Mont Saint Michel and Chartres

Ch. 2 - La Chason de Roland

These verses begin the "Roman du Mont-Saint-Michel," and if the

spelling is corrected, they still read almost as easily as Voltaire;

more easily than Verlaine; and much like a nursery rhyme; but as

tourists cannot stop to clear their path, or smooth away the

pebbles, they must be lifted over the rough spots, even when

roughness is beauty. Translation is an evil, chiefly because every

one who cares for mediaeval architecture cares for mediaeval French,

and ought to care still more for mediaeval English. The language of

this "Roman" was the literary language of England. William of Saint-

Pair was a subject of Henry II, King of England and Normandy; his

verses, like those of Richard Coeur-de-Lion, are monuments of

English literature. To this day their ballad measure is better

suited to English than to French; even the words and idioms are more

English than French. Any one who attacks them boldly will find that

the "vers romieus" run along like a ballad, singing their own

meaning, and troubling themselves very little whether the meaning is

exact or not. One's translation is sure to be full of gross

blunders, but the supreme blunder is that of translating at all when

one is trying to catch not a fact but a feeling. If translate one

must, we had best begin by trying to be literal, under protest that

it matters not a straw whether we succeed. Twelfth-century art was

not precise; still less "precieuse," like Moliere's famous

seventeenth-century prudes.

The verses of the young monk, William, who came from the little

Norman village of Saint-Pair, near Granville, within sight of the

Mount, were verses not meant to be brilliant. Simple human beings

like rhyme better than prose, though both may say the same thing, as

they like a curved line better than a straight one, or a blue better

than a grey; but, apart from the sensual appetite, they chose rhyme

in creating their literature for the practical reason that they

remembered it better than prose. Men had to carry their libraries in

their heads.

These lines of William, beginning his story, are valuable because

for once they give a name and a date. Abbot Robert of Torigny ruled

at the Mount from 1154 to 1186. We have got to travel again and

again between Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres during these years, but

for the moment we must hurry to get back to William the Conqueror

and the "Chanson de Roland." William of Saint-Pair comes in here,

out of place, only on account of a pretty description he gave of the

annual pilgrimage to the Mount, which is commonly taken to be more

or less like what he saw every year on the Archangel's Day, and what

had existed ever since the Normans became Christian in 912:--

If you are not satisfied with this translation, any scholar of

French will easily help to make a better, for we are not studying

grammar or archaeology, and would rather be inaccurate in such

matters than not, if, at that price, a freer feeling of the art

could be caught. Better still, you can turn to Chaucer, who wrote

his Canterbury Pilgrimage two hundred years afterwards:--

The passion for pilgrimages was universal among our ancestors as far

back as we can trace them. For at least a thousand years it was

their chief delight, and is not yet extinct. To feel the art of

Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres we have got to become pilgrims again:

but, just now, the point of most interest is not the pilgrim so much

as the minstrel who sang to amuse him,--the jugleor or jongleur,--

who was at home in every abbey, castle or cottage, as well as at

every shrine. The jugleor became a jongleur and degenerated into the

street-juggler; the minstrel, or menestrier, became very early a

word of abuse, equivalent to blackguard; and from the beginning the

profession seems to have been socially decried, like that of a

music-hall singer or dancer in later times; but in the eleventh

century, or perhaps earlier still, the jongleur seems to have been a

poet, and to have composed the songs he sang. The immense mass of

poetry known as the "Chansons de Geste" seems to have been composed

as well as sung by the unnamed Homers of France, and of all spots in

the many provinces where the French language in its many dialects

prevailed, Mont-Saint-Michel should have been the favourite with the

jongleur, not only because the swarms of pilgrims assured him food

and an occasional small piece of silver, but also because Saint

Michael was the saint militant of all the warriors whose exploits in

war were the subject of the "Chansons de Geste." William of Saint-

Pair was a priest-poet; he was not a minstrel, and his "Roman" was

not a chanson; it was made to read, not to recite; but the "Chanson

de Roland" was a different affair.

So it was, too, with William's contemporaries and rivals or

predecessors, the monumental poets of Norman-English literature.

Wace, whose rhymed history of the Norman dukes, which he called the

"Roman de Rou," or "Rollo," is an English classic of the first rank,

was a canon of Bayeux when William of Saint-Pair was writing at

Mont-Saint-Michel. His rival Benoist, who wrote another famous

chronicle on the same subject, was also a historian, and not a

singer. In that day literature meant verse; elegance in French prose

did not yet exist; but the elegancies of poetry in the twelfth

century were as different, in kind, from the grand style of the

eleventh, as Virgil was different from Homer.

William of Saint-Pair introduces us to the pilgrimage and to the

jongleur, as they had existed at least two hundred years before his

time, and were to exist two hundred years after him. Of all our two

hundred and fifty million arithmetical ancestors who were going on

pilgrimages in the middle of the eleventh century, the two who would

probably most interest every one, after eight hundred years have

passed, would be William the Norman and Harold the Saxon. Through

William of Saint-Pair and Wace and Benoist, and the most charming

literary monument of all, the Bayeux tapestry of Queen Matilda, we

can build up the story of such a pilgrimage which shall be as

historically exact as the battle of Hastings, and as artistically

true as the Abbey Church.

According to Wace's "Roman de Rou," when Harold's father, Earl

Godwin, died, April 15, 1053, Harold wished to obtain the release of

certain hostages, a brother and a cousin, whom Godwin had given to

Edward the Confessor as security for his good behaviour, and whom

Edward had sent to Duke William for safe-keeping. Wace took the

story from other and older sources, and its accuracy is much

disputed, but the fact that Harold went to Normandy seems to be

certain, and you will see at Bayeux the picture of Harold asking

permission of King Edward to make the journey, and departing on

horseback, with his hawk and hounds and followers, to take ship at

Bosham, near Chichester and Portsmouth. The date alone is doubtful.

Common sense seems to suggest that the earliest possible date could

not be too early to explain the rash youth of the aspirant to a

throne who put himself in the power of a rival in the eleventh

century. When that rival chanced to be William the Bastard, not even

boyhood could excuse the folly; but Mr. Freeman, the chief authority

on this delicate subject, inclined to think that Harold was forty

years old when he committed his blunder, and that the year was about

1064. Between 1054 and 1064 the historian is free to choose what

year he likes, and the tourist is still freer. To save trouble for

the memory, the year 1058 will serve, since this is the date of the

triumphal arches of the Abbey Church on the Mount. Harold, in

sailing from the neighbourhood of Portsmouth, must have been bound

for Caen or Rouen, but the usual west winds drove him eastward till

he was thrown ashore on the coast of Ponthieu, between Abbeville and

Boulogne, where he fell into the hands of the Count of Ponthieu,

from whom he was rescued or ransomed by Duke William of Normandy and

taken to Rouen. According to Wace and the "Roman de Rou":--

They came to the river Couesnon. Harold must have got great fame by

saving life on the sands, to be remembered and recorded by the

Normans themselves after they had killed him; but this is the affair

of historians. Tourists note only that Harold and William came to

the Mount:--"Venerunt ad Montem." They would never have dared to

pass it, on such an errand, without stopping to ask the help of

Saint Michael.

If William and Harold came to the Mount, they certainly dined or

supped in the old refectory, which is where we have lain in wait for

them. Where Duke William was, his jongleur--jugleor--was not far,

and Wace knew, as every one in Normandy seemed to know, who this

favourite was,--his name, his character, and his song. To him Wace

owed one of the most famous passages in his story of the assault at

Hastings, where Duke William and his battle began their advance

against the English lines:--

Of course, critics doubt the story, as they very properly doubt

everything. They maintain that the "Chanson de Roland" was not as

old as the battle of Hastings, and certainly Wace gave no sufficient

proof of it. Poetry was not usually written to prove facts. Wace

wrote a hundred years after the battle of Hastings. One is not

morally required to be pedantic to the point of knowing more than

Wace knew, but the feeling of scepticism, before so serious a

monument as Mont-Saint-Michel, is annoying. The "Chanson de Roland"

ought not to be trifled with, at least by tourists in search of art.

One is shocked at the possibility of being deceived about the

starting-point of American genealogy. Taillefer and the song rest on

the same evidence that Duke William and Harold and the battle itself

rest upon, and to doubt the "Chanson" is to call the very roll of

Battle Abbey in question. The whole fabric of society totters; the

British peerage turns pale.

Wace did not invent all his facts. William of Malmesbury is supposed

to have written his prose chronicle about 1120 when many of the men

who fought at Hastings must have been alive, and William expressly

said: "Tune cantilena Rollandi inchoata ut martium viri exemplum

pugnaturos accenderet, inclamatoque dei auxilio, praelium

consertum." Starting the "Chanson de Roland" to inflame the fighting

temper of the men, battle was joined. This seems enough proof to

satisfy any sceptic, yet critics still suggest that the "cantilena

Rollandi" must have been a Norman "Chanson de Rou," or "Rollo," or

at best an earlier version of the "Chanson de Roland"; but no Norman

chanson would have inflamed the martial spirit of William's army,

which was largely French; and as for the age of the version, it is

quite immaterial for Mont-Saint-Michel; the actual version is old

enough.

Taillefer himself is more vital to the interest of the dinner in the

refectory, and his name was not mentioned by William of Malmesbury.

If the song was started by the Duke's order, it was certainly

started by the Duke's jongleur, and the name of this jongleur

happens to be known on still better authority than that of William

of Malmesbury. Guy of Amiens went to England in 1068 as almoner of

Queen Matilda, and there wrote a Latin poem on the battle of

Hastings which must have been complete within ten years after the

battle was fought, for Guy died in 1076. Taillefer, he said, led the

Duke's battle:--

Like a drum-major with his staff, he threw his sword high in the air

and caught it, while he chanted his song to the French, and

terrified the English. The rhymed chronicle of Geoffrey Gaimer who

wrote about 1150, and that of Benoist who was Wace's rival, added

the story that Taillefer died in the melee.

The most unlikely part of the tale was, after all, not the singing

of the "Chanson," but the prayer of Taillefer to the Duke:--

Legally translated, Taillefer asked to be ennobled, and offered to

pay for it with his life. The request of a jongleur to lead the

Duke's battle seems incredible. In early French "bataille" meant

battalion,--the column of attack. The Duke's grant: "Io l'otrei!"

seems still more fanciful. Yet Guy of Amiens distinctly confirmed

the story: "Histrio cor audax nimium quem nobilitabat"; a stage-

player--a juggler--the Duke's singer--whose bravery ennobled him.

The Duke granted him--octroya--his patent of nobility on the field.

All this preamble leads only to unite the "Chanson" with the

architecture of the Mount, by means of Duke William and his Breton

campaign of 1058. The poem and the church are akin; they go

together, and explain each other. Their common trait is their

military character, peculiar to the eleventh century. The round arch

is masculine. The "Chanson" is so masculine that, in all its four

thousand lines, the only Christian woman so much as mentioned was

Alda, the sister of Oliver and the betrothed of Roland, to whom one

stanza, exceedingly like a later insertion, was given, toward the

end. Never after the first crusade did any great poem rise to such

heroism as to sustain itself without a heroine. Even Dante attempted

no such feat.

Duke William's party, then, is to be considered as assembled at

supper in the old refectory, in the year 1058, while the triumphal

piers of the church above are rising. The Abbot, Ralph of Beaumont,

is host; Duke William sits with him on a dais; Harold is by his side

"a grant enor"; the Duke's brother, Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, with the

other chief vassals, are present; and the Duke's jongleur Taillefer

is at his elbow. The room is crowded with soldiers and monks, but

all are equally anxious to hear Taillefer sing. As soon as dinner is

over, at a nod from the Duke, Taillefer begins:--

The "Chanson" opened with these lines, which had such a direct and

personal bearing on every one who heard them as to sound like

prophecy. Within ten years William was to stand in England where

Charlemagne stood in Spain. His mind was full of it, and of the

means to attain it; and Harold was even more absorbed than he by the

anxiety of the position. Harold had been obliged to take oath that

he would support William's claim to the English throne, but he was

still undecided, and William knew men too well to feel much

confidence in an oath. As Taillefer sang on, he reached the part of

Ganelon, the typical traitor, the invariable figure of mediaeval

society. No feudal lord was without a Ganelon. Duke William saw them

all about him.

He might have felt that Harold would play the part, but if Harold

should choose rather to be Roland, Duke William could have foretold

that his own brother, Bishop Odo, after gorging himself on the

plunder of half England, would turn into a Ganelon so dangerous as

to require a prison for life. When Taillefer reached the battle-

scenes, there was no further need of imagination to realize them.

They were scenes of yesterday and to-morrow. For that matter,

Charlemagne or his successor was still at Aix, and the Moors were

still in Spain. Archbishop Turpin of Rheims had fought with sword

and mace in Spain, while Bishop Odo of Bayeux was to marshal his men

at Hastings, like a modern general, with a staff, but both were

equally at home on the field of battle. Verse by verse, the song was

a literal mirror of the Mount. The battle of Hastings was to be

fought on the Archangel's Day. What happened to Roland at

Roncesvalles was to happen to Harold at Hastings, and Harold, as he

was dying like Roland, was to see his brother Gyrth die like Oliver.

Even Taillefer was to be a part, and a distinguished part, of his

chanson. Sooner or later, all were to die in the large and simple

way of the eleventh century. Duke William himself, twenty years

later, was to meet a violent death at Mantes in the same spirit, and

if Bishop Odo did not die in battle, he died, at least, like an

eleventh-century hero, on the first crusade. First or last, the

whole company died in fight, or in prison, or on crusade, while the

monks shrived them and prayed.

Then Taillefer certainly sang the great death-scenes. Even to this

day every French school-boy, if he knows no other poetry, knows

these verses by heart. In the eleventh century they wrung the heart

of every man-at-arms in Europe, whose school was the field of battle

and the hand-to-hand fight. No modern singer ever enjoys such power

over an audience as Taillefer exercised over these men who were

actors as well as listeners. In the melee at Roncesvalles, overborne

by innumerable Saracens, Oliver at last calls for help:--

Of course the full value of the verse cannot be regained. One knows

neither how it was sung nor even how it was pronounced. The

assonances are beyond recovering; the "laisse" or leash of verses or

assonances with the concluding cry, "Aoi," has long ago vanished

from verse or song. The sense is as simple as the "Ballad of Chevy

Chase," but one must imagine the voice and acting. Doubtless

Taillefer acted each motive; when Oliver called loud and clear,

Taillefer's voice rose; when Roland spoke "doulcement et suef," the

singer must have sung gently and soft; and when the two friends,

with the singular courtesy of knighthood and dignity of soldiers,

bowed to each other in parting and turned to face their deaths,

Taillefer may have indicated the movement as he sang. The verses

gave room for great acting. Hearing Oliver's cry for help, Roland

rode up, and at sight of the desperate field, lost for a moment his

consciousness:--

No one should try to render this into English--or, indeed, into

modern French--verse, but any one who will take the trouble to catch

the metre and will remember that each verse in the "leash" ends in

the same sound,--aimer, parler, cler, mortel, damnede, mel, deu,

suef, nasel,--however the terminal syllables may be spelled, can

follow the feeling of the poetry as well as though it were Greek

hexameter. He will feel the simple force of the words and action, as

he feels Homer. It is the grand style,--the eleventh century:--

Ferut vus ai! Kar le me pardunez!

Not a syllable is lost, and always the strongest syllable is chosen.

Even the sentiment is monosyllabic and curt:--

Ja est co Rollanz ki tant vus soelt amer!

Taillefer had, in such a libretto, the means of producing dramatic

effects that the French comedy or the grand opera never approached,

and such as made Bayreuth seem thin and feeble. Duke William's

barons must have clung to his voice and action as though they were

in the very melee, striking at the helmets of gemmed gold. They had

all been there, and were to be there again. As the climax

approached, they saw the scene itself; probably they had seen it

every year, more or less, since they could swing a sword. Taillefer

chanted the death of Oliver and of Archbishop Turpin and all the

other barons of the rear guard, except Roland, who was left for dead

by the Saracens when they fled on hearing the horns of Charlemagne's

returning host. Roland came back to consciousness on feeling a

Saracen marauder tugging at his sword Durendal. With a blow of his

ivory horn--oliphant--he killed the pagan; then feeling death near,

he prepared for it. His first thought was for Durendal, his sword,

which he could not leave to infidels. In the singular triple

repetition which gives more of the same solidity and architectural

weight to the verse, he made three attempts to break the sword, with

a lament--a plaint--for each. Three times he struck with all his

force against the rock; each time the sword rebounded without

breaking. The third time--

This "laisse" is even more eleventh-century than the other, but it

appealed no longer to the warriors; it spoke rather to the monks. To

the warriors, the sword itself was the religion, and the relics were

details of ornament or strength. To the priest, the list of relics

was more eloquent than the Regent diamond on the hilt and the

Kohinoor on the scabbard. Even to us it is interesting if it is

understood. Roland had gone on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. He had

stopped at Rome and won the friendship of Saint Peter, as the tooth

proved; he had passed through Constantinople and secured the help of

Saint Basil; he had reached Jerusalem and gained the affection of

the Virgin; he had come home to France and secured the support of

his "seigneur" Saint Denis; for Roland, like Hugh Capet, was a

liege-man of Saint Denis and French to the heart. France, to him,

was Saint Denis, and at most the Ile de France, but not Anjou or

even Maine. These were countries he had conquered with Durendal:--

Yet even the religion is martial, as though it were meant for the

fighting Archangel and Odo of Bayeux. The relics serve the sword;

the sword is not in service of the relics. As the death-scene

approaches, the song becomes even more military:--

Li gentils quens quil fut morz cunqueranz.

Only then the singer allowed the Church to assert some of its

rights:-

Correct as the law may have been, the religion even at that time

must have seemed to the monks to need professional advice. Roland's

life was not exemplary. The "Chanson" had taken pains to show that

the disaster at Roncesvalles was due to Roland's headstrong folly

and temper. In dying, Roland had not once thought of these faults,

or repented of his worldly ambitions, or mentioned the name of Alda,

his betrothed. He had clung to the memory of his wars and conquests,

his lineage, his earthly seigneur Charlemagne, and of "douce

France." He had forgotten to give so much as an allusion to Christ.

The poet regarded all these matters as the affair of the Church; all

the warrior cared for was courage, loyalty, and prowess.

The interest of these details lies not in the scholarship or the

historical truth or even the local colour, so much as in the art.

The naivete of the thought is repeated by the simplicity of the

verse. Word and thought are equally monosyllabic. Nothing ever

matched it. The words bubble like a stream in the woods:--

Co sent Rollanz de sun tens ni ad plus.

Try and put them into modern French, and see what will happen:--

Que jo ai fait des l'ure que nez fui.

The words may remain exactly the same, but the poetry will have gone

out of them. Five hundred years later, even the English critics had

so far lost their sense for military poetry that they professed to

be shocked by Milton's monosyllables:--

Whereat he inly raged, and, as they talked,

Smote him into the midriff with a stone

That beat out life.

Milton's language was indeed more or less archaic and Biblical; it

was a Puritan affectation; but the "Chanson" in the refectory

actually reflected, repeated, echoed, the piers and arches of the

Abbey Church just rising above. The verse is built up. The qualities

of the architecture reproduce themselves in the song: the same

directness, simplicity, absence of self-consciousness; the same

intensity of purpose; even the same material; the prayer is

granite:--

Guaris de mei l'anme de tuz perils Pur les pecchiez que en ma vie

fisi

The action of dying is felt, like the dropping of a keystone into

the vault, and if the Romanesque arches in the church, which are

within hearing, could speak, they would describe what they are doing

in the precise words of the poem:--

Desur sun braz teneit Ie chief enclin Juintes ses mains est alez a

sa fin.

Upon their shoulders have their heads inclined,

Folded their hands, and sunken to their rest.

Many thousands of times these verses must have been sung at the

Mount and echoed in every castle and on every battle-field from the

Welsh Marches to the shores of the Dead Sea. No modern opera or play

ever approached the popularity of the "Chanson." None has ever

expressed with anything like the same completeness the society that

produced it. Chanted by every minstrel,--known by heart, from

beginning to end, by every man and woman and child, lay or

clerical,--translated into every tongue,--more intensely felt, if

possible, in Italy and Spain than in Normandy and England,--perhaps

most effective, as a work of art, when sung by the Templars in their

great castles in the Holy Land,--it is now best felt at Mont-Saint-

Michel, and from the first must have been there at home. The proof

is the line, evidently inserted for the sake of its local effect,

which invoked Saint Michael in Peril of the Sea at the climax of

Roland's death, and one needs no original documents or contemporary

authorities to prove that, when Taillefer came to this invocation,

not only Duke William and his barons, but still more Abbot Ranulf

and his monks, broke into a frenzy of sympathy which expressed the

masculine and military passions of the Archangel better than it

accorded with the rules of Saint Benedict.