Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/458

408 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE ever. Some have thought him a satire upon the robber knight of the period. Indeed, this beast epic is throughout a keen satire not only upon medieval society, but upon human nature in all ages. The poem also illustrates the medieval fondness for animals and sympathy with them which we shall meet again in the carvings on the cathedrals. The Romance of the Rose is an allegorical story. The author is represented as dreaming and seeing various virtues The Romance and vices personified. In other words, abstrac- of the Rose tions, such as False-Seeming, Largess, Courtesy, and Reason, are the characters of the Romance of the Rose, instead of beasts, such as Bernard the ass, Dame Fiere the lioness, Isengrim the wolf, and Chantecleer the cock, in Reynard the Fox. The Rose represents the loved one whom the lover seeks to win throughout the poem. This romance was begun by William of Lorris in the first half of the thir- teenth century, perhaps about 1235, and was completed some forty years later by Jean de Meun, a place on the Loire River. William's briefer part of the poem is an alle- gorical love story with descriptions of a beautiful garden and the wonderful singing of the birds therein. John con- tinues the story, but digresses or has his characters digress to discuss all sorts of subjects, scientific, historical, and social, showing us that in the thirteenth century people who could neither speak nor read Latin might nevertheless learn not a little both of nature and the human past as well as of present political and social problems. The lover's quest at last is brought to a successful termination and the poem closes with the couplets : — "Here ends the romance called 'The Rose,' Where all the art of love's enclosed: And Nature laughs, it seems to me, When joined at last are He and She." If the chansons de geste and many other romances were written largely for the feudal nobles and their ladies, in „ the fabliaux, which may be called short stories in verse, we have a variety of literature more adapted to the bourgeois society of the towns, whose ordi-