llant deeds of men, but now they
can see nothing, think of nothing but the human heart. And what is
perhaps strangest of all, this great reality of feeling, of passion, is
presented under the form of a world almost wholly unreal and
conventional. The men and women of the epic were great heroic figures,
of larger stature, of greater passions than the common run, but they
were quite real people, moving and acting in the real world. The figures
of romance are for the most part, but for the intense reality of their
love, the unreal, conventional figures of a world of knights and ladies,
of unreal and conventional actions. We understand the epic world, we see
and recognize their people, their dwellings, their ways of acting and
thinking, but the romantic knights and ladies are mere conventions.

The truth is that the chivalrous or romantic world is unreal, partly
perhaps because the artists are occupied with nothing but the emotions,
and profound though these are, it is perhaps because of their
abstraction that the romance ended in the strange allegorical movement
of the thirteenth century. In the hands of the later and lesser poets,
the romantic method finally loses almost all sense of personality, and
becomes a picture and analysis of abstract emotion. It is to these
abstractions that Guillaume de Lorris gave a new life and a singular
grace in the personifications of the _Romance of the Rose_, and the
charm and grace of his art carried Europe off its feet, so that for
nearly three hundred years it tended to dominate European poetry. Even
the greatest artists of these centuries, Dante and Chaucer, at least
started with this method, and at the very end of the fifteenth century
William Dunbar in Scotland still used it with grace and vivacity.

But I have lingered too long in the Middle Ages. I have done so because,
if we could only make more clear to ourselves the homogeneity of the
Europe out of which we all came, it would, I think, greatly help to
clear up the superstitious exaggeration of the conception of nationality
in art. There is not time to deal with it, or we might stay to observe
that the characteristic of mediaeval literature is that of all mediaeval
art and life. To myself, indeed, it is clear that the notion that the
people of the Middle Ages desired or worked for a unified political
organization is indeed a great mistake. But, on the other hand, it is
equally certain that in general civilization, as in religion