the public at large was more constant, and still retained a love for mediaeval romance. But more than humanities, more than scientific scepticism and religious puritanism, did the slow dispelling of the illusion of Eldorado and the Fortunate Isles. Mankind set sail for America in brilliant and knightly gear, believing in fountains of youth and St. Brandan"s Isles, with Ariosto, Ta.s.so, and Spenser still in its pockets. It returns from America either as the tattered fever-stricken ruffian, or as the vulgar, fat upstart of Spanish comedy, returns without honour or shame, holding money (and next to money, negroes) of greater account than any insignia of paladinship or the Round Table; it is brutal, vulgar, cynical; at best very sad, and it gets written for its delectation the comic-tragic novels of rapscallions, panders, prost.i.tutes, and card-sharpers, which from "Lazarillo de Tormes" to "Gil Blas," and from "Gil Blas" to "Tom Jones," finally replace the romances of the Launcelots, Galahads, Rinaldos, and Orlandos.
Thus did the mediaeval romantic-epic stuffs suffer alteration, adulteration, and loss of character, throughout the long period of the Middle Ages, without ever receiving an artistic shape, such as should make all men preserve and cherish them for the only thing which makes men preserve and cherish such things--that never to be wasted quality, beauty. The Middle Ages were powerless to endow therewith their own subjects; so the subjects had to wait, altering more and more with every pa.s.sing day, till the coming of the Renaissance. And by that time these subjects had ceased to have any serious meaning whatever; the Roland of the song of Roncevaux had become the crazy Orlando of Ariosto; the Renaud of "The Quatre Fils Aymon," had become the Rinaldo, thrashed with sheaves of lilies by Cupid, of Matteo Boiardo. The Renaissance took up the old epic-romantic materials and made out of them works of art; but works of art which, as I said before, were playthings gets written for its delectation the comic-tragic novels of rapscallions, panders, prost.i.tutes, and card-sharpers, which, from "Lazarillo de Tormes" to "Gil Bias," and from "Gil Bias" to "Tom Jones," finally replace the romances of the Launcelots, Galahads, Rinaldos, and Orlandos.
MEDIEVAL LOVE.
On laying down the "Vita Nuova" our soul is at first filled and resounding with the love of Beatrice. Whatever habits or capacities of n.o.ble loving may lurk within ourselves, have been awakened by the solemn music of this book, and have sung in unison with Dante"s love till we have ceased to hear the voice of his pa.s.sion and have heard only the voice of our own. When the excitement has diminished, when we have grown able to separate from our own feelings the feelings of the man dead these five centuries and a half, and to realize the strangeness, the obsoleteness of this love which for a moment had seemed our love; then a new phase of impressions has set in, and the "Vita Nuova" inspires us with mere pa.s.sionate awe: awe before this pa.s.sion which we feel to be no longer our own, but far above and distant from us, as in some rarer stratum of atmosphere; awe before this woman who creates it, or rather who is its creation. Even as Dante fancied that the people of Florence did when the bodily presence of this lady came across their path, so do we cast down our glance as the image of Beatrice pa.s.ses across our mind.
Nay, the glory of her, felt so really while reading the few, meagre words in the book, is stored away in our heart, and clothes with a faint aureole the lady--if ever in our life we chance to meet her--in whom, though Dante tells us nothing of stature, features, eyes or hair, we seem to recognize a likeness to her on whose pa.s.sage "ogni lingua divien tremando muta, e gli occhi non ardiscon di guardare." Pa.s.sion like this, to paraphrase a line of Rossetti"s, is genius; and it arouses in such as look upon it the peculiar sense of wonder and love, of awe-stricken raising up of him who contemplates, which accompanies the contemplation of genius.
But it may be that one day we feel, instead of this, wonder indeed, but wonder mingled with doubt. This ideal love, which craves for no union with its object; which seeks merely to see, nay, which is satisfied with mere thinking on the beloved one, will strike us with the cold and barren glitter of the miraculous. This Beatrice, as we gaze on her, will prove to be no reality of flesh and blood like ourselves; she is a form modelled in the semblance of that real, living woman who died six centuries ago, but the substance of which is the white fire of Dante"s love. And the thought will arise that this purely intellectual love of a scarce-noticed youth for a scarce-known woman is a thing which does not belong to life, neither sweetening nor enn.o.bling any of its real relations; that it is, in its dazzling purity and whiteness, in fact a mere strange and sterile death light, such as could not and should not, in this world of ours, exist twice over. And, lest we should ever be tempted to think of this ideal love for Beatrice as of a wonderful and beautiful, but scarcely natural or useful phenomenon, I would wish to study the story of its origin and its influence. I would wish to show that had it not burned thus strangely concentrated and pure, the poets of succeeding ages could not have taken from that white flame of love which Dante set alight upon the grave of Beatrice, the spark of ideal pa.s.sion which has, in the n.o.blest of our literature, made the desire of man for woman and of woman for man burn clear towards heaven, leaving behind the noisome ashes and soul-enervating vapours of earthly l.u.s.t.
I.
The centuries have made us; forcing us into new practices, teaching us new habits, creating for us new capacities and wants; adding, ever and anon, to the soul organism of mankind features which at first were but accidental peculiarities, which became little by little qualities deliberately sought for and at lengths inborn and hereditary characteristics. And thus, in, what we call the Middle Ages, there was invented by the stress of circ.u.mstances, elaborated by half-conscious effort and bequeathed as an unalienable habit, a new manner of loving.
The women of cla.s.sical Antiquity appear to us in poetry and imaginative literature as one of two things: the wife or the mistress. The wife, Penelope, Andromache, Alkestis, nay, even the charming young bride in Xenophon"s "Oeconomics," is, while excluded from many concerns, distinctly reverenced and loved in her own household capacity; but the reverence is of the sort which the man feels for his parents and his household G.o.ds, and the affection is calm and gently rebuking like that for his children. The mistress, on the other hand, is the object of pa.s.sion which is often very vehement, but which is always either simply fleshly or merely fancifully aesthetic or both, and which entirely precludes any save a degrading influence upon the sensual and suspicious lover. Even Tibullus, in love matters one of the most modern among the ancients, and capable of painting many charming and delicate little domestic idyls even in connection with a mere bought mistress, is perpetually accusing his Delia of selling herself to a higher bidder, and sighing at the high probability of her abandoning him for the Illyrian praetor or some other rich amateur of pretty women. The barbarous North--whose songs have come down to us either, like the Volsunga Saga translated by Mr. Morris, in an original pagan version, or else, as the Nibelungenlied, recast during the early Middle Ages--the North tells us nothing of the venal paramour, but knows nothing also beyond the wedded wife; more independent and mighty perhaps than her counterpart of cla.s.sical Antiquity, but although often bought, like Brynhilt or Gudrun, at the expense of tremendous adventures, cherished scarcely more pa.s.sionately than the wives of Odysseus and Hector. Thus, before the Middle Ages, there existed as a rule only a holy, but indifferent and utterly unlyrical, love for the women, the equals of their husbands, wooed usually of the family and solemnly given in marriage without much consultation of their wishes; and a highly pa.s.sionate and singing, but completely profligate and debasing, desire for mercenary though cultivated creatures like the Delias and Cynthlas of Tibullus and Propertius, or highborn women, descended, like Catullus"
Lesbia, in brazen dishonour to their level, women towards whom there could not possibly exist on the part of their lovers any sense of equality, much less of inferiority. To these two kinds of love, chaste but cold, and pa.s.sionate but unchaste, the Middle Ages added, or rather opposed, a new manner of loving, which, although a mere pa.s.sing phenomenon, has left the clearest traces throughout our whole mode of feeling and writing.
To describe mediaeval love is a difficult matter, and to describe it except in negations is next to impossibility. I conceive it to consist in a certain sentimental, romantic, idealistic att.i.tude towards women, not by any means incompatible however with the grossest animalism; an att.i.tude presupposing a complete moral, aesthetical, and social superiority on the part of the whole s.e.x, inspiring the very highest respect and admiration independently of the individual"s qualities; and reaching the point of actual worship, varying from the adoration of a queen by a courtier to the adoration of a shrine by a pilgrim, in the case of the one particular lady who happens to be the beloved; an att.i.tude in the relations of the s.e.xes which results in love becoming an indispensable part of a n.o.ble life, and the devoted attachment to one individual woman, a necessary requisite of a gentlemanly training.
Mediaeval love is not merely a pa.s.sion, a desire, an affection, a habit; it is a perfect occupation. It absorbs, or is supposed to absorb, the Individual; it permeates his life like a religion. It is not one of the interests of life, or, rather, one of life"s phases; it is the whole of life, all other interests and actions either sinking into an unsingable region below it, or merely embroidering a variegated pattern upon its golden background. Mediaeval love, therefore, never obtains its object, however much it may obtain the woman; for the object of mediaeval love, as of mediaeval religious mysticism, is not one particular act or series of acts, but is its own exercise, of which the various incidents of the drama between man and woman are merely so many results. It has not its definite stages, like the love of the men of cla.s.sical Antiquity or the heroic time of the North: its stages of seeking, obtaining, cherishing, guarding; it is always at the same point, always in the same condition of half-religious, half-courtier-like adoration, whether it be triumphantly successful or sighingly despairing. The man and the woman--or rather, I should say, the knight and the lady, for mediaeval love is an aristocratic privilege, and the love of lower folk is not a theme for song--the knight and the lady, therefore, seem always, however knit together by habit, nay, by inextricable meshes of guilt, somehow at the same distance from one another. Once they have seen and loved each other, their pa.s.sion burns on always evenly, burns on (at least theoretically) to all eternity. It seems almost as if the woman were a mere shrine, a mysterious receptacle of the ineffable, a grail cup, a consecrated wafer, but not the ineffable itself. For there is always in mediaeval love, however fleshly the incidents which it produces, a certain Platonic element; that is to say, a craving for, a pursuit of, something which is an abstraction; an abstraction impossible to define in its constant shifting and shimmering, and which seems at one moment a social standard, a religious ideal, or both, and which merges for ever in the dazzling, vague sheen of the Eternal Feminine. Hence, one of the most distinctive features of mediaeval love, an extraordinary sameness of intonation, making it difficult to distinguish between the _bona fide_ pa.s.sion for which a man risks life and honour, and the mere conventional gallantry of the knight who sticks a lady"s glove on his helmet as a compliment to her rank; nay, between the impure adoration of an adulterous lamia like Yseult, and the mystical adoration of a glorified Mother of G.o.d; for both are women, both are ladies, and therefore the greatest poet of the early Middle Ages, Gottfried von Stra.s.sburg, sings them both with the same religious respect, and the same hysterical rapture. This mediaeval love is furthermore a deliberately expected, sought-for, and received necessity in a man"s life; it is not an accident, much less an incidental occurrence to be lightly taken or possibly avoided: it is absolutely indispensable to man"s social training, to his moral and aesthetical self-improvement; it is part and parcel of manhood and knighthood. Hence, where it does not arise of itself (and where a man is full of the notion of such love, it is rare that it does not come but too soon) it has to be sought for.
Ulrich von Liechtenstein, in his curious autobiography written late in the twelfth century, relates how ever since his childhood he had been aware of the necessity of the loyal love service of a lady for the accomplishment of knightly duties; and how, as soon as he was old enough to love, he looked around him for a lady whom he might serve; a proceeding renewed in more prosaic days and with a curious pedantic smack, by Lorenzo dei Medici; and then again, perhaps for the last time, by the Knight of La Mancha, in that memorable discussion which ended in the enthronement as his heart"s queen of the unrivalled Dulcinea of Toboso. _Frowendienst,_ "lady"s service," is the name given by Ulrich von Liechtenstein, a mediaeval Quixote, outshining by far the mad Provencals Rudel and Vidal, to the memoirs very delightfully done into modern German by Ludwig Tieck; and "lady"s service" is the highest occupation of knightly leisure, the subject of the immense bulk of mediaeval poetry. "Lady"s service" in deeds of arms and song, in constant praise and defence of the beloved, in heroic enterprise and madcap mummery, in submission and terror to the wondrous creature whom the humble servant, the lover, never calls by her sacred name, speaking of her in words unknown to Antiquity, _dompna, dame, frowe, madonna_--words of which the original sense has almost been forgotten, although there cleave to them even now ideas higher than those a.s.sociated with the _puella_ of the ancients, the _wib_ of the heroic days--lady, mistress--the t.i.tles of the Mother of G.o.d, who is, after all, only the mystical Soul"s Paramour of the mediaeval world. "Lady"s service"--the almost technical word, expressing the position, half-serf-like, half-religious, the bonds of complete humility and never-ending faithfulness, the hopes of reward, the patience under displeasure, the pride in the livery of servitude, the utter absorption of the life of one individual in the life of another; which const.i.tute in Provence, in France, in Germany, in England, in Italy, in the fabulous kingdoms of Arthur and Charlemagne, the strange new thing which I have named Mediaeval Love.
Has such a thing really existed? Are not these mediaeval poets leagued together in a huge conspiracy to deceive us? Is it possible that strong men have wept and fainted at a mere woman"s name, like the Count of Nevers in "Flamenca," or that their mind has swooned away in months of reverie like that of Parzifal in Eschenbach"s poem; that worldly wise and witty men have shipped off and died on sea for love of an unseen woman like Jaufre Rudel; or dressed in wolf"s hide and lurked and fled before the huntsmen-like Peire Vidal; or mangled their face and cut off their finger, and, clothing themselves in rags more frightful than Nessus" robe, mixed in the untouchable band of lepers like Ulrich von Liechtenstein? Is it possible to believe that the insane enterprises of the Amadises, Lisvarts and Felixmartes of late mediaeval romance, that the behaviour of Don Quixote in the Sierra Morena, ever had any serious models in reality? Nay, more difficult still to believe--because the whole madness of individuals is more credible than the half-madness of the whole world--is it possible to believe that, as the poems of innumerable trouveres and troubadours, minnesingers and Italian poets, as the legion of mediaeval romances of the cycles of Charlemagne, Arthur, and Amadis would have it, that during so long a period of time society could have been enthralled by this hysterical, visionary, artificial, incredible religion of mediaeval love? It is at once too grotesque and too beautiful, too high and too low, to be credible; and our first impulse, on closing the catechisms and breviaries, the legendaries and hymn-books of this strange new creed, is to protest that the love poems must be allegories, the love romances solar myths, the Courts of Love historical bungles; that all this mediaeval world of love is a figment, a misinterpretation, a falsehood.
But if we seek more than a mere casual impression; if, instead of feeling sceptical over one or two fragments of evidence, we attempt to collect the largest possible number of facts together; if we read not one mediaeval love story, but twenty--not half a dozen mediaeval love poems, but several scores; if we really investigate into the origin of the apparent myth, the case speedily alters. Little by little this which had been inconceivable becomes not merely intelligible, but inevitable; the myth becomes an historical phenomenon of the most obvious and necessary sort. Mediaeval love, which had seemed to us a poetic fiction, is turned into a reality; and a reality, alas, which is prosaic. Let us look at it.
Mediaeval love is first revealed in the sudden and almost simultaneous burst of song which, like the twitter and trill so dear to trouveres, troubadours, and minnesingers, fills the woods that yesterday were silent and dead, and greeted the earliest sunshine, the earliest faint green after the long winter numbness of the dark ages, after the boisterous gales of the earliest Crusade. The French and Provencals sang first, the Germans later, the Sicilians last; but although we may say after deliberate a.n.a.lysis, such or such a form, or such or such a story, was known in this country before it appeared in that one, such imitation or suggestion was so rapid that with regard to the French, the Provencals, and the Germans at least, the impression is simultaneous; only the Sicilians beginning distinctly later, forerunners of the new love lyric, wholly different from that of trouveres, troubadours, and minnesingers, of the Italians of the latter thirteenth century. And this simultaneous revelation of mediaeval love takes place in the last quarter of the twelfth century, when Northern France had already consolidated into a powerful monarchy, and Paris, after the teachings of Abelard, was recognized as the intellectual metropolis of Europe; when south of the Loire the brilliant Angevine kings held the overlordship of the cultured Raymonds of Toulouse and of the reviving Latin munic.i.p.alities of Provence when Germany was welded as a compact feudal ma.s.s by the most powerful of the Stauffens; and the papacy had been built up by Gregory and Alexander into a political wall against which Frederick and Henry vainly battered; when the Italian commonwealths grew slowly but surely, as yet still far from guessing that the day would come when their democracy should produce a new civilization to supersede this triumphant mediaeval civilization of the early Capetiens, the Angevines, and the Hohenstauffens. Europe was setting forth once more for the East; but no longer as the ignorant and enthusiastic hordes of Peter the Hermit: Asia was the great field for adventure, the great teacher of new luxuries, at once the Eldorado and the grand tour of all the brilliant and inquisitive and unscrupulous chivalry of the day. And, while into the West were insidiously entering habits and modes of thought of the East; throughout Germany and Provence, and throughout the still obscure free burghs of Italy, was spreading the first indication of that emotional mysticism which, twenty or thirty years later, was to burst out in the frenzy of spiritual love of St. Francis and his followers. The moment is one of the most remarkable in all history: the premature promise in the twelfth century of that intellectual revival which was delayed throughout Northern Europe until the sixteenth. It is the moment when society settled down, after the anarchy of eight hundred years, on its feudal basis; a basis fallaciously solid, and in whose presence no one might guess that the true and definitive Renaissance would arise out of the democratic civilization of Italy.
Such is the moment when we first hear the almost universal song of mediaeval love. This song comes from the triumphantly reorganized portion of society, not from the part which is slowly working its way to reorganization; not from the timidly encroaching burghers, but from the n.o.bles. The reign of town poetry, of fabliaux and meistersang, comes later; the poets of the early Middle Ages, trouveres, troubadours, and minnesingers are, with barely one or two exceptions, all knights. And their song comes from the castle. Now, in order to understand mediaeval love, we must reflect for a moment upon this feudal castle, and upon the kind of life which the love poets of the late twelfth and early thirteenth century--whether lords like Bertram de Born, and Guillaume de Poitiers, among the troubadours; the Vidame de Chartres, Meurisses de Craon, and the Duke of Brabant among the trouveres of Northern France; like Ulrich von Liechtenstein among the minnesingers; or retainers and hangers-on like Bernard de Ventadour and Armand de Mareulh, like Chrestiens de Troyes, Gaisses Brulez, or Quienes de Bethune, like Walther, Wolfram, and Tannhauser--great or small, good or bad, saw before them and mixed with in that castle. The castle of a great feudatory of the early Middle Ages, whether north or south of the Loire, in Austria or in Franconia, is like a miniature copy of some garrison town in barbarous countries: there is an enormous numerical preponderance of men over women; for only the chiefs in command, the overlord, and perhaps one or two of his princ.i.p.al kinsmen or adjutants, are permitted the luxury of a wife; the rest of the gentlemen are subalterns, younger sons without means, youths sent to learn their military duty and the ways of the world: a whole pack of men without wives, without homes, and usually without fortune. High above all this deferential male crowd, moves the lady of the castle: highborn, proud, having brought her husband a dower of fiefs often equal to his own, and of va.s.sals devoted to her race. About her she has no equals; her daughters, scarcely out of the nurse"s hands, are given away in marriage; and her companions, if companions they may be called, are the waiting ladies, poor gentlewomen situated between the maid of honour and the ladies" maid, like that Brangwaine whom Yseult sacrifices to her intrigue with Tristram, or those damsels whom Flamenca gives over to the squires of her lover Guillems; at best, the wife of one of her husband"s subalterns, or some sister or aunt or widow kept by charity. Round this lady--the stately, proud lady perpetually described by mediaeval poets--flutters the swarm of young men, all day long, in her path: serving her at meals, guarding her apartments, nay, as pages, admitted even into her most secret chamber; meeting her for ever in the narrowness of that castle life, where every unnecessary woman is a burden usurping the place of a soldier, and, if possible, replaced by a man. Servants, lacqueys, and enjoying the privileges of ubiquity of lacqueys, yet, at the same time, men of good birth and high breeding, good at the sword and at the lute; bound to amuse this highborn woman, fading away in the monotony of feudal life, with few books to read or unable to read them, and far above all the household concerns which devolve on the butler, the cellarer, the steward, the gentleman, honourably employed as a servant. To them, to these young men, with few or no young women of their own age to a.s.sociate, and absolutely no unmarried girls who could be a desirable match, the lady of the castle speedily becomes a G.o.ddess, the impersonation at once of that feudal superiority before which they bow, of that social perfection which they are commanded to seek, and of that womankind of which the castle affords so few examples. To please her, this lazy, bored, highbred woman, with all the squeamishness and caprice of high birth and laziness about her, becomes their ideal; to be favourably noticed, their highest glory; to be loved, these wretched mortals, by this divinity--that thought must often pa.s.s through their brain and terrify them with its delicious audacity; oh no, such a thing is not possible. But it is. The lady at first, perhaps most often, singles out as a pastime some young knight, some squire, some page; and, in a half-queenly, half-motherly way, corrects, rebukes his deficiencies, undertakes to teach him his duty as a servant. The romance of the "Pet.i.t Jehan de Saintre," written in the fifteenth century, but telling, with a delicacy of cynicism worthy of Balzac, what must have been the old, old story of the whole feudal Middle Ages, shows the manner in which, while feeling that he is being trained to knightly courtesy and honour, the young man in the service of a great feudal lady is gradually taught dissimulation, lying, intrigue; is initiated by the woman who looms above him like a saint into all the foulness of adultery. Adultery; a very ugly word, which must strike almost like a handful of mud in the face whosoever has approached this subject of mediaeval love in admiration of its strange delicacy and enthusiasm. Yet it is a word which must be spoken, for in it is the explanation of the whole origin and character of this pa.s.sion which burst into song in the early Middle Ages. This almost religious love, this love which conceives no higher honour than the service of the beloved, no higher virtue than eternal fidelity--this love is the love for another man"s wife. Between unmarried young men and young women, kept carefully apart by the system which gives away a girl without her consent and only to a rich suitor, there is no possibility of love in these early feudal courts; the amours, however licentious, between kings" daughters and brave knights, of the Carolingian tales, belong to a different rank of society, to the prose romances made up in the fourteenth century for the burgesses of cities; the intrigues, ending in marriage, of the princes and princesses of the cycle of Amadis, belong to a different period, to the fifteenth century, and to courts where feudal society scarcely exists; the squires, the young knights who hang about a great baronial establishment of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, have still to make their fortune, and do not dream of marriage. The husband, on the other hand, the great lord or successful knightly adventurer, married late in life, and married from the necessity, for ever pressing upon the feudal proprietor, of adding on new fiefs and new immunities, of increasing his importance and independence in proportion to the hourly increasing strength and claims of the overlord, the king, who casts covetous eyes upon him--the husband has not married for love; he has had his love affairs with the wives of other men in his day, or may still have them; this lady is a mere feudal necessity, she is required to give him a dower and give him an heir, that is all. If the husband does not love, how much less can the wife; married, as she is, scarce knowing what marriage is, to a man much older than herself, whom most probably she has never seen, to whom she is a mere investment. Nay, there is not even the after-marriage love of the ancients: this wife is not the housekeeper, the woman who works that the man"s house may be rich and decorous; not even the nurse of his children, for the children are speedily given over to the squires and duennas; she is the woman of another family who has come into his, the stranger who must be respected (as that most typical mediaeval wife, Eleanor of Guienne, was respected by her husbands) on account of her fiefs, her va.s.sals, her kinsfolk; but who cannot be loved. Can there be love between man and wife? There cannot be love between man and wife.
This is no answer of mine, fantastically deduced from mediaeval poetry.
It is the answer solemnly made to the solemnly asked question by the Court of Love held by the Countess of Champagne in 1174, and registered by Master Andrew the King of France"s chaplain: "Dicimus enim et stabilito tenore firmamus amorem non posse inter duos jugales suas extendere vires." And the reason alleged for this judgment brings us back to the whole conception of mediaeval love as a respectful service humbly waiting for a reward: "For," pursues the decision published by Andre le Chapelain, "whereas lovers grant to each other favours freely and from no legal necessity, married people have the duty of obeying each other"s wishes and of refusing nothing to one another." "No love is possible between man and wife," repeat the Courts of Love which, consisting of all the highborn ladies of the province and presided by some mighty queen or princess, represent the social opinions of the day.
"But this lady," says a knight (Miles) before the love tribunal of Queen Eleanor, "promised to me that if ever she should lose the love of her lover, she would take me in his place. She has wedded the man who was her lover, and I have come to claim fulfilment of her promise." The court discusses for awhile. "We cannot," answers Queen Eleanor, "go against the Countess of Champagne"s decision that love cannot exist between man and wife. We therefore desire this lady to fulfil her promise and give you her love." Again, there come to the Court of Love of the Viscountess of Narbonne a knight and a lady, who desire to know whether, having been once married, but since divorced, a love engagement between them would be honourable. The viscountess decides that "Love between those who have been married together, but who have since been divorced from one another, is not to be deemed reprehensible; nay, that it is to be considered as honourable." And these Courts of Love, be it remarked, were frequently held on occasion of the marriage of great personages; as, for instance, of that between Louis VII. and Eleanor of Poitiers in 1137. The poetry of the early Middle Ages follows implicitly the decisions of these tribunals, which reveal a state of society to which the nearest modern approach is that of Italy in the eighteenth century, when, as Goldoni and Parini show us, as Stendhal (whose "De l"Amour" may be taken as the modern "Breviari d"Amor") expounds, there was no impropriety possible as long as a lady was beloved by any one except her own husband. No love, therefore, between unmarried people (the cyclical romances, as before stated, and the Amadises, belong to another time of social condition, and the only real exception to my rule of which I can think is the lovely French tale of "Auca.s.sin et Nicolette"); and no love between man and wife. But love there must be; and love there consequently is; love for the married woman from the man who is not her husband. The feudal lady, married without being consulted and without having had a chance of knowing what love is, yet lives to know love; lives to be taught it by one of these many bachelors bound to flutter about her in military service or social duty; lives to teach it herself. And she is too powerful in her fiefs and kinsmen, too powerful in the public opinion which approves and supports her, to be hampered by her husband. The husband, indeed, has grown up in the same habits, has known, before marrying, the customs sanctioned by the Courts of Love; he has been the knight of some other man"s wife in his day, what right has he to object? As in the days of Italian _cecisbei_, the early mediaeval lover might say with Goldoni"s Don Alfonso or Don Roberto, "I _serve_ your wife--such or such another serves mine, what harm can there be in it?" ("Io servo vostra moglie, Don Eugenio favorisce la mia; che male c"
e?" I am quoting from memory.) And as a fact, we hear little of jealousy; the amus.e.m.e.nt of En Barral when Peire Vidal came in and kissed his sleeping wife; and the indignation of all Provence for the murder of Guillems de Cabestanh (buried in the same tomb with the lady who had been made to eat of his heart)--showing from opposite sides how the society accustomed to Courts of Love looked upon the duties of husbands.
Such was the social life in those feudal courts whence first arises the song of mediaeval love, and that this is the case is proved by the whole huge body of early mediaeval poetry. We must not judge, as I have said, either by poems of much earlier date, like the Nibelungen and the Carolingian _chansons de geste_, which merely received a new form in the early Middle Ages; still less from the prose romances of Melusine, Milles et Amys, Palemon and Arcite, and a host of others which were elaborated only later and under the influence of the quite unfeudal habits of the great cities; and least of all from that strange late southern cycle of the Amadises, from which, odd as it seems, many of our notions of chivalric love have, through our ancestors, through the satirists or burlesque poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, been inherited. We must look at the tales which, as we are constantly being told by trouveres, troubadours, and minnesingers, were the fashionable reading of the feudal cla.s.ses of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: the tales best known to us in the colourless respectability of the collection made in the reign of Edward IV. by Sir Thomas Malory, and called by him the "Morte d"Arthur"--of the ladies and knights of Arthur"s court; of the quest of the Grail by spotless knights who were b.a.s.t.a.r.ds and fathers of b.a.s.t.a.r.ds; of the intrigues of Tristram of Lyoness and Queen Yseult; of Launcelot and Guenevere; the tales which Francesca and Paolo read together. We must look, above all, at the lyric poetry of France, Provence, Germany, and Sicily in the early Middle Ages.
Vos qui tres bien ameis i pet.i.t mentendeis Por l"amor de Ihesu les pucelles ameis.
Nos trouvons en escris de sainte auctoriteis Ke pucelle est la fleur de loyaulment ameir.
This strange entreaty to love the maidens for the sake of Christ"s love, this protest of a nameless northern French poet (Wackernagel, Altfranzosische Lieder and Leiche IX.) against the adulterous pa.s.sion of his contemporaries, comes to us, pathetically enough, solitary, faint, unnoticed in the vast chorus, boundless like the spring song of birds or the sound of the waves, of poets singing the love of other men"s wives.
But, it may be objected--how can we tell that these love songs, so carefully avoiding all mention of names, are not addressed to the desired bride, to the legitimate wife of the poet? For several reasons; and mainly, for the crushing evidence of an undefinable something which tells us that they are not. The other reasons are easily stated. We know that feudal habits would never have allowed to unmarried women (and women were married when scarcely out of their childhood) the opportunities for the relations which obviously exist between the poet and his lady; and that, if by some accident a young knight might fall in love with a girl, he would address not her but her parents, since the Middle Ages, who were indifferent to adultery, were, like the southern nations among whom the married woman is not expected to be virtuous, extreme sticklers for the purity of their unmarried womankind. Further, we have no instance of an unmarried woman being ever addressed during the early Middle Ages, in those terms of social respect--_madame, domna, frowe, madonna_--which essentially belong to the mistress of a household; nor do these stately names fit in with any theory which would make us believe that the lady addressed by the poet is the jealously guarded daughter of the house with whom he is plotting a secret marriage, or an elopement to end off in marriage. This is not the way that Romeo speaks to Juliet, nor even that the princesses in the cyclical romances and in the Amadises are wooed by their bridegrooms.
This is not the language of a lover who is broaching his love, and who hopes, however timidly, to consummate it before all the world by marriage. It is obviously the language of a man either towards a woman who is taking a pleasure in keeping him dangling without favours which she has implicitly or explicitly promised; or towards a woman who is momentarily withholding favours which her lover has habitually enjoyed.
And in a large proportion of cases the poems of trouveres, troubadours, and minnesingers are the expression of fortunate love, the fond recollection or eager expectation of meetings with the beloved. All this can evidently not be connected with the wooing, however stealthy, however Romeo-and-Juliet-like of a bride; still less can it be explained in reference to love within wedlock. A man does not, however loving, worship his wife as his social superior; he does not address her in t.i.tles of stiff respect; he does not sigh and weep and supplicate for love which is his due, and remind his wife that she owes it him in return for loyal, humble, discreet service. Above all, a man (except in some absurd comedy perhaps, where the husband, in an age of _cicisbeos_, is in love with his own wife and dares not admit it before the society which holds "that there can be no love between married folk ")--a husband, I repeat, does not beg for, arrange, look forward to, and recall with triumph or sadness, secret meetings with his own wife. Now the secret meeting is, in nearly every aristocratic poet of the early poetry, the inevitable result of the humble praises and humble requests for kindness; it is, most obviously, _the_ reward for which the poet is always importuning. Mediaeval love poetry, compared with the love poetry of Antiquity and the love poetry of the revival of letters, is, in its lyric form, decidedly chaste; but it is perfectly explicit; and, for all its metaphysical tendencies and its absence of clearly painted pictures, the furthest possible removed from being Platonic. One of the most important, characteristic, and artistically charming categories of mediaeval love lyrics is that comprising the Provencal _serena_ and _alba,_ with their counterparts in the _langue d"oil_, and the so-called _Wachtlieder_ of the minnesingers; and this category of love poetry may be defined as the drama, in four acts, of illicit love. The faithful lover has received from his lady an answer to his love, the place and hour are appointed; all the day of which the evening is to bring him this honour, he goes heavy hearted and sighing: "Day, much do you grow for my grief, and the evening, the evening and the long hope kills me."
Thus far the _serena_, the evening song, of Guiraut Riquier. A lovely anonymous _alba,_ whose refrain, "Oi deus, oi deus; de l" alba, tan tost ve!" is familiar to every smatterer of Provencal, shows us the lady and her knight in an orchard beneath the hawthorn, giving and taking the last kisses while the birds sing and the sky whitens with dawn. "The lady is gracious and pleasant, and many look upon her for her beauty, and her heart Is all in loving loyally; alas, alas, the dawn! how soon it: comes!--" "Oi deus, oi deus; de l"alba, tan tost ve!" The real _alba_ is the same as the German _Wachtlieder,_ the song of the squire or friend posted at the garden gate or outside the castle wall, warning the lovers to separate. "Fair comrade (Bel Companho), I call to you singing.
"Sleep no more, for I hear the birds announcing the day in the trees, and I fear that the jealous one may find you;" and in a moment it will be day, "Bel Companho, come to the window and look at the signs in the sky! you will know me a faithful messenger; if you do it not, it will be to your harm" and in a moment it will be dawn (et ades sera l" alba)...
Bel Companho, since I left you I have not slept nor raised myself from my knees; for I have prayed to G.o.d the Son of Saint Mary, that he should send me: back my faithful comrade, and in a moment it will be dawn In this _alba_ of Guiraut de Borneulh, the lover comes at last to the window, and cries to his watching comrade that he is too happy to care either for the dawn or for the jealous one. The German _Wachtlieder_ are even more explicit. "He must away at once and without delay," sings the watchman in a poem of Wolfram, the austere singer of Parzifal and the Grail Quest; "let him go, sweet lady; let him away from thy love so that he keep his honour and life. He trusted himself to me that I should bring him safely hence; it is day ..." "Sing what thou wilt, watchman,"
answers the lady, "but leave him here." In a far superior, but also far less chaste poem of Heinrich von Morungen, the lady, alone and melancholy, wakes up remembering the sad white light of morning, the sad cry of the watchman, which separated her from her knight. Still more frankly, and in a poem which is one of the few real masterpieces of Minnesang, the lady in Walther von der Vogelweide"s "Under der linden an der Heide" narrates a meeting in the wood. "What pa.s.sed between us shall never be known by any! never by any, save him and me--yes, and by the little nightingale that sang _Tandaradei_! The little bird will surely be discreet."
The songs of light love for another"s wife of troubadour, trouvere, and minnesinger, seem to have been squeezed together, so that all their sweet and acrid perfume is, so to speak, sublimated, in the recently discovered early Provencal narrative poem called "Flamenca." Like the "Tristram" of Gottfried von Stra.s.sburg, like all these light mediaeval love _lyrics,_ of which I have been speaking, the rhymed story of "Flamenca," a pale and simple, but perfect petalled daisy, has come up in a sort of moral and intellectual dell in the winter of the Middle Ages--a dell such as you meet in hollows of even the most wind-swept southern hills, where, while all round the earth is frozen and the short gra.s.s nibbled away by the frost, may be found even at Christmas a bright sheen of budding wheat beneath the olives on the slope, a yellow haze of sun upon the gra.s.s in which the little aromatic shoots of fennel and mint and marigold pattern with greenness the sere brown, the frost-burnt; where the very leafless fruit trees have a spring-like rosy tinge against the blue sky, and the tufted little osiers flame a joyous orange against the greenness of the hill.
Such spots there are--and many--in the winter of the Middle Ages; though it is not in them, but where the rain beats, and the snow and the wind tugs, that grow, struggling with bitterness, the great things of the day: the philosophy of Abelard, the love of man of St. Francis, the patriotism of the Lombard communes; nor that lie dormant, fertilized in the cold earth, the great things of art and thought, the great things to come. But in them arise the delicate winter flowers which we prize: tender, pale things, without much life, things either come too soon or stayed too late, among which is "Flamenca;" one of those roses, nipped and wrinkled, but stained a brighter red by the frost, which we pluck in December or in March; beautiful, bright, scentless roses, which, scarce in bud, already fall to pieces in our hand. "Flamenca" is simply the narrative of the loves of the beautiful wife of the bearish and jealous Count Archambautz, and of Guillems de Nevers, a brilliant young knight who hears of the lady"s sore captivity, is enamoured before he sees her, dresses up as the priest"s clerk, and speaks one word with her while presenting the ma.s.s book to be kissed, every holiday; and finally deceives the vigilance of the husband by means of a subterranean corridor, which he gets built between his inn and the bath-room of the lady at the famous waters of Bourbon-les-Bains. In this world of "Flamenca," which is in truth the same world as that of the "Romaunt of the Rose," the "Morte d"Arthur," and of the love poets of early France and Germany, conjugal morality and responsibility simply do not exist.
It seems an unreal pleasure-garden, with a shadowy guardian--impalpable to us gross moderns--called Honour, but where, as it seems, Love only reigns. Love, not the mystic and melancholy G.o.d of the "Vita Nuova," but a foppish young deity, sentimental at once and sensual, of fashionable feudal life: the G.o.d of people with no apparent duties towards others, unconscious of any restraints save those of this vague thing called honour; whose highest mission for the knight, as put in our English "Romaunt of the Rose" is to--
Set thy might and alle thy witte Wymmen and ladies for to plese, And to do thyng that may hem ese;
while, for the lady, it is expressed with perfect simplicity of shamelessness by Flamenca herself to her damsels, teaching them that the woman must yield to the pleasure of her lover. Now love, when young, when, so to speak, but just born and able to feed (as a newborn child on milk, without hungering for more solid food) on looks and words and sighs; love thus young, is a fair-seeming G.o.dhead, and the devotion to him a pretty and delicate piece of aestheticism. And such it is here in "Flamenca," where there certainly exists neither G.o.d nor Christ, both complete absentees, whose priest becomes a courteous lover"s valet, whose church the place for amorous rendezvous, whose sacrifice of ma.s.s and prayer becomes a means of amorous correspondence: Cupid, in the shape of his slave Guillems de Nevers--become _patarin_(zealot) for love--peeping with shaven golden head from behind the missal, touching the lady"s hand and whispering with the words of spiritual peace the declaration of love, the appointment for meeting. G.o.d and Christ, I repeat, are absentees. Where they are I know not; perhaps over the Rhine with the Lollards in their weavers" dens, or over the Alps in the cell of St. Francis; not here, certainly, or if here, themselves become the mere slaves of love. But this King Love, as long as a mere infant, is a sweet and gracious divinity, surrounded by somewhat of the freshness and hawthorn sweetness of spring which seem to accompany his favourite Guillems. Guillems de Nevers, "who could still grow," this brilliant knight and troubadour, in his white silken and crimson and purple garments and soundless shoes embroidered with flowers, this prince of tournaments and _tensos_, who hearing the sorrows of the beautiful Flamenca, loves her unseen, sits sighing in sight of her prison bower, and faints like a hero of the Arabian Nights at her name, and has visions of her as St. Francis has of Christ; this younger and brighter Sir Launcelot, is an ideal little figure, whom you might mistake for Love himself as described in the "Romaunt of the Rose;" Love"s avatar or incarnation, on whose appearance the year blooms into spring, the fruit trees blossom, the birds sing, the girls dance at eve round the maypoles; behind whom, while reading this poem, we seem to see the corn shine green beneath the olives, the white-blossomed branches slant across the blue sky. For is he not the very incarnation of chivalry, of beauty, and of love? So much for this King Love while but quite young.
Unfortunately he is speedily weaned of his baby food of mere blushing glances and sighed-out names; and then his aspect, his kingdom"s aspect, the aspect of his votaries, undergoes a change. The profane but charming game of the loving clerk and the missal is exchanged for the more coa.r.s.e hide-and-seek of hidden causeways and tightened bolts, with jealous husbands guarding the useless door; Guillems becomes but an ordinary Don Juan or Lovelace, Flamenca but a sorry, sneaking adulteress, and the gracious damsels mere common s.l.u.ts, curtseying at the loan (during the interview of n.o.bler folk) of the gallant"s squires.
For the scent of May, of fresh leaves and fallen blossoms, we get the nauseous vapours of the bath-room; and, alas, King Love has lost his aureole and his wings and turned keeper of the hot springs, sought out by the gouty and lepers, of Bourbon-les-Bains; and in closing this book, so delightfully begun, we sicken at the whiff of hot and fetid moral air as we should sicken in pa.s.sing over the outlet of the polluted hot water.
"But where is the use of telling us all this?" the reader will ask; "every one knows that illicit pa.s.sion existed and exists, and has its chroniclers, its singers in prose and in verse. But what has all this poetry of common adultery to do with a book like the "Vita Nuova," with that strange new thing, that lifelong worship of a woman, which you call mediaeval love?" This much: that out of this illicit love, and out of it, gross as it looks, alone arises the possibility of the "Vita Nuova;"
arises the possibility of the romantic and semi-religious love of the Middle Ages. Or, rather, let us say that this mere loose love of the _albas_ and _Wachtlieder_ and "Flamenca," is the substratum, nay, is the very flesh and blood, of the spiritual pa.s.sion to which, in later days, we owe the book of Beatrice.
It is a harsh thing to say, but one which all sociology teaches us, that as there exists no sensual relation which cannot produce for its enn.o.blement a certain amount of pa.s.sion, so also does there exist no pa.s.sion (and Phaedrus is there to prove it) so vile and loathsome as to be unable to weave about itself a glamour of ideal sentiment. The poets of the Middle Ages strove after the criminal possession of another man"s wife. This, however veiled with fine and delicate poetic expressions, is the thing for which they wait and sigh and implore; this is the reward, the supremely honouring and almost sanctifying reward which the lady cannot refuse to the knight who has faithfully and humbly served her.
The whole bulk of the love lyrics of the early Middle Ages are there to prove it; and if the allusions in them are not sufficiently clear, those who would be enlightened may study the discussions of the allegorical persons even in the English (and later) version of Guillaume de Lorris"
"Roman de la Rose;" and turn to what, were it in _langue d"oc_, we should call a _tenso_ of Guillaume li Viniers among Matzner"s "Altfranzosische Lieder-dichter." The catastrophe of Ulrich von Liechtenstein"s "Frowendienst," where the lady, the "virtuous," the "pure," as he is pleased to call her, after making him cut off his finger, dress in leper"s clothes, chop off part of his upper lip, and go through the most marvellous Quixotic antics dressed in satin and pearls and false hair as Queen Venus, and jousting in this costume with every knight between Venice and Styria, all for her honour and glory; pulls the gallant in a basket up to her window, and then lets him drop down into the moat which is no better than a sewer; this grotesque and tragically resented end of Ulrich"s first _love service_ speaks volumes on the point. The stones in Nostradamus" "Lives of the Troubadours," the incidents in Gottfried"s "Tristan und Isolde," nay, the adventures even in our expunged English "Morte d"Arthur," relating to the birth of Sir Galahad, are as explicit as anything in Brantome or the Queen of Navarre; the most delicate love songs of Provence and Germany are cobwebs spun round Decameronian situations. And all this is permitted, admitted, sanctioned by feudal society even as the _cecisbeos_ of the n.o.ble Italian ladies were sanctioned by the society of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the mediaeval castle, where, as we have seen, the lady, separated from her own s.e.x, is surrounded by a swarm of young men without a chance of marriage, and bound to make themselves agreeable to the wife of a military superior; the woman soon ceases to be the exclusive property of her husband, and the husband speedily discovers that the majority, hence public ridicule, are against any attempt at monopolizing her. Thus adultery becomes, as we have seen, accepted as an inst.i.tution under the name of _service_; and, like all other social inst.i.tutions, developes a morality of its own--a morality within immorality, of faithfulness within infidelity. The lady must be true to her knight, and the knight must be true to his lady: the Courts of Love solemnly banish from society any woman who is known to have more than one lover. Faithfulness is the first and most essential virtue of mediaeval love; a virtue unknown to the erotic poets of Antiquity, and which modern times have inherited from the Middle Ages as a requisite, even (as the reproaches of poets of the Alfred de Musset school teach us) in the most completely illicit love. Tristram and Launcelot, the two paragons of knighthood, are inviolably constant to their mistress: the husband may and must be deceived, but not the wife who helps to deceive him. Yseult of Brittany and Elaine, the mother of Galahad, do not succeed in breaking the vows made to Yseult the Fair and to Queen Guenevere. The beautiful lady in the hawthorn _alba_ "a son cor en amar lejalmens." But this loyal loving is for the knight who is warned to depart, certainly not for the husband, the _gilos_, in whose despite ("Bels dous amios, baizem nos eu e vos--Aval els pratzon chantols auzellos--_Tot O fa.s.sam en despeit del gilos_") they are meeting. The ladies of the minnesingers are "pure," "good," "faithful" (and each and all are pure, good, and faithful, as long as they do not resist) from the point of view of the lover, not of the husband, if indeed a husband be permitted to have any point of view at all. And as fidelity is the essential virtue in these adulterous connections, so infidelity is the greatest crime that a woman (and even a man) can commit, the greatest misfortune which fate can send to an unhappy knight. That he leaves a faithful mistress behind him is the one hope of the knight who, taking the cross, departs to meet the scimitars of Saladin"s followers, the fevers, the plagues, the many miserable deaths of the unknown East. "If any lady be unfaithful," says Quienes de Bethune, "she will have to be unfaithful with some base wretch."
Et les dames ki castement vivront Se loiaute font a ceus qui iront; Et seles font par mal conseil folaje, A lasques gens et mauvais le feront, Car tout li bon iront en cest voiage.
"I have taken the cross on account of my sins," sings Albrecht von Johansdorf, one of the most earnest of the minnesingers; "now let G.o.d help, till my return, the woman who has great sorrow on my account, in order that I may find her possessed of her honour; let Him grant me this prayer. But if she change her life (_i.e_., take to bad courses), then may G.o.d forbid my ever returning." The lady is bound (the Courts of Love decide this point of honour) to reward her faithful lover. "A knight,"
says a lady, in an anonymous German song published by Bartsch, "has served me according to my will. Before too much time elapse, I must reward him; nay, if all the world were to object, he must have his way with me" ("und waerez al der Werlte leit, so muoz sin wille an mir ergan"). But, on the other hand, the favoured knight is bound to protect his lady"s good fame.
Se jai mamie en tel point mis, Que tout motroit (m"octroit) sans esformer, Tant doi je miex sonnor gaiter--
thus one of the interlocutors in a French _jeu-parti_, published by Matzner; a rule which, if we may judge from the behaviour of Tristram and Launcelot, and from the last remnants of mediaeval love lore in modern French novels, means simply that the more completely a man has induced a woman to deceive her husband, the more stoutly is he bound to deny, with lies, rows, and blows, that she has ever done anything of the sort. Here, then, we find established, as a very fundamental necessity of this socially recognized adultery, a reciprocity of fidelity between lover and mistress which Antiquity never dreamed of even between husband and wife (Agamemnon has a perfect right to Briseis or Chryseis, but Clytaemnestra has no right to Aegisthus); and which indeed could scarcely arise as a moral obligation except where the woman was not bound to love the man (which the wife is) and where her behaviour towards him depended wholly upon her pleasure, that is to say, upon her satisfaction with his behaviour towards her. This, which seems to us so obvious, and of which every day furnishes us an example in the relations of the modern suitor and his hoped-for wife, could not, at a time when women were married by family arrangement, arise except as a result of illegitimate love.
Horrible as it seems, the more we examine into this subject of mediaeval love, the more shall we see that our whole code of Grandisonian chivalry between lovers who intend marriage is derived from the practice of the Launcelots and Gueneveres, not from that of the married people (we may remember the manner in which Gunther woos his wife Brunhilt in the Nibelungenlied) of former ages; nay, the more we shall have to recognize that the very feeling which const.i.tutes the virtuous love of modern poets is derived from the illegitimate loves of the Middle Ages.
Let us examine what are the habits of feeling and thinking which grow out of this reciprocal fidelity due to the absence of all one-sided legal pressure in this illegitimate, but socially legitimated, love of the early Middle Ages; which are added on to it by the very necessities of illicit connection. The lover, having no right to the favours of his mistress, is obliged, in order to win and to keep them, to please her by humility, fidelity, and such knightly qualities as are the ideal plumage of a man: he must bring home to her, by showing the world her colours victorious in serious warfare, in the scarcely less dangerous play of tournaments, and by making her beauty and virtues more ill.u.s.trious in his song than are those of other women in the songs of their lovers--he must bring home to her that she has a more worthy servant than her rivals; he must determine her to select him and to adhere to her selection. Now mediaeval husbands select their wives, instead of being selected; and once the woman and the dowry are in their hands, trouble themselves but little whether they are approved of or not. On the other hand, the mistress appears to her lover invested with imaginative, ideal advantages such as cannot surround her in the eyes of her husband: she is, in nearly every case, his superior in station and the desired of many beholders; she is bound to him by no tie which may grow prosaic and wearisome; she appears to him in no domestic capacity, can never descend to be the female drudge; her possession is prevented from growing stale, her personality from becoming commonplace, by the difficulty, rareness, mystery, adventure, danger, which even in the days of Courts of Love attach to illicit amours; above all, being for this man neither the housewife nor the mother, she remains essentially and continually the mistress, the beloved. Similarly the relations between the knight and the lady, untroubled by domestic worries, pecuniary difficulties, and squabbles about children, remain, exist merely as love relations, relations of people whose highest and sole desire is to please one another. Moreover, and this is an important consideration, the lady, who is a mere inexperienced, immature girl when she first meets her husband, is a mature woman, with character and pa.s.sions developed by the independence of conjugal and social life. When she meets her lover, whatever power or dignity of character she may possess is ripe; whatever intensity of aspiration and pa.s.sion may be latent is ready to come forth; for the first time there is equality in love. Equality? Ah, no.
This woman who is the wife of his feudal superior, this woman surrounded by all the state of feudal sovereignty, this woman who, however young, has already known so much of life, this woman whose love is a free, gift of grace to the obscure, trembling va.s.sal who has a right not even to be noticed; this lady of mediaeval love must always remain immeasurably above her lover. And, in the long day-dreams while watching her, as he thinks unseen, while singing of her, as he thinks unheard, there cl.u.s.ter round her figure, mistily seen in his fancy, those vague and-mystic splendours which surround the new sovereign of the Middle Ages, the Queen of Heaven; there mingles in the half-terrified raptures of the first kind glance, the first encouraging word, the ineffable pa.s.sion stored up in the Christian"s heart for the immortal beings who, in the days of Bernard and Francis, descend cloud-like on earth and fill the cells of the saints with unendurable glory.
And thus, out of the baseness of habitual adultery, arises incense-like, in the early mediaeval poetry, a new kind of love--subtler, more imaginative, more pa.s.sionate, a love of the fancy and the heart, a love stimulating to the perfection of the individual as is any religion; nay, a religion, and one appealing more completely to the complete man, flesh and soul, than even the mystical beliefs of the Middle Ages. And as, in the fantastic song of Ritter Tannhauser, whose liege lady, so legend tells, was Dame Venus herself, the lady bids the knight go forth and fetch her green water which has washed the setting sun, salamanders s.n.a.t.c.hed from the flame, the stars out of heaven; so would it seem as if this new power in the world, this poetically worshipped woman, had sent forth mankind to seek wonderful new virtues, never before seen on earth.
Nay, rather, as the snowflakes became green leaves, the frost blossoms red and blue flowers, the winter wind a spring-scented breeze, when Bernard de Ventadorn was greeted by his mistress; so also does it seem as if, at the first greeting of the world by this new love, the mediaeval winter had turned to summer, and there had budded forth and flowered a new ideal of manly virtue, a new ideal of womanly grace.