amiliar world of life and character described and displayed; from the
brilliant stock epithets and phrases that stud the style as if with a
stiff but glittering embroidery; and from other sources too many to
mention here.

[Sidenote: Some drawbacks.]

Yet one must draw attention to the fact that all the named sources of
the attraction, and may perhaps ask the reader to take it on trust that
most of the unnamed, are not essentially or exclusively attractions of
fiction--that they are attractions of poetry. And, on the other hand,
while the weaving of so vast a web of actual fiction remains "to
credit," there are not a few things to be set on the other side of the
account. The sameness of the _chanson_ story, the almost invariable
recurrence of the stock motives and frameworks--of rebellion, treason,
paynim invasion, petulance of a King's son, somewhat too "coming"
affection of a King's daughter, tyrannical and Lear-like _impotentia_ of
the King himself, etc.--may be exaggerated, but cannot be denied. In the
greatest of all by general acknowledgment, the far-famed _Roland_, the
economy of pure story interest is pushed to a point which in a less
unsophisticated age--say the twentieth instead of the twelfth or
eleventh century--might be put down to deliberate theory or crotchet.
The very incidents, stirring as they are, are put as it were in
skeleton argument or summary rather than amplified into full story-flesh
and blood; we see such heroine as there is only to see her die; even the
great moment of the horn is given as if it had been "censored" by
somebody. People, I believe, have called this brevity Homeric; but that
is not how I read Homer.

In fact, so jealous are some of those who well and wisely love the
_chansons_, that I have known objections taken to ranking as pure
examples, despite their undoubted age and merit, such pieces as _Amis et
Amiles_ (for passion and pathos and that just averted tragedy which is
so difficult to manage, one of the finest of all) and the _Voyage a
Constantinoble_, the single early specimen of mainly or purely comic
donnee.[15] This seems to me, I confess, mere prudery or else mistaken
logic, starting from the quite unjustifiable proposition that nothing
that is not found in the _Chanson de Roland_ ought to be found in any
_chanson_. But we may admit that the "bones"--the simplest terms of the
_chanson_-formula--hardly include varied interests, though they allow
such interests to be cl