as of an author with a
mind and style of his own, who now has his proper
place among the masters of the French tongue. He
has not the variety nor the wide range of Froissart.
But he writes like a man of honour and a man of
good sense, acquainted with great affairs and able to
find the right words for them.
Les Vrayes chroniques de Messire Jehan le Bel. Edited in two
volumes by M. L. Polain : Brussels, 1863 .
Incidentally, and apart from the matter of his

book, Jean le Bel will always be interesting through
the contrast between the quiet tone of his narrative
and the apparent pomp and glory of his manner of
living. It must perplex a moralist to find this very
unaffected story coming from a man of such splendid
ways as those described by the clerk of Hesbaye ;
while it might also puzzle an economist to explain
how the revenue of Jean le Bel was increased under
those conditions, which look so much like mere
ostentation and prodigality. Such resolution and
independence are not easily found in so rich a house.
The contrast is like that in the case of Chaucer's
Monk, from whom, as he is described in the Prologue,
one would not expect the “ Tragedies ” that he after
wards recites, nor the gravity of his mood and
disposition .
VIII
Froissart's Chronicles have been found wanting in

many respects, and their credit has been damaged in
several places by exact historical criticism i; but these
blemishes, even from the scientific point of view, are
small in comparison to his merits and the great
amount of news of all sorts that he has collected and
exhibited. Was it possible for him to have done
more than he did by way of “ justifying ” his his
tory ? The wonder is that he could have done so
FROISSART 215
much , when we consider what a great mass of

writing is published as his work, in prose and verse .
And not all of his work is extant. There was
hardly time for him to do more . Between his
researches, his taking of notes , his composition of
new chapters for his Chronicles, and his revision of
old work , besides his songs and virelays , his moral
poems , and the leisurely romance of Meliador, he
can seldom have been idle. He was not negligent,
though he may have made mistakes ; and it is hard
to see how he could have spent his time better than
he did, if he was to accomplish the enormous labour
he had set himself to get through .
Was he the historian of a declining age, of false
chivalry ? He has been so represented, but it is not
easy to accept this opinion about him . He is spoken
of sometimes as if his Chronicles were a romance of
chivalry, without substance or gravity, as if all the
life in it were a pageant or a tournament. But is
this really so ?
Froissart has the French character of the four
teenth century. He notes, by the way, that the
English think every one French who uses the Gallic
tongue ; but although he would not call himself
French, there is no injustice in giving him the
common qualities of the French courtly authors in
the time in which he lived. French literature in the
fourteenth century had undoubtedly not a little
vanity in it. The court poetry of Froissart and his

contemporaries, including Chaucer, was living on ideas
and imaginations that had begun to lose their youth
and freshness even before the days of Guillaume de
Lorris, a hundred years and more before Froissart
was born. The motives of the old French heroic
romances were exhausted, and Meliador is the dream
of aa shadow7 ; the old lyric motives of Provence and
of the Provençal schools in other languages had been
repeated for generations before the poets of ballades
and rondels adopted new metrical forms without
changing the spirit or the common ideas of the old
tradition . Meliador, both in Froissart's narrative
couplets and in the rondels and virelays of Duke
Wenceslas, is all reminiscence and repetition of
conventional common forms, and Meliador is a
representative book : if one wishes to know what
chivalrous poetry had come to in 1380, it is to be
found there. It has graces indeed, but there is no
strength in it. The strength of poetry is elsewhere
at that time,—in the Italian study of classical litera
ture and in Chaucer's following of the Italians.
But this does not dispose of Froissart's Chronicles,
and even Froissart's poetry, it has been seen, is not
all convention and repetition. It is true that in
many respects his age was one of literary exhaustion,
and it is true also that Froissart remained all his life
insensible to the chief new sources of literary strength
FROISSART 217
that were accessible in his time : he had no interest
in what was being done in Italy, and in spirit he came
no nearer to his contemporary Petrarch than if they
had been living in separate worlds or with a thousand
years between them. Italy made no impression on
him when he travelled there, and is incomparably less
valuable to him than Spain , which he had never seen .
He notes the fortunes of Sir John Hawkwood and
his companies in Italy, and some of the business of
the Papacy, and with some detail and in his best
manner the rise of the Visconti at Milan ; but he
did not know nor care what Petrarch and Boccaccio
were about, and he brought back from his Italian
travels nothing in the smallest degree resembling the
acquisitions of Chaucer. He was made for the world
he lived in ; and the meteors that were flickering
here and there as intimations of a change that was
drawing on, the restlessness, the misgivings by which
the spirit of Petrarch was disquieted, had no effect
on Froissart, and lay beyond his consciousness.
Froissart's soul was at ease :
Coer qui reçoit en bon gré

Ce que le temps li envoie
En bien, en plaisance, en joie,
Son eage use en santé,
Partout dire l'oseroie.1
These moral sentiments of Froissart express his own

1 L'Espinette, 1. 1021 3; virelay.
mind thoroughly : he took in good part whatever

Time sent him, and spent his life happily - quite at
home in the world where he found himself. No one
would go to him for anything like those intimations
of vast unachieved discoveries in literature such as
perplex and disturb the life of Petrarch , “ dreaming
on things to come, ” and make him what he is for
every one who has been drawn under his influence.
If Froissart had known the letters of Petrarch he
would not have liked nor understood them ; he
would have dismissed them with another of his
moral verses, in which the old proverbial judgment
is reiterated against those who look for better bread
than is made of wheat :
C'est grant folie de querir

Meilleur pain que de bon froment.
But if Froissart, compared to Petrarch , be wanting

in depth and originality, wanting in perception for
anything beyond the ordinary ranges of life, it is not
just to put him down as limited or partial in his treat
ment of his own proper ground. If his work be
superficial, —and this is what is alleged against
him, - at any rate there is a good extent of
surface, and many things come into the picture
besides the vainglory of the age of chivalry. To
judge from some accounts of him, one might imagine
1 Trésor amoureux : Poésies, Ed. Scheler, iii. p. 161 .
FROISSART 219
that there was a on ev
tournament ery second
every
page, and that the matter of the Chronicles was
the same as that of Meliador, where indeed the
vanities have their own way , and ample room to
display themselves. The knight -errant, it is true, is
there, as he is in Chaucer's Prologue, come back from
Pruce or Gernade . But Robert of Namur or Guy of
Châtillon is no more fantastic than Chaucer's Knight ;
and as for tournaments , if they are a sign of decay,
then the age of chivalry was already far gone long
before this, for tournaments are made more of in the
sober biography of William the Marshall than in
Froissart's Chronicles. When it is said that Froissart
writes as if the whole of life were one long holiday
for lords and knights , is there not some confusion
between the temper of the historian and the things
he writes about ? Undoubtedly Froissart takes the
whole of life with enjoyment, and his Chronicles, in
spite of the falls of princes, are not depressing to
read. Nor is the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire : it was written by an historian with the same
invincibly happy temperament as Froissart . But the
contented minds of Froissart and Gibbon do not
misrepresent the facts by leaving out afflictions and
distresses. Though Froissart may be kept alive for
his fifty years of chronicle -writing by an equanimity
of nature that protects him from the strain of tragic
emotions and from melancholy, and though his
demeanour, like Gibbon’s, may be too placid for

readers with a taste for gloom and fire in historical
pictures, he does not cover up the miseries of life or
cry peace when there is no peace. It is not a
theatrical or unreal life in his pages : it is not the
less real because it is showy in some of its aspects ;
and most of the fighting in it is not showy, but grim
enough. Froissart is no more ostentatious with his
banners and pennons waving in the wind than the
Books of Moses are, when they go into details about
knops and bowls and lavers, and ram-skins dyed red.
And much of the warfare in Froissart, as in Jean le
Bel, is chivalrous just in the sense that any war may
be chivalrous where there is courage and heroism.
It would not be grossly misleading to say of Froissart
that life as he represents it is all ambuscades and
surprises, hungry and heavy marching in pursuit of
invisible enemies, all weariness, wounds, death, and
captivity of good knights. The end of Chandos
was rather wretched : “ he slode and fell down at
the joining with his enemies,” and a squire gave
him his death -wound with a stroke coming on his
blind side, for he had only one eye. The Captal
died in prison, and Sir Enguerrand of Coucy
broken -hearted in captivity among the Turks, after
he had seen the butchery at Nicopolis , the most
pitiful and shameful ruin of the best knighthood of
Christendom .
FROISSART 221
It would be easier to prove Froissart a writer of

sad stories than a chronicler of the false splendours
of chivalry, if one were set down with his book
before one to find illustrative passages by turning
over his pages. William Morris in his poems from
Froissart (in the Defence of Guinevere volume) has
discovered more of the spirit of his history than the
professed historians who complain of his levity and
cheerfulness. Froissart, it is true, does not dwell too
long on themes like those of Sir Peter Harpdon's
End or Concerning Geoffrey Teste Noire ; but he
knows the cruelty of war, and if he had wanted
knowledge of such griefs, and of the way human
beings are wrung by them, he might have learned
from Jean le Bel's heroic work what such things
cre . But he did not need this instruction.
Froissart's wars are no doubt influenced by the
chivalrous ideal, which counted for something in
the life of the fourteenth century. Don Quixote,
if he had lived in the time of Chaucer's Knight,
would have been considered sound in his principles
and not remarkably extravagant in his manner
of expressing himself. He might have justified
himself by the example of the English knights
bachelors in 1337 , who went to win their ladies'
grace in the fields of France, each with a patch
over one eye. He might have quoted the com
panion of Ywain of Wales, on the French side
in 1369 , who was commonly called the Pursuivant

of Love. King John of France founded the Com
pany of the Star, which was to be like the Round
Table of King Arthur ; and Chandos and a French
lord disputed before Poitiers because “ each of them
bare one manner of device, a blue lady embroidered
in aa sunbeam above on their apparel.” But if this be
vanity, it is not all that Froissart has to tell : the
battle of Poitiers was a real battle, and not a mere
thing in a story -book. Froissart understands the
gentlemen who went into war “ their bodies to
advance,” to win honour ; but it is no design of his
to turn them into absolute romantic knights. Frois
sart, who could write verse about aa small boy making
dams in running water at Valenciennes, was not
offended by real things, and never tried to alter the
reports he got (from James Audley and others) in
order to make his Chronicles look more like the
adventures of Meliador. He shows no preference
for the kind of fighting which is most like tourna
ments. Joinville praises a battle in which there is
nothing but clean strokes in the mellay, no interfer
ence of bolts or arrows ; but Froissart knows many
different kinds of fighting, and does not disparage
any of them for the sake of that which was of course
the noblest. His great captains and his other valiant
men are not reduced to the abstract type of chivalry.
Bertrand du Guesclin is perhaps not treated with full
FROISSART 223
justice by Froissart, but at any rate he is one of the

prowest,” and he is very different from the con
ventional romantic hero. Froissart understands the
practical hard -working military man, from Edward
the Black Prince, Sir Walter Manny, Sir John
Chandos, Bertrand du Guesclin , Oliver Clisson, to
the less eminent ranks of Sir Robert Knolles and Sir
John Hawkwood, and lower than these the chiefs of
brigands, Bacon, Crokart, Geoffrey Teste Noire, and
Aymerigot Marcel. The adventures are varied , the
men engaged in them are not all alike.
: Froissart's story resembles Barbour's in many
places—not only where they are telling of the same
matter in the same order, as in the scene of the
death of the Bruce, but where the same kind of
incident is found in different places. The “ sleights
of Barbour are like the “ subtilties” of Froissart,
especially where there are fortresses to be taken.
Any one who has been told that Froissart is all
tournaments and vanity should read the story of
the ingenious person who 'won the city and castle
of Evreux, “ the which as than was French , ” in
Berners, cap. clxxvi. : how he talked pleasantly to
the captain and got into the castle, with authentic
news that the kings of Denmark and Ireland had
made an alliance and were going to destroy all
England. It might have had a place among the
“ interludes and jeopardies ” of the Bruce, along
with the story of William Bunnock at Linlithgow

or the “ trains " made by Sir James Douglas.
Some of the liveliest of Froissart's episodes did
not find their way into the vulgate text, and so did
not reach Lord Berners. One of these is the game
of chess between King Edward and the Countess of
Salisbury ; another is the story of Oliver de Mauny
at the siege of Rennes. They are worth considerably
more than most commentaries and criticisms, and
the readers of Froissart may be left to form their
own judgment upon them, as upon the rest of the
book to which these omitted chapters belong. This
is the story of the king's game of chess. In
Berners, cap. lxxvii. , it reads, “ All that day the
kyng taryed ther,” and so forth, with nothing about
the game. From that point the fuller version goes
on as follows, unhappily not in the English of Lord
Berners :
After dinner the tables were removed. Then the king

sent lord Reynold Cobham and lord Richard Stamford to the
host and the companions who were lodged under the castle
to know how they did, and that they should make ready,
for he wished to ride on and follow the Scots, and that they
hould send on all the carriages and the munitions, and by
the evening he would be with them. And he ordered the
Earl of Pembroke to make the rearguard with five hundred
lances, and that they should wait for him on the field till
he should come, and all the rest should ride forward . The
two barons did all as he commanded.
And he remained still in the castle with the lady, and
FROISSART 225
hoped that before his departure he would have response more
agreeable than he had had as yet. So he called for chess, and
the lady had it brought in. Then the king asked the lady
to play with him, and she consented gladly, for she made
him all the good cheer that she might. And well was she
bound thereto, for the king had done her a fair service in
raising the siege of the Scots before the castle, and again she
was obliged because the king was her right and natural lord
in fealty and homage. At the outset of the game of chess,
the king, who wished that something of his might be won
by the lady, challenged her, laughing, and said, “ Madam ,
what will your stake be at the game ? ” And she answered :
“ And yours, sir ? ” Then the king set down on the board
a fair ring that he wore with a large ruby. Then said the
countess, “ Sir, sir, I have no ring so rich as yours is.”
“ Madam ,” said the king, “ that which you have, set it
down, and consider not so narrowly.”
Then the countess to please the king drew from her
finger a light ring of gold of no great worth. And they
played at chess together, the lady with all the wit and skill
she could, that the king might not hold her for too simple
and ignorant ;; and the king played false, and would not play
as well as he knew. And there was scarce pausing between
the moves but the king looked so hard on the lady that she
was all put out of countenance, and made mistakes in her
play. And when the king saw that she had lost a rook or
a knight or what not, he would lose also to restore the
lady's game.
They played on till at last the king lost, and was check
mate with a bishop. Then the lady rose and called for the
wine and comfits, for the king, as it seemed, was about to
depart. And she took her ring and put it on her finger,
and she would fain have had the king take back his own
again, and presented it to him and said : “Sir, it is not
meet that in my house I should take anything of yours, but
Q
rather you should take of mine. ” “Nay, madam ,” said

the king, “ but the game has made it so, and if I had won
be assured that I should have carried yours away." The
countess would not press the king further, but went to one
of her damsels, and gave her the ring, and said : “ When
you shall see that the king has gone out, and taken leave of
me, and is about to mount his horse, do you go forward and
render him his ring again, courteously, and say that in no
wise will I retain it, for it is not mine. ” And the damsel
answered that so she would readily do.
At this the wine and the comfits came in . And the
king would not take of them before the lady, nor the lady
before him, and there was there a great debate all in mirth
between them. Finally it was agreed, to make it short,
that it should be together, as soon the one as the other.
After this, and when the king's knights had all drunk, the
king took leave of the lady, and said to her aloud, so that
no one should comment upon it : “ Madam , you abide in
your house, and I will go to follow my enemies.” The
lady at these words courtesied low before the king. And
a
the king freely took her by the hand and pressed it a little,
to his contentment, in sign of love. And the king watched
until knights and damsels were busy taking leave of one
another ; then he came forward again to say two words
alone : “ My dear lady, to God I commend you till I
return again, praying you to advise you otherwise than
you have said to me.” “ My dear lord ,” answered the
lady, “ God the Father glorious be your conduct, and put
you out of all base and dishonourable thoughts, for I am
and ever shall be ready to serve you to your honour and
mine.”
Then the king went out of the room, and the countess
also, who conveyed him to the hall where his palfrey was.
Then the king said that he would not mount while the lady
was there, so to make it short the countess took her full and
FROISSART 227
final leave of the king and his knights and returned to her
bower with her maidens.. When the king was about to
mount, the damsel whom the countess had instructed came
to the king and knelt ; and when the king saw her he
raised her up very speedily, and thought that she would have
spoken of another matter than she did. Then she said :
“ My lord, here is the ring which my lady returns to you,
and prays you not to hold it as discourtesy, for she wishes
not to have it remaining with her. You have done so
much for her in other manners that she is bound, she says,
to be your servant always.” The king, when he heard the
damsel and saw his ring that she had, and was told of the
wish and the excuse of the countess, was all amazed.
Nevertheless he made up his mind quickly according to his
own will ; and in order that the ring might remain in that
house as he had intended, he answered briefly, for long
speech was needless, and said : “ Mistress, since your lady
likes not the little gain that she won of me, let it stay in
your keeping.” Then he mounted quickly and rode out of
the castle to the lawn where his knights were, and found
the Earl of Pembroke waiting him with five hundred lances
and more. Then they set out all together and followed the
host. And the damsel returned and told the king's answer,
and gave back the ring that the king had lost at chess.
But the countess would not have it and claimed no right to
it : the king had given it to the damsel, let her take it and
welcome . So the king's ring was left with the damsel.
The story of Oliver de Mauny at the siege of
Rennes, and of John Bolton and the partridges,
belongs to 1357 , and would have appeared in
Berners, cap. clxxv., where he gives the coming of
>
the young bachelor “ Bertrande of Glesquyne, ” but

not of his cousin :
And there were newly come to the siege two young

bachelors, cousins german, who were afterwards much
renowned in the realm of France and the realm of Spain, as
you will hear further on in this history. These two cousins
were named Bertrand du Guesclin and Oliver de Mauny.
And the said Bertrand during the siege fought in single
combat with an English knight, likewise renowned, called
Sir Thomas Dagworth ; and the combat was appointed for
three courses with a lance, three strokes of an axe, and three
strokes of a dagger. And these two champions acquitted
themselves valiantly to their great honour ; howbeit the
said Bertrand gave such a stroke of his axe to the said
Englishman that he smote him to the ground with violence.
And there it ended. And they were eagerly watched by
those within and also by those without : then they left
the field without great hurt to either. So the Duke Henry
of Lancaster kept his siege before Rennes a long time, and
made many assaults, but nothing gained there.
Now it happened one day during the siege that an
English knight, Sir John Bolton, a man of valour in war,
had been for sport to the fields with his sparrowhawk, and
had taken six partridges. He mounted his horse, armed at
all points, with his partridges in his hand, and came before
the barriers of the city and began calling to the townsmen
that he wished to speak with Sir Bertrand du Guesclin.
Now it chanced that Oliver de Mauny was standing above
the gate to watch the condition of the English host ; and
he perceived and was aware of the Englishman with his
partridges, and asked him what he wanted and whether he
would sell or give his partridges to the ladies who were in
the place besieged. “ By my faith ,” answered the English
knight to Oliver, “ if you dare bring your bargain nearer
and come and fight with me, you have found your chap
(C
man .” " In God's name,” said Oliver, “ yea, wait for me
and I will pay you on the nail. ” Then he came down from
FROISSART 229
the walls to the ditches, which were all full of water, and
plunged in and swam, and crossed them, armed at all points
save the harness of the legs and his gauntlets, and came to
his chapman who was waiting for him. Then they fought,
valiantly and long, and quite near to the host of the Duke
of Lancaster, who looked on well pleased, and forbade any
one going forth to them. And also those of the town and
the ladies who were there took great delight in watching
them. The two valiant men fought on, and the end of it
was that Sir Oliver de Mauny overcame his chapman, Sir
John Bolton, with his partridges, and carried him off
without his leave and sore wounded across the ditches and
into the town, and presented him to the ladies with the said
partridges, and they received him gladly and did him great
honour.
It was not long afterwards that Oliver felt his wounds
paining him sore, and could not get the herbs that he knew
would cure him. So he called upon his prisoner courteously
and said : “ Sir John, I am hard wounded ; and I know
some herbs out there which with the help of God would
cure and restore me . Now, I will tell what you shall do :
you shall go out from here and go to the Duke of Lancaster
your lord, and bring me a safe -conduct for myself and three
men for a month till I am healed ; and if you can obtain it
for me I will let you go free, and if not, then you will
return here to be my prisoner as before.” At this news Sir
John Bolton was well pleased, and went away to the English
court, where he was gladly welcomed by all, and by the
Duke of Lancaster no less, who rallied him well about the
partridges. And then he made his request and the Duke
granted it, and gave him the safe - conduct written and sealed.
Sir John returned at once with the safe- conduct, and gave it
to his captor, Sir Oliver de Mauny, who said that he had
done admirably, and forthwith freed him from his captivity.
And they set out together from the good city of Rennes
and came to the host of the Duke of Lancaster, who was

glad to see them, and received them heartily and showed
great kindness to Oliver. And the Duke said that he had
a noble heart, and proved that he would yet be a valiant
man and of great prowess , “ when to get my safe -conduct
and a few simples he had released a prisoner who might well
have paid him ten thousand florins of gold .” After this the
Duke appointed a room to lodge Oliver de Mauny, and
ordered it to be richly hung and furnished, and every one to
give and afford him all that he might require. There was
Oliver housed in the camp of the Duke, and the surgeons
and physicians of the Duke attended him and visited him
every day ; and also the Duke came often to see him and
cheer him. And he stayed there and was healed of his
wounds ; then he took his leave of the Duke of Lancaster,
and thanked him much for the great honour he had done
him ; and also he took leave of the other gentlemen and of
Sir John Bolton, his prisoner that had been. But at his
going the Duke of Lancaster gave him some fine plate in
a present and said to him : “Mauny, I pray you commend
me to the ladies, and tell them that we have often wished
for partridges for them ." With this Sir Oliver departed
and came to the city of Rennes, where he was joyfully
received by every one great and small, and by the ladies, for
whom he had plenty of news , and more especially to his
cousin Bertrand de Guesclin he told the whole of his
adventure, and they had much mirth of it between them,
for they loved one another well, and afterwards till their
death, as you shall hear recounted later in this story.
Chaucer was harder than he need have been to

the two cousins in his Monk's Tragedy of Peter of
Spain : whatever “ cursedness ” they may have brewed
later for the ally of the Black Prince, this episode
FROISSART 231
would make one think well of Mauny, “ wicked nest"

though Chaucer calls him. Another passage of
Chaucer comes to mind in another way to illustrate
the history of Froissart : the battle of Actium in the
Legend of Cleopatra, saint and martyr, has its com
panion, if not its original, in Froissart's sea battle at
La Rochelle on St. John's Eve, 1372 ( Berners, cap.
ccxcvii.-ccxcix.), when the Earl of Pembroke was
taken . The Spaniards are not said to have thrown
pease on the hatches to make them “ slidder, ” as was
done at Actium ; but the nature of the business is
the same in both , and no more and no less chivalrous
in either than the affair of the Shannon and the
Chesapeake.
Description with Froissart is seldom employed for
the mere sake of ornament. He has not in his
prose, and not very noticeably in his poetry, the
common taste of the Middle Ages for elaborate cata
logues of furniture and minute descriptions of works
of art, such as the sculptures at the beginning of the
Romaunt of the Rose, or the pictures of the Æneid in
Chaucer's temple of Venus in the first book of the
House of Fame. When he takes up this kind of
work, as in the pageants for the queen's entry into
Paris in 1389, he does it with a will, but he does not
introduce such things irrelevantly. Generally it will
be found that where he is most brilliant with his
scenery and properties he is also most dramatic :
they accompany the action, and do not impede one's

view of it. He is very particular about the way
things appeared on the blazing day when King
Charles VI. fell into his frenzy ( Berners, II .
clxxxvii.) :
The French King rode upon a fair plain in the heat of the
sun, which was as then of a marvellous height, and the
King had on a jack of black velvet, which sore chafed him,
and on his head a single bonnet of scarlet, and a chaplet of
great pearls which the Queen had given him at his de
parture , and he had a page that rode behind him bearing on
his head a chapeau of Montauban bright and clear shining
against the sun, and behind that page rode another bearing
the King's spear painted red and fringed with silk, with a
sharp head of steel ; the Lord de la River had brought
a dozen of them with him from Toulouse, and that was
one of them ; he had given the whole dozen to the King,
and the King had given three of them to his brother the
Duke of Orleans and three to the Duke of Bourbon. And
as they rode thus forth the page that bare the spear, whether
it were by negligence or that he fell asleep, he let the spear
fall on the other page's head that rode before him, and the
head of the spear made a great clash on the bright chapeau
of steel. The King, who rode but afore them, with the
noise suddenly started, and his heart trembled, and into his
imagination ran the impression of the words of the man
that stopped his horse in the forest of Mans, and it ran into
his thought that his enemies ran after him to slay and
destroy him, and with that abusion he fell out of his wit by
feebleness of his head, and dashed his spurs to his horse and
drew out the sword and turned to his pages, having no
knowledge of any man, weening himself to be in a battle
enclosed with his enemies, and lift up his sword to strike, he
FROISSART 233
cared not where, and cried and said : “ On,, on upon these
traitors ! ”
Here no doubt an educated taste would blame the

excessive notice of particulars, as Dante was criticised
by Warton for relating things “ circumstantially and
without rejection . ” But Froissart does not always
write so vividly, and here the circumstances are given
“ without rejection,” because he is leading up to the
event that gives them all their right proportion ; his
mind is not like that of the conventional poets who
were accustomed to put in a description of a king's
pavilion or of pictures in a hall when they could not
think of anything better to fill out their story.
Froissart's descriptive passages are not the lazy
intervals in his history, like the pauses for orna
mental catalogues of precious things in the old
French romances, not to speak of other and more
classical kinds of poem. Froissart's mode of descrip
tion varies with the dramatic interest of the scene
taking -“ dramatic ” to mean generally whatever
belongs to the action. He is never still for a
moment . He does not put down blocks of inani
mate detail between his passages of adventure.. His

writing is made what it is principally through his
sense of time — that is, his sense of the way things
change their appearance as the plot develops itself.
There is another chapter which shows this plainly
enough : the description of Edward III. , as admiral,
>
waiting for the Spanish fleet in 1350—an addition of

Froissart's own to the matter he borrowed from Jean
le Bel, and an example of the strength of his early
work even before he had come to rely entirely on his
own materials. Unfortunately this did not come
into Lord Berners' copy, the early French editions
having a bad text about that part, confused , abridged,
and padded with extracts from other chronicles :
wand
The King of England, who was at sea with his fleet,
had given order fully for all that was to be done and for the
manner of engaging the enemy, and had made my Lord
Robert of Namur captain of a ship, which was called
La Sale du Roy, where all his household was. And the
King sat on the quarter-deck of his ship, wearing a jack of
black velvet, and on his head a black beaver hat that became
him well. And as I was told by those who were with him
that day, he was as merry as he had ever been in his life, and
made his minstrels play before him a dance of Almayne
that Sir John Chandos, who was with him, had newly
brought over. And further for his pastime he made the
said knight sing to the minstrels' music, and took great
delight in it. And ever he looked aloft, for he had set a
watch in the topcastle of his ship to give warning when the
Spaniards came on.
Now when the King was taking his pleasure thus, and
all the knights very glad to see him of such good cheer,
the watch that saw the Spaniards heave in sight said :
“ Ho ! I see a ship, and it looks like a ship of Spain .”
Then the minstrels ceased ; and he was asked if he saw
more. Not long after he answered and said, “Yes, I see
two — and three—and four.” And then when he saw the
main fleet : — “ I see so many, God help me, that I cannot
FROISSART 235
tell them all. ” Then the King and his people knew that it
was the Spaniards. Then he bade sound his trumpets, and
all their ships drew in to be more in order and better for
defence, for they knew that they should have battle since
the Spaniards came in so large a fleet. By this time it was
late, upon the hour of vespers or thereabout ; and the King
called for wine and drank, as also did all his knights, and
put his basnet on his head, and so did the others.
Froissart has so often been praised for picturesque

work, that it is allowable to refine a little about the
excellence of this, and to observe that it is plainly
dramatic, and only picturesque in an incidental way,
the imaginative vision of Froissart being wakened to
the picturesque things in the scene—as in that other
of the madness of the King of France—by his sym
pathy with the dramatic life in it. The figure of
the king would be nothing much without the suspense
of the adventure approaching. What Froissart feels
most vividly and with most delight is not the charm
of the king's majesty nor yet the accompaniment of
Chandos's Almain, the minstrels and the song, but
the movement of the hour as it passes, and its effect
on the king's mind. The gesture of the king, as his
eyes shift to the look-out on the maintop, is what
really makes the value of Froissart's description, and
the other points in the story are lively because of
this interest in the future event. There is nothing
very deep or very far fetched in the art of Froissart,
but it is not untrue or irrelevant. It aims at the
centre, and is kept to its task and carried through

it by an instinctive pleasure in the dramatic motives,
though these are little elaborated or analysed .
Thus with all his defects he is one of the chief
medieval writers, and his work is the culmination of
a great medieval school, the school of adventurous
history, which begins in those heroic poems of
France, whose old forms were still available in
1
Froissart's time for the epic of Bertrand du Guesclin .
That poem, however, was the last of its heroic race,
and prose had come to be more generally convenient
for historical work, as Froissart found in his youth .
It had learned some of its capabilities before Froissart
began ; indeed, he added little to the school of
historical prose except his wider range and his
indefatigable spirit. He had models in his pre
decessors for almost everything he did, and he is
inferior to some of them in some things. He
cannot have more dignity than Villehardouin, more
weight of expression than Jean le Bel ; Joinville had
more intimate knowledge of the life he wrote about,
and his reminiscences come from a deeper source.
Froissart completes the older school, however, in a
way that was scarce possible later. He carried on
the medieval love of adventure and the old simple
1 La Vie du vaillant Bertran du Guesclin (par Cuvelier), edited in
Documents inédits sur l'histoire de France, 1839 ; a chanson de geste in
Alexandrines :
“ Seigneurs or escoutez, pour Dieu le roi divin . ”
FROISSART 237
methods of story-telling into a time when other

fashions were making themselves evident and claim
ing to be recognised. Before the new generations
break in, before the ideals of Petrarch come
into possession of the world, Froissart takes
leisure to look about him, and spends fifty years
in a large comprehensive history, where the life
of the world is represented according to the medieval
traditions of good narrative. He was well equipped
and well protected. He had no suspicion nor mis
giving about the new fashions, and took no notice of
their allurements ; the Humanities and their new
scholarship found him impenitent and insensible.
His humanism was of an older and more Gothic
kind, which very naturally was disparaged as too
quaint and barbarous when the Italian classical rules
of poetry and rhetoric began to dominate the litera
ture of Europe. But his work remains with that of
the other old French historians to prove how well
the Middle Ages understood some essential principles
of narrative, and even of grammar, when that liberal
art is taken liberally. He does not indeed represent
all the powers and virtues of medieval literature ;
but though other writers may have gone deeper and
higher, none before him had commanded so wide a
field with so little sign of labour and weariness.
“ Wise and imaginative,” the terms that he is fond
of using in his praise of kings and lords, are not
inapplicable to Froissart, though the wisdom and

imagination may be different from those of the
greatest masters. He had at any rate the wisdom
that he claimed for himself — of taking things as they
came ; and his imagination was of the same kind .
It saved him from false rhetoric, and Lord Berners in
translating him did more for the humanities than when
he adapted the examples of the Spanish rhetorical
school. Montaigne, who is entitled to speak for the
new age, has given his opinion, and will hardly be
contradicted when he pronounces Guevara a little
overpraised, or when he discovers something akin to
his own freedom in the variety of Froissart.
GASTON PARIS
The recent death of Gaston Paris was felt as a per

sonal loss by many who had never known him ; such
was the influence of his character, exerted through
the long series of his published works. It is rarely
that an author so purely scientific and specialist, so
little inclined to court the popular favour, receives
such a tribute of regret. The death of a poet or a
novelist may touch a number of people all over the
world ; but the death of a man of learning, whose
work was conducted always with regard for the
subject, and never with any unfair device to catch
applause, can seldom make the impression which
that of Gaston Paris gave to all who laboured in
the same fields. A rare candour and simplicity of
aim and procedure made Gaston Paris what he was,
and won for him his many friends. The beginners,
the half-learned , were drawn into his circle and made
partners in his industry, by virtue of the perennial
youthfulness of his spirit.
With all his knowledge and all his skill in methods
239
of work, the product of his long experience, he never

grew out of humour with his subject. In freshness of
interest, in the keen appetite for learning, he was the
equal of the “ juniorest sophister.”. This was his
genius and his charm . Those who listened or who
read had no need to be afraid of any bondage to
formulas, any respectable orthodoxy taking the place
of freedom . Their master was ahead of them all,
pressing forward and exploring ; stopping to defend
his views only when such a defence was forced upon
him as part of the day's work. Gaston Paris was
always more ready to discover new things than to
dwell upon his former attainments. Not that he
had any want of respect for positions which he
thought he had secured ; his work was too solid for
that. Nor did he try to lighten his studies by for
getting what he had once known, and allowing new
interests to drive out the old. But new interest was
unfailing, wherever he turned .. His followers were
kept busy ; and that was why they followed him.
Gaston Paris, as a child, received from his father
the right of entry into the old literature of France,
and never lost the simple pleasure in romances and
chansons de geste, as poems and stories. In his uni
versity days, keeping still to the subjects in which
Paulin Paris was at home, he added a more exact
training in philology under Diez at Bonn. But
language did not usurp upon the other province ;
GASTON PARIS 241
in Germany there was not yet the division between

literary and linguistic teaching which is now gener
ally observed, perhaps inevitably. Diez himself, the
historian of Provençal poetry and author of the
Comparative Grammar of the Romance Languages,
refused to be limited exclusively to one portion of
the field ; and the work of Gaston Paris was compre
hensive in the same way. Although literary history
was always his chief interest, he did not neglect what
is called in the narrower sense philology. He was
not wholly occupied with the medieval literature of
France. Problems of linguistic science engaged him,
as the pages of Romania show. It may be that
division of labour is more and more required for the
progress of these studies ; it is not easy for any one
scholar to speak with authority on matters so various
as were handled by Gaston Paris. But no number
of specialists can quite make up for the genius, wide
in range and at the same time discriminating, of the
old type of great scholars. The acuteness, the finer
work , of Bentley or Lachmann cannot well be taken
apart from their substantial historical learning. Gaston
Paris had the same sort of ideal. Language cannot
be understood from words alone ; and the emenda
tion of aa phrase in an old French text might require
the help of wide and miscellaneous reading, far away
from the immediate matter in hand. There are ob
vious dangers for the pure scholar in the attractions
R
1
of historical research ; and it is possible for a narrow

man to be more active than one who carries a burden
of learning. But the greatest scholars are not
“ word - catchers, that live on syllables " ; they find it
possible to be both strong in the weighty matters
and alert with the more subtle problems, as Gaston
Paris was .
He learned much from his father, as has been said
already, and he carried on his work . Paulin Paris 1
represented an older stage of interest in medieval
French-older methods and views, mainly of the
eighteenth century, with some colouring from the
Romantic school. His manner often recalls that of
Scott in his antiquarian essays, e.g. the introduction
to Sir Tristrem , or, from an earlier generation, that
of Warton's History of English Poetry. He writes
like a free man, as if it were all for his own pleasure,
whatever amount of industry he may have put into
his description of chansons de geste, or romances of
the Round Table, or French lyric poetry of the
thirteenth century. He refused to be pitied for the
time spent in “ deciphering ” old manuscripts.
Car pour moi je ne demande pas qu'on me sache le
moindre gré de les avoir déchiffrés. En effet, combien
d'heures ai-je vues passer rapidement en poursuivant cette
lecture ! Combien de romans du jour et de gazettes ai-je
1 Notice sur Paulin Paris, 1881 ; see also La poésie du moyen âge,
i. p. 211 et seq.
GASTON PARIS 243
fermés pour étudier plus longtemps ces admirables composi

tions, images de l'esprit, des meurs et des croyances de nos
ancêtres !! Combien de fois alors n'ai-je pas mis un frein à
mon enthousiasme, en me rappelant avec une sorte d'effroi
l'aventure du chevalier de la Manche ! Honnête Don
Quichotte ! les romans coupables de ta folie n'étaient que
de longues paraphrases décolorées des Chansons de Geste ; que
serais - tu devenu si tu avais lu les originaux !
Yet, deeply plunged as he was in the literature of

the Middle Ages, full of knowledge and enjoyment
of all the things that appealed to the Romantic school,
Paulin Paris at the same time judged his ground with
a rational and sceptical coolness, and never forced
his admiration or allowed it to interfere with his
historical sense . His controversy with Fauriel, over
the hypothesis of a Provençal origin for French epic,
is still delightful reading for the ease with which
he manages the discussion and corrects the too
enthusiastic reasoning of the other side. Gaston
Paris, with a much severer training, followed the
same tradition , and displayed, though in a different
way, the same enjoyment of medieval literature, the
same good sense in criticism .
Neither Paulin Paris nor his son belonged to the
Romantic school, though they passed their time
among the books and in the centuries from which
modern romantic poets are supposed to have drawn
1 Preface to Garin le Loherain ( 1833), p. iii. ; quoted by Gaston Paris
in his account of his father, op . cit. p. 217 .
their most effective scenery, properties, ideals, and

emotions. Paulin Paris was glad to call the attention
of poets to the riches of the chansons de geste, but it
did not matter to him very much whether they took
his advice or not. He had his books, and could
use them for his own profit or entertainment what
ever the contemporary fashion might be. In spite
of the humorous reference to Don Quixote, his
very sincere delight in the old heroic poems was
never wrought up to the extreme romantic pitch .
Like George Ellis , and like Scott himself, he kept a
sane estimate of medieval romance . Gaston Paris
was equally free from any extravagant romanticism ,
but not quite in the same manner . It was not the
old -fashioned ironical worldliness of the eighteenth
century that determined his views and tastes. The
second half of the nineteenth century never escaped
from the romantic influence, however it might protest
and rebel ; the realists are all romanticists disguised
— “ unfrocked,” as Flaubert expressed it. Men of
learning were of course protected from the violent
revolutions that tormented the poets and novelists ;
some were drawn to the Middle Ages by purely
scientific motives, with a positive prejudice to begin
with against all the “ Gothic ” fascinations of the
romantic tradition . But Gaston Paris was not one
1 Cf. La poésie du moyen âge, i. p. 213, for the “ conversion ” of

Victor Le Clerc.
GASTON PARIS 245
of these ;; he had learned from the Romantic school
all that it had to teach regarding the Middle Ages
and the interpretation of their art ; he had gone
further on ways of his own, but in his sober judg
ment of values, even when pointing out the faults,
the flatness, the puerilities of medieval literature, he
always kept a sense of the old charm , of the magic
still recoverable in Tristan and in many less famous
stories .
The French Romantic school was not so deep in
learning as the schools of some other countries :
there was no poet who, like Scott or Uhland, worked
hard in antiquarian prose to collect and edit and
explain the poetry of the Middle Ages. Victor
Hugo's romantic ornament is borrowed from all
lands and tongues : a tribute levied on mild historians
without respect for their feelings
Écoutez tous, marquis venus de la montagne,
Duc Gerhard, Sire Uther, pendragon de Bretagne,
Burgrave Darius, burgrave Cadwalla !
Among the lighter essays of Gaston Paris is one
( appended to Les sept infants de Lara in Poèmes
et légendes) that traces in an amusing way one of
the medieval inspirations of Victor Hugo : in M.
Demaison's introduction to Aimeri de Narbonne
may be found the sources of the poet's Aymerillot,
showing the same masterful ease and unconcern in
turning the most casual knowledge to good account
in immortal verse. By which it is not proved, nor

intended, that Aymerillot is less poetical than it seems
to be ; only that Victor Hugo was not a student of
the same sort as Scott or Uhland. The Romantic
school in France, so far as it dealt with the Middle
Ages, was dependent upon the men of learning,,
and not to any great extent a sharer in their historical
work .
Gaston Paris, coming after the romantic days,
carried on the researches that had preceded them .
How continuous the labour has been, and how
enormous, may be partly realised in looking at the
thirty -two volumes of the Histoire littéraire de la
France, begun by the Benedictines in 1733 , and
now brought down, " vaster than empires and more
slow ," as far as the fourteenth century. In that
great work the ideas of 1830 may be found here and
there reflected , but they are only an accident, a pass
ing radiance : the substantial life is hardly touched
by them .
The study of Old French as it is understood by
Gaston Paris and his associates and pupils is the
same kind of work as the study of antiquity, Greek
or Latin, carried on at the time of the revival of
learning. They have the same trust in the value
of the subject, the same sort of ambition and appe
tite for universal knowledge, including in its scope
everything ascertainable in political or social history,
GASTON PARIS 247
every document of the time, with the most effective

instruments of criticism to explain them. Their
business is historical, in the original liberal meaning
of the term history. The spirit of curiosity about
the past is their chief motive ; no appliance or
apparatus is neglected that can add to the store of
knowledge.
In an essay on Gaston Paris written some years
1
ago, M. Jules Lemaître described the processes of
medieval research in terms that might have held
good of Browning's Grammarian . Historical learn
ing, he says (and the text of his sermon is the work
of Gaston Paris) , has no thought of any immediate
use for its discoveries ; labour is bestowed on minute
things, in the faith that some day they may be turned
to account. The history of the Middle Ages grows
like aa coral island, by the aggregated lives of many
workers. This is not the whole truth . Few indeed
of the contributors to the Histoire littéraire have
allowed the pursuit of knowledge to be hindered or
diverted by doubts or scruples about the immediate
value of each step. It is in this that the modern
scholar, the successor of the Benedictines in their
industry, differs from the dilettante of the Romantic
school . Many things are included in the Histoire
littéraire and in Romania that are of no obvious use
to the literary artist. It is not on every page that a
1 Les Contemporains, troisième série, p. 219.
suggestion like that of Aymerillot may be found ;

and a discussion of the terminations in -ain has little
connection-much less than “ hoti's business "-with
the inspiration or the interpretation of poetry.
But Gaston Paris thought of more than the accu
mulation of facts or the working out of historical
and philological details. He was a humanist ; and
his labours were directed by the same ideal as those
of the founders of classical learning.. He studied
the history of old French literature, not by way of
opposition to the humanities of Greece and Rome,
but as an extension of the same domain. He had a
full sense of all the respects in which Roland comes
short of the Iliad, in which the fluent simplicity of
old French verse is inferior to the Greek art of
poetry ; yet he believed that the French epics have |
things to tell worth listening to, and that there is a
lesson of style, not only of mythology, in the intri
cate romances of Arthur.1
His genius as a critic of literature equalled his
industry as historian and philologist. Of all his
achievements, if not the greatest, at any rate that of
which it is easiest to speak outside of the school, is
that, in a long series of writings, with every variety
of scale and immediate purpose, he has explained the
1 See for example the comparison of the Anglo-Norman Thomas,
the chief authority for the story of Tristan, with his more refined con
temporary Chrétien de Troyes ( Poèmes et légendes).
GASTON PARIS 249
growth of old French poetry and prose in all their

kinds, and has judged their present literary value
as securely as he worked out technical points of
history or scholarship. It is not everything, but it
is the aspect of his work most convenient for this
place, that he was one of the great critics of French
literature . His preface to the History of French
Literature, edited by Petit de Julleville, is a summary
of the whole matter, down to the Renaissance and
beyond, written with an insight into general causes
such as is often desired but seldom attained in the
work of other critics. In the certainty with which
the lines are drawn it resembles St. Evremond's
comparison and interpretation of the French and
English genius, probably the most successful piece
of generalisation ever made by any writer on such
subjects ; while the general view is enlivened with
exact knowledge of details. This essay explains
the peculiar character of the French Renaissance,
the reason of the wide difference between the
Middle Ages and the sixteenth century in France,
bringing out the peculiar character of the fifteenth
century
une littérature bâtarde, sorte de Renaissance avortée, mêlant

les restes de la puérilité subtile du moyen âge à une gauche
imitation de l'antiquité latine. ( Preface, p. 9) -
a kind of waste interval—empty, pretentious—at the

back of which lay the right medieval poetry, un

known to Ronsard and his companions. Then
follows the description of this older literature, in
terms that prove its affinity with all that is most
characteristic of the French nation in modern times,
its talent for clear language, a perfect sympathy and
understanding between the author and his audience.
From this virtue of lucidity comes also (as St. Evre
mond has remarked in comparing French and Eng
lish) a certain shallowness : the personages in French
epic or French drama are not fully realised ; more or
less they are abstract, they represent ideas.
On chercherait en vain dans toute l'Europe médiévale une
oeuvre qui incarne comme la Chanson de Roland les façons
de sentir, sinon de la nation tout entière, au moins de la
partie active et dominante de la nation, dans ce qu'elles
eurent de plus impersonnel et de plus élevé. De là cette
faiblesse de la caractéristique qu'on a relevée dans notre
vieille épopée : les individus l'intéressent moins que les idées
et les sentiments dont ils sont les porteurs. ( 16.)
A similar quality is proved to exist in the other

kinds of old poetry, in the courtly romances of
the twelfth century, in the fabliaux ; Lancelot and
Renard, the hero and the picaroon, are both of them ,
in Old French , rather abstract types.
Leurs traits sont d'autant plus significatifs qu'ils sont moins

personnels, et se gravent d'autant mieux dans le souvenir
qu'ils sont coordonnés par une logique parfaite. Ils gagnent
GASTON PARIS 251
en relief et en clarté tout ce qu'ils perdent en profondeur et
en complication. N'est-ce pas aussi ce qu'on peut dire des créa
tions les plus parfaites de notre littérature classique ? ( 16.)
Then Gaston Paris brings out the peculiar ex
cellence of the romantic poetry of France in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, so seldom understood
beyond the borders by the Teutonic nations who
imported French novels and adapted them.
La tendance à créer des types, plutôt qu'à essayer de faire
vivre des individus dans toute leur complexité changeante ,
n’exclut pas l'analyse psychologique ; au contraire. Les
sentiments humains sont étudiés en eux-mêmes, dans leur
évolution logique et leurs conflits, tels que, dans des con
ditions données, ils doivent se produire, chez tout homme
défini d'une certaine façon ; et ceux qui les éprouvent
aiment à se les expliquer à eux-mêmes ... pour l'instruc
tion des autres. Cette analyse psychologique, la littérature
française y a excellé dans tous les temps. On pourrait
citer tel morceau de Chrétien de Troyes qui ne le cède
pas en vérité, en ingéniosité, parfois en subtilité, aux plus
célèbres monologues de nos tragédies, aux pages les plus
fouillées de nos romans contemporains. ( Ib .)
Following which comes a note on the Romance of the
Rose, l'épopée psychologique, as it were the ghost or
shadow of all the sentiment in the school of Chrétien
de Troyes, disembodied “ states of mind ” moving
about as persons in a story. The discussion of
French medieval style, after this, is equally sure of
its ground, and in the same way impartial ; setting
down all the common faults, platitude, triviality,
but not concealing the delight with which the critic

turns to the ancient writers, nor ignoring the true
beauty of their work.
Mais leur langue n'est pas seulement claire : elle a souvent
une justesse, une légèreté, une aisance naturelle qui font
penser aux meilleurs morceaux de notre littérature des deux
derniers siècles. Ils voient bien et savent dire avec netteté
ce qu'ils ont vu ; leur parole les amuse et nous amuse avec
eux . Beaucoup d'entre eux sont d'aimables causeurs, un peu
ba billards, qui se laissent d'autant plus volontiers aller à leur
verve qu'ils voient que leurs auditeurs y prennent plaisir ;
d'autres sont d'excellents raisonneurs, qui cherchent sérieuse
ment à convaincre ou à intéresser leur public, et qui y
réussissent par la simplicité et la précision de leur exposition ;
d'autres encore ont su imprimer à leurs discours de la grandeur,
de la sensibilité ou de la finesse. ( Ib .)
Gaston Paris himself, in his writing, had that
instinctive clearness which he finds constant in French
literature — that same regard for his hearers which, in
the earliest authors of his nation, as he points out,
distinguished the even, plain discourse of the chansons
de geste from the more high -flown heroic poetry of
other nations. At the same time his literary judg
ment, moving so freely among generalisations, was
always based on particulars—a different thing from the
peremptory opinions of less patient critics. Popular
literary history , working at some distance from its
subject, may pronounce that one chanson de geste is just
like any other chanson de geste. Gaston Paris, with
complete appreciation of all the habitual ways, the
GASTON PARIS 253
repetitions, the want of care, the ready use of com

mon forms and stop -gaps (décourageantes chevilles),
in Old French epic, knew well also that under super
ficial uniformity there were differences of genius and
temper clearly marked ; and that to confound Balzac
and Stendhal, or Corneille and Racine, on account of
their common qualities would be hardly a stronger
proof of critical incompetence than ( for example) a
refusal to distinguish the merits of Roland and Raoul
de Cambrai. He treated old French poetry with
the same conscience and the same discernment as
the greatest critics have given to the greatest masters.
He did not exaggerate the value of his authors ;
but the fact that they did not belong to the seven
teenth or the nineteenth century was for him no
reason to treat them under different rules or with less
precision.
Perhaps the essays in which he showed his learn
ing and his critical power to best advantage are those
on the Arthurian romances, in Romania and the
Histoire littéraire (tome xxx. ) . He had to discover
their sources and trace their development -a business
sometimes pursued without much regard for qualities
of literature. Gaston Paris, studying the transmission
of popular tales from obscure Celtic origins to the
schools of French poetry in the twelfth century, did
not keep to what is called folklore, though this was a
large part of his work. It was not enough for him
to trace the progress of a fable through different

stages, or merely to verify the fact that similar plots,
incidents, characters, or names were found in different
versions, in different languages. Along with this
he watched the literary motives of the poets, the in
fluences of fashion or of individual temper that made
them change and remould the folklore substance.
An example of his procedure may be found in
the description of Guinglain, a poem of Renaud de
Beaujeu, in which the simple fairy -tale of “ Li beaux
Desconus is incongruously decorated to indulge the
rhetorical and sentimental taste of an ambitious liter
ary man . Problems much more complex are solved
in the essay on Le Chevalier de la Charrette, i.e. the
Lancelot of Chrétien de Troyes (Romania, vol. x. p.
459 et seq .). Peculiar insight and judgment were re
quired to distinguish the shadows in this illusory realm :
the result, which proves the dependence of Lancelot
on the doctrine of the troubadours, and establishes
the relation between the narrative poetry of France
and the lyric of Provence, is gained by a masterly
use of every available instrument. Historical study
of the facts (e.g. of the part taken by Marie de
Champagne in bringing Provençal ideas to the north)
is completed and enlightened by critical intuition and
sympathy.
Another talent is displayed in the short history of
medieval French literature. This is a book for the
GASTON PARIS 255
schools, compact and positive, with little room either

for eloquence or for historical detail. Yet, along
with its serried names and dates, it presents, at the
smallest cost of words, a critical estimate of every
matter it touches. On a larger scale the Villon, one
of the author's latest works, is perhaps the finest
example of his powers.. In the description of Villon's
poetry, and more especially, perhaps, in the account
of his poetical education , there is the fruit of a whole
lifetime of research and reflection . Villon and his
age are shown in their relation to the poetry of the
preceding centuries : the decline of the earlier litera
ture, the strange obliteration of the older poetry,
the rise and decay of new schools in the fourteenth
century, the vacancy and vanity of the fifteenth, are
all brought out, in the author's inimitably simple
manner, as a setting for the new genius of Villon.
Often and well as Villon has been praised, this mode
of approaching his work was needed ; and no one
else could have used it to the same effect, with so sure
a control of all the history.
Many of the friends of Gaston Paris have written
lately about his personal influence . Such regret as
they feel was felt and expressed by Gaston Paris him
self in the memorial notices that he wrote on James
Darmesteter and Renan—passages of meditation, full
of dignity, not effusive, which perhaps convey as
much as a stranger need seek to know about his
more intimate thoughts.. It may not be out of place

to mention here the generous phrase in his Villon,
returning thanks for the liberal gift of his friend
Marcel Schwob, who, surrendering the interests of
his own book, made over the results of his inde
pendent researches to be used in the biography. And
further, there is one aspect of the private life of
Gaston Paris which it is well to remember—the grace
and rectitude of his dealing with scholars outside of
France. He believed strongly in his own country,
and hardly less strongly in the community of learn
ing over all the world. Two papers of his, composed
during the Franco-Prussian war, illustrate the two
loyalties, which he was able to reconcile without
diluting either of them. One is the lecture on
Roland,” in December 1870, repeating the old
prayer
Ne placet Deu ne ses saintismes angles
Que ja par mei perdet sa valor France !
The other is one of his more technical pieces (on

a Latin poem about Frederick Barbarossa) , written
during the siege of Paris. It mentions calmly his
regret that he is prevented from consulting German
1 The war interrupted the work of a young German scholar in Paris,
Julius Brakelmann, who had to leave half printed the Corpus of Old
French lyric poetry which he was editing. He was killed, fighting
against the French, at Mars la Tour, in July 1870 ; the fragment of
his book was published in 1891 as he had left it, with a note simply
stating the facts, more impressive than any rhetoric.
GASTON PARIS 257
scholars : “ They are separated from us by their

armies and our ramparts, or engaged perhaps in the
preparations for an attack upon our city.” Gaston
Paris knew to the full the claims of patriotism and of
learning, and tampered with neither when they were
accidentally opposed.
In England he had many personal friends, besides
many more who were indebted to him through his
writings — attracted almost unconsciously by the char
acter as well as the matter of his work . There was
no display, no emphasis in his style. But every

thing he wrote gave the impression of efficiency and
sincerity , or rather of an intellectual magnanimity in
which all the other excellences are included .
INDEX
Ælfric, 6, 9, 15, 18 Buisson de Jonece, le Foli, 114, 184

Alfred , King, 6, 10, 14 , 19, 29 Byrhtnoth, see Maldon
Aliscans, 180
Ameto, 67 Canterbury Tales, 94 599.
Ancren Riwle (ed. Camden Society), 17 Casibus Virorum Illustrium , De, 70
Anelida and the false Arcite, 82 sq. Castell of Love, 156 599.
Apollonius of Tyre, 19 Caxton, 23
Arthur ofLittle Britain, 146 599 . Cervantes, 67, 99.
Astrée, of Honoré d'Urfé, a pastoral | Champagne, Marie de, 254
romance, 67 Chandos, Sir John, 151 , 220, 234
Ayenbite of Inwyt, 155 Charles VI . of France, 232
Aymerigot Marcel, 153 Chaucer, 20, 25 , 32, 34 , 69, 71 sq .,
76-100, 112, 117 599., 139, 181 ,
Balades of Gower, 126, 130 599. 190, 203 sq ., 230
Barbour, John, 110, 223 Chrestien de Troyes, 108 , 251 , 254
Bavaria, Albert of, Count of Hainault, Chronicle, Anglo-Saxon, 12, 15
194 Claris Mulieribus, De, 70
Beaumont, Jean de, 206 sq. Clerk's Tale, 99
Bede, Anglo-Saxon translation of, 166 Complaint of Venus, 80
Benoit de Sainte-More, his Roman de Confessio Amantis, 104 899.
Troie, 108 , 121 Coucy, Enguerrand de, 184, 193 sq.,
Bernart de Ventadorn , 44 sq. 220
Berners, John Bourchier, Lord , 27, Craik, Sir Henry, 149

136-169 Cursor Mundi, 18
Berry, Duchess of, 193 Cynewulf and Cyneheard, in the Anglo
Bertran de Born, 51 Saxon Chronicle, A.D. 755, 12
Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster, 184
(see Duchess) Dagworth, Sir Thomas, 228
Blickling Homilies, 6 Dante, 32-51 , 58 s99., 68, 77, 132,
Blois, Guy, Count of, 184, 188 599., 233
194 Darmesteter, Mme., on Froissart,
Boccaccio, 21 , 25 , 33 , 52-75 , 84, 180 n .
87 899., 112, 203 Decameron, 65
Boethius, 18, 20, 92 Delisle, L., 186 n.
Bolton, Sir John, and the partridges, | Demaison, M., 245 .
227 Deschamps, Eustache, 80, 108 , 130,
Boyd, Mark Alexander, 174 197
Brakelmann, 256 n. Despenser, Lord, 183
Buch, Captal de, 220 Diez, Friedrich, 240
Buchon, M., 176 Dit du Florin , 184, 193
7
259
Douglas, Earl, and his family at Dal- Harry the Minstrel, 126
keith, 182 Hart, Professor J. M., 166 n.
Diana of Montemayor, a pastoral Hawkwood, Sir John, 217
romance, 67 Hei ne, 94
Diego de San Pedro, 141, 160 599. Heliodorus, 19, 67
Dryden, 100, 120 Hemricourt, Jean de, 206 s99.
Duchess, Book of the, 118 Henry IV., 125
Dunbar, William, 101 Henry VIII., 143
Hernani and the point of honour ,"
Edward III., 184, 206, 210 591., 224 99
599., 233 sq . Herodotus, 25, 135
Edward the Black Prince, 184 , 186, | Histoire littéraire de la France, 246
195 Homer, his similes compared with
Ellis, George, 28, 244 Dante's, 39 599.
Espinette amcureuse, 114, 182, 217 Horace, quoted, 205
Eupbues, 43, 131, 140 Horton, a spirit, 192
House of Fame, 71, 81, 93, 117, 231
Fauriel, 243 Hugo, Victor, 245
Fiammetta, 66 Huon of Bordeaux, 143 599.
Filocolo, 66 Hûsen , Hêr Friderich von, his heroic
Filostrato, 33, 71, 84 verse, 128 sq .
Fiorio e Biancifiore, Cantare di, quoted,
74
Flaubert, 244 Inghilfredi Siciliano, 42
Fletcher, The Two Noble Kinsmen, 89
599 Jean d'Outremeuse, 206
Floris and Blanchefloure, 66 Jean le Bel, 170, 187, 206-214
Foix, Gaston de, 191 Jocelyn of Brakelonde, 171
Folquet of Marseilles, 46 John, King of France, 222
Fortescue, Sir John, 22 Johnson, Dr., 27, 172, 177
Fournival, Richard de, his Bestiaire Joinville, 16, 175 sq .
d'Amour, 43
Franklin's Tale, 99
Froissart, 108 , 112 599., 125, 129 599.9 Kelly, James
Knight'sMr.Tale, 89 sqFitzmaurice,
., 98 134
135-238
Galatea of Cervantes , 67 Lancaster, Blanche, Duchess of, 184
Garin le Loherain, 38, 243 n. Henry, Duke of, 228 sq.
Genealogia Deorum, De, 62, 70 John , Duke of, 134
Golden Boke of Marcus Aurelius, 156 Landor, 58
$99. Lang, Mr. Andrew, 121 n.
Gower, John, 101-134 Layamon, 2
Granson , Oton de, 80 Le Clerc, Victor, 244 n .
Gray, 28, 135, 195 Lee, Mr. Sidney , 143 sq .
Gregory, St., the Great, 62 Legend of Good Women, 82, 231
Grise, René Berthault de la, 163 Lelio de' Manfredi, 161
Grisel, Froissart's horse, 202 Lemaître, M. Jules, 247
Guesclin, Bertrand du, 222, 227, 236 Longnon, M., 186 n.
Guevara, 140, 159 Lopes, Fernan, 177
Guido Cavalcanti, 44, 132 Luce, M. Siméon, 188
Guido delle Colonne, 122 Lucian, 62
Guinglain, 254 Lydgate, his Bochas, 70 , 101 , III
Lyndesay, Sir David, 18
Hakluyt, 11 Lyon, Sir Espaing de, 201
INDEX 261
Macaulay, Mr. G. C., his edition of Queste del Saint Graal, 23, 177
Gower, 102 599
on Lord Berners, 143 n. Rehearsal, The, 36, 99
Machaut, Guillaume de, 80, 197 Richard II., 106, 184, 195 sqq.
Maldon, Anglo-Saxon poem on the Richart de Berbezill, 51
battle of, 12 Roland, Chanson de, 256
Malory, 22 599. 138 , 150 Rose, Romaunt of the, 198, 251 , passim
Man ofLaw's Tale, 96 sq. Rosiphelee, 115
Mandeville , 20 Russell's Modern Europe, 177
Marshal, William, Earl of Pembroke,
110, 174, 186, 219 St. Evremond, 249
Mauny, Oliver de, 227 599. Salisbury, Countess of, 210, 224 599.
Meliador, 183, 186, 190 sq., 193, 203, Sandras, M., 198
216 Santillana, Marquis of, Spanish poet ,
Melibeus, 72, 98 134
Melville, Mr. James, 174 sq. Schwob, Marcel, 256
Mirour de l'Omme, 125 ; see Speculum Scott, 135 sq., 244
Meditantis Shakespeare, 85 , 160 n.
Montaigne, 60, 238 Sidney, Sir Philip, 27, 63, 67, 73
Montaudon, Monk of, Provençal poet, Skeat, Professor, his edition of Chaucer,
48 92
Morris, William, 87, 221 Solinus , 43 n.
Speculum Meditantis, 102, 104
Namur, Robert of, 185, 187 $ 99 . Stury, Sir Richard, 192, 195
Nicholas of Guildford , 109
Nicholas Nuñez, 160 n. Tasso, 67, 73
Teseide, 67, 71 , 88
Trésor amoureux , 182, 218
Ohthere, his narrative, and Wulfstan's, Troilus and Criseyde, 71 , 83 899., passim
in King Alfred's Orosius, 10 599.
Orm, 2 Ulfilas, 7
Orosius , 18
Ostrevant , William of, 194 Villehardouin, 2, 16, 175
Ovid, 121 Villon , 255
Owl, The, and the Nightingale, 109
Virgil, in Boccaccio's. lectures, 70
Visconti , 56 sq., 217
Pacheco, D. João, 194 Vox Clamantis, 129
Pardoner , 91
Payn, Robert, Canon of Lisbon, 134 Wales, Ywain of, 22 I
Paris, Gaston, 115, 197 , 239-257 Waltharius, by Ekkehard, 38 n.
Paris, Paulin , 240 899. Warton , 28 , 233, 242
Pecock , his Repressour, 20 Wenceslas of Brabant, 183, 188 sq.
Petit de Julleville, 115 n., 249 Wife of Bath, 91 , 195
Petrarch , 42, 52 599., 217 sq . William of Orange, 51 , 180
Philip, King of France, 211 599. Wooing of our Lord (ed. Morris, Old
Philippa, Queen, 182, 183, 188 English Homilies), 17
Plato, his parodies of Euphuism , 160 n. Wulfstan, see Ohthere
Pons de Capdoill, 48 Wycliffe, 8, 20
Provençal poetry, similes in, 41 599.
Puttenham , 126 Young, Dr., quoted, 106
Printed by R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, Edinburgh.
WORKS ON THE
HISTORY AND CRITICISM OF LITERATURE

History of English Poetry By WILLIAM JOHN COURTHOPE,
C.B. , M.A. Vol. 1.—The Middle Ages - The Influence of
the Roman Empire — The Encyclopædic Education of the
Church — The Feudal System . Vol . II . -The Renaissance
and the Reformation : Influence of the Court and the Univer
sities. Vol. III .-The Intellectual Conflict of the Seventeenth
Century — Decadent Influence of the Feudal Monarchy -
Growth of the National Genius. Vol. IV.-- Development and
Decline of the Poetical Drama Influence of the Court and the
People. 8vo. ros. net each volume. [ Vol. V. in the Press.
Life in Poetry : Law in Taste. Two Series of Lcetures delivered
in Oxford, 1895-1900. By W. J. COURTHOPE, C.B. 8vo.
IOS , net.
A History of Early English Literature . By Rev. STOPFORD

A. BROOKE. Two Vols. 8vo. 2os. net.
Romances of Roguery : An Episode in the History of the

Novel. By FRANK WADLEIGH CHANDLER, In two parts.
Part I. — The Picaresque Novel in Spain , Globe 8vo. 8s. 6d, net.
The English Heroic Play. By LEWIS N. CHASE. Globe 8vo.
8s. 6d, net.
Studies in German Literature in the Nineteenth Century.

By J. F. COAR. 8vo . ros, 6d. net.
Abridged History of Greek Literature. By MM . ALFRED
and MAURICE CROISET. Translated by G. F. HEFFELBOWER.
8vo. Ios . 6d. net.
The Development of the English Novel. By W. L. CROSS .

Globe 8vo. 6s.
Frédéric Mistral, Poet and Leader in Provence. By Prof.

C. A. DOWNER. Globe 8vo. 6s. net.
The Italian Renaissance in England. By L. EINSTEIN. Globe

8vo. 6s. net.
The Elizabethan Lyric. By JOHN ERSKINE, Ph.D. Globe

8vo. 6s. 6d, net.
The Beginnings of Poetry. By Prof. F. B. GUMMERE. 8vo.
12s . 6d. net.
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED, LONDON

WORKS ON THE HISTORY AND CRITICISM OF LITERATURE
continued .
The Masters of English Literature. By STEPHEN GWYNN.

Globe 8vo. 35. 6d.
The Indebtedness of Chaucer's “ Troilus and Criseyde ” to
ido Delle Colonne's “ Historia Trojana ." By GEORGE L.
HAMILTON, A.M. Crown 8vo. 55. net.
Platonism in English Poetry of the 16th and 17th Centuries.
By J. S, HARRISON. Globe 8vo. 8s. 6d. net.
History of English Literature. - In Four Volumes. Crown 8vo.
English Literature from the Beginning to the Norman Conquest.
By STOPFORD A. BROOKE, M.A. 75. 6d.
Elizabethan Literature ( 1560-1665 ). By GEORGE SAINTSBURY.
75. 6d.
Eighteenth Century Literature (1660-1780). By EDMUND GOSSE,
M.A. 75. 6d.
Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1900 ). By G. SAINTSBURY.
7ѕ. 6d.
Renascence of the English Drama. By HENRY ARTHUR JONES.
Crown 8vo. 6s.
Studies in Montaigne. Early Writing of Montaigne. By
GRACE NORTON. Two Vols. Globe 8vo. 125. 6d. net.
A Short History of English Literature. By Prof. GEORGE
SAINTSBURY. Crown 8vo. 8s. 6d.
English Chronicle Play. By FELIX E. SCHELLING. Crown
8vo. 8s. 6d. net.
A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance. With
Special Reference to Influence of Italy in the Formation and
Development of Modern Classicism. By J. E. SPINGARN.
Crown 8vo. 6s. net.
The Evolution of the English Novel. By F. H. STODDARD.

Globe 8vo. 6s.
The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages. By H. O.
TAYLOR. Globe 8vo. 75. 6d. net.
The Language and Metre of Chaucer. By BERNHARD TEN
BRINK. Revised by F. KLUGE. Translated by M. BENTINCK
SMITH. Crown 8vo. 6s. net.
Spanish Literature in the England of the Tudors. By J. G.

UNDERHILL. Crown 8vo. 8s, 6d. net.
A History of English Dramatic Literature, to the Death of
Queen Anne. By ADOLPHUS WILLIAM WARD, Litt.D.
Second Edition. Three Vols . 8vo. 36s , net.
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED , I ONDON
9 8975
1
3 2044 019 345 453
4 be
ra ire
лес
THE BORROWER WILL BE CHARGED

AN OVERDUE FEE IF THIS BOOK IS
NOT RETURNED TO THE LIBRARY ON
OR BEFORE THE LAST DATE STAMPED
E
BELOW . NON -RECEIPT OF OVERDU
NOTICES DOES NOT EXEMPT THE
BORROWER FROM OVERDUE FEES .
Harvard College Widener Library
Cambridge , MA 02138 (617 ) 495-2413
REB 1253 19997

CARPE DUELE
WIDENER
FEBFE0DK 1999 ER
BOO QUE B
EB 0.5 1999

Untitled

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Untitled

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Untitled

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

This is a reproduction of a library book that was digitized

by Google as part of an ongoing effort to preserve the

All rights reserved

These Essays have all been printed before. The

Review , July 1904. I have to offer my thanks to

LONDON , June 9, 1905 .

THE EARLIER HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE I

GASTON Paris 239

The attraction of medieval literature comes perhaps

Swabia, for the winds of the forest of Broceliande.

out preparation, in the East — of the wholesale modern

for people who wanted to know about things, and

importance . The history of English prose cannot

successfully the temptations of foreign grammatical

sorts is common to the whole of medieval prose, and

one hand and to the popular taste for poetical decora

what bulks largest, but it is not the only prose

That is not the highest kind, and there is a higher to

could do when left to themselves ; here is the true

vagueness or airiness, but a sense of solidity and

of the Chronicle may be remembered —the

It is rude and harsh in its phrasing, but dramatic,

tional homilies and saints' lives. But for some things

This has sometimes been forgotten or ignored,

romance ; true histories are not so common in the

was therein, and afterwards burned the church and

and let their voices break and tremble. Pathos was

one may easily forget the enormous difficulties that

Alfred to turn into prose, encouraged an over

likeness between the Anglo -Saxon Apollonius and

decent and respectable hundreds of years before

freshness ; it suffered from an absorbing interest in

in some respects are beyond comparison the best.

Fay. The time in which Malory wrote was not

selfish world described in the Paston leters. He

begun to be critical and reflective. Malory, in a similar

line, by taking up what was old and carrying it on.

Palmerin. Perhaps the historians of literature have

venient to begin where the language has come into

stages has been wrongly judged, most of all in the

In the Teseide (ix. 28 ) Boccaccio varies the lan

It was in that way, sometimes by mere copying,

chiefly studied by Spenser, for example — Chaucer in

The instance first cited has nothing peculiarly dis

There is nothing that exactly corresponds to this

matter, like those in which an army is compared to

Quando si parte il giuoco della zara,

It is the great virtue of the Homeric simile — the

and like many in Dante, to go beyond the exact

The same kind of terrified rush for shelter is ren

This simile is preceded by another one describing the

1 In Ekkehard's Latin poem of Waltharius Manufortis a comparison

The Homeric simile is rather nearer to the particulars

As under the stress of fire the locusts are wafted to the

The French simile has only one line of expansion,

Further, they were in command of an order of

candle - the Phoenix — the turtle — the

1 Poeti del primo secolo, i. 136 ; Nannucci, Manuale, i. p. 57.

--where the allusion is evidently to the properties of

genius led them towards freedom , and some of the