But sooner or later men will talk and sing and think and compose in the speech which is closest to them. The Romance tongues became literary through this human need of natural expression. There always had been songs in the old Vulgar Latin; and such did not cease as it gradually became what one may call Romance. Moreover, the clergy might be impelled to use the popular speech in preaching to the laity, or some unlearned person might compose religious verses. Almost the oldest monument of Old French is the hymn in honour of Ste. Eulalie. Then as civilization advanced from the tenth to the twelfth century, in southern and northern France for example, and the langue d’oc and the langue d’oil became independent and developed languages, unlearned men, or men with unlearned audiences, would unavoidably set themselves to composing poetry in these tongues. In the North the chansons de geste came into existence; in the South the knightly Troubadours made love-lyrics. Somehow, these poems were written down, and there was literature for men’s eyes as well as for men’s ears.
In the twelfth century and the thirteenth, the audiences for Romance poetry, especially through the regions of southern and northern France, increased and became diversified. They were made up of all classes, save the brute serf, and of both sexes. The chansons de geste met the taste of the feudal barons; the Arthurian Cycle charmed the feudal dames; the coarse fabliaux pleased the bourgeoisie; and chansons of all kinds might be found diverting by various people. If the religious side was less strongly represented, it was because the closeness of the language to the clerkly and liturgical Latin left no such need of translations as was felt from the beginning among peoples of Germanic speech. Still the Gospels, especially the apocryphal, were put into Old French, and miracles de Notre Dame without number; also legends of the saints, and devout tales of many kinds.
The accentual verses of the Romance tongues had their source in the popular accentual Latin verse of the later Roman period. Their development was not unrelated to the Latin accentual verse which was superseding metrical composition in the centuries extending, one may say, from the fifth to the eleventh. Divergences between the Latin and Romance verse would be caused by the linguistic evolution through which the Romance tongues were becoming independent languages. Nor was this divergence uninfluenced by the fact that Romance poetry was popular and usually concerned with topics of this life, while Latin poetry in the most striking lines of its evolution was liturgical; and even when secular in topic tended to become learned, since it was the product of the academically educated classes. Much of the vernacular (Romance as well as Germanic) poetry in the Middle Ages was composed by unlearned men who had at most but a speaking acquaintance with Latin, and knew little of the antique literature. This was true, generally, of the Troubadours of Provence, of the authors of the Old French chansons de geste, and of such a courtly poet as Chrétien de Troies; true likewise of the great German Minnesingers, epic poets rather, Gottfried von Strassburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and Walther von der Vogelweide.
On the other hand, vernacular poetry might be written by highly learned men, of whom the towering though late example would be Dante Alighieri. An instance somewhat nearer to us at present is Jean Clopinel or de Meun, the author of the second part of the Roman de la rose. His extraordinary Voltairean production embodies all the learning of the time; and its scholar-author was a man of genius, who incorporated his learning and the fruit thereof very organically in his poem.
But here, at the close of our consideration of the mediaeval appreciation of the Classics, and the relations between the Classics and mediaeval Latin literature, we are not occupied with the very loose and general question of the amount of classical learning to be found in the vernacular literatures of western Europe. That was a casual matter depending on the education and learning, or lack thereof, of the author of the given piece. But it may be profitable to glance at the passing over of antique themes of story into mediaeval vernacular literature, and the manner of their refashioning. This is a huge subject, but we shall not go into it deeply, or pursue the various antique themes through their endless propagations.
Antique stories aroused and pointed the mediaeval imagination; they made part of the never-absent antique influence which helped to bring the mediaeval peoples on and evoke in them an articulate power to fashion and create all kinds of mediaeval things. But with antique story as with other antique material, the Middle Ages had to turn it over and absorb it, and also had to become themselves with power, before they could refashion the antique theme or create along its lines. All this had taken place by the middle of the twelfth century. As to choice of matter, twelfth-century refashioners would either select an antique theme suited to their handling, or extract what appealed to them from some classic story. In the one case as in the other they might recast, enlarge, or invent as their faculties permitted.
Mediaeval taste took naturally to the degenerate productions of the late antique or transition centuries. The Greek novels seem to have been unknown, except the Apollonius of Tyre.[332] But the congenially preposterous story of Alexander by the Pseudo-Callisthenes was available in a sixth-century Latin version, and was made much of. Equally popular was the debasement and intentional distortion of the Tale of Troy in the work of “Dares” and “Dictys”; other tales were aptly presented in Ovid’s Metamorphoses; and the stories of Hero and Leander, of Pyramus and Thisbe, of Narcissus, Orpheus, Cadmus, Daedalus, were widely known and often told in the Middle Ages.
The mediaeval writers made as if they believed these tales. At least they accepted them as they would have their own audiences accept their recasting, with little reflection as to whether truth or fable. But was the work of the refashioners conscious fiction? Scarcely, when it simply recast the old story in mediaevalizing paraphrase; but when the poet went on and wove out of ten lines a thousand, he must have known himself devising.
The mediaeval treatment of classic themes of history and epic poetry shows how the Middle Ages refashioned and reinspired after their own image whatever they took from the antique. If it was partly their fault, it was also their unavoidable misfortune that they received these great themes in the literary distortions of the transition centuries. Doubtless they preferred encyclopaedic dulness to epic unity; they loved fantasy rather than history, and of course delighted in the preposterous, as they found it in the Latin version of the Life and Deeds of Alexander. As for the Tale of Troy, the real Homer never reached them: and perhaps mediaeval peoples who were pleased, like Virgil’s Romans, to draw their origins from Trojan heroes, would have rejected Homer’s story just as “Dares” and “Dictys,” whoever they were, did.[333] The true mediaeval rifacimenti, to wit, the retellings of these tales in the vernacular, mirror the mediaeval mind, the mediaeval character, and the whole panorama of mediaeval life and fantasy.
The chief epic themes drawn from the antique were the Tales of Troy and Thebes and the story of Aeneas. In verse and prose they were retold in the vernacular literatures and also in mediaeval Latin.[334] We shall, however, limit our view to the primary Old French versions, which formed the basis of compositions in German, Italian, English, as well as French. They were composed between 1150 and 1170 by Norman-French trouvères. The names of the authors of the Roman de Thebes and the Eneas are unknown; the Roman de Troie was written by Benoit de St. More.