Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/8

4 rhyme, as came to be the way of later and lazier poets.

In sequence of which patient emulation, the time came when the confident graduate of his own instruction bade farewell to the furrier's craft and to Toulouse and strode gayly forth to meet as strange a fortune as poet ever had. "Son of a petty tradesman," as one of his modern biographers has put it, "he became the companion of princes, reckoned five kings among his friends, won fame in as many countries, and, after seven centuries, still lives in fifty songs." Incontestably the most original, perhaps the most gifted, of the group of poets to which he belongs, it is the only too obvious contrast between his wisdom and his folly that still chiefly arouses interest; for human curiosity loves to exercise itself upon such a riddle as the career of this "Don Quixote of troubadours," this earlier prototype, as it has been said of him, of Goldsmith, who "wrote like an angel" but could not live like one. "He sang better than any poet in the world," declares the Provençal chronicler, "and was one of the maddest men that ever lived, for he believed everything to be just as he wished it."

HERE is a tradition—the tale at least fits in with Peire's tumultuous and not too dignified career—that he first introduced himself, in the character of a troubadour, at the gates of the castle of the Seigneur Guillems de Castenel. Now from first to last Peire Vidal was no less an actor than a poet; and nothing could better exemplify the audacity that was the readiest expression of his facile temperament than that, arriving unknown, on foot, destitute of the panoply or the attendance of the successful poet, he should—with a quizzical twist of the mouth, perhaps—have sent word to the seigneur that a poet was his guest. It is true that the isolation of the strongholds of the nobility sufficed to make the troubadour invariably welcome and his approach the signal for unstinted hospitality. Yet the Seigneur de Castenel's hospitality was not large enough to include a bold youth the legitimacy of whose pretensions there was good reason to distrust; and as a playful rebuke for his impertinence it was ordered that the self-styled poet be lowered in a bucket half-way down a well, with the invitation there to compose a poem. If the composition should fail to justify its author's arrogance, the rope was to be cut. The minstrel's hardihood was fully equal to the test; and reading the verses sent up for his inspection, the Seigneur decided that, after all, it were a pity to drown a poet of so very marked resourcefulness.

From the time of this farcical adventure until his death Vidal was a persistent nomad. To most of us, however, the precise itinerary of the vagabond genius whose hasty footprints lie beneath the dust of seven centuries is of less importance than the sufficiently established fact that very early in his career Peire had roamed through a good part of France, Spain, and Italy. Indeed, he had barely escaped from the well of the Seigneur de Castenel when, perhaps from a desire not to put to too severe a test the fate of a prophet in his own country, he journeyed into near-lying Spain. Here, partly through merit, and partly, no doubt, through effrontery, he succeeded in recommending himself to the genial Alfonso of Aragon, one of the most liberal patrons of troubadours, and a monarch of whom Peire—it should be recorded of his constancy—always remained a devoted servitor. The first sirvente, or political poem, that Peire is known to have written is in praise of King Alfonso and of the war which he then happened, somewhat awkwardly for the poet, to be making upon Count Raymond of Toulouse.

Years after, when Alfonso died, Peire dutifully lamented him. "In great affliction," he wrote, "must live he who loses his good master, as I have lost the best to whom death ever came. Certainly," he adds, with a comfortable reliance upon ethical principle, "I should not live if suicide were not a sin."

It is not with dirges, however, that legend associates the profession of the troubadour. Centuries of emphasis upon the pre-eminence of love in the life and literature of the Midi have naturally resulted in a definite popular conception of the troubadour as the most