which seems to us so obvious, and of which
every day furnishes us an example in the relations of the modern suitor
and his hoped-for wife, could not, at a time when women were married by
family arrangement, arise except as a result of illegitimate love.
Horrible as it seems, the more we examine into this subject of mediaeval
love, the more shall we see that our whole code of Grandisonian chivalry
between lovers who intend marriage is derived from the practice of the
Launcelots and Gueneveres, not from that of the married people (we may
remember the manner in which Gunther woos his wife Brunhilt in the
Nibelungenlied) of former ages; nay, the more we shall have to recognize
that the very feeling which constitutes the virtuous love of modern
poets is derived from the illegitimate loves of the Middle Ages.

Let us examine what are the habits of feeling and thinking which grow
out of this reciprocal fidelity due to the absence of all one-sided
legal pressure in this illegitimate, but socially legitimated, love of
the early Middle Ages; which are added on to it by the very necessities
of illicit connection. The lover, having no right to the favours of his
mistress, is obliged, in order to win and to keep them, to please her by
humility, fidelity, and such knightly qualities as are the ideal plumage
of a man: he must bring home to her, by showing the world her colours
victorious in serious warfare, in the scarcely less dangerous play of
tournaments, and by making her beauty and virtues more illustrious in
his song than are those of other women in the songs of their lovers--he
must bring home to her that she has a more worthy servant than her
rivals; he must determine her to select him and to adhere to her
selection. Now mediaeval husbands select their wives, instead of being
selected; and once the woman and the dowry are in their hands, trouble
themselves but little whether they are approved of or not. On the other
hand, the mistress appears to her lover invested with imaginative, ideal
advantages such as cannot surround her in the eyes of her husband: she
is, in nearly every case, his superior in station and the desired of
many beholders; she is bound to him by no tie which may grow prosaic and
wearisome; she appears to him in no domestic capacity, can never descend
to be the female drudge; her possession is prevented from growing stale,
her personality from becoming commonplace, by the difficulty, rareness,
mystery, adventur