1
10
1
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/2ab260f3d4bae53a5437586eebef32bf.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=LN-COsVywRmNmPlpAlVLDW4klfGwgGZ0k7ydp436nDw9cYS%7EyHXUKm4-Lgniw%7EORVSzKCv7HUpmP%7E2y3tiwQqnXKfnpBjHKVKpPVhN2Q88IFtjZVnnmr%7E2f0YNKzM9ETTphH8BtyaV0MYlnrYCaAj9WV0qIABXVm1Uxs-dwGi4bbqem6G8jmYaE1PFkv8FUYEC7zEP1X3ZfzTH4zsEpYhFv-LsQC4rXdiZlLNMIb0yZNBPithIh1Y0j3qtaU5P6MDI0cQATK6dbtn8-lyfpqaSGwp%7Eih-EPKK25lkTcjkteK0AWxx2v%7Ec-bcaRDqZ0s6NOj6C3JxyKXx1cxG9Wh%7E1w__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
5216a45ccfd779b4d55b10b6c67b7a4c
PDF Text
Text
32
The Chanson de Roland.
been accidental, while both are really inaccurate. Our object
will be attained, however, if, in consequence of what we have
written, the necessity of a joint employment of the two processes
of observation and a priori reasoning, is more clearly kept in
view in future discussions of the subject. What educational
system will prove itself the best, it is impossible to predict; but
that the best will ultimately prevail, when the “struggle for life”
between the various kinds of schools is ended, does not admit of
a doubt. Meanwhile we protest against a resuscitation of the
policy of “levelling-up,” which has been finally exploded in
reference to ecclesiastical establishments, and its application to
education. We claim for private schools no State support
obtained by fresh taxation, nor a share in endowments already
existing, but simply that recognition of their importance which
they justly demand as their due.
Art. II.—The Chanson de Roland.
Le Chanson de Roland, texte critique accompagne d’une tra
duction nouvelle et precede d’une Introduction Historique.
Par L£on Gautier. Tours. 1872.
N quo proelio Eggihardus, regiae mensae praepositus, Anselmus
comes palatii, et Hruodlandus Britannici limitis praefectus, cum aliis compluribus interficiuntur.” This sentence of
Eginhard, the courtier and chronicler of Charles the Great, is
the only line in all history that contains the name of Roland.
Yet a later writer of the next reign, known as “ L’Astronome,”
might well say of the hero and his peers, “ quorum quia nomina
vulgata sunt, dicere supersedi.” Legend is capricious and has
her favourites, who are not those of history ; phantoms that have
secured a renown as real and as immortal as the real men among
whom posterity sees them move. Thus, three centuries after his
death at Roncevaux, it was the song and the name of Roland
that were chanted at Hastings, when Taillefer rode out before
the Norman line. He has become the mediaeval Achilles, “ risen
invulnerable from the stream of Lethe, not of Styx,” a figure
at which Time can throw no dart. Even the glory of Charles
pales before that of the Warden of the March of Britanny ; the
great Emperor becomes like Arthur or Agamemnon, a crowned
shadow, remote, withdrawn, while the epic of the heroic age of
the West is “ La Mort Roland.” His name has gone out to
the ends of the earth, and wherever he passes, he leaves traces of
sword-blows,like thunder-strokes; and footsteps more than human.
I
�The Chanson de Roland.
33
The immense gorge that splits the Pyrenees under the towers
of Marbore was cloven at one blow of Roland’s blade Durandal ;
Francis I. lifted the stone of his sepulchre at Blayes, and mar
velled, like Virgil’s labourer, at those mighty bones of ancient
men. Italy is full of relics of his renown, his time-worn statue
guards the gate of the Cathedral at Verona ; Pavia shows his
lance, and at Rome Durandal is carven on a wall of the street
Spada d’Orlando. In Germany he rides through the forests,
melancholy as Diirer’s mysterious knight; on the Rhine he built
the tower of Rolandseck, and distant echoes of him are heard
in vaguest tradition through India to the snows of Tartary.
In Paradise Dante beholds his soul, with that of Charles,
pass, “a double star, among the central splendours of the
Blessed/’*
How did so wide and permanent a glory gather round this
figure ? what portion of his legend is historical, what mere fan
tasy ; what the shreds of old mythology, fallen from the limbs
of forgotten gods of the North, and woven into a garment
whereby we see this forgotten man ? M. Ldon Gautier has
done much to present clearly and so far to solve, the difficulties
of these questions, in his new and splendid edition and transla
tion of the Chanson de Roland. M. Gautier’s task has been a
long one, fulfilled with a conscientious love of the Iliad of the
warlike West. But before the poem itself can be epjoyed, there
is much to be done : an iron and rugged language to be mas
tered, a history of the growth of the epic to be studied, a con
ception of the society whereof it is the one literary charm and
treasure to be attained to.
The first part of this labour M. Gautier has made light enough.
He furnishes a text, based on that of the oldest, the Bodleian
MS., which is not earlier than the middle of the eleventh, nor
later than the first part of the twelfth century. This text is
aided by collations of the Venice and Paris MSS., and is printed
more in accordance with the best grammar of the period than
that which the careless scribe of the Oxford version chose to
employ. Further, M. Gautier has filled up the lacunae of the
Oxford text with remaniements from the foreign sources, trans
lated back into the earlier style of the Bodleian copy ; but these
hazardous emendations are confined among the notes. In the
translation he has avoided the pedantry of M. Genin, who
turned the style of the eleventh into that of the sixteenth cen
tury—and has given a line for line version in modern French
prose.
Thus the epic can be read, but scarcely as yet appreciated.
* Paul de S. Victor, “ Hommes et Dieux.”
[Vol. C. No. CXCVII.}—New Seeies, Vol. XLIV. No. I.
D
�34
The Chanson de Roland.
There are works of art, masterpieces in their way, which ap
peal in vain to unaccustomed eyes or ears. The impassive atti
tude of an Egyptian Sphinx, the archaic lines of 2Eginetan
sculpture, the low relief of early Italian marbles, the thin
luxuriance and artifice of the age of the Pompadour, are enigmas
to all who cannot see in these the forces of society, of thought,
of life, of which they were the fruit, the ultimate ex
pression. We must have lived in imagination with the old
Egyptians, in a changeless land of peoples obedient to the dead ;
we must have felt the struggle in the Greek or Florentine
heart, between a keen new sense of the grace of things, and a
sense, not less constraining, of the religious traditions in art;
we must have fleeted the time carelessly with Manon Lescaut,
passing delicately over the volcanic crust of society, before certain
lovely creations of art can yield the intimate secret of their love
liness. Indeed, of what art is this not true, save of the mirror
which the Academy or the Salon holds up to the dress and
manners of the day ? And even this in a hundred years will
require a historical attitude, of a mind as keen as that of Charles
Baudelaire, to see the beauty of artifice and decadence, before it
will find an admirer. The Frankish epic of Roland is the only
beautiful thing in literature that survives from an age that, save
to one or two historians, seems to have only the darkness, and
none of the fruitfulness, of Chaos and of Night. We can only
admire it, when we find that that epoch was indeed heroic, and
not the scene of a “ mere fighting and flocking of kites and
crows.” Here then is a poem of more than four thousand lines
in length, telling of the events of two or three days, and giving
to these events colossal proportions altogether unwarranted by
history. How far is the action historical ? Was there ever a
battle with the Saracens, a heavy discouragement for Charles,
fought in the passes of the Pyrenees ? Are the Paladins mere
fictitious and gigantic ancestors of the later feudal houses, or
exaggerated pictures of real peers ; or have the stories of old gods
been attached to new names, and is Roland with his sword of
sharpness and wondrous horn, the Norse Hrodo, or a myth of
the Sun ; is his love, Lady Aide, one of the maidens of the Dawn ?
Next, how did the epic come to have the shape it has, rough
indeed, yet massive, in verse too ponderous to be lyrical. It
cannot be a mere collection of people’s songs, it has not the light
measure of the Kalevala, or of the Romaic Tragoudia, or of the
Scotch or Provencal ballad. Is it then the work of some monk,
who in that grey dawn of the first Renaissance may have tasted
of the stolen waters of the Magician Virgilius ? Or is it the soDg
of a wandering jongleur, chanted in village streets ? Or is it
only one out of the countless crowd of feudal romances, composed
�The Chanson de Roland.
35
by known authors, for a kind of literary public, between the
eleventh and the fourteenth centuries? Probably it falls under
none of these descriptions. Not lyrical, with no touch of clas
sical influence, not vulgar in tone, the poem is a true chanson
de geste, a family lay, grown together under the hands of a
succession of the minstrels nurtured by a noble house, and
ultimately it has received written form at the hands of one of
these.
Again, what manner of men were they who found in the
Paladins their heroes, and in this poem their epic ? How much
memory had they of the Roman culture, and of the Olympian
gods ? what did they know of the new monotheism of Arabia,
what survivals of heathenism did they retain ? What beginnings
of chivalry were there among them, what remains of barbarism ?
In what were they like, and in what unlike the sons of the
Achaeans, among whom the older and lovelier epics came into
existence ? Some of these questions need to be considered before
the poem is approached, some of them the poem itself answers.
First, with regard to what Mr. Max Muller calls the “ grits of
local history,” which sometimes exist at the centre of a myth,
and refuse to yield to the keenest instruments of the mythologist.
Here there rises one form, as later another, of the endless
Homeric question. In the case of Homer no one can doubt that
there was a great empire at Argos, a great capital at Mycenae,
and few can refuse to see in the Iliad traces of a war more
human than the struggle between light and darkness. Yet it is
only here and there a student of Professor Blackie’s type who
believes in a real Achilles, a real Helen ; and most readers must
rest in the opinion that the prehistoric civilization of Argos left a
genuine though vague memory, which became a nucleus for
myth and tradition of various date and origin, and scarcely of
estimable historical value. Just so it is with the historical part
of the Frankish epic. We know that in 778 the rear-guard of
Charles’s army was cut off by mountaineers in the Pyrenees, as it
returned from an unsuccessful attempt on Saragossa. But we
have no reason to believe that the Saracens aided in the attack,
and we are certain that the prodigious feats of Roland and his
companions, the echoes of the “dread horn/’ the edge of
Durandal, the angelic apparition, are as unhistorical as
the vision of Pallas to Achilles. Ganelon too, the traitor, is of
the race of JEgistheus, and the whole epic is full of the common
places and stock characters of primitive imagination. Yet
it does not follow that because much is impossible and super
natural, and the tale one of defeat and death, the poem is a
mere version of a Solar myth.
The school of mythologists who see all tradition in the sun
�36
The Chanson de Roland.
as Malebranche saw all things in God, have not spared the glory
of Roland. There are two attacks, one scientific and one popular,
on the hero’s identity. The first is the theory of Dr. Hugo’
Meyer, according to whom the Chanson sets forth a myth blended
of memories of the twilight of the gods, and of the real disaster
at Roncevaux. Thus the name of the traitor Ganelon is resolved
into Gamal, gamal is translated old, Old is an epithet of the
mythical Wolf of the Edda, the Wolf is Twilight, for Twilight is
grey and swallows the light. This equation worked out, it
is plain to any unbiassed mind that Roland, the foe of Ganelon,
must be the God Hrodo fighting the Wolf Fenris. In point of
fact, Roland does not fight Ganelon, who is his stepfather, and
certainly regards him in a stepfatherly way. The only real
refutation of the solar theory, as M. Gaston Paris has observed,
is a parody, or a sneer. Any battle, the life of any hero, may be
twisted into a parable of day and night. But M. Paris has
proved that in this case Ganelon is saved from being the wolf by
the laws of language, which do not permit the conversion of
Gamal into Guenes, or Ganelon. Besides, there is no d priori
reason why a Christian and Frankish aristocracy of the ninth
century should desert their own stock of Christian mythology for
that of Scandinavia. Mr. Cox, another advocate of the Sun,
has nothing to say of Hrodo, or Gamal, but thinks that Roland’s
sword of sharpness, his invulnerable strength, his horn, and his
lady Aide, who dies at the tidings of his death, identify him
with Herakles, Achilles, Sigurd, Arthur, all the heroes who are
absorbed in the centre of our system. Perhaps the super
natural element in the epic is more easily accounted for by the
usual, and apparently necessary forces of the primitive imagina
tion. Whatever the will may be, in primitive man the imagi
nation is bond, and the seemingly wildest fancies of remote races
go an unvarying round of events, characters, very often of verbal
formulae.
As to the supernatural occurrences, Guibert de
Nogent, or any chronicler of the eleventh century, tells stranger
marvels. Roland’s arms are not those of the Sun/the lucida tela
diei, they are gifts of no god more celestial than Wiinsch or
Wish, the old German God of Desire. Whatever the childlike
imagination craves, caps of darkness, nebel-cappe, shoes of swift
ness, swords of sharpness—with these it equips its favourite
heroes. The Chanson is just as historic as the Iliad ; it tells of a
war in which little is certain save that the contending parties
were great hostile races.
Supposing that three centuries were enough for the one tragic
incident in Charles’s career to bear fruit in the popular imagina
tion, it would certainly be sung of in the ballads of the people,
and the question occurs, Is the Chanson a pastiche of popular
�The Chanson de Roland.
37
songs ? And here the likeness to the Homeric controversy recurs,
for the Homeric epics, too, are felt to have some relation to the
ballad style. That ballads existed among the Franks there can
be no doubt at all. Charles himself is known to have collected
the ancient volks-lieder of Germany. In the biography of S.
Faro, a work of the ninth century, mention is made of a ballad
on one of Clotaire’s victories—a ballad sung by girls in the
dance. The biographer of S. William of Gellone, too, writing in
the eleventh century, talks of the chori juvenum who sung of
his hero. A yet earlier, and still extant ballad, is that of Donna
Lombarda, Rosamond, the wife of Alboin. These ballads were
contemporary with the events they recorded, and no doubt such
ballads must have contained the popular view of the disaster at
Roncevaux. These would be portions of truly popular poetry, of
that spontaneous song which in Corsica and Modern Greece, and
Russia still—as of old all over Europe—formed the culture of the
*
people.
These songs in all lands express delight at the return
of spring, or record the aspect in which, as through deeps of still
water, some tragical event of the moving world of men appears
to the indolent eyes of peasants; or they give voice to joy or
sorrow at bridal or burial, or weave into melody some one of
the primitive stock of folk-stories. These are all of the nature
of true popular poetry, but these must not be confused with epic.
It is this mistake which has led to attempts at Homeric transla
tion in ballad metre and ballad commonplace. The epic is of its
nature not popular, but aristocratic and artistic, and sings of the
ancestors of a settled aristocracy. Thus in Greece the Lityerses
song, or the Rhodian song of the swallow, was popular; the
aristeia of Diomede, or of Achilles, were primarily the property
(the chansons de geste'), of the houses of Crete or Larissa. How,
then, was the epic formed ? how was the advance made from the
lyric versicle to the ornate chronicle in verse ? Looking at the
epics either of Greece or France, it is plain that they contain
survivals of the characteristic formulae of ballads. These are
textual repetitions of speeches, recurring epithets, as “ the green
grass,” “ the salt sea foam
in Homer, opta aKiotvra; in
Roland, coupes d’or cler, L’Emperes d la barbe chenue ; also
the curious practice of lavishing gold and silver on common
articles of everyday use. One might say, then, that artistic poetry
grew like the manor out of the folk-land, like religion out of the
worship of recognised ancestral spirits, instead of strange objects
at large ; that even so in art, an aristocracy found popular poetry a
* Cf. Mr. Ralston’s “ Songs of the Russian PeopleM. Rathery’s article
in the Revue des Deux Mondes ; M. Nigra’s and M. Pitre’s “ Popular Songs of
Italy.”
�38
The Chanson de Roland.
field unenclosed, and employed ministers of its own—retainers,
who became a profession, with a hereditary collection of artistic
rules, to perpetuate the memory of forefathers. These minstrels
would naturally retain much of the simple formulae of the folk
song ; but with practice, with an audience that had plenty of
leisure, would add to the early simplicity the length, fire, con
tinued majesty of the epic. This would, lastly, be written out, and
become a model, from which a later class of singers degenerated.
If this account of the growth of a chanson de geste be a correct
one, we need not look, like M. Gautier, for fragments of ballads
in the separate stanzas. M. Gautier, like many Homeric critics,
thinks he can discern various short lays in the Dream of Charles,
the Death of Aide, the battle-scene, and so on. But these, with
their dramatic propriety, as necessary links in the poem, cannot
have been composed as chance snatches of song. The girls of
Lorraine in the present century still sung of Ogier, but the
ancient ballad was a light lyric, in nothing like the stanza
of Roland.
*
Who then may have been the genius, the Homeros, who gave
unity to the traditions of Roncevaux ? Two answers at least
may be rejected. He was not one of the lower jongleurs, who
got his living by singing through villages. A village audience
could have neither time nor appreciation to give to such
a poem ; though in Finland, through the enforced idleness of
the long winter nights, the peasantry have developed the
Kalevala, an epic of their own. Lastly, the composer of the
“ Chanson de Roland ” can scarcely, as a writer in the Quarterly
Review supposes, “ have been acquainted with the great models
of Roman literature.” t Where the feudal approaches the
classic epic, it is by virtue of its native force and heroic quality,
not by the patches of mythological allusion and faded rhetoric
with which the contemporary, Abbo, garnishes his verses on the
siege of Paris by the Normans. Nor is the religious tone at all
that of the learned monk. What monks made of Roland we
see in the chronicle of the Pseudo Turpin, where the hero is a
military pietist, not the Baron who holds up in death his
gauntlet to God.
We may set aside, then, the village jongleur, and the monk
of letters, and consider “ Roland” a real “ family song,” chanson
de geste. Looking further down history, we find a school of
cyclic poets in France, occupied with glorifying the heroic houses
of Lorrain, of Rousillon, at the expense of Charles, the ancestor
of the royal line, and the typical enemy of the feudal revolt.
* “ Romancero Champenois.”
f Quarterly Review, vol. cxx., p. 287.
�The Chanson de Roland.
39
In the hands of this school Charles is degraded, just as the
characters of Menelaus and Odysseus were by the poets of
republican Greece.
“ Roland ” is to such a poem as “les fils d’Aymon,” as the
“Iliad” is to the “ Orestes ” of Euripides. Even in Roland the
king is not the most prominent figure; but as the influence of
the leudes of the later Carlovingdans grew stronger, he becomes
the faineant that even the latest of his race in Laon never
were.
Later still, the cyclic epics lost all hold on history, became poems
of fantasy, like “ Huon of Bordeaux,” the mediaeval Odyssey.
Still later came Celtic and Provencal influences, the chivalry
and faerie of the court of Arthur, and Roland was only remem
bered in the chap books of peasants, and the burlesque of
Ariosto. Other poems of the early date must have existed, for
they are referred to in the “ Chanson” just as the “ Iliad ” refers
to lost songs ; but of this class, the great Chanson alone remains
tn testify to a heroic age and an epic genius among the Franks.
So far, there is a tolerably complete parallel between the
Homeric and the mediaeval epopee. Both retain traces and
survivals of an earlier genre of poetry, the folk-song ; of both,
the ultimate composer is unknown, both glorify an aristocracy
co-existing with a heroic kingship.
In the epic the strange identity of human nature is once more
revealed. Here, after the ages of classic civilization and of
Christian faith, an epoch as simple and hardy, noble and child
like as the Greek heroic age, is reborn, under changed stars
indeed, and on ground strewn with the ruins of empires, and
amid confusion of broken lights. This recurrence of the past is
the beauty of the poem, “all of iron” as it is, as the King
Didier said of the hosts of Charles. Here once more is the
Homeric king, “ here are the Franks of France,” like the sons
of the Achaeans, here are quarrels like those in the leaguer of
Troy, and the wrath of Ganelon sends many souls of heroes to
be among “ the holy flowers of Paradise.” God is the spectator
of this fight, and angels and devils take sides with Franks and
Saracens, for the war had a sacred character reflected on it from
the religious indignation that caused the first crusade. Yet,
sacred as is the war, the military character is the more promi
nent, the song is the voice of the free life of the Franks, who
have changed Odin for Christ, without any of the fear or ecstasy
of the monk, but simply as men recognising a higher form of the
God of battles. The courtesy of the North is here with all its
gravity, not even Ganelon returns a railing answer; but this
courtesy is the natural growth of reverence from freeman to
freeman, and has none of the later refinement of chivalry.
�40
The Chanson de Roland.
Love, too, so soon to be the god of Western poetry, is kept out
of view—a power unthought of in time of war—and though the
lady Aide dies at the news of Roland’s death, he wears in battle
no favours of hers, or of any lady’s.
The artistic form of the epic is a series of laisses, or stanzas
of varying length ; of lines of five feet, each laisse having but
one rhyme or assonance throughout. M. Littrd has translated
a book of Homer into this metre, not without success ; and an
idea of its value for Homeric imitation may be gathered from
this fragment by M. L. Gautier:—
“ Oiez chanson plus bele n’iert chantee
Ce est d’Achille a la chiere membree
Qui tant duel fist en Grece la loee
Par qui tant atnne en enter fust logee
Tant corps es chiens gite comme cuiree.”
The poet starts at once in medias res, there is no invocation
of any muse. Charles is sitting on his golden throne, judging
his host, under a pine-tree; around the warriors are playing
chess or draughts, like the suitors on the threshold of Odysseus.
Then comes Blancandrin to the Emperor of “ the long beard
in white flower,” with offers of peace and treaty from Marsile,
sultan of the miscreants. Marsile will give hostages, and follow
the Emperor to Aachen. Here Roland speaks out, and would
have Charles refuse all parley with heathens who once already
had slain his envoys. This is enough to make Ganelon,
Roland’s stepfather, reply moult jierement on the other side.
From this quarrel, the /bthvig of Ganelon takes occasion. As the
barons wrangle Charles speaks, the Emperor is still lord of his
warring knights, Franceis si taisent at his word. He decides
to send an envoy to Marsile, and the choice falls on the re
luctant Ganelon, who now thinks himself but a slain man. As
he mounts to ride away with Blancandrin, he already meditates
treason. , “ Seigneurs,” he says, “ ye shall have news of this
sending.’ Yet his heart is softened a moment, thinking of la
belle France, and of his son at home.
“ Baldewin mon filz que vous savez
E lui aidez, e pur seignior le tenez.”
There is even something noble and admirable in Ganelon's
bearing. He scarcely disguises his intention to play the traitor,
a part fatal in his house, as other crimes in the house of Thyestes.
“ In hell we are a great house,” says a traitor of his line, in a
later epic, and in the hostile camp Ganelon acts like one who is
treacherous through no coward fear. He cries aloud to Marsile,
“ Be thou baptized, oh king, to Aachen shalt thou be haled,
�The Chanson de Roland.
41
and there receive judgment, and there shalt thou die in shame
and mean estate?’ Marsile laid his hand on his spear, it seemed
as if the envoy were to be slain with his missive unread. Then
Ganelon having been as insulting as his code required, produced
Charles’s letter, and as Marsile read it, set his back against a pine,
and half drew his sword. Even the ranks of miscreants could
scarce forbear to cheer : Noble Barun ad ci, they said. He is
indeed a fair knight, broken loose from the central duty, the
necessary loyalty of feudalism.
Marsile found the letter less fiery than the manner of its
delivery; he spoke softly to Ganelon, and offered him a present
of sable skins, a Homeric rather than a chivalrous form of satisfac
tion. “ When will Charles the Old be weary of war ?” “Never
while his nephew Roland and the Peers are on ground,” says
Ganelon ; and he advises the Sultan to send tribute and hostages,
but withal to lay a great ambush in the passes of the Pyrenees.
Then Ganelon swears to treason on the relics of his sword, and
returns to camp “en l’albe, si cum li jurz esclairet,” bringing the
keys of Saragossa, hostages and treasures.
Before the army sets out for home, Charles has an evil dream,
that Ganelon seized his spear in the pass of the hills. The king
■wakes, and weeps like Agamemnon or Achilles, the ready heroic
tears. “ Charles ne poet muer que de ses oilz ne plurt.” By
Ganelon’s advice he assigns the rearguard to Roland, with Evrard
de Rousillon, Turpin, and Oliver. Then the army broke up
camp. “ Black rocks they crossed, and dark valleys,” till they
came within sight of Gascony. Then again broke out the ready
heroic tears, “ at memory of their fiefs and fields and of their
little ones, and gentle wives none was there who did not weep.”
There was forethought of evil in the hearts of the vanguard ; in
the rear, Oliver heard the footsteps of the gathering Pagans.
“We shall have battle,” he says. “ God grant it,” says Roland,
“ que malvais chant de nus chantet ne seit.” Never let bad
ballad be sang of us. Then Oliver would have spoken evil of
Ganelon, but Roland would not hear it; “ mis parastre ist, ne
voeill que mot en suns.” Nor will Roland listen to Oliver when
he bids him blow his magic horn, for aid against miscreants.
“ In sweet France I would lose my fame.”
The heathen approach, Turpin absolves the army; no ele
ments of sacrament are there but grass and leaves. So in
Threnakia the doomed company of Odysseus made hapless sacri
fice, QvXXa ^peipafitvoi rtptva 8pvoc vxpiKopoto. Then the Franks
cried “ Mount Joieand Aelroth, the nephew of Marsile, rode
along the heathen line shouting taunts, and the melde began.
Through all the scene of battle, the Frankish singer, like Scott
�42
The Chanson de Roland.
in the song of Flodden, “ never stoops his wing?’ In this Homeric
battle Roland drives his lance through breastplate and breast
of Aelroth, Oliver casts down Fausseron, “ Seigneur of the land
of Dathan and Abiron,” Turpin slays King Corsablyx. Spears
and axes sound like hammers on heroic mails; the fight goes
well for the Franks. “ Gente est nostre battaille,” cries Oliver.
Siglorel falls, the “ enchanter whom Jupiter had led through
bell.” Sathan hath his soul. Lances are broken and thrown
away. Oliver draws his sword Haute claire—it is no battle to
smite in with a spear truncheon. Roland draws Durandal; the
peers cut their way through the Saracens, as Cortez’s men
through the white clouds of Aztec spearmen. But the innume
rable hosts of the miscreants close in, the heathen reserves come
up, the ranks of the barons are thinned. And now would
Roland fain sound his horn, but Oliver mocks him. “ Wilt thou
not lose thy fame in sweet France? Ah, never now shalt thou
lie in the arms of Aide my sister.” “Nay, sound,” said Turpin,
“ we shall have burial at our friends’ hands, and be no wolves’
spoil.” Then the hero blew till blood started from his mouth,
and the echo of that dread horn wound through the passes
of the hills, and rang above the tempest of wind, and the
thunder, the wailing of nature, la granz dulurs pur la mort
de Roland. Surely if there is anything of mythology in the
legend of Roland it is here, where the heaven is darkened,
and the veil of the heaven is rent, and the blind powers of the
world cry, as for Baldur or Adonis. Charles heard the horn,
and knew his nephew was in extremity, and knew the treason
of Ganelon. So Ganelon was given to the cooks and campfollowers, to bind him and torment him. Meanwhile the battle
raged on the Spanish side of the hills, “ the black folk that had
nothing white save the teeth,” fell on the weary knights. Never
shall they see tere de France, mult dulz pais. The Califf
wounds Oliver to death, and is slain by the Paladin, whose eyes
are now dimmed by blood and heat, and who strikes blindly,
like John of Bohemia at Cre^y. A blow even falls on Roland’s
crest, “Sire cumpain faites le vos de gred,” he asks, “ did you
strike me wilfully?” “Nay, for I hear thee, but see thee not,
friend Roland, God help thee.” Then Roland pardoned him
before God, “ d icel mot Vun a Valtre ad clinet.” With this
courtesy they parted that had in life been true companions in
arms, and in death were not long divided. Now Roland’s horse
was slain, and himself foredone with battle, and he gathered the
corpses of the peers in a circle about the dying Bishop Turpin.
The bishop crosses his hands, “ ses beles mams les blanches,”
his fair white hands, that shine out in the rough poem like a
delicate jleur de Paradis from hewn Gothic work. They shall
�The Chansen de Roland.
43
all meet soon, he says, among the Holy Innocents. So Roland
spoke his praise over Oliver, as Borsover the dead Sir Launcelot.
But Oliver is honoured, not as “ the curtiest knight that ever in
hall did eat with ladies/’ but
“ Pur Osbercs rompre et desmailler,
Epur proz domes tenir e cunseiller ....
En multe tere n’ot meillur chevaler.”
Last, Roland lays himself down “ sur l’erbe verte,” and seeks to
break the blade of Durandal lest it fall into the hands of un
believers. Ten blows on the hard rock and on the Sardonyx
stone fail to splinter the steel. “ Ah, Durandal, how clear thou
art and bright that shinest as the sun ; with thee have I con
quered lands and domains for Charles of the white beard.
Yea, now for thee have I sorrow and heaviness, and would die
sooner than see thee in pagan hands. Holy thou art, and lovely;
in thy golden hilt is store of relics. How many kingdoms have
I taken with thee, wherein Charles now rules !” Then he lay
down on the green grass beneath a pine, and cast his sword and
horn beneath his body. His face was turned to Spain, and
many things came into his mind—sweet France, and the Barons
of his house, and Charles his lord. He might not endure, but
wept and groaned heavily. He stretched out to God the glove
of his right hand ; S. Gabriel took it from his grasp. Roland is
dead ; God have his soul in heaven. S. Michael of the Sea
bare his spirit to Paradise.
The poem might well end with Roland’s, as the Iliad with
Hector’s, death. But national pride requires that the Paynim
should not triumph, and poetical justice demands the punish
ment of Ganelon. The sun stood still for Charles, as of old on
Gilboah, and the heathen, calling on Termagaunt their god,
were driven to Saragossa. They pass like a mist into the dark ;
the tired horses lie down and feed as they lie. Charles finds
Roland’s body with its face to the foe. In Saragossa, Marsile
beats his image of Apollo, and casts the idol of Mahomet into
a ditch. Clearly the poet’s notion of the Arab monotheism was
gathered previous to the Crusades, from some alien fetichism,
and from memoirs of the degraded rulers of Olympus.
Next day was a day of battle. The king fought well in his
place, dient Franceis, Icist Reis ist Vassals, Mult bien i fieri
Charles li Reis, an angel stood by him. Night fell softly.
Clere est la lune, et les esteiles flambiert, when Charles marched
into Saragossa. His second return was unmolested ; but in
Aachen the beloved of Roland waited for news of her lord.
Aide “of the golden hair and the bright face,” fell dead at
Charles’s feet. He would have given her rough comfort, and his
�An Early French Economist.
44
son for husband. Here only love enters the poem, “vierge
comme la Mort.” The part of woman in the Western world is
not yet come.
With Aide’s death all the interest of the Chanson ceases. Yet
the last lines are dramatic. The grey king is musing alone ; he
says, Deus, si peneuse est ma vie, a vista opens of future
wars without Roland’s sword, of a hard end to a hard life, of
Norman invaders and a tarnished fame, to the eyes of the weary
emperor.
Ci fait le Geste que Turoldus declinet. So ends the epic
which Theroualde, whoever he was, wrote, or composed, or
recited. New themes, chivalry, Arthur’s Table, faerie, came in,
“ the newest songs are sweetest to men.” When Ronsard and
Voltaire sought subjects for epics they found them in a fictitious
Francus, and that dubious hero, Henri IV. The later writer
might well say that the French have not la tele e pique. What
ever the conquering Franks possessed of weighty language, of
simple heroism and grave imagination, they lost as they became
one with the subject Celts and Latins.
The Chanson de Roland will probably always be for France,
not a source of new and lofty poetry, but a rough literary curi
osity, a thing to admire by practice and with reservations. The
nation, like Sainte-Beuve, is more at home with the polished arti
fice of the Renaissance, or the passion of the Romantic school.
Art.
III.—An Early French Economist.
IERRE LE PESANT DE BOISGUILBERT, or Boisguillebert, was the Civil and Criminal Lieutenant of the Balliage of
Rouen towards the end of the seventeenth century, a rank about
equivalent to that of President of the Civil Tribunal at the pre
sent day.
Beyond the fact that he was a grand-nephew of the great
Corneille, and that he was a native of Normandy, presumably of
a poor gentleman’s family of Rouen, scarcely anything is known
of his birth and parentage.
The Due de St. Simon, in his well-known Memoirs, tells us
that Boisguilbert, inspired with the profoundest sympathy for the
woes of his country, and deeply disgusted with the incapacity and
dishonesty of the officials who preyed upon her, resolved to wait
upon Pontchartrain, the Controller General of Finance, in the
hope of inducing him to listen to his plans of reform.
P
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
The Chanson de Roland
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [London]
Collation: p. 32-44 ; 22 cm.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references. From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. From Westminster Review 44 (July 1973). Review of Les Chansons de Roland, texte critique accompagne d'une traduction nouvelle et precede d'une introduction historique par Leon Gautier. Tours 1872.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
[s.n.]
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
[n.d.]
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
CT40
Subject
The topic of the resource
Book reviews
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
[Unknown]
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (The Chanson de Roland), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
French
Book Reviews
Conway Tracts
Legends
Poetry
Song of Roland