It is amusing to observe, at the end of this chapter, how the author endeavours to persuade himself that his history opens with the origin of fictitious narrative in Greece. After some general remarks on the romances he had been reviewing, he adds, ‘In short, these early fictions are such as might have been expected at the first effort’—as if the romances produced several centuries after the Christian era, or even in the time of Alexander the Great, were the first attempts at fiction in the country of Homer and Hesiod.
In the second chapter, where the author proposes to review the Latin romances, the principal article is the Ass of Apuleius, which, from its great popularity, has been called the Golden Ass. It is an improvement of Lucian’s whimsical tale, entitled Lucius; and relates the adventures of the author Apuleius during his transformation into an ass. This misfortune befel him at the house of a female magician in Thessaly with whom he lodged, and whose maidservant at his request had stolen a box of ointment from her mistress, by rubbing himself with which Apuleius expected to be changed into a bird; but as his friend the damsel had by mistake given him a wrong box, he found himself compelled to bray and walk on all fours, instead of whistling and flying in the air. He is informed by her, that the eating of rose leaves is necessary for his restoration to the human form. One should imagine that roses might be found as easily in Thessaly as in this country, where an ass of ordinary observation and address might contrive, without much difficulty, to regale himself with one, if he liked it as well as a thistle—and much more, if it were an object of as great importance to him as to Apuleius. This poor beast, however, went through many adventures, some to be sure agreeable enough, but in general very unpleasant, before he had it in his power to taste a rose leaf. At last, having one evening escaped from his master, he found unexpectedly the termination of his misfortunes. We shall quote Mr. Dunlop’s account of this happy catastrophe.
‘He fled unperceived to the fields; and having galloped for three leagues, he came to a retired place on the shore of the sea. The moon which was in full splendour, and the awful silence of the night, inspired him with sentiments of devotion. He purified himself in the manner prescribed by Pythagoras, and addressed a long prayer to the great goddess Isis. In the course of the night she appeared to him in a dream; and after giving a strange account of herself, announced to him the end of his misfortunes; but demanded in return the consecration of his whole life to her service. On awakening, he feels himself confirmed in his resolution of aspiring to a life of virtue. On this change of disposition and conquest over his passions, the author finely represents all nature as assuming a new face of cheerfulness and gaiety. “Tanta hilaritate, praeter peculiarem meam, gestire mihi cuncta videbantur, ut pecua etiam cujuscemodi, et totas domos, et ipsam diem serena facie gaudere sentirem.”
‘While in this frame of mind, Apuleius perceived an innumerable multitude approaching the shore to celebrate the festival of Isis. Amid the crowd of priests, he remarked the sovereign pontiff, with a crown of roses on his head; and approached to pluck them. The pontiff, yielding to a secret inspiration, held forth the garland. Apuleius resumed his former figure, and the promise of the Goddess was fulfilled. He was then initiated into her rites—returned to Rome, and devoted himself to her service.... He was finally invited to a more mystic and solemn initiation by the Goddess herself, who rewarded him for his accumulated piety, by an abundance of temporal blessings.’—Vol. i. p. 114.
This romance has acquired great celebrity, from having been pressed by Warburton into the service of Christianity, in his curious argument for the Divine Legation of Moses—which we trust is defensible upon other grounds. We cannot go so far as the learned prelate; though we think it extremely probable that Apuleius had in view the general idea of representing, on the one hand, by his metamorphosis, the degradation of human nature in consequence of a voluptuous life; and on the other hand, the dignity and happiness of virtue, by his restoration and admission to the mysteries of Isis. The Golden Ass, however, is not calculated to make converts from pleasure; and is chiefly valuable as a book of amusement, written very agreeably, but not without affectation, and containing some beautiful tales and many diverting incidents.
Of the ancient Latin romances very few are extant; and it is probable that the production of these luxuries was checked in Italy before the end of the fourth century, though the Greek writers continued for nine or ten centuries afterwards to compose tales of various kinds both in prose and verse. But, while the idle people of Constantinople were amusing themselves with their novels, the western provinces of the Roman empire were laid waste by barbarous invaders; and a period of extreme misery was at length succeeded by a new state of society, a new state of government, manners and opinions, very different from that which had been subverted in the west, or from that which subsisted in the refined and effeminate provinces of the east, but far better adapted to rouse the ardour of a poetical imagination. Hence arose a new and remarkable class of fictions,—the fictions of Chivalry, which have so long delighted Britain and France, and Spain and Italy. They are the subject of the third and three following chapters of our Author’s history.
It is in this portion of his work, particularly, that we have to lament the unhappy limitation of his plan. The prose romances of Chivalry were produced for the most part by Bayes’s most expeditious recipe for original composition, namely, by turning verse into prose,—being extremely diffuse and languid compilations from the early metrical tales; and they are in general of little value to the antiquary, as neither their authors nor their dates can be ascertained. Amadis de Gaul is one of the most celebrated; and yet it remains undetermined whether the work now extant under that title has not been greatly altered from the original; nor can any one tell either who composed the original, or who manufactured the present work, or at what time either the one or the other was written. The early metrical tales are far more deserving of attention as connected with real history; and if we consider the romances of chivalry merely as amusements to the imagination, the subject appears better adapted for verse than for prose. The stately and formal manners of those ages soon grow wearisome in ordinary narrative, and require to be enlivened by the rapidity and brilliancy of poetical description: And who does not feel that the marvellous exploits and supernatural events with which they abound, deserve rather to be sung to the sound of the harp, tabret, cymbal, and all manner of musical instruments, than to be detailed in the sober language of truth, which is absurdly affected by the prose romancers, who generally announce themselves as authentic historians, and rail at the falsehood of their metrical predecessors? Accordingly it is among the poets that we are to look for the finest specimens of the fictions which we are now considering; and while the romances of Ariosto, and Tasso and Scott, are read again and again by persons of all descriptions, even Mr. Southey’s translation of the great Amadis de Gaul, though it is ably executed, and has much improved its original by abridging it, was never popular, and is now almost forgotten.
Our author deviates from his plan so far as to give us a slight notice of a few of the metrical romances which were preserved in the library of M. de St. Palaye, the learned writer of the Memoirs on Chivalry. But with this exception, he gratifies his readers with an account of the prose romances only; of which the most ancient, and perhaps the most curious, are those which relate to the fabulous history of England. Amidst the devastation of the Roman empire in the west, this island suffered far more than its share of the general calamity. The Christian religion, which had been elsewhere not only spared but embraced by the conquerors, was exterminated by the idolatrous and unlettered Saxons who subdued the British province; and if any of the Britons were suffered to exist within its bounds, they were only poor despised stragglers of the lower orders; while the remnant of its chiefs, clergy and bards—its traditions, its records, its literature, its very language—were swept into the mountains of Wales, or beyond the sea into Britany. In these circumstances, it is not surprising that the history of England should be lost in fable, from the time that the Saxons got a footing in it, about the middle of the fifth century, till the year 600, in which they began to be converted, and civilized, and instructed in letters, by Augustine and the other missionaries of Pope Gregory the Great. This dark period of 150 years, between the entrance of the Saxons under Hengist, and their conversion to Christianity, was the age of the famous King Arthur, his friend Merlin the Enchanter, and the Knights of his illustrious order of the Round Table, who are the great heroes in the older romances of chivalry. Not that these good people, although they fought stoutly against the invaders, knew any thing about the etiquette and parade of chivalry, which was not instituted as an order till long afterwards: but the romancers of the eleventh and twelfth centuries chose to dress in the fashion of their own times, the characters whom they found in the stories of Wales and Britany, or in the chronicle of Geoffry of Monmouth, who reduced these stories into the form of a regular authentic history, ascending to Brutus the Trojan, generally denominated Le Brut by the French, and Brute by the English poets, who was the great-grandson of Æneas, and the undoubted founder of the British kingdom;—a fact which is abundantly confirmed, if it needed confirmation, by the name Britain, quasi Brutain, evidently derived from Brutus.
The earliest of the prose romances relating to Arthur, is the history of Merlin the Enchanter, who was the son of a demon and an innocent young lady, and favourite minister of Uter Pendragon, the British king. It was this monarch who instituted at Carduel (Carlisle), the order of the Round Table; at which were seated 50 or 60 of the first nobles of the country, with an empty place always left for the Sangreal. The Sangreal, our readers must know, was the most precious of all the Christian relics: it was the blood which flowed from our Saviour’s wounds, preserved in the hanap or cup in which he drank with his apostles the night when he was betrayed. This relic was first in the possession of Joseph of Arimathea, by whom it was brought to Britain, and afterwards fell into the hands of king Pecheur, who, by a beautiful ambiguity of the French language, might have received this name either from being a great fisher or a great sinner, or both. His nephew, the redoubted knight Percival, succeeded to his uncle’s kingdom and to the possession of the Sangreal; which, at the moment of Percival’s death, was in the presence of his attendants carried up into heaven, and has never since been seen or heard of. But to return to the romance of Merlin, which is a favourable specimen of the class to which it belongs—we shall extract the following account from our author’s history.
‘Soon after this institution (of the Round Table), the king invited all his barons to the celebration of a great festival, which he proposed holding annually at Carduel.