number of real artists who finally gave an enduring and beautiful shape
to that strangely mixed and altered material of romantic epic left
behind by the Middle Ages; comes to an end at least till our own day of
appreciative and deliberate imitation and selection and rearrangement of
the artistic forms of the past. Until the revival (after much study and
criticism) by our own poets of Arthur and Gudrun and the Fortunate
Isles, the world had had enough of mediaeval romance. Chivalry had
avowedly ended in chamberlainry; the devotion to women in the official
routine of the _cicisbeo_; the last romance to which the late
Renaissance had clung, which made it sympathize with Huon, Ogier,
Orlando, and Rinaldo, which had made it take delight still in the
fairyland of Oberon, of Fallerina, of Alcina, of Armida, of Acrasia, the
romance of the new world, had also turned into prose, prose of
blood-stained filth. The humanistic and rationalistic men of the
Renaissance had doubtless early begun to turn up their noses in dainty
dilettantism or scientific contempt, at what were later to be called by
Montaigne, "Ces Lancelots du Lac, ces Amadis, ces Huons et tels fatras
di livres a quoy l'enfance s'amuse;" and by Ben Jonson:
Public nothings,
Abortives of the fabulous dark cloister,
Sent out to poison courts, and infect manners--
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, Tasso, 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,
prostitutes, 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
passing 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,
prostitutes, 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
noble 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 passion 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 passionate awe: awe before this passion 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 passes 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 passage "ogni lingua divien
tremando muta, e gli occhi non ardiscon di guardare." Passion 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 ennobling 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
passion which has, in the noblest 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 lust.
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 circumstances, elaborated by half-conscious
effort and bequeathed as an unalienable habit, a new manner of loving.
The women of classical 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 gods, and the affection is calm and gently rebuking like that
for his children. The mistress, on the other hand, is the object of
passion 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 classical Antiquity, but although often bought, like
Brynhilt or Gudrun, at the expense of tremendous adventures, cherished
scarcely more passionately 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
passionate 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 passionate but unchaste, the Middle Ages added, or rather
opposed, a new manner of loving, which, although a mere passing
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 attitude towards women,
not by any means incompatible however with the grossest animalism; an
attitude presupposing a complete moral, aesthetical, and social
superiority on the part of the whole sex, 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
attitude in the relations of the sexes which results in love becoming an
indispensable part of a noble life, and the devoted attachment to one
individual woman, a necessary requisite of a gentlemanly training.
Mediaeval love is not merely a passion, 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 classical 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 passion 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_
passion 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 God; for both are women, both are ladies, and
therefore the greatest poet of the early Middle Ages, Gottfried von
Strassburg, 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 associated with the
_puella_ of the ancients, the _wib_ of the heroic days--lady,
mistress--the titles of the Mother of God, 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 constitute 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 analysis, 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 municipalities of
Provence \ when Germany was welded as a compact feudal mass 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.