al
influence of the Scriptures. Furthermore, when Mediaeval France began to
create a new body of European literature, the Crusades had taken place;
the appetite for things Oriental and perhaps we should say the
half-imaginative power of appreciating them, had become active; and a
considerable amount of literature in the vernacular had already been
composed. It was not wonderful, therefore, that the _trouveres_ should
fly upon this spoil. By not the least notable of the curiosities of
literature in its own class, they picked out a historical but not very
important episode--the siege of Gaza and Alexander's disgraceful cruelty
to its brave defender--and made of this a regular _Chanson de Geste_ (in
all but "Family" connection), the _Fuerres de Gadres_, a poem of several
thousand lines. But the most generally popular (though sometimes
squabbled over) parts of the story, were the supposed perversion of
Olympias, not by the God Ammon but by the magician-king Nectanabus
personating the God and becoming thereby father of the Hero; the Indian
and some other real campaigns (the actual conquest of Persia was very
slightly treated), and, far above all, the pure Oriental wonder-tales of
the descent into the sea, the march to the Fountain of Youth, and other
myths of the kind.

Few things can be more different than the story-means used in these two
legends; yet it must be personal taste rather than strict critical
evaluation which pronounces one more important to the development of the
novel than the other. There is a little love interest in the Alexander
poems--the heroine of this part being Queen Candace--but it is slight,
episodic, and rudimentary beside the complex and all-absorbing passions
which, when genius took the matter in hand, were wrought out of the
truth of Troilus and the faithlessness of Cressid. The joys of fighting
or roaming, of adventure and quest, and above all those of marvel, are
the attractions which the Alexander legend offers, and who shall say
that they are insufficient? At any rate no one can deny that they have
been made the seasoning, if not the stuff and substance, of an enormous
slice of the romance interest, and of a very large part of that of the
novel.

[Sidenote: The Arthurian Legend.]

It is scarcely necessary to speak of other classical romances, and it is
of course very desirable to keep in mind that the Alexander story, in no
form in which we have it, attempts any _strictly_ novel interest;