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 their direct construction, their 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 and 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 tie
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,