The troubadours

With the canzo we have at last reached the climax and innermost essence of the poetry of the troubadours. I have in the above called the idea of the troubadour as exclusively a singer of love a one-sided one. So indeed it is, but at the same time the lingering of this feature and this feature alone in the memory of ages distinctly proves its prevailing importance in the picture which the popular mind conceived and treasured up. And the vox populi in literature, as in other matters, is generally found to be after all the voice of good sense and unsophisticated truth.

All true poetry must be the offspring of its time; it must show as in a mirror the best contemporary thoughts and ideas. Now there is no doubt that the purest and most poetic motive of early mediæval life was the cultus of the new-found ideal of womanhood. To this worship, therefore, the troubadour devoted his noblest endeavour, and the result is a literature in some respects unique in the history of all nations.

On first becoming acquainted with the amatory verses of Provençal poets, one is apt to give way to a feeling of disappointment. Everything is different from what one’s vague idea of the subject had led him to expect. There is here no wild storm of passion, no untrammelled effusion of sentiment On the contrary, the stream of emotion, and sometimes not a very powerful stream, seems to run in a regular channel—a channel, to continue the simile, with the marble sides and facings of a rigid form, and the narrowness of which admits of little individual bubbling. The last-mentioned feature, viz., the want of individual peculiarities, is especially noticeable in the poets of the langue d’oc. There are of course differences, as there are, and must be, in all other schools and coteries of literary workers. Bernart de Ventadorn is an infinitely more impassioned and more loveable singer than the affected Rambaut of Orange; and the Monk of Montaudon, when he deigns to write a love-song, cannot wholly disguise his sardonic vein, nor does he ever attain to the lyrical sweetness of Guillem de Cabestanh. But such distinctions do not meet the eye of the casual observer with the same force as is the case with the poets of other nationalities. One of the reasons is the perfection of formal development which universally prevails. In modern France or England it is easy to know one poet from another, and attribute to each his place in the republic of song by the quality of his verse quâ verse. There are, in short, those who can and those who cannot write poetry. But with the troubadours it was otherwise: they all knew their business equally well; there were no bunglers amongst them.

We here once again touch upon that pride and bane of Provençal poetry—form. That much freshness of expression, much genuine fervour of inspiration, has been sacrificed to this moloch, is not a matter of doubt. The sameness of type observable in a whole galaxy of gifted and no doubt variously gifted poets cannot be explained from any other cause. For not only did the observance of certain external niceties absorb a great part of the poet’s energy, but the habit of such observance gradually encroached even on his cast of thought. Certain feelings and ideas gradually grew into established formulas. The absence of a true sympathy with nature in the works of the troubadours is a case in point. Originally such a feeling must have existed; the very common occurrence at the beginning of a love-song of some remarks on the beauties of spring, the song of birds, and the like, tends to prove it. But unfortunately the similarity of these preludes and the narrow range of objects to which they refer are a proof equally strong of the detrimental force of the ‘set speech’ above alluded to. For one Gaucelm Faidit, who feels genuine delight in the ‘rossinholet salvatge,’ the ‘wild nightingale,’ there are twenty troubadours who speak of the sweet-toned songster with perfect indifference and merely as a matter of custom. Even the main and moving subject of the canzo, the lady, does not always escape the same fate. She also frequently becomes a barren symbol to be described according to a certain code of beauty and to be addressed in certain well-turned phrases.

Another striking defect in Provençal poetry may to a great extent be derived from the same source. This is the want of continuity in most of the canzos. Few of these show a necessary organic growth. In most cases stanzas might be added or taken away without detracting from or increasing the general merit of the poem. The reason is the wonderful elaborateness and symmetry of the single stanzas, which make them appear in the light of independent and compact units, the stringing together of which may delight the hearer for a time, but can never produce the impression of an organic whole. I could cite modern instances in which the same cause has had exactly the same effect.

But such deficiencies, apparent as they are in a greater or less degree in every troubadour, ought not to blind us to the high merits of Provençal poetry, its refinement, its tenderness of feeling, its unrivalled perfection of form. Our admiration of these qualities increases when we think of the soil in which this remarkable growth took place. The troubadours were the first harbingers of reviving literary culture after the storms which wrecked the Western Empire. They had no models to fall back upon; for the poets of antiquity were more or less above their ken, and the simple creations of the popular mind beneath their attention. They had even to create their language from a mixture of provincial patois. If ever poetry has sprung from the spontaneous impulse of man, it is in this instance. And, what is more, it was at a time when everywhere else intellectual darkness and barrenness covered the land. At the time when Guillem of Poitiers wrote his masterpieces of lyrical refinement, the amalgamation of the native with the foreign idiom had only just begun in England; in Northern France the stage of the primitive epic was hardly reached, and a century was to pass before the seed sown by the troubadours was to bring forth fruit in Germany; Italy yielding to the same influence at a still later period. But the Provençal love-song had reached its autumn before these subsequent developments entered into existence. For a long time it stood alone, an exotic plant of unknown origin, but of rich and peculiar growth, in the wilderness of the early middle ages.

Of the metrical structure of the love-song I shall say little in this place. The varieties and niceties of its rhymes and stanzas the reader will find fully discussed in the technical chapters. It may be mentioned here that some difference seems to have existed between two kinds of the love-song, the vers and the canzo; but what the exact nature of the difference was it is impossible to say. The troubadours themselves had not a very clear notion of it. The Leys d’amors is even more than usually rambling and vague in its definition, and all the characteristics it mentions of the vers belong in equal measure to the canzo. Aimeric de Pegulhan, one of the later troubadours, candidly confesses that to him the distinction between the terms has lost its significance. ‘Frequently,’ he says, ‘I am asked at court why I do not write a vers. Therefore I leave it to those who care, to decide whether this song be a vers or a canzo; and to those who inquire I answer that I do not find any difference between vers and canzo beyond the name.’ It further appears from his song, that, according to rule or prejudice, the canzo generally had feminine rhymes and short lively musical accompaniments, while the more primitive vers affected monosyllabic endings and long-drawn melodies. But he justly infers that this rule is not observed by the troubadours to any prevailing extent, and this fact deprives the theoretical subtleties of ancient and modern grammarians of their substantial basis.

And here my remarks on the canzo and on the general aspects of Provençal literature must end. Of the incompleteness of the sketch in more than one respect I am fully conscious. But I hope that the reader may be able to form some adequate view of the intellectual and moral conditions of which the poetry of the troubadours is the embodiment. To blur this outline with further detail would be contrary to the purpose of this book, which, I repeat it, is not a scientific treatise aiming at exhaustiveness, but rather a first attempt to attract the English reader towards a subject which deserves so much and has had so little of his attention. The safest, perhaps the only, method of gaining this end is the biographical. In the biographies of some of the principal troubadours I therefore have embodied what further information of the life and work of these poets I desired to give on the present occasion. Guillem de Cabestanh will be the representative of the love-song proper. Peire Vidal combines the satiric and the lyrical gifts. Bertran de Born represents the warlike or political sirventes; the Monk of Montaudon is the master of personal and literary satire, while Peire Cardinal’s pessimism and severe morality loom in cloudy distance above the gay throng. The crusade against the Albigeois heretics, with its baneful consequences for Provençal literature, is treated in continuous chapters, and a separate niche of fame is gallantly assigned to the lady troubadours. Other questions connected with the subject are incidentally treated.