CHAUCER. 217 



If not literature, they were at least memories of literature, 

 and such memories are not without effect in reproducing 

 what they regret. The provincial writers of Latin devoted 

 themselves with a dreary assiduity to the imitation of 

 models which they deemed classical, but which were 

 truly so only in the sense that they were the more 

 decorously respectful of the dead form in proportion as the 

 living spirit had more utterly gone out of it. It is, I 

 suspect, to the traditions of this purely rhetorical influence, 

 indirectly exercised, that we are to attribute the rapid 

 passage of the new Provengal poetry from what must have 

 been its original popular character to that highly artificial 

 condition which precedes total extinction. It was the 

 alienation of the written from the spoken language (always, 

 perhaps, more or less malignly operative in giving Roman 

 literature a cool-blooded turn as compared with 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. The position 

 of the Gallo-Romans of the South, both ethical and geo 

 graphical, 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 Revolutionary War. They 

 had been thoroughly romanised in language and culture, but 

 the line of their historic continuity had been broken. The 



