plants, all these dainty folk.

Had they no eyes, then, these poets of the Middle Ages, that they could
see, among all the things of Nature, only those few which had been seen
by their predecessors? At first one feels tempted to think so, till the
recollection of many vivid touches in spring and forest descriptions
persuades one that, enormous as was the sway of tradition among these
men, they were not all of them, nor always, repeating mere conventional
platitudes. This singular limitation in the mediaeval perceptions of
Nature--a limitation so important as almost to make it appear as if the
Middle Ages had not perceived Nature at all--is most frequently
attributed to the prevalence of asceticism, which, according to some
critics, made all mediaeval men into so many repetitions of Bernard of
Clairvaux, of whom it is written that, being asked his opinion of Lake
Leman, he answered with surprise that, during his journey from Geneva to
the Rhone Valley, he had remarked no lake whatever, so absorbed had he
been in spiritual meditations. But the predominance of asceticism has
been grossly exaggerated. It was a state of moral tension which could
not exist uninterruptedly, and could exist only in the classes for whom
poetry was not written. The mischief done by asceticism was the warping
of the moral nature of men, not of their aesthetic feelings; it had no
influence upon the vast numbers, the men and women who relished the
profane and obscene fleshliness and buffoonery of stage plays and
fabliaux, and those who favoured the delicate and exquisite immoralities
of Courtly poetry. Indeed, the presence of whole classes of writings, of
which such things as Boccaccio's Tales, "The Wife of Bath," and Villon's
"Ballades," on the one hand, and the songs of the troubadours, the poem
of Gottfried, and the romance or rather novel of "Flamenca," are
respectively but the most conspicuous examples, ought to prove only too
clearly that the Middle Ages, for all their asceticism, were both as
gross and as aesthetic in sensualism as antiquity had been before them.
We must, therefore, seek elsewhere than in asceticism, necessarily
limited, and excluding the poetry-reading public, for an explanation of
this peculiarity of mediaeval poetry. And we shall find it, I think, in
that which during the Middle Ages could, because it was an
all-regulating social condition, really create universal habits of
thought and feeling, namely, feudalism. A moral c