[In the following essay, Varty argues that Deschamps's primary object in L'Art de dictier was “divorcing lyric verse from music and claiming as much prestige for the composition of the verse as for the music, if not more.”]

Most of the comments one reads in literary histories on Deschamps's Art de Dictier tend to lead one away from what may well be its main point. The fault is partly Deschamps's because he wrote so badly. Indeed, Georges Lote's brief study of the Art de Dictier is devoted entirely to its imperfections, mostly to be found in the last two-thirds of the treatise.¹ In one brief paragraph Lote dismisses the first third as a long exordium which has little or nothing to do with the subject.² To my mind, this ‘exordium’ is in fact an exposition of Deschamps's subject. It is here that Deschamps defines poetry as a kind of music, as musique naturele. In a recent article Roger Dragonetti concentrates on this definition of poetry and traces it back to Boethius.³ Dragonetti thus disproves the hypotheses of Langlois⁴ and Raynaud⁵ that this definition was due to Jean de Garlande. He explains what Deschamps meant by musique naturele, stressing the poet's originality in breaking with the traditional association of lyric poetry and music. This explanation was cautiously suggested by Hoepffner long ago⁶ but Petit de Julleville⁷ and W. F. Patterson⁸ suggested the exact opposite; they argued that Deschamps thought of music and poetry as one, and that his chief object in writing the Art de Dictier was to strengthen the alliance between music and lyric poetry as we understand the words.

If one takes into account a number of external factors and then analyses the text, the orderly logic, the object and the importance of the exordium are readily revealed.⁹

Machaut, Deschamps's master, was the last of the trouvères of any stature. He created a new style in music and poetry. After him, poetry in France went its separate way. His disciples, Deschamps, Froissart, Oton de Grandson and Christine de Pisan did not, probably could not, compose musical settings for their poems. If Deschamps had been able to, he surely would have composed the music for the double ballade which he wrote on Machaut's death;¹⁰ but he left this to F. Andrieu. The compositions of the trouvères were respected and hallowed by tradition. The kind of composition which Deschamps and his contemporaries had to offer the public lacked that musical setting which had been regarded for centuries as essential, perhaps the main thing. Nevertheless, he was conscious of the artistic worth of the verse alone and was determined to establish its composition as an art in its own right. This, surely, was his first objective in writing the Art de Dictier.

It would not be easy to achieve, for men in his day did not easily accept new concepts, they did not easily break with tradition. Unfortunately, according to tradition, there were seven arts and only seven, and lyric poetry as we understand the phrase was not one of them. He therefore had to, and did, find a place for it among the seven. During the next 150 years many another author of an art of poetry was to follow his lead and include poetry among the arts, but nearly always under the aegis of Rhetoric.¹¹ Deschamps opted for Music. Literary historians are unjust to refer, as they so often do, to Deschamps's Art de Dictier as the first of the Arts de seconde rhétorique. Looking at it from our point of view, it may have a lot in common with the Arts de seconde rhétorique which followed it, but it is not really the first of them.

Why did Deschamps opt for Music? On the one hand, there was the Boethian tradition and terminology, as Dragonetti has shown,¹² which made it a serious possibility; on the other hand, until Deschamps's day, the words of a lyric poem were usually meant to be sung. The link with music was obvious.

Deschamps therefore began his Art de Dictier with a rapid survey of the seven liberal arts, naming them all and briefly commenting on Grammar in his first paragraph.¹³ In the next six paragraphs he deals in turn with Logic, Rhetoric, Geometry, Arithmetic, Astronomy and Music. In the next five paragraphs he elaborates his ideas on music. In paragraph eight he states that there are two kinds of music, one of which is called artificiele and the other naturele. He defines musique artificiele in the ninth paragraph, and it is obvious that this is music largely as we now understand the word, involving the ability to play musical instruments, to read and write music, and to sing. All this, he maintains, can be learned by anybody, by ‘le plus rude homme du monde’. He defines musique naturele in the tenth paragraph, and it is clear that he understands it to mean lyric poetry, or at least the ability to write lyric poetry, for he begins his explanation by saying that, as opposed to musique artificiele, this cannot be taught by anybody (‘elle ne puet estre aprinse a nul …’). One has to have a gift for it (‘… se son propre couraige naturelment ne s'i applique’). This musique naturele, or poetry, consists of a metrical arrangement of words in certain patterns (‘… est une musique de bouche en proferant paroules metrifiées, aucunesfoiz en laiz, autrefoiz en balades, autrefoiz en rondeaulx …’).

Deschamps has now reached his first objective. Poetry is one of the seven liberal arts because it is a kind of music. He is at the same time in something of a dilemma, for his next objective must be to show that it has, or can have, a dignified independent existence of its own. It is music and yet it is not. If he had defined poetry as a kind of rhetoric, he would not have been in this difficult position. So, in this same paragraph, Deschamps begins to show how the words of a song may be divorced from their musical setting and live independently. He points out that these words, arranged in rhythmical patterns, are not necessarily sung or even set to music any more, for writers in his day do not, for the most part, know how to compose music (‘ceuls qui en ceste musique [naturele] s'appliquent … ne saichent pas communement la musique artificiele ne donner chant par art de notes a ce qu'ilz font …’). Having said this, Deschamps is quick to return to the argument that the metrical arrangement of words is, nevertheless, a kind of music (‘… toutevoies est appellée musique ceste science naturele …’) and to stress that he means the spoken and not the sung word (‘… pour ce que les diz et chançons par eulx faiz … se lisent de bouche, et proferent par voix non pas chantable’). The practice of reciting and not singing the words is quite old, says Deschamps, bringing tradition, even if a rather recent one, to reinforce his argument. It has been done, and still is, at many a Puy d'amours (‘les douces paroles ainsis faictes et recordées par voix plaisent aux escoutans qui les oyent, si que au Puy d'amours anciennement et encores est acoustumez en pluseurs villes et citez …’).

The eleventh paragraph is devoted entirely to the ‘tradition’ of reciting the words of songs. He says that at the Puys competitors have long been accustomed to reciting the words of their songs after they have sung them before the Prince du puys (‘ce recort estoit appellé en disant, après qu'ilz avoient chanté leur chançon devant le Prince’). There can be little doubt that Deschamps is now at pains to show that lyric poetry is a separate art, independent of music.

If Deschamps goes on, in the twelfth paragraph, to repeat again that it is a kind of music, it is surely because, in the first place, he must keep this argument before his reader in order to give lyric poetry the prestige which music has; and, in second place, because he saw that lyric poetry did indeed have certain musical qualities and not only metrical ones. He refers to the words of the lyric poem as douces¹⁴ as well as metrifiées, and he later devotes some lines to what he considers to be the musical properties of certain vowels and consonants,¹⁵ musical in a very modern, Verlaine-like way, albeit crude. It is perhaps true that his examples do not seem very good to us, and that his own verse appears to lack melodious qualities, but that does not alter the remarkable poetic insight of his theory.

So, at the beginning of paragraph twelve, Deschamps repeats once more that, even if the words of a song can be considered separately, they are, nevertheless, a kind of music (‘Et aussi ces deux musiques sont si consonans l'une avecques l'autre, que chascune puet bien estre appellée musique …’) and he goes on to say that, just as the words improve a song, so the song improves the words (‘… les chans … sont plus anobliz et mieulx seans par la parole … Et semblablement les chançons natureles sont … embellies par la melodie … de la musique artificiele’).¹⁶ After all these cautious repetitions, Deschamps comes to the most important sentence in his treatise and declares, at last, the independence of the words of the lyric poem. ‘Et neantmoins est chascune de ces deux plaisant a ouir par soy; et se puet l'une chanter par voix et par art, sanz parole; et aussis les diz des chançons se puent souventefoiz recorder en pluseurs lieux ou … le chant de la musique artificiele n'aroit pas tousjours lieu …’ He even goes so far as to say that there are occasions when it is in fact preferable not to have the words sung, as in the presence of a sick man who might derive pleasure from the spoken word, but pain from the noise of the musical accompaniment!¹⁷ This is not the comic remark it might seem to us. A therapeutic property was traditionally ascribed to music,¹⁸ and Deschamps refers to this near the beginning of his treatise (‘Musique est la derreniere science ainsis comme la medicine des VII. ars …’).¹⁹ It is therefore very significant that he concludes his argument about the relationship of lyric poetry to music by ascribing to lyric poetry greater therapeutic powers than those possessed by music proper.

In paragraph thirteen Deschamps returns to another capital point he had made earlier,²⁰ the point that la musique naturele, poetry, is a gift; it cannot be learned; but those who have this gift must learn how to use it, they must learn the technique of versification. The rest of the treatise deals with versification as Deschamps and his contemporaries understood it.

If Deschamps had really been a musician, he would no doubt have realized that one had also to be gifted to be a musician, and he would have distinguished, in dealing with musique artificiele, between the gift of inspiration and acquirable technique, just as he does in dealing with musique naturele. But if he had been a musician like Machaut, he would probably not have written a treatise with the object of divorcing lyric verse from music and claiming as much prestige for the composition of the verse as for the music, if not more.

Notes

1. Georges Lote, ‘Quelques remarques sur l'Art de Dictier d'Eustache Deschamps’, Mélanges de Philologie romane et de Littérature médiévale offerts à Ernest Hoepffner, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1949, pp. 361-367.

2. Ibid., p. 362.

3. Roger Dragonetti, ‘L'Art de Dictier d'Eustache Deschamps’, Fin du Moyen Age et Renaissance, Mélanges de Philologie française offerts à Robert Guiette, Anvers, De Nederlandsche Boekhandel, 1961, pp. 49-64.

4. Ernest Langlois, Recueil d'Arts de Seconde Rhétorique, Paris, Imprimerie Nationale, 1902, p. iii.

5. Gaston Raynaud, Œuvres Complètes de Eustache Deschamps, Paris, Firmin-Didot, 1891, Vol. XI, pp. 155-157.

6. Ernst Hoepffner, Eustache Deschamps, Leben und Werke, Strasburg, 1904, p. 126. (‘Macht doch diese Stelle geradezu den Eindruck, als ob er den gesprochenen Vortrag, den er als Neuerung empfinden mochte, gewissermassen hier rechtfertigen wollte’).

7. L. Petit de Julleville, Histoire de la Langue et de la Littérature française des Origines à 1900, Paris, Colin, n.d., Vol. II, pp. 355-356. See also note 16.

8. W. F. Patterson, Three Centuries of French Poetic Theory, A critical history of the chief arts of poetry in France (1328-1630), 1935, Univ. of Michigan Press, Vol. I, pp. 87 et sqq. Patterson, like Petit de Julleville, repeats Langlois' opinion that ‘Poetry is for him, as it had been for Jean de Garlande, a form of music’. See also note 16.

9. It will be discovered, significantly, that Deschamps is especially orderly and clear when he defines music. If he is not so orderly and clear in the paragraphs which precede and succeed his definition of music, it is perhaps because he was interested only in the definition. Once this is completed, he can hardly finish his treatise quickly enough; hence the fewer and briefer definitions of the fixed forms as his treatise progresses, and phrases such as ‘et ce seroit trop longue chose de l'avoir escript en ce livret’. (Raynaud, op. cit., p. 288.)

10. Ballades 123 and 124, Raynaud, op. cit., Vol. I.

11. Langlois, op. cit., pp. i and ii; also Patterson, op. cit. Vol. I, part I.

12. See note 3.

13. The numbering of the paragraphs follows Raynaud, op. cit. Vol. VII, pp. 266-292.

14. Ibid., p. 271, l. 8. See also ll. 25 and 26.

15. Ibid., p. 273, ll. 7-10.

16. L. Petit de Julleville and W. F. Patterson seem to have stopped analysing the Art de Dictier at the point where they make such statements as ‘Eustache Deschamps semble avoir défini la poésie comme nous définissons le chant, et l'alliance étroite qu'il établit entre les deux arts, en ne concevant guère d'autre poésie que la poésie chantée, et mise en musique, devait être et fut en effet funeste à la pensée poétique’. (Petit de Julleville, op. cit., p. 356.) ‘Though poetry and music may exist apart, they are at their best when combined in song’ (W. F. Patterson, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 96). See the end of my first paragraph.

17. Raynaud, op. cit., Vol. VII, p. 272, ll. 3-15.

18. Dragonetti, op. cit., pp. 53-55.

19. Raynaud, op. cit., Vol. VII, p. 269.

20. In paragraph ten, p. 270.