The use of personification and abstraction, especially in relation to love-matters, had not been unknown in the troubadour poetry itself and in the northern verse, lyrical and other, which grew up beside or in succession to it. It rose no doubt partly, if not wholly, from the constant habit in sermons and theological treatises of treating the Seven Deadly Sins and other abstractions as entities. Every devout or undevout frequenter of the Church in those times knew "Accidia"[143] and Avarice, Anger and Pride, as bodily rather than ghostly enemies, furnished with a regular uniform, appearing in recognised circumstances and companies, acting like human beings. And these were by no means the only sacred uses of allegory.
William of Lorris and Jean de Meung.
When William of Lorris, probably at some time in the fourth decade of the thirteenth century, set to work to write the Romance of the Rose, he adjusted this allegorical handling to the purposes of love-poetry with an ingenious intricacy never before attained. It has been the fashion almost ever since the famous Romance was rescued from the ignorant and contemptuous oblivion into which it had fallen, to praise Jean de Meung's part at the expense of that due to William of Lorris. But this is hard to justify either on directly æsthetic or on historical principles of criticism. In the first place, there can be no question that, vitally as he changed the spirit, Jean de Meung was wholly indebted to his predecessor for the form—the form of half-pictorial, half-poetic allegory, which is the great characteristic of the poem, and which gave it the enormous attraction and authority that it so long possessed. In the second place, clever as Jean de Meung is, and more thoroughly in harmony as he may be with the esprit gaulois, his work is on a much lower literary level than that of his predecessor. Jean de Meung in the latter and larger part of the poem simply stuffs into it stock satire on women, stock learning, stock semi-pagan morality. He is, it is true, tolerably actual; he shares with the fabliau-writers and the authors of Renart a firm grasp on the perennial rascalities and meannesses of human nature. The negative commendation that he is "no fool" may be very heartily bestowed upon him. But he is a little commonplace and more than a little prosaic. There is amusement in him, but no charm: and where (that is to say, in large spaces) there is no amusement, there is very little left. Nor, except for the inappropriate exhibition of learning and the strange misuse of poetical (at least of verse) allegory, can he be said to be eminently characteristic of his own time. His very truth to general nature prevents that; while his literary ability, considerable as it is, is hardly sufficient to clothe his universally true reflections in a universally acceptable form.
The first part.
The first four thousand and odd lines of the Romance, on the other hand—for beyond them it is known that the work of William of Lorris does not go—contain matter which may seem but little connected with criticism of life, arranged in a form completely out of fashion. But they, beyond all question, contain also the first complete presentation of a scheme, a mode, an atmosphere, which for centuries enchained, because they expressed, the poetical thought of the time, and which, for those who can reach the right point of view, can develop the right organs of appreciation, possess an extraordinary, indeed a unique charm. I should rank this first part of the Roman de la Rose high among the books which if a man does not appreciate he cannot even distantly understand the Middle Ages; indeed there is perhaps no single one which on the serious side contains such a master-key to their inmost recesses.
Its capital value.
To comprehend a Gothic cathedral the Rose should be as familiar as the Dies Iræ. For the spirit of it is indeed, though faintly "decadent," even more the mediæval spirit than that of the Arthurian legend, precisely for the reason that it is less universal, less of humanity generally, more of this particular phase of humanity. And as it is opposed to, rather than complementary of, the religious side of the matter in one direction, so it opposes and completes the satirical side, of which we have heard so much in this chapter, and the purely fighting and adventurous part, which we have dealt with in others, not excluding by any means in this half-reflective, half-contrasting office, the philosophical side also. Yet when men pray and fight, when they sneer and speculate, they are constrained to be very like themselves and each other. They are much freer in their dreams: and the Romance of the Rose, if it has not much else of life, is like it in this way—that it too is a dream.
As such it quite honestly holds itself out. The author lays it down, supporting himself with the opinion of another "qui ot nom macrobes," that dreams are quite serious things. At any rate he will tell a dream of his own, a dream which befell him in his twentieth year, a dream wherein was nothing
"Qui avenu trestout ne soit
Si com le songes racantoit."
And if any one wishes to know how the romance telling this dream shall be called—