The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory

By George Saintsbury

[Pg 148]

CHAPTER IV.

ANTIQUITY IN ROMANCE.

Oddity of the Classical Romance. Its importance. The Troy story. The Alexandreid. Callisthenes. Latin versions. Their story. Its developments. Alberic of Besançon. The decasyllabic poem. The great Roman d'Alixandre. Form, &c. Continua[Pg xv]tions. King Alexander. Characteristics. The Tale of Troy. Dictys and Dares. The Dares story. Its absurdity. Its capabilities. Troilus and Briseida. The Roman de Troie. The phases of Cressid. The Historia Trojana. Meaning of the classical romance

As the interest of Jean Bodel's first two divisions[68] differs strikingly, and yet represents, in each case intimately and indispensably, certain sides of the mediæval character, so also does that of his third. This has perhaps more purely an interest of curiosity than either of the others. It neither constitutes a capital division of general literature like the Arthurian story, nor embodies and preserves a single long-past phase in national spirit and character, like the chansons de geste. From certain standpoints of the drier and more rigid criticism it is[Pg 149] exposed to the charge of being trifling, almost puerile. We cannot understand—or, to speak with extremer correctness, it would seem that some of us cannot understand—the frame of mind which puts Dictys and Dares on the one hand, Homer on the other, as authorities to be weighed on equal terms, and gravely sets Homer aside as a very inferior and prejudiced person; which, even after taking its Dictys and Dares, proceeds to supplement them with entire inventions of its own; which, after in the same way taking the Pseudo-Callisthenes as the authoritative biographer of Alexander, elaborates the legend with a wild luxuriance that makes the treatment of the Tale of Troy seem positively modest and sober; which makes Thebes, Julius Cæsar, anything and anybody in fabulous and historical antiquity alike, the centre, or at least the nucleus, of successive accretions of romantic fiction.

Nevertheless, the attractions, intrinsic and extrinsic, of the division are neither few nor small. This very confusion, as it seems nowadays, this extraordinary and almost monstrous blending of uncritical history and unbridled romance, shows one of the most characteristic sides of the whole matter, and exhibits, as do few other things, that condition of mediæval thought in regard to all critical questions which has so constantly to be insisted on. As in the case of the Arthurian story, the matter thus presented caught hold of the mediæval imagination with a remarkable grip, and some of the most interesting literary successions of all history date from it. Among them it is almost enough to mention the chain of names—Benoît[Pg 150] de Sainte-More, Guido Colonna, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Henryson—which reaches Shakespeare, and does not cease with him, all successively elaborating the history of Troilus and Cressida. The lively story, first formed, like so many others, by the French genius, and well, if rather impudently, copied by Colonna; Boccaccio's vivid Italian Cressida; Chaucer's inimitable Pandarus, the first pleasing example of the English talent for humorous portrayal in fiction; the wonderful passage, culminating in a more wonderful single line,[69] of that Dunfermline schoolmaster whom some inconceivable person has declared to be only a poet to "Scotch patriotism"; the great gnomic verses of Shakespeare's Ulysses, and the various, unequal, sometimes almost repulsive, never otherwise than powerful, pageantry of that play, which has been perhaps more misjudged than any other of Shakespeare's,—all these spring from the Tale of Troy, not in the least as handed down by the ancients, but tricked and frounced as the Middle Age[Pg 151] was wont. Nor is this half-borrowed interest by any means the only one. The Cressid story, indeed, does not reach its full attraction as a direct subject of literary treatment till the fourteenth century. But the great Alexander cycle gives us work which merely as poetry equals all but the very best mediæval work, and its importance in connection with the famous metre named from it is of itself capital.

In interest, bulk, and importance these two stories—the Story of the Destruction of Troy and the Alexandreid—far outstrip all the other romances of antiquity; they are more accessible than the rest, and have been the subject of far more careful investigation by modern students. Little has been added, or is likely to be added, in regard to the Troy-books generally, since M. Joly's introduction to Benoît's Roman de Troie six-and-twenty years ago,[70] and it is at least improbable that much will be added to M. Paul Meyer's handling of the old French treatments of the Alexandreid in his Alexandre le Grand dans la Littérature Française au Moyen Age.[71] For it must once more be said that the pre-eminence of French over other literatures in this volume is not due to any crotchet of the writer, or to any desire to speak of what he has known pretty thoroughly, long, and at first-hand, in preference to that which he[Pg 152] knows less thoroughly, less of old, and in parts at second-hand. It is the simplest truth to say that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries France kept the literary school of Europe, and that, with the single exception of Iceland, during a part, and only a part, of the time, all the nations of Europe were content to do, each in its own tongue, and sometimes even in hers, the lessons which she taught, the exercises which she set them. That the scholars sometimes far surpassed their masters is quite true, and is nothing unusual; that they were scholars is simple fact.

The Alexander story, which Mr Wallis Budge, our chief authority (and perhaps the chief authority) on the Oriental versions of it, speaks of as "a book which has had more readers than any other, the Bible alone excepted," is of an antiquity impossible to determine in any manner at all certain. Nor is the exact place of its origin, or the language in which it was originally written, to be pronounced upon with anything like confidence. What does seem reasonably sure is that what is called "the Pseudo-Callisthenes"—that is to say, the fabulous biography of the great king, which is certainly the basis of all Western, and perhaps that of most Eastern, versions of the legend—was put into Greek at least as early as the third century after Christ, and thence into Latin (by "Julius Valerius" or another) before the middle of the fourth. And it appears probable that some of the Eastern versions, if not themselves the original (and a strong fight has been made for the Æthiopic or Old-Egyptian origin of nearly the whole), represent[Pg 153] Greek texts older than those we have, as well as in some cases other Eastern texts which may be older still. Before any modern Western vernacular handled the subject, there were Alexander legends, not merely in Greek and Latin, not merely in Æthiopic or Coptic, but in Armenian and Syriac, in Hebrew and Arabic, in Persian and perhaps in Turkish: and it is possible that, either indirectly before the Crusades, or directly through and after them, the legend as told in the West received additions from the East.

As a whole, however, the Pseudo-Callisthenes, or rather his Latin interpreter Julius Valerius,[72] was the main source of the mediæval legend of Alexander. And it is not at all impossible (though the old vague assertions that this or that mediæval characteristic or development was derived from the East were rarely based on any solid foundation so far as their authors knew) that this Alexander legend did, at second-hand, and by suggesting imitation of its contents and methods, give to some of the most noteworthy parts of mediæval literature itself an Eastern colouring, perhaps to some extent even an Eastern substance.

Still the direct sources of knowledge in the West were undoubtedly Latin versions of the Pseudo-Callisthenes, one of which, that ascribed to Julius Valerius, appears, as has been said, to have existed before the middle of the fourth century, while the other, sometimes called the Historia de Prœliis, is later by a good deal. Later still, and repre[Pg 154]senting traditions necessarily different from and later than those of the Callisthenes book, was the source of the most marvellous elements in the Alexandreids of the twelfth and subsequent centuries, the Iter ad Paradisum, in which the conquerer was represented as having journeyed to the Earthly Paradise itself. After this, connected as it was with dim Oriental fables as to his approach to the unknown regions north-east of the Caucasus, and his making gates to shut out Gog, there could be no further difficulty, and all accretions as to his descent into the sea in a glass cage and so forth came easily.

Nor could they, indeed, be said to be so very different in nature from at least the opening part of the Callisthenes version itself. This starts with what seems to be the capital and oldest part of the whole fabulous story, a very circumstantial account of the fictitious circumstances of the birth of Alexander. According to this, which is pretty constantly preserved in all the fabulous versions of the legend (a proof of its age), Nectanabus, an Egyptian king and magician, having ascertained by sortilege (a sort of kriegs-spiel on a basin of water with wax ships) that his throne is doomed, quits the country and goes to Macedonia. There he falls in love with Olympias, and during the absence of her husband succeeds by magic arts not only in persuading her that the god Ammon is her lover, but to some extent in persuading King Philip to believe this, and to accept the consequences, the part of Ammon having been played of course by Nectanabus himself. Bucephalus makes[Pg 155] a considerable figure in the story, and Nectanabus devotes much attention to Alexander's education—care which the Prince repays (for no very discernible reason) by pushing his father and tutor into a pit, where the sorcerer dies after revealing the relationship. The rest of the story is mainly occupied by the wars with Darius and Porus (the former a good deal travestied), and two important parts, or rather appendices, of it are epistolary communications between Aristotle and Alexander on the one hand, Alexander and Dindymus (Dandamis, &c.), King of the Brahmins, on the other. After his Indian adventures the king is poisoned by Cassander or at his instigation.

Into a framework of this kind fables of the sort above mentioned had, it will be seen, not the remotest difficulty in fitting themselves; and it was not even a very long step onward to make Alexander a Christian, equip him with twelve peers, and the like. But it has been well demonstrated by M. Paul Meyer that though the fictitious narrative obtained wide acceptance, and even admission into their historical compilations by Vincent of Beauvais, Ekkehard, and others, a more sober tradition as to the hero obtained likewise. If we were more certain than we are as to the exact age of Quintus Curtius, it would be easier to be certain likewise how far he represents and how far he is the source of this more sober tradition. It seems clear that the Latin Alexandreis of Walter of Châtillon is derived from him, or from a common source, rather than from Valerius-Callisthenes: while M. Meyer has dwelt upon a Latin[Pg 156] compilation perhaps as old as the great outburst of vernacular romance on Alexander, preserved only in English MSS. at Oxford and Cambridge, and probably of English composition, which is a perfectly common-sense account based upon historians, of various dates and values, indeed, ranging from Trogus to Isidore of Seville, but all historians and not romancers.

In this path, however, comparatively few cared to tread. The attraction for the twelfth century lay elsewhere. Sometimes a little of the more authentic matter was combined with the fabulous, and at least one instance occurs where the author, probably in the thirteenth century, simply combined, with a frank audacity which is altogether charming, the popular epitome of Valerius and the sober compilation just referred to. The better, more famous, and earlier romantic work is taken straight from, though it by no means confines itself to, Valerius, the Historia de Prœliis, and the Iter ad Paradisum. The results of this handling are enormous in bulk, and in minor varieties; but they are for general purposes sufficiently represented by the great Roman d'Alixandre[73] in French, the long and interesting English King Alisaunder,[74] and perhaps the German of Lamprecht. The Icelandic Alexander-Saga, though of the thirteenth century, is derived from Walter of Châtillon, and so reflects the comparatively sober side of the story. Of all the others the Roman d'Alixandre is the most immediate parent.

[Pg 157]

There was, indeed, an older French poem than this—perhaps two such—and till the discovery of a fragment of it six years after the publication in 1846 of the great Roman d'Alixandre itself by Michelant, it was supposed that this poem was the original of Lamprecht's German (or of the German by whomsoever it be, for some will have it that Lamprecht is simply Lambert li Tors, v. infra). This, however, seems not to be the case. The Alberic fragment[75] (respecting which the philologists, as usual, fight whether it was written by a Besançon man or a Briançon one, or somebody else) is extremely interesting in some ways. For, in the first place, it is written in octosyllabic tirades of single assonance or rhyme, a very rare form; in the second, it is in a dialect of Provençal; and in the third, the author not only does not follow, but distinctly and rather indignantly rejects, the story of Nectanabus:—

But the fragment is unluckily so short (105 lines only) that it is impossible to say much of its matter.

Between this and the Alexandrine poem there is another version,[77] curiously intermediate in form, date, and substance. This is in the ordinary form of the older, but not oldest, chansons de geste, decasyllabic rhymed tirades. There are only about eight hundred lines of it, which have been eked[Pg 158] out, by about ten thousand Alexandrines from the later and better known poem, in the MSS. which remain. The decasyllabic part deals with the youth of Alexander, and though the author does not seem, any more than Alberic, to have admitted the scandal about Nectanabus, the death of that person is introduced, and altogether we see a Callisthenic influence. The piece has been very highly praised for literary merit; it seems to me certainly not below, but not surprisingly above, the average of the older chansons in this respect. But in so much of the poem as remains to us no very interesting part of the subject is attacked.

The great romance is in more fortunate conditions. We have it not indeed complete (for it does not go to the death of the hero) but in ample measure: and fortunately it has for full half a century been accessible to the student. When M. Paul Meyer says that this edition "ne saurait fournir une base suffisante à une étude critique sur le roman d'Alixandre," he is of course using the word critique with the somewhat arbitrary limitations of the philological specialist. The reader who cares for literature first of all—for the book as a book to read—will find it now complete for his criticism in the Stuttgart version of the Alixandre, though he cannot be too grateful to M. Meyer for his second volume as a whole, and for the printing in the first of Alberic, and the decasyllabic poem, and for the extracts from that of Thomas of Kent, who, unlike the authors of the great Romance, admitted the Nectanabus marvels and intrigues.[Pg 159]

The story is of such importance in mediæval literature that some account of the chief English and French embodiments of it may be desirable. The French version, attributed in shares, which have as usual exercised the adventurous ingenuity of critics, to two authors, Lambert li Tors, the Crooked (the older designation "Li Cors," the Short, seems to be erroneous), and Alexander of Bernay or Paris, occupies in the standard edition of Michelant 550 pages, holding, when full and with no blanks or notes, 38 lines each. It must, therefore, though the lines are not continuously numbered, extend to over 20,000. It begins with Alexander's childhood, and though the paternity of Nectanabus is rejected here as in the decasyllabic version, which was evidently under the eyes of the authors, yet the enchanter is admitted as having a great influence on the Prince's education. This portion, filling about fifteen pages, is followed by another of double the length, describing a war with Nicolas, King of Cesarea, an unhistorical monarch, who in the Callisthenic fiction insults Alexander. He is conquered and his kingdom given to Ptolemy. Next Alexander threatens Athens, but is turned from his wrath by Aristotle; and coming home, prevents his father's marriage with Cleopatra, who is sent away in disgrace. And then, omitting the poisoning of Philip by Olympias and her paramour, which generally figures, the Romance goes straight to the war with Darius. This is introduced (in a manner which made a great impression on the Middle Ages,[Pg 160] as appears in a famous passage of our wars with France[78]) by an insulting message and present of childish gifts from the Persian king. Alexander marches to battle, bathes in the Cydnus, crosses "Lube" and "Lutis," and passing by a miraculous knoll which made cowards brave and brave men fearful, arrives at Tarsus, which he takes. The siege of Tyre comes next, and holds a large place; but a very much larger is occupied by the Fuerres de Gadres ("Foray of Gaza"), where the story of the obstinate resistance of the Philistine city is expanded into a kind of separate chanson de geste, occupying 120 pages and some five thousand lines.

In contradistinction to this prolixity, the visit to Jerusalem, and the two battles of Arbela and Issus mixed into one, are very rapidly passed over, though the murder of Darius and Alexander's vengeance for it are duly mentioned. Something like a new beginning (thought by some to coincide with a change of authors) then occurs, and the more marvellous part of the narrative opens. After passing the desert and (for no very clear object) visiting the bottom of the sea in a glass case, Alexander begins his campaign with Porus, whom Darius had summoned to his aid. The actual fighting does not take very long; but there is an elaborate description of the strange tribes and other wonders of India. Porus fights again in Bactria and is again beaten, after which Alexander pursues his allies Gog and Magog and shuts them off by his famous wall. An arrangement with Porus and a[Pg 161] visit to the Pillars of Hercules follow. The return is begun, and marvels come thicker and thicker. Strange beasts and amphibious men attack the Greeks. The "Valley from which None Return" presents itself, and Alexander can only obtain passage for his army by devoting himself, though he manages to escape by the aid of a grateful devil whom he sets free from bondage. At the sea-shore sirens beset the host, and numbers perish; after which hairy horned old men tell them of the three magic fountains—the Fountain of Youth, the Fountain (visible only once a-year) of Immortality, and the Fountain of Resurrection. Many monstrous tribes of enemies supervene; also a Forest of Maidens, kind but of hamadryad nature—"flower-women," as they have been poetically called. It is only after this experience that they come to the Fountain of Youth—the Fontaine de Jouvence—which has left such an indelible impression on tradition. Treachery had deprived Alexander of access to that of Immortality; and that of Resurrection has done nothing but restore two cooked fish to life. But after suffering intense cold, and passing through a rain of blood, the army arrives at the Jouvence, bathes therein, and all become as men thirty years old. The fountain is a branch of the Euphrates, the river of Paradise. After this they come to the Trees of the Sun and Moon—speaking trees which foretell Alexander's death. Porus hears of this, and when the army returns to India he picks a quarrel, and the two kings fight. Bucephalus is mortally wounded; but Porus is killed.[Pg 162] The beginnings of treason, plots against Alexander, and the episode of Queen Candace (who has, however, been mentioned before) follow. The king marches on Babylon and soars into the air in a car drawn by griffins. At Babylon there is much fighting; indeed, except the Foray of Gaza, this is the chief part of the book devoted to that subject, the Persian and Indian wars having been, as we saw, but lightly treated. The Amazons are brought in next; but fighting recommences with the siege of "Defur." An enchanted river, which whosoever drinks he becomes guilty of cowardice or treachery, follows; and then we return to Tarsus and Candace, that courteous queen. Meanwhile the traitors Antipater and "Divinuspater" continue plotting, and though Alexander is warned against them by his mother Olympias, they succeed in poisoning him. The death of the king and the regret of his Twelve Peers, to whom he has distributed his dominions, finish the poem.

In form this poem resembles in all respects the chansons de geste. It is written in mono-rhymed laisses of the famous metre which owes its name and perhaps its popularity to the use of it in this romance. Part of it at least cannot be later than the twelfth century; and though in so long a poem, certainly written by more than one, and in all likelihood by more than two, there must be inequality, this inequality is by no means very great. The best parts of the poem are the marvels. The fighting is not quite so good as in the chansons de geste proper; but the marvels are excellent, the poet relat[Pg 163]ing them with an admirable mixture of gravity and complaisance, in spirited style and language, and though with extremely little attention to coherence and verisimilitude, yet with no small power of what may be called fabulous attraction.

It is also characteristic in having been freely continued. Two authors, Guy of Cambray and Jean le Nevelois, composed a Vengeance Alexandre. The Vœux du Paon, which develop some of the episodes of the main poem, were almost as famous at the time as Alixandre itself. Here appears the popular personage of Gadiffer, and hence was in part derived the great prose romance of Perceforest. Less interesting in itself, but curious as illustrating the tendency to branch up and down to all parts of a hero's pedigree, is Florimont, a very long octosyllabic poem, perhaps as old as the twelfth century, dealing with Alexander's grandfather.[79]

The principal and earliest version of the English Alexander is accessible without much difficulty in Weber's Metrical Romances of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Centuries. Its differences from the French original are, however, very well worth noting. That it only extends to about eight thousand octosyllabic lines instead of some twenty thousand Alexandrines is enough to show that a good deal is omitted; and an indication in some little detail[Pg 164] of its contents may therefore not be without interest. It should be observed that besides this and the Scots Alexander (see note above) an alliterative Romance of Alexander and Dindymus[80] exists, and perhaps others. But until some one supplements Mr Ward's admirable Catalogue of Romances in the British Museum with a similar catalogue for the minor libraries of the United Kingdom, it will be very difficult to give complete accounts of matters of this kind.

Our present poem may be of the thirteenth century, and is pretty certainly not long posterior to it. It begins, after the system of English romances, with a kind of moral prologue on the various lives and states of men of "Middelerd." Those who care for good literature and good learning are invited to hear a noble geste of Alisaundre, Darye, and Pore, with wonders of worm and beast. After a geographical prologue the story of Nectanabus, "Neptanabus," is opened, and his determination to revenge himself on Philip of Macedon explained by the fact of that king having headed the combination against Egypt. The design on Olympias, and its success, are very fully expounded. Nectanabus tells the queen, in his first interview with her, "a high master in Egypt I was"; and about eight hundred lines carry us to the death of Nectanabus and the breaking of "Bursifal" (Bucephalus) by the Prince. The episodes of Nicolas (who is here King of Carthage) and of Cleopatra follow; but when the expedition against Darius is reached, the[Pg 165] mention of "Lube" in the French text seems to have induced the English poet to carry his man by Tripoli, instead of Cilicia, and bring him to the oracle of Ammon—indeed in all the later versions of the story the crossing of the purely fantastic Callisthenic romance with more or less historical matter is noticeable. The "Bishop" of Ammon, by the way, assures him that Philip is really his father. The insulting presents follow the siege of Tyre; the fighting with Darius, though of course much mediævalised, is brought somewhat more into accordance with the historic account, though still the Granicus does not appear; the return to Greece and the capture of Thebes have their place; and the Athens-Aristotle business is also to some extent critically treated. Then the last battle with Darius comes in: and his death concludes the first part of the piece in about five thousand lines. It is noticeable that the "Foray of Gaza" is entirely omitted; and indeed, as above remarked, it bears every sign of being a separate poem.

The second part deals with "Pore"—in other words, with the Indian expedition and its wonders. These are copied from the French, but by no means slavishly. The army is, on the whole, even worse treated by savage beasts and men on its way to India than in the original; but the handling, including the Candace episodes, follows the French more closely than in the first part. The fighting at "Defur," however, like that at Gaza, is omitted; and the wilder and more mystical and luxuriant parts of the story—the three[Pg 166] Fountains, the Sirens, the flower-maidens, and the like—are either omitted likewise or handled more prosaically.[81]

One of the most curious things about this poem is that every division—divisions of which Weber made chapters—begins by a short gnomic piece in the following style:—

The treatment of the Alexander story thus well illustrates one way of the mediæval mind with such things—the way of combining at will incongruous stories, of accepting with no, or with little, criticism any tale of wonder that it happened to find in books, of using its own language, applying its own manners, supposing its own clothing, weapons, and so forth to have prevailed at any period of history. And further, it shows how the geste theory—the theory of working out family connections and stories of ancestors and successors—could not fail to be applied to any subject that at all lent itself to such treatment. But, on the other hand, this division of the romances of antiquity does not exhibit the more fertile, the more inventive, the more poetical, and generally the nobler[Pg 167] traits of Middle-Age literature. As will have been noted, there was little invention in the later versions, the Callisthenic fictions and the Iter ad Paradisum being, with a few Oriental accretions, almost slavishly relied upon for furnishing out the main story, though the "Foray of Gaza," the "Vows of the Peacock," and Florimont exhibit greater independence. Yet again no character, no taking and lively story, is elaborated. Nectanabus has a certain personal interest: but he was given to, not invented by, the Romance writers. Olympias has very little character in more senses than one: Candace is not worked out: and Alexander himself is entirely colourless. The fantastic story, and the wonders with which it was bespread, seem to have absorbed the attention of writers and hearers; and nobody seems to have thought of any more. Perhaps this was merely due to the fact that none of the more original genius of the time was directed on it: perhaps to the fact that the historical element in the story, small as it was, cramped the inventive powers, and prevented the romancers from doing their best.

In this respect the Tale of Troy presents a remarkable contrast to its great companion—a contrast pervading, and almost too remarkable to be accidental. Inasmuch as this part of mediæval dealings with antiquity connects itself with the literary history of two of the very greatest writers of our own country, Chaucer and Shakespeare; with that of one of the greatest writers of Italy, Boccaccio; and with some of the most noteworthy work in Old French, it has been thoroughly and repeatedly inves[Pg 168]tigated.[82] But it is so important, and so characteristic of the time with which we are dealing, that it cannot be passed over here, though the later developments must only be referred to in so far as they help us to understand the real originality, which was so long, and still is sometimes, denied to mediæval writers. In this case, as in the other, the first striking point is the fact that the Middle Ages, having before them what may be called, mutatis mutandis, canonical and apocryphal, authentic and unauthentic, ancient and not ancient, accounts of a great literary matter, chose, by an instinct which was not probably so wrong as it has sometimes seemed, the apocryphal in preference to the canonical, the unauthentic in preference to the authentic, the modern in preference to the ancient.

As in the case of the Alexander-Saga, their origins were the Pseudo-Callisthenes and the Iter ad Paradisum, so in the Tale of Troy they were the works of two persons whose literary offspring has obtained for them an amount of attention transcending to a quite ludicrous extent their literary merit—Dictys Cretensis and Dares Phrygius, to whom may perhaps be added the less shadowy personage of the grammarian John Tzetzes. But, as in the other case also, they were by no means confined to such authorities. If they did not know Homer very well at first-hand, they did know him: they knew Ovid (who of[Pg 169] course represents Homer, though not Homer only) extremely well: and they knew Virgil. But partly from the instinct above referred to, of which more presently, partly from the craze for tracing Western Europe back to the "thrice-beaten Trojans," it pleased them to regard Homer as a late and unhistorical calumniator, whose Greek prejudices made him bear false witness; and to accept the pretensions of Dictys and Dares to be contemporaries and eyewitnesses of fact. Dictys, a companion of Idomeneus, was supposed to represent the Greek side, but more fairly than Homer; and Dares, priest of Hephæstus, the Trojan.

The works of these two worthies, which are both of small compass,—Dictys occupies rather more than a hundred, Dares rather more than fifty, pages of the ordinary Teubner classics,[83]—exist at present only in Latin prose, though, as the Greeks were more expert and inventive forgers than the Romans, it is possible, if not even highly probable, that both were, and nearly certain that Dictys was, originally Greek at least in language. Dictys, the older pretty certainly, is introduced by a letter to a certain Quintus Aradius from Lucius Septimius, who informs "his Rufinus" and the world, with a great deal of authority and learning, that the book had been written by Dictys in Punic letters, which Cadmus and Agenor had then made of common use in Greece; that some shepherds found the manuscript written on linden-bark paper in a tin case at his tomb at Gnossus; that their landlord turning the Punic letters into Greek (which had always[Pg 170] been the language), gave it to Nero the Emperor, who rewarded him richly; and that he, Septimius, having by chance got the book into his hands, thought it worth while to translate it into Latin, both for the sake of making the true history known and "ut otiosi animi desidiam discuteremus." The Dares volume is more ambitious, and purports to be introduced by no less a person than Cornelius Nepos to no less a person than Sallustius Crispus, and to have been "faithfully translated" by the former from MS. in the very hand of Dares, which he found at Athens, in order to correct the late and fabulous authority of Homer, who actually makes gods fight with men!

It will be, of course, obvious to the merest tyro in criticism that these prefaces bear "forgery" on the very face of them. The first is only one of those innumerable variants of the genesis of a fiction which Sir Walter Scott has so pleasantly summarised in one of his introductions; and the phrase quoted about animi otiosi desidiam is a commonplace of mediæval bookmaking. The second, more cleverly arranged, exposes itself to the question how far, putting the difficulty about writing aside, an ancient Greek MS. of the kind could possibly have escaped the literary activity of many centuries of Athenian wits and scholars, to fall into the hands of Cornelius Nepos. The actual age and origin of the two have, of course, occupied many modern scholars; and the favourite opinion seems to be that Dictys may have been originally written by some Greek about the time of Nero (the Latin translation[Pg 171] cannot well be earlier than the fourth century and may be much later), while Dares may possibly be as late as the twelfth. Neither book is of the very slightest interest intrinsically. Dictys (the full title of whose book is Ephemeris Belli Trojani) is not only the longer but the better written of the two. It contains no direct "set" at Homer; and may possibly preserve traits of some value from the lost cyclic writers. But it was not anything like such a favourite with the Middle Ages as Dares. Dictys had contented himself with beginning at the abduction of Helen; Dares starts his De Excidio Trojæ with the Golden Fleece, and excuses the act of Paris as mere reprisals for the carrying off of Hesione by Telamon. Antenor having been sent to Greece to demand reparation and rudely treated, Paris makes a regular raid in vengeance, and so the war begins with a sort of balance of cause for it on the Trojan side. Before the actual fighting, some personal descriptions of the chief heroes and heroines are given, curiously feeble and strongly tinged with mediæval peculiarities, but thought to be possibly derived from some similar things attributed to the rhetorician Philostratus at the end of the third century. And among these a great place is given to Troilus and "Briseida."

Nearly half the book is filled with these preliminaries, with an account of the fruitless embassy of Ulysses and Diomed to Troy, and with enumerating the forces and allies of the two parties. But when Dares gets to work he proceeds with a rapidity which[Pg 172] may be partly due to the desire to contradict Homer. The landing and death of Protesilaus, avenged to some extent by Achilles, the battle in which Hector slays Patroclus (to whom Dares adds Meriones), and that at the ships, are all lumped together; and the funerals of Protesilaus and Patroclus are simultaneously celebrated. Palamedes begins to plot against Agamemnon. The fighting generally goes much against the Greeks; and Agamemnon sues for a three years' truce, which is granted despite Hector's very natural suspicion of such an uncommonly long time. It is skipped in a line; and then, the fighting having gone against the Trojans, they beg for a six months' truce in their turn. This is followed by a twelve days' fight and a thirty days' truce asked by the Greeks. Then comes Andromache's dream, the fruitless attempt to prevent Hector fighting, and his death at the hands of Achilles. After more truces, Palamedes supplants Agamemnon, and conducts the war with pretty good success. Achilles sees Polyxena at the tomb of Hector, falls in love with her, demands her hand, and is promised it if he can bring about peace. In the next batch of fighting, Palamedes kills Deiphobus and Sarpedon, but is killed by Paris; and in consequence a fresh battle at the ships and the firing of them takes place, Achilles abstaining, but Ajax keeping up the battle till (natural) night. Troilus then becomes the hero of a seven days' battle followed by the usual truce, during which Agamemnon tries to coax Achilles out of the sulks, and on his refusal holds a great council of war. When next tempus pugnæ[Pg 173] supervenit (a stock phrase of the book) Troilus is again the hero, wounds everybody, including Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Diomed, and very reasonably opposes a six months' armistice which his father grants. At its end he again bears all before him; but, killing too many Myrmidons, he at last excites Achilles, who, though at first wounded, kills him at last by wounding his horse, which throws him. Memnon recovers the body of Troilus, but is himself killed. The death of Achilles in the temple of Apollo (by ambush, but, of course, with no mention of the unenchanted heel), and of Ajax and Paris in single fight, leads to the appearance of the Amazons, who beat the Greeks, till Penthesilea is killed by Neoptolemus. Antenor, Æneas, and others urge peace, and on failing to prevail with Priam, begin to parley with the Greeks. There is no Trojan horse, but the besiegers are treacherously introduced at a gate ubi extrinsecus portam equi sculptum caput erat. Antenor and Æneas receive their reward; but the latter is banished because he has concealed Polyxena, who is massacred when discovered by Neoptolemus. Helenus, Cassandra, and Andromache go free: and the book ends with the beautifully precise statements that the war, truces and all, lasted ten years, six months, and twelve days; that 886,000 men fell on the Greek side, and 676,000 on the Trojan; that Æneas set out in twenty-two ships ("the same with which Paris had gone to Greece," says the careful Dares), and 3400 men, while 2500 followed Antenor, and 1200 Helenus and Andromache.[Pg 174]

This bald summary is scarcely balder than the book itself, which also, as can be seen from the summary, and would be more fully seen from the book, has no literary merit of any kind. It reads more like an excessively uninspired précis of a larger work than like anything else—a précis in which all the literary merit has, with unvarying infelicity, been omitted. Nothing can be more childish than the punctilious euhemerism by which all the miraculous elements of the Homeric story are blinked or explained away, unless it be the painstaking endeavour simply to say something different from Homer, or the absurd alternation of fighting and truces, in which each party invariably gives up its chance of finishing the war at the precise time at which that chance is most flourishing, and which reads like a humorous travesty of the warfare of some historic periods with all the humour left out.

Nevertheless it is not really disgraceful to the Romantic period that it fastened so eagerly on this sorriest of illegitimate epitomes.[84] Very few persons at that time were in case to compare the literary merit of Homer—even that of Ovid and Virgil—with the literary merit of these bald pieces of bad Latin prose. Moreover, the supernatural elements in the Homeric story, though very congenial to the temper of the Middle Age itself, were presented and ascribed in such a fashion that it was almost impossible for that age to adopt them. Putting aside[Pg 175] a certain sentimental cult of "Venus la déesse d'amors," there was nothing of which the mediæval mind was more tranquilly convinced than that "Jubiter," "Appollin," and the rest were not mere fond things vainly invented, but actual devils who had got themselves worshipped in the pagan times. It was impossible for a devout Christian man, whatever pranks he might play with his own religion, to represent devils as playing the part of saints and of the Virgin, helping the best heroes, and obtaining their triumph. Nor, audacious as was the faculty of "transfer" possessed by the mediæval genius, was it easy to Christianise the story in any other way. It is perhaps almost surprising that, so far as I know or remember, no version exists representing Cassandra as a holy and injured nun, making Our Lady play the part of Venus to Æneas, and even punishing the sacrilegious Diomed for wounding her. But I do not think I have heard of such a version (though Sir Walter has gone near to representing something parallel in Ivanhoe), and it would have been a somewhat violent escapade for even a mediæval fancy.

So, with that customary and restless ability to which we owe so much, and which has been as a rule so much slighted, it seized on the negative capacities of the story. Dares gives a wretched painting, but a tolerable canvas and frame. Each section of his meagre narrative is capable of being worked out by sufficiently busy and imaginative operators into a complete roman d'aventures: his facts, if meagre and jejune, are numerous. The raids and[Pg 176] reprisals in the cases of Hesione and Helen suited the demands of the time; and, as has been hinted, the singular interlardings of truce and war, and the shutting up of the latter into so many days' hand-to-hand fighting,—with no strategy, no care for communications, no scientific nonsense of any kind,—were exactly to mediæval taste.

Above all, the prominence of new heroes and heroines, about whom not very much was said, and whose gestes the mediæval writer could accordingly fill up at his own will, with the presentation of others in a light different from that of the classical accounts, was a godsend. Achilles, as the principal author of the "Excidium Trojæ" (the title of the Dares book, and after it of others), must be blackened; and though Dares himself does not contain the worst accusations of the mediæval writers against the unshorn son of the sea-goddess, it clears the way for them by taking away the excuse of the unjust deprivation of Briseis. From this to making him not merely a factious partisan, but an unfair fighter, who mobs his enemies half to death with Myrmidons before he engages them himself, is not far. On the other hand, Troilus, a mere name in the older stories, offers himself as a hero. And for a heroine, the casual mention of the charms of Briseida in Dares started the required game. Helen was too puzzling, as well as too Greek; Andromache only a faithful wife; Cassandra a scolding sorceress; Polyxena a victim. Briseida had almost a clear record, as after the confusion with Chryseis (to be altered in name after[Pg 177]wards) there was very little personality left in her, and she could for that very reason be dealt with as the romancers pleased.

In the subsequent and vernacular handling of the story the same difference of alternation is at first perceived as that which appears in the Alexander legend. The sobriety of Gautier of Châtillon's Alexandreis is matched and its Latinity surpassed by the Bellum Trojanum of our countryman Joseph of Exeter, who was long and justly praised as about the best mediæval writer of classical Latin verse. But this neighbourhood of the streams of history and fiction ceases much earlier in the Trojan case, and for very obvious reasons. The temperament of mediæval poets urged them to fill in and fill out: the structure of the Daretic epitome invited them to do so: and they very shortly did it.

After some controversy, the credit of first "romancing" the Tale of Troy has been, it would seem justly and finally, assigned to Benoît de Sainte-More. Benoît, whose flourishing time was about 1160, who was a contemporary and rival of Wace, and who wrote a chronicle of Normandy even longer than his Troy-book, composed the latter in more than thirty thousand octosyllabic lines, an expansion of the fifty pages of Dares, which stands perhaps almost alone even among the numerous similar feats of mediæval bards. He has helped himself freely with matter from Dictys towards the end of his work; but, as we have seen, even this reinforcement could not be great in bulk. Expansion, however,[Pg 178] so difficult to some writers, was never in the least a stumbling-block to the trouvère. It was rather a bottomless pit into which he fell, traversing in his fall lines and pages with endless alacrity of sinning.

Not that Benoît is by any means a person to be contemptuously spoken of. In the first place, as we shall see presently, he was for many hundred years completely and rather impudently robbed of his fame; in the second, he is the literary ancestor of far greater men than himself; and in the third, his verse, though not free from the besetting sin of its kind, and especially of the octosyllabic variety—the sin of smooth but insignificant fluency—is always pleasant, and sometimes picturesque. Still there is no doubt that at present the second claim is the strongest with us; and that if Benoît de Sainte-More had not, through his plagiarist Colonna, been the original of Boccaccio and Chaucer and Shakespeare, he would require little more than a bare mention here.

Dares, as we have seen, mentions Briseida, and extols her beauty and charm: she was, he says, "beautiful, not of lofty stature, fair, her hair yellow and silky, her eyebrows joined, her eyes lively, her body well proportioned, kind, affable, modest, of a simple mind, and pious." He also mightily extols Troilus; but he does not intimate any special connection between the two, or tell the story of "Cressid," which indeed his followers elaborated in terms not altogether consistent with some of the above laudatory epithets. Tzetzes, who with some others gives her the alternative name of Hippodamia,[Pg 179] alters her considerably, and assigns to her tall stature, a white complexion, black hair, as well as specially comely breasts, cheeks, and nose, skill in dress, a pleasant smile, but a distinct tendency to "arrogance." Both these writers, however, with Joseph of Exeter and others, seem to be thinking merely of the Briseis whom we know from Homer as the mistress of Achilles, and do not connect her with Calchas, much less with Troilus. What may be said with some confidence is that the confusion of Briseida with the daughter of Calchas and the assignment of her to Troilus as his love originated with Benoît de Sainte-More. But we must perhaps hesitate a little before assigning to him quite so much credit as has sometimes been allowed him. Long before Shakespeare received the story in its full development (for though he does not carry it to the bitter end in Troilus and Cressida itself, the allusion to the "lazar kite of Cressid's kind" in Henry V. shows that he knew it) it had reached that completeness through the hands of Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Henryson, the least of whom was capable of turning a comparatively barren donnée into a rich possession, and who as a matter of fact each added much. We do not find in the Norman trouvère, and it would be rather wonderful if we did find, the gay variety of the Filostrato and its vivid picture of Cressid as merely passionate, Chaucer's admirable Pandarus and his skilfully blended heroine, or the infinite pathos of Henryson's final interview. Still, all this great and moving romance would have been impossible without the idea of Cressid's successive sojourn in Troy and the Greek[Pg 180] camp, and of her successive courtship by Troilus and by Diomed. And this Benoît really seems to have thought of first. His motives for devising it have been rather idly inquired into. For us it shall be sufficient that he did devise it.

By an easy confusion with Chryses and Chryseis—half set right afterwards in the change from Briseida to Griseida in Boccaccio and Creseide in Chaucer—he made his heroine the daughter of Calchas. The priest, a traitor to Troy but powerful with the Greeks, has left his daughter in the city and demands her—a demand which, with the usual complacency noticed above as characterising the Trojans in Dares himself, is granted, though they are very angry with Calchas. But Troilus is already the damsel's lover; and a bitter parting takes place between them. She is sent, gorgeously equipped, to the Greeks; and it happens to be Diomed who receives her. He at once makes the fullest declarations—for in nothing did the Middle Age believe more fervently than in the sentiment,

But Briseida, with a rather excessive politeness, and leaving him a good deal of hope, informs him that she has already a fair friend yonder. Whereat, as is reasonable, he is not too much discouraged. It must be supposed that this is related to Troilus, for in the next fight he, after Diomed has been wounded, reproaches Briseida pretty openly. He is not wrong, for Briseida weeps at Diomed's wound, and (to the regret and reproof of her historian, and indeed against[Pg 181] her own conscience) gives herself to the Greek, or determines to do so, on the philosophical principle that Troilus is lost to her. Achilles then kills Troilus himself, and we hear no more of the lady.

The volubility of Benoît assigns divers long speeches to Briseida, in which favourable interpreters have seen the germ of the future Cressid; and in which any fair critic may see the suggestion of her. But it is little more than a suggestion. Of the full and masterly conception of Cressid as a type of woman which was afterwards reached, Troilus, and Diomed, and Pandarus, and the wrath of the gods were essential features. Here Troilus is a shadow, Diomed not much more, Pandarus non-existent, the vengeance of Love on a false lover unthought of. Briseida, though she has changed her name, and parentage, and status, is still, as even the patriotic enthusiasm of MM. Moland and d'Héricault (the first who did Benoît justice) perceives, the Briseis of Homer, a slave-girl who changes masters, and for her own pleasure as well as her own safety is chiefly anxious to please the master that is near. The vivifying touch was brought by Boccaccio, and Boccaccio falls out of our story.

But between Benoît and Boccaccio there is another personage who concerns us very distinctly. Never was there such a case, even in the Middle Ages, when the absence of printing, of public libraries, and of general knowledge of literature made such things easy, of sic vos non vobis as the Historia Trojana of Guido de Columnis, otherwise Guido delle Colonne, or Guido Colonna, of Mes[Pg 182]sina. This person appears to have spent some time in England rather late in the thirteenth century; and there, no doubt, he fell in with the Roman de Troie. He wrote—in Latin, and thereby appealing to a larger audience than even French could appeal to—a Troy-book which almost at once became widely popular. The MSS. of it occur by scores in the principal libraries of Europe; it was the direct source of Boccaccio, and with that writer's Filostrato of Chaucer, and it formed the foundation of almost all the known Troy-books of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Benoît being completely forgotten. Yet recent investigation has shown that Guido not merely adapted Benoît in the usual mediæval fashion, but followed him so closely that his work might rather be called translation than adaptation. At any rate, beyond a few details he has added nothing to the story of Troilus and Cressida as Benoît left it, and as, in default of all evidence to the contrary, it is only fair to conclude that he made it.

From the date, 1287, of Guido delle Colonne's version, it follows necessarily that all the vernacular Troy-books—our own Destruction of Troy,[85] the French prose romance of Troilus,[86] &c., not to mention Lydgate and others—fall like Boccaccio and Chaucer out of the limits of this volume. Nor can it be necessary to enter into detail as to the other classical French romances, the Roman de Thèbes, the Roman d'Enéas, the Roman de Jules César, Athis and Profilias, and the[Pg 183] rest;[87] while something will be said of the German Æneid of H. von Veldeke in a future chapter. The capital examples of the Alexandreid and the Iliad, as understood by the Middle Ages, not only must but actually do suffice for our purpose.

And we see from them very well not merely in what light the Middle Ages regarded the classical stories, but also to what extent the classical stories affected the Middle Ages. This latter point is of the more importance in that even yet the exact bearing and meaning of the Renaissance in this respect is by no means universally comprehended. It may be hoped, if not very certainly trusted, that most educated persons have now got rid of the eighteenth-century notion of mediæval times as being almost totally ignorant of the classics themselves, a notion which careful reading of Chaucer alone should be quite sufficient to dispel. The fact of course is, that all through the Middle Ages the Latin classics were known, unequally but very fairly in most cases, while the earlier Middle Ages at least were by no means ignorant of Greek.

But although there was by no means total ignorance, there was what is to us a scarcely comprehensible want of understanding. To the average mediæval student, perhaps to any mediæval student, it seems seldom or never to have occurred that the men of whom he was reading had lived under a dispensation[Pg 184] so different from his own in law and in religion, in politics and in philosophy, in literature and in science, that an elaborate process of readjustment was necessary in order to get at anything like a real comprehension of them. Nor was he, as a rule, able—men of transcendent genius being rather rare, amid a more than respectable abundance of men of talent—to take them, as Chaucer did to a great extent, Dante more intensely though less widely, and Shakespeare (but Shakespeare had already felt the Renaissance spirit) fully and perfectly, on the broad ground of humanity, so that anachronisms, and faults of costume, matter not one jot to any one but a pedant or a fool. When he came to something in the story—something in sentiment, manners, religion, what not—which was out of the range of his own experience, he changed it into something within the range of his own experience. When the whole story did not lend itself to the treatment which he wished to apply, he changed it, added to it, left out from it, without the slightest scruple. He had no more difficulty in transforming the disciplined tactic of the Macedonian phalanx into a series of random chevauchées than in adjusting the much more congenial front-fighting of Greeks and Trojans to his own ideas; and it cost him little more to engraft a whole brand-new romantic love-story on the Tale of Troy than to change the historical siege of Gaza into a Fuerres de Gadres, of which Aimeri of Narbonne or Raoul de Cambrai would have been the appropriate hero. Sometimes, indeed, he simply confounded Persians and Saracens, just as else[Pg 185]where he confounded Saracens and Vikings; and he introduced high priests of heathen divinities as bishops, with the same sang froid with which long afterwards the translators of the Bible founded an order of "dukes" in Edom.

A study of antiquity conducted in such a fashion could hardly have coloured mediæval thought with any real classicism, even if it had been devoted to much more genuine specimens of antiquity than the semi-Oriental medley of the Pseudo-Callisthenes and the bit of bald euhemerism which had better have been devoted to Hephæstus than ascribed to his priest. But, by another very curious fact, the two great and commanding examples of the Romance of Antiquity were executed each under the influence of the flourishing of one of the two mightiest branches of mediæval poetry proper. When Alberic and the decasyllabist (whoever he was) wrote, the chanson de geste was in the very prime of its most vigorous manhood, and the Roman d'Alixandre accordingly took not merely the outward form, but the whole spirit of the chanson de geste itself. And when Benoît de Sainte-More gave the first shapings of the great story of Troilus and Cressida out of the lifeless rubbish-heap of Dares, it was at the precise minute when also, in hands known or unknown, the greater story of Arthur and Gawain, of Lancelot and Guinevere, was shaping itself from materials probably even scantier. Even Guido of the Columns, much more Boccaccio, had this story fully before them; and Cressida, when at last she becomes herself, has, if nothing of the majesty of Guinevere, a[Pg 186] good deal of Iseult—an Iseult more faithless to love, but equally indifferent to anything except love. As Candace in Alexander has the crude though not unamiable naturalism of a chanson heroine, so Cressid—so even Briseida to some extent—has the characteristic of the frail angels of Arthurian legend. The cup would have spilled wofully in her husband's hand, the mantle would scarcely have covered an inch of her; but though of coarser make, she is of the same mould with the ladies of the Round Table,—she is of the first creation of the order of romantic womanhood.

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