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Title: The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory

Author: George Saintsbury

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Periods of European Literature
EDITED BY

PROFESSOR SAINTSBURY

II.

THE TWELFTH AND THIRTEENTH
CENTURIES

Contents

PERIODS OF EUROPEAN LITERATURE.
Edited by Professor SAINTSBURY.

"The criticism which alone can much help us for the future is
a criticism which regards Europe as being, for intellectual
and spiritual purposes, one great confederation, bound to a
joint action and working to a common result."
—Matthew Arnold.

In 12 Crown 8vo Volumes. Price 5s. net each.

Professor W.P.
The DARK AGES
Ker.
The FLOURISHING OF
ROMANCE
The Editor.
AND THE RISE OF ALLEGORY
The FOURTEENTH CENTURY F.J. Snell.
The TRANSITION PERIOD
The EARLIER RENAISSANCE
The LATER RENAISSANCE David Hannay.
The FIRST HALF of 17th
CENTURY
The AUGUSTAN AGES Oliver Elton.
The MID-EIGHTEENTH
CENTURY
The ROMANTIC REVOLT Edmund Gosse.
Walter H.
The ROMANTIC TRIUMPH
Pollock.

The LATER NINETEENTH
The Editor.
CENTURY

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & SONS, Edinburgh and London.

THE

FLOURISHING OF
ROMANCE
AND THE

RISE OF ALLEGORY
BY

GEORGE SAINTSBURY, M.A.
PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND ENGLISH
LITERATURE IN THE
UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
MDCCCXCVII

PREFACE.

As this volume, although not the first in chronological order, is likely to be
the first to appear in the Series of which it forms part, and of which the
author has the honour to be editor, it may be well to say a few words here as
to the scheme of this Series generally. When that scheme was first sketched,
it was necessarily objected that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to
obtain contributors who could boast intimate and equal knowledge of all the
branches of European literature at any given time. To meet this by a simple
denial was, of course, not to be thought of. Even universal linguists, though
not unknown, are not very common; and universal linguists have not
usually been good critics of any, much less of all, literature. But it could be
answered that if the main principle of the scheme was sound—that is to say,
if it was really desirable not to supplant but to supplement the histories of
separate literatures, such as now exist in great numbers, by something like a
new "Hallam," which should take account of all the simultaneous and
contemporary developments and their interaction—some sacrifice in point
of specialist knowledge of individual literatures not only must be made, but
might be made with little damage. And it could be further urged that this
sacrifice might be reduced to a minimum by selecting in each case writers
thoroughly acquainted with the literature which happened to be of greatest
prominence in the special period, provided always that their general literary
knowledge and critical habits were such as to render them capable of giving
a fit account of the rest.
In the carrying out of such a scheme occasional deficiencies of specialist
dealing, or even of specialist knowledge, must be held to be compensated
by range of handling and width of view. And though it is in all such cases
hopeless to appease what has been called "the rage of the specialist" himself
—though a Mezzofanti doubled with a Sainte-Beuve could never, in any
general history of European literature, hope to satisfy the special devotees
of Roumansch or of Platt-Deutsch, not to mention those of the greater

languages—yet there may, I hope, be a sufficient public who, recognising
the advantage of the end, will make a fair allowance for necessary
shortcomings in the means.
As, however, it is quite certain that there will be some critics, if not some
readers, who will not make this allowance, it seemed only just that the
Editor should bear the brunt in this new Passage Perilous. I shall state very
frankly the qualifications which I think I may advance in regard to this
volume. I believe I have read most of the French and English literature
proper of the period that is in print, and much, if not most, of the German. I
know somewhat less of Icelandic and Provençal; less still of Spanish and
Italian as regards this period, but something also of them: Welsh and Irish I
know only in translations. Now it so happens that—for the period—French
is, more than at any other time, the capital literature of Europe. Very much
of the rest is directly translated from it; still more is imitated in form. All
the great subjects, the great matières, are French in their early treatment,
with the exception of the national work of Spain, Iceland, and in part
Germany. All the forms, except those of the prose saga and its kinsman the
German verse folk-epic, are found first in French. Whosoever knows the
French literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, knows not merely
the best literature in form, and all but the best in matter, of the time, but that
which all the time was imitating, or shortly about to imitate, both in form
and matter.
Again, England presents during this time, though no great English work
written "in the English tongue for English men," yet the spectacle, unique in
history, of a language and a literature undergoing a sea-change from which
it was to emerge with incomparably greater beauty and strength than it had
before, and in condition to vie with—some would say to outstrip—all actual
or possible rivals. German, if not quite supreme in any way, gives an
interesting and fairly representative example of a chapter of national literary
history, less brilliant and original in performance than the French, less
momentous and unique in promise than the English, but more normal than
either, and furnishing in the epics, of which the Nibelungenlied and Kudrun
are the chief examples, and in the best work of the Minnesingers, things not
only of historical but of intrinsic value in all but the highest degree.

Provençal and Icelandic literature at this time are both of them of far greater
intrinsic interest than English, if not than German, and they are infinitely
more original. But it so happens that the prominent qualities of form in the
first, of matter and spirit in the second, though intense and delightful, are
not very complicated, various, or wide-ranging. If monotony were not by
association a question-begging word, it might be applied with much justice
to both: and it is consequently not necessary to have read every Icelandic
saga in the original, every Provençal lyric with a strictly philological
competence, in order to appreciate the literary value of the contributions
which these two charming isolations made to European history.
Yet again, the production of Spain during this time is of the smallest,
containing, perhaps, nothing save the Poem of the Cid, which is at once
certain in point of time and distinguished in point of merit; while that of
Italy is not merely dependent to a great extent on Provençal, but can be
better handled in connection with Dante, who falls to the province of the
writer of the next volume. The Celtic tongues were either past or not come
to their chief performance; and it so happens that, by the confession of the
most ardent Celticists who speak as scholars, no Welsh or Irish texts
affecting the capital question of the Arthurian legends can be certainly
attributed to the twelfth or early thirteenth centuries. It seemed to me,
therefore, that I might, without presumption, undertake the volume. Of the
execution as apart from the undertaking others must judge. I will only
mention (to show that the book is not a mere compilation) that the chapter
on the Arthurian Romances summarises, for the first time in print, the result
of twenty years' independent study of the subject, and that the views on
prosody given in chapter v. are not borrowed from any one.
I have dwelt on this less as a matter of personal explanation, which is
generally superfluous to friends and never disarms foes, than in order to
explain and illustrate the principle of the Series. All its volumes have been
or will be allotted on the same principle—that of occasionally postponing or
antedating detailed attention to the literary production of countries which
were not at the moment of the first consequence, while giving greater
prominence to those that were: but at the same time never losing sight of
the general literary drift of the whole of Europe during the whole period in
each case. It is to guard against such loss of sight that the plan of
committing each period to a single writer, instead of strapping together

bundles of independent essays by specialists, has been adopted. For a
survey of each time is what is aimed at, and a survey is not to be
satisfactorily made but by one pair of eyes. As the individual study of
different literatures deepens and widens, these surveys may be more and
more difficult: they may have to be made more and more "by allowance."
But they are also more and more useful, not to say more and more
necessary, lest a deeper and wider ignorance should accompany the deeper
and wider knowledge.
The dangers of this ignorance will hardly be denied, and it would be
invidious to produce examples of them from writings of the present day.
But there can be nothing ungenerous in referring—honoris, not invidiæ
causa—to one of the very best literary histories of this or any century, Mr
Ticknor's Spanish Literature. There was perhaps no man of his time who
was more widely read, or who used his reading with a steadier industry and
a better judgment, than Mr Ticknor. Yet the remarks on assonance, and on
long mono-rhymed or single-assonanced tirades, in his note on Berceo
(History of Spanish Literature, vol. i. p. 27), show almost entire ignorance
of the whole prosody of the chansons de geste, which give such an
indispensable light in reference to the subject, and which, even at the time
of his first edition (1849), if not quite so well known as they are to-day,
existed in print in fair numbers, and had been repeatedly handled by
scholars. It is against such mishaps as this that we are here doing our best to
supply a guard.[1]

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.

THE FUNCTION OF LATIN.

PAGE
Reasons for not noticing the bulk of mediæval Latin literature.
Excepted divisions. Comic Latin literature. Examples of its verbal
influence. The value of burlesque. Hymns. The Dies Iræ. The rhythm
of Bernard. Literary perfection of the Hymns. Scholastic Philosophy.
Its influence on phrase and method. The great Scholastics 1

CHAPTER II.

CHANSONS DE GESTE.

European literature in 1100. Late discovery of the chansons. Their age 22
and history. Their distinguishing character. Mistakes about them. Their
isolation and origin. Their metrical form. Their scheme of matter. The
character of Charlemagne. Other characters and characteristics. Realist
quality. Volume and age of the chansons. Twelfth century. Thirteenth
century. Fourteenth, and later. Chansons in print. Language: oc and oïl.
Italian. Diffusion of the chansons. Their authorship and publication.
Their performance. Hearing, not reading, the object. Effect on prosody.
The jongleurs. Jongleresses, &c. Singularity of the chansons. Their
charm. Peculiarity of the geste system. Instances. Summary of the geste
of William of Orange. And first of the Couronnement Loys. Comments
on the Couronnement. William of Orange. The earlier poems of the
cycle. The Charroi de Nîmes. The Prise d'Orange. The story of Vivien.

Aliscans. The end of the story. Renouart. Some other chansons. Final
remarks on them

CHAPTER III.

THE MATTER OF BRITAIN.

Attractions of the Arthurian Legend. Discussions on their sources. The
personality of Arthur. The four witnesses. Their testimony. The version
of Geoffrey. Its lacunæ. How the Legend grew. Wace. Layamon. The
Romances proper. Walter Map. Robert de Borron. Chrestien de Troyes.
Prose or verse first? A Latin Graal-book. The Mabinogion. The Legend
itself. The story of Joseph of Arimathea. Merlin. Lancelot. The Legend
becomes dramatic. Stories of Gawain and other knights. Sir Tristram.
His story almost certainly Celtic. Sir Lancelot. The minor knights.
Arthur. Guinevere. The Graal. How it perfects the story. Nature of this
perfection. No sequel possible. Latin episodes. The Legend as a whole.
The theories of its origin. Celtic. French. English. Literary. The Celtic
theory. The French claims. The theory of general literary growth. The
English or Anglo-Norman pretensions. Attempted hypothesis 86

CHAPTER IV.

ANTIQUITY IN ROMANCE.

Oddity of the Classical Romance. Its importance. The Troy story. The
Alexandreid. Callisthenes. Latin versions. Their story. Its
developments. Alberic of Besançon. The decasyllabic poem. The great
Roman d'Alixandre. Form, &c. Continuations. King Alexander.
Characteristics. The Tale of Troy. Dictys and Dares. The Dares story.
Its absurdity. Its capabilities. Troilus and Briseida. The Roman de
Troie. The phases of Cressid. The Historia Trojana. Meaning of the
classical romance 148

CHAPTER V.

THE MAKING OF ENGLISH AND THE SETTLEMENT OF
EUROPEAN PROSODY.

Special interest of Early Middle English. Decay of Anglo-Saxon. Early
Middle English Literature. Scantiness of its constituents. Layamon.
The form of the Brut. Its substance. The Ormulum: Its metre, its
spelling. The Ancren Riwle. The Owl and the Nightingale. Proverbs.
Robert of Gloucester. Romances. Havelok the Dane. King Horn. The
prosody of the modern languages. Historical retrospect. Anglo-Saxon
prosody. Romance prosody. English prosody. The later alliteration.
The new verse. Rhyme and syllabic equivalence. Accent and quantity.
The gain of form. The "accent" theory. Initial fallacies, and final
perversities thereof 187

CHAPTER VI.

MIDDLE HIGH GERMAN POETRY.

Position of Germany. Merit of its poetry. Folk-epics: The
Nibelungenlied. The Volsunga saga. The German version. Metres.
Rhyme and language. Kudrun. Shorter national epics. Literary poetry.
Its four chief masters. Excellence, both natural and acquired, of
German verse. Originality of its adaptation. The Pioneers: Heinrich
von Veldeke. Gottfried of Strasburg. Hartmann von Aue. Erec der
Wanderære and Iwein. Lyrics. The "booklets." Der Arme Heinrich.
Wolfram von Eschenbach. Titurel. Willehalm. Parzival. Walther von
der Vogelweide. Personality of the poets. The Minnesingers generally 225

CHAPTER VII.

THE 'FOX,' THE 'ROSE,' AND THE MINOR CONTRIBUTIONS OF
FRANCE.

The predominance of France. The rise of Allegory. Lyric. The 265
Romance and the Pastourelle. The Fabliaux. Their origin. Their

licence. Their wit. Definition and subjects. Effect of the fabliaux on
language. And on narrative. Conditions of fabliau-writing. The
appearance of irony. Fables proper. Reynard the Fox. Order of texts.
Place of origin. The French form. Its complications. Unity of spirit.
The Rise of Allegory. The satire of Renart. The Fox himself. His
circle. The burial of Renart. The Romance of the Rose. William of
Lorris and Jean de Meung. The first part. Its capital value. The rose-
garden. "Danger." "Reason." "Shame" and "Scandal." The later poem.
"False-Seeming." Contrast of the parts. Value of both, and charm of
the first. Marie de France and Rutebœuf. Drama. Adam de la Halle.
Robin et Marion. The Jeu de la Feuillie. Comparison of them. Early
French prose. Laws and sermons. Villehardouin. William of Tyre.
Joinville. Fiction. Aucassin et Nicolette

CHAPTER VIII.

ICELANDIC AND PROVENÇAL.

Resemblances. Contrasts. Icelandic literature of this time mainly
prose. Difficulties with it. The Saga. Its insularity of manner. Of
scenery and character. Fact and fiction in the sagas. Classes and
authorship of them. The five greater sagas. Njala. Laxdæla. Eyrbyggja.
Egla. Grettla. Its critics. Merits of it. The parting of Asdis and her
sons. Great passages of the sagas. Style. Provençal mainly lyric.
Origin of this lyric. Forms. Many men, one mind. Example of rhyme-
schemes. Provençal poetry not great. But extraordinarily pedagogic.
Though not directly on English. Some troubadours. Criticism of
Provençal 333

CHAPTER IX.

THE LITERATURE OF THE PENINSULAS.

Limitations of this chapter. Late Greek romance. Its difficulties as a 375
subject. Anna Comnena, &c. Hysminias and Hysmine. Its style. Its

story. Its handling. Its "decadence." Lateness of Italian. The "Saracen"
theory. The "folk-song" theory. Ciullo d'Alcamo. Heavy debt to
France. Yet form and spirit both original. Love-lyric in different
European countries. Position of Spanish. Catalan-Provençal. Galician-
Portuguese. Castilian. Ballads? The Poema del Cid. A Spanish
chanson de geste. In scheme and spirit. Difficulties of its prosody.
Ballad-metre theory. Irregularity of line. Other poems. Apollonius and
Mary of Egypt. Berceo. Alfonso el Sabio

CHAPTER X.

CONCLUSION 412

INDEX 427

THE FLOURISHING OF ROMANCE
AND THE

RISE OF ALLEGORY.

CHAPTER I.
THE FUNCTION OF LATIN.

REASONS FOR NOT NOTICING THE BULK OF
MEDIÆVAL LATIN LITERATURE. EXCEPTED
DIVISIONS. COMIC LATIN LITERATURE.
EXAMPLES OF ITS VERBAL INFLUENCE. THE
VALUE OF BURLESQUE. HYMNS. THE "DIES
IRÆ." THE RHYTHM OF BERNARD. LITERARY
PERFECTION OF THE HYMNS. SCHOLASTIC
PHILOSOPHY. ITS INFLUENCE ON PHRASE AND
METHOD. THE GREAT SCHOLASTICS.

Reasons for
This series is intended to survey and illustrate the
not noticing development of the vernacular literatures of mediæval and
the bulk of Europe; and for that purpose it is unnecessary to busy
mediæval
Latin ourselves with more than a part of the Latin writing which,
literature. in a steadily decreasing but—until the end of the last century
—an always considerable proportion, served as the vehicle
of literary expression. But with a part of it we are as necessarily concerned
as we are necessarily compelled to decline the whole. For not only was
Latin for centuries the universal means of communication between educated
men of different languages, the medium through which such men received
their education, the court-language, so to speak, of religion, and the vehicle
of all the literature of knowledge which did not directly stoop to the
comprehension of the unlearned; but it was indirectly as well as directly,
unconsciously as well as consciously, a schoolmaster to bring the
vernacular languages to literary accomplishment. They could not have
helped imitating it, if they would; and they did not think of avoiding
imitation of it, if they could. It modified, to a very large extent, their
grammar; it influenced, to an extent almost impossible to overestimate, the
prosody of their finished literature; it supplied their vocabulary; it furnished

models for all their first conscious literary efforts of the more deliberate
kind, and it conditioned those which were more or less spontaneous.
But, even if we had room, it would profit us little to busy ourselves with
diplomatic Latin or with the Latin of chronicles, with the Latin of such
scientific treatises as were written or with the Latin of theology. All these
except, for obvious reasons, the first, tended away from Latin into the
vernaculars as time went on, and were but of lesser literary moment, even
while they continued to be written in Latin. Nor in belles lettres proper were
such serious performances as continued to be written well into our period of
capital importance. Such a book, for instance, as the well-known Trojan
War of Joseph of Exeter,[2] though it really deserves much of the praise
which it used to receive,[3] can never be anything much better than a large
prize poem, such as those which still receive and sometimes deserve the
medals and the gift-books of schools and universities. Every now and then a
man of irrepressible literary talent, having no vernacular or no public in the
vernacular ready to his hand, will write in Latin a book like the De Nugis
Curialium,[4] which is good literature though bad Latin. But on the whole it
is a fatal law of such things that the better the Latin the worse must the
literature be.

Excepted
We may, however, with advantage select three divisions of
divisions. the Latin literature of our section of the Middle Ages, which
have in all cases no small literary importance and interest,
and in some not a little literary achievement. And these are the comic and
burlesque Latin writings, especially in verse; the Hymns; and the great body
of philosophical writing which goes by the general title of Scholastic
Philosophy, and which was at its palmiest time in the later portion of our
own special period.

Comic Latin
It may not be absolutely obvious, but it does not require
literature. much thought to discover, why the comic and burlesque
Latin writing, especially in verse, of the earlier Middle Ages
holds such a position. But if we compare such things as the Carmina
Burana, or as the Goliardic poems attributed to or connected with Walter
Map,[5] with the early fabliaux, we shall perceive that while the latter,
excellently written as they sometimes are, depend for their comedy chiefly
on matter and incident, not indulging much in play on words or subtle

adjustment of phrase and cadence, the reverse is the case with the former. A
language must have reached some considerable pitch of development, must
have been used for a great length of time seriously, and on a large variety of
serious subjects, before it is possible for anything short of supreme genius
to use it well for comic purposes. Much indeed of this comic use turns on
the existence and degradation of recognised serious writing. There was little
or no opportunity for any such use or misuse in the infant vernaculars; there
was abundant opportunity in literary Latin. Accordingly we find, and should
expect to find, very early parodies of the offices and documents of the
Church,—things not unnaturally shocking to piety, but not perhaps to be
justly set down to any profane, much less to any specifically blasphemous,
intention. When the quarrel arose between Reformers and "Papists,"
intentional ribaldry no doubt began. But such a thing as, for example, the
"Missa de Potatoribus"[6] is much more significant of an unquestioning
familiarity than of deliberate insult. It is an instance of the same bent of the
human mind which has made very learned and conscientious lawyers
burlesque law, and which induces schoolboys and undergraduates to parody
the classics, not at all because they hate them, but because they are their
most familiar literature.
At the same time this comic degradation, as may be seen in its earliest and
perhaps its greatest practitioner Aristophanes—no bad citizen or innovating
misbeliever—leads naturally to elaborate and ingenious exercises in style,
to a thorough familiarity with the capacities of language, metre, rhyme. And
expertness in all these things, acquired in the Latin, was certain sooner or
later to be transferred to the vernacular. No one can read the Latin poems
which cluster in Germany round the name of the "Arch-Poet,"[7] in England
round that of Map, without seeing how much freer of hand is the Latin
rhymer in comparison with him who finds it "hard only not to stumble" in
the vernacular. We feel what a gusto there is in this graceless catachresis of
solemn phrase and traditionally serious literature; we perceive how the
language, colloquially familiar, taught from infancy in the schools, provided
with plentiful literary examples, and having already received perfect licence
of accommodation to vernacular rhythms and the poetical ornaments of the
hour, puts its stammering rivals, fated though they were to oust it, out of
court for the time by its audacious compound of experience and experiment.

Examples of
The first impression of any one who reads that exceedingly
its verbal delightful volume the Camden Society's Poems attributed to
influence. Walter Mapes may be one of mere amusement, of which
there are few books fuller. The agreeable effrontery with
which the question "whether to kiss Rose or Agnes" is put side by side with
that "whether it is better to eat flesh cooked in the cauldron or little fishes
driven into the net;" the intense solemnity and sorrow for self with which
Golias discourses in trochaic mono-rhymed laisses of irregular length, De
suo Infortunio; the galloping dactylics of the "Apocalypse"; the
concentrated scandal against a venerated sex of the De Conjuge non
Ducenda, are jocund enough in themselves, if not invariably edifying. But
the good-for-nothing who wrote

"Fumus et mulier et stillicidia
Expellunt hominem a domo propria,"

was not merely cracking jokes, he was exercising himself, or his
countrymen, or at farthest his successors, in the use of the vernacular
tongues with the same lightness and brightness. When he insinuated that

"Dulcis erit mihi status
Si prebenda muneratus,
Reditu vel alio,
Vivam, licet non habunde,
Saltem mihi detur unde
Studeam de proprio,"—

he was showing how things could be put slyly, how the stiffness and
awkwardness of native speech could be suppled and decorated, how the
innuendo, the turn of words, the nuance, could be imparted to dog-Latin.
And if to dog-Latin, why not to genuine French, or English, or German?

The value of
And he was showing at the same time how to make verse
burlesque. flexible, how to suit rhythm to meaning, how to give
freedom, elasticity, swing. No doubt this had in part been
done by the great serious poetry to which we shall come presently, and
which he and his kind often directly burlesqued. But in the very nature of
things comic verse must supple language to a degree impossible, or very

seldom possible, to serious poetry: and in any case the mere tricks with
language which the parodist has to play, familiarise him with the use of it.
Even in these days of multifarious writing, it is not absolutely uncommon to
find men of education and not devoid of talent who confess that they have
no notion how to put things, that they cannot express themselves. We can
see this tying of the tongue, this inability to use words, far more reasonably
prevalent in the infancy of the vernacular tongues; as, for instance, in the
constant presence of what the French call chevilles, expletive phrases such
as the "sikerly," and the "I will not lie," the "verament," and the "everidel,"
which brought a whole class of not undeserving work, the English verse
romances of a later time, into discredit. Latin, with its wide range of already
consecrated expressions, and with the practice in it which every scholar
had, made recourse to constantly repeated stock phrases at least less
necessary, if necessary at all; and the writer's set purpose to amuse made it
incumbent on him not to be tedious. A good deal of this comic writing may
be graceless: some of it may, to delicate tastes, be shocking or disgusting.
But it was at any rate an obvious and excellent school of word-fence, a
gymnasium and exercising-ground for style.

Hymns.
And if the beneficial effect in the literary sense of these light
songs is not to be overlooked, how much greater in every
way is that of the magnificent compositions of which they were in some
cases the parody! It will be more convenient to postpone to a later chapter
of this volume a consideration of the exact way in which Latin sacred
poetry affected the prosody of the vernacular; but it is well here to point out
that almost all the finest and most famous examples of the mediæval hymn,
with perhaps the sole exception of Veni, Sancte Spiritus, date from the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries.[8] Ours are the stately rhythms of Adam of
St Victor, and the softer ones of St Bernard the Greater. It was at this time
that Jacopone da Todi, in the intervals of his eccentric vernacular exercises,
was inspired to write the Stabat Mater. From this time comes that glorious
descant of Bernard of Morlaix, in which, the more its famous and very
elegant English paraphrase is read beside it, the more does the greatness and
the beauty of the original appear. And from this time comes the greatest of
all hymns, and one of the greatest of all poems, the Dies Iræ. There have
been attempts—more than one of them—to make out that the Dies Iræ is no
such wonderful thing after all: attempts which are, perhaps, the extreme

examples of that cheap and despicable paradox which thinks to escape the
charge of blind docility by the affectation of heterodox independence. The
judgment of the greatest (and not always of the most pious) men of letters
of modern times may confirm those who are uncomfortable without
authority in a different opinion. Fortunately there is not likely ever to be
lack of those who, authority or no authority, in youth and in age, after much
reading or without much, in all time of their tribulation and in all time of
their wealth, will hold these wonderful triplets, be they Thomas of Celano's
or another's, as nearly or quite the most perfect wedding of sound to sense
that they know.

The Dies Iræ.
It would be possible, indeed, to illustrate a complete
dissertation on the methods of expression in serious poetry
from the fifty-one lines of the Dies Iræ. Rhyme, alliteration, cadence, and
adjustment of vowel and consonant values,—all these things receive perfect
expression in it, or, at least, in the first thirteen stanzas, for the last four are
a little inferior. It is quite astonishing to reflect upon the careful art or the
felicitous accident of such a line as

"Tuba mirum spargens sonum,"

with the thud of the trochee[9] falling in each instance in a different vowel;
and still more on the continuous sequence of five stanzas, from Judex ergo
to non sit cassus, in which not a word could be displaced or replaced by
another without loss. The climax of verbal harmony, corresponding to and
expressing religious passion and religious awe, is reached in the last—

"Quærens me sedisti lassus,
Redemisti crucem passus:
Tantus labor non sit cassus!"—

where the sudden change from the dominant e sounds (except in the rhyme
foot) of the first two lines to the a's of the last is simply miraculous, and
miraculously assisted by what may be called the internal sub-rhyme of
sedisti and redemisti. This latter effect can rarely be attempted without a
jingle: there is no jingle here, only an ineffable melody. After the Dies Iræ,
no poet could say that any effect of poetry was, as far as sound goes,

unattainable, though few could have hoped to equal it, and perhaps no one
except Dante and Shakespeare has fully done so.
Beside the grace and the grandeur, the passion and the art, of this wonderful
composition, even the best remaining examples of mediæval hymn-writing
may look a little pale. It is possible for criticism, which is not
hypercriticism, to object to the pathos of the Stabat, that it is a trifle
luscious, to find fault with the rhyme-scheme of Jesu dulcis memoria, that it
is a little faint and frittered; while, of course, those who do not like conceits
and far-fetched interpretations can always quarrel with the substance of
Adam of St Victor. But those who care for merits rather than for defects will
never be weary of admiring the best of these hymns, or of noticing and, as
far as possible, understanding their perfection. Although the language they
use is old, and their subjects are those which very competent and not at all
irreligious critics have denounced as unfavourable to poetry, the special
poetical charm, as we conceive it in modern days, is not merely present in
them, but is present in a manner of which few traces can be found in
classical times. And some such students, at least, will probably go on to
examine the details of the hymn-writers' method, with the result of finding
more such things as have been pointed out above.

The rhythm of
Let us, for instance, take the rhythm of Bernard the
Bernard. Englishman (as he was really, though called of Morlaix).
"Jerusalem the Golden" has made some of its merits
common property, while its practical discoverer, Archbishop Trench, has set
those of the original forth with a judicious enthusiasm which cannot be
bettered.[10] The point is, how these merits, these effects, are produced. The
piece is a crucial one, because, grotesque as its arrangement would probably
have seemed to an Augustan, its peculiarities are superadded to, not
substituted for, the requirements of classical prosody. The writer does not
avail himself of the new accentual quantification, and his other licences are
but few. If we examine the poem, however, we shall find that, besides the
abundant use of rhyme—interior as well as final—he avails himself of all
those artifices of what may be called word-music, suggesting beauty by a
running accompaniment of sound, which are the main secret of modern
verse. He is not satisfied, ample as it may seem, with his double-rhyme
harmony. He confines himself to it, indeed, in the famous overture-couplet
—

"Hora novissima, tempora pessima
sunt, vigilemus!
Ecce! minaciter imminet arbiter ille
supremus."

But immediately afterwards, and more or loss throughout, he redoubles and
redoubles again every possible artifice—sound-repetition in the imminet,
imminet, of the third line, alliteration in the recta remuneret of the fourth,
and everywhere trills and roulades, not limited to the actually rhyming
syllables of the same vowel—

"Tunc nova gloria pectora sobria
clarificabit...
Candida lilia, viva monilia, sunt tibi
Sponsa...
Te peto, te colo, te flagro, te volo,
canto, saluto."

He has instinctively discovered the necessity of varying as much as possible
the cadence and composition of the last third of his verse, and carefully
avoids anything like a monotonous use of his only spondee; in a batch of
eighteen lines taken at random, there are only six end-words of two
syllables, and these only once rhyme together. The consequence of these
and other devices is that the whole poem is accompanied by a sort of swirl
and eddy of sound and cadence, constantly varying, constantly shifting its
centres and systems, but always assisting the sense with grateful clash or
murmur, according as it is loud or soft, of word-music.

Literary
The vernacular languages were not as yet in case to produce
perfection of anything so complicated as this, and some of them have
the Hymns. never been quite able to produce it to this day. But it must be
obvious at once what a standard was held up before poets,
almost every one of whom, even if he had but small Latin in a general way,
heard these hymns constantly sung, and what means of producing like
effects were suggested to them. The most varied and charming lyric of the
Middle Ages, that of the German Minnesingers, shows the effect of this
Latin practice side by side, or rather inextricably mingled, with the effects
of the preciser French and Provençal verse-scheme, and the still looser but

equally musical, though half-inarticulate, suggestions of indigenous song.
That English prosody—the prosody of Shakespeare and Coleridge, of
Shelley and Keats—owes its origin to a similar admixture the present writer
at least has no doubt at all, while even those who deny this can hardly deny
the positive literary achievement of the best mediæval hymns. They stand
by themselves. Latin—which, despite its constant colloquial life, still even
in the Middle Ages had in profane use many of the drawbacks of a dead
language, being either slipshod or stiff,—here, owing to the millennium and
more during which it had been throughout Western Europe the living
language and the sole living language of the Church Universal, shakes off at
once all artificial and all doggerel character. It is thoroughly alive: it comes
from the writers' hearts as easily as from their pens. They have in the fullest
sense proved it; they know exactly what they can do, and in this particular
sphere there is hardly anything that they cannot do.

Scholastic
The far-famed and almost more abused than famed
Philosophy. Scholastic Philosophy[11] cannot be said to have added to
positive literature any such masterpieces in prose as the
hymn-writers (who were very commonly themselves Scholastics) produced
in verse. With the exception of Abelard, whose interest is rather
biographical than strictly literary, and perhaps Anselm, the heroes of
mediæval dialectic, the Doctors Subtle and Invincible, Irrefragable and
Angelic, have left nothing which even on the widest interpretation of pure
literature can be included within it, or even any names that figure in any but
the least select of literary histories. Yet they cannot but receive some notice
here in a history, however condensed, of the literature of the period of their
chief flourishing. This is not because of their philosophical importance,
although at last, after much bandying of not always well-informed
argument, that importance is pretty generally allowed by the competent. It
has, fortunately, ceased to be fashionable to regard the dispute about
Universals as proper only to amuse childhood or beguile dotage, and the
quarrels of Scotists and Thomists as mere reductions of barren logomachy
to the flatly absurd. Still, this importance, though real, though great, is not
directly literary. The claim which makes it impossible to pass them over
here is that excellently put in the two passages from Condorcet and
Hamilton which John Stuart Mill (not often a scholastically minded
philosopher) set in the forefront of his Logic, that, in the Scottish

philosopher's words, "it is to the schoolmen that the vulgar languages are
indebted for what precision and analytical subtlety they possess;" and that,
as the Frenchman, going still further, but hardly exaggerating, lays it down,
"logic, ethics, and metaphysics itself owe to Scholasticism a precision
unknown to the ancients themselves."

Its influence
There can be no reasonable or well-informed denial of the
on phrase and fact of this: and the reason of it is not hard to understand.
method. That constant usage, the effect of which has been noted in
theological verse, had the same effect in philosophico-
theological prose. Latin is before all things a precise language, and the one
qualification which it lacked in classical times for philosophic use, the
presence of a full and exact terminology, was supplied in the Middle Ages
by the fearless barbarism (as pedants call it) which made it possible and
easy first to fashion such words as aseitas and quodlibetalis, and then, after,
as it were, lodging a specification of their meaning, to use them ever
afterwards as current coin. All the peculiarities which ignorance or sciolism
used to ridicule or reproach in the Scholastics—their wiredrawnness, their
lingering over special points of verbal wrangling, their neglect of plain fact
in comparison with endless and unbridled dialectic—all these things did no
harm but much positive good from the point of view which we are now
taking. When a man defended theses against lynx-eyed opponents or
expounded them before perhaps more lynx-eyed pupils, according to rules
familiar to all, it was necessary for him, if he were to avoid certain and
immediate discomfiture, to be precise in his terms and exact in his use of
them. That it was possible to be childishly as well as barbarously scholastic
nobody would deny, and the famous sarcasms of the Epistolæ Obscurorum
Virorum, two centuries after our time, had been anticipated long before by
satirists. But even the logical fribble, even the logical jargonist, was bound
to be exact. Now exactness was the very thing which languages, mostly
young in actual age, and in all cases what we may call uneducated,
unpractised in literary exercises, wanted most of all. And it was impossible
that they should have better teachers in it than the few famous, and even
than most of the numerous unknown or almost unknown, philosophers of
the Scholastic period.

The great
It has been said that of those most famous almost all belong
specially to this our period. Before it there is, till its very

Scholastics. latest eve, hardly one except John Scotus Erigena; after it
none, except Occam, of the very greatest. But during the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries there is scarcely a decade without its
illustration. The first champions of the great Realist and Nominalist
controversy, Roscellinus and William of Champeaux, belong to the eleventh
century in part, as does their still more famous follower, Abelard, by the
first twenty years of his life, while almost the whole of that of Anselm may
be claimed by it.[12] But it was not till the extreme end of that century that
the great controversy in which these men were the front-fighters became
active (the date of the Council of Soissons, which condemned the
Nominalism of Roscellinus as tritheistic is 1092), and the controversy itself
was at its hottest in the earlier part of the succeeding age. The Master of the
Sentences, Peter Lombard, belongs wholly to the twelfth, and the book
which gives him his scholastic title dates from its very middle. John of
Salisbury, one of the clearest-headed as well as most scholarly of the whole
body, died in 1180. The fuller knowledge of Aristotle, through the Arabian
writers, coincided with the latter part of the twelfth century: and the curious
outburst of Pantheism which connects itself on the one hand with the little-
known teaching of Amaury de Bène and David of Dinant, on the other with
the almost legendary "Eternal Gospel" of Joachim of Flora, occurred almost
exactly at the junction of the twelfth and thirteenth. As for the writers of the
thirteenth century itself, that great period holds in this as in other
departments the position of palmiest time of the Middle Ages. To it belong
Alexander Hales, who disputes with Aquinas the prize for the best example
of the Summa Theologiæ; Bonaventura, the mystic; Roger Bacon, the
natural philosopher; Vincent of Beauvais, the encyclopædist. If, of the four
greatest of all, Albert of Bolstadt, Albertus Magnus, the "Dumb Ox of
Cologne," was born seven years before its opening, his life lasted over four-
fifths of it; that of Aquinas covered its second and third quarters; Occam
himself, though his main exertions lie beyond us, was probably born before
Aquinas died; while John Duns Scotus hardly outlived the century's close
by a decade. Raymond Lully (one of the most characteristic figures of
Scholasticism and of the mediæval period, with his "Great Art" of automatic
philosophy), who died in 1315, was born as early as 1235. Peter the
Spaniard, Pope and author of the Summulæ Logicales, the grammar of
formal logic for ages, died in 1277.

Of the matter which these and others by hundreds put in forgotten wealth of
exposition, no account will be expected here. Even yet it is comparatively
unexplored, or else the results of the exploration exist only in books
brilliant, but necessarily summary, like that of Hauréau, in books thorough,
but almost as formidable as the original, like that of Prantl. Even the latest
historians of philosophy complain that there is up to the present day no
"ingoing" (as the Germans say) monograph about Scotus and none about
Occam.[13] The whole works of the latter have never been collected at all:
the twelve mighty volumes which represent the compositions of the former
contain probably not the whole work of a man who died before he was
forty. The greater part of the enormous mass of writing which was
produced, from Scotus Erigena in the ninth century to Gabriel Biel in the
fifteenth, is only accessible to persons with ample leisure and living close to
large and ancient libraries. Except Erigena himself, Anselm in a few of his
works, Abelard, and a part of Aquinas, hardly anything can be found in
modern editions, and even the zealous efforts of the present Pope have been
less effectual in divulging Aquinas than those of his predecessors were in
making Amaury of Bena a mystery.[14] Yet there has always, in generous
souls who have some tincture of philosophy, subsisted a curious kind of
sympathy and yearning over the work of these generations of mainly
disinterested scholars who, whatever they were, were thorough, and
whatever they could not do, could think. And there have even, in these latter
days, been some graceless ones who have asked whether the Science of the
nineteenth century, after an equal interval, will be of any more positive
value—whether it will not have even less comparative interest than that
which appertains to the Scholasticism of the thirteenth.
However this may be, the claim, modest and even meagre as it may seem to
some, which has been here once more put forward for this Scholasticism—
the claim of a far-reaching educative influence in mere language, in mere
system of arrangement and expression, will remain valid. If, at the outset of
the career of modern languages, men had thought with the looseness of
modern thought, had indulged in the haphazard slovenliness of modern
logic, had popularised theology and vulgarised rhetoric, as we have seen
both popularised and vulgarised since, we should indeed have been in evil
case. It used to be thought clever to moralise and to felicitate mankind over
the rejection of the stays, the fetters, the prison in which its thought was

mediævally kept. The justice or the injustice, the taste or the vulgarity, of
these moralisings, of these felicitations, may not concern us here. But in
expression, as distinguished from thought, the value of the discipline to
which these youthful languages were subjected is not likely now to be
denied by any scholar who has paid attention to the subject. It would have
been perhaps a pity if thought had not gone through other phases; it would
certainly have been a pity if the tongues had all been subjected to the fullest
influence of Latin constraint. But that the more lawless of them benefited
by that constraint there can be no doubt whatever. The influence of form
which the best Latin hymns of the Middle Ages exercised in poetry, the
influence in vocabulary and in logical arrangement which Scholasticism
exercised in prose, are beyond dispute: and even those who will not pardon
literature, whatever its historical and educating importance be, for being
something less than masterly in itself, will find it difficult to maintain the
exclusion of the Cur Deus Homo, and impossible to refuse admission to the
Dies Iræ.

CHAPTER II.
CHANSONS DE GESTE.[15]

EUROPEAN LITERATURE IN 1100. LATE
DISCOVERY OF THE "CHANSONS." THEIR AGE
AND HISTORY. THEIR DISTINGUISHING
CHARACTER. MISTAKES ABOUT THEM. THEIR
ISOLATION AND ORIGIN. THEIR METRICAL
FORM. THEIR SCHEME OF MATTER. THE
CHARACTER OF CHARLEMAGNE. OTHER
CHARACTERS AND CHARACTERISTICS. REALIST
QUALITY. VOLUME AND AGE OF THE
"CHANSONS." TWELFTH CENTURY.
THIRTEENTH CENTURY. FOURTEENTH, AND
LATER. "CHANSONS" IN PRINT. LANGUAGE:
"OC" AND "OÏL." ITALIAN. DIFFUSION OF THE
"CHANSONS." THEIR AUTHORSHIP AND
PUBLICATION. THEIR PERFORMANCE. HEARING,
NOT READING, THE OBJECT. EFFECT ON
PROSODY. THE "JONGLEURS."
"JONGLERESSES," ETC. SINGULARITY OF THE
"CHANSONS." THEIR CHARM. PECULIARITY OF
THE "GESTE" SYSTEM. INSTANCES. SUMMARY
OF THE "GESTE" OF WILLIAM OF ORANGE. AND
FIRST OF THE "COURONNEMENT LOYS."
COMMENTS ON THE "COURONNEMENT."
WILLIAM OF ORANGE. THE EARLIER POEMS OF
THE CYCLE. THE "CHARROI DE NÎMES." THE
"PRISE D'ORANGE." THE STORY OF VIVIEN.
"ALISCANS." THE END OF THE STORY.
RENOUART. SOME OTHER "CHANSONS." FINAL
REMARKS ON THEM.

European
When we turn from Latin and consider the condition of the
literature in vernacular tongues in the year 1100, there is hardly more
1100. than one country in Europe where we find them producing
anything that can be called literature. In England Anglo-
Saxon, if not exactly dead, is dying, and has for more than a century ceased
to produce anything of distinctly literary attraction; and English, even the
earliest "middle" English, is scarcely yet born, is certainly far from being in
a condition for literary use. The last echoes of the older and more original
Icelandic poetry are dying away, and the great product of Icelandic prose,
the Saga, still volitat per ora virum, without taking a concrete literary form.
It is in the highest degree uncertain whether anything properly to be called
Spanish or Italian exists at all—anything but dialects of the lingua rustica
showing traces of what Spanish and Italian are to be; though the originals of
the great Poema del Cid cannot be far off. German is in something the same
trance between its "Old" and its "Middle" state as is English. Only in
France, and in both the great divisions of French speech, is vernacular
literature active. The northern tongue, the langue d'oïl, shows us—in
actually known existence, or by reasonable inference that it existed—the
national epic or chanson de geste; the southern, or langue d'oc, gives us the
Provençal lyric. The latter will receive treatment later, the former must be
dealt with at once.
It is rather curious that while the chansons de geste are, after Anglo-Saxon
and Icelandic poetry, the oldest elaborate example of verse in the modern
vernaculars; while they exhibit a character, not indeed one of the widest in
range or most engaging in quality, but individual, interesting, intense as few
others; while they are entirely the property of one nation, and that a nation
specially proud of its literary achievements,—they were almost the last
division of European literature to become in any degree properly known. In
so far as they were known at all, until within the present century, the
knowledge was based almost entirely on later adaptations in verse, and still
later in prose; while—the most curious point of all—they were not warmly
welcomed by the French even after their discovery, and cannot yet be said
to have been taken to the heart of the nation, even to the limited extent to
which the Arthurian romances have been taken to the heart of England,
much less to that in which the old, but much less old, ballads of England,
Scotland, Germany, and Spain have for periods of varying length been

welcomed in their respective countries. To discuss the reason of this at
length would lead us out of our present subject; but it is a fact, and a very
curious fact.

Late discovery
The romances of Charlemagne, or, to employ their more
of the technical designation, the chansons de geste, form a large, a
chansons. remarkably homogeneous, and a well-separated body of
compositions. These, as far as can be decided, date in time
from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, with a few belated
representatives in the fourteenth; but scarcely, as far as probability shows,
with any older members in the tenth. Very little attention of any kind was
paid to them, till some seventy years ago, an English scholar, Conybeare,
Their age and
known for his services to our own early literature, following
history. the example of another scholar, Tyrwhitt, still earlier and
more distinguished, had drawn attention to the merit and
interest of, as it happens, the oldest and most remarkable of all. This was
the Chanson de Roland, which, in this oldest form, exists only in one of the
MSS. of the Bodleian Library at Oxford. But they very soon received the
care of M. Paulin Paris, the most indefatigable student that in a century of
examination of the older European literature any European country has
produced, and after more than half a century of enthusiastic resuscitation by
M. Paris, by his son M. Gaston, and by others, the whole body of them has
been thoroughly overhauled and put at the disposal of those who do not care
to read the original, in the four volumes of the remodelled edition of M.
Léon Gautier's Epopées Françaises, while perhaps a majority of the actual
texts are in print. This is as well, for though a certain monotony is always
charged against the chansons de geste[16] by those who do not love them,
and may be admitted to some extent even by those who do, there are few
which have not a more or less distinct character of their own; and even the
generic character is not properly to be perceived until a considerable
number have been studied.

Their
The old habit of reading this division of romance in late and
distinguishingtravestied versions naturally and necessarily obscured the
character. curious traits of community in form and matter that belong
to it, and indeed distinguish it from almost all other
departments of literature of the imaginative kind. Its members are
frequently spoken of as "the Charlemagne Romances"; and, as a matter of

fact, most of them do come into connection with the great prince of the
second race in one way or another. Yet Bodel's phrase of matière de
France[17] is happier. For they are all still more directly connected with
French history, seen through a romantic lens; and even the late and half-
burlesque Hugues Capet, even the extremely interesting and partly
contemporary set on the Crusades, as well as such "little gestes" as that of
the Lorrainers, Garin le Loherain and the rest, and the three "great gestes"
of the king, of the southern hero William of Orange (sometimes called the
geste of Montglane), and of the family of Doon de Mayence, arrange
themselves with no difficulty under this more general heading. And the
chanson de geste proper, as Frenchmen are entitled to boast, never quite
deserts this matière de France. It is always the Gesta Francorum at home,
or the Gesta Dei per Francos in the East, that supply the themes. When this
subject or group of subjects palled, the very form of the chanson de geste
was lost. It was not applied to other things;[18] it grew obsolete with that
which it had helped to make popular. Some of the material—Huon of
Bordeaux, the Four Sons of Aymon, and others—retained a certain vogue in
forms quite different, and gave later ages the inexact and bastard notion of
"Charlemagne Romance" which has been referred to. But the chanson de
geste itself was never, so to speak, "half-known"—except to a very few
antiquaries. After its three centuries of flourishing, first alone, then with the
other two "matters," it retired altogether, and made its reappearance only
after four centuries had passed away.

Mistakes about
This fact or set of facts has made the actual nature of the
them. original Charlemagne Romances the subject of much
mistake and misstatement on the part of general historians of
literature. The widely read and generally accurate Dunlop knew nothing
whatever about them, except in early printed versions representing their
very latest form, and in the hopelessly travestied eighteenth-century
Bibliothèque des Romans of the Comte de Tressan. He therefore assigned to
them[19] a position altogether inferior to their real importance, and actually
apologised for the writers, in that, coming after the Arthurian historians,
they were compelled to imitation. As a matter of fact, it is probable that all
the most striking and original chansons de geste, certainly all those of the
best period, were in existence before a single one of the great Arthurian
romances was written; and as both the French and English, and even the

German, writers of these latter were certainly acquainted with the chansons,
the imitation, if there were any, must lie on their side. As a matter of fact,
however, there is little or none. The later and less genuine chansons borrow
to some extent the methods and incidents in the romances; but the romances
at no time exhibit much resemblance to the chansons proper, which have an
extremely distinct, racy, and original character of their own. Hallam, writing
later than Dunlop, and if with a less wide knowledge of Romance, with a
much greater proficiency in general literary history, practically passes the
chansons de geste over altogether in the introduction to his Literature of
Europe, which purports to summarise all that is important in the History of
the Middle Ages, and to supplement and correct that book itself.

Their isolation
The only excuse (besides mere unavoidable ignorance,
and origin. which, no doubt, is a sufficient one) for this neglect is the
curious fact, in itself adding to their interest, that these
chansons, though a very important chapter in the histories both of poetry
and of fiction, form one which is strangely marked off at both ends from all
connection, save in point of subject, with literature precedent or subsequent.
As to their own origin, the usual abundant, warm, and if it may be said
without impertinence, rather futile controversies have prevailed. Practically
speaking, we know nothing whatever about the matter. There used to be a
theory that the Charlemagne Romances owed their origin more or less
directly to the fabulous Chronicle of Tilpin or Turpin, the warrior-
Archbishop of Rheims. It has now been made tolerably certain that the
Latin chronicle on the subject is not anterior even to our existing Chanson
de Roland, and very probable that it is a good deal later. On the other hand,
of actual historical basis we have next to nothing except the mere fact of the
death of Roland ("Hruotlandus comes Britanniæ") at the skirmish of
Roncesvalles. There are, however, early mentions of certain cantilenæ or
ballads; and it has been assumed by some scholars that the earliest chansons
were compounded out of precedent ballads of the kind. It is unnecessary to
inform those who know something of general literary history, that this
theory (that the corruption of the ballad is the generation of the epic) is not
confined to the present subject, but is one of the favourite fighting-grounds
of a certain school of critics. It has been applied to Homer, to Beowulf, to
the Old and Middle German Romances, and it would be very odd indeed if
it had not been applied to the Chansons de geste. But it may be said with

some confidence that not one tittle of evidence has ever been produced for
the existence of any such ballads containing the matter of any of the
chansons which do exist. The song of Roland which Taillefer sang at
Hastings may have been such a ballad: it may have been part of the actual
chanson; it may have been something quite different. But these "mays" are
not evidence; and it cannot but be thought a real misfortune that, instead of
confining themselves to an abundant and indeed inexhaustible subject, the
proper literary study of what does exist, critics should persist in dealing
with what certainly does not, and perhaps never did. On the general point it
might be observed that there is rather more positive evidence for the
breaking up of the epic into ballads than for the conglomeration of ballads
into the epic. But on that point it is not necessary to take sides. The matter
of real importance is, to lay it down distinctly that we have nothing anterior
to the earliest chansons de geste; and that we have not even any satisfactory
reason for presuming that there ever was anything.

Their metrical
One of the reasons, however, which no doubt has been most
form. apt to suggest anterior compositions is the singular
completeness of form exhibited by these poems. It is now
practically agreed that—scraps and fragments themselves excepted—we
have no monument of French in accomplished profane literature more
ancient than the Chanson de Roland.[20] And the form of this, though from
one point of view it may be called rude and simple, is of remarkable
perfection in its own way. The poem is written in decasyllabic iambic lines
with a cæsura at the second foot, these lines being written with a precision
which French indeed never afterwards lost, but which English did not attain
till Chaucer's day, and then lost again for more than another century.
Further, the grouping and finishing of these lines is not less remarkable, and
is even more distinctive than their internal construction. They are not blank;
they are not in couplets; they are not in equal stanzas; and they are not (in
the earliest examples, such as Roland) regularly rhymed. But they are
arranged in batches (called in French laisses or tirades) of no certain
number, but varying from one to several score, each of which derives unity
from an assonance—that is to say, a vowel-rhyme, the consonants of the
final syllable varying at discretion. This assonance, which appears to have
been common to all Romance tongues in their early stages, disappeared
before very long from French, though it continued in Spanish, and is indeed

the most distinguishing point of the prosody of that language. Very early in
the chansons themselves we find it replaced by rhyme, which, however,
remains the same for the whole of the laisse, no matter how long it is. By
degrees, also, the ten-syllabled line (which in some examples has an
octosyllabic tail-line not assonanced at the end of every laisse) gave way in
its turn to the victorious Alexandrine. But the mechanism of the chanson
admitted no further extensions than the substitution of rhyme for assonance,
and of twelve-syllabled lines for ten-syllabled. In all other respects it
remained rigidly the same from the eleventh century to the fourteenth, and
in the very latest examples of such poems, as Hugues Capet and Baudouin
de Seboure—full as enthusiasts like M. Gautier complain that they are of a
spirit very different from that of the older chansons—there is not the
slightest change in form; while certain peculiarities of stock phrase and
"epic repetition" are jealously preserved. The immense single-rhymed
laisses, sometimes extending to several pages of verse, still roll rhyme after
rhyme with the same sound upon the ear. The common form generally
remains; and though the adventures are considerably varied, they still retain
a certain general impress of the earlier scheme.

Their scheme
That scheme is, in the majority of the chansons, curiously
of matter. uniform. It has, since the earliest studies of them, been
remarked as odd that Charlemagne, though almost
omnipresent (except of course in the Crusading cycle and a few others), and
though such a necessary figure that he is in some cases evidently
confounded both with his ancestor Charles Martel and his successor Charles
The character
the Bald, plays a part that is very dubiously heroic. He is,
of indeed, presented with great pomp and circumstance as li
Charlemagne. empereres à la barbe florie, with a gorgeous court, a wide
realm, a numerous and brilliant baronage. But his character
is far from tenderly treated. In Roland itself he appears so little that critics
who are not acquainted with many other poems sometimes deny the
characteristic we are now discussing. But elsewhere he is much less
leniently handled. Indeed the plot of very many chansons turns entirely on
the ease with which he lends an ear to traitors (treason of various kinds
plays an almost ubiquitous part, and the famous "trahis!" is heard in the
very dawn of French literature), on his readiness to be biassed by bribes,
and on the singular ferocity with which, on the slightest and most

unsupported accusation, he is ready to doom any one, from his own family
downwards, to block, stake, gallows, or living grave. This combination,
indeed, of the irascible and the gullible tempers in the king defrays the plot
of a very large number of the chansons, in which we see his best knights,
and (except that they are as intolerant of injustice as he is prone to it) his
most faithful servants, forced into rebellion against him, and almost
overwhelmed by his own violence following on the machinations of their
and his worst enemies.

Other
Nevertheless, Charlemagne is always the defender of the
characters and Cross, and the antagonist of the Saracens, and the part which
characteristics these latter play is as ubiquitous as his own, and on the
.
whole more considerable. A very large part of the earlier
chansons is occupied with direct fighting against the heathen; and from an
early period (at least if the Voyage à Constantinoble is, as is supposed, of
the early twelfth century, if not the eleventh) a most important element,
bringing the class more into contact with romance generally than some
others which have been noticed, is introduced in the love of a Saracen
princess, daughter of emperor or "admiral" (emir), for one of the Christian
heroes. Here again Roland stands alone, and though the mention of Aude,
Oliver's sister and Roland's betrothed, who dies when she hears of his death,
is touching, it is extremely meagre. There is practically nothing but the
clash of arms in this remarkable poem. But elsewhere there is, in rather
narrow and usual limits, a good deal else. Charlemagne's daughter, and the
daughters of peers and paladins, figure: and their characteristics are not
very different from those of the pagan damsels. It is, indeed, unnecessary to
convert them,—a process to which their miscreant sisters usually submit
with great goodwill,—and they are also relieved from the necessity of
showing the extreme undutifulness to their more religiously constant sires,
which is something of a blot on Paynim princesses like Floripas in
Fierabras. This heroine exclaims in reference to her father, "He is an old
devil, why do you not kill him? little I care for him provided you give me
Guy," though it is fair to say that Fierabras himself rebukes her with a
"Moult grant tort avès." All these ladies, however, Christian as well as
heathen, are as tender to their lovers as they are hard-hearted to their
relations; and the relaxation of morality, sometimes complained of in the
later chansons, is perhaps more technical than real, even remembering the

doctrine of the mediæval Church as to the identity, for practical purposes, of
betrothal and marriage. On the other hand, the courtesy of the chansons is
distinctly in a more rudimentary state than that of the succeeding romances.
Not only is the harshest language used by knights to ladies,[21] but blows
are by no means uncommon; and of what is commonly understood by
romantic love there is on the knights' side hardly a trace, unless it be in
stories such as that of Ogier le Danois, which are obviously late enough to
have come under Arthurian influence. The piety, again, which has been so
much praised in these chansons, is of a curious and rather elementary type.
The knights are ready enough to fight to the last gasp, and the last drop of
blood, for the Cross; and their faith is as free from flaw as their zeal. Li
Apostoiles de Rome—the Pope—is recognised without the slightest
hesitation as supreme in all religious and most temporal matters. But there
is much less reference than in the Arthurian romances, not merely to the
mysteries of the Creed, but even to the simple facts of the birth and death of
Christ. Except in a few places—such as, for instance, the exquisite and
widely popular story of Amis and Amiles (the earliest vernacular form of
which is a true chanson de geste of the twelfth century)—there are not
many indications of any higher or finer notion of Christianity than that
which is confined to the obedient reception of the sacraments, and the
cutting off Saracens' heads whensoever they present themselves.[22]
In manners, as in theology and ethics, there is the same
Realist quality.
simplicity, which some have called almost barbarous.
Architecture and dress receive considerable attention; but in other ways the
arts do not seem to be far advanced, and living is still conducted nearly, if
not quite, as much in public as in the Odyssey or in Beowulf. The hall is still
the common resort of both sexes by day and of the men at night. Although
gold and furs, silk and jewels, are lavished with the usual cheap
magnificence of fiction, very few details are given of the minor supellex or
of ways of living generally. From the Chanson de Roland in particular
(which, though it is a pity to confine the attention to it as has sometimes
been done, is undoubtedly the type of the class in its simplest and purest
form) we should learn next to nothing about the state of society depicted,
except that its heroes were religious in their fashion, and terrible fighters.
But it ought to be added that the perusal of a large number of these
chansons leaves on the mind a much more genuine belief in their world (if

it may so be called) as having for a time actually existed, than that which is
created by the reading of Arthurian romance. That fair vision we know
(hardly knowing why or how we know it) to have been a creation of its own
Fata Morgana, a structure built of the wishes, the dreams, the ideals of men,
but far removed from their actual experience. This is not due to miracles—
there are miracles enough in the chansons de geste most undoubtingly
related: nor to the strange history, geography, and chronology, for the two
divisions are very much on a par there also. But strong as the fantastic
element is in them, the chansons de geste possess a realistic quality which
is entirely absent from the gracious idealism of the Romances. The
emperors and the admirals, perhaps even their fair and obliging daughters,
were not personages unknown to the contemporaries of the Norman
conquerors of Italy and Sicily, or to the first Crusaders. The faithful and
ferocious, covetous and indomitable, pious and lawless spirit, which hardly
dropped the sword except to take up the torch, was, poetic presentation and
dressing apart, not so very different from the general temper of man after
the break up of the Roman peace till the more or less definite mapping out
of Europe into modern divisions. More than one Vivien and one William of
Orange listened to Peter the Hermit. In the very isolation of the atmosphere
of these romances, in its distance from modern thought and feeling, in its
lack (as some have held) of universal quality and transcendent human
interest, there is a certain element of strength. It was not above its time, and
it therefore does not reach the highest forms of literature. But it was
intensely of its time; and thus it far exceeds the lowest kinds, and retains an
abiding value even apart from the distinct, the high, and the very curious
perfection, within narrow limits, of its peculiar form.

Volume and
It is probable that very few persons who are not specially
age of the acquainted with the subject are at all aware of the enormous
chansons. bulk and number of these poems, even if their later
remaniements (as they are called) both in verse and prose—
fourteenth and fifteenth century refashionings, which in every case meant a
large extension—be left out of consideration. The most complete list
published, that of M. Léon Gautier, enumerates 110. Of these he himself
places only the Chanson de Roland in the eleventh century, perhaps as early
as the Norman Conquest of England, certainly not later than 1095. To the
twelfth he assigns (and it may be observed that, enthusiastic as M. Gautier

Twelfth
is on the literary side, he shows on all questions of age, &c.,
century. a wariness not always exhibited by scholars more
exclusively philological) Acquin, Aliscans, Amis et Amiles,
Antioche Aspremont, Auberi le Bourgoing, Aye d'Avignon, the Bataille
Loquifer, the oldest (now only known in Italian) form of Berte aus grans
Piés, Beuves d'Hanstone (with another Italian form more or less
independent), the Charroi de Nîmes, Les Chétifs, the Chevalerie Ogier de
Danemarche, the Chevalerie Vivien (otherwise known as Covenant Vivien),
the major part (also known by separate titles) of the Chevalier au Cygne, La
Conquête de la Petite Bretagne (another form of Acquin), the
Couronnement Loys, Doon de la Roche, Doon de Nanteuil, the Enfances
Charlemagne, the Enfances Godefroi, the Enfances Roland, the Enfances
Ogier, Floovant, Garin le Loherain, Garnier de Nanteuil, Giratz de
Rossilho, Girbert de Metz, Gui de Bourgogne, Gui de Nanteuil, Hélias,
Hervis de Metz, the oldest form of Huon de Bordeaux, Jérusalem, Jourdains
de Blaivies, the Lorraine cycle, including Garin, &c., Macaire, Mainet, the
Moniage Guillaume, the Moniage Rainoart, Orson de Beauvais, Rainoart,
Raoul de Cambrai, Les Saisnes, the Siège de Barbastre, Syracon, and the
Voyage de Charlemagne. In other words, nearly half the total number date
from the twelfth century, if not even earlier.

Thirteenth
By far the larger number of the rest are not later than the
century. thirteenth. They include—Aimeri de Narbonne, Aiol, Anséis
de Carthage, Anséis Fils de Gerbert, Auberon, Berte aus
grans Piés in its present French form, Beton et Daurel, Beuves de
Commarchis, the Département des Enfans Aimeri, the Destruction de Rome,
Doon de Mayence, Elie de Saint Gilles, the Enfances Doon de Mayence, the
Enfances Guillaume, the Enfances Vivien, the Entrée en Espagne,
Fierabras, Foulques de Candie, Gaydon, Garin de Montglane, Gaufrey,
Gérard de Viane, Guibert d'Andrenas, Jehan de Lanson, Maugis
d'Aigremont, the Mort Aimeri de Narbonne, Otinel, Parise la Duchesse, the
Prise de Cordres, the Prise de Pampelune, the Quatre Fils d'Aymon,
Renaud de Montauban (a variant of the same), Renier, the later forms of the
Chanson de Roland, to which the name of Roncevaux is sometimes given
for the sake of distinction, the Siège de Narbonne, Simon de Pouille, Vivien
l'Amachour de Montbranc, and Yon.

Fourteenth,
By this the list is almost exhausted. The fourteenth century,
and later. though fruitful in remaniements, sometimes in mono-
rhymed tirades, but often in Alexandrine couplets and other
changed shapes, contributes hardly anything original except the very
interesting and rather brilliant last branches of the Chevalier au Cygne—
Baudouin de Seboure, and the Bastart de Bouillon; Hugues Capet, a very
lively and readable but slightly vulgar thing, exhibiting an almost
undisguised tone of parody; and some fragments known by the names of
Hernaut de Beaulande, Renier de Gennes, &c. As for fifteenth and
sixteenth century work, though some pieces of it, especially the very long
and unprinted poem of Lion de Bourges, are included in the canon, all the
chanson-production of this time is properly apocryphal, and has little or
nothing left of the chanson spirit, and only the shell of the chanson form.

Chansons in
It must further be remembered that, with the exception of a
print. very few in fragmentary condition, all these poems are of
great length. Only the later or less genuine, indeed, run to
the preposterous extent of twenty, thirty, or (it is said in the case of Lion de
Bourges) sixty thousand lines. But Roland itself, one of the shortest, has
four thousand; Aliscans, which is certainly old, eight thousand; the oldest
known form of Huon, ten thousand. It is probably not excessive to put the
average length of the older chansons at six thousand lines; while if the more
recent be thrown in, the average of the whole hundred would probably be
doubled.
This immense body of verse, which for many reasons it is very desirable to
study as a whole, is still, after the best part of a century, to a great extent
unprinted, and (as was unavoidable) such of its constituents as have been
sent to press have been dealt with on no very uniform principles. It was less
inevitable, and is more to be regretted, that the dissensions of scholars on
minute philological points have caused the repeated printing of certain
texts, while others have remained inaccessible; and it cannot but be
regarded as a kind of petty treason to literature thus to put the satisfaction of
private crotchets before the "unlocking of the word-hoard" to the utmost
possible extent. The earliest chansons printed[23] were, I believe, M. Paulin
Paris's Berte aus grans Piés, M. Francisque Michel's Roland; and thereafter
these two scholars and others edited for M. Techener a very handsome set
of "Romances des Douze Pairs," as they were called, including Les Saisnes,

Ogier, Raoul de Cambrai, Garin, and the two great crusading chansons,
Antioche and Jérusalem. Other scattered efforts were made, such as the
publication of a beautiful edition of Baudouin de Seboure at Valenciennes
as early as 1841; while a Belgian scholar, M. de Reiffenberg, published Le
Chevalier au Cygne, and a Dutch one, Dr Jonckbloët, gave a large part of
the later numbers of the Garin de Montglane cycle in his Guillaume
d'Orange (2 vols., The Hague, 1854). But the great opportunity came soon
after the accession of Napoleon III., when a Minister favourable to
literature, M. de Fourtou, gave, in a moment of enthusiasm, permission to
publish the entire body of the chansons. Perfect wisdom would probably
have decreed the acceptance of the godsend by issuing the whole, with a
minimum of editorial apparatus, in some such form as that of our
Chalmers's Poets, the bulk of which need probably not have been exceeded
in order to give the oldest forms of every real chanson from Roland to the
Bastart de Bouillon. But perfect wisdom is not invariably present in the
councils of men, and the actual result took the form of ten agreeable little
volumes, in the type, shape, and paper of the "Bibliothèque Elzévirienne"
with abundant editorial matter, paraphrases in modern French, and the like.
Les Anciens Poètes de la France, as this series was called, appeared
between 1858, which saw the first volume, and 1870, which fatal year saw
the last, for the Republic had no money to spare for such monarchical
glories as the chansons. They are no contemptible possession; for the ten
volumes give fourteen chansons of very different ages, and rather
interestingly representative of different kinds. But they are a very small
portion of the whole, and in at least one instance, Aliscans, they double on a
former edition. Since then the Société des Anciens Textes Français has
edited some chansons, and independent German and French scholars have
given some more; but no systematic attempt has been made to fill the gaps,
and the pernicious system of re-editing, on pretext of wrong selection of
MSS. or the like, has continued. Nevertheless, the number of chansons
actually available is so large that no general characteristic is likely to have
escaped notice; while from the accounts of the remaining MSS., it would
not appear that any of those unprinted can rank with the very best of those
already known. Among these very best I should rank in alphabetical order
—Aliscans, Amis et Amiles, Antioche, Baudouin de Seboure (though in a
mixed kind), Berte aus grans Piés, Fierabras, Garin le Loherain, Gérard
de Roussillon, Huon de Bordeaux, Ogier de Danemarche, Raoul de

Cambrai, Roland, and the Voyage de Charlemagne à Constantinoble. The
almost solitary eminence assigned by some critics to Roland is not, I think,
justified, and comes chiefly from their not being acquainted with many
others; though the poem has undoubtedly the merit of being the oldest, and
perhaps that of presenting the chanson spirit in its best and most
unadulterated, as well as the chanson form at its simplest, sharpest, and first
state. Nor is there anywhere a finer passage than the death of Roland,
though there are many not less fine.
It may, however, seem proper, if not even positively indispensable, to give
some more general particulars about these chansons before analysing
specimens or giving arguments of one or more; for they are full of
curiosities.

Language. Oc
In the first place, it will be noticed by careful readers of the
and oïl. list above given, that these compositions are not limited to
French proper or to the langue d'oïl, though infinitely the
greater part of them are in that tongue. Indeed, for some time after attention
had been drawn to them, and before their actual natures and contents had
been thoroughly examined, there was a theory that they were Provençal in
origin. This, though it was chiefly due to the fact that Raynouard, Fauriel,
and other early students of old French had a strong southern leaning, had
some other excuses. It is a fact that Provençal was earlier in its development
than French; and whether by irregular tradition of this fact, or owing to
ignorance, or from anti-French prejudice (which, however, would not apply
in France itself), the part of the langue d'oc in the early literature of Europe
was for centuries largely overvalued. Then came the usual reaction, and
some fifty years ago or so one of the most capable of literary students
declared roundly that the Provençal epic had "le défaut d'être perdu." That
is not quite true. There is, as noted above, a Provençal Fierabras, though it
is beyond doubt an adaptation of the French; Betonnet d'Hanstone or Beton
et Daurel only exists in Provençal, though there is again no doubt of its
being borrowed; and, lastly, the oldest existing, and probably the original,
form of Gérard de Roussillon, Giratz de Rossilho, is, as its title implies,
Provençal, though it is in a dialect more approaching to the langue d'oïl
than any form of oc, and even presents the curious peculiarity of existing in
two forms, one leaning to Provençal, the other to French. But these very
facts, though they show the statement that "the Provençal epic is lost" to be

excessive, yet go almost farther than a total deficiency in proving that the
chanson de geste was not originally Provençal. Had it been otherwise, there
can be no possible reason why a bare three per cent of the existing
examples should be in the southern tongue, while two of these are evidently
translations, and the third was as evidently written on the very northern
borders of the "Limousin" district.

Italian.
The next fact—one almost more interesting, inasmuch as it
bears on that community of Romance tongues of which we
have evidence in Dante,[24] and perhaps also makes for the antiquity of the
Charlemagne story in its primitive form—is the existence of chansons in
Italian, and, it may be added, in a most curious bastard speech which is
neither French, nor Provençal, nor Italian, but French Italicised in part.[25]
The substance, moreover, of the Charlemagne stories was very early
naturalised in Italy in the form of a sort of abstract or compilation called the
Reali di Francia,[26] which in various forms maintained popularity through
mediæval and early modern times, and undoubtedly exercised much
Diffusion of
influence on the great Italian poets of the Renaissance. They
the were also diffused throughout Europe, the Carlamagnus
chansons. Saga in Iceland marking their farthest actual as well as
possible limit, though they never in Germany attained
anything like the popularity of the Arthurian legend, and though the
Spaniards, patriotically resenting the frequent forays into Spain to which the
chansons bear witness, and availing themselves of the confession of disaster
at Roncesvalles, set up a counter-story in which Roland is personally
worsted by Bernardo del Carpio, and the quarrels of the paynims are taken
up by Spain herself. In England the imitations, though fairly numerous, are
rather late. They have been completely edited for the Early English Text
Society, and consist (for Bevis of Hampton has little relation with its
chanson namesake save the name) of Sir Ferumbras (Fierabras), The Siege
of Milan, Sir Otuel (two forms), the Life of Charles the Great, The Soudone
of Babylone, Huon of Bordeaux, and The Four Sons of Aymon, besides a
very curious semi-original entitled Rauf Coilzear (Collier), in which the
well-known romance-donnée of the king visiting some obscure person is
applied to Charlemagne. Of these, one, the version of Huon of Bordeaux,[27]
is literature of no mean kind; but this is because it was executed by Lord
Berners, long after our present period. Also, being of that date, it represents

the latest French form of the story, which was a very popular one, and
incorporated very large borrowings from other sources (the loadstone rock,
the punishment of Cain, and so forth) which are foreign to the subject and
substance of the chansons proper.

Their
Very great pains have been spent on the question of the
authorship and authorship, publication, or performance of these
publication. compositions. As is the case with so much mediæval work,
the great mass of them is entirely anonymous. A line which
concludes, or rather supplements, Roland—

"Ci falt la geste que Turoldus
declinet"—

has been the occasion of the shedding of a very great deal of ink. The
enthusiastic inquisitiveness of some has ferreted about in all directions for
Turolds, Thorolds, or Therouldes, in the eleventh century, and discovering
them even among the companions of the Conqueror himself, has started the
question whether Taillefer was or was not violating the copyright of his
comrade at Hastings. The fact is, however, that the best authorities are very
much at sea as to the meaning of declinet, which, though it must signify "go
over," "tell like a bead-roll," in some way or other, might be susceptible of
application to authorship, recitation, or even copying. In some other cases,
however, we have more positive testimony, though they are in a great
minority. Graindor of Douai refashioned the work of Richard the Pilgrim,
an actual partaker of the first Crusade, into the present Antioche, Jérusalem,
and perhaps Les Chétifs. Either Richard or Graindor must have been one of
the very best poets of the whole cycle. Jehan de Flagy wrote the spirited
Garin le Loherain; and Jehan Bodel of Arras Les Saisnes. Adenès le Roi, a
trouvère, of whose actual position in the world we know a little, wrote or
refashioned three or four chansons of the thirteenth century, including Berte
aus grans Piés, and one of the forms of part of Ogier. Other names—
Bertrand of Bar sur Aube, Pierre de Rieu, Gérard d'Amiens, Raimbert de
Paris, Brianchon (almost a character of Balzac!), Gautier of Douai, Nicolas
of Padua (an interesting person who was warned in a dream to save his soul
by compiling a chanson), Herbert of Dammartin, Guillaume de Bapaume,
Huon de Villeneuve—are mere shadows of names to which in nearly all

cases no personality attaches, and which may be as often those of mere
jongleurs as of actual poets.

Their
No subject, however, in connection with these chansons de
performance. geste has occupied more attention than the precise mode of
what has been called above their "authorship, publication, or
performance." They are called chansons, and there is no doubt at all that in
their inception, and during the earlier and better part of their history, they
strictly deserved the name, having been written not to be read but to be sung
or recited. To a certain extent, of course, this was the case with all the
lighter literature of mediæval times. Far later than our present period the
English metrical romances almost invariably begin with the minstrel's
invocation, "Listen, lordings," varied according to his taste, fancy, and
metre; and what was then partly a tradition, was two or three hundred years
earlier the simple record of a universal practice. Since the early days of the
Romantic revival, even to the present time, the minutest details of this
singing and recitation have been the subject of endless wrangling; and even
the point whether it was "singing" or "recitation" has been argued. In a
wider and calmer view these things become of very small interest. Singing
and recitation—as the very word recitative should be enough to remind any
one—pass into each other by degrees imperceptible to any but a technical
ear; and the instruments, if any, which accompanied the performance of the
chansons, the extent of that accompaniment, and the rest, concern, if they
concern history at all, the history of music, not that of literature.

Hearing, not
But it is a matter of quite other importance that, as has been
reading, the said, lighter mediæval literature generally, and the chansons
object. in particular, were meant for the ear, not the eye—to be
heard, not to be read. For this intention very closely
concerns some of their most important literary characteristics. It is certain
as a matter of fact, though it might not be very easy to account for it as a
matter of argument, that repetitions, stock phrases, identity of scheme and
form, which are apt to be felt as disagreeable in reading, are far less
irksome, and even have a certain attraction, in matter orally delivered.
Whether that slower irritation of the mind through the ear of which Horace
speaks supplies the explanation may be left undiscussed. But it is certain
that, especially for uneducated hearers (who in the eleventh and twelfth
centuries, if not in the thirteenth, must have been the enormous majority),

not merely the phraseological but the rhythmical peculiarities of the
Effect on
chansons would be specially suitable. In particular, the long
prosody. maintenance of the mono-rhymed, or even the single-
assonanced, tirade depends almost entirely upon its being
delivered vivâ voce. Only then does that wave-clash which has been spoken
of produce its effect, while the unbroken uniformity of rhyme on the printed
page, and the apparent absence of uniformity in the printed assonances, are
almost equally annoying to the eye. Nor is it important or superfluous to
note that this oral literature had, in the Teutonic countries and in England
more especially, an immense influence (hitherto not nearly enough allowed
for by literary historians) in the great change from a stressed and alliterative
to a quantitative and rhymed prosody, which took place, with us, from about
1200 a.d. Accustomed as were the ears of all to quantitative (though very
licentiously quantitative) and rhymed measures in the hymns and services
of the Church—the one literary exercise to which gentle and simple,
learned and unlearned, were constantly and regularly addicted—it was
almost impossible that they should not demand a similar prosody in the
profaner compositions addressed to them. That this would not affect the
chansons themselves is true enough; for there are no relics of any
alliterative prosody in French, and its accentual scanning is only the
naturally "crumbled" quantity of Latin. But it is extremely important to note
that the metre of these chansons themselves, single-rhyme and all, directly
influenced English writers. Of this, however, more will be found in the
chapter on the rise of English literature proper.

The jongleurs.
Another, and for literature a hardly less important,
consequence of this intention of being heard, was that
probably from the very first, and certainly from an early period, a
distinction, not very different from that afterwards occasioned by the drama,
took place between the trouvère who invented the chanson and the jongleur
or minstrel who introduced it. At first these parts may, for better or worse,
have been doubled. But it would seldom happen that the poet who had the
wits to indite would have the skill to perform; and it would happen still
seldomer that those whose gifts lay in the direction of interpretation would
have the poetical spirit. Nor is it wonderful that, in the poems themselves,
we find considerably more about the performer than about the author. In the
cases where they were identical, the author would evidently be merged in

the actor; in cases where they were not, the actor would take care of
himself. Accordingly, though we know if possible even less of the names of
the jongleurs than of those of the trouvères, we know a good deal about
their methods. Very rarely does an author like Nicolas of Padua (v. supra)
tell us so much as his motive for composing the poems. But the patient
study of critics, eked out it may be by a little imagination here and there,
has succeeded in elaborating a fairly complete account of the ways and
fortunes of the jongleur, who also not improbably, even where he was not
the author, adjusted to the chansons which were his copyright, extempore
codas, episodes, tags, and gags of different kinds. Immense pains have been
spent upon the jongleur. It has been asserted, and it is not improbable, that
during the palmiest days—say the eleventh and twelfth centuries—of the
chansons a special order of the jongleur or minstrel hierarchy concerned
itself with them,—it is at least certain that the phrase chanter de geste
occurs several times in a manner, and with a context, which seem to justify
its being regarded as a special term of art. And the authors at least present
their heroes as deliberately expecting that they will be sung about, and
fearing the chance of a dishonourable mention; a fact which, though we
must not base any calculations upon it as to the actual sentiments of Roland
or Ogier, Raoul or Huon, is a fact in itself. And it is also a fact that in the
fabliaux and other light verse of the time we find jongleurs presented as
boasting of the particular chansons they can sing.

Jongleresses,
But the enumeration of the kinds of jongleurs—those
&c. itinerant, those attached to courts and great families, &c.—
would lead us too far. They were not all of one sex, and we
hear of jongleresses and chanteresses, such as Adeline who figures in the
history of the Norman Conquest, Aiglantine who sang before the Duke of
Burgundy, Gracieuse d'Espagne, and so forth—pretty names, as even M.
Gautier, who is inclined to be suspicious of them, admits. These suspicions,
it is fair to say, were felt at the time. Don Jayme of Aragon forbade noble
ladies to kiss jongleresses or share bed and board with them; while the
Church, which never loved the jongleur much, decided that the duty of a
wife to follow her husband ceased if he took to jongling, which was a vita
turpis et inhonesta. Further, the pains above referred to, bestowed by
scholars of all sorts, from Percy downwards, have discovered or guessed at
the clothes which the jongleur and his mate wore, and the instruments with

which they accompanied their songs. It is more germane to our purpose to
know, as we do in one instance on positive testimony, the principles (easily
to be guessed, by the way) on which the introduction of names into these
poems were arranged. It appears, on the authority of the historian of
Guisnes and Ardres, that Arnold the Old, Count of Ardres, would actually
have had his name in the Chanson d'Antioche had he not refused a pair of
scarlet boots or breeches to the poet or performer thereof. Nor is it more
surprising to find, on the still more indisputable authority of passages in the
chansons themselves, that the jongleur would stop singing at an interesting
point to make a collection, and would even sometimes explicitly protest
against the contribution of too small coins—poitevines, mailles, and the
like.
It is impossible not to regard with a mixture of respect and pity the labour
which has been spent on collecting details of the kind whereof, in the last
paragraph or two, a few examples have been given. But they really have
very little, if anything, to do with literature; and what they have to do with it
is common to all times and subjects. The excessive prodigality to minstrels
of which we have record parallels itself in other times in regard to actors,
jockeys, musicians, and other classes of mechanical pleasure-makers whose
craft happens to be popular for the moment. And it was never more likely to
be shown than in the Middle Ages, when generosity was a profane virtue;
when the Church had set the example—an example the too free extension
of which she resented highly—of putting reckless giving above almost all
other good deeds; and when the system of private war, of ransoms and other
things of the same kind, made "light come, light go," a maxim almost more
applicable than in the days of confiscations, in those of pensions on this or
that list, or in those of stock-jobbing. Moreover, inquirers into this matter
have certainly not escaped the besetting sin of all but strictly political
historians—a sin which even the political historian has not always avoided
—the sin of mixing up times and epochs.
It is the great advantage of that purely literary criticism, which is so little
practised and to some extent so unpopular, that it is able to preserve
accuracy in this matter. When with the assistance (always to be gratefully
received) of philologists and historians in the strict sense the date of a
literary work is ascertained with sufficient—it is only in a few cases that it
can be ascertained with absolute—exactness, the historian of literature

places it in that position for literary purposes only, and neither mixes it with
other things nor endeavours to use it for purposes other than literary. To
recur to an example mentioned above, Adeline in the eleventh century and
Gracieuse d'Espagne in the fifteenth are agreeable objects of contemplation
and ornaments of discourse; but, once more, neither has much, if anything,
to do with literature.

Singularity of
We may therefore with advantage, having made this
the chansons. digression to comply a little with prevalent fashions, return
to the chansons themselves, to the half-million or million
verses of majestic cadence written in one of the noblest languages, for at
least first effect, to be found in the history of the world, possessing that
character of distinction, of separate and unique peculiarity in matter and
form, which has such extraordinary charm, and endowed besides, more
perhaps than any other division, with the attraction of presenting an utterly
vanished Past. The late Mr Froude found in church-bells—the echo of the
Middle Ages—suggestion of such a vanishing. To some of us there is
nothing dead in church-bells; there is only in them, as in the Arthurian
legends, for instance, a perennial thing still presented in associations, all the
more charming for being slightly antique. But the chansons de geste, living
by the poetry of their best examples, by the fire of their sentiment, by the
clash and clang of their music, are still in thought, in connection with
manners, hopes, aims, almost more dead than any of the classics. The
literary misjudgment of them which was possible in quite recent times, to
two such critics—very different, but each of the first class—as Mr Matthew
Arnold and M. Ferdinand Brunetière, is half excused by this curious feature
in their own literary character. More than mummies or catacombs, more
than Herculaneum and Pompeii, they bring us face to face with something
so remote and afar that we can hardly realise it at all. It may be that that
peculiarity of the French genius, which, despite its unsurpassed and almost
unmatched literary faculty, has prevented it from contributing any of the
very greatest masterpieces to the literature of the world, has communicated
to them this aloofness, this, as it may almost be called, provincialism. But
some such note there is in them, and it may be that the immense stretch of
time during which they were worse than unknown—misknown—has
brought it about.

Their charm.
Yet their interest is not the less; it is perhaps even the more.
It is nearly twenty years since I began to read them, and
during that period I have also been reading masses of other literature from
other times, nations, and languages; yet I cannot at this moment take up one
without being carried away by the stately language, as precise and well
proportioned as modern French, yet with much of the grandeur which
modern French lacks, the statelier metre, the noble phrase, the noble
incident and passion. Take, for instance, one of the crowning moments, for
there are several, of the death-scene of Roland, that where the hero
discovers the dead archbishop, with his hands—"the white, the beautiful"—
crossed on his breast:—

"Li quenz Rollanz revient de
pasmeisuns,
Sur piez se drecet, mais il ad grant
dulur;
Guardet aval e si guardet amunt;
Sur l'erbe verte, ultre ses
cumpaignuns,
La veit gesir le nobile barun:
C'est l'arcevesque que deus mist en
sun num,
Claimet sa culpe, si regardet amunt,
Cuntre le ciel ainsdoux ses mains ad
juinz,
Si priet deu que pareis li duinst.
Morz est Turpin le guerrier Charlun.
Par granz batailles e par mult bels
sermuns
Contre paiens fut tuz tens campiuns.
Deus li otreit seinte beneïçun.
Aoi!"[28]

Then turn to, perhaps, the very last poem which can be called a chanson de
geste proper in style, Le Bastart de Bouillon, and open on these lines:—

"Pardevant la chité qui Miekes[29] fut
clamée
Fu grande la bataille, et fière la mellée,
Enchois car on eust nulle tente levée,
Commencha li debas à chelle matinée.
Li cinc frere paien i mainent grant
huée,
Il keurent par accort, chascuns tenoit
l'espée,
Et une forte targe à son col acolée.
Esclamars va ferir sans nulle demorée,
Un gentil crestien de France l'onnerée
—
Armeïre n'i vault une pomme pelée;
Sus le senestre espaulle fu la chars
atamée,
Le branc li embati par dedans la corée,
[30]
Mort l'abat du cheval; son ame soit
sauvée!"[31]

This is in no way a specially fine passage, it is the very "padding" of the
average chanson, but what padding it is! Compare the mere sound, the clash
and clang of the verse, with the ordinary English romance in Sir Thopas
metre, or even with the Italian poets. How alert, how succinct, how finished
it is beside the slip-shodness of the first, in too many instances;[32] how
manly, how intense, beside the mere sweetness of the second! The very ring
of the lines brings mail-shirt and flat-topped helmet before us.

Peculiarity of
But in order to the proper comprehension of this section of
the geste literature, it is necessary that something more should be said
system. as well of the matter at large as of the construction and
contents of separate poems; and, most of all, of the singular
process of adjustment of these separate poems by which the geste proper
(that is to say, the subdivision of the whole which deals more or less
distinctly with a single subject) is constituted. Here again we find a
"difference" of the poems in the strict logical sense. The total mass of the
Arthurian story may be, though more probably it is not, as large as that of

the Charlemagne romances, and it may well seem to some of superior
literary interest. But from its very nature, perhaps from the very nature of its
excellence, it lacks this special feature of the chansons de geste. Arthur may
or may not be a greater figure in himself than Charlemagne; but when the
genius of Map (or of some one else) had hit upon the real knotting and
unknotting of the story—the connection of the frailty of Guinevere with the
Quest for the Grail—complete developments of the fates of minor heroes,
elaborate closings of minor incidents, became futile. Endless stories could
be keyed or geared on to different parts of the main legend: there might be a
Tristan-saga, a Palomides-saga, a Gawain-saga, episodes of Balin or of
Beaumains, incidents of the fate of the damsel of Astolat or the resipiscence
of Geraint. But the central interest was too artistically complete to allow
any of these to occupy very much independent space.

Instances.
In our present subject, on the other hand, even
Charlemagne's life is less the object of the story than the
history of France; and enormous as the falsification of that history may
seem to modern criticism, the writers always in a certain sense remembered
that they were historians. When an interesting and important personality
presented itself, it was their duty to follow it out to the end, to fill up the
gaps of forerunners, to round it off and shade it in.[33] Thus it happens that
the geste or saga of Guillaume d'Orange—which is itself not the whole of
the great geste of Garin de Montglane—occupies eighteen separate poems,
some of them of great length; that the crusading series, beginning no doubt
in a simple historical poem, which was extended and "cycled," has seven,
the Lorraine group five; while in the extraordinary monument of industry
and enthusiasm which for some eight hundred pages M. Léon Gautier has
devoted to the king's geste, twenty-seven different chansons are more or
less abstracted. Several others might have been added here if M. Gautier
had laid down less strict rules of exclusion against mere romans d'aventures
subsequently tied on, like the above-mentioned outlying romances of the
Arthurian group, to the main subject.

Summary of
It seems necessary, therefore, or at least desirable, especially
the geste of as these poems are still far too little known to English
William of readers, to give in the first place a more or less detailed
Orange.
account of one of the groups; in the second, a still more
detailed account of a particular chanson, which to be fully illustrative

should probably be a member of this group; and lastly, some remarks on the
more noteworthy and accessible (for it is ill speaking at second-hand from
accounts of manuscripts) of the remaining poems. For the first purpose
nothing can be better than Guillaume d'Orange, many, though not all, of the
constituents of which are in print, and which has had the great advantage of
being systematically treated by more than one or two of the most competent
scholars of the century on the subject—Dr Jonckbloët, MM. Guessard and
A. de Montaiglon, and M. Gautier himself. Of this group the short, very old,
and very characteristic Couronnement Loys will supply a good subject for
more particular treatment, a subject all the more desirable that Roland may
be said to be comparatively familiar, and is accessible in English
translations.

And first of the
The poem as we have it[34] begins with a double exordium,
Couronnement from which the jongleur might perhaps choose as from
Loys. alternative collects in a liturgy. Each is ten lines long, and
while the first rhymes throughout, the second has only a
very imperfect assonance. Each bespeaks attention and promises
satisfaction in the usual manner, though in different terms—

"Oez seignor que Dex vos soit aidant;"

"Seignor baron, pleroit vos d'un
exemple!"

A much less commonplace note is struck immediately afterwards in what
may be excusably taken to be the real beginning of the poem:—

"A king who wears our France's crown
of gold
Worthy must be, and of his body bold;
What man soe'er to him do evil wold,
He may not quit in any manner hold
Till he be dead or to his mercy yold.
Else France shall lose her praise she
hath of old.
Falsely he's crowned: so hath our story
told."

Then the story itself is plunged into in right style. When the chapel was
blessed at Aix and the minster dedicated and made, there was a mighty
court held. Poor and rich received justice; eighteen bishops, as many
archbishops, twenty-six abbots, and four crowned kings attended; the Pope
of Rome himself said mass; and Louis, son of Charlemagne, was brought
up to the high altar where the crown was laid. At this moment the people
are informed that Charles feels his death approaching, and must hand over
his kingdom to his son. They thank God that no strange king is to come on
them. But when the emperor, after good advice as to life and policy, bids
him not dare to take the crown unless he is prepared for a clean and valiant
life, the infant (li enfes) does not dare. The people weep, and the king
storms, declaring that the prince is no son of his and shall be made a monk.
But Hernaut of Orleans, a great noble, strikes in, and pretending to plead for
Louis on the score of his extreme youth, offers to take the regency for three
years, when, if the prince has become a good knight, he shall have the
kingdom back, and in increased good condition. Charlemagne, with the
singular proneness to be victim of any kind of "confidence trick" which he
shows throughout the chansons, is turning a willing ear to this proposition
when William of Orange enters, and, wroth at the notion, thinks of striking
off Hernaut's head. But remembering

"Que d'ome occire est trop mortex
péchiés,"

he changes his plan and only pummels him to death with his fists, a
distinction which seems indifferential. Then he takes the crown himself,
places it on the boy's head, and Charles accommodates himself to this
proceeding as easily as to the other proposal.
Five years pass: and it is a question, not of the mere choice of a successor or
assessor, but of actual death. He repeats his counsels to his son, with the
additional and very natural warning to rely on William. Unluckily this chief,
who is in the earlier part of the chanson surnamed Firebrace (not to be
confounded with the converted Saracen of that name), is not at the actual
time of the king's death at Aix, but has gone on pilgrimage, in fulfilment of
a vow, to Rome. He comes at a good time, for the Saracens have just
invaded Italy, have overthrown the King of Apulia with great slaughter, and
are close to Rome. The Pope (the "Apostle") hears of William, and implores

his succour, which, though he has but forty knights and the Saracens are in
their usual thousands, he consents to give. The Pope promises him as a
reward that he may eat meat all the days of his life, and take as many wives
as he chooses,—a method of guerdon which shocks M. Gautier, the most
orthodox as well as not the least scholarly of scholars. However, the Holy
Father also wishes to buy off the heathen, thereby showing a truly apostolic
ignorance of the world. Galafré, the "admiral," however has a point of
honour. He will not be bought off. He informs the Pope, calling him "Sir
with the big hat,"[35] that he is a descendant of Romulus and Julius Cæsar,
and for that reason feels it necessary to destroy Rome and its clerks who
serve God. He relents, however, so far as to propose to decide the matter by
single combat, to which the Pope, according to all but nineteenth century
sentiment, very properly consents. William is, of course, the Christian
champion; the Saracen is a giant named Corsolt, very hideous, very violent,
and a sort of Mahometan Capaneus in his language. The Pope does not
entirely trust in William's valour, but rubs him all over with St Peter's arm,
which confers invulnerability. Unfortunately the "promontory of the face" is
omitted. The battle is fierce, but not long. Corsolt cuts off the uncharmed tip
of William's nose (whence his epic surname of Guillaume au Court Nez),
but William cuts off Corsolt's head. The Saracens fly: William (he has joked
rather ruefully with the Pope on his misadventure, which, as being a
recognised form of punishment, was almost a disgrace even when
honourably incurred) pursues them, captures Galafré, converts him at point
of sword, and receives from him the offer of his beautiful daughter. The
marriage is about to be celebrated, William and the Saracen princess are
actually at the altar, when a messenger from Louis arrives claiming the
champion's help against the traitors who already wish to wrest the sceptre
from his hand. William asks the Pope what he is to do, and the Pope says
"Go":

"Guillaumes bese la dame o le vis cler,
Et ele lui; ne cesse deplorer.
Par tel covent ensi sont dessevré,
Puis ne se virent en trestot leur aé."

Promptly as he acts, however, he is only in time to repair, not to prevent, the
mischief. The rebels have already dethroned Louis and imprisoned him at St

Martins in Tours, making Acelin of Rouen, son of Richard, Emperor.
William makes straight for Tours, prevails on the castellan of the gate-
fortress to let him in, kicks—literally kicks—the monks out of their abbey,
and rescues Louis. He then kills Acelin, violently maltreats his father, and
rapidly traverses the whole of France, reducing the malcontents.
Peace having been for the time restored at home, William returns to Rome,
where many things have happened. The Pope and Galafré are dead, the
princess, though she is faithful to William, has other suitors, and there is a
fresh invasion, not this time of heathen Asiatics, but led by Guy of
Germany. The Count of Orange forces Louis (who behaves in a manner
justifying the rebels) to accompany him with a great army to Rome, defeats
the Germans, takes his fainéant emperor's part in a single combat with Guy,
and is again victorious. Nor, though he has to treat his pusillanimous
sovereign in an exceedingly cavalier fashion, does he fail to have Louis
crowned again as Emperor of Rome. A fresh rebellion breaking out in
France, he again subdues it; and strengthens the tottering house of Charles
Martel by giving his own sister Blanchefleur to the chicken-hearted king.

"En grant barnage fu Looys entrez;
Quant il fu riche, Guillaume n'en sot
gré,"

ends the poem with its usual laconism.

Comments on
There is, of course, in this story an element of rough
the comedy, approaching horse-play, which may not please all
Couronnement tastes. This element, however, is very largely present in the
.
chansons (though it so happens, yet once more, that Roland
is accidentally free from it), and it is especially obvious in the particular
branch or geste of William with the Short Nose, appearing even in the finest
and longest of the subdivisions, Aliscans, which some have put at the head
of the whole. In fact, as we might expect, the esprit gaulois can seldom
refrain altogether from pleasantry, and its pleasantry at this time is distinctly
"the humour of the stick." But still the poem is a very fine one. Its ethical
opening is really noble: the picture of the Court at Aix has grandeur, for all
its touches of simplicity; the fighting is good; the marriage scene and its
fatal interruption (for we hear nothing of the princess on William's second

visit to Rome) give a dramatic turn: and though there is no fine writing,
there is a refreshing directness. The shortness, too (it has less than three
thousand lines), is undoubtedly in its favour, for these pieces are apt to be
rather too long than too short. And if the pusillanimity and fainéantise of
Louis seem at first sight exaggerated, it must be remembered that, very
awkward as was the position of a Henry III. of England in the thirteenth
century, and a James III. of Scotland in the fifteenth, kings of similar
character must have cut even worse figures in the tenth or eleventh, when
the story was probably first elaborated, and worse still in the days of the
supposed occurrence of its facts. Indeed, one of the best passages as poetry,
and one of the most valuable as matter, is that in which the old king warns
his trembling son how he must not only do judgment and justice, must not
only avoid luxury and avarice, protect the orphan and do the widow no
wrong, but must be ready at any moment to cross the water of Gironde with
a hundred thousand men in order to craventer et confondre the pagan host,
—how he must be towards his own proud vassals "like a man-eating
leopard," and if any dare levy war against him, must summon his knights,
besiege the traitor's castle, waste and spoil all his land, and when he is taken
show him no mercy, but lop him limb from limb, burn him in fire, or drown
him in the sea.[36] It is not precisely an amiable spirit, this spirit of the
chansons: but there is this to be said in its favour, there is no mistake about
it.

William of
It may be perhaps expected that before, in the second place,
Orange. summing the other branches of the saga of this William of
Orange, it should be said who he was. But it is better to refer
to the authorities already given on this, after all, not strictly literary point.
Enormous pains have been spent on the identification or distinction of
William Short-nose, Saint William of Gellona, William Tow-head of
Poitiers, William Longsword of Normandy, as well as several other
Williams. It may not be superfluous, and is certainly not improper, for those
who undertake the elaborate editing of a particular poem to enter into such
details. But for us, who are considering the literary development of Europe,
it would be scarcely germane. It is enough that certain trouvères found in
tradition, in history freely treated, or in their own imaginations, the material
which they worked into this great series of poems, of which those
concerning William directly amount to eighteen, while the entire geste of
Garin de Montglane runs to twenty-four.

The earlier
For the purposes of the chansons, William of the Strong
poems of the Arm or the Short Nose is Count, or rather Marquis, of
cycle. Orange, one of Charlemagne's peers, a special bulwark of
France and Christendom towards the south-east, and a man
of approved valour, loyalty, and piety, but of somewhat rough manners.
Also (which is for the chanson de geste of even greater importance) he is
grandson of Garin de Montglane and the son of Aimeri de Narbonne, heroes
both, and possessors of the same good qualities which extend to all the
family. For it is a cardinal point of the chansons that not only bon sang
chasse de race, but evil blood likewise. And the House of Narbonne, or
Montglane, or Orange, is as uniformly distinguished for loyalty as the
Normans and part of the house of Mayence for "treachery." To illustrate its
qualities, twenty-four chansons, as has been said, are devoted, six of which
tell the story before William, and the remaining eighteen that of his life. The
first in M. Gautier's order[37] is Les Enfances Garin de Montglane. Garin de
Montglane, the son of Duke Savary of Aquitaine and a mother persecuted
by false accusations, like so many heroines of the middle ages, fights first in
Sicily, procures atonement for his mother's wrongs, and then goes to the
Court of Charlemagne, who, according to the general story, is his exact
equal in age, as is also Doon de Mayence, the special hero of the third great
geste. He conquers Montglane, and marries the Lady Mabille, his marriage

and its preliminaries filling the second romance, or Garin de Montglane
proper. He has by Mabille four sons—Hernaut de Beaulande, Girart de
Viane, Renier de Gennes, and Milles de Pouille. Each of the three first is the
subject of an existing chanson, and doubtless the fourth was similarly
honoured. Girart de Viane is one of the most striking of the chansons in
matter. The hero quarrels with Charlemagne owing to the bad offices of the
empress, and a great barons' war follows, in which Roland and Oliver have
their famous fight, and Roland is betrothed to Oliver's sister Aude. Hernaut
de Beaulande tells how the hero conquers Aquitaine, marries Fregonde, and
becomes the father of Aimeri de Narbonne; and Renier de Gennes in like
fashion the success of its eponym at Genoa, and his becoming the father of
Oliver and Aude. Then we pass to the third generation (Charlemagne
reigning all the time) with the above-named Aimeri de Narbonne. The
events of this come after Roncesvalles, and it is on the return thence that,
Narbonne being in Paynim hands, Aimeri, after others have refused, takes
the adventure, the town, and his surname. He marries Hermengart, sister of
the king of the Lombards, repulses the Saracens, who endeavour to recover
Narbonne, and begets twelve children, of whom the future William of
Orange is one. These chansons, with the exception of Girart de Viane,
which was printed early, remained much longer in MS. than their
successors, and the texts are not accessible in any such convenient corpus
as De Jonckbloët's though some have been edited recently.
Three poems intervene between Aimeri de Narbonne and the Couronnement
Loys, but they do not seem to have been always kept apart. The first, the
Enfances Guillaume, tells how when William himself had left Narbonne for
Charlemagne's Court, and his father was also absent, the Saracens under
Thibaut, King of Arabia, laid siege to the town, laying at the same time
siege to the heart of the beautiful Saracen Princess Orable, who lives in the
enchanted palace of Gloriette at Orange, itself then, as Narbonne had been,
a pagan possession. William, going with his brothers to succour their
mother, captures Baucent, a horse sent by the princess to Thibaut, and falls
in love with her, his love being returned. She is forced to marry Thibaut, but
preserves herself by witchcraft as a wife only in name. Orange does not fall
into the hand of the Christians, though they succeed in relieving Narbonne.
William meanwhile has returned to Court, and has been solemnly dubbed
knight, his enfances then technically ceasing.

This is followed by the Département des Enfans Aimeri, in which William's
brothers, following his example, leave Narbonne and their father for
different parts of France, and achieve adventures and possessions. One of
them, Bernart of Brabant, is often specially mentioned in the latter branches
of the cycle as the most valiant of the clan next to Guillaume, and it is not
improbable that he had a chanson to himself. The youngest, Guibelin,
remains, and in the third Siege of Narbonne, which has a poem to itself, he
shows prowess against the Saracens, but is taken prisoner. He is rescued
from crucifixion by his aged father, who cuts his way through the Saracens
and carries off his son. But the number of the heathen is too great, and the
city must have surrendered if an embassy sent to Charlemagne had not
brought help, headed by William himself, in time. He is as victorious as
usual, but after his victory again returns to Aix.

The Charroi de
Now begins the Couronnement Loys, of which the more
Nîmes. detailed abstract given above may serve, not merely to make
the individual piece known, but to indicate the general
course, incidents, language, and so forth of all these poems. It will be
remembered that it ends by a declaration that the king was not grateful to
the King-maker. He forgets William in the distribution of fiefs, says M.
Gautier; we may say, perhaps, that he remembers rather too vividly the
rough instruction he has received from his brother-in-law. On protest
William receives Spain, Orange, and Nîmes, a sufficiently magnificent
dotation, were it not that all three are in the power of the infidels. William,
however, loses no time in putting himself in possession, and begins with
Nîmes. This he carries, as told in the Charroi de Nîmes,[38] by the Douglas-
like stratagem (indeed it is not at all impossible that the Good Lord James
was acquainted with the poem) of hiding his knights in casks, supposed to
contain salt and other merchandise, which are piled on cars and drawn by
oxen. William himself and Bertrand his nephew conduct the caravan,
dressed in rough boots (which hurt Bertrand's feet), blue hose, and coarse
cloth frocks. The innocent paynims give them friendly welcome, though
William is nearly discovered by his tell-tale disfigurement. A squabble,
however, arises; but William, having effected his entrance, does not lose
time. He blows his horn, and the knights springing from their casks, the
town is taken. This Charroi de Nîmes is one of the most spirited, but one of
the roughest, of the group. The catalogue of his services with which

William overwhelms the king, each item ushered by the phrase "Rois, quar
te membre" ("King, bethink thee then"), and to which the unfortunate Louis
can only answer in various forms, "You are very ill-tempered" ("Pleins es
de mautalent"; "Mautalent avez moult"), is curiously full of uncultivated
eloquence; while his refusal to accept the heritage of Auberi le Bourgoing,
and thereby wrong Auberi's little son, even though "sa marrastre
Hermengant de Tori" is also offered by the generous monarch with the odd
commendation—

"La meiller feme qui onc beust de
vin,"

is justly praised. But when the venerable Aymon not unnaturally protests
against almost the whole army accompanying William, and the wrathful
peer breaks his jaw with his fist, when the peasants who grumble at their
casks and their oxen being seized are hanged or have their eyes put out—
then the less amiable side of the matter certainly makes its appearance.

The Prise
William has thus entered on part, though the least part, of
d'Orange. the king's gift to him—a gift which it is fair to Louis to say
that the hero had himself demanded, after refusing the rather
vague offer of a fourth of the lands and revenues of all France. The Prise
d'Orange[39] follows in time and as a subject of chanson, the Charroi de
Nîmes. The earlier poem had been all sheer fighting with no softer side. In
this William is reminded of the beautiful Orable (wife, if only in name, of
King Thibaut), who lives there, though her husband, finding a wife who
bewitches the nuptial chamber unsatisfactory, has left her and Orange to the
care of his son Arragon. The reminder is a certain Gilbert of Vermandois
who has been prisoner at Orange, and who, after some hesitation, joins
William himself and his brother Guibelin in a hazardous expedition to the
pagan city. They blacken themselves with ink, and are not ill received by
Arragon: but a Saracen who knows the "Marquis au Court Nez" informs
against him (getting his brains beaten out for his pains), and the three,
forcing a way with bludgeons through the heathen, take refuge in Gloriette,
receive arms from Orable, who has never ceased to love the Marquis, and
drive their enemies off. But a subterranean passage (this probably shows the
chanson to be a late one in this form) lets the heathen in: and all three
champions are seized, bound, and condemned to the flames. Orable

demands them, not to release but to put in her own dungeons, conveniently
furnished with vipers; and for a time they think themselves betrayed. But
Orable soon appears, offers them liberty if William will marry her, and
discloses a second underground passage. They do not, however, fly by this,
but only send Gilbert to Nîmes to fetch succour: and as Orable's conduct is
revealed to Arragon, a third crisis occurs. It is happily averted, and Bertrand
soon arriving with thirteen thousand men from Nîmes, the Saracens are cut
to pieces and Orange won. Orable is quickly baptised, her name being
changed to Guibourc, and married without further delay. William is William
of Orange at length in good earnest, and the double sacrament reconciles M.
Gautier (who is constantly distressed by the forward conduct of his
heroines) to Guibourc ever afterwards. It is only fair to say that in the text
published by M. Jonckbloët (and M. Gautier gives references to no other)
"la curtoise Orable" does not seem to deserve his hard words. There is
nothing improper in her conduct, and her words do not come to much more
than—

"I am your wife if you will marry me."

La Prise d'Orange ends with the couplet—

"Puis estut il tiex xxx ans en Orenge
Mes ainc un jor n'i estut sanz
chalenge."

The story of
Orange, in short, was a kind of Garde Douloureuse against
Vivien. the infidel: and William well earned his title of "Marchis."
The story of his exploits diverges a little—a loop rather than
an episode—in two specially heroic chansons, the Enfances Vivien and the
Covenant Vivien,[40] which tell the story of one of his nephews, a story
finished by Vivien's glorious death at the opening of the great chanson of
Aliscans. Vivien is the son of Garin d'Ansène, one of those "children of
Aimeri" who have sought fortune away from Narbonne, and one of the
captives of Roncesvalles. Garin is only to be delivered at the cost of his
son's life, which Vivien cheerfully offers. He is actually on the pyre, which
is kindled, when the pagan hold Luiserne is stormed by a pirate king, and
Vivien is rescued, but sold as a slave. An amiable paynim woman buys him
and adopts him; but he is a born knight, and when grown up, with a few

allies surprises Luiserne itself, and holds it till a French army arrives, and
Garin recovers his son, whom he had thought dead. After these Enfances,
promising enough, comes the Covenant or vow, never to retreat before the
Saracens. Vivien is as savage as he is heroic; and on one occasion sends
five hundred prisoners, miserably mutilated, to the great Admiral Desramé.
The admiral assembles all the forces of the East as well as of Spain, and
invades France. Vivien, overpowered by numbers, applies to his uncle
William for help, and the battle of Aliscans is already half fought and more
than half lost before the actual chanson of the name begins. Aliscans[41]
itself opens with a triplet in which the "steel clash" of the chanson measure
is more than ever in place:—

"A icel jor ke la dolor fu grans,
Et la bataille orible en Aliscans:
Li quens Guillaumes i soufri grans
ahans."

Aliscans.
And it continues in the same key. The commentators declare
that the story refers to an actual historical battle of
Villedaigne. This may be a fact: the literary excellence of Aliscans is one.
The scale of the battle is represented as being enormous: and the poet is not
unworthy of his subject. Neither is William impar sibi: but his day of
unbroken victory is over. No one can resist him personally; but the vast
numbers of the Saracens make personal valour useless. Vivien, already
hopelessly wounded, fights on, and receives a final blow from a giant. He is
able, however, to drag himself to a tree where a fountain flows, and there
makes his confession, and prays for his uncle's safety. As for William
himself, his army is entirely cut to pieces, and it is only a question whether
he can possibly escape. He comes to Vivien's side just as his nephew is
dying, bewails him in a very noble passage, receives his last breath, and is
able before it passes to administer the holy wafer which he carries with him.
It is Vivien's first communion as well as his last.
After this really great scene, one of the finest in all the chansons, William
puts the corpse of Vivien on the wounded but still generous Baucent, and
endeavours to make his way through the ring of enemies who have held
aloof but are determined not to let him go. Night saves him: and though he
has to abandon the body, he cuts his way through a weak part of the line,

gains another horse (for Baucent can carry him no longer), and just reaches
Orange. But he has taken the arms as well as the horse of a pagan to get
through his foes: and in this guise he is refused entrance to his own city.
Guibourc herself rejects him, and only recognises her husband from the
prowess which he shows against the pursuers, who soon catch him up. The
gates are opened and he is saved, but Orange is surrounded by the heathen.
There is no room to tell the full heroism of Guibourc, and, besides, Aliscans
is one of the best known of the chansons, and has been twice printed.

The end of the
From this point the general interest of the saga, which has
story. culminated in the battle of Aliscans, though it can hardly be
said to disappear, declines somewhat, and is diverted to
other persons than William himself. It is decided that Guibourc shall hold
Orange, while he goes to the Court of Louis to seek aid. This personal suit
is necessary lest the fulness of the overthrow be not believed; and the pair
part after a scene less rugged than the usual course of the chansons, in
which Guibourc expresses her fear of the "damsels bright of blee," the
ladies of high lineage that her husband will meet at Laon; and William
swears in return to drink no wine, eat no flesh, kiss no mouth, sleep on his
saddle-cloth, and never change his garments till he meets her again.

Renouart.
His reception is not cordial. Louis thinks him merely a
nuisance, and the courtiers mock his poverty, distress, and
loneliness. He meets with no hospitality save from a citizen. But the chance
arrival of his father and mother from Narbonne prevents him from doing
anything rash. They have a great train with them, and it is no longer
possible simply to ignore William; but from the king downwards, there is
great disinclination to grant him succour, and Queen Blanchefleur is
especially hostile. William is going to cut her head off—his usual course of
action when annoyed—after actually addressing her in a speech of extreme
directness, somewhat resembling Hamlet's to Gertrude, but much ruder.
Their mother saves Blanchefleur, and after she has fled in terror to her
chamber, the fair Aelis, her daughter, a gracious apparition, begs and
obtains forgiveness from William, short of temper as of nose, but also not
rancorous. Reconciliation takes place all round, and an expedition is
arranged for the relief of Orange. It is successful, but chiefly owing to the
prowess, not of William, but of a certain Renouart, who is the special hero,
not merely of the last half of Aliscans, but of nearly all the later chansons of

the geste of Garin de Montglane. This Renouart or Rainouart is an example,
and one of the earliest, perhaps the very earliest, of the type of hero, so dear
to the middle ages, who begins by service in the kitchen or elsewhere, of no
very dignified character, and ends by being discovered to be of noble or
royal birth. Rainouart is thus the ancestor, and perhaps the direct ancestor,
of Havelok, whom he especially resembles; of Beaumains, in a hitherto
untraced episode of the Arthurian story, and of others. His early feats
against the Saracens, in defence of Orange first, and then when William
arrives, are made with no knightly weapon, but with a tinel—huge
bludgeon, beam, "caber"—but he afterwards turns out to be Guibourc's, or
rather Orable's, own brother. There are very strong comic touches in all this
part of the poem, such as the difficulty Rainouart finds in remounting his
comrades, the seven nephews of William, because his tinel blows are so
swashing that they simply smash horse and man—a difficulty overcome by
the ingenious suggestion of Bertrand that he shall hit with the small end.
And these comic touches have a little disturbed those who wish to find in
the pure chanson de geste nothing but war and religion, honour and
generosity. But, as has been already hinted, this is to be over-nice. No doubt
the oldest existing, or at least the oldest yet discovered, MS. of Aliscans is
not the original, for it is rhymed, not assonanced, a practically infallible
test. But there is no reason to suppose that the comic touches are all new,
though they may have been a little amplified in the later version. Once
more, it is false argument to evolve the idea of a chanson from Roland only,
and then to insist that all chansons shall conform to it.
After the defeat of Desramé, and the relief of half-ruined Orange, the
troubles of that city and its Count are not over. The admiral returns to the
charge, and the next chanson, the Bataille Loquifer, is ranked by good
judges as ancient, and describes fresh prowess of Rainouart. Then comes
the Moniage ["Monking" of] Rainouart, in which the hero, like so many
other heroes, takes the cowl. This, again, is followed by a series describing
chiefly the reprisals in Spain and elsewhere of the Christians—Foulques de
Candie, the Siège de Barbastre, the Prise de Cordres, and Gilbert
d'Andrenas. And at last the whole geste is wound up by the Mort Aimeri de
Narbonne, Renier, and the Moniage Guillaume, the poem which unites the
profane history of the Marquis au Court Nez to the legend of St William of
the Desert, though in a fashion sometimes odd. M. Gautier will not allow

any of these poems (except the Bataille Loquifer and the two Moniages)
great age; and even if it were otherwise, and more of them were directly
accessible,[42] there could be no space to say much of them here. The sketch
given should be sufficient to show the general characteristics of the
chansons as each is in itself, and also the curious and ingenious way in
which their successive authors have dovetailed and pieced them together
into continuous family chronicles.

Some other
If these delights can move any one, they may be found
chansons. almost universally distributed about the chansons. Of the
minor groups the most interesting and considerable are the
crusading cycle, late as it is in part, and that of the Lorrainers, which is, in
the main, very early. Of the former the Chansons d'Antioche and de
Jérusalem are almost historical, and are pretty certainly based on the
account of an actual partaker. Antioche in particular has few superiors in the
whole hundred and more poems of the kind. Hélias ties this historic matter
on to legend proper by introducing the story of the Knight of the Swan;
while Les Chétifs (The Captives) combines history and legend very
interestingly, starting as it does with a probably historical capture of certain
Christians, who are then plunged in dreamland of romance for the rest of it.
The concluding poems of this cycle, Baudouin de Sebourc and the Bastart
de Bouillon, have been already more than once mentioned. They show, as
has been said, the latest form of the chanson, and are almost pure fiction,
though they have a sort of framework or outline in the wars in Northern
Arabia, at and round the city of Jôf, whose crusading towers still, according
to travellers, look down on the hadj route through the desert. Garin le
Loherain, on the other hand, and its successors, are pure early feudal
fighting, as is also the early, excellent, and very characteristic Raoul de
Cambrai. These are instances, and no doubt not the only ones, of what may
be called district or provincial gestes, applying the principles of the
chansons generally to local quarrels and fortunes.
Of what purists call the sophisticated chansons, those in which general
romance-motives of different kinds are embroidered on the strictly chanson
canvas, there are probably none more interesting than the later forms of
Huon de Bordeaux and Ogier de Danemarche. The former, since the
fortunate reprinting of Lord Berners's version by the Early English Text
Society, is open to every one, though, of course, the last vestiges of chanson

form have departed, and those who can should read it as edited in M.
Guessard's series. The still more gracious legend, in which the ferocious
champion Ogier, after his early triumphs over the giant Caraheu and against
the paladins of Charles, is, like Huon, brought to the loadstone rock, is then
subjected to the enchantments—loving, and now not baneful—of Arthur's
sister Morgane, and tears himself from fairyland to come to the rescue of
France, is by far the most delightful of the attempts to "cross" the Arthurian
and Carlovingian cycles. And of this we fortunately have in English a
poetical version from the great trouvère among the poets of our day, the late
Mr William Morris. Of yet others, the often-mentioned Voyage à
Constantinoble, with its rather unseemly gabz (boasting jests of the peers,
which are overheard by the heathen emperor with results which seem like at
one time to be awkward), is among the oldest, and is a warning against the
tendency to take the presence of comic elements as a necessary evidence of
late date. Les Saisnes, dealing with the war against the Saxons, is a little
loose in its morals, but vigorous and interesting. The pleasant pair of Aiol
and Elie de St Gilles; the touching history of Charlemagne's mother, Berte
aus grans Piés; Acquin, one of the rare chansons dealing with Brittany
(though Roland was historically count thereof); Gérard de Roussillon,
which has more than merely philological interest; Macaire, already
mentioned; the famous Quatre Fils d'Aymon, longest and most widely
popular, must be added to the list, and are not all that should be added to it.

Final remarks
On the whole, I must repeat that the chansons de geste,
on them. which as we have them are the work of the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries in the main, form the second division in
point of literary value of early mediæval literature, while they possess, in a
certain "sincerity and strength," qualities not to be found even in the
Arthurian story itself. Despite the ardour with which they have been
philologically studied for nearly three-quarters of a century, despite (or
perhaps because of) the enthusiasm which one or two devotees have shown
for their literary qualities, it does not seem to me that fair justice, or
anything like it, has yet been generally done. German critics care little for
literary merit, and are perhaps not often trained to appreciate it; in England
the chansons have been strangely little read. But the most singular thing is
the cold reception, slightly if at all thawed recently, which they have met in
France itself. It may give serious pause to the very high estimate generally

entertained of French criticism by foreigners to consider this coldness,
which once reached something like positive hostility in M. Ferdinand
Brunetière, the chief French literary critic of our generation. I regret to see
that M. Lanson, the latest historian of French literature, has not dared to
separate himself from the academic grex. "On ne saurait nier," he says, "que
quelques uns aient eu du talent;" but he evidently feels that this generous
concession is in need of guards and caveats. There is no "beauté formelle"
in them, he says—no formal beauty in those magnificently sweeping
laisses, of which the ear that has once learnt their music can no more tire
thereafter than of the sound of the sea itself. The style (and if it be objected
that his previous words have been directly addressed to the later chansons
and chanson writers, here he expressly says that this style "est le même
style que dans le Roland," though "moins sobre, moins plein, moins sur")
has "no beauty by itself," and finally he thinks that the best thing to do is "to
let nine-tenths of the chansons follow nine-tenths of our tragedies." I have
read many chansons and many tragedies; but I have never read a chanson
that has not more poetry in it than ninety-nine French tragedies out of a
hundred.
The fact is that it is precisely the beauté formelle, assisted as it is by the
peculiar spirit of which so much has been said already, which constitutes
the beauty of these poems: and that these characteristics are present, not of
course in uniform measure, but certainly in the great majority of the
chansons from Roland to the Bastard. Of course if a man sits down with a
preconceived idea of an epic poem, it is more likely than not that his
preconceived idea will be of something very different from a chanson de
geste. And if, refusing to depart from his preconceived idea, and making
that idea up of certain things taken from the Iliad, certain from the Æneid,
certain from the Divina Commedia, certain from Paradise Lost,—if he runs
over the list and says to the chanson, "Are you like Homer in this point?
Can you match me Virgil in that?" the result will be that the chanson will
fail to pass its examination.
But if, with some knowledge of literature in the wide sense, and some love
for it, he sits down to take the chansons as they are, and judge them on their
merits and by the law of their own poetical state, then I think he will come
to a very different conclusion. He will say that their kind is a real kind, a
thing by itself, something of which if it were not, nothing else in literature

could precisely supply the want. And he will decide further that while the
best of them are remarkably good of their kind, few of them can be called
positively bad in it. And yet again, if he has been fortunately gifted by
nature with that appreciation of form which saves the critic from mere
prejudice and crotchet, from mere partiality, he will, I believe, go further
still, and say that while owing something to spirit, they owe most to form
itself, to the form of the single-assonanced or mono-rhymed tirade, assisted
as it is by the singular beauty of Old French in sound, and more particularly
by the sonorous recurring phrases of the chanson dialect. No doubt much
instruction and some amusement can be got out of these poems as to
matters of fact: no doubt some passages in Roland, in Aliscans, in the
Couronnement Loys, have a stern beauty of thought and sentiment which
deserves every recognition. But these things are not all-pervading, and they
can be found elsewhere: the clash and clang of the tirade are everywhere
here, and can be found nowhere else.

CHAPTER III.
THE MATTER OF BRITAIN.

ATTRACTIONS OF THE ARTHURIAN LEGEND.
DISCUSSIONS ON THEIR SOURCES. THE
PERSONALITY OF ARTHUR. THE FOUR
WITNESSES. THEIR TESTIMONY. THE VERSION
OF GEOFFREY. ITS LACUNÆ. HOW THE LEGEND
GREW. WACE. LAYAMON. THE ROMANCES
PROPER. WALTER MAP. ROBERT DE BORRON.
CHRESTIEN DE TROYES. PROSE OR VERSE
FIRST? A LATIN GRAAL-BOOK. THE
MABINOGION. THE LEGEND ITSELF. THE STORY
OF JOSEPH OF ARIMATHEA. MERLIN.
LANCELOT. THE LEGEND BECOMES DRAMATIC.
STORIES OF GAWAIN AND OTHER KNIGHTS. SIR
TRISTRAM. HIS STORY ALMOST CERTAINLY
CELTIC. SIR LANCELOT. THE MINOR KNIGHTS.
ARTHUR. GUINEVERE. THE GRAAL. HOW IT
PERFECTS THE STORY. NATURE OF THIS
PERFECTION. NO SEQUEL POSSIBLE. LATIN
EPISODES. THE LEGEND AS A WHOLE. THE
THEORIES OF ITS ORIGIN. CELTIC. FRENCH.
ENGLISH. LITERARY. THE CELTIC THEORY. THE
FRENCH CLAIMS. THE THEORY OF GENERAL
LITERARY GROWTH. THE ENGLISH OR ANGLO-
NORMAN PRETENSIONS. ATTEMPTED
HYPOTHESIS.

Attractions of
To English readers, and perhaps not to English readers only,
the Arthurian the middle division of the three great romance-subjects[43]
Legend. ought to be of far higher interest than the others; and that not
merely, even in the English case, for reasons of local

patriotism. The mediæval versions of classical story, though attractive to the
highest degree as evidence of the extraordinary plastic power of the period,
which could transform all art to its own image and guise, and though not
destitute of individual charm here and there, must always be mainly
curiosities. The cycle of Charlemagne, a genuine growth and not merely an
incrustation or transformation, illustrated, moreover, by particular examples
of the highest merit, is exposed on the one hand to the charge of a certain
monotony, and on the other to the objection that, beautiful as it is, it is dead.
For centuries, except in a few deliberate literary exercises, the king à la
barbe florie has inspired no modern singer—his geste is extinct. But the
Legend of Arthur, the latest to take definite form of the three, has shown by
far the greatest vitality. From generation to generation it has taken new
forms, inspired new poetries. The very latest of the centuries has been the
most prolific in contributions of any since the end of the Middle Ages; and
there is no sufficient reason why the lineage should ever stop. For while the
romance of antiquity is a mere "sport," an accident of time and
circumstance, the chanson de geste, majestic and interesting as it is,
representative as it is to a certain extent of a nation and a language, has the
capital defect of not being adaptable. Having little or no allegorical
capacity, little "soul," so to speak, it was left by the tide of time on the
shores thereof without much hope of floating and living again. The
Arthurian Legend, if not from the very first, yet from the first moment when
it assumed vernacular forms, lent itself to that double meaning which,
though it is open to abuse, and was terribly abused in these very ages, is
after all the salvation of things literary, since every age adopting the first
and outer meaning can suit the second and inner to its own taste and need.

Discussions on
That the vitality of the Legend is in part, if not wholly, due
their sources. to the strange crossing and blending of its sources, I at least
have no doubt. To discuss these sources at all, much more to
express any definite opinion on the proportions and order of their blending,
is a difficult matter for any literary student, and dangerous withal; but the
adventure is of course not to be wholly shirked here. The matter has, both in
England and abroad, been quite recently the subject of that rather
acrimonious debating by which scholars in modern tongues seem to think it
a point of honour to rival the scholars of a former day in the classics,
though the vocabulary used is less picturesque. A great deal of this debate,

too, turns on matters of sheer opinion, in regard to which language only
appropriate to matters of sheer knowledge is too often used. The candid
inquirer, informed that Mr, or M., or Herr So-and-so, has "proved" such and
such a thing in such and such a book or dissertation, turns to the text, to find
to his grievous disappointment that nothing is "proved"—but that more or
less probable arguments are advanced with less or more temper against or in
favour of this or that hypothesis. Even the dates of MSS., which in all such
cases must be regarded as the primary data, are very rarely data at all, but
only (to coin, or rather adapt, a much-needed term) speculata. And the
matter is further complicated by the facts that extremely few scholars
possess equal and adequate knowledge of Celtic, English, French, German,
and Latin, and that the best palæographers are by no means always the best
literary critics.
Where every one who has handled the subject has had to confess, or should
have confessed, imperfect equipment in one or more respects, there is no
shame in confessing one's own shortcomings. I cannot speak as a Celtic
scholar; and I do not pretend to have examined MSS. But for a good many
years I have been familiar with the printed texts and documents in Latin,
English, French, and German, and I believe that I have not neglected any
important modern discussions of the subject. To have no Celtic is the less
disqualification in that all the most qualified Celtic scholars themselves
admit, however highly they may rate the presence of the Celtic element in
spirit, that no texts of the legend in its romantic form at present existing in
the Celtic tongues are really ancient. And it is understood that there is now
very little left unprinted that can throw much light on the general question. I
shall therefore endeavour, without entering into discussions on minor points
which would be unsuitable to the book, to give what seems to me the most
probable view of the case, corrected by (though not by any means adjusted
in a hopeless zigzag of deference to) the various authorities, from Ritson to
Professor Rhys, from Paulin Paris to M. Loth, and from San Marte to Drs
Förster and Zimmer.
The first and the most important thing—a thing which has been by no
means always or often done—is to keep the question of Arthur apart from
the question of the Arthurian Legend.

The
That there was no such a person as Arthur in reality was at
personality of one time a not very uncommon opinion among men who
Arthur. could call themselves scholars, though of late it has yielded
to probable if not certain arguments. The two most
damaging facts are the entire silence of Bede and that of Gildas in regard to
him. The silence of Bede might be accidental, and he wrote ex hypothesi
nearly two centuries after Arthur's day. Yet his collections were extremely
careful, and the neighbourhood of his own Northumbria was certainly not
that in which traditions of Arthur should have been least rife. That Gildas
should say nothing is more surprising and more difficult of explanation. For
putting aside altogether the positive testimony of the Vita Gildæ, to which
we shall come presently, Gildas was, again ex hypothesi, a contemporary of
Arthur's, and must have known all about him. If the compound of scolding
and lamentation known as De Excidio Britanniæ is late and a forgery, we
should expect it to contain some reference to the king; if it is early and
genuine, it is difficult to see how such reference could possibly be omitted.

The four
At the same time, mere silence can never establish anything
witnesses. but a presumption; and the presumption is in this case
rebutted by far stronger probabilities on the other side. The
evidence is here drawn from four main sources, which we may range in the
order of their chronological bearing. First, there are the Arthurian place-
names, and the traditions respecting them; secondly, the fragments of
genuine early Welsh reference to Arthur; thirdly, the famous passage of
Nennius, which introduces him for the first time to probably dated
literature; fourthly, the curious references in the above-referred-to Vita
Gildæ of, or attributed to, Caradoc of Lancarvan. After this last, or at a time
contemporary with it, we come to the comparatively detailed account of
Geoffrey of Monmouth, and the beginning of the Legend proper.

Their
To summarise this evidence as carefully but as briefly as
testimony. possible, we find, in almost all parts of Britain beyond the
range of the first Saxon conquests, but especially in West
Wales, Strathclyde, and Lothian, certain place-names connecting
themselves either with Arthur himself or with the early catalogue of his
battles.[44] We find allusions to him in Welsh poetry which may be as old as
the sixth century—allusions, it is true, of the vaguest and most meagre kind,
and touching no point of his received story except his mysterious death or

no-death, but fairly corroborative of his actual existence. Nennius—the
much-debated Nennius, whom general opinion attributes to the ninth
century, but who may be as early as the eighth, and cannot well be later than
the tenth—gives us the catalogue of the twelve battles, and the exploits of
Arthur against the Saxons, in a single paragraph containing no reference to
any but military matters, and speaking of Arthur not as king but as a dux
bellorum commanding kings, many of whom were more noble than himself.
The first authority from whom we get any personal account of Arthur is
Caradoc, if Caradoc it be. The biographer makes his hero St Gildas (I put
minor and irrelevant discrepancies aside) contemporary with Arthur, whom
he loved, and who was king of all Greater Britain. But his brother kings did
not admit this sovereignty quietly, and often put him to flight. At last Arthur
overthrew and slew Hoel, who was his major natu, and became
unquestioned rex universalis Britanniæ, but incurred the censure of the
Church for killing Hoel. From this sin Gildas himself at length absolved
him. But King Melvas carried off King Arthur's queen, and it was only after
a year that Arthur found her at Glastonbury and laid siege to that place.
Gildas and the abbot, however, arranged matters, and the queen was given
up. It is most proper to add in this place that probably at much the same
time as the writings of Caradoc and of Geoffrey (v. infra), or at a time not
very distant, William of Malmesbury and Giraldus Cambrensis give us
Glastonbury traditions as to the tomb of Arthur, &c., which show that by the
middle of the twelfth century such traditions were clustering thickly about
the Isle of Avalon. All this time, however, it is very important to notice that
there is hardly the germ, and, except in Caradoc, not even the germ, of what
makes the Arthurian Legend interesting to us, even of what we call the
Arthurian Legend. Although the fighting with the Saxons plays an
important part in the Merlin branches of the story, it has extremely little to
do with the local traditions, and was continually reduced in importance by
the men of real genius, especially Mapes, Chrestien, and, long afterwards,
Malory, who handled them. The escapade of Melvas communicates a touch
rather nearer to the perfect form, but only a little nearer to it. In fact, there is
hardly more in the story at this point than in hundreds of other references in
early history or fiction to obscure kinglets who fought against invaders.

The version of
And it is again very important to observe that, though under
the hands of Geoffrey of Monmouth the story at once

Geoffrey. acquires more romantic proportions, it is still not in the
least, or only in the least, the story that we know. The
advance is indeed great. The wonder-working of Merlin is brought in to
help the patriotism of Arthur. The story of Uther's love for Igraine at once
alters the mere chronicle into a romance. Arthur, the fruit of this passion,
succeeds his father, carries on victorious war at home and abroad, is
crowned with magnificence at Caerleon, is challenged by and defeats the
Romans, is about to pass the Alps when he hears that his nephew Mordred,
left in charge of the kingdom, has assumed the crown, and that Guinevere
(Guanhumara, of whom we have only heard before as "of a noble Roman
family, and surpassing in beauty all the women of the island") has wickedly
married him. Arthur returns, defeats Mordred at Rutupiæ (after this battle
Guinevere takes the veil), and, at Winchester, drives him to the extremity of
Cornwall, and there overthrows and kills him. But the renowned King
Arthur himself was mortally wounded, and "being carried thence to the Isle
of Avallon to be cured of his wounds, he gave up the crown to his kinsman
Constantine." And so Arthur passes out of Geoffrey's story, in obedience to
one of the oldest, and certainly the most interesting, of what seem to be the
genuine Welsh notices of the king—"Not wise is it to seek the grave of
Arthur."

Its lacunæ.
A few people, perhaps, who read this little book will need to
be told that Geoffrey attributed the new and striking facts
which he sprung upon his contemporaries to a British book which Walter,
Archdeacon of Oxford, had brought out of Armorica: and that not the
slightest trace of this most interesting and important work has ever been
found. It is a thousand pities that it has not survived, inasmuch as it was not
only "a very ancient book in the British tongue," but contained "a
continuous story in an elegant style." However, the inquiry whether Walter,
Archdeacon of Oxford, did or did not belong to the ancient British family of
Harris may be left to historians proper. To the specially literary historian the
chief point of interest is first to notice how little, if Geoffrey really did take
his book from "British" sources, those sources apparently contained of the
Arthurian Legend proper as we now know it. An extension of the fighting
with Saxons at home, and the addition of that with Romans abroad, the
Igraine episode, or rather overture, the doubtless valuable introduction of
Merlin, the treason of Mordred and Guinevere, and the retirement to Avalon

—that is practically all. No Round Table; no knights (though "Walgan, the
king's nephew," is, of course, an early appearance of Gawain); none of the
interesting difficulties about Arthur's succession: an entire absence of
personal characteristics about Guinevere (even that peculiarity of hers
which a French critic has politely described as her being "very subject to be
carried off," and which already appears in Caradoc, being changed to a
commonplace act of ambitious infidelity with Mordred): and, most
remarkable of all, no Lancelot, and no Holy Grail.
Nevertheless Geoffrey had, as it has been the fashion to say of late years,
"set the heather on fire," and perhaps in no literary instance on record did
the blaze spread and heighten itself with such extraordinary speed and
intensity. His book must have been written a little before the middle of the
twelfth century: by the end thereof the legend was, except for the
embellishments and amplifications which the Middle Age was always
giving, complete.

How the
In the account of its probable origins and growth which
Legend grew. follows nothing can be further from the writer's wish than to
emulate the confident dogmatism of those who claim to
have proved or disproved this or that fact or hypothesis. In the nature of the
case proof is impossible; we cannot go further than probability. It is
unfortunate that some of the disputants on this, as on other kindred subjects,
have not more frequently remembered the admirable words of the greatest
modern practitioner and though he lacked some more recent information,
the shrewdest modern critic of romance itself.[45] I need only say that
though I have not in the least borrowed from either, and though I make
neither responsible for my views, these latter, as they are about to be stated,
will be found most to resemble those of Sir Frederic Madden in England
and M. Paulin Paris in France—the two critics who, coming after the age of
wild guesswork and imperfect reading, and before that of a scholarship
which, sometimes at least, endeavours to vindicate itself by innovation for
the sake of innovation, certainly equalled, and perhaps exceeded, any others
in their familiarity with the actual texts. With that familiarity, so far as
MSS. go, I repeat that I do not pretend to vie. But long and diligent reading
of the printed material, assisted by such critical lights as critical practice in
more literatures than one or two for many years may give, has led me to the
belief that when they agreed they were pretty sure to be right, and that when

they differed, the authority of either was at least equal, as authority, to
anything subsequent.

Wace.
The known or reasonably inferred historical procession of
the Legend is as follows. Before the middle of the twelfth
century we have nothing that can be called a story. At almost that exact
point (the subject of the dedication of the Historia Britonum died in 1146)
Geoffrey supplies the outlines of such a story. They were at once seized
upon for filling in. Before many years two well-known writers had
translated Geoffrey's Latin into French, another Geoffrey, Gaimar, and
Wace of Jersey. Gaimar's Brut (a title which in a short time became generic)
has not come down to us: Wace's (written in 1155) has, and though there is,
as yet, no special attention bestowed upon Arthur, the Arthurian part of the
story shares the process of dilatation and amplification usual in the Middle
Ages. The most important of these additions is the appearance of the Round
Table.

Layamon.
As Geoffrey fell into the hands of Wace, so did Wace fall
into those of Layamon; but here the result is far more
interesting, both for the history of the legend itself and for its connection
with England. Not only did the priest of Ernley or Arley-on-Severn do the
English tongue the inestimable service of introducing Arthur to it, not only
did he write the most important book by far, both in size, in form, and in
matter, that was written in English between the Conquest and the fourteenth
century, but he added immensely to the actual legend. It is true that these
additions still do not exactly give us the Arthur whom we know, for they
still concern the wars with the Saxons and Romans chiefly. But if it were
only that we find first[46] in Layamon the introduction of "elves" at Arthur's
birth, and his conveyance by them at death in a magic boat to Queen
"Argante" at Avalon, it would be almost enough. But there is much more.
The Uther story is enlarged, and with it the appearances of Merlin; the
foundation of the Round Table receives added attention; the voluntary
yielding of Guinevere, here called Wenhaver, is insisted upon, and Gawain
(Walwain) and Bedivere (Beduer) make their appearance. But there is still
no Lancelot, and still no Grail.

The Romances
These additions, which on the one side gave the greatest part
proper. of the secular interest, on the other almost the whole of the

mystical attraction, to the complete story, had, however, it seems probable,
been actually added before Layamon wrote. For the date of the earlier
version of his Brut is put by the best authorities at not earlier than 1200, and
it is also, according to such authorities, almost certain that the great French
romances (which contain the whole legend with the exception of part of the
Tristram story, and of hitherto untraced excursions like Malory's
Beaumains) had been thrown into shape. But the origin, the authorship, and
the order of Merlin in its various forms, of the Saint Graal and the Quest
for it, of Lancelot and the Mort Artus,—these things are the centre of nearly
all the disputes upon the subject.

Walter Map.
A consensus of MS. authority ascribes the best and largest
part of the prose romances,[47] especially those dealing with
Lancelot and the later fortunes of the Graal and the Round Table company,
to no less a person than the famous Englishman Walter Mapes, or Map, the
author of De Nugis Curialium, the reputed author (v. chap. i.) of divers
ingenious Latin poems, friend of Becket, Archdeacon of Oxford,
churchman, statesman, and wit. No valid reason whatever has yet been
shown for questioning this attribution, especially considering the number,
antiquity, and strength of the documents by which it is attested. Map's date
(1137-96) is the right one; his abilities were equal to any literary
performance; his evident familiarity with things Welsh (he seems to have
been a Herefordshire man) would have informed him of Welsh tradition, if
there was any, and the De Nugis Curialium shows us in him, side by side
with a satirical and humorous bent, the leaning to romance and to the
marvellous which only extremely shallow people believe to be alien from
humour. But it is necessary for scholarship of the kind just referred to to be
always devising some new thing. Frenchmen, Germans, and Celticising
partisans have grudged an Englishman the glory of the exploit; and there
has been of late a tendency to deny or slight Map's claims. His deposition,
however, rests upon no solid argument, and though it would be exceedingly
rash, considering the levity with which the copyists in mediæval MSS.
attributed authorship, to assert positively that Map wrote Lancelot, or the
Quest of the Saint Graal, it may be asserted with the utmost confidence that
it has not been proved that he did not.

Robert de
The other claimant for the authorship of a main part of the
story—in this case the Merlin part, and the long history of

Borron. the Graal from the days of Joseph of Arimathea downwards
—is a much more shadowy person, a certain Robert de
Borron, a knight of the north of France. Nobody has much interest in
disturbing Borron's claims, though they also have been attacked; and it is
only necessary to say that there is not the slightest ground for supposing
that he was an ancestor of Lord Byron, as was once very gratuitously done,
the time when he was first heard of happening to coincide with the
popularity of that poet.

Chrestien de
The third personage who is certainly or uncertainly
Troyes. connected by name with the original framework of the
legend is again more substantial than Robert de Borron,
though less so than Walter Map. As his surname, derived from his
birthplace, indicates, Chrestien de Troyes was of Champenois extraction,
thus belonging to the province which, with Normandy, contributed most to
early French literature. And he seems to have been attached not merely to
the court of his native prince, the Count of Champagne, but to those of the
neighbouring Walloon lordships or principalities of Flanders and Hainault.
Of his considerable work (all of it done, it would seem, before the end of
the twelfth century) by far the larger part is Arthurian—the immense
romance of Percevale le Gallois,[48] much of which, however, is the work
of continuators; the interesting episode of the Lancelot saga, called Le
Chevalier à la Charette; Erec et Énide, the story known to every one from
Lord Tennyson's idyll; the Chevalier au Lyon, a Gawain legend; and Cligès,
which is quite on the outside of the Arthurian group. All these works are
written in octosyllabic couplets, particularly light and skipping, somewhat
destitute of force and grip, but full of grace and charm. Of their contents
more presently.
Next to the questions of authorship and of origin in point of difficulty come
two others—"Which are the older: the prose or the verse romances?" and,
"Was there a Latin original of the Graal story?"

Prose or verse
With regard to the first, it has long been laid down as a
first? general axiom, and it is no doubt as a rule true, that prose is
always later than verse, and that in mediæval times
especially the order is almost invariable. Verse; unrhymed and half-
disrhythmed prose; prose pure and simple: that is what we find. For many

reasons, however, drawn partly from the presumed age of the MSS. and
partly from internal evidence, the earlier scholars who considered the
Arthurian matter, especially M. Paulin Paris, came to the conclusion that
here the prose romances were, if not universally, yet for the most part, the
earlier. And this, though it is denied by M. Paris's equally learned son, still
seems the more probable opinion. For, in the first place, by this time prose,
though not in a very advanced condition, was advanced enough not to make
it absolutely necessary for it to lag behind verse, as had been the case with
the chansons de geste. And in the second place, while the prose romances
are far more comprehensive than the verse, the age of the former seems to
be beyond question such that there could be no need, time, or likelihood for
the reduction to a general prose summary of separate verse originals, while
the separate verse episodes are very easily intelligible as developed from
parts of the prose original.[49]

A Latin Graal-
With regard to the Latin Graal-book, the testimony of the
book. romances themselves is formal enough as to its existence.
But no trace of it has been found, and its loss, if it existed, is
contrary to all probability. For ex hypothesi (and if we take one part of the
statement we must take the rest) it was not a recent composition, but a
document, whether of miraculous origin or not, of considerable age. Why it
should only at this time have come to light, why it should have immediately
perished, and why none of the persons who took interest enough in it to turn
it into the vernacular should have transmitted his copy to posterity, are
questions difficult, or rather impossible, to answer. But here, again, the wise
critic will not peremptorily deny. He will say that there may be a Latin
Graal-book, and that when that book is produced, and stands the test of
examination, he will believe in it; but that until it appears he will be
contented with the French originals of the end of the twelfth century. Of the
characteristic and probable origins of the Graal story itself, as of those of
the larger Legend of which it forms a part, it will be time enough to speak
when we have first given an account of the general history as it took shape,
probably before the twelfth century had closed, certainly very soon after the
thirteenth had opened. For the whole Legend—even excluding the
numerous ramifications into independent or semi-independent romans
d'aventures—is not found in any single book or compilation. The most
extensive, and by far the best, that of our own Malory, is very late,

extremely though far from unwisely eclectic, and adjusted to the presumed
demands of readers, and to the certain existence in the writer of a fine
literary sense of fitness. It would be trespassing on the rights of a future
contributor to say much directly of Malory; but it must be said here that in
what he omits, as well as in his treatment of what he inserts, he shows
nothing short of genius. Those who call him a mere, or even a bad,
compiler, either have not duly considered the matter or speak unhappily.
But before we go further it may be well also to say a word on the Welsh
stories, which, though now admitted to be in their present form later than
the Romances, are still regarded as possible originals by some.

The
It would hardly be rash to rest the question of the Celtic
Mabinogion. origin, in any but the most remote and partial sense, of the
Arthurian Romances on the Mabinogion[50] alone. The
posteriority of these as we have them need not be too much dwelt upon. We
need not even lay great stress on what I believe to be a fact not likely to be
disputed by good critics, that the reading of the French and the Welsh-
English versions one after the other, no matter in what order they be taken,
will leave something more than an impression that the French is the direct
original of the Welsh, and that the Welsh, in anything at all like its present
form, could not by any possibility be the original of the French. The test to
which I refer is this. Let any one read, with as open a mind as he can
procure, the three Welsh-French or French-Welsh romances of Yvain-
Owain, Erec-Geraint, and Percivale-Peredur, and then turn to those that are
certainly and purely Celtic, Kilhwch and Olwen, the Dream of Rhiabwy
(both of these Arthurian after a fashion, though quite apart from our
Arthurian Legend), and the fourfold Mabinogi, which tells the adventures
of Rhiannon and those of Math ap Matholwy. I cannot conceive this being
done by any one without his feeling that he has passed from one world into
another entirely different,—that the two classes of story simply cannot by
any possibility be, in any more than the remotest suggestion, the work of
the same people, or have been produced under the same literary covenant.

The Legend
Let us now turn to the Legend itself. The story which ends
itself. in Avalon begins in Jerusalem. For though the Graal-legends
are undoubtedly later additions to whatever may have been
the original Arthurian saga—seeing that we find nothing of them in the

early Welsh traditions, nothing in Nennius, nothing in Geoffrey, nothing
even in Wace or Layamon—yet such is the skill with which the unknown or
uncertain authors have worked them into the legend that the whole makes
one indivisible romance. Yet (as the untaught genius of Malory instinctively
perceived) when the Graal-story on the one hand, and the loves of Lancelot
and Guinevere with which it is connected on the other, came in, they made
comparatively otiose and uninteresting the wars with Saxons and Romans,
which in the earlier Legend had occupied almost the whole room. And
accordingly these wars, which still hold a very large part of the field in the
Merlin, drop out to some extent later. The whole cycle consists practically
of five parts, each of which in almost all cases exists in divers forms, and
more than one of which overlaps and is overlapped by one or more of the
others. These five are Merlin, the Saint-Graal, Lancelot, the Quest of the
Saint-Graal, and the Death of Arthur. Each of the first two pairs intertwines
with the other: the last, Mort Artus, completes them all, and thus its title
was not improperly used in later times to designate the whole Legend.

The story of
The starting-point of the whole, in time and incident, is the
Joseph of supposed revenge of the Jews on Joseph of Arimathea for
Arimathea. the part he has taken in the burial of our Lord. He is thrown
into prison and remains there (miraculously comforted, so
that the time seems to him but as a day or two) till delivered by Titus. Then
he and certain more or less faithful Christians set out in charge of the Holy
Graal, which has served for the Last Supper, which holds Christ's blood,
and which is specially under the guardianship of Joseph's son, the Bishop
"Josephes," to seek foreign lands, and a home for the Holy Vessel. After a
long series of the wildest adventures, in which the personages, whose
names are known rather mistily to readers of Malory only—King Evelake,
Naciens, and others—appear fully, and in which many marvels take place,
the company, or the holier survivors of them, are finally settled in Britain.
Here the imprudence of Evelake (or Mordrains) causes him to receive the
"dolorous stroke," from which none but his last descendant, Galahad, is to
recover him fully. The most striking of all these adventures, related in
various forms in other parts of the Legend, is the sojourn of Naciens on a
desert island, where he is tempted of the devil; while a very great part is
played throughout by the Legend of the Three Trees, which in successive
ages play their part in the Fall, in the first origin of mankind according to

natural birth, not creation, in the building of the Temple, and in the Passion.
This later legend, a wild but very beautiful one, dominated the imagination
of English mediæval writers very particularly, and is fully developed, apart
from its Arthurian use, in the vast and interesting miscellany of the Cursor
Mundi.

Merlin.
But when the Graal and its guardians have been safely
established upon English soil, the connection of the legend
with the older and, so to speak, historical Arthurian traditions, is effected by
means of Merlin, in a manner at least ingenious if not very direct. The
results of the Passion, and especially the establishment on earth of a
Christian monarchy with a sort of palladium in the Saint-Graal, greatly
disturb the equanimity of the infernal regions; and a council is held to
devise counter-policy. It occurs apparently that as this discomfiture has
come by means of the union of divine and human natures, it can be best
opposed by a union of human and diabolic: and after some minor
proceedings a seductive devil is despatched to play incubus to the last and
chastest daughter of a prud'homme, who has been driven to despair and
death by previous satanic attacks. The attempt is successful in a way; but as
the victim keeps her chastity of intention and mind, not only is she herself
saved from the legal consequences of the matter, but her child when born is
the celebrated Merlin, a being endowed with supernatural power and
knowledge, and not always scrupulous in the use of them, but always on the
side of the angels rather than of his paternal kinsfolk. A further and more
strictly literary connection is effected by attributing the knowledge of the
Graal history to his information, conveyed to his master and pupil Blaise,
who writes it (as well as the earlier adventures at least of the Arthurian era
proper) from Merlin's dictation or report.
For some time the various Merlin stories follow Geoffrey in recounting the
adventures of the prophetic child in his youth, with King Vortigern and
others. But he is soon brought (again in accordance with Geoffrey) into
direct responsibility for Arthur, by his share in the wooing of Igraine. For it
is to be observed that—and not in this instance only—though there is
usually some excuse for him, Merlin is in these affairs more commonly
occupied in making two lovers happy than in attending to the strict dictates
of morality. And thenceforward till his inclusion in his enchanted prison (an
affair in which it is proper to say that the earliest versions give a much more

favourable account of the conduct and motives of the heroine than that
which Malory adopted, and which Tennyson for purposes of poetic contrast
blackened yet further) he plays the part of adviser, assistant, and good
enchanter generally to Arthur and Arthur's knights. He in some stories
directly procures, and in all confirms, the seating of Arthur on his father's
throne; he brings the king's nephews, Gawain and the rest, to assist their
uncle, in some cases against their own fathers; he presides over the
foundation of the Round Table, and brings about the marriage of Guinevere
and Arthur; he assists, sometimes by actual force of arms, sometimes as
head of the intelligence department, sometimes by simple gramarye, in the
discomfiture not merely of the rival and rebel kinglets, but of the Saxons
and Romans. As has been said, Malory later thought proper to drop the
greater part of this latter business (including the interminable fights round
the Roche aux Saisnes or Saxon rock). And he also discarded a curious
episode which makes a great figure in the original Merlin, the tale of the
"false Guinevere," a foster-sister, namesake, and counterpart of the true
princess, who is nearly substituted for Guinevere herself on her bridal night,
and who later usurps for a considerable time the place and rights of the
queen. For it cannot be too often repeated that Arthur, not even in Malory a
"blameless king" by any means, is in the earlier and original versions still
less blameless, especially in the article of faithfulness to his wife.
We do not, however, in the Merlin group proper get any tidings of Lancelot,
though Lucan, Kay, Bedivere, and others, as well as Gawain and the other
sons of Lot, make their appearance, and the Arthurian court and régime, as
we imagine it with the Round Table, is already constituted. It is to be
observed that in the earlier versions there is even a sharp rivalry between
the "Round Table" proper and the "Queen's" or younger knights. But this
subsides, and the whole is centred at Camelot, with the realm (until
Mordred's treachery) well under control, and with a constant succession of
adventures, culminating in the greatest of all, the Quest of the Graal or
Sangreal itself. Although there are passages of great beauty, the excessive
mysticism, the straggling conduct of the story, and the extravagant praise of
virginity in and for itself, in the early Graal history, have offended some
readers. In the Merlin proper the incompleteness, the disproportionate space
given to mere kite-and-crow fighting, and the defect of love-interest,
undoubtedly show themselves. Although Merlin was neither by extraction

nor taste likely to emulate the almost ferocious horror of human affection
entertained by Robert de Borron (if Robert de Borron it was), the authors of
his history, except in the version of his own fatal passion, above referred to,
have touched the subject with little grace or charm. And while the great and
capital tragedies of Lancelot and Guinevere, of Tristram and Iseult, are
wholly lacking, there is an equal lack of such minor things as the episodes
of Lancelot and the two Elaines, of Pelleas and the Lady of the Lake, and
many others. Nor is this lack compensated by the stories of the incestuous
(though on neither side consciously incestuous, and on the queen's quite
innocent) adventure of Arthur with his sister Margause, of the exceedingly
unromantic wooing of Morgane le Fée, and of the warlock-planned
intercourse of King Ban and the mother of Lancelot.

Lancelot.
Whether it was Walter Map, or Chrestien de Troyes, or both,
or neither, to whom the glory of at once completing and
exalting the story is due, I at least have no pretension to decide. Whosoever
did it, if he did it by himself, was a very great man indeed—a man second
only to Dante among the men of the Middle Age. Even if it was done by an
irregular company of men, each patching and piecing the others' efforts, the
result shows a marvellous "wind of the spirit" abroad and blowing on that
company. As before, the reader of Malory only, though he has nearly all the
best things, has not quite all even of those, and is without a considerable
number of things not quite the best, but good. The most difficult to justify
of the omissions of Sir Thomas is the early history of the loves of
Guinevere and Lancelot, when the knight was introduced to the queen by
Galahault the haughty prince—"Galeotto," as he appears in the most
universally known passage of Dante himself. Not merely that unforgettable
association, but the charm and grace of the original passage, as well as the
dramatic and ethical justification, so to speak, of the fatal passion which
wrecked at once Lancelot's quest and Arthur's kingdom, combine to make
us regret this exclusion. But Malory's genius was evidently rather an
unconscious than a definitely critical one. And though the exquisite felicity
of his touch in detail is established once for all by comparing his prose
narratives of the Passing of Arthur and the parting of Lancelot and the
queen with the verse[51] from which he almost beyond question directly
took both, he must sometimes have been bewildered by the mass of material

from which he had to select, and may not always have included or excluded
with equally unerring judgment.

The Legend
We have seen that in the original story of Geoffrey the
becomes treason of Mordred and the final scenes take place while
dramatic. Arthur is warring against the Romans, very shortly after he
has established his sovereignty in the Isle of Britain. Walter,
or Chrestien, or whoever it was, saw that such a waste of good romantic
material could never be tolerated. The romance is never—it has not been
even in the hands of its most punctilious modern practitioners—very
observant of miserable minutiæ of chronology; and after all, it was
reasonable that Arthur's successes should give him some considerable
enjoyment of his kingdom. It will not do to scrutinise too narrowly, or we
should have to make Arthur a very old man at his death, and Guinevere a
lady too elderly to leave any excuse for her proceedings, in order to
accommodate the birth of Lancelot (which happened, according to the
Merlin, after the king came to the throne), the birth of Lancelot's son
Galahad, Galahad's life till even the early age of fifteen, when knighthood
was then given, the Quest of the Sangreal itself, and the subsequent
breaking out of Mordred's rebellion, consequent upon the war between
Lancelot and Arthur after the deaths of Agravain and Gareth. But the
allowance of a golden age of comparatively quiet sovereignty, of feasts and
joustings at Camelot, and Caerleon, and Carlisle, of adventures major and
minor, and of the great Graal-quest, is but a moderate demand for any
romancer to make. At any rate, he or they made it, and justified the demand
amply by the result. The contents of the central Arthurian story thus
elaborated may be divided into four parts: 1. The miscellaneous adventures
of the several knights, the king himself sometimes taking share in them. 2.
Those of Sir Tristram, of which more presently. 3. The Quest of the
Sangreal. 4. The Death of Arthur.

Stories of
Taking these in order, the first, which is the largest in bulk,
Gawain and is also, and necessarily, the most difficult to summarise in
other knights. short space. It is sometimes said that the prominent figure in
the earlier stories is Gawain, who is afterwards by some
spite or caprice dethroned in favour of Lancelot. This is not quite exact, for
the bulk of the Lancelot legends being, as has been said, anterior to the end
of the twelfth century, is much older than the bulk of the Gawain romances,

which, owing their origin to English, and especially to northern, patriotism,
do not seem to date earlier than the thirteenth or even the fourteenth. But it
is true that Gawain, as we have seen, makes an appearance, though no very
elaborate one, in the most ancient forms of the legend itself, where we hear
nothing of Lancelot; and also that his appearances in Merlin do not bear
anything like the contrast (similar to that afterwards developed in the
Iberian romance-cycle as between Galaor and Amadis) which other
authorities make between him and Lancelot.[52] Generally speaking, the
knights are divisible into three classes. First there are the older knights,
from Ulfius (who had even taken part in the expedition which cheated
Igraine) and Antor, down to Bedivere, Lucan, and the most famous of this
group, Sir Kay, who, alike in older and in later versions, bears the uniform
character of a disagreeable person, not indeed a coward, though of prowess
not equal to his attempts and needs; but a boaster, envious, spiteful, and
constantly provoking by his tongue incidents in which his hands do not help
him out quite sufficiently.[53] Then there is the younger and main body, of
whom Lancelot and Gawain (still keeping Tristram apart) are the chiefs;
and lastly the outsiders, whether the "felon" knights who are at internecine,
or the mere foreigners who are in friendly, antagonism with the knights of
the "Rowntabull."
Of these the chief are Sir Palomides or Palamedes (a gallant Saracen, who
is Tristram's unlucky rival for the affections of Iseult, while his special task
is the pursuit of the Questing Beast, a symbol of Slander), and Tristram
himself.

Sir Tristram.
The appearance of this last personage in the Legend is one
of the most curious and interesting points in it. Although on
this, as on every one of such points, the widest diversity of opinion prevails,
an impartial examination of the texts perhaps enables us to obtain some
tolerably clear views on the subject—views which are helpful not merely
with reference to the "Tristan-saga" itself, but with reference to the origins
and character of the whole Legend.[54] There cannot, I think, be a doubt that
the Tristram story originally was quite separate from that of Arthur. In the
first place, Tristram has nothing whatever to do with that patriotic and
national resistance to the Saxon invader which, though it died out in the
later legend, was the centre, and indeed almost reached the circumference,
of the earlier. In the second, except when he is directly brought to Arthur's

court, all Tristram's connections are with Cornwall, Brittany, Ireland, not
with that more integral and vaster part of la bloie Bretagne which extends
from Somerset and Dorset to the Lothians. When he appears abroad, it is as
a Varangian at Constantinople, not in the train of Arthur fighting against
Romans. Again, the religious part of the story, which is so important in the
developed Arthurian Legend proper, is almost entirely absent from the
Tristram-tale, and the subject which played the fourth part in mediæval
affections and interests with love, religion, and fighting—the chase—takes
in the Tristram romances the place of religion itself.

His story
But the most interesting, though the most delicate, part of
almost the inquiry concerns the attitude of this episode or branch to
certainly love, and the conclusion to be drawn as well from that
Celtic.
attitude as from the local peculiarities above noticed, as to
the national origin of Tristram on the one hand, and of the Arthur story on
the other. It has been said that Tristram's connections with what may be
roughly called Britain at large—i.e., the British Islands plus Brittany—are,
except in his visits to Arthur's court, entirely with the Celtic parts—
Cornwall, Ireland, Armorica—less with Wales, which plays a strangely
small part in the Arthurian romances generally. This would of itself give a
fair presumption that the Tristram story is more purely, or at any rate more
directly, Celtic than the rest. But it so happens that in the love of Tristram
and Iseult, and the revenge and general character of Mark, there is also a
suffusion of colour and tone which is distinctly Celtic. The more recent
advocates for the Celtic origin of romance in general, and the Arthurian
legend in particular, have relied very strongly upon the character of the love
adventures in these compositions as being different from those of classical
story, different from those of Frankish, Teutonic, and Scandinavian
romance; but, as it seems to them, like what has been observed of the early
native poetry of Wales, and still more (seeing that the indisputable texts are
older) of Ireland.
A discussion of this kind is perhaps more than any other periculosæ plenum
opus aleæ; but it is too important to be neglected. Taking the character of
the early Celtic, and especially the Irish, heroine as it is given by her
champions—a process which obviates all accusations of misunderstanding
that might be based on the present writer's confession that of the Celtic texts
alone he has to speak at second-hand—it seems to me beyond question that

both the Iseults, Iseult of Ireland and Iseult of Brittany, approach much
nearer to this type than does Guinevere, or the Lady of the Lake, or the
damsel Lunete, or any of Arthur's sisters, even Morgane, or, to take earlier
examples, Igraine and Merlin's love. So too the peculiar spitefulness of
Mark, and his singular mixture of tolerance and murderous purpose towards
Tristram[55] are much more Celtic than Anglo-French: as indeed is the
curious absence of religiosity before noted, which extends to Iseult as well
as to Tristram. We have no trace in Mark's queen of the fact or likelihood of
any such final repentance as is shown by Arthur's: and though the complete
and headlong self-abandonment of Iseult is excused to some extent by the
magic potion, it is of an "all-for-love-and-the-world-well-lost" kind which
finds no exact parallel elsewhere in the legend. So too, whether it seem
more or less amiable, the half-coquettish jealousy of Guinevere in regard to
Lancelot is not Celtic: while the profligate vindictiveness attributed to her
in Sir Launfal, and only in Sir Launfal, an almost undoubtedly Celtic
offshoot of the Arthurian Legend, is equally alien from her character. We
see Iseult planning the murder of Brengwain with equal savagery and
ingratitude, and we feel that it is no libel. On the other hand, though
Tristram's faithfulness is proverbial, it is an entirely different kind of
faithfulness from that of Lancelot—flightier, more passionate perhaps in a
way, but of a less steady passion. Lancelot would never have married Iseult
the White-handed.
It is, however, quite easy to understand how, this Tristram legend existing
by hypothesis already or being created at the same time, the curious
centripetal and agglutinative tendency of mediæval romance should have
brought it into connection with that of Arthur. The mere fact of Mark's
being a vassal-king of Greater Britain would have been reason enough; but
the parallel between the prowess of Lancelot and Tristram, and between
their loves for the two queens, was altogether too tempting to be resisted.
So Tristram makes his appearance in Arthur's court, and as a knight of the
Round Table, but as not exactly at home there,—as a visitor, an "honorary
member" rather than otherwise, and only an occasional partaker of the
home tournaments and the adventures abroad which occupy Arthur's
knights proper.

Sir Lancelot.
The origin of the greatest of these, of Lancelot himself, is
less distinct. Since the audacious imaginativeness of the late

M. de la Villemarqué, which once, I am told, brought upon him the epithet
"Faussaire!" uttered in full conclave of Breton antiquaries, has ceased to be
taken seriously by Arthurian students, the old fancies about some Breton
"Ancel" or "Ancelot" have been quietly dropped. But the Celticisers still
cling fondly to the supposed possibility of derivation from King Melvas, or
King Maelgon, one or other of whom does seem to have been connected, as
above mentioned, by early Welsh tradition with the abduction of the queen.
It is, however, evident to any reader of the Charette episode, whether in the
original French prose and verse or in Malory, that Meleagraunce the
ravisher and Lancelot the avenger cannot have the same original. I should
myself suppose Lancelot to have been a directly and naturally spontaneous
literary growth. The necessity of a love-interest for the Arthurian story
being felt, and, according to the manner of the time, it being felt with equal
strength that the lover must not be the husband, it was needful to look about
for some one else. The merely business-like self-surrender to Mordred as
the king de facto, to the "lips that were near," of Geoffrey's Guanhumara
and Layamon's Wenhaver, was out of the question; and the part of Gawain
as a faithful nephew was too well settled already by tradition for it to be
possible to make him the lover. Perhaps the great artistic stroke in the whole
Legend, and one of the greatest in all literature, is the concoction of a hero
who should be not only

"Like Paris handsome, and like Hector
brave,"

but more heroic than Paris and more interesting than Hector,—not only a
"greatest knight," but at once the sinful lover of his queen and the champion
who should himself all but achieve, and in the person of his son actually
achieve, the sacred adventure of the Holy Graal. If, as there seems no valid
reason to disbelieve, the hitting upon this idea, and the invention or
adoption of Lancelot to carry it out, be the work of Walter Mapes, then
Walter Mapes is one of the great novelists of the word, and one of the
greatest of them. If it was some unknown person (it could hardly be
Chrestien, for in Chrestien's form the Graal interest belongs to Percevale,
not to Lancelot or Galahad), then the same compliment must be paid to that
person unknown. Meanwhile the conception and execution of Lancelot, to
whomsoever they may be due, are things most happy. Entirely free from the

faultlessness which is the curse of the classical hero; his unequalled valour
not seldom rewarded only by reverses; his merits redeemed from
mawkishness by his one great fault, yet including all virtues that are
themselves most amiable, and deformed by no vice that is actually
loathsome; the soul of goodness in him always warring with his human
frailty;—Sir Lancelot fully deserves the noble funeral eulogy pronounced
over his grave, and felt by all the elect to be, in both senses, one of the first
of all extant pieces of perfect English prose.

The minor
But the virtues which are found in Lancelot eminently are
knights. found in all but the "felon" knights, differing only in degree.
It is true that the later romances and compilations, feeling
perhaps the necessity of shade, extend to all the sons of Lot and Margause,
except Gareth, and to some extent Gawain, the unamiable character which
Mordred enjoys throughout, and which even in the Merlin is found showing
itself in Agravaine. But Sir Lamoracke, their victim, is almost Lancelot's
equal: and the best of Lancelot's kin, especially Sir Bors, come not far
behind. It is entirely untrue that, as the easy epigram has it, they all "hate
their neighbour and love their neighbour's wife." On the contrary, except in
the bad subjects—ranging from the mere ruffianism of Breuse-sans-Pitié to
the misconduct of Meleagraunce—there is no hatred of your neighbour
anywhere. It is not hatred of your neighbour to be prepared to take and give
hard blows from and to him, and to forgather in faith and friendship before
and after. And as to the other and more delicate point, a large majority of
the knights can at worst claim the benefit of the law laid down by a very
pious but indulgent mediæval writer,[56] who says that if men will only not
meddle with "spouse or sib" (married women or connections within the
prohibited degrees), it need be no such deadly matter.

Arthur.
It may be desirable, as it was in reference to Charlemagne,
to say a few words as to Arthur himself. In both cases there
is noticeable (though less in the case of Arthur than in that of Charlemagne)
the tendency not to make the king blameless, or a paragon of prowess: and
in both cases, as we should expect, this tendency is even more noticeable in
the later versions than in the earlier. This may have been partly due to the
aristocratic spirit of at least idealised feudalism, which gave the king no
semi-divine character, but merely a human primacy inter pares; partly also
to the literary instinct of the Middle Ages, which had discovered that the

"biggest" personage of a story is by no means that one who is most
interesting. In Arthur's very first literary appearance, the Nennius passage,
his personal prowess is specially dwelt upon: and in those parts of the
Merlin group which probably represent the first step from Geoffrey to the
complete legend, he slays Saxons and Romans, wrests the sword single-
handed from King Ryaunce, and so forth, as valiantly as Gawain himself. It
is, however, curious that at this time the writers are much less careful than
at a later to represent him as faithful to Guinevere, and blameless before
marriage, with the exception of the early affair with Margause. He accepts
the false Guinevere and the Saxon enchantress very readily; and there is
other scandal in which the complaisant Merlin as usual figures. But in the
accepted Arthuriad (I do not of course speak of modern writers) this is
rather kept in the background, while his prowess is also less prominent,
except in a few cases, such as his great fight with his sister's lover, Sir
Accolon. Even here he never becomes the complaisant wittol, which late
and rather ignoble works like the Cokwold's Daunce[57] represent him as
being: and he never exhibits the slightest approach to the outbursts of
almost imbecile wrath which characterise Charlemagne.

Guinevere.
Something has been said of Guinevere already. It is perhaps
hard to look, as any English reader of our time must,
backward through the coloured window of the greatest of the Idylls of the
King without our thoughts of the queen being somewhat affected by it. But
those who knew their Malory before the Idylls appeared escape that danger.
Mr Morris's Guinevere in her Defence is perhaps a little truer than Lord
Tennyson's to the original conception—indeed, much of the delightful
volume in which she first appeared is pure Extrait Arthurien. But the
Tennysonian glosses on Guinevere's character are not ill justified: though
perhaps, if less magnificent, it would have been truer, both to the story and
to human nature, to attribute her fall rather to the knowledge that Arthur
himself was by no means immaculate than to a despairing sense of his
immaculateness. The Guinevere of the original romances is the first
perfectly human woman in English literature. They have ennobled her
unfaithfulness to Arthur by her constancy to Lancelot, they have saved her
constancy to Lancelot from being insipid by interspersing the gusts of
jealousy in the matter of the two Elaines which play so great a part in the
story. And it is curious that, coarse as both the manners and the speech of

the Middle Ages are supposed to have been, the majority of these romances
are curiously free from coarseness. The ideas might shock Ascham's
prudery, but the expression is, with the rarest exceptions, scrupulously
adapted to polite society. There are one or two coarse passages in the Merlin
and the older Saint Graal, and I remember others in outside branches like
the Chevalier as Deux Espées. But though a French critic has detected
something shocking in Le Chevalier à la Charette, it requires curious
consideration to follow him.

The Graal.
The part which the Holy Graal plays in the legend generally
is not the least curious or interesting feature of the whole. As
has been already said more than once, it makes no figure at all in the
earliest versions: and it is consistent with this, as well as with the general
theory and procedure of romance, that when it does appear the development
of the part played by it is conducted on two more or less independent lines,
which, however, the later compilers at least do not seem to think mutually
exclusive. With the usual reserves as to the impossibility of pronouncing
with certainty on the exact order of the additions to this wonderful structure
of legend, it may be said to be probable, on all available considerations of
literary probability, that of the two versions of the Graal story—that in
which Percival is the hero of the Quest, and that in which Galahad occupies
that place—the former is the earlier. According to this, which commended
itself especially to the French and German handlers of the story,[58] the
Graal Quest lies very much outside the more intimate concerns of the
Arthurian court and the realm of Britain. Indeed, in the latest and perhaps
greatest of this school, Wolfram von Eschenbach (v. chap. vi.), the story
wanders off into uttermost isles of fancy, quite remote from the proper
Arthurian centres. It may perhaps be conceded that this development is in
more strict accordance with what we may suppose and can partly perceive
to have been the original and almost purely mystical conception of the
Graal as entertained by Robert de Borron, or another—the conception in
which all earthly, even wedded, love is of the nature of sin, and according to
which the perfect knight is only an armed monk, converting the heathen and
resisting the temptations of the devil, the world, and more particularly the
flesh; diversifying his wars and preachings only or mainly by long mystical
visions of sacred history as it presented itself to mediæval imagination. It is
true that the genius of Wolfram has not a little coloured and warmed this

chilly ideal: but the story is still conducted rather afar from general human
interest, and very far off indeed from the special interests of Arthur.

How it
Another genius, that of Walter Map (by hypothesis, as
perfects the before), described and worked out different capabilities in
story. the story. By the idea, simple, like most ideas of genius, of
making Lancelot, the father, at once the greatest knight of
the Arimathean lineage, and unable perfectly to achieve the Quest by reason
of his sin, and Galahad the son, inheritor of his prowess but not of his
weakness, he has at once secured the success of the Quest in sufficient
accordance with the original idea and the presence of abundant purely
romantic interest as well. And at the same time by connecting the sin which
disqualifies Lancelot with the catastrophe of Arthur, and the achieving of
the Quest itself with the weakening and breaking up of the Round Table (an
idea insisted upon no doubt, by Tennyson, but existent in the originals), a
dramatic and romantic completeness has been given to the whole cycle
which no other collection of mediæval romances possesses, and which
equals, if it does not exceed, that of any of the far more apparently regular
epics of literary history. It appears, indeed, to have been left for Malory to
adjust and bring out the full epic completeness of the legend: but the
materials, as it was almost superfluous for Dr Sommer to show by chapter
and verse, were all ready to his hand. And if (as that learned if not
invariably judicious scholar thinks) there is or once was somewhere a Suite
of Lancelot corresponding to the Suite de Merlin of which Sir Thomas made
such good use, it is not improbable that we should find the adjustment,
though not the expression, to some extent anticipated.

Nature of this
At any rate, the idea is already to hand in the original
perfection. romances of our present period; and a wonderfully great and
perfect idea it is. Not the much and justly praised
arrangement and poetical justice of the Oresteia or of the story of Œdipus
excel the Arthuriad in what used to be called "propriety" (which has nothing
to do with prudishness), while both are, as at least it seems to me, far
inferior in varied and poignant interest. That the attainment of the Graal, the
healing of the maimed king, and the fulfilling of the other "weirds" which
have lain upon the race of Joseph, should practically coincide with the
termination of that glorious reign, with which fate and metaphysical aid had
connected them, is one felicity. The "dolorous death and departing out of

this world" in Lyonnesse and elsewhere corresponds to and completes the
triumph of Sarras. From yet another point of view, the bringing into
judgment of all the characters and their deeds is equally complete, equally
natural and unforced. It is astonishing that men like Ascham,[59] unless
blinded by a survival of mediæval or a foreshadowing of Puritan prudery,
should have failed to see that the morality of the Morte d'Arthur is as
rigorous as it is unsqueamish. Guinevere in her cloister and Lancelot in his
hermitage, Arthur falling by (or at any rate in battle against) the fruit of his
incestuous intercourse—these are not exactly encouragements to vice:
while at the same time the earlier history may be admitted to have nothing
of a crabbed and jejune virtue.
But this conclusion, with the minor events which lead up to it, is scarcely
less remarkable as exhibiting in the original author, whoever he was, a
sense of art, a sense of finality, the absence of which is the great blot on
Romance at large, owing to the natural, the human, but the very inartistic,
craving for sequels. As is well known, it was the most difficult thing in the
world for a mediæval romancer to let his subject go. He must needs take it
up from generation to generation; and the interminable series of Amadis and
Esplandian stories, which, as the last example, looks almost like a designed
caricature, is only an exaggeration of the habit which we can trace back
through Huon of Bordeaux and Guy of Warwick almost to the earliest
chansons de geste.

No sequel
But the intelligent genius who shaped the Arthuriad has
possible. escaped this danger, and that not merely by the simple
process which Dryden, with his placid irony, somewhere
describes as "leaving scarce three of the characters alive." We have reached,
and feel that we have reached, the conclusion of the whole matter when the
Graal has been taken to Heaven, and Arthur has gone to Avalon. Nobody
wants to hear anything of the doubtless excellent Duke and King
Constantine. Sir Ector himself could not leave the stage with more grace
than with his great discourse on his dead comrade and kinsman. Lancelot's
only son has gone with the Graal. The end is not violent or factitious, it is
necessary and inevitable. It were even less unwise to seek the grave of
Arthur than to attempt to take up the story of the Arthurians after king and
queen and Lancelot are gone each to his and her own place, after the Graal
is attained, after the Round Table is dissolved.

It is creditable to the intelligence and taste of the average mediæval
romance-writer that even he did not yield to his besetting sin in this
particular instance. With the exception of Ysaie le Triste, which deals with
the fortunes of a supposed son of Tristan and Yseult, and thus connects
itself with the most outlying part of the legend—a part which, as has been
shown, is only hinged on to it—I cannot remember a single romance which
purports to deal with affairs subsequent to the battle in Lyonesse. The two
latest that can be in any way regarded as Arthurian, Arthur of Little Britain
and Cleriodus, avowedly take up the story long subsequently, and only
claim for their heroes the glory of distant descent from Arthur and his
heroes. Meliadus de Lyonnois ascends from Tristram, and endeavours to
connect the matter of Britain with that of France. Giron le Courtois deals
with Palamedes and the earlier Arthurian story; while Perceforest, though
based on the Brut, selects periods anterior to Arthur.[60]

Latin episodes.
There was, however, no such artistic constraint as regards
episodes of the main story, or romans d'aventures
celebrating the exploits of single knights, and connected with that story by a
sort of stock overture and dénoûment, in the first of which an adventure is
usually started at Arthur's court, while the successful knight is also
accustomed to send his captives to give testimony to his prowess in the
same place. As has been said above,[61] there is a whole cluster of such
episodes—most, it would seem, owing their origin to England or Scotland
—which have Sir Gawain for their chief hero, and which, at least in such
forms as survive, would appear to be later than the great central romances
which have been just noticed. Some of these are of much local interest—
there being a Scottish group, a group which seems to centre about Cumbria,
and so forth—but they fall rather to the portion of my successor in this
series, who will take as his province Gawaine and the Green Knight,
Lancelot of the Laik, the quaint alliterative Thornton Morte Arthur, and not
a few others. The most interesting of all is that hitherto untraced romance of
Beaumains or Gareth (he, as Gawain's brother, brings the thing into the
class referred to), of which Malory has made an entire book, and which is
one of the most completely and perfectly turned-out episodes existing. It
has points in common with Yvain,[62] and others in common with Ipomydon,
[63] but at the same time quite enough of its own. But we have no French
text for it. On the other hand, we have long verse romances like Durmart le

Gallois[64] (which both from the title and from certain mystical Graal
passages rather connects itself with the Percevale sub-section); and the
Chevalier as Deux Espées,[65] which belongs to the Gawain class. But all
these, as well as the German romances to be noticed in chap. vi., distinguish
themselves from the main stories analysed above not merely by their
obvious and almost avowed dependence, but by a family likeness in
incident, turn, and phrase from which those main stories are free. In fact the
general fault of the Romans d'Aventures is that neither the unsophisticated
freshness of the chanson de geste, nor the variety and commanding breadth
of the Arthurian legend, appears in them to the full. The kind of "balaam,"
the stock repetitions and expletives at which Chaucer laughs in "Sir
Thopas"—a laugh which has been rather unjustly received as condemning
the whole class of English romances—is very evident even in the French
texts. We have left the great and gracious ways, the inspiring central ideas,
of the larger romance.

The legend as
It may perhaps seem to some readers that too much praise
a whole. has been given to that romance itself. Far as we are, not
merely from Ascham's days, but from those in which the
excellent Dunlop was bound to confess that "they [the romances of the
Round Table] will be found extremely defective in those points which have
been laid down as constituting excellence in fictitious narrative," that they
are "improbable," full of "glaring anachronisms and geographical blunders,"
"not well shaded and distinguished in character," possessing heroines such
as "the mistresses of Tristan and Lancelot" [may God assoil Dunlop!] who
are "women of abandoned character," "highly reprehensible in their moral
tendency," "equalled by the most insipid romance of the present day as a
fund of amusement." In those days even Scott thought it prudent to limit his
praise of Malory's book to the statement that "it is written in pure old
English, and many of the wild adventures which it contains are told with a
simplicity bordering on the sublime." Of Malory—thanks to the charms of
his own book in the editions of Southey, of the two editors in 12mo, of
Wright and of Sir Edward Strachey, not to mention the recent and stately
issues given by Dr Sommer and Professor Rhys—a better idea has long
prevailed, though there are some gainsayers. But of the originals, and of the
Legend as a whole, the knowledge is too much limited to those who see in
that legend only an opportunity for discussing texts and dates, origins and

national claims. Its extraordinary beauty, and the genius which at some time
or other, in one brain or in many, developed it from the extremely meagre
materials which are all that can be certainly traced, too often escape
attention altogether, and have hardly, I think, in a single instance obtained
full recognition.

The theories of
Yet however exaggerated the attention to the Quellen may
its origin. have been, however inadequate the attention to the actual
literary result, it would be a failure in duty towards the
reader, and disrespectful to those scholars who, if not always in the most
excellent way, have contributed vastly to our knowledge of the subject, to
finish this chapter without giving something on the question of origins
itself. I shall therefore conclude it with a brief sketch of the chief opinions
on the subject, and with an indication of those to which many years' reading
have inclined myself.
The theories, not to give them one by one as set forth by individual writers,
are in the main as follows:—

Celtic.
I. That the Legend is, not merely in its first inception, but in
main bulk, Celtic, either (a) Welsh or (b) Armorican.

French.
II. That it is, except in the mere names and the vaguest
outline, French.

English.
III. That it is English, or at least Anglo-Norman.

Literary.
IV. That it is very mainly a "literary" growth, owing
something to the Greek romances, and not to be regarded
without error as a new development unconnected, or almost unconnected,
with traditional sources of any kind.

The Celtic
The first explanation is the oldest. After being for nearly half
theory. a century discredited, it has again found ardent defenders,
and it may seem at first sight to be the most natural and
reasonable. Arthur, if he existed at all, was undoubtedly a British hero; the
British Celts, especially the Welsh, possess beyond all question strong

literary affinities and a great literary performance, and Geoffrey of
Monmouth, the father of the whole story, expressly declares that he took it
from a book written in the British tongue. It was natural that in
comparatively uncritical ages no quarrel should be made with this account.
There were, even up to the last century, I believe, enthusiastic antiquaries
who affirmed, and perhaps believed, that they had come across the very
documents to which Geoffrey refers, or at worst later Welsh transcripts of
them. But when the study of the matter grew, and especially when Welsh
literature itself began to be critically examined, uncomfortable doubts
began to arise. It was found impossible to assign to the existing Welsh
romances on the subject, such as those published in the Mabinogion, a date
even approaching in antiquity that which can certainly be claimed by the
oldest French texts: and in more than one case the Welsh bore unmistakable
indications of having been directly imitated from the French itself. Further,
in undoubtedly old Welsh literature, though there were (v. supra) references
to Arthur, they were few, they were very meagre, and except as regards the
mystery of his final disappearance rather than death, they had little if
anything to do with the received Arthurian story. On the other hand, as far
as Brittany was concerned, after a period of confident assertion, and of
attempts, in at least doubtful honesty, to supply what could not be found, it
had to be acknowledged that Brittany could supply no ancient texts
whatever, and hardly any ancient tradition. These facts, when once
established (and they have never since been denied by competent criticism),
staggered the Celtic claim very seriously. Of late years, however, it has
found advocates (who, as usual, adopt arguments rather mutually
destructive than mutually confirmatory) both in France (M. Gaston Paris)
and in Germany (Herr Zimmer), while it has been passionately defended in
England by Mr Nutt, and with a more cautious, but perhaps at least equally
firm, support by Professor Rhys. As has been said, these Neo-Celticists do
not, when they are wise, attempt to revive the older form of the claims.
They rest theirs on the scattered references in undoubtedly old Welsh
literature above referred to, on the place-names which play such an
undoubtedly remarkable part in the local nomenclature of the West-Welsh
border in the south-west of England and in Cornwall, of Wales less
frequently, of Strathclyde and Lothian eminently, and not at all, or hardly at
all, of that portion of England which was early and thoroughly subjected to
Saxon and Angle sway. And the bolder of them, taking advantage of the

admitted superiority in age of Irish to Welsh literature as far as texts go,
have had recourse to this, not for direct originals (it is admitted that there
are none, even of parts of the Legend such as those relating to Tristram and
Iseult, which are not only avowedly Irish in place but Irish in tone), but for
evidences of differential origin in comparison with classical and Teutonic
literature. Unfortunately this last point is one not of technical "scholarship,"
but of general literary criticism, and it is certain that the Celticists have not
converted all or most students in that subject to their view. I should myself
give my opinion, for whatever it may be worth, to the effect that the tone
and tendency of the Celtic, and especially the Irish, literature of very early
days, as declared by its own modern champions, are quite different from
those of the romances in general and the Arthurian Legend in particular.
Again, though the other two classes of evidence cannot be so ruled out of
court as a whole, it must be evident that they go but a very little way, and
are asked to go much further. If any one will consult Professor Rhys's
careful though most friendly abstract of the testimony of early Welsh
literature, he will see how very great the interval is. When we are asked to
accept a magic caldron which fed people at discretion as the special original
of the Holy Grail, the experienced critic knows the state of the case pretty
well.[66] While as to the place-names, though they give undoubted and
valuable support of a kind to the historical existence of Arthur, and support
still more valuable to the theory of the early and wide distribution of
legends respecting him, it is noticeable that they have hardly anything to do
with our Arthurian Legend at all. They concern—as indeed we should
expect—the fights with the Saxons, and some of them reflect (very vaguely
and thinly) a tradition of conjugal difficulties between Arthur and his queen.
But unfortunately these last are not confined to Arthurian experience; and,
as we have seen, Arthur's fights with the Saxons, except the last when they
joined Mordred, are of ever-dwindling importance for the Romance.

The French
Like the Celtic theory, the French has an engaging
claims. appearance of justice and probability, and it has over the
Celtic the overwhelming advantage as regards texts. That
all, without exception, of the oldest texts in which the complete romantic
story of Arthur appears are in the French language is a fact entirely
indisputable, and at first blench conclusive. We may even put it more
strongly still and say that, taking positive evidence as apart from mere

assertion (as in the case of the Latin Graal-book), there is nothing to show
that any part of the full romantic story of Arthur, as distinguished from the
meagre quasi-historical outline of Geoffrey, ever appeared in any language
before it appeared in French. The most certain of the three personal
claimants for the origination of these early texts, Chrestien de Troyes, was
undoubtedly a Frenchman in the wide sense; so (if he existed) was Robert
de Borron, another of them. The very phrase so familiar to readers of
Malory, "the French book," comes to the assistance of the claim.
And yet, as is the case with some other claims which look irresistible at first
sight, the strength of this shrinks and dwindles remarkably when it comes to
be examined. One consideration is by itself sufficient, not indeed totally to
destroy it, but to make a terrible abatement in its cogency; and this is, that if
the great Arthurian romances, written between the middle and end of the
twelfth century, were written in French, it was chiefly because they could
not have been written in any other tongue. Not only was no other language
generally intelligible to that public of knights and ladies to which they were
addressed; not only was no other vernacular language generally known to
European men of letters, but no such vernacular, except Provençal, had
attained to anything like the perfection necessary to make it a convenient
vehicle. Whatever the nationality of the writer or writers, it was more likely
that he or they would write in French than in any other language. And as a
matter of fact we see that the third of the great national claimants was an
Englishman, while it is not certain that Robert de Borron was not an
English subject. Nor is it yet formally determined whether Chrestien
himself, in those parts of his work which are specially Arthurian, had not
Map or some one else before him as an authority.

The theory of
The last theory, that the Legend may be almost if not quite
general sufficiently accounted for as a legitimate descendant of
literary previous literature, classical and other (including Oriental
growth.
sources), has been the least general favourite. As originally
started, or at least introduced into English literary history, by Warton, it
suffered rather unfairly from some defects of its author. Warton's History of
English Poetry marks, and to some extent helped to produce, an immense
change for the better in the study of English literature: and he deserved the
contemptuous remarks of some later critics as little as he did the savage
attacks of the half-lunatic Ritson. But he was rather indolent; his

knowledge, though wide, was very desultory and full of scraps and gaps;
and, like others in his century, he was much too fond of hypothesis without
hypostasis, of supposition without substance. He was very excusably but
very unluckily ignorant of what may be called the comparative panorama of
English and European literature during the Middle Ages, and was apt to
assign to direct borrowing or imitation those fresh workings up of the
eternal données of all literary art which presented themselves. As the theory
has been more recently presented with far exacter learning and greater
judgment by his successor, Mr Courthope,[67] it is much relieved from most
of its disabilities. I have myself no doubt that the Greek romances (see
chap. ix.) do represent at the least a stage directly connecting classical with
romantic literature; and that the later of them (which, it must be
remembered, were composed in this very twelfth century, and must have
come under the notice of the crusaders), may have exercised a direct effect
upon mediæval Romance proper. I formed this opinion more than twenty
years ago, when I first read Hysminias and Hysmine; and I have never seen
reason to change it since. But these influences, though not to be left out of
the question, are perhaps in one respect too general, and in another too
partial, to explain the precise matter. That the Arthurian Romances, in
common with all the romances, and with mediæval literature generally,
were much more influenced by the traditional classical culture than used at
one time to be thought, I have believed ever since I began to study the
subject, and am more and more convinced of it. The classics both of Europe
and the East played a part, and no small part, in bringing about the new
literature; but it was only a part.

The English or
If, as I think may fairly be done, the glory of the Legend be
Anglo-Norman chiefly claimed for none of these, but for English or Anglo-
pretensions. Norman, it can be done in no spirit of national pleonexia,
but on a sober consideration of all the facts of the case, and
allowing all other claimants their fair share in the matter as subsidiaries.
From the merely a priori point of view the claims of England—that is to
say, the Anglo-Norman realm—are strong. The matter is "the matter of
Britain," and it was as natural that Arthur should be sung in Britain as that
Charlemagne should be celebrated in France. But this could weigh nothing
against positive balance of argument from the facts on the other side. The
balance, however, does not lie against us. The personal claim of Walter

Map, even if disproved, would not carry the English claim with it in its fall.
But it has never been disproved. The positive, the repeated, attribution of
the MSS. may not be final, but requires a very serious body of counter-
argument to upset it. And there is none such. The time suits; the man's
general ability is not denied; his familiarity with Welshmen and Welsh
tradition as a Herefordshire Marcher is pretty certain; and his one
indisputable book of general literature, the De Nugis Curialium, exhibits
many—perhaps all—of the qualifications required: a sharp judgment united
with a distinct predilection for the marvellous, an unquestionable piety
combined with man-of-the-worldliness, and a toleration of human
infirmities. It is hardly necessary to point out the critical incompetence of
those who say that a satirist like Map could not have written the Quest and
the Mort. Such critics would make two Peacocks as the simultaneous
authors of Nightmare Abbey and Rhododaphne—nay, two Shakespeares to
father the Sonnets and the Merry Wives. If any one will turn to the stories of
Gerbert and Meridiana, of Galo, Sadius, and the evil queen in the Nugæ, he
will, making allowance for Walter's awkward Latin in comparison with the
exquisite French of the twelfth century, find reasons for thinking the author
of that odd book quite equal to the authorship of part—not necessarily the
whole—of the Arthurian story in its co-ordinated form.
Again, it is distinctly noticeable that the farther the story goes from England
and the English Continental possessions, the more does it lose of that
peculiar blended character, that mixture of the purely mystical and purely
romantic, of sacred and profane, which has been noted as characteristic of
its perfect bloom. In the Percevale of Chrestien and his continuators, and
still more in Wolfram von Eschenbach, as it proceeds eastwards, and into
more and more purely Teutonic regions, it absorbs itself in the Graal and
the moonshiny mysticism thereto appertaining. When it has fared
southwards to Italy, the lawlessness of the loves of Guinevere and Iseult
preoccupies Southern attention. As for Welsh, it is sufficient to quote the
statement of the most competent of Welsh authorities, Professor Rhys, to
the effect that "the passion of Lancelot for Guinevere is unknown to Welsh
literature." Now, as I have tried to point out, the passion of Lancelot for
Guinevere, blended as it is with the quasi-historic interest of Arthur's
conquests and the religious-mystical interest of the Graal story, is the heart,
the life, the source of all charm and beauty in the perfect Arthur-story.

I should think, therefore, that the most reasonable account of the whole
matter may be somewhat as follows, using imagination as little as possible,
and limiting hypothesis rigidly to what is necessary to connect, explain, and
render generally intelligible the historical facts which have been already
summarised. And I may add that while this account is not very different
from the views of the earliest of really learned modern authorities, Sir
Frederic Madden and M. Paulin Paris, I was surprised to find how much it
agrees with that of one of the very latest, M. Loth.

Attempted
In so far as the probable personality and exploits, and the
hypothesis. almost certain tradition of such exploits and such a
personality, goes, there is no reason for, and much reason
against, denying a Celtic origin to this Legend of Arthur. The best
authorities have differed as to the amount of really ancient testimony in
Welsh as to him, and it seems to be agreed by the best authorities that there
is no ancient tradition in any other branch of Celtic literature. But if we take
the mentions allowed as ancient by such a careful critic as Professor Rhys,
if we combine them with the place-name evidence, and if we add the really
important fact, that of the earliest literary dealers, certain or probable, with
the legend, Geoffrey, Layamon, and Walter Map were neighbours of Wales,
and Wace a neighbour of Brittany, to suppose that Arthur as a subject for
romantic treatment was a figment of some non-Celtic brain, Saxon or
Norman, French or English, is not only gratuitous but excessively
unreasonable. Again, there can be no reasonable doubt that the Merlin
legends, in at least their inception, were Celtic likewise. The attempt once
made to identify Merlin with the well-known "Marcolf," who serves as
Solomon's interlocutor in a mass of early literature more or less Eastern in
origin, is one of those critical freaks which betray an utterly uncritical
temperament. Yet further, I should be inclined to allow no small portion of
Celtic ingredient in the spirit, the tendency, the essence of the Arthurian
Legend. We want something to account for this, which is not Saxon, not
Norman, not French, not Teutonic generally, not Latin, not Eastern; and I at
least am unable to discover where this something comes from if it is not
from the Celtic fringe of England and of Normandy.
But when we come to the Legend proper, and to its most important and
most interesting characteristics, to its working up, to that extraordinary
development which in a bare half-century (and half a century, though a long

time now, was a very short one seven hundred years ago) evolved almost a
whole library of romance from the scanty faits et gestes of Arthur as given
by Geoffrey,—then I must confess that I can see no evidence of Celtic
forces or sources having played any great part in the matter. If Caradoc of
Lancarvan wrote the Vita Gildæ—and it is pretty certainly not later than his
day, while if it was not written by him it must have been written by some
one equally well acquainted with traditions, British and Armorican, of St
Gildas—if he or any one else gave us what he has given about Arthur and
Gildas himself, about Arthur's wife and Melvas, and if traditions existed of
Galahad or even Percivale and the Graal, of the Round Table, most of all of
Lancelot,—why in the name of all that is critical and probable did he not
give us more? His hero could not have been ignorant of the matter, the
legends of his hero could hardly have been silent about them. It is hard to
believe that anybody can read the famous conclusion of Geoffrey's history
without seeing a deliberate impishness in it, without being certain that the
tale of the Book and the Archdeacon is a tale of a Cock and a Bull. But if it
be taken seriously, how could the "British book" have failed to contain
something more like our Legend of Arthur than Geoffrey has given us, and
how, if it existed and gave more, could Geoffrey have failed to impart it?
Why should the Welsh, the proudest in their way of all peoples, and not the
least gifted in literature, when they came to give Arthurian legends of the
kind which we recognise, either translate them from the French or at least
adapt and adjust them thereto?
On the other hand, the supposition that the fashioning, partly out of vague
tradition, partly it may be out of more definite Celtic tales like that of
Tristram, partly from classical, Eastern, and other sources, belongs to the
English in the wide sense—that is to say, the nation or nations partly under
English rule proper, partly under Scottish, partly under that of the
feudatories or allies of the English kings as Dukes of Normandy—has to
support it not merely the arguments stated above as to the concentration of
the legend proper between Troyes and Herefordshire, between Broceliande
and Northumbria, as to MS. authority, as to the inveteracy of the legend in
English,—not only those negative ones as to the certainty that if it were
written by Englishmen it would be written in French,—but another, which
to the comparative student of literary history may seem strongest of all.

Here first, here eminently, and here just at the time when we should expect
it, do we see that strange faculty for exhibiting a blend, a union, a cross of
characteristics diverse in themselves, and giving when blended a result
different from any of the parts, which is more than anything else the
characteristic of the English language, of English literature, of English
politics, of everything that is English. Classical rhetoric, French gallantry,
Saxon religiosity and intense realisation of the other world, Oriental
extravagance to some extent, the "Celtic vague"—all these things are there.
But they are all co-ordinated, dominated, fashioned anew by some thing
which is none of them, but which is the English genius, that curious,
anomalous, many-sided genius, which to those who look at only one side of
it seems insular, provincial, limited, and which yet has given us
Shakespeare, the one writer of the world to whom the world allows an
absolute universality.

CHAPTER IV.
ANTIQUITY IN ROMANCE.

ODDITY OF THE CLASSICAL ROMANCE. ITS
IMPORTANCE. THE TROY STORY. THE
ALEXANDREID. CALLISTHENES. LATIN
VERSIONS. THEIR STORY. ITS DEVELOPMENTS.
ALBERIC OF BESANÇON. THE DECASYLLABIC
POEM. THE GREAT "ROMAN D'ALIXANDRE."
FORM, ETC. CONTINUATIONS. "KING
ALEXANDER." CHARACTERISTICS. THE TALE OF
TROY. DICTYS AND DARES. THE DARES STORY.
ITS ABSURDITY. ITS CAPABILITIES. TROILUS AND
BRISEIDA. THE 'ROMAN DE TROIE.' THE PHASES
OF CRESSID. THE 'HISTORIA TROJANA.'
MEANING OF THE CLASSICAL ROMANCE.

Oddity of the
As the interest of Jean Bodel's first two divisions[68] differs
Classical strikingly, and yet represents, in each case intimately and
Romance. indispensably, certain sides of the mediæval character, so
also does that of his third. This has perhaps more purely an
interest of curiosity than either of the others. It neither constitutes a capital
division of general literature like the Arthurian story, nor embodies and
preserves a single long-past phase in national spirit and character, like the
chansons de geste. From certain standpoints of the drier and more rigid
criticism it is exposed to the charge of being trifling, almost puerile. We
cannot understand—or, to speak with extremer correctness, it would seem
that some of us cannot understand—the frame of mind which puts Dictys
and Dares on the one hand, Homer on the other, as authorities to be
weighed on equal terms, and gravely sets Homer aside as a very inferior
and prejudiced person; which, even after taking its Dictys and Dares,
proceeds to supplement them with entire inventions of its own; which, after
in the same way taking the Pseudo-Callisthenes as the authoritative

biographer of Alexander, elaborates the legend with a wild luxuriance that
makes the treatment of the Tale of Troy seem positively modest and sober;
which makes Thebes, Julius Cæsar, anything and anybody in fabulous and
historical antiquity alike, the centre, or at least the nucleus, of successive
accretions of romantic fiction.

Its importance
Nevertheless, the attractions, intrinsic and extrinsic, of the
—the Troy division are neither few nor small. This very confusion, as it
story. seems nowadays, this extraordinary and almost monstrous
blending of uncritical history and unbridled romance, shows
one of the most characteristic sides of the whole matter, and exhibits, as do
few other things, that condition of mediæval thought in regard to all critical
questions which has so constantly to be insisted on. As in the case of the
Arthurian story, the matter thus presented caught hold of the mediæval
imagination with a remarkable grip, and some of the most interesting
literary successions of all history date from it. Among them it is almost
enough to mention the chain of names—Benoît de Sainte-More, Guido
Colonna, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Henryson—which reaches Shakespeare, and
does not cease with him, all successively elaborating the history of Troilus
and Cressida. The lively story, first formed, like so many others, by the
French genius, and well, if rather impudently, copied by Colonna;
Boccaccio's vivid Italian Cressida; Chaucer's inimitable Pandarus, the first
pleasing example of the English talent for humorous portrayal in fiction; the
wonderful passage, culminating in a more wonderful single line,[69] of that
Dunfermline schoolmaster whom some inconceivable person has declared
to be only a poet to "Scotch patriotism"; the great gnomic verses of
Shakespeare's Ulysses, and the various, unequal, sometimes almost
repulsive, never otherwise than powerful, pageantry of that play, which has
been perhaps more misjudged than any other of Shakespeare's,—all these
spring from the Tale of Troy, not in the least as handed down by the
ancients, but tricked and frounced as the Middle Age was wont. Nor is this
half-borrowed interest by any means the only one. The Cressid story,
indeed, does not reach its full attraction as a direct subject of literary
treatment till the fourteenth century. But the great Alexander cycle gives us
work which merely as poetry equals all but the very best mediæval work,
and its importance in connection with the famous metre named from it is of
itself capital.

The
In interest, bulk, and importance these two stories—the
Alexandreid. Story of the Destruction of Troy and the Alexandreid—far
outstrip all the other romances of antiquity; they are more
accessible than the rest, and have been the subject of far more careful
investigation by modern students. Little has been added, or is likely to be
added, in regard to the Troy-books generally, since M. Joly's introduction to
Benoît's Roman de Troie six-and-twenty years ago,[70] and it is at least
improbable that much will be added to M. Paul Meyer's handling of the old
French treatments of the Alexandreid in his Alexandre le Grand dans la
Littérature Française au Moyen Age.[71] For it must once more be said that
the pre-eminence of French over other literatures in this volume is not due
to any crotchet of the writer, or to any desire to speak of what he has known
pretty thoroughly, long, and at first-hand, in preference to that which he
knows less thoroughly, less of old, and in parts at second-hand. It is the
simplest truth to say that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries France kept
the literary school of Europe, and that, with the single exception of Iceland,
during a part, and only a part, of the time, all the nations of Europe were
content to do, each in its own tongue, and sometimes even in hers, the
lessons which she taught, the exercises which she set them. That the
scholars sometimes far surpassed their masters is quite true, and is nothing
unusual; that they were scholars is simple fact.

Callisthenes.
The Alexander story, which Mr Wallis Budge, our chief
authority (and perhaps the chief authority) on the Oriental
versions of it, speaks of as "a book which has had more readers than any
other, the Bible alone excepted," is of an antiquity impossible to determine
in any manner at all certain. Nor is the exact place of its origin, or the
language in which it was originally written, to be pronounced upon with
anything like confidence. What does seem reasonably sure is that what is
called "the Pseudo-Callisthenes"—that is to say, the fabulous biography of
the great king, which is certainly the basis of all Western, and perhaps that
of most Eastern, versions of the legend—was put into Greek at least as
early as the third century after Christ, and thence into Latin (by "Julius
Valerius" or another) before the middle of the fourth. And it appears
probable that some of the Eastern versions, if not themselves the original
(and a strong fight has been made for the Æthiopic or Old-Egyptian origin
of nearly the whole), represent Greek texts older than those we have, as

well as in some cases other Eastern texts which may be older still. Before
any modern Western vernacular handled the subject, there were Alexander
legends, not merely in Greek and Latin, not merely in Æthiopic or Coptic,
but in Armenian and Syriac, in Hebrew and Arabic, in Persian and perhaps
in Turkish: and it is possible that, either indirectly before the Crusades, or
directly through and after them, the legend as told in the West received
additions from the East.
As a whole, however, the Pseudo-Callisthenes, or rather his Latin
interpreter Julius Valerius,[72] was the main source of the mediæval legend
of Alexander. And it is not at all impossible (though the old vague
assertions that this or that mediæval characteristic or development was
derived from the East were rarely based on any solid foundation so far as
their authors knew) that this Alexander legend did, at second-hand, and by
suggesting imitation of its contents and methods, give to some of the most
noteworthy parts of mediæval literature itself an Eastern colouring, perhaps
to some extent even an Eastern substance.

Latin versions.
Still the direct sources of knowledge in the West were
undoubtedly Latin versions of the Pseudo-Callisthenes, one
of which, that ascribed to Julius Valerius, appears, as has been said, to have
existed before the middle of the fourth century, while the other, sometimes
called the Historia de Prœliis, is later by a good deal. Later still, and
representing traditions necessarily different from and later than those of the
Callisthenes book, was the source of the most marvellous elements in the
Alexandreids of the twelfth and subsequent centuries, the Iter ad
Paradisum, in which the conquerer was represented as having journeyed to
the Earthly Paradise itself. After this, connected as it was with dim Oriental
fables as to his approach to the unknown regions north-east of the
Caucasus, and his making gates to shut out Gog, there could be no further
difficulty, and all accretions as to his descent into the sea in a glass cage and
so forth came easily.

Their story.
Nor could they, indeed, be said to be so very different in
nature from at least the opening part of the Callisthenes
version itself. This starts with what seems to be the capital and oldest part
of the whole fabulous story, a very circumstantial account of the fictitious
circumstances of the birth of Alexander. According to this, which is pretty
constantly preserved in all the fabulous versions of the legend (a proof of its
age), Nectanabus, an Egyptian king and magician, having ascertained by
sortilege (a sort of kriegs-spiel on a basin of water with wax ships) that his
throne is doomed, quits the country and goes to Macedonia. There he falls
in love with Olympias, and during the absence of her husband succeeds by
magic arts not only in persuading her that the god Ammon is her lover, but
to some extent in persuading King Philip to believe this, and to accept the
consequences, the part of Ammon having been played of course by
Nectanabus himself. Bucephalus makes a considerable figure in the story,
and Nectanabus devotes much attention to Alexander's education—care
which the Prince repays (for no very discernible reason) by pushing his
father and tutor into a pit, where the sorcerer dies after revealing the
relationship. The rest of the story is mainly occupied by the wars with
Darius and Porus (the former a good deal travestied), and two important
parts, or rather appendices, of it are epistolary communications between
Aristotle and Alexander on the one hand, Alexander and Dindymus

(Dandamis, &c.), King of the Brahmins, on the other. After his Indian
adventures the king is poisoned by Cassander or at his instigation.

Its
Into a framework of this kind fables of the sort above
developments. mentioned had, it will be seen, not the remotest difficulty in
fitting themselves; and it was not even a very long step
onward to make Alexander a Christian, equip him with twelve peers, and
the like. But it has been well demonstrated by M. Paul Meyer that though
the fictitious narrative obtained wide acceptance, and even admission into
their historical compilations by Vincent of Beauvais, Ekkehard, and others,
a more sober tradition as to the hero obtained likewise. If we were more
certain than we are as to the exact age of Quintus Curtius, it would be easier
to be certain likewise how far he represents and how far he is the source of
this more sober tradition. It seems clear that the Latin Alexandreis of Walter
of Châtillon is derived from him, or from a common source, rather than
from Valerius-Callisthenes: while M. Meyer has dwelt upon a Latin
compilation perhaps as old as the great outburst of vernacular romance on
Alexander, preserved only in English MSS. at Oxford and Cambridge, and
probably of English composition, which is a perfectly common-sense
account based upon historians, of various dates and values, indeed, ranging
from Trogus to Isidore of Seville, but all historians and not romancers.
In this path, however, comparatively few cared to tread. The attraction for
the twelfth century lay elsewhere. Sometimes a little of the more authentic
matter was combined with the fabulous, and at least one instance occurs
where the author, probably in the thirteenth century, simply combined, with
a frank audacity which is altogether charming, the popular epitome of
Valerius and the sober compilation just referred to. The better, more
famous, and earlier romantic work is taken straight from, though it by no
means confines itself to, Valerius, the Historia de Prœliis, and the Iter ad
Paradisum. The results of this handling are enormous in bulk, and in minor
varieties; but they are for general purposes sufficiently represented by the
great Roman d'Alixandre[73] in French, the long and interesting English
King Alisaunder,[74] and perhaps the German of Lamprecht. The Icelandic
Alexander-Saga, though of the thirteenth century, is derived from Walter of
Châtillon, and so reflects the comparatively sober side of the story. Of all
the others the Roman d'Alixandre is the most immediate parent.

Alberic of
There was, indeed, an older French poem than this—perhaps
Besançon. two such—and till the discovery of a fragment of it six years
after the publication in 1846 of the great Roman d'Alixandre
itself by Michelant, it was supposed that this poem was the original of
Lamprecht's German (or of the German by whomsoever it be, for some will
have it that Lamprecht is simply Lambert li Tors, v. infra). This, however,
seems not to be the case. The Alberic fragment[75] (respecting which the
philologists, as usual, fight whether it was written by a Besançon man or a
Briançon one, or somebody else) is extremely interesting in some ways.
For, in the first place, it is written in octosyllabic tirades of single
assonance or rhyme, a very rare form; in the second, it is in a dialect of
Provençal; and in the third, the author not only does not follow, but
distinctly and rather indignantly rejects, the story of Nectanabus:—

"Dicunt alquant estrobatour
Quel reys fud filz d'encantatour:
Mentent fellon losengetour;
Mai en credreyz nec un de lour."[76]

But the fragment is unluckily so short (105 lines only) that it is impossible
to say much of its matter.

The
Between this and the Alexandrine poem there is another
decasyllabic version,[77] curiously intermediate in form, date, and
poem. substance. This is in the ordinary form of the older, but not
oldest, chansons de geste, decasyllabic rhymed tirades.
There are only about eight hundred lines of it, which have been eked out, by
about ten thousand Alexandrines from the later and better known poem, in
the MSS. which remain. The decasyllabic part deals with the youth of
Alexander, and though the author does not seem, any more than Alberic, to
have admitted the scandal about Nectanabus, the death of that person is
introduced, and altogether we see a Callisthenic influence. The piece has
been very highly praised for literary merit; it seems to me certainly not
below, but not surprisingly above, the average of the older chansons in this
respect. But in so much of the poem as remains to us no very interesting
part of the subject is attacked.

The great romance is in more fortunate conditions. We have it not indeed
complete (for it does not go to the death of the hero) but in ample measure:
and fortunately it has for full half a century been accessible to the student.
When M. Paul Meyer says that this edition "ne saurait fournir une base
suffisante à une étude critique sur le roman d'Alixandre," he is of course
using the word critique with the somewhat arbitrary limitations of the
philological specialist. The reader who cares for literature first of all—for
the book as a book to read—will find it now complete for his criticism in
the Stuttgart version of the Alixandre, though he cannot be too grateful to
M. Meyer for his second volume as a whole, and for the printing in the first
of Alberic, and the decasyllabic poem, and for the extracts from that of
Thomas of Kent, who, unlike the authors of the great Romance, admitted
the Nectanabus marvels and intrigues.

The great
The story is of such importance in mediæval literature that
Roman some account of the chief English and French embodiments
d'Alixandre. of it may be desirable. The French version, attributed in
shares, which have as usual exercised the adventurous
ingenuity of critics, to two authors, Lambert li Tors, the Crooked (the older
designation "Li Cors," the Short, seems to be erroneous), and Alexander of
Bernay or Paris, occupies in the standard edition of Michelant 550 pages,
holding, when full and with no blanks or notes, 38 lines each. It must,
therefore, though the lines are not continuously numbered, extend to over
20,000. It begins with Alexander's childhood, and though the paternity of
Nectanabus is rejected here as in the decasyllabic version, which was
evidently under the eyes of the authors, yet the enchanter is admitted as
having a great influence on the Prince's education. This portion, filling
about fifteen pages, is followed by another of double the length, describing
a war with Nicolas, King of Cesarea, an unhistorical monarch, who in the
Callisthenic fiction insults Alexander. He is conquered and his kingdom
given to Ptolemy. Next Alexander threatens Athens, but is turned from his
wrath by Aristotle; and coming home, prevents his father's marriage with
Cleopatra, who is sent away in disgrace. And then, omitting the poisoning
of Philip by Olympias and her paramour, which generally figures, the
Romance goes straight to the war with Darius. This is introduced (in a
manner which made a great impression on the Middle Ages, as appears in a
famous passage of our wars with France[78]) by an insulting message and

present of childish gifts from the Persian king. Alexander marches to battle,
bathes in the Cydnus, crosses "Lube" and "Lutis," and passing by a
miraculous knoll which made cowards brave and brave men fearful, arrives
at Tarsus, which he takes. The siege of Tyre comes next, and holds a large
place; but a very much larger is occupied by the Fuerres de Gadres ("Foray
of Gaza"), where the story of the obstinate resistance of the Philistine city is
expanded into a kind of separate chanson de geste, occupying 120 pages
and some five thousand lines.
In contradistinction to this prolixity, the visit to Jerusalem, and the two
battles of Arbela and Issus mixed into one, are very rapidly passed over,
though the murder of Darius and Alexander's vengeance for it are duly
mentioned. Something like a new beginning (thought by some to coincide
with a change of authors) then occurs, and the more marvellous part of the
narrative opens. After passing the desert and (for no very clear object)
visiting the bottom of the sea in a glass case, Alexander begins his
campaign with Porus, whom Darius had summoned to his aid. The actual
fighting does not take very long; but there is an elaborate description of the
strange tribes and other wonders of India. Porus fights again in Bactria and
is again beaten, after which Alexander pursues his allies Gog and Magog
and shuts them off by his famous wall. An arrangement with Porus and a
visit to the Pillars of Hercules follow. The return is begun, and marvels
come thicker and thicker. Strange beasts and amphibious men attack the
Greeks. The "Valley from which None Return" presents itself, and
Alexander can only obtain passage for his army by devoting himself,
though he manages to escape by the aid of a grateful devil whom he sets
free from bondage. At the sea-shore sirens beset the host, and numbers
perish; after which hairy horned old men tell them of the three magic
fountains—the Fountain of Youth, the Fountain (visible only once a-year)
of Immortality, and the Fountain of Resurrection. Many monstrous tribes of
enemies supervene; also a Forest of Maidens, kind but of hamadryad nature
—"flower-women," as they have been poetically called. It is only after this
experience that they come to the Fountain of Youth—the Fontaine de
Jouvence—which has left such an indelible impression on tradition.
Treachery had deprived Alexander of access to that of Immortality; and that
of Resurrection has done nothing but restore two cooked fish to life. But
after suffering intense cold, and passing through a rain of blood, the army

arrives at the Jouvence, bathes therein, and all become as men thirty years
old. The fountain is a branch of the Euphrates, the river of Paradise. After
this they come to the Trees of the Sun and Moon—speaking trees which
foretell Alexander's death. Porus hears of this, and when the army returns to
India he picks a quarrel, and the two kings fight. Bucephalus is mortally
wounded; but Porus is killed. The beginnings of treason, plots against
Alexander, and the episode of Queen Candace (who has, however, been
mentioned before) follow. The king marches on Babylon and soars into the
air in a car drawn by griffins. At Babylon there is much fighting; indeed,
except the Foray of Gaza, this is the chief part of the book devoted to that
subject, the Persian and Indian wars having been, as we saw, but lightly
treated. The Amazons are brought in next; but fighting recommences with
the siege of "Defur." An enchanted river, which whosoever drinks he
becomes guilty of cowardice or treachery, follows; and then we return to
Tarsus and Candace, that courteous queen. Meanwhile the traitors Antipater
and "Divinuspater" continue plotting, and though Alexander is warned
against them by his mother Olympias, they succeed in poisoning him. The
death of the king and the regret of his Twelve Peers, to whom he has
distributed his dominions, finish the poem.

Form, &c.
In form this poem resembles in all respects the chansons de
geste. It is written in mono-rhymed laisses of the famous
metre which owes its name and perhaps its popularity to the use of it in this
romance. Part of it at least cannot be later than the twelfth century; and
though in so long a poem, certainly written by more than one, and in all
likelihood by more than two, there must be inequality, this inequality is by
no means very great. The best parts of the poem are the marvels. The
fighting is not quite so good as in the chansons de geste proper; but the
marvels are excellent, the poet relating them with an admirable mixture of
gravity and complaisance, in spirited style and language, and though with
extremely little attention to coherence and verisimilitude, yet with no small
power of what may be called fabulous attraction.

Continuations.
It is also characteristic in having been freely continued. Two
authors, Guy of Cambray and Jean le Nevelois, composed a
Vengeance Alexandre. The Vœux du Paon, which develop some of the
episodes of the main poem, were almost as famous at the time as Alixandre
itself. Here appears the popular personage of Gadiffer, and hence was in

part derived the great prose romance of Perceforest. Less interesting in
itself, but curious as illustrating the tendency to branch up and down to all
parts of a hero's pedigree, is Florimont, a very long octosyllabic poem,
perhaps as old as the twelfth century, dealing with Alexander's grandfather.
[79]

King
The principal and earliest version of the English Alexander
Alexander. is accessible without much difficulty in Weber's Metrical
Romances of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth
Centuries. Its differences from the French original are, however, very well
worth noting. That it only extends to about eight thousand octosyllabic lines
instead of some twenty thousand Alexandrines is enough to show that a
good deal is omitted; and an indication in some little detail of its contents
may therefore not be without interest. It should be observed that besides this
and the Scots Alexander (see note above) an alliterative Romance of
Alexander and Dindymus[80] exists, and perhaps others. But until some one
supplements Mr Ward's admirable Catalogue of Romances in the British
Museum with a similar catalogue for the minor libraries of the United
Kingdom, it will be very difficult to give complete accounts of matters of
this kind.
Our present poem may be of the thirteenth century, and is pretty certainly
not long posterior to it. It begins, after the system of English romances, with
a kind of moral prologue on the various lives and states of men of
"Middelerd." Those who care for good literature and good learning are
invited to hear a noble geste of Alisaundre, Darye, and Pore, with wonders
of worm and beast. After a geographical prologue the story of Nectanabus,
"Neptanabus," is opened, and his determination to revenge himself on
Philip of Macedon explained by the fact of that king having headed the
combination against Egypt. The design on Olympias, and its success, are
very fully expounded. Nectanabus tells the queen, in his first interview with
her, "a high master in Egypt I was"; and about eight hundred lines carry us
to the death of Nectanabus and the breaking of "Bursifal" (Bucephalus) by
the Prince. The episodes of Nicolas (who is here King of Carthage) and of
Cleopatra follow; but when the expedition against Darius is reached, the
mention of "Lube" in the French text seems to have induced the English
poet to carry his man by Tripoli, instead of Cilicia, and bring him to the
oracle of Ammon—indeed in all the later versions of the story the crossing

of the purely fantastic Callisthenic romance with more or less historical
matter is noticeable. The "Bishop" of Ammon, by the way, assures him that
Philip is really his father. The insulting presents follow the siege of Tyre;
the fighting with Darius, though of course much mediævalised, is brought
somewhat more into accordance with the historic account, though still the
Granicus does not appear; the return to Greece and the capture of Thebes
have their place; and the Athens-Aristotle business is also to some extent
critically treated. Then the last battle with Darius comes in: and his death
concludes the first part of the piece in about five thousand lines. It is
noticeable that the "Foray of Gaza" is entirely omitted; and indeed, as above
remarked, it bears every sign of being a separate poem.
The second part deals with "Pore"—in other words, with the Indian
expedition and its wonders. These are copied from the French, but by no
means slavishly. The army is, on the whole, even worse treated by savage
beasts and men on its way to India than in the original; but the handling,
including the Candace episodes, follows the French more closely than in the
first part. The fighting at "Defur," however, like that at Gaza, is omitted;
and the wilder and more mystical and luxuriant parts of the story—the three
Fountains, the Sirens, the flower-maidens, and the like—are either omitted
likewise or handled more prosaically.[81]
One of the most curious things about this poem is that every division—
divisions of which Weber made chapters—begins by a short gnomic piece
in the following style:—

"Day spryng is jolyf tide.
He that can his tyme abyde,
Oft he schal his wille bytyde.
Loth is grater man to chyde."

Characteristic
The treatment of the Alexander story thus well illustrates
s. one way of the mediæval mind with such things—the way
of combining at will incongruous stories, of accepting with
no, or with little, criticism any tale of wonder that it happened to find in
books, of using its own language, applying its own manners, supposing its
own clothing, weapons, and so forth to have prevailed at any period of
history. And further, it shows how the geste theory—the theory of working

out family connections and stories of ancestors and successors—could not
fail to be applied to any subject that at all lent itself to such treatment. But,
on the other hand, this division of the romances of antiquity does not
exhibit the more fertile, the more inventive, the more poetical, and
generally the nobler traits of Middle-Age literature. As will have been
noted, there was little invention in the later versions, the Callisthenic
fictions and the Iter ad Paradisum being, with a few Oriental accretions,
almost slavishly relied upon for furnishing out the main story, though the
"Foray of Gaza," the "Vows of the Peacock," and Florimont exhibit greater
independence. Yet again no character, no taking and lively story, is
elaborated. Nectanabus has a certain personal interest: but he was given to,
not invented by, the Romance writers. Olympias has very little character in
more senses than one: Candace is not worked out: and Alexander himself is
entirely colourless. The fantastic story, and the wonders with which it was
bespread, seem to have absorbed the attention of writers and hearers; and
nobody seems to have thought of any more. Perhaps this was merely due to
the fact that none of the more original genius of the time was directed on it:
perhaps to the fact that the historical element in the story, small as it was,
cramped the inventive powers, and prevented the romancers from doing
their best.

The Tale of
In this respect the Tale of Troy presents a remarkable
Troy. contrast to its great companion—a contrast pervading, and
almost too remarkable to be accidental. Inasmuch as this
part of mediæval dealings with antiquity connects itself with the literary
history of two of the very greatest writers of our own country, Chaucer and
Shakespeare; with that of one of the greatest writers of Italy, Boccaccio; and
with some of the most noteworthy work in Old French, it has been
thoroughly and repeatedly investigated.[82] But it is so important, and so
characteristic of the time with which we are dealing, that it cannot be
passed over here, though the later developments must only be referred to in
so far as they help us to understand the real originality, which was so long,
and still is sometimes, denied to mediæval writers. In this case, as in the
other, the first striking point is the fact that the Middle Ages, having before
them what may be called, mutatis mutandis, canonical and apocryphal,
authentic and unauthentic, ancient and not ancient, accounts of a great
literary matter, chose, by an instinct which was not probably so wrong as it

has sometimes seemed, the apocryphal in preference to the canonical, the
unauthentic in preference to the authentic, the modern in preference to the
ancient.

Dictys and
As in the case of the Alexander-Saga, their origins were the
Dares. Pseudo-Callisthenes and the Iter ad Paradisum, so in the
Tale of Troy they were the works of two persons whose
literary offspring has obtained for them an amount of attention transcending
to a quite ludicrous extent their literary merit—Dictys Cretensis and Dares
Phrygius, to whom may perhaps be added the less shadowy personage of
the grammarian John Tzetzes. But, as in the other case also, they were by
no means confined to such authorities. If they did not know Homer very
well at first-hand, they did know him: they knew Ovid (who of course
represents Homer, though not Homer only) extremely well: and they knew
Virgil. But partly from the instinct above referred to, of which more
presently, partly from the craze for tracing Western Europe back to the
"thrice-beaten Trojans," it pleased them to regard Homer as a late and
unhistorical calumniator, whose Greek prejudices made him bear false
witness; and to accept the pretensions of Dictys and Dares to be
contemporaries and eyewitnesses of fact. Dictys, a companion of
Idomeneus, was supposed to represent the Greek side, but more fairly than
Homer; and Dares, priest of Hephæstus, the Trojan.
The works of these two worthies, which are both of small compass,—
Dictys occupies rather more than a hundred, Dares rather more than fifty,
pages of the ordinary Teubner classics,[83]—exist at present only in Latin
prose, though, as the Greeks were more expert and inventive forgers than
the Romans, it is possible, if not even highly probable, that both were, and
nearly certain that Dictys was, originally Greek at least in language. Dictys,
the older pretty certainly, is introduced by a letter to a certain Quintus
Aradius from Lucius Septimius, who informs "his Rufinus" and the world,
with a great deal of authority and learning, that the book had been written
by Dictys in Punic letters, which Cadmus and Agenor had then made of
common use in Greece; that some shepherds found the manuscript written
on linden-bark paper in a tin case at his tomb at Gnossus; that their landlord
turning the Punic letters into Greek (which had always been the language),
gave it to Nero the Emperor, who rewarded him richly; and that he,
Septimius, having by chance got the book into his hands, thought it worth

while to translate it into Latin, both for the sake of making the true history
known and "ut otiosi animi desidiam discuteremus." The Dares volume is
more ambitious, and purports to be introduced by no less a person than
Cornelius Nepos to no less a person than Sallustius Crispus, and to have
been "faithfully translated" by the former from MS. in the very hand of
Dares, which he found at Athens, in order to correct the late and fabulous
authority of Homer, who actually makes gods fight with men!

The Dares
It will be, of course, obvious to the merest tyro in criticism
story. that these prefaces bear "forgery" on the very face of them.
The first is only one of those innumerable variants of the
genesis of a fiction which Sir Walter Scott has so pleasantly summarised in
one of his introductions; and the phrase quoted about animi otiosi desidiam
is a commonplace of mediæval bookmaking. The second, more cleverly
arranged, exposes itself to the question how far, putting the difficulty about
writing aside, an ancient Greek MS. of the kind could possibly have
escaped the literary activity of many centuries of Athenian wits and
scholars, to fall into the hands of Cornelius Nepos. The actual age and
origin of the two have, of course, occupied many modern scholars; and the
favourite opinion seems to be that Dictys may have been originally written
by some Greek about the time of Nero (the Latin translation cannot well be
earlier than the fourth century and may be much later), while Dares may
possibly be as late as the twelfth. Neither book is of the very slightest
interest intrinsically. Dictys (the full title of whose book is Ephemeris Belli
Trojani) is not only the longer but the better written of the two. It contains
no direct "set" at Homer; and may possibly preserve traits of some value
from the lost cyclic writers. But it was not anything like such a favourite
with the Middle Ages as Dares. Dictys had contented himself with
beginning at the abduction of Helen; Dares starts his De Excidio Trojæ with
the Golden Fleece, and excuses the act of Paris as mere reprisals for the
carrying off of Hesione by Telamon. Antenor having been sent to Greece to
demand reparation and rudely treated, Paris makes a regular raid in
vengeance, and so the war begins with a sort of balance of cause for it on
the Trojan side. Before the actual fighting, some personal descriptions of
the chief heroes and heroines are given, curiously feeble and strongly tinged
with mediæval peculiarities, but thought to be possibly derived from some

similar things attributed to the rhetorician Philostratus at the end of the third
century. And among these a great place is given to Troilus and "Briseida."
Nearly half the book is filled with these preliminaries, with an account of
the fruitless embassy of Ulysses and Diomed to Troy, and with enumerating
the forces and allies of the two parties. But when Dares gets to work he
proceeds with a rapidity which may be partly due to the desire to contradict
Homer. The landing and death of Protesilaus, avenged to some extent by
Achilles, the battle in which Hector slays Patroclus (to whom Dares adds
Meriones), and that at the ships, are all lumped together; and the funerals of
Protesilaus and Patroclus are simultaneously celebrated. Palamedes begins
to plot against Agamemnon. The fighting generally goes much against the
Greeks; and Agamemnon sues for a three years' truce, which is granted
despite Hector's very natural suspicion of such an uncommonly long time. It
is skipped in a line; and then, the fighting having gone against the Trojans,
they beg for a six months' truce in their turn. This is followed by a twelve
days' fight and a thirty days' truce asked by the Greeks. Then comes
Andromache's dream, the fruitless attempt to prevent Hector fighting, and
his death at the hands of Achilles. After more truces, Palamedes supplants
Agamemnon, and conducts the war with pretty good success. Achilles sees
Polyxena at the tomb of Hector, falls in love with her, demands her hand,
and is promised it if he can bring about peace. In the next batch of fighting,
Palamedes kills Deiphobus and Sarpedon, but is killed by Paris; and in
consequence a fresh battle at the ships and the firing of them takes place,
Achilles abstaining, but Ajax keeping up the battle till (natural) night.
Troilus then becomes the hero of a seven days' battle followed by the usual
truce, during which Agamemnon tries to coax Achilles out of the sulks, and
on his refusal holds a great council of war. When next tempus pugnæ
supervenit (a stock phrase of the book) Troilus is again the hero, wounds
everybody, including Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Diomed, and very
reasonably opposes a six months' armistice which his father grants. At its
end he again bears all before him; but, killing too many Myrmidons, he at
last excites Achilles, who, though at first wounded, kills him at last by
wounding his horse, which throws him. Memnon recovers the body of
Troilus, but is himself killed. The death of Achilles in the temple of Apollo
(by ambush, but, of course, with no mention of the unenchanted heel), and
of Ajax and Paris in single fight, leads to the appearance of the Amazons,

who beat the Greeks, till Penthesilea is killed by Neoptolemus. Antenor,
Æneas, and others urge peace, and on failing to prevail with Priam, begin to
parley with the Greeks. There is no Trojan horse, but the besiegers are
treacherously introduced at a gate ubi extrinsecus portam equi sculptum
caput erat. Antenor and Æneas receive their reward; but the latter is
banished because he has concealed Polyxena, who is massacred when
discovered by Neoptolemus. Helenus, Cassandra, and Andromache go free:
and the book ends with the beautifully precise statements that the war,
truces and all, lasted ten years, six months, and twelve days; that 886,000
men fell on the Greek side, and 676,000 on the Trojan; that Æneas set out in
twenty-two ships ("the same with which Paris had gone to Greece," says the
careful Dares), and 3400 men, while 2500 followed Antenor, and 1200
Helenus and Andromache.

Its absurdity.
This bald summary is scarcely balder than the book itself,
which also, as can be seen from the summary, and would be
more fully seen from the book, has no literary merit of any kind. It reads
more like an excessively uninspired précis of a larger work than like
anything else—a précis in which all the literary merit has, with unvarying
infelicity, been omitted. Nothing can be more childish than the punctilious
euhemerism by which all the miraculous elements of the Homeric story are
blinked or explained away, unless it be the painstaking endeavour simply to
say something different from Homer, or the absurd alternation of fighting
and truces, in which each party invariably gives up its chance of finishing
the war at the precise time at which that chance is most flourishing, and
which reads like a humorous travesty of the warfare of some historic
periods with all the humour left out.

Its
Nevertheless it is not really disgraceful to the Romantic
capabilities. period that it fastened so eagerly on this sorriest of
illegitimate epitomes.[84] Very few persons at that time were
in case to compare the literary merit of Homer—even that of Ovid and
Virgil—with the literary merit of these bald pieces of bad Latin prose.
Moreover, the supernatural elements in the Homeric story, though very
congenial to the temper of the Middle Age itself, were presented and
ascribed in such a fashion that it was almost impossible for that age to adopt
them. Putting aside a certain sentimental cult of "Venus la déesse d'amors,"
there was nothing of which the mediæval mind was more tranquilly

convinced than that "Jubiter," "Appollin," and the rest were not mere fond
things vainly invented, but actual devils who had got themselves
worshipped in the pagan times. It was impossible for a devout Christian
man, whatever pranks he might play with his own religion, to represent
devils as playing the part of saints and of the Virgin, helping the best
heroes, and obtaining their triumph. Nor, audacious as was the faculty of
"transfer" possessed by the mediæval genius, was it easy to Christianise the
story in any other way. It is perhaps almost surprising that, so far as I know
or remember, no version exists representing Cassandra as a holy and injured
nun, making Our Lady play the part of Venus to Æneas, and even punishing
the sacrilegious Diomed for wounding her. But I do not think I have heard
of such a version (though Sir Walter has gone near to representing
something parallel in Ivanhoe), and it would have been a somewhat violent
escapade for even a mediæval fancy.
So, with that customary and restless ability to which we owe so much, and
which has been as a rule so much slighted, it seized on the negative
capacities of the story. Dares gives a wretched painting, but a tolerable
canvas and frame. Each section of his meagre narrative is capable of being
worked out by sufficiently busy and imaginative operators into a complete
roman d'aventures: his facts, if meagre and jejune, are numerous. The raids
and reprisals in the cases of Hesione and Helen suited the demands of the
time; and, as has been hinted, the singular interlardings of truce and war,
and the shutting up of the latter into so many days' hand-to-hand fighting,—
with no strategy, no care for communications, no scientific nonsense of any
kind,—were exactly to mediæval taste.

Troilus and
Above all, the prominence of new heroes and heroines,
Briseida. about whom not very much was said, and whose gestes the
mediæval writer could accordingly fill up at his own will,
with the presentation of others in a light different from that of the classical
accounts, was a godsend. Achilles, as the principal author of the "Excidium
Trojæ" (the title of the Dares book, and after it of others), must be
blackened; and though Dares himself does not contain the worst accusations
of the mediæval writers against the unshorn son of the sea-goddess, it clears
the way for them by taking away the excuse of the unjust deprivation of
Briseis. From this to making him not merely a factious partisan, but an
unfair fighter, who mobs his enemies half to death with Myrmidons before

he engages them himself, is not far. On the other hand, Troilus, a mere
name in the older stories, offers himself as a hero. And for a heroine, the
casual mention of the charms of Briseida in Dares started the required
game. Helen was too puzzling, as well as too Greek; Andromache only a
faithful wife; Cassandra a scolding sorceress; Polyxena a victim. Briseida
had almost a clear record, as after the confusion with Chryseis (to be altered
in name afterwards) there was very little personality left in her, and she
could for that very reason be dealt with as the romancers pleased.
In the subsequent and vernacular handling of the story the same difference
of alternation is at first perceived as that which appears in the Alexander
legend. The sobriety of Gautier of Châtillon's Alexandreis is matched and
its Latinity surpassed by the Bellum Trojanum of our countryman Joseph of
Exeter, who was long and justly praised as about the best mediæval writer
of classical Latin verse. But this neighbourhood of the streams of history
and fiction ceases much earlier in the Trojan case, and for very obvious
reasons. The temperament of mediæval poets urged them to fill in and fill
out: the structure of the Daretic epitome invited them to do so: and they
very shortly did it.

The Roman de
After some controversy, the credit of first "romancing" the
Troie. Tale of Troy has been, it would seem justly and finally,
assigned to Benoît de Sainte-More. Benoît, whose
flourishing time was about 1160, who was a contemporary and rival of
Wace, and who wrote a chronicle of Normandy even longer than his Troy-
book, composed the latter in more than thirty thousand octosyllabic lines,
an expansion of the fifty pages of Dares, which stands perhaps almost alone
even among the numerous similar feats of mediæval bards. He has helped
himself freely with matter from Dictys towards the end of his work; but, as
we have seen, even this reinforcement could not be great in bulk.
Expansion, however, so difficult to some writers, was never in the least a
stumbling-block to the trouvère. It was rather a bottomless pit into which he
fell, traversing in his fall lines and pages with endless alacrity of sinning.
Not that Benoît is by any means a person to be contemptuously spoken of.
In the first place, as we shall see presently, he was for many hundred years
completely and rather impudently robbed of his fame; in the second, he is
the literary ancestor of far greater men than himself; and in the third, his

verse, though not free from the besetting sin of its kind, and especially of
the octosyllabic variety—the sin of smooth but insignificant fluency—is
always pleasant, and sometimes picturesque. Still there is no doubt that at
present the second claim is the strongest with us; and that if Benoît de
Sainte-More had not, through his plagiarist Colonna, been the original of
Boccaccio and Chaucer and Shakespeare, he would require little more than
a bare mention here.

The phases of
Dares, as we have seen, mentions Briseida, and extols her
Cressid. beauty and charm: she was, he says, "beautiful, not of lofty
stature, fair, her hair yellow and silky, her eyebrows joined,
her eyes lively, her body well proportioned, kind, affable, modest, of a
simple mind, and pious." He also mightily extols Troilus; but he does not
intimate any special connection between the two, or tell the story of
"Cressid," which indeed his followers elaborated in terms not altogether
consistent with some of the above laudatory epithets. Tzetzes, who with
some others gives her the alternative name of Hippodamia, alters her
considerably, and assigns to her tall stature, a white complexion, black hair,
as well as specially comely breasts, cheeks, and nose, skill in dress, a
pleasant smile, but a distinct tendency to "arrogance." Both these writers,
however, with Joseph of Exeter and others, seem to be thinking merely of
the Briseis whom we know from Homer as the mistress of Achilles, and do
not connect her with Calchas, much less with Troilus. What may be said
with some confidence is that the confusion of Briseida with the daughter of
Calchas and the assignment of her to Troilus as his love originated with
Benoît de Sainte-More. But we must perhaps hesitate a little before
assigning to him quite so much credit as has sometimes been allowed him.
Long before Shakespeare received the story in its full development (for
though he does not carry it to the bitter end in Troilus and Cressida itself,
the allusion to the "lazar kite of Cressid's kind" in Henry V. shows that he
knew it) it had reached that completeness through the hands of Boccaccio,
Chaucer, and Henryson, the least of whom was capable of turning a
comparatively barren donnée into a rich possession, and who as a matter of
fact each added much. We do not find in the Norman trouvère, and it would
be rather wonderful if we did find, the gay variety of the Filostrato and its
vivid picture of Cressid as merely passionate, Chaucer's admirable Pandarus
and his skilfully blended heroine, or the infinite pathos of Henryson's final

interview. Still, all this great and moving romance would have been
impossible without the idea of Cressid's successive sojourn in Troy and the
Greek camp, and of her successive courtship by Troilus and by Diomed.
And this Benoît really seems to have thought of first. His motives for
devising it have been rather idly inquired into. For us it shall be sufficient
that he did devise it.
By an easy confusion with Chryses and Chryseis—half set right afterwards
in the change from Briseida to Griseida in Boccaccio and Creseide in
Chaucer—he made his heroine the daughter of Calchas. The priest, a traitor
to Troy but powerful with the Greeks, has left his daughter in the city and
demands her—a demand which, with the usual complacency noticed above
as characterising the Trojans in Dares himself, is granted, though they are
very angry with Calchas. But Troilus is already the damsel's lover; and a
bitter parting takes place between them. She is sent, gorgeously equipped,
to the Greeks; and it happens to be Diomed who receives her. He at once
makes the fullest declarations—for in nothing did the Middle Age believe
more fervently than in the sentiment,

"Who ever loved that loved not at first
sight?"

But Briseida, with a rather excessive politeness, and leaving him a good
deal of hope, informs him that she has already a fair friend yonder. Whereat,
as is reasonable, he is not too much discouraged. It must be supposed that
this is related to Troilus, for in the next fight he, after Diomed has been
wounded, reproaches Briseida pretty openly. He is not wrong, for Briseida
weeps at Diomed's wound, and (to the regret and reproof of her historian,
and indeed against her own conscience) gives herself to the Greek, or
determines to do so, on the philosophical principle that Troilus is lost to her.
Achilles then kills Troilus himself, and we hear no more of the lady.
The volubility of Benoît assigns divers long speeches to Briseida, in which
favourable interpreters have seen the germ of the future Cressid; and in
which any fair critic may see the suggestion of her. But it is little more than
a suggestion. Of the full and masterly conception of Cressid as a type of
woman which was afterwards reached, Troilus, and Diomed, and Pandarus,
and the wrath of the gods were essential features. Here Troilus is a shadow,

Diomed not much more, Pandarus non-existent, the vengeance of Love on a
false lover unthought of. Briseida, though she has changed her name, and
parentage, and status, is still, as even the patriotic enthusiasm of MM.
Moland and d'Héricault (the first who did Benoît justice) perceives, the
Briseis of Homer, a slave-girl who changes masters, and for her own
pleasure as well as her own safety is chiefly anxious to please the master
that is near. The vivifying touch was brought by Boccaccio, and Boccaccio
falls out of our story.

The Historia
But between Benoît and Boccaccio there is another
Trojana. personage who concerns us very distinctly. Never was there
such a case, even in the Middle Ages, when the absence of
printing, of public libraries, and of general knowledge of literature made
such things easy, of sic vos non vobis as the Historia Trojana of Guido de
Columnis, otherwise Guido delle Colonne, or Guido Colonna, of Messina.
This person appears to have spent some time in England rather late in the
thirteenth century; and there, no doubt, he fell in with the Roman de Troie.
He wrote—in Latin, and thereby appealing to a larger audience than even
French could appeal to—a Troy-book which almost at once became widely
popular. The MSS. of it occur by scores in the principal libraries of Europe;
it was the direct source of Boccaccio, and with that writer's Filostrato of
Chaucer, and it formed the foundation of almost all the known Troy-books
of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Benoît being completely forgotten.
Yet recent investigation has shown that Guido not merely adapted Benoît in
the usual mediæval fashion, but followed him so closely that his work
might rather be called translation than adaptation. At any rate, beyond a few
details he has added nothing to the story of Troilus and Cressida as Benoît
left it, and as, in default of all evidence to the contrary, it is only fair to
conclude that he made it.
From the date, 1287, of Guido delle Colonne's version, it follows
necessarily that all the vernacular Troy-books—our own Destruction of
Troy,[85] the French prose romance of Troilus,[86] &c., not to mention
Lydgate and others—fall like Boccaccio and Chaucer out of the limits of
this volume. Nor can it be necessary to enter into detail as to the other
classical French romances, the Roman de Thèbes, the Roman d'Enéas, the
Roman de Jules César, Athis and Profilias, and the rest;[87] while something
will be said of the German Æneid of H. von Veldeke in a future chapter.

The capital examples of the Alexandreid and the Iliad, as understood by the
Middle Ages, not only must but actually do suffice for our purpose.

Meaning of the
And we see from them very well not merely in what light
classical the Middle Ages regarded the classical stories, but also to
romance. what extent the classical stories affected the Middle Ages.
This latter point is of the more importance in that even yet
the exact bearing and meaning of the Renaissance in this respect is by no
means universally comprehended. It may be hoped, if not very certainly
trusted, that most educated persons have now got rid of the eighteenth-
century notion of mediæval times as being almost totally ignorant of the
classics themselves, a notion which careful reading of Chaucer alone should
be quite sufficient to dispel. The fact of course is, that all through the
Middle Ages the Latin classics were known, unequally but very fairly in
most cases, while the earlier Middle Ages at least were by no means
ignorant of Greek.
But although there was by no means total ignorance, there was what is to us
a scarcely comprehensible want of understanding. To the average mediæval
student, perhaps to any mediæval student, it seems seldom or never to have
occurred that the men of whom he was reading had lived under a
dispensation so different from his own in law and in religion, in politics and
in philosophy, in literature and in science, that an elaborate process of
readjustment was necessary in order to get at anything like a real
comprehension of them. Nor was he, as a rule, able—men of transcendent
genius being rather rare, amid a more than respectable abundance of men of
talent—to take them, as Chaucer did to a great extent, Dante more intensely
though less widely, and Shakespeare (but Shakespeare had already felt the
Renaissance spirit) fully and perfectly, on the broad ground of humanity, so
that anachronisms, and faults of costume, matter not one jot to any one but
a pedant or a fool. When he came to something in the story—something in
sentiment, manners, religion, what not—which was out of the range of his
own experience, he changed it into something within the range of his own
experience. When the whole story did not lend itself to the treatment which
he wished to apply, he changed it, added to it, left out from it, without the
slightest scruple. He had no more difficulty in transforming the disciplined
tactic of the Macedonian phalanx into a series of random chevauchées than
in adjusting the much more congenial front-fighting of Greeks and Trojans

to his own ideas; and it cost him little more to engraft a whole brand-new
romantic love-story on the Tale of Troy than to change the historical siege
of Gaza into a Fuerres de Gadres, of which Aimeri of Narbonne or Raoul
de Cambrai would have been the appropriate hero. Sometimes, indeed, he
simply confounded Persians and Saracens, just as elsewhere he confounded
Saracens and Vikings; and he introduced high priests of heathen divinities
as bishops, with the same sang froid with which long afterwards the
translators of the Bible founded an order of "dukes" in Edom.
A study of antiquity conducted in such a fashion could hardly have coloured
mediæval thought with any real classicism, even if it had been devoted to
much more genuine specimens of antiquity than the semi-Oriental medley
of the Pseudo-Callisthenes and the bit of bald euhemerism which had better
have been devoted to Hephæstus than ascribed to his priest. But, by another
very curious fact, the two great and commanding examples of the Romance
of Antiquity were executed each under the influence of the flourishing of
one of the two mightiest branches of mediæval poetry proper. When Alberic
and the decasyllabist (whoever he was) wrote, the chanson de geste was in
the very prime of its most vigorous manhood, and the Roman d'Alixandre
accordingly took not merely the outward form, but the whole spirit of the
chanson de geste itself. And when Benoît de Sainte-More gave the first
shapings of the great story of Troilus and Cressida out of the lifeless
rubbish-heap of Dares, it was at the precise minute when also, in hands
known or unknown, the greater story of Arthur and Gawain, of Lancelot
and Guinevere, was shaping itself from materials probably even scantier.
Even Guido of the Columns, much more Boccaccio, had this story fully
before them; and Cressida, when at last she becomes herself, has, if nothing
of the majesty of Guinevere, a good deal of Iseult—an Iseult more faithless
to love, but equally indifferent to anything except love. As Candace in
Alexander has the crude though not unamiable naturalism of a chanson
heroine, so Cressid—so even Briseida to some extent—has the
characteristic of the frail angels of Arthurian legend. The cup would have
spilled wofully in her husband's hand, the mantle would scarcely have
covered an inch of her; but though of coarser make, she is of the same
mould with the ladies of the Round Table,—she is of the first creation of the
order of romantic womanhood.

CHAPTER V.
THE MAKING OF ENGLISH AND THE SETTLEMENT OF
EUROPEAN PROSODY.

SPECIAL INTEREST OF EARLY MIDDLE ENGLISH.
DECAY OF ANGLO-SAXON. EARLY MIDDLE
ENGLISH LITERATURE. SCANTINESS OF ITS
CONSTITUENTS. LAYAMON. THE FORM OF THE
'BRUT.' ITS SUBSTANCE. THE 'ORMULUM': ITS
METRE, ITS SPELLING. THE 'ANCREN RIWLE.'
THE 'OWL AND THE NIGHTINGALE.' PROVERBS.
ROBERT OF GLOUCESTER. ROMANCES.
'HAVELOK THE DANE.' 'KING HORN.' THE
PROSODY OF THE MODERN LANGUAGES.
HISTORICAL RETROSPECT. ANGLO-SAXON
PROSODY. ROMANCE PROSODY. ENGLISH
PROSODY. THE LATER ALLITERATION. THE NEW
VERSE. RHYME AND SYLLABIC EQUIVALENCE.
ACCENT AND QUANTITY. THE GAIN OF FORM.
THE "ACCENT" THEORY. INITIAL FALLACIES,
AND FINAL PERVERSITIES THEREOF.

Special
The positive achievements of English literature, during the
interest of period with which this volume deals, are not at first sight
Early Middle great; and all the more finished literary production of the
English.
time, till the extreme end of it, was in French and Latin. But
the work done during this time in getting the English language ready for its
future duties, in equipping it with grammar and prosody, in preparing, so to
speak, for Chaucer, is not only of the first importance intrinsically, but has a
value which is almost unique in general literary history as an example.
Nowhere else have we the opportunity of seeing a language and a literature
in the process of gestation, or at least of a reformation so great as to be

almost equal to new birth. Of the stages which turned Latin through the
Romanic vulgar tongues into Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Provençal,
French, we have the very scantiest remains; and though the Strasburg oaths
and the Eulalia hymn are no doubt inestimable in their way, they supply
exceedingly minute and precarious stepping-stones by which to cross from
Ausonius to the Chanson de Roland. From the earliest literary stages of the
Teutonic tongues we have, except in the case of Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic,
very little wreckage of time; and Anglo-Saxon at least presents the puzzling
characteristic that its earliest remains are, cœteris paribus, nearly as
complete and developed as the earliest remains of Greek. In German itself,
whether High or Low, the change from oldest to youngest is nothing like
the change from the English of Beowulf to the English of Browning. And
though the same process of primordial change as that which we have seen
in English took place certainly in German, and possibly in the Romance
tongues, it is nowhere traceable with anything like the same clearness or
with such gradual development. By the eleventh century at latest in France,
by the end of the twelfth in Germany, verse had taken, in the first case fully,
in the second almost fully, a modern form. In England it was, during the
two hundred years from 1150 to 1350, working itself steadily, and with
ample examples, from pure accent to accentual quantity, and from
alliteration to rhyme. Of this process, and those similar to it in other
countries, we shall give an account which will serve for the whole in the
latter part of this chapter; the actual production and gradual transformation
of English language and literature generally may occupy us in the earlier
part.
It is to be hoped that by this time a middle way, tolerably free from
molestation, may be taken between those historians of English who would
have a great gulf fixed before Chaucer, and those who insist upon absolute
continuity from Cædmon to Tennyson. There must surely be something
between dismissing (as did the best historian of the subject in the last
generation) Anglo-Saxon as "that nocturnal portion of our literature,"
between calling it "impossible to pronounce with certainty whether
anything in it is artistically good or bad,"[88] and thinking it proper, as it has
sometimes been thought, in an examination in English literature, to give
four papers to Cædmon, Ælfric, and Wulfstan, and one to the combined
works of Addison, Pope, Johnson, and Burke. Extravagances of the latter

kind have still, their heyday of reaction not being quite past, a better chance
than extravagances of the former. But both may surely be avoided.

Decay of
The evidence is rendered more easy in the present
Anglo-Saxon. connection by the fact, recognised by the most competent
authorities in First English or Anglo-Saxon itself, that for
some time before the arbitrary line of the Conquest the productive powers
of the literature had been failing, and the language itself was showing signs
of change. No poetry of the first class seems to have been written in it much
after the end of the ninth century, little prose of a very good class after the
beginning of the eleventh; and its inflexions must in time have given way—
were, it is said by some, actually giving way—before the results of the
invasion and assimilation of French and Latin. The Conquest helped; but it
did not wholly cause.
This, however, is no doubt open to argument, and the argument would have
to be conducted mainly if not wholly on philological considerations, with
which we do not here meddle. The indisputable literary facts are that the
canon of pure Anglo-Saxon or Old-English literature closes with the end of
the Saxon Chronicle in 1154, and that the "Semi-Saxon," the "First Middle
English," which then makes its appearance, approximates, almost decade by
decade, almost year by year, nearer and nearer to the modern type. And for
our purpose, though not for the purpose of a history of English Literature
proper, the contemporary French and Latin writing has to be taken side by
side with it.

Early Middle
It is not surprising that, although the Latin literary
English production of the time, especially in history, was at least
Literature. equal to that of any other European country, and though it is
at least probable that some of the greatest achievements of
literature, French in language, are English in nationality, the vernacular
should for long have been a little scanty and a little undistinguished in its
yield. Periods of moulting, of putting on new skins, and the like, are never
periods of extreme physical vigour. And besides, this Anglo-Saxon itself
had (as has been said) been distinctly on the wane as a literary language for
more than a century, while (as has not yet been said) it had never been very
fertile in varieties of profane literature. This infertility is not surprising.
Except at rare periods literature without literary competition and

comparison is impossible; and the Anglo-Saxons had absolutely no modern
literature to compare and compete with. If any existed, their own was far
ahead of it. On the other hand, though the supposed ignorance of Latin and
even Greek in the "dark" ages has long been known to be a figment of
ignorance itself, circumstances connected with, though not confined to, the
concentration of learning and teaching in the clergy brought about a
disproportionate attention to theology. The result was that the completest
Anglo-Saxon library of which we can form any well-based conception
would have contained about ten cases of religious to one of non-religious
books, and would have held in that eleventh but little poetry, and hardly any
prose with an object other than information or practical use.

Scantiness of
It could not be expected that the slowly changing language
its should at once change its habits in this respect. And so, as
constituents. the century immediately before the Conquest had seen little
but chronicles and homilies, leechdoms and laws, that which
came immediately afterwards gave at first no very different products,
except that the laws were wanting, for obvious reasons. Nay, the first, the
largest, and almost the sole work of belles lettres during the first three-
fourths of our period, the Brut of Layamon, is a work of belles lettres
without knowing it, and imagines itself to be a sober history, while its most
considerable contemporaries, the Ormulum and the Ancren Riwle, the
former in verse, the latter in prose, are both purely religious. At the extreme
end of the period the most important and most certain work, Robert of
Gloucester's, is, again, a history in verse. About the same time we have,
indeed, the romances of Havelok and Horn; but they are, like most of the
other work of the time, translations from the French. The interesting Poema
Morale, or "Moral Ode," which we have in two forms—one of the meeting-
point of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, one fifty years later—is almost
certainly older than its earliest extant version, and was very likely pure
Saxon. Only in Nicholas of Guilford's Owl and Nightingale, about 1250,
and perhaps some of the charming Specimens of Lyric Poetry, printed more
than fifty years ago by Mr Wright, with a very few other things, do we find
pure literature—not the literature of education or edification, but the
literature of art and form.

Layamon.
Yet the whole is, for the true student of literature, full
enough of interest, while the best things are not in need of

praising by allowance. Of Layamon mention has already been made in the
chapter on the Arthurian Legend. But his work covers very much more than
the Arthurian matter, and has interests entirely separate from it. Layamon,
as he tells us,[89] derived his information from Bede, Wace, and a certain
Albinus who has not been clearly identified. But he must have added a great
deal of his own, and if it could be decided exactly how he added it, the most
difficult problem of mediæval literature would be solved. Thus in the
Arthurian part, just as we find additions in Wace to Geoffrey, so we find
additions to Wace in Layamon. Where did he get these additions? Was it
from the uncertain "Albinus"? Was it, as Celtic enthusiasts hold, that, living
as he did on Severn bank, he was a neighbour of Wales, and gathered Welsh
tradition? Or was it from deliberate invention? We cannot tell.
Again, we have two distinct versions of his Brut, the later of which is fifty
years or thereabouts younger than the earlier. It may be said that almost all
mediæval work is in similar case. But then the great body of mediæval
work is anonymous; and even the most scrupulous ages have not been
squeamish in taking liberties with the text of Mr Anon. But the author is
named in both these versions, and named differently. In the elder he is
Layamon the son of Leovenath, in the younger Laweman the son of Leuca;
and though Laweman is a mere variant or translation of Layamon, as much
can hardly be said of Leovenath and Leuca. Further, the later version,
besides the changes of language which were in the circumstances
inevitable, omits many passages, besides those in which it is injured or
mutilated, and alters proper names entirely at discretion.
The only explanation of this, though it is an explanation which leaves a
good deal unexplained, is, of course, that the sense both of historical
criticism and of the duty of one writer to another was hardly born. The
curiosity of the Middle Ages was great; their literary faculty, though
somewhat incult and infantine, was great likewise: and there were such
enormous gaps in their positive knowledge that the sharp sense of division
between the certain, the uncertain, and the demonstrably false, which has
grown up later, could hardly exist. It seems to have been every man's desire
to leave each tale a little richer, fuller, handsomer, than he found it: and in
doing this he hesitated neither at the accumulation of separate and
sometimes incongruous stories, nor at the insertion of bits and scraps from
various sources, nor, it would appear, at the addition of what seemed to him

possible or desirable, without troubling himself to examine whether there
was any ground for considering it actual.

The form of
Secondly, Layamon has no small interest of form. The
the Brut. language in which the Brut is written has an exceedingly
small admixture of French words; but it has made a step,
and a long one, from Anglo-Saxon towards English. The verse is still
alliterative, still destitute of any fixed number of syllables or syllabic
equivalents. But the alliteration is weak and sometimes not present at all,
the lines are of less extreme lawlessness in point of length than their older
Saxon representatives, and, above all, there is a creeping in of rhyme. It is
feeble, tentative, and obvious, confined to ostentatious pairs like "brother"
and "other," "might" and "right," "fare" and "care." But it is a beginning:
and we know that it will spread.

Its substance.
In the last comparison, that of matter, Layamon will not
come out ill even if he be tried high. The most obvious trial
is with the work of Chrestien de Troyes, his earlier, though not much earlier,
contemporary. Here the Frenchman has enormous advantages—the
advantage of an infinitely more accomplished scheme of language and
metre, that of some two centuries of finished poetical work before him, that
of an evidently wider knowledge of literature generally, and perhaps that of
a more distinctly poetical genius. And yet Layamon can survive the test. He
is less, not more, subject to the cliché, the stereotyped and stock poetical
form, than Chrestien. If he is far less smooth, he has not the monotony
which accompanies and, so to speak, dogs the "skipping octosyllable"; and
if he cannot, as Chrestien can, frame a set passage or show-piece, he
manages to keep up a diffused interest, and in certain instances—the story
of Rouwènne (Rowena), the Tintagel passage, the speech of Walwain to the
Emperor of Rome—has a directness and simple appeal which cannot be
slighted. We feel that he is at the beginning, while the other in respect of his
own division is nearly at the end: that he has future, capabilities,
opportunities of development. When one reads Chrestien or another earlier
contemporary, Benoît de Sainte-More, the question is, "What can come
after this?" When one reads Layamon the happier question is, "What will
come after this?"

The Ormulum.
The Ormulum and the Ancren Riwle appear to be—the
Its metre. former exactly and the latter nearly of the same date as
Layamon, all being near to 1200. But though they were
"good books," their interest is by no means merely one of edification. That
of the Ormulum[90] is, indeed, almost entirely confined to its form and
language; but it so happens that this interest is of the kind that touches
literature most nearly. Orm or Ormin, who gives us his name, but of whom
nothing else is known, has left in ten thousand long lines or twenty
thousand short couplets a part only of a vast scheme of paraphrase and
homiletic commentary on the Four Gospels (the "four-in-hand of
Aminadab," as he calls them, taking up an earlier conceit), on the plan of
taking a text for each day from its gospel in the calendar. As we have only
thirty-two of these divisions, it is clear that the work, if completed, was
much larger than this. Orm addresses it to Walter, his brother in the flesh as
well as spiritually: the book seems to be written in an Anglian or East
Anglian dialect, and it is at least an odd coincidence that the names Orm
and Walter occur together in a Durham MS. But whoever Orm or Ormin
was, he did two very remarkable things. In the first place, he broke entirely
with alliteration and with any-length lines, composing his poem in a metre
which is either a fifteen-syllabled iambic tetrameter catalectic, or else, as
the reader pleases, a series of distichs in iambic dimeters, alternately
acatalectic and catalectic. He does not rhyme, but his work, in the couplet
form which shows it best, exhibits occasionally the alternation of masculine
and feminine endings. This latter peculiarity was not to take hold in the
language; but the quantified or mainly syllabic arrangement was. It was
natural that Ormin, greatly daring, and being almost the first to dare, should
neither allow himself the principle of equivalence shortly to distinguish
English prosody from the French, which, with Latin, he imitated, nor should
further hamper his already difficult task with rhyme. But his innovation was
great enough, and his name deserves—little positive poetry as there is in his
own book—high rank in the hierarchy of British poets. But for him and
others like him that magnificent mixed harmony, which English almost
alone of languages possesses, which distinguishes it as much from the rigid
syllabic bondage of French as from the loose jangle of merely alliterative
and accentual verse, would not have come in, or would have come in later.
We might have had Langland, but we should not have had Chaucer: we
should have had to console ourselves for the loss of Surrey and Wyatt with

ingenious extravagances like Gawain Douglas's Eighth Prologue; and it is
even possible that when the reaction did come, as it must have come sooner
or later, we might have been bound like the French by the rigid syllable
which Orm himself adopted, but which in those early days only served to
guide and not to fetter.

Its spelling.
His second important peculiarity shows that he must have
been an odd and crotchety creature, but one with sense in his
crotchets. He seems to have been annoyed by mispronunciation of his own
and other work: and accordingly he adopts (with full warning and
explanation) the plan of invariably doubling the consonant after every short
vowel without exception. This gives a most grotesque air to his pages,
which are studded with words like "nemmnedd" (named), "forrwerrpenn"
(to despise), "tunderrstanndenn" (to understand), and so forth. But, in the
first place, it fixes for all time, in a most invaluable manner, the
pronunciation of English at that time; and in the second, it shows that Orm
had a sound understanding of that principle of English which has been set at
nought by those who would spell "traveller" "traveler." He knew that the
tendency, and the, if not warned, excusable tendency, of an English tongue
would be to pronounce this traveeler. It is a pity that knowledge which
existed in the twelfth century should apparently have become partial
ignorance close to the beginning of the twentieth.

The Ancren
The Ancren Riwle[91] has no oddities of this kind, and
Riwle. nothing particularly noticeable in its form, though its easy
pleasant prose would have been wonderful at the time in any
other European nation. Even French prose was only just beginning to take
such form, and had not yet severed itself from poetic peculiarities to
anything like the same extent. But then the unknown author of the Ancren
Riwle had certainly four or five, and perhaps more, centuries of good sound
Saxon prose before him: while St Bernard (if he wrote French prose), and
even Villehardouin, had little or nothing but Latin. I have called him
unknown, and he neither names himself nor is authoritatively named by any
one; while of the guesses respecting him, that which identifies him with
Simon of Ghent is refuted by the language of the book, while that which
assigns it to Bishop Poore has no foundation. But if we do not know who
wrote the book, we know for whom it was written—to wit, for the three

"anchoresses" or irregular nuns of a private convent or sisterhood at Tarrant
Keynes in Dorsetshire.
Later this nunnery, which lasted till the dissolution, was taken under the
Cistercian rule; but at first, and at the time of the book, it was free, the
author advising the inmates, if anybody asked, to say that they were under
"the rule of St James"—i.e., the famous definition, by that apostle, of pure
religion and undefiled. The treatise, which describes itself, or is described in
one of its MSS., as "one book to-dealed into eight books," is of some
length, but singularly pleasing to read, and gives evidence of a very amiable
and sensible spirit in its author, as well as of a pretty talent for writing easy
prose. If he never rises to the more mystical and poetical beauties of
mediæval religion, so he never descends to its ferocities and its puerilities.
The rule, the "lady-rule," he says, is the inward; the outward is only adopted
in order to assist and help the inward: therefore it may and should vary
according to the individual, while the inward cannot. The outward rule of
the anchoresses of Tarrant Keynes was by no means rigorous. They were
three in number; they had lay sisters (practically lady's-maids) as well as
inferior servants. They are not to reduce themselves to bread-and-water
fasting without special direction; they are not to be ostentatious in alms-
giving; they may have a pet cat; haircloth and hedgehog-skins are not for
them; and they are not to flog themselves with briars or leaded thongs.
Ornaments are not to be worn; but a note says that this is not a positive
command, all such things belonging merely to the external rule. Also they
may wash just as often as it is necessary, or as they like!—an item which,
absurd as is the popular notion of the dirt of the Middle Ages, speaks
volumes for the sense and taste of this excellent anonym.
This part is the last or eighth "dole," as the sections are termed; the
remaining seven deal with religious service, private devotion, the Wesen or
nature of anchorites, temptation, confession, penance, penitence, and the
love of God. Although some may think it out of fashion, it is astonishing
how much sense, kindliness, true religion, and useful learning there is in
this monitor of the anchoresses of Tarrant Keynes, which place a man might
well visit in pilgrimage to do him honour. Every now and then, rough as is
his vehicle of speech—a transition medium, endowed neither with the oak-
and-rock strength of Anglo-Saxon nor with the varied gifts of modern
English—he can rise to real and true eloquence, as where he speaks of the

soul and "the heavy flesh that draweth her downwards, yet through the
highship [nobleness] of her, it [the flesh] shall become full light—yea,
lighter than the wind is, and brighter than the sun is, if only it follow her
and draw her not too hard to its own low kind." But though such passages,
good in phrase and rhythm, as well as noble in sense, are not rare, the
pleasant humanity of the whole book is the best thing in it. M. Renan oddly
enough pronounced Ecclesiastes, that voice of the doom of life, to be "le
seul livre aimable" which Judaism had produced. The ages of St Francis and
of the Imitation do not compel us to look about for a seul livre aimable, but
it may safely be said that there is none more amiable in a cheerful human
way than the Ancren Riwle.
It would serve no purpose here to discuss in detail most of the other
vernacular productions of the first half of the thirteenth century in English.
[92] They are almost without exception either religious—the constant
rehandling of the time cannot be better exemplified than by the fact that at
least two paraphrases, one in prose, one in verse, of one of the "doles" of
the Ancren Riwle itself exist—or else moral-scientific, such as the Bestiary,
[93] so often printed. One of the constantly recurring version-paraphrases of
the Scriptures, however—the so-called Story of Genesis and Exodus,[94]
supposed to date from about the middle—has great interest, because here
we find (whether for the first time or not he would be a rash man who
should say, but certainly for almost, if not quite, the first) the famous
"Christabel" metre—iambic dimeter, rhymed with a wide licence of
trisyllabic equivalence. This was to be twice revived by great poets, with
immense consequences to English poetry—first by Spenser in the
Kalendar, and then by Coleridge himself—and was to become one of the
most powerful, varied, and charming of English rhythms. That this metre,
the chief battle-ground of fighting between the accent-men and the
quantity-men, never arose till after rhymed quantitative metre had met
accentual alliteration, and had to a great extent overcome it, is a tell-tale
fact, of which more hereafter. And it is to be observed also that in this same
poem it is possible to discover not a few very complete and handsome
decasyllables which would do no discredit to Chaucer himself.

The Owl and
But the Owl and the Nightingale[95] is another kind of thing.
the In the first place, it appears to be (though it would be rash to
Nightingale. affirm this positively of anything in a form so popular with

the French trouvères as the débat) original and not translated. It bears a
name, that of Nicholas of Guildford, who seems to be the author, and
assigns himself a local habitation at Portesham in Dorsetshire. Although of
considerable length (nearly two thousand lines), and written in very pure
English with few French words, it manages the rhymed octosyllabic couplet
(which by this time had become the standing metre of France for everything
but historical poems, and for some of these) with remarkable precision,
lightness, and harmony. Moreover, the Owl and the Nightingale conduct
their debate with plenty of mother-wit, expressed not unfrequently in
Proverbs.
proverbial form. Indeed proverbs, a favourite form of
expression with Englishmen at all times, appear to have
been specially in favour just then; and the "Proverbs of Alfred"[96]
(supposed to date from this very time), the "Proverbs of Hendyng"[97] a
little later, are not likely to have been the only collections of the kind. The
Alfred Proverbs are in a rude popular metre like the old alliteration much
broken down; those of Hendyng in a six-line stanza (soon to become the
famous ballad stanza) syllabled, though sometimes catalectically, 8 8 6 8 8
6, and rhymed a a b c c b, the proverb and the coda "quod Hendyng" being
added to each. The Owl and the Nightingale is, however, as we might
expect, superior to both of these in poetical merit, as well as to the so-called
Moral Ode which, printed by Hickes in 1705, was one of the first Middle
English poems to gain modern recognition.

Robert of
As the dividing-point of the thirteenth and fourteenth
Gloucester. centuries approaches, the interest of literary work increases,
and requires less and less allowance of historical and
accidental value. This allowance, indeed, is still necessary with the verse
chronicle of Robert of Gloucester,[98] the date of which is fixed with
sufficient certainty at 1298. This book has been somewhat undervalued, in
point of strict literary merit, from a cause rather ludicrous but still real. It
will almost invariably be found that those mediæval books which happen to
have been made known before the formal beginning of scholarship in the
modern languages, are underrated by modern scholars, who not unnaturally
put a perhaps excessive price upon their own discoveries or fosterlings.
Robert of Gloucester's work, with the later but companion Englishing of
Peter of Langtoft by Robert Manning of Brunne, was published by Hearne
in the early part of the last century. The contemporaries of that publication

thought him rude, unkempt, "Gothick": the moderns have usually passed
him by for more direct protégés of their own. Yet there is not a little
attraction in Robert. To begin with, he is the first in English, if not the first
in any modern language, to attempt in the vernacular a general history, old
as well as new, new as well as old. And the opening of him is not to be
despised—

"Engeland is a well good land, I ween
of each land the best,
Yset in the end of the world, as all in
the West:
The sea goeth him all about, he stands
as an isle,
His foes he dares the less doubt but it
be through guile
Of folk of the self land, as men hath y-
seen while."

And in the same good swinging metre he goes on describing the land,
praising its gifts, and telling its story in a downright fashion which is very
agreeable to right tastes. Like almost everybody else, he drew upon
Geoffrey of Monmouth for his early history: but from at least the time of
the Conqueror (he is strongly prejudiced in the matter of Harold) he
represents, if not what we should call solid historical knowledge, at any rate
direct, and for the time tolerably fresh, historical tradition, while as he
approaches his own time he becomes positively historical, and, as in the
case of the Oxford town-and-gown row of 1263, the first Barons' Wars, the
death of the Earl-Marshal, and such things, is a vigorous as well as a
tolerably authoritative chronicler. In the history of English prosody he, too,
is of great importance, being another landmark in the process of
consolidating accent and quantity, alliteration and rhyme. His swinging
verses still have the older tendency to a trochaic rather than the later to an
anapæstic rhythm; but they are, so to speak, on the move, and approaching
the later form. He is still rather prone to group his rhymes instead of
keeping the couplets separate: but as he is not translating from chanson de
geste form, he does not, as Robert of Brunne sometimes does, fall into
complete laisses. I have counted as many as twenty continuous rhymes in

Manning, and there may be more: but there is nothing of that extent in the
earlier Robert.

Romances.
Verse history, however, must always be an awkward and
unnatural form at the best. The end of the thirteenth century
had something better to show in the appearance of romance proper and of
epic. When the study of any department of old literature begins, there is a
natural and almost invariable tendency to regard it as older than it really is;
and when, at the end of the last century, the English verse romances began
to be read, this tendency prevailed at least as much as usual. Later
investigation, besides showing that, almost without exception, they are
adaptations of French originals, has, partly as a consequence of this, shown
that scarcely any that we have are earlier than the extreme end of the
thirteenth century. Among these few that are, however, three of exceptional
interest (perhaps the best three except Gawaine and the Green Knight and
Sir Launfal) may probably be classed—to wit, Horn, Havelok, and the
famous Sir Tristram. As to the last and best known of these, which from its
inclusion among Sir Walter Scott's works has received attention denied to
the rest, it may or may not be the work of Thomas the Rhymer. But whether
it is or not, it can by no possibility be later than the first quarter of the
fourteenth century, while the most cautious critics pronounce both Havelok
the Dane and King Horn to be older than 1300.[99]

Havelok the
It is, moreover, not a mere accident that these three, though
Dane. the authors pretty certainly had French originals before
them, seem most likely to have had yet older English or
Anglo-Saxon originals of the French in the case of Horn and Havelok,
while the Tristram story, as is pointed out in the chapter on the Arthurian
Legend, is the most British in tone of all the divisions of that Legend.
Havelok and Horn have yet further interest because of the curious contrast
between their oldest forms in more ways than one. Havelok is an English
equivalent, with extremely strong local connections and identifications, of
the homelier passages of the French chansons de geste. The hero, born in
Denmark, and orphan heir to a kingdom, is to be put away by his
treacherous guardian, who commits him to Grim the fisherman to be
drowned. Havelok's treatment is hard enough even on his way to the
drowning; but as supernatural signs show his kingship to Grim's wife, and
as the fisherman, feigning to have performed his task, meets with very scant

gratitude from his employer, he resolves to escape from the latter's power,
puts to sea, and lands in England at the place afterwards to be called from
him Grimsby. Havelok is brought up simply as a rough fisher-boy; but he
obtains employment in Lincoln Castle as porter to the kitchen, and much
rough horse-play of the chanson kind occurs. Now it so happens that the
heiress of England, Goldborough, has been treated by her guardian with as
much injustice though with less ferocity; and the traitor seeks to crown his
exclusion of her from her rights by marrying her to the sturdy scullion.
When the two rights are thus joined, they of course prevail, and the two
traitors, after a due amount of hard fighting, receive their doom, Godard the
Dane being hanged, and Godric the Englishman burnt at the stake. This
rough and vigorous story is told in rough and vigorous verse—octosyllabic
couplets, with full licence in shortening, but with no additional syllables
except an occasional double rhyme—in very sterling English, and with
some, though slight, traces of alliteration.

King Horn.
Horn (King Horn, Horn-Child and Maiden Rimnilde, &c.) is
somewhat more courtly in its general outlines, and has less
of the folk-tale about it; but it also has connections with Denmark, and it
turns upon treachery, as indeed do nearly all the romances. Horn, son of a
certain King Murray, is, in consequence of a raid of heathen in ships,
orphaned and exiled in his childhood across the sea, where he finds an
asylum in the house of King Aylmer of Westerness. His love for Aylmer's
daughter Rimenhild and hers for him (he is the most beautiful of men), the
faithfulness of his friend Athulf (who has to undergo the very trying
experience of being made violent love to by Rimenhild under the
impression that he is Horn), and the treachery of his friend Fikenild (who
nearly succeeds in making the princess his own), defray the chief interest of
the story, which is not very long. The good steward Athelbrus also plays a
great part, which is noticeable, because the stewards of Romances are
generally bad. The rhymed couplets of this poem are composed of shorter
lines than those of Havelok. They allow themselves the syllabic licence of
alliterative verse proper, though there is even less alliteration than in
Havelok, and they vary from five to eight syllables, though five and six are
the commonest. The poem, indeed, in this respect occupies a rather peculiar
position. Yet it is all the more valuable as showing yet another phase of the
change.

The first really charming literature in English has, however, still to be
mentioned: and this is to be found in the volume—little more than a
pamphlet—edited fifty years ago for the Percy Society (March 1, 1842) by
Thomas Wright, under the title of Specimens of Lyric Poetry composed in
England in the Reign of Edward the First, from MS. 2253 Harl. in the
British Museum. The first three poems are in French, of the well-known and
by this time far from novel trouvère character, of which those of Thibaut of
Champagne are the best specimens. The fourth—

"Middel-erd for mon wes mad,"

is English, and is interesting as copying not the least intricate of the
trouvère measures—an eleven-line stanza of eight sevens or sixes, rhymed
ab, ab, ab, ab, c, b, c; but moral-religious in tone and much alliterated. The
fifth, also English, is anapæstic tetrameter heavily alliterated, and mono-
rhymed for eight verses, with the stanza made up to ten by a couplet on
another rhyme. It is not very interesting. But with VI. the chorus of sweet
sounds begins, and therefore, small as is the room for extract here, it must
be given in full:—

"Bytuene Mershe and Avoril
When spray beginneth to springe,
The little foul hath hire wyl
On hyre lud to synge:
Ich libbe in love-longinge
For semlokest of alle thynge,
He may me blisse bringe
Icham in hire banndoun.
An hendy hap ichabbe y-hent,
Ichot from hevine it is me sent,
From alle wymmen my love is lent
Ant lyht on Alisoun.

On hew hire her is fayr ynoh
Hire browe bronne, hire eye blake;
With lovsom chere he on me loh;
With middel small ant wel y-make;
Bott he me wille to hire take,

For to buen hire owen make,
Long to lyven ichulle forsake,
Ant feye fallen a-doun.
An hendy hap, &c.

Nihtes when I wenke ant wake,
For-thi myn wonges waxeth won;
Levedi, al for thine sake
Longinge is ylent me on.
In world is non so wytor mon
That al hire bounté telle con;
Heir swyre is whittere than the swon
Ant fayrest may in toune.
An hendy hap, &c.

Icham for wouyng al for-wake,
Wery so water in wore
Lest any reve me my make
Ychabbe y-Ȝyrned Ȝore.
Betere is tholien whyle sore
Then mournen evermore.
Geynest under gore,
Herkene to my roune.
An hendy hap, &c."
The next, "With longyng y am lad," is pretty, though less so: and is in ten-
line stanzas of sixes, rhymed a a b, a a b, b a a b. Those of VIII. are twelve-
lined in eights, rhymed ab, ab, ab, ab, c, d, c, d; but it is observable that
there is some assonance here instead of pure rhyme. IX. is in the famous
romance stanza of six or rather twelve lines, à la Sir Thopas; X. in octaves
of eights alternately rhymed with an envoy quatrain; XI. (a very pretty one)
in a new metre, rhymed a a a b a, b. And this variety continues after a
fashion which it would be tedious to particularise further. But it must be
said that the charm of "Alison" is fully caught up by—

"Lenten ys come with love to toune,
With blosmen ant with bryddes roune,
That al this blisse bringeth;

Dayes-eyes in this dales,
Notes suete of nytengales,
Ilk foul song singeth;"
by a sturdy Praise of Women which charges gallantly against the usual
mediæval slanders; and by a piece which, with "Alison," is the flower of the
whole, and has the exquisite refrain—

"Blow, northerne wynd,
Send thou me my suetyng,
Blow, northerne wynd, blou, blou,
blou"—

Here is Tennysonian verse five hundred years before Tennyson. The "cry"
of English lyric is on this northern wind at last; and it shall never fail
afterwards.

The prosody of
This seems to be the best place to deal, not merely with the
the modern form of English lyric in itself, but with the general subject of
languages. the prosody as well of English as of the other modern
literary languages. A very great[100] deal has been written,
with more and with less learning, with ingenuity greater or smaller, on the
origins of rhyme, on the source of the decasyllabic and other staple lines
and stanzas; and, lastly, on the general system of modern as opposed to
ancient scansion. Much of this has been the result of really careful study,
and not a little of it the result of distinct acuteness; but it has suffered on the
whole from the supposed need of some new theory, and from an
unwillingness to accept plain and obvious facts. These facts, or the most
important of them, may be summarised as follows: The prosody of a
language will necessarily vary according to the pronunciation and
composition of that language; but there are certain general principles of
prosody which govern all languages possessing a certain kinship. These
Historical
general principles were, for the Western branches of the
retrospect. Aryan tongues, very early discovered and formulated by the
Greeks, being later adjusted to somewhat stiffer rules—to
compensate for less force of poetic genius, or perhaps merely because
licence was not required—by the Latins. Towards the end of the classical
literary period, however, partly the increasing importance of the Germanic

and other non-Greek and non-Latin elements in the Empire, partly those
inexplicable organic changes which come from time to time, broke up this
system. Rhyme appeared, no one knows quite how, or why, or whence, and
at the same time, though the general structure of metres was not very much
altered, the quantity of individual syllables appears to have undergone a
complete change. Although metres quantitative in scheme continued to be
written, they were written, as a rule, with more or less laxity; and though
rhyme was sometimes adapted to them in Latin, it was more frequently used
with a looser syllabic arrangement, retaining the divisional characteristics
of the older prosody, but neglecting quantity, the strict rules of elision, and
so forth.

Anglo-Saxon
On the other hand, some of the new Teutonic tongues which
prosody. were thus brought into contact with Latin, and with which
Latin was brought into contact, had systems of prosody of
their own, based on entirely different principles. The most elaborate of
these probably, and the only one from which we have distinct remains of
undoubtedly old matter in considerable quantities, is Anglo-Saxon, though
Icelandic runs it close. A detailed account of the peculiarities of this belongs
to the previous volume: it is sufficient to say here that its great
characteristic was alliteration, and that accent played a large part, to the
exclusion both of definite quantity and of syllabic identity or equivalence.

Romance
While these were the states of things with regard to Latin on
prosody. the one hand, and to the tongues most separated from Latin
on the other, the Romance languages, or daughters of Latin,
had elaborated or were elaborating, by stages which are almost entirely
hidden from us, middle systems, of which the earliest, and in a way the
most perfect, is that of Provençal, followed by Northern French and Italian,
the dialects of the Spanish Peninsula being a little behindhand in elaborate
verse. The three first-named tongues seem to have hit upon the verse of ten
or eleven syllables, which later crystallised itself into ten for French and
eleven for Italian, as their staple measure.[101] Efforts have been made to
father this directly on some classical original, and some authorities have
even been uncritical enough to speak of the connection—this or that—
having been "proved" for these verses or others. No such proof has been
given, and none is possible. What is certain, and alone certain, is that
whereas the chief literary metre of the last five centuries of Latin had been

dactylic and trisyllabic, this, the chief metre of the daughter tongues, and
by-and-by almost their only one, was disyllabic—iambic, or trochaic, as the
case may be, but generally iambic. Rhyme became by degrees an invariable
or almost invariable accompaniment, and while quantity, strictly speaking,
almost disappeared (some will have it that it quite disappeared from
French), a syllabic uniformity more rigid than any which had prevailed,
except in the case of lyric measures like the Alcaic, became the rule. Even
elision was very greatly restricted, though cæsura was pretty strictly
retained, and an additional servitude was imposed by the early adoption in
French of the fixed alternation of "masculine" and "feminine" rhymes—that
is to say, of rhymes with, and rhymes without, the mute e.

English
But the prosody of the Romance tongues is perfectly simple
prosody. and intelligible, except in the one crux of the question how it
came into being, and what part "popular" poetry played in it.
We find it, almost from the first, full-blown: and only minor refinements or
improvements are introduced afterwards. With English prosody it is very
different.[102] As has been said, the older prosody itself, with the older
verse, seems to have to a great extent died out even before the Conquest,
and what verse was written in the alliterative measures afterwards was of a
The later
feeble and halting kind. Even when, as the authors of later
alliteration. volumes of this series will have to show, alliterative verse
was taken up with something like a set purpose during the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, its character was wholly changed, and
though some very good work was written in it, it was practically all literary
exercise. It frequently assumed regular stanza-forms, the lines also
frequently fell into regular quantitative shapes, such as the heroic, the
Alexandrine, and the tetrameter. Above all, the old strict and accurate
combination of a limited amount of alliteration, jealously adjusted to words
important in sense and rhythm, was exchanged for a profusion of alliterated
syllables, often with no direct rhythmical duty to pay, and constantly
leading to mere senseless and tasteless jingle, if not to the positive coining
of fantastic or improper locutions to get the "artful aid."

The new verse.
Meanwhile the real prosody of English had been elaborated,
in the usual blending fashion of the race, by an intricate, yet,
as it happens, an easily traceable series of compromises and naturalisations.
By the end of the twelfth century, as we have seen, rhyme was creeping in

to supersede alliteration, and a regular arrangement of elastic syllabic
equivalents or strict syllabic values was taking the place of the irregular
accented lengths. It does not appear that the study of the classics had
anything directly to do with this: it is practically certain that the influence
on the one hand of Latin hymns and the Church services, and on the other
of French poetry, had very much.

Rhyme and
Rhyme is to the modern European ear so agreeable, if not so
syllabic indispensable, an ornament of verse, that, once heard, it is
equivalence. sure to creep in, and can only be expelled by deliberate and
unnatural crotchet from any but narrative and dramatic
poetry. On the other hand, it is almost inevitable that when rhyme is
expected, the lines which it tips should be reduced to an equal or at any rate
an equivalent length. Otherwise the expectation of the ear—that the final
ring should be led up to by regular and equable rhythm—is baulked. If this
is not done, as in what we call doggerel rhyme, an effect of grotesque is
universally produced, to the ruin of serious poetic effect. With these
desiderata present, though unconsciously present, before them, with the
Latin hymn-writers and the French poets for models, and with Church
music perpetually starting in their memories cadences, iambic or trochaic,
dactylic or anapæstic, to which to set their own verse, it is not surprising
that English poets should have accompanied the rapid changes of their
language itself with parallel rapidity of metrical innovation. Quantity they
observed loosely—quantity in modern languages is always loose: but it
does not follow that they ignored it altogether.

Accent and
Those who insist that they did ignore it, and who painfully
quantity. search for verses of so many "accents," for "sections," for
"pauses," and what not, are confronted with difficulties
throughout the whole course of English poetry: there is hardly a page of that
brilliant, learned, instructive, invaluable piece of wrong-headedness, Dr
Guest's English Rhythms, which does not bristle with them. But at no time
are these difficulties so great as during our present period, and especially at
the close of it. Let any man who has no "prize to fight," no thesis to defend,
take any characteristic piece of Anglo-Saxon poetry and "Alison," place
them side by side, read them aloud together, scan them carefully with the
eye, compare each separately and both together with as many other
examples of poetic arrangement as he likes. He must, I think, be hopelessly

blinded by prejudice if he does not come to the conclusion that there is a
gulf between the systems of which these two poems are examples—that if
the first is "accentual," "sectional," and what not, then these same words are
exactly not the words which ought to be applied to the second.[103] And he
will further see that with "Alison" there is not the slightest difficulty
whatever, but that, on the contrary, it is the natural and all but inevitable
thing to do to scan the piece according to classical laws, allowing only
much more licence of "common" syllables—common in themselves and by
position—than in Latin, and rather more than in Greek.

The gain of
Yet another conclusion may perhaps be risked, and that is
form. that this change of prosody was either directly caused by, or
in singular coincidence was associated with, a great
enlargement of the range and no slight improvement of the quality of
poetry. Anglo-Saxon verse at its best has grandeur, mystery, force, a certain
kind of pathos. But it is almost entirely devoid of sweetness, of all the
lighter artistic attractions, of power to represent other than religious
passion, of adaptability to the varied uses of lyric. All these additional gifts,
and in no slight measure, have now been given; and there is surely an
almost fanatical hatred of form in the refusal to connect the gain with those
changes, in vocabulary first, in prosody secondly, which have been noted.
For there is not only the fact, but there is a more than plausible reason for
the fact. The alliterative accentual verse of indefinite length is obviously
unsuited for all the lighter, and for some of the more serious, purposes of
verse. Unless it is at really heroic height (and at this height not even
Shakespeare can keep poetry invariably) it must necessarily be flat,
awkward, prosaic, heavy, all which qualities are the worst foes of the
Muses. The new equipments may not have been indispensable to the poet's
soaring—they may not be the greater wings of his song, the mighty pinions
that take him beyond Space and Time into Eternity and the Infinite. But
they are most admirable talaria, ankle-winglets enabling him to skim and
scud, to direct his flight this way and that, to hover as well as to tower, even
to run at need as well as to fly.
That a danger was at hand, the danger of too great restriction in the syllabic
direction, has been admitted. The greatest poet of the fourteenth century in
England—the greatest, for the matter of that, from the beginning till the
sixteenth—went some way in this path, and if Chaucer's English followers

had been men of genius we might have been sorely trammelled. Fortunately
Lydgate and Occleve and Hawes showed the dangers rather than the
attractions of strictness, and the contemporary practice of alliterative
irregulars kept alive the appetite for liberty. But at this time—at our time—
it was restriction, regulation, quantification, metrical arrangement, that
English needed; and it received them.

The "accent"
These remarks are of course not presented as a complete
theory. account, even in summary, of English, much less of
European prosody. They are barely more than the heads of
such a summary, or than indications of the line which the inquiry might, and
in the author's view should, take. Perhaps they may be worked out—or
rather the working out of them may be published—more fully hereafter. But
for the present they may possibly be useful as a protest against the "accent"
and "stress" theories which have been so common of late years in regard to
English poetry, and which, though not capable of being applied in quite the
same fashion to the Romance languages, have had their counterparts in
attempts to decry the application of classical prosody (which has never been
very well understood on the Continent) to modern tongues. No one can
speak otherwise than respectfully of Dr Guest, whose book is certainly one
of the most patient and ingenious studies of the kind to be found in any
literature, and whose erudition, at a time when such erudition needed far
greater efforts than now, cannot be too highly praised. But it is a besetting
sin or disease of Englishmen in all matters, after pooh-poohing innovation,
to go blindly in for it; and I cannot but think that Dr Guest's accentual
theory, after being for years mainly neglected, has, for years again, been
altogether too greedily swallowed. It is not of course a case necessarily of
want of scholarship, or want of ear, for there are few better scholars or poets
than Mr Robert Bridges, who, though not a mere Guestite, holds theories of
prosody which seem to me even less defensible than Guest's. But it is, I
think, a case of rather misguided patriotism, which thinks it necessary to
invent an English prosody for English poems.

Initial
This is surely a mistake. Allowances in degree, in shade, in
local colour, there must of course be in prosody as in other

fallacies. things. The developments, typical and special, of English
prosody in the nineteenth century cannot be quite the same
as those of Greek two thousand years ago, or of French to-day. But if, as I
see not the slightest reason for doubting, prosody is not an artificially
acquired art but a natural result of the natural desires, the universal organs
of humanity, it is excessively improbable that the prosodic results of nations
so nearly allied to each other, and so constantly studying each other's work,
as Greeks, Romans, and modern Europeans, should be in any great degree
different. If quantity, if syllabic equivalence and so forth, do not display
themselves in Anglo-Saxon or in Icelandic, it must be remembered that the
poetry of these nations was after all comparatively small, rather isolated,
and in the conditions of extremely early development—a childish thing to
which there is not the slightest rhyme or reason for straining ourselves to
assimilate the things of manhood. That accent modified English prosody
nobody need deny; there is no doubt that the very great freedom of
equivalence—which makes it, for instance, at least theoretically possible to
compose an English heroic line of five tribrachs—and the immense
predominance of common syllables in the language, are due in some degree
to a continuance of accentual influence.

And final
But to go on from this, as Dr Guest and some of his
perversities followers have done, to the subjection of the whole
thereof. invaluable vocabulary of classical prosody to a sort of
præmunire, to hold up the hands in horror at the very name
of a tribrach, and exhibit symptoms of catalepsy at the word catalectic—to
ransack the dictionary for unnatural words or uses of words like "catch,"
and "stop," and "pause," where a perfectly clear and perfectly flexible
terminology is ready to your hand—this does seem to me in another sense a
very childish thing indeed, and one that cannot be too soon put away. It is
no exaggeration to say that the extravagances, the unnatural contortions of
scansion, the imputations of irregularity and impropriety on the very
greatest poets with which Dr Guest's book swarms, must force themselves
on any one who studies that book thoroughly and impartially. When theory
leads to the magisterial indorsement of "gross fault" on some of the finest
passages of Shakespeare and Milton, because they "violate" Dr Guest's
privy law of "the final pause"; when we are told that "section 9," as Dr
Guest is pleased to call that admirable form of "sixes," the anapæst

followed by two iambs,[104] one of the great sources of music in the ballad
metre, is "a verse which has very little to recommend it"; when one of
Shakespeare's secrets, the majestic full stop before the last word of the line,
is black-marked as "opposed to every principle of accentual rhythm," then
the thing becomes not so much outrageous as absurd. Prosody respectfully
and intelligently attempting to explain how the poets produce their best
things is useful and agreeable: when it makes an arbitrary theory
beforehand, and dismisses the best things as bad because they do not agree
therewith, it becomes a futile nuisance. And I believe that there is no period
of our literature which, when studied, will do more to prevent or correct
such fatuity than this very period of Early Middle English.

CHAPTER VI.
MIDDLE HIGH GERMAN POETRY.

POSITION OF GERMANY. MERIT OF ITS POETRY.
FOLK-EPICS: THE 'NIBELUNGENLIED.' THE
'VOLSUNGA SAGA.' THE GERMAN VERSION.
METRES. RHYME AND LANGUAGE. 'KUDRUN.'
SHORTER NATIONAL EPICS. LITERARY POETRY.
ITS FOUR CHIEF MASTERS. EXCELLENCE, BOTH
NATURAL AND ACQUIRED, OF GERMAN VERSE.
ORIGINALITY OF ITS ADAPTATION. THE
PIONEERS: HEINRICH VON VELDEKE.
GOTTFRIED OF STRASBURG. HARTMANN VON
AUE. 'EREC DER WANDERÆRE' AND 'IWEIN.'
LYRICS. THE "BOOKLETS." 'DER ARME
HEINRICH.' WOLFRAM VON ESCHENBACH.
'TITUREL.' 'WILLEHALM.' 'PARZIVAL.' WALTHER
VON DER VOGELWEIDE. PERSONALITY OF THE
POETS. THE MINNESINGERS GENERALLY.

Position of
It must have been already noticed that one main reason for
Germany. the unsurpassed literary interest of this present period is that
almost all the principal European nations contribute, in their
different ways, elements to that interest. The contribution is not in all cases
one of positive literary production, of so much matter of the first value
actually added to the world's library. But in some cases it is; and in the
instance to which we come at present it is so in a measure approached by no
other country except France and perhaps Iceland. Nor is Germany,[105] as
every other country except Iceland may be said to be, wholly a debtor or
vassal to France herself. Partly she is so; of the three chief divisions of
Middle High German poetry (for prose here practically does not count), the
folk-epic, the "art-epic," as the Germans themselves not very happily call it,
and the lyric—the second is always, and the third to no small extent, what

might punningly be called in copyhold of France. But even the borrowed
material is treated with such intense individuality of spirit that it almost
acquires independence; and part of the matter, as has been said, is not
borrowed at all.

Merit of its
It has been pointed out that for some curious reason French
poetry. literary critics, not usually remarkable for lack of national
vanity, have been by no means excessive in their laudations
of the earlier literature of their country. The opposite is the case with those
of Germany, and the rather extravagant patriotism of some of their
expressions may perhaps have had a bad effect on some foreign readers. It
cannot, for instance, be otherwise than disgusting to even rudimentary
critical feeling to be told in the same breath that the first period of German
literature was "richer in inventive genius than any that followed it," and that
"nothing but fragments of a single song[106] remain to us" from this first
period—fragments, it may be added, which, though interesting enough, can,
in no possible judgment that can be called judgment, rank as in any way
first-rate poetry. So, too, the habit of comparing the Nibelungenlied to the
Iliad and Kudrun to the Odyssey (parallels not far removed from the
Thucydides-and-Tennyson order) may excite resentment. But the Middle
High German verse of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is in itself of such
interest, such variety, such charm, that if only it be approached in itself, and
not through the medium of its too officious ushers, its effect on any real
taste for poetry is undoubted.
The three divisions above sketched may very well be taken in the order
given. The great folk-epics just mentioned, with some smaller poems, such
as König Rother, are almost invariably anonymous; the translators or
adaptors from the French—Gottfried von Strasburg, Hartmann von Aue,
Wolfram von Eschenbach, and others—are at least known by name, if we
do not know much else about them; and this is also the case with the Lyric
poets, especially the best of them, the exquisite singer known as Walter of
the Bird-Meadow.

Folk-epics—
It was inevitable that the whole literary energy of a nation
The which is commentatorial or nothing, should be flung on such
Nibelungenlie a subject as the Nibelungenlied;[107] the amount of work
d.
expended on the subject by Germans during the century in

which the poem has been known is enormous, and might cause despair, if
happily it were not for the most part negligible. The poem served as a
principal ground in the battle—not yet at an end, but now in a more or less
languid condition—between the believers in conglomerate epic, the
upholders of the theory that long early poems are always a congeries of still
earlier ballads or shorter chants, and the advocates of their integral
condition. The authorship of the poem, its date, and its relation to previous
work or tradition, with all possible excursions and alarums as to sun-myths
and so forth, have been discussed ad nauseam. Literary history, as here
understood, need not concern itself much about such things. It is sufficient
to say that the authorship of the Lied in its present condition is quite
unknown; that its date would appear to be about the centre of our period, or,
in other words, not earlier than the middle of the twelfth century or later
than the middle of the thirteenth, and that, as far as the subject goes, we
The Volsunga
undoubtedly have handlings of it in Icelandic (the so-called
Saga. Volsunga Saga), and still earlier verse-dealings in the Elder
Edda, which are older, and probably much older, than the
German poem.[108] They are not only older, but they are different. As a
Volsung story, the interest is centred on the ancestor of Sigurd (Sigfried in
the later poem), on his acquisition of the hoard of the dwarf Andvari by
slaying the dragon Fafnir, its guardian, and on the tale of his love for the
Amazon Brynhild; how by witchcraft he is beguiled to wed instead Gudrun
the daughter of Giuki, while Gunnar, Gudrun's brother, marries Brynhild by
the assistance of Sigurd himself; how the sisters-in-law quarrel, with the
result that Gudrun's brothers slay Sigurd, on whose funeral-pyre Brynhild
(having never ceased to love him and wounded herself mortally), is by her
own will burnt; and how Gudrun, having married King Atli, Brynhild's
brother, achieves vengeance on her own brethren by his means. A sort of
coda of the story tells of the third marriage of Gudrun to King Jonakr, of the
cruel fate of Swanhild, her daughter by Sigurd (who was so fair that when
she gazed on the wild horses that were to tread her to death they would not
harm her, and her head had to be covered ere they would do their work), of
the further fate of Swanhild's half-brothers in their effort to avenge her, and
of the final threnos and death of Gudrun herself.
The author of the Nibelungenlied (or rather the "Nibelungen-Noth," for this
is the older title of the poem, which has a very inferior sequel called Die

Klage) has dealt with the story very differently. He pays no attention to the
ancestry of Sifrit (Sigurd), and little to his acquisition of the hoard,
diminishes the part of Brynhild, stripping it of all romantic interest as
regards Sifrit, and very largely increases the importance of the revenge of
Gudrun, now called Kriemhild. Only sixteen of the thirty-nine "aventiuren"
or "fyttes" (into which the poem in the edition here used is divided) are
allotted to the part up to and including the murder of Sifrit; the remaining
twenty-three deal with the vengeance of Kriemhild, who is herself slain just
when this vengeance is complete, the after-piece of her third marriage and
the fate of Swanhild being thus rendered impossible.
Among the idler parts of Nibelungen discussions perhaps the idlest are the
attempts made by partisans of Icelandic and German literature respectively
to exalt or depress these two handlings, each in comparison with the other.
There is no real question of superiority or inferiority, but only one of
difference. The older handling, in the Volsunga Saga to some extent, but
still more in the Eddaic songs, has perhaps the finer touches of pure clear
poetry in single passages and phrases; the story of Sigurd and Brynhild has
a passion which is not found in the German version; the defeat of Fafnir and
the treacherous Regin is excellent; and the wild and ferocious story of
Sinfiötli, with which the saga opens, has unmatched intensity, well brought
out in Mr Morris's splendid verse-rendering, The Story of Sigurd the
Volsung.[109]

The German
But every poet has a perfect right to deal with any story as
version. he chooses, if he makes good poetry of it; and the poet of
the Nibelungenlied is more than justified in this respect. By
curtailing the beginning, cutting off the coda above mentioned altogether,
and lessening the part and interest of Brynhild, he has lifted Kriemhild to a
higher, a more thoroughly expounded, and a more poetical position, and has
made her one of the greatest heroines of epic, if not the greatest in all
literature. The Gudrun of the Norse story is found supplying the loss of one
husband with the gain of another to an extent perfectly consonant with
Icelandic ideas, but according to less insular standards distinctly damaging
to her interest as a heroine; and in revenging her brothers on Atli, after
revenging Sigurd on her brothers by means of Atli, she completely alienates
all sympathy except on a ferocious and pedantic theory of blood-revenge.
The Kriemhild of the German is quite free from this drawback; and her own

death comes just when and as it should—not so much a punishment for the
undue bloodthirstiness of her revenge as an artistic close to the situation.
There may be too many episodic personages—Dietrich of Bern, for
instance, has extremely little to do in this galley. But the strength,
thoroughness, and in its own savage way charm of Kriemhild's character,
and the incomparable series of battles between the Burgundian princes and
Etzel's men in the later cantos—cantos which contain the very best poetical
fighting in the history of the world—far more than redeem this. The
Nibelungenlied is a very great poem; and with Beowulf (the oldest, but the
least interesting on the whole), Roland (the most artistically finished in
form), and the Poem of the Cid (the cheerfullest and perhaps the fullest of
character), composes a quartette of epic with which the literary story of the
great European literary nations most appropriately begins. In bulk, dramatic
completeness, and a certain furia, the Nibelungenlied, though the youngest
and probably the least original, is the greatest of the four.

Metres.
The form, though not finished with the perfection of the
French decasyllabic, is by no means of a very uncouth
description. The poem is written in quatrains, rhymed couplet and couplet,
not alternately, but evidently intended for quatrains, inasmuch as the sense
frequently runs on at the second line, but regularly stops at the fourth. The
normal line of which these quatrains are composed is a thirteen-syllabled
one divided by a central pause, so that the first half is an iambic dimeter
catalectic, and the second an iambic dimeter hypercatalectic.

"Von einer isenstangen: des gie dem
helde not."

The first half sometimes varies from this norm, though not very often, the
alteration usually taking the form of the loss of the first syllable, so that the
half-line consists of three trochees. The second half is much more variable.
Sometimes, in the same way as with the first, a syllable is dropped at the
opening, and the half-line becomes similarly trochaic. Sometimes there is a
double rhyme instead of a single, making seven syllables, though not
altering the rhythm; and sometimes this is extended to a full octosyllable.
But this variety by no means results in cacophony or confusion; the general
swing of the metre is well maintained, and maintains itself in turn on the
ear.

Rhyme and
In the rhymes, as in those of all early rhymed poems, there
language. is a certain monotony. Just as in the probably contemporary
Layamon the poet is tempted into rhyme chiefly by such
easy opportunities as "other" and "brother," "king" and "thing," so here,
though rhyme is the rule, and not, as there, the exception, certain pairs,
especially "wip" and "lip" ("wife" and "body"), "sach" and "sprach,"
"geben" and "geleben," "tot" and "not," recur perhaps a little too often for
the ear's perfect comfort. But this is natural and extremely pardonable. The
language is exceedingly clear and easy—far nearer to German of the
present day than Layamon's own verse, or the prose of the Ancren Riwle, is
to English prose and verse of the nineteenth century; the differences being,
as a rule, rather matters of spelling or phrase than of actual vocabulary. It is
very well suited both to the poet's needs and to the subject; there being little
or nothing of that stammer—as it may be called—which is not uncommon
in mediæval work, as if the writer were trying to find words that he cannot
find for a thought which he cannot fully shape even to himself. In short,
there is in the particular kind, stage, and degree that accomplishment which
distinguishes the greater from the lesser achievements of literature.

Kudrun.
Kudrun[110] or Gudrun—it is a little curious that this should
be the name of the original joint-heroine of the
Nibelungenlied, of the heroine of one of the finest and most varied of the
Icelandic sagas, the Laxdæla, and of the present poem—is far less known to
general students of literature than its companion. Nor can it be said that this
comparative neglect is wholly undeserved. It is an interesting poem enough;
but neither in story nor in character-interest, in arrangement nor in
execution, can it vie with the Nibelungen, of which in formal points it has
been thought to be a direct imitation. The stanza is much the same, except
that there is a much more general tendency to arrange the first couplet in
single masculine rhyme and the second in feminine, while the second half
of the fourth line is curiously prolonged to either ten or eleven syllables.
The first refinement may be an improvement: the second certainly is not,
and makes it very difficult to a modern ear to get a satisfactory swing on the
verse. The language, moreover (though this is a point on which I speak with
some diffidence), has a slightly more archaic cast, as of intended archaism,
than is the case with the Nibelungen.

As for matter, the poem has the interest, always considerable to English
readers, of dealing with the sea, and the shores of the sea; and, like the
Nibelungenlied, it seems to have had older forms, of which some remains
exist in the Norse. But there is less coincidence of story: and the most
striking incident in the Norse—an unending battle, where the combatants,
killed every night, come alive again every day—is in the German a merely
ordinary "battle of Wulpensand," where one side has the worst, and cloisters
are founded for the repose of the dead. On the other hand, Kudrun, while
rationalised in some respects and Christianised in others, has the
extravagance, not so much primitive as carelessly artificial, of the later
romances. Romance has a special charter to neglect chronology; but the
chronology here is exceptionally wanton. After the above-mentioned Battle
of Wulpensand, the beaten side resigns itself quite comfortably to wait till
the sons of the slain grow up: and to suit this arrangement the heroine
remains in ill-treated captivity—washing clothes by the sea-shore—for
fifteen years or so. And even thus the climax is not reached; for Gudrun's
companion in this unpleasant task, and apparently (since they are married at
the same time) her equal, or nearly so, in age, has in the exordium of the
poem also been the companion of Gudrun's grandmother in durance to some
griffins, from whom they were rescued by Gudrun's grandfather.
One does not make peddling criticisms of this kind on any legend that has
the true poetic character of power—of sweeping the reader along with it;
but this I, at least, can hardly find in Kudrun. It consists of three or perhaps
four parts: the initial adventures of Child Hagen of Ireland with the griffins
who carry him off; the wooing of his daughter Hilde by King Hetel, whose
ambassadors, Wate, Morunc, and Horant, play a great part throughout the
poem; the subsequent wooing of her daughter Gudrun, and her
imprisonment and ill-usage by Gerlind, her wooer's mother; her rescue by
her lover Herwig after many years, and the slaughter of her tyrants,
especially Gerlind, which "Wate der alte" makes. There is also a generally
happy ending, which, rather contrary to the somewhat ferocious use and
wont of these poems, is made to include Hartmuth, Gudrun's unsuccessful
wooer, and his sister Ortrun. The most noteworthy character, perhaps, is the
above-mentioned Wate (or Wade), who is something like Hagen in the
Nibelungenlied as far as valour and ferocity go, but is more of a
subordinate. Gudrun herself has good touches—especially where in her joy

at the appearance of her rescuers she flings the hated "wash" into the sea,
and in one or two other passages. But she is nothing like such a person as
Brynhild in the Volsung story or Kriemhild in the Nibelungenlied. Even the
"wash" incident and the state which, in the teeth of her enemies, she takes
upon her afterwards—the finest thing in the poem, though it frightens some
German critics who see beauties elsewhere that are not very clear to eyes
not native—fail to give her this personality. A better touch of nature still,
though a slight one, is her lover Herwig's fear, when he meets with a slight
mishap before the castle of her prison, that she may see it and reproach him
with it after they are married. But on the whole, Kudrun, though an
excellent story of adventure, is not a great poem in the sense in which the
Nibelungenlied is one.

Shorter
Besides these two long poems (the greater of which, the
national epics.Nibelungenlied, connects itself indirectly with others
through the personage of Dietrich[111]) there is a group of
shorter and rather older pieces, attributed in their present forms to the
twelfth century, and not much later than the German translation of the
Chanson de Roland by a priest named Conrad, which is sometimes put as
early as 1130, and the German translation (see chapter iv.) of the Alixandre
by Lamprecht, which may be even older. Among these smaller epics, poems
on the favourite mediæval subjects of Solomon and Marcolf, St Brandan,
&c., are often classed, but somewhat wrongly, as they belong to a different
school. Properly of the group are König Rother, Herzog Ernst, and Orendel.
All these suggest distinct imitation of the chansons, Orendel inclining
rather to the legendary and travelling kind of Jourdains de Blaivies or
Huon, Herzog Ernst to the more feudal variety. König Rother,[112] the most
important of the batch, is a poem of a little more than five thousand lines, of
rather irregular length and rhythm, but mostly very short, rhymed, but with
a leaning towards assonance. The strong connection of these poems with the
chansons is also shown by the fact that Rother is made grandfather of
Charlemagne and King of Rome. Whether he had anything to do with the
actual Lombard King Rother of the seventh century is only a speculative
question; the poem itself seems to be Bavarian, and to date from about
1150. The story is one of wooing under considerable difficulties, and thus in
some respects at least nearer to a roman d'aventures than a chanson.

Literary
It will depend on individual taste whether the reader prefers
poetry. the so-called "art-poetry" which broke out in Germany,
almost wholly on a French impulse, but with astonishing
individuality and colour of national and personal character, towards the end
of the twelfth century, to the folk-poetry, of which the greater examples
have been mentioned hitherto, whether he reverses the preference, or
whether, in the mood of the literary student proper, he declines to regard
either with preference, but admires and delights in both.[113] On either side
there are compensations for whatever loss may be urged by the partisans of
the other. It may or may not be an accident that the sons of adoption are
more numerous than the sons of the house: it is not so certain that the one
group is to be on any true reckoning preferred to the other.

Its four chief
In any case the German literary poetry (a much better phrase
masters. than kunst-poesie, for there is plenty of art on both sides)
forms a part, and, next to its French originals, perhaps the
greatest part, of that extraordinary and almost unparalleled blossoming of
literature which, starting from France, overspread the whole of Europe at
one time, the last half or quarter of the twelfth century, and the first quarter
of the thirteenth. Four names, great and all but of the greatest—Hartmann
von Aue, Gottfried of Strasburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and Walther von
der Vogelweide—illustrate it as far as Germany is concerned. Another,
somewhat earlier than these, and in a way their master, Eilhart von Oberge,
is supposed or rather known to have dealt with the Tristram story before
Gottfried; and Heinrich von Veldeke, in handling the Æneid, communicated
to Germany something of a directly classical, though more of a French,
touch. We have spoken of the still earlier work of Conrad and Lamprecht,
while in passing must be mentioned other things fashioned after French
patterns, such as the Kaiserchronik, which is attributed to Bavarian hands.
The period of flourishing of the literary poetry proper was not long—1150
to 1350 would cover very nearly the whole of it, and, here, as elsewhere, it
is impossible to deal with every individual, or even with the majority of
individuals. But some remarks in detail, though not in great detail, on the
four principals above referred to, will put the German literary "state" of the
time almost as well as if all the battalions and squadrons were enumerated.
Hartmann, Gottfried, and Wolfram, even in what we have of them, lyric

writers in part, were chiefly writers of epic or romance; Walther is a song-
writer pure and simple.

Excellence,
One thing may be said with great certainty of the division of
both natural literature to which we have come, that none shows more
and acquired, clearly the natural aptitude of the people who produced it for
of German
verse. poetry. It is a familiar observation from beginners in
German who have any literary taste, that German poetry
reads naturally, German prose does not. In verse the German disencumbers
himself of that gruesome clumsiness which almost always besets him in the
art he learnt so late, and never learnt to any perfection. To "say" is a trouble
to him, a trouble too often unconquerable; to sing is easy enough. And this
truth, true of all centuries of German literature, is never truer than here.
Translated or adapted verse is not usually the most cheerful department of
poetry. The English romances, translated or adapted from the French, at
times on the whole later than these, have been unduly abused; but they are
certainly not the portion of the literature of his country on which an
Englishman would most pride himself. Even the home-grown and, as I
would fain believe, home-made legend of Arthur, had to wait till the
fifteenth century before it met, and then in prose, a worthy master in
English.

Originality of
But the German adapters of French at the meeting of the
its adaptation.twelfth and thirteenth centuries are persons of very different
calibre from the translators of Alexander and the other
English-French romances, even from those who with far more native talent
Englished Havelok and Horn. If I have spoken harshly of German
admiration of Kudrun, I am glad to make this amends and to admit that
Gottfried's Tristan is by far the best of all the numerous rehandlings of the
story which have come down to us. If we must rest Hartmann von Aue's
chief claims on the two Büchlein, on the songs, and on the delightful Armer
Heinrich, yet his Iwein and his Erec can hold their own even with two of
the freshest and most varied of Chrestien's original poems. No one except
the merest pedant of originality would hesitate to put Parzival above
Percevale le Gallois, though Wolfram von Eschenbach may be thought to
have been less fortunate with Willehalm. And though in the lyric, the debt
due to both troubadour and trouvère is unmistakable, it is equally
unmistakable what mighty usury the minnesingers have paid for the capital

they borrowed. The skill both of Northern and Southern Frenchmen is
seldom to seek in lyric: we cannot give them too high praise as fashioners
of instruments for other men to use. The cheerful bird-voice of the trouvère,
the half artificial but not wholly insincere intensity of his brethren of the
langue d'oc, will never miss their meed. But for real "cry," for the diviner
elements of lyric, we somehow wait till we hear it in

"Under der linden
An der heide,
da unser zweier bette was,
da muget ir vinden
schone beide
gebrochen bluomen unde gras.
Vor dem walde in einem tal,
tandaradei!
schone sanc diu nahtegal."[114]

At last we are free from the tyranny of the iambic, and have variety beyond
the comparative freedom of the trochee. The blessed liberty of trisyllabic
feet not merely comes like music, but is for the first time complete music,
to the ear.

The pioneers.
Historians arrange the process of borrowing from the French
Heinrich von and adjusting prosody to the loans in, roughly speaking,
Veldeke. three stages. The first of these is represented by Lamprecht's
Alexander and Conrad's Roland; while the second and far
more important has for chief exponents an anonymous rendering of the
universally popular Flore et Blanchefleur,[115] the capital example of a pure
love-story in which love triumphs over luck and fate, and differences of
nation and religion. Of this only fragments survive, and the before-
mentioned first German version of the Tristan story by Eilhart von Oberge
exists only in a much altered form of the fifteenth century. But both, as well
as the work in lyric and narrative of Heinrich von Veldeke, date well within
the twelfth century, and the earliest of them may not be much younger than
its middle. It was Heinrich who seems to have been the chief master in form
of the greater poets mentioned above, and now to be noticed as far as it is
possible to us. We do not know, personally speaking, very much about
them, though the endless industry of their commentators, availing itself of

not a little sheer guesswork, has succeeded in spinning various stories
concerning them; and the curious incident of the Wartburg-krieg or
minstrels' tournament, though reported much later, very likely has sound
traditional foundations. But it is not very necessary to believe, for instance,
that Gottfried von Strasburg makes an attack on Wolfram von Eschenbach.
And generally the best attitude is that of an editor of the said Gottfried (who
himself rather fails to reck his own salutary rede by proceeding to
redistribute the ordinary attribution of poems), "Ich bekenne dass ich in
diesen Dingen skeptischer Natur bin."

Gottfried of
If, however, even Gottfried's own authorship of the
Strasburg. Tristan[116] is rather a matter of extremely probable
inference than of certain knowledge, and if the lives of most
of the poets are very little known, the poems themselves are fortunately
there, for every one who chooses to read and to form his own opinion about
them. The palm for work of magnitude in every sense belongs to Gottfried's
Tristan and to Wolfram's Parzival, and as it happens—as it so often happens
—the contrasts of these two works are of the most striking and interesting
character. The Tristram story, as has been said above, despite its extreme
popularity and the abiding hold which it has exercised on poets as well as
readers, is on the whole of a lower and coarser kind than the great central
Arthurian legend. The philtre, though it supplies a certain excuse for the
lovers, degrades the purely romantic character of their affection in more
than compensating measure; the conduct of Iseult to the faithful Brengwain,
if by no means unfeminine, is exceedingly detestable; and if Tristram was
nearly as good a knight as Lancelot, he certainly was not nearly so good a
lover or nearly so thorough a gentleman. But the attractions of the story
were and are all the greater, we need not say to the vulgar, but to the
general; and Gottfried seems to have been quite admirably and almost
ideally qualified to treat them. His French original is not known, for the
earlier French versions of this story have perished or only survive in
fragments; and there is an almost inextricable coil about the "Thomas" to
whom Gottfried refers, and who used to be (though this has now been given
up) identified with no less a person than Thomas the Rhymer, Thomas of
Erceldoune himself. But we can see, as clearly as if we had parallel texts,
that Gottfried treated his original as all real and sensible poets do treat their
originals—that is to say, that he took what he wanted, added what he chose,

and discarded what he pleased. In his handling of the French octosyllable he
at once displays that impatience of the rigidly syllabic system of prosody
which Teutonic poetry of the best kind always shows sooner or later. At first
the octosyllables are arranged in a curious and not particularly charming
scheme of quatrains, not only mono-rhymed, but so arranged that the very
same words occur in alternate places, or in 1, 4, and 2, 3—"Man," "kan,"
"man," "kan"; "list," "ist," "ist," "list,"—the latter order being in this
interesting, that it suggests the very first appearance of the In Memoriam
stanza. But Gottfried was much too sensible a poet to think of writing a
long poem—his, which is not complete, and was continued by Ulrich von
Turheim, by an Anon, and by Heinrich von Freiberg, extends to some
twenty thousand lines—in such a measure as this. He soon takes up the
simple octosyllabic couplet, treated, however, with great freedom. The
rhymes are sometimes single, sometimes double, occasionally even triple.
The syllables constantly sink to seven, and sometimes even to six, or extend
themselves, by the admission of trisyllabic feet, to ten, eleven, if not even
twelve. Thus, once more, the famous "Christabel" metre is here, not indeed
in the extremely mobile completeness which Coleridge gave it, nor even
with quite such an indulgence in anapæsts as Spenser allows himself in
"The Oak and the Brere," but to all intents and purposes fully constituted, if
not fully developed.
And Gottfried is quite equal to his form. One may feel, indeed, and it is not
unpleasant to feel, that evidence of the "young hand," which consists in
digressions from the text, of excursus and ambages, essays, as it were, to
show, "Here I am speaking quite for myself, and not merely reading off
book." But he tells the story very well—compare, for instance, the crucial
point of the substitution of Brengwain for Iseult in him and in the English
Sir Tristrem, or the charming account of the "Minnegrotte" in the twenty-
seventh song, with the many other things of the kind in French, English,
and German of the time. Also he has constant little bursts, little spurts, of
half-lyrical cry, which lighten the narrative charmingly.

"Diu wise Isôt, diu schoene Isôt,
Diu liuhtet alse der morgenrot,"

is the very thing the want of which mars the pleasantly flowing but
somewhat featureless octosyllables of his French models. In the famous

passage[117] where he has been thought to reflect on Wolfram, he certainly
praises other poets without stint, and shows himself a generous as well as a
judicious critic. How Hartmann von Aue hits the meaning of a story! how
loud and clear rings the crystal of his words! Did not Heinrich von Veldeke
"imp the first shoot on Teutish tongues" (graft French on German poetry)?
With what a lofty voice does the nightingale of the Bird-Meadow (Walther)
warble across the heath! Nor is it unpleasant to come shortly afterwards to
our old friends Apollo and the Camœnæ, the nine "Sirens of the ears"—a
slightly mixed reminiscence, but characteristic of the union of classical and
romantic material which communicates to the Middle Ages so much of their
charm. Indeed nowhere in this Pisgah sight of literature would it be
pleasanter to come down and expatiate on the particular subject than in the
case of these Middle High German poets.

Hartmann von
Hartmann von Aue,[118] the subject of Gottfried's highest
Aue. eulogy, has left a bulkier—at least a more varied—poetical
baggage than his eulogist, whose own legacy is not small. It
will depend a good deal on individual taste whether his actual poetical
powers be put lower or higher. We have of his, or attributed to him, two
long romances of adventure, translations or adaptations of the Chevalier au
Lyon and the Erec et Énide of Chrestien de Troyes; a certain number of
songs, partly amatory, partly religious, two curious pieces entitled Die
Klage and Büchlein, a verse-rendering of a subject which was much a
favourite, the involuntary incest and atonement of St Gregory of the Rock;
and lastly, his masterpiece, Der Arme Heinrich.

Erec der
In considering the two Arthurian adventure-stories, it is fair
Wanderære to remember that in Gottfried's case we have not the
and Iwein. original, while in Hartmann's we have, and that the originals
here are two of the very best examples in their kind and
language. That Hartmann did not escape the besetting sin of all adapters,
and especially of all mediæval adapters, the sin of amplification and
watering down, is quite true. It is shown by the fact that while Chrestien
contents himself in each case with less than seven thousand lines (and he
has never been thought a laconic poet), Hartmann extends both in
practically the same measure (though the licences above referred to make
the lines often much shorter than the French, while Hartmann himself does
not often make them much longer)—in the one case to over eight thousand

lines, in the other to over ten. But it would not be fair to deny very
considerable merits to his versions. They are readable with interest after the
French itself: and in the case of Erec after the Mabinogion and the Idylls of
the King also. It cannot be said, however, that in either piece the poet
handles his subject with the same appearance of mastery which belongs to
Gottfried: and this is not to be altogether accounted for by the fact that the
stories themselves are less interesting. Or rather it may be said that his
selection of these stories, good as they are in their way, when greater were
at his option, somewhat "speaks him" as a poet.

Lyrics.
The next or lyrical division shows Hartmann more
favourably, though still not exactly as a great poet. The
"Frauenminne," or profane division, of these has something of the artificial
character which used very unjustly to be charged against the whole love-
poetry of the Middle Ages, and which certainly does affect some of it.
There is nowhere the "cry" that we find in the best of Gottfried's
"nightingales"—the lyric poets as opposed to the epic. He does not seem to
have much command of trisyllabic measures, and is perhaps happiest in the
above-mentioned mono-rhymed quatrain, apparently a favourite measure
then, which he uses sometimes in octosyllables, but often also in
decasyllables. I do not know, and it would probably be difficult to say, what
was the first appearance of the decasyllable, which in German, as in
English, was to become on the whole the staple measure of non-lyrical
poetry and the not infrequent medium of lyrical. But this must be fairly
early, and certainly is a good example. The "Gottesminne," or, as our own
old word has it, the "Divine" Poems, are very much better. Hartmann
himself was a crusader, and there is nothing merely conventional in his few
lays from the crusading and pilgrim standpoint. Indeed the very first words,
expressing his determination after his lord's death to leave the world to
itself, have a better ring than anything in his love-poetry; and the echo is
kept up in such simple but true sayings as this about "Christ's flowers" (the
badge of the cross):—

"Min froude wart nie sorgelos
Unz an die tage
Daz ich mir Krystes bluomon kos
Die ich hie trage."

The
The two curious booklets or complaints (for each bore the
"booklets." title of Büchlein in its own day, and each is a Klage) and the
Gregorius touch the lyric on one side and the adventure
poems on the other. Gregorius, indeed, is simply a roman d'aventures of
pious tendency; and there cannot be very much doubt that it had a French
original. It extends to some four thousand lines, and does not show any
poetical characteristics very different from those of Erec and Iwein, though
they are applied to different matter. In size the two "booklets" stand in a
curiously diminishing ratio to Erec with its ten thousand verses, Iwein with
its eight, and Gregorius with its four; for Die Klage has a little under two
thousand, and the Büchlein proper a little under one. Die Klage is of varied
structure, beginning with octosyllables, of which the first—

"Minne waltet grozer kraft"—

has a pleasant trochaic cadence: continuing after some sixteen hundred lines
(if indeed it be a continuation and not a new poem) in curious long laisses,
rather than stanzas, of eights and sevens rhymed on one continuous pair of
single and double rhymes, cit unde: ant ende, &c. The Büchlein proper is all
couplets, and ends less deplorably than its beginning—

"Owê, Owê, unde owê!"—

might suggest. It is, however, more serious than the Klage, which is really a
débat (as the technical term in French poetry then went) between Body and
Soul, and of no unusual kind.

Der Arme
Fortunately for Hartmann, he has left another work, Der
Heinrich. Arme Heinrich, which is thought to be his last, and is
certainly his most perfect. It is almost a pity that
Longfellow, in his adaptation of it, did not stick closer to the original; for
pleasant as The Golden Legend is, it is more of a pastiche and mosaic than
Der Arme Heinrich, one of the simplest, most direct, and most touching of
mediæval poems. Heinrich (also Von Aue) is a noble who, like Sir Isumbras
and other examples of the no less pious than wise belief of the Middle Ages
in Nemesis, forgets God and is stricken for his sin with leprosy. He can only
recover by the blood of a pure maiden; and half despairing of, half revolting
at, such a cure, he gives away all his property but one farm, and lives there

in misery. The farmer's daughter learns his doom and devotes herself.
Heinrich refuses for a time, but yields: and they travel to Salerno, where, as
the sacrifice is on the point of completion, Heinrich sees the maiden's face
through a crack in the doctor's room-wall, feels the impossibility of
allowing her to die, and stops the crime. He is rewarded by a cure as
miraculous as was his harm; recovers his fortune, and marries the maiden.
A later termination separates them again; but this is simply the folly and bad
taste of a certain, and only a certain, perversion of mediæval sentiment, the
crowning instance of which is found in Guy of Warwick. Hartmann himself
was no such simpleton; and (with only an infinitesimal change of a famous
sentence) we may be sure that as he was a good lover so he made a good
end to his story.

Wolfram von
Although German writers may sometimes have mispraised
Eschenbach. or over-praised their greatest mediæval poet, it certain that
we find in Wolfram von Eschenbach[119] qualities which, in
the thousand years between the Fall and the Renaissance of classical
literature, can be found to anything like the same extent in only two known
writers, the Italian Dante and the Englishman Langland; while if he is
immensely Dante's inferior in poetical quality, he has at least one gift,
humour, which Dante had not, and is far Langland's superior in variety and
in romantic charm. He displays, moreover, a really curious contrast to the
poets already mentioned, and to most of the far greater number not
mentioned. It is in Wolfram first that we come across, in anything like
noticeable measure, that mastery of poetical mysticism which is the pride,
and justly the pride, of the German Muse. Gottfried and Hartmann are
rather practical folk. Hartmann has at best a pious and Gottfried a profane
fancy; of the higher qualities of imagination there is little or nothing in
them; and not much in the vast crowd of the Minnesingers, from the chief
"nightingale" Walther downwards. Wolfram, himself a Minnesinger (indeed
the term is loosely applied to all the poets of this time, and may be very
properly claimed by Gottfried and Hartmann, though the former has left no
lyric), has left us few but very remarkable aubades, in which the
commonplace of the morning-song, with its disturbance of lovers, is treated
in no commonplace way. But his fame rests on the three epics, Parzival,
Titurel, and Willehalm. It is practically agreed that Parzival represents the
Titurel.
flourishing time, and Willehalm the evening, of his work;

there is more critical disagreement about the time of composition of Titurel,
which, though it was afterwards continued and worked up by another hand,
exists only in fragments, and presents a very curious difference of structure
as compared both with Parzival (with which in subject it is connected) and
with Willehalm. Both these are in octosyllables: Titurel is in a singular and
far from felicitous stanza, which stands to that of Kudrun much as the
Kudrun stanza does to that of the Nibelungen. Here there are none but
double rhymes; and not merely the second half of the fourth, but the second
half of the second line "tails out" in the manner formerly described. The
consequence is, that while in Kudrun it is, as was remarked, difficult to get
any swing on the metre, in Titurel it is simply impossible; and it has been
thought without any improbability that the fragmentary condition of the
piece is due to the poet's reasonable discontent with the shackles he had
imposed on himself. The substance is good enough, and would have made
an interesting chapter in the vast working up of the Percevale story which
Wolfram probably had in his mind.

Willehalm.
Willehalm, on the other hand, is not only in form but in
substance a following of the French, and of no less a French
poem than the Battle of Aliscans, which has been so fully dealt with above.
It is interesting to compare advocates of the two, and see how German
critics usually extol the improvements made by the German poet, while the
French sneer at his preachments and waterings-down. But we need say
nothing more than that if Wolfram's fame rested on Willehalm, the notice of
him here would probably not go beyond a couple of lines.

Parzival.
Parzival, however, is a very different matter. It has of late
years received adventitious note from the fact of its selection
by Wagner as a libretto; but it did not need this, and it was the admiration of
every fit reader long before the opera appeared. The Percevale story, it may
be remembered, lies somewhat outside of the main Arthurian legend, which,
however, had hardly taken full form when Wolfram wrote. It has been
strongly fought for by the Celticists as traceable originally to the Welsh
legend of Peredur; but it is to be observed that neither in this form nor in the
English version (which figures among the Thornton Romances) does the
Graal make any figure. In the huge poem, made huger by continuators, of
Chrestien de Troyes, Percival becomes a Graal-seeker; and on the whole it
would appear that, as observed before, he in point of time anticipates

Galahad and the story which works the Graal thoroughly into the main
Arthurian tale. According to Wolfram (but this is a romantic commonplace),
Chrestien was culpably remiss in telling the story, and his deficiencies had
to be made up by a certain Provençal named Kyot. Unfortunately there are
no traces elsewhere of any such person, or of any version, in Provençal or
otherwise, between Chrestien's and Wolfram's. The two, however, stand far
enough apart to have admitted of more than one intermediary; or rather no
number of intermediaries could really have bridged the chasm, which is one
of spirit rather than of matter. In Percevale le Gallois, though the Graal
exists, and though the adventures are rather more on the outside of the
strictly Arthurian cycle than usual, we are still in close relations with that
cycle, and the general tone and handling are similar (except in so far as
Chrestien is a better trouvère than most) to those of fifty other poems. In
Parzival we are translated into another country altogether. Arthur appears
but seldom, and though the link with the Round Table is maintained by the
appearances of Gawain, who as often, though not always, plays to
Percevale the part of light to serious hero, here almost only, and here not
always, are we in among "kenned folk." The Graal mountain,
Montsalvatsch, is even more in fairyland than the "enchanted towers of
Carbonek"; the magician Klingschor is a more shadowy person far than
Merlin.

"Cundrie la Sorziere
Diu unsueze und doch diu fiere"

is a much more weird personage than Morgane or Nimue, though she may
also be more "unsweet." Part of this unfamiliar effect is no doubt due to
Wolfram's singular fancy for mutilating and torturing his French names, to
his admixture of new characters and adventures, and especially to the
almost entirely new genealogy which he introduces. In the pedigree,
containing nearly seventy names, which will be found at the end of
Bartsch's edition, not a tithe will be familiar to the reader of the English and
French romances; and that reader will generally find those whom he does
know provided with new fathers and mothers, daughters and wives.
But these would be very small matters if it were not for other differences,
not of administration but of spirit. There may have been something too
much of the attempt to credit Wolfram with anti-dogmatic views, and with a

certain Protestant preference of simple repentance and amendment to the
performance of stated rites and penances. What is unmistakable is the way
in which he lifts the story, now by phrase, now by verse effect, now by the
indefinable magic of sheer poetic handling, out of ordinary ways into ways
that are not ordinary. There may perhaps be allowed to be a certain want of
"architectonic" in him. He has not made of Parzival and Condwiramurs, of
Gawain and Orgeluse, anything like the complete drama which we find
(brought out by the genius of Malory, but existing before) in the French-
English Arthurian legend. But any one who knows the origins of that legend
from Erec et Énide to Durmart le Gallois, and from the Chevalier au Lyon
to the Chevalier as Deux Espées, must recognise in him something higher
and larger than can be found in any of them, as well as something more
human, if even in the best sense more fairy-tale like, than the earlier and
more Western legends of the Graal as we have them in Merlin and the other
French books. Here again, not so much for the form as for the spirit, we
find ourselves driven to the word "great"—a great word, and one not to be
misused as it so often is.

Walther von
Yet it may be applied in a different sense, though without
der hesitation, to our fourth selected name, Walther von der
Vogelweide. Vogelweide,[120] a name in itself so agreeable that one really
has to take care lest it raise an undue prejudice in his favour.
Perhaps a part of his greatness belongs to him as the chief representative of
a class, not, as in Wolfram's case, because of individual merit,—a part also
to his excellence of form, which is a claim always regarded with doubt and
dislike by some, though not all. It is nearly a quarter of a century since the
present writer first possessed himself of and first read the delectable volume
in which Franz Pfeiffer opened his series of German Classics of the Middle
Ages with this singer; and every subsequent reading, in whole or in part,
has only increased his attraction. There are some writers—not many—who
seem to defy criticism by a sort of native charm, and of these Walther is
one. If we listen to some grave persons, it is a childish thing to write a
poem, as he does his second Lied, in stanzas every one of which is mono-
rhymed on a different vowel. But as one reads

"Diu werlt was gelf, röt unde blâ,"[121]

one only prays for more such childishness. Is there a better song of May and
maidens than

"So diu bluomen uz dem grase
dringent"?

where the very phrase is romance and nature itself, and could never be
indulged in by a "classical" poet, who would say (very justly), "flowers
grow in beds, not grass; and if in the latter, they ought to be promptly mown
and rolled down." How intoxicating, after deserts of iambs, is the dactylic
swell of

"Wol mich der stunde, daz ich sie
erkande"!

how endearing the drooping cadence of

"Bin ich dir unmære
Des enweiz ich niht; ich minne dich"!

how small the change which makes a jewel out of a commonplace in

"Si hat ein kûssen daz ist rot"!

But to go through the nearly two hundred pieces of Walther's lyric would be
here impossible. His Leich, his only example of that elaborate kind, the
most complicated of the early German lyrical forms, is not perhaps his
happiest effort; and his Sprüche, a name given to short lyrical pieces in
which the Minnesingers particularly delighted, and which correspond pretty
nearly, though not exactly, to the older sense of "epigram," seldom, though
sometimes, possess the charm of the Lieder themselves. But these Lieder
are, for probable freedom from indebtedness and intrinsic exquisiteness of
phrase and rhythm, unsurpassed, perhaps unequalled. To compare Walther
to Petrarch, and to talk of the one being superior or inferior to the other, is
to betray hopeless insensibility to the very rudiments of criticism. They are
absolutely different,—the one the embodiment of stately form and laboured
intellectual effort—of the Classical spirit; the other the mouthpiece of the
half-inarticulate, all-suggesting music that is at once the very soul and the

very inseparable garment of Romance. Some may like one better, others the
other; the more fortunate may enjoy both. But the greatest of all gulfs is the
gulf fixed between the Classical and the Romantic; and few there are, it
seems, who can cross it.

Personality of
Perhaps something may be expected as to the personality of
the poets. these poets, a matter which has had too great a place
assigned to it in literary history. Luckily, unless he delights
in unbridled guessing, the historian of mediæval literature is better entitled
to abstain from it than any other. But something may perhaps be said of the
men whose work has just been discussed, for there are not uninteresting
shades of difference between them. In Germany, as in France, the trouvère-
jongleur class existed; the greater part of the poetry of the twelfth century,
including the so-called small epics, König Rother and the rest, is attributed
to them, and they were the objects of a good deal of patronage from the
innumerable nobles, small and great, of the Empire. On the other hand,
though some men of consequence were poets, the proportion of these is, on
the whole, considerably less than in France proper or in Provence. The
German noble was not so much literary as a patron of literature, like that
Landgrave Hermann of Thuringia, whose court saw the fabulous or semi-
fabulous "War of the Wartburg," with Wolfram von Eschenbach and
Heinrich von Ofterdingen as chief champions. Indeed this court was the
main resort of German poets and minstrels till Saint Elizabeth of Hungary
in the next generation proved herself a rather "sair sanct" for literature,
which has since returned her good for evil.
To return to our four selected poets. Gottfried is supposed to have been
neither noble, nor even directly attached to a noble household, nor a
professional minstrel, but a burgher of the town which gives him his name
—indeed a caution is necessary to the effect that the von of these early
designations, like the de of their French originals, is by no means, as a rule,
a sign of nobility. Hartmann von Aue, though rather attached to than a
member of the noble family of the same name from which he has taken the
hero of Der Arme Heinrich, seems to have been admitted to knightly
society, was a crusader, and appears to have been of somewhat higher rank
than Gottfried, whom, however, he resembled in this point, that both were
evidently men of considerable education. We rise again in status, though
probably not in wealth, and certainly not in education, when we come to

Wolfram von Eschenbach. He was of a family of Northern Bavaria or
Middle Franconia; he bore (for there are diversities on this heraldic point)
two axe-blades argent on a field gules, or a bunch of five flowers argent
springing from a water-bouget gules; and he is said by witnesses in 1608 to
have been described on his tombstone as a knight. But he was certainly
poor, had not received much education, and he was attached in the usual
guest-dependant fashion of the time to the Margrave of Vohburg (whose
wife, Elizabeth of Bavaria, received his poetical declarations) and to
Hermann of Thuringia. He was a married man, and had a daughter.
Lastly, Walther von der Vogelweide appears to have been actually a
"working poet," as we may say—a trouvère, who sang his own poems as he
wandered about, and whose surname was purely a decorative one. He lived,
no doubt, by gifts; indeed, the historians are proud to record that a bishop
gave him a fur coat precisely on the 12th of November 1203. He was
probably born in Austria, lived at Vienna with Duke Frederic of Babenberg
for some time, and held poetical offices in the households of several other
princes, including the Emperor Frederick II., who gave him an estate at last.
It should be said that there are those who insist that he also was of knightly
position, and was Vogelweide of that ilk, inasmuch as we find him called
"herr," the supposed mark of distinction of a gentleman at the time. Such
questions are of importance in their general bearing on the question of
literature at given dates, not in respect of individual persons. It must be
evident that no word which, like "herr," is susceptible of general as well as
technical meanings, can be absolutely decisive in such a case, unless we
find it in formal documents. Also, after Frederick's gift Walther would have
been entitled to it, though he was not before. At any rate, the entirely
wandering life, and the constant relationship to different protectors, which
are in fact the only things we know about him, are more in accordance with
the notion of a professional minstrel than with that of a man who, like
Wolfram, even if he had no estate and was not independent of patronage,
yet had a settled home of his own, and was buried where he was born.

The
The introduction of what may be called a representative
Minnesingers system into literary history has been here rendered necessary
generally. by the fact that the school-resemblance so common in
mediæval writers is nowhere more common than among the
Minnesingers,[122] and that the latter are extraordinarily numerous, if not

also extraordinarily monotonous. One famous collection contains
specimens of 160 poets, and even this is not likely to include the whole of
those who composed poetry of the kind before Minnesong changed
(somewhere in the thirteenth century or at the beginning of the fourteenth,
but at times and in manners which cannot be very precisely fixed) into
Meistersong. The chief lyric poets before Walther were Heinrich von
Veldeke, his contemporary and namesake Heinrich von Morungen, and
Reinmar von Hagenau, whom Gottfried selects as Walther's immediate
predecessor in "nightingaleship": the chief later ones, Neidhart von
Regenthal, famous for dance-songs; Tannhäuser, whose actual work,
however, is of a mostly burlesque character, as different as possible from,
and perhaps giving rise by very contrast to, the beautiful and terrible legend
which connects his name with the Venus-berg (though Heine has managed
in his version to combine the two elements); Ulrich von Lichtenstein, half
an apostle, half a caricaturist of Frauendienst on the Provençal model; and,
finally, Frauenlob or Heinrich von Meissen, who wrote at the end of our
period and the beginning of the next for nearly fifty years, and may be said
to be the link between Minnesong and Meistersong.
So also in the other departments of poetry, harbingers, contemporaries, and
continuators, some of whom have been mentioned, most of whom it would
be impossible to mention, group round the greater masters, and as in
France, so here, the departments themselves branch out in an almost
bewildering manner. Germany, as may be supposed, had its full share of
that "poetry of information" which constitutes so large a part of mediæval
verse, though here even more than elsewhere such verse is rarely, except by
courtesy, poetry. Families of later handlings, both of the folk epic and the
literary romances, exist, such as the Rosengarten, the Horny Siegfried, and
the story of Wolfdietrich in the one class; Wigalois and Wigamur, and a
whole menagerie of poems deriving from the Chevalier au Lyon, on the
other. With the general growth, half epidemic, half directly borrowed from
France, of abstraction and allegory (vide next chapter), Satire made its way,
and historians generally dwell on the "Frau Welt" of Konrad von Wurzburg
in the middle of the thirteenth century, in which Wirent von Grafenburg (a
well-known poet among the literary school, the author of Wigalois) is
brought face to face with an incarnation of the World and its vanity.
Volumes on volumes of moral poetry date from the thirteenth century, and

culminate in the somewhat well-known Renner[123] of Hugo von Trimberg,
dating from the very last year of our period: perhaps the most noteworthy is
the Bescheidenheit of Freidank, a crusader trouvère who accompanied
Frederick II. to the East. But in all this Germany is only following the
general habit of the age, and to a great extent copying directly. Even in
those greater writers who have been here noticed there is, as we have seen,
not a little imitation; but the national and individual peculiarities more than
excuse this. The national epics, with the Nibelungenlied at their head, the
Arthurian stories transformed, of which in different ways Tristan and
Parzival, but especially the latter, are the chief, and the Minnesong,—these
are the great contributions of Germany during the period, and they are great
indeed.

CHAPTER VII.
THE ‘FOX,’ THE ‘ROSE,’ AND THE MINOR
CONTRIBUTIONS OF FRANCE.

THE PREDOMINANCE OF FRANCE. THE RISE OF
ALLEGORY. LYRIC. THE "ROMANCE" AND THE
"PASTOURELLE." THE "FABLIAUX." THEIR
ORIGIN. THEIR LICENCE. THEIR WIT.
DEFINITION AND SUBJECTS. EFFECT OF THE
"FABLIAUX" ON LANGUAGE. AND ON
NARRATIVE. CONDITIONS OF "FABLIAU"-
WRITING. THE APPEARANCE OF IRONY. FABLES
PROPER. 'REYNARD THE FOX.' ORDER OF TEXTS.
PLACE OF ORIGIN. THE FRENCH FORM. ITS
COMPLICATIONS. UNITY OF SPIRIT. THE RISE OF
ALLEGORY. THE SATIRE OF 'RENART.' THE FOX
HIMSELF. HIS CIRCLE. THE BURIAL OF RENART.
THE 'ROMANCE OF THE ROSE.' WILLIAM OF
LORRIS AND JEAN DE MEUNG. THE FIRST PART.
ITS CAPITAL VALUE. THE ROSE-GARDEN.
"DANGER." "REASON." "SHAME" AND
"SCANDAL." THE LATER POEM. "FALSE-
SEEMING." CONTRAST OF THE PARTS. VALUE OF
BOTH, AND CHARM OF THE FIRST. MARIE DE
FRANCE AND RUTEBŒUF. DRAMA. ADAM DE LA
HALLE. "ROBIN ET MARION." THE "JEU DE LA
FEUILLIE." COMPARISON OF THEM. EARLY
FRENCH PROSE. LAWS AND SERMONS.
VILLEHARDOUIN. WILLIAM OF TYRE.
JOINVILLE. FICTION. 'AUCASSIN ET
NICOLETTE.'

The
The contributions of France to European literature
predominance mentioned in the three chapters (II.-IV.) which deal with the
of France. three main sections of Romance, great as we have seen them
to be, by no means exhausted the debt which literature owes
to her during this period. It is indeed not a little curious that the productions
of this time, long almost totally ignored in France itself, and even now
rather grudgingly acknowledged there, are the only periodic set of
productions that justify the claim, so often advanced by Frenchmen, that
their country is at the head of the literary development of Europe. It was not
so in the fourteenth century, when not only Chaucer in England, but Dante,
Petrarch, and Boccaccio in Italy, attained literary heights to which none of
their French contemporaries even approached. It was not so in the fifteenth,
when France, despite Villon and others, was the very School of Dulness,
and even England, with the help of the Scottish poets and Malory, had a
slight advantage over her, while she was far outstripped by Italy. It was not
so in the sixteenth, when Italy hardly yet fell behind, and Spain and
England far outwent her: nor, according to any just estimate, in the
seventeenth. In the eighteenth her pale correctness looks faint enough, not
merely beside the massive strength of England, but beside the gathering
force of Germany: and if she is the equal of the best in the nineteenth, it is
at the very most a bare equality. But in the twelfth and thirteenth France, if
not Paris, was in reality the eye and brain of Europe, the place of origin of
almost every literary form, the place of finishing and polishing, even for
those forms which she did not originate. She not merely taught, she
wrought—and wrought consummately. She revived and transformed the
fable; perfected, if she did not invent, the beast-epic; brought the short
prose tale to an exquisite completeness; enlarged, suppled, chequered, the
somewhat stiff and monotonous forms of Provençal lyric into myriad-noted
variety; devised the prose-memoir, and left capital examples of it; made
attempts at the prose history; ventured upon much and performed no little in
the vernacular drama; besides the vast performance, sometimes inspired
from elsewhere but never as literature copied, which we have already seen,
in her fostering if not mothering of Romance. When a learned and
enthusiastic Icelander speaks of his patrimony in letters as "a native
literature which, in originality, richness, historical and artistic worth, stands
unrivalled in modern Europe," we can admire the patriot but must shake our
heads at the critic. For by Dr Vigfusson's own confession the strength of

Icelandic literature consists in the sagas, and the sagas are the product of the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries. At that very time France, besides the
chansons de geste—as native, as original, as the sagas, and if less rich, far
more artistic in form—France has to show the great romances proper, which
Iceland herself, like all the world, copied, a lyric of wonderful charm and
abundance, the vast comic wealth of the fabliaux, and the Fox-epic, prose
not merely of laws and homilies and rudimentary educational subjects, but
of every variety, drama, history, philosophy, allegory, dream.

The rise of
To give an account of these various things in great detail
Allegory. would not merely be impossible here, but would injure the
scheme and thwart the purpose of this history. We must
survey them in the gross, or with a few examples—showing the lessons
taught and the results achieved, from the lyric, which was probably the
earliest, to the drama and the prose story, which were pretty certainly the
latest of the French experiments. But we must give largest space to the
singular growth of Allegory. This, to some extent in the beast-epic, to a far
greater in one of the most epoch-making of European books, the Romance
of the Rose, set a fashion in Europe which had hardly passed away in three
hundred years, and which, latterly rather for the worse, but in the earlier
date not a little for the better, coloured not merely the work directly
composed in imitation of the great originals, but all literary stuff of every
kind, from lyric to drama, and from sermons to prose tales.

Lyric.
It has been said elsewhere that the shaping of a prosody
suitable for lyric was the great debt which Europe owes to
the language of Provence. And this is not at all inconsistent with the
undoubted critical fact that in a Corpus Lyricorum the best songs of the
northern tongues would undoubtedly rank higher, according to all sound
canons of poetical criticism, than the best lyrics of the southern. For, as it
happens, we have lyrics in at least two most vigorous northern tongues
before they had gone to school to southern prosody, and we can see at once
the defects in them. The scanty remains of Anglo-Saxon lyric and the more
copious remains of Icelandic display, with no little power and pathos, and
plenty of ill-organised "cry," an almost total lack of ability to sing. Every
now and then their natural genius enables them to hit, clumsily and
laboriously, on something—the refrain of the Complaint of Deor, the
stepped stanzas of the Lesson of Loddfafni—resembling the more

accomplished methods of more educated and long-descended literatures.
But the poets are always in a Robinson Crusoe condition, and worse: for
Robinson had at least seen the tools and utensils he needed, if he did not
know how to make them. The scôps and scalds were groping for the very
pattern of the tools themselves.
The langue d'oc, first of all vernacular tongues, borrowed from Latin, as
Latin had borrowed from Greek, such of the practical outcomes of the laws
of lyric harmony in Aryan speech as were suitable to itself; and passed the
lesson on to the trouvères of the north of France—if indeed these did not
work out the transfer for themselves almost independently. And as there
was much more northern admixture, and in particular a less tyrannous
softness of vowel-ending in the langue d'oïl, this second stage saw a great
increase of suppleness, a great emancipation from monotony, a wonderful
freshness and wealth of colour and form. It has been said, and I see no
reason to alter the saying, that the French tongue in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries was actually better suited for lyrical poetry, and did
actually produce lyrical poetry, as far as prosody is concerned, of a fresher,
freer, more spontaneous kind, from the twelfth century to the beginning of
the fifteenth than has ever been the case since.[124]
M. Alfred Jeanroy has written a learned and extensive monograph on Les
Origines de la Poesie Lyrique en France, which with M. Gaston Raynaud's
Bibliographie des Chansonniers Français, and his collection of Motets of
our present period, is indispensable to the thorough student of the subject.
[125] But for general literary purposes the two classics of the matter are, and
are long likely to be, the charming Romancero Français[126] which M.
Paulin Paris published in the very dawn of the study of mediæval literature
in France, and the admirable Romanzen und Pastourellen[127] which Herr
Karl Bartsch collected and issued a quarter of a century ago. Here as
elsewhere the piecemeal system of publication which has been the bane of
the whole subject is to be regretted, for with a little effort and a little
division of labour the entire corpus of French lyric from the tenth to the
fourteenth century might have been easily set before the public. But the two
volumes above mentioned will enable the reader to judge its general
characteristics with pretty absolute sureness; and if he desires to supplement
them with the work of a single author, that of Thibaut of Champagne or
Navarre,[128] which is easily accessible, will form an excellent third.

The Romance
In this northern lyric—that is to say, northern as compared
and the with Provençal[129]—we find all or almost all the artificial
Pastourelle. forms which are characteristic of Provençal itself, some of
them no doubt rather sisters than daughters of their
analogues in the langue d'oc. Indeed, at the end of our present period, and
still more later, the ingenuity of the trouvères seems to have pushed the
strictly formal, strictly artificial part of the poetry of the troubadours to
almost its furthest possible limits in varieties of triolet and rondeau, ballade
and chant royal. But the Romances and the Pastourelles stand apart from
these, and both are recognised by authorities among the troubadours
themselves as specially northern forms. The differentia of each is in subject
rather than in form, the "romance" in this sense being a short love-story,
with little more than a single incident in it sometimes, but still always
possessing an incident; the Pastourelle, a special variety of love-story of the
kind so curiously popular in all mediæval languages, and so curiously alien
from modern experience, where a passing knight sees a damsel of low
degree, and woos her at once, with or without success, or where two
personages of the shepherd kind sue and are sued with evil hap or good. In
other words, the "romance" is supremely presented in English, and in the
much-abused fifteenth century, by the Nut-Browne Maid, the "pastourelle"
by Henryson's Robene and Makyne. Perhaps there is nothing quite so good
as either in the French originals of both; certainly there is nothing like the
union of metrical felicity, romantic conduct, sweet but not mawkish
sentiment, and never-flagging interest in the anonymous masterpiece which
the ever-blessed Arnold preserved for us in his Chronicle. But the diffused
merits—the so-to-speak "class-merits"—of the poems in general are very
high indeed: and when the best of the other lyrics—aubades, débats, and
what not—are joined to them, they supply the materials of an anthology of
hardly surpassed interest, as well for the bubbling music of their refrains
and the trill of their metre, as for the fresh mirth and joy of living in their
matter. The "German paste in our composition," as another Arnold had it,
and not only that, may make us prefer the German examples; but it must
never be forgotten that but for these it is at least not improbable that those
would never have existed.
To select capital examples from so large a body is no easy task. One or two,
indeed, have "made fortune," the most famous of them being the great

aubade (chief among its kind, as "En un vergier sotz folha d'albespi" is
among the Provençal albas), which begins—

"Gaite de la tor,
Gardez entor
Les murs, si Deus vos voie;"[130]

and where the gaite (watcher) answers (like a Cornish watcher of the
pilchards)—

"Hu! et hu! et hu! et hu!"

Then there is the group, among the oldest and the best of all, assigned to
Audefroy le Bâtard—a most delectable garland, which tells how the loves
of Gerard and Fair Isabel are delayed (with the refrain "et joie atent
Gerars"), and how the joy comes at last; of "belle Ydoine" and her at first
ill-starred passion for "li cuens [the Count] Garsiles"; of Béatrix and Guy;
of Argentine, whose husband better loved another; of Guy the second, who
aima Emmelot de foi—all charming pieces of early verse. And then there
are hundreds of others, assigned or anonymous, in every tone, from the
rather unreasonable request of the lady who demands—

"Por coi me bast mes maris?
laysette!"

immediately answering her own question by confessing that he has found
her embracing her lover, and threatening further justification; through the
less impudent but still not exactly correct morality of "Henri and
Aiglentine," to the blameless loves of Roland and "Bele Erembors" and the
moniage of "Bele Doette" after her lover's death, with the words—

"Tant mar i fustes, cuens Do, frans de
nature,
por vostre aor vestrai je la haire
ne sur mon cors n'arai pelice vaire."

This conduct differs sufficiently from that of the unnamed heroine of
another song, who in the sweetest and smoothest of verse bids her husband

never to mind if she stays with her lover that night, for the night is very
short, and he, the husband, shall have her back to-morrow!
And besides the morality, perverse or touching, the quaint manners, the
charming unusual names or forms of names, Oriour, Oriolanz, Ysabiaus,
Aigline,—there are delightful fancies, borrowed often since:—

"Li rossignox est mon père,
Qui chante sur la ramée
el plus haut boscage;
La seraine ele est ma mère,
qui chante en la mer salée
el plus haut rivage."

Something in the very sound of the language keeps for us the freshness of
the imagery—the sweet-briar and the hawthorn, the mavis and the oriole—
which has so long become publica materies. It is not withered and
hackneyed by time and tongues as, save when genius touches it, it is now.
The dew is still on all of it; and, thanks to the dead language, the dead
manners, it will always be on. All is just near enough to us for it to be
enjoyed, as we cannot enjoy antiquity or the East; and yet the "wall of
glass" which seven centuries interpose, while hiding nothing, keeps all
intact, unhackneyed, strange, fresh. There may be better poetry in the world
than these twelfth and thirteenth century French lyrics: there is certainly
higher, grander, more respectable. But I doubt whether there is any sweeter
or, in a certain sense, more poignant. The nightingale and the mermaid were
justified of their children.
It is little wonder that all Europe soon tried to imitate notes so charming,
and in some cases, though other languages were far behind French in
development, tried successfully. Our own "Alison,"[131] the first note of true
English lyric, is a "romance" of the most genuine kind; the songs of Walther
von der Vogelweide, of which we have also spoken, though they may rise
higher, yet owe their French originals service, hold of them, would either
never or much later have come into existence but for them. An astonishing
privilege for a single nation to have enjoyed, if only for a short time; a
privilege almost more astonishing in its reception than even in itself. France
could point to the chansons and to the romances, to Audefroy le Bastard

and Chrestien of Troyes, to Villehardouin and Thibaut, to William of Lorris
and John of Meung, to the fabliaux writers and the cyclists of Renart, in
justification of her claims. She shut them up; she forgot them; she sneered
at them whenever they were remembered; and she appointed as her
attorneys in the court of Parnassus Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux and François
Arouet de Voltaire!

The Fabliaux.
No more curious contrast, but also none which could more
clearly show the enormous vigour and the unique variety of
the French genius at this time, can be imagined than that which is presented
by the next division to which we come—the division occupied by the
celebrated poems, or at least verse-compositions, known as fabliaux. These,
for reasons into which it is perhaps better not to inquire too closely, have
been longer and better known than any other division of old French poetry.
They were first collected and published a hundred and forty years ago by
Barbazan; they were much commented on by Le Grand d'Aussy in the last
years of the last century, were again published in the earlier years of the
present by Méon, and recently have been re-collected, divested of some
companions not strictly of their kind, and published in an edition desirable
in every respect by M. Anatole de Montaiglon and M. Gaston Raynaud.[132]
Since this collection M. Bédier has executed a monograph upon them which
stands to the subject much as that of M. Jeanroy does to the Lyrics. But a
great deal of it is occupied by speculations, more interesting to the folk-
lorist than to the student of literature, as to the origin of the stories
themselves. This, though a question of apparently inexhaustible attraction to
some people, must not occupy us very long here. It shall be enough to say
that many of these subjects are hardy perennials which meet us in all
literatures, and the existence of which is more rationally to be accounted for
by the supposition of a certain common form of story, resulting partly from
the conditions of human life and character, partly from the conformation of
the human intellect, than by supposing deliberate transmission and copying
from one nation to another. For this latter explanation is one of those which,
as has been said, only push ignorance further back; and in fact, leave us at
the last with no alternative except that which we might have adopted at the
first.

Their origin.
That, however, some assistance may have been given to the
general tendency to produce the same forms by the literary

knowledge of earlier, especially Eastern, collections of tales is no
extravagant supposition, and is helped by the undoubted fact that actual
translations of such collections—Dolopathos, the Seven Sages of Rome,[133]
and so forth—are found early in French, and chiefly at second-hand from
the French in other languages. But the general tendency of mankind,
reinforced and organised by a certain specially literary faculty and
adaptability in the French genius, is on the whole sufficient to account for
the fabliau.

Their licence.
It presents, as we have said, the most striking and singular
contrast to the Lyric poems which we have just noticed. The
technical morality of these is extremely accommodating, indeed (in its
conventional and normal form) very low. But it is redeemed by an exquisite
grace and charm, by true passion, and also by a great decency and
accomplishment of actual diction. Coarse language—very rare in the
romances, though there are a few examples of it—is rarer still in the
elaborate formal lyric of the twelfth and thirteenth century in French. In the
fabliaux, which are only a very little later, and which seem not to have been
a favourite form of composition very long after the fourteenth century had
reached its prime, coarseness of diction, though not quite invariable, is the
rule. Not merely are the subjects, in the majority of cases, distinctly
"broad," but the treatment of them is broader still. In a few instances it is
very hard to discern any wit at all, except a kind similar to that known much
later in England as "selling bargains"; and almost everywhere the words
which, according to a famous classical French tag, bravent l'honnêteté, in
Latin, the use of which a Roman poet has vaunted as Romana simplicitas,
and which for some centuries have been left alone by regular literature in all
European languages till very recently,—appear to be introduced on purpose
as part of the game. In fact, it is in the fabliau that the characteristic which
Mr Matthew Arnold selected as the opprobrium of the French in life and
literature practically makes its first appearance. And though the "lubricity"
of these poems is free from some ugly features which appear after the
Italian wars of the late fifteenth century, it has never been more frankly
destitute of shamefacedness.

Their wit.
It would, however, be extremely unfair to let it be supposed
that the fabliaux contain nothing but obscenity, or that they
can offer attractions to no one save those whom obscenity attracts. As in

those famous English followings of them, where Chaucer considerably
reduced the licence of language, and still more considerably increased the
dose of wit—the Reeve's and Miller's sections of the Canterbury Tales—the
lack of decency is very often accompanied by no lack of sense. And a
certain proportion, including some of the very best in a literary point of
view, are not exposed to the charge of any impropriety either of language or
of subject.

Definition and
There is, indeed, no special reason why the fabliau should
subjects. be "improper" (except for the greater ease of getting a
laugh) according to its definition, which is capable of being
drawn rather more sharply than is always the case with literary kinds. It is a
short tale in verse—almost invariably octosyllabic couplets—dealing, for
the most part from the comic point of view, with incidents of ordinary life.
This naturally admits of the widest possible diversity of subject: indeed it is
only by sticking to the condition of "ordinary life" that the fabliau can be
differentiated from the short romance on one side and the allegoric beast-
fable on the other. Even as it is, its most recent editors have admitted among
their 157 examples not a few which are simple jeux d'esprit on the things of
humanity, and others which are in effect short romances and nothing else.
Of these last is the best known of all the non-Rabelaisian fabliaux, "Le Vair
Palefroi," which has been Englished by Leigh Hunt and shortly paraphrased
by Peacock, while examples of the former may be found without turning
very long over even one of M. M. de Montaiglon and Raynaud's pretty and
learned volumes. A very large proportion, as might be expected, draw their
comic interest from satire on priests, on women, or on both together; and
this very general character of the fabliaux (which, it must be remembered,
were performed or recited by the very same jongleurs who conducted the
publication of the chansons de geste and the romances) was no doubt partly
the result and partly the cause of the persistent dislike and disfavour with
which the Church regarded the profession of jonglerie. It is, indeed, from
the fabliaux themselves that we learn much of what we know about the
jongleurs; and one of not the least amusing[134] deals with the half-clumsy,
half-satiric boasts of two members of the order, who misquote the titles of
their répertoire, make by accident or intention ironic comments on its
contents, and in short do not magnify their office in a very modern spirit of
humorous writing.

Every now and then, too, we find, in the half-random and wholly scurrile
slander of womankind, a touch of real humour, of the humour that has
feeling behind it, as here, where a sufficiently ribald variation on the theme
of the "Ephesian matron" ends—

"Por ce teng-je celui à fol
Qui trop met en fame sa cure;
Fame est de trop foible nature,
De noient rit, de noient pleure,
Fame aime et het en trop poi d'eure:
Tost est ses talenz remuez,
Qui fame croit, si est desvès."

So too, again, in "La Housse Partie," a piece which perhaps ranks next to
the "Vair Palefroi" in general estimation, there is neither purely romantic
interest, as in the Palfrey, nor the interest of "the pity of it," as in the piece
just quoted; but an ethical purpose, showing out of the mouth of babes and
sucklings the danger of filial ingratitude.
But, as a general rule, there is little that is serious in these frequently
graceless but generally amusing compositions. There is a curious variety
about them, and incidentally a crowd of lively touches of common life. The
fisherman of the Seine starts for his day's work or sport with oar and tackle;
the smith plies the forge; the bath plays a considerable part in the stories,
and we learn that it was not an unknown habit to eat when bathing, which
seems to be an unwise attempt to double luxuries. A short sketch of
mediæval catering might be got out of the fabliaux, where figure not merely
the usual dainties—capons, partridges, pies well peppered—but eels salted,
dried, and then roasted, or more probably grilled, as we grill kippered
salmon. Here we have a somewhat less grimy original—perhaps it was
actually the original—of Skelton's "Tunning of Elinor Rumming"; and in
many places other patterns, the later reproductions of which are well known
to readers of Boccaccio and the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles of La Fontaine
and his followers. Title after title—"Du Prestre Crucifié," "Du Prestre et
d'Alison," &c.—tells us that the clergy are going to be lampooned.
Sometimes, where the fun is no worse than childish, it is childish enough—
plays on words, jokes on English mispronunciation of French, and so forth.
But it very seldom, though it is sometimes intolerably nasty, approaches the

sheer drivel which appears in some English would-be comic writing of the
Middle Ages, or the very early Renaissance—such, for instance, as most of
that in the prose "Pleasant Historie of Thomas of Reading,"[135] which the
late Mr Thoms was pleased to call a romance. Yet the actual stuff of
"Thomas of Reading" is very much of the nature of the fabliaux (except of
course the tragical part, which happens to be the only good part), and so the
difference of the handling is noteworthy. So it is also in English verse-work
of the kind—the "Hunting of the Hare"[136] and the like—to take examples
necessarily a little later than our time.

Effect of the
For in these curious compositions the esprit Gaulois found
fabliaux on itself completely at home; indeed some have held that here it
language. hit upon its most characteristic and peculiar development.
The wonderful faculty for expression—for giving, if not the
supreme, yet the adequate and technically masterly dress to any kind of
literary production—which has been the note of French literature
throughout, and which was never more its note than at this time, enabled the
language, as we have seen and shall see, to keep as by an easy sculling
movement far ahead of all its competitors. But in other departments, with
one or two exceptions, the union of temper and craft, of inspiration and
execution, was not quite perfect. Here there was no misalliance. As the
language lost the rougher, fresher music which gives such peculiar
attraction to the chansons, as it disused itself to the varied trills, the half-
inarticulate warblings which constitute the charm of the lyrics, so it
acquired the precision, the flexibility, the netteté, which satiric treatment of
the follies and evil chances of life, the oddities of manners and morals,
require. It became bright, if a little hard, easy, if a little undistinguished,
capable of slyness, of innuendo, of "malice," but not quite so capable as it
had been of the finer and vaguer suggestions and aspirations.

And on
Above all, these fabliaux served as an exercise-ground for
narrative. the practice in which French was to become almost if not
quite supreme, the practice of narrative. In the longer
romances, which for a century or a century and a half preceded the fabliaux,
the art of narration, as has been more than once noticed, was little attended
to, and indeed had little scope. The chansons had a common form, or
something very like it, which almost dispensed the trouvère from devoting
much pains to the individual conduct of the story. The most abrupt

transitions were accustomed, indeed expected; minor incidents received
very little attention; the incessant fighting secured the attention of the
probable hearers by itself; the more grandiose and striking incidents—the
crowning of Prince Louis and the indignation of William at his sister's
ingratitude, for instance—were not "engineered" or led up to in any way,
but left to act in mass and by assault.

Conditions of
The smaller range and more delicate—however indelicate—
fabliau- argument of the fabliaux not only invited but almost
writing. 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
The great means for doing this in literature is irony; and
appearance of irony appears in the fabliaux as it had hardly done since
irony. 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.

Fables proper.
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.

Reynard the
Not, of course, that the antiquity of the Reynard story
Fox. itself[138] does not mount far higher than the thirteenth
century. No two things are more remarkable as results of
that comparative and simultaneous study of literature, to which this series
hopes to give some little assistance, than the way in which, on the one hand,
a hundred years seem to be in the Middle Ages but a day, in the growth of
certain kinds, and on the other a day sometimes appears to do the work of a
hundred years. We have seen how in the last two or three decades of the
twelfth century the great Arthurian legend seems suddenly to fill the whole
literary scene, after being previously but a meagre chronicler's record or
invention. The growth of the Reynard story, though to some extent
contemporaneous, was slower; but it was really the older of the two. Before
the middle of this century, as we have seen, there was really no Arthurian
story worthy the name; it would seem that by that time the Reynard legend
had already taken not full but definite form in Latin, and there is no
reasonable reason for scepticism as to its existence in vernacular tradition,
though perhaps not in vernacular writing, for many years, perhaps for more
than one century, earlier.

Order of texts.
It was not to be expected but that so strange, so interesting,
and so universally popular a story as that of King Noble and
his not always loving subjects, should have been made, as usual, the battle-
ground of literary fancy and of that general tendency of mankind to ferocity,
which, unluckily, the study of belles lettres does not seem very appreciably
to soften. Assisted by the usual fallacy of antedating MSS. in the early days
of palæographic study, and by their prepossessions as Germans, some early
students of the Reynard story made out much too exclusive and too early
claims, as to possession by right of invention, for the country in which
Reynard has no doubt, for the last four centuries or so, been much more of a
really popular hero than anywhere else. Investigation and comparison,
however, have had more healing effects here than in other cases; and since
the acknowledgment of the fact that the very early Middle High German
version of Henry the Glichezare, itself of the end of the twelfth century, is a
translation from the French, there has not been much serious dispute about
the order of the Reynard romances as we actually have them. That is to say,
if the Latin Isengrimus—the oldest Reinardus Vulpes—of 1150 or
thereabouts is actually the oldest text, the older branches of the French

Renart pretty certainly come next, with the High German following a little
later, and the Low German Reincke de Vos and the Flemish Reinaert a little
later still. The Southern Romance nations do not seem—indeed the humour
is essentially Northern—to have adopted Reynard with as much enthusiasm
as they showed towards the Romances; and our English forms were
undoubtedly late adaptations from foreign originals.

Place of
If, however, this account of the texts may be said to be fairly
origin. settled, the same cannot of course be said as to the origin of
the story. Here there are still champions of the German
claim, whose number is increased by those who stickle for a definite "Low"
German origin. Some French patriots, with a stronger case than they
generally have, still maintain the story to be purely French in inception. I
have not myself seen any reason to change the opinion I formed some
fifteen years ago, to the effect that it seems likely that the original language
of the epic is French, but French of a Walloon or Picard dialect, and that it
was written somewhere between the Seine and the Rhine.
The character and accomplishment of the story, however, are matters of
much more purely literary interest than the rather barren question of the
probable—it is not likely that it will ever be the proved—date or place of
origin of this famous thing. The fable in general, and the beast-fable in
particular, are among the very oldest and most universal of the known forms
of literature. A fresh and special development of it might have taken place
in any country at any time. It did, as a matter of fact, take place somewhere
about the twelfth century or earlier, and somewhere in the central part of the
northern coast district of the old Frankish empire.

The French
As usual with mediæval work, when it once took hold on the
form. imagination of writers and hearers, the bulk is very great,
especially in the French forms, which, taking them
altogether, cannot fall much short of a hundred thousand lines. This total,
however, includes developments—Le Couronnement Renart, Renart le
Nouvel, and, later than our present period, a huge and still not very well-
known thing called Renart le Contrefait, which are distinct additions to the
first conception of the story. Yet even that first conception is not a story in
the single sense. Its thirty thousand lines or thereabouts are divided into a
considerable number of what are called branches, attributed to authors

sometimes anonymous, sometimes named, but never, except in the one case
of Renart le Bestourné, known.[139] And it is always difficult and sometimes
impossible to determine in what relation these branches stand to the main
trunk, or which of them is the main trunk. The two editors of the Roman,
Méon and Herr Martin, arrange them in different orders; and I do not think
it would be in the least difficult to make out a good case for an order, or
even a large number of orders, different still.[140]
By comparison, however, with the versions in other languages, it seems not
very doubtful that the complaint of Isengrim the Wolf as to the outrages
committed by Reynard on the complainant's personal comfort, and the
honour of Hersent his wife—a complaint laid formally before King Noble
the Lion—forms, so far as any single thing can be said to form it, the basis
and beginning of the Reynard story. The multiplication of complaints by
other beasts, the sufferings inflicted by Reynard on the messengers sent to
summon him to Court, and his escapes, by mixture of fraud and force, when
he is no longer able to avoid putting in an appearance, supply the natural
continuation.

Its
But from this, at least in the French versions, the branches
complications. diverge, cross, and repeat or contradict each other with an
altogether bewildering freedom. Sometimes, for long
passages together, as in the interesting fytte, "How Reynard hid himself
among the Skins,"[141] the author seems to forget the general purpose
altogether, and to devote himself to something quite different—in this case
the description of the daily life and pursuits of a thirteenth-century
sportsman of easy means. Often the connection with the general story is
kept only by the introduction of the most obvious and perfunctory devices
—an intrigue with Dame Hersent, a passing trick played on Isengrim, and
so forth.
Nevertheless the whole is knit together, to a degree
Unity of spirit.
altogether unusual in a work of such magnitude, due to
many different hands, by an extraordinary unity of tone and temper. This
tone and this temper are to some extent conditioned by the Rise of Allegory,
the great feature, in succession to the outburst of Romance, of our present
The Rise of
period. We do not find in the original Renart branches the
Allegory. abstracting of qualities and the personification of

abstractions which appear in later developments, and which are due to the
popularity of the Romance of the Rose, if it be not more strictly correct to
say that the popularity of the Romance of the Rose was due to the taste for
allegory. Jacquemart Giélée, the author of Renart le Nouvel, might
personify Renardie and work his beast-personages into knights of tourney;
the clerk of Troyes, who later wrote Renart le Contrefait, might weave a
sort of encyclopædia into his piece. But the authors of the "Ancien Renart"
knew better. With rare lapses, they exhibit wonderful art in keeping their
characters beasts, while assigning to them human arts; or rather, to put the
matter with more correctness, they pass over the not strictly beast-like
performances of Renart and the others with such entire unconcern, with
such a perfect freedom from tedious after-thought of explanation, that no
sense of incongruity occurs. The illustrations of Méon's Renart, which show
us the fox painfully clasping in his forelegs a stick four times his own
length, show the inferiority of the nineteenth century. Renart may beat le
vilain (everybody beats the poor vilain) as hard as he likes in the old French
text; it comes all naturally. A neat copper-plate engraving, in the best style
of sixty or seventy years ago, awakes distrust.

The satire of
The general fable is so familiar that not much need be said
Renart. about it. But it is, I think, not unfair to say that the German
and Flemish versions, from the latter of which Caxton's and
all later English forms seem to be copied, are, if better adjusted to a
continuous story, less saturated with the quintessence of satiric criticism of
life than the French Renart. The fault of excessive coarseness of thought
and expression, which has been commented on in the fabliaux, recurs here
to the fullest extent; but it is atoned for and sweetened by an even greater
measure of irony. As to the definite purposes of this irony it would not be
well to be too sure. The passage quoted on a former page will show with
what completely fearless satire the trouvères treated Church and State, God
and Man. It is certain that they had no love of any kind for the clergy, who
were not merely their rivals but their enemies; and it is not probable they
had much for the knightly order, who were their patrons. But it is never in
the very least degree safe to conclude, in a mediæval writer, from that satire
of abuses, which is so frequent, to the distinct desire of reform or
revolution, which is so rare. The satire of the Renart—and it is all the more
delightful—is scarcely in the smallest degree political, is only in an

interesting archæological way of the time ecclesiastical or religious; but it is
human, perennial, contemptuous of mere time and circumstance,
throughout.

The Fox
It cannot, no doubt, be called kindly satire—French satire
himself. very rarely is. Renart, the only hero, though a hero
sometimes uncommonly hard bested, is a furred and four-
footed Jonathan Wild. He appears to have a creditable paternal affection for
Masters Rovel, Percehaie, and the other cubs; and despite his own extreme
licence of conjugal conduct, only one or two branches make Dame
Hermeline, his wife, either false to him or ill-treated by him. In these
respects, as in the other that he is scarcely ever outwitted, he has the
advantage of Jonathan. But otherwise I think our great eighteenth-century
maufès was a better fellow than Renart, because he was much less purely
malignant. I do not think that Jonathan often said his prayers; but he
probably never went to bed, as Reynard did upon the hay-mow, after
performing his devotions in a series of elaborate curses upon all his
enemies. The fox is so clever that one never dislikes him, and generally
admires him; but he is entirely compact of all that is worst, not merely in
beast-nature but in humanity. And it is a triumph of the writers that, this
being so, we at once can refrain from disliking him, and are not tempted to
like him illegitimately.

His circle.
The trouvères did not trouble themselves to work out any
complete character among the many whom they grouped
round this great personage; but they left none without touches of
vivification and verisimilitude. The female beasts—Dame Fière or
Orgueilleuse, the lioness, Hersent, the she-wolf, Hermeline, the vixen, and
the rest—are too much tinged with that stock slander of feminine character
which was so common in the Middle Ages. And each is rather too much of
a type, a fault which may be also found with their lords. Yet all of these—
Bruin and Brichemer, Coart and Chanticleer, Tybert and Primaut, Hubert
and Roonel—have the liveliest touches, not merely of the coarsely labelling
kind, but of the kind that makes a character alive. And, save as concerns the
unfortunate capons and gelines whom Renart consumes, so steadily and
with such immunity, it cannot be said that their various misfortunes are ever
incurred without a valid excuse in poetical justice. Isengrim, the chief of
them all, is an especial case in point. Although he is Chief Constable, he is

just as much of a rascal and a malefactor as Renart himself, with the
additional crime of stupidity. One is disposed to believe that, if domiciliary
visits were made to their various abodes, Malpertuis would by no means
stand alone as a bad example of a baronial abode. Renart is indeed
constantly spoken of as Noble's "baron." Yet it would be a great mistake to
take this epic, as it has been sometimes taken, for a protest against baronial
suppression. A sense of this, no doubt, counts—as do senses of many other
oppressions that are done under the sun. But it is the satire on life as a
whole that is uppermost; and that is what makes the poem, or collection of
poems, so remarkable. It is hard, coarse, prosaic except for the range and
power of its fancy, libellous enough on humanity from behind its stalking-
brutes. But it is true, if an exaggeration of the truth; and its constant
hugging of the facts of life supplies the strangest possible contrast to the
graceful but shadowy land of romance which we have left in former
chapters. We all know the burial-scene of Launcelot—later, no doubt, in its
finest form, but in suggestion and spirit of the time with which we are
dealing. Let us now consider briefly the burial-scene of Renart.

The burial of
When Méon, the excellent first editor of the collection, put,
Renart. as was reason, the branch entitled "La Mort Renart" last, he
was a little troubled by the consideration that several of the
beasts whom in former branches Renart himself has brought to evil ends
reappear and take part in his funeral. But this scarcely argued a sufficient
appreciation of the true spirit of the cycle. The beasts, though perfectly
lively abstractions, are, after all, abstractions in a way, and you cannot kill
an abstraction. Nay, the author, with a really grand final touch of the
pervading satire which is the key of the whole, gives us to understand at the
last that Renart (though he has died not once, but twice, in the course of the
fytte) is not really dead at all, and that when Dame Hermeline persuades the
complaisant ambassadors to report to the Lion-King that they have seen the
tomb with Renart inscribed upon it, the fact was indeed true but the
meaning false, inasmuch as it was another Renart altogether. Indeed the true
Renart is clearly immortal.
Nevertheless, as it is his mission, and that of his poets, to satirise all the
things of Life, so must Death also be satirised in his person and with his aid.
The branch, though it is probably not a very early one, is of an admirable
humour, and an uncompromising truth after a fashion, which makes the

elaborate realism and pessimism of some other periods look singularly
poor, thin, and conventional. The author, for the keeping of his story, begins
by showing the doomed fox more than a little "failed"—the shadow of fate
dwelling coldly beforehand on him. He is badly mauled at the opening
(though, it is true, he takes vengeance for it) by monks whose hen-roost he
is robbing, and when he meets Coart the hare, sur son destrier, with a vilain
whom he has captured (this is a mark of lateness, some of the verisimilitude
of the early time having been dropped), he plays him no tricks. Nay, when
Isengrim and he begin to play chess he is completely worsted by his ancient
butt, who at last takes, in consequence of an imprudent stake of the
penniless Fox, a cruel but appropriate vengeance for his former wrongs.
Renart is comforted to some extent by his old love, Queen Fière the lioness;
but pain, and wounds, and defeat have brought him near death, and he
craves a priest. Bernard the Ass, Court-Archpriest, is ready, and admonishes
the penitent with the most becoming gravity and unction. The confession, as
might be expected, is something impudent; and the penitent very frankly
stipulates that if he gets well his oath of repentance is not to stand good. But
it looks as if he were to be taken at the worse side of his word, and he falls
into a swoon which is mistaken for death. The Queen laments him with
perfect openness; but the excellent Noble is a philosophic husband as well
as a good king, and sets about the funeral of Renart

("Jamais si bon baron n'avai,"

says he) with great earnestness. Hermeline and her orphans are fetched
from Malpertuis, and the widow makes heartrending moan, as does Cousin
Grimbart when the news is brought to him. The vigils of the dead are sung,
and all the beasts who have hated Renart, and whom he has affronted in his
lifetime, assemble in decent mourning and perform the service, with the
ceremony of the most well-trained choir. Afterwards they "wake" the corpse
through the night a little noisily; but on the morrow the obsequies are
resumed "in the best and most orgilous manner," with a series of grave-side
speeches which read like a designed satire on those common in France at
the present day. A considerable part of the good Archpriest's own sermon is
unfortunately not reproducible in sophisticated times; but every one can
appreciate his tender reference to the deceased's prowess in daring all
dangers—

"Pur avoir vostre ventre plaine,
Et pour porter à Hermeline
Vostre fame, coc ou geline
Chapon, ou oie, ou gras oison"—

for, as he observes in a sorrowful parenthesis, "anything was in season if
you could only get hold of it." Brichemer the Stag notes how Reynard had
induced the monks to observe their vows by making them go to bed late and
get up early to watch their fowls. But when Bruin the Bear has dug his
grave, and holy water has been thrown on him, and Bruin is just going to
shovel the earth—behold! Reynard wakes up, catches Chanticleer (who is
holding the censer) by the neck, and bolts into a thick pleached plantation.
Still, despite this resurrection, his good day is over, and a levée en masse of
the Lion's people soon surrounds him, catches him up, and forces him to
release Chanticleer, who, nothing afraid, challenges him to mortal combat
on fair terms, beats him, and leaves him for dead in the lists. And though he
manages to pay Rohart the Raven and his wife (who think to strip his body)
in kind, he reaches Malpertuis dead-beat; and we feel that even his last shift
and the faithful complaisance of Grimbart will never leave him quite the
same Fox again.
The defects which distinguish almost all mediæval poetry are no doubt
discoverable here. There is some sophistication of the keeping in the
episodes of Coart and Chanticleer, and the termination is almost too
audacious in the sort of choice of happy or unhappy ending, triumph or
defeat for the hero, which it leaves us. Yet this very audacity suits the whole
scheme; and the part dealing with the death (or swoon) and burial is
assuredly one of the best things of its kind in French, almost one of the best
things in or out of it. The contrast between the evident delight of the beasts
at getting rid of Renart and their punctilious discharge of ceremonial duties,
the grave parody of rites and conventions, remind us more of Swift or
Lucian than of any French writer, even Rabelais or Voltaire. It happened
that some ten or twelve years had passed between the time when the present
writer had last opened Renart (except for mere reference now and then) and
the time when he refreshed his memory of it for the purposes of the present
volume. It is not always in such cases that the second judgment exactly
confirms the first; but here, not merely in the instance of this particular
branch but almost throughout, I can honestly say that I put down the Roman

de Renart with even a higher idea of its literary merit than that with which I
had taken it up.

The Romance
The second great romance which distinguishes the thirteenth
of the Rose. century in France stands, as we may say, to one side of the
Roman de Renart as the fabliaux do to the other side. But,
though complex in fewer pieces, the Roman de la Rose[142] is, like the
Roman de Renart, a complex, not a single work; and its two component
parts are distinguished from one another by a singular change of tone and
temper. It is the later and larger part of the Rose which brings it close to
Renart: the smaller and earlier is conceived in a spirit entirely different,
though not entirely alien, and one which, reinforcing the satiric drift of the
fabliaux and Renart itself, influenced almost the entire literary production
in belles lettres at least, and sometimes out of them, for more than two
centuries throughout Europe.
At no time probably except in the Middle Ages would Jean de Meung, who
towards the end of the thirteenth century took up the scheme which William
of Lorris had left unfinished forty years earlier, have thought of continuing
the older poem instead of beginning a fresh one for himself. And at no other
time probably would any one, choosing to make a continuation, have
carried it out by putting such entirely different wine into the same bottle. Of
William himself little is known, or rather nothing, except that he must have
been, as his continuator certainly was, a native of the Loire district; so that
the Rose is a product of Central, not, like Renart, of Northern France, and
exhibits, especially in the Lorris portion, an approximation to Provençal
spirit and form.
The use of personification and abstraction, especially in relation to love-
matters, had not been unknown in the troubadour poetry itself and in the
northern verse, lyrical and other, which grew up beside or in succession to
it. It rose no doubt partly, if not wholly, from the constant habit in sermons
and theological treatises of treating the Seven Deadly Sins and other
abstractions as entities. Every devout or undevout frequenter of the Church
in those times knew "Accidia"[143] and Avarice, Anger and Pride, as bodily
rather than ghostly enemies, furnished with a regular uniform, appearing in
recognised circumstances and companies, acting like human beings. And
these were by no means the only sacred uses of allegory.

William of
When William of Lorris, probably at some time in the fourth
Lorris and decade of the thirteenth century, set to work to write the
Jean de Romance of the Rose, he adjusted this allegorical handling
Meung.
to the purposes of love-poetry with an ingenious intricacy
never before attained. It has been the fashion almost ever since the famous
Romance was rescued from the ignorant and contemptuous oblivion into
which it had fallen, to praise Jean de Meung's part at the expense of that due
to William of Lorris. But this is hard to justify either on directly æsthetic or
on historical principles of criticism. In the first place, there can be no
question that, vitally as he changed the spirit, Jean de Meung was wholly
indebted to his predecessor for the form—the form of half-pictorial, half-
poetic allegory, which is the great characteristic of the poem, and which
gave it the enormous attraction and authority that it so long possessed. In
the second place, clever as Jean de Meung is, and more thoroughly in
harmony as he may be with the esprit gaulois, his work is on a much lower
literary level than that of his predecessor. Jean de Meung in the latter and
larger part of the poem simply stuffs into it stock satire on women, stock
learning, stock semi-pagan morality. He is, it is true, tolerably actual; he
shares with the fabliau-writers and the authors of Renart a firm grasp on the
perennial rascalities and meannesses of human nature. The negative
commendation that he is "no fool" may be very heartily bestowed upon
him. But he is a little commonplace and more than a little prosaic. There is
amusement in him, but no charm: and where (that is to say, in large spaces)
there is no amusement, there is very little left. Nor, except for the
inappropriate exhibition of learning and the strange misuse of poetical (at
least of verse) allegory, can he be said to be eminently characteristic of his
own time. His very truth to general nature prevents that; while his literary
ability, considerable as it is, is hardly sufficient to clothe his universally true
reflections in a universally acceptable form.
The first four thousand and odd lines of the Romance, on the
The first part.
other hand—for beyond them it is known that the work of
William of Lorris does not go—contain matter which may seem but little
connected with criticism of life, arranged in a form completely out of
fashion. But they, beyond all question, contain also the first complete
presentation of a scheme, a mode, an atmosphere, which for centuries
enchained, because they expressed, the poetical thought of the time, and

which, for those who can reach the right point of view, can develop the
right organs of appreciation, possess an extraordinary, indeed a unique
charm. I should rank this first part of the Roman de la Rose high among the
books which if a man does not appreciate he cannot even distantly
understand the Middle Ages; indeed there is perhaps no single one which on
the serious side contains such a master-key to their inmost recesses.

Its capital
To comprehend a Gothic cathedral the Rose should be as
value. familiar as the Dies Iræ. For the spirit of it is indeed, though
faintly "decadent," even more the mediæval spirit than that
of the Arthurian legend, precisely for the reason that it is less universal, less
of humanity generally, more of this particular phase of humanity. And as it
is opposed to, rather than complementary of, the religious side of the matter
in one direction, so it opposes and completes the satirical side, of which we
have heard so much in this chapter, and the purely fighting and adventurous
part, which we have dealt with in others, not excluding by any means in this
half-reflective, half-contrasting office, the philosophical side also. Yet when
men pray and fight, when they sneer and speculate, they are constrained to
be very like themselves and each other. They are much freer in their
dreams: and the Romance of the Rose, if it has not much else of life, is like
it in this way—that it too is a dream.
As such it quite honestly holds itself out. The author lays it down,
supporting himself with the opinion of another "qui ot nom macrobes," that
dreams are quite serious things. At any rate he will tell a dream of his own,
a dream which befell him in his twentieth year, a dream wherein was
nothing

"Qui avenu trestout ne soit
Si com le songes racantoit."

And if any one wishes to know how the romance telling this dream shall be
called—

"Ce est li Rommanz de la Rose,
Ou l'ars d'amorz est tote enclose."

The rose-
The poem itself opens with a description of a dewy morn in
garden. May, a description then not so hackneyed as, chiefly from
this very instance, it afterwards became, and in itself at once
"setting," so to speak, the frame of gracious decorative imagery in which
the poet works. He "threaded a silver needle" (an odd but not unusual
mediæval pastime was sewing stitches in the sleeve) and strolled, cousant
ses manches, towards a river-bank. Then, after bathing his face and seeing
the bright gravel flashing through the water, he continued his stroll down-
stream, till he saw in front of him a great park (for this translates the
mediæval verger much better than "orchard"), on the wall of which were
portrayed certain images[144]—Hatred, Felony, Villainy, Covetousness,
Avarice, Envy, Sadness, Old Age, Hypocrisy, and Poverty. These
personages, who strike the allegoric and personifying note of the poem, are
described at varying length, the last three being perhaps the best. Despite
these uninviting figures, the Lover (as he is soon called) desires violently to
enter the park; but for a long time he can find no way in, till at length Dame
Oyseuse (Idleness) admits him at a postern. She is a very attractive damsel
herself; and she tells the Lover that Delight and all his Court haunt the park,
and that he has had the ugly images made, apparently as skeletons at the
feast, to heighten, not to dash, enjoyment. Entering, the Lover thinks he is
in the Earthly Paradise, and after a time he finds the fair company listening
to the singing of Dame Lyesse (Pleasure), with much dancing, music, and
entertainment of jongleurs and jongleresses to help pass the time.
Courtesy asks him to join in the karole (dance), and he does so, giving full
description of her, of Lyesse, of Delight, and of the God of Love himself,
with his bow-bearer Sweet-Glances, who carries in each hand five arrows—
in the right Beauty, Simpleness, Frankness, Companionship, Fair-Seeming;
in the left Pride, Villainy,[145] Shame, Despair, and "New-Thought"—i.e.,
Fickleness. Other personages—sometimes with the same names, sometimes
with different—follow in the train; Cupid watches the Lover that he may
take shot at him, and the tale is interrupted by an episode giving the story of
Narcissus. Meanwhile the Lover has seen among the flowers of the garden
one rose-bud on which he fixes special desires. The thorns keep him off;
and Love, having him at vantage, empties the right-hand quiver on him. He
yields himself prisoner, and a dialogue between captive and captor follows.
Love locks his heart with a gold key; and after giving him a long sermon on

his duties, illustrated from the Round Table romances and elsewhere,
vanishes, leaving him in no little pain, and still unable to get at the Rose.
Suddenly in his distress there appears to him

"Un valet buen et avenant
Bel-Acueil se faisoit clamer,"

and it seems that he was the son of Courtesy.

"Danger."
Bialacoil (to give him his Chaucerian[146] Englishing) is
most obliging, and through his help the Lover has nearly
reached the Rose, when an ugly personage named Danger in turn makes his
appearance. Up to this time there is no very important difficulty in the
interpretation of the allegory; but the learned are not at one as to what
"Danger" means. The older explanation, and the one to which I myself still
incline as most natural and best suiting what follows, is that Danger is the
representative of the beloved one's masculine and other guardians—her
husband, father, brother, mother, and so forth. Others, however, see in him
only subjective obstacles—the coyness, or caprice, or coquettishness of the
Beloved herself. But these never troubled a true lover to any great extent;
and besides they seem to have been provided for by the arrows in the left
hand of Love's bow-bearer, and by Shame (v. infra). At any rate Danger's
proceedings are of a most kill-joy nature. He starts from his hiding-place—

"Grans fu, et noirs et hericiés,
S'ot les iex rouges comme feus,
Le nés froncié, le vis hideus,
Et s'escrie comme forcenés."

He abuses Bialacoil for bringing the Lover to the Rose, and turns the Lover
out of the park, while Bialacoil flies.

"Reason."
To the disconsolate suitor appears Reason, and does not
speak comfortable words. She is described as a middle-aged
lady of a comely and dignified appearance, crowned, and made specially in
God's image and likeness. She tells him that if he had not put himself under
the guidance of Idleness, Love would not have wounded him; that besides
Danger, he has made her own daughter Shame his foe, and also Male-

Bouche (Scandal, Gossip, Evil-Speaking), the third and most formidable
guardian of the Rose. He ought never to have surrendered to Love. In the
service of that power

"il a plus poine
Que n'ont hermite ne blanc moine;
La poine en est démesurée,
Et la joie a courte durée."

The Lover does not take this sermon well. He is Love's: she may go about
her business, which she does. He bethinks him that he has a companion,
Amis (the Friend), who has always been faithful; and he will go to him in
his trouble. Indeed Love had bidden him do so. The Friend is obliging and
consoling, and says that he knows Danger. His bark is worse than his bite,
and if he is spoken softly to he will relent. The Lover takes the advice with
only partial success. Danger, at first robustious, softens so far as to say that
he has no objection to the Lover loving, only he had better keep clear of his
roses. The Friend represents this as an important point gained; and as the
next step Pity and Frankness go as his ambassadresses to Danger, who
allows Bialacoil to return to him and take him once more to see the Rose,
more beautiful than ever. He even, assisted by Venus, is allowed to kiss his
love.

"Shame" and
This is very agreeable: but it arouses the two other guardians
"Scandal." of whom Reason has vainly warned him, Shame and Evil-
Speaking, or Scandal. The latter wakes Jealousy, Fear
follows, and Fear and Shame stir up Danger. He keeps closer watch,
Jealousy digs a trench round the rose-bush and builds a tower where
Bialacoil is immured: and the Lover, his case only made worse by the
remembered savour of the Rose on his lips,[147] is left helpless outside. But
as the rubric of the poem has it—

"Cyendroit trespassa Guillaume
De Lorris, et n'en fist plus pseaulme."

The later
The work which forty years later Jean de Meung (some say
poem. at royal suggestion) added to the piece, so as to make it five
times its former length, has been spoken of generally

already, and needs less notice in detail. Jean de Meung takes up the theme
by once more introducing Reason, whose remonstrances, with the Lover's
answers, take nearly half as much room as the whole story hitherto. Then
reappears the Friend, who is twice as long-winded as Reason, and brings
the tale up to more than ten thousand lines already. At last Love himself
takes some pity of his despairing vassal, and besieges the tower where
"False-
Bialacoil is confined. This leads to the introduction of the
Seeming." most striking and characteristic figure of the second part,
Faux-Semblant, a variety of Reynard. Bialacoil is freed: but
Danger still guards the Rose. Love, beaten, invokes the help of his mother,
who sends Nature and Genius to his aid. They talk more than anybody else.
But Venus has to come herself before Danger is vanquished and the Lover
plucks the Rose.

Contrast of the
The appeal of this famous poem is thus twofold, though the
parts. allegorical form in which the appeal is conveyed is the
same. In the first part all the love-poetry of troubadour and
trouvère is gathered up and presented under the guise of a graceful dreamy
symbolism, a little though not much sicklied o'er with learning. In the
second the satiric tendency of the Fabliaux and Renart is carried still
further, with an admixture of not often apposite learning to a much greater
extent. Narcissus was superfluous where William of Lorris introduced him,
but Pygmalion and his image, inserted at great length by Jean de Meung,
when after twenty thousand lines the catastrophe is at length approaching,
are felt to be far greater intruders.

Value of both,
The completeness of the representation of the time given by
and charm of the poem is of course enormously increased by this second
the first. part, and the individual touches, though rather lost in the
wilderness of "skipping octosyllables," are wonderfully
sharp and true at times. Yet to some judgments at any rate the charm of the
piece will seem mostly to have vanished when Bialacoil is once shut up in
his tower. In mere poetry Jean de Meung is almost infinitely the inferior of
William of Lorris: and though the latter may receive but contemptuous
treatment from persons who demand "messages," "meanings," and so forth,
others will find message and meaning enough in his allegorical presentation
of the perennial quest, of "the way of a man with a maid," and more than
enough beauty in the pictures with which he has adorned it. He is indeed the

first great word-painter of the Middle Ages, and for long—almost to the
close of them—most poets simply copied him, while even the greatest used
him as a starting-point and source of hints.[148] Also besides pictures he has
music—music not very brilliant or varied, but admirably matching his
painting, soft, dreamy, not so much monotonous as uniform with a soothing
uniformity. Few poets deserve better than William of Lorris the famous
hyperbole which Greek furnished in turn to Latin and to English. He is
indeed "softer than sleep," and, as soft sleep is, laden with gracious and
various visions.

Marie de
The great riches of French literature at this time, and the
France and necessity of arranging this history rather with a view to
Rutebœuf. "epoch-making" kinds and books than to interesting
individual authors, make attention to many of these latter
impossible here. Thus Marie de France[149] yields to few authors of our two
centuries in charm and interest for the reader; yet for us she must be
regarded chiefly as one of the practitioners of the fable, and as the chief
practitioner of the Lai, which in her hands is merely a subdivision of the
general romance on a smaller scale. So, again, the trouvère Rutebœuf, who
has been the subject of critical attention, a little disproportionate perhaps,
considering the vast amount of work as good as his which has hardly any
critical notice, but still not undeserved, must serve us rather as an introducer
of the subject of dramatic poetry than as an individual, though his work is in
the bulk of it non-dramatic, and though almost all of it is full of interest in
itself.
Rutebœuf[150] (a name which seems to be a professional nom de guerre
rather than a patronymic) was married in 1260, and has devoted one of his
characteristic poems, half "complaints," half satires, to this not very
auspicious event. For the rest, it is rather conjectured than known that his
life must have filled the greater part, if not the whole, of the last two-thirds
of the thirteenth century, thus including the dates of both parts of the Rose
within it. The tendencies of the second part of the great poem appear in
Rutebœuf more distinctly than those of the earlier, though, like both, his
work shows the firm grip which allegory was exercising on all poetry, and
indeed on all literature. He has been already referred to as having written an
outlying "branch" of Renart; and not a few of his other poems—Le Dit des
Cordeliers, Frère Denise, and others—are of the class of the Fabliaux: