On these points it is not possible to decide: the point on which to lay the finger for our present purpose is that the contribution of Italy at this time was, on the one hand, the further refinement of the Provençal attention to form, and the production of one capital instrument of European poetry—the sonnet; on the other, the conveyance, by means of this instrument and others, of a further, and in one way almost final, variation of the poetic expression of love. It is of the first importance to note the characteristics, in different nations at nearly the same time, of this rise of lyrical love-poetry. We find it in Northern and Southern France, probably at about the same time; in Germany and Italy somewhat later, and almost certainly in a state of pupilship to the French. All, in different ways, display a curious and delightful metrical variety, as if the poet were trying to express the eternal novelty, combined with the eternal oneness, of passion by variations of metrical form. In each language these variations reflect national peculiarities—in Northern French and German irregular bursts with a multiplicity of inarticulate refrain, in Provençal and Italian a statelier and more graceful but somewhat more monotonous arrangement and proportion.
And the differences of spirit are equally noticeable, though one must, as always, be careful against generalising too rashly as to their identity with supposed national characteristics. The innumerable love-poems of the trouvères, pathetic sometimes, and sometimes impassioned, are yet, as a rule, cheerful, not very deep, verging not seldom on pure comedy. The so-called monotonous enthusiasm of the troubadour, his stock-images, his musical form, sublime to a certain extent the sensual side of love, but confine themselves to that side merely, as a rule, or leave it only to indulge in the purely fantastic.
Of those who borrowed from them, the Germans, as we should expect, lean rather to the Northern type, but vary it with touches of purity, and other touches of religion; the Italians to the Southern, exalting it into a mysticism which can hardly be called devotional, though it at times wears the garb of devotion.[192] Among those collections for which the student of letters pines, not the least desirable would be a corpus of the lyric poets of Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. We should then see—after a fashion difficult if not impossible in the sporadic study of texts edited piecemeal, and often overlaid with comment not of the purely literary kind—at once the general similarity and the local or individual exceptions, the filiation of form, the diffusion of spirit. No division of literature, perhaps, would serve better as a kind of chrestomathy for illustrating the positions on which the scheme of this series is based. And though it is overshadowed by the achievements of its own pupils; though it has a double portion of the mediæval defect of "school"-work—of the almost tedious similarity of different men's manner—the Italian poetry, which is practically the Italian literature, of the thirteenth century would be not the least interesting part of such a corpus.
Position of Spanish.
The Spanish literature[193] with which we have to do is probably inferior in bulk even to that of Italy; it is certainly far less rich in named and more or less known authors, while it is a mere drop as compared with the Dead Sea of Byzantine writing. But by virtue of at least one really great composition, the famous Poema del Cid, it ranks higher than either of these groups in sheer literary estimation, while from the point of view of literary history it is perhaps more interesting than the Italian, and certainly far more interesting than the Greek. It does not rank with French as an instance of real literary preponderance and chieftainship; or with German as an example of the sudden if short blossoming of a particular period and dialect into great if not wholly original literary prominence; much less with Icelandic and Provençal, as containing a "smooth and round" expression of certain definite characteristics of literature and life once for all embodied. It has to give way not merely to Provençal, but to Italian itself as an example of early scholarship in literary form. But it makes a most interesting pair to English as an instance of vigorous and genuine national literary development; while, if it is inferior to English, as showing that fatal departmental or provincial separation, that "particularism" which has in many ways been so disastrous to the Peninsula, it once more, by virtue of the Poema, far excels our own production of the period in positive achievement, and foretells the masterpieces of the national poetry in a way very different from any that can be said to be shown in Layamon or the Ancren Riwle, even in the Arthurian romances and the early lyrics.
Catalan-Provençal.
The earliest literature which, in the wide sense, can be called Spanish divides itself into three heads—Provençal-Catalan; Galician-Portuguese; and Castilian or Spanish proper. Not merely Catalonia itself, but Aragon, Navarre, and even Valencia, were linguistically for centuries mere outlying provinces of the langue d'oc. The political circumstances which attended the dying-out of the Provençal school at home, for a time even encouraged the continuance of Provençal literature in Spain: and to a certain extent Spanish and Provençal appear to have been written, if not spoken, bilingually by the same authors. But for the general purpose of this book the fact of the persistence of the "Limousin" tongue in Catalonia and (strongly dialected) in Valencia having been once noted, not much further notice need be taken of this division.
Galician-
Portuguese.
So also we may, with a brief distinctive notice, pass by the Galician dialects which found their perfected literary form later in Portuguese. No important early literature remains in Galician, and of Portuguese itself there does not seem to be anything certainly dating before the fourteenth century, or anything even probably attributed to an earlier time except a certain number of ballads, as to the real antiquity of which a sane literary criticism has always to reiterate the deepest and most irremovable doubts. The fact of the existence of this dialect, and of its development later into the language of Camoens, is of high interest: the positive documents which at this time it offers for comment are very scanty indeed.
Castilian.