Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/899

Rh LITERATURE. PROVENQAL 875 Bonifaci Calvo, Guiraut Riquier, Folquet de Lunel, Arnaut Plages, Bertran CarboneL Italy. BONIFACE II., marquis of Montferrat (1192-1207), Peire Vidal, Raimbaut de Vacqueiras, Elias Cairel, Gaucelm Faidit(?); FREDERICK II., emperor (1215-1250), Jean d Aubusson, Aimeric de Pegullian, Guillem Figueira ; Azzo VI., marquis of Este (1196- 1212), Aimeric de Pegulhan, Rambertin de Buvalel; Azzo VIII., marquis of Este (1215-1264), Aimeric de Pegulhan. The first thing that strikes o ne in this list is that, while the troubadours find protectors in Spain and Italy, they do not seem to have been welcomed in French-speaking countries. This, however, must not be taken too abso lutely. Provengal poetry was appreciated in the north of France. There is reason to believe that when Constance, daughter of one of the counts of Aries, was married in 998 to Kobert, king of France, she brought along with her Provengal jongleurs. Poems by troubadours are quoted in the French romances of the beginning of the 13th century; some of them are transcribed in the old collections of French songs, and the preacher Kobert de Sorbon informs us in a curious passage that one day a jongleur sang a poem by Folquet of Marseilles at the court of the king of France. But in any case it is easy to understand that, the countries of the langue d om having a fall developed literature of their own suited to the taste of the people, the troubadours generally preferred to go to regions where they had less to fear in the way of competition. The decline and fall of troubadour poetry was mainly due to political causes. When about the beginning of the 1 3th century the Albigensian war had ruined a large number of the nobles and reduced to lasting poverty a part of the south of France, the profession of troubadour ceased to be lucrative. It was then that many of those poets went to spend their last days in the north of Spain and Italy, where Provengal poetry had for more than one generation been highly esteemed. Following their exaniple, other poets who were not natives of the south of France began to compose in Provengal, and this fashion continued till, about the middle of the 13th century, they gradually abandoned the foreign tongue in northern Italy, and somewhat later in Catalonia, and took to singing the same airs in the local dialects. About the same time in the Provengal region the flame of poetry had died out save in a few places Narbonne, Rodez, Foix, and Astarac where it kept burn ing feebly for a little longer. In the 14th century com position in the language of the country was still practised ; but the productions of this period are mainly works for instruction and edification, translations from Latin or some times even from French, with an occasional romance. As for the poetry of the troubadours, it was dead for ever. Form. Originally the poems of the troubadours were intended to be sung. The poet usually composed the music as well as the words ; and in several cases he owed his fame more to his musical than to his literary ability. Two manuscripts preserve specimens of the music of the troubadours ; but, as the subject has not as yet been investigated, we are still ignorant of one of the elements of their success. The following are the principal poetic forms which they employed. The oldest and most usual generic term is i-crs, by which is understood any composition intended to be sung, no matter what the subject. At the close of the 12th century it became customary to call all verse treating of love canso, the name vers being then more generally reserved for poems on other themes. The sirventesc differs from the vers and the canso only by its subject, being for the most part devoted to moral and political topics. Peire Cardinal is celebrated for the sirvcntescs he composed against the clergy of his time. The political poems of Bertran de Born are sirvcntescs. There is reason to believe that originally this word meant simply a poem composed by a sir vent (Lat. serviens) or man-at-arms. The sirventesc is very frequently composed in the form, sometimes even with the rhymes, of a popu lar song, so that it might be sung to the same air. The tcnson is a debate between two interlocutors, each of whom has a stanza in turn. The partimen (Fr. jeu parti] is also a poetic debate, but it differs from the tenson in so far that the range of debate is limited. In the first stanza one of the partners proposes two alternatives ; the other partner chooses one of them and defends it, and the opposite side remains to be defended by the original pro- pounder. Often in a final couplet a judge or arbiter is appointed to decide between the parties. This poetic game is mentioned by &quot;William, count of Poitiers, at the end of the llth century. The pastorela, afterwards pastorela, is in general an account of the love adventures of a knight with a shepherdess. All these classes have one form capable of endless variations, five or more stanzas and one or two envois. The dansa and balada, intended to mark the time in dancing, are pieces with a refrain. The alba, which has also a refrain, is, as the name indicates, a waking or morning song at the dawning of the day. All those classes are in stanzas. The descort is not thus divided, and consequently it must be set to music right through. Its name is derived from the fact that, its component parts not being equal, there is a kind of &quot; discord &quot; between them. It is generally reserved for themes of love. Other kinds of lyric poems, sometimes with nothing new about them except the name, were developed in the south of France ; but those here mentioned are the more important. Narrative Poetry. Although the strictly lyric poetry of the troubadours forms the most original part of Proven9al literature, it must not be supposed that the remainder is of trifling import ance. Narrative poetry, especially, received in the south of France a great development, and, thanks to recent discoveries, a consider able body of it has already become known. Several classes must be distinguished : the chanson de geste legendary or historic, the romance of adventure, and the novel. Northern France remains emphatically the native country of the chanson de geste ; but, although in the south different social conditions, a more delicate taste, and a higher state of civilization prevented a similar pro fusion of tales of war and heroic deeds, Provengal literature has some highly important specimens of this class. The first place belongs to Girart de Roussillon, a poem of ten thousand verses, which relates the struggles of Charles Martel with his powerful vassal the Burgundian Gerard of Roussillon. It is a literary production of rare excellence and of exceptional interest for the history of civiliza tion in the llth and 12th centuries. Gerard of Roussillon belongs only within certain limits to the literature of southern France. The recension which we possess appears to have been made on the borders of Limousin and Poitou ; but it is clearly no more than a recast of an older poem no longer extant, probably either of French or at least Burgundian origin. To Limousin also seems to belong the poem of Aiyar and Manrin (12th century), of which we have unfortunately only a fragment so short that the subject cannot be clearly made out. Of less heroic character is the poem of Daurel and Beton (end of the 12th or beginning of the 13th century), con nected with the cycle of Charlemagne, but by the romantic character of the events more like a regular romance of adventure. We can not, however, form a complete judgment in regard to it, as the only MS. in which it has been preserved is defective at the close, and that to an amount there is no means of ascertaining. Midway between legend and history may be classified the Provencal Chanson of Antioch, a fragment of which, 700 verses in extent, has been recently recovered in Madrid and published in Archives de I Orient Latin, vol. ii. To history proper belongs the chanson of the crusade against the Albigensians, which, in its present state, is composed of two poems one tacked to the other : the first, contain ing the events from the beginning of the crusade till 1213, is the work of a certain William of Tudela, a moderate supporter of the crusaders ; the second, from 1213 to 1218, is by a vehement opponent of the enterprise. The language and style of the two parts are no less different than the opinions. Finally, about 1280 a native of Toulouse named Guillaume Anelier composed, in the chanson de geste form, a poem on the war carried on in Navarre by the French in 1276 and 1277. It is an historical work of little literary merit. All these poems are, as chansons de geste ought to be, in stanzas of indefinite length, with a single rhyme. Gerard of Roussillon, Aigar and Maurin, and Daurel and Beton are in verses of ten, the others in verses of twelve syllables. The peculiarity of the versi fication in Gerard is that the pause in the line occurs after the sixth syllable, and not, as is usual, after the fourth. Like the chanson de geste, the romance of adventure is but slightly represented in the south ; but it is to be borne in mind that many works of this class must have perished, as is rendered evident by the mere fact that, with few exceptions, the narrative poems which have come down to us are each known by a single manuscript only. We possess but three Provencal romances of adventure : Jaufre (com posed in the middle of the 13th century and dedicated to a king of Aragon, possibly James I.), Blandin of Cornwall, and Guilkm do la Barra. The first two are connected with the Arthurian cycle : Jaufre, is an elegant and ingenious work ; Blandin of Cornwall the dullest and most insipid one can well imagine. The romance^ of Guillem de la Barra tells an unlikely story also found in Boccaccio s Decameron (2d Day, viii.). It is rather a poor poem; but as a contribution to literary history it has the advantage of being dated. It was completed in 1318, and is dedicated to a noble of Languedoc called Sicart de Montaut. Connected with the romance of adven ture is the novel (in Provencal novas, always in the plural), which