The Renaissance | Page 9

the reader of to-day.
Antiquarianism, by a purely historical effort, by putting its object in
perspective, and setting the reader in a certain point of view, from
which what gave pleasure to the past is pleasurable for him also, may
often add greatly to the charm we receive from ancient literature. But
the first condition of such aid must be a real, direct, aesthetic charm in
the thing itself. Unless it has that charm, unless some purely artistic
quality went to its original making, no merely antiquarian effort can
ever give it an aesthetic value, or make it a proper subject of aesthetic
criticism. This quality, wherever it exists, it is always pleasant to define,
and discriminate from the sort of borrowed interest which an old play,
or an old story, may very likely acquire through a true antiquarianism.
The story of Aucassin and Nicolette has something of this quality.
Aucassin, the only son of Count Garins of Beaucaire, is passionately in
love with Nicolette, a beautiful girl of unknown parentage, bought of
the Saracens, whom his father will not permit him to marry. The story
turns on the adventures of these two lovers, until at the end of the piece
their mutual fidelity is rewarded. These [20] adventures are of the
simplest sort, adventures which seem to be chosen for the happy
occasion they afford of keeping the eye of the fancy, perhaps the
outward eye, fixed on pleasant objects, a garden, a ruined tower, the
little hut of flowers which Nicolette constructs in the forest whither she
escapes from her enemies, as a token to Aucassin that she has passed
that way. All the charm of the piece is in its details, in a turn of peculiar
lightness and grace given to the situations and traits of sentiment,
especially in its quaint fragments of early French prose.
All through it one feels the influence of that faint air of overwrought

delicacy, almost of wantonness, which was so strong a characteristic of
the poetry of the Troubadours. The Troubadours themselves were often
men of great rank; they wrote for an exclusive audience, people of
much leisure and great refinement, and they came to value a type of
personal beauty which has in it but little of the influence of the open air
and sunshine. There is a languid Eastern deliciousness in the very
scenery of the story, the full-blown roses, the chamber painted in some
mysterious manner where Nicolette is imprisoned, the cool brown
marble, the almost nameless colours, the odour of plucked grass and
flowers. Nicolette herself well becomes this scenery, and is the best
illustration of the quality I mean--the beautiful, weird, foreign girl,
whom the [21] shepherds take for a fay, who has the knowledge of
simples, the healing and beautifying qualities of leaves and flowers,
whose skilful touch heals Aucassin's sprained shoulder, so that he
suddenly leaps from the ground; the mere sight of whose white flesh, as
she passed the place where he lay, healed a pilgrim stricken with sore
disease, so that he rose up, and returned to his own country. With this
girl Aucassin is so deeply in love that he forgets all knightly duties. At
last Nicolette is shut up to get her out of his way, and perhaps the
prettiest passage in the whole piece is the fragment of prose which
describes her escape:--
"Aucassin was put in prison, as you have heard, and Nicolette remained
shut up in her chamber. It was summer-time, in the month of May,
when the days are warm and long and clear, and the nights coy and
serene.
"One night Nicolette, lying on her bed, saw the moon shine clear
through the little window, and heard the nightingale sing in the garden,
and then came the memory of Aucassin, whom she so much loved. She
thought of the Count Garins of Beaucaire, who mortally hated her, and,
to be rid of her, might at any moment cause her to be burned or
drowned. She perceived that the old woman who kept her company was
asleep; she rose and put on the fairest gown she had; she took the
bed-clothes [22] and the towels, and knotted them together like a cord,
as far as they would go. Then she tied the end to a pillar of the window,
and let herself slip down quite softly into the garden, and passed

straight across it, to reach the town.
"Her hair was yellow in small curls, her smiling eyes blue-green, her
face clear and feat, the little lips very red, the teeth small and white;
and the daisies which she crushed in passing, holding her skirt high
behind and before, looked dark against her feet; the girl was so white!
"She came to the garden-gate and opened it, and