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the middle ages. M. Boutmy has
produced an analysis of our political development which our
Universities have justly recognized. Our friend M. Angellier of the
École Normale has written what is acknowledged by the more learned
Scotch to be the principal existing monograph upon Robert Burns; Mr.
Kipling himself has snatched the attention of M. Chevrillon. You know
how many names might be added to this list to prove the close, applied
and penetrating manner in which French scholars have latterly
presented our English writers to their fellow-citizens.
We have both believed that something of the sort might be attempted in
the converse; that a view could be given--a glimpse at least--of that vast
organism whose foundations are in Rome, Coeval with the spring of
Christianity, and whose last growth seems as vigorous and as fecund as
though it were exempt from any laws of age.
But, I say, we know how heavy is the balance against us.
The Gallic ritual is unrecognized, even by our over-numerous class of
clerical antiquarians. The Carolingian cycle is neglected, save perhaps
for a dozen men who have seen the Song of Roland. The Complaints of
Rusteboeuf, the Fabliaux, all the local legendary poetry, all the
chroniclers (save Froissart--for he wrote of us), the tender simplicity of
Joinville, the hard steel of Villehardouin, no one has handled.
The fifteenth century, the storm of the Renaissance, are not taught.
Why, Rabelais himself might be but an unfamiliar name had not a
northern squire of genius rendered to the life three quarters of his work.
The list is interminable. Even the great Drama of the great century is

but a text for our schools leaving no sort of trace upon the mind: and as
for the French moderns (I have heard it from men of liberal education)
they are denied to have written any poetry at all: so exact, so subtle, so
readily to be missed, are the proportions of their speech.
If you ask me why I should myself approach the matter, I can plead
some inheritance of French blood, comparable, I believe, to your own;
and though I have no sort of claim to that unique and accomplished
scholarship which gives you a mastery of the French tongue unmatched
in England, and a complete familiarity with its history, application and
genius, yet I can put to my credit a year of active, if eccentric,
experience in a French barrack room, and a complete segregation
during those twelve memorable months wherein I could study the very
soul of this sincere, creative, and tenacious people.
Your learning, my singular adventure, have increased in us, it must be
confessed, a permanent and reasoned admiration for this people's
qualities. Such an attitude of mind is rare enough and often dangerous:
it is but a qualification the more for beginning the work. It permits us to
follow the main line of the past of the French, to comprehend and not
to be troubled by the energy of their present, to catch the advancing
omens of their future.
Indeed, if anything of France is to be explained in English and to
people reading English, I could not desire a better alliance than yours
and mine.
But if you ask me why the Renaissance especially--or why in the
Renaissance these six poets alone--should have formed the subject of
my first endeavour, I can only tell you that in so vast a province,
whereof the most ample leisure could not in a lifetime exhaust a tithe,
Chance, that happy Goddess, led me at random to their groves.
Whether it will be possible to continue such interpretation I do not
know, but if it be so possible, I know still less what next may be put
into my hands: Racine, perhaps, may call me, or those forgotten men
who urged the Revolution with phrases of fire.

H. BELLOC.
CHELSEA, _January, 1904._
CHARLES OF ORLEANS.
I put down Charles of Orleans here as the first representative of that
long glory which it is the business of this little book to recall: but to
give him such a place at the threshold requires some apology.
The origins of a literary epoch differ according as that epoch is primal
or derivative. There are those edifices of letters which start up, not
indeed out of nothing, but out of things wholly different. Produced by a
shock or a revelation, as two gases lit will, in a sharp explosion, unite
to form a liquid wholly unlike either, so after a great conquest, a battle,
the sudden preaching of a creed, these primal literatures appear in an
epic or a dithyrambic code of awful law. Their first effort is their
mightiest. They come mature. They are allied to that element of the
catastrophic which the modern world (taking its general philosophy
from