The Press. — London, England, 1858-08-07 00:00:00

THE PRESS, AUGUST 7,1858. rupted peasantry of England crowded every Sunday the rustic parish church, and listened with reverence to the patriarchal exhortations of a divine to whom all learning was familiar, but whose evangelical humility delighted to devote splendid gifts and acquirements to the unosten tatious work of tending the simplest sheep of the Christian fold. On the other hand, Puri tanism is to Mr. Heygate, if we may judge from the specimens of it here presented to us, neither more nor less than a system of gross hypocrisy. The young Royalist warrior sits with urfantine submission at the feet of Saunderson, and then walks a spotless hero on the field of battle. The puritan warrior is ready at any moment to change his side for a title or an estate. The Royalist woman is faithful to her king and her true-love through every kind of misfortune. The Puritan woman, with the Scriptures always in her mouth, is married to two husbands at once. It would have been quite possible to expose the excesses into which a daring spirit of innovation often betrayed the Puritans, and how sullen and unsympathetic they often made their religion by sinking the Church too much in the individual, without condescending to such coarse rancour as this. And, further, though it is a great mistake to idolize success, yet, on the other hand, failure is rarely respectable. That which is sound and good has a principle of vitality in it, against which nothing bad can prevail. It was for its sins that the Church of England suffered temporary eclipse ; it was because she had become the Church of gentlemen and scholars, and had ceased to be the Church of the middle classes and the poor. Puritanism suffered a still more grievous downfall, but the principle of neither system was destined to perish. Under new forms both principles have revived ; they have outlived the bitterness of their hostility : in these days they make shift to live together—they even meditate a permanent alliance. It is certainly the part of a divine at the present day to do his best to reconcile the antagonists, and not to make the difference greater than it is by an indiscriminate libel upon the Puritans and a blind panegyric upon the Church. It is possibly a doubtful kindness to the Church to connect her cause with that of Archbishop Laud, and to speak of his grace as one of those " who require "to be known before they are loved, though, "perhaps, hasty and sharp at times." We doubt if Leighton or Bastwick ever regretted that they had not known more of him. The Ancient Poem of Guillaume de Guileville, entitled Le Pelerinage de r Homme, compared with the Pilgrim's Progress of John Bunyan. Edited from Notes collected by the late Mr. Nathaniel Hill, F.R.S. With Illustrations and an Appendix. London : Pickering. Tins sumptuous volume,—one of the choicest productions of the Chiswick Press, with its creamy binding, its lucid type and mellow paper, its list of noble and gentle subscribers, its array of notes, references, and parallel passages, and its copious illustrations, exhibiting various forms of the engraver's art,—is a contribution to our antiquarian literature, which has evidently been not only an exercise of knowledge, but also a labour of love. Nor is it difficult to understand how thoroughly absorbing a pursuit the prepa ration of such a work may become, although the leisure and accomplishment necessary for the task can only be the portion of a select few. To pass from the multifarious disarray of modern literature, with its fundamental worldliness, its borrowed earnestness, its feverish brilliancy, and its unshackled copiousness of range and subject, to the definite creed, the monotonous strain, the quaint imagery, and the restricted circle of this religious poem of the fourteenth century, is like stepping out of the smoke-grimed streets and eager throngs of a Liverpool or a Liege into the cool dim seclusion of some mediveval cloister, with its regular patterns of floriated diaper or zigzag moulding, its inlaid brasses and inscrip tions of leonine verse, and its central plot of smooth and verdant cooled by the shadow of the grey cathedral tower. As we pause over the flowing unpunctuated lines of the monkish hand, with thei r di rec t cons t ruc ti on , th e i r simple idiom, and their wealth i.f scriptural allusion, we seem to catch somewhat of the spirit of those early times, when literature, planted in a limited domain, and struggling in the blasts of foreign invasion or domestic strife, struck its roots deep into the soil, and made up by intensity what it wanted in polish and refinement. Some such feelings have perhaps influenced the editors of these pages. The papers which were placed in their hands had been collected by the late Mr. Hill chiefly in a form tending to show that he either proposed to re-edit Bunyan's " Pilgrim's Progress," or at all events to bring it forward as the principal theme of his work. His main object, apparently, would have been to prove that that writer was not wholly original, but had been indebted both for the general notion of his allegory and also for many special ideas occurring in it to earlier writers, familiarly known among the people at the time he wrote. That the present editors should have implicitly adhered to this plan, was, we think, neither to be expected nor desired. We can readily imagine how, on the one hand, when they had once im mersed themselves in the manuscripts to which Mr. Hill's references had directed them, they would discover in this kind of research a fascina tion capable of inducing them to pursue it for its own sake alone, and far outweighing even that which the elder Disraeli terms "no ordinary gratification "—the detection of borrowed thoughts and the true affiliation of literary progeny. On the other hand, the question of Bunyan's greater or less originality is one of little moment, for pro bably no one who seriously considered the matter, keeping the general analogies of literature in view, would fail to conclude that hr!„ like Homer, Dante, Milton, and many other great writers, must have had his precursors, from whose crude, imperfect, or lifeless attempts his religious fervour and glowing imagination elaborated the powerful work with which his fame is imperishably con nected. his originality consisted in his genius, not in his ingenuity. Hence none of those who treasure his volume as a household book, and have his reputation warmly at heart, need be offended at being told that sonic of the brightly coloured pictures, almost as familiar to theni as their Bible, ;are filled up from outlines sketched by a more cramped and less skilful hand. And all who like to know how in the fourteenth cen tury our ancestors, and the ancestors of our neigh bours across the Channel, occupied themselves in the intervals of fighting and praying, or of play ing at the quintain, and riding at the ring, will be interested in turning over a volume disclosing, as this does, the kind of subjects and treatment which at that time found readiest acceptance with their minds. That these should be ecclesiastical or turning upon scriptural topics will surprise no one who has looked into the history of the Middle Ages. At an epoch when the Church swayed with its despotic control every part of human nature which rose above the dominion of mere animal necessities,—when the religious edifice itself was to its poorer sons the exchange, the newsroom, the theatre, and sometimes the market—the place where the humblest citizen, leaving his squalid hovel and his struggle for daily bread, could feel himself a member of a great and powerful community, and join in the act of worship on equal terms with his loftiest brethren, it could not be wondered that so subtle and all-embracing a power should also claim its portion in the imagination and fancy of its disciples, and mingle in their amusements as well as prescribe their duties. But the peculiar character which poems such as the one before us display is attributable to other influences besides those of the priest. In the fourteenth century, the old heroic poetry of mediaeval Europe—such songs as Taillefer chanted on the vigil of Hast ings—had long declined, and had been succeeded in the south of France by the lyric school of the Troubadours. These in their turn gave place to the Trouveres of Normandy and Brittany, who represented the epic clement of the national poetry, and whose lays of saintly experience or knightly adventure were ultimately remo delled in prose, to suit the changing taste of a more cultivated audience. Poetry, which had at first been confined to one style and one set of topics, gradually developed itself in various directions, according to the more diversified want., of the several classes who encouraged it; the sentimental element was represented by pastoral poems, the satirical by the "Fabliaux,' and the purely religious by Mysteries an d Moralities. From the union of these latter with the Scholastic Phi- 753 losophy, just then in the full development of its realistic phase, there sprang a fourth kind of poetry, the Allegoric, in which the creatures of the abstract reason, the virtues, vices, and mental faculties, were exhibited in the concrete form which the dramatic entertainments of the Church, and the lingering fondness for some kind of nar • rative excitement, alike combined to suggest Of these allegoric poems the first and still the most celebrated example is the " Romance of the Rose," a work whose immense length (22,000 lines) did not prevent its being the most popular book of its time, or from leaving a strong impress upon subsequent generations down to the revival of letters. Modern writers have, indeed, pro nounced it to be tedious, artificial, and pedantic; but it found numerous imitators, and of these one of the most widely known and appreciated appears to have been the author whose work the editors have undertaken to present to us. Guillaume de Guileville was born at Paris about the year 1295 ; became a monk at the Abbey of Chalis, of which he was ultimately prior ; and died there about 1360. That is all we know about his life. He wrote three poems on the subject of " pilgrimage "—" L'homme durant qu'est en vie " ; " L'ame spare du corps " ; and " Notre Sauveur Thus Christ" ; and it is with the first of these, written when he was about thirty years of age, that we are now c'ncerned. It is written in seven-syllabled verse, without punctuation, and having no other divisions than the titles to the several descrip tions as they occur. Two printed copies of this original French version exist in the library of the British Museum, and we presume that the extracts contained in this volume are taken from one of these, or from some similar edition. The language is not difficult to read, and would present no obstacle to any one able to understand modern French, from which it differs somewhat less than Chaucer does from modern English. The follow ing are specimens of the style : FROM THE PROLOGUE. Pour qui a bon lens caprendre Toot ce que ce livre contient Moralement le fault entendre Et non pas litteralement Car l'acteur la fait cointement Tenant forme paraholique Pour agniser l'entendetrient A tout chascun scieattfique. DESCRIPTION OF THE HOLY CITY. Il nest nulle cite si belle Ne qui de rien lui snit pareille Masson en fut seullement dieu Nut entre ne feroit tel lieu Car lee chemins et lee aloes for fin estoient toutes pauees En hank assis son fundement Estoit et son massonnemect De vices pierres fait estoit Et hault mar entour la clooit Dessus lequelz anges estoient Qui tons temps le guet y feisoient Et gardoient tresbien que lentree Nullement fust abandonnee Fors sax petering seullement Qui y venoient denotement Leans aaoit moult de mansions De lieux et habitacions Illec est•ait toute liesser Et toute joye sans tristesse. The poem opens by the author describing how he saw in a dream the Holy City, and felt, impelled to make a pilgrimage thither. He finds that he requires a staff and scrip, and on rushing out of his house, weeping aloud to know whence he shall obtain them, " I meet," says he, " right " in my way, a lady of great beauty and very great nobleness. She seemed the daughter of "an emperor, a king, or some great lord." On her asking him why he weeps, he tells her that He is in search of the heavenly city, which he hnd had a sight of in a glass, hut that his grief was he hnd no means of getting thither. She replies, if his search be sincere, tete will be his guide ; having been sent into that country I y t ie Lord of the way to guide halt and lame, but pilgrims in the way of salvation, to relieve t e fallen, to support the lame, to btrengthen the doub f 1, ant to open the eyes of the blind. She then pr reels to warn hint that he is going to travel through aco intry beet with difficulties, trials, enemies, and adversi ies ; and, Ai he will dotibtl, as often be in trouble and stand tit need of help, he must always call upon her : Je anis celle Tie to dole guerre Quant to vas en estrange terra Jeolumine les non voyans Et donne force aux recreaits Je relieve les trelatchieit radrece lea fornoyez 4e sole Gracedieu appelle at. le cqqlqg Witi4o 4esignee, I