There is nothing in artistic poetry
quite akin to “Aucassin and Nicolete.”
By a rare piece of good fortune the
one manuscript of the Song-Story has escaped those
waves of time which have wrecked the bark of Menander
and left of Sappho but a few floating fragments.
The very form of the tale is peculiar; we have nothing
else from the twelfth or thirteenth century in the
alternate prose and verse of the cante-fable.
We have fabliaux in verse and prose Arthurian
romances. We have Chansons de Geste
heroic poems like “Roland” unrhymed assonant
laisses but we have not the alternations of
prose with laisses in seven-syllabled lines.
It cannot be certainly known whether the form of “Aucassin
and Nicolete” was a familiar form used
by many jogleors or wandering minstrels and
story-tellers such as Nicolete in the tale feigned
herself to be or whether this is a solitary
experiment by “the old captive” its author
a contemporary as M. Gaston Paris thinks him of
Louis vii (1130). He was original enough
to have invented or adopted from popular tradition
a form for himself; his originality declares itself
everywhere in his one surviving masterpiece.
True he uses certain traditional formulae that have
survived in his time as they survived in Homer’s
from the manner of purely popular poetry of Volkslieder.
Thus he repeats snatches of conversation always in
the same or very nearly the same words. He
has a stereotyped form like Homer for saying that
one person addressed another “ains traist au
visconte de la vile si l’apela” [Greek
text] . . . Like Homer and like popular song
he deals in recurrent epithets and changeless courtesies.
To Aucassin the hideous plough-man is “Biax frère”
“fair brother” just as the treacherous
Aegisthus is in Homer; these are complimentary
terms with no moral sense in particular. The
jogleor is not more curious than Homer or
than the poets of the old ballads about giving novel
descriptions of his characters. As Homer’s
ladies are “fair-tressed” so Nicolete
and Aucassin have each of them close yellow curls
eyes of vair (whatever that may mean) and red
lips. War cannot be mentioned except as war
“where knights do smite and are smitten”
and so forth. The author is absolutely conventional
in such matters according to the convention of his
age and profession.
Nor is his matter more original.
He tells a story of thwarted and finally fortunate
love, and his hero is “a Christened knight” like
Tamlane, his heroine a Paynim lady.
To be sure, Nicolete was baptized before the tale
begins, and it is she who is a captive among Christians,
not her lover, as usual, who is a captive among Saracens.
The author has reversed the common arrangement, and
he appears to have cared little more than his reckless
hero, about creeds and differences of faith.
He is not much interested in the recognition of Nicolete
by her great Paynim kindred, nor indeed in any of
the “business” of the narrative, the fighting,
the storms and tempests, and the burlesque of the kingdom
of Torelore.
What the nameless author does care
for, is his telling of the love-story, the passion
of Aucassin and Nicolete. His originality lies
in his charming medley of sentiment and humour, of
a smiling compassion and sympathy with a touch of
mocking mirth. The love of Aucassin and Nicolete
“Des grans paines qu’il
soufri,”
that is the one thing serious to him
in the whole matter and that is not so very serious.
The story-teller is no Mimnermus Love and Youth
are the best things he knew “deport
du viel caitif” and now he has
“come to forty years” and now they are
with him no longer. But he does not lament like
Mimnermus like Alcman like Llwyarch Hen. “What
is Life what is delight without golden Aphrodite?
May I die!” says Mimnermus “when I am
no more conversant with these with secret love and
gracious gifts and the bed of desire.”
And Alcman when his limbs waver beneath him is
only saddened by the faces and voices of girls and
would change his lot for the sea-birds.
“Maidens with voices like
honey for sweetness that breathe desire,
Would that I were a sea-bird with
limbs that never could tire,
Over the foam-flowers flying with
halcyons ever on wing,
Keeping a careless heart, a sea-blue
bird of the spring.”
But our old captive, having said farewell
to love, has yet a kindly smiling interest in its
fever and folly. Nothing better has he met, even
now that he knows “a lad is an ass.”
He tells a love story, a story of love overmastering,
without conscience or care of aught but the beloved.
And the viel caitif tells it with sympathy,
and with a smile. “Oh folly of fondness,”
he seems to cry, “oh merry days of desolation”
“When I was young as you are
young,
When lutes were touched and songs
were sung,
And love lamps in the windows hung.”
It is the very tone of Thackeray,
when Thackeray is tender, and the world heard it first
from this elderly, nameless minstrel, strolling with
his viol and his singing boys, perhaps, like a blameless
d’Assoucy, from castle to castle in “the
happy poplar land.” One seems to see him
and hear him in the twilight, in the court of some
chateau of Picardy, while the ladies on silken cushions
sit around him listening, and their lovers, fettered
with silver chains, lie at their feet. They listen,
and look, and do not think of the minstrel with his
grey head and his green heart, but we think of him.
It is an old man’s work, and a weary man’s
work. You can easily tell the places where he
has lingered, and been pleased as he wrote.
They are marked, like the bower Nicolete built, with
flowers and broken branches wet with dew. Such
a passage is the description of Nicolete at her window,
in the strangely painted chamber,
“ki faîte est par
grant dévisse
panturee a miramie.”
Thence
“she saw
the roses blow,
Heard the birds sing loud and low.”
Again, the minstrel speaks out what
many must have thought, in those incredulous ages
of Faith, about Heaven and Hell, Hell where the gallant
company makes up for everything. When he comes
to a battle-piece he makes Aucassin “mightily
and knightly hurl through the press,” like one
of Malory’s men. His hero must be a man
of his hands, no mere sighing youth incapable of arms.
But the minstrels heart is in other things, for example,
in the verses where Aucassin transfers to Beauty the
wonder-working powers of Holiness, and makes the sight
of his lady heal the palmer, as the shadow of the
Apostle, falling on the sick people, healed them by
the Gate Beautiful. The Flight of Nicolete is
a familiar and beautiful picture, the daisy flowers
look black in the ivory moonlight against her feet,
fair as Bombyca’s “feet of carven ivory”
in the Sicilian idyll, long ago. It is characteristic
of the poet that the two lovers begin to wrangle about
which loves best, in the very mouth of danger, while
Aucassin is yet in prison, and the patrol go down the
moonlit street, with swords in their hands, sworn to
slay Nicolete. That is the place and time chosen
for this ancient controversy. Aucassin’s
threat that if he loses Nicolete he will not wait for
sword or knife, but will dash his head against a wall,
is in the very temper of the prisoned warrior-poet,
who actually chose this way of death. Then the
night scene, with its fantasy, and shadow, and moonlight
on flowers and street, yields to a picture of the
day, with the birds singing, and the shepherds laughing,
in the green links between wood and water. There
the shepherds take Nicolete for a fairy, so bright
a beauty shines about her. Their mockery, their
independence, may make us consider again our ideas
of early Feudalism. Probably they were in the
service of townsmen, whose good town treated the Count
as no more than an equal of its corporate dignity.
The bower of branches built by Nicolete is certainly
one of the places where the minstrel himself has rested
and been pleased with his work. One can feel
it still, the cool of that clear summer night, the
sweet smell of broken boughs, and trodden grass, and
deep dew, and the shining of the star that Aucassin
deemed was the translated spirit of his lady.
Romance has touched the book here with her magic,
as she has touched the lines where we read how Consuelo
came by moonlight to the Canon’s garden and
the white flowers. The pleasure here is the keener
for contrast with the luckless hind whom Aucassin encountered
in the forest: the man who had lost his master’s
ox, the ungainly man who wept, because his mother’s
bed had been taken from under her to pay his debt.
This man was in that estate which Achilles, in Hades,
preferred above the kingship of the dead outworn.
He was hind and hireling to a villein,
It is an unexpected touch of pity
for the people, and for other than love-sorrows,
in a poem intended for the great and courtly people
of chivalry.
At last the lovers meet, in the lodge
of flowers beneath the stars. Here the story
should end, though one could ill spare the pretty lecture
the girl reads her lover as they ride at adventure,
and the picture of Nicolete, with her brown stain,
and jogleor’s attire, and her viol, playing
before Aucassin in his own castle of Biaucaire.
The burlesque interlude of the country of Torelore
is like a page out of Rabelais, stitched into the
cante-fable by mistake. At such lands
as Torelore Pantagruel and Panurge touched many a
time in their vague voyaging. Nobody, perhaps,
can care very much about Nicolete’s adventures
in Carthage, and her recognition by her Paynim kindred.
If the old captive had been a prisoner among the
Saracens, he was too indolent or incurious to make
use of his knowledge. He hurries on to his journey’s
end;
“Journeys end in lovers meeting.”
So he finishes the tale. What
lives in it, what makes it live, is the touch of poetry,
of tender heart, of humorous resignation. The
old captive says the story will gladden sad men:-
“Nus hom n’est si esbahis,
tant dolans ni entrepris,
de grant mal amaladis,
se il l’oit, ne
soit garis,
et de joie resbaudis,
tant par
est douce.”