Читать книгу History of the French Novel - Saintsbury George - Страница 15

[75] The position of "origin" assigned already to the sacred matter of the Saint's Life may perhaps be continued here as regards the Sermon. It was, as ought to be pretty generally known, the not ungenial habit of the mediaeval preacher to tell stories freely. We have them in Ælfric's and other English homilies long before there was any regular French prose; and we have, later, large and numerous collections of them—compiled more or less expressly for the use of the clergy—in Latin, English, and French. The Latin story is, in fact, very wide-ranging and sometimes quite of the novel (at least nouvelle) kind, as any one may see in Wright's Latin Stories, Percy Society, 1842.

[76] This is one, and one of the most glaring, of the bêtises which at some times have been urged against Romance at large. They are not, as a matter of fact, very frequent; but their occurrence certainly does show the essentially uncritical character of the time.

[77] For of course the knight did not tell the whole story.

[78] I.e. not sorry for having tried to kill him, but sorry that she had not done so.

[79] In prose. For the very important part played by the home verse fabliaux see next chapter.