Brief History of English and American Literature | Page 5

sometimes from authentic English history, sometimes from the
legendary history of ancient Britain, Denmark, and Scotland, as in Lear,
Hamlet, and Macbeth, ignores the Saxon period altogether. And
Spenser, who gives in his second book of the Faerie Queene, a resumé
of the reigns of fabulous British kings--the supposed ancestors of
Queen Elizabeth, his royal patron--has nothing to say of the real kings
of early England. So completely had the true record faded away that it
made no appeal to the imaginations of our most patriotic poets. The
Saxon Alfred had been dethroned by the British Arthur, and the
conquered Welsh had imposed their fictitious genealogies upon the
dynasty of the conquerors. In the Roman de Rou, a verse chronicle of
the dukes of Normandy, written by the Norman Wace, it is related that
at the battle of Hastings the French jongleur, Taillefer, spurred out
before the van of William's army, tossing his lance in the air and
chanting of "Charlemagne and of Roland, of Oliver and the peers who
died at Roncesvals." This incident is prophetic of the victory which
Norman song, no less than Norman arms, was to win over England.
The lines which Taillefer {19} sang were from the Chanson de Roland,
the oldest and best of the French hero sagas. The heathen Northmen,
who had ravaged the coasts of France in the 10th century, had become

in the course of one hundred and fifty years, completely identified with
the French. They had accepted Christianity, intermarried with the
native women, and forgotten their own Norse tongue. The race thus
formed was the most brilliant in Europe. The warlike, adventurous
spirit of the vikings mingled in its blood with the French nimbleness of
wit and fondness for display. The Normans were a nation of
knights-errant, with a passion for prowess and for courtesy. Their
architecture was at once strong and graceful. Their women were skilled
in embroidery, a splendid sample of which is preserved in the famous
Bayeux tapestry, in which the conqueror's wife, Matilda, and the ladies
of her court wrought the history of the Conquest.
This national taste for decoration expressed itself not only in the
ceremonious pomp of feast and chase and tourney, but likewise in
literature. The most characteristic contribution of the Normans to
English poetry were the metrical romances or chivalry tales. These
were sung or recited by the minstrels, who were among the retainers of
every great feudal baron, or by the jongleurs, who wandered from court
to castle. There is a whole literature of these romans d' aventure in the
Anglo-Norman dialect of French. Many of them are {20} very
long--often thirty, forty, or fifty thousand lines--written sometimes in a
strophic form, sometimes in long Alexandrines, but commonly in the
short, eight-syllabled rhyming couplet. Numbers of them were turned
into English verse in the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries. The translations
were usually inferior to the originals. The French trouvere (finder or
poet) told his story in a straight-forward, prosaic fashion, omitting no
details in the action and unrolling endless descriptions of dresses,
trappings, gardens, etc. He invented plots and situations full of fine
possibilities by which later poets have profited, but his own handling of
them was feeble and prolix. Yet there was a simplicity about the old
French language and a certain elegance and delicacy in the diction of
the trouveres which the rude, unformed English failed to catch.
The heroes of these romances were of various climes: Guy of Warwick,
and Richard the Lion Heart of England, Havelok the Dane, Sir Troilus
of Troy, Charlemagne, and Alexander. But, strangely enough, the
favorite hero of English romance was that mythical Arthur of Britain,

whom Welsh legend had celebrated as the most formidable enemy of
the Sassenach invaders and their victor in twelve great battles. The
language and literature of the ancient Cymry or Welsh had made no
impression on their Anglo-Saxon conquerors. There are a few Welsh
borrowings in the English speech, such as bard and druid; but in the
old Anglo-Saxon literature there are {21} no more traces of British
song and story than if the two races had been sundered by the ocean
instead of being borderers for over six hundred years. But the Welsh
had their own national traditions, and after the Norman Conquest these
were set free from the isolation of their Celtic tongue and, in an indirect
form, entered into the general literature of Europe. The French came
into contact with the old British literature in two places: in the Welsh
marches in England and in the province of Brittany in France, where
the population is of Cymric race and spoke, and still to some extent
speaks, a Cymric dialect akin to the Welsh.
About 1140 Geoffrey of Monmouth, a Benedictine monk, seemingly of
Welsh descent,