n or eager expectation of meetings with the beloved. All this
can evidently not be connected with the wooing, however stealthy,
however Romeo-and-Juliet-like of a bride; still less can it be explained
in reference to love within wedlock. A man does not, however loving,
worship his wife as his social superior; he does not address her in
titles of stiff respect; he does not sigh and weep and supplicate for
love which is his due, and remind his wife that she owes it him in
return for loyal, humble, discreet service. Above all, a man (except in
some absurd comedy perhaps, where the husband, in an age of _cicisbeos_,
is in love with his own wife and dares not admit it before the society
which holds "that there can be no love between married folk ")--a
husband, I repeat, does not beg for, arrange, look forward to, and
recall with triumph or sadness, secret meetings with his own wife. Now
the secret meeting is, in nearly every aristocratic poet of the early
poetry, the inevitable result of the humble praises and humble requests
for kindness; it is, most obviously, _the_ reward for which the poet is
always importuning. Mediaeval love poetry, compared with the love poetry
of Antiquity and the love poetry of the revival of letters, is, in its
lyric form, decidedly chaste; but it is perfectly explicit; and, for all
its metaphysical tendencies and its absence of clearly painted pictures,
the furthest possible removed from being Platonic. One of the most
important, characteristic, and artistically charming categories of
mediaeval love lyrics is that comprising the Provencal _serena_ and
_alba,_ with their counterparts in the _langue d'oil_, and the so-called
_Wachtlieder_ of the minnesingers; and this category of love poetry may
be defined as the drama, in four acts, of illicit love. The faithful
lover has received from his lady an answer to his love, the place and
hour are appointed; all the day of which the evening is to bring him
this honour, he goes heavy hearted and sighing: "Day, much do you grow
for my grief, and the evening, the evening and the long hope kills me."
Thus far the _serena_, the evening song, of Guiraut Riquier. A lovely
anonymous _alba,_ whose refrain, "Oi deus, oi deus; de l' alba, tan tost
ve!" is familiar to every smatterer of Provencal, shows us the lady and
her knight in an orchard beneath the hawthorn, giving and taking the
last kisses while the birds sing and the sky whitens with dawn. "The
lady is graciou