, and we have to recognize that, notwithstanding its questionable
shape, it was really an effort to attain a purer and more ideal
relationship than was possible in a rough and warlike age which placed
the wife in subordination to her husband. A tender devotion that
inspired poetry, an unalloyed respect that approached reverence, vows
that were based on equal freedom and independence on both sides--these
were possibilities which the men and women of that age felt to be
incompatible with marriage as they knew it.

The second form of medieval romantic love was more ethereal than the
first, and much more definitely and consciously based on a religious
attitude. It was really the worship of the Virgin transferred to a
young earthly maiden, yet retaining the purity and ideality of
religious worship. To so high a degree is this the case that it is
sometimes difficult to be sure whether we are concerned with a real
maiden of flesh and blood or only a poetic symbol of womanhood. This
doubt has been raised, notably by Bartoli, concerning Dante's Beatrice,
the supreme type of this ethereal love, which arose in the thirteenth
century, and was chiefly cultivated in Florence. The poets of this
movement were themselves aware of the religious character of their
devotion to the _donna angelicata_ to whom they even apply, as they
would to the Queen of Heaven, the appellation Stella Maris. That there
was an element of flesh and blood in these figures is believed by Remy
de Gourmont, but when we gaze at them, he remarks, we see at first, "in
place of a body only two eyes with angel's wings behind them, on the
background of an azure sky sown with golden stars"; the lover is on his
knees and his love has become a prayer.[79] This phase of romantic love
was brief, and perhaps mostly the possession of the poets, but it
represented a really important moment in the evolution of modern
romantic love. It was a step towards the realization of the genuinely
human charm of young womanhood in real human relationships, of which we
already have a foretaste in the delicious early French story of Aucassin
and Nicolette.

The re-discovery of classic literature, the movements of Humanism and
the Renaissance, swept away what was left of the almost religious
idealization of the young virgin. The ethereal maiden, thin, pale,
anaemic, disappeared alike from literature and from art, and was no
longer an ideal in actual life. She gave place to a new woman, consc