If, on the other hand, it be said, "You propose to give, according to your scheme, a volume apiece to the fourteenth and even the fifteenth centuries, the work of which was far less original and interesting than the work of these two! Why do you couple these?" the answer is not difficult. In the first place, the work of these two centuries—which is mainly though not wholly the work of the hundred years that form their centre period—is curiously inseparable. In only a few cases do we know precise dates, and in many the circa is of such a circuitous character that we can hardly tell whether the twelfth or the thirteenth century deserves the credit. In almost all the adoption of any intermediate date of severance would leave an awkward, raw, unreal division. We should leave off while the best of the chansons de geste were still being produced, in the very middle of the development of the Arthurian legend, with half the fabliaux yet to come and half the sagas unwritten, with the Minnesingers in full voice, with the tale of the Rose half told, with the Fox not yet broken up.
And, in the second place, the singular combination of anonymity and school-character in the most characteristic mediæval literature makes it easier, vast as is its mass and in some cases conspicuous as is its merit, to handle in small space than later work. Only by a wild indulgence in guessing or a tedious minuteness of attention to Lautlehre and rhyme-lists is it possible to make a treatment of even a named person like Chrestien de Troyes on the scale of a notice of Dante or even Froissart, and this without reference to the comparative literary importance of the three. The million lines of the chansons de geste do not demand discussion in anything like direct proportion to their bulk. One fabliau, much more one minnesong or troubadour lyric, has a far greater resemblance of kind to its fellows than even one modern novel, even one nineteenth-century minor poem, to another. As the men write in schools, so they can be handled in them.
Yet I should hope that it must have been already made apparent how very far the present writer is from undervaluing the period with which he has essayed to deal. He might perhaps be regarded as overvaluing it with more apparent reason—not, I think, with any reason that is more than apparent.
For this was the time, if not of the Birth—the exact times and seasons of literary births no man knoweth—at any rate of the first appearance, full-blown or full-fledged, of Romance. Many praiseworthy folk have made many efforts to show that Romance was after all no such new thing—that there is Romance in the Odyssey, Romance in the choruses of Æschylus, Romance East and West, North and South, before the Middle Ages. They are only less unwise than the other good folk who endeavour to tie Romance down to a Teutonic origin, or a Celtic, or in the other sense a Romance one, to Chivalry (which was in truth rather its offspring than its parent), to this, and that, and the other. "All the best things in literature," it has been said, "are returns"; and this is perfectly true, just as it is perfectly true in another sense that all the best things in literature are novelties. In this particular growth, being as it was a product of the unchanging human mind, there were notes, doubtless, of Homer and of Æschylus, of Solomon the son of David and of Jesus the son of Sirach. But the constituents of the mixture were newly grouped; elements which had in the past been inconspicuous or dormant assumed prominence and activity; and the whole was new.
It was even one of the few, the very few, permutations and combinations of the elements of literature, which are of such excellence, volume, durability, and charm, that they rank above all minor changes and groupings. An amabilis insania of the same general kind with those above noted has endeavoured again and again to mark off and define the chief constituents of the fact. The happiest result, if only a partial one, of such attempts has been the opposition between Classical precision and proportion and the Romantic vague; but no one would hold this out as a final or sufficient account of the matter. It may, indeed, be noted that that peculiar blended character which has been observed in the genesis of perhaps the greatest and most characteristic bloom of the whole garden—the Arthurian Legend—is to be found elsewhere also. The Greeks, if they owed part of the intensity, had undoubtedly owed nearly all the gaps and flaws of their production, as well as its extraordinarily short-lived character, to their lack alike of instructors and of fellow-pupils—to the defect in Comparison. Roman Literature, always more or less in statu pupillari, had wanted the fellow-pupils, if not the tutor. But the national divisions of mediæval Europe—saved from individual isolation by the great bond of the Church, saved from mutual lack of understanding by the other great bond of the Latin quasi-vernacular, shaken together by wars holy and profane, and while each exhibiting the fresh characteristics of national infancy, none of them case-hardened into national insularity—enjoyed a unique opportunity, an opportunity never likely to be again presented, of producing a literature common in essential characteristic, but richly coloured and fancifully shaded in each division by the genius of race and soil. And this literature was developed in the two centuries which have been the subject of our survey. It is true that not all the nations were equally contributors to the positive literary production of the time. England was apparently paying a heavy penalty for her unique early accomplishments, was making a large sacrifice for the better things to come. Between 1100 and 1300 no single book that can be called great was produced in the English tongue, and hardly any single writer distinctly deserving the same adjective was an Englishman. But how mighty were the compensations! The language itself was undergoing a process of "inarching," of blending, crossing, which left it the richest, both in positive vocabulary and in capacity for increasing that vocabulary at need, of any European speech; the possessor of a double prosody, quantitative and alliterative, which secured it from the slightest chance of poetic poverty or hide-boundness; relieved from the cumbrousness of synthetic accidence to all but the smallest extent, and in case to elaborate a syntax equally suitable for verse and prose, for exposition and narrative, for oratory and for argument. Moreover it was, as I have at least endeavoured to show, probably England which provided the groundwork and first literary treatment, it was certainly England that provided the subject, of the largest, the most enduring, the most varied single division of mediæval work; while the Isle of Britain furnished at least its quota to the general literature of Europe other than vernacular.
Other countries, though their languages were not conquering their conqueror as English was doing with French, also displayed sufficient individuality in dealing with the models and the materials with which French activity supplied them. The best poetical work of Icelandic, like the best work of its cousin Anglo-Saxon, was indeed over before the period began, and the best prose work was done before it ended, the rapid and never fully explained exhaustion of Norse energy and enterprise preventing the literature which had been produced from having effect on other nations. The children of the vates of Grettir and Njal contented themselves, like others, with adapting French romances, and, unlike others, they did not make this adaptation the groundwork of new and original effort. But meanwhile they had made in the Sagas, greater and lesser, such a contribution as no literature has excelled in intensity and character, comparatively small as it is in bulk and comparatively undistinguished in form.
"Unlike others," it has been said; for there can be no doubt that the Charlemagne Cycle from Northern, the troubadour lyric from Southern, France exercised upon Italy the same effect that was exercised in Germany by the romances of Arthur and of Antiquity, and by the trouvère poetry generally. But in these two countries, as also more doubtfully, but still with fair certainty, in Spain, the French models found, as they did also in England, literary capacities and tastes not jaded and outworn, but full of idiosyncrasy, and ready to develop each in its own way. Here however, by that extraordinary law of compensation which seems to be the most general law of the universe, the effects differed as much in quantity and time as in character—a remarkable efflorescence of literature in Germany being at once produced, to relapse shortly into a long sterility, a tardier but more constant growth following in England and Italy, while the effect in Spain was the most partial and obscure of all. The great names of Wolfram von Eschenbach and Walther von der Vogelweide hardly meet with any others in these literatures representing writers who are known abroad as well as at home. Only philologists out of England (and I fear not too many besides philologists in it) read Alisaunder and Richard Cœur de Lion, Arthour and Merlin, or the Brut; the early Italian poets shine but in the reflected light of Dante; and if any one knows the Cid, it is usually from Corneille, or Herder, or Southey, rather than from his own noble Poem. But no one who does study these forgotten if not disdained ones, no one who with a love for literature bestows even the most casual attention on them, can fail to see their meaning and their promise, their merit and their charm.
That languages of such power should have remained without literatures is of course inconceivable; that any of them even needed the instruction they received from France cannot be said positively; but what is certain is that they all received it. In most cases the acknowledgment is direct, express, not capable of being evaded or misconstrued: in all it is incapable of being mistaken by those who have eyes, and who have trained them. To inquire into the cause were rather idle. The central position of France; the early notoriety and vogue of the schools of Paris; the curious position of the language, midway between the extremer Romance and the purely Teutonic tongues, which made it a sort of natural interpreter between them; perhaps most of all that inexplicable but undeniable formal talent of the French for literature, which is as undeniable and as inexplicable as the less formal genius of the English,—all these things, except the central position, only push the problem farther back, and are in need of being explained themselves. But the fact, the solid and certain fact, remains. And so it is that the greater part of this book has necessarily been occupied in expounding, first the different forms which the lessons of France took, and then the different ways in which other countries learnt those lessons and turned them to account.
It is thus difficult to overestimate the importance of that wonderful literature which rises dominant among all these, imparting to all, borrowing from none, or borrowing only subjects, exhibiting finish of structure when all the rest were merely barbarian novices, exploring every literary form from history to drama, and from epic to song, while others were stammering their exercises, mostly learnt from her. The exact and just proportions of the share due to Southern and Northern France respectively none can now determine, and scholarship oscillates between extremes as usual. What is certain (perhaps it is the only thing that is certain) is that to Provençal belongs the credit of establishing for the first time a modern prosody of such a kind as to turn out verse of perfect form. Whether, if Pallas in her warlike capacity had been kinder to the Provençals, she could or would have inspired them with more varied kinds of literature than the exquisite lyric which as a fact is almost their sole title to fame, we cannot say. As a matter of fact, the kinds other than lyric, and some of the lyrical kinds themselves—the short tale, the epic, the romance, the play, the history, the sermon—all find their early home, if not their actual birthplace, north, not south, of the Limousin line. It was from Normandy and Poitou, from Anjou and the Orleannais, from the Isle of France and Champagne, that in language at least the patterns which were used by all Europe, the specifications, so to speak, which all Europe adapted and filled up, went forth, sometimes not to return.
Yet it is not in the actual literature of France itself, except in those contributions to the Arthurian story which, as it has been pointed out, were importations, not indigenous growths, and in some touches of the Rose, that the spirit of Romance is most evident—the spirit which, to those who have come thoroughly to appreciate it, makes classical grace and finish seem thin and tame, Oriental exuberance tasteless and vulgar, modern scientific precision inexpressibly charmless and jejune.