the characteristics of the Renaissance, in Montaigne those of
the sceptical reaction from Renaissance and reform alike, in
Molière those of the society of France after Richelieu had tamed
and levelled it, in Voltaire and Rousseau respectively the two
aspects of the great revolt,—so there are to be found in the Roman
de la rose the characteristics of the later middle age, its gallantry,
its mysticism, its economical and social troubles and problems,
its scholastic methods of thought, its naïve acceptance as science
of everything that is written, and at the same time its shrewd
and indiscriminate criticism of much that the age of criticism
has accepted without doubt or question. The Roman de la rose,
as might be supposed, set the example of an immense literature of
allegorical poetry, which flourished more and more until the
Renaissance. Some of these poems we have already mentioned,
some will have to be considered under the head of the 15th
century. But, as usually happens in such cases and was certain
to happen in this case, the allegory which has seemed tedious to
many, even in the original, became almost intolerable in the
majority of the imitations.
We have observed that, at least in the later section of the
Roman de la rose, there is observable a tendency to import into
the poem indiscriminate erudition. This tendency is
now remote from our poetical habits; but in its own
day it was only the natural result of the use of poetry Early
didactic
verse.
for all literary purposes. It was many centuries
before prose became recognized as the proper vehicle for instruction,
and at a very early date verse was used as well for educational
and moral as for recreative and artistic purposes. French
verse was the first born of all literary mediums in modern European
speech, and the resources of ancient learning were certainly
not less accessible in France than in any other country. Dante,
in his De vulgari eloquio, acknowledges the excellence of the
didactic writers of the Langue d’Oïl. We have already alluded
to the Bestiary of Philippe de Thaun, a Norman trouvère who
lived and wrote in England during the reign of Henry Beauclerc.
Besides the Bestiary, which from its dedication to Queen Adela
has been conjectured to belong to the third decade of the 12th
century, Philippe wrote also in French a Liber de creaturis, both
works being translated from the Latin. These works of mystical
and apocryphal physics and zoology became extremely popular
in the succeeding centuries, and were frequently imitated.
A moralizing turn was also given to them, which was much
helped by the importation of several miscellanies of Oriental
origin, partly tales, partly didactic in character, the most celebrated
of which is the Roman des sept sages, which, under that
title and the variant of Dolopathos, received repeated treatment
from French writers both in prose and verse. The odd notion
of an Ovide moralisé used to be ascribed to Philippe de Vitry,
bishop of Meaux (1291?–1391?), a person complimented by
Petrarch, but is now assigned to a certain Chrétien Legonais.
Art, too, soon demanded exposition in verse, as well as science.
The favourite pastime of the chase was repeatedly dealt with,
notably in the Roi Modus (1325), mixed prose and verse; the
Deduits de la chasse (1387), of Gaston de Foix, prose; and the
Tresor de Venerie of Hardouin (1394), verse. Very soon didactic
verse extended itself to all the arts and sciences. Vegetius and
his military precepts had found a home in French octosyllables
as early as the 12th century; the end of the same age saw the
ceremonies of knighthood solemnly versified, and napes (maps)
du monde also soon appeared. At last, in 1245, Gautier of Metz
translated from various Latin works into French verse a sort
of encyclopaedia, while another, incongruous but known as
L’Image du monde, exists from the same century. Profane
knowledge was not the only subject which exercised didactic
poets at this time. Religious handbooks and commentaries on
the scriptures were common in the 13th and following centuries,
and, under the title of Castoiements, Enseignements and Doctrinaux,
moral treatises became common. The most famous of
these, the Castoiement d’un père à son fils, falls under the class,
already mentioned, of works due to oriental influence, being
derived from the Indian Panchatantra. In the 14th century the
influence of the Roman de la rose helped to render moral verse
frequent and popular. The same century, moreover, which
witnessed these developments of well-intentioned if not always Artificial forms of verse.
judicious erudition witnessed also a considerable change
in lyrical poetry. Hitherto such poetry had chiefly
been composed in the melodious but unconstrained
forms of the romance and the pastourelle. In the
14th century the writers of northern France subjected themselves
to severer rules. In this age arose the forms which for so long
a time were to occupy French singers,—the ballade, the rondeau,
the rondel, the triolet, the chant royal and others. These
received considerable alterations as time went on. We possess
not a few Artes poëticae, such as that of Eustache Deschamps
at the end of the 14th century, that formerly ascribed to Henri
de Croy and now to Molinet at the end of the 15th, and that
of Thomas Sibilet in the 16th, giving particulars of them, and
these particulars show considerable changes. Thus the term
rondeau, which since Villon has been chiefly limited to a poem of
15 lines, where the 9th and 15th repeat the first words of the first,
was originally applied both to the rondel, a poem of 13 or 14
lines, where the first two are twice repeated integrally, and to the
triolet, one of 8 only, where the first line occurs three times
and the second twice. The last is an especially popular metre,
and is found where we should least expect it, in the dialogue
of the early farces, the speakers making up triolets between them.
As these three forms are closely connected, so are the ballade
and the chant royal, the latter being an extended and more
stately and difficult version of the former, and the characteristic
of both being the identity of rhyme and refrain in the several
stanzas. It is quite uncertain at what time these fashions were
first cultivated, but the earliest poets who appear to have practised
them extensively were born at the close of the 13th and the
beginning of the 14th centuries. Of these Guillaume de Machault
(c. 1300–1380) is the oldest. He has left us 80,000 verses,
never yet completely printed. Eustache Deschamps (c. 1340–c. 1410)
was nearly as prolific, but more fortunate as more
meritorious, the Société des anciens Textes having at last provided
a complete edition of him. Froissart the historian (1333–1410)
was also an agreeable and prolific poet. Deschamps, the most
famous as a poet of the three, has left us nearly 1200 ballades
and nearly 200 rondeaux, besides much other verse all manifesting
very considerable poetical powers. Less known but not less
noteworthy, and perhaps the earliest of all, is Jehannot de Lescurel,
whose personality is obscure, and most of whose works are lost,
but whose remains are full of grace. Froissart appears to have
had many countrymen in Hainault and Brabant who devoted
themselves to the art of versification; and the Livre des cent
ballades of the Marshal Boucicault (1366–1421) and his friends—c.
1390—shows that the French gentleman of the 14th century
was as apt at the ballade as his Elizabethan peer in England
was at the sonnet.
Early Drama.—Before passing to the prose writers of the
middle ages, we have to take some notice of the dramatic
productions of those times—productions of an extremely
interesting character, but, like the immense
majority of medieval literature, poetic in form. The Mysteries
and
miracles.
origin or the revival of dramatic composition in France
has been hotly debated, and it has been sometimes contended
that the tradition of Latin comedy was never entirely lost, but
was handed on chiefly in the convents by adaptations of the
Terentian plays, such as those of the nun Hroswitha. There
is no doubt that the mysteries (subjects taken from the sacred
writings) and miracle plays (subjects taken from the legends of
the saints and the Virgin) are of very early date. The mystery
of the Foolish Virgins (partly French, partly Latin), that of
Adam and perhaps that of Daniel, are of the 12th century,
though due to unknown authors. Jean Bodel and Ruteboeuf,
already mentioned, gave, the one that of Saint Nicolas at the
confines of the 12th and 13th, the other that of Théophile later
in the 13th itself. But the later moralities, soties, and farces
seem to be also in part a very probable development of the
simpler and earlier forms of the fabliau and of the tenson or jeu-parti,
a poem in simple dialogue much used by both troubadours
