additions to these funds are simply to take the form of bullion which is to be put away in the vaults of the banks concerned until a severe monetary crisis occurs, it is evident that there will not be that expansion in the amount of loanable capital which has obtained in past years. Again, from the banking companies' point of view, there is the important disadvantage that the portion of their shareholders' reserves invested in gold will not bring in any interest. The experience of past years points to the conclusion, however, that this will not involve any great hardship, for if all the additions made to the reserve funds of the various banks during the past decade had been invested in the purchase of gold instead of securities, the banks would not have had to provide such large sums for depreciation as they have lately had to find. In the case of one of our leading joint-stock banks, the chairman recently announced that they had written down their investments by 1,200,000l. since 1899, a sum which represents nearly 4 per cent. per annum on the amount of their reserve funds during that period.

Higher gold reserves cannot be obtained without some sacrifices being made; and, on the whole, there is reason to believe that the mercantile community would derive greater advantages from the assurance of a moderate supply of credit at rates which are not likely to fluctuate violently or suddenly than they obtain under the present system, which involves the possibility of credit becoming suddenly very costly. The business of the country is conducted so largely upon borrowed money and upon such a narrow margin of profit that uniformity in the cost of credit is almost as vital to the commercial community as the volume of the supply.

EDGAR CRAMMOND.

Art. XIII.-THE HEROIC IDEAL OF THE FRENCH EPIC. 1. Histoire poétique de Charlemagne. By Gaston Paris. First edition. Paris: Franck, 1865.

2. Les Épopées françaises. By Léon Gautier. Seconde édition. Four vols. Paris: Société Catholique, 18781894.

3. Le Origini dell' Epopea francese. By Pio Rajna. Firenze: Sansoni, 1884.

4. Histoire poétique des Mérovingiens. By Godefroi Kurth. Paris, 1893.

5. Epic and Romance. By W. P. Ker. London: Macmillan, 1895.

THE books whose titles stand above may be said to represent the most important work that has been done on the medieval French epic. A complete bibliography of the subject would contain many hundred titles of books and of special articles by French, German, and Italian scholars who have devoted themselves to the subject since 1820. These scholars, however, have been occupied with the question of origins, and with the critical analysis of the texts and variants, rather than with the literary and social interest of these old poems dealing with 'reges et proelia.' Even in France, where acquaintance with medieval literature is still an affair of the savants, Léon Gautier and Gaston Paris alone have felt any concern to interpret the noble epic message of their ancestors for Frenchmen of to-day.

If this ignorance of the French national epic may properly be made a reproach to France, it is needless to say that to even the cultured man in England and America the old French poems are practically unknown. There are reasons for this. To read the language of these poems requires, of course, a special training; further, many of the texts are rare and accessible only in large libraries; and finally, the Breton romances of adventure, in their Old French form, have absorbed all the attention which our literary men have devoted to medieval French literature. We are not complaining that it should be the case; but the fact remains that in popularity Arthur and the Knights of his Round Table have definitely triumphed

over Charlemagne and his Twelve Peers. With the exception of the 'Song of Roland,' the poems themselves have not been translated, nor has their message been interpreted to the modern world. To all but the scholar an enormous collection of documents bearing upon the evolution of modern ideals has thus remained sealed.

It is time, then, for a statement of the value of the French epic. One might have hoped to find such a statement developed in Professor W. P. Ker's admirable volume of studies entitled 'Epic and Romance.' One might wish that in a study begun upon such broad lines the author had not devoted so much space to the sagas— which, as he concludes, have had no influence '-at the expense of the chansons de geste, which belong to the history of those great schools of literature in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries from which all modern imaginations in prose and rhyme are descended.' But though the chansons de geste were contemporary with the twelfth century school of romantic poetry in France, they have no logical connexion with it, nor have they had any share in the popularity accorded to medieval romantic poetry by the nineteenth century. The fact is that the value of the so-called French epic is rather historical than literary. Hence, while modern critics have rightly searched the contemporary romances of adventure for the origins of the modern novel, the historical epic poems have been comparatively neglected. On the other hand, the historian of the period in question delves among the Latin charters and chronicles of the time rather than in the popular literature in the vulgar tongue. Upon the whole, the French epic may be said to have fallen between two stools; it has been neglected by the historians of society even more than by the historians of literature. Its message has not been sought for nor discovered. In common with other remains of medieval literature in the vulgar tongues, the French epic has been staked out as the private domain of the philologists.

In these days of ancestral research it is fitting to pay our tardy respects to our French ancestors, and to see what messages of enduring import they have left to us from the days of feudal struggle and strife. Can we, by searching, find some modern note in these old poems which will bring us and them into sympathetic touch?

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Some three or four score French epic poems have been preserved in a complete form, to which must be added a score or two of fragmentary or mutilated poems which have not yet been published. The complete poems embrace from two thousand to ten thousand verses, of ten or twelve syllables each, arranged in assonance. their name implies, they are songs of deeds-chansons de geste. They pretend to be historical accounts of national and feudal events which happened during the reigns of Charlemagne and of his immediate successors. Following Gaston Paris, we may sufficiently characterise their historical reliability by calling them 'poetical history.' As a matter of fact, we have no specimens of the primitive French epic, founded as it must have been upon heroic ballads sung by the contemporaries of the Carolingian monarchs. The 'Song of Roland,' dating from the eleventh century, is universally held to be the earliest and worthiest example extant of what the French national epic must have sometime been. Even the 'Roland' is visibly modernised to suit the naïve taste of the eleventh century. Composed during a period which, of all others before the Renaissance, was pregnant with political, social, and literary changes, it is not strange that the later poems of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries should reflect in some degree the momentous evolution of the times. For to say that there is no difference in spirit between a version of the eleventh and a version of the thirteenth century would be untrue. Yet the French epic was a conservative genre, and always remained faithful to the traditional material. It was corrupted, but never assimilated, by the more frivolous matière de Bretagne-the poetic tissue of that seductive young Celtic muse who so quickly captivated the new chivalry of France. The popular poets, these anonymous trouvères, who cast the poems in their present shape, have in reality left us a picture of the humanity and the ideals of the eleventh and early twelfth centuries. They never weary of proclaiming that their stories are true, reproaching certain of their contemporaries who delight in romances of adventure which are fantastic and false. Their claim of veracity is justified by their works, but not in the sense they intended. They affected to believe that they were telling the truth about Charlemagne and

his great vassals whom they had not seen; in reality, they have left us, all unconsciously, the true reflection of the spirit of their own times which they had seen.

Nowhere, then, better than in the chansons de geste can we find a vast body of material wherein to study the medieval standards and ideals of what Montaigne has called the 'average man.' Our hero is the average man of the earlier crusades, a contemporary of those Normans who were carrying into England the best features of European civilisation.

When a student of the French epic considers what is most worth saying concerning the vast quantity of material to which reference has been made, he must reject several methods of treatment. Our subject must be carefully defined. We want to get at the spirit of these poems. We must, then, leave out of consideration their literary value, the question of their authorship, their philological value, and their historical accuracy as chronicles of the events which they pretend to narrate. So much, at the outset, is beside our present purpose. The material is thus greatly circumscribed. Even so, sufficient documentary proof remains to establish our ethical connexion with our Norman ancestors in the twelfth century, the moment when medieval civilisation reached its highest point. Our purpose is to show that the chansons de geste of seven centuries ago give expression to the ethical standards of conduct under which we live to-day; that the Frenchman of the early twelfth century, more nearly than any other epic character, foreshadows in his fundamental traits the Christian gentleman of our own day.

In the first place, the characters in the chansons de geste are all human beings, men and women of flesh and blood like ourselves, tried by the same temptations, and victorious over sin through the same faith. From the standpoint of human interest this fact is of vast importance. In the French epic there are no gods, no spirits, no fairies, no monsters, no unhuman dramatis personæ of any kind. This means that, unlike the Homeric poems, the French epic presents no complicated aristocracy of immortals who take sides and hasten to the aid of their human favourites with unsportsmanlike participation in the fray. Surely the god of Charlemagne could have stepped in and saved Roland at Roncesvalles and Vivien