The troubadours

When about the end of the fourth century (A.D.) Germanic and Asiatic hordes began to invade the Western Empire with more and more irresistible force, the refined voice of Roman eloquence and poetry was soon drowned by the noise of barbarous tongues. Even before this irruption of new elements the language of the Romans had lost much of its classic purity. It was no longer the idiom of Cicero and of Horace. Familiar phrases, provincialisms and barbarisms had found their way into the written language. Thence it is that we find the illiterate expressions of the comic characters in Plautus and Terence occupying a place as legitimate words in the dictionaries of the Romance idioms.

When with the already decaying language of the fourth and fifth centuries the variegated dialects of the conquering barbarians were mingled, confusion became worse confounded and linguistic chaos seemed at hand. It need not be said that for artistic purposes this mongrel type of speech became totally unfit. But in the same measure as the healthy, though uncultured, peoples of the North were destined to revivify the old institutions of Roman political life, their languages also added new vitality to the decaying forms of Roman speech. The chaos was a preparatory stage of amalgamation and new development. For the formation of languages, like any other natural process, is ruled by a strict law of decay and growth.

In the derivation of the Romance dialects from the common Latin mother-tongue, two main principles are observable. The German invaders, like all barbarous conquerors, soon adopted the speech of their more civilised subjects; but they adhered to certain terms and denominations of objects particularly familiar or dear to them. Thus the terms for warfare and many of its chief implements were characteristically retained by them. The French guerre and the Italian guerra are identical with the old High German werra, our war; and the title of highest dignity in the French army of the present day, Maréchal (mediæval Latin mariscalcus), means nothing but shalc (groom) of the mares.

The second cause of transformation and re-formation already inherent in the Latin language of the second and third centuries (A.C.) is what philologists term the analytic or dissolving principle. Synthetic or primitive languages indicate the declension of a noun or the conjugation of a verb by a modification of the word itself; analytical languages by the addition of other words. Thus, patris in Latin answers to our three words of the father, or to the French de le (contracted du) père. The addition of the article subsequently makes the modification of the noun itself superfluous; hence père answers to the four modifications of the Roman pater. But the same tendency existed in the late-Latin speech itself, and the de le père presupposes a de illo patre. In an analogous manner, the j’ai fait or ho fatto of the French and Italian languages is beyond doubt derived from a Latin habeo factum, instead of the simpler and older feci.

Of the various languages of Latin growth, the Provençal was the first to attain to an independent characteristic type of expression. The limits of its domain have been variously defined; but it extended far beyond the boundaries of the later Provence, even beyond those of modern France, comprising, for instance, parts of Spain, such as Aragon, Valencia, Catalonia, and the Balearic Islands. Its northern limit may be roughly stated to be the line drawn from the mouth of the Gironde to that of the Saone. The political autonomy of the south of France, which secured it from the international and national troubles of its northern neighbour, greatly favoured peaceful progress and enjoyment of life. Moreover, the rich, bountiful soil, and the prosperity and natural gaiety of the inhabitants, were conducive to the early growth of poetic feeling; and it may be assumed that long before the time of the Troubadours, rustic lays, accompanied by the sounds of the viola, used to enliven the harvest homes of Provençal villages. Of this popular epoch no record now remains, except the language itself—at once the result and embodiment of a nation’s longing for utterance. The generic term applied to the language of southern France seems to have been ‘Provençal,’ in allusion no doubt to the Provincia Romana of the Cæsars. For this term we have the weighty authority of Dante, also that of an old Provençal grammar called ‘Donatus Provincialis.’ The Troubadours themselves, however, never use this perhaps more scientific denomination. They generally speak of Lengua Romana, a term which of course applies with equal propriety to all the languages derived from the Latin. But what do poets care about philological distinctions? Another term, langue d’oc, afterwards transferred to a province of France, was undoubtedly known in the middle ages. It is derived from the affirmative particle oc, i.e. ‘yes,’ and chiefly used to distinguish Provençal from its sister-languages, the lingua di sì (Italian) and the langue d’oïl, (northern French, oïl = oui). From the latter it was a totally distinct language both in grammar and pronunciation, quite as distinct, for instance, as Portuguese from Spanish, or Dutch from English. On the strength of the latter parallel the much-mooted question as to the possibility of conversation between Trouvère and Troubadour may perhaps receive some new light from an adventure of the late Mr. Buckle, who, while travelling in a railway carriage in Holland, addressed a gentleman in the language of the country, but received after a time the polite answer that he, the Dutch gentleman, was sorry he did not understand—Italian.

The langue d’oc was again subdivided into numerous provincial dialects, but of these little or no trace appears in the songs of the Troubadours. For they were court poets, and the idiom they used a court language, spoken in its purity by no one beyond the magic circle of polite society. It seems, however, that the dialects of Limosin and the neighbouring districts, and of Provence proper, showed the nearest approach to this language of poets and courtiers. Such at least is the decided opinion of the grammarian and poet Raimon Vidal, not himself a native of those parts. ‘Every person,’ he says, ‘who wants to produce or understand poetry, ought to know, first of all, that none is the natural and proper accent of our language but that of Limosin, Provence, Auvergne, and Quercy. Therefore I tell you, that when I speak of Limosin, you must understand all these countries and those that are near them or lie between them; and all people born or brought up in those parts have the natural and correct accent.’

The origin of the Provençal language can of course not be referred to a particular year nor even to a particular century. Its development was gradual and slow. But it is a remarkable fact, that after it had once taken literary form and substance, no signs of change or further growth are noticeable. Two centuries in the German or English, or indeed any living language, constitute enormous differences as regards phraseology, orthography, and grammatical structure. Johnson had difficulties in fully understanding Shakespeare, a modern German is puzzled by many expressions in Luther’s Bible; and this, after these languages had become fixed by the introduction of printing, and a generally acknowledged standard of grammatical regularity. But the first troubadour known to us, Guillem of Poitiers, born in 1071, uses exactly the same grammar, the same structure of sentences, and even in all essential points the same poetic diction, as his last successor two hundred years after him.⁠[1] The cause of this unusual stability must be looked for in the fact already pointed out, that the Provençal was not, strictly speaking, a living language used by all, and for all purposes, but the exclusive speech of an exclusive class, reserved moreover for the expression of courteous love and chivalry. Even where, for the purposes of satire and personal invective, the terms of low life are introduced, they have to submit to the strict rules of grammar and metre.

At the end of the thirteenth century the langue d’oc, as a means of poetic utterance at least, disappears again, as suddenly almost as it had emerged from obscurity. Learned societies and scholarly poets and writers vainly tried to keep alive the interest which had vanished with the last of the knightly singers. Jeux floraux were started, and golden primroses rewarded the successful efforts of learned competitors. But the true life of poetry was gone. By the crusade against the Albigeois and the subsequent conquest of the French south by the north, the spirit of the Provençal nobility had been broken. No lordly castles invited, no gifts encouraged the Troubadour, and by his silence all vitality and zest was lost to the langue d’oc, which henceforth degenerated into a common patois; the rapid intrusion of northern French idioms consequent on the political events alluded to accelerating its final doom—final, for all the attempts at reviving the old splendour of the langue d’oc have as yet proved abortive. The patois of Mistral’s Mireïo has little in common with the language of the mediæval singers, and his gifted disciples’ strenuous efforts stand little chance against the crushing influence of an idiom formed by Voltaire’s prose and Alfred de Musset’s poetry.