Part 18 (1/2)

”On peut dire que la _Chanson de Roland_ (ainsi que toutes nos plus anciennes chansons de geste) se developpe non pas, comme les poemes homeriques, par un courant large et ininterrompu, non pas, comme le _Nibelungenlied_, par des battements d'ailes egaux et lents, mais par un suite d'explosions successives, toujours arretees court et toujours reprenant avec soudainete” (_Litt. fr. au moyen age_, p. 59).

_Roland_ is a succession of separate scenes, with no gradation or transition between them. It still bears traces of the lyrical origins of epic. But the narrative, though broken, is neither stinted nor laboured; it does not, like _Beowulf_, give the impression that it has been expanded beyond the convenient limits, and that the author is scant of breath. And none of the later _chansons de geste_ are so restricted and reserved in their design as _Roland_; most of them are diffuse and long. The French and the Teutonic epics are at opposite extremes of style.

The French epics are addressed to the largest conceivable audience.[69] They are plain and simple, as different as possible from the allusive brevity of the Northern poems. Even the plainest of the old English poems, even _Maldon_, has to employ the poetical diction, the unprosaic terms and figures of the Teutonic School. The alliterative poetry down to its last days has a vocabulary different from that of prose, and much richer. The French epic language is not distinguished and made difficult in this way; it is ”not prismatic but diaphanous.” Those who could understand anything could understand it, and the _chansons de geste_ easily found currency in the market-place, when they were driven by the new romances from their old place of honour in ”bower and hall.” The Teutonic poetry, even at its simplest, must have required more attention in its hearers than the French, through the strangeness and the greater variety of its vocabulary. It is less familiar, less popular. Whatever dignity may be acquired by the French epic is not due to any special or elaborate convention of phrase. Where it is weak, its poverty is not disguised, as in the weaker portions of Teutonic poetry, by the ornaments and synonyms of the _Gradus_. The commonplaces of French epic are not imposing.[70]

With this difference between the French and the Teutonic conventions, there is all the more interest in a comparison of the two kinds, where they come into comparison through any resemblance of their subjects or their thought, as in _Byrhtnoth_ and _Roland_.

[Footnote 69: G. Paris, Preface to _Histoire de la litterature francaise_, edited by L. Pet.i.t de Julleville.]

[Footnote 70: See the preface to _Raoul de Cambrai_, ed. Paul Meyer (Anc. Textes), for examples of such _chevilles_; and also _Aimeri de Narbonne_, p. civ.]

The French epics have generally a larger political field, more numerous armies, and more magnificent kings, than the Teutonic. In the same degree, their heroism is different from that of the earlier heroic age. The general motives of patriotism and religion, France and Christendom, prevent the free use of the simpler and older motives of individual heroism. The hero of the older sort is still there, but his game is hindered by the larger and more complex political conditions of France; or if these are evaded, still the mere size of the country and numbers of the fighting-men tell against his importance; he is dwarfed by his surroundings. The limitation of the scenes in the poems of _Beowulf_, _Ermanaric_, and _Attila_ throws out the figures in strong relief. The mere extent of the stage and the number of the supernumeraries required for the action of most of the French stories appear to have told against the definiteness of their characters; as, on the other hand, the personages in _Beowulf_, without much individual character of their own, seem to gain in precision and strength from the smallness of the scene in which they act. There is less strict economy in the _chansons de geste_.

Apart from this, there is real and essential vagueness in their characters; their drama is rudimentary. The simplicity of the French epic style, which is addressed to a large audience and easily intelligible, is not capable of much dramatic subtlety. It can be made to express a variety of actions and a variety of moods, but these are generally rendered by means of common formulas, without much dramatic insight or intention. While the fragments of Teutonic epic seem to give evidence of a growing dramatic imagination, and the Northern poems, especially, of a series of experiments in character, the French epic imagination appears to have remained content with its established and abstract formulas for different modes of sentiment and pa.s.sion. It would not be easy to find anything in French epic that gives the same impression of discovery and innovation, of the search for dramatic form, of the absorption of the poet's mind in the pursuit of an imaginary character, as is given, again and again, by the Northern poems of the Volsung cycle. Yet the _chansons de geste_ are often true and effective in their outlines of character, and include a quant.i.ty of ”humours and observation,” though their authors seem to have been unable to give solidity to their sketches.

The weakness of the drama in the French epics, even more than their compliance with foreign romance in the choice of incidents or machinery, is against their claim to be reckoned in the higher order of heroic narrative. They are romantic by the comparative levity of their imagination; the story, with them, is too much for the personages. But it is still the problem of heroic character that engages them, however feebly or conventionally they may deal with it.

They rely, like the Teutonic epic and the Sagas, on situations that test the force of character, and they find those situations in the common conditions of an heroic age, subject of course to the modifications of the comparatively late period and late form of society to which they belong. _Roland_ is a variation on the one perpetual heroic theme; it has a grander setting, a grander accompaniment, than _Byrhtnoth_ or _Waldere_, but it is essentially the old story of the heroic age,--no knight-errantry, but the last resistance of a man driven into a corner.

The greatness of the poem of _Roland_ is that of an author who knows his own mind, who has a certain mood of the heroic imagination to express, and is at no loss for his instrument or for the lines of his work.

The poem, as has been already noted, has a general likeness in its plan to the story of Finnesburh as told in _Beowulf_, and to the poems of the death of Attila. The plot falls into two parts, the second part being the vengeance and expiation.

Although the story is thus not absolutely simple, like the adventures of Beowulf, no epic has a more magnificent simplicity of effect. The other personages, Charlemagne, Ganelon, Oliver, King Marsile, have to Roland nothing like the importance of Agamemnon, Ajax, Diomede, or Hector, as compared with Achilles in the _Iliad_. The poem is almost wholly devoted to the praise and glorification of a single hero; it retains very much of the old manners of the earlier stages of epic poetry, before it ceased to be lyric. It is a poem in honour of a chieftain.

At the same time, this lyrical tone in _Roland_ and this pathetic concentration of the interest on one personage do not interfere with the epic plan of the narrative, or disturb the lines of the composition. The central part of the poem is on the Homeric scale; the fighting, the separate combats, are rendered in an Homeric way.

_Byrhtnoth_ and _Roland_ are the works that have given the best medieval counterpart to the battles of Homer. There is more of a crisis and a climax in _Roland_ than in the several battles of the _Iliad_, and a different sort of climax from that of _Byrhtnoth_.

Everything leads to the agony and heroic death of Roland, and to his glory as the unyielding champion of France and Christendom. It is not as in the _Iliad_, where different heroes have their day, or as at Maldon, where the fall of the captain leads to the more desperate defence and the more exalted heroism of his companions. Roland is the absolute master of the _Song of Roland_. No other heroic poetry conveys the same effect of pre-eminent simplicity and grandeur. There is hardly anything in the poem except the single mood; its simplicity is overpowering, a type of heroic resistance for all the later poets of Europe. This impressive effect is aided, it is true, by an infusion of the lyrical tone and by playing on the pathetic emotions. Roland is ideal and universal, and the story of his defeat, of the blast of his horn, and the last stroke of Durendal, is a kind of funeral march or ”heroic symphony” into which a meaning may be read for every new hero, to the end of the world; for any one in any age whose _Mood is the more as the Might lessens_. Yet although Roland has this universal or symbolical or musical meaning--unlike the more individual personages in the Sagas, who would resent being made into allegories--the total effect is mainly due to legitimate epic means. There is no stinting of the epic proportions or suppression of the epic devices. The _Song of Roland_ is narrative poetry, a model of narrative design, with the proper epic s.p.a.ces well proportioned, well considered, and filled with action. It may be contrasted with the _Death-Song of Ragnar Lodbrok_, which is an attempt to get the same sort of moral effect by a process of lyrical distillation from heroic poetry; putting all the strongest heroic motives into the most intense and emphatic form. There is something lyrical in _Roland_, but the poem is not governed by lyrical principles; it requires the deliberation and the freedom of epic; it must have room to move in before it can come up to the height of its argument. The abruptness of its periods is not really an interruption of its even flight; it is an abruptness of detail, like a broken sea with a larger wave moving under it; it does not impair or disguise the grandeur of the movement as a whole.

There are other poems among the _chansons de geste_ which admit of comparison with _Roland_, though _Roland_ is supreme; other epics in which the simple motives of heroism and loyalty are treated in a simple and n.o.ble way, without any very strong individual character among the personages. Of these rather abstract expositions of the heroic ideal, some of the finest are to be found in the cycle of William of Orange, more especially in the poems relating the exploits of William and his nephew Vivian, and the death of Vivian in the battle against the Moors--

En icel jor que la dolor fu grans Et la bataille orible en Aliscans.

Like _Roland_, the poem of _Aliscans_ is rather lyrical in its effect, reiterating and reinforcing the heroic motives, making an impression by repet.i.tion of one and the same mood; a poem of the glorification of France. It shows, at the same time, how this motive might be degraded by exaggeration and amplification. There are too many Moors in it (as also in _Roland_), and the sequel is reckless and extravagant, where William of Orange rides to the king's court for help and discovers an ally in the enormous scullion of the king's kitchen, Rainouart, the Morgante of French epic. Rainouart, along with William of Orange, was seen by Dante in Paradise. In his gigantic and discourteous way he was one of the champions of Christendom, and his manners are interesting as a variation from the conventional heroic standards. But he takes up too much room; he was not invented by the wide and comprehensive epic imagination which finds a place for many varieties of mankind in its story, but by some one who felt that the old epic forms were growing thin and unsatisfactory, and that there was need of some violent diversion to keep the audiences awake. This new device is not abandoned till Rainouart has been sent to Avalon--the epic form and spirit losing themselves in a misappropriation of Romance. These excursions are of course not to be ascribed to the central authors of the cycle of William of Orange; but already even in the most heroic parts of the cycle there are indications of the flagging imagination, the failure of the old motives, which gave an opening to these wild auxiliary forces. Where the epic came to trust too much to the mere heroic sentiment, to the moral of _Roland_, to the contrast of knight and infidel, there was nothing for it but either to have recourse to the formal heroics of Camoens or Ta.s.so,--for which the time had not yet come,--or to be dissolved altogether in a medley of adventures, and to pa.s.s from its old station in the front of literature to those audiences of the market-place that even now, in some parts of the world, have a welcome for Charlemagne and his peers.[71]

[Footnote 71: _Historia Verdadera de Carlo Magno y los doce Pares de Francia_: Madrid, 4to (1891), a chap-book of thirty-two pages.]

Those of the French epics in which the motives of _Roland_ are in some form or other repeated, in which the defence of Christendom is the burden, are rightly considered the best representatives of the whole body. But there are others in which with less dignity of theme there is more freedom, and in which an older epic type, more akin to the Teutonic, nearer in many ways to the Icelandic Sagas, is preserved, and for a long time maintains itself distinct from all the forms of romance and the romantic schools. It is not in _Roland_ or in _Aliscans_ that the epic interest in character is most p.r.o.nounced and most effective. Those among the _chansons de geste_ which make least of the adventures in comparison with the personages, which think more of the tragic situation than of rapid changes of scene and incident, are generally those which represent the feuds and quarrels between the king and his va.s.sals, or among the great houses themselves; the anarchy, in fact, which belongs to an heroic age and pa.s.ses from experience into heroic literature. There is hardly any of the _chansons de geste_ in which this element of heroic anarchy is not to be found in a greater or less degree. In _Roland_, for example, though the main action is between the French and the Moors, it is jealousy and rivalry that bring about the catastrophe, through the treason of Ganelon. This sort of jealousy, which is subordinate in _Roland_, forms the chief motive of some of the other epics. These depend for their chief interest on the vicissitudes of family quarrels almost as completely as the Sagas. These are the French counterparts of _Eyrbyggja_, and of the stories of Glum or Gisli. In France, as in Iceland, the effect of the story is produced as much by the energy of the characters as by the interest of adventures. Only in the French epic, while they play for larger stakes, the heroes are incomparably less impressive. The imagination which represents them is different in kind from the Icelandic, and puts up with a very indefinite and general way of denoting character. Though the extant poems are late, some of them have preserved a very elementary psychology and a very simple sort of ethics, the artistic formulas and devices of a rudimentary stage which has nothing to correspond to it in the extant Icelandic prose.

_Raoul de Cambrai_ in its existing form is a late poem; it has gone through the process of translation from a.s.sonance into rhyme, and like _Huon of Bordeaux_, though by a different method, it has been fitted with a romantic continuation. But the first part of the poem apparently keeps the lines of an older and more original version. The story is not one of the later cyclic fabrications; it has an historical basis and is derived from the genuine epic tradition of that tenth-century school which unfortunately is only known through its descendants and its influence. _Raoul de Cambrai_, though in an altered verse and later style, may be taken as presenting an old story still recognisable in most of its original features, especially in its moral.

Raoul de Cambrai, a child at his father's death, is deprived of his inheritance. To make up for this he is promised, later, the first fief that falls vacant, and a.s.serts his claim in a way that brings him into continual trouble,--a story with great opportunities for heroic contrasts and complications. The situation is well chosen; it is better than that of the story of Glum, which is rather like it[72]--the right is not all on one side. Raoul has a just cause, but cannot make it good; he is driven to be unjust in order to come by his own. Violence and excess in a just cause will make a tragic history; there is no fault to be found with the general scheme or principle in this case. It is in the details that the barbarous simplicity of the author comes out. For example, in the invasion of the lands on which he has a claim, Raoul attacks and burns a nunnery, and in it the mother of his best friend and former squire, Bernier. The injured man, his friend, is represented as taking it all in a helpless dull expostulatory way. The author has no language to express any imaginative pa.s.sion; he can only repeat, in a m.u.f.fled professional voice, that it was really a very painful and discreditable affair. The violent pa.s.sions here are those of the heroic age in its most barbarous form; more sudden and uncontrolled even than the anger of Achilles. But with all their vehemence and violence there is no real tragic force, and when the hero is killed by his friend, and the friend is sorry afterwards, there is nothing but the mere formal and abstract ident.i.ty of the situation to recall to mind the tragedy of Kjartan and Bolli.

[Footnote 72: Glum, like Raoul, is a widow's son deprived of his rights.]

_Garin le Loherain_ is a story with a similar plot,--the estrangement and enmity of old friends, ”sworn companions.” Though no earlier than _Raoul de Cambrai_, though belonging in date to the flouris.h.i.+ng period of romance, it is a story of the older heroic age, and its contents are epic. Its heroes are unsophisticated, and the incidents, sentiments, and motives are primitive and not of the romantic school.

The story is much superior to _Raoul de Cambrai_ in speed and lightness; it does not drag at the critical moments; it has some humour and some grace. Among other things, its gnomic pa.s.sages represent very fairly the dominant heroic ideas of courage and good temper; it may be appealed to for the humanities of the _chansons de geste_, expressed in a more fluent and less emphatic shape than _Roland_. The characters are taken very lightly, but at least they are not obtuse and awkward. If there is not much dramatic subtlety, there is a recognition and appreciation of different aspects of the same character. The story proceeds like an Icelandic Saga, through different phases of a long family quarrel, springing from a well-marked origin; foreshadowed and accompanied, as in many of the Sagas, by the hereditary felonious character of the one party, which yet is not blackened too much nor wholly unrelieved.

As in many of the Icelandic stories, there is a stronger dramatic interest in the adversary, the wrong side, than in the heroes. As with Kari and Flosi in _Njala_, as with Kjartan and Bolli in _Laxdaela_, and with Sigmund and Thrond of Gata in _Faereyinga Saga_, so in the story of Garin it is Fromont the enemy whose case is followed with most attention, because it is less simple than that of the heroes, Garin of Lorraine and Begon his brother. The character of Fromont shows the true observation, as well as the inadequate and sketchy handling, of the French epic school. Fromont is in the wrong; all the trouble follows from his original misconduct, when he refused to stand by Garin in a war of defence against the Moors:--

Iluec comence li grans borroflemens.