hansons de geste_ possess a realistic quality which is
entirely absent from the gracious idealism of the Romances. The
emperors and the admirals, perhaps even their fair and obliging
daughters, were not personages unknown to the contemporaries of the
Norman conquerors of Italy and Sicily, or to the first Crusaders. The
faithful and ferocious, covetous and indomitable, pious and lawless
spirit, which hardly dropped the sword except to take up the torch,
was, poetic presentation and dressing apart, not so very different
from the general temper of man after the break up of the Roman peace
till the more or less definite mapping out of Europe into modern
divisions. More than one Vivien and one William of Orange listened to
Peter the Hermit. In the very isolation of the atmosphere of these
romances, in its distance from modern thought and feeling, in its lack
(as some have held) of universal quality and transcendent human
interest, there is a certain element of strength. It was not above its
time, and it therefore does not reach the highest forms of literature.
But it was intensely _of_ its time; and thus it far exceeds the
lowest kinds, and retains an abiding value even apart from the
distinct, the high, and the very curious perfection, within narrow
limits, of its peculiar form.

[Sidenote: _Volume and age of the_ chansons.]

[Sidenote: _Twelfth century._]

It is probable that very few persons who are not specially acquainted
with the subject are at all aware of the enormous bulk and number of
these poems, even if their later _remaniements_ (as they are called)
both in verse and prose--fourteenth and fifteenth century
refashionings, which in every case meant a large extension--be left
out of consideration. The most complete list published, that of M.
Leon Gautier, enumerates 110. Of these he himself places only the
_Chanson de Roland_ in the eleventh century, perhaps as early as the
Norman Conquest of England, certainly not later than 1095. To the
twelfth he assigns (and it may be observed that, enthusiastic as M.
Gautier is on the literary side, he shows on all questions of age,
&c., a wariness not always exhibited by scholars more exclusively
philological) _Acquin_, _Aliscans_, _Amis et Amiles_, _Antioche
Aspremont_, _Auberi le Bourgoing_, _Aye d'Avignon_, the _Bataille
Loquifer_, the oldest (now only known in Italian) form of _Berte aus
grans Pies_, _Beuves d'Hanstone_ (with another Italian form more or
less independ