In the Iliadwe hear of no minstrels in camp: in the Odysseya prince has a minstrel among his retainers—Demodocus, at the court of Phaeacia; Phemius, in the house of Odysseus. In Ionia, when princes had passed away, rhapsodists recited for gain in marketplaces and at fairs. The parallel with France is so far complete.
The French national epics, like those of the Achaeans, deal mainly with legends of a long past legendary age. To the French authors the greatness and the fortunes of the Emperor Charles and other heroic heads of great Houses provide a theme. The topics of song are his wars, and the prowess and the quarrels of his peers with the Emperor and among themselves. These are seen magnified through a mist of legend; Saracens are substituted for Gascon foes, and the great Charles, so nobly venerable a figure in the oldest French epic (the Chanson de Roland, circ.1050-1070 in its earliest extant form), is more degraded, in the later epics, than Agamemnon himself. The "machinery" of the gods in Homer is replaced by the machinery of angels, but the machinery of dreams is in vogue, as in the Iliad and Odyssey. The sources are traditional and legendary.
We know that brief early lays of Charles and other heroes had existed, and they may have been familiar to the French epic poets, but they were not merely patched into the epics. The form of verse is not ballad-like, but a series of laissesof decasyllabic lines, each laissepresenting one assonance, not rhyme. As time went on, rhyme and Alexandrine lines were introduced, and the old epics were expanded, altered, condensed, remaniйs, with progressive changes in taste, metre, language, manners, and ways of life.
Finally, an age of Cyclic poems began; authors took new characters, whom they attached by false genealogies to the older heroes, and they chanted the adventures of the sons of the former heroes, like the Cyclic poet who sang of the son of Odysseus by Circe. All these conditions are undeniably "true parallels" to "the conditions under which the Homeric poems appeared." The only obvious point of difference vanishes if we admit, with Sir Richard Jebb and M. Salomon Reinach, the possibility of the existence of written texts in the Greece of the early iron age.
We do not mean texts prepared for a readingpublic. In France such a public, demanding texts for reading, did not arise till the decadence of the epic. The oldest French texts of their epics are small volumes, each page containing some thirty lines in one column. Such volumes were carried about by the jongleurs, who chanted their own or other men's verses. They were not in the hands of readers. {Footnote: Йpopйes Franзaises, Lйon Gautier, vol. i. pp. 226-228. 1878.}
An example of an author-reciter, Jendeus de Brie (he was the maker of the first version of the Bataille Loquifer, twelfth century) is instructive. Of Jendeus de Brie it is said that "he wrote the poem, kept it very carefully, taught it to no man, made much gain out of it in Sicily where he sojourned, and left it to his son when he died." Similar statements are made in Renaus de Montauban(the existing late version is of the thirteenth century) about Huon de Villeneuve, who would not part with his poem for horses or furs, or for any price, and about other poets. {Footnote: Йpopйes Franзaises, Lйon Gautier, vol. i. p. 215, Note I.}
These early jongleurswere men of position and distinction; their theme was the gestesof princes; they were not under the ban with which the Church pursued vulgar strollers, men like the Greek rhapsodists. Pindar's story that Homer wrote the Cypria{Footnote: Pindari Opera, vol. iii. p. 654. Boeckh.} and gave the copy, as the dowry of his daughter, to Stasinus who married her, could only have arisen in Greece in circumstances exactly like those of Jendeus de Brie. Jendeus lived on his poem by reciting it, and left it to his son when he died. The story of Homer and Stasinus could only have been invented in an age when the possession of the solitary text of a poem was a source of maintenance to the poet. This condition of things could not exist, either when there were no written texts or when such texts were multiplied to serve the wants of a reading public.
Again, a poet in the fortunate position of Jendeus would not teach his Epic in a "school" of reciters unless he were extremely well paid. In later years, after his death, his poem came, through copies good or bad, into circulation.
Late, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, we hear of a "school" of jongleursat Beauvais. In Lent they might not ply their profession, so they gathered at Beauvais, where they could learn cantilenae, new lays. {Footnote: Йpopйes Franзaises, Lйon Gautier, vol. ii. pp. 174, 175.} But by that time the epic was decadent and dying?
The audiences of the jongleurs, too, were no longer, by that time, what they had been. The rich and great, now, had library copies of the epics; not small jongleurs'copies, but folios, richly illuminated and bound, with two or three columns of matter on each page. {Footnote: Ibid., vol. i. p. 228. See, too, photographs of an illuminated, double-columned library copy in La Chancun de Willame., London, 1903.}
The age of recitations from a text in princely halls was ending or ended; the age of a reading public was begun. The earlier condition of the jongleurwho was his own poet, and carefully guarded his copyright in spite of all temptations to permit the copying of his MS., is regarded by Sir Richard Jebb as quite a possible feature of early Greece. He thinks that there was "no wide circulation of writings by numerous copies for a reading public" before the end of the fifth century B.C. As Greek mercenaries could write, and write well, in the seventh to sixth centuries, I incline to think that there may then, and earlier, have been a reading public. However, long before that a man might commit his poems to writing. "Wolf allows that some men did, as early at least as 776 B.C. The verses might never be read by anybody except himself" (the author) "or those to whom he privately bequeathed them" (as Jendeus de Brie bequeathed his poem to his son), "but his end would have been gained." {Footnote: Homer, p. 113.}
Recent discoveries as to the very early date of linear non-Phoenician writing in Crete of course increase the probability of this opinion, which is corroborated by the story of the Cypria, given as a dowry with the author's daughter. Thus "the particular conditions under which the Homeric poems appeared" "been reproduced with sufficient closeness" in every respect, with surprising closeness, in the France of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. The social conditions are the same; the legendary materials are of identical character; the method of publication by recitation is identical; the cyclic decadence occurs in both cases, the monomanie cyclique. In the Greece of Homer we have the four necessary conditions of the epic, as found by M. Lйon Gautier in mediaeval France. We have:—
(1) An uncritical age confusing history by legend.
(2) We have a national milieuwith religious uniformity.
(3) We have poems dealing with—
"Old unhappy far-off things
And battles long ago."
(4) We have representative heroes, the Over-Lord, and his peers or paladins. {Footnote: Йpopйes Franзaises, Lйon Gautier, vol. i. pp. 6-9}
It may be added that in Greece, as in France, some poets adapt into the adventures of their heroes world-old Mдrchen, as in the Odyssey, and in the cycle of the parents of Charles.