THE

CHRISTIAN REMEMBRANCER.

NOVEMBER, 1843.

A Selection of Latin Stories from MSS. of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries. A Contribution to the History of Fiction during the Middle Ages. Edited by THOMAS WRIGHT, M.A. F.S.A. London: Printed for the Percy Society. 1842.

Gesta Romanorum; or, Entertaining Moral Stories. Translated from the Latin, with Preliminary Observations and Copious Notes. By the REV. CHARLES SWAN. 2 vols. London: Rivingtons. 1824.

WASHINGTON IRVING, in one of the chapters of his delightful Sketch-Book, describes a curious scene which he witnessed during an afternoon reverie in the library of the British Museum. Whilst the authors of the day were bepluming themselves with the feathers of the great writers of old, and parading their borrowed ornaments as the creation of their own minds and their own hands, on a sudden the trumpet of alarm was sounded, and from all sides rushed the resuscitated champions of old, eager to tear from the backs of the impostures the various plumes and patches they had appropriated. Those who had borrowed a gem from some old author, and heightened its splendour by its new setting, the original possessors not only spared, but applauded; the rest of the crowd fared but poorly.

First and foremost among these men of old, thus summoned to reclaim their treasures, must have been the author or authors of those Latin stories which the monks of the middle ages composed as recreations at the refectory, or exhortations from the pulpit. Innumerable must have been the purloiners of gems from their treasury; and many, very many, those celebrated writers and poets who had heightened and improved the splendours of the gems they had borrowed from the didactic fiction of the monks. Gower, Lydgate, Boccace, Shakspere-nay, the list would be as long as a chancery-roll-have drawn their best plots and most attractive stories from this monkish mine, as the monks themselves drew many of their stories from the legends of far-off countries, still traditionally remembered in their convent, and here and there enshrined in the older chronicle of some 30

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elder brother of the monastery. In the middle ages, even more than in any other, did almost every effort of the human mind assume the primitive and simple form of fable-a form at all times most attractive, and in that age the only medium by which the untutored mind could realize its conceptions.

The History of Fiction has ever been involved in much perplexity, and formed the most agreeable debateable land of our leading antiquaries. The more mysterious an investigation bids fair to be; the less we have to depend on fact; and the more we are at the mercy of conjecture, so much the more does the mind love to grasp at the mystery, and delight in the dim perspective and intricacies of the way. Each successive adventurer finds it more easy to pull down the various bridges, and break in the various cuttings by which his predecessor has endeavoured to make the way straight, than to throw his own bridge over the river or the morass of time that intervenes between the traveller and the goal. Four distinct sources have been contended for: the Scandinavian bards, the Arabians of the Spanish peninsula, the Armoricans, or Bretons, and the classical authors of Greece and Rome. Mallet and Bishop Percy come forward as the advocates of Scandinavia; Dr. Wharton writes himself the champion of the Spanish Arabians; Wilson is rather inclined to the Breton theory; and Dr. Southey and Mr. Dunlop come forward as the advocates of the classical and mythological authors; whilst Sir Henry Ellis would reconcile all differences by a quiet jumble of Breton scenes coloured by Scandinavia, and worked by Arabian machinery.

The poems of the northern Scalds, the legends of the Arabians of Spain, the songs of the Armoricans, and the classics of the ancient world, have doubtless been the mediate sources of the most prevalent fictions. The immediate source must be sought in even earlier times and more eastern climes. In some instances perverted notions of Scripture characters furnished the supernatural agency of the legend; in the majority the machinery came direct from the East, already dilated and improved. In many parts of the old Scriptures we learn how familiar the nations of the East were with spells; and the elevation of Solomon Daoud to the throne of the Genii, and to the lordship of the Talisman, proves the traditional intercourse between God's own people and the nations of the far East. We can easily conceive how the contest of David and Goliath may have formed the foundation of many a fierce encounter between knight and giant, and the feats of Samson been dilated into the miracles of the heroes of chivalry. In the book of Tobit, which is indeed referred to in the application of the tale of "The Emperor Vespasian and the Two Rings," we find an angel in the place of a saint, enchantments, antidotes, distressed damsels, demons, and nearly all the recognised machinery of fiction. The vagaries of the Talmud, clearly derived from eastern sources, were no small treasure on which to draw for wonders and miracles. And when we find all the

machinery of the East in the poems of the Scalds, we cannot but perceive how much more reasonable it is to suppose the cold conceptions of the Northern bards to have been fed from the East, than the warm imaginations of the East to have drawn their inspiration from the North.

Two objections must not be neglected-the ignorance and misrepresentation of the religions of the East, shown through every page of the popular legends of the chivalric age. May it not have been the aim of the Christian writers to represent the infidels in the worst possible light, to pervert their creed, to exaggerate their vices? The charge of idolatry, and the adoration of the golden image of Mahomet, may have been mere pious frauds. Again, the Romans adopted the legends of Greece, and naturalized them. With the mythology came the religious rites appendant to it. How did it happen that the Scalds adopted the one without falling into the other error? Was there no difference of predisposition in the Romans and the Scalds as to the adoption of the mythologies of the East and Greece? Had not long intercourse in the one case prepared the Romans to receive, did it not agree with their preconceived notions? Such was not the case with the Northern nations. Children, and rude children of nature, they were in no way prepared for a similar effect; but, seizing on the prominent features of the legends presented to them, they engrafted them on their own wild and terrible stories, adding to the original matter in some cases, and rejecting portions of it in others.

That the Arabians, who entered Spain from the opposite shores of Africa about the beginning of the eighth century," disseminated those extravagant inventions which were so peculiar to their romantic and creative genius," is in no way refuted by the absence of Moorish subjects from the earliest tales of chivalry, for when they arrived, the legends of Charlemagne and his peers had already taken root in the minds of the people; and however the Arabians may have introduced some portion of eastern fiction to mingle with the already popular legends, they could not introduce it as a whole, so powerful is the tendency of a conquered country to graft its own character, legends, and customs, on its conquerors. Is there anything very monstrous in believing that the introduction of judicial astrology, medicine, and chemistry, sciences so connected with the supposed operations of the magician, as to give that name to the possessor of them, would fail of extending their influence to the legendary stories, as well as to the habits and life of the Western world, described in these legends? And thus the introduction of eastern invention would be gradual, and therefore more natural; would be the growth of times and of ages, not the sudden birth and growth of a night; and would be gradually augmenting until it attained to perfect maturity. The writer to whom we are indebted for the translation of the "Gesta Romanorum," has put forward another theory to account for the introduction of romantic fiction into the Western world. In his

idea the banishment of the primitive Christians to the East, by the persecutions of the pagan rulers, would account for the use of these fictions when the cessation of the persecutions enabled them to return to their native land.

"Full of the mysterious wonders of the Apocalypse, not less than of the miraculous records of the Holy Gospels, imbued with all the Old Testament narratives, and probably anticipating similar interposition from heaven in their own persons; their minds wrought up by many causes to the highest pitch of enthusiasm, and their hearts glowing with a fervour that no other ages can boast-the primitive Christians were well prepared to receive the impressions naturally made upon a heated fancy, and to put credit in tales which the distress of their situation prevented them from investigating, and their ignorance and credulity debarred from doubt. Hence, with the lives of the Fathers of the Church, they interwove prodigies of another land; and being further willing to address the prejudices of those they might hope to convert, adorned their martyrologies with fictitious incidents of oriental structure, even as, to conciliate the heathen, they introduced into their religious buildings the statues of pagan worship, dignifying them with novel names, and serving them with novel ceremonies."

Mr. Swan's returning fugitives may certainly have had their share in introducing the fictions of the East into the Western world, equally with the natural interchange of habitations between the East and the West which was consequent on the settlement of Constantinople, and the great influx of the West into the East. During the same century much was undoubtedly effected in the transmission of romantic fiction by the monks, who were at that period wandering over every part of the habitable world. We have the evidence of Gibbon that the progress of monachism was not more rapid or universal than that of Christianity itself. Every province-nay, almost every city in the empire, had its ascetics, to whom no way was impassable; no sea a barrier to their copying in the most distant climes the model of monastic life.

"The roving character of the monks, therefore," says Mr. Swan, “is another link of the chain by which I introduce oriental fiction into the West; and it is utterly impossible (maturely weighing the habits and propensities of this class of people) that they should not have picked up and retained the floating traditions of the countries through which they passed. Some of the early romances, as well as the legends of the saints, were undoubtedly fabricated in the deep silence of the cloister. Both frequently sprung from the warmth of fancy, which religious seclusion is so well tended to nourish; but the former were adorned with foreign embellishments."

It were almost superfluous to allude to the Crusades as further sources of romantic and didactic fiction. No one will dispute their right to a place in the system. About the period of the third crusade this kind of writing was at its height. That age was the full tide of chivalry. Twenty years elapsed between that and the fourth and fifth expeditions into the East; and nearly a generation elapsed before, for the sixth and the last time, the wealth and blood of Europe was poured upon the plains of the East. Enough of money and life had been now spent to satisfy the most enthusiastic of the

crusading body, and to check, if not to stem, the tide of popular feeling which had formerly run so strong in favour of the restoration of the sepulchre and the holy city to the guardianship of the faithful. A juster and more rational mode of thinking was now beginning to be introduced, and time was at last beginning to allay the Anti-Saracenic passion. With the decline of these savage expeditions romantic fiction began to be regarded. For though originally extraneous and independent, romantic fictions had of late years become incorporated with chivalry and its institutions, and, with them, they naturally fell into decay.

The selection of Latin stories which Mr. Wright has edited for the Percy Society, as a contribution to the history of fiction during the middle ages, are, he tells us, chiefly taken from two works of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Some are from the Summa Predicantium of an English Dominican of the fourteenth century, named John of Bromyard; whilst the Promptuarium Exemplorum of the early part of the next century supplies the remainder of his stories.

The "Gesta Romanorum is the most famous collection of didactic fiction, for which we are indebted to the imagination, knowledge, and literary labour of the monks of the middle ages. In the refectory, whilst the monks ate their meals, one, the youngest generally, of the society, read from some such collection as this, a tale at once amusing and instructive. Nor was the use of these fables confined to the refectory. The success which has always attended instruction by fables, and the popularity ever consequent on this form of teaching, led the monks to use this medium to illustrate their public dicourses, as well as for their own daily relaxation. An argument, however clear, a deduction, however logical, operates but faintly except on trained intellects; but an apposite story at once arouses the attention, and makes a more durable impression on illiterate auditors. Knowledge in the garb of verse is soonest appreciated by an uneducated mind, and remains there far longer than in any other form. A ballad will descend from generation to generation without a fault or an interpolation. Next to poetry comes poetic prose, at the head of which class stands didactic fiction. Many a clever man has confessed, that he was more indebted to Shakspere and Scott for his English and Scottish history, than to the standard historians of either land.

The title of the work must not lead us to believe that to the Roman nation these tales are confined: the substance corresponds but little with the heading; oriental, legendary, and classical fables, contribute about equal shares in the formation of this singular composition. "It is," says Wharton, "a multitude of narratives, either not historical, or in another respect, such as are totally unconnected with the Roman people, or perhaps the most preposterous misrepresentations of their history. To cover this deviation from the promised plan, which, by introducing a more ample variety of matter,