Page:Columbia University Lectures on Literature (1911).djvu/160

146 And when we turn to Comedy, we find the popular Muse again supreme. The hearty laugh and the merry jest most often come, as might be expected, from the full throats of the lower classes. For the Hogarth picture of the Middle Ages we must turn to the fabliaux, those coarse and witty tales unfit for the ears of dames. It is a thousand pities that such masterly bits of narration, short stories in verse at a time when there were so few in prose, are so indecorous as to be impossible for modern readers. The romances show the age as it imagined itself to be; the fabliaux, as it really was. They ridiculed hypocrisy in the church and immorality in the relations of the sexes with biting irony, and took a wicked delight in the frailties of the smugly virtuous. They were essentially a French product, other nations lagging behind the brightness of Gallic wit. And they exercised a strong influence on more studied literary productions. When we trace medieval humor to its origins, even when a great artist has shaped it, we generally hear the voices of the people. Such men as Chaucer, Pulci, Rabelais, illustrate this admirably. In Chaucer's tales of the Reeve and Miller we recognize the technic of the fabliau. Rabelais shows book-learning refracted by popular irreverence, the same spirit which set wandering scholars, men of the middle classes, to parodying the offices of the Church. Pulci, really outside the limits of our period, takes the unromantic view of romantic characters current among the people, and makes the burlesque "Morgante Maggiore." The cruder fun is of medieval origin; the more delicate facets in the story belong to the Renaissance. As for Chaucer's dry humor, that belongs to him and not to his age. His whimsical vein, something like the spirit we see to-day in the work of Mr. Barrie, is rare indeed in the Middle Ages. Too seldom is medieval humor subtle; too often it is of the slap-stick order. This is true even of the greatest achievement of medieval wit, the beast-epic of "Reynard the Fox." It is not without its subtleties, particularly if the