Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/679

 ROMAN DE LA ROSE.] FRANCE 643 One of the latest, if not absolutely the latest, and yet not one of the least remarkable of the chansons de gestes is Baudouin de Sebourc, one of the members of the great rom ance or cycle of romances dealing with the crusades, and iu entitled Le Chevalier au Cygne. Baudouin de Sebourc dates from the early years of the 14th century. It is strictly &quot;a chanson de geste in form, and also in the general run ofjits incidents. The hero.is dispossessed of his inherit ance by the agency of traitors, fights his battle with the world and its injustice, and at last prevails over his enemy Gaufrois, who has succeeded in obtaining the kingdom of Friesland and almost that of France. Gaufrois has as his assistants two personages who were very popular in the poetry of the time, the devil, namely, and money. These two sinister figures pervade the fabliaux, tales, and fantastic literature generally of the time. M. Lenient, the historian of French satire, has well remarked that a romance as long as the Renart might be spun out of the separate short poems of this period which have the devil for.hero, and many of which form a very interesting transition between the fabliau and the mystery. But the devil is in one respect a far inferior hero to Kenart. He has an adver sary in the Virgin who constantly upsets his best-laid schemes, and who does not always treat him quite fairly. The abuse of usury at the time, and the exactions of the Jews and Lombards, were severely felt, and money itself, as personified, figures largely in the popular literature of the time. Roman de la Rose. A work of very different import ance from all of these, though with seeming touches of the same spirit, a work which deserves to take rank among the most important of the Middle Ages, is the Roman de la Rose, one of the few really remarkable books which is the work of two authors, and that not in collaboration but in continuation one of the other. The author of the earlier part was Guillaume de Lorris, who lived in the first half of the 13th century; the author of the later part was Jean de Meung, who did not die until 1320, and whose parkin the Roman dates at least from the extreme end of the preceding century. This great poem, while it has perforce attracted much attention, has suffered from the disrespect with which all nations, and the French perhaps more than any, are wont to treat literature that is out of date. Yet the Roman de la Rose is a great deal more interesting merely as litera ture, and without any antiquarian considerations, than a very large number of so-called classics. It exhibits in its two | parts very different characteristics, which yet go to make up a not inharmonious whole. It is a love poem, and yet it is satire. But both gallantry and raillery are treated in an entirely allegorical spirit ; and this allegory, while it makes the. poem tedious to hasty appetites of to-day, was exactly what gave it its charm in the eyes of the Middle Ages. It might be described as an A rs Amor is crossed with a Quodlibela. This mixture exactly hit the taste of the time, and continued to hit it for two centuries and a half. When its obvious and gallant meaning was attacked by moralists and theologians, it was easy to quote the example of the Canticles, and to furnish esoteric explanations of the allegory. The writers of the IGth century were never tired of quoting and explaining it. Antoine de Baif, indeed, gave the simple and obvious meaning, and declared that &quot; La rose c est d amours le guerdon gracieux ; &quot; but Marot, on the other hand, gives us the choice of four mystical interpreta tions, the rose being either the state of wisdom, the state of grace/the state of eternal happiness, or the Virgin her self. ^ We cannot here analyse this celebrated poem. It is (sufficient to say that the lover meets all sorts of obstacles in his pursuit of the rose, though he has for a guide the Belongs to William of Lorris, is remarkable for its gracious and fanciful descriptions. Forty years after Lorris s death, Jean de Jean de Meung completed it in an entirely different spirit. Meung. He keeps the allegorical form, and, indeed introduces two new personages of importance, Nature and Faux-semblant. In the mouths of these personages and of another, Raison, he puts the most extraordinary mixture of erudition and satire. At one time we have the history of classical heroes, at another theories against the hoarding of money, about astronomy, about the duty of mankind to k increase and multiply. Accounts of the origin of loyalty, which would have cost the poet his head at some periods of history, and even communistic ideas, are also to be found here. In Faux- semblanb we have a real creation of the theatrical hypo crite. All this miscellaneous and apparently incongruous material really explains the success of the poem. It has the one characteristic which has at all times secured the popularity of great works of literature. It holds the mirror up firmly and fully to its age. As we find in Rabelais the characteristics of the Renaissance, in Montaigne those of the sceptical reaction from Renaissance and reform alike, in Moliere those of the society of France after Richelieu had tamed and levelled it, in Voltaire and Rousseau re spectively 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 naive acceptance as science of every thing 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 im mense 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. To a great extent, however, it held its ground in forms more or less disguised. The tradition of allegorizing and personifying found refuge especially in the French classical tragedy, where the heroes of the school of Racine talk about their passions and their flames in a style by no means alien from that of William of Lorris. 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 for all literary purposes. It was many centuries before prose Early became recognized as the proper vehicle for instruction, and didactic at a very early date verse was used as well for educational verse - 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 Vidgari Eloquio, acknowledges the excellence of the didactic writers of the Langue d Oil. We have already alluded to the Bestiary of Philippe de Thaun, a Norman trouvere who lived and wrote in England during the reign of Henry Beauclerc. Besides the Bestiary, which from its dedication to Queen Adela has been con jectured 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
 * metaphorical personage Bel-Accueil. The early part, which