"Thou knowest well, señora, he said before he went,
To parting from each other our love doth not consent;
But love and joyance never may stand in duty's way,
And when the king commandeth the noble must obey.
Now let discretion guide thee, thou art of worthy name;
While I am parted from thee, let none in thee find blame.
Employ thy hours full wisely, and tend thy household well,
Be never slothful, woe and death with idleness do dwell.
Lay by thy costly dresses until I come again.
For in the husband's absence let wives in dress be plain;
And look well to thy daughters, nor let them be aware.
Lest they comprehend the danger because they see thy care,
And lose unconscious innocence. At home they must abide,
For the safety of the daughter is at the mother's side.
Be serious with thy servants, with strangers on thy guard,
With friends be kind and friendly, and well thy household ward,
To no one show my letters, thy best friends may not see.
Lest reading them they also may guess of thine to me.
And if good news they bring thee, and woman-like dost seek
The sympathy of others, with thy daughters only speak.
* * *
Farewell, farewell, Jimena, the trumpet's call I hear!
One last embrace, and then he mounts the steed without a peer."
The touch of paternal solicitude and prudence in the passage we have put in italics is so apparently modern, that it can scarcely fail to be a source of surprise, coming as it does from that crude period at the end of the Twelfth Century when such minute psychological observation as to young folks' ways would be little expected, and least of all in the rough warrior [{173}] hero or his poet creator, whose notions of right and wrong are, to judge from many passages of the poem, so much coarser than those of our time.
After the Cid in point of time, the next enduring poetic work that was destined to have an influence on all succeeding generations, was the series of the Arthur Legends as completed in England. As in the case of the Cid these stories of King Arthur's Court, his Knights and his Round Table, had been for a long time the favorite subject of ballad poets among the English people. Just where they originated is not very clear, though it seems most likely that the original inspiration came from Celtic sources. These old ballads, however, had very little of literary form and it was not until the end of the Twelfth and the beginning of the Thirteenth Century that they were cast in their present mold, after having passed through the alembic of the mind of a great poetic and literary genius, which refined away the dross and left only the pure gold of supremely sympathetic human stories. To whom we owe this transformation is not known with absolute certainty, though the literary and historical criticism of the last quarter of a century seems to have made it clear that the work must be attributed to Walter Map or Mapes, an English clergyman who died during the first decade of the Thirteenth Century.
His claims to the authorship of the Graal legend in its artistic completeness and to the invention of the character of Lancelot, which is one of the great triumphs of the Arthur legends as they were told at this time, have been much discussed by French and English critics. This discussion has perhaps been best summarized by Mr. Henry Morley, the late Professor of Literature at the University of London, whose third volume of English writers contains an immense amount of valuable information with regard to the literary history, not alone of England at this time but practically of all the countries of Europe. Mr. Morley's plan was conceived with a breath of view that makes his work a very interesting and authoritative guide in the literary matters of the time. His summation of the position of critical opinion with regard to the authorship of the Arthur Legends deserves to be quoted in its entirety:
"The Arthurian Romances were, according to this opinion. [{174}] all perfectly detached tales, till in the Twelfth Century Robert de Borron (let us add, at Map's suggestion) translated the first Romance of the St. Graal as an introduction to the series, and shortly afterwards Walter Map added his Quest of the Graal, Lancelot, and Mort Artus. The way for such work had been prepared by Geoffrey of Monmouth's bold setting forward of King Arthur as a personage of history, in a book that was much sought and discussed, and that made the Arthurian Romances a fresh subject of interest to educated men.
"But M. Paulin Paris, whose opinions, founded upon a wide acquaintance with the contents of old MSS. I am now sketching, and in part adopting, looked upon Walter Map as the soul of this work of Christian spiritualisation. Was the romance of the St. Graal Latin, before it was French? He does not doubt that it was. He sees in it the mysticism of the subtlest theologian. It was not a knight or a jongleur who was so well read in the apocryphal gospels, the legends of the first Christian centuries, rabbinical fancies, and old Greek mythology; and there is all this in the St. Graal. There is a theory, too, of the sacrifice of the mass, an explanation of the Saviour's presence in the Eucharist, that is the work, he says, of the loftiest and the most brilliant imagination. These were not matters that a knight of the Twelfth Century would dare to touch. They came from an ecclesiastic and a man of genius. But if so, why should we refuse credit to the assertion, repeated in every MS. that they were first written in Latin? The earliest MSS. are of a date not long subsequent to the death of Walter Map, Latinist, theologian, wit, and Chaplain to King Henry II., who himself took the liveliest interest in Breton legends. King Henry, M. Paris supposes, wished them to be collected, but how? Some would prefer one method, some another; Map reconciled all. He satisfied the clergy, pleased the scholar, filled the chasms in the popular tales, reconciled contradictions, or rejected inconsistencies, and by him also the introductory tale of the Graal was first written in Latin for Robert de Borron to translate into French."
The best literary appreciation of Map's genius, apart, of course, from the fact that all generations ever since have acknowledged the supreme human interest and eminently [{175}] sympathetic quality of his work, is perhaps to be found in certain remarks of the modern critics who have made special studies in these earlier literary periods. Prof. George Saintsbury, of the University of Edinburgh, for instance, in the second volume of Periods of English Literature, [Footnote 18] has been quite unstinted in his praise of this early English writer. He has not hesitated even to say in a striking passage that Map, or at least the original author of the Launcelot story, was one of the greatest of literary men and deserves a place only next to Dante in this century so preciously full of artistic initiative.
[Footnote 18: The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory, by George Saintsbury, Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature in the University of Edinburgh (New York, Charles Scribner & Sons, 1897).]
"Whether it was Walter Map, or Chrestien de Troyes, or both, or neither to whom the glory of at once completing and exalting the story is due, I at least have no pretension to decide. Whoever did it, if he did it by himself, was a great man indeed—a man second to Dante among the men of the Middle Age. Even if it was done by an irregular company of men, each patching and piecing the other's efforts, the result shows a marvelous 'wind of the spirit' abroad and blowing on that company."
Prof. Saintsbury then proceeds to show how much even readers of Mallory miss of the greatness and especially of the sympathetic humanity of the original poem, and in a further passage states his firm conviction that the man who created Lancelot was one of the greatest literary inventors and sympathetic geniuses of all times, and that his work is destined, because the wellsprings of its action are so deep down in the human heart, to be of interest to generations of men for as long as our present form of civilization lasts.
"Perhaps the great artistic stroke in the whole legend, and one of the greatest in all literature, is the concoction of a hero who should be not only