EUROPEAN LITERATURE IN 1100. LATE DISCOVERY OF THE "CHANSONS." THEIR AGE AND HISTORY. THEIR DISTINGUISHING CHARACTER. MISTAKES ABOUT THEM. THEIR ISOLATION AND ORIGIN. THEIR METRICAL FORM. THEIR SCHEME OF MATTER. THE CHARACTER OF CHARLEMAGNE. OTHER CHARACTERS AND CHARACTERISTICS. REALIST QUALITY. VOLUME AND AGE OF THE "CHANSONS." TWELFTH CENTURY. THIRTEENTH CENTURY. FOURTEENTH, AND LATER. "CHANSONS" IN PRINT. LANGUAGE: "OC" AND "OÏL." ITALIAN. DIFFUSION OF THE "CHANSONS." THEIR AUTHORSHIP AND PUBLICATION. THEIR PERFORMANCE. HEARING, NOT READING, THE OBJECT. EFFECT ON PROSODY. THE "JONGLEURS." "JONGLERESSES," ETC. SINGULARITY OF THE "CHANSONS." THEIR CHARM. PECULIARITY OF THE "GESTE" SYSTEM. INSTANCES. SUMMARY OF THE "GESTE" OF WILLIAM OF ORANGE. AND FIRST OF THE "COURONNEMENT LOYS." COMMENTS ON THE "COURONNEMENT." WILLIAM OF ORANGE. THE EARLIER POEMS OF THE CYCLE. THE "CHARROI DE NÎMES." THE "PRISE D'ORANGE." THE STORY OF VIVIEN. "ALISCANS." THE END OF THE STORY. RENOUART. SOME OTHER "CHANSONS." FINAL REMARKS ON THEM.
European literature in 1100.
When we turn from Latin and consider the condition of the vernacular tongues in the year 1100, there is hardly more than one country in Europe where we find them producing anything that can be called literature. In England Anglo-Saxon, if not exactly dead, is dying, and has for more than a century ceased to produce anything of distinctly literary attraction; and English, even the earliest "middle" English, is scarcely yet born, is certainly far from being in a condition for literary use. The last echoes of the older and more original Icelandic poetry are dying away, and the great product of Icelandic prose, the Saga, still volitat per ora virum, without taking a concrete literary form. It is in the highest degree uncertain whether anything properly to be called Spanish or Italian exists at all—anything but dialects of the lingua rustica showing traces of what Spanish and Italian are to be; though the originals of the great Poema del Cid cannot be far off. German is in something the same trance between its "Old" and its "Middle" state as is English. Only in France, and in both the great divisions of French speech, is vernacular literature active. The northern tongue, the langue d'oïl, shows us—in actually known existence, or by reasonable inference that it existed—the national epic or chanson de geste; the southern, or langue d'oc, gives us the Provençal lyric. The latter will receive treatment later, the former must be dealt with at once.
It is rather curious that while the chansons de geste are, after Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic poetry, the oldest elaborate example of verse in the modern vernaculars; while they exhibit a character, not indeed one of the widest in range or most engaging in quality, but individual, interesting, intense as few others; while they are entirely the property of one nation, and that a nation specially proud of its literary achievements,—they were almost the last division of European literature to become in any degree properly known. In so far as they were known at all, until within the present century, the knowledge was based almost entirely on later adaptations in verse, and still later in prose; while—the most curious point of all—they were not warmly welcomed by the French even after their discovery, and cannot yet be said to have been taken to the heart of the nation, even to the limited extent to which the Arthurian romances have been taken to the heart of England, much less to that in which the old, but much less old, ballads of England, Scotland, Germany, and Spain have for periods of varying length been welcomed in their respective countries. To discuss the reason of this at length would lead us out of our present subject; but it is a fact, and a very curious fact.
Late discovery of the chansons.
The romances of Charlemagne, or, to employ their more technical designation, the chansons de geste, form a large, a remarkably homogeneous, and a well-separated body of compositions. These, as far as can be decided, date in time from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, with a few belated representatives in the fourteenth; but scarcely, as far as probability shows, with any older members in the tenth. Very little attention of any kind was paid to them, till some seventy years ago, an English scholar, Their age and
history.Conybeare, known for his services to our own early literature, following the example of another scholar, Tyrwhitt, still earlier and more distinguished, had drawn attention to the merit and interest of, as it happens, the oldest and most remarkable of all. This was the Chanson de Roland, which, in this oldest form, exists only in one of the MSS. of the Bodleian Library at Oxford. But they very soon received the care of M. Paulin Paris, the most indefatigable student that in a century of examination of the older European literature any European country has produced, and after more than half a century of enthusiastic resuscitation by M. Paris, by his son M. Gaston, and by others, the whole body of them has been thoroughly overhauled and put at the disposal of those who do not care to read the original, in the four volumes of the remodelled edition of M. Léon Gautier's Epopées Françaises, while perhaps a majority of the actual texts are in print. This is as well, for though a certain monotony is always charged against the chansons de geste[16] by those who do not love them, and may be admitted to some extent even by those who do, there are few which have not a more or less distinct character of their own; and even the generic character is not properly to be perceived until a considerable number have been studied.
Their distinguishing character.
The old habit of reading this division of romance in late and travestied versions naturally and necessarily obscured the curious traits of community in form and matter that belong to it, and indeed distinguish it from almost all other departments of literature of the imaginative kind. Its members are frequently spoken of as "the Charlemagne Romances"; and, as a matter of fact, most of them do come into connection with the great prince of the second race in one way or another. Yet Bodel's phrase of matière de France[17] is happier. For they are all still more directly connected with French history, seen through a romantic lens; and even the late and half-burlesque Hugues Capet, even the extremely interesting and partly contemporary set on the Crusades, as well as such "little gestes" as that of the Lorrainers, Garin le Loherain and the rest, and the three "great gestes" of the king, of the southern hero William of Orange (sometimes called the geste of Montglane), and of the family of Doon de Mayence, arrange themselves with no difficulty under this more general heading. And the chanson de geste proper, as Frenchmen are entitled to boast, never quite deserts this matière de France. It is always the Gesta Francorum at home, or the Gesta Dei per Francos in the East, that supply the themes. When this subject or group of subjects palled, the very form of the chanson de geste was lost. It was not applied to other things;[18] it grew obsolete with that which it had helped to make popular. Some of the material—Huon of Bordeaux, the Four Sons of Aymon, and others—retained a certain vogue in forms quite different, and gave later ages the inexact and bastard notion of "Charlemagne Romance" which has been referred to. But the chanson de geste itself was never, so to speak, "half-known"—except to a very few antiquaries. After its three centuries of flourishing, first alone, then with the other two "matters," it retired altogether, and made its reappearance only after four centuries had passed away.
Mistakes about them.
This fact or set of facts has made the actual nature of the original Charlemagne Romances the subject of much mistake and misstatement on the part of general historians of literature. The widely read and generally accurate Dunlop knew nothing whatever about them, except in early printed versions representing their very latest form, and in the hopelessly travestied eighteenth-century Bibliothèque des Romans of the Comte de Tressan. He therefore assigned to them[19] a position altogether inferior to their real importance, and actually apologised for the writers, in that, coming after the Arthurian historians, they were compelled to imitation. As a matter of fact, it is probable that all the most striking and original chansons de geste, certainly all those of the best period, were in existence before a single one of the great Arthurian romances was written; and as both the French and English, and even the German, writers of these latter were certainly acquainted with the chansons, the imitation, if there were any, must lie on their side. As a matter of fact, however, there is little or none. The later and less genuine chansons borrow to some extent the methods and incidents in the romances; but the romances at no time exhibit much resemblance to the chansons proper, which have an extremely distinct, racy, and original character of their own. Hallam, writing later than Dunlop, and if with a less wide knowledge of Romance, with a much greater proficiency in general literary history, practically passes the chansons de geste over altogether in the introduction to his Literature of Europe, which purports to summarise all that is important in the History of the Middle Ages, and to supplement and correct that book itself.