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Old French Romances By: William Morris (1834-1896) |
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INTRODUCTION
Many of us have first found our way into the Realm of Romance,
properly so called, through the pages of a little crimson clad volume
of the Bibliotheque Elzevirienne. {1} Its last pages contain the
charming Cante Fable of Aucassin et Nicolete, which Mr. Walter
Pater's praises and Mr. Andrew Lang's brilliant version have made
familiar to all lovers of letters. But the same volume contains four
other tales, equally charming in their way, which Mr. William Morris
has now made part of English literature by writing them out again for
us in English, reproducing, as his alone can do of living men's, the
tone, the colour, the charm of the Middle Ages. His versions have
appeared in three successive issues of the Kelmscott Press, which
have been eagerly snapped up by the lovers of good books. It seemed
a pity that these cameos of romance should suffer the same fate as
Mr. Lang's version of Aucassin et Nicolete, which has been swept off
the face of the earth by the Charge of the Six Hundred, who were
lucky enough to obtain copies of the only edition of that little
masterpiece of translation. Mr. Morris has, therefore, consented to
allow his versions of the Romances to be combined into one volume in
a form not unworthy of their excellence but more accessible to those
lovers of books whose purses have a habit of varying in inverse
proportion to the amount of their love. He has honoured me by asking
me to introduce them to that wider public to which they now make
their appeal.
I.
Almost all literary roads lead back to Greece. Obscure as still
remains the origin of that genre of romance to which the tales before
us belong, there is little doubt that their models, if not their
originals, were once extant at Constantinople. Though in no single
instance has the Greek original been discovered of any of these
romances, the mere name of their heroes would be in most cases
sufficient to prove their Hellenic or Byzantine origin. Heracles,
Athis, Porphirias, Parthenopeus, Hippomedon, Protesilaus, Cliges,
Cleomades, Clarus, Berinus names such as these can come but from one
quarter of Europe, and it is as easy to guess how and when they came
as whence. The first two crusades brought the flower of European
chivalry to Constantinople and restored that spiritual union between
Eastern and Western Christendom that had been interrupted by the
great schism of the Greek and Roman Churches. The crusaders came
mostly from the Lands of Romance. Permanent bonds of culture began
to be formed between the extreme East and the extreme West of Europe
by intermarriage, by commerce, by the admission of the nobles of
Byzantium within the orders of chivalry. These ties went on
increasing throughout the twelfth century till they culminated at its
close with the foundation of the Latin kingdom of Constantinople. In
European literature these historic events are represented by the
class of romances represented in this volume, which all trace back to
versions in verse of the twelfth century, though they were done into
prose somewhere in Picardy during the course of the next century.
Daphnis and Chloe, one might say, had revived after a sleep of 700
years, and donned the garb and spoke the tongue of Romance.
II
The very first of our tales illustrates admirably the general course
of their history. It is, in effect, a folk etymology of the name of
the great capital of the Eastern Empire. Constantinople, so runs the
tale, received that name instead of Byzantium, because of the
remarkable career of one of its former rulers, Coustans. M.
Wesselovsky has published in Romania (vi. 1. seq.) the Dit de
l'empereur Constant, the verse original of the story before us, and
in this occur the lines
Pour ce que si nobles estoit
Et que nobles oevres faisoit
L'appielloient Constant le noble
Et pour cou ot Constantinnoble
Li cytes de Bissence a non.
From which it would appear that we are mistaken in thinking of the
capital of Turkey as the "City of Constantine," whereas it is rather
Constant the Noble, and the name Coustant is further explained as
"costing" too much... Continue reading book >>
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