The Evolution of Love Part 2

The memory of the figure and preaching of Christ had so powerfully influenced the centuries that it had gradually permeated and transformed not only the Platonic doctrine of ideas--that maturest fruit of Greek wisdom--but also the Semitic mediaeval monotheism. Something new had sprung into being, something which expressed a hitherto unknown feeling for life and for humanity, vague and uncertain in the beginning, but growing in clearness and uniformity. On the throne of the Roman emperors sat a bishop, whose power was increasing with the development of the new civilisation, and whom the final victory of the new transcendental world-principle had made master of the world. The building up of this new civilisation had absorbed the intellectual force of a thousand years; it had monopolised thought and every form of energy. The reward was great. For the first time in the annals of the world the questionings of brooding intelligence were fully answered, the anguish of the tortured soul was stilled. The purpose of the universe, the destiny of man, were comprehended and interpreted, good and evil being finally known. At the close of the first Christian millenary, all moral and intellectual values were grouped round and dominated by one supreme ideal; the loftiest value in this world and the next, side by side with the greatest secular power, were in the hands of the Church; together with the imperium she had succeeded to the spiritual and ethical inheritance of the dead civilisations. Without her uncouth barbarism reigned, and it was her task, while elaborating the system of the universe for which she stood, to teach and convert the new nations, to spread a uniform Christian civilisation.

On the mere face of it it must seem strange that a religion which had grown on foreign soil, out of foreign spiritual a.s.sumptions, should have been accepted so readily and quickly by nations to whom it must have been alien and unintelligible. The love of war and valour of the Teutonic tribes and Christian asceticism were diametrically opposed ideals, and very often their relationship was one of direct hostility. I need only remind the reader of the contempt expressed for the chaplain by Hagen (in the "Song of the Niebelungen"). On the other hand, the ancient Celtic and Teutonic races shared one profound characteristic with the Christian world, the consequences of which were sufficiently far-reaching to raise the religion of Christ to the religion of Europe.

The characteristic common to the still uncultivated European spirit and Christianity, and meaningless alike to the Asiatic barbarians, the Jews of the Old Testament and the Greeks, was the importance which both attached to the individual soul. Through the Christian religion this new intuition which saw in the soul of man the highest of values, became the centre and pivot of life and faith--a position to which even Plato, to whom the objective, metaphysical idea was the essential, never attained.

It had been the most personal experience of Christ, and centuries after his death the nations rediscovered it as their highest value. It ent.i.tled Christianity to become the natural religion of Europe, and the soul of its new system of civilisation. It formed the most complete contrast to all Asiatic cults, Brahminism and Buddhism, a fact which, since Schopenhauer, one is inclined to overlook. To the Indian, the soul of man is not an ent.i.ty; his consciousness is a republic, as it were, composed of diverse spiritual principles and metaphysical forces which are not centralised into an "I-centre," but exist impersonally, side by side. This may be a great conception, but it is foreign to the feeling of the citizen of Europe. To the latter the I, the soul, the personality, is the pivot round which life turns. The evolution of the European world-feeling is in the direction of the independent development of all psychical forces and their fusion into a unity of ever-increasing intimacy. New values will be created, but the fusing power of the soul will strive with growing intensity to co-ordinate and unify the internal and external life; personality will recreate the world in conformity with its own purposes, that is to say, it will found the system of objective civilisation. The incapacity of the Indian to produce a civilisation perfect in every direction is explained by his one-sided, morally-speculative thought. The world is to him nothing but a moral phenomenon, he admits no other explanation; he seeks its true meaning and the possibility of its salvation in the realisation of the vanity of life, not in the liberating deed, and not in the inward change.

The kernel of matured and spiritualised Christianity, which reached its apex in the German mystics, lies in the soul of man, eager to shed everything which is subjective and accidental, and become spirit, profound, divine reality. Eckhart, the great perfecter of this European religion, deliberately and in direct contradiction to the dogma of his time, placed man above the "highest angels," whom he considered subject to limitations; "man," he argues, "thanks to his freedom, is able to reach a goal to which no angel could aspire. For he is always new, infinitely exalted above the limitations of the angels and all finite reason." Of the relationship between the soul and G.o.d he says; "The soul of the righteous man shall be with G.o.d, his equal and compeer, no more and no less." The Upanishads, on the other hand, maintain that the core of the world is not to be found in the soul of the individual but in Brahma, the universal soul, outside whom there is no reality. "The individual soul is but a phantasm of the universal soul, as the reflection of the sun in the water is but a phantasm of the sun." The sole purpose of the world is the extinction of individual consciousness, its absorption in Brahma, the end of all suffering: "When feeling has ceased, pain must cease, too, and the world be delivered." The Indian lacks the central conception of love, for which he subst.i.tutes knowledge. Primitive Christianity conceived the connection between body and soul, the enc.u.mbering of the soul by the body, as it were, as a temptation or a punishment; according to the Vedas, it is merely a delusion to which the sage is not subject. Before his keen vision, the deception falls to the ground, and by this very fact he is delivered. To the feeling of Europe and Christianity, however, life and the universe are genuine, deep realities, the touchstone of the soul. Love is the soul's greatest treasure and the only true path to G.o.d; knowledge can never take its place. "The divine stream of love flowing through the soul," says Eckhart, "carries the soul along with it to its origin, to the bourne of all knowledge, to G.o.d."

The very general identification of the Christian and Indian mystics--a fact which is accounted for by their common metaphysical tendency--is based on an error; Indian mysticism and Christian mysticism originated in different concepts; here the centre of all being is laid in love and in the soul of man, there it is contained in knowledge and in Brahma.

But ultimately, at the termination of the world-process, they will meet, although coming from different directions. "While the soul worships a G.o.d, realises a G.o.d and knows of a G.o.d," says Eckhart, "it is separated from G.o.d. This is G.o.d's purpose, to annihilate Himself in the soul, so that the soul, too, shall lose itself. For G.o.d has been called G.o.d by the creatures." The words "The soul creates G.o.d from within, is connected with the divine and becomes divine itself," are highly significant. To the Vedantist the soul of man is an emanation from the world-soul: "Although G.o.d differs from the individual soul, the individual soul does not differ from G.o.d." At this point it is no longer an easy matter to distinguish the feeling of the Christian mystic from the feeling of the Brahmin; though their valuations of man, life and the world differ, nay, are even opposed to each other, they finally meet in G.o.d. We read in the Vedanta: "The force which created and maintains the universe, the eternal principle of all being, dwells entirely and undividedly in every one of us. Our self is identical with the supreme deity and only apparently differentiated from it. Whosoever has mastered this truth has become at one with all creation; whosoever has not mastered it, is a stranger and a foe to all creatures."

I do not intend to depreciate Indian wisdom; I merely desire to point out its inherent dissimilarity to Western thought; my task of laying hold of the spirit of Europe in its crises and watching its growth is bound to be advanced by this division.

The religious experience of Christ, based on the realisation of the divine nature of the soul, and the road of the soul to G.o.d, has established the fundamental Western principle. A world-system was built up which emanated from the innermost depth of the individual soul and, very consistently, related all existing things, heaven and earth, the creation and the destruction of the world, salvation and perdition, to the soul of man. This was achieved with the aid of a nave metaphysic, created by the Greek genius and externalised by the crude intellect of barbarians; this metaphysic drew its whole content from a unique revelation, and the essential was frequently hidden by dialectic and speculation. One may safely say that the first millenary strove, if not exactly to set aside the original principle of Christianity, yet to bind it by dogma in such a way that it often became completely obscured. A long training was necessary before the immature nations of barbarians were fit to become citizens of the spiritual world, before they could fully a.s.similate the new traditions and grasp their innermost meaning, which by this very fact became altered and modified. This process of education came to a temporary conclusion about the year 1100. At last the European nations had outgrown the guardianship of the Church with its antiquated methods; a new, a creative epoch was dawning; the civilisation of Europe, opposed to all barbarism and orientalism, rose like a brilliant star on the horizon of the world. Spontaneous feeling for the race, for nature and for the divine verities had again become possible.

I shall have to exceed the limits of my subject in this chapter, for I propose showing the seeds from which, in the time of the Crusades, the new soul of the European, throwing off the lethargy of the first Christian millenary, began to grow with extraordinary vigour and rapidity; that new soul which experienced a wider, if not deeper, unfolding in the period of the Renascence, and to this day pervades and fertilises our spiritual life. I might have been less digressive, but I hope that two reasons will justify my prolixity; the first is the great importance of the subject from the point of view of a history of civilisation, and the second and more particular one is its close inner relationship to my princ.i.p.al theme. For, in complete contrast with the s.e.xuality on which heretofore the relationship between husband and wife had been based, a new feeling, that of spiritual love, had come into existence and quickly reached its climax. Projected not only on the other s.e.x, but also on G.o.d and on nature, it permeated the age and explains its great and unprecedented manifestations: the spiritual love between man and woman (which deteriorated later on into the deification of woman), the new religion of the German mystics, the awakening appreciation of the beauty of nature, the sudden outburst of German poetry--no sooner born than it reached perfection--the specifically European Gothic architecture, so completely independent of the old art.

All these new creations had their origin in the strange craving of the period for something novel and romantic, something hitherto unknown.

This longing begot the ideal of chivalry and a wealth of half human, half preter-human conceptions, such as the Holy Sepulchre and the Holy Grail. And all at once, something unprecedented, something of which the race had as yet no experience, had come to pa.s.s: love, which had nothing in common with sensuality, which was even deliberately hostile to it, love which welled up in one soul and flowed into the other--presupposing personality--love was there! If, therefore, I have gone into detail, I hope that it has served to elucidate the princ.i.p.al theme of this part of my book, namely, the spiritual part of man for woman aspiring to the metaphysical, which is so alien to our modern feeling.

It is necessary to begin by sketching a background which shall set off the new phenomenon. The spiritual achievement of the first millenary was the construction of the Christian system of the universe the Church had complete knowledge of all things in heaven and earth--symbols merely of the eternal verities; her wisdom almost equalled divine wisdom, for the secrets of life and death had been revealed and surrendered to her; St.

Chrysostom's words uttered in the fourth century, "The Church is G.o.d,"

had become a fact. The profoundest wisdom, the greatest power, were hers; the loftiest ideal had been realised as it has never been realised before or since. As the wisdom of the Church had been a direct gift of G.o.d, so her power, too, had divine origin and reached beyond this earthly life. The Church alone held the key to eternal bliss, her curse meant everlasting d.a.m.nation. To be excommunicated was to be bereaved of temporal and eternal happiness. A man who had been excommunicated was worse off than a wild beast; he was surrendered to the devils in h.e.l.l, and he knew it. There was but one road to salvation: to do penance and humbly submit to the Church. This has been symbolised for all times by the memorable submission of the Roman-German emperor, who stood for three days, barefooted and fasting, in the snow in the courtyard of Canossa, before he was received back into the kingdom of G.o.d. The kingdom of G.o.d was synonymous with the Church; Jews and pagans were the natural children of the devil, but the dissenter, the heretic who dared to question a single proposition of the divine system, or was bold enough to think on original lines--in other words in contradiction to tradition--voluntarily turned his back on G.o.d, and with seeing eyes went into the kingdom of the devil. He was wholly evil, and no earthly punishment fitted his crime. The emperor Theodosius, as far back as A.D.

380, had called such heretics "insane and demented," and the burning of their bodies at the stake which prevented their souls from falling into the hands of the devil, was looked upon as a great and undeserved mercy.

But not only during their lifetime, but after their death, too, the hand of the Church fell heavily on all those who had strayed beyond her pale; their bodies were dragged from their graves and thrown into the carrion-pit. A man whom the Church had excommunicated was buried in the cemetery of a German convent. The Archbishop of Mayence ordered the exhumation of the body, threatening to interdict divine service in the convent if his command were disobeyed. But the abbess, Hildegarde of Bingen (1098-1179), a woman of great mental power and an inspired seer, opposed him. Having received a direct message from G.o.d, she wrote to the bishop as follows: "Conforming to my custom, I looked up to the true light, and G.o.d commanded me to withhold my consent to the exhumation of the body, because He Himself took the dead man from the pale of the Church, so that He might lead him to the beat.i.tude of the blessed.... It were better for me to fall into the hands of man than to disobey the command of my Lord." The saint had interpreted the will of G.o.d, and the archbishop, sanctioning a sudden rumour that the deceased had received absolution at the eleventh hour, yielded. But the bishop's yielding by no means countenanced the belief that G.o.d might, for once, tolerate the body of an excommunicate in sacred ground, far from it--the vision of the abbess Hildegarde had merely served to correct an error.

All those who dared to oppose the clergy by word or deed were doomed to everlasting perdition--this was a fact which it were futile to doubt; at the most, a man shrugged his shoulders at certain d.a.m.nation for the sake of mundane pleasures--a rich legacy in the hour of death might save him.

Not infrequently the fear of the devil was transformed into indifference, and sometimes even into demonolatry. A single unG.o.dly thought might involve eternal death, and as many a man, more particularly many a priest, realised his inability to live continuously in the presence of G.o.d, he surrendered his soul to the anti-G.o.d, not from a longing for the pleasures of the senses, but from despair. The worship of the devil, far from being an invention of fanatical monks, actually existed, and was often the last consolation of those who held themselves forsaken by G.o.d. The hierarchy did not hesitate a moment to make the utmost use or the power conferred upon them by the mental att.i.tude of the people. The government of kings and princes, in addition to the ecclesiastical government, could only be a transient, sinful condition; the time was bound to come when the pope would be king of the earth, and the great lords of the world his va.s.sals, appointed by him to keep the wicked world in check, and deposed by him if he found them incapable, worshippers of the devil, or disobedient to the Church. The whole world was a hierarchy whose apex reached heaven and bore, as the representative of its invisible summit, the pope. He stood, to quote Innocent III., "in the middle, between G.o.d and humanity." The same great pope has left us a doc.u.ment ent.i.tled _On the Contempt of the World_, which treats of the absolute futility of all things mundane. There is no reason to look upon the union of this unquenchable thirst for power and complete "other-worldiness" as a contradiction. The kingdom of G.o.d, Augustine's _Civitas Dei_, must of necessity be established that the destiny of the world may be fulfilled. Every pope must account to G.o.d for his share in the advancement of the only work which mattered, and the greater the power the ruler of this world had acquired over the souls of men, the more he trembled before G.o.d, weighed down by the burden of his enormous responsibility. "The renunciation of the world in the service of the world-ruling Church, the mastery of the world in the service of renunciation, this was the problem and ideal of the middle ages" (Harnack). But not only the pope, every priest, as a direct member of the kingdom of G.o.d, was superior to the secular rulers. This was taught emphatically by the great St. Bernard of Clairvaux, for instance, and Gregory VII., the wildest fanatic of the kingdom of G.o.d, said, in writing to a German bishop: "Who then who possesses even small knowledge and reasoning power, could hesitate to place the priests above the kings?" Even the emperor Constantine, though he was still largely under the sway of the imperial idea, distinctly acknowledged the bishops as his masters; according to the legend he handed to the Bishop of Rome the insignia of his power, sceptre, crown and cloak, and humbly held the bridle of the prelate's horse.

The theoretic backbone of this mental att.i.tude was the doctrine of the Fathers of the Church and the older scholasticism, p.r.o.nouncing the illimitable power of human perception; the world's profoundest depths had been fathomed, its riddle finally solved; there was consequently no room for philosophy, the endless meditation on the meaning of the world and the destiny of man. Science had but one task: to bring logical proof of the revealed religious verities. The greatest champion of this view was Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109), who in his treatise, _Cur Deus h.o.m.o_ proved that G.o.d was compelled to become man in order to complete the work of salvation. Abelard preached a similar doctrine, but carried away by the fervour of thought, arrived at conclusions which he was forced to recant ignominiously; for at the end of his chain of evidence he did not always find the foregone conclusion which should have been there. This system of a final and infallible knowledge of the world is the very foundation of ecclesiastical government. The priest alone has all knowledge, for he has the doctrine of salvation. Had it occurred to any man to defend his own opinions in contradiction to the system of the Church, that man would speedily have come to the conclusion that the devil had tempted him to false observations, or false deductions, and his submission to the Church would have been the outward sign of his victory over the evil which had blinded his spiritual vision. A man had to choose between the worship of G.o.d and the worship of the devil, there was no alternative. n.o.body knew the limits of human knowledge; everybody, the learned ecclesiastic as well as the unlearned, plain man, believed others to be in possession of the key to profound secrets and unlimited power. One thing only was needful: to possess one's self of the philosopher's stone; therefore the belief in witchcraft and the fear of certain men supposed to be endowed with supernatural power--the priests--were but the obvious results of a world-system, founded on a revealed and exact religion.

The Latin poets, whose study would probably have counteracted the universal barbarism, were regarded as dangerous, the G.o.ds of antiquity being identified with the demons of the Scriptures. This view was responsible for the loss of many a valuable ma.n.u.script. The favourite haunts of the demons were the convents, originally designed as battlefields on which the struggles with the demons were to be fought out, but frequently perishing in superst.i.tion and ignorance. Every monk had visions of devils; miracles occurred continually; the torturing problem was as to whether they were worked by G.o.d or the devil. Nature was merely a collection of mystic symbols, divine--or perhaps diabolical--allegories, whose meaning could be discovered by a correct interpretation of the Bible. Everything which could possibly happen was recorded in the Scriptures; they contained the true explanation of all things. It was only a matter of selecting the right word and interpreting it correctly, for every word was ambiguous and allegorical.

Every natural occurrence--an eclipse of the sun, a comet, or even a fire--stood for something else; it was the symbol of a spiritual event concealed behind a phenomenon. The allegorical interpretation of the Bible was carried to the point of abstruseness because every word was considered of necessity to have an unfathomably profound meaning. The following amazing interpretation is by the highly-gifted German poet and mystic, Suso: "Among the great number of Solomon's wives was a black woman whom the king loved above all others. Now what does the Holy Ghost mean by this? The charming black woman in whom G.o.d delights more than in any other, is a man patiently bearing the trials which G.o.d sends him."

Abelard's interpretation of the black woman is even worse; he maintained that though she was black outside, her bones, that is her character, were white. A really remarkable deed of bad taste was committed by the monk, Matfre Ermengau, the author of the _Breviari d'Amor_, at a time when civilisation had already made considerable strides. He sent his sister a Christmas present, consisting of a honey-cake, mead, and a roast capon, accompanied by the following letter: "The mead is the blood of Christ, the honey-cake and the capon are His body, which for our salvation was baked and pierced at the Cross. The Holy Ghost baked the cake in the Virgin's womb, in which the sugar of His divinity amalgamated with the dough of our humanity. In the Virgin's womb the Holy Ghost also spiced the mead and prepared it from wine; the spice is divine virtue, the wine is human blood. In addition He caused the holy capon to issue from the egg; the yolk of the egg is the deity, the white is humanity, the sh.e.l.l is the womb of the Virgin Mary ...," etc.

The religion of Christ was lost, man had become a stranger to his own soul--celestial warnings, signs of the Judgment Day, daemonic temptations, surrounded him, as far as he paid heed to anything super-sensuous on all sides. The French chronicler, Radulf Glaber (about A.D. 1000), might have been writing a satire on antiquity when he warned his contemporaries of the demons lurking everywhere, but more especially dwelling in trees and fountains. Of a learned man who was studying the cla.s.sic poets, he said: "This man, confused by the magic of evil spirits, had the impudence to propound doctrines contradictory to our holy faith. In his opinion everything the ancient poets had maintained was true. Peter, the bishop of the town, condemned him as a heretic. At that time there were many men in Italy believing this false doctrine; they perished by the sword or at the stake." We have a letter, written at the same time by Gerbert, who later on became Pope Sylvester II., to a friend, beseeching him to obtain for him ma.n.u.scripts of the Latin philosophers and poets. He wrote textbooks of astronomy, geometry and medicine, and introduced the Arabic numbers and the decimal system into Europe. In consequence he, too, was accused of magic and intercourse with Arabian pagans. A chronicler relates that he sold his soul to the devil and became pope through the devil's agency; and that, when he was on the point of death, he ordered his body to be cut to pieces so that the devil should not carry it away.

To-day we find it difficult to realise such a state of mind. Every man of our period who takes the smallest interest in things spiritual--be he the most orthodox ecclesiastic--at least knows that there are capable people in the world whose opinions differ from his, who seek fresh knowledge; he knows it, even though he may pretend that they are people who have gone astray and have been abandoned by G.o.d. No one can be entirely blind to the new values created by human intellect. But the men of the Middle Ages were swayed by a monstrous dualism, and despite their belief in the illimitable power of human cognition, they unquestioningly accepted the sacred tradition and rejected the nave evidence of the senses and intellect whenever it seemed to contradict the dogma. Thus mediaeval science did not represent what it represented in antiquity, and what it represents now, the study of the true relationship of things, but rather the application of truths revealed once and for all.

There was nothing more to be discovered, and therefore scientists took a delight in logical and dialectical speculations which to a man of our day seem senseless and childish. Far into the Renascence, natural history was a medley of ancient traditions, oriental fables and superficial observations. The strangest qualities were attributed to animals with which we come almost daily into contact. The following quotations are culled from a Provencal book on zoology: "The cricket is so pleased with its song that it forgets to feed and dies singing."

"When a snake catches sight of a nude man, it is so filled with fear that it does not dare to look at him; but if the man is dressed, the snake looks upon him as a weakling and springs upon him." "The adder guards the balsam; if a man desires to steal the balsam, he must first send the adder to sleep by playing on a musical instrument. But if the adder discovers that it is being duped, it closes one of its ears with its tail and rubs the other one against the ground until it is filled with earth; then it cannot hear the music and remains awake." "Of all animals there is none so dangerous as the unicorn; it attacks everybody with the horn which grows on the top of its head. But it takes such delight in virgins that the hunters place a maiden on its trail. As soon as the unicorn sees the maiden, it lays its head into her lap and falls asleep, when it may easily be caught." Of the magnet we learn among other things that it restores peace between husband and wife, softens the heart of all men and cures dropsy. "If a magnet is made into a powder and burnt on charcoal in the four corners of the house, the inhabitants imagine that they cannot keep on their legs and run away, sorely affrighted; thieves frequently profit by this fact. If a magnet is placed under the pillow of a sleeping woman, she is compelled, if she is virtuous, to embrace her husband in her sleep; if she has betrayed him, she will fall out of her bed with fear."

All this information was the common property of the period; Richard of Berbezilh, for instance, an "aesthetic" troubadour, tells us that--like a still-born lion's cub which was only brought to life by the roaring of its dam--he was awakened to life by his mistress. (He does not say whether it was by her roaring.) Conrad of Wurzburg compares the Holy Virgin to a lioness who brings her dead cubs, _i.e._, mankind, to life with loud roaring. Bartolome Zorgi, another troubadour of the same period, likens his lady to a snake, for--he explains--"she flees from the nude poet and her courage only returns with his clothes." During the whole mediaeval period the unicorn was a well-known symbol of virginity, more especially of the virginity of Mary. The _Golden Smithy_ of the German minnesinger, afterwards monk Conrad of Wurzburg, contains a rather abstruse poem which begins:

The hunt began; The heavenly unicorn Was chased into the thicket Of this alien world, And sought, imperial maid, Within thine arms a sanctuary.... etc.

Natural history was in a parlous state, and geographical knowledge was equally spurious. The Church was averse to natural research, for the only problem in the world was the salvation of man from everlasting d.a.m.nation. Not only Tertullian, but several Fathers of the Church, regarded physical research as superfluous and absurd, and even as G.o.dless. "What happiness shall be mine if I know where the Nile has its source, or what the physicists fable of heaven?" asked Lactantius. And, "Should we not be regarded as insane if we pretended to have knowledge of matters of which we can know nothing? How much more, then, are they to be regarded as raving madmen who imagine that they know the secrets of nature, which will never be revealed to human inquisitiveness?" Here one is reminded of a remark made in "Phaedros" by _the wisest of all Greeks_, who refused to leave town because "what could Socrates learn from trees and gra.s.s?" And Julius Caesar wrote an account of his wars to while away the time when he was crossing the Alps.

Very likely the system of the Church would have been less rigid had it not largely been occupied in dealing with ignorant barbarians. In the case of Celts and Teutons, a complete and una.s.sailable form of dogmatics with its corollary of hieratical intolerance was the only possible system. The traditions of these peoples were far too foreign to Christianity to allow Christian germs to flourish in their soil. And the new nations, accepting what Rome offered to them, were completely unproductive in their adolescence. The achievement of this fatal first millenary might be formulated as follows: "The civilised world of Western Europe was united under the government of the Church of Rome; on all nations it had been impressed in the same combination of words and similes that they were living in a sinful world; they knew when this world had been created and when its Saviour had appeared; they knew that its end would come together with the bodily resurrection of the dead and the terrible day of the Last Judgment; they knew that demons were lurking everywhere, seeking to destroy man's soul, and that the Church alone could save him. All these facts were as unalterable as the return of the seasons."

The fundamental sources of antiquity had been sensuality and asceticism, the elements of the Middle Ages abstract thought and historical faith; now emotion was to become the princ.i.p.al factor. It welled up in the soul and soon dominated all life. The fountain which had been dried up since the dawn of the Christian era, began to flow again in a small country in the south of France. The civilising centre had again shifted westwards, as in the past it had shifted from Asia to Greece, and from Greece to Rome. In the course of the first thousand years Greece and Asia Minor had separated themselves from Europe, and founded a distinct culture, the Byzantine, which exerted no influence on the development of Europe.

But not even Italy, the scene of the older civilisation, was destined to give birth to the new; maybe the memory of the antique, ante-Christian, period was too powerful here. Its cradle stood on virgin ground, in Provence, a country wrested from Celts and Teutons by the Roman eagles, ploughed by the Roman spirit, preserving in some of its coast towns, notably in Marsilia, the rich remains of Greek settlements, something of Moorish influence in race and language, and fusing all these heterogeneous elements into a splendid whole. But why this important spiritual centre should have been formed just here it is difficult to say.

For the first time the system of ecclesiastical values was confronted by something novel, which was not--like the old Teutonic ideal of the perfect warrior--tainted by barbarism, but may be described as the system of mundane court values. This new ideal was not founded on an authority which had to be accepted in good faith; it had its direct origin in the pa.s.sionate yearning of the human soul. Man had re-discovered himself and become conscious of his personal creative force. A very great thing had been accomplished; the seed which, slowly gathering strength, had lain in the soil for a thousand years, had at last burst its husk, and was rapidly growing into the magnificent tree of the European civilisation. In silent opposition to the system of the accepted ecclesiastical values, the new ideal of _pretz e valor e beutatz_ (worth and value and beauty), of _cavalaria_ and _cortezia_ (chivalry and courtesy), was upheld in Provence. Four worldly virtues, wisdom, courtly manners, honesty and self-restraint, were contrasted with the ecclesiastical cardinal virtues. The courts of the princes became centres of new life and art. The new spiritual-aesthetic concept of feasting and enjoyment transformed the former orgies of eating and drinking. Woman, who had heretofore been excluded from male society, was all at once transferred to the very centre of being; for her sake men controlled their brutal tempers and exerted themselves to please by good manners, taste and art. She, whom the Church had done everything to depreciate, who had been denied a soul at the Council of Macon (in the sixth century), had become the very vessel of the soul; man looked up to her and bent his knee before the newly-created G.o.ddess.

The cultivation of the new courtly manner coincided with the nascent art of the troubadours. There was no gradual growth and development in the latter; at the very outset it had reached perfection. The first troubadour whose name has come down to us was Guillem of Poitiers, Duke of Aquitania (about 1100); great lords and barons gloried in the exercise of this new art. Every court boasted its poets, hospitably received and loaded with presents; the great ones of the earth were beginning to exercise that patronage of art and letters which in the Renascence reached such extravagant proportions. Every distinguished poet employed salaried musicians, the joglars (jongleurs), who wandered from court to court, singing their masters' new songs. Others again, the comtaires, related romances of love and adventure, gathering round them a rapt throng of lords and ladies. Courtly manners and lofty principles quickly became the recognised ideal; the man who was satisfied with the pleasures of the senses was held in contempt; the greatest reproach was "vilania"; in the "Yvain" of the French epic poet Chrestien de Troyes, this universal feeling is thus expressed:

A courtier counts though he be dead, More than a rustic stout and red.

Dante and his circle, as well as the best of the troubadours, subst.i.tuted for the "cortois" of the superficial Chrestien the "cor gentil," the n.o.ble heart, which they accounted more precious than rank and wealth and power. "Wherever there is virtue there is n.o.bility," says Dante, "but where there is n.o.bility there need not necessarily be virtue." A time had come when personal distinction was in every man's grasp, no matter whether he was learned or unlearned, a n.o.bleman or a commoner. Certainly the commoner was never on an equality with the aristocrat, partly because he was dependent on the largess of the great.

Even Dante was compelled to seek princely patronage, and not until the Renascence do we hear of writers whose sarcastic tongues were so dreaded that they became independent of charity.

In opposition to the monkish ideal of a contemplative life which had hitherto obtained, a new ideal, the ideal of the courtier's life, was upheld; ecclesiastical saintliness was contrasted with knightly honour.

Beauty, which at the dawn of the Christian era had fallen into ill repute and had become a.s.sociated with unholy, and even diabolical, practices, had again come into its kingdom. Above everything it was the beauty of woman which was re-discovered--or rather, in its new, spiritual sense, newly discovered--and claimed the enthusiasm and love of the best men of the period. After a thousand years of gloom and brutality, joy and culture shed their radiance on a renewed world. The ideal of chivalry bore very little resemblance to the old Teutonic ideal of the hero; the older ideal had been based entirely on the appreciation of physical strength; but chivalry was the disseminator of culture, leaving ecclesiastical culture, which hitherto had been synonymous with civilisation, a very long way behind. "Mezura," "masze" (the [Greek: mphstoes] of the Platonic Greeks) was the new criterion, as compared with the barbarian's want of restraint.

I do not propose to give a description of the life at the courts of Provence. The news of it travelled north, and everywhere roused a desire to imitate it. The need of a renewed life was powerfully stirring all hearts. Men yearned for beauty and spontaneity, for pa.s.sionate life, unprecedented and romantic. This was especially the case in the north, in France and in Germany, and above all in Wales, the country of the imaginative and highly-gifted Celts. Here life was harder, poorer, more barbaric; the cultured mind suffered more from its brutal surroundings than it did in the favoured south. It was here that the great legends of the Middle Ages, so clearly expressive of the yearning of the period, were first collected. The early Middle Ages had produced epic poems, treating scriptural subjects (such as the Harmony of the Gospels of the monk Otfrit, written in the ninth century), and celebrating the exploits of popular heroes, as, for instance, the German Song of Hildebrand, and the French "Chansons de Geste," which contain episodes from the lives of Charlemagne and his nephew Roland. The true epic, arising from the rich and poetical Celtic tradition, came into existence in the eleventh century in the North of France and immediately burst into extraordinary luxuriance. The legends of the heroes of the dreamy Celtic race--King Arthur and his knights, Merlin the magician, the knights of the Holy Grail--travelling across France, became the common property of the civilised European nations, and filled all hearts with longing and fantastic dreams. Chrestien de Troyes, in his romances, extolled knightly exploits and the service of woman, thus producing by the combination of the older and the newer ideals the novel of adventure which has fascinated the world for centuries. It is a mistake to believe that Don Quixote has struck at the root of it; to this day the ma.s.ses wax enthusiastic in reading of the doughty deeds of knights, the beauty of ladies and their unswerving, undying love.

In addition to the great and heroic subjects, there were lesser, more intimate, and frequently sentimental, romances, especially enjoyed and widely circulated by the ladies. The baron, riding forth, left his young wife at home, shut up in her bower and surrounded by spies; sometimes even physically branded as his property. A prisoner behind bars, her imagination went out--not to the unloved husband who had married her for the sake of her broad acres, and could send her back to her parents as soon as he found a wealthier bride (he had but to maintain that she was related to him in the fifth degree and the Church was ready to annul the marriage), not to him, her lord and master, but to the unknown knight, the pa.s.sionate lover, who would gladly give his life to win her. A jongleur arrived with stories of the courts where love was the only ruler; where the knights willingly suffered grief and want, if by so doing they could serve their lady; where the lover, in the shape of a beautiful blue bird, nightly slipped through the barred windows into the arms of his mistress. But the jealous husband had drawn barbed wire across the window, and the lover, flying away at dawn, bled to death before the eyes of his grief-stricken lady. The jongleur would tell of the knight who had fallen pa.s.sionately in love with a beautiful damsel of whom he had but caught a pa.s.sing glimpse; month after month he worked at digging an underground pa.s.sage; every night brought him a little nearer to her bower--she could distinctly hear the dull sounds of his burrowing--until at last he rose through the ground and took her into his arms. These and similar tales, doubtless all of them of Celtic origin--preserved for us in the charming "Lais" of Marie de France--brought tears to the eyes of many a lonely wife and gave shape to her vague longing. There was no reason why a man, and a lover to boot, should not transform himself nightly into a blue bird. Those simple stories in verse fulfilled every desire of the heart; imagination supplied in the north what the south offered in abundant reality. But Marie de France, the first woman novelist of Europe (about the end of the twelfth century), deserves to be remembered for another reason; she was the first poet voicing woman's longing for love and romance--woman's adventure. The charming _Lai du Chevrefoile_ ("The Story of the Honeysuckle") relates an episode from the loves of Tristan and Isolde, the famous lovers, legendary even at that time. Tristan and Isolde, Lancelot and Guinevere, Fleur and Blanchefleur--these were the admired and mythical lovers of whom the poets sang and dreamed. All the world knew their adventures; all the world repeated them again and again, reverently preserving the identical words and yet unconsciously remoulding them. At the recital of their loves, hand clasped hand; "on that day we read no more," confessed Dante's ill-fated lovers.

The longing, so characteristic of the North of Europe, to see the world and meet with adventures, was in Provence and Italy less p.r.o.nounced.

These favoured climes possessed so many of the things dreamed of and desired by other countries. Events, strange as fiction, actually occurred. Count Raimond of Roussillon, for instance, imprisoned his wife in a tower because the troubadour, Guillem of Cabestann, was in love with and beloved by her. He waylaid the lover, killed him, cut his heart out of his breast and sent it, roasted, to his countess. When she had partaken of it, he showed her Guillem's head and asked her how she had enjoyed the dish. "So much that no other food shall ever pa.s.s my lips,"

she replied, casting herself out of the window. When the story spread abroad, the great n.o.bles rose up in arms against Raimond, and even the King of Aragon made war on him. He was caught and imprisoned for life, and his estates were confiscated. Guillem and the countess were buried in the church, and for a long time after men and women travelled long distances to kneel at their grave. The charming poems of Melusine and the beautiful Magelone, which to this day delight the reader, were composed during the same period.

Before the eleventh century poetry in the true sense of the word did not exist. There were only Latin Church hymns and legends, perverted reminiscences of antiquity, and, in the vulgar tongue, legends of the saints and simple dancing-songs for the amus.e.m.e.nt of the lower cla.s.ses.

Thanks to the relentless war which the clergy waged against them, a few only have been preserved. There can be no doubt that Provence was the birthplace of European poetry. The "sweet language" of Provence was the first to reach perfection and perfect maturity. It drove the language of the German conquerors eastwards and prepared the ground for the French tongue.

The beginning of the twelfth century saw the birth of the poetry of the troubadours, which possessed from the first in great perfection everything that distinguishes modern lyric poetry from the antique.

Instead of the syllable-measuring quant.i.ty, we now have the emphasising accent; the rhyme, one of the most important lyrical contrivances--and in its near approach to music the most striking characteristic of modern lyrical poetry as compared with the antique--reaches perfection together with the complete, evenly-recurring verse which is still to-day peculiar to lyrical art. The poems of many of the troubadours pulsate with pa.s.sionate life, and bear no trace of the traditional or the conventional. The martial songs of Bertrand de Born stride along with a rhythm reminiscent of the clanking of iron. I quote the first verse of one of these:

Le coms m'a mandat e mogut Per N'Arramon Luc d'Esparro, Qu'eu fa.s.sa per lui tal chanso, On sian trenchat mil escut, Elm e ausberc e alcoto E perponh faussat e romput.

The count he sent to me one day Sir Arramon Luc d'Esparro; A song I was to make him--so That thousand shields with ring and stay And mail and armour of the foe To fragments shivered in dismay.

The poetry of the Provencal troubadours had already pa.s.sed its prime when, in the other European countries, lyric art was still in its infancy. The crusade against the Albigenses (1209), undertaken by Gregory VII. with the object of killing the new spirit and the new secular civilisation, drove many troubadours to Italy, among others the famous Sordello, who is mentioned in Dante's _Divine Comedy_. Others went to Sicily, to the court of the art-loving Emperor, Frederick II., where a distinct, but not very original, poetic art arose. In Italy the perfection of mediaeval poetry was reached in the "sweet, new style"

immortalised by Dante. But not only the great Italians, the trouveres from the North of France also, and--to some extent--the German minnesingers, were influenced by the art, and above all, the ideals which had originated in Provence. The poetry of the earliest Rhenish and Austrian minnesingers closely follows German folklore, and the songs of Dietmar of Aist and others are still quite innocent of any trace of neo-Latin characteristics. But very soon the technical perfection of the Provencal poetry and the Provencal ideal of courtesy and love, famous all over Europe, strongly influenced the German mind.

The new poetry and the ideal of chivalry and the service of woman were the first independent developments able to hold their own by the side of ecclesiastical culture. The rigid Latin was superseded; the soul of man sang in its own language of the return of spring, the beauty of woman, knighthood and adventure. Poetry became the most important source of secular education, and as each nation sang in its own tongue, national characteristics shone out through the individuality of the singer.

Provencals, Frenchmen, Germans and Italians realised that they belonged to different races. This was particularly the case during the Crusades when, under the auspices of the Church, the nations of Europe had apparently undertaken a common task.

In Provence, in France and Germany, every poem was set to music, and thus, simultaneously with the lyrical art, secular music was evolved.

J.B. Beck, the greatest authority on the music of the troubadours,--the music of the minnesingers has been studied very little,--says, "The poetry of the troubadours and trouveres represents in its totality a collection of songs which in their frequently amazing navete and melodiousness, their spontaneity and sound music, intimate congruity of melody and text and extraordinary originality, have been unparalleled to this day." All these songs are distinguished by graceful simplicity; but the ear of the non-musician can hardly perceive the originality on which Beck lays such stress. In any case, the music is inferior to the frequently perfect text. This same period saw the inception of our present system of musical notation.

The new poetry created a desire for "literature," thus giving impetus to the already existent art of illuminated ma.n.u.scripts. Every prince kept a salaried army of copyists and illuminators, producing the ma.n.u.scripts to-day preserved and studied in our museums. Studios where this work was carried on existed at various art centres, especially--as far as we are able to tell to-day--at the papal courts at Avignon--that meeting-ground of French and Italian artists--in Paris and at Rheims. These workshops were the birthplace of miniature painting, which reached perfection in the famous Burgundian "Livres d'Heures."

To-day the science of aesthetics is attempting to trace the influence which emanated from the French and even from the earlier English workshops, and spread over the whole continent. It is very probable that the French art of miniature painting of the first half of the thirteenth century was mother of the later North-European art of painting. It was in Northern Europe that, independently of h.e.l.lenic and Byzantine influence, a new art originated, of which Max Dvorak says: "It would hardly be possible to find an external cause for the quick and complete disappearance of the elements of the Neo-Latin art. The past was simply done with, and an absolutely new period was beginning. Thus the new art was almost without any tradition." Dvorak calls this complete change the most important in the history of painting since antiquity. George, Count Vitzthum, has proved that the famous Cologne school of painting modelled itself on Northern-French, Belgian, and a quite independent English school of illuminators. It is even suggested that the English style of miniature painting influenced Europe as far as the Upper Rhine. It is also very significant that the Dutch art of the brothers van Eyck, whose sudden appearance seemed so inexplicable, is now proved to have had its source in the North of France. On the other hand, we have drawings of three ecstatic nuns showing decided originality; Hildegarde of Bingen, already mentioned on a previous occasion, has herself ornamented her book, _Scivias_, with miniatures which, according to Haseloff, in spite of their primitive style, reveal a bizarre plastic talent, and are therefore closely related to her intuitions. Alfred Peltzer speaks of "fantastic figures surrounded by flames." The two other nuns were Elizabeth of Schonau, and Herrad of Landsberg; these two were entirely under the influence of the dawning mysticism.

I will here quote a few more pa.s.sages from Dvorak, who, in dealing with the individual arts, does not lose sight of the whole. "Simultaneously with a new literature," he says, "we have a new art of ill.u.s.tration, new miniatures, no longer drawing inspiration from antiquity.... We meet the new style in its full perfection wherever it is a matter of a new technique (in the art of staining gla.s.s, for instance, or of ill.u.s.trating profane literature)...." He speaks of a new decoration of ma.n.u.scripts invented in Paris in the first half of the thirteenth century. Thus the close and causal connection between the new poetry and the illumination of books is clearly apparent, and it may be said without exaggeration that the Provencal lyric poetry and the North-French and Celtic cycles of romance led up to the new European style of painting which did not come to perfection until two centuries later. (Nothing positive can be said about the influence of France on Italian art; the monumental character and the art of Cimabue, Giotto and the Sienese does not, however, suggest that they were much influenced by the art of miniature painting, but rather hints that they drew inspiration from antique frescoes.)

I must add a few words on the subject of those miniatures which are not easily accessible to the layman, but reproductions of which are frequently met with in books on the history of art. In addition to religious subjects, the whole courtly company which lives and breathes in the legends of the Round Table, kings and knights, poets, minstrels, and fair damsels, hawking, jousting, banqueting and playing chess, everything which stirred the poet's imagination, is depicted. The spirit of the romances which in modern times enchanted the English Pre-Raphaelites, six centuries ago provided food and stimulus to the industrious illuminators whose names have long been forgotten.

If the art of miniature painting never rose--excepting in its wider consequences--to universal significance, mediaeval architecture stands before our eyes magnificent as on the first day. Until the middle of the twelfth century the monumental structures of Europe were directly influenced by the later h.e.l.lenic civilisation. The Byzantine basilica was slowly transformed into the Neo-Latin house, and thus, in this important domain also, Europe drew her inspirations from antiquity. But only the ground-plan of the Gothic cathedral, that is to say, the idea of a nave with side-aisles, was traditional and borrowed from Neo-Latin models. From this invisible ground-plan rose something absolutely original and autochthonic. This new, specifically Central-European style of architecture was developed on soil where there were no antique buildings to stem the new life with their overwhelming domination, and to bar the way of artistic inspiration with their ominous "I am perfection!" In every branch of art antiquity had proved itself a foe, until at last the Renascence was sufficiently mature to a.s.similate and overcome the antique inheritance so completely that it became an excellent fertiliser for the new art. The essence of the Gothic style is the dissolution of all that is heavy and material--the victory of spirit over matter. Walls were broken up into pillars and soaring arcades; monotonous facework was tolerated less and less, and every available inch was moulded into a living semblance. The result may be studied in the incomparable facades of many of the cathedrals in the North of France; and in tower-pieces almost vibrating with life and pa.s.sion such as that of St. Stephen's in Vienna. The conflict between matter and pure form is settled--for the first and only time--in Gothic architecture.