The Golden Verses of Pythagoras — with commentary (1917)

The Italians and Spaniards, who received from the Oscan troubadours their first impulse toward poetry, would have been perhaps as limited as they, to composing amorous sonnets, madrigals or, at the most, certain vehement sylves, ' if the Greeks, driven from their country by the conquests of Mohammed II., had not brought them the works of the ancients as I have already said. These works, explained in the chaire publique, due to the munificence of the Medicis, struck particularly the Italians: not however by exciting their poets to take them as models; the turn of their mind and the form of their poetry, similar in everything to that of the troubadours, were opposed too obviously here; but by giving them that sort of emulation which, without copying the others, makes one strive to equal them. At this epoch the book of the monk of St. Andr6, attributed as I have said to Archbishop Turpin, already more than four centuries old, was known by all Europe, whether by itself, or whether by the numberless imitations of which it had been the subject. Not only France, Spain, Italy, but also

= It is necessary to observe that vau or val, bau or bal, according to the dialect, signifies equally a dance, a ball, and a folly, a fool. The Phoenician, root hy (wkal) eitpresses all that is elevated, exalted. The French words bal, vol,fol, are here derived.

' The sonnets are of Oscan origin. The word son signifies a song in the ancient langue d'oc. The word sonnet is applied to a little song, pleasing and of an affected form.

The madrigals are of Spanish origin as their name sufficiently proves. The word gala signifies in Spanish a kind of favour, an honour rendered, a gallantry, a present. Thus Madrid-gala arises from a gallantry in the Madrid fashion.

The sylves, called sirves or sirventes by the troubadours, were kinds of serious poems, ordinarily satirical. These words come from the Latin sylva which, according to Quintilius, is said of a piece of verse recited ex-tempore (1. X., c. 3).

70 The Golden Verses of Pythagoras

England and Germany were inundated with a mass of romances and ballads, wherein were pictured the knights of the court of Charlemagne and those of the Round Table. ' All these works were written in verse, and the greater part, particularly those composed by the troubadours or their disciples, intended to be sung, were cut into strophes. Those of the imitator poets, who had had the force to go back to the allegorical sense of their model, had only developed and enriched it with their own knowledge; the others, following their various methods of considering it, had chosen subjects real and historical, or indeed had followed ingenuously without aim or plan, the impulse of their vagabond imagination. In Prance could be seen represented by the side of the stories of Tristan, of Lancelot, of the Grail, and of Ogierle-Danois, that of Alexander the Great and of the Bible, that of the Seven Sages and of Judas Maccabeus, that of the History of the Normands and the Bretons, and finally that of the Rose, the most famous of all. A certain Guilhaume had published a philosophical romance upon the nature of beasts. ^

Already the Italian poets, after having received from the troubadours the form of their verses and that of their works, had surpassed their masters and had caused them to be forgotten. Petrarch in the sonnet and Dante in the sirvente assumed all the glory of their models, and left not any for the successors^; already even Bojardo and some

' Voyez Laborde, Essai sur la Musigue, t. i., p. 112, et t. ii., p. 168. On trouve, de la page 149 h, la page 232 de ce mgme volume, un catalogue de tous les anciens romanciers frangais. On peut voir, pour les Italiens, Crescembini, Delia Volgar Poesia.

' See Laborde. It is believed that this Guilhaume, bishop of Paris, is the author of the hieroglyphic figures which adorn the portal of Notre-Dame, and that they have some connection with the hermetic science. {Biblioth. des Phil. Chim., t. iv. Saint-Foix, Essai sur Paris.)

' Perhaps one is astonished to see that I give the name of sirventes, or sylves, to that which is commonly called the poems of Dante; but in order to understand me, it is necessary to consider that these poems, composed of stanzas of three verses joined in couplets, are properly only long songs on a

The Essence and Form of Poetry 71 others had attempted, with the example of Homer, to bring back to the unity of epopoeia, the incongruous and fantastic scenes of the romance, when Ariosto appeared. This man, gifted with a keen and brilliant imagination, and possessor of a matchless talent, executed what no one else had been able to do before him; he was neither inspired by Homer, nor by Vergil; he copied no one. He learned from them only to raise himself to the poetic source, to see it where it was and to draw from it his genius. Then he received a first inspiration and became the creator of a particular style of poetry which may be called romantic. Undoubtedly this style is greatly inferior to epopoeia; but after all it is original: its beauties as well as its faults belong to him.