bud and birds sing in the heart of man. Out of it, through
simple creatures like Bruder Wernher, through the simplicity of scores
of obscurer singers and craftsmen than he, of hundreds of nameless good
men and women, comes one large half of the art of Dante and Giotto, nay,
of Raphael and Shakespeare: the tenderness of the modern world, unknown
to stoical Antiquity.

II

The early Middle Ages--the times before Love came, and with it the
gradual dignifying of all realities which had been left so long to mere
gross or cunning or violent men--the early Middle Ages have left behind
them one of the most complete and wonderful of human documents, the
letters of Abelard and Heloise. This is a book which each of us should
read, in order to learn, with terror and self-gratulation, how the
aridity of the world's soul may neutralise the greatest individual
powers for happiness and good. These letters are as chains which we
should keep in our dwelling-place, to remind us of past servitude,
perhaps to warn us against future.

No other two individuals could have been found to illustrate, by the
force of contrast, the intellectual and moral aridity of that eleventh
century, which yet, in a degree, was itself a beginning of better things.
For Heloise and Abelard were not merely among the finest intellects
of the Middle Ages; they were both, in different ways, to the highest
degree passionately innovating natures. No woman has ever been more rich
and bold and warm of mind and heart than Heloise; nor has any woman ever
questioned the unquestioned ideas and institutions of her age, of any
age, with such vehemence and certainty of intuition. She judges questions
which are barely asked and judged of now-a-days, applying to consecrated
sentimentality the long-lost instinctive human rationalism of the ancient
philosophers. How could St. Luke recommend us to desist from getting
back our stolen property? She feels, however obscurely, that this is
foolish, antisocial, unnatural. Nay, why should God prefer the penitence
of one sinner to the constant goodness of ninety-nine righteous men? She
is, this learned theologian of the eleventh century, as passionately
human in thought as any Mme. Roland or Mary Wolstonecraft of a hundred
years ago.

Abelard, on the other hand, we know to have been one of the most subtle
and solvent thinkers of the Middle Ages; pursued by the greatest
theologians, crushed by two Councils, and remaining, in the popul