So much for the origin of our tales. Yet who cares for origins nowadays?
We are all democrats now, and a tale, like a man, is welcomed for its
merits and not for its pedigree. Yet even democracy must own, that
pedigree often leaves its trace in style and manner, and certainly the
tales before us owe some of their charm to their lineage. “Out of
Byzantium by Old France” is a good strain by which to produce
thoroughbred romance.
Certainly we breathe the very air of romance in these stories. There is
none of your modern priggish care for the state of your soul. Men take
rank according to their might, women are valued for their beauty alone.
Adventures are to the adventurous, and the world is full of them. Every
place but that in which one is born is equally strange and wondrous.
Once beyond the bounds of the city walls and none knows what may happen.
We have stepped forth into the Land of Faerie, but at least we are in the
open air.
Mr. Pater seems to regard our stories as being a premonition of the
freedom and gaiety of the Renaissance rather than as especially
characteristic of the times of Romance. All that one need remark upon
such misconception is that it only proves that Mr. Pater knew less of
Romance Literature than he did of his favourite subject. The freshness,
the gaiety, the direct outlook into life are peculiar neither to Romance
nor Renaissance; their real source was the _esprit Gaulois_. But the
unquestioning, if somewhat external, piety, the immutability of the caste
system, the spirit of adventure, the frankly physical love of woman, the
large childlike wonder, these are of the essence of Romance, and they are
fully represented in the tales before us. Wonder and reverence, are not
these the parents of Romance? Intelligent curiosity and intellectual
doubt—those are what the Renaissance brought. Without indulging in
invidious comparisons between the relative value of these gifts, I would
turn back to our stories with the remark that much of the wonder which
they exhibit is due to the vague localisation which runs through them.
Rome, Paris, Byzantium, form spots of light on the mediæval map, but all
between is in the dim obscure where anything may occur, and the brave man
moves about with his life in his hands.
We thus obtain that absence or localisation which helps to give the
characteristic tone to mediæval romance. Events happen in a sort of
sublime No Man’s Land. They happen, as it were, at the root of the
mountains, on the glittering plain, and in short, we get news from
Nowhere. It seems, therefore, peculiarly appropriate that they should be
done into English in the same style and by the same hand that has already
written the annals of those countries of romance. Writing here, in front
of Mr. Morris’s versions, I am speaking, as it were, before his face, and
must not say all that I should like in praise of the style in which he
has clothed them, and of its appropriateness for its present purpose. I
should merely like to recall the fact that it was used by him in his
versions of the Sagas as long ago as 1869. Since then it has been
adopted by all who desire to give an appropriate English dress to their
versions of classic or mediæval masterpieces of a romantic character. We
may take it, I think, that this style has established itself as the only
one suitable for a romantic version, and who shall use it with ease and
grace if not its original inventor?
If their style suits Mr. Morris, there is little doubt that their subject
is equally congenial. I cannot claim to be in his confidence on the
point, but it is not difficult, I fancy, to guess what has attracted him
to them. Nearly all of them, we have seen, are on the borderland between
folk-tale and romance. It is tales such as these that Mr. Morris wishes
to see told in tapestry on the walls of the Moot-Hall of the Hammersmith
of Nowhere. It was by tales such as these that he first won a hearing
from all lovers of English literature. The story of Jason is but a Greek
setting of a folk-tale known among the Gaels as the _Battle of the
Birds_, and in Norse as the _Master Maid_. Many of the tales which the
travellers told one another in the _Earthly Paradise_, such as _The Man
Born to be King_ (itself derived from the first of our stories), _The
Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon_, and _The Ring given to
Venus_, are, on the face of them, folk-tales. Need I give any stronger
recommendation of this book to English readers than to ask them to regard
it as a sort of outhouse to that goodly fabric so appropriately known to
us all as _The Earthly Paradise_?