Romance | Page 7

unreal, until, in the fourteenth century, a stout townsman,
who ticketed bales in a custom- house, and was the best English poet of

his time, found them ridiculous. In Sir Thopas Chaucer parodies the
popular literature of his day. Sir Thopas is a great reader of romances;
he models himself on the heroes whose deeds possess his imagination,
and scours the English countryside, seeking in vain for the fulfilment of
his dreams of prowess.
So Romance declined; and by the end of the seventeenth century the
fashion is completely reversed; the pendulum has swung back; now it is
the literature inspired by the old classical models that is real, and
handles actual human interests, while Romantic literature has become
remote, fictitious, artificial. This does not mean that the men of the
later seventeenth century believed in the gods and Achilles, but not in
the saints and Arthur. It means that classical literature was found best
to imitate for its form. The greater classical writers had described the
life of man, as they saw it, in direct and simple language, carefully
ordered by art. After a long apprenticeship of translation and imitation,
modern writers adopted the old forms, and filled them with modern
matter. The old mythology, when it was kept, was used allegorically
and allusively. Common-sense, pointedly expressed, with some
traditional ornament and fable, became the matter of poetry.
A rough summary of this kind is enough to show how large a question
is involved in the history of Romance. All literary history is a long
record of the struggle between those two rival teachers of man--books,
and the experience of life. Good books describe the world, and teach
whole generations to interpret the world. Because they throw light on
the life of man, they enjoy a vast esteem, and are set up in a position of
authority. Then they generate other books; and literature, receding
further and further from the source of truth, becomes bookish and
conventional, until those who have been taught to see nature through
the spectacles of books grow uneasy, and throw away the distorting
glasses, to look at nature afresh with the naked eye. They also write
books, it may be, and attract a crowd of imitators, who produce a
literature no less servile than the literature it supplants.
This movement of the sincere and independent human mind is found in
the great writers of all periods, and is called the Return to Nature. It is

seen in Pope no less than in Wordsworth; in The Rape of the Lock no
less than in Peter Bell. Indeed the whole history of the mock-heroic,
and the work of Tassoni, Boileau, and Pope, the three chief masters in
that kind, was a reassertion of sincerity and nature against the stilted
conventions of the late literary epic. The Iliad is the story of a quarrel.
What do men really quarrel about? Is there any more distinctive mark
of human quarrels than the eternal triviality of the immediate cause?
The insulting removal of a memorial emblem from an Italian city; the
shifting of a reading-desk from one position to another in a French
church; the playful theft of a lock of hair by an amorous young English
nobleman--these were enough, in point of fact, to set whole
communities by the ears, and these are the events celebrated in The
Rape of the Bucket, The Rape of the Lectern, The Rape of the Lock.
How foolish it is to suppose that nature and truth are to be found in one
school of poetry to the exclusion of another! The eternal virtues of
literature are sincerity, clarity, breadth, force, and subtlety. They are to
be found, in diverse combinations, now here and now there. While the
late Latin Christian poets were bound over to Latin models--to elegant
reminiscences of a faded mythology and the tricks of a professional
rhetoric--there arose a new school, intent on making literature real and
modern. These were the Romance poets. If they pictured Theseus as a
duke, and Jason as a wandering knight, it was because they thought of
them as live men, and took means to make them live for the reader or
listener. The realism of the early literature of the Middle Ages is
perhaps best seen in old Irish. The monk bewails the lawlessness of his
wandering thoughts, which run after dreams of beauty and pleasure
during the hour of divine service. The hermit in the wood describes,
with loving minuteness, the contents of his larder. Never was there a
fresher or more spontaneous poetry than the poetry of this early
Christian people. But it is not in the direct line of descent, for it was
written in the Celtic speech of a people who did not achieve the
government of Europe. The French romances