a continual struggle to revivify the well-worn tale by means of strange turns of expression, by the use of unusual adjectives and forced metaphor, by the discovery of difficult rimes (rimes cars) and stanza schemes of extraordinary complexity.  Marcabrun asserts, possibly in jest, that he could not always understand his own poems.  A further and possibly an earlier cause of obscurity in expression was the fact that the chanso was a love song addressed to a married lady; and though in many cases it was the fact that the poem embodied compliments purely conventional, however exaggerated to our ideas, yet the further fact remains that the sentiments expressed might as easily be those of veritable passion, and, in view of a husband’s existence, obscurity had a utility of its own.  This point Guiraut de Bornelh advances as an objection to the use of the easy style:  “I should like to send my song to my lady, if I should find a messenger; but if I made another my spokesman, I fear she would blame me.  For there is no sense in making another speak out what one wishes to conceal and keep to oneself.”  The [36] habit of alluding to the lady addressed under a senhal, or pseudonym, in the course of the poem, is evidence for a need of privacy, though this custom was also conventionalised, and we find men as well as women alluded to under a senhal.  It was not always the fact that the senhal was an open secret, although in many cases, where a high-born dame desired to boast of the accomplished troubadour in her service, his poems would naturally secure the widest publication which she could procure.  A further reason for complexity of composition is given by the troubadour Peire d’Auvergne:  “He is pleasing and agreeable to me who proceeds to sing with words shut up and obscure, to which a man is afraid to do violence.”  The “violence” apprehended is that of the joglar, who might garble a song in the performance of it, if he had not the memory or industry to learn it perfectly, and Peire d’Alvernhe (1158-80) commends compositions so constructed that the disposition of the rimes will prevent the interpolation of topical allusions or careless altercation.  The similar safeguard of Dante’s terza rima will occur to every student.

The social conditions again under which troubadour poetry was produced, apart from the limitations of its subject matter, tended to foster an obscure and highly artificial diction.  This obscurity was attained, as we have said, by elevation and preciosity of style, and was not the result of confusion of thought.  Guiraut de Bornelh tells us his method [37] in a passage worth quoting in the original—­

Mas per melhs assire mon chan, vau cercan bos motz en fre que son tuit cargat e ple d’us estranhs sens naturals; mas no sabon tuich de cals.

“But for the better foundation of my song I keep on the watch for words good on the rein (i.e. tractable like horses), which are all loaded (like pack horses) and full of a meaning which is unusual, and yet is wholly theirs (naturals); but it is not everyone that knows what that meaning is".[17]