PSYCHOLOGY AND TROUBADOURS (1912)
A divagation from questions of technique
Behind the narratives is a comparatively simple state of
" romanticism," behind the canzos, the " love code."
One or two theories as to its inner significance may in some
way promote an understanding of the period.
The "chivalric love," was, as I understand it, an art, that is is
to say, a religion. The writers of "trobar clus" did not seek
obscurity for the sake of obscurity.
An art is vital only so long as it is interpretative, so long, that
is, as it manifests something which the artist perceives at greater
intensity, and more intimately, than his public. If he be the
seeing man among the sightless, they will attend him only so long
as his statements seem, or are proven, true. If he forsake this
honor of interpreting, if he speak for the pleasure of hearing his
own voice, they may listen for a while to the babble and to the
sound of the painted words, but there comes, after a little, a
murmur, a slight stirring, and then that condition which we see
about us, disapproved as the "divorce of art and life."
The interpretive function is the highest honor of the arts,
and because it is so we find that a sort of hyper-scientific pre-
cision is the touchstone and assay of the artist's power, of his
honor, his authenticity. Constantly he must distinguish between
the shades and the degrees of the ineffable.
If we apply this test, first, as to the interpretive intention on
the part of the artist, second, as to the exactness of presentation,
we shall find that the Divina Commedia is a single elaborated
metaphor of life; it is an accumulation of fine discriminations
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arranged in orderly sequence. It makes no difference in kind
whether the artist treat of heaven and hell, of paradise upon
earth and of the elysian enamelled fields beneath it, or of Love
appearing in an ash-grey vision, or of the seemingly slight matter
of birds and branches . . . through one and the other of all these,
there is to the artist a like honorable opportunity for precision,
for that precision through which alone can any of these matters
take on their immortality.
" Magna pars mei," says Horace, speaking of his own futurity,
"that in me which is greatest shall escape dissolution": The
accurate artist seems to leave not only his greater self, but beside
it, upon the films of his art, some living print of the circumvolv-
ing man, his taste, his temper and his foible&emdash;of the things about
which he felt it never worth his while to bother other people
by speaking, the things he forgot for some major interest; of
these, and of another class of things, things that his audience
would have taken for granted; or thirdly, of things about
which he had, for some reason or other, a reticence. We find
these not so much in the words&emdash;which anyone may read&emdash;
but in the subtle joints of the craft, in the crannies perceptible
only to the craftsman.
Such is the record left us by a man whom Dante found "best
verse-wright in the fostering tongue," the lingua materna,
Provençal Langue d'Oc; and in that affectionate epithet,
materna, we have a slight evidence of the regard in which this
forgotten speech was held by the Tuscan poets, both for its
sound and for its matter.
We find this poetry divided into two schools; the first school
complained about the obscurities of the second&emdash;we have them
always with us. They claimed, or rather jeered in Provence,
remonstrated in Tuscany, wrangle today, and will wrangle
tomorrow&emdash;and not without some show of reason&emdash;that poetry,
especially lyric poetry, must be simple; that you must get the
meaning while the man sings it. This school had, and has
always, the popular ear. The other school culminated in Dante
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Alighieri. There is, of course, ample room for both schools
The ballad-concert ideal is correct, in its own way. A song is
a thing to sing. If you approach the canzoni of the second
school with this bias you will be disappointed, not because their
sound or form is not as lyric as that of the canzoni of the first
school, but because they are not always intelligible at first
hearing. They are good art as the high mass is good art. The
first songs are apt to weary you after you know them; they
are especially tiresome if one tries to read them after one has read
fifty others of more or less the same sort.
The second sort of canzone is a ritual. It must be conceived
and approached as ritual. It has its purpose and its effect. These
are different from those of simple song. They are perhaps
subtler. They make their revelations to those who are already
expert.
Apart from Arnaut's aesthetic merits, his position in the his-
tory of poetry, etc., his music, the fineness of his observation
and of his perceptive senses, there is a problem of meaning.
The crux of the matter might seem to rest on a very narrow
base; it might seem to be a matter of taste or of opinion, of
scarcely more than a personal predilection to ascribe or not to
ascribe to one passage in the canzon " Doutz brais e critz," a
visionary significance, where, in the third stanza, he speaks of
a castle, a dream-castle, or otherwise&emdash;as you like&emdash;and says of
the "lady":
She made me a shield, extending over me her fair mantle of indigo,
so that the slanderers might not see this.
This may be merely a conceit, a light and pleasant phrase;
if we found it in Herrick or Decker, or some minor Elizabethan,
we might well consider it so, and pass without further ado.
If one consider it as historical, the protection offered the secret
might seem inadequate. I have, however, no quarrel with
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those who care to interpret the passage in either of these more
obvious and, to me, less satisfactory ways.
We must, however, take into our account a number of
related things; consider, in following the clue of a visionary
interpretation, whether it will throw light upon events and
problems other than our own, and weigh the chances in favor
of, or against, this interpretation. Allow for climate, consider
the restless sensitive temper of our jongleur, and the quality of
the minds which appreciated him. Consider what poetry was
to become, within less than a century, at the hands of Guinicelli,
or of "il nostro Guido" in such a poem as the ballata, ending:
" Vedrai la sua virtu nel ciel salita,"2 and consider the whole
temper of Dante's verse. In none of these things singly is there
any specific proof. Consider the history of the time, the Albigen-
sian Crusade, nominalIy against a sect tinged with Manichean
heresy, and remember how Provençal song is never wholly
disjunct from pagan rites of May Day. Provence was less dis-
turbed than the rest of Europe by invasion from the North in
the darker ages; if paganism survived anywhere it would have
been, unoffcially, in the Langue d'Oc. That the spirit was, in
Provence, Hellenic is seen readily enough by anyone who will
compare the Greek Anthology with the work of the troubadours.
They have, in some way, lost the names of the gods and remem-
bered the names of lovers. Ovid and The Eclogues of Virgil
would seem to have been their chief documents.
The question: Did this "close ring," this aristocracy of
emotion, evolve, out of its half memories of Hellenistic mys-
teries, a cult&emdash;a cult stricter, or more subtle, than that of the
celibate ascetics, a cult for the purgation of the soul by a refine-
ment of, and lordship over, the senses ? Consider in such
passages in Arnaut as, "E quel remir contral lums de la lampa,"
whether a sheer love of beauty and a delight in the perception
[ 2 In this ballata, Guido speaks of seeing issue from his lady's lips a subtle body, from that a subtler body, from that a star, from that a voice, proclaiming the ascent of the virtu. For effect upon the air, upon the soul, etc., the " lady in Tuscan poetry has assumed all the properties of the Alchemist's stone.]
90
of it have not replaced all heavier emotion, whether or no the
thing has not become a function of the intellect.3
Some mystic or other speaks of the intellect as standing in the
same relation to the soul as do the senses to the mind; and
beyond a certain border, surely we come to this place where
the ecstasy is not a whirl or a madness of the senses, but a glow
arising from the exact nature of the perception. We find a
similar thought in Spinoza where he says that "the intellectual
love of a thing consists in the understanding of its perfections,"
and adds "all creatures whatsoever desire this love."
If a certain number of people in Provence developed their
own unofficial mysticism, basing it for the most part on their
own experience, if the servants of Amor saw visions quite as
well as the servants of the Roman ecclesiastical hierarchy, if
they were, moreover, troubled with no "dark night of the
soul," and the kindred incommodities of ascetic yoga, this may
well have caused some scandal and jealousy to the orthodox.
If we find a similar mode of thought in both devotions, we find
a like similarity in the secular and sacred music. "Alba" was
probably sung to "Hallelujah's" melody. Many of the trouba-
dours, in fact nearly all who knew letters or music, had been
taught in the monasteries (St. Martial, St. Leonard and the other
abbeys of Limoges). Visions and the doctrines of the early
Fathers could not have been utterly strange to them. The rise
of Mariolatry, its pagan lineage, the romance of it, find modes
of expression which verge over-easily into the speech and
casuistry of Our Lady of Cyprus, as we may see in Arnaut, as
we see so splendidly in Guido's " Una figura della donna miae."
And there is the consummation of it all in Dante's glorification
[3 Let me admit at once that a recent lecture by Mr. Mead on Simon Magus has opened my mind to a number of new possibilities. There would seem to be in the legend of Simon Magus and Helen of Tyre a clearer prototype of "chivalric love " than in anything h~reinafter discussed. I recognize that in this matter of mine may have to be reconstructed or at least re-oriented about that tradition. Such rearrangement would not, however, enable us to dispense
with a discussion of the parallels here collected, nor would it materially affect the manner in which they are treated. (1916.)]
91
of Beatrice. There is the inexplicable address to the lady in
the masculine. There is the final evolution of Amor by Guido
and Dante, a new and paganish god, neither Eros nor an angel
of the Talmud.
I believe in a sort of permanent basis in humanity, that is to
say, I believe that Greek myth arose when someone having
passed through delightful psychic experience tried to communi-
cate it to others and found it necessary to screen himself from
persecution. Speaking aesthetically, the myths are explications
of mood: you may stop there, or you may probe deeper.
Certain it is that these myths are only intelligible in a vivid
and glittering sense to those people to whom they occur.
I know, I mean, one man who understands Persephone and
Demeter, and one who understands the Laurel, and another
who has, I should say, met Artemis. These things are for them
real.
Let us consider the body as pure mechanism. Our kinship
to the ox we have constantly thrust upon us; but beneath this
is our kinship to the vital universe, to the tree and the living
rock, and, because this is less obvious&emdash;and possibly more
interesting&emdash;we forget it.
We have about us the universe of fluid force, and below us
the germinal universe of wood alive, of stone alive. Man is&emdash;
the sensitive physical part of him&emdash;a mechanism, for the purpose
of our further discussion a mechanism rather like an electric
appliance, switches, wires, etc. Chemically speaking, he is ut
credo, a few buckets of water, tied up in a complicated sort of
fig-leaf. As to his consciousness, the consciousness of some
seems to rest, or to have its center more properly, in what the
Greek psychologists called the phantastikon. Their minds are,
that is, circumvolved about them like soap-bubbles reflecting
sundry patches of the macrocosmos. And with certain others
their consciousness is " germinal." Their thoughts are in them
as the thought of the tree is in the seed, or in the grass, or the
grain, or the blossom. And these minds are the more poetic,
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and they affect mind about them, and transmute it as the seed
the earth. And this latter sort of mind is close on the vital
universe; and the strength of the Greek beauty rests in this,
that it is ever at the interpretation of this vital universe, by its
signs of gods and godly attendants and oreads.
In the Trecento the Tuscans are busy with their phantastikon.
In Provence we may find preparation for this, or we may find
faint reliqua of the other consciousness; though one misses the
pantheon. Line after line of Arnaut will repeat from Sappho,
but the whole seems curiously barren if we turn suddenly from
the Greek to it.
After the Trecento we get Humanism,4 and as the art is carried
northward we have Chaucer and Shakespeare, (Jacques-pere).
Man is concerned with man and forgets the whole and the
flowing. And we have in sequence, first the age of drama, and
then the age of prose. At any rate, when we do get into
contemplation of the flowing we find sex, or some correspon-
dance to it, "positive and negative," "North and South," "sun
and moon," or whatever terms of whatever cult or science
you prefer to substitute.
For the particular parallel I wish to indicate, our handiest
illustrations are drawn from physics: Ist, the common electric
machine, the glass disc and rotary brushes; 2nd, the wireless
telegraph receiver. In the first we generate a current, or if you
like, split up a static condition of things and produce a tension.
This is focussed on two brass knobs or "poles." These are first
in contact, and after the current is generated we can gradually
widen the distance between them, and a spark will leap across
it, the wider the stronger, until with the ordinary sized labora-
tory appliance it will leap over or around a large obstacle or
pierce a heavy book cover. In the telegraph we have a charged
surface&emdash;produced in a cognate manner&emdash;attracting to it, or
registering movements in the invisible aether.
[4 The Italian, not the recent American brand.]
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Substituting in these equations a more complex mechanism
and a possibly subtler form of energy is, or should be, simple
enough. I have no dogma, but the figures may serve as an
assistance to thought.
It is an ancient hypothesis that the little cosmos "corresponds"
to the greater, that man has in him both "sun "and "moon."
From this I should say that there are at least two paths&emdash;I do
not say that they lead to the same place&emdash;the one ascetic, the
other for want of a better term "chivalric." In the first
the monk or whoever he may be, develops, at infinite
trouble and expense, the secondary pole within himself, pro-
duces his charged surface which registers the beauties, celestial
or otherwise, by "contemplation." In the second, which I
must say seems more in accord with "mens sana in corpore
sano" the charged surface is produced between the predominant
natural poles of two human mechanisms.
Sex is, that is to say, of a double function and purpose, repro-
ductive and educational; or, as we see in the realm of fluid
force, one sort of vibration produces at different intensities,
heat and light. No scientist would be so stupid as to affirm
that heat produced light, and it is into a similar sort of false
ratiocination that those writers fall who find the source of
illumination, or of religious experience, centred solely in the
philo-progenitive instinct.
The problem, in so far as it concerns Provence, is simply
this: Did this "chivalric love," this exotic, take on mediumis-
tic properties ? Stimulated by the color or quality of emotion,
did that "color "take on forms interpretive of the divine order ?
Did it lead to an "exteriorization of the sensibility," and inter-
pretation of the cosmos by feeling ?
For our basis in nature we rest on the indisputable and very
scientific fact that there are in the "normal course of things "
certain times, a certain sort of moment more than another,
when a man feels his immortality upon him. As for the effect
of this phenomenon in Provence, before coming to any judg-
94
ment upon it we should consider carefully the history of the
various cults or religions of orgy and of ecstasy, from the simpler
Bacchanalia to the more complicated rites of Isis or Dionysus
&emdash;sudden rise and equally sudden decline. The corruptions of
their priesthoods follow, probably, the admission thereto of
one neophyte who was not properly "sacerdos."
There are, as we see, only two kinds of religion. There is the
Mosaic or Roman or British Empire type, where someone,
having to keep a troublesome rabble in order, invents and scares
them with a disagreeable bogie, which he calls god.
Christianity and all other forms of ecstatic religion, on the
other hand, are not in inception dogma or propaganda of some-
thing called the one truth or the universal truth; they seem little
concerned with ethics; their general object appears to be to
stimulate a sort of confidence in the life-force. Their teaching
is variously and constantly a sort of working hypothesis accept-
able to people of a certain range of temperament&emdash;a "regola "
which suits a particular constitution of nerves and intellect,
and in accord with which the people of this temperament can
live at greatest peace with "the order," with man and nature.
The old cults were sane in their careful inquisition or novitiate,
which served to determine whether the candidates were or
were not of such temper and composition.
One must consider that the types which joined these cults
survived, in Provence, and survive, today&emdash;priests, maenads and
the rest&emdash;though there is in our society no provision for them.
I have no particular conclusion to impose upon the reader;
for a due consideration of Provençal poetry in "trobar clus,"
I can only suggest the evidence and lines of inquiry. The Pauline
position on wedlock is of importance&emdash;I do not mean its general
and inimical disapproval, but its more specific utterances.
Whatever one may think of the pagan survivals in Mariolatry
or of the cult of virginity, it is certain that nothing exists with-
out due cause or causes. The language of the Christian mystics
concerning the " bride " and the rest of it; the ancient ideas
95
of union with the god, or with Queen Isis&emdash;all these, as "atmos-
pheric influences," must be weighed; together with the
testimony of the arts, and their progression of content.
In Catullus' superb epithalamium "Collis O Heliconii,"
we find the affair is strictly on one plane; the bride is what
she is in Morocco today, and the function is "normal" and
eugenic. It is the sacrificial concept. Yet Catullus, recording
his own emotion, could say: "More as a father than a lover."
Propertius writes: "Ingenium nobis ipsa puella fecit."
Christianity had, one might say, brought in the mystic note;
but this would be much too sweeping. Anatole France, in his
commentary on Horace's "Tu ne quaesaris," has told us a good
deal about the various Oriental cults thronging the Eternal
City. At Marseille the Greek settlement was very ancient.
How much of the Roman tone, or the Oriental mode, went
out from Rome to the Roman country houses which were
the last hold of culture, we can hardly say; and from the end
of the Sixth Century until the beginning of the Twelfth there
is supposed to be little available evidence. At least we are a
fair distance from Catullus when we come to Peire Vidal's:
"Good Lady, I think I see God when I gaze on your delicate
body."
You may take this if you like cum grano. Vidal was confessedly
erratic. Still it is an obvious change from the manner of the
Roman classics, and it cannot be regarded as a particularly
pious or Christian expression. If this state of mind was fostered
by the writings of the early Christian Fathers, we must regard
their influence as purely indirect and unintentional.
Richard St. Victor has left us one very beautiful passage on
the splendors of paradise.
They are ineffable and innumerable and no man having
beheld them can fittingly narrate them or even remember
them exactly. Nevertheless by naming over all the most beauti-
ful things we know we may draw back upon the mind some
vestige of the heavenly splendor.
96
I suggest that the troubadour, either more indolent or more
logical, progresses from correlating all these details for purpose
of comparison, and lumps the matter. The Lady contains the
catalogue, is more complete. She serves as a sort of mantram.
"The lover stands ever in unintermittent imagination of his
lady (co-amantis)." This is clause 30 of a chivalric code in Latin,
purporting to have been brought to the court of Arthur. This
code is not, I should say, the code of the "trobar clus," not the
esoteric rule, but such part of it as has been more generally
propagated for the pleasure of Eleanor of Poictiers or Marie de
Champagne.
Yet there is, in what I have called the "natural course of
events," the exalted moment, the vision unsought, or at least
the vision gained without machination.
Though the servants of Amor went pale and wept and suf-
fered heat and cold, they came on nothing so apparently morbid
as the "dark night." The electric current gives light where it
meets resistance. I suggest that the living conditions of Provence
gave the necessary restraint, produced the tension sufficient for
the results, a tension unattainable under, let us say, the living
conditions of imperial Rome.
So far as "morals " go, or at least a moral code in the modern
sense, which might interfere in art, Arnaut can no more be
accused of having one than can Ovid.5 Yet the attitude of the
Latin doctor amoris and that of the gran maestro de amor are notably
different, as for instance on such a matter as delay. Ovid takes
no account of the psychic function.
It is perhaps as far a cry from a belief in higher affection to a
mediumistic function or cult of Amor, as is the latter from
Ovid. One must consider the temper of the time, and some of
the most interesting evidence as to this temper has been gathered
by Remy de Gourmont, in Le Latin Mystique, from which:
[5 Ovid, outside hi~ poetry, perhaps, superficially had one.]
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Qui pascis inter lilia
Septus choreis virginum.
Quocumque pergis virgines
Sequntur, atque laudibus
Post te canentes cursitant,
Hymnosque dulces personany6
Who feedest 'mid the lilies,
Ringed with dancing virgins
Where'er Thou runnest, maidens
Follow, and with praises
Run behind Thee singing,
Carolling their hymns.
Or:
Nard of Columba flourisheth;
The little gardens flame with privet;
Stay the glad maid with flowers,
Encompass her with apple boughs.7
As for the personae of the Christian cult they are indeed
treated as pagan gods&emdash;Apollo with his chorus of Muses, Adonis,
the yearly slain, "victima paschalis,"8 yet in the "sequaire"
of Godeschalk, a monk in the Eleventh Century, we see a new
refinement, an enrichment, I think, of paganism. The god
has at last succeeded in becoming human, and it is not the
beauty of the god but the personality which is the goal of the
love and the invocation.
Thc Pharisee murmurs whcn the woman weeps, conscious of guilt.
Sinner, hc despises a fellow-in-sin. Thou, unacquainted with sin,
hast regard for the penitent, cleansest the soiled one, loved her to make
her most fair.
She embraces the feet of the master, washes them with tears, dries
[6 From Hymns to Christ.]
[7 From Ode on St. Cohm.]
[8 There is a magnificent thesis to be written on the role of Fortune, coming down through the Middle Ages, from pagan mythology, via Seneca, into Guido and Dante.]
98
them with her hair; washing and drying them she anointed them
with unguent, covered them with kisses.
These are the feasts which please thee, O Wisdom of the Father!
Born of the Virgin, who disdained not the touch of a sinner.
Chaste virgins, they immaculately offer unto the Lord the sacrifice
of their pure bodies, choosing Christ for their dcathless bridegroom.
O happy bridals, whereto there are no stains, no heavy dolors of
childbirth, no rival mistress to be feared, no nurse molestful!
Their couches, kept for Christ alone, are walled about by angels
of the guard, who, with drawn swords, ward off the unclean lest any
paramour defile them.
Therein Christ sleepeth with them: happy is this sleep, sweet the
rest there, wherein true maid is fondled in the embraces of her heavenly
spouse.
Adorned are they with fine linen, and with a robe of purple; their
Ieft hands hold lilies, their right hands roses.
On these the lamb feedeth, and with these is he refreshed; thesc
fiowers are his choscn food.
He leapeth, and boundeth and gamboleth among them.
With them doth he rest through the noon-heat.
It is upon their bosoms that he sleepeth at mid-day, placing his head
between their virgin breasts.
Virgin Himself, born of a virgin mother, virginal retreats above all
he seeketh and loveth.
Quiet is his sleep upon their bosoms, that no spot by any chance
should soil His snowy fleece.
Give ear unto this canticle, most noble company of virgin devotees,
that by it our devotion may with greater zeal prepare a temple for the
Lord.
With such language in thc cloisters, would it be surprising
that the rebels from it, the clerks who did not take orders, should
have transferred something of the manner, and something of
the spirit, to the beauty of life as they found it, that souls who
belonged, not in heaven but, by reason of their refinement,
somewhat above the mortal turmoil, should have chosen some
middle way, something short of grasping at the union with the
absolute, nor yet that their cult should have been extra-marital?
Arnaut was taught in cloister, Dante praises certain "prose di
99
romanzi" and no one can say precisely whether or no they
were such prose for music as the Latin sequence I have just
quoted. Yet one would be rash to affirm that the " passada
folor " which he laments9 at almost the summit of the purifying
hill, and just below the earthly paradise, was anything more
than such deflection.
[9 Purgatorio, Canto 26.]