238 CHAUCER. 



is subtilized into das Eivig-Weihliche, tyjie of man's finer 

 conscience and nobler aspiration made sensible to him 

 only thi'ough her. 



On the whole, it woiild be hard to find anything more 

 tediously artificial than the Provencal literatui-e, except 

 the reproduction of it by the Minnesingers. The Tedes- 

 chi lurchi certainly did contrive to make something heavy 

 as dough out of what was at least light, if not very satis- 

 fying, in the canorous 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 literatiu'e, imprisoned within extreme- 

 ly narrow intellectual and even geographical limits. It 

 is not race or language that can inilict this leprous isola- 

 tion, but some defect of sjTupathy with the simpler and 

 more universal relations of human nature. You cannot 

 shut up Burns in a dialect bristling with archaisms, nor 

 prevent Beranger from setting all pulses a-dance in the 

 least rhythmic and imaginative of modem tongiies. The 

 healthy temperament of Chaucei*, with its breadth of inter- 

 est 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. 



The refined formality with which the literary product 

 of Pi'oven^e is for the most part stamped, as with a 

 trademark, was doubtless the legacy of Gallo-Roman cul- 

 ture, itself at best derivative and superficial. I think, 

 indeed, that it may well be doubted whether Roman 

 literatiwe, always a half-hardy exotic, could ripen the 

 seeds of living reproduction. The Roman genius was 

 eminently practical, and far more apt for the triumphs 

 of politics and jurisprudence than of art. Supreme ele- 

 gance it could and did arrive at in Virgil, but, if I may 

 trust my own judgment, it produced but one original 



