The Portland daily press., 1874-11-28
THE PR ES S.
SATURDAY MORNING. NOV. %, 1874
Recent Publications.

THE FRENCH HUMoRIsTs, FROM THE TWELFTH
TO THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. By Walter
Besant, Boston, Roberts Brothers. For sale by
Loring, Short s. Harmon.
There has long been vacant place on the
shelves of our libraries, waiting for this vol
ume. 1t is suficiency of praise to say that
the author has succeeded in filling gap in
our histories of French lterature-filling it
in way too that leaves but little to be de-
sired. The story of the French hum morists is
not only fully told, but pleasingly as well.
The style of the author is easy, graceful,
picturesque, often forcible. always eminently
readable. 1t not only gives the reader a
well outlined and well celored picture of the
men and their works but subtilely suffuses
them in the atmosphere of their times.
The history Of French medieval satire, Mr..
Besant tells us, is the history of medieval
literature and art. Satire is everywhere
Side by side with the solemn service of the
church is the parody, with its ass, its boy
bishop, its liturgy in praise of wine. Beside
the crimson cavalcade of ladies and knights
is the procession of Renard and Isengrin.
After the monks and priests, chanting their
psalms, comes, telling his beads like them,
the Devil; while along with every pleasure of
life, an echo of the song, guest at the feast,
the companion of king and peasant, sneering
at all, laughing at all, mocking at all, is the
Mephistophelian Death of the Danse Maca6re.
From the eleventh to the fifteenth CEN
tury there is a long procession of satire.
With the eleventh century come indications
Of the great changes sweeping over Europe.
The laity are beginning to ask questions; the
universities are taking learning out of the
converts; Bernard complains that the faith
of the simple is divided, and the very secrets
of Heaven are searched into. The first of
the terrible French risings takes place. The
people rise in Loan, slaughter the bishop,
burn the palaces, establish the commune,
are put down and punished Taey rise in
Normandy, armed with ritchforks and sticks,
and are easily dispersed by steel clad men at
arms. Evidently the heritage of the Gaul,
who used to divide his land afresh every five
years, is the irrepressib.e sense OF equality.
At this time arise the chanson and sir
vente. The sirvente, an imitation of monk
ish rhymes in the vulgar tongue, is the earli-
est form of satire. From this time satire
goes up and down the face of France. striking
all, spa-ing nothing; ridiculing the ladies for
their painted faces, the lords for their tyran-
nies, the Pope for his pride, the clergy for
their avarice. The names of the satiris
trouueres are legion. Most noticeable, per-
haps, among them is Thibaut of Champagne,
who has thing or two to say about the gen.
eral corruption of the age-a theme which
grows to be a trifie monotonous before we
get through with the French satirists. Be-
sides the siryentes favorite outlet for the
satirical spirit was the parody of the chan
sons de geste, those prototypes of Amadis
de Gaul and his brood.
Mr.. Besants first chapter is given to a pre-.
liminary survey of the field in the closing
years of the twelfth century. The second is
devoted to Rutebeuf, cross between the
jongleur and the truousfe, when out of luck
the peoples poet, when in luck a dangler
about courts. Our author calls him the
most original and real of the satirists of his
time. OF his life we know nothing except
what We can construct from his poems.
From these it seems that be was at first
stroling minstrel, writing we'll because he al
lowed himself the luxury of writing TO please
himself. After time he left the road, set
tied down in Paris, and like many other
satirists in those times and the present, be-
gan to court the great and write songs to
order. He seems to have been always hor-
ribly poor-a true poetic condition. Then
he begins to grow old, falls to lamenting his
sins (being too old to sin any more) patches
up hasty peace with the church, and dies,
leaving behind as literary baggage, songs,
ballads, fabliaur, and poems against the
monks. Indeed he is bold assaiant of the
clergy, and may be regarded as the literary
ancestor of Tartuffe. For this chiefly he is
remembered.
This time, the time of r ltebeuf, is the
golden age of the .fabliaur. Here may be
found the origin of the ''medecn malgre lui.''
Of patient Griselda and other tales of estab-
lished repute. Here the cure and the friar
come to well-merited grief; here the jealous
husband is outwitted; here la .fename-the life
and soul of the stories-is alternately glorified
and disgraced. Most prominent of the char
acteristics is an intense hatred of the monks,
hatred which pervaded all France in the
three centuries Immediately preceding the Ref
ormation. Finally the monks began to get
alarmed, and so devised the plan of teaching
sound doctrines by the same means. In
pious fables were inculcated the worship of
the Virgin, of different saints, the duty of
paying church dues, attending services, and
the like. Then people began to yawn and
the fabliaur went into disrepute.
The third chapter is given to the considera-
tion of book which, Mr.. Besant justly re-
marks, for two centuries lived as a sort of BIZ
ble in France, the source whence its readers
drew their maxims of morality, their philoso-
ply, their science, their history, even their
religion-the Romance of the Rose. Eng
lish readers know it through the translation
attributed to Chaucer. That translation con-
tains the first five thousand lines, the portion
contributed by Guillaume de Lorris, and a
thousand only, the thousand embracing the
attack on the hypocrisy of monks and friars,
of the twenty thousand lines written by Jean
de Meupg. 1t is, as is wel-knowa TO stu
dents of English literature, an allegory, cold,
monotonous, bloodless, though graceful, fan
ciful, and not devoid of poetic taste. Be-
tween the two writers there is a gulf of forty
years. The earlier of these seems to have
cied about the time that his successor was
born. In the interval mems thoughts had
widely changed. Jean de Meung took up the
tale, it is true, where Guillaume de Lorris
left it, but he made it the medium for popu-
larizing his own opinions. He made it
tresor, like that dreariest of dreary books, the
Confessio Amantis. The only way of getting
at the people was by means of rhyme, and he
used the allegory as a vehicle for conveying
his sentiments and convictions on religion,
politics and science. After time the allego-
ry is quite lost sight of, and the work be-
comes SIMPLY the opinions of Jean de
Meung.