CHAPTER XVI

HOMER AND THE FRENCH MEDIAEVAL EPICS

Sir Richard Jebb remarks, with truth, that "before any definite solution of the Homeric problem could derive scientific support from such analogies" (with epics of other peoples), "it would be necessary to show that the particular conditions under which the Homeric poems appear in early Greece had been reproduced with sufficient closeness elsewhere." {Footnote: Homer, pp. 131, 132.} Now we can show that the particular conditions under which the Homeric poems confessedly arose were "reproduced with sufficient closeness elsewhere," except that no really great poet was elsewhere present.

This occurred among the Germanic aristocracy, "the Franks of France," in the eleventh, twelfth, and early thirteenth centuries of our era. The closeness of the whole parallel, allowing for the admitted absence in France of a very great and truly artistic poet, is astonishing.

We have first, in France, answering to the Achaean aristocracy, the Frankish noblesse of warriors dwelling in princely courts and strong castles, dominating an older population, owing a practically doubtful fealty to an Over-Lord, the King, passing their days in the chace, in private war, or in revolt against the Over-Lord, and, for all literary entertainment, depending on the recitations of epic poems by jongleurs, who in some cases are of gentle birth, and are the authors of the poems which they recite.

"This national poetry," says M. Gaston Paris, "was born and mainly developed among the warlike class, princes, lords, and their courts.... At first, no doubt, some of these men of the sword themselves composed and chanted lays" (like Achilles), "but soon there arose a special class of poets ... They went from court to court, from castle ... Later, when the townsfolk began to be interested in their chants, they sank a degree, and took their stand in public open places ..." {Footnote: Literature Franзaise au Moyen Age, pp. 36, 37. 1898.}

In the Iliadwe hear of no minstrels in camp: in the Odysseya prince has a minstrel among his retainers—Demodocus, at the court of Phaeacia; Phemius, in the house of Odysseus. In Ionia, when princes had passed away, rhapsodists recited for gain in marketplaces and at fairs. The parallel with France is so far complete.

The French national epics, like those of the Achaeans, deal mainly with legends of a long past legendary age. To the French authors the greatness and the fortunes of the Emperor Charles and other heroic heads of great Houses provide a theme. The topics of song are his wars, and the prowess and the quarrels of his peers with the Emperor and among themselves. These are seen magnified through a mist of legend; Saracens are substituted for Gascon foes, and the great Charles, so nobly venerable a figure in the oldest French epic (the Chanson de Roland, circ.1050-1070 in its earliest extant form), is more degraded, in the later epics, than Agamemnon himself. The "machinery" of the gods in Homer is replaced by the machinery of angels, but the machinery of dreams is in vogue, as in the Iliad and Odyssey. The sources are traditional and legendary.

We know that brief early lays of Charles and other heroes had existed, and they may have been familiar to the French epic poets, but they were not merely patched into the epics. The form of verse is not ballad-like, but a series of laissesof decasyllabic lines, each laissepresenting one assonance, not rhyme. As time went on, rhyme and Alexandrine lines were introduced, and the old epics were expanded, altered, condensed, remaniйs, with progressive changes in taste, metre, language, manners, and ways of life.

Finally, an age of Cyclic poems began; authors took new characters, whom they attached by false genealogies to the older heroes, and they chanted the adventures of the sons of the former heroes, like the Cyclic poet who sang of the son of Odysseus by Circe. All these conditions are undeniably "true parallels" to "the conditions under which the Homeric poems appeared." The only obvious point of difference vanishes if we admit, with Sir Richard Jebb and M. Salomon Reinach, the possibility of the existence of written texts in the Greece of the early iron age.

We do not mean texts prepared for a readingpublic. In France such a public, demanding texts for reading, did not arise till the decadence of the epic. The oldest French texts of their epics are small volumes, each page containing some thirty lines in one column. Such volumes were carried about by the jongleurs, who chanted their own or other men's verses. They were not in the hands of readers. {Footnote: Йpopйes Franзaises, Lйon Gautier, vol. i. pp. 226-228. 1878.}

An example of an author-reciter, Jendeus de Brie (he was the maker of the first version of the Bataille Loquifer, twelfth century) is instructive. Of Jendeus de Brie it is said that "he wrote the poem, kept it very carefully, taught it to no man, made much gain out of it in Sicily where he sojourned, and left it to his son when he died." Similar statements are made in Renaus de Montauban(the existing late version is of the thirteenth century) about Huon de Villeneuve, who would not part with his poem for horses or furs, or for any price, and about other poets. {Footnote: Йpopйes Franзaises, Lйon Gautier, vol. i. p. 215, Note I.}

These early jongleurswere men of position and distinction; their theme was the gestesof princes; they were not under the ban with which the Church pursued vulgar strollers, men like the Greek rhapsodists. Pindar's story that Homer wrote the Cypria{Footnote: Pindari Opera, vol. iii. p. 654. Boeckh.} and gave the copy, as the dowry of his daughter, to Stasinus who married her, could only have arisen in Greece in circumstances exactly like those of Jendeus de Brie. Jendeus lived on his poem by reciting it, and left it to his son when he died. The story of Homer and Stasinus could only have been invented in an age when the possession of the solitary text of a poem was a source of maintenance to the poet. This condition of things could not exist, either when there were no written texts or when such texts were multiplied to serve the wants of a reading public.

Again, a poet in the fortunate position of Jendeus would not teach his Epic in a "school" of reciters unless he were extremely well paid. In later years, after his death, his poem came, through copies good or bad, into circulation.

Late, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, we hear of a "school" of jongleursat Beauvais. In Lent they might not ply their profession, so they gathered at Beauvais, where they could learn cantilenae, new lays. {Footnote: Йpopйes Franзaises, Lйon Gautier, vol. ii. pp. 174, 175.} But by that time the epic was decadent and dying?

The audiences of the jongleurs, too, were no longer, by that time, what they had been. The rich and great, now, had library copies of the epics; not small jongleurs'copies, but folios, richly illuminated and bound, with two or three columns of matter on each page. {Footnote: Ibid., vol. i. p. 228. See, too, photographs of an illuminated, double-columned library copy in La Chancun de Willame., London, 1903.}

The age of recitations from a text in princely halls was ending or ended; the age of a reading public was begun. The earlier condition of the jongleurwho was his own poet, and carefully guarded his copyright in spite of all temptations to permit the copying of his MS., is regarded by Sir Richard Jebb as quite a possible feature of early Greece. He thinks that there was "no wide circulation of writings by numerous copies for a reading public" before the end of the fifth century B.C. As Greek mercenaries could write, and write well, in the seventh to sixth centuries, I incline to think that there may then, and earlier, have been a reading public. However, long before that a man might commit his poems to writing. "Wolf allows that some men did, as early at least as 776 B.C. The verses might never be read by anybody except himself" (the author) "or those to whom he privately bequeathed them" (as Jendeus de Brie bequeathed his poem to his son), "but his end would have been gained." {Footnote: Homer, p. 113.}