CHAUCER. 175 



timentality, his love of the marvellous and the picturesque, he is 

 its natural precursor. The analogy between his Fasti and the 

 versified legends of saints is more than a fanciful one. He was 

 certainly popular with the poets of the thirteenth and fourteenth 

 centuries. Virgil had wellnigh become mythical. The chief 

 merit of the Provengal poets is in having been the first to demon 

 strate that it was possible to write with elegance in a modern 

 dialect, and their interest for us is mainly as forerunners, as indi 

 cations of tendency. Their literature is prophecy, not fulfilment. 

 Its formal sentiment culminated in Laura, its ideal aspiration in 

 Beatrice. Shakspeare s hundred and sixth sonnet, if, for the 

 imaginary mistress to whom it was addressed, we substitute the 

 muse of a truer conception and more perfected utterance, repre 

 sents exactly the feeling with which we read Provengal poetry: 



When in the chronicle of wasted Time 

 I see descriptions of the fairest wights 

 And beauty making beautiful old rhyme 

 In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights, 



I see their antique pen would have expressed 



Even such a beauty as you master now; 



So all their praises are but prophecies 



Of this our time, all you prefiguring, 



And, for they looked but with divining eyes, 



They had not skill enough your worth to sing 



It is astonishing how little of the real life of the time we learn 

 from the Troubadours, except by way of inference and deduction. 

 Their poetry is purely lyric in its most narrow sense, that is, the 

 expression of personal and momentary moods. To the fancy of 

 critics who take their cue from tradition, Provence is a morning 

 sky of early summer, out of which innumerable larks rain a faint 

 melody (the sweeter because rather half divined than heard too 

 distinctly) over an earth where the dew never dries and the 

 flowers never fade. But when we open Raynouard it is like 

 opening the door of an aviary. We are deafened and confused 

 by a hundred minstrels singing the same song at once, and more 

 than suspect that the flowers they welcome are made of French 

 cambric, spangled with dewdrops of prevaricating glass. Ber 

 nard de Ventadour and Bertrand de Born are well-nigh the only 

 ones among them in whom we find an original type. Yet the 

 Troubadours undoubtedly led the way to refinement of concep 

 tion and perfection of form. They were the conduit through 

 which the failing stream of Roman literary tradition flowed into 

 the new channel which mediaeval culture was slowly shaping for 

 itself. Without them we could not understand Petrarca, who 



