Epic and Romance | Page 7

convey some notion of mystery
and fantasy. A general distinction of this kind, whatever names may be
used to render it, can be shown, in medieval literature, to hold good of
the two large groups of narrative belonging to the earlier and the later
Middle Ages respectively. Beowulf might stand for the one side,
Lancelot or Gawain for the other. It is a difference not confined to
literature. The two groups are distinguished from one another, as the
respectable piratical gentleman of the North Sea coast in the ninth or
tenth century differs from one of the companions of St. Louis. The
latter has something fantastic in his ideas which the other has not. The
Crusader may indeed be natural and brutal enough in most of his ways,
but he has lost the sobriety and simplicity of the earlier type of rover. If
nothing else, his way of fighting--the undisciplined cavalry
charge--would convict him of extravagance as compared with men of
business, like the settlers of Iceland for example.
The two great kinds of narrative literature in the Middle Ages might be
distinguished by their favourite incidents and commonplaces of
adventure. No kind of adventure is so common or better told in the
earlier heroic manner than the defence of a narrow place against odds.

Such are the stories of Hamther and Sorli in the hall of Ermanaric, of
the Niblung kings in the hall of Attila, of the Fight of Finnesburh, of
Walter at the Wasgenstein, of Byrhtnoth at Maldon, of Roland in the
Pyrenees. Such are some of the finest passages in the Icelandic Sagas:
the death of Gunnar, the burning of Njal's house, the burning of
Flugumyri (an authentic record), the last fight of Kjartan in Svinadal,
and of Grettir at Drangey. The story of Cynewulf and Cyneheard in the
English Chronicle may well have come from a poem in which an attack
and defence of this sort were narrated.
The favourite adventure of medieval romance is something different,--a
knight riding alone through a forest; another knight; a shock of lances;
a fight on foot with swords, "racing, tracing, and foining like two wild
boars"; then, perhaps, recognition--the two knights belong to the same
household and are engaged in the same quest.
Et Guivrez vers lui esperone, De rien nule ne l'areisone, Ne Erec ne li
sona mot.
Erec, l. 5007.
This collision of blind forces, this tournament at random, takes the
place, in the French romances, of the older kind of combat. In the older
kind the parties have always good reasons of their own for fighting;
they do not go into it with the same sort of readiness as the wandering
champions of romance.
The change of temper and fashion represented by the appearance and
the vogue of the medieval French romances is a change involving the
whole world, and going far beyond the compass of literature and
literary history. It meant the final surrender of the old ideas,
independent of Christendom, which had been enough for the Germanic
nations in their earlier days; it was the close of their heroic age. What
the "heroic age" of the modern nations really was, may be learned from
what is left of their heroic literature, especially from three groups or
classes,--the old Teutonic alliterative poems on native subjects; the
French Chansons de Geste; and the Icelandic Sagas.

All these three orders, whatever their faults may be, do something to
represent a society which is "heroic" as the Greeks in Homer are heroic.
There can be no mistake about the likeness. To compare the
imaginations and the phrases of any of these barbarous works with the
poetry of Homer may be futile, but their contents may be compared
without reference to their poetical qualities; and there is no question
that the life depicted has many things in common with Homeric life,
and agrees with Homer in ignorance of the peculiar ideas of medieval
chivalry.
The form of society in an heroic age is aristocratic and magnificent. At
the same time, this aristocracy differs from that of later and more
specialised forms of civilisation. It does not make an insuperable
difference between gentle and simple. There is not the extreme division
of labour that produces the contempt of the lord for the villain. The
nobles have not yet discovered for themselves any form of occupation
or mode of thought in virtue of which they are widely severed from the
commons, nor have they invented any such ideal of life or conventional
system of conduct as involves an ignorance or depreciation of the
common pursuits of those below them. They have no such elaborate
theory of conduct as is found in the chivalrous society of the Middle
Ages. The great man is the man who is best at the things with which