strife ! But, what if the enemy remain within ourselves, if the soul be subdued by love, if the strong find his own conqueror within himself, if Hercules clothe himself in the burning tunic, if the sage Merlin, in obedience to his Vyvyan, lie down in his own tomb? This delirium men still call Passion. Tis the antique, I think; ah! tell me, when will it end? Against this new enemy Hercules could find but one shelter-the funeral pile. 'Tis by this last trial, by the purifying flame of solitary privations in which the heroes of the life within, the athletes of morality, the solitary Christians, the Richis of India steeped in penitence, consumed a long life, that the soul acquired such power that at the wrinkling of their brow the seven worlds would have been turned to powder. Still there is something higher than the power of dashing seven globes to pieces: 'tis to live pure in the midst of the impurity of the world, yet to love, and die for it. But to be forsaken of God, to be left to one's self, to one's own strength, to the sense of duty to resist the world in arms,-there is in all this a colossal greatness. It is to learn the true key to man, to taste the divine bitterness of the fruit of knowledge, of which it was said at the beginning of the world, “Ye shall know that ye are gods, ye shall become gods." Here you have the whole mystery of the middle age, the secret of its ever-flowing tears, and the key to its profound genius-precious tears, which have flowed into limpid legends, into marvellous poems, and which, heaping themselves up towards the sky, have become crystallized into gigantic cathedrals, that have wished to rise to the Lord! Seated on the bank of this great poetic river of the middle age, I can distinguish in it by the color of their waters, two different sources. The epic torrent, which erst gushed out of the depths of pagan nature to traverse the Greek and Roman heroism, rolls mingled and troubled with the confused waters of the world. By its side flows in purer current the Christian stream, which springs from the foot of the cross. Nature roars with rage at this mild, calm strength, this victorious serenity. The material infinite, in presence of the moral infinite, compares itself to it, and is troubled and stung with spite. What can it do with its brutal force, its massive bulk ? Strike; only strike. Array, then, on one side, in arms, all kings and people, and, if this do not suffice, let all the globes of creation shiver: place against all, the thinking reed. A strange combat, and such as | alrous, warlike, and amorous, and, from an early God alone were worthy to assist at, were God period, aristocratic; the other, ever religious himself not the combatant. and popular. THE EPOPEE OF THE MIDDLE AGE. Two poetries, two literatures: the one chiv The mass strikes, shatters, crushes. The first, too, is popular at its birth. It bebut 'tis the outward form she has crushed. gins with the war against the infidels, with This destroyed, the spirit soars on its wings Charlemagne and Roland. I can readily bewith blessings on its cruel liberator, whom it lieve that there existed among us from this illumines and sanctifies: such is the ideal of time, and even before it, poems of Celtic origin the Passion, of the divine Passion. The mar- in which the closing struggles of the West vel is, that this Passion is not altogether pas-with the Romans and Germans, were illustrated sive. Passion is action by free consent, by the sufferer's will; it is even action pre-eminently -drama, to use the Greek word. The Passion, whatever may be said to the contrary, is of all subjects the dramatic subject. But by the names of Fingal or of Arthur. Although the Passion is active and voluntary, inasmuch as this will is in a body, this soul in a covering, this God in a man, there is a moment of fear and doubt. In this consists the tragic part, the terror of the drama: it is this which rends in twain the veil of the temple, which shrouds the earth in darkness, which troubles me as I read the Gospel, and which to this day wrings tears from me. That God should have doubted God! that the sacred vic-tains of Wales and of Brittany, like the rain tim should have said, “ Father, Father, have you then forsaken me ?" rustling among the green oaks of my Ardennes, the cataract of the Carlovingian romances was All heroic souls who have dared great things rushing down from the Pyrenees. Even as far for mankind, have known this trial: all have as from the mountains of Alsace and of Swabia, more or less approached this ideal of suffering. there have been poured in to us, through the It was in such a moment that Brutus exclaim-channel of Austrasia, a flood of the Nibelungen. ed, "Virtue, thou art but a name." It was in such a moment that Gregory the Seventh said, “ I have followed justice and shunned iniquity, and therefore I die in exile." The erudite poesy of Alexander and of Troy, despite the Alps, overflowed from the old classic world; and still, from the distant East, thrown open by the crusade, there flowed to us, in fa bles, tales, and parables, the recovered rivers of Paradise.* The ungovernable spirit of chivalrous poetry. THE PASSION, THE PRINCIPLE Europe knew herself to be Europe, by combating with Africa and Asia: hence, Homer and Herodotus; hence our Carlovingian poems, with the holy wars of Spain, the victory of Charles Martel, and the death of Roland. Literature is the awakening consciousness of a nationality. The people are unified in one man. Roland dies in the solemn passes of the mountains which separate Europe from African Spain. Like the Philenæ, immortalized at Carthage, he consecrates with his tomb the boundary of his country. Grand as the struggle, lofty as heroism, is the tomb of the hero; his gigantic tumulus is the Pyrenees themselves. But the hero who dies for Christendom is a Christian hero, a warrior, barbarian Christ; like Christ, he is sold with his twelve companions; like Christ, he sees himself forsaken, deserted. From his Pyrenean Calvary he cries out, he winds the horn which is heard from Toulouse to Saragossa. He winds it; but the traitor, Ganelon of Mentz, and the careless Charlemagne, will not hear the sound. He winds it, and Christendom, for which he dies, still makes no reply. Then he shivers his sword in pieces: he longs to die. But he will die neither by the Saracen sword, nor by his own arms. He swells the accusing sound, the veins of his neck start out, they burst, his noble blood wells forth: he dies of indignation at his unjust desertion by the world. The sonorous voice of this grand poesy was soon to grow fainter, just like the sound of Roland's horn, in proportion as the crusade, seceding from the Pyrenees, was transferred * Besides former laborers in this field, as Faucher, Tresson, St. Palaie, Legrand d'Aussy, Barbasan, Méon, &c., we must mention Becker, Goerres, Fauriel, Monin, Quinet, and the last editor of Warton.-See, also, M. P. Paris, Introduction au Roman de Berte, dedicated to M. de Montmerqué : "Following the publication of the Roman du Renard, there have appeared, under your auspices, both our first comic opera, Le Jeu de Robin et Marion, and our first drama, Le Jeu d'Adam e bossu d'Arras. M. Roquefort, too, has contributed as his offering the poems of Marie de France, and M. Crapelet, the graceful romance of the Châtelain de Coucy. M. F. Michel, not content with having published the romance of the Comte de Poitiers, and that of La Violette, is about to bring out, with the assistance of an able orientalist, a poem on Mahomet, from which we may expect to learn the opinion entertained in the West, in the thirteenth century, of the religion and person of the Arab legislator. M. Bourdillon is busied with an edition of the Chant de Roncevaux; and M. Robert, whose labors on La Fontaine are well known, will shortly publish the beautiful romance of Partenopex de Blois. Meanwhile, M. Raynouard is on the eve of completing his Glossaire des Langues Vulgaires, and the Abbé Delarue is seeing through the press a great work on Les Bardes, les Jongleurs, et les Trouveres." "How many romances of the Round Table have we not still in Latin? Are not Nennius, the False Gildas, Brutus of England, the Life of Merlin, his Prophecies, the romance of the Knight of the Lion, that of Joseph of Arimathea, &c., in all large libraries? Do we not also find in Latin Turpin's Romance of Charlemagne, and that of Charlemagne's Voyage to Jerusalem, the romance of Oger the Dane, that of Amis and Amilion-of Athis and Porphilias, alias of the Siege of Athens, those of Alexander, Dolopathos, &c. &c. Finally, have we not a large number of our fabliaux in the Disciplina Clericalis of Pierre Alphonse, and in the Gesta Romanorum?" Delarue, Bardes Armoricains, p. 64. This apparent contradiction between authority and equity, which, after all, is but hatred of law-the revolt of individual against general man-is ill-supported by Renaud, by Gérard, * A pleonasm: in Celtic, Alban, Alp, signify mountainso Mont-auban is equivalent to "mountain-mountain." The following is a passage from Guillaume au Court in Gérard de Nevers :Nez, (Paris. Introduct. de Berte aux Grands Pieds,) quoted "Grant fu la cort en la sale a Loon, Moult of as tables oiseax et venoison. (Great was the throng in the hall at Laon, the tables spread with fowl and venison: let who would eat flesh and fish, not a bit passed William's chin, but he eat pie, (bread! and drank plenty of water. When the knights and barens had done; squire and page removed the cloths. Count William took the king to book: "What have you determined about your son Charles? Will you aid me against the Turks ?" Louis replied, "We will take counsel, and in the morning, will let you know my will, whether I go of not." William heard, and reddened like a coal. He stooped down, picked up a stick, and said to the king, "Send your son, or I will not value you a stick, nor be your friend if your man; and you shall go, whether you will or not.") and by the feudal sword. The king, for all they may say, is the more legitimate; the representative of a more general and a diviner idea. He can only be unseated by a more general idea still. The king will prevail over the baron, and the people over the king. The notion of this last conquest is already implied in a satiric drama, which, brought from Asia into France, has been welcomed and translated by every nation-the dialogue between Solomon and Morolf. The latter is an Æsop, a rude buffoon, a rustic, a villein; but villein as he is, his subtle reasonings are embarrassing, and he humbles good king Solomon on his throne, who, possessed at will of all gifts, handsome, rich, and all-powerful, and above all, learned and wise, is discomfited by this cunning clown. The weapon of the feudal Renaud against authority, the king, and the written law, is the sword-force that of the popular buffoon, far more piercing, is reasoning and irony. tions which science was to prove in our days, poetry, in its divine prescience, has foreseen. Yet is the hero still incomplete. In vain to attain it does the middle age raise itself on antiquity. In vain to complete the conquest of the world, is Aristotle turned into a magician, who leads through air and over sea the knightly Alexander. The foreign element not sufficing, they trace back to the old indigenous element, up to the Celtic dolmen and Arthur's tomb.† Arthur revives; no more the petty chief of a clan as barbarous as his Saxon conquerors; no, an Arthur purified by chivalry. Pale, very pale, it is true, is this king of the valiant, with his queen Geneviève, and his twelve paladins seated round the round table. And what do they bring into the world after the long sleep into which woman has cast Merlin? They bring with them the love of woman-it is their heroic idea-ever woman, ever Eve, that deceiving symbol of nature, of pagan sensuality, which promises infinite joy, and which keeps mourning and tears. Let them go, then, sad lovers, seeking adventures in forests, weak and agitated, revolving in their interminable epopee as in that circle of Dante, in which gyrate the victims of love at the sport of a constant wind. What was the end of these religious forms, these initiations, these tables of twelve, these chivalrous love-feasts in imitation of the last Supper? An effort is made to transfigure all this, to correct this mundane poesy, and to bring it to penitence. By the side of the profane chivalry, which sought woman and glory, another is erected. The latter is allowed wars and adventurous expeditions; but the object is changed. It is left Arthur and his brave knights; but on condition of their amendment. This new poetry, leads them, devout pilgrims, to the mysterious temple in which the sacred treasure is kept. This treasure is not woman: it is not the profane cup of Giamschid, of Hyperion, of Hercules, but the chaste cup of Joseph and of Solomon, the cup in which our Lord drank at his last Supper, and in which Joseph of Arimathea collected his precious blood. The mere sight of this cup, or Graal, prolongs Titurel's life for five hundred years. The king is to overcome the baron, not only in power, but in popularity. The epopee of feudal resistance early loses all its popular character, and restricts itself to the limited sphere of the aristocracy. Especially will it fade away in the South, where feudalism was never aught else than an odious importation, and where municipal life, the vivacious remain of antiquity, had always prevailed in the cities. The idea common to the two cycles of Roland and of Renaud, is war, heroism: foreign war, civil war. But to complete the idea of the heroic, heroism extends its horizon and tends to the infinite. The poetic unknown which floated at first over the two frontiers, over the Ardennes and the Pyrenees, falls back towards the East, as that of the ancients pushed on towards the West with their Hesperia, from Italy to Spain, and from Spain to the Atlantides. After the Iliads come Odysseys. Poetry goes on seeking in distant lands-seeking what? The infinite-infinite beauty, infinite conquest. Then is it remembered that a Greek, that a Roman conquered the world. But the West adopts Alexander and Cæsar only on condition of their becoming Westerns. They are knighted. Alexander becomes a paladin; the Macedonians and Trojans are ancestors of the French; the Saxons descend from Cæsar's soldiers, the Britons from Brutus. That affinity between the Indo-Germanic na-andriad, (often printed,) published in 1180 by a canon of *Roquefort, p. 196, n. 3. "The said Marcoul et Salomon, No. 7218, and Fonds de Nôtre-Dame, N. No. 2, has no doubt been built on an ancient work, the Contradictio Salamonis. This romance, one of the oldest in Europe, seems to be drawn from Greek, or rather Asiatic sources. It was at first translated into Latin; and, subsequently, into all the vulgar tongues. As early as the end of the fifth century, pope Gelasius placed it in the number of apocryphal books. William of Tyre speaks of it; but he is mistaken when he thinks he may discover it in the Jewish antiquities of Josephus. It is extant in old German and French verse; and Is the Bertoldo of the Italians, which has been rendered the most celebrated of all the versions, from the circumstance of a literary society's having conceived the notion of continuing it, and arranging it in stanzas. But this idea, though whimsically carried out, has been the means of procuring us an excellent dictionary of the Italian dialects." VOL. 1.-41 *See the poem of Alexander, by Lambert-le-Court and Alexander of Paris, born at Bernai. They assert that they only translate from the Latin.-There is also a Latin Alex Amiens, Gautier de Chatillon, born at Lille; it was read in the schools in preference to the ancient writers.-The verses of the French Alexandriad, quoted by Legrand d'Aussy, (Notices et Extraits des MSS. de la Bibl. Roy.,) are elegant and sonorous "Si long comme il estoit, mesura la campagne M'espée meurt de fain et ma lance de soi . (Tall as he was, he measured his length on the plain... My sword is dying of hunger, and my lance of thirst.) The chief storehouse of the Breton traditions of the middle age, is the work of the famous Geoffrey of Monmouth. With regard to this author's veracity, and the sources from which he has drawn, see Ellis, Intr. to Metrical Romances; Turner, Quarterly Review, Jan. 1820; Delarue, Bardes Armoricains; and, especially, the last edition of Warton, (1824.) with Douce's and Park's notes; also Ritson, and some passages from the poems of Marie de France, published by M. Roquefort, 1820, &c. 322 The Graal.-The ideal placed so high as to be inoperative. THE PASSION, THE PRINCIPLE The guardians of the cup and of the temple, | the Templists, must remain pure. Neither Arthur nor Perceval is worthy to touch it. For merely approaching it, the amorous Lancelot remains all but lifeless for thirty-four days. The new chivalry of the Graal is the work of priestly hands it is a bishop who dubs Titurel a knight. This sacerdotal poetry places its ideal so high, that it is sterile and powerless therefore. Vainly does it exalt the virtues of the Graal: the Graal remains unattainable, the children of Perceval, Launcelot, and Gawain alone can approach it. And when the true knight, the fitting guardian of the Graal, is at last to be produced, it is obliged to take one Sir Galahad, perfect at all points, a saint in his lifetime, but much unknown. This obscure hero, brought into the world on purpose, has no great influence. Such was the powerlessness of chivalrous poetry. Daily more sophistical and more subtle, it became the sister of scholasticism, a scholasticism of love as of devotion. In the South, where the jongleurs hawked it about in lays and ballads through court and castle, it was overlaid and extinguished by the refinements of form, and the fetters of the most artificial and labored system of versification ever devised. In the North it sank from the epopee to the romance, from symbol to allegory; that is, into the void. In its decrepitude, it still anticked on throughout the fourteenth century, in the sorry imitations of the sorry "Romance of the Rose;" while above its notes there rose by degrees the shrill voice of popular derision in the tales and fabliaux. The poetry of chivalry, then, had to resign itself to death. What had it done for humanity during all these ages? Man, whom it had been pleased in its confidence to take simple, still ignorant, mute as Perceval, brutal as Roland or Renaud, and had promised to conduct through the different steps of chivalrous initiation up to the dignity of Christian hero-it left weak, discouraged, miserable. From the cycle of Roland to that of the Graal, his sadness has gone on increasing. He has been led wandering through forests, in pursuit of giants and monsters, and with woman ever in view. His have been the labors of the ancient Hercules, and his weaknesses as well. The poetry of chivalry has scarcely developed its hero, and has retained him in a state of infancy; like the thoughtless mother of Perceval, who prolongs the imbecility of her son's early age. And therefore he quits this mother of his, just as Gérard of Roussillon throws up chivalry, and turns charcoal-burner; and Renaud of Montauban turns mason, and carries stones on his back to help to build Cologne cathedral.* *After treating of chivalrous, I ought to proceed to consider Christian poetry, as exemplified in legends, &c. But I hope to discuss this great subject thoroughly, elsewhere. Here, I shall only treat of the poetry of worship, and of Christian art. See note, p. 171. The Church, the real home of the people. The knight turns man, turns one of the people, devotes himself to the Church; for in the Church, alone, resides at this time manly intellect, his true life, his repose. While this silly virgin of the chivalrous epopee hastes over mountains and valleys, mounted on the crupper behind Lancelot and Tristan, the wise virgin of the Church keeps her lamp lighted, waiting for the great awakening. Seated near the mysterious manger, she watches over the infant people who grow up between the ox and the ass during her Christmas night presently, kings will come to worship her. The Church is herself-people. Together they play in the great drama of the world the combat of the soul and of matter, of man and of nature, the sacrifice, the incarnation, the Passion. The chivalrous and aristocratic epopee was the poetry of love, of the human Passion, of the pretended happy of this world. The ecclesiastical drama, otherwise called worship, is the poetry of the people, the poetry of those who suffer, of the suffering the divine Passion. * : The church was at this time the real domicile of the people. A man's house, the wretched masonry to which he returned in the evening, was only a temporary shelter. To say truth, there was but one house, the house of God. Not in vain had the Church her right of asylum; she was now the universal asylum: social life altogether sought refuge with her. Man prayed there; there the commune held its deliberations. The bell was the voice of the city she summoned to the labors of the field,† to civil affairs, sometimes to the battles of liberty. In Italy, it was in the churches that the sovereign people assembled. It was at St. Mark's that the deputies of Europe sought from the Venetians a fleet for the fourth crusade. Trade was carried on around the church: the places of pilgrimage were fairs. The articles of merchandise received the priestly blessing. Even cattle, as still continues to be the custom at Naples, were brought to receive benediction. The Church did not refuse it. she suffered these little ones to draw near. Heretofore, in Paris, Easter hams were sold in the parvis Notre-Dame, and as the buyers took them away, they had them blessed. Formerly they did better: they ate in the church. and after the feast came the dance. Church encouraged these infantine joys. The At this period, the people and the Church, which was recruited from among the people. were one and the same thing, like child and *As at Paris, the churches of St. Jacques-la-Boucherie St. Geneviève, &c. The abbé Leboeuf noticed on the f which those who sought asylum passed their arms.—It was cade of the latter church an enormous iron ring, through in churches, too, that the sick were laid; especially those attacked by the mal des ardens, (burning or sweating sick ness.) The silver bell at Reims was rung on the 1st of Mar to announce the resumption of agricultural labor. Another bell used to be rung from the year 1498, every morning and evening, at the hour of opening and shutting the gate and the manufactories of the town. Worship, a dialogue between God, OF ART IN THE MIDDLE AGE. the Church, and the people. mother. Both were still free from distrust the mother wished to be all in all to her child. She took him wholly to her, and without reservation,... "Pandentemque sinus et totâ veste vocantem cœruleum in gremium."* Worship was a tender dialogue between God, the Church, and the people, expressing one and the same thought. Impassioned and grave by turns, she blended the old sacred language with that of the people. The solemnity of the prayers was broken-dramatized with pathetic chants, like that dialogue between the foolish and the wise virginst which has been handed down to us. And sometimes, also, the great, the learned, the eternal Church herself made herself a child to prattle with her child, and translated the ineffable to it in puerile legends, such as fitted its tender age. She spoke it listened. The people lifted up their voice: not the fictitious people who speak in the choir, but the true people, rushing from without tumultuously and innumerably through all the vomitories of the cathedral, with their loud confused voice-a giant child, like the St. Christopher of the legend, brute, ignorant, passionate, but docile, imploring initiation, and praying to bear Christ on their colossal shoulders. They entered, dragging into the Church the hideous dragon of sin, gorged with victuals, to the Saviour's feet, to wait the stroke of the prayer which was to immolate it. At times, also, recognising that the animalism was in themselves, they exposed in symbolical extravagances their miseries and infirmity. This was called the festival of idiots, fatuorum ; and this imitation of the pagan orgies, tolerated by Christianity as man's farewell to the sensualism which he abjured, was repeated at the festivals of the Nativity, the Circumcision, Epiphany, the Murder of the Innocents, and likewise on those days on which mankind, saved from the devil, fell into the intoxication (Throwing open her bosom, and inviting with outstretched robes to her azure lap.) t Monumens Primitifs de la Langue Romane-given by M. Raynouard in his great work.-Since writing this, I have perused on this dramatic character of the middle age an important article of my friend, M. Ch. Magnin's, (Revue des Deux-Mondes,) and several chapters of Mr. Digby's fine work, Mores Catholici, London, 1832-1834. This will be noticed elsewhere. At Tarascon, the drac; at Metz, the graouilli; at Rouen, the gargouille; at Paris, the monster of the Bievre, &c. See note at p. 165. The gargouille is on the seals of Rouen.-Archives du Royaume. See Ducange, verb. Kalenda, cervulus, abbas cornardorum; Lobineau, Hist. de Paris, t. i. p. 224; Dutillet, Mémoires pour servir à l'Histoire de la Fête des Fous; Flogel, Geschichte des Groteskekomichen; Marlot, Metropolis Remensis Historia; Millin, Description d'un dyptique (register) qui renferme un missel de la Fête des Fons. In 1198, the legate, Peter of Capua, prohibited the celebration of this festival in the diocese of Paris; but it was not given up in France till about 1444. We find it held in England in 1530.-In 1761, the children of the choir of the SainteChapelle still claimed to direct on Innocents'-Day, and occupied the first stalls, with the chanter's cope and bâton. Morand, Hist. de la Sainte-Chapelle, p. 222.-At Bayeux, on Innocents'-Day, the children of the choir, headed by a little bishop who performed the service, occupied the upper stalls, and the canons, the lower. Histoire du Diocèse de Bayeux, par Hermant, curé de Maltot. Chap. Cathédrale de Bayeux. of joy-at Christmas and Easter. The clergy themselves took a share in it. Here, the canons played at ball within the church; there, they insultingly dragged after them the odious Lent herring. Beast as well as man was rehabilitated. The humble witness of our Saviour's birth, the faithful animal which warmed his infant body as he lay in the manger with his breath, which bore him with his mother into Egypt, which carried him in triumph into Jerusalem-it had its share in the general joy.† * See, above, note at p. 175, an enumeration of the bur lesque festivals, partially preserved in our provinces. At Beauvais, Autun, &c., they celebrated the Feast of the Ass.-Rubrica MSS. festi asinorum, ap. Ducange:-"At the end of the mass, the priest turning to the people over,) shall neigh thrice, and then the people, with the forwith the words, 'Ite, missa est.' (Ye may depart, church is mula, Deo gratias,' (all thanks to God,) shall thrice answer 'Hi-haw, hi-haw, hi-haw.' Then the following hymn was Orientis partibus sung: Adventavit asinus Hez, sire asnes, car chantez Hic in collibus Sichem, Ecce magnis auribus Saltu vincit hinnulos, Aurum de Arabia, Dum trahit vehicula Cum aristis hordeum Amen dicas, asine, (hic genuflectebatur,) Hez va! hez va! hez va hez! Biax sire asnes car allez, Belle bouche car chantez." MS. du treizième siècle, ap. Ducange, Glossar. (From the east came the ass, fair and sturdy, fitted for burdens. Ha, sir ass, open your fine mouth to sing, you shall have hay enough, and plenty of oats. |