Page:Western Europe in the Middle Ages.djvu/198

182 beside the great works of scholarship. This may be a warped view—students of literature find much of interest in the period—but some justification can be attempted for it. The remark would certainly be true for the eighteenth century—another intensely rational period—and perhaps for all centuries which seek order and reason above everything else. Certainly the originality and the verve of the twelfth century decrease after 1200. The old forms continue and are perfected. There are excellent versions of the chansons de geste and the Celtic legends, lyrics which are always technically skillful and occasionally touching, stories and legends which are still good reading. Yet the writers seem to have little new to say, and as the century goes on they seem to be satisfied either with technical perfection or with conveying information. Encyclopedism and the desire to teach creep into poetry. The great cycles of the chansons de geste are completed by mediocre poems which explain the ancestry or the missing years in the lives of heroes of earlier epics. The lyrics of the troubadours are full of the metaphysics of love and empty of real emotion; intricate rhyme-schemes and deliberately obscure language make them difficult for the ordinary reader to understand. As the century goes on, the most interesting lyrics are political—invectives against the pope, or the emperor, or the king of France—and political verse has seldom been great poetry.

The most popular poem of the thirteenth century—the Roman de la Rose—sums up many of these tendencies. It was begun as an allegory of love by Guillaume de Lorris in the 1230’s: the lover seeks his beloved who is imprisoned in a fair garden. She is guarded by allegorical figures such as Danger and Jealousy; he is dissuaded by Reason, aided by Fair-Welcome, and so on. The allegory is a little over-elaborate for modern taste, but at its best it has some of the freshness and charm of the best early medieval poetry. Guillaume never finished the poem; it was completed a generation later by Jean de Meung. Jean almost loses sight of the allegory in his desire to convey information; his characters deliver long