manuscript, in the national library of Paris; and there were reasons
which made him divine for it a still more ancient ancestry, traces in it
of an Arabian origin, as in a leaf lost out of some early Arabian
Nights.* The little book loses none of its interest through the
criticism which finds in it only a traditional subject, handed on by one
people to another; for after passing thus from hand to hand, its outline
is still clear, its surface untarnished; and, like many other stories,
books, literary and artistic conceptions of the middle age, it has come
to have in this way a sort of personal history, almost as full of risk
and adventure as that of its own heroes. The writer himself calls the
piece a cantefable, a tale told in prose, but with its incidents and
sentiment helped forward by songs, inserted at irregular intervals. In
the junctions of the story itself there are signs of roughness and want
of skill, which make one suspect that the prose was only put together to
connect a series of songs--a series of songs so moving and attractive
that people wished to heighten and dignify their effect by a regular
framework or setting. Yet the songs themselves are of the simplest kind,
not rhymed even, but only imperfectly assonant, stanzas of twenty or
thirty lines apiece, all ending with a similar vowel sound. And here, as
elsewhere in that early poetry, much of the interest lies in the
spectacle of the formation of a new artistic sense. A new music is
arising, the music of rhymed poetry, and in the songs of Aucassin and
Nicolette, which seem always on the point of passing into true rhyme,
but which halt somehow, and can never quite take flight, you see people
just growing aware of the elements of a new music in their possession,
and anticipating how pleasant such music might become. The piece was
probably intended to be recited by a company of trained performers, many
of whom, at least for the lesser parts, were probably children. The
songs are introduced by the rubric, Or se cante (ici on chante); and
each division of prose by the rubric, Or dient et content et fabloient