Above all, these fabliaux served as an exercise-ground for the practice in which French was to become almost if not quite supreme, the practice of narrative. In the longer romances, which for a century or a century and a half preceded the fabliaux, the art of narration, as has been more than once noticed, was little attended to, and indeed had little scope. The chansons had a common form, or something very like it, which almost dispensed the trouvère from devoting much pains to the individual conduct of the story. The most abrupt transitions were accustomed, indeed expected; minor incidents received very little attention; the incessant fighting secured the attention of the probable hearers by itself; the more grandiose and striking incidents—the crowning of Prince Louis and the indignation of William at his sister's ingratitude, for instance—were not "engineered" or led up to in any way, but left to act in mass and by assault.
Conditions of fabliau-writing.
The smaller range and more delicate—however indelicate—argument of the fabliaux not only invited but almost necessitated a different kind of handling. The story had to draw to point in (on an average) two or three hundred lines at most—there are fabliaux of a thousand lines, and fabliaux of thirty or forty, but the average is as just stated. The incidents had to be adjusted for best effect, neither too many nor too few. The treatment had to be mainly provocative—an appeal in some cases by very coarse means indeed to very coarse nerves, in others by finer devices addressed to senses more tickle o' the sere. And so grew up that unsurpassed and hardly matched product the French short story, where, if it is in perfection, hardly a word is thrown away, and not a word missed that is really wanted.
The appearance of irony.
The great means for doing this in literature is irony; and irony appears in the fabliaux as it had hardly done since Lucian. Take, for instance, this opening of a piece, the rest of which is at least as irreverent, considerably less quotable, but not much less pointed:—
"Quant Dieus ot estoré lo monde,
Si con il est à la reonde,
Et quanque il convit dedans,
Trois ordres establir de genz,
Et fist el siecle demoranz
Chevalers, clers et laboranz.
Les chevalers toz asena
As terres, et as clers dona
Les aumosnes et les dimages;
Puis asena les laborages
As laborenz, por laborer.
Qant ce ot fet, sanz demeler
D'iluec parti, et s'en ala."
What two orders were left, and how the difficulty of there being nothing left for them was got over, may be found by the curious in the seventy-sixth fabliau of the third volume of the collection so often quoted. But the citation given will show that there is nothing surprising in the eighteenth-century history, literary or poetical, of a country which could produce such a piece, certainly not later than the thirteenth. Even Voltaire could not put the thing more neatly or with a more complete freedom from superfluous words.
Fables proper.
It will doubtless have been observed that the fabliau—though the word is simply fabula in one of its regular Romance metamorphoses, and though the method is sufficiently Æsopic—is not a "fable" in the sense more especially assigned to the term. Yet the mediæval languages, especially French and Latin, were by no means destitute of fables properly so called. On the contrary, it would appear that it was precisely during our present period that the rather meagre Æsopisings of Phædrus and Babrius were expanded into the fuller collection of beast-stories which exists in various forms, the chief of them being the Ysopet (the name generally given to the class in Romance) of Marie de France, the somewhat later Lyoner Ysopet (as its editor, Dr Förster, calls it), and the original of this latter, the Latin elegiacs of the so-called Anonymus Neveleti.[137] The collection of Marie is interesting, at least, because of the author, whose more famous Lais, composed, it would seem, at the Court of Henry III. of England about the meeting of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and forming a sort of offshoot less of the substance of the Arthurian story than of its spirit, are among the most delightful relics of mediæval poetry. But the Lyons book perhaps exhibits more of the characteristic which, evident enough in the fabliau proper, discovers, after passing as by a channel through the beast-fable, its fullest and most famous form in the world-renowned Romance of Reynard the Fox, one of the capital works of the Middle Ages, and with the sister but contrasted Romance of the Rose, as much the distinguishing literary product of the thirteenth century as the romances proper—Carlovingian, Arthurian, and Classical—are of the twelfth.
Reynard the Fox.