214 CHAUCER. 



imaginary mistress to whom it was addressed, we substitute 

 the muse of a truer conception and more perfected utterance, 

 represents exactly the feeling with which we read Provengal 

 poetry : 



&quot; 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. &quot; 



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. Bernard de Yentadour 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 conception and perfection of form. 

 They were the conduit through which the failing stream of 

 Roman literary tradition flowed into the new channel which 

 medieval culture was slowly shaping for itself. Without 

 them we could not understand Petrarca, who carried the 

 manufacture of artificial bloom and fictitious dewdrop to a 



