Petit Jehan de Saintré.
The history of "little John of Saintré and the Lady of the Beautiful Cousins"[86] has not struck all judges, even all English judges,[87] in the same way. Some have thought it mawkish, rhetorical, clumsily imitative of the manners of dead chivalry, and the like. Others, admitting it to be a late and "literary" presentation of the stately society it describes, rank it much higher as such. Its author was a bitter enough satirist if he wrote, as he most probably did, the famous Quinze Joyes de Mariage, one of the most unmitigated pieces of unsweetened irony—next to A Tale of a Tub and Jonathan Wild—to be found in literature; but not couched in narrative form. The same quality appears of course in the still more famous farce of Pathelin, which few good judges deny very stoutly to him, though there is little positive evidence. In the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles again, as has been said, he certainly had a hand, and possibly a great hand, as well as perhaps elsewhere. The satiric touch appears even in Petit Jehan itself; for, after all the gracious courtship of the earlier part, the dame des belles Cousines, during an absence of her lover on service, falls a by no means, as it would seem, very reluctant victim to the vulgar viciousness of a rich churchman, just like the innominatas of the nouvelles themselves. But the earlier part is gracious—a word specifically and intensively applicable to it. It may be a little unreal; does not the secondary form and sense which has been fastened upon reality—"realism"—show that, in the opinion of many people at least, reality is not gracious? The Foozles of this world who "despise all your kickshaws," the Dry-as-dusts who point out—not in the least seeing the real drift of their argument—that the fifteenth century was, in the greater part of Europe if not the whole, at a new point of morals and manners, may urge these things. But the best part of Petit Jehan remains a gracious sort of dream for gracious dreamers—a picture of a kind of Utopia of Feminism, when Feminism did not mean votes or anything foolish, but only adoration of the adorable.
Jehan de Paris.
It would be impossible to find or even to imagine anything more different than the not much later Jehan de Paris, an evident folk-tale[88] of uncertain origin, which very quickly became a popular chapbook and lasted long in that condition. Although we Englishmen provide the fun, he is certainly no Englishman who resents the fact or fails to enjoy the result, not to mention that we "could tell them tales with other endings." It is, for instance, not quite historically demonstrable that in crossing a river many English horsemen would be likely to be drowned, while all the French cavaliers got safe through; nor that, in scouring a country, the Frenchmen would score all the game and all the best beasts and poultry, while the English bag would consist of starvelings and offal. But no matter for that. The actual tale tells (with the agreeable introductory "How," which has not yet lost its zest for the right palates in chapter-headings) the story of a King and Queen of Spain who have, in recompense for help given them against turbulent barons, contracted their daughter to the King of France for his son; how they forgot this later, and betrothed her to the King of England, and how that King set out with his train, through France itself, to fetch his bride. As soon as the Dauphin (now king, for his father is dead) hears of their coming, he disguises himself under the name of John of Paris, with a splendid train of followers, much more gorgeous than the English (the "foggy islander" of course cannot make this out), and sets of quiproquos follow, in each of which the Englishman is outdone and baffled generally, till at last "John of Paris" enters Burgos in state, reveals himself, and carries off the Englishman's bride, with the natural effect of making him bien marry et courroucé, though no fight comes off.
The tale is smartly and succinctly told (there are not many more than a hundred of the small-sized and large-printed pages of the Collection Jannet-Picard), and there is a zest and verve about it which ought to please any mood that is for the time in harmony with the much talked of Comic Spirit. But it certainly does not lose attraction, and it as certainly does not fail to lend some, when it is considered side by side with the other "John," especially if both are again compared with the certainly not earlier and probably later "Prose Romances" in English, to which that rather ambitious title was given by Mr. Thoms. There is nothing in these in the very remotest degree resembling Jehan de Saintré: you must get on to the Arcadia or at least to Euphues before you come anywhere near that. There is, on the other hand, in our stuff, a sort of distant community of spirit with Jehan de Paris; but it works in an altogether lower and less imaginative sphere and fashion; no sense of art being present, and very little of craft. It is astonishing that a language which had had, if only in verse, such an unsurpassable tale-teller as Chaucer, should have been so backward. But then the whole conditions of the fifteenth century, especially in England, become only the more puzzling the longer one studies them. Even in France, it will be observed, the output of Tale is by no means large.[89] Nor shall we find it very greatly increased even in the next age, though there is one masterpiece in quantity as well as quality. But, for our purpose, the Cent Nouvelles and the two separate pieces just discussed continue, and in more and more striking manner, to show the vast possibilities when the way shall have been clearly found and the feet of the wayfarers firmly set in it.
FOOTNOTES:
[80] Prose as well as verse.
[81] In the very delightful imaginative introduction to Quentin Durward.
[82] This is one of the points which a modern novelist would certainly have seized; but whether to advantage or not is another question.
[83] And of course recognised by the "Antonians" as peculiar to La Salle.
[84] Only contrast "Tom, Tom, the piper's son," with "There was once a piper's son," or think how comparatively uninteresting the enormities of another hero or not-hero would have been if he had been anonymous instead of being called "Georgy-Porgy Pudding-and-Pie!" ["Puddenum" is, or used to be, the preferred if corrupt nursery form.] In more elaborate and adorned narrative the influence, not merely of the name but of the beautiful name, comes in, and that of the name itself remains. In that tragic story of Ludlow Castle which was given above (Chap. iv. pp. 84–6), something, for the present writer at least, would have been lost if the traitor had been merely "a knight" instead of Sir Ernault Lisle and the victim merely "a damsel" instead of Marion de la Brière. And would the bocca bacciata of Alaciel itself be as gracious if it was merely anybody's?
[85] The amazing farce-insets of Lyndsay's Satire of the Three Estates could be paralleled, and were no doubt suggested, by French farces of older date.
[86] Nobody seems to be entirely certain what this odd title means: though there have been some obvious and some far-fetched guesses. But it has, like other rhétoriqueur names of 1450–1550, such as "Traverser of Perilous Ways" and the like, a kind of fantastic attraction for some people.