"Escoutatz mas no sai que s'es"
(in six-lined stanzas, rhymed ababab, with prose "tags" to each, something in the manner of the modern comic song), is at least a curiosity. The primacy of the whole school in its most flourishing time, between 1150 and 1250, is disputed by Arnaut Daniel (a great master of form, and as such venerated by his greater Italian pupils) and Giraut de Bornelh, who is more fully represented in extant work than most of his fellows, as we have more than fourscore pieces of his. Peire or Peter Vidal, another typical troubadour, who was a crusader, an exceedingly ingenious verse-smith, a great lover, and a proficient in the fantastic pranks which rather brought the school into discredit, inasmuch as he is said to have run about on all fours in a wolfskin in honour of his mistress Loba (Lupa); Gaucelm Faidit and Arnaut de Maroilh, Folquet of Marseilles, and Rambaut of Vaqueras; the Monk of Montaudon and Bertrand de Born himself, who with Peire Cardinal is the chief satirist (though the satire of the two takes different forms); Guillem Figueira, the author of a long invective against Rome, and Sordello of mysterious and contingent fame,—are other chief members, and of some of them we have early, perhaps contemporary, Lives, or at least anecdotes. For instance, the Cabestanh or Cabestaing story comes from these. The last name of importance in our period, if not the last of the right troubadours, is usually taken to be that of Guiraut Riquier.
Criticism of Provençal.
It would scarcely be fair to say that the exploit attributed to Rambaut of Vaqueras, a poet of the very palmiest time, at the juncture of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—that of composing a poem in lines written successively in three different forms of Provençal (langue d'oc proper, Gascon, and Catalan), in langue d'oïl, and in Italian, with a coda line jumbled up of all five—is a final criticism at once of the merits and the defects of this literature. But it at least indicates the lines of such a criticism. By its marvellous suppleness, sweetness, and adaptation to the verbal and metrical needs of poetry, Provençal served—in a fashion probably impossible to the stiffer if more virile tongues—as an example in point of form to these tongues themselves: and it achieved, at the same time with a good deal of mere gymnastic, exercises in form of the most real and abiding beauty. But it had as a language too little character of its own, and was too fatally apt to shade into the other languages—French on the one hand, Spanish and Italian on the other—with which it was surrounded, and to which it was akin. And coming to perfection at a time when no modern thought was distinctly formed, when positive knowledge was at a low ebb, and when it had neither the stimulus of vigorous national life nor the healthy occupation of what may be called varied literary business, it tended to become, on the whole, too much of a plaything merely. Now, schools and playgrounds are both admirable things, and necessary to man; but what is done in both is only an exercise or a relaxation from exercise. Neither man nor literature can stay either in class-room or playing-field for ever, and Provençal had scarcely any other places of abode to offer.
CHAPTER IX.
THE LITERATURE OF THE PENINSULAS.
LIMITATIONS OF THIS CHAPTER. LATE GREEK ROMANCE. ITS DIFFICULTIES AS A SUBJECT. ANNA COMNENA, ETC. 'HYSMINIAS AND HYSMINE.' ITS STYLE. ITS STORY. ITS HANDLING. ITS "DECADENCE." LATENESS OF ITALIAN. THE "SARACEN" THEORY. THE "FOLK-SONG" THEORY. CIULLO D'ALCAMO. HEAVY DEBT TO FRANCE. YET FORM AND SPIRIT BOTH ORIGINAL. LOVE-LYRIC IN DIFFERENT EUROPEAN COUNTRIES. POSITION OF SPANISH. CATALAN-PROVENÇAL. GALICIAN-PORTUGUESE. CASTILIAN. BALLADS? THE 'POEMA DEL CID.' A SPANISH "CHANSON DE GESTE." IN SCHEME AND SPIRIT. DIFFICULTIES OF ITS PROSODY. BALLAD-METRE THEORY. IRREGULARITY OF LINE. OTHER POEMS. APOLLONIUS AND MARY OF EGYPT. BERCEO. ALFONSO EL SABIO.