Romancein 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 theOdyssey, or the similes of the clouds, winds, and mountain-waters in theIliad. 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 despairof 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 thatare 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 heroicand 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 romanticschool, 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 theLégende 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 theAncient Mariner, orLa Belle Dame sans Merci, or theLady 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 asThalabafromKubla 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 leftthe 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 theFaery QueeneorLa Belle Dame sans Merci. There is more of the pure romantic element in the poems of Brynhild, in the story of Njal, in theSong 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 themasters 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 theGrand Cyrusthan 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 theQueste del St. Graal—a very different thing from Chrestien'sPerceval—it will be found, again and again, in the prose of Sir Thomas Malory; it will be found in many ballads and ballad burdens, inWilliam and Margaret, inBinnorie, in theWife of Usher's Well, in theRime of the Count Arnaldos, in theKönigskinder; 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 Nicolettecannot 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 sourcesof 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 allthe 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-SaxonEpistle of Alexanderseems to anticipate the popular taste for Eastern stories, just as the Anglo-Saxon version ofApollonius of Tyreanticipates 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 thePilgrimage 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 ofTroy 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:—
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 beastDindialos, which is hunted in the shadowless land by the savage people whose name isCenocefali; and the fringes of the mantle were not of the sable, but of a "beast of price" that dwells in the water of Paradise:—
Calchas had a tent which had belonged to Pharaoh:—
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'sTroilus and Cressidaon the ultimate authority (when it comes to be looked into) of Benoit de Sainte More.[80]
A quotation by M. Gaston Paris (Hist. litt. de la France, xxx. p. 210), from the unpublished romance ofIder(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 ofIderexplains 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:—
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. (Hyperbolemeans by definition that which is untrue and incredible.) I will only say of this pavilion that there was not its match under heaven.
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. (Hyperbolemeans 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 ofhyperbole[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 theHouse of Fame. Thus Chrestien seems to assert his superiorityof 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 ofEuphues, is bestowed in making pedantry look attractive.
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 hisErec,Lancelot, andYvain, not to speak of his unfinishedPerceval; while inCligeshe 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 withthe 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'sTroilusin our own time has inspired a new rendering of theLife 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 theKing's Son of Irelandwas 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 hisreading of theMetamorphoses; the passion of Medea, namely. But the story itself is hardly distinguishable in kind fromLibeaux 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 proseLancelotand in theQueste del St. GraalandMort 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 simplythan 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 translatingDidoandMedea, 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'sLectures, 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 theFrench versions ofTristram, as there is of the genius of Virgil in theRoman 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 theLay 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 ofGuinglain, 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 theConte du Graalof Chrestien with the EnglishSir Perceval of Galles.
Guingamoris one of the best of the simpler kindof 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, ofGuingamoris 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 thelande 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 ofwhat 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 ina 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 ofWalewein, 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'sWest Highland Tales(No. xlvi.), as well as of Grimm'sGolden 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 returnssuccessful. 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. InWaleweinthere 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'sLancelot. 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 theland 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 thePèlerinageor of Benoit'sTroy. 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 ofWaleweinwould 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, thiscourteous but rather dull and middle-aged gentleman in armour, is not his old light-hearted companion.
Still, though this story ofGawainis 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 ofWaleweinexisted once in a simpler and clearer form, like that ofGuingamor.
The curious sophistication ofGuinglainby 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 theMorte d'Arthur, and of the Red Cross Knight in Spenser, which is founded upon Malory'sGareth.[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 periodof 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."
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?
This poet ofTristramdoes 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 lostTristramof 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 thestory 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 theRomaunt of the Rose. The dominant interest in the French romances is the same as in the Provençal lyric poetry and in theRomaunt 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 theArt of Love. About this there can be no doubt, however great may seemto 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 theArt of Lovewas 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 theAeneid, theHeroidesof Ovid, and certain parts of theMetamorphoses. 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.
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 ofliterature than the story of Medea in theRoman de Troieof 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.
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 compositionin 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 toan 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 thereceptacles 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 arefanciful, 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 theRoman de la Rosein 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 theChevalier 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:—