‘Richard of Barbezieux the poet fell in love with a lady, the wife of a noble lord. She was gentle and fair, and gay and gracious, and very desirous of praise and honour; daughter of Jeffrey Rudel, prince of Blaye. And when she knew that he loved her, she made him fair semblance of love, so that he got hardihood to plead his suit to her. And she with gracious countenance of love treasured his praise of her, and accepted and listened, as a lady who had good will of a poet to make verses about her. And he composed his songs of her, and called herMielhs de Domna(‘Sovran Lady’) in his verse. And he took great delight in finding similitudes of beasts and birds and men in his poetry, and of the sun and the stars, so as to give new arguments such as no poet had found before him. Long time he sang to her; but it was never believed that she yielded to his suit.’
Provençal poetry cannot be shown to have had any direct influence upon English, which is rather strange considering the close relations between England and the districts where the Provençal language—thelangue d’oc—was spoken. It had great indirect influence, through the French. The French imitated the Provençal lyric poetry, as the Germans and the Italians did, and by means of the French poets the Provençal ideas found their way to England. But this took a long time. The Provençal poets were ‘courtly makers’; so were the French who copied them. The ‘courtly maker’ needs not only great houses and polite society for his audience; not only the fine philosophy ‘the love of honour and the honour of love’, which is the foundation of chivalrous romance. Besides allthis, he needs the reward and approbation of success in poetical art; he cannot thrive as an anonymous poet. And it is not till the time of Chaucer and Gower that there is found in England any poet making a great name for himself as a master of the art of poetry, like the Provençal masters Bernart de Ventadour or Arnaut Daniel in the twelfth century, or like the German Walther von der Vogelweide at the beginning of the thirteenth.
Lyric poetry of the Provençal kind was a most exacting and difficult art; it required very peculiar conditions before it could flourish and be appreciated, and those conditions did not exist in England or in the English language. At the same time the elaborate lyrics of Provence, like those of the Minnesingers in Germany, are pretty closely related to many ‘popular’ forms and motives. Besides the idealist love-poetry there were other kinds available—simple songs of lament, or of satire—comic songs—lyrics with a scene in them, such as the very beautiful one about the girl whose lover has gone on the Crusade. In such as these, though they have little directly to do with English poetry, may be found many illustrations of English modes of verse, and rich examples of that most delightful sort of poetry which refuses to be labelled either ‘courtly’ or ‘popular’.
In French literature, as distinct from Provençal, there was a ‘courtly’ strain which flourished in the same general conditions as the Provençal, but was not so hard to understand and had a much greater immediate effect on England.
The French excelled in narrative poetry. Thereseems to have been a regular exchange in poetry between the South and the North of France. French stories were translated into Provençal, Provençal lyrics were imitated in the North of France. Thus French lyric is partly Provençal in character, and it is in this way that the Provençal influence is felt in English poetry. The French narrative poetry, though it also is affected by ideas from the South, is properly French in origin and style. It is by means of narrative that the French ideal of courtesy and chivalry is made known, to the French themselves as well as to other nations.
In the twelfth century a considerable change was made in French poetry by the rise and progress of a new romantic school in succession to the oldchansons de geste—the epic poems on the ‘matter of France’. The old epics went down in the world, and gradually passed into the condition of merely ‘popular’ literature. Some of them survive to this day in roughly printed editions, like theReali di Francia, which is an Italian prose paraphrase of old French epics, and which seems to have a good sale in the markets of Italy still, asThe Seven Champions of Christendomused to have in England, andThe Four Sons of Aymonin France. The decline of the old epics began in the twelfth century through the competition of more brilliant new romances.
The subjects of these were generally taken either from the ‘matter of Britain’, or from antiquity, the ‘matter of Rome the Great’, which included Thebes and Troy. The new romantic school wanted new subjects, and by preference foreign subjects. This, however,was of comparatively small importance; it had long been usual for story-tellers to go looking for subjects to foreign countries; this is proved by the Saints’ Lives, and also by the story of Alexander the Great, which appeared in French before the new school was properly begun.
In form of verse the new romances generally differed from thechansons de geste, but this again is not an exact distinction. Apart from other considerations, the distinction fails because the octosyllabic rhyming measure, the short couplet, which was the ordinary form for fashionable romances, was also at the same time the ordinary form for everything else—for history, for moral and didactic poetry, and for comic stories like Reynard the Fox. The establishment of this ‘short verse’ (as the author ofHudibrascalls it) in England is one of the most obvious and one of the largest results of the literary influence of France, but it is not specially due to the romantic school.
The character of that school must be sought much more in its treatment of motives, and particularly in its use of sentiment. It is romantic in its fondness for strange adventures; but this taste is nothing new. The real novelty and the secret of its greatest success was its command of pathos, more especially in the pathetic monologues and dialogues of lovers. It is greatly indebted for this, as has been already remarked, to the Latin poets. TheAeneidis turned into a French romance (Roman d’Eneas); and the French author of theRoman de Troie, who gives the story of the Argonauts in the introductory part of his work, has borrowed much from Ovid’s Medea in theMetamorphoses. Virgil’s Dido and Ovid’s Medea had an immense effect on the imagination of the French poets and their followers. From Virgil and Ovid the medieval authors got the suggestion of passionate eloquence, and learned how to manage a love-story in a dramatic way—allowing the characters free scope to express themselves fully. Chivalrous sentiment in the romances is partly due to the example of the Latin authors, who wrote long passionate speeches for their heroines, or letters like that of Phyllis to Demophoon or Ariadne to Theseus and the rest of Ovid’sHeroides—the source of Chaucer’sLegend of Good Women. The idea of the lover as the servant of his mistress was also taken first of all from the Latin amatory poets. And the success of the new romantic school was gained by the working together of those ideas and examples, the new creation of chivalrous and courteous love out of those elements.
The ideas are the same in the lyric as in the narrative poetry; and it is allowable to describe a large part of the French romantic poems as being the expression in narrative of the ideas which had been lyrically uttered in the poetry of Provence—
The love of honour and the honour of love.
The love of honour and the honour of love.
The well-known phrase of Sidney is the true rendering of the Provençal spirit; it is found nearly in the same form in the old language—
Quar non es joys, si non l’adutz honors,Ni es honors, si non l’adutz amors.
Quar non es joys, si non l’adutz honors,
Ni es honors, si non l’adutz amors.
(There is no joy, if honour brings it not; nor is there honour, if love brings it not.)
The importance of all this for the history of Europe can scarcely be over-estimated. It was the beginning of a classical renaissance through the successful appropriation of classical ideas in modern languages and modern forms. It is true that the medieval version of theAeneidor of the story of the Argonauts may appear exceedingly quaint and ‘Gothic’ and childish, if it be thought of in comparison with the original; but if it be contrasted with the style of narrative which was in fashion before it, theRoman d’Eneascomes out as something new and promising. There is ambition in it, and the ambition is of the same sort as has produced all the finer sentimental fiction since. If it is possible anywhere to trace the pedigree of fashions in literature, it is here. All modern novelists are descended from this French romantic poetry of the twelfth century, and therefore from the classical poets to whom so much of the life of the French romances can be traced. The great poets of the Renaissance carry on in their own way the processes of adaptation which were begun in the twelfth century, and, besides that, many of them are directly indebted—Ariosto and Spenser, for example—to medieval romance.
Further, all the chivalrous ideals of the modern world are derived from the twelfth century. Honour and loyalty would have thriven without the chivalrous poets, as they had thriven before them in every nation on earth. But it is none the less true that the tradition of honour was founded for the sixteenth century and the eighteenth and the present day in Europe by the poets of the twelfth century.
The poetical doctrine of love, which is so great a part of chivalry, has had one effect both on civilization in general and on particular schools of poetry which it is hard to sum up and to understand. It is sometimes a courtly game like that described in the life of the troubadour quoted above; the lady pleased at the honour paid her and ready to accept the poet’s worship; the lady’s husband either amused by it all, or otherwise, if not amused, at any rate prevented by the rules of polite society from objecting; the poet enamoured according to the same code of law, with as much sincerity as that law and his own disposition might allow; thoroughly occupied with his own craft of verse and with the new illustrations from natural or civil history by means of which he hoped to make a name and go beyond all other poets. The difficulty is to know how much there is of pretence and artifice in the game. It is certain that the Provençal lyric poetry, and the other poetry derived from it in other languages, has many excellences besides the ingenious repetition of stock ideas in cleverly varied patterns of rhyme. The poets are not all alike, and the poems of one poet are not all alike. The same poem of Bernart de Ventadour contains a beautiful, true, fresh description of the skylark singing and falling in the middle of the song through pure delight in the rays of the sun; and also later an image of quite a different sort: the lover looking in the eyes of his mistress and seeing himself reflected there is in danger of the same fate as Narcissus, who pined away over his own reflection in the well. Imagination and Fancy are blended and interchanged in the troubadours as much as in anymodern poet. But apart from all questions of their value, there is no possible doubt that the Provençal idealism is the source, though not the only source, to which all the noblest lyric poetry of later times and other nations may be referred for its ancestry. The succession of schools (or whatever the right name may be) can be traced with absolute certainty through Dante and Petrarch in the fourteenth century to Ronsard and Spenser in the sixteenth, and further still.
The society which invented good manners and the theory of honour, which is at the beginning of all modern poetry and of all novels as well, is often slighted by modern historians. The vanity, the artifice, the pedantry can easily be noted and dismissed. The genius of the several writers is buried in the difficulty and unfamiliarity of the old languages, even where it has not been destroyed and lost in other ways. But still the spirit of Provençal lyric and of old French romance can be proved to be, at the very lowest estimate, the beginning of modern civilization, as distinct from the earlier Middle Ages.
All through the time between the Norman Conquest and Chaucer one feels thatthe Courtis 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 ofAmadas and Ydoine; it is certain that the romance ofIpomedonwas 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 Ydoineis as perfect a romance of true love asAmadis of Gaulin later days—a history which possibly derived the name of its hero from the earlier Amadas.Ipomedonis 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 lookat 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. BothIpomedonandAmadas and Ydoineare 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 toIpomedonis 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 correctlywritten 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. InIpomedon, 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 theRomance of Thebes, like Palamon and Arcita, which are taken from the Greek names Palæmon and Archytas. Everything is borrowed, and nothing is used clumsily.Ipomedonis 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. Thissuccessful piece was turned into English in at least two versions. One of these imitates the original verse ofIpomedon, 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 ofIpomedoninto a form of stanza, like that which Chaucer burlesques inSir 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 inthe 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 isYwain and Gawain, a translation of Chrestien’sYvain, otherwise calledLe Chevalier au Lion. It is a good romance, and in style it is much closer to the original than either of the two versions ofIpomedon, 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 theRoman d’Eneas; while German historians note that it was a translation of this French poem, theEneideof 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 asAmadis of Gaul, to those of the seventeenth century, such as theGrand CyrusorCassandra. 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. . . . Youwill 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; inPerceval(the story of the Grail), his last poem, the adventures are many and wonderful. In hisLancelot, the sentimental interest is managed in accordance with the rules of the Provençal poetry at its most refined and artificial height; but his story ofEnidis in substance the same as Tennyson’s, a romance which does not need (like Chrestien’sLancelot) 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 calledlaiand 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 shorterlais(like that ofSir 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 somethingin 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 theTravelling Companion. The EnglishSir Amadaceis unfortunately not one of the best of the short stories—not nearly as good asSir 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 hisDe Nugis Curialium) and Gervase of Tilbury (in hisOtia 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 thehistorical 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 findfavour, 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 thelaishe 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 ofSir 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 theMorte Arthure, one of the best of the alliterative poems. Arthur had long been known in Britain as a great leader against theSaxon 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’sBrut—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 thepassing 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 HornandHavelok the Dane, which appear to be founded on national English traditions coming down from the time of the Danish wars.King Hornis 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; andKing Hornis 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, astory 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.HornandHavelok, 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 ofFloris 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 ofFloris and Blanchefleur, however, does not come from Greece, but from the same source as theArabian 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 inSwedish 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 famousAuchinleckmanuscript in Edinburgh,Sir OrfeoandSir Tristrem. The stories are two of the best known in the world.Sir Orfeois 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 intoSir 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 priceThat is clepèd Dame Erodys.
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 headIt was no silver, ne gold red,All it was of precious stone,As bright as sun forsooth it shone.
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, fieldsand 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 hawèsThat on hawthorne groweth by shawès,And in winter by root and rindFor other thing may he none find.No man could tell of his soreThat he suffered ten year and more,He that had castle and tower,Forest, frith, both field and flower,Now hath he nothing that him likethBut wild beasts that by him striketh.
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 shrillAs he could harpè at his will:The wildè bestès that there bethFor joy about him they gethAll the fowlès that there wereThey comen about him thereTo hear harping that was fineSo mickle joy was therein.. . .Oft he saw him besideIn the hotè summer tideThe king of Fayré with his routCame to hunt all about.. . .
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 therivere—i.e. the bank of the stream) at
Pheasant heron and cormorant;The fowls out of the river flewEvery falcon his game slew.
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 speakThough she him knew and he her, eke.
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-goWell three mile, and some deal moHe came to a fair countrayWas as bright as any day.
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 thoughtThe riches that therein was wrought.
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 beYet we must proffer our game or glee.’
‘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.’
‘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 ofSir Launfale.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 forgoAnd said the queen before:‘I have loved a fairer womanThan thou ever laidest thine eye upon,This seven year and more!’
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 ofLohengrinkeeps this idea before the public (not to speak of the opera ofOrfeo), andLohengrinis 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 hisGeste of Sir Thopas. It is all in good compass, and coherent; nothing in it is meaningless or ill-placed.
Sir Tristremis a great contrast toSir Orfeo; not an absolute contrast, for neither is this story rambling or out of compass. The difference between the two is thatSir Orfeois nearly perfect as an English representative of the ‘Breton lay’—i.e. the short French romantic story like theLaisof Marie de France; whileSir Tristremrepresents no French style of narrative poetry, and is not very successful (though technicallyvery 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 heweIs far out in the sea;A wind again them blewThat sail no might there be;So rew the knightes trewe,Tristrem, so rew he,Ever as they came neweHe one again them threeGreat swink—Sweet Ysonde the freeAsked Brengwain a drink.
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 noughtSuch drink as there was in;Brengwain was wrong bethoughtTo that drink she gan winAnd sweet Ysonde it betaught;She bad Tristrem beginTo say:Their love might no man twinTill their ending day.
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 grisAnd scarlet that was newe;In warld was none so wisOf crafte that men knewe.
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’sSir Thopas—the companions ofSir 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’sRime of Sir Thopasis interrupted by the voice of common sense—rudely—