Landmarks in French Literature (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Landmarks in French Literature

Some of these qualities are already distinctly visible in the earliest French works which have come down to us - the Chansons de Geste. These poems consist of several groups or cycles of narrative verse, cast in the epic mould. It is probable that they first came into existence in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; and they continued to be produced in various forms of repetition, rearrangement, and at last degradation, throughout the Middle Ages. Originally they were not written, but recited. Their authors were the wandering minstrels, who found, in the crowds collected together at the great fairs and places of pilgrimage of those early days, an audience for long narratives of romance and adventure drawn from the Latin chronicles and the monkish traditions of a still more remote past. The earliest, the most famous, and the finest of these poems is the Chanson de Roland, which recounts the mythical incidents of a battle between Charlemagne, with all his peerage', and the hosts of the Saracens. Apart from some touches of the marvellous - such as the two hundred years of Charlemagne and the intervention of angels - the whole atmosphere of the work is that of eleventh-century France, with its aristocratic society, its barbaric vigour, its brutality, and its high sentiments of piety and honour. The beauty of the poem lies in the grand simplicity of its style. Without a trace of the delicacy and variety of a Homer, farther still from the con summate literary power of a Virgil or a Dante, the unknown minstrel who composed the Chanson de Roland possessed nevertheless a very real gift of art. He worked on a large scale with a bold confidence.

Discarding absolutely the aids of ornament and the rhetorical elaboration of words, he has succeeded in evoking with an extraordinary, naked vividness the scenes of strife and heroism which he describes. At his best - ih the lines of farewell between Roland and Oliver, and the well-known account of Roland's death -he rises to a restrained and severe pathos which is truly sublime. This great work - bleak, bare, gaunt, majestic - stands out, to the readers of to-day, like some huge mass of ancient granite on the far horizon of the literature of France.

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