Provencal Language and Literature

Origin.

It took poetic form ; and its oldest monuments show a relative perfection and a variety from which it may be concluded that poetry had already received a considerable development. The honour of being the oldest literary monument of the Provencal language must be assigned to a fragment of 257 decasyllabic verses preserved in an Orleans ms. and frequently edited and anno tated since it was first printed by Raynouard in 1817 in his Choix des poesies originates des troubadours. The writing of the ms. is of the first half of the iith century. The peculiarities of the lan guage point to the north of the Provencal region, probably Limou sin or Marche. It is the beginning of a poem in which the unknown author, taking Boethius's treatise De consolatione philosophise as the groundwork of his composition, adopts and develops its ideas and gives them a Christian colouring of which there is no trace in the original. Thus from some verses in which Boethius con trasts his happy youth with his afflicted old age he draws a lengthy homily on the necessity of laying up from early years a treasure of good works. A little later, at the close of the same century, we have the poems of William IX., count of Poitiers, duke of Guienne. They consist of i I very diverse strophic pieces, and were meant to be sung. We also know from Ordericus Vitalis that William IX. had composed various poems on the incidents of his ill-fated expe dition to the Holy Land in Ho'. And it must further be men tioned that in one of his pieces (Ben mil que sapchon li plusor) he makes a very clear allusion to a kind of poetry which we know only by the specimens of later date, the partimen, or, as it is called in France, the jeu parti. William IX. was born in 1071 and died in 1127. The contrast in form and subject between the Boethius poem and the stanzas of William IX. is an indication that by the I I th century Provencal poetry was being rapidly developed in various directions. Whence came this poetry? How and by whose work was it formed? That it has no connection whatever with Latin poetry is generally admitted. The view which seems to meet with general acceptance, though it has not been distinctly formu lated by any one, is that Romanic poetry sprang out of a popu lar poetry quietly holding its place from the Roman times, no specimen of which has survived—just as the Romanic languages are only continuations with local modifications of Vulgar Latin. There are both truth and error in this opinion. Romanic versifica tion, as it appears in the Boethius poem and the verses of William IX., and a little farther north in the poem of the Passion and the Life of St. Leger (Ioth or I I th century), has with all its variety some general and permanent characteristics; it is rhymed, and it is composed of a definite number of syllables certain of which have the syllabic accent. This form has evident affinity with the rhythmic Latin versification, of which specimens exist from the close of the Roman empire in ecclesiastical poetry. The exact type of Romanic verse is not found, however, in this ecclesiastical Latin poetry; the latter was not popular. However, it may be assumed that there was a popular rhythmic poetry from which Romanic verse is derived.

Again, as regards the substance, the poetic material, we find nothing in the earliest Provencal which is strictly popular. The extremely personal compositions of William IX. have nothing in common with folk-lore. They are subjective poetry addressed to a very limited and probably rather aristocratic audience. The same may be said of the Boethius poem, though it belongs to the quite different species of edifying literature; at any rate it is not popular poetry. Vernacular compositions seem to have been at first produced for the amusement, or in the case of religious poetry, for the edification, of that part of lay society which had leisure and lands, and reckoned intellectual pastime among the good things of life. Gradually this class, intelligent, but with no Latin education, enlarged the circle of its ideas. In the 12th century, and still more in the 13th, historical works and popular treatises on contemporary science were composed for its use in the only language it understood; and vernacular literature continued gradu ally to develop partly on original lines and partly by borrowing from the literature of the "clerks."

From what class of persons then did it proceed? Latin chroni clers of the middle ages mention as ioculares, ioculatores, men of a class not very highly esteemed whose profession consisted in amusing their audience either by what we still call jugglers' tricks, by exhibiting performing animals, or by recitation and song. They are called joglars in Provencal, jonglers or jongleurs in French ; and they were the first authors of poetry in the vernacular both in the south and in the north of France. (See Edmond Faral, Les Jongleurs en France an moyen age, Paris, 191o, and R. Menendez Pidal, Poesia juglaresca y juglares, Madrid, Poetry of the Troubadours.—Centres of poetic activity are found first in Limousin and Gascony. In Limousin lived a vis count of Ventadour, Eble, who during the second part of Wil liam of Poitiers's life seems to have been brought into relation with him, and according to a contemporary historian, Geffrei, prior of Vigeois, erat valde gratiosus in cantilenis. We possess none of his compositions; but under his influence Bernart of Ven tadour was trained to poetry. Bernart gained the love of the lady of Ventadour, and when on the discovery of their amour he had to depart elsewhere, received a gracious welcome from Eleanor of Guienne, consort (from 1152) of Henry II. of England. Of Ber nart's compositions we possess about so songs of elegant simplicity, some of which may be taken as the most perfect specimens of love poetry Provencal literature has ever produced. At the same pe riod, or earlier, flourished Cercamon, a Gascon, who composed, says his old biographer, "pastorals" according to the ancient cus tom (pastorelas a la uzansa antiga). Among the earliest trouba dours is Marcabrun, a pupil of Cercamon's, from whose pen we have about 4o pieces, those which can be approximately dated ranging from 1135 to 1148 or thereabout. His songs, several of which are historical, are free from the commonplaces of their class, and contain curious strictures on the corruptions of the time.

We cannot here do more than enumerate the leading trouba dours and briefly indicate in what conditions their poetry was developed and through what circumstances it fell into decay and finally disappeared: Peter of Auvergne (Peire d'Alvernha), who in certain respects must be classed with Marcabrun; Arnaut Daniel, remarkable for his complicated versification, the inventor of the sestina, a poetic form for which Dante and Petrarch express an admiration difficult for us to understand ; Arnaut of Mareuil, who, while less famous than Arnaut Daniel, certainly surpasses him in elegant simplicity of form and delicacy of sentiment; Bertran de Born, now the most generally known of all the trouba dours on account of the part he is said to have played both by his sword and his sirventescs in the struggle between Henry II. of England and his rebel sons, though the importance of his part in the events of the time seems to have been greatly exaggerated; Peire Vidal of Toulouse, a poet of varied inspiration who grew rich with gifts bestowed on him by the greatest nobles of his time; Guiraut de Borneil, lo maestre dels trobadors, and at any rate master in the art of the so-called "close" style (trobar clus), though he has also left us some songs of charming simplicity; Gaucelm Faidit, from whom we have a touching lament (plank) on the death of Richard Coeur de Lion ; Folquet of Marseilles, the most powerful thinker among the poets of the south, who from being a troubadour became first a monk, then an abbot, and finally bishop of Toulouse (d. 1231).

The troubadours could hardly expect to obtain a livelihood from any other quarter than the generosity of the great. It will consequently be well to mention the most important at least of those princes who are known to have been patrons and some of them practisers of the poetic art. They are arranged approximately in geographical order, and after each are inserted the names of those troubadours with whom they were connected.

France.—ELEANOR OF GUIENNE, Bernart de Ventadour (Venta dorn) ; HENRY CURTMANTLE, son of Henry II. of England, Ber tran de Born ( ?) ; RICHARD COEUR DE LION, Arnaut Daniel, Peire Vidal, Folquet of Marseilles, Gaucelm Faidit ; ERMENGARDE OF