CHAPTER VIII
LOVE FORMALIZED
When in the twelfth century unsatisfied desire was placed by the troubadours of Provence in the centre of the poetic conception of love, an important turn in the history of civilization was effected. Antiquity, too, had sung the sufferings of love, but it had never conceived them save as the expectation of happiness or as its pitiful frustration. The sentimental point of Pyramus and Thisbe, of Cephalus and Procris, lies in their tragic end; in the heart-rending loss of a happiness already enjoyed. Courtly poetry, on the other hand, makes desire itself the essential motif, and so creates a conception of love with a negative ground-note. Without giving up all connection with sensual love, the new poetic ideal was capable of embracing all kinds of ethical aspirations. Love now became the field where all moral and cultural perfection flowered. Because of his love, the courtly lover is pure and virtuous. The spiritual element dominates more and more, till towards the end of the thirteenth century, the dolce stil nuovo of Dante and his friends ends by attributing to love the gift of bringing about a state of piety and holy intuition. Here an extreme had been reached. Italian poetry was gradually to find its way back to a less exalted expression of erotic sentiment. Petrarch is divided between the ideal of spiritualized love and the more natural charm of antique models. Soon the artificial system of courtly love is abandoned, and its subtle distinctions will not be revived, when the Platonism of the Renaissance, latent, already, in the courtly conception, gives rise to new forms of erotic poetry with a spiritual tendency.
In France the evolution of erotic culture was more complicated. The idea of courtly love was not to be supplanted so easily there. The system is not given up; but the forms are filled by new values. Even before Dante had found the eternal harmony of his Vita Nuova, the Roman de la Rose had inaugurated a novel phase of erotic thought in France. The work, begun before 1240 by Guillaume de Lorris, was finished, before 1280, by Jean Chopinel. Few books have exercised a more profound and enduring influence on the life of any period than the Romaunt of the Rose. Its popularity lasted for two centuries at least. It determined the aristocratic conception of love in the expiring Middle Ages. By reason of its encyclopedic range it became the treasure-house whence lay society drew the better part of its erudition.
The existence of an upper class whose intellectual and moral notions are enshrined in an ars amandi remains a rather exceptional fact in history. In no other epoch did the ideal of civilization amalgamate to such a degree with that of love. Just as scholasticism represents the grand effort of the medieval spirit to unite all philosophic thought in a single centre, so the theory of courtly love, in a less elevated sphere, tends to embrace all that appertains to the noble life. The Roman de la Rose did not destroy the system; it only modified its tendencies and enriched its contents.
To formalize love is the supreme realization of the aspiration to the life beautiful, of which we traced above both the ceremonial and the heroic expression. More than in pride and in strength, beauty is found in love. To formalize love is, moreover, a social necessity, a need that is the more imperious as life is more ferocious. Love has to be elevated to the height of a rite. The overflowing violence of passion demands it. Only by constructing a system of forms and rules for the vehement emotions can barbarity be escaped. The brutality and the licence of the lower classes was always fervently, but never very efficiently, repressed by the Church. The aristocracy could feel less dependent on religious admonition, because they had a piece of culture of their own from which to draw their standards of conduct, namely, courtesy. Literature, fashion and conversation here formed the means to regulate and refine erotic life. If they did not altogether succeed, they at least created the appearance of an honourable life of courtly love. For, in reality, the sexual life of the higher classes remained surprisingly rude.
In the erotic conceptions of the Middle Ages two diverging currents are to be distinguished. Extreme indecency showing itself freely in customs, as in literature, contrasts with an excessive formalism, bordering on prudery. Chastellain mentions frankly how the duke of Burgundy, awaiting an English embassy at Valenciennes, reserves the baths of the town “for them and for all their retinue, baths provided with everything required for the calling of Venus, to take by choice and by election what they liked best, and all at the expense of the duke.” Charles the Bold was reproached with his continence, which was thought unbecoming in a prince. At the royal or princely courts of the fifteenth century, marriage feasts were accompanied by all sorts of licentious pleasantries—a usage which had not disappeared two centuries later. In Froissart’s narrative of the marriage of Charles VI with Isabella of Bavaria we hear the obscene grinning of the court. Deschamps dedicates to Antoine de Bourgogne an epithalamium of extreme indecency. A certain rhymer makes a lascivious ballad at the request of the lady of Burgundy and of all the ladies.
Such customs seem to be absolutely opposed to the constraint and the modesty imposed by courtesy. The same circles who showed so much shamelessness in sexual relations professed to venerate the ideal of courtly love. Are we to look for hypocrisy in their theory or for cynical abandonment of troublesome forms in their practice?
We should rather picture to ourselves two layers of civilisation superimposed, coexisting though contradictory. Side by side with the courtly style, of literary and rather recent origin, the primitive forms of erotic life kept all their force; for a complicated civilization like that of the closing Middle Ages could not but be heir to a crowd of conceptions, motives, erotic forms, which now collided and now blended.
The whole of the epithalamic genre may be considered as a heritage of a remote past. In primitive culture marriage and nuptials form but one single sacred rite, converging in the mystery of copulation. Afterwards the Church, by transferring the sacred element of marriage to the sacrament, reserved the mystery for itself, leaving its accessories, to which it objected, to develop freely as popular practices. Thus the epithalamic apparatus, though stripped of its sacred character, nevertheless kept its importance as the main element in the nuptial feasts, thriving there more freely than ever. Licentious expression and gross symbolism were essential to it. The Church was powerless to bridle them. Neither Catholic discipline nor Reformed Puritanism could do away with the quasi-publicity of the marriage-bed, which remained in vogue well into the seventeenth century.
It is therefore from an ethnological point of view, as survivals, that we have to regard the mass of obscenities, equivocal sayings and lascivious symbols which we meet in the civilization of the Middle Ages. They were the remains of mysteries that had degenerated into games and amusements. Evidently the people of that epoch did not feel that, in taking pleasure in them, they were infringing the prescriptions of the courtly code; they felt themselves on different soil where courtesy was not current.
It would be an exaggeration to say that in erotic literature the whole comic genre was derived from the epithalamium. Certainly the indecent tale, the farce and the lascivious song had long formed a genre of their own of which the forms of expression were liable to but little variation. Obscene allegory predominates; every trade lent itself to this treatment; the literature of the time abounds in symbolism borrowed from the tournament, the chase or music; but most popular of all was the religious travesty of erotic matters. Besides the grossly comic style of the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, punning with homonymous words like saint and seins, or using in an obscene sense the words for blessing and confession, erotic-ecclesiastical allegory took a more refined form. The poets of the circle of Charles d’Orléans compared their amorous sadness to the sufferings of the ascetic and the martyr. They call themselves “les amoureux de l’observance,” alluding to the severe reform which the Franciscan order had just undergone. Charles d’Orléans begins one of his pieces:
“Ce sont ici les dix commandemens,
Vray Dieu d’amours….”[1]
“J’ay fait l’obseque de ma dame
Dedans le moustier amoureux,
Et le service pour son ame
A chanté Penser doloreux.
Mains sierges de soupirs piteux
Ont esté en son luminaire,
Aussi j’ay fait la tombe faire
De regrets….”[2]
All the effects of a sweet and melancholy burlesque are found together in that very tender and pure poem of the end of the century called L’Amant rendu Cordelier de l’Observance d’Amour, which describes the reception of an inconsolable lover in the convent of amorous martyrs. It is as though erotic poetry even in this perverse way strove to recover that primitive connection with sacred matters of which the Christian religion had bereft it.
French authors like to oppose “l’esprit gaulois” to the conventions of courtly love, as the natural conception and expression opposed to the artificial. Now the former is no less a fiction than the latter. Erotic thought never acquires literary value save by some process of transfiguration of complex and painful reality into illusionary forms. The whole genre of Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles and the loose song, with its wilful neglect of all the natural and social complications of love, with its indulgence towards the lies and egotism of sexual life, and its vision of a never-ending lust, implies, no less than the screwed-up system of courtly love, an attempt to substitute for reality the dream of a happier life. It is once more the aspiration towards the life sublime, but this time viewed from the animal side. It is an ideal all the same, even though it be that of unchastity. Reality at all times has been worse and more brutal than the refined æstheticism of courtesy would have it be, but also more chaste than it is represented to be by the vulgar genre which is wrongly regarded as realism.
As an element of literary culture the “genre gaulois” could only occupy a secondary place, because erotic poetry is only fit to beautify life and to serve as a source of inspiration and imitation, in so far as it takes for its themes, not sexual intercourse itself, but the possibility of happiness, the promise, desire, languor, expectation. Only thus will it be capable of expressing all the different shadings of love, and of treating it equally from the sad and from the merry side. By introducing into love's domain the concepts of honour, courage, fidelity, and all the other elements of moral life, it will be of far greater æsthetic and ethical value. The Roman de la Rose, by combining the passionate character of its sensuous central theme with all the elaborate fancy of the system of courtly love, satisfied the needs of erotic expression of a whole age.
In this veritable treasure-house of amorous doctrine, ritual and legend, systematic and complete, the encyclopedic spirit of the thirteenth century had poured itself out, as it did in the sterner work of a Vincent of Beauvais. The extraordinary influence of the book could not but be heightened by its ambiguous nature. The work of two poets of different trends of thought, it joined—it would be more correct to say it juxtaposed—the courtly conception of love and sensual cynicism of the most daring kind. Texts could be found in it for all purposes.
Guillaume de Lorris had given it charm of form and tenderness of accent. The background of vernal landscape, the bizarre and yet harmonious imagery of allegorical figures, are his work. As soon as the lover has approached the wall of the mysterious garden of love, the allegorical system is unfolded. Dame Leisure opens the gate for him, Gaiety conducts the dance, Amor holds by the hand Beauty, who is accompanied by Wealth, Liberality, Frankness, Courtesy and Youth. After having locked the heart of his vassal, Amor enumerates to him the blessings of love, called Hope, Sweet Thought, Sweet Speech, Sweet Look. Then, when Bel-Accueil, the son of Courtesy, invites him to come and see the roses, Danger, Malebouche, Fear and Shame come to chase him away. The dramatic struggle commences. Reason comes down from its high tower, and Venus appears upon the scene. The text of Guillaume de Lorris ends in the middle of the crisis.
Jean Chopinel, or Clopinel, or de Meun, who finished the work, adding much more than he found, sacrificed the harmony of the composition to his fondness for psychological and social analysis. The conquest of the castle of the roses is drowned in a continual flood of digressions, speculations and examples. The sweet breeze of Guillaume de Lorris was followed by the east wind of chilling scepticism and cruel cynicism of his successor. The vigorous and trenchant spirit of the second tarnished the naïve and lightsome idealism of the first. Jean de Meun is an enlightened man, who believes neither in spectres nor in sorcerers, neither in faithful love nor in the chastity of woman, who has an inkling of the problems of mental pathology, and puts into the mouths of Venus, Nature and Genius the most daring apology for sensuality.
Venus, requested by her son to come to his aid, swears not to leave a single woman chaste and makes Amor and the whole army of assailants take the same vow as regards men. Nature, occupied in her smithy with her task of preserving the various species, her eternal struggle against Death, complains that of all creatures, man alone transgresses her commandments by abstaining from procreation. She charges Genius, her priest, to go and hurl at Love's army, Nature's anathema on those who despise her laws. In sacerdotal dress, a taper in his hand, Genius pronounces the sacrilegious excommunication, in which the boldest sensualism blends with refined mysticism. Virginity is condemned, hell is reserved for those who do not observe the commandments of nature and of love. For the others the flowered field, where the white sheep, led by Jesus, the lamb born of the Virgin, crop the incorruptible grass in endless daylight. At the close Genius throws the taper into the besieged fortress; its flame sets the universe on fire. Venus also throws her torch; then Shame and Fear flee, the castle is taken, and Bel-Accueil allows the lover to pluck the rose.
Here, then, in the Roman de la Rose, the sexual motif is again placed in the centre of erotic poetry, but enveloped by symbolism and mystery and presented in the guise of saintliness. It is impossible to imagine a more deliberate defiance of the Christian ideal. The dream of love had taken a form as artistic as it was passionate. The profusion of allegory satisfied all the requirements of medieval imagination. These personifications were indispensable for expressing the finer shades of sentiments. Erotic terminology, to be understood, could not dispense with these graceful puppets. People used these figures of Danger, Evil Mouth, etc., as the accepted terms of a scientific psychology. The passionate character of the central motif prevented tediousness and pedantry.
In theory, the Roman de la Rose does not deny the ideal of courtesy. The garden of delights is inaccessible except to the elect, regenerated by love. He who wants to enter must be free from all hatred, felony, villainy, avarice, envy, sadness, hypocrisy, poverty and old age. But the positive qualities he has to oppose to these are no longer ethical, as in the system of courtly love, but simply of an aristocratic character. They are leisure, pleasure, gaiety, love, beauty, wealth, liberality, frankness and courteousness. They are no longer so many perfections brought about by the sacredness of love, but simply the proper means to conquer the object desired. For the veneration of idealized womanhood, Jean Chopinel substituted cruel contempt for its feebleness.
Now, whatever influence the Roman de la Rose may have exercised on the minds of men, it did not succeed in completely destroying the older conception of love. Side by side with the glorification of seduction professed by the Rose, the glorification of the pure and faithful love of the knight maintained its ground, both in lyrical poetry and in the romance of chivalry, not to speak of the fantasy of tournaments and passages of arms. Towards the end of the fourteenth century the question which of the two conceptions of love should be held by the perfect nobleman provoked a literary dispute such as French taste loved in later centuries also. The noble Boucicaut had made himself the champion of true courtesy by composing with his travelling companions the Livre des Cent Ballades, in which he called on the wits of the court to decide between the honest and self-denying service of a single lady, and fashionable flirtation. Knights or poets who, like Boucicaut, honoured the old ideal of courtesy, were vaunted as models, Othe de Granson and Louis de Sancerre among others. Christine de Pisan took part in the dispute by posing as the intrepid advocate of female honour. Her Episire au Dieu d’Amours formulated the complaints of women about all the deceit and insults of men. With serious indignation she denounces the doctrine of the Roman de la Rose.
Then the multitude of fervent admirers of Jean de Meun appeared upon the scene. Among them were men of very varying spiritual bent, even ecclesiastics. The debate lasted for years. The nobility and the court took it up as a means of amusement. Boucicaut—encouraged, perhaps, by the praise of Christine de Pisan, for his defence of ideal courtesy—had already founded his “ordre de l’escu vert à la dame blanche,” for the defence of oppressed women, when the duke of Burgundy eclipsed him by founding in Paris, at the “hétel d’Artois,” on February 14, 1401, a court of love on a very splendid scale. Philippe le Hardi, the old diplomat, whom one would have supposed to be occupied with affairs of a very different nature, and Louis de Bourbon, had begged the king to institute a court of love to furnish some distraction during an epidemic of the plague which raged at Paris, “to spend part of the time more graciously and in order to find awakening of new joy.” The cause of chivalry triumphed in the form of a literary salon. The court was founded on the virtues of humility and of fidelity, “to the honour, praise and commendation and service of all noble ladies.” The members were provided with illustrious titles. The two founders and the king were called the Grands Conservateurs. Among the conservators we find Jean sans Peur, his brother Antoine, and his six-years-old son, Philippe. A certain Pierre d’Hauteville, from Hainault, was Prince of Love; there were also ministers, auditors, knights of honour, knights treasurers, councillors, grand-masters of the chase, squires of love, etc. Burghers and lower clergy were admitted, side by side with princes and prelates. The business of the court much resembled that of a “rhetorical chamber.” Refrains were set to be worked up into “ballades couronnées ou chapelées,” songs, sirventois, complaints, rondels, lays, virelais, etc. There were debates “in the form of amorous law-suits to defend different opinions.” The ladies distributed the prizes, and poems attacking the honour of women were forbidden.
In this pompous and grave apparatus of a graceful amusement one cannot help feeling the effect of Burgundian style beginning to influence the French court itself. It is equally obvious that the royal court, archaic like all courts, must declare in favour of the ancient and severe ideal of love, and that the 700 known members of the club were far from conforming their practice to it. By what is known of their habits, the great lords of that epoch were rather strange protectors of female honour. The most curious fact is that we find there the same persons who, in the debate about love, had defended the Roman de la Rose and attacked Christine de Pisan. Evidently it was merely a society amusement.
The intimate circle of Jean de Meun’s admirers consisted of men in the service of princes, both priests and laymen. It is identical with that of the first French humanists. One of them, Jean de Montreuil, provost of Lille, secretary to the dauphin and later to the duke of Burgundy, was the author of good many Ciceronian epistles, and, like his friends, Gontier and Pierre Col, he corresponded with Nicolas de Clemanges, the grave censor of the abuses in the Church. We now find him devoting his talents to the defence of the Roman de la Rose, and of its author, Jean de Meun. He asserts that several of the most learned and enlightened men honour the Roman de la Rose so much that their appreciation resembles a cult (paene ut colerent), and that they would rather do without their shirt than this book. He exhorts his friends to undertake its defence, like himself. “The more I study”—he writes to one of the detractors—“the gravity of the mysteries and the mystery of the gravity of this profound and famous work of Master Jean de Meun, the more I am astonished at your disapprobation.” He himself will defend it to his last breath, and many others will serve this cause with words and deeds.
The conviction with which Jean de Montreuil speaks, seems already to indicate that the question of love, after all, involved graver issues than those of a court amusement, and this is further proved by the fact that Jean Gerson, the illustrious chancellor of the university, took part in the quarrel. He hated the Roman de la Rose with implacable hatred. The book seemed to him to be the most dangerous pest, the source of all immorality. In his works he reverts again and again to the pernicious influence “of the vicious romaunt of the rose.” If he had a copy, which was the only one and worth a thousand pounds, he would rather burn it than sell it to be published. When Pierre Col had refuted one of Gerson's polemical writings, the latter replied by a treatise against the Roman de la Rose, which was more bitter than his former denunciations. He dated it "from my study, on the evening of the 18th of May, 1402."
Following the example of the author of the Roman de la Rose he gave his treatise the form of an allegoric vision. Awakening, one morning, he feels his soul flying far away, "using the feathers and the wings of various thoughts, from one place to another, to the sacred court of Christianity," where he hears the complaints of Chastity addressed to Justice, Conscience and Wisdom about the Fool of love, that is to say, Jean de Meun, who has chased her from the earth, with all her train. The "good guardians" of Chastity are precisely the evil personages of the Rose: Shame, Fear and Danger, "the good porter, who would not dare, who would not deign to sanction even an impure kiss or dissolute look, or attractive smile or light speech." Chastity overwhelms the Fool of love with reproaches. The Fool rails at marriage and monastic life. He teaches "how all young girls should sell their persons early and dearly, without fear and without shame, and that they should make light of deceit and perjury." He directs the fancy exclusively to carnal desire, and, to top all perversity, in the speeches of Venus, of Nature, and of Dame Reason, he blends conceptions of Paradise, and of the mysteries of the Faith, with those of sensual pleasure.
There, in truth, was the peril. This imposing work, with its mixture of sensuality, scoffing cynicism and elegant symbolism, infused a voluptuous mysticism into the mind which, to an austere man, was simply an abyss of sin. Had not Gerson's adversary dared to affirm that only the Fool of love could judge of the value of passion? He who does not know it sees it only as in a glass, to him it remains a riddle. Such was the use he had made for his sacrilegious purposes, of the holy words of Saint Paul! Pierre Col had not scrupled to affirm that the Song of Solomon was composed in honour of the daughter of Pharaoh. Those who have defamed the Roman de la Rose, he declared, have bent their knees before Baal. Nature does not wish that woman should be content with one single man, and the genius of Nature is God. He carried his blasphemy so far as to show from the Gospel of Saint Luke that formerly a woman’s genitals, the rose of the romance, were sacred. Being convinced of the truth of this impious mysticism, he appealed to the friends of the book, forming a cloud of witnesses, and predicted that Gerson himself would fall madly in love, as had happened to other theologians before him.
Gerson did not succeed in destroying the authority, or, at least, the popularity, of the Roman de la Rose. In 1444 a canon of Lisieux, Estienne Legris, composed a Répertoire du Roman de la Rose. Towards the end of the century Jean Molinet could assert that its sentences were current like pro- verbs. He has given himself the trouble of “moralizing” the whole book, in giving its allegories a religious meaning. The nightingale calling to love meant the voice of the preacher, the rose meant Jesus. Even in the hey-day of the Renaissance, Clément Marot considered that the work deserved to be modernized, and Ronsard did not consider the figures of Bel-Accueil and Faus Danger too worn for use in his verse.