CHAUCER. 237 



momentary moods. To the fancy of critics who take 

 their cue from tradition, Provenge 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 cam- 

 bric si^anglcd with dewdrops of prevaricating glass. 

 Bernard de Ventadour 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 mediaeval culture was slowly shaping for 

 itself. Without them we could not understand Petrarca,' 

 who carried the manufiicture of artificial bloom and fic- 

 titious dew-drop to a 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 idealized by a passionate intellect and 

 a profound natui'e, 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 Proven9al love-poetry was as abstracted from all 

 sensuality as that of Petrarca, but it stops short of that 

 larger and more gracious style of treatment which has 

 secured him a place in all gentle hearts and refined 

 imaginations forever. In it also woman leads her ser- 

 vants upward, but it is along the easy slopes of conven- 

 tional sentiment, and no Troubadour so much as di'eamed 

 Oi. that loftier region, native to Dante, where the woman 



