which came to notice only when they were dispossessed of their last
strongholds by Saxons and Normans, and which immediately spread with
astounding rapidity all over Europe. The vanquished race became
fashionable; themselves, their art and their poetry, began to be sought
for as a precious and war-enhanced loot. The heroic tales of the Kelts
were transcribed in Welsh, and translated into Latin, by order of the
Norman and Angevine kings, glad, it would seem, to oppose the Old Briton
to the Saxon element. The Keltic songs were carried all over France by
Breton bards, to whose music and rhymes, with only a general idea of the
subjects, the neo-Latin-speaking Franks listened with the sort of stolid
satisfaction with which English or Germans of a hundred years ago
listened to Italians singing Metastasio's verses. But soon the songs and
tales were translated; and French poets imitated in their language,
northern and southern, the graceful metres of the Keltic lays, and
altered and arranged their subjects. So that, in a very short time,
France, and through it Germany, was inundated with Keltic stories. This
triumph of the vanquished race was not without reason. The Kelts, early
civilized by Rome and Christianity, had a set of stories and a set of
heroes extremely in accordance with mediaeval ideas, and requiring but
very little alteration. The considerable age of their civilization had
long obliterated all traces of pagan and tribal feeling in their tales.
Their heroes, originally, like those of all other people, divinities
intimately connected with natural phenomena, had long lost all cosmic
characteristics, long ceased to be gods, and, manipulated by the fancy
of a race whose greatness was quite a thing of the past, had become a
sort of golden age ideals--the men of a distant period of glory, which
was adorned with every kind of perfection, till it became as unreal as
fairyland. Fairyland, in good sooth, was this country of the Keltic
tales; and there is a sort of symbolical significance in the fact of its
lawgiver Merlin, and its emperor Arthur, being both of them not dead,
like Sigurd, like Dietrich, like Charlemagne and Roland, but lying in
enchanted sleep. Long inaction and the day-dreaming of idleness had
refined and idealized the heroes of this Keltic race--a race of
brilliant fancy and almost southern mobility, and softened for a long
time by contact with Roman colonists and Christian priests. They were
not the brutal combatants of an active fighting age, like the heroes of
the Edda and of the Carolingian cycles; nor had they any particular
military work to do, belonging as they did to a people huddled away into
inactivity. Their sole occupation was to extend abroad that ideal
happiness which reigned in the ideal court of Arthur; to go forth on the
loose and see what ill-conditioned folk there might yet be who required
being subdued or taught manners in the happy kingdom, which the poor
insignificant Kelts connected with some princelet of theirs who
centuries before may have momentarily repelled the pagan Saxons. Hence
in the Keltic stories, such as they exist in the versions previous to
the conquest by the Norman kings, and previous also to any
communications with other peoples, the distinct beginning of what was
later to be called knight-errantry; of heroes, creations of an inactive
nation, having no special military duties, going forth to do what good
they may at random, unforced by any necessity, and following a mere
aesthetico-romantic plan of perfecting themselves by deeds of valour to
become more worthy of their God, their King, and their Lady: religion,
loyalty, and love, all three of them mere aesthetic abstractions,
becoming the goal of an essentially aesthetic, unpractical system of
self-improvement, such as was utterly incompatible with any real and
serious business in life. Idle poetic fancies of an inert people, the
Knights of the Round Table have no mission save that of being
poetically perfect. Such was the spirit of Keltic poetry; and, as it
happened, this spirit satisfied the imaginative wants of mediaeval
society just at the moment when political events diffused in other
countries the knowledge of the Arthurian legends. The old Teutonic tales
of Sigurd, Gudrun, and Dietrich, had long ceased to appeal, in their
mutilated and obliterated condition, to a society to whom tribal feeling
and pagan heroism were odious, and whose religion distinctly reproved
revenge. These semi-mythological tales had been replaced by another
cycle: the purely realistic epic, which had arisen during the struggles
between the Christian west against the pagan north-east and the
Mohammedan south, and which, originating in the short battle-songs
narrating the exploits of the predecessors and help-mates of
Charlemagne, had constituted itself into large narratives of which the
"Song of Roland" represents artistic culmination. These narratives of
mere military exploits, of the battles of a strong feudal aristocracy
animated by feudal loyalty and half-religious, half-patriotic fury
against invading heathenness, had perfectly satisfied the men of the
earliest Middle Ages, of the times when feudalism was being established
and the church being reformed; when the strong military princelets of
the North were embarking with their barons to conquer new kingdoms in
England and in Italy and Greece; when the whole of feudal Europe hurled
itself against Asia in the first Crusades. But the condition of things
soon altered: the feudal hierarchy was broken up into a number of
semi-independent little kingdoms or principalities, struggling, with the
assistance of industrial and mercantile classes, to become absolute
monarchies; princes who had been mere generals became stay-at-home
diplomatists, studious of taxation and intrigue, surrounded no longer by
armed vassals, but by an essentially urban court, in constant
communication with the money-making burghers. Religion, also, instead of
being a matter of fighting with infidel invaders, turned to fantastic
sectarianism and emotional mysticism. With the sense of futility, of
disappointment, attendant on the later Crusades, came also a habit of
roaming in strange countries, of isolated adventure in search of wealth
or information, a love of the distant, the half-understood, the
equivocal; perhaps even a hankering after a mysterious compromise
between the religion of Europe and the religions of the East, such as
appears to have existed among the Templars and other Franks settled in
Asia.
There was, throughout feudal society, a sort of enervated languor, a
morbid longing for something new, now that the old had ceased to be
possible or had proved futile; after the great excitement of the
Crusades it was impossible to be either sedately idle or quietly active,
even as it is with all of us during the days of weariness and
restlessness after some long journey. To such a society the strongly
realistic Carolingian epic had ceased to appeal: the tales of the Welsh
and Breton bards, repeated by trouvere and jongleur, troubadour and
minnesinger, came as a revelation. The fatigued, disappointed, morbid,
imaginative society of the later Crusades recognized in this fairyland
epic of a long refined, long idle, nay, effete race, the realization of
their own ideal: of activity unhampered by aim or organization, of
sentiment and emotion and action quite useless and unnecessary, purely
subservient to imaginative gratification. These Arthurs, Launcelots,
Tristrams, Kays, and Gawains, fantastic phantoms, were also far more
artistically malleable than the iron Rolands, Olivers, and Renauds of
earlier days; that unknown kingdom of Britain could much more easily be
made the impossible ideal, in longing for which squeamish and lazy minds
might refuse all coarser reality. Moreover, those who listened to the
tales of chivalry were different from those who had listened to the
Carolingian stories; and, therefore, required something different. They
were courtiers, and one half of them were women. Now the Carolingian
tales, originally battle-songs, sung in camps and castles to mere
soldiers, had at first possessed no female characters at all; and when
gradually they were introduced, it was in the coarsest barrack or
tap-room style. The Keltic tales, on the contrary, whether from national
tradition, or rather from longer familiarity with Christian culture and
greater idleness of life, naturally made women and women's love the
goal of a great many adventures which an effete nation could no longer
ascribe to patriotic movements. But this was not all. The religious
feeling of the day was extremely inclined to mysticism, in which
aesthetic, erotic, and all kinds of morbid and ill-defined tendencies
were united, which was more than anything else tinged with a
semi-Asiatic quietism, a longing for the passive ecstasy of Nirvana.
This religious side of mediaeval life was also gratified by the Arthurian
romances. Oddly enough, there existed an old Welsh or Breton tale about
the boy Peredur, who from a complete simpleton became the prince of
chivalry, and his many adventures connected with a certain mysterious
blood-dripping lance, and a still more mysterious basin or _grail_ (an
allusion to which is said by M. de la Villemarque to be contained in the
originally Keltic name of Percival), which possessed magic properties
akin to those of the purse of Fortunatus, or the pipkin in the story of
"Little pot, boil!" The story, whose original mythical meaning had been
lost in the several centuries of Christianity, was very decayed and
obscure; and the fact of the blood on the lance being that of a murdered
kinsman of Peredur, and of the basin containing the head of the same
person cut off by Gloucester witches, was evidently insufficient to
account for all the mystery with which these objects were surrounded.
The French poets of the Middle Ages, strongly imbued with Oriental
legends brought back by the Crusaders, saw at a glance the meaning of
the whole story: the lance was the lance with which Longinus had pierced
the Saviour's side; the Grail was the cup which had received His blood,
nay, it was the cup of the Last Supper. A tale about the preservation of
these precious relics by Joseph of Arimathaea, was immediately connected
therewith; a theory was set up (doubtless with the aid of quite
unchristian, Oriental legends) of a kind of kingdom of the keepers of
the Grail, of a vague half-material, half-spiritual state of bliss
connected with the service of the Grail, which fed its knights (and here
the Templars and their semi-oriental mysteries, for which they were
later so frightfully misused, certainly come into play) with food which
is at once of the body and of the soul. Thus the Keltic Peredur, bent
upon massacring the Gloucester witches to avenge his uncle, was turned
into a saintly knight, seeking throughout a more and more perfect life
for the kingdom of the Grail: the Perceval of Chrestien de Troyes, the
Parzifal of Wolfram von Eschenbach, whom later romance writers (wishing
to connect everything more closely with Arthur's court) replaced by the
Sir Galahad of the "Morte d'Arthur," while the guest of the Grail became
a sort of general mission of several knights, a sort of spiritual
crusade to whose successful champions Percival, Bors, and Galahad, the
Middle Ages did not hesitate to add the arch-adulterer Launcelot.
Thus did the Arthurian tales answer the requirements of the languid,
dreamy, courtly, lady-serving and religiously mystic sons and grandsons
of those earlier Crusaders whose aspirations had been expressed by the
rough and solemn heroes of Carolingian tales. The Carolingian tales were
thrown aside, or were kept by the noble mediaeval poets only on condition
of their original meaning being completely defaced by wholesale
admixture of the manners and adventures belonging to the Arthurian
cycles. The paladins were forced to disport themselves in the same
fairyland as the Knights of the Round Table; and many mediaeval poems the
heroes of which, like Ogier of Denmark and Huon of Bordeaux, already
existed in the Carolingian tales, are in reality, with their romantic
loves, their useless adventures, their Morgana's castles and Oberon's
horns, offshoots of the Keltic stories, which were as rich in every kind
of supernatural (being, in fact, pagan myths turned into fairy tales) as
the genuine Carolingian subjects, whose origin was entirely historical,
were completely devoid of such things. Arthur and his ladies and
knights: Guenevere, Elaine, Enid, Yseult, Launcelot, Geraint, Kay,
Gawain, Tristram, and Percival-Galahad, were the real heroes and
heroines of the courtly nobles and the courtly poets of this second
phase of mediaeval life. The Teuton Charlemagne, Roland and Oliver were
as completely forgotten of the poets who met in that memorable combat of
the Wartburg, as were the Teuton Sigurd and Dietrich. And if the
Carolingian cycle survived, however much altered, I think it must have
been thanks to the burghers and artizans of the Netherlands and of
Provence, to whom the bluff, matter-of-fact heroism, the simple, gross,
but not illegitimate amours of Carolingian heroes, were more
satisfactory than any mystic quest of the Grail, any refined adultery of
Guenevere or Yseult.
But the inevitable fate of all mediaeval epics awaited this triumphant
Arthurian cycle: the fate of being obliterated by passing from one
nation and civilization to another, long before the existence of any
poetic art adequate to its treatment. Of this I will take as an example
one of the mediaeval poems which has the greatest reputation the
masterpiece (according to most critics, with whom I find it difficult,
in the presence of a poet like Gottfried von Strassburg, to agree) of
probably the most really poetical and earnest school of poetry which the
pre-Dantesque Middle Ages possessed--the "Parzifal" of Wolfram von
Eschenbach.
The paramount impression (I cannot say the strongest, for strong
impressions are incompatible with such work as this) left by the
masterpiece of Wolfram von Eschenbach, is that of the most astonishing
vagueness, fluidity, haziness, vaporousness. In reading it one looks
back to that rudely hewn and extremely obliterated Nibelungenlied, as to
something quite astonishingly clear, detailed and strongly marked as to
something distinctly artistic. Indeed by the side of "Parzifal"
everything seems artistic; Hartmann von Aue reads like Chaucer,
"Aucassin et Nicolette" is as living as "Cymbeline," "Chevy Chase" seems
as good as the battles of Homer. It is not a narrative, but a vague
mooning; a knight illiterate, not merely like his fellow minnesingers,
in the way of reading and writing, but in the sense of complete absence
of all habit of literary form; extremely noble and pure of mind, chaste,
gentle, with a funny, puzzled sense of humour, reminding one distantly
of Jean Paul in his drowsy moments; a hanger-on of courts, but perfectly
simple-hearted and childlike; very poor and easily pleased: such is, for
good and for bad, Herr Wolfram von Eschenbach, the only real personality
in his poem. And he narrates, in a mooning, digressive, good-natured,
drowsy tone, with only a rare awaking of interest, a story which he has
heard from some one else, and that some one else from a series of other
some one elses (Chrestien de Troyes, a legendary Provencal Chiot or
Guyot, perhaps even the original Welsh bard); all muddled, monotonous,
and droning; events and persons ill-defined, without any sense of the
relative importance of anything, without clear perception of what it is
all about, or at least without the power of keeping the matter straight
before the reader. A story, in point of fact, which is no story at all,
but a mere series of rambling adventures (adventures which are scarcely
adventures, having no point or plot) of various people with not much
connection and no individuality--Gachmuret, Parzifal, Gawain,
Loherangrein, Anfortas, Feirefis--pale ghosts of beings, moving in a
country of Kennaqwhere, Aquitaine, Anjou, Brittany, Wales, Spain, and
heaven knows what wondrous Oriental places; a misty country with woods
and towns and castles which are infinitely far apart and yet quite near
each other; which seem to sail about like cloud castles round the only
solid place in the book, Plimizoel, where Arthur's court, with round
table constantly spread, is for ever established. A no place, nowhere;
yet full of details; minute inventories of the splendid furniture of
castles (castles where? how reached?); infinitely inferior in this
matter even to the Nibelungenlied, where you are made to feel so vividly
(one of the few modern and therefore clear things therein) the long,
dreary road from Worms to Bechlarn, and thence to Etzelburg, though of
none of them is there anything beyond a name. For the Nibelungen story
had been localized in what to narrator and audience was a reality, the
country in which themselves lived, where themselves might seek out the
abbey in which Siegfried was buried, the well in the Odenwald near which
he was stabbed; where they knew from merchant and pilgrim the road taken
by the Nibelungs from Santen to Worms, by the Burgundians from Worms to
Hungary. But here in "Parzifal" we are in a mere vague world of
anywhere, the world of Keltic and Oriental romance become mere cloudland
to the Thuringian knight. And similarly have the heroes of other
nations, the Arthurs, Gawains, Gachmurets, of Wales and Anjou, become
mere vague names; they have become liquified, lost all shape and local
habitation. They are mere names, these ladies and knights of Herr
Wolfram, names with fair pink and white faces, names magnificently
draped in bejewelled Oriental stuffs and embossed armour; they have no
home, no work, nothing to do. This is the most remarkable characteristic
of "Parzifal," and what makes it so typical of the process of growing
inane through overmuch alteration, which prevented the mediaeval epics
ever turning into an Iliad or an Odyssey; this that it is essentially
idle and all about nothing. The feudal relations strongly marked in the
German Nibelungenlied have melted away like the distinctions of race:
every knight is independent, not a vassal nor a captain, a Volker or
Hagen, or Roland or Renaud followed by his men; but an isolated
individual, without even a squire, wandering about alone through this
hazy land of nowhere. Knight-errantry, in the time of the great Guelph
and Ghibelline struggles, every bit as ideal as that of Spenser or
Cervantes; and with the difference that Sir Calidore and Sir Artegal
have an appointed task, some Blatant Beast or other nuisance to
overcome; and that Don Quixote has the general rescuing of all the
oppressed Princesse Micomiconas, and the destruction of all windmills,
and the capturing of all helmets of Mambrino, and the establishing all
over the world of the worship of Dulcinea. But these knights of Wolfram
von Eschenbach have no more this mission than they have the
politico-military missions, missions of a Ruedger or a Roland. They are
all riding about at random, without any particular pagans, necromancers,
or dragons to pursue. The very service of the Holy Grail, which is the
main interest of the poem, consists in nothing apparently except living
virtuously at the Castle of Montselvaesche, and virtuously eating and
drinking the victuals provided miraculously. To be admitted to this
service, no initiation, no mission, nothing preliminary seems required.
Parzifal himself merely wanders about vaguely, without doing any
specified thing. The fact is that in this poem all has become purely
ideal; ideal to the point of utter vacuity: there is no connection with
any human business. Of all the heroes and heroines we hear that they are
perfectly chaste, truthful, upright; and they are never put into any
situation to test these qualities: they are never placed in the way of
temptation, never made to fight with evil, or to decide between it and
good. The very religion of the Holy Grail consists in doing nothing: not
a word about relieving the poor or oppressed, of tending the sick, of
delivering the Holy Sepulchre, of defending that great injured One,
Christ. To be Grail Knight or even Grail King means to be exactly the
same as before. Where in this vague dreamland of passive purity and
heroism, of untempted chastity and untried honour, where are the earthly
trials of Tristram, of Guenevere, of Ruedger, of Renaud? Where the moral
struggles of the Middle Ages? Where is Godfrey, or Francis, or Dominick?
Nowhere. All has disappeared, melted away; Christianity and Paganism
themselves have melted away or into each other, as in the easy meeting
of the Pagan Feirefis and the Christian Parzifal, and in the double
marriage of Gachmuret with the Indian Belakane and the Welsh Herzeloid;
there remains only a kind of Buddhistic Nirvana of vague passive
perfection, but without any renunciation; and in a world devoid of evil
and full of excellent brocade and armour and eatables, and lovely
maidens who dress and undress you, and chastely kiss you on the mouth; a
world without desire, aspiration, or combat, vacantly happy and
virtuous. A world purely ideal, divorced from all reality, unsubstantial
like the kingdom of Gloriana, but, unlike Spenser's, quite unshadowed by
any puritan sadness, by any sense of evil, untroubled by allegorical
vices; cheerful, serene, filled with flowers and song of birds, but as
unreal as the illuminated arabesques of a missal. In truth, perhaps more
to be compared with an eighteenth century pastoral, an ideal created
almost in opposition to reality; a dream of passiveness and liberty (as
of light leaves blown about) as the ideal of the fiercely troubled,
struggling, tightly fettered feudal world. The ideal, perhaps, of only
one moment, scarcely of a whole civilization; or rather (how express my
feeling?) an accidental combination of an instant, as of spectre vapour
arisen from the mixture of Kelt and Teuton, of Frank and Moslem. Is it
Christian, Pagan, Mohammedan? None of all these. A simple-looking
vaporous chaos of incongruous, but not conflicting, elements: a poem of
virtue without object, of knighthood without work, of religion without
belief; in this like its central interest, the Grail: a mystery, a cup,
a stone; a thing which heals, feeds, speaks; animate or inanimate? Stone
of the Caaba or chalice of the Sacrament? Merely a mysterious holy of
holies and good of goods, which does everything and nothings means
nothing and requires nothing--is nothing.
III.
Thus was obliterated, in all its national and traditional meaning, the
heroic cycle of Arthur; and by the same process of slow adaptation to
new intellectual requirements which had completely wiped out of men's
memory the heroic tales of Siegfried, which had entirely altered the
originally realistic character of the epic of Charlemagne. But unreal
and ideal as had become the tales of the Round Table, and disconnected
with any national tradition, the time came when even these were not
sufficiently independent of reality to satisfy the capricious
imagination of the later Middle Ages. At the end of the fourteenth
century was written, most probably in Portuguese by Vasco de Lobeira,
the tale of "Amadis de Gaula," which was followed by some forty or fifty
similar books telling the adventures of all the brothers, nephews,
sons, grandsons sons, and great-grandsons, an infinite succession, of
the original Amadis; which, translated into all languages and presently
multiplied by the press, seem to have usurped the place of the Arthurian
stories in feudal countries until well-nigh the middle of the sixteenth
century; and which were succeeded by no more stories of heroes, but by
the realistic comic novels of the type of "Lazarillo de Tormes," and the
buffoon philosophic extravaganzas of "Gargantua." Further indeed it was
impossible to go than did mediaeval idealism in the Amadises. Compared
with them the most fairy-tale-like Arthurian stories are perfect
historical documents. There remains no longer any connection whatsoever
with reality, historical or geographical: the whole world seems to have
been expeditiously emptied of all its contents, to make room for
kingdoms of Gaul, of Rome, of the Firm Island, of Sobradisa, etc., which
are less like the Land West of the Moon and East of the Sun than they
are like Sancho Panza's island. All real mankind, past, present, and
future, has similarly been swept away and replaced by a miraculous race
of Amadises, Lisvarts, Galaors, Gradasilias, Orianas, Pintiquinestras,
Fradalons, and so forth, who flit across our vision, in company with the
indispensable necromancers, fairies, dwarfs, giants, and duennas, like
some huge ballet: things without character, passions, pathos; knights
who are never wounded or killed, princesses who always end with
marrying the right man, enchanters whose heads are always chopped off,
foundlings who are always reinstated in their kingdom, inane paper
puppets bespangled with impossible sentiment, tinsel and rags which are
driven about like chaff by the wind-puffs of romance. The advent of the
Amadises is the coming of the Kingdom of Nonsense, the sign that the
last days of chivalric romance have come; a little more, and the
Licentiate Alonzo Perez will take his seat in Don Quixote's library, and
Nicholas the Barber light his faggots in the yard.