try and
facile pleasure. Yet it was not only the age in which women for the
first time succeeded in openly attaining their supreme social
influence,[85] it was an age of romantic love, and the noble or poignant
love-stories which have reached us from the records of that period
surpass those of any other age.

If we believe with Goethe that the religion of the future consists in a
triple reverence--the reverence for what is above us, the reverence for
what is below us, and the reverence for our equals[86]--we need not
grieve overmuch if one form of this reverence, the first, and that which
Goethe regarded as the earliest and crudest, has lost its exclusive
claim. Reverence is essential to all romantic love. To bring down the
Madonna and the Virgin from their pedestals to share with men the common
responsibilities and duties of life is not to divest them of the claim
to reverence. It is merely the sign of a change in the form of that
reverence, a change which heralds a new romantic love.

It would be premature to attempt to define the exact outline of the new
forms of romantic love, or the precise lineaments of the beings who will
most ardently evoke that love. In literature, indeed, the ideals of life
cast their shadow before, and we may surely trace a change in the erotic
ideals mirrored in literature. The woman whom Dickens idealized in
_David Copperfield_ is unlike indeed to the series of women of a new
type introduced by George Meredith, and the modern heroine generally
exhibits more of the robust, open-eyed and spontaneous qualities of that
later type than the blind and clinging nature of the amiable simpletons
of the older type. That the changed conditions of civilization should
produce new types of womanhood and of love is not surprising, if we
realize that, even within the ancient chivalrous forms it was possible
to produce similar robust types when the qualities of a race were
favourable to them. Spain furnishes a notable illustration. Spanish
literature from Cervantes and Tirso to Valera and Blasco Ibanez reflects
a type of woman who stands on the same ground as man and is his equal
and often his superior on that ground, alike in vigour of body and of
spirit, acquiring all that she cares to of virility, while losing
nothing feminine that is of worth.[87] In more than one respect the
ideal woman of Spain is the ideal woman our civilization now renders
necessary. The women of the future, Grete Meisel-Hess declar