European lit

literature.

hardly more than one country in Europe where we find them producing anything that can be called In England Anglo-Saxon, if erature in 1100. not exactly dead, is dying, and has for more than a century ceased to produce anything of distinctly literary attraction; and English, even the earliest "middle" English, is scarcely yet born, is certainly far from being in a condition for literary use. The last echoes of the older and more original Icelandic poetry are dying away, and the great product of Icelandic prose, the Saga, still volitat per ora virum, without taking a concrete literary form. It is in the highest degree uncertain whether anything properly to be called Spanish or Italian exists at all -anything but dialects of the lingua rustica showing traces of what Spanish and Italian are to be; though the originals of the great Poema del Cid cannot be far off. German is in something the same trance between

the general subject. But of late years the fashion of dropping the s has prevailed, and, therefore, in a book meant for general reading, I follow it here. Those who prefer native authorities will find a recent and excellent one on the whole subject of French literature in M. Lanson, Histoire de la Littérature Française, Paris, 1895. For the medieval period generally M. Gaston Paris, La Littérature Française au Moyen Age (Paris, 1888), speaks with unapproached competence; and, still narrowing the range, the subject of the present chapter has been dealt with by M. Léon Gautier, Les Epopées Françaises (Paris, 4 vols., 1878-92), in a manner equally learned and loving. M. Gautier has also been intrusted with the section on the Chansons in the new and splendidly illustrated collection of monographs (Paris: Colin) which M. Petit de Julleville is editing under the title Histoire de la Langue et de la Littérature Française. Mr Paget Toynbee's Specimens of Old French (Oxford, 1892) will illustrate this and the following chapters.

its "Old" and its "Middle" state as is English. Only in France, and in both the great divisions of French speech, is vernacular literature active. The northern tongue, the langue d'oïl, shows us-in actually known existence, or by reasonable inference that it existed -the national epic or chanson de geste; the southern, or langue d'oc, gives us the Provençal lyric. The latter will receive treatment later, the former must be dealt with at once.

It is rather curious that while the chansons de geste are, after Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic poetry, the oldest elaborate example of verse in the modern vernaculars; while they exhibit a character, not indeed one of the widest in range or most engaging in quality, but individual, interesting, intense as few others; while they are entirely the property of one nation, and that a nation specially proud of its literary achievements,— they were almost the last division of European literature to become in any degree properly known. In so far as they were known at all, until within the present century, the knowledge was based almost entirely on later adaptations in verse, and still later in prose; while the most curious point of all-they were not warmly welcomed by the French even after their discovery, and cannot yet be said to have been taken to the heart of the nation, even to the limited extent to which the Arthurian romances have been taken to the heart of England, much less to that in which the old, but much less old, ballads of England, Scotland, Germany, and Spain have for periods of varying length been welcomed in their respective countries. To dis

cuss the reason of this at length would lead us out of our present subject; but it is a fact, and a very curious fact.

Their age

The romances of Charlemagne, or, to employ their more technical designation, the chansons de geste, form Late discovery a large, a remarkably homogeneous, and a of the chansons. well-separated body of compositions. These, as far as can be decided, date in time from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, with a few belated representatives in the fourteenth; but scarcely, as far as probability shows, with any older members in the tenth. Very little attention of any kind was paid to them, till some seventy years ago, an English scholar, Conybeare, known for his services to our and history. own early literature, following the example of another scholar, Tyrwhitt, still earlier and more distinguished, had drawn attention to the merit and interest of, as it happens, the oldest and most remarkable of all. This was the Chanson de Roland, which, in this oldest form, exists only in one of the MSS. of the Bodleian Library at Oxford. But they very soon received the care of M. Paulin Paris, the most indefatigable student that in a century of examination of the older European literature any European country has produced, and after more than half a century of enthusiastic resuscitation by M. Paris, by his son M. Gaston, and by others, the whole body of them has been thoroughly overhauled and put at the disposal of those who do not care to read the original, in the four volumes of the remodelled edition of M. Léon Gautier's Epopées Françaises, while perhaps a

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majority of the actual texts are in print. This is as well, for though a certain monotony is always charged against the chansons de geste1 by those who do not love them, and may be admitted to some extent even by those who do, there are few which have not a more or less distinct character of their own; and even the generic character is not properly to be perceived until a considerable number have been studied.

guishing char.

acter.

The old habit of reading this division of romance in late and travestied versions naturally and necesTheir distin- sarily obscured the curious traits of community in form and matter that belong to it, and indeed distinguish it from almost all other departments of literature of the imaginative kind. Its members are frequently spoken of as "the Charlemagne Romances"; and, as a matter of fact, most of them do come into connection with the great prince of the second race in one way or another. Yet Bodel's phrase of matière de France 2 is happier. For they are all still more directly connected with French history,

1 This monotony almost follows from the title. For geste in the French is not merely the equivalent of gesta, "deeds." It is used for the record of those deeds, and then for the whole class or family of performances and records of them. In this last sense the gestes are in chief three-those of the king, of Doon de Mayence, and of Garin de Montglane-besides smaller ones.

2 Jean Bodel, a trouvère of the thirteenth century, furnished literary history with a valuable stock-quotation in the opening of his Chanson des Saisnes for the three great divisions of Romance :

"Ne sont que trois matières à nul home attendant,

De France et de Bretaigne et de Rome la grant."

-Chanson des Saxons, ed. Michel, Paris, 1839, vol. i. p. 1.

The lines following, less often quoted, are an interesting early locus for French literary patriotism.

seen through a romantic lens; and even the late and half-burlesque Hugues Capet, even the extremely interesting and partly contemporary set on the Crusades, as well as such "little gestes" as that of the Lorrainers, Garin le Loherain and the rest, and the three "great gestes" of the king, of the southern hero William of Orange (sometimes called the geste of Montglane), and of the family of Doon de Mayence, arrange themselves with no difficulty under this more general heading. And the chanson de geste proper, as Frenchmen are entitled to boast, never quite deserts this matière de France. It is always the Gesta Francorum at home, or the Gesta Dei per Francos in the East, that supply the themes. When this subject or group of subjects palled, the very form of the chanson de geste was lost. It was not applied to other things; it grew obsolete with that which it had helped to make popular. Some of the material-Huon of Bordeaux, the Four Sons of Aymon, and others-retained a certain vogue in forms quite different, and gave later ages the inexact and bastard notion of "Charlemagne Romance" which has been referred to. But the chanson de geste itself was never, so to speak, "half-known"-except to a very few antiquaries. After its three centuries of flourishing, first alone, then with the other two "matters," it retired altogether, and made its reappearance only after four centuries had passed away.

This fact or set of facts has made the actual nature of the original Charlemagne Romances the subject of

1 Or only in rare cases to later French history itself-Du Guesclin, and the Comlat des Trente.