Dante and his circle, as well as the best of the troubadours, substituted for the "cortois" of the superficial Chrestien the "cor gentil," the noble heart, which they accounted more precious than rank and wealth and power. "Wherever there is virtue there is nobility," says Dante, "but where there is nobility there need not necessarily be virtue." A time had come when personal distinction was in every man's grasp, no matter whether he was learned or unlearned, a nobleman or a commoner. Certainly the commoner was never on an equality with the aristocrat, partly because he was dependent on the largess of the great. Even Dante was compelled to seek princely patronage, and not until the Renascence do we hear of writers whose sarcastic tongues were so dreaded that they became independent of charity.
In opposition to the monkish ideal of a contemplative life which had hitherto obtained, a new ideal, the ideal of the courtier's life, was upheld; ecclesiastical saintliness was contrasted with knightly honour. Beauty, which at the dawn of the Christian era had fallen into ill repute and had become associated with unholy, and even diabolical, practices, had again come into its kingdom. Above everything it was the beauty of woman which was re-discovered—or rather, in its new, spiritual sense, newly discovered—and claimed the enthusiasm and love of the best men of the period. After a thousand years of gloom and brutality, joy and culture shed their radiance on a renewed world. The ideal of chivalry bore very little resemblance to the old Teutonic ideal of the hero; the older ideal had been based entirely on the appreciation of physical strength; but chivalry was the disseminator of culture, leaving ecclesiastical culture, which hitherto had been synonymous with civilisation, a very long way behind. "Mezura," "masze" (the μφστὁηϛ of the Platonic Greeks) was the new criterion, as compared with the barbarian's want of restraint.
I do not propose to give a description of the life at the courts of Provence. The news of it travelled north, and everywhere roused a desire to imitate it. The need of a renewed life was powerfully stirring all hearts. Men yearned for beauty and spontaneity, for passionate life, unprecedented and romantic. This was especially the case in the north, in France and in Germany, and above all in Wales, the country of the imaginative and highly-gifted Celts. Here life was harder, poorer, more barbaric; the cultured mind suffered more from its brutal surroundings than it did in the favoured south. It was here that the great legends of the Middle Ages, so clearly expressive of the yearning of the period, were first collected. The early Middle Ages had produced epic poems, treating scriptural subjects (such as the Harmony of the Gospels of the monk Otfrit, written in the ninth century), and celebrating the exploits of popular heroes, as, for instance, the German Song of Hildebrand, and the French "Chansons de Geste," which contain episodes from the lives of Charlemagne and his nephew Roland. The true epic, arising from the rich and poetical Celtic tradition, came into existence in the eleventh century in the North of France and immediately burst into extraordinary luxuriance. The legends of the heroes of the dreamy Celtic race—King Arthur and his knights, Merlin the magician, the knights of the Holy Grail—travelling across France, became the common property of the civilised European nations, and filled all hearts with longing and fantastic dreams. Chrestien de Troyes, in his romances, extolled knightly exploits and the service of woman, thus producing by the combination of the older and the newer ideals the novel of adventure which has fascinated the world for centuries. It is a mistake to believe that Don Quixote has struck at the root of it; to this day the masses wax enthusiastic in reading of the doughty deeds of knights, the beauty of ladies and their unswerving, undying love.
In addition to the great and heroic subjects, there were lesser, more intimate, and frequently sentimental, romances, especially enjoyed and widely circulated by the ladies. The baron, riding forth, left his young wife at home, shut up in her bower and surrounded by spies; sometimes even physically branded as his property. A prisoner behind bars, her imagination went out—not to the unloved husband who had married her for the sake of her broad acres, and could send her back to her parents as soon as he found a wealthier bride (he had but to maintain that she was related to him in the fifth degree and the Church was ready to annul the marriage), not to him, her lord and master, but to the unknown knight, the passionate lover, who would gladly give his life to win her. A jongleur arrived with stories of the courts where love was the only ruler; where the knights willingly suffered grief and want, if by so doing they could serve their lady; where the lover, in the shape of a beautiful blue bird, nightly slipped through the barred windows into the arms of his mistress. But the jealous husband had drawn barbed wire across the window, and the lover, flying away at dawn, bled to death before the eyes of his grief-stricken lady. The jongleur would tell of the knight who had fallen passionately in love with a beautiful damsel of whom he had but caught a passing glimpse; month after month he worked at digging an underground passage; every night brought him a little nearer to her bower—she could distinctly hear the dull sounds of his burrowing—until at last he rose through the ground and took her into his arms. These and similar tales, doubtless all of them of Celtic origin—preserved for us in the charming "Lais" of Marie de France—brought tears to the eyes of many a lonely wife and gave shape to her vague longing. There was no reason why a man, and a lover to boot, should not transform himself nightly into a blue bird. Those simple stories in verse fulfilled every desire of the heart; imagination supplied in the north what the south offered in abundant reality. But Marie de France, the first woman novelist of Europe (about the end of the twelfth century), deserves to be remembered for another reason; she was the first poet voicing woman's longing for love and romance—woman's adventure. The charming Lai du Chevrefoile ("The Story of the Honeysuckle") relates an episode from the loves of Tristan and Isolde, the famous lovers, legendary even at that time. Tristan and Isolde, Lancelot and Guinevere, Fleur and Blanchefleur—these were the admired and mythical lovers of whom the poets sang and dreamed. All the world knew their adventures; all the world repeated them again and again, reverently preserving the identical words and yet unconsciously remoulding them. At the recital of their loves, hand clasped hand; "on that day we read no more," confessed Dante's ill-fated lovers.
The longing, so characteristic of the North of Europe, to see the world and meet with adventures, was in Provence and Italy less pronounced. These favoured climes possessed so many of the things dreamed of and desired by other countries. Events, strange as fiction, actually occurred. Count Raimond of Roussillon, for instance, imprisoned his wife in a tower because the troubadour, Guillem of Cabestann, was in love with and beloved by her. He waylaid the lover, killed him, cut his heart out of his breast and sent it, roasted, to his countess. When she had partaken of it, he showed her Guillem's head and asked her how she had enjoyed the dish. "So much that no other food shall ever pass my lips," she replied, casting herself out of the window. When the story spread abroad, the great nobles rose up in arms against Raimond, and even the King of Aragon made war on him. He was caught and imprisoned for life, and his estates were confiscated. Guillem and the countess were buried in the church, and for a long time after men and women travelled long distances to kneel at their grave. The charming poems of Melusine and the beautiful Magelone, which to this day delight the reader, were composed during the same period.
Before the eleventh century poetry in the true sense of the word did not exist. There were only Latin Church hymns and legends, perverted reminiscences of antiquity, and, in the vulgar tongue, legends of the saints and simple dancing-songs for the amusement of the lower classes. Thanks to the relentless war which the clergy waged against them, a few only have been preserved. There can be no doubt that Provence was the birthplace of European poetry. The "sweet language" of Provence was the first to reach perfection and perfect maturity. It drove the language of the German conquerors eastwards and prepared the ground for the French tongue.
The beginning of the twelfth century saw the birth of the poetry of the troubadours, which possessed from the first in great perfection everything that distinguishes modern lyric poetry from the antique. Instead of the syllable-measuring quantity, we now have the emphasising accent; the rhyme, one of the most important lyrical contrivances—and in its near approach to music the most striking characteristic of modern lyrical poetry as compared with the antique—reaches perfection together with the complete, evenly-recurring verse which is still to-day peculiar to lyrical art. The poems of many of the troubadours pulsate with passionate life, and bear no trace of the traditional or the conventional. The martial songs of Bertrand de Born stride along with a rhythm reminiscent of the clanking of iron. I quote the first verse of one of these:
Le coms m'a mandat e mogut
Per N'Arramon Luc d'Esparro,
Qu'eu fassa per lui tal chanso,