Lewis Freeman Mott

"In the ancient land of vintage and dance and sun-burnt mirth, there resounded during the Middle Ages a sweet chorus of song, which was the delight, not only of the native lords and ladies, but of cultivated society in all neighboring countries. Spreading to France, Spain, Germany and Italy, its underlying ideas and fancies furnished the basis of much that is greatest in medieval literature. Its sudden appearance, its rapid development, its brief glory, and its untimely extinction, invest this lyric outburst with a special, almost tragic, interest."

"The poetry of the troubadours was essentially social in character. Unlike Goethe's minstrel, who sang as the bird among the branches, these bards exercised their art for the sake of applause and gain,—a recompense which could be won only by pleasing the knights and ladies gathered at the court of some wealthy and noble patron. Of the three classes into which feudal society was divided—commons, clergy and nobles—the last alone possessed either the means or the desire to reward literary and musical skill. It was to this class, therefore, to the Counts of Provence and Toulouse, to Eleanore of Aquitaine and Ermengarde of Narbonne, to Richard the Lionhearted and Alfonso of Aragon, that the Provençal lyric was addressed."

"In the eleventh century the nobility, which had previously been terribly rough and barbarous, began to grow more refined. Under the influence of favorable conditions, chivalry was developed. Particularly in the south of France, where wealth had long accumulated and where, through rights, taxes and the sale of privileges, it flowed largely into the hands of the great lords, the delight in life became conspicuous. Prodigality was the fashion. As in the Elizabethan age in England, the love of splendor manifested itself particularly in gorgeousness of dress and magnificence of entertainments. A host of attendants accompanied the man of rank, and the ideal prince bestowed gifts lavishly and without thought upon knights, squires, and, above all, upon jongleurs.These jongleurs—the successors of the Latin Mimi—supplied entertainment to the commons at the fairs and to the higher classes at their feasts. The meaner kind not only recited, sang and played on musical instruments, but performed as jugglers, dancers, acrobats and exhibitors of trained animals. But the courtly singers were not of this order. Though mostly professional minstrels, they were not infrequently the friends and companions of princes. When they wandered from castle to castle, they were honorably received; when they attached themselves to some particular patron, they were caressed and richly paid. We are told that one great lord was so highly pleased with the first song of Aimeric de Pegulhan that he gave him his own palfrey and the very clothes he wore."

"Illiterate and yet cultivated, these lords and ladies demanded of their poets a strict adherence to generally recognized conventional forms, and, at the same time, an elaboration of artificial conceits and an originality of metrical complication, which gave pleasure in the feeling of difficulties overcome.The conventionalism, both in ideas and in forms, must be obvious to every reader. Instead of the description of nature, we find vague references to green meadows, fragrant flowers, and singing birds. It is the same with the expression of love. The griefs and joys of the lover, his hopes and cares, are set forth in general terms. The detail that would give life to the picture is conspicuously absent. Even in the most personal songs of affection, sorrow or hatred, there is the same indefiniteness of image. A fund of materials was accumulated from which all could draw. The chief demand upon the poet was that these materials should be perpetually rearranged in slightly varied combinations."

"Just as the ideas settled into a system, so the free forms of popular poetry also hardened into categories, so that later writers were enabled to set down a code of almost absolute laws. Even very early care for form became excessive. As a general rule, the rhymes of every stanza throughout a poem are identical; there was an effort to devise new kinds of poetry; complicated rhyming schemes were invented; to these were added word-play, alliteration and forced constructions; difficulties of every kind were sought. Some poets even boasted it as a merit that they could not be understood.This artificiality and elaboration seem strange when we remember that neither the poets nor their audiences were really educated people. Some few authors, it is true, possessed a slight acquaintance with the Classics,—enough to make an occasional allusion to Ovid,—but there were many who could not even read their native tongue. These, of course, transmitted their songs orally to the jongleur, who preserved both words and music in his memory."

"A jongleur was one who, either as author or performer, made poetry and music a profession. The name troubadour, on the other hand, was reserved for him who composed, whether for money or merely for pleasure. It is among the troubadours, therefore, that we find the greatest variety of personages. Some were peasants or townsmen, some poor knights, some unfrocked priests or monks. Such made a living by song. Their rivals in fame, though not in pecuniary reward, included powerful barons, princes, and even kings. Music and verse, it must be remembered, were inseparable, and the author was almost invariably the composer as well. Those who could sing, moreover, produced their own compositions to the accompaniment of the fiddle or the harp; others employed professional singers, who frequently carried the song to a distant patron or friend."

"There was the vers, a simple, early form, which developed into the canso. This was an elaborate poem, of from five to seven stanzas, dealing always with the subject of love, and requiring a melody of its own. On the other hand, from the sirventesc love was properly excluded, and it was written to fit some well-known and popular air. The subject was moral or religious, political or personal. In the planh the poet lamented the death of his patron, or his lady-love. A most curious form was the tenso, a play of wit, in which, usually with great personal bitterness, two poets debated, in alternate stanzas, such questions as: Which are the greater, the benefits or the ills of love? Which contribute most to keep a lover faithful, the eyes or the heart? Which loves the more deeply, one who can not keep from speaking to everyone of his lady, or one who does not speak of her at all, but thinks of her night and day?Such questions of love causistry are thoroughly characteristic of the social element in the troubadour poetry. They are questions of which the knights and ladies seemed never weary."

"The brilliant and worldly society, before whom the Provençal lyric was sung, lived under the domination of the ideals of chivalry, ideals which demanded that men should fight and that men should love. The poetry that would please this society must, therefore, bear the stamp of these same ideals and subject itself to the tyranny of the same narrow circle of thought. Religion could mostly be left to the close of life, except as it stirred warriors to battle for the Holy Sepulchre. The vast range of emotion open to a Burns, a Heine, a Hugo, lay in an untrodden, if not undreamed, region. The courtly singers, be their birth royal, noble or base, treat, with hardly an exception, of two subjects, and two subjects alone—of war and of love.The love, indeed, was of that peculiar sort termed lady-service. The object of affection was almost invariably a married woman of high rank, to whom the poet addressed his homage and his humble supplications. How much of real passion and how much of simulated adoration this relationship represented, it is impossible to discover. It is reasonable to believe, however, that, in general, the limits of propriety were strictly observed.Without doubt the burning phrases of the earliest troubadours expressed their true sentiments, and we can hardly believe that even the later poets were always confined to emotions purely Platonic. Yet, on the whole, the exaggerated anguish and the equally exaggerated joy, the unlimited praises, the assurances of absolute devotion and unchangeableness, the wishes, the hopes, the despairs of these lovers must be interpreted as we interpret the same sort of language addressed by needy suppliants to Queen Elizabeth of England.In Provence, rich heiresses married young, and after marriage they enjoyed much liberty. Becoming social queens, they patronized the poor singers, who in turn gratified their ladyships' vanity by prolonging and spreading the fame of their beauty. These singers, while professing love, professed also the deepest humility, a humility most strongly marked in those of much lower birth than the ladies they addressed. Every one of them proclaimed himself his lady's vassal, until this convention became so firmly established that even a king (Alfonso II) sang: "Her man, warranted and sworn, shall I now be, if it please her, before all other lords.""

"Every poet uttered the same exaggerated laments and praises. He would contrast his past joy with his present grief, and resolve to abandon song forever—a resolution, it may be said, that was rarely kept. Nothing could alleviate such pain, nor could words express it: joy is hateful, the mere thought of his loss is enough to slay the mourner; it were better to have died first, for the world seems miserable and worthless; all people are called upon to join in weeping, and curses are heaped upon false, traitorous, injurious Death. At the same time, the lady is represented as the best, noblest, completest, that could exist; she is the summit and the source of worth and virtue; with her everything splendid has sunk into the grave: may the Lord save her soul and place her among the saints in heaven."

"Again and again we find the same ideas expressed in the same language. In the Provençal lyric formalism crushed and annihilated all freshness and life."

"No field has offered better opportunities to our modern poets than the biographies of these wandering singers.They are biographies that, in this critical age, we cannot accept as truth; but what we reluctantly yield in the domain of fact, we cling to, with greater persistence, in the domain of poetry. Real events, the treasures of folk-lore, and the play of imaginative genius, have combined to mould these stories into shapes that cannot die.The jongleur, before he chanted a song, narrated the life-history upon which it was founded. Sometimes, perhaps, he told that which he knew; more frequently, however, he relied upon tradition, or even upon his own fancy. Thus were accumulated the materials for those tales of passion which have inspired succeeding poets from Dante to Swinburne and Browning, the Biographies of the Troubadours. In them are to be found tragedy and comedy, faithfulness and deception, affection, jealousy and hate. No one who reads them, with any belief in their accuracy, can help feeling that, when their heroes occupied the stage, the chief business of life was love.We read of Rudel, who was enamoured of the Countess of Tripoli, without ever having seen her, solely upon the reports of her beauty and virtue which he heard from pilgrims returning from the Holy Land. In her honor he made all his songs, and at last, in order that he might see her, he joined the Crusaders and began his voyage across the sea. But a great sickness fell upon him, and when he reached the haven he was dying. Yet he could thank God that, before his death, he had seen his lady. Within her arms he breathed his last, and she, in her grief, entered a convent that very day.Less tragic, but hardly less romantic, is a story of Peire Vidal, who at one time believed himself Emperor of Constantinople. In love with Madame Loba—a name that signifies wolf—he attired himself in a wolf-skin, allowed himself to be pursued in the mountains by huntsmen and hounds, and was almost killed for his pains.Guilhem de Balaruc, learning from a friend that a lover, reconciled to his sweetheart after a quarrel, has a happiness equal to that caused by the first interchange of affection, departs from his lady, insults her messengers, and refuses all offers of reconcilement. When he thinks it time to renew his courtship, it is she who is obdurate, and only after long efforts and the intervention of many friends, is he pardoned. The penance imposed upon him by the lady is severe. He must draw out the nail of his little finger, and send it to her with a song in which he declares his folly and expresses his sorrow for his fault. Both conditions he, of course, joyfully fulfils.Most famous of all, perhaps, is the story of Guilhem de Cabestaing. This knight fell under the suspicions of his lord, but, by pretending that his passion was for his lady's sister, and by enlisting her services in the imposture, he for some time escaped detection. At length, however, one of his own songs betrayed his secret. He was slain, and his heart was served to his lady at her repast. When informed what it was she had eaten unaware, she said: "My lord, you have given me so good a food to eat, that I will never again taste of any other." And casting herself from a lofty balcony, she died.In such wise has romantic fiction embellished the lives of the troubadours and reflected its splendor upon their songs. Other bards have celebrated an Achilles, a Roland, or a Siegfried, but these bards are themselves heroes of poetry.Among them all, there is none, perhaps, who is, at the same time, so distinguished for his own poems and for his legendary reputation, as Bertran de Born. Living during the eventful period of the wars between Henry II of England and his rebellious sons, and himself taking a prominent part in these contests, this singer represents, in the fullest degree, the warlike element in the Provençal lyric. Love, indeed, he sang, but his chief inspiration was the trumpet of battle. He was, in turn, in friendly and in hostile relations with all three of the young princes—with Henry, known as "the Young King," with Geoffrey, and with Richard of the Lion-heart."

"Even in the exhortations to the Crusades, love is often more prominent than duty toward God and the Church. Usually it was only at the close of life that the other world cast its shadow upon their thoughts. Many of them, atoning for lighter days by fasting and penance, ended their careers in the cloister."

"When Simon de Montfort destroyed the chivalry of Southern France, the troubadours perished from the earth. Some few, indeed, might keep alive a spark of the old spirit in foreign lands, but the flame was spent, and it could not be rekindled. In 1324 the townsmen of Toulouse tried to revivify the ancient lyric, but the Floral Games which they instituted, with prizes and degrees distributed before a great concourse of citizens, could not invigorate this child of chivalry. The old forms were maintained—indeed they were reduced to a science—and the lyric which had celebrated earthly passion now celebrated the love of the Virgin Mary and the love of God. Yet all real life had fled. The Provençal lyric was the offspring and the expression of chivalric society, and when that society died, this lyric died with it.It was no problem poetry, as so much of our recent verse pretends to be. Limited in range, and appealing to the fancy rather than to the heart, it produced no surpassing singer, no Burns, no Heine. But its influence still survives. Like a butterfly among the flowers, it flourished for its brief season, and then perished utterly. And yet, in the artistic impulse which it gave to poetic endeavor, in the civilizing and, with all its faults, elevating influence which it exerted upon European ideals, and in the passionate, tender and brave romance with which it has gifted succeeding generations, the Provençal lyric remains, and must remain, a precious—in truth, an invaluable—contribution to universal literature."