caused to be translated into Flemish. Of such poets who worked for the Fleming, Chrestien of Troyes was chief. The Flemings themselves had their trouvères or troubadours under the name of Vinder, and their wandering story-tellers, called Spreker or Zegger, and even the Flemish noble would put off his courtly robes and seek applause as a wandering minstrel, in which case he was called a Gezel. Provençal. Meanwhile in Provence very many preferred the spinning of emptily ingenious love-song to the telling of good stories. The close of a song by the Count of Poitou, father of King Henry the Second's Eleanor, runs thus, to the sense that he has made a verse of he knows not whom and will transmit it to whoever can send him back the key to it from her own keeping "Fag ai lo vers no sai de cui, E trametrai lo à celui Que lo m trametra per autrui Lai ves Anjau, Que m tramezes del seu estui Musical trifling is the chief characteristic of the Provençal love poem; musical trifling is also the chief characteristic of the sirventes or service poems—written in service of some chief—on any other theme. Many of these pieces were mere exercises of rhyming skill, cut like clothes to a fashion; mere intellectual tailoring; and when they were most earnest had seldom more than a beast's animal feeling to express with a man's grace of wit and melody of speech. But the troubadour of southern Europe, who in the twelfth century began to represent new forms of culture in the *It is the first poem in the "Parnasse Occatanien, ou Choix des Poésies Originales des Troubadours (Toulouse, 1819). Troubadours and jongleurs. halls of princes and nobles, only modified the customs of older institutions, which lived on in them. The scóp and gleeman of First-English poetry must have been parts of a system widely spread; and under different names in different lands they represented the position of the poet at an early stage of civilisation. The scóp invented and often also recited; the gleeman recited, and otherwise provided entertainment as musician, conjurer, rope-dancer.* Exactly similar was the relation of the troubadour to the jongleur. The jongleur of the south of Europe always lived by his craft as an entertainer of the rich. He chanted tales with action; when he was especially a story-teller, he was called comtaire; and his dramatic method gave him the Latin name of mimus, or the Provençal contrafazeire. He played music; and Guirant de Calanson, a troubadour, sang of the jongleur that he ought to be able to play at least nine instruments. He had choice of many-the monocord, the rote with seventeen strings, the fiddle, psaltery, sackbut, lyre, castanets, drum, trumpet ; there are nine. The art of music had been little elaborated, and the ears of the polite sought nothing higher than either the melody of dainty little tunes, or an expressive accompaniment to a tale told in dramatic recitative. The jongleur of Provence might add rope-dancing and conjuring to his accomplishments; he might imitate the songs of birds, or he might bring in an entertainment of trained dogs, or other animals. But he must have skill as a musician. The jongleur was named from his jocus, which in middle Latin chiefly meant the play of music. The troubadour, named from the Provençal trobaire, trobador-the finder or inventor-was a scóp of the twelfth century, and, like the scóp, a companion of chiefs, often himself a warrior. The exercise of his art was now associated with the forms of chivalry, and he often was a * "E. W." II. 13-17. knight or noble who disdained to look on his art as a means of livelihood. The troubadour might or might not be one who sought reward from the use of his skill; the jongleur always and only exercised his skill for pay. The more courtly troubadours drew partly from the Arabs their pleasure in a cunning interweaving of rhymes and their faith in words of love as the material for such works of art. They called their skill an art-art de trobar—and often expressed pride in works from which no line could be taken away without hurt to the cunningly constructed music. It was thus that there grew out of the old national poetry, which still had vigour in its stem, a branch of court poetry which blossomed in the utterances of the troubadours. The defect of the court poetry was that it appealed rather to the ear than to the mind. As in our First-English civilisation, the scóp who could not himself sing or recite would give his work to be recited in hall by a gleeman, so the troubadour who wanted skill in music delivered his inventions to a jongleur, who was his servant, and who usually was left to take the gifts earned by the song. But to a knightly troubadour, who himself by invention and song contributed to pleasure of the feast in hall, a horse, arms, or rich raiment would be the gift, if he accepted gifts. Large liberality in giving was encouraged by the singers. One chief was advised to have no bolts to his doors, and no hall-porters to drive out any who might come; one chief is said to have spent half his lands in gifts; another, as he became poor, took to plundering his neighbours, and justified himself by saying that he did not rob for his own gain, he robbed from others that he might be liberal in gifts. Among the chief patrons of the Provençal troubadours was Richard Cœur de Lion, Count of Poitou from 1169 to 1199, and who in 1189 succeeded Henry II. as King of England. His ten years' reign from Cœur de men. 1189 to 1199 quickened the love of song in courtly EnglishIt quickened culture also by fresh contact with the Saracens, whose minds had much to give. The twelfth century contains the golden time of the court poetry of the troubadours. In the thirteenth century its characters became effaced by growth, not by decay, it rose to higher life, and helped towards the shaping of the full poet. in Dante, who united grace of form to energy of thought, and allied both to the deepest interests of life in the Divine Comedy, which took for its date of action the year 1300.* Norman French. The more vigorous northern France, of which the power has been shown by the subsequent triumph of the Langue d'Oil over the Langue d'Oc as the tongue of the French nation, had its love-songs too, after the Provençal fashion, in a language clearly testifying its relation to the French of later times. Thus, for example, almost in French of to-day, ran a song of the Langue d'Oïl in the year 1160: 66 Quand florist la violette Et ferai Chanson joliette Pour l'amour de m'amiette Où grand pièça me donnai.” But while in the south of France the light word-music held its ground, music of thought and action seized more firmly on the Norman French. The Scandinavian and Teutonic *For the best recent study of the Troubadours see "Die Poesie der Troubadours. Nach gedrückten und handschriftlichen Werken derselben dargestellt von Friedrich Diez. Zweite vermehrte Auflage von Karl Bartsch" (Leipzig, 1883). blood that gave new life and energy to their region of France was only to be stirred by records or by songs of action. They desired only such works of fancy as imagined noble or strong deeds as patterns of all that was most to be cared for by a masterful and busy race. They could enjoy also a literature astir with lively record of things done and suffered. The branch of court literature that grew out of the stem of their national poetry put out few blossoms. Their leaning was to the true literature that comes of a nation's mind and heart. In Germany, as we have seen, the kindred mind was at work. German. Tacitus tells us that the ancient Germans celebrated in songs their heroes and their battles, the victory of Arminius over Varus in the Teutoberg Forest being a century afterwards renowned in song. The old heroic tale of Horny Sigfrid, the Dragon Slayer, and the animal story, really Flemish in its origin, of Reynard the Fox and Isegrim the Wolf, that in every turn refers to human character and action, are said to have come down in tradition even from the fourth century. Reynard or Reinaert first entered into literature as a Flemish poem in 1150, and a more erudite and philosophical second part was added to it in the course of the next century. Sigfrid became nearly at the same time the hero of the NibelungenLied. Reinaert (or High-German Reinard), which had for its Flemish or Low-German diminutive Reineke, became among the Franks so popular as Reynard, that in remote time the name of the story supplanted the old French name for a fox, goupil. King Arthur was hardly seated on his throne of Romance (the tales of him in the Romance language first giving the name of Romance to such stories of * * This has been shown by Mr. J. E. Willems, quoted in "A Sketch of the History of Flemish Literature and its Celebrated Authors from the 12th Century down to the Present Time." By Octave Delepierre, LL.D. (London, 1860). |