f emotion, though glorified by
the literary art of greatest poets, has something pitiably unreal,
incurably morbid, in its mysticism. But, putting this aside, we are
still bound to notice the absence of that far more human self-devotion
of man to woman which forms a conspicuous element in the Arthurian
romances. The love of Tristram for Iseult, of Lancelot for Guinevere,
of Beaumains for his lady, is alien to the Goliardic conception of
intersexual relations. Nowhere do we find a trace of Arthur's vow
imposed upon his knights: "never to do outrage,... and alway to do
ladies, damosels, and gentlewomen succour upon pain of death." This
manly respect for women, which was, if not precisely the purest, yet
certainly the most fruitful social impulse of the Middle Ages,
receives no expression in the _Carmina Vagorum_.

The reason is not far to seek. The Clerici were a class debarred from
domesticity, devoted in theory to celibacy, in practice incapable of
marriage. They were not so much unsocial or anti-social as
extra-social; and while they gave a loose rein to their appetites,
they respected none of those ties, anticipated none of those home
pleasures, which consecrate the animal desires in everyday existence
as we know it. One of their most popular poems is a brutal monastic
diatribe on matrimony, fouler in its stupid abuse of women, more
unmanly in its sordid imputations, than any satire which emanated from
the corruption of Imperial Rome.[35] The cynicism of this exhortation
against marriage forms a proper supplement to the other kind of
cynicism which emerges in the lyrics of triumphant seducers and light
lovers.

But why then have I taken the trouble to translate these songs, and
to present them in such profusion to a modern audience? It is because,
after making all allowances for their want of great or noble feeling,
due to the peculiar medium from which they sprang, they are in many
ways realistically beautiful and in a strict sense true to vulgar
human nature. They are the spontaneous expression of careless, wanton,
unreflective youth. And all this they were, too, in an age which we
are apt to regard as incapable of these very qualities.

The defects I have been at pains to indicate render the Goliardic
poems remarkable as documents for the right understanding of the
brilliant Renaissance epoch which was destined to close the Middle
Ages. To the best of them we may with certainty assign the
seventy-five years bet