Provençal poetry

“ 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 ”

“ We are deafened and confused by a hundred minstrels singing the same song at once, and more than suspect the flowers they welcome are made of French cambric, spangled with dewdrops of prevaricating glass."
The forms in which the Provençal poets wrote were chiefly these:—The oldest was called vers, and consisted of octosyllabic lines arranged in stanzas; from this grew the canzo, with interlaced rhymes—later on with the distinctive feature still prominent in French, but unknown in English poetry, the rhymes masculine and feminine. ”

“ 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, this rebellious element, this sinister claim for liberty of heart and thought, comes to the surface. The Albigensian movement, connected so strangely with the history of Provencal poetry, is deeply tinged with it. ”

“ It was then that many of those poets went to spend their last days in the north of Spain and Italy, where Provençal poetry had for more than one generation been highly esteemed. Following their example, other poets who were not natives of the south of France began to compose in Provençal, and this fashion continued till, about the middle of the 13th century, they gradually abandoned the foreign tongue in northern Italy, and somewhat later in Catalonia, and took to singing the same airs in the local dialects. ”

“ It is easy to understand how his high social rank saved some of his productions from oblivion whilst the poems of his predecessors and contemporaries disappeared with the generations who heard and sang them; and in the contrast in form and subject between the Boethius poem and the stanzas of William IX. we find evidence that by the 11 century Provençal poetry was being rapidly developed in various directions. Whence came this poetry? How and by whose work was it formed? That it has no connexion whatever with Latin poetry is generally admitted. ”

“ They form, perhaps, the only collection of lays now extant, and it is to them, therefore, that we must turn to get some idea of the style of narration that gradually replaced the taste for the epic as Norman influence grew and spread in England. Beside the sensualism of the Chansons de Geste, the sentiment expressed in them may seem naïve; beside the gallantry of the Provençal poetry, it may seem primitive; but nevertheless it is, in its very simplicity, the profoundest note that can be struck in this world of men and women. ”

“ 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. ”

“ One of the largest and plainest facts of medieval history is the change of literature in the twelfth century, and the sudden and exuberant growth and progress of a number of new poetical forms; particularly the courtly lyric that took shape in Provence, and passed into the tongues of Italy, France, and Germany, and the French romance which obeyed the same general inspiration as the Provençal poetry, and was equally powerful as an influence on foreign nations. ”

“ And by making song in rimas escarsas he let into Provençal poetry many words that are not found elsewhere and maybe some words half Latin, and he uses many more sounds on the rhyme, for, as Canello or Lavaud has written, he uses ninety-eight rhyme sounds in seventeen canzos, and Peire Vidal makes use of but fifty-eight in fifty-four canzos and Folquet of thirty-three in twenty-two poems, and Raimbaut Orenga uses 129 rhymes in thirty-four poems, a lower proportion than Arnaut's. ”

“ In the first place it ceases to be anonymous, and individual singers—some of them, like Thibaut of Champagne, of very great merit and individuality—make their appearance. In the second place it becomes more varied but at the same time more artificial in form, and exhibits evident marks of the communication between troubadour and trouvère, and of the imitation by the latter of the stricter forms of Provençal poetry. The Romance and the Pastourelle are still cultivated, but by their side grow up French versions, often adapted with considerable independence, of the forms of the South [69] . ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Narrative Poetry.—Although the strictly lyric poetry of the troubadours forms the most original part of Provençal literature, it must not be supposed that the remainder is of trifling importance. Narrative poetry, especially, received in the south of France a great development, and, thanks to recent discoveries, a considerable body of it has already become known. Several classes must be distinguished: the chanson de geste, legendary or apparently historical, the romance of adventure and the novel. Northern France remains emphatically the native count of the chanson de geste ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ The 14th and 15th centuries were in no respect a prosperous period for literature in the south of France. In the 15th century people began to write French both in verse and prose; and from that time Provençal literature became a thing of the past. From the 16th century such poetry as is written in the vernacular of southern France (Auger Gaillard, La Bellaudiera, Goudelin, d’Astros, &c.) , is entirely dependent on French influence. The Connexion with ancient Provençal literature is entirely broken. ”

“ 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. ”

“ That character makes destiny is very clearly evidenced in Provençal history. This rich, eventful, romantic story is just what a people renowned for bonté d'esprit, grace, good looks, poetry, eloquence, sentiment, passion, must inevitably weave for themselves in the course of ages. From the time when paleolithic man was making rude stone implements and living in caves or holes in the earth, this country has been busily forming and developing the human body and soul, perhaps in a more clear and visible sequence of progress that can easily be traced elsewhere. ”

“ It is obvious that musical notation is well established; and it seems to follow that with a good musical tradition there may be encouragement for lyric poetry apart from any such ‘courtly’ circumstances as have been described in another chapter. There is no doubt about this. While it is certain on the one hand that the lyrical art of the Middle Ages was carried furthest in courtly society by the French, Provençal, German and Italian poets, it is equally certain that the art of music flourished also in out-of-the-way places. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ As has been pointed out above, the modern prosody of Europe is quite easily and logically explicable as the result of the juxtaposition of the Latin rhythms of the Church service, and the [Pg 386] verse systems indigenous in the different barbaric nations. That the peculiar cast and colour of early Italian poetry may owe something of that difference which it exhibits, even in comparison with Provençal, much more with French, most of all with Teutonic poetry, to contact with Arabian literature, is not merely possible but probable. ”

“ We have seen, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Provençal poets capable of producing simple and thrilling numbers which are out of the reach of their sophisticated brethren who employ the worn locutions of the French language. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Ingenuity is more characteristic of their poetry than force, subtilty more obvious in it than beauty. The second and later class were poets who wrote in the Italian tongue, but still under the influence of the poetic code which had governed the compositions of their Provençal predecessors. ”

“ The Sicilians followed closely in the track of the Provençal poets. After, or contemporaneously with them, the same Italo-Provençal literature was cultivated in the cities of central Italy. The subject-matter of this imitative poetry was love—but love that bore a peculiar relation to ordinary human feeling. Woman was regarded as an ideal being, to be approached with worship bordering on adoration. The lover derived personal force, virtue, elevation, energy, from his enthusiastic passion. Honor, justice, courage, self-sacrifice, contempt of worldly goods, flowed-60- from that one sentiment ”

“ And it was during this period, from Petrarch to Politian, that, as philologists have now proved beyond dispute, the once fashionable chivalric romance, and the poetry of Provençal and Sicilian school, cast off by the upper classes, was gradually picked up by the lower and especially by the rural classes. ”

“ 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. ”