Notes on the Early Use of the Various Forms
Some Notes on the Early Use of the Various Forms, and Rules for Their Construction
In the limited space available, it is hardly possible to give more than a very crude sketch of the origin of these forms; but some reference to early Provençal literature is inevitable, since the nucleus of not a few of them can be traced among the intricate rhyming of the Troubadours. Yet it would be beyond the purpose to go minutely into the enticing history of that remarkable period, nor is it needful to raise disputed questions regarding the origin of each particular fashion. The number of books on Provençal subjects is great, the mere enumeration of the names of those in the library of the British Museum would fill several pages. The language itself has a fascination which allures many to disaster, for as Mr. Hueffer points out, it “looks at first sight so like the Latin and more familiar Romance languages that it offers special temptations” to guess at its meaning, with very doubtful success.
The term Provençal is usually applied to a dialect more correctly known as “the Langue d’Oc, which, with the Langue d’Oil, forms the two divisions of the Romance language spoken in the country we now know as France;” but Mr. Saintsbury remarks that, strictly speaking, the Langue d’Oc should not be called “French” at all, since it is hardly more akin to the Langue d’Oil than it is to Spanish and Italian, and that those who spoke it applied the term “French” to northern speech, calling their own Limousin, or Provençal, or Auvergnat. The limits where it prevailed extended far beyond Provence itself. Authorities differ with regard to the exact boundaries. It will suffice for the present purpose to take those Mr. Hueffer adopts—namely, the district within a boundary formed by a line drawn from the mouth of the Gironde to that of the Saone, in the north, while the southern limit includes parts of Spain, such as Aragon, Valencia, Catalonia, and the Balearic Islands.
Herr Karl Bartsch, the eminent historian of Provençal literature, divides it into three periods:—the first, to the end of the eleventh century; the second, which is the one that marks the most flourishing time of the poetry of the Troubadours, extending over the twelfth and thirteenth; and the third period—of its decadence—in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. To this may be added the attempt to revive it in our own day, by the school of the so-called Félibres, including Mistral, Aubanel, Alphonse Daudet, and others, who have worked vigorously, and with no mean success, to produce a modern literature in the old dialect, worthy of its former dignity. In this preface it is impossible to mention any part of the prose of this marvellous literature, which sprang almost suddenly into a gigantic growth, that has been a fruitful theme for wonder and admiration ever since, and left its influence widely felt. The point that is to the purpose here, concerns the invention by the Provençal poets of many set forms of verse, some few of which are still written, but most so altered and renewed by later use, that their original character is well-nigh obscured. The forms included in this book are often erroneously attributed en masse to the jongleurs of Provence, yet few assumptions are less true. Altered by the Trouvères, the fifteenth century poets, the Ronsardists, and later writers, it is safer to assign to the Troubadours only the germs which evolved gradually into their now matured forms. To linger over the extraordinary period is a temptation hard to dismiss; the very name still has a flavour of romance, and brings a curious medley of images to the mind when it is heard, many perhaps as far from the actual Provençal Troubadour as Nanki-Poo in the “Mikado” is from the wandering minstrel of the court of King Thibaut. Of the Troubadours who have come down to fame, four hundred and sixty are recorded by name, besides two hundred and fifty-one pieces that have survived without evidence of their authors. King Richard I. (our own Cœur de Lion), Guillem de Cabestanh, Peire Vidal, Bertran de Born, The Monk of Montaudon, and many others, have biographical sketches of exceeding interest allotted to them in Mr. Hueffer’s “The Troubadours.” A halo of romance has gathered round their names, and thrown a glamour over the record of their lives; to read their history is to be transported to a region where all topics but love and song are deemed unimportant trifles, unless the old chroniclers are singularly untruthful in their statements. We know now-a-days many a young poet’s crushed life appears only in his verses, and outside those he appears but an average Philistine to vulgar eyes. Perhaps the “land of the nightingale and rose” was not so idyllic as its historians paint it; but with every deduction, there yet remains evidence of an exceptional importance attached to the arts, more especially to that of song. To those who wrote, or rather sang, witty impromptus (made often, we can but fancy, with much labour beforehand), or produced dainty conceits in elaborate rhymes and rhythms, when sound came perilously near triumphing over sense, a welcome was extended, as widespread and far more personal in its application than even that accorded to our modern substitute for the troubadour—the popular novelist. The doings of the Courts of Love, set down in sober chronicles, are hardly less fantastic than Mr. Gilbert’s ingenious operas. Matters of the most sentimental and amorous character were debated in public, with all the earnestness of a question of state. That their poetry was singularly limited in its character there is little doubt, but Mr. Hueffer declares that it had its serious side, often lost sight of, and that no small portion was devoted to stately and dignified subjects. Mr. Lowell, on the other hand, in an essay on Chaucer in My Study Windows, says—
“Their poetry is purely lyric in its most narrow sense, that is, the expression of personal and momentary moods. To the fancy of the critics who take their cue from tradition, Provence 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 the flowers they welcome are made of French cambric, spangled with dewdrops of prevaricating glass.”
The forms in which the Provençal poets wrote were chiefly these:—The oldest was called vers, and consisted of octosyllabic lines arranged in stanzas; from this grew the canzo, with interlaced rhymes—later on with the distinctive feature still prominent in French, but unknown in English poetry, the rhymes masculine and feminine. The canzo was used entirely for subjects of love and gallantry, but the sirvente, composed of short stanzas, simply rhyming, and corresponding one to the other, was employed for political and social subjects, sometimes treated seriously, at others satirically. The tenso was a curious trial of skill in impromptu versification. Two antagonists met and agreed that the one should reply on the opposite side to any argument the first might select. The opening stanza, chosen at will by the speaker, was imitated in the reply, both in observance of its rhyme and rhythm, the same rhyme-sound being often kept throughout the whole poem. It must not be forgotten that the Langue d’Oc was singularly fertile in rhymes, so that the feat was less arduous than it would be in other tongues. The alba, a farewell at morning, and the serena, or evening song, the pastorella, devoted, as its name implies, to pastoral subjects, appear to govern the themes of the verses rather than the form. There is record, however, of the breu-doble (double short), invented by Guirant Riquier, a little form with three rhymes, two of which are repeated twice in three four-lined stanzas, and given once in a concluding couplet, while the third finished each quatrain. The retroensa is noticeable for its refrain of more than one line. The sonnet has ceased to be claimed as a Provençal invention, yet it must be noted, as at one time its origin there was a favourite theory. The ballade, “a song serving to accompany the dance,” must not be confused with the later ballade; and lastly, the greatest in most respects, the sestina, which, as it occurs among the poems noticed technically later on, need not be further mentioned here.
“The artificial verse-forms of Provence include some as peculiar and arbitrary as ever issued from the brain of Persian poet—verse-forms by the side of which the metrical glitter of ballade, chant royal, rondeau, rondel, triolet, virelai and villanelle must pale,” says a writer in the Westminster Review (October 1878), and instances the tenso and the sestina in proof of his assertion. Mr. Hueffer also treats the chant royal as mere child’s play beside the intricate feats displayed by the Troubadours. The above short list shows many examples of forms using the refrain and some other features preserved in Northern poetry; but the debt owed by the North to the Troubadours is far less, according to later writers, than that assigned to Provençal influence some few years ago. Mr. Saintsbury says that “poems called rondeaux and ballades, of loose construction and undecided form, began to make their appearance at the end of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth century,” but the forms as we know them owe their present shape to their reformation in Northern France, culminating in the poems of Charles d’Orléans and François Villon. In this revival, the lai and pastourelle kept their Provençal titles, but were made much more exact in form, and never attained the widespread celebrity of the newer shapes, which are to all intents and purposes the models for the forms in this volume, save the sestina, which is practically an Italian, and the pantoum, an Eastern form.
There is no space here to notice more than the names of a few of even the most prominent of the poets who succeeded the Provençal singers in their use of these forms. There are thousands of ballades in MSS. in the Royal French Library, by known and unknown writers. Eustache Deschamps (1328-1415), a friend of Chaucer’s, “has left no less than 1175 ballades. Rondeaus, virelais, etc., also proceeded in great numbers from his pen; also an important Art of Poetry, a treatise rendered at once necessary and popular by the fashion of artificial rhyming.”1 Some of the earliest ballades and rondel-triolets bear the name of Jehan Froissart (1337-1410), the chronicler. Messire Guy de la Tremouille, according to Mr. Gosse, is supposed to have been the first to devise the elaborate rules of construction of the ballade, which have been in force ever since. He was guard of the Oriflamme in 1383, and died in 1398; but Deschamps is more often credited with the honour. That he cultivated the form we know, besides writing an “Art of making Chansons, Ballades, Virelais, and Rondels,” which is a valuable relic of his time. Jehannot de Lescurel, “of whom absolutely nothing is known, has left sixteen ballades, fifteen rondeaus (not in regular form), and other pieces, said to be ‘of singular grace, lightness, and elegance.’”
Guillaume de Machault (1284-1377) was also a voluminous writer. One of his poems, a chanson balladée, is printed in Mr. Saintsbury’s Short History of French Literature, which contains also a Ballade by Alain Chartier (1390-1458), the hero of the famous story of the kiss of Queen Margaret of Scotland, and other specimens of this period, in a succinct and trustworthy account of the growth of French poetry, surpassed by no book in our own language.
Charles d’Orléans (1391-1466), noticed among the English writers, is specially honoured as the master of the rondel; while François Villon (1431-1485) stands out as the “prince of all ballade-makers.” For brief, but splendid sketches of these two, Mr. R. L. Stevenson’s Familiar Studies of Men and Books should be consulted, while for more prosaic description there is no lack of data. Since the revival of interest in Villon, France has done tardy but unstinted honour to her most famous poet, as it is the fashion just now to style him, but there is a doubt whether the praise given is not in danger of being exaggerated. Yet, making all allowances, there is vital humanity in his wondrous writings, that now, after four hundred years, read as living and modern in their presentation of life, as though they were by a realist of our own day. In Villon, student, poet, housebreaker, we find the forerunner of the Zola of to-day—one who, in so eminently an artificial form as the ballade, cast aside all conventional restraints, and sang of what he saw and knew. It is much to be regretted that space forbids more translations of his poems to be included in this collection. For those who wish to tackle him in his old, and by no means easy, French, a good edition is published for a franc, in the Collection Jannet-Picard (Paris). Mr. Payne has translated the whole of his authentic works into English in a volume, at present out of print, which contains also a very graphic and full biography of this remarkable man. Space forbids insertion of the sketch of his life prepared for this chapter. Born in 1431, student 1448, B.A. in 1452, writing his Lesser Testament in 1446, his Greater Testament in 1461; in those few years he contrived to win more fame, and, to speak truly, more infamy, than a whole generation of lesser poets. He was condemned to die—he wrote his marvellous Ballade of the Gibbet while lying under sentence of death—but escaped. Where he died is unknown, the date of his Greater Testament being the last record of Master François Villon of Paris.
In 1493 appeared L’art et science de rhéthorique pour faire rigmes et ballades, by Henry de Croï—an invaluable treatise on French Poetics. The works of Pierre Gringoire (1478-1544) must be named, if only for the fact of De Banville’s splendid ballade in his comedy “Gringoire,” founded on an incident in the poet’s life. By Mr. Lang’s permission a translation is quoted in the body of this volume. Mr. John Payne also englished it, in the Dublin University Magazine, 1879. The works of Clement Marot (1497-1544) demand special note, since his ballades and chants royaux are now accepted as the ideal models for imitation.
In his Art Poëtique, 1555, Thomas Sibilet reviews many of the former writers, and gives the rules of the poetry then in force. Immediately after this date came another change; with the famous school of Ronsard (1524-1585) and the Pléiade, as they are styled, one of whom, however, Du Bellay, was eager to abolish the ballade and chant royal in favour of the sonnet. The members of this group produced some notable work in strict forms. Among the Ronsardists we find Grévin the dramatist, who wrote some graceful poems which he called Villanesques—a modified form of the Villanelle—and Jean Passerat (1534-1602) who is specially noteworthy, since in his hand the Villanelle crystallised into its present shape, Joseph Boulmier, in the last revival, making this form his special study, and writing all his verses after Passerat’s model given elsewhere in this volume.
The rondeau was revived in great splendour in the middle of the seventeenth century. Foremost among the brilliant group is Voiture (1598-1648), the acknowledged master of this form. Only thirty of his rondeaus are left, but each one of these is a masterpiece, and may be studied for all the subtle devices and dainty inventions that the form has yet yielded. Benserade (1612-1691) and Sarrasin were also famous for rondeau-making, the former translating the whole of Ovid’s Metamorphoses into rondeaus, which were sumptuously printed at the King’s Press at a cost of 10,000 francs. When Voiture died in 1648, it is curious to note that Sarrasin wrote a “pompous funereal poem—possibly the most funny serious elegy ever composed—in which, among other strange mourners, he makes the ‘poor little triolet,’ all in tears, trot by the side of the dead poet,” who, according to Mr. Gosse, from whom the above paragraph is quoted, had never written one in his life. Sarrasin also left a curious specimen of the Glose, written on the famous Sonnet “de IOB” by Benserade. In 1649 Gérard de Saint Amant wrote a volume of sixty-four triolets. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century no important examples occur. About thirty years ago De Banville revived these old shapes, and initiated a movement that Daudet, Glatigny, Boulmier, and a host of others have helped forward, so that now modern French literature is flooded with examples of the forms-the ballade, rondeau, and triolet being the most widely used.
Having imperfectly followed the growth of the forms in France, it will be interesting to give a few notes of the various attempts made to acclimatise some in England. Although no effort previous to 1873 warrants us in claiming an English pedigree for them, yet it is curious to see how often the attempt was made to write them in our own tongue. The sonnet gradually grew into use, until it became as little an exotic as the potato, to employ an uncouth simile; the ballade and rondeau—hardly more formal in their rules, and with susceptibilities of infinite grace and beauty—failed to be even residents amongst us, much less naturalised subjects, sharing the rights and duties of citizens. Chaucer is believed to have used these forms, as in “The Legend of Good Women” he says, speaking of himself—
“Many a himpne for your holy daies
That highten balades, roundels, virelaies.”
His “Balade de Vilage sauns Peynture,” however, does not correspond with the accepted form. Mr. Gosse says that the Chaucer of 1651 contains a number of poems attributed to himself and Lydgate “which are merely pieces in rhyme-royal, so arranged as to imitate the French ballade: without its severity of form.”
The following is a roundel attributed to Chaucer:—
Notes
1 See Saintsbury’s Short History of French Literature, p. 103.