Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/45

Rh Le temps passé trop mieulx valoit. Qui règne? Tristesse et Ennuy; Il ne court justice ne droit; Je ne scé mais desquelz je suy.” And again:

Pessimism of this kind has hardly anything to do with religion. Deschamps only gives an off-hand pious purport to his reflections. Despondency and spleen are at the bottom of them, not piety. A contempt of the world, which is dominated by fear of weariness and of sorrow, of disease and of old age, is but an asceticism of the blasé, born of disillusion and of satiety. It has nothing in common with religion but its terminology.

Even in ascetic utterances of a purer and loftier kind such fear of life, such recoiling before its inevitable sorrows, is not seldom mingled. The series of arguments which Jean Gerson propounds in his Discours de l’excellence de Virginité, written for his sisters, with a view to keep them from marrying, does not essentially differ from Deschamps’ gloomy lamentations. All the evils attaching to wedlock are found there. The husband may be a drunkard, a spendthrift, a miser. If he be honest and good, bad harvests, death of cattle, a shipwreck may occur, robbing him of all he possesses. What misery it is to be pregnant! How many women die in childbed. The woman who suckles her baby knows neither rest nor pleasure. Children may be deformed or disobedient; the husband may die, and leave his widow behind in care and poverty.

Thus, always and everywhere in the literature of the age, we find a confessed pessimism. As soon as the soul of these men has passed from childlike mirth and unreasoning