George Saintsbury

“ To compare Walther to Petrarch, and to talk of the one being superior or inferior to the other, is to betray hopeless insensibility to the very rudiments of criticism. They are absolutely different,—the one the embodiment of stately form and laboured intellectual effort—of the Classical spirit; the other the mouthpiece of the half-inarticulate, all-suggesting music that is at once the very soul and the very inseparable garment of Romance. Some may like one better, others the other ”

“ But if it be taken seriously, how could the "British book" have failed to contain something more like our Legend of Arthur than Geoffrey has given us, and how, if it existed and gave more, could Geoffrey have failed to impart it? Why should the Welsh, the proudest in their way of all peoples, and not the least gifted in literature, when they came to give Arthurian legends of the kind which we recognise, either translate them from the French or at least adapt and adjust them thereto? ”

“ The late Mr Froude found in church-bells—the echo of the Middle Ages—suggestion of such a vanishing. To some of us there is nothing dead in church-bells; there is only in them, as in the Arthurian legends, for instance, a perennial thing still presented in associations, all the more charming for being slightly antique. But the chansons de geste, living by the poetry of their best examples, by the fire of their sentiment, by the clash and clang of their music, are still in thought, in connection with manners, hopes, aims, almost more dead than any of the classics. ”

“ Every now and then, rough as is his vehicle of speech—a transition medium, endowed neither with the oak-and-rock strength of Anglo-Saxon nor with the varied gifts of modern English—he can rise to real and true eloquence, as where he speaks of the soul and "the heavy flesh that draweth her downwards, yet through the highship [nobleness] of her, it [the flesh] shall become full light—yea, lighter than the wind is, and brighter than the sun is, if only it follow her and draw her not too hard to its own low kind." ”

“ But it had as a language too little character of its own, and was too fatally apt to shade into the other languages—French on the one hand, Spanish and Italian on the other—with which it was surrounded, and to which it was akin. And coming to perfection at a time when no modern thought was distinctly formed, when positive knowledge was at a low ebb, and when it had neither the stimulus of vigorous national life nor the healthy occupation of what may be called varied literary business, it tended to become, on the whole, too much of a plaything merely. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is this which gives to Romance, and to mediæval work generally, that "high seriousness," the want of which was so strangely cast at it in reproach by a critic who, I cannot but think, was less intimately acquainted with its literature than with that either of classical or of modern times. Constantly in mediæval poetry, very commonly in mediæval prose, the great things appear greatly. There is in English verse romance perhaps no less felicitous sample of the kind as it stands, none which has received greater vituperation for dulness and commonplace, than Sir Amadas. ”

“ But we must give largest space to the singular growth of Allegory. This, to some extent in the beast-epic, to a far greater in one of the most epoch-making of European books, the Romance of the Rose, set a fashion in Europe which had hardly passed away in three hundred years, and which, latterly rather for the worse, but in the earlier date not a little for the better, coloured not merely the work directly composed in imitation of the great originals, but all literary stuff of every kind, from lyric to drama, and from sermons to prose tales. ”

“ An astonishing privilege for a single nation to have enjoyed, if only for a short time; a privilege almost more astonishing in its reception than even in itself. France could point to the chansons and to the romances, to Audefroy le Bastard and Chrestien of Troyes, to Villehardouin and Thibaut, to William of Lorris and John of Meung, to the fabliaux writers and the cyclists of Renart, in justification of her claims. ”

“ But any one who knows the origins of that legend from Erec et Énide to Durmart le Gallois, and from the Chevalier au Lyon to the Chevalier as Deux Espées, must recognise in him something higher and larger than can be found in any of them, as well as something more human, if even in the best sense more fairy-tale like, than the earlier and more Western legends of the Graal as we have them in Merlin and the other French books. Here again, not so much for the form as for the spirit, we find ourselves driven to the word "great"—a great word, and one not to be misused as it so often is. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is no real question of superiority or inferiority, but only one of difference. The older handling, in the Volsunga Saga to some extent, but still more in the Eddaic songs, has perhaps the finer touches of pure clear poetry in single passages and phrases; the story of Sigurd and Brynhild has a passion which is not found in the German version; the defeat of Fafnir and the treacherous Regin is excellent; and the wild and ferocious story of Sinfiötli, with which the saga opens, has unmatched intensity, well brought out in Mr Morris's splendid verse-rendering, The Story of Sigurd the Volsung. ”

“ The indisputable literary facts are that the canon of pure Anglo-Saxon or Old-English literature closes with the end of the Saxon Chronicle in 1154, and that the "Semi-Saxon," the "First Middle English," which then makes its appearance, approximates, almost decade by decade, almost year by year, nearer and nearer to the modern type. And for our purpose, though not for the purpose of a history of English Literature proper, the contemporary French and Latin writing has to be taken side by side with it. ”

“ More than mummies or catacombs, more than Herculaneum and Pompeii, they bring us face to face with something so remote and afar that we can hardly realise it at all. It may be that that peculiarity of the French genius, which, despite its unsurpassed and almost unmatched literary faculty, has prevented it from contributing any of the very greatest masterpieces to the literature of the world, has communicated to them this aloofness, this, as it may almost be called, provincialism. ”

“ In fact the general fault of the Romans d'Aventures is that neither the unsophisticated freshness of the chanson de geste, nor the variety and commanding breadth of the Arthurian legend, appears in them to the full. The kind of "balaam," the stock repetitions and expletives at which Chaucer laughs in "Sir Thopas"—a laugh which has been rather unjustly received as condemning the whole class of English romances—is very evident even in the French texts. We have left the great and gracious ways, the inspiring central ideas, of the larger romance. ”

“ But with and through and above all these various spirits there is most of all that abstract spirit of poetry, which, though not possessed by the Middle Ages or by Romance alone, seems somehow to be a more inseparable and pervading familiar of Romance and of the Middle Ages than of any other time and any other kind of literature. ”

“ German, if not quite supreme in any way, gives an interesting and fairly representative example of a chapter of national literary history, less brilliant and original in performance than the French, less momentous and unique in promise than the English, but more normal than either, and furnishing in the epics, of which the Nibelungenlied and Kudrun are the chief examples, and in the best work of the Minnesingers, things not only of historical but of intrinsic value in all but the highest degree. ”

“ The language is exceedingly clear and easy—far nearer to German of the present day than Layamon's own verse, or the prose of the Ancren Riwle, is to English prose and verse of the nineteenth century; the differences being, as a rule, rather matters of spelling or phrase than of actual vocabulary. It is very well suited both to the poet's needs and to the subject; there being little or nothing of that stammer—as it may be called—which is not uncommon in mediæval work, as if the writer were trying to find words that he cannot find for a thought which he cannot fully shape even to himself. ”

“ Lancelot would never have married Iseult the White-handed.
It is, however, quite easy to understand how, this Tristram legend existing by hypothesis already or being created at the same time, the curious centripetal and agglutinative tendency of mediæval romance should have brought it into connection with that of Arthur. The mere fact of Mark's being a vassal-king of Greater Britain would have been reason enough; but the parallel between the prowess of Lancelot and Tristram, and between their loves for the two queens, was altogether too tempting to be resisted. ”

“ 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 masse 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. ”

“ It will be observed that Spain is at this time content, like Goethe's scholar, sich üben. Her one great literary achievement—admirable in some respects, incomparable in itself—is not a novelty in kind; she has no lessons in form to give, which, like some of Italy's, have not been improved upon to this day; she cannot, like Germany, boast a great quantity of work of equal accomplishment and inspiration; least of all has she the astonishing fertility and the unceasing maestria of France. ”

“ No nation has ever been able, in the course of less than two centuries, to provide four hundred and sixty named poets and an indefinitely strong reinforcement of anonyms, all of whom have native power enough to produce verse at once elaborate in form and sovereign in spirit; and the peoples of the langue d'oc, who hardly together formed a nation, were no exception to the rule. That rule is a rule of "minor poetry," accomplished, scholarly, agreeable, but rarely rising out of minority. ”

“ For while the romance of antiquity is a mere "sport," an accident of time and circumstance, the chanson de geste, majestic and interesting as it is, representative as it is to a certain extent of a nation and a language, has the capital defect of not being adaptable. ”

“ Again, Grettir is warmly welcomed by a widow, Steinvor of Sand-heaps, at whose dwelling, in the oddest way, he takes up the full Beowulf adventure and slays a troll-wife in a cave just as his forerunner slew Grendel's mother. But in the end the hue and cry is too strong, and by advice of friends he flies to the steep holm of Drangey in Holmfirth—a place where the top can only be won by ladders—with his younger brother Illugi and a single thrall or slave. Illugi is young, but true as steel: the slave is a fool, if not actually a traitor. ”

“ So, too, the habit of comparing the Nibelungenlied to the Iliad and Kudrun to the Odyssey (parallels not far removed from the Thucydides-and-Tennyson order) may excite resentment. But the Middle High German verse of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is in itself of such interest, such variety, such charm, that if only it be approached in itself, and not through the medium of its too officious ushers, its effect on any real taste for poetry is undoubted. ”