Note 1039 — Chapter XVII · THE GRECIAN MYTHICAL VEIN COMPARED WITH THAT OF MODERN EUROPE.
Reading edition
See Warton’s History of English Poetry, vol. i. dissert. i. p. xvii. Again, in sect. iii. p. 140: “Vincent de Beauvais, who lived under Louis IX. of France (about 1260), and who, on account of his extraordinary erudition, was appointed preceptor to that king’s sons, very gravely classes Archbishop Turpin’s Charlemagne among the real histories, and places it on a level with Suetonius and Cæsar. He was himself an historian, and has left a large history of the world, fraught with a variety of reading, and of high repute in the Middle Ages; but edifying and entertaining as this work might have been to his contemporaries, at present it serves only to record their prejudices and to characterize their credulity.” About the full belief in Arthur and the Tales of the Round Table during the fourteenth century, and about the strange historical mistakes of the poet Gower in the fifteenth, see the same work, sect. 7. vol. ii. p. 33; sect. 19. vol. ii. p. 239.
“L’auteur de la Chronique de Turpin (says M. Sismondi, Littérature du Midi, vol. i. ch. 7. p. 289) n’avait point l’intention de briller aux yeux du public par une invention heureuse, ni d’amuser les oisifs par des contes merveilleux qu’ils reconnoitroient pour tels: il présentait aux Français tous ces faits étranges comme de l’histoire, et la lecture des légendes fabuleuses avait accoutumé à croire à de plus grandes merveilles encore; aussi plusieurs de ces fables furent-elles reproduites dans la Chronique de St. Denis.”
Again, ib. p. 290: “Souvent les anciens romanciers, lorsqu’ils entreprennent un récit de la cour de Charlemagne, prennent un ton plus élevé: ce ne sont point des fables qu’ils vont conter, c’est de l’histoire nationale,—c’est la gloire de leurs ancêtres qu’ils veulent célébrer, et ils ont droit alors à demander qu’on les écoute avec respect.”
The Chronicle of Turpin was inserted, even so late as the year 1566, in the collection printed by Scardius at Frankfort of early German historians (Ginguené, Histoire Littéraire d’Italie, vol. iv. part ii. ch. 3. p. 157).
To the same point—that these romances were listened to as real stories—see Sir Walter Scott’s Preface to Sir Tristram, p. lxvii. The authors of the Legends of the Saints are not less explicit in their assertions that everything which they recount is true and well-attested (Ampère, c. 14. p. 358).