On the whole, I must repeat that the chansons de geste, which as we have them are the work of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the main, form the second division in point of literary value of early mediæval literature, while they possess, in a certain "sincerity and strength," qualities not to be found even in the Arthurian story itself. Despite the ardour with which they have been philologically studied for nearly three-quarters of a century, despite (or perhaps because of) the enthusiasm which one or two devotees have shown for their literary qualities, it does not seem to me that fair justice, or anything like it, has yet been generally done. German critics care little for literary merit, and are perhaps not often trained to appreciate it; in England the chansons have been strangely little read. But the most singular thing is the cold reception, slightly if at all thawed recently, which they have met in France itself. It may give serious pause to the very high estimate generally entertained of French criticism by foreigners to consider this coldness, which once reached something like positive hostility in M. Ferdinand Brunetière, the chief French literary critic of our generation. I regret to see that M. Lanson, the latest historian of French literature, has not dared to separate himself from the academic grex. "On ne saurait nier," he says, "que quelques uns aient eu du talent;" but he evidently feels that this generous concession is in need of guards and caveats. There is no "beauté formelle" in them, he says—no formal beauty in those magnificently sweeping laisses, of which the ear that has once learnt their music can no more tire thereafter than of the sound of the sea itself. The style (and if it be objected that his previous words have been directly addressed to the later chansons and chanson writers, here he expressly says that this style "est le même style que dans le Roland," though "moins sobre, moins plein, moins sur") has "no beauty by itself," and finally he thinks that the best thing to do is "to let nine-tenths of the chansons follow nine-tenths of our tragedies." I have read many chansons and many tragedies; but I have never read a chanson that has not more poetry in it than ninety-nine French tragedies out of a hundred.
The fact is that it is precisely the beauté formelle, assisted as it is by the peculiar spirit of which so much has been said already, which constitutes the beauty of these poems: and that these characteristics are present, not of course in uniform measure, but certainly in the great majority of the chansons from Roland to the Bastard. Of course if a man sits down with a preconceived idea of an epic poem, it is more likely than not that his preconceived idea will be of something very different from a chanson de geste. And if, refusing to depart from his preconceived idea, and making that idea up of certain things taken from the Iliad, certain from the Æneid, certain from the Divina Commedia, certain from Paradise Lost,—if he runs over the list and says to the chanson, "Are you like Homer in this point? Can you match me Virgil in that?" the result will be that the chanson will fail to pass its examination.
But if, with some knowledge of literature in the wide sense, and some love for it, he sits down to take the chansons as they are, and judge them on their merits and by the law of their own poetical state, then I think he will come to a very different conclusion. He will say that their kind is a real kind, a thing by itself, something of which if it were not, nothing else in literature could precisely supply the want. And he will decide further that while the best of them are remarkably good of their kind, few of them can be called positively bad in it. And yet again, if he has been fortunately gifted by nature with that appreciation of form which saves the critic from mere prejudice and crotchet, from mere partiality, he will, I believe, go further still, and say that while owing something to spirit, they owe most to form itself, to the form of the single-assonanced or mono-rhymed tirade, assisted as it is by the singular beauty of Old French in sound, and more particularly by the sonorous recurring phrases of the chanson dialect. No doubt much instruction and some amusement can be got out of these poems as to matters of fact: no doubt some passages in Roland, in Aliscans, in the Couronnement Loys, have a stern beauty of thought and sentiment which deserves every recognition. But these things are not all-pervading, and they can be found elsewhere: the clash and clang of the tirade are everywhere here, and can be found nowhere else.
CHAPTER III.
THE MATTER OF BRITAIN.
ATTRACTIONS OF THE ARTHURIAN LEGEND. DISCUSSIONS ON THEIR SOURCES. THE PERSONALITY OF ARTHUR. THE FOUR WITNESSES. THEIR TESTIMONY. THE VERSION OF GEOFFREY. ITS LACUNÆ. HOW THE LEGEND GREW. WACE. LAYAMON. THE ROMANCES PROPER. WALTER MAP. ROBERT DE BORRON. CHRESTIEN DE TROYES. PROSE OR VERSE FIRST? A LATIN GRAAL-BOOK. THE MABINOGION. THE LEGEND ITSELF. THE STORY OF JOSEPH OF ARIMATHEA. MERLIN. LANCELOT. THE LEGEND BECOMES DRAMATIC. STORIES OF GAWAIN AND OTHER KNIGHTS. SIR TRISTRAM. HIS STORY ALMOST CERTAINLY CELTIC. SIR LANCELOT. THE MINOR KNIGHTS. ARTHUR. GUINEVERE. THE GRAAL. HOW IT PERFECTS THE STORY. NATURE OF THIS PERFECTION. NO SEQUEL POSSIBLE. LATIN EPISODES. THE LEGEND AS A WHOLE. THE THEORIES OF ITS ORIGIN. CELTIC. FRENCH. ENGLISH. LITERARY. THE CELTIC THEORY. THE FRENCH CLAIMS. THE THEORY OF GENERAL LITERARY GROWTH. THE ENGLISH OR ANGLO-NORMAN PRETENSIONS. ATTEMPTED HYPOTHESIS.
Attractions of the Arthurian Legend.
To English readers, and perhaps not to English readers only, the middle division of the three great romance-subjects[43] ought to be of far higher interest than the others; and that not merely, even in the English case, for reasons of local patriotism. The mediæval versions of classical story, though attractive to the highest degree as evidence of the extraordinary plastic power of the period, which could transform all art to its own image and guise, and though not destitute of individual charm here and there, must always be mainly curiosities. The cycle of Charlemagne, a genuine growth and not merely an incrustation or transformation, illustrated, moreover, by particular examples of the highest merit, is exposed on the one hand to the charge of a certain monotony, and on the other to the objection that, beautiful as it is, it is dead. For centuries, except in a few deliberate literary exercises, the king à la barbe florie has inspired no modern singer—his geste is extinct. But the Legend of Arthur, the latest to take definite form of the three, has shown by far the greatest vitality. From generation to generation it has taken new forms, inspired new poetries. The very latest of the centuries has been the most prolific in contributions of any since the end of the Middle Ages; and there is no sufficient reason why the lineage should ever stop. For while the romance of antiquity is a mere "sport," an accident of time and circumstance, the chanson de geste, majestic and interesting as it is, representative as it is to a certain extent of a nation and a language, has the capital defect of not being adaptable. Having little or no allegorical capacity, little "soul," so to speak, it was left by the tide of time on the shores thereof without much hope of floating and living again. The Arthurian Legend, if not from the very first, yet from the first moment when it assumed vernacular forms, lent itself to that double meaning which, though it is open to abuse, and was terribly abused in these very ages, is after all the salvation of things literary, since every age adopting the first and outer meaning can suit the second and inner to its own taste and need.