Deves vostre pais
M’es vejaire qu’ev senta
Odor de paradis.”
Notwithstanding English blank verse from the sixteenth century on, and notwithstanding the pathetic efforts of our contemporary crew of “free versifiers” feeling ignorantly back to unrhymed rhythms such as the ancients knew, notwithstanding these, I say that Provençal stanza, with its rhyme and regular accents, still represents exactly the sort of lyric rhythm we use. As far as verse form goes, the troubadours were beyond all question the first of the modern poets, in the easy skill and variety of their measures, some simple, some as intricate as any verse ever written. Dante revered them second only to Virgil.
What is most important to us is the picture they give of their society. First of all they represent the chief end of man to be the worship of woman. We have seen in the last chapter that feminism in religion, i.e., the cult of the Virgin, was one of the twelfth century master-passions. In Italy, towards the end of the thirteenth century, poets intertwined love with philosophy, somewhat as the Platonists had before them. The troubadours concerned themselves not at all with philosophy and little with religion. Here and there they bring in religion as a sauce to flavour more piquantly their love for their lady, very much in the manner of our modern decadents. Thus the poet may protest that he loves his lady “more than God loves Our Lady of Puy de Dôme.” Incidentally, the devotion of the poets is almost always for someone else’s wife.
The essential thing about all this “courteous love” is that it is unmistakably the most cultivated and civilized thing that had been since Rome had fallen asleep.
Furthermore, the appearance of the troubadour poetry in Southern Gaul is still another fact proving that the Dark Ages were not a murder but a sleep. The foolish historians of the last generation who attributed the vigour and the chivalric romance of the Middle Ages to an infusion of “Teutonic” blood, got a hard knock when Belloc[7] noted that after the Dark Ages a comparatively high civilization expressing itself in poetry full of the “romantic” idealization of woman arose in precisely one of the districts least affected by the handfuls of barbarian auxiliary troops of the fifth and sixth century. The soul of Europe was not moulded anew by the barbarians of the northern forests. That soul fell asleep, as it were, from weariness, and then having slept, it awoke and sang.
The courtly fashion set by the troubadours overspread Christendom. Indeed, it became a characteristic of the later twelfth century, as we saw in the last chapter. Treitschke has a lively passage on the “chivalrous, polished” time of the Hohenstaufen in Germany, “the age of gallantry and the Minnesingers, quite distinctly feminine in its universal attempt to adorn itself with womanly graces,”[8] in contrast to the harsher time which had preceded it. But the fact that the new fashion so quickly became European must not blind us to the fact that it began in Languedoc. The troubadour poetry is already fully developed in William Count of Poitiers and Duke of Aquitaine, who was born in 1071. The first Hohenstaufen king did not reign over Germany until 1138, and it was Count William’s granddaughter Eleanor, Queen to Henry II, who first brought the cultivation of Provence to England about the middle of the twelfth century.
Even in the troubadours, however, the near savagery of the Dark Ages had been merely overlaid and not destroyed. Vivid memories of a time at once feeble and gross swelled up in them sometimes. One poet, that Sordello whose name Dante and Browning have combined to keep alive, when singing the death of a brave knight, amiably suggests that a long list of coward princes would do well to eat of the dead man’s heart to better their courage! The idea was familiar to our Red Indians.
Unfortunately, as events were to prove, their society which still kept something of the underlying spirit of the savage, was losing the spirit of the soldier. The statement needs qualification, especially in the case of one of the greatest troubadours, Bertran de Born, who was never happy without a fight unless he was rhyming about one. But, although a striking exception he was only an exception. Even if none of the troubadour poetry had survived, we could perhaps prove that the “Provençal” was less warlike than the North Frenchman, or even than most Christians of the time, by the fact that local wars had to be fought with a larger proportion of mercenaries than was the case elsewhere; so large indeed that their roving bands became a serious “social problem,” as we shall see. Even if we assume that the high proportion of mercenaries was due to the wealth of Languedoc, still it is hard for us to imagine any twelfth-century hero of song or story, outside of Provence, who would lose himself so deeply in day dreams of his beloved as to be captured by his enemies, like Aucassin in “Aucassin and Nicolette,” without so much as striking a blow in his own defence.