The permanent value of knowledge is always before him, and having learnt a great deal himself, what wonder that he should empty it all out, only now and again giving the tale a perfunctory prod forward before continuing his discourse? Knowledge comes always before culture, and knowledge taken with such abandon is almost inspiriting. I cannot be bored by a scholar who in the thirteenth century is so independent and so frank. Eager quarry work such as his had to precede the refined statuary of the Renaissance, and in The Romance of the Rose the pedagogue is far too human to be dismissed as a dealer in books alone. Wisdom and observation were not disunited in him, and there are in that rambling, various repository of learning promises enough of realistic story-telling and of the criticism of life, sufficiently valuable to excuse its atrocious narrative, even were that not justified by the classical allusion with which it is so abundantly loaded. It gives me pleasure to hear Jean Clopinel defend plain speaking, and, protesting against calling spades anything but spades, prepare the way for Rabelais. What matter if the romance suffer a little, and the Rose lie pressed beneath a weight of scholarship? Jean himself moves on unhampered. He talked of women's table-manners so well that Chaucer himself could do no better than borrow from him. He attacked womenkind in general so mercilessly (with the authority of the classics behind him) that he won a stern rebuke from Christine de Pisan, that popular authoress of a century later, just as Schopenhauer might be censured by Miss Corelli. He looks at kings, and, turning away, remarks that it is best, if a man wishes to feel respectful towards them, that he should not see them too close. Nor does he forget to let us know his views on astronomy, on immortality, or his preference of nature over art in sculpture and painting. This last opinion of his is an illustration of that good and honest Philistinism that he needed for his work. All these things and a thousand others he puts, without a shudder, into the continuation of a story on the art of loving, that begins with a spring morning account of a dreamer's vision of a rose and a garden, and Mirth and Idleness, Youth and Courtesy, dancing together as if in a picture by Botticelli.
In Meung six hundred years ago.
I went down that night just after sunset and crossed the river in the dusk. Resting in the middle of the bridge and looking over the dim reflections to the far-distant bank, with its grove of huge trees, and the tower of the church with the outline of the gateway on the hill behind just showing against the sky, I dreamed that I was back in the old days, when the minstrel was giving place to the scholar, and that up there on the hill, in the little town of Meung, was Jean, Doctor of Divinity, poring at his books. I remembered the bust by Desvergnes, that beautiful scholar's face, and thought how strong a personality his must have been, to leave after six hundred years and more the memory of himself and the feeling of his time so vividly impressed upon the town. For even now, though they do not read his book in Meung, they know all about it, and talk of him with that reverence in speaking that children use when they talk of a master whom they do not often see. I could not help feeling that their attitude was traditional. It has been the same for all these years, and perhaps long ago the townsfolk, passing in the narrow streets, hushed themselves before one door, and whispered, 'Yes; he is in there writing a book; there are not many who can do that,' while old Jean Clopinel inside nursed his lame leg and dipped from folio to folio, as he took gem and pebble from the dead tongue and put his vivid thought and gleeful knowledge in black letter on the parchment, in black-lettered French, the speech of his own people, that all might see how fine a thing it was to look into antiquity and to be wise.
CHAUCER AND BOCCACCIO
CHAUCER AND BOCCACCIO
The Romancers before Chaucer.