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EPIC AND ROMANCE
Essays on Medieval Literature
by
W. P. KER
Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford
Professor of English Literature in University College
London
MacMillan and Co., Limited
St. Martin's Street, London
1931
Copyright
First Edition (8vo) 1896
Second Edition (Eversley Series) 1908
Reprinted (Crown 8vo) 1922, 1926, 1931
Printed in Great Britain
By R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh
PREFACE
These essays are intended as a general description of some of the
principal forms of narrative literature in the Middle Ages, and as a
review of some of the more interesting works in each period. It is
hardly necessary to say that the conclusion is one "in which nothing
is concluded," and that whole tracts of literature have been barely
touched on--the English metrical romances, the Middle High German
poems, the ballads, Northern and Southern--which would require to be
considered in any systematic treatment of this part of history.
Many serious difficulties have been evaded (in _Finnesburh_, more
particularly), and many things have been taken for granted, too
easily. My apology must be that there seemed to be certain results
available for criticism, apart from the more strict and scientific
procedure which is required to solve the more difficult problems of
_Beowulf_, or of the old Northern or the old French poetry. It is
hoped that something may be gained by a less minute and exacting
consideration of the whole field, and by an attempt to bring the more
distant and dissociated parts of the subject into relation with one
another, in one view.
Some of these notes have been already used, in a course of three
lectures at the Royal Institution, in March 1892, on "the Progress of
Romance in the Middle Ages," and in lectures given at University
College and elsewhere. The plot of the Dutch romance of _Walewein_ was
discussed in a paper submitted to the Folk-Lore Society two years ago,
and published in the journal of the Society (_Folk-Lore_, vol. v. p.
121).
I am greatly indebted to my friend Mr. Paget Toynbee for his help in
reading the proofs.
I cannot put out on this venture without acknowledgment of my
obligation to two scholars, who have had nothing to do with my
employment of all that I have borrowed from them, the Oxford editors
of the Old Northern Poetry, Dr. Gudbrand Vigfusson and Mr. York
Powell. I have still to learn what Mr. York Powell thinks of these
discourses. What Gudbrand Vigfusson would have thought I cannot guess,
but I am glad to remember the wise goodwill which he was always ready
to give, with so much else from the resources of his learning and his
judgment, to those who applied to him for advice.
W. P. KER.
LONDON, _4th November 1896_.
POSTSCRIPT
This book is now reprinted without addition or change, except in a few
small details. If it had to be written over again, many things, no
doubt, would be expressed in a different way. For example, after some
time happily spent in reading the Danish and other ballads, I am
inclined to make rather less of the interval between the ballads and
the earlier heroic poems, and I have learned (especially from Dr. Axel
Olrik) that the Danish ballads do not belong originally to simple
rustic people, but to the Danish gentry in the Middle Ages. Also the
comparison of Sturla's Icelandic and Norwegian histories, though it
still seems to me right in the main, is driven a little too far; it
hardly does enough justice to the beauty of the _Life of Hacon_
(_Hákonar Saga_), especially in the part dealing with the rivalry of
the King and his father-in-law Duke Skule. The critical problems with
regard to the writings of Sturla are more difficult than I imagined,
and I am glad to have this opportunity of referring, with admiration,
to the work of my friend Dr. Björn Magnússon Olsen on the _Sturlunga
Saga_ (in _Safn til Sögu Islands_, iii. pp. 193-510, Copenhagen,
1897). Though I am unable to go further into that debatable ground, I
must not pass over Dr. Olsen's argument showing that the life of the
original Sturla of Hvamm (_v. inf._ pp. 253-256) was written by Snorri
himself; the story of the alarm and pursuit (p. 255) came from the
recollections of Gudny, Snorri's mother.
In the _Chansons de Geste_ a great discovery has been made since my
essay was written; the _Chançun de Willame_, an earlier and ruder
version of the epic of _Aliscans_, has been printed by the unknown
possessor of the manuscript, and generously given to a number of
students who have good reason to be grateful to him for his
liberality. There are some notes on the poem in _Romania_ (vols.
xxxii. and xxxiv.) by M. Paul Meyer and Mr. Raymond Weeks, and it has
been used by Mr. Andrew Lang in illustration of Homer and his age. It
is the sort of thing that the Greeks willingly let die; a rough
draught of an epic poem, in many ways more barbarous than the other
extant _chansons de geste_, but full of vigour, and notable (like _le
Roi Gormond_, another of the older epics) for its refrain and other
lyrical passages, very like the manner of the ballads. The _Chançun de
Willame_, it may be observed, is not very different from _Aliscans_
with regard to Rainouart, the humorous gigantic helper of William of
Orange. One would not have been surprised if it had been otherwise, if
Rainouart had been first introduced by the later composer, with a view
to "comic relief" or some such additional variety for his tale. But it
is not so; Rainouart, it appears, has a good right to his place by
the side of William. The grotesque element in French epic is found
very early, _e.g._ in the _Pilgrimage of Charlemagne_, and is not to
be reckoned among the signs of decadence.
There ought to be a reference, on p. 298 below, to M. Joseph Bédier's
papers in the _Revue Historique_ (xcv. and xcvii.) on _Raoul de
Cambrai_. M. Bédier's _Légendes épiques_, not yet published at this
time of writing, will soon be in the hands of his expectant readers.
I am deeply indebted to many friends--first of all to York Powell--for
innumerable good things spoken and written about these studies. My
reviewers, in spite of all differences of opinion, have put me under
strong obligations to them for their fairness and consideration.
Particularly, I have to offer my most sincere acknowledgments to Dr.
Andreas Heusler of Berlin for the honour he has done my book in his
_Lied und Epos_ (1905), and not less for the help that he has given,
in this and other of his writings, towards the better understanding of
the old poems and their history.
W. P. K.
OXFORD, _25th Jan. 1908_.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
I
THE HEROIC AGE
PAGE
Epic and Romance: the two great orders of medieval narrative 3
_Epic_, of the "heroic age," preceding _Romance_ of the "age
of chivalry" 4
The heroic age represented in three kinds of literature--Teutonic
Epic, French Epic, and the Icelandic Sagas 6
Conditions of Life in an "heroic age" 7
Homer and the Northern poets 9
Homeric passages in _Beowulf_ 10
and in the _Song of Maldon_ 11
Progress of poetry in the heroic age 13
Growth of Epic, distinct in character, but generally incomplete,
among the Teutonic nations 14
II
EPIC AND ROMANCE
The complex nature of Epic 16
No kind or aspect of life that may not be included 16
This freedom due to the dramatic quality of true (_e.g._
Homeric) Epic 17
as explained by Aristotle 17
Epic does not require a magnificent ideal subject 18
such as those of the artificial epic (_Aeneid_, _Gerusalemme
Liberata_, _Paradise Lost_) 18
The _Iliad_ unlike these poems in its treatment of "ideal"
motives (patriotism, etc.) 19
True Epic begins with a dramatic plot and characters 20
The Epic of the Northern heroic age is sound in its dramatic
conception 20
and does not depend on impersonal ideals (with exceptions,
in the _Chansons de geste_) 21
The German heroes in history and epic (Ermanaric, Attila,
Theodoric) 21
Relations of Epic to historical fact 22
The epic poet is free in the conduct of his story 23
but his story and personages must belong to his own
people 26
Nature of Epic brought out by contrast with secondary narrative
poems, where the subject is not national 27
This secondary kind of poem may be excellent, but is always
different in character from native Epic 28
Disputes of academic critics about the "Epic Poem" 30
Tasso's defence of Romance. Pedantic attempts to restrict
the compass of Epic 30
Bossu on Phaeacia 31
Epic, as the most comprehensive kind of poetry, includes
Romance as one of its elements 32
but needs a strong dramatic imagination to keep Romance
under control 33
III
ROMANTIC MYTHOLOGY
Mythology not required in the greatest scenes in Homer 35
Myths and popular fancies may be a hindrance to the epic
poet, but he is compelled to make some use of them 36
He criticises and selects, and allows the characters of the gods
to be modified in relation to the human characters 37
Early humanism and reflexion on myth--two processes: (1)
rejection of the grosser myths; (2) refinement of myth
through poetry 40
Two ways of refining myth in poetry--(1) by turning it into
mere fancy, and the more ludicrous things into comedy;
(2) by finding an imaginative or an ethical meaning in it 40
Instances in Icelandic literature--_Lokasenna_ 41
Snorri Sturluson, his ironical method in the _Edda_ 42
The old gods rescued from clerical persecution 43
Imaginative treatment of the graver myths--the death of
Balder; the Doom of the Gods 43
Difficulties in the attainment of poetical self-command 44
Medieval confusion and distraction 45
Premature "culture" 46
Depreciation of native work in comparison with ancient
literature and with theology 47
An Icelandic gentleman's library 47
The whalebone casket 48
Epic not wholly stifled by "useful knowledge" 49
IV
THE THREE SCHOOLS--TEUTONIC EPIC--FRENCH EPIC--THE
ICELANDIC HISTORIES
Early failure of Epic among the Continental Germans 50
Old English Epic invaded by Romance (Lives of Saints, etc.) 50
Old Northern (Icelandic) poetry full of romantic mythology 51
French Epic and Romance contrasted 51
Feudalism in the old French Epic (_Chansons de Geste_) not
unlike the prefeudal "heroic age" 52
But the _Chansons de Geste_ are in many ways "romantic" 53
Comparison of the English _Song of Byrhtnoth_ (_Maldon_, A.D.
991) with the _Chanson de Roland_ 54
Severity and restraint of _Byrhtnoth_ 55
Mystery and pathos of _Roland_ 56
Iceland and the German heroic age 57
The Icelandic paradox--old-fashioned politics together with
clear understanding 58
Icelandic prose literature--its subject, the anarchy of the
heroic age; its methods, clear and positive 59
The Icelandic histories, in prose, complete the development
of the early Teutonic Epic poetry 60
CHAPTER II
THE TEUTONIC EPIC
I
THE TRAGIC CONCEPTION
Early German poetry 65
One of the first things certain about it is that it knew the
meaning of tragic situations 66
The _Death of Ermanaric_ in Jordanes 66
The story of _Alboin_ in Paulus Diaconus 66
Tragic plots in the extant poems 69
The _Death of Ermanaric_ in the "Poetic Edda" (_Hamðismál_) 70
Some of the Northern poems show the tragic conception
modified by romantic motives, yet without loss of the
tragic purport--_Helgi and Sigrun_ 72
Similar harmony of motives in the _Waking of Angantyr_ 73
Whatever may be wanting, the heroic poetry had no want of
tragic plots--the "fables" are sound 74
Value of the abstract plot (Aristotle) 74
II
SCALE OF THE POEMS
List of extant poems and fragments in one or other of
the older Teutonic languages (German, English, and
Northern) in unrhymed alliterative verse 76
Small amount of the extant poetry 78
Supplemented in various ways 79
1. THE WESTERN GROUP (German and English) 79
Amount of story contained in the several poems, and scale
of treatment 79
_Hildebrand_, a short story 80
_Finnesburh_, (1) the Lambeth fragment (Hickes); and (2)
the abstract of the story in _Beowulf_ 81
_Finnesburh_, a story of (1) wrong and (2) vengeance, like the
story of the death of Attila, or of the betrayal of Roland 82
Uncertainty as to the compass of the _Finnesburh_ poem
(Lambeth) in its original complete form 84
_Waldere_, two fragments: the story of Walter of Aquitaine
preserved in the Latin _Waltharius_ 84
Plot of _Waltharius_ 84
Place of the _Waldere_ fragments in the story, and probable
compass of the whole poem 86
Scale of _Maldon_ 88
and of _Beowulf_ 89
General resemblance in the themes of these poems--unity of
action 89
Development of style, and not neglect of unity nor multiplication
of contents, accounts for the difference of length
between earlier and later poems 91
Progress of Epic in England--unlike the history of Icelandic
poetry 92
2. THE NORTHERN GROUP 93
The contents of the so-called "Elder Edda" (_i.e._ _Codex
Regius_ 2365, 4to _Havn_.) 93
to what extent _Epic_ 93
Notes on the contents of the poems, to show their scale; the
_Lay of Weland_ 94
Different plan in the _Lays of Thor_, _Þrymskviða_ and _Hymiskviða_ 95
The _Helgi_ Poems--complications of the text 95
Three separate stories--_Helgi Hundingsbane and Sigrun_ 95
_Helgi Hiorvardsson and Swava_ 98
_Helgi and Kara_ (lost) 99
The story of the Volsungs--the long _Lay of Brynhild_ 100
contains the whole story in abstract 100
giving the chief place to the character of _Brynhild_ 101
The _Hell-ride of Brynhild_ 102
The fragmentary _Lay of Brynhild_ (_Brot af Sigurðarkviðu_) 103
Poems on the death of Attila--the _Lay of Attila_ (_Atlakviða_),
and the Greenland _Poem of Attila_ (_Atlamál_) 105
Proportions of the story 105
A third version of the story in the _Lament of Oddrun_
(_Oddrúnargrátr_) 107
The _Death of Ermanaric_ (_Hamðismál_) 109
The Northern idylls of the heroines (Oddrun, Gudrun)--the
_Old Lay of Gudrun_, or Gudrun's story to Theodoric 109
The _Lay of Gudrun_ (_Guðrúnarkviða_)--Gudrun's sorrow for
Sigurd 111
The refrain 111
Gudrun's _Chain of Woe_ (_Tregrof Guðrúnar_) 111
The _Ordeal of Gudrun_, an episodic lay 111
Poems in dialogue, without narrative--
(1) Dialogues in the common epic measure--_Balder's
Doom_, Dialogues of _Sigurd_, _Angantyr_--explanations in
prose, between the dialogues 112
(2) Dialogues in the gnomic or elegiac measure:
(_a_) vituperative debates--_Lokasenna_,
_Harbarzlióð_ (in irregular verse), _Atli and Rimgerd_ 112
(_b_) Dialogues implying action--_The Wooing of Frey_
(_Skírnismál_) 114
_Svipdag and Menglad_ (_Grógaldr_, _Fiölsvinnsmál_) 114
The _Volsung_ dialogues 115
The Western and Northern poems compared, with respect
to their scale 116
The old English poems (_Beowulf_, _Waldere_), in scale, midway
between the Northern poems and Homer 117
Many of the Teutonic epic remains may look like the "short
lays" of the agglutinative epic theory; but this is illusion 117
Two kinds of story in Teutonic Epic--(1) episodic, _i.e._
representing a single action (_Hildebrand_, etc.); (2) summary,
_i.e._ giving the whole of a long story in abstract,
with details of one part of it (_Weland_, etc.) 118
The second class is unfit for agglutination 119
Also the first, when it is looked into 121
The Teutonic Lays are too individual to be conveniently
fused into larger masses of narrative 122
III
EPIC AND BALLAD POETRY
Many of the old epic lays are on the scale of popular ballads 123
Their style is different 124
As may be proved where later ballads have taken up the epic
subjects 125
The Danish ballads of _Ungen Sveidal_ (_Svipdag and Menglad_) 126
and of _Sivard_ (_Sigurd and Brynhild_) 127
The early epic poetry, unlike the ballads, was ambitious and
capable of progress 129
IV
THE STYLE OF THE POEMS
Rhetorical art of the alliterative verse 133
English and Norse 134
Different besetting temptations in England and the North 136
English tameness; Norse emphasis and false wit (the Scaldic
poetry) 137
Narrative poetry undeveloped in the North; unable to compete
with the lyrical forms 137
Lyrical element in Norse narrative 138
_Volospá_, the greatest of all the Northern poems 139
False heroics; _Krákumál_ (_Death-Song of Ragnar Lodbrok_) 140
A fresh start, in prose, with no rhetorical encumbrances 141
V
THE PROGRESS OF EPIC
Various renderings of the same story due (1) to accidents of
tradition and impersonal causes; (2) to calculation and
selection of motives by poets, and intentional modification
of traditional matter 144
The three versions of the death of Gunnar and Hogni
compared--_Atlakviða_, _Atlamál_, _Oddrúnargrátr_ 147
Agreement of the three poems in ignoring the German theory
of Kriemhild's revenge 149
The incidents of the death of Hogni clear in _Atlakviða_,
apparently confused and ill recollected in the other two
poems 150
But it turns out that these two poems had each a view of its
own which made it impossible to use the original story 152
_Atlamál_, the work of a critical author, making his selection
of incidents from heroic tradition 153
the largest epic work in Northern poetry, and the last of
its school 155
The "Poetic Edda," a collection of deliberate experiments
in poetry and not of casual popular variants 156
VI
_BEOWULF_
_Beowulf_ claims to be a single complete work 158
Want of unity: a story and a sequel 159
More unity in _Beowulf_ than in some Greek epics. The first
2200 lines form a complete story, not ill composed 160
Homeric method of episodes and allusions in _Beowulf_ 162
and _Waldere_ 163
Triviality of the main plot in both parts of _Beowulf_--tragic
significance in some of the allusions 165
The characters in _Beowulf_ abstract types 165
The adventures and sentiments commonplace, especially in
the fight with the dragon 168
Adventure of Grendel not pure fantasy 169
Grendel's mother more romantic 172
_Beowulf_ is able to give epic dignity to a commonplace set of
romantic adventures 173
CHAPTER III
THE ICELANDIC SAGAS
I
ICELAND AND THE HEROIC AGE
The close of Teutonic Epic--in Germany the old forms were
lost, but not the old stories, in the later Middle Ages 179
England kept the alliterative verse through the Middle
Ages 180
Heroic themes in Danish ballads, and elsewhere 181
Place of Iceland in the heroic tradition--a new heroic literature
in prose 182
II
MATTER AND FORM
The Sagas are not pure fiction 184
Difficulty of giving form to genealogical details 185
Miscellaneous incidents 186
Literary value of the historical basis--the characters well
known and recognisable 187
The coherent Sagas--the tragic motive 189
Plan of _Njála_ 190
of _Laxdæla_ 191
of _Egils Saga_ 192
_Vápnfirðinga Saga_, a story of two generations 193
_Víga-Glúms Saga_, a biography without tragedy 193
_Reykdæla Saga_ 194
_Grettis Saga_ and _Gísla Saga_ clearly worked out 195
Passages of romance in these histories 196
_Hrafnkels Saga Freysgoða_, a tragic idyll, well proportioned 198
Great differences of scale among the Sagas--analogies with
the heroic poems 198
III
THE HEROIC IDEAL
Unheroic matters of fact in the Sagas 200
Heroic characters 201
Heroic rhetoric 203
Danger of exaggeration--Kjartan in _Laxdæla_ 204
The heroic ideal not made too explicit or formal 206
IV
TRAGIC IMAGINATION
Tragic contradictions in the Sagas--_Gisli_, _Njal_ 207
Fantasy 208
_Laxdæla_, a reduction of the story of Sigurd and Brynhild to
the terms of common life 209
Compare Ibsen's _Warriors in Helgeland_ 209
The Sagas are a late stage in the progress of heroic literature 210
The Northern rationalism 212
Self-restraint and irony 213
The elegiac mood infrequent 215
The story of Howard of Icefirth--ironical pathos 216
The conventional Viking 218
The harmonies of _Njála_ 219
and of _Laxdæla_ 222
The two speeches of Gudrun 223
V
COMEDY
The Sagas not bound by solemn conventions 225
Comic humours 226
Bjorn and his wife in _Njála_ 228
_Bandamanna Saga_: "The Confederates," a comedy 229
Satirical criticism of the "heroic age" 231
Tragic incidents in _Bandamanna Saga_ 233
Neither the comedy nor tragedy of the Sagas is monotonous
or abstract 234
VI
THE ART OF NARRATIVE
Organic unity of the best Sagas 235
Method of representing occurrences as they appear at the
time 236
Instance from _Þorgils Saga_ 238
Another method--the death of Kjartan as it appeared to a
churl 240
Psychology (not analytical) 244
Impartiality--justice to the hero's adversaries (_Færeyinga
Saga_) 245
VII
EPIC AND HISTORY
Form of Saga used for contemporary history in the thirteenth
century 246
The historians, Ari (1067-1148) and Snorri (1178-1241) 248
The _Life of King Sverre_, by Abbot Karl Jónsson 249
Sturla (_c._ 1214-1284), his history of Iceland in his own time
(_Islendinga_ or _Sturlunga Saga_) 249
The matter ready to his hand 250
Biographies incorporated in _Sturlunga_: Thorgils and Haflidi 252
_Sturlu Saga_ 253
The midnight raid (A.D. 1171) 254
Lives of Bishop Gudmund, Hrafn, and Aron 256
Sturla's own work (_Islendinga Saga_) 257
The burning of Flugumyri 259
Traces of the heroic manner 264
The character of this history brought out by contrast with
Sturla's other work, the _Life of King Hacon of Norway_ 267
Norwegian and Icelandic politics in the thirteenth century 267
Norway more fortunate than Iceland--the history less
interesting 267
Sturla and Joinville contemporaries 269
Their methods of narrative compared 270
VIII
THE NORTHERN PROSE ROMANCES
Romantic interpolations in the Sagas--the ornamental
version of _Fóstbræðra Saga_ 275
The secondary romantic Sagas--_Frithiof_ 277
French romance imported (_Strengleikar_, _Tristram's Saga_,
etc.) 278
Romantic Sagas made out of heroic poems (_Volsunga Saga_,
etc.) 279
and out of authentic Sagas by repetition of common forms
and motives 280
Romantic conventions in the original Sagas 280
_Laxdæla_ and _Gunnlaug's Saga_--_Thorstein the White_ 281
_Thorstein Staffsmitten_ 282
Sagas turned into rhyming romances (_Rímur_) 283
and into ballads in the Faroes 284
CHAPTER IV
THE OLD FRENCH EPIC
(_CHANSONS DE GESTE_)
Lateness of the extant versions 287
Competition of Epic and Romance in the twelfth century 288
Widespread influence of the _Chansons de geste_--a contrast to
the Sagas 289
Narrative style 290
No obscurities of diction 291
The "heroic age" imperfectly represented 292
but not ignored 293
_Roland_--heroic idealism--France and Christendom 293
William of Orange--_Aliscans_ 296
Rainouart--exaggeration of heroism 296
Another class of stories in the _Chansons de geste_, more like
the Sagas 297
_Raoul de Cambrai_ 298
Barbarism of style 299
_Garin le Loherain_--style clarified 300
Problems of character--Fromont 301
The story of the death of Begon 302
unlike contemporary work of the Romantic School 304
The lament for Begon 307
_Raoul_ and _Garin_ contrasted with _Roland_ 308
Comedy in French Epic--"humours" in _Garin_ 310
in the _Coronemenz Looïs_, etc. 311
Romantic additions to heroic cycles--_la Prise d'Orange_ 313
_Huon de Bordeaux_--the original story grave and tragic 314
converted to Romance 314
CHAPTER V
ROMANCE AND THE OLD FRENCH ROMANTIC
SCHOOLS
Romance an element in Epic and Tragedy apart from all
"romantic schools" 321
The literary movements of the twelfth century 322
A new beginning 323
The Romantic School unromantic in its methods 324
Professional Romance 325
Characteristics of the school--courteous sentiment 328
Decorative passages--descriptions--pedantry 329
Instances from _Roman de Troie_ 330
and from _Ider_, etc. 331
Romantic adventures--the "matter of Rome" and the
"matter of Britain" 334
Blending of classical and Celtic influences--_e.g._ in Benoit's
_Medea_ 334
Methods of narrative--simple, as in the _Lay of Guingamor_;
overloaded, as in _Walewein_ 337
_Guingamor_ 338
_Walewein_, a popular tale disguised as a chivalrous romance 340
The different versions of _Libeaux Desconus_--one of them is
sophisticated 343
_Tristram_--the Anglo-Norman poems comparatively simple
and ingenuous 344
French Romance and Provençal Lyric 345
Ovid in the Middle Ages--the _Art of Love_ 346
The Heroines 347
Benoit's _Medea_ again 348
Chrestien of Troyes, his place at the beginning of modern
literature 349
'Enlightenment' in the Romantic School 350
The sophists of Romance--the rhetoric of sentiment and
passion 351
The progress of Romance from medieval to modern literature 352
Chrestien of Troyes, his inconsistencies--nature and convention 352
Departure from conventional romance; Chrestien's _Enid_ 355
Chrestien's _Cliges_--"sensibility" 357
_Flamenca_, a Provençal story of the thirteenth century--the
author a follower of Chrestien 359
His acquaintance with romantic literature 360
and rejection of the "machinery" of adventures 360
_Flamenca_, an appropriation of Ovid--disappearance of
romantic mythology 361
The _Lady of Vergi_, a short tragic story without false rhetoric 362
Use of medieval themes by the great poets of the fourteenth
century 363
Boccaccio and Chaucer--the _Teseide_ and the _Knight's Tale_ 364
Variety of Chaucer's methods 364
Want of art in the _Man of Law's Tale_ 365
The abstract point of honour (_Clerk's Tale_, _Franklin's Tale_) 366
Pathos in the _Legend of Good Women_ 366
Romantic method perfect in the _Knight's Tale_ 366
_Anelida_, the abstract form of romance 367
In _Troilus and Criseyde_ the form of medieval romance is
filled out with strong dramatic imagination 367
Romance obtains the freedom of Epic, without the old local
and national limitations of Epic 368
Conclusion 370
APPENDIX
Note A--Rhetoric of the Alliterative Poetry 373
Note B--Kjartan and Olaf Tryggvason 375
Note C--Eyjolf Karsson 381
Note D--Two Catalogues of Romances 384
INDEX 391
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
I
THE HEROIC AGE
The title of Epic, or of "heroic poem," is claimed by historians for a
number of works belonging to the earlier Middle Ages, and to the
medieval origins of modern literature. "Epic" is a term freely applied
to the old school of Germanic narrative poetry, which in different
dialects is represented by the poems of Hildebrand, of Beowulf, of
Sigurd and Brynhild. "Epic" is the name for the body of old French
poems which is headed by the _Chanson de Roland_. The rank of Epic is
assigned by many to the _Nibelungenlied_, not to speak of other Middle
High German poems on themes of German tradition. The title of prose
Epic has been claimed for the Sagas of Iceland.
By an equally common consent the name Romance is given to a number of
kinds of medieval narrative by which the Epic is succeeded and
displaced; most notably in France, but also in other countries which
were led, mainly by the example and influence of France, to give up
their own "epic" forms and subjects in favour of new manners.
This literary classification corresponds in general history to the
difference between the earlier "heroic" age and the age of chivalry.
The "epics" of Hildebrand and Beowulf belong, if not wholly to German
heathendom, at any rate to the earlier and prefeudal stage of German
civilisation. The French epics, in their extant form, belong for the
most part in spirit, if not always in date, to an order of things
unmodified by the great changes of the twelfth century. While among
the products of the twelfth century one of the most remarkable is the
new school of French romance, the brilliant and frequently
vainglorious exponent of the modern ideas of that age, and of all its
chivalrous and courtly fashions of thought and sentiment. The
difference of the two orders of literature is as plain as the
difference in the art of war between the two sides of the battle of
Hastings, which indeed is another form of the same thing; for the
victory of the Norman knights over the English axemen has more than a
fanciful or superficial analogy to the victory of the new literature
of chivalry over the older forms of heroic narrative. The history of
those two orders of literature, of the earlier Epic kinds, followed by
the various types of medieval Romance, is parallel to the general
political history of the earlier and the later Middle Ages, and may do
something to illustrate the general progress of the nations. The
passage from the earlier "heroic" civilisation to the age of chivalry
was not made without some contemporary record of the "form and
pressure" of the times in the changing fashions of literature, and in
successive experiments of the imagination.
Whatever Epic may mean, it implies some weight and solidity; Romance
means nothing, if it does not convey some notion of mystery and
fantasy. A general distinction of this kind, whatever names may be
used to render it, can be shown, in medieval literature, to hold good
of the two large groups of narrative belonging to the earlier and the
later Middle Ages respectively. Beowulf might stand for the one side,
Lancelot or Gawain for the other. It is a difference not confined to
literature. The two groups are distinguished from one another, as the
respectable piratical gentleman of the North Sea coast in the ninth or
tenth century differs from one of the companions of St. Louis. The
latter has something fantastic in his ideas which the other has not.
The Crusader may indeed be natural and brutal enough in most of his
ways, but he has lost the sobriety and simplicity of the earlier type
of rover. If nothing else, his way of fighting--the undisciplined
cavalry charge--would convict him of extravagance as compared with men
of business, like the settlers of Iceland for example.
The two great kinds of narrative literature in the Middle Ages might
be distinguished by their favourite incidents and commonplaces of
adventure. No kind of adventure is so common or better told in the
earlier heroic manner than the defence of a narrow place against odds.
Such are the stories of Hamther and Sorli in the hall of Ermanaric, of
the Niblung kings in the hall of Attila, of the Fight of Finnesburh,
of Walter at the Wasgenstein, of Byrhtnoth at Maldon, of Roland in the
Pyrenees. Such are some of the finest passages in the Icelandic Sagas:
the death of Gunnar, the burning of Njal's house, the burning of
Flugumyri (an authentic record), the last fight of Kjartan in
Svinadal, and of Grettir at Drangey. The story of Cynewulf and
Cyneheard in the English Chronicle may well have come from a poem in
which an attack and defence of this sort were narrated.
The favourite adventure of medieval romance is something different,--a
knight riding alone through a forest; another knight; a shock of
lances; a fight on foot with swords, "racing, tracing, and foining
like two wild boars"; then, perhaps, recognition--the two knights
belong to the same household and are engaged in the same quest.
Et Guivrez vers lui esperone,
De rien nule ne l'areisone,
Ne Erec ne li sona mot.
_Erec_, l. 5007.
This collision of blind forces, this tournament at random, takes the
place, in the French romances, of the older kind of combat. In the
older kind the parties have always good reasons of their own for
fighting; they do not go into it with the same sort of readiness as
the wandering champions of romance.
The change of temper and fashion represented by the appearance and the
vogue of the medieval French romances is a change involving the whole
world, and going far beyond the compass of literature and literary
history. It meant the final surrender of the old ideas, independent of
Christendom, which had been enough for the Germanic nations in their
earlier days; it was the close of their heroic age. What the "heroic
age" of the modern nations really was, may be learned from what is
left of their heroic literature, especially from three groups or
classes,--the old Teutonic alliterative poems on native subjects; the
French _Chansons de Geste_; and the Icelandic Sagas.
All these three orders, whatever their faults may be, do something to
represent a society which is "heroic" as the Greeks in Homer are
heroic. There can be no mistake about the likeness. To compare the
imaginations and the phrases of any of these barbarous works with the
poetry of Homer may be futile, but their contents may be compared
without reference to their poetical qualities; and there is no
question that the life depicted has many things in common with Homeric
life, and agrees with Homer in ignorance of the peculiar ideas of
medieval chivalry.
The form of society in an heroic age is aristocratic and magnificent.
At the same time, this aristocracy differs from that of later and more
specialised forms of civilisation. It does not make an insuperable
difference between gentle and simple. There is not the extreme
division of labour that produces the contempt of the lord for the
villain. The nobles have not yet discovered for themselves any form of
occupation or mode of thought in virtue of which they are widely
severed from the commons, nor have they invented any such ideal of
life or conventional system of conduct as involves an ignorance or
depreciation of the common pursuits of those below them. They have no
such elaborate theory of conduct as is found in the chivalrous society
of the Middle Ages. The great man is the man who is best at the things
with which every one is familiar. The epic hero may despise the
churlish man, may, like Odysseus in the _Iliad_ (ii. 198), show little
sympathy or patience with the bellowings of the multitude, but he may
not ostentatiously refuse all community of ideas with simple people.
His magnificence is not defended by scruples about everything low. It
would not have mattered to Odysseus if he had been seen travelling in
a cart, like Lancelot; though for Lancelot it was a great misfortune
and anxiety. The art and pursuits of a gentleman in the heroic age are
different from those of the churl, but not so far different as to keep
them in different spheres. There is a community of prosaic interests.
The great man is a good judge of cattle; he sails his own ship.
A gentleman adventurer on board his own ship, following out his own
ideas, carrying his men with him by his own power of mind and temper,
and not by means of any system of naval discipline to which he as well
as they must be subordinate; surpassing his men in skill, knowledge,
and ambition, but taking part with them and allowing them to take part
in the enterprise, is a good representative of the heroic age. This
relation between captain and men may be found, accidentally and
exceptionally, in later and more sophisticated forms of society. In
the heroic age a relation between a great man and his followers
similar to that between an Elizabethan captain and his crew is found
to be the most important and fundamental relation in society. In later
times it is only by a special favour of circumstances, as for example
by the isolation of shipboard from all larger monarchies, that the
heroic relation between the leader and the followers can be repeated.
As society becomes more complex and conventional, this relation
ceases. The homeliness of conversation between Odysseus and his
vassals, or between Njal and Thord Freedman's son, is discouraged by
the rules of courtly behaviour as gentlefolk become more idle and
ostentatious, and their vassals more sordid and dependent. The secrets
also of political intrigue and dexterity made a difference between
noble and villain, in later and more complex medieval politics, such
as is unknown in the earlier days and the more homely forms of
Society. An heroic age may be full of all kinds of nonsense and
superstition, but its motives of action are mainly positive and
sensible,--cattle, sheep, piracy, abduction, merchandise, recovery of
stolen goods, revenge. The narrative poetry of an heroic age, whatever
dignity it may obtain either by its dramatic force of imagination, or
by the aid of its mythology, will keep its hold upon such common
matters, simply because it cannot do without the essential practical
interests, and has nothing to put in their place, if kings and chiefs
are to be represented at all. The heroic age cannot dress up ideas or
sentiments to play the part of characters. If its characters are not
men they are nothing, not even thoughts or allegories; they cannot go
on talking unless they have something to do; and so the whole business
of life comes bodily into the epic poem.
How much the matter of the Northern heroic literature resembles the
Homeric, may be felt and recognised at every turn in a survey of the
ground. In both there are the _ashen spears_; there are the _shepherds
of the people_; the retainers bound by loyalty to the prince who gives
them meat and drink; the great hall with its minstrelsy, its boasting
and bickering; the battles which are a number of single combats, while
"physiology supplies the author with images"[1] for the same; the
heroic rule of conduct ([Greek: iomen])[2]; the eminence of the hero,
and at the same time his community of occupation and interest with
those who are less distinguished.
[Footnote 1: Johnson on the Epic Poem (_Life of Milton_).]
[Footnote 2: _Il._ xii. 328.]
There are other resemblances also, but some of these are miraculous,
and perhaps irrelevant. By what magic is it that the cry of Odysseus,
wounded and hard bestead in his retreat before the Trojans, comes over
us like the three blasts of the horn of Roland?
Thrice he shouted, as loud as the head of a man will bear;
and three times Menelaus heard the sound thereof, and
quickly he turned and spake to Ajax: "Ajax, there is come
about me the cry of Odysseus slow to yield; and it is like
as though the Trojans had come hard upon him by himself
alone, closing him round in the battle."[3]
[Footnote 3: _Il._ xi. 462.]
It is reported as a discovery made by Mephistopheles in Thessaly, in
the classical _Walpurgisnacht_, that the company there was very much
like his old acquaintances on the Brocken. A similar discovery, in
regard to more honourable personages and other scenes, may be made by
other Gothic travellers in a "south-eastward" journey to heroic
Greece. The classical reader of the Northern heroics may be frequently
disgusted by their failures; he may also be bribed, if not to applaud,
at least to continue his study, by the glimmerings and "shadowy
recollections," the affinities and correspondences between the Homeric
and the Northern heroic world.
Beowulf and his companions sail across the sea to Denmark on an errand
of deliverance,--to cleanse the land of monsters. They are welcomed by
Hrothgar, king of the Danes, and by his gentle queen, in a house less
fortunate than the house of Alcinous, for it is exposed to the attacks
of the lumpish ogre that Beowulf has to kill, but recalling in its
splendour, in the manner of its entertainment, and the bearing of its
gracious lord and lady, the house where Odysseus told his story.
Beowulf, like Odysseus, is assailed by an envious person with
discourteous words. Hunferth, the Danish courtier, is irritated by
Beowulf's presence; "he could not endure that any one should be
counted worthier than himself"; he speaks enviously, a biting
speech--[Greek: thymodakês gar mythos]--and is answered in the tone of
Odysseus to Euryalus.[4] Beowulf has a story to tell of his former
perils among the creatures of the sea. It is differently introduced
from that of Odysseus, and has not the same importance, but it
increases the likeness between the two adventurers.
[Footnote 4: _Od._ viii. 165.]
In the shadowy halls of the Danish king a minstrel sings of the
famous deeds of men, and his song is given as an interlude in the main
action. It is a poem on that same tragedy of Finnesburh, which is the
theme of a separate poem in the Old English heroic cycle; so Demodocus
took his subjects from the heroic cycle of Achaea. The leisure of the
Danish king's house is filled in the same manner as the leisure of
Phaeacia. In spite of the difference of the climate, it is impossible
to mistake the likeness between the Greek and the Northern conceptions
of a dignified and reasonable way of life. The magnificence of the
Homeric great man is like the magnificence of the Northern lord, in so
far as both are equally marked off from the pusillanimity and
cheapness of popular morality on the one hand, and from the
ostentation of Oriental or chivalrous society on the other. The
likeness here is not purely in the historical details, but much more
in the spirit that informs the poetry.
If this part of _Beowulf_ is a Northern _Odyssey_, there is nothing in
the whole range of English literature so like a scene from the _Iliad_
as the narrative of Maldon. It is a battle in which the separate deeds
of the fighters are described, with not quite so much anatomy as in
Homer. The fighting about the body of Byrhtnoth is described as
strongly, as "the Fighting at the Wall" in the twelfth book of the
_Iliad_, and essentially in the same way, with the interchange of
blows clearly noted, together with the speeches and thoughts of the
combatants. Even the most heroic speech in Homer, even the power of
Sarpedon's address to Glaucus in the twelfth book of the _Iliad_,
cannot discredit, by comparison, the heroism and the sublimity of the
speech of the "old companion" at the end of _Maldon_. The language is
simple, but it is not less adequate in its own way than the
simplicity of Sarpedon's argument. It states, perhaps more clearly and
absolutely than anything in Greek, the Northern principle of
resistance to all odds, and defiance of ruin. In the North the
individual spirit asserts itself more absolutely against the bodily
enemies than in Greece; the defiance is made wholly independent of any
vestige of prudent consideration; the contradiction, "Thought the
harder, Heart the keener, Mood the more, as our Might lessens," is
stated in the most extreme terms. This does not destroy the
resemblance between the Greek and the Northern ideal, or between the
respective forms of representation.
The creed of Maldon is that of Achilles:[5] "Xanthus, what need is
there to prophesy of death? Well do I know that it is my doom to
perish here, far from my father and mother; but for all that I will
not turn back, until I give the Trojans their fill of war." The
difference is that in the English case the strain is greater, the
irony deeper, the antithesis between the spirit and the body more
paradoxical.
[Footnote 5: _Il._ xix. 420.]
Where the centre of life is a great man's house, and where the most
brilliant society is that which is gathered at his feast, where
competitive boasting, story-telling, and minstrelsy are the principal
intellectual amusements, it is inevitable that these should find their
way into a kind of literature which has no foundation except
experience and tradition. Where fighting is more important than
anything else in active life, and at the same time is carried on
without organisation or skilled combinations, it is inevitable that it
should be described as it is in the _Iliad_, the _Song of Maldon_ and
_Song of Roland_, and the Icelandic Sagas, as a series of personal
encounters, in which every stroke is remembered. From this early
aristocratic form of society, there is derived in one age the
narrative of life at Ithaca or of the navigation of Odysseus, in
another the representation of the household of Njal or of Olaf the
Peacock, and of the rovings of Olaf Tryggvason and other captains.
There is an affinity between these histories in virtue of something
over and above the likeness in the conditions of things they describe.
There is a community of literary sense as well as of historical
conditions, in the record of Achilles and Kjartan Olafsson, of
Odysseus and Njal.
The circumstances of an heroic age may be found in numberless times
and places, in the history of the world. Among its accompaniments will
be generally found some sort of literary record of sentiments and
imaginations; but to find an heroic literature of the highest order is
not so easy. Many nations instead of an _Iliad_ or an _Odyssey_ have
had to make shift with conventional repetitions of the praise of
chieftains, without any story; many have had to accept from their
story-tellers all sorts of monstrous adventures in place of the
humanities of debate and argument. Epic literature is not common; it
is brought to perfection by a slow process through many generations.
The growth of Epic out of the older and commoner forms of poetry,
hymns, dirges, or panegyrics, is a progress towards intellectual and
imaginative freedom. Few nations have attained, at the close of their
heroic age, to a form of poetical art in which men are represented
freely in action and conversation. The labour and meditation of all
the world has not discovered, for the purposes of narrative, any
essential modification of the procedure of Homer. Those who are
considered reformers and discoverers in later times--Chaucer,
Cervantes, Fielding--are discoverers merely of the old devices of
dramatic narration which were understood by Homer and described after
him by Aristotle.
The growth of Epic, in the beginning of the history of the modern
nations, has been generally thwarted and stunted. It cannot be said of
many of the languages of the North and West of Europe that in them the
epic form has come fully to its own, or has realised its proper
nature. Many of them, however, have at least made a beginning. The
history of the older German literature, and of old French, is the
history of a great number of experiments in Epic; of attempts, that
is, to represent great actions in narrative, with the personages well
defined. These experiments are begun in the right way. They are not
merely barbarous nor fantastic. They are different also from such
traditional legends and romances as may survive among simple people
long after the day of their old glories and their old kings. The poems
of _Beowulf_ and _Waldere_, of _Roland_ and _William of Orange_, are
intelligible and reasonable works, determined in the main by the same
essential principles of narrative art, and of dramatic conversation
within the narrative, as are observed in the practice of Homer.
Further, these are poems in which, as in the Homeric poems, the ideas
of their time are conveyed and expressed in a noble manner: they are
high-spirited poems. They have got themselves clear of the confusion
and extravagance of early civilisation, and have hit upon a way of
telling a story clearly and in proportion, and with dignity. They are
epic in virtue of their superiority to the more fantastic motives of
interest, and in virtue of their study of human character. They are
heroic in the nobility of their temper and their style. If at any time
they indulge in heroic commonplaces of sentiment, they do so without
insincerity or affectation, as the expression of the general temper or
opinion of their own time. They are not separated widely from the
matters of which they treat; they are not antiquarian revivals of past
forms, nor traditional vestiges of things utterly remote and separate
from the actual world. What art they may possess is different from the
"rude sweetness" of popular ballads, and from the unconscious grace of
popular tales. They have in different degrees and manners the form of
epic poetry, in their own right. There are recognisable qualities that
serve to distinguish even a fragment of heroic poetry from the ballads
and romances of a lower order, however near these latter forms may
approach at times to the epic dignity.
II
EPIC AND ROMANCE
It is the nature of epic poetry to be at ease in regard to its subject
matter, to be free from the strain and excitement of weaker and more
abstract forms of poetry in dealing with heroic subjects. The heroic
ideal of epic is not attained by a process of abstraction and
separation from the meannesses of familiar things. The magnificence
and aristocratic dignity of epic is conformable to the practical and
ethical standards of the heroic age; that is to say, it tolerates a
number of things that may be found mean and trivial by academicians.
Epic poetry is one of the complex and comprehensive kinds of
literature, in which most of the other kinds may be included--romance,
history, comedy; _tragical_, _comical_, _historical_, _pastoral_ are
terms not sufficiently various to denote the variety of the _Iliad_
and the _Odyssey_.
The "common life" of the Homeric poems may appeal to modern pedantic
theorists, and be used by them in support of Euripidean or
Wordsworthian receipts for literature. But the comprehensiveness of
the greater kinds of poetry, of Homer and Shakespeare, is a different
thing from the premeditated and self-assertive realism of the authors
who take viciously to common life by way of protest against the
romantic extreme. It has its origin, not in a critical theory about
the proper matter of literature, but in dramatic imagination. In an
epic poem where the characters are vividly imagined, it follows
naturally that their various moods and problems involve a variety of
scenery and properties, and so the whole business of life comes into
the story.
The success of epic poetry depends on the author's power of imagining
and representing characters. A kind of success and a kind of
magnificence may be attained in stories, professing to be epic, in
which there is no dramatic virtue, in which every new scene and new
adventure merely goes to accumulate, in immortal verse, the proofs of
the hero's nullity and insignificance. This is not the epic poetry of
the heroic ages.
Aristotle, in his discussion of tragedy, chose to lay stress upon the
plot, the story. On the other hand, to complete the paradox, in the
epic he makes the characters all-important, not the story. Without the
tragic plot or fable, the tragedy becomes a series of moral essays or
monologues; the life of the drama is derived from the original idea of
the fable which is its subject. Without dramatic representation of the
characters, epic is mere history or romance; the variety and life of
epic are to be found in the drama that springs up at every encounter
of the personages.
"Homer is the only poet who knows the right proportions of epic
narrative; when to narrate, and when to let the characters speak for
themselves. Other poets for the most part tell their story straight
on, with scanty passages of drama and far between. Homer, with little
prelude, leaves the stage to his personages, men and women, all with
characters of their own."[6]
[Footnote 6: [Greek: Homêros de alla te polla axios epaineisthai kai
dê kai hoti monos tôn poiêtôn ouk agnoei ho dei poiein auton. auton
gar dei ton poiêtên elachista legein: ou gar esti kata tauta mimêtês.
hoi men oun alloi autoi men di' holou agônizontai, mimountai de oliga
kai oligakis: ho de oliga phroimiasamenos euthys eisagei andra ê
gynaika ê allo ti êthos kai ouden' aêthê all' echonta êthê.]--ARIST.
_Poet._ 1460 a 5.]
Aristotle wrote with very little consideration for the people who were
to come after him, and gives little countenance to such theories of
epic as have at various times been prevalent among the critics, in
which the dignity of the subject is insisted on. He does not imagine
it the chief duty of an epic poet to choose a lofty argument for
historical rhetoric. He does not say a word about the national or the
ecumenical importance of the themes of the epic poet. His analysis of
the plot of the _Odyssey_, but for the reference to Poseidon, might
have been the description of a modern realistic story.
"A man is abroad for many years, persecuted by Poseidon and alone;
meantime the suitors of his wife are wasting his estate and plotting
against his son; after many perils by sea he returns to his own
country and discovers himself to his friends. He falls on his enemies
and destroys them, and so comes to his own again."
The _Iliad_ has more likeness than the _Odyssey_ to the common pattern
of later sophisticated epics. But the war of Troy is not the subject
of the _Iliad_ in the same way as the siege of Jerusalem is the
subject of Tasso's poem. The story of the _Aeneid_ can hardly be told
in the simplest form without some reference to the destiny of Rome, or
the story of _Paradise Lost_ without the feud of heaven and hell. But
in the _Iliad_, the assistance of the Olympians, or even the presence
of the whole of Greece, is not in the same degree essential to the
plot of the story of Achilles. In the form of Aristotle's summary of
the _Odyssey_, reduced to "the cool element of prose," the _Iliad_
may be proved to be something quite different from the common fashion
of literary epics. It might go in something like this way:--
"A certain man taking part in a siege is slighted by the general, and
in his resentment withdraws from the war, though his own side is in
great need of his help. His dearest friend having been killed by the
enemy, he comes back into the action and takes vengeance for his
friend, and allows himself to be reconciled."
It is the debate among the characters, and not the onset of Hera and
Athena in the chariot of Heaven, that gives its greatest power to the
_Iliad_. The _Iliad_, with its "machines," its catalogue of the
forces, its funeral games, has contributed more than the _Odyssey_ to
the common pattern of manufactured epics. But the essence of the poem
is not to be found among the Olympians. Achilles refusing the embassy
or yielding to Priam has no need of the Olympian background. The poem
is in a great degree independent of "machines"; its life is in the
drama of the characters. The source of all its variety is the
imagination by which the characters are distinguished; the liveliness
and variety of the characters bring with them all the other kinds of
variety.
It is impossible for the author who knows his personages intimately to
keep to any one exclusive mode of sentiment or one kind of scene. He
cannot be merely tragical and heroic, or merely comical and pastoral;
these are points of view to which those authors are confined who are
possessed by one kind of sentiment or sensibility, and who wish to
find expression for their own prevailing mood. The author who is
interested primarily in his characters will not allow them to be
obliterated by the story or by its diffused impersonal sentiment. The
action of an heroic poem must be "of a certain magnitude," but the
accessories need not be all heroic and magnificent; the heroes do not
derive their magnificence from the scenery, the properties, and the
author's rhetoric, but contrariwise: the dramatic force and
self-consistency of the _dramatis personae_ give poetic value to any
accessories of scenery or sentiment which may be required by the
action. They are not figures "animating" a landscape; what the
landscape means for the poet's audience is determined by the character
of his personages.
All the variety of epic is explained by Aristotle's remark on Homer.
Where the characters are true, and dramatically represented, there can
be no monotony.
In the different kinds of Northern epic literature--German, English,
French, and Norse--belonging to the Northern heroic ages, there will
be found in different degrees this epic quality of drama. Whatever
magnificence they may possess comes mainly from the dramatic strength
of the heroes, and in a much less degree from the historic dignity or
importance of the issues of the story, or from its mythological
decorations.
The place of history in the heroic poems belonging to an heroic age is
sometimes misconceived. Early epic poetry may be concerned with great
historic events. It does not necessarily emphasise--by preference it
does not emphasise--the historic importance or the historic results of
the events with which it deals. Heroic poetry implies an heroic age,
an age of pride and courage, in which there is not any extreme
organisation of politics to hinder the individual talent and its
achievements, nor on the other hand too much isolation of the hero
through the absence of any national or popular consciousness. There
must be some unity of sentiment, some common standard of appreciation,
among the people to whom the heroes belong, if they are to escape
oblivion. But this common sentiment must not be such as to make the
idea of the community and its life predominant over the individual
genius of its members. In such a case there may be a Roman history,
but not anything approaching the nature of the Homeric poems.
In some epic poems belonging to an heroic age, and not to a time of
self-conscious and reflective literature, there may be found general
conceptions that seem to resemble those of the _Aeneid_ rather than
those of the _Iliad_. In many of the old French _Chansons de Geste_,
the war against the infidels is made the general subject of the story,
and the general idea of the Holy War is expressed as fully as by
Tasso. Here, however, the circumstances are exceptional. The French
epic with all its Homeric analogies is not as sincere as Homer. It is
exposed to the touch of influences from another world, and though many
of the French poems, or great part of many of them, may tell of heroes
who would be content with the simple and positive rules of the heroic
life, this is not allowed them. They are brought within the sphere of
other ideas, of another civilisation, and lose their independence.
Most of the old German heroic poetry is clearly to be traced, as far
as its subjects are concerned, to the most exciting periods in early
German history, between the fourth and the sixth centuries. The names
that seem to have been most commonly known to the poets are the names
that are most important to the historian--Ermanaric, Attila,
Theodoric. In the wars of the great migration the spirit of each of
the German families was quickened, and at the same time the spirit of
the whole of Germany, so that each part sympathised with all the rest,
and the fame of the heroes went abroad beyond the limits of their own
kindred. Ermanaric, Attila, and Theodoric, Sigfred the Frank, and
Gundahari the Burgundian, are heroes over all the region occupied by
all forms of Teutonic language. But although the most important period
of early German history may be said to have produced the old German
heroic poetry, by giving a number of heroes to the poets, at the same
time that the imagination was stirred to appreciate great things and
make the most of them, still the result is nothing like the patriotic
epic in twelve books, the _Aeneid_ or the _Lusiad_, which chooses, of
set purpose, the theme of the national glory. Nor is it like those old
French epics in which there often appears a contradiction between the
story of individual heroes, pursuing their own fortunes, and the idea
of a common cause to which their own fortunes ought to be, but are not
always, subordinate. The great historical names which appear in the
old German heroic poetry are seldom found there in anything like their
historical character, and not once in their chief historical aspect as
adversaries of the Roman Empire. Ermanaric, Attila, and Theodoric are
all brought into the same Niblung story, a story widely known in
different forms, though it was never adequately written out. The true
history of the war between the Burgundians and the Huns in the fifth
century is forgotten. In place of it, there is associated with the
life and death of Gundahari the Burgundian king a story which may have
been vastly older, and may have passed through many different forms
before it became the story of the Niblung treasure, of Sigfred and
Brynhild. This, which has made free with so many great historical
names, the name of Attila, the name of Theodoric, has little to do
with history. In this heroic story coming out of the heroic age, there
is not much that can be traced to historical as distinct from mythical
tradition. The tragedy of the death of Attila, as told in the
_Atlakviða_ and the _Atlamál_, may indeed owe something to the facts
recorded by historians, and something more to vaguer historical
tradition of the vengeance of Rosamund on Alboin the Lombard. But, in
the main, the story of the Niblungs is independent of history, in
respect of its matter; in its meaning and effect as a poetical story
it is absolutely free from history. It is a drama of personal
encounters and rivalries. This also, like the story of Achilles, is
fit for a stage in which the characters are left free to declare
themselves in their own way, unhampered by any burden of history, any
purpose or moral apart from the events that are played out in the
dramatic clashing of one will against another.
It is not vanity in an historian to look for the historical origin of
the tale of Troy or of the vengeance of Gudrun; but no result in
either case can greatly affect the intrinsic relations of the various
elements within the poems. The relations of Achilles to his
surroundings in the _Iliad_, of Attila and Ermanaric to theirs, are
freely conceived by the several poets, and are intelligible at once,
without reference to anything outside the poems. To require of the
poetry of an heroic age that it shall recognise the historical meaning
and importance of the events in which it originates, and the persons
whose names it uses, is entirely to mistake the nature of it. Its
nature is to find or make some drama played by kings and heroes, and
to let the historical framework take care of itself. The connexion of
epic poetry with history is real, and it is a fitting subject for
historical inquiry, but it lies behind the scene. The epic poem is cut
loose and set free from history, and goes on a way of its own.
Epic magnificence and the dignity of heroic poetry may thus be only
indirectly derived from such greatness or magnificence as is known to
true prosaic history. The heroes, even if they can be identified as
historical, may retain in epic nothing of their historical character,
except such qualities as fit them for great actions. Their conduct in
epic poetry may be very far unlike their actual demeanour in true
history; their greatest works may be thrust into a corner of the epic,
or barely alluded to, or left out altogether. Their greatness in epic
may be quite a different kind of greatness from that of their true
history and where there are many poems belonging to the same cycle
there may be the greatest discrepancy among the views taken of the
same hero by different authors, and all the views may be alike remote
from the prosaic or scientific view. There is no constant or
self-consistent opinion about the character of Charles the Emperor in
old French poetry: there is one view in the _Chanson de Roland_,
another in the _Pèlerinage_, another in the _Coronemenz Looïs_: none
of the opinions is anything like an elaborate or detailed historical
judgment. Attila, though he loses his political importance and most of
his historical acquisitions in the Teutonic heroic poems in which he
appears, may retain in some of them his ruthlessness and strength; at
other times he may be a wise and peaceful king. All that is constant,
or common, in the different poetical reports of him, is that he was
great. What touches the mind of the poet out of the depths of the past
is nothing but the tradition, undefined, of something lordly. This
vagueness of tradition does not imply that tradition is impotent or
barren; only that it leaves all the execution, the growth of detail,
to the freedom of the poet. He is bound to the past, in one way; it is
laid upon him to tell the stories of the great men of his own race.
But in those stories, as they come to him, what is most lively is not
a set and established series of incidents, true or false, but
something to which the standards of truth and falsehood are scarcely
applicable; something stirring him up to admiration, a compulsion or
influence upon him requiring him to make the story again in his own
way; not to interpret history, but to make a drama of his own, filled
somehow with passion and strength of mind. It does not matter in what
particular form it may be represented, so long as in some form or
other the power of the national glory is allowed to pass into his
work.
This vagueness and generality in the relation of heroic poetry to the
historical events and persons of an heroic age is of course quite a
different thing from vagueness in the poetry itself. Gunther and
Attila, Roland and Charlemagne, in poetry, are very vaguely connected
with their antitypes in history; but that does not prevent them from
being characterised minutely, if it should agree with the poet's taste
or lie within his powers to have it so. The strange thing is that this
vague relation should be so necessary to heroic poetry; that it should
be impossible at any stage of literature or in any way by taking
thought to make up for the want of it.
The place of Gunther the Burgundian, Sigfred the Frank, and Attila the
Hun, in the poetical stories of the Niblung treasure may be in one
sense accidental. The fables of the treasure with a curse upon it, the
killing of the dragon, the sleeping princess, the wavering flame, are
not limited to this particular course of tradition, and, further, the
traditional motives of the Niblung story have varied enormously not
only in different countries, but in one and the same language at the
same time. The story is never told alike by two narrators; what is
common and essential in it is nothing palpable or fixed, but goes from
poet to poet "like a shadow from dream to dream." And the historical
names are apparently unessential; yet they remain. To look for the
details of the Niblung story in the sober history of the Goths and
Huns, Burgundians and Franks, is like the vanity confessed by the
author of the _Roman de Rou_, when he went on a sentimental journey to
Broceliande, and was disappointed to find there only the common
daylight and nothing of the Faerie. Nevertheless it is the historical
names, and the vague associations about them, that give to the Niblung
story, not indeed the whole of its plot, but its temper, its pride and
glory, its heroic and epic character.
Heroic poetry is not, as a rule, greatly indebted to historical fact
for its material. The epic poet does not keep record of the great
victories or the great disasters. He cannot, however, live without the
ideas and sentiments of heroism that spring up naturally in periods
like those of the Teutonic migrations. In this sense the historic
Gunther and Attila are necessary to the Niblung story. The wars and
fightings of generation on generation went to create the heroism, the
loftiness of spirit, expressed in the Teutonic epic verse. The plots
of the stories may be commonplace, the common property of all popular
tales. The temper is such as is not found everywhere, but only in
historical periods of great energy. The names of Ermanaric and Attila
correspond to hardly anything of literal history in the heroic poems;
but they are the sign of conquests and great exploits that have gone
to form character, though their details are forgotten.
It may be difficult to appreciate and understand in detail this vague
relation of epic poetry to the national life and to the renown of the
national heroes, but the general fact is not less positive or less
capable of verification than the date of the battle of Châlons, or the
series of the Gothic vowels. All that is needed to prove this is to
compare the poetry of a national cycle with the poetry that comes in
its place when the national cycle is deserted for other heroes.
The secondary or adopted themes may be treated with so much of the
manner of the original poetry as to keep little of their foreign
character. The rhetoric, the poetical habit, of the original epic may
be retained. As in the Saxon poem on the Gospel history, the
_Hêliand_, the twelve disciples may be represented as Thanes owing
loyalty to their Prince, in common poetic terms befitting the men of
Beowulf or Byrhtnoth. As in the French poems on Alexander the Great,
Alexander may become a feudal king, and take over completely all that
belongs to such a rank. There may be no consciousness of any need for
a new vocabulary or a new mode of expression to fit the foreign
themes. In France, it is true, there is a general distinction of form
between the _Chansons de Geste_ and the romances; though to this there
are exceptions, themes not French, and themes not purely heroic, being
represented in the epic form. In the early Teutonic poetry there is no
distinction of versification, vocabulary, or rhetoric between the
original and the secondary narrative poems; the alliterative verse
belongs to both kinds equally. Nor is it always the case that subjects
derived from books or from abroad are handled with less firmness than
the original and traditional plots. Though sometimes a prevailing
affection for imported stories, for Celtic or Oriental legend, may be
accompanied by a relaxation in the style, the superiority of national
to foreign subjects is not always proved by greater strength or
eloquence. Can it be said that the Anglo-Saxon _Judith_, for instance,
is less heroic, less strong and sound, than the somewhat damaged and
motley accoutrements of Beowulf?
The difference is this, that the more original and native kind of epic
has immediate association with all that the people know about
themselves, with all their customs, all that part of their experience
which no one can account for or refer to any particular source. A poem
like _Beowulf_ can play directly on a thousand chords of association;
the range of its appeal to the minds of an audience is almost
unlimited; on no side is the poet debarred from freedom of movement,
if only he remember first of all what is due to the hero. He has all
the life of his people to strengthen him.
A poem like the _Hêliand_ is under an obligation to a literary
original, and cannot escape from this restriction. It makes what use
it can of the native associations, but with whatever perseverance the
author may try to bend his story into harmony with the laws of his own
country, there is an untranslated residue of foreign ideas.
Whatever the defects or excesses of _Beowulf_ may be, the characters
are not distressed by any such unsolved contradiction as in the Saxon
_Hêliand_, or in the old English _Exodus_, or _Andreas_, or the other
poems taken from the Bible or the lives of saints. They have not, like
the personages of the second order of poems, been translated from one
realm of ideas to another, and made to take up burdens and offices
not their own. They have grown naturally in the mind of a poet, out of
the poet's knowledge of human nature, and the traditional ethical
judgments of which he is possessed.
The comparative freedom of _Beowulf_ in its relation to historical
tradition and traditional ethics, and the comparative limitation of
the _Hêliand_, are not in themselves conditions of either advantage or
inferiority. They simply mark the difference between two types of
narrative poem. To be free and comprehensive in relation to history,
to summarise and represent in epic characters the traditional
experience of an heroic age, is not the proper virtue of every kind of
poetry, though it is proper to the Homeric kind. The freedom that
belongs to the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ is also shared by many a
dismal and interminable poem of the Middle Ages. That foreign or
literary subjects impose certain limitations, and interfere with the
direct use of matter of experience in poetry, is nothing against them.
The Anglo-Saxon _Judith_, which is thus restricted as compared with
_Beowulf_, may be more like Milton for these restrictions, if it be
less like Homer. Exemption from them is not a privilege, except that
it gives room for the attainment of a certain kind of excellence, the
Homeric kind; as, on the other hand, it excludes the possibility of
the literary art of Virgil or Milton.
The relation of epic poetry to its heroic age is not to be found in
the observance of any strict historical duty. It lies rather in the
epic capacity for bringing together all manner of lively passages from
the general experience of the age, in a story about famous heroic
characters. The plot of the story gives unity and harmony to the
composition, while the variety of its matter is permitted and
justified by the dramatic variety of the characters and their
interests.
By its comprehensiveness and the variety of its substance, which are
the signs and products of its dramatic imagination, epic poetry of the
heroic age is distinguished from the more abstract kinds of narrative,
such as the artificial epic, and from all kinds of imagination or
fancy that are limited in their scope.
In times when "the Epic Poem" was a more attractive, if not more
perilous theme of debate than it now is, there was a strong
controversy about the proper place and the proper kind of miraculous
details to be admitted. The question was debated by Tasso in his
critical writings, against the strict and pedantic imitators of
classical models, and with a strong partiality for Ariosto against
Trissino. Tasso made less of a distinction between romance and epic
than was agreeable to some of his successors in criticism; and the
controversy went on for generations, always more or less concerned
with the great Italian heroic poems, _Orlando_ and _Jerusalem_. Some
record of it will be found in Dr. Hurd's _Letters on Chivalry and
Romance_ (1762). If the controversy has any interest now, it must be
because it provided the most extreme statements of abstract literary
principles, which on account of their thoroughness are interesting.
From the documents it can be ascertained how near some of the critics
came to that worship of the Faultless Hero with which Dryden in his
heroic plays occasionally conformed, while he guarded himself against
misinterpretation in his prefaces.
The epic poetry of the more austere critics was devised according to
the strictest principles of dignity and sublimity, with a precise
exclusion of everything "Gothic" and romantic. Davenant's Preface to
_Gondibert_--"the Author's Preface to his much Honour'd friend, Mr
Hobs"--may show how the canon of epic was understood by poets who took
things seriously; "for I will yield to their opinion, who permit not
_Ariosto_, no, not _Du Bartas_, in this eminent rank of the
_Heroicks_; rather than to make way by their admission for _Dante_,
_Marino_, and others."
It is somewhat difficult to find a common measure for these names, but
it is clear that what is most distasteful to the writer, in theory at
any rate, is variety. Epic is the most solemn, stately, and frigid of
all kinds of composition. This was the result attained by the perverse
following of precepts supposed to be classical. The critics of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were generally right in
distinguishing between Epic and Romance, and generally wrong in
separating the one kind from the other as opposite and mutually
exclusive forms, instead of seeing with Tasso, in his critical
discourses, that romance may be included in epic. Against the manifold
perils of the Gothic fantasy they set up the image of the Abstract
Hero, and recited the formulas of the decorous and symmetrical
abstract heroic poem. They were occasionally troubled by the "Gothic"
elements in Homer, of which their adversaries were not slow to take
advantage.
One of the most orthodox of all the formalists, who for some reason
came to be very much quoted in England, Bossu, in his discourse on the
Epic Poem, had serious difficulties with the adventures of Ulysses,
and his stories told in Phaeacia. The episodes of Circe, of the
Sirens, and of Polyphemus, are _machines_; they are also not quite
easy to understand. "They are necessary to the action, and yet they
are not humanly probable." But see how Homer gets over the difficulty
and brings back these _machines_ to the region of human probability.
"Homère les fait adroitement rentrer dans la Vraisemblance humaine par
la simplicité de ceux devant qui il fait faire ses récits fabuleux. Il
dit assez plaisamment que les Phéaques habitoient dans une Isle
éloignée des lieux où demeurent les hommes qui ont de l'esprit.
[Greek: heisen d' en Scheriê hekas andrôn alphêstaôn]. Ulysses les
avoit connus avant que de se faire connoître à eux: et aiant observé
qu'ils avoient toutes les qualités de ces fainéans qui n'admirent rien
avec plus de plaisir que les aventures Romanesques: il les satisfait
par ces récits accommodez à leur humeur. Mais le Poëte n'y a pas
oublié les Lecteurs raisonnables. Il leur a donné en ces Fables tout
le plaisir que l'on peut tirer des véritez Morales, si agréablement
déguisées sous ces miraculeuses allégories. C'est ainsi qu'il a réduit
ces Machines dans la vérité et dans la Vraisemblance Poëtique."[7]
[Footnote 7: _Traité du Poëme Épique_, par le R.P. Le Bossu, Chanoine
Régulier de Sainte Geneviève; MDCLXXV (t. ii. p. 166).]
Although the world has fallen away from the severity of this critic,
there is still a meaning at the bottom of his theory of machines. He
has at any rate called attention to one of the most interesting parts
of Epic, and has found the right word for the episodes of the
Phaeacian story of Odysseus. Romance is the word for them, and Romance
is at the same time one of the constituent parts and one of the
enemies of epic poetry. That it was dangerous was seen by the
academical critics. They provided against it, generally, by treating
it with contempt and proscribing it, as was done by those French
critics who were offended by Ariosto and perplexed by much of the
Gothic machinery of Tasso. They did not readily admit that epic poetry
is as complex as the plays of Shakespeare, and as incongruous as these
in its composition, if the different constituents be taken out
separately in the laboratory and then compared.
Romance by itself is a kind of literature that does not allow the full
exercise of dramatic imagination; a limited and abstract form, as
compared with the fulness and variety of Epic; though episodes of
romance, and romantic moods and digressions, may have their place,
along with all other human things, in the epic scheme.
The difference between the greater and the lesser kinds of narrative
literature is vital and essential, whatever names may be assigned to
them. In the one kind, of which Aristotle knew no other examples than
the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_, the personages are made individual
through their dramatic conduct and their speeches in varying
circumstances; in the other kind, in place of the moods and sentiments
of a multitude of different people entering into the story and working
it out, there is the sentiment of the author in his own person; there
is one voice, the voice of the story-teller, and his theory of the
characters is made to do duty for the characters themselves. There may
be every poetic grace, except that of dramatic variety; and wherever,
in narrative, the independence of the characters is merged in the
sequence of adventures, or in the beauty of the landscape, or in the
effusion of poetic sentiment, the narrative falls below the highest
order, though the art be the art of Ovid or of Spenser.
The romance of Odysseus is indeed "brought into conformity with poetic
verisimilitude," but in a different way from that of Bossu _On the
Epic Poem_. It is not because the Phaeacians are romantic in their
tastes, but because it belongs to Odysseus, that the Phaeacian night's
entertainment has its place in the _Odyssey_. The _Odyssey_ is the
story of his home-coming, his recovery of his own. The great action
of the drama of Odysseus is in his dealings with Penelope, Eumaeus,
Telemachus, the suitors. The Phaeacian story is indeed episodic; the
interest of those adventures is different from that of the meeting
with Penelope. Nevertheless it is all kept in harmony with the
stronger part of the poem. It is not pure fantasy and "Faerie," like
the voyage of Maelduin or the vigil in the castle of Busirane.
Odysseus in the house of Alcinous is not different from Odysseus of
the return to Ithaca. The story is not pure romance, it is a dramatic
monologue; and the character of the speaker has more part than the
wonders of the story in the silence that falls on the listeners when
the story comes to an end.
In all early literature it is hard to keep the story within limits, to
observe the proportion of the _Odyssey_ between strong drama and
romance. The history of the early heroic literature of the Teutonic
tongues, and of the epics of old France, comes to an end in the
victory of various romantic schools, and of various restricted and
one-sided forms of narrative. From within and without, from the
resources of native mythology and superstition and from the
fascination of Welsh and Arabian stories, there came the temptation to
forget the study of character, and to part with an inheritance of
tragic fables, for the sake of vanities, wonders, and splendours among
which character and the tragic motives lost their pre-eminent interest
and their old authority over poets and audience.
III
ROMANTIC MYTHOLOGY
Between the dramatic qualities of epic poetry and the myths and
fancies of popular tradition there must inevitably be a conflict and a
discrepancy. The greatest scenes of the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ have
little to do with myth. Where the characters are most vividly realised
there is no room for the lighter kinds of fable; the epic "machines"
are superfluous. Where all the character of Achilles is displayed in
the interview with Priam, all his generosity, all his passion and
unreason, the imagination refuses to be led away by anything else from
looking on and listening. The presence of Hermes, Priam's guide, is
forgotten. Olympus cannot stand against the spell of words like those
of Priam and Achilles; it vanishes like a parched scroll. In the great
scene in the other poem where the disguised Odysseus talks with
Penelope, but will not make himself known to her for fear of spoiling
his plot, there is just as little opportunity for any intervention of
the Olympians. "Odysseus pitied his wife as she wept, but his eyes
were firm as horn or steel, unwavering in his eyelids, and with art he
concealed his tears.[8]"
[Footnote 8:
[Greek: autar' Odysseus
thymôi men gooôsan heên eleaire gynaika,
ophthalmoi d' hôs ei kera hestasan êe sidêros
atremas en blepharoisi; dolôi d' ho ge dakrya keuthen.]
_Od._ xix. 209.]
In passages like these the epic poet gets clear away from the cumbrous
inheritance of traditional fancies and stories. In other places he is
inevitably less strong and self-sustained; he has to speak of the gods
of the nation, or to work into his large composition some popular and
improbable histories. The result in Homer is something like the result
in Shakespeare, when he has a more than usually childish or
old-fashioned fable to work upon. A story like that of the _Three
Caskets_ or the _Pound of Flesh_ is perfectly consistent with itself
in its original popular form. It is inconsistent with the form of
elaborate drama, and with the lives of people who have souls of their
own, like Portia or Shylock. Hence in the drama which uses the popular
story as its ground-plan, the story is never entirely reduced into
conformity with the spirit of the chief characters. The caskets and
the pound of flesh, in despite of all the author's pains with them,
are imperfectly harmonised; the primitive and barbarous imagination in
them retains an inconvenient power of asserting its discordance with
the principal parts of the drama. Their unreason is of no great
consequence, yet it is something; it is not quite kept out of sight.
The epic poet, at an earlier stage of literature than Shakespeare, is
even more exposed to this difficulty. Shakespeare was free to take his
plots where he chose, and took these old wives' tales at his own risk.
The epic poet has matter of this sort forced upon him. In his
treatment of it, it will be found that ingenuity does not fail him,
and that the transition from the unreasonable or old-fashioned part of
his work to the modern and dramatic part is cunningly worked out. "He
gets over the unreason by the grace and skill of his handling,"[9]
says Aristotle of a critical point in the "machinery" of the
_Odyssey_, where Odysseus is carried ashore on Ithaca in his sleep.
There is a continual play in the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ between the
wonders of mythology and the spirit of the drama. In this, as in other
things, the Homeric poems observe the mean: the extremes may be found
in the heroic literature of other nations; the extreme of marvellous
fable in the old Irish heroic legends, for example; the extreme of
plainness and "soothfastness" in the old English lay of _Maldon_. In
some medieval compositions, as in _Huon of Bordeaux_, the two extremes
are brought together clumsily and without harmony. In other medieval
works again it is possible to find something like the Homeric
proportion--the drama of strong characters, taking up and transforming
the fanciful products of an earlier world, the inventions of minds not
deeply or especially interested in character.
[Footnote 9:
[Greek: nun de tois allois agathois aphanizei hêdunôn to atopon.]
ARISTOT. _Poet._ 1460 b.]
The defining and shaping of myths in epic poetry is a process that
cannot go on in a wholly simple and unreflecting society. On the
contrary, this process means that the earlier stages of religious
legend have been succeeded by a time of criticism and selection. It is
hard on the old stories of the gods when men come to appreciate the
characters of Achilles and Odysseus. The old stories are not all of
equal value and authority; they cannot all be made to fit in with the
human story; they have to be tested, and some have to be rejected as
inconvenient. The character of the gods is modified under the
influence of the chief actors in the drama. Agamemnon, Diomede,
Odysseus, Ajax, and Achilles set the standard by which the gods are
judged. The Homeric view of the gods is already more than half-way to
the view of a modern poet. The gods lose their old tyranny and their
right to the steam of sacrifice as they gain their new poetical
empire, from which they need not fear to be banished; not, at any
rate, for any theological reasons.
In Shakespearean drama, where each man is himself, with his own
character and his own fortune to make, there is small scope for any
obvious Divine interposition in the scene. The story of human actions
and characters, the more fully it is developed, leaves the less
opportunity for the gods to interfere in it. Something of this sort
was felt by certain medieval historians; they found it necessary to
begin with an apologetic preface explaining the long-suffering of God,
who has given freedom to the will of man to do good or evil. It was
felt to be on the verge of impiety to think of men as left to
themselves and doing what they pleased. Those who listen to a story
might be tempted to think of the people in it as self-sufficient and
independent powers, trespassing on the domain of Providence. A pious
exculpation was required to clear the author of blame.[10]
[Footnote 10: "In the events of this history may be proved the great
long-suffering of God Almighty towards us every day; and the freedom
of will which He has given to every man, that each may do what he
will, good or evil."--_Hrafns Saga_, Prologue (_Sturlunga Saga_
Oxford, 1878, II. p. 275).
"As all good things are the work of God, so valour is made by Him and
placed in the heart of stout champions, and freedom therewithal to use
it as they will, for good or evil."--_Fóstbræðra Saga_ (1852), p. 12:
one of the sophistical additions to the story: see below p. 275.
The moral is different in the following passage:--
"And inasmuch as the Providence of God hath ordained, and it is His
pleasure, that the seven planets should have influence on the world,
and bear dominion over man's nature, giving him divers inclinations to
sin and naughtiness of life: nevertheless the Universal Creator has
not taken from him the free will, which, as it is well governed, may
subdue and abolish these temptations by virtuous living, if men will
use discretion."--_Tirant lo Blanch_ (1460), c. i.]
In the _Iliad_ this scrupulous conscience has less need to deliver
itself. The gods are not far away; the heroes are not left alone. But
the poet has already done much to reduce the immediate power of the
gods, not by excluding them from the action, certainly, nor by any
attenuation of their characters into allegory, but by magnifying and
developing the characters of men. In many occasional references it
would seem that an approach was being made to that condition of mind,
at ease concerning the gods, so common in the North, in Norway and
Iceland, in the last days of heathendom. There is the great speech of
Hector to Polydamas--"we defy augury"[11]--there is the speech of
Apollo himself to Aeneas[12] about those who stand up for their own
side, putting trust in their own strength. But passages like these do
not touch closely on the relations of gods and men as they are
depicted in the story. As so depicted, the gods are not shadowy or
feeble abstractions and personifications; yet they are not of the
first value to the poem, they do not set the tone of it.
[Footnote 11: _Il._ xii. 241.]
[Footnote 12: _Il._ xvii. 227.]
They are subsidiary, like some other of the most beautiful things in
the poem; like the similes of clouds and winds, like the pictures on
the Shield. They are there because the whole world is included in epic
poetry; the heroes, strong in themselves as they could be if they were
left alone in the common day, acquire an additional strength and
beauty from their fellowship with the gods. Achilles talking with the
Embassy is great; he is great in another way when he stands at the
trench with the flame of Athena on his head. These two scenes belong
to two different kinds of imagination. It is because the first is
there that the second takes effect. It is the hero that gives meaning
and glory to the light of the goddess. It is of some importance that
it is Achilles, and not another, that here is crowned with the light
of heaven and made terrible to his enemies.
There is a double way of escape for young nations from their outgrown
fables and mythologies. They start with enormous, monstrous, and
inhuman beliefs and stories. Either they may work their way out of
them, by gradual rejection of the grosser ingredients, to something
more or less positive and rational; or else they may take up the myths
and transmute them into poetry.
The two processes are not independent of one another. Both are found
together in the greater artists of early times, in Homer most notably;
and also in artists less than Homer; in the poem of _Beowulf_, in the
stories of Sigfred and Brynhild.
There are further, under the second mode, two chief ways of operation
by which the fables of the gods may be brought into poetry.
It is possible to take them in a light-hearted way and weave them into
poetical stories, without much substance or solemnity; enhancing the
beauty that may be inherent in any part of the national legend, and
either rejecting the scandalous chronicle of Olympus or Asgard
altogether, or giving it over to the comic graces of levity and irony,
as in the Phaeacian story of Ares and Aphrodite, wherein the Phaeacian
poet digressed from his tales of war in the spirit of Ariosto, and
with an equally accomplished and elusive defiance of censure.[13]
[Footnote 13: The censure is not wanting:--
"L'on doit considérer que ce n'est ni le Poëte, ni son Héros, ni un
honnête homme qui fait ce récit: mais que les Phéaques, peuples mols
et effeminez, se le font chanter pendant leur festin."--BOSSU, _op.
cit._ p. 152.]
There is another way in which poetry may find room for fable.
It may treat the myths of the gods as material for the religious or
the ethical imagination, and out of them create ideal characters,
analogous in poetry to the ideal divine or heroic figures of painting
and sculpture. This is the kind of imagination in virtue of which
modern poets are best able to appropriate the classical mythology; but
this modern imagination is already familiar to Homer, and that not
only in direct description, as in the description of the majesty of
Zeus, but also, more subtly, in passages where the character of the
divinity is suggested by comparison with one of the human personages,
as when Nausicaa is compared to Artemis,[14] a comparison that
redounds not less to the honour of the goddess than of Nausicaa.
[Footnote 14: _Od._ vi. 151.]
In Icelandic literature there are many instances of the trouble
arising from inconsiderate stories of the gods, in the minds of people
who had got beyond the more barbarous kind of mythology. They took the
boldest and most conclusive way out of the difficulty; they made the
barbarous stories into comedy. The _Lokasenna_, a poem whose author
has been called the Aristophanes of the Western Islands, is a dramatic
piece in which Loki, the Northern Satan, appearing in the house of the
gods, is allowed to bring his railing accusations against them and
remind them of their doings in the "old days." One of his victims
tells him to "let bygones be bygones." The gods are the subject of
many stories that are here raked up against them, stories of another
order of belief and of civilisation than those in which Odin appears
as the wise and sleepless counsellor. This poem implies a great amount
of independence in the author of it. It is not a satire on the gods;
it is pure comedy; that is, it belongs to a type of literature which
has risen above prejudices and which has an air of levity because it
is pure sport--or pure art--and therefore is freed from bondage to
the matter which it handles. This kind of invention is one that tests
the wit of its audience. A serious-minded heathen of an older school
would no doubt have been shocked by the levity of the author's manner.
Not much otherwise would the poem have affected a serious adversary of
heathendom, or any one whose education had been entirely outside of
the circle of heathen or mythological tradition. An Englishman of the
tenth century, familiar with the heroic poetry of his own tongue,
would have thought it indecent. If chance had brought such an one to
hear this _Lokasenna_ recited at some entertainment in a great house
of the Western Islands, he might very well have conceived the same
opinion of his company and their tastes in literature as is ascribed
by Bossu to Ulysses among the Phaeacians.
This genius for comedy is shown in other Icelandic poems. As soon as
the monstrosities of the old traditions were felt to be monstrous,
they were overcome (as Mr. Carlyle has shown) by an appreciation of
the fun of them, and so they ceased to be burdensome. It is something
of this sort that has preserved old myths, for amusement, in popular
tales all over the world. The Icelandic poets went further, however,
than most people in their elaborate artistic treatment of their myths.
There is with them more art and more self-consciousness, and they give
a satisfactory and final poetical shape to these things, extracting
pure comedy from them.
The perfection of this ironical method is to be found in the _Edda_, a
handbook of the Art of Poetry, written in the thirteenth century by a
man of liberal genius, for whom the Æsir were friends of the
imagination, without any prejudice to the claims of the Church or of
his religion. In the view of Snorri Sturluson, the old gods are exempt
from any touch of controversy. Belief has nothing to do with them;
they are free. It may be remembered that some of the greatest English
writers of the seventeenth century have come short of this security of
view, and have not scrupled to repeat the calumny of the missionaries
and the disputants against the ancient gods, that Jupiter and Apollo
were angels of the bottomless pit, given over to their own devices for
a season, and masking as Olympians.
In this freedom from embarrassing and irrelevant considerations in
dealing with myth, the author of the _Edda_ follows in his prose the
spirit of mythological poems three centuries older, in which, even
before the change of faith in the North, the gods were welcomed
without fear as sharing in many humorous adventures.
And at the same time, along with this detached and ironical way of
thinking there is to be found in the Northern poetry the other, more
reverent mode of shaping the inherited fancies; the mode of Pindar,
rejecting the vain things fabled about the gods, and holding fast to
the more honourable things. The humours of Thor in the fishing for the
serpent and the winning of the hammer may be fairly likened to the
humours of Hermes in the Greek hymn. The _Lokasenna_ has some likeness
to the Homeric description of the brawls in heaven. But in the poems
that refer to the death of Balder and the sorrow of the gods there is
another tone; and the greatest of them all, the _Sibyl's Prophecy_, is
comparable, not indeed in volume of sound, but in loftiness of
imagination, to the poems in which Pindar has taken up the myths of
most inexhaustible value and significance--the Happy Islands, the
Birth of Athena.
The poet who lives in anything like an heroic or Homeric age has it in
his power to mingle the elements of mythology and of human
story--Phaeacia and Ithaca--in any proportion he pleases. As a matter
of fact, all varieties of proportion are to be found in medieval
documents. At the one extreme is the mythological romance and fantasy
of Celtic epic, and at the other extreme the plain narrative of human
encounters, in the old English battle poetry or the Icelandic family
histories. As far as one can judge from the extant poems, the old
English and old German poetry did not make such brilliant romance out
of mythological legend as was produced by the Northern poets. These
alone, and not the poets of England or Saxony, seem to have
appropriated for literature, in an Homeric way, the histories of the
gods. Myth is not wanting in old English or German poetry, but it does
not show itself in the same clear and delightful manner as in the
Northern poems of Thor, or in the wooing of Frey.
Thus in different places there are different modes in which an
inheritance of mythical ideas may be appreciated and used. It may
become a treasury for self-possessed and sure-handed artists, as in
Greece, and so be preserved long after it has ceased to be adequate to
all the intellectual desires. It may, by the fascination of its
wealth, detain the minds of poets in its enchanted ground, and prevent
them from ever working their way through from myth to dramatic
imagination, as in Ireland.
The early literature, and therewith the intellectual character and
aptitudes, of a nation may be judged by their literary use of
mythology. They may neglect it, like the Romans; they may neglect all
things for the sake of it, like the Celts; they may harmonise it, as
the Greeks did, in a system of imaginative creations where the
harmony is such that myth need never be felt as an encumbrance or an
absurdity, however high or far the reason may go beyond it in any
direction of art or science.
At the beginning of modern literature there are to be found the
attempts of Irish and Welsh, of English and Germans, Danes and
Northmen, to give shape to myth, and make it available for literature.
Together with that, and as part of the same process, there is found
the beginning of historical literature in an heroic or epic form. The
results are various; but one thing may be taken as certain, that
progress in literature is most assured when the mythology is so far
under control as to leave room for the drama of epic characters; for
epic, as distinguished from romance.
Now the fortunes of these people were such as to make this
self-command exceedingly difficult for them, and to let in an enormous
extraneous force, encouraging the native mythopoetic tendencies, and
unfavourable to the growth of epic. They had to come to an
understanding with themselves about their own heathen traditions, to
bring the extravagances of them into some order, so as to let the epic
heroes have free play. But they were not left to themselves in this
labour of bringing mythology within bounds; even before they had
fairly escaped from barbarism, before they had made a fair beginning
of civilisation and of reflective literature on their own account,
they were drawn within the Empire, into Christendom. Before their
imaginations had fully wakened out of the primeval dream, the
cosmogonies and theogonies, gross and monstrous, of their national
infancy, they were asked to have an opinion about the classical
mythology, as represented by the Latin poets; they were made
acquainted with the miracles of the lives of saints.
More than all this, even, their minds were charmed away from the
labour of epic invention, by the spell of the preacher. The task of
representing characters--Waldere or Theodoric or Attila--was forgotten
in the lyrical rapture of devotion, in effusion of pathos. The
fascination of religious symbolism crept over minds that had hardly
yet begun to see and understand things as they are; and in all their
reading the "moral," "anagogical," and "tropological" significations
prevailed against the literal sense.
One part of medieval history is concerned with the progress of the
Teutonic nations, in so far as they were left to themselves, and in so
far as their civilisation is home-made. The _Germania_ of Tacitus, for
instance, is used by historians to interpret the later development of
Teutonic institutions. But this inquiry involves a good deal of
abstraction and an artificial limitation of view. In reality, the
people of Germania were never left to themselves at all, were never
beyond the influence of Southern ideas; and the history of the
influence of Southern ideas on the Northern races takes up a larger
field than the isolated history of the North. Nothing in the world is
more fantastic. The logic of Aristotle and the art of Virgil are
recommended to people whose chief men, barons and earls, are commonly
in their tastes and acquirements not very different from the suitors
in the _Odyssey_. Gentlemen much interested in raids and forays, and
the profits of such business, are confronted with a literature into
which the labours of all past centuries have been distilled. In a
society that in its native elements is closely analogous to Homer's
Achaeans, men are found engaged in the study of Boethius _On the
Consolation of Philosophy_, a book that sums up the whole course of
Greek philosophical speculation. Ulysses quoting Aristotle is an
anachronism; but King Alfred's translation of Boethius is almost as
much of a paradox. It is not easy to remain unmoved at the thought of
the medieval industry bestowed on authors like Martianus Capella _de
Nuptiis Philologiae_, or Macrobius _de Somnio Scipionis_. What is to
be said of the solemnity with which, in their pursuit of authoritative
doctrine, they applied themselves to extract the spiritual meaning of
Ovid's _Metamorphoses_, and appropriate the didactic system of the
_Art of Love_?
In medieval literature, whatever there is of the Homeric kind has an
utterly different relation to popular standards of appreciation from
that of the Homeric poems in Greece. Here and there some care may be
taken, as by Charlemagne and Alfred, to preserve the national heroic
poetry. But such regard for it is rare; and even where it is found, it
comes far short of the honour paid to Homer by Alexander. English Epic
is not first, but one of the least, among the intellectual and
literary interests of King Alfred. Heroic literature is only one
thread in the weft of medieval literature.
There are some curious documents illustrative of its comparative
value, and of the variety and complexity of medieval literature.
Hauk Erlendsson, an Icelander of distinction in the fourteenth
century, made a collection of treatises in one volume for his own
amusement and behoof. It contains the _Volospá_, the most famous of
all the Northern mythical poems, the Sibyl's song of the doom of the
gods; it contains also the _Landnámabók_, the history of the
colonisation of Iceland; _Kristni Saga_, the history of the conversion
to Christianity; the history of _Eric the Red_, and _Fóstbræðra Saga_,
the story of the two sworn brethren, Thorgeir and Thormod the poet.
Besides these records of the history and the family traditions of
Iceland and Greenland, there are some mythical stories of later date,
dealing with old mythical themes, such as the life of Ragnar Lodbrok.
In one of them, the _Heidreks Saga_, are embedded some of the most
memorable verses, after _Volospá_, in the old style of Northern
poetry--the poem of the _Waking of Angantyr_. The other contents of
the book are as follows: geographical, physical, and theological
pieces; extracts from St. Augustine; the _History of the Cross_; the
_Description of Jerusalem_; the _Debate of Body and Soul_;
_Algorismus_ (by Hauk himself, who was an arithmetician); a version of
the _Brut_ and of _Merlin's Prophecy_; _Lucidarium_, the most popular
medieval handbook of popular science. This is the collection, to which
all the ends of the earth have contributed, and it is in strange and
far-fetched company like this that the Northern documents are found.
In Greece, whatever early transactions there may have been with the
wisdom of Egypt or Phoenicia, there is no such medley as this.
Another illustration of the literary chaos is presented, even more
vividly than in the contents of Hauk's book, by the whalebone casket
in the British Museum. Weland the smith (whom Alfred introduced into
his _Boethius_) is here put side by side with the Adoration of the
Magi; on another side are Romulus and Remus; on another, Titus at
Jerusalem; on the lid of the casket is the defence of a house by one
who is shooting arrows at his assailants; his name is written over
him, and his name is _Ægili_,--Egil the master-bowman, as Weland is
the master-smith, of the Northern mythology. Round the two companion
pictures, Weland on the left and the Three Kings on the right, side by
side, there go wandering runes, with some old English verses about
the "whale," or walrus, from which the ivory for these engravings was
obtained. The artist plainly had no more suspicion than the author of
_Lycidas_ that there was anything incorrect or unnatural in his
combinations. It is under these conditions that the heroic poetry of
Germania has been preserved; never as anything more than an accident
among an infinity of miscellaneous notions, the ruins of ancient
empires, out of which the commonplaces of European literature and
popular philosophy have been gradually collected.
The fate of epic poetry was the same as that of the primitive German
forms of society. In both there was a progress towards independent
perfection, an evolution of the possibilities inherent in them,
independent of foreign influences. But both in Teutonic society, and
in the poetry belonging to it and reflecting it, this independent
course of life is thwarted and interfered with. Instead of independent
strong Teutonic national powers, there are the more or less Romanised
and blended nationalities possessing the lands that had been conquered
by Goths and Burgundians, Lombards and Franks; instead of Germania,
the Holy Roman Empire; instead of Epic, Romance; not the old-fashioned
romance of native mythology, not the natural spontaneous romance of
the Irish legends or the Icelandic stories of gods and giants, but the
composite far-fetched romance of the age of chivalry, imported from
all countries and literatures to satisfy the medieval appetite for
novel and wonderful things.
Nevertheless, the stronger kind of poetry had still something to show,
before all things were overgrown with imported legend, and before the
strong enunciation of the older manner was put out of fashion by the
medieval clerks and rhetoricians.
IV
THE THREE SCHOOLS--TEUTONIC EPIC--FRENCH EPIC--THE ICELANDIC HISTORIES
The Teutonic heroic poetry was menaced on all hands from the earliest
times; it was turned aside from the national heroes by saints and
missionaries, and charmed out of its sterner moods by the spell of
wistful and regretful meditation. In continental Germany it appears to
have been early vanquished. In England, where the epic poetry was
further developed than on the Continent, it was not less exposed to
the rivalry of the ideas and subjects that belonged to the Church.
The Anglo-Saxon histories of St. Andrew and St. Helen are as full of
romantic passages as those poems of the fourteenth century in which
the old alliterative verse is revived to tell the tale of Troy or of
the _Mort Arthur_. The national subjects themselves are not proof
against the ideas of the Church; even in the fragments of _Waldere_
they are to be found; and the poem of _Beowulf_ has been filled, like
so much of the old English poetry, with the melancholy of the
preacher, and the sense of the vanity of earthly things. But the
influence of fantasy and pathos could not dissolve the strength of
epic beyond recovery, or not until it had done something to show what
it was worth. Not all the subjects are treated in the romantic manner
of Cynewulf and his imitators. The poem of _Maldon_, written at the
very end of the tenth century, is firm and unaffected in its style,
and of its style there can be no question that it is heroic.
The old Norse poetry was beyond the influence of most of the
tendencies and examples that corrupted the heroic poetry of the
Germans, and changed the course of poetry in England. It was not till
the day of its glory was past that it took to subjects like those of
Cynewulf and his imitators. But it was hindered in other ways from
representing the lives of heroes in a consistent epic form. If it knew
less of the miracles of saints, it knew more of the old mythology; and
though it was not, like English and German poetry, taken captive by
the preachers, it was stirred and thrilled by the beauty of its own
stories in a way that inclined to the lyrical rather than the epic
tone. Yet here also there are passages of graver epic, where the tone
is more assured and the composition more stately.
The relation of the French epics to French romance is on the one side
a relation of antagonism, in which the older form gives way to the
newer, because "the newer song is sweeter in the ears of men." The
_Chanson de Geste_ is driven out by poems that differ from it in
almost every possible respect; in the character of their original
subject-matter, in their verse, their rhetoric, and all their gear of
commonplaces, and all the devices of their art. But from another point
of view there may be detected in the _Chansons de Geste_ no small
amount of the very qualities that were fatal to them, when the
elements were compounded anew in the poems of _Erec_ and _Lancelot_.
The French epics have many points of likeness with the Teutonic
poetry of _Beowulf_ or _Finnesburh_, or of the Norse heroic songs.
They are epic in substance, having historical traditions at the back
of them, and owing the materials of their picture to no deliberate
study of authorities. They differ from _Beowulf_ in this respect,
among others, that they are the poems of feudal society, not of the
simpler and earlier communities. The difference ought not to be
exaggerated. As far as heroic poetry is concerned, the difference lies
chiefly in the larger frame of the story. The kingdom of France in the
French epics is wider than the kingdom of Hrothgar or Hygelac. The
scale is nearer that of the _Iliad_ than of the _Odyssey_. The
"Catalogue of the Armies sent into the Field" is longer, the mass of
fighting-men is more considerable, than in the epic of the older
school. There is also, frequently, a much fuller sense of the national
greatness and the importance of the defence of the land against its
enemies, a consciousness of the dignity of the general history, unlike
the carelessness with which the Teutonic poets fling themselves into
the story of individual lives, and disregard the historical
background. Generally, however, the Teutonic freedom and rebellious
spirit is found as unmistakably in the _Chansons de Geste_ as in the
alliterative poems. Feudalism appears in heroic poetry, and indeed in
prosaic history, as a more elaborate form of that anarchy which is the
necessary condition of an heroic age. It does not deprive the poet of
his old subjects, his family enmities, and his adventures of private
war. Feudalism did not invent, neither did it take away, the virtue of
loyalty that has so large a place in all true epic, along with its
counterpart of defiance and rebellion, no less essential to the story.
It intensified the poetical value of both motives, but they are older
than the _Iliad_. It provided new examples of the "wrath" of injured
or insulted barons; it glorified to the utmost, it honoured as
martyrs, those who died fighting for their lord.[15]
[Footnote 15:
Lor autres mors ont toz en terre mis:
Crois font sor aus, qu'il erent droit martir:
Por lor seignor orent esté ocis.
_Garin le Loherain_, tom. ii. p. 88.]
In all this it did nothing to change the essence of heroic poetry. The
details were changed, the scene was enlarged, and so was the number of
the combatants. But the details of feudalism that make a difference
between Beowulf, or the men of Attila, and the epic paladins of
Charlemagne in the French poems of the eleventh and twelfth centuries,
need not obscure the essential resemblance between one heroic period
and another.
On the other hand, it is plain from the beginning that French epic had
to keep its ground with some difficulty against the challenge of
romantic skirmishers. In one of the earliest of the poems about
Charlemagne, the Emperor and his paladins are taken to the East by a
poet whom Bossu would hardly have counted "honest." In the poem of
_Huon of Bordeaux_, much later, the story of Oberon and the magic horn
has been added to the plot of a feudal tragedy, which in itself is
compact and free from extravagance. Between those extreme cases there
are countless examples of the mingling of the graver epic with more or
less incongruous strains. Sometimes there is magic, sometimes the
appearance of a Paynim giant, often the repetition of long prayers
with allusions to the lives of saints and martyrs, and throughout
there is the constant presence of ideas derived from homilies and the
common teaching of the Church. In some of these respects the French
epics are in the same case as the old English poems which, like
_Beowulf_, show the mingling of a softer mood with the stronger; of
new conventions with old. In some respects they show a further
encroachment of the alien spirit.
The English poem of _Maldon_ has some considerable likeness in the
matter of its story, and not a little in its ideal of courage, with
the _Song of Roland_. A comparison of the two poems, in those respects
in which they are commensurable, will show the English poem to be
wanting in certain elements of mystery that are potent in the other.
The _Song of Maldon_ and the _Song of Roncesvalles_ both narrate the
history of a lost battle, of a realm defended against its enemies by a
captain whose pride and self-reliance lead to disaster, by refusing to
take fair advantage of the enemy and put forth all his available
strength. Byrhtnoth, fighting the Northmen on the shore of the Essex
river, allows them of his own free will to cross the ford and come to
close quarters. "He gave ground too much to the adversary; he called
across the cold river and the warriors listened: 'Now is space granted
to you; come speedily hither and fight; God alone can tell who will
hold the place of battle.' Then the wolves of blood, the rovers, waded
west over Panta."
This unnecessary magnanimity has for the battle of Maldon the effect
of Roland's refusal to sound the horn at the battle of Roncesvalles;
it is the tragic error or transgression of limit that brings down the
crash and ruin at the end of the day.
In both poems there is a like spirit of indomitable resistance. The
close of the battle of Maldon finds the loyal companions of Byrhtnoth
fighting round his body, abandoned by the cowards who have run away,
but themselves convinced of their absolute strength to resist to the
end.
Byrhtwold spoke and grasped his shield--he was an old
companion--he shook his ashen spear, and taught courage to
them that fought:--
"Thought shall be the harder, heart the keener, mood shall
be the more, as our might lessens. Here our prince lies low,
they have hewn him to death! Grief and sorrow for ever on
the man that leaves this war-play! I am old of years, but
hence I will not go; I think to lay me down by the side of
my lord, by the side of the man I cherished."
The story of Roncesvalles tells of an agony equally hopeless and
equally secure from every touch of fear.
The _Song of Maldon_ is a strange poem to have been written in the
reign of Ethelred the Unready. But for a few phrases it might, as far
as the matter is concerned, have been written before the conversion of
England, and although it is a battle in defence of the country, and
not a mere incident of private war, the motive chiefly used is not
patriotism, but private loyalty to the captain. Roland is full of the
spirit of militant Christendom, and there is no more constant thought
in the poem than that of the glory of France. The virtue of the
English heroes is the old Teutonic virtue. The events of the battle
are told plainly and clearly; nothing adventitious is brought in to
disturb the effect of the plain story; the poetical value lies in the
contrast between the grey landscape (which is barely indicated), the
severe and restrained description of the fighters, on the one hand,
and on the other the sublimity of the spirit expressed in the last
words of the "old companion." In the narrative of events there are no
extraneous beauties to break the overwhelming strength of the
eloquence in which the meaning of the whole thing is concentrated.
With Roland at Roncesvalles the case is different. He is not shown in
the grey light of the Essex battlefield. The background is more
majestic. There is a mysterious half-lyrical refrain throughout the
tale of the battle: "high are the mountains and dark the valleys"
about the combatants in the pass; they are not left to themselves like
the warriors of the poem of _Maldon_. It is romance, rather than epic
or tragedy, which in this way recognises the impersonal power of the
scene; the strength of the hills under which the fight goes on. In the
first part of the _Odyssey_ the spell of the mystery of the sea is all
about the story of Odysseus; in the later and more dramatic part the
hero loses this, and all the strength is concentrated in his own
character. In the story of Roland there is a vastness and vagueness
throughout, coming partly from the numbers of the hosts engaged,
partly from the author's sense of the mystery of the Pyrenean valleys,
and, in a very large measure, from the heavenly aid accorded to the
champion of Christendom. The earth trembles, there is darkness over
all the realm of France even to the Mount St. Michael:
C'est la dulur pur la mort de Rollant.
St. Gabriel descends to take from the hand of Roland the glove that he
offers with his last confession; and the three great angels of the
Lord are there to carry his soul to Paradise.
There is nothing like this in the English poem. The battle is fought
in the light of an ordinary day; there is nothing to greet the eyes of
Byrhtnoth and his men except the faces of their enemies.
It is not hard to find in old English poetry descriptions less austere
than that of _Maldon_; there may be found in the French _Chansons de
Geste_ great spaces in which there is little of the majestic light and
darkness of Roncesvalles. But it is hard to escape the conviction that
the poem of _Maldon_, late as it is, has uttered the spirit and
essence of the Northern heroic literature in its reserved and simple
story, and its invincible profession of heroic faith; while the poem
of Roncesvalles is equally representative of the French epic spirit,
and of the French poems in which the ideas common to every heroic age
are expressed with all the circumstances of the feudal society of
Christendom, immediately before the intellectual and literary
revolutions of the twelfth century. The French epics are full of omens
of the coming victory of romance, though they have not yet given way.
They still retain, in spite of their anticipations of the Kingdom of
the Grail, an alliance in spirit with the older Teutonic poetry, and
with those Icelandic histories that are the highest literary
expression of the Northern spirit in its independence of feudalism.
The heroic age of the ancient Germans may be said to culminate, and
end, in Iceland in the thirteenth century. The Icelandic _Sagas_--the
prose histories of the fortunes of the great Icelandic houses--are the
last and also the finest expression and record of the spirit and the
ideas belonging properly to the Germanic race in its own right, and
not derived from Rome or Christendom. Those of the German nations who
stayed longest at home had by several centuries the advantage of the
Goths and Franks, and had time to complete their native education
before going into foreign subjects. The English were less exposed to
Southern influences than the continental Germans; the Scandinavian
nations less than the Angles and Saxons. In Norway particularly, the
common German ideas were developed in a way that produced a code of
honour, a consciousness of duty, and a strength of will, such as had
been unknown in the German nations who were earlier called upon to
match themselves against Rome. Iceland was colonised by a picked lot
of Norwegians; by precisely those Norwegians who had this strength of
will in its highest degree.
Political progress in the Middle Ages was by way of monarchy; but
strong monarchy was contrary to the traditions of Germania, and in
Norway, a country of great extent and great difficulties of
communication, the ambition of Harold Fairhair was resisted by numbers
of chieftains who had their own local following and their own family
dignity to maintain, in their firths and dales. Those men found Norway
intolerable through the tyranny of King Harold, and it was by them
that Iceland was colonised through the earlier colonies in the
west--in Scotland, in Ireland, in Shetland and the other islands.
The ideas that took the Northern colonists to Iceland were the ideas
of Germania,--the love of an independent life, the ideal of the
old-fashioned Northern gentleman, who was accustomed to consideration
and respect from the freemen, his neighbours, who had authority by his
birth and fortune to look after the affairs of his countryside, who
would not make himself the tenant, vassal, or steward of any king. In
the new country these ideas were intensified and defined. The ideal of
the Icelandic Commonwealth was something more than a vague motive, it
was present to the minds of the first settlers in a clear and definite
form. The most singular thing in the heroic age of Iceland is that the
heroes knew what they were about. The heroic age of Iceland begins in
a commonwealth founded by a social contract. The society that is
established there is an association of individuals coming to an
agreement with one another to invent a set of laws and observe them.
Thus while Iceland on the one hand is a reactionary state, founded by
men who were turning their backs on the only possible means of
political progress, cutting themselves off from the world, and
adhering obstinately to forms of life with no future before them, on
the other hand this reactionary commonwealth, this fanatical
representative of early Germanic use and wont, is possessed of a
clearness of self-consciousness, a hard and positive clearness of
understanding, such as is to be found nowhere else in the Middle Ages
and very rarely at all in any polity.
The prose literature of Iceland displays the same two contradictory
characters throughout. The actions described, and the customs, are
those of an early heroic age, with rather more than the common amount
of enmity and vengeance, and an unequalled power of resistance and
rebellion in the individual wills of the personages. The record of all
this anarchy is a prose history, rational and unaffected, seeing all
things in a dry light; a kind of literature that has not much to learn
from any humanism or rationalism, in regard to its own proper subjects
at any rate.
The people of Iceland were not cut off from the ordinary European
learning and its commonplaces. They read the same books as were read
in England or Germany. They read St. Gregory _de Cura Pastorali_, they
read _Ovidius Epistolarum_, and all the other popular books of the
Middle Ages. In time those books and the world to which they belonged
were able to obtain a victory over the purity of the Northern
tradition and manners, but not until the Northern tradition had
exhausted itself, and the Icelandic polity began to break up. The
literature of the maturity of Iceland just before the fall of the
Commonwealth is a literature belonging wholly and purely to Iceland,
in a style unmodified by Latin syntax and derived from the colloquial
idiom. The matter is the same in kind as the common matter of heroic
poetry. The history represents the lives of adventurers, the rivalries
and private wars of men who are not ignorant of right and honour, but
who acknowledge little authority over them, and are given to choose
their right and wrong for themselves, and abide the consequences. This
common matter is presented in a form which may be judged on its own
merits, and there is no need to ask concessions from any one in
respect of the hard or unfavourable conditions under which this
literature was produced. One at least of the Icelandic Sagas is one of
the great prose works of the world--the story of Njal and his sons.
The most perfect heroic literature of the Northern nations is to be
found in the country where the heroic polity and society had most room
and leisure; and in Iceland the heroic ideals of life had conditions
more favourable than are to be discovered anywhere else in history.
Iceland was a world divided from the rest, outside the orbit of all
the states of Europe; what went on there had little more than an ideal
relation to the course of the great world; it had no influence on
Europe, it was kept separate as much as might be from the European
storms and revolutions. What went on in Iceland was the progress in
seclusion of the old Germanic life--a life that in the rest of the
world had been blended and immersed in other floods and currents.
Iceland had no need of the great movements of European history.
They had a humanism of their own, a rationalism of their own, gained
quite apart from the great European tumults, and gained prematurely,
in comparison with the rest of Europe. Without the labour of the
Middle Ages, without the storm and stress of the reform of learning,
they had the faculty of seeing things clearly and judging their values
reasonably, without superstition. They had to pay the penalty of their
opposition to the forces of the world; there was no cohesion in their
society, and when once the balance of power in the island was
disturbed, the Commonwealth broke up. But before that, they
accomplished what had been ineffectually tried by the poet of
_Beowulf_, the poet of _Roland_; they found an adequate form of heroic
narrative. Also in their use of this instrument they were led at last
to a kind of work that has been made nowhere else in the world, for
nowhere else does the form of heroic narrative come to be adapted to
contemporary events, as it was in Iceland, by historians who were
themselves partakers in the actions they described. Epic, if the Sagas
are epic, here coincides with autobiography. In the _Sturlunga Saga_,
written by Sturla, Snorri's nephew, the methods of heroic literature
are applied by an eye-witness to the events of his own time, and there
is no discrepancy or incongruity between form and matter. The age
itself takes voice and speaks in it; there is no interval between
actors and author. This work is the end of the heroic age, both in
politics and in literature. After the loss of Icelandic freedom there
is no more left of Germania, and the _Sturlunga Saga_ which tells the
story of the last days of freedom is the last word of the Teutonic
heroic age. It is not a decrepit or imitative or secondary thing; it
is a masterpiece; and with this true history, this adaptation of an
heroic style to contemporary realities, the sequence of German heroic
tradition comes to an end.