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TITLE: FRENCH LYRICS
AUTHOR: ARTHUR GRAVES CANFIELD
EBOOK: E05677 (O'Briens Book Cellar)
LANGUAGE: FRENCH AND ENGLISH

FRENCH LYRICS

SELECTED AND EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES

BY

ARTHUR GRAVES CANFIELD

Professor of the Romance Languages and Literatures in the University
of Michigan.

PREFACE.

This book is intended as an introduction to the reading and study of
French lyric poetry. If it contributes toward making that poetry more
widely known and more justly appreciated its purpose will have been
fulfilled.

It is rather usual among English-speaking people to think slightingly
of the poetry of France, especially of her lyrics. This is not
unnatural. The qualities that give French verse its distinction are
very different from those that make the strength and the charm of our
English lyrics. But we must guard ourselves against the conclusion
that because a work is unlike those that we are accustomed to admire
it is necessarily bad. There are many kinds of excellence. And this
little book must have been poorly put together indeed if it fail to
suggest to the reader that France possesses a wealth of lyric
verse which, whatever be its shortcomings in those qualities that
characterize our English lyrics, has others quite its own, both of
form and of spirit, that give it a high and serious interest and no
small measure of beauty and charm.

The editor has sought to keep the purpose of the volume constantly in
view in preparing the introduction and notes. He has hoped to supply
such information as would be most helpful, if not indispensable, to
the reader. And as he has thought that the best service the book could
render would be to stimulate interest in French poetry and to persuade
to a wider reading of it, he has wished in the bibliography to meet
especially the wants of those who may be inclined to pursue further
one or another of the acquaintances here begun. It is of course not
intended to be in any wise exhaustive, but only to present the sum of
an author's lyrical work, to indicate current and available editions,
and to point out sources of further information; among these last it
has sometimes been accessibility to the American reader rather than
relative importance that has dictated the insertion of a title.

The editor acknowledges here his wholesale indebtedness for his
materials to the various sources that he has recommended to the
reader. But he wishes to confess the special debt that he owes to Miss
Eugenie Galloo, Assistant Professor of French in the University of
Kansas, for many suggestions and valuable help with the proofs.
Her assistance has reduced considerably the number of the volume's
imperfections. For those that remain he can hold no one responsible
but himself.

A. G. C.

LAWRENCE, KANSAS,

Dec. 7, 1898.

INTRODUCTION.

As literature is not a bundle of separate threads, but one fabric, it
is manifestly impossible to give an adequate account of any one of its
forms, as the lyric poem, by itself and aside from the larger web of
which it is a part. The following pages will attempt only to sketch
the main phases which the history of the lyric in France exhibits and
so to furnish a rough outline that may help the reader of these poems
to place them in the right historical relations. He should fill it out
at all points by study of some history of French literature.[1] No
account will be taken here of those kinds of verse that have only a
slight contact with serious poetry. Such are, for instance, the songs
of the _chansonniers_, mainly of vinous inspiration, which followed a
tradition of their own apart from that of the more sober lyric, though
some of the later writers, especially BERANGER 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 Provencal
models. Among these earliest cultivators of literary art in the French
language the most noteworthy were CONON DE BETHUNE (d. 1224), BLONDEL
DE NESLE, GACE BRULE, 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 Provencal influence, but
were the developments of the forms of the earlier _chansons a danser_,
the _rondets_, _ballettes_, and _virelis_. The new poetic art that
proceeded from Machault spent itself mainly in refining the phrase of
the old commonplaces, allegories, and reflections, and on turning them
out in _rondels_, _rondeaux_, _triolets_, _ballades_, _chants royaux_,
and _virelis_. The new fashion was followed by FROISSART (1337-1410),
EUSTACHE DESCHAMPS (approximately 1340-1407), who rhymed one thousand
four hundred and forty ballades, CHRISTINE DE PISAN (1363-_?_), and
CHARLES D'ORLEANS (1391-1465), who marks the culmination of the
movement by the perfection of formal elegance and easy grace which his
rondels and ballades exhibit.

All this lyric poetry had been the product of an aristocratic and
polite society. But there existed at the same time in the north of
France a current of lyrical production in an entirely different social
region. The bourgeoisie, at least in the larger and industrial towns,
followed the example of the princely courts, and vied with them in
cultivating a formal lyric, and numerous societies, called _puis_,
arranged poetical competitions and offered prizes. Naturally in their
hands the courtly lyric only degenerated. But there were now and then
men of greater individuality who, if their verses lacked something
of the refinement and elaborateness of the courtly lyric, more than
atoned for it by the greater directness and sincerity of their
utterance, and by their closer contact with common life and real
experience. Here belong the farewell poems (_conges_) of JEAN BODEL
(twelfth century) and ADAM DE LA HALLE (about 1235-1285), of Arras;
here belong especially two Parisians who were real poets, RUTEBEUF
(d. about 1280) and FRANCOIS VILLON (1431- 146?), who distinctly
announces the end of the old order of things and the beginning of
modern times, not by any renewal of the fixed forms, within which he
continued to move, but by cutting loose from the conventional round
of subjects and ideas, and by giving a strikingly direct and personal
expression to thoughts and feelings that he had the originality to
think and feel for himself.

But no one at once appeared to make VILLON'S example fruitful for
the development of lyric verse, and it went on its way of formal
refinement at the hands of the industrious school of rhetoricians,
becoming more and more dry and empty, more and more a matter of
intricate mechanism and ornament. No more signal proof of the
sterility of the school could be imagined than the triumphs of the art
of some of the grands _rhetoriqueurs_ like MESCHINOT (1415?-1491),
or MOLINET (d. 1507), the recognized leader of his day. The last
expiring effort of this essentially mediaeval lyric is seen in CLEMENT

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