es good
care to address his love songs only to marriageable young women. In this
way, without any deliberate attempt .at originality, the old Courtly
poetry becomes, when once removed to the country, thoroughly patched and
seamed with rustic ideas, feelings, and images; while never ceasing to
be, in its general stuff and shape, of a kind such as only professional
poets of the upper classes can produce. The Sicilian lyrics collected by
Signor Pitre, still more the Tuscan poems of Tigri's charming volume,
are, therefore, a curious mixture of high-flown sentiment, dainty
imagery, and most artistic arrangements of metre and diction (especially
in the rispetto, where metrical involution is accompanied by logical
involution of the most refined mediaeval sort), with hopes and complaints
such as only a farmer could frame, with similes and descriptions such as
only the business of the field, vineyard, and dairy could suggest. A
mixture, but not a jumble. For as in this slow process of assimilation
and alteration only that was remembered by the peasant which the peasant
could understand and sympathize with; and only that was welded into the
once Courtly poetry which was sufficiently refined to please the people
who delighted in the exotic refinement--as, in short, everything came
about perfectly simply and unconsciously, there resulted what in good
sooth may be considered as a perfectly substantive and independent form
of art, with beauties and refinements of its own. And, indeed, it
appears to me that one might say, without too much paradox, that in
these peasant songs only does the poetry of minnesingers and
troubadours, become thoroughly enjoyable; that only when the
conventionality of feeling and imagery is corrected by the freshness,
the straightforwardness, nay, even the grotesqueness of rural likings,
dislikings, and comparisons, can the dainty beauty of mediaeval Courtly
poetry ever really satisfy our wishes. Comparing together Tigri's
collection of Tuscan folk poetry with any similar anthology that might
be made of middle-high German and Provencal, and early Italian lyrics, I
feel that the adoption of Courtly mediaeval poetry by the Italian
peasantry of the Renaissance can be compared more significantly than at
first seemed with the adoption of a once fashionable garb by country
folk. The peasant pulled about this Courtly lyrism, oppressively tight
in its conventional fit and starched with elaborate rhetorical
embroiderie