bells--the echo of the Middle
Ages--suggestion of such a vanishing. To some of us there is nothing
dead in church-bells; there is only in them, as in the Arthurian
legends, for instance, a perennial thing still presented in
associations, all the more charming for being slightly antique. But
the _chansons de geste_, living by the poetry of their best examples,
by the fire of their sentiment, by the clash and clang of their music,
are still in thought, in connection with manners, hopes, aims, almost
more dead than any of the classics. The literary misjudgment of them
which was possible in quite recent times, to two such critics--very
different, but each of the first class--as Mr Matthew Arnold and M.
Ferdinand Brunetiere, is half excused by this curious feature in their
own literary character. More than mummies or catacombs, more than
Herculaneum and Pompeii, they bring us face to face with something so
remote and afar that we can hardly realise it at all. It may be that
that peculiarity of the French genius, which, despite its unsurpassed
and almost unmatched literary faculty, has prevented it from
contributing any of the very greatest masterpieces to the literature
of the world, has communicated to them this aloofness, this, as it may
almost be called, provincialism. But some such note there is in them,
and it may be that the immense stretch of time during which they were
worse than unknown--misknown--has brought it about.

[Sidenote: _Their charm._]

Yet their interest is not the less; it is perhaps even the more. It is
nearly twenty years since I began to read them, and during that period
I have also been reading masses of other literature from other times,
nations, and languages; yet I cannot at this moment take up one
without being carried away by the stately language, as precise and
well proportioned as modern French, yet with much of the grandeur
which modern French lacks, the statelier metre, the noble phrase, the
noble incident and passion. Take, for instance, one of the crowning
moments, for there are several, of the death-scene of Roland, that
where the hero discovers the dead archbishop, with his hands--"the
white, the beautiful"--crossed on his breast:--

"Li quenz Rollanz revient de pasmeisuns,
Sur piez se drecet, mais il ad grant dulur;
Guardet aval e si guardet amunt;
Sur l'erbe verte, ultre ses cumpaignuns,
La veit gesir le nobile barun:
C'est l'arcevesque que deus mist en su