orality and responsibility simply do not exist.
It seems an unreal pleasure-garden, with a shadowy guardian--impalpable
to us gross moderns--called Honour, but where, as it seems, Love only
reigns. Love, not the mystic and melancholy god of the "Vita Nuova," but
a foppish young deity, sentimental at once and sensual, of fashionable
feudal life: the god of people with no apparent duties towards others,
unconscious of any restraints save those of this vague thing called
honour; whose highest mission for the knight, as put in our English
"Romaunt of the Rose" is to--

Set thy might and alle thy witte
Wymmen and ladies for to plese,
And to do thyng that may hem ese;

while, for the lady, it is expressed with perfect simplicity of
shamelessness by Flamenca herself to her damsels, teaching them that the
woman must yield to the pleasure of her lover. Now love, when young,
when, so to speak, but just born and able to feed (as a newborn child on
milk, without hungering for more solid food) on looks and words and
sighs; love thus young, is a fair-seeming godhead, and the devotion to
him a pretty and delicate piece of aestheticism. And such it is here in
"Flamenca," where there certainly exists neither God nor Christ, both
complete absentees, whose priest becomes a courteous lover's valet,
whose church the place for amorous rendezvous, whose sacrifice of mass
and prayer becomes a means of amorous correspondence: Cupid, in the
shape of his slave Guillems de Nevers--become _patarin_(zealot) for
love--peeping with shaven golden head from behind the missal, touching
the lady's hand and whispering with the words of spiritual peace the
declaration of love, the appointment for meeting. God and Christ, I
repeat, are absentees. Where they are I know not; perhaps over the Rhine
with the Lollards in their weavers' dens, or over the Alps in the cell
of St. Francis; not here, certainly, or if here, themselves become the
mere slaves of love. But this King Love, as long as a mere infant, is a
sweet and gracious divinity, surrounded by somewhat of the freshness and
hawthorn sweetness of spring which seem to accompany his favourite
Guillems. Guillems de Nevers, "who could still grow," this brilliant
knight and troubadour, in his white silken and crimson and purple
garments and soundless shoes embroidered with flowers, this prince of
tournaments and _tensos_, who hearing the sorrows of the beautiful
Flamenca, loves her unseen,