The editor has sought to keep the purpose of the volume constantly in view in preparing the introduction and notes. He has hoped to supply such information as would be most helpful, if not indispensable, to the reader. And as he has thought that the best service the book could render would be to stimulate interest in French poetry and to persuade to a wider reading of it, he has wished in the bibliography to meet especially the wants of those who may be inclined to pursue further one or another of the acquaintances here begun. It is of course not intended to be in any wise exhaustive, but only to present the sum of an author's lyrical work, to indicate current and available editions, and to point out sources of further information; among these last it has sometimes been accessibility to the American reader rather than relative importance that has dictated the insertion of a title.
The editor acknowledges here his wholesale indebtedness for his materials to the various sources that he has recommended to the reader. But he wishes to confess the special debt that he owes to Miss Eugénie Galloo, Assistant Professor of French in the University of Kansas, for many suggestions and valuable help with the proofs. Her assistance has reduced considerably the number of the volume's imperfections. For those that remain he can hold no one responsible but himself.
A. G. C.
LAWRENCE, KANSAS,
Dec. 7, 1898.
INTRODUCTION.
As literature is not a bundle of separate threads, but one fabric, it is manifestly impossible to give an adequate account of any one of its forms, as the lyric poem, by itself and aside from the larger web of which it is a part. The following pages will attempt only to sketch the main phases which the history of the lyric in France exhibits and so to furnish a rough outline that may help the reader of these poems to place them in the right historical relations. He should fill it out at all points by study of some history of French literature.[1] No account will be taken here of those kinds of verse that have only a slight contact with serious poetry. Such are, for instance, the songs of the chansonniers, mainly of vinous inspiration, which followed a tradition of their own apart from that of the more sober lyric, though some of the later writers, especially BÉRANGER and DUPONT, raised them to a higher dignity. Such also are the songs so abundant in the modern vaudevilles and light operas, many of which have enjoyed a very wide circulation and great favor and have left couplets fixed in the memory of the great public.
Neither will account be taken of the poems of oral tradition, the chansons populaires, of which France possesses a rich treasure, but which have never there, as so conspicuously in Germany, been brought into fructifying contact with the literary lyric.[2]
The beginnings of the literary tradition of lyric poetry in France are found in the poetry of the Troubadours. No doubt lyric expression was no new discovery then; lyrics in the popular language had existed from time immemorial. But it was in the twelfth century and in Provence that it began to be cultivated by a considerable number of persons who consciously treated it as an art and developed for it rules and forms. These were the Troubadours. Though their poems did not, at least at first, lack sincerity and spontaneity, their tendency to theorizing about the ideals of courtly life, especially about the nature and practice of love as the ideal form of refined conduct, was not favorable to these qualities. As lyrical expression lost in directness and spontaneity it was natural that more and more attention should be paid to form. The external qualities of verse were industriously cultivated. Great ingenuity was expended upon the invention of intricate and elaborate forms. Beginning at the end of the eleventh century, the poetry of the Troubadours had by the middle of the twelfth become a highly artificial and studied product. It was then that it began to awaken imitation in the north of France and thus determine the beginnings of French lyric poetry.
An earlier native lyric had indeed existed in northern France, known to us only by scanty fragments and allusions. It was a simple and light accompaniment of dancing or of the monotonous household tasks of sewing and spinning. Its theme was love and love-making. Its characteristic outward feature was a recurring refrain. The manner and frequency of repeating this refrain determined different forms, as rondets, ballettes, and virelis But there are few examples left us of early French lyrics that have not already felt the influence of the art of the Troubadours. Even those that are in a way the most perfect and distinctive products of the earlier period, the fresh and graceful pastourelles, with their constant theme of a pretty shepherdess wooed by a knight, may have been imported from the south and have pretty surely been touched by southern influence.