mediæval Europe claimed an ancestral records of contemporaries, while Homer was discredited as a glorious but untruthful clerk. From such scanty materials was constructed that "Tale of Troy" which four centuries were to read with delight and to revere as the beginning of authentic history. interest in that far-off event. Virgil, not Homer, was for the first fourteen centuries of our era the exponent of antiquity, and Virgil had forever given authority to the belief of the Roman people in their descent from the royal house of Troy. When Rome in her decay and death fascinated and awed the imagination of her barbarian conquerors, these parvenus of glory, eager to cover their nakedness with rags of her imperial purple, found no method less capable of disproof than to claim common descent from the princes of Troy. As early as the seventh century a Frankish clerk with some confused scraps of learning claimed for his people direct descent from Francus, son of Priam, a pedigree which soon came to be matter of national faith. Antenor was the ancestor chosen by the Normans when they, in their turn growing conscious of a national destiny, desired to connect their history with the imperial past; while the ancient and self-glorous peoples of Wales and Brittany traced with peculiar circumstantiality their descent from Brut, son of Silvius and grandson of Æneas and Lavinia. These claims have curiously colored the medieval Tale of Troy. In all the numerous versions the Greeks play a sorry part; even Achilles triumphs through a mixture of cunning and ferocity, while Hector is the ideal knight, prudent and courteous as he is in valor pre-eminent. Up to the end of the twelfth century, though the name of Troy was familiar in men's minds, their knowledge of the siege was scanty. Homer was unread; even Virgil, though he lived in popular imagination as a great magician, was the property of the learned few. The main authorities for the tale, as it was then known, were two writers of the latest and worst period of Latin literature, who, under the names of Dares and Dictys, professed to describe the siege as eye-witnesses. These forgeries, miserable and arid epitomes, were received by the uncritical Middle Ages as trustworthy The real author of this extraordinary work was Benoît de Sainte-More, a Norman troubadour of the twelfth century. Of his life we know nothing; his learning would argue him a clerk; his zest for fighting would prove him not unacquainted with arms; his knowledge of courts and camps and cities indicate that he was a man of the world. Benoît, indeed, professes to follow his author closely, but admits to have added certain passages, bons dits, as he calls them. Among these happy inventions, which give life and grace to his endless chronicles of combats and truces, is one so bright, so original, so full of natural life that later authors detached it from the context, dressed it in varying circumstance and sentiment, and made of it one of the typical love-stories of the Middle Ages, the tale of Troilus and Cressida. No later poet has essentially altered the story; none has excelled Benoît in dramatic interest; only Chaucer has equalled him in freshness and purity of treatment. It was impossible that a French poem of the twelfth century should lack the element of love, though in the north of France love was not yet exalted into an art as it was in the south. Fighting, and not love-making nor song-writing, was the occupation of Norman knights, though love and music might fill their leisure hours. There is a terrible reality about the part played by women in the daily life of that town of Troy which Benoît describes so vividly. When the heroes in true mediaval fashion ride out to fight beneath the walls, the ladies look down from windows and balconies with breathless interest. Desperate issues hang for them on the combat; their lives, their freedom, their honor are at stake. When the warriors return, princesses, noble damsels, and rich maidens unarm the weary and nent fact in the life of that splendid nurse the wounded. When Hector young warrior. Bitter is the lamentafalls, the streets resound with their tion of the lovers when they know that loud cries. They are impotent to influ- they must part; full of forebodings ence their men in any serious busi- and sad farewells is the last night ness; even Hector, who never spoke they spend together, yet even at this despitefully to any one, turns savagely heart-breaking moment Breseida is on Andromache when she would keep concerned to pack up all her gowns him from the field. Living thus in con- and other possessions. It is a satiric stant fear, in submission, and in the touch that male authors in all ages are performance of humble services, there fond of repeating, but very few have is a pathos about these medieval the secret sympathy with love of women. Polyxena, Benoît's ideal of a splendor which made Benoît devote high-born damsel, meets her doom seventy lines to the description of a with pathetic patience. In startling cloak, which had been marvellously contrast to the tragic figures of Hec wrought by necromancy in the laud of tor's wife and sister is the Breseida Ind. whose portrait Benoît draws with so Despite the consoling and upholdmuch life and with a satiric but not ing consciousness of finery Breseida unkindly humor. She is the natural cannot restrain her cries when the woman, the eternal type common alike Trojan ladies take a tearful farewell to courts and cottages, and every of her; when at the barriers of the where born to be the delight and dis- Greek camp, she says good-bye to traction of all youthful males within Troilus, she nearly dies of grief. But her reach. Beautiful, quick-witted, Benoît wastes no serious sympathy on the victim of sympathies that outrun the despair of his heroine; in four her sincerity and betray her good days, he assures us, her humor will faith, Breseida can grieve over the be so completely changed that she will wreck of her lover's happiness, even have no longer any desire to return to while she secures her own by the elas- Troy. "All women are alike," adds ticity and facile affectionateness of this sweeping satirist; "with one eye her nature. This blithe creature of they weep, and already are smiling little stability and great attraction is with the other." Breseida is indeed to thus described in the old French poem: find absorbing interests in the Grecian "Breseida was courteous; she was camp. Hardly is Troilus out of sight neither too little nor too tall. She was than Diomede, into whose charge she fairer and whiter and lovelier than has been delivered, begins to look on lily-flower or snow upon the branch; her with a soldier's eye, and immeonly the eyebrows meeting marred diately, with all the insolent frankness the perfection of her face. She had of a man-at-arms, makes an avowal beautiful wide open eyes, and her of his admiration and desire to be her speech was quick and witty. She was friend. For all his boldness love will well beloved, and loved much in re- in a short time completely subdue that turn, but her heart was fickle." Bre- simple heart and rob him of sleep, of seida appears on the scene at the mo- speech, and self-possession. Diomede ment when her father, Calchas, the is in fact a mediæval Rawdon Crawrenegade Trojan priest, has persuaded ley, as brave, as vacant, and as infatuthe Greeks to exchange their prisoner ated as was that honest gentleman. Antenor for the daughter whom he With animated but quite unnecessary has left behind in Troy. We have explicitness Breseida declines his overhere no word of that long wooing by tures for the time; she abashes her Troilus which forms the chief interest rash suitor with a great show of maidof later versions; in Benoît's poem enly prudence, piques him by detailing Breseida is simply Troilus's sweet the worth and devotion of the lover heart, an accepted and not too promi- she has quitted, but, not to appear too she free no one would deserve her favor more than he. Before they reach her father's tent Diomede has possessed himself of her glove, whereat, we read, she was in nowise displeased. discouraging, assures him that were Troilus singles Diomede out in the fight, strikes him down and, after bidding him carry his wounds to the daughter of Calchas, adds this bitter warning: "You stand where I stood once. Now we are two; before the end of the siege there will be more." With mockery on his tongue and a heart henceforth hardened against all women, Troilus shuts out the memory of Breseida. This policy of alternately tormenting and cajoling her big, simpleminded suitor, Breseida pursues with animation to the exclusion of all other thoughts or regrets; "she had such quick understanding, that she clearly perceived that he loved her beyond aught else in the world, wherefore she showed herself all the prouder to him." "This is always the way with ladies," adds Benoît, who dearly loves a flout at womenkind. If Breseida remembers Troilus at all, it is only to twit her new lover with praise of his valor and worth. When, however, she has almost distracted Diomede by her taunts, softening suddenly she bestows on him her favor, a scarlet sleeve fatally familiar to Troilus. Faithless and vain as she is, Breseida is not like some of her descendants, altogether heartless. When Diomede is carried dangerously wounded from the field she flings off all pretence, defies calumnious tongues, and hastens to nurse him in his tent. But even when she follows the impulse of her heart, she stops to analyze her own feelings with the subtlety and self-consciousness of a modern heroine. "Alas!" she reflects, "henceforth no good will ever be said of me;" but while she bewails her faithlessness, she finds excuse for it; in her isolation she sorely needed distraction from sad thoughts. the comfortable practicalness which is the true nurse of sentimentality, she deplores her spiritual short-comings from the vantage-ground of material gain; after all she has the best of the game. Finally, with cheerful good sense, she prays God to bless Troilus, and resolves henceforward to be true to his rival. With There is far more of the natural man in Benoît's Troilus than in the patient, heart-broken lover of later and subtler poets. In his jealous rage the Norman unac Benoit's "Tale of Troy" was prodigiously successful, as success went in those days; the author's name was ignored while his poem was freely pillaged and plagiarized, translated into every tongue in Europe, turned into prose and then back again into verse. The most noticeable of these knowledged thefts was a Latin translation made in the thirteenth century by Guido delle Colonne of Messina. This version is important, because it was probably in this form that the story of Troilus and Cressida passed into the hands of the most famous story-teller the western world has known. Boccaccio himself tells as what reasons led him to choose the loves and sorrows of Troilus as the subject of his early poem, "Philostrato." It was written at the Court of Naples, when he was a young man of eightand-twenty, and already deeply enamoured of the lady he has celebrated under the name of Fiammetta. It was during the absence of this lady that the poet, to still the restless longings of his heart, searched through old stories to discover some other lover as hapless as himself, and found no case so apt as that of the deserted Prince of Troy. To suit this purpose, the whole story had to be refashioned. Love was in his age and country the one theme of poetry. Though this love is elevated into a kind of worship, it is no longer spiritualized as in the early writings of Dante; in Boccaccio it is frankly and passionately sensuous. Troilus is no warrior, but a lover; nights of tears and sighs, raptures of hope and passionate regret, replace the call to arms and the stern joy of the fight. The din of battle sounds faintly in Boccaccio's poem; we are no longer in a besieged city, but in the pleasant town of Naples, and in the sweetest season of the year, when painted flowers and young fresh grass color the fields. Greseida, too, has changed not only her name, but her condition. Fiammetta was a married woman; hence to heighten the likeness Greseida is described as a widow and a lady of high estate. She does not gain by the change. Beautiful and noble as is the appearance Boccaccio lends her, drawing obviously from memory, she has as little real distinction as Benoît's Breseida, and far less vitality. She yields with slavish facility to Troilo's vicarious wooing. She is not carried away like the French Breseida by vanity and too eager sympathy, still less by the finer stirrings of heart and imagination that moved the English Cressida; love with this southern nature is a matter of the senses, voluptuous, not passionate. She nearly dies of grief at parting with Troilo; but not for one instant will she listen to his appeal to defy the world, and make a bold stroke with him for happiness. That such a Greseida should, in her first discourse with Diomede, make sentimental capital out of her widowhood is perhaps not out of character, but it is surely an incredibly coarse touch to represent her as, a few days later, joining Diomede in deriding Troilo. If the bulk of the "Philostrato" has a voluptuous monotony which even the flow of the limpid Italian verse cannot redeem from languor, there is both freshness and poignancy in the passages where Boccaccio is evidently retracing his own foud memories. It was in a church of nuns that he first saw Maria, the beautiful natural daughter of Robert, king of Naples, who became the lady of his song; it was in the Temple of Diana that Troilo first saw Greseida. He had entered with a troop of noble youths, carelessness in his heart, and laughter on his lips. Suddenly his roving eye is caught by a tall figure standing, gentle and proud, withdrawn from the The verses in which Boccaccio describes his own feelings, under the guise of Troilo's sufferings in Greseida's absence, have something of the poignancy and tender ingenuity of phrase which mark the Elizabethan sonneteers. To shorten the hours of her absence Pandaro, his friend, has persuaded Troilo to take part in a festival at the house of Sarpedon. Sitting silent at the feast, he sees nothing but her image engraved on his own heart. "The sight of other fair and noble ladies was painful to him; nor could any solace nor sweet song afford him aught but weariness, since he could no longer see her in whose hands Love had placed the keys of his woeful life." It is the mood that all lovers know, that many poets have tried to express, the mood that finds most perfect utterance in the lines of Burns: Though this was fair and that was braw, If the men and women about him are to Troilo but as shadows on the wall, shadows and memories alone have life and meet him at every turn. Passing her deserted house, the sight of closed doors and windows presses his heart together with pain and blanches his cheek. "There," he says, pointing out a spot to Pandaro, "once as she spoke to me I saw her smile; here she stood waiting for me once as I passed by, and there she graciously saluted me. Here I have seen her joyful, there full of sadness, and here I first knew that she had pity on my love." Only the winds that blow from the quarter where she lives bring him but the character of Pandaro changes refreshment; the whole world is a blank except the hills which lie round the jealous place that keeps her hidden; he envies the waters of the Scamander which, passing through the Greek camp, may mirror her beauty and embrace her feet. Perhaps we have had excess of love in "Philostrato." Probably Chaucer thought so, when he undertook to turn the story into English. Though love was to him a craft so sharp and hard that life seemed all too short to learn it perfectly, yet even love could not shut out from his interest the beauty of this delightful world, the trafficking and gossiping of ordinary men and women, the pomp of war, the pleasantness of fair ladies, the humors and absurdities of human life. He has incorporated most of Boccaccio's poem into his own longer and more dramatic work, and oddly enough do some of the most love-sick passages appear in the cheerful and delicate setting of the English story. Then, as now, the fashion of courtship was franker and freer in England than in other countries. Chaucer's story of Troilus and Cressida is as full as any modern novel of incident, conversations, chance meetings, lively descriptions of character and delicate analysis of feeling. Helen gives a feast, gay and sumptuous, such as Pinturicchio loved to paint; Cressida receives visits from the Trojan ladies and gossips about the siege; with her maidens she plays and dances under the blossoming boughs of her garden, or improves the time reading aloud the Romance of Thebes in twelve volumes. Boccaccio had already enriched the tale with a character of which Benoît had not dreamed. A confidant was as necessary to an Italian lover as a ladylove. Pandaro, who plays this part to Troilo, is himself a hopeless lover and a fantastically devoted friend, while his attitude towards women generally is almost brutal in its cynicism. Such a character was too un-English to find favor with Chaucer. He starts, indeed, by following his author closely, rapidly in his hands. He becomes elderly; proverbs and saws adorn his conversation; the friend and lover entirely disappear in the humorist and busy-body. Equivocal as is the part both are made to play, the sly, kindly, unprincipled old uncle of Chaucer is far less repulsive than the chivalrous profligate whom Boccaccio describes as cousin to Cressida. This English Pandarus lives in a world of agreeable intrigue. It is he who induces Helen to ask Cressida to dinner; he takes advantage of the rainy aspect of the heavens to invite Cressida to supper, knowing that stress of weather will compel her to prolong her visit; ne holds her in conversation near the window when he knows that Troilus may pass by. It needs, however, more than his skill to capture the maidenly fancy of this English Cressida. She is not won easily, as were her predecessors. She is a gentlewoman with dignities, reserves, and sensibilities unknown to Breseida, that brilliant child of nature, unfelt by Greseida who has never quite lost the servile instincts bequeathed from her far-off Homeric ancestress. Impulses from sounds and sights, hours of dreamy reflection, sympathetic emotion caught from another, all had to quicken the imagination of Cressida before she felt the stirrings of love. Fate, as well as Pandarus, is working for Troilus. Even as she sits alone at her lattice, moved and almost aghast by all that her uncle has told her of the passion she has excited, a cry arises without that Troilus, straight from the victorious field, is riding down the street. We have various portraits of Troilus. In a spirited passion Benoît describes his long throat, square chin, crisp locks, broad shoulders, and active, powerful limbs; it is the picture of a young warrior gauged by another fighting man. In "Philostrato" we have a glimpse of Troilo on horseback, hawk on wrist that recalls the slender, oval-faced, richly clad youths that ac-` company fair, worldly women on Orcagna's frescoes. The Troilus, whom |