speak, on
principle--less because the particular violation has a particular
temptation for him than because the thing is forbidden. The Icelander
may covet and take another man's wife, but it is to make her his own.
The Provencal will hardly fall, and will never stay, in love with any
one who is not another's. In savagery there is not so very much to
choose: it requires a calculus, not of morals but of manners, to
distinguish accurately between carving the blood-eagle on your enemy
and serving up your rival's heart as a dish to his mistress. In
passion also there may be less difference than the extreme advocates
of both sides would maintain. But in all things external the contrast,
the hackneyed contrast, of South and North never could have been
exhibited with a more artistic completeness, never has been exhibited
with a completeness so artistic. And these two contrasting parts were
played at the very same time at the two ends of Europe. In the very
same years when the domestic histories and tragedies (there were few
comedies) of Iceland were being spun into the five great sagas and the
fifty smaller ones, the fainter, the more formal, but the not less
peculiar music of the gracious long-drawn Provencal love-song was
sounding under the vines and olives of Languedoc. The very Icelanders
who sailed to Constantinople in the intervals of making the subjects
of these sagas, and sometimes of composing them, must not seldom have
passed or landed on the coasts where _cansos_ and _tensos_, _lai_ and
_sirvente_, were being woven, and have listened to them as the
Ulyssean mariners listened to the songs of the sirens.

[Sidenote: _Icelandic literature of this time mainly prose._]

It is not, of course, true that Provencal only sings of love and
Icelandic only of war. There is a fair amount of love in the Northern
literature and a fair amount of fighting in the Southern. And it is
not true that Icelandic literature is wholly prose, Provencal wholly
poetry. But it is true that Provencal prose plays an extremely small
part in Provencal literature, and that Icelandic poetry plays, in
larger minority, yet still a minor part in Icelandic. It so happens,
too, that in this volume we are almost wholly concerned with Icelandic
prose, and that we shall not find it necessary to say much, if
anything, about Provencal that is not in verse. It is distinctly
curious how much later, _coeteris paribus_, the Romance tongues are
than the Teutonic i