French Lyrics | Page 2

inspiration, which followed a tradition of their own

apart from that of the more sober lyric, though some of the later writers,
especially BÉRANGER and DUPONT, raised them to a higher dignity.
Such also are the songs so abundant in the modern vaudevilles and light
operas, many of which have enjoyed a very wide circulation and great
favor and have left couplets fixed in the memory of the great public.
Neither will account be taken of the poems of oral tradition, the
chansons populaires, of which France possesses a rich treasure, but
which have never there, as so conspicuously in Germany, been brought
into fructifying contact with the literary lyric.[2]
The beginnings of the literary tradition of lyric poetry in France are
found in the poetry of the Troubadours. No doubt lyric expression was
no new discovery then; lyrics in the popular language had existed from
time immemorial. But it was in the twelfth century and in Provence that
it began to be cultivated by a considerable number of persons who
consciously treated it as an art and developed for it rules and forms.
These were the Troubadours. Though their poems did not, at least at
first, lack sincerity and spontaneity, their tendency to theorizing about
the ideals of courtly life, especially about the nature and practice of
love as the ideal form of refined conduct, was not favorable to these
qualities. As lyrical expression lost in directness and spontaneity it was
natural that more and more attention should be paid to form. The
external qualities of verse were industriously cultivated. Great
ingenuity was expended upon the invention of intricate and elaborate
forms. Beginning at the end of the eleventh century, the poetry of the
Troubadours had by the middle of the twelfth become a highly artificial
and studied product. It was then that it began to awaken imitation in the
north of France and thus determine the beginnings of French lyric
poetry.
An earlier native lyric had indeed existed in northern France, known to
us only by scanty fragments and allusions. It was a simple and light
accompaniment of dancing or of the monotonous household tasks of
sewing and spinning. Its theme was love and love-making. Its
characteristic outward feature was a recurring refrain. The manner and
frequency of repeating this refrain determined different forms, as

rondets_, _ballettes_, and _virelis But there are few examples left us of
early French lyrics that have not already felt the influence of the art of
the Troubadours. Even those that are in a way the most perfect and
distinctive products of the earlier period, the fresh and graceful
pastourelles, with their constant theme of a pretty shepherdess wooed
by a knight, may have been imported from the south and have pretty
surely been touched by southern influence.
From the middle of the twelfth century the native lyric in the north was
entirely submerged under the flood of imitations of the Troubadours.
The marriage of Eleanor of Poitiers with Louis VII. in 1137 brought
Provence and France together, and opened the north, particularly about
her court and that of her daughter Marie, Countess of Champagne, at
Troyes, to the ideas and manners of the south. The first result was an
eager and widespread imitation of the Provençal models. Among these
earliest cultivators of literary art in the French language the most
noteworthy were CONON DE BÉTHUNE (d. 1224), BLONDEL DE
NESLE, GACE BRÛLÉ, GUI DE COUCI (d. 1201), GAUTIER
D'ESPINAUS, and THIBAUT DE CHAMPAGNE, King of Navarre (d.
1253). There is in the work of these poets a great sameness. Their one
theme was love as the essential principle of perfect courtly conduct,
and their treatment was made still more lifeless by the use of allegory
which was beginning to reveal its fascination for the mediaeval mind.
From all their work the note of individuality is almost completely
absent. Their art consisted in saying the same conventional
commonplaces in a form that was not just like any other previously
devised. So the predominance of the formal element was a matter of
necessity. Some variation from existing forms was the one thing
required of a piece of verse.
This school of direct imitation flourished for about a century. Then it
suddenly ceased and for another century there was almost no lyric
production of any sort. In the fourteenth century Guillaume de
Machault (1295- 1377) inaugurated a revival, hardly of lyric poetry, but
of the cultivation of lyric forms. He introduced a new style which made
the old conventional themes again presentable by refinement of phrase
and rhetorical embellishments, and he directed the pursuit of form not

to the invention of ever new variations, but to the perfection of a few
forms. And it is noticeable that these fixed forms were not selected
from those elaborated under Provençal