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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Euphorion, by Vernon Lee
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Euphorion
+       Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the
+       Renaissance - Vol. II
+
+Author: Vernon Lee
+
+Release Date: February 17, 2010 [EBook #31304]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EUPHORION ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Marc D'Hooghe
+
+
+
+
+EUPHORION: BEING STUDIES OF THE ANTIQUE AND THE MEDIEVAL IN THE RENAISSANCE
+
+BY
+
+VERNON LEE
+
+_Author of "Studies of the 18th Century in Italy," "Belcaro," etc._
+
+_VOL. II._
+
+
+
+TABLE OF CONTENTS.
+
+
+THE PORTRAIT ART
+
+THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO
+
+MEDIĘVAL LOVE
+
+EPILOGUE
+
+APPENDIX
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+THE PORTRAIT ART
+
+
+I.
+
+Real and Ideal--these are the handy terms, admiring or disapproving,
+which criticism claps with random facility on to every imaginable
+school. This artist or group of artists goes in for the real--the
+upright, noble, trumpery, filthy real; that other artist or group of
+artists seeks after the ideal--the ideal which may mean sublimity or
+platitude. We summon every living artist to state whether he is a
+realist or an idealist; we classify all dead artists as realists or
+idealists; we treat the matter as if it were one of almost moral
+importance. Now the fact of the case is that the question of realism and
+idealism, which we calmly assume as already settled or easy to settle by
+our own sense of right and wrong, is one of the tangled questions of
+art-philosophy; and one, moreover, which no amount of theory, but only
+historic fact, can ever set right. For, to begin with, we find realism
+and idealism coming before us in different ways and with different
+meaning and importance. All art which is not addressing (as decrepit art
+is forced to do) faculties to which it does not spontaneously and
+properly appeal--all art is decorative, ornamental, idealistic
+therefore, since it consciously or unconsciously aims, not merely at
+reproducing the already existing, but at producing something which shall
+repay the looking at it, something which shall ornament, if not a place,
+at least our lives; and such making of the ornamental, of the worth
+looking at, necessarily implies selection and arrangement--that is to
+say idealism. At the same time, while art aims definitely at being in
+this sense decorative, art may very possibly aim more immediately at
+merely reproducing, without, selection or arrangement, the actually
+existing things of the world; and this in order to obtain the mere power
+of representation. In short, art which is idealistic as a master will
+yet be realistic as a scholar: it decorates when it achieves, it copies
+when it studies. But this is only half the question. Certain whole
+schools may be described as idealistic, others as realistic, in
+tendency; and this, not in their study, but in their achievement. One
+school will obviously be contented with forms the most unselected and
+vulgar; others will go but little out of their way in search of
+form-superiority; while yet others, and these we must emphatically call
+idealistic, are squeamish to the last degree in the choice and
+adaptation of form, anxious, to get the very best, and make the very
+best of it. Yet, on thinking over it, we shall find that realistic and
+idealistic schools are all, in their achievements, equally striving
+after something which is not the mere reproduction of the already
+existing as such--striving, in short, after decoration. The pupil of
+Perugino will, indeed, wait patiently to begin his work until he can
+find a model fit for a god or goddess; while the fellow-craftsman of
+Rembrandt will be satisfied with the first dirty old Jew or besotten
+barmaid that comes to hand. But the realistic Dutchman is not,
+therefore, any the less smitten with beauty, any the less eager to be
+ornamental, than the idealistic Italian: his man and woman he takes
+indeed with off-hand indifference, but he places them in that of which
+the Italian shall perhaps never have dreamed, in that on which he has
+expended all his science, his skill, his fancy, in that which he gives
+as his addition to the beautiful things of art--in atmosphere, in light,
+which are to the everyday atmosphere and light what the patiently sought
+for, carefully perfected god or goddess model of Raphael is to the
+everyday Jew, to the everyday barmaid, of Rembrandt.
+
+The ideal, for the man who is quite coarsely realistic in his figures,
+exists in the air, light, colour; and in saying this I have, so to
+speak, turned over the page too quickly, forestalled the expression of
+what I can prove only later: the disconnection of such comparative
+realism and idealism as this (the only kind of realism, let us remember,
+which can exist in great art) with any personal bias of the artist, its
+intimate dependence upon the constitution and tendency of art, upon its
+preoccupations about form, or colour, or light, in a given country and
+at a given moment. And now I should wish to resume the more orderly
+treatment of the subject, which will lead us in time to the second half
+of the question respecting realism and idealism. These considerations
+have come to me in connection with the portrait art of the Renaissance;
+and this very simply. For portrait is a curious bastard of art, sprung
+on the one side from a desire which is not artistic, nay, if anything,
+opposed to the whole nature and function of art: the desire for the mere
+likeness of an individual. The union with this interloping tendency, so
+foreign to the whole aristocratic temper of art, has produced portrait;
+and by the position of this hybrid, or at least far from regularly bred
+creature; by the amount of the real artistic quality of beauty which it
+is permitted to retain by the various schools of art, we can, even as by
+the treatment of similar social interlopers we can estimate the
+necessities and tendencies of various states of society, judge what are
+the conditions in which the various schools of art struggle for the
+object of their lives, which is the beautiful.
+
+I have said that art is realistic in its periods or moments of study;
+and this is essentially the case even with the school which in many
+respects was the most unmistakably decorative and idealistic in
+intention: the school of Giotto. The Giottesques are more than
+decorative artists, they are decorators in the most literal sense.
+Painting with them is merely one of the several arts and crafts enslaved
+by medięval architecture and subservient to architectural effects. Their
+art is the only one which is really and successfully architecturally
+decorative; and to appreciate this we must contrast their fresco-work
+with that of the fifteenth century and all subsequent times. Masaccio,
+Ghirlandajo, Signorelli, turn the wall into a mere badly made frame; a
+gigantic piece of cardboard would do as well, and better; the colours
+melt into one another, the figures detach themselves at various degrees
+of relief; those upon the ceiling and pendentives are frequently upside
+down; yet these figures, which are so difficult to see, are worth seeing
+only in themselves, and not in relation to their position. The masonry
+is no longer covered, but carved, rendered uneven with the cavities and
+protrusions of perspective. In Mantegna's frescoes the wall becomes a
+slanting theatre scene, cunningly perspectived like Palladio's Teatro
+Olimpico; with Correggio, wall, masonry, everything, is dissolved, the
+side or cupola of a church becomes a rent in the clouds, streaming with
+light.
+
+Not so with the Giottesque frescoes: the wall, the vault, the triumphant
+masonry is always present and felt, beneath the straight, flat bands of
+uniform colour; the symmetrical compartments, the pentacles, triangles,
+and segments, and borders of histories, whose figures never project,
+whose colours are separate as those in a mosaic. The Giottesque
+frescoes, with their tiers and compartments of dark blue, their vague
+figures dressed in simple ultramarines, greens, dull reds, and purples;
+their geometrical borders and pearlings and dog-tooths; cover the walls,
+the ribbed and arched ceilings, the pointed raftering almost like some
+beautiful brown, blue, and tarnished gold leather-hangings; the figures,
+outlined in dark paint, have almost the appearance of being stencilled,
+or even stamped on the wall. Such is Giottesque painting: an art which
+is not merely essentially decorative, but which is, moreover, what
+painting and sculpture remained throughout the Gothic period,
+subservient to the decorative effect of another art; an art in which all
+is subordinated to architectural effect, in which form, colour, figures,
+houses, the most dramatic scenes of the most awful of all dramas,
+everything is turned into a kind of colossal and sublime wall-paper; and
+such an art as this would lead us to expect but little realism, little
+deliberate and slavish imitation of the existing. Yet wherever there is
+life in this Gothic art (which has a horrible tendency, piously
+unobserved by critics, to stagnate into blundering repetition of the
+same thing), wherever there is progress, there is, in the details of
+that grandiose, idealistic decoration, realism of the crudest kind.
+Those Giottesque workers, who were not content with a kind of Gothic
+Byzantinism; those who really handed over something vital to their
+successors of the fifteenth century, while repeating the old
+idealistical decorations; were studying with extraordinary crudeness of
+realism. Everything that was not conventional ornament or type was
+portrait; and portrait in which the scanty technical means of the
+artist, every meagre line and thin dab of colour, every timid stroke of
+brush or of pencil, went towards the merciless delineation not merely of
+a body but of a soul. And the greater the artist, the more cruel the
+portrait: cruellest in representation of utter spiritual baseness in the
+two greatest of these idealistic decorators; Giotto, and his latest
+disciple, Fra Angelico. Of this I should like to give a couple of
+examples.
+
+In Giotto's frescoes at Santa Croce--one of the most lovely pieces of
+mere architectural decoration conceivable--there are around the dying
+and the dead St. Francis two groups of monks, which are astoundingly
+realistic. The solemn ending of the ideally beautiful life of sanctity
+which was so fresh in the memory of Giotto's contemporaries, is nothing
+beyond a set of portraits of the most absolutely mediocre creatures,
+moral and intellectual, of creatures the most utterly incapable of
+religious enthusiasm that ever made religion a livelihood. They gather
+round the dying and the dead St. Francis, a noble figure, not at all
+ecstatic or seraphic, but pure, strong, worn out with wise and righteous
+labour, a man of thought and action, upon whose hands and feet the
+stigmata of supernatural rapture are a mere absurdity. The monks are
+presumably his immediate disciples, those fervent and delicate poetic
+natures of whom we read in the "Fioretti di San Francesco." To represent
+them Giotto has painted the likeness of the first half-dozen friars he
+may have met in the streets near Santa Croce: not caricatures, nor
+ideals, but portraits Giotto has attempted neither to exalt nor to
+degrade them into any sort of bodily or spiritual interestingness. They
+are not low nor bestial nor extremely stupid. They are in various
+degrees dull, sly, routinist, prosaic, pedantic; their most noteworthy
+characteristic is that they are certainly the men who are not called by
+God. They are no scandal to the Church, but no honour; they are sloth,
+stupidity, sensualism, and cunning not yet risen to the dignity of a
+vice. They look upon the dying and the dead saint with indifference,
+want of understanding, at most a gape or a bright look of stupid
+miscomprehension at the stigmata: they do not even perceive that a saint
+is a different being from themselves. With these frescoes of Giotto I
+should wish to compare Fra Angelico's great ceremonial crucifixion in
+the cloister chapel of San Marco of Florence; for it displays to an
+extraordinary degree that juxtaposition of the most conventionally
+idealistic, pious decorativeness with the realism straightforward,
+unreflecting, and heartless to the point of becoming perfectly
+grotesque. The fresco is divided into two scenes: on the one side the
+crucifixion, the mystic actors of the drama, on the other the holy men
+admitted to its contemplation. A sense that holy things ought to be
+old-fashioned, a respect for Byzantine inanity which invariable haunted
+the Giottesques in their capacity of idealistic decorators, of men who
+replaced with frescoes the solemn lifeless splendours of mosaic; this
+kind of artistico-religious prudery has made Angelico, who was able to
+foreshorten powerfully the brawny crucified thieves, represent the
+Saviour dangling from the cross bleached, boneless, and shapeless, a
+thing that is not dead because it has never been alive. The holy persons
+around stand rigid, vacant, against their blue nowhere of background,
+with vague expanses of pink face looking neither one way nor the other;
+mere modernized copies of the strange, goggle-eyed, vapid beings on the
+old Italian mosaics. This is not a representation of the actual reality
+of the crucifixion, like Tintoret's superb picture at S. Rocco, or
+Dürer's print, or so many others, which show the hill, the people, the
+hangman, the ladders and ropes and hammers and tweezers: it is a sort of
+mystic repetition of it; subjective, if I may say so; existing only in
+the contemplation of the saints on the opposite side, who are spectators
+only in the sense that a contemplative Christian may be said to be the
+mystic spectator of the Passion. The thing for the painter to represent
+is fervent contemplation, ecstatic realization of the past by the force
+of ardent love and belief; the condition of mind of St. Francis, St.
+Catherine of Siena, Madame Guyon: it is the revelation of the great
+tragedy of heaven to the soul of the mystic. Now, how does Fra Angelico
+represent this? A row of saints, founders of orders, kneel one behind
+the other, and by their side stand apostles and doctors of the Church;
+admitting them to the sight of the super-human, with the gesture, the
+bland, indifferent vacuity of the Cameriere Segreto or Monsignore who
+introduces a troop of pilgrims to the Pope; they are privileged persons,
+they respect, they keep up decorum, they raise their eyes and compress
+their lips with ceremonious reverence; but, Lord! they have gone through
+it all so often, they are so familiar with it, they don't look at it any
+longer; they gaze about listlessly, they would yawn if they were not too
+well bred for that. The others, meanwhile, the sainted pilgrims, the men
+whose journey over the sharp stones and among the pricking brambles of
+life's wilderness finds its final reward in this admission into the
+presence of the Holiest, kneel one by one, with various expressions: one
+with the stupid delight of a religious sightseer; his vanity is
+satisfied, he will next draw a rosary from his pocket and get it blessed
+by Christ Himself; he will recount it all to his friends at home.
+Another is dull and gaping, a clown who has walked barefoot from
+Valencia to Rome, and got imbecile by the way; yet another, prim and
+dapper; the rest indifferent looking restlessly about them, at each
+other, at their feet and hands, perhaps exchanging mute remarks about
+the length of time they are kept waiting; those at the end of the
+kneeling procession, St. Peter Martyr and St. Giovanni Gualberto
+especially, have the bored, listless, devout look of the priestlets in
+the train of a bishop. All these figures, the standing ones who
+introduce and the kneeling ones who are being introduced, are the most
+perfect types of various states of dull, commonplace, mediocre routinist
+superstition; so many Camerlenghi on the one hand, so many Passionist or
+Propagandists on the other: the first aristocratic, bland and bored; the
+second, dull, listless, mumbling, chewing Latin Prayers which never
+meant much to their minds, and now mean nothing; both perfectly
+reverential and proper in behaviour, with no more possibility of
+individual fervour of belief than of individual levity of disbelief: the
+Church, as it exists in well-regulated decrepitude. And thus does the
+last of the Giottesques, the painter of glorified Madonnas and dancing
+angels, the saint, represent the saints admitted to behold the supreme
+tragedy of the Redemption.
+
+Thus much for the Giottesques. The Tuscans of the early Renaissance
+developed up to the utmost, assisted by the goldsmiths and sculptors,
+who taught them modelling and anatomy, that realistic element of
+Giottesque painting. Its ideal decorative part had become impossible.
+Painting could no longer be a decoration of architecture, and it had not
+yet the means of being ornamental in itself; it was an art which did
+not achieve, but merely studied. Among its exercises in anatomy,
+modelling, perspective, and so forth, always laborious and frequently
+abortive, its only spontaneous, satisfactory, mature production was its
+portrait work, Portraits of burghers in black robes and hoods; of
+square-jawed youths with red caps stuck on to their fuzzy heads, of bald
+and wrinkled scholars and magnificoes; of thinly bearded artizans;
+people who stand round the preaching Baptist or crucified Saviour, look
+on at miracle or martyrdom, stolid, self-complacent, heedless, against
+their background of towered, walled, and cypressed city--of buttressed
+square and street; ugly but real, interesting, powerful among the
+grotesque agglomerations of bag-of-bones nudities, bunched and taped-up
+draperies and out-of-joint architecture of the early Renaissance
+frescoes; at best among its picture-book and Noah's-ark prettinesses of
+toy-box cypresses, vine trellises, inlaid house fronts, rabbits in the
+grass, and peacocks on the roofs; for the early Renaissance, with the
+one exception of Masaccio, is in reality a childish time of art, giving
+us the horrors of school-hour blunders and abortions varied with the
+delights of nursery wonderland: maturity, the power of achieving, the
+perception of something worthy of perception, comes only with the later
+generation, the one immediately preceding the age of Raphael and Michael
+Angelo; with Ghirlandajo, Signorelli, Filippino, Botticelli, Perugino,
+and their contemporaries.
+
+But this period is not childish, is not immature in everything. Or,
+rather, the various arts which exist together at this period are not all
+in the same stage of development. While painting is in this immature
+ugliness, and ideal sculpture, in works like Verrocchio's and
+Donatello's David, only a cleverer, more experienced, but less
+legitimate kind of painting, painting more successful in the present,
+but with no possible future; the almost separate art of
+portrait-sculpture arises again where it was left by Gręco-Roman
+masters, and, developing to yet greater perfection, gives in marble the
+equivalent of what painting will be able to produce only much later:
+realistic art which is decorative; beautiful works made out of ugly
+materials.
+
+The vicissitudes of Renaissance sculpture are strange: its life, its
+power, depend upon death; it is an art developed in the burying vault
+and cloister cemetery. During the Middle Ages sculpture had had its
+reason, its vital possibility, its something to influence, nay, to keep
+it alive, in architecture; but with the disappearance of Gothic building
+disappears also the possibility of the sculpture which covers the
+portals of Chartres and the belfry of Florence. The pseudo-classic
+colonnades, entablatures, all the thin bastard Ionic and Corinthian of
+Aberti and Bramante, did not require sculpture, or had their own little
+supply of unfleshed ox-skulls, greengrocer's garlands, scallopings and
+wave-linings, which, with a stray siren and one or two bloated emperors'
+heads, amply sufficed. On the other hand, medięval civilization and
+Christian dogma did not encourage the production of naked of draped
+ideal statues like those which Antiquity stuck on countless temple
+fronts, and erected at every corner of square, street, or garden. The
+people of the Middle Ages were too grievously ill grown, distorted,
+hideous, to be otherwise than indecent in nudity; they may have had an
+instinct of the kind, and, ugly as they knew themselves to be, they must
+yet have found in forms like those of Verrocchio's David insufficient
+beauty to give much pleasure. Besides, if the Middle Ages had left no
+moral room for ideal sculpture once freed from the service of
+architecture; they had still less provided it with a physical place.
+Such things could not be set up in churches, and only a very moderate
+number of statues could be wanted as open-air monuments in the narrow
+space of a still Gothic city; and, in fact, ideal heroic statues of the
+early Renaissance are fortunately not only ugly, but comparatively few
+in number. There remained, therefore, for sculpture, unless contented to
+dwindle down into brass and gold miniature work, no regular employment
+save that connected with sepulchral monuments. During the real Middle
+Ages, and in the still Gothic north, the ornamentation of a tomb
+belonged to architecture: from the superb miniature minsters, pillared
+and pinnacled and sculptured, cathedrals within the cathedral, to the
+humbler foliated arched canopy, protecting a simple sarcophagus at the
+corner of many a street in Lombardy. The sculptor's work was but the
+low relief on the church flags, the timidly carved, outlined,
+cross-legged knight or praying priest, flattened down on his pillow as
+if ashamed even of that amount of prominence, and in a hurry to be
+trodden down and obliterated into a few ghostly outlines. But to this
+humiliated prostrate image, to this flat thing doomed to obliteration,
+came the sculptor of the Renaissance, and bade the wafer-like simulacrum
+fill up, expand, raise itself, lift itself on its elbow, arise and take
+possession of the bed of state, the catafalque raised high above the
+crowd, draped with brocade, carved with rich devices of leaves and
+beasts of heraldry, roofed over with a daļs, which is almost a triumphal
+arch, garlanded with fruits and flowers, upon which the illustrious dead
+were shown to the people; but made eternal, and of eternal magnificence,
+by the stone-cutter, and guarded, not for an hour by the liveried pages
+or chaunting monks, but by winged genii for all eternity. Some people, I
+know, call this a degradation, and say that it was the result of corrupt
+pride, this refusal to have the dear or illustrious dead scraped out any
+longer by the shoe-nails of every ruffian, rubbed out by the knees of
+every kitchen wench; but to me it seems that it was due merely to the
+fact that sculpture had lost its former employment, and that a great art
+cannot (thank Heaven!) be pietistically self-humiliating. Be this as it
+may, the sculpture of the Renaissance had found a new and singularly
+noble line of work, the one in which it was great, unique, unsurpassed,
+because untutored. It worked here without models, to suit modern
+requirements, with modern spirit; it was emphatically-modern sculpture;
+the only modern sculpture which can be talked of as something original,
+genuine, valuable, by the side of antique sculpture. Greek Antiquity had
+evaded death, and neglected the dead; a garland of męnads and fauns
+among ivy leaves, a battle of amazons or centaurs; in the late
+semi-Christian, platonic days, some Orphic emblem, or genius; at most,
+as in the exquisite tombs of the Keramikos of Athens, a figure, a youth
+on a prancing steed, like the Phidian monument of Dexileus; a maiden,
+draped and bearing an urn; but neither the youth nor the maiden is the
+inmate of the tomb: they are types, living types, no portraits. Nay,
+even where Antiquity shows us Death or Hermes, gently leading away the
+beloved; the spirit, the ghost, the dead one, is unindividual.
+"Sarkophagen und Urnen bekränzte der Heide mit Leben," said Goethe; but
+it was the life which was everlasting because it was typical: the life
+not which had been relinquished by the one buried there, but the life
+which the world danced on, forgetful, round his ashes. The Romans, on
+the contrary, graver and more retentive folk than the Greeks, as well as
+more domestic, less coffee-house living, appear to have inherited from
+the Etruscans a desire to preserve the effigy of the dead, a desire
+unknown to the Greeks. But the Etrusco-Roman monuments, where husband
+and wife stare forth togaed and stolaed, half reduced to a conventional
+crop-headedness, grim and stiff as if sitting unwillingly for their
+portrait; or reclining on the sarcophagus-lid, neither dead, nor asleep,
+nor yet alive and awake, but with a hieratic mummy stare, have little of
+ęsthetic or sympathetic value. The early Renaissance, then, first
+bethought it of representing the real individual in the real death
+slumber. And I question whether anything more fitting could be placed on
+a tomb than the effigy of the dead as we saw them just before the
+coffin-lid closed down; as we would give our all to see them but one
+little moment longer; as they continue to exist for our fancy within the
+grave; for to any but morbid feelings the beloved can never suffer
+decay. Whereas a portrait of the man in life, as the throning popes in
+St. Peter's, seems heartless and derisive; such monuments striking us as
+conceived and ordered by their inmates while alive, like Michael
+Angelo's Pope Julius, and Browning's Bishop, who was so preoccupied
+about his tomb in St. Praxed's Church. The Renaissance, the late Middle
+Ages, felt better than this: on the extreme pinnacle, high on the roof,
+they might indeed place against the russet brick or the blue sky, amid
+the hum of life and the movement of the air, the living man, like the
+Scaligers, the mailed knight on his charger, lance in rest: but in the
+church below, under the funereal pall, they could place only the body
+such as it may have lain on the bier.
+
+And that figure on the bier was the great work of Renaissance sculpture.
+Inanimate and vulgar when in heroic figures they tried to emulate the
+ancients, the sculptors of the fifteenth century have found their own
+line. The modesty, the simplicity, the awful and beautiful repose of the
+dead; the individual character cleared of all its conflicting meannesses
+by death, simplified, idealized as it is in the memory of the
+survivors--all these are things which belong to the Renaissance. As the
+Greeks gave the strong, smooth life-current circulating through their
+heroes; so did these men of the fifteenth century give the gentle and
+harmonious ebbing after-life of death in their sepulchral monuments.
+Things difficult to describe, and which must be seen and remembered.
+There is the monument, now in the museum at Ravenna, by a sculptor whose
+name, were it known, would surely be among the greatest, of the
+condottiere, Braccioforte: the body prone in its heavy case of armour,
+not yet laid out in state, but such as he may have been found in the
+evening, when the battle was over, under a tree where they had carried
+him to die while they themselves went back to fight; the head has fallen
+back, side-ways, weighed down by the helmet, which has not even been
+unbuckled, only the face, the clear-cut, austere features, visible
+beneath the withdrawn vizor; the eyes have not been closed; and there
+are few things more exquisite and solemn at once in all sculpture, than
+the indication of those no longer seeing eyes, of that broken glance,
+beneath the half-closed lids. There is Rossellino's Cardinal of Portugal
+at S. Miniato a Monte: the slight body, draped in episcopal robes, lying
+with delicate folded hands, in gracious decorum of youthful sanctity;
+the strong delicate head, of clear feature and gentle furrow of
+suffering and thought, a face of infinite purity of strength, strength
+still ungnarled by action: a young priest, who in his virginal dignity
+is almost a noble woman. And there is the Ilaria Guinigi of Jacopo della
+Quercia (the man who had most natural affinity with the antique of all
+these sculptors, as one may see from the shattered remains of the Fonte
+Gaia of Siena), the lady stretched out on the rose-garlanded bed of
+state in a corner of Lucca Cathedral, her feet upon her sleeping dog,
+her sweet, girlish head, with wavy plaits of hair encircled by a
+rose-wreathed, turban-like diadem, lying low on round cushions; the bed
+gently giving way beneath the beautiful, ample-bosomed body, round which
+the soft robe is chastely gathered, and across which the long-sleeved
+arms are demurely folded; the most beautiful lady (whose majestic tread
+through the palace rooms we can well imagine) that the art of the
+fifteenth century has recorded. There is, above all, the Carlo
+Marsuppini of Desiderio da Settignano, the humanist Secretary of the
+Commonwealth, lying on the sarcophagus, superb with shell fretwork and
+curling acanthus, in Santa Croce of Florence. For the youthful beauty
+of the Cardinal of Portugal and of the Lady Ilaria are commonplace
+compared with the refinement of this worn old face, with scant wavy hair
+and thin, gently furrowed, but by no means ploughed-up features. The
+slight figure looks as if in life it must have seemed almost
+transparent; and the hands are very pathetic: noble, firm hands, subtle
+of vein and wrist, crossed simply, neither in prayer nor in agony, but
+in gentle weariness, over the book on his breast. That book is certainly
+no prayer-book; rather a volume of Plato or Cicero: in his last moments
+the noble old man has longed for a glance over the familiar pages; they
+have placed the book on his breast, but it has been too late; the
+drowsiness of death has overtaken him, and with his last sigh he has
+gently folded his hands over the volume, with the faint, last clinging
+to the things beloved in this world.
+
+Such is that portrait sculpture of the early Renaissance, its only
+sculpture, if we except the exquisite work in babies and angels just out
+of the nursery of the Robbias, which is a real achievement. But how
+achieved? This art is great just by the things which Antiquity did not.
+And what are those things? Shall we say that it is sentiment? But all
+fine art has tact, antique art most certainly; and as to pathos, why,
+any quiet figure of a dead man or woman, however rudely carved, has
+pathos; nay, there is pathos in the poor puling hysterical art which
+makes angels draw the curtains of fine ladies' bedchambers, and fine
+ladies, in hoop or limp Grecian dress, faint (the smelling bottle,
+Betty!) over their lord's coffin; there is pathos, to a decently
+constituted human being, wherever (despite all absurdities) we can
+imagine that there lies some one whom it was bitter to see departing, to
+whom it was bitter to depart. Pathos, therefore, is not the question;
+and, if you choose to call it sentiment, it is in reality a sentiment
+for line and curve, for stone and light. The great question is, How did
+these men of the Renaissance make their dead people look beautiful? For
+they were not all beautiful in life, and ugly folk do not grow beautiful
+merely because they are dead. The Cardinal of Portugal, the beautiful
+Ilaria herself, were you to sketch their profile and place it by the
+side of no matter what ordinary antique, would greatly fall short of
+what we call sculpturesque beauty; and many of the others, old humanists
+and priests and lawyers, are emphatically ugly: snub or absurdly hooked
+noses, retreating or deformedly overhanging foreheads, fleshy noses, and
+flabby cheeks, blear eyes and sunk-in mouths; and a perfect network of
+wrinkles and creases, which, hard as it is to say, have been scooped out
+not merely by age, but by low mind, fretting and triumphant animalism.
+Now, by what means did the sculptor--the sculptor, too unacquainted with
+sculptural beauty (witness his ugly ideal statues), to be able, like the
+man who turned the successors of Alexander into a race of leonine though
+crazy demi-gods--to insidiously idealize these ugly and insignificant
+features; by what means did he turn these dead men into things beautiful
+to see? I have said that he took up art where Gręco-Roman Antiquity had
+left it. Remark that I say Gręco-Roman, and I ought to add much more
+Roman than Greek. For Greek sculpture, nurtured in the habit of perfect
+form, art to whom beauty was a cheap necessity, invariably idealized
+portrait, idealized it into beauty or inanity. But when Greek art had
+run its course; when beauty of form had well-nigh been exhausted or
+begun to pall; certain artists, presumably Greeks, but working for
+Romans, began to produce portrait work of quite a new and wonderful
+sort: the beautiful portraits of ugly old men, of snub little boys, work
+which was clearly before its right time, and was swamped by idealized
+portraits, insipid, nay, inane, from the elegant revivalist busts of
+Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius down to the bonnet blocks of the lower
+empire. Of this Roman portrait art, of certain heads of half-idiotic
+little Cęsar brats, of sly and wrinkled old men, things which ought to
+be so ugly and yet are so beautiful, we say, at least, perhaps
+unformulated, we think, "How Renaissance!" And the secret of the beauty
+of these few Gręco-Roman busts, which is also that of Renaissance
+portrait sculpture, is that the beauty is quite different in kind from
+the beauty of Greek ideal sculpture, and obtained by quite different
+means.
+
+It is, essentially, that kind of beauty which I began by saying
+belonged to realistic art, to the art which is not squeamish about the
+object which it represents, but is squeamish about the manner and medium
+in which that indifferent object is represented; it is a kind of beauty,
+therefore, more akin to that of Rembrandt and Velasquez than to that of
+Michael Angelo or Raphael. It is the beauty, not of large lines and
+harmonies, beauty residing in the real model's forms, beauty real,
+wholesale, which would be the same if the man were not marble but flesh,
+not in a given position but moving; but it is a beauty of combinations
+of light and surface, a beauty of texture opposed to texture, which
+would probably be unperceived in the presence of the more regal beauty
+of line and colour harmonies, and which those who could obtain this
+latter would employ only as much as they were conducive to such larger
+beauties. And this beauty of texture opposed to texture and light
+combined with surface is a very real thing; it is the great reality of
+Renaissance sculpture: this beauty, resulting from the combination, for
+instance, in a commonplace face, of the roughness and coarser pore of
+the close shaven lips and chin with the smoothness of the waxy hanging
+cheeks; the one catching the light, the other breaking it into a ribbed
+and forked penumbra. The very perfection of this kind of work is
+Benedetto da Maiano's bust of Pietro Mellini in the Bargello at
+Florence. The elderly head is of strongly marked osseous structure, yet
+fleshed with abundant and flaccid flesh, hanging in folds or creases
+round the mouth and chin, yet not flobbery and floppy, but solid, though
+yielding, creased, wrinkled, crevassed rather as a sandy hillside is
+crevassed by the trickling waters; semi-solid, promising slight
+resistance, waxy, yielding to the touch. But all the flesh has, as it
+were, gravitated to the lower part of the face, conglomerated, or rather
+draped itself, about the mouth, firmer for sunken teeth and shaving; and
+the skin has remained alone across the head, wrinkled, yet drawn in
+tight folds across the dome-shaped skull, as if, while the flesh
+disappeared, the bone also had enlarged. And on the temples the flesh
+has once been thick, the bone (seemingly) slight; and now the skin is
+being drawn, recently, and we feel more and more every day, into a
+radiation of minute creases, as if the bone and flesh were having a last
+struggle. Now in this head there is little beauty of line (the man has
+never been good-looking), and there is not much character in the sense
+of strongly marked mental or moral personality. I do not know, nor care,
+what manner of man this may have been. The individuality is one, not of
+the mind but of the flesh. What interests, attaches, is not the
+character or temperament, but the bone and skin, the creases and folds
+of flesh. And herein also lies the beauty of the work. I do not mean its
+interest or mere technical skill, I mean distinctly visible and artistic
+beauty.
+
+Thus does the sculptor of the Renaissance get beauty, visible beauty,
+not psychologic interest, out of a plain human being; but the beauty
+(and this is the distinguishing point of what I must call realistic
+decorative art) does not exist necessarily in the plain human being: he
+merely affords the beginning of a pattern which the artist may be able
+to carry out. A person may have in him the making of a really beautiful
+bust and yet be ugly; just as the same person may afford a subject for a
+splendid painting and for an execrable piece of sculpture. The wrinkles
+and creases in a face like that of Benedetto da Maiano's Mellini would
+probably be ugly and perhaps disgusting in the real reddish, flaccid,
+discoloured flesh; while they are admirable in the solid and
+supple-looking marble, in its warm and delicate bistre and yellow.
+Material has an extraordinary effect upon form; colour, though not a
+positive element in sculpture, has immense negative power in
+accentuating or obliterating the mere line. All form becomes vague and
+soft in the dairy flaccidness of modern ivory; and clear and powerful in
+the dark terra cotta, which can ennoble even the fattest and flattest
+faces with its wonderful faculty for making mere surface markings, mere
+crowsfeet, interesting. Thus also with bronze: the polished, worked
+bronze, of fine chocolate burnish and reddish reflections, mars all
+beauty of line; how different the unchased, merely rough cast, greenish,
+with infinite delicate greys and browns, making, for instance, the head
+of an old woman like an exquisite withered, shrivelled, veined autumnal
+leaf. It is moreover, as I have said, a question of combination of
+surface and light, this art which makes beautiful busts of ugly men. The
+ideal statue of the Greeks intended for the open air; fit to be looked
+at under any light, high or low, brilliant or veiled, had indeed to be
+prepared to look well under any light; but to look well under any light
+means not to use any one particular relation of light as an ally; the
+surface was kept modestly subordinated to the features, the features
+which must needs look well at all moments and from all points of view.
+But the Renaissance sculptor knew where his work would be placed; he
+could calculate the effect of the light falling invariably through this
+or that window; he could make a fellow-workman of that light, present
+for it to draw or to obliterate what features he liked, bid it sweep
+away such or such surfaces with a broad stream, cut them with a deep
+shadow, caress their smooth chiselling or their rough grainings, mark as
+with a nail the few large strokes of the point which gave the firmness
+to the strained muscle or stretched skin. Out of this model of his, this
+plain old burgess, he and his docile friend the light, could make quite
+a new thing; a new pattern of bosses and cavities, of smooth sweeps and
+tracked lines, of creases and folds of flesh, of pliable linen and rough
+brocade of dress: something new, something which, without a single
+feature being straightened or shortened, yet changed completely the
+value of the whole assemblage of features; something undreamed of by
+nature in moulding that ugly old merchant or humanist. With this art
+which produced works like Desiderio da Settignano's Carlo Marsuppini and
+Benedetto da Maiano's Pietro Mellini, is intimately connected the art of
+the great medallists of the Renaissance--Pasti, Guacialotti, Niccolņ
+Fiorentino, and, greatest of all, Pisanello. Its excellence depends
+precisely upon its independence of the ideal work of Antiquity; nay,
+even upon the fact that, while the ancients, striking their coins in
+chased metal dies, obtained an astonishing minuteness and clearness of
+every separate little stroke and dint, and were therefore forced into an
+almost more than sculptural perfection of mere line, of mere profile and
+throat and elaborately composed hair, a sort of sublime abstraction of
+the possible beauty of a human face, as in the coins of Syracuse and
+also of Alexander; the men of the fifteenth century employed the process
+of casting the bronze in a concave mould obtained by the melting away of
+a medallion in wax; in wax, which taking the living impress of the
+artist's finger, and recalling in its firm and yet soft texture the real
+substance of the human face, insensibly led the medallist to seek, not
+sharp and abstract lines, but simple, strongly moulded bosses; not ideal
+beauty, but the real appearance of life. It is, moreover, a significant
+fact that while the men who, half a century or so later, made fine,
+characterless die-stamped medals in imitation of the antique, Caradossi
+and Benvenuto for instance, were goldsmiths and sculptors, workers with
+the chisel, artists seeking essentially for abstract elegance of line;
+the two greatest medallists of the early Renaissance, Vittore Pisano and
+Matteo di Pasti, were both of them painters; and painters of the
+Northern Italian school, to whom colour and texture were all important,
+and linear form a matter of indifference. And indeed, if we look at the
+best work of what I may call the wax mould medallists of the fifteenth
+century, even at the magnificent marble medallions of the
+laurel-wreathed head of Sigismund Malatesta on the pillars of his church
+at Rimini, modelled by Pasti, we shall see that these men were
+preoccupied almost exclusively with the almost pictorial effect of the
+flesh in its various degrees of boss and of reaction of the light; and
+that the character, the beauty even, which they attained, is essentially
+due to a skilful manipulation of texture, and surface, and light--one
+might almost say of colour. We all know Pisanello's famous heads of the
+Malatesti of Rimini: the saturnine Sigismund, the delicate dapper
+Novello, the powerful yet beautiful Isotta; but there are other
+Renaissance medals which illustrate my meaning even better, and connect
+my feelings on the subject of this branch of art more clearly with my
+feelings towards such work as Benedetto's Pietro Mellini. Foremost among
+these is the perhaps somewhat imperfect and decidedly grotesque, but
+astonishingly powerful, naļf and characteristic Lorenzo dei Medici by
+Niccolņ real grandeur of whose conception of this coarse yet imaginative
+head may be profitably contrasted with the classicizing efforts after
+the demi-god or successor of Alexander in Pollaiolo's famous medal of
+the Pazzi conspiracy. Next to this I would place a medal by Guacialotti
+of Bishop Niccolņ Palmieri, with the motto, "Nudus egressus sic
+redibo"--singularly appropriate to the shameless fleshliness of the
+personage, with his naked fat chest and shoulders, his fat, pig-like
+cheeks and greasy-looking bald head; a hideous beast, yet magnificent in
+his bestiality like some huge fattened porker. These medals give us, as
+does the bust of Pietro Mellini, beauty of the portrait despite ugliness
+of the original. But there are two other medals, this time by Pisanello,
+and, as it seems to me, perhaps his masterpieces, which show the quite
+peculiar way in which this homely charm of portraiture amalgamates, so
+as to form a homogeneous and most seemingly simple whole, with the
+homely charm of certain kinds of pure and simple youthful types. One of
+these (the reverse of which fantastically represents the four elements,
+the wooded earth, the starry sky, the rippled sea, the sun, all in one
+sphere) is the portrait of Don Inigo d'Avalos; the other that of Cecilia
+Gonzaga. This slender beardless boy in the Spanish shovel hat and wisp
+of scarf twisted round the throat; and this tall, long-necked girl, with
+sloping shoulders and still half-developed bosom; are, so to speak,
+brother and sister in art, in Pisanello's wonderful genius. The relief
+of the two medals is extremely low, so that in certain lights the
+effigies vanish almost completely, sink into the pale green surface of
+the bronze; the portraits are a mere film, a sort of haze which has
+arisen on the bronze and gathered into human likeness; but in this film,
+this scarce perceptible relief, we are made to perceive the slender
+osseous structure, the smooth, sleek, childish blond flesh and hair, the
+delicate, undecided pallor of extreme youth and purity, even as we might
+in some elaborate portrait by Velasquez, but with a spring-like
+healthiness which Velasquez, painting his lymphatic Hapsburgs, rarely
+has.
+
+Such is this Renaissance art of medals, this side branch of the great
+realistic portraiture in stone of the Benedettos, Desiderios, and
+Rossellinos; a perfect thing in itself; and one which, if we muse over
+it in connection with the more important works of fifteenth century
+sculpture, will perhaps lead us to think that, as the sculpture of
+Antiquity, in its superb idealism, its devotion to the perfect line and
+curve of beauty, achieved the highest that mere colourless art can
+achieve--thanks to the very purity, sternness, and narrowness of its
+sculpturesque feeling--so also, perhaps, modern sculpture, should it
+ever re-arise, must be a continuation of the tendencies of the
+Renaissance, must be the humbler sister of painting, must seek for the
+realistic portrait and begin, perhaps, with the realistic medal.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+This kind of realism, where only the model is ugly, while the portrait
+is beautiful; which seeks decorative value by other means than the
+intrinsic excellence of form in the object represented, this kind of
+realism is quite different in sort from the realisms of immature art,
+which, aiming at nothing beyond a faithful copy, is content with
+producing an ugly picture of an ugly thing. Now this latter kind of
+realism endured in painting some time after decorative realism such as I
+have described had reached perfection in sculpture. Nor was it till
+later, and when the crude scholastic realism had completely come to an
+end, that there became even partially possible in painting decorative
+realism analogous to what we have noticed in sculpture; while it was not
+till after the close of the Italian Renaissance period that the painters
+arose in Spain and the Netherlands who were able to treat their subjects
+with the uncompromising decorative realism of Desiderio or Rosellino or
+Benedetto da Maiano. For the purely imitative realism of the painters of
+the early Renaissance was succeeded in Italy by idealism, which matured
+in the great art of intrinsically beautiful linear form of Michael
+Angelo and Raphael, and the great art of intrinsically beautiful colour
+form of Giorgione and Titian. These two schools were bound to be, each
+in its degree, idealistic. Complete power of mere representation in
+tint and colour having been obtained through the realistic drudgery of
+the early Renaissance, selection in the objects thus to be represented
+had naturally arisen; and the study of the antique had further hastened
+and directed this movement of art no longer to study but to achieve, to
+be decorative once more, decorative no longer in subservience to
+architecture, but as the separate and self-sufficing art of painting.
+Selection, therefore, which is the only practical kind of idealism, had
+begun as soon as painting was possessed of the power of representing
+objects in their relations of line and colour, with that amount of light
+and shadow requisite to the just appreciation of the relations of form
+and the just relations of colour. Now art which stops short at this
+point of representation must inevitably be, if decorative at all,
+idealistically decorative; it must be squeamish respecting the objects
+represented, respecting their real structure, colour, position, and
+grouping. For, of the visible impressions received from an object, some
+are far more intrinsic than others. Suppose we see a woman, beautiful in
+the structure of her body, and beautiful in the colour of her person and
+her draperies, standing under a light which is such as we should call
+beautiful and interesting: of these three qualities one will be
+intrinsic in the woman, the second very considerably so, the third not
+at all. For, let us call that woman away and replace her immediately by
+another woman chosen at random. We shall immediately perceive that we
+have lost one pleasurable impression, that of beautiful bodily
+structure: the woman has taken away her well-shapen body. Next we shall
+perceive a notable diminution in the second pleasurable impression: the
+woman has taken with her, not indeed her well-tinted garments, which we
+may have bestowed on her successor, but her beautifully coloured skin
+and hair, so that of the pleasing colour-impression will remain only as
+much as was due to, and may have been retained with, the original
+woman's clothes. But if we look for our third pleasurable impression,
+our beautiful light, we shall find that unchanged, whether it fall upon
+a magnificently arrayed goddess or upon a sordid slut And, conversely,
+the beautiful woman, when withdrawn from that light and placed in any
+other, will be equally lovely in form, even if we cast her in plaster,
+and lose the colour of her skin and hair; or if we leave her not only
+the beautiful tints of her flesh and hair, but her own splendidly
+coloured garments, we shall still have, in whatsoever light, a
+magnificent piece of colour. But if we recall the poor ugly creature who
+has succeeded her from out of that fine effect of light, we shall have
+nothing but a hideous form invested in hideous colour.
+
+This rough diagram will be sufficient to explain my thought respecting
+the relative degree to which the art dealing with linear form, that
+dealing with colour and that dealing with light, with the medium in
+which form and colour are perceived; is each respectively bound to be
+idealistically or realistically decorative. Now painting was
+ęsthetically mature, possessed the means to achieve great beauty, at a
+time when of the three modes of representation there had as yet
+developed only those of linear form and colour; and the very possibility
+and necessity of immediately achieving all that could be achieved by
+these means delayed for a long time the development of the third mode of
+representation: the representation of objects as they appear with
+reference to the light through which they are seen. A beginning had
+indeed been made. Certain of Correggio's effects of light, even more an
+occasional manner of treating the flesh and hair, reducing both form and
+colour to a kind of vague boss and vague sheen, such as they really
+present in given effects of light, a something which we define roughly
+as eminently modern in the painting of his clustered cherubs; all this
+is certainly a beginning of the school of Velasquez. Still more so is it
+the case with Andrea del Sarto, the man of genius whom critics love to
+despatch as a mediocrity, because his art, which is art altogether for
+the eyes, and in which he innovated more than any of his contemporaries,
+does not afford any excuse for the irrelevancies of ornamental
+criticism; with him the appearance of form and colour, acted upon by
+light, the relative values of which flesh and draperies consist with
+reference to the surrounding medium, all this becomes so evident a
+preoccupation and a basis for decorative effects, as to give certain of
+his works an almost startling air of being modern. But this tendency
+comes to nothing: the men of the sixteenth century appear scarcely to
+have perceived wherein lay the true excellence of this "Andrea senza
+errori," deeming him essentially the artist of linear perfection; while
+the innovations of Correggio in the way of showing the relations of
+flesh tones and light ended in the mere coarse gala illuminations in
+which his successors made their seraphs plunge and sprawl. There was too
+much to be done, good and bad, in the way of mere linear form and mere
+colour; and as art of mere linear form and colour, indifferent of all
+else, did the art of the Italian Renaissance run to seed.
+
+I said at the beginning of this paper that the degree to which any art
+is strictly idealistic, can be measured by the terms which it will make
+with portrait. For as portrait is due to the desire to represent a
+person quite apart from that person affording material for decoration,
+it is evident that only the art which can call in the assistance of
+decorative materials, independent of the represented individual, can
+possibly make a beautiful picture out of an ugly man; while the art
+which deals only with such visible peculiarities as are inherent in the
+individual, has no kind of outlet, is cornered, and can make of a
+repulsive original only a repulsive picture. The analogy to this we have
+already noticed in sculpture: antique sculpture, considering only the
+linear bosses which existed equally in the living man and in the statue,
+could not afford to represent plain people; while Renaissance sculpture,
+extracting a large amount of beauty out of combinations of surface and
+light, was able, as long as it could arrange such an artificial
+combination, to dispense with great perfection in the model. Nay, if we
+except Renaissance statuary as a kind of separate art, we may say that
+this independence of the object portrayed is a kind of analytic test,
+enabling us to judge at a glance, and by the degree of independence from
+the model, the degree to which any art is removed from the mere line and
+boss of antique sculpture. In the statue standing free in any light that
+may chance to come, every form must be beautiful from every point; but
+in proportion as the new elements of painting enter, in proportion as
+the actual linear form and boss is marked and helped out by grouping,
+colour, and light and shade, does the actual perfection of the model
+become less important; until, under the reign of light as the chief
+factor, it becomes altogether indifferent. In this fact lies the only
+rational foundation for the notion, made popular by Hegel, that painting
+is an art in which beauty is of much less account than in sculpture;
+failing to understand that the sum total of beauty remained the same,
+whether dependent upon the concentration of a single element or obtained
+by the co-operation of several consequently less singly important
+elements.
+
+But to return to the question of portrait art. From what we have seen,
+it is clear that art which requires perfection of form will be reduced
+to ugliness if cramped in the obtaining of such perfection, whereas art
+which can obtain beauty by other means will still have a chance when
+reduced to imitate ugly object? Hence it is that while the realistically
+decorative art of the seventeenth century can make actually beautiful
+things of the portraits of ugly people, the idealistically decorative
+art of the Renaissance produces portraits which are cruelly ugly in
+proportion as the art is purely idealistic. Yet even in idealism there
+are degrees: the more the art is confined to mere linear form, to the
+exclusion of colour, the uglier will be the portraits. With Michael
+Angelo the difficulty was simplified to impossibility: he could not
+paint portrait at all; and in his sculptured portraits of the two
+Medicean dukes at S. Lorenzo he evaded all attempt at likeness, making
+those two men into scarcely more than two architectural monsters,
+half-human cousins of the fantastic creatures who keep watch on the
+belfries and gurgoyles of a Gothic cathedral. It is almost impossible to
+think of Michael Angelo attempting portrait: the man's genius cannot be
+constrained to it, and what ought to be mere ugliness would come out
+idealized into grandiose monstrosity. Men like Titian and Tintoret are
+at the other end of the scale of ideal decoration: they are bordering
+upon the domain of realism. Hence they can raise into interest, by the
+mere power of colour, many an insignificant type; yet even they are
+incapable of dealing with absolute ugliness, with absence of fine
+colour, or, if they do deal with it, there is an immediate improvement
+upon the model, and the appearance of truthfulness goes. Between the
+absolute incapacity for dealing with ugliness of Michael Angelo, and the
+power of compromising with it of Titian and Tintoret, Raphael stands
+half-way: he can call in the assistance of colour just sufficiently to
+create a setting of carefully harmonized draperies and accessories,
+beautiful enough to allow of his filling it up with the most cruelly
+ugly likeness which any painter ever painted. Far too much has been
+written about Raphael in general, but not half enough about Raphael as a
+portrait-painter; for by the side of the eclectic idealist, who combined
+and balanced beauty almost into insipidity, is the most terribly,
+inflexibly veracious portrait-painter that ever was. Compared with those
+sternly straightforward portraits of his Florentine and Roman time,
+where ugliness and baseness are never attenuated by one tittle, and
+alloyed nobility or amiability, as with his finer models, like the two
+Donis, husband and wife, and Bibbiena, is never purified of its
+troubling element; compared with them the Venetian portraits are mere
+insincere, enormously idealized pieces of colour-harmony; nay, the
+portraits of Velasquez are mere hints--given rapidly by a sickened
+painter striving to make those scrofulous Hapsburgs no longer mere men,
+but keynotes of harmonies of light--of what the people really are. For
+Velasquez seems to show us the temperament, the potentiality of his
+people, and to leave us, with a kind of dignified and melancholy silence
+as to all further, to find out what life, what feelings and actions,
+such a temperament implies. But Raphael shows us all: the temperament
+and the character, the real active creature, with all the marks of his
+present temper and habits, with all the indications of his immediate
+actions upon him: completely without humour or bitterness, without the
+smallest tendency to twist the reality into caricature or monstrosity,
+nay, perhaps without much psychologic analysis to tell him the exact
+meaning of what he is painting, going straight to the point, and utterly
+ruthless from sheer absence of all alternative of doing otherwise than
+he does. There is nothing more cruelly realistic in the world, cruel not
+only to the base originals but to the feelings of the spectator, than
+the harmony of villainies, of various combinations of black and hog-like
+bestiality, and fox and wolf-like cunning and ferocity with wicked human
+thought and self-command, which Raphael has enshrined in that splendid
+harmony of scarlet silk and crimson satin, and purple velvet and dull
+white brocade, as the portraits of Leo X. and his cardinals Rossi and
+Dei Medici.
+
+The idealistic painter, accustomed to rely upon the intrinsic beauty
+which he has hitherto been able to select or create; accustomed also to
+think of form as something quite independent of the medium through which
+it is seen, scarcely conscious of the existence of light and air in his
+habit of concentrating all attention upon a figure placed, as it were,
+in a sort of vacuum of indifference;--this idealistic artist is left
+without any resources when bid to paint an ugly man or woman. With the
+realistic artist, to whom the man or woman is utterly indifferent, to
+whom the medium in which they are seen is everything, the case Is just
+reversed: let him arrange his light, his atmospheric effect, and he will
+work into their pattern no matter what plain or repulsive wretch. To
+Velasquez the flaccid yellowish fair flesh, with its grey downy shadows,
+the limp pale drab hair, which is grey in the light and scarcely
+perceptibly blond in the shade, all this unhealthy, bloodless, feebly
+living, effete mass of humanity called Philip IV. of Spain, shivering in
+moral anęmia like some dog thorough bred into nothingness, becomes
+merely the foundation for a splendid harmony of pale tints. Again, the
+poor little baby princess, with scarce visible features, seemingly
+kneaded (but not sufficiently pinched and modelled) out of the wet ashes
+of an _auto da fč_, in her black-and-white frock (how different from the
+dresses painted by Raphael and Titian!), dingy and gloomy enough for an
+abbess or a cameriera major, this childish personification of courtly
+dreariness, certainly born on an Ash Wednesday, becomes the principal
+strands for a marvellous tissue of silvery and ashy light, tinged
+yellowish in the hair, bluish in the eyes and downy cheeks, pale red in
+the lips and the rose in the hair; something to match which in beauty
+you must think of some rarely seen veined and jaspered rainy twilight,
+or opal-tinted hazy winter morning. Ugliness, nay, repulsiveness,
+vanish, subdued into beauty, even as noxious gases may be subdued into
+health-giving substances by some cunning chemist. The difference between
+such portraits as these and the portraits by Raphael does not however
+consist merely in the beauty: there is also the fact that if you take
+one of Velasquez's portraits out of their frame, reconstitute the living
+individual, and bid him walk forth in whatsoever light may fall upon
+him, you will have something infinitely different from the portrait, and
+of which your only distinct feeling will be that a fine portrait might
+be made of the creature; whereas it is a matter of complete indifference
+whether you see Raphael's Leo X. in the flesh or in his gilded frame.
+
+Whatever may fairly be said respecting the relative value of idealistic
+and realistic decorative art is really also connected with this latter
+point. Considering that realistic art is merely obtaining beauty by
+attention to other factors than those which preoccupy idealistic art,
+that the one fulfils what the other neglects--taking the matter from
+this point of view, it would seem as if the two kinds of arts were, so
+to speak, morally equal; and that any vague sense of mysterious
+superior dignity clinging to idealistic art was a mere shred of long
+discarded pedantry. But it is not so. For realistic art does more than
+merely bring into play powers unknown to idealistic art: it becomes, by
+the possession of these powers, utterly indifferent to the intrinsic
+value of the forms represented: it is so certain of making everything
+lovely by its harmonies of light and atmosphere that it almost prefers
+to choose inferior things for this purpose. I am thinking at present of
+a picture by I forget what Dutchman in our National Gallery,
+representing in separate compartments five besotten-looking creatures,
+symbolical of the five senses: they are ugly, brutish, with I know not
+what suggestion of detestable temperament in their bloodshot flesh and
+vermilion lips, as if the whole man were saturated with his appetite.
+Yet the Dutchman has found the means of making these degraded types into
+something which we care to look at, and to look at on account of its
+beauty; even as, in lesser degree, Rubens has always managed to make us
+feel towards his flaccid, veal-complexioned, fish-eyed women, something
+of what we feel towards the goddesses of the Parthenon; towards the
+white-robed, long-gloved ladies, with meditative face beneath their
+crimped auburn hair, of Titian.
+
+Viewed in one way, there is a kind of nobility in the very fact that
+such realistic art can make us pardon, can redeem, nay almost sanctify,
+so much. But is it right thus to pardon, redeem, and sanctify; thus to
+bring the inferior on to the level of the superior? Nay, is it not
+rather wrong to teach us to endure so much meanness and ugliness in
+creatures, on account of the nobility with which they are represented?
+Is this not vitiating our feelings, blunting our desire for the better,
+our repugnance for the worse?
+
+A great and charitable art, this realistic art of the seventeenth
+century, and to be respected for its very tenderness towards the scorned
+and castaway things of reality; but accustoming us, perhaps too much,
+like all charitable and reclaiming impulses, to certain unworthy
+contacts: in strange contrast herein with that narrow but ascetic and
+aristocratic art of idealism, which, isolated and impoverished though it
+may be, has always the dignity of its immaculate purity, of its
+unswerving judgment, of its obstinate determination to deal only with
+the best. A hard task to judge between them. But be this as it may, it
+is one of the singular richnesses of the Italian Renaissance that it
+knew of both tendencies; that while in painting it gave the equivalent
+of that rigid idealism of the Greeks which can make no compromise with
+ugliness; in sculpture it possessed the equivalent of the realism of
+Velasquez, which can make beauty out of ugly things, even as the chemist
+can make sugar out of vitriol.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO.
+
+"Le donne, i cavalieri, l' armi, gli amori."
+
+
+
+I.
+
+Throughout the tales of Charlemagne and his warriors, overtopping by far
+the crowd of paladins and knights, move two colossal mailed and vizored
+figures--Roland, whom the Italians call Orlando and the Spaniards
+Roldan, the son of Milon d'Angers and of Charlemagne's sister; and
+Renaud or Rinaldo, the lord of Montauban, and eldest of the famous four
+sons of Aymon. These are the two representative heroes, equal but
+opposed, the Achilles and Odysseus, the Siegfried and Dietrich, of the
+Carolingian epic; and in each is personified, by the unconscious genius
+of the early Middle Ages, one of the great political movements, of the
+heroic struggles, of feudalism. For there existed in feudalism two
+forces, a centripetal and a centrifugal--a force which made for the
+supremacy of the kingly overlordship, and a force which made for the
+independence of the great vassals. Hence, in the poetry which is the
+poetry of feudalism, two distinct currents of feeling, two distinct
+epics---the epic of the devoted loyalty of all the heroes of France to
+their wise and mighty emperor Charlemagne, triumphant even in
+misfortune; and the epic of the hopeless resistance against a craven and
+capricious despot Charles of the most righteous and whole-hearted among
+his feudatories: the epic of Roland, and the epic of Renaud. Of the
+first there remains to us, in its inflexible and iron solemnity, an
+original rhymed narrative, "The Chanson de Roland," which we may read
+perhaps almost in the self-same words in which it was sung by the
+Normans of William in their night watch before the great battle. The
+centripetal force of feudalism gained the upper hand, and the song of
+the great empire, of the great deeds of loyal prowess, was consecrated
+in the feudal monarchy. The case was different with the tale of
+resistance and rebellion. The story of Renaud soon became a dangerous
+lesson for the great barons; it fell from the hands of the nobles to
+those of humbler folk; and it is preserved to us no longer in medięval
+verse, but in a prose version, doubtless of the fifteenth century, under
+the name, familiar on the stalls of village fairs, of "The Quatre Fils
+Aymon." But, as Renaud is the equal of Roland, so is this humble prose
+tale nevertheless the equal of the great song of Roncevaux; and even
+now, it would be a difficult task to decide which were the grander, the
+tale of loyalty or the tale of resistance.
+
+In each of these tales,"The Chanson de Roland" and "The Quatre Fils
+Aymon," there is contained a picture of its respective hero, which sums
+up, as it were, the whole noble character of the book; and which, the
+picture of the dying Roland and the picture of the dying Renaud, I would
+fain bring before you before speaking of the other Roland and the other
+Renaud, the Orlando of Ariosto and the Rinaldo of Boiardo. The traitor
+Ganelon has enabled King Marsile to overtake with all his heathenness
+the rear-guard of Charlemagne between the granite walls of Roncevaux;
+the Franks have been massacred, but the Saracens have been routed;
+Roland has at last ceded to the prayers of Oliver and of Archbishop
+Turpin; three times has he put to his mouth his oliphant and blown a
+blast to call back Charlemagne to vengeance, till the blood has foamed
+round his lips and his temple has burst. Oliver is dead, the archbishop
+is dying, Roland himself is slowly bleeding to death. He goes down into
+the defile, heaped with corpses, and seeks for the bodies of the
+principal paladins, Ivon and Ivaire, the Gascon Engelier, Gérier and
+Gérin, Bérenger and Otho, Anseis and Salamon, and the old Gerard of
+Rousillon; and one by one drags them to where the archbishop lies dying.
+And then, when to these knights Roland has at last added his own beloved
+comrade Oliver, he bids the archbishop bless all the dead, before he die
+himself. Then, when he has reverently crossed Turpin's beautiful
+priestly hands over his breast, he goes forth to shatter his sword
+Durendal against the rocks; but the good sword has cut the rock without
+shivering; and the coldness of death steals, over Roland. He stretches
+himself upon a hillock looking towards Spain, and prays for the
+forgiveness of his sins; then, with Durendal and his ivory horn by his
+side, he stretches out the glove of his right hand to God. "He has
+stretched forth to God the glove of his right hand; St. Gabriel has
+received it... Then his head has sunk on his arm; he has gone, with
+clasped hands, to his end. God sends him one of his cherubim and St.
+Michael of Peril. St. Gabriel has come with them. They carry the soul of
+the Count: up to paradise."
+
+More solitary, and solemn and sad even, is the end of the other hero, of
+the great rebel Renaud of Montauban. At length, after a lifetime wasted
+in fruitless, attempts to resist the iniquity of the emperor, to baffle
+his power, to shame him by magnanimity into, justice, the four sons of
+Aymon, who have given up their youth, their manhood, the dearest things
+to their heart, respect to their father and loyalty to their sovereign,
+rather than countenance the injustice of Charlemagne to their kinsman,
+have at last obtained to be pardoned; to be pardoned, they, heroes, by
+this, dastardly tyrant, and to quietly sink, broken-hearted into
+nothingness. The eldest, Renaud, returning from his exile and the Holy
+Land, finds that his wife Clarisse has pined for him and died; and
+then, putting away his armour from him, and dressing in a pilgrim's
+frock made of the purple serge of the dead lady's robe, he goes forth to
+wander through the world; not very old in years, but broken-spirited; at
+peace, but in solitude of heart. And one evening he arrives at Cologne.
+We can imagine the old knight, only half aware of the sunshine of the
+evening, the noise of the streets, the looks of the crowd, the great
+minster rising half-finished in the midst of the town by the Rhine, the
+cries and noise and chipping of the masons; unconscious of all this,
+half away: with his brothers hiding in the Ardennes, living on roots and
+berries, at bay before Charlemagne; or wandering ragged and famishing
+through France; with King Yon brilliant at Toulouse, seeing perhaps for
+the first time his bride Clarisse, or the towers of Montauban rising
+under the workmen's hands; thinking perhaps of the frightful siege, when
+all, all had been eaten in the fortress, and his children Aymonnet and
+Yonnet, all thin and white, knelt down and begged him to slaughter his
+horse Bayard that they might eat; perhaps of that journey, when he and
+his brothers, all in red-furred robes with roses in their hands, rode
+prisoners of King Charles across the plain of Vaucouleurs; perhaps of
+when he galloped up to the gallows at Montfaucon, and cut loose his
+brother Richard; or of that daring ride to Paris, where he and his horse
+won the race, snatched the prize from before Charlemagne and sped off
+crying out that the winner was Renaud of Montauban; or, perhaps, seeing
+once more the sad, sweet face of the Lady Clarisse, when she had burned
+all her precious stuffs and tires in the castle-yard, and lay dead
+without him to kiss her cold mouth; of seeing once more his good horse
+Bayard, when he kissed him in his stall before giving him to be killed
+by Charlemagne. Thinking of all that past, seeing it all within his
+mind, and seeing but little of the present; as, in the low yellow light,
+he helped, for his bread, the workmen to heave the great beams, to carry
+the great stones of the cathedral, to split the huge marble masses while
+they stared in astonished envy; as he sat, unconscious of their
+mutterings, eating his dry bread and porridge in the building docks by
+the river. And then, when wearied, he had sunk to sleep in the hay-loft,
+dreaming perchance that all this evil life was but a dream and the
+awakening therefrom to happiness and strength; the jealous workmen came
+and killed him with their base tools, and cast him into the Rhine. They
+say that the huge body floated on the water, surrounded by a great halo;
+and that when the men of the banks, seeing this, reverently fished it
+out, they found that the noble corpse was untouched by decay, and still
+surrounded by a light of glory. And thus, it seems to me, this Renaud,
+this rebel baron of whose reality we know nothing, has floated
+surrounded by a halo of poetry down the black flood of the Middle Ages
+(in which so much has sunk); and when we look upon his face, and see
+its beauty and strength and solemness, we feel, like the people of the
+Rhine bank, inclined to weep, and to say of this mysterious corpse,
+"Surely this is some great saint."
+
+Of each of these heroes thus shown us by the Middle Ages, the Italian
+Renaissance also, by the hand of two of her greatest poets, has given us
+a picture. And first, of Roland. Of him, of Count Orlando, we are told
+by Messer Lodovico Ariosto, that in consequence of his having
+discovered, in a certain pleasant grotto among the ferns and maidenhair,
+words graven on the rock (interrupted, doubtless, by the lover's kisses)
+which revealed that the Princess Angelica of Cathay had disdained him
+for Medoro, the fair-haired page of the King of the Moors; Count Orlando
+went straightway out of his mind, and hanging up his armour and
+stripping off his clothes, galloped about on his bare-backed horse,
+slaughtering cows and sheep instead of Saracens; until it pleased God,
+moved by the danger of Christendom and the prayers of Charlemagne, to
+permit Astolfo to ride on the hippogriffs back up to the moon, and bring
+back thence the wits of the great paladin contained in a small phial. We
+all know that merry tale. What the Renaissance has to say of Renaud of
+Montauban is even stranger and more fantastic. One day, says Matteo
+Boiardo, in the fifteenth canto of the second part of his "Orlando
+Innamorato," as Rinaldo of Montalbano, the contemner of love, was riding
+in the Ardennes, he came to a clearing in the forest, where, close to
+the fountain of Merlin, a wonderful sight met his eyes. On a flowery
+meadow were dancing three naked damsels, and singing with them danced
+also a naked youth, dark of eyes and fair of hair, the first down on his
+lips, so that some might have said it was and others that it was not
+there. On Rinaldo's approach they broke through their singing and
+dancing, and rushed upon him, pelting him with roses and hyacinths and
+violets from their baskets, and beating him with great sheaves of
+lilies, which burnt like flames through the plates of his armour to the
+very marrow of his bones. Then when they had dragged him, tied with
+garlands, by the feet round and round the meadow; wings, eyed not with
+the eyes of a peacock but with the eyes of lovely damsels, suddenly
+sprouted out of their shoulders, and they flew off, leaving the poor
+baron, bruised on the grass, to meditate upon the vanity of all future
+resistance to love.
+
+Such are the things which the Middle Ages and the Renaissance found to
+tell us of the two great heroes of Carolingian poetry. And the
+explanation of how it came to pass, that for the Roland of the song of
+Roncevaux was substituted the Orlando of Ariosto, and for the Renaud of
+"The Quatre Fils Aymon" the Rinaldo of Matteo Boiardo--means simply that
+which I desire here to study: the metamorphoses of medięval romance
+stuffs, and, more especially, the vicissitudes of the cycle of
+Charlemagne.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+We are apt to think of the Middle Ages as if they were the
+companion-piece to Antiquity; but no such ideal correspondence exists
+between the two periods. Antiquity is all of a piece, and the Middle
+Ages, on the contrary, are heterogeneous and chaotic. For Antiquity is
+the steady and uniform development of civilization in one direction and
+with one meaning; there are great differences between its various
+epochs, but they are as the differences between the budding, the
+blossoming, and the fading stages of one plant: life varies, but is one.
+The Middle Ages, on the other hand, are a series of false starts, of
+interruptions and of new departures; a perpetual confusion. For, if we
+think over them, we shall see that these centuries called medięval are
+occupied by the effort of one people, or one generation, to put to
+rights and settle down among as much as it can save of the civilization
+of Antiquity. And the sudden overwhelming of this people or this
+generation by another, which puts all the elaborate arrangements into
+disarray, adds to the ruins of Antiquity the ruins of more recent times;
+and then this destroying generation tries to put things straight, to
+settle down, and is in its turn interrupted by the advent of some new
+comer who begins the game afresh.
+
+As it is with peoples, so also is it with ideas; scarcely has a scheme
+of life or of philosophy or of art taken shape and consistence before,
+from out of the inexhaustible chaos of medięval thought and feeling,
+there issue new necessities, new aspirations, which put into confusion
+all previous ones. The Middle Ages were like some financial crisis: a
+little time, a little credit, money will fructify, wealth will reappear,
+the difficult moment will be tided over; and so with civilization. But
+unfortunately the wealth of ideas began to accumulate in the storehouse
+only just long enough to bring down a rout of creditors, people who
+rifled the bank, and went home to consume or invest their money in order
+to be succeeded by others. Hence, in the matter of civilization, the
+Middle Ages ended in an extraordinary slow ruin, a bankruptcy like that
+which overtook France before '89, and from which, as France was restored
+by the bold seizure and breaking up of property of the revolution, the
+world was restored by the bold breaking of feudal and spiritual
+mortmain, the restoring of wasted energies to utility, of that great
+double revolution, the Renaissance and the Reformation. Be this as it
+may, mankind throughout the Middle Ages appears to have been in a
+chronic condition of packing up and unpacking, and packing up again; one
+after another a nation, a race, a philosophy, a political system came to
+the front and was pushed back again into limbo: Germans and Kelts and
+Latins, French civilization of the day of Abélard, Provenēal
+civilization of the days of the Raymonds, brilliant and evanescent
+Hohenstauffen supremacy, papacy at Canossa and at Avignon, Templars
+triumphant and Templars persecuted; scholasticism, mysticism, feudalism,
+democracy, communism: influences all these perpetually rising up and
+being trodden down, till they all rotted away in the great stagnation of
+the fifteenth century; and only in one part of the world, where the
+conflict was more speedily ended, where one set of tendencies early
+triumphed, where stability was temporarily obtained, in Italy alone did
+civilization continue to be nurtured and developed for the benefit of
+all mankind. In such a state of affairs only such things could flourish
+and mature as were safe from what I have called, for want of a better
+expression, the perpetual unpacking and repacking, the perpetual being
+on the move, of the Middle Ages; and among such things foremost was art,
+the essential art of the times, architecture, which, belonging to the
+small towns, to the infinite minority of the democracy, who worked and
+made money and let the great changes pass over their heads, thrived
+almost as something too insignificant for notice. But it was different
+with literature. Cathedrals once built cannot so easily be changed; new
+peoples, new ideas, must accept them. But poetry--the thing which every
+nation insists upon having to suit its own taste, the thing which every
+nation and every generation carries about with it hither and thither,
+the thing which can be altered to suit every passing whim--poetry was,
+of all the fluctuating things of the Middle Ages, perhaps the most
+fluctuating. And fluctuating also because, as none of these various
+nations, tendencies, aspirations, dominated sufficiently long to produce
+any highly organized art, there remained no standard works, nothing
+recognizedly perfect, which would be kept for its perfection and gather
+round it imitations, so as to form the nucleus of any homogeneous
+tradition. The Middle Ages, so full of fashions in literary matters,
+possessed no classics; the minnesingers knew nothing of the stern old
+Teutonic war songs; the meistersängers had forgotten the minnesingers;
+the trouvčres and troubadours knew nothing of "The Chanson de Roland,"
+and Villon knew nothing of them; only in Italy, where the Middle Ages
+came to an end and the Renaissance began with the Lombard league, was
+there established a tradition of excellence, with men like Dante,
+Petrarch, and Boccaccio, handed down from generation to generation; even
+as, while in the north there came about the strange modification which
+substituted the French of Rabelais for the French of Chrestien de
+Troyes, the German of Luther for the German of Wolfram von Eschenbach,
+the Italian language, from Ciullo d'Alcamo almost to Boiardo and Lorenzo
+dei Medici, remained virtually identical. The result of this, which I
+may call the heterogeneousness and instability of the Middle Ages was
+that not merely literary forms were for ever arising and being
+superseded, but literary subject matter was continually undergoing a
+process of transformation. While in Antiquity the great epic and tragic
+stuffs remained well-nigh unaltered, and the stories of Valerius Flaccus
+and Apollonius Rhodius were merely the stories which had been current
+since the days of Homer, during the course of the Middle Ages every epic
+cycle, and every tale belonging thereunto, was gradually adulterated,
+mingled with, swamped by, some other cycle or tale; nay, rather, every
+other, cycle and every other tale, the older ones trying to save their
+popularity by admixture with the more recent, till at last all mythical
+significance, all historical meaning, all national character, all
+psychological reality, were lost in the chaotic result. And meanwhile,
+in the absence of any stable language, of any durable literary fashion,
+the Middle Ages were unable to give to these epic stuffs, at any one
+period of their life of metamorphose, a form sufficiently artistically
+valuable to secure anything beyond momentary vogue, to secure for them
+the immortality of the great Greek tales of adventure and warfare and
+love. Thus it came about that the epic cycle of Charlemagne, after
+supplanting in men's minds the grand sagas of the pagan North, was
+itself supplanted by the Arthurian cycle; that the Frankish stories
+absorbed the wholly discrepant elements of their more fortunate Keltic
+rivals; that both cycles, having lost all character through fusion and
+through obliteration by time, became more meaningless generation by
+generation and year by year, until when the Middle Ages had come to an
+end, and the great poets of the Renaissance were ready to give this old
+medięval epic stuff a definitive and durable artistic shape, there came
+to the hands of Boiardo and Ariosto, of Tasso and Spenser, only a
+strange, trumpery material, muddled by jongleurs and romance writers,
+and reduced to mere fairy stuff, taken seriously only by Don Quixote,
+and by the authors of the volumes of insane twaddle called after Amadis
+of Gaul and all his kinsmen.
+
+Such a condition of perpetual change as explains, in my belief, why the
+medięval epic subjects were wanted, can be made clear only by examples.
+I shall therefore try to show the transformations which were undergone
+by one or two principal medięval epic subjects as a result of a mixture
+with other epic cycles; of a gradual adaptation to a new state of
+civilization; and finally of their gradual separation from all kind of
+reality and real interests.
+
+First of all, let us look at the epic cycle, which, although known to us
+only in poems no older than those of the trouvčres and minnesingers who
+sang of Charlemagne and Arthur, is in reality far more ancient, and on
+account of its antiquity and its consequent disconnection with medięval
+religious and political interests, was thrown aside even by the nations
+to which it belonged, by the Scandinavians who took to writing sagas
+about the wars of Charlemagne against Saracens, and by the Germans who
+preferred to hear the adventures of Welsh and Briton, Launcelots and
+Tristrams. I am alluding to the stories connected with the family and
+life of the hero called Sigurd by the Scandinavians, and Siegfried by
+the Germans. Of these we possess a Norse version called the Volsunga
+Saga, magnificently done into English by Mr. William Morris; which,
+although written down at the end of the twelfth century, in the very
+time therefore of Chrestien de Troyes, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and
+Gottfried von Strassburg, and subsequently to the presumed writing of
+"The Chanson de Roland" and the Nibelungenlied, shows us in reality the
+product of a people, the distant Scandinavians of Iceland, who were five
+or six hundred years behind the French, Germans, and English of the
+twelfth century. In the Volsunga Saga, neither Christianity nor
+feudalism is yet dreamed of; and it is for this reason that I wish to
+compare it with the Nibelungenlied, in order to show how enormously the
+old epic stuff was altered by the new civilization. The whole social and
+moral condition of the two versions is different. In the old
+Scandinavian civilization, where the Viking is surrounded and served by
+clansmen, the feeling of blood relationship is the strongest in people's
+hearts; strangely and fearfully shown in the introductory tale of Signy,
+who, in order to avenge her father Volsung, killed by her husband,
+murders her children by the latter, and then, altered in face by magic
+arts, goes forth to the woods to her brother Sigmund, that,
+un-wittingly, he may beget with her the only man fit to avenge the
+Volsungs. And then she sends the boy Sinfjotli to the man he has
+hitherto considered merely as his uncle, bidding the latter kill him if
+he prove unworthy of his incestuous birth, or train him to vengeance.
+The three together murder the husband and legitimate children of Signy,
+and set the palace on fire; which, being done, the queen, having
+accomplished her duty to her kin, accomplishes that towards her husband,
+and calmly returns to die in the burning hall. Here (and apparently
+again in the case of the children of Sigurd and Brynhilt) incest becomes
+a family virtue. This being the frightful preponderance of the feeling
+of blood relationship, it is quite natural that the Scandinavian
+Chriemhilt (called in the Volsunga Saga, Gudrun) should not resent the
+murder of her husband Siegfried or Sigurd by her brothers at the
+instigation of the jealous Brynhilt (who has in a manner been Sigurd's
+wife before he made her over to Chriemhilt's eldest brother); and that,
+so far from seeking any revenge against them, she should, when her second
+husband Atli sends for her brothers in order to rob and murder them,
+first vainly warn them of the plot, and then, when they have been
+massacred, kill Atli and her children by him in order to avenge her
+brothers. The slackening of the tribal feeling, the idea of fidelity in
+love and sanctity of marriage belonging to Christianity and feudalism,
+rendered such a story unintelligible to the Germans of the Othos and
+Henrys. In the Nibelungenlied, the whole story of the massacre of the
+brothers is changed. Chriemhilt never forgives the murder of Siegfried,
+and it is not Etzel--Atli for the sake of plunder, but she herself for
+the sake of revenge, who decoys her brothers and murders them; it is she
+who with her own hand cuts off the head of Gunther to expiate his murder
+of Siegfried. To our feelings, more akin to those of the feudal
+Christians of Franconia than to those of the tribal Scandinavians of the
+Edda, the second version is far more intelligible and interesting--the
+story of this once gentle and loving Chriemhilt, turned by the murder of
+her beloved into a fury, and plotting to avenge his death by the death
+of all his kinsfolk, must be much grander and more pathetic than the
+story of this strange Gudrun, who sits down patiently beneath the injury
+done to her by her brothers, but savagely avenges them on her new
+husband, and her own and his innocent children; to us this persistence
+of tribal feeling, destroying all indignation and love, is merely
+unnatural, confusing, and repulsive. But this alteration for the better
+in one of the incidents of the tale is a mere fluke; and the whole main
+plot of the originally central figures are completely obliterated by the
+new state of civilization, and rendered merely trivial and grotesque. In
+the Volsunga Saga Sigurd, overcome by enchantments, has forgotten his
+wife (or mistress, a vague mythical relationship); and, with all sense
+of the past obliterated, has made her over to the brother of his new
+wife Gudrun; and Brynhilt kills her faithless love to dissolve the
+second marriage and be reunited with him in death. In the Nibelungenlied
+Siegfried, although the flower of knighthood, conquers by foul play the
+Amazon Brunhilt to reward Gunther for the hand of his sister; nay, in a
+comic and loathsome scene he forces her into the embraces of the craven
+Gunther; and then he gets killed by Brunhilt's machinations; when, after
+most unqueenly bickerings, the proud Amazon is brutally told by
+Siegfried's wife of the dirty trick which has given her to Gunther.
+After this, it is impossible to realize, when Siegfried is murdered and
+all our sympathies called on to his side, the utterly out-of-character,
+blackguardly behaviour which has brought the hero to his death.
+Similarly the conception of the character and position of Brynhilt is
+entirely disfigured and rendered inane in the Nibelungenlied: of that
+superb demi-goddess of the Scandinavians, burnt on the pyre with her
+falcons and dogs and horses and slaves, by the side of the demi-god
+Sigurd, whom she has loved and killed, lest the door of Valhalla,
+swinging after him, should shut her out from his presence; of her there
+remains in the German medięval poem only a virago (more like the
+giantesses of the Amadis romances) enraged at having been defeated and
+grotesquely and grossly pummelled into wedlock by a man not her husband,
+and then slanged like a fishwife by her envious sister-in-law.
+
+The old, consistent, grandly tragic tale of the mysterious incests and
+revenges of a race of demi-gods has lost its sense, its point in the
+attempt to arrange it to suit Christian and feudal ideas. The really
+fine portions of the Nibelungenlied are exactly those which have no real
+connection with the original story, gratuitous additions by medięval
+poets. The delicately indicated falling in love of Siegfried and
+Chriemhilt, the struggles of Markgraf Rüdger between obedience to his
+feudal superior and fidelity towards his friends and guests; and, above
+all, the canto of the death of Siegfried. This last is different,
+intensely different, from the rugged and dreary monotony of the rest;
+this most poetical, almost Spenserian or Ariostesque realization of the
+scene; this beautiful picture (though worked with the needle of the
+arras-worker rather than with pencil or brush) of the wood, the hunt,
+the solitary fountain in the Odenwald, where, with his spear leaned
+against the lime-tree, Siegfried was struck down into the clover and
+flowers, and writhed with Hagen's steel through his back. This canto is
+certainly interpolated by some first-rate poet, at least a Gottfried or
+a Walther, to whom that passage of the savage old droning song of death
+had suggested a piece of new art; it is like the fragments of
+exquisitely chiselled leafage and figures which you sometimes find
+encrusted--by whom? wherefore?--quite isolated in the midst of the rough
+and lichen-stained stones of some rude Lombard church. All the rest of
+the Nibelungenlied gives an impression of effeteness; there is no
+definiteness of idea such as that of the Volsunga Saga; the battles are
+mere vague slaughter, no action, no realized movement, or (excepting
+Rüdger) no realized motive of conduct. Shape and colour would seem to
+have been obliterated by repetition and alteration. Yet even these
+alterations could not make the tale of Siegfried survive among the
+Germans of the Middle Ages; nay, the more the alterations the less the
+interest; the want of consistency and colour due to rearrangement merely
+accelerated the throwing aside of a subject which, dating from pagan and
+tribal times, had become repugnant to the new generations. All the
+mutilations in the world could not make the old Scandinavian tales of
+betrayed trust, of revenge and triumphant bloodshed, at all sympathetic
+to men whose religious and social ideals were those of forgiveness and
+fidelity; even stripped of its incestuous mysteries and of its fearful
+tribal love, the tale of Sigurd and Brynhilt, reduced to the tale of
+Chriemhilt's revenge, was unpalatable: no more attempts were made at
+re-writing it, and the poems of Walther, of Gottfried, of Wolfram, of
+Ulrich, and of Tannhäuser, full as they are of references to stories of
+the Carolingian and Arthurian cycles, nay, to Antique and Oriental
+tales, contain no allusion to the personages of the Nibelungenlied. The
+old epic of the Gothic races had been pushed aside by the triumphant
+epic of the obscure and conquered Kelts.
+
+There are few phenomena in the history of ideas and forms more singular
+than that of the sudden conquest of the poetry of dominant or distant
+nations by the poetic subjects of a comparatively small race, sheared of
+all political importance, restricted to a trifling territory, and
+well-nigh deprived of their language; and of this there can be found no
+more striking example than the sudden ousting of the Carolingian epic by
+the cycle of Arthur.
+
+The Kelts of Britain and Ireland possessed an epic cycle of their own,
+which came to notice only when they were dispossessed of their last
+strongholds by Saxons and Normans, and which immediately spread with
+astounding rapidity all over Europe. The vanquished race became
+fashionable; themselves, their art and their poetry, began to be sought
+for as a precious and war-enhanced loot. The heroic tales of the Kelts
+were transcribed in Welsh, and translated into Latin, by order of the
+Norman and Angevine kings, glad, it would seem, to oppose the Old Briton
+to the Saxon element. The Keltic songs were carried all over France by
+Breton bards, to whose music and rhymes, with only a general idea of the
+subjects, the neo-Latin-speaking Franks listened with the sort of stolid
+satisfaction with which English or Germans of a hundred years ago
+listened to Italians singing Metastasio's verses. But soon the songs and
+tales were translated; and French poets imitated in their language,
+northern and southern, the graceful metres of the Keltic lays, and
+altered and arranged their subjects. So that, in a very short time,
+France, and through it Germany, was inundated with Keltic stories. This
+triumph of the vanquished race was not without reason. The Kelts, early
+civilized by Rome and Christianity, had a set of stories and a set of
+heroes extremely in accordance with medięval ideas, and requiring but
+very little alteration. The considerable age of their civilization had
+long obliterated all traces of pagan and tribal feeling in their tales.
+Their heroes, originally, like those of all other people, divinities
+intimately connected with natural phenomena, had long lost all cosmic
+characteristics, long ceased to be gods, and, manipulated by the fancy
+of a race whose greatness was quite a thing of the past, had become a
+sort of golden age ideals--the men of a distant period of glory, which
+was adorned with every kind of perfection, till it became as unreal as
+fairyland. Fairyland, in good sooth, was this country of the Keltic
+tales; and there is a sort of symbolical significance in the fact of its
+lawgiver Merlin, and its emperor Arthur, being both of them not dead,
+like Sigurd, like Dietrich, like Charlemagne and Roland, but lying in
+enchanted sleep. Long inaction and the day-dreaming of idleness had
+refined and idealized the heroes of this Keltic race--a race of
+brilliant fancy and almost southern mobility, and softened for a long
+time by contact with Roman colonists and Christian priests. They were
+not the brutal combatants of an active fighting age, like the heroes of
+the Edda and of the Carolingian cycles; nor had they any particular
+military work to do, belonging as they did to a people huddled away into
+inactivity. Their sole occupation was to extend abroad that ideal
+happiness which reigned in the ideal court of Arthur; to go forth on the
+loose and see what ill-conditioned folk there might yet be who required
+being subdued or taught manners in the happy kingdom, which the poor
+insignificant Kelts connected with some princelet of theirs who
+centuries before may have momentarily repelled the pagan Saxons. Hence
+in the Keltic stories, such as they exist in the versions previous to
+the conquest by the Norman kings, and previous also to any
+communications with other peoples, the distinct beginning of what was
+later to be called knight-errantry; of heroes, creations of an inactive
+nation, having no special military duties, going forth to do what good
+they may at random, unforced by any necessity, and following a mere
+ęsthetico-romantic plan of perfecting themselves by deeds of valour to
+become more worthy of their God, their King, and their Lady: religion,
+loyalty, and love, all three of them mere ęsthetic abstractions,
+becoming the goal of an essentially ęsthetic, unpractical system of
+self-improvement, such as was utterly incompatible with any real and
+serious business in life. Idle poetic fancies of an inert people, the
+Knights of the Round Table have no mission save that of being
+poetically perfect. Such was the spirit of Keltic poetry; and, as it
+happened, this spirit satisfied the imaginative wants of medięval
+society just at the moment when political events diffused in other
+countries the knowledge of the Arthurian legends. The old Teutonic tales
+of Sigurd, Gudrun, and Dietrich, had long ceased to appeal, in their
+mutilated and obliterated condition, to a society to whom tribal feeling
+and pagan heroism were odious, and whose religion distinctly reproved
+revenge. These semi-mythological tales had been replaced by another
+cycle: the purely realistic epic, which had arisen during the struggles
+between the Christian west against the pagan north-east and the
+Mohammedan south, and which, originating in the short battle-songs
+narrating the exploits of the predecessors and help-mates of
+Charlemagne, had constituted itself into large narratives of which the
+"Song of Roland" represents artistic culmination. These narratives of
+mere military exploits, of the battles of a strong feudal aristocracy
+animated by feudal loyalty and half-religious, half-patriotic fury
+against invading heathenness, had perfectly satisfied the men of the
+earliest Middle Ages, of the times when feudalism was being established
+and the church being reformed; when the strong military princelets of
+the North were embarking with their barons to conquer new kingdoms in
+England and in Italy and Greece; when the whole of feudal Europe hurled
+itself against Asia in the first Crusades. But the condition of things
+soon altered: the feudal hierarchy was broken up into a number of
+semi-independent little kingdoms or principalities, struggling, with the
+assistance of industrial and mercantile classes, to become absolute
+monarchies; princes who had been mere generals became stay-at-home
+diplomatists, studious of taxation and intrigue, surrounded no longer by
+armed vassals, but by an essentially urban court, in constant
+communication with the money-making burghers. Religion, also, instead of
+being a matter of fighting with infidel invaders, turned to fantastic
+sectarianism and emotional mysticism. With the sense of futility, of
+disappointment, attendant on the later Crusades, came also a habit of
+roaming in strange countries, of isolated adventure in search of wealth
+or information, a love of the distant, the half-understood, the
+equivocal; perhaps even a hankering after a mysterious compromise
+between the religion of Europe and the religions of the East, such as
+appears to have existed among the Templars and other Franks settled in
+Asia.
+
+There was, throughout feudal society, a sort of enervated languor, a
+morbid longing for something new, now that the old had ceased to be
+possible or had proved futile; after the great excitement of the
+Crusades it was impossible to be either sedately idle or quietly active,
+even as it is with all of us during the days of weariness and
+restlessness after some long journey. To such a society the strongly
+realistic Carolingian epic had ceased to appeal: the tales of the Welsh
+and Breton bards, repeated by trouvčre and jongleur, troubadour and
+minnesinger, came as a revelation. The fatigued, disappointed, morbid,
+imaginative society of the later Crusades recognized in this fairyland
+epic of a long refined, long idle, nay, effete race, the realization of
+their own ideal: of activity unhampered by aim or organization, of
+sentiment and emotion and action quite useless and unnecessary, purely
+subservient to imaginative gratification. These Arthurs, Launcelots,
+Tristrams, Kays, and Gawains, fantastic phantoms, were also far more
+artistically malleable than the iron Rolands, Olivers, and Renauds of
+earlier days; that unknown kingdom of Britain could much more easily be
+made the impossible ideal, in longing for which squeamish and lazy minds
+might refuse all coarser reality. Moreover, those who listened to the
+tales of chivalry were different from those who had listened to the
+Carolingian stories; and, therefore, required something different. They
+were courtiers, and one half of them were women. Now the Carolingian
+tales, originally battle-songs, sung in camps and castles to mere
+soldiers, had at first possessed no female characters at all; and when
+gradually they were introduced, it was in the coarsest barrack or
+tap-room style. The Keltic tales, on the contrary, whether from national
+tradition, or rather from longer familiarity with Christian culture and
+greater idleness of life, naturally made women and women's love the
+goal of a great many adventures which an effete nation could no longer
+ascribe to patriotic movements. But this was not all. The religious
+feeling of the day was extremely inclined to mysticism, in which
+ęsthetic, erotic, and all kinds of morbid and ill-defined tendencies
+were united, which was more than anything else tinged with a
+semi-Asiatic quietism, a longing for the passive ecstasy of Nirvāna.
+This religious side of medięval life was also gratified by the Arthurian
+romances. Oddly enough, there existed an old Welsh or Breton tale about
+the boy Peredur, who from a complete simpleton became the prince of
+chivalry, and his many adventures connected with a certain mysterious
+blood-dripping lance, and a still more mysterious basin or _grail_ (an
+allusion to which is said by M. de la Villemarqué to be contained in the
+originally Keltic name of Percival), which possessed magic properties
+akin to those of the purse of Fortunatus, or the pipkin in the story of
+"Little pot, boil!" The story, whose original mythical meaning had been
+lost in the several centuries of Christianity, was very decayed and
+obscure; and the fact of the blood on the lance being that of a murdered
+kinsman of Peredur, and of the basin containing the head of the same
+person cut off by Gloucester witches, was evidently insufficient to
+account for all the mystery with which these objects were surrounded.
+The French poets of the Middle Ages, strongly imbued with Oriental
+legends brought back by the Crusaders, saw at a glance the meaning of
+the whole story: the lance was the lance with which Longinus had pierced
+the Saviour's side; the Grail was the cup which had received His blood,
+nay, it was the cup of the Last Supper. A tale about the preservation of
+these precious relics by Joseph of Arimathęa, was immediately connected
+therewith; a theory was set up (doubtless with the aid of quite
+unchristian, Oriental legends) of a kind of kingdom of the keepers of
+the Grail, of a vague half-material, half-spiritual state of bliss
+connected with the service of the Grail, which fed its knights (and here
+the Templars and their semi-oriental mysteries, for which they were
+later so frightfully misused, certainly come into play) with food which
+is at once of the body and of the soul. Thus the Keltic Peredur, bent
+upon massacring the Gloucester witches to avenge his uncle, was turned
+into a saintly knight, seeking throughout a more and more perfect life
+for the kingdom of the Grail: the Perceval of Chrestien de Troyes, the
+Parzifal of Wolfram von Eschenbach, whom later romance writers (wishing
+to connect everything more closely with Arthur's court) replaced by the
+Sir Galahad of the "Morte d'Arthur," while the guest of the Grail became
+a sort of general mission of several knights, a sort of spiritual
+crusade to whose successful champions Percival, Bors, and Galahad, the
+Middle Ages did not hesitate to add the arch-adulterer Launcelot.
+
+Thus did the Arthurian tales answer the requirements of the languid,
+dreamy, courtly, lady-serving and religiously mystic sons and grandsons
+of those earlier Crusaders whose aspirations had been expressed by the
+rough and solemn heroes of Carolingian tales. The Carolingian tales were
+thrown aside, or were kept by the noble medięval poets only on condition
+of their original meaning being completely defaced by wholesale
+admixture of the manners and adventures belonging to the Arthurian
+cycles. The paladins were forced to disport themselves in the same
+fairyland as the Knights of the Round Table; and many medięval poems the
+heroes of which, like Ogier of Denmark and Huon of Bordeaux, already
+existed in the Carolingian tales, are in reality, with their romantic
+loves, their useless adventures, their Morgana's castles and Oberon's
+horns, offshoots of the Keltic stories, which were as rich in every kind
+of supernatural (being, in fact, pagan myths turned into fairy tales) as
+the genuine Carolingian subjects, whose origin was entirely historical,
+were completely devoid of such things. Arthur and his ladies and
+knights: Guenevere, Elaine, Enid, Yseult, Launcelot, Geraint, Kay,
+Gawain, Tristram, and Percival-Galahad, were the real heroes and
+heroines of the courtly nobles and the courtly poets of this second
+phase of medięval life. The Teuton Charlemagne, Roland and Oliver were
+as completely forgotten of the poets who met in that memorable combat of
+the Wartburg, as were the Teuton Sigurd and Dietrich. And if the
+Carolingian cycle survived, however much altered, I think it must have
+been thanks to the burghers and artizans of the Netherlands and of
+Provence, to whom the bluff, matter-of-fact heroism, the simple, gross,
+but not illegitimate amours of Carolingian heroes, were more
+satisfactory than any mystic quest of the Grail, any refined adultery of
+Guenevere or Yseult.
+
+But the inevitable fate of all medięval epics awaited this triumphant
+Arthurian cycle: the fate of being obliterated by passing from one
+nation and civilization to another, long before the existence of any
+poetic art adequate to its treatment. Of this I will take as an example
+one of the medięval poems which has the greatest reputation the
+masterpiece (according to most critics, with whom I find it difficult,
+in the presence of a poet like Gottfried von Strassburg, to agree) of
+probably the most really poetical and earnest school of poetry which the
+pre-Dantesque Middle Ages possessed--the "Parzifal" of Wolfram von
+Eschenbach.
+
+The paramount impression (I cannot say the strongest, for strong
+impressions are incompatible with such work as this) left by the
+masterpiece of Wolfram von Eschenbach, is that of the most astonishing
+vagueness, fluidity, haziness, vaporousness. In reading it one looks
+back to that rudely hewn and extremely obliterated Nibelungenlied, as to
+something quite astonishingly clear, detailed and strongly marked as to
+something distinctly artistic. Indeed by the side of "Parzifal"
+everything seems artistic; Hartmann von Aue reads like Chaucer,
+"Aucassin et Nicolette" is as living as "Cymbeline," "Chevy Chase" seems
+as good as the battles of Homer. It is not a narrative, but a vague
+mooning; a knight illiterate, not merely like his fellow minnesingers,
+in the way of reading and writing, but in the sense of complete absence
+of all habit of literary form; extremely noble and pure of mind, chaste,
+gentle, with a funny, puzzled sense of humour, reminding one distantly
+of Jean Paul in his drowsy moments; a hanger-on of courts, but perfectly
+simple-hearted and childlike; very poor and easily pleased: such is, for
+good and for bad, Herr Wolfram von Eschenbach, the only real personality
+in his poem. And he narrates, in a mooning, digressive, good-natured,
+drowsy tone, with only a rare awaking of interest, a story which he has
+heard from some one else, and that some one else from a series of other
+some one elses (Chrestien de Troyes, a legendary Provenēal Chiot or
+Guyot, perhaps even the original Welsh bard); all muddled, monotonous,
+and droning; events and persons ill-defined, without any sense of the
+relative importance of anything, without clear perception of what it is
+all about, or at least without the power of keeping the matter straight
+before the reader. A story, in point of fact, which is no story at all,
+but a mere series of rambling adventures (adventures which are scarcely
+adventures, having no point or plot) of various people with not much
+connection and no individuality--Gachmuret, Parzifal, Gawain,
+Loherangrein, Anfortas, Feirefis--pale ghosts of beings, moving in a
+country of Kennaqwhere, Aquitaine, Anjou, Brittany, Wales, Spain, and
+heaven knows what wondrous Oriental places; a misty country with woods
+and towns and castles which are infinitely far apart and yet quite near
+each other; which seem to sail about like cloud castles round the only
+solid place in the book, Plimizöl, where Arthur's court, with round
+table constantly spread, is for ever established. A no place, nowhere;
+yet full of details; minute inventories of the splendid furniture of
+castles (castles where? how reached?); infinitely inferior in this
+matter even to the Nibelungenlied, where you are made to feel so vividly
+(one of the few modern and therefore clear things therein) the long,
+dreary road from Worms to Bechlarn, and thence to Etzelburg, though of
+none of them is there anything beyond a name. For the Nibelungen story
+had been localized in what to narrator and audience was a reality, the
+country in which themselves lived, where themselves might seek out the
+abbey in which Siegfried was buried, the well in the Odenwald near which
+he was stabbed; where they knew from merchant and pilgrim the road taken
+by the Nibelungs from Santen to Worms, by the Burgundians from Worms to
+Hungary. But here in "Parzifal" we are in a mere vague world of
+anywhere, the world of Keltic and Oriental romance become mere cloudland
+to the Thuringian knight. And similarly have the heroes of other
+nations, the Arthurs, Gawains, Gachmurets, of Wales and Anjou, become
+mere vague names; they have become liquified, lost all shape and local
+habitation. They are mere names, these ladies and knights of Herr
+Wolfram, names with fair pink and white faces, names magnificently
+draped in bejewelled Oriental stuffs and embossed armour; they have no
+home, no work, nothing to do. This is the most remarkable characteristic
+of "Parzifal," and what makes it so typical of the process of growing
+inane through overmuch alteration, which prevented the medięval epics
+ever turning into an Iliad or an Odyssey; this that it is essentially
+idle and all about nothing. The feudal relations strongly marked in the
+German Nibelungenlied have melted away like the distinctions of race:
+every knight is independent, not a vassal nor a captain, a Volker or
+Hagen, or Roland or Renaud followed by his men; but an isolated
+individual, without even a squire, wandering about alone through this
+hazy land of nowhere. Knight-errantry, in the time of the great Guelph
+and Ghibelline struggles, every bit as ideal as that of Spenser or
+Cervantes; and with the difference that Sir Calidore and Sir Artegal
+have an appointed task, some Blatant Beast or other nuisance to
+overcome; and that Don Quixote has the general rescuing of all the
+oppressed Princesse Micomiconas, and the destruction of all windmills,
+and the capturing of all helmets of Mambrino, and the establishing all
+over the world of the worship of Dulcinea. But these knights of Wolfram
+von Eschenbach have no more this mission than they have the
+politico-military missions, missions of a Rüdger or a Roland. They are
+all riding about at random, without any particular pagans, necromancers,
+or dragons to pursue. The very service of the Holy Grail, which is the
+main interest of the poem, consists in nothing apparently except living
+virtuously at the Castle of Montselväsche, and virtuously eating and
+drinking the victuals provided miraculously. To be admitted to this
+service, no initiation, no mission, nothing preliminary seems required.
+Parzifal himself merely wanders about vaguely, without doing any
+specified thing. The fact is that in this poem all has become purely
+ideal; ideal to the point of utter vacuity: there is no connection with
+any human business. Of all the heroes and heroines we hear that they are
+perfectly chaste, truthful, upright; and they are never put into any
+situation to test these qualities: they are never placed in the way of
+temptation, never made to fight with evil, or to decide between it and
+good. The very religion of the Holy Grail consists in doing nothing: not
+a word about relieving the poor or oppressed, of tending the sick, of
+delivering the Holy Sepulchre, of defending that great injured One,
+Christ. To be Grail Knight or even Grail King means to be exactly the
+same as before. Where in this vague dreamland of passive purity and
+heroism, of untempted chastity and untried honour, where are the earthly
+trials of Tristram, of Guenevere, of Rüdger, of Renaud? Where the moral
+struggles of the Middle Ages? Where is Godfrey, or Francis, or Dominick?
+Nowhere. All has disappeared, melted away; Christianity and Paganism
+themselves have melted away or into each other, as in the easy meeting
+of the Pagan Feirefis and the Christian Parzifal, and in the double
+marriage of Gachmuret with the Indian Belakane and the Welsh Herzeloid;
+there remains only a kind of Buddhistic Nirvāna of vague passive
+perfection, but without any renunciation; and in a world devoid of evil
+and full of excellent brocade and armour and eatables, and lovely
+maidens who dress and undress you, and chastely kiss you on the mouth; a
+world without desire, aspiration, or combat, vacantly happy and
+virtuous. A world purely ideal, divorced from all reality, unsubstantial
+like the kingdom of Gloriana, but, unlike Spenser's, quite unshadowed by
+any puritan sadness, by any sense of evil, untroubled by allegorical
+vices; cheerful, serene, filled with flowers and song of birds, but as
+unreal as the illuminated arabesques of a missal. In truth, perhaps more
+to be compared with an eighteenth century pastoral, an ideal created
+almost in opposition to reality; a dream of passiveness and liberty (as
+of light leaves blown about) as the ideal of the fiercely troubled,
+struggling, tightly fettered feudal world. The ideal, perhaps, of only
+one moment, scarcely of a whole civilization; or rather (how express my
+feeling?) an accidental combination of an instant, as of spectre vapour
+arisen from the mixture of Kelt and Teuton, of Frank and Moslem. Is it
+Christian, Pagan, Mohammedan? None of all these. A simple-looking
+vaporous chaos of incongruous, but not conflicting, elements: a poem of
+virtue without object, of knighthood without work, of religion without
+belief; in this like its central interest, the Grail: a mystery, a cup,
+a stone; a thing which heals, feeds, speaks; animate or inanimate? Stone
+of the Caaba or chalice of the Sacrament? Merely a mysterious holy of
+holies and good of goods, which does everything and nothings means
+nothing and requires nothing--is nothing.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+
+Thus was obliterated, in all its national and traditional meaning, the
+heroic cycle of Arthur; and by the same process of slow adaptation to
+new intellectual requirements which had completely wiped out of men's
+memory the heroic tales of Siegfried, which had entirely altered the
+originally realistic character of the epic of Charlemagne. But unreal
+and ideal as had become the tales of the Round Table, and disconnected
+with any national tradition, the time came when even these were not
+sufficiently independent of reality to satisfy the capricious
+imagination of the later Middle Ages. At the end of the fourteenth
+century was written, most probably in Portuguese by Vasco de Lobeira,
+the tale of "Amadis de Gaula," which was followed by some forty or fifty
+similar books telling the adventures of all the brothers, nephews,
+sons, grandsons sons, and great-grandsons, an infinite succession, of
+the original Amadis; which, translated into all languages and presently
+multiplied by the press, seem to have usurped the place of the Arthurian
+stories in feudal countries until well-nigh the middle of the sixteenth
+century; and which were succeeded by no more stories of heroes, but by
+the realistic comic novels of the type of "Lazarillo de Tormes," and the
+buffoon philosophic extravaganzas of "Gargantua." Further indeed it was
+impossible to go than did medięval idealism in the Amadises. Compared
+with them the most fairy-tale-like Arthurian stories are perfect
+historical documents. There remains no longer any connection whatsoever
+with reality, historical or geographical: the whole world seems to have
+been expeditiously emptied of all its contents, to make room for
+kingdoms of Gaul, of Rome, of the Firm Island, of Sobradisa, etc., which
+are less like the Land West of the Moon and East of the Sun than they
+are like Sancho Panza's island. All real mankind, past, present, and
+future, has similarly been swept away and replaced by a miraculous race
+of Amadises, Lisvarts, Galaors, Gradasilias, Orianas, Pintiquinestras,
+Fradalons, and so forth, who flit across our vision, in company with the
+indispensable necromancers, fairies, dwarfs, giants, and duennas, like
+some huge ballet: things without character, passions, pathos; knights
+who are never wounded or killed, princesses who always end with
+marrying the right man, enchanters whose heads are always chopped off,
+foundlings who are always reinstated in their kingdom, inane paper
+puppets bespangled with impossible sentiment, tinsel and rags which are
+driven about like chaff by the wind-puffs of romance. The advent of the
+Amadises is the coming of the Kingdom of Nonsense, the sign that the
+last days of chivalric romance have come; a little more, and the
+Licentiate Alonzo Perez will take his seat in Don Quixote's library, and
+Nicholas the Barber light his faggots in the yard.
+
+But, as if in compensation of the usurpation of which they had been the
+victims, the Carolingian tales, pushed out of the way by the Arthurian
+cycle, were not destined to perish. Thrown aside with contempt by the
+upper classes, engrossed with the Round Table and the Holy Grail, the
+tales of Charlemagne and his paladins, largely adulterated with
+Arthurian elements, were apparently cherished by a lower class of
+society: burgesses, artizans, and such-like, for whom that Arthurian
+world was far too etherial and too delicately immoral; and to this
+circumstance is due the fact that the humiliated Carolingian tales
+eventually received an artistic embodiment which was not given to the
+Arthurian stories. While troubadours and minnesingers were busy with the
+court of Arthur, and grave Latinists like Rusticiano of Pisa wrote of
+Launcelot and Guenevere; the Carolingian epics seem to have been mainly
+sung about by illiterate jongleurs, and to have busied the pens of
+prose hackwriters for the benefit of townsfolk. The free towns of the
+Netherlands and of Germany appear to have been full of this
+unfashionable literature: the Carolingian cycle had become democratic.
+And, inasmuch as it was literature no longer for knights and courtiers,
+but for artizans and shopkeepers, it went, of course, to the
+pre-eminently democratic country of the Middle Ages--Italy. This was at
+a time when Italian was not yet a recognized language, and when the men
+and women who talked in Tuscan, Lombard, or Venetian dialects, wrote in
+Latin and in French; and while Francesca and Paolo read the story of
+Launcelot most probably in good medięval _langue d'oil_, as befitted
+people of high birth; the jongleurs, who collected crowds so large as to
+bar the streets and require the interference of the Bolognese
+magistrates, sang of Roland and Oliver in a sort of _lingua Franca_ of
+French Lombard. French jongleurs singing in impossible French-Italian;
+Italian jongleurs singing in impossible French; Paduan penny-a-liners
+writing Carolingian cyclical novels in French, not of Paris, assuredly,
+but of Padua--a comical and most hideous jabber of hybrid
+languages--this was how the Carolingian stories became popular in Italy.
+Meanwhile, the day came when the romantic Arthurian tales had to
+dislodge in Italy before the invasion of the classic epic. Troy, Rome,
+and Thebes had replaced Tintagil and Cęrleon in the interest of the
+cultured classes long before the beginning of the fifteenth century;
+when Poggio, in the very midst of the classic revival, still told of the
+comically engrossed audience which surrounded the vagabonds singing of
+Orlando and Rinaldo. The effete Arthurian cycle, superseded in Spain and
+France by the Amadis romances, was speedily forgotten in Italy; but the
+Carolingian stories remained; and when Italian poetry arose once more
+after the long interregnum between Petrarch and Lorenzo dei Medici, and
+looked about for subjects, it laid its hand upon them. But when, in the
+second half of the fifteenth century, those old tales of Charlemagne
+received, after so many centuries of alterations and ephemeral
+embodiments, that artistic form which the Middle Ages had been unable to
+give them, the stories themselves, and the way in which they were
+regarded, were totally different from what they had been in the time of
+Theroulde, or of the anonymous author of "The Quatre Fils Aymon;" the
+Renaissance, with its keen artistic sense, made out of the Carolingian
+tales real works of art, but works of art which were playthings. To
+begin with, the Carolingian stories had been saturated with Arthurian
+colour: they had been furnished with all the knight-rrantry, all the
+gallantry, all the enchantments, the fairies, giants, and necromancers
+of the Keltic legends; and, moreover, they had lost, by infinite
+repetition, all the political realism and meaning so striking in "The
+Chanson de Roland" and "The Quatre Fils Aymon;" a confusion and
+unreality further increased by the fact that the Italians had no
+original connection with those tales, that to them real men and plans
+were no better than imaginary ones, and that the minstrels who sang in
+the market-place, and the laborious prose-writers who compiled such
+collections as that called of the "Reali di Francia," were equally free
+in their alterations and adaptations, creating unknown relationships,
+inventing new adventures, suppressing essential historical points, with
+no object save amusing their audience or readers with new stories about
+familiar heroes. Such was the condition of the stories themselves. The
+attitude of the public towards them was, by the middle of the fifteenth
+century, one of complete incredulity and frivolous amusement; the
+paladins were as unreal as the heroes of any granny's fairy tale. The
+people wanted to hear of wonderful battles and adventures, of
+enchantments and love-makings; but they wanted also to laugh; and,
+sceptical, practical, democratic, the artizans and shopkeepers of
+Florence--to whom, paying, as they did, expensive mercenaries who stole
+poultry and never got wounded on any account, all chivalry or real
+military honour was the veriest nursery rubbish--such people as crowded
+round the _cantastoria_ of _mercato vecchio_, must indeed have found
+much to amuse them in these tales of so different an age.
+
+And into such crowds there penetrated to listen and watch (even as the
+Magnificent Lorenzo had elbowed among the carnival ragamuffins of
+Florence, and had slid in among the holiday-making peasants of Poggio a
+Caiano) a learned man, a poet, an intimate of the Medicis, of Politian,
+Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola, Messer Luigi Pulci, the same who had
+written the semi-allegorical, semi-realistic poem about Lorenzo dei
+Medici's gala tournament. There was a taste in the house of the Medici,
+together with those for platonic philosophy, classical erudition,
+religious hymns, and Hebrew kabbala, for a certain kind of realism, for
+the language and mode of thinking of the lower classes, as a reaction
+from Petrarchesque conventionality. As the Magnificent Lorenzo had had
+the fancy to string together in more artistic shape the quaint and
+graceful love poems, hyperbolical, realistic, tender, and abusive, of
+the Tuscan peasantry; so also Messer Luigi Pulci appears to have been
+smitten with the notion of trying his hand at a chivalric poem like
+those to which he and his friends had listened among the butchers and
+pork-shops, the fishmongers and frying booths of the market, and giving
+an impression, in its ideas and language, of the people to whom such
+strains were sung. But Luigi Pulci was vastly less gifted as a poet than
+Lorenzo dei Medici; Florentine prentices are less ęsthetically pleasing
+than Tuscan peasants, and the "Morgante Maggiore" is a piece of work of
+a sort utterly inferior to the "Nencia da Barberino." Still the
+"Morgante Maggiore" remains, and will remain, as a very remarkable
+production of grotesque art. Just as Lorenzo dei Medici was certainly
+not without a deliberate purpose of selecting the quaintness and
+gracefulness of peasant life; even so, and perhaps more, Luigi Pulci
+must have had a deliberate intention of producing a ludicrous effect; in
+both cases the deliberate attempt is very little perceptible, in the
+"Nencia da Barberino" from the genius of Lorenzo, in the "Morgante
+Maggiore" from the stolidity of Pulci. The "Morgante," of which parts
+were probably written as a mere sample to amuse a supper party, became
+interesting to Pulci, in the mere matter of inventing and stringing
+together new incidents; and despite its ludicrous passages, it must have
+been more seriously written by him, and more seriously listened to by
+his friends, than would a similar production now-a-days. For the men of
+the Renaissance, no matter how philosophized and cultured, retained the
+pleasure in mere incident, which we moderns seem to have given over to
+children and savages; and Lorenzo, Ficino, and Politian probably
+listened to the adventures of Luigi Pulci's paladins and giants with
+much the same interest, and only a little more conscious sense of
+grotesqueness, with which the crowd in the market listened to Cristofano
+dell' Altissimo and similar story-tellers. The "Morgante Maggiore,"
+therefore, is neither really comic nor really serious. It is not a piece
+of realistic grotesqueness like "Gargantua" or "Pantagruel," any more
+than it is a serious ideal work like "Amadis de Gaula:" the proportion
+of deliberately sought effects is small; the great bulk, serious or
+comic, seems to have come quite at random. It is not a caricatured
+reproduction of the poems of chivalry sung in the market, for they were
+probably serious, stately, and bald, with at most an occasional joke; it
+is the reproduction of the joint impression received from the absurd,
+harum-scarum, unpractical world of chivalry of the poet, and the real
+world of prose, of good-humoured buffoonish coarseness with which the
+itinerant poet was surrounded. The paladins are no Don Quixotes, the
+princesses no Dulcineas, the battles are real battles; but the language
+is that of Florentine wool-workers, housewives, cheese-sellers, and
+ragamuffins, crammed with the slang of the market-place, its heavy jokes
+and perpetual sententious aphorism. Moreover the prominence given to
+food and eating is unrivalled except by Rabelais: the poet must have
+lounged with delight through the narrow medięval lanes, crowded with
+booths and barrows, sniffing with rapture the mingled scents of cheese,
+pork, fish, spices, and a hundred strange concomitant market smells. And
+the market, that classic _mercato vecchio_ (alas, finally condemned and
+destroyed by modern sanitary prudishness, and which only those who have
+seen can conceive in its full barbarous, nay, barbaric Pantagruelian
+splendour of food, blood, and stenches) of Florence, is what we think of
+throughout the poem. And, when Messer Luigi comes to narrate, with real
+gravity and after the due invocation of the Virgin, the Trinity, and
+the saints, the tremendous disaster of Roncevaux, he uses such words and
+such similes, that above the neighing of horses and the clash of
+hurtling armour and the yells of the combatants we suddenly hear the
+nasal sing-song of Florentine tripe-vendors and pumpkin-pod-sellers, the
+chaffer and oaths and laughter of the gluttonous crowd pouring through
+the lanes of Calimala and Pellicceria; nay (horrible and grotesque
+miracle), there seems to rise out of the confused darkness of the
+battle-filled valley, there seems to disengage itself (as out of a mist)
+from the chaos of heaped bodies, and the flash of steel among the
+whirlwinds of dust, a vision, more and more distinct and familiar, of
+the crowded square with its black rough-hewn, smoke-stained houses,
+ornamented with Robbia-ware angels and lilies or painted madonnas; of
+its black butchers dens, outside which hang the ghastly disembowelled
+sheep with blood-stained fleeces, the huge red-veined hearts and livers;
+of the piles of cabbage and cauli-flowers, the rows of tin ware and
+copper saucepans, the heaps of maccaroni and pastes, of spices and
+drugs; the garlands of onions and red peppers and piles of apples; the
+fetid sliminess of the fish tressels; the rough pavement oozy and black,
+slippery with cabbage-stalks, puddled with bullock's blood, strewn with
+plucked feathers--all under the bright blue sky, with Giotto's
+dove-coloured belfry soaring high above; a vision, finally, of one of
+those deep dens, with walls, all covered with majolica plates and
+dishes and flashing brass-embossed trenchers, in the dark depths of
+which crackles perennially a ruddy fire, while a huge spit revolves,
+offering to the flames now one now the other side of scores of legs of
+mutton, rounds of beef, and larded chickens, trickling with the butter
+unceasingly ladled by the white-dressed cooks. Roncisvalle, Charlemagne,
+the paladins, paganism, Christendom--what of them? "I believe in capon,
+roast or boiled, and sometimes done in butter; in mead and in must; and
+I believe in the pasty and the pastykins, mother and children; but above
+all things I believe in good wine "--as Margutte snuffles out in his
+catechism; and as to Saracens and paladins, past, present, and future, a
+fig for them!
+
+But meanwhile, for all that Florentine burgesses, artizans, and
+humorists may think, there is in this Italy of the Renaissance something
+besides Florence; there is a school of poetry, disconnected with the
+realisms of Lorenzo and Pulci, with the Ovidian Petrarchisms of
+Politian. There is Ferrara. Lying, as they do, between the Northern
+Apennine slopes of Modena and the Euganean hills, the dominions of the
+House of Este appear at first sight merely as part and parcel of
+Lombardy, and we should expect from them nothing very different from
+that which we expect from Milan or Bologna or Padua. But the truth is
+different; all round Ferrara, indeed, stretches the fertile flatness of
+Lombard cornfields, and they produce, as infallibly as they produce
+their sacks of grain and tuns of wine and heaps of silk cocoon, the
+intellectual and social equivalents of such things in Renaissance Italy:
+industry, wealth, comfort, scepticism, art. But on either side, into the
+defiles of the Euganean hills to the north, into the widening torrent
+valleys of the Modenese Apennines to the south, the Marquisate of Este
+stretches up into feudalism, into chivalry, into the imaginative kingdom
+of the Middle Ages. Medięvalism, feudalism, chivalry, indeed, of a very
+modified sort; and as different from that of France and Germany as
+differ from the poverty-stricken plains and forests and and moors of the
+north these Italian mountain slopes, along which the vines crawl in long
+trellises, and the chestnuts rise in endlessly superposed tiers of
+terraces, cultivated by a peasant who is not the serf, but the equal
+sharer in profits with the master of the soil. And on one of those
+fertile hill-sides, looking down upon a narrow valley all a green-blue
+shimmer with corn and vine-bearing elms, was born, in the year 1434,
+Matteo Maria Boiardo, in the village which gave him the title, one of
+the highest in the Estensian dominions, of Count of Scandiano. Here, in
+the Apennines, Scandiano is a fortified village, also a castle,
+doubtless half turned into a Renaissance villa, but medięval and feudal
+nevertheless; but the name of Scandiano belongs also, I know not for
+what reason, to a certain little red-brick palace on the outskirts of
+Ferrara, beautifully painted with half-allegorical, half-realistic
+pageant frescoes by Cosimo Tura, and enclosing a sweet tangled
+orchard-garden; to all of which, being the place to which Duke Borso and
+Duke Ercole were wont to retire for amusement, the Ferrarese have given
+the further name of Schifanoia, which means, "fly from cares." This
+little coincidence of Scandiano the feudal castle in the Apennines, and
+Scandiano the little pleasure palace at Ferrara, seems to give, by
+accidental allegory, a fair idea of the double nature of Matteo Boiardo,
+of the Ferrarese court to which he belonged, and of the school of poetry
+(including the more notable but less original work of Ariosto) which the
+genius of the man and the character of the court succeeded together in
+producing.
+
+To understand Boiardo we must compare him with Ariosto; and to
+understand Ariosto we must compare him with Boiardo; both belong to the
+same school, and are men of very similar genius, and where the one
+leaves off the other begins. But first, in order to understand the
+character of this poetry which, in the main, is identical in Boiardo and
+in his more successful but less fascinating pupil Ariosto, let us
+understand Ferrara. It was, in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth
+centuries, a chivalric town of Ariostesque chivalry: feudalism turned
+courtly and elegant, and moreover, very liberal and comfortable by
+preponderance of democratic and industrial habits; a military court, of
+brave mercenary captains full of dash and adventure, not mere brigands
+and marauders having studied strategy, like the little Umbrian
+chieftains; a court orderly, elegant, and brilliant: a prince not risen
+from behind a counter like Medicis and Petruccis, nor out of blood like
+Baglionis and Sforzas, but of a noble old house whose beginnings are
+lost in the mist of real chivalry and real paladinism; a duke with a
+pretence of feudal honour and decorum, at whose court men were all brave
+and ladies all chaste--with the little licenses of baseness and
+gallantry admitted by Renaissance chivalry. A bright, brilliant court at
+the close of the fifteenth century; and more stable than the only one
+which might have rivalled it, the Feltrian court of Urbino, too small
+and lost among the Umbrian bandits. A bright, brilliant town, also, this
+Ferrara: not mercantile like Florence, not mere barracks like Perugia; a
+capital, essentially, in its rich green plain by the widened Po, with
+its broad handsome streets (so different from the medięval exchanges of
+Bologna, and the feudal alleys of Perugia), its well-built houses, so
+safe and modern, needing neither _bravi_ nor iron window bars, protected
+(except against some stray murder by one of the Estensi themselves), by
+the duke's well-organized police; houses with well-trimmed gardens, like
+so many Paris hōtels; and with the grand russet brick castle, military
+with its moat and towers, urban with its belvederes and balconies, in
+the middle, well placed to sweep away with its guns (the wonderful guns
+of the duke's own making) any riot, tidily, cleanly, without a nasty
+heap of bodies and slop of blood as in the narrow streets of other
+towns Imagine this bright capital, placed, moreover, in the richest
+centre of Lombardy, with glitter of chivalry from the Euganean hills and
+Apennines (castellated with Este, Monselice, Canossa, and Boiardo's own
+Scandiano); with gorgeous rarities of commerce from Venice and Milan--a
+central, unique spot. It is the natural home of the chivalrous poets of
+the Renaissance, Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso; as Florence is of the
+Politians and Pulcis (Hellenism and back-shopery); and Venice of the
+literature of lust, jests, cynicism, and adventure, Aretine, Beolco,
+Calmo, and Poliphilo-Colonna. In that garden, where the white
+butterflies crowd among the fruit trees bowed down to the tall grass of
+the palace of Schifanoia--a garden neither grand nor classic, but
+elegiac and charming--we can imagine Boiardo or Ariosto reading their
+poems to just such a goodly company as Giraldi Cinthio (a Ferrarese, and
+fond of romance, too) describes in the prologue of his "Ecatomiti:"
+gentle and sprightful ladies, with the splendid brocaded robes, and the
+gold-filleted golden hair of Dosso Dossi's wonderful Alcina Circe;
+graceful youths like the princely St. John of Benvenuto Garofalo;
+jesters like Dosso's at Modena; brilliant captains like his St. George
+and St. Michael; and a little crowd of pages with doublets and sleeves
+laced with gold tags, of sedate magistrates in fur robes and scarlet
+caps, of white-dressed maids with instruments of music and embroidery
+frames and hand looms, like those which Cosimo Tura painted for Duke
+Borso on the walls of this same Schifanoia palace. Such is the audience;
+now for the poems.
+
+The stuff of Boiardo and Ariosto is the same: that old medięval stuff of
+the Carolingian poems, coloured, scented with Arthurian chivalry and
+wonder. The knight-errantry of the Keltic tales is cleverly blended with
+the pseudo-historical military organization of the Carolingian cycle.
+Paladins and Saracens are ingeniously manoeuvred about, now scattered in
+little groups of twos and threes, to encounter adventures in the style
+of Sir Launcelot or Amadis; now gathered into a compact army to crash
+upon each other as at Roncevaux; or else wildly flung up by the poet to
+alight in fairyland, to find themselves in the caverns of Jamschid, in
+the isles where Oberon's mother kept Cęsar, and Morgana kept Ogier, in
+the boats, entering subterranean channels, of Sindbad and Huon of
+Bordeaux; a constant alternation of individual adventure and wholesale
+organized campaigns, conceived and carried out with admirable ingenuity.
+So much for the deeds of arms. The deeds of love are also compounded of
+Carolingian and Arthurian, but flavoured with special Renaissance
+feeling. There is a great deal of rapid love-making between too gallant
+knights and too impressionable ladies; licentious amours which we
+moderns lay at the door of Boiardo and Ariosto, not knowing that the
+licentiousness of the Olivers and Ogiers and Guerins and Huons of
+medięval poetry, of the sentimental Amadises, Galaors, and Lisvarts of
+the fourteenth century, whom the Renaissance has toned down in Rogers
+and Rinaldos and Ricciardettos, is by many degrees worse. A moral
+improvement also (for all the immorality of the Renaissance) in the
+eschewing of the never-failing adultery of the Arthurian romances, and
+the appropriation to legitimately faithful love of the poetical devotion
+which Tristram and Launcelot bear to other men's wives. To this are
+added, and more by Ariosto than by Boiardo, two essentially Italian
+elements: something of the nobility of passion of the Platonic
+sonneteers; and a good dose of the ironical, scurrilous, moralizing
+immoral anecdote gossiping of Boccaccio and Sacchetti. Such is the
+stuff. The conception, though rarely comic, and sometimes _bond fide_
+serious, is never earnest. All this is a purely artistic world, a world
+of decorative arabesque incident, intended to please, scarcely ever to
+move, or to move, at most, like some Decameronian tale of Isabella and
+the Basil Plant, or Constance and Martuccio. On the other hand, there is
+none of the grotesque irreverence of Pulci. Boiardo and Ariosto are not
+in earnest; they are well aware that their heroes and heroines are mere
+modern men and women tricked out in pretty chivalric trappings, driven
+wildly about from Paris to Cathay, and from Spain to the Orkneys--on
+Tony Lumpkin's principle of driving his mother round and round the
+garden plot till she thought herself on a heath six miles off--without
+ever really changing place. But they do not, like Pulci, make fun of
+their characters. They write chivalry romances not for Florentine
+pork-butchers and wool-carders, but for gallant ladies and gentlemen, to
+whom, with duels, tournaments, serenades, and fine speeches, chivalry is
+an admired name, though no longer a respected reality.
+
+The heroes of Boiardo and of Ariosto are always bold and gallant and
+glittering, the spirit of romance is in them; a giant Sancho Panza like
+Morgante, redolent of sausage and cheese, would never be admitted into
+the society of a Ferrarese Orlando. The art of Boiardo and of Ariosto is
+eminently pageant art, in which sentiment and heroism are but as one
+element among many; there is no pretence at reality (although there is a
+good deal of incidental realism), and no thought of the interest in
+subject and persons which goes with reality. It is a masquerade, and one
+whose men and women must, I think, be imagined in a kind of artistic
+fancy costume: a mixture of the Renaissance dress and of the antique, as
+we see it in the prints of contemporary pageants, and in Venetian and
+Ferrarese pictures; that Circe of Dosso's, in the Borghese gallery of
+Rome, seated in her stately wine-lees and gold half-heraldically and
+half-cabalistically patterned brocade, before the rose-bushes of the
+little mysterious wood, is the very ideal of the Falerinas and Alcinas,
+of the enchantresses of Boiardo and Ariosto. Pageant people, these of
+the Ferrarese poets; they only play at being in forests and deserts, as
+children play at being on volcanoes or in Green-land by the nursery
+fire. It is a kind of dressing up, a masquerading of the fancy; not
+disguising in order to deceive, but rather laying hold of any pretty or
+brilliant impressive garb that comes to hand, and putting that on in
+conjunction with many odds and ends, as an artist's guests might do with
+the silks and velvets and Oriental properties of a studio. These knights
+and ladies, for ever tearing about from Scotland to India, never, in
+point of fact, get any further than the Apennine slopes where Boiardo
+was born, where Ariosto governed the Garfagnana. They ride for ever
+(while supposed to be in the Ardennes or in Egypt) across the velvet
+moss turf, all patterned with minute starry clovers and the fallen white
+ropy chestnut blossom, amidst the bracken beneath the slender chestnut
+trees, the pale blue sky looking in between their spreading branches; at
+most they lose their way in the intricacies of some seaside pineta,
+where the feet slip on the fallen needles, and the sun slants along the
+vistas of serried, red, scaly trunks, among the juniper and gorse and
+dry grass and flowers growing in the sea sand. Into the vast medięval
+forests of Germany and France, Boiardo and Ariosto's fancy never
+penetrated.
+
+Such is the school: a school represented in its typical character only
+by Boiardo and Ariosto, but to which belong, nevertheless, with whatever
+differences, Tasso, Spenser, Camoens, all the poets of Renaissance
+romance. Now of the two leaders thereof. Here I feel that I can speak
+only personally; tell only of my own personal impressions and
+preferences. Comparing together Boiardo and Ariosto, I am, of course,
+aware of the infinite advantages of the latter. Ariosto is a man of far
+more varied genius; he is an artist, while Boiardo is an amateur; he is
+learned in arranging and ornamenting; he knows how to alternate various
+styles, how to begin and how to end. Moreover, he is a scholarly person
+of a more scholarly time: he is familiar with the classics, and, what is
+more important, he is familiar with the language in which he is writing.
+He writes exquisitely harmonious, supple, and brilliant Tuscan verse,
+with an infinite richness of diction; while poor Boiardo jogs along in a
+language which is not the Lombard dialect in which he speaks, and which
+is very uncouth and awkward, as is every pure language for a provincial;
+indeed, so much so, that the pedantic Tuscans require Berni to make
+Tuscan, elegant, to _ingentilire_, with infinite loss to quaintness and
+charm, the "Orlando Innamorato" of poor Ferrarese Boiardo. Moreover,
+Ariosto has many qualities unknown to Boiardo; wit, malice, stateliness,
+decided eloquence and power of simile and apostrophe; he is a symphony
+for full orchestra, and Boiardo a mere melody played on a single fiddle,
+which good authorities (and no one dare contest with Italians when they
+condemn anything not Tuscan as jargon) pronounce to be no Cremona. All
+these advantages Ariosto certainly has; and I do not quarrel with those
+who prefer him for them. But many of them distinctly take away from my
+pleasure. I confess that I am bored by the beautifully written moral and
+allegorical preludes of Ariosto's cantos; I would willingly give all his
+aphorism and all his mythology to get quickly to the story. Also, I
+resent his admirable rhetorical flourishes about his patrons, his
+Ercoles, Ippolitos, and Isabellas they ring false, dreadfully false and
+studied; and Boiardo's quickly despatched friendly greeting of his
+friends, his courteous knights and gentle ladies, pleases me much
+better. Moreover, the all-pervading consciousness of the existence of
+Homer, Virgil, nay, Statius and Lucan, every trumpery antique
+epic-monger, annoys me, giving an uncomfortable doubt as to whether
+Ariosto did not try to make all this nonsense serious, and this romance
+into an epic; all this occasional Virgilian stateliness, alternated with
+a kind of polished Decameronian gossipy cynicism, diverts my attention,
+turns paladins and princesses too much into tutor-educated gentlemen,
+into Bandello and Cinthio-reading ladies of the sixteenth century. The
+picture painted by Ariosto is finer, but you see too much of the
+painter; he and his patrons take up nearly the whole foreground, and
+they have affected, idealized faces and would-be dignified and
+senatorial poses. For these and many other reasons, I personally prefer
+Boiardo; and perhaps the best reason for my preference is the
+irrational one that he gives me more pleasure. My preferences, my
+impressions, I have said, are in this matter, much less critical than
+personal. Hence I can speak of Boiardo only as he affects me.
+
+When first I read Boiardo, I was conscious of a curious phenomenon in
+myself. I must confess to reading books usually in a very ardent or
+rather weary manner, either way in a hurry to finish them. As it
+happened, when I borrowed Boiardo, I had a great many other things on
+hand which required my time and attention; yet I could not make up my
+mind to return the book until I had finished it, though my intention had
+been merely to satisfy my curiosity by a dip into it. I went on, without
+that eager desire to know what follows which one has in a novel;
+drowsily with absolute reluctance to leave off, like the reluctance to
+rise from the grass beneath the trees with only butterflies and shadows
+to watch, or the reluctance to put aside some fairy book of Walter
+Crane's. It was like strolling in some quaint, ill-trimmed, old garden,
+finding fresh flowers, fresh bits of lichened walls, fresh fragments of
+broken earthenware ornaments; or, rather, more like a morning in the
+Cathedral Library at Siena, the place where the gorgeous choir books are
+kept, itself illuminated like missal pages by Pinturicchio: amused,
+delighted, not moved nor fascinated; finding every moment something new,
+some charming piece of gilding, some sweet plumed head, some quaint
+little tree or town; making a journey of lazy discovery in a sort of
+world of Prince Charmings, the real realm of the "Färy Queen," quite
+different in enchantment from the country of Spenser's Gloriana, with
+its pale allegoric ladies and knights, half-human, half-metaphysical,
+and its make-believe allegorical ogres and giants. This is the real
+Fairyland, this of Boiardo: no mere outskirts of Ferrara, with real,
+playfully cynical Ferrarese men and women tricked out as paladins and
+Amazons, and making fun of their disguise, as in Ariosto; no wonderland
+of Tasso, with enchanted gardens copied out of Bolognese pictures and
+miraculous forests learned from theatre mechanicians, wonders imitated
+by a great poet from the cardboard and firework wonders of Bianca
+Cappello's wedding feasts. This is the real fairyland, the wonderland of
+medięval romance and of Persian and Arabian tales, no longer solemn or
+awful, but brilliant, sunny, only half believed in; the fairyland of the
+Renaissance, superficially artistic, with its lightest, brightest
+fancies, and its charming realities; its cloistered and painted courts
+with plashing fountains, its tapestried and inlaid rooms, its towered
+and belvedered villas, its quaint clipped gardens full of strange
+Oriental plants and beasts; and all this transported into a country of
+wonders, where are the gardens of the Hesperides, the fountain of
+Merlin, the tomb of Narcissus, the castle of Morgan-le-Fay; every quaint
+and beautiful fancy, antique and medięval, mixed up together, as in some
+Renaissance picture of Botticelli or Rosselli or Filippino, where
+knights in armour descend from Pegasus before Roman temples, where
+swarthy white-turbaned Turks, with oddly bunched-up trousers and
+jewelled caftans, and half-naked, oak-crowned youths, like genii
+descended, pensive and wondering, from some antique sarcophagus, and
+dapper princelets and stalwart knights, and citizens and monks, all
+crowd round the altar of some wonder-working Macone or Apolline or
+Trevigante; some comic, dreadful, apish figure, mummed up in
+half-antique, half-oriental garb. Or else we are led into some dainty,
+pale-tinted panel of Botticelli, where the maidens dance in white
+clinging clothes, strewing flowers on to the flower-freaked turf; or
+into some of Poliphilo's vignettes, where the gentle ladies, seated with
+lute and viol under vine-trellises, welcome the young gallant, or poet,
+or knight.
+
+Such is the world of Boiardo. Spenser has once or twice peeped in,
+painted it, and given us exquisite little pictures, as that of
+Malecasta's castle, all hung with mythological tapestries, that of the
+enchanted chamber of Britomart, and those of Sir Calidore meeting the
+Graces and of Hellenore dancing with the Satyrs; but Spenser has done it
+rarely, trembling to return to his dreary allegories. Equal to these
+single pictures by Spenser, Boiardo has only one or two, but he keeps us
+permanently in the world where such pictures are painted. Boiardo is not
+a great artist like Spenser: but he is a wizard, which is better. He
+leads us, unceasingly, through the little dreamy laurelwoods, where we
+meet crisp-haired damsels tied to pine-trees, or terrible dragons, or
+enchanted wells, through whose translucent green waters we see brocaded
+rooms full of fair ladies; he ferries us ever and anon across shallow
+streams, to the castles where _gentil donzelle_ wave their kerchiefs
+from the pillared belvedere; he slips us unseen into the camps and
+council-rooms of the splendidly trapped Saracens, like so many figures
+out of Filippino's frescoes; he conducts us across the bridges where
+giants stand warders, to the mysterious carved tombs whence issue green
+and crested snakes, who, kissed by a paladin, turn into lovely
+enchantresses; he takes us beneath the beds of rivers and through the
+bowels of the earth where kings and knights turned into statues of gold,
+sit round tables covered with jewels, illumined by carbuncles more
+wonderful than that of Jamschid; or through the mazes of fairy gardens,
+where every ear of corn, cut off, turns into a wild beast, and every
+fallen leaf into a bird, where hydras watch in the waters and lamias
+rear themselves in the grass, where Orlando must fill his helmet with
+roses lest he hear the voice of the sirens; where all the wonders of
+Antiquity--the snake-women, the Circes, the sirens, the hydras and fauns
+live, strangely changed into something infinitely quaint and graceful,
+still half-antique, yet already half-Arabian or Keltic, in the midst of
+the fairyland of Merlin and of Oberon--live, move, transform themselves
+afresh; where the golden-haired damsels and the stripling knights,
+delicate like Pinturicchio's Prince Charmings, gallop for ever on their
+enchanted coursers, within enchanted armour, invincible, invulnerable,
+under a sky always blue, and through an unceasing spring, ever onwards
+to new adventures. Adventures which the noble, gentle Castellan of
+Scandiano, poet and knight and humorist, philanthropical philosopher
+almost from sheer goodness of heart, yet a little crazy, and capable of
+setting all the church bells ringing in honour of the invention of the
+name of Rodomonte relates not to some dully ungrateful Alfonso or
+Ippolito, but to his own guests, his own brilliant knights and ladies,
+with ever and anon an effort to make them feel, through his verse, some
+of those joyous spring-tide feelings which bubble up in himself; as when
+he remembers how, "Once did I wander on a May morning in a fair
+flower-adorned field on a hillside overlooking the sea, which was all
+tremulous with light; and there, among the roses of a green thorn-brake,
+a damsel was singing of love; singing so sweetly that the sweetness
+still touches my heart; touches my heart, and makes me think of the
+great delight it was to listen;" and how he would fain repeat that song,
+and indeed an echo of its sweetness runs through his verse. Meanwhile,
+stanza pours out after stanza, adventure grows out of adventure, each
+more wonderful, more gorgeous than its predecessor. To which listen the
+ladies, with their white, girdled dresses and crimped golden locks; the
+youths, with their soft beardless faces framed in combed-out hair, with
+their daggers on their hips and their plumed hats between their fingers;
+and the serious bearded men, in silken robes; drawing nearer the poet,
+letting go lute or violin or music-book as they listen on the villa
+terrace or in some darkened room, where the sunset sky turns green-blue
+behind the pillared window, and the roses hang over the trellise of the
+cloister. And as they did four hundred years ago, so do we now, rejoice.
+The great stalwart naked forms of Greece no longer leap and wrestle or
+carry their well-poised baskets of washed linen before us; the mailed
+and vizored knights of the Nibelungen no longer clash their armour to
+the sound of Volker's red fiddle-bow; the glorified souls of Dante no
+longer move in mystic mazes of light before the eyes of our fancy. All
+that is gone. But here is the fairyland of the Renaissance. And thus
+Matteo Boiardo, Count of Scandiano, goes on, adding adventure to
+adventure, stanza to stanza, in his castle villa, or his palace at
+Ferrara. But suddenly he stops and his bright fiddle and lute music jars
+and ends: "While I am singing, O Redeeming God, I see all Italy set on
+fire by these Gauls, coming to ravage I know not what fresh place."
+
+And thus, with the earlier and more hopeful Renaissance of the fifteenth
+century, Matteo Boiardo broke off with his "Orlando Innamorato." The
+perfect light-heartedness, the delight in play of a gentle, serious,
+eminently kindly nature, which gives half the charm to Boiardo's work,
+seems to have become impossible after the ruin of Italian liberty and
+prosperity the frightful showing up of Italy's moral and social and
+political insignificance at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
+Lombardy especially became a permanent battle-field, and its towns mere
+garrison places of French, German, Spanish, and Swiss barbarians, whose
+presence meant slaughter and pillage and every foulest outrage; and
+then, between the horrors of the unresisted invasions and the unresisted
+exactions, came plague and famine, and industry and commerce gradually
+died out. A few princes, subsidised and guarded by French or
+Imperialists, kept up an appearance of cheerfulness, but the courts even
+grew more gloomy as the people grew more miserable. There is more
+joking, more resonant laughter in Ariosto than in Boiardo, but there is
+very much less serenity and cheerfulness; ever and anon a sort of
+bitterness, a dreary moralizing tendency, a still more dreary fit of
+prophesying future good in which he has no belief, comes over Ariosto.
+Berni, who rewrote the "Orlando Innamorato" in choice Tuscan, and who
+underlined every faintly marked jest of Boiardo's, with evident
+preoccupation of the ludicrous effects of the "Morgante Maggiore"--Berni
+even could not keep up his spirits; into the middle of Boiardo's serene
+fairyland adventures he inserted a description of the sack of Rome which
+is simply harrowing. All real cheerfulness departed from the people, to
+be replaced only by pleasure in the debaucheries of the buffoonish
+obscenity of Aretino, Bandello, and so forth, to which the men of the
+dying Italy of the Renaissance listened as the roysterers of the plague
+of Florence, with the mortal sickness almost upon them, may have
+listened to the filthy songs which they trolled out in their
+drunkenness. Or at best, the poor starved, bruised, battered, humiliated
+nation may have tried to be cheerful on the principle of its harlequin
+playwright Beolco, who, more honest than the Ariostos and Bibbienas, and
+Aretines, came forward on his stage of planks at Padua, and after
+describing the ruin and wretchedness of the country, the sense of
+dreariness and desolation, which made young folk careless of marriage,
+and the very nightingales (he thought) careless of song, recommended his
+audience, since they could not even cry thoroughly and to feel any the
+better for it, to laugh, if they still were able. Boiardo was forgotten;
+his spirit was unsuited to the depression, gloomy brutality, gloomy
+sentimentality, which grew every day as Italy settled down after its
+Renaissance-Shrovetide in the cinders and fasting of the long Lent of
+Spanish and Jesuit rule.
+
+Still the style of Boiardo was not yet exhausted; the peculiar kind of
+fairy epic, the peculiar combination of chivalric and classic elements
+of which the "Orlando Innamorato" and the "Orlando Furioso," had been
+the great examples, still fascinated poets and public. The Renaissance,
+or what remained of it, was now no longer confined to Italy; it had
+spread, paler, more diluted, shallower, over the rest of Europe. To
+follow the filiation of schools, to understand the intellectual
+relationships of individuals, of the latter half of the sixteenth
+century, it becomes necessary to move from one country to another. And
+thus the two brother poets of the family of Boiardo, its two last and
+much saddened representatives, came to write in very different languages
+and under very different circumstances. These two are Tasso and our own
+Spenser. They are both poets of the school of the "Orlando Innamorato,"
+both poets of a reaction, of a kind of purified Renaissance: the one of
+the late Italian Renaissance emasculated by the Council of Trent and by
+Spain; the other of the English Renaissance, in its youth truly, but, in
+the individual case of Spenser, timidly drawn aside from the excesses of
+buoyant life around. In the days of the semi-atheist dramatists, all
+flesh and blood and democracy, Spenser steeps himself in Christianity
+and chivalry, even as Tasso does, following on the fleshly levity and
+scepticism of Boiardo, Berni, and Ariosto. There is in both poets a
+paleness, a certain diaphanous weakness, an absence of strong tint or
+fibre or perfume; in Tasso the pallor of autumn, in Spenser the paleness
+of spring: autumn left sad and leafless by the too voluptuous heat and
+fruitfulness of summer; spring still pale and pinched by winter, with
+timid nipped grass and unripe stiff buds and catkins, which never
+suggest the tangle of bush, grasses, and magnificent flowers and fruits,
+sweet, splendid, or poisonous, which the sun will make out of them. The
+Renaissance, in the past for Tasso, in the proximate and very visible
+future for Spenser, has frightened both; the cynicism and bestiality of
+men like Machiavelli and Aretino; the godless, muscular lustiness of
+Marlowe, Greene, and Peele, seen in a glimpse by Tasso and Spenser, have
+given a shock to their sensitive nature, have made them turn away and
+hide themselves from a second sight of it. They both take refuge in a
+land of fiction, of romance, from the realities into which they dread to
+splash; a world unsubstantial, diaphanous, faint-hued, almost
+passionless, which they make out of beauty and heroism and purity, which
+they alembicize and refine, but into which there never enters any vital
+element, anything to give it flesh and bone and pulsing life: it is a
+mere soap bubble. And beautiful as is this world of their own making, it
+is too negative even for them; they move in it only in imagination,
+calm, serene, vacant, almost sad. There is in it, and in themselves, a
+something wanting; and the remembrance of that unholy-life of reality
+which jostled and splashed their delicate souls, comes back and haunts
+them with its evil thought. There is no laugh--what is worse, no smile
+--in these men. Incipient puritanism, not yet the terrible brawny
+reality of Bunyan, but a vague, grey spectre, haunts Spenser; and the
+puritanism of Don Quixote, the vague, melancholy, fantastic reverting
+from the evil world of to-day to an impossible world of chivalry, is
+troubling the sight of Tasso. He cannot go crazy like Don Quixote, and
+instead he grows melancholy; he cannot believe in his own ideals; he
+cannot give them life, any more than can Spenser give life to his
+allegoric knights and ladies, because the life would have to be fetched
+by Tasso out of the flesh of Ariosto, and by Spenser out of the blood of
+Marlowe; and both Tasso and Spenser shrink at the thought of what might
+with it be inoculated or transfused; and they rest satisfied with
+phantoms. The phantoms of Spenser are more shadowy much more utterly
+devoid of human character; they are almost metaphysical abstractions,
+and they do not therefore sadden us: they are too unlike living things
+to seem very lifeless. But the phantoms of Tasso, he would fain make
+realities; he works at every detail of character, history, or geography,
+which may make his people real; they are not, as with Spenser, elves and
+wizards flitting about in a nameless fairyland, characterless and
+passionless; they are historical creatures, captains and soldiers in a
+country mapped out by the geographer; but they are phantoms all the more
+melancholy, these beautiful and heroic Clorindas and Erminias and
+Tancreds and Godfreys--why? because the real world around Tasso is
+peopled with Brachianos and Corombonas, and Annabellas and Giovannis,
+creatures for Webster and Ford; and because this world of chivalry is,
+in his Italy, as false as the world of Amadis and Esplandian in Toboso
+and Barcelona for poor Don Quixote. Melancholy therefore, and dreamy,
+both Tasso and Spenser, with nothing they can fully love in reality,
+because they see it tainted with reality and evil; without the cheerful
+falling back upon everyday life of Ariosto and Shakespeare, and with a
+strange fancy for fairyland, for the distant, for the Happy Islands, the
+St. Brandan's Isles, the country of the fountain of youth, the country
+of which vague reports have come back with the ships of Raleigh and
+Ponce de Leon. Tasso and Spenser are happiest, in their calm, melancholy
+way, when they can let themselves go in day-dreams, and talk of things
+in which they do not believe, of diamond shields which stun monsters of
+ointments which cure all ills of body and of soul of enchanted groves
+whose trees sound with voices, and lutes, of boats in which, steered by
+fairies, we can glide across the scarcely rippled summer sea, and
+watching the ruins of the past, time and reality left behind, set sail
+for some strange land of bliss. And there is in the very sensuousness
+and love of beauty-of these men a vagueness and melancholy, a constant:
+sense of the fleeting and of the eternal, as in that passage, translated
+from the languidly sweet Italian perfection of Tasso into the timid,
+almost scentless, English of Spenser--"Cosi trapassa al trapassar d'un
+giorno."
+
+
+     So passeth, in the passing of a day,
+
+     Of mortall life the leafe, the bud, the flowre
+
+     No more doth florish after first decay,
+     That earst was sought to deck both bed and bowre
+     Of many a lady, and many a Paramowre.
+     Gather therefore the Rose whilest yet is prime,
+     For soone comes age that will her pride deflowre;
+     Gather the Rose of love whitest yet is time,
+     Whitest loving thou mayest loved be withe equall crime.
+
+
+A sense of evanescence, of dreamlikeness, quite different from the
+thoughtless enjoyment of Boiardo, from the bold and manly facing of the
+future, the solemn, strong sense of life and death as of waking
+realities, of the Elizabethan dramatists, even of weaklings like
+Massinger and Beaumont. In Tasso and in Spenser there is no such
+joyousness, no such solemnity; only a dreamy watching, a regret which is
+scarcely a regret, at the evanescence of pale beauty and pale life, of
+joys feebly felt and evils meekly borne.
+
+With Tasso and Spenser comes to a close the school of Boiardo, the small
+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 medięval 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 ą 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
+medięval 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 medięval 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 ęsthetic 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 prętor 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 medięval 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, ęsthetical, 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.
+
+Medięval 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. Medięval love, therefore, never obtains its object,
+however much it may obtain the woman; for the object of medięval love,
+as of medięval 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 medięval
+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
+medięval 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 medięval love, an extraordinary sameness of
+intonation, making it difficult to distinguish between the _bonā 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 medięval 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 ęsthetical 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 medięval Quixote, outshining by far the mad
+Provenēals 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
+medięval 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 medięval 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
+Medięval Love.
+
+Has such a thing really existed? Are not these medięval 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 medięval 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 trouvčres and troubadours, minnesingers and Italian poets,
+as the legion of medięval 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 medięval 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 medięval 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 medięval love story, but twenty--not half a dozen medięval 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. Medięval 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.
+
+Medięval love is first revealed in the sudden and almost simultaneous
+burst of song which, like the twitter and trill so dear to trouvčres,
+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 Provenēals
+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
+Provenēals, 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 trouvčres, troubadours, and
+minnesingers, of the Italians of the latter thirteenth century. And this
+simultaneous revelation of medięval 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 Abélard, 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
+medięval 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
+medięval 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
+nobles. The reign of town poetry, of fabliaux and meistersang, comes
+later; the poets of the early Middle Ages, trouvčres, troubadours, and
+minnesingers are, with barely one or two exceptions, all knights. And
+their song comes from the castle. Now, in order to understand medięval
+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 trouvčres 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 Béthune, like
+Walther, Wolfram, and Tannhäuser--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 principal 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 vassals 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 medięval
+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 associate, and absolutely no
+unmarried girls who could be a desirable match, the lady of the castle
+speedily becomes a goddess, 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 pass 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 "Petit 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 medięval 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 passion 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 medięval wife,
+Eleanor of Guienne, was respected by her husbands) on account of her
+fiefs, her vassals, 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 medięval 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 medięval love as a respectful service
+humbly waiting for a reward: "For," pursues the decision published by
+André 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 "Aucassin 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 medięval
+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 amusement 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 medięval love, and that this is the case is proved by the whole
+huge body of early medięval 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 Mélusine,
+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 trouvčres, troubadours, and minnesingers, were the
+fashionable reading of the feudal classes 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
+bastards and fathers of bastards; 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 trčs bien ameis i petit 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,
+Altfranzösische Lieder and Leiche IX.) against the adulterous passion 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 trouvčres, 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
+titles 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. Medięval 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
+medięval love lyrics is that comprising the Provenēal _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 Provenēal, 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 God 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 passed 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, trouvčre, 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 Provenēal narrative poem called "Flamenca." Like the
+"Tristram" of Gottfried von Strassburg, like all these light medięval
+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
+grass 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 grass 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 Abélard, 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 mass 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 god of the "Vita Nuova," but
+a foppish young deity, sentimental at once and sensual, of fashionable
+feudal life: the god 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 godhead, and the devotion to
+him a pretty and delicate piece of ęstheticism. And such it is here in
+"Flamenca," where there certainly exists neither God nor Christ, both
+complete absentees, whose priest becomes a courteous lover's valet,
+whose church the place for amorous rendezvous, whose sacrifice of mass
+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. God 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
+coarse 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 sluts, curtseying at
+the loan (during the interview of nobler 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 passing 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 passion 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
+medięval 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 passion 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
+ennoblement a certain amount of passion, so also does there exist no
+passion (and Phędrus 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 Mätzner's
+"Altfranzösische 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 Brantōme 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
+noble Italian ladies were sanctioned by the society of the seventeenth
+and eighteenth centuries. In the medięval castle, where, as we have
+seen, the lady, separated from her own sex, 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 institution under the name of _service_; and, like all
+other social institutions, 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
+medięval 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 fassam 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 Béthune, "she will have to be
+unfaithful with some base wretch."
+
+
+     Et les dames ki castement vivront
+     Se loiauté 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 God
+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 God 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 sīn wille an mir
+ergän"). 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
+Mätzner; a rule which, if we may judge from the behaviour of Tristram
+and Launcelot, and from the last remnants of medięval 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
+Clytęmnestra 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 medięval
+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 constitutes 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 illustrious 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 medięval 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 passions 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 passion 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 vassal who has a right not even to be
+noticed; this lady of medięval 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 cluster
+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 passion
+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 medięval poetry, a new kind of love--subtler, more
+imaginative, more passionate, 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 Tannhäuser, 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
+snatched 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 medięval
+winter had turned to summer, and there had budded forth and flowered a
+new ideal of manly virtue, a new ideal of womanly grace.
+
+But evil is evil, and evil is its fruit. Out of circumstances hitherto
+unknown, circumstances come about for the first time owing to the
+necessities of illegitimate passion, have arisen certain new and nobler
+characters of sexual love, certain new and beautiful conceptions of
+manly and womanly nature. The circumstances to which these are owed are
+pure in themselves, they are circumstances which in more modern times
+have characterized the perfectly legitimate passion of lovers held
+asunder by no social law, but by mere accidental barriers--from Romeo
+and Juliet to the Master of Ravenswood and Lucy Ashton; and pure so far
+have been the spiritual results. But these circumstances were due, in
+the early Middle Ages, to the fact of adultery; and to the new ideal of
+love has clung, even in its purity, in its superior nobility, an element
+of corruption as unknown to gross and corrupt Antiquity as was the
+delicacy and nobility of medięval love. The most poetical and pathetic
+of all medięval love stories, the very incarnation of all that is most
+lyric at once and most tragic in the new kind of passion, is the story,
+told and retold by a score of poets and prose writers, of the loves of
+Yseult of Ireland and of Sir Tristram who, as the knight was bringing
+the princess to his uncle and her affianced, King Mark of Cornwall drank
+together by a fatal mistake a philter which made all such as partook of
+it in common inseparable lovers even unto death. Every one knows the
+result r: how Yseult came to her husband already the paramour of
+Tristram; how Brangwaine, her damsel, feeling that this unhallowed
+passion was due to her having left-within reach the potion intended for
+the King and Queen of Cornwall, devoted herself, at the price of her
+maidenhood, to connive in the amours of the lovers whom she had made;
+how King Mark was deceived, and doubted, and was deceived again; how
+Tristram fled to Brittany, but how, despite his seeming marriage with
+another and equally lovely Yseult, he remained faithful to the Queen of
+Cornwall. One version tells that Mark slew his nephew while he sat
+harping to Queen Yseult; another that Tristram died of grief because his
+scorned though wedded wife told him that the white-sailed ship, bearing
+his mistress to meet him, bore the black sail which meant that she was
+not on board; but all versions, I think, agree in ending with the fact,
+that the briar-rose growing on the tomb of the one, slowly trailed its
+flowers and thorns along till it had reached also the grave of the
+other, and knit together, as love had knit together with its sweet
+blossoms and sharp spines, the two fated lovers. The Middle Ages were
+enthralled by this tale; but they were also, occasionally, a little
+shocked by it. Poets and prose writers tampered every now and then with
+incidents and characters, seeking to make it appear that, owing to the
+substitution of the waiting-maid, and the neglect of the wedded princess
+of Brittany, Yseult had never belonged to any man save Tristram, nor
+Tristram to any woman save Yseult; or that King Mark had sent his nephew
+to woo the Irish queen's daughter merely in hopes of his perishing in
+the attempt, and that his whole subsequent conduct was due to a mere
+unnatural hatred of a better knight than himself; touching up here and
+there with a view to justifying and excusing to some degree the long
+series of deceits which constituted the whole story. Thus the more timid
+and less gifted. But when, in the very first years (1210) of the
+thirteenth century, the greatest medięval poet that preceded Dante, the
+greatest German poet that preceded Goethe, Meister Gottfried von
+Strassburg, took in hand the old threadbare story of "Tristan und
+Isolde," he despised all alterations of this sort, and accepted the
+original tale in its complete crudeness.
+
+For, consciously or unconsciously, Gottfried had conceived this story as
+a thing wholly unknown in his time, and no longer subject to any of
+those necessities of constant rearrangement which tormented medięval
+poets: he had conceived it not as a tale, but as a novel. Gottfried
+himself was probably but little aware of what he was doing; the poem
+that he was writing probably fell for him into the very same category as
+the poems of other men; but to us, with our experience of so many
+different forms of narrative, it must be evident that "Tristan und
+Isolde" is a new departure, inasmuch as it is not the story of deeds and
+the people who did them, like the true epic from Homer to the
+Nibelungen; nor the story of people and the adventures which happened to
+them, like all romance poetry from "Palemon and Arcite," to the "Orlando
+Furioso;" but, on the contrary, the story of the psychological
+relations, the gradual metamorphosis of soul by soul, between two
+persons. The long introductory story of Tristram's youth must not
+mislead us, nor all the minute narrations of the killing of dragons and
+the drinking of love philters: Gottfried, we must remember, was
+certainly no deliberate innovator, and these thing's are the mere
+inevitable externalities of medięval poetry, preserved with dull slavish
+care by the re-writer of a well-known tale, but enclosing in reality
+something essentially and startlingly modern: the history of a passion
+and of the spiritual changes which it brings about in those who are its
+victims.
+
+To meet again this purely psychological interest we must skip the whole
+rest of the Middle Ages, nay, skip even the great period of dramatic
+literature, not stopping till we come to the end of the seventeenth and
+beginning of the eighteenth century, to the "Princesse de Clčves," to
+"Clarissa Harlowe," nay, really, to "The Nouvelle Heloise." For even in
+Shakespeare there is always interest and importance in the action and
+reaction of subsidiary characters, in the event, in the accidental;
+there is intrigue, chance, misunderstanding, fate--active agencies of
+which Othello and Hamlet, King Lear and Romeo, are helpless victims;
+there is, even in this psychological English drama of the Elizabethans,
+fate in the shape of Iago, in the shape of the Ghost, in the shape of
+the brothers of Webster's duchess; fate in the shape of a ring, a
+letter, a drug, but fate always. And in this "Tristan und Isolde" of
+Gottfried von Strassburg is there not fate also in the love potion
+intended for King Mark, and given by the mistake of Brangwaine to Mark's
+bride and his nephew? To this objection, which will naturally occur to
+any reader who is not acquainted with the poem of Gottfried, I simply
+answer, there is not. The love potion there is, but it does not play the
+same part as do, for instance, the drugs of Friar Laurence and his
+intercepted letter. Suppose the friar's narcotic to have been less
+enduring in its action, or his message to have reached in safety, why
+then Juliet would have been awake instead of asleep, or Romeo would not
+have supposed her to be dead, and instead of the suicide of the two
+lovers, we should have had the successful carying off of Juliet by
+Romeo. Not so with Gottfried. The philter is there, and a great deal is
+talked about it; but it is merely one of the old, threadbare trappings
+of the original story, which he has been too lazy to suppress; it is
+merely, for the reader, the allegorical signal for an outburst of
+passion which all our subsequent knowledge of Tristram and Yseult shows
+us to be absolutely inevitable. In Gottfried's poem, the drinking of the
+potion signifies merely that all the rambling, medięval prelude, not to
+be distinguished from the stories of "Morte d'Arthur," and of half the
+romances of the Middle Ages, has come to a close and may be forgotten;
+and that the real work of the great poet, the real, matchless tragedy of
+the four actors--Tristram, Yseult, Mark, and Brangwaine--has begun.
+
+Yet if we seek again to account to ourselves for this astonishing
+impression of modernness which we receive from Gottfried's poem, we
+recognize that it is due to something far more important than the mere
+precocious psychological interest; nay, rather, that this psychological
+interest is itself dependent upon the fact which makes "Tristan und
+Isolde," so modern to our feelings. This fact is simply that the poem of
+Gottfried is the earliest, and yet perhaps almost the completest,
+example of a literary anomaly which Antiquity, for all its abominations,
+did not know: the glorification of fidelity in adultery, the
+glorification of excellence within the compass of guilt. Older times
+--more distant from our own in spirit, though not necessarily in
+years--have presented us with many themes of guilt: the guilt which
+exists according to our own moral standard, but not according to that of
+the narrator, as the magnificently tragic Icelandic incest story of
+Sigmund and Signy; the guilt which has come about no one well knows how,
+an unfortunate circumstance leaving the sinner virtually stainless, in
+his or her own eyes and the eyes of others, like the Homeric Helen; the
+heroic guilt, where the very heroism seems due to the self-sacrifice of
+the sinner's innocence, of Judith; the struggling, remorseful guilt,
+hopelessly overcome by fate and nature, of Phędra; the dull and dogged
+guilt, making the sinner scarce more than a mere physical
+stumbling-block for others, of the murderer Hagen in the Nibelungenlied;
+and, finally, the perverse guilt, delighting in the consciousness of
+itself, of demons like Richard and Iago, of libidinous furies like the
+heroines of Tourneur and Marston. The guilt theme of "Tristan und
+Isolde" falls into none of these special categories. This theme,
+unguessed even by Shakespeare, is that of the virtuous behaviour towards
+one another of two individuals united in sinning against every one else.
+Gottfried von Strassburg narrates with the greatest detail how Tristram
+leads to the unsuspecting king the unblushing, unremorseful woman
+polluted by his own embraces; how Yseult substitutes on the wedding
+night her spotless damsel Brangwaine for her own sullied self; then,
+terrified lest the poor victim of her dishonour should ever reveal it,
+attempts to have her barbarously murdered, and, finally, seeing that
+nothing can shake the heroic creature's faith, admits her once more to
+be the remorseful go-between in her amours. He narrates how Tristram
+dresses as a pilgrim and carries the queen from a ship to the shore, in
+order that Yseult may call on Christ to bear witness by a miracle that
+she is innocent of adultery, never having been touched save by that
+pilgrim and her own husband; and how, when the followers of King Mark
+have surrounded the grotto in the wood, Tristram places the drawn sword
+between himself and the sleeping queen, as a symbol of their chastity
+which the king is too honest to suspect. He draws, with a psychological
+power truly extraordinary in the beginning of the thirteenth century,
+the two other figures in this love drama: King Mark, cheated,
+dishonoured, oscillating between horrible doubt, ignominious suspicion
+and more ignominious credulity, his love for his wife, his trust in his
+nephew, his incapacity for conceiving ill-faith and fraud, the very
+gentleness and generosity of his nature, made the pander of guilt in
+which he cannot believe; and, on the other side, Brangwaine, the
+melancholy, mute victim of her fidelity to Yseult, the weak, heroic
+soul, rewarded only with cruel ingratitude, and condemned to screen and
+help the sin which she loathes and for which she assumes the awful
+responsibility. All this does Gottfried do, yet without ever seeming to
+perceive the baseness and wickedness of this tissue of lies,
+equivocations, and perjuries in which his lovers hide their passion;
+without ever seeming to guess at the pathos and nobility of the man and
+the woman who are the mere trumpery obstacles or trumpery aids to their
+amours. He heaps upon Tristram and Yseult the most extravagant praises:
+he is the flower of all knighthood, and she, the kindest, gentlest,
+purest, and noblest of women; he insists upon the wickedness of the
+world which is for ever waging war upon their passion, and holds up to
+execration all those who seek to spy out their secret. Gottfried is most
+genuinely overcome by the ideal beauty of this inextinguishable
+devotion, by the sublimity of this love which holds the whole world as
+dross; the crimes of the lovers are for him the mere culminating point
+of their moral grandeur, which has ceased to know any guilt save
+absence of love, any virtue save loving. And so serene is the old
+minnesinger's persuasion, that it obscures the judgment and troubles the
+heart even of his reader; and we are tempted to ask ourselves, on laying
+down the book, whether indeed this could have been sinful, this love of
+Tristram and Yseult which triumphed over everything in the world, and
+could be quenched only by death. That circle of hell where all those who
+had sinfully loved were whirled incessantly in the perse, dark, stormy
+air, appeared in the eyes even of Dante as a place less of punishment
+than of glory; and, especially since the Middle Ages, all mankind looks
+upon that particular hell-pit with admiration rather than with loathing.
+And herein consists, more even than in any deceptions practised upon
+King Mark or any ingratitude manifested towards Brangwaine, the
+sinfulness of Tristram and Yseult: sinfulness which is not finite like
+the individual lives which it offends, but infinite and immortal as the
+heart and the judgment which it perverts. For such a tale, and so told,
+as the tale of Gottfried von Strassburg, makes us sympathize with this
+fidelity and devotion of a man and woman who care for nothing in the
+world save for each other, who are dragged and glued together by the
+desire and habit of mutual pleasure; it makes us admire their readiness
+to die rather than be parted, when their whole life is concentrated in
+their reciprocal sin, when their miserable natures enjoy, care for,
+know, only this miserable love. It makes us wink with leniency at the
+dishonour, the baseness, the cruelty, to which all this easy virtue is
+due. And such sympathy, such admiration, such leniency, for howsoever
+short a time they may remain in our soul, leave it, if they ever leave
+it completely and utterly less strong, less clean than it was before. We
+have all of us a lazy tendency to approve of the virtue which costs no
+trouble; to contemplate in ourselves or others, with a spurious moral
+satisfaction, the development of this or that virtuous quality in souls
+which are deteriorating in undoubted criminal self-indulgence. We have
+all of us, at the bottom of our hearts, a fellow feeling for all human
+affection; and the sinfulness of sinners like Tristram and Yseult lies
+largely in the fact that they pervert this legitimate and holy sympathy
+into a dangerous leniency for any strong and consistent love, into a
+morbid admiration for any irresistible mutual passion, making us forget
+that love has in itself no moral value, and that while self-indulgence
+may often be innocent, only self-abnegation can ever be holy.
+
+The great medięval German poem of Tristram and Yseult remained for
+centuries a unique phenomenon; only John Ford perhaps, that grander and
+darker twin spirit of Gottfried von Strassburg, reviving, even among the
+morbidly psychological and crime-fascinated followers of Shakespeare,
+that new theme of evil--the heroism of unlawful love. But Gottfried had
+merely manipulated with precocious analytical power a mode of feeling
+and thinking which was universal in the feudal Middle Ages; the great
+epic of adultery was forgotten, but the sympathetic and admiring
+interest in illegitimate passion remained; and was transmitted, wherever
+the Renaissance or the Reformation did not break through such
+transmission of medięval habits, as an almost inborn instinct from
+father to son, from mother to daughter. And we may doubt whether the
+important class of men and women who write and read the novels of
+illicit love, could ever have existed, had not the psychological artists
+of modern times, from Rousseau to George Sand, and from Stendhal to
+Octave Feuillet, found ready prepared for them in the countries not
+re-tempered by Protestantism, an assoiation of romance, heroism, and
+ideality with mere adulterous passion, which was unknown to the
+corruption of Antiquity and to the lawlessness of the Dark Ages, and
+which remained as a fatal alloy to that legacy of mere spiritual love
+which was left to the world by the love poets of early feudalism.
+
+
+II.
+
+The love of the troubadours and minnesingers, of the Arthurian tales,
+which show that love in narrative form, was, as we have seen, polluted
+by the selfishness, the deceitfulness, the many unclean necessities of
+adulterous passion. Elevated and exquisite though it was, it could not
+really purify the relations of man and woman, since it was impure. Nay,
+we see that through its influence the grave and simple married love of
+the earlier tales of chivalry, the love of Siegfried for Chriemhilt, of
+Roland for his bride Belle Aude, of Renaud for his wife Clarisse, is
+gradually replaced in later fiction by the irregular love-makings of
+Huon of Bordeaux, Ogier the Dane, and Artus of Brittany; until we come
+at last to the extraordinary series of the Amadis romances, where every
+hero without exception is the bastard of virtuous parents, who
+subsequently marry and discover their foundling: a state of things
+which, even in the corrupt Renaissance, Boiardo and Ariosto found it
+necessary to reform in their romantic poems. With idealizing refinement,
+the chivalric love of the French, Provenēal, and German poets brings
+also a kind of demoralization which, from one point of view, makes the
+spotless songs of Bernard de Ventadour and Armaud de Mareulh, of Ulrich
+von Liechtenstein and Frauenlob, less pure than the licentious poems
+addressed by the Greeks and Romans to women who, at least, were not the
+wives of other men.
+
+Shall all this idealizing refinement, this almost religious fervour,
+this new poetic element of chivalric love remain useless; or serve only
+to subtly pollute while pretending to purify the great singing passion?
+Not so. But to prevent such waste of what in itself is pure and
+precious, is the mission of another country, of another civilization; of
+a wholly different cycle of poets who, receiving the new element of
+medięval love after it has passed through and been sifted by a number
+of hands, shall cleanse and recreate it in the fire of intellectual and
+almost abstract passion, producing that wonderful essence of love which,
+as the juices squeezed by alchemists out of jewels purified the body
+from all its ills, shall purify away all the diseases of the human soul.
+
+While the troubadours and minnesingers had been singing at the courts of
+Angevine kings and Hohenstauffen emperors, of counts of Toulouse and
+dukes of Austria; a new civilization, a new political and social system,
+had gradually been developing in the free burghs of Italy; a new life
+entirely the reverse of the life of feudal countries. The Italian cities
+were communities of manufacturers and merchants, into which only
+gradually, and at the sacrifice of every aristocratic privilege and
+habit, a certain number of originally foreign feudatories were gradually
+absorbed. Each community consisted of a number of mercantile families,
+equal before the law, and illustrious or obscure according to their
+talents or riches, whose members, instead of being scattered over a wide
+area like the members of the feudal nobility, were most often gathered
+together under one roof--sons, brothers, nephews, daughters, sisters and
+daughters-in-law, forming a hierarchy attending to the business of
+factory or counting-house under the orders of the father of the family,
+and to the economy of the house-under the superintendence of the mother;
+a manner of living at once business-like and patriarchal, expounded
+pounded by the interlocutors in Alberti's "Governo della Famiglia," and
+which lasted until the dissolution of the commonwealths and almost to
+our own times. Such habits imply a social organization, an intercourse
+between men and women, and a code of domestic morality the exact
+opposite to those of feudal countries. Here, in the Italian cities,
+there are no young men bound to loiter, far from their homes, round the
+wife of a military superior, to whom her rank and her isolation from all
+neighbours give idleness and solitude. The young men are all of them in
+business, usually with their own kinsfolk; not in their employer's
+house, but in his office; they have no opportunity of seeing a woman
+from dawn till sunset. The women, on their side, are mainly employed at
+home: the whole domestic arrangement depends upon them, and keeps their
+hands constantly full; working, and working in the company of their
+female relatives and friends. Men and women are free comparatively
+little, and then they are free all together in the same places; hence no
+opportunities for _tźte-ą-tźte_. Early Italian poetry is fond of showing
+us the young poet reading his verses or explaining his passion to those
+gentle, compassionate women learned in love, of whom we meet a troop,
+beautiful, vague, half-arch, half-melancholy faces, consoling Dante in
+the "Vita Nuova," and reminding Guido Cavalcanti of his lady far off at
+Toulouse. But such women almost invariably form a group; they cannot be
+approached singly. Such a state of society inevitably produces a high
+and strict morality. In these early Italian cities a case of in'
+fidelity is punished ruthlessly; the lover banished or killed; the wife
+for ever lost to the world, perhaps condemned to solitude and a
+lingering death in the fever tracts, like Pia dei Tolomei. A complacent
+deceived husband is even more ridiculous (the deceived husband is
+notoriously the chief laughing stock of all medięval free towns) than is
+a jealous husband among the authorized and recognized _cicisbeos_ of a
+feudal court. Indeed the respect for marriage vows inevitable in this
+busy democratic medięval life is so strong, that long after the
+commonwealths have turned into despotisms, and every social tie has been
+dissolved in the Renaissance, the wives and daughters of men stained
+with every libidinous vice, nay, of the very despots themselves
+--Tiberiuses and Neros on a smaller scale--remain spotless in the midst
+of evil; and authorized adultery begins in Italy only under the Spanish
+rule in the late sixteenth century.
+
+Such were the manners and morals of the Italian commonwealths when,
+about the middle of the thirteenth century, the men of Tuscany, now free
+and prosperous, suddenly awoke to the consciousness that they had a soul
+which desired song, and a language which was spontaneously singing. It
+was the moment when painting was beginning to claim for the figures of
+real men and women the walls and vaulted spaces whence had hitherto
+glowered, with vacant faces and huge ghostlike eyes, mosaic figures,
+from their shimmering golden ground; the moment when the Pisan artists
+had sculptured solemnly draped madonnas and kings not quite unworthy of
+the carved sarcophagi which stood around them; the moment when, merging
+together old Byzantine traditions and Northern examples, the architects
+of Florence, Siena, and Orvieto conceived a style which made cathedrals
+into marvellous and huge reliquaries of marble, jasper, alabaster, and
+mosaics. The medięval flowering time had come late, very late, in Italy;
+but the atmosphere was only the warmer, the soil the richer, and Italy
+put forth a succession of exquisite and superb immortal flowers of art
+when the artistic sap of other countries had begun to be exhausted. But
+the Italians, the Tuscans, audacious in the other arts, were diffident
+of themselves with regard to poetry. Architecture, painting, sculpture,
+had been the undisputed field for plebeian craftsmen, belonging
+exclusively to the free burghs and disdained by the feudal castles; but
+poetry was essentially the aristocratic, the feudal art, cultivated by
+knights and cultivated for kings and barons. It was probably an unspoken
+sense of this fact which caused the early Tuscan poets to misgive their
+own powers and to turn wistfully and shyly towards the poets of Provence
+and of Sicily. There, beyond the seas, under the last lords of Toulouse
+and the brilliant mongrel Hohenstauffen princes, were courts, knights,
+and ladies; there was the tradition of this courtly art of poetry; and
+there only could the sons of Florentine or Sienese merchants,
+clodhoppers in gallantry and song, hope to learn the correct style of
+thing. Hence the history of the Italian lyric before Dante is the
+history of a series of transformations which connect a style of poetry
+absolutely feudal and feudally immoral, with the hitherto unheard-of
+platonic love subtleties of the "Vita Nuova." And it is curious, in
+looking over the collections of early Italian lyrists, to note the
+alteration in tone as Sicily and the feudal courts are left further and
+further behind. Ciullo d' Alcamo, flourishing about 1190, is the only
+Italian-writing poet absolutely contemporaneous with the earlier and
+better trouvčres, troubadours, and minnesingers; and he is also the only
+one who resembles them very closely. His famous _tenso_, beginning "Rosa
+fresca aulentissima" (a tolerably faithful translation heads the
+beautiful collection of the late Mr. D.G. Rossetti), is indeed more
+explicitly gross and immoral than the majority of Provenēal and German
+love-songs: loose as are many of the _albas, serenas, wachtlieder_, and
+even many of the less special forms of German and Provenēal poetry, I am
+acquainted with none of them which comes up to this singular dialogue,
+in which a man, refusing to marry a woman, little by little wins her
+over to his wishes and makes her brazenly invite him to her dishonour.
+Between Ciullo d' Alcamo and his successors there is some gap of time,
+and a corresponding want of gradation. Yet the Sicilian poets of the
+courts of Hohenstauffen and Anjou, recognizable by their name or the
+name of their town, Inghilfredi, Manfredi, Ranieri and Ruggierone da
+Palermo, Tommaso and Matteo da Messina, Guglielmotto d' Otranto, Rinaldo
+d'Aquino, Peir delle Vigne, either maintain altogether unchanged the
+tone of the troubadours, or only gradually, as in the remarkable case of
+the Notary of Lentino, approximate to the platonic poets of Tuscany. The
+songs of the archetype of Sicilian singers, the Emperor Frederick II.,
+are completely Provenēal in feeling as in form, though infinitely
+inferior in execution. With him it is always the pleasure which he hopes
+from his lady, or the pleasure which he has had--"Quando ambidue stavamo
+in allegranza alla dolce fera;" "Pregovi donna mia--Per vostra
+cortesia--E pregovi che sia--Quello che lo core disia." Again: "Sospiro
+e sto in rancura--Ch' io son si disioso--E pauroso--Mi fate penare--Ma
+tanto m' assicura--Lo suo viso amoroso--E lo gioioso--Riso e lo
+sguardare--E lo parlare--Di questa criatura--Che per paura--Mi fate
+penare--E di morare--Tant' č fina e pura--Tanto č saggia e cortese--Non
+credo che pensasse--Nč distornasse--Di ciņ he m' impromise." It is, this
+earliest Italian poetry, like the more refined poetry of troubadours and
+minnesingers, eminently an importuning of highborn but loosely living
+women. From Sicily and Apulia poetry goes first, as might be expected
+(and as probably sculpture went) to the seaport Pisa, thence to the
+neighbouring Lucca, considerably before reaching Florence. And as it
+becomes more Italian and urban, it becomes also, under the strict
+vigilance of burgher husbands, considerably more platonic. In Bologna,
+the city of jurists, it acquires (the remark is not mine merely, but
+belongs also to Carducci) the very strong flavour of legal quibbling
+which distinguishes the otherwise charming Guido Guinicelli; and once in
+Florence, among the most subtle of all subtle Tuscans, it becomes at
+once what it remained even for Dante, saturated with metaphysics: the
+woman is no longer paramount, she is subordinated to Love himself; to
+that personified abstraction Amor, the serious and melancholy son of
+pagan philosophy and Christian mysticism. The Tuscans had imported from
+Provence and Sicily the new element of medięval love, of life devotion,
+soul absorption in loving; if they would sing, they must sing of this;
+any other kind of love, at a time when Italy still read and relished her
+would-be Provenēals, Lanfranc Cicala and Sordel of Mantua, would have
+been unfashionable and unendurable. But in these Italian commonwealths,
+as we have seen, poets are forced, nilly-willy, to be platonic; an
+importuning poem found in her work-basket may send a Tuscan lady into a
+convent, or, like Pia, into the Maremma; an _alba_ or a _serena_
+interrupted by a wool-weaver of Calimara or a silk spinner of Lucca, may
+mean that the imprudent poet be found weltering in blood under some
+archway the next morning. The chivalric sentimentality of feudalism must
+be restrained; and little by little, under the pressure of such very
+different social habits, it grows into a veritable platonic passion.
+Poets must sing, and in order that they sing, they must adore; so men
+actually begin to seek out, and adore and make themselves happy and
+wretched about women from whom they can hope only social distinctions;
+and this purely ęsthetic passion goes on by the side nay, rather on the
+top, of their humdrum, conjugal life or loosest libertinage. Petrarch's
+bastards were born during the reign of Madonna Laura; and that they
+should have been, was no more a slight or infidelity to her than to the
+other Madonna, the one in heaven. Laura had a right to only ideal
+sentiments ideal relations; the poet was at liberty to carry more
+material preferences elsewhere.
+
+But could such love as this exist, could it be genuine? To my mind,
+indubitably. For there is, in all our perceptions and desires of
+physical and moral beauty, an element of passion which is akin to love;
+and there is, in all love that is not mere lust, a perception of, a
+craving for, beauty, real or imaginary which is identical with our
+merely ęsthetic perceptions and cravings; hence the possibility, once
+the wish for such a passion present, of a kind of love which is mainly
+ęsthetic, which views the beloved as gratifying merely to the wish for
+physical or spiritual loveliness, and concentrates upon one exquisite
+reality all dreams of ideal perfection. Moreover there comes, to all
+nobler natures, a love dawning: a brightening and delicate flushing of
+the soul before the actual appearance of the beloved one above the
+horizon, which is as beautiful and fascinating in its very clearness,
+pallor, and coldness, as the unearthly purity of the pale amber and
+green and ashy rose which streaks the heavens before sunrise. The love
+of the early Tuscan poets (for we must count Guinicelli, in virtue of
+his language, as a Tuscan) had been restrained, by social necessities
+first, then by habit and deliberate ęsthetic choice, within the limits
+of this dawning state; and in this state, it had fed itself off mere
+spiritual food, and acquired the strange intensity of mere intellectual
+passions. We give excessive weight, in our days, to spontaneity in all
+things, apt to think that only the accidental, the unsought, can be
+vital; but it is true in many things, and truest in all matters of the
+imagination and the heart, that the desire to experience any sentiment
+will powerfully conduce to its production, and even give it a strength
+due to the long incubation of the wish. Thus the ideal love of the
+Tuscan poets was probably none the weaker, but rather the stronger, for
+the desire which they felt to sing such passion; nay, rather to hear it
+singing in themselves. The love of man and wife, of bride and
+bridegroom, was still of the domain of prose; adulterous love forbidden;
+and the tradition of, the fervent wish for, the romantic passion of the
+troubadours consumed them as a strong artistic craving. Platonic love
+was possible, doubly possible in souls tense with poetic wants; it
+became a reality through the strength of the wish for it.
+
+Nor was this all. In all imaginative passions, intellectual motives are
+so much fuel; and in this case the necessity of logically explaining the
+bodiless passion for a platonic lady, of understanding why they felt in
+a manner so hitherto unknown to gross mankind, tended greatly to
+increase the love of these Tuscans, and to bring it in its chastity to
+the pitch of fervour of more fleshly passions, by mingling with the
+ęsthetic emotions already in their souls the mystical theorizings of
+transcendental metaphysics, and the half-human, half-supernatural
+ecstasy of medięval religion. For we must remember that Italy was a
+country not merely of manufacturers and bankers, but of philosophers
+also and of saints.
+
+Among the Italians of the thirteenth century the revival of antique
+literature was already in full swing; while in France, Germany, and
+Provence there had been, in lyric poetry at least, no trace of classic
+lore. Whereas the trouvčres and troubadours had possessed but the light
+intellectual luggage of a military aristocracy; and the minnesingers
+had, for the most part, been absolutely ignorant of reading and writing
+(Wolfram says so of himself, and Ulrich von Liechtenstein relates how he
+carried about his lady's letter for days unread until the return of his
+secretary); the poets of Italy, from Brunetto Latini to Petrarch, were
+eminently scholars; men to whom, however much they might be politicians
+and ringleaders, like Cavalcanti, Donati, and Dante, whatever existed of
+antique learning was thoroughly well known. Such men were familiar with
+whatever yet survived of the transcendental theories of Plato and
+Plotinus; and they seized at once upon the mythic metaphysics of an
+antenatal condition, of typical ideas, of the divine essence of beauty,
+on all the mystic discussions on love and on the soul, as a
+philosophical explanation of their seemingly inexplicable passion for an
+unapproachable woman. The lady upon whom the poetic fervour, the
+medięval love, inherited from Provence and France, was now expended, and
+whom social reasons placed quite beyond the reach of anything save the
+poet's soul and words, was evidently beloved for the sake of that much
+of the divine essence contained in her nature; she was loved for purely
+spiritual reasons, loved as a visible and living embodiment of virtue
+and beauty, as a human piece of the godhead. So far, therefore, from
+such an attachment being absurd, as absurd it would have seemed to
+troubadours and minnesingers, who never served a lady save for what they
+called a reward; it became, in the eyes of these platonizing Italians,
+the triumph of the well-bred soul; and as such, soon after, a necessary
+complement to dignities, talents, and wealth, the very highest
+occupation of a liberal mind. Thus did their smattering of platonic and
+neo-platonic philosophy supply the Tuscan poets with a logical reality
+for this otherwise unreal passion.
+
+But there was something more. In this democratic and philosophizing
+Italy, there was not the gulf which separated the chivalric poets, men
+of the sword and not of books, from the great world of religious
+mysticism; for, though the minnesingers especially were extremely devout
+and sang many a strange love-song to the Virgin; they knew, they could
+know, nothing of the contemplative religion of Eckhardt and his
+disciples--humble and transcendental spirits, whose words were treasured
+by the sedentary, dreamy townsfolk of the Rhine, but would have conveyed
+no meaning even to the poet of the Grail epic, with its battles and
+feasts, its booted and spurred slapdash morality, Wolfram von
+Eschenbach. In the great manufacturing cities of Italy, such religious
+mysticism spread as it could never spread in feudal courts; it became
+familiar, both in the mere passionate sermons and songs of the wandering
+friars, and in the subtle dialectics of the divines; above all, it
+became familiar to the poets. Now the essence of this contemplative
+theology of the Middle Ages, which triumphantly held its own against the
+cut-and-dry argumentation of scholastic rationalism, was love. Love
+which assuredly meant different things to different minds; a passionate
+benevolence towards man and beast to godlike simpletons like Francis of
+Assisi; a mere creative and impassive activity of the divinity to
+deep-seeing (so deep as to see only their own strange passionate eyes
+and lips reflected in the dark well of knowledge) and almost pantheistic
+thinkers like Master Eckhardt; but love nevertheless, love. "Amor,
+amore, ardo d' amore," St. Francis had sung in a wild rhapsody, a sort
+of mystic dance, a kind of furious _malagueńa_ of divine love; and that
+he who would wish to know God, let him love--"Qui vult habere notitiam
+Dei, amet," had been written by Hugo of St. Victor, one of the subtlest
+of all the mystics. "Amor oculus est," said Master Eckhardt; love,
+love--was not love then the highest of all human faculties, and must not
+the act of loving, of perceiving God's essence in some creature which
+had virtue, the soul's beauty, and beauty, the body's virtue, be the
+noblest business of a noble life? Thus argued the poets; and their
+argument, half-passionate, half-scholastic, mixing Phędrus and
+Bonaventura, the Schools of Alexandria and the Courts of Love of
+Provence, resulted in adding all the fervid reality of philosophical and
+religious aspiration to their clear and cold phantom of disembodied love
+of woman.
+
+Little by little therefore, together with the carnal desires of
+Provenēals and Sicilians, the Tuscan poets put behind them those little
+coquetries of style and manner, complications of metre and rhythm
+learned and fantastic as a woman's plaited and braided hair; those
+metaphors and similes, like bright flowers or shining golden ribbons
+dropped from the lady's bosom and head and eagerly snatched by the
+lover, which we still find, curiously transformed and scented with the
+rosemary and thyme of country lanes, in the peasant poetry of modern
+Tuscany. Little by little does the love poetry of the Italians reject
+such ornaments; and cloth itself in that pale garment, pale and stately
+in heavy folds like a nun's or friar's weeds, but pure and radiant and
+solemn as the garment of some painted angel, which we have all learned
+to know from the "Vita Nuova."
+
+To describe this poetry of the immediate precursors and contemporaries
+of Dante is to the last degree difficult: it can be described only by
+symbols, and symbols can but mislead us. Dante Rossetti himself, after
+translating with exquisite beauty the finest poems of this school,
+showed how he had read into them his own spirit, when he drew the
+beautiful design for the frontispiece of his collection. These two
+lovers--the youth kneeling in his cloth of silver robe, lifting his long
+throbbing neck towards the beloved; the lady stooping down towards him,
+raising him up and kissing him; the mingled cloud of waving hair, the
+four tight-clasped hands, the four tightly glued lips, the profile
+hidden by the profile, the passion and the pathos, the eager, wistful
+faces, nay, the very splendour of brocade robes and jewels, the very
+sweetness of blooming rose spaliers; all this is suitable to illustrate
+this group of sonnets or that of the "House of Life;" but it is false,
+false in efflorescence and luxuriance of passion, splendour and colour
+of accessory, to the poetry of these early Tuscans. Imaginative their
+poetry certainly is, and passionate; indeed the very concentration of
+imaginative passion; but imagination and passion unlike those of all
+other poets; perhaps because more rigorously reduced to their elements:
+imagination purely of the heart, passion purely of the intellect,
+neither of the senses: love in its most essential condition, but, just
+because an essence, purged of earthly alloys, rarefied, sublimated into
+a cultus or a philosophy.
+
+These poems might nearly all have been written by one man, were it
+possible for one man to vary from absolute platitude to something like
+genius, so homogeneous is their tone: everywhere do we meet the same
+simplicity of diction struggling with the same complication and subtlety
+of thought, the same abstract speculation strangely mingled with most
+individual and personal pathos. The mode of thinking and feeling, the
+conception of all the large characteristics of love, and of all its
+small incidents are, in this _cycle_ of poets, constantly the same; and
+they are the same in the "Vita Nuova;" Dante having, it would seem,
+invented and felt nothing unknown to his immediate predecessors and
+contemporaries, but merely concentrated their thoughts and feelings by
+the greater intenseness of his genius. This platonic love of Dante's
+days is, as I have said, a passion sublimated into a philosophy and a
+cultus. The philosophy of love engages much of these poets' attention;
+all have treated of it, but Guido Cavalcanti, Dante's elder brother in
+poetry, is love's chief theologian. He explains, as Eckhardt or
+Bonaventura might explain the mysteries of God's being and will, the
+nature and operation of love. "Love, which enamours us of excellence,
+arises out of pure virtue of the soul, and equals us to God," he tells
+us; and subtly developes his theme. This being the case, nothing can be
+more mistaken than to suppose, as do those of little sense, that Love is
+blind, and goes blindly about ("Da sentir poco, e da credenza vana--Si
+move il dir di cotal grossa gente--Ch' amor fa cieco andar per lo suo
+regno"). Love is omniscient, since love is born of the knowledge and
+recognition of excellence. Such love as this is the only true source of
+happiness, since it alone raises man to the level of the divinity.
+Cavalcanti has in him not merely the subtlety but the scornfulness of a
+great divine. His wrath against all those who worship or defend a
+different god of Love knows no bounds. "I know not what to say of him
+who adores the goddess born of Saturn and sea-foam. His love is fire: it
+seems sweet, but its result is bitter and evil. He may indeed call
+himself happy; but in such delights he mingles himself with much
+baseness." Such is this god of Love, who, when he descended into Dante's
+heart, caused the spirit of life to tremble terribly in his secret
+chamber, and trembling to cry, "Lo, here is a god stronger than myself,
+who coming will rule over me. Ecce Deus fortior me, qui veniens
+dominabitur mihi!"
+
+The god, this chaste and formidable archangel Amor, is the true subject
+of these poets' adoration; the woman into whom he descends by a mystic
+miracle of beauty and of virtue becomes henceforward invested with
+somewhat of his awful radiance. She is a gentle, gracious lady; a
+lovable and loving woman, in describing whose grey-green eyes and colour
+as of snow tinted with pomegranate, the older Tuscans would fain linger,
+comparing her to the new-budded rose, to the morning star, to the golden
+summer air, to the purity of snowflakes falling silently in a serene
+sky; but the sense of the divinity residing within her becomes too
+strong. From her eyes dart spirits who strike awe into the heart; from
+her lips come words which make men sigh; on her passage the poet casts
+down his eyes; notions, all these, with which we are familiar from the
+"Vita Nuova;" but which belong to Cavalcanti, Lapo Gianni, nay, even to
+Guinicelli, quite as much as to Dante. The poet bids his verse go forth
+to her, but softly; and stand before her with bended head, as before the
+Mother of God. She is a miracle herself, a thing sent from heaven, a
+spirit, as Dante says in that most beautiful of all his sonnets, the
+summing up of all that the poets of his circle had said of their
+lady--"Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare."
+
+"She passes along the street so beautiful and gracious," says
+Guinicelli, "that she humbles pride in all whom she greets, and makes
+him of our faith if he does not yet believe. And no base man can come
+into her presence. And I will tell you another virtue of her: no man can
+think ought of evil as long as he looks upon her." "The noble mind which
+I feel, on account of this youthful lady who has appeared, makes me
+despise baseness and vileness," says Lapo Gianni. The women who surround
+her are glorified in her glory, glorified in their womanhood and
+companionship with her. "The ladies around you," says Cavalcanti, "are
+dear to me for the sake of your love; and I pray them as they are
+courteous, that they should do you all honour." She is, indeed, scarcely
+a woman, and something more than a saint: an avatar, an incarnation of
+that Amor who is born of virtue and beauty, and raises men's minds to
+heaven; and when Cavalcanti speaks of his lady's portrait behind the
+blazing tapers of Orsanmichele, it seems but natural that she should be
+on an altar, in the Madonna's place. The idea of a mysterious
+incarnation of love in the lady, or of a mystic relationship between her
+and love, returns to these poets. Lapo Gianni tells us first that she is
+Amor's sister, then speaks of her as Amor's bride; nay, in this love
+theology of the thirteenth century, arises the same kind of confusion as
+in the mystic disputes of the nature of the Godhead. A Sienese poet, Ugo
+da Massa, goes so far as to say, "Amor and I are all one thing; and we
+have one will and one heart; and if I were not, Amor were not; mind you,
+do not think I am saying these things from subtlety ('e non pensate ch'
+io 'l dica per arte'); for certainly it is true that I am love, and he
+who should slay me would slay love."
+
+Together with the knowledge of public life and of scholastic theories,
+together with the love of occult and cabalistic science, and the craft
+of Provenēal poetry, Dante received from his Florence of the thirteenth
+century the knowledge of this new, this exotic and esoteric intellectual
+love. And, as it is the mission of genius to gather into an undying
+whole, to model into a perfect form, the thoughts and feelings and
+perceptions of the less highly endowed men who surround it, so Dante
+moulded out of the love passion and love philosophy of his day the "Vita
+Nuova." Whether the story narrated in this book is fact; whether a real
+woman whom he called Beatrice ever existed; some of those praiseworthy
+persons, who prowl in the charnel-house of the past, and put its poor
+fleshless bones into the acids and sublimates of their laboratory, have
+gravely doubted. But such doubts cannot affect us. For if the story of
+the "Vita Nuova" be a romance, and if Beatrice be a mere romance
+heroine, the real meaning and value of the book does not change in our
+eyes; since, to concoct such a tale, Dante must have had a number of
+real experiences which are fully the tale's equivalent; and to conceive
+and create such a figure as Beatrice, and such a passion as she inspires
+her poet, he must have felt as a poignant reality the desire for such a
+lady, the capacity for such a love. A tale merely of the soul, and of
+the soul's movements and actions, this "Vita Nuova;" so why should it
+matter if that which could never exist save in the spirit, should have
+been but the spirit's creation? It is, in its very intensity, a vision
+of love; what if it be a vision merely conceived and never realized?
+Hence the futility of all those who wish to destroy our faith and
+pleasure by saying "all this never took place." Fools, can you tell what
+did or did not take place in a poet's mind? Be this as it may, the "Vita
+Nuova," thank heaven, exists; and, thank heaven, exists as a reality to
+our feelings. The longed-for ideal, the perfection whose love, said
+Cavalcanti, raises us up to God, has seemed to gather itself into a
+human shape; and a real being has been surrounded by the halo of
+perfection emanated from the poet's own soul. The vague visions of glory
+have suddenly taken body in this woman, seen rarely, at a distance; the
+woman whom, as a child, the poet, himself a child, had already looked at
+with the strange, ideal fascination which we sometimes experience in our
+childhood. People are apt to smile at this opening of the "Vita Nuova;"
+to put aside this narrative of childish love together with the pathetic
+little pedantries of learned poetry and Kabbala, of the long gloses to
+each poem, and the elaborate calculations of the recurrence and
+combination of the number nine (and that curious little bit of
+encyclopędic display about the Syrian month _Tismin_) as so much pretty
+local colouring or obsolete silliness. But there is nothing at which to
+laugh in such childish fascinations; the wonderful, the perfect, is more
+open to us as children than it is afterwards: a word, a picture, a
+snatch of music will have for us an ineffable, mysterious meaning; and
+how much more so some human being, often some other, more brilliant
+child from whose immediate contact we are severed by some circumstance,
+perhaps by our own consciousness of inferiority, which makes that other
+appear strangely distant, above us, moving in a world of glory which we
+scarcely hope to approach; a child sometimes, or sometimes some grown
+person, beautiful, brilliant, who sings or talks or looks at us, the
+child, with ways which we do not understand, like some fairy or goddess.
+No indeed, there is nothing to laugh at in this, in this first
+blossoming of that love for higher and more beautiful things, which in
+most of us is trodden down, left to wither, by our maturer selves;
+nothing to make us laugh; nay, rather to make us sigh that later on we
+see too well, see others too much on their real level, scrutinize too
+much; too much, alas, for what at best is but an imperfect creature. And
+in this state of fascination does the child Dante see the child
+Beatrice, as a strange, glorious little vision from a childish sphere
+quite above him; treasuring up that vision, till with his growth it
+expands and grows more beautiful and noble, but none the less
+fascinating and full of awfulness. When, therefore, the grave young
+poet, full of the yearning for Paradise (but Paradise vaguer, sweeter,
+less metaphysic and theological than the Paradise of his manhood); as
+yet but a gracious, learned youth, his terrible moral muscle still
+undeveloped by struggle, the noble and delicate dreamer of Giotto's
+fresco, with the long, thin, almost womanish face, marked only by dreamy
+eyes and lips, wandering through this young Florence of the Middle
+Ages--when, I say, he meets after long years, the noble and gentle
+woman, serious and cheerful and candid; and is told that she is that
+same child who was the queen and goddess of his childish fancies; then
+the vague glory with which his soul is filled expands and enwraps the
+beloved figure, so familiar and yet so new. And the blood retreats from
+his veins, and he trembles; and a vague god within him, half allegory,
+half reality, cries out to him that a new life for him has begun.
+Beatrice has become the ideal; Beatrice, the real woman, has ceased to
+exist; the Beatrice of his imagination only remains, a piece of his own
+soul embodied in a gracious and beautiful reality, which he follows,
+seeks, but never tries to approach. Of the real woman he asks nothing;
+no word throughout the "Vita Nuova" of entreaty or complaint, no shadow
+of desire, not a syllable of those reproaches of cruelty which Petrarch
+is for ever showering upon Laura. He desires nothing of Beatrice, and
+Beatrice cannot act wrongly; she is perfection, and perfection makes him
+who contemplates humble at once and proud, glorifying his spirit. Once,
+indeed, he would wish that she might listen to him; he has reason to
+think that he has fallen in her esteem, has seemed base and uncourteous
+in her eyes, and he would explain. But he does not wish to address her;
+it never occurs to him that she can ever feel in any way towards him; it
+is enough that he feels towards her. Let her go by and smile and
+graciously salute her friends: the sight of her grave and pure
+regalness, nay, rather divinity, of womanhood, suffices for his joy;
+nay, later the consciousness comes upon him that it is sufficient to
+know of her existence and of his love even without seeing her. And, as
+must be the case in such ideal passion, where the action is wholly in
+the mind of the lover, he is at first ashamed, afraid; he feels a terror
+lest his love, if known to her, should excite her scorn; a horror lest
+it be misunderstood and befouled by the jests of those around him, even
+of those same gentle women to whom he afterwards addresses his praise of
+Beatrice. He is afraid of exposing to the air of reality this ideal
+flower of passion. But the moment comes when he can hide it no longer;
+and, behold, the passion flower of his soul opens out more gloriously in
+the sunlight of the world. He is proud of his passion, of his worship;
+he feels the dignity and glory of being the priest of such a love. The
+women all round, the beautiful, courteous women, of whom, only just
+now, he was so dreadfully afraid, become his friends and confidants;
+they are quite astonished (half in love, perhaps, with the young poet)
+at this strange way of loving; they sympathize, admire, are in love with
+his love for Beatrice. And to them he speaks of her rather than to men,
+for the womanhood which they share with his lady consecrates them in his
+eyes; and they, without jealousy towards this ideal woman, though
+perhaps not without longing for this ideal love, listen as they might
+listen to some new and unaccountably sweet music, touched and honoured,
+and feeling towards Dante as towards some beautiful, half-mad thing. He
+talks of her, sings of her, and is happy; the strangest thing in this
+intensely real narrative of real love is this complete satisfaction of
+the passion in its own existence, this complete absence of all desire or
+hope. But this happiness is interrupted by the sudden, terrible thought
+that one day all this must cease; the horrible, logical necessity coming
+straight home to him, that one day she must die--"Di necessitą conviene
+che la gentilissima Beatrice alcuna volta si muoia." There is nothing
+truer, more intensely pathetic, in all literature, than this frightful
+pang of evil, not real, but first imagined; this frightful nightmare
+vision of the end coming when reality is still happy. Have we not all of
+us at one time felt the horrible shudder of that sudden perception that
+happiness must end; that the beloved, the living, must die; that this
+thing the present, which we clasp tight with our arms, which throbs
+against our breast, will in but few moments be gone, vanished, leaving
+us to grasp mere phantom recollections? Compared with this the blow of
+the actual death of Beatrice is gentle. And then, the truthfulness of
+his narration how, with yearning, empty heart, hungering after those
+poor lost realities of happiness, after that occasional glimpse of his
+lady, that rare catching of her voice, that blessed consciousness of her
+existence, he little by little lets himself be consoled, cradled to
+sleep like a child which has sobbed itself out, in the sympathy, the
+vague love, of another--the Donna della Finestra--with whom he speaks of
+Beatrice; and the sudden, terrified, starting up and shaking off of any
+such base consolation, the wrath at any such mental infidelity to the
+dead one, the indignant impatience with his own weakness, with his
+baseness in not understanding that it is enough that Beatrice has lived
+and that he has loved her, in not feeling that the glory and joy of the
+ineffaceable past is sufficient for all present and future. A revolution
+in himself which gradually merges in that grave final resolve, that
+sudden seeing how Beatrice can be glorified by him, that solemn, quiet,
+brief determination not to say any more of her as yet; not till he can
+show her transfigured in Paradise. "After this sonnet there appeared
+unto me a marvellous vision, in which I beheld things that made me
+propose unto myself to speak no more of this blessed one, until the
+time when I might more worthily treat of her. And that this may come to
+pass, I strive with all my endeavour, even as she truly knows it. Thus,
+if it should please Him, through whom all things do live, that my life
+continue for several more years, I hope to say of her such things as
+have never been said of any lady. And then may it please Him, who is the
+lord of all courtesy, that my soul shall go forth to see the glory of
+its lady, that is to say, of that blessed Beatrice, who gloriously looks
+up into the face of Him, _qui est per omnia sęcula benedictus_"
+
+Thus ends the "Vita Nuova;" a book, to find any equivalent for whose
+reality and completeness of passion, though it is passion for a woman
+whom the poet scarcely knows and of whom he desires nothing, we must go
+back to the merest fleshly love of Antiquity, of Sappho or Catullus; for
+modern times are too hesitating and weak. So at least it seems; but in
+fact, if we only think over the matter, we shall find that in no earthly
+love can we find this reality and completeness: it is possible only in
+love like Dante's. For there can be no unreality in it: it is a reality
+of the imagination, and leaves, with all its mysticism and idealism, no
+room for falsehood. Any other kind of love may be set aside, silenced,
+by the activity of the mind; this love of Dante's constitutes that very
+activity. And, after reading that last page which I have above
+transcribed, as those closing Latin words echo through our mind like the
+benediction from an altar, we feel as if we were rising from our knees
+in some secret chapel, bright with tapers and dim with incense; among a
+crowd kneeling like ourselves; yet solitary, conscious of only the glory
+we have seen and tasted, of that love _qui est per omnia scecula
+benedictus._
+
+
+III.
+
+But is it right that we should feel thus? Is it right that love,
+containing within itself the potentialities of so many things so sadly
+needed in this cold real world, as patience, tenderness, devotion, and
+loving-kindness--is it right that love should thus be carried away out
+of ordinary life and enclosed, a sacred thing for contemplation, in the
+shrine or chapel of an imaginary Beatrice? And, on the other hand, is it
+right that into the holy places of our soul, the places where we should
+come face to face with the unattainable ideal of our own conduct that we
+may strive after something nobler than mere present pleasure and
+profit--is it right that into such holy places, destined but for an
+abstract perfection, there should be placed a mere half-unknown, vaguely
+seen woman? In short, is not this "Vita Nuova" a mere false ideal, one
+of those works of art which, because they are beautiful, get worshipped
+as holy?
+
+This question is a grave one, and worthy to make us pause. The world is
+full of instances of the fatal waste of feelings misapplied: of human
+affections, human sympathy and compassion, so terribly necessary to
+man, wasted in various religious systems, upon Christ and God: of
+religious aspirations, contemplation, worship, and absorption, necessary
+to the improvement of the soul, wasted in various artistic or poetic
+crazes upon mere pleasant works, or pleasant fancies, of man;
+wastefulness of emotions, wastefulness of time, which constitute
+two-thirds of mankind's history and explain the vast amount of evil in
+past and present. The present question therefore becomes, is not this
+"Vita Nuova" merely another instance of this lamentable carrying off of
+precious feelings in channels where they result no longer in
+fertilization, but in corruption? The Middle Ages, especially, in its
+religion, its philosophy, nay, in that very love of which I am writing,
+are one succession of such acts of wastefulness. This question has come
+to me many a time, and has left me in much doubt and trouble. But on
+reflection I am prepared to answer that such doubts as these may safely
+be cast behind us, and that we may trust that instinct which, whenever
+we lay down the "Vita Nuova," tells us that to have felt and loved this
+book is one of those spiritual gains in our life which, come what may,
+can never be lost entirely.
+
+The "Vita Nuova" represents the most exceptional of exceptional moral
+and intellectual conditions. Dante's love for Beatrice is, in great
+measure, to be regarded as an extraordinary and exquisite work of art,
+produced not by the volition of man, but by the accidental combination
+of circumstances. It is no more suited to ordinary life than would a
+golden and ivory goddess of Phidias be suited to be the wife of a mortal
+man. But it may not therefore be useless; nay, it may be of the highest
+utility. It may serve that high utilitarian mission of all art, to
+correct the real by the ideal, to mould the thing as it is in the
+semblance of the thing as it should be. Herein, let it be remembered,
+consists the value, the necessity of the abstract and the ideal. In the
+long history of evolution we have now reached the stage where selection
+is no longer in the mere hands of unconscious nature, but of conscious
+or half-conscious man; who makes himself, or is made by mankind,
+according to not merely physical necessities, but to the intellectual
+necessity of realizing the ideal, of pursuing the object, of imitating
+the model, before him. No man will ever find the living counterpart of
+that chryselephantine goddess of the Greeks; ivory and gold, nay,
+marble, fashioned by an artist, are one thing; flesh is another, and
+flesh fashioned by mere blind accident. But the man who should have
+beheld that Phidian goddess, who should have felt her full perfection,
+would not have been as easily satisfied as any other with a mere
+commonplace living woman; he would have sought--and seeking, would have
+had more likelihood of finding--the woman of flesh and blood who nearest
+approached to that ivory and gold perfection. The case is similar with
+the "Vita Nuova." No earthly affection, no natural love of man for
+woman, of an entire human being, body and soul, for another entire human
+being, can ever be the counterpart of this passion for Beatrice, the
+passion of a mere mind for a mere mental ideal. But if the old
+lust-fattened evil of the world is to diminish rather than to increase,
+why then every love of man for woman and of woman for man should tend,
+to the utmost possibility, to resemble that love of the "Vita Nuova."
+For mankind has gradually separated from brute kind merely by the
+development of those possibilities of intellectual and moral passion
+which the animal has not got; an animal man will never cease to be, but
+a man he can daily more and more become, until from the obscene
+goat-legged and goat-faced creature which we commonly see, he has turned
+into something like certain antique fauns: a beautiful creature, not
+noticeably a beast, a beast in only the smallest portion of his nature.
+In order that this may come to pass--and its coming to pass means, let
+us remember, the enormous increase of happiness and diminution of misery
+upon earth--it is necessary that day by day and year by year there
+should enter into man's feelings, emotions, and habits, into his whole
+life, a greater proportion of that which is his own, and is not shared
+by the animal; that his actions, preferences, the great bulk of his
+conscious existence, should be busied with things of the soul, truth,
+good, and beauty, and not with things of the body. Hence the love of
+such a gradually improving and humanizing man for a gradually improving
+and humanizing woman, should become, as much as is possible, a
+connection of the higher and more human, rather than of the lower and
+more bestial, portions of their nature; it should tend, in its
+reciprocal stimulation, to make the man more a man, the woman more a
+woman, to make both less of the mere male and female animals that they
+were. In brief, love should increase, instead, like that which oftenest
+profanes love's name, of diminishing, the power of aspiration, of
+self-direction, of self-restraint, which may exist within us. Now to
+tend to this is to tend towards the love of the "Vita Nuova;" to tend
+towards the love of the "Vita Nuova" is to tend towards this. Say what
+you will of the irresistible force of original constitution, it remains
+certain, and all history is there as witness, that mankind--that is to
+say, the only mankind in whom lies the initiative of good, mankind which
+can judge and select--possesses the faculty of feeling and acting in
+accordance with its standard of feeling and action; the faculty in great
+measure of becoming that which it thinks desirable to become. Now to
+have perceived the even imaginary existence of such a passion as that of
+Dante for Beatrice, must be, for all who can perceive it, the first step
+towards attempting to bring into reality a something of that passion:
+the real passion conceived while the remembrance of that ideal passion
+be still in the mind will bear to it a certain resemblance, even as,
+according to the ancients, the children born of mothers whose rooms
+contained some image of Apollo or Adonis would have in them a reflex,
+however faint, of that beauty in whose presence they came into
+existence. In short, it seems to me, that as the "Vita Nuova" embodies
+the utmost ideal of absolutely spiritual love, and as to spiritualize
+love must long remain one of the chief moral necessities of the world,
+there exists in this book a moral force, a moral value, a power in its
+unearthly passion and purity, which, as much as anything more
+deliberately unselfish, more self-consciously ethical, we must
+acknowledge and honour as holy.
+
+As the love of him who has read and felt the "Vita Nuova" cannot but
+strive towards a purer nature, so also the love of which poets sang
+became also nobler as the influence of the strange Tuscan school of
+platonic lyrists spread throughout literature, bringing to men the
+knowledge of a kind of love born of that idealizing and worshipping
+passion of the Middle Ages; but of medięval love chastened by the
+manners of stern democracy and passed through the sieve of Christian
+mysticism and pagan philosophy. Of this influence of the "Vita
+Nuova"--for the "Vita Nuova" had concentrated in itself all the
+intensest characteristics of Dante's immediate predecessors and
+contemporaries, causing them to become useless and forgotten--of this
+influence of the "Vita Nuova," there is perhaps no more striking example
+than that of the poet who, constituted by nature to be the mere
+continuator of the romantically gallant tradition of the troubadours,
+became, and hence his importance and glory, the mediator between Dante
+and the centuries which followed him; the man who gave to mankind,
+incapable as yet of appreciating or enduring the spiritual essence of
+the "Vita Nuova," that self-same essence of intellectual love in an
+immortal dilution. I speak, of course, of Petrarch. His passion is
+neither ideal nor strong. The man is in love, or has been in love,
+existing on a borderland of loving and not loving, with the beautiful
+woman. His elegant, refined, half-knightly, half-scholarly, and
+altogether courtly mind is delighted with her; with her curly yellow
+hair, her good red and white beauty (we are never even told that Dante's
+Beatrice is beautiful, yet how much lovelier is she not than this Laura,
+descended from all the golden-haired bright-eyed ladies of the
+troubadours!), with her manner, her amiability, her purity and dignity
+in this ecclesiastical Babylon called Avignon. He maintains a
+semi-artificial love; frequenting her house, writing sonnet after
+sonnet, rhetorical exercises, studies from the antique and the
+Provenēal, for the most part; he, who was born to be a mere troubadour
+like Ventadour or Folquet, becomes, through the influence of Dante, the
+type of the poet Abate, of the poetic _cavaliere servente_; a good, weak
+man with aspirations, who, failing to get the better of Laura's virtue,
+doubtless consoles himself elsewhere, but returns to an habitual
+contemplation of it. He is, being constitutionally a troubadour, an
+Italian priest turned partly Provenēal, vexed at her not becoming his
+mistress; then (having made up his mind, which was but little set upon
+her), quite pleased at her refusal: it turns her into a kind of
+Beatrice, and him, poor man, heaven help him! into a kind of Dante--a
+Dante for the use of the world at large. He goes on visiting Laura, and
+writing to her a sonnet regularly so many times a week, and the best,
+carefully selected, we feel distinctly persuaded, at regular intervals.
+It is a determined cultus, a sort of half-real affectation, something
+equivalent to lighting a lamp before a very well-painted and very
+conspicuous shrine. All his humanities, all his Provenēal lore go into
+these poems--written for whom? For her? Decidedly; for she has no reason
+not to read the effusions of this amiable, weak priestlet; she feels
+nothing for him. For her; but doubtless also to be handed round in
+society; a new sonnet or canzone by that charming and learned man, the
+Abate Petrarch. There is considerable emptiness in all this: he praises
+Laura's chastity, then grows impatient, then praises her again; adores
+her, calls her cruel, his goddess, his joy, his torment; he does not
+really want her, but in the vacuity of his feeling, thinks he does;
+calls her alternately the flat, abusive, and eulogistic names which mean
+nothing. He plays loud and soft with this absence of desire; he fiddle
+faddles in descriptions of her, not passionate or burning, but
+delicately undressed: he sees her (but with chaste eyes) in her bath;
+he envies her veil, &c.; he neither violently intellectually embraces,
+nor humbly bows down in imagination before her; he trifles gracefully,
+modestly, half-familiarly, with her finger tips, with the locks of her
+hair, and so forth. Fancy Dante abusing Beatrice; fancy Dante talking of
+Beatrice in her bath; the mere idea of his indignation and shame makes
+one shameful and indignant at the thought. But this perfect Laura is no
+Beatrice, or only a half-and-half sham one. She is no ideal figure,
+merely a figure idealized; this is no imaginative passion, merely an
+unreal one. Compare, for instance, the suggestion of Laura's possible
+death with the suggestion of the possible death of Beatrice. Petrarch
+does not love sufficiently to guess what such a loss would be. Then
+Laura does die. Here Petrarch rises. The severing of the dear old
+habits, the absence of the sweet reality, the terrible sense that all is
+over, Death, the great poetizer and giver of love philters, all this
+makes him love Laura as he never loved her before. The poor weak
+creature, who cannot, like a troubadour, go seek a new mistress when the
+old one fails him, feels dreadfully alone, the world dreadfully dreary
+around him; he sits down and cries, and his crying is genuine, making
+the tears come also into our eyes. And Laura, as she becomes a more
+distant ideal, becomes nobler, though noble with only a faint earthly
+graciousness not comparable to the glory of the living Beatrice. And,
+as he goes on, growing older and weaker and more desolate, the thought
+of a glorified Laura (as all are glorified, even in the eyes of the
+weakest, by death) begins to haunt him as Dante was haunted by the
+thought of Beatrice alive. Yet, even at this very time, come doubts of
+the lawfulness of having thus adored (or thought he had adored) a mortal
+woman; he does not know whether all this may not have been vanity and
+folly; he tries to turn his thoughts away from Laura and up to God.
+Perhaps he may be called on to account for having given too much of his
+life to a mere earthly love. Then, again, Laura reappears beautified in
+his memory, and is again tremblingly half-conjured away. He is weak, and
+sad, and helpless, and alone; and his heart is empty; he knows not what
+to think nor how to feel; he sobs, and we cry with him. Nowhere could
+there be found a stranger contrast than this nostalgic craving after the
+dead Laura, vacillating and troubled by fear of sin and doubt of
+unworthiness of object, with that solemn ending of the "Vita Nuova,"
+where the name of Beatrice is pronounced for the last time before it be
+glorified in Paradise, where Dante devotes his life to becoming worthy
+of saying "such words as have never been said of any lady." The ideal
+woman is one and unchangeable in glory, and unchangeable is the passion
+of her lover; but of this sweet dead Laura, whose purity and beauty and
+cruelty he had sung, without a tremor of self-unworthiness all her
+life, of her the poor weak Petrarch begins to doubt, of her and her
+worthiness of all this love; and when? when she is dead and himself is
+dying.
+
+Such a man is Petrarch; and yet, by the irresistible purifying and
+elevating power of the "Vita Nuova,'" this man came to write not other
+_albas_ and _serenas,_ not other love-songs to be added to the
+love-songs of Provence, but those sonnets and canzoni which for four
+centuries taught the world, too coarse as yet to receive Dante's passion
+at first hand, a nobler and more spiritual love. After Petrarch a
+gradual change takes place in the poetic conception of love: except in
+learned revivalisms or in loose buffooneries, the mere fleshly love of
+Antiquity disappears out of literature; and equally so, though by a
+slower process of gradual transformation, vanishes also the adoring, but
+undisguisedly adulterous love of the troubadours and minnesingers. Into
+the love Instincts of mankind have been mingled, however much diluted,
+some drops of the more spiritual passion of Dante. The _puella_ of
+Antiquity, the noble dame of feudal days, is succeeded in Latin
+countries, in Italy, and France, and Spain, and Portugal, by the
+_gloriosa donna_ imitated from. Petrarch, and imitated by Petrarch from
+Dante; a long-line of shadowy figures, veiled in the veil of Madonna
+Laura, ladies beloved of Lorenzo and Michael Angelo, of Ariosto, and
+Tasso, and Camoens, and Cervantes, passes through the world; nay, even
+the sprightly-mistress of Ronsard, half-bred pagan and troubadour has
+airs of dignity and mystery which make us almost think that in this
+dainty coquettish French body, of Marie or Helene or Cassandrette, there
+really may be an immortal soul. But with the Renaissance--that movement
+half of medięval democratic progress, and half of antique revivalism,
+and to which in reality belongs not merely Petrarch, but Dante, and
+every one of the Tuscan poets, Guinicelli, Lapo Gianni, Cavalcanti, who
+broke with the feudal poetry of Provence and Sicily--with the
+Renaissance, or rather with its long-drawn-out end, comes the close, for
+the moment, of the really creative activity of the Latin peoples in the
+domain of poetry. All the things for two centuries which Italy and
+France and Spain and Portugal (which we must remember for the sake of
+Camoens) continue to produce, are but developments of parts left
+untouched; or refinements of extreme detail, as in the case,
+particularly, of the French poets of the sixteenth century; but poetry
+receives from these races nothing new or vital, no fresh ideal or
+fruitful marriage of ideals. And here begins, uniting in itself all the
+scattered and long-dormant powers of Northern poetry, the great and
+unexpected action of England. It had slept through the singing period of
+the Middle Ages, and was awakened, not by Germany or Provence, but by
+Italy: Boccaccio and Petrarch spoke, and, as through dreams, England in
+Chaucer's voice, made answer. Again, when the Renaissance had drawn to a
+close, far on in the sixteenth century, English poetry was reawakened;
+and again by Italy. This time it was completely wakened, and arose and
+slept no more. And one of the great and fruitful things achieved by
+English poetry in this its final awakening was to give to the world the
+new, the modern, perhaps the definitive, the final ideal of love.
+England drank a deep draught--how deep we see from Sidney's and
+Spenser's sonnets--of Petrarch; and in this pleasant dilution, tasted
+and felt the burning essence of the "Vita Nuova;" for though Dante
+remained as the poet, the poet of heaven and hell, this happy
+half-and-half Petrarch had for full two centuries completely driven into
+oblivion the young Dante who had loved Beatrice. For England, for this
+magnificent and marvellous outburst of all the manifold poetic energy
+stored up and quintupled during that long period of inertness, there
+could however be no foreign imported ideal of love; there was no
+possibility of a new series of spectral Lauras, shadows projected by a
+shadow. Already, long ago, at the first call of Petrarch, Chaucer, by
+the side of the merely medięval love types--of brutish lust and doglike
+devotion--of the Wife of Bath and of Griseldis, had rough-sketched a
+kind of modern love, the love which is to become that of Romeo and
+Hamlet, in his story of Palemon and Arcite. Among the poetic material
+which existed in England at the close of the sixteenth century was the
+old, long-neglected, domestic love, quiet, undemonstrative, essentially
+unsinging, of the early Northern (as indeed also of the Greek and
+Hindoo) epics; a domestic love which, in a social condition more closely
+resembling our own than any other, even than that of the Italian
+democracies, which had preceded it; among a people who permitted a woman
+to choose her own husband, and forbade a man wooing another man's wife,
+had already, in ballads and folk poetry, begun a faint-twitter of song.
+To this love of the man and the woman who hope to marry, strong and
+tender, but still (as Coleridge remarked of several of the lesser
+Elizabethan playwrights) most outspokenly carnal, was united by the pure
+spirit of Spenser, by the unerring genius of Shakespeare, that vivifying
+drop of burning, spiritual love taken from out of the "Vita Nuova,"
+which had floated, like some sovereign essential oil, on the top of
+Petrarch's rose-water. Henceforward the world possesses a new kind of
+love: the love of Romeo, of Hamlet, of Bassanio, of Viola, and of
+Juliet; the love of the love poems of Shelley, of Tennyson, of Browning
+and Browning's wife. A love whose blindness, exaggeration of passion,
+all that might have made it foolish and impracticable, leads no longer
+to folly and sin, but to an intenser activity of mankind's imagination
+of the good and beautiful, to a momentary realization in our fancy of
+all our vague dreams of perfection; a love which, though it may cool
+down imperceptibly and pale in its intenseness, like the sunrise fires
+into a serene sky, has left some glory round the head of the wife, some
+glory in the heart of the husband, has been, however fleeting, a vision
+of beauty which has made beauty more real. And all this owing to the
+creation, the storing up, the purification by the Platonic poets of
+Tuscany, of that strange and seemingly so artificial and unreal thing,
+medięval love; the very forms and themes of whose poetry, the _serena_
+and the _alba_, which had been indignantly put aside by the early
+Italian lyrists, being unconsciously revived, and purified and
+consecrated in the two loveliest love poems of Elizabethan poetry: the
+_serena_, the evening song of impatient expectation in Spenser's
+Epithalamium; the _alba_, the dawn song of hurried parting, in the
+balcony scene of "Romeo and Juliet."
+
+Let us recapitulate. The feudal Middle Ages gave to mankind a more
+refined and spiritual love, a love all chivalry, fidelity, and
+adoration, but a love steeped in the poison of adultery; and to save the
+pure and noble portions of this medięval love became the mission of the
+Tuscan poets of that strange school of Platonic love which in its very
+loveliness may sometimes seem so unnatural and sterile. For, by reducing
+this medięval love to a mere intellectual passion, seeking in woman
+merely a self-made embodiment of cravings after perfection, they
+cleansed away that deep stain of adultery; they quadrupled the intensity
+of the ideal element; they distilled the very essential spirit of poetic
+passion, of which but a few drops, even as diluted by Petrarch,
+precipitated, when mingled with the earthly passion of future poets, to
+the bottom, no longer to be seen or tasted, all baser ingredients.
+
+And, while the poems of minnesingers and troubadours have ceased to
+appeal to us, and remain merely for their charm of verse and of graceful
+conceit; the poetry written by the Italians of the thirteenth century
+for women, whose love was but an imaginative fervour, remains
+concentrated in the "Vita Nuova;" and will remain for all time the
+sovereign purifier to which the world must have recourse whenever that
+precipitate of baser instincts, which thickened like slime the love
+poetry of Antiquity, shall rise again and sully the purity of the love
+poetry of to-day.
+
+
+
+
+
+EPILOGUE.
+
+More than a year has elapsed since the moment when, fancying that this
+series of studies must be well-nigh complete, I attempted to explain in
+an introductory chapter what the nature of this book of mine is, or
+would fain be. I had hoped that each of these studies would complete its
+companions; and that, without need for explicit explanation, my whole
+idea would have become more plain to others than it was at that time
+even to myself. But instead, it has become obvious that the more
+carefully I had sought to reduce each question to unity, the more that
+question-subdivided and connected itself with other questions; and that,
+with the solution of each separate problem, had arisen a new set of
+problems which infinitely complicated the main lessons to be deduced
+from a study of that many-sided civilization to which, remembering the
+brilliant and mysterious offspring of Faustus and Helena, I have given
+the name of Euphorion. Hence, as it seems, the necessity for a few
+further words of explanation.
+
+In those introductory pages written some fifteen months ago, I tried to
+bring home to the reader a sense which has haunted me throughout the
+writing of this volume; namely, that instead of having deliberately made
+up my mind to study the Renaissance, as one makes up one's mind to visit
+Greece or Egypt or the Holy Land; I have, on the contrary, quite
+accidentally and unconsciously, found myself wandering about in spirit
+among the monuments of this particular historic region, even as I might
+wander about in the streets of Siena where I wrote last year, of
+Florence whence I write at present; wandering about among these things,
+and little by little feeling a particular interest in one, then in
+another, according as each happened to catch my fancy or to recall some
+already known thing. Now these, which for want of a better word I have
+just called monuments, and just now, less clearly, but also less
+foolishly, merely _things_--these things were in reality not merely
+individual and really existing buildings, books, pictures, or statues,
+individual and really registered men, women, and events; they were the
+mental conceptions which I had extracted out of these realities; the
+intellectual types made up (as the medięval symbols of justice are made
+up of the visible paraphernalia, robe, scales and sword, for judging and
+weighing and punishing) of the impressions left on the mind by all
+those buildings, or books, or pictures, or statues, or men, women, and
+events. They were not the iniquities of this particular despot nor the
+scandalous sayings of that particular humanist, but the general moral
+chaos of the Italian fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; not the poem of
+Pulci, of Boiardo, of Ariosto in especial, but a vast imaginary poem
+made up of them all; not the medięval saints of Angelico and the pagan
+demi-gods of Michael Angelo, but the two tremendous abstractions: the
+spirit of Medięvalism in art, and the spirit of Antiquity; the interest
+in the distressed soul, and the interest in the flourishing body. And,
+as my thoughts have gone back to Antiquity and onwards to our own times,
+their starting-point has nevertheless been the Tuscan art of the
+fifteenth century, their nucleus some notes on busts by Benedetto da
+Maiano and portraits by Raphael.
+
+My _dramatis persona_ have been modes of feeling and forms of art. I
+have tried to explain the life and character, not of any man or woman,
+but of the moral scepticism of Italy, of the tragic spirit of our
+Elizabethan dramatists; I have tried to write the biography of the
+romance poetry of the Middle Ages, of the realism of the great portrait
+painters and sculptors of the Renaissance. But these, my _dramatis
+persona,_ are, let me repeat it, abstractions: they exist only in my
+mind and in the minds of those who think like myself. Hence, like all
+abstractions, they represent the essence of a question, but not its
+completeness, its many-sidedness as we may see it in reality. Hence it
+is that I have frequently passed over exceptions to the rule which I was
+stating, because the explanation of these exceptions would have involved
+the formulating of a number of apparently irrelevant propositions; so
+that any one who please may accuse me of inexactness; and, to give an
+instance, cover the margins of my essay on Medięval Love with a whole
+list of virtuous love stories of the Middle Ages; or else ferret out of
+Raynouard and Von der Hagen a dozen pages of medięval poems in praise of
+rustic life. These objections will be perfectly correct, and (so far as
+my knowledge permitted me) I might have puzzled the reader with them
+myself; but it remains none the less certain that, in the main, medięval
+love was not virtuous, and medięval peasantry not admired by poets; and
+none the less certain, I think, also, that in describing the
+characteristics and origin of an abstract thing, such as medięval love,
+or medięval feeling towards the country and country folk, it was my
+business to state the rule and let alone the exceptions.
+
+There is another matter which gives me far greater concern. In creating
+and dealing with an abstraction, one is frequently forced, if I may use
+the expression, to cut a subject in two, to bring one of its sides into
+full light and leave the other in darkness; nay, to speak harshly of one
+side of an art or of a man without being able to speak admiringly of
+another side.
+
+This one-sidedness, this apparent injustice of judgment, has in some
+cases been remedied by the fact that I have treated in one study those
+things which I was forced to omit in another study; as, in two separate
+essays, I have pointed out first the extreme inferiority of Renaissance
+sculpture to the sculpture of Antiquity with regard to absolute beauty
+of form; and then the immeasurable superiority of Renaissance over
+antique sculpture in the matter of that beauty and interest dependent
+upon mere arrangement and handling, wherein lies the beauty-creating
+power of realistic schools. But most often I have shown one side, not
+merely of an artist or an art, but of my own feeling, without showing
+the other; and in one case this inevitable one-sidedness has weighed
+upon me almost like personal guilt, and has almost made me postpone the
+publication of this book to the Greek Kalends, in hopes of being able to
+explain and to atone. I am alluding to Fra Angelico. I spoke of him in a
+study of the progress of mere beautiful form, the naked human form
+moreover, in the art of the Renaissance; I looked at his work with my
+mind full of the unapproachable superiority of antique form; I judged
+and condemned the artist with reference to that superb movement towards
+nature and form and bodily beauty which was the universal movement of
+the fifteenth century; I lost patience with this saint because he would
+not turn pagan; I pushed aside, because he did not seek for a classic
+Olympus, his exquisite dreams of a medięval Paradise. I had taken part,
+as its chronicler, with the art which seeks mere plastic perfection, the
+art to which Angelico said, "Retro me Sathana." It was my intention to
+close even this volume with a study of the poetical conception of early
+Renaissance painting, of that strange kind of painting in which a thing
+but imperfect in itself, a mere symbol of lovely ideas, brings home to
+our mind, with a rush of associations, a sense of beauty and wonder
+greater perhaps than any which we receive from the sober reality of
+perfect form. Again, there are the German masters--the great engravers,
+Kranach, Altdorfer, Aldegrever, especially; of whom, for their absolute
+pleasure in ugly women, for their filthy delight in horrors, I have said
+an immense amount of ill; and of whom, for their wonderful intuition of
+dramatic situation, their instinct of the poetry of common things, and
+their magnificently imaginative rendering of landscape, I hope some day
+to say an equal amount of good.
+
+I have spoken of the lesson which may be derived from studies even as
+humble as these studies of mine; since, in my opinion, we cannot treat
+history as a mere art--though history alone can gives us now-a-days
+tragedy which has ceased to exist on our stage, and wonder which has
+ceased to exist in our poetry--we cannot seek in it mere selfish
+enjoyment of imagination and emotion, without doing our soul the great
+injury of cheating it of some of those great indignations, some of
+those great lessons which make it stronger and more supple in the
+practical affairs of life. Each of these studies of mine brings its own
+lesson, artistic or ethical, important or unimportant; its lesson of
+seeking certainty in our moral opinions, beauty in all and whatever our
+forms of art, spirituality in our love. But besides these I seem to
+perceive another deduction, an historical fact with a practical
+application; to see it as the result not merely perhaps of the studies
+of which this book is the fruit, but of those further studies, of the
+subtler sides of Medięval and Renaissance life and art which at present
+occupy my mind and may some day add another series of essays to this: a
+lesson still vague to myself, but which, satisfactorily or
+unsatisfactorily, I shall nevertheless attempt to explain; if indeed it
+requires to be brought home to the reader.
+
+Of the few forms of feeling and imagination which I have treated--things
+so different from one another as the feeling for nature and the
+chivalric poem, as modern art, with its idealism and realism, and modern
+love--of these forms, emotional and artistic, which Antiquity did not
+know, or knew but little, the reader may have observed that I have
+almost invariably traced the origin deep into that fruitful cosmopolitan
+chaos, due to the mingling of all that was still unused of the remains
+of Antiquity with all that was untouched of the intellectual and moral
+riches of the barbarous nations, to which we give the name of Middle
+Ages; and that I have, as invariably, followed the development of these
+precious forms, and their definitive efflorescence and fruit-bearing,
+into that particular country where certain medięval conditions had
+ceased to exist, namely Italy. In other words, it has seemed to me that
+the things which I have studied were originally produced during the
+Middle Ages, and consequently in the medięval countries, France,
+Germany, Provence; but did not attain maturity except in that portion of
+the Middle Ages which is medięval no longer, but already more than half
+modern, the Renaissance, which began in Italy not with the establishment
+of despotisms and the coming of Greek humanists, but with the
+independence of the free towns and with the revival of Roman tradition.
+
+Why so? Because, it appears to me, after watching the lines of my
+thought converging to this point, because, with a few exceptions, the
+Middle Ages were rich in great beginnings (indeed a good half of all
+that makes up our present civilization seems to issue from them): but
+they were poor in complete achievements; full of the seeds of modern
+institutions, arts, thoughts, and feelings, they yet show us but rarely
+the complete growth of any one of them: a fruitful Nile flood, but which
+must cease to drown and to wash away, which must subside before the
+germs that it has brought can shoot forth and mature. The sense of this
+comes home to me most powerfully whenever I think of medięval poetry and
+medięval painting.
+
+The songs of the troubadours and minnesingers, what are they to our
+feelings? They are pleasant, even occasionally beautiful, but they are
+empty, lamentably empty, charming arrangements of words; poetry which
+fills our mind or touches our heart comes only with the Tuscan lyrists
+of the thirteenth century. The same applies to medięval narrative-verse:
+it is, with one or two exceptions or half exceptions, such as "The
+Chanson de Roland" and Gottfried's "Tristan und Isolde," decidedly
+wearisome; a thing to study, but scarcely a thing to delight in. I do
+not mean to say that the old legends of Wales and Scandinavia,
+subsequently embodied by the French and German poets of the Middle Ages,
+are without imaginative or emotional interest; nothing can be further
+from my thoughts. The Nibelung story possesses, both in the Norse and in
+the Middle High German version, a tragic fascination; and a quaint
+fairy-tale interest, every now and then rising to the charm of a
+Decameronian _novella_, is possessed by many of the Keltic tales,
+whether briefly told in the Mabinogion or lengthily detailed by
+Chrestien de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach. But all this is the
+interest of the mere story, and you would enjoy it almost as much if
+that story were related not by a poet but by a peasant; it is the
+fascination of the mere theme, with the added fascination of our own
+unconscious filling up and colouring of details. And the poem itself,
+whence we extract this theme, remains, for the most part, uninteresting.
+The figures are vague, almost shapeless and colourless; they have no
+well-understood mental and moral anatomy, so that when they speak and
+act the writer seems to have no clear conception of the motives or
+tempers which make them do so; even as in a child's pictures, the horses
+gallop, the men run, the houses stand, but without any indication of the
+muscles which move the horse, of the muscles which hold up the man, of
+the solid ground upon which is built, nay rather, into which is planted,
+the house. Hatred of Hagen, devotion of Rüdger, passionate piety of
+Parzival--all these are things of which we do not particularly see the
+how or why; we do not follow the reasons, in event or character, which
+make these men sacrifice themselves or others, weep, storm, and so
+forth; nay, even when these reasons are clear from the circumstances, we
+are not shown the action of the mechanism, we do not see how Brunhilt is
+wroth, how Chriemhilt is revengeful, how Herzeloid is devoted to
+Parzival. There is, in the vast majority of this medięval poetry, no
+clear conception of the construction and functions of people's
+character, and hence no conception either of those actions and reactions
+of various moral organs which, after all, are at the bottom of the
+events related. Herein lies the difference between the forms of the
+Middle Ages and those of Antiquity; for how perfectly felt, understood,
+is not every feeling and every action of the Homeric heroes, how
+perfectly indicated! We can see the manner and reason of the conflict of
+Achilles and Agamemnon, of the behaviour of the returned Odysseus, as
+clearly as we see the manner and reason of the movements of the fighting
+Centaurs and Lapithę, or the Amazons; nay, even the minute mood of
+comparatively unimportant figures, as Helen, Brisei's, and Nausicaa, is
+indicated in its moral anatomy and attitude as distinctly as is the
+manner in which the maidens of the Parthenon frieze slowly restrain
+their steps, the boys curb their steeds, or the old men balance their
+oil jars. Nothing of this in medięval literature, except perhaps in
+"Flamenca" and "Tristan," where the motive of action, mere imaginative
+desire, is all-permeating and explains everything. These people clearly
+had no interest, no perception, connected with character: a valorous
+woman, a chivalrous knight, an insolent steward, a jealous husband, a
+faithful retainer; things recognized only in outline, made to speak and
+act only according to a fixed tradition, without knowledge of the
+internal mechanism of motive; these sufficed. Hence it is that medięval
+poetry is always like medięval painting (for painting continued to be
+medięval with Giotto's pupils long after poetry had ceased to be
+medięval with Dante and his school), where the Virgin sits and holds the
+child without body wherewith to sit or arms wherewith to hold; where
+angels flutter forward and kneel in conventional greeting, with
+obviously no bended knees beneath their robes, nay, with knees, waist,
+armpits, all anywhere; where men ride upon horses without flat to their
+back; where processions of the blessed come forth, guided by fiddling
+seraphs, vague, faint faces, sweet or grand, heads which might wave like
+pieces of cut-out paper upon their necks, arms and legs here and there,
+not clearly belonging to any one; creatures marching, soaring, flying,
+singing, fiddling, without a bone or a muscle wherewith to do it all.
+And meanwhile, in this medięval poetry, as in this medięval painting,
+there are yards and yards of elaborate preciousness: all the embossed
+velvets, all the white-and-gold-shot brocades, all the silks and satins,
+and jewel-embroidered stuffs of the universe cast stiffly about these
+phantom men and women, these phantom horses and horsemen. It is not
+until we turn to Italy, and to the Northern man, Chaucer, entirely under
+Italian influence, that we obtain an approach to the antique clearness
+of perception and comprehension; that we obtain not only in Dante
+something akin to the muscularities of Signorelli and Michael Angelo;
+but in Boccaccio and Chaucer, in Cavalca and Petrarch, the equivalent of
+the well-understood movement, the well-indicated situation of the
+simple, realistic or poetic, sketches of Filippino and Botticelli.
+
+This, you will say, is a mere impression; it is no explanation, still
+less such an explanation as may afford a lesson. Not so. This strange
+inconclusiveness in all medięval things, till the moment comes when they
+cease to be medięval; this richness in germs and poverty in mature
+fruit, cannot be without its reason. And this reason, to my mind, lies
+in one word, the most terrible word of any, since it means suffering and
+hopelessness; a word which has haunted my mind ever since I have looked
+into medięval things: the word Wastefulness. Wastefulness; the frightful
+characteristic of times at once so rich and so poor, the explanation of
+the long starvation and sickness that mankind, that all mankind's
+concerns--art, poetry, science, life--endured while the very things
+which would have fed and revived and nurtured, existed close at hand,
+and in profusion. Wastefulness, in this great period of confusion, of
+the most precious things that we possess: time, thought, and feeling
+refused to the realities of the world, and lavished on the figments of
+the imagination. Why this vagueness, this imperfection in all medięval
+representations of life? Because even as men's eyes were withdrawn, by
+the temporal institutions of those days, from the sight of the fields
+and meadows which were left to the blind and dumb thing called serf; so
+also the thoughts of mankind, its sympathy and intentions, were
+withdrawn from the mere earthly souls, the mere earthly wrongs and woes
+of men by the great self-organized institution of medięval religion.
+Pity of the body of Christ held in bondage by the Infidel; love of God;
+study of the unknowable things of Heaven: such are the noblest
+employments of the medięval soul; how much of pity, of love, may remain
+for man; how much of study for the knowable? To Wastefulness like
+this--to misapplication of mind ending almost in palsy--must we ascribe,
+I think, the strange sterility of such medięval art as deals not merely
+with pattern, but with the reality of man's body and soul. And we might
+be thankful, if, during our wanderings among medięval things, we had
+seen the starving of only art and artistic instincts; but the soul of
+man has lain starving also; starving for the knowledge which was sought
+only of Divine things, starving for the love which was given only to
+God.
+
+The explanation, therefore, and its lesson, may thus be summed up in the
+one word Wastefulness. And the fruitfulness of the Renaissance, all that
+it has given to us of art, of thought, of feeling (for the "Vita Nuova"
+is its fruit), is due, as it seems to me, to the fact that the
+Renaissance is simply the condition of civilization when, thanks to the
+civil liberty and the spiritual liberty inherited from Rome and
+inherited from Greece, man's energies of thought and feeling were
+withdrawn from the unknowable to the knowable, from Heaven to Earth; and
+were devoted to the developing of those marvellous new things which
+Antiquity had not known, and which had lain neglected and wasted during
+the Middle Ages.
+
+FLORENCE, _January_,1884.
+
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX.
+
+I have seen the pictures and statues and towns which I have described,
+and I have read the books of which I attempt to give an impression; but
+here my original research, if such it may be called, comes to an end. I
+have trusted only to myself for my impressions; but I have taken from
+others everything that may be called historical fact, as distinguished
+from the history of this or that form of thought or of art which I have
+tried to elaborate. My references are therefore only to standard
+historical works, and to such editions of poets and prose writers as
+have come into my hands. How much I am endebted to the genius of
+Michelet; nay, rather, how much I am, however unimportant, the thing
+made by him, every one will see and judge. With regard to positive
+information I must express my great obligations to the works of Jacob
+Burckhardt, of Prof. Villari, and of Mr. J.A. Symonds in everything that
+concerns the political history and social condition of the Renaissance.
+Mr. Symonds' name I have placed last, although this is by no means the
+order of importance in which the three writers appear in my mind,
+because vanity compels me to state that I have deprived myself of the
+pleasure and profit of reading his volumes on Italian literature, from a
+fear that finding myself doubtless forestalled by him in various
+appreciations, I might deprive my essays of what I feel to be their
+principal merit, namely, the spontaneity and wholeness of personal
+impression. With regard to philological lore, I may refer, among a
+number of other works, to M. Gaston Paris' work on the Cycle of
+Charlemagne, M. de la Villemarqué's companion volume on Keltic romances,
+and Professor Rajna's "Fonti dell' Ariosto." My knowledge of
+troubadours, trouvčres, and minnesingers is obtained mainly from the
+great collections of Raynouard, Wackernagel, Mätzner, Bartsch, and Von
+der Hagen, and from Bartsch's and Simrock's editions and versions of
+Gottfried von Strassburg, Hartmann von Aue, and Wolfram von Eschenbach.
+"Flamenca" I have read in Professor Paul Meyer's beautiful edition, text
+and translation; "Aucassin et Nicolette," in an edition published, if I
+remember rightly, by Janet; and also in a very happy translation
+contained in Delvau's huge collection of "Romans de Chevalerie," which
+contains, unfortunately sometimes garbled, as many of the prose stories
+of the Carolingian and Amadis cycle as I, at all events, could endure to
+read. For the early Italian poets, excepting Carducci's "Cino da
+Pistoia," my references are the same as those in Rossetti's "Dante and
+his Cycle," especially the "Rime Antiche" and the "Poeti del Primo
+Secolo." Professor d'Ancona's pleasant volume has greatly helped me in
+the history of the transformation of the courtly poetry of the early
+Middle Ages into the folk poetry of Tuscany. I owe a good deal also,
+with regard to this same essay "The Outdoor Poetry," to Roskoff's famous
+"Geschichte des Teufels," and to Signor Novati's recently published
+"Carmina Medii _Ęvi_." The Italian _novellieri,_ Bandello, Cinthio, and
+their set, I have used in the Florentine editions of 1820 or 1825;
+Masuccio edited by De Sanctis. For the essay on the Italian Renaissance
+on the Elizabethan Stage, I have had recourse, chiefly, to the fifteenth
+century chronicles in the "Archivio Storico Italiano," and to Dyce's
+Webster, Hartley Coleridge's Massinger and Ford, Churton Collins' Cyril
+Tourneur, and J.O. Halliwell's Marston.
+
+The essays on art have naturally profited by the now inevitable Crowe
+and Cavalcaselle; but in this part of my work, while I have relied very
+little on books, I have received more than the equivalent of the
+information to be obtained from any writers in the suggestions and
+explanations of my friend Mr. T. Nelson MacLean, who has made it
+possible for a mere creature of pens and ink to follow the differences
+of _technique_ of the sculptors and medallists of the fifteenth century;
+a word of thanks also, for various such suggestions as can come only
+from a painter, to my old friend Mr. John S. Sargent, of Paris.
+
+I must conclude these acknowledgments by thanking the Editors of the
+_Contemporary, British Quarterly_, and _National Reviews_, and of the
+_Cornhill Magazine_, for permission to republish such of the essays or
+fragments of essays as have already appeared in those periodicals.
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Euphorion, by Vernon Lee
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Euphorion, by Vernon Lee
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Euphorion
+       Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the
+              Renaissance - Vol. II
+
+Author: Vernon Lee
+
+Release Date: February 17, 2010 [EBook #31304]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EUPHORION ***
+
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+Produced by Marc D'Hooghe
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+</pre>
+
+
+<h1>EUPHORION: BEING STUDIES OF THE ANTIQUE AND THE MEDI&AElig;VAL IN THE RENAISSANCE</h1>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h2>VERNON LEE</h2>
+
+<h3><i>Author of "Studies of the 18th Century in Italy," "Belcaro," etc.</i></h3>
+
+<h3><i>VOL. II.</i></h3>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h3>TABLE OF CONTENTS.</h3>
+
+
+<p class="center"><a href="#THE_PORTRAIT_ART">The Portrait Art</a></p>
+
+<p class="center"><a href="#THE_SCHOOL_OF_BOIARDO">The School Of Boiardo</a></p>
+
+<p class="center"><a href="#MEDIEVAL_LOVE">Mediaeval Love</a></p>
+
+<p class="center"><a href="#EPILOGUE">Epilogue</a></p>
+
+<p class="center"><a href="#APPENDIX">Appendix</a></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+<h3><a name="THE_PORTRAIT_ART" id="THE_PORTRAIT_ART"></a>THE PORTRAIT ART</h3>
+
+
+<h3>I.</h3>
+
+<p>Real and Ideal&mdash;these are the handy terms, admiring
+or disapproving, which criticism claps with random
+facility on to every imaginable school. This artist
+or group of artists goes in for the real&mdash;the upright,
+noble, trumpery, filthy real; that other artist or group
+of artists seeks after the ideal&mdash;the ideal which may
+mean sublimity or platitude. We summon every
+living artist to state whether he is a realist or an
+idealist; we classify all dead artists as realists or
+idealists; we treat the matter as if it were one of
+almost moral importance. Now the fact of the case
+is that the question of realism and idealism, which
+we calmly assume as already settled or easy to settle
+by our own sense of right and wrong, is one of the
+tangled questions of art-philosophy; and one, moreover,
+which no amount of theory, but only historic
+fact, can ever set right. For, to begin with, we find
+realism and idealism coming before us in different
+ways and with different meaning and importance.
+All art which is not addressing (as decrepit art is
+forced to do) faculties to which it does not spontaneously
+and properly appeal&mdash;all art is decorative, ornamental,
+idealistic therefore, since it consciously or
+unconsciously aims, not merely at reproducing the
+already existing, but at producing something which
+shall repay the looking at it, something which shall ornament,
+if not a place, at least our lives; and such making
+of the ornamental, of the worth looking at, necessarily
+implies selection and arrangement&mdash;that is to say
+idealism. At the same time, while art aims definitely
+at being in this sense decorative, art may very possibly
+aim more immediately at merely reproducing, without,
+selection or arrangement, the actually existing things
+of the world; and this in order to obtain the mere
+power of representation. In short, art which is idealistic
+as a master will yet be realistic as a scholar: it
+decorates when it achieves, it copies when it studies.
+But this is only half the question. Certain whole
+schools may be described as idealistic, others as
+realistic, in tendency; and this, not in their study, but
+in their achievement. One school will obviously be
+contented with forms the most unselected and vulgar;
+others will go but little out of their way in search of
+form-superiority; while yet others, and these we must
+emphatically call idealistic, are squeamish to the last
+degree in the choice and adaptation of form, anxious,
+to get the very best, and make the very best of it.
+Yet, on thinking over it, we shall find that realistic.
+and idealistic schools are all, in their achievements,
+equally striving after something which is not the mere
+reproduction of the already existing as such&mdash;striving,
+in short, after decoration. The pupil of Perugino
+will, indeed, wait patiently to begin his work until he
+can find a model fit for a god or goddess; while the
+fellow-craftsman of Rembrandt will be satisfied with
+the first dirty old Jew or besotten barmaid that comes
+to hand. But the realistic Dutchman is not, therefore,
+any the less smitten with beauty, any the less eager
+to be ornamental, than the idealistic Italian: his man
+and woman he takes indeed with off-hand indifference,
+but he places them in that of which the Italian shall
+perhaps never have dreamed, in that on which he has
+expended all his science, his skill, his fancy, in that
+which he gives as his addition to the beautiful things
+of art&mdash;in atmosphere, in light, which are to the everyday
+atmosphere and light what the patiently sought
+for, carefully perfected god or goddess model of
+Raphael is to the everyday Jew, to the everyday
+barmaid, of Rembrandt.</p>
+
+<p>The ideal, for the man who is quite coarsely realistic
+in his figures, exists in the air, light, colour; and in
+saying this I have, so to speak, turned over the page
+too quickly, forestalled the expression of what I can
+prove only later: the disconnection of such comparative
+realism and idealism as this (the only kind of realism,
+let us remember, which can exist in great art) with
+any personal bias of the artist, its intimate dependence
+upon the constitution and tendency of art, upon its
+preoccupations about form, or colour, or light, in a
+given country and at a given moment. And now I
+should wish to resume the more orderly treatment
+of the subject, which will lead us in time to the second
+half of the question respecting realism and idealism.
+These considerations have come to me in connection
+with the portrait art of the Renaissance; and this
+very simply. For portrait is a curious bastard of art,
+sprung on the one side from a desire which is not
+artistic, nay, if anything, opposed to the whole nature
+and function of art: the desire for the mere likeness of
+an individual. The union with this interloping tendency,
+so foreign to the whole aristocratic temper of art, has
+produced portrait; and by the position of this hybrid,
+or at least far from regularly bred creature; by the
+amount of the real artistic quality of beauty which it
+is permitted to retain by the various schools of art,
+we can, even as by the treatment of similar social
+interlopers we can estimate the necessities and tendencies
+of various states of society, judge what are
+the conditions in which the various schools of art
+struggle for the object of their lives, which is the
+beautiful.</p>
+
+<p>I have said that art is realistic in its periods or
+moments of study; and this is essentially the case
+even with the school which in many respects was the
+most unmistakably decorative and idealistic in intention:
+the school of Giotto. The Giottesques are
+more than decorative artists, they are decorators in
+the most literal sense. Painting with them is merely
+one of the several arts and crafts enslaved by mediaeval
+architecture and subservient to architectural effects.
+Their art is the only one which is really and successfully
+architecturally decorative; and to appreciate this
+we must contrast their fresco-work with that of the
+fifteenth century and all subsequent times. Masaccio,
+Ghirlandajo, Signorelli, turn the wall into a mere badly
+made frame; a gigantic piece of cardboard would do
+as well, and better; the colours melt into one another,
+the figures detach themselves at various degrees of
+relief; those upon the ceiling and pendentives are
+frequently upside down; yet these figures, which are
+so difficult to see, are worth seeing only in themselves,
+and not in relation to their position. The masonry
+is no longer covered, but carved, rendered uneven with
+the cavities and protrusions of perspective. In Mantegna's
+frescoes the wall becomes a slanting theatre
+scene, cunningly perspectived like Palladio's Teatro
+Olimpico; with Correggio, wall, masonry, everything,
+is dissolved, the side or cupola of a church becomes a
+rent in the clouds, streaming with light.</p>
+
+<p>Not so with the Giottesque frescoes: the wall, the
+vault, the triumphant masonry is always present and
+felt, beneath the straight, flat bands of uniform colour;
+the symmetrical compartments, the pentacles,triangles,
+and segments, and borders of histories, whose figures
+never project, whose colours are separate as those in
+a mosaic. The Giottesque frescoes, with their tiers
+and compartments of dark blue, their vague figures
+dressed in simple ultramarines, greens, dull reds, and
+purples; their geometrical borders and pearlings and
+dog-tooths; cover the walls, the ribbed and arched
+ceilings, the pointed raftering almost like some
+beautiful brown, blue, and tarnished gold leather-hangings;
+the figures, outlined in dark paint, have
+almost the appearance of being stencilled, or even
+stamped on the wall. Such is Giottesque painting:
+an art which is not merely essentially decorative,
+but which is, moreover, what painting and sculpture
+remained throughout the Gothic period, subservient
+to the decorative effect of another art; an art in which
+all is subordinated to architectural effect, in which
+form, colour, figures, houses, the most dramatic scenes
+of the most awful of all dramas, everything is turned
+into a kind of colossal and sublime wall-paper; and
+such an art as this would lead us to expect but little
+realism, little deliberate and slavish imitation of the
+existing. Yet wherever there is life in this Gothic
+art (which has a horrible tendency, piously unobserved
+by critics, to stagnate into blundering repetition of
+the same thing), wherever there is progress, there is,
+in the details of that grandiose, idealistic decoration,
+realism of the crudest kind. Those Giottesque
+workers, who were not content with a kind of Gothic
+Byzantinism; those who really handed over something
+vital to their successors of the fifteenth century, while
+repeating the old idealistical decorations; were studying
+with extraordinary crudeness of realism. Everything
+that was not conventional ornament or type
+was portrait; and portrait in which the scanty technical
+means of the artist, every meagre line and thin dab
+of colour, every timid stroke of brush or of pencil, went
+towards the merciless delineation not merely of a body
+but of a soul. And the greater the artist, the more
+cruel the portrait: cruellest in representation of utter
+spiritual baseness in the two greatest of these idealistic
+decorators; Giotto, and his latest disciple, Fra
+Angelico. Of this I should like to give a couple of
+examples.</p>
+
+<p>In Giotto's frescoes at Santa Croce&mdash;one of the
+most lovely pieces of mere architectural decoration
+conceivable&mdash;there are around the dying and the dead
+St. Francis two groups of monks, which are astoundingly
+realistic. The solemn ending of the ideally
+beautiful life of sanctity which was so fresh in the
+memory of Giotto's contemporaries, is nothing beyond
+a set of portraits of the most absolutely mediocre
+creatures, moral and intellectual, of creatures the most
+utterly incapable of religious enthusiasm that ever
+made religion a livelihood. They gather round the
+dying and the dead St. Francis, a noble figure, not at
+all ecstatic or seraphic, but pure, strong, worn out
+with wise and righteous labour, a man of thought and
+action, upon whose hands and feet the stigmata of
+supernatural rapture are a mere absurdity. The
+monks are presumably his immediate disciples, those
+fervent and delicate poetic natures of whom we read
+in the "Fioretti di San Francesco." To represent them
+Giotto has painted the likeness of the first half-dozen
+friars he may have met in the streets near Santa
+Croce: not caricatures, nor ideals, but portraits
+Giotto has attempted neither to exalt nor to degrade
+them into any sort of bodily or spiritual interestingness.
+They are not low nor bestial nor extremely
+stupid. They are in various degrees dull, sly, routinist,
+prosaic, pedantic; their most noteworthy characteristic
+is that they are certainly the men who are not called
+by God. They are no scandal to the Church, but
+no honour; they are sloth, stupidity, sensualism, and
+cunning not yet risen to the dignity of a vice. They
+look upon the dying and the dead saint with indifference,
+want of understanding, at most a gape or a
+bright look of stupid miscomprehension at the stigmata:
+they do not even perceive that a saint is a
+different being from themselves. With these frescoes
+of Giotto I should wish to compare Fra Angelico's
+great ceremonial crucifixion in the cloister chapel of
+San Marco of Florence; for it displays to an extraordinary
+degree that juxtaposition of the most conventionally
+idealistic, pious decorativeness with the
+realism straightforward, unreflecting, and heartless to
+the point of becoming perfectly grotesque. The fresco
+is divided into two scenes: on the one side the crucifixion,
+the mystic actors of the drama, on the other
+the holy men admitted to its contemplation. A sense
+that holy things ought to be old-fashioned, a respect
+for Byzantine inanity which invariable haunted the
+Giottesques in their capacity of idealistic decorators,
+of men who replaced with frescoes the solemn lifeless
+splendours of mosaic; this kind of artistico-religious
+prudery has made Angelico, who was able to foreshorten
+powerfully the brawny crucified thieves, represent
+the Saviour dangling from the cross bleached,boneless,
+and shapeless, a thing that is not dead because it
+has never been alive. The holy persons around stand
+rigid, vacant, against their blue nowhere of background,
+with vague expanses of pink face looking neither one way
+nor the other; mere modernized copies of the strange,
+goggle-eyed, vapid beings on the old Italian mosaics.
+This is not a representation of the actual reality of the
+crucifixion, like Tintoret's superb picture at S. Rocco,
+or D&uuml;rer's print, or so many others, which show the
+hill, the people, the hangman, the ladders and ropes
+and hammers and tweezers: it is a sort of mystic
+repetition of it; subjective, if I may say so; existing
+only in the contemplation of the saints on the opposite
+side, who are spectators only in the sense that a contemplative
+Christian may be said to be the mystic
+spectator of the Passion. The thing for the painter
+to represent is fervent contemplation, ecstatic realization
+of the past by the force of ardent love and belief;
+the condition of mind of St. Francis, St. Catherine of
+Siena, Madame Guyon: it is the revelation of the great
+tragedy of heaven to the soul of the mystic. Now,
+how does Fra Angelico represent this? A row of
+saints, founders of orders, kneel one behind the other,
+and by their side stand apostles and doctors of the
+Church; admitting them to the sight of the super-human,
+with the gesture, the bland, indifferent vacuity
+of the Cameriere Segreto or Monsignore who introduces
+a troop of pilgrims to the Pope; they are privileged
+persons, they respect, they keep up decorum,
+they raise their eyes and compress their lips with ceremonious
+reverence; but, Lord! they have gone through
+it all so often, they are so familiar with it, they don't
+look at it any longer; they gaze about listlessly, they
+would yawn if they were not too well bred for that.
+The others, meanwhile, the sainted pilgrims, the men
+whose journey over the sharp stones and among the
+pricking brambles of life's wilderness finds its final
+reward in this admission into the presence of the
+Holiest, kneel one by one, with various expressions:
+one with the stupid delight of a religious sightseer;
+his vanity is satisfied, he will next draw a rosary from
+his pocket and get it blessed by Christ Himself; he
+will recount it all to his friends at home. Another is
+dull and gaping, a clown who has walked barefoot
+from Valencia to Rome, and got imbecile by the way;
+yet another, prim and dapper; the rest indifferent
+looking restlessly about them, at each other, at their
+feet and hands, perhaps exchanging mute remarks
+about the length of time they are kept waiting; those
+at the end of the kneeling procession, St. Peter Martyr
+and St. Giovanni Gualberto especially, have the bored,
+listless, devout look of the priestlets in the train of a
+bishop. All these figures, the standing ones who
+introduce and the kneeling ones who are being introduced,
+are the most perfect types of various states of
+dull, commonplace, mediocre routinist superstition;
+so many Camerlenghi on the one hand, so many
+Passionist or Propagandists on the other: the first
+aristocratic, bland and bored; the second, dull, listless,
+mumbling, chewing Latin Prayers which never
+meant much to their minds, and now mean nothing;
+both perfectly reverential and proper in behaviour,
+with no more possibility of individual fervour of belief
+than of individual levity of disbelief: the Church, as
+it exists in well-regulated decrepitude. And thus
+does the last of the Giottesques, the painter of glorified
+Madonnas and dancing angels, the saint, represent
+the saints admitted to behold the supreme tragedy of
+the Redemption.</p>
+
+<p>Thus much for the Giottesques. The Tuscans of
+the early Renaissance developed up to the utmost,
+assisted by the goldsmiths and sculptors, who taught
+them modelling and anatomy, that realistic element
+of Giottesque painting. Its ideal decorative part had
+become impossible. Painting could no longer be a
+decoration of architecture, and it had not yet the means
+of being ornamental in itself; it was an art which did
+not achieve, but merely studied. Among its exercises
+in anatomy, modelling, perspective, and so forth, always
+laborious and frequently abortive, its only spontaneous,
+satisfactory, mature production was its portrait work,
+Portraits of burghers in black robes and hoods; of
+square-jawed youths with red caps stuck on to their
+fuzzy heads, of bald and wrinkled scholars and magnificoes;
+of thinly bearded artizans; people who stand
+round the preaching Baptist or crucified Saviour, look
+on at miracle or martyrdom, stolid, self-complacent,
+heedless, against their background of towered, walled,
+and cypressed city&mdash;of buttressed square and street;
+ugly but real, interesting, powerful among the grotesque
+agglomerations of bag-of-bones nudities, bunched and
+taped-up draperies and out-of-joint architecture of the
+early Renaissance frescoes; at best among its picture-book
+and Noah's-ark prettinesses of toy-box cypresses,
+vine trellises, inlaid house fronts, rabbits in the grass,
+and peacocks on the roofs; for the early Renaissance,
+with the one exception of Masaccio, is in reality a
+childish time of art, giving us the horrors of school-hour
+blunders and abortions varied with the delights of
+nursery wonderland: maturity, the power of achieving,
+the perception of something worthy of perception,
+comes only with the later generation, the one immediately
+preceding the age of Raphael and Michael
+Angelo; with Ghirlandajo, Signorelli, Filippino, Botticelli,
+Perugino, and their contemporaries.</p>
+
+<p>But this period is not childish, is not immature in
+everything. Or, rather, the various arts which exist
+together at this period are not all in the same stage
+of development. While painting is in this immature
+ugliness, and ideal sculpture, in works like Verrocchio's
+and Donatello's David, only a cleverer, more experienced,
+but less legitimate kind of painting, painting
+more successful in the present, but with no possible
+future; the almost separate art of portrait-sculpture
+arises again where it was left by Graeco-Roman
+masters, and, developing to yet greater perfection,
+gives in marble the equivalent of what painting will
+be able to produce only much later: realistic art
+which is decorative; beautiful works made out of ugly
+materials.</p>
+
+<p>The vicissitudes of Renaissance sculpture are
+strange: its life, its power, depend upon death; it is an
+art developed in the burying vault and cloister cemetery.
+During the Middle Ages sculpture had had its
+reason, its vital possibility, its something to influence,
+nay, to keep it alive, in architecture; but with the disappearance
+of Gothic building disappears also the
+possibility of the sculpture which covers the portals of
+Chartres and the belfry of Florence. The pseudo-classic
+colonnades, entablatures, all the thin bastard
+Ionic and Corinthian of Aberti and Bramante, did not
+require sculpture, or had their own little supply of unfleshed
+ox-skulls, greengrocer's garlands, scallopings
+and wave-linings, which, with a stray siren and one
+or two bloated emperors' heads, amply sufficed. On
+the other hand, mediaeval civilization and Christian
+dogma did not encourage the production of naked of
+draped ideal statues like those which Antiquity stuck
+on countless temple fronts, and erected at every
+corner of square, street, or garden. The people of the
+Middle Ages were too grievously ill grown, distorted,
+hideous, to be otherwise than indecent in nudity; they
+may have had an instinct of the kind, and, ugly as
+they knew themselves to be, they must yet have found
+in forms like those of Verrocchio's David insufficient
+beauty to give much pleasure. Besides, if the Middle
+Ages had left no moral room for ideal sculpture once
+freed from the service of architecture; they had still
+less provided it with a physical place. Such things
+could not be set up in churches, and only a very
+moderate number of statues could be wanted as open-air
+monuments in the narrow space of a still Gothic
+city; and, in fact, ideal heroic statues of the early
+Renaissance are fortunately not only ugly, but comparatively
+few in number. There remained, therefore,
+for sculpture, unless contented to dwindle down into
+brass and gold miniature work, no regular employment
+save that connected with sepulchral monuments.
+During the real Middle Ages, and in the still Gothic
+north, the ornamentation of a tomb belonged to architecture:
+from the superb miniature minsters, pillared
+and pinnacled and sculptured, cathedrals within the
+cathedral, to the humbler foliated arched canopy, protecting
+a simple sarcophagus at the corner of many a
+street in Lombardy. The sculptor's work was but the low
+relief on the church flags, the timidly carved, outlined,
+cross-legged knight or praying priest, flattened down
+on his pillow as if ashamed even of that amount of
+prominence, and in a hurry to be trodden down and
+obliterated into a few ghostly outlines. But to this
+humiliated prostrate image, to this flat thing doomed
+to obliteration, came the sculptor of the Renaissance,
+and bade the wafer-like simulacrum fill up, expand,
+raise itself, lift itself on its elbow, arise and take
+possession of the bed of state, the catafalque raised
+high above the crowd, draped with brocade, carved
+with rich devices of leaves and beasts of heraldry,
+roofed over with a da&iuml;s, which is almost a triumphal
+arch, garlanded with fruits and flowers, upon which
+the illustrious dead were shown to the people; but
+made eternal, and of eternal magnificence, by the
+stone-cutter, and guarded, not for an hour by the
+liveried pages or chaunting monks, but by winged
+genii for all eternity. Some people, I know, call this
+a degradation, and say that it was the result of corrupt
+pride, this refusal to have the dear or illustrious dead
+scraped out any longer by the shoe-nails of every
+ruffian, rubbed out by the knees of every kitchen
+wench; but to me it seems that it was due merely to
+the fact that sculpture had lost its former employment,
+and that a great art cannot (thank Heaven!) be
+pietistically self-humiliating. Be this as it may, the
+sculpture of the Renaissance had found a new and
+singularly noble line of work, the one in which it was
+great, unique, unsurpassed, because untutored. It
+worked here without models, to suit modern requirements,
+with modern spirit; it was emphatically-modern
+sculpture; the only modern sculpture which
+can be talked of as something original, genuine, valuable,
+by the side of antique sculpture. Greek Antiquity
+had evaded death, and neglected the dead; a garland
+of maenads and fauns among ivy leaves, a battle of
+amazons or centaurs; in the late semi-Christian,
+platonic days, some Orphic emblem, or genius; at
+most, as in the exquisite tombs of the Keramikos of
+Athens, a figure, a youth on a prancing steed, like the
+Phidian monument of Dexileus; a maiden, draped
+and bearing an urn; but neither the youth nor the
+maiden is the inmate of the tomb: they are types,
+living types, no portraits. Nay, even where Antiquity
+shows us Death or Hermes, gently leading away the
+beloved; the spirit, the ghost, the dead one, is unindividual.
+"Sarkophagen und Urnen bekr&auml;nzte der
+Heide mit Leben," said Goethe; but it was the life
+which was everlasting because it was typical: the life
+not which had been relinquished by the one buried
+there, but the life which the world danced on, forgetful,
+round his ashes. The Romans, on the contrary,
+graver and more retentive folk than the Greeks, as
+well as more domestic, less coffee-house <i>living</i>, appear
+to have inherited from the Etruscans a desire to preserve
+the effigy of the dead, a desire unknown to the
+Greeks. But the Etrusco-Roman monuments, where
+husband and wife stare forth togaed and stolaed, half
+reduced to a conventional crop-headedness, grim and
+stiff as if sitting unwillingly for their portrait; or
+reclining on the sarcophagus-lid, neither dead, nor
+asleep, nor yet alive and awake, but with a hieratic
+mummy stare, have little of aesthetic or sympathetic
+value. The early Renaissance, then, first bethought
+it of representing the real individual in the real death
+slumber. And I question whether anything more
+fitting could be placed on a tomb than the effigy of the
+dead as we saw them just before the coffin-lid closed
+down; as we would give our all to see them but one
+little moment longer; as they continue to exist for our
+fancy within the grave; for to any but morbid feelings
+the beloved can never suffer decay. Whereas a portrait
+of the man in life, as the throning popes in St.
+Peter's, seems heartless and derisive; such monuments
+striking us as conceived and ordered by their inmates
+while alive, like Michael Angelo's Pope Julius, and
+Browning's Bishop, who was so preoccupied about his
+tomb in St. Praxed's Church. The Renaissance, the
+late Middle Ages, felt better than this: on the
+extreme pinnacle, high on the roof, they might indeed
+place against the russet brick or the blue sky, amid
+the hum of life and the movement of the air, the
+living man, like the Scaligers, the mailed knight on
+his charger, lance in rest: but in the church below,
+under the funereal pall, they could place only the body
+such as it may have lain on the bier.</p>
+
+<p>And that figure on the bier was the great work of
+Renaissance sculpture. Inanimate and vulgar when
+in heroic figures they tried to emulate the ancients,
+the sculptors of the fifteenth century have found their
+own line. The modesty, the simplicity, the awful and
+beautiful repose of the dead; the individual character
+cleared of all its conflicting meannesses by death,
+simplified, idealized as it is in the memory of the
+survivors&mdash;all these are things which belong to the
+Renaissance. As the Greeks gave the strong, smooth
+life-current circulating through their heroes; so did
+these men of the fifteenth century give the gentle and
+harmonious ebbing after-life of death in their sepulchral
+monuments. Things difficult to describe, and which
+must be seen and remembered. There is the monument,
+now in the museum at Ravenna, by a sculptor
+whose name, were it known, would surely be among
+the greatest, of the condottiere, Braccioforte: the body
+prone in its heavy case of armour, not yet laid out in
+state, but such as he may have been found in the
+evening, when the battle was over, under a tree where
+they had carried him to die while they themselves
+went back to fight; the head has fallen back, side-ways,
+weighed down by the helmet, which has not
+even been unbuckled, only the face, the clear-cut,
+austere features, visible beneath the withdrawn vizor;
+the eyes have not been closed; and there are few
+things more exquisite and solemn at once in all
+sculpture, than the indication of those no longer seeing
+eyes, of that broken glance, beneath the half-closed
+lids. There is Rossellino's Cardinal of Portugal at
+S. Miniato a Monte: the slight body, draped in episcopal
+robes, lying with delicate folded hands, in
+gracious decorum of youthful sanctity; the strong
+delicate head, of clear feature and gentle furrow of
+suffering and thought, a face of infinite purity of
+strength, strength still ungnarled by action: a young
+priest, who in his virginal dignity is almost a noble
+woman. And there is the Ilaria Guinigi of Jacopo
+della Quercia (the man who had most natural affinity
+with the antique of all these sculptors, as one may see
+from the shattered remains of the Fonte Gaia of
+Siena), the lady stretched out on the rose-garlanded
+bed of state in a corner of Lucca Cathedral, her feet
+upon her sleeping dog, her sweet, girlish head, with
+wavy plaits of hair encircled by a rose-wreathed,
+turban-like diadem, lying low on round cushions; the
+bed gently giving way beneath the beautiful, ample-bosomed
+body, round which the soft robe is chastely
+gathered, and across which the long-sleeved arms
+are demurely folded; the most beautiful lady (whose
+majestic tread through the palace rooms we can well
+imagine) that the art of the fifteenth century has recorded.
+There is, above all, the Carlo Marsuppini of
+Desiderio da Settignano, the humanist Secretary of
+the Commonwealth, lying on the sarcophagus, superb
+with shell fretwork and curling acanthus, in Santa
+Croce of Florence. For the youthful beauty of the
+Cardinal of Portugal and of the Lady Ilaria are
+commonplace compared with the refinement of this
+worn old face, with scant wavy hair and thin, gently
+furrowed, but by no means ploughed-up features.
+The slight figure looks as if in life it must have
+seemed almost transparent; and the hands are very
+pathetic: noble, firm hands, subtle of vein and wrist,
+crossed simply, neither in prayer nor in agony, but in
+gentle weariness, over the book on his breast. That
+book is certainly no prayer-book; rather a volume of
+Plato or Cicero: in his last moments the noble old
+man has longed for a glance over the familiar pages;
+they have placed the book on his breast, but it has
+been too late; the drowsiness of death has overtaken
+him, and with his last sigh he has gently folded his
+hands over the volume, with the faint, last clinging to
+the things beloved in this world.</p>
+
+<p>Such is that portrait sculpture of the early Renaissance,
+its only sculpture, if we except the exquisite work
+in babies and angels just out of the nursery of the Robbias,
+which is a real achievement. But how achieved?
+This art is great just by the things which Antiquity
+did not. And what are those things? Shall we say
+that it is sentiment? But all fine art has tact, antique
+art most certainly; and as to pathos, why, any quiet
+figure of a dead man or woman, however rudely carved,
+has pathos; nay, there is pathos in the poor puling^
+hysterical art which makes angels draw the curtains
+of fine ladies' bedchambers, and fine ladies, in hoop or
+limp Grecian dress, faint (the smelling bottle, Betty!)
+over their lord's coffin; there is pathos, to a decently
+constituted human being, wherever (despite all absurdities)
+we can imagine that there lies some one
+whom it was bitter to see departing, to whom it was
+bitter to depart. Pathos, therefore, is not the question;
+and, if you choose to call it sentiment, it is in reality
+a sentiment for line and curve, for stone and light.
+The great question is, How did these men of the
+Renaissance make their dead people look beautiful?
+For they were not all beautiful in life, and ugly folk
+do not grow beautiful merely because they are dead.
+The Cardinal of Portugal, the beautiful Ilaria herself,
+were you to sketch their profile and place it by the
+side of no matter what ordinary antique, would greatly
+fall short of what we call sculpturesque beauty; and
+many of the others, old humanists and priests and
+lawyers, are emphatically ugly: snub or absurdly
+hooked noses, retreating or deformedly overhanging
+foreheads, fleshy noses, and flabby cheeks, blear eyes
+and sunk-in mouths; and a perfect network of wrinkles
+and creases, which, hard as it is to say, have been
+scooped out not merely by age, but by low mind,
+fretting and triumphant animalism. Now, by what
+means did the sculptor&mdash;the sculptor, too unacquainted
+with sculptural beauty (witness his ugly
+ideal statues), to be able, like the man who turned the
+successors of Alexander into a race of leonine though
+crazy demi-gods&mdash;to insidiously idealize these ugly and
+insignificant features; by what means did he turn
+these dead men into things beautiful to see? I have
+said that he took up art where Graeco-Roman Antiquity
+had left it. Remark that I say Graeco-Roman, and I
+ought to add much more Roman than Greek. For
+Greek sculpture, nurtured in the habit of perfect form,
+art to whom beauty was a cheap necessity, invariably
+idealized portrait, idealized it into beauty or inanity.
+But when Greek art had run its course; when beauty
+of form had well-nigh been exhausted or begun to
+pall; certain artists, presumably Greeks, but working
+for Romans, began to produce portrait work of quite
+a new and wonderful sort: the beautiful portraits of
+ugly old men, of snub little boys, work which was
+clearly before its right time, and was swamped by
+idealized portraits, insipid, nay, inane, from the elegant
+revivalist busts of Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius down
+to the bonnet blocks of the lower empire. Of this
+Roman portrait art, of certain heads of half-idiotic
+little Caesar brats, of sly and wrinkled old men, things
+which ought to be so ugly and yet are so beautiful,
+we say, at least, perhaps unformulated, we think,
+"How Renaissance!" And the secret of the beauty
+of these few Graeco-Roman busts, which is also that
+of Renaissance portrait sculpture, is that the beauty is
+quite different in kind from the beauty of Greek ideal
+sculpture, and obtained by quite different means.</p>
+
+<p>It is, essentially, that kind of beauty which I began
+by saying belonged to realistic art, to the art which is
+not squeamish about the object which it represents,
+but is squeamish about the manner and medium in
+which that indifferent object is represented; it is a kind
+of beauty, therefore, more akin to that of Rembrandt
+and Velasquez than to that of Michael Angelo or
+Raphael. It is the beauty, not of large lines and
+harmonies, beauty residing in the real model's forms,
+beauty real, wholesale, which would be the same if
+the man were not marble but flesh, not in a given
+position but moving; but it is a beauty of combinations
+of light and surface, a beauty of texture opposed
+to texture, which would probably be unperceived in
+the presence of the more regal beauty of line and
+colour harmonies, and which those who could obtain
+this latter would employ only as much as they were
+conducive to such larger beauties. And this beauty
+of texture opposed to texture and light combined with
+surface is a very real thing; it is the great reality of
+Renaissance sculpture: this beauty, resulting from
+the combination, for instance, in a commonplace face,
+of the roughness and coarser pore of the close shaven
+lips and chin with the smoothness of the waxy
+hanging cheeks; the one catching the light, the other
+breaking it into a ribbed and forked penumbra. The
+very perfection of this kind of work is Benedetto da
+Maiano's bust of Pietro Mellini in the Bargello at
+Florence. The elderly head is of strongly marked
+osseous structure, yet fleshed with abundant and flaccid
+flesh, hanging in folds or creases round the mouth and
+chin, yet not flobbery and floppy, but solid, though
+yielding, creased, wrinkled, crevassed rather as a sandy
+hillside is crevassed by the trickling waters; semi-solid,
+promising slight resistance, waxy, yielding
+to the touch. But all the flesh has, as it were, gravitated
+to the lower part of the face, conglomerated,
+or rather draped itself, about the mouth, firmer for
+sunken teeth and shaving; and the skin has remained
+alone across the head, wrinkled, yet drawn in tight
+folds across the dome-shaped skull, as if, while the
+flesh disappeared, the bone also had enlarged. And
+on the temples the flesh has once been thick, the bone
+(seemingly) slight; and now the skin is being drawn,
+recently, and we feel more and more every day, into a
+radiation of minute creases, as if the bone and flesh
+were having a last struggle. Now in this head there
+is little beauty of line (the man has never been good-looking),
+and there is not much character in the sense
+of strongly marked mental or moral personality. I
+do not know, nor care, what manner of man this may
+have been. The individuality is one, not of the mind^
+but of the flesh. What interests, attaches, is not the
+character or temperament, but the bone and skin, the
+creases and folds of flesh. And herein also lies the
+beauty of the work. I do not mean its interest or
+mere technical skill, I mean distinctly visible and
+artistic beauty.</p>
+
+<p>Thus does the sculptor of the Renaissance get
+beauty, visible beauty, not psychologic interest, out of
+a plain human being; but the beauty (and this is the
+distinguishing point of what I must call realistic
+decorative art) does not exist necessarily in the plain
+human being: he merely affords the beginning of a
+pattern which the artist may be able to carry out. A
+person may have in him the making of a really beautiful
+bust and yet be ugly; just as the same person may
+afford a subject for a splendid painting and for an
+execrable piece of sculpture. The wrinkles and creases
+in a face like that of Benedetto da Maiano's Mellini
+would probably be ugly and perhaps disgusting in the
+real reddish, flaccid, discoloured flesh; while they are
+admirable in the solid and supple-looking marble, in
+its warm and delicate bistre and yellow. Material has
+an extraordinary effect upon form; colour, though
+not a positive element in sculpture, has immense
+negative power in accentuating or obliterating the
+mere line. All form becomes vague and soft in the
+dairy flaccidness of modern ivory; and clear and
+powerful in the dark terra cotta, which can ennoble
+even the fattest and flattest faces with its wonderful
+faculty for making mere surface markings, mere
+crowsfeet, interesting. Thus also with bronze: the
+polished, worked bronze, of fine chocolate burnish
+and reddish reflections, mars all beauty of line; how
+different the unchased, merely rough cast, greenish,
+with infinite delicate greys and browns, making, for
+instance, the head of an old woman like an exquisite
+withered, shrivelled, veined autumnal leaf. It is
+moreover, as I have said, a question of combination of
+surface and light, this art which makes beautiful busts
+of ugly men. The ideal statue of the Greeks intended
+for the open air; fit to be looked at under any light,
+high or low, brilliant or veiled, had indeed to be prepared
+to look well under any light; but to look well
+under any light means not to use any one particular
+relation of light as an ally; the surface was kept
+modestly subordinated to the features, the features
+which must needs look well at all moments and from
+all points of view. But the Renaissance sculptor
+knew where his work would be placed; he could calculate
+the effect of the light falling invariably through
+this or that window; he could make a fellow-workman
+of that light, present for it to draw or to obliterate
+what features he liked, bid it sweep away such or such
+surfaces with a broad stream, cut them with a deep
+shadow, caress their smooth chiselling or their rough
+grainings, mark as with a nail the few large strokes of
+the point which gave the firmness to the strained
+muscle or stretched skin. Out of this model of his,
+this plain old burgess, he and his docile friend the light,
+could make quite a new thing; a new pattern of bosses
+and cavities, of smooth sweeps and tracked lines, of
+creases and folds of flesh, of pliable linen and rough
+brocade of dress: something new, something which,
+without a single feature being straightened or shortened,
+yet changed completely the value of the whole
+assemblage of features; something undreamed of by
+nature in moulding that ugly old merchant or humanist.
+With this art which produced works like Desiderio
+da Settignano's Carlo Marsuppini and Benedetto da
+Maiano's Pietro Mellini, is intimately connected the
+art of the great medallists of the Renaissance&mdash;Pasti,
+Guacialotti, Niccol&ograve; Fiorentino, and, greatest of all,
+Pisanello. Its excellence depends precisely upon its
+independence of the ideal work of Antiquity; nay,
+even upon the fact that, while the ancients, striking
+their coins in chased metal dies, obtained an astonishing
+minuteness and clearness of every separate little
+stroke and dint, and were therefore forced into an
+almost more than sculptural perfection of mere line,
+of mere profile and throat and elaborately composed
+hair, a sort of sublime abstraction of the possible
+beauty of a human face, as in the coins of Syracuse
+and also of Alexander; the men of the fifteenth
+century employed the process of casting the bronze
+in a concave mould obtained by the melting away of
+a medallion in wax; in wax, which taking the living
+impress of the artist's finger, and recalling in its firm
+and yet soft texture the real substance of the human
+face, insensibly led the medallist to seek, not sharp
+and abstract lines, but simple, strongly moulded
+bosses; not ideal beauty, but the real appearance of
+life. It is, moreover, a significant fact that while the
+men who, half a century or so later, made fine, characterless
+die-stamped medals in imitation of the antique,
+Caradossi and Benvenuto for instance, were gold-smiths
+and sculptors, workers with the chisel, artists
+seeking essentially for abstract elegance of line; the
+two greatest medallists of the early Renaissance,
+Vittore Pisano and Matteo di Pasti, were both of them
+painters; and painters of the Northern Italian school,
+to whom colour and texture were all important, and
+linear form a matter of indifference. And indeed, if
+we look at the best work of what I may call the wax
+mould medallists of the fifteenth century, even at the
+magnificent marble medallions of the laurel-wreathed
+head of Sigismund Malatesta on the pillars of his
+church at Rimini, modelled by Pasti, we shall see
+that these men were preoccupied almost exclusively
+with the almost pictorial effect of the flesh in its
+various degrees of boss and of reaction of the light;
+and that the character, the beauty even, which they
+attained, is essentially due to a skilful manipulation
+of texture, and surface, and light&mdash;one might almost
+say of colour. We all know Pisanello's famous heads
+of the Malatesti of Rimini: the saturnine Sigismund,
+the delicate dapper Novello, the powerful yet beautiful
+Isotta; but there are other Renaissance medals
+which illustrate my meaning even better, and connect
+my feelings on the subject of this branch of art more
+clearly with my feelings towards such work as Benedetto's
+Pietro Mellini. Foremost among these is
+the perhaps somewhat imperfect and decidedly grotesque,
+but astonishingly powerful, na&iuml;f and characteristic
+Lorenzo dei Medici by Niccol&ograve;
+real grandeur of whose conception of this coarse yet
+imaginative head may be profitably contrasted with
+the classicizing efforts after the demi-god or successor
+of Alexander in Pollaiolo's famous medal of the Pazzi
+conspiracy. Next to this I would place a medal by
+Guacialotti of Bishop Niccol&ograve; Palmieri, with the
+motto, "Nudus egressus sic redibo"&mdash;singularly appropriate
+to the shameless fleshliness of the personage,
+with his naked fat chest and shoulders, his fat, pig-like
+cheeks and greasy-looking bald head; a hideous
+beast, yet magnificent in his bestiality like some huge
+fattened porker. These medals give us, as does the
+bust of Pietro Mellini, beauty of the portrait despite
+ugliness of the original. But there are two other
+medals, this time by Pisanello, and, as it seems to
+me, perhaps his masterpieces, which show the quite
+peculiar way in which this homely charm of portraiture
+amalgamates, so as to form a homogeneous and
+most seemingly simple whole, with the homely charm
+of certain kinds of pure and simple youthful types.
+One of these (the reverse of which fantastically represents
+the four elements, the wooded earth, the starry
+sky, the rippled sea, the sun, all in one sphere) is the
+portrait of Don Inigo d'Avalos; the other that of
+Cecilia Gonzaga. This slender beardless boy in the
+Spanish shovel hat and wisp of scarf twisted round
+the throat; and this tall, long-necked girl, with sloping
+shoulders and still half-developed bosom; are, so to
+speak, brother and sister in art, in Pisanello's wonderful
+genius. The relief of the two medals is extremely
+low, so that in certain lights the effigies vanish almost
+completely, sink into the pale green surface of the
+bronze; the portraits are a mere film, a sort of haze
+which has arisen on the bronze and gathered into
+human likeness; but in this film, this scarce perceptible
+relief, we are made to perceive the slender osseous
+structure, the smooth, sleek, childish blond flesh and
+hair, the delicate, undecided pallor of extreme youth
+and purity, even as we might in some elaborate portrait
+by Velasquez, but with a springlike healthiness
+which Velasquez, painting his lymphatic Hapsburgs,
+rarely has.</p>
+
+<p>Such is this Renaissance art of medals, this side
+branch of the great realistic portraiture in stone of
+the Benedettos, Desiderios, and Rossellinos; a perfect
+thing in itself; and one which, if we muse over it in
+connection with the more important works of fifteenth
+century sculpture, will perhaps lead us to think that,
+as the sculpture of Antiquity, in its superb idealism,
+its devotion to the perfect line and curve of beauty,
+achieved the highest that mere colourless art can
+achieve&mdash;thanks to the very purity, sternness, and narrowness
+of its sculpturesque feeling&mdash;so also, perhaps,
+modern sculpture, should it ever re-arise, must be
+a continuation of the tendencies of the Renaissance,
+must be the humbler sister of painting, must seek for
+the realistic portrait and begin, perhaps, with the
+realistic medal.</p>
+
+<h3>II.</h3>
+
+<p>This kind of realism, where only the model is ugly,
+while the portrait is beautiful; which seeks decorative
+value by other means than the intrinsic excellence of
+form in the object represented, this kind of realism is
+quite different in sort from the realisms of immature
+art, which, aiming at nothing beyond a faithful copy,
+is content with producing an ugly picture of an ugly
+thing. Now this latter kind of realism endured in
+painting some time after decorative realism such as I
+have described had reached perfection in sculpture.
+Nor was it till later, and when the crude scholastic
+realism had completely come to an end, that there
+became even partially possible in painting decorative
+realism analogous to what we have noticed in sculpture;
+while it was not till after the close of the Italian
+Renaissance period that the painters arose in Spain
+and the Netherlands who were able to treat their
+subjects with the uncompromising decorative realism
+of Desiderio or Rosellino or Benedetto da Maiano.
+For the purely imitative realism of the painters of
+the early Renaissance was succeeded in Italy by idealism,
+which matured in the great art of intrinsically
+beautiful linear form of Michael Angelo and Raphael,
+and the great art of intrinsically beautiful colour
+form of Giorgione and Titian. These two schools
+were bound to be, each in its degree, idealistic.
+Complete power of mere representation in tint and
+colour having been obtained through the realistic
+drudgery of the early Renaissance, selection in the
+objects thus to be represented had naturally arisen;
+and the study of the antique had further hastened
+and directed this movement of art no longer to study
+but to achieve, to be decorative once more, decorative
+no longer in subservience to architecture, but as the
+separate and self-sufficing art of painting. Selection,
+therefore, which is the only practical kind of
+idealism, had begun as soon as painting was possessed
+of the power of representing objects in their relations
+of line and colour, with that amount of light and
+shadow requisite to the just appreciation of the relations
+of form and the just relations of colour. Now art
+which stops short at this point of representation must
+inevitably be, if decorative at all, idealistically decorative;
+it must be squeamish respecting the objects
+represented, respecting their real structure, colour,
+position, and grouping. For, of the visible impressions
+received from an object, some are far more
+intrinsic than others. Suppose we see a woman,
+beautiful in the structure of her body, and beautiful
+in the colour of her person and her draperies, standing
+under a light which is such as we should call beautiful
+and interesting: of these three qualities one will be
+intrinsic in the woman, the second very considerably
+so, the third not at all. For, let us call that woman
+away and replace her immediately by another woman
+chosen at random. We shall immediately perceive
+that we have lost one pleasurable impression, that of
+beautiful bodily structure: the woman has taken away
+her well-shapen body. Next we shall perceive a
+notable diminution in the second pleasurable impression:
+the woman has taken with her, not indeed her
+well-tinted garments, which we may have bestowed
+on her successor, but her beautifully coloured skin
+and hair, so that of the pleasing colour-impression
+will remain only as much as was due to, and may
+have been retained with, the original woman's clothes.
+But if we look for our third pleasurable impression,
+our beautiful light, we shall find that unchanged,
+whether it fall upon a magnificently arrayed goddess
+or upon a sordid slut And, conversely, the beautiful
+woman, when withdrawn from that light and placed
+in any other, will be equally lovely in form, even if
+we cast her in plaster, and lose the colour of her skin
+and hair; or if we leave her not only the beautiful
+tints of her flesh and hair, but her own splendidly
+coloured garments, we shall still have, in whatsoever
+light, a magnificent piece of colour. But if we recall
+the poor ugly creature who has succeeded her from
+out of that fine effect of light, we shall have nothing
+but a hideous form invested in hideous colour.</p>
+
+<p>This rough diagram will be sufficient to explain
+my thought respecting the relative degree to which
+the art dealing with linear form, that dealing with
+colour and that dealing with light, with the medium
+in which form and colour are perceived; is each
+respectively bound to be idealistically or realistically
+decorative. Now painting was aesthetically mature,
+possessed the means to achieve great beauty, at a time
+when of the three modes of representation there had
+as yet developed only those of linear form and colour;
+and the very possibility and necessity of immediately
+achieving all that could be achieved by these means
+delayed for a long time the development of the third
+mode of representation: the representation of objects
+as they appear with reference to the light through
+which they are seen. A beginning had indeed been
+made. Certain of Correggio's effects of light, even
+more an occasional manner of treating the flesh and
+hair, reducing both form and colour to a kind of vague
+boss and vague sheen, such as they really present in
+given effects of light, a something which we define
+roughly as eminently modern in the painting of his
+clustered cherubs; all this is certainly a beginning of
+the school of Velasquez. Still more so is it the case
+with Andrea del Sarto, the man of genius whom critics
+love to despatch as a mediocrity, because his art,
+which is art altogether for the eyes, and in which he
+innovated more than any of his contemporaries, does
+not afford any excuse for the irrelevancies of ornamental
+criticism; with him the appearance of form
+and colour, acted upon by light, the relative values of
+which flesh and draperies consist with reference to
+the surrounding medium, all this becomes so evident
+a preoccupation and a basis for decorative effects, as
+to give certain of his works an almost startling air of
+being modern. But this tendency comes to nothing:
+the men of the sixteenth century appear scarcely to
+have perceived wherein lay the true excellence of this
+"Andrea senza errori," deeming him essentially the
+artist of linear perfection; while the innovations of
+Correggio in the way of showing the relations of flesh
+tones and light ended in the mere coarse gala
+illuminations in which his successors made their
+seraphs plunge and sprawl. There was too much to
+be done, good and bad, in the way of mere linear form
+and mere colour; and as art of mere linear form and
+colour, indifferent of all else, did the art of the Italian
+Renaissance run to seed.</p>
+
+<p>I said at the beginning of this paper that the degree
+to which any art is strictly idealistic, can be measured
+by the terms which it will make with portrait. For as
+portrait is due to the desire to represent a person quite
+apart from that person affording material for decoration,
+it is evident that only the art which can call
+in the assistance of decorative materials, independent
+of the represented individual, can possibly make a
+beautiful picture out of an ugly man; while the art
+which deals only with such visible peculiarities as are
+inherent in the individual, has no kind of outlet, is
+cornered, and can make of a repulsive original only
+a repulsive picture. The analogy to this we have
+already noticed in sculpture: antique sculpture, considering
+only the linear bosses which existed equally
+in the living man and in the statue, could not afford
+to represent plain people; while Renaissance sculpture,
+extracting a large amount of beauty out of combinations
+of surface and light, was able, as long as it
+could arrange such an artificial combination, to dispense
+with great perfection in the model. Nay, if we
+except Renaissance statuary as a kind of separate
+art, we may say that this independence of the object
+portrayed is a kind of analytic test, enabling us to
+judge at a glance, and by the degree of independence
+from the model, the degree to which any art is removed
+from the mere line and boss of antique sculpture.
+In the statue standing free in any light that
+may chance to come, every form must be beautiful
+from every point; but in proportion as the new elements
+of painting enter, in proportion as the actual
+linear form and boss is marked and helped out by
+grouping, colour, and light and shade, does the actual
+perfection of the model become less important; until,
+under the reign of light as the chief factor, it becomes
+altogether indifferent. In this fact lies the only
+rational foundation for the notion, made popular by
+Hegel, that painting is an art in which beauty is of
+much less account than in sculpture; failing to understand
+that the sum total of beauty remained the same,
+whether dependent upon the concentration of a single
+element or obtained by the co-operation of several
+consequently less singly important elements.</p>
+
+<p>But to return to the question of portrait art. From
+what we have seen, it is clear that art which requires
+perfection of form will be reduced to ugliness if
+cramped in the obtaining of such perfection, whereas
+art which can obtain beauty by other means will still
+have a chance when reduced to imitate ugly object?
+Hence it is that while the realistically decorative art
+of the seventeenth century can make actually beautiful
+things of the portraits of ugly people, the idealistically
+decorative art of the Renaissance produces
+portraits which are cruelly ugly in proportion as the
+art is purely idealistic. Yet even in idealism there
+are degrees: the more the art is confined to mere
+linear form, to the exclusion of colour, the uglier will be
+the portraits. With Michael Angelo the difficulty was
+simplified to impossibility: he could not paint portrait
+at all; and in his sculptured portraits of the two
+Medicean dukes at S. Lorenzo he evaded all attempt
+at likeness, making those two men into scarcely more
+than two architectural monsters, half-human cousins
+of the fantastic creatures who keep watch on the
+belfries and gurgoyles of a Gothic cathedral. It is
+almost impossible to think of Michael Angelo attempting
+portrait: the man's genius cannot be constrained
+to it, and what ought to be mere ugliness would come
+out idealized into grandiose monstrosity. Men like
+Titian and Tintoret are at the other end of the scale
+of ideal decoration: they are bordering upon the
+domain of realism. Hence they can raise into interest,
+by the mere power of colour, many an insignificant
+type; yet even they are incapable of dealing with
+absolute ugliness, with absence of fine colour, or, if
+they do deal with it, there is an immediate improvement
+upon the model, and the appearance of truthfulness
+goes. Between the absolute incapacity for dealing
+with ugliness of Michael Angelo, and the power of
+compromising with it of Titian and Tintoret, Raphael
+stands half-way: he can call in the assistance of colour
+just sufficiently to create a setting of carefully harmonized
+draperies and accessories, beautiful enough
+to allow of his filling it up with the most cruelly ugly
+likeness which any painter ever painted. Far too
+much has been written about Raphael in general, but
+not half enough about Raphael as a portrait-painter;
+for by the side of the eclectic idealist, who combined
+and balanced beauty almost into insipidity, is the most
+terribly, inflexibly veracious portrait-painter that ever
+was. Compared with those sternly straightforward
+portraits of his Florentine and Roman time, where
+ugliness and baseness are never attenuated by one
+tittle, and alloyed nobility or amiability, as with his
+finer models, like the two Donis, husband and wife,
+and Bibbiena, is never purified of its troubling element;
+compared with them the Venetian portraits
+are mere insincere, enormously idealized pieces of
+colour-harmony; nay, the portraits of Velasquez are
+mere hints&mdash;given rapidly by a sickened painter striving
+to make those scrofulous Hapsburgs no longer
+mere men, but keynotes of harmonies of light&mdash;of
+what the people really are. For Velasquez seems to
+show us the temperament, the potentiality of his
+people, and to leave us, with a kind of dignified and
+melancholy silence as to all further, to find out what
+life, what feelings and actions, such a temperament
+implies. But Raphael shows us all: the temperament
+and the character, the real active creature, with all the
+marks of his present temper and habits, with all the
+indications of his immediate actions upon him: completely
+without humour or bitterness, without the
+smallest tendency to twist the reality into caricature
+or monstrosity, nay, perhaps without much psychologic
+analysis to tell him the exact meaning of what he is
+painting, going straight to the point, and utterly ruthless
+from sheer absence of all alternative of doing
+otherwise than he does. There is nothing more
+cruelly realistic in the world, cruel not only to the
+base originals but to the feelings of the spectator,
+than the harmony of villainies, of various combinations
+of black and hog-like bestiality, and fox and
+wolf-like cunning and ferocity with wicked human
+thought and self-command, which Raphael has enshrined
+in that splendid harmony of scarlet silk and
+crimson satin, and purple velvet and dull white
+brocade, as the portraits of Leo X. and his cardinals
+Rossi and Dei Medici.</p>
+
+<p>The idealistic painter, accustomed to rely upon the
+intrinsic beauty which he has hitherto been able to
+select or create; accustomed also to think of form as
+something quite independent of the medium through
+which it is seen, scarcely conscious of the existence
+of light and air in his habit of concentrating all attention
+upon a figure placed, as it were, in a sort of
+vacuum of indifference;&mdash;this idealistic artist is left
+without any resources when bid to paint an ugly
+man or woman. With the realistic artist, to whom
+the man or woman is utterly indifferent, to whom the
+medium in which they are seen is everything, the case
+Is just reversed: let him arrange his light, his atmospheric
+effect, and he will work into their pattern no
+matter what plain or repulsive wretch. To Velasquez
+the flaccid yellowish fair flesh, with its grey downy
+shadows, the limp pale drab hair, which is grey in the
+light and scarcely perceptibly blond in the shade, all
+this unhealthy, bloodless, feebly living, effete mass of
+humanity called Philip IV. of Spain, shivering in
+moral anaemia like some dog thorough bred into
+nothingness, becomes merely the foundation for a
+splendid harmony of pale tints. Again, the poor
+little baby princess, with scarce visible features, seemingly
+kneaded (but not sufficiently pinched and
+modelled) out of the wet ashes of an <i>auto da f&egrave;</i>, in
+her black-and-white frock (how different from the
+dresses painted by Raphael and Titian!), dingy and
+gloomy enough for an abbess or a cameriera major,
+this childish personification of courtly dreariness,
+certainly born on an Ash Wednesday, becomes the
+principal strands for a marvellous tissue of silvery and
+ashy light, tinged yellowish in the hair, bluish in the
+eyes and downy cheeks, pale red in the lips and the
+rose in the hair; something to match which in beauty
+you must think of some rarely seen veined and
+jaspered rainy twilight, or opal-tinted hazy winter
+morning. Ugliness, nay, repulsiveness, vanish, subdued
+into beauty, even as noxious gases may be subdued
+into health-giving substances by some cunning
+chemist. The difference between such portraits as
+these and the portraits by Raphael does not however
+consist merely in the beauty: there is also the fact
+that if you take one of Velasquez's portraits out of
+their frame, reconstitute the living individual, and bid
+him walk forth in whatsoever light may fall upon him,
+you will have something infinitely different from the
+portrait, and of which your only distinct feeling will
+be that a fine portrait might be made of the creature;
+whereas it is a matter of complete indifference whether
+you see Raphael's Leo X. in the flesh or in his gilded
+frame.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever may fairly be said respecting the relative
+value of idealistic and realistic decorative art is really
+also connected with this latter point. Considering
+that realistic art is merely obtaining beauty by attention
+to other factors than those which preoccupy
+idealistic art, that the one fulfils what the other neglects&mdash;taking
+the matter from this point of view, it
+would seem as if the two kinds of arts were, so to
+speak, morally equal; and that any vague sense of
+mysterious superior dignity clinging to idealistic art
+was a mere shred of long discarded pedantry. But
+it is not so. For realistic art does more than merely
+bring into play powers unknown to idealistic art: it
+becomes, by the possession of these powers, utterly
+indifferent to the intrinsic value of the forms represented:
+it is so certain of making everything lovely by
+its harmonies of light and atmosphere that it almost
+prefers to choose inferior things for this purpose.
+I am thinking at present of a picture by I forget what
+Dutchman in our National Gallery, representing in
+separate compartments five besotten-looking creatures,
+symbolical of the five senses: they are ugly, brutish,
+with I know not what suggestion of detestable temperament
+in their bloodshot flesh and vermilion lips,
+as if the whole man were saturated^with his appetite.
+Yet the Dutchman has found the means of making
+these degraded types into something which we care
+to look at, and to look at on account of its beauty;
+even as, in lesser degree, Rubens has always managed
+to make us feel towards his flaccid, veal-complexioned,
+fish-eyed women, something of what we feel towards
+the goddesses of the Parthenon; towards the white-robed,
+long-gloved ladies, with meditative face beneath
+their crimped auburn hair, of Titian.</p>
+
+<p>Viewed in one way, there is a kind of nobility in
+the very fact that such realistic art can make us
+pardon, can redeem, nay almost sanctify, so much.
+But is it right thus to pardon, redeem, and sanctify;
+thus to bring the inferior on to the level of the superior?
+Nay, is it not rather wrong to teach us to
+endure so much meanness and ugliness in creatures,
+on account of the nobility with which they are represented?
+Is this not vitiating our feelings, blunting
+our desire for the better, our repugnance for the
+worse?</p>
+
+<p>A great and charitable art, this realistic art of the
+seventeenth century, and to be respected for its very
+tenderness towards the scorned and castaway things
+of reality; but accustoming us, perhaps too much, like
+all charitable and reclaiming impulses, to certain unworthy
+contacts: in strange contrast herein with that
+narrow but ascetic and aristocratic art of idealism,
+which, isolated and impoverished though it may be,
+has always the dignity of its immaculate purity, of its
+unswerving judgment, of its obstinate determination
+to deal only with the best. A hard task to judge
+between them. But be this as it may, it is one of the
+singular richnesses of the Italian Renaissance that
+it knew of both tendencies; that while in painting
+it gave the equivalent of that rigid idealism of the
+Greeks which can make no compromise with ugliness;
+in sculpture it possessed the equivalent of the
+realism of Velasquez, which can make beauty out of
+ugly things, even as the chemist can make sugar out
+of vitriol.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h3><a name="THE_SCHOOL_OF_BOIARDO" id="THE_SCHOOL_OF_BOIARDO"></a>THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO.</h3>
+
+<p class="center">"Le donne, i cavalieri, 1' armi, gli amori."</p>
+
+
+<h3>I.</h3>
+
+<p>Throughout the tales of Charlemagne and his
+warriors, overtopping by far the crowd of paladins
+and knights, move two colossal mailed and vizored
+figures&mdash;Roland, whom the Italians call Orlando and
+the Spaniards Roldan, the son of Milon d'Angers and
+of Charlemagne's sister; and Renaud or Rinaldo, the
+lord of Montauban, and eldest of the famous four sons
+of Aymon. These are the two representative heroes,
+equal but opposed, the Achilles and Odysseus, the
+Siegfried and Dietrich, of the Carolingian epic; and
+in each is personified, by the unconscious genius of
+the early Middle Ages, one of the great political
+movements, of the heroic struggles, of feudalism.
+For there existed in feudalism two forces, a centripetal
+and a centrifugal&mdash;a force which made for the
+supremacy of the kingly overlordship, and a force
+which made for the independence of the great vassals.
+Hence, in the poetry which is the poetry of feudalism,
+two distinct currents of feeling, two distinct epics&mdash;-the
+epic of the devoted loyalty of all the heroes of France
+to their wise and mighty emperor Charlemagne,
+triumphant even in misfortune; and the epic of the
+hopeless resistance against a craven and capricious
+despot Charles of the most righteous and whole-hearted
+among his feudatories: the epic of Roland,
+and the epic of Renaud. Of the first there remains
+to us, in its inflexible and iron solemnity, an original
+rhymed narrative, "The Chanson de Roland," which
+we may read perhaps almost in the selfsame words in
+which it was sung by the Normans of William in their
+night watch before the great battle. The centripetal
+force of feudalism gained the upper hand, and the
+song of the great empire, of the great deeds of
+loyal prowess, was consecrated in the feudal monarchy.
+The case was different with the tale of resistance and
+rebellion. The story of Renaud soon became a dangerous
+lesson for the great barons; it fell from the
+hands of the nobles to those of humbler folk; and it is
+preserved to us no longer in mediaeval verse, but in a
+prose version, doubtless of the fifteenth century, under
+the name, familiar on the stalls of village fairs, of "The
+Quatre Fils Aymon." But, as Renaud is the equal of
+Roland, so is this humble prose tale nevertheless the
+equal of the great song of Roncevaux; and even now,
+it would be a difficult task to decide which were the
+grander, the tale of loyalty or the tale of resistance.</p>
+
+<p>In each of these tales,"The Chanson de Roland" and
+"The Quatre Fils Aymon," there is contained a picture
+of its respective hero, which sums up, as it were, the
+whole noble character of the book; and which, the
+picture of the dying Roland and the picture of the
+dying Renaud, I would fain bring before you before
+speaking of the other Roland and the other Renaud,
+the Orlando of Ariosto and the Rinaldo of Boiardo.
+The traitor Ganelon has enabled King Marsile to
+overtake with all his heathenness the rear-guard of
+Charlemagne between the granite walls of Roncevaux;
+the Franks have been massacred, but the Saracens
+have been routed; Roland has at last ceded to the
+prayers of Oliver and of Archbishop Turpin; three
+times has he put to his mouth his oliphant and blown
+a blast to call back Charlemagne to vengeance, till
+the blood has foamed round his lips and his temple
+has burst. Oliver is dead, the archbishop is dying,
+Roland himself is slowly bleeding to death. He goes
+down into the defile, heaped with corpses, and seeks
+for the bodies of the principal paladins, Ivon and
+Ivaire, the Gascon Engelier, G&eacute;rier and G&eacute;rin, B&eacute;renger
+and Otho, Anseis and Salamon, and the old Gerard of
+Rousillon; and one by one drags them to where the
+archbishop lies dying. And then, when to these
+knights Roland has at last added his own beloved
+comrade Oliver, he bids the archbishop bless all the
+dead, before he die himself. Then, when he has reverently
+crossed Turpin's beautiful priestly hands over
+his breast, he goes forth to shatter his sword Durendal
+against the rocks; but the good sword has cut the rock
+without shivering; and the coldness of death steals,
+over Roland. He stretches himself upon a hillock
+looking towards Spain, and prays for the forgiveness
+of his sins; then, with Durendal and his ivory horn
+by his side, he stretches out the glove of his right
+hand to God. "He has stretched forth to God the glove
+of his right hand; St. Gabriel has received it...
+Then his head has sunk on his arm; he has gone, with
+clasped hands, to his end. God sends him one of his
+cherubim and St. Michael of Peril. St. Gabriel has
+come with them. They carry the soul of the Count:
+up to paradise."</p>
+
+<p>More solitary, and solemn and sad even, is the end
+of the other hero, of the great rebel Renaud of Montauban.
+At length, after a lifetime wasted in fruitless,
+attempts to resist the iniquity of the emperor, to
+baffle his power, to shame him by magnanimity into,
+justice, the four sons of Aymon, who have given up
+their youth, their manhood, the dearest things to their heart,
+respect to their father and loyalty to their
+sovereign, rather than countenance the injustice of
+Charlemagne to their kinsman, have at last obtained
+to be pardoned; to be pardoned, they, heroes, by this,
+dastardly tyrant, and to quietly sink, broken-hearted
+into nothingness. The eldest, Renaud, returning from
+his exile and the Holy Land, finds that his wife
+Clarisse has pined for him and died; and then, putting
+away his armour from him, and dressing in a pilgrim's
+frock made of the purple serge of the dead lady's robe,
+he goes forth to wander through the world; not very
+old in years, but broken-spirited; at peace, but in
+solitude of heart. And one evening he arrives at
+Cologne. We can imagine the old knight, only half
+aware of the sunshine of the evening, the noise of the
+streets, the looks of the crowd, the great minster
+rising half-finished in the midst of the town by the
+Rhine, the cries and noise and chipping of the masons;
+unconscious of all this, half away: with his brothers
+hiding in the Ardennes, living on roots and berries, at
+bay before Charlemagne; or wandering ragged and
+famishing through France; with King Yon brilliant
+at Toulouse, seeing perhaps for the first time his bride
+Clarisse, or the towers of Montauban rising under the
+workmen's hands; thinking perhaps of the frightful
+siege, when all, all had been eaten in the fortress, and
+his children Aymonnet and Yonnet, all thin and
+white, knelt down and begged him to slaughter his
+horse Bayard that they might eat; perhaps of that
+journey, when he and his brothers, all in red-furred
+robes with roses in their hands, rode prisoners of
+King Charles across the plain of Vaucouleurs; perhaps
+of when he galloped up to the gallows at Montfaucon,
+and cut loose his brother Richard; or of that daring
+ride to Paris, where he and his horse won the race,
+snatched the prize from before Charlemagne and
+sped off crying out that the winner was Renaud of
+Montauban; or, perhaps, seeing once more the sad,
+sweet face of the Lady Clarisse, when she had burned
+all her precious stuffs and tires in the castle-yard, and
+lay dead without him to kiss her cold mouth; of
+seeing once more his good horse Bayard, when he
+kissed him in his stall before giving him to be killed
+by Charlemagne. Thinking of all that past, seeing
+it all within his mind, and seeing but little of the
+present; as, in the low yellow light, he helped, for his
+bread, the workmen to heave the great beams, to
+carry the great stones of the cathedral, to split the
+huge marble masses while they stared in astonished
+envy; as he sat, unconscious of their mutterings,
+eating his dry bread and porridge in the building
+docks by the river. And then, when wearied, he had
+sunk to sleep in the hay-loft, dreaming perchance that
+all this evil life was but a dream and the awakening
+therefrom to happiness and strength; the jealous workmen
+came and killed him with their base tools, and
+cast him into the Rhine. They say that the huge
+body floated on the water, surrounded by a great
+halo; and that when the men of the banks, seeing this,
+reverently fished it out, they found that the noble
+corpse was untouched by decay, and still surrounded
+by a light of glory. And thus, it seems to me, this
+Renaud, this rebel baron of whose reality we know
+nothing, has floated surrounded by a halo of poetry
+down the black flood of the Middle Ages (in which
+so much has sunk); and when we look upon his face,
+and see its beauty and strength and solemness, we
+feel, like the people of the Rhine bank, inclined to
+weep, and to say of this mysterious corpse, "Surely
+this is some great saint."</p>
+
+<p>Of each of these heroes thus shown us by the
+Middle Ages, the Italian Renaissance also, by the
+hand of two of her greatest poets, has given us a
+picture. And first, of Roland. Of him, of Count
+Orlando, we are told by Messer Lodovico Ariosto, that
+in consequence of his having discovered, in a certain
+pleasant grotto among the ferns and maidenhair,
+words graven on the rock (interrupted, doubtless, by
+the lover's kisses) which revealed that the Princess
+Angelica of Cathay had disdained him for Medoro,
+the fair-haired page of the King of the Moors; Count
+Orlando went straightway out of his mind, and hanging
+up his armour and stripping off his clothes, galloped
+about on his bare-backed horse, slaughtering cows and
+sheep instead of Saracens; until it pleased God, moved
+by the danger of Christendom and the prayers of
+Charlemagne, to permit Astolfo to ride on the hippogriffs
+back up to the moon, and bring back thence
+the wits of the great paladin contained in a small phial.
+We all know that merry tale. What the Renaissance
+has to say of Renaud of Montauban is even stranger
+and more fantastic. One day, says Matteo Boiardo,
+in the fifteenth canto of the second part of his "Orlando
+Innamorato," as Rinaldo of Montalbano, the contemner
+of love, was riding in the Ardennes, he came to a
+clearing in the forest, where, close to the fountain of
+Merlin, a wonderful sight met his eyes. On a flowery
+meadow were dancing three naked damsels, and singing
+with them danced also a naked youth, dark of
+eyes and fair of hair, the first down on his lips, so
+that some might have said it was and others that it
+was not there. On Rinaldo's approach they broke
+through their singing and dancing, and rushed upon him,
+pelting him with roses and hyacinths and violets from
+their baskets, and beating him with great sheaves of
+lilies, which burnt like flames through the plates of his
+armour to the very marrow of his bones. Then when
+they had dragged him, tied with garlands, by the feet
+round and round the meadow; wings, eyed not with
+the eyes of a peacock but with the eyes of lovely
+damsels, suddenly sprouted out of their shoulders, and
+they flew off, leaving the poor baron, bruised on the
+grass, to meditate upon the vanity of all future resistance
+to love.</p>
+
+<p>Such are the things which the Middle Ages and
+the Renaissance found to tell us of the two great
+heroes of Carolingian poetry. And the explanation
+of how it came to pass, that for the Roland of the
+song of Roncevaux was substituted the Orlando of
+Ariosto, and for the Renaud of "The Quatre Fils
+Aymon" the Rinaldo of Matteo Boiardo&mdash;means
+simply that which I desire here to study: the metamorphoses
+of mediaeval romance stuffs, and, more
+especially, the vicissitudes of the cycle of Charlemagne.</p>
+
+<h2>II.</h2>
+
+<p>We are apt to think of the Middle Ages as if they
+were the companion-piece to Antiquity; but no such
+ideal correspondence exists between the two periods.
+Antiquity is all of a piece, and the Middle Ages, on
+the contrary, are heterogeneous and chaotic. For
+Antiquity is the steady and uniform development of
+civilization in one direction and with one meaning;
+there are great differences between its various epochs,
+but they are as the differences between the budding,
+the blossoming, and the fading stages of one plant:
+life varies, but is one. The Middle Ages, on the
+other hand, are a series of false starts, of interruptions
+and of new departures; a perpetual confusion. For,
+if we think over them, we shall see that these centuries
+called mediaeval are occupied by the effort of one
+people, or one generation, to put to rights and settle
+down among as much as it can save of the civilization
+of Antiquity. And the sudden overwhelming of this
+people or this generation by another, which puts all
+the elaborate arrangements into disarray, adds to the
+ruins of Antiquity the ruins of more recent times; and
+then this destroying generation tries to put things
+straight, to settle down, and is in its turn interrupted
+by the advent of some new comer who begins the
+game afresh.</p>
+
+<p>As it is with peoples, so also is it with ideas;
+scarcely has a scheme of life or of philosophy or of art
+taken shape and consistence before, from out of the
+inexhaustible chaos of mediaeval thought and feeling,
+there issue new necessities, new aspirations, which put
+into confusion all previous ones. The Middle Ages
+were like some financial crisis: a little time, a little
+credit, money will fructify, wealth will reappear, the
+difficult moment will be tided over; and so with
+civilization. But unfortunately the wealth of ideas
+began to accumulate in the storehouse only just long
+enough to bring down a rout of creditors, people who
+rifled the bank, and went home to consume or invest
+their money in order to be succeeded by others.
+Hence, in the matter of civilization, the Middle Ages
+ended in an extraordinary slow ruin, a bankruptcy
+like that which overtook France before '89, and from
+which, as France was restored by the bold seizure and
+breaking up of property of the revolution, the world
+was restored by the bold breaking of feudal and
+spiritual mortmain, the restoring of wasted energies
+to utility, of that great double revolution, the Renaissance
+and the Reformation. Be this as it may,
+mankind throughout the Middle Ages appears to
+have been in a chronic condition of packing up and
+unpacking, and packing up again; one after another
+a nation, a race, a philosophy, a political system came
+to the front and was pushed back again into limbo:
+Germans and Kelts and Latins, French civilization
+of the day of Ab&eacute;lard, Proven&ccedil;al civilization of the
+days of the Raymonds, brilliant and evanescent
+Hohenstauffen supremacy, papacy at Canossa and at
+Avignon, Templars triumphant and Templars persecuted;
+scholasticism, mysticism, feudalism, democracy,
+communism: influences all these perpetually
+rising up and being trodden down, till they all rotted
+away in the great stagnation of the fifteenth century;
+and only in one part of the world, where the conflict was
+more speedily ended, where one set of tendencies early
+triumphed, where stability was temporarily obtained,
+in Italy alone did civilization continue to be nurtured
+and developed for the benefit of all mankind. In
+such a state of affairs only such things could flourish
+and mature as were safe from what I have called, for
+want of a better expression, the perpetual unpacking
+and repacking, the perpetual being on the move, of the
+Middle Ages; and among such things foremost was
+art, the essential art of the times, architecture, which,
+belonging to the small towns, to the infinite minority
+of the democracy, who worked and made money and
+let the great changes pass over their heads, thrived
+almost as something too insignificant for notice.
+But it was different with literature. Cathedrals once
+built cannot so easily be changed; new peoples, new
+ideas, must accept them. But poetry&mdash;the thing which
+every nation insists upon having to suit its own taste,
+the thing which every nation and every generation
+carries about with it hither and thither, the thing
+which can be altered to suit every passing whim&mdash;poetry
+was, of all the fluctuating things of the Middle
+<i>Ages</i>, perhaps the most fluctuating. And fluctuating
+also because, as none of these various nations, tendencies,
+aspirations, dominated sufficiently long to
+produce any highly organized art, there remained
+no standard works, nothing recognizedly perfect,
+which would be kept for its perfection and gather
+round it imitations, so as to form the nucleus of any
+homogeneous tradition. The Middle Ages, so full of
+fashions in literary matters, possessed no classics; the
+minnesingers knew nothing of the stern old Teutonic
+war songs; the meisters&auml;ngers had forgotten the
+minnesingers; the trouv&egrave;res and troubadours knew
+nothing of "The Chanson de Roland," and Villon knew
+nothing of them; only in Italy, where the Middle
+Ages came to an end and the Renaissance began with
+the Lombard league, was there established a tradition
+of excellence, with men like Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio,
+handed down from generation to generation;
+even as, while in the north there came about the
+strange modification which substituted the French of
+Rabelais for the French of Chrestien de Troyes, the
+German of Luther for the German of Wolfram von
+Eschenbach, the Italian language, from Ciullo d'Alcamo
+almost to Boiardo and Lorenzo dei Medici, remained
+virtually identical. The result of this, which I
+may call the heterogeneousness and instability of the
+Middle Ages was that not merely literary forms were
+for ever arising and being superseded, but literary
+subject matter was continually undergoing a process
+of transformation. While in Antiquity the great epic
+and tragic stuffs remained well-nigh unaltered, and
+the stories of Valerius Flaccus and Apollonius Rhodius
+were merely the stories which had been current since
+the days of Homer, during the course of the Middle
+Ages every epic cycle, and every tale belonging
+thereunto, was gradually adulterated, mingled with,
+swamped by, some other cycle or tale; nay, rather,
+every other, cycle and every other tale, the older ones
+trying to save their popularity by admixture with
+the more recent, till at last all mythical significance,
+all historical meaning, all national character, all
+psychological reality, were lost in the chaotic result.
+And meanwhile, in the absence of any stable language,
+of any durable literary fashion, the Middle
+Ages were unable to give to these epic stuffs, at any
+one period of their life of metamorphose, a form
+sufficiently artistically valuable to secure anything
+beyond momentary vogue, to secure for them the
+immortality of the great Greek tales of adventure and
+warfare and love. Thus it came about that the epic
+cycle of Charlemagne, after supplanting in men's
+minds the grand sagas of the pagan North, was itself
+supplanted by the Arthurian cycle; that the Frankish
+stories absorbed the wholly discrepant elements of
+their more fortunate Keltic rivals; that both cycles,
+having lost all character through fusion and through
+obliteration by time, became more meaningless generation
+by generation and year by year, until when the
+Middle Ages had come to an end, and the great poets
+of the Renaissance were ready to give this old
+mediaeval epic stuff a definitive and durable artistic
+shape, there came to the hands of Boiardo and
+Ariosto, of Tasso and Spenser, only a strange, trumpery
+material, muddled by jongleurs and romance
+writers, and reduced to mere fairy stuff, taken seriously
+only by Don Quixote, and by the authors of the volumes
+of insane twaddle called after Amadis of Gaul and
+all his kinsmen.</p>
+
+<p>Such a condition of perpetual change as explains,
+in my belief, why the mediaeval epic subjects were
+wanted, can be made clear only by examples. I shall
+therefore try to show the transformations which were
+undergone by one or two principal mediaeval epic
+subjects as a result of a mixture with other epic cycles;
+of a gradual adaptation to a new state of civilization;
+and finally of their gradual separation from all kind
+of reality and real interests.</p>
+
+<p>First of all, let us look at the epic cycle, which,
+although known to us only in poems no older than
+those of the trouv&egrave;res and minnesingers who sang of
+Charlemagne and Arthur, is in reality far more
+ancient, and on account of its antiquity and its consequent
+disconnection with mediaeval religious and
+political interests, was thrown aside even by the
+nations to which it belonged, by the Scandinavians
+who took to writing sagas about the wars of Charlemagne
+against Saracens, and by the Germans who
+preferred to hear the adventures of Welsh and Briton,
+Launcelots and Tristrams. I am alluding to the
+stories connected with the family and life of the hero
+called Sigurd by the Scandinavians, and Siegfried by
+the Germans. Of these we possess a Norse version
+called the Volsunga Saga, magnificently done into
+English by Mr. William Morris; which, although
+written down at the end of the twelfth century, in the
+very time therefore of Chrestien de Troyes, Wolfram
+von Eschenbach, and Gottfried von Strassburg, and
+subsequently to the presumed writing of "The Chanson
+de Roland" and the Nibelungenlied, shows us in reality
+the product of a people, the distant Scandinavians of
+Iceland, who were five or six hundred years behind
+the French, Germans, and English of the twelfth century.
+In the Volsunga Saga, neither Christianity nor
+feudalism is yet dreamed of; and it is for this reason
+that I wish to compare it with the Nibelungenlied, in
+order to show how enormously the old epic stuff was
+altered by the new civilization. The whole social and
+moral condition of the two versions is different. In
+the old Scandinavian civilization, where the Viking is
+surrounded and served by clansmen, the feeling of
+blood relationship is the strongest in people's hearts;
+strangely and fearfully shown in the introductory tale
+of Signy, who, in order to avenge her father Volsung,
+killed by her husband, murders her children by the
+latter, and then, altered in face by magic arts, goes
+forth to the woods to her brother Sigmund, that, un-wittingly,
+he may beget with her the only man fit to
+avenge the Volsungs. And then she sends the boy
+Sinfjotli to the man he has hitherto considered merely
+as his uncle, bidding the latter kill him if he prove
+unworthy of his incestuous birth, or train him to vengeance.
+The three together murder the husband
+and legitimate children of Signy, and set the palace
+on fire; which, being done, the queen, having accomplished
+her duty to her kin, accomplishes that towards
+her husband, and calmly returns to die in the burning
+hall. Here (and apparently again in the case of the
+children of Sigurd and Brynhilt) incest becomes a
+family virtue. This being the frightful preponderance
+of the feeling of blood relationship, it is quite natural
+that the Scandinavian Chriemhilt (called in the Volsunga
+Saga, Gudrun) should not resent the murder
+of her husband Siegfried or Sigurd by her brothers at
+the instigation of the jealous Brynhilt (who has in a
+manner been Sigurd's wife before he made her over to
+Chriemhilt's eldest brother); and that, so far from
+seeking any revenge against them,she should, when her
+second husband Atli sends for her brothers in order to
+rob and murder them, first vainly warn them of the
+plot, and then, when they have been massacred, kill
+Atli and her children by him in order to avenge her
+brothers. The slackening of the tribal feeling, the idea
+of fidelity in love and sanctity of marriage belonging
+to Christianity and feudalism, rendered such a story
+unintelligible to the Germans of the Othos and
+Henrys. In the Nibelungenlied, the whole story of
+the massacre of the brothers is changed. Chriemhilt
+never forgives the murder of Siegfried, and it is not
+Etzel&mdash;Atli for the sake of plunder, but she herself
+for the sake of revenge, who decoys her brothers and
+murders them; it is she who with her own hand cuts
+off the head of Gunther to expiate his murder of Siegfried.
+To our feelings, more akin to those of the feudal
+Christians of Franconia than to those of the tribal
+Scandinavians of the Edda, the second version is far
+more intelligible and interesting&mdash;the story of this
+once gentle and loving Chriemhilt, turned by the
+murder of her beloved into a fury, and plotting to
+avenge his death by the death of all his kinsfolk,
+must be much grander and more pathetic than the
+story of this strange Gudrun, who sits down patiently
+beneath the injury done to her by her brothers, but
+savagely avenges them on her new husband, and her
+own and his innocent children; to us this persistence
+of tribal feeling, destroying all indignation and love, is
+merely unnatural, confusing, and repulsive. But this
+alteration for the better in one of the incidents of
+the tale is a mere fluke; and the whole main plot of
+the originally central figures are completely obliterated
+by the new state of civilization, and rendered merely
+trivial and grotesque. In the Volsunga Saga Sigurd,
+overcome by enchantments, has forgotten his wife (or
+mistress, a vague mythical relationship); and, with all
+sense of the past obliterated, has made her over to the
+brother of his new wife Gudrun; and Brynhilt kills
+her faithless love to dissolve the second marriage and
+be reunited with him in death. In the Nibelungenlied
+Siegfried, although the flower of knighthood, conquers
+by foul play the Amazon Brunhilt to reward
+Gunther for the hand of his sister; nay, in a comic
+and loathsome scene he forces her into the embraces
+of the craven Gunther; and then he gets killed by
+Brunhilt's machinations; when, after most unqueenly
+bickerings, the proud Amazon is brutally told by
+Siegfried's wife of the dirty trick which has given
+her to Gunther. After this, it is impossible to realize,
+when Siegfried is murdered and all our sympathies
+called on to his side, the utterly out-of-character,
+blackguardly behaviour which has brought the hero
+to his death. Similarly the conception of the character
+and position of Brynhilt is entirely disfigured and
+rendered inane in the Nibelungenlied: of that superb
+demi-goddess of the Scandinavians, burnt on the pyre
+with her falcons and dogs and horses and slaves, by
+the side of the demi-god Sigurd, whom she has loved
+and killed, lest the door of Valhalla, swinging after
+him, should shut her out from his presence; of her
+there remains in the German mediaeval poem only
+a virago (more like the giantesses of the Amadis
+romances) enraged at having been defeated and grotesquely
+and grossly pummelled into wedlock by a
+man not her husband, and then slanged like a fishwife
+by her envious sister-in-law.</p>
+
+<p>The old, consistent, grandly tragic tale of the mysterious
+incests and revenges of a race of demi-gods has
+lost its sense, its point in the attempt to arrange it to
+suit Christian and feudal ideas. The really fine portions
+of the Nibelungenlied are exactly those which
+have no real connection with the original story,
+gratuitous additions by mediaeval poets. The delicately
+indicated falling in love of Siegfried and
+Chriemhilt, the struggles of Markgraf R&uuml;dger between
+obedience to his feudal superior and fidelity
+towards his friends and guests; and, above all, the
+canto of the death of Siegfried. This last is different,
+intensely different, from the rugged and dreary
+monotony of the rest; this most poetical, almost
+Spenserian or Ariostesque realization of the scene;
+this beautiful picture (though worked with the needle
+of the arras-worker rather than with pencil or brush)
+of the wood, the hunt", the solitary fountain in the
+Odenwald, where, with his spear leaned against the
+lime-tree, Siegfried was struck down into the clover
+and flowers, and writhed with Hagen's steel through
+his back. This canto is certainly interpolated by
+some first-rate poet, at least a Gottfried or a Walther,
+to whom that passage of the savage old droning song of
+death had suggested a piece of new art; it is like the
+fragments of exquisitely chiselled leafage and figures
+which you sometimes find encrusted&mdash;by whom?
+wherefore?&mdash;quite isolated in the midst of the rough
+and lichen-stained stones of some rude Lombard
+church. All the rest of the Nibelungenlied gives an
+impression of effeteness; there is no definiteness of
+idea such as that of the Volsunga Saga; the battles
+are mere vague slaughter, no action, no realized movement,
+or (excepting Rudger) no realized motive of
+conduct. Shape and colour would seem to have
+been obliterated by repetition and alteration. Yet
+even these alterations could not make the tale of Siegfried
+survive among the Germans of the Middle Ages;
+nay, the more the alterations the less the interest;
+the want of consistency and colour due to rearrangement
+merely accelerated the throwing aside of a subject
+which, dating from pagan and tribal times, had
+become repugnant to the new generations. All the
+mutilations in the world could not make the old
+Scandinavian tales of betrayed trust, of revenge and
+triumphant bloodshed, at all sympathetic to men
+whose religious and social ideals were those of forgiveness
+and fidelity; even stripped of its incestuous
+mysteries and of its fearful tribal love, the tale of
+Sigurd and Brynhilt, reduced to the tale of Chriemhilt's
+revenge, was unpalatable: no more attempts were
+made at re-writing it, and the poems of Walther, of
+Gottfried, of Wolfram, of Ulrich, and of Tannh&auml;user,
+full as they are of references to stories of the Carolingian
+and Arthurian cycles, nay, to Antique and
+Oriental tales, contain no allusion to the personages of
+the Nibelungenlied. The old epic of the Gothic races
+had been pushed aside by the triumphant epic of the
+obscure and conquered Kelts.</p>
+
+<p>There are few phenomena in the history of ideas
+and forms more singular than that of the sudden
+conquest of the poetry of dominant or distant nations
+by the poetic subjects of a comparatively small race,
+sheared of all political importance, restricted to a
+trifling territory, and well-nigh deprived of their
+language; and of this there can be found no more
+striking example than the sudden ousting of the
+Carolingian epic by the cycle of Arthur.</p>
+
+<p>The Kelts of Britain and Ireland possessed an epic
+cycle of their own, which came to notice only when
+they were dispossessed of their last strongholds by
+Saxons and Normans, and which immediately spread
+with astounding rapidity all over Europe. The vanquished
+race became fashionable; themselves, their
+art and their poetry, began to be sought for as a
+precious and war-enhanced loot. The heroic tales of
+the Kelts were transcribed in Welsh, and translated
+into Latin, by order of the Norman and Angevine
+kings, glad, it would seem, to oppose the Old Briton
+to the Saxon element. The Keltic songs were carried
+all over France by Breton bards, to whose music and
+rhymes, with only a general idea of the subjects, the
+neo-Latin-speaking Franks listened with the sort of
+stolid satisfaction with which English or Germans of
+a hundred years ago listened to Italians singing
+Metastasio's verses. But soon the songs and tales
+were translated; and French poets imitated in their
+language, northern and southern, the graceful metres
+of the Keltic lays, and altered and arranged their
+subjects. So that, in a very short time, France, and
+through it Germany, was inundated with Keltic stories.
+This triumph of the vanquished race was not without
+reason. The Kelts, early civilized by Rome and
+Christianity, had a set of stories and a set of heroes
+extremely in accordance with mediaeval ideas, and
+requiring but very little alteration. The considerable
+age of their civilization had long obliterated all traces
+of pagan and tribal feeling in their tales. Their
+heroes, originally, like those of all other people,
+divinities intimately connected with natural phenomena,
+had long lost all cosmic characteristics, long
+ceased to be gods, and, manipulated by the fancy of a
+race whose greatness was quite a thing of the past,
+had become a sort of golden age ideals&mdash;the men of a
+distant period of glory, which was adorned with every
+kind of perfection, till it became as unreal as fairyland.
+Fairyland, in good sooth, was this country of
+the Keltic tales; and there is a sort of symbolical
+significance in the fact of its lawgiver Merlin, and its
+emperor Arthur, being both of them not dead, like
+Sigurd, like Dietrich, like Charlemagne and Roland,
+but lying in enchanted sleep. Long inaction and the
+day-dreaming of idleness had refined and idealized the
+heroes of this Keltic race&mdash;a race of brilliant fancy and
+almost southern mobility, and softened for a long time
+by contact with Roman colonists and Christian priests.
+They were not the brutal combatants of an active
+fighting age, like the heroes of the Edda and of the
+Carolingian cycles; nor had they any particular military
+work to do, belonging as they did to a people
+huddled away into inactivity. Their sole occupation
+was to extend abroad that ideal happiness which
+reigned in the ideal court of Arthur; to go forth on the
+loose and see what ill-conditioned folk there might
+yet be who required being subdued or taught manners
+in the happy kingdom, which the poor insignificant
+Kelts connected with some princelet of theirs who
+centuries before may have momentarily repelled the
+pagan Saxons. Hence in the Keltic stories, such as
+they exist in the versions previous to the conquest by
+the Norman kings, and previous also to any communications
+with other peoples, the distinct beginning
+of what was later to be called knight-errantry; of
+heroes, creations of an inactive nation, having no
+special military duties, going forth to do what good
+they may at random, unforced by any necessity, and
+following a mere aesthetico-romantic plan of perfecting
+themselves by deeds of valour to become more worthy
+of their God, their King, and their Lady: religion,
+loyalty, and love, all three of them mere aesthetic
+abstractions, becoming the goal of an essentially
+aesthetic, unpractical system of self-improvement, such
+as was utterly incompatible with any real and serious
+business in life. Idle poetic fancies of an inert people,
+the Knights of the Round Table have no mission save
+that of being poetically perfect. Such was the spirit
+of Keltic poetry; and, as it happened, this spirit
+satisfied the imaginative wants of mediaeval society
+just at the moment when political events diffused
+in other countries the knowledge of the Arthurian
+legends. The old Teutonic tales of Sigurd, Gudrun,
+and Dietrich, had long ceased to appeal, in their
+mutilated and obliterated condition, to a society to
+whom tribal feeling and pagan heroism were odious,
+and whose religion distinctly reproved revenge. These
+semi-mythological tales had been replaced by another
+cycle: the purely realistic epic, which had arisen
+during the struggles between the Christian west
+against the pagan north-east and the Mohammedan
+south, and which, originating in the short battle-songs
+narrating the exploits of the predecessors and help-mates
+of Charlemagne, had constituted itself into large
+narratives of which the  "Song of Roland" represents
+artistic culmination. These narratives of mere military
+exploits, of the battles of a strong feudal aristocracy
+animated by feudal loyalty and half-religious, half-patriotic
+fury against invading heathenness, had perfectly
+satisfied the men of the earliest Middle Ages,
+of the times when feudalism was being established and
+the church being reformed; when the strong military
+princelets of the North were embarking with their
+barons to conquer new kingdoms in England and in
+Italy and Greece; when the whole of feudal Europe
+hurled itself against Asia in the first Crusades. But
+the condition of things soon altered: the feudal
+hierarchy was broken up into a number of semi-independent
+little kingdoms or principalities, struggling,
+with the assistance of industrial and mercantile classes,
+to become absolute monarchies; princes who had been
+mere generals became stay-at-home diplomatists,
+studious of taxation and intrigue, surrounded no
+longer by armed vassals, but by an essentially urban
+court, in constant communication with the money-making
+burghers. Religion, also, instead of being a
+matter of fighting with infidel invaders, turned to fantastic
+sectarianism and emotional mysticism. With
+the sense of futility, of disappointment, attendant on
+the later Crusades, came also a habit of roaming in
+strange countries, of isolated adventure in search of
+wealth or information, a love of the distant, the half-understood,
+the equivocal; perhaps even a hankering
+after a mysterious compromise between the religion of
+Europe and the religions of the East, such as appears
+to have existed among the Templars and other Franks
+settled in Asia.</p>
+
+<p>There was, throughout feudal society, a sort of enervated
+languor, a morbid longing for something new,
+now that the old had ceased to be possible or had
+proved futile; after the great excitement of the Crusades
+it was impossible to be either sedately idle or
+quietly active, even as it is with all of us during the
+days of weariness and restlessness after some long
+journey. To such a society the strongly realistic
+Carolingian epic had ceased to appeal: the tales of
+the Welsh and Breton bards, repeated by trouv&egrave;re
+and jongleur, troubadour and minnesinger, came as a
+revelation. The fatigued, disappointed, morbid, imaginative
+society of the later Crusades recognized in
+this fairyland epic of a long refined, long idle, nay,
+effete race, the realization of their own ideal: of
+activity unhampered by aim or organization, of sentiment
+and emotion and action quite useless and unnecessary,
+purely subservient to imaginative gratification.
+These Arthurs, Launcelots, Tristrams, Kays,
+and Gawains, fantastic phantoms, were also far more
+artistically malleable than the iron Rolands, Olivers,
+and Renauds of earlier days; that unknown kingdom
+of Britain could much more easily be made the impossible
+ideal, in longing for which squeamish and
+lazy minds might refuse all coarser reality. Moreover,
+those who listened to the tales of chivalry were
+different from those who had listened to the Carolingian
+stories; and, therefore, required something
+different. They were courtiers, and one half of them
+were women. Now the Carolingian tales, originally
+battle-songs, sung in camps and castles to mere
+soldiers, had at first possessed no female characters
+at all; and when gradually they were introduced, it
+was in the coarsest barrack or tap-room style. The
+Keltic tales, on the contrary, whether from national
+tradition, or rather from longer familiarity with Christian
+culture and greater idleness of life, naturally
+made women and women's love the goal of a great
+many adventures which an effete nation could no
+longer ascribe to patriotic movements. But this was
+not all. The religious feeling of the day was extremely
+inclined to mysticism, in which aesthetic,
+erotic, and all kinds of morbid and ill-defined tendencies
+were united, which was more than anything else
+tinged with a semi-Asiatic quietism, a longing for the
+passive ecstasy of Nirvāna. This religious side of
+mediaeval life was also gratified by the Arthurian
+romances. Oddly enough, there existed an old Welsh
+or Breton tale about the boy Peredur, who from a
+complete simpleton became the prince of chivalry,
+and his many adventures connected with a certain
+mysterious blood-dripping lance, and a still more
+mysterious basin or <i>grail</i> (an allusion to which is said
+by M. de la Villemarqué to be contained in the originally
+Keltic name of Percival), which possessed magic
+properties akin to those of the purse of Fortunatus,
+or the pipkin in the story of "Little pot, boil!" The
+story, whose original mythical meaning had been lost
+in the several centuries of Christianity, was very
+decayed and obscure; and the fact of the blood on
+the lance being that of a murdered kinsman of Peredur,
+and of the basin containing the head of the same
+person cut off by Gloucester witches, was evidently
+insufficient to account for all the mystery with which
+these objects were surrounded. The French poets of
+the Middle Ages, strongly imbued with Oriental legends
+brought back by the Crusaders, saw at a glance the
+meaning of the whole story: the lance was the lance
+with which Longinus had pierced the Saviour's side;
+the Grail was the cup which had received His blood,
+nay, it was the cup of the Last Supper. A tale about
+the preservation of these precious relics by Joseph of
+Arimathaea, was immediately connected therewith; a
+theory was set up (doubtless with the aid of quite unchristian,
+Oriental legends) of a kind of kingdom of
+the keepers of the Grail, of a vague half-material, half-spiritual
+state of bliss connected with the service of
+the Grail, which fed its knights (and here the Templars
+and their semi-oriental mysteries, for which they were
+later so frightfully misused, certainly come into play)
+with food which is at once of the body and of the soul.
+Thus the Keltic Peredur, bent upon massacring the
+Gloucester witches to avenge his uncle, was turned
+into a saintly knight, seeking throughout a more and
+more perfect life for the kingdom of the Grail: the
+Perceval of Chrestien de Troyes, the Parzifal of
+Wolfram von Eschenbach, whom later romance
+writers (wishing to connect everything more closely
+with Arthur's court) replaced by the Sir Galahad of
+the "Morte d'Arthur," while the guest of the Grail
+became a sort of general mission of several knights,
+a sort of spiritual crusade to whose successful champions
+Percival, Bors, and Galahad, the Middle Ages
+did not hesitate to add the arch-adulterer Launcelot.</p>
+
+<p>Thus did the Arthurian tales answer the requirements
+of the languid, dreamy, courtly, lady-serving
+and religiously mystic sons and grandsons of those
+earlier Crusaders whose aspirations had been expressed
+by the rough and solemn heroes of Carolingian tales.
+The Carolingian tales were thrown aside, or were kept
+by the noble mediaeval poets only on condition of
+their original meaning being completely defaced by
+wholesale admixture of the manners and adventures
+belonging to the Arthurian cycles. The paladins
+were forced to disport themselves in the same fairyland
+as the Knights of the Round Table; and many
+mediaeval poems the heroes of which, like Ogier of
+Denmark and Huon of Bordeaux, already existed in
+the Carolingian tales, are in reality, with their romantic
+loves, their useless adventures, their Morgana's castles
+and Oberon's horns, offshoots of the Keltic stories,
+which were as rich in every kind of supernatural
+(being, in fact, pagan myths turned into fairy tales)
+as the genuine Carolingian subjects, whose origin was
+entirely historical, were completely devoid of such
+things. Arthur and his ladies and knights: Guenevere,
+Elaine, Enid, Yseult, Launcelot, Geraint, Kay, Gawain,
+Tristram, and Percival-Galahad, were the real heroes
+and heroines of the courtly nobles and the courtly
+poets of this second phase of mediaeval life. The
+Teuton Charlemagne, Roland and Oliver were as
+completely forgotten of the poets who met in that
+memorable combat of the Wartburg, as were the
+Teuton Sigurd and Dietrich. And if the Carolingian
+cycle survived, however much altered, I think it must
+have been thanks to the burghers and artizans of the
+Netherlands and of Provence, to whom the bluff,
+matter-of-fact heroism, the simple, gross, but not illegitimate
+amours of Carolingian heroes, were more
+satisfactory than any mystic quest of the Grail, any
+refined adultery of Guenevere or Yseult.</p>
+
+<p>But the inevitable fate of all mediaeval epics awaited
+this triumphant Arthurian cycle: the fate of being obliterated
+by passing from one nation and civilization
+to another, long before the existence of any poetic art
+adequate to its treatment. Of this I will take as an
+example one of the mediaeval poems which has the
+greatest reputation the masterpiece (according to most
+critics, with whom I find it difficult, in the presence
+of a poet like Gottfried von Strassburg, to agree) of
+probably the most really poetical and earnest school of
+poetry which the pre-Dantesque Middle Ages possessed&mdash;the
+"Parzifal" of Wolfram von Eschenbach.</p>
+
+<p>The paramount impression (I cannot say the
+strongest, for strong impressions are incompatible
+with such work as this) left by the masterpiece of
+Wolfram von Eschenbach, is that of the most astonishing
+vagueness, fluidity, haziness, vaporousness. In
+reading it one looks back to that rudely hewn and
+extremely obliterated Nibelungenlied, as to something
+?quite astonishingly clear, detailed and strongly marked
+as to something distinctly artistic. Indeed by the
+side of "Parzifal" everything seems artistic; Hartmann
+von Aue reads like Chaucer, "Aucassin et
+Nicolette" is as living as "Cymbeline," "Chevy Chase"
+seems as good as the battles of Homer. It is not a
+narrative, but a vague mooning; a knight illiterate,
+not merely like his fellow minnesingers, in the way
+of reading and writing, but in the sense of complete
+absence of all habit of literary form; extremely noble
+and pure of mind, chaste, gentle, with a funny, puzzled
+sense of humour, reminding one distantly of Jean
+Paul in his drowsy moments; a hanger-on of courts,
+but perfectly simple-hearted and childlike; very poor
+and easily pleased: such is, for good and for bad,
+Herr Wolfram von Eschenbach, the only real personality
+in his poem. And he narrates, in a mooning,
+digressive, good-natured, drowsy tone, with only a rare
+awaking of interest, a story which he has heard from
+some one else, and that some one else from a series
+of other some one elses (Chrestien de Troyes, a
+legendary Proven&ccedil;al Chiot or Guyot, perhaps even
+the original Welsh bard); all muddled, monotonous,
+and droning; events and persons ill-defined, without
+any sense of the relative importance of anything,
+without clear perception of what it is all about, or at
+least without the power of keeping the matter straight
+before the reader. A story, in point of fact, which is
+no story at all, but a mere series of rambling adventures
+(adventures which are scarcely adventures, having
+no point or plot) of various people with not much
+connection and no individuality&mdash;Gachmuret, Parzifal,
+Gawain, Loherangrein,Anfortas, Feirefis&mdash;pale ghosts
+of beings, moving in a country of Kennaqwhere,
+Aquitaine, Anjou, Brittany, Wales, Spain, and heaven
+knows what wondrous Oriental places; a misty country
+with woods and towns and castles which are infinitely
+far apart and yet quite near each other; which
+seem to sail about like cloud castles round the only solid
+place in the book, Plimiz&ouml;l, where Arthur's court,
+with round table constantly spread, Is for ever established.
+A no place, nowhere; yet full of details;
+minute inventories of the splendid furniture of castles
+(castles where? how reached?); infinitely inferior in
+this matter even to the Nibelungenlied, where you are
+made to feel so vividly (one of the few modern and
+therefore clear things therein) the long, dreary road
+from Worms to Bechlarn, and thence to Etzelburg,
+though of none of them is there anything beyond a
+name. For the Nibelungen story had been localized
+in what to narrator and audience was a reality, the
+country in which themselves lived, where themselves
+might seek out the abbey in which Siegfried was
+buried, the well in the Odenwald near which he was
+stabbed; where they knew from merchant and pilgrim
+the road taken by the Nibelungs from Santen to
+Worms, by the Burgundians from Worms to Hungary.
+But here in "Parzifal" we are in a mere vague world
+of anywhere, the world of Keltic and Oriental romance
+become mere cloudland to the Thuringian knight.
+And similarly have the heroes of other nations, the
+Arthurs, Gawains, Gachmurets, of Wales and Anjou,
+become mere vague names; they have become liquified,
+lost all shape and local habitation. They are
+mere names, these ladies and knights of Herr Wolfram,
+names with fair pink and white faces, names magnificently
+draped in bejewelled Oriental stuffs and embossed
+armour; they have no home, no work, nothing
+to do. This is the most remarkable characteristic of
+"Parzifal," and what makes it so typical of the process
+of growing inane through overmuch alteration, which
+prevented the mediaeval epics ever turning into an
+Iliad or an Odyssey; this that it is essentially idle
+and all about nothing. The feudal relations strongly
+marked in the German Nibelungenlied have melted
+away like the distinctions of race: every knight is
+independent, not a vassal nor a captain, a Volker or
+Hagen, or Roland or Renaud followed by his men;
+but an isolated individual, without even a squire,
+wandering about alone through this hazy land of
+nowhere. Knight-errantry, in the time of the great
+Guelph and Ghibelline struggles, every bit as ideal as
+that of Spenser or Cervantes; and with the difference
+that Sir Calidore and Sir Artegal have an appointed
+task, some Blatant Beast or other nuisance to overcome;
+and that Don Quixote has the general rescuing
+of all the oppressed Princesse Micomiconas, and the
+destruction of all windmills, and the capturing of all
+helmets of Mambrino, and the establishing all over
+the world of the worship of Dulcinea. But these
+knights of Wolfram von Eschenbach have no more
+this mission than they have the politico-military
+missions, missions of a R&uuml;dger or a Roland. They
+are all riding about at random, without any particular
+pagans, necromancers, or dragons to pursue. The very
+service of the Holy Grail, which is the main interest
+of the poem, consists in nothing apparently except
+living virtuously at the Castle of Montselv&auml;sche, and
+virtuously eating and drinking the victuals provided
+miraculously. To be admitted to this service, no
+initiation, no mission, nothing preliminary seems
+required. Parzifal himself merely wanders about
+vaguely, without doing any specified thing. The fact
+is that in this poem all has become purely ideal; ideal
+to the point of utter vacuity: there is no connection
+with any human business. Of all the heroes and
+heroines we hear that they are perfectly chaste, truthful,
+upright; and they are never put into any situation
+to test these qualities: they are never placed in the
+way of temptation, never made to fight with evil, or
+to decide between it and good. The very religion of
+the Holy Grail consists in doing nothing: not a word
+about relieving the poor or oppressed, of tending the
+sick, of delivering the Holy Sepulchre, of defending
+that great injured One, Christ. To be Grail Knight
+or even Grail King means to be exactly the same as
+before. Where in this vague dreamland of passive
+purity and heroism, of untempted chastity and untried
+honour, where are the earthly trials of Tristram, of
+Guenevere, of R&uuml;dger, of Renaud? Where the moral
+struggles of the Middle Ages? Where is Godfrey, or
+Francis, or Dominick? Nowhere. All has disappeared,
+melted away; Christianity and Paganism themselves
+have melted away or into each other, as in the easy
+meeting of the Pagan Feirefis and the Christian
+Parzifal, and in the double marriage of Gachmuret with
+the Indian Belakane and the Welsh Herzeloid; there
+remains only a kind of Buddhistic Nirvāna of vague
+passive perfection, but without any renunciation; and
+in a world devoid of evil and full of excellent brocade
+and armour and eatables, and lovely maidens who
+dress and undress you, and chastely kiss you on the
+mouth; a world without desire, aspiration, or combat,
+vacantly happy and virtuous. A world purely ideal,
+divorced from all reality, unsubstantial like the kingdom
+of Gloriana, but, unlike Spenser's, quite unshadowed
+by any puritan sadness, by any sense of evil, untroubled
+by allegorical vices; cheerful, serene, filled with flowers
+and song of birds, but as unreal as the illuminated
+arabesques of a missal. In truth, perhaps more to be
+compared with an eighteenth century pastoral, an ideal
+created almost in opposition to reality; a dream of
+passiveness and liberty (as of light leaves blown about)
+as the ideal of the fiercely troubled, struggling, tightly
+fettered feudal world. The ideal, perhaps, of only one
+moment, scarcely of a whole civilization; or rather
+(how express my feeling?) an accidental combination
+of an instant, as of spectre vapour arisen from the mixture
+of Kelt and Teuton, of Frank and Moslem. Is it
+Christian, Pagan, Mohammedan? None of all these....
+A simple-looking vaporous chaos of incongruous,
+but not conflicting, elements: a poem of virtue without
+object, of knighthood without work, of religion without
+belief; in this like its central interest, the Grail: a mystery,
+a cup, a stone; a thing which heals, feeds, speaks;
+animate or inanimate? Stone of the Caaba or chalice of
+the Sacrament? Merely a mysterious holy of holies
+and good of goods, which does everything and nothings
+means nothing and requires nothing&mdash;is nothing.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3>III.</h3>
+
+<p>Thus was obliterated, in all its national and traditional
+meaning, the heroic cycle of Arthur; and by the
+same process of slow adaptation to new intellectual
+requirements which had completely wiped out of
+men's memory the heroic tales of Siegfried, which had
+entirely altered the originally realistic character of
+the epic of Charlemagne. But unreal and ideal as
+had become the tales of the Round Table, and disconnected
+with any national tradition, the time came
+when even these were not sufficiently independent of
+reality to satisfy the capricious imagination of the later
+Middle Ages. At the end of the fourteenth century
+was written, most probably in Portuguese by Vasco
+de Lobeira, the tale of "Amadis de Gaula," which was
+followed by some forty or fifty similar books telling the
+adventures of all the brothers, nephews, sons, grandsons
+sons, and great-grandsons, an infinite succession, of
+the original Amadis; which, translated into all languages
+and presently multiplied by the press, seem to
+have usurped the place of the Arthurian stories in
+feudal countries until well-nigh the middle of the
+sixteenth century; and which were succeeded by no
+more stories of heroes, but by the realistic comic
+novels of the type of "Lazarillo de Tormes," and the
+buffoon philosophic extravaganzas of "Gargantua."
+Further indeed it was impossible to go than did mediaeval
+idealism in the Amadises. Compared with them
+the most fairy-tale-like Arthurian stories are perfect
+historical documents. There remains no longer any
+?connection whatsoever with reality, historical or
+geographical: the whole world seems to have been
+expeditiously emptied of all its contents, to make room
+for kingdoms of Gaul, of Rome, of the Firm Island, of
+Sobradisa, etc., which are less like the Land West of the
+Moon and East of the Sun than they are like Sancho
+Panza's island. All real mankind, past, present, and
+future, has similarly been swept away and replaced
+by a miraculous race of Amadises, Lisvarts, Galaors,
+Gradasilias, Orianas, Pintiquinestras, Fradalons, and
+so forth, who flit across our vision, in company with
+the indispensable necromancers, fairies, dwarfs, giants,
+and duennas, like some huge ballet: things without
+character, passions, pathos; knights who are never
+wounded or killed, princesses who always end with
+marrying the right man, enchanters whose heads
+are always chopped off, foundlings who are always
+reinstated in their kingdom, inane paper puppets
+bespangled with impossible sentiment, tinsel and rags
+which are driven about like chaff by the wind-puffs of
+romance. The advent of the Amadises is the coming
+of the Kingdom of Nonsense, the sign that the last
+days of chivalric romance have come; a little more,
+and the Licentiate Alonzo Perez will take his seat in
+Don Quixote's library, and Nicholas the Barber light
+his faggots in the yard.</p>
+
+<p>But, as if in compensation of the usurpation of
+which they had been the victims, the Carolingian tales,
+pushed out of the way by the Arthurian cycle, were
+not destined to perish. Thrown aside with contempt
+by the upper classes, engrossed with the Round Table
+and the Holy Grail, the tales of Charlemagne and his
+paladins, largely adulterated with Arthurian elements,
+were apparently cherished by a lower class of society:
+burgesses, artizans, and such-like, for whom that
+Arthurian world was far too etherial and too delicately
+immoral; and to this circumstance is due
+the fact that the humiliated Carolingian tales eventually
+received an artistic embodiment which was not
+given to the Arthurian stories. While troubadours and
+minnesingers were busy with the court of Arthur,
+and grave Latinists like Rusticiano of Pisa wrote
+of Launcelot and Guenevere; the Carolingian epics
+seem to have been mainly sung about by illiterate
+jongleurs, and to have busied the pens of prose hackwriters
+for the benefit of townsfolk. The free towns
+of the Netherlands and of Germany appear to have
+been full of this unfashionable literature: the Carolingian
+cycle had become democratic. And, inasmuch
+as it was literature no longer for knights and
+courtiers, but for artizans and shopkeepers, it went, of
+course, to the pre-eminently democratic country of
+the Middle Ages&mdash;Italy. This was at a time when
+Italian was not yet a recognized language, and when
+the men and women who talked in Tuscan, Lombard,
+or Venetian dialects, wrote in Latin and in French;
+and while Francesca and Paolo read the story of
+Launcelot most probably in good mediaeval <i>langue
+d'oil</i>, as befitted people of high birth; the jongleurs,
+who collected crowds so large as to bar the streets
+and require the interference of the Bolognese magistrates,
+sang of Roland and Oliver in a sort of <i>lingua
+Franca</i> of French Lombard. French jongleurs singing
+in impossible French-Italian; Italian jongleurs
+singing in impossible French; Paduan penny-a-liners
+writing Carolingian cyclical novels in French, not of
+Paris, assuredly, but of Padua&mdash;a comical and most
+hideous jabber of hybrid languages&mdash;this was how
+the Carolingian stories became popular in Italy.
+Meanwhile, the day came when the romantic Arthurian
+tales had to dislodge in Italy before the invasion
+of the classic epic. Troy, Rome, and Thebes had
+replaced Tintagil and Caerleon in the interest of the
+cultured classes long before the beginning of the
+fifteenth century; when Poggio, in the very midst of
+the classic revival, still told of the comically engrossed
+audience which surrounded the vagabonds singing of
+Orlando and Rinaldo. The effete Arthurian cycle,
+superseded in Spain and France by the Amadis
+romances, was speedily forgotten in Italy; but the
+Carolingian stories remained; and when Italian poetry
+arose once more after the long interregnum between
+Petrarch and Lorenzo dei Medici, and looked about
+for subjects, it laid its hand upon them. But when,
+in the second half of the fifteenth century, those old
+tales of Charlemagne received, after so many centuries
+of alterations and ephemeral embodiments, that artistic
+form which the Middle Ages had been unable to
+give them, the stories themselves, and the way in
+which they were regarded, were totally different from
+what they had been in the time of Theroulde, or of
+the anonymous author of "The Quatre Fils Aymon;"
+the Renaissance, with its keen artistic sense, made out
+of the Carolingian tales real works of art, but works
+of art which were playthings. To begin with, the
+Carolingian stories had been saturated with Arthurian
+colour: they had been furnished with all the knight-rrantry,
+all the gallantry, all the enchantments, the
+fairies, giants, and necromancers of the Keltic legends;
+and, moreover, they had lost, by infinite repetition, all
+the political realism and meaning so striking in "The
+Chanson de Roland" and "The Quatre Fils Aymon;"
+a confusion and unreality further increased by the
+fact that the Italians had no original connection with
+those tales, that to them real men and plans were no
+better than imaginary ones, and that the minstrels
+who sang in the market-place, and the laborious prose-writers
+who compiled such collections as that called
+of the "Reali di Francia," were equally free in their
+alterations and adaptations, creating unknown relationships,
+inventing new adventures, suppressing essential
+historical points, with no object save amusing their
+audience or readers with new stories about familiar
+heroes. Such was the condition of the stories themselves.
+The attitude of the public towards them was,
+by the middle of the fifteenth century, one of complete
+incredulity and frivolous amusement; the paladins
+were as unreal as the heroes of any granny's
+fairy tale. The people wanted to hear of wonderful
+battles and adventures, of enchantments and love-makings;
+but they wanted also to laugh; and, sceptical,
+practical, democratic, the artizans and shopkeepers
+of Florence&mdash;to whom, paying, as they did, expensive
+mercenaries who stole poultry and never got wounded
+on any account, all chivalry or real military honour
+was the veriest nursery rubbish&mdash;such people as
+crowded round the <i>cantastoria</i> of <i>mercato vecchio</i>, must
+indeed have found much to amuse them in these tales
+of so different an age.</p>
+
+<p>And into such crowds there penetrated to listen and
+watch (even as the Magnificent Lorenzo had elbowed
+among the carnival ragamuffins of Florence, and had
+slid in among the holiday-making peasants of Poggio
+a Caiano) a learned man, a poet, an intimate of the
+Medicis, of Politian, Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola,
+Messer Luigi Pulci, the same who had written the semi-allegorical,
+semi-realistic poem about Lorenzo dei
+Medici's gala tournament. There was a taste in the
+house of the Medici, together with those for platonic
+philosophy, classical erudition, religious hymns, and
+Hebrew kabbala, for a certain kind of realism, for the
+language and mode of thinking of the lower classes, as
+a reaction from Petrarchesque conventionality. As
+the Magnificent Lorenzo had had the fancy to string
+together in more artistic shape the quaint and graceful
+love poems, hyperbolical, realistic, tender, and abusive,
+of the Tuscan peasantry; so also Messer Luigi Pulci
+appears to have been smitten with the notion of trying
+his hand at a chivalric poem like those to which he
+and his friends had listened among the butchers and
+pork-shops, the fishmongers and frying booths of the
+market, and giving an impression, in its ideas and
+language, of the people to whom such strains were
+sung. But Luigi Pulci was vastly less gifted as a
+poet than Lorenzo dei Medici; Florentine prentices
+are less aesthetically pleasing than Tuscan peasants,
+and the "Morgante Maggiore" is a piece of work of
+a sort utterly inferior to the "Nencia da Barberino."
+Still the "Morgante Maggiore" remains, and will
+remain, as a very remarkable production of grotesque
+art. Just as Lorenzo dei Medici was certainly not
+without a deliberate purpose of selecting the quaintness
+and gracefulness of peasant life; even so, and
+perhaps more, Luigi Pulci must have had a deliberate
+intention of producing a ludicrous effect; in both cases
+the deliberate attempt is very little perceptible, in the
+"Nencia da Barberino" from the genius of Lorenzo,
+in the "Morgante Maggiore" from the stolidity of
+Pulci. The "Morgante," of which parts were probably
+written as a mere sample to amuse a supper party,
+became interesting to Pulci, in the mere matter of
+inventing and stringing together new incidents; and
+despite its ludicrous passages, it must have been more
+seriously written by him, and more seriously listened
+to by his friends, than would a similar production
+now-a-days. For the men of the Renaissance, no
+matter how philosophized and cultured, retained the
+pleasure in mere incident, which we moderns seem to
+have given over to children and savages; and Lorenzo,
+Ficino, and Politian probably listened to the adventures
+of Luigi Pulci's paladins and giants with much
+the same interest, and only a little more conscious
+sense of grotesqueness, with which the crowd in the
+market listened to Cristofano dell' Altissimo and
+similar story-tellers. The "Morgante Maggiore,"
+therefore, is neither really comic nor really serious.
+It is not a piece of realistic grotesqueness like "Gargantua"
+or "Pantagruel," any more than it is a serious
+ideal work like "Amadis de Gaula:" the proportion
+of deliberately sought effects is small; the great bulk,
+serious or comic, seems to have come quite at random.
+It is not a caricatured reproduction of the poems of
+chivalry sung in the market, for they were probably
+serious, stately, and bald, with at most an occasional
+joke; it is the reproduction of the joint impression
+received from the absurd, harum-scarum, unpractical
+world of chivalry of the poet, and the real world of
+prose, of good-humoured buffoonish coarseness with
+which the itinerant poet was surrounded. The paladins
+are no Don Quixotes, the princesses no Dulcineas,
+the battles are real battles; but the language is that
+of Florentine wool-workers, housewives, cheese-sellers,
+and ragamuffins, crammed with the slang of the
+market-place,its heavy jokes and perpetual sententious
+aphorism. Moreover the prominence given to food
+and eating is unrivalled except by Rabelais: the
+poet must have lounged with delight through the
+narrow mediaeval lanes, crowded with booths and
+barrows, sniffing with rapture the mingled scents of
+cheese, pork, fish, spices, and a hundred strange concomitant
+market smells. And the market, that
+classic <i>mercato vecchio</i> (alas, finally condemned and
+destroyed by modern sanitary prudishness, and which
+only those who have seen can conceive in its full
+barbarous, nay, barbaric Pantagruelian splendour of
+food, blood, and stenches) of Florence, is what we
+think of throughout the poem. And, when Messer
+Luigi comes to narrate, with real gravity and after the
+due invocation of the Virgin, the Trinity, and the saints,
+the tremendous disaster of Roncevaux, he uses such
+words and such similes, that above the neighing of
+horses and the clash of hurtling armour and the yells
+of the combatants we suddenly hear the nasal sing-song
+of Florentine tripe-vendors and pumpkin-pod-sellers,
+the chaffer and oaths and laughter of the gluttonous
+crowd pouring through the lanes of Calimala
+and Pellicceria; nay (horrible and grotesque miracle),
+there seems to rise out of the confused darkness of
+the battle-filled valley, there seems to disengage itself
+(as out of a mist) from the chaos of heaped bodies,
+and the flash of steel among the whirlwinds of dust, a
+vision, more and more distinct and familiar, of the
+crowded square with its black rough-hewn, smoke-stained
+houses, ornamented with Robbia-ware angels
+and lilies or painted madonnas; of its black butchers
+dens, outside which hang the ghastly disembowelled
+sheep with blood-stained fleeces, the huge red-veined
+hearts and livers; of the piles of cabbage and cauliflowers,
+the rows of tin ware and copper saucepans,
+the heaps of maccaroni and pastes, of spices and
+drugs; the garlands of onions and red peppers and
+piles of apples; the fetid sliminess of the fish tressels;
+the rough pavement oozy and black, slippery with
+cabbage-stalks, puddled with bullock's blood, strewn
+with plucked feathers&mdash;all under the bright blue sky,
+with Giotto's dove-coloured belfry soaring high above;
+a vision, finally, of one of those deep dens, with walls,
+all covered with majolica plates and dishes and
+flashing brass-embossed trenchers, in the dark depths
+of which crackles perennially a ruddy fire, while a
+huge spit revolves, offering to the flames now one
+now the other side of scores of legs of mutton, rounds
+of beef, and larded chickens, trickling with the butter
+unceasingly ladled by the white-dressed cooks.
+Roncisvalle, Charlemagne, the paladins, paganism,
+Christendom&mdash;what of them? "I believe in capon,
+roast or boiled, and sometimes done in butter; in
+mead and in must; and I believe in the pasty and
+the pastykins, mother and children; but above all
+things I believe in good wine "&mdash;as Margutte snuffles
+out in his catechism; and as to Saracens and paladins,
+past, present, and future, a fig for them!</p>
+
+<p>But meanwhile, for all that Florentine burgesses,
+artizans, and humorists may think, there is in this
+Italy of the Renaissance something besides Florence;
+there is a school of poetry, disconnected with the
+realisms of Lorenzo and Pulci, with the Ovidian
+Petrarchisms of Politian. There is Ferrara. Lying,
+as they do, between the Northern Apennine slopes of
+Modena and the Euganean hills, the dominions of the
+House of Este appear at first sight merely as part and
+parcel of Lombardy, and we should expect from them
+nothing very different from that which we expect from
+Milan or Bologna or Padua. But the truth is different;
+all round Ferrara, indeed, stretches the fertile flatness
+of Lombard cornfields, and they produce, as infallibly
+as they produce their sacks of grain and tuns of wine
+and heaps of silk cocoon, the intellectual and social
+equivalents of such things in Renaissance Italy: industry,
+wealth, comfort, scepticism, art. But on either
+side, into the defiles of the Euganean hills to the
+north, into the widening torrent valleys of the Modenese
+Apennines to the south, the Marquisate of Este
+stretches up into feudalism, into chivalry, into the
+imaginative kingdom of the Middle Ages. Mediaevalism,
+feudalism, chivalry, indeed, of a very modified
+sort; and as different from that of France and
+Germany as differ from the poverty-stricken plains
+and forests and and moors of the north these Italian
+mountain slopes, along which the vines crawl in long
+trellises, and the chestnuts rise in endlessly superposed
+tiers of terraces, cultivated by a peasant who is not the
+serf, but the equal sharer in profits with the master of
+the soil. And on one of those fertile hill-sides, looking
+down upon a narrow valley all a green-blue shimmer
+with corn and vine-bearing elms, was born, in the
+year 1434, Matteo Maria Boiardo, in the village which
+gave him the title, one of the highest in the Estensian
+dominions, of Count of Scandiano. Here, in the
+Apennines, Scandiano is a fortified village, also a
+castle, doubtless half turned into a Renaissance villa,
+but mediaeval and feudal nevertheless; but the name
+of Scandiano belongs also, I know not for what reason,
+to a certain little red-brick palace on the outskirts of
+Ferrara, beautifully painted with half-allegorical, half-realistic
+pageant frescoes by Cosimo Tura, and enclosing
+a sweet tangled orchard-garden; to all of
+which, being the place to which Duke Borso and Duke
+Ercole were wont to retire for amusement, the Ferrarese
+have given the further name of Schifanoia, which
+means, "fly from cares." This little coincidence of
+Scandiano the feudal castle in the Apennines, and
+Scandiano the little pleasure palace at Ferrara, seems to
+give, by accidental allegory, a fair idea of the
+double nature of Matteo Boiardo, of the Ferrarese
+court to which he belonged, and of the school of poetry
+(including the more notable but less original work of
+Ariosto) which the genius of the man and the character
+of the court succeeded together in producing.</p>
+
+<p>To understand Boiardo we must compare him with
+Ariosto; and to understand Ariosto we must compare
+him with Boiardo; both belong to the same school,
+and are men of very similar genius, and where the one
+leaves off the other begins. But first, in order to
+understand the character of this poetry which, in the
+main, is identical in Boiardo and in his more successful
+but less fascinating pupil Ariosto, let us understand
+Ferrara. It was, in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth
+centuries, a chivalric town of Ariostesque
+chivalry: feudalism turned courtly and elegant, and
+moreover, very liberal and comfortable by preponderance
+of democratic and industrial habits; a military
+court, of brave mercenary captains full of dash
+and adventure, not mere brigands and marauders
+having studied strategy, like the little Umbrian chieftains;
+a court orderly, elegant, and brilliant: a prince
+not risen from behind a counter like Medicis and Petruccis,
+nor out of blood like Baglionis and Sforzas, but
+of a noble old house whose beginnings are lost in the
+mist of real chivalry and real paladinism; a duke with
+a pretence of feudal honour and decorum, at whose
+court men were all brave and ladies all chaste&mdash;with
+the little licenses of baseness and gallantry admitted
+by Renaissance chivalry. A bright, brilliant court at
+the close of the fifteenth century; and more stable
+than the only one which might have rivalled it, the
+Feltrian court of Urbino, too small and lost among
+the Umbrian bandits. A bright, brilliant town, also,
+this Ferrara: not mercantile like Florence, not mere
+barracks like Perugia; a capital, essentially, in its rich
+green plain by the widened Po, with its broad handsome
+streets (so different from the mediaeval exchanges of
+Bologna, and the feudal alleys of Perugia), its well-built
+houses, so safe and modern, needing neither
+<i>bravi</i> nor iron window bars, protected (except against
+some stray murder by one of the Estensi themselves),
+by the duke's well-organized police; houses with well-trimmed
+gardens, like so many Paris h&ocirc;tels; and with
+the grand russet brick castle, military with its moat
+and towers, urban with its belvederes and balconies, in
+the middle, well placed to sweep away with its guns
+(the wonderful guns of the duke's own making) any
+riot, tidily, cleanly, without a nasty heap of bodies and
+slop of blood as in the narrow streets of other towns
+Imagine this bright capital, placed, moreover, in the
+richest centre of Lombardy, with glitter of chivalry
+from the Euganean hills and Apennines (castellated
+with Este, Monselice,Canossa, and Boiardo's own Scandiano);
+with gorgeous rarities of commerce from Venice
+and Milan&mdash;a central, unique spot. It is the natural
+home of the chivalrous poets of the Renaissance,
+Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso; as Florence is of the Politians
+and Pulcis (Hellenism and back-shopery); and Venice
+of the literature of lust, jests, cynicism, and adventure,
+Aretine, Beolco, Calmo, and Poliphilo-Colonna. In
+that garden, where the white butterflies crowd among
+the fruit trees bowed down to the tall grass of the palace
+of Schifanoia&mdash;a garden neither grand nor classic, but
+elegiac and charming&mdash;we can imagine Boiardo or
+Ariosto reading their poems to just such a goodly
+company as Giraldi Cinthio (a Ferrarese, and fond
+of romance, too) describes in the prologue of his
+"Ecatomiti:" gentle and sprightful ladies, with the
+splendid brocaded robes, and the gold-filleted golden
+hair of Dosso Dossi's wonderful Alcina Circe; graceful
+youths like the princely St. John of Benvenuto
+Garofalo; jesters like Dosso's at Modena; brilliant
+captains like his St. George and St. Michael; and a
+little crowd of pages with doublets and sleeves laced
+with gold tags, of sedate magistrates in fur robes
+and scarlet caps, of white-dressed maids with instruments
+of music and embroidery frames and hand
+looms, like those which Cosimo Tura painted for Duke
+Borso on the walls of this same Schifanoia palace
+Such is the audience; now for the poems.</p>
+
+<p>The stuff of Boiardo and Ariosto is the same: that
+old mediaeval stuff of the Carolingian poems, coloured,
+scented with Arthurian chivalry and wonder. The
+knight-errantry of the Keltic tales is cleverly blended
+with the pseudo-historical military organization of
+the Carolingian cycle. Paladins and Saracens are
+ingeniously manoeuvred about, now scattered in little
+groups of twos and threes, to encounter adventures
+in the style of Sir Launcelot or Amadis; now gathered
+into a compact army to crash upon each other as at
+Roncevaux; or else wildly flung up by the poet to
+alight in fairyland, to find themselves in the caverns
+of Jamschid, in the isles where Oberon's mother
+kept Caesar, and Morgana kept Ogier, in the boats,
+entering subterranean channels, of Sindbad and
+Huon of Bordeaux; a constant alternation of individual
+adventure and wholesale organized campaigns,
+conceived and carried out with admirable
+ingenuity. So much for the deeds of arms. The
+deeds of love are also compounded of Carolingian and
+Arthurian, but flavoured with special Renaissance
+feeling. There is a great deal of rapid love-making
+between too gallant knights and too impressionable
+ladies; licentious amours which we moderns lay at the
+door of Boiardo and Ariosto, not knowing that the
+licentiousness of the Olivers and Ogiers and Guerins
+and Huons of mediaeval poetry, of the sentimental
+Amadises, Galaors, and Lisvarts of the fourteenth
+century, whom the Renaissance has toned down in
+Rogers and Rinaldos and Ricciardettos, is by many
+degrees worse. A moral improvement also (for all
+the immorality of the Renaissance) in the eschewing
+of the never-failing adultery of the Arthurian romances,
+and the appropriation to legitimately faithful
+love of the poetical devotion which Tristram and
+Launcelot bear to other men's wives. To this are
+added, and more by Ariosto than by Boiardo, two
+essentially Italian elements: something of the nobility
+of passion of the Platonic sonneteers; and a good dose
+of the ironical, scurrilous, moralizing immoral anecdote
+gossiping of Boccaccio and Sacchetti. Such is the
+stuff. The conception, though rarely comic, and
+sometimes <i>bon&acirc; fide</i> serious, is never earnest. All
+this is a purely artistic world, a world of decorative
+arabesque incident, intended to please, scarcely ever
+to move, or to move, at most, like some Decameronian
+tale of Isabella and the Basil Plant, or Constance and
+Martuccio. On the other hand, there is none of the
+grotesque irreverence of Pulci. Boiardo and Ariosto
+are not in earnest; they are well aware that their heroes
+and heroines are mere modern men and women tricked
+out in pretty chivalric trappings, driven wildly about
+from Paris to Cathay, and from Spain to the Orkneys&mdash;on
+Tony Lumpkin's principle of driving his mother
+round and round the garden plot till she thought herself
+on a heath six miles off&mdash;without ever really changing
+place. But they do not, like Pulci, make fun of their
+characters. They write chivalry romances not for
+Florentine pork-butchers and wool-carders, but for
+gallant ladies and gentlemen, to whom, with duels,
+tournaments, serenades, and fine speeches, chivalry is
+an admired name, though no longer a respected reality.</p>
+
+<p>The heroes of Boiardo and of Ariosto are always
+bold and gallant and glittering, the spirit of romance
+is in them; a giant Sancho Panza like Morgante,
+redolent of sausage and cheese, would never be admitted
+into the society of a Ferrarese Orlando. The
+art of Boiardo and of Ariosto is eminently pageant
+art, in which sentiment and heroism are but as one
+element among many; there is no pretence at reality
+(although there is a good deal of incidental realism),
+and no thought of the interest in subject and persons
+which goes with reality. It is a masquerade, and one
+whose men and women must, I think, be imagined
+in a kind of artistic fancy costume: a mixture of the
+Renaissance dress and of the antique, as we see it in
+the prints of contemporary pageants, and in Venetian
+and Ferrarese pictures; that Circe of Dosso's, in the
+Borghese gallery of Rome, seated in her stately wine-lees
+and gold half-heraldically and half-cabalistically
+patterned brocade, before the rose-bushes of the little
+mysterious wood, is the very ideal of the Falerinas
+and Alcinas, of the enchantresses of Boiardo and
+Ariosto. Pageant people, these of the Ferrarese
+poets; they only play at being in forests and deserts,
+as children play at being on volcanoes or in Green-land
+by the nursery fire. It is a kind of dressing up,
+a masquerading of the fancy; not disguising in order
+to deceive, but rather laying hold of any pretty or
+brilliant impressive garb that comes to hand, and
+putting that on in conjunction with many odds and
+ends, as an artist's guests might do with the silks and
+velvets and Oriental properties of a studio. These
+knights and ladies, for ever tearing about from Scotland
+to India, never, in point of fact, get any further
+than the Apennine slopes where Boiardo was born,
+where Ariosto governed the Garfagnana. They ride
+for ever (while supposed to be in the Ardennes or in
+Egypt) across the velvet moss turf, all patterned with
+minute starry clovers and the fallen white ropy
+chestnut blossom, amidst the bracken beneath the
+slender chestnut trees, the pale blue sky looking in
+between their spreading branches; at most they lose
+their way in the intricacies of some seaside pineta,
+where the feet slip on the fallen needles, and the sun
+slants along the vistas of serried, red, scaly trunks,
+among the juniper and gorse and dry grass and
+flowers growing in the sea sand. Into the vast mediaeval
+forests of Germany and France, Boiardo and
+Ariosto's fancy never penetrated.</p>
+
+<p>Such is the school: a school represented in its
+typical character only by Boiardo and Ariosto, but to
+which belong, nevertheless, with whatever differences,
+Tasso, Spenser, Camoens, all the poets of Renaissance
+romance. Now of the two leaders thereof. Here I
+feel that I can speak only personally; tell only of
+my own personal impressions and preferences. Comparing
+together Boiardo and Ariosto, I am, of course,
+aware of the infinite advantages of the latter. Ariosto
+is a man of far more varied genius; he is an artist,
+while Boiardo is an amateur; he is learned in arranging
+and ornamenting; he knows how to alternate various
+styles, how to begin and how to end. Moreover, he
+is a scholarly person of a more scholarly time: he is
+familiar with the classics, and, what is more important,
+he is familiar with the language in which he is writing.
+He writes exquisitely harmonious, supple, and brilliant
+Tuscan verse, with an infinite richness of diction; while
+poor Boiardo jogs along in a language which is not the
+Lombard dialect in which he speaks, and which is very
+uncouth and awkward, as is every pure language for
+a provincial; indeed, so much so, that the pedantic
+Tuscans require Berni to make Tuscan, elegant, to
+<i>ingentilire</i>, with infinite loss to quaintness and charm,
+the "Orlando Innamorato" of poor Ferrarese Boiardo.
+Moreover, Ariosto has many qualities unknown to
+Boiardo; wit, malice, stateliness, decided eloquence
+and power of simile and apostrophe; he is a symphony
+for full orchestra, and Boiardo a mere melody played
+on a single fiddle, which good authorities (and no one
+dare contest with Italians when they condemn anything
+not Tuscan as jargon) pronounce to be no
+Cremona. All these advantages Ariosto certainly
+has; and I do not quarrel with those who prefer him
+for them. But many of them distinctly take away
+from my pleasure. I confess that I am bored by the
+beautifully written moral and allegorical preludes of
+Ariosto's cantos; I would willingly give all his aphorism
+and all his mythology to get quickly to the
+story. Also, I resent his admirable rhetorical flourishes
+about his patrons, his Ercoles, Ippolitos, and Isabellas
+they ring false, dreadfully false and studied; and
+Boiardo's quickly despatched friendly greeting of his
+friends, his courteous knights and gentle ladies, pleases
+me much better. Moreover, the all-pervading consciousness
+of the existence of Homer, Virgil, nay,
+Statius and Lucan, every trumpery antique epic-monger,
+annoys me, giving an uncomfortable doubt
+as to whether Ariosto did not try to make all this
+nonsense serious, and this romance into an epic; all
+this occasional Virgilian stateliness, alternated with
+a kind of polished Decameronian gossipy cynicism,
+diverts my attention, turns paladins and princesses
+too much into tutor-educated gentlemen, into Bandello
+and Cinthio-reading ladies of the sixteenth century.
+The picture painted by Ariosto is finer, but you see
+too much of the painter; he and his patrons take up
+nearly the whole foreground, and they have affected,
+idealized faces and would-be dignified and senatorial
+poses. For these and many other reasons, I personally
+prefer Boiardo; and perhaps the best reason for my preference
+is the irrational one that he gives me more
+pleasure. My preferences, my impressions, I have
+said, are in this matter, much less critical than personal.
+Hence I can speak of Boiardo only as he
+affects me.</p>
+
+<p>When first I read Boiardo, I was conscious of a
+curious phenomenon in myself. I must confess to
+reading books usually in a very ardent or rather weary
+manner, either way in a hurry to finish them. As it
+happened, when I borrowed Boiardo, I had a great
+many other things on hand which required my time
+and attention; yet I could not make up my mind to
+return the book until I had finished it, though my
+intention had been merely to satisfy my curiosity by
+a dip into it. I went on, without that eager desire to
+know what follows which one has in a novel; drowsily
+with absolute reluctance to leave off, like the reluctance
+to rise from the grass beneath the trees with only
+butterflies and shadows to watch, or the reluctance to
+put aside some fairy book of Walter Crane's. It was
+like strolling in some quaint, ill-trimmed, old garden,
+finding fresh flowers, fresh bits of lichened walls, fresh
+fragments of broken earthenware ornaments; or, rather,
+more like a morning in the Cathedral Library at
+Siena, the place where the gorgeous choir books are
+kept, itself illuminated like missal pages by Pinturicchio:
+amused, delighted, not moved nor fascinated;
+finding every moment something new, some charming
+piece of gilding, some sweet plumed head, some quaint
+little tree or town; making a journey of lazy discovery
+in a sort of world of Prince Charmings, the real realm
+of the "Fa&euml;ry Queen," quite different in enchantment
+from the country of Spenser's Gloriana, with its pale
+allegoric ladies and knights, half-human, half-metaphysical,
+and its make-believe allegorical ogres and
+giants. This is the real Fairyland, this of Boiardo:
+no mere outskirts of Ferrara, with real, playfully
+cynical Ferrarese men and women tricked out as
+paladins and Amazons, and making fun of their
+disguise, as in Ariosto; no wonderland of Tasso, with
+enchanted gardens copied out of Bolognese pictures
+and miraculous forests learned from theatre mechanicians,
+wonders imitated by a great poet from the cardboard
+and firework wonders of Bianca Cappello's
+wedding feasts. This is the real fairyland, the wonderland
+of mediaeval romance and of Persian and Arabian
+tales, no longer solemn or awful, but brilliant, sunny,
+only half believed in; the fairyland of the Renaissance,
+superficially artistic, with its lightest, brightest fancies,
+and its charming realities; its cloistered and painted
+courts with plashing fountains, its tapestried and inlaid
+rooms, its towered and belvedered villas, its quaint
+clipped gardens full of strange Oriental plants and
+beasts; and all this transported into a country of
+wonders, where are the gardens of the Hesperides, the
+fountain of Merlin, the tomb of Narcissus, the castle
+of Morgan-le-Fay; every quaint and beautiful fancy,
+antique and mediaeval, mixed up together, as in some
+Renaissance picture of Botticelli or Rosselli or Filippino,
+where knights in armour descend from Pegasus
+before Roman temples, where swarthy white-turbaned
+Turks, with oddly bunched-up trousers and jewelled
+caftans, and half-naked, oak-crowned youths, like genii
+descended, pensive and wondering, from some antique
+sarcophagus, and dapper princelets and stalwart knights,
+and citizens and monks, all crowd round the altar of
+some wonder-working Macone or Apolline or Trevigante;
+some comic, dreadful, apish figure, mummed
+up in half-antique, half-oriental garb. Or else we are
+led into some dainty, pale-tinted panel of Botticelli,
+where the maidens dance in white clinging clothes,
+strewing flowers on to the flower-freaked turf; or into
+some of Poliphilo's vignettes, where the gentle ladies,
+seated with lute and viol under vine-trellises, welcome
+the young gallant, or poet, or knight.</p>
+
+<p>Such is the world of Boiardo. Spenser has once
+or twice peeped in, painted it, and given us exquisite
+little pictures, as that of Malecasta's castle, all hung
+with mythological tapestries, that of the enchanted
+chamber of Britomart, and those of Sir Calidore meeting
+the Graces and of Hellenore dancing with the
+Satyrs; but Spenser has done it rarely, trembling to
+return to his dreary allegories. Equal to these single
+pictures by Spenser, Boiardo has only one or two, but
+he keeps us permanently in the world where such
+pictures are painted. Boiardo is not a great artist
+like Spenser: but he is a wizard, which is better. He
+leads us, unceasingly, through the little dreamy laurelwoods,
+where we meet crisp-haired damsels tied to
+pine-trees, or terrible dragons, or enchanted wells,
+through whose translucent green waters we see
+brocaded rooms full of fair ladies; he ferries us ever
+and anon across shallow streams, to the castles where
+<i>gentil donzelle</i> wave their kerchiefs from the pillared
+belvedere; he slips us unseen into the camps and
+council-rooms of the splendidly trapped Saracens,
+like so many figures out of Filippino's frescoes; he
+conducts us across the bridges where giants stand
+warders, to the mysterious carved tombs whence issue
+green and crested snakes, who, kissed by a paladin,
+turn into lovely enchantresses; he takes us beneath
+the beds of rivers and through the bowels of the earth
+where kings and knights turned into statues of gold,
+sit round tables covered with jewels, illumined by
+carbuncles more wonderful than that of Jamschid; or
+through the mazes of fairy gardens, where every ear
+of corn, cut off, turns into a wild beast, and every
+fallen leaf into a bird, where hydras watch in the waters
+and lamias rear themselves in the grass, where Orlando
+must fill his helmet with roses lest he hear the voice
+of the sirens; where all the wonders of Antiquity&mdash;the
+snake-women, the Circes, the sirens, the hydras and
+fauns live, strangely changed into something infinitely
+quaint and graceful, still half-antique, yet already half-Arabian
+or Keltic, in the midst of the fairyland of
+Merlin and of Oberon&mdash;live, move, transform themselves
+afresh; where the golden-haired damsels and
+the stripling knights, delicate like Pinturicchio's Prince
+Charmings, gallop for ever on their enchanted coursers,
+within enchanted armour, invincible, invulnerable,
+under a sky always blue, and through an unceasing
+spring, ever onwards to new adventures. Adventures
+which the noble, gentle Castellan of Scandiano, poet
+and knight and humorist, philanthropical philosopher
+almost from sheer goodness of heart, yet a little crazy,
+and capable of setting all the church bells ringing in
+honour of the invention of the name of Rodomonte
+relates not to some dully ungrateful Alfonso or
+Ippolito, but to his own guests, his own brilliant
+knights and ladies, with ever and anon an effort to
+make them feel, through his verse, some of those
+joyous spring-tide feelings which bubble up in himself;
+as when he remembers how, "Once did I wander on
+a May morning in a fair flower-adorned field on a
+hillside overlooking the sea, which was all tremulous
+with light; and there, among the roses of a green
+thorn-brake, a damsel was singing of love; singing
+so sweetly that the sweetness still touches my heart;
+touches my heart, and makes me think of the greatdelight
+it was to listen;" and how he would fain repeat that
+song, and indeed an echo of its sweetness runs through
+his verse. Meanwhile, stanza pours out after stanza,
+adventure grows out of adventure, each more wonderful,
+more gorgeous than its predecessor. To which
+listen the ladies, with their white, girdled dresses and
+crimped golden locks; the youths, with their soft
+beardless faces framed in combed-out hair, with their
+daggers on their hips and their plumed hats between
+their fingers; and the serious bearded men, in silken
+robes; drawing nearer the poet, letting go lute or
+violin or music-book as they listen on the villa terrace
+or in some darkened room, where the sunset sky turns
+green-blue behind the pillared window, and the roses
+hang over the trellise of the cloister. And as they
+did four hundred years ago, so do we now, rejoice.
+The great stalwart naked forms of Greece no longer
+leap and wrestle or carry their well-poised baskets of
+washed linen before us; the mailed and vizored knights
+of the Nibelungen no longer clash their armour to the
+sound of Volker's red fiddle-bow; the glorified souls
+of Dante no longer move in mystic mazes of light
+before the eyes of our fancy. All that is gone. But
+here is the fairyland of the Renaissance. And thus
+Matteo Boiardo, Count of Scandiano, goes on, adding
+adventure to adventure, stanza to stanza, in his castle
+villa, or his palace at Ferrara. But suddenly he stops
+and his bright fiddle and lute music jars and ends:
+"While I am singing, O Redeeming God, I see all Italy
+set on fire by these Gauls, coming to ravage I know
+not what fresh place."</p>
+
+<p>And thus, with the earlier and more hopeful Renaissance
+of the fifteenth century, Matteo Boiardo
+broke off with his "Orlando Innamorato." The perfect
+light-heartedness, the delight in play of a gentle,
+serious, eminently kindly nature, which gives half the
+charm to Boiardo's work, seems to have become impossible
+after the ruin of Italian liberty and prosperity
+the frightful showing up of Italy's moral and social
+and political insignificance at the beginning of the
+sixteenth century. Lombardy especially became a
+permanent battle-field, and its towns mere garrison
+places of French, German, Spanish, and Swiss barbarians,
+whose presence meant slaughter and pillage
+and every foulest outrage; and then, between the
+horrors of the unresisted invasions and the unresisted
+exactions, came plague and famine, and industry and
+commerce gradually died out. A few princes, subsidised
+and guarded by French or Imperialists, kept
+up an appearance of cheerfulness, but the courts even
+grew more gloomy as the people grew more miserable.
+There is more joking, more resonant laughter in
+Ariosto than in Boiardo, but there is very much less
+serenity and cheerfulness; ever and anon a sort of
+bitterness, a dreary moralizing tendency, a still more
+dreary fit of prophesying future good in which he has
+no belief, comes over Ariosto. Berni, who rewrote the
+"Orlando Innamorato" in choice Tuscan, and who
+underlined every faintly marked jest of Boiardo's, with
+evident preoccupation of the ludicrous effects of the
+"Morgante Maggiore"&mdash;Berni even could not keep up
+his spirits; into the middle of Boiardo's serene fairyland
+adventures he inserted a description of the sack
+of Rome which is simply harrowing. All real cheerfulness
+departed from the people, to be replaced only
+by pleasure in the debaucheries of the buffoonish
+obscenity of Aretino, Bandello, and so forth, to which
+the men of the dying Italy of the Renaissance listened
+as the roysterers of the plague of Florence, with the
+mortal sickness almost upon them, may have listened
+to the filthy songs which they trolled out in their
+drunkenness. Or at best, the poor starved, bruised,
+battered, humiliated nation may have tried to be
+cheerful on the principle of its harlequin playwright
+Beolco, who, more honest than the Ariostos and
+Bibbienas, and Aretines, came forward on his stage of
+planks at Padua, and after describing the ruin and
+wretchedness of the country, the sense of dreariness
+and desolation, which made young folk careless of
+marriage, and the very nightingales (he thought)
+careless of song, recommended his audience, since
+they could not even cry thoroughly and to feel any
+the better for it, to laugh, if they still were able.
+Boiardo was forgotten; his spirit was unsuited to the
+depression, gloomy brutality, gloomy sentimentality,
+which grew every day as Italy settled down after its
+Renaissance-Shrovetide in the cinders and fasting of
+the long Lent of Spanish and Jesuit rule.</p>
+
+<p>Still the style of Boiardo was not yet exhausted; the
+peculiar kind of fairy epic, the peculiar combination of
+chivalric and classic elements of which the "Orlando
+Innamorato" and the "Orlando Furioso," had been
+the great examples, still fascinated poets and public.
+The Renaissance, or what remained of it, was now no
+longer confined to Italy; it had spread, paler, more
+diluted, shallower, over the rest of Europe. To follow
+the filiation of schools, to understand the intellectual
+relationships of individuals, of the latter half of the
+sixteenth century, it becomes necessary to move from
+one country to another. And thus the two brother
+poets of the family of Boiardo, its two last and much
+saddened representatives, came to write in very
+different languages and under very different circumstances.
+These two are Tasso and our own Spenser.
+They are both poets of the school of the "Orlando
+Innamorato," both poets of a reaction, of a kind of
+purified Renaissance: the one of the late Italian
+Renaissance emasculated by the Council of Trent and
+by Spain; the other of the English Renaissance, in
+its youth truly, but, in the individual case of Spenser,
+timidly drawn aside from the excesses of buoyant life
+around. In the days of the semi-atheist dramatists,
+all flesh and blood and democracy, Spenser steeps
+himself in Christianity and chivalry, even as Tasso
+does, following on the fleshly levity and scepticism of
+Boiardo, Berni, and Ariosto. There is in both poets
+a paleness, a certain diaphanous weakness, an absence
+of strong tint or fibre or perfume; in Tasso the pallor
+of autumn, in Spenser the paleness of spring: autumn
+left sad and leafless by the too voluptuous heat and
+fruitfulness of summer; spring still pale and pinched
+by winter, with timid nipped grass and unripe stiff
+buds and catkins, which never suggest the tangle of
+bush, grasses, and magnificent flowers and fruits, sweet,
+splendid, or poisonous, which the sun will make out
+of them. The Renaissance, in the past for Tasso, in
+the proximate and very visible future for Spenser, has
+frightened both; the cynicism and bestiality of men
+like Machiavelli and Aretino; the godless, muscular
+lustiness of Marlowe, Greene, and Peele, seen in a
+glimpse by Tasso and Spenser, have given a shock to
+their sensitive nature, have made them turn away and
+hide themselves from a second sight of it. They both
+take refuge in a land of fiction, of romance, from the
+realities into which they dread to splash; a world unsubstantial,
+diaphanous, faint-hued, almost passionless,
+which they make out of beauty and heroism and
+purity, which they alembicize and refine, but into
+which there never enters any vital element, anything
+to give it flesh and bone and pulsing life: it is a mere
+soap bubble. And beautiful as is this world of their
+own making, it is too negative even for them; they
+move in it only in imagination, calm, serene, vacant,
+almost sad. There is in it, and in themselves, a something
+wanting; and the remembrance of that unholy life
+of reality which jostled and splashed their delicate
+souls, comes back and haunts them with its evil
+thought. There is no laugh&mdash;what is worse, no smile
+&mdash;in these men. Incipient puritanism, not yet the
+terrible brawny reality of Bunyan, but a vague, grey
+spectre, haunts Spenser; and the puritanism of Don
+Quixote, the vague, melancholy, fantastic reverting
+from the evil world of to-day to an impossible world
+of chivalry, is troubling the sight of Tasso. He
+cannot go crazy like Don Quixote, and instead he
+grows melancholy; he cannot believe in his own
+ideals; he cannot give them life, any more than can
+Spenser give life to his allegoric knights and ladies,
+because the life would have to be fetched by Tasso
+out of the flesh of Ariosto, and by Spenser out of the
+blood of Marlowe; and both Tasso and Spenser
+shrink at the thought of what might with it be inoculated
+or transfused; and they rest satisfied with
+phantoms. The phantoms of Spenser are more
+shadowy much more utterly devoid of human character;
+they are almost metaphysical abstractions,
+and they do not therefore sadden us: they are too
+unlike living things to seem very lifeless. But the
+phantoms of Tasso, he would fain make realities; he
+works at every detail of character, history, or geography,
+which may make his people real; they are
+not, as with Spenser, elves and wizards flitting about
+in a nameless fairyland, characterless and passionless;
+they are historical creatures, captains and soldiers in
+a country mapped out by the geographer; but they
+are phantoms all the more melancholy, these beautiful
+and heroic Clorindas and Erminias and Tancreds
+and Godfreys&mdash;why? because the real world around
+Tasso is peopled with Brachianos and Corombonas,
+and Annabellas and Giovannis, creatures for Webster
+and Ford; and because this world of chivalry is, in
+his Italy, as false as the world of Amadis and
+Esplandian in Toboso and Barcelona for poor Don
+Quixote. Melancholy therefore, and dreamy, both
+Tasso and Spenser, with nothing they can fully love
+in reality, because they see it tainted with reality and
+evil; without the cheerful falling back upon everyday
+life of Ariosto and Shakespeare, and with a strange
+fancy for fairyland, for the distant, for the Happy
+Islands, the St. Brandan's Isles, the country of the
+fountain of youth, the country of which vague reports
+have come back with the ships of Raleigh and Ponce
+de Leon. Tasso and Spenser are happiest, in their
+calm, melancholy way, when they can let themselves
+go in day-dreams, and talk of things in which they do not
+believe, of diamond shields which stun monsters,
+of ointments which cure all ills of body and of soul
+of enchanted groves whose trees sound with voices,
+and lutes, of boats in which, steered by fairies, we can
+glide across the scarcely rippled summer sea, and
+watching the ruins of the past, time and reality left
+behind, set sail for some strange land of bliss. And
+there is in the very sensuousness and love of beauty-of
+these men a vagueness and melancholy, a constant:
+sense of the fleeting and of the eternal, as in that
+passage, translated from the languidly sweet Italian
+perfection of Tasso into the timid, almost scentless,
+English of Spenser&mdash;"Cosi trapassa al trapassar d'un
+giorno."</p>
+
+<p><span style="margin-left: 2em;">So passeth, in the passing of a day,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Of mortall life the leafe, the bud, the flowre</span></p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">No more doth florish after first decay,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">That earst was sought to deck both bed and bowre</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Of many a lady, and many a Paramowre.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Gather therefore the Rose whilest yet is prime,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">For soone comes age that will her pride deflowre;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Gather the Rose of love whitest yet is time,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Whitest loving thou mayest loved be withe equall crime.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>A sense of evanescence, of dreamlikeness, quite different
+from the thoughtless enjoyment of Boiardo,
+from the bold and manly facing of the future, the
+solemn, strong sense of life and death as of waking
+realities, of the Elizabethan dramatists, even of weaklings
+like Massinger and Beaumont. In Tasso and in
+Spenser there is no such joyousness, no such solemnity;
+only a dreamy watching, a regret which is scarcely a
+regret, at the evanescence of pale beauty and pale life,
+of joys feebly felt and evils meekly borne.</p>
+
+<p>With Tasso and Spenser comes to a close the school
+of Boiardo, the small 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 <i>cicisbeo</i>; 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 &agrave; quoy l'enfance
+s'amuse;" and by Ben Jonson:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 16.5em;">Public nothings,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Abortives of the fabulous dark cloister,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Sent out to poison courts, and infect manners&mdash;</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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," finall replace
+the romances of the Launcelots, Galahads, Rinaldos,
+and Orlandos.</p>
+
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+<h3><a name="MEDIEVAL_LOVE" id="MEDIEVAL_LOVE"></a>MEDIEVAL LOVE.</h3>
+
+
+<p>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&mdash;if ever in our life we
+chance to meet her&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+<h3>I.</h3>
+
+<p>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-consciuos
+effort and bequeathed as an unalienable habit,
+a new manner of loving.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;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
+<i>bon&acirc; fide</i> 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. <i>Frowendienst,</i>
+"lady's service," is the name given by Ulrich
+von Liechtenstein, a mediaeval Quixote, outshining by
+far the mad Proven&ccedil;als 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, <i>dompna, dame, frowe, madonna</i>&mdash;words
+of which the original sense has almost been forgotten,
+although there cleave to them even now ideas higher
+than those associated with the <i>puella</i> of the ancients,
+the <i>wib</i> of the heroic days&mdash;lady, mistress&mdash;the titles
+of the Mother of God, who is, after all, only the mystical
+Soul's Paramour of the mediaeval world. "Lady's
+service"&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;because the whole
+madness of individuals is more credible than the half-madness
+of the whole world&mdash;is it possible to believe
+that, as the poems of innumerable trouv&egrave;res 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Mediaeval love is first revealed in the sudden and
+almost simultaneous burst of song which, like the
+twitter and trill so dear to trouv&egrave;res, 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 Proven&ccedil;als 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 Proven&ccedil;als, 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 trouv&egrave;res, 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 Ab&eacute;lard, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 nobles. The reign of town
+poetry, of fabliaux and meistersang, comes later; the
+poets of the early Middle Ages, trouv&egrave;res, 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&mdash;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
+trouv&egrave;res 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 B&eacute;thune, like Walther, Wolfram, and
+Tannh&auml;user&mdash;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 principal 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 vassals 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&mdash;the stately, proud lady perpetually described
+by mediaeval poets&mdash;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 associate, and absolutely no unmarried girls
+who could be a desirable match, the lady of the castle
+speedily becomes a goddess, 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&mdash;that thought must often pass
+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
+"Petit Jehan de Saintr&eacute;," 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 passion 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&mdash;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&mdash;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 vassals, 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 Andr&eacute; 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 "Aucassin 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 <i>cecisbei</i>, the early mediaeval lover
+might say with Goldoni's Don Alfonso or Don
+Roberto, "I <i>serve</i> your wife&mdash;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' &egrave;?" I am quoting from memory.) And as a
+fact, we hear little of jealousy; the amusement 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)&mdash;showing from opposite sides how the society
+accustomed to Courts of Love looked upon the duties
+of husbands.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>chansons de
+geste</i>, which merely received a new form in the early
+Middle Ages; still less from the prose romances of
+M&eacute;lusine, 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 trouv&egrave;res, troubadours,
+and minnesingers, were the fashionable reading of the
+feudal classes 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"&mdash;of the ladies and knights of
+Arthur's court; of the quest of the Grail by spotless
+knights who were bastards and fathers of bastards;
+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.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Vos qui tr&egrave;s bien ameis i petit mentendeis</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Por l'amor de Ihesu les pucelles ameis.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Nos trouvons en escris de sainte auctoriteis</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Ke pucelle est la fleur de loyaulment ameir.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>This strange entreaty to love the maidens for the
+sake of Christ's love, this protest of a nameless
+northern French poet (Wackernagel, Altfranz&ouml;sische
+Lieder and Leiche IX.) against the adulterous passion
+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&mdash;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&mdash;<i>madame,
+domna, frowe, madonna</i>&mdash;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 trouv&egrave;res,
+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 titles 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 <i>cicisbeos</i>, 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 ")&mdash;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,
+<i>the</i> 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 Proven&ccedil;al <i>serena</i> and <i>alba,</i>
+with their counterparts in the <i>langue d'oil</i>, and the
+so-called <i>Wachtlieder</i> 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 <i>serena</i>, the evening song,
+of Guiraut Riquier. A lovely anonymous <i>alba,</i>
+whose refrain, "Oi deus, oi deus; de l' alba, tan tost
+ve!" is familiar to every smatterer of Proven&ccedil;al,
+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!&mdash;" "Oi deus, oi deus; de l'alba, tan tost ve!"
+The real <i>alba</i> is the same as the German <i>Wachtlieder,</i>
+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 1' alba)...
+Bel Companho, since I left you I have not slept nor
+raised myself from my knees; for I have prayed to God
+the Son of Saint Mary, that he should send me:
+back my faithful comrade, and in a moment it will be
+dawn  In this <i>alba</i> 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
+<i>Wachtlieder</i> 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 passed
+between us shall never be known by any! never by
+any, save him and me&mdash;yes, and by the little nightingale
+that sang <i>Tandaradei</i>! The little bird will surely
+be discreet."</p>
+
+<p>The songs of light love for another's wife of troubadour,
+trouv&egrave;re, 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 Proven&ccedil;al narrative poem called
+"Flamenca." Like the "Tristram" of Gottfried von
+Strassburg, like all these light mediaeval love <i>lyrics,</i>
+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&mdash;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 grass 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 grass 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.</p>
+
+<p>Such spots there are&mdash;and many&mdash;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 Ab&eacute;lard, 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 mass
+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&mdash;les&mdash;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&mdash;impalpable to
+us gross moderns&mdash;called Honour, but where, as it
+seems, Love only reigns. Love, not the mystic and
+melancholy god of the "Vita Nuova," but a foppish
+young deity, sentimental at once and sensual, of
+fashionable feudal life: the god 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&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Set thy might and alle thy witte</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Wymmen and ladies for to plese,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">And to do thyng that may hem ese;</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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 godhead, and the devotion to
+him a pretty and delicate piece of aestheticism. And
+such it is here in "Flamenca," where there certainly
+exists neither God nor Christ, both complete absentees,
+whose priest becomes a courteous lover's valet, whose
+church the place for amorous rendezvous, whose
+sacrifice of mass and prayer becomes a means of
+amorous correspondence: Cupid, in the shape of his
+slave Guillems de Nevers&mdash;become <i>patarin</i>(zealot) for
+love&mdash;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. God 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 <i>tensos</i>, 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 coarse 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
+sluts, curtseying at the loan (during the interview of
+nobler 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 passing over the outlet of the polluted hot water.</p>
+
+<p>"But where is the use of telling us all this?" the
+reader will ask; "every one knows that illicit passion
+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 <i>albas</i>
+and <i>Wachtlieder</i> and "Flamenca," is the substratum,
+nay, is the very flesh and blood, of the spiritual passion
+to which, in later days, we owe the book of Beatrice.</p>
+
+<p>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 ennoblement a certain
+amount of passion, so also does there exist no passion
+(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 <i>langue d'oc</i>, we should call a <i>tenso</i> of Guillaume
+li Viniers among M&auml;tzner's "Altfranz&ouml;sische 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 <i>love service</i> 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 Brant&ocirc;me 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 <i>cecisbeos</i> of
+the noble 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 sex, 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 institution under the name of <i>service</i>; and, like all
+other social institutions, developes a morality of its
+own&mdash;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
+<i>alba</i> "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 <i>gilos</i>, in whose
+despite ("Bels dous amios, baizem nos eu e vos&mdash;Aval
+els pratzon chantols auzellos&mdash;<i>Tot O fassam en despeit
+del gilos</i>") 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 B&eacute;thune,
+"she will have to be unfaithful with some base
+wretch."</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Et les dames ki castement vivront</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Se loiaut&eacute; font a ceus qui iront;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Et seles font par mal conseil folaje,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">A lasques gens et mauvais le feront,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Car tout li bon iront en cest voiage.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>"I have taken the cross on account of my sins," sings
+Albrecht von Johansdorf, one of the most earnest of
+the minnesingers; "now let God 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>i.e</i>., take to bad courses), then may God 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 s&icirc;n wille an mir
+erg&auml;n"). But, on the other hand, the favoured knight
+is bound to protect his lady's good fame.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Se jai mamie en tel point mis,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Que tout motroit (m'octroit) sans esformer,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Tant doi je miex sonnor gaiter&mdash;</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>thus one of the interlocutors in a French <i>jeu-parti</i>,
+published by M&auml;tzner; 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
+constitutes the virtuous love of modern poets is derived
+from the illegitimate loves of the Middle Ages.</p>
+
+<p>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 illustrious in his song than are those of other
+women in the songs of their lovers&mdash;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 passions 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
+passion 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
+vassal 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 cluster 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
+passion 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.</p>
+
+<p>And thus, out of the baseness of habitual adultery,
+arises incense-like, in the early mediaeval poetry, a new
+kind of love&mdash;subtler, more imaginative, more passionate,
+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 Tannh&auml;user, 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
+snatched 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.</p>
+
+<p>But evil is evil, and evil is its fruit. Out of circumstances
+hitherto unknown, circumstances come about
+for the first time owing to the necessities of illegitimate
+passion, have arisen certain new and nobler
+characters of sexual love, certain new and beautiful
+conceptions of manly and womanly nature. The
+circumstances to which these are owed are pure in
+themselves, they are circumstances which in more
+modern times have characterized the perfectly legitimate
+passion of lovers held asunder by no social law,
+but by mere accidental barriers&mdash;from Romeo and
+Juliet to the Master of Ravenswood and Lucy Ashton;
+and pure so far have been the spiritual results. But
+these circumstances were due, In the early Middle
+Ages, to the fact of adultery; and to the new ideal
+of love has clung, even in its purity, in its superior
+nobility, an element of corruption as unknown to gross
+and corrupt Antiquity as was the delicacy and
+nobility of mediaeval love. The most poetical and
+pathetic of all mediaeval love stories, the very incarnation
+of all that is most lyric at once and most
+tragic in the new kind of passion, is the story, told
+and retold by a score of poets and prose writers, of
+the loves of Yseult of Ireland and of Sir Tristram
+who, as the knight was bringing the princess to his
+uncle and her affianced, King Mark of Cornwall
+drank together by a fatal mistake a philter which
+made all such as partook of it in common inseparable
+lovers even unto death. Every one knows the result r:
+how Yseult came to her husband already the paramour
+of Tristram; how Brangwaine, her damsel, feeling that this
+unhallowed passion was due to her having left-within
+reach the potion intended for the King and
+Queen of Cornwall, devoted herself, at the price of
+her maidenhood, to connive in the amours of the lovers
+whom she had made; how King Mark was
+deceived, and doubted, and was deceived again; how
+Tristram fled to Brittany, but how, despite his seeming
+marriage with another and equally lovely Yseult,
+he remained faithful to the Queen of Cornwall. One
+version tells that Mark slew his nephew while he
+sat harping to Queen Yseult; another that Tristram
+died of grief because his scorned though wedded wife
+told him that the white-sailed ship, bearing his mistress
+to meet him, bore the black sail which meant that she
+was not on board; but all versions, I think, agree in
+ending with the fact, that the briar-rose growing on
+the tomb of the one, slowly trailed its flowers and
+thorns along till it had reached also the grave of the
+other, and knit together, as love had knit together with
+its sweet blossoms and sharp spines, the two fated
+lovers. The Middle Ages were enthralled by this
+tale; but they were also, occasionally, a little shocked
+by it. Poets and prose writers tampered every now and
+then with incidents and characters, seeking to make it
+appear that, owing to the substitution of the waiting-maid,
+and the neglect of the wedded princess of
+Brittany, Yseult had never belonged to any man save
+Tristram, nor Tristram to any woman save Yseult;
+or that King Mark had sent his nephew to woo the
+Irish queen's daughter merely in hopes of his perishing
+in the attempt, and that his whole subsequent
+conduct was due to a mere unnatural hatred of a
+better knight than himself; touching up here and
+there with a view to justifying and excusing to some
+degree the long series of deceits which constituted the
+whole story. Thus the more timid and less gifted.
+But when, in the very first years (1210) of the thirteenth
+century, the greatest mediaeval poet that preceded
+Dante, the greatest German poet that preceded Goethe,
+Meister Gottfried von Strassburg, took in hand the
+old threadbare story of "Tristan und Isolde," he
+despised all alterations of this sort, and accepted the
+original tale in its complete crudeness.</p>
+
+<p>For, consciously or unconsciously, Gottfried had
+conceived this story as a thing wholly unknown in
+his time, and no longer subject to any of those necessities
+of constant re-arrangement which tormented
+mediaeval poets: he had conceived it not as a tale, but
+as a novel. Gottfried himself was probably but little
+aware of what he was doing; the poem that he was
+writing probably fell for him into the very same category
+as the poems of other men; but to us, with our
+experience of so many different forms of narrative, it
+must be evident that "Tristan und Isolde" is a new
+departure, inasmuch as it is not the story of deeds and
+the people who did them, like the true epic from
+Homer to the Nibelungen; nor the story of people
+and the adventures which happened to them, like all
+romance poetry from "Palemon and Arcite," to the
+"Orlando Furioso;" but, on the contrary, the story of
+the psychological relations, the gradual metamorphosis
+of soul by soul, between two persons. The
+long introductory story of Tristram's youth must not
+mislead us, nor all the minute narrations of the killing
+of dragons and the drinking of love philters: Gottfried,
+we must remember, was certainly no deliberate
+innovator, and these thing's are the mere inevitable
+externalities of mediaeval poetry, preserved with dull
+slavish care by the re-writer of a well-known tale, but
+enclosing in reality something essentially and startlingly
+modern: the history of a passion and of the
+spiritual changes which it brings about in those who
+are its victims.</p>
+
+<p>To meet again this purely psychological interest
+we must skip the whole rest of the Middle Ages, nay,
+skip even the great period of dramatic literature, not
+stopping till we come to the end of the seventeenth
+and beginning of the eighteenth century, to the
+"Princesse de Cl&egrave;ves," to "Clarissa Harlowe," nay,
+really, to "The Nouvelle Heloise." For even in
+Shakespeare there is always interest and importance
+in the action and reaction of subsidiary characters, in
+the event, in the accidental; there is intrigue, chance,
+misunderstanding, fate&mdash;active agencies of which
+Othello and Hamlet, King Lear and Romeo, are
+helpless victims; there is, even in this psychological
+English drama of the Elizabethans, fate in the shape
+of Iago, in the shape of the Ghost, in the shape of the
+brothers of Webster's duchess; fate in the shape of a
+ring, a letter, a drug, but fate always. And in this
+"Tristan und Isolde" of Gottfried von Strassburg is
+there not fate also in the love potion intended for
+King Mark, and given by the mistake of Brangwaine
+to Mark's bride and his nephew? To this objection,
+which will naturally occur to any reader who is not
+acquainted with the poem of Gottfried, I simply
+answer, there is not. The love potion there is, but
+it does not play the same part as do, for instance, the
+drugs of Friar Laurence and his intercepted letter.
+Suppose the friar's narcotic to have been less enduring
+in its action, or his message to have reached in
+safety, why then Juliet would have been awake instead
+of asleep, or Romeo would not have supposed her
+to be dead, and instead of the suicide of the two
+lovers, we should have had the successful carying off
+of Juliet by Romeo. Not so with Gottfried. The
+philter is there, and a great deal is talked about it;
+but it is merely one of the old, threadbare trappings
+of the original story, which he has been too lazy to
+suppress; it is merely, for the reader, the allegorical
+signal for an outburst of passion which all our subsequent
+knowledge of Tristram and Yseult shows us
+to be absolutely inevitable. In Gottfried's poem, the
+drinking of the potion signifies merely that all the
+rambling, mediaeval prelude, not to be distinguished
+from the stories of "Morte d'Arthur," and of half the
+romances of the Middle Ages, has come to a close and
+may be forgotten; and that the real work of the
+great poet, the real, matchless tragedy of the four
+actors&mdash;Tristram, Yseult, Mark, and Brangwaine&mdash;has
+begun.</p>
+
+<p>Yet if we seek again to account to ourselves for this
+astonishing impression of modernness which we receive
+from Gottfried's poem, we recognize that it is due to
+something far more important than the mere precocious
+psychological interest; nay, rather, that this
+psychological interest is itself dependent upon the
+fact which makes "Tristan und Isolde," so modern to
+our feelings. This fact is simply that the poem of
+Gottfried is the earliest, and yet perhaps almost the
+completest, example of a literary anomaly which Antiquity,
+for all its abominations, did not know: the
+glorification of fidelity in adultery, the glorification of
+excellence within the compass of guilt. Older times
+&mdash;more distant from our own in spirit, though not
+necessarily in years&mdash;have presented us with many
+themes of guilt: the guilt which exists according to
+our own moral standard, but not according to that of
+the narrator, as the magnificently tragic Icelandic
+incest story of Sigmund and Signy; the guilt which
+has come about no one well knows how, an unfortunate
+circumstance leaving the sinner virtually stainless,
+in his or her own eyes and the eyes of others, like the
+Homeric Helen; the heroic guilt, where the very
+heroism seems due to the self-sacrifice of the sinner's
+innocence, of Judith; the struggling, remorseful guilt,
+hopelessly overcome by fate and nature, of Phaedra;
+the dull and dogged guilt, making the sinner scarce
+more than a mere physical stumbling-block for others,
+of the murderer Hagen in the Nibelungenlied; and,
+finally, the perverse guilt, delighting in the consciousness
+of itself, of demons like Richard and Iago, of
+libidinous furies like the heroines of Tourneur and
+Marston. The guilt theme of "Tristan und Isolde"
+falls into none of these special categories. This theme,
+unguessed even by Shakespeare, is that of the virtuous
+behaviour towards one another of two individuals
+united in sinning against every one else. Gottfried
+von Strassburg narrates with the greatest detail how
+Tristram leads to the unsuspecting king the unblushing,
+unremorseful woman polluted by his own
+embraces; how Yseult substitutes on the wedding night
+her spotless damsel Brangwaine for her own sullied
+self; then, terrified lest the poor victim of her dishonour
+should ever reveal it, attempts to have her barbarously
+murdered, and, finally, seeing that nothing
+can shake the heroic creature's faith, admits her once
+more to be the remorseful go-between in her amours.
+He narrates how Tristram dresses as a pilgrim and
+carries the queen from a ship to the shore, in order
+that Yseult may call on Christ to bear witness by a
+miracle that she is innocent of adultery, never having
+been touched save by that pilgrim and her own husband;
+and how, when the followers of King Mark
+have surrounded the grotto in the wood, Tristram
+places the drawn sword between himself and the
+sleeping queen, as a symbol of their chastity which
+the king is too honest to suspect. He draws, with
+a psychological power truly extraordinary in the
+beginning of the thirteenth century, the two other
+figures in this love drama: King Mark, cheated, dishonoured,
+oscillating between horrible doubt, ignominious
+suspicion and more ignominious credulity,
+his love for his wife, his trust in his nephew, his incapacity
+for conceiving ill-faith and fraud, the very
+gentleness and generosity of his nature, made the
+pander of guilt in which he cannot believe; and, on
+the other side, Brangwaine, the melancholy, mute
+victim of her fidelity to Yseult, the weak, heroic soul,
+rewarded only with cruel ingratitude, and condemned
+to screen and help the sin which she loathes and for
+which she assumes the awful responsibility. All this
+does Gottfried do, yet without ever seeming to perceive
+the baseness and wickedness of this tissue of
+lies, equivocations, and perjuries in which his lovers hide
+their passion; without ever seeming to guess at the
+pathos and nobility of the man and the woman who
+are the mere trumpery obstacles or trumpery aids to
+their amours. He heaps upon Tristram and Yseult
+the most extravagant praises: he is the flower of all
+knighthood, and she, the kindest, gentlest, purest, and
+noblest of women; he insists upon the wickedness of
+the world which is for ever waging war upon their
+passion, and holds up to execration all those who seek
+to spy out their secret. Gottfried is most genuinely
+overcome by the ideal beauty of this inextinguishable
+devotion, by the sublimity of this love which holds
+the whole world as dross; the crimes of the lovers
+are for him the mere culminating point of their moral
+grandeur, which has ceased to know any guilt save
+absence of love, any virtue save loving. And so
+serene is the old minnesinger's persuasion, that it
+obscures the judgment and troubles the heart even
+of his reader; and we are tempted to ask ourselves,
+on laying down the book, whether indeed this could
+have been sinful, this love of Tristram and Yseult
+which triumphed over everything in the world, and
+could be quenched only by death. That circle of hell
+where all those who had sinfully loved were whirled
+incessantly in the perse, dark, stormy air, appeared
+in the eyes even of Dante as a place less of punishment
+than of glory; and, especially since the Middle
+Ages, all mankind looks upon that particular hell-pit
+with admiration rather than with loathing. And
+herein consists, more even than in any deceptions
+practised upon King Mark or any ingratitude manifested
+towards Brangwaine, the sinfulness of Tristram
+and Yseult: sinfulness which is not finite like the individual
+lives which it offends, but infinite and immortal
+as the heart and the judgment which it perverts.
+For such a tale, and so told, as the tale of Gottfried
+von Strassburg, makes us sympathize with this fidelity
+and devotion of a man and woman who care for
+nothing in the world save for each other, who are
+dragged and glued together by the desire and habit
+of mutual pleasure; it makes us admire their readiness
+to die rather than be parted, when their whole
+life is concentrated in their reciprocal sin, when their
+miserable natures enjoy, care for, know, only this
+miserable love. It makes us wink with leniency at the
+dishonour, the baseness, the cruelty, to which all this
+easy virtue is due. And such sympathy, such admiration,
+such leniency, for howsoever short a time they
+may remain in our soul, leave it, if they ever leave it
+completely and utterly less strong, less clean than it
+was before. We have all of us a lazy tendency to
+approve of the virtue which costs no trouble; to
+contemplate in ourselves or others, with a spurious
+moral satisfaction, the development of this or that
+virtuous quality in souls which are deteriorating in
+undoubted criminal self-indulgence. We have all of
+us, at the bottom of our hearts, a fellow feeling for all
+human affection; and the sinfulness of sinners like
+Tristram and Yseult lies largely in the fact that they
+pervert this legitimate and holy sympathy into a
+dangerous leniency for any strong and consistent love,
+into a morbid admiration for any irresistible mutual
+passion, making us forget that love has in itself no
+moral value, and that while self-indulgence may often
+be innocent, only self-abnegation can ever be holy.</p>
+
+<p>The great mediaeval German poem of Tristram and
+Yseult remained for centuries a unique phenomenon;
+only John Ford perhaps, that grander and darker
+twin spirit of Gottfried von Strassburg, reviving, even
+among the morbidly psychological and crime-fascinated
+followers of Shakespeare, that new theme of evil&mdash;the
+heroism of unlawful love. But Gottfried had merely
+manipulated with precocious analytical power a mode of
+feeling and thinking which was universal in the
+feudal Middle Ages; the great epic of adultery was
+forgotten, but the sympathetic and admiring interest
+in illegitimate passion remained; and was transmitted,
+wherever the Renaissance or the Reformation did not
+break through such transmission of mediaeval habits,
+as an almost inborn instinct from father to son, from
+mother to daughter. And we may doubt whether the
+important class of men and women who write and
+read the novels of illicit love, could ever have existed,
+had not the psychological artists of modern times,
+from Rousseau to George Sand, and from Stendhal to
+Octave Feuillet, found ready prepared for them in the
+countries not re-tempered by Protestantism, an assoiation
+of romance, heroism, and ideality with mere
+adulterous passion, which was unknown to the corruption
+of Antiquity and to the lawlessness of the Dark
+Ages, and which remained as a fatal alloy to that
+legacy of mere spiritual love which was left to the
+world by the love poets of early feudalism.</p>
+
+<h3>II.</h3>
+
+<p>The love of the troubadours and minnesingers, of
+the Arthurian tales, which show that love in narrative
+form, was, as we have seen, polluted by the selfishness,
+the deceitfulness, the many unclean necessities of
+adulterous passion. Elevated and exquisite though
+it was, it could not really purify the relations of man
+and woman, since it was impure. Nay, we see that
+through its influence the grave and simple married
+love of the earlier tales of chivalry, the love of
+Siegfried for Chriemhilt, of Roland for his bride Belle
+Aude, of Renaud for his wife Clarisse, is gradually
+replaced in later fiction by the irregular love-makings
+of Huon of Bordeaux, Ogier the Dane, and Artus of
+Brittany; until we come at last to the extraordinary
+series of the Amadis romances, where every hero
+without exception is the bastard of virtuous parents,
+who subsequently marry and discover their foundling:
+a state of things which, even in the corrupt Renaissance,
+Boiardo and Ariosto found it necessary to
+reform in their romantic poems. With idealizing refinement,
+the chivalric love of the French, Proven&ccedil;al,
+and German poets brings also a kind of demoralization
+which, from one point of view, makes the spotless
+songs of Bernard de Ventadour and Armaud de
+Mareulh, of Ulrich von Liechtenstein and Frauenlob,
+less pure than the licentious poems addressed by the
+Greeks and Romans to women who, at least, were
+not the wives of other men.</p>
+
+<p>Shall all this idealizing refinement, this almost
+religious fervour, this new poetic element of chivalric
+love remain useless; or serve only to subtly pollute
+while pretending to purify the great singing passion?
+Not so. But to prevent such waste of what in itself is
+pure and precious, is the mission of another country,
+of another civilization; of a wholly different cycle of
+poets who, receiving the new element of mediaeval
+love after it has passed through and been sifted by a
+number of hands, shall cleanse and recreate it in the
+fire of intellectual and almost abstract passion, producing
+that wonderful essence of love which, as the
+juices squeezed by alchemists out of jewels purified
+the body from all its ills, shall purify away all the
+diseases of the human soul.</p>
+
+<p>While the troubadours and minnesingers had
+been singing at the courts of Angevine kings and
+Hohenstauffen emperors, of counts of Toulouse and
+dukes of Austria; a new civilization, a new political
+and social system, had gradually been developing in
+the free burghs of Italy; a new life entirely the
+reverse of the life of feudal countries. The Italian
+cities were communities of manufacturers and merchants,
+into which only gradually, and at the sacrifice
+of every aristocratic privilege and habit, a certain
+number of originally foreign feudatories were gradually
+absorbed. Each community consisted of a number of
+mercantile families, equal before the law, and illustrious
+or obscure according to their talents or riches, whose
+members, instead of being scattered over a wide area
+like the members of the feudal nobility, were most
+often gathered together under one roof&mdash;sons, brothers,
+nephews, daughters, sisters and daughters-in-law,
+forming a hierarchy attending to the business of
+factory or counting-house under the orders of the
+father of the family, and to the economy of the house-under
+the superintendence of the mother; a manner
+of living at once business-like and patriarchal, expounded
+pounded by the interlocutors in Alberti's "Governo
+della Famiglia," and which lasted until the dissolution
+of the commonwealths and almost to our own
+times. Such habits imply a social organization, an
+intercourse between men and women, and a code
+of domestic morality the exact opposite to those of
+feudal countries. Here, in the Italian cities, there are
+no young men bound to loiter, far from their homes,
+round the wife of a military superior, to whom her
+rank and her isolation from all neighbours give
+idleness and solitude. The young men are all of them
+in business, usually with their own kinsfolk; not in
+their employer's house, but in his office; they have no
+opportunity of seeing a woman from dawn till sunset.
+The women, on their side, are mainly employed at
+home: the whole domestic arrangement depends upon
+them, and keeps their hands constantly full; working,
+and working in the company of their female relatives
+and friends. Men and women are free comparatively
+little, and then they are free all together in the same
+places; hence no opportunities for <i>t&ecirc;te-&agrave;-t&ecirc;te</i>. Early
+Italian poetry is fond of showing us the young poet
+reading his verses or explaining his passion to those
+gentle, compassionate women learned in love, of whom
+we meet a troop, beautiful, vague, half-arch, half-melancholy
+faces, consoling Dante in the "Vita
+Nuova," and reminding Guido Cavalcanti of his lady
+far off at Toulouse. But such women almost invariably
+form a group; they cannot be approached singly. Such
+a state of society inevitably produces a high and strict
+morality. In these early Italian cities a case of in'
+fidelity is punished ruthlessly; the lover banished or
+killed; the wife for ever lost to the world, perhaps
+condemned to solitude and a lingering death in the
+fever tracts, like Pia dei Tolomei. A complacent
+deceived husband is even more ridiculous (the deceived
+husband is notoriously the chief laughing stock of
+all mediaeval free towns) than is a jealous husband
+among the authorized and recognized <i>cicisbeos</i> of a
+feudal court. Indeed the respect for marriage vows
+inevitable in this busy democratic mediaeval life is
+so strong, that long after the commonwealths have
+turned into despotisms, and every social tie has been
+dissolved in the Renaissance, the wives and daughters
+of men stained with every libidinous vice, nay, of the
+very despots themselves&mdash;Tiberiuses and Neros on a
+smaller scale&mdash;remain spotless in the midst of evil;
+and authorized adultery begins in Italy only under
+the Spanish rule in the late sixteenth century.</p>
+
+<p>Such were the manners and morals of the Italian
+commonwealths when, about the middle of the thirteenth
+century, the men of Tuscany, now free and
+prosperous, suddenly awoke to the consciousness that
+they had a soul which desired song, and a language
+which was spontaneously singing. It was the moment
+when painting was beginning to claim for the figures
+of real men and women the walls and vaulted spaces
+whence had hitherto glowered, with vacant faces and
+huge ghostlike eyes, mosaic figures, from their shimmering
+golden ground; the moment when the Pisan artists
+had sculptured solemnly draped madonnas and kings
+not quite unworthy of the carved sarcophagi which
+stood around them; the moment when, merging
+together old Byzantine traditions and Northern examples,
+the architects of Florence, Siena, and Orvieto
+conceived a style which made cathedrals into marvellous
+and huge reliquaries of marble, jasper, alabaster,
+and mosaics. The mediaeval flowering time had come
+late, very late, in Italy; but the atmosphere was only
+the warmer, the soil the richer, and Italy put forth a
+succession of exquisite and superb immortal flowers
+of art when the artistic sap of other countries had
+begun to be exhausted. But the Italians, the Tuscans,
+audacious in the other arts, were diffident of themselves
+with regard to poetry. Architecture, painting,
+sculpture, had been the undisputed field for plebeian
+craftsmen, belonging exclusively to the free burghs
+and disdained by the feudal castles; but poetry was
+essentially the aristocratic, the feudal art, cultivated
+by knights and cultivated for kings and barons. It
+was probably an unspoken sense of this fact which
+caused the early Tuscan poets to misgive their own
+powers and to turn wistfully and shyly towards the
+poets of Provence and of Sicily. There, beyond the
+seas, under the last lords of Toulouse and the brilliant
+mongrel Hohenstauffen princes, were courts, knights,
+and ladies; there was the tradition of this courtly art
+of poetry; and there only could the sons of Florentine
+or Sienese merchants, clodhoppers in gallantry and
+song, hope to learn the correct style of thing. Hence
+the history of the Italian lyric before Dante is the
+history of a series of transformations which connect a
+style of poetry absolutely feudal and feudally immoral,
+with the hitherto unheard-of platonic love subtleties
+of the "Vita Nuova." And it is curious, in looking
+over the collections of early Italian lyrists, to note the
+alteration in tone as Sicily and the feudal courts are
+left further and further behind. Ciullo d' Alcamo,
+flourishing about 1190, is the only Italian-writing
+poet absolutely contemporaneous with the earlier and
+better trouv&egrave;res, troubadours, and minnesingers; and
+he is also the only one who resembles them very
+closely. His famous <i>tenso</i>, beginning "Rosa fresca
+aulentissima" (a tolerably faithful translation heads
+the beautiful collection of the late Mr. D.G. Rossetti),
+is indeed more explicitly gross and immoral than the
+majority of Proven&ccedil;al and German love-songs: loose
+as are many of the <i>albas, serenas, wachtlieder</i>, and
+even many of the less special forms of German and
+Proven&ccedil;al poetry, I am acquainted with none of them
+which comes up to this singular dialogue, in which a
+man, refusing to marry a woman, little by little wins
+her over to his wishes and makes her brazenly invite
+him to her dishonour. Between Ciullo d' Alcamo
+and his successors there is some gap of time, and a
+corresponding want of gradation. Yet the Sicilian
+poets of the courts of Hohenstauffen and Anjou,
+recognizable by their name or the name of their town,
+Inghilfredi, Manfredi, Ranieri and Ruggierone da
+Palermo, Tommaso and Matteo da Messina, Guglielmotto
+d' Otranto, Rinaldo d'Aquino, Peir delle Vigne,
+either maintain altogether unchanged the tone of the
+troubadours, or only gradually, as in the remarkable
+case of the Notary of Lentino, approximate to the
+platonic poets of Tuscany. The songs of the archetype
+of Sicilian singers, the Emperor Frederick II.,
+are completely Proven&ccedil;al in feeling as in form, though
+infinitely inferior in execution. With him it is always
+the pleasure which he hopes from his lady, or the
+pleasure which he has had&mdash;"Quando ambidue stavamo
+in allegranza alla dolce fera;" "Pregovi donna
+mia&mdash;Per vostra cortesia&mdash;E pregovi che sia&mdash;Quello
+che lo core disia." Again: "Sospiro e sto in rancura&mdash;Ch' io
+son si disioso&mdash;E pauroso&mdash;Mi fate penare&mdash;Ma
+tanto m' assicura&mdash;Lo suo viso amoroso&mdash;E lo
+gioioso&mdash;Riso e lo sguardare&mdash;E lo parlare&mdash;Di questa
+criatura&mdash;Che per paura&mdash;Mi fate penare&mdash;E di morare&mdash;Tant'
+&egrave; fina e pura&mdash;Tanto &egrave; saggia e
+cortese&mdash;Non credo che pensasse&mdash;N&egrave; distornasse&mdash;Di
+ci&ograve; he m' impromise." It is, this earliest Italian
+poetry, like the more refined poetry of troubadours
+and minnesingers, eminently an importuning of highborn
+but loosely living women. From Sicily and
+Apulia poetry goes first, as might be expected (and
+as probably sculpture went) to the seaport Pisa,
+thence to the neighbouring Lucca, considerably before
+reaching Florence. And as it becomes more Italian
+and urban, it becomes also, under the strict vigilance
+of burgher husbands, considerably more platonic. In
+Bologna, the city of jurists, it acquires (the remark is
+not mine merely, but belongs also to Carducci) the
+very strong flavour of legal quibbling which distinguishes
+the otherwise charming Guido Guinicelli;
+and once in Florence, among the most subtle of all
+subtle Tuscans, it becomes at once what it remained
+even for Dante, saturated with metaphysics: the
+woman is no longer paramount, she is subordinated
+to Love himself; to that personified abstraction Amor,
+the serious and melancholy son of pagan philosophy
+and Christian mysticism. The Tuscans had imported
+from Provence and Sicily the new element of mediaeval
+love, of life devotion, soul absorption in loving;
+if they would sing, they must sing of this; any other
+kind of love, at a time when Italy still read and
+relished her would-be Proven&ccedil;als, Lanfranc Cicala and
+Sordel of Mantua, would have been unfashionable and
+unendurable. But in these Italian commonwealths,
+as we have seen, poets are forced, nilly-willy, to be
+platonic; an importuning poem found in her work-basket
+may send a Tuscan lady into a convent, or,
+like Pia, into the Maremma; an <i>alba</i> or a <i>serena</i>
+interrupted by a wool-weaver of Calimara or a silk
+spinner of Lucca, may mean that the imprudent poet
+be found weltering in blood under some archway the
+next morning. The chivalric sentimentality of feudalism
+must be restrained; and little by little, under
+the pressure of such very different social habits,
+it grows into a veritable platonic passion. Poets must
+sing, and in order that they sing, they must adore;
+so men actually begin to seek out, and adore and
+make themselves happy and wretched about women
+from whom they can hope only social distinctions;
+and this purely aesthetic passion goes on by the side
+nay, rather on the top, of their humdrum, conjugal
+life or loosest libertinage. Petrarch's bastards were
+born during the reign of Madonna Laura; and that
+they should have been, was no more a slight or
+infidelity to her than to the other Madonna, the one
+in heaven. Laura had a right to only ideal sentiments
+ideal relations; the poet was at liberty to carry more
+material preferences elsewhere.</p>
+
+<p>But could such love as this exist, could it be
+genuine? To my mind, indubitably. For there is,
+in all our perceptions and desires of physical and
+moral beauty, an element of passion which is akin to
+love; and there is, in all love that is not mere lust, a
+perception of, a craving for, beauty, real or imaginary
+which is identical with our merely aesthetic perceptions
+and cravings; hence the possibility, once the
+wish for such a passion present, of a kind of love
+which is mainly aesthetic, which views the beloved
+as gratifying merely to the wish for physical or spiritual
+loveliness, and concentrates upon one exquisite
+reality all dreams of ideal perfection. Moreover there
+comes, to all nobler natures, a love dawning: a
+brightening and delicate flushing of the soul before
+the actual appearance of the beloved one above the
+horizon, which is as beautiful and fascinating in its
+very clearness, pallor, and coldness, as the unearthly
+purity of the pale amber and green and ashy rose
+which streaks the heavens before sunrise. The love
+of the early Tuscan poets (for we must count Guinicelli,
+in virtue of his language, as a Tuscan) had
+been restrained, by social necessities first, then by
+habit and deliberate aesthetic choice, within the limits
+of this dawning state; and in this state, it had fed
+itself off mere spiritual food, and acquired the strange
+intensity of mere intellectual passions. We give
+excessive weight, in our days, to spontaneity in all
+things, apt to think that only the accidental, the unsought,
+can be vital; but it is true in many things, and
+truest in all matters of the imagination and the heart,
+that the desire to experience any sentiment will powerfully
+conduce to its production, and even give it a
+strength due to the long incubation of the wish. Thus
+the ideal love of the Tuscan poets was probably none
+the weaker, but rather the stronger, for the desire
+which they felt to sing such passion; nay, rather to hear
+it singing in themselves. The love of man and wife,
+of bride and bridegroom, was still of the domain of
+prose; adulterous love forbidden; and the tradition
+of, the fervent wish for, the romantic passion of the
+troubadours consumed them as a strong artistic
+craving. Platonic love was possible, doubly possible
+in souls tense with poetic wants; it became a reality
+through the strength of the wish for it.</p>
+
+<p>Nor was this all. In all imaginative passions, intellectual
+motives are so much fuel; and in this case the
+necessity of logically explaining the bodiless passion
+for a platonic lady, of understanding why they felt in
+a manner so hitherto unknown to gross mankind,
+tended greatly to increase the love of these Tuscans,
+and to bring it in its chastity to the pitch of fervour of
+more fleshly passions, by mingling with the aesthetic
+emotions already in their souls the mystical theorizings
+of transcendental metaphysics, and the half-human,
+half-supernatural ecstasy of mediaeval religion. For
+we must remember that Italy was a country not
+merely of manufacturers and bankers, but of philosophers
+also and of saints.</p>
+
+<p>Among the Italians of the thirteenth century the
+revival of antique literature was already in full swing;
+while in France, Germany, and Provence there had
+been, in lyric poetry at least, no trace of classic lore.
+Whereas the trouv&egrave;res and troubadours had possessed
+but the light intellectual luggage of a military aristocracy;
+and the minnesingers had, for the most part,
+been absolutely ignorant of reading and writing
+(Wolfram says so of himself, and Ulrich von Liechtenstein
+relates how he carried about his lady's letter
+for days unread until the return of his secretary);
+the poets of Italy, from Brunetto Latini to Petrarch,
+were eminently scholars; men to whom, however
+much they might be politicians and ringleaders, like
+Cavalcanti, Donati, and Dante, whatever existed of
+antique learning was thoroughly well known. Such
+men were familiar with whatever yet survived of the
+transcendental theories of Plato and Plotinus; and
+they seized at once upon the mythic metaphysics of
+an antenatal condition, of typical ideas, of the divine
+essence of beauty, on all the mystic discussions on
+love and on the soul, as a philosophical explanation of
+their seemingly inexplicable passion for an unapproachable
+woman. The lady upon whom the poetic fervour,
+the mediaeval love, inherited from Provence and France,
+was now expended, and whom social reasons placed quite
+beyond the reach of anything save the poet's soul and
+words, was evidently beloved for the sake of that much
+of the divine essence contained in her nature; she was
+loved for purely spiritual reasons, loved as a visible
+and living embodiment of virtue and beauty, as a
+human piece of the godhead. So far, therefore, from
+such an attachment being absurd, as absurd it would
+have seemed to troubadours and minnesingers, who
+never served a lady save for what they called a reward;
+it became, in the eyes of these platonizing Italians,
+the triumph of the well-bred soul; and as such, soon
+after, a necessary complement to dignities, talents, and
+wealth, the very highest occupation of a liberal mind.
+Thus did their smattering of platonic and neo-platonic
+philosophy supply the Tuscan poets with a logical
+reality for this otherwise unreal passion.</p>
+
+<p>But there was something more. In this democratic
+and philosophizing Italy, there was not the gulf which
+separated the chivalric poets, men of the sword and
+not of books, from the great world of religious mysticism;
+for, though the minnesingers especially were
+extremely devout and sang many a strange love-song
+to the Virgin; they knew, they could know, nothing
+of the contemplative religion of Eckhardt and his
+disciples&mdash;humble and transcendental spirits, whose
+words were treasured by the sedentary, dreamy townsfolk
+of the Rhine, but would have conveyed no
+meaning even to the poet of the Grail epic, with its
+battles and feasts, its booted and spurred slapdash
+morality, Wolfram von Eschenbach. In the great
+manufacturing cities of Italy, such religious mysticism
+spread as it could never spread in feudal courts;
+it became familiar, both in the mere passionate sermons
+and songs of the wandering friars, and in the
+subtle dialectics of the divines; above all, it became
+familiar to the poets. Now the essence of this
+contemplative theology of the Middle Ages, which
+triumphantly held its own against the cut-and-dry
+argumentation of scholastic rationalism, was love.
+Love which assuredly meant different things to different
+minds; a passionate benevolence towards man and
+beast to godlike simpletons like Francis of Assisi; a
+mere creative and impassive activity of the divinity to
+deep-seeing (so deep as to see only their own strange
+passionate eyes and lips reflected in the dark well of
+knowledge) and almost pantheistic thinkers like
+Master Eckhardt; but love nevertheless, love. "Amor,
+amore, ardo d' amore," St. Francis had sung in a wild
+rhapsody, a sort of mystic dance, a kind of furious
+<i>malague&ntilde;a</i> of divine love; and that he who would
+wish to know God, let him love&mdash;"Qui vult habere
+notitiam Dei, amet," had been written by Hugo of
+St. Victor, one of the subtlest of all the mystics.
+"Amor oculus est," said Master Eckhardt; love, love&mdash;was
+not love then the highest of all human faculties,
+and must not the act of loving, of perceiving God's
+essence in some creature which had virtue, the soul's
+beauty, and beauty, the body's virtue, be the noblest
+business of a noble life? Thus argued the poets; and
+their argument, half-passionate, half-scholastic, mixing
+Phaedrus and Bonaventura, the Schools of Alexandria
+and the Courts of Love of Provence, resulted in adding
+all the fervid reality of philosophical and religious
+aspiration to their clear and cold phantom of disembodied
+love of woman.</p>
+
+<p>Little by little therefore, together with the carnal
+desires of Proven&ccedil;als and Sicilians, the Tuscan poets
+put behind them those little coquetries of style and
+manner, complications of metre and rhythm learned
+and fantastic as a woman's plaited and braided hair;
+those metaphors and similes, like bright flowers or
+shining golden ribbons dropped from the lady's bosom
+and head and eagerly snatched by the lover, which we
+still find, curiously transformed and scented with the
+rosemary and thyme of country lanes, in the peasant
+poetry of modern Tuscany. Little by little does the
+love poetry of the Italians reject such ornaments; and
+cloth itself in that pale garment, pale and stately in
+heavy folds like a nun's or friar's weeds, but pure and
+radiant and solemn as the garment of some painted
+angel, which we have all learned to know from the
+"Vita Nuova."</p>
+
+<p>To describe this poetry of the immediate precursors
+and contemporaries of Dante is to the last degree
+difficult: it can be described only by symbols, and
+symbols can but mislead us. Dante Rossetti himself,
+after translating with exquisite beauty the finest poems
+of this school, showed how he had read into them his
+own spirit, when he drew the beautiful design for the
+frontispiece of his collection. These two lovers&mdash;the
+youth kneeling in his cloth of silver robe, lifting his
+long throbbing neck towards the beloved; the lady
+stooping down towards him, raising him up and kissing
+him; the mingled cloud of waving hair, the four
+tight-clasped hands, the four tightly glued lips, the
+profile hidden by the profile, the passion and the
+pathos, the eager, wistful faces, nay, the very splendour
+of brocade robes and jewels, the very sweetness of
+blooming rose spaliers; all this is suitable to illustrate
+this group of sonnets or that of the "House of Life;"
+but it is false, false in efflorescence and luxuriance of
+passion, splendour and colour of accessory, to the
+poetry of these early Tuscans. Imaginative their
+poetry certainly is, and passionate; indeed the very
+concentration of imaginative passion; but imagination
+and passion unlike those of all other poets; perhaps
+because more rigorously reduced to their elements:
+imagination purely of the heart, passion purely of the
+intellect, neither of the senses: love in its most essential
+condition, but, just because an essence, purged of
+earthly alloys, rarefied, sublimated into a cultus or a
+philosophy.</p>
+
+<p>These poems might nearly all have been written by
+one man, were it possible for one man to vary from
+absolute platitude to something like genius, so homogeneous
+is their tone: everywhere do we meet the same
+simplicity of diction struggling with the same complication
+and subtlety of thought, the same abstract speculation
+strangely mingled with most individual and
+personal pathos. The mode of thinking and feeling,
+the conception of all the large characteristics of love,
+and of all its small incidents are, in this <i>cycle</i> of poets,
+constantly the same; and they are the same in the
+"Vita Nuova;" Dante having, it would seem, invented
+and felt nothing unknown to his immediate predecessors
+and contemporaries, but merely concentrated
+their thoughts and feelings by the greater intenseness
+of his genius. This platonic love of Dante's days is,
+as I have said, a passion sublimated into a philosophy
+and a cultus. The philosophy of love engages much
+of these poets' attention; all have treated of it, but
+Guido Cavalcanti, Dante's elder brother in poetry, is
+love's chief theologian. He explains, as Eckhardt or
+Bonaventura might explain the mysteries of God's
+being and will, the nature and operation of love.
+"Love, which enamours us of excellence, arises out
+of pure virtue of the soul, and equals us to God," he
+tells us; and subtly developes his theme. This being
+the case, nothing can be more mistaken than to suppose,
+as do those of little sense, that Love is blind,
+and goes blindly about ("Da sentir poco, e da credenza
+vana&mdash;Si move il dir di cotal grossa gente&mdash;Ch' amor
+fa cieco andar per lo suo regno"). Love is omniscient,
+since love is born of the knowledge and recognition
+of excellence. Such love as this is the only true
+source of happiness, since it alone raises man to the
+level of the divinity. Cavalcanti has in him not merely
+the subtlety but the scornfulness of a great divine.
+His wrath against all those who worship or defend
+a different god of Love knows no bounds. "I know
+not what to say of him who adores the goddess born
+of Saturn and sea-foam. His love is fire: it seems
+sweet, but its result is bitter and evil. He may indeed
+call himself happy; but in such delights he mingles
+himself with much baseness." Such is this god of
+Love, who, when he descended into Dante's heart,
+caused the spirit of life to tremble terribly in his
+secret chamber, and trembling to cry, "Lo, here is a
+god stronger than myself, who coming will rule over
+me. Ecce Deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur
+mihi!"</p>
+
+<p>The god, this chaste and formidable archangel
+Amor, is the true subject of these poets' adoration;
+the woman into whom he descends by a mystic
+miracle of beauty and of virtue becomes henceforward
+invested with somewhat of his awful radiance.
+She is a gentle, gracious lady; a lovable and loving
+woman, in describing whose grey-green eyes and
+colour as of snow tinted with pomegranate, the older
+Tuscans would fain linger, comparing her to the new-budded
+rose, to the morning star, to the golden summer
+air, to the purity of snowflakes falling silently in a
+serene sky; but the sense of the divinity residing
+within her becomes too strong. From her eyes dart
+spirits who strike awe into the heart; from her lips
+come words which make men sigh; on her passage
+the poet casts down his eyes; notions, all these, with
+which we are familiar from the "Vita Nuova;" but
+which belong to Cavalcanti, Lapo Gianni, nay, even
+to Guinicelli, quite as much as to Dante. The poet
+bids his verse go forth to her, but softly; and stand
+before her with bended head, as before the Mother of
+God. She is a miracle herself, a thing sent from
+heaven, a spirit, as Dante says in that most beautiful
+of all his sonnets, the summing up of all that the
+poets of his circle had said of their lady&mdash;"Tanto
+gentile e tanto onesta pare."</p>
+
+<p>"She passes along the street so beautiful and
+gracious," says Guinicelli, "that she humbles pride in
+all whom she greets, and makes him of our faith if he
+does not yet believe. And no base man can come
+into her presence. And I will tell you another virtue
+of her: no man can think ought of evil as long as he
+looks upon her." "The noble mind which I feel, on
+account of this youthful lady who has appeared, makes
+me despise baseness and vileness," says Lapo Gianni.
+The women who surround her are glorified in her
+glory, glorified in their womanhood and companionship
+with her. "The ladies around you," says Cavalcanti,
+"are dear to me for the sake of your love; and I pray
+them as they are courteous, that they should do you
+all honour." She is, indeed, scarcely a woman, and
+something more than a saint: an avatar, an incarnation
+of that Amor who is born of virtue and beauty,
+and raises men's minds to heaven; and when Cavalcanti
+speaks of his lady's portrait behind the blazing
+tapers of Orsanmichele, it seems but natural that she
+should be on an altar, in the Madonna's place. The
+idea of a mysterious incarnation of love in the lady,
+or of a mystic relationship between her and love,
+returns to these poets. Lapo Gianni tells us first that
+she is Amor's sister, then speaks of her as Amor's
+bride; nay, in this love theology of the thirteenth
+century, arises the same kind of confusion as in the
+mystic disputes of the nature of the Godhead. A
+Sienese poet, Ugo da Massa, goes so far as to say,
+"Amor and I are all one thing; and we have one will
+and one heart; and if I were not, Amor were not;
+mind you, do not think I am saying these things from
+subtlety ('e non pensate ch' io '1 dica per arte'); for
+certainly it is true that I am love, and he who should
+slay me would slay love."</p>
+
+<p>Together with the knowledge of public life and of
+scholastic theories, together with the love of occult
+and cabalistic science, and the craft of Proven&ccedil;al
+poetry, Dante received from his Florence of the
+thirteenth century the knowledge of this new, this
+exotic and esoteric intellectual love. And, as it is
+the mission of genius to gather into an undying whole,
+to model into a perfect form, the thoughts and feelings
+and perceptions of the less highly endowed men
+who surround it, so Dante moulded out of the love
+passion and love philosophy of his day the "Vita
+Nuova." Whether the story narrated in this book is
+fact; whether a real woman whom he called Beatrice
+ever existed; some of those praiseworthy persons, who
+prowl in the charnel-house of the past, and put its
+poor fleshless bones into the acids and sublimates of
+their laboratory, have gravely doubted. But such
+doubts cannot affect us. For if the story of the "Vita
+Nuova" be a romance, and if Beatrice be a mere
+romance heroine, the real meaning and value of the
+book does not change in our eyes; since, to concoct
+such a tale, Dante must have had a number of real
+experiences which are fully the tale's equivalent; and
+to conceive and create such a figure as Beatrice, and
+such a passion as she inspires her poet, he must have
+felt as a poignant reality the desire for such a lady,
+the capacity for such a love. A tale merely of the
+soul, and of the soul's movements and actions, this
+"Vita Nuova;" so why should it matter if that which
+could never exist save in the spirit, should have been
+but the spirit's creation? It is, in its very intensity, a
+vision of love; what if it be a vision merely conceived
+and never realized? Hence the futility of all those
+who wish to destroy our faith and pleasure by saying
+"all this never took place." Fools, can you tell what
+did or did not take place in a poet's mind? Be this
+as it may, the "Vita Nuova," thank heaven, exists;
+and, thank heaven, exists as a reality to our feelings.
+The longed-for ideal, the perfection whose love, said
+Cavalcanti, raises us up to God, has seemed to gather
+itself into a human shape; and a real being has been
+surrounded by the halo of perfection emanated from
+the poet's own soul. The vague visions of glory have
+suddenly taken body in this woman, seen rarely, at a
+distance; the woman whom, as a child, the poet,
+himself a child, had already looked at with the strange,
+ideal fascination which we sometimes experience in
+our childhood. People are apt to smile at this opening
+of the "Vita Nuova;" to put aside this narrative of
+childish love together with the pathetic little pedantries
+of learned poetry and Kabbala, of the long gloses
+to each poem, and the elaborate calculations of the
+recurrence and combination of the number nine (and
+that curious little bit of encyclopaedic display about
+the Syrian month <i>Tismin</i>) as so much pretty local
+colouring or obsolete silliness. But there is nothing
+at which to laugh in such childish fascinations; the
+wonderful, the perfect, is more open to us as children
+than it is afterwards: a word, a picture, a snatch of
+music will have for us an ineffable, mysterious meaning;
+and how much more so some human being, often some
+other, more brilliant child from whose immediate
+contact we are severed by some circumstance, perhaps
+by our own consciousness of inferiority, which makes
+that other appear strangely distant, above us, moving
+in a world of glory which we scarcely hope to approach;
+a child sometimes, or sometimes some
+grown person, beautiful, brilliant, who sings or talks
+or looks at us, the child, with ways which we do not
+understand, like some fairy or goddess. No indeed,
+there is nothing to laugh at in this, in this first
+blossoming of that love for higher and more beautiful
+things, which in most of us is trodden down, left to
+wither, by our maturer selves; nothing to make us
+laugh; nay, rather to make us sigh that later on we
+see too well, see others too much on their real level,
+scrutinize too much; too much, alas, for what at best
+is but an imperfect creature. And in this state of
+fascination does the child Dante see the child Beatrice,
+as a strange, glorious little vision from a childish
+sphere quite above him; treasuring up that vision, till
+with his growth it expands and grows more beautiful
+and noble, but none the less fascinating and full of
+awfulness. When, therefore, the grave young poet,
+full of the yearning for Paradise (but Paradise vaguer,
+sweeter, less metaphysic and theological than the
+Paradise of his manhood); as yet but a gracious,
+learned youth, his terrible moral muscle still undeveloped
+by struggle, the noble and delicate dreamer
+of Giotto's fresco, with the long, thin, almost womanish
+face, marked only by dreamy eyes and lips, wandering
+through this young Florence of the Middle Ages&mdash;when,
+I say, he meets after long years, the noble and
+gentle woman, serious and cheerful and candid; and
+is told that she is that same child who was the queen
+and goddess of his childish fancies; then the vague
+glory with which his soul is filled expands and enwraps
+the beloved figure, so familiar and yet so new.
+And the blood retreats from his veins, and he trembles;
+and a vague god within him, half allegory, half reality,
+cries out to him that a new life for him has begun.
+Beatrice has become the ideal; Beatrice, the real
+woman, has ceased to exist; the Beatrice of his imagination
+only remains, a piece of his own soul embodied
+in a gracious and beautiful reality, which he follows,
+seeks, but never tries to approach. Of the real woman
+he asks nothing; no word throughout the "Vita
+Nuova" of entreaty or complaint, no shadow of desire,
+not a syllable of those reproaches of cruelty which
+Petrarch is for ever showering upon Laura. He
+desires nothing of Beatrice, and Beatrice cannot act
+wrongly; she is perfection, and perfection makes him
+who contemplates humble at once and proud, glorifying
+his spirit. Once, indeed, he would wish that she might
+listen to him; he has reason to think that he has fallen
+in her esteem, has seemed base and uncourteous in
+her eyes, and he would explain. But he does not wish
+to address her; it never occurs to him that she can
+ever feel in any way towards him; it is enough that
+he feels towards her. Let her go by and smile and
+graciously salute her friends: the sight of her grave
+and pure regalness, nay, rather divinity, of womanhood,
+suffices for his joy; nay, later the consciousness comes
+upon him that it is sufficient to know of her existence
+and of his love even without seeing her. And, as
+must be the case in such ideal passion, where the
+action is wholly in the mind of the lover, he is at first
+ashamed, afraid; he feels a terror lest his love, if
+known to her, should excite her scorn; a horror lest it
+be misunderstood and befouled by the jests of those
+around him, even of those same gentle women to
+whom he afterwards addresses his praise of Beatrice.
+He is afraid of exposing to the air of reality this ideal
+flower of passion. But the moment comes when he
+can hide it no longer; and, behold, the passion flower
+of his soul opens out more gloriously in the sunlight
+of the world. He is proud of his passion, of his
+worship; he feels the dignity and glory of being the
+priest of such a love. The women all round, the
+beautiful, courteous women, of whom, only just now,
+he was so dreadfully afraid, become his friends and
+confidants; they are quite astonished (half in love,
+perhaps, with the young poet) at this strange way of
+loving; they sympathize, admire, are in love with his
+love for Beatrice. And to them he speaks of her
+rather than to men, for the womanhood which they
+share with his lady consecrates them in his eyes;
+and they, without jealousy towards this ideal woman,
+though perhaps not without longing for this ideal love,
+listen as they might listen to some new and unaccountably
+sweet music, touched and honoured, and
+feeling towards Dante as towards some beautiful, half-mad
+thing. He talks of her, sings of her, and is
+happy; the strangest thing in this intensely real
+narrative of real love is this complete satisfaction of
+the passion in its own existence, this complete absence
+of all desire or hope. But this happiness is interrupted
+by the sudden, terrible thought that one day all this
+must cease; the horrible, logical necessity coming
+straight home to him, that one day she must die&mdash;
+"Di necessit&agrave; conviene che la gentilissima Beatrice
+alcuna volta si muoia." There is nothing truer, more
+intensely pathetic, in all literature, than this frightful
+pang of evil, not real, but first imagined; this frightful
+nightmare vision of the end coming when reality is
+still happy. Have we not all of us at one time felt
+the horrible shudder of that sudden perception that
+happiness must end; that the beloved, the living, must
+die; that this thing the present, which we clasp tight
+with our arms, which throbs against our breast, will in
+but few moments be gone, vanished, leaving us to
+grasp mere phantom recollections? Compared with
+this the blow of the actual death of Beatrice is gentle.
+And then, the truthfulness of his narration how, with
+yearning, empty heart, hungering after those poor lost
+realities of happiness, after that occasional glimpse of
+his lady, that rare catching of her voice, that blessed
+consciousness of her existence, he little by little lets
+himself be consoled, cradled to sleep like a child which
+has sobbed itself out, in the sympathy, the vague love,
+of another&mdash;the Donna della Finestra&mdash;with whom he
+speaks of Beatrice; and the sudden, terrified, starting
+up and shaking off of any such base consolation,
+the wrath at any such mental infidelity to the dead
+one, the indignant impatience with his own weakness,
+with his baseness in not understanding that
+it is enough that Beatrice has lived and that he has
+loved her, in not feeling that the glory and joy of the
+ineffaceable past is sufficient for all present and future.
+A revolution in himself which gradually merges in
+that grave final resolve, that sudden seeing how
+Beatrice can be glorified by him, that solemn, quiet,
+brief determination not to say any more of her as yet;
+not till he can show her transfigured in Paradise.
+"After this sonnet there appeared unto me a marvellous
+vision, in which I beheld things that made me
+propose unto myself to speak no more of this blessed
+one, until the time when I might more worthily treat
+of her. And that this may come to pass, I strive with
+all my endeavour, even as she truly knows it. Thus,
+if it should please Him, through whom all things do
+live, that my life continue for several more years, I
+hope to say of her such things as have never been said
+of any lady. And then may it please Him, who is the
+lord of all courtesy, that my soul shall go forth to see
+the glory of its lady, that is to say, of that blessed
+Beatrice, who gloriously looks up into the face of Him,
+<i>qui est per omnia saecula benedictus</i>"</p>
+
+<p>Thus ends the "Vita Nuova;" a book, to find any
+equivalent for whose reality and completeness of
+passion, though it is passion for a woman whom the
+poet scarcely knows and of whom he desires nothing,
+we must go back to the merest fleshly love of Antiquity,
+of Sappho or Catullus; for modern times are too hesitating
+and weak. So at least it seems; but in fact,
+if we only think over the matter, we shall find that in
+no earthly love can we find this reality and completeness:
+it is possible only in love like Dante's. For
+there can be no unreality in it: it is a reality of the
+imagination, and leaves, with all its mysticism and
+idealism, no room for falsehood. Any other kind of
+love may be set aside, silenced, by the activity of the
+mind; this love of Dante's constitutes that very activity.
+And, after reading that last page which I have above
+transcribed, as those closing Latin words echo through
+our mind like the benediction from an altar, we feel
+as if we were rising from our knees in some secret
+chapel, bright with tapers and dim with incense; among
+a crowd kneeling like ourselves; yet solitary, conscious
+of only the glory we have seen and tasted, of that love
+<i>qui est per omnia scecula benedictus.</i></p>
+
+
+<h3>III.</h3>
+
+<p>But is it right that we should feel thus? Is it right that
+love, containing within itself the potentialities of so
+many things so sadly needed in this cold real world,
+as patience, tenderness, devotion, and loving-kindness
+&mdash;is it right that love should thus be carried away out
+of ordinary life and enclosed, a sacred thing for contemplation,
+in the shrine or chapel of an imaginary
+Beatrice? And, on the other hand, is it right that
+into the holy places of our soul, the places where we
+should come face to face with the unattainable ideal
+of our own conduct that we may strive after something
+nobler than mere present pleasure and profit&mdash;is it
+right that into such holy places, destined but for an
+abstract perfection, there should be placed a mere
+half-unknown, vaguely seen woman? In short, is not
+this "Vita Nuova" a mere false ideal, one of those works
+of art which, because they are beautiful, get worshipped
+as holy?</p>
+
+<p>This question is a grave one, and worthy to make
+us pause. The world is full of instances of the fatal
+waste of feelings misapplied: of human affections,
+human sympathy and compassion, so terribly necessary
+to man, wasted in various religious systems,
+upon Christ and God: of religious aspirations, contemplation,
+worship, and absorption, necessary to the
+improvement of the soul, wasted in various artistic or
+poetic crazes upon mere pleasant works, or pleasant
+fancies, of man; wastefulness of emotions, wastefulness
+of time, which constitute two-thirds of mankind's
+history and explain the vast amount of evil in past
+and present. The present question therefore becomes,
+is not this "Vita Nuova" merely another instance of
+this lamentable carrying off of precious feelings in
+channels where they result no longer in fertilization,
+but in corruption? The Middle Ages, especially, in
+its religion, its philosophy, nay, in that very love of
+which I am writing, are one succession of such acts
+of wastefulness. This question has come to me many
+a time, and has left me in much doubt and trouble.
+But on reflection I am prepared to answer that such
+doubts as these may safely be cast behind us, and that
+we may trust that instinct which, whenever we lay
+down the "Vita Nuova," tells us that to have felt and
+loved this book is one of those spiritual gains in our
+life which, come what may, can never be lost entirely.</p>
+
+<p>The "Vita Nuova" represents the most exceptional
+of exceptional moral and intellectual conditions.
+Dante's love for Beatrice is, in great measure, to be
+regarded as an extraordinary and exquisite work of
+art, produced not by the volition of man, but by the
+accidental combination of circumstances. It is no
+more suited to ordinary life than would a golden and
+ivory goddess of Phidias be suited to be the wife of a
+mortal man. But it may not therefore be useless;
+nay, it may be of the highest utility. It may serve
+that high utilitarian mission of all art, to correct
+the real by the ideal, to mould the thing as it is in
+the semblance of the thing as it should be. Herein,
+let it be remembered, consists the value, the necessity
+of the abstract and the ideal. In the long history
+of evolution we have now reached the stage where
+selection is no longer in the mere hands of unconscious
+nature, but of conscious or half-conscious
+man; who makes himself, or is made by mankind,
+according to not merely physical necessities, but to
+the intellectual necessity of realizing the ideal, of
+pursuing the object, of imitating the model, before
+him. No man will ever find the living counterpart of
+that chryselephantine goddess of the Greeks; ivory and
+gold, nay, marble, fashioned by an artist, are one thing;
+flesh is another, and flesh fashioned by mere blind
+accident. But the man who should have beheld that
+Phidian goddess, who should have felt her full perfection,
+would not have been as easily satisfied as any
+other with a mere commonplace living woman; he
+would have sought&mdash;and seeking, would have had more
+likelihood of finding&mdash;the woman of flesh and blood
+who nearest approached to that ivory and gold perfection.
+The case is similar with the "Vita Nuova."
+No earthly affection, no natural love of man for
+woman, of an entire human being, body and soul, for
+another entire human being, can ever be the counterpart
+of this passion for Beatrice, the passion of a mere
+mind for a mere mental ideal. But if the old lust-fattened
+evil of the world is to diminish rather than
+to increase, why then every love of man for woman
+and of woman for man should tend, to the utmost
+possibility, to resemble that love of the "Vita Nuova."
+For mankind has gradually separated from brute kind
+merely by the development of those possibilities of intellectual
+and moral passion which the animal has not
+got; an animal man will never cease to be, but a man
+he can daily more and more become, until from the
+obscene goat-legged and goat-faced creature which we
+commonly see, he has turned into something like certain
+antique fauns: a beautiful creature, not noticeably a
+beast, a beast in only the smallest portion of his nature.
+In order that this may come to pass&mdash;and its coming
+to pass means, let us remember, the enormous increase
+of happiness and diminution of misery upon earth&mdash;it
+is necessary that day by day and year by year there
+should enter into man's feelings, emotions, and habits,
+into his whole life, a greater proportion of that which
+is his own, and is not shared by the animal; that his
+actions, preferences, the great bulk of his conscious
+existence, should be busied with things of the soul,
+truth, good, and beauty, and not with things of the
+body. Hence the love of such a gradually improving
+and humanizing man for a gradually improving
+and humanizing woman, should become, as much as
+is possible, a connection of the higher and more
+human, rather than of the lower and more bestial,
+portions of their nature; it should tend, in its reciprocal
+stimulation, to make the man more a man, the
+woman more a woman, to make both less of the mere
+male and female animals that they were. In brief, love
+should increase, instead, like that which oftenest profanes
+love's name, of diminishing, the power of aspiration,
+of self-direction, of self-restraint, which may
+exist within us. Now to tend to this is to tend towards
+the love of the "Vita Nuova;" to tend towards the
+love of the "Vita Nuova" is to tend towards this.
+Say what you will of the irresistible force of original
+constitution, it remains certain, and all history is
+there as witness, that mankind&mdash;that is to say, the
+only mankind in whom lies the initiative of good,
+mankind which can judge and select&mdash;possesses the
+faculty of feeling and acting in accordance with its
+standard of feeling and action; the faculty in great
+measure of becoming that which it thinks desirable
+to become. Now to have perceived the even imaginary
+existence of such a passion as that of Dante for Beatrice,
+must be, for all who can perceive it, the first step
+towards attempting to bring into reality a something
+of that passion: the real passion conceived while
+the remembrance of that ideal passion be still in the
+mind will bear to it a certain resemblance, even as,
+according to the ancients, the children born of mothers
+whose rooms contained some image of Apollo or
+Adonis would have in them a reflex, however faint,
+of that beauty in whose presence they came into
+existence. In short, it seems to me, that as the "Vita
+Nuova" embodies the utmost ideal of absolutely
+spiritual love, and as to spiritualize love must long
+remain one of the chief moral necessities of the world,
+there exists in this book a moral force, a moral value,
+a power in its unearthly passion and purity, which, as
+much as anything more deliberately unselfish, more
+self-consciously ethical, we must acknowledge and
+honour as holy.</p>
+
+<p>As the love of him who has read and felt the "Vita
+Nuova" cannot but strive towards a purer nature, so
+also the love of which poets sang became also nobler
+as the influence of the strange Tuscan school of
+platonic lyrists spread throughout literature, bringing
+to men the knowledge of a kind of love born of that
+idealizing and worshipping passion of the Middle
+Ages; but of mediaeval love chastened by the manners
+of stern democracy and passed through the sieve of
+Christian mysticism and pagan philosophy. Of this influence
+of the "Vita Nuova"&mdash;for the "Vita Nuova" had
+concentrated in itself all the intensest characteristics
+of Dante's immediate predecessors and contemporaries,
+causing them to become useless and forgotten&mdash;of
+this influence of the "Vita Nuova," there is perhaps no
+more striking example than that of the poet who,
+constituted by nature to be the mere continuator of
+the romantically gallant tradition of the troubadours,
+became, and hence his importance and glory, the
+mediator between Dante and the centuries which
+followed him; the man who gave to mankind, incapable
+as yet of appreciating or enduring the spiritual
+essence of the "Vita Nuova," that self-same essence of
+intellectual love in an immortal dilution. I speak, of
+course, of Petrarch. His passion is neither ideal nor
+strong. The man is in love, or has been in love, existing
+on a borderland of loving and not loving, with the
+beautiful woman. His elegant, refined, half-knightly,
+half-scholarly, and altogether courtly mind is delighted
+with her; with her curly yellow hair, her good red
+and white beauty (we are never even told that Dante's
+Beatrice is beautiful, yet how much lovelier is she not
+than this Laura, descended from all the golden-haired
+bright-eyed ladies of the troubadours!), with her
+manner, her amiability, her purity and dignity in this
+ecclesiastical Babylon called Avignon. He maintains
+a semi-artificial love; frequenting her house, writing
+sonnet after sonnet, rhetorical exercises, studies from
+the antique and the Proven&ccedil;al, for the most part; he,
+who was born to be a mere troubadour like Ventadour
+or Folquet, becomes, through the influence of Dante,
+the type of the poet Abate, of the poetic <i>cavaliere
+servente</i>; a good, weak man with aspirations, who,
+failing to get the better of Laura's virtue, doubtless
+consoles himself elsewhere, but returns to an habitual
+contemplation of it. He is, being constitutionally a
+troubadour, an Italian priest turned partly Proven&ccedil;al,
+vexed at her not becoming his mistress; then (having
+made up his mind, which was but little set upon her),
+quite pleased at her refusal: it turns her into a kind
+of Beatrice, and him, poor man, heaven help him! into
+a kind of Dante&mdash;a Dante for the use of the world at
+large. He goes on visiting Laura, and writing to her
+a sonnet regularly so many times a week, and the
+best, carefully selected, we feel distinctly persuaded, at
+regular intervals. It is a determined cultus, a sort of
+half-real affectation, something equivalent to lighting
+a lamp before a very well-painted and very conspicuous
+shrine. All his humanities, all his Proven&ccedil;al lore
+go into these poems&mdash;written for whom? For her?
+Decidedly; for she has no reason not to read the
+effusions of this amiable, weak priestlet; she feels
+nothing for him. For her; but doubtless also to be
+handed round in society; a new sonnet or canzone
+by that charming and learned man, the Abate
+Petrarch. There is considerable emptiness in all this:
+he praises Laura's chastity, then grows impatient, then
+praises her again; adores her, calls her cruel, his
+goddess, his joy, his torment; he does not really want
+her, but in the vacuity of his feeling, thinks he does;
+calls her alternately the flat, abusive, and eulogistic
+names which mean nothing. He plays loud and soft
+with this absence of desire; he fiddle faddles in
+descriptions of her, not passionate or burning, but
+delicately undressed: he sees her (but with chaste
+eyes) in her bath; he envies her veil, &amp;c.; he neither
+violently intellectually embraces, nor humbly bows
+down in imagination before her; he trifles gracefully,
+modestly, half-familiarly, with her finger tips, with the
+locks of her hair, and so forth. Fancy Dante abusing
+Beatrice; fancy Dante talking of Beatrice in her
+bath; the mere idea of his indignation and shame
+makes one shameful and indignant at the thought.
+But this perfect Laura is no Beatrice, or only a half-and-half
+sham one. She is no ideal figure, merely a
+figure idealized; this is no imaginative passion, merely
+an unreal one. Compare, for instance, the suggestion
+of Laura's possible death with the suggestion of the
+possible death of Beatrice. Petrarch does not love
+sufficiently to guess what such a loss would be. Then
+Laura does die. Here Petrarch rises. The severing
+of the dear old habits, the absence of the sweet reality,
+the terrible sense that all is over, Death, the great
+poetizer and giver of love philters, all this makes him
+love Laura as he never loved her before. The poor
+weak creature, who cannot, like a troubadour, go seek
+a new mistress when the old one fails him, feels
+dreadfully alone, the world dreadfully dreary around
+him; he sits down and cries, and his crying is
+genuine, making the tears come also into our eyes.
+And Laura, as she becomes a more distant ideal,
+becomes nobler, though noble with only a faint earthly
+graciousness not comparable to the glory of the living
+Beatrice. And, as he goes on, growing older and
+weaker and more desolate, the thought of a glorified
+Laura (as all are glorified, even in the eyes of the
+weakest, by death) begins to haunt him as Dante
+was haunted by the thought of Beatrice alive. Yet,
+even at this very time, come doubts of the lawfulness
+of having thus adored (or thought he had adored) a
+mortal woman; he does not know whether all this
+may not have been vanity and folly; he tries to turn
+his thoughts away from Laura and up to God. Perhaps
+he may be called on to account for having
+given too much of his life to a mere earthly love.
+Then, again, Laura reappears beautified in his
+memory, and is again tremblingly half-conjured away.
+He is weak, and sad, and helpless, and alone; and his
+heart is empty; he knows not what to think nor how
+to feel; he sobs, and we cry with him. Nowhere
+could there be found a stranger contrast than this
+nostalgic craving after the dead Laura, vacillating and
+troubled by fear of sin and doubt of unworthiness of
+object, with that solemn ending of the "Vita Nuova,"
+where the name of Beatrice is pronounced for the last
+time before it be glorified in Paradise, where Dante
+devotes his life to becoming worthy of saying "such
+words as have never been said of any lady." The
+ideal woman is one and unchangeable in glory, and
+unchangeable is the passion of her lover; but of this
+sweet dead Laura, whose purity and beauty and
+cruelty he had sung, without a tremor of self-unworthiness
+all her life, of her the poor weak Petrarch
+begins to doubt, of her and her worthiness of all this
+love; and when? when she is dead and himself is
+dying.</p>
+
+<p>Such a man is Petrarch; and yet, by the irresistible
+purifying and elevating power of the "Vita Nuova,'"
+this man came to write not other <i>albas</i> and <i>serenas,</i>
+not other love-songs to be added to the love-songs of
+Provence, but those sonnets and canzoni which for
+four centuries taught the world, too coarse as yet to
+receive Dante's passion at first hand, a nobler and more
+spiritual love. After Petrarch a gradual change takes
+place in the poetic conception of love: except in
+learned revivalisms or in loose buffooneries, the mere
+fleshly love of Antiquity disappears out of literature;
+and equally so, though by a slower process of gradual
+transformation, vanishes also the adoring, but undisguisedly
+adulterous love of the troubadours and minnesingers.
+Into the love Instincts of mankind have
+been mingled, however much diluted, some drops of
+the more spiritual passion of Dante. The <i>puella</i> of
+Antiquity, the noble dame of feudal days, is succeeded
+in Latin countries, In Italy, and France, and Spain,
+and Portugal, by the <i>gloriosa donna</i> imitated from.
+Petrarch, and imitated by Petrarch from Dante; a long-line
+of shadowy figures, veiled in the veil of Madonna
+Laura, ladies beloved of Lorenzo and Michael Angelo,
+of Ariosto, and Tasso, and Camoens, and Cervantes,
+passes through the world; nay, even the sprightly-mistress
+of Ronsard, half-bred pagan and troubadour
+has airs of dignity and mystery which make us almost
+think that in this dainty coquettish French body, of
+Marie or Helene or Cassandrette, there really may be
+an immortal soul. But with the Renaissance&mdash;that
+movement half of mediaeval democratic progress, and
+half of antique revivalism, and to which in reality
+belongs not merely Petrarch, but Dante, and every
+one of the Tuscan poets, Guinicelli, Lapo Gianni,
+Cavalcanti, who broke with the feudal poetry of
+Provence and Sicily&mdash;with the Renaissance, or rather
+with its long-drawn-out end, comes the close, for the
+moment, of the really creative activity of the Latin
+peoples in the domain of poetry. All the things for
+two centuries which Italy and France and Spain and
+Portugal (which we must remember for the sake of
+Camoens) continue to produce, are but developments
+of parts left untouched; or refinements of extreme
+detail, as in the case, particularly, of the French poets
+of the sixteenth century; but poetry receives from these
+races nothing new or vital, no fresh ideal or fruitful
+marriage of ideals. And here begins, uniting in itself
+all the scattered and long-dormant powers of Northern
+poetry, the great and unexpected action of England.
+It had slept through the singing period of the Middle
+Ages, and was awakened, not by Germany or Provence,
+but by Italy: Boccaccio and Petrarch spoke, and, as
+through dreams, England in Chaucer's voice, made
+answer. Again, when the Renaissance had drawn to a
+close, far on in the sixteenth century, English poetry was
+reawakened; and again by Italy. This time it was
+completely wakened, and arose and slept no more.
+And one of the great and fruitful things achieved by
+English poetry in this its final awakening was to give
+to the world the new, the modern, perhaps the definitive,
+the final ideal of love. England drank a deep
+draught&mdash;how deep we see from Sidney's and Spenser's
+sonnets&mdash;of Petrarch; and in this pleasant dilution,
+tasted and felt the burning essence of the "Vita Nuova;"
+for though Dante remained as the poet, the poet of
+heaven and hell, this happy half-and-half Petrarch had
+for full two centuries completely driven into oblivion
+the young Dante who had loved Beatrice. For
+England, for this magnificent and marvellous outburst
+of all the manifold poetic energy stored up and
+quintupled during that long period of inertness, there
+could however be no foreign imported ideal of love;
+there was no possibility of a new series of spectral
+Lauras, shadows projected by a shadow. Already,
+long ago, at the first call of Petrarch, Chaucer, by the
+side of the merely mediaeval love types&mdash;of brutish
+lust and doglike devotion&mdash;of the Wife of Bath and of
+Griseldis, had rough-sketched a kind of modern love,
+the love which is to become that of Romeo and
+Hamlet, in his story of Palemon and Arcite. Among
+the poetic material which existed in England at the
+close of the sixteenth century was the old, long-neglected,
+domestic love, quiet, undemonstrative, essentially
+unsinging, of the early Northern (as indeed
+also of the Greek and Hindoo) epics; a domestic love
+which, in a social condition more closely resembling
+our own than any other, even than that of the Italian
+democracies, which had preceded it; among a people
+who permitted a woman to choose her own husband, and
+forbade a man wooing another man's wife, had
+already, in ballads and folk poetry, begun a faint-twitter
+of song. To this love of the man and the woman
+who hope to marry, strong and tender, but still (as
+Coleridge remarked of several of the lesser Elizabethan
+playwrights) most outspokenly carnal, was united by
+the pure spirit of Spenser, by the unerring genius of
+Shakespeare, that vivifying drop of burning, spiritual
+love taken from out of the "Vita Nuova," which had
+floated, like some sovereign essential oil, on the top
+of Petrarch's rose-water. Henceforward the world
+possesses a new kind of love: the love of Romeo, of
+Hamlet, of Bassanio, of Viola, and of Juliet; the love
+of the love poems of Shelley, of Tennyson, of Browning
+and Browning's wife. A love whose blindness,
+exaggeration of passion, all that might have made it
+foolish and impracticable, leads no longer to folly and
+sin, but to an intenser activity of mankind's imagination
+of the good and beautiful, to a momentary realization
+in our fancy of all our vague dreams of perfection; a
+love which, though it may cool down imperceptibly
+and pale in its intenseness, like the sunrise fires into
+a serene sky, has left some glory round the head of
+the wife, some glory in the heart of the husband, has
+been, however fleeting, a vision of beauty which has
+made beauty more real. And all this owing to the creation,
+the storing up, the purification by the Platonic
+poets of Tuscany, of that strange and seemingly so
+artificial and unreal thing, mediaeval love; the very
+forms and themes of whose poetry, the <i>serena</i> and
+the <i>alba</i>, which had been indignantly put aside by the
+early Italian lyrists, being unconsciously revived, and
+purified and consecrated in the two loveliest love poems
+of Elizabethan poetry: the <i>serena</i>, the evening song
+of impatient expectation in Spenser's Epithalamium;
+the <i>alba</i>, the dawn song of hurried parting, in the
+balcony scene of "Romeo and Juliet."</p>
+
+<p>Let us recapitulate. The feudal Middle Ages gave
+to mankind a more refined and spiritual love, a love
+all chivalry, fidelity, and adoration, but a love steeped
+in the poison of adultery; and to save the pure and
+noble portions of this mediaeval love became the
+mission of the Tuscan poets of that strange school of
+Platonic love which in its very loveliness may sometimes
+seem so unnatural and sterile. For, by reducing
+this mediaeval love to a mere intellectual passion,
+seeking in woman merely a self-made embodiment
+of cravings after perfection, they cleansed away that
+deep stain of adultery; they quadrupled the intensity
+of the ideal element; they distilled the very essential
+spirit of poetic passion, of which but a few drops,
+even as diluted by Petrarch, precipitated, when
+mingled with the earthly passion of future poets, to
+the bottom, no longer to be seen or tasted, all baser
+ingredients.</p>
+
+<p>And, while the poems of minnesingers and troubadours
+have ceased to appeal to us, and remain merely
+for their charm of verse and of graceful conceit; the
+poetry written by the Italians of the thirteenth century
+for women, whose love was but an imaginative fervour,
+remains concentrated in the "Vita Nuova;" and will
+remain for all time the sovereign purifier to which the
+world must have recourse whenever that precipitate of
+baser instincts, which thickened like slime the love
+poetry of Antiquity, shall rise again and sully the
+purity of the love poetry of to-day.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="EPILOGUE" id="EPILOGUE"></a>EPILOGUE.</h3>
+
+<p>More than a year has elapsed since the moment
+when, fancying that this series of studies must be
+well-nigh complete, I attempted to explain in an
+introductory chapter what the nature of this book of
+mine is, or would fain be. I had hoped that each of
+these studies would complete its companions; and
+that, without need for explicit explanation, my whole
+idea would have become more plain to others than it
+was at that time even to myself. But instead, it has
+become obvious that the more carefully I had sought
+to reduce each question to unity, the more that
+question-subdivided and connected itself with other
+questions; and that, with the solution of each separate
+problem, had arisen a new set of problems which
+infinitely complicated the main lessons to be deduced
+from a study of that many-sided civilization to which,
+remembering the brilliant and mysterious offspring of
+Faustus and Helena, I have given the name of
+Euphorion. Hence, as it seems, the necessity for a
+few further words of explanation.</p>
+
+<p>In those introductory pages written some fifteen
+months ago, I tried to bring home to the reader a
+sense which has haunted me throughout the writing
+of this volume; namely, that instead of having deliberately
+made up my mind to study the Renaissance,
+as one makes up one's mind to visit Greece or
+Egypt or the Holy Land; I have, on the contrary,
+quite accidentally and unconsciously, found myself
+wandering about in spirit among the monuments of
+this particular historic region, even as I might wander
+about in the streets of Siena where I wrote last year,
+of Florence whence I write at present; wandering
+about among these things, and little by little feeling
+a particular interest in one, then in another, according
+as each happened to catch my fancy or to recall some
+already known thing. Now these, which for want of
+a better word I have just called monuments, and just
+now, less clearly, but also less foolishly, merely <i>things</i>&mdash;these
+things were in reality not merely individual
+and really existing buildings, books, pictures, or statues,
+individual and really registered men, women, and
+events; they were the mental conceptions which I had
+extracted out of these realities; the intellectual types
+made up (as the mediaeval symbols of justice are
+made up of the visible paraphernalia, robe, scales and
+sword, for judging and weighing and punishing) of
+the impressions left on the mind by all those buildings,
+or books, or pictures, or statues, or men, women, and
+events. They were not the iniquities of this particular
+despot nor the scandalous sayings of that particular
+humanist, but the general moral chaos of the Italian
+fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; not the poem of
+Pulci, of Boiardo, of Ariosto in especial, but a vast
+imaginary poem made up of them all; not the mediaeval
+saints of Angelico and the pagan demi-gods of
+Michael Angelo, but the two tremendous abstractions:
+the spirit of Mediaevalism in art, and the spirit of
+Antiquity; the interest in the distressed soul, and the
+interest in the flourishing body. And, as my thoughts
+have gone back to Antiquity and onwards to our own
+times, their starting-point has nevertheless been the
+Tuscan art of the fifteenth century, their nucleus
+some notes on busts by Benedetto da Maiano and
+portraits by Raphael.</p>
+
+<p>My <i>dramatis persona</i> have been modes of feeling
+and forms of art. I have tried to explain the life and
+character, not of any man or woman, but of the moral
+scepticism of Italy, of the tragic spirit of our Elizabethan
+dramatists; I have tried to write the biography
+of the romance poetry of the Middle Ages, of the
+realism of the great portrait painters and sculptors of
+the Renaissance. But these, my <i>dramatis persona,</i>
+are, let me repeat it, abstractions: they exist only in
+my mind and in the minds of those who think like
+myself. Hence, like all abstractions, they represent
+the essence of a question, but not its completeness, its
+many-sidedness as we may see it in reality. Hence
+it is that I have frequently passed over exceptions to
+the rule which I was stating, because the explanation
+of these exceptions would have involved the formulating
+of a number of apparently irrelevant propositions;
+so that any one who please may accuse me
+of inexactness; and, to give an instance, cover the
+margins of my essay on Mediaeval Love with a whole
+list of virtuous love stories of the Middle Ages; or
+else ferret out of Raynouard and Von der Hagen a
+dozen pages of mediaeval poems in praise of rustic
+life. These objections will be perfectly correct, and
+(so far as my knowledge permitted me) I might have
+puzzled the reader with them myself; but it remains
+none the less certain that, in the main, mediaeval love
+was not virtuous, and mediaeval peasantry not admired
+by poets; and none the less certain, I think, also, that
+in describing the characteristics and origin of an
+abstract thing, such as mediaeval love, or mediaeval
+feeling towards the country and country folk, it was
+my business to state the rule and let alone the
+exceptions.</p>
+
+<p>There is another matter which gives me far greater
+concern. In creating and dealing with an abstraction,
+one is frequently forced, if I may use the expression,
+to cut a subject in two, to bring one of its sides into
+full light and leave the other in darkness; nay, to
+speak harshly of one side of an art or of a man without
+being able to speak admiringly of another side.</p>
+
+<p>This one-sidedness, this apparent injustice of judgment,
+has in some cases been remedied by the fact
+that I have treated in one study those things which I
+was forced to omit in another study; as, in two separate
+essays, I have pointed out first the extreme inferiority
+of Renaissance sculpture to the sculpture of
+Antiquity with regard to absolute beauty of form; and
+then the immeasurable superiority of Renaissance over
+antique sculpture in the matter of that beauty and
+interest dependent upon mere arrangement and handling,
+wherein lies the beauty-creating power of realistic
+schools. But most often I have shown one side, not
+merely of an artist or an art, but of my own feeling,
+without showing the other; and in one case this inevitable
+one-sidedness has weighed upon me almost
+like personal guilt, and has almost made me postpone
+the publication of this book to the Greek Kalends, in
+hopes of being able to explain and to atone. I am
+alluding to Fra Angelico. I spoke of him in a study
+of the progress of mere beautiful form, the naked
+human form moreover, in the art of the Renaissance;
+I looked at his work with my mind full of the unapproachable
+superiority of antique form; I judged
+and condemned the artist with reference to that superb
+movement towards nature and form and bodily beauty
+which was the universal movement of the fifteenth
+century; I lost patience with this saint because he
+would not turn pagan; I pushed aside, because he did
+not seek for a classic Olympus, his exquisite dreams
+of a mediaeval Paradise. I had taken part, as its
+chronicler, with the art which seeks mere plastic perfection,
+the art to which Angelico said, "Retro me
+Sathana." It was my intention to close even this
+volume with a study of the poetical conception of
+early Renaissance painting, of that strange kind of
+painting in which a thing but imperfect in itself, a
+mere symbol of lovely ideas, brings home to our mind,
+with a rush of associations, a sense of beauty and
+wonder greater perhaps than any which we receive
+from the sober reality of perfect form. Again, there
+are the German masters&mdash;the great engravers, Kranach,
+Altdorfer, Aldegrever, especially; of whom, for
+their absolute pleasure in ugly women, for their filthy
+delight in horrors, I have said an immense amount of
+ill; and of whom, for their wonderful intuition of
+dramatic situation, their instinct of the poetry of
+common things, and their magnificently imaginative
+rendering of landscape, I hope some day to say an
+equal amount of good.</p>
+
+<p>I have spoken of the lesson which may be derived
+from studies even as humble as these studies of mine;
+since, in my opinion, we cannot treat history as a mere
+art&mdash;though history alone can gives us now-a-days
+tragedy which has ceased to exist on our stage, and
+wonder which has ceased to exist in our poetry&mdash;we
+cannot seek in it mere selfish enjoyment of imagination
+and emotion, without doing our soul the great
+injury of cheating it of some of those great indignations,
+some of those great lessons which make it
+stronger and more supple in the practical affairs of
+life. Each of these studies of mine brings its own
+lesson, artistic or ethical, important or unimportant;
+its lesson of seeking certainty in our moral opinions,
+beauty in all and whatever our forms of art, spirituality
+in our love. But besides these I seem to perceive
+another deduction, an historical fact with a practical
+application; to see it as the result not merely perhaps
+of the studies of which this book is the fruit, but of
+those further studies, of the subtler sides of Mediaeval
+and Renaissance life and art which at present occupy
+my mind and may some day add another series
+of essays to this: a lesson still vague to myself, but
+which, satisfactorily or unsatisfactorily, I shall nevertheless
+attempt to explain; if indeed it requires to be
+brought home to the reader.</p>
+
+<p>Of the few forms of feeling and imagination which
+I have treated&mdash;things so different from one another
+as the feeling for nature and the chivalric poem, as
+modern art, with its idealism and realism, and modern
+love&mdash;of these forms, emotional and artistic, which
+Antiquity did not know, or knew but little, the
+reader may have observed that I have almost invariably
+traced the origin deep into that fruitful
+cosmopolitan chaos, due to the mingling of all that
+was still unused of the remains of Antiquity with
+all that was untouched of the intellectual and moral
+riches of the barbarous nations, to which we give
+the name of Middle Ages; and that I have, as invariably,
+followed the development of these precious forms,
+and their definitive efflorescence and fruit-bearing,
+into that particular country where certain
+mediaeval conditions had ceased to exist, namely Italy.
+In other words, it has seemed to me that the things
+which I have studied were originally produced during
+the Middle Ages, and consequently in the mediaeval
+countries, France, Germany, Provence; but did not
+attain maturity except in that portion of the Middle
+Ages which is mediaeval no longer, but already more
+than half modern, the Renaissance, which began in
+Italy not with the establishment of despotisms and
+the coming of Greek humanists, but with the independence
+of the free towns and with the revival of Roman
+tradition.</p>
+
+<p>Why so? Because, it appears to me, after watching
+the lines of my thought converging to this point,
+because, with a few exceptions, the Middle Ages were
+rich in great beginnings (indeed a good half of all
+that makes up our present civilization seems to issue
+from them): but they were poor in complete achievements;
+full of the seeds of modern institutions, arts,
+thoughts, and feelings, they yet show us but rarely
+the complete growth of any one of them: a fruitful
+Nile flood, but which must cease to drown and to
+wash away, which must subside before the germs
+that it has brought can shoot forth and mature.
+The sense of this comes home to me most powerfully
+whenever I think of mediaeval poetry and mediaeval
+painting.</p>
+
+<p>The songs of the troubadours and minnesingers,
+what are they to our feelings? They are pleasant,
+even occasionally beautiful, but they are empty,
+lamentably empty, charming arrangements of words;
+poetry which fills our mind or touches our heart
+comes only with the Tuscan lyrists of the thirteenth
+century. The same applies to mediaeval narrative-verse:
+it is, with one or two exceptions or half exceptions,
+such as "The Chanson de Roland" and
+Gottfried's "Tristan und Isolde," decidedly wearisome;
+a thing to study, but scarcely a thing to
+delight in. I do not mean to say that the old legends
+of Wales and Scandinavia, subsequently embodied by
+the French and German poets of the Middle Ages,
+are without imaginative or emotional interest; nothing
+can be further from my thoughts. The Nibelung
+story possesses, both in the Norse and in the Middle
+High German version, a tragic fascination; and a
+quaint fairy-tale interest, every now and then rising
+to the charm of a Decameronian <i>novella</i>, is possessed
+by many of the Keltic tales, whether briefly told in
+the Mabinogion or lengthily detailed by Chrestien de
+Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach. But all this
+is the interest of the mere story, and you would
+enjoy it almost as much if that story were related not
+by a poet but by a peasant; it is the fascination of
+the mere theme, with the added fascination of our
+own unconscious filling up and colouring of details.
+And the poem itself, whence we extract this theme,
+remains, for the most part, uninteresting. The figures
+are vague, almost shapeless and colourless; they have
+no well-understood mental and moral anatomy, so
+that when they speak and act the writer seems to
+have no clear conception of the motives or tempers
+which make them do so; even as in a child's pictures,
+the horses gallop, the men run, the houses stand, but
+without any indication of the muscles which move
+the horse, of the muscles which hold up the man, of
+the solid ground upon which is built, nay rather,
+into which is planted, the house. Hatred of Hagen,
+devotion of Riidger, passionate piety of Parzival&mdash;all
+these are things of which we do not particularly see
+the how or why; we do not follow the reasons, in
+event or character, which make these men sacrifice
+themselves or others, weep, storm, and so forth; nay,
+even when these reasons are clear from the circumstances,
+we are not shown the action of the mechanism,
+we do not see how Brunhilt is wroth, how Chriemhilt
+is revengeful, how Herzeloid is devoted to Parzival.
+There is, in the vast majority of this mediaeval poetry,
+no clear conception of the construction and functions
+of people's character, and hence no conception either
+of those actions and reactions of various moral organs
+which, after all, are at the bottom of the events related.
+Herein lies the difference between the forms of the
+Middle Ages and those of Antiquity; for how perfectly
+felt, understood, is not every feeling and every
+action of the Homeric heroes, how perfectly indicated!
+We can see the manner and reason of the conflict
+of Achilles and Agamemnon, of the behaviour of the
+returned Odysseus, as clearly as we see the manner
+and reason of the movements of the fighting Centaurs
+and Lapithae, or the Amazons; nay, even the minute
+mood of comparatively unimportant figures, as Helen,
+Brisei's, and Nausicaa, is indicated in its moral anatomy
+and attitude as distinctly as is the manner in which
+the maidens of the Parthenon frieze slowly restrain
+their steps, the boys curb their steeds, or the old men
+balance their oil jars. Nothing of this in mediaeval
+literature, except perhaps in "Flamenca" and "Tristan,"
+where the motive of action, mere imaginative
+desire, is all-permeating and explains everything.
+These people clearly had no interest, no perception,
+connected with character: a valorous woman, a
+chivalrous knight, an insolent steward, a jealous
+husband, a faithful retainer; things recognized only
+in outline, made to speak and act only according to
+a fixed tradition, without knowledge of the internal
+mechanism of motive; these sufficed. Hence it is
+that mediaeval poetry is always like mediaeval painting
+(for painting continued to be mediaeval with
+Giotto's pupils long after poetry had ceased to be
+mediaeval with Dante and his school), where the
+Virgin sits and holds the child without body wherewith
+to sit or arms wherewith to hold; where angels
+flutter forward and kneel in conventional greeting, with
+obviously no bended knees beneath their robes, nay,
+with knees, waist, armpits, all anywhere; where men
+ride upon horses without flat to their back; where
+processions of the blessed come forth, guided by
+fiddling seraphs, vague, faint faces, sweet or grand,
+heads which might wave like pieces of cut-out paper
+upon their necks, arms and legs here and there, not
+clearly belonging to any one; creatures marching,
+soaring, flying, singing, fiddling, without a bone or a
+muscle wherewith to do it all. And meanwhile, in this
+mediaeval poetry, as in this mediaeval painting, there
+are yards and yards of elaborate preciousness: all the
+embossed velvets, all the white-and-gold-shot brocades,
+all the silks and satins, and jewel-embroidered stuffs
+of the universe cast stiffly about these phantom men
+and women, these phantom horses and horsemen. It
+is not until we turn to Italy, and to the Northern
+man, Chaucer, entirely under Italian influence, that
+we obtain an approach to the antique clearness of
+perception and comprehension; that we obtain not
+only in Dante something akin to the muscularities
+of Signorelli and Michael Angelo; but in Boccaccio
+and Chaucer, in Cavalca and Petrarch, the equivalent
+of the well-understood movement, the well-indicated
+situation of the simple, realistic or poetic, sketches of
+Filippino and Botticelli.</p>
+
+<p>This, you will say, is a mere impression; it is no
+explanation, still less such an explanation as may
+afford a lesson. Not so. This strange inconclusiveness
+in all mediaeval things, till the moment comes
+when they cease to be mediaeval; this richness in
+germs and poverty in mature fruit, cannot be without
+its reason. And this reason, to my mind, lies in one
+word, the most terrible word of any, since it means
+suffering and hopelessness; a word which has haunted
+my mind ever since I have looked into mediaeval
+things: the word Wastefulness. Wastefulness; the
+frightful characteristic of times at once so rich and
+so poor, the explanation of the long starvation and
+sickness that mankind, that all mankind's concerns&mdash;art,
+poetry, science, life&mdash;endured while the very
+things which would have fed and revived and nurtured,
+existed close at hand, and in profusion. Wastefulness,
+in this great period of confusion, of the most precious
+things that we possess: time, thought, and feeling
+refused to the realities of the world, and lavished on
+the figments of the imagination. Why this vagueness,
+this imperfection in all mediaeval representations of
+life? Because even as men's eyes were withdrawn,
+by the temporal institutions of those days, from the
+sight of the fields and meadows which were left to
+the blind and dumb thing called serf; so also the
+thoughts of mankind, its sympathy and intentions,
+were withdrawn from the mere earthly souls, the
+mere earthly wrongs and woes of men by the great
+self-organized institution of mediaeval religion. Pity
+of the body of Christ held in bondage by the Infidel;
+love of God; study of the unknowable things of
+Heaven: such are the noblest employments of the
+mediaeval soul; how much of pity, of love, may
+remain for man; how much of study for the knowable?
+To Wastefulness like this&mdash;to misapplication
+of mind ending almost in palsy&mdash;must we ascribe, I
+think, the strange sterility of such mediaeval art as
+deals not merely with pattern, but with the reality
+of man's body and soul. And we might be thankful,
+if, during our wanderings among mediaeval things,
+we had seen the starving of only art and artistic
+instincts; but the soul of man has lain starving also;
+starving for the knowledge which was sought only of
+Divine things, starving for the love which was given
+only to God.</p>
+
+<p>The explanation, therefore, and its lesson, may thus
+be summed up in the one word Wastefulness. And
+the fruitfulness of the Renaissance, all that it has
+given to us of art, of thought, of feeling (for the "Vita
+Nuova" is its fruit), is due, as it seems to me, to the
+fact that the Renaissance is simply the condition of
+civilization when, thanks to the civil liberty and the
+spiritual liberty inherited from Rome and inherited
+from Greece, man's energies of thought and feeling
+were withdrawn from the unknowable to the knowable,
+from Heaven to Earth; and were devoted to
+the developing of those marvellous new things which
+Antiquity had not known, and which had lain neglected
+and wasted during the Middle Ages.</p>
+
+<p>FLORENCE, <i>January</i>,1884.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="APPENDIX" id="APPENDIX"></a>APPENDIX.</h3>
+
+<p>I have seen the pictures and statues and towns which I have
+described, and I have read the books of which I attempt to give
+an impression; but here my original research, if such it may be
+called, comes to an end. I have trusted only to myself for my
+impressions; but I have taken from others everything that may
+be called historical fact, as distinguished from the history of this
+or that form of thought or of art which I have tried to elaborate.
+My references are therefore only to standard historical works,
+and to such editions of poets and prose writers as have come
+into my hands. How much I am endebted to the genius of
+Michelet; nay, rather, how much I am, however unimportant,
+the thing made by him, every one will see and judge. With
+regard to positive information I must express my great obligations
+to the works of Jacob Burckhardt, of Prof. Villari, and of
+Mr. J.A. Symonds in everything that concerns the political
+history and social condition of the Renaissance. Mr. Symonds'
+name I have placed last, although this is by no means the order
+of importance in which the three writers appear in my mind,
+because vanity compels me to state that I have deprived myself
+of the pleasure and profit of reading his volumes on Italian
+literature, from a fear that finding myself doubtless forestalled
+by him in various appreciations, I might deprive my essays of
+what I feel to be their principal merit, namely, the spontaneity
+and wholeness of personal impression. With regard to philological
+lore, I may refer, among a number of other works,
+to M. Gaston Paris' work on the Cycle of Charlemagne, M.
+de la Villemarqu&eacute;'s companion volume on Keltic romances, and
+Professor Rajna's "Fonti dell' Ariosto." My knowledge of troubadours,
+trouv&egrave;res, and minnesingers is obtained mainly from the
+great collections of Raynouard, Wackernagel, M&auml;tzner, Bartsch,
+and Von der Hagen, and from Bartsch's and Simrock's editions
+and versions of Gottfried von Strassburg, Hartmann von Aue,
+and Wolfram von Eschenbach. "Flamenca" I have read in
+Professor Paul Meyer's beautiful edition, text and translation;
+"Aucassin et Nicolette," in an edition published, if I remember
+rightly, by Janet; and also in a very happy translation contained
+in Delvau's huge collection of "Romans de Chevalerie,"
+which contains, unfortunately sometimes garbled, as many of
+the prose stories of the Carolingian and Amadis cycle as I, at
+all events, could endure to read. For the early Italian poets,
+excepting Carducci's "Cino da Pistoia," my references are the
+same as those in Rossetti's "Dante and his Cycle," especially the
+"Rime Antiche" and the "Poeti del Primo Secolo." Professor
+d'Ancona's pleasant volume has greatly helped me in the history
+of the transformation of the courtly poetry of the early Middle
+Ages into the folk poetry of Tuscany. I owe a good deal also,
+with regard to this same essay "The Outdoor Poetry," to Roskoff's
+famous "Geschichte des Teufels," and to Signor Novati's
+recently published "Carmina Medii <i>Aevi</i>." The Italian <i>novellieri,</i>
+Bandello, Cinthio, and their set, I have used in the
+Florentine editions of 1820 or 1825; Masuccio edited by De
+Sanctis. For the essay on the Italian Renaissance on the
+Elizabethan Stage, I have had recourse, chiefly, to the fifteenth
+century chronicles in the "Archivio Storico Italiano," and to
+Dyce's Webster, Hartley Coleridge's Massinger and Ford,
+Churton Collins' Cyril Tourneur, and J.O. Halliwell's
+Marston.</p>
+
+<p>The essays on art have naturally profited by the now inevitable
+Crowe and Cavalcaselle; but in this part of my work, while
+I have relied very little on books, I have received more than
+the equivalent of the information to be obtained from any writers
+in the suggestions and explanations of my friend Mr. T. Nelson
+MacLean, who has made it possible for a mere creature of pens
+and ink to follow the differences of <i>technique</i> of the sculptors
+and medallists of the fifteenth century; a word of thanks also,
+for various such suggestions as can come only from a painter,
+to my old friend Mr. John S. Sargent, of Paris.</p>
+
+<p>I must conclude these acknowledgments by thanking the
+Editors of the <i>Contemporary, British Quarterly</i>, and <i>National
+Reviews</i>, and of the <i>Cornhill Magazine</i>, for permission to republish
+such of the essays or fragments of essays as have
+already appeared in those periodicals.</p>
+
+<p>THE END.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Euphorion, by Vernon Lee
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Euphorion, by Vernon Lee
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Euphorion
+       Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the
+       Renaissance - Vol. II
+
+Author: Vernon Lee
+
+Release Date: February 17, 2010 [EBook #31304]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EUPHORION ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Marc D'Hooghe
+
+
+
+
+EUPHORION: BEING STUDIES OF THE ANTIQUE AND THE MEDIEVAL IN THE RENAISSANCE
+
+BY
+
+VERNON LEE
+
+_Author of "Studies of the 18th Century in Italy," "Belcaro," etc._
+
+_VOL. II._
+
+
+
+TABLE OF CONTENTS.
+
+
+THE PORTRAIT ART
+
+THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO
+
+MEDIAEVAL LOVE
+
+EPILOGUE
+
+APPENDIX
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+THE PORTRAIT ART
+
+
+I.
+
+Real and Ideal--these are the handy terms, admiring or disapproving,
+which criticism claps with random facility on to every imaginable
+school. This artist or group of artists goes in for the real--the
+upright, noble, trumpery, filthy real; that other artist or group of
+artists seeks after the ideal--the ideal which may mean sublimity or
+platitude. We summon every living artist to state whether he is a
+realist or an idealist; we classify all dead artists as realists or
+idealists; we treat the matter as if it were one of almost moral
+importance. Now the fact of the case is that the question of realism and
+idealism, which we calmly assume as already settled or easy to settle by
+our own sense of right and wrong, is one of the tangled questions of
+art-philosophy; and one, moreover, which no amount of theory, but only
+historic fact, can ever set right. For, to begin with, we find realism
+and idealism coming before us in different ways and with different
+meaning and importance. All art which is not addressing (as decrepit art
+is forced to do) faculties to which it does not spontaneously and
+properly appeal--all art is decorative, ornamental, idealistic
+therefore, since it consciously or unconsciously aims, not merely at
+reproducing the already existing, but at producing something which shall
+repay the looking at it, something which shall ornament, if not a place,
+at least our lives; and such making of the ornamental, of the worth
+looking at, necessarily implies selection and arrangement--that is to
+say idealism. At the same time, while art aims definitely at being in
+this sense decorative, art may very possibly aim more immediately at
+merely reproducing, without, selection or arrangement, the actually
+existing things of the world; and this in order to obtain the mere power
+of representation. In short, art which is idealistic as a master will
+yet be realistic as a scholar: it decorates when it achieves, it copies
+when it studies. But this is only half the question. Certain whole
+schools may be described as idealistic, others as realistic, in
+tendency; and this, not in their study, but in their achievement. One
+school will obviously be contented with forms the most unselected and
+vulgar; others will go but little out of their way in search of
+form-superiority; while yet others, and these we must emphatically call
+idealistic, are squeamish to the last degree in the choice and
+adaptation of form, anxious, to get the very best, and make the very
+best of it. Yet, on thinking over it, we shall find that realistic and
+idealistic schools are all, in their achievements, equally striving
+after something which is not the mere reproduction of the already
+existing as such--striving, in short, after decoration. The pupil of
+Perugino will, indeed, wait patiently to begin his work until he can
+find a model fit for a god or goddess; while the fellow-craftsman of
+Rembrandt will be satisfied with the first dirty old Jew or besotten
+barmaid that comes to hand. But the realistic Dutchman is not,
+therefore, any the less smitten with beauty, any the less eager to be
+ornamental, than the idealistic Italian: his man and woman he takes
+indeed with off-hand indifference, but he places them in that of which
+the Italian shall perhaps never have dreamed, in that on which he has
+expended all his science, his skill, his fancy, in that which he gives
+as his addition to the beautiful things of art--in atmosphere, in light,
+which are to the everyday atmosphere and light what the patiently sought
+for, carefully perfected god or goddess model of Raphael is to the
+everyday Jew, to the everyday barmaid, of Rembrandt.
+
+The ideal, for the man who is quite coarsely realistic in his figures,
+exists in the air, light, colour; and in saying this I have, so to
+speak, turned over the page too quickly, forestalled the expression of
+what I can prove only later: the disconnection of such comparative
+realism and idealism as this (the only kind of realism, let us remember,
+which can exist in great art) with any personal bias of the artist, its
+intimate dependence upon the constitution and tendency of art, upon its
+preoccupations about form, or colour, or light, in a given country and
+at a given moment. And now I should wish to resume the more orderly
+treatment of the subject, which will lead us in time to the second half
+of the question respecting realism and idealism. These considerations
+have come to me in connection with the portrait art of the Renaissance;
+and this very simply. For portrait is a curious bastard of art, sprung
+on the one side from a desire which is not artistic, nay, if anything,
+opposed to the whole nature and function of art: the desire for the mere
+likeness of an individual. The union with this interloping tendency, so
+foreign to the whole aristocratic temper of art, has produced portrait;
+and by the position of this hybrid, or at least far from regularly bred
+creature; by the amount of the real artistic quality of beauty which it
+is permitted to retain by the various schools of art, we can, even as by
+the treatment of similar social interlopers we can estimate the
+necessities and tendencies of various states of society, judge what are
+the conditions in which the various schools of art struggle for the
+object of their lives, which is the beautiful.
+
+I have said that art is realistic in its periods or moments of study;
+and this is essentially the case even with the school which in many
+respects was the most unmistakably decorative and idealistic in
+intention: the school of Giotto. The Giottesques are more than
+decorative artists, they are decorators in the most literal sense.
+Painting with them is merely one of the several arts and crafts enslaved
+by mediaeval architecture and subservient to architectural effects. Their
+art is the only one which is really and successfully architecturally
+decorative; and to appreciate this we must contrast their fresco-work
+with that of the fifteenth century and all subsequent times. Masaccio,
+Ghirlandajo, Signorelli, turn the wall into a mere badly made frame; a
+gigantic piece of cardboard would do as well, and better; the colours
+melt into one another, the figures detach themselves at various degrees
+of relief; those upon the ceiling and pendentives are frequently upside
+down; yet these figures, which are so difficult to see, are worth seeing
+only in themselves, and not in relation to their position. The masonry
+is no longer covered, but carved, rendered uneven with the cavities and
+protrusions of perspective. In Mantegna's frescoes the wall becomes a
+slanting theatre scene, cunningly perspectived like Palladio's Teatro
+Olimpico; with Correggio, wall, masonry, everything, is dissolved, the
+side or cupola of a church becomes a rent in the clouds, streaming with
+light.
+
+Not so with the Giottesque frescoes: the wall, the vault, the triumphant
+masonry is always present and felt, beneath the straight, flat bands of
+uniform colour; the symmetrical compartments, the pentacles, triangles,
+and segments, and borders of histories, whose figures never project,
+whose colours are separate as those in a mosaic. The Giottesque
+frescoes, with their tiers and compartments of dark blue, their vague
+figures dressed in simple ultramarines, greens, dull reds, and purples;
+their geometrical borders and pearlings and dog-tooths; cover the walls,
+the ribbed and arched ceilings, the pointed raftering almost like some
+beautiful brown, blue, and tarnished gold leather-hangings; the figures,
+outlined in dark paint, have almost the appearance of being stencilled,
+or even stamped on the wall. Such is Giottesque painting: an art which
+is not merely essentially decorative, but which is, moreover, what
+painting and sculpture remained throughout the Gothic period,
+subservient to the decorative effect of another art; an art in which all
+is subordinated to architectural effect, in which form, colour, figures,
+houses, the most dramatic scenes of the most awful of all dramas,
+everything is turned into a kind of colossal and sublime wall-paper; and
+such an art as this would lead us to expect but little realism, little
+deliberate and slavish imitation of the existing. Yet wherever there is
+life in this Gothic art (which has a horrible tendency, piously
+unobserved by critics, to stagnate into blundering repetition of the
+same thing), wherever there is progress, there is, in the details of
+that grandiose, idealistic decoration, realism of the crudest kind.
+Those Giottesque workers, who were not content with a kind of Gothic
+Byzantinism; those who really handed over something vital to their
+successors of the fifteenth century, while repeating the old
+idealistical decorations; were studying with extraordinary crudeness of
+realism. Everything that was not conventional ornament or type was
+portrait; and portrait in which the scanty technical means of the
+artist, every meagre line and thin dab of colour, every timid stroke of
+brush or of pencil, went towards the merciless delineation not merely of
+a body but of a soul. And the greater the artist, the more cruel the
+portrait: cruellest in representation of utter spiritual baseness in the
+two greatest of these idealistic decorators; Giotto, and his latest
+disciple, Fra Angelico. Of this I should like to give a couple of
+examples.
+
+In Giotto's frescoes at Santa Croce--one of the most lovely pieces of
+mere architectural decoration conceivable--there are around the dying
+and the dead St. Francis two groups of monks, which are astoundingly
+realistic. The solemn ending of the ideally beautiful life of sanctity
+which was so fresh in the memory of Giotto's contemporaries, is nothing
+beyond a set of portraits of the most absolutely mediocre creatures,
+moral and intellectual, of creatures the most utterly incapable of
+religious enthusiasm that ever made religion a livelihood. They gather
+round the dying and the dead St. Francis, a noble figure, not at all
+ecstatic or seraphic, but pure, strong, worn out with wise and righteous
+labour, a man of thought and action, upon whose hands and feet the
+stigmata of supernatural rapture are a mere absurdity. The monks are
+presumably his immediate disciples, those fervent and delicate poetic
+natures of whom we read in the "Fioretti di San Francesco." To represent
+them Giotto has painted the likeness of the first half-dozen friars he
+may have met in the streets near Santa Croce: not caricatures, nor
+ideals, but portraits Giotto has attempted neither to exalt nor to
+degrade them into any sort of bodily or spiritual interestingness. They
+are not low nor bestial nor extremely stupid. They are in various
+degrees dull, sly, routinist, prosaic, pedantic; their most noteworthy
+characteristic is that they are certainly the men who are not called by
+God. They are no scandal to the Church, but no honour; they are sloth,
+stupidity, sensualism, and cunning not yet risen to the dignity of a
+vice. They look upon the dying and the dead saint with indifference,
+want of understanding, at most a gape or a bright look of stupid
+miscomprehension at the stigmata: they do not even perceive that a saint
+is a different being from themselves. With these frescoes of Giotto I
+should wish to compare Fra Angelico's great ceremonial crucifixion in
+the cloister chapel of San Marco of Florence; for it displays to an
+extraordinary degree that juxtaposition of the most conventionally
+idealistic, pious decorativeness with the realism straightforward,
+unreflecting, and heartless to the point of becoming perfectly
+grotesque. The fresco is divided into two scenes: on the one side the
+crucifixion, the mystic actors of the drama, on the other the holy men
+admitted to its contemplation. A sense that holy things ought to be
+old-fashioned, a respect for Byzantine inanity which invariable haunted
+the Giottesques in their capacity of idealistic decorators, of men who
+replaced with frescoes the solemn lifeless splendours of mosaic; this
+kind of artistico-religious prudery has made Angelico, who was able to
+foreshorten powerfully the brawny crucified thieves, represent the
+Saviour dangling from the cross bleached, boneless, and shapeless, a
+thing that is not dead because it has never been alive. The holy persons
+around stand rigid, vacant, against their blue nowhere of background,
+with vague expanses of pink face looking neither one way nor the other;
+mere modernized copies of the strange, goggle-eyed, vapid beings on the
+old Italian mosaics. This is not a representation of the actual reality
+of the crucifixion, like Tintoret's superb picture at S. Rocco, or
+Duerer's print, or so many others, which show the hill, the people, the
+hangman, the ladders and ropes and hammers and tweezers: it is a sort of
+mystic repetition of it; subjective, if I may say so; existing only in
+the contemplation of the saints on the opposite side, who are spectators
+only in the sense that a contemplative Christian may be said to be the
+mystic spectator of the Passion. The thing for the painter to represent
+is fervent contemplation, ecstatic realization of the past by the force
+of ardent love and belief; the condition of mind of St. Francis, St.
+Catherine of Siena, Madame Guyon: it is the revelation of the great
+tragedy of heaven to the soul of the mystic. Now, how does Fra Angelico
+represent this? A row of saints, founders of orders, kneel one behind
+the other, and by their side stand apostles and doctors of the Church;
+admitting them to the sight of the super-human, with the gesture, the
+bland, indifferent vacuity of the Cameriere Segreto or Monsignore who
+introduces a troop of pilgrims to the Pope; they are privileged persons,
+they respect, they keep up decorum, they raise their eyes and compress
+their lips with ceremonious reverence; but, Lord! they have gone through
+it all so often, they are so familiar with it, they don't look at it any
+longer; they gaze about listlessly, they would yawn if they were not too
+well bred for that. The others, meanwhile, the sainted pilgrims, the men
+whose journey over the sharp stones and among the pricking brambles of
+life's wilderness finds its final reward in this admission into the
+presence of the Holiest, kneel one by one, with various expressions: one
+with the stupid delight of a religious sightseer; his vanity is
+satisfied, he will next draw a rosary from his pocket and get it blessed
+by Christ Himself; he will recount it all to his friends at home.
+Another is dull and gaping, a clown who has walked barefoot from
+Valencia to Rome, and got imbecile by the way; yet another, prim and
+dapper; the rest indifferent looking restlessly about them, at each
+other, at their feet and hands, perhaps exchanging mute remarks about
+the length of time they are kept waiting; those at the end of the
+kneeling procession, St. Peter Martyr and St. Giovanni Gualberto
+especially, have the bored, listless, devout look of the priestlets in
+the train of a bishop. All these figures, the standing ones who
+introduce and the kneeling ones who are being introduced, are the most
+perfect types of various states of dull, commonplace, mediocre routinist
+superstition; so many Camerlenghi on the one hand, so many Passionist or
+Propagandists on the other: the first aristocratic, bland and bored; the
+second, dull, listless, mumbling, chewing Latin Prayers which never
+meant much to their minds, and now mean nothing; both perfectly
+reverential and proper in behaviour, with no more possibility of
+individual fervour of belief than of individual levity of disbelief: the
+Church, as it exists in well-regulated decrepitude. And thus does the
+last of the Giottesques, the painter of glorified Madonnas and dancing
+angels, the saint, represent the saints admitted to behold the supreme
+tragedy of the Redemption.
+
+Thus much for the Giottesques. The Tuscans of the early Renaissance
+developed up to the utmost, assisted by the goldsmiths and sculptors,
+who taught them modelling and anatomy, that realistic element of
+Giottesque painting. Its ideal decorative part had become impossible.
+Painting could no longer be a decoration of architecture, and it had not
+yet the means of being ornamental in itself; it was an art which did
+not achieve, but merely studied. Among its exercises in anatomy,
+modelling, perspective, and so forth, always laborious and frequently
+abortive, its only spontaneous, satisfactory, mature production was its
+portrait work, Portraits of burghers in black robes and hoods; of
+square-jawed youths with red caps stuck on to their fuzzy heads, of bald
+and wrinkled scholars and magnificoes; of thinly bearded artizans;
+people who stand round the preaching Baptist or crucified Saviour, look
+on at miracle or martyrdom, stolid, self-complacent, heedless, against
+their background of towered, walled, and cypressed city--of buttressed
+square and street; ugly but real, interesting, powerful among the
+grotesque agglomerations of bag-of-bones nudities, bunched and taped-up
+draperies and out-of-joint architecture of the early Renaissance
+frescoes; at best among its picture-book and Noah's-ark prettinesses of
+toy-box cypresses, vine trellises, inlaid house fronts, rabbits in the
+grass, and peacocks on the roofs; for the early Renaissance, with the
+one exception of Masaccio, is in reality a childish time of art, giving
+us the horrors of school-hour blunders and abortions varied with the
+delights of nursery wonderland: maturity, the power of achieving, the
+perception of something worthy of perception, comes only with the later
+generation, the one immediately preceding the age of Raphael and Michael
+Angelo; with Ghirlandajo, Signorelli, Filippino, Botticelli, Perugino,
+and their contemporaries.
+
+But this period is not childish, is not immature in everything. Or,
+rather, the various arts which exist together at this period are not all
+in the same stage of development. While painting is in this immature
+ugliness, and ideal sculpture, in works like Verrocchio's and
+Donatello's David, only a cleverer, more experienced, but less
+legitimate kind of painting, painting more successful in the present,
+but with no possible future; the almost separate art of
+portrait-sculpture arises again where it was left by Graeco-Roman
+masters, and, developing to yet greater perfection, gives in marble the
+equivalent of what painting will be able to produce only much later:
+realistic art which is decorative; beautiful works made out of ugly
+materials.
+
+The vicissitudes of Renaissance sculpture are strange: its life, its
+power, depend upon death; it is an art developed in the burying vault
+and cloister cemetery. During the Middle Ages sculpture had had its
+reason, its vital possibility, its something to influence, nay, to keep
+it alive, in architecture; but with the disappearance of Gothic building
+disappears also the possibility of the sculpture which covers the
+portals of Chartres and the belfry of Florence. The pseudo-classic
+colonnades, entablatures, all the thin bastard Ionic and Corinthian of
+Aberti and Bramante, did not require sculpture, or had their own little
+supply of unfleshed ox-skulls, greengrocer's garlands, scallopings and
+wave-linings, which, with a stray siren and one or two bloated emperors'
+heads, amply sufficed. On the other hand, mediaeval civilization and
+Christian dogma did not encourage the production of naked of draped
+ideal statues like those which Antiquity stuck on countless temple
+fronts, and erected at every corner of square, street, or garden. The
+people of the Middle Ages were too grievously ill grown, distorted,
+hideous, to be otherwise than indecent in nudity; they may have had an
+instinct of the kind, and, ugly as they knew themselves to be, they must
+yet have found in forms like those of Verrocchio's David insufficient
+beauty to give much pleasure. Besides, if the Middle Ages had left no
+moral room for ideal sculpture once freed from the service of
+architecture; they had still less provided it with a physical place.
+Such things could not be set up in churches, and only a very moderate
+number of statues could be wanted as open-air monuments in the narrow
+space of a still Gothic city; and, in fact, ideal heroic statues of the
+early Renaissance are fortunately not only ugly, but comparatively few
+in number. There remained, therefore, for sculpture, unless contented to
+dwindle down into brass and gold miniature work, no regular employment
+save that connected with sepulchral monuments. During the real Middle
+Ages, and in the still Gothic north, the ornamentation of a tomb
+belonged to architecture: from the superb miniature minsters, pillared
+and pinnacled and sculptured, cathedrals within the cathedral, to the
+humbler foliated arched canopy, protecting a simple sarcophagus at the
+corner of many a street in Lombardy. The sculptor's work was but the
+low relief on the church flags, the timidly carved, outlined,
+cross-legged knight or praying priest, flattened down on his pillow as
+if ashamed even of that amount of prominence, and in a hurry to be
+trodden down and obliterated into a few ghostly outlines. But to this
+humiliated prostrate image, to this flat thing doomed to obliteration,
+came the sculptor of the Renaissance, and bade the wafer-like simulacrum
+fill up, expand, raise itself, lift itself on its elbow, arise and take
+possession of the bed of state, the catafalque raised high above the
+crowd, draped with brocade, carved with rich devices of leaves and
+beasts of heraldry, roofed over with a dais, which is almost a triumphal
+arch, garlanded with fruits and flowers, upon which the illustrious dead
+were shown to the people; but made eternal, and of eternal magnificence,
+by the stone-cutter, and guarded, not for an hour by the liveried pages
+or chaunting monks, but by winged genii for all eternity. Some people, I
+know, call this a degradation, and say that it was the result of corrupt
+pride, this refusal to have the dear or illustrious dead scraped out any
+longer by the shoe-nails of every ruffian, rubbed out by the knees of
+every kitchen wench; but to me it seems that it was due merely to the
+fact that sculpture had lost its former employment, and that a great art
+cannot (thank Heaven!) be pietistically self-humiliating. Be this as it
+may, the sculpture of the Renaissance had found a new and singularly
+noble line of work, the one in which it was great, unique, unsurpassed,
+because untutored. It worked here without models, to suit modern
+requirements, with modern spirit; it was emphatically-modern sculpture;
+the only modern sculpture which can be talked of as something original,
+genuine, valuable, by the side of antique sculpture. Greek Antiquity had
+evaded death, and neglected the dead; a garland of maenads and fauns
+among ivy leaves, a battle of amazons or centaurs; in the late
+semi-Christian, platonic days, some Orphic emblem, or genius; at most,
+as in the exquisite tombs of the Keramikos of Athens, a figure, a youth
+on a prancing steed, like the Phidian monument of Dexileus; a maiden,
+draped and bearing an urn; but neither the youth nor the maiden is the
+inmate of the tomb: they are types, living types, no portraits. Nay,
+even where Antiquity shows us Death or Hermes, gently leading away the
+beloved; the spirit, the ghost, the dead one, is unindividual.
+"Sarkophagen und Urnen bekraenzte der Heide mit Leben," said Goethe; but
+it was the life which was everlasting because it was typical: the life
+not which had been relinquished by the one buried there, but the life
+which the world danced on, forgetful, round his ashes. The Romans, on
+the contrary, graver and more retentive folk than the Greeks, as well as
+more domestic, less coffee-house living, appear to have inherited from
+the Etruscans a desire to preserve the effigy of the dead, a desire
+unknown to the Greeks. But the Etrusco-Roman monuments, where husband
+and wife stare forth togaed and stolaed, half reduced to a conventional
+crop-headedness, grim and stiff as if sitting unwillingly for their
+portrait; or reclining on the sarcophagus-lid, neither dead, nor asleep,
+nor yet alive and awake, but with a hieratic mummy stare, have little of
+aesthetic or sympathetic value. The early Renaissance, then, first
+bethought it of representing the real individual in the real death
+slumber. And I question whether anything more fitting could be placed on
+a tomb than the effigy of the dead as we saw them just before the
+coffin-lid closed down; as we would give our all to see them but one
+little moment longer; as they continue to exist for our fancy within the
+grave; for to any but morbid feelings the beloved can never suffer
+decay. Whereas a portrait of the man in life, as the throning popes in
+St. Peter's, seems heartless and derisive; such monuments striking us as
+conceived and ordered by their inmates while alive, like Michael
+Angelo's Pope Julius, and Browning's Bishop, who was so preoccupied
+about his tomb in St. Praxed's Church. The Renaissance, the late Middle
+Ages, felt better than this: on the extreme pinnacle, high on the roof,
+they might indeed place against the russet brick or the blue sky, amid
+the hum of life and the movement of the air, the living man, like the
+Scaligers, the mailed knight on his charger, lance in rest: but in the
+church below, under the funereal pall, they could place only the body
+such as it may have lain on the bier.
+
+And that figure on the bier was the great work of Renaissance sculpture.
+Inanimate and vulgar when in heroic figures they tried to emulate the
+ancients, the sculptors of the fifteenth century have found their own
+line. The modesty, the simplicity, the awful and beautiful repose of the
+dead; the individual character cleared of all its conflicting meannesses
+by death, simplified, idealized as it is in the memory of the
+survivors--all these are things which belong to the Renaissance. As the
+Greeks gave the strong, smooth life-current circulating through their
+heroes; so did these men of the fifteenth century give the gentle and
+harmonious ebbing after-life of death in their sepulchral monuments.
+Things difficult to describe, and which must be seen and remembered.
+There is the monument, now in the museum at Ravenna, by a sculptor whose
+name, were it known, would surely be among the greatest, of the
+condottiere, Braccioforte: the body prone in its heavy case of armour,
+not yet laid out in state, but such as he may have been found in the
+evening, when the battle was over, under a tree where they had carried
+him to die while they themselves went back to fight; the head has fallen
+back, side-ways, weighed down by the helmet, which has not even been
+unbuckled, only the face, the clear-cut, austere features, visible
+beneath the withdrawn vizor; the eyes have not been closed; and there
+are few things more exquisite and solemn at once in all sculpture, than
+the indication of those no longer seeing eyes, of that broken glance,
+beneath the half-closed lids. There is Rossellino's Cardinal of Portugal
+at S. Miniato a Monte: the slight body, draped in episcopal robes, lying
+with delicate folded hands, in gracious decorum of youthful sanctity;
+the strong delicate head, of clear feature and gentle furrow of
+suffering and thought, a face of infinite purity of strength, strength
+still ungnarled by action: a young priest, who in his virginal dignity
+is almost a noble woman. And there is the Ilaria Guinigi of Jacopo della
+Quercia (the man who had most natural affinity with the antique of all
+these sculptors, as one may see from the shattered remains of the Fonte
+Gaia of Siena), the lady stretched out on the rose-garlanded bed of
+state in a corner of Lucca Cathedral, her feet upon her sleeping dog,
+her sweet, girlish head, with wavy plaits of hair encircled by a
+rose-wreathed, turban-like diadem, lying low on round cushions; the bed
+gently giving way beneath the beautiful, ample-bosomed body, round which
+the soft robe is chastely gathered, and across which the long-sleeved
+arms are demurely folded; the most beautiful lady (whose majestic tread
+through the palace rooms we can well imagine) that the art of the
+fifteenth century has recorded. There is, above all, the Carlo
+Marsuppini of Desiderio da Settignano, the humanist Secretary of the
+Commonwealth, lying on the sarcophagus, superb with shell fretwork and
+curling acanthus, in Santa Croce of Florence. For the youthful beauty
+of the Cardinal of Portugal and of the Lady Ilaria are commonplace
+compared with the refinement of this worn old face, with scant wavy hair
+and thin, gently furrowed, but by no means ploughed-up features. The
+slight figure looks as if in life it must have seemed almost
+transparent; and the hands are very pathetic: noble, firm hands, subtle
+of vein and wrist, crossed simply, neither in prayer nor in agony, but
+in gentle weariness, over the book on his breast. That book is certainly
+no prayer-book; rather a volume of Plato or Cicero: in his last moments
+the noble old man has longed for a glance over the familiar pages; they
+have placed the book on his breast, but it has been too late; the
+drowsiness of death has overtaken him, and with his last sigh he has
+gently folded his hands over the volume, with the faint, last clinging
+to the things beloved in this world.
+
+Such is that portrait sculpture of the early Renaissance, its only
+sculpture, if we except the exquisite work in babies and angels just out
+of the nursery of the Robbias, which is a real achievement. But how
+achieved? This art is great just by the things which Antiquity did not.
+And what are those things? Shall we say that it is sentiment? But all
+fine art has tact, antique art most certainly; and as to pathos, why,
+any quiet figure of a dead man or woman, however rudely carved, has
+pathos; nay, there is pathos in the poor puling hysterical art which
+makes angels draw the curtains of fine ladies' bedchambers, and fine
+ladies, in hoop or limp Grecian dress, faint (the smelling bottle,
+Betty!) over their lord's coffin; there is pathos, to a decently
+constituted human being, wherever (despite all absurdities) we can
+imagine that there lies some one whom it was bitter to see departing, to
+whom it was bitter to depart. Pathos, therefore, is not the question;
+and, if you choose to call it sentiment, it is in reality a sentiment
+for line and curve, for stone and light. The great question is, How did
+these men of the Renaissance make their dead people look beautiful? For
+they were not all beautiful in life, and ugly folk do not grow beautiful
+merely because they are dead. The Cardinal of Portugal, the beautiful
+Ilaria herself, were you to sketch their profile and place it by the
+side of no matter what ordinary antique, would greatly fall short of
+what we call sculpturesque beauty; and many of the others, old humanists
+and priests and lawyers, are emphatically ugly: snub or absurdly hooked
+noses, retreating or deformedly overhanging foreheads, fleshy noses, and
+flabby cheeks, blear eyes and sunk-in mouths; and a perfect network of
+wrinkles and creases, which, hard as it is to say, have been scooped out
+not merely by age, but by low mind, fretting and triumphant animalism.
+Now, by what means did the sculptor--the sculptor, too unacquainted with
+sculptural beauty (witness his ugly ideal statues), to be able, like the
+man who turned the successors of Alexander into a race of leonine though
+crazy demi-gods--to insidiously idealize these ugly and insignificant
+features; by what means did he turn these dead men into things beautiful
+to see? I have said that he took up art where Graeco-Roman Antiquity had
+left it. Remark that I say Graeco-Roman, and I ought to add much more
+Roman than Greek. For Greek sculpture, nurtured in the habit of perfect
+form, art to whom beauty was a cheap necessity, invariably idealized
+portrait, idealized it into beauty or inanity. But when Greek art had
+run its course; when beauty of form had well-nigh been exhausted or
+begun to pall; certain artists, presumably Greeks, but working for
+Romans, began to produce portrait work of quite a new and wonderful
+sort: the beautiful portraits of ugly old men, of snub little boys, work
+which was clearly before its right time, and was swamped by idealized
+portraits, insipid, nay, inane, from the elegant revivalist busts of
+Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius down to the bonnet blocks of the lower
+empire. Of this Roman portrait art, of certain heads of half-idiotic
+little Caesar brats, of sly and wrinkled old men, things which ought to
+be so ugly and yet are so beautiful, we say, at least, perhaps
+unformulated, we think, "How Renaissance!" And the secret of the beauty
+of these few Graeco-Roman busts, which is also that of Renaissance
+portrait sculpture, is that the beauty is quite different in kind from
+the beauty of Greek ideal sculpture, and obtained by quite different
+means.
+
+It is, essentially, that kind of beauty which I began by saying
+belonged to realistic art, to the art which is not squeamish about the
+object which it represents, but is squeamish about the manner and medium
+in which that indifferent object is represented; it is a kind of beauty,
+therefore, more akin to that of Rembrandt and Velasquez than to that of
+Michael Angelo or Raphael. It is the beauty, not of large lines and
+harmonies, beauty residing in the real model's forms, beauty real,
+wholesale, which would be the same if the man were not marble but flesh,
+not in a given position but moving; but it is a beauty of combinations
+of light and surface, a beauty of texture opposed to texture, which
+would probably be unperceived in the presence of the more regal beauty
+of line and colour harmonies, and which those who could obtain this
+latter would employ only as much as they were conducive to such larger
+beauties. And this beauty of texture opposed to texture and light
+combined with surface is a very real thing; it is the great reality of
+Renaissance sculpture: this beauty, resulting from the combination, for
+instance, in a commonplace face, of the roughness and coarser pore of
+the close shaven lips and chin with the smoothness of the waxy hanging
+cheeks; the one catching the light, the other breaking it into a ribbed
+and forked penumbra. The very perfection of this kind of work is
+Benedetto da Maiano's bust of Pietro Mellini in the Bargello at
+Florence. The elderly head is of strongly marked osseous structure, yet
+fleshed with abundant and flaccid flesh, hanging in folds or creases
+round the mouth and chin, yet not flobbery and floppy, but solid, though
+yielding, creased, wrinkled, crevassed rather as a sandy hillside is
+crevassed by the trickling waters; semi-solid, promising slight
+resistance, waxy, yielding to the touch. But all the flesh has, as it
+were, gravitated to the lower part of the face, conglomerated, or rather
+draped itself, about the mouth, firmer for sunken teeth and shaving; and
+the skin has remained alone across the head, wrinkled, yet drawn in
+tight folds across the dome-shaped skull, as if, while the flesh
+disappeared, the bone also had enlarged. And on the temples the flesh
+has once been thick, the bone (seemingly) slight; and now the skin is
+being drawn, recently, and we feel more and more every day, into a
+radiation of minute creases, as if the bone and flesh were having a last
+struggle. Now in this head there is little beauty of line (the man has
+never been good-looking), and there is not much character in the sense
+of strongly marked mental or moral personality. I do not know, nor care,
+what manner of man this may have been. The individuality is one, not of
+the mind but of the flesh. What interests, attaches, is not the
+character or temperament, but the bone and skin, the creases and folds
+of flesh. And herein also lies the beauty of the work. I do not mean its
+interest or mere technical skill, I mean distinctly visible and artistic
+beauty.
+
+Thus does the sculptor of the Renaissance get beauty, visible beauty,
+not psychologic interest, out of a plain human being; but the beauty
+(and this is the distinguishing point of what I must call realistic
+decorative art) does not exist necessarily in the plain human being: he
+merely affords the beginning of a pattern which the artist may be able
+to carry out. A person may have in him the making of a really beautiful
+bust and yet be ugly; just as the same person may afford a subject for a
+splendid painting and for an execrable piece of sculpture. The wrinkles
+and creases in a face like that of Benedetto da Maiano's Mellini would
+probably be ugly and perhaps disgusting in the real reddish, flaccid,
+discoloured flesh; while they are admirable in the solid and
+supple-looking marble, in its warm and delicate bistre and yellow.
+Material has an extraordinary effect upon form; colour, though not a
+positive element in sculpture, has immense negative power in
+accentuating or obliterating the mere line. All form becomes vague and
+soft in the dairy flaccidness of modern ivory; and clear and powerful in
+the dark terra cotta, which can ennoble even the fattest and flattest
+faces with its wonderful faculty for making mere surface markings, mere
+crowsfeet, interesting. Thus also with bronze: the polished, worked
+bronze, of fine chocolate burnish and reddish reflections, mars all
+beauty of line; how different the unchased, merely rough cast, greenish,
+with infinite delicate greys and browns, making, for instance, the head
+of an old woman like an exquisite withered, shrivelled, veined autumnal
+leaf. It is moreover, as I have said, a question of combination of
+surface and light, this art which makes beautiful busts of ugly men. The
+ideal statue of the Greeks intended for the open air; fit to be looked
+at under any light, high or low, brilliant or veiled, had indeed to be
+prepared to look well under any light; but to look well under any light
+means not to use any one particular relation of light as an ally; the
+surface was kept modestly subordinated to the features, the features
+which must needs look well at all moments and from all points of view.
+But the Renaissance sculptor knew where his work would be placed; he
+could calculate the effect of the light falling invariably through this
+or that window; he could make a fellow-workman of that light, present
+for it to draw or to obliterate what features he liked, bid it sweep
+away such or such surfaces with a broad stream, cut them with a deep
+shadow, caress their smooth chiselling or their rough grainings, mark as
+with a nail the few large strokes of the point which gave the firmness
+to the strained muscle or stretched skin. Out of this model of his, this
+plain old burgess, he and his docile friend the light, could make quite
+a new thing; a new pattern of bosses and cavities, of smooth sweeps and
+tracked lines, of creases and folds of flesh, of pliable linen and rough
+brocade of dress: something new, something which, without a single
+feature being straightened or shortened, yet changed completely the
+value of the whole assemblage of features; something undreamed of by
+nature in moulding that ugly old merchant or humanist. With this art
+which produced works like Desiderio da Settignano's Carlo Marsuppini and
+Benedetto da Maiano's Pietro Mellini, is intimately connected the art of
+the great medallists of the Renaissance--Pasti, Guacialotti, Niccolo
+Fiorentino, and, greatest of all, Pisanello. Its excellence depends
+precisely upon its independence of the ideal work of Antiquity; nay,
+even upon the fact that, while the ancients, striking their coins in
+chased metal dies, obtained an astonishing minuteness and clearness of
+every separate little stroke and dint, and were therefore forced into an
+almost more than sculptural perfection of mere line, of mere profile and
+throat and elaborately composed hair, a sort of sublime abstraction of
+the possible beauty of a human face, as in the coins of Syracuse and
+also of Alexander; the men of the fifteenth century employed the process
+of casting the bronze in a concave mould obtained by the melting away of
+a medallion in wax; in wax, which taking the living impress of the
+artist's finger, and recalling in its firm and yet soft texture the real
+substance of the human face, insensibly led the medallist to seek, not
+sharp and abstract lines, but simple, strongly moulded bosses; not ideal
+beauty, but the real appearance of life. It is, moreover, a significant
+fact that while the men who, half a century or so later, made fine,
+characterless die-stamped medals in imitation of the antique, Caradossi
+and Benvenuto for instance, were goldsmiths and sculptors, workers with
+the chisel, artists seeking essentially for abstract elegance of line;
+the two greatest medallists of the early Renaissance, Vittore Pisano and
+Matteo di Pasti, were both of them painters; and painters of the
+Northern Italian school, to whom colour and texture were all important,
+and linear form a matter of indifference. And indeed, if we look at the
+best work of what I may call the wax mould medallists of the fifteenth
+century, even at the magnificent marble medallions of the
+laurel-wreathed head of Sigismund Malatesta on the pillars of his church
+at Rimini, modelled by Pasti, we shall see that these men were
+preoccupied almost exclusively with the almost pictorial effect of the
+flesh in its various degrees of boss and of reaction of the light; and
+that the character, the beauty even, which they attained, is essentially
+due to a skilful manipulation of texture, and surface, and light--one
+might almost say of colour. We all know Pisanello's famous heads of the
+Malatesti of Rimini: the saturnine Sigismund, the delicate dapper
+Novello, the powerful yet beautiful Isotta; but there are other
+Renaissance medals which illustrate my meaning even better, and connect
+my feelings on the subject of this branch of art more clearly with my
+feelings towards such work as Benedetto's Pietro Mellini. Foremost among
+these is the perhaps somewhat imperfect and decidedly grotesque, but
+astonishingly powerful, naif and characteristic Lorenzo dei Medici by
+Niccolo real grandeur of whose conception of this coarse yet imaginative
+head may be profitably contrasted with the classicizing efforts after
+the demi-god or successor of Alexander in Pollaiolo's famous medal of
+the Pazzi conspiracy. Next to this I would place a medal by Guacialotti
+of Bishop Niccolo Palmieri, with the motto, "Nudus egressus sic
+redibo"--singularly appropriate to the shameless fleshliness of the
+personage, with his naked fat chest and shoulders, his fat, pig-like
+cheeks and greasy-looking bald head; a hideous beast, yet magnificent in
+his bestiality like some huge fattened porker. These medals give us, as
+does the bust of Pietro Mellini, beauty of the portrait despite ugliness
+of the original. But there are two other medals, this time by Pisanello,
+and, as it seems to me, perhaps his masterpieces, which show the quite
+peculiar way in which this homely charm of portraiture amalgamates, so
+as to form a homogeneous and most seemingly simple whole, with the
+homely charm of certain kinds of pure and simple youthful types. One of
+these (the reverse of which fantastically represents the four elements,
+the wooded earth, the starry sky, the rippled sea, the sun, all in one
+sphere) is the portrait of Don Inigo d'Avalos; the other that of Cecilia
+Gonzaga. This slender beardless boy in the Spanish shovel hat and wisp
+of scarf twisted round the throat; and this tall, long-necked girl, with
+sloping shoulders and still half-developed bosom; are, so to speak,
+brother and sister in art, in Pisanello's wonderful genius. The relief
+of the two medals is extremely low, so that in certain lights the
+effigies vanish almost completely, sink into the pale green surface of
+the bronze; the portraits are a mere film, a sort of haze which has
+arisen on the bronze and gathered into human likeness; but in this film,
+this scarce perceptible relief, we are made to perceive the slender
+osseous structure, the smooth, sleek, childish blond flesh and hair, the
+delicate, undecided pallor of extreme youth and purity, even as we might
+in some elaborate portrait by Velasquez, but with a spring-like
+healthiness which Velasquez, painting his lymphatic Hapsburgs, rarely
+has.
+
+Such is this Renaissance art of medals, this side branch of the great
+realistic portraiture in stone of the Benedettos, Desiderios, and
+Rossellinos; a perfect thing in itself; and one which, if we muse over
+it in connection with the more important works of fifteenth century
+sculpture, will perhaps lead us to think that, as the sculpture of
+Antiquity, in its superb idealism, its devotion to the perfect line and
+curve of beauty, achieved the highest that mere colourless art can
+achieve--thanks to the very purity, sternness, and narrowness of its
+sculpturesque feeling--so also, perhaps, modern sculpture, should it
+ever re-arise, must be a continuation of the tendencies of the
+Renaissance, must be the humbler sister of painting, must seek for the
+realistic portrait and begin, perhaps, with the realistic medal.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+This kind of realism, where only the model is ugly, while the portrait
+is beautiful; which seeks decorative value by other means than the
+intrinsic excellence of form in the object represented, this kind of
+realism is quite different in sort from the realisms of immature art,
+which, aiming at nothing beyond a faithful copy, is content with
+producing an ugly picture of an ugly thing. Now this latter kind of
+realism endured in painting some time after decorative realism such as I
+have described had reached perfection in sculpture. Nor was it till
+later, and when the crude scholastic realism had completely come to an
+end, that there became even partially possible in painting decorative
+realism analogous to what we have noticed in sculpture; while it was not
+till after the close of the Italian Renaissance period that the painters
+arose in Spain and the Netherlands who were able to treat their subjects
+with the uncompromising decorative realism of Desiderio or Rosellino or
+Benedetto da Maiano. For the purely imitative realism of the painters of
+the early Renaissance was succeeded in Italy by idealism, which matured
+in the great art of intrinsically beautiful linear form of Michael
+Angelo and Raphael, and the great art of intrinsically beautiful colour
+form of Giorgione and Titian. These two schools were bound to be, each
+in its degree, idealistic. Complete power of mere representation in
+tint and colour having been obtained through the realistic drudgery of
+the early Renaissance, selection in the objects thus to be represented
+had naturally arisen; and the study of the antique had further hastened
+and directed this movement of art no longer to study but to achieve, to
+be decorative once more, decorative no longer in subservience to
+architecture, but as the separate and self-sufficing art of painting.
+Selection, therefore, which is the only practical kind of idealism, had
+begun as soon as painting was possessed of the power of representing
+objects in their relations of line and colour, with that amount of light
+and shadow requisite to the just appreciation of the relations of form
+and the just relations of colour. Now art which stops short at this
+point of representation must inevitably be, if decorative at all,
+idealistically decorative; it must be squeamish respecting the objects
+represented, respecting their real structure, colour, position, and
+grouping. For, of the visible impressions received from an object, some
+are far more intrinsic than others. Suppose we see a woman, beautiful in
+the structure of her body, and beautiful in the colour of her person and
+her draperies, standing under a light which is such as we should call
+beautiful and interesting: of these three qualities one will be
+intrinsic in the woman, the second very considerably so, the third not
+at all. For, let us call that woman away and replace her immediately by
+another woman chosen at random. We shall immediately perceive that we
+have lost one pleasurable impression, that of beautiful bodily
+structure: the woman has taken away her well-shapen body. Next we shall
+perceive a notable diminution in the second pleasurable impression: the
+woman has taken with her, not indeed her well-tinted garments, which we
+may have bestowed on her successor, but her beautifully coloured skin
+and hair, so that of the pleasing colour-impression will remain only as
+much as was due to, and may have been retained with, the original
+woman's clothes. But if we look for our third pleasurable impression,
+our beautiful light, we shall find that unchanged, whether it fall upon
+a magnificently arrayed goddess or upon a sordid slut And, conversely,
+the beautiful woman, when withdrawn from that light and placed in any
+other, will be equally lovely in form, even if we cast her in plaster,
+and lose the colour of her skin and hair; or if we leave her not only
+the beautiful tints of her flesh and hair, but her own splendidly
+coloured garments, we shall still have, in whatsoever light, a
+magnificent piece of colour. But if we recall the poor ugly creature who
+has succeeded her from out of that fine effect of light, we shall have
+nothing but a hideous form invested in hideous colour.
+
+This rough diagram will be sufficient to explain my thought respecting
+the relative degree to which the art dealing with linear form, that
+dealing with colour and that dealing with light, with the medium in
+which form and colour are perceived; is each respectively bound to be
+idealistically or realistically decorative. Now painting was
+aesthetically mature, possessed the means to achieve great beauty, at a
+time when of the three modes of representation there had as yet
+developed only those of linear form and colour; and the very possibility
+and necessity of immediately achieving all that could be achieved by
+these means delayed for a long time the development of the third mode of
+representation: the representation of objects as they appear with
+reference to the light through which they are seen. A beginning had
+indeed been made. Certain of Correggio's effects of light, even more an
+occasional manner of treating the flesh and hair, reducing both form and
+colour to a kind of vague boss and vague sheen, such as they really
+present in given effects of light, a something which we define roughly
+as eminently modern in the painting of his clustered cherubs; all this
+is certainly a beginning of the school of Velasquez. Still more so is it
+the case with Andrea del Sarto, the man of genius whom critics love to
+despatch as a mediocrity, because his art, which is art altogether for
+the eyes, and in which he innovated more than any of his contemporaries,
+does not afford any excuse for the irrelevancies of ornamental
+criticism; with him the appearance of form and colour, acted upon by
+light, the relative values of which flesh and draperies consist with
+reference to the surrounding medium, all this becomes so evident a
+preoccupation and a basis for decorative effects, as to give certain of
+his works an almost startling air of being modern. But this tendency
+comes to nothing: the men of the sixteenth century appear scarcely to
+have perceived wherein lay the true excellence of this "Andrea senza
+errori," deeming him essentially the artist of linear perfection; while
+the innovations of Correggio in the way of showing the relations of
+flesh tones and light ended in the mere coarse gala illuminations in
+which his successors made their seraphs plunge and sprawl. There was too
+much to be done, good and bad, in the way of mere linear form and mere
+colour; and as art of mere linear form and colour, indifferent of all
+else, did the art of the Italian Renaissance run to seed.
+
+I said at the beginning of this paper that the degree to which any art
+is strictly idealistic, can be measured by the terms which it will make
+with portrait. For as portrait is due to the desire to represent a
+person quite apart from that person affording material for decoration,
+it is evident that only the art which can call in the assistance of
+decorative materials, independent of the represented individual, can
+possibly make a beautiful picture out of an ugly man; while the art
+which deals only with such visible peculiarities as are inherent in the
+individual, has no kind of outlet, is cornered, and can make of a
+repulsive original only a repulsive picture. The analogy to this we have
+already noticed in sculpture: antique sculpture, considering only the
+linear bosses which existed equally in the living man and in the statue,
+could not afford to represent plain people; while Renaissance sculpture,
+extracting a large amount of beauty out of combinations of surface and
+light, was able, as long as it could arrange such an artificial
+combination, to dispense with great perfection in the model. Nay, if we
+except Renaissance statuary as a kind of separate art, we may say that
+this independence of the object portrayed is a kind of analytic test,
+enabling us to judge at a glance, and by the degree of independence from
+the model, the degree to which any art is removed from the mere line and
+boss of antique sculpture. In the statue standing free in any light that
+may chance to come, every form must be beautiful from every point; but
+in proportion as the new elements of painting enter, in proportion as
+the actual linear form and boss is marked and helped out by grouping,
+colour, and light and shade, does the actual perfection of the model
+become less important; until, under the reign of light as the chief
+factor, it becomes altogether indifferent. In this fact lies the only
+rational foundation for the notion, made popular by Hegel, that painting
+is an art in which beauty is of much less account than in sculpture;
+failing to understand that the sum total of beauty remained the same,
+whether dependent upon the concentration of a single element or obtained
+by the co-operation of several consequently less singly important
+elements.
+
+But to return to the question of portrait art. From what we have seen,
+it is clear that art which requires perfection of form will be reduced
+to ugliness if cramped in the obtaining of such perfection, whereas art
+which can obtain beauty by other means will still have a chance when
+reduced to imitate ugly object? Hence it is that while the realistically
+decorative art of the seventeenth century can make actually beautiful
+things of the portraits of ugly people, the idealistically decorative
+art of the Renaissance produces portraits which are cruelly ugly in
+proportion as the art is purely idealistic. Yet even in idealism there
+are degrees: the more the art is confined to mere linear form, to the
+exclusion of colour, the uglier will be the portraits. With Michael
+Angelo the difficulty was simplified to impossibility: he could not
+paint portrait at all; and in his sculptured portraits of the two
+Medicean dukes at S. Lorenzo he evaded all attempt at likeness, making
+those two men into scarcely more than two architectural monsters,
+half-human cousins of the fantastic creatures who keep watch on the
+belfries and gurgoyles of a Gothic cathedral. It is almost impossible to
+think of Michael Angelo attempting portrait: the man's genius cannot be
+constrained to it, and what ought to be mere ugliness would come out
+idealized into grandiose monstrosity. Men like Titian and Tintoret are
+at the other end of the scale of ideal decoration: they are bordering
+upon the domain of realism. Hence they can raise into interest, by the
+mere power of colour, many an insignificant type; yet even they are
+incapable of dealing with absolute ugliness, with absence of fine
+colour, or, if they do deal with it, there is an immediate improvement
+upon the model, and the appearance of truthfulness goes. Between the
+absolute incapacity for dealing with ugliness of Michael Angelo, and the
+power of compromising with it of Titian and Tintoret, Raphael stands
+half-way: he can call in the assistance of colour just sufficiently to
+create a setting of carefully harmonized draperies and accessories,
+beautiful enough to allow of his filling it up with the most cruelly
+ugly likeness which any painter ever painted. Far too much has been
+written about Raphael in general, but not half enough about Raphael as a
+portrait-painter; for by the side of the eclectic idealist, who combined
+and balanced beauty almost into insipidity, is the most terribly,
+inflexibly veracious portrait-painter that ever was. Compared with those
+sternly straightforward portraits of his Florentine and Roman time,
+where ugliness and baseness are never attenuated by one tittle, and
+alloyed nobility or amiability, as with his finer models, like the two
+Donis, husband and wife, and Bibbiena, is never purified of its
+troubling element; compared with them the Venetian portraits are mere
+insincere, enormously idealized pieces of colour-harmony; nay, the
+portraits of Velasquez are mere hints--given rapidly by a sickened
+painter striving to make those scrofulous Hapsburgs no longer mere men,
+but keynotes of harmonies of light--of what the people really are. For
+Velasquez seems to show us the temperament, the potentiality of his
+people, and to leave us, with a kind of dignified and melancholy silence
+as to all further, to find out what life, what feelings and actions,
+such a temperament implies. But Raphael shows us all: the temperament
+and the character, the real active creature, with all the marks of his
+present temper and habits, with all the indications of his immediate
+actions upon him: completely without humour or bitterness, without the
+smallest tendency to twist the reality into caricature or monstrosity,
+nay, perhaps without much psychologic analysis to tell him the exact
+meaning of what he is painting, going straight to the point, and utterly
+ruthless from sheer absence of all alternative of doing otherwise than
+he does. There is nothing more cruelly realistic in the world, cruel not
+only to the base originals but to the feelings of the spectator, than
+the harmony of villainies, of various combinations of black and hog-like
+bestiality, and fox and wolf-like cunning and ferocity with wicked human
+thought and self-command, which Raphael has enshrined in that splendid
+harmony of scarlet silk and crimson satin, and purple velvet and dull
+white brocade, as the portraits of Leo X. and his cardinals Rossi and
+Dei Medici.
+
+The idealistic painter, accustomed to rely upon the intrinsic beauty
+which he has hitherto been able to select or create; accustomed also to
+think of form as something quite independent of the medium through which
+it is seen, scarcely conscious of the existence of light and air in his
+habit of concentrating all attention upon a figure placed, as it were,
+in a sort of vacuum of indifference;--this idealistic artist is left
+without any resources when bid to paint an ugly man or woman. With the
+realistic artist, to whom the man or woman is utterly indifferent, to
+whom the medium in which they are seen is everything, the case Is just
+reversed: let him arrange his light, his atmospheric effect, and he will
+work into their pattern no matter what plain or repulsive wretch. To
+Velasquez the flaccid yellowish fair flesh, with its grey downy shadows,
+the limp pale drab hair, which is grey in the light and scarcely
+perceptibly blond in the shade, all this unhealthy, bloodless, feebly
+living, effete mass of humanity called Philip IV. of Spain, shivering in
+moral anaemia like some dog thorough bred into nothingness, becomes
+merely the foundation for a splendid harmony of pale tints. Again, the
+poor little baby princess, with scarce visible features, seemingly
+kneaded (but not sufficiently pinched and modelled) out of the wet ashes
+of an _auto da fe_, in her black-and-white frock (how different from the
+dresses painted by Raphael and Titian!), dingy and gloomy enough for an
+abbess or a cameriera major, this childish personification of courtly
+dreariness, certainly born on an Ash Wednesday, becomes the principal
+strands for a marvellous tissue of silvery and ashy light, tinged
+yellowish in the hair, bluish in the eyes and downy cheeks, pale red in
+the lips and the rose in the hair; something to match which in beauty
+you must think of some rarely seen veined and jaspered rainy twilight,
+or opal-tinted hazy winter morning. Ugliness, nay, repulsiveness,
+vanish, subdued into beauty, even as noxious gases may be subdued into
+health-giving substances by some cunning chemist. The difference between
+such portraits as these and the portraits by Raphael does not however
+consist merely in the beauty: there is also the fact that if you take
+one of Velasquez's portraits out of their frame, reconstitute the living
+individual, and bid him walk forth in whatsoever light may fall upon
+him, you will have something infinitely different from the portrait, and
+of which your only distinct feeling will be that a fine portrait might
+be made of the creature; whereas it is a matter of complete indifference
+whether you see Raphael's Leo X. in the flesh or in his gilded frame.
+
+Whatever may fairly be said respecting the relative value of idealistic
+and realistic decorative art is really also connected with this latter
+point. Considering that realistic art is merely obtaining beauty by
+attention to other factors than those which preoccupy idealistic art,
+that the one fulfils what the other neglects--taking the matter from
+this point of view, it would seem as if the two kinds of arts were, so
+to speak, morally equal; and that any vague sense of mysterious
+superior dignity clinging to idealistic art was a mere shred of long
+discarded pedantry. But it is not so. For realistic art does more than
+merely bring into play powers unknown to idealistic art: it becomes, by
+the possession of these powers, utterly indifferent to the intrinsic
+value of the forms represented: it is so certain of making everything
+lovely by its harmonies of light and atmosphere that it almost prefers
+to choose inferior things for this purpose. I am thinking at present of
+a picture by I forget what Dutchman in our National Gallery,
+representing in separate compartments five besotten-looking creatures,
+symbolical of the five senses: they are ugly, brutish, with I know not
+what suggestion of detestable temperament in their bloodshot flesh and
+vermilion lips, as if the whole man were saturated with his appetite.
+Yet the Dutchman has found the means of making these degraded types into
+something which we care to look at, and to look at on account of its
+beauty; even as, in lesser degree, Rubens has always managed to make us
+feel towards his flaccid, veal-complexioned, fish-eyed women, something
+of what we feel towards the goddesses of the Parthenon; towards the
+white-robed, long-gloved ladies, with meditative face beneath their
+crimped auburn hair, of Titian.
+
+Viewed in one way, there is a kind of nobility in the very fact that
+such realistic art can make us pardon, can redeem, nay almost sanctify,
+so much. But is it right thus to pardon, redeem, and sanctify; thus to
+bring the inferior on to the level of the superior? Nay, is it not
+rather wrong to teach us to endure so much meanness and ugliness in
+creatures, on account of the nobility with which they are represented?
+Is this not vitiating our feelings, blunting our desire for the better,
+our repugnance for the worse?
+
+A great and charitable art, this realistic art of the seventeenth
+century, and to be respected for its very tenderness towards the scorned
+and castaway things of reality; but accustoming us, perhaps too much,
+like all charitable and reclaiming impulses, to certain unworthy
+contacts: in strange contrast herein with that narrow but ascetic and
+aristocratic art of idealism, which, isolated and impoverished though it
+may be, has always the dignity of its immaculate purity, of its
+unswerving judgment, of its obstinate determination to deal only with
+the best. A hard task to judge between them. But be this as it may, it
+is one of the singular richnesses of the Italian Renaissance that it
+knew of both tendencies; that while in painting it gave the equivalent
+of that rigid idealism of the Greeks which can make no compromise with
+ugliness; in sculpture it possessed the equivalent of the realism of
+Velasquez, which can make beauty out of ugly things, even as the chemist
+can make sugar out of vitriol.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO.
+
+"Le donne, i cavalieri, l' armi, gli amori."
+
+
+
+I.
+
+Throughout the tales of Charlemagne and his warriors, overtopping by far
+the crowd of paladins and knights, move two colossal mailed and vizored
+figures--Roland, whom the Italians call Orlando and the Spaniards
+Roldan, the son of Milon d'Angers and of Charlemagne's sister; and
+Renaud or Rinaldo, the lord of Montauban, and eldest of the famous four
+sons of Aymon. These are the two representative heroes, equal but
+opposed, the Achilles and Odysseus, the Siegfried and Dietrich, of the
+Carolingian epic; and in each is personified, by the unconscious genius
+of the early Middle Ages, one of the great political movements, of the
+heroic struggles, of feudalism. For there existed in feudalism two
+forces, a centripetal and a centrifugal--a force which made for the
+supremacy of the kingly overlordship, and a force which made for the
+independence of the great vassals. Hence, in the poetry which is the
+poetry of feudalism, two distinct currents of feeling, two distinct
+epics---the epic of the devoted loyalty of all the heroes of France to
+their wise and mighty emperor Charlemagne, triumphant even in
+misfortune; and the epic of the hopeless resistance against a craven and
+capricious despot Charles of the most righteous and whole-hearted among
+his feudatories: the epic of Roland, and the epic of Renaud. Of the
+first there remains to us, in its inflexible and iron solemnity, an
+original rhymed narrative, "The Chanson de Roland," which we may read
+perhaps almost in the self-same words in which it was sung by the
+Normans of William in their night watch before the great battle. The
+centripetal force of feudalism gained the upper hand, and the song of
+the great empire, of the great deeds of loyal prowess, was consecrated
+in the feudal monarchy. The case was different with the tale of
+resistance and rebellion. The story of Renaud soon became a dangerous
+lesson for the great barons; it fell from the hands of the nobles to
+those of humbler folk; and it is preserved to us no longer in mediaeval
+verse, but in a prose version, doubtless of the fifteenth century, under
+the name, familiar on the stalls of village fairs, of "The Quatre Fils
+Aymon." But, as Renaud is the equal of Roland, so is this humble prose
+tale nevertheless the equal of the great song of Roncevaux; and even
+now, it would be a difficult task to decide which were the grander, the
+tale of loyalty or the tale of resistance.
+
+In each of these tales,"The Chanson de Roland" and "The Quatre Fils
+Aymon," there is contained a picture of its respective hero, which sums
+up, as it were, the whole noble character of the book; and which, the
+picture of the dying Roland and the picture of the dying Renaud, I would
+fain bring before you before speaking of the other Roland and the other
+Renaud, the Orlando of Ariosto and the Rinaldo of Boiardo. The traitor
+Ganelon has enabled King Marsile to overtake with all his heathenness
+the rear-guard of Charlemagne between the granite walls of Roncevaux;
+the Franks have been massacred, but the Saracens have been routed;
+Roland has at last ceded to the prayers of Oliver and of Archbishop
+Turpin; three times has he put to his mouth his oliphant and blown a
+blast to call back Charlemagne to vengeance, till the blood has foamed
+round his lips and his temple has burst. Oliver is dead, the archbishop
+is dying, Roland himself is slowly bleeding to death. He goes down into
+the defile, heaped with corpses, and seeks for the bodies of the
+principal paladins, Ivon and Ivaire, the Gascon Engelier, Gerier and
+Gerin, Berenger and Otho, Anseis and Salamon, and the old Gerard of
+Rousillon; and one by one drags them to where the archbishop lies dying.
+And then, when to these knights Roland has at last added his own beloved
+comrade Oliver, he bids the archbishop bless all the dead, before he die
+himself. Then, when he has reverently crossed Turpin's beautiful
+priestly hands over his breast, he goes forth to shatter his sword
+Durendal against the rocks; but the good sword has cut the rock without
+shivering; and the coldness of death steals, over Roland. He stretches
+himself upon a hillock looking towards Spain, and prays for the
+forgiveness of his sins; then, with Durendal and his ivory horn by his
+side, he stretches out the glove of his right hand to God. "He has
+stretched forth to God the glove of his right hand; St. Gabriel has
+received it... Then his head has sunk on his arm; he has gone, with
+clasped hands, to his end. God sends him one of his cherubim and St.
+Michael of Peril. St. Gabriel has come with them. They carry the soul of
+the Count: up to paradise."
+
+More solitary, and solemn and sad even, is the end of the other hero, of
+the great rebel Renaud of Montauban. At length, after a lifetime wasted
+in fruitless, attempts to resist the iniquity of the emperor, to baffle
+his power, to shame him by magnanimity into, justice, the four sons of
+Aymon, who have given up their youth, their manhood, the dearest things
+to their heart, respect to their father and loyalty to their sovereign,
+rather than countenance the injustice of Charlemagne to their kinsman,
+have at last obtained to be pardoned; to be pardoned, they, heroes, by
+this, dastardly tyrant, and to quietly sink, broken-hearted into
+nothingness. The eldest, Renaud, returning from his exile and the Holy
+Land, finds that his wife Clarisse has pined for him and died; and
+then, putting away his armour from him, and dressing in a pilgrim's
+frock made of the purple serge of the dead lady's robe, he goes forth to
+wander through the world; not very old in years, but broken-spirited; at
+peace, but in solitude of heart. And one evening he arrives at Cologne.
+We can imagine the old knight, only half aware of the sunshine of the
+evening, the noise of the streets, the looks of the crowd, the great
+minster rising half-finished in the midst of the town by the Rhine, the
+cries and noise and chipping of the masons; unconscious of all this,
+half away: with his brothers hiding in the Ardennes, living on roots and
+berries, at bay before Charlemagne; or wandering ragged and famishing
+through France; with King Yon brilliant at Toulouse, seeing perhaps for
+the first time his bride Clarisse, or the towers of Montauban rising
+under the workmen's hands; thinking perhaps of the frightful siege, when
+all, all had been eaten in the fortress, and his children Aymonnet and
+Yonnet, all thin and white, knelt down and begged him to slaughter his
+horse Bayard that they might eat; perhaps of that journey, when he and
+his brothers, all in red-furred robes with roses in their hands, rode
+prisoners of King Charles across the plain of Vaucouleurs; perhaps of
+when he galloped up to the gallows at Montfaucon, and cut loose his
+brother Richard; or of that daring ride to Paris, where he and his horse
+won the race, snatched the prize from before Charlemagne and sped off
+crying out that the winner was Renaud of Montauban; or, perhaps, seeing
+once more the sad, sweet face of the Lady Clarisse, when she had burned
+all her precious stuffs and tires in the castle-yard, and lay dead
+without him to kiss her cold mouth; of seeing once more his good horse
+Bayard, when he kissed him in his stall before giving him to be killed
+by Charlemagne. Thinking of all that past, seeing it all within his
+mind, and seeing but little of the present; as, in the low yellow light,
+he helped, for his bread, the workmen to heave the great beams, to carry
+the great stones of the cathedral, to split the huge marble masses while
+they stared in astonished envy; as he sat, unconscious of their
+mutterings, eating his dry bread and porridge in the building docks by
+the river. And then, when wearied, he had sunk to sleep in the hay-loft,
+dreaming perchance that all this evil life was but a dream and the
+awakening therefrom to happiness and strength; the jealous workmen came
+and killed him with their base tools, and cast him into the Rhine. They
+say that the huge body floated on the water, surrounded by a great halo;
+and that when the men of the banks, seeing this, reverently fished it
+out, they found that the noble corpse was untouched by decay, and still
+surrounded by a light of glory. And thus, it seems to me, this Renaud,
+this rebel baron of whose reality we know nothing, has floated
+surrounded by a halo of poetry down the black flood of the Middle Ages
+(in which so much has sunk); and when we look upon his face, and see
+its beauty and strength and solemness, we feel, like the people of the
+Rhine bank, inclined to weep, and to say of this mysterious corpse,
+"Surely this is some great saint."
+
+Of each of these heroes thus shown us by the Middle Ages, the Italian
+Renaissance also, by the hand of two of her greatest poets, has given us
+a picture. And first, of Roland. Of him, of Count Orlando, we are told
+by Messer Lodovico Ariosto, that in consequence of his having
+discovered, in a certain pleasant grotto among the ferns and maidenhair,
+words graven on the rock (interrupted, doubtless, by the lover's kisses)
+which revealed that the Princess Angelica of Cathay had disdained him
+for Medoro, the fair-haired page of the King of the Moors; Count Orlando
+went straightway out of his mind, and hanging up his armour and
+stripping off his clothes, galloped about on his bare-backed horse,
+slaughtering cows and sheep instead of Saracens; until it pleased God,
+moved by the danger of Christendom and the prayers of Charlemagne, to
+permit Astolfo to ride on the hippogriffs back up to the moon, and bring
+back thence the wits of the great paladin contained in a small phial. We
+all know that merry tale. What the Renaissance has to say of Renaud of
+Montauban is even stranger and more fantastic. One day, says Matteo
+Boiardo, in the fifteenth canto of the second part of his "Orlando
+Innamorato," as Rinaldo of Montalbano, the contemner of love, was riding
+in the Ardennes, he came to a clearing in the forest, where, close to
+the fountain of Merlin, a wonderful sight met his eyes. On a flowery
+meadow were dancing three naked damsels, and singing with them danced
+also a naked youth, dark of eyes and fair of hair, the first down on his
+lips, so that some might have said it was and others that it was not
+there. On Rinaldo's approach they broke through their singing and
+dancing, and rushed upon him, pelting him with roses and hyacinths and
+violets from their baskets, and beating him with great sheaves of
+lilies, which burnt like flames through the plates of his armour to the
+very marrow of his bones. Then when they had dragged him, tied with
+garlands, by the feet round and round the meadow; wings, eyed not with
+the eyes of a peacock but with the eyes of lovely damsels, suddenly
+sprouted out of their shoulders, and they flew off, leaving the poor
+baron, bruised on the grass, to meditate upon the vanity of all future
+resistance to love.
+
+Such are the things which the Middle Ages and the Renaissance found to
+tell us of the two great heroes of Carolingian poetry. And the
+explanation of how it came to pass, that for the Roland of the song of
+Roncevaux was substituted the Orlando of Ariosto, and for the Renaud of
+"The Quatre Fils Aymon" the Rinaldo of Matteo Boiardo--means simply that
+which I desire here to study: the metamorphoses of mediaeval romance
+stuffs, and, more especially, the vicissitudes of the cycle of
+Charlemagne.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+We are apt to think of the Middle Ages as if they were the
+companion-piece to Antiquity; but no such ideal correspondence exists
+between the two periods. Antiquity is all of a piece, and the Middle
+Ages, on the contrary, are heterogeneous and chaotic. For Antiquity is
+the steady and uniform development of civilization in one direction and
+with one meaning; there are great differences between its various
+epochs, but they are as the differences between the budding, the
+blossoming, and the fading stages of one plant: life varies, but is one.
+The Middle Ages, on the other hand, are a series of false starts, of
+interruptions and of new departures; a perpetual confusion. For, if we
+think over them, we shall see that these centuries called mediaeval are
+occupied by the effort of one people, or one generation, to put to
+rights and settle down among as much as it can save of the civilization
+of Antiquity. And the sudden overwhelming of this people or this
+generation by another, which puts all the elaborate arrangements into
+disarray, adds to the ruins of Antiquity the ruins of more recent times;
+and then this destroying generation tries to put things straight, to
+settle down, and is in its turn interrupted by the advent of some new
+comer who begins the game afresh.
+
+As it is with peoples, so also is it with ideas; scarcely has a scheme
+of life or of philosophy or of art taken shape and consistence before,
+from out of the inexhaustible chaos of mediaeval thought and feeling,
+there issue new necessities, new aspirations, which put into confusion
+all previous ones. The Middle Ages were like some financial crisis: a
+little time, a little credit, money will fructify, wealth will reappear,
+the difficult moment will be tided over; and so with civilization. But
+unfortunately the wealth of ideas began to accumulate in the storehouse
+only just long enough to bring down a rout of creditors, people who
+rifled the bank, and went home to consume or invest their money in order
+to be succeeded by others. Hence, in the matter of civilization, the
+Middle Ages ended in an extraordinary slow ruin, a bankruptcy like that
+which overtook France before '89, and from which, as France was restored
+by the bold seizure and breaking up of property of the revolution, the
+world was restored by the bold breaking of feudal and spiritual
+mortmain, the restoring of wasted energies to utility, of that great
+double revolution, the Renaissance and the Reformation. Be this as it
+may, mankind throughout the Middle Ages appears to have been in a
+chronic condition of packing up and unpacking, and packing up again; one
+after another a nation, a race, a philosophy, a political system came to
+the front and was pushed back again into limbo: Germans and Kelts and
+Latins, French civilization of the day of Abelard, Provencal
+civilization of the days of the Raymonds, brilliant and evanescent
+Hohenstauffen supremacy, papacy at Canossa and at Avignon, Templars
+triumphant and Templars persecuted; scholasticism, mysticism, feudalism,
+democracy, communism: influences all these perpetually rising up and
+being trodden down, till they all rotted away in the great stagnation of
+the fifteenth century; and only in one part of the world, where the
+conflict was more speedily ended, where one set of tendencies early
+triumphed, where stability was temporarily obtained, in Italy alone did
+civilization continue to be nurtured and developed for the benefit of
+all mankind. In such a state of affairs only such things could flourish
+and mature as were safe from what I have called, for want of a better
+expression, the perpetual unpacking and repacking, the perpetual being
+on the move, of the Middle Ages; and among such things foremost was art,
+the essential art of the times, architecture, which, belonging to the
+small towns, to the infinite minority of the democracy, who worked and
+made money and let the great changes pass over their heads, thrived
+almost as something too insignificant for notice. But it was different
+with literature. Cathedrals once built cannot so easily be changed; new
+peoples, new ideas, must accept them. But poetry--the thing which every
+nation insists upon having to suit its own taste, the thing which every
+nation and every generation carries about with it hither and thither,
+the thing which can be altered to suit every passing whim--poetry was,
+of all the fluctuating things of the Middle Ages, perhaps the most
+fluctuating. And fluctuating also because, as none of these various
+nations, tendencies, aspirations, dominated sufficiently long to produce
+any highly organized art, there remained no standard works, nothing
+recognizedly perfect, which would be kept for its perfection and gather
+round it imitations, so as to form the nucleus of any homogeneous
+tradition. The Middle Ages, so full of fashions in literary matters,
+possessed no classics; the minnesingers knew nothing of the stern old
+Teutonic war songs; the meistersaengers had forgotten the minnesingers;
+the trouveres and troubadours knew nothing of "The Chanson de Roland,"
+and Villon knew nothing of them; only in Italy, where the Middle Ages
+came to an end and the Renaissance began with the Lombard league, was
+there established a tradition of excellence, with men like Dante,
+Petrarch, and Boccaccio, handed down from generation to generation; even
+as, while in the north there came about the strange modification which
+substituted the French of Rabelais for the French of Chrestien de
+Troyes, the German of Luther for the German of Wolfram von Eschenbach,
+the Italian language, from Ciullo d'Alcamo almost to Boiardo and Lorenzo
+dei Medici, remained virtually identical. The result of this, which I
+may call the heterogeneousness and instability of the Middle Ages was
+that not merely literary forms were for ever arising and being
+superseded, but literary subject matter was continually undergoing a
+process of transformation. While in Antiquity the great epic and tragic
+stuffs remained well-nigh unaltered, and the stories of Valerius Flaccus
+and Apollonius Rhodius were merely the stories which had been current
+since the days of Homer, during the course of the Middle Ages every epic
+cycle, and every tale belonging thereunto, was gradually adulterated,
+mingled with, swamped by, some other cycle or tale; nay, rather, every
+other, cycle and every other tale, the older ones trying to save their
+popularity by admixture with the more recent, till at last all mythical
+significance, all historical meaning, all national character, all
+psychological reality, were lost in the chaotic result. And meanwhile,
+in the absence of any stable language, of any durable literary fashion,
+the Middle Ages were unable to give to these epic stuffs, at any one
+period of their life of metamorphose, a form sufficiently artistically
+valuable to secure anything beyond momentary vogue, to secure for them
+the immortality of the great Greek tales of adventure and warfare and
+love. Thus it came about that the epic cycle of Charlemagne, after
+supplanting in men's minds the grand sagas of the pagan North, was
+itself supplanted by the Arthurian cycle; that the Frankish stories
+absorbed the wholly discrepant elements of their more fortunate Keltic
+rivals; that both cycles, having lost all character through fusion and
+through obliteration by time, became more meaningless generation by
+generation and year by year, until when the Middle Ages had come to an
+end, and the great poets of the Renaissance were ready to give this old
+mediaeval epic stuff a definitive and durable artistic shape, there came
+to the hands of Boiardo and Ariosto, of Tasso and Spenser, only a
+strange, trumpery material, muddled by jongleurs and romance writers,
+and reduced to mere fairy stuff, taken seriously only by Don Quixote,
+and by the authors of the volumes of insane twaddle called after Amadis
+of Gaul and all his kinsmen.
+
+Such a condition of perpetual change as explains, in my belief, why the
+mediaeval epic subjects were wanted, can be made clear only by examples.
+I shall therefore try to show the transformations which were undergone
+by one or two principal mediaeval epic subjects as a result of a mixture
+with other epic cycles; of a gradual adaptation to a new state of
+civilization; and finally of their gradual separation from all kind of
+reality and real interests.
+
+First of all, let us look at the epic cycle, which, although known to us
+only in poems no older than those of the trouveres and minnesingers who
+sang of Charlemagne and Arthur, is in reality far more ancient, and on
+account of its antiquity and its consequent disconnection with mediaeval
+religious and political interests, was thrown aside even by the nations
+to which it belonged, by the Scandinavians who took to writing sagas
+about the wars of Charlemagne against Saracens, and by the Germans who
+preferred to hear the adventures of Welsh and Briton, Launcelots and
+Tristrams. I am alluding to the stories connected with the family and
+life of the hero called Sigurd by the Scandinavians, and Siegfried by
+the Germans. Of these we possess a Norse version called the Volsunga
+Saga, magnificently done into English by Mr. William Morris; which,
+although written down at the end of the twelfth century, in the very
+time therefore of Chrestien de Troyes, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and
+Gottfried von Strassburg, and subsequently to the presumed writing of
+"The Chanson de Roland" and the Nibelungenlied, shows us in reality the
+product of a people, the distant Scandinavians of Iceland, who were five
+or six hundred years behind the French, Germans, and English of the
+twelfth century. In the Volsunga Saga, neither Christianity nor
+feudalism is yet dreamed of; and it is for this reason that I wish to
+compare it with the Nibelungenlied, in order to show how enormously the
+old epic stuff was altered by the new civilization. The whole social and
+moral condition of the two versions is different. In the old
+Scandinavian civilization, where the Viking is surrounded and served by
+clansmen, the feeling of blood relationship is the strongest in people's
+hearts; strangely and fearfully shown in the introductory tale of Signy,
+who, in order to avenge her father Volsung, killed by her husband,
+murders her children by the latter, and then, altered in face by magic
+arts, goes forth to the woods to her brother Sigmund, that,
+un-wittingly, he may beget with her the only man fit to avenge the
+Volsungs. And then she sends the boy Sinfjotli to the man he has
+hitherto considered merely as his uncle, bidding the latter kill him if
+he prove unworthy of his incestuous birth, or train him to vengeance.
+The three together murder the husband and legitimate children of Signy,
+and set the palace on fire; which, being done, the queen, having
+accomplished her duty to her kin, accomplishes that towards her husband,
+and calmly returns to die in the burning hall. Here (and apparently
+again in the case of the children of Sigurd and Brynhilt) incest becomes
+a family virtue. This being the frightful preponderance of the feeling
+of blood relationship, it is quite natural that the Scandinavian
+Chriemhilt (called in the Volsunga Saga, Gudrun) should not resent the
+murder of her husband Siegfried or Sigurd by her brothers at the
+instigation of the jealous Brynhilt (who has in a manner been Sigurd's
+wife before he made her over to Chriemhilt's eldest brother); and that,
+so far from seeking any revenge against them, she should, when her second
+husband Atli sends for her brothers in order to rob and murder them,
+first vainly warn them of the plot, and then, when they have been
+massacred, kill Atli and her children by him in order to avenge her
+brothers. The slackening of the tribal feeling, the idea of fidelity in
+love and sanctity of marriage belonging to Christianity and feudalism,
+rendered such a story unintelligible to the Germans of the Othos and
+Henrys. In the Nibelungenlied, the whole story of the massacre of the
+brothers is changed. Chriemhilt never forgives the murder of Siegfried,
+and it is not Etzel--Atli for the sake of plunder, but she herself for
+the sake of revenge, who decoys her brothers and murders them; it is she
+who with her own hand cuts off the head of Gunther to expiate his murder
+of Siegfried. To our feelings, more akin to those of the feudal
+Christians of Franconia than to those of the tribal Scandinavians of the
+Edda, the second version is far more intelligible and interesting--the
+story of this once gentle and loving Chriemhilt, turned by the murder of
+her beloved into a fury, and plotting to avenge his death by the death
+of all his kinsfolk, must be much grander and more pathetic than the
+story of this strange Gudrun, who sits down patiently beneath the injury
+done to her by her brothers, but savagely avenges them on her new
+husband, and her own and his innocent children; to us this persistence
+of tribal feeling, destroying all indignation and love, is merely
+unnatural, confusing, and repulsive. But this alteration for the better
+in one of the incidents of the tale is a mere fluke; and the whole main
+plot of the originally central figures are completely obliterated by the
+new state of civilization, and rendered merely trivial and grotesque. In
+the Volsunga Saga Sigurd, overcome by enchantments, has forgotten his
+wife (or mistress, a vague mythical relationship); and, with all sense
+of the past obliterated, has made her over to the brother of his new
+wife Gudrun; and Brynhilt kills her faithless love to dissolve the
+second marriage and be reunited with him in death. In the Nibelungenlied
+Siegfried, although the flower of knighthood, conquers by foul play the
+Amazon Brunhilt to reward Gunther for the hand of his sister; nay, in a
+comic and loathsome scene he forces her into the embraces of the craven
+Gunther; and then he gets killed by Brunhilt's machinations; when, after
+most unqueenly bickerings, the proud Amazon is brutally told by
+Siegfried's wife of the dirty trick which has given her to Gunther.
+After this, it is impossible to realize, when Siegfried is murdered and
+all our sympathies called on to his side, the utterly out-of-character,
+blackguardly behaviour which has brought the hero to his death.
+Similarly the conception of the character and position of Brynhilt is
+entirely disfigured and rendered inane in the Nibelungenlied: of that
+superb demi-goddess of the Scandinavians, burnt on the pyre with her
+falcons and dogs and horses and slaves, by the side of the demi-god
+Sigurd, whom she has loved and killed, lest the door of Valhalla,
+swinging after him, should shut her out from his presence; of her there
+remains in the German mediaeval poem only a virago (more like the
+giantesses of the Amadis romances) enraged at having been defeated and
+grotesquely and grossly pummelled into wedlock by a man not her husband,
+and then slanged like a fishwife by her envious sister-in-law.
+
+The old, consistent, grandly tragic tale of the mysterious incests and
+revenges of a race of demi-gods has lost its sense, its point in the
+attempt to arrange it to suit Christian and feudal ideas. The really
+fine portions of the Nibelungenlied are exactly those which have no real
+connection with the original story, gratuitous additions by mediaeval
+poets. The delicately indicated falling in love of Siegfried and
+Chriemhilt, the struggles of Markgraf Ruedger between obedience to his
+feudal superior and fidelity towards his friends and guests; and, above
+all, the canto of the death of Siegfried. This last is different,
+intensely different, from the rugged and dreary monotony of the rest;
+this most poetical, almost Spenserian or Ariostesque realization of the
+scene; this beautiful picture (though worked with the needle of the
+arras-worker rather than with pencil or brush) of the wood, the hunt,
+the solitary fountain in the Odenwald, where, with his spear leaned
+against the lime-tree, Siegfried was struck down into the clover and
+flowers, and writhed with Hagen's steel through his back. This canto is
+certainly interpolated by some first-rate poet, at least a Gottfried or
+a Walther, to whom that passage of the savage old droning song of death
+had suggested a piece of new art; it is like the fragments of
+exquisitely chiselled leafage and figures which you sometimes find
+encrusted--by whom? wherefore?--quite isolated in the midst of the rough
+and lichen-stained stones of some rude Lombard church. All the rest of
+the Nibelungenlied gives an impression of effeteness; there is no
+definiteness of idea such as that of the Volsunga Saga; the battles are
+mere vague slaughter, no action, no realized movement, or (excepting
+Ruedger) no realized motive of conduct. Shape and colour would seem to
+have been obliterated by repetition and alteration. Yet even these
+alterations could not make the tale of Siegfried survive among the
+Germans of the Middle Ages; nay, the more the alterations the less the
+interest; the want of consistency and colour due to rearrangement merely
+accelerated the throwing aside of a subject which, dating from pagan and
+tribal times, had become repugnant to the new generations. All the
+mutilations in the world could not make the old Scandinavian tales of
+betrayed trust, of revenge and triumphant bloodshed, at all sympathetic
+to men whose religious and social ideals were those of forgiveness and
+fidelity; even stripped of its incestuous mysteries and of its fearful
+tribal love, the tale of Sigurd and Brynhilt, reduced to the tale of
+Chriemhilt's revenge, was unpalatable: no more attempts were made at
+re-writing it, and the poems of Walther, of Gottfried, of Wolfram, of
+Ulrich, and of Tannhaeuser, full as they are of references to stories of
+the Carolingian and Arthurian cycles, nay, to Antique and Oriental
+tales, contain no allusion to the personages of the Nibelungenlied. The
+old epic of the Gothic races had been pushed aside by the triumphant
+epic of the obscure and conquered Kelts.
+
+There are few phenomena in the history of ideas and forms more singular
+than that of the sudden conquest of the poetry of dominant or distant
+nations by the poetic subjects of a comparatively small race, sheared of
+all political importance, restricted to a trifling territory, and
+well-nigh deprived of their language; and of this there can be found no
+more striking example than the sudden ousting of the Carolingian epic by
+the cycle of Arthur.
+
+The Kelts of Britain and Ireland possessed an epic cycle of their own,
+which came to notice only when they were dispossessed of their last
+strongholds by Saxons and Normans, and which immediately spread with
+astounding rapidity all over Europe. The vanquished race became
+fashionable; themselves, their art and their poetry, began to be sought
+for as a precious and war-enhanced loot. The heroic tales of the Kelts
+were transcribed in Welsh, and translated into Latin, by order of the
+Norman and Angevine kings, glad, it would seem, to oppose the Old Briton
+to the Saxon element. The Keltic songs were carried all over France by
+Breton bards, to whose music and rhymes, with only a general idea of the
+subjects, the neo-Latin-speaking Franks listened with the sort of stolid
+satisfaction with which English or Germans of a hundred years ago
+listened to Italians singing Metastasio's verses. But soon the songs and
+tales were translated; and French poets imitated in their language,
+northern and southern, the graceful metres of the Keltic lays, and
+altered and arranged their subjects. So that, in a very short time,
+France, and through it Germany, was inundated with Keltic stories. This
+triumph of the vanquished race was not without reason. The Kelts, early
+civilized by Rome and Christianity, had a set of stories and a set of
+heroes extremely in accordance with mediaeval ideas, and requiring but
+very little alteration. The considerable age of their civilization had
+long obliterated all traces of pagan and tribal feeling in their tales.
+Their heroes, originally, like those of all other people, divinities
+intimately connected with natural phenomena, had long lost all cosmic
+characteristics, long ceased to be gods, and, manipulated by the fancy
+of a race whose greatness was quite a thing of the past, had become a
+sort of golden age ideals--the men of a distant period of glory, which
+was adorned with every kind of perfection, till it became as unreal as
+fairyland. Fairyland, in good sooth, was this country of the Keltic
+tales; and there is a sort of symbolical significance in the fact of its
+lawgiver Merlin, and its emperor Arthur, being both of them not dead,
+like Sigurd, like Dietrich, like Charlemagne and Roland, but lying in
+enchanted sleep. Long inaction and the day-dreaming of idleness had
+refined and idealized the heroes of this Keltic race--a race of
+brilliant fancy and almost southern mobility, and softened for a long
+time by contact with Roman colonists and Christian priests. They were
+not the brutal combatants of an active fighting age, like the heroes of
+the Edda and of the Carolingian cycles; nor had they any particular
+military work to do, belonging as they did to a people huddled away into
+inactivity. Their sole occupation was to extend abroad that ideal
+happiness which reigned in the ideal court of Arthur; to go forth on the
+loose and see what ill-conditioned folk there might yet be who required
+being subdued or taught manners in the happy kingdom, which the poor
+insignificant Kelts connected with some princelet of theirs who
+centuries before may have momentarily repelled the pagan Saxons. Hence
+in the Keltic stories, such as they exist in the versions previous to
+the conquest by the Norman kings, and previous also to any
+communications with other peoples, the distinct beginning of what was
+later to be called knight-errantry; of heroes, creations of an inactive
+nation, having no special military duties, going forth to do what good
+they may at random, unforced by any necessity, and following a mere
+aesthetico-romantic plan of perfecting themselves by deeds of valour to
+become more worthy of their God, their King, and their Lady: religion,
+loyalty, and love, all three of them mere aesthetic abstractions,
+becoming the goal of an essentially aesthetic, unpractical system of
+self-improvement, such as was utterly incompatible with any real and
+serious business in life. Idle poetic fancies of an inert people, the
+Knights of the Round Table have no mission save that of being
+poetically perfect. Such was the spirit of Keltic poetry; and, as it
+happened, this spirit satisfied the imaginative wants of mediaeval
+society just at the moment when political events diffused in other
+countries the knowledge of the Arthurian legends. The old Teutonic tales
+of Sigurd, Gudrun, and Dietrich, had long ceased to appeal, in their
+mutilated and obliterated condition, to a society to whom tribal feeling
+and pagan heroism were odious, and whose religion distinctly reproved
+revenge. These semi-mythological tales had been replaced by another
+cycle: the purely realistic epic, which had arisen during the struggles
+between the Christian west against the pagan north-east and the
+Mohammedan south, and which, originating in the short battle-songs
+narrating the exploits of the predecessors and help-mates of
+Charlemagne, had constituted itself into large narratives of which the
+"Song of Roland" represents artistic culmination. These narratives of
+mere military exploits, of the battles of a strong feudal aristocracy
+animated by feudal loyalty and half-religious, half-patriotic fury
+against invading heathenness, had perfectly satisfied the men of the
+earliest Middle Ages, of the times when feudalism was being established
+and the church being reformed; when the strong military princelets of
+the North were embarking with their barons to conquer new kingdoms in
+England and in Italy and Greece; when the whole of feudal Europe hurled
+itself against Asia in the first Crusades. But the condition of things
+soon altered: the feudal hierarchy was broken up into a number of
+semi-independent little kingdoms or principalities, struggling, with the
+assistance of industrial and mercantile classes, to become absolute
+monarchies; princes who had been mere generals became stay-at-home
+diplomatists, studious of taxation and intrigue, surrounded no longer by
+armed vassals, but by an essentially urban court, in constant
+communication with the money-making burghers. Religion, also, instead of
+being a matter of fighting with infidel invaders, turned to fantastic
+sectarianism and emotional mysticism. With the sense of futility, of
+disappointment, attendant on the later Crusades, came also a habit of
+roaming in strange countries, of isolated adventure in search of wealth
+or information, a love of the distant, the half-understood, the
+equivocal; perhaps even a hankering after a mysterious compromise
+between the religion of Europe and the religions of the East, such as
+appears to have existed among the Templars and other Franks settled in
+Asia.
+
+There was, throughout feudal society, a sort of enervated languor, a
+morbid longing for something new, now that the old had ceased to be
+possible or had proved futile; after the great excitement of the
+Crusades it was impossible to be either sedately idle or quietly active,
+even as it is with all of us during the days of weariness and
+restlessness after some long journey. To such a society the strongly
+realistic Carolingian epic had ceased to appeal: the tales of the Welsh
+and Breton bards, repeated by trouvere and jongleur, troubadour and
+minnesinger, came as a revelation. The fatigued, disappointed, morbid,
+imaginative society of the later Crusades recognized in this fairyland
+epic of a long refined, long idle, nay, effete race, the realization of
+their own ideal: of activity unhampered by aim or organization, of
+sentiment and emotion and action quite useless and unnecessary, purely
+subservient to imaginative gratification. These Arthurs, Launcelots,
+Tristrams, Kays, and Gawains, fantastic phantoms, were also far more
+artistically malleable than the iron Rolands, Olivers, and Renauds of
+earlier days; that unknown kingdom of Britain could much more easily be
+made the impossible ideal, in longing for which squeamish and lazy minds
+might refuse all coarser reality. Moreover, those who listened to the
+tales of chivalry were different from those who had listened to the
+Carolingian stories; and, therefore, required something different. They
+were courtiers, and one half of them were women. Now the Carolingian
+tales, originally battle-songs, sung in camps and castles to mere
+soldiers, had at first possessed no female characters at all; and when
+gradually they were introduced, it was in the coarsest barrack or
+tap-room style. The Keltic tales, on the contrary, whether from national
+tradition, or rather from longer familiarity with Christian culture and
+greater idleness of life, naturally made women and women's love the
+goal of a great many adventures which an effete nation could no longer
+ascribe to patriotic movements. But this was not all. The religious
+feeling of the day was extremely inclined to mysticism, in which
+aesthetic, erotic, and all kinds of morbid and ill-defined tendencies
+were united, which was more than anything else tinged with a
+semi-Asiatic quietism, a longing for the passive ecstasy of Nirvana.
+This religious side of mediaeval life was also gratified by the Arthurian
+romances. Oddly enough, there existed an old Welsh or Breton tale about
+the boy Peredur, who from a complete simpleton became the prince of
+chivalry, and his many adventures connected with a certain mysterious
+blood-dripping lance, and a still more mysterious basin or _grail_ (an
+allusion to which is said by M. de la Villemarque to be contained in the
+originally Keltic name of Percival), which possessed magic properties
+akin to those of the purse of Fortunatus, or the pipkin in the story of
+"Little pot, boil!" The story, whose original mythical meaning had been
+lost in the several centuries of Christianity, was very decayed and
+obscure; and the fact of the blood on the lance being that of a murdered
+kinsman of Peredur, and of the basin containing the head of the same
+person cut off by Gloucester witches, was evidently insufficient to
+account for all the mystery with which these objects were surrounded.
+The French poets of the Middle Ages, strongly imbued with Oriental
+legends brought back by the Crusaders, saw at a glance the meaning of
+the whole story: the lance was the lance with which Longinus had pierced
+the Saviour's side; the Grail was the cup which had received His blood,
+nay, it was the cup of the Last Supper. A tale about the preservation of
+these precious relics by Joseph of Arimathaea, was immediately connected
+therewith; a theory was set up (doubtless with the aid of quite
+unchristian, Oriental legends) of a kind of kingdom of the keepers of
+the Grail, of a vague half-material, half-spiritual state of bliss
+connected with the service of the Grail, which fed its knights (and here
+the Templars and their semi-oriental mysteries, for which they were
+later so frightfully misused, certainly come into play) with food which
+is at once of the body and of the soul. Thus the Keltic Peredur, bent
+upon massacring the Gloucester witches to avenge his uncle, was turned
+into a saintly knight, seeking throughout a more and more perfect life
+for the kingdom of the Grail: the Perceval of Chrestien de Troyes, the
+Parzifal of Wolfram von Eschenbach, whom later romance writers (wishing
+to connect everything more closely with Arthur's court) replaced by the
+Sir Galahad of the "Morte d'Arthur," while the guest of the Grail became
+a sort of general mission of several knights, a sort of spiritual
+crusade to whose successful champions Percival, Bors, and Galahad, the
+Middle Ages did not hesitate to add the arch-adulterer Launcelot.
+
+Thus did the Arthurian tales answer the requirements of the languid,
+dreamy, courtly, lady-serving and religiously mystic sons and grandsons
+of those earlier Crusaders whose aspirations had been expressed by the
+rough and solemn heroes of Carolingian tales. The Carolingian tales were
+thrown aside, or were kept by the noble mediaeval poets only on condition
+of their original meaning being completely defaced by wholesale
+admixture of the manners and adventures belonging to the Arthurian
+cycles. The paladins were forced to disport themselves in the same
+fairyland as the Knights of the Round Table; and many mediaeval poems the
+heroes of which, like Ogier of Denmark and Huon of Bordeaux, already
+existed in the Carolingian tales, are in reality, with their romantic
+loves, their useless adventures, their Morgana's castles and Oberon's
+horns, offshoots of the Keltic stories, which were as rich in every kind
+of supernatural (being, in fact, pagan myths turned into fairy tales) as
+the genuine Carolingian subjects, whose origin was entirely historical,
+were completely devoid of such things. Arthur and his ladies and
+knights: Guenevere, Elaine, Enid, Yseult, Launcelot, Geraint, Kay,
+Gawain, Tristram, and Percival-Galahad, were the real heroes and
+heroines of the courtly nobles and the courtly poets of this second
+phase of mediaeval life. The Teuton Charlemagne, Roland and Oliver were
+as completely forgotten of the poets who met in that memorable combat of
+the Wartburg, as were the Teuton Sigurd and Dietrich. And if the
+Carolingian cycle survived, however much altered, I think it must have
+been thanks to the burghers and artizans of the Netherlands and of
+Provence, to whom the bluff, matter-of-fact heroism, the simple, gross,
+but not illegitimate amours of Carolingian heroes, were more
+satisfactory than any mystic quest of the Grail, any refined adultery of
+Guenevere or Yseult.
+
+But the inevitable fate of all mediaeval epics awaited this triumphant
+Arthurian cycle: the fate of being obliterated by passing from one
+nation and civilization to another, long before the existence of any
+poetic art adequate to its treatment. Of this I will take as an example
+one of the mediaeval poems which has the greatest reputation the
+masterpiece (according to most critics, with whom I find it difficult,
+in the presence of a poet like Gottfried von Strassburg, to agree) of
+probably the most really poetical and earnest school of poetry which the
+pre-Dantesque Middle Ages possessed--the "Parzifal" of Wolfram von
+Eschenbach.
+
+The paramount impression (I cannot say the strongest, for strong
+impressions are incompatible with such work as this) left by the
+masterpiece of Wolfram von Eschenbach, is that of the most astonishing
+vagueness, fluidity, haziness, vaporousness. In reading it one looks
+back to that rudely hewn and extremely obliterated Nibelungenlied, as to
+something quite astonishingly clear, detailed and strongly marked as to
+something distinctly artistic. Indeed by the side of "Parzifal"
+everything seems artistic; Hartmann von Aue reads like Chaucer,
+"Aucassin et Nicolette" is as living as "Cymbeline," "Chevy Chase" seems
+as good as the battles of Homer. It is not a narrative, but a vague
+mooning; a knight illiterate, not merely like his fellow minnesingers,
+in the way of reading and writing, but in the sense of complete absence
+of all habit of literary form; extremely noble and pure of mind, chaste,
+gentle, with a funny, puzzled sense of humour, reminding one distantly
+of Jean Paul in his drowsy moments; a hanger-on of courts, but perfectly
+simple-hearted and childlike; very poor and easily pleased: such is, for
+good and for bad, Herr Wolfram von Eschenbach, the only real personality
+in his poem. And he narrates, in a mooning, digressive, good-natured,
+drowsy tone, with only a rare awaking of interest, a story which he has
+heard from some one else, and that some one else from a series of other
+some one elses (Chrestien de Troyes, a legendary Provencal Chiot or
+Guyot, perhaps even the original Welsh bard); all muddled, monotonous,
+and droning; events and persons ill-defined, without any sense of the
+relative importance of anything, without clear perception of what it is
+all about, or at least without the power of keeping the matter straight
+before the reader. A story, in point of fact, which is no story at all,
+but a mere series of rambling adventures (adventures which are scarcely
+adventures, having no point or plot) of various people with not much
+connection and no individuality--Gachmuret, Parzifal, Gawain,
+Loherangrein, Anfortas, Feirefis--pale ghosts of beings, moving in a
+country of Kennaqwhere, Aquitaine, Anjou, Brittany, Wales, Spain, and
+heaven knows what wondrous Oriental places; a misty country with woods
+and towns and castles which are infinitely far apart and yet quite near
+each other; which seem to sail about like cloud castles round the only
+solid place in the book, Plimizoel, where Arthur's court, with round
+table constantly spread, is for ever established. A no place, nowhere;
+yet full of details; minute inventories of the splendid furniture of
+castles (castles where? how reached?); infinitely inferior in this
+matter even to the Nibelungenlied, where you are made to feel so vividly
+(one of the few modern and therefore clear things therein) the long,
+dreary road from Worms to Bechlarn, and thence to Etzelburg, though of
+none of them is there anything beyond a name. For the Nibelungen story
+had been localized in what to narrator and audience was a reality, the
+country in which themselves lived, where themselves might seek out the
+abbey in which Siegfried was buried, the well in the Odenwald near which
+he was stabbed; where they knew from merchant and pilgrim the road taken
+by the Nibelungs from Santen to Worms, by the Burgundians from Worms to
+Hungary. But here in "Parzifal" we are in a mere vague world of
+anywhere, the world of Keltic and Oriental romance become mere cloudland
+to the Thuringian knight. And similarly have the heroes of other
+nations, the Arthurs, Gawains, Gachmurets, of Wales and Anjou, become
+mere vague names; they have become liquified, lost all shape and local
+habitation. They are mere names, these ladies and knights of Herr
+Wolfram, names with fair pink and white faces, names magnificently
+draped in bejewelled Oriental stuffs and embossed armour; they have no
+home, no work, nothing to do. This is the most remarkable characteristic
+of "Parzifal," and what makes it so typical of the process of growing
+inane through overmuch alteration, which prevented the mediaeval epics
+ever turning into an Iliad or an Odyssey; this that it is essentially
+idle and all about nothing. The feudal relations strongly marked in the
+German Nibelungenlied have melted away like the distinctions of race:
+every knight is independent, not a vassal nor a captain, a Volker or
+Hagen, or Roland or Renaud followed by his men; but an isolated
+individual, without even a squire, wandering about alone through this
+hazy land of nowhere. Knight-errantry, in the time of the great Guelph
+and Ghibelline struggles, every bit as ideal as that of Spenser or
+Cervantes; and with the difference that Sir Calidore and Sir Artegal
+have an appointed task, some Blatant Beast or other nuisance to
+overcome; and that Don Quixote has the general rescuing of all the
+oppressed Princesse Micomiconas, and the destruction of all windmills,
+and the capturing of all helmets of Mambrino, and the establishing all
+over the world of the worship of Dulcinea. But these knights of Wolfram
+von Eschenbach have no more this mission than they have the
+politico-military missions, missions of a Ruedger or a Roland. They are
+all riding about at random, without any particular pagans, necromancers,
+or dragons to pursue. The very service of the Holy Grail, which is the
+main interest of the poem, consists in nothing apparently except living
+virtuously at the Castle of Montselvaesche, and virtuously eating and
+drinking the victuals provided miraculously. To be admitted to this
+service, no initiation, no mission, nothing preliminary seems required.
+Parzifal himself merely wanders about vaguely, without doing any
+specified thing. The fact is that in this poem all has become purely
+ideal; ideal to the point of utter vacuity: there is no connection with
+any human business. Of all the heroes and heroines we hear that they are
+perfectly chaste, truthful, upright; and they are never put into any
+situation to test these qualities: they are never placed in the way of
+temptation, never made to fight with evil, or to decide between it and
+good. The very religion of the Holy Grail consists in doing nothing: not
+a word about relieving the poor or oppressed, of tending the sick, of
+delivering the Holy Sepulchre, of defending that great injured One,
+Christ. To be Grail Knight or even Grail King means to be exactly the
+same as before. Where in this vague dreamland of passive purity and
+heroism, of untempted chastity and untried honour, where are the earthly
+trials of Tristram, of Guenevere, of Ruedger, of Renaud? Where the moral
+struggles of the Middle Ages? Where is Godfrey, or Francis, or Dominick?
+Nowhere. All has disappeared, melted away; Christianity and Paganism
+themselves have melted away or into each other, as in the easy meeting
+of the Pagan Feirefis and the Christian Parzifal, and in the double
+marriage of Gachmuret with the Indian Belakane and the Welsh Herzeloid;
+there remains only a kind of Buddhistic Nirvana of vague passive
+perfection, but without any renunciation; and in a world devoid of evil
+and full of excellent brocade and armour and eatables, and lovely
+maidens who dress and undress you, and chastely kiss you on the mouth; a
+world without desire, aspiration, or combat, vacantly happy and
+virtuous. A world purely ideal, divorced from all reality, unsubstantial
+like the kingdom of Gloriana, but, unlike Spenser's, quite unshadowed by
+any puritan sadness, by any sense of evil, untroubled by allegorical
+vices; cheerful, serene, filled with flowers and song of birds, but as
+unreal as the illuminated arabesques of a missal. In truth, perhaps more
+to be compared with an eighteenth century pastoral, an ideal created
+almost in opposition to reality; a dream of passiveness and liberty (as
+of light leaves blown about) as the ideal of the fiercely troubled,
+struggling, tightly fettered feudal world. The ideal, perhaps, of only
+one moment, scarcely of a whole civilization; or rather (how express my
+feeling?) an accidental combination of an instant, as of spectre vapour
+arisen from the mixture of Kelt and Teuton, of Frank and Moslem. Is it
+Christian, Pagan, Mohammedan? None of all these. A simple-looking
+vaporous chaos of incongruous, but not conflicting, elements: a poem of
+virtue without object, of knighthood without work, of religion without
+belief; in this like its central interest, the Grail: a mystery, a cup,
+a stone; a thing which heals, feeds, speaks; animate or inanimate? Stone
+of the Caaba or chalice of the Sacrament? Merely a mysterious holy of
+holies and good of goods, which does everything and nothings means
+nothing and requires nothing--is nothing.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+
+Thus was obliterated, in all its national and traditional meaning, the
+heroic cycle of Arthur; and by the same process of slow adaptation to
+new intellectual requirements which had completely wiped out of men's
+memory the heroic tales of Siegfried, which had entirely altered the
+originally realistic character of the epic of Charlemagne. But unreal
+and ideal as had become the tales of the Round Table, and disconnected
+with any national tradition, the time came when even these were not
+sufficiently independent of reality to satisfy the capricious
+imagination of the later Middle Ages. At the end of the fourteenth
+century was written, most probably in Portuguese by Vasco de Lobeira,
+the tale of "Amadis de Gaula," which was followed by some forty or fifty
+similar books telling the adventures of all the brothers, nephews,
+sons, grandsons sons, and great-grandsons, an infinite succession, of
+the original Amadis; which, translated into all languages and presently
+multiplied by the press, seem to have usurped the place of the Arthurian
+stories in feudal countries until well-nigh the middle of the sixteenth
+century; and which were succeeded by no more stories of heroes, but by
+the realistic comic novels of the type of "Lazarillo de Tormes," and the
+buffoon philosophic extravaganzas of "Gargantua." Further indeed it was
+impossible to go than did mediaeval idealism in the Amadises. Compared
+with them the most fairy-tale-like Arthurian stories are perfect
+historical documents. There remains no longer any connection whatsoever
+with reality, historical or geographical: the whole world seems to have
+been expeditiously emptied of all its contents, to make room for
+kingdoms of Gaul, of Rome, of the Firm Island, of Sobradisa, etc., which
+are less like the Land West of the Moon and East of the Sun than they
+are like Sancho Panza's island. All real mankind, past, present, and
+future, has similarly been swept away and replaced by a miraculous race
+of Amadises, Lisvarts, Galaors, Gradasilias, Orianas, Pintiquinestras,
+Fradalons, and so forth, who flit across our vision, in company with the
+indispensable necromancers, fairies, dwarfs, giants, and duennas, like
+some huge ballet: things without character, passions, pathos; knights
+who are never wounded or killed, princesses who always end with
+marrying the right man, enchanters whose heads are always chopped off,
+foundlings who are always reinstated in their kingdom, inane paper
+puppets bespangled with impossible sentiment, tinsel and rags which are
+driven about like chaff by the wind-puffs of romance. The advent of the
+Amadises is the coming of the Kingdom of Nonsense, the sign that the
+last days of chivalric romance have come; a little more, and the
+Licentiate Alonzo Perez will take his seat in Don Quixote's library, and
+Nicholas the Barber light his faggots in the yard.
+
+But, as if in compensation of the usurpation of which they had been the
+victims, the Carolingian tales, pushed out of the way by the Arthurian
+cycle, were not destined to perish. Thrown aside with contempt by the
+upper classes, engrossed with the Round Table and the Holy Grail, the
+tales of Charlemagne and his paladins, largely adulterated with
+Arthurian elements, were apparently cherished by a lower class of
+society: burgesses, artizans, and such-like, for whom that Arthurian
+world was far too etherial and too delicately immoral; and to this
+circumstance is due the fact that the humiliated Carolingian tales
+eventually received an artistic embodiment which was not given to the
+Arthurian stories. While troubadours and minnesingers were busy with the
+court of Arthur, and grave Latinists like Rusticiano of Pisa wrote of
+Launcelot and Guenevere; the Carolingian epics seem to have been mainly
+sung about by illiterate jongleurs, and to have busied the pens of
+prose hackwriters for the benefit of townsfolk. The free towns of the
+Netherlands and of Germany appear to have been full of this
+unfashionable literature: the Carolingian cycle had become democratic.
+And, inasmuch as it was literature no longer for knights and courtiers,
+but for artizans and shopkeepers, it went, of course, to the
+pre-eminently democratic country of the Middle Ages--Italy. This was at
+a time when Italian was not yet a recognized language, and when the men
+and women who talked in Tuscan, Lombard, or Venetian dialects, wrote in
+Latin and in French; and while Francesca and Paolo read the story of
+Launcelot most probably in good mediaeval _langue d'oil_, as befitted
+people of high birth; the jongleurs, who collected crowds so large as to
+bar the streets and require the interference of the Bolognese
+magistrates, sang of Roland and Oliver in a sort of _lingua Franca_ of
+French Lombard. French jongleurs singing in impossible French-Italian;
+Italian jongleurs singing in impossible French; Paduan penny-a-liners
+writing Carolingian cyclical novels in French, not of Paris, assuredly,
+but of Padua--a comical and most hideous jabber of hybrid
+languages--this was how the Carolingian stories became popular in Italy.
+Meanwhile, the day came when the romantic Arthurian tales had to
+dislodge in Italy before the invasion of the classic epic. Troy, Rome,
+and Thebes had replaced Tintagil and Caerleon in the interest of the
+cultured classes long before the beginning of the fifteenth century;
+when Poggio, in the very midst of the classic revival, still told of the
+comically engrossed audience which surrounded the vagabonds singing of
+Orlando and Rinaldo. The effete Arthurian cycle, superseded in Spain and
+France by the Amadis romances, was speedily forgotten in Italy; but the
+Carolingian stories remained; and when Italian poetry arose once more
+after the long interregnum between Petrarch and Lorenzo dei Medici, and
+looked about for subjects, it laid its hand upon them. But when, in the
+second half of the fifteenth century, those old tales of Charlemagne
+received, after so many centuries of alterations and ephemeral
+embodiments, that artistic form which the Middle Ages had been unable to
+give them, the stories themselves, and the way in which they were
+regarded, were totally different from what they had been in the time of
+Theroulde, or of the anonymous author of "The Quatre Fils Aymon;" the
+Renaissance, with its keen artistic sense, made out of the Carolingian
+tales real works of art, but works of art which were playthings. To
+begin with, the Carolingian stories had been saturated with Arthurian
+colour: they had been furnished with all the knight-rrantry, all the
+gallantry, all the enchantments, the fairies, giants, and necromancers
+of the Keltic legends; and, moreover, they had lost, by infinite
+repetition, all the political realism and meaning so striking in "The
+Chanson de Roland" and "The Quatre Fils Aymon;" a confusion and
+unreality further increased by the fact that the Italians had no
+original connection with those tales, that to them real men and plans
+were no better than imaginary ones, and that the minstrels who sang in
+the market-place, and the laborious prose-writers who compiled such
+collections as that called of the "Reali di Francia," were equally free
+in their alterations and adaptations, creating unknown relationships,
+inventing new adventures, suppressing essential historical points, with
+no object save amusing their audience or readers with new stories about
+familiar heroes. Such was the condition of the stories themselves. The
+attitude of the public towards them was, by the middle of the fifteenth
+century, one of complete incredulity and frivolous amusement; the
+paladins were as unreal as the heroes of any granny's fairy tale. The
+people wanted to hear of wonderful battles and adventures, of
+enchantments and love-makings; but they wanted also to laugh; and,
+sceptical, practical, democratic, the artizans and shopkeepers of
+Florence--to whom, paying, as they did, expensive mercenaries who stole
+poultry and never got wounded on any account, all chivalry or real
+military honour was the veriest nursery rubbish--such people as crowded
+round the _cantastoria_ of _mercato vecchio_, must indeed have found
+much to amuse them in these tales of so different an age.
+
+And into such crowds there penetrated to listen and watch (even as the
+Magnificent Lorenzo had elbowed among the carnival ragamuffins of
+Florence, and had slid in among the holiday-making peasants of Poggio a
+Caiano) a learned man, a poet, an intimate of the Medicis, of Politian,
+Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola, Messer Luigi Pulci, the same who had
+written the semi-allegorical, semi-realistic poem about Lorenzo dei
+Medici's gala tournament. There was a taste in the house of the Medici,
+together with those for platonic philosophy, classical erudition,
+religious hymns, and Hebrew kabbala, for a certain kind of realism, for
+the language and mode of thinking of the lower classes, as a reaction
+from Petrarchesque conventionality. As the Magnificent Lorenzo had had
+the fancy to string together in more artistic shape the quaint and
+graceful love poems, hyperbolical, realistic, tender, and abusive, of
+the Tuscan peasantry; so also Messer Luigi Pulci appears to have been
+smitten with the notion of trying his hand at a chivalric poem like
+those to which he and his friends had listened among the butchers and
+pork-shops, the fishmongers and frying booths of the market, and giving
+an impression, in its ideas and language, of the people to whom such
+strains were sung. But Luigi Pulci was vastly less gifted as a poet than
+Lorenzo dei Medici; Florentine prentices are less aesthetically pleasing
+than Tuscan peasants, and the "Morgante Maggiore" is a piece of work of
+a sort utterly inferior to the "Nencia da Barberino." Still the
+"Morgante Maggiore" remains, and will remain, as a very remarkable
+production of grotesque art. Just as Lorenzo dei Medici was certainly
+not without a deliberate purpose of selecting the quaintness and
+gracefulness of peasant life; even so, and perhaps more, Luigi Pulci
+must have had a deliberate intention of producing a ludicrous effect; in
+both cases the deliberate attempt is very little perceptible, in the
+"Nencia da Barberino" from the genius of Lorenzo, in the "Morgante
+Maggiore" from the stolidity of Pulci. The "Morgante," of which parts
+were probably written as a mere sample to amuse a supper party, became
+interesting to Pulci, in the mere matter of inventing and stringing
+together new incidents; and despite its ludicrous passages, it must have
+been more seriously written by him, and more seriously listened to by
+his friends, than would a similar production now-a-days. For the men of
+the Renaissance, no matter how philosophized and cultured, retained the
+pleasure in mere incident, which we moderns seem to have given over to
+children and savages; and Lorenzo, Ficino, and Politian probably
+listened to the adventures of Luigi Pulci's paladins and giants with
+much the same interest, and only a little more conscious sense of
+grotesqueness, with which the crowd in the market listened to Cristofano
+dell' Altissimo and similar story-tellers. The "Morgante Maggiore,"
+therefore, is neither really comic nor really serious. It is not a piece
+of realistic grotesqueness like "Gargantua" or "Pantagruel," any more
+than it is a serious ideal work like "Amadis de Gaula:" the proportion
+of deliberately sought effects is small; the great bulk, serious or
+comic, seems to have come quite at random. It is not a caricatured
+reproduction of the poems of chivalry sung in the market, for they were
+probably serious, stately, and bald, with at most an occasional joke; it
+is the reproduction of the joint impression received from the absurd,
+harum-scarum, unpractical world of chivalry of the poet, and the real
+world of prose, of good-humoured buffoonish coarseness with which the
+itinerant poet was surrounded. The paladins are no Don Quixotes, the
+princesses no Dulcineas, the battles are real battles; but the language
+is that of Florentine wool-workers, housewives, cheese-sellers, and
+ragamuffins, crammed with the slang of the market-place, its heavy jokes
+and perpetual sententious aphorism. Moreover the prominence given to
+food and eating is unrivalled except by Rabelais: the poet must have
+lounged with delight through the narrow mediaeval lanes, crowded with
+booths and barrows, sniffing with rapture the mingled scents of cheese,
+pork, fish, spices, and a hundred strange concomitant market smells. And
+the market, that classic _mercato vecchio_ (alas, finally condemned and
+destroyed by modern sanitary prudishness, and which only those who have
+seen can conceive in its full barbarous, nay, barbaric Pantagruelian
+splendour of food, blood, and stenches) of Florence, is what we think of
+throughout the poem. And, when Messer Luigi comes to narrate, with real
+gravity and after the due invocation of the Virgin, the Trinity, and
+the saints, the tremendous disaster of Roncevaux, he uses such words and
+such similes, that above the neighing of horses and the clash of
+hurtling armour and the yells of the combatants we suddenly hear the
+nasal sing-song of Florentine tripe-vendors and pumpkin-pod-sellers, the
+chaffer and oaths and laughter of the gluttonous crowd pouring through
+the lanes of Calimala and Pellicceria; nay (horrible and grotesque
+miracle), there seems to rise out of the confused darkness of the
+battle-filled valley, there seems to disengage itself (as out of a mist)
+from the chaos of heaped bodies, and the flash of steel among the
+whirlwinds of dust, a vision, more and more distinct and familiar, of
+the crowded square with its black rough-hewn, smoke-stained houses,
+ornamented with Robbia-ware angels and lilies or painted madonnas; of
+its black butchers dens, outside which hang the ghastly disembowelled
+sheep with blood-stained fleeces, the huge red-veined hearts and livers;
+of the piles of cabbage and cauli-flowers, the rows of tin ware and
+copper saucepans, the heaps of maccaroni and pastes, of spices and
+drugs; the garlands of onions and red peppers and piles of apples; the
+fetid sliminess of the fish tressels; the rough pavement oozy and black,
+slippery with cabbage-stalks, puddled with bullock's blood, strewn with
+plucked feathers--all under the bright blue sky, with Giotto's
+dove-coloured belfry soaring high above; a vision, finally, of one of
+those deep dens, with walls, all covered with majolica plates and
+dishes and flashing brass-embossed trenchers, in the dark depths of
+which crackles perennially a ruddy fire, while a huge spit revolves,
+offering to the flames now one now the other side of scores of legs of
+mutton, rounds of beef, and larded chickens, trickling with the butter
+unceasingly ladled by the white-dressed cooks. Roncisvalle, Charlemagne,
+the paladins, paganism, Christendom--what of them? "I believe in capon,
+roast or boiled, and sometimes done in butter; in mead and in must; and
+I believe in the pasty and the pastykins, mother and children; but above
+all things I believe in good wine "--as Margutte snuffles out in his
+catechism; and as to Saracens and paladins, past, present, and future, a
+fig for them!
+
+But meanwhile, for all that Florentine burgesses, artizans, and
+humorists may think, there is in this Italy of the Renaissance something
+besides Florence; there is a school of poetry, disconnected with the
+realisms of Lorenzo and Pulci, with the Ovidian Petrarchisms of
+Politian. There is Ferrara. Lying, as they do, between the Northern
+Apennine slopes of Modena and the Euganean hills, the dominions of the
+House of Este appear at first sight merely as part and parcel of
+Lombardy, and we should expect from them nothing very different from
+that which we expect from Milan or Bologna or Padua. But the truth is
+different; all round Ferrara, indeed, stretches the fertile flatness of
+Lombard cornfields, and they produce, as infallibly as they produce
+their sacks of grain and tuns of wine and heaps of silk cocoon, the
+intellectual and social equivalents of such things in Renaissance Italy:
+industry, wealth, comfort, scepticism, art. But on either side, into the
+defiles of the Euganean hills to the north, into the widening torrent
+valleys of the Modenese Apennines to the south, the Marquisate of Este
+stretches up into feudalism, into chivalry, into the imaginative kingdom
+of the Middle Ages. Mediaevalism, feudalism, chivalry, indeed, of a very
+modified sort; and as different from that of France and Germany as
+differ from the poverty-stricken plains and forests and and moors of the
+north these Italian mountain slopes, along which the vines crawl in long
+trellises, and the chestnuts rise in endlessly superposed tiers of
+terraces, cultivated by a peasant who is not the serf, but the equal
+sharer in profits with the master of the soil. And on one of those
+fertile hill-sides, looking down upon a narrow valley all a green-blue
+shimmer with corn and vine-bearing elms, was born, in the year 1434,
+Matteo Maria Boiardo, in the village which gave him the title, one of
+the highest in the Estensian dominions, of Count of Scandiano. Here, in
+the Apennines, Scandiano is a fortified village, also a castle,
+doubtless half turned into a Renaissance villa, but mediaeval and feudal
+nevertheless; but the name of Scandiano belongs also, I know not for
+what reason, to a certain little red-brick palace on the outskirts of
+Ferrara, beautifully painted with half-allegorical, half-realistic
+pageant frescoes by Cosimo Tura, and enclosing a sweet tangled
+orchard-garden; to all of which, being the place to which Duke Borso and
+Duke Ercole were wont to retire for amusement, the Ferrarese have given
+the further name of Schifanoia, which means, "fly from cares." This
+little coincidence of Scandiano the feudal castle in the Apennines, and
+Scandiano the little pleasure palace at Ferrara, seems to give, by
+accidental allegory, a fair idea of the double nature of Matteo Boiardo,
+of the Ferrarese court to which he belonged, and of the school of poetry
+(including the more notable but less original work of Ariosto) which the
+genius of the man and the character of the court succeeded together in
+producing.
+
+To understand Boiardo we must compare him with Ariosto; and to
+understand Ariosto we must compare him with Boiardo; both belong to the
+same school, and are men of very similar genius, and where the one
+leaves off the other begins. But first, in order to understand the
+character of this poetry which, in the main, is identical in Boiardo and
+in his more successful but less fascinating pupil Ariosto, let us
+understand Ferrara. It was, in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth
+centuries, a chivalric town of Ariostesque chivalry: feudalism turned
+courtly and elegant, and moreover, very liberal and comfortable by
+preponderance of democratic and industrial habits; a military court, of
+brave mercenary captains full of dash and adventure, not mere brigands
+and marauders having studied strategy, like the little Umbrian
+chieftains; a court orderly, elegant, and brilliant: a prince not risen
+from behind a counter like Medicis and Petruccis, nor out of blood like
+Baglionis and Sforzas, but of a noble old house whose beginnings are
+lost in the mist of real chivalry and real paladinism; a duke with a
+pretence of feudal honour and decorum, at whose court men were all brave
+and ladies all chaste--with the little licenses of baseness and
+gallantry admitted by Renaissance chivalry. A bright, brilliant court at
+the close of the fifteenth century; and more stable than the only one
+which might have rivalled it, the Feltrian court of Urbino, too small
+and lost among the Umbrian bandits. A bright, brilliant town, also, this
+Ferrara: not mercantile like Florence, not mere barracks like Perugia; a
+capital, essentially, in its rich green plain by the widened Po, with
+its broad handsome streets (so different from the mediaeval exchanges of
+Bologna, and the feudal alleys of Perugia), its well-built houses, so
+safe and modern, needing neither _bravi_ nor iron window bars, protected
+(except against some stray murder by one of the Estensi themselves), by
+the duke's well-organized police; houses with well-trimmed gardens, like
+so many Paris hotels; and with the grand russet brick castle, military
+with its moat and towers, urban with its belvederes and balconies, in
+the middle, well placed to sweep away with its guns (the wonderful guns
+of the duke's own making) any riot, tidily, cleanly, without a nasty
+heap of bodies and slop of blood as in the narrow streets of other
+towns Imagine this bright capital, placed, moreover, in the richest
+centre of Lombardy, with glitter of chivalry from the Euganean hills and
+Apennines (castellated with Este, Monselice, Canossa, and Boiardo's own
+Scandiano); with gorgeous rarities of commerce from Venice and Milan--a
+central, unique spot. It is the natural home of the chivalrous poets of
+the Renaissance, Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso; as Florence is of the
+Politians and Pulcis (Hellenism and back-shopery); and Venice of the
+literature of lust, jests, cynicism, and adventure, Aretine, Beolco,
+Calmo, and Poliphilo-Colonna. In that garden, where the white
+butterflies crowd among the fruit trees bowed down to the tall grass of
+the palace of Schifanoia--a garden neither grand nor classic, but
+elegiac and charming--we can imagine Boiardo or Ariosto reading their
+poems to just such a goodly company as Giraldi Cinthio (a Ferrarese, and
+fond of romance, too) describes in the prologue of his "Ecatomiti:"
+gentle and sprightful ladies, with the splendid brocaded robes, and the
+gold-filleted golden hair of Dosso Dossi's wonderful Alcina Circe;
+graceful youths like the princely St. John of Benvenuto Garofalo;
+jesters like Dosso's at Modena; brilliant captains like his St. George
+and St. Michael; and a little crowd of pages with doublets and sleeves
+laced with gold tags, of sedate magistrates in fur robes and scarlet
+caps, of white-dressed maids with instruments of music and embroidery
+frames and hand looms, like those which Cosimo Tura painted for Duke
+Borso on the walls of this same Schifanoia palace. Such is the audience;
+now for the poems.
+
+The stuff of Boiardo and Ariosto is the same: that old mediaeval stuff of
+the Carolingian poems, coloured, scented with Arthurian chivalry and
+wonder. The knight-errantry of the Keltic tales is cleverly blended with
+the pseudo-historical military organization of the Carolingian cycle.
+Paladins and Saracens are ingeniously manoeuvred about, now scattered in
+little groups of twos and threes, to encounter adventures in the style
+of Sir Launcelot or Amadis; now gathered into a compact army to crash
+upon each other as at Roncevaux; or else wildly flung up by the poet to
+alight in fairyland, to find themselves in the caverns of Jamschid, in
+the isles where Oberon's mother kept Caesar, and Morgana kept Ogier, in
+the boats, entering subterranean channels, of Sindbad and Huon of
+Bordeaux; a constant alternation of individual adventure and wholesale
+organized campaigns, conceived and carried out with admirable ingenuity.
+So much for the deeds of arms. The deeds of love are also compounded of
+Carolingian and Arthurian, but flavoured with special Renaissance
+feeling. There is a great deal of rapid love-making between too gallant
+knights and too impressionable ladies; licentious amours which we
+moderns lay at the door of Boiardo and Ariosto, not knowing that the
+licentiousness of the Olivers and Ogiers and Guerins and Huons of
+mediaeval poetry, of the sentimental Amadises, Galaors, and Lisvarts of
+the fourteenth century, whom the Renaissance has toned down in Rogers
+and Rinaldos and Ricciardettos, is by many degrees worse. A moral
+improvement also (for all the immorality of the Renaissance) in the
+eschewing of the never-failing adultery of the Arthurian romances, and
+the appropriation to legitimately faithful love of the poetical devotion
+which Tristram and Launcelot bear to other men's wives. To this are
+added, and more by Ariosto than by Boiardo, two essentially Italian
+elements: something of the nobility of passion of the Platonic
+sonneteers; and a good dose of the ironical, scurrilous, moralizing
+immoral anecdote gossiping of Boccaccio and Sacchetti. Such is the
+stuff. The conception, though rarely comic, and sometimes _bond fide_
+serious, is never earnest. All this is a purely artistic world, a world
+of decorative arabesque incident, intended to please, scarcely ever to
+move, or to move, at most, like some Decameronian tale of Isabella and
+the Basil Plant, or Constance and Martuccio. On the other hand, there is
+none of the grotesque irreverence of Pulci. Boiardo and Ariosto are not
+in earnest; they are well aware that their heroes and heroines are mere
+modern men and women tricked out in pretty chivalric trappings, driven
+wildly about from Paris to Cathay, and from Spain to the Orkneys--on
+Tony Lumpkin's principle of driving his mother round and round the
+garden plot till she thought herself on a heath six miles off--without
+ever really changing place. But they do not, like Pulci, make fun of
+their characters. They write chivalry romances not for Florentine
+pork-butchers and wool-carders, but for gallant ladies and gentlemen, to
+whom, with duels, tournaments, serenades, and fine speeches, chivalry is
+an admired name, though no longer a respected reality.
+
+The heroes of Boiardo and of Ariosto are always bold and gallant and
+glittering, the spirit of romance is in them; a giant Sancho Panza like
+Morgante, redolent of sausage and cheese, would never be admitted into
+the society of a Ferrarese Orlando. The art of Boiardo and of Ariosto is
+eminently pageant art, in which sentiment and heroism are but as one
+element among many; there is no pretence at reality (although there is a
+good deal of incidental realism), and no thought of the interest in
+subject and persons which goes with reality. It is a masquerade, and one
+whose men and women must, I think, be imagined in a kind of artistic
+fancy costume: a mixture of the Renaissance dress and of the antique, as
+we see it in the prints of contemporary pageants, and in Venetian and
+Ferrarese pictures; that Circe of Dosso's, in the Borghese gallery of
+Rome, seated in her stately wine-lees and gold half-heraldically and
+half-cabalistically patterned brocade, before the rose-bushes of the
+little mysterious wood, is the very ideal of the Falerinas and Alcinas,
+of the enchantresses of Boiardo and Ariosto. Pageant people, these of
+the Ferrarese poets; they only play at being in forests and deserts, as
+children play at being on volcanoes or in Green-land by the nursery
+fire. It is a kind of dressing up, a masquerading of the fancy; not
+disguising in order to deceive, but rather laying hold of any pretty or
+brilliant impressive garb that comes to hand, and putting that on in
+conjunction with many odds and ends, as an artist's guests might do with
+the silks and velvets and Oriental properties of a studio. These knights
+and ladies, for ever tearing about from Scotland to India, never, in
+point of fact, get any further than the Apennine slopes where Boiardo
+was born, where Ariosto governed the Garfagnana. They ride for ever
+(while supposed to be in the Ardennes or in Egypt) across the velvet
+moss turf, all patterned with minute starry clovers and the fallen white
+ropy chestnut blossom, amidst the bracken beneath the slender chestnut
+trees, the pale blue sky looking in between their spreading branches; at
+most they lose their way in the intricacies of some seaside pineta,
+where the feet slip on the fallen needles, and the sun slants along the
+vistas of serried, red, scaly trunks, among the juniper and gorse and
+dry grass and flowers growing in the sea sand. Into the vast mediaeval
+forests of Germany and France, Boiardo and Ariosto's fancy never
+penetrated.
+
+Such is the school: a school represented in its typical character only
+by Boiardo and Ariosto, but to which belong, nevertheless, with whatever
+differences, Tasso, Spenser, Camoens, all the poets of Renaissance
+romance. Now of the two leaders thereof. Here I feel that I can speak
+only personally; tell only of my own personal impressions and
+preferences. Comparing together Boiardo and Ariosto, I am, of course,
+aware of the infinite advantages of the latter. Ariosto is a man of far
+more varied genius; he is an artist, while Boiardo is an amateur; he is
+learned in arranging and ornamenting; he knows how to alternate various
+styles, how to begin and how to end. Moreover, he is a scholarly person
+of a more scholarly time: he is familiar with the classics, and, what is
+more important, he is familiar with the language in which he is writing.
+He writes exquisitely harmonious, supple, and brilliant Tuscan verse,
+with an infinite richness of diction; while poor Boiardo jogs along in a
+language which is not the Lombard dialect in which he speaks, and which
+is very uncouth and awkward, as is every pure language for a provincial;
+indeed, so much so, that the pedantic Tuscans require Berni to make
+Tuscan, elegant, to _ingentilire_, with infinite loss to quaintness and
+charm, the "Orlando Innamorato" of poor Ferrarese Boiardo. Moreover,
+Ariosto has many qualities unknown to Boiardo; wit, malice, stateliness,
+decided eloquence and power of simile and apostrophe; he is a symphony
+for full orchestra, and Boiardo a mere melody played on a single fiddle,
+which good authorities (and no one dare contest with Italians when they
+condemn anything not Tuscan as jargon) pronounce to be no Cremona. All
+these advantages Ariosto certainly has; and I do not quarrel with those
+who prefer him for them. But many of them distinctly take away from my
+pleasure. I confess that I am bored by the beautifully written moral and
+allegorical preludes of Ariosto's cantos; I would willingly give all his
+aphorism and all his mythology to get quickly to the story. Also, I
+resent his admirable rhetorical flourishes about his patrons, his
+Ercoles, Ippolitos, and Isabellas they ring false, dreadfully false and
+studied; and Boiardo's quickly despatched friendly greeting of his
+friends, his courteous knights and gentle ladies, pleases me much
+better. Moreover, the all-pervading consciousness of the existence of
+Homer, Virgil, nay, Statius and Lucan, every trumpery antique
+epic-monger, annoys me, giving an uncomfortable doubt as to whether
+Ariosto did not try to make all this nonsense serious, and this romance
+into an epic; all this occasional Virgilian stateliness, alternated with
+a kind of polished Decameronian gossipy cynicism, diverts my attention,
+turns paladins and princesses too much into tutor-educated gentlemen,
+into Bandello and Cinthio-reading ladies of the sixteenth century. The
+picture painted by Ariosto is finer, but you see too much of the
+painter; he and his patrons take up nearly the whole foreground, and
+they have affected, idealized faces and would-be dignified and
+senatorial poses. For these and many other reasons, I personally prefer
+Boiardo; and perhaps the best reason for my preference is the
+irrational one that he gives me more pleasure. My preferences, my
+impressions, I have said, are in this matter, much less critical than
+personal. Hence I can speak of Boiardo only as he affects me.
+
+When first I read Boiardo, I was conscious of a curious phenomenon in
+myself. I must confess to reading books usually in a very ardent or
+rather weary manner, either way in a hurry to finish them. As it
+happened, when I borrowed Boiardo, I had a great many other things on
+hand which required my time and attention; yet I could not make up my
+mind to return the book until I had finished it, though my intention had
+been merely to satisfy my curiosity by a dip into it. I went on, without
+that eager desire to know what follows which one has in a novel;
+drowsily with absolute reluctance to leave off, like the reluctance to
+rise from the grass beneath the trees with only butterflies and shadows
+to watch, or the reluctance to put aside some fairy book of Walter
+Crane's. It was like strolling in some quaint, ill-trimmed, old garden,
+finding fresh flowers, fresh bits of lichened walls, fresh fragments of
+broken earthenware ornaments; or, rather, more like a morning in the
+Cathedral Library at Siena, the place where the gorgeous choir books are
+kept, itself illuminated like missal pages by Pinturicchio: amused,
+delighted, not moved nor fascinated; finding every moment something new,
+some charming piece of gilding, some sweet plumed head, some quaint
+little tree or town; making a journey of lazy discovery in a sort of
+world of Prince Charmings, the real realm of the "Faery Queen," quite
+different in enchantment from the country of Spenser's Gloriana, with
+its pale allegoric ladies and knights, half-human, half-metaphysical,
+and its make-believe allegorical ogres and giants. This is the real
+Fairyland, this of Boiardo: no mere outskirts of Ferrara, with real,
+playfully cynical Ferrarese men and women tricked out as paladins and
+Amazons, and making fun of their disguise, as in Ariosto; no wonderland
+of Tasso, with enchanted gardens copied out of Bolognese pictures and
+miraculous forests learned from theatre mechanicians, wonders imitated
+by a great poet from the cardboard and firework wonders of Bianca
+Cappello's wedding feasts. This is the real fairyland, the wonderland of
+mediaeval romance and of Persian and Arabian tales, no longer solemn or
+awful, but brilliant, sunny, only half believed in; the fairyland of the
+Renaissance, superficially artistic, with its lightest, brightest
+fancies, and its charming realities; its cloistered and painted courts
+with plashing fountains, its tapestried and inlaid rooms, its towered
+and belvedered villas, its quaint clipped gardens full of strange
+Oriental plants and beasts; and all this transported into a country of
+wonders, where are the gardens of the Hesperides, the fountain of
+Merlin, the tomb of Narcissus, the castle of Morgan-le-Fay; every quaint
+and beautiful fancy, antique and mediaeval, mixed up together, as in some
+Renaissance picture of Botticelli or Rosselli or Filippino, where
+knights in armour descend from Pegasus before Roman temples, where
+swarthy white-turbaned Turks, with oddly bunched-up trousers and
+jewelled caftans, and half-naked, oak-crowned youths, like genii
+descended, pensive and wondering, from some antique sarcophagus, and
+dapper princelets and stalwart knights, and citizens and monks, all
+crowd round the altar of some wonder-working Macone or Apolline or
+Trevigante; some comic, dreadful, apish figure, mummed up in
+half-antique, half-oriental garb. Or else we are led into some dainty,
+pale-tinted panel of Botticelli, where the maidens dance in white
+clinging clothes, strewing flowers on to the flower-freaked turf; or
+into some of Poliphilo's vignettes, where the gentle ladies, seated with
+lute and viol under vine-trellises, welcome the young gallant, or poet,
+or knight.
+
+Such is the world of Boiardo. Spenser has once or twice peeped in,
+painted it, and given us exquisite little pictures, as that of
+Malecasta's castle, all hung with mythological tapestries, that of the
+enchanted chamber of Britomart, and those of Sir Calidore meeting the
+Graces and of Hellenore dancing with the Satyrs; but Spenser has done it
+rarely, trembling to return to his dreary allegories. Equal to these
+single pictures by Spenser, Boiardo has only one or two, but he keeps us
+permanently in the world where such pictures are painted. Boiardo is not
+a great artist like Spenser: but he is a wizard, which is better. He
+leads us, unceasingly, through the little dreamy laurelwoods, where we
+meet crisp-haired damsels tied to pine-trees, or terrible dragons, or
+enchanted wells, through whose translucent green waters we see brocaded
+rooms full of fair ladies; he ferries us ever and anon across shallow
+streams, to the castles where _gentil donzelle_ wave their kerchiefs
+from the pillared belvedere; he slips us unseen into the camps and
+council-rooms of the splendidly trapped Saracens, like so many figures
+out of Filippino's frescoes; he conducts us across the bridges where
+giants stand warders, to the mysterious carved tombs whence issue green
+and crested snakes, who, kissed by a paladin, turn into lovely
+enchantresses; he takes us beneath the beds of rivers and through the
+bowels of the earth where kings and knights turned into statues of gold,
+sit round tables covered with jewels, illumined by carbuncles more
+wonderful than that of Jamschid; or through the mazes of fairy gardens,
+where every ear of corn, cut off, turns into a wild beast, and every
+fallen leaf into a bird, where hydras watch in the waters and lamias
+rear themselves in the grass, where Orlando must fill his helmet with
+roses lest he hear the voice of the sirens; where all the wonders of
+Antiquity--the snake-women, the Circes, the sirens, the hydras and fauns
+live, strangely changed into something infinitely quaint and graceful,
+still half-antique, yet already half-Arabian or Keltic, in the midst of
+the fairyland of Merlin and of Oberon--live, move, transform themselves
+afresh; where the golden-haired damsels and the stripling knights,
+delicate like Pinturicchio's Prince Charmings, gallop for ever on their
+enchanted coursers, within enchanted armour, invincible, invulnerable,
+under a sky always blue, and through an unceasing spring, ever onwards
+to new adventures. Adventures which the noble, gentle Castellan of
+Scandiano, poet and knight and humorist, philanthropical philosopher
+almost from sheer goodness of heart, yet a little crazy, and capable of
+setting all the church bells ringing in honour of the invention of the
+name of Rodomonte relates not to some dully ungrateful Alfonso or
+Ippolito, but to his own guests, his own brilliant knights and ladies,
+with ever and anon an effort to make them feel, through his verse, some
+of those joyous spring-tide feelings which bubble up in himself; as when
+he remembers how, "Once did I wander on a May morning in a fair
+flower-adorned field on a hillside overlooking the sea, which was all
+tremulous with light; and there, among the roses of a green thorn-brake,
+a damsel was singing of love; singing so sweetly that the sweetness
+still touches my heart; touches my heart, and makes me think of the
+great delight it was to listen;" and how he would fain repeat that song,
+and indeed an echo of its sweetness runs through his verse. Meanwhile,
+stanza pours out after stanza, adventure grows out of adventure, each
+more wonderful, more gorgeous than its predecessor. To which listen the
+ladies, with their white, girdled dresses and crimped golden locks; the
+youths, with their soft beardless faces framed in combed-out hair, with
+their daggers on their hips and their plumed hats between their fingers;
+and the serious bearded men, in silken robes; drawing nearer the poet,
+letting go lute or violin or music-book as they listen on the villa
+terrace or in some darkened room, where the sunset sky turns green-blue
+behind the pillared window, and the roses hang over the trellise of the
+cloister. And as they did four hundred years ago, so do we now, rejoice.
+The great stalwart naked forms of Greece no longer leap and wrestle or
+carry their well-poised baskets of washed linen before us; the mailed
+and vizored knights of the Nibelungen no longer clash their armour to
+the sound of Volker's red fiddle-bow; the glorified souls of Dante no
+longer move in mystic mazes of light before the eyes of our fancy. All
+that is gone. But here is the fairyland of the Renaissance. And thus
+Matteo Boiardo, Count of Scandiano, goes on, adding adventure to
+adventure, stanza to stanza, in his castle villa, or his palace at
+Ferrara. But suddenly he stops and his bright fiddle and lute music jars
+and ends: "While I am singing, O Redeeming God, I see all Italy set on
+fire by these Gauls, coming to ravage I know not what fresh place."
+
+And thus, with the earlier and more hopeful Renaissance of the fifteenth
+century, Matteo Boiardo broke off with his "Orlando Innamorato." The
+perfect light-heartedness, the delight in play of a gentle, serious,
+eminently kindly nature, which gives half the charm to Boiardo's work,
+seems to have become impossible after the ruin of Italian liberty and
+prosperity the frightful showing up of Italy's moral and social and
+political insignificance at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
+Lombardy especially became a permanent battle-field, and its towns mere
+garrison places of French, German, Spanish, and Swiss barbarians, whose
+presence meant slaughter and pillage and every foulest outrage; and
+then, between the horrors of the unresisted invasions and the unresisted
+exactions, came plague and famine, and industry and commerce gradually
+died out. A few princes, subsidised and guarded by French or
+Imperialists, kept up an appearance of cheerfulness, but the courts even
+grew more gloomy as the people grew more miserable. There is more
+joking, more resonant laughter in Ariosto than in Boiardo, but there is
+very much less serenity and cheerfulness; ever and anon a sort of
+bitterness, a dreary moralizing tendency, a still more dreary fit of
+prophesying future good in which he has no belief, comes over Ariosto.
+Berni, who rewrote the "Orlando Innamorato" in choice Tuscan, and who
+underlined every faintly marked jest of Boiardo's, with evident
+preoccupation of the ludicrous effects of the "Morgante Maggiore"--Berni
+even could not keep up his spirits; into the middle of Boiardo's serene
+fairyland adventures he inserted a description of the sack of Rome which
+is simply harrowing. All real cheerfulness departed from the people, to
+be replaced only by pleasure in the debaucheries of the buffoonish
+obscenity of Aretino, Bandello, and so forth, to which the men of the
+dying Italy of the Renaissance listened as the roysterers of the plague
+of Florence, with the mortal sickness almost upon them, may have
+listened to the filthy songs which they trolled out in their
+drunkenness. Or at best, the poor starved, bruised, battered, humiliated
+nation may have tried to be cheerful on the principle of its harlequin
+playwright Beolco, who, more honest than the Ariostos and Bibbienas, and
+Aretines, came forward on his stage of planks at Padua, and after
+describing the ruin and wretchedness of the country, the sense of
+dreariness and desolation, which made young folk careless of marriage,
+and the very nightingales (he thought) careless of song, recommended his
+audience, since they could not even cry thoroughly and to feel any the
+better for it, to laugh, if they still were able. Boiardo was forgotten;
+his spirit was unsuited to the depression, gloomy brutality, gloomy
+sentimentality, which grew every day as Italy settled down after its
+Renaissance-Shrovetide in the cinders and fasting of the long Lent of
+Spanish and Jesuit rule.
+
+Still the style of Boiardo was not yet exhausted; the peculiar kind of
+fairy epic, the peculiar combination of chivalric and classic elements
+of which the "Orlando Innamorato" and the "Orlando Furioso," had been
+the great examples, still fascinated poets and public. The Renaissance,
+or what remained of it, was now no longer confined to Italy; it had
+spread, paler, more diluted, shallower, over the rest of Europe. To
+follow the filiation of schools, to understand the intellectual
+relationships of individuals, of the latter half of the sixteenth
+century, it becomes necessary to move from one country to another. And
+thus the two brother poets of the family of Boiardo, its two last and
+much saddened representatives, came to write in very different languages
+and under very different circumstances. These two are Tasso and our own
+Spenser. They are both poets of the school of the "Orlando Innamorato,"
+both poets of a reaction, of a kind of purified Renaissance: the one of
+the late Italian Renaissance emasculated by the Council of Trent and by
+Spain; the other of the English Renaissance, in its youth truly, but, in
+the individual case of Spenser, timidly drawn aside from the excesses of
+buoyant life around. In the days of the semi-atheist dramatists, all
+flesh and blood and democracy, Spenser steeps himself in Christianity
+and chivalry, even as Tasso does, following on the fleshly levity and
+scepticism of Boiardo, Berni, and Ariosto. There is in both poets a
+paleness, a certain diaphanous weakness, an absence of strong tint or
+fibre or perfume; in Tasso the pallor of autumn, in Spenser the paleness
+of spring: autumn left sad and leafless by the too voluptuous heat and
+fruitfulness of summer; spring still pale and pinched by winter, with
+timid nipped grass and unripe stiff buds and catkins, which never
+suggest the tangle of bush, grasses, and magnificent flowers and fruits,
+sweet, splendid, or poisonous, which the sun will make out of them. The
+Renaissance, in the past for Tasso, in the proximate and very visible
+future for Spenser, has frightened both; the cynicism and bestiality of
+men like Machiavelli and Aretino; the godless, muscular lustiness of
+Marlowe, Greene, and Peele, seen in a glimpse by Tasso and Spenser, have
+given a shock to their sensitive nature, have made them turn away and
+hide themselves from a second sight of it. They both take refuge in a
+land of fiction, of romance, from the realities into which they dread to
+splash; a world unsubstantial, diaphanous, faint-hued, almost
+passionless, which they make out of beauty and heroism and purity, which
+they alembicize and refine, but into which there never enters any vital
+element, anything to give it flesh and bone and pulsing life: it is a
+mere soap bubble. And beautiful as is this world of their own making, it
+is too negative even for them; they move in it only in imagination,
+calm, serene, vacant, almost sad. There is in it, and in themselves, a
+something wanting; and the remembrance of that unholy-life of reality
+which jostled and splashed their delicate souls, comes back and haunts
+them with its evil thought. There is no laugh--what is worse, no smile
+--in these men. Incipient puritanism, not yet the terrible brawny
+reality of Bunyan, but a vague, grey spectre, haunts Spenser; and the
+puritanism of Don Quixote, the vague, melancholy, fantastic reverting
+from the evil world of to-day to an impossible world of chivalry, is
+troubling the sight of Tasso. He cannot go crazy like Don Quixote, and
+instead he grows melancholy; he cannot believe in his own ideals; he
+cannot give them life, any more than can Spenser give life to his
+allegoric knights and ladies, because the life would have to be fetched
+by Tasso out of the flesh of Ariosto, and by Spenser out of the blood of
+Marlowe; and both Tasso and Spenser shrink at the thought of what might
+with it be inoculated or transfused; and they rest satisfied with
+phantoms. The phantoms of Spenser are more shadowy much more utterly
+devoid of human character; they are almost metaphysical abstractions,
+and they do not therefore sadden us: they are too unlike living things
+to seem very lifeless. But the phantoms of Tasso, he would fain make
+realities; he works at every detail of character, history, or geography,
+which may make his people real; they are not, as with Spenser, elves and
+wizards flitting about in a nameless fairyland, characterless and
+passionless; they are historical creatures, captains and soldiers in a
+country mapped out by the geographer; but they are phantoms all the more
+melancholy, these beautiful and heroic Clorindas and Erminias and
+Tancreds and Godfreys--why? because the real world around Tasso is
+peopled with Brachianos and Corombonas, and Annabellas and Giovannis,
+creatures for Webster and Ford; and because this world of chivalry is,
+in his Italy, as false as the world of Amadis and Esplandian in Toboso
+and Barcelona for poor Don Quixote. Melancholy therefore, and dreamy,
+both Tasso and Spenser, with nothing they can fully love in reality,
+because they see it tainted with reality and evil; without the cheerful
+falling back upon everyday life of Ariosto and Shakespeare, and with a
+strange fancy for fairyland, for the distant, for the Happy Islands, the
+St. Brandan's Isles, the country of the fountain of youth, the country
+of which vague reports have come back with the ships of Raleigh and
+Ponce de Leon. Tasso and Spenser are happiest, in their calm, melancholy
+way, when they can let themselves go in day-dreams, and talk of things
+in which they do not believe, of diamond shields which stun monsters of
+ointments which cure all ills of body and of soul of enchanted groves
+whose trees sound with voices, and lutes, of boats in which, steered by
+fairies, we can glide across the scarcely rippled summer sea, and
+watching the ruins of the past, time and reality left behind, set sail
+for some strange land of bliss. And there is in the very sensuousness
+and love of beauty-of these men a vagueness and melancholy, a constant:
+sense of the fleeting and of the eternal, as in that passage, translated
+from the languidly sweet Italian perfection of Tasso into the timid,
+almost scentless, English of Spenser--"Cosi trapassa al trapassar d'un
+giorno."
+
+
+     So passeth, in the passing of a day,
+
+     Of mortall life the leafe, the bud, the flowre
+
+     No more doth florish after first decay,
+     That earst was sought to deck both bed and bowre
+     Of many a lady, and many a Paramowre.
+     Gather therefore the Rose whilest yet is prime,
+     For soone comes age that will her pride deflowre;
+     Gather the Rose of love whitest yet is time,
+     Whitest loving thou mayest loved be withe equall crime.
+
+
+A sense of evanescence, of dreamlikeness, quite different from the
+thoughtless enjoyment of Boiardo, from the bold and manly facing of the
+future, the solemn, strong sense of life and death as of waking
+realities, of the Elizabethan dramatists, even of weaklings like
+Massinger and Beaumont. In Tasso and in Spenser there is no such
+joyousness, no such solemnity; only a dreamy watching, a regret which is
+scarcely a regret, at the evanescence of pale beauty and pale life, of
+joys feebly felt and evils meekly borne.
+
+With Tasso and Spenser comes to a close the school of Boiardo, the small
+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.
+
+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
+nobles. 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 Tannhaeuser--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 principal 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 vassals 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 associate, and absolutely no
+unmarried girls who could be a desirable match, the lady of the castle
+speedily becomes a goddess, 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 pass 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 "Petit 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 passion 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 vassals, 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 "Aucassin 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 amusement 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 classes 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
+bastards and fathers of bastards; 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 petit 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,
+Altfranzoesische Lieder and Leiche IX.) against the adulterous passion 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
+titles 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 God 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 passed 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 Strassburg, 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
+grass 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 grass 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 mass 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 god of the "Vita Nuova," but
+a foppish young deity, sentimental at once and sensual, of fashionable
+feudal life: the god 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 godhead, and the devotion to
+him a pretty and delicate piece of aestheticism. And such it is here in
+"Flamenca," where there certainly exists neither God nor Christ, both
+complete absentees, whose priest becomes a courteous lover's valet,
+whose church the place for amorous rendezvous, whose sacrifice of mass
+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. God 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
+coarse 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 sluts, curtseying at
+the loan (during the interview of nobler 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 passing 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 passion 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 passion 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
+ennoblement a certain amount of passion, so also does there exist no
+passion (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 Maetzner's
+"Altfranzoesische 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
+noble 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 sex, 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 institution under the name of _service_; and, like all
+other social institutions, 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 fassam 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 God
+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 God 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
+ergaen"). 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
+Maetzner; 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 constitutes 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 illustrious 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 passions 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 passion 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 vassal 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 cluster
+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 passion
+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 passionate, 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 Tannhaeuser, 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
+snatched 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.
+
+But evil is evil, and evil is its fruit. Out of circumstances hitherto
+unknown, circumstances come about for the first time owing to the
+necessities of illegitimate passion, have arisen certain new and nobler
+characters of sexual love, certain new and beautiful conceptions of
+manly and womanly nature. The circumstances to which these are owed are
+pure in themselves, they are circumstances which in more modern times
+have characterized the perfectly legitimate passion of lovers held
+asunder by no social law, but by mere accidental barriers--from Romeo
+and Juliet to the Master of Ravenswood and Lucy Ashton; and pure so far
+have been the spiritual results. But these circumstances were due, in
+the early Middle Ages, to the fact of adultery; and to the new ideal of
+love has clung, even in its purity, in its superior nobility, an element
+of corruption as unknown to gross and corrupt Antiquity as was the
+delicacy and nobility of mediaeval love. The most poetical and pathetic
+of all mediaeval love stories, the very incarnation of all that is most
+lyric at once and most tragic in the new kind of passion, is the story,
+told and retold by a score of poets and prose writers, of the loves of
+Yseult of Ireland and of Sir Tristram who, as the knight was bringing
+the princess to his uncle and her affianced, King Mark of Cornwall drank
+together by a fatal mistake a philter which made all such as partook of
+it in common inseparable lovers even unto death. Every one knows the
+result r: how Yseult came to her husband already the paramour of
+Tristram; how Brangwaine, her damsel, feeling that this unhallowed
+passion was due to her having left-within reach the potion intended for
+the King and Queen of Cornwall, devoted herself, at the price of her
+maidenhood, to connive in the amours of the lovers whom she had made;
+how King Mark was deceived, and doubted, and was deceived again; how
+Tristram fled to Brittany, but how, despite his seeming marriage with
+another and equally lovely Yseult, he remained faithful to the Queen of
+Cornwall. One version tells that Mark slew his nephew while he sat
+harping to Queen Yseult; another that Tristram died of grief because his
+scorned though wedded wife told him that the white-sailed ship, bearing
+his mistress to meet him, bore the black sail which meant that she was
+not on board; but all versions, I think, agree in ending with the fact,
+that the briar-rose growing on the tomb of the one, slowly trailed its
+flowers and thorns along till it had reached also the grave of the
+other, and knit together, as love had knit together with its sweet
+blossoms and sharp spines, the two fated lovers. The Middle Ages were
+enthralled by this tale; but they were also, occasionally, a little
+shocked by it. Poets and prose writers tampered every now and then with
+incidents and characters, seeking to make it appear that, owing to the
+substitution of the waiting-maid, and the neglect of the wedded princess
+of Brittany, Yseult had never belonged to any man save Tristram, nor
+Tristram to any woman save Yseult; or that King Mark had sent his nephew
+to woo the Irish queen's daughter merely in hopes of his perishing in
+the attempt, and that his whole subsequent conduct was due to a mere
+unnatural hatred of a better knight than himself; touching up here and
+there with a view to justifying and excusing to some degree the long
+series of deceits which constituted the whole story. Thus the more timid
+and less gifted. But when, in the very first years (1210) of the
+thirteenth century, the greatest mediaeval poet that preceded Dante, the
+greatest German poet that preceded Goethe, Meister Gottfried von
+Strassburg, took in hand the old threadbare story of "Tristan und
+Isolde," he despised all alterations of this sort, and accepted the
+original tale in its complete crudeness.
+
+For, consciously or unconsciously, Gottfried had conceived this story as
+a thing wholly unknown in his time, and no longer subject to any of
+those necessities of constant rearrangement which tormented mediaeval
+poets: he had conceived it not as a tale, but as a novel. Gottfried
+himself was probably but little aware of what he was doing; the poem
+that he was writing probably fell for him into the very same category as
+the poems of other men; but to us, with our experience of so many
+different forms of narrative, it must be evident that "Tristan und
+Isolde" is a new departure, inasmuch as it is not the story of deeds and
+the people who did them, like the true epic from Homer to the
+Nibelungen; nor the story of people and the adventures which happened to
+them, like all romance poetry from "Palemon and Arcite," to the "Orlando
+Furioso;" but, on the contrary, the story of the psychological
+relations, the gradual metamorphosis of soul by soul, between two
+persons. The long introductory story of Tristram's youth must not
+mislead us, nor all the minute narrations of the killing of dragons and
+the drinking of love philters: Gottfried, we must remember, was
+certainly no deliberate innovator, and these thing's are the mere
+inevitable externalities of mediaeval poetry, preserved with dull slavish
+care by the re-writer of a well-known tale, but enclosing in reality
+something essentially and startlingly modern: the history of a passion
+and of the spiritual changes which it brings about in those who are its
+victims.
+
+To meet again this purely psychological interest we must skip the whole
+rest of the Middle Ages, nay, skip even the great period of dramatic
+literature, not stopping till we come to the end of the seventeenth and
+beginning of the eighteenth century, to the "Princesse de Cleves," to
+"Clarissa Harlowe," nay, really, to "The Nouvelle Heloise." For even in
+Shakespeare there is always interest and importance in the action and
+reaction of subsidiary characters, in the event, in the accidental;
+there is intrigue, chance, misunderstanding, fate--active agencies of
+which Othello and Hamlet, King Lear and Romeo, are helpless victims;
+there is, even in this psychological English drama of the Elizabethans,
+fate in the shape of Iago, in the shape of the Ghost, in the shape of
+the brothers of Webster's duchess; fate in the shape of a ring, a
+letter, a drug, but fate always. And in this "Tristan und Isolde" of
+Gottfried von Strassburg is there not fate also in the love potion
+intended for King Mark, and given by the mistake of Brangwaine to Mark's
+bride and his nephew? To this objection, which will naturally occur to
+any reader who is not acquainted with the poem of Gottfried, I simply
+answer, there is not. The love potion there is, but it does not play the
+same part as do, for instance, the drugs of Friar Laurence and his
+intercepted letter. Suppose the friar's narcotic to have been less
+enduring in its action, or his message to have reached in safety, why
+then Juliet would have been awake instead of asleep, or Romeo would not
+have supposed her to be dead, and instead of the suicide of the two
+lovers, we should have had the successful carying off of Juliet by
+Romeo. Not so with Gottfried. The philter is there, and a great deal is
+talked about it; but it is merely one of the old, threadbare trappings
+of the original story, which he has been too lazy to suppress; it is
+merely, for the reader, the allegorical signal for an outburst of
+passion which all our subsequent knowledge of Tristram and Yseult shows
+us to be absolutely inevitable. In Gottfried's poem, the drinking of the
+potion signifies merely that all the rambling, mediaeval prelude, not to
+be distinguished from the stories of "Morte d'Arthur," and of half the
+romances of the Middle Ages, has come to a close and may be forgotten;
+and that the real work of the great poet, the real, matchless tragedy of
+the four actors--Tristram, Yseult, Mark, and Brangwaine--has begun.
+
+Yet if we seek again to account to ourselves for this astonishing
+impression of modernness which we receive from Gottfried's poem, we
+recognize that it is due to something far more important than the mere
+precocious psychological interest; nay, rather, that this psychological
+interest is itself dependent upon the fact which makes "Tristan und
+Isolde," so modern to our feelings. This fact is simply that the poem of
+Gottfried is the earliest, and yet perhaps almost the completest,
+example of a literary anomaly which Antiquity, for all its abominations,
+did not know: the glorification of fidelity in adultery, the
+glorification of excellence within the compass of guilt. Older times
+--more distant from our own in spirit, though not necessarily in
+years--have presented us with many themes of guilt: the guilt which
+exists according to our own moral standard, but not according to that of
+the narrator, as the magnificently tragic Icelandic incest story of
+Sigmund and Signy; the guilt which has come about no one well knows how,
+an unfortunate circumstance leaving the sinner virtually stainless, in
+his or her own eyes and the eyes of others, like the Homeric Helen; the
+heroic guilt, where the very heroism seems due to the self-sacrifice of
+the sinner's innocence, of Judith; the struggling, remorseful guilt,
+hopelessly overcome by fate and nature, of Phaedra; the dull and dogged
+guilt, making the sinner scarce more than a mere physical
+stumbling-block for others, of the murderer Hagen in the Nibelungenlied;
+and, finally, the perverse guilt, delighting in the consciousness of
+itself, of demons like Richard and Iago, of libidinous furies like the
+heroines of Tourneur and Marston. The guilt theme of "Tristan und
+Isolde" falls into none of these special categories. This theme,
+unguessed even by Shakespeare, is that of the virtuous behaviour towards
+one another of two individuals united in sinning against every one else.
+Gottfried von Strassburg narrates with the greatest detail how Tristram
+leads to the unsuspecting king the unblushing, unremorseful woman
+polluted by his own embraces; how Yseult substitutes on the wedding
+night her spotless damsel Brangwaine for her own sullied self; then,
+terrified lest the poor victim of her dishonour should ever reveal it,
+attempts to have her barbarously murdered, and, finally, seeing that
+nothing can shake the heroic creature's faith, admits her once more to
+be the remorseful go-between in her amours. He narrates how Tristram
+dresses as a pilgrim and carries the queen from a ship to the shore, in
+order that Yseult may call on Christ to bear witness by a miracle that
+she is innocent of adultery, never having been touched save by that
+pilgrim and her own husband; and how, when the followers of King Mark
+have surrounded the grotto in the wood, Tristram places the drawn sword
+between himself and the sleeping queen, as a symbol of their chastity
+which the king is too honest to suspect. He draws, with a psychological
+power truly extraordinary in the beginning of the thirteenth century,
+the two other figures in this love drama: King Mark, cheated,
+dishonoured, oscillating between horrible doubt, ignominious suspicion
+and more ignominious credulity, his love for his wife, his trust in his
+nephew, his incapacity for conceiving ill-faith and fraud, the very
+gentleness and generosity of his nature, made the pander of guilt in
+which he cannot believe; and, on the other side, Brangwaine, the
+melancholy, mute victim of her fidelity to Yseult, the weak, heroic
+soul, rewarded only with cruel ingratitude, and condemned to screen and
+help the sin which she loathes and for which she assumes the awful
+responsibility. All this does Gottfried do, yet without ever seeming to
+perceive the baseness and wickedness of this tissue of lies,
+equivocations, and perjuries in which his lovers hide their passion;
+without ever seeming to guess at the pathos and nobility of the man and
+the woman who are the mere trumpery obstacles or trumpery aids to their
+amours. He heaps upon Tristram and Yseult the most extravagant praises:
+he is the flower of all knighthood, and she, the kindest, gentlest,
+purest, and noblest of women; he insists upon the wickedness of the
+world which is for ever waging war upon their passion, and holds up to
+execration all those who seek to spy out their secret. Gottfried is most
+genuinely overcome by the ideal beauty of this inextinguishable
+devotion, by the sublimity of this love which holds the whole world as
+dross; the crimes of the lovers are for him the mere culminating point
+of their moral grandeur, which has ceased to know any guilt save
+absence of love, any virtue save loving. And so serene is the old
+minnesinger's persuasion, that it obscures the judgment and troubles the
+heart even of his reader; and we are tempted to ask ourselves, on laying
+down the book, whether indeed this could have been sinful, this love of
+Tristram and Yseult which triumphed over everything in the world, and
+could be quenched only by death. That circle of hell where all those who
+had sinfully loved were whirled incessantly in the perse, dark, stormy
+air, appeared in the eyes even of Dante as a place less of punishment
+than of glory; and, especially since the Middle Ages, all mankind looks
+upon that particular hell-pit with admiration rather than with loathing.
+And herein consists, more even than in any deceptions practised upon
+King Mark or any ingratitude manifested towards Brangwaine, the
+sinfulness of Tristram and Yseult: sinfulness which is not finite like
+the individual lives which it offends, but infinite and immortal as the
+heart and the judgment which it perverts. For such a tale, and so told,
+as the tale of Gottfried von Strassburg, makes us sympathize with this
+fidelity and devotion of a man and woman who care for nothing in the
+world save for each other, who are dragged and glued together by the
+desire and habit of mutual pleasure; it makes us admire their readiness
+to die rather than be parted, when their whole life is concentrated in
+their reciprocal sin, when their miserable natures enjoy, care for,
+know, only this miserable love. It makes us wink with leniency at the
+dishonour, the baseness, the cruelty, to which all this easy virtue is
+due. And such sympathy, such admiration, such leniency, for howsoever
+short a time they may remain in our soul, leave it, if they ever leave
+it completely and utterly less strong, less clean than it was before. We
+have all of us a lazy tendency to approve of the virtue which costs no
+trouble; to contemplate in ourselves or others, with a spurious moral
+satisfaction, the development of this or that virtuous quality in souls
+which are deteriorating in undoubted criminal self-indulgence. We have
+all of us, at the bottom of our hearts, a fellow feeling for all human
+affection; and the sinfulness of sinners like Tristram and Yseult lies
+largely in the fact that they pervert this legitimate and holy sympathy
+into a dangerous leniency for any strong and consistent love, into a
+morbid admiration for any irresistible mutual passion, making us forget
+that love has in itself no moral value, and that while self-indulgence
+may often be innocent, only self-abnegation can ever be holy.
+
+The great mediaeval German poem of Tristram and Yseult remained for
+centuries a unique phenomenon; only John Ford perhaps, that grander and
+darker twin spirit of Gottfried von Strassburg, reviving, even among the
+morbidly psychological and crime-fascinated followers of Shakespeare,
+that new theme of evil--the heroism of unlawful love. But Gottfried had
+merely manipulated with precocious analytical power a mode of feeling
+and thinking which was universal in the feudal Middle Ages; the great
+epic of adultery was forgotten, but the sympathetic and admiring
+interest in illegitimate passion remained; and was transmitted, wherever
+the Renaissance or the Reformation did not break through such
+transmission of mediaeval habits, as an almost inborn instinct from
+father to son, from mother to daughter. And we may doubt whether the
+important class of men and women who write and read the novels of
+illicit love, could ever have existed, had not the psychological artists
+of modern times, from Rousseau to George Sand, and from Stendhal to
+Octave Feuillet, found ready prepared for them in the countries not
+re-tempered by Protestantism, an assoiation of romance, heroism, and
+ideality with mere adulterous passion, which was unknown to the
+corruption of Antiquity and to the lawlessness of the Dark Ages, and
+which remained as a fatal alloy to that legacy of mere spiritual love
+which was left to the world by the love poets of early feudalism.
+
+
+II.
+
+The love of the troubadours and minnesingers, of the Arthurian tales,
+which show that love in narrative form, was, as we have seen, polluted
+by the selfishness, the deceitfulness, the many unclean necessities of
+adulterous passion. Elevated and exquisite though it was, it could not
+really purify the relations of man and woman, since it was impure. Nay,
+we see that through its influence the grave and simple married love of
+the earlier tales of chivalry, the love of Siegfried for Chriemhilt, of
+Roland for his bride Belle Aude, of Renaud for his wife Clarisse, is
+gradually replaced in later fiction by the irregular love-makings of
+Huon of Bordeaux, Ogier the Dane, and Artus of Brittany; until we come
+at last to the extraordinary series of the Amadis romances, where every
+hero without exception is the bastard of virtuous parents, who
+subsequently marry and discover their foundling: a state of things
+which, even in the corrupt Renaissance, Boiardo and Ariosto found it
+necessary to reform in their romantic poems. With idealizing refinement,
+the chivalric love of the French, Provencal, and German poets brings
+also a kind of demoralization which, from one point of view, makes the
+spotless songs of Bernard de Ventadour and Armaud de Mareulh, of Ulrich
+von Liechtenstein and Frauenlob, less pure than the licentious poems
+addressed by the Greeks and Romans to women who, at least, were not the
+wives of other men.
+
+Shall all this idealizing refinement, this almost religious fervour,
+this new poetic element of chivalric love remain useless; or serve only
+to subtly pollute while pretending to purify the great singing passion?
+Not so. But to prevent such waste of what in itself is pure and
+precious, is the mission of another country, of another civilization; of
+a wholly different cycle of poets who, receiving the new element of
+mediaeval love after it has passed through and been sifted by a number
+of hands, shall cleanse and recreate it in the fire of intellectual and
+almost abstract passion, producing that wonderful essence of love which,
+as the juices squeezed by alchemists out of jewels purified the body
+from all its ills, shall purify away all the diseases of the human soul.
+
+While the troubadours and minnesingers had been singing at the courts of
+Angevine kings and Hohenstauffen emperors, of counts of Toulouse and
+dukes of Austria; a new civilization, a new political and social system,
+had gradually been developing in the free burghs of Italy; a new life
+entirely the reverse of the life of feudal countries. The Italian cities
+were communities of manufacturers and merchants, into which only
+gradually, and at the sacrifice of every aristocratic privilege and
+habit, a certain number of originally foreign feudatories were gradually
+absorbed. Each community consisted of a number of mercantile families,
+equal before the law, and illustrious or obscure according to their
+talents or riches, whose members, instead of being scattered over a wide
+area like the members of the feudal nobility, were most often gathered
+together under one roof--sons, brothers, nephews, daughters, sisters and
+daughters-in-law, forming a hierarchy attending to the business of
+factory or counting-house under the orders of the father of the family,
+and to the economy of the house-under the superintendence of the mother;
+a manner of living at once business-like and patriarchal, expounded
+pounded by the interlocutors in Alberti's "Governo della Famiglia," and
+which lasted until the dissolution of the commonwealths and almost to
+our own times. Such habits imply a social organization, an intercourse
+between men and women, and a code of domestic morality the exact
+opposite to those of feudal countries. Here, in the Italian cities,
+there are no young men bound to loiter, far from their homes, round the
+wife of a military superior, to whom her rank and her isolation from all
+neighbours give idleness and solitude. The young men are all of them in
+business, usually with their own kinsfolk; not in their employer's
+house, but in his office; they have no opportunity of seeing a woman
+from dawn till sunset. The women, on their side, are mainly employed at
+home: the whole domestic arrangement depends upon them, and keeps their
+hands constantly full; working, and working in the company of their
+female relatives and friends. Men and women are free comparatively
+little, and then they are free all together in the same places; hence no
+opportunities for _tete-a-tete_. Early Italian poetry is fond of showing
+us the young poet reading his verses or explaining his passion to those
+gentle, compassionate women learned in love, of whom we meet a troop,
+beautiful, vague, half-arch, half-melancholy faces, consoling Dante in
+the "Vita Nuova," and reminding Guido Cavalcanti of his lady far off at
+Toulouse. But such women almost invariably form a group; they cannot be
+approached singly. Such a state of society inevitably produces a high
+and strict morality. In these early Italian cities a case of in'
+fidelity is punished ruthlessly; the lover banished or killed; the wife
+for ever lost to the world, perhaps condemned to solitude and a
+lingering death in the fever tracts, like Pia dei Tolomei. A complacent
+deceived husband is even more ridiculous (the deceived husband is
+notoriously the chief laughing stock of all mediaeval free towns) than is
+a jealous husband among the authorized and recognized _cicisbeos_ of a
+feudal court. Indeed the respect for marriage vows inevitable in this
+busy democratic mediaeval life is so strong, that long after the
+commonwealths have turned into despotisms, and every social tie has been
+dissolved in the Renaissance, the wives and daughters of men stained
+with every libidinous vice, nay, of the very despots themselves
+--Tiberiuses and Neros on a smaller scale--remain spotless in the midst
+of evil; and authorized adultery begins in Italy only under the Spanish
+rule in the late sixteenth century.
+
+Such were the manners and morals of the Italian commonwealths when,
+about the middle of the thirteenth century, the men of Tuscany, now free
+and prosperous, suddenly awoke to the consciousness that they had a soul
+which desired song, and a language which was spontaneously singing. It
+was the moment when painting was beginning to claim for the figures of
+real men and women the walls and vaulted spaces whence had hitherto
+glowered, with vacant faces and huge ghostlike eyes, mosaic figures,
+from their shimmering golden ground; the moment when the Pisan artists
+had sculptured solemnly draped madonnas and kings not quite unworthy of
+the carved sarcophagi which stood around them; the moment when, merging
+together old Byzantine traditions and Northern examples, the architects
+of Florence, Siena, and Orvieto conceived a style which made cathedrals
+into marvellous and huge reliquaries of marble, jasper, alabaster, and
+mosaics. The mediaeval flowering time had come late, very late, in Italy;
+but the atmosphere was only the warmer, the soil the richer, and Italy
+put forth a succession of exquisite and superb immortal flowers of art
+when the artistic sap of other countries had begun to be exhausted. But
+the Italians, the Tuscans, audacious in the other arts, were diffident
+of themselves with regard to poetry. Architecture, painting, sculpture,
+had been the undisputed field for plebeian craftsmen, belonging
+exclusively to the free burghs and disdained by the feudal castles; but
+poetry was essentially the aristocratic, the feudal art, cultivated by
+knights and cultivated for kings and barons. It was probably an unspoken
+sense of this fact which caused the early Tuscan poets to misgive their
+own powers and to turn wistfully and shyly towards the poets of Provence
+and of Sicily. There, beyond the seas, under the last lords of Toulouse
+and the brilliant mongrel Hohenstauffen princes, were courts, knights,
+and ladies; there was the tradition of this courtly art of poetry; and
+there only could the sons of Florentine or Sienese merchants,
+clodhoppers in gallantry and song, hope to learn the correct style of
+thing. Hence the history of the Italian lyric before Dante is the
+history of a series of transformations which connect a style of poetry
+absolutely feudal and feudally immoral, with the hitherto unheard-of
+platonic love subtleties of the "Vita Nuova." And it is curious, in
+looking over the collections of early Italian lyrists, to note the
+alteration in tone as Sicily and the feudal courts are left further and
+further behind. Ciullo d' Alcamo, flourishing about 1190, is the only
+Italian-writing poet absolutely contemporaneous with the earlier and
+better trouveres, troubadours, and minnesingers; and he is also the only
+one who resembles them very closely. His famous _tenso_, beginning "Rosa
+fresca aulentissima" (a tolerably faithful translation heads the
+beautiful collection of the late Mr. D.G. Rossetti), is indeed more
+explicitly gross and immoral than the majority of Provencal and German
+love-songs: loose as are many of the _albas, serenas, wachtlieder_, and
+even many of the less special forms of German and Provencal poetry, I am
+acquainted with none of them which comes up to this singular dialogue,
+in which a man, refusing to marry a woman, little by little wins her
+over to his wishes and makes her brazenly invite him to her dishonour.
+Between Ciullo d' Alcamo and his successors there is some gap of time,
+and a corresponding want of gradation. Yet the Sicilian poets of the
+courts of Hohenstauffen and Anjou, recognizable by their name or the
+name of their town, Inghilfredi, Manfredi, Ranieri and Ruggierone da
+Palermo, Tommaso and Matteo da Messina, Guglielmotto d' Otranto, Rinaldo
+d'Aquino, Peir delle Vigne, either maintain altogether unchanged the
+tone of the troubadours, or only gradually, as in the remarkable case of
+the Notary of Lentino, approximate to the platonic poets of Tuscany. The
+songs of the archetype of Sicilian singers, the Emperor Frederick II.,
+are completely Provencal in feeling as in form, though infinitely
+inferior in execution. With him it is always the pleasure which he hopes
+from his lady, or the pleasure which he has had--"Quando ambidue stavamo
+in allegranza alla dolce fera;" "Pregovi donna mia--Per vostra
+cortesia--E pregovi che sia--Quello che lo core disia." Again: "Sospiro
+e sto in rancura--Ch' io son si disioso--E pauroso--Mi fate penare--Ma
+tanto m' assicura--Lo suo viso amoroso--E lo gioioso--Riso e lo
+sguardare--E lo parlare--Di questa criatura--Che per paura--Mi fate
+penare--E di morare--Tant' e fina e pura--Tanto e saggia e cortese--Non
+credo che pensasse--Ne distornasse--Di cio he m' impromise." It is, this
+earliest Italian poetry, like the more refined poetry of troubadours and
+minnesingers, eminently an importuning of highborn but loosely living
+women. From Sicily and Apulia poetry goes first, as might be expected
+(and as probably sculpture went) to the seaport Pisa, thence to the
+neighbouring Lucca, considerably before reaching Florence. And as it
+becomes more Italian and urban, it becomes also, under the strict
+vigilance of burgher husbands, considerably more platonic. In Bologna,
+the city of jurists, it acquires (the remark is not mine merely, but
+belongs also to Carducci) the very strong flavour of legal quibbling
+which distinguishes the otherwise charming Guido Guinicelli; and once in
+Florence, among the most subtle of all subtle Tuscans, it becomes at
+once what it remained even for Dante, saturated with metaphysics: the
+woman is no longer paramount, she is subordinated to Love himself; to
+that personified abstraction Amor, the serious and melancholy son of
+pagan philosophy and Christian mysticism. The Tuscans had imported from
+Provence and Sicily the new element of mediaeval love, of life devotion,
+soul absorption in loving; if they would sing, they must sing of this;
+any other kind of love, at a time when Italy still read and relished her
+would-be Provencals, Lanfranc Cicala and Sordel of Mantua, would have
+been unfashionable and unendurable. But in these Italian commonwealths,
+as we have seen, poets are forced, nilly-willy, to be platonic; an
+importuning poem found in her work-basket may send a Tuscan lady into a
+convent, or, like Pia, into the Maremma; an _alba_ or a _serena_
+interrupted by a wool-weaver of Calimara or a silk spinner of Lucca, may
+mean that the imprudent poet be found weltering in blood under some
+archway the next morning. The chivalric sentimentality of feudalism must
+be restrained; and little by little, under the pressure of such very
+different social habits, it grows into a veritable platonic passion.
+Poets must sing, and in order that they sing, they must adore; so men
+actually begin to seek out, and adore and make themselves happy and
+wretched about women from whom they can hope only social distinctions;
+and this purely aesthetic passion goes on by the side nay, rather on the
+top, of their humdrum, conjugal life or loosest libertinage. Petrarch's
+bastards were born during the reign of Madonna Laura; and that they
+should have been, was no more a slight or infidelity to her than to the
+other Madonna, the one in heaven. Laura had a right to only ideal
+sentiments ideal relations; the poet was at liberty to carry more
+material preferences elsewhere.
+
+But could such love as this exist, could it be genuine? To my mind,
+indubitably. For there is, in all our perceptions and desires of
+physical and moral beauty, an element of passion which is akin to love;
+and there is, in all love that is not mere lust, a perception of, a
+craving for, beauty, real or imaginary which is identical with our
+merely aesthetic perceptions and cravings; hence the possibility, once
+the wish for such a passion present, of a kind of love which is mainly
+aesthetic, which views the beloved as gratifying merely to the wish for
+physical or spiritual loveliness, and concentrates upon one exquisite
+reality all dreams of ideal perfection. Moreover there comes, to all
+nobler natures, a love dawning: a brightening and delicate flushing of
+the soul before the actual appearance of the beloved one above the
+horizon, which is as beautiful and fascinating in its very clearness,
+pallor, and coldness, as the unearthly purity of the pale amber and
+green and ashy rose which streaks the heavens before sunrise. The love
+of the early Tuscan poets (for we must count Guinicelli, in virtue of
+his language, as a Tuscan) had been restrained, by social necessities
+first, then by habit and deliberate aesthetic choice, within the limits
+of this dawning state; and in this state, it had fed itself off mere
+spiritual food, and acquired the strange intensity of mere intellectual
+passions. We give excessive weight, in our days, to spontaneity in all
+things, apt to think that only the accidental, the unsought, can be
+vital; but it is true in many things, and truest in all matters of the
+imagination and the heart, that the desire to experience any sentiment
+will powerfully conduce to its production, and even give it a strength
+due to the long incubation of the wish. Thus the ideal love of the
+Tuscan poets was probably none the weaker, but rather the stronger, for
+the desire which they felt to sing such passion; nay, rather to hear it
+singing in themselves. The love of man and wife, of bride and
+bridegroom, was still of the domain of prose; adulterous love forbidden;
+and the tradition of, the fervent wish for, the romantic passion of the
+troubadours consumed them as a strong artistic craving. Platonic love
+was possible, doubly possible in souls tense with poetic wants; it
+became a reality through the strength of the wish for it.
+
+Nor was this all. In all imaginative passions, intellectual motives are
+so much fuel; and in this case the necessity of logically explaining the
+bodiless passion for a platonic lady, of understanding why they felt in
+a manner so hitherto unknown to gross mankind, tended greatly to
+increase the love of these Tuscans, and to bring it in its chastity to
+the pitch of fervour of more fleshly passions, by mingling with the
+aesthetic emotions already in their souls the mystical theorizings of
+transcendental metaphysics, and the half-human, half-supernatural
+ecstasy of mediaeval religion. For we must remember that Italy was a
+country not merely of manufacturers and bankers, but of philosophers
+also and of saints.
+
+Among the Italians of the thirteenth century the revival of antique
+literature was already in full swing; while in France, Germany, and
+Provence there had been, in lyric poetry at least, no trace of classic
+lore. Whereas the trouveres and troubadours had possessed but the light
+intellectual luggage of a military aristocracy; and the minnesingers
+had, for the most part, been absolutely ignorant of reading and writing
+(Wolfram says so of himself, and Ulrich von Liechtenstein relates how he
+carried about his lady's letter for days unread until the return of his
+secretary); the poets of Italy, from Brunetto Latini to Petrarch, were
+eminently scholars; men to whom, however much they might be politicians
+and ringleaders, like Cavalcanti, Donati, and Dante, whatever existed of
+antique learning was thoroughly well known. Such men were familiar with
+whatever yet survived of the transcendental theories of Plato and
+Plotinus; and they seized at once upon the mythic metaphysics of an
+antenatal condition, of typical ideas, of the divine essence of beauty,
+on all the mystic discussions on love and on the soul, as a
+philosophical explanation of their seemingly inexplicable passion for an
+unapproachable woman. The lady upon whom the poetic fervour, the
+mediaeval love, inherited from Provence and France, was now expended, and
+whom social reasons placed quite beyond the reach of anything save the
+poet's soul and words, was evidently beloved for the sake of that much
+of the divine essence contained in her nature; she was loved for purely
+spiritual reasons, loved as a visible and living embodiment of virtue
+and beauty, as a human piece of the godhead. So far, therefore, from
+such an attachment being absurd, as absurd it would have seemed to
+troubadours and minnesingers, who never served a lady save for what they
+called a reward; it became, in the eyes of these platonizing Italians,
+the triumph of the well-bred soul; and as such, soon after, a necessary
+complement to dignities, talents, and wealth, the very highest
+occupation of a liberal mind. Thus did their smattering of platonic and
+neo-platonic philosophy supply the Tuscan poets with a logical reality
+for this otherwise unreal passion.
+
+But there was something more. In this democratic and philosophizing
+Italy, there was not the gulf which separated the chivalric poets, men
+of the sword and not of books, from the great world of religious
+mysticism; for, though the minnesingers especially were extremely devout
+and sang many a strange love-song to the Virgin; they knew, they could
+know, nothing of the contemplative religion of Eckhardt and his
+disciples--humble and transcendental spirits, whose words were treasured
+by the sedentary, dreamy townsfolk of the Rhine, but would have conveyed
+no meaning even to the poet of the Grail epic, with its battles and
+feasts, its booted and spurred slapdash morality, Wolfram von
+Eschenbach. In the great manufacturing cities of Italy, such religious
+mysticism spread as it could never spread in feudal courts; it became
+familiar, both in the mere passionate sermons and songs of the wandering
+friars, and in the subtle dialectics of the divines; above all, it
+became familiar to the poets. Now the essence of this contemplative
+theology of the Middle Ages, which triumphantly held its own against the
+cut-and-dry argumentation of scholastic rationalism, was love. Love
+which assuredly meant different things to different minds; a passionate
+benevolence towards man and beast to godlike simpletons like Francis of
+Assisi; a mere creative and impassive activity of the divinity to
+deep-seeing (so deep as to see only their own strange passionate eyes
+and lips reflected in the dark well of knowledge) and almost pantheistic
+thinkers like Master Eckhardt; but love nevertheless, love. "Amor,
+amore, ardo d' amore," St. Francis had sung in a wild rhapsody, a sort
+of mystic dance, a kind of furious _malaguena_ of divine love; and that
+he who would wish to know God, let him love--"Qui vult habere notitiam
+Dei, amet," had been written by Hugo of St. Victor, one of the subtlest
+of all the mystics. "Amor oculus est," said Master Eckhardt; love,
+love--was not love then the highest of all human faculties, and must not
+the act of loving, of perceiving God's essence in some creature which
+had virtue, the soul's beauty, and beauty, the body's virtue, be the
+noblest business of a noble life? Thus argued the poets; and their
+argument, half-passionate, half-scholastic, mixing Phaedrus and
+Bonaventura, the Schools of Alexandria and the Courts of Love of
+Provence, resulted in adding all the fervid reality of philosophical and
+religious aspiration to their clear and cold phantom of disembodied love
+of woman.
+
+Little by little therefore, together with the carnal desires of
+Provencals and Sicilians, the Tuscan poets put behind them those little
+coquetries of style and manner, complications of metre and rhythm
+learned and fantastic as a woman's plaited and braided hair; those
+metaphors and similes, like bright flowers or shining golden ribbons
+dropped from the lady's bosom and head and eagerly snatched by the
+lover, which we still find, curiously transformed and scented with the
+rosemary and thyme of country lanes, in the peasant poetry of modern
+Tuscany. Little by little does the love poetry of the Italians reject
+such ornaments; and cloth itself in that pale garment, pale and stately
+in heavy folds like a nun's or friar's weeds, but pure and radiant and
+solemn as the garment of some painted angel, which we have all learned
+to know from the "Vita Nuova."
+
+To describe this poetry of the immediate precursors and contemporaries
+of Dante is to the last degree difficult: it can be described only by
+symbols, and symbols can but mislead us. Dante Rossetti himself, after
+translating with exquisite beauty the finest poems of this school,
+showed how he had read into them his own spirit, when he drew the
+beautiful design for the frontispiece of his collection. These two
+lovers--the youth kneeling in his cloth of silver robe, lifting his long
+throbbing neck towards the beloved; the lady stooping down towards him,
+raising him up and kissing him; the mingled cloud of waving hair, the
+four tight-clasped hands, the four tightly glued lips, the profile
+hidden by the profile, the passion and the pathos, the eager, wistful
+faces, nay, the very splendour of brocade robes and jewels, the very
+sweetness of blooming rose spaliers; all this is suitable to illustrate
+this group of sonnets or that of the "House of Life;" but it is false,
+false in efflorescence and luxuriance of passion, splendour and colour
+of accessory, to the poetry of these early Tuscans. Imaginative their
+poetry certainly is, and passionate; indeed the very concentration of
+imaginative passion; but imagination and passion unlike those of all
+other poets; perhaps because more rigorously reduced to their elements:
+imagination purely of the heart, passion purely of the intellect,
+neither of the senses: love in its most essential condition, but, just
+because an essence, purged of earthly alloys, rarefied, sublimated into
+a cultus or a philosophy.
+
+These poems might nearly all have been written by one man, were it
+possible for one man to vary from absolute platitude to something like
+genius, so homogeneous is their tone: everywhere do we meet the same
+simplicity of diction struggling with the same complication and subtlety
+of thought, the same abstract speculation strangely mingled with most
+individual and personal pathos. The mode of thinking and feeling, the
+conception of all the large characteristics of love, and of all its
+small incidents are, in this _cycle_ of poets, constantly the same; and
+they are the same in the "Vita Nuova;" Dante having, it would seem,
+invented and felt nothing unknown to his immediate predecessors and
+contemporaries, but merely concentrated their thoughts and feelings by
+the greater intenseness of his genius. This platonic love of Dante's
+days is, as I have said, a passion sublimated into a philosophy and a
+cultus. The philosophy of love engages much of these poets' attention;
+all have treated of it, but Guido Cavalcanti, Dante's elder brother in
+poetry, is love's chief theologian. He explains, as Eckhardt or
+Bonaventura might explain the mysteries of God's being and will, the
+nature and operation of love. "Love, which enamours us of excellence,
+arises out of pure virtue of the soul, and equals us to God," he tells
+us; and subtly developes his theme. This being the case, nothing can be
+more mistaken than to suppose, as do those of little sense, that Love is
+blind, and goes blindly about ("Da sentir poco, e da credenza vana--Si
+move il dir di cotal grossa gente--Ch' amor fa cieco andar per lo suo
+regno"). Love is omniscient, since love is born of the knowledge and
+recognition of excellence. Such love as this is the only true source of
+happiness, since it alone raises man to the level of the divinity.
+Cavalcanti has in him not merely the subtlety but the scornfulness of a
+great divine. His wrath against all those who worship or defend a
+different god of Love knows no bounds. "I know not what to say of him
+who adores the goddess born of Saturn and sea-foam. His love is fire: it
+seems sweet, but its result is bitter and evil. He may indeed call
+himself happy; but in such delights he mingles himself with much
+baseness." Such is this god of Love, who, when he descended into Dante's
+heart, caused the spirit of life to tremble terribly in his secret
+chamber, and trembling to cry, "Lo, here is a god stronger than myself,
+who coming will rule over me. Ecce Deus fortior me, qui veniens
+dominabitur mihi!"
+
+The god, this chaste and formidable archangel Amor, is the true subject
+of these poets' adoration; the woman into whom he descends by a mystic
+miracle of beauty and of virtue becomes henceforward invested with
+somewhat of his awful radiance. She is a gentle, gracious lady; a
+lovable and loving woman, in describing whose grey-green eyes and colour
+as of snow tinted with pomegranate, the older Tuscans would fain linger,
+comparing her to the new-budded rose, to the morning star, to the golden
+summer air, to the purity of snowflakes falling silently in a serene
+sky; but the sense of the divinity residing within her becomes too
+strong. From her eyes dart spirits who strike awe into the heart; from
+her lips come words which make men sigh; on her passage the poet casts
+down his eyes; notions, all these, with which we are familiar from the
+"Vita Nuova;" but which belong to Cavalcanti, Lapo Gianni, nay, even to
+Guinicelli, quite as much as to Dante. The poet bids his verse go forth
+to her, but softly; and stand before her with bended head, as before the
+Mother of God. She is a miracle herself, a thing sent from heaven, a
+spirit, as Dante says in that most beautiful of all his sonnets, the
+summing up of all that the poets of his circle had said of their
+lady--"Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare."
+
+"She passes along the street so beautiful and gracious," says
+Guinicelli, "that she humbles pride in all whom she greets, and makes
+him of our faith if he does not yet believe. And no base man can come
+into her presence. And I will tell you another virtue of her: no man can
+think ought of evil as long as he looks upon her." "The noble mind which
+I feel, on account of this youthful lady who has appeared, makes me
+despise baseness and vileness," says Lapo Gianni. The women who surround
+her are glorified in her glory, glorified in their womanhood and
+companionship with her. "The ladies around you," says Cavalcanti, "are
+dear to me for the sake of your love; and I pray them as they are
+courteous, that they should do you all honour." She is, indeed, scarcely
+a woman, and something more than a saint: an avatar, an incarnation of
+that Amor who is born of virtue and beauty, and raises men's minds to
+heaven; and when Cavalcanti speaks of his lady's portrait behind the
+blazing tapers of Orsanmichele, it seems but natural that she should be
+on an altar, in the Madonna's place. The idea of a mysterious
+incarnation of love in the lady, or of a mystic relationship between her
+and love, returns to these poets. Lapo Gianni tells us first that she is
+Amor's sister, then speaks of her as Amor's bride; nay, in this love
+theology of the thirteenth century, arises the same kind of confusion as
+in the mystic disputes of the nature of the Godhead. A Sienese poet, Ugo
+da Massa, goes so far as to say, "Amor and I are all one thing; and we
+have one will and one heart; and if I were not, Amor were not; mind you,
+do not think I am saying these things from subtlety ('e non pensate ch'
+io 'l dica per arte'); for certainly it is true that I am love, and he
+who should slay me would slay love."
+
+Together with the knowledge of public life and of scholastic theories,
+together with the love of occult and cabalistic science, and the craft
+of Provencal poetry, Dante received from his Florence of the thirteenth
+century the knowledge of this new, this exotic and esoteric intellectual
+love. And, as it is the mission of genius to gather into an undying
+whole, to model into a perfect form, the thoughts and feelings and
+perceptions of the less highly endowed men who surround it, so Dante
+moulded out of the love passion and love philosophy of his day the "Vita
+Nuova." Whether the story narrated in this book is fact; whether a real
+woman whom he called Beatrice ever existed; some of those praiseworthy
+persons, who prowl in the charnel-house of the past, and put its poor
+fleshless bones into the acids and sublimates of their laboratory, have
+gravely doubted. But such doubts cannot affect us. For if the story of
+the "Vita Nuova" be a romance, and if Beatrice be a mere romance
+heroine, the real meaning and value of the book does not change in our
+eyes; since, to concoct such a tale, Dante must have had a number of
+real experiences which are fully the tale's equivalent; and to conceive
+and create such a figure as Beatrice, and such a passion as she inspires
+her poet, he must have felt as a poignant reality the desire for such a
+lady, the capacity for such a love. A tale merely of the soul, and of
+the soul's movements and actions, this "Vita Nuova;" so why should it
+matter if that which could never exist save in the spirit, should have
+been but the spirit's creation? It is, in its very intensity, a vision
+of love; what if it be a vision merely conceived and never realized?
+Hence the futility of all those who wish to destroy our faith and
+pleasure by saying "all this never took place." Fools, can you tell what
+did or did not take place in a poet's mind? Be this as it may, the "Vita
+Nuova," thank heaven, exists; and, thank heaven, exists as a reality to
+our feelings. The longed-for ideal, the perfection whose love, said
+Cavalcanti, raises us up to God, has seemed to gather itself into a
+human shape; and a real being has been surrounded by the halo of
+perfection emanated from the poet's own soul. The vague visions of glory
+have suddenly taken body in this woman, seen rarely, at a distance; the
+woman whom, as a child, the poet, himself a child, had already looked at
+with the strange, ideal fascination which we sometimes experience in our
+childhood. People are apt to smile at this opening of the "Vita Nuova;"
+to put aside this narrative of childish love together with the pathetic
+little pedantries of learned poetry and Kabbala, of the long gloses to
+each poem, and the elaborate calculations of the recurrence and
+combination of the number nine (and that curious little bit of
+encyclopaedic display about the Syrian month _Tismin_) as so much pretty
+local colouring or obsolete silliness. But there is nothing at which to
+laugh in such childish fascinations; the wonderful, the perfect, is more
+open to us as children than it is afterwards: a word, a picture, a
+snatch of music will have for us an ineffable, mysterious meaning; and
+how much more so some human being, often some other, more brilliant
+child from whose immediate contact we are severed by some circumstance,
+perhaps by our own consciousness of inferiority, which makes that other
+appear strangely distant, above us, moving in a world of glory which we
+scarcely hope to approach; a child sometimes, or sometimes some grown
+person, beautiful, brilliant, who sings or talks or looks at us, the
+child, with ways which we do not understand, like some fairy or goddess.
+No indeed, there is nothing to laugh at in this, in this first
+blossoming of that love for higher and more beautiful things, which in
+most of us is trodden down, left to wither, by our maturer selves;
+nothing to make us laugh; nay, rather to make us sigh that later on we
+see too well, see others too much on their real level, scrutinize too
+much; too much, alas, for what at best is but an imperfect creature. And
+in this state of fascination does the child Dante see the child
+Beatrice, as a strange, glorious little vision from a childish sphere
+quite above him; treasuring up that vision, till with his growth it
+expands and grows more beautiful and noble, but none the less
+fascinating and full of awfulness. When, therefore, the grave young
+poet, full of the yearning for Paradise (but Paradise vaguer, sweeter,
+less metaphysic and theological than the Paradise of his manhood); as
+yet but a gracious, learned youth, his terrible moral muscle still
+undeveloped by struggle, the noble and delicate dreamer of Giotto's
+fresco, with the long, thin, almost womanish face, marked only by dreamy
+eyes and lips, wandering through this young Florence of the Middle
+Ages--when, I say, he meets after long years, the noble and gentle
+woman, serious and cheerful and candid; and is told that she is that
+same child who was the queen and goddess of his childish fancies; then
+the vague glory with which his soul is filled expands and enwraps the
+beloved figure, so familiar and yet so new. And the blood retreats from
+his veins, and he trembles; and a vague god within him, half allegory,
+half reality, cries out to him that a new life for him has begun.
+Beatrice has become the ideal; Beatrice, the real woman, has ceased to
+exist; the Beatrice of his imagination only remains, a piece of his own
+soul embodied in a gracious and beautiful reality, which he follows,
+seeks, but never tries to approach. Of the real woman he asks nothing;
+no word throughout the "Vita Nuova" of entreaty or complaint, no shadow
+of desire, not a syllable of those reproaches of cruelty which Petrarch
+is for ever showering upon Laura. He desires nothing of Beatrice, and
+Beatrice cannot act wrongly; she is perfection, and perfection makes him
+who contemplates humble at once and proud, glorifying his spirit. Once,
+indeed, he would wish that she might listen to him; he has reason to
+think that he has fallen in her esteem, has seemed base and uncourteous
+in her eyes, and he would explain. But he does not wish to address her;
+it never occurs to him that she can ever feel in any way towards him; it
+is enough that he feels towards her. Let her go by and smile and
+graciously salute her friends: the sight of her grave and pure
+regalness, nay, rather divinity, of womanhood, suffices for his joy;
+nay, later the consciousness comes upon him that it is sufficient to
+know of her existence and of his love even without seeing her. And, as
+must be the case in such ideal passion, where the action is wholly in
+the mind of the lover, he is at first ashamed, afraid; he feels a terror
+lest his love, if known to her, should excite her scorn; a horror lest
+it be misunderstood and befouled by the jests of those around him, even
+of those same gentle women to whom he afterwards addresses his praise of
+Beatrice. He is afraid of exposing to the air of reality this ideal
+flower of passion. But the moment comes when he can hide it no longer;
+and, behold, the passion flower of his soul opens out more gloriously in
+the sunlight of the world. He is proud of his passion, of his worship;
+he feels the dignity and glory of being the priest of such a love. The
+women all round, the beautiful, courteous women, of whom, only just
+now, he was so dreadfully afraid, become his friends and confidants;
+they are quite astonished (half in love, perhaps, with the young poet)
+at this strange way of loving; they sympathize, admire, are in love with
+his love for Beatrice. And to them he speaks of her rather than to men,
+for the womanhood which they share with his lady consecrates them in his
+eyes; and they, without jealousy towards this ideal woman, though
+perhaps not without longing for this ideal love, listen as they might
+listen to some new and unaccountably sweet music, touched and honoured,
+and feeling towards Dante as towards some beautiful, half-mad thing. He
+talks of her, sings of her, and is happy; the strangest thing in this
+intensely real narrative of real love is this complete satisfaction of
+the passion in its own existence, this complete absence of all desire or
+hope. But this happiness is interrupted by the sudden, terrible thought
+that one day all this must cease; the horrible, logical necessity coming
+straight home to him, that one day she must die--"Di necessita conviene
+che la gentilissima Beatrice alcuna volta si muoia." There is nothing
+truer, more intensely pathetic, in all literature, than this frightful
+pang of evil, not real, but first imagined; this frightful nightmare
+vision of the end coming when reality is still happy. Have we not all of
+us at one time felt the horrible shudder of that sudden perception that
+happiness must end; that the beloved, the living, must die; that this
+thing the present, which we clasp tight with our arms, which throbs
+against our breast, will in but few moments be gone, vanished, leaving
+us to grasp mere phantom recollections? Compared with this the blow of
+the actual death of Beatrice is gentle. And then, the truthfulness of
+his narration how, with yearning, empty heart, hungering after those
+poor lost realities of happiness, after that occasional glimpse of his
+lady, that rare catching of her voice, that blessed consciousness of her
+existence, he little by little lets himself be consoled, cradled to
+sleep like a child which has sobbed itself out, in the sympathy, the
+vague love, of another--the Donna della Finestra--with whom he speaks of
+Beatrice; and the sudden, terrified, starting up and shaking off of any
+such base consolation, the wrath at any such mental infidelity to the
+dead one, the indignant impatience with his own weakness, with his
+baseness in not understanding that it is enough that Beatrice has lived
+and that he has loved her, in not feeling that the glory and joy of the
+ineffaceable past is sufficient for all present and future. A revolution
+in himself which gradually merges in that grave final resolve, that
+sudden seeing how Beatrice can be glorified by him, that solemn, quiet,
+brief determination not to say any more of her as yet; not till he can
+show her transfigured in Paradise. "After this sonnet there appeared
+unto me a marvellous vision, in which I beheld things that made me
+propose unto myself to speak no more of this blessed one, until the
+time when I might more worthily treat of her. And that this may come to
+pass, I strive with all my endeavour, even as she truly knows it. Thus,
+if it should please Him, through whom all things do live, that my life
+continue for several more years, I hope to say of her such things as
+have never been said of any lady. And then may it please Him, who is the
+lord of all courtesy, that my soul shall go forth to see the glory of
+its lady, that is to say, of that blessed Beatrice, who gloriously looks
+up into the face of Him, _qui est per omnia saecula benedictus_"
+
+Thus ends the "Vita Nuova;" a book, to find any equivalent for whose
+reality and completeness of passion, though it is passion for a woman
+whom the poet scarcely knows and of whom he desires nothing, we must go
+back to the merest fleshly love of Antiquity, of Sappho or Catullus; for
+modern times are too hesitating and weak. So at least it seems; but in
+fact, if we only think over the matter, we shall find that in no earthly
+love can we find this reality and completeness: it is possible only in
+love like Dante's. For there can be no unreality in it: it is a reality
+of the imagination, and leaves, with all its mysticism and idealism, no
+room for falsehood. Any other kind of love may be set aside, silenced,
+by the activity of the mind; this love of Dante's constitutes that very
+activity. And, after reading that last page which I have above
+transcribed, as those closing Latin words echo through our mind like the
+benediction from an altar, we feel as if we were rising from our knees
+in some secret chapel, bright with tapers and dim with incense; among a
+crowd kneeling like ourselves; yet solitary, conscious of only the glory
+we have seen and tasted, of that love _qui est per omnia scecula
+benedictus._
+
+
+III.
+
+But is it right that we should feel thus? Is it right that love,
+containing within itself the potentialities of so many things so sadly
+needed in this cold real world, as patience, tenderness, devotion, and
+loving-kindness--is it right that love should thus be carried away out
+of ordinary life and enclosed, a sacred thing for contemplation, in the
+shrine or chapel of an imaginary Beatrice? And, on the other hand, is it
+right that into the holy places of our soul, the places where we should
+come face to face with the unattainable ideal of our own conduct that we
+may strive after something nobler than mere present pleasure and
+profit--is it right that into such holy places, destined but for an
+abstract perfection, there should be placed a mere half-unknown, vaguely
+seen woman? In short, is not this "Vita Nuova" a mere false ideal, one
+of those works of art which, because they are beautiful, get worshipped
+as holy?
+
+This question is a grave one, and worthy to make us pause. The world is
+full of instances of the fatal waste of feelings misapplied: of human
+affections, human sympathy and compassion, so terribly necessary to
+man, wasted in various religious systems, upon Christ and God: of
+religious aspirations, contemplation, worship, and absorption, necessary
+to the improvement of the soul, wasted in various artistic or poetic
+crazes upon mere pleasant works, or pleasant fancies, of man;
+wastefulness of emotions, wastefulness of time, which constitute
+two-thirds of mankind's history and explain the vast amount of evil in
+past and present. The present question therefore becomes, is not this
+"Vita Nuova" merely another instance of this lamentable carrying off of
+precious feelings in channels where they result no longer in
+fertilization, but in corruption? The Middle Ages, especially, in its
+religion, its philosophy, nay, in that very love of which I am writing,
+are one succession of such acts of wastefulness. This question has come
+to me many a time, and has left me in much doubt and trouble. But on
+reflection I am prepared to answer that such doubts as these may safely
+be cast behind us, and that we may trust that instinct which, whenever
+we lay down the "Vita Nuova," tells us that to have felt and loved this
+book is one of those spiritual gains in our life which, come what may,
+can never be lost entirely.
+
+The "Vita Nuova" represents the most exceptional of exceptional moral
+and intellectual conditions. Dante's love for Beatrice is, in great
+measure, to be regarded as an extraordinary and exquisite work of art,
+produced not by the volition of man, but by the accidental combination
+of circumstances. It is no more suited to ordinary life than would a
+golden and ivory goddess of Phidias be suited to be the wife of a mortal
+man. But it may not therefore be useless; nay, it may be of the highest
+utility. It may serve that high utilitarian mission of all art, to
+correct the real by the ideal, to mould the thing as it is in the
+semblance of the thing as it should be. Herein, let it be remembered,
+consists the value, the necessity of the abstract and the ideal. In the
+long history of evolution we have now reached the stage where selection
+is no longer in the mere hands of unconscious nature, but of conscious
+or half-conscious man; who makes himself, or is made by mankind,
+according to not merely physical necessities, but to the intellectual
+necessity of realizing the ideal, of pursuing the object, of imitating
+the model, before him. No man will ever find the living counterpart of
+that chryselephantine goddess of the Greeks; ivory and gold, nay,
+marble, fashioned by an artist, are one thing; flesh is another, and
+flesh fashioned by mere blind accident. But the man who should have
+beheld that Phidian goddess, who should have felt her full perfection,
+would not have been as easily satisfied as any other with a mere
+commonplace living woman; he would have sought--and seeking, would have
+had more likelihood of finding--the woman of flesh and blood who nearest
+approached to that ivory and gold perfection. The case is similar with
+the "Vita Nuova." No earthly affection, no natural love of man for
+woman, of an entire human being, body and soul, for another entire human
+being, can ever be the counterpart of this passion for Beatrice, the
+passion of a mere mind for a mere mental ideal. But if the old
+lust-fattened evil of the world is to diminish rather than to increase,
+why then every love of man for woman and of woman for man should tend,
+to the utmost possibility, to resemble that love of the "Vita Nuova."
+For mankind has gradually separated from brute kind merely by the
+development of those possibilities of intellectual and moral passion
+which the animal has not got; an animal man will never cease to be, but
+a man he can daily more and more become, until from the obscene
+goat-legged and goat-faced creature which we commonly see, he has turned
+into something like certain antique fauns: a beautiful creature, not
+noticeably a beast, a beast in only the smallest portion of his nature.
+In order that this may come to pass--and its coming to pass means, let
+us remember, the enormous increase of happiness and diminution of misery
+upon earth--it is necessary that day by day and year by year there
+should enter into man's feelings, emotions, and habits, into his whole
+life, a greater proportion of that which is his own, and is not shared
+by the animal; that his actions, preferences, the great bulk of his
+conscious existence, should be busied with things of the soul, truth,
+good, and beauty, and not with things of the body. Hence the love of
+such a gradually improving and humanizing man for a gradually improving
+and humanizing woman, should become, as much as is possible, a
+connection of the higher and more human, rather than of the lower and
+more bestial, portions of their nature; it should tend, in its
+reciprocal stimulation, to make the man more a man, the woman more a
+woman, to make both less of the mere male and female animals that they
+were. In brief, love should increase, instead, like that which oftenest
+profanes love's name, of diminishing, the power of aspiration, of
+self-direction, of self-restraint, which may exist within us. Now to
+tend to this is to tend towards the love of the "Vita Nuova;" to tend
+towards the love of the "Vita Nuova" is to tend towards this. Say what
+you will of the irresistible force of original constitution, it remains
+certain, and all history is there as witness, that mankind--that is to
+say, the only mankind in whom lies the initiative of good, mankind which
+can judge and select--possesses the faculty of feeling and acting in
+accordance with its standard of feeling and action; the faculty in great
+measure of becoming that which it thinks desirable to become. Now to
+have perceived the even imaginary existence of such a passion as that of
+Dante for Beatrice, must be, for all who can perceive it, the first step
+towards attempting to bring into reality a something of that passion:
+the real passion conceived while the remembrance of that ideal passion
+be still in the mind will bear to it a certain resemblance, even as,
+according to the ancients, the children born of mothers whose rooms
+contained some image of Apollo or Adonis would have in them a reflex,
+however faint, of that beauty in whose presence they came into
+existence. In short, it seems to me, that as the "Vita Nuova" embodies
+the utmost ideal of absolutely spiritual love, and as to spiritualize
+love must long remain one of the chief moral necessities of the world,
+there exists in this book a moral force, a moral value, a power in its
+unearthly passion and purity, which, as much as anything more
+deliberately unselfish, more self-consciously ethical, we must
+acknowledge and honour as holy.
+
+As the love of him who has read and felt the "Vita Nuova" cannot but
+strive towards a purer nature, so also the love of which poets sang
+became also nobler as the influence of the strange Tuscan school of
+platonic lyrists spread throughout literature, bringing to men the
+knowledge of a kind of love born of that idealizing and worshipping
+passion of the Middle Ages; but of mediaeval love chastened by the
+manners of stern democracy and passed through the sieve of Christian
+mysticism and pagan philosophy. Of this influence of the "Vita
+Nuova"--for the "Vita Nuova" had concentrated in itself all the
+intensest characteristics of Dante's immediate predecessors and
+contemporaries, causing them to become useless and forgotten--of this
+influence of the "Vita Nuova," there is perhaps no more striking example
+than that of the poet who, constituted by nature to be the mere
+continuator of the romantically gallant tradition of the troubadours,
+became, and hence his importance and glory, the mediator between Dante
+and the centuries which followed him; the man who gave to mankind,
+incapable as yet of appreciating or enduring the spiritual essence of
+the "Vita Nuova," that self-same essence of intellectual love in an
+immortal dilution. I speak, of course, of Petrarch. His passion is
+neither ideal nor strong. The man is in love, or has been in love,
+existing on a borderland of loving and not loving, with the beautiful
+woman. His elegant, refined, half-knightly, half-scholarly, and
+altogether courtly mind is delighted with her; with her curly yellow
+hair, her good red and white beauty (we are never even told that Dante's
+Beatrice is beautiful, yet how much lovelier is she not than this Laura,
+descended from all the golden-haired bright-eyed ladies of the
+troubadours!), with her manner, her amiability, her purity and dignity
+in this ecclesiastical Babylon called Avignon. He maintains a
+semi-artificial love; frequenting her house, writing sonnet after
+sonnet, rhetorical exercises, studies from the antique and the
+Provencal, for the most part; he, who was born to be a mere troubadour
+like Ventadour or Folquet, becomes, through the influence of Dante, the
+type of the poet Abate, of the poetic _cavaliere servente_; a good, weak
+man with aspirations, who, failing to get the better of Laura's virtue,
+doubtless consoles himself elsewhere, but returns to an habitual
+contemplation of it. He is, being constitutionally a troubadour, an
+Italian priest turned partly Provencal, vexed at her not becoming his
+mistress; then (having made up his mind, which was but little set upon
+her), quite pleased at her refusal: it turns her into a kind of
+Beatrice, and him, poor man, heaven help him! into a kind of Dante--a
+Dante for the use of the world at large. He goes on visiting Laura, and
+writing to her a sonnet regularly so many times a week, and the best,
+carefully selected, we feel distinctly persuaded, at regular intervals.
+It is a determined cultus, a sort of half-real affectation, something
+equivalent to lighting a lamp before a very well-painted and very
+conspicuous shrine. All his humanities, all his Provencal lore go into
+these poems--written for whom? For her? Decidedly; for she has no reason
+not to read the effusions of this amiable, weak priestlet; she feels
+nothing for him. For her; but doubtless also to be handed round in
+society; a new sonnet or canzone by that charming and learned man, the
+Abate Petrarch. There is considerable emptiness in all this: he praises
+Laura's chastity, then grows impatient, then praises her again; adores
+her, calls her cruel, his goddess, his joy, his torment; he does not
+really want her, but in the vacuity of his feeling, thinks he does;
+calls her alternately the flat, abusive, and eulogistic names which mean
+nothing. He plays loud and soft with this absence of desire; he fiddle
+faddles in descriptions of her, not passionate or burning, but
+delicately undressed: he sees her (but with chaste eyes) in her bath;
+he envies her veil, &c.; he neither violently intellectually embraces,
+nor humbly bows down in imagination before her; he trifles gracefully,
+modestly, half-familiarly, with her finger tips, with the locks of her
+hair, and so forth. Fancy Dante abusing Beatrice; fancy Dante talking of
+Beatrice in her bath; the mere idea of his indignation and shame makes
+one shameful and indignant at the thought. But this perfect Laura is no
+Beatrice, or only a half-and-half sham one. She is no ideal figure,
+merely a figure idealized; this is no imaginative passion, merely an
+unreal one. Compare, for instance, the suggestion of Laura's possible
+death with the suggestion of the possible death of Beatrice. Petrarch
+does not love sufficiently to guess what such a loss would be. Then
+Laura does die. Here Petrarch rises. The severing of the dear old
+habits, the absence of the sweet reality, the terrible sense that all is
+over, Death, the great poetizer and giver of love philters, all this
+makes him love Laura as he never loved her before. The poor weak
+creature, who cannot, like a troubadour, go seek a new mistress when the
+old one fails him, feels dreadfully alone, the world dreadfully dreary
+around him; he sits down and cries, and his crying is genuine, making
+the tears come also into our eyes. And Laura, as she becomes a more
+distant ideal, becomes nobler, though noble with only a faint earthly
+graciousness not comparable to the glory of the living Beatrice. And,
+as he goes on, growing older and weaker and more desolate, the thought
+of a glorified Laura (as all are glorified, even in the eyes of the
+weakest, by death) begins to haunt him as Dante was haunted by the
+thought of Beatrice alive. Yet, even at this very time, come doubts of
+the lawfulness of having thus adored (or thought he had adored) a mortal
+woman; he does not know whether all this may not have been vanity and
+folly; he tries to turn his thoughts away from Laura and up to God.
+Perhaps he may be called on to account for having given too much of his
+life to a mere earthly love. Then, again, Laura reappears beautified in
+his memory, and is again tremblingly half-conjured away. He is weak, and
+sad, and helpless, and alone; and his heart is empty; he knows not what
+to think nor how to feel; he sobs, and we cry with him. Nowhere could
+there be found a stranger contrast than this nostalgic craving after the
+dead Laura, vacillating and troubled by fear of sin and doubt of
+unworthiness of object, with that solemn ending of the "Vita Nuova,"
+where the name of Beatrice is pronounced for the last time before it be
+glorified in Paradise, where Dante devotes his life to becoming worthy
+of saying "such words as have never been said of any lady." The ideal
+woman is one and unchangeable in glory, and unchangeable is the passion
+of her lover; but of this sweet dead Laura, whose purity and beauty and
+cruelty he had sung, without a tremor of self-unworthiness all her
+life, of her the poor weak Petrarch begins to doubt, of her and her
+worthiness of all this love; and when? when she is dead and himself is
+dying.
+
+Such a man is Petrarch; and yet, by the irresistible purifying and
+elevating power of the "Vita Nuova,'" this man came to write not other
+_albas_ and _serenas,_ not other love-songs to be added to the
+love-songs of Provence, but those sonnets and canzoni which for four
+centuries taught the world, too coarse as yet to receive Dante's passion
+at first hand, a nobler and more spiritual love. After Petrarch a
+gradual change takes place in the poetic conception of love: except in
+learned revivalisms or in loose buffooneries, the mere fleshly love of
+Antiquity disappears out of literature; and equally so, though by a
+slower process of gradual transformation, vanishes also the adoring, but
+undisguisedly adulterous love of the troubadours and minnesingers. Into
+the love Instincts of mankind have been mingled, however much diluted,
+some drops of the more spiritual passion of Dante. The _puella_ of
+Antiquity, the noble dame of feudal days, is succeeded in Latin
+countries, in Italy, and France, and Spain, and Portugal, by the
+_gloriosa donna_ imitated from. Petrarch, and imitated by Petrarch from
+Dante; a long-line of shadowy figures, veiled in the veil of Madonna
+Laura, ladies beloved of Lorenzo and Michael Angelo, of Ariosto, and
+Tasso, and Camoens, and Cervantes, passes through the world; nay, even
+the sprightly-mistress of Ronsard, half-bred pagan and troubadour has
+airs of dignity and mystery which make us almost think that in this
+dainty coquettish French body, of Marie or Helene or Cassandrette, there
+really may be an immortal soul. But with the Renaissance--that movement
+half of mediaeval democratic progress, and half of antique revivalism,
+and to which in reality belongs not merely Petrarch, but Dante, and
+every one of the Tuscan poets, Guinicelli, Lapo Gianni, Cavalcanti, who
+broke with the feudal poetry of Provence and Sicily--with the
+Renaissance, or rather with its long-drawn-out end, comes the close, for
+the moment, of the really creative activity of the Latin peoples in the
+domain of poetry. All the things for two centuries which Italy and
+France and Spain and Portugal (which we must remember for the sake of
+Camoens) continue to produce, are but developments of parts left
+untouched; or refinements of extreme detail, as in the case,
+particularly, of the French poets of the sixteenth century; but poetry
+receives from these races nothing new or vital, no fresh ideal or
+fruitful marriage of ideals. And here begins, uniting in itself all the
+scattered and long-dormant powers of Northern poetry, the great and
+unexpected action of England. It had slept through the singing period of
+the Middle Ages, and was awakened, not by Germany or Provence, but by
+Italy: Boccaccio and Petrarch spoke, and, as through dreams, England in
+Chaucer's voice, made answer. Again, when the Renaissance had drawn to a
+close, far on in the sixteenth century, English poetry was reawakened;
+and again by Italy. This time it was completely wakened, and arose and
+slept no more. And one of the great and fruitful things achieved by
+English poetry in this its final awakening was to give to the world the
+new, the modern, perhaps the definitive, the final ideal of love.
+England drank a deep draught--how deep we see from Sidney's and
+Spenser's sonnets--of Petrarch; and in this pleasant dilution, tasted
+and felt the burning essence of the "Vita Nuova;" for though Dante
+remained as the poet, the poet of heaven and hell, this happy
+half-and-half Petrarch had for full two centuries completely driven into
+oblivion the young Dante who had loved Beatrice. For England, for this
+magnificent and marvellous outburst of all the manifold poetic energy
+stored up and quintupled during that long period of inertness, there
+could however be no foreign imported ideal of love; there was no
+possibility of a new series of spectral Lauras, shadows projected by a
+shadow. Already, long ago, at the first call of Petrarch, Chaucer, by
+the side of the merely mediaeval love types--of brutish lust and doglike
+devotion--of the Wife of Bath and of Griseldis, had rough-sketched a
+kind of modern love, the love which is to become that of Romeo and
+Hamlet, in his story of Palemon and Arcite. Among the poetic material
+which existed in England at the close of the sixteenth century was the
+old, long-neglected, domestic love, quiet, undemonstrative, essentially
+unsinging, of the early Northern (as indeed also of the Greek and
+Hindoo) epics; a domestic love which, in a social condition more closely
+resembling our own than any other, even than that of the Italian
+democracies, which had preceded it; among a people who permitted a woman
+to choose her own husband, and forbade a man wooing another man's wife,
+had already, in ballads and folk poetry, begun a faint-twitter of song.
+To this love of the man and the woman who hope to marry, strong and
+tender, but still (as Coleridge remarked of several of the lesser
+Elizabethan playwrights) most outspokenly carnal, was united by the pure
+spirit of Spenser, by the unerring genius of Shakespeare, that vivifying
+drop of burning, spiritual love taken from out of the "Vita Nuova,"
+which had floated, like some sovereign essential oil, on the top of
+Petrarch's rose-water. Henceforward the world possesses a new kind of
+love: the love of Romeo, of Hamlet, of Bassanio, of Viola, and of
+Juliet; the love of the love poems of Shelley, of Tennyson, of Browning
+and Browning's wife. A love whose blindness, exaggeration of passion,
+all that might have made it foolish and impracticable, leads no longer
+to folly and sin, but to an intenser activity of mankind's imagination
+of the good and beautiful, to a momentary realization in our fancy of
+all our vague dreams of perfection; a love which, though it may cool
+down imperceptibly and pale in its intenseness, like the sunrise fires
+into a serene sky, has left some glory round the head of the wife, some
+glory in the heart of the husband, has been, however fleeting, a vision
+of beauty which has made beauty more real. And all this owing to the
+creation, the storing up, the purification by the Platonic poets of
+Tuscany, of that strange and seemingly so artificial and unreal thing,
+mediaeval love; the very forms and themes of whose poetry, the _serena_
+and the _alba_, which had been indignantly put aside by the early
+Italian lyrists, being unconsciously revived, and purified and
+consecrated in the two loveliest love poems of Elizabethan poetry: the
+_serena_, the evening song of impatient expectation in Spenser's
+Epithalamium; the _alba_, the dawn song of hurried parting, in the
+balcony scene of "Romeo and Juliet."
+
+Let us recapitulate. The feudal Middle Ages gave to mankind a more
+refined and spiritual love, a love all chivalry, fidelity, and
+adoration, but a love steeped in the poison of adultery; and to save the
+pure and noble portions of this mediaeval love became the mission of the
+Tuscan poets of that strange school of Platonic love which in its very
+loveliness may sometimes seem so unnatural and sterile. For, by reducing
+this mediaeval love to a mere intellectual passion, seeking in woman
+merely a self-made embodiment of cravings after perfection, they
+cleansed away that deep stain of adultery; they quadrupled the intensity
+of the ideal element; they distilled the very essential spirit of poetic
+passion, of which but a few drops, even as diluted by Petrarch,
+precipitated, when mingled with the earthly passion of future poets, to
+the bottom, no longer to be seen or tasted, all baser ingredients.
+
+And, while the poems of minnesingers and troubadours have ceased to
+appeal to us, and remain merely for their charm of verse and of graceful
+conceit; the poetry written by the Italians of the thirteenth century
+for women, whose love was but an imaginative fervour, remains
+concentrated in the "Vita Nuova;" and will remain for all time the
+sovereign purifier to which the world must have recourse whenever that
+precipitate of baser instincts, which thickened like slime the love
+poetry of Antiquity, shall rise again and sully the purity of the love
+poetry of to-day.
+
+
+
+
+
+EPILOGUE.
+
+More than a year has elapsed since the moment when, fancying that this
+series of studies must be well-nigh complete, I attempted to explain in
+an introductory chapter what the nature of this book of mine is, or
+would fain be. I had hoped that each of these studies would complete its
+companions; and that, without need for explicit explanation, my whole
+idea would have become more plain to others than it was at that time
+even to myself. But instead, it has become obvious that the more
+carefully I had sought to reduce each question to unity, the more that
+question-subdivided and connected itself with other questions; and that,
+with the solution of each separate problem, had arisen a new set of
+problems which infinitely complicated the main lessons to be deduced
+from a study of that many-sided civilization to which, remembering the
+brilliant and mysterious offspring of Faustus and Helena, I have given
+the name of Euphorion. Hence, as it seems, the necessity for a few
+further words of explanation.
+
+In those introductory pages written some fifteen months ago, I tried to
+bring home to the reader a sense which has haunted me throughout the
+writing of this volume; namely, that instead of having deliberately made
+up my mind to study the Renaissance, as one makes up one's mind to visit
+Greece or Egypt or the Holy Land; I have, on the contrary, quite
+accidentally and unconsciously, found myself wandering about in spirit
+among the monuments of this particular historic region, even as I might
+wander about in the streets of Siena where I wrote last year, of
+Florence whence I write at present; wandering about among these things,
+and little by little feeling a particular interest in one, then in
+another, according as each happened to catch my fancy or to recall some
+already known thing. Now these, which for want of a better word I have
+just called monuments, and just now, less clearly, but also less
+foolishly, merely _things_--these things were in reality not merely
+individual and really existing buildings, books, pictures, or statues,
+individual and really registered men, women, and events; they were the
+mental conceptions which I had extracted out of these realities; the
+intellectual types made up (as the mediaeval symbols of justice are made
+up of the visible paraphernalia, robe, scales and sword, for judging and
+weighing and punishing) of the impressions left on the mind by all
+those buildings, or books, or pictures, or statues, or men, women, and
+events. They were not the iniquities of this particular despot nor the
+scandalous sayings of that particular humanist, but the general moral
+chaos of the Italian fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; not the poem of
+Pulci, of Boiardo, of Ariosto in especial, but a vast imaginary poem
+made up of them all; not the mediaeval saints of Angelico and the pagan
+demi-gods of Michael Angelo, but the two tremendous abstractions: the
+spirit of Mediaevalism in art, and the spirit of Antiquity; the interest
+in the distressed soul, and the interest in the flourishing body. And,
+as my thoughts have gone back to Antiquity and onwards to our own times,
+their starting-point has nevertheless been the Tuscan art of the
+fifteenth century, their nucleus some notes on busts by Benedetto da
+Maiano and portraits by Raphael.
+
+My _dramatis persona_ have been modes of feeling and forms of art. I
+have tried to explain the life and character, not of any man or woman,
+but of the moral scepticism of Italy, of the tragic spirit of our
+Elizabethan dramatists; I have tried to write the biography of the
+romance poetry of the Middle Ages, of the realism of the great portrait
+painters and sculptors of the Renaissance. But these, my _dramatis
+persona,_ are, let me repeat it, abstractions: they exist only in my
+mind and in the minds of those who think like myself. Hence, like all
+abstractions, they represent the essence of a question, but not its
+completeness, its many-sidedness as we may see it in reality. Hence it
+is that I have frequently passed over exceptions to the rule which I was
+stating, because the explanation of these exceptions would have involved
+the formulating of a number of apparently irrelevant propositions; so
+that any one who please may accuse me of inexactness; and, to give an
+instance, cover the margins of my essay on Mediaeval Love with a whole
+list of virtuous love stories of the Middle Ages; or else ferret out of
+Raynouard and Von der Hagen a dozen pages of mediaeval poems in praise of
+rustic life. These objections will be perfectly correct, and (so far as
+my knowledge permitted me) I might have puzzled the reader with them
+myself; but it remains none the less certain that, in the main, mediaeval
+love was not virtuous, and mediaeval peasantry not admired by poets; and
+none the less certain, I think, also, that in describing the
+characteristics and origin of an abstract thing, such as mediaeval love,
+or mediaeval feeling towards the country and country folk, it was my
+business to state the rule and let alone the exceptions.
+
+There is another matter which gives me far greater concern. In creating
+and dealing with an abstraction, one is frequently forced, if I may use
+the expression, to cut a subject in two, to bring one of its sides into
+full light and leave the other in darkness; nay, to speak harshly of one
+side of an art or of a man without being able to speak admiringly of
+another side.
+
+This one-sidedness, this apparent injustice of judgment, has in some
+cases been remedied by the fact that I have treated in one study those
+things which I was forced to omit in another study; as, in two separate
+essays, I have pointed out first the extreme inferiority of Renaissance
+sculpture to the sculpture of Antiquity with regard to absolute beauty
+of form; and then the immeasurable superiority of Renaissance over
+antique sculpture in the matter of that beauty and interest dependent
+upon mere arrangement and handling, wherein lies the beauty-creating
+power of realistic schools. But most often I have shown one side, not
+merely of an artist or an art, but of my own feeling, without showing
+the other; and in one case this inevitable one-sidedness has weighed
+upon me almost like personal guilt, and has almost made me postpone the
+publication of this book to the Greek Kalends, in hopes of being able to
+explain and to atone. I am alluding to Fra Angelico. I spoke of him in a
+study of the progress of mere beautiful form, the naked human form
+moreover, in the art of the Renaissance; I looked at his work with my
+mind full of the unapproachable superiority of antique form; I judged
+and condemned the artist with reference to that superb movement towards
+nature and form and bodily beauty which was the universal movement of
+the fifteenth century; I lost patience with this saint because he would
+not turn pagan; I pushed aside, because he did not seek for a classic
+Olympus, his exquisite dreams of a mediaeval Paradise. I had taken part,
+as its chronicler, with the art which seeks mere plastic perfection, the
+art to which Angelico said, "Retro me Sathana." It was my intention to
+close even this volume with a study of the poetical conception of early
+Renaissance painting, of that strange kind of painting in which a thing
+but imperfect in itself, a mere symbol of lovely ideas, brings home to
+our mind, with a rush of associations, a sense of beauty and wonder
+greater perhaps than any which we receive from the sober reality of
+perfect form. Again, there are the German masters--the great engravers,
+Kranach, Altdorfer, Aldegrever, especially; of whom, for their absolute
+pleasure in ugly women, for their filthy delight in horrors, I have said
+an immense amount of ill; and of whom, for their wonderful intuition of
+dramatic situation, their instinct of the poetry of common things, and
+their magnificently imaginative rendering of landscape, I hope some day
+to say an equal amount of good.
+
+I have spoken of the lesson which may be derived from studies even as
+humble as these studies of mine; since, in my opinion, we cannot treat
+history as a mere art--though history alone can gives us now-a-days
+tragedy which has ceased to exist on our stage, and wonder which has
+ceased to exist in our poetry--we cannot seek in it mere selfish
+enjoyment of imagination and emotion, without doing our soul the great
+injury of cheating it of some of those great indignations, some of
+those great lessons which make it stronger and more supple in the
+practical affairs of life. Each of these studies of mine brings its own
+lesson, artistic or ethical, important or unimportant; its lesson of
+seeking certainty in our moral opinions, beauty in all and whatever our
+forms of art, spirituality in our love. But besides these I seem to
+perceive another deduction, an historical fact with a practical
+application; to see it as the result not merely perhaps of the studies
+of which this book is the fruit, but of those further studies, of the
+subtler sides of Mediaeval and Renaissance life and art which at present
+occupy my mind and may some day add another series of essays to this: a
+lesson still vague to myself, but which, satisfactorily or
+unsatisfactorily, I shall nevertheless attempt to explain; if indeed it
+requires to be brought home to the reader.
+
+Of the few forms of feeling and imagination which I have treated--things
+so different from one another as the feeling for nature and the
+chivalric poem, as modern art, with its idealism and realism, and modern
+love--of these forms, emotional and artistic, which Antiquity did not
+know, or knew but little, the reader may have observed that I have
+almost invariably traced the origin deep into that fruitful cosmopolitan
+chaos, due to the mingling of all that was still unused of the remains
+of Antiquity with all that was untouched of the intellectual and moral
+riches of the barbarous nations, to which we give the name of Middle
+Ages; and that I have, as invariably, followed the development of these
+precious forms, and their definitive efflorescence and fruit-bearing,
+into that particular country where certain mediaeval conditions had
+ceased to exist, namely Italy. In other words, it has seemed to me that
+the things which I have studied were originally produced during the
+Middle Ages, and consequently in the mediaeval countries, France,
+Germany, Provence; but did not attain maturity except in that portion of
+the Middle Ages which is mediaeval no longer, but already more than half
+modern, the Renaissance, which began in Italy not with the establishment
+of despotisms and the coming of Greek humanists, but with the
+independence of the free towns and with the revival of Roman tradition.
+
+Why so? Because, it appears to me, after watching the lines of my
+thought converging to this point, because, with a few exceptions, the
+Middle Ages were rich in great beginnings (indeed a good half of all
+that makes up our present civilization seems to issue from them): but
+they were poor in complete achievements; full of the seeds of modern
+institutions, arts, thoughts, and feelings, they yet show us but rarely
+the complete growth of any one of them: a fruitful Nile flood, but which
+must cease to drown and to wash away, which must subside before the
+germs that it has brought can shoot forth and mature. The sense of this
+comes home to me most powerfully whenever I think of mediaeval poetry and
+mediaeval painting.
+
+The songs of the troubadours and minnesingers, what are they to our
+feelings? They are pleasant, even occasionally beautiful, but they are
+empty, lamentably empty, charming arrangements of words; poetry which
+fills our mind or touches our heart comes only with the Tuscan lyrists
+of the thirteenth century. The same applies to mediaeval narrative-verse:
+it is, with one or two exceptions or half exceptions, such as "The
+Chanson de Roland" and Gottfried's "Tristan und Isolde," decidedly
+wearisome; a thing to study, but scarcely a thing to delight in. I do
+not mean to say that the old legends of Wales and Scandinavia,
+subsequently embodied by the French and German poets of the Middle Ages,
+are without imaginative or emotional interest; nothing can be further
+from my thoughts. The Nibelung story possesses, both in the Norse and in
+the Middle High German version, a tragic fascination; and a quaint
+fairy-tale interest, every now and then rising to the charm of a
+Decameronian _novella_, is possessed by many of the Keltic tales,
+whether briefly told in the Mabinogion or lengthily detailed by
+Chrestien de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach. But all this is the
+interest of the mere story, and you would enjoy it almost as much if
+that story were related not by a poet but by a peasant; it is the
+fascination of the mere theme, with the added fascination of our own
+unconscious filling up and colouring of details. And the poem itself,
+whence we extract this theme, remains, for the most part, uninteresting.
+The figures are vague, almost shapeless and colourless; they have no
+well-understood mental and moral anatomy, so that when they speak and
+act the writer seems to have no clear conception of the motives or
+tempers which make them do so; even as in a child's pictures, the horses
+gallop, the men run, the houses stand, but without any indication of the
+muscles which move the horse, of the muscles which hold up the man, of
+the solid ground upon which is built, nay rather, into which is planted,
+the house. Hatred of Hagen, devotion of Ruedger, passionate piety of
+Parzival--all these are things of which we do not particularly see the
+how or why; we do not follow the reasons, in event or character, which
+make these men sacrifice themselves or others, weep, storm, and so
+forth; nay, even when these reasons are clear from the circumstances, we
+are not shown the action of the mechanism, we do not see how Brunhilt is
+wroth, how Chriemhilt is revengeful, how Herzeloid is devoted to
+Parzival. There is, in the vast majority of this mediaeval poetry, no
+clear conception of the construction and functions of people's
+character, and hence no conception either of those actions and reactions
+of various moral organs which, after all, are at the bottom of the
+events related. Herein lies the difference between the forms of the
+Middle Ages and those of Antiquity; for how perfectly felt, understood,
+is not every feeling and every action of the Homeric heroes, how
+perfectly indicated! We can see the manner and reason of the conflict of
+Achilles and Agamemnon, of the behaviour of the returned Odysseus, as
+clearly as we see the manner and reason of the movements of the fighting
+Centaurs and Lapithae, or the Amazons; nay, even the minute mood of
+comparatively unimportant figures, as Helen, Brisei's, and Nausicaa, is
+indicated in its moral anatomy and attitude as distinctly as is the
+manner in which the maidens of the Parthenon frieze slowly restrain
+their steps, the boys curb their steeds, or the old men balance their
+oil jars. Nothing of this in mediaeval literature, except perhaps in
+"Flamenca" and "Tristan," where the motive of action, mere imaginative
+desire, is all-permeating and explains everything. These people clearly
+had no interest, no perception, connected with character: a valorous
+woman, a chivalrous knight, an insolent steward, a jealous husband, a
+faithful retainer; things recognized only in outline, made to speak and
+act only according to a fixed tradition, without knowledge of the
+internal mechanism of motive; these sufficed. Hence it is that mediaeval
+poetry is always like mediaeval painting (for painting continued to be
+mediaeval with Giotto's pupils long after poetry had ceased to be
+mediaeval with Dante and his school), where the Virgin sits and holds the
+child without body wherewith to sit or arms wherewith to hold; where
+angels flutter forward and kneel in conventional greeting, with
+obviously no bended knees beneath their robes, nay, with knees, waist,
+armpits, all anywhere; where men ride upon horses without flat to their
+back; where processions of the blessed come forth, guided by fiddling
+seraphs, vague, faint faces, sweet or grand, heads which might wave like
+pieces of cut-out paper upon their necks, arms and legs here and there,
+not clearly belonging to any one; creatures marching, soaring, flying,
+singing, fiddling, without a bone or a muscle wherewith to do it all.
+And meanwhile, in this mediaeval poetry, as in this mediaeval painting,
+there are yards and yards of elaborate preciousness: all the embossed
+velvets, all the white-and-gold-shot brocades, all the silks and satins,
+and jewel-embroidered stuffs of the universe cast stiffly about these
+phantom men and women, these phantom horses and horsemen. It is not
+until we turn to Italy, and to the Northern man, Chaucer, entirely under
+Italian influence, that we obtain an approach to the antique clearness
+of perception and comprehension; that we obtain not only in Dante
+something akin to the muscularities of Signorelli and Michael Angelo;
+but in Boccaccio and Chaucer, in Cavalca and Petrarch, the equivalent of
+the well-understood movement, the well-indicated situation of the
+simple, realistic or poetic, sketches of Filippino and Botticelli.
+
+This, you will say, is a mere impression; it is no explanation, still
+less such an explanation as may afford a lesson. Not so. This strange
+inconclusiveness in all mediaeval things, till the moment comes when they
+cease to be mediaeval; this richness in germs and poverty in mature
+fruit, cannot be without its reason. And this reason, to my mind, lies
+in one word, the most terrible word of any, since it means suffering and
+hopelessness; a word which has haunted my mind ever since I have looked
+into mediaeval things: the word Wastefulness. Wastefulness; the frightful
+characteristic of times at once so rich and so poor, the explanation of
+the long starvation and sickness that mankind, that all mankind's
+concerns--art, poetry, science, life--endured while the very things
+which would have fed and revived and nurtured, existed close at hand,
+and in profusion. Wastefulness, in this great period of confusion, of
+the most precious things that we possess: time, thought, and feeling
+refused to the realities of the world, and lavished on the figments of
+the imagination. Why this vagueness, this imperfection in all mediaeval
+representations of life? Because even as men's eyes were withdrawn, by
+the temporal institutions of those days, from the sight of the fields
+and meadows which were left to the blind and dumb thing called serf; so
+also the thoughts of mankind, its sympathy and intentions, were
+withdrawn from the mere earthly souls, the mere earthly wrongs and woes
+of men by the great self-organized institution of mediaeval religion.
+Pity of the body of Christ held in bondage by the Infidel; love of God;
+study of the unknowable things of Heaven: such are the noblest
+employments of the mediaeval soul; how much of pity, of love, may remain
+for man; how much of study for the knowable? To Wastefulness like
+this--to misapplication of mind ending almost in palsy--must we ascribe,
+I think, the strange sterility of such mediaeval art as deals not merely
+with pattern, but with the reality of man's body and soul. And we might
+be thankful, if, during our wanderings among mediaeval things, we had
+seen the starving of only art and artistic instincts; but the soul of
+man has lain starving also; starving for the knowledge which was sought
+only of Divine things, starving for the love which was given only to
+God.
+
+The explanation, therefore, and its lesson, may thus be summed up in the
+one word Wastefulness. And the fruitfulness of the Renaissance, all that
+it has given to us of art, of thought, of feeling (for the "Vita Nuova"
+is its fruit), is due, as it seems to me, to the fact that the
+Renaissance is simply the condition of civilization when, thanks to the
+civil liberty and the spiritual liberty inherited from Rome and
+inherited from Greece, man's energies of thought and feeling were
+withdrawn from the unknowable to the knowable, from Heaven to Earth; and
+were devoted to the developing of those marvellous new things which
+Antiquity had not known, and which had lain neglected and wasted during
+the Middle Ages.
+
+FLORENCE, _January_,1884.
+
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX.
+
+I have seen the pictures and statues and towns which I have described,
+and I have read the books of which I attempt to give an impression; but
+here my original research, if such it may be called, comes to an end. I
+have trusted only to myself for my impressions; but I have taken from
+others everything that may be called historical fact, as distinguished
+from the history of this or that form of thought or of art which I have
+tried to elaborate. My references are therefore only to standard
+historical works, and to such editions of poets and prose writers as
+have come into my hands. How much I am endebted to the genius of
+Michelet; nay, rather, how much I am, however unimportant, the thing
+made by him, every one will see and judge. With regard to positive
+information I must express my great obligations to the works of Jacob
+Burckhardt, of Prof. Villari, and of Mr. J.A. Symonds in everything that
+concerns the political history and social condition of the Renaissance.
+Mr. Symonds' name I have placed last, although this is by no means the
+order of importance in which the three writers appear in my mind,
+because vanity compels me to state that I have deprived myself of the
+pleasure and profit of reading his volumes on Italian literature, from a
+fear that finding myself doubtless forestalled by him in various
+appreciations, I might deprive my essays of what I feel to be their
+principal merit, namely, the spontaneity and wholeness of personal
+impression. With regard to philological lore, I may refer, among a
+number of other works, to M. Gaston Paris' work on the Cycle of
+Charlemagne, M. de la Villemarque's companion volume on Keltic romances,
+and Professor Rajna's "Fonti dell' Ariosto." My knowledge of
+troubadours, trouveres, and minnesingers is obtained mainly from the
+great collections of Raynouard, Wackernagel, Maetzner, Bartsch, and Von
+der Hagen, and from Bartsch's and Simrock's editions and versions of
+Gottfried von Strassburg, Hartmann von Aue, and Wolfram von Eschenbach.
+"Flamenca" I have read in Professor Paul Meyer's beautiful edition, text
+and translation; "Aucassin et Nicolette," in an edition published, if I
+remember rightly, by Janet; and also in a very happy translation
+contained in Delvau's huge collection of "Romans de Chevalerie," which
+contains, unfortunately sometimes garbled, as many of the prose stories
+of the Carolingian and Amadis cycle as I, at all events, could endure to
+read. For the early Italian poets, excepting Carducci's "Cino da
+Pistoia," my references are the same as those in Rossetti's "Dante and
+his Cycle," especially the "Rime Antiche" and the "Poeti del Primo
+Secolo." Professor d'Ancona's pleasant volume has greatly helped me in
+the history of the transformation of the courtly poetry of the early
+Middle Ages into the folk poetry of Tuscany. I owe a good deal also,
+with regard to this same essay "The Outdoor Poetry," to Roskoff's famous
+"Geschichte des Teufels," and to Signor Novati's recently published
+"Carmina Medii _AEvi_." The Italian _novellieri,_ Bandello, Cinthio, and
+their set, I have used in the Florentine editions of 1820 or 1825;
+Masuccio edited by De Sanctis. For the essay on the Italian Renaissance
+on the Elizabethan Stage, I have had recourse, chiefly, to the fifteenth
+century chronicles in the "Archivio Storico Italiano," and to Dyce's
+Webster, Hartley Coleridge's Massinger and Ford, Churton Collins' Cyril
+Tourneur, and J.O. Halliwell's Marston.
+
+The essays on art have naturally profited by the now inevitable Crowe
+and Cavalcaselle; but in this part of my work, while I have relied very
+little on books, I have received more than the equivalent of the
+information to be obtained from any writers in the suggestions and
+explanations of my friend Mr. T. Nelson MacLean, who has made it
+possible for a mere creature of pens and ink to follow the differences
+of _technique_ of the sculptors and medallists of the fifteenth century;
+a word of thanks also, for various such suggestions as can come only
+from a painter, to my old friend Mr. John S. Sargent, of Paris.
+
+I must conclude these acknowledgments by thanking the Editors of the
+_Contemporary, British Quarterly_, and _National Reviews_, and of the
+_Cornhill Magazine_, for permission to republish such of the essays or
+fragments of essays as have already appeared in those periodicals.
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
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