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Rh Such poems, but of a more strictly narrative nature, continued to be produced, mainly in the north and north-east of France, until the middle of the 14th century. Much speculation has been expended on the probable sources of the tales which the trouvères told. The Aryan theory, which saw in them the direct influence of India upon Europe, has now been generally abandoned. It does not seem probable that any ancient or exotic influences were brought to bear upon the French jongleurs, who simply invented or adapted stories of that universal kind which springs unsown from every untilled field of human society. More remarkable than the narratives themselves is the spirit in which they are told. This is full of the national humour and the national irony, the true esprit gaulois. A very large section of these popular poems deals satirically with the pretensions of the clergy. Such are the famous Prêtre aux mûres, the Prêtre qui dit la Passion and Les Perdrix. Some of these are innocently merry; others are singularly depraved and obscene. Another class of fabliaux is that which comprises jests against the professions; in this, the most prominent example is Le Vilain Mire, a satire on doctors, which curiously predicts the Médecin malgré lui of Molière. There are also tales whose purpose is rather voluptuous than witty, and whose aim is to excuse libertinage and render marriage ridiculous. Among these are prominent Court Mantel and Le Dit de Berenger. Yet another class repeated, with a strain of irony or oddity, such familiar classical stories as those of Narcissus, and Pyramus and Thisbe. It is rarely that any elevation of tone raises these poems above a familiar and even playful level, but there are some that are almost idealistic. Among these the story of a sort of Sisyphus errant, Le Chevalier de Barizel, offers an ethical interest which lifts it in certain respects above all other surviving fabliaux. An instance of the pathetic fabliau is Housse Partie, a kind of primitive version of the story of King Lear.

In composing these pieces, of very varied character, the jongleurs have practised an art which was in many respects rudimentary, but sincere and simple. The student of language finds the rich vocabulary of the fabliaux much more attractive to him than the conventionality of the serious religious and amatory poems of the same age. The object of the writers was the immediate amusement of their audience; by reference to familiar things, they hoped to arouse a quick and genuine merriment. Hence their incorrectness and their negligence are balanced by a delightful ease and absence of pedantry, and in the fabliaux we get closer than elsewhere to the living diction of medieval France. It is true that if we extend too severe a judgment to these pieces, we may find ourselves obliged to condemn them altogether. An instructed French critic, vexed with their faults, has gone so far as to say that “the subjects of these tales are degrading, their inspiration nothing better than flat and cruel derision, their distinguishing features rascality, vulgarity and platitude of style.” From one point of view, this condemnation of the fabliau is hardly too severe. But such scholars as Gaston Paris and Paul Meyer have not failed to emphasize other sides to the question. They have praised, in the general laxity of style and garrulity of the middle ages, the terseness of the jongleurs; in the period of false ornament, their fidelity to nature; in a time of general vagueness, the sharp and picturesque outlines of their art. One feature of the fabliaux, however, cannot be praised and yet must not be overlooked. In no other section of the world’s literature is the scorn and hatred of women so prominent. It is difficult to account for the anti-feminine rage which pervades the fabliaux, and takes hideous shapes in such examples as Le Valet aux deux femmes, Le Pêcheur de Pont-sur-Seine and Chicheface et Bigorne. Probably this was a violent reaction against the extravagant cult of woman as expressed in the contemporary lais as well as in the legends of saints. The exaggeration was not greater in the one case than in the other, and it is probable that the exaltation was made endurable to those who listened to the trouvères by the corresponding degradation. We must remember, too, that those who listened were not nobles or clerks, they were the common people. The fabliaux were fabellae ignobilium, little stories told to amuse persons of low degree, who were irritated by the moral pretensions of their superiors.

The names of about twenty of the authors of fabliaux have been preserved, although in most cases nothing is known of their personal history. The most famous poet of this class of writing is the man whose name, or more probably pseudonym, was Rutebeuf. He wrote Frère Denyse and Le Sacristain, while to him is attributed the Dit d’Aristote, in the course of which Aristotle gives good advice to Alexander. Fabliaux, however, form but a small part of the work of Rutebeuf, who was a satirical poet of wide accomplishment and varied energy. Most of the jongleurs who wrote these merry and indecent tales in octosyllabic verse were persons of less distinction. Henri d’Andeli was an ecclesiastic, attached, it is supposed, to the cathedral of Rouen. Jean de Condé, who flourished in the court of Hainaut from 1310 to 1340, and who is the latest of the genuine writers of fabliaux, lived in comfort and security, but most of the professional jongleurs seem to have spent their years in a Bohemian existence, wandering among the clergy and the merchant class, alternately begging for money and food and reciting their mocking verses.

The principal authorities for the fabliaux are MM. Anatole de Montaiglon and Gaston Raynaud, who published the text, in 6 vols., between 1872 and 1890. This edition corrected and supplemented the very valuable labours of Méon (1808–1823) and Jubinal (1839–1842). The works of Henri d’Andeli were edited by M. A. Héron in 1880, and those of Rutebeuf were made the subject of an exhaustive monograph by M. Léon Clédat in 1891. See also the editions of separate fabliaux by Gaston Paris, Paul Meyer, Ebeling, August Schéler and other modern scholars. M. Joseph Bedier’s Les Fabliaux (1895) is a useful summary of critical opinion on the entire subject.

 FABRE, FERDINAND (1830–1898), French novelist, was born at Bédarieux, in Hérault, a very picturesque district of the south of France, which he made completely his own in literature. He was the son of a local architect, who failed in business, and Ferdinand was brought up by his uncle, the Abbé Fulcran Fabre, at Camplong among the mulberry woods. Of his childhood and early youth he has given a charming account in Ma Vocation (1889). He was destined to the priesthood, and was sent for that purpose to the seminary of St Pons de Thomières, where, in 1848, he had, as he believed, an ecstatic vision of Christ, who warned him “It is not the will of God that thou shouldst be a priest.” He had now to look about for a profession, and, after attempting medicine at Montpellier, was articled as a lawyer’s clerk in Paris. In 1853 he published a volume of verses, Feuilles de lierre, broke down in health, and crept back, humble and apparently without ambition, to his old home at Bédarieux. After some eight or nine years of country life he reappeared in Paris, with the MS. of his earliest novel, Les Courbezon (1862), in which he treated the subject which was to recur in almost all his books, the daily business of country priests in the Cevennes. This story enjoyed an immediate success with the literary class of readers; George Sand praised it, Sainte-Beuve hailed in its author “the strongest of the disciples of Balzac,” and it was crowned by the French Academy. From this time forth Fabre settled down to the production of novels, of which at the time of his death he had published about twenty. Among these the most important were Le Chevrier (1868), unique among his works as written in an experimental mixture of Cevenol patois and French of the 16th century; L’Abbé Tigrane, candidat à la papauté (1873), by common consent the best of all Fabre’s novels, a very powerful picture of unscrupulous priestly ambition; Mon Oncle Célestin (1881), a study of the entirely single and tender-hearted country abbé; and Lucifer (1884), a marvellous gallery of serious clerical portraits. In 1883 Fabre was appointed curator of the Mazarin Library, with rooms in the Institute, where, on 11th February 1898, he died after a brief attack of pneumonia. Ferdinand Fabre occupies in French literature a position somewhat analogous to that of Mr Thomas Hardy amongst English writers of fiction. He deals almost exclusively with the population of the mountain villages of Hérault, and particularly with its priests. He loved most of all to treat of the celibate virtues, the strictly ecclesiastical passions, the enduring tension of the young soul drawn between the spiritual 