Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/7



. CVIII

''BY OLIVIA HOWARD DUNBAR

O the son of a furrier, reared, under more or less prosaic and homely restrictions, in prosperrous twelfth-century Toulouse, yet with an impatient genius always secretly nestling in his bosom, the life of all lives most desirable and enchanting may well have seemed that of the famed troubadours of his own Provence. And it must have been his conscious natural affiliation with these masters of the "gay science" that gave sustenance and color to the otherwise dingy boyhood of one Peire Vidal, who, having uncomfortably little taste for a dark workshop, ill-smelling pelts, the society of his father's dull apprentices, determined, while still a lad, to join the sweet-toned chorus of the poet-adventurers.

Not only was it an inspiriting matter to a youthful poet to feel himself a native of that sunny, magically fecund Provence which recognized no season but spring and no mode of expression but the lyric; but, apart from this, there were two important facts which must have entered prominently into the ambitious lad's calculations. One was the democracy, extraordinary in a feudal age, of the poet's calling. Was not a poet as good as a prince, and were they not often identical? It was a Count of Poitiers who was the first troubadour, after whom the making of verses not only came to be affected by duke and baron, monk and bishop, but was even practised, with a more than kingly excellence, by that darling of romance, Richard of the Lion Heart. On the other hand, equal prestige awaited minstrels of lowlier origin: Arnaud de Marveil, originally a serf, was permitted to address his songs to the Countess Adelaide, daughter of Count Raymond V. of Toulouse, while Bernart de Ventadour, "son of a serving-man," as his biographer has it, wooed first a Viscountess and then a Duchess of Normandy. Moreover, to a lad of quick parts, the acquirement of the technicalities of this courtly art, far from being the dreary and tedious affair that it was, for instance, to serve as a furrier's apprentice, was in itself an infinite solace and delight. If one had a head that was always singing soundless music within itself and a heart that beat riotously, one needed only a torchlight and an undisturbed hour to play at master and apprentice both.

Thus Peire, having diligently studied his models of canzos, sirventes, albas, retroensas, those complex verse-forms but lately borrowed from the Arabs and handled by the Provençal poets with consummate adroitness, learned, in his turn, to weave the soft syllables of the Langue d'Oc into subtly intricate accord, artfully distributing the harmonies throughout the verses, as his masters did, rather than contenting himself with a mere stupid tagging of the lines with Copyright, 1903, by Harper and Brothers. All rights reserved