The twenty-three students of Provençal and the seven people seriously interested in the technic and æsthetic of verse may communicate with me in person. I give here only enough to illustrate the points of the _razo_, that is to say, as much as, and probably more than, the general reader can be bothered with. The translations are a make-shift; it is not to be expected that I can do in ten years what it took two hundred troubadours a century and a half to accomplish; for the full understanding of Arnaut's system of echoes and blending there is no substitute for the original; but in extenuation of the language of my verses, I would point out that the Provençals were not constrained by the modern literary sense. Their restraints were the tune and rhyme-scheme, they were not constrained by a need for certain qualities of writing, without which no modern poem is complete or satisfactory. They were not competing with De Maupassant's prose. Their triumph is, as I have said, in an art between literature and music; if I have succeeded in indicating some of the properties of the latter I have also let the former go by the board. It is quite possible that if the troubadours had been bothered about "style," they would not have brought their blend of word and tune to so elaborate a completion.
"Can chai la fueilla" is interesting for its rhythm, for the sea-chantey swing produced by simple device of cæsuræ:
Can chai la fueilla dels ausors entrecims, El freitz s'ergueilla don sechal vais' el vims, Dels dous refrims vei sordezir la brueilla; Mas ieu soi prims d'amor, qui que s'en tueilla.
The poem does not keep the same rhyme throughout, and the only reason for giving the whole of it in my English dither is that one can _not_ get the effect of the thumping and iterate foot-beat from one or two strophes alone.
When sere leaf falleth from the high forkèd tips, And cold appalleth dry osier, haws and hips, Coppice he strips of bird, that now none calleth. Fordel[1] my lips in love have, though he galleth.
Though all things freeze here, I can naught feel the cold, For new love sees, here my heart's new leaf unfold; So am I rolled and lapped against the breeze here: Love who doth mould my force, force guarantees here.