there, and the non-essentials can be
easily supplied--as indeed they are to some extent in the _Life of St.
Leger_ and to a greater in the _Life of St. Alexis_, which almost follow
the _Sainte-Eulalie_ in the making of French literature. The _St.
Alexis_ indeed provides something like a complete scheme of romance
interest, and should be, though not translated (for it runs to between
600 and 700 lines), in some degree analysed and discussed. It had, of
course, a Latin original, and was rehandled more than once or twice. But
we have the (apparently) first French form, probably of the eleventh
century. The theme is one of the commonest and one of the least
sympathetic in hagiology. Alexis is forced by his father, a rich Roman
"count," to marry; and after (not before) the marriage, though of course
before its consummation, he deserts his wife, flies to Syria, and
becomes a beggar at Edessa. After a time, long enough to prevent
recognition, he goes back to Rome, and obtains from his own family alms
enough to live on, though these alms are dispensed to him by the
servants with every mark of contempt. At last he dies, and is recognised
forthwith as a saint. This hackneyed and somewhat repulsive _donnee_
(there is nothing repulsive to the present writer, let it be observed,
either in Stylites or in Galahad) the French poet takes and makes a
rather surprising best of it. He is not despicable even as a poet, all
things considered; but he is something very different indeed from
despicable as a tale-teller. To begin, or, strictly speaking, to end
with (R. L. Stevenson never said a wiser thing than that the end must be
the necessary result of, and as it were foretold in, the beginning), he
has lessened if not wholly destroyed the jar of the situation by (most
unusually and considering the mad chastity-worship of the time rather
audaciously) associating the deserted wife directly with the Saint's
"gustation of God" above:

Without doubt is St. Alexis in Heaven,
With him has he God in the company of the Angels,
_With him the maiden to whom he made himself strange,_
_Now he has her close to him--together are their souls,_
_I know not how to tell you how great their joy is._[10]

But there are earlier touches of that life which makes all literature,
and tale-telling most of all. An opening on Degeneracy is scarcely one
of these, for this was, of course, a commonplace millenniums earlier,
and it had the recent belie