_Raoul de Cambrai_ in its existing form is a late poem; it has gone through the process of translation from assonance into rhyme, and like _Huon of Bordeaux_, though by a different method, it has been fitted with a romantic continuation. But the first part of the poem apparently keeps the lines of an older and more original version. The story is not one of the later cyclic fabrications; it has an historical basis and is derived from the genuine epic tradition of that tenth-century school which unfortunately is only known through its descendants and its influence. _Raoul de Cambrai_, though in an altered verse and later style, may be taken as presenting an old story still recognisable in most of its original features, especially in its moral. Raoul de Cambrai, a child at his father's death, is deprived of his inheritance. To make up for this he is promised, later, the first fief that falls vacant, and asserts his claim in a way that brings him into continual trouble,--a story with great opportunities for heroic contrasts and complications. The situation is well chosen; it is better than that of the story of Glum, which is rather like it[72]--the right is not all on one side. Raoul has a just cause, but cannot make it good; he is driven to be unjust in order to come by his own. Violence and excess in a just cause will make a tragic history; there is no fault to be found with the general scheme or principle in this case. It is in the details that the barbarous simplicity of the author comes out. For example, in the invasion of the lands on which he has a claim, Raoul attacks and burns a nunnery, and in it the mother of his best friend and former squire, Bernier. The injured man, his friend, is represented as taking it all in a helpless dull expostulatory way. The author has no language to express any imaginative passion; he can only repeat, in a muffled professional voice, that it was really a very painful and discreditable affair. The violent passions here are those of the heroic age in its most barbarous form; more sudden and uncontrolled even than the anger of Achilles. But with all their vehemence and violence there is no real tragic force, and when the hero is killed by his friend, and the friend is sorry afterwards, there is nothing but the mere formal and abstract identity of the situation to recall to mind the tragedy of Kjartan and Bolli. [Footnote 72: Glum, like Raoul, is a widow's son deprived of his rights.]