It would, however, be extremely unfair to let it be supposed that the fabliaux contain nothing but obscenity, or that they can offer attractions to no one save those whom obscenity attracts. As in those famous English followings of them, where Chaucer considerably reduced the licence of language, and still more considerably increased the dose of wit—the Reeve's and Miller's sections of the Canterbury Tales—the lack of decency is very often accompanied by no lack of sense. And a certain proportion, including some of the very best in a literary point of view, are not exposed to the charge of any impropriety either of language or of subject.
Definition and subjects.
There is, indeed, no special reason why the fabliau should be "improper" (except for the greater ease of getting a laugh) according to its definition, which is capable of being drawn rather more sharply than is always the case with literary kinds. It is a short tale in verse—almost invariably octosyllabic couplets—dealing, for the most part from the comic point of view, with incidents of ordinary life. This naturally admits of the widest possible diversity of subject: indeed it is only by sticking to the condition of "ordinary life" that the fabliau can be differentiated from the short romance on one side and the allegoric beast-fable on the other. Even as it is, its most recent editors have admitted among their 157 examples not a few which are simple jeux d'esprit on the things of humanity, and others which are in effect short romances and nothing else. Of these last is the best known of all the non-Rabelaisian fabliaux, "Le Vair Palefroi," which has been Englished by Leigh Hunt and shortly paraphrased by Peacock, while examples of the former may be found without turning very long over even one of M. M. de Montaiglon and Raynaud's pretty and learned volumes. A very large proportion, as might be expected, draw their comic interest from satire on priests, on women, or on both together; and this very general character of the fabliaux (which, it must be remembered, were performed or recited by the very same jongleurs who conducted the publication of the chansons de geste and the romances) was no doubt partly the result and partly the cause of the persistent dislike and disfavour with which the Church regarded the profession of jonglerie. It is, indeed, from the fabliaux themselves that we learn much of what we know about the jongleurs; and one of not the least amusing[134] deals with the half-clumsy, half-satiric boasts of two members of the order, who misquote the titles of their répertoire, make by accident or intention ironic comments on its contents, and in short do not magnify their office in a very modern spirit of humorous writing.
Every now and then, too, we find, in the half-random and wholly scurrile slander of womankind, a touch of real humour, of the humour that has feeling behind it, as here, where a sufficiently ribald variation on the theme of the "Ephesian matron" ends—
"Por ce teng-je celui à fol
Qui trop met en fame sa cure;
Fame est de trop foible nature,
De noient rit, de noient pleure,
Fame aime et het en trop poi d'eure:
Tost est ses talenz remuez,
Qui fame croit, si est desvès."
So too, again, in "La Housse Partie," a piece which perhaps ranks next to the "Vair Palefroi" in general estimation, there is neither purely romantic interest, as in the Palfrey, nor the interest of "the pity of it," as in the piece just quoted; but an ethical purpose, showing out of the mouth of babes and sucklings the danger of filial ingratitude.
But, as a general rule, there is little that is serious in these frequently graceless but generally amusing compositions. There is a curious variety about them, and incidentally a crowd of lively touches of common life. The fisherman of the Seine starts for his day's work or sport with oar and tackle; the smith plies the forge; the bath plays a considerable part in the stories, and we learn that it was not an unknown habit to eat when bathing, which seems to be an unwise attempt to double luxuries. A short sketch of mediæval catering might be got out of the fabliaux, where figure not merely the usual dainties—capons, partridges, pies well peppered—but eels salted, dried, and then roasted, or more probably grilled, as we grill kippered salmon. Here we have a somewhat less grimy original—perhaps it was actually the original—of Skelton's "Tunning of Elinor Rumming"; and in many places other patterns, the later reproductions of which are well known to readers of Boccaccio and the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles of La Fontaine and his followers. Title after title—"Du Prestre Crucifié," "Du Prestre et d'Alison," &c.—tells us that the clergy are going to be lampooned. Sometimes, where the fun is no worse than childish, it is childish enough—plays on words, jokes on English mispronunciation of French, and so forth. But it very seldom, though it is sometimes intolerably nasty, approaches the sheer drivel which appears in some English would-be comic writing of the Middle Ages, or the very early Renaissance—such, for instance, as most of that in the prose "Pleasant Historie of Thomas of Reading,"[135] which the late Mr Thoms was pleased to call a romance. Yet the actual stuff of "Thomas of Reading" is very much of the nature of the fabliaux (except of course the tragical part, which happens to be the only good part), and so the difference of the handling is noteworthy. So it is also in English verse-work of the kind—the "Hunting of the Hare"[136] and the like—to take examples necessarily a little later than our time.
Effect of the fabliaux on language.
For in these curious compositions the esprit Gaulois found itself completely at home; indeed some have held that here it hit upon its most characteristic and peculiar development. The wonderful faculty for expression—for giving, if not the supreme, yet the adequate and technically masterly dress to any kind of literary production—which has been the note of French literature throughout, and which was never more its note than at this time, enabled the language, as we have seen and shall see, to keep as by an easy sculling movement far ahead of all its competitors. But in other departments, with one or two exceptions, the union of temper and craft, of inspiration and execution, was not quite perfect. Here there was no misalliance. As the language lost the rougher, fresher music which gives such peculiar attraction to the chansons, as it disused itself to the varied trills, the half-inarticulate warblings which constitute the charm of the lyrics, so it acquired the precision, the flexibility, the netteté, which satiric treatment of the follies and evil chances of life, the oddities of manners and morals, require. It became bright, if a little hard, easy, if a little undistinguished, capable of slyness, of innuendo, of "malice," but not quite so capable as it had been of the finer and vaguer suggestions and aspirations.
And on narrative.