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Up the mountains they go, high-heeled and high-hatted, laden like Christian with mortifications and mortgages of divers sorts and degrees, some suffering from the sting of bad bargains, others exulting in good ones; hunters and fishermen with gun and rod and leggins; blythe and jolly troubadours to whom all Shasta is romance; poets singing their prayers; the weak and the strong, unable or unwilling to bear mental taxation.
The centuries, however, were only silent because the moderns did not know how to listen to their message. We know now that every country in Europe had a great contributor to literature in the century before Dante. The Cid, the Arthur Legends, the Nibelungen, the Troubadours, naturally led up to Dante. He was only the culmination of a great period of literature.
The dialect of these provenzaleggianti was not pure Sicilian but was probably a literary language containing elements drawn from other dialects, as happened long before in the case of the troubadours themselves. The best known representatives of this school, Pier delle Vigne, Jacopo da Lentini and Guido delle Colonne are familiar to students of Dante.
He met an old woman herb-gathering at daybreak, and said, 'Mother, hast thou seen a crow or other bird? 'Yea, answered the crone, 'on the trunk of a dead willow. Beral counted upon his fingers the day of the year, and turned bridle. With troubadours of name and note they had dealings, but not always to their own advantage, as the following story testifies.
The world hears a bugle-call to-day more noble than any of your piping troubadours. We have something better to fight for than a vacant tomb." The old man drew himself up haughtily. "I know what you would say, Liberty for the low and vile. It is a good word. That was a better which they hid in their hearts in the old time, Honour!" Honour!
Mediæval love is first revealed in the sudden and almost simultaneous burst of song which, like the twitter and trill so dear to trouvères, troubadours, and minnesingers, fills the woods that yesterday were silent and dead, and greeted the earliest sunshine, the earliest faint green after the long winter numbness of the dark ages, after the boisterous gales of the earliest Crusade.
These fascinating characters, outlined by the imagination of the troubadours, set their seal and sanction upon this truth. LVIII. We do not attach ourselves permanently to any possessions, excepting in proportion to the trouble, toil and longing which they have cost us.
See, for hereditaments, specimens, Walter Scott's Border Minstrelsy, Percy's collection, Ellis's early English Metrical Romances, the European continental poems of Walter of Aquitania, and the Nibelungen, of pagan stock, but monkish-feudal redaction; the history of the Troubadours, by Fauriel; even the far-back cumbrous old Hindu epics, as indicating the Asian eggs out of which European chivalry was hatch'd; Ticknor's chapters on the Cid, and on the Spanish poems and poets of Calderon's time.
In 1092 the crown of Provence passing to the Count of Barcelona brought a more refined taste into the Provencal poetry; the arts and the sciences of the Arabians obtained a foothold in the country; rhyme the method used in Arabian poetry, was adopted by the Troubadours, and from them has been handed down to the nations of modern Europe.
The history of Geoffrey Rudel illustrates the wildness of the imagination and manners of the troubadours.
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