The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory Part 20

There is no reason at all to question the sincerity of this faith. But Joinville was a shrewd and practical man, and when the kings of France and Navarre pressed him to take the cross a second time, he answered that their majesties' servants had during his first absence done him and his people so much harm that he thought he had better not go away again. Indeed it would be displeasing to G.o.d, "qui mit son corps pour son peuple sauver," if he, Joinville, abandoned _his_ people. And he reports only in the briefest abstract the luckless "voie de Tunes," or expedition to Tunis. But of the earlier and not much less unlucky Damietta crusade, in which he took part, as well as of his hero's life till all but the last, he has written very fully, and in a fas.h.i.+on which is very interesting, though unluckily we have no ma.n.u.script representing the original text, or even near to it in point of time.

The book, which has been thought to have been written in pieces at long intervals, has nothing of the antique vigour of Villehardouin.

Joinville is something of a gossip, and though he evidently writes with a definite literary purpose, is not master of very great argumentative powers. But for this same reason he abounds in anecdote, and in the personal detail which, though it may easily be overdone, is undoubtedly now and then precious for the purpose of enabling us to conjure up the things and men of old time more fully and correctly.

And there is a Pepysian garrulity as well as a Pepysian shrewdness about Joinville; so that, on the whole, he fills the position of ancestor in the second group of historians, the group of lively _raconteurs_, as well as Villehardouin leads that of inspired describers. For an instance of the third kind, the philosophical historian, France, if not Europe, had to wait two centuries, when such a one came in Comines.

It is almost unnecessary to say that when the secret of producing prose and its advantages over verse for certain purposes had been discovered, it was freely employed for all such purposes, scientific as science was understood, devotional, instructive, business (the _Livre des Mestiers_, or book of the guilds of Paris, is of the thirteenth century), and miscellaneous. But few of these things concern literature proper. It is otherwise with the application of prose to fiction.

[Sidenote: _Fiction._]

This, as we have seen, had probably taken place in the case of the Arthurian romances as early as the middle of our period, and throughout the thirteenth century prose romances of length were not unknown, though it was later that all the three cla.s.ses--Carlovingian, Arthurian, and Antique--were thrown indiscriminately into prose, and lengthened even beyond the huge length of their later representatives in verse. But for this reason or that, romance in prose was with rare exceptions unfavourable to the production of the best literature. It encouraged the prolixity which was the great curse of the Middle Ages, and the deficient sense of form and scanty presence of models prevented the observance of anything like a proper scheme.

[Sidenote: Auca.s.sin et Nicolette.]

But among the numerous origins of this wonderful time the origin of the short prose tale, in which France was to hold almost if not quite the highest rank among European countries, was also included. It would not seem that the kind was as yet very frequently attempted--the fact that the verse _fabliau_ was still in the very height of its flouris.h.i.+ng-time, made this unlikely; nor was it till that flouris.h.i.+ng-time was over that farces on the one hand, and prose tales on the other, succeeded as fruit the _fabliau_-flower. But it is from the thirteenth century that (with some others) we have _Auca.s.sin et Nicolette_.[159] If it was for a short time rather too much of a fas.h.i.+on to praise (it cannot be over-praised) this exquisite story, no wise man will allow himself to be disgusted any more than he will allow himself to be attracted by fas.h.i.+on. This work of "the old caitiff," as the author calls himself with a rather Hibernian coaxingness, is what has been called a _cantefable_--that is to say, it is not only obviously written, like verse romances and _fabliaux_, for recitation, but it consists partly of prose, partly of verse, the music for the latter being also given. Mr Swinburne, Mr Pater, and, most of all, Mr Lang, have made it unnecessary to tell in any detailed form the story how Auca.s.sin, the son of Count Garin of Beaucaire, fell in love with Nicolette, a Saracen captive, who has been bought by the Viscount of the place and brought up as his daughter; how Nicolette was shut up in a tower to keep her from Auca.s.sin; how Count Bongars of Valence a.s.sailed Beaucaire and was captured by Auca.s.sin on the faith of a promise from his father that Nicolette shall be restored to him; how the Count broke his word, and Auca.s.sin, setting his prisoner free, was put in prison himself; how Nicolette escaped, and by her device Auca.s.sin also; how the lovers were united; and how, after a comic interlude in the country of "Torelore," which could be spared by all but folk-lorists, the damsel is discovered to be daughter of the King of Carthage, and all ends in bowers of bliss.

[Footnote 159: Frequently edited: not least satisfactorily in the _Nouvelles Francaises du XIIIme. Siecle_, referred to above. In 1887 two English translations, by Mr Lang and Mr Bourdillon, the latter with the text and much apparatus, appeared: and Mr Bourdillon has recently edited a facsimile of the unique MS. (Oxford, 1896).]

But even the enthusiasm and the art of three of the best writers of English and lovers of literature in this half-century have not exhausted the wonderful charm of this little piece. The famous description of Nicolette, as she escapes from her prison and walks through the daisies that look black against her white feet, is certainly the most beautiful thing of the kind in mediaeval prose-work, and the equal of anything of the kind anywhere. And for original audacity few things surpa.s.s Auca.s.sin's equally famous inquiry, "En Paradis qu'ai-je a faire?" with the words with which he follows it up to the Viscount. But these show pa.s.sages only concentrate the charm which is spread all over the novelette, at least until its real conclusion, the union and escape of the lovers. Here, as in the earlier part of the _Rose_--to which it is closely akin--is the full dreamy beauty, a little faint, a little shadowy, but all the more attractive, of mediaeval art; and here it has managed to convey itself in prose no less happily and with more concentrated happiness than there in verse.

CHAPTER VIII.

ICELANDIC AND PROVENcAL.

RESEMBLANCES. CONTRASTS. ICELANDIC LITERATURE OF THIS TIME MAINLY PROSE. DIFFICULTIES WITH IT. THE SAGA. ITS INSULARITY OF MANNER. OF SCENERY AND CHARACTER. FACT AND FICTION IN THE SAGAS. CLa.s.sES AND AUTHORs.h.i.+P OF THEM. THE FIVE GREATER SAGAS. 'NJALA.' 'LAXDaeLA.' 'EYRBYGGJA.' 'EGLA.' 'GRETTLA.'

ITS CRITICS. MERITS OF IT. THE PARTING OF ASDIS AND HER SONS. GREAT Pa.s.sAGES OF THE SAGAS. STYLE. PROVENcAL MAINLY LYRIC. ORIGIN OF THIS LYRIC. FORMS. MANY MEN, ONE MIND.

EXAMPLE OF RHYME-SCHEMES. PROVENcAL POETRY NOT GREAT. BUT EXTRAORDINARILY PEDAGOGIC. THOUGH NOT DIRECTLY ON ENGLISH.

SOME TROUBADOURS. CRITICISM OF PROVENcAL.

[Sidenote: _Resemblances._]

These may seem at first to be no sufficient reason for treating together two such literatures as those named in the t.i.tle of this chapter. But the connection, both of likeness and unlikeness, between them is too tempting to the student of comparative literature, and too useful in such a comparative survey of literature as that which we are here undertaking, to be mistaken or refused. Both attaining, thanks to very different causes, an extraordinarily early maturity, completely worked themselves out in an extraordinarily short time. Neither had, so far as we know, the least a.s.sistance from antecedent vernacular models. Each achieved an extraordinary perfection and intensity, Icelandic in spirit, Provencal in form.

[Sidenote: _Contrasts._]

And their differences are no less fascinating, since they start from this very diversity of similar perfection. Icelandic, after a brief period of copying French and other languages, practically died out as a language producing literature; and, perhaps for that very reason, maintained itself in all the more continuity as a spoken language.

Even its daughter--or at least successor--Norse tongues produced nothing worthy to take up the tradition of the Sagas and the Poems. It influenced (till the late and purely literary revival of it bia.s.sed to some extent the beginnings of the later Romantic revival in Western Europe, a hundred and fifty years ago) nothing and n.o.body. It was as isolated as its own island. To Provencal, on the other hand, though its own actual producing-time was about as brief, belongs the schooling, to no small extent, of the whole literature of Europe.

Directly, it taught the _trouveres_ of Northern France and the poets of Spain and Italy prosody, and a certain amount of poetical style and tone; indirectly, or directly through France, it influenced England and Germany. It started, indeed, none of the greater poetical kinds except lyric, and lyric is the true _gra.s.s_ of Parna.s.sus--it springs up naturally everywhere; but it started the form of all, or at least was the first to adapt from Latin a prosody suitable to all.

The most obvious, though not the least interesting, points of likeness in unlikeness have been left to the last. The contrasts between the hawthorn and nightingale of Provence, her "winds heavy with the rose," and the grey firths, the ice- and foam-fretted skerries of Iceland; between the remains of Roman luxury pushed to more than Roman effeminacy in the one, and the rough Germanic virtue exasperated to sheer ferocity in the other,--are almost too glaring for anything but a schoolboy's or a rhetorician's essay. Yet they are reproduced with an incredible--a "copy-book"--fidelity in the literatures. The insistence of experts and enthusiasts on the law-abiding character of the sagas has naturally met with some surprise from readers of these endless private wars, and burnings, and "heath-slayings," these feuds where blood flows like water, to be compensated by fines as regular as a water-rate, these methodical a.s.sa.s.sinations, in which it is not in the least discreditable to heroes to mob heroes as brave as themselves to death by numbers, in which n.o.body dreams of measuring swords, or avoiding vantage of any kind. Yet the enthusiastic experts are not wrong. Whatever outrages the Icelander may commit, he always has the law--an eccentric, unmodern, conventional law, but a real and recognised one--before his eyes, and respects it in principle, however much he may sometimes violate it in practice. To the Provencal, on the other hand, law, as such, is a nuisance. He will violate it, so to speak, on principle--less because the particular violation has a particular temptation for him than because the thing is forbidden. The Icelander may covet and take another man's wife, but it is to make her his own.

The Provencal will hardly fall, and will never stay, in love with any one who is not another's. In savagery there is not so very much to choose: it requires a calculus, not of morals but of manners, to distinguish accurately between carving the blood-eagle on your enemy and serving up your rival's heart as a dish to his mistress. In pa.s.sion also there may be less difference than the extreme advocates of both sides would maintain. But in all things external the contrast, the hackneyed contrast, of South and North never could have been exhibited with a more artistic completeness, never has been exhibited with a completeness so artistic. And these two contrasting parts were played at the very same time at the two ends of Europe. In the very same years when the domestic histories and tragedies (there were few comedies) of Iceland were being spun into the five great sagas and the fifty smaller ones, the fainter, the more formal, but the not less peculiar music of the gracious long-drawn Provencal love-song was sounding under the vines and olives of Languedoc. The very Icelanders who sailed to Constantinople in the intervals of making the subjects of these sagas, and sometimes of composing them, must not seldom have pa.s.sed or landed on the coasts where _cansos_ and _tensos_, _lai_ and _sirvente_, were being woven, and have listened to them as the Ulyssean mariners listened to the songs of the sirens.

[Sidenote: _Icelandic literature of this time mainly prose._]

It is not, of course, true that Provencal only sings of love and Icelandic only of war. There is a fair amount of love in the Northern literature and a fair amount of fighting in the Southern. And it is not true that Icelandic literature is wholly prose, Provencal wholly poetry. But it is true that Provencal prose plays an extremely small part in Provencal literature, and that Icelandic poetry plays, in larger minority, yet still a minor part in Icelandic. It so happens, too, that in this volume we are almost wholly concerned with Icelandic prose, and that we shall not find it necessary to say much, if anything, about Provencal that is not in verse. It is distinctly curious how much later, _coeteris paribus_, the Romance tongues are than the Teutonic in attaining facilities of prose expression. But there is no reason for believing that even the Teutonic tongues falsified the general law that poetry comes before prose. And certainly this was the case with Icelandic--so much so that, uncertain as are the actual dates, it seems better to relinquish the Iceland of poetry to the first volume of this series, where it can be handled in connection with that Anglo-Saxon verse which it so much resembles. The more characteristic Eddaic poems--that is to say, the most characteristic parts of Icelandic poetry--must date from Heathen times, or from the first conflicts of Christianity with Heathenism in Iceland; and this leaves them far behind us.[160] On the other hand, the work which we have in Provencal before the extreme end of the eleventh century is not finished literature. It has linguistic interest, the interest of origins, but no more.

[Footnote 160: Iceland began to be Christian in 1000.]

[Sidenote: _Difficulties with it._]

Although there is practically as little doubt about the antiquity of Icelandic literature[161] as about its interest, there is unusual room for guesswork as to the exact dates of the doc.u.ments which compose it.

Writing seems to have been introduced into Iceland late; and it is not the opinion of scholars who combine learning with patriotism that many, if any, of the actual MSS. date further back than the thirteenth century; while the actual composition of the oldest that we have is not put earlier than the twelfth, and rather its later than its earlier part. Moreover, though Icelanders were during this period, and indeed from the very first settlement of the island, constantly in foreign countries and at foreign courts--though as Vikings or Varangians, as merchants or merely travelling adventurers, they were to be found all over Europe, from Dublin to Constantinople--yet, on the other hand, few or no foreigners visited Iceland, and it figures hardly at all in the literary and historical records of the Continent or even of the British Isles, with which it naturally had most correspondence. We are therefore almost entirely devoid of those side-lights which are so invaluable in general literary history, while yet again we have no borrowings from Icelandic literature by any other to tell us the date of the borrowed matter. At the end of our present time, and still more a little later, Charlemagne and Arthur and the romances of antiquity make their appearance in Icelandic; but nothing Icelandic makes its appearance elsewhere. For it is not to be supposed for one moment that the _Nibelungenlied_, for instance, is the work of men who wrote with the _Volsunga-Saga_ or the Gudrun lays before them, any more than the _Grettis Saga_ is made up out of _Beowulf_. These things are mere examples of the successive refas.h.i.+onings of traditions and stories common to the race in different centuries, manners, and tongues. Except as to the bare fact of community of origin they help us little or not at all.

[Footnote 161: It is almost superfluous to insert, but would be disagreeable to omit, a reference to the _Sturlunga Saga_ (2 vols., Oxford, 1879) and the _Corpus Poetic.u.m Boreale_ (2 vols., Oxford, 1883) of the late Dr Vigfusson and Professor York Powell. The first contains an invaluable sketch, or rather history, of Icelandic literature: the second (though one may think its arrangement a little arbitrary) is a book of unique value and interest. Had these two been followed up according to Dr Vigfusson's plan, practically the whole of Icelandic literature that has real interest would have been accessible once for all. As it is, one is divided between satisfaction that England should have done such a service to one of the great mediaeval literatures, and regret that she has not done as much for others.]

[Sidenote: _The Saga._]

The reasons why Icelandic literature, in its most peculiar and interesting form of the saga, did not penetrate abroad are clear enough; and the remoteness and want of school-education in the island itself are by no means the most powerful of them. The very thing which is most characteristic of them, and which in these later times const.i.tutes their greatest charm, must have been against them in their own time. For the stories which ran like an epidemic through Europe in the years immediately before and immediately after 1200, though they might be in some cases concerned directly with national heroes, appealed without exception to international and generally human interests. The slightest education, or the slightest hearing of persons educated, sufficed to teach every one that Alexander and Caesar were great conquerors, that the Story of Troy (the exact truth of which was never doubted) had been famous for hundreds and almost thousands of years. Charlemagne had had directly to do with the greater part of Europe in peace or war, and the struggle with the Saracens was of old and universal interest, freshened by the Crusades.

The Arthurian story received from fiction, if not from history, an almost equally wide bearing; and was, besides, knitted to religion--the one universal interest of the time--by its connection with the Graal. All Europe, yet again, had joined in the Crusades, and the stories brought by the crusaders directly or indirectly from the East were in the same way common property.

[Sidenote: _Its insularity of manner._]

But saga-literature had nothing of this appeal. It was as indifferently and almost superciliously insular as the English country-house novel itself, and may have produced in some of the very few foreigners who can ever have known it originally, something of the same feelings of wrath which we have seen excited by the English country-house novel in our own day. The heroes were not, according to the general ideas of mediaeval Europe, either great chiefs or accomplished knights; the heroines were the very reverse of those damsels "with mild mood" (as the catch-word in the English romances has it) whom the general Middle Age liked or thought it liked. An intricate, intensely local, and (away from the locality) not seldom shocking system of law and public morality pervaded the whole. The supernatural element, though in itself it might have been an attraction, was of a cast quite different from the superst.i.tions of the South, or even of the Centre; and the Christian element, which was to the Middle Ages the very air they breathed, was either absent altogether or present in an artificial, uneasy, and scanty fas.h.i.+on.

[Sidenote: _Of scenery and character._]

Yet all these things were of less importance than another, which is, after all, the great _differentia_, the abiding quality, of the sagas.

In the literature of the rest of Europe, and especially in the central and everywhere radiating literature of France, there were sometimes local and almost parochial touches--sometimes unimportant heroes, not seldom savage heroines, frequently quaint bits of exotic supernaturalism. But all this was subdued to a kind of common literary handling, a "dis-realising" process which made them universally acceptable. The personal element, too, was conspicuously absent--the generic character is always uppermost. Charlemagne was a real person, and not a few of the incidents with which he was connected in the _chansons_ were real events; but he and they have become mere stuff of romance as we see them in these poems. Whether Arthur was a real person or not, the same to an even greater extent is true of him. The kings and their knights appealed to Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Italians alike, because they were not obtrusively English, German, Italian, or French. But the sagas are from the first and to the (at least genuine) last nothing if not national, domestic, and personal.

The grim country of ice and fire, of jokul and skerry, the ma.s.sive timber homesteads, the horse-fights and the Viking voyages, the spinning-wheel and the salting-tub, are with us everywhere; and yet there is an almost startling individuality, for all the sameness of ma.s.sacre and chicanery, of wedding and divorce, which characterises the circ.u.mstances. Gunnar is not distinguished from Grettir merely by their adventures; there is no need of labels on the lovers of Gudrun; Steingerd in Kormak's Saga and Hallgerd in Njal's, are each something much more than types of the woman with bad blood and the woman with blood that is only light and hot. And to the unsophisticated reader and hearer, as many examples might be adduced to show, this personality, the highest excellence of literature to the sophisticated scholar, is rather a hindrance than a help. He has not proved the ways and the persons; and he likes what he has proved.

To us, on the contrary, the characteristics of saga-work, at which a glance has been made in the foregoing paragraphs, form its princ.i.p.al charm, a charm reinforced by the fact of its extraordinary difference from almost all other literature except (in some points) that of the Homeric poems. Although there is a good deal of common form in the sagas, though outlawry and divorce, the quibbles of the Thing and the violence of ambush or holmgang, recur to and beyond the utmost limits of permitted repet.i.tion, the unfamiliarity of the setting atones for its monotony, and the individuality of the personages themselves very generally prevents that monotony from being even felt. The stories are never tame; and, what is more remarkable, they seldom or never have the mere extravagance which in mediaeval, at least as often as in other, writing, plays Scylla to the Charybdis of tameness. Moreover, they have, as no other division of mediaeval romance has in anything like the same measure, the advantage of the presence of _interesting_ characters of both s.e.xes. Only the Arthurian story can approach them here, and that leaves still an element of gracious shadowiness about the heroines, if not the heroes. The Icelandic heroine has nothing shadowy about her. Her weakest point is the want of delicacy--not in a finicking sense by any means--which a rough promiscuous life to begin with, and the extreme facility and frequency of divorce on the other, necessarily brought about. But she is always, as the French have it, a "person"--when she is good, a person altogether of the best; even when she is bad, a person seldom other than striking and often charming.

[Sidenote: _Fact and fiction in the sagas._]

There is, of course, Icelandic literature in prose outside of the sagas--the great law code (_Gragas_ or _Greygoose_), religious books in the usual plenty, scientific books of a kind, and others. But the saga, the story, was so emphatically the natural mould into which Icelandic literary impulse threw itself, that it is even more difficult here than elsewhere at the time to separate story and history, fiction and fact. Indeed the stricter critics would, I believe, maintain that every saga which deserves the name is actually founded on fact: the _Laxdaela_ no less than the _Heimskringla_,[162]

the story of Kormak no less than that of Jarl Rognwald. A merely and wholly invented story (they hold, and perhaps rightly) would have been repugnant to that extraordinarily business-like spirit which has left us, by the side of the earlier songs and later sagas, containing not a little of the most poetical matter of the whole world, the _Landnama Bok_ of Ari Frodi, a Domesday-book turned into literature, which is indeed older than our time, but which forms a sort of commentary and companion to the whole of the sagas by antic.i.p.ation or otherwise.

[Footnote 162: Dr Vigfusson is exceedingly severe on the _Heimskringla_, which he will have to be only a late, weak, and rationalised compilation from originals like the oddly termed "Great O.T. Saga." But it is hard for a man to think hardly of the book in which, though only a translation, he first read how Queen Sigrid the Haughty got rid of her troublesome lovers by the effectual process of burning them _en ma.s.se_ in a barn, and how King Olaf died the greatest sea-death--greater even than Grenville's--of any defeated hero, in history or literature.]

[Sidenote: _Cla.s.ses and authors.h.i.+p of them._]

Difficult as it may be to draw the line between intended history, which was always strongly "romanced" in form, if not intentionally in fact, and that very peculiar product of Icelandic genius the saga proper, in which the original domestic record has been, so to speak, "super-romanced" into a work of art, it is still possible to see it, if not to draw it, between the _Heimskringla_, the story of the Kings of Norway (made English after some earlier versions by Messrs Magnusson and Morris, and abstracted, as genius can abstract, by Carlyle), the _Orkneyinga_ and _Faereyinga_ Sagas (the tales of these outlying islands before the former came under Norwegian rule), the curious conglomerate known as the _Sturlunga Saga_ on the one hand, and the greater and lesser sagas proper on the other. The former are set down to the two great writers Snorri and Sturla, the one the chief literary light of Iceland in the first half of the thirteenth century, the other the chief light in the second, both of the same family, and with Ari Frodi the three greatest of the certainly known men of letters of the island. Conjecture has naturally run riot as to the part which either Snorri or Sturla may have taken in the sagas not directly attributed to either, but most probably dating from their time, as well as with the personalities of the unknown or little known poets and pros.e.m.e.n who shaped the older stories at about the same period. But to the historian who takes delight in literature, and does not care very much who made it provided it is made well, what has been called "the singular silence" as to authors.h.i.+p which runs through the whole of the early Icelandic literature is rather a blessing than otherwise. It frees him from those biographical inquiries which always run the risk of drawing nigh to gossip, and it enables him to concentrate attention on the literature itself.

This literature is undoubtedly best exemplified, as we should expect, in the wholly anonymous and only indirectly historical sagas of the second division, though it is fair to say that there is nothing here much finer than such things as the famous last fight of King Olaf in the _Heimskringla_, or as many other incidents and episodes in the history-books. Only the hands of the writers were freer in the others: and complete freedom--at least from all but the laws of art--is never a more "n.o.bil thing" than it is to the literary artist.

[Sidenote: _The five greater sagas._]

There seems no reason to quarrel with the cla.s.sification which divides the sagas proper into two cla.s.ses, greater and lesser, and a.s.signs position in the first to five only--the Saga of Burnt Njal, that of the dwellers in Laxdale, the _Eyrbyggja_, Egil's Saga, and the Saga of Grettir the Strong. It is very unlucky that the reception extended by the English public to the publications of Mr Vigfusson and Professor York Powell, mentioned in a note above, did not encourage the editors to proceed to an edition at least of these five sagas together, which might, according to estimate, have been done in three volumes, two more containing all the small ones. Meanwhile _Njala_--the great sagas are all known by familiar diminutives of this kind--is accessible in English in the late Sir G.W. Dasent's well-known translation;[163] the _Eyrbyggja_ and _Egla_ in abstracts by Sir Walter Scott[164] and Mr Gosse;[165] _Laxdaela_ has been treated as it deserves in the longest and nearly the finest section of Mr Morris's _Earthly Paradise_;[166]

and the same writer with Dr Magnusson has given a literal translation of _Grettla_.[167]

[Footnote 163: _The Story of Burnt Njal._ Edinburgh, 1861.]

[Footnote 164: Included in the Bohn edition of Mallet's _Northern Antiquities_.]

[Footnote 165: _Cornhill Magazine_, July 1879.]