Amenities of Literature Part 9

It is unquestionable that these martial romances of chivalry inflamed the restlessness of those numerous military adventurers who found an ample field for their chivalry after the crusades, in our continued incursions into France, of which country we were long a living plague, from the reign of Edward III. to that of Henry V., nearly a century of national tribulation. Many "a gentyl and n.o.ble esquyer," if perchance the English monarch held a truce with France or Scotland, flew into some foreign service. Sir Robert Knolles was known to the French as "le veritable demon de la guerre;" and Sir John Hawkwood, when there was no fighting to be got at home, pa.s.sed over into Italy, where he approved himself to be such a prodigy of "a man-at-arms," that the grateful Florentines raised his statue in their cathedral; this image of English valour may still be proudly viewed. This chivalric race of romance-readers were not, however, always of the purest "order of chivalry." If they were eager for enterprise, they were not less for its more prudential results. A castle or a ransom in France, a lordly marriage, or a domain in Italy, were the lees that lie at the bottom of their glory.

We continued long in this mixed state of glory clouded with barbarism; for at a time when literature and the fine arts were on the point of breaking out into the splendour of the pontificate of Leo the Tenth, in our own country the great Duke of Buckingham, about 1500, held the old romance of "The Knight of the Swan" in the highest estimation, because the translator maintained that our duke was lineally descended from that hero; the first peer of the realm was proud of deriving his pedigree from a fabulous knight in a romantic genealogy.

But all the inventions and fas.h.i.+ons of man have their date and their termination. For three centuries these ancient romances, metrical or prose, had formed the reading of the few who read, and entranced the circle of eager listeners. The enchantment was on the wane; their admirers had become somewhat sceptical of "the true history" which had been so solemnly warranted; another taste in the more chastened writings of Roman and Grecian lore was now on the ascendant. One last effort was made in this decline of romantic literature, in that tesselated compilement where the mottled pieces drawn out of the French prose romances of chivalry were finely squared together by no unskilful workman, in Sir THOMAS MALORY, to the English lover of ancient romance well known by the t.i.tle of _La Morte d'Arthur_. This last of these ancient romances was finished in the ninth year of the reign of Edward IV., about 1470. CAXTON exulted to print this epical romance; and at the same time he had the satisfaction of reproaching the "laggard" age.

"What do ye now," exclaimed the ancient printer, "but go to the _Bagnes_, and play at dice? Leave this! leave it! and read these n.o.ble volumes." Volumes which not many years after, when a new system of affairs had occurred to supplant this long-idolised "order of chivalry,"

ROGER ASCHAM plainly a.s.serted only taught "open manslaughter and bold bawdry." Such was the final fate of Love and Arms!

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Warton and Percy, Ritson and Leyden, Ellis and Turner and Price, and recently the late Abbe de la Rue.

[2] A profound and poetic genius has thrown out a new suggestion on the origin of these Eastern tales. "I think it not unlikely that the 'Milesian Tales' contained the germs of many of those _now in the_ 'Arabian Nights.' The Greek empire must have left deep impressions on the Persian intellect--so also many of the Roman Catholic _Legends_ are taken from _Apuleius_. The exquisite story of Cupid and Psyche is evidently a philosophical attempt to parry Christianity with a quasi Platonic account of the fall and redemption of man."--Coleridge's "Literary Remains," i. 180. Whatever were these "Milesian Tales,"

they amused the Grecian sages in the earliest period of their history.

[3] Ritson and Weber have elegantly printed some of the best English metrical romances. In France they have recently enriched literature with many of these ma.n.u.script romances. See "Gentleman's Magazine,"

Oct. 1839.

[4] It is a curious fact, that in 1390 Sir James Douglas, of Dalkeith, the ancestor of the Earl of Morton, apparently valued them as about equal to the statutes of the realm; for he bequeathed in his will to his son, "Omnes libros meos tam _Statutorum_ Regni Scocie quam _Romancie_."--Laing's "Early Metrical Tales," Edinburgh, 1826.

[5] A collection of these romances formed into three folio tomes in ma.n.u.script was enriched by seven hundred and forty-seven miniatures, _avec les Initiales peintes en or et couleurs_. 6093, Roxburgh Cat.

[6] Cat. of the Duke de la Valliere, 4507. Strutt would have done as much for ourselves, but he worked in unrequited solitude with all the pa.s.sion of the French amateur, but without his "best artists."

[7] This romance was composed about the year 1200; the present copy was made in 1338. There is also a splendid ma.n.u.script with rich and delicate illuminations of the ancient romance of Alexander in prose in the Brit. Mus., Bib. Reg. 15, E. 6.

[8] Campbell's "Essay on English Poetry."

[9] Our vernacular literature owes to the unremitting ardour of our laureate recent editions of "La Morte d'Arthur," "Palmerin of England," and a new translation from the Portuguese of "Amadis of Gaul." For readers who are not antiquaries, and who may recoil from the prolixity of the ancient romances, there is a work of their species which may amply gratify their curiosity, and it is of easy acquisition. It is not an unskilful compilation from the romances of chivalry made by RICHARD JOHNSON, a noted bookwright in the reign of Elizabeth; it has pa.s.sed through innumerable editions, and has at last taken its station in the popular library of our juvenile literature. I suspect that the style has been too often altered in the modern editions, which has injured its raciness. It is well known as "The Renowned History of the Seven Champions of Christendom." The compiler has metamorphosed the Rowland, Oliver, Guy, Bevis, &c., into seven saints or champions of Christendom; but "he has preserved some of the most capital fictions of the old Arabian romance."--Warton, iii. 63, Ed. 8vo. It may serve as a subst.i.tute for the old black-letter romances, being a compendium of their rich or their grotesque fancies; or, as Ritson observes with his accustomed energetical criticism, "It is a compound of superst.i.tion, and, as it were, all the lyes in Christendom in one lye, and is in many parts of the country believed at this day to be as true as the gospel."--"Dissertation on Romance," x.x.xiv.

[10] One of the most celebrated romantic histories is "the Troy-book of Guido delle Colonne," which has been considered as the original of all the later tales of Troy. On the acute suggestion of Tyrwhit, Douce ascertained that this fabulous history, by many regarded as original, is only a Latin translation of a Norman poet,* which Guido pa.s.ses off as a history collected from Dares and other fict.i.tious authorities, but disingenuously conceals the name of Benoit de Saint Maur, whose works he appears to have found when he came to England.

It was a prevalent practice in the middle ages to appropriate a work by a cautious suppression of any mention of the original. Tiraboschi might now be satisfied that Guido delle Colonne was in England, which he doubted, since he now stands charged with only turning into Latin prose the poem of a Norman, that is, an English poet at the court of our Henry the Second.

* Douce's "Ill.u.s.trations of Shakspeare."

[11] In the curious catalogue of these romances in the Roxburgh Library, the cataloguer announced three or four of these pretended authors as "names unknown to any literary historians," and considered the announcement a literary discovery.

[12] Pere Menestrier, "Chevalerie Ancienne et Moderne," chap. v. On HERALDS.

[13] See Bentham's "History and Antiquities of Ely," 27.

ORIGIN OF THE VERNACULAR LANGUAGES OF EUROPE.

The predominance of the Latin language, during many centuries, r.e.t.a.r.ded the cultivation of the vernacular dialects of Europe. When the barbarous nations had triumphed over ancient Rome, the language of the Latins remained unconquered; that language had diffused itself with the universal dominion, and, living in the minds of men, required neither legions nor consuls to maintain its predominance.

From accident, and even from necessity, the swarming hordes, some of whom seem to have spoken a language which had never been written, and were a roving people at a period prior to historical record, had adopted that single colloquial idiom which their masters had conveyed to them, attracted, if not by its beauty, at least by its convenience. This vulgar Latin was not, indeed, the Latin of the great writers of antiquity; but in its corrupt state; freed from a complex construction, and even from grammar, had more easily lent itself to the jargon of the ruder people. Teutonic terms, or Celtic words with corrupt latinisms, were called "the sc.u.m of ancient eloquence, and the rust of vulgar barbarisms," by an indignant critic in the middle of the fifth century.[1] It was amid this confusion of races, of idioms, and of customs, that from this heterogeneous ma.s.s were hewed out those VERNACULAR DIALECTS of Europe which furnished each people with their own idiom, and which are now distinguished as the MODERN LANGUAGES.

In this transference and transfusion of languages, Italy retained the sonorous termination of her paternal soil, and Spain did not forget the majesty of the Latin accent; lands favoured by more genial skies, and men blessed with more flexible organs. But the Gothic and the Northern races barbarously abbreviated or disfigured their Latin words--to sounds so new to them they gave their own rude inflections; there is but one organ to regulate the delicacy of orthoepy--a musical and a tutored ear.

The Gaul,[2] in cutting his words down, contracted a nasal sharpness; and the Northmen, in the shock of their hard, redundant consonants, lost the vowelly confluence.

This vulgar or corrupt Latin, mingled with this diversity of jargons, was the vitiated mother of the sister-languages of Europe--sisters still bearing their family likeness, of the same homely origin, but of various fortunes, till some attained to the beauty and affluence of their Latin line. From the first the people themselves had dignified their spurious generation of language as _Romans_, or _Romance_, or _Romaunt_, still proud perhaps of its Roman source; but the critical Latins themselves had distinguished it as _Rustic_, to indicate a base dialect used only by those who were far removed from the metropolis of the world.

But when these different nations had established their separate independence, this vernacular idiom was wholly left to the people; it was the image of their own barbaric condition, unworthy of the studies, and inadequate to the genius, of any writer. The universal language maintained its pre-eminence over the particular dialect, and as the course of human events succeeded in the overwhelming of ancient Rome, another Rome shadowed the world. Ecclesiastical Rome, whence the novel faith of Christianity was now to emanate, far more potent than military Rome, perpetuated the ancient language. The clergy, through the diversified realms of Europe, were held together in strict conformity, and by a common bond chained to the throne of the priesthood--one faith, one discipline, one language!

The Latin tongue, both in verse and prose, was domiciliated among people of the most opposite interests, customs, and characters. The primitive fathers, the later schoolmen, the monkish chroniclers, all alike composed in Latin; all legal instruments, even marriage-contracts, were drawn in Latin: and even the language of Christian prayer was that of abolished paganism.

The idiom of their father-land--or as we have affectionately called it, our "mother-tongue," and as our ancient translator of the "Polychronicon" energetically terms it, "the birth-tongue"--those first human accents which their infant ear had caught, and which from their boyhood were a.s.sociated with the most tender and joyous recollections, every nation left to fluctuate on the lips of the populace, rude and neglected. Whenever a writer, proposing to inform the people on subjects which more nearly interested them, composed in the national idiom, it was a strong impulse only which could induce him thus to submit to degrade his genius. One of the French crusaders, a learned knight, was anxious that the nation should become acquainted with the great achievements of the deliverers of Jerusalem; it was the command of his bishop that induced him to compose the narrative in the vernacular idiom; but the twelve years which he bestowed on his chronicle were not considered by him as employed for his glory, for he avows that the humiliating style which he had used was the mortifying performance of a religious penance.

All who looked towards advancement in worldly affairs, and were of the higher orders in society, cultivated the language of Rome. It is owing to this circ.u.mstance, observes a learned historian of our country, that "the Latin language and the cla.s.sical writers were preserved by the Christian clergy from that destruction which has entirely swept from us the language and the writings of Phoenicia, Carthage, Babylon, and Egypt."[3] We must also recollect that the influence of the Latin language became far more permanent when the great master-works of antiquity were gradually unburied from their concealments. In this resurrection of taste and genius, they derived their immortality from the imperishable soul of their composition. All Europe was condemned to be copiers, or in despair to be plagiarists.

It is well known how the admirable literatures of Greece and Rome struck a fresh impulse into literary pursuits at that period which has been distinguished as the restoration of letters. The emigration of the fugitive Greeks conveyed the lost treasures of their more ancient literature to the friendly sh.o.r.es of Italy. Italy had then to learn a new language, and to borrow inspiration from another genius.

The occupation of disinterring ma.n.u.scripts which had long been buried in dungeon-darkness, was carried on with an enthusiasm of which perhaps it would be difficult for us at this day to form an adequate conception.

Many exhausted their fortunes in remote journeys, or in importations from the East; and the possession of a ma.n.u.script was considered not to have been too dearly purchased by the transfer of an estate, since only for the loan of one the pledge was nothing less.[4] The discovery of an author, perhaps heard of for the first time, was tantamount to the acquisition of a province; and when a complete copy of "Quintilian" was discovered, the news circulated throughout Europe. The rapture of collation, the restoration of a corrupt text, or the perpetual commentary, became the ambition of a life, even after the era of printing.

This was the useful age of critical erudition. It furnished the studious with honours and avocations; but they were reserved only for themselves: it withdrew them from the cultivation of all vernacular literature. They courted not the popular voice when a professorial chair or a dignified secretarys.h.i.+p offered the only profit or honour the literary man contemplated. Accustomed to the finished compositions of the ancients, the scholar turned away from the rudeness of the maternal language.

There was no other public opinion than what was gathered from the writings of the Few who wrote to the Few who read; they transcribed as sacred what authority had long established; their arguments were scholastic and metaphysical, for they held little other communication with the world, or among themselves, but through the restricted medium of their writings. This state was a heritage of ideas and of opinions, transmitted from age to age with little addition or diminution.

Authority and quotation closed all argument, and filled vast volumes.

University responded to university, and men of genius were following each other in the sheep-tracks of antiquity. Even to so late a period as the days of Erasmus, every Latin word was culled with a cla.s.sical superst.i.tion; and a week of agony was exhausted on a page finely inlaid with a mosaic of phrases.[5] While this verbal generation flourished, some eminent scholars were but ridiculous apes of Cicero, and, in a cento of verses, empty echoes of Virgil. All native vigour died away in the coldness of imitation; and a similarity of thinking and of style deprived the writers of that raciness which the nations of Europe subsequently displayed when they cultivated their vernacular literature.

It is remarkable of those writers who had already distinguished themselves by their Latin works, that when they began to compose in their native language, those cla.s.sical effusions on which they had confidently rested their future celebrity sank into oblivion; and the writers themselves ceased to be subjects either of critical inquiry or of popular curiosity, except in that language in which they had opened a vein of original thought, in a manner and diction the creation of their own feelings. Here their natural power and their freed faculties placed them at a secure interval from their imitators. Modern writers in Latin were doomed to find too many academical equals; but those who were inimitable in their vernacular idiom could dread no rival, and discovered how the productions of the heart, rather than those of the lexicon, were echoed to their authors in the voice of their contemporaries.

The people indeed were removed far out of the influence of literature.

The people could neither become intelligent with the knowledge, nor sympathise with the emotions, concealed in an idiom which had long ceased to be spoken, and which exacted all the labour and the leisure of the cloistered student.

This state of affairs had not occurred among the Greeks, and hardly among the Romans, who had only composed their immortal works in their maternal tongue. Their arts, their sciences, and their literature were to be acquired by the single language which they used. It was the infelicity of their successors in dominion, to weary out the tenderness of youth in the repulsive labours of acquiring the languages of the two great nations whose empire had for ever closed, but whose finer genius had triumphed over their conquerors.

With the ancients, instruction did not commence until their seventh year; and till they had reached that period Nature was not disturbed in her mysterious workings: the virgin intellect was not doomed to suffer the violence of our first barren studies--that torture of learning a language which has ceased to be spoken by the medium of another equally unknown. Perhaps it was owing to this favourable circ.u.mstance that, among the inferior cla.s.ses of society in the two ancient nations, their numerous slaves displayed such an apt.i.tude for literature, eminent as skilful scribes, and even as original writers.

One of the earliest prose writers in our language when style was beginning to be cultivated, has aptly described, by a domestic but ingenious image, the effect of our youth gathering the burdens of grammatical f.a.ggots in the Sylva of antiquity. It is Sir THOMAS ELYOT who speaks, in "The Boke of the Governor," printed in 1531: "By that time the learner cometh to the most sweet and pleasant rendering of old authors, the sparks of fervent desire are extinct with the burthen of grammar, like as a little fire is even quenched with a great heap of small sticks, so that it can never come to the princ.i.p.al logs, where it should burn in a great pleasant fire."

It was Italy, the Mother and the Nurse of Literature (as the filial zeal of her sons has hailed her), which first opened to the nations of Europe the possibility of each creating a vernacular literature, reflecting the image not of the Greeks and of the Romans, but of themselves.

Three memorable men, of the finest and most contrasted genius, appeared in one country and at one period. With that contempt for the language of the people in which the learned partic.i.p.ated, busied as they were at the restoration of letters by their new studies and their progressive discoveries, PETRARCH contemned his own Italian "Rime," and was even insensible to the inspiration of a mightier genius than his own,--that genius who, with a parental affection, had adopted the orphan idiom of his father-land; an orphan idiom, which had not yet found even a name; for it was then uncertain what was the true language of Italy. DANTE had at first proposed to write in Latin; but with all his adoration of his master Virgil, he rejected the verse of Virgil, and antic.i.p.ated the wants of future ages. A peculiar difficulty, however, occurred to the first former of the vernacular literature of Italy. In the state of this unsettled language--composed of fragments of the latinity of a former populace, with the corruptions and novelties introduced by its new masters--deformed by a great variety of dialects--submitted, in the mouths of the people, to their caprices, and unstamped by the hand of a master--it seemed hopeless to fix on any idiom which, by its inherent n.o.bleness, should claim the distinguished honour of being deemed Italian. DANTE denied this envied grace to any of the rival princ.i.p.alities of his country. The poet, however, mysteriously a.s.serted that the true Italian "volgare" might be discovered in every Italian city; but being common to all, it could not be appropriated by any single one. Dante dignified the "volgare ill.u.s.tre" which he had conceived in his mind, by magnificent t.i.tles;--it was "ill.u.s.trious," it was "cardinal," it was "aulic," it was "courtly," it was the language of the most learned who had composed in the vulgar idiom, whether in Sicily, in Tuscany, in Puglia, even in Lombardy, or in the marshes of Ancona! This fanciful description of the Italian language appeared enigmatical to the methodical investigations of the cold and cautious TIRABOSCHI. That grave critic submitted the interior feeling of the poet to the test of facts and dates. With more erudition than taste, he marked the mechanical gradations--the stages of every language, from rudeness to refinement. The mere historical investigator could conceive no other style than what his chronology had furnished. But the spirit of DANTE had penetrated beyond the palpable substances of the explorer of facts, and the arranger of dates. DANTE, in his musings, had thrown a mystical veil over the Italian language; but the poet presciently contemplated, amid the distraction of so many dialects, that an Italian style would arise which at some distant day would be deemed cla.s.sical.

DANTE wrote, and DANTE was the cla.s.sic of his country.

The third great master of the vernacular literature of Italy was BOCCACCIO, who threw out the fertility of his genius in the _volgare_ of nature herself. This Shakspeare of a hundred tales transformed himself into all the conditions of society; he touched all the pa.s.sions of human beings, and penetrated into the thoughts of men ere he delineated their manners. Even two learned Greeks acknowledged that the tale-teller of Certaldo, in his variegated pages, had displayed such force and diversity in his genius, that no Greek writer could be compared with his "volgare eloquenza."

The Italian literature thus burst into birth and into maturity; while it is remarkable of the other languages of Europe, that after their first efforts they fell into decrepitude. Our Saxon rudeness seems to have required more hewing and polis.h.i.+ng to be modelled into elegance, and more volubility to flow into harmony, than even the genius of its earliest writers could afford. Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio were the contemporaries of Gower, of Chaucer, and of "the Ploughman;" they delight their nation after the lapse of many centuries; while the critics of the reign of Elizabeth complained that Piers Ploughman, Chaucer, and Gower then required glossaries; and so, at a later period, did Ronsard, Baif, and Marot in France. In prose we had no single author till the close of the sixteenth century who had yet constructed a style; and in France Rabelais and Montaigne had contracted the rust and the rudeness of antiquity, as it seemed to the refinement of the following generation.

It cannot be thought that the genius of the Italians always excelled that of other countries, but the material which those artists handled yielded more kindly to their touch. The sh.e.l.l they struck gave a more melodious sound than the rough and scrannel pipe cut from the northern forests.

Custom and prejudice, however, predominated over the feelings of the learned even in Italy. Their epistolary correspondence was still carried on in Latin, and their first dramas were in the language of ancient Rome. ANGELO POLITIAN appears to have been the earliest who composed a dramatic piece, his "Orfeo," in "stilo volgare," and for which he a.s.signs a reason which might have occurred to many of his predecessors--"perche degli spettatori fusse meglio intesa," that he might be better understood by the audience!