CHAUCER. 243 



the Song of Roland — can remember much more than a 

 cloud of 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 cV avaritures, 

 the cycle of iVrthur and his knights, but a procession of 

 armor and plumes, mere spectacle, not vision like their 

 Grecian antitype, the Odyssey, whose pictures of life, 

 whether domestic or heroic, are among the abiding con- 

 solations 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 

 Roland, 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 com- 

 bat 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 treatment, 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 vigor 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 workman- 

 ship 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, 



* Compare Floripar in Fierabras with Nausikaa, for example. 



