The earliest purely secular lyrics, however, are attributed to William IX., Count of Poitiers, who was a crusader in the very first year of the twelfth century, and is said to have written an account of his journey which is lost. His lyrics survive to the number of some dozen, and show that the art had by his time received very considerable development. For their form, it may suffice to say that of those given by Bartsch[179] the first is in seven-lined stanzas, rhymed aaaabab, the a-rhyme lines being iambic dimeters, and the b's monometers. Number two has five six-lined stanzas, all dimeters, rhymed aaabab: and a four-lined finale, rhymed ab, ab. The third is mono-rhymed throughout, the lines being disyllabic with licence to extend. And the fourth is in the quatrain aaab, but with the b rhyme identical throughout, capped with a couplet ab. If these systems be compared with the exact accounts of early French, English, and German lyric in chapters [v.-vii.], it will be seen that Provençal probably, if not certainly, led the way in thus combining rhythmic arrangement and syllabic proportion with a cunning variation of rhyme-sound. It was also the first language to classify poetry, as it may be called, by assigning special forms to certain kinds of subject or—if not quite this—to constitute classes of poems themselves according to their arrangement in line, stanza, and rhyme. A complete prosody of the language of canso and sirvente, of vers and cobla, of planh, tenso, tornejamens, balada, retroensa, and the rest, would take more room than can be spared here, and would hardly be in place if it were otherwise. All such prosodies tend rather to the childish, as when, for instance, the pastorela, or shepherdess poem in general, was divided into porquiera, cabreira, auqueira, and other things, according as the damsel's special wards were pigs or goats or geese. Perhaps the most famous, peculiar, and representative of Provençal forms are the alba, or poem of morning parting, and the sirvente, or poem not of love. The sestina, a very elaborate canzonet, was invented in Provence and borrowed by the Italians. But it is curious to find that the sonnet, the crown and flower of all artificial poetry, though certainly invented long before the decadence of Provençal, was only used in Provençal by Italian experimenters. The poets proper of the langue d'oc were probably too proud to admit any form that they had not invented themselves.
Many men, one mind.
Next in noteworthiness to the variety of form of the Provençal poets is their number. Even the multitude of trouvères and Minnesingers dwindles beside the list of four hundred and sixty named poets, for the twelfth and thirteenth centuries only, which Bartsch's list contains; some, it is true, credited with only a single piece, but others with ten, twenty, fifty, or even close to a hundred, not to mention an anonymous appendix of over two hundred and fifty poems more. Great, however, as is the bulk of this division of literature, hardly any has more distinct and uniform—its enemies may say more monotonous—characteristics. It is not entirely composed of love-poetry; but the part devoted to this is so very much the largest, and so very much the most characteristic, that popular and almost traditional opinion is scarcely wrong in considering love-poetry and Provençal poetry to be almost, and with the due limitation in the first case, convertible terms.
Example of rhyme-schemes.
The spirit of this poetry is nowhere better shown than in the refrain of an anonymous alba, which begins—
"En un verger sotz folha d'albespi,"
and which has for burden—
"Oi deus! oi deus, de l'alba, tant tost ve!"
of which an adaptation by Mr Swinburne is well known. "In the Orchard," however, is not only a much longer poem than the alba from which it borrows its burden, but is couched in a form much more elaborate, and has a spirit rather early Italian than Provençal. It is, indeed, not very easy to define the Provençal spirit itself, which has sometimes been mistaken, and oftener exaggerated. Although the average troubadour poem—whether of love, or of satire, or, more rarely, of war—is much less simple in tone than the Northern lyric already commented on, it cannot be said to be very complex; and, on the whole, the ease, accomplishment, and, within certain strict limits, variety of the form are more remarkable than any intensity or volume of passion or of thought. The musical character (less inarticulate and more regular), which has also been noted in the poems of the trouvères, is here eminent: though the woodnote wild of the Minnesinger is quite absent or very rarely present. The facility of double rhymes, with a full vowel sound in each syllable, has a singular and very pleasing effect, as in the piece by Marcabrun beginning—
"L'autrier jost una sebissa,"