is no part of the task of the historian of English literature. It is necessary, however, that the English student should have some general knowledge of the matter; otherwise he would very imperfectly understand the course of English poetry in this and in the following period. The French poetry of the age was divided into two schools, the Norman and the Provençal. The poets of the one were called Trouvères, those of the other, Troubadours. The language of the one was the Langue d'oil, that of the other the Langue d'oc.' The poetry of the Trouverès was mostly epic in its character; that of the Troubadours mostly lyric. Each most probably arose independently of the other, although that of the Troubadours sprang the soonest into full maturity, as it was also the first to decline and pass away. The origin of the Provençal literature is to be sought in the amicable intercourse which subsisted during the ninth and tenth centuries between the Moorish and the Christian states of Spain, resulting for the latter in their acquaintance with, and imitation of, the Arabic poetry and prose fiction. The poems of those children of the burning South were distinguished by an almost idolatrous exaltation of the female sex, and an inexhaustible inventiveness in depicting every phase, and imagining every condition, of the passion of love. The Catalan minstrels took up the strain in their own language, which was a variety of the langue d'oc; and from Catalonia, upon its being united to a portion of Provence, in 1092, under Raymond Berenger, Count of Barcelona, the newly kindled flame of romantic sentiment and idealising passion passed into the South of France, and gave birth to the poetry of the Troubadours. Of this poetry, love is the chief, though not the sole, inspiration. It neglects the realities of life; it is impatient of historical themes which require learning and toil; it is essentially So called from the different words signifying 'yes' in the two languages. fugitive-subjective--conventional. In a certain sense it may be called abstract poetry, since throughout a large portion of it the reader is removed from the world of concrete existences, and placed in an imaginary realm, peopled by beings who own no laws but the conventional decrees of a Court of Love, and know no higher ambition than that of being a successful suitor. Such a style evidently contains within itself the germ of a certain dissolution, unless it admit of change and enrichment from without. But external circumstances accelerated the fall of the literature of the Troubadours; the bloody wars of which the south of France was the theatre during the early part of the thirteenth century, silenced the minstrel's lute, and substituted the wail of the mourner for the song of the lover. Attempts were subsequently made, down even to the fifteenth century, to revive the ancient style; but they failed to impart to it more than a transient and factitious vitality. But in its flourishing time the Gay Science was eagerly cultivated in every part of Western Europe, and kings were proud to rank themselves among its members. Our own Richard Coeur-de-Lion not only entertained at his court some of the most celebrated Troubadours of Provence, but himself composed several sirventes which are still extant. A tenson, the joint composition of himself and his favourite minstrel Blondel, is said, according to the well-known story in Matthew Paris, to have been the means of Blondel's discovering the place of the king's confinement in Germany. The Almost the whole of the poetry of the Troubadours falls under two heads; the tenson and the sirvente.1 former was a kind of literary duel, or dialogue controversial, between two rival Troubadours, on some knotty point of amatory ethics, and often took place before, and Tenson is connected by Raynouard with 'contention.' Ducange explains sirventes as 'poemata in quibus servientium, seu militum, facta et servitia referuntur.' was decided by, a Court of Love. To these courts we shall again have occasion to refer when we come to speak of Chaucer. The latter was employed on themes of war or politics or satire. Among the most eminent composers of sirventes were Bertrand de Born, the gifted knight of Périgord, whose insidious suggestions kept alive for years the feud which divided our Henry II. and his sons,Peyrols, a knight of Auvergne,-and Sordello of Mantua. Bertrand and Sordello both figure in the great poem of Dante, the one in the Inferno, the other in the Purgatorio. Poems by these, and many other Troubadours, may be found in the great work of M. Raynouard on the Provençal poetry. But the poetry of the Trouvères had a far more important and lasting influence over our early English literature than that of the Troubadours. We may arrange it under four heads :-Romances, Fabliaux, Satires, and Historical Poetry. To the first head belong, besides a great number of poems on separate subjects, four great epic cycles of romance; the first relating to Charlemagne, the second to Arthur and the Round Table, the third to the crusades for the Recovery of the Holy Sepulchre, and the fourth to the ancient world and its heroes, especially Alexander the Great. Of the romances relating to Charlemagne, the oldest is the Chanson de Roland, a narrative of the last battle and death of the brave Roland on the field of Roncesvalles. This poem, although, in the shape in which we now have it, it was not written down earlier than the twelfth century, in its primitive form is believed to date from the reign of Louis le Débonnaire. The metre is the ten-syllable rhyming couplet. Among the more celebrated pieces in this cycle are the Four Sons of Aymon, Roland and Ferrabras, and Ogier le Danois. A direct proof of the high antiquity of some portions at least ' Démogect, Hist. de la Lit. Française. of the Charlemagne romance is found in the lines in which Richard Wace (who wrote about 1155) describes the proceedings of the Norman minstrel Taillefer, just before the battle of Hastings :- 'Taillefer, qui moult bien chantait, Sur un cheval qui tot allait, Qui moururent à Roncevaux.' The next cycle, that of Arthur, was unquestionably founded upon the national and patriotic songs of Wales and Britanny. At the courts of the petty kingdoms of Wales, which for centuries, while the Saxons were fighting with each other or struggling against the Danes, seem to have enjoyed comparative prosperity and peace, the Welsh bards, feeding their imagination on the memory of the gallant stand made by their patriotic prince against the Teutonic hordes, gradually wove a beautiful tissue of romantic poetry, of which the central figure was Arthur. The songs in which his exploits were celebrated naturally made their way among their self-exiled brethren in Brittany, and, perhaps, were by them added to and embellished. From Britanny they easily passed into the rest of France, and by the congenial imaginations of the Norman poets were eagerly welcomed. This is the direct influence of Britanny upon the formation of the Arthur cycle; and it is exemplified in the romance of Iwain or Owen, composed in French by Chrétien of Troyes, about the year 1160, after the Breton original by Jehann Vaour. There was also an indirect or reflex influence, communicated through the British history of Geoffrey of Monmouth, which, as we have seen, is stated by its author to have been translated from a work in the Breton language. Geoffrey reproduced this work in Latin, adding probably a good deal from original Welsh sources, and the result was the Historia Britonum. This Latin history became exceedingly popular, and was resorted to by the Trouvères as a secondary mine of information respecting Arthur and the Round Table. The earliest form of these French romances was unquestionably metrical, but it has happened that the original poems have in some instances been lost, so that the oldest existing versions of portions of the cycle are in French prose. The authors of these prose versions-Luke Gast, Walter Map, and Robert Borronappear to have been all natives of England. Among them are found Merlin, The Quest of the Saint Graal, and Mort Artur. Of the third cycle, that relating to the crusades, the most important piece is the famous romance of Richard Coeurde-Lion. The French original is not known to exist, but there is an English metrical translation, dating probably from the reign of Edward I., which is of great interest. It abounds in marvellous or miraculous details, which, however, there is reason to suppose, were not in the original romance, (which was of the nature of a true heroic poem, and contemporaneous with the crusade itself), but added by succeeding Norman minstrels in the course of the thirteenth century.' The leading poem of the fourth cycle is the Alexandreis, the joint work of Lambert li Cors and Alexander of Paris, published in 1184. The extraordinary success of this poem caused the metre in which it was composed (the twelve-syllable rhyming couplet) to be known thenceforth by the name of Alexandrine. The Fabliau, or Metrical Tale, aimed, not at singing the actions of heroes, but at describing, in an amusing, striking way, the course of real life. It was to the chivalrous romance what comedy is to tragedy--comedy, that is to say, like that of Menander, not like that of 1 See Ellis's Specimens of Early English Romances, vol ii. p. 93. |