Early Drama.—Before passing to the prose writers of the middle ages, we have to take some notice of the dramatic productions of those times—productions of an extremely interesting character, but, like the immense Mysteries and miracles. majority of medieval literature, poetic in form. The origin or the revival of dramatic composition in France has been hotly debated, and it has been sometimes contended that the tradition of Latin comedy was never entirely lost, but was handed on chiefly in the convents by adaptations of the Terentian plays, such as those of the nun Hroswitha. There is no doubt that the mysteries (subjects taken from the sacred writings) and miracle plays (subjects taken from the legends of the saints and the Virgin) are of very early date. The mystery of the Foolish Virgins (partly French, partly Latin), that of Adam and perhaps that of Daniel, are of the 12th century, though due to unknown authors. Jean Bodel and Ruteboeuf, already mentioned, gave, the one that of Saint Nicolas at the confines of the 12th and 13th, the other that of Théophile later in the 13th itself. But the later moralities, soties, and farces seem to be also in part a very probable development of the simpler and earlier forms of the fabliau and of the tenson or jeu-parti, a poem in simple dialogue much used by both troubadours and trouvères. The fabliau has been sufficiently dealt with already. It chiefly supplied the subject; and some miracle-plays and farces are little more than fabliaux thrown into dialogue. Of the jeux-partis there are many examples, varying from very simple questions and answers to something like regular dramatic dialogue; even short romances, such as Aucassin et Nicolette, were easily susceptible of dramatization. But the Jeu de la feuillie (or feuillée) of Adam de la Halle seems to be the earliest piece, profane in subject, containing something more than mere dialogue. The poet has not indeed gone far for his subject, for he brings in his own wife, father and friends, the interest being complicated by the introduction of stock characters (the doctor, the monk, the fool), and of certain fairies—personages already popular from the later romances of chivalry. Another piece of Adam’s, Le Jeu de Robin et Marion, also already alluded to, is little more than a simple throwing into action of an ordinary pastourelle with a considerable number of songs to music. Nevertheless later criticism has seen, and not unreasonably, in these two pieces the origin in the one case of farce, and thus indirectly of comedy proper, in the other of comic opera.
For a long time, however, the mystery and miracle-plays remained the staple of theatrical performance, and until the 13th century actors as well as performers were more or less taken from the clergy. It has, indeed, been well pointed out that the offices of the church were themselves dramatic performances, and required little more than development at the hands of the mystery writers. The occasional festive outbursts, such as the Feast of Fools, that of the Boy Bishop and the rest, helped on the development. The variety of mysteries and miracles was very great. A single manuscript contains forty miracles of the Virgin, averaging from 1200 to 1500 lines each, written in octosyllabic couplets, and at least as old as the 14th century, most of them perhaps much earlier. The mysteries proper, or plays taken from the scriptures, are older still. Many of these are exceedingly long. There is a Mystère de l’Ancien Testament, which extends to many volumes, and must have taken weeks to act in its entirety. The Mystère de la Passion, though not quite so long, took several days, and recounts the whole history of the gospels. The best apparently of the authors of these pieces, which are mostly anonymous, were two brothers, Arnoul and Simon Gréban (authors of the Actes des apôtres, and in the first case of the Passion), c. 1450, while a certain Jean Michel (d. 1493) is credited with having continued the Passion from 30,000 lines to 50,000. But these performances, though they held their ground until the middle of the 16th century and extended their range of subject from sacred to profane history—legendary as in the Destruction de Troie, contemporary as in the Profane drama. Siège d’Orléans—were soon rivalled by the more profane performances of the moralities, the farces and the soties. The palmy time of all these three kinds is the 15th century, while the Confrérie de la Passion itself, the special performers of the sacred drama, only obtained the licence constituting it by an ordinance of Charles VI. in 1402. In order, however, to take in the whole of the medieval theatre at a glance, we may anticipate a little. The Confraternity was not itself the author or performer of the profaner kind of dramatic performance. This latter was due to two other bodies, the clerks of the Bazoche and the Enfans sans Souci. As the Confraternity was chiefly composed of tradesmen and persons very similar to Peter Quince and his associates, so the clerks of the Bazoche were members of the legal profession of Paris, and the Enfans sans Souci were mostly young men of family. The morality was the special property of the first, the sotie of the second. But as the moralities were sometimes decidedly tedious plays, though by no means brief, they were varied by the introduction of farces, of which the jeux already mentioned were the early germ, and of which L’Avocat Patelin, dated by some about 1465 and certainly about 200 years subsequent to Adam de la Halle, is the most famous example.
The morality was the natural result on the stage of the immense literary popularity of allegory in the Roman de la rose and its imitations. There is hardly an abstraction, a virtue, a vice, a disease, or anything else of the kind, which does not figure in Moralities. these compositions. There is Bien Advisé and Mal Advisé, the good boy and the bad boy of nursery stories, who fall in respectively with Faith, Reason and Humility, and with Rashness, Luxury and Folly. There is the hero Mange-Tout, who is invited to dinner by Banquet, and meets after dinner very unpleasant company in Colique, Goutte and Hydropisie. Honte-de-dire-ses-Péchés might seem an anticipation of Puritan nomenclature to an English reader who did not remember the contemporary or even earlier personae of Langland’s poem. Some of these moralities possess distinct dramatic merit; among these is mentioned Les Blasphémateurs, an early and remarkable presentation of the Don Juan story. But their general character appears to be gravity, not to say dullness. The Enfans sans Souci, on the other hand, were definitely satirical, and nothing if not amusing. The chief of the society was entitled Soties. Prince des Sots, and his crown was a hood decorated with asses’ ears. The sotie was directly satirical, and only assumed the guise of folly as a stalking-horse for shooting wit. It was more Aristophanic than any other modern form of comedy, and like its predecessor, it perished as a result of its political application. Encouraged for a moment as a political engine at the beginning of the 16th century, it was soon absolutely forbidden and put down, and had to give place in one direction to the lampoon and the prose pamphlet, in another to forms of comic satire more general and vague in their scope. The farce, on the other hand, having neither moral purpose nor political intention, was a purer work of art, enjoyed a wider range of subject, and was in no danger of any permanent extinction. Farcical interludes were interpolated in the mysteries themselves; short farces introduced and rendered palatable the moralities, while the sotie was itself but a variety of farce, and all the kinds were sometimes combined in a sort of tetralogy. It was a short composition, 500 verses being considered sufficient, while the morality might run to at least 1000 verses, the miracle-play to nearly double that number, and the mystery to some 40,000 or 50,000, or indeed to any length that the author could find in his heart to bestow upon the audience, or the audience in their patience to suffer from the author. The number of persons and societies who acted these performances grew to be very large, being estimated at more than 5000 towards the end of the 15th century. Many fantastic personages came to join the Prince des Sots, such as the Empereur de Galilée, the Princes de l’Étrille, and des Nouveaux Mariés, the Roi de l’Épinette, the Recteur des Fous. Of the pieces which these societies represented one only, that of Maître Patelin, is now much known; but many are almost equally amusing. Patelin itself has an immense number of versions and editions. Other farces are too numerous to attempt to classify; they bear, however, in their subjects, as in their manner, a remarkable resemblance to the fabliaux, their source. Conjugal disagreements, the unpleasantness of mothers-in-law, the shifty or, in the earlier stages, clumsy valet and chambermaid, the mishaps of too loosely given ecclesiastics, the abuses of relics and pardons, the extortion, violence, and sometimes cowardice of the seigneur and the soldiery, the corruption of justice, its delays and its pompous apparatus, supply the subjects. The treatment is rather narrative than dramatic in most cases, as might be expected, but makes up by the liveliness of the dialogue for the deficiency of elaborately planned action and interest. All these forms, it will be observed, are directly or indirectly comic. Tragedy in the middle ages is represented only by the religious drama, except for a brief period towards the decline of that form, when the “profane” mysteries referred to above came to be represented. These were, however, rather “histories,” in the Elizabethan sense, than tragedies proper.
Prose History.—In France, as in all other countries of whose literary developments we have any record, literature in prose is considerably later than literature in verse. We have certain glosses or vocabularies possibly dating as far Early chronicles. back as the 8th or even the 7th century; we have the Strassburg oaths, already described, of the 9th, and a commentary on the prophet Jonas which is probably as early. In the 10th century there are some charters and muniments in the vernacular; of the 11th the laws of William the Conqueror are the most important document; while the Assises de Jérusalem of Godfrey of Bouillon date, though not in the form in which we now possess them, from the same age. The 12th century gives us certain translations of the Scriptures, and the remarkable Arthurian romances already alluded to; and thenceforward French prose, though long less favoured than verse, begins to grow in importance. History, as is natural, was the first subject which gave it a really satisfactory opportunity of developing its powers. For a time the French chroniclers contented themselves with Latin prose or with French verse, after the fashion of Wace and the Belgian, Philippe Mouskés (1215-1283). These, after a fashion universal in medieval times, began from fabulous or merely literary origins, and just as Wyntoun later carries back the history of Scotland to the terrestrial paradise, so does Mouskés start that of France from the rape of Helen. But soon prose chronicles, first translated, then original, became common; the earliest of all is said to have been that of the pseudo-Turpin, which thus recovered in prose the language which had originally clothed it in verse, and which, to gain a false appearance of authenticity, it had exchanged still earlier for Latin. Then came French selections and versions from the great series of historical compositions undertaken by the monks of St Denys, the so-called Grandes Chroniques de France from the date of 1274, when they first took form in the hands of a monk styled Primat, to the reign of Charles V., when they assumed the title just given. But the first really remarkable author who used French prose as a vehicle of historical expression is Geoffroi de Villehardouin, marshal of Champagne, who was born rather after the middle of the 12th Villehardouin. century, and died in Greece in 1212. Under the title of Conquête de Constantinoble Villehardouin has left us a history of the fourth crusade, which has been accepted by all competent judges as the best picture extant of feudal chivalry in its prime. The Conquête de Constantinoble has been well called a chanson de geste in prose, and indeed in the surprising nature of the feats it celebrates, in the abundance of detail, and in the vivid and picturesque poetry of the narration, it equals the very best of the chansons. Even the repetition of the same phrases which is characteristic of epic poetry repeats itself in this epic prose; and as in the chansons so in Villehardouin, few motives appear but religious fervour and the love of fighting, though neither of these excludes a lively appetite for booty and a constant tendency to disunion and disorder. Villehardouin was continued by Henri de Valenciennes, whose work is less remarkable, and has more the appearance of a rhymed chronicle thrown into prose, a process which is known to have been actually applied in some cases. Nor is the transition from Villehardouin to Jean de Joinville (considerable in point of time, for Joinville was not born till ten years after Villehardouin’s death) in point of literary history immediate. The rhymed chronicles of Philippe Mouskés and Guillaume Guiart belong to this interval; and in prose the most remarkable works are the Chronique de Reims, a well-written history, having the interesting characteristics of taking the lay and popular side, and the great compilation edited (in the modern sense) by Baudouin d’Avesnes Joinville. (1213-1289). Joinville (? 1224-1317), whose special subject is the Life of St Louis, is far more modern than even the half-century which separates him from Villehardouin would lead us to suppose. There is nothing of the knight-errant about him personally, notwithstanding his devotion to his hero. Our Lady of the Broken Lances is far from being his favourite saint. He is an admirable writer, but far less simple than Villehardouin; the good King Louis tries in vain to make him share his own rather high-flown devotion. Joinville is shrewd, practical, there is even a touch of the Voltairean about him; but he, unlike his predecessor, has political ideas and antiquarian curiosity, and his descriptions are often very creditable pieces of deliberate literature.
It is very remarkable that each of the three last centuries of feudalism should have had one specially and extraordinarily gifted chronicler to describe it. What Villehardouin is to the 12th and Joinville to the 13th century, that Jean Froissart Froissart. (1337-1410) is to the 14th. His picture is the most famous as it is the most varied of the three, but it has special drawbacks as well as special merits. French critics have indeed been scarcely fair to Froissart, because of his early partiality to our own nation in the great quarrel of the time, forgetting that there was really no reason why he as a Hainaulter should take the French side. But there is no doubt that if the duty of an historian is to take in all the political problems of his time, Froissart certainly comes short of it. Although the feudal state in which knights and churchmen were alone of estimation was at the point of death, and though new orders of society were becoming important, though the distress and confusion of a transition state were evident to all, Froissart takes no notice of them. Society is still to him all knights and ladies, tournaments, skirmishes and feasts. He depicts these, not like Joinville, still less like Villehardouin, as a sharer in them, but with the facile and picturesque pen of a sympathizing literary onlooker. As the comparison of the Conquête de Constantinoble with a chanson de geste is inevitable, so is that of Froissart’s Chronique with a roman d’aventures.
For Provençal Literature see the separate article under that heading.
15th Century.—The 15th century holds a peculiar and somewhat disputed position in the history of French literature, as, indeed, it does in the history of the literature of all Europe, except Italy. It has sometimes been regarded as the final stage of the medieval period, sometimes as the earliest of the modern, the influence of the Renaissance in Italy already filtering through. Others again have taken the easy step of marking it as an age of transition. There is as usual truth in all these views. Feudality died with Froissart and Eustache Deschamps. The modern spirit can hardly be said to arise before Rabelais and Ronsard. Yet the 15th century, from the point of view of French literature, is much more remarkable than its historians have been wont to confess. It has not the strongly marked and compact originality of some periods, and it furnishes only one name of the highest order of literary interest; but it abounds in names of the second rank, and the very difference which exists between their styles and characters testifies to the existence of a large number of separate forces working in their different manners on different persons. Its theatre we have already treated by anticipation, and to it we shall afterwards recur. It was the palmy time of the early French stage, and all the dramatic styles which we have enumerated then came to perfection. Of no other kind of literature can the same be said. The century which witnessed the invention of printing naturally devoted itself at first more to the spreading of old literature than to the production of new. Yet as it perfected the early drama, so it produced the prose tale. Nor, as regards individual and single names, can the century of Charles d’Orléans, of Alain Chartier, of Christine de Pisan, of Coquillart, of Comines, and, above all, of Villon, be said to lack illustrations.
First among the poets of the period falls to be mentioned the shadowy personality of Olivier Basselin. Modern criticism has attacked the identity of the jovial miller, who was once supposed to have written and perhaps Christine de Pisan. invented the songs called vaux de vire, and to have also carried on a patriotic warfare against the English. But though Jean le Houx may have written the poems published under Basselin’s name two centuries later, it is taken as certain that an actual Olivier wrote actual vaux de vire at the beginning of the 15th century. About Christine de Pisan (1363-1430) and Alain Chartier (1392-c. 1430) there is no such doubt. Christine was the daughter of an Italian astrologer who was patronized by Charles V. She was born in Italy but brought up in France, and she enriched the literature of her adopted country Alain Chartier. with much learning, good sense and patriotism. She wrote history, devotional works and poetry; and though her literary merit is not of the highest, it is very far from despicable. Alain Chartier, best known to modern readers by the story of Margaret of Scotland’s Kiss, was a writer of a somewhat similar character. In both Christine and Chartier there is a great deal of rather heavy moralizing, and a great deal of rather pedantic erudition. But it is only fair to remember that the intolerable political and social evils of the day called for a good deal of moralizing, and that it was the function of the writers of this time to fill up as well as they could the scantily filled vessels of medieval science and learning. A very different Charles d’Orléans. person is Charles d’Orléans (1391-1465), one of the greatest of grands seigneurs, for he was the father of a king of France, and heir to the duchies of Orléans and Milan. Charles, indeed, if not a Roland or a Bayard, was an admirable poet. He is the best-known and perhaps the best writer of the graceful poems in which an artificial versification is strictly observed, and helps by its recurrent lines and modulated rhymes to give to poetry something of a musical accompaniment even without the addition of music properly so called. His ballades are certainly inferior to those of Villon, but his rondels are unequalled. For fully a century and a half these forms engrossed the attention of French lyrical poets. Exercises in them were produced in enormous numbers, and of an excellence which has only recently obtained full recognition even in France. Charles d’Orléans is himself sufficient proof of what can be done in them in the way of elegance, sweetness, and grace which some have unjustly called effeminacy. But that this effeminacy was no natural or inevitable fault of the ballades and the rondeaux was fully proved by the most remarkable literary figure of the 15th century in France. To François Villon (1431-1463?), Villon. as to other great single writers, no attempt can be made to do justice in this place. His remarkable life and character especially lie outside our subject. But he is universally recognized as the most important single figure of French literature before the Renaissance. His work is very strange in form, the undoubtedly genuine part of it consisting merely of two compositions, known as the great and little Testament, written in stanzas of eight lines of eight syllables each, with lyrical compositions in ballade and rondeau form interspersed. Nothing in old French literature can compare with the best of these, such as the “Ballade des dames du temps jadis,” the “Ballade pour sa mère,” “La Grosse Margot,” “Les Regrets de la belle Heaulmière,” and others; while the whole composition is full of poetical traits of the most extraordinary vigour, picturesqueness and pathos. Towards the end of the century the poetical production of the time became very large. The artificial measures already alluded to, and others far more artificial and infinitely less beautiful, were largely practised. The typical poet of the end of the 15th century is Guillaume Crétin (d. 1525), who distinguished himself by writing verses with punning rhymes, verses ending with double or treble repetitions of the same sound, and many other tasteless absurdities, in which, as Pasquier remarks, “il perdit toute la grâce et la Crétin. liberté de la composition.” The other favourite direction of the poetry of the time was a vein of allegorical moralizing drawn from the Roman de la rose through the medium of Chartier and Christine, which produced “Castles of Love,” “Temples of Honour,” and such like. The combination of these drifts in verse-writing produced a school known in literary history, from a happy phrase of the satirist Coquillart (v. inf.), as the “Grands Rhétoriqueurs.” The chief of these besides Crétin were Jean Molinet (d. 1507); Jean Meschinot (c. 1420-1491), author of the Lunettes des princes; Florimond Robertet (d. 1522); Georges Chastellain (1404-1475), to be mentioned again; and Octavien de Saint-Gelais (1466-1502), father of a better poet than himself. Yet some of the minor poets of the time are not to be despised. Such are Henri Baude (1430-1490), a less pedantic writer than most, Martial d’Auvergne (1440-1508), whose principal work is L’Amant rendu cordelier au service de l’amour, and others, many of whom formed part of the poetical court which Charles d’Orléans kept up at Blois after his release.
While the serious poetry of the age took this turn, there was no lack of lighter and satirical verse. Villon, indeed, were it not for the depth and pathos of his poetical sentiment, might be claimed as a poet of the lighter order, and the patriotic diatribes against the English to which we have alluded easily passed into satire. The political quarrels of the latter part of the century also provoked much satirical composition. The disputes of the Bien Public and those between Louis XI. and Charles of Burgundy employed many pens. The most remarkable piece of the light literature of the first is “Les Ânes Volants,” a ballad on some of the early favourites of Louis. The battles of France and Burgundy were waged on paper between Gilles des Ormes and the above-named Georges Chastelain, typical representatives of the two styles of 15th-century poetry already alluded to—Des Ormes being the lighter and more graceful writer, Chastelain a pompous and learned allegorist. The most remarkable representative of purely light poetry outside the Coquillart. theatre is Guillaume Coquillart (1421-1510), a lawyer of Champagne, who resided for the greater part of his life in Reims. This city, like others, suffered from the pitiless tyranny of Louis XI. The beginnings of the standing army which Charles VII. had started were extremely unpopular, and the use to which his son put them by no means removed this unpopularity. Coquillart described the military man of the period in his Monologue du gendarme cassé. Again, when the king entertained the idea of unifying the taxes and laws of the different provinces, Coquillart, who was named commissioner for this purpose, wrote on the occasion a satire called Les Droits nouveaux. A certain kind of satire, much less good-tempered than the earlier forms, became indeed common at this epoch. M. Lenient has well pointed out that a new satirical personification dominates this literature. It is no longer Renart with his cynical gaiety, or the curiously travestied and almost amiable Devil of the Middle Ages. Now it is Death as an incident ever present to the imagination, celebrated in the thousand repetitions of the Danse Macabre, sculptured all over the buildings of the time, even frequently performed on holidays and in public. With the usual tendency to follow pattern, the idea of the “dance” seems to have been extended, and we have a Danse aux aveugles (1464) from Pierre Michaut, where the teachers are fortune, love and death, all blind. All through the century, too, anonymous verse of the lighter kind was written, some of it of great merit. The folk-songs already alluded to, published by Gaston Paris, show one side of this composition, and many of the pieces contained in M. de Montaiglon’s extensive Recueil des anciennes poésies françaises exhibit others.
The 15th century was perhaps more remarkable for its achievements in prose than in poetry. It produced, indeed, no prose writer of great distinction, except Comines; but it witnessed serious, if not extremely successful, efforts at prose composition. The invention of printing finally substituted the reader for the listener, and when this substitution has been effected, the main inducement to treat unsuitable subjects in verse is gone. The study of the classics at first hand contributed to the same end. As early as 1458 the university of Paris had a Greek professor. But long before this time translations in prose had been made. Pierre Bercheure (Bersuire) (1290-1352) had already translated Livy. Nicholas Oresme (c. 1334-1382), the tutor of Charles V., gave a version of certain Aristotelian works, which enriched the language with a large number of terms, then strange enough, now familiar. Raoul de Presles (1316-1383) turned into French the De civitate Dei of St Augustine. These writers or others composed Le Songe du vergier, an elaborate discussion of the power of the pope. The famous chancellor, Jean Charlier or Gerson (1363-1429), to whom the Imitation has among so many others been attributed, spoke constantly and wrote often in the vulgar tongue, though he attacked the most famous and popular work in that tongue, the Roman de la rose. Christine de Pisan and Alain Chartier were at least as much prose writers as poets; and the latter, while he, like Gerson, dealt much with the reform of the church, used in his Quadriloge invectif really forcible language for the purpose of spurring on the nobles of France to put an end to her sufferings and evils. These moral and didactic treatises were but continuations of others, which for convenience sake we have hitherto left unnoticed. Though verse was in the centuries prior to the 15th the favourite medium for literary composition, it was by no means the only one; and moral and educational treatises—some referred to above—already existed in pedestrian phrase. Certain household books (Livres de raison) have been preserved, some of which date as far back as the 13th century. These contain not merely accounts, but family chronicles, receipts and the like. Accounts of travel, especially to the Holy Land, culminated in the famous Voyage of Mandeville which, though it has never been of so much importance in French as in English, perhaps first took vernacular form in the French tongue. Of the 14th century, we have a Menagier de Paris, intended for the instruction of a young wife, and a large number of miscellaneous treatises of art, science and morality, while private letters, mostly as yet unpublished, exist in considerable numbers, and are generally of the moralizing character; books of devotion, too, are naturally frequent.