his journey's end is uncertain; and
it is in this uncertain twilight that his relation to the general
beliefs of his age has always remained. In this, as in other things, he
prefigures the character of the Renaissance, that movement in which, in
various ways, the human mind wins for itself a new kingdom of feeling
and sensation and thought, not opposed to, but only beyond and
independent of the spiritual system then actually realised. The
opposition into which Abelard is thrown, which gives its colour to his
career, which breaks his soul to pieces, is a no less subtle opposition
than that between the merely professional, official, hireling ministers
of that system, with their ignorant worship of system for its own sake,
and the true child of light, the humanist, with reason and heart and
senses quick, while theirs were almost dead. He reaches out towards, he
attains, modes of ideal living, beyond the prescribed limits of that
system, though possibly contained in essential germ within it. As always
happens, the adherents of the poorer and narrower culture had no
sympathy with, because no understanding of, a culture richer and more
ample than their own: after the discovery of wheat they would still live
upon acorns--apres l'invention du ble ils voulaient encore vivre du
gland; and would hear of no service to the higher needs of humanity with
instruments not of their forging.

But the human spirit, bold through those needs, was too strong for them.
Abelard and Heloise write their letters--letters with a wonderful
outpouring of soul--in medieval Latin; and Abelard, though he composes
songs in the vulgar tongue, writes also in Latin those treatises in
which he tries to find a ground of reality below the abstractions of
philosophy, as one bent on trying all things by their congruity with
human experience, who had felt the hand of Heloise, and looked into her
eyes, and tested the resources of humanity in her great and energetic
nature. Yet it is only a little later, early in the thirteenth century,
that French prose romance begins; and in one of the pretty volumes of
the Bibliotheque Elzevirienne some of the most striking fragments of it
may be found, edited with much intelligence. In one of these
thirteenth-century stories, Li Amitiez de Ami et Amile, that free play
of human affection, of the claims of which Abelard's story is an
assertion, makes itself felt in the incidents of a great friendship, a
friendship pure and gener