French Lyrics — Edition Insights

hese were the Troubadours. Though their poems did not, at least at first, lack sincerity and spontaneity, their tendency to theorizing about the ideals of courtly life, especially about the nature and practice of love as the ideal form of refined conduct, was not favorable to these qualities. As lyrical expression lost in directness and spontaneity it was natural that more and more attention should be paid to form. The external qualities of verse were industriously cultivated. Great ingenuity was expended upon the invention of intricate and elaborate forms. Beginning at the end of the eleventh century, the poetry of the Troubadours had by the middle of the twelfth become a highly artificial and studied product. It was then that it began to awaken imitation in the north of France and thus determine the beginnings of French lyric poetry.

An earlier native lyric had indeed existed in northern France, known to us only by scanty fragments and allusions. It was a simple and light accompaniment of dancing or of the monotonous household tasks of sewing and spinning. Its theme was love and love-making. Its characteristic outward feature was a recurring refrain. The manner and frequency of repeating this refrain determined different forms, as _rondets_, _ballettes_, and _virelis_ But there are few examples left us of early French lyrics that have not already felt the influence of the art of the Troubadours. Even those that are in a way the most perfect and distinctive products of the earlier period, the fresh and graceful _pastourelles_, with their constant theme of a pretty shepherdess wooed by a knight, may have been imported from the south and have pretty surely been touched by southern influence.

From the middle of the twelfth century the native lyric in the north was entirely submerged under the flood of imitations of the Troubadours. The marriage of Eleanor of Poitiers with Louis VII. in 1137 brought Provence and France together, and opened the north, particularly about her court and that of her daughter Marie, Countess of Champagne, at Troyes, to the ideas and manners of the south. The first result was an eager and widespread imitation of the Provençal models. Among these earliest cultivators of literary art in the French language the most noteworthy were CONON DE BÉTHUNE (d. 1224), BLONDEL DE NESLE, GACE BRÛLÉ, GUI DE COUCI (d. 1201), GAUTIER D'ESPINAUS, and THIBAUT DE CHAMPAGNE, King of Navarre (d. 1253). There is in the work of these poets a great sameness. Their one theme was love as the essential principle of perfect courtly conduct, and their treatment was made still more lifeless by the use of allegory which was beginning to reveal its fascination for the mediaeval mind. From all their work the note of individuality is almost completely absent. Their art consisted in saying the same conventional commonplaces in a form that was not just like any other previously devised. So the predominance of the formal element was a matter of necessity. Some variation from existing forms was the one thing required of a piece of verse.

This school of direct imitation flourished for about a century. Then it suddenly ceased and for another century there was almost no lyric production of any sort. In the fourteenth century Guillaume de Machault (1295- 1377) inaugurated a revival, hardly of lyric poetry, but of the cultivation of lyric forms. He introduced a new style which made the old conventional themes again presentable by refinement of phrase and rhetorical embellishments, and he directed the pursuit of form not to the invention of ever new variations, but to the perfection of a few forms. And it is noticeable that these fixed forms were not selected from those elaborated under Provençal influence, but were the developments of the forms of the earlier _chansons à danser_, the _rondets_, _ballettes_, and _virelis_. The new poetic art that proceeded from Machault spent itself mainly in refining the phrase of the old commonplaces, allegories, and reflections, and on turning them out in _rondels_, _rondeaux_, _triolets_, _ballades_, _chants royaux_, and _virelis_. The new fashion was followed by FROISSART (1337-1410), EUSTACHE DESCHAMPS (approximately 1340-1407), who rhymed one thousand four hundred and forty ballades, CHRISTINE DE PISAN (1363-_?_), and CHARLES D'ORLÉANS (1391-1465), who marks the culmination of the movement by the perfection of formal elegance and easy grace which his rondels and ballades exhibit.