now in the chateau, the reign
of reverie set in. The devotion of the cloister knew that mood
thoroughly, and had sounded all its stops. For the object of this
devotion was absent or veiled, not limited to one supreme plastic
form like Zeus at Olympia or Athena in the Acropolis, but distracted,
as in a fever dream, into a thousand symbols and reflections. But
then, the Church, that new Sibyl, had a thousand secrets to make the
absent near. Into this kingdom of reverie, and with it into a
paradise of ambitious refinements, the earthly love enters, and
becomes a prolonged somnambulism. Of religion it learns the art of
directing towards an unseen object sentiments whose natural direction
is towards objects of sense. Hence a love defined by the absence of
the beloved, choosing to be without hope, protesting [217] against
all lower uses of love, barren, extravagant, antinomian. It is the
love which is incompatible with marriage, for the chevalier who never
comes, of the serf for the chatelaine, of the rose for the
nightingale, of Rudel for the Lady of Tripoli. Another element of
extravagance came in with the feudal spirit: Provencal love is full
of the very forms of vassalage. To be the servant of love, to have
offended, to taste the subtle luxury of chastisement, of
reconciliation--the religious spirit, too, knows that, and meets just
there, as in Rousseau, the delicacies of the earthly love. Here,
under this strange complex of conditions, as in some medicated air,
exotic flowers of sentiment expand, among people of a remote and
unaccustomed beauty, somnambulistic, frail, androgynous, the light
almost shining through them. Surely, such loves were too fragile and
adventurous to last more than for a moment.

That monastic religion of the Middle Age was, in fact, in many of its
bearings, like a beautiful disease or disorder of the senses: and a
religion which is a disorder of the senses must always be subject to
illusions. Reverie, illusion, delirium: they are the three stages of
a fatal descent both in the religion and the loves of the Middle Age.
Nowhere has the impression of this delirium been conveyed as by
Victor Hugo in Notre Dame de Paris. The [218] strangest creations of
sleep seem here, by some appalling licence, to cross the limit of the
dawn. The English poet too has learned the secret. He has diffused
through King Arthur's Tomb the maddening white glare of the sun, and
tyranny of the moon, not tender