ceeding ages could not have taken from that white flame of love
which Dante set alight upon the grave of Beatrice, the spark of ideal
passion which has, in the noblest of our literature, made the desire of
man for woman and of woman for man burn clear towards heaven, leaving
behind the noisome ashes and soul-enervating vapours of earthly lust.

I.

The centuries have made us; forcing us into new practices, teaching us
new habits, creating for us new capacities and wants; adding, ever and
anon, to the soul organism of mankind features which at first were but
accidental peculiarities, which became little by little qualities
deliberately sought for and at lengths inborn and hereditary
characteristics. And thus, in, what we call the Middle Ages, there was
invented by the stress of circumstances, elaborated by half-conscious
effort and bequeathed as an unalienable habit, a new manner of loving.

The women of classical Antiquity appear to us in poetry and imaginative
literature as one of two things: the wife or the mistress. The wife,
Penelope, Andromache, Alkestis, nay, even the charming young bride in
Xenophon's "Oeconomics," is, while excluded from many concerns,
distinctly reverenced and loved in her own household capacity; but the
reverence is of the sort which the man feels for his parents and his
household gods, and the affection is calm and gently rebuking like that
for his children. The mistress, on the other hand, is the object of
passion which is often very vehement, but which is always either simply
fleshly or merely fancifully aesthetic or both, and which entirely
precludes any save a degrading influence upon the sensual and suspicious
lover. Even Tibullus, in love matters one of the most modern among the
ancients, and capable of painting many charming and delicate little
domestic idyls even in connection with a mere bought mistress, is
perpetually accusing his Delia of selling herself to a higher bidder,
and sighing at the high probability of her abandoning him for the
Illyrian praetor or some other rich amateur of pretty women. The
barbarous North--whose songs have come down to us either, like the
Volsunga Saga translated by Mr. Morris, in an original pagan version, or
else, as the Nibelungenlied, recast during the early Middle Ages--the
North tells us nothing of the venal paramour, but knows nothing also
beyond the wedded wife; more independent and mighty perhaps than her
counterpart of classical Antiquity