Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/220

 212 first century, it is not strange to find it noticed here; this passage probably contains one of the earliest references to it” (op. cit., vol. ii, p. 212, note). Lamprecht’s poem and Weismann’s ambiguous hint were probably familiar to other students of the Grail cycle as they were to me. Dr. Gaster is the first, to my knowledge, to take Weismann's hint au sérieux.

Before examining the hypothesis, I would note a statement in which, if I may venture to say so, the fallacy underlying Dr. Gaster’s whole argument is especially prominent. I refer to the characterisation of the twelfth-century French Alexander romances (supra, p. 59): “One has only to see how they dealt with their originals, how they transferred the whole scenery from hoary antiquity to their own time, and to their own courts, to understand the liberty a poet of those times could take with his originals.” So far from the mediæval poet transferring hoary antiquity to his own time, he projected his own time back into hoary antiquity—a very different matter—and this he did because he was unconscious of any difference between the two. In the words of the most eminent living master of mediæval literature, “Le moyen âge n’a jamais eu conscience de ce qui le distinguait profondement de l’antiquité; il s’est toujours représenté le monde comme ayant été de tout temps ce qu’il le voyait être; il se figurait naïvement Alexandre avec ses capitaines comme un roi de France ou d’Angleterre entouré de ses barons.” What follows? this—the mediæval poet never felt the need of renaming his antique heroes, of shifting the scenes of their exploits. An hypothesis which starts with the assumption that a twelfth-century writer took an Alexander story and transferred it into the Arthur cycle, changing names and locale, at once excites suspicion. The thing is not, indeed, impossible, but it is extremely unlikely. We know almost