Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/676

 640 FRANCE [LITERATURE. links of however dubious authenticity, with the great his tory and literature of the past. They show a certain amount of scholarship in their authors, and in their hearers they show a capacity of taking an interest in subjects which are not merely these directly connected with the village or the tribe. The chansons de gestes had shown the creative power and independent character of French literature. There is, at least about the earlier ones, nothing borrowed, traditional, or scholarly. They smack of the soil, and they rank France among the very few countries which, in this matter of indigenous growth, have yielded more than folk songs and fireside tales. The Arthurian romances, less in dependent in origin, exhibit a wider range of view, a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more extensive command of the sources of poetical and romantic interest. The classi cal epics superadd the only ingredient necessary to an ac complished literature, that is to say, the knowledge of what lias been done by other peoples and other literatures already, and the readiness to take advantage of the materials thus supplied. Romans d Aventures. These are the three earliest develop ments of French literature on the great scale. They led, however, to a fourth, which, though later in date than all except their latest forms, is so closely connected with them by literary and social considerations that it had best be mentioned here. This is the roman d aventures, a title given to those almost avowedly fictitious poems which con nect themselves neither with French history, with the Round Table, nor with the heroes of antiquity. These be gin to be written in the 13th century, and continued until the prose form of fiction became generally preferred. The later forms of the chansons de gestes and the Arthurian poems might indeed be well called romans d aventures them selves. Hugues Capet, for instance, a chanson in form and class of subject, is certainly one of this latter kind in treat ment. But for convenience sake the definition we have given is preferable. The style and subject of these romans d aventures are naturally extremely various. Guillaume de Falerme deals with the adventures of a Sicilian prince, who is befriended by a were-wolf; Le Roman del Escoujle, with a heroine whose ring is carried off by a sparrow-hawk (Escoufle), like Prince Camaralzaman s talisman; Guy of Warwick, with the well-known slayer of the dun cow; Meraugis de Portleyuez is a sort of branch or offshoot of the romances of the Round Table. There is, in short, no possi bility of classifying their subjects. The habit of writing in gestes, or of necessarily connecting the new work with an older one, had ceased to be binding, and the instinct of fiction writing was free ; yet these romans d aventures do not rank quite as high in literary importance as the classes which preceded them. This under-valuation arises rather from a lack of originality and distinctness of savour than from any shortcomings in treatment. Their versification, usually octosyllabic, is pleasant enough ; but there is not much distinctness of character about them, and their inci dents, commonly taken from some preceding fabliau or lai, often strike the reader with something of the sameness but nothing of the naivete&quot; of those of the older poems. Never theless some of them attained to a very high popularity, such, for instance, as Partenopex de Blois. With them may be connected a large number of early romances and fictions of various dates in prose and verse, such as Aucassin et Nieolette, Le Ckatelain de Coney, Lc Roman de la Violette, and others. This class possesses representatives in Pro vencal as well as in northern French, some of which, for instance, Flamenca and Jaufrey, are full of interest. But none of those smaller stories in verse, prose, or the two com bined, can vie in charm with Aucassin el Nicolette (13th century), an exquisite literary presentment of mediaeval sen timent in its most delightful form, In these four classes may be said to be summed up the literature of feudal chivalry in France. They were all, ex cept perhaps the last, composed by one class of persons, the trouveres, and performed by another, the jongleurs. The latter, indeed, sometimes presumed to compose for himself, and was denounced as a troveor batard by the indignant members of the superior caste. They were all originally intended to be performed in the palais marberin of the baron to an audience of knights and ladies, and, when read ing became more common, to be read by such persons. They dealt therefore chiefly, if not exclusively, with the class to whom they were addressed. The bourgeois and the villain, personages of political nonentity at the time of their early composition, come in for the slightest possible notice. Occasionally in the few curious instances we have mentioned, persons of a class inferior to the seigneur play an important part, but this is rare. The habit of private wars and of in surrection against the sovereign supply the motives of the chanson de geste, the love of gallantry, adventure, and foreign travel those of the romances Arthurian and miscel laneous. None of these motives much affected the lower classes, who were, with the early developed temper of the middle and lower class Frenchman, already apt to think and speak cynically enough of tournaments, courts, crusades, and the other occupations of the nobility. The communal system was springing up, the towns were receiving royal encouragement as a counterpoise to the authority of the nobles. The corruptions and maladministration of the church attracted the satire rather of the citizens and peas antry who suffered by them, than of the nobles ,vho had less to fear and even something to gain. On the other hand, the gradual spread of learning, inaccurate and ill- digested perhaps, but still learning, not only opened up new classes of subjects, but opened them to new classes of persons. The thousands of students who flocked to the schools of Paris were not all princes or nobles. Hence there arose two new classes of literature, one consisting of the embodiment of learning of one kind or other in the vulgar tongue, and ranging from the half-fabulous histories of the Jerseyman Wace, the Roman de Brut, and the Roman de Rou, to bestiaries such as that of Philippe de Thaun and popular treatises on science and morality. The other, one of the most remarkable developments of sportive literature which the world has seen, produced the second indigenous literary growth of which France can boast, namely, the fabliaux, and the almost more remarkable work which is an immense conglomerate of fabliaux, the great beast-epic of the Roman du Renart. Fabliaux. There are few literary products which have more originality and at the same time more diversity than the fabliau. The epic and the drama, even when they are independently produced, are similar in their main charac teristics all the world over. But there is nothing in pre vious literature which exactly corresponds to the fabliau. It comes nearest to the /Esopic fable and its Eastern origins or parallels. But it differs from these in being less allego rical, less obviously moral (though a moral of some sort is usually if not always enforced), and in having a much more direct personal interest. It is in many degrees further re moved from the parable, and many degrees nearer to the novel. The story is the first thing, the moral the second, and the latter is never suffered to interfere with the former. These observations apply only to the fabliaux, properly so called, but the term has been used with considerable loose ness. The collectors of those interesting pieces, Barbazan, Moon, Le Grand d Aussy, have included in their collections large numbers of miscellaneous pieces such as dits (rhymed descriptions of various objects), and debats (discussions between two persons or contrasts of the attributes of two things), sometimes even short romances, farces, and mystery carl ruti Spild lite -y. tas