Part 6 (1/2)

False can I be or true for her, Sincere or full of lies, A perfect knight or worthless cur, Serene or grave, stupid or wise.

Raimon of Toulouse:

In the kingdom of love Folly rules and not sense.

It was typical of this enthusiastic love that the social rank of the beloved, the mistress, was invariably above the rank of the lover. The latter was fond of calling himself her va.s.sal and serf, proclaiming that she had invested him with all his goods; even kings and German emperors composed love-songs, although in all probability they would have achieved their purpose far more quickly by other means; but in all cases we find the characteristic att.i.tude of the humble lover, looking up to his mistress. The underlying thought is obvious: Love, the loftiest value in all the world, is the great leveller of all social differences, a force before which wealth is as dust. ”I would rather win a kind glance from my lady's eyes than the royal crown of France,” was a favourite profession of the poets. Montanhagol, for instance, in a rhymed meditation, stated that a lady was wise in choosing a lover of a lower social rank, because not only could she always count on his grat.i.tude and devotion, but she would also have more influence over him, a fact which in the case of a social equal or superior was, to say the least, a little doubtful. This supreme reverence for love soon became an accepted doctrine. We constantly meet the thought that chaste love alone can make a man n.o.ble, good and wise. I will select a few ill.u.s.trations from a wealth of instances:

Miraval:

n.o.ble is every deed whose root is love.

Peire Rogier:

Full well I know that right and good Is all I do for love of her.

Guirot Riquier:

The man who loves not is not n.o.ble-minded, For love is fruit and blossom of the highest.

And:

Thus love transfigures ev'ry deed we do, And love gives everything a deeper sense.

Love is the teaching of all genuine worth.

So base is no man's heart on this wide earth, Love could not guide it to great excellence.

Giraut of Calenso said of the City of Love that no base or ignorant man could enter it, and the Italian Lapo Gianni sang:

The youthful maiden who appeared to me So filled my soul with pure and lofty thoughts, That henceforth all ign.o.ble things I scorn.

Dante in the _Vita Nuova_ calls Beatrice ”the destroyer of all evil and the queen of all virtues.”

The very thought of the beloved makes a good man of the lover:

”I cannot sin when I am in her thoughts.”

a.s.serts the sincere Guirot Riquier, and he prays Christ to teach him the true love of woman.

While it was a generally accepted theory that love was the source of man's perfection, I know of only one pa.s.sage (by Raimon of Miraval) contending that woman, also, was perfected by love; everywhere else we meet the universal and silently accepted opinion that the essence of womanhood is something unearthly, unfathomable and divine. Perhaps the most cla.s.sical formulation of the new doctrine, to wit, that spiritual love is the begetter of all virtue and the mother of chast.i.ty, outside which there is nothing divine, is to be found in the poems of the somewhat pedantic Montanhagol:

The lover who loves not the highest love, Is like a fool polluting precious wine.

Let loftiest love alone within thee move, And purity and virtue will be thine.

Guirot Riquier expressed a similar sentiment:

For chaste and pure my love has always been, From my ”sweet bliss” I've never asked a boon; If I may humbly serve her night and noon, My life be her inalienable lien.

Walter von der Vogelweide says: ”Love is a treasure heaped up of all virtues.”

As time went on the barrier erected between true spiritual love and insidious sensuality became more and more clearly defined; the former pervaded the erotic emotion of the whole period. Parallel with chaste love, sensuality continued to exist as something contemptible, unworthy of a n.o.ble mind; and it must be admitted that according to the contemporary ”Fabliaux,” later German comedies and Italian and French novels, the s.e.xual manifestations of the period, were of incredible coa.r.s.eness. As against these, spiritual love was not merely an artistic and theoretic concept, but the profound emotion of the cultured minds, and remained a powerful and creative force even in later centuries.

Spiritual love and s.e.xuality were irreconcilable contradistinctions; the man who thought otherwise was looked upon as a libertine. The following pa.s.sages from the poems of the troubadours and their heirs, the Italian poets of the _dolce stil nuovo_, will prove the historical reality of this relations.h.i.+p, the ideal of the declining Middle Ages. We need take no account of the German minnesingers, for although they shared the same ideal, they did not influence principle in the same way as the neo-Latin poets.