THE TROUBADOURS

Evening Star, Issue 22451, 23 September 1936, Page 11

THE TROUBADOURS

ROMANTICS OF THE CRUSADES Les Troubadours ” were contemporaneous with the Crusades, and the Age of Chivalry. The manhood of a united Europe, called then a united Christendom, was transported, like our own men during the Great War, into the countries of Phidias and Homer—who,' though Greek, lived in the Motherland’s colonies in Asia Minor. They contacted with the voluptuousness of the East, and the learning of the Arabs, and came back with new sensations, new ideas, new tasks. They “found” (trohver, to find; Trouveres-Troubadours) something. They found themselves, and poetry, music and song were born anew in and around the Pyrenees, expressed in the vernacular for the first time in Europe, in contrast to the usual. Latin. BRIEF AND BRIGHT EPOCH. Their history is brief—barely two centuries. It died young,'like all things beloved of the Gods—a bud, as it were; but its influence expanded, colouring and shaping the literature of all Western Europe. This belt, of which the Pyrenees formed the dorsal spine, has always been noted for its fondness of song. Philippe Mousket, the old French Chronicler, accounts for it thus:—

“ When the Emperor Charlemagne divided his lands among his adherents he gave Provence to the singers and musicians. Evidently there had always been there in the south that love of melody and rhythm which burst upon the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth century world as the art of the troubadour. Using the vulgar tongue, the personal and intimate word, to sing of their ideal, the Eternal Feminine, who leads ua ever upward and onward, they ‘ found ’ a form of their own in word and music, and created an exquisite art in the language of their hearts and feelings, which are models of grace and delicacy. “ Essentially artistic, theirs was the poetry of the aristocrat. Kings were among their number, as well as the noblemen from whose rank they. were mostly drawn. But the peasant class, though rare, was not excluded, for alongside of the haughty Bertram de Born, a thorn in the flesh of Henry 111., we havo the rustic Bernart of Ventadour —a particularly brilliant star in that famous constellation. And Pope Clement IV. of Nimes had himself been a troubadour- under the name of Guy Folqueys.” Toulouse was the centre of the movement, and when its counts were destroyed the singers sang no more. Toulouse was also the home of that strange sect called the Albigenses, or more popularly Bulgars. Their story is wrapt in' mystery. Suffice it to tell their end, for they, too, perished with the Troubadours, at the nands of our own Simon de Montfort. He led the army called together by the Church to destroy the avowed enemies of orthodox Christianity. Simon was as effectual in this campaign as he was in wringing the unwilling King John’s consent to *he Magna Charta in 1215. It is calculated that about 2,000,000 souls perished in this crusade, and with the establishment at Toulouse of the I» quisition, light-hearted poetry, which sang of dawns and spring and “ the woman afar,” fled from the brutality of the mailed glove and the fire. The reigning count was excommunicated—there was no protection for makers of melody. But, though stricken to death, they were not conquered. Out of the ashes of these singers sprang harmoniously and quite naturally, as the flower follows the bud, the hymns to the Virgin. These were the metamorphoses of the Troubadour • love songs—admirably adapted for the cult of the Virgin, which now began. These_ poet-singers had made a principle of virtue, purity, and chastity. The same images, the same terms, which had served to sing of terestrial love served as homage to their new ideal. The fourteenth century saw the complete triumph of this new style. The cult of the woman was transformed almost insensibly into a mystic love and devotion to the Virgin. This evolution was regular. It proceeded without effort out of the primitive conception “ From love, chastity is born,” as glorified by Dante, that superb Troubadour of genius, when chanting of Beatrice, “ the highest good.” And to-day there are signs of a revival towards Romance and Chivalry in most unlikely places, <