CHAPTER VII. THE ROMANCES IN RHYME.

When romance "is in," and, after Geoffrey of Monmouth, romance was in, every other kind of literature "is out"; is unfashionable and little regarded. The English rhyming chroniclers, and even religious writers such as the author of the "Cursor Mundi," felt constrained to make their works resemble fiction as nearly as possible; owing to the supremacy of French romances and English translations and adaptations of French romances, in the late twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries.

Many of these productions grouped themselves round the Table of King Arthur, "matter of Britain"; others dealt with "matter of Rome," that is all the ancient world; others with "matter of France"; others with legends or fancies, English or foreign. Their subject was often the chivalrous theory and practice of love, as a kind of religion, a fantastic semi-idealized devotion to the beloved, who, as a rule, was another man's wife. This breach of recognized religion and morality was often set down to fate, to the power that the Anglo-Saxons named Wyrd.

The two greatest cycles of romantic love are found in the lives of Tristram and Iseult (the wife of King Mark of Cornwall, and aunt by marriage of Tristram), and of Lancelot and Guinevere, the wife of King Arthur. Tristram (whose name seems to be altered from the Welsh name Drysdan), has but little original connexion with the Court of Arthur, though he is a mythical hero of a very old Welsh "triad". He and Iseult love each other because they have by mischance drunk together of a love potion intended for Mark and his wife; their love is fatal and inevitable, and immortal.

Lancelot, on the other hand, has been sent to bring the bride[Pg 61] Guinevere to Arthur, and they fall in love before the lady has seen her lord. Every one knows their joys and sorrows, from Malory's "Morte d'Arthur," (1470)—a prose selection and compilation of "the French books," which excels them and supersedes them—and from the poems of Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, and Mr. Swinburne.

The romances of love and tournament are pervaded and darkened by the influence of the Celtic Merlin, the enchanter and prophet whom men call Devil's son; he represents Destiny. A wide circle of romances, "Merlin" and the "Suite de Merlin," attributed to Robert de Borron, at the end of the twelfth century, are concerned with him.

As if to counteract the fanaticism of love which, in the romances, becomes a non-moral counter-religion, the mysterious story of the Holy Grail came into literature, French, German, and English. The Grail is perhaps originally one of the many magical things of Celtic legend, a vessel as rich in food inexhaustible as the purse of Fortunatus in gold, but conceived by the romance writers to be a mystic dish or cup, used by our Lord before His passion, and still existing, but only to be seen by the pure of heart, such as Sir Percival, and Sir Galahad, the maiden son of Lancelot.

By accident or design the romances fall into a tragic sequence: the youth of Arthur, and his unconscious sin; the mysterious birth of Merlin; the fatal loves of Lancelot and Guinevere; the coming of the Grail and the search for the Grail by many knights; the failure of all but Galahad and Percival; the falling of Lancelot and Guinevere to their old love again; and the sorrows and treacheries that precede and lead up to the king's last battle in the west, and his passing to Avilion.

France and Ireland, like England, have their own romances on the adventures of knights under the feudal sway of a chief king; in France, Charlemagne; in Ireland, Conchobar or Fionn; in England, Arthur, and in all these cases the king becomes much less interesting than his knights, such as Roland and Oliver in France; Cuchulain and Diarmaid in Ireland; Lancelot, Tristram, Gawain, and Percival in England. Yet Arthur, at first and at the last, is the supreme as well as the central figure in the epic, or[Pg 62] cycle, of romances. These are a great treasury of brilliant imaginations, rising from Celtic traditions of unknown antiquity, and then transfigured, first by the chivalrous counter-religion of love; next by the reaction to celibacy, and the yearning after some visible and tangible Christian relic and sign, "the vision of the Holy Grail". From this hoard of mediaeval fancies later poets have taken what they could, have placed the jewels in settings of their own fashioning.

The romance writers were by no means restricted to "matter of Britain," with Celtic traditions; or to "matter of France," the epics of Charlemagne and his peers, or even to "matter of Rome," ranging through all antiquity. Material came in from popular tales of all countries, and from recent historical events, as in the romance of Richard C?ur de Lion. In the fifteenth century there was a romance of Jeanne d'Arc, as fantastic as any; the matter of it survives partly in the prose of the "Chronique de Lorraine," and has drifted into "Henry VI," Pt. I. In France the most famous and fashionable novelists of the late twelfth century were Chrétien de Troyes and Beno?t de Ste.-Maure, author of the great romance of Troy, whose manner, long-winded and elaborately courtly, was strangely revived by the French romancers of the years preceding Molière.

Tristram.

The earliest English romances, or novels of chivalrous adventures, are couched in metre. Among the first is "Sir Tristrem" (usually spelled Tristram); certainly this has been the most popular in modern times. Sir Walter Scott edited it, from the copy in the Auchinleck Manuscript (a collection of early poems once in the possession of Boswell of Auchinleck, father of Dr. Johnson's Boswell).[1]

Sir Walter was persuaded that "Sir Tristrem" was written from local Celtic tradition, by the famed Thomas of Ercildoune, called[Pg 63] the Rhymer. Thomas, who dwelt at Ercildoune (Earlstone on Leader water), was a neighbour, as it were, of Scott at Abbotsford; he died between 1286 and 1299, and he had great though obviously accidental fame, as a prophet.

The poem on Tristram begins with the words,

I was at Erceldoune
With Thomas spake I there,
There heard I rede in roune
Who Tristram gat and bare,
(that is, "I heard who the father and mother of Tristram were")
Who was King with croun;
And who him fostered yare;
And who was bold baroun.
As their elders ware,
Bi yere:—
Thomas tells in toun,
This auventours as thai ware.

The English poet uses this difficult stanza in place of the simple rhymes of a French original which knew nothing of Ercildoune. In similar stanzas, of French origin as usual, the whole romance is told. Throughout "Tomas" is mentioned as the source of the story—"as Tomas hath us taught".

There are fragments of an earlier French romance in which Tomas is also quoted as the source, and an early German version, by Godfrey of Strasbourg refers to Thomas of Britanie.

Scott was well aware that the story of Tristram was popular in France long before the time of Thomas of Ercildoune, but he liked to believe that Thomas collected Celtic traditions of Tristram from the people of Leaderdale and Tweeddale, though they, by 1220-1290, were English in blood and speech.

In the romance, Tristram is peerless in music, chess-playing, the fine art of hunting, and of cutting up the deer; and his main virtue is constancy to Iseult, wife of his uncle, King Mark. This unfortunate prince is not the crafty avenger of his own wrongs, as in Malory's "Morte d'Arthur," but a guileless, good-natured being, constantly and ludicrously deceived. Iseult is treacherous and cruel, but everything is forgiven to her, and, as the manuscript, is defective, we do not know how the poet handled the close of[Pg 64] the tale, the episode of the other Iseult "of the white hands". Scott finished the tale in the metre and language of the original. Tristram is dying in Brittany, only Iseult of Cornwall can heal him, as only ?none could heal Paris. Tristram sends for her, the vessel is to carry white sails if it bears her; black, if it does not. The idea is from the Greek saga of Theseus. The second Iseult, wife of Tristram, falsely reports that the sails of the vessel are black. Tristram dies, and Iseult of Cornwall falls dead when she beholds him.

Swiche lovers als thei
Neer shall be moe,"

concludes Sir Walter.

Havelok.

In "Havelok" we naturally expect, thinking of our historical hero Havelock, to find a true English romance. The scene is partly in England, the tale is of a Danish king's son kept out of his own by one of the most fearsome guardians of romance (who chops up the hero's little sisters), is saved by the thrall Grim, who was ordered to murder him, and, after adventures as a kitchen lad, marries an English princess who is in the hands of another usurper. The story is truly English in sentiment and style. The poet curses Godard, the murderous oppressor of Havelok, in a thoroughly satisfactory fashion. The noble birth of the hero is recognized by the "battle-flame" of the ancient Irish romances; the flame with which Athene crowns Achilles in Homer shines round Havelok. This light warns Grim not to drown Havelok, and teaches the oppressed lady whom he wins that her wooer is no kitchen-knave but a prince in disguise. The story has abundance of spirit, and may be read with more pleasure than the romance of the perfidies of Iseult. It is written in no affected and entangled rhymes, but in rhyming couplets.

King Horn.

In "King Horn" we have a novel that must have been reckoned most satisfactory. The course of true love is interrupted by accidents which caused the utmost anxiety to the[Pg 65] readers, who probably looked at the end to see "if she got him". "He" was Prince Horn, son of Murry, King of Saddene; the realm is "by west," and is invaded by Saracens. They spare Horn, for his beauty's sake, but launch him in a boat with his friends, Athulf and Fikenhild; his land they overrun, and disestablish the Church, being themselves professors of the Moslem religion. Horn drifts to the shore of the realm of Westerness, under King Aylmar. Here the king's daughter Rymenhild, falls in love with Horn, but cannot have an opportunity of declaring her passion. In the romances the lady, as a rule, begins the wooing. By Athelbrus, the steward, Athulf is brought to her bower, apparently in the dark, for she addresses him as Horn.

"Horn" quoth she, "well long
I have thee loved strong."

Athulf undeceives her; Horn is brought, in the absence of King Aylmar: Rymenhild again speaks the secret of her heart, and when Horn alludes to their unequal ranks, she faints away—one of the earliest faints executed by any heroine in English fiction. Horn kisses her into consciousness, and she devises that he shall be knighted. The king consents, giving him a ring which secures him from "dread of dunts," sends him to win glory. Horn at once kills a hundred Saracens. But Fikenhild, his false friend, finds Horn consoling Rymenhild for a dream of a great fish that burst her landing net. Fikenhild, in jealousy, warns King Aylmar, who discovers Horn and his daughter embracing. Horn is exiled, and bids Rymenhild wait seven years, and then marry if she will. Like the daughter of "that Turk," in "The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman," she "takes a vow and keeps it strong".

At another court Horn, now styled Cutberd, not only slays giants, but encounters and routs the very Saracens who had invaded his father's dominions. The king of the country offers Horn his daughter and realm: he, however, is true to his vow, but, at the end of seven years, Rymenhild is betrothed to a king. She sends a boy to Horn with a message. In returning with Horn's reply the boy is drowned; the princess finds his dead[Pg 66] body. Disguised as a palmer, like Ivanhoe, Horn returns to Westerness, and, like Odysseus, sits on the ground at the palace, as a beggar. Rymenhild does not recognize him, asks him if he has met Horn, and is shown her own ring. Horn, she is told, is dead. She had secreted a knife to kill her bridegroom, like the Bride of Lammermoor. Then Horn reveals himself, the pair are wedded, but he has still to recover his own kingdom. This he does, but Fikenhild has carried off Rymenhild. Disguised as minstrels, Horn and his friends surprise him in his new castle, and all ends happily.

"Horn" is a fair example, happily short, of the novels of the period, which, in essence, are like all good novels that end well. Assonance (rhyme of vowels but not of consonants) occurs in the verse:—

He lokede on his rynge,
And thogte on Rymenhilde.

It is not necessary to analyze the plots of all the romances: two or three enable us to estimate the kind of fiction that was popular with ladies in bower.

Beues of Hamtoun.

"Sir Beues of Hamtoun" is another English romance, concerning the son of the Earl of Southampton and his wife, a princess of Scotland. The Earl is old, and his bride proposes to the Kaiser to kill the Earl and wed herself. The Emperor promptly invades England and cuts off the head of the good Earl. The Scottish traitress orders the murder of her son, Beues, but is deceived by her agent, and Beues knocks down the Kaiser.

The boy is sold and sent to Armenia, where he refuses to worship Apolyn (Apollo). The pagan king has a fair daughter, Josian, who becomes the mistress of Beues, while he has a conquered giant, Ascopart, for page. After a thousand adventures, Beues and Josian, being true lovers, make a good end, and die together. The English writer, prolix as he is, has shortened his French original, in places, made additions in others, and generally writes with freedom.

[Pg 67]

Guy of Warwick.

The same happy end, simultaneous death, rewards the hero and heroine of "Guy of Warwick". The hero's unexplained forgetfulness of his lady, Felice, is borrowed from the ancient popular tale in Scots, "The Black Bull of Noroway," where the forgetfulness is explained. Many stock incidents of the romances come from popular tales ("M?rchen") of unknown antiquity. Felice is a very learned and rather hard-hearted maiden, and Guy, when in love, faints frequently. The romance contains every kind of adventure with dragons, lions, and human foes, and as much religion as devout damsels could desire, or even more, for Guy, in a devout mood, deserts the learned Felice for a life of chastity and military adventure. As usual he returns in the guise of a palmer.

Arthur and Merlin.

The "Arthour and Merlin," a rhymed romance of the old story, from the Auchinleck manuscript, about 1320, has not the gleams of true poetry that shine in Layamon's "Brut," and is verbose and incomplete—the tragedy of Arthur is absent. We find, however, the story of how Arthur won the sword Excalibur, thereby proving himself a true prince, for no other man could pluck it from the stone into which it was driven. King Lot (Llew, a historical personage apparently), could not draw forth Excalibur. Sir Kay, one of Arthur's companions in the oldest Welsh tales, appears, with Sir Gawain, whose character, as in the Welsh romances, is far above that which he displays in the "Idylls of the King"; Merlin continually exercises the art of glamour, appearing in various forms, and Arthur loves Guinevere, but the poet wearied of his toil long before the last battle in the west.

He professes that, as many gentlemen know not French, and as

Right is that Inglische understand
That was born in Inglond.

he sings in English of the glory of England, Arthur. The final English-form of the great Arthurian tale may best be considered when we arrive at the date of Sir Thomas Malory and Caxton.[Pg 68] In Malory's "Morte Arthur" the long dull wars of the king against the Anglo-Saxon invaders are much compressed, while the epic, tragic, and mystic elements, the great character of Lancelot, the mournful victory of the winning of the Grail, and the end of all, are handled with genius.

The Tale of Troy.

The story of Troy had a hold on the mediaeval mind only less strong than the story of Arthur. In early English, at the end of the fourteenth century, we find the romance in the revived Anglo-Saxon alliterative form; it is the "Geste Hystoriale" concerning the Destruction of Troy, and the story is told once more in the rhyming couplets of the "Troy Book". The manuscript of the "Troy Book" is marked "Liber Guilielmi Laud, Archiepiscopi Cantuar et Cancellarii Universitatis Oxon 1633". (The book of William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury and Chancellor of the University of Oxford.)

The author of the alliterative romance begins by saying that learned men wrote the history in Latin, but that poets have corrupted it by fables and partisanship. Homer, he says, was notoriously partial to the Greeks; moreover, he introduced incredible gods fighting like men. Ovid, on the other hand, was "honest"; Virgil was true to the rightful cause, that of Troy; but the best authority is Gydo (Guido de Colonna).

Such was the nature of historical criticism as understood by the mediaeval romancer. For love of lost causes, and, as descendants of the Trojans through the Brut of mediaeval myth, the romancers detested the Ach?ans, the conquering Greeks.

The Story of Troy from Homer to Shakespeare.

The history of the development of the "Tale of Troy," as Chaucer and even as Shakespeare knew it, is very curious. Homer himself, perhaps living about 1100-1000 b.c., tells, in the Iliad and Odyssey, parts of the "Tale" as it was known to his own people, the conquering Ach?ans, who were to the older dwellers in Greece what the Normans were to the English. They finally melted into the older population, who, about 800-700 b.c., wrote poems of[Pg 69] their own about the "Tale of Troy," altered the facts, and blackened the characters of Homer's greatest heroes. Later, again, the great Athenian tragedians, of the fifth century b.c., wrote dramas more on the lines of the conquered population of Greece than on those of Homer, and they still more deeply degraded some of the heroes of Homer. The Romans, looking on themselves as descended from the Trojans, persevered in the same course, and a Greek, after the Christian era, wrote a prose version of the "Tale of Troy," pretending that it was a manuscript by Dictys of Crete, who was a spectator of the Trojan war. A similar prose book was attributed—to another spectator, Dares of Phrygia. These books tell the story of Troilus and Cressida, of Palamedes, and many other tales unknown to Homer. But, in Western Europe, Homer was unread, and unknown in England till Chapman translated him: and all the romancers about Troy—Lydgate, Chaucer, Caxton, and the rest, down to Shakespeare,—depend on the false tales whose growth we have described.

Probably the first romancer who expanded the bald prose narratives of Dares and Dictys, was Beno?t de Sainte-Maure (1160) in a long French rhyming poem. He unites the fates of Briseida (Briseis, daughter of Calchas, the Greek priest who is made a Trojan), and Troilus, son of King Priam. Briseida, through a confusion with Homer's "Chryseis," daughter of Chryses, the Phrygian priest of Apollo, later becomes the "Cressid" of Chaucer and Shakespeare. Meanwhile "Gydo" or Guido de Colonna, did the French of Beno?t into Latin prose (1287) and Guido is the source of the English authors of the alliterative and the rhyming romances of Troy. The pedigree of the story is

Pseudo-Dares—Pseudo-Dictys
|
Beno?t de Sainte-Maure
|
Guido de Colonna
|
The English Romances.

[Pg 70]

Through Caxton's printed "Book of Troy," the story continued popular, a cheap edition appeared in the eighteenth century.

Each of Homer's poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, deals but with the adventures of a fortnight, or six weeks, but the mediaeval readers wanted, and from the romancers received, the whole history of the ten years' siege, and more, with Christian legends thrown in, with minute descriptions of all the characters—Cassandra "gleyit a little," had a slight cast of the eye like Mary Stuart. The heroes fight as mounted knights, not in chariots; they use cross-bows as well as long-bows; and Hector kills men by the thousand, with more than Irish exaggeration. As Hector must be killed, Achilles suddenly charges him in front, while his shield is slung behind. Had a Trojan poet left an epic on the war he would not have told the story otherwise. The poet of the Laud "Troy Book" bids God curse ?neas as a traitor, forgetting, apparently, that the British are descendants of ?neas.

King Alisaundre.

The history of Alexander with all manner of romantic and fabulous additions, under the name "King Alisaundre," is in rhyming couplets of eight syllables to each line; the couplets are often irregular, as in Coleridge's "Christabel," and the story, like most of the English romances of this period, is borrowed through the French, from a late fabulous Greek work.

This kind of versified romance endured till Chaucer thought it tiresome, and parodied it, in "Sir Thopas". These rhyming English romances, in various forms of verse, were made for ladies and gentlemen who, already, were not able to read the more artistic and elaborate French romances for themselves; but were very well able to take pleasure in stories of true love and miraculous adventures. The romances set a fashion which was continued in the endless heroic novels in prose, French, and English, down to the end of the seventeenth century. The Middle Ages had no taste for novels of ordinary life, about people of their own time. These, in England, do not begin to appear till the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and then nearly a century and a half passed before they became really popular.

[Pg 71]

If much has been said about these old romances it is because they have so powerfully impressed themselves on the fancy of all later English poets, from Shakespeare and Milton, who dreamed of an epic on Arthur, and delighted in the sonorous names of Arthur's knights, to Tennyson and William Morris.

The romances, composed of fancies from so many sources and times, Greek, Celtic, Roman, and French, and English, are like that Corinthian bronze composed of gold and silver, copper and lead, all molten together at the burning of Corinth. In this rich metal poets of later times have moulded figures in their own fashion.

[1] Scott's edition of 1819 is the fourth, while other romances in verse are to be read in the volumes of learned societies. No doubt people bought the book for the interesting essays and notes of Sir Walter; few of them would look at the old romance itself.