WINE, WOMEN, AND SONG. - The Language Realm

IX.
It is easier to say what the Goliardi wrote about than who the writers were, and what they felt and
thought than by what names they were baptised. The mass of their literature, as it is at present
known to us, divides[29] into two broad classes. The one division includes poems on the themes
of vagabond existence, the truant life of these capricious students; on spring­time and its rural
pleasure; on love in many phases and for divers kinds of women; lastly, on wine and on the dice­
box. The other division is devoted to graver topics; to satires on society, touching especially the
Roman Court, and criticising eminent ecclesiastics in all countries; to moral dissertations, and to
discourses on the brevity of life.
Of the two divisions, the former yields by far the livelier image of the men we have to deal with.
It will therefore form the staple of my argument. The latter blends at so many points with
medieval literature of the monastic kind, that it is chiefly distinguished by boldness of censure
and sincerity of invective. In these qualities the serious poems of the Goliardi, emanating from a
class of men who moved behind the scenes and yet were free to speak their thoughts, are unique.
Written with the satirist's eye upon the object of his sarcasm, tinged with the license of his
vagabondage, throbbing with the passionate and nonchalant afflatus of the wine­cup, they wing
their flight like poisoned arrows or plumed serpents with unerring straightness at abuses in high
places.
The wide space occupied by Nature in the secular poems of the Goliardi is remarkable. As a
background to their love­songs we always find the woods and fields of May, abundant flowers
and gushing rivulets, lime­trees and pines and olive­trees, through which soft winds are blowing.
There are rose­bowers and nightingales; fauns,[30] nymphs, and satyrs dancing on the sward.
Choirs of mortal maidens emerge in the midst of this Claude­landscape. The scene, meanwhile,
has been painted from experience, and felt with the enthusiasm of affection. It breathes of
healthy open air, of life upon the road, of casual joys and wayside pleasure, snatched with
careless heart by men whose tastes are natural. There is very little of the alcove or the closet in
this verse; and the touch upon the world is so infantine, so tender, that we are indulgent to the
generalities with which the poets deal.
What has been said about popular poetry applies also to popular painting. In the landscapes of
Goliardic literature there is nothing specific to a single locality—no name like Vaucluse, no
pregnant touch that indicates one scene selected from a thousand. The landscape is always a
background, more northern or more southern as the case may be, but penetrated with the feeling
of the man who has been happy or has suffered there. This feeling, broadly, sensuously diffused,
as in a masterpiece of Titian, prepares us for the human element to be exhibited.
The foreground of these pictures is occupied by a pair of lovers meeting after the long winter's
separation, a dance upon the village green, a young man gazing on the mistress he adores, a
disconsolate exile from his home, the courtship of a student and a rustic beauty, or perhaps the
grieved and melancholy figure of one whose sweetheart has proved faithless. Such actors in the
comedy of life are defined with fervent intensity of[31] touch against the leafy vistas of the scene.
The lyrical cry emerges clear and sharp in all that concerns their humanity.