Note 1 — THE OUTDOOR POETRY.
Reading edition
The reader may oppose to my views the existence of the —class of poems, French, Latin, and German, of which the Provençal Pastourela is the original type, and which represent the courting, by the poet, who is, of course, a knight, of a beautiful country-girl, who is shown us as feeding her sheep or spinning with her distaff. But these poems are, to the best of my knowledge, all of a single pattern, and extremely insincere and artificial in tone, that I feel inclined to class them with the pastorals —Dresden china idylls by men who had never looked a live peasant in the face—of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, -as distant descendants from the pastoral poetry of antiquity, of which the chivalric poets may have got some indirect notions as they did of the antique epics. It is moreover extremely rag doll, dressed up in shreds of many-coloured villainy without a recognizable human feature, dragged in the likely that these love poems, in which, successfully or unsuccess- fully, the poet usually offers a bribe to the woman of low degree, conceal beneath the conventional pastoral trappings the intrigues of minnesingers and troubadours with women of the small artizan or village proprietor class. The real peasant woman— the female of the villain—could scarcely have been above the notice of the noblemen's servants; and, in countries where the seigneurial rights were in vigour, would scarcely have been offered presents and fine words. As regards the innumerable poems against the peasantry, I may refer the reader to an extremely curious publication of "Carmina Medii Ævi," recently made by Sig. Francesco Novati, and which contains, besides a selection of specimens, a list of references on the subject of poems "De Natura Rusticorum." One of the satirical declensions runs as follows:
Singulariter. Pluraliter.
Nom. Hic villanus. Nom. Hi maledicti.
Gen. Huius rustici. Gen. Horum tristium.
Dat. Huic tferfero (sic). Dat. His mendacibus.
Acc. Hunc furem. Acc. Hos nequissimos.
Voc. O latro. Voc. O pessimi.
Abl. Ab hoc depredatore. Abl. Ab his infidelibus.
The accusation of heresy and of crucifying Christ is evidently due to the devil-worship prevalent among the serfs, and is thus, alluded to in a north Italian poem, probably borrowed from the French:
Christo fo da villan crucifiò, E stagom sempre in pioza, in vento, e in neve, Perchè havom fato cosi gran peccà.
This feeling is exactly analogous to that existing nowadays in semi-barbarous countries against the Jews. The idle hated the industrious, and hated them all the more when their industry brought them any profit.