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 [17] 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 novel art 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,
[18] Or se cante (ici on chante); and each division of prose by
the rubric, Or dient et content et fabloient (ici on conte). The
musical notes of a portion of the songs have been preserved; and