Provençal literature

“ From the south of France the novel spread into Catalonia, where we find in the 14th century a number of novels in verse very similar to the Provençal ones, and into Italy, where in general the prose form has been adopted.
Didactic and Religions Poetry.—Compositions intended for instruction, correction and edification were very numerous in the south of France as well as elsewhere, and, in spite of the enormous losses sustained by Provençal literature, much of this kind still remains. But it is seldom that such works have much originality or literary value. ”

“ PROVENÇAL LITERATURE. Provençal literature is much more easily defined than the language in which it is expressed. Starting in the 11th and 12th centuries in several centres it thence gradually spread out, first over the greater portion, though not the whole of southern France, and then into the north of Italy and Spain. It never felt the influence of the neighbouring literatures. At the time of its highest development (12th century) the art of composing in the vulgar tongue did not exist, or was only beginning to exist, to the south of the Alps and the Pyrenees. ”

“ Paul Meyer began with the study of old Provençal literature, but subsequently did valuable work in many different departments of romance literature, and ranks as the chief modern authority on the French language. ”

“ The sextine, in six stanzas of identical and complicated versification, is the stateliest of all Provençal forms. Not merely the rhymes but the words which rhyme are repeated on a regular scheme. The breu-doble (double-short) is a curious little form on three rhymes, two of which are repeated twice in three four-lined stanzas, and given once in a concluding couplet, while the third finishes each quatrain. Other forms are often mentioned and given, but they are not of much consequence.
The prose of the best period of Provençal literature is of little importance. ”

“ Among the most distinguished troubadours, we find the names of Arnaud de Marveil, and of Arnaud Daniel, celebrated by Petrarch and Dante, Rambaud de Vaqueiras, and Pierre Vidal, both warriors and poets, and Pierre Cardinal, the satirist of Provence. The Provençal literature does not however appear to have produced any one great genius or lasting work. Their poetry, indeed, did not aim at immortality ”

“ The name stuck, and has now for many years been the banner-word for the vigorous school of Provençal literature and the allied arts of painting and sculpture which has responded with such eager vitality to Mistral's rallying cry. ”

“ Provençal literature contains examples of almost every poetical genre. Epic poetry is represented by Girart of Roussillon,12 a story of long struggles between Charles Martel and one of his barons, by the Roman de Jaufre, the adventures of a knight of the Round Table, by Flamenca, a love story which provides an admirable picture of the manners and customs of the time, and by other fragments and novelas or shorter stories in the same style. ”

“ Didactic poetry includes historical works such as the poem of the Albigeois crusade, ethical or moralising ensenhamens and religious poetry. But the dominating element in Provençal literature is lyrical, and during the short classical age of this literature lyric poetry was supreme. Nearly five hundred different troubadours are known to us at least by name and almost a thousand different stanza forms have been enumerated. While examples of the fine careless rapture of inspiration are by no means wanting, artificiality reigns supreme in the majority of cases. ”

“ Thus, religious enthusiasm, martial bravery, and licentious love, so grotesquely mingled, formed the very life of the Middle Ages, and impossible as it is to transfuse into a translation the harmony of Provençal verse, or to find in it, when stripped of this harmony, any poetical idea, these remains are valuable since they present us with a picture of the life and manners of the times. ”

“ Modern civilization will upset all the traditions of the old intellectual centres by making new ones. Thus our posterity will have a revenge on British condescension we can only enjoy in anticipatory imaginings. I wish I could live as long as Methusaleh to be alive then. England and English’ literature will perhaps finally hold the importance of the Provencal literature in France—it will be an archaic survival in the midst of the great throbbing heart of a great modern people. Our descendants will roar over our adulation of English female theological novelists. ”

“ The troubadours—harbingers of reviving culture in the middle ages—displayed in their highly finished literature a refinement and splendour of imagination, an intensity and warmth, which, with the power they wielded, gradually changed the life, the tastes, the manners, of their times; whilst the quaint imagery, with the richness of colouring of Provençal song, left traces of its ascendency in the works of more than one celebrated Italian poet, as well as in English poetry long before the Elizabethan age. ”

“ The chief merit of the Provençal poets is in having been the first to demonstrate that it was possible to write with elegance in a modern dialect, and their interest for us is mainly as forerunners, as indications of tendency. Their literature is prophecy, not fulfilment. Its formal sentiment culminated in Laura, its ideal aspiration in Beatrice. Shakespeare’s hundred and sixth sonnet, if, for the imaginary mistress to whom it was addressed, we substitute the muse of a truer conception and more perfected utterance, represents exactly the feeling with which we read Provençal poetry ”

“ The earlier French epics have been lost; the earliest known Provençal poet is already a master of verse, and must be indebted to many poetical ancestors whose names and poems have disappeared. Long before 1100 there must have been a common literary taste in France, fashions of poetry well understood and appreciated, a career open for youthful poets. In the twelfth century the social success of poetry in France was extended in different degrees over all Europe. ”

“ It is certain that the Provençal lyric poetry, and the other poetry derived from it in other languages, has many excellences besides the ingenious repetition of stock ideas in cleverly varied patterns of rhyme. The poets are not all alike, and the poems of one poet are not all alike. The same poem of Bernart de Ventadour contains a beautiful, true, fresh description of the skylark singing and falling in the middle of the song through pure delight in the rays of the sun ”

“ Together with the influence of the Provençal lyric idealism, it determined the forms of modern literature, long after the close of the Middle Ages. The change of fashion in the twelfth century is as momentous and far-reaching in its consequences as that to which the name "Renaissance" is generally appropriated. The later Renaissance, indeed, in what concerns imaginative literature, makes no such abrupt and sudden change of fashion as was made in the twelfth century. The poetry and romance of the Renaissance follow naturally upon the literature of the Middle Ages ”

“ This charming representation of life in southern France made his name famous and gained for him the poet's prize of the French Academy and the cross of the Legion of Honor. It also led to the formation of the society called Lou Felibrige, to create a modern Provençal literature. ”

“ Anyhow the Tarasques of the world are doomed; whether they will be without successors is a different question. Some one has said that mankind has always lived upon illusions, and always will, the essential thing being to change the nature of these illusions from time to time, so as to bring them into harmony with the spirit of the age.
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Provençal folk-songs have but few analogies with the literature which heedlessly, though beyond recall, has been named Provençal. The poetry of the Miejour was a literary orchid of the fabulous sort that has neither root nor fruit. ”

“ No sooner had the Gay Science been established in Provence, than it became the fashion in surrounding countries. The sovereigns of Europe adopted the Provençal language, and enlisted themselves among the poets, and there was soon neither baron nor knight who did not feel himself bound to add to his fame as a warrior the reputation of a gentle troubadour. Monarchs were now the professors of the art, and the only patrons were the ladies. Women, no longer beautiful ciphers, acquired complete liberty of action, and the homage paid to them amounted almost to worship. ”

“ The fanatical Fra Rupert and the low, vile-tongued Catanaise are not tragic characters. The psychology throughout is decidedly upon the surface.
The author in his introduction warns us that to judge this play we must place ourselves at the point of view of the Provençals, in whom many an expression or allusion that leaves the ordinary reader or spectator untouched, will possibly awaken, as he hopes, some particular emotion. This is true of all his literature; the Provençal language, the traditions, the memories of Provence, are the web and woof of it all. ”

“ Jasmin had already shown the Parisians that real poetry of a high order could be written in a patois. Lamartine and Villemain welcomed the new literature most cordially, and the latter declared that "France is rich enough to have two literatures."
But the student of this history must not lose sight of the fact that the Provençal poets are not first of all littérateurs; they are not men devoting themselves to literature for a livelihood, or even primarily for fame. They are patriots before they are poets. ”

“ A glance at the modern history of language will make this clearer. There could never be any doubt that the so-called Romance languages, Italian, Wallachian, Provençal, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, were closely related to each other. Everybody could [pg 171] see that they were all derived from Latin. But one of the most distinguished French scholars, Raynouard, who has done more for the history of the Romance languages and literature than any one else, maintained that Provençal only was the daughter of Latin; whereas French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese were the daughters of Provençal. ”

“ The Arthurian legends have at least a tinge both of Celtic and Oriental character; while the greater number of them were probably written by Englishmen, and their distinguishing spirit is pretty clearly Anglo-Norman rather than French. On the other hand, Provençal poetry represents a temperament and a disposition which find their full development rather in Spanish and Italian literature and character than in the literature and character of France. ”

“ He instances, as periods naturally romantic, the time of the early Provençal troubadour poetry: the years following the Bourbon Restoration in France (say, 1815-30) ; and "the later Middle Age; so that the medieval poetry, centering in Dante, is often opposed to Greek or Roman poetry, as romantic to classical poetry."
In Pater's use of the terms, then, classic and romantic do not describe particular literature, or particular periods in literary history, so much as certain counterbalancing qualities and tendencies which run through the literatures of all times and countries. ”

“ And in Guillaume de Lorris himself, it is difficult to find a word for or against the Church.
He was, no doubt, mindful of the stern lesson read to heretics in the crusade of Provence, fresh in all men's recollection. But he had been nurtured and fed on the poetry of the troubadours; the form of his verse and the turn of his thought were Provençal. Was it likely that so young a writer should escape the spirit of the literature while he studied its form? ”

“ This, notwithstanding the offensive theme, is replete with curious literature, and some original researches in Provençal poetry.
“Rymer is the worst critic that ever lived.” Such is the warm decision of an eloquent modern critic.19 But in taste, as well as in more serious affairs, every age is governed by opinions. A mechanical critic then seemed mathematically irrefutable. Judging an English drama 555 by the practice of the ancients, his triumph was easy. ”

“ The extreme fulness and elaboration of the Provençal poets, however, has been serviceable as placing a very high ideal of structural skill before the poets of all succeeding times, and it was of immense value in directing the experiments of the earliest poet-artists of Italy and France. ”

“ The artistic conventions apparent in his poetry and his obviously careful respect for fixed rules oblige us to regard his poetry as the outcome of a considerable stage of previous development. At what point this development began and what influences stimulated its progress are questions which still remain in [7] dispute. Three theories have been proposed. It is, in the first place, obviously tempting to explain the origin of Provençal poetry as being a continuation of Latin poetry in its decadence. ”

“ More and more, as we come to mark changes and distinctions of temper in what is often in one all-embracing confusion called the middle age, that rebellion, that sinister claim for liberty of heart and thought, comes to the surface. The Albigensian movement, connected so strangely with the history of Provençal poetry, is deeply tinged with it. ”

“ But in the 11th century vernacular poetry was still rather limited, and has hardly any higher object than the amusement or the edification of the upper classes. An aristocratic poetry, such as it appears in the oldest Provençal compositions, cannot be the production of shepherds and husbandmen ”