Alas, for their disappointment, when adverse winds and endless altercations kept the invaders safe at home! There was a great deal of solid enjoyment lost on both sides, though wealthy citizens counted their gains in peace. War was not only a recognized business, but a recognized pleasure as well, and noble knights relieved their heavy fighting with the gentler diversions of the tournament and the chase. When Edward III. entered France for the last time, he carried with him thirty falconers laden with hawks, sixty couples of strong hounds, and as many greyhounds, “so that every day he had good sport, either by land or water. Many lords had their hawks and hounds as well as the king.”
A merry life while the sun shone; and if it set early for most of these stout warriors, their survivors had but little leisure to lament them. It is not easy to read Froissart’s account of certain battles, serious enough in their results, without being strangely impressed by the boyish enthusiasm with which the combatants went to work; so that even now, five centuries later, our blood tingles with their pleasurable excitement. When France undertook to support the Earl of Flanders against Philip van Arteveld and the rebellious citizens of Ghent, the Flemish army entrenched themselves in a strong position on the river Lys, destroying all bridges save one, which was closely guarded. The French, in the dead of night, crossed the river in rickety little boats, a handful of men at a time, and only a mile or so distant from the spot where nine thousand of the enemy lay encamped. Apparently they regarded this hazardous feat as the gayest kind of a lark, crowding like schoolboys around the boats, and begging to be taken on board. “It was a pleasure to see with what eagerness they embarked,” says the historian; and indeed, so great was the emulation, that only men of noble birth and tried valor were permitted to cross. Not a single varlet accompanied them. After infinite labor and danger, some twelve hundred knights—the flower of French chivalry—were transported to the other side of the river, where they spent the rest of a cold and stormy November night standing knee-deep in the marshes, clad in complete armor, and without food or fire. At this point the fun ceases to sound so exhilarating; but we are assured that “the great attention they paid to be in readiness kept up their spirits, and made them almost forget their situation.” When morning came, these knights, by way of rest and breakfast, crossed the intervening country, fell upon the Flemish ranks, and routed them with great slaughter; for what could a mass of untrained artisans do against a small body of valiant and accomplished soldiers? A few days later, the decisive battle of Rosebecque ended the war. Van Arteveld was slain, and the cause of democracy, of “the ill intentioned,” as Froissart for the most part designates the toiling population of towns, received its fatal blow.
Yet this courtly chronicler of battles and deeds of chivalry is not without a sense of justice and a noble compassion for the poor. He disapproves of “commonalties” when they assert their claims too boisterously; he fails to detect any signs of sapience in a mob; and he speaks of “weavers, fullers, and other ill-intentioned people,” as though craftsmen were necessarily rebellious,—which perhaps was true, and not altogether a matter for surprise. But the grievous taxes laid upon the French peasantry fill him with indignation; the distress of Ghent, though brought about, as he believes, by her own pride and presumption, touches him so deeply that he grows eloquent in her behalf; and he records with distinct approbation the occasional efforts made by both the French and the English kings to explain to their patient subjects what it was they were fighting about. Eloquent bishops, he tells us, were sent to preach “long and fine sermons,” setting forth the justice of the respective claims. “In truth, it was but right that these sovereigns, since they were determined on war, should explain and make clear to their people the cause of the quarrel, that they might understand it, and have the better will to assist their lords and monarchs.” Above all, he gives us a really charming and cheerful picture of the French and English fishermen, who went quietly about their daily toil, and bore each other no ill will, although their countries were so hard at war. “They were never interrupted in their pursuits,” he says, “nor did they attack each other; but, on the contrary, gave mutual assistance, and bought or sold, according as they had more fish or less than they required. For if they were to meddle in the national strife, there would be an end of fishing, and none would attempt it unless supported by men-at-arms.” So perhaps there is one lesson of common sense and forbearance we may learn, even now, from those barbarous days of old.
As for the personal touches which give such curious vitality to Froissart’s pages, they belong naturally to an unscientific age, when history,—or what passed as such,—biography, court gossip, and legendary lore were all mingled together, with no vexatious sifting of material. The chronicler tells us in ample detail every separate clause of an important treaty, and then breaks off to recount, at great length and with commendable gravity, the story of the Lord de Corasse and his familiar demon, Orthon, who served him out of pure love, and visited him at night, to the vexation and terror of his lady wife. We hear in one chapter how the burghers of Ghent spoiled all the pleasure of the Lord d’Estournaz’s Christmas by collecting and carrying away his rents, “which made him very melancholy,” as well it might; and in the next we are told in splendid phrases of the death of Duke Wenceslaus of Bohemia, “who was, in his time, magnificent, blithe, prudent, amorous, and polite. God have mercy on his soul!” It is hard to see how anything could be better described, in fewer words, than the disastrous expedition of William of Hainault against the Frieslanders. “About the feast of St. Rémy, William, Earl of Hainault, collected a large body of men-at-arms, knights, and squires, from Hainault, Flanders, Brabant, Holland, Gueldres, and Juliers, and, embarking them on board a considerable fleet at Dordrecht, made sail for Friesland; for the Earl considered himself as lord thereof. If the Frieslanders had been people to listen to the legality and reasonableness of the claim, the Earl was entitled to it. But as they were obstinate, he exerted himself to obtain it by force, and was slain, as well as a great many other knights and squires. God forgive them their sins!”
Surely that line about the unreasonable Frieslanders is worthy of Carlyle,—of Carlyle whose grim and pregnant humor lurks beneath sentences that, to the unwary, seem as innocent as the sheathed dagger before the blade is sprung. He it was who hated with a just and lively abhorrence all constitutional histories, and all philosophy of history, as likewise “empty invoice lists of Pitched Battles and Changes of Ministry,”—as dead, he declared, as last year’s almanacs, “to which species of composition they bear, in several points of view, no inconsiderable affinity.” He it was, moreover, who welded together history and literature, and gave us their perfect and harmonious union in the story of the “Diamond Necklace.” The past was enough for Carlyle, when he worked amid her faded parchments, and made them glow with renewed color and fire. That splendid pageant of events, that resistless torrent of life, that long roll-call of honored names which we term comprehensively history, had for him a significance which needed neither moral nor maxim to confirm it. If we can believe with him that it is better to revere great men than to belittle them, better to worship blindly than to censure priggishly, better to enlarge our mental vision until it embraces the standards of other centuries than to narrow it in accordance with the latest humanitarian doctrine,—then we may stray safely through the storied past, until even Froissart, writing in a feudal chimney-corner strange tales of chivalry and carnage, will have for us a message of little practical service, but of infinite comfort in hours of idleness and relaxation. It is an engaging task to leave the present, so weighted with cumbersome enigmas and ineffectual activity, and to go back, step by step, to other days, when men saw life in simpler aspects, and moved forward unswervingly to the attainment of definite and obvious desires.
One voice has been recently raised with modest persistence in behalf of old-fashioned history,—history which may possibly be inaccurate here and there, but which gives to the present generation some vivid insight into the lives of other generations which were not without importance in their day. Now that we are striving to educate every class of people, whether they respond to our advances or not, it is at least worth while to make their instruction as pleasant and as profitable as we can. Mr. Augustus Jessopp, whose knowledge of the agricultural classes is of that practical and intimate kind which comes of living with them for many years in sympathy and friendship, has a right to be heard when he speaks in their behalf. If they must be taught in scraps and at the discretion of committees, he believes that the Extension lecturers who go about dispensing “small doses of Ruskin and water, or weak dilutions of Mr. Addington Symonds,” would be better employed in telling the people something of their own land and of their rude forefathers. And this history, he insists, should be local, full of detail, popular in character, and without base admixture of political science, so that the rustic mind may accustom itself to the thought of England, in all Christian ages, as a nation of real people; just as Tom Tulliver woke gradually, under the stimulating friction of Maggie’s questions, to the astonishing conviction that the Romans were once live men and women, who learned their mother tongue through some easier medium than the Latin grammar.
Again and again Mr. Jessopp has tried the experiment of lecturing on local antiquities and the dim traditions of ancient country parishes; and he has always found that these topics, which carried with them some homely and familiar flavor of the soil, awoke a deep and abiding interest in minds to which abstract ethics and technical knowledge appealed alike in vain. School boards may raise the cry for useful information, and fancy that a partial acquaintance with chlorides and phosphates is all that is necessary to make of a sulky yokel an intelligent agriculturist and a contented citizen; but a man must awaken before he can think, and think before he can work, and work before he can realize his position and meaning in the universe. And it needs a livelier voice than that of elementary chemistry to arouse him. “The Whigs,” said Sir Walter Scott, “will live and die in the belief that the world is ruled by pamphlets and speeches;” and a great many excellent people in every country will live and die in the belief that the world is ruled by printed books, full of proven and demonstrable truths. But we, the world’s poor children, sick, tired, and fractious, know very well that we never learn unless we like our lesson, and never behave ourselves unless inspired by precept and example. The history of every nation is the heritage of its sons and daughters; and the story of its struggles, sufferings, misdeeds, and glorious atonements is the story that keeps alive in all our hearts that sentiment of patriotism, without which we are speeding swiftly on our path to national corruption and decay.
THE ROYAL ROAD OF FICTION.
“A tale,” says that charming scholar and critic, M. Jusserand, “is the first key to the heart of a child, the last utterance to penetrate the fastnesses of age.” And what is true of the individual is true also of the race. The earliest voice listened to by the nations in their infancy was the voice of the story-teller. Whether he spoke in rude prose or in ruder rhyme, his was the eloquence which won a hearing everywhere. All through the young world’s vigorous, ill-spent manhood it found time mid wars, and pestilence, and far migrations to cherish and cultivate the first wild art of fiction. We, in our chastened, wise, and melancholy middle age, find still our natural solace in this kind and joyous friend. And when mankind grows old, so old we shall have mastered all the knowledge we are seeking now, and shall have found ourselves as far from happiness as ever, I doubt not we shall be comforted in the twilight of existence with the same cheerful and deceptive tales we hearkened to in childhood. Facts surround us from the cradle to the grave. Truth stares us coldly in the face, and checks our unmeaning gayety of heart. What wonder that we turn for pleasure and distraction to those charming dreams with which the story-teller, now grown to be a novelist, is ever ready to lure us away from everything that it is comfortable to forget.
And it was always thus. From the very beginning of civilization, and before civilization was well begun, the royal road of fiction ran straight to the hearts of men, and along it traveled the gay and prosperous spinners of wondrous tales which the world loved well to hear. When I was a little girl, studying literature in the hard and dry fashion then common in all schools, and which was not without its solid advantages after all, I was taught, first that “Pamela” was the earliest English novel; then that “Robinson Crusoe” was the earliest English novel; then that Lodge’s “Rosalynde” was the earliest English novel. By the time I got that far back, I began to see for myself, what I dare say all little girls are learning now, that the earliest English novel dates mistily from the earliest English history, and that there is no such thing as a firm starting-point for their uncertain feet to gain. Long, long before Lodge’s “Rosalynde” led the way for Shakespeare’s “Rosalind” to follow, romantic tales were held in such high esteem that people who were fortunate enough to possess them in manuscript—the art of printing not having yet cheapened such precious treasures—left them solemnly by will to their equally fortunate heirs. In 1315, Guy, Earl of Warwick, bequeathed to Bordesley Abbey in Warwickshire his entire library of thirty-nine volumes, which consisted almost exclusively, like the library of a modern young lady, of stories, such as the “Romaunce de Troies,” and the “Romaunce d’Alisaundre.” In 1426, Thomas, Duke of Exeter, left to his sister Joan a single book, perhaps the only one he possessed, and this too was a romance on that immortal knight and lover, Tristram.