Sacramento daily record-union. [volume] (Sacramento [Calif.]) 1875-1891, 1881-02-26
TUEEFUL MlNsTRELs AND ROMANTIC
POETRY

The good old.fashioned idea of the trou-
badour-as the minstrel of love going from
land to land singing his song and twangng
his guitar with no object in view but phe
praise of beauty, and no rule to entrammel
his passionate efusion-has by this time
been pretty generally abandoned. 1t Is or
should be known to all students of htera-
ture, that Provencal poets, so far from be-
ing wholly wrapt up in their love-thought,
took, on the contrary, keen and active
interest in the affairs of their day; that,
indeed, their literary as well as their social
Importance depends quite as much on their
slashing and satire as on their always sweet
and frequently monotonous and conven.
tional love-songs. But still more mis-
taken is the notion that the troubadour as
the singer of pure passion was unfettered
by any rules and canons OF art. 1t may
indeed be said that he was the representa-
tive of art, or, if the reader prefers it,
artifciality in It's strictest and most
highly developed sense. The meters
invented and used with consummate
skill by the poets of medieval Pro
vence remain wonder of symmetry
and technical perfection in the history OF
literature, unequaled by the poets of other
nations who successfully tried to initiate
them. For it may truly be said in matters
metrical the troubadours became the
schoolmasters of Europe. In that capacity
they were acknowledged and revered by
the great poets of Italy, by Dante and Pc
trarch, while the singers of northern
France-the trouveres-although submit
ting more or less consciously to the same
influence, observed discreet silence on
the point. Through the medium of French,
and, in limited degree, italian htera,
ture, the metrical lore of Provence was
transmitted to those singers of our own
time and country whom in the heading OF
this essay | have ventured to desig nate as
modern troubadours. Among the latest
school of English poetry the adoption of
complicated foreign meters has become
passion and creed Rondeaus and ron
dels, vilanelles and triolets, have been
naturalized, and in a certain sense accli-
matized by our younger bards, and conser-
vative critics have lamented over the de-
generacy of modern days, ruefully pointing
to the good old times when English
poets would have scorned to borrow
their meters from the foreigner. There,
however, the critics were wrong-histor-
ically wrong, at least. There had been a
previous invasion of the same foreign ele-
ment infinitely more important than the
one which we are witnessing at present,
and in an age, too, which patriotic lovers of
literature regard as the home of English
poetry-I mean, of course, the reign of
Elizabeth. That time gave us not only the
romantic epic and the drama, but it also
introduced us to the sonnet and many other
toll and fhrnnOI tho
sources, too, Spenser and Shakespeare, the
two representative names of the time, also
stand at the head of the revival of form in.
augurated by the foreign movement above
mentioned. 1t is true that neither of them
adopted the strange Importation with
slavish accuracy. They recast the beauty
of Italian rhyme in accordance with the
genius of the language and their own. In
this manner we see the Spenserian stanza
grow out of the ottawa rima of Aristo, and the
Shakespearean sonnet out of that of Dante
and of Petrarch For that origin it does
not belle, although it must be owned that
Shakespeare in his remodeling process has
used the utmost liberty, one might say H.
cense.
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