othed upon and added to them.

[Sidenote: But a fair balance of actual story merit.]

Despite this admission, however, and despite the further one that it is
to the "romances" proper--Arthurian, classical, and adventurous--rather
than to the _chansons_ that one must look for the first satisfactory
examples of such clothing and addition, it is not to be denied that the
_chansons_ themselves provide a great deal of it--whether because of
adulteration with strictly "romance" matter is a question for debate in
another place and not here. But it would be a singularly ungrateful
memory which should, in this place, leave the reader with the idea that
the _Chanson de Geste_ as such is merely monotonous and dull. The
intensity of the appeal of _Roland_ is no doubt helped by that approach
to bareness--even by a certain tautology--which has been mentioned.
_Aliscans_, which few could reject as faithless to the type, contains,
even without the family of dependent poems which cluster round it, a
vivid picture of the valiant insubordinate warrior in William of Orange,
with touches of comedy or at least horse-play.

[Sidenote: Some instances of this.]

The striking, and to all but unusually dull or hopelessly "modern"
imaginations as unusually beautiful, centre-point of _Amis et
Amiles_,--where one of the heroes, who has sworn a "white" perjury to
save his friend and is punished for it by the terror, "white" in the
other sense, of leprosy, is abandoned by his wife, and only healed by
the blood of the friend's children, is the crowning instance of another
set of appeals. The catholicity of a man's literary taste, and his more
special capacity of appreciating things mediaeval, may perhaps be better
estimated by his opinion of _Amis et Amiles_ than by any other
touchstone; for it has more appeals than this almost tragic one--a much
greater development of the love-motive than either _Roland_ or
_Aliscans_, and a more varied interest generally. Its continuation,
_Jourdains de Blaivies_, takes the hero abroad, as do many other
_chansons_, especially two of the most famous, _Huon de Bordeaux_ and
_Ogier de Danemarche_. These two are also good--perhaps the
best--examples of a process very much practised in the Middle Ages and
leaving its mark on future fiction--that of expansion and continuation.
In the case of Ogier, indeed, this process was carried so far that
enquiring students have been known to be sadly disappointed in the
almost tot