sake of Christ's love,
this protest of a nameless northern French poet (Wackernagel,
Altfranzoesische Lieder and Leiche IX.) against the adulterous passion of
his contemporaries, comes to us, pathetically enough, solitary, faint,
unnoticed in the vast chorus, boundless like the spring song of birds or
the sound of the waves, of poets singing the love of other men's wives.
But, it may be objected--how can we tell that these love songs, so
carefully avoiding all mention of names, are not addressed to the
desired bride, to the legitimate wife of the poet? For several reasons;
and mainly, for the crushing evidence of an undefinable something which
tells us that they are not. The other reasons are easily stated. We know
that feudal habits would never have allowed to unmarried women (and
women were married when scarcely out of their childhood) the
opportunities for the relations which obviously exist between the poet
and his lady; and that, if by some accident a young knight might fall in
love with a girl, he would address not her but her parents, since the
Middle Ages, who were indifferent to adultery, were, like the southern
nations among whom the married woman is not expected to be virtuous,
extreme sticklers for the purity of their unmarried womankind. Further,
we have no instance of an unmarried woman being ever addressed during
the early Middle Ages, in those terms of social respect--_madame,
domna, frowe, madonna_--which essentially belong to the mistress of a
household; nor do these stately names fit in with any theory which would
make us believe that the lady addressed by the poet is the jealously
guarded daughter of the house with whom he is plotting a secret
marriage, or an elopement to end off in marriage. This is not the way
that Romeo speaks to Juliet, nor even that the princesses in the
cyclical romances and in the Amadises are wooed by their bridegrooms.
This is not the language of a lover who is broaching his love, and who
hopes, however timidly, to consummate it before all the world by
marriage. It is obviously the language of a man either towards a woman
who is taking a pleasure in keeping him dangling without favours which
she has implicitly or explicitly promised; or towards a woman who is
momentarily withholding favours which her lover has habitually enjoyed.
And in a large proportion of cases the poems of trouveres, troubadours,
and minnesingers are the expression of fortunate love, the fond
recollectio