this medievalism was superficial, or at least external.
Adventure, romance in the frankest sense, grotesque individualism--that
is one element in medieval poetry, and with it alone Scott and
Goethe dealt. Beyond them were the two other elements of the
medieval spirit: its mystic religion at its apex in Dante and Saint
Louis, and its mystic passion, passing here and there into the great
romantic loves of rebellious flesh, of Lancelot and Abelard. That
stricter, imaginative medievalism which re-creates the mind of the
Middle Age, so that the form, the presentment grows outward [215]
from within, came later with Victor Hugo in France, with Heine in
Germany.

In the Defence of Guenevere: and Other Poems, published by Mr.
William Morris now many years ago, the first typical specimen of
aesthetic poetry, we have a refinement upon this later, profounder
medievalism. The poem which gives its name to the volume is a thing
tormented and awry with passion, like the body of Guenevere defending
herself from the charge of adultery, and the accent falls in strange,
unwonted places with the effect of a great cry. In truth these
Arthurian legends, in their origin prior to Christianity, yield all
their sweetness only in a Christian atmosphere. What is
characteristic in them is the strange suggestion of a deliberate
choice between Christ and a rival lover. That religion, monastic
religion at any rate, has its sensuous side, a dangerously sensuous
side, has been often seen: it is the experience of Rousseau as well
as of the Christian mystics. The Christianity of the Middle Age made
way among a people whose loss was in the life of the senses partly by
its aesthetic beauty, a thing so profoundly felt by the Latin
hymn-writers, who for one moral or spiritual sentiment have a hundred
sensuous images. And so in those imaginative loves, in their highest
expression, the Provencal poetry, it is a rival religion with a [216]
new rival cultus that we see. Coloured through and through with
Christian sentiment, they are rebels against it. The rejection of
one worship for another is never lost sight of. The jealousy of that
other lover, for whom these words and images and refined ways of
sentiment were first devised, is the secret here of a borrowed,
perhaps factitious colour and heat. It is the mood of the cloister
taking a new direction, and winning so a later space of life it never
anticipated.

Hereon, as before in the cloister, so