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

by Various

Worth one jot more than simple squire,

Or clerk, or one who works for hire.

'Foolish people imagine, too, that stars fall like flying dragons from the skies; and that eclipses are to be taken as portents. Now, no one would be astonished at these things who understood the causes of things.

'Every student ought to acquire a knowledge of optics, which can be learned by the aid of geometry, from the books of Aristotle, Albacen, and Hucayen. Here can be learned the properties of mirrors; how they produce things which appear miracles; make small things seem great—a grain of sand like a mountain; and great things small—a mountain like a grain of sand; how glasses can be used to burn things; how straight lines can be made to look crooked, round things oblong, upright things reversed; the phantoms which do not exist appear to be moving about.'

The book from beginning to end is as full of quotations as Burton. The author quotes from Aristotle, Justinian, Horace, Seneca, St. Augustine, Ovid, Cicero, Boethius, Lucan, Claudian, Suetonius, and he has, probably through Cicero, some knowledge of Plato, but all this in the wildest jumble, with no discrimination and no critical power whatever. His range of reading was not by any means contemptible, and though we know of no writer of his time who can compare with him in this respect, it is evident that since one man had command of so many books, other men must have enjoyed the same advantages. There is reason to believe from Jean de Meung alone that acquaintance with Latin literature was much more extended than is generally thought, and that the scholarship of the time was by no means wholly confined to scholastic disputation.

Such, roughly sketched, is the work of Jean de Meung, from which we have plucked some of the fruits that come readiest to our hand. If not altogether an original or a profound thinker, he has at least the merit of fearlessness. He taught the folk, in the most popular way possible, great and valuable lessons. He told them that religion is a thing apart from, and independent of, religious profession; that "la robe ne faict pas le moyne;" he says that most of the saints, men and women, were decent married people, that marriage is a laudable and holy custom, that the wealth of monks is a mockery of their profession and a perjury of their vows, that learned persons ought to set an example, and what is sheer ignorance and brutality in others is rank sin with them; he attacks superstition, showing that all phenomena have natural causes, and have nothing to do with earthly events and the fortunes of men, because men are equal in the sight of God; and he teaches in terms as clear as any used by Carlyle, that labor is noble, and in accordance with the conditions of our being—that man's welfare is the end and aim of all earthly provision.

All this is what used to be called the Dark Ages. After six hundred years, the same questions exercise us which exercised Jean de Meung. We are still disputing as to whether true nobility is inherited or not; we have not all made up our minds about the holiness of marriage; we still think the clergyman, because he wears a surplice, holier than other men; work has been quite recently and with much solemnity pronounced noble by a prophet who forgot, while he was about it, to call it also respectable; men yet live who look upon scientific men with horror, and quote with fine infelicity, a text of St. Paul's about 'science falsely so called;' while the lesson of personal holiness has to be preached again and again, and is generally forgotten in the war over vestments and creeds.

Jean de Meung wished, as it seems to us, to write a book for the people, to answer their questions, to warn them of dangers before them, to instruct their ignorance. On the sapless trunk of a dying and passionless allegory he grafts a living branch which shall bear fruit in the years to come. His poem breathes indeed. Its pulses beat with a warm human life. Its sympathies are with all mankind. The poet has a tear for the poor naked beggars dying on dung-heaps and in the Hôtel-Dieu, and a lash of scorpions for the Levite who goes by on the other side; he teaches the loveliness of friendship; he catches the wordless complaint of the poor, and gives it utterance: he speaks with a scorn which Voltaire only has equalled, and a revolutionary fearlessness surpassing that of D'Alembert or Diderot.

And much more than this. It seems to us that his book—absolutely the only cheerful book of the time—afforded hope that things were not permanent: evil times may change; times have not been always evil: there was once a Golden Age: the troubles of the present are due, not to the innate badness of Nature and the universal unfitness of things, but to certain definite and ascertainable causes. Now to discover the cause is to go some way towards curing the disease.

In that uneasy time, strange questions and doubts perplexed men's minds—questions of religion and politics, affecting the very foundations of society. They asked themselves why things were so; and looking about in the dim twilight of dawning knowledge they could find as yet no answer. There was no rest in the Church or in the State, and the mind of France—which was the mind of Europe—was gravitating to a social and religious democracy. An hour before the dawn, you may hear the birds of the forest twitter in their sleep: they dream of the day. Europe at the close of the thirteenth century was dreaming of the glorious Renaissance, the dawn of the second great day of civilization. Jean de Meung answered the questions of the times with a clearness and accuracy which satisfied if it did not entirely explain. Five generations passed away before the full burst of light, and he taught them all, with that geniality that is his greatest charm. His book lasted because, confused and without art as it is, it is full of life and cheerfulness and hope. Not one of the poets of his own time had his lightness of heart: despondency and dejection weigh down every one: they alternate between a monotonous song to a mistress or a complaint for France; and to Jean de Meung they are as the wood-pigeon to the nightingale. They all borrowed from him, or studied him. Charles of Orleans, Villon, Clement Marot, Rabelais, La Fontaine, Regnier, Molière, Béranger, all come down from him in direct line, his literary children and grandchildren. And in Jean de Meung, to make an end, is the first manifestation of the true spirit of French literature—the esprit Gaulois—the legacy, they tell us, of the ancient Gaul.