Studies in the History of the Renaissance/Aucassin and Nicolette
AUCASSIN AND NICOLETTE[1].
The history of the Renaissance ends in France and carries us away from Italy to the beautiful cities of the country of the Loire. But it was in France also, in a very important sense, that the Renaissance had begun; and French writers, who are fond of connecting the creations of Italian genius with a French origin, who tell us how Saint Francis of Assisi took not his name only, but all those notions of chivalry and romantic love which so deeply penetrated his thoughts, from a French source, how Boccaccio borrowed the outlines of his stories from the old French fabliaux and how Dante himself expressly connects the origin of the art of miniature painting with the city of Paris, have often dwelt on this notion of a Renaissance in the end of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth century,—a Renaissance within the limits of the middle age itself, a brilliant but in part abortive effort to do for human life and the human mind what was afterwards done in the fifteenth. The word Renaissance indeed is now generally used to denote not merely that revival of classical antiquity which took place in the fifteenth century, and to which the word was first applied, but a whole complex movement, of which that revival of classical antiquity was but one element or symptom. For us the Renaissance is the name of a many-sided but yet united movement, in which the love of the things of the intellect and the imagination for their own sake, the desire for a more liberal and comely way of conceiving life, make themselves felt, prompting those who experience this desire to seek first one and then another means of intellectual or imaginative enjoyment, and directing them not merely to the discovery of old and forgotten sources of this enjoyment, but to divine new sources of it, new experiences, new subjects of poetry, new forms of art. Of this feeling there was a great outbreak in the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the following century. Here and there, under rare and happy conditions, in Pointed architecture, in the doctrines of romantic love, in the poetry of Provence, the rude strength of the middle age turns to sweetness; and the taste for sweetness generated there becomes the seed of the classical revival in it, prompting it constantly to seek after the springs of perfect sweetness in the Hellenic world. And coming after a long period in which this instinct had been crushed, that true 'dark age,' in which so many sources of intellectual and imaginative enjoyment had actually disappeared, this outbreak is rightly called a Renaissance, a revival.
Theories which bring into connection with each other modes of thought and feeling, periods of taste, forms of art and poetry, which the narrowness of men's minds constantly tends to oppose to each other, have a great stimulus for the intellect and are almost always worth understanding. It is so with this theory of a Renaissance within the middle age, which seeks to establish a continuity between the most characteristic work of the middle age, the sculpture of Chartres and the windows of Lemans, and the work of the later Renaissance, the work of Jean Cousin and Germain Pilon, and thus heals that rupture between the middle age and the Renaissance which has so often been exaggerated. But it is not so much the ecclesiastical art of the middle age, its sculpture and painting,—work certainly done in a great measure for pleasure's sake, in which even a secular, a rebellious spirit often betrays itself,—but rather the profane poetry of the middle age, the poetry of Provence, and the magnificent aftergrowth of that poetry in Italy and France, which those French writers have in view when they speak of this Renaissance within the middle age. In that poetry, earthly passion, in its intimacy, its freedom, its variety—the liberty of the heart—makes itself felt; and the name of Abelard, the great clerk and the great lover, connects the expression of this liberty of heart with the free play of human intelligence round all subjects presented to it, with the liberty of the intellect, as that age understood it. Every one knows the legend of Abelard, that legend hardly less passionate, certainly not less characteristic of the middle age, than the legend of Tannhäuser; how the famous and comely clerk, in whom Wisdom herself, self-possessed, pleasant, and discreet, seemed to sit enthroned, came to live in the house of a canon of the church of Notre-Dame, where dwelt a girl Héloïse, believed to be his orphan niece, his love for whom he had testified by giving her an education then unrivalled, so that rumour even asserted that, through the knowledge of languages, enabling her to penetrate into the mysteries of the older world, she had become a sorceress, like the Celtic druidesses; and how as they sat together in that shadowy home, to refine a little further on the nature of abstract ideas, 'Love made himself of the party with them.' You conceive the temptations of the scholar in that dreamy tranquillity, who, amid the bright and busy spectacle of 'the Island,' lived in a world of something like shadows; and how for one who knew so well to assign its exact value to every abstract idea, those restraints which lie on the consciences of other men had been relaxed. It appears that he composed many verses in the vulgar tongue; already the young men sang them on the quay below the house. Those songs, says M. de Rémusat, were probably in the taste of the Trouvères, of whom he was one of the first in date, or, so to speak, the predecessor; it is the same spirit which has moulded the famous 'letters' written in the quaint Latin of the middle age. At the foot of that early Gothic tower, which the next generation raised to grace the precincts of Abelard's school on the 'mountain' of Saint Genevieve, the historian Michelet sees in thought 'a terrible assembly; not the hearers of Abelard alone, fifty bishops, twenty cardinals, two popes, the whole body of scholastic philosophy: not only the learned Héloïse, the teaching of languages and the Renaissance; but Arnold of Brescia,—that is to say, the revolution.'
And so from the rooms of that shadowy house by the Seine side we see that spirit going abroad, with its qualities already well-defined, its intimacy, its languid sweetness, its rebellion, its subtle skill in dividing the elements of human passion, its care for physical beauty, its worship of the body; which penetrated the early literature of Italy and finds an echo in Dante.
The central love-poetry of Provence, the poetry of the Tenson and the Aubade, of Bernard de Ventadour and Pierre Vidal, is poetry for the few, for the elect and peculiar people of the kingdom of sentiment. But below this intenser poetry there was probably a wide range of literature, less serious and elevated, reaching, by lightness of form and comparative homeliness of interest, an audience which the concentrated passion of those higher lyrics left untouched. This literature has long since perished, or lives only in later French or Italian versions. One such version, the only representative of its species, M. Fauriel thought he detected in the story of Aucassin and Nicolette, written in the French of the latter half of the thirteenth century, and preserved in a unique manuscript in the national library of Paris; and there were reasons which made him divine for it a still more ancient ancestry, traces in it of an Arabian origin, as in a leaf lost out of some early Arabian Nights. The little book loses none of its interest by the criticism which finds in it only a traditional subject, handed on from one people to another; for after passing thus from hand to hand, its outline is still clear and its surface untarnished; and, like many other stories, books, literary and artistic conceptions of the middle age, it has come to have in this way a sort of personal history almost as full of risk and adventure as that of its own heroes. The writer himself calls the piece a cantefable, a tale told in prose, but with its incidents and sentiment helped forward by songs, inserted at irregular intervals. In the junctions of the story itself there are signs of roughness and want of skill which make one suspect that the prose was only put together to connect a series of songs,—a series of songs so moving and attractive that people wished to heighten and dignify their effect by a regular framework or setting. Yet the songs themselves are of the simplest kind, not rhymed even, but only imperfectly assonant, stanzas of twenty or thirty lines apiece, all ending with a similar vowel sound. And here, as elsewhere in that early poetry, much of the interest is in the spectacle of the formation of a new artistic sense. A new music is arising, the music of rhymed poetry, and in the songs of Aucassin and Nicolette, which seem always on the point of passing into true rhyme, but which halt somehow, and can never quite take flight, you see people just growing aware of the elements of a new music in their possession, and anticipating how pleasant such music might become. The piece was probably intended to be recited by a company of trained performers, many of whom, at least for the lesser parts, were probably children. The songs are introduced by the rubric 'Or se cante'—ici on chante; and each division of prose by the rubric, 'Or dient et content et fabloient'—ici on conte. The musical notes of part of the songs have been preserved; and some of the details are so descriptive that they suggested to M. Fauriel the notion that the words had been accompanied throughout by dramatic action. That mixture of simplicity and refinement which he was surprised to find in a composition of the thirteenth century is shown sometimes in the turn given to some passing expression or remark; thus, 'the Count de Garins, was old and frail, his time was over:—Li quens Garins de Beaucaire estoit vix et frales; si avoit son tans trespassè.' And then all is so realised! One still sees the ancient forest of Gastein, with its disused roads grown deep with grass, and the place where seven roads meet—'u a forkeut set cemin qui s'en vont par le païs—we hear the lighthearted country people calling each other by their rustic names, and putting forward as their spokesman one among them who is more eloquent and ready than the rest—'li un qui plus fu enparlés des autres'; for the little book has its burlesque too, so that one hears the faint far-off laughter still. Rough as it is, the piece has certainly this high quality of poetry that it aims at a purely artistic effect. Its subject is a great sorrow, yet it claims to be a thing of joy and refreshment, to be entertained not for its matter only, but chiefly for its manner; it is 'cortois,' it tells us, 'et bien assis.'
For the student of manners and of the old French language and literature it has much interest of a purely antiquarian order. To say of an ancient literary composition that it has an antiquarian interest, often means that it has no distinct æsthetic interest for the reader of to-day. Antiquarianism, by a purely historical effort, by putting its object in perspective and setting the reader in a certain point of view from which what gave pleasure to the past is pleasurable for him also, may often add greatly to the charm we receive from ancient literature. But the first condition of such aid must be a real, direct, æsthetic charm in the thing itself; unless it has that charm, unless some purely artistic quality went to its original making, no merely antiquarian effort can ever give it an æsthetic value or make it a proper object of æsthetic criticism. These qualities, when they exist, it is always pleasant to define, and discriminate from the sort of borrowed interest which an old play, or an old story, may very likely acquire through a true antiquarianism. The story of Aucassin and Nicolette has some of these qualities. Aucassin, the only son of Count Garins of Beaucaire, is passionately in love with Nicolette, a beautiful girl of unknown parentage, bought of the Saracens, whom his father will not permit him to marry. The story turns on the adventures of these two lovers until at the end of the piece their mutual fidelity is rewarded. These adventures are of the simplest sort, adventures which seem to be chosen for the happy occasion they afford of keeping the eye of the fancy, perhaps the outward eye, fixed on pleasant objects, a garden, a ruined tower, the little hut of flowers which Nicolette constructs in the forest as a token to Aucassin that she has passed that way. All the charm of the piece is in its details, in a turn of peculiar lightness and grace given to the situations and traits of sentiment, especially in its quaint fragments of early French prose.
All through it one feels the influence of that faint air of overwrought delicacy, almost of wantonness, which was so strong a characteristic of the poetry of the Troubadours. The Troubadours themselves were often men of great rank; they wrote for an exclusive audience, people of much leisure and great refinement, and they came to value a type of personal beauty which has in it but little of the influence of the open air and sunshine. There is a faint Eastern delicacy in the very scenery of the story, the full-blown roses, the chamber painted in some mysterious manner where Nicolette is imprisoned, the cool brown marble, the almost nameless colours, the odour of plucked grass and flowers. Nicolette herself well becomes this scenery, and is the best illustration of the quality I mean, the beautiful weird foreign girl whom the shepherds take for a fay, who has the knowledge of simples, the healing and beautifying qualities of leaves and flowers, whose skilful touch heals Aucassin's sprained shoulder, so that he suddenly leaps from the ground; the mere sight of whose white flesh, as she passed the place where he lay, healed a pilgrim stricken with sore disease, so that he rose up and returned to his own country. With this girl Aucassin is so deeply in love that he forgets all knightly duties. At last Nicolette is shut up to get her out of his way, and perhaps the prettiest passage in the whole piece is the fragment of early prose which describes her escape from this place.
'Aucassin was put in prison, as you have heard, and Nicolette remained shut up in her chamber. It was summer-time, in the month of the May, when the days are warm and long and clear, and the nights coy and serene.
'One night Nicolette, lying on her bed, saw the moon shine clear through the little window and heard the nightingale sing in the garden, and then came the memory of Aucassin whom she so much loved. She thought of the Count Garins of Beaucaire, who so mortally hated her, and to be rid of her might at any moment cause her to be burned or drowned. She perceived that the old woman who kept her company was asleep; she rose and put on the fairest gown she had; she took the bed-clothes, and other pieces of stuff, and knotted them together like a cord as far as they would go. Then she tied the end to a pillar of the window and let herself slip down quite softly into the garden, and passed straight across it to reach the town.
'Her hair was fair, in small curls, her eyes smiling and of a greenish-blue colour, her face feat and clear, the little lips very red, the teeth small and white; and the daisies which she crushed in passing, holding her skirt high behind and before, looked dark against her feet; the girl was so white!
'She came to the garden-gate and opened it, and walked through the streets of Beaucaire, keeping on the dark side of the street to avoid the light of the moon which shone quietly in the sky. She walked as fast as she could until she came to the tower where Aucassin was. The tower was set about with pillars here and there. She pressed herself against one of the pillars, wrapped herself close in her mantle, and putting her face to a chink of the tower, which was old and ruined, she heard Aucassin crying bitterly within, and when she had listened a while she began to speak.'
But scattered up and down through this lighter matter, always tinged with humour, and often passing into burlesque, which makes up the general substance of the piece, there are morsels of a different quality, touches of some intenser sentiment, coming it would seem from the profound and energetic spirit of the Provençal poetry itself, to which the inspiration of the book has been referred. Let me gather up these morsels of deeper colour, these expressions of the ideal intensity of love, the motive which really unites together the fragments of the little composition. Dante, the perfect flower of that ideal love, has recorded how the tyranny of that 'Lord of terrible aspect' became actually physical, blinding his senses and suspending his bodily forces. In this, Dante is but the central expression and type, of experiences known well enough to the initiated, in that passionate age. Aucassin represents this ideal intensity of passion—
Li gentix, li amorous;—'
the slim, tall, debonair figure, dansellon, as the singers call him, with curled yellow hair and eyes of vair, who faints with love, as Dante fainted, who rides all day through the forest in search of Nicolette, while the thorns tear his flesh so that one might have traced him by the blood upon the grass, and who weeps at evening because he has not found her; who has the malady of his love so that he neglects all knightly duties. Once he is induced to put himself at the head of his people, that they, seeing him before them, might have more heart to defend themselves; then a song relates how the sweet grave figure goes forth to battle in dainty tight-laced armour. It is the very image of the Provençal love-god, no longer a child but grown to pensive youth, as Pierre Vidal met him, riding on a white horse, fair as the morning, his vestment embroidered with flowers. He rode on through the gates into the open plain beyond. But as he went that strong malady of his love came upon him, so that the bridle fell from his hands; and like one who sleeps walking, he was carried on into the midst of the enemy, and heard them talking together how they might most conveniently kill him.
One of the strongest characteristics of that outbreak of the reason and the imagination, of that assertion of the liberty of the heart in the middle age, which I have termed a mediæval Renaissance, was its antinomianism, its spirit of rebellion and revolt against the moral and religious ideas of the age. In their search after the pleasures of the senses and the imagination, in their care for beauty, in their worship of the body, people were impelled beyond the bounds of the primitive Christian ideal; and their love became a strange idolatry, a strange rival religion. It was the return of that ancient Venus, not dead, but only hidden for a time in the caves of the Venusberg, of those old pagan gods still going to and fro on the earth, under all sorts of disguises. The perfection of culture is not rebellion but peace; only when it has realised a deep moral stillness has it really reached its end. But often on the way to that end there is room for a noble antinomianism. This element in the middle age, so often ignored by those writers on it, who have said so much of the 'Ages of Faith,' this rebellious and antinomian element, the recognition of which has made the delineation of the middle age by the writers of the Romantic school in France, by Victor Hugo for instance, in 'Notre Dame de Paris,' so suggestive and exciting, is found alike in the history of Abelard and the legend of Tannhäuser. More and more as we come to mark changes, and distinctions of temper, in what is often in one all-embracing confusion called the middle age, this rebellious element, this sinister claim for liberty of heart and thought, comes to the surface. The Albigensian movement, connected so strangely with the history of Provençal poetry, is deeply tinged with it. A touch of it makes the Franciscan order, with its poetry, its mysticism, its illumination, from the point of view of religious authority, justly suspect. It influences the thoughts of those obscure prophetical writers, like Joachim of Flora, strange dreamers in a world of flowery rhetoric of that third and final dispensation of a spirit of freedom, in which law has passed away. Of this spirit Aucassin and Nicolette contains perhaps the most famous expression; it is the answer Aucassin makes when he is threatened with the pains of hell, if he makes Nicolette his mistress.
'En paradis qu'ai-je à faire[2]? répondit Aucassin. Je ne me soucie d'y aller, pourvu qui j'aie seulement Nicolette, ma douce mie, qui j'aime tant. Qui va en paradis, sinon telles gens, comme je vous dirai bien? Ces vieux prêtres y vont, ces vieux boiteux, ces vieux manchots, qui jour et nuit se cramponnent aux autels, et aux chapelles. Aussi y vont ces vieux moines en guenilles, qui marchent nu-pieds ou en sandales rapiécetées, qui meurent de faim, de soif et de mésaises. Voilà ceux qui vont en paradis; et avec telles gens n'ai je que faire. Mais en enfer je veux bien aller; car en enfer vont les bons clercs et les beaux chevaliers morts en bataille et en fortes guerres, les braves sergents d'armes et les hommes de parage. Et avec tons ceux-là veux-je bien aller. En enfer aussi vont les belles courtoises dames qui, avec leurs maris, ont deux amis ou trois. L'or et l'argent y vont, les belles fourrures, le vair et le gris. Les joueurs de harpe y vont, les jongleurs et les rois du monde; et avec eux tons veux-je aller, pourvu seulement qu'avec moi j'aie Nicolette, ma très-douce mie.'