a long time our only bibliotheca, that we owe a new style of poetry, called Romanesque, on account of the Romance tongue in which it had birth.[1] This style is to the eumolpique style, as a wild offshoot, growing laboriously in an arid and bramble-covered land, is to a cultivated tree which rises majestically in the heart of a fertile country.
It was with the chivalrous ideas, inspired by the book of the monk of Saint André, that the first poetic ideas were brought forth in France. The Oscan troubadours seizing these first glimmerings of genius, threw themselves with enthusiasm into a career which offered at the same time pleasures, glory, and the gifts of fortune.[2] They sang of the fair, of gallants and of kings; but their verses, monotonous enough when a real passion did not animate them, hardly reached above eulogy or satire. But little capable of feeling the moral beauties of poetry, they stopped at form. The rhyme for them was everything. For them the supreme talent was only rhyming much and with difficulty. One could not imagine to what lengths they went in this style. Not content with restricting themselves to follow the same rhyme throughout the entire course of the poem, they sometimes doubled it at the end of each verse, rhyming by echo, or else they made an initial rhyme.[3] These obstacles becoming multiplied stifled their muse in its cradle. All that art owed to these first modern poets was limited to a sort
- ↑ This Ballad tongue, or rather Romance, was a mixture of corrupt Latin, Teutonic, and ancient Gallic. It was called thus, in order to distinguish it from the pure Latin and French. The principal dialects of the Romance tongue were the langue d'oc, spoken in the south of France, and the longue d'oïl, spoken in the north. It is from the langue d'oïl that the French descend. The langue d'oc, prevailing with the troubadours who cultivated it, disappeared with them in the fourteenth century and was lost in numberless obscure provincial dialects. Voyez Le Troubadour, poésies occitaniques, à la Dissert., vol. i.
- ↑ Fontenelle, Hist. du Théâtre Français.
- ↑ Voyez Sainte-Palaye, Mém. sur l'ancienne Cheval.; Millot, Hist. des Troubad. Disc. prélim., on ce que j'ai dit moi-même dans le Troubadour, comme ci-dessus.
