any really national difference between the epics as we find them in
different languages; they are indeed the expression of the temperament
and personality of the great artists who produced them, and they are
each unique and individual in proportion to the greatness of their
authors, but in their general characteristics they are the same.

There are few changes in the history of literature more remarkable than
that which came over European art in the later years of the eleventh
century and the beginning of the twelfth. The epic is concerned with the
world of action, the romance is occupied almost exclusively with the
world of feeling and emotion. For this is the real character of the
romance. It has sometimes been said that the essence of the romance lies
in the strange and mysterious circumstances of the world, in stories of
mystery and wonder, of fairyland and magic. And it is quite true that it
often uses these forms of human experience. But this is not its real
quality. From the story of Tristan and the 'lais' of Mary of France,
down to the _Vita Nuova_ of Dante, that with which it is occupied is the
human heart, its hopes and fears, its joys and sorrows, its exultation
and despair. We have only to read the earliest and greatest forms in
which the story of Tristan and Iseult have come down to us to see this
for ourselves. It is indeed true that we can see or that we can
conjecture that behind the present romance there may have lain an epic
story of the hero's actions, but what we see now is nothing but the
story of the 'infinite passion', the 'infinite pain' of the human heart.
It is the story of their fatal love, of the passion which drives them
out of the homes of men into the wilderness, the fatal passion which
separation only makes deeper, which nothing can change, nothing can end,
the story of a man and woman to whom the world is well lost for love.
And if you wish to see the whole meaning of life as the romance actually
understood it, you have but to turn again to that 'lai' of Mary of
France, which tells us in a few lines how Tristan and Iseult, long
parted, succeed in meeting in the forest for a few moments--meet and
then part--and over it all there is nothing but a certain exquisite
sentiment of love and pain, of love and tears.

This romance poetry is indeed strange, so strange that no one has yet
succeeded in finding or explaining its real origin. Only the day before,
the great artists were singing the ga