77'-, 



I .... \i.\NCES 



French ambassador. U in reality tlio property of 

 the irith century Comb- de CifnenteH. It would 

 be strange if BO remote n figure a- Arthur's <liil 

 nut show signs of some 1Mb process; liut even 

 if we find there, as Profc.ssor Khys holds, traces 

 of the culture hero, or of the solar myth, the 

 nneation of his [Mnonftlitj cannot be said to be 

 thereby affected. It MOM )>< almost as unreason- 

 able to treat him u* a purely mythical being on 

 MU-II grounds, as to deny Sheridan's existence 

 because jokes attributed to him arc U> In- fouml in 

 c.-uly editions of .loe Miller. There is very little 

 certainty connected with the construction of i In- 

 Arthurian story. It seems plain that the History 

 of the Grail, which propeily should precede the 

 Quest, was in reality a later composition ; ami tin- 

 respective shares of Chretien dc. '1 roves and Robert 

 de Borron in the (irail, Perceval, and Lancelot are 

 pretty clearly defined. Hut in most other respects 

 the Arthurian cycle deserves the title M. Custon 

 Paris applies to it of ' dcdale inextricable.' In no 

 case, as Mr Alfred Nutt says, do we possess a 

 primary form; all the versions that have come 

 down to us presuppose something earlier; all is 

 uncertainty, the order in which the component 

 parto were produced, the Bourses from which they 

 were derived, the authors to whom they are 

 attributable, the relationships of the various ver- 

 sions and forms one to another ; and research 

 seems ever to reveal new nebula- and discover fresh 

 clusters of difficulties. Even on the question as to 

 whether the primary form was in verse, as analogy 

 would lead us to expect, we are for the most part 

 left to conjecture. That Breton popular |>oetry 

 may have contained the germs of Tristram, Per- 

 ceval, and Lancelot i- no doubt a probability ; but 

 of one thing at least we may be certain, that verit- 

 able creations like the Lancelot of the Arthur story 

 could have had no place in the simple naive Im* of 

 which we have examples in the translated speci- 

 mens of Marie de France. The stones may have 

 come from a Celtic quarry, hut the building was 

 Anglo-Norman. 



It was inevitable that the Arthur stories proper 

 should be followed by romances claiming a supple- 

 mentary or an introductory character, such as Meli- 

 in/ UK, (iiiirun le. ( !<ii<rtiiis. Art us de Bretagnc, anil 

 Perceforest, but it would be an injustice to treat 

 these, as Dunlop has done, as though they were h-gi 

 innate members of the Arthurian cycle, nor have 

 they been admitted into it by the compilers or 

 arrangers who have now ami then attempted to 

 present it in a consecutive shape. Facile princejts 



of them U our own Sir Tl is Malory, whose 



work is, OB Dr Somim-r say.- in his masterly editi 



' by far the best guide to the Arthur romances in 

 their entirety.' Malory's judgment may not he, 

 perhaps, invariably impeccable. Me has not always 

 chosen the best or most poetical form, and he has 

 left unculled many beuiities of the old MSS. Hut 

 this may not have been so much his fault as that 

 of the materials with which he had to content 

 himself. Of his general good taste and literary 

 -kill there can be as little question as of his F.nglish 

 which has made his lunik one of the cla ics ..(' his 

 language. Malory, furthermore, as the e\hausti\e 

 researches of I)r Summer show, is the sole authority 

 for portions of the -ciies. in particular the story of 

 Careth in the seventh hook. See Ai: i m r. ( li: MI 



In the romances of the Charlemagne cycle we 

 stand on much firmer ground. It is true that we 

 know even less of the authors than in the case of 

 the Arthur storic-, but on the other hand the 

 whole process of production lies plain to view. 

 The starting-point of the legend is undoubtedly 

 the disaster oi l:iim-i-\al|i-s, and the Sony of 

 Itnlnnil not, of course, the f '/unison r/f Roland 

 that ban come down to us, but Mime older form, the 



existence and nature of which are matters of infer- 

 ence may be taken as the foundation of the whole 

 Charlemagne cycle of romance (nee Km. AMI ). (if 



this, appaicntly, we have a pros.- \i-ision at the 

 end of the Latin hi.-ioiy oi Charlemagne, which 

 pretends to be ihe wink of his contemporaiy the 

 Archbishop Turjiin. Nothing was farther from 

 the intention of the writers than to produce a 

 romance ; but among the romance.-, or at the head 

 of them, their work must be placed. AlKint its 

 intention there can IK; no mistake. By Charle- 

 magne's example it points out the advantages hen- 

 ami ben-alter of serving the church lilx>rally and 

 zealously, endowing holy shrines, encouraging pil- 

 grimages, converting the heathen 01 exterminating 

 them when unconvertible, li records a milii 

 pilgrimage to ( 'ompostclla made by ('baric- 

 the call of St James, and is plainly the work of 

 dillerent hands. M. Ca-ton Paris believes the 

 first five chapters to have been written by a monk 

 of Compostclla al-out 1050; but it is not very 

 obvious why a Spaniard who hail his own national 

 li-L-eml >! Conipostella should have gone out of his 

 way to make a patron of a foreigner and an invader. 

 The remainder, he thinks, was written by a monk 

 of Viennc between 110!) and 1119. The Ixmk was- 

 soon translated into French, and Wanie tin- chief 

 source of the story of Kohincl and lioncesvalles, for 

 which it was Ix'licvcd to be the prime authority until 

 the discovery of the rlunisnH proved the existence 

 of a common ancestor. The influence of the latter 

 was mainly through the rhuntiim (If yettcs of which 

 it was in most ca-es the model. Of these the number 

 is large. M. Leon (iantier's list enumerates aliove 

 a hundred belonging to the Charlemagne cycle, 

 and this of course only represents survivors. Only 

 a few, however, gave nirtti to prose romances. The 

 Uoland had been forestalled by the Turpin history, 

 and of the others the majority were in inten-t ion 

 local, not sufficiently ponular, or for other n-a.-on- 

 unsnitable for prose. Tne story of Ogier h- Ii.-uiois 

 (who possibly had nothing to do with Denmark, 

 but was merely warden of the Ardenne -mark 

 too famous to IK- left in the verse of Aib-m-s le l;,>\ : 

 the traditions of the struggles between the sove- 

 reign and his vaals in Aquitaine, not so much in 

 Charlemagne's time as in Pi-pin s, lent an interest 

 to Kenaml de Montaubaii, the 1,'imildo of Italian 

 poetry, but best known as the hero of the / 

 Sons of A >/ mull (q.v.). a romance that ha- piob 

 ably never been out of print since the introduction 

 of printing; and similar reasons, more or le-s 

 strong, inlluenced the selection of Doon de Jllny- 

 encc, Miniifist tFAyifrrnioiit, (liirriii <lr .!/<>/</ 

 Mi/If rt Aiiiys, Jniirddii de Jiluri'x. (.'n/ifn Hhrturt, 

 and divers others. One of the most notable, 

 indc]endcntly of its connection with Don (Quixote, 

 is l-'i,-r<ilirn.t. In the l.'ilh century it was translated 

 into prose by one .lean liaiu'non of Lausanne, who 

 ineliveil to it the early account of Charlemagne 

 ny Vincent de Beau vain, and added the concluding 

 chapters of Turpin with the 1,'oncesvalles stm\. 

 the whole forming a kind of consecutive Charle- 

 magne romance resembling tin- Arthur compila- 

 tion-. In this shape, and under the title of l. 

 ( '<jii'/iii-\t'- ilii ip-init I-HI/ ( '/nii'li inn Kin. 'lies, 



it M-ldeved extraordinary popularity, beran.- 

 regular chap-lHMik, was translated into Spanish by 

 Nicolas de Piamonte, whose \ersinn supplied the 

 Imlsam of which Don (,iui\otc made trial, and 

 from Spanish into Portuguese about the middle 

 of the isth centniy : when it was supplemented by 

 an entirely new Charlemagne romance h\ the trans- 

 lator, a curious proof of the vitality of tin- legend. 



From the lays of the minstrels of the same period 

 there came also many indemuident prose romances 

 not necessarily connects) with any particular 

 cycle : Valentine and Orson, which, however, i 



