CELIBACY VERSUS MARRIAGE

Were I asked to name the four most refining influences in modern civilisation I would answer: Women, Beauty, Love, and Marriage. Were I asked to name the essence of the early mediÆval spirit I would say: Deadly Enmity toward Women, Beauty, Love, and Marriage.

This pathologic attitude of the mediÆval mind was at first a natural reaction against the incredible depravity and licentiousness that prevailed under the Roman Empire. But the reaction went to such preposterous extremes that the resulting state of affairs was even more degrading and deplorable than the original evil. It was like inoculating a man with leprosy to cure him of smallpox. It was bad enough to treat marriage as a farce, as did the later Romans, among whom there were women who had their eighth and tenth husband, while one case is related of a woman “who was married to her twenty-third husband, she herself being his twenty-first wife”; while the public looked upon this case as a “match” in a double sense, the survivor being publicly crowned and feted as champion. But a thousand times worse was the mediÆval notion that marriage is a crime. And this preposterous notion—that a relation on which all civilisation is based, which is sanctioned even by many animals and ignored by only the very lowest of the savages—this criminal notion was foisted on the world by the fanatical priesthood in whose hands unfortunately Christianity was placed for centuries, to be distorted, vitiated, and utilised for political, criminal, and selfish purposes.

“The services rendered,” says Mr. Lecky, “by the ascetics in imprinting on the minds of men a profound and enduring conviction of the importance of chastity, though extremely great, were seriously counterbalanced by their noxious influence upon marriage. Two or three beautiful descriptions of this institution have been culled out of the immense mass of patristic writings; but in general it would be difficult to conceive anything more coarse and more repulsive than the manner in which they regarded it.... The tender love which it elicits, the holy and beautiful domestic qualities that follow in its train, were almost absolutely omitted from consideration. The object of the ascetic was to attract men to a life of virginity, and, as a necessary consequence, marriage was treated as an inferior state.”

“The days of Chivalry were not yet,” we read in Smith’s Dictionary of Christian Antiquities, “and we cannot but notice even in the greatest of the Christian fathers a lamentably low estimate of woman, and, consequently, of the marriage relationship.”

What an inexhaustible source of mediÆval immorality this contemptuous treatment of marriage by the most influential class of society proved, has been so often depicted in glaring colours that these pages need not be tainted with illustrations.

WOMAN’S LOWEST DEGRADATION

Woman was represented by the Fathers “as the door of hell, as the mother of all human ills. She should be ashamed at the very thought that she is a woman; she should live in continual penance on account of the curses she has brought upon the world. Women were even forbidden by a provincial council in the sixth century, on account of their impurity, to receive the Eucharist into their naked hands. Their essentially subordinate position was continually maintained” (Lecky).

Not even the Koran took such a degrading view of woman as these early “Christian Fathers.” For the current notion that the existence of a soul in woman is denied by the Mahometan faith is contradicted by several passages in the Koran.

The lowest depths of feminine degradation and the sublimest heights of fanatical folly and crime, however, were not reached in this early period, but some centuries later, when the incredible brutalities of the witchcraft trials began. The vast majority of the victims were women; and Professor Scherr, in his Geschichte der Deutschen Frauenwelt, estimates that in Germany alone at least one hundred thousand “witches” were burnt at the stake. No one on reading the accounts of these trials can help feeling that Shakspere made a mistake when he wrote that

He should have said,

More demons than fools, however. Superstition was, indeed, epidemic during the Middle Ages; but those who superintended the witches’ trials—the rulers and the clergy—were not the persons affected by it. If they did execute 100,000 victims in Germany; if they did murder girls of twelve, ten, eight, and even seven years, on the accusation of having borne children whose father was Satan, or of having murdered persons who in some cases were actually present at the trial—the reason of this was not because the authorities believed this cruel nonsense. The real reason is given by Scherr: “The circumstance that the property of those who were burnt at the stake was confiscated, two-thirds of it getting into the hands of the landowner (Grundherr), the other third into those of the judges, clergy, accusers, and executioners, has beyond doubt kindled countless witch-fires.... During the Thirty Years’ War, especially, the trials for witchcraft became a greedily-utilised source of profit to many a country nobleman in reduced circumstances, and no less to bishops, abbots, and councillors, who were in financial straits. Indeed, as early as the sixteenth century, one of the opponents of witches’ trials, Cornelius Loos, justly observed that the whole proceeding was simply ‘a newly-invented alchemy for converting human blood into gold.’”

What difference is there between these civilised savages and the Australian who eats his wife when he gets tired of her? Let those who are fond of seeking needles in haystacks search for traces of Romantic Love under such circumstances.

NEGATION OF FEMININE CHOICE

Feudal legislation combined with clerical contempt and criminal persecution in lowering woman’s position. There were numerous and stringent enactments which “rendered it impossible for women to succeed to any considerable amount of property, and which almost reduced them to the alternative of marriage or a nunnery. The complete inferiority of the sex was continually maintained by the law; and that generous public opinion which in Rome had frequently revolted against the injustice done to girls, in depriving them of the greater part of the inheritance of their fathers, totally disappeared.” Beaumanoir says that “Every husband may beat his wife if she refuses to obey his orders, or if she speaks ill of him or tells an untruth, provided he does so with moderation.” Early German law permitted the father, and subsequently the husband, to sell, punish, or even kill the wife; and in England wife-beating has not yet died out.

“If, in the times of St. Louis,” says LegouvÉ, “a young vassal of some royal fief was sought in marriage, it was necessary for her father to get his seigneur’s permission for her marriage; the seigneur asked the king’s consent to his permission, and not till after all these agreements (father, seigneur, king) was she consulted regarding this contract which affected her whole life.” How beautifully such a law must have fostered the sentiment of Love which depends on Individual Preference and Special Sympathy!

Such laws no doubt were simply echoes of clerical teachings. “The girl,” says St. Ambrose of Rebecca, whom he holds up herein as an example, “is not consulted about her espousals, for she awaits the judgment of her parents; inasmuch as a girl’s modesty will not allow her to choose a husband” (!). Irish “bulls” appear to have crept even into ecclesiastic enactments, for we read in Smith’s Dictionary of Christian Antiquities that “An Irish council in the time of St. Patrick, about the year 450 lays it down that the will of the girl is to be inquired of the father, and that the girl is to do what her father chooses, inasmuch as man is the head of the woman.” “Even widows,” we read further, “under the age of twenty-five were forbidden by a law of Valentinian and Gratian to marry without their parents’ consent; and St. Ambrose desires young widows to leave the choice of their second husbands to their parents.”

CompayrÉ states in his History of Pedagogy that in the seventeenth century “woman was still regarded as the inferior of man, in the lower classes as a drudge, in the higher as an ornament. In her case intellectual culture was regarded as either useless or dangerous; and the education that was given her was to fit her for a life of devotion or a life of seclusion from society.”

Still more, of course, was this the case in the times of St. Jerome, who in his letter to LÆta on the education of her daughter Paula, tells her that the girl must never eat in public, or eat meat. “Never let Paula listen to musical instruments.” Even her affections must be suppressed—all except the devotional sentiments. She must not be “in the gatherings and in the company of her kindred; let her be found only in retirement.” “Do not allow Paula to feel more affection for one of her companions than for others.” And this ascetic moralist even recommends uncleanliness as a virtue: “I entirely forbid a young girl to bathe;” which may be matched with the following, also cited from CompayrÉ: “The first preceptors of Gargantua said that it sufficed to comb one’s hair with the four fingers and the thumb; and that whoever combed, washed, and cleansed himself otherwise was losing his time in this world.”

In such a rough atmosphere of masculine ignorance, fanaticism, and cruelty the feminine virtues of sympathy, tenderness, grace, and sweetness could not have flourished very luxuriantly. Consequently there is doubtless more than a grain of truth in mediÆval proverbs about women, cynical and brutal as some of them are. Here are a few specimens:—

“Women and horses must be beaten.”

“Women and money are the cause of all evil in the world.”

“Women only keep those secrets which they don’t know.”

“Trust no woman, and were she dead.”

“Between a woman’s yes and no there isn’t room for the point of a needle.”

“If you are too happy, take a wife.”

When we read that “Montaigne is of that number, who, through false gallantry, would keep woman in a state of ignorance, on the pretext that instruction would mar her natural charms;” and that the same author recommends poetry to women, because it is “a wanton, crafty art, disguised, all for pleasure, all for show, just as they are”; we recall with a smile John Stuart Mill’s sarcastic reference to the time, “Some generations ago, when satires on women were in vogue, and men thought it a clever thing to insult women for being what men made them.”

CHRISTIANITY AND LOVE

Christianity claims to be pre-eminently the religion of love, in the widest sense of that term, including, especially, religious veneration of a personal Deity and love of one’s enemy. It has been asserted by Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others that Christianity has done little or nothing in aid of woman’s elevation; and it cannot be denied that much good would have resulted if more emphasis had been placed by the Apostles on certain phases of the domestic relations. That Romantic Love is not alluded to in the New Testament need not cause any surprise, for that sentiment cannot have existed in those days when Courtship and Individual Choice were unknown. But there are passages in St. Paul’s writings which were probably the seeds from which grew the mediÆval contempt for marriage and women. And although marriage is now zealously guarded by the Church, Love of the romantic sort is no doubt looked upon even to-day by many an austere clergyman as a harmless youthful epidemic—a sort of emotional measles—rather than as a new Æsthetico-moral sentiment destined to become the strongest of all agencies working for the improvement of the personal appearance, social condition, and happiness of mankind.

On the other hand, even agnostics must admit on reflection that Christianity contained elements which, despite the vicious fanaticism of many of its early teachers, slowly helped to ameliorate woman’s lot. In the first place, Protestantism, as embodied in Luther, performed an invaluable service by restoring and enforcing universal respect for the marriage-tie. He set a good example by not only defying the degrading custom of obligatory celibacy, but by marrying a most sensible woman—a nun who had escaped with eight others from a convent at Nimtsch.

Mariolatry, or the cult of the Virgin Mary, is the second avenue through which Christianity influenced the development of the tender emotions. The halo of sanctity which it spread at the same time over virginity and motherhood has been of incalculable value in raising woman in the estimation of the masses.

A third way in which Christianity influenced woman’s position is suggested by the following remarks of Mr. Lecky, who has done valuable service to philosophy, in showing how emotions as well as ideas change with time: “In antiquity,” he says, “the virtues that were most admired were almost exclusively those which were distinctively masculine. Courage, self-assertion, magnanimity, and, above all, patriotism, were the leading features of the ideal type; and chastity, modesty, and charity, the gentler and the domestic virtues, which are especially feminine, were greatly undervalued. With the single exception of conjugal fidelity, none of the virtues that were highly prized were virtues distinctively or pre-eminently feminine.” Now the “religion of love,” by especially insisting on these “feminine virtues,” became a powerful agent in undermining the coarse mediÆval spirit with its masculine, military “virtues,” alias barbarisms.

CHIVALRY—MILITANT AND COMIC

In the howling wilderness of mediÆval masculine brutality and feminine degradation there was one sunny oasis in which the flowers of Love were allowed to grow undisturbed for a few generations,—until military ambition trod them again underfoot. This brief episode of gentler manners is known as the period of Chivalry.

Ever since the fifth century the worship of the Virgin Mary had increased in ardour, and it was to be expected that at some favourable moment this adoration would be extended to the whole female sex, or at least its nobler representatives. This was the mission taken upon themselves by the knights and poets of chivalrous times.

Chivalry, it is true, was so often a mixture of clownishness and licentiousness, its practice was so much less refined than its theory, that in opposition to those historians who have sung its praises others have doubted whether its influence was on the whole for good or for evil. For, although the knights vowed especially to protect widows and orphans, and respect and honour ladies, yet it was precisely under their rÉgime that, when cities were taken and castles stormed, women were subjected to the most brutal treatment.

The difficulty is best solved by distinguishing between two kinds of Chivalry—the Militant and the Poetic. The militant type of knight-errantry was less inspired by the desire to benefit womankind than by ambition to gratify silly masculine vanity. So thoroughly was the mediÆval mind imbued with ideas of war that these knights could not conceive even of love except in a military guise. So they rode about the country in quest of adventure, ostensibly in the service of an adored mistress, but really to find an outlet, in times of peace, for pent-up military energy and ambition.

Spain and Southern France were the principal home of Chivalry Militant, because there a warm climate and smiling nature offered most favourable conditions to wandering knights in quest of adventure. Fortunately the world possesses, in Don Quixote, a lifelike picture of knight-errantry; for although the aim of Cervantes was to make fun, not so much of Chivalry as of trashy contemporaneous romances of Chivalry, yet in doing this he could not avoid depicting the comic side of the institution itself, concerning which it is indeed difficile satiram non scribere.

It appears to have been the custom of these knights to wander about the country interfering in every quarrel, and, in default of a disturbance, creating one.

Each knight had a Dulcinea, whom he had perhaps never seen, but in whose honour and for whose love he engages in all these combats. And whenever he meets another knight he forthwith challenges him to admit that this Dulcinea, whom the other has of course never seen, is the most beautiful lady in the world. The other knight echoes the challenge in behalf of his Dulcinea; and the result is a combat in which the victor, by the inexorable logic of superior strength, proves the superior beauty of his chosen lady-love.

The vanquished knight is then sent as prisoner to the victor’s mistress with a message of love.

The Germans do not often originate anything; but if they take up an idea or institution they work it more thoroughly than any other nation. So with the fantastic side of Chivalry, which was introduced after the second crusade, during which German knights had come into close contact with French knights.

“Spain,” says Professor Scherr, “has imagined a Don Quixote, but Germany has really produced one.”

His name was Ulrich von Lichtenstein, and he was born in the year 1200. “From his boyhood, Herr Ulrich’s thoughts were directed towards woman-worship, and as a youth he chose a high-born and, be it well understood, a married lady as his patroness, in whose service he infused method into his knightly madness. The circumstance that meanwhile he himself gets married does not abate his folly. He greedily drinks water in which his patroness has washed herself; he has an operation performed on his thick double underlip, because she informs him that it is not inviting for kisses; he amputates one of his fingers which had become stiff in an encounter, and sends it to his mistress as a proof of his capacity of endurance for her sake. Masked as Frau Venus, he wanders about the country and engages in encounters, in this costume, in honour of his mistress; at her command he goes among the lepers and eats with them from one bowl.... The most remarkable circumstance, however, is that Ulrich’s own spouse, while her husband and master masquerades about the land as a knight in his beloved’s service, remains aside in his castle, and is only mentioned (in his poetic autobiography) whenever he returns home, tired and dilapidated, to be restored by her nursing.”

When a German knight had chosen a Dulcinea, he adopted and wore her colour, for he was now her love-servant, and stood to his mistress in the same relation as a vassal to his master. “The beloved,” Scherr continues, “gave her lover a love-token—a girdle or veil, a ribbon, or even a sleeve of her dress; this token he fastened to his helmet or shield, and great was the lady’s pride if he brought it back to her from battle thoroughly cut and hewn to pieces. Thus (in Parzival) Gawan had fastened on his shield a sleeve of the beautiful Olibet, and when he returned it to her, torn and speared, ‘Da ward des MÄgdlein’s Freude gross; ihr blanker Arm war noch bloss, darÜber schob sie ihn zuhand.’”

The attitude of the knight-errants may be briefly described as Gallantry gone mad. We have seen that a few traces of Gallantry are found in the pages of Ovid; but it was during the age of Chivalry that this overtone of Love made itself heard for the first time distinctly and loudly. And as, when a new popular melody appears, everybody takes it up and sings and whistles it ad nauseam; so these knights, intoxicated with the novel idea of gallant behaviour toward women, took it up and carried it to the most ridiculous extremes.

The women, naturally enough, unused to such devotion, became as extravagantly coy as the men were gallant. They subjected this Gallantry to the most absurd and even cruel tests. The knights were sent to war, to the crusades, into the dens of wild animals, to test their devotion; and few were so manly as the knight in Schiller’s ballad, who, after fetching his lady’s glove from the lion’s den, threw it in her face, instead of accepting her willing favours.

It is with reference to these coy and cruel tests of Gallantry that Wolfram von Eschenbach bitterly accuses Love of having caused the death of many a noble knight.

Yet, despite these absurdities, the trials and procrastinations to which the knights were subjected had one good result: they helped to give Love a supersensual, imaginative basis. This fact is brought out clearly in the following statement made by Dr. BÖtticher in his learned work on Parzival. When, he says, after the middle of the twelfth century, the Troubadour love-poetry became known in Austria, “it was especially the idea of Minnedienst (love-service) that was seized upon with avidity: the knight wooes and labours for a woman’s love, but she holds back and grants no favours until after a long trial-service. The final object of this service, the possession of the beloved, is regarded as quite subordinate to the pangs and pleasures of wooing and waiting.”

Here was a novelty in Love, indeed! And, as good luck would have it, fashion lent its powerful aid to the innovation. The sentiment was that “Whoever is not in the service of love is unworthy to be a courtier”; and thus many a boor who would have very much preferred to continue treating women as servants, had to put his head into the yoke of Gallantry, in order to be “fashionable.”

CHIVALRY—POETIC

If these knights of Chivalry bestrode their warlike Rosinantes to show an astonished world for the first time what could be done in the way of Gallantry, the peaceful poets of Chivalry—the Troubadours and Minnesingers—in turn mounted their winged Pegasus, and soared for the first time to the dizzy heights of Ecstatic Adoration or Emotional Hyperbole.

“Woman was regarded,” says Mr. Symonds, “as an ideal being, to be approached with worship bordering on adoration. The lover derived personal force, virtue, elevation, energy from his enthusiastic passion. Honour, justice, courage, self-sacrifice, contempt of worldly goods flowed from that one sentiment, and love united two wills in a single ecstasy. Love was the consummation of spiritual felicity, which surpassed all other modes of happiness in its beatitude. Thus, Bernard de Ventadour and Jacopo da Lentino were ready to forego Paradise, unless they might behold their lady’s face before the throne of God. For a certain period in modern history this mysticism of the amorous emotion was no affectation. It formulated a genuine impulse of manly hearts, influenced by beauty, and touched with the sense of moral superiority in woman, perfected through weakness, and demanding physical protection. By bringing the tender passions into accord with gentle manners and unselfish aspirations, it served to temper the rudeness of primitive society; and no little of its attraction was due to the conviction that only refined natures could experience it. This new aspect of love was due to chivalry, to Christianity, to the Teutonic reverence for woman, in which religious awe seems to have blended with the service of the weaker by the stronger.”

These remarks, though applicable to Chivalrous poetry in general, refer especially to the Italian species. The most important varieties of Chivalrous poetry, however, are those of the ProvenÇal, or French, Troubadours, and the German Minnesingers. These must be briefly considered in turn, as they present national differences of importance to the history and psychology of Love.

(a) French Troubadours.—As we live in a period in which the newspaper has become the greatest of moral forces, we can most easily realise the social influence of the Troubadours on reading, in Thierry, that “In the twelfth century the songs of the troubadours, circulating rapidly from castle to castle, and from town to town, supplied the place of periodical gazettes in all the country between the rivers IsÈre and Vienne, the mountains of Auvergne and the two seas.”

The wandering minstrels who wielded this poetic power were recruited from all classes—nobility, artisans, and clergy. But, as Dr. F. Hueffer remarks in his entertaining work on ProvenÇal life and poetry, “By far the largest number of the Troubadours known to us—fifty-seven in number—belong to the nobility, not to the highest nobility in most cases, it is true. In several instances, poverty is distinctly mentioned as the cause for adopting the profession of a troubadour. It almost appears, indeed, as if this profession, like that of the churchman, and sometimes in connection with it, had been regarded by ProvenÇal families as a convenient mode of providing for their younger sons.”

In a time when distinctions of rank were so closely observed, it was perhaps of special importance that these singers should be chiefly persons of noble blood. Women, it is true, have at all times shown a disposition to ignore rank in favour of bards and tenors; but the mediÆval nobles might have hesitated, frequently, to extend to commoners the unlimited hospitality of their castles, and the privilege of adoring their wives in verse and action. These husbands, in fact, appear to have shown remarkable forbearance towards their poetic guests. No doubt it flattered their vanity (overtone of Pride) to have the charms of their spouse sung by a famous poet in person; and on account of the social influence wielded by the Troubadours, owing to their successive appearance at all the castles in the land, it was, moreover, wise not to forfeit their goodwill. Sometimes, however, Jealousy held high carnival, as, in the case of Guillem, the hero of Hueffer and Mackenzie’s opera, The Troubadour, who was murdered by the injured husband, and the faithless wife compelled to drink of the wine called “the poet’s blood,” adulterated in a horribly realistic manner. The women, likewise, were frequently moved by Jealousy—not in behalf of their husbands but of the Troubadours, of whose art and adoration they desired a Monopoly, whereas these bards were very apt to transfer their fickle affections to other women.

Fickleness, however, was not the greatest fault of these Troubadours. Their great moral shortcoming was that they paid no attention to the borderline between conjugal and romantic love. Dr. Hueffer does not recollect a single instance amongst the numerous love-stories told in connection with the Troubadours, in which the object of passion was not a married lady—a strange point of affinity with the modern French novel to which he calls the attention of those interested in national psychology. A case in point is that of Guirant (1260), one of whose pastorals is analysed by Hueffer: “The idea is simple enough: an amorous knight, whose importunate offers to an unprotected girl are kept in check by mere dint of graceful, witty, sometimes tart reply.” These offers of love are repeated at intervals of two, three, seven, and six years, and finally transferred to the woman’s daughter, always with the same bad luck. His own wife, meanwhile, is never considered a proper object for his poetic effusions. Concerning the German imitator of foreign customs—Ulrich von Lichtenstein, mentioned a few pages back—we have likewise seen that his wife never entered his mind except when he came home “tired and dilapidated, to be restored by her nursing.”

Besides pastorals of the kind just referred to, the Troubadours had several other classes of songs, among them the tensons, or contentions which were “metrical dialogues of lively repartee on some disputed points of gallantry.” These may have given ground for the myth that aristocratic ladies of this period “instituted Courts of Love, in which questions of gallantry were gravely discussed and determined by their suffrages,” as, e.g. whether a husband could really love his wife. The question whether any such debating clubs for considering the ethics and etiquette of love existed is still debated by scholars; but the best evidence appears to be negative.

(b) German Minnesingers.—The German wandering minstrels also belonged mainly to the aristocracy, and imitated their French colleagues in paying their addresses chiefly to married women—a fact for which, in both cases, the rigid chaperonage of the young must be held responsible; for man will make love, and if not allowed to do so properly he will do it improperly. Yet on the whole the Minnesingers, at least in their verse, were less amorous than the Troubadours. As Mr. L. C. Elson remarks in his History of German Song: “The Troubadour praised the eyes, the hair, the lips, the form of his chosen one; the Minnesinger praised the sweetness, the grace, the modesty, the tenderness of the entire sex. The one was concrete, the other abstract.”

Abstractness, however, is not a desirable quality in poetry, the very essence of which is concrete imagery. Accordingly we find that with few exceptions the German Minnesingers are not as poets equal to their French prototypes. It was Schiller himself who passed the severest judgment on these early colleagues of his. “If the sparrows on the roof,” he once remarked to a friend, “should ever undertake to write, or to issue an almanac of love and friendship, I would wager ten to one it would be just like these songs of love. What a poverty of ideas in these songs! A garden, a tree, a hedge, a forest, and a sweetheart—these are about all the objects that are to be found in a sparrow’s head. Then we have flowers which are fragrant, fruits which grow mellow, twigs on which a bird sits in the sunshine and sings, and spring which comes, and winter which goes, and nothing that remains except—ennui.”

Schiller’s criticism, however, is too sweeping, for there were notable exceptions to these sparrow-poets, concerning one of whom, Hadlaub, the late Professor Scherer gives the following fascinating information in his History of German Literature: "He introduces human figures into his descriptions of scenery, and shows us, for instance, in the summer a group of beautiful ladies walking in an orchard, and blushing with womanly modesty when gazed at by young men. He compares the troubles of love with the troubles of hard-working men, like charcoal-burners and carters.

“Hadlaub tells us more of his personal experiences than any other Minnesinger. Even as a child, we learn, he had loved a little girl, who, however, would have nothing to say to him, but continually flouted him, to his great distress. Once she bit his hand, but her bite, he says, was so tender, womanly, and gentle, that he was sorry the feeling of it passed away so soon. Another time, being urged to give him a keepsake, she threw her needle-case at him, and he seized it with sweet eagerness, but it was taken from him and returned to her, and she was made to give it him in a friendly manner. In later years his pains still remained unrewarded; when his lady perceived him, she would get up and go away. Once, he tells us, he saw her fondling and kissing a child, and when she had gone he drew the child towards him and embraced it as she had embraced it, and kissed it in the place where she had kissed it.”

The gradual change in woman’s position, social and amorous, is indicated by the differences between the earlier and the later Minnesongs. In the early poems Professor Scherer remarks, "The social supremacy of noble woman is not yet recognised, and the man wooes with proud self-respect.... Another refuses himself to a woman who desired his love.... A fourth boasts of his triumphs. ‘Women,’ says he, ‘are as easily tamed as falcons.’ In another song a woman tells how she tamed a falcon, but he flew away from her, and now wears other chains....

“In the later Minnesongs it is the women who are proud, and the men who must languish.”

A still more remarkable change is noticed in the German Folk-songs which followed the periods of Minnesong proper. “The women of these popular love-songs are not mostly married women; they are, as a rule, young maidens” [at last, pure Romantic Love!] “who are not only praised but also turned to ridicule and blamed. The woes of love do not here arise from the capricious coyness of the fair one, but are called forth by parting, jealousy, or faithlessness. Feeling is stronger than in the Minnesong, and seeks accordingly for stronger modes of expression.”

It is not a mere accident that true Romantic Love should have first appeared in these Folk-songs. For these were the products of gifted individuals in the lower classes, where chaperonage—arch enemy of Love—was less strict than among the higher classes.

FEMALE CULTURE

That the women were not ungrateful to the mediÆval bards who first discovered in them the possibilities of higher charms and virtues, is shown by their treatment of Heinrich von Meissen, Minnesinger, who was called Frauenlob, because he constantly sang the “praise of woman.” When he died at Mainz in 1317 they carried his bier to church with their own hands, and then, in accordance with the custom of the time, poured libations of wine on his bier so freely that the whole floor of the church was covered.

And there is every reason to believe that the women of Frauenlob’s period deserved his praises, because they were in Æsthetic, moral, and intellectual culture far superior to the women before or directly after their time. We read in Gottfried von Strassburg’s poem how Tristan, while Isolde healed his wound, instructed her in the arts and manners of court life. Isolde knew French and Latin besides her own language. She played the violin and the harp, and sang; she wrote letters and poems, and would indeed have been a model of culture even at the present day. The twelfth century even had a genuine blue-stocking, the nun Herrad von Landsberg, who wrote a cyclopÆdia of all human knowledge, in the Latin tongue, called the Hortus Deliciarum. Learning throughout the mediÆval ages was all concentrated in the monasteries; but at the period in question the monks did not retain everything for themselves, but aided the knights and the poets in instructing the women of the court and nobility.

Nor did these women neglect their domestic affairs or physical exercise. They accompanied the men on their falcon-hunting parties, and at home learned to spin, weave, sew, and make clothing for themselves and their husbands and children. At the tournaments and other games they appeared as Queens of Beauty to distribute prizes and inspire their admirers to heroic deeds; and at banquets and other social gatherings they seem to have supplied more of the wit and entertainment than the men, whose military occupations left them less time for the cultivation of the arts.

At the same time one cannot help smiling at the elementary rules of conduct which had to be given even to women of the nobility. You must not stare at a man long, or refuse to return his salutation, young ladies were told; nor must you in walking take too long or too short steps. A poet of the middle of the thirteenth century (quoted by Mr. Hueffer) gives this advice to a girl: “If a gentleman takes you aside and wishes to talk of courtship to you, do not show a strange or sullen behaviour, but defend yourself with pleasant and pretty repartees. And if his talk annoys you and makes you uneasy, I advise you to ask him questions,” and contradict his statements, in order “to give a harmless turn to the conversation.”

Like Greek and Roman civilisation, like the palmy days of Persian and Arabian culture, this mediÆval period of feminine ascendancy and refinement unfortunately did not last many generations. Although, undoubtedly, chivalry accomplished real good for the time being, most of what went by that name was, after all, too much of a sham—less a matter of actuality than of poetic fancy. “Sincere and beautiful as the chivalrous ideal may have been,” says Mr. Symonds, “it speedily degenerated. Chivalry, though a vital element of feudalism, existed, even among the nations of its origin, more as an aspiration than a reality. In Italy it never penetrated the life or subdued the imagination of the people. For the Italo-ProvenÇal poets that code of love was almost wholly formal.” Petrarch, like Alberti and Boccaccio, indulges again in abuse of women as coarse and brutal as that of the early “Christian Fathers”; and when we come to the sixteenth century, the scholar Cornelius Agrippa complains of the old state of affairs—woman’s complete subjection: “Unjust laws,” he says, “do their worst to repress women; custom and education combine to make them nonentities. From her childhood a girl is brought up in idleness at home, and confined to needle and thread for sole employment. When she reaches marriageable years, she has this alternative: the jealousy of a husband, or the custody of a convent. All public duties, all legal functions, all active ministrations of religion are closed against her.”

The manner in which a great English poet, much later still, treated the women of his household was quite in consonance with the customs of preceding times. As an English author wrote, forty years ago, “Milton taught his daughters to pronounce Greek and Latin, so that they might read the classics aloud for his pleasure, but forbade their understanding the meaning of a word for their own—for which he deserved to be blind.”

Regarding France we read in CompayrÉ that “Even in the higher classes, woman held herself aloof from instruction, and from things intellectual. Madame Racine had never seen played, and had probably never read, the tragedies of her husband.” Mme. de Lambert “reproaches MoliÈre for having excluded women from recreation, pastime, and pleasure.” FÉnelon advised girls to learn to read and write correctly and to learn grammar, which “surpassed in the time of FÉnelon the received custom.” “No one knew better than FÉnelon the faults that come to woman through ignorance—unrest, unemployed time, inability to apply herself to solid and serious duties, frivolity, indolence, lawless imagination, indiscreet curiosity concerning trifles, levity, and talkativeness, sentimentalism, and ... a mania for theology: women are too much inclined to speak decisively on religious questions.”

Rarer even than feminine culture, Personal Beauty appears to have been throughout the Middle Ages. Most of the portraits of women and men, as well as the ideal heads and figures in paintings and sculpture, are repulsively ugly and inexpressive of higher traits. The general causes of mediÆval ugliness—neglect of personal hygiene and sanitary measures, hard manual labour, prevention of love-matches, etc.—will be considered elsewhere. In this place only one cause need be alluded to. The old Church Fathers, it is well known, were not only unÆsthetic but positively anti-Æsthetic. Everything pleasing to the senses was denounced by them, especially the physical beauty of women, which they looked upon as a special gift of the devil. Such an attitude on the part of the leading social class could hardly tend to encourage the cultivation of personal charms; and during the trials for witchcraft special efforts appear to have even been made to eliminate beauty forcibly; for the mere possession of unusual beauty sometimes sufficed to bring a poor girl to trial, outrage, torture, and death.

It may have been due partly to a natural reaction against asceticism, partly to the rarity of spiritual beauty, that the mediÆval poets in enumerating the charms of their mistresses, confine themselves almost exclusively to their physical features. Professor Scherr, after quoting Ariosto’s description of his heroine Alcina in Orlando Furioso (vii. 11, seq.), for comparison with similar efforts of German poets, observes: “It is very remarkable that, as in this female portrait sketched by Ariosto, so with mediÆval poets in general, including those of Germany, the principal accent is placed on the bodily charms of the women. Almost all sketches of this kind are purely material. Intellectual beauty, as expressed in the features, is barely mentioned. These old romanticists were much more sensual than modern writers would have us believe.”

SPENSER ON LOVE

That Love, too, continued to be looked at from a material point of view, long after the chivalric efforts to idealise it, is shown strikingly by the way in which Spenser compares love with friendship and family affection. In the fifth book of the Faery Queene he asks—

Like an ancient Greek he decides in favour of friendship—

Could anything attest better than this the general mediÆval ignorance of the psychic traits or “overtones” which constitute Romantic Love?

DANTE AND SHAKSPERE

Long before the day of Spenser there lived, however, in Florence, a poet whose transcendent genius enabled him to feel and describe for the first time the real romantic sentiment of Love. It is true that some of the poets of Chivalry had before him attempted to depict the supersensual, Æthereal side of the passion. But their portraits lacked the touch of realism: they described what they imagined; Dante what he felt.

Dante was born in 1265: Modern Love was born nine years later—613 years ago. “Nine times already since my birth,” says Dante, “had the heaven of light returned to the self-same point almost, as concerns its own revolution, when first the glorious lady of my mind was made manifest to mine eyes; even she who was called Beatrice (she who confers blessing) by many who knew not wherefore.... From that time onward, Love quite governed my soul.... But seeing that were I to dwell overmuch on the passions and doings of such early youth, my words might be counted something fabulous, I will therefore put them aside,” etc.

These are the opening lines of the Vita Nuova, in which Modern Love is for the first time portrayed with an air of sincerity, and concerning which Professor C. E. Norton justly remarks that “so long as there are lovers in the world, and so long as lovers are poets, will this first and tenderest love-story of modern literature be read with appreciation and responsive sympathy.”

What a privilege to describe First Love not only in an individual but a historic sense, as Dante did in this poem, which Rossetti calls “the auto-biography or auto-psychology of Dante’s youth, till his twenty-seventh year.”

After that first sight of Beatrice one of her sweet smiles was the highest goal of his desires; but so powerful was the spell of her presence that he was obliged to avoid her. “From that night forth the natural functions of my body began to be vexed and impeded, for I was given up wholly to thinking of this most gracious creature; whereby in short space I became so weak and so reduced that it was irksome to many of my friends to look upon me ... the thing was so plainly to be discerned in my countenance that there was no longer any means of concealing it.” Such words as “trembling,” “confusion,” “weeping,” constantly occur as the narrative proceeds. Love, he says, “bred in me such overpowering sweetness that my body, being all subjected thereto, remained many times helpless and passive.” When for the first time Beatrice denied him her smile, “I became possessed with such grief that, parting myself from others, I went into a lonely place to bathe the ground with most bitter tears.” And in one of the sonnets interspersed he says—

But by far the most remarkable thing in the Vita Nuova, is Dante’s own indirect testimony that such Love as he felt, such supersensual, Æsthetic Love, was a novelty and a puzzle to his contemporaries. For he tells how he met some ladies who gazed at him and laughed till one of them asked: “To what end lovest thou this lady, seeing that thou canst not support her presence? Now tell us this thing that we may know it: for certainly the end of such a love must be worthy of knowledge.”

No doubt it was worth knowing; for, as the author of the admirable article on “Poetry,” in the eighth edition of the EncyclopÆdia Britannica (1859), remarks: “When in modern times the attempt was made to revive tragedy, it proved totally unsuccessful until this principle (of romantic love) was admitted into the drama to give it warmth and life. Of that species of composition which in its proper sense is peculiar to the moderns, viz. the novel and romance, it forms, as we all know, the moving power. In short, it influences, more or less, every department in which the imagination has exerted itself with success since the revival of literature.”

Once more it is well to state that there are geniuses in the emotional as in the intellectual world. Dante was both; and the realistic descriptions he has given of the effects of Romantic Love have helped to sustain the notion that Love is immutable, and has existed at all times. But the indirect testimony to the contrary just quoted, and the whole argument of this chapter on MediÆval Love, make it apparent that Dante’s Love was the exception which proves that among the others Love did not exist. And even Dante was not entirely modern in his Love. A modern lover would not have attempted to conceal the object of his Love, but would have made it apparent to all by his foolish actions that he was in Love with this particular girl and no other; he would perhaps have wooed more persistently, and his feelings would not have remained unchanged after her marriage to another. Like Petrarch, moreover, Dante cannot be quite acquitted of the suspicion that, after the first flush of excitement, the excessive and persistent purification and idealisation of his passion was based not so much on real amorous feelings and motives, as on an author’s craving for an object on which to lavish his literary art of embellishment.

Dante, in a word, hyper-idealised his passion. He became quite deaf to the fundamental tone of Love, and heard only its overtones. And herein lies his inferiority to Shakspere. It is in the works of Shakspere that the various motives and emotions which constitute Love—sensuous, Æsthetic, intellectual—are for the first time mingled in proper proportions. Shakspere’s Love is Modern Love, full-fledged, and therefore calls for no separate analysis. It is a primitive passion, purified and refined by intellectual, moral, and Æsthetic culture. And though by no means universal, or even common, at the present day, it is yet of frequent occurrence, and will become more and more prevalent as time rolls on. To facilitate its progress by pointing out its characteristics, its evolution, and the measures that must be taken to foster it, is one of the principal objects of this monograph.