MANY of us have first found our way into the Realm of Romance, properly
so called, through the pages of a little crimson clad volume of the
_Bibliothèque Elzevirienne_. {1} Its last pages contain the charming
Cante-Fable of _Aucassin et Nicolete_, which Mr. Walter Pater’s praises
and Mr. Andrew Lang’s brilliant version have made familiar to all lovers
of letters. But the same volume contains four other tales, equally
charming in their way, which Mr. William Morris has now made part of
English literature by writing them out again for us in English,
reproducing, as his alone can do of living men’s, the tone, the colour,
the charm of the Middle Ages. His versions have appeared in three
successive issues of the Kelmscott Press, which have been eagerly snapped
up by the lovers of good books. It seemed a pity that these cameos of
romance should suffer the same fate as Mr. Lang’s version of _Aucassin et
Nicolete_, which has been swept off the face of the earth by the Charge
of the Six Hundred, who were lucky enough to obtain copies of the only
edition of that little masterpiece of translation. Mr. Morris has,
therefore, consented to allow his versions of the Romances to be combined
into one volume in a form not unworthy of their excellence but more
accessible to those lovers of books whose purses have a habit of varying
in inverse proportion to the amount of their love. He has honoured me by
asking me to introduce them to that wider public to which they now make
their appeal.
I
ALMOST all literary roads lead back to Greece. Obscure as still remains
the origin of that _genre_ of romance to which the tales before us
belong, there is little doubt that their models, if not their originals,
were once extant at Constantinople. Though in no single instance has the
Greek original been discovered of any of these romances, the mere name of
their heroes would be in most cases sufficient to prove their Hellenic or
Byzantine origin. Heracles, Athis, Porphirias, Parthenopeus, Hippomedon,
Protesilaus, Cliges, Cleomades, Clarus, Berinus—names such as these can
come but from one quarter of Europe, and it is as easy to guess how and
when they came as whence. The first two crusades brought the flower of
European chivalry to Constantinople and restored that spiritual union
between Eastern and Western Christendom that had been interrupted by the
great schism of the Greek and Roman Churches. The crusaders came mostly
from the Lands of Romance. Permanent bonds of culture began to be formed
between the extreme East and the extreme West of Europe by intermarriage,
by commerce, by the admission of the nobles of Byzantium within the
orders of chivalry. These ties went on increasing throughout the twelfth
century till they culminated at its close with the foundation of the
Latin kingdom of Constantinople. In European literature these historic
events are represented by the class of romances represented in this
volume, which all trace back to versions in verse of the twelfth century,
though they were done into prose somewhere in Picardy during the course
of the next century. Daphnis and Chloe, one might say, had revived after
a sleep of 700 years, and donned the garb and spoke the tongue of
Romance.