[Sidenote: _Conditions of_ fabliau-_writing._]
The smaller range and more delicate--however indelicate--argument of the _fabliaux_ not only invited but almost necessitated a different kind of handling. The story had to draw to point in (on an average) two or three hundred lines at most--there are _fabliaux_ of a thousand lines, and _fabliaux_ of thirty or forty, but the average is as just stated. The incidents had to be adjusted for best effect, neither too many nor too few. The treatment had to be mainly provocative--an appeal in some cases by very coarse means indeed to very coarse nerves, in others by finer devices addressed to senses more tickle o' the sere. And so grew up that unsurpassed and hardly matched product the French short story, where, if it is in perfection, hardly a word is thrown away, and not a word missed that is really wanted.
The great means for doing this in literature is irony; and irony appears in the _fabliaux_ as it had hardly done since Lucian. Take, for instance, this opening of a piece, the rest of which is at least as irreverent, considerably less quotable, but not much less pointed:--
"Quant Dieus ot estoré lo monde, Si con il est à la reonde, Et quanque il convit dedans, Trois ordres establir de genz, Et fist el siecle demoranz Chevalers, clers et laboranz. Les chevalers toz asena As terres, et as clers dona Les aumosnes et les dimages; Puis asena les laborages As laborenz, por laborer. Qant ce ot fet, sanz demeler D'iluec parti, et s'en ala."
What two orders were left, and how the difficulty of there being nothing left for them was got over, may be found by the curious in the seventy-sixth _fabliau_ of the third volume of the collection so often quoted. But the citation given will show that there is nothing surprising in the eighteenth-century history, literary or poetical, of a country which could produce such a piece, certainly not later than the thirteenth. Even Voltaire could not put the thing more neatly or with a more complete freedom from superfluous words.
It will doubtless have been observed that the _fabliau_--though the word is simply _fabula_ in one of its regular Romance metamorphoses, and though the method is sufficiently Æsopic--is not a "fable" in the sense more especially assigned to the term. Yet the mediæval languages, especially French and Latin, were by no means destitute of fables properly so called. On the contrary, it would appear that it was precisely during our present period that the rather meagre Æsopisings of Phædrus and Babrius were expanded into the fuller collection of beast-stories which exists in various forms, the chief of them being the _Ysopet_ (the name generally given to the class in Romance) of _Marie de France_, the somewhat later _Lyoner Ysopet_ (as its editor, Dr Förster, calls it), and the original of this latter, the Latin elegiacs of the so-called _Anonymus Neveleti_.[137] The collection of Marie is interesting, at least, because of the author, whose more famous Lais, composed, it would seem, at the Court of Henry III. of England about the meeting of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and forming a sort of offshoot less of the substance of the Arthurian story than of its spirit, are among the most delightful relics of mediæval poetry. But the Lyons book perhaps exhibits more of the characteristic which, evident enough in the _fabliau_ proper, discovers, after passing as by a channel through the beast-fable, its fullest and most famous form in the world-renowned _Romance of Reynard the Fox_, one of the capital works of the Middle Ages, and with the sister but contrasted _Romance of the Rose_, as much the distinguishing literary product of the thirteenth century as the romances proper--Carlovingian, Arthurian, and Classical--are of the twelfth.
