240 CHAUCER. 



were the more decorously respectful of the dead form hi 

 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 Provenc^-al 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 ma- 

 lignly operative in giving Roman literature a cold-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. Un- 

 doubtedly a man of genius can out of his own super- 

 abundant 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 (Toe, which, it should 

 seem, had performed its special function in the devel- 

 opment of modern literature, and would have perished 

 even without the Albigensian war. The position of the 

 Gallo-llomans of the South, both ethical and geogTaphi- 

 cal, precluded them from producing anything really gi'eat 

 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 romanized in language and culture, 

 but the line of their historic continuity had been broken. 

 The Roman road, whicli Hnked them with the only past 

 they knew, had been buried under the great barbarian 



