CHAPTER V.

AN OMNIBUS CHAPTER

“Passions are like dogs:  the big ones need more food than the little ones.”—­HENRY T. FINCK, “Romantic Love and Personal Beauty.”

There is both temptation and material enough for as many musical love stories, as there are novels in the handwriting of Sir Walter Scott, but this being a limited work, the covers already begin to bulge and creak, and it will be necessary to crowd into one swift mail-coach such other composers as we can hardly afford to leave behind.

In some cases, this summary treatment is all the easier because little or nothing is known of their love affairs, while in others it will be purely a case of regretful omission.  It is the chief difficulty and the chief regret, whom and what to omit.  There are composers whom to neglect argues oneself ignorant, yet who composed no love affair of immortal charm.  There are composers of whom few ever heard, whose magnum opus was some romance that still makes the heart-strings tingle by the acoustic law of sympathetic vibration.  For example, there are two old crusading troubadours.

CERTAIN TROUBADOURS

You never heard, perhaps, of Geoffrey Rudel, who “died for the charms of an imaginary mistress.”  He fell in love with the Countess of Tripoli, never having seen her.  He loved the very fame of her beauty.  He set sail for the East, and endured the agonies of travel of those days.  Whether anticipation was better than realisation, we cannot know to-day, having no portrait of the countess; but at least anticipation was more fatal, for it wrought him into such a fever, that when at last Tripoli was reached, he was carried ashore dying.  The countess had heard of his pilgrimage, and had hastened to greet him, only to be permitted to clasp his hand and to hear him gasp, with his last breath:  “Having seen thee, I die satisfied.”

There is a distressing ambiguity about the troubadour’s last words.

And so there was the other troubadour, the Chatelain Regnault de Coucy.  His mistress was a married woman, whom he left to go to the Third Crusade.  In the inveterate siege of Acre, he was mortally wounded before those odious Paynim walls; but, with his dying breath, he begged that his heart be taken from his breast and sent home to her who had owned it.  The stupid messenger, arriving at home, betrayed to the husband what it was he had been charged to deliver, and the husband chose a most mediaeval revenge:  he had the heart of the troubadour cooked and placed before his wife.  When she had eaten, he told her what sweetmeat it was she had so relished.  Thereafter, she starved herself to death.  The same story is told of the troubadour Guillem de Cabestanh; but it is good enough to repeat.

There was another old troubadour, Pierre Vidal, of whom an ancient biographer wrote that he “sang better than any man in the world, and was one of the most foolish men who ever lived, for he believed everything to be just as it pleased him and as he would have it be.”  But the biographer contradicted his own beautiful portrait by telling how poor Pierre sang once too well to a married woman, whose husband took him, jailed him, and pierced his linnet tongue.