Roussillon,¹² a story of long struggles between Charles Martel and one of his barons, by the Roman de Jaufre, the adventures of a knight of the Round Table, by Flamenca, a love story which provides an admirable picture of the manners and customs of the time, and by other fragments and novelas or shorter stories in the same style. Didactic poetry includes historical works such as the poem of the Albigeois crusade, ethical or moralising ensenhamens and religious poetry. But the dominating element in Provençal literature is lyrical, and during the short classical age of this literature lyric poetry was supreme. Nearly five hundred different troubadours are known to us at least by name and almost a thousand different stanza forms have been enumerated. While examples of the fine careless rapture of inspiration are by no means wanting, artificiality reigns supreme in the majority of cases. Questions of technique receive the most sedulous attention, and the principles of stanza construction, rime correspondence and rime distribution, as evolved by the troubadours, exerted so wide an influence upon other European literature that they deserve a chapter to themselves.

There was no formal school for poetical training during the best period of Provençal lyric. When, for instance, Giraut de Bornelli is said to have gone to "school" during the winter seasons, nothing more is meant than the pursuit of the trivium and quadrivium, the seven arts, which formed the usual subjects of instruction. A troubadour learned the principles of his art from other poets who were well acquainted with the conventions that had been formulated in course of time, conventions which were collected and systematised in such treatises as the Leys d'Amors during the period of the decadence.

The love song or chanso was composed of five, six or seven stanzas (coblas) with, one or two tornadas or envois. The stanza varied in length from two to forty-two lines, though these limits are, of course, exceptional. An earlier form of the chanso was known as the vers; it seems to have been in closer relation to the popular poetry than the more artificial chanso, and to have had shorter stanzas and lines; but the distinction is not clear. As all poems were intended to be sung, the poet was also a composer; the biography of Jaufre Rudel, for instance, says that this troubadour "made many poems with good tunes but poor words." The tune known as son (diminutive sonnet) was as much the property of a troubadour as his poem, for it implied and would only suit a special form of stanza; hence if another poet borrowed it, acknowledgment was generally made. Dante, in his De Vulgari Eloquentia, informs us concerning the structure of this musical setting: it might be continuous without repetition or division; or it might be in two parts, one repeating the other, in which case the stanza was also divided into two parts, the division being termed by Dante the diesis or volta; of these two parts one might be subdivided into two or even more parts, which parts, in the stanza, corresponded both in rimes and in the arrangement of the lines. If the first part of the stanza was thus divisible, the parts were called pedes, and the musical theme or oda of the first pes was repeated for the second; the rest of the stanza was known as the syrma or coda, and had a musical theme of its own. Again the first part of the stanza might be indivisible, when it was called the frons, the divided parts of the second half being the versus; in this case the frons had its own musical theme, as did the first versus, the theme of the first versus being repeated for the second. Or, lastly, a stanza might consist of pedes and versus, one theme being used for the first pes and repeated for the second and similarly with the versus. Thus the general principle upon which the stanza was constructed was that of tripartition in the following three forms:—

These forms were rather typical than stringently binding as Dante himself notes (De Vulg. El., ii, 11); many variations were possible. The first seems to have been the most popular type. The poem might also conclude with a half stanza or tornada, (French envoi). Here, as in the last couplet of the Arabic gazul, were placed the personal allusions, and when these were unintelligible to the audience the joglar usually explained the poem before singing it; the explanations, which in some cases remain prefixed to the poem, were known as the razos.

Troubadour poems were composed for singing, not for recitation, and the music of a poem was an element of no less importance than the words. Troubadours are described as composing "good" tunes and "poor" words, or vice versa; the tune was a piece of literary property, and, as we have said, if a troubadour borrowed a tune he was expected to acknowledge its origin. Consequently music and words were regarded as forming a unity, and the structure of the one should be a guide to the structure of the other. Troubadour music is a subject still beset with difficulties¹³: we possess 244 tunes written in Gregorian notation, and as in certain cases the same poem appears in different MSS. with the tune in substantial agreement in each one, we may reasonably assume that we have an authentic record, as far as this could be expressed in Gregorian notation. The chief difference between Troubadour and Gregorian music lies in the fact that the former was syllabic in character; in other words, one note was not held over several syllables, though several notes might be sung upon one syllable. The system of musical time in the age of the troubadours was based upon the so-called "modes," rhythmical formulae combining short and long notes in various sequences. Three of these concern us here. The first mode consists of a long followed by a short note, the long being equivalent to two short, or in time . The second mode is the reverse of the first . The third mode in modern time appears as . The principle of sub-division is thus ternary; "common" time or time is a later modification. So much being admitted, the problem of transposing a tune written in Gregorian notation without bars, time signature, marks of expression or other modern devices is obviously a difficult matter. J. Beck, who has written most recently upon the subject, formulates the following rules; the musical accent falls upon the