CHAUCER. 215 



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 ifc 

 stops short of that larger and more gracious style of treat 

 ment 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 conven 

 tional 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 con 

 science 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 Tedeschi 

 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 continues to be, a strictly 

 provincial literature, imprisoned within 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 Be&amp;gt;anger 

 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 sentiment and rhetorical 

 punctilios of a school of poets which, with rare exceptions, 

 began and ended in courtly dilettantism. 



