ROLAND AGAINST GANELON
LVIII 737 Tresvait la noit e apert la clere albe …
Par mi cel host (sonent menut cil graisle).
Li emperere mult fierement chevalchet.
740 “Seignurs barons,” dist li emperere Carles,
“Veez les porz e les destreiz passages:
Kar me jugez ki ert en la rereguarde.”
Guenes respunt: “Rollant, cist miens fillastre:
N’avez baron de si grant vasselage.”
745 Quant l’ot li reis, fierement le reguardet,
Si li ad dit: “Vos estes vifs diables.
El cors vos est entree mortel rage.
E ki serat devant mei en l’ansguarde?”
Guenes respunt: “Oger de Denemarche:
750 N’avez baron ki mielz de lui la facet.”
LIX Li quens Rollant, quant il s’oït juger,
Dunc ad parled a lei de chevaler:
“Sire parastre, mult vos dei aveir cher:
La rereguarde avez sur mei jugiet!
755 N’i perdrat Carles, li reis ki France tient,
Men escientre palefreid ne destrer,
Ne mul ne mule que deiet chevalcher,
Ne n’i perdrat ne runcin ne sumer
Que as espees ne seit einz eslegiet.”
760 Guenes respunt: “Veir dites, jol sai bien.”
LX Quant ot Rollant qu’il ert en la rereguarde,
Ireement parlat a sun parastre:
“Ahi! culvert, malvais hom de put aire,
Quias le guant me caïst en la place,
765 Cume fist a tei le bastun devant Carle?”
LXI “Dreiz emperere,” dist Rollant le baron,
“Dunez mei l’arc que vos tenez el poign.
Men escientre nel me reproverunt
Que il me chedet cum fist a Guenelun
770 De sa main destre, quant reçut le bastun.”
Li empereres en tint sun chef enbrunc,
Si duist sa barbe e detoerst sun gernun,
Ne poet muer que des oilz ne plurt.
LXII Anpres iço i est Neimes venud,
775 Meillor vassal n’out en la curt de lui,
E dist al rei: “Ben l’avez entendut;
Li quens Rollant, il est mult irascut.
La rereguarde est jugee sur lui:
N’avez baron ki jamais la remut.
780 Dunez li l’arc que vos avez tendut,
Si li truvez ki trés bien li aiut!”
Li reis li dunet e Rollant l’a reçut.
(LVIII 737 Night goes and bright dawn appears …
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Proudly the Emperor rides on horseback.
740 “Lords Barons,” says Emperor Charles,
“See those gaps and those narrow passages;
Now decide for me who shall be in the rearguard.”
Ganelon answers: “Roland, my stepson:
You have no baron of such great prowess.”
745 When the King hears this, he looks at him fiercely,
And thus he spoke to him: “You are a living devil.
Into your body mortal rage has entered.
And who will be before me in the vanguard?”
Ganelon answers: “Ogier the Dane:
750 You have no baron who would do it better than he.”
LIX Count Roland, when he hears himself chosen,
Then spoke as befits a knight:
“Sir stepfather, I must hold you very dear:
The rearguard you have adjudged to me!
755 Thereby shall Charles, the king who holds France, lose,
If I know rightly, neither palfrey nor charger,
Neither mule nor hinny which he is to ride,
Nor shall he lose thereby either hack or sumpter
Which has not first been fought for with sword.”
760 Ganelon answers: “You speak true, I know it well.”
LX When Roland hears that he will be in the rearguard,
Angrily he spoke to his stepfather:
“Ah! wretch, bad man of stinking birth,
Did you think the glove would drop from my hand in this place
765 As the staff did for you before Charles?”
LXI “Just Emperor,” said Roland the baron,
“Give me the bow which you hold in your clenched hand.
If I know rightly, none shall reproach me
That it dropped from my hand as it did for Ganelon,
770 From his right hand, when he received the staff.”
The Emperor kept his head bowed,
Stroked his beard and twisted his mustache,
He cannot keep his eyes from weeping.
LXII After this Naimes came there,
775 There was no better vassal than he at court,
And he said to the King: “Well have you heard it;
Count Roland, he is very angry.
The rearguard is allotted to him:
You have no baron who could (would?) change this.
780 Give him the bow which you have drawn,
And find him some to help him very well!”
The King gives it to him, and Roland received it.)
These lines are from the Oxford manuscript of the Chanson de Roland. They relate the appointment of Roland to a dangerous post, that of commander of the rearguard of the Frankish army, which is on its way back through the Pyrenees after the campaign in Spain. The choice is made at the suggestion of Roland’s stepfather Ganelon. The manner of it corresponds to an earlier episode, the choice of Ganelon for the post of Charles’s emissary to Marsilius, King of the Saracens, at the suggestion of Roland (ll. 274ff.). Both occurrences are rooted in an old enmity between the two barons, who are at odds over matters of money and property and seek to destroy one another (l. 3758). Any emissary to Marsilius, it was known from earlier experiences, was in great danger of losing his life. The events of Ganelon’s mission showed that it would have cost him too his life, if he had not proposed to the Saracen King the treacherous bargain which at the same time would satisfy his own hatred and thirst for revenge: he promises the King that he will deliver into his hands the rearguard of the Frankish army, with Roland and his twelve closest friends, the douzepers, whom he represents (rightly) to be the war party at the Frankish court. He has now come back to the Frankish camp with Marsilius’ insincere offer of peace and submission. The return of the army to France has begun. And Ganelon, to carry out the plan he has agreed upon with Marsilius, still has to arrange that Roland shall be appointed to the rearguard. This takes place in the lines quoted above.
The occurrence is related in five strophes (laisses). The first contains Ganelon’s proposal and Charles’s immediate reaction. The second, third, and fourth are concerned with Roland’s attitude toward the proposal. The fifth takes up Naimes’s intervention and the final appointment of Roland by the Emperor. The first laisse begins with an introduction of three lines, three paratactically juxtaposed principal clauses which describe the early-morning departure of the army (the subject immediately preceding was the past night and a dream of the Emperor’s). Next comes the scene of the proposal, which is given in the form of a double exchange of speech and rejoinder: demand that a choice be made, reply (with proposal), counterquestion, and counterreply. Both pairs of speeches are fitted into the simplest stereotyped frame (dist, respunt, dit, respunt). After the first pair, they are interrupted by line 745, the only one containing a brief temporal hypotaxis. Everything else is in the form of principal clauses, juxtaposed and opposed like blocks, with a paratactic independence still further emphasized by mention of the speaking subject each time (especially striking, 740, li emperere Carles, although he is also the subject of the preceding sentence). Let us now examine the individual speeches. Charles’s demand contains a causal train of reasoning: since we are to traverse a difficult terrain, choose for me. … But in keeping with the Emperor’s proudly confident demeanor (mult fierement), it is presented paratactically in two principal clauses, a demonstrative clause (see the difficult terrain) and an imperative clause. In answer—like a gauntlet flung down—comes Ganelon’s proposal, again a parataxis, with three members: first the name, then a reference, filled with triumphant revenge, to the kinship (cist miens fillastre, as a reminiscence of the corresponding mis parastre, l. 277, and l. 287, ço set hom ben que jo sui tis parastres), and finally the supporting argument with its conventional praise, no doubt uttered in a tone of scornful irony. After this we have the brief dramatic pause with Charles’s fierce look. His reply—likewise purely paratactic in form—begins with violent expressions which show that he sees through Ganelon’s plan, but also, as is later confirmed by Naimes, that he has in his power no effective means of rejecting the proposal. Perhaps we may interpret his concluding question as a sort of counterattack: I need Roland for the vanguard! If this interpretation is correct, Ganelon at any rate disposes of the counterattack at once, and the identity of structure between his second speech and his first emphasizes the slashing abruptness of his demeanor. His position is apparently very strong, and he is quite certain of victory. In syntax too, this laisse answers blow with blow.
To this keenness and finality of statement there is a certain contrast in the fact that many things in the scene are not particularly clear. We can hardly be expected to assume that the Emperor is bound by the proposal of a single one of his barons. In fact, in similar cases elsewhere (for example in the previous case of Ganelon’s appointment, ll. 278-9 and 321-2; see also l. 243), explicit mention is made of the assent of the entire army. It may be conjectured that in the present instance the same assent is given without its being mentioned, or that the Emperor knows that there can be no doubt that it would be given. But even so, even if our text conceals a portion of the tradition—the fact that Roland has enemies among the Franks, who would be glad to see him given a dangerous assignment and removed from the Emperor’s entourage, possibly for fear his influence might reverse the decision to end the war—even so it is puzzling that the Emperor should have failed to make arrangements beforehand for a solution agreeable to him, so that his call for a choice puts him in a position from which he knows no escape. He must after all be aware of what currents of thought prevail among his men, and in addition he has been warned by a dream. This connects with another enigma: how well does he see through Ganelon, how well does he know beforehand what is going to happen? We cannot assume that he is informed of Ganelon’s plan in all its details. But if he is not, his reaction to the proposal (vos estes vifs diables, etc.) seems exaggerated. The Emperor’s entire position is unclear; and despite all the authoritative definiteness which he manifests from time to time, he seems as it were somnambulistically paralyzed. The important and symbolic position—almost that of a Prince of God—in which he appears as the head of all Christendom and as the paragon of knightly perfection, is in strange contrast to his impotence. Although he hesitates, although he even sheds tears, although he foresees the impending disaster to some not clearly definable extent, he cannot prevent it. He is dependent upon his barons, and among them there is none who can change the situation at all (or should we say, who will? That depends on how we interpret line 779). In the same way, later on, at Ganelon’s trial, he would be obliged to leave his nephew Roland’s death unavenged were it not that, finally, a single knight is prepared to defend his cause. It is possible to find various explanations for all this: for example, the weakness of the central power in the feudal order of society, a weakness which, though it had hardly developed by Charlemagne’s time, was certainly prevalent later, at the time when the Chanson de Roland originated; then, too, semireligious, semilegendary concepts of the kind found with many royal figures in the courtly romance, concepts which, to the personification of the great Emperor, add an admixture of passive, martyrlike, and somnambulistically paralyzed traits. Furthermore, his relation to Ganelon seems to contain elements of the Christ-Judas pattern.
The poem itself in any case gives no analyses or explanations whatever of the mysterious aspects of this and other events. We have to contribute them ourselves, and they rather detract from our aesthetic appreciation. The poet explains nothing; and yet the things which happen are stated with a paratactic bluntness which says that everything must happen as it does happen, it could not be otherwise, and there is no need for explanatory connectives. This, as the reader knows, refers not only to the events but also to the views and principles which form the basis of the actions of the persons concerned. The knightly will to fight, the concept of honor, the mutual loyalty of brothers in arms, the community of the clan, the Christian dogma, the allocation of right and wrong to Christians and infidels, are probably the most important of these views. They are few in number. They give a narrow picture in which only one stratum of society appears, and even that stratum in a greatly simplified form. They are posited without argument as pure theses: these are the facts. No argument, no explanatory discussion whatever is called for when, for example, the statement is made: paien unt tort et chrestiens unt dreit (l. 1015: heathens are wrong and Christians are right), although the life of the infidel knights—except for the names of their gods—seems hardly different from that of the Christians. Often, it is true, they are referred to as depraved and horrible, at times in fantastic and symbolic ways, but they are knights too, and the structure of their society seems to be exactly the same as that of Christian society. The parallel extends to minor details and thus serves to render the narrowness of the representation of life still more striking. The Christianity of the Christians is simply a stipulation. It exhausts itself in the creed and the liturgic formulas that go with it. Furthermore it is, in a very extreme sense, made to serve the knightly will to fight and political expansion. The penance laid upon the Franks when they pray and receive absolution before going into battle is to fight hard; whoever falls in the fight is a martyr and can surely expect a place in Paradise. Conversions by force which involve the killing of those who offer resistance are works with which God is well pleased. This attitude, astonishing as a Christian attitude and non-existent as such in earlier times, is not based, here in the Chanson de Roland, on a given historical situation, as it was in Spain, whence it would seem to have stemmed. Nor is any other explanation of it given. That is the way it is—a paratactic situation made up of theses which, extremely narrow as they are, are yet full of contradictions.
Let us go on to the second part of the scene—Roland’s reaction. It is the theme of three laisses. In the first two Roland addresses Ganelon, in the third the Emperor. His speeches contain three motifs of various strength and variously crossed: (1) a tremendously assertive and ferocious pride, (2) hatred for Ganelon, and (3), much weaker, devotion to the Emperor and the desire to serve him. (1) and (2) are crossed in such a way that (1) appears first, with great force, but even here is already imbued with (2) and (3). Roland loves danger and seeks it; he cannot be frightened. Furthermore he sets great value upon his prestige. He refuses to grant Ganelon the briefest moment of triumph. And so his first consideration is to point out emphatically, for all to hear, that he, unlike Ganelon in a comparable situation, has not lost his composure. Hence his expression of gratitude to Ganelon, which in view of the enmity between them—well known to all present—can have only an effect of irony and scorn. Hence too the enumeration of the various mounts and beasts of burden not one of which will he abandon without fight—a powerful, demonstrative, and very successful assertion of his pride and courage which even Ganelon is obliged to recognize, although in doing so he may well have his own thoughts in the back of his mind, for it is precisely Roland’s intrepid self-confidence on which he relies in his plan to destroy him. But in any case, Ganelon’s momentary triumph is spoiled. For, once Roland has made his attitude sufficiently known, he can give the reins to his hatred and contempt, which now assume the form of a scornful triumph on his part: you see, you scoundrel, I do not conduct myself as you did that time; and even when he stands before Charles to receive the bow, his expression of ready obedience, formulated so as to reveal impatience, is once again interspersed with his scornful and triumphant comparison between his behavior and Ganelon’s.
The whole scene—Roland’s display of self-confidence, followed by his sustained, repetitive, and triumphant outburst of hatred and scorn—is spread out over three laisses, and since the first two are addressed to Ganelon, with very similar opening phrases, distinguished only by the adverbial modifiers—the first time a lei de chevaler, the second time ireement—since furthermore a superficial and purely rational examination seems to show their contents to be incongruous—the first appearing friendly and the second angry—numerous editors and critics have doubted the authenticity of the text and have cut out one of the two laisses, usually the second. That this cannot be right was pointed out by Bédier in his commentary (Paris, Piazza, 1927, p. 151), and this—as the foregoing analysis may serve to indicate—is my view too. The second laisse presupposes the first. The attitude revealed in the first laisse, which stands in sharp contrast to Ganelon’s attitude in that earlier scene, supplies the justification for the triumphant hatred of the second. I should like to corroborate this result by another, a stylistic, consideration. This kind of repeated resumption of the same situation in consecutive laisses, in a manner which at first leaves the reader in doubt as to whether he is confronted with a new scene or a complementary treatment of the first, is very frequent in the Chanson de Roland (as well as elsewhere in the chansons de geste). There are other instances where such resumptions occasion surprising shifts, as is the case in the passage here under discussion. In laisses 40, 41, and 42, the question which King Marsilius repeats three times in almost identical terms—i.e., when will Charles, who after all is getting on in years, tire of war—is answered by Ganelon in three different ways, of which the first gives not the least inkling of what the others will be. In his first answer Ganelon speaks exclusively in praise of Charles, and it is only in the second and third that he names Roland and his companions as warmongers, thus taking his first step toward treason; in the following laisse, 43, he at last speaks plainly, and Charles is no longer referred to in friendly terms. Even before this, Ganelon’s attitude in Marsilius’ presence is not to be understood in purely rational terms. He displays such hostility and haughtiness that his purpose seems to be to irritate the king at all costs, and negotiation and treason appear to be out of the question. In other instances (laisses 5 and 6, 79 to 81, 83 to 86, 129 and 130, 133 to 135, 137 to 139, 146 and 147, etc.) there is no real contradiction between the content of one laisse and that of another, but here too one and the same point of departure is frequently used to push ahead in different directions or over different distances. When in laisse 80 Oliver climbs to the top of a hill and from there sees the approaching Saracen army, he summons Roland and talks to him of Ganelon’s treason. In laisse 81, which also begins with Oliver’s climbing the hill, no mention is made of Roland, but Oliver comes down as quickly as possible to report back to the Franks. In laisses 83 to 85, where Oliver thrice asks Roland to blow his horn and thrice receives the same negative reply, the function of the repetition is to make the scene more intense; as, in the Chanson de Roland generally, both the urgent-intense and the manifold-simultaneous are represented by the repetition and addition of many, and frequently of artfully varied, individual occurrences. The series of knights who assume a place in the action, as well as the series of battle scenes, are instances of this procedure. Laisses 129 to 131, where Roland himself proposes to blow his horn (prepared in laisse 128 and extremely artful in the expression of Roland’s self-conscious regret), correspond to the earlier scene although the actors have exchanged roles. This time it is Oliver who thrice replies in the negative. His three answers are constructed with considerable psychological finesse. The first, with concealed irony, repeats Roland’s own counterarguments but suddenly changes to a spontaneous outburst of sympathy (or admiration) at the sight of Roland’s blood-stained arms. The second again begins ironically, and concludes in an outburst of anger. It is not until we reach the third that we have Oliver’s reproaches and his grief formulated in an orderly manner. In the three laisses of the horn signal—133 to 135, presumably involving a threefold blowing of the horn—the effect which the horn produces upon the Franks is developed differently each time. Taken together, to be sure, the three effects represent a development too, that is, from surprise and confusion to a complete realization of the state of affairs (which Ganelon endeavors to prevent), but this development is not evenly progressive but spastic, now gaining, now losing ground, like generation or birth.
Varied repetition of the same theme is a technique stemming from medieval Latin poetics, which in turn draws it from antique rhetoric. This fact has recently been pointed out once again by Faral and E. R. Curtius. But neither the form nor the stylistic effect of the “regressions” in the Chanson de Roland can thus be explained or even described. It would seem that the series of similar events and the resumption of previous statements are phenomena related in character to the parataxis of sentence structure. Whether one comprehensive representation is replaced by a reiterative enumeration of individual scenes similar in form and progress; whether one intense action is replaced by a repetition of the same action, beginning at the same starting point time and again; or whether finally, instead of a process of complex and periodic development, we have repeated returns to the starting point, each one proceeding to elaborate a different element or motif: in all cases rationally organized condensations are avoided in favor of a halting, spasmodic, juxtapositive, and pro- and retrogressive method in which causal, modal, and even temporal relations are obscured. (In the very first laisse of the poem, the last line, nes poet guarder que mals ne l’i ateignet, looks very far into the future.) Time and again there is a new start; every resumption is complete in itself and independent; the next is simply juxtaposed to it, and the relation between the two is often left hanging. This too is a type of epic retardation in Goethe’s and Schiller’s sense (cf. above, pp. 4f.), but it is not managed through interpolations and episodes but through progression and retrogression within the principal action itself. This procedure is very markedly epic; it is even recitationally epic, for a listener arriving in the course of the recitation receives a coherent impression. At the same time it is a technique of subdividing the course of events into numerous rigid little divisions, mutually delimited by the use of stereotyped phrases.
Roland’s three speeches are not as brief as the Emperor’s and Ganelon’s in the first laisse, but they too have no periodic flow. The long sentence of laisse 59 is merely an enumeration with repeated breaks. In all three laisses the subordinate clauses are of the simplest type; they are independent to a very high degree. Anything like flow of discourse does not arise. The rhythm of the Chanson de Roland is never flowing, as is that of the antique epic. Every line marks a new start, every stanza represents a new approach. This impression, already produced by the prevailing parataxis, is increased by the generally clumsy and ungrammatical handling of connections whenever a rare attempt is made to use somewhat more complex hypotaxes. Another factor is the assonant strophic pattern, which gives every line the appearance of an independent unit while the entire strophe appears to be a bundle of independent parts, as though sticks or spears of equal length and with similar points were bundled together. Consider for example Ganelon’s speech in support of accepting Marsilius’ offer of peace (ll. 220ff.), which contains a long sentence:
222 Quant ço vos mandet li reis Marsiliun
Qu’il devendrat jointes ses mains tis hum
E tute Espaigne tendrat par vostre dun,
225 Puis recevrat la lei que nus tenum,
Ki ço vos lodet que cest plait degetuns,
Ne li chalt, sire, de quel mort nus muriuns.
(If this is the message King Marsilius sends, that he will become—his hands folded—your vassal, and will hold all of Spain in fief to you, then will take the faith which we hold, he who recommends to you that we reject this proposal, to him it does not matter, Sire, what kind of death we die.)
The principal clause (ne li chalt …) comes at the end. But the beginning of the period does not consider what the pattern of the main clause is going to be and consequently—after the content of Marsilius’ message has been stated—a shift in construction proves necessary. The quant-clause with its subordinate statements of the content (que … e … puis …)—which itself loses sight of its structure before it is half finished (puis recevrat … already begins breaking away from the anchorage in que)—remains an anacoluthon, and the emphatically anticipated ki-clause starts a new pattern. But in addition to this type of sentence structure, which is hypotactic in external appearance but in reality quite paratactic, there is also the subdivision in meaning according to the individual lines, the sharp incisions marked by the assonance in u, and the somewhat less emphatic but clearly noticeable caesuras in the middle of the line, which in all cases indicate units of meaning as well. No indeed—periodicity and flow of discourse are not among the characteristics of this style. It is admirably homogeneous, for the attitudes of the personages are so strongly molded and limited by the narrow range of the established order in which they move, that their thoughts, feelings, and passions can find room in such lines. The copious and connected argumentation of which Homer’s heroes are so fond is wholly outside of their ken; and by the same token they are without any free-flowing, dynamic, and impulsive movement in expression. The words which the Emperor Charles utters when he hears the call of the horn (ll. 1768-9),
Ce dist li reis: “Jo oi le corn Rollant.
Unc nel sunast se ne fust cumbatant”
(This said the King: “I hear Roland’s horn. Never would he sound it if he were not fighting.”)
have often been compared with the corresponding lines in Vigny’s poem “Le Cor,”
Malheur! C’est mon neveu! malheur! car si Roland
Appelle à son secours, ce doit être en mourant,
which is extremely informative in the present connection. But it is not necessary to adduce a romantic parallel; the same purpose can be served by classical and later European texts from periods preceding Romanticism. Consider Roland’s death prayer (ll. 2384ff.) or the formally quite similar prayer uttered by the Emperor before the battle against Baligant (ll. 3100ff.). These follow liturgical models and consequently display a comparatively prolonged sweep in their syntax. Roland’s prayer reads:
2384 Veire Paterne, ki unkes ne mentis,
Seint Lazaron de mort resurrexis
E Daniel des leons guaresis,
Guaris de mei l’anme de tuz perilz
Pur les pecchez que en ma vie fis!
(True Father, who never lied, who resurrected Saint Lazarus from the dead, and saved Daniel from the lions, save my soul from all dangers on account of the sins which I committed in my life!)
and the Emperor’s:
3100 Veire Paterne, hoi cest jor me defend,
Ki guaresis Jonas tut veirement
De la baleine ki en sun cors l’aveit,
E esparignas le rei de Niniven
E Daniel del merveillus turment
3105 Enz en la fosse des leons o fut enz,
Les. III. enfanz tut en un fou ardant!
La tue amurs me seit hoi en present!
Par ta mercit, se te plaist, me cunsent
Que mun nevold poisse venger Rollant!
(True Father, help me now on this day, Thou who didst Jonas truly save from the whale which had him in its belly, and spared the King of Nineveh, and Daniel from the terrible torture in the lions’ den wherein he was, and the three men from the burning oven: let Thy love be with me today. Through Thy mercy, if it please Thee, grant me that I may avenge my nephew Roland.)
In this rigidly stereotyped use of the figures of redemption (figures which, as the literature of mysticism shows, can be employed in a very differently dynamic fashion), as well as in the almost static and reiterative manner of the apostrophizing supplication, there is, to be sure, a strong element of emotion, but there is also the narrow definitiveness of a spatially limited and perfectly unambiguous view of God, the universe, and fate. If we confront this with any prayer from the Iliad—I choose at random 305ff.,
πότνι᾽ Ἀθηναίη ἐρνσίπτολι, δῖα θεάων,
ἆξον δὴ ἔγχος Διομήδεος ἠδὲ καὶ αὐτὸν
πρηνέα δὸς πεσέειν Σκαιῶν προπάροιθε πνλάων
(Mighty Athena, protectress of the city, sublime goddess, turn Diomedes’ lance and make him fall headlong before the Skaean gates!)
with a violent upsurge in the movement of imploration (ἠδὲ καὶ αὐτὸν πρηνέα δὸς πεσέειν)—we discover how much greater possibilities for freely flowing, urgent, and imploring movements are to be found in Homer, and that his world, though certainly limited, yet has a much less rigid structure. The significant feature here is obviously not the run-on lines (which are frequent in antique versification) but the broad sweep of the richly nuanced sentence movement. This can equally well be displayed in rhymed verse without enjambment, whether the lines are short or long. And it appears quite early in Old French, as early as the twelfth century, in the octosyllabic rhymes of courtly romance or in shorter rhymed tales. If one compares the octosyllabic line of an old heroic epic, the fragment of Gormund et Isembard, which sounds like a series of detached and sharply marked bugle calls (criant l’enseigne al rei baron,/ la Loovis, le fiz Charlun), with the fluent, sometimes verbose, sometimes lyrical octosyllabic line of the courtly romance, one will quickly grasp the difference between rigid and fluent-connective syntax. And very soon indeed widely sweeping rhetorical movement appears in the courtly style. The following lines are from the Folie Tristan (after Bartsch, Chrestomathie de l’ancien Français, 12e éd., pièce 24):
31 en ki me purreie fier,
quant Ysolt ne me deingne amer,
quant Ysolt a si vil me tient
k’ore de mei ne li suvient?
(In whom can I have confidence, if Ysolt deigns not to love me, if Ysolt considers me so despicable that she does not now remember me?)
This is an urgent movement of grief in the form of a rhetorical question with two similarly constructed subordinate clauses of which the second is broader in scope, while the whole passage displays ascending rhythm. In pattern, it is reminiscent of, though much simpler than, the famous lines in Racine’s Bérénice (4, 5):
Dans un mois, dans un an, comment souffrirons-nous,
Seigneur, que tant de mers me séparent de vous:
Que le jour recommence et que le jour finisse,
Sans que jamais Titus puisse voir Bérénice,
Sans que, de tout le jour, je puisse voir Titus?
Let us briefly complete the analysis of our text. At the end of laisse 61 the Emperor still hesitates to hand the bow to Roland, who stands before him, and thus definitely to give him the order. He bows his head, he strokes his beard, he weeps. The intervention of Naimes, which concludes the scene, is again entirely paratactic in structure. The modal connections implied in his remarks are not grammatically expressed. Otherwise the passage would have to read: “You have heard how angry Roland is because his name has been suggested for the rearguard. But since there is no baron who could (or: would?) fill his place, give him the bow, but at least make certain that his support is strong enough.” The beautiful concluding line is also paratactic.
In the classical languages paratactic constructions belong to the low style; they are oral rather than written, comic and realistic rather than elevated. But here parataxis belongs to the elevated style. This is a new form of the elevated style, not dependent on periodic structure and rhetorical figures but on the power of juxtaposed and independent verbal blocks. An elevated style operating with paratactic elements is not, in itself, something new in Europe. The style of the Bible has this characteristic (cf. our first chapter). Here we may recall the discussion concerning the sublime character of the sentence dixitque Deus: fiat lux, et facta est lux (Genesis 1: 3) which Boileau and Huet carried on in the seventeenth century in connection with the essay On the Sublime attributed to Longinus. The sublime in this sentence from Genesis is not contained in a magnificent display of rolling periods nor in the splendor of abundant figures of speech but in the impressive brevity which is in such contrast to the immense content and which for that very reason has a note of obscurity which fills the listener with a shuddering awe. It is precisely the absence of causal connectives, the naked statement of what happens—the statement which replaces deduction and comprehension by an amazed beholding that does not even seek to comprehend—which gives the sentence its grandeur. But the case of the chanson de geste is completely different. The subject here is not the awesome riddle of creation and the Creator, not the creature man’s relationship to one and the other. The subject of the Chanson de Roland is narrow, and for the men who figure in it nothing of fundamental significance is problematic. All the categories of this life and the next are unambiguous, immutable, fixed in rigid formulations. To be sure, rational comprehension has no direct access to them, but that is an observation which we ourselves make; the poem and its contemporary audience felt no such concern. They live safely and confidently in the rigid and narrow established order within which the duties of life, their distribution according to estates (cf. the division of labor between knights and monks, ll. 1877ff.), the character of supernatural forces, and mankind’s relationship thereto are regulated in the simplest way. Within this frame there are abundant and delicate emotions; there is also a certain motley variegation in external phenomena; but the frame is so restricted and rigid that properly problematic situations, let alone tragedy, can hardly arise. There are no conflicts which deserve to be called tragic.
The early Germanic epic texts which have come down to us also exhibit paratactic construction; here too the warrior ethics of a nobility dominates, with its strict definitions of honor, justice, and ordeal by battle. And yet the final impression is quite different. The verbal blocks are more loosely juxtaposed, the space about the occurrences and the heaven above them are incomparably wider, destiny is more enigmatic, and the structure of society is not so rigidly established. The mere fact that the most famous Germanic epics, from the Hildebrandslied to the Nibelungenlied, derive their historical setting from the wild and spacious epoch of the tribal migrations rather than from the solidly established structure of the age of feudalism, gives them greater breadth and freedom. The Germanic themes of the age of the migrations did not reach Gallo-Roman territory, or at least they could not strike root there. And Christianity has almost no significance at all for the Germanic heroic epic. Free and immediate forces, still unsubdued by settled forms, are stronger in it, and the human roots—so at least it seems to me—go deeper. We cannot say of the Germanic poems of the heroic epic cycle, as we said of the Chanson de Roland, that the problematic and tragic element is lacking in them. Hildebrand is more directly human and tragic than Roland, and how much more deeply motivated are the conflicts in the Nibelungenlied than the hatred between Roland and Ganelon!
Yet we do encounter the same restricted and definitely established cosmos when we take up an early Romance religious text. We have several of these which precede the Chanson de Roland chronologically. The most important is the Chanson d’Alexis, a saint’s legend, which crystallized in the eleventh century in an Old French form still extant in several manuscripts. According to the legend, Alexius was the late-born only son of a noble Roman family. He was carefully educated, entered the emperor’s service, and in accordance with his father’s wishes was to marry a virgin of equal rank. He obeyed, but on the bridal night he left his wife without having touched her and lived for seventeen years as a poor beggar in a strange land (Edessa in northeastern Syria, the modern Turkish Urfa), that he might serve only God. Leaving his refuge to escape being revered as a saint, he was driven back to Rome by a storm. There he passed another seventeen years, still unrecognized and living as a despised beggar under the steps of his father’s house, unmoved by the sorrow of his parents and his wife, whose laments he often heard without revealing his identity. Not until after his death was he finally and miraculously recognized and thenceforth revered as a saint. The attitudes reflected in this text are different entirely from those of the Chanson de Roland. But it exhibits the same paratactic and rigid style, the same narrowness, indisputability, and fixity of all categories. Everything is settled, white or black, good or bad, and never requires further search or justification. Temptation is there, to be sure, but there is no realm of problem. On the one hand there is serving God, forsaking the world and seeking eternal bliss—on the other, natural life in the world, which leads to “great sorrow.” There are no other levels of consciousness, and external reality—the many additional phenomena which have their place in the universe and which ought somehow to constitute the frame for the occurrences of the narrative—is submitted to such reduction that nothing survives but an insubstantial background for the life of the saint. About him are grouped, accompanying his activities with appropriate pantomime, his father, mother, and bride. A few other characters required by the action appear, but they are even more shadowy. Everything else is completely schematized, both sociologically and geographically speaking. This is the more surprising since the scene seems to embrace the extent and variety of the entire Roman Empire. Nothing remains of West and East but churches, voices from on high, praying multitudes—nothing but the ever identical environment of the life of a saint; even as in the Chanson de Roland, the same social structure—that of feudalism—and the same ethos is dominant throughout, among both pagans and Christians. But here this is much more pronounced. The world has become very small and narrow; and in it everything revolves rigidly and immutably about a single question, which has been answered in advance and which it is man’s duty to answer rightly. He knows what road he must follow, or better, there is but one road open to him, there is no other. He knows too that he will reach a fork in the road, and that then he must turn right although the tempter will try to entice him to turn left. Everything else has vanished, the whole sweeping infinity of the outer and inner worlds, with its innumerable possibilities, configurations, and strata.
This, without doubt, is not Germanic; nor is it, I believe, Christian; at least it is not the necessary and original version of Christianity. For Christianity, the product of a variety of premises, and coming to grips with a variety of realities, has proved itself—before and after this period—incomparably more elastic, more rich, and more complexly stratified. This narrowness can hardly be original at all; it contains too many and too various inherited elements for that; it is not narrowness, it is a narrowing process. It is the process of rigidification and reduction which late antiquity underwent and which has figured in our earlier chapters. To be sure, a significant part is played in it by the simplified reduced form which Christianity assumed in its clash with exhausted or barbaric peoples.
In the Old French Chanson d’Alexis the scene of the bridal night, which is one of the high points of the poem, reads as follows (stanzas 11 to 15, text after Bartsch, Chrestomathie, 12e éd.):
11 Quant li jorz passet ed il fut anoitiet,
ço dist li pedre: “filz, quer t’en va colchier,
avuec ta spouse, al comant Deu del ciel.”
ne volst li enfes son pedre corrocier,
vait en la chambre o sa gentil moillier.
12 Com vit le lit, esguardat la pulcele,
donc li remembret de son seignour celeste
que plus ad chier que tote rien terrestre;
“e! Deus,” dist il, “si forz pechiez m’apresset!
s’or ne m’en fui, molt criem que ne t’en perde.”
13 Quant en la chambre furent tuit soul remes,
danz Alexis la prist ad apeler:
la mortel vide li prist molt a blasmer,
de la celeste li mostrat veritet;
mais lui ert tart qued il s’en fust tornez.
14 “Oz mei, pulcele, celui tien ad espous
Qui nos redemst de son sanc precious.
en icest siecle nen at parfite amour:
la vide est fraile, n’i at durable onour;
ceste ledece revert a grant tristour.”
15 Quant sa raison li at tote mostrede,
donc li comandet les renges de sa spede,
ed un anel dont il l’out esposede.
donc en ist fors de la chambre son pedre;
en mie nuit s’en fuit de la contrede.
(When the day was passed and night had come, thus spake his father: “Son, now go to bed, with your spouse, as the God of Heaven commands.” The son did not want to anger his father; he goes into the chamber with his gentle wife.
When he saw the bed, he looked at the maiden, then he remembers his Heavenly Lord whom he holds more dear than any earthly thing; “Ah, God!” said he, “how strongly sin presses upon me! If I flee not now, much I fear that I shall thereby lose Thee.” When they were left all alone in the chamber, Master Alexis began to speak to her: mortal life he began to chide to her, of heavenly life he showed her the truth; but much he wished that he were gone from there.
“Hear me, maiden, take Him for spouse who redeemed us with his precious blood. In this world there is no perfect love: life is frail, there is no lasting honor in it; this joy becomes great sorrow.”
When he had set forth all his mind to her, he gives her the thong of his sword and a ring with which he had married her. Then he went out of the chamber in his father’s house; in the middle of the night he fled from the country.)
However different the tenor of the two poems may be, the stylistic resemblance to the Chanson de Roland is very striking. In both, the paratactic principle goes far beyond mere technique of sentence structure. In both we have the same repeated returning to fresh starts, the same spasmodic progression and retrogression, the same independence of the individual occurrences and their constituent parts. Stanza 13 recapitulates the situation at the beginning of stanza 12, but carries the action further and in a different direction. Stanza 14 repeats, concretely and in direct discourse, the statement made in stanza 13 (of which, however, the last line had already gone further). Instead of the construction, “When they were alone in the room, he remembered …, and said ‘Listen …’ ”, we have the following arrangement: 1. “When he was in the room, he remembered …” 2. “When they were in the room, he said that ….” (indirect discourse) 3. “Listen, (he said) …” Each of the stanzas presents a complete and autonomous scene. The impression of a unified, progressive event whose advance binds together the various elements is much weaker than the impression of a juxtaposition of three very similar but separate scenes. One may generalize on the basis of this impression: the Chanson d’Alexis is a string of autonomous, loosely interrelated events, a series of mutually quite independent scenes from the life of a saint, each of which contains an expressive yet simple gesture. The father ordering Alexis to join his bride in the chamber; Alexis at the bedside, speaking to his bride; Alexis at Edessa distributing his worldly goods to the poor; Alexis the beggar; the servants sent out after him but failing to recognize him and giving him an alms; the mother’s lament; the conversation between mother and bride; and so forth. It is a cycle of scenes. Each one of these occurrences contains one decisive gesture with only a loose temporal or causal connection with those that follow or precede. Many of them (the mother’s lament, for example) are subdivided into several similar and individually independent pictures. Every picture has as it were a frame of its own. Each stands by itself in the sense that nothing new or unexpected happens in it and that it contains no propulsive force which demands the next. And the intervals are empty. But it is with no dark and profound emptiness, in which much befalls and much is prepared, in which we hold our breath in trembling expectation, the emptiness sometimes conjured up in the style of the Bible, with its intervals which make us ponder. Instead, it is a colorless duration without relief or substance, sometimes only a moment, sometimes seventeen years, sometimes wholly indefinable.
The course of events is thus resolved into a series of pictures; it is, as it were, parceled out. The Chanson de Roland taken as a whole is more compressed; the coherence is clearer; the individual picture sometimes displays more movement. But the representational technique (and this means more than mere technical procedure, it includes the idea of structure which poet and audience apply to the narrated event) is still exactly the same: it strings independent pictures together like beads. The intervals in the Chanson de Roland are not always so very empty and flat; landscape sometimes intrudes; we see or hear armies riding through valleys and mountain passes—yet the occurrences are still strung together in such a fashion that, time and again, completely independent and self-contained scenes result. The number of the characters who maintain the action is very small in the Chanson de Roland too; all the others—although they are far more varied than in the Alexis—seem mere types. Those participating in the action of the individual scenes are fixed to the spot; it is but rarely that a newcomer joins their number; and when that occurs (Naimes or Turpin acting as mediators), there is a sharp break. The variously altering relationship between a large number of persons, with the consequent involvements and element of adventure so characteristic of epic elsewhere, is here completely lacking. So much the stronger is the element of impressive gestures, both in the Alexis and the Roland. The urge to establish connections and pursue developments is feeble. Even within an individual scene, the development, if any, is halting and laborious. But the gestures of the scenic moment are simply and plastically impressive in the highest degree.
This impressiveness of gestures and attitudes is obviously the purpose of the technique under consideration when it divides the course of events into a mosaic of parceled pictures. The scenic moment with its gestures is given such power that it assumes the stature of a moral model. The various phases of the story of the hero or the traitor or the saint are concretized in gestures to such an extent that the pictured scenes, in the impression they produce, closely approach the character of symbols or figures, even in cases where it is not possible to trace any symbolic or figural signification. But very often such a signification can be traced: in the Chanson de Roland it is present in the person of Charlemagne, in the description of many characteristics of the pagan knights, and of course in the prayers. As for the Chanson d’Alexis, E. R. Curtius’ excellent interpretation (Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 56, 113ff., especially pp. 122 and 124) conclusively supports the idea of a figural fulfillment in the beyond. This figural tradition played no small part in discrediting the horizontal, historical connections between events and in encouraging rigidification of all categories. Thus the prayers cited above exhibit the figures of redemption completely rigidified. The parceling of the events of the Old Testament, which are interpreted figurally in isolation from their historic context, has become a formula. The figures—as on the sarcophagi of late antiquity—are placed side by side paratactically. They no longer have any reality, they have only signification. With respect to the events of this world, a similar tendency prevails: to remove them from their horizontal context, to isolate the individual fragments, to force them into a fixed frame, and, within it, to make them impressive gesturally, so that they appear as exemplary, as models, as significant, and to leave all “the rest” in abeyance. It is easy to see that such a procedure permits but a small, extremely narrow portion of reality to assume visual plasticity, that portion which the crystallized idioms of the established categories are able to convey. But small as it may be, it does assume visual plasticity, and this shows that the high point of the process of rigidification has been passed. It is precisely in the isolated pictures that the germs of a revival are to be found.
The Latin text which may be assumed to have been the source for the French Chanson d’Alexis (it will be found in the Acta Sanctorum of July 17; it is here cited after Förster-Koschwitz, Altfranzösisches Übungsbuch, sixth edition, 1921, pp. 299ff.) is perhaps not much older than the French version, for the legend, which originated in Syria, can be traced in the West only at a comparatively late date. But it exhibits the form of the saint’s legend of late antiquity much more purely. Its treatment of the bridal night deviates from the Old French version in a highly characteristic fashion:
Vespere autem facto dixit Euphemianus filio suo; “Intra, fili, in cubiculum et visita sponsam tuam.” Ut autem intravit, coepit nobilissimus juvenis et in Christo sapientissimus instruere sponsam suam et plura ei sacramenta disserere, deinde tradidit ei annulum suum aureum et rendam, id est caput baltei, quo cingebatur, involuta in prandeo et purpureo sudario, dixitque ei: “Suscipe haec et conserva, usque dum Domino placuerit, et Dominus sit inter nos.” Post haec accepit de substantia sua et discessit ad mare. …
(When it was evening, Euphemianus said to his son: “Go into the bedroom, son, and visit your wife.” But when he entered, the noble youth began most sagely to teach his wife of Christ and to explain to her many holy things, then he gave her his golden ring and the thong of his sword wrapped in a purple cloth of silk and spoke to her: “Take these and keep them as long as it pleases the Lord, and the Lord be between us.” After that he took some of his wealth and went down to the sea.)
It will have been noticed that the Latin text is likewise almost wholly paratactic. But it does not exploit the possibilities of parataxis; it has not come to know them. It has leveled and flattened the whole scene to complete uniformity. The narration proceeds without any ups and downs, without change of tone, “monotonously”: so that not only the frame but even the picture within it remains motionless, is rigid and without dynamism. The inner struggle which the temptation brings about in Alexis’ soul and for which the Old French version has the simplest and most beautiful expression, is not even mentioned. There seems to be no temptation at all. And the great movement of Alexis’ words in direct discourse to his bride (Oz mei, pulcele …)—one of the strongest movements of the entire Old French poem, in which Alexis rises to his full stature and which is the first outbreaking of his real nature—is evidently something the French poet created out of the pale Latin words of his source. The flight too first becomes dramatic in the French text. The Latin version is much smoother and more uniformly progressive; but the human movement is weak, is barely alluded to, as if the story had to do with a ghost and not a living being. The same impression continues as one reads on. A really human formulation can be found only in the vernacular version. New in it (and we mention only the most important points) are the mother’s lament in the deserted room and, later, the saint’s inner struggle when the storm drives him back to Rome. Here Alexius hesitates before taking upon himself the most difficult trial of all, which is to live as an unknown beggar in his father’s house, where day after day he sees his nearest relatives mourning for him. He wishes that the cup might pass from him; yet he accepts it. The Latin text knows no hesitation and no inner struggle, here as in the scene of the bridal night. Alexis goes to his father’s house because he does not want the burden to fall on anyone else.
It was vernacular poetry—our comparison of these two texts seems to show—which first imparted relief to the individual pictures, so that their characters took on life and human fullness. This life, to be sure, is restricted by the rigidity and narrowness of the categories, which persist unalterably, and it fails all too easily for lack of progressive movement; but it is precisely through the resistance offered by the frame of rigid categories that it acquires impressiveness and force. It was the vernacular poets who first saw man as a living being and found the form in which parataxis possesses poetic power. Instead of a thin, monotonous trickle of juxtapositions, we now have the laisse form, with its abrupt advances and regressions and its abundance of energetic new beginnings, which is a new elevated style. If the life which this stylistic procedure can seize upon is narrowly restricted and without diversity, it is nevertheless a full life, a life of human emotion, a powerful life, a great relief after the pale, intangible style of the late antique legend. The vernacular poets also knew how to exploit direct discourse in terms of tone and gesture. We have already referred to Alexis’ address to his bride and to his mother’s lament. In addition we may mention the words in which, after his return to Rome, the saint asks his father for food and shelter. In the French version they have a concrete and direct appeal to which the Latin text could not possibly attain. The French passage reads:
Eufemiiens, bels sire, riches om,
quer me herberge por Deu en ta maison;
soz ton degret me fai un grabaton
empor ton fil dont tu as tel dolour;
toz sui enfers, sim pais por soue amour. …
(Euphemianus, noble lord, wealthy man, may it please thee to give me shelter in thy house for the sake of God. Under thy stairs arrange a sickbed for me, for thy son’s sake through whom thou hast such great sorrow. I am very ill; so feed me for the sake of thy love to him. …)
and the Latin parallel:
Serve Dei, respice in me et fac mecum misericordiam, quia pauper sum et peregrinus, et jube me suscipi in domo tua, ut pascar de micis mensae tuae et Deus benedicat annos tuos et ei quem habes in peregre misereatur.
(Servant of God, look at me and be charitable to me, for I am poor and a stranger; and give orders that I be received in thy house, so that I may feed upon the crumbs from thy table, and may God bless thy years and have mercy on him whom you have wandering far from home.)
We observed earlier that it would be a mistake simply to make Christianity responsible for the rigidity and narrowness which appear in the late antique legend and from which the vernacular texts are able to emancipate themselves only gradually. In our earlier chapters we attempted to show that the first effect of the Judaeo-Christian manner of dealing with the events in the world of reality led to anything but rigidity and narrowness. The hiddenness of God and finally his parousia, his incarnation in the common form of an ordinary life, these concepts—we tried to show—brought about a dynamic movement in the basic conception of life, a swing of the pendulum in the realms of morals and sociology, which went far beyond the classicantique norm for the imitation of real life and living growth. Even the Church Fathers, Augustine in particular, have not by any means come down to us as schematized figures pursuing a rigidly preordained course, and Augustine’s friend, Alypius, whose inner upheaval at the gladiatorial games we discussed in an earlier passage, comes fully alive as he struggles, is defeated, and finally recovers. Rigid, narrow, and unproblematic schematization is originally completely alien to the Christian concept of reality. It is true, to be sure, that the rigidifying process is furthered to a considerable degree by the figural interpretation of real events, which, as Christianity became established and spread, grew increasingly influential and which, in its treatment of actual events, dissolved their content of reality, leaving them only their content of meaning. As dogma was established, as the Church’s task became more and more a matter of organization, its problem that of winning over peoples completely unprepared and unacquainted with Christian principles, figural interpretation must inevitably become a simple and rigid scheme. But the problem of the process of rigidification as a whole goes deeper; it is linked to the decline of the culture of antiquity. It is not Christianity which brought about the process of rigidification, but rather Christianity was drawn into it. With the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the principle of order which it embodied—a principle which had itself been long characterized by certain senile traits of calcification—the inner coherence of the orbis terrarum disintegrated too, and a new world could only be rebuilt from its parceled fragments. During the process, the politically and psychologically crude ethos of the newly emerging peoples everywhere clashed with the surviving institutions of Rome, the vestiges of antique culture, which retained a tremendous prestige despite decline and rigidification. It was a clash of the very young and the age old, and at first the very young was paralyzed, until it had managed to come to terms with the vestiges of tradition, until it had filled them with its own life and brought them to a new florescence. The process of rigidification was naturally least pronounced in countries where the culture of late antiquity had never played a dominant role, that is, in the countries at the center of the Germanic world; it was considerably more pronounced in the Romance countries, where a real clash occurred, and perhaps it is no accident that France—where the Germanic influence was stronger than in any other Romance country—was the first to begin emancipating itself from that influence.
It appears to me that the first elevated style of the European Middle Ages arose at the moment when the single event is filled with life. That is why this style is so rich in individual scenes of great effectiveness, scenes in which only a very few characters confront one another, in which the gestures and speeches of a brief occurrence come out in sharp relief. The characters, facing one another at close quarters, without much room for movement, nevertheless stand there as individuals clearly set off from one another. What is said of them never degenerates into mere talk; it always remains a solemn statement in which every address, every phrase, and indeed every word, has a value of its own, separate and emphatic, with no trace of softness and no relaxed flow. Confronting the reality of life, this style is neither able nor willing to deal with its breadths or depths. It is limited in time, place, and social milieu. It simplifies the events of the past by stylizing and idealizing them. The feeling it seeks to arouse in its auditor is admiration and amazement for a distant world, whose instincts and ideals, though they certainly remain his own, yet evolve in such uncompromising purity and freedom, in comparison with the friction and resistance of real life, as his practical existence could not possibly attain. Human movements and great, towering exemplary figures appear with striking effect; his own life is not there at all. To be sure, in the very tone of the Chanson de Roland there is a great deal of contemporaneity. It does not begin with an announcement which removes the events to a distant past (“Long ago it came to pass … Of olden days I will sing …”) but with a strongly immediate note, as though Charles, our great Emperor, were almost still a living man. The naive transfer of events three centuries past into the ethos of feudal society of the early crusading period, the exploitation of the subject matter in the interest of ecclesiastic and feudal propaganda, give the poem a quality of living presentness. Something like a nascent national consciousness is even perceptible in it. When we read—to choose a simple illustration—the line in which Roland tries to organize the imminent attack of the Frankish knights (1165):
Seignurs barons, suef, le pas tenant!
we hear the echo of a common scene of contemporary feudal cavalry maneuvers. But these are isolated instances. Class limitation, idealization, simplification, and the shimmering veil of legend prevail.
The style of the French heroic epic is an elevated style in which the structural concept of reality is still extremely rigid and which succeeds in representing only a narrow portion of objective life circumscribed by distance in time, simplification of perspective, and class limitations. I shall be saying nothing new, but merely reformulating what I have said many times, if I add that in this style the separation of the realm of the heroic and sublime from that of the practical and everyday is a matter of course. Strata other than that at the top of the feudal system simply do not appear. The economic bases of society are not even mentioned. This is carried much further than in the heroic epic of the early Germanic and Middle High German periods and is also in striking contrast to the heroic epic of Spain, which begins to appear but little later. Yet the chanson de geste, and the Chanson de Roland in particular, was popular. It is true that these poems deal exclusively with the exploits of the upper stratum of feudal society, but there is no doubt that they address the common people as well. The explanation may be that despite the marked material and juridic differences between the various strata of the lay population they were as yet essentially on the same intellectual level; that, indeed, the ideals men cherished were still uniform, or at least that secular ideals other than those of knighthood and heroism were not ready to be put into practice and into words. That the chanson de geste was a force and an influence on all levels of society is shown by the fact that about the end of the eleventh century the clergy—whose attitude toward vernacular lay literature had not theretofore been benevolent—began to exploit the heroic epic for their own purpose. The fact that these themes survived for centuries, that they were recast in ever new versions and quickly sank to the level of country-fair entertainment, proves their enduring popularity among the lower classes. For audiences of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries the heroic epic was history; in it the historical tradition of earlier ages was alive. No other tradition existed, at least none accessible to those audiences. It is only about the year 1200 that the first vernacular chronicles are composed, but they do not relate the past, they are eye-witness accounts of contemporary events, and even so they are strongly influenced by the epic style. And indeed, the heroic epic is history, at least insofar as it recalls actual historical conditions—however much it may distort and simplify them—and insofar as its characters always perform a historico-political function. This historico-political element is abandoned by the courtly novel, which consequently has a completely new relationship to the objective world of reality.