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

87

 

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

88

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

89

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,

92

 

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.]

93

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.]

97

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.]