again had been the first to receive and to turn to use the riches of Eastern apologue, the most famous example of which is The Seven Wise Masters, these rather serious matters do not seem to have especially commended themselves to the French people. The place of composition of the most famous of all, the Gesta Romanorum, has been fairly settled to be England, though the original language of composition is not likely to have been other than Latin. At any rate, the style of serious allegory, in prose which should also be literature, never really caught hold of the French taste.
Comic tale-telling, on the other hand, was germane to the very soul of the race, and had shown itself in chanson and roman episodes at a very early date. But it had been so abundantly, and in so popular a manner, associated with verse as a vehicle in those pieces, in the great beast-epic of Renart, and above all in the fabliaux and in the earliest farces, that the connection was hard to separate. None of the stories discussed in the last chapter has, it may be noticed, the least comic touch or turn.
And of the fabliaux.
As we go on we must disengage ourselves more and more (though with occasional returns to it) from attention to verse; and the two great compositions in that form, the Romance of the Rose and the Story of the Fox, especially the former, hardly require much writing about to any educated person. They are indeed most strongly contrasted examples of two modes of tale-telling, both in a manner allegoric, but in other respects utterly different. The mere story of the Rose, apart from the dreamy or satiric digressions and developments of its two parts and the elaborate descriptions of the first, can be told in a page or two. An abstract of the various Renart books, to give any idea of their real character, would, on the other hand, have to be nearly as long as the less spun-out versions themselves. But the verse fabliaux can hardly be passed over so lightly. Many of them formed the actual bases of the prose nouvelles that succeeded them; not a few have found repeated presentation in literature; and, above all, they deserve the immense praise of having deliberately introduced ordinary life, and not conventionalised manners, into literary treatment. We have taken some pains to point out touches of that life which are observable in Saint's Life and Romance, in chanson and early prose tale. But here the case is altered. Almost everything is real; a good deal is what is called, in one of the senses of a rather misused word, downright "realism."
Few people who have ever heard of the fabliaux can need to be told that this realism in their case implies extreme freedom of treatment, extending very commonly to the undoubtedly coarse and not seldom to the merely dirty. There are some—most of them well known by modern imitations such as Leigh Hunt's "Palfrey"—which are quite guiltless in this respect; but the great majority deal with the usual comic farrago of satire on women, husbands, monks, and other stock subjects of raillery, all of which at the time invited "sculduddery." To translate some of the more amusing, one would require not merely Chaucerian licence of treatment but Chaucerian peculiarities of dialect in order to avoid mere vulgarity. Even Prior, who is our only modern English fabliau-writer of real literary merit—the work of people like Hanbury Williams and Hall Stevenson being mostly mere pornography—could hardly have managed such a piece as "Le Sot Chevalier"—a riotously "improper" but excessively funny example—without running the risk of losing that recommendation of being "a lady's book" with which Johnson rather capriciously tempered his more general undervaluation. Sometimes, on the other hand, the joke is trivial enough, as in the English-French word-play of anel for agnel (or -neau), which substitutes "donkey" for "lamb"; or, in the other, on the comparison of a proper name, "Estula," with its component syllables "es tu là?" But the important point on the whole is that, proper or improper, romantic or trivial, they all exhibit a constant improvement in the mere art of telling; in discarding of the stock phrases, the long-winded speeches, and the general paraphernalia of verse; in sticking and leading up smartly to the point; in coining sharp, lively phrase; in the co-ordination of incident and the excision of superfluities. Often they passed without difficulty into direct dramatic presentation in short farces. But on the whole their obvious destiny was to be "unrhymed" and to make their appearance in the famous form of the nouvelle or novella, in regard to which it is hard to say whether Italy was most indebted to France for substance, or France to Italy for form.
The rise of the nouvelle itself.
It was not, however, merely the intense conservatism of the Middle Ages as to literary form which kept back the prose nouvelle to such an extent that, as we have seen, only a few examples survive from the two whole centuries between 1200 and 1400, while not one of these is of the kind most characteristic ever since, or at least until quite recent days, of French tale-telling. The French octosyllabic couplet, in which the fabliaux were without exception or with hardly an exception composed, can, in a long story, become very tiresome because of its want of weight and grasp, and the temptations it offers to a weak rhymester to stuff it with endless tags. But for a short tale in deft hands it can apply its lightness in the best fashion, and put its points with no lack of sting. The fabliau-writer or reciter was not required—one imagines that he would have found scant audiences if he had tried it—to spin a long yarn; he had got to come to his jokes and his business pretty rapidly; and, as La Fontaine has shown to thousands who have never known—perhaps have never heard of—his early masters, he had an instrument which would answer to his desires perfectly if only he knew how to finger it.
At the same time, both the lover of poetry and the lover of tale must acknowledge that, though alliance between them is not in the least an unholy one, and has produced great and charming children, the best of the poetry is always a sort of extra bonus or solace to the tale, and the tale not unfrequently seems as if it could get on better without the poetry. The one can only aspire somewhat irrelevantly; the other can never attain quite its full development. So it was no ill day when the prose nouvelle came to its own in France.
Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles.
The first remarkable collection was the famous Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, traditionally attributed to Louis XI. when Dauphin and an exile in Brabant, with the assistance of friends and courtiers, but more recently selected by critics that way minded as part of the baggage they have "commandeered" for Antoine de la Salle. The question of authorship is of scarcely the slightest importance to us; though the point last mentioned is worth mentioning, because we shall have to notice the favoured candidate in this history again. There are certainly some of the hundred that he might have written.
In the careless way in which literary history used to be dealt with, the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles were held to be mere imitation of the Decameron and other Italian things. It is, of course, much more than probable that the Italian novella had not a little to do with the precipitation of the French nouvelle from its state of solution in the fabliau. But the person or persons who, in imitating the Decameron, produced the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles had a great deal more to do—and did a great deal less—than this mere imitation of their original. As for a group of included tales, the already-mentioned Seven Wise Masters[80] was known in France much before Boccaccio's time. The title was indeed admittedly Italian, but such an obvious one as to require no positive borrowing, and there is in the French book no story-framework like that of the plague and the country-house visit; no cheerful personalities like Fiammetta or Dioneo make not merely the intervals but the stories themselves alive with a special interest. Above all, there is nothing like the extraordinary mixture of unity and variety—a pure gift of genius—which succeeds in making the Decameron a real book as well as a bundle of narratives. Nor is there anything like the literary brilliancy of the actual style and handling.
Nevertheless, Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles is a book of great interest and value, despite serious defects due to its time generally and to its place in the history of fiction in particular. Its obscenity, on which even Sir Walter Scott, the least censorious or prudish-prurient of men, and with Southey, the great witness against false squeamishness, has been severe,
