# The Waning of the Middle Ages/Chapter 23

CHAPTER XXIII
THE ADVENT OF THE NEW FORM
The transition from the spirit of the declining Middle Ages to humanism was far less simple than we are inclined to imagine it. Accustomed to oppose humanism to the Middle Ages, we would gladly believe that it was necessary to give up the one in order to embrace the other. We find it difficult to fancy the mind cultivating the ancient forms of medieval thought and expression while aspiring at the same time to antique wisdom and beauty. Yet this is just what we have to picture to ourselves. Classicism did not come as a sudden revelation, it grew up among the luxuriant vegetation of medieval thought. Humanism was a form before it was an inspiration. On the other hand, the characteristic modes of thought of the Middle Ages did not die out till long after the Renaissance.
In Italy the problem of humanism presents itself in a most simple form, because there men's minds had ever been predisposed to the reception of antique culture. The Italian spirit had never lost touch with classic harmony and simplicity. It could expand freely and naturally in the restored forms of classic expression. The quattrocento with its serenity makes the impression of a renewed culture, which has shaken off the fetters of medieval thought, until Savonarola reminds us that below the surface the Middle Ages still subsist.
The history of French civilization of the fifteenth century, on the contrary, does not permit us to forget the Middle Ages. France had been the mother-land of all that was strongest and most beautiful in the products of the medieval spirit. All medieval forms—feudalism, the ideas of chivalry and courtesy, scholasticism, Gothic architecture—were rooted here much more firmly than ever they had been in Italy. In the fifteenth century they were dominating still. Instead of the full rich style, the blitheness and the harmony characteristic ​of Italy and the Renaissance, here it is bizarre pomp, cumbrous forms of expreesion, a worn-out fancy and an atmosphere of melancholy gravity which prevail. It is not the Middle Ages, it is the new coming culture, which might easily be forgotten.
In literature classical forms could appear without the spirit having changed. An interest in the refinement of Latin style was enough, it seems, to give birth to humanism. The proof of this is furnished by a group of French scholars about the year 1400. It was composed of ecclesiastics and magistrates, Jean de Monstreuil, canon of Lille and secretary to the king, Nicolas de Clemanges, the famous denouncer of abuses in the Church, Pierre et Gontier Col, the Milanese Ambrose de Miliis, also royal secretaries. The elegant and grave epistles they exchange are inferior in no respect—neither in the vagueness of thought, nor in the consequential air, nor in the tortured sentences, nor even in learned trifling—to the epistolary genre of later humanists. Jean de Monstreuil spins long dissertations on the subject of Latin spelling. He defends Cicero and Virgil against the criticism of his friend Ambrose de Miliis, who had accused the former of contradictions and preferred Ovid to the latter. On another occasion he writes to Clemanges: "If you do not come to my aid, dear master and brother, I shall have lost my reputation and be as one sentenced to death. I have just noticed that in my last letter to my lord and father, the bishop of Cambray, I wrote proximior instead of the comparative propior; so rash and careless is the pen. Kindly correct this, otherwise our detractors will write libels about it."
There are more charming passages in his correspondence than this: for example, his description of the monastery of Charlieu, near Senlis, where he speaks of the sparrows coming to share the monks' repast, the wren which behaves as if it were the abbot, and lastly, the gardener's donkey, which begs the author not to forget it in his letter. We may hesitate whether to call this medieval naïvety or humanistic elegance.
It suffices to recall that we met Jean de Monstreuil and the brothers Col among the zealots of the Roman de la Rose and among the members of the Court of Love of 1401, to be convinced that this primitive French humanism was but a secondary element of their culture, the fruit of scholarly ​erudition, analogous to the so-called renaissances of classic latinity of earlier ages, notably the ninth and the twelfth century. The circle of Jean de Monstreuil had no immediate successors, and this early French humanism seems to disappear with the men who cultivated it. Still, in its origins it was to some extent connected with the great international movement of literary renovation. Petrarch was, in the eyes of Jean de Monstreuil and his friends, the illustrious initiator, and Coluccio Salutati, the Florentine chancellor who introduced classicism into official style, was not unknown to them either. Their zeal for classic refinement had evidently been roused not a little by Petrarch’s taunt that there were no orators nor poets outside Italy. In France Petrarch’s work had, so to say, been accepted in a medieval spirit and incorporated into medieval thought. He himself had personally known the leading spirits of the second half of the fourteenth century; the poet Philippe de Vitri, Nicolas Oresme, philosopher and politician, who had been a preceptor to the dauphin, probably also Philippe de Mézières. These men, in spite of the ideas which make Oresme one of the forerunners of modern science, were not humanists. As to Petrarch himself, we are always inclined to exaggerate the modern element in his mind and work, because we are accustomed to see him exclusively as the first of renovators. It is easy to imagine him emancipated from the ideas of his century. Nothing is further from the truth. He is most emphatically a man of his time. The themes of which he treated were those of the Middle Ages: De contemptu mundi, De otio religiosorum, De vita solitaria. It is only the form and the tone of his work which differ and are more highly finished. His glorification of antique virtue in his De viris illustribus and his Rerum memorandarum libri corresponds more or less with the chivalrous cult of the Nine Worthies. There is nothing surprising in his being found in touch with the founder of the Brethren of the Common Life, or cited as an authority on a dogmatic point by the fanatic Jean de Varennes. Denis the Carthusian borrowed laments from him about the loss of the Holy Sepulchre, a typically medieval subject. What contemporaries outside Italy saw in Petrarch was not at all the poet of the Sonnets or the Trionfi, but a moral philosopher, a Christian Cicero.
​In a more limited field Boccaccio exercised an influence resembling that of Petrarch. His fame too was that of a moral philosopher, and by no means rested on the Decamerone. He was honoured as the "doctor of patience in adversity," as the author of De casibus virorum illustrium and of De claris mulieribus. Because of these queer writings treating of the inconstancy of human fate "messire Jehan Bocace" had made himself a sort of impresario of Fortune. As such he appears to Chastellain, who gave the name of Le Temple de Bocace to the bizarre treatise in which he endeavoured to console Queen Margaret, after her flight from England, by relating to her a series of the tragic destinies of his time. In recognizing in Boccaccio the strongly medieval spirit which was their own, these Burgundian spirits of a century later were not at all off the mark.
What distinguishes nascent Humanism in France from that of Italy, is a difference of erudition, skill and taste, rather than of tone or aspiration. To transplant antique form and sentiment into national literature the French had to overcome far more obstacles than the people born under the Tuscan sky or in the shadow of the Coliseum. France too, had her learned clerks, writing in Latin, who were capable at an early date of rising to the height of the epistolary style. But a blending of classicism and medievalism in the vernacular, such as was achieved by Boccaccio, was for a long time impossible in France. The old forms were too strong, and the general culture still lacked the proficiency in mythology and ancient history which was current in Italy. Machaut, although a clerk, pitifully disfigures the names of the seven sages. Chastellain confounds Peleus with Pelias, La Marche Proteus with Pirithous. The author of the Pastoralet speaks of the "good king Scipio of Africa." But at the same time his subject inspires him with a description of the god Silvanus and a prayer to Pan, in which the poetical imagination of the Renaissance seems on the point of breaking forth. The chroniclers were already trying their hand at military speeches in Livy's manner, and adorning their narrative of important events by mentioning portents, in close imitation of Livy. Their attempts at classicism did not always succeed. Jean Germain's description of the Arras congress of 1435 is a veritable caricature of ​antique prose. The vision of Antiquity was still very bizarre. At the funeral service of Charles the Bold at Nancy, his conqueror, the young duke of Lorraine, came to honour the corpse of his enemy, dressed "in antique style," that is to say, wearing a long golden beard which reached to his girdle. Thus got up to represent one of the Nine Worthies, he prayed for a quarter of an hour.
The word "antique" as conceived in France about 1400 belonged to the same group of ideas as "rhétorique, orateur, poésie." No one would have thought of applying the word "poésie" to a ballad or a song in the old French form. This classical word, which evoked the idea of the admired perfection of the Ancients, meant above all an artificial form. The poets of this time are perfectly capable of expressing heartfelt emotions in a simple form, but when they wish to attain superior beauty, they hunt up mythology, employ pedantic latinized terms and then consider themselves "rhetoricians." Christine de Pisan expressly singles out a mythologic piece, which she calls "balade pouétique," from her ordinary work. Eustache Deschamps, wishing to air his talent, in sending his works to Chaucer, his fellow-poet and admirer, adds the following lines:
"O Socrates plains de philosophie, Seneque en meurs et Anglux en pratique, Ovides grans en ta poeterie, Bries en parler, saiges en rethorique Aigles tres haulz, qui par ta théorique Enlumines le regne d'Eneas, L'Isle aux Geans, ceuls de Bruth, et qui as Semé les fleurs et planté le rosier, Aux ignorans de la langue pandras, Grant translateur, noble Geoffroy Chaucier!
A toy pour ce de la fontaine Helye Requier avoir un buvraige autentique, Dont la doys est du tout en ta baillie, Pour rafrener d'elle ma soif ethique, Qui en Gaul seray paralitique Jusques a ce que tu m'abuveras."
This far-fetched rhetoric testifies both to an ideal of literary conversation and to an ideal of style. Like the troubadours of yore, the rhetoricians and the humanists cultivated literature in the form of an all-round game. Literary correspondence of a rather strange kind springs up. A fervent admirer of Georges Chastellain, Jean Robertet, secretary to three dukes of Bourbon and to three kings of France, tried to enter into correspondence with the poet-historiographer of the Burgundian court, by the good offices of a certain Montferrant who lived at Bruges. The latter, to soften the old author, who was at first rather reserved, had recourse to the time-honoured device of allegory. He evoked the "twelve dames of rhetoric," Science, Eloquence, Gravity of Meaning, Profundity, etc., who appeared to him in a vision and told him to exert himself in behalf of the correspondence desired by Robertet. In the exchange of poetical and rhetorical compliments which followed, Chastellain's verses are sober, when compared with the hyperbolic effusions of Robertet.
"Frappé en l'oeil d'une clarté terrible Attaint au cœur d'eloquence incrédible, A humain sens difficile à produire, Tout offusquié de lumière incendible Outre perçant de ray presqu'impossible Sur obscur corps qui jamais ne peut luire, Ravi, abstrait me trouve en mon déduire, En extase corps gisant à la terre, Foible esperit perplex à voye enquerre Pour trouver lieu et oportune yssue Du pas estroit où je suis mis en serre, Pris à la rets qu'amour vraye a tissue."
In these terms he describes the sensations which the arrival of a letter by Chastellain caused in him. And, continuing in prose, he asks his friend Montferrant (whom he calls "friend of the immortal gods, beloved of men, high Ulyssean breast, full of mellifluent eloquence"), "N'est-ce resplendeur équale au curre Phœbus?" Does he not surpass Orpheus' lyre? and "la tube d'Amphion, la Mercuriale flute qui endormit Argus?" "Où est l'œil capable de tel objet visible, l'oreille pour ouyr le haut son argentin et tintinabule d'or?"
Chastellain showed some scepticism as to this raving enthusiasm. Soon he had enough of it and wanted to bar the gate which had so long and widely been open to "Dame Vanity." "Robertet has quite soaked me by his cloud, of which the drops, congealing like hail, make my garments brilliant as with pearls; but what good is it to the dark body underneath, when my robe deceives the onlookers?" Therefore let him cease writing in this way, otherwise Chastellain will throw his letters into the fire without reading them. If he is willing to speak as beseems among friends, he may rest assured of George's affection.
​Lucubrations of this sort by no means give us the feeling of the measure and harmony of the Renaissance. It all seems to us antiquated in sentiment and style. There is no doubt, however, that these wits considered themselves supremely modern. This Robertet had been in Italy, "a country greedy for renovation . . . on which the meteoric conditions operate to facilitate ornate speech, and towards which all elemental sweetness is drawn, there to resolve into harmony." He evidently believed that the secret of this harmony was in the "ornate speech" and that to rival the Italians it sufficed to bedeck the French style with the ornaments of classicism. Now, in Italy, where language and thought had never been entirely estranged from the pure Latin style, the social environment and the turn of mind were far more congenial to the humanistic tendencies than in France. Italian civilization had naturally developed the type of the humanist. The Italian language was not, like the French, corrupted by an influx of latinism; it absorbed it without difficulty. In France, on the contrary, the medieval foundations of social life were still solid; the language, much farther removed from Latin than Italian was, refused to be latinized. If, in English, erudite latinisms were to find an easy access, it was because of the very fact that here the language was not of Latin stock at all, so that no incongruity of expression made itself felt.
In so far as the French humanists of the fifteenth century wrote in Latin, the medieval subsoil of their culture is little in evidence. The more completely the classical style is imitated, the more the true spirit is concealed. The letters and the discourses of Robert Gaguin are not distinguishable from the works of other humanists. But Gaguin is, at the same time, a French poet of altogether medieval inspiration and of altogether national style. Whereas those who did not, and perhaps could not, write in Latin, spoiled their French by latinized forms, he, the accomplished latinist, when writing in French, disdained rhetorical effects. His Débat du Laboureur, du Prestre et du Gendarme, medieval in its subject, is also medieval in style. It is simple and vigorous, like Villon's poetry and Deschamps' best work.
Who are the true moderns in the French literature of the fifteenth century? Those, no doubt, whose works approach ​nearest to what the following century produced of beauty. Assuredly it is not, whatever their merits may have been, the grave and pompous representatives of the Burgundian style: not Chastellain, La Marche, Molinet. The novelties of form which they affected were too superficial, the foundation of their thought too essentially medieval, their classical whimsies to naive. Should one look for the modern element in the refinement of form? Sometimes this form, though most artificial, has so much grace that the sweet melody makes us forget the emptiness of meaning.
"Plusiers bergiers sont en lacz mortelz telz Heurtez, boutez, que pou leur déduit duyt. Et leurs moutons en maux fortunez nez, Venez, vanez, de fers mal parez rez, Leurs bledz emblez, ayans sauf conduit vuyd, La nuit leur nuit, la mort qui destruit ruit, Leur fruit's'en fuit venant aperte perte: Mais Pan nous tient en asseurance experte."
This was written by Jean Lemaire de Belges. Much more might be said on this elaboration of a purely formal beauty in poetry. But, taking all in all, it is not here that the future of literature lies. If by moderns we understand those who have most affinity with the later development of French literature, the moderns are Villon, Charles of Orleans and the poet of L'Amant rendu Cordelier, just those who kept most aloof from classicism and who did not strain after over-nice forms. The medieval character of their motifs robs them not in the least of their aspect of youth and of promise. It is the spontaneity of their expression which makes them moderns.
Classicism then was not the controlling factor in the advent of the new spirit in literature. Neither was paganism. The frequent use of pagan expressions or tropes has often been considered the chief characteristic of the Renaissance. This practice, however, is far older. As early as the twelfth century mythological terms were employed to express concepts of the ​Christian faith, and this was not considered at all irreverent or impious. Deschamps speaking of "Jupiter come from paradise," Villon calling the Holy Virgin "high goddess," the humanists referring to God in terms like "princeps superum" and to Mary as "genetrix tonantis," are by no means pagans. Pastorals required some admixture of innocent paganism, by which no reader was duped. The author of the Pastoralet who calls the Celestine church at Paris "the temple in the high woods, where people pray to the gods," declares, to dispel all ambiguity, "If, to lend my Muse some strangeness, I speak of the pagan gods, the shepherds and myself are Christians all the same." In the same way Molinet excuses himself for having introduced Mars and Minerva, by quoting "Reason and Understanding," who said to him: "You should do it, not to instil faith in gods and goddesses, but because Our Lord alone inspires people as it pleases Him and frequently by various inspirations."
The purity of Faith was more seriously threatened when, as in the following lines, a certain respect for pagan cults, and notably of sacrifices, is manifested.
"Des dieux jadis les nations gentiles Quirent l'amour par humbles sacrifices, Lesquels, posé que ne fussent utiles, Furent nientmoins rendables et fertiles, De maint grant fruit et de haulx bénéfices, Monstrans par fait que d'amour les offices Et d'honneur humble, impartis où qu'ils soient Pour percer ciel et enfer suffisoient."
This is a stanza of the Dit de Vérité, the best poem of Chastellain, which was inspired by his fidelity to the duke of Burgundy, and in which, forgetting his ordinary grandiloquence a little, he gives free rein to his political indignation.
To find paganism, there was no need for the spirit of the waning Middle Ages to revert to classic literature. The pagan spirit displayed itself, as amply as possible, in the Roman de la ​Rose. Not in the guise of some mythological phrases; it was not there that the danger lay, but in the whole erotic conception and inspiration of this most popular work of all. From the early Middle Ages onward Venus and Cupid had found a refuge in this domain. But the great pagan who called them to vigorous life and enthroned them was Jean de Meun. By blending with Christian conceptions of eternal bliss the boldest praise of voluptuousness, he had taught numerous generations a very ambiguous attitude towards Faith. He had dared to distort Genesis for his impious purposes by making Nature complain of men because they neglect her commandment of procreation, in the words:
"Si m'aïst Diex li crucefis, Moult me repens dont homme fis."
It is astonishing that the Church, which so rigorously repressed the slightest deviations from dogma of a speculative character, suffered the teaching of this breviary of the aristocracy (for the Roman de la Rose was nothing less) to be disseminated with impunity.
But the essence of the great renewal lies even less in paganism than in pure Latinity. Classic expression and imagery, and even sentiments borrowed from heathen Antiquity, might be a potent stimulus or an indispensable support in the process of cultural renovation, they never were its moving power. The soul of Western Christendom itself was outgrowing medieval forms and modes of thought that had become shackles. The Middle Ages had always lived in the shadow of Antiquity, always handled its treasures, or what they had of them, interpreting it according to truly medieval principles: scholastic theology and chivalry, asceticism and courtesy. Now, by an inward ripening, the mind, after having been so long conversant with the forms of Antiquity, began to grasp its spirit. The incomparable simpleness and purity of the ancient culture, its exactitude of conception and of expression, its easy and natural thought and strong interest in men and in life,—all this began to dawn upon men's minds. Europe, ​after having lived in the shadow of Antiquity, lived in its sunshine once more.
This process of assimilation of the classic spirit, however, was intricate and full of incongruities. The new form and the new spirit do not yet coincide. The classical form may serve to express the old conceptions: more than one humanist chooses the sapphic strophe for a pious poem of purely medieval inspiration. Traditional forms, on the other hand, may contain the spirit of the coming age. Nothing is more erroneous than to identify classicism and modern culture.
The fifteenth century in France and the Netherlands is still medieval at heart. The diapason of life had not yet changed. Scholastic thought, with symbolism and strong formalism, the thoroughly dualistic conception of life and the world still dominated. The two poles of the mind continued to be chivalry and hierarchy. Profound pessimism spread a general gloom over life. The gothic principle prevailed in art. But all these forms and modes were on the wane. A high and strong culture is declining, but at the same time and in the same sphere new things are being born. The tide is turning, the tone of life is about to change.
* ↑ O Socrates full of philosophy, Seneca in morals and Englishman in practice, Great Ovid in your poetry, Brief of speech, well-versed in rhetoric, Exalted eagle, who by your erudition Have illumined the reign of Eneas, The Island of the Giants, and that of Brut, and who have Sown flowers and planted the eglantine, For the ignorant of the language, you will pour yourself forth, Great translator, noble Geoffroy Chaucer! From you therefore out of the fountain of Helye I ask to have an authentic draught, Of which the conduit is wholly in your power To slake my ethic thirst, I who in Gaul shall be paralysed Till you shall give me to drink.
* ↑ Your very humble and obedient slave and servant, the city of Ghent; The intestinal inward sorrow and tribulation.
* ↑ Our French-born locution and vernacular tongue.
* ↑ Having drunk from the sweet and mellifluous liquor proceeding from the equine fountain. This virtuous scipionic duke. People of muliebral courage.
* ↑ Struck in the eye by a terrible brightness, Touched in the heart by incredible eloquence, Difficult for the human mind to produce, Quite obscured by incendiary light Penetrating with almost unbearable rays, To a dark body that can never shine, Ravished, distraught, I find myself, in my delight, My body in ecstasy lying on the ground, My feeble spirit is at a loss to go in quest of a path In order to find a place and opportune exit From the narrow pass where I am hemmed in Caught in the toils which true love has netted.
* ↑ Is this not splendour equal to the car of Phœbus?
* ↑ The reed of Amphion, the Mercurial flute, which caused Argus to sleep? Where is the eye capable of seeing such a visible object, the ear to hear the high silver sound and golden tintinnabulation?
* ↑ Several shepherds are in such mortal snares So much knocked and pushed that it little tends to their delight. And their sheep, born in an evil hour, Are hunted, exhausted, shorn by ill-sharpened shears, Their corn is stolen, having a fruitless safe-conduct, The night is noxious to them; destructive death rushes in, Their fruit flies, as open ruin comes, But Pan holds us in his expert protection.
* ↑ Formerly the gentile nations of the gods Craved love by humble sacrifices, Which, taken for granted that they were useless, Were nevertheless profitable and prolific Of much important fruit and of high benefits, Which shows by facts that offices of love And of humble homage, rendered wherever they were, Were sufficient to pierce heaven and hell.
* ↑ So help me God who was crucified, I much repent that I made man.