the end of the eleventh century, had dropped out of sight utterly for many centuries, unread and unknown, existing in a solitary manuscript copy hidden away in an English library where no one probably who had access to it was acquainted with the dialect in which it was written. Its existence was hardly known to more than a few antiquarians fifty years ago. It was never published till 1837. And yet there is already in France and in Germany quite an extensive literature devoted to the Chanson de Roland. It is strange enough and certainly fortunate that it has been left to an Irishman, in so late a year of this century, to be the first to give "The Song of Roland" a place in English literature. Before fulfilling the promise with which our preceding paragraph begins, let us give a sample of Mr. O'Hagan's prose. "Such as it is, the numerous popular editions, and the continuous rendering of it into modern French, are a manifest proof that it has given delight to thousands of readers in our time. What must it have been in its own? Let us conceive the marketplace of some French or Italian medieval city, such as a whole world of art has made us familiar with. It is an hour or so after noon, when the morning's business and the midday meal are both well over, and the after-dinner time is weighing somewhat heavily upon the citizens. The rumour goes that the famous jongleur, or trouvère, who had been entertained the preceding night at the castle of the lord upon the hill, is riding thither, and means to give them a cast of his art. Soon the market-place is thronged, and, after a long period of expectation, their desire is gratified. The jongleur has come, and he and his attendant, having put up their horses at the hostelry, are making their way through the crowd, which eagerly separates to admit them. He wears a long mantle, cap, and feather, and his attendant carries a little triangular lyre. He mounts upon the perron of the Hotel de Ville, or upon some temporary scaffold, takes the lyre from his companion, and, striking a few preluding notes to mark the rhythm, commences the tale of the disaster of Roncesvalles. His voice, naturally strong and melodious (or he would not have chosen such a calling), has been cultivated with the greatest care, and he has formed himself to all the arts of an accomplished actor. The language he uses has nothing strange or antiquated: it is the very idiom of the assembly he is addressing. It is, of course, impossible that the whole poem should be recited in one day. He selects such parts as he deems will most captivate his audience, or, if he means to make a stay for some days, he gives it to them piecemeal, breaking off each day like a feuilletoniste, at some point of highly-wrought interest. But if we, after the lapse of centuries in a cultivated age, reading this as a mere fiction, in a language now grown wholly obsolete, cannot help being moved by its heroic and pathetic traits, what, I repeat, must it have been when declaimed in their own tongue, and by a finished orator, to a population who listened to every word with unquestioning faith, and whose hearts were on fire for the Christian cause? But the jongleur had other audiences dearer to his heart. From the city market-place we may follow him to the halls of princes and nobles. Imagine the long and weary evenings in a medieval castle; then conceive what a delight and resource it must have been when fortune brought a minstrel who was master of the chansons de geste, and, above all, of the great 'Song of Roncesvalles.' High and low, baron, squire, and servitor, lady and damsel, would gather round, and hang upon the strain. And not for pleasure alone. Familiarity with such a poem must have formed no mean education in point of nobility of thought and greatness of purpose. It was romance, no doubt, but not the chimerical romance of knight-errantry. It was the story of brave men fighting to the last, against desperate odds, for their land and faith.” "the Treason of Ganelon," The three parts of the poem are 'Roncesvalles," and "the Reprisals." The historical event on which the legend is founded took place just eleven hundred years ago, almost to the very year. In that real history the traitor Ganelon had no part, and the hero Roland very little. In the "Chanson" not only these, but the gentle Olivier, Archbishop Turpin, Charlemagne himself, and many minor characters, are brought before us with great vividness and dramatic vigour. This distinctness and variety of character, and the rapid variety of incidents, lend to this old ballad-epic a great deal of the charm of the best romance. But the central figure of course is Roland, the Orlando of the Italian poems which take their inspiration from some form of this long-forgotten lay. "He is in the prime and the strength of youth, the bright, consummate flower of Frankish chivalry." Never more knightly or chivalrous than at the end, when Ganelon's treachery and his own proud self-confidence have cut him off from Karl's host, and left him at the mercy of the Saracen foe. He who has done so much for the fame of this brave Christian knight thinks that there "are few things in poetry more touching than the passage where Olivier, wounded to death and blinded by the blood which streams down his forehead, strikes out darkly and smites the helm of Roland who had ridden to his side. My comrade, thou didst it not wittingly, I am thy Roland who have loved thee so dearly.' I hear thee,' said Olivier, but I see thee not; God seeth thee. Have I then struck thee?' And they bent their heads and laid them together, and made their parting in great love." Let us cite the metrical version of the passage of which Mr. O'Hagan gives us this beautiful summary in prose. It will show the marvellous literalness of a translation, which nevertheless flows on as smoothly as if it were following its own caprice, instead of reproducing faithfully words and thoughts woven together many hundreds of years ago: "Roland looked Olivier in the face, Ghastly paleness was there to trace; Forth from his wound did the bright blood flow, And rain in showers to the earth below. 'O God!' said Roland, 'is this the end Of all thy prowess, my gentle friend? Nor know I whither to bear me now: On earth shall never be such as thou. At the word he fainted upon his steed. "See Roland there on his charger swooned, His eyes from bleeding are dimmed and dark, And when his comrade beside him pressed, And thus bespake him soft and low: Have I struck thee, brother? Forgive it me.' 'I am not hurt, O Olivier; And in sight of God, I forgive thee here.' Then each to other his head hath laid, And in love like this was their parting made." This extract shows the metre which Mr. O'Hagan has used. After giving cogent reasons for not attempting the assonant rhyme of the original—in which Mr. M'Carthy has succeeded so wonderfully in his "Calderon"-he says: "I adopted the mixed iambic and anapastic metre, which Christabel' and the 'Siege of Corinth' and the Bridal of Triermain' have made so familiar to us. It has, I know, fallen into much discredit, as a lilting metre. Mr. Conington speaks very disparagingly of it, in the introduction to his translation of Virgil. And yet I doubt if I could have chosen better. One can certainly imagine the story of Roland beautifully rendered in heroic numbers. Not, perhaps, in the couplet of Pope, but in the free, sweet, and dignified line of Chaucer and Keats, of which in our day Mr. Morris has shown himself so complete a master. Still more perfectly could it be conceived as another idyll, in the exquisite blank verse of the laureate. But I dared not attempt either, and I perceived that one advantage lay in a metre so facile, viz., that many of the proper names, especially among the heathen, were 'strong and unworkable,' not easily got into verse, unless the verse were of a somewhat elastic character." We are strongly of opinion that any one who knows anything of the different characters and dispositions of the various metres, and a little of the exigencies of such a work as the one before us, will agree very heartily with the foregoing remarks, and decide that Mr. O'Hagan could not possibly have chosen better. In the execution of his enterprise he has shown consummate skill in versification, and a very uncommon mastery of pure and refined poetic diction; and especially of that diction which suits best so noble a strain of medieval chivalry. No tame echo of Scott's ballad-epics, but the true spirit of Scott in some of his best moods both as a poet and a romance writer. A contributor to this Magazine* has given a curious list of the many dedications in which various works have been presented by their authors to Cardinal Newman; and a writer in another periodical remarked lately, that the Cardinal is himself one of the few to keep *IRISH MONTHLY, vol. iv., p. 660. up the graceful custom of dedications. One of the friends whom he thus honoured was again honoured thus for the last time on the first page of this "Song of Roland." Mr. O'Hagan has left unchanged the words he addressed to the late Dr. Russell in one of the closing months of his life. "But for the great interest you took in it, your generous encouragement, your acute and scholarly criticism, I am sure I should have never ventured to publish it. Your kindness to me in this regard has been but the sequel of a lifetime of kindness. It is truly a great happiness and privilege to be enabled to subscribe myself your affectionate friend." And then he adds, a month after his friend's death : "When the above dedication was written and in print, I little thought that Dr. Russell would not live to see the publication of a work, with every page and almost every line of which he is associated in my memory. In love, sorrow, and reverence 1 dedicate it to him anew." It was remarked lately by a distinguished authority how singular it is that two Irishmen should have adorned English literature with the best translations of the two great Catholic poets of Spain and Italy. And now a third Irishman has come forward to add to our repertory of translated poems, another as perfect in its kind as Cary's Dante, or M'Carthy's Calderon. The unknown author of the "Chanson de Roland" may not rank for genius with the authors of the Divina Commedia, and the Autos Sacramentales-though even Mr. Matthew Arnold has only a mild rebuke for the French critics who boldly compare their newly discovered poet to Homer; but assuredly he has produced a true masterpiece of another sort, which, worthily transfused into the noble language which we write and speak, enriches us all. On the whole, considering the unique interest and worth of this recovered relic of a bygone age, and considering the thoroughly satisfactory form in which it is now for the first time presented to us, may we not confidently predict that in this form it will long survive the poor score of years that remains of our proud nineteenth century, and that, when the "popular books of the season" will long have perished as waste paper, the libraries of a remote future will still keep a corner of their shelves for Mr. O'Hagan's magnificent version of "The Song of Roland ?" DIONYSIUS THE AREOPAGITE. BY THE REV. WILLIAM HENRY ANDERDON, S.J. THE Agora, or market-place in Athens, like the Forum in Rome, was the scene of the city's general public life. Business of every kind was carried on there, and careless talk and amusement, all under the glorious cloudless sky of Attica, an atmosphere that seemed to sparkle with brightness and exhilaration, making it a pleasant thing for the populace to lounge about, hearing or retailing any trifle of news. For "all the Athenians, and strangers that were there," says the Inspired Word,* as well as the comic dramatist,† "employed themselves in nothing else but either in telling or in hearing some new thing." A fickle, light-hearted, quick-witted race, with a keen sense of beauty in the physical order, and the intellectual sphere; witness their statues, friezes, temples, porticoes and colonnades; witness their glorious dramas, choruses, orations. You might trust them unhesitatingly for a just and acute criticism of a passage in Eschylus or Sophocles, of a flowing oriental description from Herodotus, a terse historical epigram in Thucydides, a metaphor of Pericles, an indignant period of Demosthenes, closely reasoned, yet melodious withal. Only, do not trust them with your purse, nor rely on their plighted word. 66 What news, what news?" twittered the busier quidnuncs, up and down the agora, in the midst of gossip, and laughter, and chaffering, buying and selling, politics, poetry, scraps of philosophy, lighthearted scepticism, and all the small talk of a cultivated heathen city. "Anything fresh to-day?" drawled out, here and there, a lounging fop of the Alcibiades type, with a pet quail or dove nestling in the ungirt folds of his tunic. "Anything from the East, or from Rome ?" "The newest thing I've heard for many a day," said young Aristobulus to Perdiccas the tragedian, "is what yonder strange man is saying; there, look, beyond that pile of olive-baskets. Do you see him?—well, you hardly can, for he is not great of stature, and those Epicureans and Stoics are crowding so round him. I made one of his audience yesterday, for he has been disputing in the agora these several days past. Such wonderful things, and all new!" "You make me curious," said the other. "What is his philosophy? A new system? That's delightful. Anything in my way, to work up into a drama?" |