AUCASSIN AND NICOLETE


Dedicated to the Hon. James Russell Lowell.




INTRODUCTION


There is nothing in artistic poetry quite akin to "Aucassin and
Nicolete."

By a rare piece of good fortune the one manuscript of the Song-Story has
escaped those waves of time, which have wrecked the bark of Menander, and
left of Sappho but a few floating fragments. The very form of the tale
is peculiar; we have nothing else from the twelfth or thirteenth century
in the alternate prose and verse of the _cante-fable_. {1} We have
fabliaux in verse, and prose Arthurian romances. We have _Chansons de
Geste_, heroic poems like "Roland," unrhymed assonant _laisses_, but we
have not the alternations of prose with _laisses_ in seven-syllabled
lines. It cannot be certainly known whether the form of "Aucassin and
Nicolete" was a familiar form--used by many _jogleors_, or wandering
minstrels and story-tellers such as Nicolete, in the tale, feigned
herself to be,--or whether this is a solitary experiment by "the old
captive" its author, a contemporary, as M. Gaston Paris thinks him, of
Louis VII (1130). He was original enough to have invented, or adopted
from popular tradition, a form for himself; his originality declares
itself everywhere in his one surviving masterpiece. True, he uses