ht 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
gratitude 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 noble, good and wise. I will select a few illustrations
from a wealth of instances:

Miraval:

Noble 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 noble-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 ignoble 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."

asserts 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 passage (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 classical formulation of the new doctrine, to wit, that spiritual
love is the begetter of all virtue and the mother of chastity, outside
which there is nothing di