Epic and Romance Part 20

The head went flying over the lea, but it had no more words to speak.

Huon is not forgiven by the Emperor; the Emperor spares his life, indeed, but sends him on a hopeless expedition.

And there the first part of the story ends. The present version is dated in the early part of the reign of St. Louis; it is contemporary with Snorri Sturluson and Sturla his nephew, and exhibits, though not quite in the Icelandic manner, the princ.i.p.al motives of early unruly society, without much fanciful addition, and with a very strong hold upon the tragic situation, and upon the types of character. As in _Raoul de Cambrai_, right and wrong are mixed; the Emperor has a real grievance against Huon, and Huon, with little fault of his own, is put apparently in the wrong. The interests involved are of the strongest possible. There was not a single lord among those to whom the minstrel repeated his story who did not know that he might have to look out for encroachments and injustice--interference at any rate--from the king, and treachery from his neighbours. No one hoped to leave his castles and lands in peace to his son, who did not also fear that his son might be left defenceless and his lands exposed to compet.i.tion; a fear most touchingly expressed in the lament of William of Poitiers, when he set out on the first Crusade.[78]

[Footnote 78: "Pos de chantar m'es pres talens:"--Raynouard, _Choix des poesies des Troubadours_, iv. p. 83; Bartsch, _Chrestomathie provencale_.]

Whatever general influences of law or politics or social economy are supposed to be at work in the story of _Huon of Bordeaux_,--and all this earlier part of it is a story of feudal politics and legal problems,--these influences were also present in the real world in which the maker and the hearers of the poem had their life. It is plain and serious dealing with matter of fact.

But after the ordeal of battle in which Huon kills the traitor, the tone changes with great abruptness and a new story begins.

The commission laid upon Huon by the implacable and doting Emperor is nothing less than that which afterwards was made a byword for all impossible enterprises--"to take the Great Turk by the beard." He is to go to Babylon and, literally, to beard the Admiral there, and carry off the Admiral's daughter. The audience is led away into the wide world of Romance. Huon goes to the East by way of Rome and Brindisi--naturally enough--but the real world ends at Brindisi; beyond that everything is magical.

CHAPTER V

ROMANCE

AND THE OLD FRENCH ROMANTIC SCHOOLS

Romance in many varieties is to be found inherent in Epic and in Tragedy; for some readers, possibly, the great and magnificent forms of poetry are most attractive when from time to time they forget their severity, and when the tragic strength is allowed to rest, as in the fairy interludes of the _Odyssey_, or the similes of the clouds, winds, and mountain-waters in the _Iliad_. If Romance be the name for the sort of imagination that possesses the mystery and the spell of everything remote and unattainable, then Romance is to be found in the old Northern heroic poetry in larger measure than any epic or tragic solemnity, and in no small measure also even in the steady course of the Icelandic histories. Possibly Romance is in its best place here, as an element in the epic harmony; perhaps the romantic mystery is most mysterious when it is found as something additional among the graver and more positive affairs of epic or tragic personages. The occasional visitations of the dreaming moods of romance, in the middle of a great epic or a great tragedy, are often more romantic than the literature which is nothing but romance from beginning to end. The strongest poets, Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, have along with their strong reasoning enough of the lighter and fainter grace and charm to be the despair of all the "romantic schools" in the world. In the Icelandic prose stories, as has been seen already, there is a similar combination. These stories contain the strongest imaginative work of the Middle Ages before Dante. Along with this there is found in them occasionally the uncertain and incalculable play of the other, the more airy mode of imagination; and the romance of the strong Sagas is more romantic than that of the medieval works which have no other interest to rely upon, or of all but a very few.

One of the largest and plainest facts of medieval history is the change of literature in the twelfth century, and the sudden and exuberant growth and progress of a number of new poetical forms; particularly the courtly lyric that took shape in Provence, and pa.s.sed into the tongues of Italy, France, and Germany, and the French romance which obeyed the same general inspiration as the Provencal poetry, and was equally powerful as an influence on foreign nations. The French Romantic Schools of the twelfth century are among the most definite and the most important appearances even in that most wonderful age; though it is irrational to contrast them with the other great historical movements of the time, because there is no real separation between them. French romance is part of the life of the time, and the life of the twelfth century is reproduced in French romance.

The rise of these new forms of story makes an unmistakable difference between the age that preceded them and everything that comes after.

They are a new, fresh, and prosperous beginning in literature, and they imply the failure of the older manner of thought, the older fashion of imagination, represented in the epic literature of France, not to speak of the various Teutonic forms of heroic verse and prose that are related to the epic of France only by a remote common ancestry, and a certain general likeness in the conditions of "heroic"

life.

The defeat of French epic, as has been noted already, was slow and long resisted; but the victory of romance was inevitable. Together with the influence of the Provencal lyric idealism, it determined the forms of modern literature, long after the close of the Middle Ages.

The change of fashion in the twelfth century is as momentous and far-reaching in its consequences as that to which the name "Renaissance" is generally appropriated. The later Renaissance, indeed, in what concerns imaginative literature, makes no such abrupt and sudden change of fashion as was made in the twelfth century. The poetry and romance of the Renaissance follow naturally upon the literature of the Middle Ages; for the very good reason that it was the Middle Ages which began, even in their dark beginnings, the modern study of the humanities, and in the twelfth century made a remarkable and determined effort to secure the inheritance of ancient poetry for the advantage of the new tongues and their new forms of verse. There is no such line of division between Ariosto and Chrestien of Troyes as there is between Chrestien and the primitive epic.

The romantic schools of the twelfth century are the result and evidence of a great unanimous movement, the origins of which may be traced far back in the general conditions of education and learning, in the influence of Latin authors, in the interchange of popular tales. They are among the most characteristic productions of the most impressive, varied, and characteristic period in the Middle Ages; of that century which broke, decisively, with the old "heroic"

traditions, and made the division between the heroic and the chivalric age. When the term "medieval" is used in modern talk, it almost always denotes something which first took definite shape in the twelfth century. The twelfth century is the source of most of the "medieval" influences in modern art and literature, and the French romances of that age are the original authorities for most of the "Gothic" ornaments adopted in modern romantic schools.

The twelfth-century French romances form a definite large group, with many ranks and divisions, some of which are easily distinguished, while all are of great historical interest.

One common quality, hardly to be mistaken, is that which marks them all as belonging to a romantic _school_, in almost all the modern senses of that term. That is to say, they are not the spontaneous product of an uncritical and ingenuous imagination; they are not the same sort of thing as the popular stories on which many of them are founded; they are the literary work of authors more or less sophisticated, on the look-out for new sensations and new literary devices. It is useless to go to those French books in order to catch the first fresh jet of romantic fancy, the "silly sooth" of the golden age. One might as well go to the _Legende des Siecles_. 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 fact.i.tious 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 a.s.sociated with the name romance, when that name is applied to the _Ancient Mariner_, or _La Belle Dame sans Merci_, or the _Lady of Shalott_, are generally absent from the most successful romances of the great medieval romantic age, full though they may be of all the forms of chivalrous devotion and all the most wonderful romantic machines. Most of them are as different from the true irresistible magic of fancy as _Thalaba_ from _Kubla Khan_. The name "romantic school" is rightly applicable to them and their work, for almost the last thing that is produced in a "romantic school" is the infallible and indescribable touch of romance. A "romantic school" is a company for the profitable working of Broceliande, an organised attempt to "open up" the Enchanted Ground; such, at least, is the appearance of a great deal of the romantic literature of the early part of the nineteenth century, and of its forerunner in the twelfth. There is this difference between the two ages, that the medieval romanticists are freer and more original than the moderns who made a business out of tales of terror and wonder, and tried to fatten their lean kine on the pastures of "Gothic" or of Oriental learning.

The romance-writers of the twelfth century, though they did much to make romance into a mechanic art, though they reduced the game to a system and left the different romantic combinations and conventions within the reach of almost any 'prentice hand, were yet in their way original explorers. Though few of them got out of their materials the kind of effect that appeals to us now most strongly, and though we think we can see what they missed in their opportunities, yet they were not the followers of any great man of their own time, and they chose their own way freely, not as bungling imitators of a greater artist. It is a disappointment to find that romance is rarely at its finest in the works that technically have the best right in the world to be called by that name. Nevertheless, the work that is actually found there is interesting in its own way, and historically of an importance which does not need to be emphasised.

The true romantic interest is very unequally distributed over the works of the Middle Ages, and there is least of it in the authors who are most representative of the "age of chivalry." There is a disappointment prepared for any one who looks in the greater romantic authors of the twelfth century for the music of the _Faery Queene_ or _La Belle Dame sans Merci_. There is more of the pure romantic element in the poems of Brynhild, in the story of Njal, in the _Song of Roland_, than in the famous romances of Chrestien of Troyes or any of his imitators, though they have all the wonders of the Isle of Britain at their command, though they have the very story of Tristram and the very mystery of the Grail to quicken them and call them out. Elegance, fluency, sentiment, romantic adventures are common, but for words like those of Hervor at the grave of her father, or of the parting between Brynhild and Sigurd, or of Helgi and Sigrun, it would be vain to search in the romances of Benoit de Sainte More or of Chrestien. Yet these are the masters of the art of romance when it was fresh and strong, a victorious fashion.

If the search be continued further, the search for that kind of imaginative beauty which these authors do not give, it will not be unsuccessful. The greater authors of the twelfth century have more affinity to the "heroic romance" of the school of the _Grand Cyrus_ than to the dreams of Spenser or Coleridge. But, while this is the case with the most distinguished members of the romantic school, it is not so with all the rest. The magic that is wanting to the clear and elegant narrative of Benoit and Chrestien will be found elsewhere; it will be found in one form in the mystical prose of the _Queste del St.

Graal_--a very different thing from Chrestien's _Perceval_--it will be found, again and again, in the prose of Sir Thomas Malory; it will be found in many ballads and ballad burdens, in _William and Margaret_, in _Binnorie_, in the _Wife of Usher's Well_, in the _Rime of the Count Arnaldos_, in the _Konigskinder_; it will be found in the most beautiful story of the Middle Ages, _Auca.s.sin 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 pa.s.sages in which it has been praised. _Auca.s.sin and Nicolette_ cannot be made into a representative medieval romance: there is nothing else like it; and the qualities that make it what it is are the opposite of the rhetorical self-possession, the correct and deliberate narrative of Chrestien and his school. It contains the quintessence of romantic imagination, but it is quite unlike the most fashionable and successful romances.

There are several stages in the history of the great Romantic School, as well as several distinct sources of interest. The value of the best works of the school consists in their representation of the pa.s.sion of love. They turn the psychology of the courtly amatory poets into narrative. Chaucer's address to the old poets,--"Ye lovers that can make of sentiment,"--when he complains that they have left little for him to glean in the field of poetry, does not touch the lyrical poets only. The narrative poetry of the courteous school is equally devoted to the philosophy of love. Narrative poets like Chrestien, when they turn to lyric, can change their instrument without changing the purport of their verse; lyric or narrative, it has the same object, the same duty. So also, two hundred years later, Chaucer himself or Froissart may use narrative or lyric forms indifferently, and observe the same "courteous" ideal in both.

In the twelfth-century narratives, besides the interest of the love-story and all its science, there was the interest of adventure, of strange things; and here there is a great diversity among the authors, and a perceptible difference between earlier and later usage.

Courteous sentiment, running through a succession of wonderful adventures, is generally enough to make a romance; but there are some notable varieties, both in the sentiment and in the incidents. The sentiment comes later in the history of literature than the adventures; the conventional romantic form of plot may be said to have been fixed before the romantic sentiment was brought to its furthest refinement. The wonders of romantic story are more easily traced to their origin, or at least to some of their earlier forms, than the spirit of chivalrous idealism which came in due time to take possession of the fabulous stories, and gave new meanings to the lives of Tristram and Lancelot.

Variety of incident, remoteness of scene, and all the incredible things in the world, had been at the disposal of medieval authors long before the French Romantic Schools began to define themselves. The wonders of the East, especially, had very early come into literature; and the Anglo-Saxon _Epistle of Alexander_ seems to antic.i.p.ate the popular taste for Eastern stories, just as the Anglo-Saxon version of _Apollonius of Tyre_ antic.i.p.ates the later importation of Greek romance, and the appropriation of cla.s.sical 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 antic.i.p.ate the peculiar charm of some of the French poems of adventures. In French literature before the vogue of romance can be said to have begun, and before the epic form had lost its supremacy, the poem of the _Pilgrimage of Charlemagne_, one of the oldest extant poems of the heroic cycle, is already far gone in subjection to the charm of mere unqualified wonder and exaggeration--rioting in the wonders of the East, like the Varangians on their holiday, when they were allowed a free day to loot in the Emperor's palace.[79] The poem of Charlemagne's journey to Constantinople is unrefined enough, but the later and more elegant romances deal often in the same kind of matter.

Mere furniture counts for a good deal in the best romances, and they are full of descriptions of riches and splendours. The story of Troy is full of details of various sorts of magnificence; the city of Troy itself and "Ylion," its master-tower, were built by Priam out of all kinds of marble, and covered with sculpture all over. Much further on in Benoit's poem (l. 14,553) Hector is brought home wounded to a room which is described in 300 lines, with particulars of its remarkable decorations, especially its four magical images. The tomb of Penthesilea (l. 25,690) is too much for the author:--

Sepolture ot et monument Tant que se _Plenius_ fust vis Ou _cil qui fist Apocalis_ Nel vos sauroient il retraire: Por co si m'en dei gie bien taire: N'en dirai plus, que n'oseroie; Trop halte chose envaroie.

[Footnote 79: See the account of the custom in the _Saga of Harald Hardrada_, c. 16. "Harald entrusted to Jarizleif all the gold that he had sent from Micklegarth, and all sorts of precious things: so much wealth all together, as no man of the North Lands had ever seen before in one man's hands. Harald had thrice come in for the palace-sweeping (_Polotasvarf_) while he was in Micklegarth. It is the law there that when the Greek king dies, the Varangians shall have a sweep of the palace; they go over all the king's palaces where his treasures are, and every man shall have for his own what falls to his hand"

(_Fornmanna Sogur_, vi. p. 171).]

Pliny and the author of the Apocalypse are here acknowledged as masters and authorities in the art of description. In other places of the same work there is a very liberal use of natural history such as is common in many versions of the history of Alexander. There is, for example, a long description of the precious clothes of Briseide (Cressida) at her departure, especially of her mantle, which had been given to Calchas by an Indian poet in Upper India. It was made by nigromancy, of the skin of the beast _Dindialos_, which is hunted in the shadowless land by the savage people whose name is _Cenocefali_; and the fringes of the mantle were not of the sable, but of a "beast of price" that dwells in the water of Paradise:--

Dedans le flum de Paradis Sont et conversent, co set l'on Se c'est vrais que nos en lison.

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

Diomedes tant la conduit Qu'il descendi al paveillon Qui fu al riche Pharaon, Cil qui noa en la mer roge.

In such pa.s.sages of ornamental description the names of strange people and of foreign kings have the same kind of value as the names of precious stones, and sometimes they are introduced on their own account, apart from the precious work of Arabian or Indian artists. Of this sort is the "dreadful sagittary," who is still retained in Shakespeare's _Troilus and Cressida_ on the ultimate authority (when it comes to be looked into) of Benoit de Sainte More.[80]

[Footnote 80:

Il ot o lui un saietaire Qui molt fu fels et deputaire: Des le nombril tot contreval Ot cors en forme de cheval: Il n'est riens nule s'il volsist Que d'isnelece n'ateinsist: Cors, chiere, braz, a noz semblanz Avoit, mes n'ert pas avenanz.

l. 12,207.]

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

210), from the unpublished romance of _Ider_ (Edeyrn, son of Nudd), shows how this fashion of rich description and allusion had been overdone, and how it was necessary, in time, to make a protest against it. Kings' pavilions were a favourite subject for rhetoric, and the poet of _Ider_ explains that he does not approve of this fashion, though he has pavilions of his own, and can describe them if he likes, as well as any one:--

Tels diz n'a fors savor de songe, Tant en acreissent les paroles: Mes jo n'ai cure d'iperboles: _Yperbole_ est chose non voire, Qui ne fu et qui n'est a croire, C'en est la difinicion: Mes tant di de cest paveillon Qu'il n'en a nul soz ciel qu'il vaille.

Many poets give themselves pains to describe gardens and pavilions and other things, and think they are beautifying their work, but this is all dreaming and waste of words; I will have no such hyperbole. (_Hyperbole_ means by definition that which is untrue and incredible.) I will only say of this pavilion that there was not its match under heaven.

The author, by his definition of _hyperbole_[81] in this place, secures an ornamental word with which he consoles himself for his abstinence in other respects. This piece of science is itself characteristic of the rhetorical enterprise of the Romantic School; of the way in which Pliny, Isidore, and other encyclopaedic authors were turned into decorations. The taste for such things is common in the early and the later Middle Ages; all that the romances did was to give a certain amount of finish and neatness to the sort of work that was left comparatively rude by the earlier pedants. There many be discovered in some writers a preference for cla.s.sical subjects in their ornamental digressions, or for the graceful forms of allegory, such as in the next century were collected for the Garden of the Rose, and still later for the _House of Fame_. Thus Chrestien seems to a.s.sert his superiority of taste and judgment when, instead of Oriental work, he gives Enid an ivory saddle carved with the story of Aeneas and Dido (_Erec_, l. 5337); or when, in the same book, Erec's coronation mantle, though it is fairy work, bears no embroidered designs of Broceliande or Avalon, but four allegorical figures of the quadrivial sciences, with a reference by Chrestien to Macrobius as his authority in describing them. One function of this Romantic School, though not the most important, is to make an immediate literary profit out of all accessible books of learning. It was a quick-witted school, and knew how to turn quotations and allusions. Much of its art, like the art of _Euphues_, is bestowed in making pedantry look attractive.

[Footnote 81: Chaucer, who often yields to the temptations of "Hyperbole" in this sense of the word, lays down the law against impertinent decorations, in the rhetorical instruction of Pandarus to Troilus, about Troilus's letter to Cressida (B. ii. l. 1037):--

Ne jompre eek no discordaunt thing yfere As thus, to usen termes of phisyk; In loves termes hold of thy matere The forme alwey, and do that it be lyk; For if a peyntour wolde peynte a pyk With a.s.ses feet, and hede it as an ape, It cordeth naught; so nere it but a j.a.pe.]

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 princ.i.p.al masters the most important part of their study. Chrestien, for example, often treats his adventures with great levity in comparison with the serious psychological pa.s.sages; the wonder often is that he should have used so much of the common stuff of adventures in poems where he had a strong commanding interest in the sentiments of the personages. There are many irrelevant and unnecessary adventures in his _Erec_, _Lancelot_, and _Yvain_, not to speak of his unfinished _Perceval_; while in _Cliges_ he shows that he did not rely on the commonplaces of adventure, on the regular machinery of romance, and that he might, when he chose, commit himself to a novel almost wholly made up of psychology and sentiment. Whatever the explanation be in this case, it is plain enough both that the adventures are of secondary value as compared with the psychology, in the best romances, and that their value, though inferior, is still considerable, even in some of the best work of the "courtly makers."

The greatest novelty in the twelfth-century narrative materials was due to the Welsh; not that the "matter of Britain" was quite overwhelming in extent, or out of proportion to the other stores of legend and fable. "The matter of Rome the Great" (not to speak again of the old epic "matter of France" and its various later romantic developments) included all known antiquity, and it was recruited continually by new importations from the East. The "matter of Rome,"

however, the tales of Thebes and Troy and the wars of Alexander, had been known more or less for centuries, and they did not produce the same effect as the discovery of the Celtic stories. Rather, it may be held that the Welsh stories gave a new value to the cla.s.sical authorities, and suggested new imaginative readings. As Chaucer's _Troilus_ in our own time has inspired a new rendering of the _Life and Death of Jason_, so (it would seem) the same story of Jason got a new meaning in the twelfth century when it was read by Benoit de Sainte More in the light of Celtic romance. Then it was discovered that Jason and Medea were no more, and no less, than the adventurer and the wizard's daughter, who might play their parts in a story of Wales or Brittany. The quest of the Golden Fleece and the labours of Jason are all reduced from the rhetoric of Ovid, from their cla.s.sical dignity, to something like what their original shape may have been when the story that now is told in Argyll and Connaught of the _King's Son of Ireland_ was told or chanted, ages before Homer, of a king's son of the Greeks and an enchantress beyond sea. Something indeed, and that of the highest consequence, as will be seen, was kept by Benoit from his reading of the _Metamorphoses_; the pa.s.sion of Medea, namely. But the story itself is hardly distinguishable in kind from _Libeaux Desconus_. It is not easy to say how far this treatment of Jason may be due to the Welsh example of similar stories, and how far to the general medieval disrespect for everything in the cla.s.sics except their matter. The Celtic precedents can scarcely have been without influence on this very remarkable detection of the "Celtic element" in the voyage of the Argonauts, while at the same time Ovid ought not to be refused his share in the credit of medieval romantic adventure. Virgil, Ovid, and Statius are not to be underrated as sources of chivalrous adventure, even in comparison with the unquestioned riches of Wales or Ireland.

There is more than one distinct stage in the progress of the Celtic influence in France. The culmination of the whole thing is attained when Chrestien makes the British story of the capture and rescue of Guinevere into the vehicle of his most finished and most courtly doctrine of love, as shown in the examples of Lancelot and the Queen.

Before that there are several earlier kinds of Celtic romance in French, and after that comes what for modern readers is more attractive than the typical work of Chrestien and his school,--the eloquence of the old French prose, with its languor and its melancholy, both in the prose _Lancelot_ and in the _Queste del St.