Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 1.djvu/560

538 not a participant in the expedition. They were refashioned perhaps seventy-five or a hundred years later, in the reign of Philip Augustus, by another trouvère, who still kept their old tone and substance. They remained poetic narratives of the holy war. In them the knights are fierce and bloody, cruel and sometimes greedy; but their whole emprise makes onward to the end in view, the winning of the holy city. These poems are epic and not romantic: they may even be called historical. The character of Godfrey is developed with legendary or epic propriety, through a heightening of his historic qualities. He equals or excels the other barons in fierce valour, and yet a touch of courtesy tempers his wrath. In Christian meekness and in modesty he surpasses all, and he refuses the throne of Jerusalem until he has been commanded from on high. At that he accepts the kingdom as a sacred charge in defence of which he is to die.

It is otherwise with a number of other chansons composed in the latter part of the twelfth and through the thirteenth century. Some of them (the Chanson des chétifs, for example) had probably to do with the First Crusade. Others, like the various poems which tell of the Chevalier au Cygne, were inaptly forced into connection with the family of Godfrey. They have become adventurous, and are studded with irrelevant marvels, rather than assisted to their denouements by serious supernatural intervention. Monsters appear, and incongruous romantic episodes; Godfrey's ancestor has become the Swan-knight, and he himself duplicates the exploits previously ascribed to that half-fairy person. Knightly manners, from brutal have become courteous. Women throng these poems, and the romantic love of women enters, although not in the finished guise in which it plays so dominant a rôle in the Arthurian Cycle. Such themes, unknown to the earlier crusading chansons, would have fitted ill with a martial theme driving on through war and carnage (not through "adventures") to the holy end in view.