THE ROMANCES
All through the time between the Norman Conquest and Chaucer one feels
that _the Court_ is what determines the character of poetry and prose.
The English writers almost always have to bear in mind their inferiority
to French, and it is possible to describe their efforts during three
centuries (1100-1400) as generally directed towards the ideal of French
poetry, a struggle to realize in English what had been already achieved
in French, to make English literature polite.
In the history of the English romances this may be tested in various
ways. To begin with, there is the fact that many writers living in
England wrote French, and that some French romances, not among the worst,
were composed in England. It can hardly be doubted that such was the case
with the famous love-story of _Amadas and Ydoine_; it is certain that the
romance of _Ipomedon_ was composed by an Englishman, Hue de Rotelande.
Those two works of fiction are, if not the noblest, at any rate among the
most refined of their species; _Amadas and Ydoine_ is as perfect a
romance of true love as _Amadis of Gaul_ in later days—a history which
possibly derived the name of its hero from the earlier Amadas. _Ipomedon_
is equally perfect in another way, being one of the most clever and
successful specimens of the conventionally elegant work which was
practised by imitative poets after the fashion had been established.
There is no better romance to look at in order to see what things were
thought important in the ‘school’, i.e. among the well-bred unoriginal
writers who had learned the necessary style of verse, and who could turn
out a showy piece of new work by copying the patterns they had before
them. Both _Ipomedon_ and _Amadas and Ydoine_ are in the best possible
style—the genteelest of tunes. The fact is clear, that in the twelfth
century literary refinement was as possible in England as in France, so
long as one used the French language.
It must not be supposed that everything written in French, whether in
France or England, was courtly or refined. There is plenty of rough
French written in England—some of it very good, too, like the prose story
of Fulk Fitzwaryn, which many people would find much more lively than the
genteel sentimental novels. But while French could be used for all
purposes, polite or rude, English was long compelled to be rude and
prevented from competing on equal terms with the language of those ‘who
have used court’.
It is very interesting to see how the English translated and adapted the
polite French poems, because the different examples show so many
different degrees of ambition and capacity among the native English. In
the style of the English romances—of which there are a great many
varieties—one may read the history of the people; the romances bring one
into relation with different types of mind and different stages of
culture. What happened to _Ipomedon_ is a good illustration. First there
is the original French poem—a romantic tale in verse written in the
regular French short couplets of octosyllabic lines—well and correctly
written by a man of English birth. In this production Hue de Rotelande,
the author, meant to do his best and to beat all other competitors. He
had the right sort of talent for this—not for really original
imagination, but for the kind of work that was most in fashion in his
time. He did not, like some other poets, look for a subject or a
groundwork in a Breton lay, or an Arabian story brought from the East by
a traveller; instead of that he had read the most successful romances and
he picked out of them, here and there, what suited him best for a new
combination. He took, for example, the idea of the lover who falls in
love with a lady he has never seen (an idea much older than the French
romantic school, but that does not matter, for the present); he took the
story of the proud lady won by faithful service; he took from one of the
Arthurian romances another device which is older than any particular
literature, the champion appearing, disguised in different colours, on
three successive days. In _Ipomedon_, of course, the days are days of
tournament, and the different disguises three several suits of armour.
The scene of the story is Apulia and Calabria, chosen for no particular
reason except perhaps to get away from the scene of the British romances.
The hero’s name, Hippomedon, is Greek, like the names in the _Romance of
Thebes_, like Palamon and Arcita, which are taken from the Greek names
Palæmon and Archytas. Everything is borrowed, and nothing is used
clumsily. _Ipomedon_ is made according to a certain prescription, and it
is made exactly in the terms of the prescription—a perfect example of the
regular fashionable novel, well entitled to its place in any literary
museum. This successful piece was turned into English in at least two
versions. One of these imitates the original verse of _Ipomedon_, it is
written in the ordinary short couplets. In every other respect it fails
to represent the original. It leaves things out, and spoils the
construction, and misses the point. It is one of our failures. The other
version is much more intelligent and careful; the author really was doing
as much as he could to render his original truly. But he fails in his
choice of verse; he translates the French couplets of _Ipomedon_ into a
form of stanza, like that which Chaucer burlesques in _Sir Thopas_. It is
a very good kind of stanza, and this anonymous English poet manages it
well. But it is the wrong sort of measure for that kind of story. It is a
dancing, capering measure, and ill suited to translate the French verse,
which is quiet, sedate, and not emphatic. These two translations show how
the English were apt to fail. Some of them were stupid, and some of them
had the wrong sort of skill.
It may be an accident that the English who were so fond of translating
from the French should (apparently) have taken so little from the chief
French poet of the twelfth century. This was Chrestien de Troyes, who was
in his day everything that Racine was five hundred years later; that is
to say, he was the successful and accomplished master of all the
subtleties of emotion, particularly of love, expressed in the newest,
most engaging and captivating style—the perfect manner of good society.
His fine narrative poems were thoroughly appreciated in Germany, where
German was at that time the language of all the courts, and where the
poets of the land were favoured and protected in the same way as poets in
France and Provence. In English there is only one romance extant which is
translated from Chrestien de Troyes; and the character of the translation
is significant: it proves how greatly the circumstances and conditions of
literature in England differed from those of France and Germany. The
romance is _Ywain and Gawain_, a translation of Chrestien’s _Yvain_,
otherwise called _Le Chevalier au Lion_. It is a good romance, and in
style it is much closer to the original than either of the two versions
of _Ipomedon_, lately mentioned; no other of the anonymous romances comes
so near to the standard of Chaucer and Gower. It is good in manner; its
short couplets (in the language of the North of England) reproduce very
well the tone of French narrative verse. But the English writer is
plainly unable to follow the French in all the effusive passages; he
thinks the French is too long, and he cuts down the speeches. On the
other hand (to show the difference between different countries), the
German translator Hartmann von Aue, dealing with the same French poem,
admires the same things as the French author, and spins out his
translation to a greater length than the original. Another historical
fact of the same sort is that the English seem to have neglected the
_Roman d’Eneas_; while German historians note that it was a translation
of this French poem, the _Eneide_ of Heinrich van Valdeke, which first
introduced the courteous literary form of romance into Germany. German
poetry about the year 1200 was fully the equal of French, in the very
qualities on which the French authors prided themselves. England was
labouring far behind.
It is necessary to judge England in comparison with France, if the
history of medieval poetry is to be written and studied at all. But the
comparison ought not to be pressed so far as to obliterate all the
genuine virtues of the English writers because they are not the same as
the French. There is another consideration also which ought not to be
left out. It is true that the most remarkable thing in the French
romances was their ‘language of the heart’, their skill in rendering
passion and emotion—their ‘sensibility’, to use an eighteenth-century
name for the same sort of disposition. But this emotional skill, this
ingenious use of passionate language in soliloquies and dialogues, was
not the only attraction in the French romances. It was the most important
thing at the time, and historically it is what gives those romances, of
Chrestien de Troyes and others, their rank among the poetical ideas of
the world. It was through their sensibility that they enchanted their own
time, and this was the spirit which passed on from them to later
generations through the prose romances of the fourteenth century, such as
_Amadis of Gaul_, to those of the seventeenth century, such as the _Grand
Cyrus_ or _Cassandra_. To understand what the works of Chrestien de
Troyes meant for his contemporaries one cannot do better than read the
letters in which Dorothy Osborne speaks of her favourite characters in
the later French prose romances, those ‘monstrous fictions’, as Scott
called them, ‘which constituted the amusement of the young and the gay in
the age of Charles II’. Writing to Sir William Temple she says: ‘Almanzor
is as fresh in my memory as if I had visited his tomb but yesterday. . .
. You will believe I had not been used to great afflictions when I made
his story such an one to me as I cried an hour together for him, and was
so angry with Alcidiana that for my life I could never love her after
it’. Almanzor and Alcidiana, and the sorrows that so touched their gentle
readers in the age of Louis XIV and Charles II, were the descendants of
Chrestien de Troyes in a direct line; they represent what is enduring and
inexhaustible in the spirit of the older polite literature in France.
Sentiment in modern fiction can be traced back to Chrestien de Troyes. It
is a fashion which was established then and has never been extinguished
since; if there is to be any history of ideas at all, this is what has to
be recorded as the principal influence in French literature in the
twelfth century. But it was not everything, and it was not a simple
thing. There are many varieties of sentiment, and besides sentiment there
are many other interests in the old French romantic literature. The works
of Chrestien de Troyes may be taken as examples again. In one, _Cliges_,
there are few adventures; in _Perceval_ (the story of the Grail), his
last poem, the adventures are many and wonderful. In his _Lancelot_, the
sentimental interest is managed in accordance with the rules of the
Provençal poetry at its most refined and artificial height; but his story
of _Enid_ is in substance the same as Tennyson’s, a romance which does
not need (like Chrestien’s _Lancelot_) any study of a special code of
behaviour to explain the essence of it. The lovers here are husband and
wife (quite against the Provençal rules), and the plot is pure comedy, a
misunderstanding cleared away by the truth and faithfulness of the
heroine.
Further, although it is true that adventure is not the chief interest
with Chrestien de Troyes and his followers, it is not true that it is
neglected by them; and besides, although they were the most fashionable
and most famous and successful authors of romance, they were not the only
story-tellers nor was their method the only one available. There was a
form of short story, commonly called _lai_ and associated with Brittany,
in which there was room for the same kind of matter as in many of the
larger romances, but not for the same expression and effusion of
sentiment. The best known are those of Marie de France, who dedicated her
book of stories to King Henry of England (Henry II). One of the best of
the English short romances, _Sir Launfal_, is taken from Marie de France;
her stories have a beauty which was not at the time so enthralling as the
charm of the longer stories, and which had nothing like the same
influence on the literature of the future, but which now, for those who
care to look at it, has much more freshness, partly because it is nearer
to the fairy mythology of popular tradition. The longer romances are
really modern novels—studies of contemporary life, characters and
emotions, mixed up with adventures more or less surprising. The shorter
_lais_ (like that of _Sir Launfal_) might be compared to the stories of
Hans Christian Andersen; they are made in the same way. Like many of
Andersen’s tales, they are borrowed from folk-lore; like them, again,
they are not mere transcripts from an uneducated story-teller. They are
‘old wives’ tales’, but they are put into fresh literary form. This new
form may occasionally interfere with something in the original
traditional version, but it does not, either with Marie de France or with
Andersen, add too much to the original. Curiously, there is an example in
English, among the shorter rhyming romances, of a story which Andersen
has told in his own way under the title of the _Travelling Companion_.
The English _Sir Amadace_ is unfortunately not one of the best of the
short stories—not nearly as good as _Sir Launfal_—but still it shows how
a common folk-lore plot, the story of the Grateful Dead, might be turned
into literary form without losing all its original force and without
being transformed into a mere vehicle for modern literary ambitions.
The relations between folk-lore and literature are forced on the
attention when one is studying the Middle Ages, and perhaps most of all
in dealing with this present subject, the romances of the age of
chivalry. In Anglo-Saxon literature it is much less to the fore, probably
not because there was little of it really, but because so little has been
preserved. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries there was a great
stirring-up of popular mythology in a number of countries, so that it
came to be noticed, and passed into scores of books, both in the form of
plots for stories, and also in scientific remarks made by investigators
and historians. Giraldus Cambrensis is full of folk-lore, and about the
same time Walter Map (in his _De Nugis Curialium_) and Gervase of Tilbury
(in his _Otia Imperialia_) were taking notes of the same sort. Both
Giraldus and Walter Map were at home in Wales, and it was particularly in
the relation between the Welsh and their neighbours that the study of
folk-lore was encouraged; both the historical study, as in the works of
these Latin authors just named, and the traffic in stories to be used for
literary purposes in the vernacular languages whether French or English.
The ‘matter of Britain’ in the stories of Tristram, Gawain, Perceval and
Lancelot came to be associated peculiarly with the courteous sentimental
type of romance which had such vogue and such influence in the Middle
Ages. But the value of this ‘matter’—the Celtic stories—was by no means
exclusively connected with the ambitious literary art of Chrestien and
others like him. Apart from form altogether, it counts for something that
such a profusion of stories was sent abroad over all the nations. They
were interesting and amusing, in whatever language they were told. They
quickened up people’s imaginations and gave them something to think
about, in the same way as the Italian novels which were so much read in
the time of Shakespeare, or the trashy German novels in the time of
Shelley.
It is much debated among historians whether it was from Wales or Brittany
that these stories passed into general circulation. It seems most
probable that the two Welsh countries on both sides of the Channel gave
stories to their neighbours—to the Normans both in France and England,
and to the English besides on the Welsh borders. It seems most probable
at any rate that the French had not to wait for the Norman Conquest
before they picked up any Celtic stories. The Arthurian names in Italy
(mentioned already above, p. 50) are found too early, and the dates do
not allow time for the stories to make their way, and find favour, and
tempt people in Lombardy to call their children after Gawain instead of a
patron saint. It is certain that both in Brittany—Little Britain—and in
Wales King Arthur was a hero, whose return was to put all things right.
It was to fulfil this prophecy that Geoffrey Plantagenet’s son was called
Arthur, and a Provençal poet hails the child with these auspices: ‘Now
the Bretons have got their Arthur’. Other writers speak commonly of the
‘Breton folly’—this hope of a deliverer was the Breton vanity, well known
and laughed at by the more practical people across the border.
Arthur, however, was not the proper hero of the romantic tales, either in
their shorter, more popular form or in the elaborate work of the courtly
school. In many of the _lais_ he is never mentioned; in most of the
romances, long or short, early or late, he has nothing to do except to
preside over the feast, at Christmas or Whitsuntide, and wait for
adventures. So he is represented in the English poem of _Sir Gawayn and
the Grene Knyght_. The stories are told not about King Arthur, but about
Gawain or Perceval, Lancelot or Pelleas or Pellenore.
The great exception to this general rule is the history of Arthur which
was written by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the first half of the twelfth
century as part of his Latin history of Britain. This history of Arthur
was of course translated wherever Geoffrey was translated, and sometimes
it was picked out for separate treatment, as by the remarkable author of
the _Morte Arthure_, one of the best of the alliterative poems. Arthur
had long been known in Britain as a great leader against the Saxon
invaders; Geoffrey of Monmouth took up and developed this idea in his own
way, making Arthur a successful opponent not of the Saxons merely but of
Rome; a conqueror of kingdoms, himself an emperor before whom the power
of Rome was humbled. In consequence of which the ‘Saxons’ came to think
of their country as Britain, and to make Arthur their national hero, in
the same way as Charlemagne was the national hero in France. Arthur also,
like Charlemagne, came to be generally respected all over Christendom, in
Norway and Iceland, as well as Italy and Greece. Speaking generally,
whenever Arthur is a great conquering hero like Alexander or Charlemagne
this idea of him is due to Geoffrey of Monmouth; the stories where he
only appears as holding a court and sending out champions are stories
that have come from popular tradition, or are imitations of such stories.
But there are some exceptions. For one thing, Geoffrey’s representation
of Arthur is not merely a composition after the model of Alexander the
Great or Charlemagne; the story of Arthur’s fall at the hands of his
nephew is traditional. And when Layamon a ‘Saxon’ turned the French
rhyming version of Geoffrey into English—Layamon’s _Brut_—he added a
number of things which are neither in the Latin nor the French, but
obtained by Layamon himself independently, somehow or other, from the
Welsh. Layamon lived on the banks of the Severn, and very probably he may
have done the same kind of note-taking in Wales or among Welsh
acquaintances as was done by Walter Map a little earlier. Layamon’s
additions are of great worth; he tells the story of the passing of
Arthur, and it is from Layamon, ultimately, that all the later
versions—Malory’s and Tennyson’s—are derived.
None of the English authors can compete with the French poets as elegant
writers dealing with contemporary manners. But apart from that kind of
work almost every variety of interest may be found in the English
stories. There are two, _King Horn_ and _Havelok the Dane_, which appear
to be founded on national English traditions coming down from the time of
the Danish wars. _King Horn_ is remarkable for its metre—short rhyming
couplets, but not in the regular eight-syllable lines which were imitated
from the French. The verse appears to be an adaptation of the old native
English measure, fitted with regular rhymes. Rhyme was used in
continental German poetry, and in Icelandic, and occasionally in
Anglo-Saxon, before there were any French examples to follow; and _King
Horn_ is one thing surviving to show how the English story-tellers might
have got on if they had not paid so much attention to the French
authorities in rhyme. The story of Havelok belongs to the town of Grimsby
particularly and to the Danelaw, the district of England occupied by
Danish settlers. The name Havelok is the Danish, or rather the Norwegian,
Anlaf or Olaf, and the story seems to be a tradition in which two
historical Olafs have been confused—one the Olaf who was defeated at the
battle of Brunanburh, the other the Olaf who won the battle of
Maldon—Olaf Tryggvason, King of Norway. _Havelok_, the English story, is
worth reading as a good specimen of popular English poetry in the
thirteenth century, a story where the subject and the scene are English,
where the manners are not too fine, and where the hero, a king’s son
disinherited and unrecognized, lives as a servant for a long time and so
gives the author a chance of describing common life and uncourtly
manners. And he does this very well, particularly in the athletic sports
where Havelok distinguishes himself—an excellent piece to compare with
the funeral games which used to be a necessary part of every regular epic
poem. _Horn_ and _Havelok_, though they belong to England, are scarcely
to be reckoned as part of the ‘matter of Britain’, at least as that was
understood by the French author who used the term. There are other
stories which will not go easily into that or into either of the two
other divisions. One of these is the story of _Floris and Blanchefleur_,
which was turned into English in the thirteenth century—one of the oldest
among the rhyming romances. This is one of the many stories that came
from the East. It is the history of two young lovers who are separated
for a time—a very well known and favourite type of story. This is the
regular plot in the Greek prose romances, such as that of Heliodorus
which was so much admired after the Renaissance. This story of _Floris
and Blanchefleur_, however, does not come from Greece, but from the same
source as the _Arabian Nights_. Those famous stories, the Thousand and
One Nights, were not known in Europe till the beginning of the eighteenth
century, but many things of the same sort had made their way in the
Middle Ages into France, and this was the best of them all. It is found
in German and Dutch, as well as in English; also in Swedish and Danish,
in the same kind of short couplets—showing how widely the fashions of
literature were prescribed by France among all the Teutonic races.
How various the styles of romance might be is shown by two poems which
are both found in the famous _Auchinleck_ manuscript in Edinburgh, _Sir
Orfeo_ and _Sir Tristrem_. The stories are two of the best known in the
world. _Sir Orfeo_ is Orpheus. But this version of Orpheus and Eurydice
is not a translation from anything classical; it is far further from any
classical original than even the very free and distinctly ‘Gothic’
rendering of Jason and Medea at the beginning of the old French tale of
Troy. The story of Orpheus has passed through popular tradition before it
turns into _Sir Orfeo_. It shows how readily folk-lore will take a
suggestion from book-learning, and how easily it will make a classical
fable into the likeness of a Breton lay. Orfeo was a king, and also a
good harper:
He hath a queen full fair of price
That is clepèd Dame Erodys.
One day in May Queen Erodys slept in her orchard, and when she awoke was
overcome with affliction because of a dream—a king had appeared to her,
with a thousand knights and fifty ladies, riding on snow-white steeds.
The king had a crown on his head
It was no silver, ne gold red,
All it was of precious stone,
As bright as sun forsooth it shone.
He made her ride on a white palfrey to his own land, and showed her
castles and towers, meadows, fields and forests; then he brought her
home, and told her that the next day she would be taken away for ever.
The king kept watch on the morrow with two hundred knights; but there was
no help; among them all she was fetched away ‘with the faerie’. Then King
Orfeo left his kingdom, and went out to the wilderness to the ‘holtes
hoar’ barefoot, taking nothing of all his wealth but his harp only.
In summer he liveth by hawès
That on hawthorne groweth by shawès,
And in winter by root and rind
For other thing may he none find.
No man could tell of his sore
That he suffered ten year and more,
He that had castle and tower,
Forest, frith, both field and flower,
Now hath he nothing that him liketh
But wild beasts that by him striketh.
Beasts and birds came to listen to his harping—
When the weather is clear and bright,
He taketh his harp anon right;
Into the wood it ringeth shrill
As he could harpè at his will:
The wildè bestès that there beth
For joy about him they geth
All the fowlès that there were
They comen about him there
To hear harping that was fine
So mickle joy was therein.
. . .
Oft he saw him beside
In the hotè summer tide
The king of Fayré with his rout
Came to hunt all about.
. . .
Sometimes he saw the armed host of the Faerie; sometimes knights and
ladies together, in bright attire, riding an easy pace, and along with
them all manner of minstrelsy. One day he followed a company of the Fairy
ladies as they were hawking by the river (or rather the _rivere_—i.e. the
bank of the stream) at
Pheasant heron and cormorant;
The fowls out of the river flew
Every falcon his game slew.
King Orfeo saw that and laughed and rose up from his resting-place and
followed, and found his wife among them; but neither might speak with the
other—
But there might none with other speak
Though she him knew and he her, eke.
But he took up his harp and followed them fast, over stock and stone, and
when they rode into a hillside—‘in at the roche’—he went in after them.
When he was into the roche y-go
Well three mile, and some deal mo
He came to a fair countray
Was as bright as any day.
There in the middle of a lawn he saw a fair high castle of gold and
silver and precious stones.
No man might tell ne think in thought
The riches that therein was wrought.
The porter let him in, as a minstrel, and he was brought before the king
and queen. ‘How do you come here?’ said the king; ‘I never sent for you,
and never before have I known a man so hardy as to come unbidden.’ Then
Sir Orfeo put in a word for the minstrels; ‘It is our manner’, he said,
‘to come to every man’s house unbidden’,
‘And though we nought welcome be
Yet we must proffer our game or glee.’
Then he took his harp and played, and the king offered him whatever he
should ask.
‘Minstrel, me liketh well thy glee.’
Orfeo asked for the lady bright. ‘Nay’, said the king, ‘that were a foul
match, for in her there is no blemish and thou art rough and black’.
‘Fouler still’, said Orfeo, ‘to hear a leasing from a king’s mouth’; and
the king then let him go with good wishes, and Orfeo and Erodys went
home. The steward had kept the kingdom truly; ‘thus came they out of
care’.
It is all as simple as can be; a rescue out of fairyland, through the
power of music; the ideas are found everywhere, in ballads and stories.
The ending is happy, and nothing is said of the injunction not to look
back. It was probably left out when Orpheus was turned into a fairy tale,
on account of the power of music; the heart of the people felt that
Orpheus the good harper ought not to be subjected to the common plot. For
there is nothing commoner in romance or in popular tales than
forgetfulness like that of Orpheus when he lost Eurydice; the plot of
_Sir Launfal_ e.g. turns on that; he was warned not to speak of his fairy
wife, but he was led, by circumstances over which he had no control, to
boast of her—
To speke ne mightè he forgo
And said the queen before:
‘I have loved a fairer woman
Than thou ever laidest thine eye upon,
This seven year and more!’
The drama of _Lohengrin_ keeps this idea before the public (not to speak
of the opera of _Orfeo_), and _Lohengrin_ is a medieval German romance.
The Breton lay of Orpheus would not have been in any way exceptional if
it had kept to the original fable; the beauty of it loses nothing by the
course which it has preferred to take, the happy ending. One may refer to
it as a standard, to show what can be done in the medieval art of
narrative, with the simplest elements and smallest amount of decoration.
It is minstrel poetry, popular poetry—the point is clear when King Orfeo
excuses himself to the King of Faerie by the rules of his profession as a
minstrel; that was intended to produce a smile, and applause perhaps,
among the audience. But though a minstrel’s poem it is far from rude, and
it is quite free from the ordinary faults of rambling and prosing, such
as Chaucer ridiculed in his _Geste of Sir Thopas_. It is all in good
compass, and coherent; nothing in it is meaningless or ill-placed.
_Sir Tristrem_ is a great contrast to _Sir Orfeo_; not an absolute
contrast, for neither is this story rambling or out of compass. The
difference between the two is that _Sir Orfeo_ is nearly perfect as an
English representative of the ‘Breton lay’—i.e. the short French romantic
story like the _Lais_ of Marie de France; while _Sir Tristrem_ represents
no French style of narrative poetry, and is not very successful (though
technically very interesting) as an original English experiment in
poetical form. It is distinctly clever, as it is likewise ambitious. The
poet intends to do finer things than the common. He adopts a peculiar
stanza, not one of the easiest—a stanza more fitted for lyric than
narrative poetry, and which is actually used for lyrical verse by the
poet Laurence Minot. It is in short lines, well managed and effective in
their way, but it is a thin tinkling music to accompany the tragic story.
Ysonde bright of hewe
Is far out in the sea;
A wind again them blew
That sail no might there be;
So rew the knightes trewe,
Tristrem, so rew he,
Ever as they came newe
He one again them three
Great swink—
Sweet Ysonde the free
Asked Brengwain a drink.
The cup was richly wrought,
Of gold it was, the pin;
In all the world was nought
Such drink as there was in;
Brengwain was wrong bethought
To that drink she gan win
And sweet Ysonde it betaught;
She bad Tristrem begin
To say:
Their love might no man twin
Till their ending day.
The stage is that of a little neat puppet-show; with figures like those
of a miniature, dressed in bright armour, or in scarlet and vair and
grey—the rich cloth, the precious furs, grey and ermine, which so often
represent the glory of this world in the old romances—
Ysonde of highe pris,
The maiden bright of hewe,
That wered fow and gris
And scarlet that was newe;
In warld was none so wis
Of crafte that men knewe.
There is a large group of rhyming romances which might be named after
Chaucer’s _Sir Thopas_—the companions of _Sir Thopas_. Chaucer’s
burlesque is easily misunderstood. It is criticism, and it is ridicule;
it shows up the true character of the common minstrelsy; the rambling
narrative, the conventional stopgaps, the complacent childish vanity of
the popular artist who has his audience in front of him and knows all the
easy tricks by which he can hold their attention. Chaucer’s _Rime of Sir
Thopas_ is interrupted by the voice of common sense—rudely—
This may well be rime doggerel, quoth he.
But Chaucer has made a good thing out of the rhyme doggerel, and
expresses the pleasant old-fashioned quality of the minstrels’ romances,
as well as their absurdities.
His parody touches on the want of plan and method and meaning in the
popular rhymes of chivalry; it is also intended as criticism of their
verse. That verse, of which there are several varieties—there is more
than one type of stanza in _Sir Thopas_—is technically called _rime
couée_ or ‘tail-rhyme’, and like all patterns of verse it imposes a
certain condition of mind, for the time, on the poets who use it. It is
not absolutely simple, and so it is apt to make the writer well pleased
with himself when he finds it going well; it very readily becomes
monotonous and flat—
Now cometh the emperour of price,
Again him rode the king of Galice
With full mickle pride;
The child was worthy under weed
And sat upon a noble steed
By his father side;
And when he met the emperour
He valed his hood with great honour
And kissed him in that tide;
And other lords of great valour
They also kissèd Segramour
In heart is not to hide. (_Emaré._)
For that reason, because of the monotonous beat of the tail-rhymes in the
middle and at the end of the stanza, it is chosen by the parodists of
Wordsworth in the _Rejected Addresses_ when they are aiming at what they
think is flat and insipid in his poetry. But it is a form of stanza which
may be so used as to escape the besetting faults; the fact that it has
survived through all the changes of literary fashion, and has been used
by poets in all the different centuries, is something to the credit of
the minstrels, as against the rude common-sense criticism of the Host of
the Tabard when he stopped the Rime of _Sir Thopas_.
Chaucer’s catalogue of romances is well known—
Men speken of romances of prys
Of Horn Child and of Ypotys
Of Bevis and Sir Gy,
Of Sir Libeux and Pleyndamour,
But Sir Thopas he bereth the flour
Of royal chivalry.
In this summary, the name of _Pleyndamour_ is still a difficulty for
historians; it is not known to what book Chaucer was referring. _Ypotis_
is curiously placed, for the poem of _Ypotis_ is not what is usually
reckoned a romance. ‘Ypotis’ is Epictetus the Stoic philosopher, and the
poem is derived from the old moralizing dialogue literature; it is
related to the Anglo-Saxon dialogue of Solomon and Saturn. The other four
are well known. _Horn Childe_ is a later version, in stanzas, of the
story of _King Horn_. Bevis of Southampton and Guy of Warwick are among
the most renowned, and most popular, of all the chivalrous heroes. In
later prose adaptations they were current down to modern times; they were
part of the favourite reading of Bunyan, and gave him ideas for the
_Pilgrim’s Progress_. _Guy of Warwick_ was rewritten many times—Chaucer’s
pupil, Lydgate, took it up and made a new version of it. There was a
moral and religious strain in it, which appealed to the tastes of many;
the remarkable didactic prose romance of _Tirant the White_, written in
Spain in the fifteenth century, is connected with _Guy of Warwick_. Sir
Bevis is more ordinary and has no particular moral; it is worth reading,
if any one wishes to know what was regularly expected in romances by the
people who read, or rather who listened to them. The disinherited hero,
the beautiful Paynim princess, the good horse Arundel, the giant
Ascapart—these and many other incidents may be paralleled in other
stories; the history of Sir Bevis has brought them all together, and all
the popular novelist’s machinery might be fairly catalogued out of this
work alone.
_Sir Libeaus_—Le Beau Desconnu, the Fair Knight unknown—is a different
thing. This also belongs to the School of Sir Thopas—it is minstrels’
work, and does not pretend to be anything else. But it is well done. The
verse, which is in short measure like that of _Sir Tristrem_, but not in
so ambitious a stanza, is well managed—
That maide knelde in halle
Before the knightes alle
And seide: My lord Arthour!
A cas ther is befalle
Worse withinne walle
Was never non of dolour.
My lady of Sinadoune
Is brought in strong prisoun
That was of great valour;
Sche praith the sende her a knight
With herte good and light
To winne her with honour.
This quotation came from the beginning of the story, and it gives the one
problem which has to be solved by the hero. Instead of the mixed
adventures of Sir Bevis, there is only one principal one, which gives
occasion to all the adventures by the way. The lady of Sinodoun has
fallen into the power of two enchanters, and her damsel (with her dwarf
attendant) comes to the court of King Arthur to ask for a champion to
rescue her. It is a story like that of the Red Cross Knight and Una. If
Sir Bevis corresponds to what one may call the ordinary matter of
Spenser’s _Faerie Queen_, the wanderings, the separations, the dangerous
encounters, _Sir Libeaus_ resembles those parts of Spenser’s story where
the plot is most coherent. One of the most beautiful passages in all his
work, Britomart in the house of the enchanter Busirane, may have been
suggested by _Sir Libeaus. Sir Libeaus_ is one example of a kind of
medieval story, not the greatest, but still good and sound; the Arthurian
romance in which Arthur has nothing to do except to preside at the
beginning, and afterwards to receive the conquered opponents whom the
hero sends home from successive stages in his progress, to make
submission to the king. Sir Libeaus (his real name is Guinglain, the son
of Gawain) sets out on his journey with the damsel and the dwarf; at
first he is scorned by her, like Sir Gareth of Orkney in another story of
the same sort, but very soon he shows what he can do at the passage of
the Pont Perilous, and in the challenging of the gerfalcon, and many
other trials. Like other heroes of romance, he falls under the spell of a
sorceress who dazzles him with ‘fantasm and faerie’, but he escapes after
a long delay, and defeats the magicians of Sinodoun and rescues the lady
with a kiss from her serpent shape which the enchanters have put upon
her. Compared with Spenser’s house of Busirane, the scene of Sir Libeaus
at Sinodoun is a small thing. But one does not feel as in _Sir Tristrem_
the discrepancy between the miniature stage, the small bright figures,
and the tragic meaning of their story. Here the story is not tragic; it
is a story that the actors understand and can play rightly. There are no
characters and no motives beyond the scope of a fairy tale—
Sir Libeaus, knight corteis
Rode into the paleis
And at the halle alighte;
Trompes, homes, schalmeis,
Before the highe dais,
He herd and saw with sight;
Amid the halle floor
A fire stark and store
Was light and brende bright;
Then farther in he yede
And took with him his steed
That halp him in the fight.
Libeaus inner gan pace
To behold each place,
The hales in the halle; _niches_
Of main more ne lasse
Ne saw he body ne face
But menstrales clothed in palle;
With harpe, fithele and rote,
And with organes note,
Great glee they maden alle,
With citole and sautrie,
So moche menstralsie
Was never withinne walle.
As if to show the range and the difference of style in English romance,
there is another story written like _Sir Libeaus_ in the reign of Edward
III, taken from the same Arthurian legend and beginning in the same way,
which has scarcely anything in common with it except the general
resemblance in the plot. This is _Sir Gawain and the Green Knight_, one
of the most original works in medieval romance. It is written in
alliterative blank verse, divided into irregular periods which have
rhyming tailpieces at the end of them—
As hit is stad and stoken
In story stif and stronge
With leal letters loken
In land so has been longe.
While the story of _Sir Libeaus_ is found in different languages—French,
Italian, German—there is no other extant older version of _Gawain and the
Green Knight_. But the separate incidents are found elsewhere, and the
scene to begin with is the usual one: Arthur at his court, Arthur keeping
high festival and waiting for ‘some main marvel’. The adventure comes
when it is wanted; the Green Knight on his green horse rides into the
king’s hall—half-ogre, by the look of him, to challenge the Round Table.
What he offers is a ‘jeopardy’, a hazard, a wager. ‘Will any gentleman
cut off my head’, says he, ‘on condition that I may have a fair blow at
him, and no favour, in a twelvemonth’s time? Or if you would rather have
it so, let me have the first stroke, and I promise to offer my neck in
turn, when a year has gone’. This is the beheading game which is spoken
of in other stories (one of them an old Irish comic romance) but which
seems to have been new at that time to the knights of King Arthur. It is
rightly considered dangerous; and so it proved when Sir Gawain had
accepted the jeopardy. For after Gawain had cut off the stranger’s head,
the Green Knight picked it up by the hair, and held it up, and it spoke
and summoned Gawain to meet him at the Green Chapel in a year’s space,
and bide the return blow.
This is more surprising than anything in _Sir Bevis_ or _Sir Guy_. Not
much is done by the writer to explain it; at the same time nothing is
left vague. The author might almost have been a modern novelist with a
contempt for romance, trying, by way of experiment, to work out a
‘supernatural’ plot with the full strength of his reason; merely
accepting the fabulous story, and trying how it will go with accessories
from real life, and with modern manners and conversation. There is none
of the minstrel’s cant in this work, none of the cheap sensations, the
hackneyed wonders such as are ridiculed in _Sir Thopas_. Only, the
incident on which the whole story turns, the device of the beheading
game, is a piece of traditional romance. It is not found in every
language, but it is fairly well known. It is not as common as the lady
turned into a serpent, or the man into a werewolf, but still it is not
invented, it is borrowed by the English poet, and borrowed for a work
which always, even in the beheading scenes, is founded on reality.
It is probable that the author of _Sir Gawain_ is also the author of
three other poems (not romances) which are found along with it in the
same manuscript—the _Pearl_, _Cleanness_, and _Patience_. He is a writer
with a gift for teaching, of a peculiar sort. He is not an original
philosopher, and his reading appears to have been the usual sort of thing
among fairly educated men. He does not try to get away from the regular
authorities, and he is not afraid of commonplaces. But he has great force
of will, and a strong sense of the difficulties of life; also high
spirits and great keenness. His memory is well supplied from all that he
has gone through. The three sporting episodes in _Sir Gawain_, the
deer-hunt (in Christmas week, killing the hinds), the boar-hunt and the
fox-hunt, are not only beyond question as to their scientific truth; the
details are remembered without study because the author has lived in
them, and thus, minute as they are, they are not wearisome. They do not
come from a careful notebook; they are not like the descriptions of rooms
and furniture in painstaking novels. The landscapes and the weather of
_Sir Gawain_ are put in with the same freedom. The author has a talent
especially for winter scenes. ‘Grim Nature’s visage hoar’ had plainly
impressed his mind, and not in a repulsive way. The winter ‘mist hackles’
(copes of mist) on the hills, the icicles on the stones, the swollen
streams, all come into his work—a relief from the too ready illustrations
of spring and summer which are scattered about in medieval stories.
The meaning of the story is in the character of Gawain. Like some other
romances, this is a chivalrous _Pilgrim’s Progress_. Gawain, so much
vilified by authors who should have known better, is for this poet, as he
is for Chaucer, the perfection of courtesy. He is also the servant of Our
Lady, and bears her picture on his shield, along with the pentangle which
is the emblem of her Five Joys, as well as the Five Wounds of Christ. The
poem is the ordeal of Gawain; Gawain is tried in courage and loyalty by
his compact with the Green Knight; he is tried in loyalty and temperance
when he is wooed by the wanton conversation of the lady in the castle.
The author’s choice of a plot is justified, because what he wants is an
ordeal of courage, and that is afforded by the Green Knight’s ‘jeopardy’.
The alliterative poetry is almost always stronger than the tales in
rhyme, written with more zest, not so much in danger of droning and
sleepiness as the school of Sir Thopas undoubtedly is. But there is a
great difference among the alliterative romances. _William of Palerne_,
for example, is vigorous, but to little purpose, because the author has
not understood the character of the French poem which he has translated,
and has misapplied his vigorous style to the handling of a rather
sophisticated story which wanted the smooth, even, unemphatic, French
style to express it properly. _The Wars of Alexander_ is the least
distinguished of the group; there was another alliterative story of
Alexander, of which only fragments remain. The _Chevelere Assigne_, the
‘Knight of the Swan,’ is historically interesting, as giving the romantic
origin of Godfrey the Crusader, who is the last of the Nine Worthies.
Though purely romantic in its contents, the _Chevalier au Cygne_ belongs
to one of the French narrative groups usually called epic—the epic of
_Antioch_, which is concerned with the first Crusade. The _Gest historial
of the Destruction of Troy_ is of great interest; it is the liveliest of
all the extant ‘Troy Books’, and it has all the good qualities of the
fourteenth-century alliterative school, without the exaggeration and
violence which was the common fault of this style, as the contrary fault
of tameness was the danger of the rhyming romances. But the alliterative
poem which ranks along with _Sir Gawayne_ as an original work with a
distinct and fresh comprehension of its subject is the _Morte Arthure_.
This has some claim to be called an epic poem, an epic of the modern
kind, composed with a definite theory. The author takes the heroic view
of Arthur given by Geoffrey of Monmouth, and turns his warfare into a
reflection of the glory of King Edward III; not casually, but following
definite lines, with almost as much tenacity as the author of _Sir
Gawayne_, and, of course, with a greater theme. The tragedy of Arthur in
Malory to some extent repeats the work of this poet—whose name was
Huchoun of the Awle Ryale; it may have been Sir Hugh of Eglinton.