bliaux_ and in the
earliest farces, that the connection was hard to separate. None of the
stories discussed in the last chapter has, it may be noticed, the least
comic touch or turn.

[Sidenote: And of the _fabliaux_.]

As we go on we must disengage ourselves more and more (though with
occasional returns to it) from attention to verse; and the two great
compositions in that form, the _Romance of the Rose_ and the _Story of
the Fox_, especially the former, hardly require much writing about to
any educated person. They are indeed most strongly contrasted examples
of two modes of tale-telling, both in a manner allegoric, but in other
respects utterly different. The mere story of the _Rose_, apart from the
dreamy or satiric digressions and developments of its two parts and the
elaborate descriptions of the first, can be told in a page or two. An
abstract of the various _Renart_ books, to give any idea of their real
character, would, on the other hand, have to be nearly as long as the
less spun-out versions themselves. But the verse _fabliaux_ can hardly
be passed over so lightly. Many of them formed the actual bases of the
prose _nouvelles_ that succeeded them; not a few have found repeated
presentation in literature; and, above all, they deserve the immense
praise of having deliberately introduced ordinary life, and not
conventionalised manners, into literary treatment. We have taken some
pains to point out touches of that life which are observable in Saint's
Life and Romance, in _chanson_ and early prose tale. But here the case
is altered. Almost everything is real; a good deal is what is called, in
one of the senses of a rather misused word, downright "realism."

Few people who have ever heard of the _fabliaux_ can need to be told
that this realism in their case implies extreme freedom of treatment,
extending very commonly to the undoubtedly coarse and not seldom to the
merely dirty. There are some--most of them well known by modern
imitations such as Leigh Hunt's "Palfrey"--which are quite guiltless in
this respect; but the great majority deal with the usual comic farrago
of satire on women, husbands, monks, and other stock subjects of
raillery, all of which at the time invited "sculduddery." To translate
some of the more amusing, one would require not merely Chaucerian
licence of treatment but Chaucerian peculiarities of dialect in order to
avoid mere vulgarity. Even Prior, who is our only modern English
_fabliau_-w