CHAUCER. 179 



formula and make it pliant to his more passionate feeling. The 

 great service of the Provengals was that they kept in mind the 

 fact that poetry was not merely an amusement, but an art, and 

 long after their literary activity had ceased their influence 

 reacted beneficially upon Europe through their Italian pupils. 

 They are interesting as showing the tendency of the Romanic 

 races to a scientific treatment of what, if it be not spontaneous, 

 becomes a fashion and erelong an impertinence. Fauriel has 

 endeavoured to prove that they were the first to treat the me 

 diaeval heroic legends epically, but the evidence is strongly 

 against him. The testimony of Dante on this point is explicit,* 

 and moreover not a single romance of chivalry has come down 

 to us in a dialect of the pure Provencal. 



The Trouveres, on the other hand, are apt to have something 

 naive and vigorous about them, something that smacks of race 

 and soil. Their very coarseness is almost better than the 

 Troubadour delicacy, because it was not an affectation. The 

 difference between the two schools is that between a culture 

 pedantically transmitted and one which grows and gathers 

 strength from natural causes. Indeed, it is to the North of 

 France and to the Trouveres that we are to look for the true 

 origins of our modern literature. I do not mean in their epical 

 poetry, though there is something refreshing in the mere fact of 

 their choosing native heroes and legends as the subjects of their 

 song. It was in their Fabliaux and Lais that, dealing with the 

 realities of the life about them, they became original and 

 delightful in spite of themselves. Their Chansons de Geste are 

 fine specimens of fighting Christianity, highly inspiring for men 

 like Peire de Bergerac, who sings 



Bel m es can aug lo resso 

 Que fai 1 ausbercs ab 1 arso, 

 Li bruit e il crit e il masan 

 Que il corn e las trombas fan ;f 



but who after reading them even the best of them, the Song of 



* Allegat ergo pro se lingua Oil quod propter sui faciliorem et^delectabiliorem 

 vulgaritatem, quicquid redactum sive inventum est ad yulgare prosaicum, suum est ; 

 videlicet biblia cum Trojanorum, Romanorumque gestibus compilata et Arturi regis 

 ambages pulcherrimae et quamplures alias historise ac doctrinae. That Dante byjro- 

 saicum did not mean prose, but a more inartificial verse, numeros lege soluto s,is 

 clear. Cf. Wolf, Ueber die Lais, pp. 92 seq. and notes. It has not, I think, been 

 remarked that Dante borrows \\\sfaciliorem et delectabiliorem from the plus dile- 

 fable et comune of his master Brunetto Latini. 



t My ears no sweeter music know 

 Than hauberk s clank with saddlebow. 

 The noise, the cries, the tumult blown 

 From trumpet and from clarion. 



