British Quarterly Review, American Edition, Vol. LIV / July and October, 1871

by Various

Or, again, the Rose was the Virgin Mary—the Rose of Jericho, pure and spotless, and not to be touched by human hands.

Fourthly: it was the rose which the Queen of Sheba gave to Solomon, which signified eternal happiness. The interpretations of Molinet and Marot are both manifestly absurd, and represent the pedantic trifling of a time when the taste for double allegories had been carried to a ridiculous extent. And as for Jean de Meung's part, there are plenty of touches in it which show that the writer, though no heretic, had little sympathy with church matters; and would certainly not be disposed to spend his time in laboriously concocting a riddle of twenty thousand lines, the answer to which was to be found in the Romish creed. And in Guillaume de Lorris himself, it is difficult to find a word for or against the Church.

He was, no doubt, mindful of the stern lesson read to heretics in the crusade of Provence, fresh in all men's recollection. But he had been nurtured and fed on the poetry of the troubadours; the form of his verse and the turn of his thought were Provençal. Was it likely that so young a writer should escape the spirit of the literature while he studied its form? And since in a time of violent religious excitement, he can find no word of sympathy for a church which persecutes, is it not probable that his sympathies are, if not with the Church persecuted, at least with the people? The probability, moreover, of there being a double allegory in the 'Romance of the Rose,' as planned originally by Guillaume de Lorris, appears to us to be strengthened by a further consideration of the Provençal literature and the line of its development.

Love, in a time when life had few pleasures and distractions to offer—when these were generally only to be snatched in the intervals of fighting—became not only the symbol of all life's joy, but grew into a kind of religion. It had its own ritual, its ceremonies, its sacraments, its lessons, and its hymns. Aged poets were its bishops, the guardians of its forms; young poets its priests; instead of the images of saints, were living women, and instead of the procession and the chant, were the love song and the dance. It was nothing new to the Provençal to celebrate the religious worship with a dance. He alone, among Christians, preserved a custom handed down from old pagan times, and as late as the sixteenth century, the worthy people of Marseilles welcomed Christmas in this way.

The other sex would naturally offer few obstacles to a homage which, though it sometimes destroyed their virtue, always flattered their vanity, and invested them with a power which was beyond that of kings. Princes, indeed, might make men rich, but women alone could make men happy. An accurate knowledge of love's ceremonies became part of the education of a gentleman; these were reduced, like those of chivalry, to a sort of code; questions of law, so to speak, arose, which were tried with great solemnity at courts of law where ladies were judges; appeals from these decisions were often made to higher courts, and there is every reason to believe that the Arrêts d'Amour, numerous examples of which are given in the work of Martial d'Auvergne, were courts as serious and as gravely disputed in times of peace, as those which decided other differences of opinion. From being, therefore, the legitimate end of a young man's hope, the chief solace of his life, love grew gradually to be surrounded by all sorts of restrictions and ceremonies, and losing its charm of spontaneity and freedom, was idealized until it lost itself, and became the mere shadow of a poetic dream. As every idea, pushed beyond its legitimate limits, provokes some kind of rebellion, two streams of thought presently diverged from the main channel, one of them, with which we have nothing to do, satirical, cynical, earthly and gross; the other, religious. Sexual love is only possible, or is strongest when life is young and the blood is strong and hopeful; as years creep on and the end of things approaches, its insufficiency to satisfy the cravings of the soul must become, even to its most ardent votary, more and more deeply apparent. The days when a smile from his mistress made him, according to the rules of the craft, happy, or a frown miserable, would leave behind them, when they had passed away, an increased sense of the real seriousness of life; while at the best of times, the art of love would not be felt as anything but elegant trifling, and the passion which it excited, transitory. Women, too, the object of all this homage, were really, though they might not know it, degraded by what was intended to do them honour. And let those who lament the subjection of the sex, own that the extravagant honour paid to ladies in the Middle Ages has had something, at least, to do with it. From some such feelings as the above, we believe it came to pass that the poet began first to imagine, and then to contrive, for his love songs a deeper and a mystical meaning. The sentiment of nearly all the Provençal poets, as regards women, was delicate, elevating to themselves, and enthusiastic. Women are to men, in the poet's imagination, what heaven is to earth; their gentleness contrasts with man's ferocity, their weakness with his strength, their strength with his weakness. Love is the principle of all honour and merit, the mainspring of every noble action; its desires and its pleasures are only legitimate, inasmuch as they are as a stimulus to the painful duties of chivalry; the springs of poetry are in love; without love there is nothing that civilizes, softens, or elevates. But earthly love, so high, so pure, so separated from the common instincts of the world, is but a type of that infinitely higher and purer heavenly love. All the allegories of the poets are to be read in a deeper sense by those who are initiated into the mysteries, and when a poet sings songs of love, he is singing songs of a mysterious religion.

That this was the case with all the troubadours, or even with most of them, we do not affirm; that it was at one time believed to be true of all of them seems tolerably clear. And no doubt many an honest bard, quite simply putting down his thoughts about his mistress's lips, or the tangles of her hair, would have been astonished to hear that he was preaching the glories of the Virgin, or advocating a free and Pope-less Church. On the supposition that Guillaume de Lorris was one of those who had learned from the troubadours the art of double allegory, and that he conveyed religious teaching under this disguise, we should expect to find the key to his poem in the religious difficulties of his time. It is not, at least, difficult to get at these.

The people of Provence[51] had always mixed freely with the educated Mahometans of Spain, and the wealthy Jews who lived among them: their own Christianity sat lightly upon them, as a cloak, the fashion of which might at any time be altered; theology was held in universal disesteem, and the priesthood, taken from the lowest strata of society, were objects of pity and contempt: a widespread heresy existed, which does not appear to have had much, if anything to do with modern Protestantism, holding 'erroneous views' on Baptism and the Eucharist, rejecting the Old Testament, denying the authority and necessity of the priesthood, and even repudiating, in some cases, marriage itself. It was growing rapidly not only in Switzerland and Languedoc but also in the Nord, in England, and in Germany, by means of wandering bards, who scattered their new doctrines broadcast wherever they went. By local persecutions and burnings, attempts were made to stop it, but in vain; and Rome saw with consternation a province the most cultivated, the most richly endowed with genius, the most wealthy, that from which the greatest help for the Church was to be expected, a prey to free thought of the most unbridled kind.

As soon as persecution began, or even suspicion of the truth, the poets would see the necessity for veiling their thoughts under carefully-constructed allegories, and while they chanted a monotonous refrain on one of the many rules of love, secretly inculcated a code of doctrines more subversive than any the Church had yet combated. Occasionally we hear a voice which speaks aloud, and plainly enough, to let us know the kind of thing that was whispered. Thus Fauriel gives the following from Pierre Cardinal.[52] He is considering the insoluble problem of suffering and evil, and cries, with a boldness that has more despair than blasphemy in it—'At the Last Day I shall say, myself, to God that He fails in His duty to His children if He thinks to destroy them and plunge them into Hell.... God ought to use gentleness and to keep His souls from trespass.'

Voluptuous, loose in morals, satirical, and careless as these poets were, they yet have the merit of boldly using thought, and carrying conviction to its logical and legitimate end. They anticipated the movement of the fifteenth century, without its knowledge and higher light: their penalty was extermination, thorough and complete. The land was destroyed; its cities burned; the people massacred; Pope and kings combined to make a desert, and to call it peace.

What could the Church do more? What indeed, could she do less? For the war was a struggle for existence, and the heresies of Provence were only the most formidable in a general movement of free thought which shook the powers of Rome to its very foundations. But one thing the Church could not do. The flame of insubordination and opposition could be handed down in secret. Things that could not be attacked openly, might be attacked secretly. There were secret societies in the Middle Ages, which had a real and definite object, the danger and the terror of the Church.[53] And to this day Rome excommunicates the members of all secret societies, whether the mild and convivial Freemason or the bloodthirsty Fenian. The Society of Jesus is the only secret society to which a Roman Catholic may belong. Guillaume de Lorris belongs to a time when doctrine was secretly assailed; his successor, Jean de Meung, to a time when practice was openly assailed. For men very soon left off attacking their enemies by allegory, and Guillaume de Lorris, if he was indeed one of that school, was one of its last disciples.