not depart from classical ideas.  The motives of man’s action are the same as in the Greek epic.  The essentially romantic element, the life of forests and mysterious adventure, the feeling for nature, and that impulse of imagination which makes the Breton warrior unceasingly pursue the unknown;—­ nothing of all this is as yet to be observed.  Roland differs from the heroes of Homer only by his armour; in heart he is the brother of Ajax or Achilles.  Perceval, on the contrary, belongs to another world, separated by a great gulf from that in which the heroes of antiquity live and act.

It was above all by the creation of woman’s character, by introducing into mediaeval poetry, hitherto hard and austere, the nuances of love, that the Breton romances brought about this curious metamorphosis.  It was like an electric spark; in a few years European taste was changed.  Nearly all the types of womankind known to the Middle Ages, Guinevere, Iseult, Enid, are derived from Arthur’s court.  In the Carlovingian poems woman is a nonentity without character or individuality; in them love is either brutal, as in the romance of “Ferebras,” or scarcely indicated, as in the “Song of Roland.”  In the “Mabinogion,” on the other hand, the principal part always belongs to the women.  Chivalrous gallantry, which makes the warrior’s happiness to consist in serving a woman and meriting her esteem, the belief that the noblest use of strength is to succour and avenge weakness, results, I know, from a turn of imagination which possessed nearly all European peoples in the twelfth century; but it cannot be doubted that this turn of imagination first found literary expression among the Breton peoples.  One of the most surprising features in the Mabinogion is the delicacy of the feminine feeling breathed in them; an impropriety or a gross word is never to be met with.  It would be necessary to quote at length the two romances of Peredur and Geraint to demonstrate an innocence such as this; but the naive simplicity of these charming compositions forbids us to see in this innocence any underlying meaning.  The zeal of the knight in the defence of ladies’ honour became a satirical euphemism only in the French imitators, who transformed the virginal modesty of the Breton romances into a shameless gallantry—­so far indeed that these compositions, chaste as they are in the original, became the scandal of the Middle Ages, provoked censures, and were the occasion of the ideas of immorality which, for religious people, still cluster about the name of romance.

Certainly chivalry is too complex a fact for us to be permitted to assign it to any single origin.  Let us say however that in the idea of envisaging the esteem of a woman as the highest object of human activity, and setting up love as the supreme principle of morality, there is nothing of the antique spirit, or indeed of the Teutonic.  Is it in the “Edda” or in the “Niebelungen” that we shall find the germ of this spirit of pure love, of exalted devotion,