, but inevitable;
the myth becomes an historical phenomenon of the most obvious and
necessary sort. Mediaeval love, which had seemed to us a poetic fiction,
is turned into a reality; and a reality, alas, which is prosaic. Let us
look at it.

Mediaeval love is first revealed in the sudden and almost simultaneous
burst of song which, like the twitter and trill so dear to trouveres,
troubadours, and minnesingers, fills the woods that yesterday were
silent and dead, and greeted the earliest sunshine, the earliest faint
green after the long winter numbness of the dark ages, after the
boisterous gales of the earliest Crusade. The French and Provencals
sang first, the Germans later, the Sicilians last; but although we may
say after deliberate analysis, such or such a form, or such or such a
story, was known in this country before it appeared in that one, such
imitation or suggestion was so rapid that with regard to the French, the
Provencals, and the Germans at least, the impression is simultaneous;
only the Sicilians beginning distinctly later, forerunners of the new
love lyric, wholly different from that of trouveres, troubadours, and
minnesingers, of the Italians of the latter thirteenth century. And this
simultaneous revelation of mediaeval love takes place in the last quarter
of the twelfth century, when Northern France had already consolidated
into a powerful monarchy, and Paris, after the teachings of Abelard, was
recognized as the intellectual metropolis of Europe; when south of the
Loire the brilliant Angevine kings held the overlordship of the cultured
Raymonds of Toulouse and of the reviving Latin municipalities of
Provence \ when Germany was welded as a compact feudal mass by the most
powerful of the Stauffens; and the papacy had been built up by Gregory
and Alexander into a political wall against which Frederick and Henry
vainly battered; when the Italian commonwealths grew slowly but surely,
as yet still far from guessing that the day would come when their
democracy should produce a new civilization to supersede this triumphant
mediaeval civilization of the early Capetiens, the Angevines, and the
Hohenstauffens. Europe was setting forth once more for the East; but no
longer as the ignorant and enthusiastic hordes of Peter the Hermit: Asia
was the great field for adventure, the great teacher of new luxuries, at
once the Eldorado and the grand tour of all the brilliant and
inquisitive and unscrupulous chivalry of t