Italian and Other Studies Author:Francis Hueffer General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1883 Original Publisher: E. Stock Subjects: Italian poetry Italian literature Music Essays Art criticism Renaissance Art / Criticism History / Renaissance Literary Collections / Essays Literary Criticism / European / Italian Poetry / Continental Euro... more »pean Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: TROUBADOURS, ANCIENT AND MODERN. The good old-fashioned idea of the troubadour -- as the minstrel of love going from land to land singing his song and twanging his guitar with no object in view but the praise of beauty, and no rule to entrammel his passionate effusion -- has by this time been prett)- generally abandoned. It is, or should be, known to all students of literature, that Provencal poets, so far from being wholly wrapt up in their love-thought, took on the contrary a keen and active interest in the affairs of their day ; that, indeed, their literary as well as their social importance depends quite as much on their slashing and bitter satire as on their always sweet but frequently monotonous and conventional love-songs. But still more mistaken is the notion that the troubadour as the singer of pure passion was unfettered by any rules and canons of art. It may, indeed, be said that he was the representative of art, or if the reader prefers it, artificiality, in its strictest and most highly developed sense. The metres invented and used with consummate skill by the poets of mediaeval Provence remain a marvel of symmetry and technical perfectionin the history of literature, unequalled by the poets of other nations who successively tried to imitate them. For it may truly be said that in matters metrical, the troubadours became the schoo...« less