ish literature bears in all its phases the imprint of a double
origin. French literature, on the other hand, is absolutely homogeneous.
How far this is an advantage or the reverse it would be difficult to
say; but the important fact for the English reader to notice is that
this great difference does exist between the French language and his
own. The complex origin of the English tongue has enabled English
writers to obtain those effects of diversity, of contrast, of
imaginative strangeness, which have played such a dominating part in our
literature. The genius of the French language, descended from its single
Latin stock, has triumphed most in the contrary direction--in
simplicity, in unity, in clarity, and in restraint.

Some of these qualities are already distinctly visible in the earliest
French works which have come down to us--the _Chansons de Geste_. These
poems consist of several groups or cycles of narrative verse, cast in
the epic mould. It is probable that they first came into existence in
the eleventh and twelfth centuries; and they continued to be produced in
various forms of repetition, rearrangement, and at last degradation,
throughout the Middle Ages. Originally they were not written, but
recited. Their authors were the wandering minstrels, who found, in the
crowds collected together at the great fairs and places of pilgrimage of
those early days, an audience for long narratives of romance and
adventure drawn from the Latin chronicles and the monkish traditions of
a still more remote past. The earliest, the most famous, and the finest
of these poems is the _Chanson de Roland_, which recounts the mythical
incidents of a battle between Charlemagne, with 'all his peerage', and
the hosts of the Saracens. Apart from some touches of the
marvellous--such as the two hundred years of Charlemagne and the
intervention of angels--the whole atmosphere of the work is that of
eleventh-century France, with its aristocratic society, its barbaric
vigour, its brutality, and its high sentiments of piety and honour. The
beauty of the poem lies in the grand simplicity of its style. Without a
trace of the delicacy and variety of a Homer, farther still from the
consummate literary power of a Virgil or a Dante, the unknown minstrel
who composed the _Chanson de Roland_ possessed nevertheless a very real
gift of art. He worked on a large scale with a bold confidence.
Discarding absolutely the aids of ornament and the rhetorical
ela