PREFACE.
Articles by the present writer on the subject of Provençal life and literature have appeared off and on in the ‘New Quarterly Magazine,’ the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine,’ ‘Macmillan’s Magazine,’ and the late ‘North British Review.’ But this book is not a reprint of essays, although some of the materials formerly used have been re-embodied in it. It claims on the contrary to be the first continuous and at all adequate account in the English language of the literary epoch which forms its subject. For I cannot concede that name to a book on ‘The Troubadours, their Loves and Lyrics,’ published some years ago; for reasons which it is not my province here to state. And yet, excepting only the English version of the unsatisfactory book which the Abbé Millot compiled from St. Palaye’s excellent materials, by that indefatigable translator and abridger in the last century, Mrs. Dobson, that volume is the only work on the Troubadours which England can boast of, at least as far as I am aware,—and of any important contribution to the subject I should be aware. By the side of the admirable criticisms of old French literature which we owe to English authors from the days of Cary and the ‘London Magazine’ to those of Mr. Andrew Lang and other gifted writers of the present time, this neglect of the langue d’oc appears all the more glaring, especially when one considers the further fact that many of the districts in which the troubadours flourished were at the time when they flourished attached to the English crown. The amount of historical, and more especially English historical, material to be gleaned from the biographies and the works of the troubadours is indeed of the utmost value to the student.
In the composition of this book I have chiefly depended on the original poetry of the troubadours, but it is far from my wish to deny the services I owe to the works of French and German scholars, such as Raynouard, Francisque Michel, Dr. Mahn, and Diez, the founder of the modern school of Romance philology, a school which counts amongst its members Professors Bartsch, Tobler, Holland, in Germany, and MM. Paul Meyer and Gaston Paris in France; to mention only a few of the most distinguished names. Monographs of single troubadours, especially those of Peire Vidal by Professor Bartsch, and of the Monk of Montaudon by Dr. Philipson, have been of great use to me. I may also refer to my own critical edition of Guillem de Cabestanh’s works. Beyond this general acknowledgment I have not thought it necessary to encumber these pages with continuous notes of reference.
For my book is not intended as a scientific and exhaustive treatment of the subject. The time for that has not yet come in England. My present purpose was rather to attract learners than to teach more or less proficient students. In plain language I wished, in the first instance, to write a readable book, and according to general prejudice such an achievement is impossible on the scientific principle. For scholarly purposes, I have, however, added a technical portion, chiefly concerned with metrical questions, in which the importance of Dante’s scientific treatise for the classification of Provençal metres, pointed out by Professor Boehmer, has been for the first time proved by systematic application. The style and manner of this purely scientific portion sufficiently distinguish it from the remainder of the book. Still an additional warning to the unwary reader may not seem superfluous.
As another warning rather than encouragement to the same ingenious person I have added some interlinear versions of Provençal poems. It is addressed to those easy-going amateur philologists who believe themselves able to master a language by simply plunging into its literature without any previous study of grammar or dictionary. The similarity of Provençal to the Latin and the more familiar Romance languages offers especially dangerous temptations in that respect. To test the truth of my remarks, I would ask the reader to attempt one of the poems at the end of this book with the sole aid of intelligent ‘guessing,’ and afterwards to compare the result of his conjecture with the literal version. He will then come to the conclusion that the langue d’oc, owing chiefly to the number of its homonymous words and the somewhat unsettled condition of its grammatical structure, is the most difficult, as it is the earliest, amongst languages sprung from the Latin stock.