al, the unsought, can be
vital; but it is true in many things, and truest in all matters of the
imagination and the heart, that the desire to experience any sentiment
will powerfully conduce to its production, and even give it a strength
due to the long incubation of the wish. Thus the ideal love of the
Tuscan poets was probably none the weaker, but rather the stronger, for
the desire which they felt to sing such passion; nay, rather to hear it
singing in themselves. The love of man and wife, of bride and
bridegroom, was still of the domain of prose; adulterous love forbidden;
and the tradition of, the fervent wish for, the romantic passion of the
troubadours consumed them as a strong artistic craving. Platonic love
was possible, doubly possible in souls tense with poetic wants; it
became a reality through the strength of the wish for it.

Nor was this all. In all imaginative passions, intellectual motives are
so much fuel; and in this case the necessity of logically explaining the
bodiless passion for a platonic lady, of understanding why they felt in
a manner so hitherto unknown to gross mankind, tended greatly to
increase the love of these Tuscans, and to bring it in its chastity to
the pitch of fervour of more fleshly passions, by mingling with the
aesthetic emotions already in their souls the mystical theorizings of
transcendental metaphysics, and the half-human, half-supernatural
ecstasy of mediaeval religion. For we must remember that Italy was a
country not merely of manufacturers and bankers, but of philosophers
also and of saints.

Among the Italians of the thirteenth century the revival of antique
literature was already in full swing; while in France, Germany, and
Provence there had been, in lyric poetry at least, no trace of classic
lore. Whereas the trouveres and troubadours had possessed but the light
intellectual luggage of a military aristocracy; and the minnesingers
had, for the most part, been absolutely ignorant of reading and writing
(Wolfram says so of himself, and Ulrich von Liechtenstein relates how he
carried about his lady's letter for days unread until the return of his
secretary); the poets of Italy, from Brunetto Latini to Petrarch, were
eminently scholars; men to whom, however much they might be politicians
and ringleaders, like Cavalcanti, Donati, and Dante, whatever existed of
antique learning was thoroughly well known. Such men were familiar with
whatever yet survived of the transcendent