One thing seems here worthy of remark. The place of punishment for the wicked man, in the Middle Ages, was the torture-chamber of their own criminal courts, intensified by imagination. Their punishment was through the senses. Of mental agony they had no conception. Yet, strangely enough, their heaven was never a heaven of the senses; and it shows how deeply they were penetrated with the feeling of Christ's holiness that while every temptation seemed set to make the mass believe in a paradise like that of Mahomet, the heaven of Christendom has always offered, as its chief charm, the worship and praise of a present God. 'There, by the fountain of mercy,' says Jean de Meung, 'shall ye sit.'
'There shall ye taste that spring so fair;
(Bright are its waters, pure and clear),
And never more from death shall shrink,
If only of that fount you drink.
But ever still, untired, prolong
The days with worship, praise, and song.'[55]
The poet reserves, however, his chief strength and the main exposition of his views for his character of Faux Semblant—False seeming—the hypocrite. There is a dramatic art of the very highest kind in the way in which Faux Semblant draws and develops his own character, pronounces, as it were, the apology of hypocrisy. His painting of the vices of the mendicant orders cannot approach those of Walter de Mapes, of Erasmus, and of Buchanan, in savage ferocity; but it is more satirical and more subtly venomous than any of those, and has the additional bitterness that it is spoken as from within the body which he attacks. The others, standing outside the monastic orders, point the finger of scorn at them. Jean de Meung makes one of themselves, an unblushing priest, with a candour which almost belongs to an approving conscience, with a chuckling self-complacency and an entire unconsciousness of the contrast between his life and his profession, which rises to the very first order of satirical writing, depict his own life, and take credit for villanies which he takes care to inform us are common to his order. He has been compared with Friar John; but the animalism and lusty vigour of this holy man lead him to a life of jovial sensuality through sheer ignorance; whereas Faux Semblant, his conscience seared with a hot iron, sins against the light. We may compare, too, the attacks made by Jean de Meung's contemporaries and immediate successors. They never even attempt satire.[56] It was an instrument whose use they could not comprehend. Their line is invective, as when Rutebeuf says, in his straightforward way—
'Papelart et Beguin,
Ont le siècle honi.'