A concise account must first be given of the two Gallic literatures, “French” and Provençal. Provençal flourished early, and enjoyed but a brief life. We may, therefore, trace this branch first, then the northern French, and afterwards compare and combine the two.

Though northern France had its song of Roland and other chansons at as early a date as the love lyrics of Provence, yet, if literature implies conscious art and system, Provençal composition is—with the exception of Anglo-Saxon—the first real literature of modern Europe; it stimulated Spain on the one hand, and Italy on the other; but it was in advance of either. It is earlier than Dante, and, although it is appreciably indebted to Ovid, and in some degree to Virgil, it is anterior to the influence of the classical forms or spirit of the first Renaissance. It began, helped by Moorish or “Arabian” impulses and lessons, in the eleventh century, enjoyed a brilliant existence for two hundred years, and died with the dying langue d’oc. Though it was never enriched and made immortal by the work of any one transcendent genius, it can boast a large number of composers possessed at least of talent and taste. Provençal verses became models for all neighbouring countries. Frederick Barbarossa in Germany, Richard Cœur-de-Lion in Anglo-French England, Alfonso II in Aragon, Frederick II in Sicily, these royal personages went out of their way to compose in the fashionable style and rhythm of Provence. They became, in fact, troubadours. The terms needs some explanation. A troubadour is not properly a wandering minstrel carrying a guitar. That itinerant minstrel is an inferior order of person, the jongleur (in Provençal joglar). He stands to the troubadour as the Anglo-Saxon “gleeman” to the “maker.” The troubadour was the “finder,” the poet, generally a noble, a knight, sometimes even a prince. It is no doubt true that the jongleur, who originally sang the troubadour’s ditties, was fain, like other inferiors, to assume the higher rank, try his own hand at composing variations, and call himself a troubadour, and so the title became degraded. It is true also that the real troubadours frequently chanted their own songs of love and glory, and so helped to cause confusion between themselves and the mere jongleur minstrels. But the troubadour proper was one who travelled sumptuously mounted and attired, to be the honoured guest of châtelains and princes.

Nearly all this Provençal literature of three centuries of troubadours is lyric, not epic. It is generally singing, not narrating, and its theme is chiefly personal feelings. Rhymes, which had, it is true, been sparsely employed in monkish compositions in Latin, were then novel things in European literature, although long and universally used by the Saracens. The Provençal poets cultivated rhymes which grew more and more varied and complicated; with careful elaboration of soft and harmonious sounds they sang of two things, and almost only of two, to wit, love and glory, gallantry and chivalry in both senses and connections. The verses were love verses or martial verses, celebrating loyalty in love and valour in arms. As a class they are without pretension to any profoundness of imagination or to any sublimity. Their excellence is their music, not any translatable substance of thought. It must be confessed that the songs and subjects lacked variety; the same tricks of expression and “conceits,” the same nouns and adjectives, the same situations, the same “fantastic sentimentality,” would reappear monotonously, and would inevitably suggest the artificial and unreal. One could hardly be expected to read extensively in the cansos, or love-songs, of those who called themselves the “gentle troubadours,” without a feeling of satiety. The serenade (serena), the morning greeting (alba), the dispute of lovers (tenso or joc parti), the lament (planh), which were recognized species of troubadour effort, inevitably suffered from exhaustion of material. Nevertheless one cannot but be impressed with the chivalrous idea of love which many of the Provençal poets professed, and according to which they nearly always treat that passion, vaunting a devoted tenderness and a delicate and sentimental worship. The influence of this idea, as still further refined and ennobled in Tuscany, is palpable in the attitude of Dante towards Beatrice, and of Petrarch towards Laura; there are many traces of its influence in Chaucer and his contemporaries. Through the Petrarchist sonneteers it again reaches England in the Elizabethan age.

It must be enough merely to mention the names of Bernard de Ventadour, Bertran de Born, Pierre Vidal, and Arnaud Daniel, among famous troubadours. But a word may be said of that remarkable institution, the “Court of Love,” to which a poem of Chaucer (or more probably of some one with a large share of Chaucer’s mind) owes its conception and its title. During the later generations of the “gentle troubadours,” the way to speak and think of love and gallantry was reduced to a system. It was made a science—called el gai saber, “the gay science”—which every poet was supposed to understand and to have at his finger-ends. One favourite form of poetry was the tenso, a dispute or altercation between troubadours upon delicate questions and scruples of behaviour and feeling in affairs of love. It became the fashion for noble ladies in those idle, rather frivolous, but doubtless not unhappy days to hold mock courts, in which poets sang one against the other, like opposing advocates; whereafter the court gave its decision, or arrêt d’amour, and awarded prizes to that troubadour whose arguments and verse were most in keeping with the code prescribed by the gay science. “Is it a greater grief to lose a lover by death or by unfaithfulness?” may serve as an example of the subjects particularly favoured in these poetical courts of the ladies of Gascony, of the Countess of Champagne, or of Queen Eleanor.

Such, briefly, was the genuine Provençal literature—lyrics of love and bravery, with here and there a pastoral, and here and there a poem of censure or satirical criticism. But true epics and romances of adventure, sustained allegories, witty tales of common life, they had practically none. For these we must look to northern France, to the land not of the troubadours, but of the Trouvères. Trouvère is the French form corresponding to the Provençal troubadour, and equally means the “finder,” who is indeed the “poet.” But in northern France there existed different social conditions and a different clime; there was also the sterner stuff which belongs to Franks and Normans, while in Brittany there was the Celt, with all his melancholy fire and imaginative and mystical emotion. The lyric literature of the north blossomed, indeed, somewhat later than that of Provence, and is largely an imitation of it. The romances of the trouvères are also distinctly infused with the ideas and style of the lyric south. Nevertheless the great mass of the poetry of northern France is of its own creation in both matter and spirit. It is the poetry of the epic, the allegory, and the tale; the poetry of the romance of heroic adventures, of satirical teaching, and of stories to amuse; in other words, it produced the chanson de geste, the roman, and the fabliau. It is in every way stronger than the creations of the south, in seriousness, in vigour, in variety, in invention. According to Ten Brink, prouesse, the masculine side of chivalry, is more northern, while courtoisie, the feminine side, is more Provençal. But the difference goes much deeper than any pair of terms can express it.

The old French poems of heroic adventure, blent with more or less of that other-world imaginative quality known as “romance,” fall into three main cycles of subjects. They deal with Charlemagne and his Paladins (in which case they are more truly epic in character, and are called chansons de geste, a term properly thus restricted to incidents in supposed French history), or with King Arthur and his knights (together with the once independent legends of Tristram), or with classical heroes, whether of the Trojan legend or, like Alexander, of actual history. These three cycles have been named the “Carlovingian” (or “French”), the “Arthurian” (or “British”), and the “classical” (or “Grecian”). Or we may make four by subdividing the last into “Trojan” and “Alexandrian.” At the time of their composition the cycle which dealt with the classical subjects of antiquity was said to deal with “matter of Rome.” All antiquity was “Rome,” and all ancient heroes “Romans.” We find, then, songs of Roland and Oliver, romances of Tristram or Launcelot, romances of Alexander the Great, and many more. Some romans, called d’aventures, are independent of any cycle and make no pretence at all to be history. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries are rich in the poetical narratives which tell of heroic feats, or miracles of devotion and loyalty, mixed with much of the supernatural withal. This was the day of the Crusades, of conquests of the Saracens, single combats, adventures in distant lands, where dwarfs and enchanters, dragons and giants, were supposed to dwell; and nothing pleased the venturous barons more than to be told such tales to the music of the itinerant jongleurs. A further variety of these songs of exploit was the lai, which is too short and too lyrical to be an epic or a roman, and is rather the song of an epic episode. The allegorical poems—which they also called romans, as being similarly akin to epic and written in the vulgar tongue—long and tedious as they are to us, were not disdained by Chaucer, and gave the cue to several conspicuous works of the Chaucerians down to the sixteenth century. That most famous of all, the Roman de la Rose, was translated by our master of English undefiled. This poem, begun by Guillaume de Lorris as an “Art of Love,” after the manner of Ovid (as filtered through Provence), was continued a generation later by Jean de Meung as a satirical miscellany of learning and legend. It is all about a lover who sought to pluck a rose, about his difficulties in reaching it, about the abstract qualities which help or hinder him, about personified virtues and vices, such as Dame Idleness, who lets him into the garden, Avarice, Meanness, Hatred, who stand in his way, Fair-Seeming, who has much to say in the matter, and numerous others. Thanks to these agencies, it takes that unhappy youth some 23,000 verses before he attains to plucking the object of his affections. Yet it was this reading which inspired the earliest efforts of our Chaucer, and which, in his first stage, he fell to imitating. It was this literature which the cultivated Norman English delighted hugely to hear. Allegorical, also, and purely satirical is the prolonged beast-fable known as the Roman de Renard (“the fox”), which enjoyed an immense vogue throughout Europe, and provoked countless imitations.

One chief species of composition, and a highly important one, yet remains. This was the fabliau, the amusing tale in verse, the one kind of writing to let us know that the world was not wholly made of doughty knights and gentle damosels. The fabliau is a tale of real or possible adventure in ordinary life, generally of a humorous kind. It is, in fact, a sort of novelette. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are often fabliaux. From France the fabliau was borrowed by the Novellieri of Italy. It was taken up and developed by Boccaccio, and both directly from France and indirectly through Italy it made its way into the general stock of European narrative material. Had it not been for fabliaux, one might have thought that in those days there was nothing else for men to do but fight and love. Yet the great ordinary mass of mankind existed all the time, doing its sober work in towns and country places. And it was time for this great stratum to find recognition in bourgeois story.

Thus in northern France we have chiefly epics and romances of heroic adventures, allegories more or less satirical and didactic, and amusing tales; in southern France we have chiefly lyrics of love and chivalry. As time goes on, each half moves closer to the other, although during the whole epoch of the northern romances the Provençal spirit had combined with the Celtic to pervade them with a peculiar tone of chivalric sentiment. In 1249 the two geographical divisions became one kingdom. Before the middle of the fourteenth century the Provençal tongue begins to die, and its literature to perish. The story of French literature thenceforward is one and undivided.

While the troubadour and trouvère literatures were thus flourishing in the two halves of France, the cultivated circles of Norman and Plantagenet England found those literatures sufficiently adapted to their needs. The ordinary language of these circles was identical with that of the trouvères, and at the same time the English possessions in Languedoc, including the cultured centre Bordeaux (gained by the marriage of Henry II with Eleanor of Guienne and Poitou), brought the Court into direct communication with the lyrics of the troubadours. Henry’s son, Richard Cœur-de-Lion, was himself a troubadour and the friend of troubadours, in particular of Bertran de Born. But better suited to the Anglo-Norman temperament, and, of course, completely intelligible to the French-speaking barons and gentry, were the romances, lais and fabliaux of the trouvères. The work of the Norman Wace (Geste des Bretons) in 1155 was as much intended for England as for France. So also was the Roman de Troie (1160) of Benoît de Ste. More, which included the story of Troilus. The French Saint Grael stories of Walter Map (1180) and the lais of Marie de France (1210) were produced in our island, and were the common property of England and Norman France. The jongleurs wandered from baron’s court to baron’s court, and the stories of Arthur,

Of Greece and Troy the strongë stryf,