When Père Menestrier imagined that it was the intention of these Heralds, by these Romances, “to celebrate their voyages in different lands,” it seems to have escaped him that “the voyages” of these Romancers to the visionary Caerleon, to England, or to Macedonia, were but a geography of Fairy Land.
In the History of Literature we here discover a whole generation of writers, who, so far from claiming the honour of their inventions, or aspiring after the meed of fame, have even studiedly concealed their claims, and, with a modesty and caution difficult to comprehend, dropped into their graves without a solitary commemoration.
These idling works of idlers must have been the pleasant productions of persons of great leisure, with some tincture of literature, and to whom, by the peculiarity of their condition, fame was an absolute nullity. Who were these writers who thus contemned fame? Who pursued the delicate tasks of the illuminator and the calligrapher? Who adorned Psalters with a religious patience, and expended a whole month in contriving the vignette of an initial letter? Who were these artists who worked for no gain? In those ages the ecclesiastics were the only persons who answer to this character; and it would only be in the silence and leisure of the monastery that such imaginative genius and such refined art could find their dwelling-place. I have sometimes thought that it was Père Hardouin’s conviction of all this literary industry of the monks which led him to indulge his extravagant conjecture, that the classical writings of antiquity were the fabrications of this sedentary brotherhood; and his “pseudo-Virgilius” and “pseudo-Horatius” astonished the world, though they provoked its laughter.
The Gothic mediæval periods were ages of imagination, when in art works of amazing magnitude were produced, while the artists sent down no claims to posterity. We know not who were the numerous writers of these voluminous Romances, but, what is far more surprising, we are nearly as unacquainted with those great and original architects who covered our land with the palatial monastery, the church, and the cathedral. In the religious societies themselves the genius of the Gothic architect was found: the bishop or the abbot planned while they opened their treasury; and the sculptor and the workmen were the tenants of the religious house. The devotion of labour and of faith raised these wonders, while it placed them beyond the unvalued glory which the world can give.13
We cannot think less than Père Hardouin that there were no poetical and imaginative monks—Homers in cowls, and Virgils who chanted vespers—who could compose in their unoccupied day more beautiful romances than their crude legends, or the dry annals of the Leiger book of their abbey. Some knowledge these writers had of the mythological, and even the Homeric and Virgilian fictions, for they often gave duplicates of the classical fables of antiquity. Circe was a fair sorceress, the one-eyed Polyphemus a dread giant, and Perseus bestrode a winged dragon, before they were reflected in romances. But what we discover peculiar in these works is a strange mixture of sacred and profane matters, always treated in a manner which scents of the cloister. Before he enters the combat, the knight is often on his knees, invoking his patron-saint; he proffers his vows on holy relics; while ladies placed in the last peril, or the most delicate positions, by their fervent repetitions of the sign of the cross, or a vow to found an abbey, are as certainly saved: and for another refined stroke of the monachal invention, the heroes often close their career in a monastery or a hermitage. The monkish morality which sat loosely about them was, however, rigid in its ceremonial discipline. Lancelot de Lac leaves the bed of the guilty Genevra, the Queen of the good king Arthur, at the ring of the matin-bell, to assist at mass; so scrupulous were such writers that even in criminal levities they should not neglect all the offices of the Church. The subject of one of these great romances is a search after the cup which held the real blood of Christ; and this history of the Sang-real forms a series of romances. Who but a monk would have thought, and even dared to have written it down, that all the circumstances in this romance were not only certain, but were originally set down by the hand of Jesus himself? and further dared to observe, that Jesus never wrote but twice before—the Lord’s Prayer, and the sentence on the woman taken in adultery. Such a pious, or blasphemous fraud, was not unusual among the dark fancies of the monastic legendaries.
Some of these Homers must have left their lengthening Iliad, as Homer himself seems to have done, unfinished; tired, or tiring, for no doubt there was often a rehearsal, “the tale half told” was resumed by some Elisha who caught the mantle his more inspired predecessor had let fall. It appears evident that several were the continuators of a favourite romance; and from deficient attention or deficient skill a fatal discrepancy has been detected in the identical characters—the ordinary fate of those who write after the ideas of another, with indistinct conceptions, or with fancies going contrary to those of the first inventor.
These metrical romances in manuscript, and the printed prose in their original editions, are now very costly. By the antiquary and the poet these tomes may be often opened. With the antiquary they have served as the veritable registers of their ages. The French antiquaries, and Carte in England, have often illustrated by those ancient romances many obscure points in geography and history. Except in the mere machinery of their fancy, these writers had no motive to pervert leading facts, for these served to give a colour of authenticity to their pretended history, or to fix their locality. As they had not the erudition to display, nor were aware of the propriety of copying, the customs and manners of the age of their legendary hero, they have faithfully transmitted their own; we should never have had but for this lucky absurdity the “Tale of Thebes” turned into a story of the middle ages; while Alexander the Great is but the ideal of a Norman baron in the splendour and altitude of the conception of the writers. It was the ignorance of the illuminators of our Latin and Saxon manuscripts of any other country than their own which enabled Strutt to place before the eye a pictorial exhibition of our Anglo-Saxon fathers. Compared with the realities of these originals, with all their faults of tediousness, the modern copiers of ancient times, in their mock scenes of other ages, too often reflect in the cold moonlight of their fancy a shadowy unsubstantial antiquity.
The influence of these fabulous achievements of unconquerable heroes and of self-devoted lovers over the intellect and the passions of men and women, during that vast interval of time when they formed the sole literature, was omnipotent. In the early romances of chivalry, when their genius was purely