ubadours and minnesingers, of the Arthurian tales,
which show that love in narrative form, was, as we have seen, polluted
by the selfishness, the deceitfulness, the many unclean necessities of
adulterous passion. Elevated and exquisite though it was, it could not
really purify the relations of man and woman, since it was impure. Nay,
we see that through its influence the grave and simple married love of
the earlier tales of chivalry, the love of Siegfried for Chriemhilt, of
Roland for his bride Belle Aude, of Renaud for his wife Clarisse, is
gradually replaced in later fiction by the irregular love-makings of
Huon of Bordeaux, Ogier the Dane, and Artus of Brittany; until we come
at last to the extraordinary series of the Amadis romances, where every
hero without exception is the bastard of virtuous parents, who
subsequently marry and discover their foundling: a state of things
which, even in the corrupt Renaissance, Boiardo and Ariosto found it
necessary to reform in their romantic poems. With idealizing refinement,
the chivalric love of the French, Provencal, and German poets brings
also a kind of demoralization which, from one point of view, makes the
spotless songs of Bernard de Ventadour and Armaud de Mareulh, of Ulrich
von Liechtenstein and Frauenlob, less pure than the licentious poems
addressed by the Greeks and Romans to women who, at least, were not the
wives of other men.

Shall all this idealizing refinement, this almost religious fervour,
this new poetic element of chivalric love remain useless; or serve only
to subtly pollute while pretending to purify the great singing passion?
Not so. But to prevent such waste of what in itself is pure and
precious, is the mission of another country, of another civilization; of
a wholly different cycle of poets who, receiving the new element of
mediaeval love after it has passed through and been sifted by a number
of hands, shall cleanse and recreate it in the fire of intellectual and
almost abstract passion, producing that wonderful essence of love which,
as the juices squeezed by alchemists out of jewels purified the body
from all its ills, shall purify away all the diseases of the human soul.

While the troubadours and minnesingers had been singing at the courts of
Angevine kings and Hohenstauffen emperors, of counts of Toulouse and
dukes of Austria; a new civilization, a new political and social system,
had gradually been developing in the free burghs of Italy; a new