racens was of old and universal interest, freshened by the Crusades.
The Arthurian story received from fiction, if not from history, an
almost equally wide bearing; and was, besides, knitted to
religion--the one universal interest of the time--by its connection
with the Graal. All Europe, yet again, had joined in the Crusades, and
the stories brought by the crusaders directly or indirectly from the
East were in the same way common property.

[Sidenote: _Its insularity of manner._]

But saga-literature had nothing of this appeal. It was as
indifferently and almost superciliously insular as the English
country-house novel itself, and may have produced in some of the very
few foreigners who can ever have known it originally, something of the
same feelings of wrath which we have seen excited by the English
country-house novel in our own day. The heroes were not, according to
the general ideas of mediaeval Europe, either great chiefs or
accomplished knights; the heroines were the very reverse of those
damsels "with mild mood" (as the catch-word in the English romances
has it) whom the general Middle Age liked or thought it liked. An
intricate, intensely local, and (away from the locality) not seldom
shocking system of law and public morality pervaded the whole. The
supernatural element, though in itself it might have been an
attraction, was of a cast quite different from the superstitions of
the South, or even of the Centre; and the Christian element, which was
to the Middle Ages the very air they breathed, was either absent
altogether or present in an artificial, uneasy, and scanty fashion.

[Sidenote: _Of scenery and character._]

Yet all these things were of less importance than another, which is,
after all, the great _differentia_, the abiding quality, of the sagas.
In the literature of the rest of Europe, and especially in the central
and everywhere radiating literature of France, there were sometimes
local and almost parochial touches--sometimes unimportant heroes, not
seldom savage heroines, frequently quaint bits of exotic
supernaturalism. But all this was subdued to a kind of common literary
handling, a "dis-realising" process which made them universally
acceptable. The personal element, too, was conspicuously absent--the
generic character is always uppermost. Charlemagne was a real person,
and not a few of the incidents with which he was connected in the
_chansons_ were real events; but he and they have become