ny
communications with other peoples, the distinct beginning of what was
later to be called knight-errantry; of heroes, creations of an inactive
nation, having no special military duties, going forth to do what good
they may at random, unforced by any necessity, and following a mere
aesthetico-romantic plan of perfecting themselves by deeds of valour to
become more worthy of their God, their King, and their Lady: religion,
loyalty, and love, all three of them mere aesthetic abstractions,
becoming the goal of an essentially aesthetic, unpractical system of
self-improvement, such as was utterly incompatible with any real and
serious business in life. Idle poetic fancies of an inert people, the
Knights of the Round Table have no mission save that of being
poetically perfect. Such was the spirit of Keltic poetry; and, as it
happened, this spirit satisfied the imaginative wants of mediaeval
society just at the moment when political events diffused in other
countries the knowledge of the Arthurian legends. The old Teutonic tales
of Sigurd, Gudrun, and Dietrich, had long ceased to appeal, in their
mutilated and obliterated condition, to a society to whom tribal feeling
and pagan heroism were odious, and whose religion distinctly reproved
revenge. These semi-mythological tales had been replaced by another
cycle: the purely realistic epic, which had arisen during the struggles
between the Christian west against the pagan north-east and the
Mohammedan south, and which, originating in the short battle-songs
narrating the exploits of the predecessors and help-mates of
Charlemagne, had constituted itself into large narratives of which the
"Song of Roland" represents artistic culmination. These narratives of
mere military exploits, of the battles of a strong feudal aristocracy
animated by feudal loyalty and half-religious, half-patriotic fury
against invading heathenness, had perfectly satisfied the men of the
earliest Middle Ages, of the times when feudalism was being established
and the church being reformed; when the strong military princelets of
the North were embarking with their barons to conquer new kingdoms in
England and in Italy and Greece; when the whole of feudal Europe hurled
itself against Asia in the first Crusades. But the condition of things
soon altered: the feudal hierarchy was broken up into a number of
semi-independent little kingdoms or principalities, struggling, with the
assistance of industrial and mercantile