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and thereto he adds according to his wont a luminous comment from his own experience: 'A month under canvas,' says he, or, better still, without a tent, will convince any one that to speak of the stars and the moon is as natural as to look at your watch or an almanack." Thus once more the Cheshire Yeoman came to the aid of the critic of literature, and spoke with an authority denied to the scholar in his library.

VIII

6

In life and in letters, as I have said, George Wyndham esteemed most highly the leader of a revel or a forlorn hope.' In The Springs of Romance in the Literature of Europe' he essayed to lead both. It was an address delivered to the Students of the University of Edinburgh, and it dealt with a subject which had long been in George Wyndham's mind. More than two years before he was Lord Rector he had made the design, and even filled in many of the details. 'The idea is,' he wrote to his mother, 'Where did romance come from? There was none among our Northern ancestors of the ninth century. It came from contact of East and West -contact with the East owing to the conflict between Christendom and the Paynim from Roncesvalles onward-contact with the West, from the Geraldines' transit through Wales into Ireland.' The idea was fantastic and difficult to make a reality, as George Wyndham acknowledged. 'In conclusion,' he wrote, 'I can say with Malory, "Now all was but enchantment"; and invite you to be enchanted.'

The question which he put in the letter quoted above, he answered in the address. When, then,

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and where does Romance arrive in Europe? The answer to the first question is, not before the second half of the eleventh century, and, to the second, probably in Great Britain.' So he begins with the Chanson de Roland, which he thinks was retouched after Henry П. of England had, by conquest and marriage asserted a shadowy overlordship from the Grampians to the Pyrenees.' He insists upon the importance, for his argument, of Eleanor's marriage with Henry of Anjou. 'It is when they married (in 1152), and where they married, that most of the springs of romance commingle in the literature of Europe.' And then, aiming at a definition, he asserts that Romance is welcoming the strange-the strange in legend, in allegory, in symbol, and in scenery. "The reaction of the mind,' says he, 'when confronted with the strange, is, in some sort, a recognition of ignored realities. Romance is an act of recognition.'

It is an ingenious argument, ingeniously conducted, and illustrated with a wealth of erudition. Of George Wyndham's fancy and courage in its conduct there can be no doubt. But there is always a danger of dogmatising as to times and places, a danger of which the writer himself was fully conscious. If we admit that Romance came into Europe in the second half of the eleventh century, and was fully grown, so to say, a hundred years later, we must discard the whole of Classical literature from our view. Fully prepared for the encounter, George Wyndham advanced the 'disputable proposition,' that the classics are not romantic. He makes certain concessions to the 'heckler'; he gives him Nausicaa and Medea, Dido and Camilla; finally, he throws to his possible

But he

opponents the whole body of Apuleius. seems to miss one point. If he makes a single exception, he gives up his argument. If there was Romance among the Greeks and Romans, then Romance did not come to efflorescence in the Court of Henry II. and Eleanor, his queen.

Truly the proposition is 'disputable.' No definition of Romance can exclude from the enchanted kingdom a vast deal of Greek and Latin literature. It is not Nausicaa alone in the Odyssey that is romantic. Romance is in the Odyssey's very texture and essence. The return of the wanderer, who after many years of miraculous dangers comes back to his wife and home is the theme of high romance. The hair of Odysseus is wet with the salt sea spray. Far-distant havens and gallant ships have delighted his vision. The palace of Alcinous, in whose garden pear upon pear waxes old, and apple on apple and cluster ripens upon cluster of the grape, and fig upon fig, is in fairyland. And what a marvellous tale Odysseus has to tell! There is the story of Polyphemus, the giant who has but a single eye in the middle of his forehead, and who devoured two of the hero's companions at a meal. And the bewitchings of Circe and the siren's song, and the soul-destroying lotus, and the dark house of Hades itself-these are the very stuff of which romance is made. Nor does Homer stand alone. Virgil and Ovid were in the Middle Ages the great quickeners of romance. From them the romancers of the Middle Ages borrowed their passion; to them the ladies of high romance owed allegiance. And is not Lucian's 'True History' romantic, and Daphnis and Chloe?' And were there not witches in Thessaly when Apuleius wrote ?

For me, indeed, classic and romantic are terms which express neither time nor place. The two modes of thought, the two states of mind have lived, side by side, since the beginning of time. They were born, both of them in the Garden of Eden, and the Serpent was the first romantic. But if, as I think, George Wyndham has not brought his good ship Romance into port, he has taken us a joyous voyage among the islands of fancy, shown us many a noble sight, and left us careless of our harbourage. In truth, the address given at Edinburgh is like good talk, set in a formal shape as becomes ink and paper, but good talk all the same, happy, voluble, and sometimes controversial. Even when a friend may disagree with him, what would that friend not give to face him once more across the hearth, and to hear his voice, gay in tone, large in utterance, confronting him! Above all, when George Wyndham set out to find the hallowed spot, where the springs of romance commingle, he set out upon an adventure. And as his friend, W. P. Ker, told him in a letter, urging him to 'go on,' 'nothing good is done except by adventurers-in that branch of learning anyhow.'

IX

It is characteristic of George Wyndham that if he accepted W. P. Ker's eulogy as the tribute of a sportsman to a poacher,' he took a natural pride in the praise that was worth having; and with the printing of The Springs of Romance' a sudden thought came to him. I remembered with regret,' he wrote to his mother, the big book I meant to write about romantic literature, with a leaning

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towards the French. Then I began to remember all the things I have written, which I had forgotten. They are hidden away in The New Review (extinct)

and in introductions to books which are out of print, or don't sell. Then it suddenly flashed on me that, without knowing it, I have written twothirds or three-fourths of my book! And I see exactly what remains to be written. The Springs is the first chapter. I never thought of that. . . Chap. II.-not written-will be The Chroniclers and the Crusades. It is not written, but I have all the stuff and many notes. That takes me right through the thirteenth century. It may become two chapters in order to bring in Dante and the Spaniards. . . . But after that it is nearly all finished. IV. or V. is my old Poetry of the Prison, about Charles d'Orléans and Villon (New Review, out of print); V. or VI. is Chaucer (not written); VI. or VII. North's Plutarch, written-indeed I must cut it down; VII. or VIII. is Ronsard, written, VIII. or IX. is Shakespeare, written, and must be cut down; IX. or X. is Elizabethan Mariners in Elizabethan literature, written in the Fortnightly twelve years ago; X. or XI. is Scott, written; XI. or XII. is the new French Romantics-not published, but almost all written, with many translations.'

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Such was the book as George Wyndham had planned it, and would that he had lived to match the perfecting with the plan! Alas, for the gaps, which never will be filled! Few men of our time were better fitted than he by sentiment and knowledge to write about Chaucer. I would give a wilderness of modern books to hear him discourse of the Chroniclers and the Crusades. Who the new French Romantics are I know not, and what he wrote

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