United States or Belize ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Those were the nights when Puck came dancing up from Tupelo with Titania's fairy rout a-twinkle at his heels; when the great Hindu Raj floated from India in his canopied barge across the moonlit waters of Lake Waban; when Tristram and Iseult, on their way to the court of King Mark, all love distraught, cast anchor in the little cove below Stone Hall and played their passion out; when Nicolette kilted her skirts against the dew and argued of love with Aucassin.
One such version, the only representative of its species, M. Fauriel thought he detected in the story of Aucassin and Nicolette, written in the French of the latter half of the thirteenth century, and preserved in a unique manuscript, in the national library of Paris; and there were reasons which made him divine for it a still more ancient ancestry, traces in it of an Arabian origin, as in a leaf lost out of some early Arabian Nights.* The little book loses none of its interest through the criticism which finds in it only a traditional subject, handed on by one people to another; for after passing thus from hand to hand, its outline is still clear, its surface untarnished; and, like many other stories, books, literary and artistic conceptions of the middle age, it has come to have in this way a sort of personal history, almost as full of risk and adventure as that of its own heroes.
They are splendid in youth, like Aucassin, whose swooning passion for Nicolette is symbolical of their almost painful desire of beauty. In Hand and Soul, Rossetti tells us of Chiaro dell Erma that "he would feel faint in sunsets and at the sight of stately persons."
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.
Nicolette herself well becomes this scenery, and is the best illustration of the quality I mean the beautiful, weird, foreign girl, whom the 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.
Indeed, this little novel ought to be reprinted, like "Aucasin et Nicolette," as one of the absolutely satisfactory works, so few but so exquisite, of the Middle Ages. It is the story of the relations of Jesus with the family of Lazarus, whose sister Mary is here identified with the Magdalen; and it is, save for the account of the Passion, which forms the nucleus, a perfect tissue of inventions.
The new grace and delicacy is upon every page of Chaucer. What was first Provencal and then French, became English when Chaucer touched it. "This ae nighte, this ae nighte, Every nighte and alle, Fire and sleet and candle-lighte, And Christe receive thy saule," we now find English poets echoing Aucassin and Nicolette: "In Paradise what have I to win?
The dressing of the wounds was complicated and difficult, the fixation of apparatus and bandages by cerecloths not having been invented as yet, at that epoch. Nicolette used up a sheet "as big as the ceiling," as she put it, for lint. It was not without difficulty that the chloruretted lotions and the nitrate of silver overcame the gangrene.
Madame was screaming for Nicolette and Mémé to come and observe the fortune returned to her by M'sieur Morin, that best of men, that saint in glory. "Marsy," said Robbins, "I'm going on a jamboree. For three days the esteemed Pic. will have to get along without my valuable services. I advise you to join me. Now, that green stuff you drink is no good. It stimulates thought.
Aucassin et Nicolette was the death-knell of the primitive Christian romance of chastity. It was the discovery that the chaste refinements of delicacy and devotion were possible within the strictly normal sphere of sexual love.
Word Of The Day