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out of more definite Celtic tales like that of Tristram, partly from classical, Eastern, and other sources, belongs to the English in the wide sense-that is to say, the nation or nations partly under English rule proper, partly under Scottish, partly under that of the feudatories or allies of the English kings as Dukes of Normandy-has to support it not merely the arguments stated above as to the concentration of the legend proper between Troyes and Herefordshire, between Broceliande and Northumbria, as to MS. authority, as to the inveteracy of the legend in English, not only those negative ones as to the certainty that if it were written by Englishmen it would be written in French,-but another, which to the comparative student of literary history may seem strongest of all.

Here first, here eminently, and here just at the time when we should expect it, do we see that strange faculty for exhibiting a blend, a union, a cross of characteristics diverse in themselves, and giving when blended a result different from any of the parts, which is more than anything else the characteristic of the English language, of English literature, of English politics, of everything that is English. Classical rhetoric, French gallantry, Saxon religiosity and intense realisation of the other world, Oriental extravagance to some extent, the "Celtic vague"-all these things are there. But they are all co-ordinated, dominated, fashioned anew by some thing which is none of them, but which is the English genius, that curious,

anomalous, many - sided genius, which to those who look at only one side of it seems insular, provincial, limited, and which yet has given us Shakespeare, the one writer of the world to whom the world allows an absolute universality.

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,
ETC.-CONTINUATIONS- “ 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.

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Oddity of the
Classical
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As the interest of Jean Bodel's first two divisions 1 differs strikingly, and yet represents, in each case intimately and indispensably, certain sides of the medieval 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 1 See note 2, p. 26.

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 Its importance— confusion, as it seems nowadays, this extrathe Troy story. ordinary 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

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,1 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

1 "Than upon him scho kest up baith her ene,
And with ane blunk it came in to his thocht,

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Ane sparke of lufe than till his hart culd spring,
And kendlit all his bodie in ane fyre

With heit fevir, ane sweit and trimbilling
Him tuik quhile he was readie to expire;
To beir his scheild his breast began to tyre:
Within ane quhyle he changit mony hew,
And nevertheles not ane ane uther knew."

Laing's Poems of Henryson (Edinburgh, 1865), p. 93. This volume is unfortunately not too common; but 'The Testament and Complaint of Cressid' may also be found under Chaucer in Chalmers's Poets (i. 298 for this passage).

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