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fluctuating. And fluctuating also because, as none of these various
nations, tendencies, aspirations, dominated sufficiently long to produce
any highly organized art, there remained no standard works, nothing
recognizedly perfect, which would be kept for its perfection and gather
round it imitations, so as to form the nucleus of any homogeneous
tradition. The Middle Ages, so full of fashions in literary matters,
possessed no classics; the minnesingers knew nothing of the stern old
Teutonic war songs; the meistersaengers had forgotten the minnesingers;
the trouveres and troubadours knew nothing of "The Chanson de Roland,"
and Villon knew nothing of them; only in Italy, where the Middle Ages
came to an end and the Renaissance began with the Lombard league, was
there established a tradition of excellence, with men like Dante,
Petrarch, and Boccaccio, handed down from generation to generation; even
as, while in the north there came about the strange modification which
substituted the French of Rabelais for the French of Chrestien de
Troyes, the German of Luther for the German of Wolfram von Eschenbach,
the Italian language, from Ciullo d'Alcamo almost to Boiardo and Lorenzo
dei Medici, remained virtually identical. The result of this, which I
may call the heterogeneousness and instability of the Middle Ages was
that not merely literary forms were for ever arising and being
superseded, but literary subject matter was continually undergoing a
process of transformation. While in Antiquity the great epic and tragic
stuffs remained well-nigh unaltered, and the stories of Valerius Flaccus
and Apollonius Rhodius were merely the stories which had been current
since the days of Homer, during the course of the Middle Ages every epic
cycle, and every tale belonging thereunto, was gradually adulterated,
mingled with, swamped by, some other cycle or tale; nay, rather, every
other, cycle and every other tale, the older ones trying to save their
popularity by admixture with the more recent, till at last all mythical
significance, all historical meaning, all national character, all
psychological reality, were lost in the chaotic result. And meanwhile,
in the absence of any stable language, of any durable literary fashion,
the Middle Ages were unable to give to these epic stuffs, at any one
period of their life of metamorphose, a form sufficiently artistically
valuable to secure anything beyond momentary vogue, to secure for them
the immor