Amour Courtois

THE songs of Count Guilhem de Poitiers contain no token of the “courtly” manner which is a distinctive trait of troubadour poetry.¹ Their broad joviality would sort with the taste of the guard-room much better than with that of elegant gatherings presided over by the ladies. And in this respect, no less than by their form, they resembled the azajal of Ibn Qūzman. The Count’s son and successor, Guilhem X of Aquitaine, surnamed the Toulousain, continued to song-makers the favor shown them by his father. His daughter, the illustrious Aliénor, was as yet too young to second him in his role of a Maecenas; she was but fifteen when she was married to the King of France, whose court, thronged with monks, did not hold songs in much favor. But the passion with which she applied herself to poetry throughout a long life—she attained the age of eighty—bears witness to the deep impression the “Toulousain’s” Court must have made upon her.

When Guilhem X died, the jongleur Cercamon expressed himself with a poet’s exaggeration, as though all the luster of poetry had gone out from the world with his patron. His hopes turned once more to the Court of Castile and also to that of Eble II, Lord of Ventadorn, a noble manor, whose imposing ruins look down to this day over the moorland of Corrèze, and which, according to Froissart was one of the strongest castles in all the world. There was much rivalry, under a surface of friendly intercourse, between the Viscounts of Ventadorn and the Dukes of Aquitaine.

The Eble family, founded by Archambaud, Viscount of Comborn and Ventadorn, considered that they possessed claims to the duchy. Furthermore, Viscount Eble II prided himself on rivalling Count Guilhem in pomp and elegance, accounting him somewhat niggardly for so great a lord. To that rivalry was added professional jealousy, for Viscount Eble was himself a poet. The epithet cantor is applied to him in all the genealogies, and he “cultivated,” says Prior Jaufré of Vigeois, “the art of light verse even in his old age.”² Those tastes became hereditary in the family. Eble III, son of the cantor, appears to have presided, like his father, over a sort of school of jongleurs at Ventadorn. Cercamon maintained relations with the elder of those princes; Marcabru studied, his biographer tells us, for a considerable time with Cercamon. With the two elder troubadours were closely associated Alégret, Peire d’Auvergne, Bernard Marti and Jaufré Rudel. Whether those poets took advantage of the instruction imparted at the school of Ventadorn, it is not possible to say. At any rate the lords of Ventadorn, it appears, started on their careers a whole group of jongleurs, who attached themselves to their Court. Finally, the Lord Eble III, having noticed the poetical disposition shown by his baker’s young-son, Bernard, had him carefully tutored in the art of poetry. The Provençal style assumed thenceforth the “courtly” character of which it became the model.

There existed then a particular association between the development of the “courtly” style and the Limoges country. The poetical vocabulary of the troubadours, enriched from every regional source, was currently spoken of as the lengue lemosina, although Jeanroy candidly admits it bears no particular mark of Limousinian dialectical peculiarities. It is those circumstances that gave the Parisian theorists occasion to conceive the daring scheme of inverting the obvious, and of deriving the poetry of the South from that of the North, the troubadours from the trouvères or some conjectural predecessors of the latter. The Limoges country was not the cradle of Provençal poetry, but it was the seminary of its subsequent adaption to the entertainment of noble audiences. Following the example set by the Count of Poitiers, whose talent did not particularly draw its inspiration from the spires of his native land, his neighbors, the nobles of Limousin, were the first to adopt the novel fashion introduced by him. Jongleurs from every region of Languedoc naturally betook themselves to where they found their most fervent patrons. The “instruction” imparted in the schools of Niort and Ventadorn was, we may surmise, largely directed to bringing the popular poetry into line with the chivalric spirit accounted distinctive of the “gentle” and well-born, as by study of the chivalric romances and, maybe, of scraps from Ovid. That Limousinian development of early “courtly” art goes to confirm the importance of the personal part played by Guilhem de Poitiers in launching the whole poetic movement.

Cercamon’s love-songs are of the pathetic order. The lover pines, deploring the severity of the lady of his thoughts. This was, to be sure, a commonplace current in the love-poetry of Moorish Spain. Like the troubadours, the Andalusian poets declared themselves “victims of the fair”—ṣarī ‘al-ghawāni. These are not yet the punctilious distinctions of courtly love. Marcabru, on the other hand, devoted considerable attention to those distinctions between love and “villainy.” In a fourteenth-century manuscript at the Bibliothèque Nationale (fr. 22545), Marcabru’s poems are prefaced with the following note: “Aissi comensa les so de Marcabru que fo lo premier trobador que fos”—here begin the songs of Marcabru, who was the first troubadour that was.³ That strange statement is remarkable in many ways. It can scarcely be supposed that its author had never heard of Guilhem de Poitiers as a poet. Can it be that he regarded the count’s songs, composed in the “popular” style, as not properly belonging to courtly troubadour poetry? (Jaufré Rudel, of the Ventadorn school, flatly declares that Count Guilhem de Poitiers “could not write a song”—No sap cantar),⁴ Marcabru was the first to lay stress on the opposition between fin amors, “refined,” or more correctly “perfect” love, and gross amatory vulgarity; although he was, for some reason that is not quite clear, vehemently hostile to the ideas and teachings of the Eble school.⁵ But Marcabru does not enter into the subtleties of the style, nor does he illustrate them in his poetry. The “courtly” manner attains at a bound its full development with Bernard de Ventadorn.

The characteristic features of that style were impressed upon troubadour poetry by the conditions obtaining in the manorial society which adopted the lyrical fashion introduced by the Count of Poitiers. The tide of wealth and luxury which had transformed the courts of the kings of Spain after their domains had become extended over Moorish territories, had reached the South of France. Provence was far more richly endowed with natural wealth than the lands of Castile and Aragon, and had just been launched upon a career of far-spread commercial expansion. A port had been established at Aigues-Mortes for the direct supply of the products of Spain and Syria; the Counts of Toulouse had contracted treaties with the great commercial republics of Italy, Genoa, Pisa, as well as with the Emir Ibn Mardanish of Valencia. The wealth of the East poured into Provence and Languedoc, and was disposed of in the markets of Toulouse and of Beaucaire, which latter could be reached up the Rhone by caravels from Valencia and Almeria. The outward aspect of the Provençal nobility and its manner of life had undergone a notable transformation.

The luxurious tastes and frivolous pleasures of that society have sometimes been set down to a somewhat effeminate natural disposition and to the leisure resulting from the peaceful conditions supposed to have prevailed in Provence. That view involves a good deal of exaggeration. In Provence, as elsewhere at that period, local wars on a small scale were almost unceasing. The Church specifically deplored them; it instituted “truces of God” which were not observed.⁶ Each feudal lord sought to become independent of his suzerain. The counts of Toulouse had disputes with the kings of Aragon, and were often called upon to defend their rights against other claimants. The lords of the Des Baux family never ceased putting forward imperial and matrimonial titles, contesting those of the Bérengers. The Plantagenets and the dukes of Aquitaine also advanced territorial claims. Henry II of England came, in 1159, to besiege Toulouse, but was repulsed; Richard Coeur de Lion waged war in Languedoc; he laid siege to the troubadour-knight Bertram de Born’s castle of Hautefort. Count Raimon Bérenger IV led 100,000 men from Provence to the crusades, and during his absence Guilhem IX of Poitiers fought against the men of Toulouse. In short, one sometimes comes to wonder how these noble lords managed to find time for poetry.

But the luxury and elegance of the southern nobles made them appear effeminate in the sight of the uncouth northern barons, bearded, unkempt, and indifferently clean of their persons. A French chronicler tells his astonishment at first meeting a company of Provençal lords, richly attired, mounted on Arab steeds and carrying damascened arms. The northerner remarks that “they shaved their faces, and wore their hair parted,” which foppery, he sourly comments “caused them to look like mummers.”⁷ The southern lords were lavish and ostentatious; they could never get used to the stinginess of the French. At an assembly convened by King Henry II at Beaucaire in 1174 to arbitrate a dispute between the King of Aragon and the Count of Toulouse, the latter gave a certain lord, the Baron d’Agoult, a present of 100,000 sous to distribute among his knights. Another lord, Bertram de Raimbaux, had a field ploughed by twelve yokes of oxen and sowed in it 30,000 sous; a third, Guillaume the stout, of Hartelos, who had brought 300 knights to the assembly, caused a meal to be cooked for them over a fire of wax candles. The Countess of Urgel wore a crown of gold and precious stones valued at 40,000 sous. A swarm of jongleurs lent the charm of their descants to those diplomatic assizes.⁸ “All these people,” remarks M. Andraud, somewhat censoriously, “lived above all for their own pleasure; such was the ideal that they pursued and to which they sacrificed everything.”⁹

The position which women occupied in Provençal society differed considerably from that of their Spanish sisters. In the Courts of Catholic Spain, women’s conventual seclusion was far in excess of any relic which might survive of the segregation of the Islamic harem. The ladies of Provençal manors were not Burgundian princesses surrounded by monks. They were usually rich heiresses and played the chief part in the social circles over which they presided. It needed no courtly theories and troubadours’ praise to establish their position; they were already semidivinized. The means of elegance at their disposal, the opulence of the “Provençal fashions,” the oriental perfumes and cosmetics with which they did not disdain to enhance the advantages of their persons, excited the envy of the ladies of the north. If the songs of the troubadours were mainly addressed to the women, the reason was that the latter were to a great extent the protectors and inspirers of the poets’ art, which some of them actually practiced. If they did not understand Latin, they were well-versed in matters of love—of “courtly” love, that is, such as was thought beseeming for a lady of high lineage whose marriage had been nothing more than a diplomatic act resting almost exclusively on political motives.

The phrase, “Courts of Love” has obtained a hold on the imagination of a public which, concerning the nursling days of European literature, knows scarcely any other particular detail. The romanticized account of the matter given by Master Jehan de Nostradamus need not be taken seriously. Nothing could be at wider variance with courtly principles than to pass judgment on individual cases or even to refer in such a connection to any person by name. But it would, nevertheless, be fully in the spirit of twelfth-century gallantry to bestow such an appellation on fashionable gatherings enlivened by tuneful flattery of the poets and jongleurs, and presided over by ladies who were quite prepared to voice their judgments on the verses descanted and on the “questions of love” therein raised. It was in the “salons” of these bluestockings born before their time that “courtly” poetry originated, at the house of Aliénor of Aquitaine at Poitiers, at Ventadorn in the home of Azelaïs, daughter of the lord Guillaume de Montpelier, under the presiding patronage of Bertrane, the Lady of Signe, of Rostangue, Lady of the Manor of Pierrefeu, of Phanette de Gentelme, Lady of Romanin, of Hermesende, Lady of Posquieres, of Beatrice, Countess of Die, of Alalète, Lady of the Manor of Ongle, of Adalazie, Viscountess of Avignon, of Mabille, Viscountess of Ieres, of Staphanie, wife of Raimon des Baux and daughter of Gilbert, Count of Provence, of Jausserande, Lady of Claustral, of Ermengarde, Countess of Narbonne and of Bertrane d’Orgon.

Like the ladies, the poet-princes who shared their tastes and pastimes were, in their character of patrons of the new poetry, anxious above all that its aristocratic refinement should place it clearly above the level of the rude ditties current among knaves and churls. The “courtly” or “aulic” character of the poetry of the troubadours was deliberately imposed upon it.

The ideas of self-styled chivalry—spread in all directions by the verse romances, the orders of knighthood, and the preaching, the “propaganda,” as we should say, of the crusades against the Saracens of both the Holy Land and Spain—had fired the imagination of feudal society. We shall not stay to discuss what those ideas owed to the very foemen against whom they spurred the Christian knights. The barbarous crusaders received from the knights of Islam many a lesson in magnanimity and honorable dealing.¹⁰ Be that as it may, the ideal, if not the practice, of those chivalrous virtues was then at the height of its vogue. In order to harmonize with the modish tastes of manorial society, the songs of the jongleurs, popular in their origin, had to indue the garb of chivalric language, of chivalric honor, with regard to which the ladies were particularly insistent.

Honor and “gallantry” in the erotic sense have in all ages gone hand in hand in the ideals of “noble” classes. The epithet and what it stood for, like the whole notion of chivalry, in romance or in the “orders,” were above all an expression of aristocratic pride and exclusiveness, studious of underlining the differences which divided the privileged caste, the “worshipful,” “gentle” and “well-born,” from the run of common humanity. Stendhal speaks in terms less than respectful of “the absurd prejudice which went by the name of honor in Madame de Sévigné’s time, and which mainly consisted in dedicating one’s life to the service of the master under whom one chanced to have been born and in winning the favor of the ladies. A man could not prove his true worth, in sixteenth-century France, otherwise than by courage in the field or in duels. And since women are particularly fascinated by physical courage and audacity, they were the supreme arbiters of a man’s merits. Thus grew the spirit of ‘gallantry.’ ”¹¹ Much the same conditions obtained in twelfth-century Provence. Venus and Mars have at all epochs been intimately associated; “gallantry” and “courtly” manners had reference to the spheres particular to both those tutelary divinities of warriors and lovers.

Associated with martial valor and the spirit of “gallantry,” in the traditional chivalric ideal, which was from its inception linked with the customs and fantasies of pagan times, was likewise the gift of music and poetry. The ideal knight was a poet. Gawaine “of the hundred loves” charmed the ladies with his songs; Tristan was a poet and a musician. The ingenious hidalgo, Don Quixote de la Mancha, an irrefutable authority on the chivalrous code, was well aware that “all, or nearly all, the knights errant of times of yore were great troubadours”—todos o lo mas caballeros andantes de la etad passada eran gran trobadores.”¹²

The bard, the skôp of pagan times was ex officio noble, a “freeman.” In like manner the troubadour poet was, in theory, supposed to be a belted knight.¹³ But like most of the rules of the chivalric code, this was little more than a conventional fiction. The age of knightly and monastic orders took delight in drawing up rules and codes, without concerning itself overmuch with their relevance in the circumstances actually obtaining, and still less was the demonstration of those rules their practice in life. As with the modern election candidate, the publication of principles was what chiefly mattered. Once declared and accepted their application might go whistle. The whole of the ideas which constituted those ideal codes appertained essentially, like the knight errants and the peers of the Table Round, to a realm of a poetic, and it may be added, a politic, fiction.

The poetic gift, conventionally regarded as an inborn attribute of men of “gentle” blood, was nevertheless one which, by long tradition as well as by appeal to their tastes and habits, the noble classes thought it fitting to display. It acquired a new importance with the rise of courtly Provençal poetry. In the twelfth century, lords, kings and emperors were proud of parading their poetic talents. Among the names that have come down to us, some twenty-three reigning princes are included. Almost all the Provençal lords plumed themselves on their skill in poetry. Besides the Dukes of Aquitania and the Lords of Ventadorn, the Counts of Toulouse, the Beaux family, Lords of Marseilles, Boniface, Lord of Castellane, the Blacatz, Lamanor, and Adhemar families were known as troubadours. “Indeed it appears,” says Master Gaufridi, “that every man of high lineage or great wealth considered it an obligation to show himself an adept in the gay science, and able to rhyme a couplet to a graceful musical accompaniment. The accomplishment was regarded as a token of noble birth and good education.”¹⁴ But it must be recognized that scarcely one of those poets has left a lyric that rises above the level of mediocre doggerel. Few indeed of their poetical effusions have survived, and had Provençal poetry depended for its reputation upon the talents of those noble practitioners, it would have had little enough to show, either in the way of quantity or quality.

From the very outset, the troubadours who raised Provençal song to the high summit of its influence were jongleurs of low birth. Cercamon was a vagabond, known by that appellation alone; Marcabru was a foundling “left at a rich man’s door”; Perdigon was the son of a fisherman; Bernard de Ventadorn was the son of a hind and a kitchen wench; Guiraut de Bornelh was a jongleur of low birth. Not a few troubadours were poor knights, who availed themselves of the convention that a poet’s status was a noble one to attach themselves in that capacity to the service of some powerful lord and thus cloak their penury without forfeiting their rank.

Instances have occurred of a jongleur being knighted, and even, like Perdigon and Rambaud de Vaneiras, given lands in fee.¹⁵ But these are rare exceptions. “Nearly all the Provençal poets whose works we read,” says an old Provençal lexicographer, “were jongleurs.” And after excepting the princes and great lords already named, who were “men of wealth and power and disposed of independent means,” the anonymous glossarist goes on to say: “All others earned their living by their poetry.” That, to be sure, was in itself a notable achievement which has seldom been repeated by poets of a later period! But the position of the poet was nevertheless a completely dependent one. In short, aristocratic claims and conventions notwithstanding, troubadour poetry was from first to last, in its origin, development and practice, essentially an art of jongleurs of humble extraction.

The term trobador (inventor), a fairly close equivalent of “poet” (maker, composer), honored the noble dilettante in his poetic character. But it rightly applied with equal propriety to the itinerant jongleur who invented and composed his songs. Critics have labored to establish, each in a different manner, a precise distinction between the troubadour and the jongleur as separate personalities. But it is idle to seek precise distinctions where none existed. The terms overlapped. The princely troubadour was not, of course, a jongleur; but the jongleur who composed his songs was a troubadour.

The term “jongleur” (in Latin, joculator) was in use as early as the sixth century to designate any sort of professional entertainer, acrobat, buffoon, bear-leader. It had no particular reference to song or music. The word had notoriously disreputable associations, both on account of the violent anathemas with which jongleurs were visited by the Church,¹⁶ and by reason of the rabble of mountebanks, vagrants and rapscallions which it included.

asks a later troubadour. “Which is the more shameful calling, to be a jongleur or a thief?” Autolycus might have supplied an apt answer. We may recall the irritation of Guiraut Riquier at the aspersion cast on a gifted poet by his being referred to as a jongleur, and thus placed in the same category as the swordswallower and the man with the monkey. The lack of a special term for a jongleur who was a troubadour certainly led to confusion, but the long established usage persisted.

From the moment, however, that he plucked the chords of his lute and lifted his voice in song, the courtly jongleur-troubadour stepped into the part of the ideal minstrel-knight. It was in that character that he paid his poetic homage. It was not the itinerant jongleur who sang of “gentle” and “refined” love, who boldly loved the liege-lady, but the ideal poet-knight. The impersonation was, as admitted, like the convention of the play-actor, or of the novelist who relates fictitious inventions as though they were true facts. But, as in drama or story, the convention though known to be fictitious was required as an integral parcel of the poet’s art to be “convincing.”

The part of that poetic, one might almost say dramatic, fiction in all that has reference to that art should be more clearly borne in mind than has generally been the case. The character of troubadour poetry cannot be rightly appreciated unless it is placed in the setting which framed its presentation. The song was a manner of operatic monody in which the jongleur-troubadour who sang it before an elegant audience occupied the place of the fashionable tenor. We should therefore be chary of attaching greater weight to the stylized passion he was under the obligation of displaying, than to the stage-love tunefully bestowed by the Italian tenor upon a prima donna graced with a lengthy career and Junonic presence. Bernard de Ventadorn celebrates in lascivious terms the personal charms of Aliénor of Aquitaine at a time when the latter was well on in her fifties.

Many modern interpreters of the troubadours follow the example of the authors of the Provençal biographies in taking literally the poet’s lyrical effusions and drawing from them a chronicle of their amatory intrigues. But the passion sung by the hard-working artist bears in truth but slight relation to his actual life. The fiction went by the name of “well-dight saying of praise,” and if the poet had any particular lady in view, she was as often as not his gracious patroness. Poetry, in this form, was not the effusion of a lorn soul’s intimate emotions or the musings of a recluse, but a public entertainment, and the libretto of the performance, which our scholars con word by word, was not composed in view of being read. We deplore the monotony of the theme, and the troubadours themselves were at times conscious of this fault.¹⁷ But the ladies would have no other. A song which did not treat of love would have moved them to disdain and indignation, as would, in another age, an Italian opera or a novel devoid of love interest.

If the sentiments expressed appear to us artificial, the intention and the setting of its presentation were in fact avowedly artificial. The lady represented as the object of the poet’s passionate inspiration often did not even exist. She is never named; at most she is referred to by some fanciful appellation, or senhal. The amusement offered by this drawing-room entertainment was enhanced by the riddle which, like a roman à clef, it propounded. One of the connotations of the term “slanderer” (luzengier; “losengere” in Caxton’s English), so conspicuous in troubadour dialectics, had reference, there can be little doubt, to the solutions put forward concerning the identity of the lady in question. The senhal was used to rebut the guesses put forward by the audience, even should they happen to be grounded. The conventions of chivalry, like the pedantic rules of courtly love, were poetical fictions, and were in large measure consciously and admittedly such.

Whatever might be the actual social condition of the poet, the courtly convention decreed that the exercise of poetic talent should be a knightly vocation. The vagrant poets of low birth compare themselves with Tristan, Lancelot, or Percival. Allusions to the subjects of the epic abound in their compositions.¹⁸ The service offered by the minstrel-knight as a love-token to his lady, is equated with that by which he might have earned a claim to her favors in battle and in joust.¹⁹ As Petrarch put it, “their voice stood them in stead of sword and stave, of helm and shield”:

The “knight,” or the impersonator of the knightly part, who performed such service, proclaimed himself his mistress’ liegeman; he owed her loyalty and homage, while she, for her part, having once formally accepted her appointed bard, was held bound to keep true plight with him and to induct him in the fieftenancy to which he had a legitimate title.²¹ The love relationship followed the pattern of the reciprocal obligations of the liege knight towards his suzerain, or towards the lady whose colors he wore in battle or list. Those poetical conventions were essentially stage-conventions. Yet for all their artificial character, they harmonized as a whole, if not in detail, with the spirit of the social circles they were designed to entertain. If the poetic passion was in large part fictitious, its seductive intention was real enough. Both men and women liked to let themselves be deceived by the fictions which at times deceive our critics and historians. Fantasy was invited to effectuate itself in actual life.

Poetic chivalry, being an aristocratic privilege, bestowed upon men and women of “gentle” birth a measure of chartered license in their relations. Such an acknowledged and statutory freedom, far from betokening a growing laxity of morals, or as a theologian would say a “corruption,” introduced, on the contrary, a measure of restraint in the far more undisciplined license of old-time barbarism. But, for all that, the ruling classes availed themselves, under cover of those highly artificial conventions, of the right to indulge their ancient use and wont without overmuch concern for a rigid interpretation of Christian sexual ethics. “Gallantry,” as it came to be called in the French seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, “courtesy,” “druerie,” as it was termed in the twelfth, rested primarily on the privileged immunity claimed by the ruling and leisured classes.

As late as the time of Dante and Petrarch, and even much later, literary tradition was to be at pains to assert that only a “gentle” heart, a “courtly” soul, a person of worship and lineage, was capable of experiencing the delicate emotions and the exalted raptures which the elegant diction of the poets was concerned with setting forth. The troubadours, accordingly, never weary of dwelling upon the subtle distinctions to be drawn between the delicacy of courtly emotions befitting well-born persons and the grossness of “villainy” which betokens the coarser fiber of boorish and plebian minds. Prudery in a woman, jealousy on the part of a husband were regarded as the marks of a low and vulgar disposition and of an inexcusable lack of conversance with the usages of polite society.

The whole ritual of poetic service was largely aimed at bringing out those distinctions. The flight of the poet’s inspiration was accordingly circumscribed within the framework of rigid prescriptions, from which he might not deviate without laying himself under the intolerable reproach of bad taste. The merits of a composition were assessed by reference to the fidelity shown in the observance of consecrated principles and the closeness of its conformity to accepted models. Manifestations of originality were thus confined to the dexterity evinced in modulating adroit variations upon the prescribed themes. Subject, sentiments, “conceits,” all that went into the composition of a poem, were dictated by the rigid canons of art.

A conventional pedantry no less meticulous governed, in the realm of poetic fiction, the relations of the courtly lover and his lady. It laid down the behavior to which they should conform, the emotions which they were expected to experience. Each individual sigh and heart-beat, the “cruelty” of the fair one, the “despair” of the lover, the concession of “favors” to be doled out on a guarded scale, were foreseen in the erotic code, any departure from which counted as a breach of courtesy. The various situations which may arise in the unfolding of a love-intrigue, and the problems they might raise, provided the subject matter of disquisitions and set disputes closely patterned on the scholastic debates of theologians. Knotty points were referred to recognized authorities whose pronouncements were used in codifying the corpus of erotic jurisprudence.

The society of the castles of Languedoc devoted to those debates on “questions of love” their fastidious leisures with much the same fervor which, in a later age, the guests of the Hôtel Rambouillet and of Mlle. Scudery’s salon were to apply to the pursuit of wit and good taste. Such were the gatherings which gave themselves or were given the name of “Courts of Love.” Their actual staging is of small importance; it is of much greater interest to note the amplitude, the formality, the incredible seriousness which characterized those whimsical debates on psychology in the twelfth century.

The phenomenon has no parallel in classical literature; still less can it be traced to barbarian precedents. To our taste the whole thing lapses into the grotesque. No subject could, in our eyes, be less suited to theoretical debate, conducted with sober solemnity and without the slightest embarrassment, than erotic sentimentality in its mannered and affected form, as understood by the dialecticians of the twelfth century.

Novelists and psychologists have since written a great deal on the subject of love; sexual problems, as presented from the point of view of the psychologist, the psychiatrist, the physiologist and the sociologist, are responsible for a vast literature. But light, sentimental and romantic love is hardly ever treated in the spirit of objective science or abstract metaphysics. “Most psychologists,” observes Ribot, “have been very sparing of details in this connection and one could name a number of voluminous treatises which do not even refer to it.”²²

Though the fops and bluestockings of the seventeenth century found entertainment in mapping out the contours of the “Pays du Tendre,” the amusement was but a pretext for a quipping exercise of wit. It might lend itself to ridicule, but it raised no problem. The amatory dialectic of the twelfth century was extravagant in quite a different manner and appears at the first glance to bear no relation to any feature of its ambience. That a whole society, still not very far removed from the ages of barbarism, should come to be smitten with a passion for debates of the scholastic type on the details of a profoundly artificial psychology of love, that it should have devoted itself to the pursuit of this manner of pseudo-science with the gravity of so many doctors of theology, is a phenomenon singular enough to call for some explanation.

The conventions of courtly love were, deliberately or not, the expression of the opposition between two converse orders of sexual morality. The pagan societies of barbaric times, like primitive societies, were unacquainted with the merits of continence and chastity. Marriage was a contract based on economic and political considerations, in which calculation entered in far larger measure than sentiment. It was often polygamous or provisional. Neither prenuptial purity nor conjugal fidelity were in those days prescribed by current ethics. Not to go beyond the lands which were to become the home of poesy, we find the first Christian witnesses declaring that “the whole of Aquitania is no better than a huge brothel.” They denounced in particular, in this connection, the moral disorder prevalent throughout the great estates, the “villas” which were to become the manorial castles of a later epoch.²³

It was long before any considerable change was brought about by the Christian religion in the morality of the barbarian chiefs and, later, in that of the powerful nobility, towards whom the Church generally showed itself very indulgent. Nevertheless, as time went by and the power of the Church grew greater, the violent contrast between the inveterate use and wont of the ruling classes and the principles of Christian morals could not but become more apparent. Feudal society, while jealous of maintaining its privileges, did not care to offer an open challenge to religious susceptibilities. The nobles owed it to their own dignity not to expose themselves to the strictures of commoners and priestlings. By bringing aristocratic usage into association with claims to cultivated taste and a refined emotional sensibility; by representing amorous relations as subject to fine distinctions passing, by their subtlety, the comprehension of the vulgar throng; by adopting heroic and knightly principles appropriate to the manifestation of lofty ideals and emotions, courtly and chivalric theories came to constitute a manner of apologetics serving to shield the time-honored way of life to which the privileged ruling class was accustomed. Love proclaimed itself noble that it might not be declared scandalous.

In a society which professed the principles of Christian morality those conventions performed the function, one might say, of a protective coloring by means of which its bearer mimicked its environment. They enabled the favored caste to denounce license, coarseness and disorder in language practically identical with that used by Christian morality, and to guard against the imputation of discreditable conduct, while they simultaneously went their wonted pace. The pedantic subtleties of “scholastic” conceits served to take the wind out of the sails of cavilling and censorious ignorance. The trobar clus helped the ends of disguise. “The refinements and obscurities of abstruse conceptions in the poetry of Arnaud Daniel and Guiraut de Bornelh,” a critic remarks, “derived from a desire to counterfeit depth and abstraction of thought.”²⁴ But the gossamer of those dialectical veils was not spun in view of metaphysical abstractions, and the interest they aroused in a world intent on pleasure was far from being a purely intellectual one. “The dialecticians of love,” as another commentator puts it, “pronounce judgment on a point of courtly casuistry in the current style of debate, and with a gravity that may call forth a smile, but shows nevertheless to what extent this solemnity in the pursuit of a frivolous pastime, factitious though it was in a sense, interwove with the interests of actual life.”²⁵

The scholasticism of love, like that of the theologians, derived in its form from Islamic sources. It was from the first connected with the lyrical style borrowed from Moorish Spain, which anticipated by two centuries the language of the “Courts of Love.” The terminology of Sufi mysticism fell in admirably with the purpose the Provençal jongleurs were called upon to advance. But however conscientiously they might seek to become acquainted with the ideas behind the lyrical manner of their models, these contained elements which they would not have been able to understand and which, could they have done so, they would not have cared to adopt. In Sufi poetry, sentimentality had its roots in an idealization which was not fictitious and conventional. It rested on genuine convictions and aspirations. That religious inspiration was rejected, it is true, by the larger number of Andalusian minstrels, who nevertheless retained its form and formulae from purely decorative motives.²⁶

The Provençal disciples of those poets adopted much the same course. Unable to make anything of doctrines of chastity and purity, they set themselves to reproduce such of the refined—the Arabs said “noble”—sentiments of Hispano-Moorish lyrics as were best calculated to impart a choice elegance to their art. They appropriated the language of that religious poetry without concerning themselves about the springs that inspired it. Thus the troubadours in search of mystery and esotericism had but to borrow the manner and language of Hispano-Mauresque poetry. There they found ready to their hand the “courtly” style and the trobar clus. Thus also did troubadour poetry come to lend itself to a misinterpretation which it in part invited, since it appeared to flaunt an idealism which was in fact foreign to it, but which its diction, with but some shades of modification, enabled later interpreters to ascribe to it.

The lyric love which these conventions aimed at idealizing or, as the Freudians would say, sublimating, referred exclusively to extra-marital relations. The homage of the troubadours was without exception addressed to married women.²⁷ That condition, for which there existed, moreover, reasons of social expediency, is abundantly underlined by the poetical casuists who expound the difference between “delicate” and “honorable” love on the one hand, and on the other the brutish intercourse which went by the name of “villainy” and which they likened to the coupling of dogs. Any woman requiring the duty of fidelity from her husband was charged with conducting herself “like a commoner.” Any husband manifesting jealousy stood under the selfconviction of “discourtesy” and “dishonorable conduct.”

Raimon Vidal addresses a humble supplication to King Alfonso II of Aragon, beseeching him to curb the scandal arising in his realm by the jealousy of husbands: “Generous King and thou Queen upon whom virtue and beauty wait, forbid unto all the married men of your estates to entertain feelings of jealousy. Women are withal endowed with so much cunning and power that they can, whenever they list, give the color of truth to a lie, and the color of a lie to truth.²⁸ The poet-knight Mataplana, one of the most noble of Spanish grandees of the old school, composed a sirventes directed against Raimon de Miraval, upbraiding him for his indelicate and dishonorable conduct, the said Raimon having had, it appears, a dispute with his wife in regard to her lovers.

He hath done great shame and disworship [says Mataplana] against the rules of courtesy, which he had hitherto professed to use and honour. So it be he ever did sue the straight trace of courtly honour, his sentiments have suffered much change, for that he hath comported himself in such wise that it will be hard for him to excuse himself from the appel of villainy. . . . A husband who delighteth in youth should approve himself debonair, so that his neighbors may in their turn show themselves gracious unto him. After suffering the blot of so gross unbeseemingness, he now assays to bring about an accord with his wife. An he would in troth have her return to him, it will behove him to approve himself more generous, and to allow her to entertain a belami after her own heart. So soon as he has made his accord with her, joy will once more grace his house, if so it be that he is not distrained from seeing it frequented by wooers for her bountyes. An he fill those obligations, he will be returned to the favour of such as, like ourselves, are affected to the use of honour and courtesy.²⁹

“Courtesy,” “honor,” “refined love” (fin amor), whereby the delicate sentiments of which only a “gentle” heart is capable were exalted above vulgar grossness and “villainy,” were, from the point of view of Christian standards, flagrantly immoral in principle and practice. Yet that scandalous sexual code and its poetical exaltation came to be the source out of which issued in time a literary treatment of amatory themes, thus spiritualized into a mystic idealism severed from all carnal associations. The forms, the manner, the language and vocabulary of the troubadours continued to be employed in that “Platonic” inversion of all the conceptions of the “courtly” love they had sung. The primary condition even of that love, that it had reference exclusively to illicit love for a married woman, persisted in the literary tradition.

Following the example of the Provençal troubadours, the most representative poet of the Italian Renaissance, the universally acknowledged singer of idealized love, Petrarch, was to celebrate in a long series of lyrics his love, real or fictitious, for a married woman. Romantic idealized and disincarnated love, as in the courtly poetry of the troubadours and the chivalric versions of pagan sagas, remained, despite the utmost spiritualization, an adulterous passion. Commenting on the tale of Tristan, Gaston Paris refers to his own feeling of regret over the immorality of the barbaric bard, who appears to have deliberately set himself the task of “glorifying adultery.”³⁰ If Messer Petrarch, worthy titular canon of the Church, could celebrate a passion as adulterous as that of Tristan without giving cause to scandal, that is because a profound change had in the meantime come about in the treatment of the theme.

From an artistic point of view, we may prefer the poignant emotions which come into play in the drama of Tristan and Iseult to the suave, elegant and sugary conceits which lend luster to the long-drawn literary passion of the Italian poet. But the latter bears, from the moral point of view, a well-nigh irreproachable appearance. If it is in fact no less adulterous than the love of Tristan, passion is idealized and subtilized to such a degree and so completely detached from all carnal suggestion in its literary presentation, that only a singularly mawkish moral pedant could find scandal in it. In the interval of time which separates the barbaric saga from the standard of poetic treatment set by the foremost representative of the Italian Renaissance in that field, the expressions of love had undergone a spiritualizing change. This notable metamorphosis took place in relation to the poetry of the troubadours and to the tradition it had established. It is therefore of particular interest to examine the causes which led, in Provence, to that notable transformation.