A new species of literature arose in the progress of that practical
education which society had assumed; a literature addressed to the
passions which rose out of the circumstances of the times; dedicated to
war, to love, and to religion, when the business of life seemed
restricted to the extreme indulgence of those ennobling pursuits. In too
much love, too much war, too much devotion, it was not imagined that
knights and ladies could ever err. If sometimes the loves were utterly
licentious, wondrous tales are told of their immaculate purity; if their
religion were then darkened by the grossest superstition, their faith
was genuine, and would have endured martyrdom; and if the chivalric
valour often exulted in its ferocity and its rapacity, its generous
honour amid a lawless state of society maintained justice in the land,
by the lance which struck the oppressor, and by the shield which covered
the helpless.
Everything had assumed a more extended form: the pageantry of society
had varied and multiplied; the banquet was prolonged; the festival day
was frequent; the ballad narrative, or the spontaneous lyric, which had
sufficed their ruder ancestors to allure attention, now demanded more
volume and more variety; the romance with a deeper interest was to
revolve in the entangling narrative of many thousand lines. There was a
traditional store, a stock of fabling in hand, heroical panegyrics,
satirical songs, and legendary ballads; all served as the stuff for the
looms of mightier weavers of rhyme, whose predecessors had left them
this inheritance. The marvellous of Romance burst forth, and this
stupendous fabric of invention bewitched Europe during three centuries.
ROMANCE, from the light fabliau to the voluminous fiction, has admitted,
in the luxury of our knowledge and curiosity, not only of critical
investigation, but of its invention, by tracing it to a single source.
The origin of Romance has been made to hinge on a theoretical history;
and by maintaining exclusive systems, mostly fanciful and partly true,
it has been made complicate. Whether invention in the form of ROMANCE
came from the oriental tale-teller or the Scandinavian Scald, or whether
the fictions of Europe be the growth of the Provencal or the Armorican
soil, our learned inquirers have each told; nor have they failed in
considerably diminishing the claims of each particular system opposed to
their own; but the greatest error will be found in their mutual
refutations.[1] While each stood entrenched in an exclusive system, they
were only furnishing an integral portion of a boundless and complicate
inquiry. They scrutinised with microscopic eyes into that vast fabric of
invention, which the Gothic genius may proudly oppose to the fictions of
antiquity, and they seemed at times forgetful of the vicissitudes which,
at distant intervals, and by novel circumstances, enlarged and modified
the changeful state of romantic fiction among every people.
In the attempt to retrace the Nile of Romance to a solitary source, in
the eagerness of their discoveries they had not yet ascertained that
this Nile bears many far-divided heads, and some from which Time shall
never remove its clouds; for who dares assign an origin to the ancient
Milesian tales, the tales and their origin being alike lost?[2]
Warton, encumbered by his theory of an Eastern origin, opened the map to
track the voyage of an Arabian tale: he landed it at Marseilles, that
port by which ancient Greece first held its intercourse with our Europe,
and thence the tale was sent forwards through genial Italy, but forced
to harbour in this voyage of Romance at the distant shores of Brittany,
that land of Romance and of the ancient Briton. The result of his system
startled the literary world by his assumption, that "the British
history" of Geoffry of Monmouth entirely consists of Arabian inventions!
the real source of the airy existence of our British Arthur! Bishop
Percy had been nearly as adventurous in his Gothic origin, by landing a
number of the northern bards with the army of Rollo in Normandy; an
event which contributed to infuse the Scaldic genius into the romances
of chivalry, whose national hero is Charlemagne--the tutelary genius of
France and Germany.
They had looked to the east, and to the north--and wherever they looked
for the origin of Romance it was found. They had sought in a corner of
the universe for that which is universal.
ROMANCE sprang to birth in every clime, native wherever she is found,
notwithstanding that she has been a wanderer among all lands, and as
prodigal a dispenser as she has been free in her borrowings and artful
in her concealments.
The art of fabling may be classed among the mimetic arts--it is an
aptitude of the universal and plastic faculties of our nature; and man
might not be ill defined and charactered as "a mimetic and fabling
animal."
The earliest Romances appear in a metrical form about the middle of the
twelfth century. The first were "Estoires," or pretended chronicles,
like that of the Brut of Wace; the Romances of martial achievement then
predominated, those of the Knights of Arthur, and the Paladins of
Charlemagne; the adventures of love and gallantry were of a later epoch.
In the mutability of taste an extraordinary transition occurred; after
nearly two centuries passed in rhyming, all the verse was to be turned
into prose. Whether voluminous rhymes satiate the public ear, or novelty
in the form was sought even when they had but little choice, the writers
of Romance, a very flexible gentry, who of all other writers servilely
accommodate themselves to the public taste, with more fluent pens
loitered into a more ample page; or, as they expressed themselves,
"translates de rime en prose," or "mis en beau langage." Many of the old
French metrical Romances, in the fourteenth century, were disguised in
this humbled form; but their "mensogne magnanime," to use Tasso's style,
who loved them, lost nothing in number or in hardihood. On the discovery
of the typographic art, in the fifteenth century, many of these prose
Romances in manuscript received a new life by passing through the press;
and these, in their venerable "lettres Gothiques," are still hoarded for
the solace of the curious in fictions of genuine antiquity, and of
invention in its prime, both at home and abroad; and in a reduced form
we find them surviving among the people on the Continent. It is singular
that the metrical Romances seem never to have received the honours
conferred on the prose.[3]
These Romances, in their manuscript state, were cherished objects;[4]
the mighty tomes, sometimes consisting of forty or fifty thousand lines,
described as those "great books of parchment," or "the great book of
Romances," were usually embellished by the pen and the pencil with every
ornament that fancy could suggest; bound in crimson velvet, guarded by
clasps of silver, and studded with golden roses; profuse of gorgeous
illuminations, and decorated with the most delicate miniatures, "lymned
with gold of graver's work" on an azure ground; or the purple page
setting off the silvery letters;--objects then of perpetual attraction
to the story-believing reader, and which now charm the eye which could
not as patiently con the endless page. The fashions of the times are
exactly shown in the dresses and the domestic furniture; as well as
their instruments, military and musical.
Studies for the artist, as for the curious antiquary,[5] we may view
the plumage in a casque curved and falling with peculiar grace, and a
lady's robe floating in its amplitude; and ornaments of dress arranged,
which our taste might emulate. A French amateur who possessed _le Roman
de la Violette_, a romance of a fabulous Count of Nevers, was so deeply
struck by its exquisite and faithful miniatures, that he employed the
best artists to copy the most interesting, and placed them in his
collection of the costume and fashions of the French nation; a
collection preserved in the Royal Library of France.[6] If their hard
outline does not always flow into grace, their imagination worked under
the mysterious influence of the Romance through all their devoted
labour. In a group of figures we may observe that the heads are not
mechanically cast by one mould, but the distinct character looks as if
the thoughtful artist had worked out his recollections on which he had
meditated. In some of the heads, portraits of distinguished persons have
been recognised. Not less observable are the arabesques often found on
the margins, where the playful pencil has prodigally flung flowers and
fruit, imitating the bloom, or insects which look as if they had lighted
on the leaf. These margins, however, occasionally exhibit arabesques of
a very different character; figures or subjects which often amused the
pencil of the monastic limners, satirical strokes aimed at their
brothers and sisters--the monks and the nuns! I have observed a wolf, in
a monk's frock and cowl, stretching its paw to bless a cock bending its
submissive head; a cat, in the habit of an abbess, holding a platter in
its paws to a mouse approaching to lick it, alluding to the allurements
of abbesses to draw young women into the convents; and a sow, in a nun's
veil, mounted on stilts. A pope appears to be thrown by devils into a
cauldron, and cardinals are roasting on spits. All these expressions of
suppressed opinion must have been executed by the monks themselves.
These reformers before the Reformation sympathised with the popular
feeling against the haughty prelate and the luxurious abbot.
The great Romance of Alexander, preserved in the Bodleian Library,
reveals a secret of the cost of time freely bestowed on that single and
mighty tome. The illuminator, by preserving the date when he had
completed his own work compared with that of the transcriber when he had
finished his part, appears to have employed nearly six years on the
paintings which embellish this precious volume.[7]
Such a metrical Romance was a gift presented to royalty, when engrossed
by the rapturous hand of the Romancer himself; the autograph, in a
presentation copy, might count on the meed of "massy goblets" when the
munificent patron found the new volume delectable to his taste, which
indeed had been anticipated by the writer. This incident occurred to
Froissart in presenting his Romance to Richard the Second, when, in
reply to his majesty's inquiry after the contents, the author exultingly
told that "the book treated of Amour!"
To the writers of these ancient Romances we cannot deny a copious
invention, a variegated imagination, and, among their rambling
exuberances and their grotesque marvels, those enchanting enchantments
which the Greeks and Romans only partially and coldly raised. We may
often, too, discover that truth of human nature which is not always
supposed to lie hid in these desultory compositions. Amid their peculiar
extravagances, which at least may serve to raise an occasional smile,
the strokes of nature are abundant, and may still form the studies of
the writers of fiction, however they may hang on the impatience of the
writers and the readers of our duodecimos. Ancient writers are
pictorial: their very fault contributes to produce a remarkable
effect--a fulness often overflowing, but which at least is not a
scantiness leaving the vagueness of imperfect description. Their details
are more circumstantial, their impressions are more vivid, and they
often tell their story with the earnestness of persons who had conversed
with the actors, or had been spectators of the scene. We may be wearied,
as one might be at a protracted trial by the witnesses, but we are often
struck by an energetic reality which we sometimes miss in their
polished successors. Their copiousness, indeed, is without selection;
they wrote before they were critics, but their truth is not the less
truth because it is given with little art.
The dilations of the metrical Romances into tomes of prose, Warton
considered as a proof of the decay of invention. Was not this censure
rather the feeling of a poet for his art, than the decision of a critic?
for the more extended scenes of the Romances in prose required a wider
stage, admitted of a fuller dramatic effect in the incidents, and a more
perfect delineation of the personages through a more sustained action.
If the prose Romances are not epics by the conventional code of the
Stagyrite, at least they are epical; and some rude Homers sleep among
these old Romancers, metrical or prosaic. A living poetic critic, one
best skilled to arbitrate, for he is without any prepossessions in
favour of our ancient writers, has honestly acknowledged their
faithfulness to nature in their touching simplicity; "nor," he adds, "do
they less afford, by their bolder imagination, adequate subjects for the
historical pencil." And he has more particularly noticed "Le bone
Florence de Rome,"--thus written by our ungrammatical minstrels.
"Classical poetry has scarcely ever conveyed in shorter boundaries so
many interesting and complicated events as may be found in this good old
Romance."[8] This indeed is so true, that we find these romantic tales
were not only recited or read, but their subjects were worked into the
tapestries which covered the walls of their apartments. The Bible and
the Romance equally offered subjects to eyes learned in the "Estoires"
never to be forgotten.
Our master poets have drawn their waters from these ancient fountains.
SIDNEY might have been himself one of their heroes, and was no unworthy
rival of his masters: SPENSER borrowed largely, and repaid with
munificence: MILTON in his loftiest theme looked down with admiration on
this terrestrial race,
-----------and what resounds
In fable or romance of Uther's son,
Begirt with British or Armoric knights.
"In 'Amadis of Gaul,'" has said our true laureate, "may be found the
Zelmane of the 'Arcadia,' the Masque of Cupid of the 'Faery Queen,' and
the Florizel of the 'Winter's Tale.' Sidney, Spenser, and Shakspeare
imitated this book: was ever book honoured by three such imitators?"[9]
A great similarity is observable among these writers of fiction, both in
their incidents and the identity of their phrases; an evidence that
these inventors were often drawing from a common source. In these ages
of manuscripts they practised without scruple many artifices, and might
safely appropriate the happiest passages of their anonymous
brothers.[10] One Romance would produce many by variations; the same
story would serve as the groundwork of another: and the later Romancer,
to set at rest the scruples of the reader, usually found fault with his
predecessors, who, having written the same story, had not given "the
true one!" By this innocent imposture, or this ingenious impudence, they
designed to confer on their Romance the dignity of History. The metrical
Romances pretend to translate some ancient "Cronik" which might be
consulted at Caerleon, the magical palace of the vanished Arthur: or
they give their own original Romance as from some "Latyn auctour," whose
name is cautiously withheld; or they practise other devices, pretending
to have drawn their work from "the Greek," or "the English," and even
from an "unknown language." In some Colophons of the prose Romances the
names of real persons are assigned as the writers;[11] but the same
Romance is equally ascribed to different persons, and works are given as
translations which in fact are originals. Amid this prevailing
confusion, and these contradictory statements, we must agree with the
editor of Warton, that we cannot with any confidence name the author of
any of these prose Romances. RITSON has aptly treated these pseudonymous
translators as "men of straw." We may say of them all as the antiquary
DOUCE, in the agony of his baffled researches after one of their
favourite authorities, a Will o' the Wisp named Lollius, exclaimed,
somewhat gravely--"Of Lollius it will become every one to speak with
diffidence." Ariosto seems to have caught this bantering humour of
mystifying his readers in his own Gothic Romance, gravely referring his
extravagances to "the Chronicle of the pseudo Archbishop Turpin" for his
voucher! What was with the Italian but a playful stroke of satire on the
pretended verity of Turpin himself, may have covered a more serious
design with these ancient romance-writers. Pere Menestrier ascribed
these productions to Heralds, who, he says, were always selected for
their talents, their knowledge and their experience; qualifications not
the most essential for romance-writing. "According to the bad taste of
those ignorant ages," he proceeds, "it is from them so many Romances on
feats of arms and on chivalry issued, by which they designed to elevate
their own office, and to celebrate their voyages in different
lands."[12] St. Palaye, in adopting this notion of these Heraldical
Romancers, with more knowledge of the ancient Romancers than the good
Father possessed, has added a more numerous body, the _Trouveres_, who,
either in rehearsing or in composing these poetical narratives, might
urge a stronger claim.
When Pere Menestrier imagined that it was the intention of these
Heralds, by these Romances, "to celebrate their voyages in different
lands," it seems to have escaped him that "the voyages" of these
Romancers to the visionary Caerleon, to England, or to Macedonia, were
but a geography of Fairy Land.
In the History of Literature we here discover a whole generation of
writers, who, so far from claiming the honour of their inventions, or
aspiring after the meed of fame, have even studiedly concealed their
claims, and, with a modesty and caution difficult to comprehend, dropped
into their graves without a solitary commemoration.
These idling works of idlers must have been the pleasant productions of
persons of great leisure, with some tincture of literature, and to whom,
by the peculiarity of their condition, fame was an absolute nullity. Who
were these writers who thus contemned fame? Who pursued the delicate
tasks of the illuminator and the calligrapher? Who adorned Psalters with
a religious patience, and expended a whole month in contriving the
vignette of an initial letter? Who were these artists who worked for no
gain? In those ages the ecclesiastics were the only persons who answer
to this character; and it would only be in the silence and leisure of
the monastery that such imaginative genius and such refined art could
find their dwelling-place. I have sometimes thought that it was Pere
Hardouin's conviction of all this literary industry of the monks which
led him to indulge his extravagant conjecture, that the classical
writings of antiquity were the fabrications of this sedentary
brotherhood; and his "pseudo-Virgilius" and "pseudo-Horatius" astonished
the world, though they provoked its laughter.
The Gothic mediaeval periods were ages of imagination, when in art works
of amazing magnitude were produced, while the artists sent down no
claims to posterity. We know not who were the numerous writers of these
voluminous Romances, but, what is far more surprising, we are nearly as
unacquainted with those great and original architects who covered our
land with the palatial monastery, the church, and the cathedral. In the
religious societies themselves the genius of the Gothic architect was
found: the bishop or the abbot planned while they opened their treasury;
and the sculptor and the workmen were the tenants of the religious
house. The devotion of labour and of faith raised these wonders, while
it placed them beyond the unvalued glory which the world can give.[13]
We cannot think less than Pere Hardouin that there were no poetical and
imaginative monks--Homers in cowls, and Virgils who chanted vespers--who
could compose in their unoccupied day more beautiful romances than their
crude legends, or the dry annals of the Leiger book of their abbey. Some
knowledge these writers had of the mythological, and even the Homeric
and Virgilian fictions, for they often gave duplicates of the classical
fables of antiquity. Circe was a fair sorceress, the one-eyed Polyphemus
a dread giant, and Perseus bestrode a winged dragon, before they were
reflected in romances. But what we discover peculiar in these works is a
strange mixture of sacred and profane matters, always treated in a
manner which scents of the cloister. Before he enters the combat, the
knight is often on his knees, invoking his patron-saint; he proffers his
vows on holy relics; while ladies placed in the last peril, or the most
delicate positions, by their fervent repetitions of the sign of the
cross, or a vow to found an abbey, are as certainly saved: and for
another refined stroke of the monachal invention, the heroes often close
their career in a monastery or a hermitage. The monkish morality which
sat loosely about them was, however, rigid in its ceremonial discipline.
Lancelot de Lac leaves the bed of the guilty Genevra, the Queen of the
good king Arthur, at the ring of the matin-bell, to assist at mass; so
scrupulous were such writers that even in criminal levities they should
not neglect all the offices of the Church. The subject of one of these
great romances is a search after the cup which held the real blood of
Christ; and this history of the _Sang-real_ forms a series of romances.
Who but a monk would have thought, and even dared to have written it
down, that all the circumstances in this romance were not only certain,
but were originally set down by the hand of Jesus himself? and further
dared to observe, that Jesus never wrote but twice before--the Lord's
Prayer, and the sentence on the woman taken in adultery. Such a pious,
or blasphemous fraud, was not unusual among the dark fancies of the
monastic legendaries.
Some of these Homers must have left their lengthening Iliad, as Homer
himself seems to have done, unfinished; tired, or tiring, for no doubt
there was often a rehearsal, "the tale half told" was resumed by some
Elisha who caught the mantle his more inspired predecessor had let fall.
It appears evident that several were the continuators of a favourite
romance; and from deficient attention or deficient skill a fatal
discrepancy has been detected in the identical characters--the ordinary
fate of those who write after the ideas of another, with indistinct
conceptions, or with fancies going contrary to those of the first
inventor.
These metrical romances in manuscript, and the printed prose in their
original editions, are now very costly. By the antiquary and the poet
these tomes may be often opened. With the antiquary they have served as
the veritable registers of their ages. The French antiquaries, and Carte
in England, have often illustrated by those ancient romances many
obscure points in geography and history. Except in the mere machinery of
their fancy, these writers had no motive to pervert leading facts, for
these served to give a colour of authenticity to their pretended
history, or to fix their locality. As they had not the erudition to
display, nor were aware of the propriety of copying, the customs and
manners of the age of their legendary hero, they have faithfully
transmitted their own; we should never have had but for this lucky
absurdity the "Tale of Thebes" turned into a story of the middle ages;
while Alexander the Great is but the ideal of a Norman baron in the
splendour and altitude of the conception of the writers. It was the
ignorance of the illuminators of our Latin and Saxon manuscripts of any
other country than their own which enabled STRUTT to place before the
eye a pictorial exhibition of our Anglo-Saxon fathers. Compared with the
realities of these originals, with all their faults of tediousness, the
modern copiers of ancient times, in their mock scenes of other ages, too
often reflect in the cold moonlight of their fancy a shadowy
unsubstantial antiquity.
The influence of these fabulous achievements of unconquerable heroes and
of self-devoted lovers over the intellect and the passions of men and
women, during that vast interval of time when they formed the sole
literature, was omnipotent. In the early romances of chivalry, when
their genius was purely military, and directed to kindle a passion for
joining the crusades, we rarely find adventures of the tender passion;
but, since women cannot endure neglect, and the female character has all
the pliancy of sympathy, and has performed her part in every age on the
theatre of society, we discover the extraordinary fact that many ladies
assumed the plumy helmet and dexterously managed the lance. The ladies
rode amid armed knights resistless as themselves. It was subsequently,
when we find that singularly fantastic institution of "The Courts of
Love," which delivered their "Arrets" in the style of a most refined
jurisprudence, that these beautiful companions-at-arms were satisfied to
conquer the conquerors by more legitimate seductions, and that the
romances told of little but of loves. Ariosto and Tasso are supposed to
have drawn their female warriors from the Amazonian Penthesilea and the
Camilla of Homer and Virgil; but it would seem that the prototype of
these feminine knights these poets also found among those old romances
which they loved.
It is unquestionable that these martial romances of chivalry inflamed
the restlessness of those numerous military adventurers who found an
ample field for their chivalry after the crusades, in our continued
incursions into France, of which country we were long a living plague,
from the reign of Edward III. to that of Henry V., nearly a century of
national tribulation. Many "a gentyl and noble esquyer," if perchance
the English monarch held a truce with France or Scotland, flew into some
foreign service. Sir Robert Knolles was known to the French as "le
veritable demon de la guerre;" and Sir John Hawkwood, when there was no
fighting to be got at home, passed over into Italy, where he approved
himself to be such a prodigy of "a man-at-arms," that the grateful
Florentines raised his statue in their cathedral; this image of English
valour may still be proudly viewed. This chivalric race of
romance-readers were not, however, always of the purest "order of
chivalry." If they were eager for enterprise, they were not less for its
more prudential results. A castle or a ransom in France, a lordly
marriage, or a domain in Italy, were the lees that lie at the bottom of
their glory.
We continued long in this mixed state of glory clouded with barbarism;
for at a time when literature and the fine arts were on the point of
breaking out into the splendour of the pontificate of Leo the Tenth, in
our own country the great Duke of Buckingham, about 1500, held the old
romance of "The Knight of the Swan" in the highest estimation, because
the translator maintained that our duke was lineally descended from that
hero; the first peer of the realm was proud of deriving his pedigree
from a fabulous knight in a romantic genealogy.
But all the inventions and fashions of man have their date and their
termination. For three centuries these ancient romances, metrical or
prose, had formed the reading of the few who read, and entranced the
circle of eager listeners. The enchantment was on the wane; their
admirers had become somewhat sceptical of "the true history" which had
been so solemnly warranted; another taste in the more chastened
writings of Roman and Grecian lore was now on the ascendant. One last
effort was made in this decline of romantic literature, in that
tesselated compilement where the mottled pieces drawn out of the French
prose romances of chivalry were finely squared together by no unskilful
workman, in Sir THOMAS MALORY, to the English lover of ancient romance
well known by the title of _La Morte d'Arthur_. This last of these
ancient romances was finished in the ninth year of the reign of Edward
IV., about 1470. CAXTON exulted to print this epical romance; and at the
same time he had the satisfaction of reproaching the "laggard" age.
"What do ye now," exclaimed the ancient printer, "but go to the
_Bagnes_, and play at dice? Leave this! leave it! and read these noble
volumes." Volumes which not many years after, when a new system of
affairs had occurred to supplant this long-idolised "order of chivalry,"
ROGER ASCHAM plainly asserted only taught "open manslaughter and bold
bawdry." Such was the final fate of Love and Arms!