CHAPTER XIV. THE CANZO. With the _canzo_ we have at last reached the climax and innermost essence of the poetry of the troubadours. I have in the above called the idea of the troubadour as exclusively a singer of love a one-sided one. So indeed it is, but at the same time the lingering of this feature and this feature alone in the memory of ages distinctly proves its prevailing importance in the picture which the popular mind conceived and treasured up. And the _vox populi_ in literature, as in other matters, is generally found to be after all the voice of good sense and unsophisticated truth. All true poetry must be the offspring of its time; it must show as in a mirror the best contemporary thoughts and ideas. Now there is no doubt that the purest and most poetic motive of early mediæval life was the _cultus_ of the new-found ideal of womanhood. To this worship, therefore, the troubadour devoted his noblest endeavour, and the result is a literature in some respects unique in the history of all nations. On first becoming acquainted with the amatory verses of Provençal poets, one is apt to give way to a feeling of disappointment. Everything is different from what one’s vague idea of the subject had led him to expect. There is here no wild storm of passion, no untrammelled effusion of sentiment On the contrary, the stream of emotion, and sometimes not a very powerful stream, seems to run in a regular channel—a channel, to continue the simile, with the marble sides and facings of a rigid form, and the narrowness of which admits of little individual bubbling. The last-mentioned feature, viz., the want of individual peculiarities, is especially noticeable in the poets of the _langue d’oc_. There are of course differences, as there are, and must be, in all other schools and coteries of literary workers. Bernart de Ventadorn is an infinitely more impassioned and more loveable singer than the affected Rambaut of Orange; and the Monk of Montaudon, when he deigns to write a love-song, cannot wholly disguise his sardonic vein, nor does he ever attain to the lyrical sweetness of Guillem de Cabestanh. But such distinctions do not meet the eye of the casual observer with the same force as is the case with the poets of other nationalities. One of the reasons is the perfection of formal development which universally prevails. In modern France or England it is easy to know one poet from another, and attribute to each his place in the republic of song by the quality of his verse _quâ_ verse. There are, in short, those who can and those who cannot write poetry. But with the troubadours it was otherwise: they all knew their business equally well; there were no bunglers amongst them.