Introduction

WHILE in the North, the tales and sagas of Celtic paganism were flowering into the romances of chivalry which captured the imagination of the Middle Ages, a literary form equally alien to the classical tradition was unfolding in southern France. The poetry of the troubadours answered the mood of a feudal society newly awakened to a sense of its native uncouthness by contact with the luxury of the Orient, and beginning to advance claims to the airs and graces of ornate leisures. Throughout Europe blew the aura of a new lyrical inspiration. Provençal song brought fertility to the flinty soil of the vernacular tongues, and stood as a pattern to their nascent productiveness. It was echoed in the lays of the Northern trouvères.¹ It kindled the luster of Italian verse, which was in turn to shed a reflected luster far and wide over the literatures of the new Europe. It begot in outlying Germanic lands and in England the first lilts of rich poetical successions.

The crusaders sang the songs of Provence as they marched east along the Danube. The people of the medieval world, accustomed to distant pilgrimages, were singularly given to travel. Poetry partook of that vagrant disposition. It was not, in the twelfth century, a specialized and somewhat precious taste confined to relatively small circles of cultivated persons. The songs of the medieval jongleur (in Caxton’s English, “jogler” or “jogeler”), the professional itinerant minstrel, discharged most of the functions of current literature in our age—novels, periodicals, dramatic spectacles. The nouvelles which he descanted were at times truly the latest news of the day. He was the world’s reporter and practically the sole provider of entertainment. As he passed, singly or in groups, from court to court, from castle to castle, where his coming was always a welcome event, the singer of verse took no account of frontiers and found ready access to every lordship. He was a vagabond by vocation.

The earliest troubadour-jongleur whose memory has reached us is known only by the nickname of “Cercamon” (Scour-the-world). This designation, which recalls that of the Old English skop, “Widsith” (the far-travelled), applies no less aptly to most of his brethren of the craft, peddlers of poetry. Spain and Italy were their second homelands. Peire Vidal lodged for a time with Aymeric, King of Hungary, and lived for a considerable period in Cyprus, where he married a Greek.² One of the surviving songs of Bernard de Ventadorn was composed in England.³ Marcabru too paid a visit to London.⁴ Almost every company of travellers included jongleurs. No prince would think of setting out on a journey without a train of minstrels in his retinue. When Raymond Bérenger V, Count of Toulouse, went to Turin to be invested by Frederick Barbarossa, “he presented his poets to the Emperor,” says master Jean de Gaufridi. “He had brought with him the most famous among them, both in order that he should be the more honored for his province’s uncommon distinction and so as to please the Emperor, who was himself given to the composition of occasional verses.”⁵ So delighted was the monarch that he assigned to Count Raymond a number of estates whose titles the Count’s rival, the Lord of Baux, had sought to obtain for himself. The troubadours thus extended, in a literal as well as figurative sense, the boundaries of their native land. Moreover, proud of being able to display his talents, the Emperor improvised for the occasion a ditty in the Provençal tongue which has come down to us.

The troubadours and the Germanic bards met again some years later, when Barbarossa came to be crowned King of Arles and sojourned for a time in Provence. It was during this period that the first German Minnesingers made their appearance in the castles of the Danube. They were in every respect the disciples of the troubadours. The songs of Heinrich von Weddeke, Friederich von Hausen, Reimar der Alte and Heinrich von Morungen are copies, in form and content, of those of Languedoc.⁶

Like the Swabian emperors, the Plantagenet kings claimed, as part of their Angevin dominions, the lands of poesy, and showered favor upon its adepts. Aliénor of Aquitaine, granddaughter of the first troubadour, Count Guilhem of Poitiers, and mother of the minstrel king, Richard the Lion-Hearted, was among the first and most ardent patrons of Provençal poetry. She was reputed to be “wondrous couth of merit, courtesy, and well-dight saying of praises”—bien dire de louanges. The lady Aliénor (never otherwise designated until David Hume vandalized her name into “Eleanor”)—who, addressing the Pope after her divorce from King Louis and her marriage to Henry of Anjou, writes herself: “I Aliénor, by the wrath of God, Queen of the English”—was of a temper and authority to impose her tastes. As Queen of France, she was responsible, together with her daughter, Countess Marie, for the spread of the new poetry in the castles of Champagne, Picardy and Artois. As Queen of England, she invited the poets to cross the Channel and introduced them to the English Court. The oldest English lyrical poetry, whence derives in unbroken succession the great poetic heritage of England, obtained its original models, both directly and through French versions, from the Provençal songs. Modern research has shown that the first stamp of that influence was scarcely less profound than upon Italian verse, and as indelible, and its full measure is far even now from having been fully computed.⁷ Already the Augustan Age had some inkling of this. Pope placed the “Provençal school” first in the lineage of English poetry.⁸ And Dryden writes: “Chaucer first adorned and amplified our barren tongue from the Provençal, which was then the most polished of all modern languages.”⁹ The idiom of the troubadours was on the point of becoming the universal language of poetry. In Italy and Spain, up to the fourteenth century, the poets knew no other.¹⁰

It is not easy for the modern reader to share the enthusiasm raised in its day by that poetry, and ratified under the seal of such high judges as Dante and Petrarch. For one thing he is brought up against the linguistic obstacle; nothing could be more futile than to try the merits of any poetry desiccated to the dust of translation. That obstacle is not insurmountable, however. Given a Latin grounding, it is very much less formidable than that encountered by one sufficiently reverent of his mother tongue to want to learn it per origines. Once let the profit be deemed worth the painstaking, the construing of Provençal is small trouble in comparison with that of Old English.¹¹

The major stumbling block lies not in the language, but in the staple theme of the poetry. The sighs and mannered tropes, the mincing measures of love, be they rhymed by the troubadours or by Petrarch, by Elizabethan sonneteers or seventeenth-century madrigalists, no longer have the ability to stir our emotions farther than to raise an indulgent smile. The troubadours are indeed mainly indictable for some six centuries of that poetic confectionary. But the very extent of the mischief with which they are indictable is witness to the magnitude of their influence, and offers, in the view of critical history, a problem which peculiarly invites inquiry.

The merits of troubadour poetry are not, in any case, adequately appraised by taking single cognizance of the fusty sentimental fashions of its matter. The matter, incidentally, was not wholly of the poet’s election; it was imposed on the professional amorist by the circumstances of his calling. Noble lords with a genuine relish for versing, such as Bertram de Born or Peire Cardenal, who were at large to choose their own subjects, did so as they pleased, and amatory themes hold a subordinate place, if any, in their production. When occasion served, and he was free to take a truce, the vocational poet too was ready enough with other matter. He could express sentiments, as does Peire Vidal in the following strophes, which have not aged:

Nor did Bertram de Born dip his quill in sugary sentiment when he dashed off this battle-piece in the manner of Ucello:

Within the very framework of their conventions, the troubadours speak at whiles in lyrical accents which belong to all time. No formula, for instance, is of more conventional order than the practice of introducing a song by an allusion to the season of the year, to the flowers that bloom, or to the notes of the nightingale. Yet Arnaud Daniel, availing himself of this convention, gives us a series of songs, headed by reference to the four seasons, which may fairly challenge very modern comparisons. Here is “Autumn”:

The poetry of the troubadours is, to be sure, archaic, inasmuch as of all post-classical European literature, it is the oldest. Yet it is certainly more modern, in the same sense as is the work of François Villon, than any poetry since produced in France down to the nineteenth century. As Gaston Paris justly remarks. “It was the troubadours who created the modern style.”¹⁵ The French language, after developing from its origin as a living Romance tongue, underwent, in fact, a change when pundits undertook to graft upon that ancient stem a dead language and one which was probably never spoken, the forensic declamatory Latin of the Ciceronian vintage. Jurists and pedants repudiated the Romance vernacular, whose growth had been largely poetic, and by dint of grammatical trituration took to framing a tongue born of court records and notaries’ deeds. They would have it logical at all costs, even though perforce allowing in every instance the precedence of usage, that is, the living quality of language, over logic.

Thence French clarity and an admirable vehicle of prose, but thence also the embarrassment of Frenchmen when set to wondering who is their great poet. For a long time they took rhetoric for poetry, the stilts of pomposity for the surge of inspiration, and were nurtured on the noble circumlocutions of Racine’s alexandrines. And when they bethought themselves of retracing their steps and of returning to truly poetical expression, by rescuing themselves from that contagion, they found themselves with the impossibility of achieving lyrical speech without doing violence to the French language and thus betraying what Dante, the pupil of the troubadours, declared to be the poet’s first duty: to keep jealous ward over the purity of his native tongue.

The troubadours who sang those tongues to life stand at the pole opposite from peruked Augustan “classicism.” Yet their songs, startling as the conjunction may be thought, meet the highest model of authentic Grecian antiquity on the level of one cardinal virtue that is paramount in both. Speaking of another archaic poet, or aggregate of poets—ballad-singers, they have been called—Matthew Arnold singles out one quality to place it in the forefront before all others. He calls it “rapidity.” It is a far cry from the troubadours to Homer, but as it happens, that same quality, swift movement, no dawdling over unessentials, no slackening of the lyre’s strings, is the outstanding excellence of the Provençal minstrel-songs also. The troubadours brought no elevated vision, no profound interpretation, no rich colored imagery to European poetry, but they gifted it with what has been called, by Nietzsche, the whole of style—tempo, the vitality of flowing and flexible rhythm. In lending words to music, they lent music to words. “This vivacity,” says Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, “this new beat of the heart of poetry, is common to Chaucer and the humblest ballad-maker; it pulses through any book of lyrics printed yesterday. And it came straight to us out of Provence.”¹⁶

And, without wishing to strain the analogy, archaic Provençal poetry touches archaic Greek poetry—perhaps because they are both archaic—at another vital point: directness and simplicity. The troubadours ventilated, far back in the twelfth century, a question which is even today not finally resolved, that of poetical obscurity. Arnaud Daniel, the most eminent exponent of the trobar clus, refused the devalued coin of ready-made eloquence. But his quest of the unlooked-for bears no sort of affinity to preciosity or the flowery ornaments into which Italian virtuosity was to fall, even while imitating the troubadours. Quite on the contrary; he sought a concision that should cut to the quick, the unloading of all ballast, the elision of the superfluous, preferring, if circumlocution were thereby avoided, the common, even the coarse word. However affected and artificial the sentiments expressed by the troubadours, as needs they had to be, being avowedly “praise” (otherwise said, flattery), their language was not. That was filed down to the minimum of verbiage. For its effect it relied on the right word in the right place, not like Petrarch and the Elizabethans, on ornament. Those are the characteristics of the style of Arnaud Daniel, and they are to be those of Dante.

That compression draws more largely on the attention of the reader, accustomed, in our over-excited age, to literary cake which levels down to his quick luncheon habits, and he feels injured when unable to snap up at one bite the meat of a period or a page. But the “obscurity” serves in fact one of the essential ends of poetry. Guiraut de Bornelh, though having dipped in the trobar clus manner, joins issue on the question. “When one uses words,” he says, “it is after all in order to be understood.” That facile logic, for all its color of truism, is in point of fact specious. Merely to be apprehended as ideas is not the sufficient end of poetry. Prose itself, emotional in its origin, and indeed the daughter of poetry, reverts to its primal nature when it seeks to convey moods and tempers, and in doing so aspires to being an art. Poetry is under the obligation of being one, an art intermediate between verbal and musical communication, aiming at enriching each with the emotional qualities of the other. The poet does not finger the elements of language as the key of a calculating machine, but as the strings of a lute. That his words should convey ideas is not enough; they must also stir by their vibrations the fibers of emotional sensibility to pleasurable or exciting purpose. The intellectual content is, in poetry, an instrumental part in the concerted symphony. The purpose of all art being to lift the mind’s excitement above the oppression of actuality, that function is not served by M. Jourdain’s prose when he calls for his slippers.

The fusion of its consubstantial elements, of form and content, in a total and indivisible effect is the rightful end of poetry; its perfect attainment is the stamp of great poetry. The troubadour lyrics are not great poetry. They are but songs; songs of which for the greater part, the words have come down to us amputated from their musical stem, but which were not composed to meet the eye in written form; songs largely descanted and delivered by strolling singers, common crowders who had been wont to collect their audiences at fairs and the junketings of yokels, before a boon of fortune sent them basking in memorial halls and princely courts. The ambition to create great poetry never entered their heads. Their highest design did not aim above providing pleasant entertainment. But within the relatively modest compass of that purpose, the song-makers were certainly in earnest, and strove, like conscientious craftsmen, to excellence. Their concern for form assigned to it an undue preponderance, and craft came to dominate inspiration. But to that solicitude, excessive to a fault, is largely owing the sway which their poetry bore over the early growth of European literatures. It is manner rather than matter that summons such influence. That fault was almost a requisite condition for the fashioning of the instrument with which Provençal poetry equipped succeeding centuries, and which furnished the burthen of poetry with resources that gave it larger and freer play. The musical instrument must needs be fashioned by the craftsman before it can be handed to the musician. And the art of the Provençal song-makers, trifling as we may account it, and removed as it is from the highest order of poetry, proved—from the outset of the wide-reaching posthumous influence it exerted—its aptness to the needs of the very greatest poetry. It answered the ends of Dante.

The considerations which engaged the attention of the troubadours in the twelfth century carry us a long way from archaic ingenuousness. Provençal technical mastery was, in point of fact, not only in advance, as by a miracle, of its time, but of the literary production of most European countries for centuries to follow. Abstracting our knowledge of dates and our concern for content, say we set the gawky, heavy-footed gait of laggard England in the fourteenth century, of Lydgate, Gower, Hoccleve, yea, of Chaucer, beside the light easeful trip and nimble sleight of the troubadour songs, there can be little question which of the two we should count the more archaic. Which is more beforehand and which is callower, this of Gower:

or this of Bernard de Ventadorn?

In respect of its intrinsic quality, troubadour poetry is today above all a poetry for poets, for artists, whether practitioners of verse or of prose or of neither, who are interested in art and able to appreciate technique. While few might choose those lyrics for their bedside book, poets like Rimbaud, Laforgue, Ezra Pound, have drawn from them profit and pleasure. It was Goethe who plucked them from the neglect of five centuries and introduced the serious study of them into Europe.

The very themes that alienate us, I had almost said repel us, by their factitious sentiments, constituted in the twelfth century a recommendation at least as weighty as the elegance of lyric love. Unlike the chivalric narratives of deeds of derring-do, that poetry was levelled at a feminine public. The oft-quoted saying of Dante, that lyrical poetry was composed in the vernacular because women did not understand Latin,¹⁸ is erroneous; neither the men nor the poets themselves, in Provence, understood Latin any better than did the women. But the gist of lyrical poetry, which was accounted equivalent with love-poetry, was imposed by the tastes of the audiences to which it was addressed. The treatment of that theme contrasts with the classical tradition even more violently than the form that clothes it. The poetical expression on which our modern tongues were nurtured, has, together with its cast and mouth, transmitted to a whole literary progeny, down to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, an attitude towards amatory sentiment which has been termed, misleadingly as it happens, a “new conception of love.”

Love-poetry did not hold an important place in pagan Europe. As is the rule in the lower cultures, erotic lays were regarded among the barbarian tribes in the light of charms. A love-song was counted as a magical incantation whereby the lover sought to work theurgically upon the object of his desire. Among Nordic peoples the composition of verses addressed to a woman amounted to an offense which exposed the author, like any other practitioner of sorcery, to punitive measures. Instances are on record of poets being formally charged, proscribed, or subjected to heavy penalties for having written verse to a young woman whose family had rejected their suit. The Scandinavian poet, Ottar the Black, found guilty of having dedicated a song to the daughter of King Olaf, was condemned to death. He owed his reprieve only to the lucky inspiration of singing the praises of the king on his way to execution.¹⁹ In one of the numerous variants of the story of Tristan, the hero is killed by King Mark for having sung a love poem to Iseult.²⁰

Those barbaric lays were devoid of merit, and bore little resemblance to what we understand by love-poetry. The conventions of Provençal love-songs are the first expression of a profound difference in the treatment of erotic themes which divides our literatures from those of classical antiquity or of barbarian cultures. When, for instance, Racine imparts to a paraphrase of Euripides a sentimental delicacy which has no analogy in the original, he is unconsciously drawing from a tradition which had its cradle in Provence. And Shakespeare’s ideal female figures, his Perditas, Imogens, Mirandas, have no sisters in the imaginative works of Greece or Rome, nor are they sib to the Diarmaid, Etain, or Essylt of Celtic saga. They are the nonesuch Lady-liege of the troubadour-knight, the paragons of every feminine charm and perfection with which the flattery of lyrical homage painted and bedecked her. The Provençal song-makers did not then frame anew the form only of poetical expression; they enacted a change which has struck deeper into the European mind, a change in the whole of its emotional and imaginative cast. They did not pour new wine into old bottles; they poured new wine into new bottles. Both form and content were, in their poetry, a new departure, in all respects, foreign from the tradition of Greco-Roman literature.

Much rather than with assessing, far less recommending, the qualities of that half-forgotten poetry, it is with placing in its historical perspective the remarkable action that it exerted that our present purpose is concerned. The intrinsic merits of troubadour poetry lie open, as does all literary production, to divergence of judgment contingent on diverse tastes and standards. But that is not the case with regard to the fact of that poetry’s historical importance. The importance is enormous. It is perhaps greater than that of any other single agency that has been influential upon the course of development of our literatures.

Down to the eighteenth century, all discussion in matters literary pivoted on the tiresome opposition between the “ancients” and the “moderns.” The assumption which lay at the base of that insistent antithesis was that European literature is essentially continuous with that of Greece and Rome. Whatever deviations its course has been put to were not seen as effects of qualitative cultural differences, but of deficiencies and disabilities, of barbarism, ignorance, and untutored license. In the later Middle Ages, thoughtful men suffered under a crushing sense of inferiority. And small wonder! They looked about them upon a world that had mouldered in the night of five centuries. They held, at the same time, the imperishable remembrance of another world that had gone before and had grown to a mythical mirage in their haunting nostalgia. Beside that splendor, its wealth of achievement, of thought, of art, of masterpieces, what were the puny and stunted fruits the present had to show, but penury? “Antiquity” did not stand in their minds for a peculiar form or phase of culture; it stood for human culture in an absolute sense, for the mental cultivation that raises man above brutishness. That there could ever be a new world, a new Europe, a new culture, a new literature was to them a notion devoid of meaning. The Renaissance, when it came, was seen as a restoration, a rebuilding. It was the resumed flow of the stream of human culture, which had its upper waters in Rome and Greece, which had for a time slumbered in hidden backpools, been sucked in the slop of swamps, but was about to take up its even course towards the changeless goals set by the great masters.

The facts are somewhat different. The contrasts between the trends of modern Europe and those of Greco-Roman tradition are not primarily effects of barbaric shortcomings and the disabilities of ignorance; they are the outcome of wholesale cultural importations and immigrations from without. Our literatures have not been shaped by adaptation and modification of the classical heritage, but by drawing from entirely distinct sources, having no sort of connection or cognateness with that heritage. There was no going back on the effects of those accessions. For better or worse, they had entered the blood and fiber of European culture, and no opinion, no debate, no pronouncement could eradicate or purge them. Despite every effort to follow in the steps of the “ancients,” whom their would-be disciples were incapable of comprehending, whom they grossly and grotesquely travestied until the rousing of the critical historical sense of archeology, comparative anthropology, and comparative religion in the nineteenth century, despite the pathetic misconceptions of psuedoclassicism, the development of our literatures has been paramountly determined by the nurture which they sucked during the impressionable period of their infancy.

As regards lyrical expression and the attitude towards amatory emotions, both categories of far wider reach and scope than narrow definitions imply, the spring at which those literatures drank was not situated in Greece or in Rome, but in Provence.

In speaking of “Provence,” I am following the example set in the Middle Ages by the inhabitants of those regions where the langue d’oc was spoken, geographically much more extended than the district now known as Provence. Those territories included the Roman “provinces” of Narbonne, the “first” and the “second” Aquitania, and reached north as far as the Loire. “The name ‘Provençal,’ ” says Raymond d’Agyles, “was given to the peoples of Burgundy, Auvergne, Gascony, Gothia and Provence.”²¹ Those were the native lands of the Provençal troubadours.

The emergence in the twelfth century of a new lyrical art in Provence was among the privileges conferred upon those lands by their favorable situation. While Christendom as a whole still lay palled in the darkness of barbarism, Provence—and more particularly the country of Toulouse, a feudal parcel of the domains of Aragon, the most Arabized of the Spanish kingdoms—stood open as no other to the influence of Hispano-Mauresque civilization. It was the mart where the rich products of Moorish industry came for distribution to northern countries. It was the intermediary through which Islamic culture at its palmary height filtered through the darkest Europe. Prominent among the manifestations of that culture, in respect to the ardor with which it was cultivated, was a lyrical art, accompanied by music. With that source of inspiration, particularly rife among the Moorish population of Aragon, the Provençal dependencies of that kingdom were in far closer contact than Northern France with Wales or Ireland. It was inevitable that the widespread popularity of Moorish music and song should instill their form and fashion into langue d’oc minstrelly.

Many specialists in Romance philology have followed Friederich Diez, professor at the University of Bonn, and the founder of modern Provençal studies, in denying the influence of Hispano-Mauresque poetry on that of the troubadours, or have, more often than not, passed over the question in ostentatious silence. Jeanroy, the most eminent French authority, makes one reference to it, and as far as I know only one, relegated to a popular article, and couched in these terms: “As for Arabian influence, which used to be much discussed so long as summary judgments did duty for the close study of facts, it is more and more likely that this is nothing but a fable.”²² I do not know whence Professor Jeanroy derived the impression of that waxing probability; not, certainly, from the study of facts bearing in favor of an extraneous influence on Provençal poetry, which he had no interest to study, closely or at all. But the effect of the close study of facts, which he himself carried out with admirable industry, has not been to bring confirmation to views touching an autochthonous origin of that poetry. On the contrary, as he has shown, the effect has been to reveal the insecurity of the suppositions on which those speculations were poised, and to impair what measure of confidence, limited and half-hearted at the best, they may for a moment have commanded.²³

The first and by far the most general assumption—it cannot be called a theory or even a hypothesis, for it was held as axiomatic on such bright conviction as to need no confirmation from references to the most accessible facts—was that Provençal poetry arose out of Latin poetry. Romance languages are derived from Latin, not as once was believed, by corruption of the speech of peoples who had once spoken Latin, but as the modified form of Latin which they and their forebears had for centuries used. But linguistic derivation is one thing, and literary derivation quite another. The English language is derived from Low German, but Anglo-Saxon productions, such as Beowulf or the Proverbs of King Alfred have left no mark or inheritance in English literature. The view that Provençal poetry had its origin from Latin, which was clung to for a longer time and with more sufficiency than any other, is today so completely abandoned that to refer to it is but to thrash a dead horse. Apart from the singular tidings that Latin poetry contained at any time an incitation to the contrivance of rhyme-patterns and strophic novelties, the main pertinent facts are: firstly, that few if any troubadours knew Latin; and secondly, that what tags of Latin verse are assignable to the period and the localities in cause, do not suggest the remotest resemblance to troubadour poetry.²⁴

Nothing in the records of Christian Europe affords a glimpse, even the dimmest, of troubadour poetry in the making. That there existed previously to the twelfth century, as at all periods, popular chants of some kind is a legitimate assumption. None have come down to us. But what slivers may be gleaned of relatively studied verse, composed by clerks, are rude in cast and manner and bear no sort of comparison with the most ancient Provençal songs. There is no reason for supposing that popular songs surpassed “learned” poetry in quality.

The well-known theory of Gaston Paris, which refers the origin of troubadour poetry to the chants sung at the great pagan Celtic festivals of May Day, has found favor in England from such high authorities as Sir Edmund Chambers. Invocations and references to the Spring are a staple in the poetry of troubadours and trouvères. Among the latter those songs bore a special name; they were called reverdies; among the Arabs they were known as neherye. That the spread of the new Provençal style ousted what uncouth psalmodies may have previously been intoned at May celebrations is only natural. But those facts, if facts they be, contain no tittle of indication that can help to trace the Provençal Muse up to her spring. They elucidate in no way the origin and development of the distinctive characteristics of that new poetry. They explain nothing. To say that it had its origin in the songs of people who went a-maying no more touches the question of its flowering than if one were to say, because troubadour poetry treats largely of amatory themes, that it had its origin from love.

The close study of facts, as we shall have occasion to note further, shakes every conjecture that attempts to explain troubadour poetry as an autochthonous growth. These attempts have failed simply because that poetry was not an autochthonous growth. Just as it would be odd to search Petronius and Apuleius for the source of the narratives of Chrestien de Troyes, were the derivation of these from the “matter from Britain” not avowed, so is it equally idle to derive the song of the Comte de Poitiers from the poems of Ausonius or Sidonius Apollinaris, or from the flight off and away from every trend of local tradition of some historically mute inglorious Miltons. In the one case as in the other, if the origin of Romance works differing profoundly from Latin tradition is to be accounted for, that difference must exist in the source, and we must needs look to an influence alien from that tradition. The question is not one to be exclusively determined by the authority, however high, of specialists in the Romance languages, since its solution calls for some acquaintance with poetical activities outside the range of the Romance idioms, concerning which information was almost entirely lacking at the time when Diez wrote.

This is no longer the case. While not a parcel of proof is to be found in support of the hypotheses which were advanced relative to the activities akin to the art of the troubadours in Christian Europe, we now dispose of a considerable amount of information concerning the rich literature of Moorish Spain from the tenth century on, and our knowledge in this direction has of late years advanced to such a degree that to ignore it is no longer excusable. Signs are not wanting of a more enlightened attitude slackening the hold of the views which have long prevailed in academic circles. Those views, it may be observed, presented but a particular instance of a much more ancient and comprehensive aberration of historical judgment, born of reluctance to owning the debts of barbarous Christendom to a miscreant civilization. No hypothesis was so wild and unsubstantial that zealots would not flee to it in pursuit of a refuge from that distasteful acknowledgement.²⁵ But while those prejudices have now lost much of their force, many cultivated Frenchmen, including distinguished writers and professors of general history whose training never offered them any encouragement to acquire a personal judgment, are readily disposed to rest on the authority of eminent scholars’ views which are agreeable to national sentiment.²⁶ They find no difficulty in believing that Provençal lyric art flowered by a spontaneous generation within a few leagues from Paris,²⁷ and never perceive the need, in accounting for its origin, of having recourse to the Moors.

The singers of those lyrics, however, did not scruple at resorting to the Moors for the musical instruments on which they accompanied their lays. The patrons of the troubadours obtained from the Moors the luxury and elegance which helped refine their tastes; those privileged leisures which cradled their courtly diversions, they owed to the wealth which their country derived from commerce with the Moors. Europe borrowed in the twelfth century from the Moors the new industries, the sciences, the arts of navigation which were to transform it. The studious and the learned resorted to the Moors to acquire the new mathematical sciences, medicine, chemistry, and to gain access to Aristotle and Averroes. Daniel de Morley, Michael Scotus, Gerard of Cremona, Gerbert d’Aurillac, Raymon Lully resorted to the Moors for the seeds of a new world of thought and science. Regiomontanus depended on the ephemerides of Al-Batáni for the data destined to enable Henry the Navigator, Vasco da Gama, and Christopher Columbus to extend tenfold the area of the known world. Adelhard of Bath went to Cordova to procure the copy of the works of Euclid which supplied, until the year 1533, all the schools of Europe; Plato of Pisa and Fibronacci went to Moorish Spain for algebra, algorism, the abacus and the almanac. The Church itself drew its system of scholastic dialectics from Moorish authors; Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, both Arabic scholars, had resort to Avicenna, Al-Farabi and Averroes for casting the philosophy of the Catholic faith into a systematic mold. While the troubadours were intoning their song on the doorsteps of Moorish Spain, Roger Bacon was proclaiming at Oxford that no science and no thought was possible without an acquaintance with the books of the Arabs.

Medieval Europe, sunk in the night of five centuries of barbarism, the darkness of which we have difficulty in piercing, was suddenly recalled to life. She owed, in that critical hour, everything to the world of Islam. She owed almost nothing to Rome, which had hitherto transmitted to her, in literature, little more than a few selections from Ovid, Cassiodorus and Boethius. To suppose that the new poetry which made itself heard on the edge of Andalusian gardens constituted a singular exception is, properly considered, an eccentricity which it would take far more cogent reasons to color than the unsupported guesses offered in explanation of the origin of that poetry.²⁸