Harness their steeds, and mount and fly
O'er valleys deep and mountains high.'
It is needless, after what has been said, to pursue any further the story of the romance. There is not much lost by this omission, because the work has really little or nothing to do with the allegory, and might simply be called, 'The Opinions of Jean de Meung.' Our object is to show what actually were the opinions of a scholar of liberal views in the thirteenth century.
They may be divided into four classes, foremost of which, in his own mind, stands his hatred of monks. In religion he was not an infidel, or even a heretic; he was simply in opposition. He writes, not against sacerdotalism, but against the inversion of recognised order by the vagabond friars. Order, indeed, he would insist upon as strenuously as Hooker himself; but order he would subordinate to what he deems the most essential thing, personal holiness. To decry, deride, and hurl contempt on the monastic orders: to put into the strongest possible words the inarticulate popular hatred of these was, we believe, his leading thought when he began his book.
His second idea was to make an angry, almost furious protest against the extravagant respect paid to women, and an onslaught on their follies and vices. It is very curious, and shows how little he was trammelled by his allegory, that he fails altogether to see how entirely out of place is such an attack in the 'Romance of the Rose.'
He had two other principal ideas: one to communicate in the common tongue as much science as the world could boast; and the other, to circulate certain principles of vague socialism and hesitating republicanism which were then beginning to take the place of those religious speculations which occupied men's minds in the early part of the century.
Jean de Meung's was not the only book of the time which aimed at being an encyclopædia, but it was by far the best known and the most widely répandu. There were written towards the close of the thirteenth century certain collections called trésors, which were designed to contain everything that was to be learned, quicquid scibile, in mathematics, physics, astronomy, alchemy, music, speculative philosophy, and theology. They were generally in verse; one of the best of them being by a monk, called 'Mainfroi,' which professedly contained the Arabic learning, borrowed from the Moors in Spain. Probably Jean de Meung had access to this. Readers of old English literature will also remember that dreariest of dreary books, Gower's 'Confessio Amantis,' into which the hapless student plunges without hope, and emerges without profit, having found nothing but vapid imitation, monotonous repetition, and somnolent platitudes. The 'Confessio' is a trésor, and designed to contain all the science of the time. It is adapted, so far as the science goes, from a trésor called the Secretum Secretorum.
Let us, then, gather some of the opinions of our author, classifying them according to this fourfold division. It may be premised that the division was not thought of by the poet, from whom, indeed, sequence and method are not to be expected.
Liberal thought, in the time of Jean de Meung, did not attack the domain of doctrine, partly, perhaps, from an unwillingness to meet the probable consequences of a charge of heresy; indeed, when doctrine came in its way, it seems to have leaned in the direction of orthodoxy. Thus we find Jean de Meung siding with Guillaume de St. Amour in an attack on the 'Eternal Gospel,' that most extraordinary book, ascribed to Joachim, Abbot of Flora,[54] which was intended to have the same relation to Christianity which Christianity bears to Judaism, to be at once its fulfilment and its abolition, which was to inaugurate the third and last, the perfect age, that of the Holy Spirit. The mendicants, an ignorant, credulous body, quite incapable of appreciating cause or consequence of teaching, espoused the cause of the book; Guillaume de St. Amour arraigned them, not only of the ordinary vices attributed to them—vices entirely contrary to their vows—but as preachers of doctrines pernicious, false, and heretical. Probably Jean de Meung was actuated by esprit de corps, Guillaume de St. Amour being a champion of the University of Paris, as well as by hatred to the monks, and, in spite of his hard words, was not moved strongly by any specially inimical feeling towards the book. Following the instincts of his time, however, he flatly ascribes its authorship to the Devil, the alleged author of so many theological books. Partizanship in those days, as in ours, meant, to be effective, a good, sound, honest hatred, and much command of language. In his description of hell, Jean anticipates the realistic horrors of Dante.
'What guerdon,' he asks, 'can the wicked man look for, save the cord which will hang him to the dolorous gibbet of hell? There will he be rivetted with everlasting fetters before the prince of devils; there will he be boiled in cauldrons; roasted before and behind; set to revolve, like Ixion, on cutting wheels turned by the paws of devils; tormented with hunger and thirst, and mocked with fruit and water, like Tantalus, or set to roll stones for ever up hill, like Sysyphus.'