Читать книгу History of English Literature from "Beowulf" to Swinburne - Andrew Lang, Robert Kirk - Страница 42

A book in verse about twice as long as the lengthy world-chronicle of Robert is the "Cursor Mundi," "the Over-Runner of the World". The author, like the makers of many pretty lyrics on religious subjects, perceived that people preferred songs to sermons, and romance to homilies. To modernize his language

Men yearn jests to hear

And romances read in divers mannere.

He gives the themes of the romances, "Matter of Rome"—which includes all antiquity, Troy, and Greece as well as Rome—"Matter of Britain," the stories of Arthur and his Knights—and "Matter of France," concerning Charlemagne, and his Twelve Peers. Nothing is in fashion but love and lovers: but this poet will sing of Her whose love never fails, namely Our Lady. He begins before Satan and his angels fell, and goes on endlessly, yet, to his readers, perhaps not tediously, for he enlivens the Biblical narrative with legends to the full as fantastic as could be found in any romance. There is the story of how Moses found, through a dream, three wands that grew from three pips placed under Adam's tongue. David, through another dream, found these wands in the grave of Moses, which, like that of Arthur, "is a mystery to the world". The wands turned ugly black Saracens into handsome white men: the branches grew into a tree, and round that tree were thirty circles of silver. The wood was made into the True Cross, and Judas received the thirty pieces of silver. The most absurd tales are told of the boyhood, by no means exemplary, of our Lord, variegated by miracles not wholly beneficent.

Thus the "Cursor Mundi" may have been found amusing enough in its day, when the ceaseless octosyllabic rhyming couplets were not reckoned tedious (they are sometimes varied), and adventures wholly unknown to the authors of the Gospels occur in every page.