Chapter X Conclusion
It is now time to sum up, as may best be done, the results of this attempt to survey the Literature of Europe during one, if not of its most accomplished, most enlightened, or most generally admired periods, yet assuredly one of the most momentous, the most interesting, the fullest of problem and of promise. Audacious as the attempt itself may seem to some, inadequate as the performance may be pronounced by others, it is needless to spend much more argument in urging its claim to be at least tried on the merits. All varieties of literary history have drawbacks almost inseparable from their schemes. The elaborate monograph, which is somewhat in favour just now, is exposed to the criticism, not quite carping, that it is practically useless without independent study of its subject, and practically superfluous with it. The history of separate literatures, whether in portion or in whole, is always liable to be charged with omissions or with disproportionate treatment within its subject, with want of perspective, with “blinking,” as regards matters without. And so such a survey as this is liable to the charge of being superficial, or of attempting more than it can possibly cover, or of not keeping the due balance between its various provinces and compartments.
It must be for others to say how such a charge, in the present case, is helped by laches or incompetence on the part of the surveyor. But enough has, I hope, been said to clear the scheme itself from the objection of uselessness or of impracticability. In one sense, no doubt, far more room than this volume, or a much larger, could provide, may seem to be required for the discussion and arrangement of so great and interesting a matter as the Literature of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. But to say this, is only saying that no such account in such a space could be exhaustive: and it so happens that an exhaustive account is for the purpose not required—would indeed go pretty far towards the defeat of that purpose. What is wanted is to secure that the reader, whether he pursues his studies in more detail with regard to any of these literatures or not, shall at any rate have in his head a fair general notion of what they were simultaneously or in succession, of the relation in which they stood to each other, of the division of literary labour between them.
If, on the other hand, it be said, “You propose to give, according to your scheme, a volume apiece to the fourteenth and even the fifteenth centuries, the work of which was far less original and interesting than the work of these two! Why do you couple these?” the answer is not difficult. In the first place, the work of these two centuries—which is mainly though not wholly the work of the hundred years that form their centre period—is curiously inseparable. In only a few cases do we know precise dates, and in many the circa is of such a circuitous character that we can hardly tell whether the twelfth or the thirteenth century deserves the credit. In almost all the adoption of any intermediate date of severance would leave an awkward, raw, unreal division. We should leave off while the best of the chansons de geste were still being produced, in the very middle of the development of the Arthurian legend, with half the fabliaux yet to come and half the sagas unwritten, with the Minnesingers in full voice, with the tale of the Rose half told, with the Fox not yet broken up.
And, in the second place, the singular combination of anonymity and school-character in the most characteristic mediæval literature makes it easier, vast as is its mass and in some cases conspicuous as is its merit, to handle in small space than later work. Only by a wild indulgence in guessing or a tedious minuteness of attention to Lautlehre and rhyme-lists is it possible to make a treatment of even a named person like Chrestien de Troyes on the scale of a notice of Dante or even Froissart, and this without reference to the comparative literary importance of the three. The million lines of the chansons de geste do not demand discussion in anything like direct proportion to their bulk. One fabliau, much more one minnesong or troubadour lyric, has a far greater resemblance of kind to its fellows than even one modern novel, even one nineteenth-century minor poem, to another. As the men write in schools, so they can be handled in them.
Yet I should hope that it must have been already made apparent how very far the present writer is from undervaluing the period with which he has essayed to deal. He might perhaps be regarded as overvaluing it with more apparent reason—not, I think, with any reason that is more than apparent.
For this was the time, if not of the Birth—the exact times and seasons of literary births no man knoweth—at any rate of the first appearance, full-blown or full-fledged, of Romance. Many praiseworthy folk have made many efforts to show that Romance was after all no such new thing—that there is Romance in the Odyssey, Romance in the choruses of Æschylus, Romance East and West, North and South, before the Middle Ages. They are only less unwise than the other good folk who endeavour to tie Romance down to a Teutonic origin, or a Celtic, or in the other sense a Romance one, to Chivalry (which was in truth rather its offspring than its parent), to this, and that, and the other. “All the best things in literature,” it has been said, “are returns”; and this is perfectly true, just as it is perfectly true in another sense that all the best things in literature are novelties. In this particular growth, being as it was a product of the unchanging human mind, there were notes, doubtless, of Homer and of Æschylus, of Solomon the son of David and of Jesus the son of Sirach. But the constituents of the mixture were newly grouped; elements which had in the past been inconspicuous or dormant assumed prominence and activity; and the whole was new.
It was even one of the few, the very few, permutations and combinations of the elements of literature, which are of such excellence, volume, durability, and charm, that they rank above all minor changes and groupings. An amabilis insania of the same general kind with those above noted has endeavoured again and again to mark off and define the chief constituents of the fact. The happiest result, if only a partial one, of such attempts has been the opposition between Classical precision and proportion and the Romantic vague; but no one would hold this out as a final or sufficient account of the matter. It may, indeed, be noted that that peculiar blended character which has been observed in the genesis of perhaps the greatest and most characteristic bloom of the whole garden—the Arthurian Legend—is to be found elsewhere also. The Greeks, if they owed part of the intensity, had undoubtedly owed nearly all the gaps and flaws of their production, as well as its extraordinarily short-lived character, to their lack alike of instructors and of fellow-pupils—to the defect in Comparison. Roman Literature, always more or less in statu pupillari, had wanted the fellow-pupils, if not the tutor. But the national divisions of mediæval Europe—saved from individual isolation by the great bond of the Church, saved from mutual lack of understanding by the other great bond of the Latin quasi-vernacular, shaken together by wars holy and profane, and while each exhibiting the fresh characteristics of national infancy, none of them case-hardened into national insularity—enjoyed a unique opportunity, an opportunity never likely to be again presented, of producing a literature common in essential characteristic, but richly coloured and fancifully shaded in each division by the genius of race and soil. And this literature was developed in the two centuries which have been the subject of our survey. It is true that not all the nations were equally contributors to the positive literary production of the time. England was apparently paying a heavy penalty for her unique early accomplishments, was making a large sacrifice for the better things to come. Between 1100 and 1300 no single book that can be called great was produced in the English tongue, and hardly any single writer distinctly deserving the same adjective was an Englishman. But how mighty were the compensations! The language itself was undergoing a process of “inarching,” of blending, crossing, which left it the richest, both in positive vocabulary and in capacity for increasing that vocabulary at need, of any European speech; the possessor of a double prosody, quantitative and alliterative, which secured it from the slightest chance of poetic poverty or hide-boundness; relieved from the cumbrousness of synthetic accidence to all but the smallest extent, and in case to elaborate a syntax equally suitable for verse and prose, for exposition and narrative, for oratory and for argument. Moreover it was, as I have at least endeavoured to show, probably England which provided the groundwork and first literary treatment, it was certainly England that provided the subject, of the largest, the most enduring, the most varied single division of mediæval work; while the Isle of Britain furnished at least its quota to the general literature of Europe other than vernacular.
Other countries, though their languages were not conquering their conqueror as English was doing with French, also displayed sufficient individuality in dealing with the models and the materials with which French activity supplied them. The best poetical work of Icelandic, like the best work of its cousin Anglo-Saxon, was indeed over before the period began, and the best prose work was done before it ended, the rapid and never fully explained exhaustion of Norse energy and enterprise preventing the literature which had been produced from having effect on other nations. The children of the vates of Grettir and Njal contented themselves, like others, with adapting French romances, and, unlike others, they did not make this adaptation the groundwork of new and original effort. But meanwhile they had made in the Sagas, greater and lesser, such a contribution as no literature has excelled in intensity and character, comparatively small as it is in bulk and comparatively undistinguished in form.
“Unlike others,” it has been said; for there can be no doubt that the Charlemagne Cycle from Northern, the troubadour lyric from Southern, France exercised upon Italy the same effect that was exercised in Germany by the romances of Arthur and of Antiquity, and by the trouvère poetry generally. But in these two countries, as also more doubtfully, but still with fair certainty, in Spain, the French models found, as they did also in England, literary capacities and tastes not jaded and outworn, but full of idiosyncrasy, and ready to develop each in its own way. Here however, by that extraordinary law of compensation which seems to be the most general law of the universe, the effects differed as much in quantity and time as in character—a remarkable efflorescence of literature in Germany being at once produced, to relapse shortly into a long sterility, a tardier but more constant growth following in England and Italy, while the effect in Spain was the most partial and obscure of all. The great names of Wolfram von Eschenbach and Walther von der Vogelweide hardly meet with any others in these literatures representing writers who are known abroad as well as at home. Only philologists out of England (and I fear not too many besides philologists in it) read Alisaunder and Richard Cœur de Lion, Arthour and Merlin, or the Brut; the early Italian poets shine but in the reflected light of Dante; and if any one knows the Cid, it is usually from Corneille, or Herder, or Southey, rather than from his own noble Poem. But no one who does study these forgotten if not disdained ones, no one who with a love for literature bestows even the most casual attention on them, can fail to see their meaning and their promise, their merit and their charm.
That languages of such power should have remained without literatures is of course inconceivable; that any of them even needed the instruction they received from France cannot be said positively; but what is certain is that they all received it. In most cases the acknowledgment is direct, express, not capable of being evaded or misconstrued: in all it is incapable of being mistaken by those who have eyes, and who have trained them. To inquire into the cause were rather idle. The central position of France; the early notoriety and vogue of the schools of Paris; the curious position of the language, midway between the extremer Romance and the purely Teutonic tongues, which made it a sort of natural interpreter between them; perhaps most of all that inexplicable but undeniable formal talent of the French for literature, which is as undeniable and as inexplicable as the less formal genius of the English,—all these things, except the central position, only push the problem farther back, and are in need of being explained themselves. But the fact, the solid and certain fact, remains. And so it is that the greater part of this book has necessarily been occupied in expounding, first the different forms which the lessons of France took, and then the different ways in which other countries learnt those lessons and turned them to account.
It is thus difficult to overestimate the importance of that wonderful literature which rises dominant among all these, imparting to all, borrowing from none, or borrowing only subjects, exhibiting finish of structure when all the rest were merely barbarian novices, exploring every literary form from history to drama, and from epic to song, while others were stammering their exercises, mostly learnt from her. The exact and just proportions of the share due to Southern and Northern France respectively none can now determine, and scholarship oscillates between extremes as usual. What is certain (perhaps it is the only thing that is certain) is that to Provençal belongs the credit of establishing for the first time a modern prosody of such a kind as to turn out verse of perfect form. Whether, if Pallas in her warlike capacity had been kinder to the Provençals, she could or would have inspired them with more varied kinds of literature than the exquisite lyric which as a fact is almost their sole title to fame, we cannot say. As a matter of fact, the kinds other than lyric, and some of the lyrical kinds themselves—the short tale, the epic, the romance, the play, the history, the sermon—all find their early home, if not their actual birthplace, north, not south, of the Limousin line. It was from Normandy and Poitou, from Anjou and the Orleannais, from the Isle of France and Champagne, that in language at least the patterns which were used by all Europe, the specifications, so to speak, which all Europe adapted and filled up, went forth, sometimes not to return.
Yet it is not in the actual literature of France itself, except in those contributions to the Arthurian story which, as it has been pointed out, were importations, not indigenous growths, and in some touches of the Rose, that the spirit of Romance is most evident—the spirit which, to those who have come thoroughly to appreciate it, makes classical grace and finish seem thin and tame, Oriental exuberance tasteless and vulgar, modern scientific precision inexpressibly charmless and jejune.
Different sides of this spirit display themselves, of course, in different productions of the time. There is the spirit of combat, in which the Chansons de geste show the way, anticipating in time, if not quite equalling in intensity, the Sagas and the Nibelungenlied. There is sometimes faintly mingled with this (as in the gabz of the Voyage à Constantinoble, and the exploits of Rainoart with the tinel) the spirit, half rough, half sly, of jesting, which by-and-by takes shape in the fabliaux. There is the immense and restless spirit of curiosity, which explores and refashions, to its own guise and fancy, the relics of the old world, the treasures of the East, the lessons of Scripture itself. Side by side with these there is that singular form of the religious spirit which has been so constantly misunderstood, and which, except in a very few persons, seems so rare nowadays—the faith which is implicit without being imbecile, childlike without being childish, devout with a fearless familiarity, the spirit to which the Dies Iræ and the sermons of St Francis were equally natural expressions, and which, if it could sometimes exasperate itself into the practices of the Inquisition, found a far commoner and more genuine expression in the kindly humanities of the Ancren Riwle. There is no lack of knowledge and none of inquiry; though in embarking on the enormous ocean of ignorance, it is inquiry not cabined and cribbed by our limits. In particular, there is an almost unparalleled, a certainly unsurpassed, activity in metaphysical speculation, a fence-play of thought astonishing in its accuracy and style. As Poetry slowly disintegrates and exfoliates itself into Prose, literary gifts for which verse was unsuited develop themselves in the vernaculars; and the chronicle—itself so lately an epic—becomes a history, or at least a memoir; the orator, sacred or profane, quits the school rhetoric and its familiar Latin vehicle for more direct means of persuasion; the jurist gives these vernaculars precision by adopting them.
But with and through and above all these various spirits there is most of all that abstract spirit of poetry, which, though not possessed by the Middle Ages or by Romance alone, seems somehow to be a more inseparable and pervading familiar of Romance and of the Middle Ages than of any other time and any other kind of literature. The sense of mystery, which had rarely troubled the keen intellect of the Greek and the sturdy common-sense of the Roman, which was even a little degraded and impoverished (except in the Jewish prophets and in a few other places) by the busy activity of Oriental imagination, which we ourselves have banished, or think we have banished, to a few “poets’ scrolls,” was always present to the mediæval mind. In its broadest and coarsest jests, in its most laborious and (as we are pleased to call them) dullest expansions of stories, in its most wire-drawn and most lifeless allegory, in its most irritating admixture of science and fable, there is always hard by, always ready to break in, the sense of the great and wonderful things of Life, and Love, and Death, of the half-known God and the unknown Hereafter. It is this which gives to Romance, and to mediæval work generally, that “high seriousness,” the want of which was so strangely cast at it in reproach by a critic who, I cannot but think, was less intimately acquainted with its literature than with that either of classical or of modern times. Constantly in mediæval poetry, very commonly in mediæval prose, the great things appear greatly. There is in English verse romance perhaps no less felicitous sample of the kind as it stands, none which has received greater vituperation for dulness and commonplace, than Sir Amadas. Yet who could much better the two simple lines, when the hero is holding revel after his ghastly meeting with the unburied corse in the roadside chapel?—
“But the dead corse that lay on bier
Full mickle his thought was on.”
In Homer’s Greek or Dante’s Italian such a couplet (which, be it observed, is as good in rhythm and vowel contrast as in simple presentation of thought) could hardly lack general admiration. In the English poetry of the Middle Ages it is dismissed as a commonplace.
Yet such things, and far better things, are to be met everywhere in the literature which, during the period we have had under review, took definite form and shape. It produced, indeed, none of the greatest men of letters—no Chaucer nor Dante, no Froissart even, at best for certainties a Villehardouin and a William of Lorris, a Wolfram and a Walther, with shadowy creatures of speculation like the authors of the great romances. But it produced some of the greatest matter, and some of not the least delightful handlings of matter, in book-history. And it is everywhere distinguished, first, by the adventurous fecundity of its experiments in form and kind, secondly, by the presence of that spirit which has been adumbrated in the last paragraph. In this last, we must own, the pupil countries far outdid their master or mistress. France was stronger relatively in the spirit of poetry during the Middle Ages than she has been since; but she was still weaker than others. She gave them expression, patterns, form: they found passion and spirit, with not seldom positive story-subject as well. When we come upon some nueva maestria, as the old Spanish poet called it, some cunning trick of form, some craftsman-like adjustment of style and kind to literary purposes, we shall generally find that it was invented in France. But we know that no Frenchman could have written the Dies Iræ; and though we recognise French as at home in the Rose-Garden, and not out of place in the fatal meeting of Lancelot and Guinevere, it sounds but as a foreign language in the towers of Carbonek or of Montsalvatsch.
Footnotes
1 One of the most difficult points to decide concerned the allowance of notes, bibliographical or other. It seemed, on the whole, better not to overload such a Series as this with them; but an attempt has been made to supply the reader, who desires to carry his studies further, with references to the best editions of the principal texts and the best monographs on the subjects of the different chapters. I have scarcely in these notes mentioned a single book that I have not myself used; but I have not mentioned a tithe of those that I have used.
2 Included with Dictys and Dares in a volume of Valpy’s Delphin Classics.
3 Cf. Warton, History of English Poetry. Ed. Hazlitt, i. 226-292.
4 Gualteri Mapes, De Nugis Curialium Distinctiones Quinque. Ed. T. Wright: Camden Society, 1850.
5 Carmina Burana, Stuttgart, 1847; Political Songs of England (1839), and Latin Poems attributed to Walter Mapes (1841), both edited for the Camden Society by T. Wright.
6 Wright and Halliwell’s Reliquiæ Antiquæ (London, 1845), ii. 208.
7 On this Arch-Poet see Scherer, History of German Literature (Engl. ed., Oxford, 1886), i. 68.
8 A few more precise dates may be useful. St Bernard, 1091-1153; Bernard of Morlaix, exact years uncertain, but twelfth century; Adam of St Victor, ob. cir. 1190; Jacopone da Todi, ob. 1306; St Bonaventura, 1221-1274; Thomas of Celano, fl. c. 1226. The two great storehouses of Latin hymn-texts are the well-known books of Daniel, Thesaurus Hymnologicus, and Mone, Hymni Latini Medii Ævi. And on this, as on all matters connected with hymns, the exhaustive Dictionary of Hymnology (London, 1892) of the Rev. John Julian will be found most valuable.
9 Of course no one of the four is a pure classical trochee; but all obey the trochaic rhythm.
10 Sacred Latin Poetry (2d ed., London, 1864), p. 304. This admirable book has not been, and from its mixture of taste and learning is never likely to be, superseded as an introduction to, and chrestomathy of, the subject. Indeed, if a little touch of orthodox prudery had not made the Archbishop exclude the Stabat, hardly a hymn of the very first class could be said to be missing in it.
11 I should feel even more diffidence than I do feel in approaching this proverbially thorny subject if it were not that many years ago, before I was called off to other matters, I paid considerable attention to it. And I am informed by experts that though the later (chiefly German) Histories of Philosophy, by Ueberweg, Erdmann, Windelband, &c., may be consulted with advantage, and though some monographs may be added, there are still no better guides than Hauréau, De la Philosophie Scolastique (revised edition) and Prantl, Geschichte der Logik im Abendlande, who were our masters five-and-twenty years ago. The last-named book in especial may be recommended with absolute confidence to any one who experiences the famous desire for “something craggy to break his mind upon.”
12 Some exacter dates may be useful. Anselm, 1033-1109; Roscellin, 1050?-1125; William of Champeaux,?-1121; Abelard, 1079-1142; Peter Lombard, ob. 1164; John of Salisbury,?-1180; Alexander of Hales,?-1245; Vincent of Beauvais,?-1265?; Bonaventura, 1221-1274; Albertus Magnus, 1195-1280; Thomas Aquinas, 1225?-1274; Duns Scotus, 1270?-1308?; William of Occam,?-1347; Roger Bacon, 1214-1292; Petrus Hispanus,?-1277; Raymond Lully, 1235-1315.
13 Rémusat on Anselm and Cousin on Abelard long ago smoothed the way as far as these two masters are concerned, and Dean Church on Anselm is also something of a classic. But I know no other recent monograph of any importance by an Englishman on Scholasticism except Mr R.L. Poole’s Erigena. Indeed the “Erin-born” has not had the ill-luck of his country, for with the Migne edition accessible to everybody, he is in much better case than most of his followers two, three, and four centuries later.
14 The Amalricans, as the followers of Amaury de Bène were termed, were not only condemned by the Lateran Council of 1215, but sharply persecuted; and we know nothing of the doctrines of Amaury, David, and the other northern Averroists or Pantheists, except from later and hostile notices.
15 I prefer, as more logical, the plural form chansons de gestes, and have so written it in my Short History of French Literature (Oxford, 4th ed., 1892), to which I may not improperly refer the reader on the general subject. But of late years the fashion of dropping the s has prevailed, and, therefore, in a book meant for general reading, I follow it here. Those who prefer native authorities will find a recent and excellent one on the whole subject of French literature in M. Lanson, Histoire de la Littérature Française, Paris, 1895. For the mediæval period generally M. Gaston Paris, La Littérature Française au Moyen Age (Paris, 1888), speaks with unapproached competence; and, still narrowing the range, the subject of the present chapter has been dealt with by M. Léon Gautier, Les Epopées Françaises (Paris, 4 vols., 1878-92), in a manner equally learned and loving. M. Gautier has also been intrusted with the section on the Chansons in the new and splendidly illustrated collection of monographs (Paris: Colin) which M. Petit de Julleville is editing under the title Histoire de la Langue et de la Littérature Française. Mr Paget Toynbee’s Specimens of Old French (Oxford, 1892) will illustrate this and the following chapters.
[16] This monotony almost follows from the title. For geste in the French is not merely the equivalent of gesta, “deeds.” It is used for the record of those deeds, and then for the whole class or family of performances and records of them. In this last sense the gestes are in chief three—those of the king, of Doon de Mayence, and of Garin de Montglane—besides smaller ones.
17 Jean Bodel, a trouvère of the thirteenth century, furnished literary history with a valuable stock-quotation in the opening of his Chanson des Saisnes for the three great divisions of Romance:—
“Ne sont que trois matières à nul home attendant,
De France et de Bretaigne et de Rome la grant.”
—Chanson des Saxons, ed. Michel, Paris, 1839, vol. i. p. 1.
The lines following, less often quoted, are an interesting early locus for French literary patriotism.
18 Or only in rare cases to later French history itself—Du Guesclin, and the Combat des Trente.
19 Dunlop, History of Prose Fiction (ed. Wilson, London, 1888), i. 274-351. Had Dunlop rigidly confined himself to prose fiction, the censure in the text might not be quite fair. As a matter of fact, however, he does not, and it would have been impossible for him to do so.
20 Editio princeps by Fr. Michel, 1837. Since that time it has been frequently reprinted, translated, and commented. Those who wish for an exact reproduction of the oldest MS. will find it given by Stengel (Heilbronn, 1878).
21 V. infra on the scene in Aliscans between William of Orange and his sister Queen Blanchefleur.
22 Even the famous and very admirable death-scene of Vivien (again v. infra) will not disprove these remarks.
23 Immanuel Bekker had printed the Provençal Fierabras as early as 1829.
24 V. the famous and all-important ninth chapter of the first book of the De Vulgari Eloquio.
25 See especially Macaire, ed. Guessard, Paris, 1860.
26 So also the geste of Montglane became the Nerbonesi.
27 Ed. S. Lee, London, 1883-86.
28 Roland, ll. 2233-2246.
29 I.e., Mecca.
30 Corée is not merely = cœur, but heart, liver, and all the upper “inwards.”
31 Li Bastars de Bouillon (ed. Scheler, Brussels, 1877).
32 Not always; for the English romance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries has on the whole been too harshly dealt with. But its average is far below that of the chansons.
33 This will explain the frequent recurrence of the title “Enfances ——” in the list given above. A hero had become interesting in some exploit of his manhood: so they harked back to his childhood.
34 Ed. Jonckbloët, op. cit., i. 1-71.
35 “Parlez à moi, sire au chaperon large.”—C.L., l. 468.
36 C.L., ll. 72-79, 172-196.
37 M. Jonckbloët, who takes a less wide range, begins his selection or collection of the William saga with the Couronnement Loys.
38 Jonckbloët, i. 73-111.
39 Jonckbloët, i. 112-162.
40 Enfances Vivien, ed. Wahlen and v. Feilitzer, Paris, 1886; Covenant Vivien, Jonckbloët, i. 163-213.
41 Jonckbloët, i. 215 to end; separately, as noted above, by Guessard and de Montaignon, Paris, 1870.
42 Foulques de Candie (ed. Tarbé, Reims, 1860) is the only one of this batch which I possess, or have read in extenso.
43 See the quotation from Jean Bodel, p. 26, note. The literature of the Arthurian question is very large; and besides the drawbacks referred to in the text, much of it is scattered in periodicals. The most useful recent things in English are Mr Nutt’s Studies on the Legend of the Holy Grail (London, 1888); Professor Rhys’s Arthurian Legend (Oxford, 1891); and the extensive introduction to Dr Sommer’s Malory (London, 1890). In French the elaborate papers on different parts which M. Gaston Paris brings out at intervals in Romania cannot be neglected; and M. Loth’s surveys of the subject there and in the Revue Celtique (October 1892) are valuable. Naturally, there has been a great deal in German, the best being, perhaps, Dr Kölbing’s long introduction to his reprint of Arthour and Merlin (Leipzig, 1890). Other books will be mentioned in subsequent notes; but a complete and impartial history of the whole subject, giving the contents, with strictly literary criticism only, of all the texts, and merely summarising theories as to origin, &c., is still wanting, and sorely wanted. Probably there is still no better, as there is certainly no more delightful, book on the matter than M. Paulin Paris’s Romans de la Table Ronde (5 vols., Paris, 1868-77). The monograph by M. Clédat on the subject in M. Petit de Julleville’s new History (v. supra, p. 23, note) is unfortunately not by any means one of the best of these studies.
44 The late Mr Skene, with great learning and ingenuity, endeavoured in his Four Ancient Books of Wales to claim all or almost all these place-names for Scotland in the wide sense. This can hardly be admitted: but impartial students of the historical references and the romances together will observe the constant introduction of northern localities in the latter, and the express testimony in the former to the effect that Arthur was general of all the British forces. We need not rob Cornwall to pay Lothian. For the really old references in Welsh poetry see, besides Skene, Professor Rhys, op. cit. Gildas and Nennius (but not the Vita Gildæ) will be found conveniently translated, with Geoffrey himself, in a volume of Bohn’s Historical Library, Six Old English Chronicles. The E.E.T.S. edition of Merlin contains a very long excursus by Mr Stuart-Glennie on the place-name question.
45 “Both these subjects of discussion [authorship and performance of Romances] have been the source of great controversy among antiquaries—a class of men who, be it said with their forgiveness, are apt to be both positive and polemical upon the very points which are least susceptible of proof, and least valuable, if the truth could be ascertained.”—Sir Walter Scott, “Essay on Romance,” Prose Works, vi. 154.
46 A caution may be necessary as to this word “first.” Nearly all the dates are extremely uncertain, and it is highly probable that intermediate texts of great importance are lost, or not yet found. But Layamon gives us Wace as an authority, and this is not in Wace. See Madden’s edition (London, 1847).
47 These, both Map’s and Borron’s (v. infra), with some of the verse forms connected with them, are in a very puzzling condition for study. M. Paulin Paris’s book, above referred to, abstracts most of them; the actual texts, as far as published, are chiefly to be found in Hucher, Le Saint Graal (3 vols., Le Mans, 1875-78); in Michel’s Petit Saint Graal (Paris, 1841); in the Merlin of MM. G. Paris and Ulrich (Paris, 1886). But Lancelot and the later parts are practically inaccessible in any modern edition.
48 Ed. Potvin, 6 vols., Mons, 1866-70. Dr Förster has undertaken a complete Chrestien, of which the 2d and 3d vols. are Yvain (“Le Chevalier au Lyon”) and Erec (Halle, 1887-90). Le Chevalier à la Charette should be read in Dr Jonckbloët’s invaluable parallel edition with the prose of Lancelot (The Hague, 1850). On this last see M. G. Paris, Romania, xii. 459—an admirable paper, though I do not agree with it.
49 The parallel edition, above referred to, of the Chevalier à la Charette and the corresponding prose settled this in my mind long ago; and though I have been open to unsettlement since, I have not been unsettled. The most unlucky instance of that over-positiveness to which I have referred above is M. Clédat’s statement that “nous savons” that the prose romances are later than the verse. We certainly do not “know” this any more than we know the contrary. There is important authority both ways; there is fair argument both ways; but the positive evidence which alone can turn opinion into knowledge has not been produced, and probably does not exist.
50 Translated by Lady Charlotte Guest, 2d ed., London, 1877.
51 Le Morte Arthur (ed. Furnivall, London, 1864), l. 3400 sqq.
52 Since I wrote this passage I have learnt with pleasure that there is a good chance of the whole of the Gawain romances, English and foreign, being examined together by a very competent hand, that of Mr I. Gollancz of Christ’s College, Cambridge.
53 The Welsh passages relating to Kay seem to be older than most others.
54 Editions: the French Tristan, edited long ago by F. Michel, but in need of completion; the English Sir Tristrem in Scott’s well-known issue, and re-edited (Heilbronn, 1882), with excellent taste as well as learning, by Dr Kölbing, who has also given the late Icelandic version, as well as for the Scottish Text Society (Edinburgh, 1886) by Mr George P. McNeill; Gottfried of Strasburg’s German (v. chap. vi.), ed. Bechstein (Leipzig, 1890). Romania, v. xv. (1886), contains several essays on the Tristram story.
55 It is fair to say that Mark, like Gawain, appears to have gone through a certain process of blackening at the hands of the late romancers; but the earliest story invited this.
56 Cursor Mundi, l. 2898.
57 Printed by Hartshorne, Ancient Metrical Tales (London, 1829), p. 209; and Hazlitt, Early Popular Poetry (London, 1864), i. 38.
58 And contrariwise the Welsh Peredur (Mabinogion, ed. cit., 81) has only a possible allusion to the Graal story, while the English Sir Percivale (Thornton Romances, ed. Halliwell, Camden Society, 1844) omits even this.
59 This curious outburst, referred to before, may be found in the Schoolmaster, ed. Arber, p. 80, or ed. Giles, Works of Ascham, iii. 159.
60 I have a much less direct acquaintance with the romances mentioned in this paragraph than with most of the works referred to in this book. I am obliged to speak of them at second-hand (chiefly from Dunlop and Mr Ward’s invaluable Catalogue of Romances, vol. i. 1883; vol. ii. 1893). It is one of the results of the unlucky fancy of scholars for re-editing already accessible texts instead of devoting themselves to anecdota, that work of the first interest, like Perceforest, for instance, is left to black-letter, which, not to mention its costliness, is impossible to weak eyes; even where it is not left to manuscript, which is more impossible still.
61 See pp. 114, 115 note.
62 See above, p. 102.
63 Ed. Weber, Metrical Romances, Edinburgh, 1810, ii. 279.
64 Ed. Stengel. Tübingen, 1873.
65 Ed. Förster. Halle, 1877.
66 For these magical provisions of food are commonplaces of general popular belief, and, as readers of Major Wingate’s book on the Soudan will remember, it was within the last few years an article of faith there that one of the original Mahdi’s rivals had a magic tent which would supply rations for an army.
67 In his History of English Poetry, vol. i., London, 1895, and in a subsequent controversy with Mr Nutt, which was carried on in the Athenæum.
68 See note 2, p. 26.
69 “Than upon him scho kest up baith her ene,
And with ane blunk it came in to his thocht,
That he sumtyme hir face before had sene.
Ane sparke of lufe than till his hart culd spring,
And kendlit all his bodie in ane fyre
With heit fevir, ane sweit and trimbilling
Him tuik quhile he was readie to expire;
To beir his scheild his breast began to tyre:
Within ane quhyle he changit mony hew,
And nevertheles not ane ane uther knew.”
Laing’s Poems of Henryson (Edinburgh, 1865), p. 93. This volume is unfortunately not too common; but ‘The Testament and Complaint of Cressid’ may also be found under Chaucer in Chalmers’s Poets (i. 298 for this passage).
70 Le Roman de Troie. Par Benoît de Sainte-More. Ed. Joly. Paris, 1870.
71 Paris, 1886. The number of monographs on this subject is, however, very large, and I should like at least to add Mr Wallis Budge’s Alexander the Great (the Syriac version of Callisthenes), Cambridge, 1889, and his subsequent Life and Exploits of Alexander.
72 Most conveniently accessible in the Teubner collection, ed. Kübler, Leipzig, 1888.
73 Ed. Michelant, Stuttgart, 1846.
74 Ed. Weber, op. cit. sup., i. 1-327.
75 Ed. Meyer, op. cit., i. 1-9.
76 Ll. 27-30.
77 Meyer, i. 25-59.
78 See Henry V. for the tennis-ball incident.
79 In this paragraph I again speak at second-hand, for neither the Vœux nor Florimont is to my knowledge yet in print. The former seems to have supplied most of the material of the poem in fifteenth-century Scots, printed by the Bannatyne Club in 1831, and to be reprinted, in another version, by the Scottish Text Society.
80 E.E.T.S., 1878, edited by Professor Skeat.
81 Dr Kölbing, who in combination of philological and literary capacity is second among Continental students of romance only to M. Gaston Paris, appears to have convinced himself of the existence of a great unknown English poet who wrote not only Alisaundre, but Arthour and Merlin, Richard Cœur de Lion, and other pieces. I should much like to believe this.
82 It would be unfair not to mention, as having preceded that of M. Joly by some years, and having practically founded study on the right lines, the handling of MM. Moland and d’Héricault, Nouvelles Françaises du Quatorzième Siècle (Bibliothèque Elzévirienne. Paris, 1856).
83 Ed. Meister. Leipzig, 1872-73.
84 The British Museum alone (see Mr Ward’s Catalogue of Romances, vol. i.) contains some seventeen separate MSS. of Dares.
85 Ed. Panton and Donaldson, E.E.T.S. London, 1869-74.
86 Ed. Moland and d’Héricault, op. cit.
87 The section on “L’Epopée Antique” in M. Petit de Julleville’s book, more than once referred to, is by M. Léopold Constans, editor of the Roman de Thèbes, and will be found useful.
88 See Craik, History of English Literature, 3d ed. (London, 1866), i. 55.
89 Ed. Madden, i. 2.
90 Ed. White and Holt, 2 vols. Oxford, 1878.
91 Ed. Morton, for the Camden Society. London, 1853. This edition is, I believe, not regarded as quite satisfactory by philology: it is amply adequate for literature.
92 Substantial portions of all the work mentioned in this chapter will be found in Messrs Morris and Skeat’s invaluable Specimens of Early English (Oxford, Part i. ed. 2, 1887; Part ii. ed. 3, 1894). These include the whole of the Moral Ode and of King Horn. Separate complete editions of some are noted below.
93 Wright, Reliquiæ Antiquæ, i. 208-227.
94 Ed. Morris, E.E.T.S., London, 1865.
95 About 600 lines of this are given by Morris and Skeat. Completely edited by (among others) F.H. Stratmann. Krefeld, 1868.
96 Ed. Morris, An Old English Miscellany. London, 1872.
97 See Reliquiæ Antiquæ, i. 109-116.
98 Edited with Langtoft, in 4 vols., by Hearne, Oxford, 1724; and reprinted, London, 1810. Also more lately in the Rolls Series.
99 Tristram, for editions v. p. 116: Havelok, edited by Madden, 1828, and again by Prof. Skeat, E.E.T.S., 1868. King Horn has been repeatedly printed—first by Ritson, Ancient English Metrical Romances (London, 1802), ii. 91, and Appendix; last by Prof. Skeat in the Specimens above mentioned.
100 It is sufficient to mention here Guest’s famous English Rhythms (ed. Skeat, 1882), a book which at its first appearance in 1838 was no doubt a revelation, but which carries things too far; Dr Schipper’s Grundriss der Englischen Metrik (Wien, 1895), and for foreign matters M. Gaston Paris’s chapter in his Littérature Française au Moyen Age. I do not agree with any of them, but I have a profound respect for all.
101 Vide Dante, De Vulgari Eloquio.
102 What is said here of English applies with certain modifications to German, though the almost entire loss of Old German poetry and the comparatively late date of Middle make the process less striking and more obscure, and the greater talent of the individual imitators of French interferes more with the process of insensible shaping and growth. German prosody, despite the charm of its lyric measures, has never acquired the perfect combination of freedom and order which we find in English, as may be seen by comparing the best blank verse of the two.
103 Of course there is plenty of alliteration in “Alison.” That ornament is too grateful to the English ear ever to have ceased or to be likely to cease out of English poetry. But it has ceased to possess any metrical value; it has absolutely nothing to do with the structure of the line.
104 His instance is Burns’s—
“Like a rogue | for for | gerie.”
It is a pity he did not reinforce it with many of the finest lines in The Ancient Mariner.
105 The most accessible History of German Literature is that of Scherer (English translation, 2 vols., Oxford, 1886), a book of fair information and with an excellent bibliography, but not very well arranged, and too full of extra-literary matter. Carlyle’s great Nibelungenlied Essay (Essays, vol. iii.) can never be obsolete save in unimportant matters; that which follows on Early German Literature is good, but less good. Mr Gosse’s Northern Studies (1879) contains a very agreeable paper on Walther von der Vogelweide. The Wagnerites have naturally of late years dealt much with Wolfram von Eschenbach, but seldom from a literary point of view.
106 Hildebrand and Hadubrand.
107 Ed. Bartsch. 6th ed. Leipzig, 1886.
108 For the verse originals see Vigfusson and Powell’s Corpus Poeticum Boreale (Oxford, 1883), vol. i. The verse and prose alike will be found conveniently translated in a cheap little volume of the “Camelot Library,” The Volsunga Saga, by W. Morris and E. Magnusson (London, 1888).
109 4th edition. London, 1887.
110 Ed. Bartsch. 4th ed. Leipzig, 1880.
111 The very name of this remarkable personage seems to have exercised a fascination over the early German mind, and appears as given to others (Wolfdietrich, Hugdietrich) who have nothing to do with him of Verona.
112 Ed. Von Bahder. Halle, 1884.
113 The subjects of the last paragraph form, it will be seen, a link between the two, being at least probably based on German traditions, but influenced in form by French.
114 Walther’s ninth Lied, opening stanza.
115 Found in every language, but originally French.
116 Ed. Bechstein. 3d ed., 2 vols. Leipzig, 1891.
117 Tristan, 8th song, l. 4619 and onwards. The crucial passage is a sharp rebuke of “finders [vindære, trouvères] of wild tales,” or one particular such who plays tricks on his readers and utters unintelligible things. It may be Wolfram: it also may not be.
118 Ed. Bech. 3d ed., 3 vols. Leipzig, 1893.
119 Complete works. Ed. Lachmann. Berlin, 1838. Parzival und Titurel. 2 vols. Ed. Bartsch. Leipzig, 1870.
120 Ed. Bartsch. 4th ed. Leipzig, 1873.
121 “Diu werlt was gelf, röt unde blâ,
grüen, in dem walde und anderswâ
kleine vogele sungen dâ.
nû schriet aber den nebelkrâ.
pfligt s’iht ander varwe? jâ,
s’ist worden bleich und übergrâ:
des rimpfet sich vil manic brâ.”
Similar stanzas in e, i, o, u follow in order.
122 The standard edition or corpus of their work is that of Von der Hagen, in three large vols. Leipzig, 1838.
123 On this see the last passage, except the conclusion on Reynard the Fox, of Carlyle’s Essay on “Early German Literature” noted above. Of the great romances, as distinguished from the Nibelungen, Carlyle did not know much, and he was not quite in sympathy either with their writers or with the Minnesingers proper. But the life-philosopher of Reynard and the Renner attracted him.
124 This is not inconsistent with allowing that no single French lyric poet is the equal of Walther von der Vogelweide, and that the exercises of all are hampered by the lack—after the earliest examples—of trisyllabic metres.
125 M. Jeanroy, as is also the case with other writers of monographs mentioned in this chapter, has contributed to M. Petit de Julleville’s Histoire (v. p. 23) on his subject.
126 Paris, 1833.
127 Leipzig, 1870.
128 Rheims, 1851.
129 This for convenience’ sake is postponed to chap. viii.
130 Romancero Français, p. 66.
131 See p. 210.
132 6 vols. Paris, 1872-90.
133 For these see the texts and editorial matter of Dolopathos, ed. Brunet and De Montaiglon (Bibliothèque Elzévirienne), Paris, 1856; and of Le Roman des Sept Sages, ed. G. Paris (Soc. des Anc. Textes), Paris, 1875. The English Seven Sages (in Weber, vol. iii.) has been thought to be of the thirteenth century. The Gesta Romanorum in any of its numerous forms is probably later.
134 “Les Deux Bordeors [bourders, jesters] Ribaux.”
135 Early English Prose Romances (2d ed., London, 1858), i. 71. The text of this is only Deloney’s and sixteenth century, but much of the matter must be far earlier.
136 Weber, iii. 177.
137 Works of Marie; ed. Roquefort, Paris, 1820; or ed. Warnke, Halle, 1885. The Lyoner Ysopet, with the Anonymus; ed. Förster, Heilbronn, 1882.
138 Roman du (should be de) Renart: ed. Méon and Chabaille, 5 vols., Paris, 1826-35; ed. Martin, 3 vols. text and 1 critical observations, Strasburg, 1882-87. Reincke de Vos, ed. Prien, Halle, 1887, with a valuable bibliography. Reinaert, ed. Martin, Paderborn, 1874. Reinardus Vulpes, ed. Mone, Stuttgart, 1834. Reinhart Fuchs, ed. Grimm, Berlin, 1832. On the story there is perhaps nothing better than Carlyle, as quoted supra.
139 This, which is not so much a branch as an independent fabliau, is attributed to Rutebœuf, v. infra.
140 The Teutonic versions are consolidated into a more continuous story. But of the oldest High German version, that of the Glichezare, we have but part, and Reincke de Vos does not reach seven thousand verses. The French forms are therefore certainly to be preferred.
141 Méon, iii. 82; Martin, ii. 43.
142 Ed. Michel. Paris, 1864. One of the younger French scholars, who, under the teaching of M. Gaston Paris, have taken in hand various sections of mediæval literature, M. Langlois, has bestowed much attention on the Rose, and has produced a monograph on it, Origines et Sources du Roman de la Rose. Paris, 1890.
143 “Sloth” is a rather unhappy substitute for Accidia (ἀκήδεια), the gloomy and impious despair and indifference to good living and even life, of which sloth itself is but a partial result.
144 “Seven” says the verse chapter-heading, which is a feature of the poem; but the actual text does not mention the number, and it will be seen that there were in fact ten. The author of the headings was no doubt thinking of the Seven Deadly Sins.
145 Vilenie is never an easy word to translate: it means general misconduct and disagreeable behaviour.
146 I am well aware of everything that has been said about and against the Chaucerian authorship of the English Rose. But until the learned philologists who deny that authorship in whole or in part agree a little better among themselves, they must allow literary critics at least to suspend their judgment.
147 “Car ge suis a greignor meschief
Por la joie que j’ai perdue.
Que s’onques ne l’éussi éue.”
Dante undoubtedly had this in his mind when he wrote the immortal Nessun maggior dolore. All this famous passage, l. 4557 sq., is admirable.
148 The following of the Rose would take a volume, even treated as the poem itself is here. The English version has been referred to: Italian naturalised it early in a sonnet cycle, Il Fiore. Every country welcomed it, but the actual versions are as nothing to the imitations and the influence.
149 See note above, p. 286.
150 Ed. Jubinal, 2d ed., Paris, 1874; or ed. Kressner, Wolfenbüttel, 1885.
151 Ed. Monmerqué et Michel, Théâtre Français au Moyen Age. Paris, 1874. This also contains Théophile, Saint Nicolas, and the plays of Adam de la Halle.
152 Ed. Luzarches, Tours, 1854; ed. Palustre, Paris, 1877.
153 Several of these miracles of the Virgin will be found in the volume by Monmerqué and Michel referred to above: the whole collection has been printed by the Société des Anciens Textes. The MS. is of the fourteenth century, but some of its contents may date from the thirteenth.
154 Besides the issue above noted these have been separately edited by A. Rambeau. Marburg, 1886.
155 The often-quoted statement that in 659 Mummolinus or Momolenus was made Bishop of Noyon because of his double skill in “Teutonic” and “Roman” (not “Latin”) speech.
156 Ed. Natalis de Wailly. Paris, 1872.
157 Ed. Paulin Paris. Paris, 1879.
158 Ed. Natalis de Wailly. Paris, 1874.
159 Frequently edited: not least satisfactorily in the Nouvelles Françaises du XIIIme Siècle, referred to above. In 1887 two English translations, by Mr Lang and Mr Bourdillon, the latter with the text and much apparatus, appeared: and Mr Bourdillon has recently edited a facsimile of the unique MS. (Oxford, 1896).
160 Iceland began to be Christian in 1000.
161 It is almost superfluous to insert, but would be disagreeable to omit, a reference to the Sturlunga Saga (2 vols., Oxford, 1879) and the Corpus Poeticum Boreale (2 vols., Oxford, 1883) of the late Dr Vigfusson and Professor York Powell. The first contains an invaluable sketch, or rather history, of Icelandic literature: the second (though one may think its arrangement a little arbitrary) is a book of unique value and interest. Had these two been followed up according to Dr Vigfusson’s plan, practically the whole of Icelandic literature that has real interest would have been accessible once for all. As it is, one is divided between satisfaction that England should have done such a service to one of the great mediæval literatures, and regret that she has not done as much for others.
162 Dr Vigfusson is exceedingly severe on the Heimskringla, which he will have to be only a late, weak, and rationalised compilation from originals like the oddly termed “Great O.T. Saga.” But it is hard for a man to think hardly of the book in which, though only a translation, he first read how Queen Sigrid the Haughty got rid of her troublesome lovers by the effectual process of burning them en masse in a barn, and how King Olaf died the greatest sea-death—greater even than Grenville’s—of any defeated hero, in history or literature.
163 The Story of Burnt Njal. Edinburgh, 1861.
164 Included in the Bohn edition of Mallet’s Northern Antiquities.
165 Cornhill Magazine, July 1879.
166 “The Lovers of Gudrun;” November, part iii. p. 337, original edition. London, 1870.
167 London, 1869.
168 Gunnlaug’s Saga Ormstungu. Ed. Mogk. Halle, 1886.
169 In Three Northern Love-Stories. London, 1875.
170 London, 1866.
171 Edinburgh, 1866.
172 In one volume. London, 1891.
173 Not translated, and said to require re-editing in the original, but very fully abstracted in Northern Antiquities, as above, pp. 321-339. The verse is in the Corpus Poeticum Boreale.
174 It seems almost incredible that the resemblances between Beowulf and the Grettis Saga should never have struck any one till Dr Vigfusson noticed them less than twenty years ago. But the fact seems to be so; and nothing could better prove the rarity of that comparative study of literature to which this series aims at being a modest contribution and incentive.
175 Compare, mutatis mutandis, Agam., 410 sq., and Kormak’s “Stray verses,” ll. 41-44, in the Corpus, ii. 65.
176 Heimskringla does not say “edgeways,” but this is the clear meaning. Kolbiorn held his shield flat and below him, so that it acted as a float, and he was taken. Olaf sank.
177 Of course this is only in comparison. For instance, in Dr Suchier’s Denkmäler (Halle, 1883), which contains nearly 500 large pages of Provençal anecdota, about four-fifths is devotional matter of various kinds and in various forms, prose and verse. But such matter, which is common to all mediæval languages, is hardly literature at all, being usually translated, with scarcely any expense of literary originality, from the Latin, or each other.
178 Alberic’s Alexander (v. chap. iv.) is of course Provençal in a way, and there was probably a Provençal intermediary between the Chanson d’Antioche and the Spanish Gran Conquesta de Ultramar. But we have only a few lines of the first and nothing of the second.
179 The Grundriss zur Geschichte der Provenzalischen Literatur (Elberfeld, 1872) and the Chrestomathie Provençale (3d ed., Elberfeld, 1875) of this excellent scholar will not soon be obsolete, and may, in the peculiar conditions of the case, suffice all but special students in a degree hardly possible in any other literature. Mahn’s Troubadours and the older works of Raynouard and Fauriel are the chief storehouses of wider information, and separate editions of the works of the chief poets are being accumulated by modern, chiefly German, scholars. An interesting and valuable addition to the English literature of the subject has been made, since the text was written, by Miss Ida Farnell’s Lives of the Troubadours, a translation with added specimens of the poets and other editorial matter.
180 Ed. Hercher, Erotici Scriptores Græci (2 vols., Leipzig, 1858), ii. 161-286.
181 Ed. Reifferscheid. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1884.
182 Following Eustathius in Hercher, op. cit.
183 These political verses are fifteen-syllabled, with a cæsura at the eighth, and in a rhythm ostensibly accentual.
184 Erotici Scriptores, ii. 555.
185 Sometimes spelt Ismenias and Ismene. I believe it was first published in an Italian translation of the late Renaissance, and it has appeared in other languages since. But it is only worth reading in its own.
186 Πόλις Εὐρύκωμις καὶ τἆλλα μὲν ἀγαθὴ, ὅτι καὶ θαλάττῃ στεφανοῦται καὶ ποίλμοῖς καταρρεῖται καὶ λειμῶσι κομᾷ καὶ τρυφαῖς εὐθηνεῖται παντοδαπαῖς, τὰ δ’ εἰς θεοῦς εὐσεβής, καὶ ὑπὲρ τὰς χρυσᾶς Ἀθήνας ὅλη βωμός, ὅλη θῦμα, θεοῖς ἀνάθημα.
Transliteration of above: Polis Eurykômis kai talla men agathê, hoti kai thalattê stephanoutai kai poilmois katarreitai kai leimôsi koma kai tryphais euthêneitai pantodapais, ta d’ eis theous eusebês, kai hyper tas chrysas Athênas holê bômos, holê thyma, theois anathêma.
187 I have not thought it proper, considering the system of excluding mere hypothesis which I have adopted, to give much place here to that interesting theory of modern “Romanists” which will have it that Latin classical literature was never much more than a literary artifice, and that the modern Romance tongues and literatures connect directly, through that famous lingua romana rustica and earlier forms of it, vigorous though inarticulate, in classical times themselves, with primitive poetry—“Saturnian,” “Fescennine,” and what not. All this is interesting, and it cannot be said, in the face of inscriptions, of the scraps of popular speech in the classics, &c., to be entirely guesswork. But a great deal of it is.
188 See Studj sulla Letteratura Italiana dei Primi Secoli. 2d ed. Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1891. Pp. 241-458.
189 Obtainable in many forms, separately and with Dante’s works. The Latin is easy enough, but there is a good English translation by A.G. Ferrers Howell (London, 1890). Those who like facsimiles may find one of the Grenoble MS., with a learned introduction, edited by MM. Maignien and Prompt (Venice, 1892).
190 Authorities differ oddly on Jacopone da Todi (v. p. 8) in his Italian work. Professor d’Andrea’s book, cited above, opens with an excellent essay on him.
191 The text with comment, stanza by stanza, is to be found in the book cited above.
192 “Sacro erotismo,” “baccanale cristiano,” are phrases of Professor d’Andrea’s.
193 Spanish can scarcely be said to have shared, to an extent commensurate with its interest, in the benefit of recent study of the older forms of modern languages. There is, at any rate in English, and I think elsewhere, still nothing better than Ticknor’s History of Spanish Literature (3 vols., London, 1849, and reprinted since), in the early part of which he had the invaluable assistance of the late Don Pascual de Gayangos. Some scattered papers may be found in Romania. Fortunately, almost all the known literary materials for our period are to be found in Sanchez’ Poesias Castellanas Anteriores al Siglo XV., the Paris (1842) reprint of which by Ochoa, with a few valuable additions, I have used. The Poema del Cid is, except in this old edition, rather discreditably inaccessible—Vollmöller’s German edition (Halle, 1879), the only modern or critical one, being, I understand, out of print. It would be a good deed if the Clarendon Press would furnish students with this, the only rival of Beowulf and the Chanson de Roland in the combination of antiquity and interest.
194 Extracts of this appear in Ticknor, Appendix A., iii. 352, note.
195 I have not seen Professor Cornu’s paper itself, but only a notice of it by M. G. Paris in Romania, xxii. 153, and some additional annotations by the Professor himself at p. 531 of the same volume.
196 It is perhaps fair to Professor Cornu to admit some weight in his argument that where proper names predominate—i.e., where the copyist was least likely to alter—his basis suggests itself most easily.
197 Some writers very inconveniently, and by a false transference from “consonant,” use “consonance” as if equivalent to “alliteration.” It is much better kept for full rhyme, in which vowels and consonants both “sound with” each other.
198 I have not thought it necessary to give an abstract of the contents of the poem, because Southey’s Chronicle of the Cid is accessible to everybody, and because no wise man will ever attempt to do over again what Southey has once done.
199 Sanchez-Ochoa, op. cit., pp. 525-561.
200 Ibid., pp. 561-576.
201 Sanchez-Ochoa, op. cit., pp. 577-579.