to treatment in verse, because the principal mode of assimilating a written work was still hearing it recited and getting it by heart. Even the “chansons de geste,” it seems, were chanted to a uniform melody. Individual and expressive declamation, as we understand it, was unknown in the Middle Ages. The growing predilection for prose means that reading was superseding recitation. Another custom, dating from the same epoch, testifies to this transition, namely the division of a work into small chapters with summaries, whereas formerly scarcely any division had been thought necessary. In fifteenth-century literature prose was, to a certain degree, the more refined and artistic form.
The superiority of prose is, however, purely formal; it lacks novelty of thought just as much as poetry. Froissart is the type of this extreme shallowness of thought and facility of expression. The simplicity of his ideas is surprising. Only three or four motives or sentiments are known to him: fidelity, honour, cupidity, courage, and these in their simplest forms. He uses no allegorical or mythological figures, never touches on theology, and even moral reflections are almost wholly absent. He goes on narrating, without effort, correctly, and yet he remains empty, because he has but the mechanical exactitude of a cinematograph. His moral reflections, when they do occur, are so commonplace as to be almost bewildering. Certain conceptions are, with him, always accompanied by fixed judgments. He cannot speak of Germans without recalling their cupidity and their barbarous treatment of prisoners. Even the quotations from Froissart which are currently presented to us as piquant prove when read in their context to lack the point attributed to them. On reading his appreciation of the first Duke of Burgundy of the house of Valois, “sage, froid et imaginatif, et qui sur ses besognes veoit au loin,”[1] we think we have lighted upon a penetrating and concise analysis of character. Only, Froissart applied these terms to almost everybody!
The poverty and sterility of Froissart’s mind, as compared with Chastellain’s, for example, is all the more evident, as his style is wholly devoid of rhetorical qualities. Now it is rhetoric which in the literature of the fifteenth century signal-
- ↑ Wise, frigid and imaginative, and far-sighted in business.
