CHAPTER III.
THE LOVES OF THE TROUBADOURS.
Gente, che d'amor givan ragionando.—petrarca.
The irruptions of the northern nations, among whom our sex was far better appreciated than among the polished Greeks and Romans; the rise of Christianity, and the institution of chivalry, by changing the moral condition of women, gave also a totally different character to the homage addressed to them. It was in the ages called gothic and barbarous,—in that era of high feelings and fierce passions,—of love, war, and wild adventure, that the sex began to take their true station in society. From the midst of ignorance, superstition, and ferocity, sprung up that enthusiasm, that exaggeration of sentiment, that serious, passionate, and imaginative adoration of women, which has since, indeed, degenerated into mere gallantry, but was the very fountain of all that is most elevated and elegant in modern poetry, and most graceful and refined in modern manners.
The amatory poetry of Provence had the same source with the national poetry of Spain; both were derived from the Arabians. To them we trace not only the use of rhyme, and the various forms of stanzas, employed by the early lyric poets, but by a strange revolution, it was from the East, where women are now held in seclusion, as mere soulless slaves of the passions and caprices of their masters, that the sentimental devotion paid to our sex in the chivalrous ages was derived.[4] The poetry of the Troubadours kept alive and enhanced the tone of feeling on which it was founded; it was cause and effect re-acting on each other; and though their songs exist only in the collections of the antiquarian, and the very language in which they wrote has passed away, and may be accounted dead,—so is not the spirit they left behind: as the founders of a new school of amatory poetry, we are under obligations to their memory, which throw a strong interest around their personal adventures, and the women they celebrated.
The tenderness of feeling and delicacy of expression in some of these old Provençal poets, are the more touching, when we recollect that the writers were sometimes kings and princes, and often knights and warriors, famed for their hardihood and exploits. William, Count of Poitou, our Richard the First, two Kings of Arragon, a King of Sicily, the Dauphin of Auvergne, the Count de Foix, and a Prince of Orange, were professors of the "gaye science." Thibault,[5] Count of Provence and King of Navarre, was another of these royal and chivalrous Troubadours, and his lais and his virelais were generally devoted to the praises of Blanche of Castile, the mother of Louis the Ninth—the same Blanche whom Shakspeare has introduced into King John, and decked out in panegyric far transcending all that her favoured poet and lover could have offered at her feet.[6]
Thibault did, however, surpass all his contemporaries in refinement of style: he usually concludes his chansons with an envoi, or address, to the Virgin, worded with such equivocal ingenuity, that it is equally applicable to the Queen of Heaven, or the queen of his earthly thoughts,—"La Blanche couronnée." There is much simplicity and elegance in the following little song, in which the French has been modernised.
"Las! si j'avais pouvoir d'oublier
Sa beauté,—son bien dire,
Et son très doux regarder
Finirait mon martyre!
Mais las! mon cœur je n'en puis ôter;
Et grand affolage
M'est d'espérer;
Mais tel servage
Donne courage
A tout endurer.
Et puis comment oublier
Sa beauté, son bien dire,
Et son très doux regarder?
Mieux aime mon martyre!"