Charlemagne and the twelve peers. In the same year, 1147, Geoffrey of Monmouth dedicated the Historia Regum Britannia to Robert, Earl of Gloucester, the uncle of Henry of Anjou, who directed the first steps of his nephew's dazzling career. It is a short book written in Latin by a Welshman. But it is the 'dry source' of many a river of song. Arthur and Guunhumara, or Guenever, are here introduced for the first time into literature that remains. Let no one suppose, for a moment, that Geoffrey invented the legends which enchanted Europe for so long, and have now renewed their spell through the art of Tennyson and Swinburne and Wagner. He found them: but whether in Wales, or in the 'very old book' -librum vetustissimum-brought, so he says, out of Brittany by Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford, is quite beside the mark. What Geoffrey did was to capture the world of letters. His prosaic handling of Celtic mythology in a learned tongue imposed on the clerks of Europe. They received it for history, and were amazed at the close fulfilment of Merlin's prophesies down to the very year in which Geoffrey began to write (1135). We need not intervene when scholars, inspired by local patriotism, dispute the racial extraction of this or that matter involved; nor attempt to decide whether the Christian graal was a Pagan caldron, or even, as some have it, a stone. It is sufficient to discover what happened in literature. For until these legends won their way into literature they could not produce a romantic effect, and may, for all we can tell, have been destitute of any tinge of romance.

Geoffrey's book was forthwith translated into French poems written by Anglo-Normans, and,

apart from its contents, gave a general impulse to the production of verse spun from the legends of Brittany and Wales. In 1150 Marie de France, who lived in England, begins to write her fifteen lays. About the same year we get the first story of Tristan and Yseut from Beroul, who wrote it in England. Unless we realise that the author staged his legend in the England of his day, without a care for anachronisms, we shall be surprised to find the cathedral cities of Ely and Durham in the kingdom of Cornwall:

'N'a chevalier en son roiaume

Ne d'Eli d'antresqu' en Dureaume' (1. 2199).

In 1155 Wace, an Anglo-Norman writing in England, expands Geoffrey's History into a long French poem. He introduces the 'Round Table ' into literature. 'Arthur,' he says (1. 998), 'made the round table, of which Bretons tell many fabulous stories; the vassals sat down to it all chivalrously and all equal in degree':

'Fist Artus la Roonde Table

Dont Breton dient mainte fable:
Iloc séoient li vassal

Tot chievalment et tot ingal.'

equal.

In another passage (1. 10, 560) the three Archbishops of London, York, and Carleon dine at the same legendary board; for to Wace it is a British institution. Whether it hails, as a legend, from Brittany, from Wales, or from Arthur's Seat by Edinburgh, it certainly arrives in literature under the auspices of Henry. Wace writes of him, I find no more benefactors except the king, Henry the Second, who has given me a canonry and many other gifts. May God repay him.' Eventually it was exhibited

as a piece of furniture in Winchester, where Henry had been crowned in 1154. At Winchester, as at Glastonbury, Henry's magnetic power polarised the legends of his Western dominions, and attracted French artists to sing them from all the realms bracketed together by his political ambition. Wace's poem, for the first time, weaves the story of Tristan into the story of Arthur, and is named, by a similar process, from Brutus, the imaginary descendant of Eneas, the ancestor of all the French and the British nations. This romantic descent was 'the kind of thing that everybody could enjoy,' and most people did up to the end of the sixteenth century. It inspired Ronsard's Franciade. I once found it set out in a nobleman's commonplace book together with other practical hints, such as the right dishes for a banquet and the proper instruments for concerted music. So late as 1605, Verstegan devotes a stout volume to destroying the myth under the imposing title, A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities.

In 1170 we get the second song of Tristan from Thomas, another Anglo-Norman. In the same year Christian of Troyes introduces, for the first time, the love of Lancelot and Guenever. He was not an Anglo-Norman, but the story was supplied to him by Eleanor's eldest daughter. In 1175 Christian introduces Perceval and the Graal from a book lent by the Count of Flanders, who had spent some months (1172) in England. After that, for fifty years Arthur and Guenever and Lancelot, Tristan and Yseut, the Round Table and the Holy Graal, are translated into every Western tongue, and interlaced with every other story that seemed true. continuous legend of Western conquerors was woven

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together, reaching right down from the Argonauts who sought the Golden Fleece, through the defenders of Troy, and the founders of Rome, to the champions who had recovered Jerusalem. Such Romances of chivalry stood side by side with the 'new' classics on the shelves of Mary Stuart's library. Then they disappear into dusty cupboards, to be released again after the Romantic Revival.

Just as the advent of Romance sprang from early contacts with Celtic mythology and Saracenic marvels, so did the development expand when those contacts were renewed and multiplied. Both found their first expression in French poems, written for the most part in England, because the conquest of England exalted that tongue into the position held by Latin through the Dark Ages. But Latin was for the learned alone; whereas French, for many reasons, appealed to the nations of Europe. To the Celts it was the language of those who had defeated their Saxon oppressors; and to all Christian people the language of those who had delivered Jerusalem. It was written by poets who welcomed the legends which the Latins had rejected. Every nation saw its folk-lore embellished by consummate artists, and their eponymous heroes glorified with pedigrees from the warriors who had redressed the fall of Troy by erecting the walls of Rome. In the French romances of the twelfth century Europe 'found herself.'

Two OBJECTIONS

Here let me anticipate some of the criticism which I am conscious of provoking. It may be said that I have ignored the Teutonic Romances.

In reply, I would submit that Teutonic Romance branched off when the empire of Charlemagne was divided between his successors, only to return into the main channel of European literature after the Romantic Revival.

The Sagas and the Nibelungenlied, and the early English Beowulf, were not European romances before the last century. Sigfried, originally a Frankish hero, who picked up Burgundian attributes and echoes of conflicts with the Huns, counts for nothing in the Middle Ages by comparison with Roland or Arthur. Arthur. The dwarf Alberich creeps through a French romance, Huon of Bordeau, to emerge as Oberon in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. But that may have been because of his diminutive size. There was no room for Teutonic gods and giants in a literature already crowded with colossal characters. Yet the influence of the North is not absent from European romances. On the contrary, since it was the Normans who launched them, the uncouth strength of the North accounts for as much in Romance as the glamour of the West, to the mirage of the East. Perhaps it accounts for more than either, and explains why all three were condemned together as Gothic' during the classical interregnum between the two Romantic periods.

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It may be said that I have exaggerated the importance of Eleanor's marriage with Henry of Anjou. On that issue I stick to my guns. They married (1152) five years after St. Bernard launched the Second Crusade from Vezelay, at the moment when Geoffrey of Monmouth published the History of the Kings of Britain. Their marriage united the influences attracted by those two events from the