ICELANDIC AND PROVENÇAL.
RESEMBLANCES. CONTRASTS. ICELANDIC LITERATURE OF THIS TIME
MAINLY PROSE. DIFFICULTIES WITH IT. THE SAGA. ITS INSULARITY
OF MANNER. OF SCENERY AND CHARACTER. FACT AND FICTION IN THE
SAGAS. CLASSES AND AUTHORSHIP OF THEM. THE FIVE GREATER
SAGAS. 'NJALA.' 'LAXDÆLA.' 'EYRBYGGJA.' 'EGLA.' 'GRETTLA.'
ITS CRITICS. MERITS OF IT. THE PARTING OF ASDIS AND HER
SONS. GREAT PASSAGES OF THE SAGAS. STYLE. PROVENÇAL MAINLY
LYRIC. ORIGIN OF THIS LYRIC. FORMS. MANY MEN, ONE MIND.
EXAMPLE OF RHYME-SCHEMES. PROVENÇAL POETRY NOT GREAT. BUT
EXTRAORDINARILY PEDAGOGIC. THOUGH NOT DIRECTLY ON ENGLISH.
SOME TROUBADOURS. CRITICISM OF PROVENÇAL.
[Sidenote: _Resemblances._]
These may seem at first to be no sufficient reason for treating
together two such literatures as those named in the title of this
chapter. But the connection, both of likeness and unlikeness, between
them is too tempting to the student of comparative literature, and too
useful in such a comparative survey of literature as that which we are
here undertaking, to be mistaken or refused. Both attaining, thanks to
very different causes, an extraordinarily early maturity, completely
worked themselves out in an extraordinarily short time. Neither had,
so far as we know, the least assistance from antecedent vernacular
models. Each achieved an extraordinary perfection and intensity,
Icelandic in spirit, Provençal in form.
[Sidenote: _Contrasts._]
And their differences are no less fascinating, since they start from
this very diversity of similar perfection. Icelandic, after a brief
period of copying French and other languages, practically died out as
a language producing literature; and, perhaps for that very reason,
maintained itself in all the more continuity as a spoken language.
Even its daughter--or at least successor--Norse tongues produced
nothing worthy to take up the tradition of the Sagas and the Poems. It
influenced (till the late and purely literary revival of it biassed to
some extent the beginnings of the later Romantic revival in Western
Europe, a hundred and fifty years ago) nothing and nobody. It was as
isolated as its own island. To Provençal, on the other hand, though
its own actual producing-time was about as brief, belongs the
schooling, to no small extent, of the whole literature of Europe.
Directly, it taught the _trouvères_ of Northern France and the poets
of Spain and Italy prosody, and a certain amount of poetical style and
tone; indirectly, or directly through France, it influenced England
and Germany. It started, indeed, none of the greater poetical kinds
except lyric, and lyric is the true _grass_ of Parnassus--it springs
up naturally everywhere; but it started the form of all, or at least
was the first to adapt from Latin a prosody suitable to all.
The most obvious, though not the least interesting, points of
likeness in unlikeness have been left to the last. The contrasts
between the hawthorn and nightingale of Provence, her "winds heavy
with the rose," and the grey firths, the ice- and foam-fretted
skerries of Iceland; between the remains of Roman luxury pushed to
more than Roman effeminacy in the one, and the rough Germanic virtue
exasperated to sheer ferocity in the other,--are almost too glaring
for anything but a schoolboy's or a rhetorician's essay. Yet they are
reproduced with an incredible--a "copy-book"--fidelity in the
literatures. The insistence of experts and enthusiasts on the
law-abiding character of the sagas has naturally met with some
surprise from readers of these endless private wars, and burnings, and
"heath-slayings," these feuds where blood flows like water, to be
compensated by fines as regular as a water-rate, these methodical
assassinations, in which it is not in the least discreditable to
heroes to mob heroes as brave as themselves to death by numbers, in
which nobody dreams of measuring swords, or avoiding vantage of any
kind. Yet the enthusiastic experts are not wrong. Whatever outrages
the Icelander may commit, he always has the law--an eccentric,
unmodern, conventional law, but a real and recognised one--before his
eyes, and respects it in principle, however much he may sometimes
violate it in practice. To the Provençal, on the other hand, law, as
such, is a nuisance. He will violate it, so to speak, on
principle--less because the particular violation has a particular
temptation for him than because the thing is forbidden. The Icelander
may covet and take another man's wife, but it is to make her his own.
The Provençal will hardly fall, and will never stay, in love with any
one who is not another's. In savagery there is not so very much to
choose: it requires a calculus, not of morals but of manners, to
distinguish accurately between carving the blood-eagle on your enemy
and serving up your rival's heart as a dish to his mistress. In
passion also there may be less difference than the extreme advocates
of both sides would maintain. But in all things external the contrast,
the hackneyed contrast, of South and North never could have been
exhibited with a more artistic completeness, never has been exhibited
with a completeness so artistic. And these two contrasting parts were
played at the very same time at the two ends of Europe. In the very
same years when the domestic histories and tragedies (there were few
comedies) of Iceland were being spun into the five great sagas and the
fifty smaller ones, the fainter, the more formal, but the not less
peculiar music of the gracious long-drawn Provençal love-song was
sounding under the vines and olives of Languedoc. The very Icelanders
who sailed to Constantinople in the intervals of making the subjects
of these sagas, and sometimes of composing them, must not seldom have
passed or landed on the coasts where _cansos_ and _tensos_, _lai_ and
_sirvente_, were being woven, and have listened to them as the
Ulyssean mariners listened to the songs of the sirens.
[Sidenote: _Icelandic literature of this time mainly prose._]
It is not, of course, true that Provençal only sings of love and
Icelandic only of war. There is a fair amount of love in the Northern
literature and a fair amount of fighting in the Southern. And it is
not true that Icelandic literature is wholly prose, Provençal wholly
poetry. But it is true that Provençal prose plays an extremely small
part in Provençal literature, and that Icelandic poetry plays, in
larger minority, yet still a minor part in Icelandic. It so happens,
too, that in this volume we are almost wholly concerned with Icelandic
prose, and that we shall not find it necessary to say much, if
anything, about Provençal that is not in verse. It is distinctly
curious how much later, _coeteris paribus_, the Romance tongues are
than the Teutonic in attaining facilities of prose expression. But
there is no reason for believing that even the Teutonic tongues
falsified the general law that poetry comes before prose. And
certainly this was the case with Icelandic--so much so that, uncertain
as are the actual dates, it seems better to relinquish the Iceland of
poetry to the first volume of this series, where it can be handled in
connection with that Anglo-Saxon verse which it so much resembles. The
more characteristic Eddaic poems--that is to say, the most
characteristic parts of Icelandic poetry--must date from Heathen
times, or from the first conflicts of Christianity with Heathenism in
Iceland; and this leaves them far behind us.[160] On the other hand,
the work which we have in Provençal before the extreme end of the
eleventh century is not finished literature. It has linguistic
interest, the interest of origins, but no more.
[Footnote 160: Iceland began to be Christian in 1000.]
[Sidenote: _Difficulties with it._]
Although there is practically as little doubt about the antiquity of
Icelandic literature[161] as about its interest, there is unusual room
for guesswork as to the exact dates of the documents which compose it.
Writing seems to have been introduced into Iceland late; and it is not
the opinion of scholars who combine learning with patriotism that
many, if any, of the actual MSS. date further back than the thirteenth
century; while the actual composition of the oldest that we have is
not put earlier than the twelfth, and rather its later than its
earlier part. Moreover, though Icelanders were during this period, and
indeed from the very first settlement of the island, constantly in
foreign countries and at foreign courts--though as Vikings or
Varangians, as merchants or merely travelling adventurers, they were
to be found all over Europe, from Dublin to Constantinople--yet, on
the other hand, few or no foreigners visited Iceland, and it figures
hardly at all in the literary and historical records of the Continent
or even of the British Isles, with which it naturally had most
correspondence. We are therefore almost entirely devoid of those
side-lights which are so invaluable in general literary history, while
yet again we have no borrowings from Icelandic literature by any other
to tell us the date of the borrowed matter. At the end of our present
time, and still more a little later, Charlemagne and Arthur and the
romances of antiquity make their appearance in Icelandic; but nothing
Icelandic makes its appearance elsewhere. For it is not to be supposed
for one moment that the _Nibelungenlied_, for instance, is the work of
men who wrote with the _Volsunga-Saga_ or the Gudrun lays before them,
any more than the _Grettis Saga_ is made up out of _Beowulf_. These
things are mere examples of the successive refashionings of traditions
and stories common to the race in different centuries, manners, and
tongues. Except as to the bare fact of community of origin they help
us little or not at all.
[Footnote 161: It is almost superfluous to insert, but would be
disagreeable to omit, a reference to the _Sturlunga Saga_ (2 vols.,
Oxford, 1879) and the _Corpus Poeticum Boreale_ (2 vols., Oxford,
1883) of the late Dr Vigfusson and Professor York Powell. The first
contains an invaluable sketch, or rather history, of Icelandic
literature: the second (though one may think its arrangement a little
arbitrary) is a book of unique value and interest. Had these two been
followed up according to Dr Vigfusson's plan, practically the whole of
Icelandic literature that has real interest would have been accessible
once for all. As it is, one is divided between satisfaction that
England should have done such a service to one of the great mediæval
literatures, and regret that she has not done as much for others.]
[Sidenote: _The Saga._]
The reasons why Icelandic literature, in its most peculiar and
interesting form of the saga, did not penetrate abroad are clear
enough; and the remoteness and want of school-education in the island
itself are by no means the most powerful of them. The very thing which
is most characteristic of them, and which in these later times
constitutes their greatest charm, must have been against them in their
own time. For the stories which ran like an epidemic through Europe in
the years immediately before and immediately after 1200, though they
might be in some cases concerned directly with national heroes,
appealed without exception to international and generally human
interests. The slightest education, or the slightest hearing of
persons educated, sufficed to teach every one that Alexander and Cæsar
were great conquerors, that the Story of Troy (the exact truth of
which was never doubted) had been famous for hundreds and almost
thousands of years. Charlemagne had had directly to do with the
greater part of Europe in peace or war, and the struggle with the
Saracens was of old and universal interest, freshened by the Crusades.
The Arthurian story received from fiction, if not from history, an
almost equally wide bearing; and was, besides, knitted to
religion--the one universal interest of the time--by its connection
with the Graal. All Europe, yet again, had joined in the Crusades, and
the stories brought by the crusaders directly or indirectly from the
East were in the same way common property.
[Sidenote: _Its insularity of manner._]
But saga-literature had nothing of this appeal. It was as
indifferently and almost superciliously insular as the English
country-house novel itself, and may have produced in some of the very
few foreigners who can ever have known it originally, something of the
same feelings of wrath which we have seen excited by the English
country-house novel in our own day. The heroes were not, according to
the general ideas of mediæval Europe, either great chiefs or
accomplished knights; the heroines were the very reverse of those
damsels "with mild mood" (as the catch-word in the English romances
has it) whom the general Middle Age liked or thought it liked. An
intricate, intensely local, and (away from the locality) not seldom
shocking system of law and public morality pervaded the whole. The
supernatural element, though in itself it might have been an
attraction, was of a cast quite different from the superstitions of
the South, or even of the Centre; and the Christian element, which was
to the Middle Ages the very air they breathed, was either absent
altogether or present in an artificial, uneasy, and scanty fashion.
[Sidenote: _Of scenery and character._]
Yet all these things were of less importance than another, which is,
after all, the great _differentia_, the abiding quality, of the sagas.
In the literature of the rest of Europe, and especially in the central
and everywhere radiating literature of France, there were sometimes
local and almost parochial touches--sometimes unimportant heroes, not
seldom savage heroines, frequently quaint bits of exotic
supernaturalism. But all this was subdued to a kind of common literary
handling, a "dis-realising" process which made them universally
acceptable. The personal element, too, was conspicuously absent--the
generic character is always uppermost. Charlemagne was a real person,
and not a few of the incidents with which he was connected in the
_chansons_ were real events; but he and they have become mere stuff of
romance as we see them in these poems. Whether Arthur was a real
person or not, the same to an even greater extent is true of him. The
kings and their knights appealed to Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans,
Italians alike, because they were not obtrusively English, German,
Italian, or French. But the sagas are from the first and to the (at
least genuine) last nothing if not national, domestic, and personal.
The grim country of ice and fire, of jökul and skerry, the massive
timber homesteads, the horse-fights and the Viking voyages, the
spinning-wheel and the salting-tub, are with us everywhere; and yet
there is an almost startling individuality, for all the sameness of
massacre and chicanery, of wedding and divorce, which characterises
the circumstances. Gunnar is not distinguished from Grettir merely by
their adventures; there is no need of labels on the lovers of Gudrun;
Steingerd in Kormak's Saga and Hallgerd in Njal's, are each something
much more than types of the woman with bad blood and the woman with
blood that is only light and hot. And to the unsophisticated reader
and hearer, as many examples might be adduced to show, this
personality, the highest excellence of literature to the sophisticated
scholar, is rather a hindrance than a help. He has not proved the ways
and the persons; and he likes what he has proved.
To us, on the contrary, the characteristics of saga-work, at which a
glance has been made in the foregoing paragraphs, form its principal
charm, a charm reinforced by the fact of its extraordinary difference
from almost all other literature except (in some points) that of the
Homeric poems. Although there is a good deal of common form in the
sagas, though outlawry and divorce, the quibbles of the Thing and the
violence of ambush or holmgang, recur to and beyond the utmost limits
of permitted repetition, the unfamiliarity of the setting atones for
its monotony, and the individuality of the personages themselves very
generally prevents that monotony from being even felt. The stories are
never tame; and, what is more remarkable, they seldom or never have
the mere extravagance which in mediæval, at least as often as in
other, writing, plays Scylla to the Charybdis of tameness. Moreover,
they have, as no other division of mediæval romance has in anything
like the same measure, the advantage of the presence of _interesting_
characters of both sexes. Only the Arthurian story can approach them
here, and that leaves still an element of gracious shadowiness about
the heroines, if not the heroes. The Icelandic heroine has nothing
shadowy about her. Her weakest point is the want of delicacy--not in a
finicking sense by any means--which a rough promiscuous life to begin
with, and the extreme facility and frequency of divorce on the other,
necessarily brought about. But she is always, as the French have it, a
"person"--when she is good, a person altogether of the best; even when
she is bad, a person seldom other than striking and often charming.
[Sidenote: _Fact and fiction in the sagas._]
There is, of course, Icelandic literature in prose outside of the
sagas--the great law code (_Gragas_ or _Greygoose_), religious books
in the usual plenty, scientific books of a kind, and others. But the
saga, the story, was so emphatically the natural mould into which
Icelandic literary impulse threw itself, that it is even more
difficult here than elsewhere at the time to separate story and
history, fiction and fact. Indeed the stricter critics would, I
believe, maintain that every saga which deserves the name is actually
founded on fact: the _Laxdæla_ no less than the _Heimskringla_,[162]
the story of Kormak no less than that of Jarl Rognwald. A merely and
wholly invented story (they hold, and perhaps rightly) would have been
repugnant to that extraordinarily business-like spirit which has left
us, by the side of the earlier songs and later sagas, containing not a
little of the most poetical matter of the whole world, the _Landnama
Bok_ of Ari Frodi, a Domesday-book turned into literature, which is
indeed older than our time, but which forms a sort of commentary and
companion to the whole of the sagas by anticipation or otherwise.
[Footnote 162: Dr Vigfusson is exceedingly severe on the
_Heimskringla_, which he will have to be only a late, weak, and
rationalised compilation from originals like the oddly termed "Great
O.T. Saga." But it is hard for a man to think hardly of the book in
which, though only a translation, he first read how Queen Sigrid the
Haughty got rid of her troublesome lovers by the effectual process of
burning them _en masse_ in a barn, and how King Olaf died the greatest
sea-death--greater even than Grenville's--of any defeated hero, in
history or literature.]
[Sidenote: _Classes and authorship of them._]
Difficult as it may be to draw the line between intended history,
which was always strongly "romanced" in form, if not intentionally in
fact, and that very peculiar product of Icelandic genius the saga
proper, in which the original domestic record has been, so to speak,
"super-romanced" into a work of art, it is still possible to see it,
if not to draw it, between the _Heimskringla_, the story of the Kings
of Norway (made English after some earlier versions by Messrs
Magnusson and Morris, and abstracted, as genius can abstract, by
Carlyle), the _Orkneyinga_ and _Færeyinga_ Sagas (the tales of these
outlying islands before the former came under Norwegian rule), the
curious conglomerate known as the _Sturlunga Saga_ on the one hand,
and the greater and lesser sagas proper on the other. The former are
set down to the two great writers Snorri and Sturla, the one the chief
literary light of Iceland in the first half of the thirteenth century,
the other the chief light in the second, both of the same family, and
with Ari Frodi the three greatest of the certainly known men of
letters of the island. Conjecture has naturally run riot as to the
part which either Snorri or Sturla may have taken in the sagas not
directly attributed to either, but most probably dating from their
time, as well as with the personalities of the unknown or little known
poets and prosemen who shaped the older stories at about the same
period. But to the historian who takes delight in literature, and does
not care very much who made it provided it is made well, what has been
called "the singular silence" as to authorship which runs through the
whole of the early Icelandic literature is rather a blessing than
otherwise. It frees him from those biographical inquiries which always
run the risk of drawing nigh to gossip, and it enables him to
concentrate attention on the literature itself.
This literature is undoubtedly best exemplified, as we should expect,
in the wholly anonymous and only indirectly historical sagas of the
second division, though it is fair to say that there is nothing here
much finer than such things as the famous last fight of King Olaf in
the _Heimskringla_, or as many other incidents and episodes in the
history-books. Only the hands of the writers were freer in the others:
and complete freedom--at least from all but the laws of art--is never
a more "nobil thing" than it is to the literary artist.
[Sidenote: _The five greater sagas._]
There seems no reason to quarrel with the classification which divides
the sagas proper into two classes, greater and lesser, and assigns
position in the first to five only--the Saga of Burnt Njal, that of
the dwellers in Laxdale, the _Eyrbyggja_, Egil's Saga, and the Saga of
Grettir the Strong. It is very unlucky that the reception extended by
the English public to the publications of Mr Vigfusson and Professor
York Powell, mentioned in a note above, did not encourage the editors
to proceed to an edition at least of these five sagas together, which
might, according to estimate, have been done in three volumes, two
more containing all the small ones. Meanwhile _Njala_--the great sagas
are all known by familiar diminutives of this kind--is accessible in
English in the late Sir G.W. Dasent's well-known translation;[163] the
_Eyrbyggja_ and _Egla_ in abstracts by Sir Walter Scott[164] and Mr
Gosse;[165] _Laxdæla_ has been treated as it deserves in the longest
and nearly the finest section of Mr Morris's _Earthly Paradise_;[166]
and the same writer with Dr Magnusson has given a literal translation
of _Grettla_.[167]
[Footnote 163: _The Story of Burnt Njal._ Edinburgh, 1861.]
[Footnote 164: Included in the Bohn edition of Mallet's _Northern
Antiquities_.]
[Footnote 165: _Cornhill Magazine_, July 1879.]
[Footnote 166: "The Lovers of Gudrun;" _November_, part iii. p. 337,
original edition. London, 1870.]
[Footnote 167: London, 1869.]
The lesser sagas of the same group are some thirty in number, the best
known or the most accessible being those of Gunnlaug Serpent's-Tongue,
often printed in the original,[168] very short, very characteristic,
and translated by the same hands as _Grettla_;[169] _Viga Glum_,
translated by Sir Edmund Head;[170] _Gisli the Outlaw_ (Dasent);[171]
_Howard_ or _Havard the Halt_, _The Banded Men_, and _Hen Thorir_
(Morris and Magnusson)[172]; _Kormak_, said to be the oldest, and
certainly one of the most interesting.[173]
[Footnote 168: _Gunnlaug's Saga Ormstungu_. Ed. Mogk. Halle, 1886.]
[Footnote 169: In _Three Northern Love-Stories_. London, 1875.]
[Footnote 170: London, 1866.]
[Footnote 171: Edinburgh, 1866.]
[Footnote 172: In one volume. London, 1891.]
[Footnote 173: Not translated, and said to require re-editing in the
original, but very fully abstracted in _Northern Antiquities_, as
above, pp. 321-339. The verse is in the _Corpus Poeticum Boreale_.]
So much of the interest of a saga depends on small points constantly
varied and renewed, that only pretty full abstracts of the contents of
one can give much idea of them. On the other hand, the attentive
reader of a single saga can usually give a very good guess at the
general nature of any other from a brief description of it, though he
must of course miss the individual touches of poetry and of character.
And though I speak with the humility of one who does not pretend to
Icelandic scholarship, I think that translations are here less
inadequate than in almost any other language, the attraction of the
matter being so much greater than that of the form. For those who will
not take the slight trouble to read Dasent's _Njala_, or Morris and
Magnusson's _Grettla_, the next best idea attainable is perhaps from
Sir Walter Scott's abstract of the _Eyrbyggja_ or Mr Blackwell's of
the Kormak's Saga, or Mr Gosse's of _Egla_. Njal's Saga deals with the
friendship between the warrior Gunnar and the lawyer Njal, which,
principally owing to the black-heartedness of Gunnar's wife Hallgerd,
brings destruction on both, Njal and almost his whole family being
burnt as the crowning point, but by no means the end, of an intricate
series of reciprocal murders. For the blood-feuds of Iceland were as
merciless as those of Corsica, with the complication--thoroughly
Northern and not in the least Southern--of a most elaborate, though
not entirely impartial, system of judicial inquiries and
compensations, either by fine or exile. To be outlawed for murder,
either in casual affray or in deliberate attack, was almost as regular
a part of an Icelandic gentleman's avocations from his home and daily
life as a journey on viking or trading intent, and was often combined
with one or both. But outlawry and fine by no means closed the
incident invariably, though they sometimes did so far as the feud was
concerned: and there is hardly one saga which does not mainly or
partly turn on a tangle of outrages and inquests.
[Sidenote: Njala.]
[Sidenote: Laxdæla.]
As _Njala_ is the most complete and dramatic of the sagas where love
has no very prominent part except in the Helen-like dangerousness, if
not exactly Helen-like charm, of Hallgerd, of whom it might certainly
be said that
"Where'er she came,
She brought Calamity";
so _Laxdæla_ is the chief of those in which love figures, though on
the male side at least there is no lover that interests us as much as
the hapless, reckless poet Kormak, or as Gunnlaug Serpent's-Tongue.
The _Earthly Paradise_ should have made familiar to all the quarrel
or, if hardly quarrel, feud between the cousins Kiartan and Bodli, or
Bolli, owing to the fatal fascinations of Gudrun. Gudrun is less
repulsive than Hallgerd, but she cannot be said to be entirely free
from the drawbacks which, as above suggested, are apt to be found in
the Icelandic heroine. It is more difficult to sentiment, if not to
morality, to pardon four husbands than many times four lovers, and the
only persons with whom Gudrun's relations are wholly agreeable is
Kiartan, who was not her husband. But the pathos of the story, its
artful unwinding, and the famous utterance of the aged heroine--
"I did the worst to him I loved the most,"
which is almost literally from the Icelandic, redeem anything
unsympathetic in the narrative: and the figure of Bodli, a strange
mixture of honour and faithlessness to the friend he loves and
murders, is one of the most striking among the thralls of Venus in
literature.
[Sidenote: Eyrbyggja.]
The defect of the _Eyrbyggja Saga_ is its want of any central
interest; for it is the history not of a person, nor even of one
single family, but of a whole Icelandic district with its inhabitants
from the settlement onwards. Its attraction, therefore, lies rather in
episodes--the rivalry of the sorceresses Katla and Geirrid; the
circumventing of the (in this case rather sinned against than sinning)
bersarks Hall and Leikner; the very curious ghost-stories; and the
artful ambition of Snorri the Godi. Still, to make an attractive
legend of a sort of "county history" may be regarded as a rare
triumph, and the saga is all the more important because it shows,
almost better than any other, the real motive of nearly all these
stories--that they are real _chansons de geste_, family legends, with
a greater vividness and individuality than the French genius could
then impart, though presented more roughly.
[Sidenote: Egla.]
The Saga of Egil Skallagrimsson, again, shifts its special points of
attraction. It is the history partly of the family of Skallagrim, but
chiefly of his son Egil, in opposition to Harald Harfagr and his son
Eric Blood-axe, of Egil's wars and exploits in England and elsewhere,
of his service to King Athelstan at Brunanburh, of the faithfulness of
his friend Arinbiorn, and the hero's consequent rescue from the danger
in which he had thrust himself by seeking his enemy King Eric at York,
of his son's shipwreck and Egil's sad old age, and of many other
moving events. This has the most historic interest of any of the great
sagas, and not least of the personal appeal. Perhaps, indeed, it is
more like a really good historical novel than any other.
[Sidenote: Grettla.]
If, however, it were not for the deficiency of feminine character (a
deficiency which rehandlers evidently felt and endeavoured to remedy
by the expedient of tacking on an obvious plagiarism from _Tristan_ as
an appendix, ostensibly dealing with the avenging of the hero), the
fifth, Grettis Saga or _Grettla_, would perhaps be the best of all.
[Sidenote: _Its critics._]
It is true that some experts have found fault with this as late in
parts, and bolstered out with extraneous matter in other respects
beside the finale just referred to. The same critics denounce its
poetical interludes (see _infra_) as spurious, object to some traits
in it as coarse, and otherwise pick it to pieces. Nevertheless there
are few sagas, if there are any, which produce so distinct and
individual an effect, which remind us so constantly that we are in
Iceland and not elsewhere. In pathos and variety of interest it cannot
touch _Njala_ or _Laxdæla_: in what is called "weirdness," in wild
vigour, it surpasses, I think, all others; and the supernatural
element, which is very strong, contrasts, I think, advantageously with
the more business-like ghostliness of _Eyrbyggja_.
After an overture about the hero's forebears, which in any other
country would be as certainly spurious as the epilogue, but to which
the peculiar character of saga-writing gives a rather different claim
here, the story proper begins with a description of the youth of
Grettir the Strong, second son to Asmund the Grey-haired of Biarg, who
had made much money by sea-faring, and Asdis, a great heiress and of
great kin. The sagaman consults poetical justice very well at first,
and prepares us for an unfortunate end by depicting Grettir as, though
valiant and in a way not ungenerous, yet not merely an incorrigible
scapegrace, but somewhat unamiable and even distinctly ferocious.
That, being made gooseherd, and finding the birds troublesome, he
knocks them about, killing some goslings, may not be an unpardonable
atrocity. And even when, being set to scratch his father's back, he
employs a wool-comb for that purpose, much to the detriment of the
paternal skin and temper, it does not very greatly go beyond the
impishness of a naughty boy. But when, being promoted to mind the
horses, and having a grudge against a certain "wise" mare named
Keingala, because she stays out at graze longer than suits his
laziness, he flays the unhappy beast alive in a broad strip from
shoulder to tail, the thing goes beyond a joke. Also he is
represented, throughout the saga, as invariably capping his pranks or
crimes with one of the jeering enigmatic epigrams in which one finds
considerable excuse for the Icelandic proneness to murder. However, in
his boyhood, he does not go beyond cruelty to animals and fighting
with his equals; and his first homicide, on his way with a friend of
his father's to the Thing-Parliament, is in self-defence. Still,
having no witnesses, he is, though powerfully backed (an all-important
matter), fined and outlawed for three years. There is little love
lost between him and his father, and he is badly fitted out for the
grand tour, which usually occupies a young Icelandic gentleman's first
outlawry; but his mother gives him a famous sword. On the voyage he
does nothing but flirt with the mate's wife: and only after strong
provocation and in the worst weather consents to bale, which he does
against eight men.
They are, however, wrecked off the island of Haramsey, and Grettir,
lodging with the chief Thorfinn, at first disgusts folk here as
elsewhere with his sulky, lazy ways. He acquires consideration,
however, by breaking open the barrow of Thorfinn's father, and not
only bringing out treasures (which go to Thorfinn), but fighting with
and overcoming the "barrow-wight" (ghost) itself, the first of the
many supernatural incidents in the story. The most precious part of
the booty is a peculiar "short-sword." Also when Thorfinn's wife and
house are left, weakly guarded, to the mercy of a crew of unusually
ruffianly bersarks, Grettir by a mixture of craft and sheer valour
succeeds in overcoming and slaying the twelve bersarks single-handed.
Thorfinn on his return presents him with the short-sword and becomes
his fast friend. He has plenty of opportunity: for Grettir, as usual,
neither entirely by his own fault nor entirely without it, owing to
his sulky temper and sour tongue, successively slays three brothers,
being in the last instance saved only with the greatest difficulty by
Thorfinn, his own half-brother Thorstein Dromond, and others, from the
wrath of Swein, Jarl of the district. So that by the time when he can
return to Iceland, he has made Norway too hot to hold him; and he
lands in his native island with a great repute for strength, valour,
and, it must be added, quarrelsomeness. For some time he searches
about "to see if there might be anywhere somewhat with which he might
contend." He finds it at a distant farm, which is haunted by the ghost
of a certain godless shepherd named Glam, who was himself killed by
Evil Ones, and now molests both stock and farm-servants. Grettir dares
the ghost, overcomes him after a tremendous conflict, which certainly
resembles that in _Beowulf_ most strikingly,[174] and slays him (for
Icelandic ghosts are mortal); but not before Glam has spoken and
pronounced a curse upon Grettir, that his strength, though remaining
great, shall never grow, that all his luck shall cease, and, finally,
that the eyes of Glam himself shall haunt him to the death.
[Footnote 174: It seems almost incredible that the resemblances
between _Beowulf_ and the _Grettis Saga_ should never have struck any
one till Dr Vigfusson noticed them less than twenty years ago. But the
fact seems to be so; and nothing could better prove the rarity of that
comparative study of literature to which this series aims at being a
modest contribution and incentive.]
Grettir at first cares little for this; but the last part of the curse
comes on almost at once and makes him afraid to be alone after dark,
while the second is not long delayed. On the eve of setting out once
more for Norway, he quarrels with and slays a braggart named
Thorbiorn; during the voyage itself he is the unintentional cause of a
whole household of men being burnt to death; and lastly, by his own
quarrelsome temper, and some "metaphysical aid," he misses the chance
of clearing himself by "bearing iron" (ordeal) before King Olaf at
Drontheim. Olaf, his own kinsman, tells him with all frankness that
he, Grettir, is much too "unlucky" for himself to countenance; and
that though he shall have no harm in Norway, he must pack to Iceland
as soon as the sea is open. He accordingly stays during the winter, in
a peace only broken by the slaying of another bersark bully, and
partly passed with his brother Thorstein Dromond.
Meanwhile Asmund has died, his eldest son Atli has succeeded him, and
has been waylaid by men suborned by Thorbiorn Oxmain, kinsman of the
Thorbiorn whom Grettir slew before leaving Iceland the second time.
Atli escapes and slays his foes. Then Thorbiorn Oxmain himself visits
Biarg and slays the unarmed Atli, who is not avenged because it was
Grettir's business to look after the matter when he came home. But
Glam's curse so works that, though plaintiff in this case, he is
outlawed in his absence for the burning of the house above referred
to, in which he was quite guiltless; and when he lands in Iceland it
is to find himself deprived of all legal rights, and in such case that
no friend can harbour him except under penalty.
Grettir, as we might expect, is not much daunted by this complication
of evils, but he lies hid for a time at his mother's house and
elsewhere, not so much to escape his own dangers as to avenge Atli on
Thorbiorn Oxmain at the right moment. At last he finds it; and
Thorbiorn, as well as his sixteen-year-old son Arnor, who rather
disloyally helps him, is slain by Grettir single-handed. His plight
at first is not much worsened by this; for though the simple plan of
setting off Thorbiorn against Atli is not adopted, Grettir's case is
backed directly by his kinsmen and indirectly by the two craftiest men
in Iceland, Snorri the Godi and Skapti the Lawman, and the latter
points out that as Grettir had been outlawed _before_ it was decreed
that the onus of avenging Atli lay on him, a fatal flaw had been made
in the latter proceeding, and no notice could be taken of the death of
Thorbiorn at all, though his kin must pay for Atli. This fine would
have been set off against Grettir's outlawry, and he would have become
a freeman, had not Thorir of Garth, the father of the men he had
accidentally killed in the burning house, refused; and so the
well-meant efforts of Grettir's kin and friends fall through.
From this time till the end of his life he is a houseless outlaw,
abiding in all the most remote parts of the island--"Grettir's lairs,"
as they are called, it would seem, to this day--sometimes countenanced
for a short time by well-willing men of position, sometimes dwelling
with supernatural creatures,--Hallmund, a kindly spirit or
cave-dweller with a hospitable daughter, or the half-troll giant
Thorir, a person of daughters likewise. But his case grows steadily
worse. Partly owing to sheer ill-luck and Glam's curse, partly, as the
saga-writer very candidly tells us, because he "was not an easy man to
live withal," his tale of slayings and the feuds thereto appertaining
grows steadily. For the most part he lives by simple cattle-lifting
and the like, which naturally does not make him popular; twice other
outlaws come to abide with him, and, after longer or shorter time, try
for his richly priced head, and though they lose their own lives,
naturally make him more and more desperate. Once he is beset by his
enemy Thorir with eighty men; and only comes off through the backing
of his ghostly friend Hallmund, who not long after meets his fate by
no ignoble hand, and Grettir cannot avenge him. Again, Grettir is
warmly welcomed by a widow, Steinvor of Sand-heaps, at whose dwelling,
in the oddest way, he takes up the full _Beowulf_ adventure and slays
a troll-wife in a cave just as his forerunner slew Grendel's mother.
But in the end the hue and cry is too strong, and by advice of friends
he flies to the steep holm of Drangey in Holmfirth--a place where the
top can only be won by ladders--with his younger brother Illugi and a
single thrall or slave. Illugi is young, but true as steel: the slave
is a fool, if not actually a traitor. After the bonders of Drangey
have done what they could to rid themselves of this very damaging and
redoubtable intruder, they give up their shares to a certain Thorbiorn
Angle. Thorbiorn at first fares ill against Grettir, whose outlawry is
on the point of coming to an end, as none might last longer than
twenty years. With the help of a wound, witch-caused to Grettir, and
the slave's treacherous laziness, Thorbiorn and his crew climb the
ladders and beset the brethren--Grettir already half dead with his
gangrened wound. The hero is slain with his own short-sword; the brave
Illugi is overwhelmed with the shields of the eighteen assailants, and
then slaughtered in cold blood. But Thorbiorn reaps little good, for
his traffickings with witchcraft deprive him of his blood-money; the
deaths of his men, of whom Illugi and Grettir had slain not a few, are
set against Illugi's own; and Thorbiorn himself, after escaping to
Micklegarth (Constantinople) and joining the Varangians, is slain by
Thorstein Dromond, who has followed him thither and joined the same
Guard on purpose, and who is made the hero of the appendix above
spoken of.
[Sidenote: _Merits of it._]
The defects of this are obvious, and may be probably enough accounted
for in part by the supposition of the experts above referred to--that
the saga as we have it is rather later than the other great sagas, and
is a patchwork of divers hands. It may perhaps be added, as a more
purely literary criticism, that no one of these hands can have been
quite a master, or that his work, if it existed, must have been
mutilated or disfigured by others. For the most is nowhere made,
except in the Glam fight and the last scenes on Drangey, of the
admirable situations provided by the story; and the presentation of
Grettir as a man almost everywhere lacks the last touches, while the
sagaman has simply thrown away the opportunities afforded him by the
insinuated amourettes with Steinvor and the daughters of the friendly
spirits, and has made a mere _fabliau_ episode of another thing of the
kind. Nevertheless the attractions of _Grettla_ are unique as regards
the mixture of the natural and supernatural; not inferior to any other
as illustrating the quaintly blended life of Iceland; and of the
highest kind as regards the conception of the hero--a not ungenerous
Strength, guided by no intellectual greatness and by hardly any
overmastering passion, marred by an unsocial and overbearing temper,
and so hardly needing the ill luck, which yet gives poetical finish
and dramatic force to the story, to cast itself utterly away. For in
stories, as in other games, play without luck is fatiguing and jejune,
luck without play childish. It is curious how touching is the figure
of the ill-fated hero, not wholly amiable, yet over-matched by
Fortune, wandering in waste places of a country the fairest spots of
which are little better than a desert, forced by his terror of
"Glam-sight" to harbour criminals far worse than himself, and well
knowing that they seek his life, grudgingly and fearfully helped by
his few friends, a public nuisance where he should have been a public
champion, only befriended heartily by mysterious shadowy personages of
whom little is positively told, and when, after twenty years of
wild-beast life, his deliverance is at hand, perishing by a
combination of foul play on the part of his foes and neglect on that
of his slave. At least once, too, in that parting of Asdis with
Grettir and Illugi, which ranks not far below the matchless epitaph of
Sir Ector on Lancelot, there is not only suggestion, but expression of
the highest quality:--
[Sidenote: _The parting of Asdis and her sons._]
"'Ah! my sons twain, there ye depart from me, and one death ye shall
have together, for no man may flee from that which is wrought for him.
On no day now shall I see either of you once again. Let one fate,
then, be over you both; for I know not what weal ye go to get for
yourselves in Drangey, but there ye shall both lay your bones, and
many shall grudge you that abiding-place. Keep ye heedfully from
wiles, for marvellously have my dreams gone. Be well ware of sorcery;
yet none the less shall ye be bitten with the edge of the sword, for
nothing can cope with the cunning of eld.' And when she had thus
spoken she wept right sore. Then said Grettir, 'Weep not, mother; for
if we be set upon by weapons it shall be said of thee that thou hast
had sons and not daughters.' And therewith they parted."
[Sidenote: _Great passages of the sagas._]
These moments, whether of incident or expression, are indeed frequent
enough in the sagas, though the main attraction may consist, as has
been said, in the wild interest of the story and the vivid
individuality of the characters. The slaying of Gunnar of Lithend in
_Njala_, when his false wife refuses him a tress of hair to twist for
his stringless bow, has rightly attracted the admiration of the best
critics; as has the dauntless resignation of Njal himself and
Bergthora, when both might have escaped their fiery fate. Of the
touches of which the Egil's Saga is full, few are better perhaps than
the picture in a dozen words of King Eric Blood-axe "sitting bolt
upright and glaring" at the son of Skallagrim as he delivers the
panegyric which is to save his life, and the composition of which had
been so nearly baulked by the twittering of the witch-swallow under
his eaves. The "long" kisses of Kormak and Steingerd, and the poet's
unconscious translation of Æschylus[175] as he says, "Eager to find
my lady, I have scoured the whole house with the glances of my
eyes--in vain," dwell in the memory as softer touches. And for the
sterner, nothing can beat the last fight of Olaf Trygveson, where with
the crack of Einar Tamberskelvir's bow Norway breaks from Olaf's
hands, and the king himself, the last man with Kolbiorn his marshal to
fight on the deck of the Long Serpent, springs, gold-helmed,
mail-coated, and scarlet-kirtled, into the waves, and sinks with
shield held up edgeways[176] to weight him through the deep green
water.
[Footnote 175: Compare, _mutatis mutandis_, _Agam._, 410 _sq._, and
Kormak's "Stray verses," ll. 41-44, in the _Corpus_, ii. 65.]
[Footnote 176: _Heimskringla_ does not _say_ "edgeways," but this is
the clear meaning. Kolbiorn held his shield flat and below him, so
that it acted as a float, and he was taken. Olaf sank.]
[Sidenote: _Style._]
The saga prose is straightforward and business-like, the dialogue
short and pithy, with considerable interspersion of proverbial phrase,
but with, except in case of bad texts, very little obscurity. It is,
however, much interspersed also with verses which, like Icelandic
verse in general, are alliterative in prosody, and often of the
extremest euphuism and extravagance in phrase. All who have even a
slight acquaintance with sagas know the extraordinary periphrases for
common objects, for men and maidens, for ships and swords, that
bestrew them. There is, I believe, a theory, not in itself improbable,
that the more elaborate and far-fetched the style of this imagery, the
later and less genuine is likely to be the poem, if not the saga; but
it is certain that the germs of the style are to be found in the
_Havamal_ and the other earliest and most certainly genuine examples.
It is perhaps well to add that very small sagas are called _thættir_
("scraps"), the same word as "tait" in the Scots phrase "tait of
wool." But it is admitted that it is not particularly easy to draw the
line between the two, and that there is no difference in real
character. In fact short sagas might be called _thættir_ and _vice
versâ_. Also, as hinted before, there is exceedingly little comedy in
the sagas. The roughest horse-play in practical joking, the most
insolent lampoons in verbal satire, form, as a rule, the lighter
element; and pieces like the _Bandamanna Saga_, which with tragic
touches is really comic in the main, are admittedly rare.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: _Provençal mainly lyric._]
In regard to the second, and contrasted, division of the subject of
the present chapter, it has been already noted that, just as Icelandic
at this period presents to the purview of the comparative literary
historian one main subject, if not one only--the saga--so Provençal
presents one main subject, and almost one only--the formal lyric. The
other products of the Muse in _langue d'oc_, whether verse or prose,
are so scanty, and in comparison[177] so unimportant, that even
special historians of the subject have found but little to say about
them. The earliest monument of all, perhaps the earliest finished
monument of literature in any Romance language, the short poem on
Boethius, in assonanced decasyllabic _laisses_,--even in its present
form probably older than our starting-point, and, it may be, two
centuries older in its first form,--is indeed not lyrical; nor is the
famous and vigorous verse-history of the Albigensian War in _chanson_
style; nor the scanty remnants of other _chansons_, _Girart de
Rossilho_, _Daurel et Beton_, _Aigar et Maurin_, which exist; nor the
later _romans d'aventure_ of _Jaufre_, _Flamenca_, _Blandin of
Cornwall_. But in this short list almost everything of interest in our
period--the flourishing period of the literature--has been mentioned
which is not lyrical.[178] And if these things, and others like them
in much larger number, had existed alone, it is certain that Provençal
literature would not hold the place which it now holds in the
comparative literary history of Europe.
[Footnote 177: Of course this is only in comparison. For instance, in
Dr Suchier's _Denkmäler_ (Halle, 1883), which contains nearly 500
large pages of Provençal _anecdota_, about four-fifths is devotional
matter of various kinds and in various forms, prose and verse. But
such matter, which is common to all mediæval languages, is hardly
literature at all, being usually translated, with scarcely any expense
of literary originality, from the Latin, or each other.]
[Footnote 178: Alberic's _Alexander_ (_v._ chap. iv.) is of course
Provençal in a way, and there was probably a Provençal intermediary
between the _Chanson d'Antioche_ and the Spanish _Gran Conquesta de
Ultramar_. But we have only a few lines of the first and nothing of
the second.]
That place is due to its lyric, construing that term in a wide sense
such as that (but indeed a little wider) in which it has been already
used with reference to the kindred and nearly contemporary lyric of
France proper. It is best to say "nearly contemporary," because it
would appear that Provençal actually had the start of French in this
respect, though no great start: and it is best to say "kindred" and
not "daughter," because though some forms and more names are common to
the two, their developments are much more parallel than on the same
lines, and they are much more sisters than mother and daughter.
[Sidenote: _Origin of this lyric._]
It would appear, though such things can never be quite certain, that,
as we should indeed expect, the first developments of Provençal lyric
were of the hymn kind, and perhaps originally mixtures of Romance and
Latin. This mixture of the vernacular and the learned tongues, both
spoken in all probability with almost equal facility by the writer, is
naturally not uncommon in the Middle Ages: and it helps to explain the
rapid transference of the Latin hymn-rhythms to vernacular verse. Thus
we have a _Noel_ or Christmas poem not only written to the tune and in
the measure of a Latin hymn, _In hoc anni circulo_, not only crowning
the Provençal six-syllable triplets with a Latin refrain, "De virgine
Maria," and other variations on the Virgin's title and name, but with
Latin verses alternate to the Provençal ones. This same arrangement
occurs with a Provençal fourth rhyme, which seems to have been a
favourite one. It is arranged with a variety which shows its
earliness, for the fourth line is sometimes "in the air" rhyming to
nothing, sometimes rhymes with the other three, and sometimes forces
its sound on the last of them, so that the quatrain becomes a pair of
couplets.
[Sidenote: _Forms._]
The earliest purely secular lyrics, however, are attributed to William
IX., Count of Poitiers, who was a crusader in the very first year of
the twelfth century, and is said to have written an account of his
journey which is lost. His lyrics survive to the number of some dozen,
and show that the art had by his time received very considerable
development. For their form, it may suffice to say that of those given
by Bartsch[179] the first is in seven-lined stanzas, rhymed _aaaabab_,
the _a_-rhyme lines being iambic dimeters, and the _b_'s monometers.
Number two has five six-lined stanzas, all dimeters, rhymed _aaabab_:
and a four-lined finale, rhymed _ab, ab_. The third is mono-rhymed
throughout, the lines being disyllabic with licence to extend. And the
fourth is in the quatrain _aaab_, but with the _b_ rhyme identical
throughout, capped with a couplet _ab_. If these systems be compared
with the exact accounts of early French, English, and German lyric in
chapters v.-vii., it will be seen that Provençal probably, if not
certainly, led the way in thus combining rhythmic arrangement and
syllabic proportion with a cunning variation of rhyme-sound. It was
also the first language to classify poetry, as it may be called, by
assigning special forms to certain kinds of subject or--if not quite
this--to constitute classes of poems themselves according to their
arrangement in line, stanza, and rhyme. A complete prosody of the
language of _canso_ and _sirvente_, of _vers_ and _cobla_, of _planh_,
_tenso_, _tornejamens_, _balada_, _retroensa_, and the rest, would
take more room than can be spared here, and would hardly be in place
if it were otherwise. All such prosodies tend rather to the childish,
as when, for instance, the _pastorela_, or shepherdess poem in
general, was divided into _porquiera_, _cabreira_, _auqueira_, and
other things, according as the damsel's special wards were pigs or
goats or geese. Perhaps the most famous, peculiar, and representative
of Provençal forms are the _alba_, or poem of morning parting, and the
_sirvente_, or poem _not_ of love. The _sestina_, a very elaborate
canzonet, was invented in Provence and borrowed by the Italians. But
it is curious to find that the sonnet, the crown and flower of all
artificial poetry, though certainly invented long before the decadence
of Provençal, was only used in Provençal by Italian experimenters. The
poets proper of the _langue d'oc_ were probably too proud to admit any
form that they had not invented themselves.
[Footnote 179: The _Grundriss zur Geschichte der Provenzalischen
Literatur_ (Elberfeld, 1872) and the _Chrestomathie Provençale_ (3d
ed., Elberfeld, 1875) of this excellent scholar will not soon be
obsolete, and may, in the peculiar conditions of the case, suffice all
but special students in a degree hardly possible in any other
literature. Mahn's _Troubadours_ and the older works of Raynouard and
Fauriel are the chief storehouses of wider information, and separate
editions of the works of the chief poets are being accumulated by
modern, chiefly German, scholars. An interesting and valuable addition
to the _English_ literature of the subject has been made, since the
text was written, by Miss Ida Farnell's _Lives of the Troubadours_, a
translation with added specimens of the poets and other editorial
matter.]
[Sidenote: _Many men, one mind._]
Next in noteworthiness to the variety of form of the Provençal poets
is their number. Even the multitude of _trouvères_ and Minnesingers
dwindles beside the list of four hundred and sixty named poets, for
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries only, which Bartsch's list
contains; some, it is true, credited with only a single piece, but
others with ten, twenty, fifty, or even close to a hundred, not to
mention an anonymous appendix of over two hundred and fifty poems
more. Great, however, as is the bulk of this division of literature,
hardly any has more distinct and uniform--its enemies may say more
monotonous--characteristics. It is not entirely composed of
love-poetry; but the part devoted to this is so very much the largest,
and so very much the most characteristic, that popular and almost
traditional opinion is scarcely wrong in considering love-poetry and
Provençal poetry to be almost, and with the due limitation in the
first case, convertible terms.
[Sidenote: _Example of rhyme-schemes._]
The spirit of this poetry is nowhere better shown than in the refrain
of an anonymous _alba_, which begins--
"En un verger sotz folha d'albespi,"
and which has for burden--
"Oi deus! oi deus, de l'alba, tant tost ve!"
of which an adaptation by Mr Swinburne is well known. "In the
Orchard," however, is not only a much longer poem than the _alba_ from
which it borrows its burden, but is couched in a form much more
elaborate, and has a spirit rather early Italian than Provençal. It
is, indeed, not very easy to define the Provençal spirit itself, which
has sometimes been mistaken, and oftener exaggerated. Although the
average troubadour poem--whether of love, or of satire, or, more
rarely, of war--is much less simple in tone than the Northern lyric
already commented on, it cannot be said to be very complex; and, on
the whole, the ease, accomplishment, and, within certain strict
limits, variety of the form are more remarkable than any intensity or
volume of passion or of thought. The musical character (less
inarticulate and more regular), which has also been noted in the poems
of the _trouvères_, is here eminent: though the woodnote wild of the
Minnesinger is quite absent or very rarely present. The facility of
double rhymes, with a full vowel sound in each syllable, has a
singular and very pleasing effect, as in the piece by Marcabrun
beginning--
"L'autrier jost una sebissa,"
"the other day by a hedge," the curiously complicated construction of
which is worth dwelling on as a specimen. It consists of six double
stanzas, of fourteen lines or two septets each, finished by a sestet,
_aabaab_. The septets are rhymed _aaabaab_; and though the _a_ rhymes
vary in each set of fourteen, the _b_ rhymes are the same throughout;
and the first of them in each septet is the same word, _vilana_
(peasant girl), throughout. Thus we have as the rhymes of the first
twenty-eight lines _sebissa_, _mestissa_, _massissa_, _vilana_,
_pelissa_, _treslissa_, _lana_; _planissa_, _faitissa_, _fissa_,
_vilana_, _noirissa_, _m'erissa_, _sana_; _pia_, _via_, _companhia_,
_vilana_, _paria_, _bestia_, _soldana_; _sia_, _folia_, _parelharia_,
_vilana_, _s'estia_, _bailia_, _l'ufana_.
[Sidenote: _Provençal poetry not great._]
Such a _carillon_ of rhymes as this is sometimes held to be likely to
concentrate the attention of both writer and reader too much on the
accompaniment, and to leave the former little time to convey, and the
latter little chance of receiving, any very particularly choice
sense. This most certainly cannot be laid down as a universal law;
there are too many examples to the contrary, even in our own language,
not to go further. But it may be admitted that when the styles of
literature are both fashionable and limited, and when a very large
number of persons endeavour to achieve distinction in them, there is
some danger of something of the sort coming about. No nation has ever
been able, in the course of less than two centuries, to provide four
hundred and sixty named poets and an indefinitely strong reinforcement
of anonyms, all of whom have native power enough to produce verse at
once elaborate in form and sovereign in spirit; and the peoples of the
_langue d'oc_, who hardly together formed a nation, were no exception
to the rule. That rule is a rule of "minor poetry," accomplished,
scholarly, agreeable, but rarely rising out of minority.
[Sidenote: _But extraordinarily pedagogic._]
Yet their educating influence was undoubtedly strong, and their actual
production not to be scorned. In the capacity of teachers they were
not without strong influence on their Northern countrymen; they
certainly and positively acted as direct masters to the literary lyric
both of Italy and Spain; they at least shared with the _trouvères_ the
position of models to the Minnesingers. It is at first sight rather
surprising that, considering the intimate relations between England
and Aquitaine during the period--considering that at least one famous
troubadour, Bertran de Born, is known to have been concerned in the
disputes between Henry II. and his sons--Provençal should not have
exercised more direct influence over English literature. It was a
partly excusable mistake which made some English critics, who knew
that Richard Coeur de Lion, for instance, was himself not unversed
in the "manner of _trobar_," assert or assume, until within the
present century, that it did exercise such influence. But, as a matter
of fact, it did not; and the reason is sufficiently simple, or at
least (for it is double rather than simple) sufficiently clear.
[Sidenote: _Though not directly on English._]
In the first place, English was not, until quite the end of the
flourishing period of Provençal poetry, and specially at the period
above referred to, in a condition to profit by Provençal models; while
in the fourteenth century, when English connection with the south of
France was closer still, Provençal was in its decadence. And, in the
second place, the structure and spirit of the two tongues almost
forbade imitation of the one in the other. It was Northern, not
Southern, French that helped to make English proper out of
Anglo-Saxon; and the gap between Northern French and Southern French
themselves was far wider than between Provençal and the Peninsular
tongues. To which things, if any one pleases, he may add the
difference of the spirit of the two races; but this is always vague
and uncertain ground, and is best avoided when we can tread on the
firm land of history and literature proper. Such a rhyme-arrangement
as that above set forth is probably impossible in English; even now it
will be observed that Mr Swinburne, the greatest master of double and
treble rhymes that we have ever had, rarely succeeds in giving even
the former with a full spondaic effect of vowel such as is easy in
Provençal. In "The Garden of Proserpine" itself, as in the double
rhymes, where they occur, of "The Triumph of Time" (the greatest thing
ever written in the Provençal manner, and greater than anything in
Provençal), the second vowels of the rhymes are never full. And there
too, as I think invariably in English, the poet shows his feeling of
the intolerableness of continued double rhyme by making the odd verses
rhyme plump and with single sound.
Of poetry so little remarkable in individual manner or matter it is
impossible to give abstracts, such as those which have been easy, and
it may be hoped profitable, in some of the foregoing chapters; and
prolonged analyses of form are tedious, except to the expert and the
enthusiast. With some brief account, therefore, of the persons who
chiefly composed this remarkable mass of lyric we may close a notice
of the subject which is superficially inadequate to its importance,
but which, perhaps, will not seem so to those who are content not
merely to count pages but to weigh moments. The moment which Provençal
added to the general body of force in European literature was that of
a limited, somewhat artificial, but at the same time exquisitely
artful and finished lyrical form, so adapted to the most inviting of
the perennial motives of literature that it was sure to lead to
imitation and development. It gave means and held up models to those
who were able to produce greater effects than are to be found in its
own accomplishment: yet was not its accomplishment, despite what is
called its monotony, despite its limits and its defects, other than
admirable and precious.
[Sidenote: _Some troubadours._]
The "first warbler," Count William IX. of Poitiers, has already been
mentioned, and his date fixed at exactly the first year of our period.
His chief immediate successors or contemporaries were Cercamon
("Cherchemonde," _Cursor Mundi_); the above quoted Marcabrun, who is
said to have accompanied Cercamon in his wanderings, and who has left
much more work; and Bertrand de Ventadorn or Ventadour, perhaps the
best of the group, a farmer's son of the place from which he takes his
noble-sounding name, and a professional lover of the lady thereof. Of
Jaufre (Geoffrey) Rudel of Blaye, whose love for the lady of Tripoli,
never yet seen by him, and his death at first sight of her, supply,
with the tragedy of Cabestanh and the cannibal banquet, the two most
famous pieces of Troubadour anecdotic history, we have half-a-dozen
pieces. In succession to these, Count Rambaut of Orange and Countess
Beatrice of Die keep up the reputation of the _gai saber_ as an
aristocratic employment, and the former's poem--
"Escoutatz mas no sai que s'es"
(in six-lined stanzas, rhymed _ababab_, with prose "tags" to each,
something in the manner of the modern comic song), is at least a
curiosity. The primacy of the whole school in its most flourishing
time, between 1150 and 1250, is disputed by Arnaut Daniel (a great
master of form, and as such venerated by his greater Italian pupils)
and Giraut de Bornelh, who is more fully represented in extant work
than most of his fellows, as we have more than fourscore pieces of
his. Peire or Peter Vidal, another typical troubadour, who was a
crusader, an exceedingly ingenious verse-smith, a great lover, and a
proficient in the fantastic pranks which rather brought the school
into discredit, inasmuch as he is said to have run about on all fours
in a wolfskin in honour of his mistress Loba (Lupa); Gaucelm Faidit
and Arnaut de Maroilh, Folquet of Marseilles, and Rambaut of Vaqueras;
the Monk of Montaudon and Bertrand de Born himself, who with Peire
Cardinal is the chief satirist (though the satire of the two takes
different forms); Guillem Figueira, the author of a long invective
against Rome, and Sordello of mysterious and contingent fame,--are
other chief members, and of some of them we have early, perhaps
contemporary, _Lives_, or at least anecdotes. For instance, the
Cabestanh or Cabestaing story comes from these. The last name of
importance in our period, if not the last of the right troubadours, is
usually taken to be that of Guiraut Riquier.
[Sidenote: _Criticism of Provençal._]
It would scarcely be fair to say that the exploit attributed to
Rambaut of Vaqueras, a poet of the very palmiest time, at the juncture
of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries--that of composing a poem in
lines written successively in three different forms of Provençal
(_langue d'oc_ proper, Gascon, and Catalan), in _langue d'oïl_, and in
Italian, with a _coda_ line jumbled up of all five--is a final
criticism at once of the merits and the defects of this literature.
But it at least indicates the lines of such a criticism. By its
marvellous suppleness, sweetness, and adaptation to the verbal and
metrical needs of poetry, Provençal served--in a fashion probably
impossible to the stiffer if more virile tongues--as an example in
point of form to these tongues themselves: and it achieved, at the
same time with a good deal of mere gymnastic, exercises in form of the
most real and abiding beauty. But it had as a language too little
character of its own, and was too fatally apt to shade into the other
languages--French on the one hand, Spanish and Italian on the
other--with which it was surrounded, and to which it was akin. And
coming to perfection at a time when no modern thought was distinctly
formed, when positive knowledge was at a low ebb, and when it had
neither the stimulus of vigorous national life nor the healthy
occupation of what may be called varied literary business, it tended
to become, on the whole, too much of a plaything merely. Now, schools
and playgrounds are both admirable things, and necessary to man; but
what is done in both is only an exercise or a relaxation from
exercise. Neither man nor literature can stay either in class-room or
playing-field for ever, and Provençal had scarcely any other places of
abode to offer.