220 CHA UCER. 



battle-dust, through which the paladins loom dimly gigantic, 

 and a strong verse flashes here and there like an angry 

 sword? What are the Roman d avantures, the cycle of 

 Arthur and his knights, but a procession of armour and 

 plumes mere spectacle, not vision like their Grecian 

 antitype, the Odyssey, whose pictures of life, whether 

 domestic or heroic, are among the abiding consolations of 

 the mind 1 An element of disproportion, of grotesqueness,* 

 earmark of the barbarian, disturbs us, even when it does not 

 disgust, in them all. Except the fioland, they all want 

 adequate motive, and even in that we may well suspect a 

 reminiscence of the Iliad. They are not without a kind of 

 dignity, for manliness is always noble, and there are 

 detached scenes that are striking, perhaps all the more so 

 from their rarity, like the combat of Oliver and Fierabras, 

 and the leave-taking of Parise la Duchesse. But in point 

 of art they are far below even Firdusi, whose great poem is 

 of precisely the same romantic type. The episode of 

 Sohrab and Rustem as much surpasses the former of the 

 passages just alluded to in largeness and energy of treat 

 ment, in the true epical quality, as the lament of Tehmine 

 over her son does the latter of them in refined and natural 

 pathos. In our revolt against pseudo-classicism we must 

 not let our admiration for the vigour and freshness which 

 are the merit of this old poetry tempt us to forget that our 

 direct literary inheritance comes to us from an ancestry who 

 would never have got beyond the Age of Iron but for the 

 models of graceful form and delicate workmanship which 

 they found in the tombs of an earlier race. 



I recall but one passage (from Jourdain de Blaivies) 

 which in its simple movement of the heart can in any way 

 be compared with Chaucer. I translate it freely, merely 

 changing the original assonance into rhyme. Eremborc, to 

 save the son of her leige-lord, has passed off her own child 

 for his, only stipulating that he shall pass the night before 

 his death with her in the prison where she is confined by 



* Compare Floripar in Fierabras with Nausikaa, for example. 



