the great rebel Renaud of Montauban. At length, after a lifetime wasted
in fruitless, attempts to resist the iniquity of the emperor, to baffle
his power, to shame him by magnanimity into, justice, the four sons of
Aymon, who have given up their youth, their manhood, the dearest things
to their heart, respect to their father and loyalty to their sovereign,
rather than countenance the injustice of Charlemagne to their kinsman,
have at last obtained to be pardoned; to be pardoned, they, heroes, by
this, dastardly tyrant, and to quietly sink, broken-hearted into
nothingness. The eldest, Renaud, returning from his exile and the Holy
Land, finds that his wife Clarisse has pined for him and died; and
then, putting away his armour from him, and dressing in a pilgrim's
frock made of the purple serge of the dead lady's robe, he goes forth to
wander through the world; not very old in years, but broken-spirited; at
peace, but in solitude of heart. And one evening he arrives at Cologne.
We can imagine the old knight, only half aware of the sunshine of the
evening, the noise of the streets, the looks of the crowd, the great
minster rising half-finished in the midst of the town by the Rhine, the
cries and noise and chipping of the masons; unconscious of all this,
half away: with his brothers hiding in the Ardennes, living on roots and
berries, at bay before Charlemagne; or wandering ragged and famishing
through France; with King Yon brilliant at Toulouse, seeing perhaps for
the first time his bride Clarisse, or the towers of Montauban rising
under the workmen's hands; thinking perhaps of the frightful siege, when
all, all had been eaten in the fortress, and his children Aymonnet and
Yonnet, all thin and white, knelt down and begged him to slaughter his
horse Bayard that they might eat; perhaps of that journey, when he and
his brothers, all in red-furred robes with roses in their hands, rode
prisoners of King Charles across the plain of Vaucouleurs; perhaps of
when he galloped up to the gallows at Montfaucon, and cut loose his
brother Richard; or of that daring ride to Paris, where he and his horse
won the race, snatched the prize from before Charlemagne and sped off
crying out that the winner was Renaud of Montauban; or, perhaps, seeing
once more the sad, sweet face of the Lady Clarisse, when she had burned
all her precious stuffs and tires in the castle-yard, and lay dead
without him to kiss her cold mouth; of seeing once more his good horse
Bayard, when he kissed him in his stall before giving him to be killed
by Charlemagne. Thinking of all that past, seeing it all within his
mind, and seeing but little of the present; as, in the low yellow light,
he helped, for his bread, the workmen to heave the great beams, to carry
the great stones of the cathedral, to split the huge marble masses while
they stared in astonished envy; as he sat, unconscious of their
mutterings, eating his dry bread and porridge in the building docks by
the river. And then, when wearied, he had sunk to sleep in the hay-loft,
dreaming perchance that all this evil life was but a dream and the
awakening therefrom to happiness and strength; the jealous workmen came
and killed him with their base tools, and cast him into the Rhine. They
say that the huge body floated on the water, surrounded by a great halo;
and that when the men of the banks, seeing this, reverently fished it
out, they found that the noble corpse was untouched by decay, and still
surrounded by a light of glory. And thus, it seems to me, this Renaud,
this rebel baron of whose reality we know nothing, has floated
surrounded by a halo of poetry down the black flood of the Middle Ages
(in which so much has sunk); and when we look upon his face, and see
its beauty and strength and solemness, we feel, like the people of the
Rhine bank, inclined to weep, and to say of this mysterious corpse,
"Surely this is some great saint."
Of each of these heroes thus shown us by the Middle Ages, the Italian
Renaissance also, by the hand of two of her greatest poets, has given us
a picture. And first, of Roland. Of him, of Count Orlando, we are told
by Messer Lodovico Ariosto, that in consequence of his having
discovered, in a certain pleasant grotto among the ferns and maidenhair,
words graven on the rock (interrupted, doubtless, by the lover's kisses)
which revealed that the Princess Angelica of Cathay had disdained him
for Medoro, the fair-haired page of the King of the Moors; Count Orlando
went straightway out of his mind, and hanging up his armour and
stripping off his clothes, galloped about on his bare-backed horse,
slaughtering cows and sheep instead of Saracens; until it pleased God,
moved by the danger of Christendom and the prayers of Charlemagne, to
permit Astolfo to ride on the hippogriffs back up to the moon, and bring
back thence the wits of the great paladin contained in a small phial. We
all know that merry tale. What the Renaissance has to say of Renaud of
Montauban is even stranger and more fantastic. One day, says Matteo
Boiardo, in the fifteenth canto of the second part of his "Orlando
Innamorato," as Rinaldo of Montalbano, the contemner of love, was riding
in the Ardennes, he came to a clearing in the forest, where, close to
the fountain of Merlin, a wonderful sight met his eyes. On a flowery
meadow were dancing three naked damsels, and singing with them danced
also a naked youth, dark of eyes and fair of hair, the first down on his
lips, so that some might have said it was and others that it was not
there. On Rinaldo's approach they broke through their singing and
dancing, and rushed upon him, pelting him with roses and hyacinths and
violets from their baskets, and beating him with great sheaves of
lilies, which burnt like flames through the plates of his armour to the
very marrow of his bones. Then when they had dragged him, tied with
garlands, by the feet round and round the meadow; wings, eyed not with
the eyes of a peacock but with the eyes of lovely damsels, suddenly
sprouted out of their shoulders, and they flew off, leaving the poor
baron, bruised on the grass, to meditate upon the vanity of all future
resistance to love.
Such are the things which the Middle Ages and the Renaissance found to
tell us of the two great heroes of Carolingian poetry. And the
explanation of how it came to pass, that for the Roland of the song of
Roncevaux was substituted the Orlando of Ariosto, and for the Renaud of
"The Quatre Fils Aymon" the Rinaldo of Matteo Boiardo--means simply that
which I desire here to study: the metamorphoses of mediaeval romance
stuffs, and, more especially, the vicissitudes of the cycle of
Charlemagne.
II.
We are apt to think of the Middle Ages as if they were the
companion-piece to Antiquity; but no such ideal correspondence exists
between the two periods. Antiquity is all of a piece, and the Middle
Ages, on the contrary, are heterogeneous and chaotic. For Antiquity is
the steady and uniform development of civilization in one direction and
with one meaning; there are great differences between its various
epochs, but they are as the differences between the budding, the
blossoming, and the fading stages of one plant: life varies, but is one.
The Middle Ages, on the other hand, are a series of false starts, of
interruptions and of new departures; a perpetual confusion. For, if we
think over them, we shall see that these centuries called mediaeval are
occupied by the effort of one people, or one generation, to put to
rights and settle down among as much as it can save of the civilization
of Antiquity. And the sudden overwhelming of this people or this
generation by another, which puts all the elaborate arrangements into
disarray, adds to the ruins of Antiquity the ruins of more recent times;
and then this destroying generation tries to put things straight, to
settle down, and is in its turn interrupted by the advent of some new
comer who begins the game afresh.
As it is with peoples, so also is it with ideas; scarcely has a scheme
of life or of philosophy or of art taken shape and consistence before,
from out of the inexhaustible chaos of mediaeval thought and feeling,
there issue new necessities, new aspirations, which put into confusion
all previous ones. The Middle Ages were like some financial crisis: a
little time, a little credit, money will fructify, wealth will reappear,
the difficult moment will be tided over; and so with civilization. But
unfortunately the wealth of ideas began to accumulate in the storehouse
only just long enough to bring down a rout of creditors, people who
rifled the bank, and went home to consume or invest their money in order
to be succeeded by others. Hence, in the matter of civilization, the
Middle Ages ended in an extraordinary slow ruin, a bankruptcy like that
which overtook France before '89, and from which, as France was restored
by the bold seizure and breaking up of property of the revolution, the
world was restored by the bold breaking of feudal and spiritual
mortmain, the restoring of wasted energies to utility, of that great
double revolution, the Renaissance and the Reformation. Be this as it
may, mankind throughout the Middle Ages appears to have been in a
chronic condition of packing up and unpacking, and packing up again; one
after another a nation, a race, a philosophy, a political system came to
the front and was pushed back again into limbo: Germans and Kelts and
Latins, French civilization of the day of Abelard, Provencal
civilization of the days of the Raymonds, brilliant and evanescent
Hohenstauffen supremacy, papacy at Canossa and at Avignon, Templars
triumphant and Templars persecuted; scholasticism, mysticism, feudalism,
democracy, communism: influences all these perpetually rising up and
being trodden down, till they all rotted away in the great stagnation of
the fifteenth century; and only in one part of the world, where the
conflict was more speedily ended, where one set of tendencies early
triumphed, where stability was temporarily obtained, in Italy alone did
civilization continue to be nurtured and developed for the benefit of
all mankind. In such a state of affairs only such things could flourish
and mature as were safe from what I have called, for want of a better
expression, the perpetual unpacking and repacking, the perpetual being
on the move, of the Middle Ages; and among such things foremost was art,
the essential art of the times, architecture, which, belonging to the
small towns, to the infinite minority of the democracy, who worked and
made money and let the great changes pass over their heads, thrived
almost as something too insignificant for notice. But it was different
with literature. Cathedrals once built cannot so easily be changed; new
peoples, new ideas, must accept them. But poetry--the thing which every
nation insists upon having to suit its own taste, the thing which every
nation and every generation carries about with it hither and thither,
the thing which can be altered to suit every passing whim--poetry was,
of all the fluctuating things of the Middle Ages, perhaps the most
fluctuating. And fluctuating also because, as none of these various
nations, tendencies, aspirations, dominated sufficiently long to produce
any highly organized art, there remained no standard works, nothing
recognizedly perfect, which would be kept for its perfection and gather
round it imitations, so as to form the nucleus of any homogeneous
tradition. The Middle Ages, so full of fashions in literary matters,
possessed no classics; the minnesingers knew nothing of the stern old
Teutonic war songs; the meistersaengers had forgotten the minnesingers;
the trouveres and troubadours knew nothing of "The Chanson de Roland,"
and Villon knew nothing of them; only in Italy, where the Middle Ages
came to an end and the Renaissance began with the Lombard league, was
there established a tradition of excellence, with men like Dante,
Petrarch, and Boccaccio, handed down from generation to generation; even
as, while in the north there came about the strange modification which
substituted the French of Rabelais for the French of Chrestien de
Troyes, the German of Luther for the German of Wolfram von Eschenbach,
the Italian language, from Ciullo d'Alcamo almost to Boiardo and Lorenzo
dei Medici, remained virtually identical. The result of this, which I
may call the heterogeneousness and instability of the Middle Ages was
that not merely literary forms were for ever arising and being
superseded, but literary subject matter was continually undergoing a
process of transformation. While in Antiquity the great epic and tragic
stuffs remained well-nigh unaltered, and the stories of Valerius Flaccus
and Apollonius Rhodius were merely the stories which had been current
since the days of Homer, during the course of the Middle Ages every epic
cycle, and every tale belonging thereunto, was gradually adulterated,
mingled with, swamped by, some other cycle or tale; nay, rather, every
other, cycle and every other tale, the older ones trying to save their
popularity by admixture with the more recent, till at last all mythical
significance, all historical meaning, all national character, all
psychological reality, were lost in the chaotic result. And meanwhile,
in the absence of any stable language, of any durable literary fashion,
the Middle Ages were unable to give to these epic stuffs, at any one
period of their life of metamorphose, a form sufficiently artistically
valuable to secure anything beyond momentary vogue, to secure for them
the immortality of the great Greek tales of adventure and warfare and
love. Thus it came about that the epic cycle of Charlemagne, after
supplanting in men's minds the grand sagas of the pagan North, was
itself supplanted by the Arthurian cycle; that the Frankish stories
absorbed the wholly discrepant elements of their more fortunate Keltic
rivals; that both cycles, having lost all character through fusion and
through obliteration by time, became more meaningless generation by
generation and year by year, until when the Middle Ages had come to an
end, and the great poets of the Renaissance were ready to give this old
mediaeval epic stuff a definitive and durable artistic shape, there came
to the hands of Boiardo and Ariosto, of Tasso and Spenser, only a
strange, trumpery material, muddled by jongleurs and romance writers,
and reduced to mere fairy stuff, taken seriously only by Don Quixote,
and by the authors of the volumes of insane twaddle called after Amadis
of Gaul and all his kinsmen.
Such a condition of perpetual change as explains, in my belief, why the
mediaeval epic subjects were wanted, can be made clear only by examples.
I shall therefore try to show the transformations which were undergone
by one or two principal mediaeval epic subjects as a result of a mixture
with other epic cycles; of a gradual adaptation to a new state of
civilization; and finally of their gradual separation from all kind of
reality and real interests.
First of all, let us look at the epic cycle, which, although known to us
only in poems no older than those of the trouveres and minnesingers who
sang of Charlemagne and Arthur, is in reality far more ancient, and on
account of its antiquity and its consequent disconnection with mediaeval
religious and political interests, was thrown aside even by the nations
to which it belonged, by the Scandinavians who took to writing sagas
about the wars of Charlemagne against Saracens, and by the Germans who
preferred to hear the adventures of Welsh and Briton, Launcelots and
Tristrams. I am alluding to the stories connected with the family and
life of the hero called Sigurd by the Scandinavians, and Siegfried by
the Germans. Of these we possess a Norse version called the Volsunga
Saga, magnificently done into English by Mr. William Morris; which,
although written down at the end of the twelfth century, in the very
time therefore of Chrestien de Troyes, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and
Gottfried von Strassburg, and subsequently to the presumed writing of
"The Chanson de Roland" and the Nibelungenlied, shows us in reality the
product of a people, the distant Scandinavians of Iceland, who were five
or six hundred years behind the French, Germans, and English of the
twelfth century. In the Volsunga Saga, neither Christianity nor
feudalism is yet dreamed of; and it is for this reason that I wish to
compare it with the Nibelungenlied, in order to show how enormously the
old epic stuff was altered by the new civilization. The whole social and
moral condition of the two versions is different. In the old
Scandinavian civilization, where the Viking is surrounded and served by
clansmen, the feeling of blood relationship is the strongest in people's
hearts; strangely and fearfully shown in the introductory tale of Signy,
who, in order to avenge her father Volsung, killed by her husband,
murders her children by the latter, and then, altered in face by magic
arts, goes forth to the woods to her brother Sigmund, that,
un-wittingly, he may beget with her the only man fit to avenge the
Volsungs. And then she sends the boy Sinfjotli to the man he has
hitherto considered merely as his uncle, bidding the latter kill him if
he prove unworthy of his incestuous birth, or train him to vengeance.
The three together murder the husband and legitimate children of Signy,
and set the palace on fire; which, being done, the queen, having
accomplished her duty to her kin, accomplishes that towards her husband,
and calmly returns to die in the burning hall. Here (and apparently
again in the case of the children of Sigurd and Brynhilt) incest becomes
a family virtue. This being the frightful preponderance of the feeling
of blood relationship, it is quite natural that the Scandinavian
Chriemhilt (called in the Volsunga Saga, Gudrun) should not resent the
murder of her husband Siegfried or Sigurd by her brothers at the
instigation of the jealous Brynhilt (who has in a manner been Sigurd's
wife before he made her over to Chriemhilt's eldest brother); and that,
so far from seeking any revenge against them, she should, when her second
husband Atli sends for her brothers in order to rob and murder them,
first vainly warn them of the plot, and then, when they have been
massacred, kill Atli and her children by him in order to avenge her
brothers. The slackening of the tribal feeling, the idea of fidelity in
love and sanctity of marriage belonging to Christianity and feudalism,
rendered such a story unintelligible to the Germans of the Othos and
Henrys. In the Nibelungenlied, the whole story of the massacre of the
brothers is changed. Chriemhilt never forgives the murder of Siegfried,
and it is not Etzel--Atli for the sake of plunder, but she herself for
the sake of revenge, who decoys her brothers and murders them; it is she
who with her own hand cuts off the head of Gunther to expiate his murder
of Siegfried. To our feelings, more akin to those of the feudal
Christians of Franconia than to those of the tribal Scandinavians of the
Edda, the second version is far more intelligible and interesting--the
story of this once gentle and loving Chriemhilt, turned by the murder of
her beloved into a fury, and plotting to avenge his death by the death
of all his kinsfolk, must be much grander and more pathetic than the
story of this strange Gudrun, who sits down patiently beneath the injury
done to her by her brothers, but savagely avenges them on her new
husband, and her own and his innocent children; to us this persistence
of tribal feeling, destroying all indignation and love, is merely
unnatural, confusing, and repulsive. But this alteration for the better
in one of the incidents of the tale is a mere fluke; and the whole main
plot of the originally central figures are completely obliterated by the
new state of civilization, and rendered merely trivial and grotesque. In
the Volsunga Saga Sigurd, overcome by enchantments, has forgotten his
wife (or mistress, a vague mythical relationship); and, with all sense
of the past obliterated, has made her over to the brother of his new
wife Gudrun; and Brynhilt kills her faithless love to dissolve the
second marriage and be reunited with him in death. In the Nibelungenlied
Siegfried, although the flower of knighthood, conquers by foul play the
Amazon Brunhilt to reward Gunther for the hand of his sister; nay, in a
comic and loathsome scene he forces her into the embraces of the craven
Gunther; and then he gets killed by Brunhilt's machinations; when, after
most unqueenly bickerings, the proud Amazon is brutally told by
Siegfried's wife of the dirty trick which has given her to Gunther.
After this, it is impossible to realize, when Siegfried is murdered and
all our sympathies called on to his side, the utterly out-of-character,
blackguardly behaviour which has brought the hero to his death.
Similarly the conception of the character and position of Brynhilt is
entirely disfigured and rendered inane in the Nibelungenlied: of that
superb demi-goddess of the Scandinavians, burnt on the pyre with her
falcons and dogs and horses and slaves, by the side of the demi-god
Sigurd, whom she has loved and killed, lest the door of Valhalla,
swinging after him, should shut her out from his presence; of her there
remains in the German mediaeval poem only a virago (more like the
giantesses of the Amadis romances) enraged at having been defeated and
grotesquely and grossly pummelled into wedlock by a man not her husband,
and then slanged like a fishwife by her envious sister-in-law.
The old, consistent, grandly tragic tale of the mysterious incests and
revenges of a race of demi-gods has lost its sense, its point in the
attempt to arrange it to suit Christian and feudal ideas. The really
fine portions of the Nibelungenlied are exactly those which have no real
connection with the original story, gratuitous additions by mediaeval
poets. The delicately indicated falling in love of Siegfried and
Chriemhilt, the struggles of Markgraf Ruedger between obedience to his
feudal superior and fidelity towards his friends and guests; and, above
all, the canto of the death of Siegfried. This last is different,
intensely different, from the rugged and dreary monotony of the rest;
this most poetical, almost Spenserian or Ariostesque realization of the
scene; this beautiful picture (though worked with the needle of the
arras-worker rather than with pencil or brush) of the wood, the hunt,
the solitary fountain in the Odenwald, where, with his spear leaned
against the lime-tree, Siegfried was struck down into the clover and
flowers, and writhed with Hagen's steel through his back. This canto is
certainly interpolated by some first-rate poet, at least a Gottfried or
a Walther, to whom that passage of the savage old droning song of death
had suggested a piece of new art; it is like the fragments of
exquisitely chiselled leafage and figures which you sometimes find
encrusted--by whom? wherefore?--quite isolated in the midst of the rough
and lichen-stained stones of some rude Lombard church. All the rest of
the Nibelungenlied gives an impression of effeteness; there is no
definiteness of idea such as that of the Volsunga Saga; the battles are
mere vague slaughter, no action, no realized movement, or (excepting
Ruedger) no realized motive of conduct. Shape and colour would seem to
have been obliterated by repetition and alteration. Yet even these
alterations could not make the tale of Siegfried survive among the
Germans of the Middle Ages; nay, the more the alterations the less the
interest; the want of consistency and colour due to rearrangement merely
accelerated the throwing aside of a subject which, dating from pagan and
tribal times, had become repugnant to the new generations. All the
mutilations in the world could not make the old Scandinavian tales of
betrayed trust, of revenge and triumphant bloodshed, at all sympathetic
to men whose religious and social ideals were those of forgiveness and
fidelity; even stripped of its incestuous mysteries and of its fearful
tribal love, the tale of Sigurd and Brynhilt, reduced to the tale of
Chriemhilt's revenge, was unpalatable: no more attempts were made at
re-writing it, and the poems of Walther, of Gottfried, of Wolfram, of
Ulrich, and of Tannhaeuser, full as they are of references to stories of
the Carolingian and Arthurian cycles, nay, to Antique and Oriental
tales, contain no allusion to the personages of the Nibelungenlied. The
old epic of the Gothic races had been pushed aside by the triumphant
epic of the obscure and conquered Kelts.
There are few phenomena in the history of ideas and forms more singular
than that of the sudden conquest of the poetry of dominant or distant
nations by the poetic subjects of a comparatively small race, sheared of
all political importance, restricted to a trifling territory, and
well-nigh deprived of their language; and of this there can be found no
more striking example than the sudden ousting of the Carolingian epic by
the cycle of Arthur.