Here first, here eminently, and here just at the time when we should expect it, do we see that strange faculty for exhibiting a blend, a union, a cross of characteristics diverse in themselves, and giving when blended a result different from any of the parts, which is more than anything else the characteristic of the English language, of English literature, of English politics, of everything that is English. Classical rhetoric, French gallantry, Saxon religiosity and intense realisation of the other world, Oriental extravagance to some extent, the "Celtic vague"—all these things are there. But they are all co-ordinated, dominated, fashioned anew by some thing which is none of them, but which is the English genius, that curious, anomalous, many-sided genius, which to those who look at only one side of it seems insular, provincial, limited, and which yet has given us Shakespeare, the one writer of the world to whom the world allows an absolute universality.
CHAPTER IV.
ANTIQUITY IN ROMANCE.
ODDITY OF THE CLASSICAL ROMANCE. ITS IMPORTANCE. THE TROY STORY. THE ALEXANDREID. CALLISTHENES. LATIN VERSIONS. THEIR STORY. ITS DEVELOPMENTS. ALBERIC OF BESANÇON. THE DECASYLLABIC POEM. THE GREAT "ROMAN D'ALIXANDRE." FORM, ETC. CONTINUATIONS. "KING ALEXANDER." CHARACTERISTICS. THE TALE OF TROY. DICTYS AND DARES. THE DARES STORY. ITS ABSURDITY. ITS CAPABILITIES. TROILUS AND BRISEIDA. THE 'ROMAN DE TROIE.' THE PHASES OF CRESSID. THE 'HISTORIA TROJANA.' MEANING OF THE CLASSICAL ROMANCE.
Oddity of the Classical Romance.
As the interest of Jean Bodel's first two divisions[68] differs strikingly, and yet represents, in each case intimately and indispensably, certain sides of the mediæval character, so also does that of his third. This has perhaps more purely an interest of curiosity than either of the others. It neither constitutes a capital division of general literature like the Arthurian story, nor embodies and preserves a single long-past phase in national spirit and character, like the chansons de geste. From certain standpoints of the drier and more rigid criticism it is exposed to the charge of being trifling, almost puerile. We cannot understand—or, to speak with extremer correctness, it would seem that some of us cannot understand—the frame of mind which puts Dictys and Dares on the one hand, Homer on the other, as authorities to be weighed on equal terms, and gravely sets Homer aside as a very inferior and prejudiced person; which, even after taking its Dictys and Dares, proceeds to supplement them with entire inventions of its own; which, after in the same way taking the Pseudo-Callisthenes as the authoritative biographer of Alexander, elaborates the legend with a wild luxuriance that makes the treatment of the Tale of Troy seem positively modest and sober; which makes Thebes, Julius Cæsar, anything and anybody in fabulous and historical antiquity alike, the centre, or at least the nucleus, of successive accretions of romantic fiction.
Its importance—the Troy story.
Nevertheless, the attractions, intrinsic and extrinsic, of the division are neither few nor small. This very confusion, as it seems nowadays, this extraordinary and almost monstrous blending of uncritical history and unbridled romance, shows one of the most characteristic sides of the whole matter, and exhibits, as do few other things, that condition of mediæval thought in regard to all critical questions which has so constantly to be insisted on. As in the case of the Arthurian story, the matter thus presented caught hold of the mediæval imagination with a remarkable grip, and some of the most interesting literary successions of all history date from it. Among them it is almost enough to mention the chain of names—Benoît de Sainte-More, Guido Colonna, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Henryson—which reaches Shakespeare, and does not cease with him, all successively elaborating the history of Troilus and Cressida. The lively story, first formed, like so many others, by the French genius, and well, if rather impudently, copied by Colonna; Boccaccio's vivid Italian Cressida; Chaucer's inimitable Pandarus, the first pleasing example of the English talent for humorous portrayal in fiction; the wonderful passage, culminating in a more wonderful single line,[69] of that Dunfermline schoolmaster whom some inconceivable person has declared to be only a poet to "Scotch patriotism"; the great gnomic verses of Shakespeare's Ulysses, and the various, unequal, sometimes almost repulsive, never otherwise than powerful, pageantry of that play, which has been perhaps more misjudged than any other of Shakespeare's,—all these spring from the Tale of Troy, not in the least as handed down by the ancients, but tricked and frounced as the Middle Age was wont. Nor is this half-borrowed interest by any means the only one. The Cressid story, indeed, does not reach its full attraction as a direct subject of literary treatment till the fourteenth century. But the great Alexander cycle gives us work which merely as poetry equals all but the very best mediæval work, and its importance in connection with the famous metre named from it is of itself capital.