The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory | Page 2

the period that is in print, and much, if not
most, of the German. I know somewhat less of Icelandic and Provençal;
less still of Spanish and Italian as regards this period, but something
also of them: Welsh and Irish I know only in translations. Now it so
happens that--for the period--French is, more than at any other time, the
capital literature of Europe. Very much of the rest is directly translated
from it; still more is imitated in form. All the great subjects, the great
matières, are French in their early treatment, with the exception of the

national work of Spain, Iceland, and in part Germany. All the forms,
except those of the prose saga and its kinsman the German verse
folk-epic, are found first in French. Whosoever knows the French
literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, knows not merely the
best literature in form, and all but the best in matter, of the time, but
that which all the time was imitating, or shortly about to imitate, both
in form and matter.
Again, England presents during this time, though no great English work
written "in the English tongue for English men," yet the spectacle,
unique in history, of a language and a literature undergoing a
sea-change from which it was to emerge with incomparably greater
beauty and strength than it had before, and in condition to vie
with--some would say to outstrip--all actual or possible rivals. German,
if not quite supreme in any way, gives an interesting and fairly
representative example of a chapter of national literary history, less
brilliant and original in performance than the French, less momentous
and unique in promise than the English, but more normal than either,
and furnishing in the epics, of which the Nibelungenlied and Kudrun
are the chief examples, and in the best work of the Minnesingers, things
not only of historical but of intrinsic value in all but the highest degree.
Provençal and Icelandic literature at this time are both of them of far
greater intrinsic interest than English, if not than German, and they are
infinitely more original. But it so happens that the prominent qualities
of form in the first, of matter and spirit in the second, though intense
and delightful, are not very complicated, various, or wide-ranging. If
monotony were not by association a question-begging word, it might be
applied with much justice to both: and it is consequently not necessary
to have read every Icelandic saga in the original, every Provençal lyric
with a strictly philological competence, in order to appreciate the
literary value of the contributions which these two charming isolations
made to European history.
Yet again, the production of Spain during this time is of the smallest,
containing, perhaps, nothing save the Poem of the Cid, which is at once
certain in point of time and distinguished in point of merit; while that

of Italy is not merely dependent to a great extent on Provençal, but can
be better handled in connection with Dante, who falls to the province of
the writer of the next volume. The Celtic tongues were either past or
not come to their chief performance; and it so happens that, by the
confession of the most ardent Celticists who speak as scholars, no
Welsh or Irish texts affecting the capital question of the Arthurian
legends can be certainly attributed to the twelfth or early thirteenth
centuries. It seemed to me, therefore, that I might, without presumption,
undertake the volume. Of the execution as apart from the undertaking
others must judge. I will only mention (to show that the book is not a
mere compilation) that the chapter on the Arthurian Romances
summarises, for the first time in print, the result of twenty years'
independent study of the subject, and that the views on prosody given
in chapter v. are not borrowed from any one.
I have dwelt on this less as a matter of personal explanation, which is
generally superfluous to friends and never disarms foes, than in order to
explain and illustrate the principle of the Series. All its volumes have
been or will be allotted on the same principle--that of occasionally
postponing or antedating detailed attention to the literary production of
countries which were not at the moment of the first consequence, while
giving greater prominence to those that were: but at the same time
never losing sight of the general literary drift of the whole of Europe
during the whole period in each case. It is to guard against such loss of
sight that the plan of committing each period to a single writer, instead
of strapping together bundles of independent essays by specialists, has
been adopted. For a survey of each time is what is aimed at, and a
survey is not to be satisfactorily made but