ictitious, it can hardly be said that any writer
of undeniable genius, entitling him to the first class in the Art of
Letters, had shown himself therein. A hundred _chansons de geste_ and as
many romances _d'aventures_ had displayed dispersed talent of a very
high kind, and in the best of them, as the present writer has tried to
point out, a very "extensive assortment" of the various attractions of
the novel had from time to time made its appearance. But this again had
been done "dispersedly," as the Shakespearean stage-direction has it.
The story is sometimes well told, but the telling is constantly
interrupted; the great art of novel-conversation is, as yet, almost
unborn; the descriptions, though sometimes very striking, as in the case
of those given from _Partenopeus_--the fatal revelation of Melior's
charms and the galloping of the maddened palfrey along the seashore,
with the dark monster-haunted wood behind and the bright moonlit sea and
galley in front--are more often stock and lifeless; while, above all,
the characters are rarely more than sketched, if even that. The one
exception--the great Arthurian history, as liberated from its
Graal-legend swaddling clothes, and its kite-and-crow battles with
Saxons and rival knights, but retaining the mystical motive of the
Graal-search itself and the adventures of Lancelot and other knights;
combining all this into a single story, and storing it with incident for
a time, and bringing it to a full and final tragic close by the loves of
Lancelot himself and Guinevere--this great achievement, it has been
frankly confessed, is so much muddled and distracted with episode which
becomes positive digression, that some have even dismissed its
pretensions to be a whole. Even those who reject this dismissal are not
at one as to any single author of the conception, still less of the
execution. The present writer has stated his humble, but ever more and
more firm conviction that Chrestien did not do it and could not have
done it; others of more note, perhaps of closer acquaintance with MS.
sources, but also perhaps not uniting knowledge of the subject with more
experience in general literary criticism and in special study of the
Novel, will not allow Mapes to have done it.

The _Roman de la Rose_, beautiful as is its earlier part and ingenious
as is (sometimes) its later, is, as a _story_, of the thinnest kind. The
_Roman de Renart_ is a vast collection of small stories of a special