178 CHAUCER. 



Greek), which, ending at length in total divorce, rendered Latin 

 incapable of supplying the wants of new men and new ideas. 

 The same thing, I am strongly inclined to think, was true of 

 the language of the Troubadours. It had become literary, and 

 so far dead. It is true that no language is ever so far gone in 

 consumption as to be beyond the great-poet-cure. Undoubtedly 

 a man of genius can out of his own superabundant vitality 

 compel life into the most decrepit vocabulary. But it is by the 

 infusion of his own blood, as it were, and not without a certain 

 sacrifice of power. No such rescue came for the langue d oc, 

 which, it should seem, had performed its special function in the 

 development of modern literature, and would have perished 

 even without the Albigensian war. Tfre position of the Gallo- 

 Romans of the South, both ethical and geographical, precluded 

 them from producing anything really great or even original in 

 literature, for that must have its root in a national life, and this 

 they never had. After the Burgundian invasion their situation 

 was in many respects analogous to our own after the Revolu 

 tionary War. They had been thoroughly romanised in lan 

 guage and culture, but the line of their historic continuity had 

 been broken. The Roman road, which linked them with the 

 only past they knew, had been buried under the great barbariat. 

 land-slide. In like manner we, inheriting the language, the 

 social usages, the literary and political traditions of Englishmen, 

 were suddenly cut adrift from our historical anchorage. Very 

 soon there arose a demand for a native literature, nay, it was 

 even proposed that, as a first step toward it, we should adopt a 

 lingo of our own to be called the Columbian or Hesperian. This, 

 to be sure, was never accomplished, though our English cousins 

 seem to hint sometimes that we have made very fair advances 

 toward it ; but if it could have been, our position would have 

 been precisely that of the Provencals when they began to have 

 a literature of their own. They had formed a language which, 

 while it completed their orphanage from their imperial mother, 

 continually recalled her, and kept alive their pride of lineage. 

 Such reminiscences as they still retained of Latin culture were 

 pedantic and rhetorical,* and it was only natural that out of 

 these they should have elaborated a code of poetical jurispru 

 dence with titles and subtitles applicable to every form of verse 

 and tyrannous over every mode of sentiment. The result could 

 not fail to be artificial and wearisome, except where some man 

 with a truly lyrical genius could breathe life into the rigid 



* Fauriel, Histoire de la Gaule Meridionale, voL i. fassint. 



