Chapter 3 - The Romance of the Rose

Chapter 3 - The Romance of the Rose

I

The reader who has followed—if any has followed—my first two chapters may well feel that he has been taken on a long journey through scenery more various than agreeable, and may pardonably ask why such a circuitous approach to our subject was needed. But, for myself, however it has fared with the reader, I know that nothing less would have sufficed to enable me to approach the Roman de la Rose with a sympathetic understanding. The allegorical love poem, as I confessed at the outset, makes little natural appeal to a modern reader. It is foreign to us not only in its sentiment but also, and more radically, in its form. In order to read it justly—to give the poet his chance, and with him to give most of the literature of the fifteenth century its chance—it was necessary to ‘remount the stream of time’: to reconstruct imaginatively, so far as our knowledge would allow us, the growth and quality both of that sentiment and of that form. As far as I myself am concerned, the experiment has in a measure succeeded. I can never again look upon the Romance as an ‘artificial’ poem, nor call its personifications ‘shadowy’, nor its mechanisms an arbitrary fashion.

The sentiment, in so far as it was a real novelty, I have, of course, failed to explain. One does not ‘explain’ such things, or not in that sense. We must be content, like the biologist, to explain the workings of the organism, and take for granted that which makes it an organism at all; ‘seminal forms’ and the like we hand over to the metaphysician. And this limitation in our account is the less disastrous because we are still living, to some extent, under the influence of courtly love and can therefore experience imaginatively, from within, what we tried in vain to understand discursively from without. And if once the germ is granted, we find the history of its development neither mysterious nor unnatural. We have seen how social conditions gave the new feeling its bent towards humility and adultery; how literary conditions entangled it with the pre-existing Ovidian tradition though it was forced to modify and even to misunderstand that tradition; how the Arthurian stories supplied it with matter; and how, in the hands of a great poet, the Arthurian story, treated in terms of courtly love, produced the first notable examples of psychological or sentimental fiction.

The origins of the allegorical method turned out to be a longer story. We saw that allegory was in no sense a mere device, or figure of rhetoric, or fashion. It was not simply a better or worse way of telling a story. On the contrary, it was originally forced into existence by a profound moral revolution occurring in the latter days of paganism. For reasons of which we know nothing at all—here again comes the ‘seminal form’ not to be explained by history—men’s gaze was turned inward. But a gaze so turned sees, not the compact ‘character’ of modern fiction, but the contending forces which cannot be described at all except by allegory. Hence the development of allegory, to supply the subjective element in literature, to paint the inner world, followed inevitably.

The two threads of our story come together in Chrétien. We found that Chrétien was psychological. And this we could explain by the whole history of courtly love. But we also found that wherever Chrétien became psychological he became allegorical. And this again we could explain, for we had seen that allegory had been born and perfected for the very purpose to which Chrétien put it. Chrétien combined two methods in his work because he combined two different appeals. He wished to satisfy the taste for marvellous adventure, and he did so by writing thousands of couplets (little mentioned in histories of literature) about honest knightly deeds and enchantments no different in essence from the work of any other metrical romancer. But he also wished to satisfy the taste for refined emotionalism, and he did this by interrupting his objective story from time to time with those long passages of soliloquy or analysis in which, as we noticed, he is always slipping into allegory. The radical defect in Chrétien’s poetry is that these two kinds of interest lie side by side in it without being really fused. The emotions of Lancelot and Guinevere are not really illustrated, save in a very shallow sense, by their adventures; their adventures are not really explained by their emotions. It was inevitable, therefore, that a story by Chrétien must have appeared in very different lights to different members of his audience. To some it must have seemed that a good story of the right kind, about splintering lances and castles dangerous, was constantly being held up, in the most tiresome way, by mere talk from the hero and the heroine. This class of readers was soon provided for by the prose romancers who took over the purely adventurous side of Chrétien’s work and set it up on its own feet. But there must also have been a second class of readers—history proves them to have been the larger and more influential class—who read Chrétien in the opposite way. For them, his poems were serious love-stories, holding the mirror up to nature, as nature appeared in the courtly circles of the time, but unfortunately interrupted at every turn by irrelevant excursions into fairyland.

II

Of those who wrote for this second class of readers, the most important was Guillaume de Lorris. In placing him thus, I am not, of course, assuming that Chrétien was the only, or the nearest, influence at work upon him. Those who wish to determine accurately the immediate predecessors of the Roman de la Rose will seek more skilful guides than the present writer. I am merely insisting on a general literary relationship which is constantly misunderstood. Many people, misled by the platitudinous allegory produced in ages to which allegory is a toy—the allegory of Maeterlinck or Addison—are disposed to think that in turning to Guillaume de Lorris we are retreating from the real world into a shadowy world of abstractions. But the whole truth about Guillaume is missed until we see that he is more of a realist than Chrétien. Of the two things that he found in Chrétien it was the fantastic that he rejected and the natural that he used. Do not let us be deceived by the allegorical form. That, as we have seen, does not mean that the author is talking about non-entities, but that he is talking about the inner world—talking, in fact, about the realities he knows best. No doubt, from a grammatical or logical point of view, the land of Gorre in Lancelot is ‘concrete’, and Danger in the Roman, being a personification, is ‘abstract’. But no one, least of all Chrétien, has ever been to the land of Gorre, while Guillaume, or any courtly lover of the period—or, for that matter, any lover in any subsequent period—has actually met Danger. In other words, the ‘concrete’ places and people in Chrétien are mere romantic supposals: the ‘abstract’ places and people in the Romance of the Rose are presentations of actual life. The biography of a poet has little relevance for criticism, and we have no data for constructing the biography of Guillaume de Lorris; but there is nothing unlikely in the theory that his poem is autobiographical. Everything that happens in it might have happened to the author in real life, and had happened to dozens of his contemporaries: no small part of it may happen to any man in our own days.

This, then, is the first condition necessary to an understanding of the Roman de la Rose, and in this sense Guillaume de Lorris is the great representative of one of those two groups into which I have divided the successors of Chrétien. In Chrétien Guillaume de Lorris found, on the one hand, fantastic adventure, on the other, a realistic account of imaginative passion, as imaginative passion actually existed, or believed itself to exist (the distinction is a barren subtlety) in the world around him. It was the second that interested him. He conceived the idea that this, by itself, stripped of its Arthurian supports, might stand on its own feet and make the subject of a poem. As such a poem would concern itself exclusively with what the lovers felt, it would, of course, be allegorical. The device—never a very happy one—of trumping up some mere skeleton or succedaneum of external happenings for a story whose real interest is subjective did not and could not, at that period, occur to him. I say that it was Guillaume who conceived and did all this, for the sake of brevity. I am not concerned to establish his actual precedence in point of time. What he owed to the Altercatio Phyllidis et Florae—when Li Fablel dou Dieu d’Amours was written—these are questions that need not delay us. The transition from amatory romance to amatory allegory, and the motives for that transition, were as I have described; and of the poets who became the instruments of that transition Guillaume is incomparably the most important.

In spite of its allegorical form, then, what we have in the Roman de la Rose is a story of real life. Here, at last, the muse of courtly love ‘stoops with disenchanted wing to truth’; a fact which goes far to explain the charm that it had for that age and for the age which followed. The allegorical method in general, as well as the particular mechanism of the Roman, were familiar to thirteenth-century readers. They needed no search to find the significacio. The poem came home immediately to their business and bosoms. Young readers in the not ignoble ardours of calf-love, and elderly readers in the mood of reminiscence, whether wistful or ironic, could all find in it the reflection of their own experience. But we are not so fortunately placed. We have to reckon not only with the unfamiliar erotic psychology, but with the unfamiliarity of allegory in general; and, to speak plainly, the art of reading allegory is as dead as the art of writing it, and more urgently in need of revival if we wish to do justice to the Middle Ages. I have heard a very sensible man say sadly of the Romance of the Rose ‘It all has some sort of mystical meaning, of course’, and the words ‘some sort’ sounded like the accent of despair, and the word ‘mystical’ like something worse. I have known readers long familiar with the fragmentary Middle English version of the Romance who had never noticed that the fountain of Narcissus represented the heroine’s eyes. Even Mr. Saintsbury once suggested that Danger was the heroine’s husband. In the face of all this I cannot be accused of beating upon an open door if I offer a few explanations.

The best preparation for a study of Guillaume de Lorris is to read a curious little dialogue in which Mr. Aldous Huxley, whether consciously or not, has revived its method. A man and a girl are talking in a conservatory. Instead of representing their conversation directly, the author has chosen to distribute it among a number of attendants whom he allots to each. The attendants represent the various selves, or facets of personality, whom the two lovers contain. Thus when they begin to talk, and are still engaged in purely formal courtesies, they use two little dolls which represent their conventional and ‘social’ selves. The humans pull the strings and the dolls say whatever politeness demands. Guillaume de Lorris would have called these puppets Courtesye and Bialacoil; though to be sure, differing widely in his outlook from the lively Mr. Huxley, he would not have made them puppets. Then there is, among the attendants of the young man, the very fleshly negro who looks over his shoulder and kisses the girl, greatly to the astonishment of the young man’s other attendants, and with disagreeable results. Guillaume would have called the negro Vilanie, and would have left him outside the conservatory. Similarly on the young woman’s side we have two attendants, one of whom is a prude who foresaw the kiss and would have averted it if she had not been lulled asleep; the other finds it thrilling to be kissed by negroes and is sorry when her fellow is waked. The names of these two in Guillaume are Honte and Venus.

This little jeu d’esprit gives us, in principle, the whole procedure of the Romance of the Rose. But Guillaume de Lorris differs from his modern successor in some important respects. In the first place he practically abolishes the hero, as one of his dramatis personae, by reducing him to the colourless teller of the tale. The whole poem is in the first person and we look through the lover’s eyes, not at him. In the second place he removes the heroine entirely. Her character is distributed among personifications. This seems, at first, a startling device, but Guillaume knows what he is about. You cannot really have the lady, and, say, the lady’s Pride, walking about on the same stage as if they were entities on the same plane. Nor is it unnatural for a lover to regard his courtship as an adventure, not with a single person, but with that person’s varying moods, some of which are his friends and some his enemies. A man need not go to the Middle Ages to discover that his mistress is many women as well as one, and that sometimes the woman he hoped to meet is replaced by a very different woman. Accordingly, the lover in the Romance is concerned not with a single ‘lady’, but with a number of ‘moods’ or ‘aspects’ of that lady who alternately help and hinder his attempts to win her love, symbolized by the Rose. I hope to show later that this ostensible banishment of the heroine from the stage does not prevent her being vividly present to an attentive reader throughout. Rather, it gives her a place in the poem which only a great novelist could have given her by other means. If she takes no part in the action, it is because her heart is most often the scene of the action. Any protracted wooing involves a conflict not only between the man and the woman but between the woman and herself; it is this second conflict which occupies the most interesting scenes in the Romance.

If Guillaume had stopped here, his method would be flawless. Unhappily, however, the friends and enemies of the lover are not all contained in his own, and in his lady’s, breast. There is the interference of her relatives to be reckoned with; and this forces the poet to introduce the character Jalosie—a personification not quite on all fours with the personified moods of the heroine. Again, there is the advice and support which the lover receives from the other young gallants: hence the character Amis, the typical Friend, who is hardly a personification at all. Finally, there is the Nurse or Duenna of the heroine who carries out the instructions of Jalosie, and whose introduction in her proper person constitutes a complete break-down of allegory at one point. It is true that these breaches of the allegorical rule do not really confuse us as we read; but we feel that a technical difficulty has not been neatly turned, and acknowledge it a serious, though not a fatal, defect in the poem. When once the scheme has been grasped, our next step is to master in some detail the scene and dramatis personae. Much will become clearer when we turn to the poem itself, and the following does not pretend to be exhaustive.

1. The Scene. Literaliter the scene is ‘at first, a river bank outside a walled garden; later the interior of the garden; and later still, a rose-plot surrounded by a hedge inside the larger garden’. All these places, as my poor friend supposed, have ‘some sort of mystical meaning’. Allegorice, therefore, the scene is ‘at first, the river of life in general, in early youth; later, the world of courtly society; later still, the mind of a young girl living in the world of courtly society’. It is not to be supposed, of course, that this allegorical garden is Guillaume’s invention. It is the same garden which we have met in Andreas and, before him, in Claudian. In some writers it means Love; in Guillaume it is changed slightly and made to mean the life of the court, considered as the necessary sphere or field for love’s operation. But, of course, its classical and erotic models only partially account for it. Deeper than these lies the world-wide dream of the happy garden—the island of the Hesperides, the earthly paradise, Tirnanogue. The machinery of allegory may always, if we please, be regarded as a system of conduit pipes which thus tap the deep, unfailing sources of poetry in the mind of the folk and convey their refreshment to lips which could not otherwise have found it.

2. The Characters. These may conveniently be divided into three groups, according as they are neutral qualities who may qualify now the hero’s and now the heroine’s mind; or qualities belonging to the hero; or again, qualities belonging to the heroine. The last is the largest and most interesting group.

Of the neutral characters the only two that require much comment are the god of Love and his mother Venus. A reader bred on the classics would expect to find these two together at the outset of the poem. But the consistent tendency of medieval love poetry was to substitute for Venus and her son a King and Queen of Love who are, of course, themselves a pair of lovers. In the Roman we meet the god of Love accompanied by his mistress Biautez as soon as we enter the garden. Venus appears at a much later stage. More than one cause probably contributed to this change in the mythology. A King and Queen provided a better parallel to the real feudal courts of which Love’s court was in some degree a copy. But if we reflect for a moment on the constant connexion between the god of Love and the month of May, we must suspect a deeper reason. We still have the Queen of the May, and we know that she once had a King: in the forgotten fertility rites of the ludus de rege et regina we may with great probability find one of the origins of the medieval King and Queen of Love, and the explanation of their continued charm. Myth is a stronger thing than formal literature. But as courtly literature is refreshed by myth from beneath, so it is also refreshed by larger philosophic conceptions from above; and it was philosophic conceptions that supplied a third motive for removing Cupid from the immediate tutelage of his mother. Venus is a personage who belongs to quite another realm than Cupid. As one of the real Olympians, she inherited from ancient times a gravity which Cupid never had. But, besides being a goddess, she was a planet; and, if a planet, then a real source of ‘influence’, not according to any poetic convention but according to the science of the time. When a poet wrote about Amor he knew that he was merely personifying an ‘accident’, which personification, as Dante says, ‘according to the truth is false’. But he could not be so sure about Venus. Perhaps Venus was only an ‘accident’; but then, again, perhaps Venus was the name of a real force in nature, or even the name of the intelligence of the third heaven. In the Romance Venus is the sexual appetite—the mere natural fact, in contrast to the god of Love who is the refined sentiment. She is the generative force in nature whom the school of Chartres had taught men to contemplate philosophically, to look upon with the eyes of a Lucretius, not with the eyes of Ovid or Jerome. This distinction between Venus and her son, which becomes explicit in Jean de Meun, is merely implicit in Guillaume de Lorris; but it is necessary to an understanding of his story.

The remainder of the neutral characters are not important. Deduit is the lord of the garden; that is, the courtly life is a life of pleasure and amusements. Oiseuse is its doorkeeper, for no busy man can lead that life. The happy dancers whom we find carolling in the presence of Deduit have such names as Joy, Largesse, Courtesy, and the like; and all this is sufficiently obvious.

The characters who belong to the hero are mere men of straw (Hope, Sweet Thought, &c.) with the single exception of Reason. Reason is almost the only character in the poem who remains the same in Jean de Meun’s continuation as she was in Guillaume’s original. In both writers some of the best passages are put into her mouth, and in both she speaks to rebuke the lover for the enterprise which he has undertaken. In Jean de Meun there is some confused struggle—as I shall explain later—to follow the poets of Chartres in their attempt to find a solution for the conflict between the courtly and the Christian ideals; but in Guillaume de Lorris there is no conflict. His hero has no reply to Reason beyond a wilful sic volo sic iubeo. The story, in other words, is the story of a lover whose deepest convictions remained opposed to his love and who knew that he acted neither well nor wisely. By implication the author therefore condemns what he relates. If he had finished his poem it would probably have closed with the familiar palinode. He gives to Reason exactly the function which she had in the Lancelot; to speak the truth and not to be heard.

In the third group we have those characters who belong to the heroine. These are the most important actors in the drama and we shall go far astray if we do not understand them. Among them Bialacoil perhaps holds the first place. The name, of course, means ‘fair welcome’—the belh aculhir of the Provençals. If we ask what he represents, I think the answer is as follows: there is such a thing as failing or succeeding in mere ordinary conversation with one’s mistress, long before there is any question of succeeding or failing as a lover. At the first introduction the lady may be, as modern English would say, ‘nice to you’ or she may not. If she has been ‘nice to you’ you have met Bialacoil. When Pandarus extorted from Cresseide a promise to show Troilus ‘bettre chere and more feste’, he was extorting a promise that she would show him Bialacoil. Bialacoil is not the same as Courtesy, but he is the son of Courtesy. He is something more than mere politeness and yet a something more which a woman of gentle breeding will find it hard to withhold from any acquaintance not obviously dishonourable or vulgar. He is a false friend to a maidenhead; and yet, when all is done, you can say truly, or almost truly, that he meant no harm. His chief allies are the lady’s Franchise and her Pity. The latter needs no gloss. The former is the quality of the freeborn: the innocent security of a great lady who does not, like her maids, see a ravisher on every lonely road and a lover in every friend; who accepts—pitifully enough in the present story—

The fiction of the Christian law

That all men honourable are.

But Bialacoil and his allies are not always dominant in the lady’s heart. If you make a false step you will bring Fear to the surface instead and Bialacoil may vanish for hours together. If you endanger her reputation you may have Shame to deal with—an uncertain spirit, who will try to defend Bialacoil, it may be, and yet mar all with her silly sooth. But these two are not the most serious enemies. A lover can always manage Fear and Shame, who are helpless if once Venus comes to his aid. The real enemy who cannot be flattered or overcome, who must be kept asleep because, if he wakes, your only course is to take to your heels, the ever-present dread of lovers and the stoutest defence of virgins, is Danger. It is not easy to determine who this Danger is. He is certainly not the lady’s husband. If he were, the fact that lovers live in perpetual terror of him would reduce the whole situation to broad comedy. You cannot, in serious poetry, have a Tristram who says, ‘I don’t mind having to leave the court and skulk in the greenwood, and I don’t mind Iseult’s temper, but what I can’t stand is the idea of Marc and his glaive.’ This is to make the good knights into Bobadills, and if a further refutation is needed, we may remind ourselves that the husband (if there is a husband at all in the Romance) is already provided for in the character of Jalosie. The late M. Langlois thought that Danger corresponded to Ovid’s Pudor. I do not say that this is disproved by the existence of shame as a separate character, for Shame seems to represent not so much sexual modesty as the public or social shame which follows scandal. But I find M. Langlois’s view difficult to reconcile either with the history of the word ‘danger’ or with the behaviour and attributes of the personification Danger. The word, we know, comes from Dominus through Dominiarium; and from the meaning of ‘lordship’ and ‘lordliness’ all its other semantic history can be explained. I can well see how a word of this origin could acquire the sense of ‘haughtiness’ or, in our modern colloquial language, ‘stand-offishness’, or ‘difficulty in granting’; that it should mean Pudor would be a grave, though scarcely unparalleled, semantic difficulty. Again, if I turn to the Romance of the Rose, I find that Danger is a vilains; that he is swarthy, huge, and hirsute; that his eyes burn like fire and that he bawls at the top of his voice. Even if Ovid calls Pudor ‘rustice’, and even if a rustic is a vilains, I cannot but feel that this ogre is a very odd description of womanly modesty. The most obvious trait of Danger is his conviction that attack is the best form of defence. Is this the character of Pudor? Does not Pudor use in this erotic warfare something more like the strategy of Fabius? I hesitate to give my vote against a great critic; but I cannot help thinking that Danger means something very different from Pudor: means rather the rebuff direct, the lady’s ‘snub’ launched from the height of her ladyhood, her pride suddenly wrapped about her as a garment, and perhaps her anger and contempt.

Such, then, is the scene, and such the characters. But when a reader has understood them, and thus escaped the danger of missing the poet’s real story, it is always possible that he may fall into the opposite danger. When we have seen what an allegory signifies, we are always tempted to attend to the signification in the abstract and to throw aside the allegorical imagery as something which has now done its work. But this is not the way to read an allegory. Allegory, after all, is simile seen from the other end; and when we have seen the point of simile we do not throw it away. We keep in mind the dawn ‘walking’, ‘in russet mantle’, although we know that the reference is to colours in the sky and not to a human figure walking in a cloak: nay, we imagine that dawn precisely because we keep the ‘untrue’ imagery in mind. And in reading allegory we must do the same. It is not enough to see that the dreamer gazing into the fountain signifies the lover first looking into the lady’s eyes. We must feel that the scene by the fountain side is an imaginative likeness of the lover’s experience. If it occurred in a simile no reader would find this difficult; and to read an allegory as a continued simile, but a simile which works backward, is hard for us only because we have lost the habit. This habit is not hard to acquire, and we must acquire it before we can tell, save by hearsay, which of the old allegories are good and which are bad. You cannot find out except by reading them as they are meant to be read; by keeping steadily before you both the literal and the allegorical sense and not treating the one as a mere means to the other but as its imaginative interpretation; by testing for yourself how far the concept really informs the image and how far the image really lends poetic life to the concept.

III

Suppose, then, that you are a youth born into the higher ranks of a feudal society. You have just emerged from the restraints of boyhood. Your life is in the spring, and all the world is opening to you. As yet no determinate ambitions have been formed. The life of the court, not yet envisaged as the basis of advancement, but as mere living, as a self-sufficient paradise of wit and love and revelry, has drawn to itself all your desires. It is an enchanted garden ‘from whose walls sorrow flies far’, a world raised almost above nature, from which the disabilities of childhood have too long excluded you. Now at last the door opens and the entry is easy, at least for such as you. Poverty, vulgarity, old age—these are the qualities that disable a candidate, and you are guilty of none of these. All that is required of you is to swim with the tide, to wrap yourself in voluptuous idleness, and to gather rose-buds while you may.

Such is the situation which Guillaume de Lorris presents in the opening of the Romance of the Rose. The dreamer is wandering on a May morning, aimlessly at first, beside the river of Life; but aim and purpose come to him as soon as he has seen the garden enclosed, four-square, in its high, embattled wall. On the outside of the wall he sees the images of those whom the garden for ever excludes. They seem at first sight a curious collection, in which vices (such as Avarice and Envy) are mingled with misfortunes like Poverty, Age, or Sadness. But the appropriateness of the list is apparent as soon as we remember the allegorical intention. The courtly life, symbolized by the garden, is neither a purely moral entity, as Plato’s aristocracy might have been, nor a purely animal one, like the aristocracy of a school, nor purely economic, like the ‘society’ of our own times. To enter into its full enjoyment a man still needs, along with certain gifts of nature, and a sufficient fortune, a certain selection of genuinely moral qualities; it is for this reason that Hatred, Covetise, and Envy find themselves side by side with Poverty and Age upon the outer side of the wall. The only figure in this gallery which need give us pause is Papelardie. She is the personification of hypocrisy in religion, no doubt; a vice which, under different names, will be found to play an important part in Jean de Meun’s continuation of the Romance. But in that continuation Hypocrisy is by no means left on the outer side of the wall, and there is no reason to suppose that Guillaume de Lorris would have used her at all in his conduct of the story. What then is her relevance? The answer is to be found in a single line:

Ne she was gay, fresh ne iolyf.

Papelardie is, in fact, that quality which parents call Chastity, and courtly lovers Prudery. No doubt, in the courtly world, ladies who supported their unkindness with moral or religious pretensions were accused of being hypocrites. In the same spirit, and for the same reasons, small boys in our schools are accused of being pi. It is thus very natural that Papelardie should rank among the disqualifications for the courtly life.

But all this time, like the dreamer himself in the poem, we are delayed too long upon the outside of the wall; and in the inevitable dryness of interpretation we lose what is the life of the allegory—the alluring secrecy of the enclosure, the tree-tops seen above the battlements, the singing of the birds within, and the long journey round to find the door. When at last the door is discovered, the dreamer meets there the portress Idleness, who is well described:

Whan she kempt was fetisly

And wel arayed and richely,

Thanne had she doon al hir iournee.

She tells him that this is the garden of Delight, who takes his pleasure there with his people, under the shade of the trees which he has imported from the land of the Saracens; and invites him to enter.

The young man is now launched into society; and for the first few months a delighted apprenticeship in courtly usage is all his occupation. In the allegory he meets the various courtly personifications whose uncourtly opposites he has already seen on the wrong side of the wall; and then wanders away from them, alone, admiring the trees, the beasts, the streams, and the flowers of that garden. But all this while the god of Love was following him, unseen. The effortless, unrippled flow of natural description in this passage, never forgetful of the allegoric meaning, yet never marred by it, and often to a modern reader suggesting a symbolism far more profound and less explicit, is an admirable example of the poet’s quality.

But though the youth could not foretell—the god, you will remember followed him unseen—his elders could easily have foretold that the life of the court as mere living would not long continue to satisfy him. ‘Love’, we know, is ‘first learned at a lady’s eyes’, and among the many ladies whom he meets there is one into whose eyes he looks both long and close. Those eyes seem to him to contain in themselves, or to sum up, the whole of that vague delight in which he has lived the last few months. But they contain more also; in them he sees the promise of the lady’s love.

This important step in the story is allegorized in a manner which quite intelligent readers have been found capable of misunderstanding or of simply overlooking. Yet the equivalences are very easy, and even approach dangerously near to that physiological allegory which burdens Spenser’s House of Alma. The dreamer in his wandering comes to a fountain. Above it, in small letters, he reads that this is the same fountain in which Narcissus saw his shadow, for whose love he died. The dreamer is afraid and draws back; but in the end his curiosity overcomes him and he also looks in. Around it the grass grows thick and luscious, both winter and summer. In the bottom of the fountain there lie two crystal stones, in which the whole garden can be seen reflected. This is the mirror perilous and the well of love, whereof many have told ‘in romans and in boke’. As soon as he looks into the crystals he sees in them, a little way off, a garden of roses, and among them one bud not yet unclosed. He is filled with longing for that bud; and turning away from the reflection he rises and approaches the rose garden to pluck the bud itself.

Of this passage I would observe two things. In the first place it ought to remove for ever the very disastrous confusion which would identify the Rose with the Lady. The Rose, in Guillaume, is clearly the Lady’s love: in Jean de Meun it has a different signification; but nowhere does it mean the Lady herself. In the second place, I would ask the reader whether this passage, despite a little over-elaboration, is not well handled by the poet. Descriptions of the act (or passion) of ‘falling in love’ tend to be among the most banal passages of fiction; but Guillaume, with his crystals and his well, seems to me to give us some of the real magic of eyes (and of mirrors) as that magic actually exists, not indeed outside the human mind, but outside any school of poetry.

In the lines that follow the meaning is too simple to need interpretation. As the dreamer puts his hand forward to pluck the Rose, he is suddenly struck by an arrow. The god of Love, who had followed so far unseen, is beginning to shoot. It is here, for once, that the dream-allegory has something of the flavour of real dreaming. In mediis conatibus aegri succidimus! The dreamer can neither reach the Rose nor yet be stayed from approaching it by the five arrows which strike him in succession. At last the god calls upon him to yield. He yields and does homage and becomes Love’s man. In other words, the youth finds himself unmistakably in love and accepts the situation.

In the three hundred lines that follow we find one of those passages in which the work of the old poet has ‘dated’. The god of Love instructs his new vassal in the duties he will have to perform and the pains he will have to bear. By an irony not uncommon in literary history Guillaume prefaces this speech with a promise that

Now the romance ginneth amende.

He is approaching the doctrinal part of his work, and claiming a place beside Ovid and Andreas Capellanus. He clearly expects this passage to be read more often and more eagerly than any other. We cannot, indeed, say that the allegory at this point corresponds to nothing in the real (i.e. the psychological) story. Even in our own times, when a young man recognizes that he is ‘in love’, he may well feel that he has come to a place where others have come before him, a place with laws of its own that existed before he met them, in which certain things, not unknown from literature and tradition, are now to be done and suffered. In the thirteenth century the erotic institutionalism which I sketched in the first chapter might greatly increase such a feeling: for there is nothing in literature which does not, in some degree, percolate into life. And thus, behind the long speech of Love, we can, and should, suppose some experience which could really have befallen a lover of that period. But it remains, when all has been said, a passage for historians rather than for poets.

In line 2767 Love vanishes away. The first shock of finding that he loves is over, and the young man has to consider what he will do. He cannot immediately demand the Lady’s love: there is a thorny hedge around the rose garden. What he can do is to advance himself in her favour by means of ordinary social intercourse; and at first he makes good headway. The Lady is disposed to be friendly, and soon they are on terms which render it possible to begin to think of raising the question of love. The Lady’s friendliness, or ‘good reception’ is personified in the fair young squire Bialacoil who leads the Dreamer beyond the hedge, into the rose garden itself. But as they draw near the Rose, they must pass by the lair of Danger, Malebouche, Shame, Fear, and Jealousy. It is one of the exquisite traits in the allegory that a quality within the Lady herself, her ‘fair-welcoming’, is from the first her lover’s accomplice against certain other qualities, equally her own, which the two conspirators fear to arouse—her own ‘danger’ and her own modesty, who are enemies as carefully to be hoodwinked as the court gossips (Malebouche) and the suspicions of her relatives (Jealousy). Bialacoil is always being distracted between his natural kindness and his fear of these enemies. Thus of his own free will he offers the dreamer a leaf that had grown near the Rose; but he is shocked and frightened at a request for the Rose itself. Scarcely has this request escaped the Dreamer’s mouth when Danger leaps up from his slumber, drives the intruder back beyond the hedge, and scolds Bialacoil to flight.

The lover has made his first attempt and failed. He is as yet no cynic, and has neither vanity nor experience to teach him that such reverses are not always final. He only knows that he has lost the intimacy he had gained and that ‘bial acoil’ has vanished from his Lady’s face and manner. The sting of disappointment drives him to reflect: or, as the allegory has it, Reason chooses this moment to descend from her high tower and address him.

Hir eyen two were cleer and light

As any candel that brenneth bright,

And on hir heed she hadde a croun:

Hir semede wel an high persoun:

For rounde enviroun, hir crounet

Was ful of riche stonis fret.

Hir goodly semblaunt, by devys,

I trowe were maad in paradys;

Nature had never such a grace

To forge a werk of such compace.

She tells him

Thou hast bought dere the tyme of May.

It was in an evil hour that Idleness opened the garden door to him. His enemies are too strong for him. Better to renounce the folly of love and to tame his heart,

Who-so his herte alwey wol leve

Shal finde among that shal him greve.

The case could scarcely be better put. But it is true to nature that the lover should hear and understand and yet renounce all this good sense, not as something too high and hard for him, but as something beneath him, as a disloyalty to love. As the modern poet says:

People in love cannot be moved by kindness

And opposition makes them feel like martyrs.

Reason—and this again is true—does not outstay her welcome. The lover is left free to console himself with the conversation of Frend who takes his designs upon the Rose for granted, and gets on with the practical side of the business. It is as a result of his advice that he dares once more to approach the hedge and even to parley with Danger.

At this point the interest of the story begins to be transferred to the heroine. The girl is beginning to recover from the first shock of her lover’s demand. Danger still guards her rose garden; but it is already a Danger more sullen than violent, and when the lover asks leave only to stand without the hedge and to love the Rose at a distance, Danger is content to growl a surly permission.

Love where thee list. What recchith me

So thou fer fro my roses be?

But the girl has enemies within as well as without. There is her Franchise, which is averse from grudging or suspicion. There is also Pite. After all, the young man looks so very miserable. And what has poor Bialacoil done that he should be treated like this? Bialacoil meant no ill; there can be no harm in being civil and agreeable. With such arguments Pite and Franchise extort Danger’s consent to the return of Bialacoil. ‘Fair welcome’ once more shows on the Lady’s face; and after that it is not long before the lover is again within the hedge.

The youth has profited by experience. This time his request is more moderate. He asks not to pluck, but only to kiss, the Rose. Bialacoil replies with perfect frankness,

Thou shuldest not warned be for me,

But I dar not, for Chastite.

Agayn hir dar I not misdo.

To this the lover has naturally no reply. His affairs are at a standstill. The story has reached its turning-point. All that Bialacoil can be expected to do for him has been done; thus far and no farther will the qualities intrinsic to the Lady carry her—her frankness, her friendliness, her pity. If all were in the Lady’s hands this check might prove final. But all is not. The lover has allies far mightier than any of the qualities personal to his mistress, allies who can make his mistress their puppet. Natural passion may fall upon her and carry her whither she never intended. It is at this moment that Venus enters the poem; Venus, who is passion, lawless and natural, who sometimes works hand in hand with courtly love, but has no need of his assistance, and often works without him. Venus is that element in the situation which Bialacoil left out of account when he led the lover a second time within the hedge. The lady pitied the young man’s passion and readmitted him to her intimacy; she did not realize that she had senses of her own. Innocence is carried away by the unforeseen. At the touch of Venus’ torch Bialacoil grants the request, and the lover kisses the Rose.

After this all is in confusion. Tale-bearers are on the lover’s track. Jealousy, summoned by Malebouche, is on the scene in a moment, and rating Bialacoil who has not a word to say for himself. Shame answers, timidly and brokenly, on his behalf. It is touching and natural, that in the long speech here allotted to Shame no word is spoken for or against the lover. It is Bialacoil who has betrayed her: Bialacoil who is to be defended, for he does no more than his mother Courtesy taught him, and meant all for the best. The girl cannot believe that her habit—if we may drop into our own vernacular—of ‘being nice to people’ is a fault: perhaps unconsciously she knows that Bialacoil, however disgraced for the moment, is of all her retinue the likeliest to serve her turn. Shame will promise to guard him more carefully in the future.

Some such settlement would have satisfied the Lady herself, but it will not do for her guardians, symbolized by Jealousy. Nothing will satisfy them but that Bialacoil should be thrown into prison. Shame and Fear are sent to waken Danger and chide him from his negligence. The gaps in the hedge are repaired. A moat is dug and within it a castle built, at whose four gates Shame, Danger, Fear, and Malebouche stand sentinel. Inside, Bialacoil is imprisoned and given as a keeper an old woman, called in our English text the Vekke. The lover, excluded, can but weep without the castle walls, and launch one despairing appeal to Bialacoil within.

Though thou be now a prisonere

Kepe atte leste thyn herte to me.

It is here that Guillaume’s work breaks off. His Lady has been given a Duenna who will strictly supervise henceforth her ‘bial acoil’. This dangerous friendliness of hers is to be watched. And the Lady herself is more than half on the side of the Duenna and of her parents. Her modesty, her fears, and her ‘danger’, co-operate with the gossips of the court and with the jealousy of her relations to shut up and to suspend from all operation that ‘fair welcome’ which, none the less, she cannot root out of her heart. Thus, on the surface, all is over with the lover’s suit. Nothing in the overt behaviour of his mistress gives him hope: but across the barrier of that overt behaviour he makes his appeal to that element in her which, having once seen, he divines to be still alive within, though under lock and key.

Such is the first part of the Romance of the Rose. We are fortunate to have a complete text of it—in part possibly by Chaucer—in fourteenth-century English; a version which lacks, to some extent, the plashing fluidity of the original, and which makes the poem in places racier and more pointed, less gentle and equable, than it really is. There is a quality in the best Old French which Gower alone among the English has approached. No poetry could be more tranquil, more pellucid. It has a winning and unobtrusive way which the harder-hitting style and deeper-chested voice of English cannot reproduce. Ours is ‘all instruments’; theirs is the ‘lonely flute’. I labour the point because it is this side of the original which necessarily escapes my analysis. While we talk of psychology and of the conduct of the story, the reader must try to remember that all this story is conveyed in a medium that is nearly perfect; that the bright beauty of the scenes depicted and the wistfulness (it is hardly pathos) of many speeches would make the poem worth reading for their sakes alone. And few poets have struck better than Guillaume de Lorris that note which is the peculiar charm of medieval love poetry—that boy-like blending (or so it seems) of innocence and sensuousness which could make us believe for a moment that paradise had never been lost.

On the psychological side Guillaume’s merits are more easily displayed and I hope that they are now apparent. It is arguable that Guillaume, even more than Chrétien, deserves to be called the founder of the sentimental novel. A love story of considerable subtlety and truth is hidden in the Romance. It would be a work not of creation, but of mere ordinary dexterity, to strip off the allegory and retell this story in the form of a novel. Nor would the change be an improvement. We see how little the allegorical form hampers the novelist in Guillaume by the fact that when we have finished his poem we have an intimate knowledge of his heroine, though his heroine, as such, has never appeared. In her fears and hesitations, in her constant betrayal at the hands of Bialacoil (who means no harm), in our certainty that she will yield and yet will claim—in a sense honestly—that she has been won against her will, we see the outlines of the character which Chaucer has developed for us in his Cresseide. For Chaucer’s Cresseide is a borrowing, not from Boccaccio, but from Guillaume de Lorris.

The story, as told in the first part of the Romance, is sufficiently interesting to excite speculation. How would the poet have ended it, if he had had time? The late M. Langlois, from whom it is rash to differ in such a matter, was of opinion that the story is near its end when it is interrupted, and that the Dreamer would soon have won the Rose. I cannot, for myself, feel any certainty that it would have ended in this way. I am not sure that a poet so removed from ribaldry as Guillaume would have introduced Reason so gravely if Reason was to be finally defeated. The speech of Reason may well have been written to prepare the way for some such palinode as is by no means foreign, we know, to medieval love-lore. The Romance might have ended with the defeat and refutation of Love.

Such speculation began soon after Guillaume’s death. The gigantic continuation by Jean de Meun will occupy us in the next section; but this continuation does not stand alone. It was (probably) preceded by a much shorter attempt, the work of an anonymous poet. In this version Bialacoil and the other powers friendly to the lover escape from the castle while Jealousy sleeps and simply present the lover with the Rose. Such a conclusion is absolutely inconsistent with the character of the heroine in Guillaume’s work. It seems to be the product of an anxiety to untie knots as quickly as possible and make some sort of conclusion, rather than of any deep sympathy with the original poem. In this sympathy Jean de Meun was, of course, at least equally defective. But then Jean de Meun did not write a mere conclusion. Rather he made the original Romance the pretext for a new poem which completely dwarfed it and which is now to be considered on its own merits.

IV

‘Let no one tell you’, said Schopenhauer, ‘what is in the Critique of Pure Reason.’ A similar caution might well be given about the second part of the Romance of the Rose. It is with a despair and an ‘astonishment’ such as Lydgate once felt that I approach the task of conveying to those who have not read it, or recalling to those who have, some idea of this huge, dishevelled, violent poem of eighteen thousand lines. The tradition of literary history has given us for our guiding thread the principle that Jean was a satirist. As if he were not a dozen things beside; as if he had not at least equal claims to be classified as a controversialist, a philosopher, a scientist, a poet of nature, a perfectly serious religious poet, a poet of the school of Chartres. The one thing that he is not is an allegorist; he is as helpless with the dainty equivalences of Guillaume de Lorris as Dr. Johnson would have been among Pope’s sylphs and gnomes. He utterly lacks, perhaps despises, Guillaume’s architectonics and sense of proportion. We never know, at one page, what we shall be reading about on the next. He is incapable, as Langland and Dryden were incapable, of producing a poem, a ποίημα, a thing made; but this is not to say that he is incapable of poetry, and even of a poetry that comes nearer at times to greatness than that of Guillaume de Lorris.

It is as well to make it clear at the outset that Jean’s work is only in a very superficial sense a continuation of Guillaume’s. It is not the allegorical narrative which swells it to its prodigious length; it is the digressions. The actual story in the second part of the Romance can be very briefly told, and as the book is not, perhaps, very often read in England, I will venture to tell it. I shall not stop to indicate the course of the love story which the allegory conceals. Jean de Meun has no place among the founders of the novel, and his significacio is hardly worth the finding.

The Dreamer, left alone outside the castle, laments his fate, and wavers in his allegiance to Love. Reason again descends to counsel him. (His conversation with Reason, which ranges over a great variety of subjects, and occupies 3,000 lines, constitutes the First Digression.) When he has got rid of Reason he turns again to Frend, who assures him that Danger’s bark is worse than his bite, and gives him a great deal of Ovidian advice about deceiving the Rose’s guardians and corrupting her servants (Frend then insensibly glides into other topics for over 1,000 lines: this is the Second Digression). The Dreamer, following Frend’s advice, attempts to approach the castle by the way of Much-giving, but finds it guarded by the lady Richesse who will admit none but her friends. The god of Love again appears to him, catechizes him, and finally summons all his barons to take part in an assault upon the castle. He prophesies to them the life and work of Jean de Meun, who will continue the Romance begun by Guillaume de Lorris. The barons advise that Venus be summoned, but Love replies that she is not at his beck and call, and explains at some length the relation in which he stands to her. He then notices that religious hypocrisy, in the persons of Falssemblant and Constrained Abstinence, have found their way into his retinue. They are admitted as allies, after a little hesitation. (In reply to Love’s questions, Falssemblant describes himself—and a good many other things—in a speech of 1,000 lines, which makes the Third Digression.) Love now gives the order for the attack. Constrained Abstinence, dressed as a pilgrim, and Falssemblant, dressed as a friar, approach the gate where Malebouche is warden, and induce him to be shriven. As soon as he is on his knees Falssemblant strangles him and throws his body into the moat. The two hypocrites, in the midst of their success, are reinforced by Courtesy and Largesse, and all four enter the castle and parley with the Vekke. The latter, on hearing that Malebouche is dead, has no hesitation in promising to smuggle the lover into the castle, and hobbles off to prepare Bialacoil for his visit, and to present him with a chaplet of flowers which the lover has sent him. She has some difficulty in persuading Bialacoil to accept it, but wins her point in the end and settles down to read him a highly autobiographical lecture on love. (This is the Fourth Digression, and takes over 2,000 lines.) Bialacoil’s timid consent being granted, the lover is brought into his presence, and again asks for the Rose, but is again interrupted by Danger, Fear, and Shame, who threaten Bialacoil with fresh rigours and drive the intruder out. At this the outposts of Love’s army call up the main body to assist him; the defenders take up their positions; and a sort of erotic psychomachia follows. (But not before the author has interrupted us with an apology for his work, which forms the Fifth Digression.) After some dullish fighting, Love asks for a truce and sends messengers to ask the help of Venus. They find her with Adonis (his story is told in the Sixth Digression) and persuade her to accompany them to the front. She threatens the garrison of the castle, and she and Love swear to reduce it. Nature, working at her forge, is pleased to overhear the oath. (Her subsequent dialogue with her confessor Genius—the Seventh Digression—occupies us for about 4,000 lines.) Nature sends Genius to visit Love’s army and present the barons with a pardon. Genius does his pardoner’s work (not without a 2,000 line sermon, the Eighth Digression), the barons cry Amen, and Venus, after calling on the castle in vain to surrender, aims with her bow at a certain image. (It was as fair as that image which Pygmalion loved. Pygmalion’s story, in 1,000 lines, is the Ninth Digression.) Venus then shoots her fiery arrow. The castle bursts into flames. The defenders fly. Bialacoil is rescued and brought before the lover to whom (after a Tenth and last Digression) he surrenders the Rose. The Dreamer wakes.

Even from this summary the case against Jean de Meun becomes apparent. He chose to continue a work in which the unity of subject was conspicuous: but he himself had no interest in that subject. He escaped from it at every turn and seems always to have come back to it with reluctance. And in those passages where he keeps himself to the matter in hand, his treatment is perfunctory and confused. Thus three of his episodes—the descent of Reason, the reassurances of Frend, and the coming of Venus—merely repeat episodes in his original. Again, he is utterly lacking in the power, so necessary for allegory, of keeping the two stories—the psychological and the symbolical—distinct and parallel before his mind. He describes how the Vekke smuggles the lover into Bialacoil’s presence through a window. This is quite meaningless if we take it allegorically. Jean has forgotten that the castle and Bialacoil’s prison within it are purely figurative: he has stumbled into the literal narration of a real intrigue, in which the duenna is admitting the gallant, by a real window, into the house or castle where his mistress lives. He makes the Vekke lecture Bialacoil on the behaviour proper to a young woman, on the deception of husbands and the treatment of lovers; he makes Bialacoil hesitate before accepting the lover’s gift of a chaplet—a hesitation proper only to Shame and Fear—and yield, at last, under the influence of vanity. ‘His’ mirror tells ‘him’ that the chaplet looks very well on ‘his’ fair hair. In other words, Jean de Meun forgets for thousands of lines together that Bialacoil is a ‘young bachelor’. He identifies Bialacoil with the heroine and describes female conduct accordingly: the name, with the masculine pronouns and adjectives which it demands, survives to remind us of the absurdity. The allegory has broken down. It would not be hard to defend such passages on the ground that they look forward to the art of literal love story and spoil the allegory only to give us something better in its place. But in fact they give us something much poorer. The delicate psychological handling without which a long and serious love story is the most tedious of all things, is still possible only by allegorical devices. What Jean really does is to substitute a third-rate literal story for a first-rate allegorical story, and to confuse the one with the other so that we can enjoy neither. When Chrétien slips into allegory, he knows what he is about and subordinates the allegorical digression to the main theme so that it enriches his poem without confusing it; when Jean de Meun, by a reverse process, slips out of allegory, he does so by mere inadvertence, and produces chaos. Clumsiness is the characteristic vice of his work. He is a bungler. His hand is heavy and his fingers, as they say, are ‘all thumbs’.

His digressions constitute a different, but equally serious fault. There are some, indeed, who would excuse them as characteristically medieval, and who would plead that we are here foisting a classical rule, a unity, upon an art to which it is foreign. I admit no such defence. Unity of interest is not ‘classical’; it is not foreign to any art that has ever existed or ever can exist in the world. Unity in diversity if possible—failing that, mere unity, as a second best—these are the norms for all human work, given, not by the ancients, but by the nature of consciousness itself. When schools of criticism or poetry break this rule, this rule breaks them. If medieval works often lack unity, they lack it not because they are medieval, but because they are, so far, bad. Even the irregularity of a medieval street was an accident, and proceeded from no ‘Gothic’ love of wildness. When the Middle Ages dreamed of an ideal town—of the town they would have built if they could—they saw its houses all of the same height:

And ther was non that other hath surmounted

In the cite, but of on heght alyche

It is true that medieval art offends in this respect more often than most art. But this is its disease, not its essence. It failed of unity because it attempted vast designs with inadequate resources. When the design was modest—as in Gawaine and the Green Knight or in some Norman parish churches—or when the resources were adequate—as in Salisbury Cathedral and the Divine Comedy—then medieval art attains a unity of the highest order, because it embraces the greatest diversity of subordinated detail.

The meandering in Jean de Meun’s work is therefore a fault, and a fault fatal to his poem. But of course it is not fatal to his poetry. In reading the second part of the Romance of the Rose, as in reading The Hind and the Panther or the Essay on Criticism, we have to give up the poem as a whole: we are thrown back on the incidental merits, the scattered poetry which survives the ruin of the poem. With these incidental merits, which in the Rose are plentiful and influential, we are now to deal.

V

Of the numerous and incompatible ends which Jean set before him, the most successful, and one of the most frequent though hardly the most significant, is that of instruction. And by instruction I do not mean moral didacticism, but plain lecture-like conveyance of the best contemporary theories in science, history, and philosophy. In this there is nothing peculiar to him. It was the tendency of the age to make every lengthy poem something of an encyclopedia; a tendency eminently natural and reasonable in an age of unspoiled curiosity, when a clerk, riming in the vernacular, became for ‘lewed’ audiences the popularizer of clerkly learning. It may be thought that this extension-lecture function of the medieval poets has nothing to do with their poethood, and does not concern the literary historian; but such a view—as the great example of Dante shows—is too rigid. The kingdoms of pure and applied literature may be as distinct in principle as those of animal and vegetable life, but they are also as indeterminate at the frontier. Certainly good popularized doctrine in verse calls for many of the qualities of the literary artist—clarity, mastery of the medium, appositeness of metaphor, and the like: and if he has really imagined as well as understood his theme—and it is hard to do one without the other—he will slip into poetry and out of it again so often and so unobtrusively that only a very austere Crocean will wish to draw a hard line between the ‘poetry’ and the ‘science’. Jean de Meun possessed in a high degree all the qualifications for this sort of work. He is the best of popularizers and thoroughly deserves the immense influence which his encyclopedic character gave him over his successors. His treatment of the problem of freedom, based on Boethius, is at once far less jerkily prosaic than Chaucer’s, and far more of a real popular résumé of the debate than Dante’s. In the unlikely event of finding a beginner in philosophy who read Old French I should confidently direct him to the Romance of the Rose for an introduction to this particular part of the subject. Jean’s account is much easier going than Boethius’; but I have not been able to find that it is much less cogent and accurate. Other instructive digressions, which call for less power of exposition, are richer in poetical elements, yet without losing their didactic value in irrelevant decoration. Jean’s account of the origin of civil society and the social contract is none the worse doctrine for including a charming picture of ‘the former age’, for that charming picture is an integral part of the theory. His discussion of alchemy, by abstaining from all technical details and giving only the root idea of that science, which is all that a layman can be expected to learn, gives also, as it happens, just that part of the alchemical idea which is truly imaginative. His meteorology, which is given in some detail, blossoms quite naturally and relevantly into pleasing natural description. Thus his science and his poetry appear much more often as allies than as enemies. Where there seems to be a cleavage—in his attack on the superstition of Habundia and her night-riders—it is we who make it. For us the poetry is on the side of the witcheries which the author is condemning, not of the rationalism he upholds. But for him this was not so. A firm rationalistic bias is present in all his scientific passages: he writes to refute vulgar errors. His imagination was not at all seduced by Habundia; if ours is, that is an accident of our historical position. The romantic revival has come in between.

I do not suggest that this side of Jean de Meun’s work is of much significance for the modern reader. We no longer believe the doctrines he teaches, and the roles of poet and extension lecturer are no longer habitually doubled. But though such work has dated, it is our duty as historians to note that such work was once both useful and pleasant, and that Jean de Meun did it very well—probably better than any of his competitors. On this score he thoroughly deserves his fame. He did honest work of the highest quality to satisfy a legitimate demand: and with that recognition, having discharged our consciences, we may turn to the more permanent elements in his talent.

The satiric element, as I have said before, is that which critics have most often attended to. And a satirist Jean de Meun frequently is, often at intolerable length. The subjects of his satire are, in the main, two: women and churchmen. It will be noticed that neither of these is a novel subject for satire. How should they be? Whatever claims reverence risks ridicule. As long as there is any religion we shall laugh at parsons; and if we still (though much less frequently than our grandfathers) make fun of women, that is because the last traces of Frauendienst are not yet wholly lost. In the objects chosen for his satire, then, Jean de Meun follows traditional lines. Even in combining love-poetry with satire on women he follows traditional lines—the lines laid down by Ovid, by the Concilium, and by Andreas Capellanus. There is a misunderstanding abroad that the second part of the Roman de la Rose represents a turning-point in the history of courtly love; that in it, something which had been the object of whole-hearted reverence becomes the object of wholehearted ridicule; that a ‘cynical’ period here succeeds an ‘idealistic’ period. But the truth is that ‘cynicism’ and ‘idealism’ about women are twin fruits on the same branch—are the positive and negative poles of a single thing—and that they may be found anywhere in the literature of romantic love, and mixed in any proportions. In Jean de Meun the emphasis is on the negative, for reasons which will presently appear; but this by no means puts him in a class apart or makes him the pioneer of a ‘cynical’ age. He is well within the tradition and inaugurates no revolution: as he looks back to Ovid and Andreas, so he looks forward to Chaucer (where Pandarus supplies the negative), to Malory (who probably understood the place of Dinadan better than is supposed), to Hawes (who created Godfrey Gobelive), and even to the vituperative element in the sonnet sequences. The negative note was there before him, and it was there after him; but it is not—at any rate among his English followers—more prominent after him than before him. It has nothing to do with a supposed cynical period; it is there for the same reason as the palinode (with which Andreas combined it)—it is there because Frauendienst is not the whole of life, or even of love, and yet pretends to be the whole, and then suddenly remembers that it is not. The history of courtly love from beginning to end may be described as an ‘amorous-odious sonnet’, a ‘scholar’s love or hatred’.

What is the explanation of Jean de Meun’s unusually lengthy excursions into satire? Partly, the explanation is to be found merely in his general vice of diffuseness. He brings many other things besides satire into his poem, and deals with them at equally inordinate length. If the satiric passages appear to be a specially aggravated instance of this his chronic disease, we must remember that for his satire he had almost inexhaustible materials both from earlier writers and from those oral sources which are the small change of every taproom. Where the turf was so smooth a gallop of thousands of couplets proved irresistible. But I am not denying that there is a further reason, and that when we have understood it we shall have the truth behind the popular critical error about the Roman. The truth is that Jean de Meun, though he inaugurates no new ‘period’, is profoundly dissatisfied with the erotic tradition. The error consists in supposing that this dissatisfaction led him solely or primarily to ridicule. In fact, ridicule is only one of the ways in which he endeavours to ‘place’ his lovelore, to find room for it in the complete synthesis of values which he is always groping towards and which he never reaches. The school of Chartres, as I have told, had been similarly troubled, and had attempted to find a modus vivendi not, indeed, between religion and courtly love in particular, but between religion and the courtly life as a whole. Jean de Meun, with a far less explicit consciousness of the problem, and far less ability to solve it, was troubled in the same way. He does not know what to do with this erotic tradition; and he makes spasmodic and inconsistent efforts to do something with it; ‘take it or leave it’ will not satisfy him. Thus in places he falls back on the old simple method of the volte-face and heavy-handed abuse of women. Such is the speech of the Jealous Husband reported by Frend. In other passages—witness the advice of the Vekke to Bialacoil—he adopts the Ovidian method. Women are given ironical instructions; how to fleece their lovers, how to deceive their husbands, how to ‘make up’, and so forth. Or, again, irony of a lighter and more playful sort is used in the conduct of the story itself—as in the scene where Bialacoil receives the chaplet. All these methods are equally satirical, and it is these which are responsible for the common view of Jean de Meun. But these by no means exhaust his repertory: nor are they of more than respectable merits. The scene of Bialacoil and the chaplet, as also the Vekke’s advice to girls, are dearly purchased at the price of the ruin of the allegory. The speech of the husband has a certain vigour and gusto of abuse; but it would argue great ignorance of good satiric writing to put it in the first rank. It is when Jean abandons satire altogether and contends by quite different methods with the problem of Frauendienst that he becomes most truly a poet.

Of these other methods the least original and the least significant is that of the direct and serious palinode—the grave denunciation of love from some higher point of view, which need not be satirical at all, and still less cynical. In such a palinode what is to be said cannot be new: but one of the chief interests of our subject is to observe the varying success with which authors attempted to give a new turn to the inevitable palinode by their treatment. Jean’s method is to put it into the mouth of Reason. In this device he had been anticipated, of course, by Guillaume, and even by Chrétien. But he goes beyond his models, and his own contribution is an interesting one. He represents Reason as a rival mistress pleading for the Dreamer’s love. Later, and in another part of the poem, he was to work out more fully the idea that courtly love is a μίμησις or a parody of which divine love is the archetype; an idea profoundly imaginative and no less profoundly true to history. The speech of Reason contains only the germ or the hint of this solution; but the conception of Reason as mistress, by keeping the rival claims on the hero in pari materia, gives a unity to the whole passage which it would otherwise have lacked. It is a distinct advance on the form of palinode which Andreas had used, and it lends to the character of Reason a dignity and even a pathos which she has not in Guillaume de Lorris. ‘Grant me your love’, says Reason, ‘And then

Thou shalt have at thyn avantage

A leman of so heigh linage

As noon stant in comparisoun;

For goddes doughter, that is croun

Of fadres alle, ich am. Lo see

Of whiche a forme he made mee!

See her thiself in my visage!

There is no maid of heigh parage

Hath leve in love ben so large;

Mi fader yaf hit mee in charge

Loven and love for to graunte;

Therof me thar no shame daunte,

Ne thou of shame tak no kepe;

Mi fader wol thee sauve and kepe

The bet, and fede us bothe tweie.

    How liketh hit thee that I seye?

That god that doth thee so awede,

Can he so wel his folkes fede?

Foles that maken him homages

Han thei therof so riche wages?

    For Crist ne seyeth me nat No!

God woot hit is greet shonde and wo,

A maiden for to ben refused,

For why, to axen sche is used

Ful lyte . . .

A second and more interesting way in which Jean deals with courtly love is learned from the school of Chartres. He attempts, spasmodically, to depart from the conventions, not into ridicule or direct denunciation, but into a genuinely naturalistic theory of sex, as of a thing noble in its place and not to be repented of. This point of view, as I have said, appears—like all Jean’s thoughts—intermittently and without much attempt on his part to harmonize it with any system. It appears in Frend’s speech in the conception of marriage as a state that could be both happy and honourable if ‘maistrie’ were banished and the maxims of Chaucer’s franklin adopted. It appears in the scene between Reason and the Dreamer, where Reason, having referred to certain physiological facts as plainly as Reason would, is accused of being unmaidenly and indecent. But Reason cannot understand the charge. She has learned her manner of speech from God.

God, the courteis, but vileinye,

Of whom is alle courtesye.

She is fully prepared to defend her practice.

For in my life I dide amis

Nevere, ne do nat now, iwis,

Thogh ich withouten glose name

Tho thinges by hir propre name

That of his owne hond and thoght

In paradis mi fader wroght.

The courtly lover is as embarrassed as Gulliver was among the horses, and can only plead that, if God made the things, at least he did not make the names by which Reason refers to them. A modern reader is reminded of Shaw’s dictum—‘it is impossible to explain decency without being indecent’. The whole scene implies a criticism of courtly love far more damaging than the bludgeon work of Jean de Meun’s explicitly satirical passages. That the spirit of polite adultery should be genuinely shocked by the unrepentant grossness of the divine Wisdom—should wish, like Milton’s enemies, to speak more cleanly than God—is a conception as profound as it is piquant.

But this passage—though, in its way, the gem of the whole Romance—is only a prelude to the appearance in person of Nature at a later stage in the poem. Nature and her priest Genius (the god of reproduction) hold the stage for nearly five thousand lines. These lines are crowded with digressions and we forget the speakers, as we so often do in the Romance of the Rose; but in its earlier phases this unwieldy passage is nothing less than a triumphal hymn in honour of generation and of Nature’s beauty and energy at large. It has really nothing to do with courtly love. Nature is introduced working at her forge not in the interests of human sentiment but in the interests of human perpetuity; labouring without rest and without weariness to keep her lead in a race with death. Death catches all individuals but cannot reach the inviolable Form: to preserve that Form incarnate the goddess is ever beating out new coins from those eternal stamps of hers which art imitates in vain. It is for this reason that Nature rejoices when she hears the great oath which Love and Venus swear to take the castle. Her joy is based on an interest equally indifferent to human morality—that is not Nature’s business—and to human refinements of feeling. What has impressed the poet—no doubt through the pages of Bernardus—is a vivid sense of the ageless fecundity, the endless and multiform going on, of life. This sweeps aside both his traditional love-lore and his traditional condemnation of it. And, what is more, this passes easily and inevitably into the expression of his delight in natural beauty. His ‘Nature’ is no abstraction. He does not forget in the personification Natura that visible nature which confronted him in the valley of the Loire. The traditional refusal to describe Nature takes on new beauty in his hands. The more he thinks of her, the less he can say,

For God, that fair is but measure,

Of fairnesse, in dame Nature,

When he hir schoop, sette a rivere

That evere in oon goth ful and clere;

Of hit the shore and sours noon can,

Of hit al other fair bigan.

I dar not in making desface

With worde hir faiture and hir face,

Who is so fresshe, fair, and gai,

That lilye flour in month of mai,

Ne rose on reise and snow on tree

Nis nat so reed and whyt to see.

This intuition of natural beauty, reinforcing and reinforced by his devotion to Nature, appears elsewhere in Jean de Meun; in his description of the flowers in the Good Pasture, of rain and floods and their effect on fairy life, of Venus resting in the woods. It is not often that the headlong course of his ideas allows him to rest in mere imagery: but we feel that in him a good ‘nature poet’ (in the modern sense) was lost. The sky-scenery of the following lines, though marred by some of the quaintnesses he had learned from Alanus, goes beyond the usual medieval recipe of May morning and singing birds. The clouds observe that the fine weather is coming back; and then

Therof greet iolitee thei taken

And to be fair and fresshe, maken

Robes newe aftir hir dolour

Of many queynt and glad colour,

And hongen oute hir fleeces clene

To dreye ayein the sonne shene,

And goon a-scatered on lofte

When wederis ben warm and softe:

Tho spinnen thei and casten oute

Foisoun of white threed aboute.

It was the misfortune of Jean de Meun to have read and remembered everything: and nothing that he remembered could be kept out of his poem. Mystical ideas were present to his mind along with naturalistic ideas: from his natural treatment of sex he reverts, towards the end of the poem, to the mystical parallel of human and divine love which he had hinted at in the speech of Reason. This final attempt to ‘do something’ with courtly love is made, oddly and clumsily enough, through the mouth of Genius: not that justifications, both subtle and pleasing, cannot be found, but that Jean has not found them. From the lips of Genius we learn for the first time that the garden of Love and Delight is, after all, only the imitation of a different garden; and not only a copy, but that misleading kind of copy which the philosophers call Schein rather than Erscheinung,

For who made comparisoun

Hit wer a greet misprisioun,

Sauf that comparisoun that is

Betwixen trouthe and fable iwis.

When we have seen the true garden we look back and realize that the garden of courtly love is an impostor. The well in Love’s garden with its two crystal springs is but a parody of the triune well that rises in the ‘park of good pasture’. The one garden contains corruptibles, the other incorruptibles. Yet they are curiously alike, too. Each is enclosed in its four-square wall: and each is carved with images on the outer side of that wall. On the wall of Love’s garden, as the reader will remember, we had such figures as Time, Vilanye, and Papelardie. On the wall of the ‘good park’, as we should expect, are the sins and the devils: but a reader who has not the taste for this sort of thing will learn with surprise that we find there also the earth and the stars, and in fact the whole material universe. But Jean de Meun is right. He is talking of the realissimum, of the Centre, of that which lies beyond the ‘sensuous curtain’: and to that, not only hell and sin and courtly love, but the world and all that is in it, and the visible heaven, are but painted things—appearances on the outside of the wall whose inside no one has seen. What the wall shows from without are, in fine, phenomena.

Who lokede on that park withoute,

Portrayed on the wal but doute

Are alle develes and depe helle,

Ful feendliche on to see and felle,

And every vyce and eek outrage

That hath in helle his herbergage,

And Cerberus our aller foo;

Ther mihte he loke on erthe also

And these secree richesses olde

That erthe can in barme folde;

Ther openly he mihte see

The fisshes fletinge in the see,

The salte see and alle his thinges;

Wateres bittere, swete springes,

And creatures alderkynne

These smale wateres withinne,

And in the eyre briddes goon

And smale flyes everychoon

That maken aldai soun and route;

Also the fyr that faste aboute

Clippeth the reste and the meving

Of thelementes in a ring.

This is the outer face of the wall, the side we know. If we could pass the wall we should see the white flocks, who are not shorn or slaughtered any more, following their Shepherd through the good pastures. The turf there is covered with little flowers which the sheep browse on, but whose number never decreases and whose freshness never withers. For all this region is out of the reach of time. Never does Jean de Meun show himself a truer poet than when he touches on the idea of eternity—of all metaphysical ideas the richest in poetic suggestion. If the pleasure I take in these lines is ‘philosophical’, then so is my pleasure in Kilmeny, and in folk tales and morning dreams innumerable.

For alwey stant in oo moment

Hir dai that nevere night hath shent,

Ne hit conquered nevere a del;

For no mesure temporel

Hit nath, but alwey as at prime

That brighte dai, withouten time

Of temps futur ne preterit,

Also hit laugheth, evere abit.

And it is this walled garden, apparently, which we were really in search of all the time, and by aping which the garden of Cupid seduced us; and of that lesser garden we can say, in the long run, no more than this, that

Tho thinges in that garden smale

Nis but lesinge and trotevale.

This passage represents Jean’s highest reach as a poet. No one who remembers the fatuity of most poetical attempts to describe heaven—the dull catalogues of jewellery and mass-singing—will underrate this green park, with its unearthly peace, its endless sunshine and fresh grass and grazing flocks. It represents also what may be called his point of maximum differentiation: in this passage he is most unlike Chaucer, or Guillaume de Lorris, or (for the matter of that) Dante. Does it also represent his final view of love? The answer, I think, is that Jean de Meun has no final view either of love or of anything else. This is but another aspect of his formlessness. The same defect which prevented him from writing a poem (as opposed to a mere heap of poetry) prevented him also from combining his ideas into any consistent whole. His work reads best in quotation because his mind—if I may hazard the metaphor—reads best in quotation. On any subject presented to him—and his reading presented him with nearly every subject—he can think vigorously; and from his thought his imagination catches fire: and he has language at will to make poetry of that result. But it is always a short flight. To-morrow he will be thinking differently, feeling differently, making a different kind of poetry. He lacks the power, or the will, to unify these inspired moments. Thus he tackles the problem of courtly love in several different ways, and tackles it in all of them with considerable success. In one place he is all for ridicule; and the ridicule (though it contains none of his best work) is lively enough. In another place he follows the school of Chartres; and his naturalism about sex produces noble verses. In a third place he will be a mystic; and on this theme of human and divine love he keeps a respectable place, despite the greatness of those who here become his rivals. But while all these solutions are good, the fatal defect is that they really have nothing to do with one another. They could have been connected. The doctrine that human sexuality is the μίμησις of which divine love is the παράδειγμα is not incompatible with the doctrine that human sexuality, in its place, is a glorious energy of nature; and neither of these is incompatible with scathing satire on human abuse of sexuality. All Jean’s ideas were, in themselves, capable of fusion, but he could not fuse them. The nature and extent of his failure become clear as soon as we think of Dante. Odd as it may sound, it is none the less true that the materials of the two poets are very nearly the same. It is almost true to say that there was nothing in Dante which was not also in Jean de Meun—except Dante himself. In both we find the same starting-point—courtly love: in both the same stores of scholastic learning and the same determination to impart them: the same unfettered range of heterogeneous experiences, both actual and imagined. If it is said that they differ in merely technical power, I reply that technique is itself only one manifestation of the unifying faculty. The power which welds raw masses of experience into a whole is the same which, in the single phrase, elicits from the chaos of language the perfect words and the perfect syntactical device. Thus, in a sense, Jean lacked nothing which Dante had, except the power to co-ordinate. But that exception is fatal. Because of it, Dante remains a strong candidate for the supreme poetical honours of the world, while Jean de Meun is read only by professional scholars, and not by very many of them.

This is not simply to repeat, at excessive length, that the Divine Comedy is a better poem than the Romance of the Rose. We do not need to be told that: but perhaps we do need to know precisely how, and how far, the Romance is bad. For there are many kinds of failure, and not every unsuccessful poet can say, as Jean de Meun could, inopem me copia fecit. Some poets, we know, have failed because they ‘never spoke out’, but that is not Jean de Meun’s trouble. No writer is less jejune, none gives us a greater sense of wide resources. If he lacks the bones of good poetry, he has all its flesh. And this explains how the Romance, though a failure, is a great failure. It explains why the Romance is the typical poem of the Middle Ages in a sense in which the Comedy is not—typical in its richness and variety, and typical also in its radical vices. It explains that enormous influence from which Chaucer—say what we will of his ‘Italian’ period—never at any stage of his career escaped. In the work of Jean de Meun succeeding generations found almost everything ready to their hands. Though he had not, like Dante, conquered, he had at least journeyed round the whole world of ideas and social life and character, and brought together spoils from every part of it. He had, for his immediate followers, the practical utility of a general store, and for us he retains some of its chaotic attraction; and all this without prejudice to those passages of pure poetry into which he often rises—I had almost said ‘tumbles’—unawares.

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