e, danger, which even in the days of Courts of Love
attach to illicit amours; above all, being for this man neither the
housewife nor the mother, she remains essentially and continually the
mistress, the beloved. Similarly the relations between the knight and
the lady, untroubled by domestic worries, pecuniary difficulties, and
squabbles about children, remain, exist merely as love relations,
relations of people whose highest and sole desire is to please one
another. Moreover, and this is an important consideration, the lady, who
is a mere inexperienced, immature girl when she first meets her husband,
is a mature woman, with character and passions developed by the
independence of conjugal and social life. When she meets her lover,
whatever power or dignity of character she may possess is ripe; whatever
intensity of aspiration and passion may be latent is ready to come
forth; for the first time there is equality in love. Equality? Ah, no.
This woman who is the wife of his feudal superior, this woman surrounded
by all the state of feudal sovereignty, this woman who, however young,
has already known so much of life, this woman whose love is a free, gift
of grace to the obscure, trembling vassal who has a right not even to be
noticed; this lady of mediaeval love must always remain immeasurably
above her lover. And, in the long day-dreams while watching her, as he
thinks unseen, while singing of her, as he thinks unheard, there cluster
round her figure, mistily seen in his fancy, those vague and-mystic
splendours which surround the new sovereign of the Middle Ages, the
Queen of Heaven; there mingles in the half-terrified raptures of the
first kind glance, the first encouraging word, the ineffable passion
stored up in the Christian's heart for the immortal beings who, in the
days of Bernard and Francis, descend cloud-like on earth and fill the
cells of the saints with unendurable glory.

And thus, out of the baseness of habitual adultery, arises incense-like,
in the early mediaeval poetry, a new kind of love--subtler, more
imaginative, more passionate, a love of the fancy and the heart, a love
stimulating to the perfection of the individual as is any religion;
nay, a religion, and one appealing more completely to the complete man,
flesh and soul, than even the mystical beliefs of the Middle Ages. And
as, in the fantastic song of Ritter Tannhaeuser, whose liege lady, so
legend tells, was Dame Venus herself, the lady bids the kn