The troubadours

The name ‘Troubadour,’ we have seen, is synonymous with our ‘lyrical poet.’ His office was, strictly speaking, limited to the writing, or at least producing, of songs. But for the publication of these poems two more cooperators were required—the musical composer and the singer or reciter. Frequently the Troubadour invented his own melodies, and takes pride in stating that fact; some even combined with these two faculties that of the executive musician; ‘Pons de Capduelh,’ we are told, ‘was a poet (trobava), and could play the violin and sing.’ Others, however, were not so variously endowed, and in that case they engaged the services of an assistant, technically called joglar. The joglar proper seems to be an exclusively Provençal institution. The necessities of musical composition and promulgation of course existed more or less in all poetic communities. Boccaccio says of Dante that he loved to associate with musicians who supplied his canzone and sestine with melodies, but we nowhere read that he kept a professional composer for that purpose.

The exact border-line between troubadour and joglar cannot be drawn without difficulty. Sometimes, as we have seen, the two offices were combined in one person, at others the same individual rose from the lower to the higher class. Of Marcabrun, for instance, subsequently one of the most celebrated troubadours, we are told that he began his career as apprentice or joglar to another poet named Cercamon.⁠[8] The safest distinction is arrived at by bearing in mind that the joglars were principally, though by no means exclusively, musicians and executants, the converse ratio of the creative and executive faculties obtaining amongst the superior class of poets. For that position the Troubadours claimed for themselves, and took good care to let the world know of their claim. Towards the joglars, immediately dependent on their productions, they frequently adopt the tone of haughty condescension. ‘Bayona,’ Raimon de Miraval addresses an unfortunate singer, ‘I know well it is for a sirventes that you have come amongst us. And counting this there will be three; for two I have made already by which you have gained much gold and silver, Bayona, and many a worn coat, and other clothes good and bad.’ ‘Goodness! Bayona,’ he says in another poem, ‘how poverty-stricken do I see you! badly dressed in a mean gown! But I will draw you from your poverty with a sirventes which I offer you.’ In other places the troubadours express anxious doubts as to the memory and capacity of their interpreters, and seriously exhort the latter to adhere strictly to the original as transmitted to them by personal instruction. ‘My son,’ Perdigo addresses his joglar, ‘on your honour, I charge you to take good care that you understand the work and do not deface it.’ Other poets sought safety from truncation in the well-knitted and compact woof of their stanzas, which would not allow of the omission of a single verse or rhyme without manifest detriment to the whole organism. ‘Marcabrun,’ that celebrated troubadour boasts of himself, ‘knows how to turn and interlace sense and verse in such a way that no other man can take away a single word;’ which precaution, by the way, answered against plagiarists as well as against slovenly reciters.

But the same feeling of ill-disguised contempt which some troubadours betray for their immediate subordinates, others extend to the whole class of singers and performers, and especially the works of later poets are full of bitter invective against the meanness, vulgarity, and innumerable other vices and shortcomings of the joglars. The nobles are reproved for receiving them at their castles, and the decline of poetic art is not unjustly attributed to the growing taste for the buffooneries cultivated by the lower grades of the body poetic.

All things considered, this antagonism was not wholly unjustified. It has already been said that the humbler members of the profession were fain to turn an honest penny by enlivening the feasts and fairs of villagers by ingenious tricks of jugglery, and whoever will consult the ‘Instructions to Joglars,’ above mentioned, will find a considerable portion of the modern répertoire anticipated. Even dancing on the tight rope, and training and producing clever dogs and monkeys, were accomplishments not wholly beneath the dignity of the joglar. No wonder that noble troubadours shunned all contact with a profession comprehending such doubtful elements. But of course there were joglars and joglars, just as in our times there are artists and artists; and a man like Perdigo, who himself wrote beautiful songs, and kept a singer to sing them, and who was knighted by the Marquis of Montferrat on account of his poetic merits, would no more have considered a common trickster his equal than Mario or Faure would artistically fraternise with the ‘Great Vance.’

And yet the old biographer calls Perdigo repeatedly and persistently a joglar. It is in such cases as this that the distinction between the two classes alluded to practically ceases. Joglars were received in the best society on the same terms of equality as were granted to the more exclusive brethren; the same gifts of horses and rich garments rewarded their efforts, and these efforts also were to a large extent identical with those of the troubadours, excepting perhaps the one circumstance that the joglars, although poets themselves, included the pieces of other authors in their répertoire, while the troubadours, if gifted with executive talents, always confined themselves to their own productions.

But another line of distinction may be drawn from the purely literary point of view previously indicated. The Troubadours, it has been said, were lyrical poets, and seem to have looked upon romancers, novelists, et hoc genus omne with all the superciliousness of a higher caste. Of one poet it is distinctly stated that he was no bos trobaire mas noellaire, ‘not a good troubadour, but a story-teller.’ The Joglars, on the contrary, as we know from the ‘Ensenhamens,’ were bound to know and reproduce the whole store of facts and fables more or less common to the mediæval literatures of Western Europe. The slight and temporary character of most of these reproductions, and the comparative neglect with which they were treated by Provençal literati, have previously been touched upon, the scarcity of epical manuscripts in the langue d’oc being the natural corollary of these two causes. For the number of joglars capable of wielding the pen must have been very small, and the scribes and scholars to whom we owe the admirable and large collections of lyrical pieces were naturally much less anxious to preserve the humble productions of the narrative muse. Hence the astounding fact above referred to that even of the epics of so renowned a poet as Arnaut Daniel not a single specimen remains, and the other circumstance, no less surprising, that the Provençal biographer passes over these important and evidently most popular works with complete silence, saving his literary conscience by a cursory reference to Arnaut as a ‘Joglar.’ It is a further significant fact that most of the narrative poems preserved—barring the scanty remains of the popular epic which belong to a separate epoch and circle of literary production—date from a comparatively late period when the all-engrossing sway of lyrical poetry, and with it the vitality of Provençal literature itself, began to dwindle. The social aspects of this decline and fall, its causes, and the vain efforts to check its detrimental force, are brought home to us in the stanzas of a noble-minded poet, Guiraut Riquier, justly called the Last of the Troubadours. For at his death, about the end of the thirteenth century, the final expiration of the literature and of the independent and artistically available idiom of Provence may be said to commence.

Of the life of Guiraut Riquier comparatively little is known, his biography being, strange to say, not included in any of the Provençal collections. On the other hand we are more than usually well instructed as to the chronology of his works. For to almost every one of his poems the date of its production is affixed in the MS., which moreover expressly claims to be an exact copy of the poet’s original. From the latter statement we may at the same time infer the penmanship of Guiraut, which in those days was never unaccompanied by other literary attainments. But, besides this, the scholarly cast of his mind is sufficiently proved by the troubadour’s work. The wonder is how with this tendency could coexist in him the sweetest and freshest fragrance of poetic naïveté—a naïveté and spontaneity all the more admirable as they are altogether rare amongst the Troubadours. To him Provençal literature owes perhaps its nearest approach to the unalloyed impulse of popular song. To this side of his creativeness we shall have to return on a later occasion.

Guiraut’s lines had not fallen in pleasant places. The old times of glory and well-being for the Troubadours were past and gone, and although Guiraut found a protector and friend in Alfonso X., King of Castile, to whom, as he says in 1278, his poetic services had been devoted for sixteen years, this protection seems not to have been of a kind to exempt the troubadour wholly from the cares of existence. With a bitterness recalling Dante’s complaint of the steepness of strange stairs and the salt flavour of strange bread, Guiraut speaks of the vergonha e paor, the shame and fear with which he enters the presence of a noble lord per demandar lo sieu, to ask him for his property.

To the above-named King Alfonso was presented a curious memorial or supplication, in which Guiraut Riquier deplores the degradation of his noble calling and at the same time suggests various remedies for the growing evil. This was not the only or the last time that the troubadour stood up in the defence of his art. In a powerful sirventes dated 1278, he refutes the attacks of fanatic priests on poetry—that is, poetry in the true and elevated meaning of the word. ‘So little,’ he complains, ‘is the noble science of poetry valued nowadays, that people scarcely desire or suffer it, or will listen to it.... And our preachers declare it to be a sin, and reprove every one bitterly for its sake.’ He fully admits the justice of these reproaches in many cases in which poets invent ‘vain things whence sin may arise or war and disunion.’ ‘But,’ he concludes, ‘those who with mastership string together noble words, and with wisdom and knowledge teach the truth, can never find sufficient honour and reward.’

The reader who might be inclined to see a tinge of scholastic pedantry in this passionate plea for ‘wisdom and knowledge,’ ought to consider the root of the evil combated by Guiraut. The long war with France and the crusaders had left its detrimental mark on the manners and morals of Provençal nobles. Their fortunes were wasted, their castles destroyed, and the new generation brought up in the camp knew little of the taste and refinement of previous ages. Hence the bitter attacks in the poems of the later troubadours directed against the vices of the nobles, their avarice, their stinginess, their coarseness of taste which delighted alone in the vulgar jests of the lowest joglars. It is especially against the encroachments of the latter on the domain of artistic poetry that Guiraut’s angry protest is directed. The mixing up of the two classes of Joglars and Troubadours he believes to be the first cause of the disease, and as the intellect of the time had grown too obtuse to draw the line, he demands an external sign of distinction. Hence the somewhat strange proposal laid down in his celebrated missive to the King of Castile.

The ‘Suplicatio qe fes Guiraut Riquier al rey de Castela per lo nom del joglars l’an LXXIII.’ is a most curious document. Nothing would be easier than to draw into ridicule a man who intended to prop a tottering literature with a name, a title. But at the same time this man is so much in earnest himself, and his cause so noble, that one’s smile at his Quixotic notion involuntarily gives way to a feeling of deep sympathy. Guiraut begins his poem with a short exordium of complacent self-laudation, in which he dwells at some length on his competence to treat the subject:

Next follow the usual compliments to his protector, and, this duty discharged, Guiraut begins to speak from the fulness of his heart. ‘You know,’ he says, ‘that all men live in classes differing and distinguished from each other. Therefore it seems to me that such a distinction of name ought also to be made amongst the Joglars; for it is unjust that the best of them should not be distinguished by name as well as they are by deed. It is unfair that an ignorant man of small learning, who knows a little how to play some instrument and strums it in public places for whatever people will give him, or one who sings low ditties to low people about the streets and taverns, and takes alms without shame from the first comer—that all these should indiscriminately go by the name of Joglars.... For joglaria was invented by wise men, to give joy to good people by their skill in playing on instruments.... After that came the Troubadours to record valiant deeds, and to praise the good and encourage them in their noble endeavour.... But in our days and for some time past a set of people without sense and wisdom have undertaken to sing and compose stanzas, and play on instruments ... and their jealousy is roused when they see honour done to the good and noble.’ Every one, he reasons, ought to be named according to the work he does, and it would be quite just, he characteristically adds, to apply the name of Joglars to all poets and singers indiscriminately if they were all more or less of the same kind and worth, like common citizens. This, however, is not the case, and the good suffer by being mixed up with the low and vulgar.

To check this confusion by a tangible sign, to distinguish by an acknowledged name and title the trickster and player of instruments, who flatters the senses by momentary enjoyment, from the learned and serious poet whose works are graven on the memory and long survive their author, to do this and save poetry from impending ruin, Guiraut says, is a worthy task for the wise and noble King Alfonso.

The king’s answer to this request is extant. It is written in verse, but otherwise composed with all the gravity of a state paper, and at the same time with a lucidity of argument rarely found in mediæval writings. ‘Although,’ the king justly remarks, ‘it is unwise and of dangerous consequence to speak about the affairs of strangers, yet he who holds honour dear, and possesses sense and wisdom and power withal, ought to consider the interests of others together with his own.’ After this cautious beginning, the king fully admits the reason of Guiraut’s complaint, and points out the injustice of comprising all the members of the poetic, musical, and histrionic professions under the common title of Joglar, a word which the king learnedly adds is derived from the Latin joculator, and therefore is wholly unfit to designate the higher branches of the art of poetry.

In Spain, we are further told, these things are managed better; musicians and mountebanks and poets have each a name of their own, and nobody can mistake the one for the other. A similar distinction the king now proposes for the domain of the langue d’oc, and for that purpose divides the whole poetic community into three classes. First and lowest are named the people who would not dare to show themselves at court, and who hang about taverns and village-greens, showing off the tricks of learned dogs and goats, imitating birds’ voices, or singing coarse songs. These in future are to be called by the Italian word ‘bufos,’ ‘as is the custom in Lombardy.’

Different from these are the musicians and reciters of stories who contribute to the amusement of the nobles by these arts or other agreeable pastimes. These, and these alone, ought to claim the name of ‘joglars,’ and they ought to be received at court and liberally remunerated according to their merits.

The third and highest class comprises those who possess the gift of composing verses and melodies, and for that reason are entitled to the name of inventores, which, as the king remarks, is the Latin equivalent of the vernacular trobadors.

But a last and highest distinction is reserved for those amongst the poets who combine the useful with the agreeable, and in the sweet rhymes of their canzos enforce moral and religious maxims. These are in future to be called doctors de trobar, doctors of poetry; for, adds the king, who is fond of etymology and not wholly averse to a pun:

Whether the degree was ever conferred remains uncertain. It is obvious that the creating of twenty doctors of poetry would not make one poet. At the same time if a man or men of high poetic gifts had arisen, the improved social position intended for them would have been a gain and an encouragement. But it is a melancholy fact that what seems most spontaneous and involuntary in man—genius—obeys, after all, the universal rules of supply and demand, and that when once literary vitality and literary interest are departed from a nation it is hopeless to galvanise the corpse with artificial life. Guiraut’s scheme in itself is therefore hardly worth mentioning. But it is interesting as a symptom of the same tendency of the age towards mixing up poetry with scholarship which soon afterwards led to the institution of Academies, and Jeux Floraux, and Poet-Laureateships, and traces of which have survived till the present day in Provence and elsewhere.