Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/324

282 some gnawing like mice, or using their teeth like a saw; others whose beards moved up and down or who made such horrible faces that they looked like devils.

As soon as literature sets to work to depict the life of the masses, it shows this realism full of vitality and good humour, which was to develop abundantly, but not till later, in painting. The peasant receiving in his hovel the duke of Burgundy, who has lost his way, reminds us, by the portrait which Chastellain draws of him, of Breughel's types. The Pastoral deviates from ite central theme, which is sentimental and romantic, to find in the description of shepherds eating, dancing, and courting, matter for a naïve naturalism with a spice of burlesque.

Wherever the eye suffices for communicating the sense of the comic, however airy it may be, art is able to express it as well as, or better than, literature. Apart from this, pictorial art can never render the comic. Line and colour are impotent wherever the comic effect lies in a point of wit. Literature is incontestably sovereign both in the low-comedy genre of the farce and the fabliaux, and in the higher domain of irony.

It is especially in erotic poetry that irony developed; by adding its acrid flavour it refined the erotic genre; it purified it at the same time by introducing into it an element of a serious nature. Outside the pale of love-poetry irony was still heavy and clumsy. It is worth remarking that a French writer of the fourteenth or fifteenth century, speaking ironically, often takes care to inform his reader of the fact. Deschamps praises his age; all is well, peace and justice reign everywhere:

L'en me demande chascun jour Qu'il me semble du temps que voy, Et je respons: c'est tout honour, Loyauté, verité et foy, Largesce, prouesce et arroy, Charité et biens qui s'advance Pour le commun; mais, par ma loy, Je ne di pas quanque je pence."