And their differences are no less fascinating, since they start from this very diversity of similar perfection. Icelandic, after a brief period of copying French and other languages, practically died out as a language producing literature; and, perhaps for that very reason, maintained itself in all the more continuity as a spoken language. Even its daughter—or at least successor—Norse tongues produced nothing worthy to take up the tradition of the Sagas and the Poems. It influenced (till the late and purely literary revival of it biassed to some extent the beginnings of the later Romantic revival in Western Europe, a hundred and fifty years ago) nothing and nobody. It was as isolated as its own island. To Provençal, on the other hand, though its own actual producing-time was about as brief, belongs the schooling, to no small extent, of the whole literature of Europe. Directly, it taught the trouvères of Northern France and the poets of Spain and Italy prosody, and a certain amount of poetical style and tone; indirectly, or directly through France, it influenced England and Germany. It started, indeed, none of the greater poetical kinds except lyric, and lyric is the true grass of Parnassus—it springs up naturally everywhere; but it started the form of all, or at least was the first to adapt from Latin a prosody suitable to all.
The most obvious, though not the least interesting, points of likeness in unlikeness have been left to the last. The contrasts between the hawthorn and nightingale of Provence, her "winds heavy with the rose," and the grey firths, the ice- and foam-fretted skerries of Iceland; between the remains of Roman luxury pushed to more than Roman effeminacy in the one, and the rough Germanic virtue exasperated to sheer ferocity in the other,—are almost too glaring for anything but a schoolboy's or a rhetorician's essay. Yet they are reproduced with an incredible—a "copy-book"—fidelity in the literatures. The insistence of experts and enthusiasts on the law-abiding character of the sagas has naturally met with some surprise from readers of these endless private wars, and burnings, and "heath-slayings," these feuds where blood flows like water, to be compensated by fines as regular as a water-rate, these methodical assassinations, in which it is not in the least discreditable to heroes to mob heroes as brave as themselves to death by numbers, in which nobody dreams of measuring swords, or avoiding vantage of any kind. Yet the enthusiastic experts are not wrong. Whatever outrages the Icelander may commit, he always has the law—an eccentric, unmodern, conventional law, but a real and recognised one—before his eyes, and respects it in principle, however much he may sometimes violate it in practice. To the Provençal, on the other hand, law, as such, is a nuisance. He will violate it, so to speak, on principle—less because the particular violation has a particular temptation for him than because the thing is forbidden. The Icelander may covet and take another man's wife, but it is to make her his own. The Provençal will hardly fall, and will never stay, in love with any one who is not another's. In savagery there is not so very much to choose: it requires a calculus, not of morals but of manners, to distinguish accurately between carving the blood-eagle on your enemy and serving up your rival's heart as a dish to his mistress. In passion also there may be less difference than the extreme advocates of both sides would maintain. But in all things external the contrast, the hackneyed contrast, of South and North never could have been exhibited with a more artistic completeness, never has been exhibited with a completeness so artistic. And these two contrasting parts were played at the very same time at the two ends of Europe. In the very same years when the domestic histories and tragedies (there were few comedies) of Iceland were being spun into the five great sagas and the fifty smaller ones, the fainter, the more formal, but the not less peculiar music of the gracious long-drawn Provençal love-song was sounding under the vines and olives of Languedoc. The very Icelanders who sailed to Constantinople in the intervals of making the subjects of these sagas, and sometimes of composing them, must not seldom have passed or landed on the coasts where cansos and tensos, lai and sirvente, were being woven, and have listened to them as the Ulyssean mariners listened to the songs of the sirens.
Icelandic literature of this time mainly prose.
It is not, of course, true that Provençal only sings of love and Icelandic only of war. There is a fair amount of love in the Northern literature and a fair amount of fighting in the Southern. And it is not true that Icelandic literature is wholly prose, Provençal wholly poetry. But it is true that Provençal prose plays an extremely small part in Provençal literature, and that Icelandic poetry plays, in larger minority, yet still a minor part in Icelandic. It so happens, too, that in this volume we are almost wholly concerned with Icelandic prose, and that we shall not find it necessary to say much, if anything, about Provençal that is not in verse. It is distinctly curious how much later, cœteris paribus, the Romance tongues are than the Teutonic in attaining facilities of prose expression. But there is no reason for believing that even the Teutonic tongues falsified the general law that poetry comes before prose. And certainly this was the case with Icelandic—so much so that, uncertain as are the actual dates, it seems better to relinquish the Iceland of poetry to the first volume of this series, where it can be handled in connection with that Anglo-Saxon verse which it so much resembles. The more characteristic Eddaic poems—that is to say, the most characteristic parts of Icelandic poetry—must date from Heathen times, or from the first conflicts of Christianity with Heathenism in Iceland; and this leaves them far behind us.[160] On the other hand, the work which we have in Provençal before the extreme end of the eleventh century is not finished literature. It has linguistic interest, the interest of origins, but no more.
Difficulties with it.
Although there is practically as little doubt about the antiquity of Icelandic literature[161] as about its interest, there is unusual room for guesswork as to the exact dates of the documents which compose it. Writing seems to have been introduced into Iceland late; and it is not the opinion of scholars who combine learning with patriotism that many, if any, of the actual MSS. date further back than the thirteenth century; while the actual composition of the oldest that we have is not put earlier than the twelfth, and rather its later than its earlier part. Moreover, though Icelanders were during this period, and indeed from the very first settlement of the island, constantly in foreign countries and at foreign courts—though as Vikings or Varangians, as merchants or merely travelling adventurers, they were to be found all over Europe, from Dublin to Constantinople—yet, on the other hand, few or no foreigners visited Iceland, and it figures hardly at all in the literary and historical records of the Continent or even of the British Isles, with which it naturally had most correspondence. We are therefore almost entirely devoid of those side-lights which are so invaluable in general literary history, while yet again we have no borrowings from Icelandic literature by any other to tell us the date of the borrowed matter. At the end of our present time, and still more a little later, Charlemagne and Arthur and the romances of antiquity make their appearance in Icelandic; but nothing Icelandic makes its appearance elsewhere. For it is not to be supposed for one moment that the Nibelungenlied, for instance, is the work of men who wrote with the Volsunga-Saga or the Gudrun lays before them, any more than the Grettis Saga is made up out of Beowulf. These things are mere examples of the successive refashionings of traditions and stories common to the race in different centuries, manners, and tongues. Except as to the bare fact of community of origin they help us little or not at all.
The Saga.
The reasons why Icelandic literature, in its most peculiar and interesting form of the saga, did not penetrate abroad are clear enough; and the remoteness and want of school-education in the island itself are by no means the most powerful of them. The very thing which is most characteristic of them, and which in these later times constitutes their greatest charm, must have been against them in their own time. For the stories which ran like an epidemic through Europe in the years immediately before and immediately after 1200, though they might be in some cases concerned directly with national heroes, appealed without exception to international and generally human interests. The slightest education, or the slightest hearing of persons educated, sufficed to teach every one that Alexander and Cæsar were great conquerors, that the Story of Troy (the exact truth of which was never doubted) had been famous for hundreds and almost thousands of years. Charlemagne had had directly to do with the greater part of Europe in peace or war, and the struggle with the Saracens was of old and universal interest, freshened by the Crusades. The Arthurian story received from fiction, if not from history, an almost equally wide bearing; and was, besides, knitted to religion—the one universal interest of the time—by its connection with the Graal. All Europe, yet again, had joined in the Crusades, and the stories brought by the crusaders directly or indirectly from the East were in the same way common property.
Its insularity of manner.