The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory Part 22

[Footnote 177: Of course this is only in comparison. For instance, in Dr Suchier's _Denkmaler_ (Halle, 1883), which contains nearly 500 large pages of Provencal _anecdota_, about four-fifths is devotional matter of various kinds and in various forms, prose and verse. But such matter, which is common to all mediaeval languages, is hardly literature at all, being usually translated, with scarcely any expense of literary originality, from the Latin, or each other.]

[Footnote 178: Alberic's _Alexander_ (_v._ chap. iv.) is of course Provencal in a way, and there was probably a Provencal intermediary between the _Chanson d'Antioche_ and the Spanish _Gran Conquesta de Ultramar_. But we have only a few lines of the first and nothing of the second.]

That place is due to its lyric, construing that term in a wide sense such as that (but indeed a little wider) in which it has been already used with reference to the kindred and nearly contemporary lyric of France proper. It is best to say "nearly contemporary," because it would appear that Provencal actually had the start of French in this respect, though no great start: and it is best to say "kindred" and not "daughter," because though some forms and more names are common to the two, their developments are much more parallel than on the same lines, and they are much more sisters than mother and daughter.

[Sidenote: _Origin of this lyric._]

It would appear, though such things can never be quite certain, that, as we should indeed expect, the first developments of Provencal lyric were of the hymn kind, and perhaps originally mixtures of Romance and Latin. This mixture of the vernacular and the learned tongues, both spoken in all probability with almost equal facility by the writer, is naturally not uncommon in the Middle Ages: and it helps to explain the rapid transference of the Latin hymn-rhythms to vernacular verse. Thus we have a _Noel_ or Christmas poem not only written to the tune and in the measure of a Latin hymn, _In hoc anni circulo_, not only crowning the Provencal six-syllable triplets with a Latin refrain, "De virgine Maria," and other variations on the Virgin's t.i.tle and name, but with Latin verses alternate to the Provencal ones. This same arrangement occurs with a Provencal fourth rhyme, which seems to have been a favourite one. It is arranged with a variety which shows its earliness, for the fourth line is sometimes "in the air" rhyming to nothing, sometimes rhymes with the other three, and sometimes forces its sound on the last of them, so that the quatrain becomes a pair of couplets.

[Sidenote: _Forms._]

The earliest purely secular lyrics, however, are attributed to William IX., Count of Poitiers, who was a crusader in the very first year of the twelfth century, and is said to have written an account of his journey which is lost. His lyrics survive to the number of some dozen, and show that the art had by his time received very considerable development. For their form, it may suffice to say that of those given by Bartsch[179] the first is in seven-lined stanzas, rhymed _aaaabab_, the _a_-rhyme lines being iambic dimeters, and the _b_'s monometers.

Number two has five six-lined stanzas, all dimeters, rhymed _aaabab_: and a four-lined finale, rhymed _ab, ab_. The third is mono-rhymed throughout, the lines being disyllabic with licence to extend. And the fourth is in the quatrain _aaab_, but with the _b_ rhyme identical throughout, capped with a couplet _ab_. If these systems be compared with the exact accounts of early French, English, and German lyric in chapters v.-vii., it will be seen that Provencal probably, if not certainly, led the way in thus combining rhythmic arrangement and syllabic proportion with a cunning variation of rhyme-sound. It was also the first language to cla.s.sify poetry, as it may be called, by a.s.signing special forms to certain kinds of subject or--if not quite this--to const.i.tute cla.s.ses of poems themselves according to their arrangement in line, stanza, and rhyme. A complete prosody of the language of _canso_ and _sirvente_, of _vers_ and _cobla_, of _planh_, _tenso_, _tornejamens_, _balada_, _retroensa_, and the rest, would take more room than can be spared here, and would hardly be in place if it were otherwise. All such prosodies tend rather to the childish, as when, for instance, the _pastorela_, or shepherdess poem in general, was divided into _porquiera_, _cabreira_, _auqueira_, and other things, according as the damsel's special wards were pigs or goats or geese. Perhaps the most famous, peculiar, and representative of Provencal forms are the _alba_, or poem of morning parting, and the _sirvente_, or poem _not_ of love. The _sestina_, a very elaborate canzonet, was invented in Provence and borrowed by the Italians. But it is curious to find that the sonnet, the crown and flower of all artificial poetry, though certainly invented long before the decadence of Provencal, was only used in Provencal by Italian experimenters. The poets proper of the _langue d'oc_ were probably too proud to admit any form that they had not invented themselves.

[Footnote 179: The _Grundriss zur Geschichte der Provenzalischen Literatur_ (Elberfeld, 1872) and the _Chrestomathie Provencale_ (3d ed., Elberfeld, 1875) of this excellent scholar will not soon be obsolete, and may, in the peculiar conditions of the case, suffice all but special students in a degree hardly possible in any other literature. Mahn's _Troubadours_ and the older works of Raynouard and Fauriel are the chief storehouses of wider information, and separate editions of the works of the chief poets are being acc.u.mulated by modern, chiefly German, scholars. An interesting and valuable addition to the _English_ literature of the subject has been made, since the text was written, by Miss Ida Farnell's _Lives of the Troubadours_, a translation with added specimens of the poets and other editorial matter.]

[Sidenote: _Many men, one mind._]

Next in noteworthiness to the variety of form of the Provencal poets is their number. Even the mult.i.tude of _trouveres_ and Minnesingers dwindles beside the list of four hundred and sixty named poets, for the twelfth and thirteenth centuries only, which Bartsch's list contains; some, it is true, credited with only a single piece, but others with ten, twenty, fifty, or even close to a hundred, not to mention an anonymous appendix of over two hundred and fifty poems more. Great, however, as is the bulk of this division of literature, hardly any has more distinct and uniform--its enemies may say more monotonous--characteristics. It is not entirely composed of love-poetry; but the part devoted to this is so very much the largest, and so very much the most characteristic, that popular and almost traditional opinion is scarcely wrong in considering love-poetry and Provencal poetry to be almost, and with the due limitation in the first case, convertible terms.

[Sidenote: _Example of rhyme-schemes._]

The spirit of this poetry is nowhere better shown than in the refrain of an anonymous _alba_, which begins--

"En un verger sotz folha d'albespi,"

and which has for burden--

"Oi deus! oi deus, de l'alba, tant tost ve!"

of which an adaptation by Mr Swinburne is well known. "In the Orchard," however, is not only a much longer poem than the _alba_ from which it borrows its burden, but is couched in a form much more elaborate, and has a spirit rather early Italian than Provencal. It is, indeed, not very easy to define the Provencal spirit itself, which has sometimes been mistaken, and oftener exaggerated. Although the average troubadour poem--whether of love, or of satire, or, more rarely, of war--is much less simple in tone than the Northern lyric already commented on, it cannot be said to be very complex; and, on the whole, the ease, accomplishment, and, within certain strict limits, variety of the form are more remarkable than any intensity or volume of pa.s.sion or of thought. The musical character (less inarticulate and more regular), which has also been noted in the poems of the _trouveres_, is here eminent: though the woodnote wild of the Minnesinger is quite absent or very rarely present. The facility of double rhymes, with a full vowel sound in each syllable, has a singular and very pleasing effect, as in the piece by Marcabrun beginning--

"L'autrier jost una sebissa,"

"the other day by a hedge," the curiously complicated construction of which is worth dwelling on as a specimen. It consists of six double stanzas, of fourteen lines or two septets each, finished by a sestet, _aabaab_. The septets are rhymed _aaabaab_; and though the _a_ rhymes vary in each set of fourteen, the _b_ rhymes are the same throughout; and the first of them in each septet is the same word, _vilana_ (peasant girl), throughout. Thus we have as the rhymes of the first twenty-eight lines _sebissa_, _mestissa_, _ma.s.sissa_, _vilana_, _pelissa_, _treslissa_, _lana_; _planissa_, _faitissa_, _fissa_, _vilana_, _noirissa_, _m'erissa_, _sana_; _pia_, _via_, _companhia_, _vilana_, _paria_, _bestia_, _soldana_; _sia_, _folia_, _parelharia_, _vilana_, _s'estia_, _bailia_, _l'ufana_.

[Sidenote: _Provencal poetry not great._]

Such a _carillon_ of rhymes as this is sometimes held to be likely to concentrate the attention of both writer and reader too much on the accompaniment, and to leave the former little time to convey, and the latter little chance of receiving, any very particularly choice sense. This most certainly cannot be laid down as a universal law; there are too many examples to the contrary, even in our own language, not to go further. But it may be admitted that when the styles of literature are both fas.h.i.+onable and limited, and when a very large number of persons endeavour to achieve distinction in them, there is some danger of something of the sort coming about. No nation has ever been able, in the course of less than two centuries, to provide four hundred and sixty named poets and an indefinitely strong reinforcement of anonyms, all of whom have native power enough to produce verse at once elaborate in form and sovereign in spirit; and the peoples of the _langue d'oc_, who hardly together formed a nation, were no exception to the rule. That rule is a rule of "minor poetry," accomplished, scholarly, agreeable, but rarely rising out of minority.

[Sidenote: _But extraordinarily pedagogic._]

Yet their educating influence was undoubtedly strong, and their actual production not to be scorned. In the capacity of teachers they were not without strong influence on their Northern countrymen; they certainly and positively acted as direct masters to the literary lyric both of Italy and Spain; they at least shared with the _trouveres_ the position of models to the Minnesingers. It is at first sight rather surprising that, considering the intimate relations between England and Aquitaine during the period--considering that at least one famous troubadour, Bertran de Born, is known to have been concerned in the disputes between Henry II. and his sons--Provencal should not have exercised more direct influence over English literature. It was a partly excusable mistake which made some English critics, who knew that Richard Coeur de Lion, for instance, was himself not unversed in the "manner of _trobar_," a.s.sert or a.s.sume, until within the present century, that it did exercise such influence. But, as a matter of fact, it did not; and the reason is sufficiently simple, or at least (for it is double rather than simple) sufficiently clear.

[Sidenote: _Though not directly on English._]

In the first place, English was not, until quite the end of the flouris.h.i.+ng period of Provencal poetry, and specially at the period above referred to, in a condition to profit by Provencal models; while in the fourteenth century, when English connection with the south of France was closer still, Provencal was in its decadence. And, in the second place, the structure and spirit of the two tongues almost forbade imitation of the one in the other. It was Northern, not Southern, French that helped to make English proper out of Anglo-Saxon; and the gap between Northern French and Southern French themselves was far wider than between Provencal and the Peninsular tongues. To which things, if any one pleases, he may add the difference of the spirit of the two races; but this is always vague and uncertain ground, and is best avoided when we can tread on the firm land of history and literature proper. Such a rhyme-arrangement as that above set forth is probably impossible in English; even now it will be observed that Mr Swinburne, the greatest master of double and treble rhymes that we have ever had, rarely succeeds in giving even the former with a full spondaic effect of vowel such as is easy in Provencal. In "The Garden of Proserpine" itself, as in the double rhymes, where they occur, of "The Triumph of Time" (the greatest thing ever written in the Provencal manner, and greater than anything in Provencal), the second vowels of the rhymes are never full. And there too, as I think invariably in English, the poet shows his feeling of the intolerableness of continued double rhyme by making the odd verses rhyme plump and with single sound.

Of poetry so little remarkable in individual manner or matter it is impossible to give abstracts, such as those which have been easy, and it may be hoped profitable, in some of the foregoing chapters; and prolonged a.n.a.lyses of form are tedious, except to the expert and the enthusiast. With some brief account, therefore, of the persons who chiefly composed this remarkable ma.s.s of lyric we may close a notice of the subject which is superficially inadequate to its importance, but which, perhaps, will not seem so to those who are content not merely to count pages but to weigh moments. The moment which Provencal added to the general body of force in European literature was that of a limited, somewhat artificial, but at the same time exquisitely artful and finished lyrical form, so adapted to the most inviting of the perennial motives of literature that it was sure to lead to imitation and development. It gave means and held up models to those who were able to produce greater effects than are to be found in its own accomplishment: yet was not its accomplishment, despite what is called its monotony, despite its limits and its defects, other than admirable and precious.

[Sidenote: _Some troubadours._]

The "first warbler," Count William IX. of Poitiers, has already been mentioned, and his date fixed at exactly the first year of our period.

His chief immediate successors or contemporaries were Cercamon ("Cherchemonde," _Cursor Mundi_); the above quoted Marcabrun, who is said to have accompanied Cercamon in his wanderings, and who has left much more work; and Bertrand de Ventadorn or Ventadour, perhaps the best of the group, a farmer's son of the place from which he takes his n.o.ble-sounding name, and a professional lover of the lady thereof. Of Jaufre (Geoffrey) Rudel of Blaye, whose love for the lady of Tripoli, never yet seen by him, and his death at first sight of her, supply, with the tragedy of Cabestanh and the cannibal banquet, the two most famous pieces of Troubadour anecdotic history, we have half-a-dozen pieces. In succession to these, Count Rambaut of Orange and Countess Beatrice of Die keep up the reputation of the _gai saber_ as an aristocratic employment, and the former's poem--

"Escoutatz mas no sai que s'es"

(in six-lined stanzas, rhymed _ababab_, with prose "tags" to each, something in the manner of the modern comic song), is at least a curiosity. The primacy of the whole school in its most flouris.h.i.+ng time, between 1150 and 1250, is disputed by Arnaut Daniel (a great master of form, and as such venerated by his greater Italian pupils) and Giraut de Bornelh, who is more fully represented in extant work than most of his fellows, as we have more than fourscore pieces of his. Peire or Peter Vidal, another typical troubadour, who was a crusader, an exceedingly ingenious verse-smith, a great lover, and a proficient in the fantastic pranks which rather brought the school into discredit, inasmuch as he is said to have run about on all fours in a wolfskin in honour of his mistress Loba (Lupa); Gaucelm Faidit and Arnaut de Maroilh, Folquet of Ma.r.s.eilles, and Rambaut of Vaqueras; the Monk of Montaudon and Bertrand de Born himself, who with Peire Cardinal is the chief satirist (though the satire of the two takes different forms); Guillem Figueira, the author of a long invective against Rome, and Sordello of mysterious and contingent fame,--are other chief members, and of some of them we have early, perhaps contemporary, _Lives_, or at least anecdotes. For instance, the Cabestanh or Cabestaing story comes from these. The last name of importance in our period, if not the last of the right troubadours, is usually taken to be that of Guiraut Riquier.

[Sidenote: _Criticism of Provencal._]

It would scarcely be fair to say that the exploit attributed to Rambaut of Vaqueras, a poet of the very palmiest time, at the juncture of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries--that of composing a poem in lines written successively in three different forms of Provencal (_langue d'oc_ proper, Gascon, and Catalan), in _langue d'ol_, and in Italian, with a _coda_ line jumbled up of all five--is a final criticism at once of the merits and the defects of this literature.

But it at least indicates the lines of such a criticism. By its marvellous suppleness, sweetness, and adaptation to the verbal and metrical needs of poetry, Provencal served--in a fas.h.i.+on probably impossible to the stiffer if more virile tongues--as an example in point of form to these tongues themselves: and it achieved, at the same time with a good deal of mere gymnastic, exercises in form of the most real and abiding beauty. But it had as a language too little character of its own, and was too fatally apt to shade into the other languages--French on the one hand, Spanish and Italian on the other--with which it was surrounded, and to which it was akin. And coming to perfection at a time when no modern thought was distinctly formed, when positive knowledge was at a low ebb, and when it had neither the stimulus of vigorous national life nor the healthy occupation of what may be called varied literary business, it tended to become, on the whole, too much of a plaything merely. Now, schools and playgrounds are both admirable things, and necessary to man; but what is done in both is only an exercise or a relaxation from exercise. Neither man nor literature can stay either in cla.s.s-room or playing-field for ever, and Provencal had scarcely any other places of abode to offer.

CHAPTER IX.

THE LITERATURE OF THE PENINSULAS.

LIMITATIONS OF THIS CHAPTER. LATE GREEK ROMANCE. ITS DIFFICULTIES AS A SUBJECT. ANNA COMNENA, ETC. 'HYSMINIAS AND HYSMINE.' ITS STYLE. ITS STORY. ITS HANDLING. ITS "DECADENCE." LATENESS OF ITALIAN. THE "SARACEN" THEORY. THE "FOLK-SONG" THEORY. CIULLO D'ALCAMO. HEAVY DEBT TO FRANCE.

YET FORM AND SPIRIT BOTH ORIGINAL. LOVE-LYRIC IN DIFFERENT EUROPEAN COUNTRIES. POSITION OF SPANISH. CATALAN-PROVENcAL.

GALICIAN-PORTUGUESE. CASTILIAN. BALLADS? THE 'POEMA DEL CID.' A SPANISH "CHANSON DE GESTE." IN SCHEME AND SPIRIT.

DIFFICULTIES OF ITS PROSODY. BALLAD-METRE THEORY.

IRREGULARITY OF LINE. OTHER POEMS. APOLLONIUS AND MARY OF EGYPT. BERCEO. ALFONSO EL SABIO.

[Sidenote: _Limitations of this chapter._]

There is something more than a freak, or a mere geographical adaptation, in taking together, and at the last, the contributions of the three peninsulas which form the extreme south of Europe. For in the present scheme they form, as it were, but an appendix to the present book. The dying literature of Greece--if indeed it be not more proper to describe this phase of Byzantine writing as ghostly rather than moribund--presents at most but one point of interest, and that rather a _Frage_, a thesis, than a solid literary contribution. The literature of Italy prior to the fourteenth century is such a daughter of Provencal on the one hand, and is so much more appropriately to be taken in connection with Dante than by itself on the other, that it can claim admission only to be, as it were, "laid on the table." And that of Spain, though full of attraction, had also but just begun, and yields but one certain work of really high importance, the _Poema del Cid_, for serious comment in our pages. In the case of Spain, and still more in that of Italy, the scanty honour apparently paid here will be amply made up in other volumes of the series. As much can hardly be said of Greece. Conscientious chroniclers of books may, indeed, up to the sixteenth century find something which, though scarcely literature, is at any rate written matter. And at the very last there is the attempt, rather respectable than successful, to re-create at once the language and the literature, for the use of Greeks who are at least questionably h.e.l.lenic, in relation to forms and subjects separated by more than a millennium--by nearly two millennia--from the forms and the subjects in regard to which Greek was once a living speech. But Greek literature, the living literary contribution of Greek to Europe, almost ceases with the latest poets of the Anthology.

[Sidenote: _Late Greek romance._]

In what has been called the "ghost" time, however, in that portion of it which belongs to our present period, there is one shadow that flutters with a nearer approach to substance than most. Some glance has been made above at the question, "What was the exact relation between western romance and that later form of Greek novel-writing of which the chief relic is the _Hysminias and Hysmine_[180] of Eustathius Macrembolita?" Were these stories, many of which must be lost, or have not yet been recovered, direct, and in their measure original and independent, continuations of the earlier school of Greek romance proper? Did they in that case, through the Crusades or otherwise, come under the notice of the West, and serve as stimulants, if not even directly as patterns, to the far greater achievements of Western romance itself? Do they, on the other hand, owe something to models still farther East? Or are they, as has sometimes been hinted, copies of Western romance itself? Had the still ingenious, though hopelessly effeminate, Byzantine mind caught up the literary style of the visitors it feared but could not keep out?

[Footnote 180: Ed. Hercher, _Erotici Scriptores Graeci_ (2 vols., Leipzig, 1858), ii. 161-286.]

[Sidenote: _Its difficulties as a subject._]

All these questions are questions exceedingly proper to be stated in a book of this kind; not quite so proper to be worked out in it, even if the working out were possible. But it is impossible for two causes--want of room, which might not be fatal; and want of ascertained fact, which cannot but be so. Despite the vigorous work of recent generations on all literary and historical subjects, no one has yet succeeded, and until some one more patient of investigation than fertile in theory arises, no one is likely to succeed, in laying down the exact connection between Eastern, Western, and, as go-between, Byzantine literature. Even in matters which are the proper domain of history itself, such as those of the Trojan and Alexandrine Apocryphas, much is still in the vague. In the case of Western Romance, of the later Greek stories, and of such Eastern matter as, for instance, the story of Sharkan and that of Zumurrud and her master in the _Arabian Nights_, the vague rules supreme. There were, perhaps, _trouvere_-knights in the garrisons of Edessa or of Jof who could have told us all about it. But n.o.body did tell: or if anybody did, the tale has not survived.

[Sidenote: _Anna Comnena, &c._]

But this interest of problem is not the only one that attaches to the "drama," as he calls it, of Eustathius or Eumathius "the philosopher,"

who flourished at some time between the twelfth and the fourteenth century, and is therefore pretty certainly ours. For the purposes of literary history the book deserves to be taken as the typical contribution of Greek during the period, much better than the famous _Alexiad_ of Anna Comnena[181] in history, or the verse romances of Eustathius's probable contemporaries Theodorus Prodromus and Nicetas Eugenia.n.u.s.[182] The princess's book, though historically important, and by no means disagreeable to read, is, as literature, chiefly remarkable as exhibiting the ease and the comparative success with which Greek lent itself to the formation of an artificial _style n.o.ble_, more like the writing of the average (not the better) Frenchman of the eighteenth century than it is like anything else. It is this peculiarity which has facilitated the construction of the literary _pastiche_ called Modern Greek, and perhaps it is this which will long prevent the production of real literature in that language or pseudo-language. On the other hand, the books of Theodorus and Nicetas, devoted, according to rule, to the loves respectively of Rhodanthe and Dosicles, of Charicles and Drosilla, are written in iambic trimeters of the very worst and most wooden description. It is doubtful whether even the great Tragic poets could have made the trimeter tolerable as the vehicle of a long story. In the hands of Theodorus and Nicetas its monotony becomes utterly sickening, while the level of the composition of neither is much above that of a by no means gifted schoolboy, even if we make full allowance for the changes in prosody, and especially in quant.i.ty, which had set in for Greek as they had for other languages. The question whether these iambics are more or less terrible than the "political verses"[183] of the Wise Mana.s.ses,[184] which usually accompany them in editions, and which were apparently inserted in what must have been the inconceivably dreary romance of "Aristander and Callithea," must be left to individual taste to decide. Mana.s.ses also wrote a History of the World in the same rhythm, and it is possible that he may have occasionally forgotten which of the two books he was writing at any given time.

[Footnote 181: Ed. Reifferscheid. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1884.]