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ОглавлениеTHE BOY AND THE MANTLE.
No incident is more common in romantic fiction, than the employment of some magical contrivance as a test of conjugal fidelity, or of constancy in love. In some romances of the Round Table, and tales founded upon them, this experiment is performed by means either of an enchanted horn, of such properties that no dishonoured husband or unfaithful wife can drink from it without spilling, or of a mantle which will fit none but chaste women. The earliest known instances of the use of these ordeals are afforded by the Lai du Corn, by Robert Bikez, a French minstrel of the twelfth or thirteenth century, and the Fabliau du Mantel Mautaillé, which, in the opinion of a competent critic, dates from the second half of the thirteenth century, and is only the older lay worked up into a new shape. (Wolf, Ueber die Lais, 327, sq., 342, sq.) We are not to suppose, however, that either of these pieces presents us with the primitive form of this humorous invention. Robert Bikez tells us that he learned his story from an abbot, and that "noble ecclesiast" stood but one further back in a line of tradition which curiosity will never follow to its source. We shall content ourselves with noticing the most remarkable cases of the use of these and similar talismans in imaginative literature.
In the Roman de Tristan, a composition of unknown antiquity, the frailty of nearly all the ladies at the court of King Marc is exposed by their essaying a draught from the marvellous horn, (see the English Morte Arthur, Southey's ed. i. 297.) In the Roman de Perceval, the knights, as well as the ladies, undergo this probation. From some one of the chivalrous romances Ariosto adopted the wonderful vessel into his Orlando, (xlii. 102, sq., xliii. 31, sq.,) and upon his narrative La Fontaine founded the tale and the comedy of La Coupe Enchantée. In German, we have two versions of the same story—one, an episode in the Krone of Heinrich vom Türlein, thought to have been borrowed from the Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes, (Die Sage vom Zauberbecher, in Wolf, Ueber die Lais, 378,) and another, which we have not seen, in Bruns, Beiträge zur kritischen Bearbeitung alter Handschriften, ii. 139; while in English, it is represented by the highly amusing "bowrd," which we are about to print, and which we have called The Horn of King Arthur. The forms of the tale of the Mantle are not so numerous. The fabliau already mentioned was reduced to prose in the sixteenth century, and published at Lyons, (in 1577,) as Le Manteau mal taillé, (Legrand's Fabliaux, 3d ed., i. 126,) and under this title, or that of Le Court Mantel, is very well known. An old fragment (Der Mantel) is given in Haupt and Hoffmann's Altdeutsche Blätter, ii. 217, and the story is also in Bruns Beiträge. Lastly, we find the legends of the horn and the mantle united, as in the German ballad Die Ausgleichung, (Des Knaben Wunderhorn, i. 389,) and in the English ballad of The Boy and The Mantle, where a magical knife is added to the other curiosities. All three of these, by the way, are claimed by the Welsh as a part of the insignia of Ancient Britain, and the special property of Tegau Eurvron, the wife of Caradog with the strong arm. (Jones, Bardic Museum, p. 49.)
In other departments of romance, many other objects are endowed with the same or an analogous virtue. In Indian and Persian story, the test of innocence is a red lotus-flower; in Amadis, a garland, which fades on the brow of the unfaithful; in Perceforest, a rose. The Lay of the Rose in Perceforest, is the original (according to Schmidt) of the much-praised tale of Senecé, Camille, ou la Manière de filer le parfait Amour, (1695,)—in which a magician presents a jealous husband with a portrait in wax, that will indicate by change of color the infidelity of his wife—and suggested the same device in the twenty-first novel of Bandello, (Part First,) on the translation of which in Painter's Palace of Pleasure, (vol. ii. No. 28,) Massinger founded his play of The Picture. Again, in the tale of Zeyn Alasman and the King of the Genii, in the Arabian Nights, the means of proof is a mirror, that reflects only the image of a spotless maiden; in that of the carpenter and the king's daughter, in the Gesta Romanorum, (c. 69,) a shirt, which remains clean and whole as long as both parties are true; in Palmerin of England, a cup of tears, which becomes dark in the hands of an inconstant lover; in the Fairy Queen, the famous girdle of Florimel; in Horn and Rimnild (Ritson, Metrical Romances, iii. 301,) as well as in one or two ballads in this collection, the stone of a ring; in a German ballad, Die Krone der Königin von Afion, (Erlach, Volkslieder der Deutschen, i. 132,) a golden crown, that will fit the head of no incontinent husband. Without pretending to exhaust the subject, we may add three instances of a different kind: the Valley in the romance of Lancelot, which being entered by a faithless lover would hold him imprisoned forever; the Cave in Amadis of Gaul, from which the disloyal were driven by torrents of flame; and the Well in Horn and Rimnild, (ibid.) which was to show the shadow of Horn, if he proved false.
In conclusion, we will barely allude to the singular anecdote related by Herodotus, (ii. 111,) of Phero, the son of Sesostris, in which the experience of King Marc and King Arthur is so curiously anticipated. In the early ages, as Dunlop has remarked, some experiment for ascertaining the fidelity of women, in defect of evidence, seems really to have been resorted to. "By the Levitical law," (Numbers v. 11–31,) continues that accurate writer, "there was prescribed a mode of trial, which consisted in the suspected person drinking water in the tabernacle. The mythological fable of the trial by the Stygian fountain, which disgraced the guilty by the waters rising so as to cover the laurel wreath of the unchaste female who dared the examination, probably had its origin in some of the early institutions of Greece or Egypt. Hence the notion was adopted in the Greek romances, the heroines of which were invariably subjected to a magical test of this nature, which is one of the few particulars in which any similarity of incident can be traced between the Greek novels and the romances of chivalry." See DUNLOP, History of Fiction, London, 1814, i. 239, sq.; LEGRAND, Fabliaux, 3d ed., i. 149, sq., 161; SCHMIDT, Jahrbücher der Literatur, xxix. 121; WOLF, Ueber die Lais, 174–177; and, above all, GRAESSE'S Sagenkreise des Mittelalters, 185, sq.
The Boy and the Mantle was "printed verbatim" from the Percy MS., in the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, iii. 38.
