Page:Romances of Chivalry on Greek Soil.djvu/28

Rh comedy, may have been the most suitable to the aptitudes of the language when the principle of quantity was abandoned for that of accent.

In the vocabulary and diction the influence of the epic is patent. But the romantic poets elaborated the style by devices. They cultivated the use of long epithets of seven or eight syllables which filled a whole verse, and they could appeal to classical literature for the propriety of this device. Such compounds occur occasionally in Digenes; they are a feature in the romances. Some of them become conventional, like, 'endued with a million graces,' or , 'daughter of the sun.' They are often accumulated in descriptions of art and beauty, such epithets, for instance, as , 'with neck like crystal snow,' , 'with round shapely chin.' The poet of Rhodamne converts her name into —reminding us of Liebröschen or Love-lily.

If I may now briefly resume my argument, the Greeks already possessed, along with their own technique, all the ideas, material, and apparatus for romances of chivalry when the Western knights came and established themselves within their borders. And just on this account it is not surprising that, although the commingling of the two cultures, Western and Greek, afforded to the French literature of chivalry an unrivalled opportunity for exercising here the potency of charm which it wrought elsewhere, there was no result that can be compared, for instance, to the reception of French romances in Germany. The romantic literature of the West did not come as a new revelation to a people who possessed in their own literature motives, ideals, and a tradition of fantastic fiction which were in many respects homogeneous. Yet the close contact with the French and Italian settlers did exert an influence. I do