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"The news of this disaster," says Eginhard, in his Annales, "obscured the glory of the successes the king had but lately obtained in Spain." It must suffice to reproduce here only the most beautiful and most characteristic passages of this little national epopee, a truly Homeric picture of the quasi-barbarous times and manners of knightly Christendom.
There we have French prose and French poesy in their simple and lusty youth; the Conquest of Constantinople by Geoffrey de Villehardouin, and the Song of Roland by the unknown poet who collected and put together in the form of an epopee the most heroic amongst the legends of the reign of Charlemagne, are the first great and beautiful monuments of French literature in the middle ages.
But what if he could have guessed the part he had passively played in obtaining it for its possessor or the part that it was still to play in his own epopee? Mark again the predestination! "The storm is passing," said the priest. "Worse luck!" thought Peter. For indeed the rain and the wind were moderating, the thunder had rolled farther away, the sky was becoming lighter.
One of Caran d’Ache’s greatest successes in this line was an Epopée de Napoléon,—the great Emperor appearing on foot and on horseback, the long lines of his army passing before him in the foreground or small in the distance. They stormed heights, cheered on by his presence, or formed hollow squares to repulse the enemy.
His "Orlando," it is true, is a medley of lies and truths sacred and profane wars, loves, enchantments, giants, madheroes, and adventurous damsels, but then, he gives it you very fairly for what it is, and does not pretend to put it upon you for the true 'epopee', or epic poem. He says: "Le Donne, i Cavalier, l'arme, gli amori Le cortesie, l'audaci imprese, io canto."
It looked as though its author had imagined Shakespeare's dramas and Dante's epic were produced by a kind of artistic commingling of pathetic with symbolic elements, and as though he wished to call attention to the danger of reversing the correct proportions, for instance, by the symbolic obtaining the preponderance in tragedy, or pathos in the epopee, or to the danger of exaggerating these proportions, until there was too much tragic pathos, or too much epic symbolism.
That has, for instance, been the history of France since the great expansion of population, roughly associated with the Napoleonic epopee, which doubtless covered a web of causes, sanitary, political, industrial, favourable to a real numerical increase of the nation had died down slowly to the level we witness to-day.
Not better, in my mind, even in the fourth of Virgil. Upon the whole, with all your classical rigor, if you will but suppose St. Louis a god, a devil, or a witch, and that he appears in person, and not in a dream, the Henriade will be an epic poem, according to the strictest statute laws of the 'epopee'; but in my court of equity it is one as it is.
But it is in the Princess's own Memoirs that the curious epopee must be read; and to which a dry abridgment does injustice.
The ludicrous epopee has, it is true, been styled a peculiar species, but it is only an accidental variety, a mere parody of the epos, and consists in applying its solemn staidness of development, which seems only suitable to great objects, to trifling and insignificant events.
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