Chapter II · (continued 2)

The fact is that it is precisely the beauté formelle, assisted as it is by the peculiar spirit of which so much has been said already, which constitutes the beauty of these poems: and that these characteristics are present, not of course in uniform measure, but certainly in the great majority of the chansons from Roland to the Bastard. Of course if a man sits down with a preconceived idea of an epic poem, it is more likely than not that his preconceived idea will be of something very different from a chanson de geste. And if, refusing to depart from his preconceived idea, and making that idea up of certain things taken from the Iliad, certain from the Æneid, certain from the Divina Commedia, certain from Paradise Lost,—if he runs over the list and says to the chanson, "Are you like Homer in this point? Can you match me Virgil in that?" the result will be that the chanson will fail to pass its examination.

But if, with some knowledge of literature in the wide sense, and some love for it, he sits down to take the chansons as they are, and judge them on their merits and by the law of their own poetical state, then I think he will come to a very different conclusion. He will say that their kind is a real kind, a thing by itself, something of which if it were not, nothing else in literature could precisely supply the want. And he will decide further that while the best of them are remarkably good of their kind, few of them can be called positively bad in it. And yet again, if he has been fortunately gifted by nature with that appreciation of form which saves the critic from mere prejudice and crotchet, from mere partiality, he will, I believe, go further still, and say that while owing something to spirit, they owe most to form itself, to the form of the single-assonanced or mono-rhymed tirade, assisted as it is by the singular beauty of Old French in sound, and more particularly by the sonorous recurring phrases of the chanson dialect. No doubt much instruction and some amusement can be got out of these poems as to matters of fact: no doubt some passages in Roland, in Aliscans, in the Couronnement Loys, have a stern beauty of thought and sentiment which deserves every recognition. But these things are not all-pervading, and they can be found elsewhere: the clash and clang of the tirade are everywhere here, and can be found nowhere else.