218 CHAUCER. 



Roman road, which linked them with the only past they 

 knew, had been buried under the great barbarian 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 line 

 age. Such reminiscences as they still retained of Latin 

 culture were pedantic and rhetorical,* and it was only 

 natural that out of those they should have elaborated a 

 code of poetical jurisprudence 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 

 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 had 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 ere long an impertinence. Fauriel has endeav 

 oured to prove that they were the first to treat the 

 mediaeval heroic legends epically, but the evidence is 

 strongly against him. The testimony of Dante on this 



* Fauriel s Histoire de la Gaule Meridionale, vol. i. passim. 



