But the intelligent genius who shaped the Arthuriad has escaped this danger, and that not merely by the simple process which Dryden, with his placid irony, somewhere describes as "leaving scarce three of the characters alive." We have reached, and feel that we have reached, the conclusion of the whole matter when the Graal has been taken to Heaven, and Arthur has gone to Avalon. Nobody wants to hear anything of the doubtless excellent Duke and King Constantine. Sir Ector himself could not leave the stage with more grace than with his great discourse on his dead comrade and kinsman. Lancelot's only son has gone with the Graal. The end is not violent or factitious, it is necessary and inevitable. It were even less unwise to seek the grave of Arthur than to attempt to take up the story of the Arthurians after king and queen and Lancelot are gone each to his and her own place, after the Graal is attained, after the Round Table is dissolved.

It is creditable to the intelligence and taste of the average mediæval romance-writer that even he did not yield to his besetting sin in this particular instance. With the exception of Ysaie le Triste, which deals with the fortunes of a supposed son of Tristan and Yseult, and thus connects itself with the most outlying part of the legend—a part which, as has been shown, is only hinged on to it—I cannot remember a single romance which purports to deal with affairs subsequent to the battle in Lyonesse. The two latest that can be in any way regarded as Arthurian, Arthur of Little Britain and Cleriodus, avowedly take up the story long subsequently, and only claim for their heroes the glory of distant descent from Arthur and his heroes. Meliadus de Lyonnois ascends from Tristram, and endeavours to connect the matter of Britain with that of France. Giron le Courtois deals with Palamedes and the earlier Arthurian story; while Perceforest, though based on the Brut, selects periods anterior to Arthur.[60]

There was, however, no such artistic constraint as regards episodes of the main story, or romans d'aventures celebrating the exploits of single knights, and connected with that story by a sort of stock overture and dénoûment, in the first of which an adventure is usually started at Arthur's court, while the successful knight is also accustomed to send his captives to give testimony to his prowess in the same place. As has been said above,[61] there is a whole cluster of such episodes—most, it would seem, owing their origin to England or Scotland—which have Sir Gawain for their chief hero, and which, at least in such forms as survive, would appear to be later than the great central romances which have been just noticed. Some of these are of much local interest—there being a Scottish group, a group which seems to centre about Cumbria, and so forth—but they fall rather to the portion of my successor in this series, who will take as his province Gawaine and the Green Knight, Lancelot of the Laik, the quaint alliterative Thornton Morte Arthur, and not a few others. The most interesting of all is that hitherto untraced romance of Beaumains or Gareth (he, as Gawain's brother, brings the thing into the class referred to), of which Malory has made an entire book, and which is one of the most completely and perfectly turned-out episodes existing. It has points in common with Yvain,[62] and others in common with Ipomydon,[63] but at the same time quite enough of its own. But we have no French text for it. On the other hand, we have long verse romances like Durmart le Gallois[64] (which both from the title and from certain mystical Graal passages rather connects itself with the Percevale sub-section); and the Chevalier as Deux Espées,[65] which belongs to the Gawain class. But all these, as well as the German romances to be noticed in chap. vi., distinguish themselves from the main stories analysed above not merely by their obvious and almost avowed dependence, but by a family likeness in incident, turn, and phrase from which those main stories are free. In fact the general fault of the Romans d'Aventures is that neither the unsophisticated freshness of the chanson de geste, nor the variety and commanding breadth of the Arthurian legend, appears in them to the full. The kind of "balaam," the stock repetitions and expletives at which Chaucer laughs in "Sir Thopas"—a laugh which has been rather unjustly received as condemning the whole class of English romances—is very evident even in the French texts. We have left the great and gracious ways, the inspiring central ideas, of the larger romance.

It may perhaps seem to some readers that too much praise has been given to that romance itself. Far as we are, not merely from Ascham's days, but from those in which the excellent Dunlop was bound to confess that "they [the romances of the Round Table] will be found extremely defective in those points which have been laid down as constituting excellence in fictitious narrative," that they are "improbable," full of "glaring anachronisms and geographical blunders," "not well shaded and distinguished in character," possessing heroines such as "the mistresses of Tristan and Lancelot" [may God assoil Dunlop!] who are "women of abandoned character," "highly reprehensible in their moral tendency," "equalled by the most insipid romance of the present day as a fund of amusement." In those days even Scott thought it prudent to limit his praise of Malory's book to the statement that "it is written in pure old English, and many of the wild adventures which it contains are told with a simplicity bordering on the sublime." Of Malory—thanks to the charms of his own book in the editions of Southey, of the two editors in 12mo, of Wright and of Sir Edward Strachey, not to mention the recent and stately issues given by Dr Sommer and Professor Rhys—a better idea has long prevailed, though there are some gainsayers. But of the originals, and of the Legend as a whole, the knowledge is too much limited to those who see in that legend only an opportunity for discussing texts and dates, origins and national claims. Its extraordinary beauty, and the genius which at some time or other, in one brain or in many, developed it from the extremely meagre materials which are all that can be certainly traced, too often escape attention altogether, and have hardly, I think, in a single instance obtained full recognition.

Yet however exaggerated the attention to the Quellen may have been, however inadequate the attention to the actual literary result, it would be a failure in duty towards the reader, and disrespectful to those scholars who, if not always in the most excellent way, have contributed vastly to our knowledge of the subject, to finish this chapter without giving something on the question of origins itself. I shall therefore conclude it with a brief sketch of the chief opinions on the subject, and with an indication of those to which many years' reading have inclined myself.

The theories, not to give them one by one as set forth by individual writers, are in the main as follows:—

I. That the Legend is, not merely in its first inception, but in main bulk, Celtic, either (a) Welsh or (b) Armorican.

II. That it is, except in the mere names and the vaguest outline, French.

III. That it is English, or at least Anglo-Norman.

IV. That it is very mainly a "literary" growth, owing something to the Greek romances, and not to be regarded without error as a new development unconnected, or almost unconnected, with traditional sources of any kind.

The first explanation is the oldest. After being for nearly half a century discredited, it has again found ardent defenders, and it may seem at first sight to be the most natural and reasonable. Arthur, if he existed at all, was undoubtedly a British hero; the British Celts, especially the Welsh, possess beyond all question strong literary affinities and a great literary performance, and Geoffrey of Monmouth, the father of the whole story, expressly declares that he took it from a book written in the British tongue. It was natural that in comparatively uncritical ages no quarrel should be made with this account. There were, even up to the last century, I believe, enthusiastic antiquaries who affirmed, and perhaps believed, that they had come across the very documents to which Geoffrey refers, or at worst later Welsh transcripts of them. But when the study of the matter grew, and especially when Welsh literature itself began to be critically examined, uncomfortable doubts began to arise. It was found impossible to assign to the existing Welsh romances on the subject, such as those published in the Mabinogion, a date even approaching in antiquity that which can certainly be claimed by the oldest French texts: and in more than one case the Welsh bore unmistakable indications of having been directly imitated from the French itself. Further, in undoubtedly old Welsh literature, though there were (v. supra) references to Arthur, they were few, they were very meagre, and except as regards the mystery of his final disappearance rather than death, they had little if anything to do with the received Arthurian story. On the other hand, as far as Brittany was concerned, after a period of confident assertion, and of attempts, in at least doubtful honesty, to supply what could not be found, it had to be acknowledged that Brittany could supply no ancient texts whatever, and hardly any ancient tradition. These facts, when once established (and they have never since been denied by competent criticism), staggered the Celtic claim very seriously. Of late years, however, it has found advocates (who, as usual, adopt arguments rather mutually destructive than mutually confirmatory) both in France (M. Gaston Paris) and in Germany (Herr Zimmer), while it has been passionately defended in England by Mr Nutt, and with a more cautious, but perhaps at least equally firm, support by Professor Rhys. As has been said, these Neo-Celticists do not, when they are wise, attempt to revive the older form of the claims. They rest theirs on the scattered references in undoubtedly old Welsh literature above referred to, on the place-names which play such an undoubtedly remarkable part in the local nomenclature of the West-Welsh border in the south-west of England and in Cornwall, of Wales less frequently, of Strathclyde and Lothian eminently, and not at all, or hardly at all, of that portion of England which was early and thoroughly subjected to Saxon and Angle sway. And the bolder of them, taking advantage of the admitted superiority in age of Irish to Welsh literature as far as texts go, have had recourse to this, not for direct originals (it is admitted that there are none, even of parts of the Legend such as those relating to Tristram and Iseult, which are not only avowedly Irish in place but Irish in tone), but for evidences of differential origin in comparison with classical and Teutonic literature. Unfortunately this last point is one not of technical "scholarship," but of general literary criticism, and it is certain that the Celticists have not converted all or most students in that subject to their view. I should myself give my opinion, for whatever it may be worth, to the effect that the tone and tendency of the Celtic, and especially the Irish, literature of very early days, as declared by its own modern champions, are quite different from those of the romances in general and the Arthurian Legend in particular. Again, though the other two classes of evidence cannot be so ruled out of court as a whole, it must be evident that they go but a very little way, and are asked to go much further. If any one will consult Professor Rhys's careful though most friendly abstract of the testimony of early Welsh literature, he will see how very great the interval is. When we are asked to accept a magic caldron which fed people at discretion as the special original of the Holy Grail, the experienced critic knows the state of the case pretty well.[66] While as to the place-names, though they give undoubted and valuable support of a kind to the historical existence of Arthur, and support still more valuable to the theory of the early and wide distribution of legends respecting him, it is noticeable that they have hardly anything to do with our Arthurian Legend at all. They concern—as indeed we should expect—the fights with the Saxons, and some of them reflect (very vaguely and thinly) a tradition of conjugal difficulties between Arthur and his queen. But unfortunately these last are not confined to Arthurian experience; and, as we have seen, Arthur's fights with the Saxons, except the last when they joined Mordred, are of ever-dwindling importance for the Romance.

Like the Celtic theory, the French has an engaging appearance of justice and probability, and it has over the Celtic the overwhelming advantage as regards texts. That all, without exception, of the oldest texts in which the complete romantic story of Arthur appears are in the French language is a fact entirely indisputable, and at first blench conclusive. We may even put it more strongly still and say that, taking positive evidence as apart from mere assertion (as in the case of the Latin Graal-book), there is nothing to show that any part of the full romantic story of Arthur, as distinguished from the meagre quasi-historical outline of Geoffrey, ever appeared in any language before it appeared in French. The most certain of the three personal claimants for the origination of these early texts, Chrestien de Troyes, was undoubtedly a Frenchman in the wide sense; so (if he existed) was Robert de Borron, another of them. The very phrase so familiar to readers of Malory, "the French book," comes to the assistance of the claim.

And yet, as is the case with some other claims which look irresistible at first sight, the strength of this shrinks and dwindles remarkably when it comes to be examined. One consideration is by itself sufficient, not indeed totally to destroy it, but to make a terrible abatement in its cogency; and this is, that if the great Arthurian romances, written between the middle and end of the twelfth century, were written in French, it was chiefly because they could not have been written in any other tongue. Not only was no other language generally intelligible to that public of knights and ladies to which they were addressed; not only was no other vernacular language generally known to European men of letters, but no such vernacular, except Provençal, had attained to anything like the perfection necessary to make it a convenient vehicle. Whatever the nationality of the writer or writers, it was more likely that he or they would write in French than in any other language. And as a matter of fact we see that the third of the great national claimants was an Englishman, while it is not certain that Robert de Borron was not an English subject. Nor is it yet formally determined whether Chrestien himself, in those parts of his work which are specially Arthurian, had not Map or some one else before him as an authority.

The last theory, that the Legend may be almost if not quite sufficiently accounted for as a legitimate descendant of previous literature, classical and other (including Oriental sources), has been the least general favourite. As originally started, or at least introduced into English literary history, by Warton, it suffered rather unfairly from some defects of its author. Warton's History of English Poetry marks, and to some extent helped to produce, an immense change for the better in the study of English literature: and he deserved the contemptuous remarks of some later critics as little as he did the savage attacks of the half-lunatic Ritson. But he was rather indolent; his knowledge, though wide, was very desultory and full of scraps and gaps; and, like others in his century, he was much too fond of hypothesis without hypostasis, of supposition without substance. He was very excusably but very unluckily ignorant of what may be called the comparative panorama of English and European literature during the Middle Ages, and was apt to assign to direct borrowing or imitation those fresh workings up of the eternal données of all literary art which presented themselves. As the theory has been more recently presented with far exacter learning and greater judgment by his successor, Mr Courthope,[67] it is much relieved from most of its disabilities. I have myself no doubt that the Greek romances (see chap. ix.) do represent at the least a stage directly connecting classical with romantic literature; and that the later of them (which, it must be remembered, were composed in this very twelfth century, and must have come under the notice of the crusaders), may have exercised a direct effect upon mediæval Romance proper. I formed this opinion more than twenty years ago, when I first read Hysminias and Hysmine; and I have never seen reason to change it since. But these influences, though not to be left out of the question, are perhaps in one respect too general, and in another too partial, to explain the precise matter. That the Arthurian Romances, in common with all the romances, and with mediæval literature generally, were much more influenced by the traditional classical culture than used at one time to be thought, I have believed ever since I began to study the subject, and am more and more convinced of it. The classics both of Europe and the East played a part, and no small part, in bringing about the new literature; but it was only a part.

If, as I think may fairly be done, the glory of the Legend be chiefly claimed for none of these, but for English or Anglo-Norman, it can be done in no spirit of national pleonexia, but on a sober consideration of all the facts of the case, and allowing all other claimants their fair share in the matter as subsidiaries. From the merely a priori point of view the claims of England—that is to say, the Anglo-Norman realm—are strong. The matter is "the matter of Britain," and it was as natural that Arthur should be sung in Britain as that Charlemagne should be celebrated in France. But this could weigh nothing against positive balance of argument from the facts on the other side. The balance, however, does not lie against us. The personal claim of Walter Map, even if disproved, would not carry the English claim with it in its fall. But it has never been disproved. The positive, the repeated, attribution of the MSS. may not be final, but requires a very serious body of counter-argument to upset it. And there is none such. The time suits; the man's general ability is not denied; his familiarity with Welshmen and Welsh tradition as a Herefordshire Marcher is pretty certain; and his one indisputable book of general literature, the De Nugis Curialium, exhibits many—perhaps all—of the qualifications required: a sharp judgment united with a distinct predilection for the marvellous, an unquestionable piety combined with man-of-the-worldliness, and a toleration of human infirmities. It is hardly necessary to point out the critical incompetence of those who say that a satirist like Map could not have written the Quest and the Mort. Such critics would make two Peacocks as the simultaneous authors of Nightmare Abbey and Rhododaphne—nay, two Shakespeares to father the Sonnets and the Merry Wives. If any one will turn to the stories of Gerbert and Meridiana, of Galo, Sadius, and the evil queen in the Nugæ, he will, making allowance for Walter's awkward Latin in comparison with the exquisite French of the twelfth century, find reasons for thinking the author of that odd book quite equal to the authorship of part—not necessarily the whole—of the Arthurian story in its co-ordinated form.

Again, it is distinctly noticeable that the farther the story goes from England and the English Continental possessions, the more does it lose of that peculiar blended character, that mixture of the purely mystical and purely romantic, of sacred and profane, which has been noted as characteristic of its perfect bloom. In the Percevale of Chrestien and his continuators, and still more in Wolfram von Eschenbach, as it proceeds eastwards, and into more and more purely Teutonic regions, it absorbs itself in the Graal and the moonshiny mysticism thereto appertaining. When it has fared southwards to Italy, the lawlessness of the loves of Guinevere and Iseult preoccupies Southern attention. As for Welsh, it is sufficient to quote the statement of the most competent of Welsh authorities, Professor Rhys, to the effect that "the passion of Lancelot for Guinevere is unknown to Welsh literature." Now, as I have tried to point out, the passion of Lancelot for Guinevere, blended as it is with the quasi-historic interest of Arthur's conquests and the religious-mystical interest of the Graal story, is the heart, the life, the source of all charm and beauty in the perfect Arthur-story.

I should think, therefore, that the most reasonable account of the whole matter may be somewhat as follows, using imagination as little as possible, and limiting hypothesis rigidly to what is necessary to connect, explain, and render generally intelligible the historical facts which have been already summarised. And I may add that while this account is not very different from the views of the earliest of really learned modern authorities, Sir Frederic Madden and M. Paulin Paris, I was surprised to find how much it agrees with that of one of the very latest, M. Loth.

In so far as the probable personality and exploits, and the almost certain tradition of such exploits and such a personality, goes, there is no reason for, and much reason against, denying a Celtic origin to this Legend of Arthur. The best authorities have differed as to the amount of really ancient testimony in Welsh as to him, and it seems to be agreed by the best authorities that there is no ancient tradition in any other branch of Celtic literature. But if we take the mentions allowed as ancient by such a careful critic as Professor Rhys, if we combine them with the place-name evidence, and if we add the really important fact, that of the earliest literary dealers, certain or probable, with the legend, Geoffrey, Layamon, and Walter Map were neighbours of Wales, and Wace a neighbour of Brittany, to suppose that Arthur as a subject for romantic treatment was a figment of some non-Celtic brain, Saxon or Norman, French or English, is not only gratuitous but excessively unreasonable. Again, there can be no reasonable doubt that the Merlin legends, in at least their inception, were Celtic likewise. The attempt once made to identify Merlin with the well-known "Marcolf," who serves as Solomon's interlocutor in a mass of early literature more or less Eastern in origin, is one of those critical freaks which betray an utterly uncritical temperament. Yet further, I should be inclined to allow no small portion of Celtic ingredient in the spirit, the tendency, the essence of the Arthurian Legend. We want something to account for this, which is not Saxon, not Norman, not French, not Teutonic generally, not Latin, not Eastern; and I at least am unable to discover where this something comes from if it is not from the Celtic fringe of England and of Normandy.

But when we come to the Legend proper, and to its most important and most interesting characteristics, to its working up, to that extraordinary development which in a bare half-century (and half a century, though a long time now, was a very short one seven hundred years ago) evolved almost a whole library of romance from the scanty faits et gestes of Arthur as given by Geoffrey,—then I must confess that I can see no evidence of Celtic forces or sources having played any great part in the matter. If Caradoc of Lancarvan wrote the Vita Gildæ—and it is pretty certainly not later than his day, while if it was not written by him it must have been written by some one equally well acquainted with traditions, British and Armorican, of St Gildas—if he or any one else gave us what he has given about Arthur and Gildas himself, about Arthur's wife and Melvas, and if traditions existed of Galahad or even Percivale and the Graal, of the Round Table, most of all of Lancelot,—why in the name of all that is critical and probable did he not give us more? His hero could not have been ignorant of the matter, the legends of his hero could hardly have been silent about them. It is hard to believe that anybody can read the famous conclusion of Geoffrey's history without seeing a deliberate impishness in it, without being certain that the tale of the Book and the Archdeacon is a tale of a Cock and a Bull. But if it be taken seriously, how could the "British book" have failed to contain something more like our Legend of Arthur than Geoffrey has given us, and how, if it existed and gave more, could Geoffrey have failed to impart it? Why should the Welsh, the proudest in their way of all peoples, and not the least gifted in literature, when they came to give Arthurian legends of the kind which we recognise, either translate them from the French or at least adapt and adjust them thereto?

On the other hand, the supposition that the fashioning, partly out of vague tradition, partly it may be out of more definite Celtic tales like that of Tristram, partly from classical, Eastern, and other sources, belongs to the English in the wide sense—that is to say, the nation or nations partly under English rule proper, partly under Scottish, partly under that of the feudatories or allies of the English kings as Dukes of Normandy—has to support it not merely the arguments stated above as to the concentration of the legend proper between Troyes and Herefordshire, between Broceliande and Northumbria, as to MS. authority, as to the inveteracy of the legend in English,—not only those negative ones as to the certainty that if it were written by Englishmen it would be written in French,—but another, which to the comparative student of literary history may seem strongest of all.

Here first, here eminently, and here just at the time when we should expect it, do we see that strange faculty for exhibiting a blend, a union, a cross of characteristics diverse in themselves, and giving when blended a result different from any of the parts, which is more than anything else the characteristic of the English language, of English literature, of English politics, of everything that is English. Classical rhetoric, French gallantry, Saxon religiosity and intense realisation of the other world, Oriental extravagance to some extent, the "Celtic vague"—all these things are there. But they are all co-ordinated, dominated, fashioned anew by some thing which is none of them, but which is the English genius, that curious, anomalous, many-sided genius, which to those who look at only one side of it seems insular, provincial, limited, and which yet has given us Shakespeare, the one writer of the world to whom the world allows an absolute universality.

CHAPTER IV.

As the interest of Jean Bodel's first two divisions[68] differs strikingly, and yet represents, in each case intimately and indispensably, certain sides of the mediæval character, so also does that of his third. This has perhaps more purely an interest of curiosity than either of the others. It neither constitutes a capital division of general literature like the Arthurian story, nor embodies and preserves a single long-past phase in national spirit and character, like the chansons de geste. From certain standpoints of the drier and more rigid criticism it is exposed to the charge of being trifling, almost puerile. We cannot understand—or, to speak with extremer correctness, it would seem that some of us cannot understand—the frame of mind which puts Dictys and Dares on the one hand, Homer on the other, as authorities to be weighed on equal terms, and gravely sets Homer aside as a very inferior and prejudiced person; which, even after taking its Dictys and Dares, proceeds to supplement them with entire inventions of its own; which, after in the same way taking the Pseudo-Callisthenes as the authoritative biographer of Alexander, elaborates the legend with a wild luxuriance that makes the treatment of the Tale of Troy seem positively modest and sober; which makes Thebes, Julius Cæsar, anything and anybody in fabulous and historical antiquity alike, the centre, or at least the nucleus, of successive accretions of romantic fiction.

Nevertheless, the attractions, intrinsic and extrinsic, of the division are neither few nor small. This very confusion, as it seems nowadays, this extraordinary and almost monstrous blending of uncritical history and unbridled romance, shows one of the most characteristic sides of the whole matter, and exhibits, as do few other things, that condition of mediæval thought in regard to all critical questions which has so constantly to be insisted on. As in the case of the Arthurian story, the matter thus presented caught hold of the mediæval imagination with a remarkable grip, and some of the most interesting literary successions of all history date from it. Among them it is almost enough to mention the chain of names—Benoît de Sainte-More, Guido Colonna, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Henryson—which reaches Shakespeare, and does not cease with him, all successively elaborating the history of Troilus and Cressida. The lively story, first formed, like so many others, by the French genius, and well, if rather impudently, copied by Colonna; Boccaccio's vivid Italian Cressida; Chaucer's inimitable Pandarus, the first pleasing example of the English talent for humorous portrayal in fiction; the wonderful passage, culminating in a more wonderful single line,[69] of that Dunfermline schoolmaster whom some inconceivable person has declared to be only a poet to "Scotch patriotism"; the great gnomic verses of Shakespeare's Ulysses, and the various, unequal, sometimes almost repulsive, never otherwise than powerful, pageantry of that play, which has been perhaps more misjudged than any other of Shakespeare's,—all these spring from the Tale of Troy, not in the least as handed down by the ancients, but tricked and frounced as the Middle Age was wont. Nor is this half-borrowed interest by any means the only one. The Cressid story, indeed, does not reach its full attraction as a direct subject of literary treatment till the fourteenth century. But the great Alexander cycle gives us work which merely as poetry equals all but the very best mediæval work, and its importance in connection with the famous metre named from it is of itself capital.

In interest, bulk, and importance these two stories—the Story of the Destruction of Troy and the Alexandreid—far outstrip all the other romances of antiquity; they are more accessible than the rest, and have been the subject of far more careful investigation by modern students. Little has been added, or is likely to be added, in regard to the Troy-books generally, since M. Joly's introduction to Benoît's Roman de Troie six-and-twenty years ago,[70] and it is at least improbable that much will be added to M. Paul Meyer's handling of the old French treatments of the Alexandreid in his Alexandre le Grand dans la Littérature Française au Moyen Age.[71] For it must once more be said that the pre-eminence of French over other literatures in this volume is not due to any crotchet of the writer, or to any desire to speak of what he has known pretty thoroughly, long, and at first-hand, in preference to that which he knows less thoroughly, less of old, and in parts at second-hand. It is the simplest truth to say that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries France kept the literary school of Europe, and that, with the single exception of Iceland, during a part, and only a part, of the time, all the nations of Europe were content to do, each in its own tongue, and sometimes even in hers, the lessons which she taught, the exercises which she set them. That the scholars sometimes far surpassed their masters is quite true, and is nothing unusual; that they were scholars is simple fact.

The Alexander story, which Mr Wallis Budge, our chief authority (and perhaps the chief authority) on the Oriental versions of it, speaks of as "a book which has had more readers than any other, the Bible alone excepted," is of an antiquity impossible to determine in any manner at all certain. Nor is the exact place of its origin, or the language in which it was originally written, to be pronounced upon with anything like confidence. What does seem reasonably sure is that what is called "the Pseudo-Callisthenes"—that is to say, the fabulous biography of the great king, which is certainly the basis of all Western, and perhaps that of most Eastern, versions of the legend—was put into Greek at least as early as the third century after Christ, and thence into Latin (by "Julius Valerius" or another) before the middle of the fourth. And it appears probable that some of the Eastern versions, if not themselves the original (and a strong fight has been made for the Æthiopic or Old-Egyptian origin of nearly the whole), represent Greek texts older than those we have, as well as in some cases other Eastern texts which may be older still. Before any modern Western vernacular handled the subject, there were Alexander legends, not merely in Greek and Latin, not merely in Æthiopic or Coptic, but in Armenian and Syriac, in Hebrew and Arabic, in Persian and perhaps in Turkish: and it is possible that, either indirectly before the Crusades, or directly through and after them, the legend as told in the West received additions from the East.

As a whole, however, the Pseudo-Callisthenes, or rather his Latin interpreter Julius Valerius,[72] was the main source of the mediæval legend of Alexander. And it is not at all impossible (though the old vague assertions that this or that mediæval characteristic or development was derived from the East were rarely based on any solid foundation so far as their authors knew) that this Alexander legend did, at second-hand, and by suggesting imitation of its contents and methods, give to some of the most noteworthy parts of mediæval literature itself an Eastern colouring, perhaps to some extent even an Eastern substance.

Still the direct sources of knowledge in the West were undoubtedly Latin versions of the Pseudo-Callisthenes, one of which, that ascribed to Julius Valerius, appears, as has been said, to have existed before the middle of the fourth century, while the other, sometimes called the Historia de Prœliis, is later by a good deal. Later still, and representing traditions necessarily different from and later than those of the Callisthenes book, was the source of the most marvellous elements in the Alexandreids of the twelfth and subsequent centuries, the Iter ad Paradisum, in which the conquerer was represented as having journeyed to the Earthly Paradise itself. After this, connected as it was with dim Oriental fables as to his approach to the unknown regions north-east of the Caucasus, and his making gates to shut out Gog, there could be no further difficulty, and all accretions as to his descent into the sea in a glass cage and so forth came easily.

Nor could they, indeed, be said to be so very different in nature from at least the opening part of the Callisthenes version itself. This starts with what seems to be the capital and oldest part of the whole fabulous story, a very circumstantial account of the fictitious circumstances of the birth of Alexander. According to this, which is pretty constantly preserved in all the fabulous versions of the legend (a proof of its age), Nectanabus, an Egyptian king and magician, having ascertained by sortilege (a sort of kriegs-spiel on a basin of water with wax ships) that his throne is doomed, quits the country and goes to Macedonia. There he falls in love with Olympias, and during the absence of her husband succeeds by magic arts not only in persuading her that the god Ammon is her lover, but to some extent in persuading King Philip to believe this, and to accept the consequences, the part of Ammon having been played of course by Nectanabus himself. Bucephalus makes a considerable figure in the story, and Nectanabus devotes much attention to Alexander's education—care which the Prince repays (for no very discernible reason) by pushing his father and tutor into a pit, where the sorcerer dies after revealing the relationship. The rest of the story is mainly occupied by the wars with Darius and Porus (the former a good deal travestied), and two important parts, or rather appendices, of it are epistolary communications between Aristotle and Alexander on the one hand, Alexander and Dindymus (Dandamis, &c.), King of the Brahmins, on the other. After his Indian adventures the king is poisoned by Cassander or at his instigation.

Into a framework of this kind fables of the sort above mentioned had, it will be seen, not the remotest difficulty in fitting themselves; and it was not even a very long step onward to make Alexander a Christian, equip him with twelve peers, and the like. But it has been well demonstrated by M. Paul Meyer that though the fictitious narrative obtained wide acceptance, and even admission into their historical compilations by Vincent of Beauvais, Ekkehard, and others, a more sober tradition as to the hero obtained likewise. If we were more certain than we are as to the exact age of Quintus Curtius, it would be easier to be certain likewise how far he represents and how far he is the source of this more sober tradition. It seems clear that the Latin Alexandreis of Walter of Châtillon is derived from him, or from a common source, rather than from Valerius-Callisthenes: while M. Meyer has dwelt upon a Latin compilation perhaps as old as the great outburst of vernacular romance on Alexander, preserved only in English MSS. at Oxford and Cambridge, and probably of English composition, which is a perfectly common-sense account based upon historians, of various dates and values, indeed, ranging from Trogus to Isidore of Seville, but all historians and not romancers.

In this path, however, comparatively few cared to tread. The attraction for the twelfth century lay elsewhere. Sometimes a little of the more authentic matter was combined with the fabulous, and at least one instance occurs where the author, probably in the thirteenth century, simply combined, with a frank audacity which is altogether charming, the popular epitome of Valerius and the sober compilation just referred to. The better, more famous, and earlier romantic work is taken straight from, though it by no means confines itself to, Valerius, the Historia de Prœliis, and the Iter ad Paradisum. The results of this handling are enormous in bulk, and in minor varieties; but they are for general purposes sufficiently represented by the great Roman d'Alixandre[73] in French, the long and interesting English King Alisaunder,[74] and perhaps the German of Lamprecht. The Icelandic Alexander-Saga, though of the thirteenth century, is derived from Walter of Châtillon, and so reflects the comparatively sober side of the story. Of all the others the Roman d'Alixandre is the most immediate parent.

There was, indeed, an older French poem than this—perhaps two such—and till the discovery of a fragment of it six years after the publication in 1846 of the great Roman d'Alixandre itself by Michelant, it was supposed that this poem was the original of Lamprecht's German (or of the German by whomsoever it be, for some will have it that Lamprecht is simply Lambert li Tors, v. infra). This, however, seems not to be the case. The Alberic fragment[75] (respecting which the philologists, as usual, fight whether it was written by a Besançon man or a Briançon one, or somebody else) is extremely interesting in some ways. For, in the first place, it is written in octosyllabic tirades of single assonance or rhyme, a very rare form; in the second, it is in a dialect of Provençal; and in the third, the author not only does not follow, but distinctly and rather indignantly rejects, the story of Nectanabus:—

But the fragment is unluckily so short (105 lines only) that it is impossible to say much of its matter.