East and West. It is when they married, and where they married, that most of the Springs of Romance commingle in the literature of Europe. Nor were the results of that commingling accidental. They were produced by design; and the designers were largely the poets of Henry's and Eleanor's cosmopolitan court. Mythological legends from the West, and miraculous stories from the East, were guided into one channel by the science of troubadoursthe gay science of courteous love-and by the sterner skill of northern trouvères. The design was literary; but it was also political. Henry, an upstart and a stranger to his Normans, Bretons, and Poitevins, Gascons, Saxons, and Welshmen, found it convenient to exploit the imaginary achievements of Arthurian knights. None could be jealous of such shadows, and, the less, since all were assured a common descent from the defenders of Troy, and shown a common foe in the assailants of Jerusalem. Henry took the cross for the Third Crusade (1187) as a desperate expedient to save his work of unification on the eve of its collapse. His work, akin as it is to the work of contemporary sovereigns, affords the most salient example of a vast attempt at unification prosecuted throughout the politics and literature of Europe; and that effort of comprehension reveals, so I believe, the reason why Romance captured the imagination of Europe in the middle of the twelfth century.

WHAT IS ROMANCE?

I have done what I could to discover When and Where and Why Romance came into European literature. But what is Romance? Are we any

nearer a definition? Here is a power which produced great changes in Europe from 1100 to 1550, and reproduced them from 1800 until now. Through all those centuries there must have been something in the mind of Europe which needed Romance and sustained it. The unromantic interval shrinks to the relative proportions of an episode in our Western civilisation. Clearly, Romance is not a tangle of absurdities to be dismissed as 'rot' by the Cardinal of Este, or despised as Gothic' by the imitators of classic models. 'Imitation will after though it break her neck' (S. Daniel, Defence of Rhime, 1603). But Romance is a tissue. In the twelfth century, when it took hold of the Middle Ages, Romance displays a deliberate weaving together of manycoloured strands. Celtic glamour, the uncouth strength of the North, and marvels from the fabulous East, are interlaced in one woof which unfolds a continuous story of Europe, from the Argonauts' quest of the Golden Fleece, by way of the fall of Troy, and the foundation of Rome, to the conquest of Jerusalem by Crusaders. An examination of these strands reveals that the earliest and most alien are largely mythological. They consist of many attempts made by many races, in different ages and distant countries, to express in symbols their guesses at the origin and destiny, the hopes and fears, of

man.

May we, then, infer that Romance is comparative mythology? In a sense that is true. Its elements are largely mythological. But that view will not yield a definition of Romance. If it did, all mythologies would be obviously romantic. But are they? There is nothing romantic in a savage's belief that the Creator of the World is a great hare,

or in a Greek legend that men and women sprang from stones thrown behind them by Deucalion and Pyrrha. These explanations are not romantic so long as they satisfy the curiosity of their authors. They only begin to be romantic-either when they cease to offer a tolerable answer to the riddle of the universe; or, in a greater degree, when they confront the mind of another civilisation which has explained the universe by a wholly different imaginative process. Mythologies begin to be romantic when they become strange by reason of their antiquity or alien character. Breton and Welsh legends were not romantic to the Celts, when they conceived them. Nor were the sagas romantic to the Icelanders. On the contrary, their rugged strength reproduced a rugged reality. Nor is magic romantic in the East; it is familiar there. These strands in the fabric of romance became romantic when they struck more modern, and wholly alien, modes of thought by their strangeness. Even this impact of the strange in mythology will not wholly account for the nature of romance.. If it did, Latin literature would have been romantic. The Romans, no less than the Normans, were confronted by Celts and Teutons and the fabulous East, yet the impact of outlandish legends produced but little romance in Latin literature. Our search for the nature of Romance must be directed not only to the strange in mythology, but, more closely, to the reaction produced in the minds that were startled by that strangeness. If we find that the attitude towards strange mythologies of periods called Classic differs profoundly from the attitude of periods called Romantic, we may discover a clue to the nature of Romance in the contrast so revealed. And that

C

is what we do find. Classic periods repudiated strange mythologies and Romantic periods welcomed them. Both aimed at unity in their order of thought and, so far as the Romans were concerned, in their order of the world's government. But the Classic world aimed at unity by exclusion, and the Middle Ages at unity by comprehension.

The Greeks stood for understanding the universe by reducing it to the terms of their lofty intelligence, expressed in terms of their all but perfect language. The Romans stood for governing the world by reducing it to one august state with one Imperial religion. To the Greeks the Barbarian was unintelligible; to the Romans, ungovernable. So both repelled him, and all his strange imaginations, as tending to disturb the pursuit of lucidity and order. It is not the goal of unity, but the method chosen for reaching that goal, which stamped its exclusive character on the Classic world, and sterilised classic literature to romance, save for some faint touches in the earliest and latest poems that dealt with wandering, and sometimes paused to wonder. Even in their own mythology the Greeks got rid of their Titans at the beginning of the world; whereas the uncouth North kept its giants at endless war against its gods; and the Persians retained Ahriman in perpetual conflict with Ormuzd; and the Celts were uncertain whether their Arthur would ever return from the twilight of Avalon.

On the other hand, if we turn to the first Romantic period, we find the most striking characteristic of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in a huge attempt at unity, throughout politics and literature, prosecuted by an all but universal comprehension. In that age political actors strove to

weld Europe into one, assisted by literary authors who sought to correlate with that policy every known record of the Drama of Mankind. Nothing came amiss to them. The political actors repudiated no race, however foreign, and the literary authors, no legend however ancient or far-fetched. Rather did they embrace the strange, seeming to recognise in it something lacking from their own conventions, but akin to a common humanity. They aimed at unity by comprehension, and that method, at least in the domain of literature, was resumed after the Romantic Revival. Walter Scott and Victor Hugo, no less than Benedict of SainteMore and Christian of Troyes, were eager to welcome the strange from the East, the West, or the North. We may say of each,

nexuque pio longinqua revinxit.'

I am not concerned to exalt the Romantic above the Classic method in Literature. Both have their several glories, and peculiar seeds of decay. When Romantic interlacing of many themes degenerates into a love of intricacy for its own sake, Romance becomes trivial, and tedious. It is then replaced by classic admiration for the noblest models. But when that degenerates into a love of imitation for its own sake, the classic method becomes slavish, and tedious in its turn. Then we note a Romantic Revival. I am solely concerned to discover a distinction between periods called Classic, and periods called Romantic, which may yield a clue to the mystery of Romance. Such a distinction is I believe, disclosed in the diversity of their attitudes towards the strange and, specially, towards the strange in mythology. It is all but impossible