NORMAN tual wealth, of elegant taste, of pure ethics, and the CHAP. best sympathies and emotions of the heart, is the VII. most likely to become the most studied, the most ANGLOuniversal, and the most permanent tongue. Every VERNAEnglish author should therefore strive to continue CULAR and increase the charms of his native diction, and to connect it with the noblest and most interesting pursuits and effusions of the cultivated, moralized and sanctified spirit. Personal fame, useful patriotism, and the sublimest philanthropy will be sweetly blended in the felicitating employment. Base subjects, trifling littlenesses, unprofitable rubbish, and mischievous extravagancies, will then no longer degrade the British press; nor withhold it from the sovereignty to which it is fully qualified to aspire, and which every misleading author contributes to prevent. Mankind will never, in the free action of their will, extensively or continuously patronise the evil, or the inferior, in any department of human action or inquiry. We may consider six languages as having pretensions, and some of them as actually contending to become the habitual speech of our Norman ancestors; and through them, of all France. They carried with them their Norwegian tongue from their rough northern ocean; they settled themselves close by the ancient British in Bretagne, divided only by hedges and rivers; they found in France, in which they at first prowled for booty, and with which they always maintained a favorite intercourse, three languages, that had been struggling for predominance; the ancient German of the Franks," the Provençal of the "The remains of their Franco-Theotric language have been collected POETRY. VI. 45 BOOK southern provinces, and the more latinized Romane of the interior and northward districts; and they beLITERARY came the chief proprietors of land in an Anglo-Saxon ENGLAND. population. HISTORY OF With all these languages to choose from, they dropped, by a process untraceable now, their native Norwegian. They avoided the Franco-Theotisc, the Breton and the Provençal; and before they invaded England, had naturalized indelibly among them that Romane tongue, which, in its old form, has survived to us in the Anglo-Norman remains," and in its newest form constitutes the modern French. It has been regretted by one of the latest writers on the ancient poets of France, that instead of this the Provençal did not become the national language. He thinks it would have given to it, by its full, sweet, and 48 by Schelter, in his Thesaurus. Its grammar is in Hickes Ant. Sept. Its most ancient monument is the oath of Louis the German, transmitted to us by Nithardus. 45 M. Raynouard's Choix des Poesies des Troubadeurs, contains some of the specimens of their language and poetry. Auguis, in his Poetes Francois before Malherbe, begins with some of the Provençal writers, but consists chiefly of the Trouveres, and their successors, the oldest French poets. 46 The Anglo-Norman poems are specimens of this, and their authors frequently call their language the romanz. Thus Gaimar: Il purchasar mainte esamplaire MS. Bib. Reg. 13. A 21. "Altho all France now uses the language of their Trouveres, as its national tongue, yet England has the credit of exhibiting the earliest specimen of it in the laws of William the Conqueror, which our Ingulf has preserved. Its most ancient work, in verse, is thought to be the translation of the Latin poem of Marbodius on the precious stones, written about 1123. Aug. xviii. 48 The two languages have been called, from their words for yes,' Langue d'oc, and Langue d'oil. On nomme encore le Provençal, Langue d'oc, et le Wallon langue d'oil. Après trois siècles d'existence, la langue des Troubadeurs s'eteignit par une nouvelle corruption, et parce qu'elle ne fit aucun progrès. Le Roman Wallon, que les Trouveres employoient se conserva se perfectionna, peu à peu ; et c'est de ce dialecte qu'est venu le François.' Anguis Disc. Prel. from Sism. v. 1. p. 259. СНАР. NORMAN VERNA POETRY. sounding terminations, a finer idiom than any other.49 But no nation can choose its diction from the taste VII. of its literati. The uncultivated population of every ANGLOcountry attach to it the language they use and prefer, long before poets compose, philosophers reason, or CULAR taste decides. These may engraft or prune, but cannot eradicate one speech to plant another; and therefore as our Anglo-Troveurs found their Romane or Norman French in full use at the Anglo-Norman court, and among its nobility, even when embosomed in England, they made it the language of their literary effusions. From the time at least of Hugh Capet,50 it had become decidedly the language of all the French provinces north of the Loire; and their new compositions in it competed its predominance in the amalgamated nation of the future France, and before the thirteenth century ended, France could enumerate the works of one hundred and twenty-seven poets." 51 49 M. Auguis says, Il est clair que la langue d'oc etoit plus digne de devenir la langue dominante: elle nous eut donné, par ses terminaisons pleines, douces et retentissantes, un idiome aussi beau que nul autre.' Dis. Prel. xii. 50 Cette romancerie, proprement dite, remonte jusqu'à Hugues Capet; et se multiplie prodigieusement.' Aug. D. Pr. xi. 51 Auguis, ib. Our own times and country have seemed peculiarly prolific in poets; but even in what are miscalled the dark ages, we read that from Guillaume IX. who died 1122, to Malherbe, who was born 1556, or in 434 years, there were no fewer than 600 poets in France; nearly one and a half a year.' M. Auguis's work presents specimens of the chief of these. We sing that Time has thinned our flowing hair;' but what a havoc has he made in the Parnassus of every country! Tandis que l'Italiens imitoient la syntaxe latine, que leurs finales, toujours pleines, se prêtoient tout de suite à l'euphonie, et que le passage d'une langue à l'autre étoit presque imperceptible; que, pressés ou lents, doux ou apres forts ou passionnés, sublimes et sonnants, ou simples et paisibles, leurs écrivains pouvoient donner à leur gré à la langue poétique de la souplesse et de la variété; qu'ils pouvoient raccourcir ou allonger leurs terminaisons après les quatre liquides, adoucir une quantité d'autres mots par des abréviations diverses, avoir dans des modifications de finales des modifications d'idées; en un mot, se créer, par des exceptions légères et faciles, une langue poétique entièrement séparée de la prose. Nous qui avions été leurs premiers maîtres, nous ignorions encore le genie de notre propre langue.' Auguis, ib. xiv. HISTORY OF 53 BOOK Its antiquaries, however, complain, that the language VI. was not improved adequately to such a literary use of LITERARY it, while the Italians, with more successful attentions, or by more fortunate accidents, were giving to their tongue a superiority of euphonous beauty," which no other European nation has either equalled or outdone. Francis I. drew the French out of its barbaric state, and extended to it the royal encouragement, by ordering it to be used instead of Latin in the tribunals and public acts. Marot first gave elegance, melody and ease to its poetry; which Malherbe, rescuing from the pedantry and artificial compounds of Ronsard, made more correct, regular, rythmical and select. While Amyot and Montaigne introduced many analogous improvements to its prose; Corneille added to verse new dignity and force, and Racine blended with it all that sweetness, charm, refinement, taste and coloring,55 which foreigners as well as natives both feel and admire. Fenelon afterwards allied to his native tongue all the graceful simplicity, intel ligence, perspicuity and delicacy of his own elegant mind and pure heart. 52 Auguis, Dis. Prel. xiv. Algarotti has left a very pleasing Italian essay on the French and Italian languages, which will reward perusal for its sweetness of diction and good sense. 53 Auguis, ib. 54 Of Marot, who, as a poet, he calls elegant, but, as a prose writer, Indigeste et obscur,' M. Auguis says, 'il s'attacha aux termes, et aux tours que le frottement de l'usage avoit le plus adoucis. Toutes les rimes agréables, toutes les phrases coulantes, echappées au hasard des vielles pleines Francoises, il recueillit et employa. He shewed' que la grace du François reside dans une tournure facile, vive, serrée, et surtout claire et directe.' Aug. ib. 6 55 Le veritable fondation de notre langue poetique, en France, fut Malherbe. Cette correction suivie que personne n'eut avant Malherbe.' Corneille added new force, and Racine gave it plus de charme,' and caused it to descend from its ancient majesty' à une jeunesse plus riante et plus douce. Il mela plus de couleurs à ses tableaux, il perfectionna l'art des nuances; et repondit sur elle un éclat de figures et d'ornements qu'elle n'avoit point connu jusqu'alors.' Aug. ib. VII. NORMAN VERNA POETRY. Facility of its rime. No circumstance could have been more auspicious CHAP. to the rise of true poetry in England, than to have had in its infant state such a simple and yet mark- ANGLOing characteristic as rime. The first Anglo-Norman verses were so completely dull and barren prose, that, CULAR if they had not possessed this distinguishing feature, it is hard to conceive how their poetry could have obtained a separate growth and peculiar cultivation; yet such was the rude and feeble state of the public mind, that if the characteristic of its poetry had been a laborious difficulty, it would have made no progress, nor attracted imitation. In all the arts and sciences, many of all classes must be tempted to study, judge and practise them, before excellence can be formed; before the chance occurs, of genius being possessed by some of the cultivators. But from the abundant consonancies which all languages retain, rime is a form of composition as easy of practice as it is a marking feature. It is a light and pliable fetter, which genius may play with as it pleases. It was so trifling a restraint to our literary ancestors, that they composed in it works which in their length might daunt even a sir Richard Blackmore. Wace has left us ten poems in Norman French, of which one alone contains 12,000 verses; and his contemporary, Beneoit, has bequeathed to us two historical poems that present us with at least 60,000 rimes.57 Gaimar emulates this fertility; and many other of the estories and romans are as prolific.58 Even the Latin lan 56 56 His Brut, Bib. Reg. 13. A 21.-His poem on the History of Normandy, Bib. Reg. 4. C 11. is much longer. 57 The Harl. MS. N° 1717, ou Normandy, contains about 45,000 lines; and the MS. N 4482, on Troy, about 15,000. 58 The roman entitled Les Gestes de Garin, Bib. Reg. 20. B 19 contains above 25,000 rimed lines. It resembles some of the Welsh poetry, in continuing the same rime for many lines together. Thus 25 lines |