ative poetry, which latterly took actual prose form, and
which--as early certainly as the eleventh century and perhaps
earlier--turns the French faculty for narrative (whether it was actually
or entirely fictitious narrative or not does not again matter) into
channels of a very promising kind.

The novel-reader who has his wits and his memory about him may perhaps
say, "Promising perhaps; but paying?" The answer must be that the
promise may have taken some time to be fully liquidated, but that the
immediate or short-dated payment was great. The fault of the _Chansons
de Geste_--a fault which in some degree is to be found in French
literature as a whole, and to a greater extent in all mediaeval
literature--is that the class and the type are rather too prominent. The
central conception of Charlemagne as a generally dignified but too
frequently irascible and rather petulant monarch, surrounded by valiant
and in a way faithful but exceedingly touchy or ticklish paladins, is no
doubt true enough to the early stages of feudalism--in fact, to adapt
the tag, there is too much human nature in it for it to be false. But it
communicates a certain sameness to the chansons which stick closest to
the model.

[Sidenote: The proportions of history and fiction in them.]

The exact relation of the _Chansons de Geste_ to the subsequent history
of French fiction is thus an extremely important one, and one that
requires, not only a good deal of reading on which to base any opinion
that shall not be worthless, but a considerable exercise of critical
discretion in order to form that opinion competently. The present writer
can at least plead no small acquaintance with the subject, and a full if
possibly over-generous acknowledgment of his dealings with it on the
part of some French authorities, living and dead, of the highest
competence. But the attractions of the vast and strangely long ignored
body of _chanson_ literature are curiously various in kind, and they
cannot be indiscriminately drawn upon as evidence of an early mastery of
tale-telling proper on the part of the French as a nation.

There is indeed one solid fact, the importance of which can hardly be
exaggerated in some ways, though it may be wrongly estimated in others.
Here is not merely the largest part proportionately, but a very large
bulk positively, of the very earliest part of a literature, devoted to a
kind of narrative which, though some of it may be historic originall