176 CHAUCER. 



carried the manufacture of artificial bloom and fictitious deW- 

 drop to a point of excellence where artifice, if ever, may claim 

 the praise of art. Without them we could not understand 

 Dante, in whom their sentiment for woman was idealised by a 

 passionate intellect and a profound nature, till Beatrice becomes 

 a half human, half divine abstraction, a woman still to memory 

 and devotion, a disembodied symbol to the ecstasy of thought. 

 The Provengal love-poetry was as abstracted from all sensuality 

 as that of Petrarca, but it stops short of that larger and more 

 gracious style of treatment which has secured him a place in all 

 gentle hearts and refined imaginations for ever. In it also 

 woman leads her servants upward, but it is along the easy 

 slopes of conventional sentiment, and no Troubadour so much 

 as dreamed of that loftier region, native to Dante, where the 

 woman is subtilised into das Ewig-Weibliche, type of man s 

 finer conscience and nobler aspiration made sensible to him only 

 through her. 



On the whole, it would be hard to find anything more tediously 

 artificial than the Provengal literature, except the reproduction 

 of it by the Minnesingers. The Tcdeschi lurchi certainly did 

 contrive to make something heavy as dough out of what was at 

 least light, if not very satisfying, in the canarous dialect of 

 Southern Gaul. But its doom was inevitably predicted in its 

 nature and position, nay, in its very name. It was, and it con 

 tinues to be, a strictly provincial literature, imprisoned withm 

 extremely narrow intellectual and even geographical limits. It 

 is not race or language that can inflict this leprous isolation, but 

 some defect of sympathy with the simpler and more universal 

 relations of human nature. You cannot shut up Burns in a 

 dialect bristling with archaisms, nor prevent BeVanger from 

 setting all pulses a-dance in the least rhythmic and imaginative 

 of modern tongues. The healthy temperature of Chaucer, with 

 its breadth of interest in all ranks and phases of social life, could 

 have found little that was sympathetic in the evaporated senti 

 ment and rhetorical punctilios of a school of poets which, with 

 rare exceptions, began and ended in courtly dilettantism. 



The refined formality with which the literary product of 

 Provence is for the most part stamped, as with a trademark, 

 was doubtless the legacy of Gallo-Roman culture, itself at best 

 derivative and superficial. I think, indeed, that it may well 

 be doubted whether Roman literature, always a half-hardy 

 exotic, could ripen the seeds of living reproduction. The 

 Roman genius was eminently practical, and far more apt for 



