Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/682

646 FRANCE [LITERATURE. ous fervour and the love of fighting, though neither of these excludes a lively appetite for booty and a constant tendency to disunion and disorder. Villehardouin was continued by Henri de Valenciennes, whose work is less remarkable, and has more the appearance of a rhymed chronicle thrown into prose, a process which is known to have been actually applied in some cases. Nor is the transition from Ville hardouin to Joinville (considerable in point of time, for Joinville was not born till ten years after Villehardouin s death) in point of literary history immediate. The rhymed chronicles of Philippe Mouskes and Guillaume Guiart belong to this interval ; and in prose the most remarkable works are the Gkronigue de Reims, a well-written history, having the interesting characteristic of taking the lay and popular side, and the great work (977-1209) attributed to Baudouin d Avesnes, and written both in French and Latin. Joinville. Joinville, whose special subject is the Life of St Louis, is far more modern than even the half-century which separ ates him from Villehardouin would lead us to suppose. There is no-thing of the knight-errant about him personally, notwithstanding his devotion to his hero. Our Lady of the Broken Lances is far from being his favourite saint. He is an admirable writer, but far less simple than Villehar douin the good King Louis tries in vain to make him share his own rather highflown devotion. Joinville is shrewd, practical, there is even a touch of the Voltairian about him j but he, unlike his predecessor, has political ideas and anti quarian curiosity, and his descriptions are often very credit able pieces of deliberate literature. It is very remarkable that each of the three last centuries of feudalism should have had one specially and extraor dinarily gifted chronicler to describe it. What Villehar douin is to the 12th and Joinville to the 13th century, that Froiasart. Froissart is to the 1 4th. His picture is the most famous as it it is the most varied of the throe, but it has special drawbacks as well as special merits. French critics have indeed been scarcely fair to Froissart, because of his early partiality to our own nation in the great quarrel of the time, forget ting that there was really no reason why he as a Hainaulter should take the French side. But there is no doubt that if the duty of an historian is to take in all the political pro blems of his time, Froissart certainly comes short of it. Although the feudal state in which knights and churchmen were alone of estimation was at the point of death, and though new orders of society were becoming important, though the distress and confusion of a transition state were evident to all, Froissart takes no notice of them. Society is still to him all knights and ladies, tournaments, skirmishes, and feasts. He depicts these, not like Joinville, still less like Villehardouin, as a sharer in them, but with the facile and picturesque pen of a sympathizing liter ary onlooker. As the comparison of the Congiiete de Con stantinople with a chanson de geste is inevitable, so is that of Froissart s Chronique with a roman d a ventures. Provencal Literature. No account of French mediaeval literature would be complete without at least some reference to the literary products of the Langue d Oc. Provengal literature will receive separate treatment elsewhere, and here our chief business is to contrast briefly. its develop ments with those of the Langue d Oil. The older belief of the antecedence and originality of the troubadours has in deed been shown of late years to be false, and all evidence goes to prove that trouvere and troubadour were in the main independent of each other ; while the creations of tho former, if less artistically elaborate, were more varied, more considerable, and mo^e fertile in their developments. The chanson de geste, the Arthurian romance, the fabliau, the allegoric poems of the type of the Renart and the Rose, the prose chronicle, the mystery, the farce, belong to the north ; und the first developments of the epic in particular ap pear to have actually preceded the composition of finished literature in the south. The earliest accents of the trouba dours are only heard at the extreme end of the 1 1 th century. By the end of the 14th, less in consequence of the Albigen- sian crusade than of the political changes which that crusade eventually caused, they ceased. The 300 years be tween these terms were occupied by a literature more rich than varied. It is, however, too often forgotten that the literature of the Langue d Oc is by no means confined to the productions of these famous minstrels. Two centuries before William of Poitiers, the earliest singer of the class (fl. 1087-1127), was written the Provengal poem on Boetius, the oldest monument that we have. It was, moreover, long after the extinction of the troubadour Ti : class that Provengal ceased for a time, except at long dc . intervals, to be used as a literary language. But though the identification of Provengal literature with the lyric products of the troubadours is not scientifically correct, it is at least not destitute of a certain excuse. In this poetry alone are found works of an individual savour and a lasting interest, and had it not been for this, Provengal would have run the risk of being regarded as a mere dialect, perhaps even a patow. A few romances and tales, and the metrical chronicle describing the Albigensian wars, sum up the longer compositions of the troubadours. On the other hand, their lyrical fecundity was extremely great, and their versification was most elaborate and correct, but their subjects were very limited. Love, war, and satire, almost exhaust the list. The satire, moreover, is for the most part of a purely personal character, and entirely lacks the diver sified historical and social interest which distinguishes the satirical poems of the Langue d Oil. Nor are the war i songs of the troubadours extremely numerous, the chief writer of them being the famous Bertrand de Born. Certain moral or didactic poems of their authorship also exist, but the bulk of their compositions deals with the subject of love, and deals with it in a manner for which, while its sweetness and grace have been universally recognized, the most ar dent champions of the literary achievements of Provence and Languedoc have not been able to claim variety, vigour, or even, in the majority of cases, passion and truth. The alba, the serena, the pastorela, are alike open to the charge of monotony which has been brought against the northern equivalent of the latter, the pastourelle. The planh or com plaint is also somewhat of a monotonous and unreal charac ter j the tenson or verse dialogue and the ensenhamen. or didactic epistle are apt to be dull; and the sirvente" or satirical poem, though spirited enough, is apt, as we have said, to degenerate into thV mere lampoon. So much for the disadvantages of Provengal verse, disadvantages which would scarcely require notice but for the contrast they present to the corresponding advantages of northern poetry. On the other hand, in its peculiar and somewhat limited way, Provengal poetry and the spirit which it expresses surpass anything which can be paralleled with them in northern French up to the date .of their disappearance. The latter, except in the 15th and 16th centuries, and in our own time, has always been deficient in impassioned amatory poetry, while, on the other hand, the anonymous alba, " En un vergier sotz folha d albespi," which Mr Swin burne has finely paraphrased, stands at the head of almost all poetry of this class; and many of the fancies of the trouba dours, such as the love of Geoffroi Rudel for the Lady of Tripoli, have fixed themselves durably in the literary imag ination of Europe. But the great glory of the troubadours was their strenuous and successful attention to the formal part of poetry. Assisted by the melodious if somewhat monotonous cadences and terminations of their language, they framed most intricate and elaborate systems of verse and rhyme, which undoubtedly served as a stimulus to