‘Richard of Barbezieux the poet fell in love with a lady, the wife of a noble lord. She was gentle and fair, and gay and gracious, and very desirous of praise and honour; daughter of Jeffrey Rudel, prince of Blaye. And when she knew that he loved her, she made him fair semblance of love, so that he got hardihood to plead his suit to her. And she with gracious countenance of love treasured his praise of her, and accepted and listened, as a lady who had good will of a poet to make verses about her. And he composed his songs of her, and called her Mielhs de Domna (‘Sovran Lady’) in his verse. And he took great delight in finding similitudes of beasts and birds and men in his poetry, and of the sun and the stars, so as to give new arguments such as no poet had found before him. Long time he sang to her; but it was never believed that she yielded to his suit.’
Provençal poetry cannot be shown to have had any direct influence upon English, which is rather strange considering the close relations between England and the districts where the Provençal language—the langue d’oc—was spoken. It had great indirect influence, through the French. The French imitated the Provençal lyric poetry, as the Germans and the Italians did, and by means of the French poets the Provençal ideas found their way to England. But this took a long time. The Provençal poets were ‘courtly makers’; so were the French who copied them. The ‘courtly maker’ needs not only great houses and polite society for his audience; not only the fine philosophy ‘the love of honour and the honour of love’, which is the foundation of chivalrous romance. Besides all this, he needs the reward and approbation of success in poetical art; he cannot thrive as an anonymous poet. And it is not till the time of Chaucer and Gower that there is found in England any poet making a great name for himself as a master of the art of poetry, like the Provençal masters Bernart de Ventadour or Arnaut Daniel in the twelfth century, or like the German Walther von der Vogelweide at the beginning of the thirteenth.
Lyric poetry of the Provençal kind was a most exacting and difficult art; it required very peculiar conditions before it could flourish and be appreciated, and those conditions did not exist in England or in the English language. At the same time the elaborate lyrics of Provence, like those of the Minnesingers in Germany, are pretty closely related to many ‘popular’ forms and motives. Besides the idealist love-poetry there were other kinds available—simple songs of lament, or of satire—comic songs—lyrics with a scene in them, such as the very beautiful one about the girl whose lover has gone on the Crusade. In such as these, though they have little directly to do with English poetry, may be found many illustrations of English modes of verse, and rich examples of that most delightful sort of poetry which refuses to be labelled either ‘courtly’ or ‘popular’.
In French literature, as distinct from Provençal, there was a ‘courtly’ strain which flourished in the same general conditions as the Provençal, but was not so hard to understand and had a much greater immediate effect on England.
The French excelled in narrative poetry. There seems to have been a regular exchange in poetry between the South and the North of France. French stories were translated into Provençal, Provençal lyrics were imitated in the North of France. Thus French lyric is partly Provençal in character, and it is in this way that the Provençal influence is felt in English poetry. The French narrative poetry, though it also is affected by ideas from the South, is properly French in origin and style. It is by means of narrative that the French ideal of courtesy and chivalry is made known, to the French themselves as well as to other nations.
In the twelfth century a considerable change was made in French poetry by the rise and progress of a new romantic school in succession to the old chansons de geste—the epic poems on the ‘matter of France’. The old epics went down in the world, and gradually passed into the condition of merely ‘popular’ literature. Some of them survive to this day in roughly printed editions, like the Reali di Francia, which is an Italian prose paraphrase of old French epics, and which seems to have a good sale in the markets of Italy still, as The Seven Champions of Christendom used to have in England, and The Four Sons of Aymon in France. The decline of the old epics began in the twelfth century through the competition of more brilliant new romances.
The subjects of these were generally taken either from the ‘matter of Britain’, or from antiquity, the ‘matter of Rome the Great’, which included Thebes and Troy. The new romantic school wanted new subjects, and by preference foreign subjects. This, however, was of comparatively small importance; it had long been usual for story-tellers to go looking for subjects to foreign countries; this is proved by the Saints’ Lives, and also by the story of Alexander the Great, which appeared in French before the new school was properly begun.
In form of verse the new romances generally differed from the chansons de geste, but this again is not an exact distinction. Apart from other considerations, the distinction fails because the octosyllabic rhyming measure, the short couplet, which was the ordinary form for fashionable romances, was also at the same time the ordinary form for everything else—for history, for moral and didactic poetry, and for comic stories like Reynard the Fox. The establishment of this ‘short verse’ (as the author of Hudibras calls it) in England is one of the most obvious and one of the largest results of the literary influence of France, but it is not specially due to the romantic school.
The character of that school must be sought much more in its treatment of motives, and particularly in its use of sentiment. It is romantic in its fondness for strange adventures; but this taste is nothing new. The real novelty and the secret of its greatest success was its command of pathos, more especially in the pathetic monologues and dialogues of lovers. It is greatly indebted for this, as has been already remarked, to the Latin poets. The Aeneid is turned into a French romance (Roman d’Eneas); and the French author of the Roman de Troie, who gives the story of the Argonauts in the introductory part of his work, has borrowed much from Ovid’s Medea in the Metamorphoses. Virgil’s Dido and Ovid’s Medea had an immense effect on the imagination of the French poets and their followers. From Virgil and Ovid the medieval authors got the suggestion of passionate eloquence, and learned how to manage a love-story in a dramatic way—allowing the characters free scope to express themselves fully. Chivalrous sentiment in the romances is partly due to the example of the Latin authors, who wrote long passionate speeches for their heroines, or letters like that of Phyllis to Demophoon or Ariadne to Theseus and the rest of Ovid’s Heroides—the source of Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women. The idea of the lover as the servant of his mistress was also taken first of all from the Latin amatory poets. And the success of the new romantic school was gained by the working together of those ideas and examples, the new creation of chivalrous and courteous love out of those elements.
The ideas are the same in the lyric as in the narrative poetry; and it is allowable to describe a large part of the French romantic poems as being the expression in narrative of the ideas which had been lyrically uttered in the poetry of Provence—