new Passage
Perilous. I shall state very frankly the qualifications which I think
I may advance in regard to this volume. I believe I have read most of
the French and English literature proper of the period that is in
print, and much, if not most, of the German. I know somewhat less of
Icelandic and Provencal; less still of Spanish and Italian as regards
this period, but something also of them: Welsh and Irish I know only
in translations. Now it so happens that--for the period--French is,
more than at any other time, the capital literature of Europe. Very
much of the rest is directly translated from it; still more is
imitated in form. All the great subjects, the great _matieres_, are
French in their early treatment, with the exception of the national
work of Spain, Iceland, and in part Germany. All the forms, except
those of the prose saga and its kinsman the German verse folk-epic,
are found first in French. Whosoever knows the French literature of
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, knows not merely the best
literature in form, and all but the best in matter, of the time, but
that which all the time was imitating, or shortly about to imitate,
both in form and matter.

Again, England presents during this time, though no great English work
written "in the English tongue for English men," yet the spectacle,
unique in history, of a language and a literature undergoing a
sea-change from which it was to emerge with incomparably greater
beauty and strength than it had before, and in condition to vie
with--some would say to outstrip--all actual or possible rivals.
German, if not quite supreme in any way, gives an interesting and
fairly representative example of a chapter of national literary
history, less brilliant and original in performance than the French,
less momentous and unique in promise than the English, but more normal
than either, and furnishing in the epics, of which the _Nibelungenlied_
and _Kudrun_ are the chief examples, and in the best work of the
Minnesingers, things not only of historical but of intrinsic value in
all but the highest degree.

Provencal and Icelandic literature at this time are both of them of
far greater intrinsic interest than English, if not than German, and
they are infinitely more original. But it so happens that the
prominent qualities of form in the first, of matter and spirit in the
second, though intense and delightful, are not very complicated,
various, or wide-ranging. If mon