Part 20 (1/2)
The head went flying over the lea, but it had no more words to speak.
Huon is not forgiven by the Emperor; the Emperor spares his life, indeed, but sends him on a hopeless expedition.
And there the first part of the story ends. The present version is dated in the early part of the reign of St. Louis; it is contemporary with Snorri Sturluson and Sturla his nephew, and exhibits, though not quite in the Icelandic manner, the princ.i.p.al motives of early unruly society, without much fanciful addition, and with a very strong hold upon the tragic situation, and upon the types of character. As in _Raoul de Cambrai_, right and wrong are mixed; the Emperor has a real grievance against Huon, and Huon, with little fault of his own, is put apparently in the wrong. The interests involved are of the strongest possible. There was not a single lord among those to whom the minstrel repeated his story who did not know that he might have to look out for encroachments and injustice--interference at any rate--from the king, and treachery from his neighbours. No one hoped to leave his castles and lands in peace to his son, who did not also fear that his son might be left defenceless and his lands exposed to compet.i.tion; a fear most touchingly expressed in the lament of William of Poitiers, when he set out on the first Crusade.[78]
[Footnote 78: ”Pos de chantar m'es pres talens:”--Raynouard, _Choix des poesies des Troubadours_, iv. p. 83; Bartsch, _Chrestomathie provencale_.]
Whatever general influences of law or politics or social economy are supposed to be at work in the story of _Huon of Bordeaux_,--and all this earlier part of it is a story of feudal politics and legal problems,--these influences were also present in the real world in which the maker and the hearers of the poem had their life. It is plain and serious dealing with matter of fact.
But after the ordeal of battle in which Huon kills the traitor, the tone changes with great abruptness and a new story begins.
The commission laid upon Huon by the implacable and doting Emperor is nothing less than that which afterwards was made a byword for all impossible enterprises--”to take the Great Turk by the beard.” He is to go to Babylon and, literally, to beard the Admiral there, and carry off the Admiral's daughter. The audience is led away into the wide world of Romance. Huon goes to the East by way of Rome and Brindisi--naturally enough--but the real world ends at Brindisi; beyond that everything is magical.
CHAPTER V
ROMANCE
AND THE OLD FRENCH ROMANTIC SCHOOLS
Romance in many varieties is to be found inherent in Epic and in Tragedy; for some readers, possibly, the great and magnificent forms of poetry are most attractive when from time to time they forget their severity, and when the tragic strength is allowed to rest, as in the fairy interludes of the _Odyssey_, or the similes of the clouds, winds, and mountain-waters in the _Iliad_. If Romance be the name for the sort of imagination that possesses the mystery and the spell of everything remote and unattainable, then Romance is to be found in the old Northern heroic poetry in larger measure than any epic or tragic solemnity, and in no small measure also even in the steady course of the Icelandic histories. Possibly Romance is in its best place here, as an element in the epic harmony; perhaps the romantic mystery is most mysterious when it is found as something additional among the graver and more positive affairs of epic or tragic personages. The occasional visitations of the dreaming moods of romance, in the middle of a great epic or a great tragedy, are often more romantic than the literature which is nothing but romance from beginning to end. The strongest poets, Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, have along with their strong reasoning enough of the lighter and fainter grace and charm to be the despair of all the ”romantic schools” in the world. In the Icelandic prose stories, as has been seen already, there is a similar combination. These stories contain the strongest imaginative work of the Middle Ages before Dante. Along with this there is found in them occasionally the uncertain and incalculable play of the other, the more airy mode of imagination; and the romance of the strong Sagas is more romantic than that of the medieval works which have no other interest to rely upon, or of all but a very few.
One of the largest and plainest facts of medieval history is the change of literature in the twelfth century, and the sudden and exuberant growth and progress of a number of new poetical forms; particularly the courtly lyric that took shape in Provence, and pa.s.sed into the tongues of Italy, France, and Germany, and the French romance which obeyed the same general inspiration as the Provencal poetry, and was equally powerful as an influence on foreign nations. The French Romantic Schools of the twelfth century are among the most definite and the most important appearances even in that most wonderful age; though it is irrational to contrast them with the other great historical movements of the time, because there is no real separation between them. French romance is part of the life of the time, and the life of the twelfth century is reproduced in French romance.
The rise of these new forms of story makes an unmistakable difference between the age that preceded them and everything that comes after.
They are a new, fresh, and prosperous beginning in literature, and they imply the failure of the older manner of thought, the older fas.h.i.+on of imagination, represented in the epic literature of France, not to speak of the various Teutonic forms of heroic verse and prose that are related to the epic of France only by a remote common ancestry, and a certain general likeness in the conditions of ”heroic”
life.
The defeat of French epic, as has been noted already, was slow and long resisted; but the victory of romance was inevitable. Together with the influence of the Provencal lyric idealism, it determined the forms of modern literature, long after the close of the Middle Ages.
The change of fas.h.i.+on in the twelfth century is as momentous and far-reaching in its consequences as that to which the name ”Renaissance” is generally appropriated. The later Renaissance, indeed, in what concerns imaginative literature, makes no such abrupt and sudden change of fas.h.i.+on as was made in the twelfth century. The poetry and romance of the Renaissance follow naturally upon the literature of the Middle Ages; for the very good reason that it was the Middle Ages which began, even in their dark beginnings, the modern study of the humanities, and in the twelfth century made a remarkable and determined effort to secure the inheritance of ancient poetry for the advantage of the new tongues and their new forms of verse. There is no such line of division between Ariosto and Chrestien of Troyes as there is between Chrestien and the primitive epic.
The romantic schools of the twelfth century are the result and evidence of a great unanimous movement, the origins of which may be traced far back in the general conditions of education and learning, in the influence of Latin authors, in the interchange of popular tales. They are among the most characteristic productions of the most impressive, varied, and characteristic period in the Middle Ages; of that century which broke, decisively, with the old ”heroic”
traditions, and made the division between the heroic and the chivalric age. When the term ”medieval” is used in modern talk, it almost always denotes something which first took definite shape in the twelfth century. The twelfth century is the source of most of the ”medieval” influences in modern art and literature, and the French romances of that age are the original authorities for most of the ”Gothic” ornaments adopted in modern romantic schools.
The twelfth-century French romances form a definite large group, with many ranks and divisions, some of which are easily distinguished, while all are of great historical interest.
One common quality, hardly to be mistaken, is that which marks them all as belonging to a romantic _school_, in almost all the modern senses of that term. That is to say, they are not the spontaneous product of an uncritical and ingenuous imagination; they are not the same sort of thing as the popular stories on which many of them are founded; they are the literary work of authors more or less sophisticated, on the look-out for new sensations and new literary devices. It is useless to go to those French books in order to catch the first fresh jet of romantic fancy, the ”silly sooth” of the golden age. One might as well go to the _Legende des Siecles_. Most of the romance of the medieval schools is already hot and dusty and fatigued.
It has come through the mills of a thousand active literary men, who know their business, and have an eye to their profits. Medieval romance, in its most characteristic and most influential form, is almost as fact.i.tious and professional as modern Gothic architecture.
The twelfth-century dealers in romantic commonplaces are as fully conscious of the market value of their goods as any later poet who has borrowed from them their giants and enchanters, their forests and their magic castles; and these and similar properties are used in the twelfth century with the same kind of literary sharpness, the same attention to the demands of the ”reading public,” as is shown by the various poets and novelists who have waited on the successes, and tried to copy the methods, of Goethe, Scott, or Victor Hugo. Pure Romance, such as is found in the old Northern poems, is very rare in the French stories of the twelfth century; the magical touch and the sense of mystery, and all the things that are a.s.sociated with the name romance, when that name is applied to the _Ancient Mariner_, or _La Belle Dame sans Merci_, or the _Lady of Shalott_, are generally absent from the most successful romances of the great medieval romantic age, full though they may be of all the forms of chivalrous devotion and all the most wonderful romantic machines. Most of them are as different from the true irresistible magic of fancy as _Thalaba_ from _Kubla Khan_. The name ”romantic school” is rightly applicable to them and their work, for almost the last thing that is produced in a ”romantic school” is the infallible and indescribable touch of romance. A ”romantic school” is a company for the profitable working of Broceliande, an organised attempt to ”open up” the Enchanted Ground; such, at least, is the appearance of a great deal of the romantic literature of the early part of the nineteenth century, and of its forerunner in the twelfth. There is this difference between the two ages, that the medieval romanticists are freer and more original than the moderns who made a business out of tales of terror and wonder, and tried to fatten their lean kine on the pastures of ”Gothic” or of Oriental learning.
The romance-writers of the twelfth century, though they did much to make romance into a mechanic art, though they reduced the game to a system and left the different romantic combinations and conventions within the reach of almost any 'prentice hand, were yet in their way original explorers. Though few of them got out of their materials the kind of effect that appeals to us now most strongly, and though we think we can see what they missed in their opportunities, yet they were not the followers of any great man of their own time, and they chose their own way freely, not as bungling imitators of a greater artist. It is a disappointment to find that romance is rarely at its finest in the works that technically have the best right in the world to be called by that name. Nevertheless, the work that is actually found there is interesting in its own way, and historically of an importance which does not need to be emphasised.
The true romantic interest is very unequally distributed over the works of the Middle Ages, and there is least of it in the authors who are most representative of the ”age of chivalry.” There is a disappointment prepared for any one who looks in the greater romantic authors of the twelfth century for the music of the _Faery Queene_ or _La Belle Dame sans Merci_. There is more of the pure romantic element in the poems of Brynhild, in the story of Njal, in the _Song of Roland_, than in the famous romances of Chrestien of Troyes or any of his imitators, though they have all the wonders of the Isle of Britain at their command, though they have the very story of Tristram and the very mystery of the Grail to quicken them and call them out. Elegance, fluency, sentiment, romantic adventures are common, but for words like those of Hervor at the grave of her father, or of the parting between Brynhild and Sigurd, or of Helgi and Sigrun, it would be vain to search in the romances of Benoit de Sainte More or of Chrestien. Yet these are the masters of the art of romance when it was fresh and strong, a victorious fas.h.i.+on.
If the search be continued further, the search for that kind of imaginative beauty which these authors do not give, it will not be unsuccessful. The greater authors of the twelfth century have more affinity to the ”heroic romance” of the school of the _Grand Cyrus_ than to the dreams of Spenser or Coleridge. But, while this is the case with the most distinguished members of the romantic school, it is not so with all the rest. The magic that is wanting to the clear and elegant narrative of Benoit and Chrestien will be found elsewhere; it will be found in one form in the mystical prose of the _Queste del St.
Graal_--a very different thing from Chrestien's _Perceval_--it will be found, again and again, in the prose of Sir Thomas Malory; it will be found in many ballads and ballad burdens, in _William and Margaret_, in _Binnorie_, in the _Wife of Usher's Well_, in the _Rime of the Count Arnaldos_, in the _Konigskinder_; it will be found in the most beautiful story of the Middle Ages, _Auca.s.sin and Nicolette_; one of the few perfectly beautiful stories in the world, about which there is no need, in England at any rate, to say anything in addition to the well-known pa.s.sages in which it has been praised. _Auca.s.sin and Nicolette_ cannot be made into a representative medieval romance: there is nothing else like it; and the qualities that make it what it is are the opposite of the rhetorical self-possession, the correct and deliberate narrative of Chrestien and his school. It contains the quintessence of romantic imagination, but it is quite unlike the most fas.h.i.+onable and successful romances.
There are several stages in the history of the great Romantic School, as well as several distinct sources of interest. The value of the best works of the school consists in their representation of the pa.s.sion of love. They turn the psychology of the courtly amatory poets into narrative. Chaucer's address to the old poets,--”Ye lovers that can make of sentiment,”--when he complains that they have left little for him to glean in the field of poetry, does not touch the lyrical poets only. The narrative poetry of the courteous school is equally devoted to the philosophy of love. Narrative poets like Chrestien, when they turn to lyric, can change their instrument without changing the purport of their verse; lyric or narrative, it has the same object, the same duty. So also, two hundred years later, Chaucer himself or Froissart may use narrative or lyric forms indifferently, and observe the same ”courteous” ideal in both.