Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/668

Rh 644 ROMANCE hypothesis, which requires to be associated with the corol- lary that British translations or adaptations were formed when the Roman influence began to wane, would account for the curious circumstance that some of the Greek and Oriental fictions are found in Anglo-Saxon versions of much greater antiquity than any that have survived in the other vernaculars of Europe. Direct transference of such works from classical codices can hardly be presumed to have been the custom of a rough and semi-barbarous nation of Teutonic invaders ; the medium must have been the existence of Brito-Latin and British poems among the conquered people. The success of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia and of his Merlin brought indignant comment from some of the Anglo-Norman historians, but it inflamed the minds of other writers already excited by the extraordinary events of the period. The result was the genesis of modern fiction. Within a few years after Geoffrey's publication the Norman Wace translated the Historia Britonum into French verse (1155), making some additions; and in his work entitled Roman de Brut we find the words " King Ertur made the Round Table Of which Bretons tell many a fable " from which we may infer that the Round Table stories, which led to the construction of the French romances, were derived directly from Brittany, just as Geoffrey de- clares his Historia to have been. Wace, as a Jersey man, could have made no confusion between the Waleis of Cambria and the Bretun of Armorica. Recapitulating what has been already said, we may chronologically tabulate the first elements of Arthurian story thus I. Arthur, Guinevere, Merlin (in Geoffrey), 1136-49 ; II. the Round Table (as shown by Wace), before 1155; III. Lancelot; IV. the Grail; and V. Tnstan. ist's The original Tristan was earlier than the Lancelot, and ristan vas presumably a French poem (or prose work ?), written l< *, about 1160 by Luc de Gast, a trouvere of English birth mcdot. w ^ li ye d near Salisbury, and is said to have had access to the book of stories referred to in a previous paragraph. The poem (?) and the book have perished, and the Tristan story was written under the name of Le Bret ( = the Breton), to distinguish it from Le Brut ( = the Briton) of Wace, at a later date, with so much additional matter that it must be placed after the Lancelot. Walter MAP (q.v.) of Here- ford, who died archdeacon of Oxford in the year 1210, was a man of Welsh origin or kindred. In 1185 Hue de Rote- lande of Credenhill near Hereford wrote a French romantic poem, in which the names of the characters are all derived from the Thebais of Statius, but the incidents are wholly imaginative or derived from other sources. In it he speaks, in deprecation of any blame for his falsification of the truth of history, of Walter Map as being quite as great a romancer as himself. In connexion with statements fre- quently repeated in the early MSS. of the romances, this remark suffices to prove that before 1185 Walter Map had already published his Lancelot. We may fairly put the date before 1175, say about 1170 ; and it would be prob- ably correct to assume that the Lancelot was a French poem (or prose work ?) composed while the author was still young (1165-70). It has perished, like Luc de Gast's Tristan, and we can only conjecture that it had some similar connexion with the Achilles of Statius to that of Hue de Rotelande's poem with the Thebais. It was, how- ever, reduced to or rewritten in prose and amplified before 1200 in the form in which we now find it in several old MSS. (none earlier than the 13th century). It is certain that Rustighello or Rusticien of Pisa was employed about faithful") to " Alcmena," and may have meant "manly," "robust." Arthur proves his fitness for kingship by the performance of wonder- ful feats like the labours of Hercules. 1270-75 to unify or harmonize in a single compilation the scattered Arthurian romances, and it is considered probable that the result was the French prose original of the exist- ing Morte Arthur. But it is also certain that there exist prose Arthurian romances in MSS. at least as old as 1270, and that they were copies of yet older ones. Rusticien's work must have been simply one of compression and com- bination. We know from the MSS. of two different prose translations of a totally different romantic chronicle (the Pseudo-Turpin's Chronicle of Charlemagne), written in and about 1200, that metrical narrative was losing credit and that French prose composition had already set in. This statement, which refers to the French kingdom, is likely to be yet more applicable to England, where metrical suc- cess would naturally be more difficult to achieve than in the true home of French speech. As prose was current in France before 1200, it is not rash to assume that it had an earlier and less limited currency in England. Reckon- ing thus we may assume that the Lancelot and the Tristan were written in prose before 1190. The Round Table and the Grail are so closely connected Early that it is difficult to regard them as having had each a Round separate origin. The mention of the former by Wace Ta1 ? le proves the existence of stories of a Round Table current Grai i before 1155. The Round Table as it appears in the current stories, texts of the romances is simply an important portion of the furniture of the narratives : it does not represent a cycle of incidents or even a number of special episodes. One might suppose from the form of Wace's phrase that the word was with him, as it is now, a general epithet to designate Arthurian stories, rather than merely the name of a material object, as it is in the romances. But we cannot assume the fact for lack of specific information. The first and also the chief instance which we have of the appearance of the- Round Table (beyond Wace's allusion) is in the existing Lancelot, which we may refer to about 1190. In the epilogue of the Tristan, Helie de Borron speaks of Luc de Gast's original work on that hero as the first of " les grans livres de la tauble roonde." There is no reason to imagine that this phrase was written after the year 1200; and it indicates sufficiently that several books were collectively styled " Romances of the Round Table " between 1155 and the end of the century. One of these books was Joseph of Arimathea, or the History of the Holy Graal, written about 1170-80 by Robert de Borron or Robert of Bouron, a trouvere born near Meaux. This narrative seems to have taken at least two forms before it was incorporated in the prose Lancelot, and the alterations were so numerous and important that some writers con- sider the Grand Graal to have been a rewriting effected in collaboration by Walter Map and Robert de Borron. The earlier portion of the History of the Graal was but lightly treated on its incorporation in the Lancelot, and the form in which we have it in the separate romance of the Graal is of more modern compilation. The later portion of the Grail story namely, the Queste du Graal, which was utilized by Map (or his recompiler) in the Lancelot differs from that of the French writer in making Galaad the achiever, while Perceval was the hero of the quest in Robert de Borron's work and its recompilations, as well as in the separate prose romance of Perceval and the separate Histoire du Graal. We may conclude that the older works (the original Lancelot, Merlin, and Tristan) had nothing of the Grail in them, and that the publication in French of the Tristan by Luc de Gast and the Lancelot by Walter Map (produced in this succession between 1160 and 1180) were accidentally contemporaneous with Robert de Borron's poem (or prose work) on the grail ( = chalice) or cup of Christ's passion and the table of the Last Supper, based upon an old legend (connected in some way with the