Editor’s Preface

THE only prefatory comment in the original French version of this work is the following “Editor’s Note”:

In his work, “The Mothers: A Study of the Origins of Sentiments and Institutions” (3 volumes, Allen and Unwin, London, and Macmillan, New York, 1927), Robert Briffault devoted a chapter, the twenty-ninth, to the poetry of the troubadours. Returning to this theme, he develops its historical and philological aspects, all the while regarding it from the viewpoint of the history of human customs and of the sentiment romanesque.

Inasmuch as the work is self-contained, perhaps this is the only comment needed, but a truly adequate appreciation of this treatise requires some degree of familiarity with the author himself, his philosophy, indeed his very psyche. Unfortunately, it is impossible to offer even a partially adequate presentation of these in the space available, and it would be very difficult to do so in the compass of a full volume, for like many men of genius, Briffault remained an enigma even to those who were closest to him.

In a philosophical and humane sense, Briffault believed that the individual counted for little in the progress of the human race, and possibly because of this he was rather secretive about the details of his personal life. In his lifetime the only available biographical sketches pertaining to him, in addition to the entries in “Who’s Who,” were those which appeared on the dust jackets of his books and some material in an article by Huntington Cairns. Recently these have been augmented by a Biographical Note in G. Rattray Taylor’s abridgement of Briffault’s The Mothers (Macmillan, New York, and Allen and Unwin, London, 1959). Early biographical sketches contain the statement that he was born in London in 1876, but he told his confidants that in fact he was born in Nice in 1873. In any event, he seems to have been a British citizen. His father, Charles Frederic Briffault, a former French diplomat during the presidency of Louis Napoleon, broke with the latter on his seizure of power, and apparently acquired British citizenship. Briffault’s mother was a devout Presbyterian of Scotch origin.

Briffault was brought up in Florence, although he was sent to England to complete his education. After his father died, his mother emigrated to New Zealand in 1892, and took Robert with her. There, in 1897, he married one Anna Clark. He took up the study of medicine about the same time, subsequently receiving the degree of Bachelor of Medicine from Dunedin University in 1901 and the degree, Bachelor of Chirurgery from Christ Church University in 1905. Upon graduation he set up private practice in Auckland. He never seemed to have been content in the colonial atmosphere of New Zealand, far from the great European centers of culture. He made one trip to Europe, via the United States in 1905, but was unable to break away from New Zealand until the War provided the opportunity. He enlisted as as army medical officer, and served with distinction (he was twice decorated) in Gallipoli and later in Flanders. His health was impaired as the result of his having been gassed. Incidentally he spent some time in a staging area in Egypt and there acquired his manifest interest in Arab civilization. While there, he added Arabic to his store of languages. Having been bought up in a trilingual situation, he spoke English, Italian and French. Sometime in the course of his career, he also learned German, Dutch, Latin, Greek, Provençal and some Spanish.

Anna Briffault died of pneumonia shortly after the end of the war, so that Robert returned to New Zealand late in 1919 only long enough to arrange for the return to England of his two daughters. His only son, Lister, is still living in New Zealand. For approximately five years following his return to England Briffault supported himself by working as a locum tenens in a London hospital while doing research for, and writing The Mothers. During this period he was beset by a series of tragedies, including the deaths of his mother and his daughter.

In 1930 he married Herma Hoyt, an American. He resided briefly in New York, but after 1932 Paris was his chief place of residence. He and his wife were trapped in Paris during the Nazi occupation. After the war his wife returned to the United States, but Briffault was unable to obtain a visa in order to join her, and his apparent compulsive need for access to the libraries and cultural attractions of the European capitals precluded his acceptance of his surviving daughter’s offer to join her in Chile. During the last four years of his life he led an incredible existence as a homeless wanderer through France, Italy and England. In 1948 while in Paris he became seriously ill with tuberculosis, the malady which had proved fatal to his daughter. With the assistance of some friends he was sent to a hospital in Hastings where he died in December, 1948.

The bare facts listed above hardly convey any impression of the man. Some additional indication of, at least, his versatility may be obtained from a consideration of his major published works:

The Making of Humanity, Allen and Unwin, London, 1919. This treatise on cultural evolution was written largely in the trenches during World War I. Chapters discussing the contribution of Arab civilization to that of Europe foreshadow some of the material in Les Troubadours.

Psyche’s Lamp: A Revaluation of Psychological Principles as Foundation of All Thought. Allen and Unwin, London, 1921. This work, which considers the question of the importance of the individual vis-à-vis that of the race, was written largely on board ship.

The Mothers: A Study of the Origins of Sentiments and Institutions. This three-volume, one-and-a-half-million-word treatise was a masterpiece of scholarship and ingenuity which earned Briffault a reputation as an anthropolgist of note. It is an unconventional study of just that which is stated in the subtitle. It has been much praised and much criticized, often by people who apparently have not bothered to read it. Much of the criticism centers around Briffault’s thesis that human sentiments and institutions developed from a form of society in which the male played a minor role in family life.

The Mothers, Macmillan, New York, 1931. This is not an abridgement of the previously listed work, but an attempt to present the major theses thereof without ancillary material and without the supporting evidence. On occasion the two works have been confounded by critics.

Rational Evolution, Macmillan, New York, 1930. A completely rewritten version of The Making of Humanity.

Breakdown: The Collapse of Traditional Civilization, Brentanos, New York, 1932. As with many of Briffault’s books, the subtitle presents a fair idea of what it is about. He said of this book that it contained a fresh idea on each of its 273 pages which, he claimed, meant that it contained at least 272 more ideas than each of the 30,000 other books published in America in 1932.

Sin and Sex, McCauley, New York, 1937. A rather moderate plea for a more enlightened view of sex than that of the puritan. See the concluding passage in The Troubadours.

Reasons For Anger, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1938. The title is a humorously sarcastic reply to a not-so-humorously sarcastic remark in a review of Sin and Sex. The book is a collection of essays by Briffault which had previously appeared in the periodical literature.

The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1938. This small book was all that resulted when Briffault found it necessary to abandon a projected “Gibbonesque” treatise on the British Empire. Briffault’s choice for the title was “The English Myth.”

Europa, Scribners, New York, 1935. This was Briffault’s first novel. Vaguely autobiographical in character, it became a bestseller.

Europa in Limbo, Scribners, New York, 1937. Sequel to Europa.

Fandango, Scribners, New York, 1940. A novel set in the Spain of the thirties. It was not very well received.

The New Life of Mr. Martin, Scribners, 1947. A fantastic novel which hardly admits of description. Its style betrays Briffault’s interest in James Joyce, whom he had lampooned in Europa. A Dante-Beatrice theme which runs through the complex plot betrays his interest in Dante which is also evident in The Troubadours.

Les Troubadours et le sentiment romanesque, Briffault’s last published work, was written in Paris during the Nazi occupation under conditions of considerable hardship. It was published in elegant form, richly illustrated, both in boards and in paperback versions, in Paris in 1945. Occasionally copies of it, wrapped as new, are still to be seen in the bookstalls along the banks of the Seine. It apparently received wide distribution. I have seen copies of it in most of the large municipal and university libraries that I have been in during the past fifteen years, and the copies usually show signs of use. In fact, Les Troubadours is one of the three major works by Briffault to be found in the Lenin Library in Moscow; the other two are the three-volume The Mothers and Europa. Yet citations to the work are rare and it is probably safe to say that knowledge of its existence has been largely confined to persons interested either in the particular topics treated or in Briffault himself.

Be that as it may, it appears to this amateur at least, that the book has had considerably more influence than references to it would indicate. American scholars generally seem to have fewer qualms about acknowledging the debt Western civilization owes to the Moors than do their European counterparts, but even on this side of the Atlantic, the topic seems to be more often encountered in popular treatises than was the case two or three decades ago. Similarly the broadcasting of paeans to the troubadour conception of idealized love seems to be much less widespread than it was as recently as my own high school days. This could, of course, only be the result of a general change in attitude, but a comparison of recent and early encyclopedia articles on the troubadours indicates that today there is actually a better understanding of the real nature of the troubadours and their works. In view of the lack of evidence, it would be more than rash to charge Les Troubadours et le sentiment romanesque with some responsibility for the general improvement in the quality of references to the troubadours, but it would be wrong to summarily dismiss this possibility.

All such abstract considerations aside, however, there are abundant good reasons for making the book available in English translation. The account of the appearance, growth and decline of the troubadours, and of the effect their tradition exerted on subsequent literature, is a peculiarly interesting one. Briffault, combining his native skill at writing with real scholarship and an irrepressible, wry humor, has told it in a way that only he could have done. Quite in addition to the matter of esthetics and interest, however, there is a fundamentally sound reason for the consideration of such matters as the accuracy of the traditionally held views on historical topics, including such apparently trivial ones as the troubadours’ “conception of love.” The reason is expressible in terms of a cardinal point in Briffault’s philosophy which is nicely stated in the conclusion of an article by him which appeared in a New Zealand newspaper before World War I, the oldest item by Briffault that I have seen in print. The passage reads: “There can be no faith but in the assurance that who loves the one [the good] loves the other [the true]; that the truest and the highest and the best are indissoluble.” Briffault equated “good” with “truth,” and “virtue” with “intellectual honesty.” I believe that he was correct in so doing. Ultimately evil stems from the acceptance of untruth as verity.

It may not matter whether Guiraut de Bornelh espoused the concept that disembodied love is the only true love. But if it is easy, for reasons frivolous or tendentious, to falsely spread the idea that he did, then it is also easy to scatter misinformation on more important matters. It would hardly be reasonable to assume that Briffault has said the “last words” on the many points of controversy which appear in this book, or that he has completely resolved the uncertainties regarding issues beclouded by time, language problems, prejudice, and a host of other factors. Here as elsewhere, however, he has given a fine example of the diligence with which it is necessary to search for facts that are not in accord with prevailing thought. One need not agree with his every conclusion in order to be inspired by the thoroughness of his investigations and his ability to weave little items of evidence together to form plausible support for ingenious inferences.

Briffault undertook the translation of Les Troubadours into English when he apparently became dissatisfied with the efforts of a professional translator. In the course of doing so, he made several revisions in the text. The changes in the first five chapters are rather slight. They include the occasional replacement of the included specimens of poetry by others he apparently deemed more appropriate, a few additional references to English authors, slight expansions of the discussions of the derivations of the terms “jongleur” and “troubadour,” and occasional variations in the order of presentation. The last chapter, however, differs materially from the corresponding passage in the original version. Many paragraphs have been rewritten, the order of presentation of much of the material has been altered, and new material has been added. The passage on Dante, which certainly is interesting and, I believe, unique, has been considerably expanded. The passage on Shakespeare and the English poets did not appear in the original version in any form. I have a copy of a letter from Briffault in which he states that his translation has ten times the worth of the original French version. Hyperbole was no doubt intended, and a serious claim of improvement by even a factor of two might bring rebuttal. There is no doubt, however, that the expansion added significantly to the value of the book.

My own contributions to this volume have been very slight, namely the translation of the notes, which unfortunately seem not to have been translated by Briffault, and a very small amount of editing of some ambiguous passages in the text. I was guided by the feeling that the work was Briffault’s, and his it should remain. To this end I was very reluctant to make any alterations, however much of an improvement they might have seemed to represent, unless it was apparent that an oversight was involved. In some of the new material, there were instances of alternate versions from which it was necessary to make a selection, but the differences generally involved matters of style and not of content. In the one important instance where content was involved, both versions are given, one in an appendix.

In one of Briffault’s translations from Provençal into Old English, some of the obscure terms have been replaced by their more familiar equivalents. What prompted Briffault to express the translations in Old English is a matter for conjecture, but I suspect he felt that such renditions better retained the spirit of the original. In any event, many of these passages which have a distinctive charm when presented in archaic terms (albeit with Briffaultian flair) would appear coarse, at best, if rendered into straightforward modern English.

The references did pose a bit of a problem. The straitened circumstances under which Briffault wrote the original version, and the apparent haste with which it was printed, resulted in the appearance of a number of typographical errors. The English translation was done while Briffault was an impoverished wanderer in postwar Europe, and there was little opportunity for careful editing on his part. Moreover, the notes to the material added in translation are usually penned in the margin of the manuscript in Briffault’s not very legible handwriting, and they are often in some sort of shorthand notation which he intended to amplify later. I mention all this not to condone any blunders on my part, but to warn of the possibility that there may be some.

Briffault was a controversial figure. Some of the reviews of each of his books were quite hostile. Sometimes these hurt him; often they amused him. (An advertisement for Rational Evolution on the flyleaf of Psyche’s Lamp includes without comment two sarcastic statements from unfavorable reviews.) Still it was exceedingly dangerous to do verbal battle with Briffault, and I cannot recall of an instance in which an adversary of his came out the victor. Although he is no longer here to defend his position, he needs no champion among the living. His work stands on its own merits, and his arguments are clear and ready for discussion. Such errors and oversights as may have occurred in the technical aspects of the preparation of this volume should be charged directly to myself. It would have been far better if the preparation and translation had been done by someone with detailed knowledge of the topics treated, and preferably by someone with a good knowledge of Arabic. Happily, however, Briffault had carried the work to the point that such a specialist was not indispensable.

In his preface to The Mothers, Briffault states that since he worked single-handed he had been denied the gratification of offering acknowledgements of indebtedness. Fortunately, I have not experienced this denial. I am indebted to Mrs. Joan Briffault Hackelberg for having retyped her father’s manuscript and having made both her copy and the original available to me, as well as for countless other forms of assistance; to Morris Justice for having offered his usual incisive, crititical comments; to Mrs. Herma Briffault for having first made me aware of the desirability of the publication of an English translation; to Mrs. Frances Joyner for having retyped my translation of the notes; to Mrs. Alice R. Jwaideh for editorial assistance, and to Bill Hixson for having been an assiduous coworker in the ferreting out of biographical data.