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But when we come to reconstruction grave historians grow almost hysterical, romancers pass the bounds of possibilities, and even official figures contradict one another with sublime effrontery. Yet this very passion of remembrance, which in one way obscures, in another way illuminates the historical situation.
Long before the time of Galileo and the invention of the telescope, men had noticed that the face of the moon bears a resemblance to the appearance that the earth would present if viewed from afar off. In remote antiquity there were philosophers who thought that the moon was an inhabited world, and very early the romancers took up the theme.
Anything soul-stirring, whether from romances or from plays, was equally grist to their mills. In seeking for the most dramatic dénouements sensational romancers were not long in perceiving the suspense that could be produced by involving the chief characters in a trial for their lives. Mrs.
The Muses smiled with a look more of complaisance than approval, as they reviewed the army of Troubadours and Minnesingers and the crowd of romancers who followed in their train. They decided that the joyous array of early mediæval literature was full of promise, though something of its tone and temper was past the comprehension of pagan goddesses.
The Spanish romancers, whether borrowing it from Lucian or not, had been fond of it; their French followers, of whom the chief were Fontenelle and Le Sage, had carried it northwards; the English essayists had almost from the beginning continued the process of acclimatization.
This furnished excellent material for the hagiologists of that age; but, like every thing else peculiar to these monkish romancers, it betrayed great lack of knowledge. The cross, even the so-called Latin cross, is not exclusively a Christian emblem. It was a religious emblem of the Phœnicians, associated with Astarte, who is usually figured bearing what is called a Latin cross.
It gave me, for the moment, an odd sense of having strayed into the world of those romancers who forecast the future; a slaughter-house of tasteful architecture, set in a grove of lemon trees and date palms, suggested the dreamy ideal of some reformer whose palate shrinks from vegetarianism. To my mind this had no place amid the landscape which spread about me.
And if an old heathen, two thousand years ago, discoursed thus gravely of the romantic part of our nature, whence comes it that in Christian lands we think in so pagan a way of it, and turn the whole care of it to ballad-makers, romancers, and opera-singers? Let us look up in fear and reverence and say, "GOD is the great maker of romance.
Yes, there was a flush under his tan and a new light in his eyes. When she had completed the introductions she looked away for a moment, and said in her soul: "Thank goodness! If that is not a case of love at first sight, I shan't believe that there is any such thing, whatever the poets and romancers may say."
Around them there were gathered, in a sort of salon, all the best-known writers of the day dramatists, critics, poets, and romancers. The Hugos knew everybody. Unfortunately, one of their visitors cast into their new life a drop of corroding bitterness.
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