, but although often bought, like
Brynhilt or Gudrun, at the expense of tremendous adventures, cherished
scarcely more passionately than the wives of Odysseus and Hector. Thus,
before the Middle Ages, there existed as a rule only a holy, but
indifferent and utterly unlyrical, love for the women, the equals of
their husbands, wooed usually of the family and solemnly given in
marriage without much consultation of their wishes; and a highly
passionate and singing, but completely profligate and debasing, desire
for mercenary though cultivated creatures like the Delias and Cynthlas
of Tibullus and Propertius, or highborn women, descended, like Catullus'
Lesbia, in brazen dishonour to their level, women towards whom there
could not possibly exist on the part of their lovers any sense of
equality, much less of inferiority. To these two kinds of love, chaste
but cold, and passionate but unchaste, the Middle Ages added, or rather
opposed, a new manner of loving, which, although a mere passing
phenomenon, has left the clearest traces throughout our whole mode of
feeling and writing.

To describe mediaeval love is a difficult matter, and to describe it
except in negations is next to impossibility. I conceive it to consist
in a certain sentimental, romantic, idealistic attitude towards women,
not by any means incompatible however with the grossest animalism; an
attitude presupposing a complete moral, aesthetical, and social
superiority on the part of the whole sex, inspiring the very highest
respect and admiration independently of the individual's qualities; and
reaching the point of actual worship, varying from the adoration of a
queen by a courtier to the adoration of a shrine by a pilgrim, in the
case of the one particular lady who happens to be the beloved; an
attitude in the relations of the sexes which results in love becoming an
indispensable part of a noble life, and the devoted attachment to one
individual woman, a necessary requisite of a gentlemanly training.

Mediaeval love is not merely a passion, a desire, an affection, a habit;
it is a perfect occupation. It absorbs, or is supposed to absorb, the
Individual; it permeates his life like a religion. It is not one of the
interests of life, or, rather, one of life's phases; it is the whole of
life, all other interests and actions either sinking into an unsingable
region below it, or merely embroidering a variegated pattern upon its
golden background. Mediaeval love, ther