ry development of Europe. It was not so in
the fourteenth century, when not only Chaucer in England, but Dante,
Petrarch, and Boccaccio in Italy, attained literary heights to which
none of their French contemporaries even approached. It was not so in
the fifteenth, when France, despite Villon and others, was the very
School of Dulness, and even England, with the help of the Scottish
poets and Malory, had a slight advantage over her, while she was far
outstripped by Italy. It was not so in the sixteenth, when Italy
hardly yet fell behind, and Spain and England far outwent her: nor,
according to any just estimate, in the seventeenth. In the eighteenth
her pale correctness looks faint enough, not merely beside the massive
strength of England, but beside the gathering force of Germany: and if
she is the equal of the best in the nineteenth, it is at the very most
a bare equality. But in the twelfth and thirteenth France, if not
Paris, was in reality the eye and brain of Europe, the place of origin
of almost every literary form, the place of finishing and polishing,
even for those forms which she did not originate. She not merely
taught, she wrought--and wrought consummately. She revived and
transformed the fable; perfected, if she did not invent, the
beast-epic; brought the short prose tale to an exquisite completeness;
enlarged, suppled, chequered, the somewhat stiff and monotonous forms
of Provencal lyric into myriad-noted variety; devised the
prose-memoir, and left capital examples of it; made attempts at the
prose history; ventured upon much and performed no little in the
vernacular drama; besides the vast performance, sometimes inspired
from elsewhere but never as literature copied, which we have already
seen, in her fostering if not mothering of Romance. When a learned and
enthusiastic Icelander speaks of his patrimony in letters as "a native
literature which, in originality, richness, historical and artistic
worth, stands unrivalled in modern Europe," we can admire the patriot
but must shake our heads at the critic. For by Dr Vigfusson's own
confession the strength of Icelandic literature consists in the sagas,
and the sagas are the product of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
At that very time France, besides the _chansons de geste_--as native,
as original, as the sagas, and if less rich, far more artistic in
form--France has to show the great romances proper, which Iceland
herself, like all the world, copied, a l