It is quite possible that in putting an imitation of the 'Art of Love' into the old woman's mouth, Jean de Meung catered to the lowest tastes of the age, and courted a popularity from this part of his work which he might not have obtained from the rest. The same sort of defence—no defence at all, but another and a worse charge—has been set up in the cases of Rabelais and Swift. All such offenders we are told, deferred to popular opinion, and wrote what they inwardly disapproved. This surely is worse. To be yourself so far depraved as to take delight in things impure is bad; to deliberately lay yourself out to please others with things impure is surely infinitely more wicked. It is possible that Jean de Meung, Rabelais, and Swift, did this; but we do not think it probable. In the case of the poet whom we are now considering, there seems every reason to believe that he had formed the lowest possible ideas of love and women; that from the depths of a corrupted morality, which permitted him the same pleasure in impurity which the common herd of the vulgar and illiterate shared, he had eager yearnings for that purity of life which alone as he felt and preached, could bring one to taste of the heavenly spring. That a man could at the same time grovel so low and look so high, that his gaze upwards was so clear and bright, while his eyes were so often turned earthward, is a singular phenomenon; but it is not a solitary one. Other great men have been as degraded as they were exalted. Perhaps when Christiana and her children saw that vision of the man with the muck-rake, while the angel, unregarded, held the crown of glory over his head, had they looked much longer, they might have seen him drop his rake and gaze upwards, with streaming eyes, upon the proffered glory. Jean de Meung was the man with the muck-rake who sometimes looked upwards.
The poet feels it necessary to apologize for his severity against the sex. 'If,' he says, 'you see anything here against womankind, blame not the poet.'
'All this was for instruction writ,
Here are no words of idle wit.
No jealousy inspired the song;
No hatred bears the lines along.
Bad are their hearts, if such there live,
Who villainie to women give.
Only, if aught your sense offend,
Think that to know yourself is good,