called a poetic restraint about them. The whole Graal-story is deliberately modelled on Scriptural suggestions; the miracle of reconciliation and restoration which concludes Amis and Amiles is the work of a duly commissioned angel. There are giants, but they are introduced moderately and equipped in consonance. The Saint's Life, which, as it has been contended, exercised so large an influence on the earlier romance, carried the nature, the poetry, the charm of its supernatural elements into the romance itself.
Extravagance in incident, nomenclature, etc.
In the Amadis cycle and in romances like Arthur of Little Britain all this undergoes a change—not by any means for the better. What has been unkindly, but not perhaps unjustly, called the "conjuror's supernatural" takes the place of the poet's variety. One of the personages of the Knight of the Sun is a "Bedevilled Faun," and it is really too much not to say that most of such personages are bedevilled. In Arthur of (so much the Lesser) Britain there is, if I remember rightly, a giant whose formidability partly consists in his spinning round on a sort of bedevilled music-stool: and his class can seldom be met with without three or seven heads, a similarly large number of legs and hands, and the like. This sort of thing has been put down, not without probability, to the Oriental suggestion which would come so readily into Spain. It may be so or it may not. But it certainly imports an element of puerility into romance, which is regrettable, and it diminishes the dignity and the poetry of the things rather lamentably. Whether it diminishes, and still more whether it originally diminished the readability of these same things, is quite another question.
Closely connected with it is the fancy for barbaric names of great length and formidable sound, such as Famongomadan, Pintiquinestra, and the like—a trait which, if anybody pleases, may be put down to the distorted echo of more musical[122] appellations in Arabic and other Eastern tongues, or to a certain childishness, for there is no doubt that the youthful mind delights, and always has delighted, in such things. The immense length of these romances even in themselves, and still more with continuations from father to son and grandson, and trains of descendants sometimes alternately named, can be less charged as an innovation, though there is no doubt that it established a rule which had only been an exception before. But, as will have been seen earlier, the continuation of romance genealogically had been not uncommon, and there had been a constant tendency to lengthen from the positively terse Roland to the prolix fifteenth-century forms. In fact this went on till the extravagant length of the Scudéry group made itself impossible, and even afterwards, as all readers of Richardson know, there was reluctance to shorten.
The "cruel" heroine.
We have, however, still to notice another peculiarity, and the most important by far as concerns the history of the novel: this is the ever-increasing tendency to exaggerate the "cruelty" of the heroine and the sufferings of the lovers. This peculiarity is not specially noticeable in the earliest and best of the group itself. Amadis suffers plentifully; yet Oriana can hardly be called "cruel." But of the two heroines of Palmerin, Polisarda does play the part to some extent, and Miraguarda (whose name it is not perhaps fantastic to interpret as "Admire her but beware of her") is positively ill-natured. Of course the thing was no more a novelty in literature than it was in life. The lines—
And cruel in the New
As in the Old one,
may certainly be transferred from the geographical world to the historical. But in classical literature "cruelty" is attributed rather indiscriminately to both sexes. The cliff of Leucas knew no distinction of sex, and Sappho can be set against Anaxarete. Indeed, it was safer for men to be cruel than for women, inasmuch as Aphrodite, among her innumerable good qualities, was very severe upon unkind girls, while one regrets to have to admit that no particular male deity was regularly "affected" to the business of punishing light o' love men, though Eros-Cupid may sometimes have done so. The Eastern mistress, for obvious reasons, had not much chance of playing the Miraguarda part as a rule, though there seems to me more chance of the convention coming from Arab and Hebrew poetry than from any other source. But in the Arabian Nights at least, though there are lustful murderesses—eastern Margarets of Burgundy, like Queen Labé of the Magicians—there is seldom any "cruelty," or even any tantalising, on the part of the heroines.
A hasty rememberer of the sufferings of Lancelot and one or two other heroes of the early and genuine romance might say, "Why go further than this?" But on a little examination the cases will be found very different. Neither Iseult nor Guinevere is cruel to her lover; Orgueilleuse has a fair excuse in difference of rank and slight acquaintance; persons like Tennyson's Ettarre, still more his Vivien, are "sophisticated"—as we have pointed out already. Besides, Vivien and Ettarre are frankly bad women, which is by no means the case with the Polisardas and Miraguardas. They, if they did not introduce the thing—which is, after all, as the old waterman in Jacob Faithful says, "Human natur',"—established and conventionalised the Silvius and Phoebe relation of lover and mistress. If Lancelot is banished more than once or twice, it is because of Guinevere's real though unfounded jealousy, not of any coquettish "cruelty" on her part; if Partenopeus nearly perishes in his one similar banishment, it is because of his own fault—his fault great and inexcusable. But the Amadisian heroes, as a rule—unless they belong to the light o' love Galaor type, which would not mind cruelty if it were exercised, but would simply laugh and ride away—are almost painfully faithful and deserving; and their sojourns in Tenebrous Isles, their encounters with Bedevilled Fauns, and the like, are either pure misfortunes or the deliberate results of capricious tyranny on the part of their mistresses.
Now of course this is the sort of thing which may be (and as a matter of fact it no doubt was) tediously abused; but it is equally evident that in the hands of a novelist of genius, or even of fair talent and craftsmanship, it gives opportunity for extensive and ingenious character-drawing, and for not a little "polite conversation." If la donna è mobile generally, she has very special opportunities of exhibiting her mobility in the exercise of her caprice: and if it is the business of the lover (as it is of minorities, according to a Right Honourable politician) to suffer, the amoureux transi who has some wits and some power of expression can suffer to the genteelest of tunes with the most ingenious fugues and variations. A great deal of the actual charm of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry in all languages comes from the rendering in verse of this very relation of woman and man. We owe to the "dear Lady Disdain" idea not merely Beatrice, but Beatrix long after her, and many another good thing both in verse and in prose between Shakespeare and Thackeray.
In the Amadis group (as in its slightly modernised successor, that of the Grand Cyrus), the handling is so preposterously long and the reliefs of dialogue and other things frequently managed with so little skill, that, except for sheer passing of time, the books have been found difficult to read. The present writer's knowledge of Spanish is too sketchy to enable him to read them in the original with full comfort. Amadis and Palmerin are legible enough in Southey's translations, made, as one would expect from him, with all due effort to preserve the language of the old English versions where possible. But Herberay's sixteenth-century French is a very attractive and perfectly easy language, thoroughly well suited to the matter. And if anything that has been said is read as despite to these romances, the reading is wrong. They have grave faults, but also real delights, and they have no small "place i' the story."[123]
FOOTNOTES:
Note on Montaigne.
This suggestive influence may be found almost as strongly, though shown with less literary craftsmanship, in Brantôme's successor and to some extent overlapper, Tallemant des Réaux.
