Froissart, Chaucer, and the Pastourelles of the Pennsylvania Manuscript

Froissart, Chaucer, and the Pastourelles of the Pennsylvania Manuscript James Wimsatt University of Texas Chaum's style has been pwfitahly discussed and an,lyud as a compound ofwhat are conveniently termed courtly idealism and bourgeois realism. 1 The two elements ofthe compound are plausibly seen as inspired and informed by modes ofantecedent French literature: the courtly ele­ ment by the chivalric romance, Guillaume de Lorris's Roman de la Rose, and the court lyric; the realism by the fabliau andJean de Meun's Roman. The contribution of Chaucer's French contemporaries has been increas­ ingly recognized, but their influence has seemed quite one-sided, contrib­ uting much to the courtly aspect but almost nothing of poetic vigor describable as either bourgeois or realistic. For those who have searched, the likely loci of a fourteenth-century French realism have proved disappointing. One might have anticipated, for example, that ifhe could find some bourgeois poets independent ofthe courts he would also find some good middle-class realism. But when one looks at the products ofthe puys, the medieval societies ofpoet-citizens that flourished in the cities, he finds lyrics in praise ofladies and the Virgin not much different from, and often not as good as, those produced by the court poets and religious writers of the time. Again, one could have reasonably hoped that a form such as the pastourelle, treating peasant-class workers, would produce works with lively dialogue and concrete detail about the shepherd's metier. But the Middle French pastourelles that we have known, as with most poetry ofthe long pastourelle tradition, leave the daily chatter and vocational practice of the shepherds to take place mainly off-stage; once more the subject matter is little different from that of the court lyrics. Or, to mention a third possibility, one might have 1 The definitive statement ofthe thesis, ofcourse, is Charles Muscatine, Chaucer andthe French Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), though Muscatine now prefers simply "realism" to "bourgeois realism." 69 RECONSTRUCTING CHAUCER expected poetry that centers on historical events and makes detailed historical reference to produce circumstantial vividness. There is plenty of historical poetry in this time-in long chronicle poems and in short poems like those of Deschamps-but a very limited amount of this copious historical work comes alive imaginatively. Notwithstanding, though the likely places have thus far proved disap­ pointing, there does remain a possibility that a tradition of effective realistic poetry existed, which Chaucer and his fellows knew, that has been largely lost to us. At first glance, in the light of the rather large body of French work that has survived from the fourteenth century, this may seem improbable. If there had been such a tradition, statistics seem to dictate that substantial evidence of it would remain. But selective disappearance of distinctive types of work seems less improbable when one recalls that only literature which is highly valued at a particular time will be retained and assiduously preserved. That which conforms to the current modes, even of marginal quality, will be kept and reproduced and will tend to drive out that which is different. Very good work which does not appeal to the taste of the time may well be ignored and as a consequence under medieval conditions quickly lost. Circumstances were ripe for this to happen with unfashionable poetry in Chaucer's time because ofthe domi­ nance of what Daniel Poirion has well called the Machaut tradition. Guillaume de Machaut wrote comparatively early in the fourteenth cen­ tury, and he was prolific. His work in the various types of lyrics and the longer dits effectively crystallized major developments of the early 1300s with the result that it became supreme and after midcentury provided a standard that was to persist through the end of the next century. It was Machaut's kind of poetry- a thoroughly courtly poetry-that one admired and therefore was likely to be collected in manuscript and to survive. Conversely, poetry that deviated was likely to perish. It seems, then, that one may reasonably postulate a fourteenth-century French tradition of realistic secular poetry that we have not known about simply because the poems were not prized and not...