For the student of manners, and of the old language and literature, it
has much interest of a purely antiquarian order. To say of an ancient
literary composition that it has an antiquarian interest, often means
that it has no distinct aesthetic interest for the reader of to-day.
Antiquarianism, by a purely historical effort, by putting its object in
perspective, and setting the reader in a certain point of view, from
which what gave pleasure to the past is pleasurable for him also, may
often add greatly to the charm we receive from ancient literature. But
the first condition of such aid must be a real, direct, aesthetic charm
in the thing itself; unless it has that charm, unless some purely
artistic quality went to its original making, no merely antiquarian
effort can ever give it an aesthetic value, or make it a proper subject
of aesthetic criticism. This quality, wherever it exists, it is always
pleasant to define, and discriminate from the sort of borrowed interest
which an old play, or an old story, may very likely acquire through a
true antiquarianism. The story of Aucassin and Nicolette has something
of this quality. Aucassin, the only son of Count Garins of Beaucaire, is
passionately in love with Nicolette, a beautiful girl of unknown
parentage, bought of the Saracens, whom his father will not permit him
to marry. The story turns on the adventures of these two lovers, until
at the end of the piece their mutual fidelity is rewarded. These
adventures are of the simplest sort, adventures which seem to be chosen
for the happy occasion they afford of keeping the eye of the fancy,
perhaps the outward eye, fixed on pleasant objects, a garden, a ruined
tower, the little hut of flowers which Nicolette constructs in the
forest whither she has escaped from her enemies, as a token to Aucassin
that she has passed that way. All the charm of the piece is in its
details, in a turn of peculiar lightness and grace given to the
situations and traits of sentiment, especially in its quaint fragments