This feeling is exactly analogous to that existing nowadays in semi-barbarous countries against the Jews. The idle hated the industrious, and hated them all the more when their industry brought them any profit.
mud, pilloried with unspeakable ordure, paraded in mock triumph like a King of Fools, and burnt in the market-place like Antichrist, such is the image which mediæval poetry has left us of the creature who was once the pious rustic, the innocent god-beloved husbandman, on whose threshold justice stopped a while when she fled from the towns of Antiquity. Yet not so; I can recall one, though only one, occasion in which mediæval literature shows us the serf. The place is surely the most unexpected, the charming thirteenth century tale of "Aucassin et Nicolette." In his beautiful essay upon that story, Mr. Pater has deliberately omitted this episode, which is indeed like a spot of blood-stained mud upon some perfect tissue of silver flowers on silver ground. It is a piece of cruellest realism, because quite quiet and unforced, in the midst of a kind of fairy-land idyl of almost childish love, the love of the beautiful son of the lord of Beaucaire for a beautiful Saracen slave girl. For, although Aucassin and Nicolette are often separated, and always disconsolate—she in her wonderfully frescoed vaulted room, he in his town prison— there is always surrounding them a sort of fairy land of trees and flowers, a constant song of birds; although they wander through the woods and tear their delicate skin, and catch their hair in brambles and briars, we have always the sense of the daisies bending beneath their tread, of the green leaves rustling aside from their heads covered with hair— "blond et menu crespelé." Their very hardships are lovely, like the hut of flowering branches and grapes, which Nicolette builds for herself, and through whose fissures the moonlight shines and the little stars twinkle: so much so, that when they weep, these two beautiful and dainty creatures, we listen as if to singing, and with no more sense of grief than at some pathetic little snatch of melody. And in the midst of this idyl of lovely things; in the midst of all these delicate patternings, whose minuteness and faint tint merge into one vague pleasurable impression; stands out, unintentionally placed there by the author, little aware of its terrible tragic realism, the episode which I am going to translate.
"Thus Aucassin wandered all day through the forest, without hearing any news of his sweet love; and when he saw that dusk was spreading, he began bitterly to weep. As he was riding along an old road, where weeds and grass grew thick and high, he suddenly saw before him, in the middle of this road, a man such as I am going to describe to you. He was tall, ugly; nay, hideous quite marvellously. His face was blacker than smoked meat, and so wide, that there was a good palm's distance between his eyes; his cheeks were huge, his nostrils also, with a very big flat nose; thick lips as red as embers, and long teeth yellow and smoke colour. He wore leathern shoes and gaiters, kept up with string at the knees; on his back was a parti-coloured coat. He was leaning upon a stout bludgeon. Aucassin was startled and fearful, and said:
"'Fair brother ("beau frère"—a greeting corresponding to the modern "bon homme") 'God be with thee!'
"'God bless you!' answered the man.
"'What dost thou here?' asked Aucassin.
"'What is that to you?' answered the man.
"'I ask thee from no evil motive.'
"'Then tell me why,' said the man, 'you yourself are weeping with such grief? Truly, were I a rich man like you, nothing in the world should make me weep.'
"'And how dost thou know me?'