The Golden Verses of Pythagoras — with commentary (1917)

Among this number was a man of strong imagination and of a genius really poetic, who, having grasped certain truths of nature, and judging it proper not to divulge them, took the expedient of enclosing them in a book which he entitled: Les Fails et Gestes de Charles-Magne. This extraordinary man who has, in these modem times, obtained an ascendancy greater than one could ever have imagined, since he is the vital source whence have come all the orders, all the institutions of chivalry with which Europe has been inundated; this man, I say, was a monk of Saint-Andre de Vienne, living from the tenth to the eleventh century and perhaps a little before.^ The book that he composed had a success as much the more prodigious as it was misunderstood, and such was the ignorance not only of the people, but even of the clergy, that the most palpable fictions were taken for reaUties. There are historians even who pretend that the council of Rheims, celebrated in 11 19, declared this work authentic'; and thence came the habit of attributing it to Archbishop Turpin. However that may be, it is to the allegorical history of Charlemagne, to that of his twelve paladins, called peers of France, to that of the four sons of Aymon and of Chevalier Bayard, to that of Renaud, Roland, Richard, and the other heroes of the bibUothhque bleue, for

' Voyez I'ouvrage de Naud6, intitul^: Apologie des homtnes accusis de magie. Le nombre de ces hommes est trfes-consid6rable. ' Allard, Bibl. du Dauphine, k la fin. 3 Duplessis-Momai, Mystlre d'iniguite., p. 279.

68 The Golden Verses of Pythagoras 2a long time our only bibliotheca, that we owe a new style of poetry, called Romanesque, on account of the Romance tongue in which it had birth. ' This style is to the eumolpique style, as a wild offshoot, growing laboriously in an arid and bramble-covered land, is to a cultivated tree which rises majestically in the heart of a fertile country.

It was with the chivalrous ideas, inspired by the book of the monk of Saint Andre, that the first poetic ideas were brought forth in France. The Oscan troubadours seizing these first glimmerings of genius, threw themselves with enthusiasm into a career which offered at the same time pleasures, glory, and the gifts of fortune. ^ They sang of the fair, of gallants and of kings; but their verses, monotonous enough when a real passion did not animate them, hardly reached above eulogy or satire. But little capable of feeling the moral beauties of poetry, they stopped at form. The rhyme for them was everything. For them the supreme talent was only rhyming much and with difiiculty. One could not imagine to what lengths they went in this style. Not content with restricting themselves to follow the same rhyme throughout the entire course of the poem, they sometimes doubled it at the end of each verse, rhyming by echo, or else they made an initial rhyme. ^ These obstacles becoming multiplied stifled their muse in its cradle. All that art owed to these first modern poets was limited to a sort