It cannot be certainly known whether the form of "Aucassin and
Nicolete" was a familiar form--used by many _jogleors_, or wandering
minstrels and story-tellers such as Nicolete, in the tale, feigned
herself to be,--or whether this is a solitary experiment by "the old
captive" its author, a contemporary, as M. Gaston Paris thinks him, of
Louis VII (1130). He was original enough to have invented, or adopted
from popular tradition, a form for himself; his originality declares
itself everywhere in his one surviving masterpiece. True, he uses
certain traditional formulae, that have survived in his time, as they
survived in Homer's, from the manner of purely popular poetry, of
_Volkslieder_. Thus he repeats snatches of conversation always in the
same, or very nearly the same words. He has a stereotyped form, like
Homer, for saying that one person addressed another, "ains traist au
visconte de la vile si l'apela" [Greek text] . . . Like Homer, and like
popular song, he deals in recurrent epithets, and changeless courtesies.
To Aucassin the hideous plough-man is "Biax frere," "fair brother," just
as the treacherous Aegisthus is [Greek text] in Homer; these are
complimentary terms, with no moral sense in particular. The _jogleor_ is
not more curious than Homer, or than the poets of the old ballads, about
giving novel descriptions of his characters.
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