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Yet despite this conscientiousness of theirs, most of the many authors of our Iliad and Odyssey were, by the theory, strolling irresponsible rhapsodists, like the later jongleurs of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in mediaeval France.
They themselves attributed their decline to the degradation into which the jongleurs, with whom at last they were confounded, had fallen. But their art contained within itself a more immediate principle of decay in the profound ignorance of its professors. They had no other models than the songs of the Arabians, which perverted their taste.
Their ragged clothes and foreign gestures, as they prayed for hospitality, led the porter to take them for jongleurs, the jesters and jugglers of the day, and the news of this break in the monotony of their lives brought prior, sacrist, and cellarer to the door to welcome them and witness their tricks.
The Troubadours, Conteurs, and Jongleurs, practised what is yet called in the southern parts of France, Le guay Saber, or the gay science. I consider these as the Miscellanists of their day; they had their grave moralities, their tragical histories, and their sportive tales; their verse and their prose.
John felt a singular lightness of heart, and, despite the forbidding glare of Suzanne, who was in the last cart, he spoke to Julie. "It's too fine a morning for battle," he said in English. "Let's pretend that we're a company of troubadours, minnesingers, jongleurs, acrobats and what not, going from one great castle to another." "I suppose Antoine there is the chief acrobat?"
After this comes the conversation in the drawing-room, and many naïve methods of raising interesting discussions are suggested. Less highly gifted than the Troubadours were the Jongleurs, who composed their retinue. These musical jacks-of-all-trades began as accompanists, singing the songs of their master at the castles he visited.
Again, a poet in the fortunate position of Jendeus would not teach his Epic in a "school" of reciters unless he were extremely well paid. In later years, after his death, his poem came, through copies good or bad, into circulation. Late, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, we hear of a "school" of jongleurs at Beauvais.
The audiences of the jongleurs, too, were no longer, by that time, what they had been. The age of recitations from a text in princely halls was ending or ended; the age of a reading public was begun.
Julien, an English Queen who never set foot in England. Loud were the lamentations of the troubadours of Aquitaine over their minstrel King, Bertrand de Born especially, bewailing him as "le roi des courtois, l'empereur des preux," and declaring that barons, troubadours, jongleurs, had lost their all.
Yes, with the French writer, we must say: "Et nous jongleurs inutiles, frivoles joueurs de luth!" . . . 1906. Yes! Why is this the chief characteristic of our art? What secret instincts are responsible for this inveterate distaste? But, first, is it true that we have it?
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