Early French

poetry

It appears at first sight an anomaly that the Latinised nations of the Middle Ages, superior to the Germanic in civilisation, should have been more tardy in developing national literatures. Even if we dated the beginning of English literature as low as Caedmon, which would be too large a concession, it would have existed for more than three centuries before anything deserving the appellation of a vernacular literature existed in France. The cause was the dependence of literature upon language, and the degree in which the formation of a vernacular adequate for literary purposes was retarded by the taint of barbarism which clung to it, and by the position of Latin as the accepted medium of law, learning, government, and worship. To the Anglo-Saxon Latin was a language indispensable indeed for many purposes, but diverse from his own; to the Frenchman it was a tongue to which he owed allegiance, and of which his ordinary speech was a debased and barbarous dialect. There is sufficient proof of the existence of a language which may be called French in the early part of the ninth century, but save for ballads, whose existence is rather a matter of inference than of knowledge, there is no evidence of its employment for literary purposes until early in the eleventh. Its beginnings precisely corresponded with the initial stages of Anglo-Saxon literature. Poetry was for long the only description of literature attempted; the authors were minstrels, or, when this was not the case, the jongleur disseminated the work of the trouvère; the exploits of heroes were their themes, and their public was one of nobles and warriors. In its original shape French literature was an accumulation of the chansons de geste, probably founded upon a pre-existing literature -but produced so copiously during the eleventh and twelfth centuries that the number of lines extant even now has been estimated at between two and three millions. As the name implies, these were ballad epics. They were composed in what are now called Alexandrine lines of ten or twelve syllables, three syllables to a foot, after this pattern :

Seigneurs, or faictes silence; s'il vous plait, escoutez,

arranged in tirades, or sets of assonant verses repeating the same merely vowel rhyme till the poet was tired of it, or it of him. This latter circumstance need not soon occur, since, if we may have recourse to the English tongue for the sake of illustration, doll would be a permissible rhyme to dog.

There is no good reason to suppose that these chansons originated in Provence, although the Provençal poets afterwards greatly expanded the range of poetry, and did much to refine and embellish metrical forms. But these ballad epics had their birth in the north and east of France, and the Normans, if not the original inventors, speedily became familiarised with them. The themes to which they were originally for the most part confined illustrate the working of the human mind in all ages, and reflect light on a still more interesting literary Carlovingian episode, the origin of the Homeric poems. One great figure, Charlemagne, filled cycle of the popular imagination, and appears in the chansons as the centre of a group of paladins, historical, perhaps, as regards the existence of some of them, but imaginary as concerns the exploits attributed to them. It being easier to take

romance

And all theo fany bad for the du bon Dotson of them to aloids comfor And for you good luyn duit f of attor and then wisly wizihe thou faved nought ther so no prow to put to on for Raught 1900 ye that day and my motharge to gedn o's shree have the mon gure and after

From a Fragment of a Fifteenth-Century Translation of the "Chanson de Roland British Museum, Lansdowne MS. 388

Arthurian cycle

liberties with such children of the imagination than with an authentic and imposing figure like Charlemagne, the latter out of mere dignity gradually retires into the background, and Roland and Renaud take his place, as Achilles and Ulysses long ago took Agamemnon's. What the Trojan War was to ancient Greece, the strife with barbarous invaders was to Europe from the ninth to the eleventh century. By far the finest example of the chansons de geste is the Chanson de Roland, not the same as that sung at Hastings by the minstrel Taillefer, but produced, most probably, by a Norman minstrel in England, before the end of the century, and attributed in the only extant MS. to a poet named Turoldus, if this be not rather the name of the transcriber. The relation of these spirited but artless performances to the elaborate Italian epics on the Charlemagne cycle is probably much the same as that of the lost ballad poetry of ancient Greece to the Iliad and Odyssey. The influence of the Chanson de Roland and other poems in which Charlemagne was represented as in conflict with the Saracens must have been an important factor in the state of feeling which produced the Crusades, and is concentrated in the history attributed with pious faith to Archbishop Turpin, a forgery of the eleventh century. It is a singular instance of romantic misrepresentation that, although Roland's expedition to Spain and death are historical, he was in reality not cut off by the Paynim, but by Christian Basques.

The Carlovingian chanson de geste produced little impression upon English literature, being within a century after the Conquest superseded even in France by another cycle of romance more attractive to the inhabitants of Britain. When the mine of Carlovingian tradition became exhausted the Norman minstrels, about 1160, turned to the story of Arthur, which they learned sometimes from tradition preserved among the Bretons, sometimes perhaps from the chronicles of Nennius, or from their own actual contact with the Welsh. In any case the Arthurian legend supplied their poets with a rich variety of subjects, and Englishmen, forgetting the actual circumstances of the struggle between Saxon and Celt in Arthur's days, were willing to accept him as a national hero. A common ground was thus created upon which Norman and Saxon could meet, and as the treatment which suited Arthurian themes was soon found to be appropriate to situations of similar character, a school of metrical romance arose, which partly by direct translation, partly by imitation, enriched English literature with many compositions of importance. The French poems upon which these were based cannot, of course, be claimed for English literature; yet, although the most distinguished writer of them, Chrétien de Troyes, was a Frenchman in every respect, there is reason to believe that most of their authors were Anglo-Norman. For a survey of the Arthurian romance as a whole the reader will be best referred to the digest of it in the great prose epic of Sir Thomas Malory in the fifteenth century; but the principal metrical romances, whether actually English or merely English in so far as they influenced English feeling, may well be treated in this place. Whether from Celtic influence, or for some other reason, they exhibit a decided advance upon the manners and feelings depicted in the

SOURCES OF MEDIEVAL ROMANCE

107 chansons de geste, and ultimately attain the ideal of chivalry as understood in the days of the Black Prince. This implies the recognition of love, an element almost entirely absent from the chansons de geste, as a leading motive, and denotes a wider range of emotion and sentiment than had found literary expression for several centuries, foreshadowing and, in a measure, preparing the modern novel; while the form is substantially that whose revival by Scott and Coleridge broke in a later age the artificial fetters which had prevailed to trammel English poetry.

It requires some consideration ere we can fully realise how extensive a store Mediaval material for of material for fiction lay at the disposition of the romancers of the twelfth and legendary the two following centuries. The development of fiction from the incidents of poetry ordinary life was yet to come, or at least was beginning but feebly in the fabliau, corresponding to the modern metrical conte, and in the Italian novelette. The only material as yet generally recognised as proper for fiction was that consecrated by history or tradition, or at least professedly linked to some famous institution like Arthur's Round Table. Yet, even with these restrictions, the available store was very copious. The romancer had classical literature at his command to a great extent, much authentic history, and the two great legendary cycles of Troy and Alexander the Great. Homer, indeed, was inaccessible, but the apocryphal compilations attributed to Dictys Cretensis and Dares Phrygius supplied his place and something more. Virgil and Ovid were not unknown; many authentic passages of ancient history were familiar; and the Sibylline books were in themselves a literature. Charlemagne for France, Arthur for England, formed the nucleus of an extensive body of romance, and the adventures of their followers presented an illimitable field for invention. In course of time a number of miscellaneous romances sprang up, some, such as the powerful tale of Hamlet, derived from Scandinavian sources; others strangely distorted versions of Oriental ideas as conveyed in Barlaam and Josaphat, Syntipas, Kalilah and Dimnah. These almost invariably shade off into the avowedly didactic fiction, of which Sidrac, avowedly borrowed from the East, is an example: or into the allegorical, a near neighbour of the Æsopic fable, also well known, and helping to produce the world-famous fiction of Reynard the Fox, which renders the novel a weapon of satire. Bordering upon this, and hovering between satire and edification, we find religious visions of the other world, such as Tundale's trance, and the relation of St. Patrick's purgatory, rude precursors of the Divina Commedia. Nor must we forget legends of ecclesiastical miracle, sometimes pious monastic frauds or actual hallucinations, sometimes like the voyage of St. Brandan, Christianised versions of ancient myths. On the whole, it may well be affirmed that man's appetite for the marvellous was amply provided for in the Middle Age, and that nothing prevented the development of a rich poetical literature but the shortcomings of mediæval language. The tool was as yet inadequate to the work; the poet did not as yet possess either a sufficiently ample vocabulary, or sufficient command of the vocabulary he had. There was also an absolute lack on the audience's part of that critical taste which, when not itself

Metrical innovations

perverted, keeps up the standard of a literature; and as the poet sang for a livelihood, with little care for posthumous reputation, he wanted the higher motives which in other ages have lent elevation to poetry.

These points duly considered, the work of the metrical romancer must of the English appear highly creditable. There is a clear distinction between the French

who wrought for courts and the English who, writing in an unfashionable language, addressed a lower order of society, but this is no proof of the latter's inferiority in original power. In one respect the later English romancers are entitled to credit, their improvements in metrical form. The French poets, other than the authors of the chansons de geste, commonly write in octosyllabic couplets, taxed in a later day with "fatal facility," and consequently tending to prolixity, defects which the English minstrels of the time of Edward III. usually remedy by adopting a regular strophe, doubtless of French invention, and known as the rime croisée in distinction from the rime plate, or consecutive rhyme, demanding more care on the part of the writer and more grateful to the ear. The

ollowing example of the rime plate is from the romance of Richard Cœur de Lion, where Richard, having "robbed the lion of his heart," proceeds to devour this raw, to the dismay of the Emperor of Germany:

1 Dais.

The king at meat sat on des,1

With dukes and earles proud in pres;

The sale on the table stood;

Richard pressed out all the blood,

And wet the hearte in the salt,

The king and all his men behalt;

Salt cellar. The final e, when not elided before a following vowel, is sounded as a distinct syllable. Beha, beheld; skeet, quickly; cognate with shoot and scoot. Ywis, certainly; German gewiss.