Among the warriors who went into the East to combat the infidels, a great number of troubadours and trouvères distinguished themselves. We have seen the romance of Raoul de Couci, and the verses of Thibault, count of Champagne. We may add to these names known in the fasti of the French muses, those of the count of Poictiers, the count of Anjou, the duke of Brittany, Frederick II., and Richard Cœur-de-Lion. Often would these princely and lordly Crusaders charm the tediousness of a long pilgrimage by poetical relaxations and remembrances. The count of Soissons, when a prisoner with St. Louis, sang the praises of the dames of France, in the presence and beneath the very swords of the Saracens. One chronicle relates that at the end of the third crusade, the duke of Burgundy made a satire against Richard, and that Richard replied by a poem. The example of these princes was enough to arouse the emulation of the poets; and as they composed their verses in the French language, this language, which was then spoken at Jerusalem, Constantinople, and many other places in the East, must have prevailed over all contemporary idioms.
The muse of the troubadours celebrated chivalry, love, and beauty; that of the trouvères, who dwelt on the banks of the Loire, and in the provinces situated beyond that river, delighted in songs of a more serious kind. The trouvères had rivals in England and Germany. These poets had created for themselves an heroic and new world, which inspired them with noble actions. They celebrated the lofty deeds of Arthur and Rinaldo, the knights of the Round Table, Charlemagne, Roland, and the twelve peers of France. They added to these names those of Godfrey, Tancred, Richard, and Saladin, the remembrance of whom vividly interested all the Christian nations of the middle ages.
The marvellous, among a people, belongs to their habits, to the effects of climate, and to the great revolutions of society. In consequence of the mixture and confusion of divers nations in the middle ages, the wonderful traditions of the North became confounded with those of the South, and produced a semi-barbarous mythology, which differed widely from the laughing mythology of the Greeks. But the labours, the perils, the exploits of a religious war, of a distant war, like those of the crusades, must have given a more noble direction to the imagination of poets, and preserved it from that which was common and whimsical in the romantic conceptions of a gross age. That which was then passing upon the real theatre of events, was more extraordinary than the inventions of poetry; and the marvellous of that period was the more easy to be seized, from being all to be found in actual history.
A new literature then was born, conforming with the genius of a new state of society. If this literature, which, to employ the expression of the learned Heren, bore a character of national and contemporary originality, had produced great works like the Iliad and the Odyssey, the muses would have opened for themselves a career unknown to the ancients; language would have been, from that time enriched, perfected, fixed by the masterpieces themselves; and history would have spoken of the age of the crusades, as it speaks to us of the age of Augustus or Pericles.
Unfortunately, our literature of the middle ages only produced indifferent poems, which were not able to make us forget the great works of antiquity. There were none but romantic productions, in which the interest of the subject was not at all raised by talent, and poems whose authors, though witty and ingenious, had none of that authority of genius which carries away the opinions of an age, and even of posterity.
We have more than one reason for regretting that the human mind did not open for itself a new career at the period of the crusades. There is no doubt that the ancients offer us the more perfect models of taste; but in proportion as people, in the end, became impassioned for the Greeks and the Latins, modern nations disdained their own antiquities for those of Athens and Rome. With the study of masterpieces which had nothing to do with our own glory, the remembrance of our own ancestors was not at all mixed; and the knowledge they have given us has added nothing to our patriotism. What an interest and what a value would the remembrances of our country have had for us, if they had been traced by a literature, formed according to the manners of the nation, and which would, in some sort, have commenced with the nation itself!
Most of the romancers, and even the poets of these times, who had no models and wanted taste, found no other means of interesting their readers, than by exaggerating the sentiments of chivalry. Imitation, pushed to the extreme, was taken for reality, and there were found knights who wished to do that which they saw in romances and poems. Thence came knight-errantry. Thus, in all times, the state of society has acted upon literature, and literature, in its turn, has reacted upon the state of society.
The romances which were consecrated to chivalry and the crusades, underwent the modifications that manners and customs received; and this species of composition has come down to our days, expressing, by turns, the tastes, sentiments, and opinions of each age. This was quite unknown to antiquity. It was born with the Romance language, whose name it took; and they who now derive pleasure from it ought to be thankful for it to the age of the crusades.
These kinds of productions, which attracted the curiosity and attention of the vulgar, contributed to form the national language, which then appeared to be scorned by the learned. The Latin language still remained the language of the sciences and of learning. But it lost its correctness and its purity. The Latin of the fifteenth century was more corrupt than that of the twelfth. The Romance language and the Latin language had a tendency to corrupt each other, by their mixture and their reciprocal borrowings.