due. And such sympathy, such admiration, such leniency, for howsoever
short a time they may remain in our soul, leave it, if they ever leave
it completely and utterly less strong, less clean than it was before. We
have all of us a lazy tendency to approve of the virtue which costs no
trouble; to contemplate in ourselves or others, with a spurious moral
satisfaction, the development of this or that virtuous quality in souls
which are deteriorating in undoubted criminal self-indulgence. We have
all of us, at the bottom of our hearts, a fellow feeling for all human
affection; and the sinfulness of sinners like Tristram and Yseult lies
largely in the fact that they pervert this legitimate and holy sympathy
into a dangerous leniency for any strong and consistent love, into a
morbid admiration for any irresistible mutual passion, making us forget
that love has in itself no moral value, and that while self-indulgence
may often be innocent, only self-abnegation can ever be holy.

The great mediaeval German poem of Tristram and Yseult remained for
centuries a unique phenomenon; only John Ford perhaps, that grander and
darker twin spirit of Gottfried von Strassburg, reviving, even among the
morbidly psychological and crime-fascinated followers of Shakespeare,
that new theme of evil--the heroism of unlawful love. But Gottfried had
merely manipulated with precocious analytical power a mode of feeling
and thinking which was universal in the feudal Middle Ages; the great
epic of adultery was forgotten, but the sympathetic and admiring
interest in illegitimate passion remained; and was transmitted, wherever
the Renaissance or the Reformation did not break through such
transmission of mediaeval habits, as an almost inborn instinct from
father to son, from mother to daughter. And we may doubt whether the
important class of men and women who write and read the novels of
illicit love, could ever have existed, had not the psychological artists
of modern times, from Rousseau to George Sand, and from Stendhal to
Octave Feuillet, found ready prepared for them in the countries not
re-tempered by Protestantism, an assoiation of romance, heroism, and
ideality with mere adulterous passion, which was unknown to the
corruption of Antiquity and to the lawlessness of the Dark Ages, and
which remained as a fatal alloy to that legacy of mere spiritual love
which was left to the world by the love poets of early feudalism.

II.

The love of the tro