Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/657

Rh ROMANCE 633 bodiraent of its ideal in the Round Table romances. The characters of Galaad and the original Perceval represent types of unattainable perfection, and were therefore models which, although commanding reverence, failed to excite as deep an interest as did the second Perceval, Sir Lancelot, Sir Tristan, and Sir Gawain. In these the noblest qualities were blemished by human frailties, and, as a necessary consequence, the knights miscarried a little below the summit of perfect achievement. Walter Map cannot be sufficiently eulogized for the tact and skill with which he drew the two first-named personages. Galaad is brought upon the stage for but a very short time, and is then dis- missed in a blaze of saintly glory, while Perceval, although adapted from the French writer's purer knight of that name, is allowed a much larger space upon the canvas, at the cost of a few minor sins which suffice to ensure his failure and to prove him a man. The other knights are brave, generous, self-sacrificing, and devout, but the indis- pensable virtue of chastity is absent from their lives, and they are foredoomed to misfortune. The perfect ideal, however, underlies the description of all their acts and motives, and the reader or hearer was never allowed to forget it amid the more powerful attractions of the story. The real prototype of the chivalric romance was the ancient epic : the Greek and Latin poems upon the win- ning of the Golden Fleece, the siege of Troy, the wander- ings of Ulysses and of ^Eneas, furnish the truest parallel ical to the mediaeval romances of knighthood. The tales Qces -which are usually dignified with the name of "classical romances " have really no claim to that rank ; they were produced in the age of decadence and correspond much more closely to the mediaeval fabliau and the 17th-century novel than to the romance proper. As a matter of course every nation had its legends and popular tales, co-exist- ent with literary works of greater importance ; but the Greeks at least, and the Romans following their example, never condescended during their ages of intellectual vigour to put such figments into written form, so that even the famous Milesian tales are now quite lost. It was not until the Greeks became a widely dispersed, a subject and deteriorated race, and not till the strength and manhood of Rome were buried in the slough of imperial corruption, that sophists and rhetoricians began to construct those artificial tales which we call Greek and Latin romances. They form, however, an epoch, as the earliest prose works of imagination in a European language, and cannot there- fore remain unnoticed here. They were succeeded in time by Christian narratives, usually woven into the lives of saints or used as illustrations in the sermons of great preachers ; these latter formed a transition to the semi- religious story of the Grail, a bowl or goblet confounded with the chalice used at the Last Supper, with the cup used to collect the precious blood of our Lord, and sym- bolically with the Holy Sepulchre itself. The achievers of the Grail-quest, or kings of the Grail, were typified in the Knights Templars and the Knights of St John ; thus the true school of romance arose in intimate connexion with the changes in European life and manners which were brought about by the crusades. iaux. The chansons de geste, which constituted a poetical intro- duction to the romances of chivalry in France, were fol- lowed by the fabliaux, metrical novelettes which furnished material to the Italian writers of prose tales in the 14th and 15th centuries, a form of composition which was not acclimatized elsewhere than in Italy till the 16th century, and which then became the remote prototype of the modern novel. The older and nobler knighthood blossomed in France for the last time in Bayard, in England in Sir Philip Sidney ; but the genuine literature of chivalric romance may be said to have come to an end with the 15th century. The knightly romances produced in the 16th century were belated and artificial examples of their class ; and, although the effects of the conquest of Granada and the discovery of America did not wholly put an end to the lingering romantic spirit in Spain, it hardly sur- vived them for half a century. Hence the inferior char- acter of most of the libros de caballerias, which chiefly date from the 16th century. Out of them grew the fictions known as 16th and 17th century romance in Spain, France, and England, monstrous and uninviting examples of per- verted ingenuity, utterly dissonant from the literature of pure romance as we conceive it in the chivalrous fictions of the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries. A more practical and utilitarian spirit set in with the latter half of the 17th century, in which readers found themselves out of sympathy with the imaginative and mysterious atmosphere of romance. Accordingly the modern novel arose, a form of composition in which the manners and customs of everyday life were more or less faithfully depicted, and which has remained in undiminished popularity to the present time. The subject will be dealt with in the following order : I. Greek and Latin romance, under the subdivisions (a) classical and post-classical prose fictions and (6) pseudo- classical works. II. Mediaeval romance, embracing (a) the Arthurian cycle, (6) the Charlemagne cycle, (c) the Spanish cycle, (d) Teutonic and Anglo -Danish, and (e) unaffiliated. III. Modern romance to the 17th century. I. GREEK AND LATIN ROMANCE. (a) Classical and Post-Classical Prose Fictions. Although the distance in manner is immense between Prose, the Ass of Lucian and the Amadis de Gaula, and again between the latter and Ivanhoe or Eugenie Grandet, there are few varieties of modern fiction which are not faintly shadowed forth in the literatures of Greece and Rome (including in this denomination the post-classical periods of Italy and Byzantium) : fables and tales, historical, philosophical, and religious novels, love-stories and narra- tives of adventure, marvellous voyages, collections of fic- titious letters all forms are represented. . As even the Andaman Islander and the Bushman have their stories, it is reasonable to suppose that the Greek, who attained a high state of civilization at an extremely remote period, had long been familiar with this method of intellectual gratification. Artistic form was first given to the higher class of such narrations by the lonians of the Asiatic colonies, when they sang the deeds of gods and heroes in epic poetry and put together the story of Troy now current under the name of Homer. From the Attic Greeks belong- ing to the same stock came the drama in its highest de- velopment, a fresh step in the representation of events in oral shape. Greek romance is a double misnomer. First, the word " romance " is wrongly applied to the tales we shall shortly discuss ; and secondly, we have no right to call anything in art or literature Greek unless it wa,s produced before the time of Alexander the Great, either in Hellas or Ionia or Sicily, or, say, between 800 and 300 B.C. After the defeat of the Greeks at Chaeronea, Mace- donia became the ruling centre, and the free political life of the Greek cities passed away. The conquests of Alex- ander, a Graeco-Albanian monarch, spread Greek civiliza- tion throughout the known world, but crushed Greece proper out of existence. This civilization (see GREECE, vol. xi. p. 136 sq.), influencing peoples foreign to the Greek race, is designated Hellenistic as opposed to the Hellenic, and the chief note of Hellenistic literature is that of imitation. The original springs of Hellenic poetry were dried up, and from the 3d century B.C. the newly XX. 80