Page:Romances of Chivalry on Greek Soil.djvu/26

Rh prototype of the cavaliers of the romances. And not only in the ideal of the cavalier, but also in the treatment of love, the atmosphere of the romances has, we might say, been constituted by the atmosphere of the epic, though new ingredients have been added. In the epic, love is only one note, though a leading note; in the romances it is the main motif, and it is idealized, and dissociated from real life, and invested with mystery. The romancers have worked, as we saw, under the influence of the sophistic novelists; they have adopted some of the tricks of their masters; they have introduced the Hellenistic personification of Love—the irresistible king with deadly arrows, and the conception of heroes or heroines who at first defy the god. Now Hellenistic antiquity also influenced the French romances. The authors of the most typical French poems went back to ancient erotic literature, taking Ovid as their doctor egregius and his Ars amatoria as their scripture—quasi evangelium. But the Greek poets, who simply continued an unbroken tradition, did not, like the French, propound a new science of love. They did not subtilize the passion after the manner of the troubadours, or sophisticate it by any such refined doctrines as were woven around it by writers like Alan the Chaplain or expert ladies like the Countess Marie of Champagne, who acted as umpires in affaires de cœur and solved questions of amorous casuistry. Though the Greek romantic poets resorted to various devices, suggested by the Alexandrine novelists, to enhance the interest of their theme by mystery, though they made love more artificial, less naïve, yet, in the sentiment and the psychology, the epic exerted a supreme influence.

From all this it follows that there was a parallel development in French and Greek lands. As the French romances of the twelfth century had a mass of epic