Epic and Romance Part 17

A comparison of the two contemporaries, Sturla and Joinville, brings out the difference between two admirable varieties of history, dealing with like subjects. The scenery of the _Life of St. Louis_ is different from that of _Sturlunga_, but there is some resemblance in parts of their themes, in so far as both narrate the adventures of brave men in difficult places, and both are told by authors who were on the spot themselves, and saw with their own eyes, or heard directly from those who had seen. As a subject for literature there is not much to choose between St. Louis in Egypt in 1250 and the burning of Flugumyri three years later, though the one adventure had all the eyes of the world upon it, and the other was of no more practical interest to the world than floods or landslips or the grinding of rocks and stones in an undiscovered valley. Nor is there much to choose between the results of the two methods; neither Sturla nor Joinville has anything to fear from a comparison between them.

Sometimes, in details, there is a very close approximation of the French and the Icelandic methods. Joinville's story, for example, of the moonlight adventure of the clerk of Paris and the three robbers might go straight into Icelandic. Only, the seneschal's opening of the story is too personal, and does not agree with the Icelandic manner of telling a story:--

As I went along I met with a wagon carrying three dead men that a clerk had slain, and I was told they were being brought for the king to see. When I heard this I sent my squire after them, to know how it had fallen out.

The difference between the two kinds is that Joinville, being mainly experimental and without much regard for the older precedents and models of historical writing, tells his story in his own way, as memoirs, in the order of events as they come within his view, revealing his own sentiments and policy, and keeping a distinction between the things he himself saw and the things he did not see.

Whereas Sturla goes on the lines that had been laid down before him, and does not require to invent his own narrative scheme; and further, the scheme he receives from his masters is the opposite of Joinville's personal memories. Though Sturla in great part of his work is as near the reality as Joinville, he is obliged by the Icelandic custom to keep himself out of the story, except when he is necessary; and then he only appears in the third person on the same terms as the other actors, with nothing except perhaps a greater particularity in description to show that the author is there himself in the thick of it. To let the story take care of itself is the first rule of the Icelandic authors. If they have any emotion or sentiment of their own, it must go into the story impersonally; it must inform or enliven the characters and their speeches; it must quicken the style un.o.btrusively, or else it must be suppressed. The parts of the Sagas that are most touching, such as the death of Njal, and the parting of Grettir and his mother, though they give evidence of the author's sensibility, never allow him a word for himself. The method is the method of Homer--[Greek: doloi d' ho ge dakrya keuthen]--"he would not confess that he wept."

In Joinville, on the contrary, all the epic matter of the story is surveyed and represented not as a drama for any one to come and look at, and make his own judgment about it, but as the life of himself, the Sire de Joinville, Seneschal of Champagne, known and interpreted to himself first of all. It is barely possible to conceive the _Life of St. Louis_ transposed into the mood of the _Odyssey_ or of _Njala_.

It is hard to see who would be a gainer thereby--certainly not St.

Louis himself. He would be deprived, for instance, of what is at once the most heroic and the most trifling of all the pa.s.sages in his story, which belongs altogether to Joinville, and is worth nothing except as he tells it, and because he tells it. The story of Joinville's misunderstanding of the king, and the king's way of taking it, on occasion of the Council at Acre and the question whether to return or to stay and recover the prisoners from the Saracens, is not only the whole _Life of St. Louis_ summed up and put into one chapter, but it is also one of those rarest pa.s.sages of true history in which a character whom we thought we knew is presented with all his qualities intensified in a momentary act or speech. It is as if the dulness of custom were magically broken, and the familiar character stood out, not different from himself, but with a new expression. In this great scene the Barons were for returning home, and put forward Guy Malvoisin their foreman to state their opinion. Joinville took the other side, remembering the warning of a kinsman of his own not to return in a hurry and forget the Lord's poor servants (_le peuple menu Nostre Signour_). There was no one there but had friends in prison among the Saracens, "so they did not rebuke me," says Joinville; but only two ventured to speak on his side, and one of these was shouted at (_mout feloness.e.m.e.nt_) by his uncle, the good knight Sir Jehan de Beaumont, for so doing. The king adjourned the Council for a week.

What follows is a kind of narrative impossible under the Homeric or the Icelandic conditions--no impersonal story, but a record of Joinville's own changes of mind as he was played upon by the mind of the king; an heroic incident, but represented in a way quite different from any epic manner. Joinville describes the breaking up of the Council, and how he was baited by them all: "The king is a fool, Sire de Joinville, if he does not take your advice against all the council of the realm of France"; how he sat beside the king at dinner, but the king did not speak to him; how he, Joinville, thought the king was displeased; and how he got up when the king was hearing grace, and went to a window in a recess and stuck his arms out through the bars, and leant there gazing out and brooding over the whole matter, making up his mind to stay, whatever happened to all the rest; till some one came behind him and put his hands on his head at the window and held him there, and Joinville thought it was one of the other side beginning to bother him again (_et je cuidai que ce fust mes sires Phelippes d'Anemos, qui trop d'ennui m'avoit fait le jour pour le consoil que je li avoie donnei_), till as he was trying to get free he saw, by a ring on the hand, that it was the king. Then the king asked him how it was that he, a young man, had been bold enough to set his opinion against all the wisdom of France; and before their talk ended, let him see that he was of the same mind as Joinville.

This personal kind of story, in which an heroic scene is rendered through its effect on one particular mind, is quite contrary to the principles of the Icelandic history, except that both kinds are heroic, and both are alive.

Joinville gives the succession of his own emotions; the Icelandic narrators give the succession of events, either as they might appear to an impartial spectator, or (on occasion) as they are viewed by some one in the story, but never as they merely affect the writer himself, though he may be as important a personage as Sturla was in the events of which he wrote the Chronicle. The subject-matter of the Icelandic historian (whether his own experience or not) is displayed as something in which he is not more nearly concerned than other people; his business is to render the successive moments of the history so that any one may form a judgment about them such as he might have formed if he had been there. Joinville, while giving his own changes of mind very clearly, is not as careful as the Icelandic writers are about the proper order of events. Thus an Icelander would not have written, as Joinville does, "the king came and put his hands on my head"; he would have said, "John found that his head was being held"; and the discovery by means of the ring would have been the first direct intimation who it was. The story as told by Joinville, though it is so much more intimate than any of the Sagas, is not as true to the natural order of impressions. He follows out his own train of sentiment; he is less careful of the order of perception, which the Icelanders generally observe, and sometimes with extraordinary effect.

Joinville's history is not one of a cla.s.s, and there is nothing equal to it; but some of the qualities of his history are characteristic of the second medieval period, the age of romance. His prose, as compared with that of Iceland, is unstudied and simple, an apparently unreserved confession. The Icelandic prose, with its richness of contents and its capability of different moods, is by comparison resolute, secure, and impartial; its authors are among those who do not give their own opinion about their stories. Joinville, for all his exceptional genius in narrative, is yet like all the host of medieval writers except the Icelandic school, in his readiness to give his opinion, to improve the occasion, and to add to his plain story something like the intonation of the preacher. Inimitable as he is, to come from the Icelandic books to Joinville is to discover that he is "medieval" in a sense that does not apply to those; that his work, with all its sobriety and solidity, has also the incalculable and elusive touch of fantasy, of exaltation, that seems to claim in a special way the name of Romance.

VIII

THE NORTHERN PROSE ROMANCES

The history of the Sturlungs is the last great work of the cla.s.sical age of Icelandic literature, and after it the end comes pretty sharply, as far as masterpieces are concerned. There is, however, a continuation of the old literature in a lower degree and in degenerate forms, which if not intrinsically valuable, are yet significant, as bringing out by exaggeration some of the features and qualities of the older school, and also as showing in a peculiar way the encroachments of new "romantic" ideas and formulas.

One of the extant versions of the _Foster-brothers' Story_ is remarkable for its patches of euphuistic rhetoric, which often appear suddenly in the course of plain, straightforward narrative. These ornamental additions are not all of the same kind. Some of them are of the alliterative ant.i.thetical kind which is frequently found in the old Northern ecclesiastical prose,[63] and which has an English counterpart in the alliterative prose of aelfric. Others are more unusual; they are borrowed not from the Latin ecclesiastical school of prose, but from the terms of the Northern poetry, and their effect is often very curious. For instance, on page 13 there is a sudden break from the common, unemphatic narrative of a storm at sea ("they were drenched through, and their clothes froze on them") into the incongruous statement that "the daughters of Ran (the sea-G.o.ddess) came and wooed them and offered them rest in their embraces,"--a conceit which might possibly be mistaken by a modern reader for the fancy of Hans Andersen, but which is really something quite different, not "pathetic fallacy," but an irruption of metaphorical rhetoric from the poetical dictionary. There is another metaphorical flare-up on the next page, equally amazing, in its plain context:--

She gave orders to take their clothes and have them thawed.

After that they had supper and were shown to bed. They were not long in falling asleep. Snow and frost held all the night through; _all that night the Dog (devourer) of the elder-tree howled with unwearying jaws and worried the earth with grim fangs of cold_. And when it began to grow light towards daybreak, a man got up to look out, and when he came in Thorgeir asked what sort of weather it was outside;

and so on in the ordinary sober way. It is not surprising that an editor should have been found to touch up the plain text of a Saga with a few ornamental phrases here and there. Considering the amount of bad taste and false wit in the contemporary poetry, the wonder is that there should be such a consistent exclusion of all such things from the prose of the Sagas. The _Fostbraera_ variations show the beginning of a process of decay, in which the lines of separation between prose and poetry are cut through.

[Footnote 63: _Fostbr._ (1852) p. 8: "vi at ekki var hjarta hans seen foarn i fugli: ekki var at blofullt sva at at skylfi af hraezlu, heldr var at herdt af enum haesta hofusmi i ollum hvatleik." ("His heart was not fashioned like the crop in a fowl: it was not gorged with blood that it should flutter with fear, but was tempered by the High Headsmith in all alacrity.")]

Except, however, as an indication of a general decline of taste, these diversions in _Fostbraera Saga_ do not represent the later and secondary schools of Icelandic narrative. They remain as exceptional results of a common degeneracy of literature; the prevailing forms are not exactly of this special kind. Instead of embroidering poetical diction over the plain text of the old Sagas, the later authors preferred to invent new stories of their own, and to use in them the machinery and vocabulary of the old Sagas. Hence arose various orders of romantic Saga, cut off from the original sources of vitality, and imitating the old forms very much as a modern romanticist might intimate them. One of the best, and one of the most famous, of these romantic Sagas is the story of Frithiof the Bold, which was chosen by Tegner as the groundwork of his elegant romantic poem, a brilliant example of one particular kind of modern medievalism. The significance of Tegner's choice is that he went for his story to the secondary order of Sagas. The original _Frithiof_ is almost as remote as Tegner himself from the true heroic tradition; and, like Tegner's poem, makes up for this want of a pedigree by a study and imitation of the great manner, and by a selection and combination of heroic traits from the older authentic literature. Hence Tegner's work, an ingenious rhetorical adaptation of all the old heroic motives, is already half done for him by the earlier romanticist; the original prose Frithiof is the same romantic hero as in the Swedish poem, and no more like the men of the Icelandic histories than Raoul de Bragelonne is like D'Artagnan. At the same time, it is easy to see how the authentic histories have supplied materials for the romance; as has been shown already, there are pa.s.sages in the older Sagas that contain some suggestions for the later kind of stories, and the fict.i.tious hero is put together out of reminiscences of Gunnar and Kjartan.

The "romantic movement" in the old Northern literature was greatly helped by foreign encouragement from the thirteenth century onward, and particularly by a change of literary taste at the Court of Norway.

King Sverre at the end of the twelfth century quotes from the old Volsung poem; he perhaps kept the Faroese memory for that kind of poetry from the days of his youth in the islands. Hakon Hakonsson, two generations later, had a different taste in literature and was fond of French romances. It was in his day that the work of translation from the French began; the results of which are still extant in _Strengleikar_ (the Lays of Marie de France), in _Karlamagnus Saga_, in the Norwegian versions of Tristram, Perceval, Iwain, and other books of chivalry.[64] These cargoes of foreign romance found a ready market in the North; first of all in Norway, but in Iceland also. They came to Iceland just at the time when the native literature, or the highest form of it at any rate, was failing; the failure of the native literature let in these foreign compet.i.tors. The Norwegian translations of French romances are not the chief agents in the creation of the secondary Icelandic School, though they help. The foreigners have contributed something to the story of Frithiof and the story of Viglund. The phrase _nattura amorsins_ (= _natura amoris_) in the latter work shows the intrusion even of the Romance vocabulary here, as under similar conditions in Germany and England. But while the old Northern literature in its decline is affected by the vogue of French romance, it still retains some independence. It went to the bad in its own way; and the later kinds of story in the old Northern tongue are not wholly spurious and surrept.i.tious. They have some claim upon _Njala_ and _Laxdaela_; there is a strain in them that distinguishes them from the ordinary professional medieval romance in French, English, or German.

[Footnote 64: "The first romantic Sagas"--_i.e._ Sagas derived from French romance--"date from the reign of King Hakon Hakonsson (1217-1263), when the longest and best were composed, and they appear to cease at the death of King Hakon the Fifth (1319), who, we are expressly told, commanded many translations to be made" (G. Vigfusson, Prol. -- 25).]

When the Icelandic prose began to fail, and the slighter forms of Romance rose up in the place of Epic history, there were two modes in which the older literature might be turned to profit. For one thing, there was plenty of romantic stuff in the old heroic poetry, without going to the French books. For another thing, the prose stories of the old tradition had in them all kinds of romantic motives which were fit to be used again. So there came into existence the highly-interesting series of Mythical Romances on the themes of the old Northern mythical and heroic poetry, and another series besides, which worked up in its own way a number of themes and conventional motives from the older prose books.

Mythical sagas had their beginning in the cla.s.sical age of the North.

Snorri, with his stories of the adventures of the G.o.ds, is the leader in the work of getting pure romance, for pure amus.e.m.e.nt, out of what once was religious or heroic myth, mythological or heroic poetry. Even Ari the Wise, his great predecessor, had done something of the same sort, if the _Ynglinga Saga_ be his, an historical abstract of Northern mythical history; though his aim, like that of Saxo Grammaticus, is more purely scientific than is the case with Snorri.

The later mythical romances are of different kinds. The _Volsunga Saga_ is the best known on account of its subject. The story of Heidrek, instead of paraphrasing throughout like the Volsung book, inserts the poems of Hervor and Angantyr, and of their descendants, in a consecutive prose narrative. _Halfs Saga_ follows the same method.

The story of _Hrolf Kraki_, full of interest from its connexion with the matter of _Beowulf_ and of Saxo Grammaticus, is more like _Volsunga Saga_ in its procedure.[65]

[Footnote 65: The Mythical Sagas are described and discussed by Vigfusson, Prol. -- 34.]

The other cla.s.s[66] contains the Sagas of _Frithiof_ and _Viglund_, and all the fict.i.tious stories which copy the style of the proper Icelandic Sagas. Their matter is taken from the adventures of the heroic age; their personages are idealised romantic heroes; romantic formulas, without substance.

[Footnote 66: _Ibid._ -- 11, "Spurious Icelandic Sagas"

(_Skrok-Sogur_). For _Frithiof_, see -- 34.]

Among the original Sagas there are some that show the beginning of the process by which the substance was eliminated, and the romantic _eidolon_ left to walk about by itself. The introductions of many of the older Sagas, of _Gisli_ and _Grettir_ for example, giving the adventures of the hero's ancestors, are made up in this way; and the best Sagas have many conventional pa.s.sages--Viking exploits, discomfiture of berserkers, etc.--which the reader learns to take for granted, like the tournaments in the French books, and which have no more effect than simple adjectives to say that the hero is brave or strong. Besides these stock incidents, there are ethical pa.s.sages (as has already been seen) in which the hero is in some danger of turning into a figure of romance. Grettir, Gisli, Kjartan, Gunnlaug the Wormtongue, Gunnar of Lithend, are all in some degree and at some point or other in danger of romantic exaggeration, while Kari has to thank his humorous squire, more than anything in himself, for his preservation. Also in the original Sagas there are conventions of the main plot, as well as of the episodes, such as are repeated with more deliberation and less skill in the romantic Sagas.

The love-adventures of Viglund are like those of Frithiof, and they have a common likeness, except in their conclusion, to the adventures of Kormak and Steingerd in _Kormaks Saga_. Kormak was too rude and natural for romance, and the romancers had to make their heroes better-looking, and to provide a happy ending. But the story of the poet's unfortunate love had become a commonplace.

The plot of _Laxdaela_, the story of the _Lovers of Gudrun_, which is the Volsung story born again, became a commonplace of the same sort.

It certainly had a good right to the favour it received. The plot of _Laxdaela_ is repeated in the story of Gunnlaug and Helga, even to a repet.i.tion of the course of events by which Kjartan is defrauded. The true lover is left in Norway and comes back too late; the second lover, the dull, persistent man, contrasted with a more brilliant but less single-minded hero, keeps to his wooing and spreads false reports, and wins his bride without her goodwill. Compared with the story of Kjartan and Gudrun, the story of Gunnlaug and Helga is shallow and sentimental; the likeness to _Frithiof_ is considerable.

The device of a false report, in order to carry off the bride of a man absent in Norway, is used again in the story of _Thorstein the White_, where the result is more summary and more in accordance with poetical justice than in _Laxdaela_ or _Gunnlaug_. This is one of the best of the Icelandic short stories, firmly drawn, with plenty of life and variety in it. It is only in its use of what seems like a stock device for producing agony that it resembles the more pretentious romantic Sagas.

Another short story of the same cla.s.s and the same family tradition (Vopnafjord), the story of _Thorstein Staffsmitten_, looks like a clever working-up of a stock theme--the quiet man roused.[67] The combat in it is less like the ordinary Icelandic fighting than the combats in the French poems, more especially that of Roland and Oliver in _Girart de Viane_; and on the whole there is no particular reason, except its use of well-known East-country names, to reckon this among the family histories rather than the romances.

[Footnote 67: Translated by Mr. William Morris and Mr. E. Magnusson, in the same volume as _Gunnlaug_, _Frithiof_, and _Viglund_ (_Three Northern Love Stories_, etc., 1875).]

Romantic Sagas of different kinds have been composed in Iceland, century after century, in a more or less mechanical way, by the repet.i.tion of old adventures, situations, phrases, characters, or pretences of character. What the worst of them are like may be seen by a reference to Mr. Ward's Catalogue of MS. Romances in the British Museum, which contains a number of specimens. There is fortunately no need to say anything more of them here. They are among the dreariest things ever made by human fancy. But the first and freshest of the romantic Sagas have still some reason in them and some beauty; they are at least the reflection of something living, either of the romance of the old mythology, or of the romantic grace by which the epic strength of _Njal_ and _Gisli_ is accompanied.

There are some other romantic transformations of the old heroic matters to be noticed, before turning away from the Northern world and its "twilight of the G.o.ds" to the countries in which the course of modern literature first began to define itself as something distinct from the older unsuccessful fashions, Teutonic or Celtic.

The fict.i.tious Sagas were not the most popular kind of literature in Iceland in the later Middle Ages. The successors of the old Sagas, as far as popularity goes, are to be found in the _Rimur_, narrative poems, of any length, in rhyming verse; not the ballad measures of Denmark, nor the short couplets of the French School such as were used in Denmark and Sweden, in England, and in High and Low Germany, but rhyming verse derived from the medieval Latin rhymes of the type best known from the works of Bishop Golias.[68] This rhyming poetry was very industrious, and turned out all kinds of stories; the native Sagas went through the mill in company with the more popular romances of chivalry.

[Footnote 68: Vigfusson, Prol. p. cx.x.xviii. _C.P.B._, ii. 392. The forms of verse used in the _Rimur_ are a.n.a.lysed in the preface to _Riddara Rimur_, by Theodor Wisen (1881).]

They were transformed also in another way. The Icelandic Sagas went along with other books to feed the imagination of the ballad-singers of the Faroes. Those islands, where the singing of ballads has always had a larger share of importance among the literary and intellectual tastes of the people than anywhere else in the world, have relied comparatively little on their own traditions or inventions for their ballad themes. Natural and popular as it is, the ballad poetry of the Faroes is derived from Icelandic literary traditions. Even Sigmund Brestisson, the hero of the islands, might have been forgotten but for the _Faereyinga Saga_; and Icelandic books, possibly near relations of _Codex Regius_, have provided the islanders with what they sing of the exploits of Sigurd and his horse Grani, as other writings brought them the story of Roncesvalles. From Iceland also there pa.s.sed to the Faroes, along with the older legends, the stories of Gunnar and of Kjartan; they have been turned into ballad measures, together with _Roland_ and _Tristram_, in that refuge of the old songs of the world.

CHAPTER IV

THE OLD FRENCH EPIC

(_Chansons de Geste_)

It appears to be generally the case in all old epic literature, and it is not surprising, that the existing specimens come from the end of the period of its greatest excellence, and generally represent the epic fashion, not quite at its freshest and best, but after it has pa.s.sed its culmination, and is already on the verge of decline. This condition of things is exemplified in _Beowulf_; and the Sagas also, here and there, show signs of over-refinement and exhaustion. In the extant ma.s.s of old French epic this condition is enormously exaggerated. The _Song of Roland_ itself, even in its earliest extant form, is comparatively late and unoriginal; while the remainder of French epic poetry, in all its variety, is much less authentic than _Roland_, sensibly later, and getting rapidly and luxuriantly worse through all the stages of lethargy.

It is the misfortune of French epic that so much should have been preserved of its "dotages," so little of the same date and order as the _Song of Roland_, and nothing at all of the still earlier epic--the more original _Roland_ of a previous generation. The exuberance, however, of the later stages of French epic, and its long persistence in living beyond its due time, are proof of a certain kind of vitality. The French epic in the twelfth century, long after its best days were over, came into the keenest and closest rivalry with the younger romantic schools in their first vigour. Fortune has to some extent made up for the loss of the older French poems by the preservation of endless later versions belonging in date to the exciting times of the great romantic revolution in literature. Feeble and drowsy as they often are, the late-born hosts of the French epic are nevertheless in the thick of a great European contest, matched not dishonourably against the forces of Romance. They were not the strongest possible champions of the heroic age, but they were _there_, in the field, and in view of all spectators. At this distance of time, we can see how much more fully the drift of the old Teutonic world was caught and rendered by the imagination of Iceland; how much more there is in Grettir or Skarphedinn than in Ogier the Dane, or Raoul de Cambrai, or even Roland and Oliver. But the Icelandic work lay outside of the consciousness of Europe, and the French epic was known everywhere. There are no such masterpieces in the French epic as in the Icelandic prose. The French epic, to make up for that, has an exciting history; it lived by antagonism, and one may look on and see how the _chansons de geste_ were fighting for their life against the newer forms of narrative poetry. In all this there is the interest of watching one of the main currents of history, for it was nothing less than the whole future imaginative life of Europe that was involved in the debate between the stubborn old epic fashion and the new romantic adventurers.

The _chansons de geste_ stand in a real, positive, ancestral relation to all modern literature; there is something of them in all the poetry of Europe. The Icelandic histories can make no such claim. Their relation to modern life is slighter, in one sense; more spiritual, in another. They are not widely known, they have had no share in establishing the forms or giving vogue to the commonplaces of modern literature. Now that they are published and accessible to modern readers, their immediate and present worth, for the friends of Skarphedinn and Gunnar, is out of all proportion to their past historical influence. They have antic.i.p.ated some of the literary methods which hardly became the common property of Europe till the nineteenth century; even now, when all the world reads and writes prose stories, their virtue is unexhausted and unimpaired. But this spiritual affinity with modern imaginations and conversations, across the interval of medieval romance and rhetoric, is not due to any direct or overt relation. The Sagas have had no influence; that is the plain historical fact about them.

The historical influence and importance of the _chansons de geste_, on the other hand, is equally plain and evident. Partly by their opposition to the new modes of fiction, and partly by compliance with their adversaries, they belong to the history of those great schools of literature in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries from which all modern imaginations in prose and rhyme are descended. The "dolorous rout" of Roncesvalles, and not the tragedy of the Niblungs, still less the history of Gunnar or of Njal, is the heroic origin of modern poetry; it is remembered and renowned, [Greek: pasi melousa], among the poets who have given shape to modern imaginative literature, while the older heroics of the Teutonic migration are forgotten, and the things of Iceland are utterly unknown.

French epic has some great advantages in comparison with the epic experiments of Teutonic verse. For one thing, it exists in great quant.i.ty; there is no want of specimens, though they are not all of the best sort or the best period. Further, it has no difficulty, only too much ease, in keeping a long regular course of narrative. Even _Beowulf_ appears to have attained to its epic proportions by a succession of efforts, and with difficulty; it labours rather heavily over the longer epic course. _Maldon_ is a poem that runs freely, but here the course is shorter, and it carries much less weight. The Northern poems of the "Elder Edda" never attain the right epic scale at all; their abrupt and lyrical manner is the opposite of the epic mode of narration. It is true that the _chansons de geste_ are far from the perfect continuity of the Homeric narrative. _Roland_ is described by M. Gaston Paris in terms not unlike those that are applied by Ten Brink in his criticism of _Beowulf_:--