Nor among the Provençals was there any one, nor had Dante thought out an æsthetic of sound; of clear sounds and opaque sounds, such as in "Sols sui," an opaque sound like Swinburne at his best; and in "Doutz brais" and in "L'aura amara" a clear sound, with staccato; and of heavy beats and of running and light beats, as very heavy in "Can chai la fueilla." Nor do we enough notice how with his drollery he is in places nearer to Chaucer than to the Italians, and indeed the Provençal is usually nearer the English in sound and in feeling, than it is to the Italian, having a softer humor, not a bitter tongue, as have the Italians in ridicule.
Nor have any yet among students taken note enough of the terms, both of love terms, and of terms of the singing; though theology was precise in its terms, and we should see clearly enough in Dante's treatise when he uses such words as _pexa, hirsuta, lubrica_, combed, and shaggy and oily to put his words into categories, that he is thinking exactly. Would the Age of Aquinas have been content with anything less? And so with the love terms, and so, as I have said in my Guido, with metaphors and the exposition of passion. Cossir, solatz, plazers, have in them the beginning of the Italian philosophic precisions, and _amors qu'inz el cor mi plou_ is not a vague decoration. By the time of Petrarca the analysis had come to an end, only the vague decorations were left. And if Arnaut is long before Cavalcanti,
Pensar de lieis m'es repaus E traigom ams los huoills cranes, S'a lieis vezer nols estuich.
leads toward "E gli occhi orbati fa vedere scorto," though the music in Arnaut is not, in this place, quickly apprehended. And those who fear to take a bold line in their interpretation of "Cill de Doma," might do worse than re-read:
and what follows it. And for the rest any man who would read Arnaut and the troubadours owes great thanks to Emil Levy of Freiburg i/b for his long work and his little dictionary (Petit Dictionaire Provençal-Français, Karl Winter's Universitätsbuchhandlung, Heidelberg), and to U.A. Canello, the first editor of Arnaut, who has shown, I think, great profundity in his arrangement of the poems in their order, and has really hit upon their sequence of composition, and the developments of En Arnaut's trobar; and lastly to René Lavaud for his new Tolosan edition.