CHAPTER V

ROMANCE

AND THE OLD FRENCH ROMANTIC SCHOOLS

Romance in many varieties is to be found inherent in Epic and in

Tragedy; for some readers, possibly, the great and magnificent forms

of poetry are most attractive when from time to time they forget their

severity, and when the tragic strength is allowed to rest, as in the

fairy interludes of the _Odyssey_, or the similes of the clouds,

winds, and mountain-waters in the _Iliad_. If Romance be the name for

the sort of imagination that possesses the mystery and the spell of

everything remote and unattainable, then Romance is to be found in the

old Northern heroic poetry in larger measure than any epic or tragic

solemnity, and in no small measure also even in the steady course of

the Icelandic histories. Possibly Romance is in its best place here,

as an element in the epic harmony; perhaps the romantic mystery is

most mysterious when it is found as something additional among the

graver and more positive affairs of epic or tragic personages. The

occasional visitations of the dreaming moods of romance, in the middle

of a great epic or a great tragedy, are often more romantic than the

literature which is nothing but romance from beginning to end. The

strongest poets, Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, have along with their

strong reasoning enough of the lighter and fainter grace and charm to

be the despair of all the "romantic schools" in the world. In the

Icelandic prose stories, as has been seen already, there is a similar

combination. These stories contain the strongest imaginative work of

the Middle Ages before Dante. Along with this there is found in them

occasionally the uncertain and incalculable play of the other, the

more airy mode of imagination; and the romance of the strong Sagas is

more romantic than that of the medieval works which have no other

interest to rely upon, or of all but a very few.

One of the largest and plainest facts of medieval history is the

change of literature in the twelfth century, and the sudden and

exuberant growth and progress of a number of new poetical forms;

particularly the courtly lyric that took shape in Provence, and passed

into the tongues of Italy, France, and Germany, and the French romance

which obeyed the same general inspiration as the Provençal poetry, and

was equally powerful as an influence on foreign nations. The French

Romantic Schools of the twelfth century are among the most definite

and the most important appearances even in that most wonderful age;

though it is irrational to contrast them with the other great

historical movements of the time, because there is no real separation

between them. French romance is part of the life of the time, and the

life of the twelfth century is reproduced in French romance.

The rise of these new forms of story makes an unmistakable difference

between the age that preceded them and everything that comes after.

They are a new, fresh, and prosperous beginning in literature, and

they imply the failure of the older manner of thought, the older

fashion of imagination, represented in the epic literature of France,

not to speak of the various Teutonic forms of heroic verse and prose

that are related to the epic of France only by a remote common

ancestry, and a certain general likeness in the conditions of "heroic"

life.

The defeat of French epic, as has been noted already, was slow and

long resisted; but the victory of romance was inevitable. Together

with the influence of the Provençal lyric idealism, it determined the

forms of modern literature, long after the close of the Middle Ages.

The change of fashion in the twelfth century is as momentous and

far-reaching in its consequences as that to which the name

"Renaissance" is generally appropriated. The later Renaissance,

indeed, in what concerns imaginative literature, makes no such abrupt

and sudden change of fashion as was made in the twelfth century. The

poetry and romance of the Renaissance follow naturally upon the

literature of the Middle Ages; for the very good reason that it was

the Middle Ages which began, even in their dark beginnings, the modern

study of the humanities, and in the twelfth century made a remarkable

and determined effort to secure the inheritance of ancient poetry for

the advantage of the new tongues and their new forms of verse. There

is no such line of division between Ariosto and Chrestien of Troyes as

there is between Chrestien and the primitive epic.

The romantic schools of the twelfth century are the result and

evidence of a great unanimous movement, the origins of which may be

traced far back in the general conditions of education and learning,

in the influence of Latin authors, in the interchange of popular

tales. They are among the most characteristic productions of the most

impressive, varied, and characteristic period in the Middle Ages; of

that century which broke, decisively, with the old "heroic"

traditions, and made the division between the heroic and the

chivalric age. When the term "medieval" is used in modern talk, it

almost always denotes something which first took definite shape in the

twelfth century. The twelfth century is the source of most of the

"medieval" influences in modern art and literature, and the French

romances of that age are the original authorities for most of the

"Gothic" ornaments adopted in modern romantic schools.

The twelfth-century French romances form a definite large group, with

many ranks and divisions, some of which are easily distinguished,

while all are of great historical interest.

One common quality, hardly to be mistaken, is that which marks them

all as belonging to a romantic _school_, in almost all the modern

senses of that term. That is to say, they are not the spontaneous

product of an uncritical and ingenuous imagination; they are not the

same sort of thing as the popular stories on which many of them are

founded; they are the literary work of authors more or less

sophisticated, on the look-out for new sensations and new literary

devices. It is useless to go to those French books in order to catch

the first fresh jet of romantic fancy, the "silly sooth" of the golden

age. One might as well go to the _Légende des Siècles_. Most of the

romance of the medieval schools is already hot and dusty and fatigued.

It has come through the mills of a thousand active literary men, who

know their business, and have an eye to their profits. Medieval

romance, in its most characteristic and most influential form, is

almost as factitious and professional as modern Gothic architecture.

The twelfth-century dealers in romantic commonplaces are as fully

conscious of the market value of their goods as any later poet who has

borrowed from them their giants and enchanters, their forests and

their magic castles; and these and similar properties are used in the

twelfth century with the same kind of literary sharpness, the same

attention to the demands of the "reading public," as is shown by the

various poets and novelists who have waited on the successes, and

tried to copy the methods, of Goethe, Scott, or Victor Hugo. Pure

Romance, such as is found in the old Northern poems, is very rare in

the French stories of the twelfth century; the magical touch and the

sense of mystery, and all the things that are associated with the name

romance, when that name is applied to the _Ancient Mariner_, or _La

Belle Dame sans Merci_, or the _Lady of Shalott_, are generally absent

from the most successful romances of the great medieval romantic age,

full though they may be of all the forms of chivalrous devotion and

all the most wonderful romantic machines. Most of them are as

different from the true irresistible magic of fancy as _Thalaba_ from

_Kubla Khan_. The name "romantic school" is rightly applicable to them

and their work, for almost the last thing that is produced in a

"romantic school" is the infallible and indescribable touch of

romance. A "romantic school" is a company for the profitable working

of Broceliande, an organised attempt to "open up" the Enchanted

Ground; such, at least, is the appearance of a great deal of the

romantic literature of the early part of the nineteenth century, and

of its forerunner in the twelfth. There is this difference between the

two ages, that the medieval romanticists are freer and more original

than the moderns who made a business out of tales of terror and

wonder, and tried to fatten their lean kine on the pastures of

"Gothic" or of Oriental learning.

The romance-writers of the twelfth century, though they did much to

make romance into a mechanic art, though they reduced the game to a

system and left the different romantic combinations and conventions

within the reach of almost any 'prentice hand, were yet in their way

original explorers. Though few of them got out of their materials the

kind of effect that appeals to us now most strongly, and though we

think we can see what they missed in their opportunities, yet they

were not the followers of any great man of their own time, and they

chose their own way freely, not as bungling imitators of a greater

artist. It is a disappointment to find that romance is rarely at its

finest in the works that technically have the best right in the world

to be called by that name. Nevertheless, the work that is actually

found there is interesting in its own way, and historically of an

importance which does not need to be emphasised.

The true romantic interest is very unequally distributed over the

works of the Middle Ages, and there is least of it in the authors who

are most representative of the "age of chivalry." There is a

disappointment prepared for any one who looks in the greater romantic

authors of the twelfth century for the music of the _Faery Queene_ or

_La Belle Dame sans Merci_. There is more of the pure romantic element

in the poems of Brynhild, in the story of Njal, in the _Song of

Roland_, than in the famous romances of Chrestien of Troyes or any of

his imitators, though they have all the wonders of the Isle of Britain

at their command, though they have the very story of Tristram and the

very mystery of the Grail to quicken them and call them out. Elegance,

fluency, sentiment, romantic adventures are common, but for words like

those of Hervor at the grave of her father, or of the parting between

Brynhild and Sigurd, or of Helgi and Sigrun, it would be vain to

search in the romances of Benoit de Sainte More or of Chrestien. Yet

these are the masters of the art of romance when it was fresh and

strong, a victorious fashion.

If the search be continued further, the search for that kind of

imaginative beauty which these authors do not give, it will not be

unsuccessful. The greater authors of the twelfth century have more

affinity to the "heroic romance" of the school of the _Grand Cyrus_

than to the dreams of Spenser or Coleridge. But, while this is the

case with the most distinguished members of the romantic school, it is

not so with all the rest. The magic that is wanting to the clear and

elegant narrative of Benoit and Chrestien will be found elsewhere; it

will be found in one form in the mystical prose of the _Queste del St.

Graal_--a very different thing from Chrestien's _Perceval_--it will be

found, again and again, in the prose of Sir Thomas Malory; it will be

found in many ballads and ballad burdens, in _William and Margaret_,

in _Binnorie_, in the _Wife of Usher's Well_, in the _Rime of the

Count Arnaldos_, in the _Königskinder_; it will be found in the most

beautiful story of the Middle Ages, _Aucassin and Nicolette_; one of

the few perfectly beautiful stories in the world, about which there is

no need, in England at any rate, to say anything in addition to the

well-known passages in which it has been praised. _Aucassin and

Nicolette_ cannot be made into a representative medieval romance:

there is nothing else like it; and the qualities that make it what it

is are the opposite of the rhetorical self-possession, the correct and

deliberate narrative of Chrestien and his school. It contains the

quintessence of romantic imagination, but it is quite unlike the most

fashionable and successful romances.

There are several stages in the history of the great Romantic School,

as well as several distinct sources of interest. The value of the

best works of the school consists in their representation of the

passion of love. They turn the psychology of the courtly amatory poets

into narrative. Chaucer's address to the old poets,--"Ye lovers that

can make of sentiment,"--when he complains that they have left little

for him to glean in the field of poetry, does not touch the lyrical

poets only. The narrative poetry of the courteous school is equally

devoted to the philosophy of love. Narrative poets like Chrestien,

when they turn to lyric, can change their instrument without changing

the purport of their verse; lyric or narrative, it has the same

object, the same duty. So also, two hundred years later, Chaucer

himself or Froissart may use narrative or lyric forms indifferently,

and observe the same "courteous" ideal in both.

In the twelfth-century narratives, besides the interest of the

love-story and all its science, there was the interest of adventure,

of strange things; and here there is a great diversity among the

authors, and a perceptible difference between earlier and later usage.

Courteous sentiment, running through a succession of wonderful

adventures, is generally enough to make a romance; but there are some

notable varieties, both in the sentiment and in the incidents. The

sentiment comes later in the history of literature than the

adventures; the conventional romantic form of plot may be said to have

been fixed before the romantic sentiment was brought to its furthest

refinement. The wonders of romantic story are more easily traced to

their origin, or at least to some of their earlier forms, than the

spirit of chivalrous idealism which came in due time to take

possession of the fabulous stories, and gave new meanings to the lives

of Tristram and Lancelot.

Variety of incident, remoteness of scene, and all the incredible

things in the world, had been at the disposal of medieval authors long

before the French Romantic Schools began to define themselves. The

wonders of the East, especially, had very early come into literature;

and the Anglo-Saxon _Epistle of Alexander_ seems to anticipate the

popular taste for Eastern stories, just as the Anglo-Saxon version of

_Apollonius of Tyre_ anticipates the later importation of Greek

romance, and the appropriation of classical rhetoric, in the twelfth

and thirteenth centuries; as the grace and brightness of the old

English poems of St. Andrew or St. Helen seem to anticipate the

peculiar charm of some of the French poems of adventures. In French

literature before the vogue of romance can be said to have begun, and

before the epic form had lost its supremacy, the poem of the

_Pilgrimage of Charlemagne_, one of the oldest extant poems of the

heroic cycle, is already far gone in subjection to the charm of mere

unqualified wonder and exaggeration--rioting in the wonders of the

East, like the Varangians on their holiday, when they were allowed a

free day to loot in the Emperor's palace.[79] The poem of

Charlemagne's journey to Constantinople is unrefined enough, but the

later and more elegant romances deal often in the same kind of matter.

Mere furniture counts for a good deal in the best romances, and they

are full of descriptions of riches and splendours. The story of Troy

is full of details of various sorts of magnificence; the city of Troy

itself and "Ylion," its master-tower, were built by Priam out of all

kinds of marble, and covered with sculpture all over. Much further on

in Benoit's poem (l. 14,553) Hector is brought home wounded to a room

which is described in 300 lines, with particulars of its remarkable

decorations, especially its four magical images. The tomb of

Penthesilea (l. 25,690) is too much for the author:--

Sepolture ot et monument

Tant que se _Plenius_ fust vis

Ou _cil qui fist Apocalis_

Nel vos sauroient il retraire:

Por ço si m'en dei gie bien taire:

N'en dirai plus, que n'oseroie;

Trop halte chose envaïroie.

[Footnote 79: See the account of the custom in the _Saga of Harald

Hardrada_, c. 16. "Harald entrusted to Jarizleif all the gold that he

had sent from Micklegarth, and all sorts of precious things: so much

wealth all together, as no man of the North Lands had ever seen before

in one man's hands. Harald had thrice come in for the palace-sweeping

(_Polotasvarf_) while he was in Micklegarth. It is the law there that

when the Greek king dies, the Varangians shall have a sweep of the

palace; they go over all the king's palaces where his treasures are,

and every man shall have for his own what falls to his hand"

(_Fornmanna Sögur_, vi. p. 171).]

Pliny and the author of the Apocalypse are here acknowledged as

masters and authorities in the art of description. In other places of

the same work there is a very liberal use of natural history such as

is common in many versions of the history of Alexander. There is, for

example, a long description of the precious clothes of Briseide

(Cressida) at her departure, especially of her mantle, which had been

given to Calchas by an Indian poet in Upper India. It was made by

nigromancy, of the skin of the beast _Dindialos_, which is hunted in

the shadowless land by the savage people whose name is _Cenocefali_;

and the fringes of the mantle were not of the sable, but of a "beast

of price" that dwells in the water of Paradise:--

Dedans le flum de Paradis

Sont et conversent, ço set l'on

Se c'est vrais que nos en lison.

Calchas had a tent which had belonged to Pharaoh:--

Diomedes tant la conduit

Qu'il descendi al paveillon

Qui fu al riche Pharaon,

Cil qui noa en la mer roge.

In such passages of ornamental description the names of strange people

and of foreign kings have the same kind of value as the names of

precious stones, and sometimes they are introduced on their own

account, apart from the precious work of Arabian or Indian artists. Of

this sort is the "dreadful sagittary," who is still retained in

Shakespeare's _Troilus and Cressida_ on the ultimate authority (when

it comes to be looked into) of Benoit de Sainte More.[80]

[Footnote 80:

Il ot o lui un saietaire

Qui molt fu fels et deputaire:

Des le nombril tot contreval

Ot cors en forme de cheval:

Il n'est riens nule s'il volsist

Que d'isnelece n'ateinsist:

Cors, chiere, braz, a noz semblanz

Avoit, mes n'ert pas avenanz.

l. 12,207.]

A quotation by M. Gaston Paris (_Hist. litt. de la France_, xxx. p.

210), from the unpublished romance of _Ider_ (Edeyrn, son of Nudd),

shows how this fashion of rich description and allusion had been

overdone, and how it was necessary, in time, to make a protest against

it. Kings' pavilions were a favourite subject for rhetoric, and the

poet of _Ider_ explains that he does not approve of this fashion,

though he has pavilions of his own, and can describe them if he likes,

as well as any one:--

Tels diz n'a fors savor de songe,

Tant en acreissent les paroles:

Mes jo n'ai cure d'iperboles:

_Yperbole_ est chose non voire,

Qui ne fu et qui n'est a croire,

C'en est la difinicion:

Mes tant di de cest paveillon

Qu'il n'en a nul soz ciel qu'il vaille.

Many poets give themselves pains to describe gardens and

pavilions and other things, and think they are beautifying

their work, but this is all dreaming and waste of words; I

will have no such hyperbole. (_Hyperbole_ means by

definition that which is untrue and incredible.) I will only

say of this pavilion that there was not its match under

heaven.

The author, by his definition of _hyperbole_[81] in this place,

secures an ornamental word with which he consoles himself for his

abstinence in other respects. This piece of science is itself

characteristic of the rhetorical enterprise of the Romantic School; of

the way in which Pliny, Isidore, and other encyclopaedic authors were

turned into decorations. The taste for such things is common in the

early and the later Middle Ages; all that the romances did was to give

a certain amount of finish and neatness to the sort of work that was

left comparatively rude by the earlier pedants. There many be

discovered in some writers a preference for classical subjects in

their ornamental digressions, or for the graceful forms of allegory,

such as in the next century were collected for the Garden of the Rose,

and still later for the _House of Fame_. Thus Chrestien seems to

assert his superiority of taste and judgment when, instead of

Oriental work, he gives Enid an ivory saddle carved with the story of

Aeneas and Dido (_Erec_, l. 5337); or when, in the same book, Erec's

coronation mantle, though it is fairy work, bears no embroidered

designs of Broceliande or Avalon, but four allegorical figures of the

quadrivial sciences, with a reference by Chrestien to Macrobius as his

authority in describing them. One function of this Romantic School,

though not the most important, is to make an immediate literary profit

out of all accessible books of learning. It was a quick-witted school,

and knew how to turn quotations and allusions. Much of its art, like

the art of _Euphues_, is bestowed in making pedantry look attractive.

[Footnote 81: Chaucer, who often yields to the temptations of

"Hyperbole" in this sense of the word, lays down the law against

impertinent decorations, in the rhetorical instruction of Pandarus to

Troilus, about Troilus's letter to Cressida (B. ii. l. 1037):--

Ne jompre eek no discordaunt thing yfere

As thus, to usen termes of phisyk;

In loves termes hold of thy matere

The forme alwey, and do that it be lyk;

For if a peyntour wolde peynte a pyk

With asses feet, and hede it as an ape,

It cordeth naught; so nere it but a jape.]

The narrative material imported and worked up in the Romantic School

is, of course, enormously more important than the mere decorations

taken out of Solinus or Macrobius. It is not, however, with the

principal masters the most important part of their study. Chrestien,

for example, often treats his adventures with great levity in

comparison with the serious psychological passages; the wonder often

is that he should have used so much of the common stuff of adventures

in poems where he had a strong commanding interest in the sentiments

of the personages. There are many irrelevant and unnecessary

adventures in his _Erec_, _Lancelot_, and _Yvain_, not to speak of his

unfinished _Perceval_; while in _Cliges_ he shows that he did not rely

on the commonplaces of adventure, on the regular machinery of romance,

and that he might, when he chose, commit himself to a novel almost

wholly made up of psychology and sentiment. Whatever the explanation

be in this case, it is plain enough both that the adventures are of

secondary value as compared with the psychology, in the best

romances, and that their value, though inferior, is still

considerable, even in some of the best work of the "courtly makers."

The greatest novelty in the twelfth-century narrative materials was

due to the Welsh; not that the "matter of Britain" was quite

overwhelming in extent, or out of proportion to the other stores of

legend and fable. "The matter of Rome the Great" (not to speak again

of the old epic "matter of France" and its various later romantic

developments) included all known antiquity, and it was recruited

continually by new importations from the East. The "matter of Rome,"

however, the tales of Thebes and Troy and the wars of Alexander, had

been known more or less for centuries, and they did not produce the

same effect as the discovery of the Celtic stories. Rather, it may be

held that the Welsh stories gave a new value to the classical

authorities, and suggested new imaginative readings. As Chaucer's

_Troilus_ in our own time has inspired a new rendering of the _Life

and Death of Jason_, so (it would seem) the same story of Jason got a

new meaning in the twelfth century when it was read by Benoit de

Sainte More in the light of Celtic romance. Then it was discovered

that Jason and Medea were no more, and no less, than the adventurer

and the wizard's daughter, who might play their parts in a story of

Wales or Brittany. The quest of the Golden Fleece and the labours of

Jason are all reduced from the rhetoric of Ovid, from their classical

dignity, to something like what their original shape may have been

when the story that now is told in Argyll and Connaught of the _King's

Son of Ireland_ was told or chanted, ages before Homer, of a king's

son of the Greeks and an enchantress beyond sea. Something indeed, and

that of the highest consequence, as will be seen, was kept by Benoit

from his reading of the _Metamorphoses_; the passion of Medea,

namely. But the story itself is hardly distinguishable in kind from

_Libeaux Desconus_. It is not easy to say how far this treatment of

Jason may be due to the Welsh example of similar stories, and how far

to the general medieval disrespect for everything in the classics

except their matter. The Celtic precedents can scarcely have been

without influence on this very remarkable detection of the "Celtic

element" in the voyage of the Argonauts, while at the same time Ovid

ought not to be refused his share in the credit of medieval romantic

adventure. Virgil, Ovid, and Statius are not to be underrated as

sources of chivalrous adventure, even in comparison with the

unquestioned riches of Wales or Ireland.

There is more than one distinct stage in the progress of the Celtic

influence in France. The culmination of the whole thing is attained

when Chrestien makes the British story of the capture and rescue of

Guinevere into the vehicle of his most finished and most courtly

doctrine of love, as shown in the examples of Lancelot and the Queen.

Before that there are several earlier kinds of Celtic romance in

French, and after that comes what for modern readers is more

attractive than the typical work of Chrestien and his school,--the

eloquence of the old French prose, with its languor and its

melancholy, both in the prose _Lancelot_ and in the _Queste del St.

Graal_ and _Mort Artus_. In Chrestien everything is clear and

positive; in these prose romances, and even more in Malory's English

rendering of his "French book," is to be heard the indescribable

plaintive melody, the sigh of the wind over the enchanted ground, the

spell of pure Romance. Neither in Chrestien of Troyes, nor yet in the

earlier authors who dealt more simply than he with their Celtic

materials, is there anything to compare with this later prose.

In some of the earlier French romantic work, in some of the lays of

Marie de France, and in the fragments of the poems about Tristram,

there is a kind of simplicity, partly due to want of skill, but in its

effect often impressive enough. The plots made use of by the medieval

artists are some of them among the noblest in the world, but none of

the poets were strong enough to bring out their value, either in

translating _Dido_ and _Medea_, or in trying to educate Tristram and

other British heroes according to the manners of the Court of

Champagne. There are, however, differences among the misinterpretations

and the failures. No French romance appears to have felt the full

power of the story of Tristram and Iseult; no French poet had his mind

and imagination taken up by the character of Iseult as more than one

Northern poet was possessed by the tragedy of Brynhild. But there were

some who, without developing the story as Chaucer did with the story

of Troilus, at least allowed it to tell itself clearly. The Celtic

magic, as that is described in Mr. Arnold's _Lectures_, has scarcely

any place in French romance, either of the earlier period or of the

fully-developed and successful chivalrous order, until the time of the

prose books. The French poets, both the simpler sort and the more

elegant, appear to have had a gift for ignoring that power of

vagueness and mystery which is appreciated by some of the prose

authors of the thirteenth century. They seem for the most part to have

been pleased with the incidents of the Celtic stories, without

appreciating any charm of style that they may have possessed. They

treated them, in fact, as they treated Virgil and Ovid; and there is

about as much of the "Celtic spirit" in the French versions of

_Tristram_, as there is of the genius of Virgil in the _Roman

d'Eneas_. In each case there is something recognisable of the original

source, but it has been translated by minds imperfectly responsive. In

dealing with Celtic, as with Greek, Latin, or Oriental stories, the

French romancers were at first generally content if they could get the

matter in the right order and present it in simple language, like

tunes played with one finger. One great advantage of this procedure is

that the stories are intelligible; the sequence of events is clear,

and where the original conception has any strength or beauty it is not

distorted, though the colours may be faint. This earlier and more

temperate method was abandoned in the later stages of the Romantic

School, when it often happened that a simple story was taken from the

"matter of Britain" and overlaid with the chivalrous conventional

ornament, losing its simplicity without being developed in respect of

its characters or its sentiment. As an example of the one kind may be

chosen the _Lay of Guingamor_, one of the lays of Marie de France;[82]

as an example of the other, the Dutch romance of Gawain (_Walewein_),

which is taken from the French and exhibits the results of a common

process of adulteration. Or, again, the story of _Guinglain_, as told

by Renaud de Beaujeu with an irrelevant "courtly" digression, may be

compared with the simpler and more natural versions in English

(_Libeaux Desconus_) and Italian (_Carduino_), as has been done by M.

Gaston Paris; or the _Conte du Graal_ of Chrestien with the English

_Sir Perceval of Galles_.

[Footnote 82: Not included in the editions of her works (Roquefort,

Warnke); edited by M. Gaston Paris in the eighth volume of _Romania_

along with the lays of _Doon_, _Tidorel_, and _Tiolet_.]

_Guingamor_ is one of the best of the simpler kind of romances. The

theme is that of an old story, a story which in one form and another

is extant in native Celtic versions with centuries between them. In

essentials it is the story of Ossian in the land of youth; in its

chief motive, the fairy-bride, it is akin to the old Irish story of

Connla. It is different from both in its definite historical manner of

treating the subject. The story is allowed to count for the full value

of all its incidents, with scarcely a touch to heighten the importance

of any of them. It is the argument of a story, and little more. Even

an argument, however, may present some of the vital qualities of a

fairy story, as well as of a tragic plot, and the conclusion,

especially, of _Guingamor_ is very fine in its own way, through its

perfect clearness.

There was a king in Britain, and Guingamor was his nephew. The queen

fell in love with him, and was driven to take revenge for his

rejection of her; but being less cruel than other queens of similar

fortune, she planned nothing worse than to send him into the _lande

aventureuse_, a mysterious forest on the other side of the river, to

hunt the white boar. This white boar of the adventurous ground had

already taken off ten knights, who had gone out to hunt it and had

never returned. Guingamor followed the boar with the king's hound. In

his wanderings he came on a great palace, with a wall of green marble

and a silver shining tower, and open gates, and no one within, to

which he was brought back later by a maiden whom he met in the forest.

The story of their meeting was evidently, in the original, a story

like that of Weland and the swan-maidens, and those of other swan or

seal maidens, who are caught by their lovers as Weland caught his

bride. But the simplicity of the French story here is in excess of

what is required even by the illiterate popular versions of similar

incidents.

Guingamor, after two days in the rich palace (where he met the ten

knights of the king's court, who had disappeared before), on the third

day wished to go back to bring the head of the white boar to the king.

His bride told him that he had been there for three hundred years, and

that his uncle was dead, with all his retinue, and his cities fallen

and destroyed.

But she allowed him to go, and gave him the boar's head and the king's

hound; and told him after he had crossed the river into his own

country to eat and drink nothing.

He was ferried across the river, and there he met a charcoal-burner

and asked for news of the king. The king had been dead for three

hundred years, he was told; and the king's nephew had gone hunting in

the forest and had never been seen again. Guingamor told him his

story, and showed him the boar's head, and turned to go back.

Now it was after nones and turning late. He saw a wild apple-tree and

took three apples from it; but as he tasted them he grew old and

feeble and fell from his horse.

The charcoal-burner had followed him and was going to help him, when

he saw two damsels richly dressed, who came to Guingamor and

reproached him for his forgetfulness. They put him gently on a horse

and brought him to the river, and ferried him over, along with his

hound. The charcoal-burner went back to his own house at nightfall.

The boar's head he took to the king of Britain that then was, and told

the story of Guingamor, and the king bade turn it into a lay.

The simplicity of all this is no small excellence in a story. If

there is anything in this story that can affect the imagination, it is

there unimpaired by anything foreign or cumbrous. It is unsupported

and undeveloped by any strong poetic art, but it is sound and clear.

In the Dutch romance of _Walewein_, and doubtless in its French

original (to show what is gained by the moderation and restriction of

the earlier school), another story of fairy adventures has been

dressed up to look like chivalry. The story of Walewein is one that

appears in collections of popular tales; it is that of Mac Iain

Direach in Campbell's _West Highland Tales_ (No. xlvi.), as well as of

Grimm's _Golden Bird_. The romance observes the general plot of the

popular story; indeed, it is singular among the romances in its close

adherence to the order of events as given in the traditional oral

forms. Though it contains 11,200 lines, it begins at the beginning and

goes on to the end without losing what may be considered the original

design. But while the general economy is thus retained, there are

large digressions, and there is an enormous change in the character of

the hero. While Guingamor in the French poem has little, if anything,

to distinguish him from the adventurer of popular fairy stories, the

hero in this Dutch romance is Gawain,--Gawain the Courteous, in

splendid armour, playing the part of Mac Iain Direach. The discrepancy

is very great, and there can be little doubt that the story as told in

Gaelic fifty years ago by Angus Campbell, quarryman, is, in respect of

the hero's condition and manners, more original than the medieval

romance. Both versions are simple enough in their plot, and their plot

is one and the same: the story of a quest for something wonderful,

leading to another quest and then another, till the several problems

are solved and the adventurer returns successful. In each story (as

in Grimm's version also) the Fox appears as a helper.

Mac Iain Direach is sent to look for the Blue Falcon; the giant who

owns the Falcon sends him to the big Women of the Isle of Jura to ask

for their white glaive of light. The Women of Jura ask for the bay

filly of the king of Erin; the king of Erin sends him to woo for him

the king's daughter of France. Mac Iain Direach wins all for himself,

with the help of the Fox.

Gawain has to carry out similar tasks: to find and bring back to King

Arthur a magical flying Chessboard that appeared one day through the

window and went out again; to bring to King Wonder, the owner of the

Chessboard, "the sword of the strange rings"; to win for the owner of

the sword the Princess of the Garden of India.

Some things in the story, apart from the hero, are different from the

popular versions. In _Walewein_ there appears quite plainly what is

lost in the Gaelic and the German stories, the character of the

strange land in which the quests are carried out. Gawain has to pass

through or into a hill to reach the land of King Wonder; it does not

belong to the common earth. The three castles to which he comes have

all of them water about them; the second of them, Ravensten, is an

island in the sea; the third is beyond the water of Purgatory, and is

reached by two perilous bridges, the bridge of the sword and the

bridge under water, like those in Chrestien's _Lancelot_. There is a

distinction here, plain enough, between the human world, to which

Arthur and his Court belong, and the other world within the hill, and

the castles beyond the waters. But if this may be supposed to belong

to an older form of the story not evident in the popular versions, a

story of adventures in the land of the Dead, on the other hand the

romance has no conception of the meaning of these passages, and gets

no poetical result from the chances here offered to it. It has nothing

like the vision of Thomas of Erceldoune; the waters about the magic

island are tame and shallow; the castle beyond the Bridge of Dread is

loaded with the common, cheap, pedantic "hyperboles," like those of

the _Pèlerinage_ or of Benoit's _Troy_. Gawain is too heavily

armoured, also, and even his horse Gringalet has a reputation of his

own; all inconsistent with the lightness of the fairy tale. Gawain in

the land of all these dreams is burdened still by the heavy chivalrous

conventions. The world for him, even after he has gone through the

mountain, is still very much the old world with the old stale business

going on; especially tournaments and all their weariness. One natural

result of all this is that the Fox's part is very much reduced. In the

Gaelic story, Mac Iain Direach and his friend Gille Mairtean (the Lad

of March, the Fox) are a pair of equals; they have no character, no

position in the world, no station and its duties. They are quite

careless, and they move freely. Gawain is slow, and he has to put in a

certain amount of the common romantic business. The authors of that

romantic school, if ever they talked shop, may have asked one another,

"Where do you put your Felon Red Knight? Where do you put your doing

away of the Ill Custom? or your tournaments?" and the author of

_Walewein_ would have had an answer ready. Everything is there all

right: that is to say, all the things that every one else has, all the

mechanical business of romance. The Fox is postponed to the third

adventure, and there, though he has not quite grown out of his

original likeness to the Gille Mairtean, he is evidently constrained.

Sir Gawain of the romance, this courteous but rather dull and

middle-aged gentleman in armour, is not his old light-hearted

companion.

Still, though this story of _Gawain_ is weighed down by the

commonplaces of the Romantic School, it shows through all its

encumbrances what sort of story it was that impressed the French

imagination at the beginning of the School. It may be permitted to

believe that the story of _Walewein_ existed once in a simpler and

clearer form, like that of _Guingamor_.

The curious sophistication of _Guinglain_ by Renaud de Beaujeu has

been fully described and criticised by M. Gaston Paris in one of his

essays (_Hist. litt. de la France_, xxx. p. 171). His comparison with

the English and Italian versions of the story brings out the

indifference of the French poets to their plot, and their readiness to

sacrifice the unities of action for the sake of irrelevant sentiment.

The story is as simple as that of Walewein; an expedition, this time,

to rescue a lady from enchantment. She is bewitched in the form of a

serpent, and freed by a kiss (_le fier basier_). There are various

adventures on the journey; it has some resemblance to that of Gareth

in the _Morte d'Arthur_, and of the Red Cross Knight in Spenser, which

is founded upon Malory's _Gareth_.[83] One of the adventures is in the

house of a beautiful sorceress, who treats Guinglain with small

consideration. Renaud de Beaujeu, in order to get literary credit from

his handling of this romantic episode, brings Guinglain back to this

enchantress after the real close of the story, in a kind of

sentimental show-piece or appendix, by which the story is quite

overweighted and thrown off its balance for the sake of a rhetorical

demonstration. This of course belongs to the later period of romance,

when the simpler methods had been discredited; but the simpler form,

much nearer the fashion of popular stories, is still kept more or less

by the English and the Italian rhymes of "Sir Lybeaux."

[Footnote 83: Britomart in the House of Busirane has some resemblance

to the conclusion of _Libius Disconius_.]

The most remarkable examples of the earlier French romantic methods

are presented by the fragments remaining of the old Anglo-Norman poems

on Tristram and Yseult, by Béroul and Thomas, especially the

latter;[84] most remarkable, because in this case there is the

greatest contradiction between the tragic capabilities of the story

and the very simple methods of the Norman poets. It is a story that

might test the tragic strength and eloquence of any poet in any age of

the world; the poetical genius of Thomas is shown in his abstinence

from effort. Hardly anything could be simpler. He does very little to

fill out or to elaborate the story; he does nothing to vitiate his

style; there is little ornament or emphasis. The story itself is

there, as if the poet thought it an impertinence to add any harmonies

of his own. If it were only extant as a whole, it would be one of the

most notable of poems. Where else is there anything like it, for

sincerity and for thinness?

[Footnote 84: Fr. Michel: _Tristan._ London, 1835. _Le Roman de

Tristan_ (Thomas) ed. Bédier; (Béroul) ed. Muret, _Anc. Textes_,

1902-1905. Cf. Gaston Paris, _Poëmes et Légendes_.]

This poet of _Tristram_ does not represent the prevalent fashion of

his time. The eloquence and the passion of the amorous romances are

commonly more effusive, and seldom as true. The lost _Tristram_ of

Chrestien would probably have made a contrast with the Anglo-Norman

poem in this respect. Chrestien of Troyes is at the head of the French

Romantic School, and his interest is in the science of love; not in

ancient rude and passionate stories, such as the story of

Tristram--for it is rude and ancient, even in the French of

Thomas--not in the "Celtic magic," except for decorative and

incidental purposes, but in psychology and analysis of the emotions,

and in the appropriate forms of language for such things.

It is impossible (as M. Gaston Paris has shown) to separate the spirit

of French romance from the spirit of the Provençal lyric poetry. The

romances represent in a narrative form the ideas and the spirit which

took shape as lyric poetry in the South; the romances are directly

dependent upon the poetry of the South for their principal motives.

The courtesy of the Provençal poetry, with its idealism and its

pedantry, its psychological formalism, its rhetoric of antithesis and

conceits, is to be found again in the narrative poetry of France in

the twelfth century, just as, in the thirteenth, all the floods of

lyrical idealism are collected in the didactic reservoir of the

_Romaunt of the Rose_. The dominant interest in the French romances is

the same as in the Provençal lyric poetry and in the _Romaunt of the

Rose_; namely, the idealist or courteous science of love. The origins

of this mode of thought are difficult to trace fully. The inquiry

belongs more immediately to the history of Provence than of France,

for the romancers are the pupils of the Provençal school; not

independent practitioners of the same craft, but directly indebted to

Provence for some of their main ideas and a good deal of their

rhetoric. In Provence itself the origins are partly to be found in the

natural (_i.e._ inexplicable) development of popular love-poetry, and

in the corresponding progress of society and its sentiments; while

among the definite influences that can be proved and explained, one of

the strongest is that of Latin poetry, particularly of the _Art of

Love_. About this there can be no doubt, however great may seem to be

the interval between the ideas of Ovid and those of the Provençal

lyrists, not to speak of their greater scholars in Italy, Dante and

Petrarch. The pedantry of Ovid was taken seriously, for one thing, in

an age when everything systematic was valuable just because it was a

system; when every doctrine was profitable. For another thing, they

found in Ovid the form, at least, of devotion, and again the _Art of

Love_ was not their only book. There were other writings of Ovid and

works of other poets from whom the Middle Ages learned their lesson of

chivalrous service; not for the most part, it must be confessed, from

the example of "Paynim Knights," but far more from the classical

"Legend of Good Women," from the passion of Dido and the other

heroines. It is true that there were some names of ancient heroes that

were held in honour; the name of Paris is almost inseparable from the

name of Tristram, wherever a medieval poet has occasion to praise the

true lovers of old time, and Dante followed the common form when he

brought the names together in his fifth canto.

But what made by far the strongest impression on the Middle Ages was

not the example of Paris or of Leander, nor yet the passion of

Catullus and Propertius, who were then unknown, but the poetry of the

loyalty of the heroines, the fourth book of the _Aeneid_, the

_Heroides_ of Ovid, and certain parts of the _Metamorphoses_. If

anything literary can be said to have taken effect upon the temper of

the Middle Ages, so as to produce the manners and sentiments of

chivalry, this is the literature to which the largest share of

influence must be ascribed. The ladies of Romance all owe allegiance,

and some of them are ready to pay it, to the queens of the Latin

poets.[85] Virgil's Dido and Ovid's Medea taught the eloquence of

love to the French poets, and the first chivalrous lovers are those

who have learned to think poorly of the recreant knights of antiquity.

[Footnote 85: A fine passage is quoted from the romance of _Ider_ in

the essay cited above, where Guenloïe the queen finds Ider near death

and thinks of killing herself, like Phyllis and other ladies of the

old time, who will welcome her. It is the "Saints' Legend of Cupid,"

many generations before Chaucer, in the form of an invocation to Love,

the tyrant:--

Bel semblant ço quit me feront

Les cheitives qui a toi sont

Qui s'ocistrent par druerie

D'amor; mout voil lor compainie:

D'amor me recomfortera

La lasse Deïanira,

Qui s'encroast, et Canacé,

Eco, Scilla, Fillis, Pronné,

Ero, Biblis, Dido, Mirra,

Tisbé, la bele Hypermnestra,

Et des autres mil et cinc cenz.

Amor! por quoi ne te repenz

De ces simples lasses destruire?

Trop cruelment te voi deduire:

Pechié feiz que n'en as pitié;

Nuls deus fors toi ne fait pechié!

De ço est Tisbé al dessus,

Que por lié s'ocist Piramus;

Amors, de ço te puet loer

Car a ta cort siet o son per;

Ero i est o Leander:

Si jo i fusse avec Ider,

Aise fusse, ço m'est avis,

Com alme qu'est en paraïs.]

The French romantic authors were scholars in the poetry of the

Provençal School, but they also knew a good deal independently of

their Provençal masters, and did not need to be told everything. They

read the ancient authors for themselves, and drew their own

conclusions from them. They were influenced by the special Provençal

rendering of the common ideas of chivalry and courtesy; they were also

affected immediately by the authors who influenced the Provençal

School.

Few things are more instructive in this part of literature than the

story of Medea in the _Roman de Troie_ of Benoit de Sainte More. It

might even claim to be the representative French romance, for it

contains in an admirable form the two chief elements common to all the

dominant school--adventure (here reduced from Ovid to the scale of a

common fairy story, as has been seen already) and sentimental

eloquence, which in this particular story is very near its original

fountain-head.

It is to be noted that Benoit is not in the least troubled by the

Latin rhetoric when he has to get at the story. Nothing Latin, except

the names, and nothing rhetorical remains to show that the story came

from Ovid, and not from Blethericus or some other of his

fellow-romancers in Wales,[86] so long, that is, as the story is

merely concerned with the Golden Fleece, the Dragon, the Bulls, and

all the tasks imposed on Jason. But one essential thing is retained by

Benoit out of the Latin which is his authority, and that is the way in

which the love of Medea for Jason is dwelt upon and described.

[Footnote 86: Blethericus, or Bréri, is the Welsh authority cited by

Thomas in his _Tristan_. Cf. Gaston Paris, _Romania_, viii. p. 427.]

This is for medieval poetry one of the chief sources of the psychology

in which it took delight,--an original and authoritative

representation of the beginning and growth of the passion of love, not

yet spoilt by the pedantry which later displayed itself unrestrained

in the following generations of amatory poets, and which took its

finest form in the poem of Guillaume de Lorris; but yet at the same

time giving a starting-point and some encouragement to the later

pedants, by its study of the different degrees of the passion, and by

the success with which they are explained and made interesting. This

is one of the masterpieces and one of the standards of composition in

early French romance; and it gives one of the most singular proofs of

the dependence of modern on ancient literature, in certain respects.

It would not be easy to prove any real connexion between Homer and the

Sagas, in order to explain the resemblances of temper, and even of

incident, between them; but in the case of the medieval romances there

is this direct and real dependence. The Medea of Apollonius Rhodius is

at the beginning of medieval poetry, in one line of descent (through

Virgil's Dido as well as Ovid's Medea); and it would be hard to

overestimate the accumulated debt of all the modern poets whose

rhetoric of passion, whether they knew it or not, is derived somehow

from the earlier medieval masters of Dante or Chaucer, Boccaccio or

Spenser.

The "medieval" character of the work of Chrestien and his

contemporaries is plain enough. But "medieval" and other terms of the

same sort are too apt to impose themselves on the mind as complete

descriptive formulas, and in this case the term "medieval" ought not

to obscure the fact that it is modern literature, in one of its chief

branches, which has its beginning in the twelfth century. No later

change in the forms of fiction is more important than the

twelfth-century revolution, from which all the later forms and

constitutions of romance and novel are in some degree or other

derived. It was this revolution, of which Chrestien was one of the

first to take full advantage, that finally put an end to the old local

and provincial restrictions upon narrative. The older schools of epic

are bound to their own nation or tribe, and to the family traditions.

These restrictions are no hindrance to the poetry of Homer, nor to the

plots and conversations of the Sagas. Within these local restrictions

the highest form of narrative art is possible. Nevertheless the period

of these restrictions must come to an end; the heroic age cannot last

for ever. The merit of the twelfth-century authors, Benoit, Chrestien,

and their followers, is that they faced the new problems and solved

them. In their productions it may be seen how the Western world was

moving away from the separate national traditions, and beginning the

course of modern civilisation with a large stock of ideas, subjects,

and forms of expression common to all the nations. The new forms of

story might be defective in many ways, thin or formal or extravagant

in comparison with some of the older modes; but there was no help for

it, there was no progress to be made in any other way.

The first condition of modern progress in novel-writing, as in other

more serious branches of learning, was that the author should be free

to look about him, to reflect and choose, to pick up his ideas and his

matter anyhow. He was turned out of the old limited region of epic

tradition. The nations had several centuries to themselves, in the

Dark Ages, in which they were at liberty to compose Homeric poems ("if

they had a mind"), but by the twelfth century that time was over. The

romancers of the twelfth century were in the same position as modern

authors in regard to their choice of subjects. Their subjects were not

prescribed to them by epic tradition. They were more or less

reflective and self-conscious literary men, citizens of the universal

world, ready to make the most of their education. They are the

sophists of medieval literature; emancipated, enlightened and

intelligent persons, with an apparatus of rhetoric, a set of abstract

ideas, a repertory of abstract sentiments, which they could apply to

any available subject. In this sophistical period, when the serious

interest of national epic was lost, and when stories, collected from

all the ends of the earth, were made the receptacles of a common,

abstract, sentimental pathos, it was of some importance that the

rhetoric should be well managed, and that the sentiment should be

refined. The great achievement of the French poets, on account of

which they are to be remembered as founders and benefactors, is that

they went to good masters for instruction. Solid dramatic

interpretation of character was beyond them, and they were not able to

make much of the openings for dramatic contrast in the stories on

which they worked. But they were caught and held by the language of

passion, the language of Dido and Medea; language not dramatic so much

as lyrical or musical, the expression of universal passion, such as

might be repeated without much change in a thousand stories. In this

they were happily guided. The greater drama, the stronger characters,

appeared in due time; but the dramas and the novels of Europe would

not have been what they are, without the medieval elaboration of the

simple motives, and the practice of the early romantic schools in

executing variations on Love and Jealousy. It may be remarked that

there were sources more remote and even more august, above and beyond

the Latin poets from whom the medieval authors copied their phrasing;

in so far as the Latin poets were affected by Athenian tragedy,

directly or indirectly, in their great declamatory passages, which in

turn affected the Middle Ages.

The history of this school has no end, for it merges in the history of

the romantic schools that are still flourishing, and will be continued

by their successors. One of the principal lines of progress may be

indicated, to conclude this discourse on Epic Poetry.

The twelfth-century romances are in most things the antithesis to

Homer, in narrative. They are fanciful, conceited, thin in their

drama, affected in their sentiments. They are like the "heroic

romances" of the seventeenth century, their descendants, as compared

with the strong imagination of Cervantes or Shakespeare, who are the

representatives, if not of the Homeric line, at any rate of the

Homeric principles, in their intolerance of the formally pathetic or

heroic, and who have all the great modern novelists on their side.

But the early romantic schools, though they are generally formal and

sentimental, and not dramatic, have here and there the possibilities

of a stronger drama and a truer imagination, and seem at times almost

to have worked themselves free from their pedantry.

There is sentiment and sentiment: and while the pathos of medieval

romance, like some of the effusion of medieval lyric, is often merely

formal repetition of phrases, it is sometimes more natural, and

sometimes the mechanical fancy seems to quicken into true poetical

vision, or at least to make room for a sane appreciation of real life

and its incidents. Chrestien of Troyes shows his genius most

unmistakably in his occasional surprising intervals of true

description and natural feeling, in the middle of his rhetoric; while

even his sustained rhetorical dissertations, like those of the _Roman

de la Rose_ in the next century, are not absolutely untrue, or

uncontrolled by observation of actual manners. Often the rhetorical

apparatus interferes in the most annoying way with the clear vision.

In the _Chevalier au Lion_, for example, there is a pretty sketch of a

family party--a girl reading a romance to her father in a garden, and

her mother coming up and listening to the story--from which there is a

sudden and annoying change to the common impertinences of the amatory

professional novelist. This is the passage, with the two kinds of

literature in abrupt opposition:--

Messire Yvain goes into the garden, and his people follow;

and he sees a goodly gentleman reclining on a cloth of silk

and leaning on his elbow; and a maiden was sitting before

him reading out of a romance, I know not whose the story.

And to listen to the romance a lady had drawn near; that was

her mother, and he was her father, and well might they be

glad to look on her and listen to her, for they had no other

child. She was not yet sixteen years old, and she was so

fair and gentle that the God of Love if he had seen her

would have given himself to be her slave, and never would

have bestowed the love of her on any other than himself. For

her sake, to serve her, he would have made himself man,

would have put off his deity, and would have stricken

himself with the dart whose wound is never healed, except a

disloyal physician tend it. It is not right that any should

recover from that wound, unless there be disloyalty in it;

and whoever is otherwise healed, he never loved with

loyalty. _Of this wound I could talk to you without end_, if

it pleased you to listen; but I know that some would say

that all my talk was idleness, for the world is fallen away

from true love, and men know not any more how to love as

they ought, for the very talk of love is a weariness to

them! (ll. 5360-5396).

This short passage is representative of Chrestien's work, and indeed

of the most successful and influential work of the twelfth-century

schools. It is not, like some affected kinds of romance, entirely cut

off from reality. But the glimpses of the real world are occasional

and short; there is a flash of pure daylight, a breath of fresh air,

and then the heavy-laden, enchanted mists of rhetoric and obligatory

sentiment come rolling down and shut out the view.

It is possible to trace out in some detail a line of progress in

medieval romance, in which there is a victory in the end for the more

ingenuous kind of sentiment; in which the rhetorical romantic forms

are altered and strengthened to bear the weight of true imagination.

This line of progress is nothing less than the earlier life of all the

great modern forms of novel; a part of European history which deserves

some study from those who have leisure for it.

The case may be looked at in this way. The romantic schools, following

on the earlier heroic literature, generally substituted a more

shallow, formal, limited set of characters for the larger and freer

portraits of the heroic age, making up for this defect in the

personages by extravagance in other respects--in the incidents, the

phrasing, the sentimental pathos, the rhetorical conceits. The great

advantage of the new school over the old was that it was adapted to

modern cosmopolitan civilisation; it left the artist free to choose

his subject anywhere, and to deal with it according to the laws of

good society, without local or national restrictions. But the earlier

work of this modern enlightenment in the Middle Ages was generally

very formal, very meagre in imagination. The progress of literature

was to fill out the romantic forms, and to gain for the new

cosmopolitan schemes of fiction the same sort of substantial contents,

the same command of human nature and its variety, as belong (with

local or national restrictions) to some at any rate of the earlier

epic authors. This being so, one of the interests of the study of

medieval romance must be the discovery of those places in which it

departs from its own dominant conventions, and seems to aim at

something different from its own nature: at the recovery of the fuller

life of epic for the benefit of romance. Epic fulness of life within

the limits of romantic form--that might be said to be the ideal which

is _not_ attained in the Middle Ages, but towards which many medieval

writers seem to be making their way.

Chrestien's story of _Geraint and Enid_ (Geraint has to take the name

of _Erec_ in the French) is one of his earlier works, but cannot be

called immature in comparison with what he wrote afterwards. In

Chrestien's _Enid_ there is not a little superfluity of the common

sort of adventure. The story of Enid in the _Idylls of the King_

(founded upon the Welsh _Geraint_, as given in Lady Charlotte Guest's

_Mabinogion_) has been brought within compass, and a number of quite

unnecessary adventures have been cut out. Yet the story here is the

same as Chrestien's, and the drama of the story is not the pure

invention of the English poet. Chrestien has all the principal

motives, and the working out of the problem is the same. In one place,

indeed, where the Welsh romance, the immediate source of Tennyson's

_Enid_, has shortened the scene of reconciliation between the lovers,

the Idyll has restored something like the proportions of the original

French. Chrestien makes Erec speak to Enid and renounce all his

ill-will, after the scene in which "the brute Earl" is killed; the

Welsh story, with no less effect, allows the reconciliation to be

taken for granted when Geraint, at this point in the history, with no

speech of his reported, lifts Enid on his own horse. The Idyll goes

back (apparently without any direct knowledge of Chrestien's version)

to the method of Chrestien.

The story of Enid in Chrestien is very unlike the other stories of

distressed and submissive wives; it has none of the ineradicable

falsity of the story of Griselda. How much is due to Chrestien for

this can hardly be reckoned, in our ignorance of the materials he

used. But taking into account the other passages, like that of the

girl reading in the garden, where Chrestien shows a distinct original

appreciation of certain aspects of life, it cannot be far wrong to

consider Chrestien's picture of Enid as mainly his own; and, in any

case, this picture is one of the finest in medieval romance. There is

no comparison between Chrestien of Troyes and Homer, but it is not

impious to speak of Enid along with Nausicaa, and there are few other

ladies of romance who may claim as much as this. The adventure of the

Sparrowhawk, one of the finest pieces of pure romance in the poetry of

this century, is also one of the finest in the old French, and in many

ways very unlike the commonplaces of chivalry, in the simplicity of

the household where Enid waits on her father's guest and takes his

horse to the stable, in the sincerity and clearness with which

Chrestien indicates the gentle breeding and dignity of her father and

mother, and the pervading spirit of grace and loyalty in the whole

scene.[87]

[Footnote 87: The Welsh version has the advantage here in noting more

fully than Chrestien the beauty of age in Enid's mother: "And he

thought that there could be no woman fairer than she must have been in

the prime of her youth." Chrestien says merely (at the end of his

story, l. 6621):--

Bele est Enide et bele doit

Estre par reison et par droit,

Que bele dame est mout sa mere

Bel chevalier a an son pere.]

In the story of Enid, Chrestien has a subject which recommends itself

to modern readers. The misunderstanding between Enid and her husband,

and the reconciliation, are not peculiarly medieval, though the

adventures through which their history is worked out are of the

ordinary romantic commonplace.

Indeed the relation of husband and wife in this story is rather

exceptionally divergent from the current romantic mode, and from the

conventional law that true love between husband and wife was

impossible. Afterwards, in his poem of _Lancelot_ (_le Chevalier de la

Charrette_), Chrestien took up and worked out this conventional and

pedantic theory, and made the love of Lancelot and the Queen into the

standard for all courtly lovers. In his _Enid_, however, there is

nothing of this. At the same time, the courtly and chivalrous mode

gets the better of the central drama in his _Enid_, in so far as he

allows himself to be distracted unduly from the pair of lovers by

various "hyperboles" of the Romantic School; there are a number of

unnecessary jousts and encounters, and a mysterious exploit of Erec in

a magic garden, which is quite out of connexion with the rest of the

story. The final impression is that Chrestien wanted strength of mind

or inclination to concentrate himself on the drama of the two lovers.

The story is taken too lightly.

In _Cliges_, his next work, the dramatic situation is much less

valuable than in _Enid_, but the workmanship is far more careful and

exact, and the result is a story which may claim to be among the

earliest of modern novels, if the Greek romances, to which it has a

close relation, are not taken into account. The story has very little

"machinery"; there are none of the marvels of the Faerie in it. There

is a Thessalian witch (the heroine's nurse), who keeps well within the

limits of possible witchcraft, and there is the incident of the

sleeping-draught (familiar in the ballad of the _Gay Goshawk_), and

that is all. The rest is a simple love-story (or rather a double

love-story, for there is the history of the hero's father and mother,

before his own begins), and the personages are merely true lovers,

undistinguished by any such qualities as the sulkiness of Erec or the

discretion of Enid. It is all pure sensibility, and as it happens the

sensibility is in good keeping--not overdriven into the pedantry of

the more quixotic troubadours and minnesingers, and not warped by the

conventions against marriage. It is explained at the end that, though

Cliges and Fenice are married, they are lovers still:--

De s'amie a feite sa fame,

Mais il l'apele amie et dame,

Que por ce ne pert ele mie

Que il ne l'aint come s'amie,

Et ele lui autresi

Con l'an doit feire son ami:

Et chascun jor lor amors crut,

N'onques cil celi ne mescrut,

Ne querela de nule chose.

_Cliges_, l. 6753.

This poem of Chrestien's is a collection of the finest specimens of

medieval rhetoric on the eternal theme. There is little incident, and

sensibility has it all its own way, in monologues by the actors and

digressions by the author, on the nature of love. It is rather the

sentiment than the passion that is here expressed in the "language of

the heart"; but, however that may be, there are both delicacy and

eloquence in the language. The pensive Fenice, who debates with

herself for nearly two hundred lines in one place (4410-4574), is the

ancestress of many later heroines.

Meis Fenice est sor toz pansive;

Ele ne trueve fonz ne rive

El panser dont ele est anplie,

Tant li abonde et mouteplie.

_Cliges_, l. 4339.

In the later works of Chrestien, in _Yvain_, _Lancelot_, and

_Perceval_, there are new developments of romance, more particularly

in the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. But these three later stories,

unlike _Cliges_, are full of the British marvels, which no one would

wish away, and yet they are encumbrances to what we must regard as the

principal virtue of the poet--his skill of analysis in cases of

sentiment, and his interest in such cases. _Cliges_, at any rate,

however far it may come short of the _Chevalier de la Charrette_ and

the _Conte du Graal_ in variety, is that one of Chrestien's poems, it

might be said that one of the twelfth-century French romances, which

best corresponds to the later type of novel. It is the most modern of

them; and at the same time it does not represent its own age any the

worse, because it also to some extent anticipates the fashions of

later literature.

In this kind of romance, which reduces the cost of the "machinery,"

and does without enchanters, dragons, magic mists, and deadly castles,

there are many other examples besides _Cliges_.

A hundred years after Chrestien, one of his cleverest pupils wrote the

Provençal story of _Flamenca_,[88] a work in which the form of the

novel is completely disengaged from the unnecessary accidents of

romance, and reaches a kind of positive and modern clearness very much

at variance in some respects with popular ideas of what is medieval.

The Romance of the medieval Romantic School attains one of its highest

and most distinctive points in _Flamenca_, and shows what it had been

aiming at from the beginning--namely, the expression in an elegant

manner of the ideas of the _Art of Love_, as understood in the polite

society of those times. _Flamenca_ is nearly contemporary with the

_Roman de la Rose_ of Guillaume de Lorris. Its inspiring ideas are the

same, and though its influence on succeeding authors is

indiscernible, where that of the _Roman de la Rose_ is widespread and

enduring, _Flamenca_ would have as good a claim to be considered a

representative masterpiece of medieval literature, if it were not that

it appears to be breaking loose from medieval conventions where the

_Roman de la Rose_ makes all it can out of them. _Flamenca_ is a

simple narrative of society, with the indispensable three

characters--the husband, the lady, and the lover. The scene of the

story is principally at the baths of Bourbon, in the then present day;

and of the miracles and adventures of the more marvellous and

adventurous romances there is nothing left but the very pleasant

enumeration of the names of favourite stories in the account of the

minstrelsy at Flamenca's wedding. The author knew all that was to be

known in romance, of Greek, Latin, or British invention--Thebes and

Troy, Alexander and Julius Caesar, Samson and Judas Maccabeus, Ivain

and Gawain and Perceval, Paris and Tristram, and all Ovid's _Legend of

Good Women_--but out of all these studies he has retained only what

suited his purpose. He does not compete with the Greek or the British

champions in their adventures among the romantic forests. Chrestien of

Troyes is his master, but he does not try to copy the magic of the

Lady of the Fountain, or the Bridge of the Sword, or the Castle of the

Grail. He follows the doctrine of love expounded in Chrestien's

_Lancelot_, but his hero is not sent wandering at random, and is not

made to display his courtly emotions among the ruins and shadows of

the lost Celtic mythology, like Lancelot in Chrestien's poem. The life

described in _Flamenca_ is the life of the days in which it was

composed; and the hero's task is to disguise himself as a clerk, so as

to get a word with the jealously-guarded lady in church on Sundays,

while giving her the Psalter to kiss after the Mass. _Flamenca_, is

really the triumph of Ovid, with the _Art of Love_, over all his

Gothic competitors out of the fairy tales. The Provençal poet has

discarded everything but the essential dominant interests, and in so

doing has gone ahead of his master Chrestien, who (except in _Cliges_)

allowed himself to be distracted between opposite kinds of story,

between the school of Ovid and the school of Blethericus; and who,

even in _Cliges_, was less consistently modern than his Provençal

follower.

[Footnote 88: Ed. Paul Meyer, 1865, and, again, 1901.]

_Flamenca_ is the perfection and completion of medieval romance in one

kind and in one direction. It is all sentiment; the ideal courtly

sentiment of good society and its poets, made lively by the author's

knowledge of his own time and its manners, and his decision not to

talk about anything else. It is perhaps significant that he allows his

heroine the romance of _Flores and Blanchefleur_ for her reading, an

older story of true lovers, after the simpler pattern of Greek

romance, which the author of _Flamenca_ apparently feels himself

entitled to refer to with the condescension of a modern and critical

author towards some old-fashioned prettiness. He is completely

self-possessed and ironical with regard to his story. His theme is the

idle love whose origin is explained by Ovid; his personages are

nothing to him but the instruments of the symphony which he composes

and directs: _sopra lor vanità che par persona_, over and through

their graceful inanity, passes the stream of sentiment, the shifting,

flickering light which the Provençal author has borrowed from Ovid and

transferred for his own purposes to his own time. It is perhaps the

first complete modern appropriation of classical examples in literary

art; for the poem of _Flamenca_ is classical in more than one sense of

the term--classical, not only because of its comprehension of the

spirit of the Latin poet and his code of manners and sentiment, but

because of its clear proportions and its definite abstract lines of

composition; because of the self-possession of the author and his

subordination of details and rejection of irrelevances.

Many things are wanting to _Flamenca_ which it did not suit the author

to bring in. It was left to other greater writers to venture on other

and larger schemes with room for more strength and individuality of

character, and more stress of passion, still keeping the romantic

framework which had been designed by the masters of the twelfth

century, and also very much of the sentimental language which the same

masters had invented and elaborated.

The story of the _Chastelaine de Vergi_[89] (dated by its editor

between 1282 and 1288) is an example of a different kind from

_Flamenca_; still abstract in its personages, still sentimental, but

wholly unlike _Flamenca_ in the tragic stress of its sentiment and in

the pathos of its incidents. There is no plot in _Flamenca_, or only

just enough to display the author's resources of eloquence; in the

_Chastelaine de Vergi_ there is no rhetorical expansion or effusion,

but instead of that the coherent closely-reasoned argument of a

romantic tragedy, with nothing in it out of keeping with the

conditions of "real life." It is a moral example to show the

disastrous result of breaking the first law of chivalrous love, which

enjoins loyal secrecy on the lover; the tragedy in this case arises

from the strong compulsion of honour under which the commandment is

transgressed.

[Footnote 89: Ed. G. Raynaud, _Romania_, xxi. p. 145.]

There was a knight who was the lover of the Chastelaine de Vergi,

unknown to all the world. Their love was discovered by the jealous

machinations of the Duchess of Burgundy, whom the knight had

neglected. The Duchess made use of her knowledge to insult the

Chastelaine; the Chastelaine died of a broken heart at the thought

that her lover had betrayed her; the knight found her dead, and threw

himself on his sword to make amends for his unwilling disloyalty. Even

a summary like this may show that the plot has capabilities and

opportunities in it; and though the scheme of the short story does not

allow the author to make use of them in the full detailed manner of

the great novelists, he understands what he is about, and his work is

a very fine instance of sensitive and clearly-executed medieval

narrative, which has nothing to learn (in its own kind, and granting

the conditions assumed by the author) from any later fiction.

The story of the _Lady of Vergi_ was known to Boccaccio, and was

repeated both by Bandello and by Queen Margaret of Navarre.

It is time to consider how the work of the medieval romantic schools

was taken up and continued by many of the most notable writers of the

period which no longer can be called medieval, in which modern

literature makes a new and definite beginning; especially in the works

of the two modern poets who have done most to save and adapt the

inheritance of medieval romance for modern forms of literature--Boccaccio

and Chaucer.

The development of romance in these authors is not always and in all

respects a gain. Even the pathetic stories of the _Decameron_ (such as

the _Pot of Basil_, _Tancred and Gismunda_, _William of Cabestaing_)

seem to have lost something by the adoption of a different kind of

grammar, a more learned rhetoric, in comparison with the best of the

simple French stories, like the _Chastelaine de Vergi_. This is the

case in a still greater degree where Boccaccio has allowed himself a

larger scale, as in his version of the old romance of _Flores and

Blanchefleur_ (_Filocolo_), while his _Teseide_ might be taken as the

first example in modern history of the pernicious effect of classical

studies. The _Teseide_ is the story of Palamon and Arcita. The

original is lost, but it evidently was a French romance, probably not

a long one; one of the favourite well-defined cases or problems of

love, easily understood as soon as stated, presenting the rivalry of

the two noble kinsmen for the love of the lady Emily. It might have

been made into one of the stories of the _Decameron_, but Boccaccio

had other designs for it. He wished to write a classical epic in

twelve books, and not very fortunately chose this simple theme as the

groundwork of his operations. The _Teseide_ is the first of the solemn

row of modern epics; "reverend and divine, abiding without motion,

shall we say that they have being?" Everything is to be found in the

_Teseide_ that the best classical traditions require in epic--Olympian

machinery, catalogues of armies, descriptions of works of art to

compete with the Homeric and Virgilian shields, elaborate battles, and

epic similes, and funeral games. Chaucer may have been at one time

tempted by all this magnificence; his final version of the story, in

the _Knight's Tale_, is a proof among other things of his critical

tact. He must have recognised that the _Teseide_, with all its

ambition and its brilliancy of details, was a failure as a story; that

this particular theme, at any rate, was not well fitted to carry the

epic weight. These personages of romance were not in training for the

heavy classical panoply. So he reduced the story of Palamon and Arcita

to something not very different from what must have been its original

scale as a romance. His modifications of Boccaccio here are a lesson

in the art of narrative which can hardly be overvalued by students of

that mystery.

Chaucer's procedure in regard to his romantic subjects is often very

difficult to understand. How firm and unwavering his critical

meditations and calculations were may be seen by a comparison of the

_Knight's Tale_ with its Italian source. At other times and in other

stories he appears to have worked on different principles, or without

much critical study at all. The _Knight's Tale_ is a complete and

perfect version of a medieval romance, worked out with all the

resources of Chaucer's literary study and reflexion; tested and

considered and corrected in every possible way. The story of

_Constance_ (the _Man of Law's Tale_) is an earlier work in which

almost everything is lacking that is found in the mere workmanship of

the _Knight's Tale_; though not, of course, the humanity, the pathos,

of Chaucer. The story of _Constance_ appears to have been taken by

Chaucer from one of the least artificial specimens of medieval

romance, the kind of romance that worked up in a random sort of way

the careless sequence of incidents in a popular traditional tale. Just

as the tellers of the stories in Campbell's _Highland Tales_, and

other authentic collections, make no scruple about proportion where

their memory happens to fail them or their irrelevant fancy to

distract them, but go on easily, dropping out a symmetrical adventure

here and there, and repeating a favourite "machine" if necessary or

unnecessary; so the story of _Constance_ forgets and repeats itself.

The voice is the voice of Chaucer, and so are the thoughts, but the

order or disorder of the story is that of the old wives' tales when

the old wives are drowsy. All the principal situations occur twice

over; twice the heroine is persecuted by a wicked mother-in-law, twice

sent adrift in a rudderless boat, twice rescued from a churl, and so

on. In this story the poetry of Chaucer appears as something almost

independent of the structure of the plot; there has been no such

process of design and reconstruction as in the _Knight's Tale_.

It is almost as strange to find Chaucer in other stories, as in the

_Franklin's Tale_ and the _Clerk's Tale_, putting up with the most

abstract medieval conventions of morality; the Point of Honour in the

_Franklin's Tale_, and the unmitigated virtue of Griselda, are

hopelessly opposed to anything like dramatic truth, and very far

inferior as motives to the ethical ideas of many stories of the

twelfth century. The truth of _Enid_ would have given no opportunity

for the ironical verses in which Chaucer takes his leave of the Clerk

of Oxford and his heroine.

In these romances Chaucer leaves some old medieval difficulties

unresolved and unreconciled, without attempting to recast the

situation as he found it in his authorities, or to clear away the

element of unreason in it. He takes the framework as he finds it, and

embroiders his poetry over it, leaving an obvious discrepancy between

his poetry and its subject-matter.

In some other stories, as in the _Legend of Good Women_, and the tale

of Virginia, he is content with pathos, stopping short of vivid drama.

In the _Knight's Tale_ he seems to have deliberately chosen a

compromise between the pathetic mood of pure romance and a fuller

dramatic method; he felt, apparently, that while the contrast between

the two rivals admitted of drama, the position of the lady Emily in

the story was such as to prevent a full dramatic rendering of all the

characters. The plot required that the lady Emily should be left

without much share of her own in the action.

The short and uncompleted poem of _Anelida_ gains in significance and

comes into its right place in Chaucer's works, when it is compared

with such examples of the older school as the _Chastelaine de Vergi_.

It is Chaucer's essay in that delicate abstract fashion of story which

formed one of the chief accomplishments of the French Romantic School.

It is his acknowledgment of his debt to the artists of sensibility,

the older French authors, "that can make of sentiment," and it proves,

like all his writings, how quick he was to save all he could from the

teaching of his forerunners, for the profit of "that fair style that

has brought him honour." To treat a simple problem, or "case," of

right and wrong in love, was a favourite task of medieval courtly

poetry, narrative and lyric. Chaucer in his _Anelida_ takes up this

old theme again, treating it in a form between narrative and lyric,

with the pure abstract melody that gives the mood of the actors apart

from any dramatic individuality. He is one of the Extractors of

Quintessence, and his _Anelida_ is the formal spirit, impalpable yet

definite, of the medieval courtly romance.

It is not here, but in a poem the opposite of this in fulness and

richness of drama, that Chaucer attains a place for himself above all

other authors as the poet who saw what was needed to transform

medieval romance out of its limitations into a new kind of narrative.

Chaucer's _Troilus and Criseyde_ is the poem in which medieval romance

passes out of itself into the form of the modern novel. What Cervantes

and what Fielding did was done first by Chaucer; and this was the

invention of a kind of story in which life might be represented no

longer in a conventional or abstract manner, or with sentiment and

pathos instead of drama, but with characters adapting themselves to

different circumstances, no longer obviously breathed upon by the

master of the show to convey his own ideas, but moving freely and

talking like men and women. The romance of the Middle Ages comes to an

end, in one of the branches of the family tree, by the production of a

romance that has all the freedom of epic, that comprehends all good

and evil, and excludes nothing as common or unclean which can be made

in any way to strengthen the impression of life and variety. Chaucer

was not tempted by the phantasm of the Epic Poem like Boccaccio, and

like so many of the great and wise in later generations. The substance

of Epic, since his time, has been appropriated by certain writers of

history, as Fielding has explained in his lectures on that science in

_Tom Jones_. The first in the line of these modern historians is

Chaucer with his _Troilus and Criseyde_, and the wonder still is as

great as it was for Sir Philip Sidney:--

Chaucer undoubtedly did excellently in his _Troylus_ and

_Cresseid_; of whom, truly I know not whether to mervaile

more, either that he in that mistie time could see so

clearely, or that wee in this cleare age walke so

stumblingly after him.

His great work grew out of the French Romantic School. The episode of

Troilus and Briseide in Benoit's _Roman de Troie_ is one of the best

passages in the earlier French romance; light and unsubstantial like

all the work of that School, but graceful, and not untrue. It is all

summed up in the monologue of Briseide at the end of her story (l.

20,308):--

Dex donge bien a Troylus!

Quant nel puis amer ne il mei

A cestui[90] me done et otrei.

Molt voldreie aveir cel talent

Que n'eüsse remembrement

Des ovres faites d'en arriere:

Ço me fait mal à grant manière!

[Footnote 90: _i.e._ Diomede.]

Boccaccio took up this story, from the Latin version of the Tale of

Troy, the _Historia Trojana_ of Guido. His _Filostrato_ is written on

a different plan from the _Teseide_; it is one of his best works. He

did not make it into an epic poem; the _Filostrato_, Boccaccio's

_Troilus and Cressida_, is a romance, differing from the older French

romantic form not in the design of the story, but in the new poetical

diction in which it is composed, and its new poetical ideas. There is

no false classicism in it, as there is in his _Palamon and Arcita_; it

is a novel of his own time, a story of the _Decameron_, only written

at greater length, and in verse. Chaucer, the "great translator," took

Boccaccio's poem and treated it in his own way, not as he had dealt

with the _Teseide_. The _Teseide_, because there was some romantic

improbability in the story, he made into a romance. The story of

Troilus he saw was strong enough to bear a stronger handling, and

instead of leaving it a romance, graceful and superficial as it is in

Boccaccio, he deepened it and filled it with such dramatic imagination

and such variety of life as had never been attained before his time by

any romancer; and the result is a piece of work that leaves all

romantic convention behind. The _Filostrato_ of Boccaccio is a story

of light love, not much more substantial, except in its new poetical

language, than the story of _Flamenca_. In Chaucer the passion of

Troilus is something different from the sentiment of romance; the

changing mind of Cressida is represented with an understanding of the

subtlety and the tragic meaning of that life which is "Time's fool."

Pandarus is the other element. In Boccaccio he is a personage of the

same order as Troilus and Cressida; they all might have come out of

the Garden of the _Decameron_, and there is little to choose between

them. Chaucer sets him up with a character and a philosophy of his

own, to represent the world outside of romance. The Comic Genius

claims a share in the tragedy, and the tragedy makes room for him,

because the tragic personages, "Tragic Comedians" as they are, can

bear the strain of the contrast. The selection of personages and

motives is made in another way in the romantic schools, but this poem

of Chaucer's is not romance. It is the fulfilment of the prophecy of

Socrates, just before Aristophanes and the tragic poet had to be put

to bed at the end of the _Symposium_, that the best author of tragedy

is the best author of comedy also. It is the freedom of the

imagination, beyond all the limits of partial and conventional forms.

NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS

APPENDIX

NOTE A (p. 133)

_Rhetoric of the Western and Northern Alliterative Poems_

Any page of the Anglo-Saxon poets, and of the "Elder Edda," will show

the difference between the "continuous" and the "discrete"--the

Western and the Northern--modes of the alliterative verse. It may be

convenient to select some passages here for reference.

(1) As an example of the Western style ("the sense variously drawn out

from one verse to another"), the speech of the "old warrior" stirring

up vengeance for King Froda (_Beowulf_, l. 2041 _sq._; see above, p.

70):--

þonne cwið æt beore se ðe beah gesyhð,

eald æscwiga, se ðe eall geman

garcwealm gumena (him bið grim sefa)

onginneð geomormod geongum cempan

þurh hreðra gehygd higes cunnian,

wigbealu weccean, ond þæt word acwyð:

"Meaht ðu, min wine, mece gecnawan,

þone þin fæder to gefeohte bær

under heregriman, hindeman siðe,

dyre iren, þær hine Dene slogon,

weoldon wælstowe, syððan Wiðergyld læg

æfter hæleþa hryre, hwate Scyldingas?

Nu her þara banena byre nathwylces,

frætwum hremig, on flet gæð,

mordres gylpeð ond þone maðþum byreð

þone þe þu mid rihte rædan sceoldest!"

(The "old warrior"--no less a hero than Starkad himself, according to

Saxo--bears a grudge on account of the slaying of Froda, and cannot

endure the reconciliation that has been made. He sees the reconciled

enemies still wearing the spoils of war, arm-rings, and even Froda's

sword, and addresses Ingeld, Froda's son):--

Over the ale he speaks, seeing the ring,

the old warrior, that remembers all,

the spear-wrought slaying of men (his thought is grim),

with sorrow at heart begins with the young champion,

in study of mind to make trial of his valour,

to waken the havoc of war, and thus he speaks:

"Knowest thou, my lord? nay, well thou knowest the falchion

that thy father bore to the fray,

wearing his helmet of war, in that last hour,

the blade of price, where the Danes him slew,

and kept the field, when Withergyld was brought down

after the heroes' fall; yea, the Danish princes slew him!

See now, a son of one or other of the men of blood,

glorious in apparel, goes through the hall,

boasts of the stealthy slaying, and bears the goodly heirloom

that thou of right shouldst have and hold!"

(2) The Northern arrangement, with "the sense concluded in the

couplet," is quite different from the Western style. There is no need

to quote more than a few lines. The following passage is from the last

scene of _Helgi and Sigrun_ (_C.P.B._, i. p. 143; see p. 72

above--"Yet precious are the draughts," etc.):--

Vel skolom drekka dýrar veigar

þótt misst hafim munar ok landa:

skal engi maðr angr-lióð kveða,

þótt mer á briósti benjar líti.

Nú ero brúðir byrgðar í haugi,

lofða dísir, hjá oss liðnom.