The second part deals with "Pore"—in other words, with the Indian expedition and its wonders. These are copied from the French, but by no means slavishly. The army is, on the whole, even worse treated by savage beasts and men on its way to India than in the original; but the handling, including the Candace episodes, follows the French more closely than in the first part. The fighting at "Defur," however, like that at Gaza, is omitted; and the wilder and more mystical and luxuriant parts of the story—the three Fountains, the Sirens, the flower-maidens, and the like—are either omitted likewise or handled more prosaically.[81]
One of the most curious things about this poem is that every division—divisions of which Weber made chapters—begins by a short gnomic piece in the following style:—
"Day spryng is jolyf tide.
He that can his tyme abyde,
Oft he schal his wille bytyde.
Loth is grater man to chyde."
Characteristics.
The treatment of the Alexander story thus well illustrates one way of the mediæval mind with such things—the way of combining at will incongruous stories, of accepting with no, or with little, criticism any tale of wonder that it happened to find in books, of using its own language, applying its own manners, supposing its own clothing, weapons, and so forth to have prevailed at any period of history. And further, it shows how the geste theory—the theory of working out family connections and stories of ancestors and successors—could not fail to be applied to any subject that at all lent itself to such treatment. But, on the other hand, this division of the romances of antiquity does not exhibit the more fertile, the more inventive, the more poetical, and generally the nobler traits of Middle-Age literature. As will have been noted, there was little invention in the later versions, the Callisthenic fictions and the Iter ad Paradisum being, with a few Oriental accretions, almost slavishly relied upon for furnishing out the main story, though the "Foray of Gaza," the "Vows of the Peacock," and Florimont exhibit greater independence. Yet again no character, no taking and lively story, is elaborated. Nectanabus has a certain personal interest: but he was given to, not invented by, the Romance writers. Olympias has very little character in more senses than one: Candace is not worked out: and Alexander himself is entirely colourless. The fantastic story, and the wonders with which it was bespread, seem to have absorbed the attention of writers and hearers; and nobody seems to have thought of any more. Perhaps this was merely due to the fact that none of the more original genius of the time was directed on it: perhaps to the fact that the historical element in the story, small as it was, cramped the inventive powers, and prevented the romancers from doing their best.
The Tale of Troy.
In this respect the Tale of Troy presents a remarkable contrast to its great companion—a contrast pervading, and almost too remarkable to be accidental. Inasmuch as this part of mediæval dealings with antiquity connects itself with the literary history of two of the very greatest writers of our own country, Chaucer and Shakespeare; with that of one of the greatest writers of Italy, Boccaccio; and with some of the most noteworthy work in Old French, it has been thoroughly and repeatedly investigated.[82] But it is so important, and so characteristic of the time with which we are dealing, that it cannot be passed over here, though the later developments must only be referred to in so far as they help us to understand the real originality, which was so long, and still is sometimes, denied to mediæval writers. In this case, as in the other, the first striking point is the fact that the Middle Ages, having before them what may be called, mutatis mutandis, canonical and apocryphal, authentic and unauthentic, ancient and not ancient, accounts of a great literary matter, chose, by an instinct which was not probably so wrong as it has sometimes seemed, the apocryphal in preference to the canonical, the unauthentic in preference to the authentic, the modern in preference to the ancient.
Dictys and Dares.
As in the case of the Alexander-Saga, their origins were the Pseudo-Callisthenes and the Iter ad Paradisum, so in the Tale of Troy they were the works of two persons whose literary offspring has obtained for them an amount of attention transcending to a quite ludicrous extent their literary merit—Dictys Cretensis and Dares Phrygius, to whom may perhaps be added the less shadowy personage of the grammarian John Tzetzes. But, as in the other case also, they were by no means confined to such authorities. If they did not know Homer very well at first-hand, they did know him: they knew Ovid (who of course represents Homer, though not Homer only) extremely well: and they knew Virgil. But partly from the instinct above referred to, of which more presently, partly from the craze for tracing Western Europe back to the "thrice-beaten Trojans," it pleased them to regard Homer as a late and unhistorical calumniator, whose Greek prejudices made him bear false witness; and to accept the pretensions of Dictys and Dares to be contemporaries and eyewitnesses of fact. Dictys, a companion of Idomeneus, was supposed to represent the Greek side, but more fairly than Homer; and Dares, priest of Hephæstus, the Trojan.
The works of these two worthies, which are both of small compass,—Dictys occupies rather more than a hundred, Dares rather more than fifty, pages of the ordinary Teubner classics,[83]—exist at present only in Latin prose, though, as the Greeks were more expert and inventive forgers than the Romans, it is possible, if not even highly probable, that both were, and nearly certain that Dictys was, originally Greek at least in language. Dictys, the older pretty certainly, is introduced by a letter to a certain Quintus Aradius from Lucius Septimius, who informs "his Rufinus" and the world, with a great deal of authority and learning, that the book had been written by Dictys in Punic letters, which Cadmus and Agenor had then made of common use in Greece; that some shepherds found the manuscript written on linden-bark paper in a tin case at his tomb at Gnossus; that their landlord turning the Punic letters into Greek (which had always been the language), gave it to Nero the Emperor, who rewarded him richly; and that he, Septimius, having by chance got the book into his hands, thought it worth while to translate it into Latin, both for the sake of making the true history known and "ut otiosi animi desidiam discuteremus." The Dares volume is more ambitious, and purports to be introduced by no less a person than Cornelius Nepos to no less a person than Sallustius Crispus, and to have been "faithfully translated" by the former from MS. in the very hand of Dares, which he found at Athens, in order to correct the late and fabulous authority of Homer, who actually makes gods fight with men!