aged for them the passion it inspired from service of domestic,
social, civic duties. The female form aroused desire, but it also
suggested maternity and obligations of the household. The male form was
the most perfect image of the deity, self-contained, subject to no
necessities of impregnation, determined in its action only by the laws
of its own reason and its own volition.

Quite a different order of ideas governed the ideal adopted by mediaeval
chivalry. The spirit in its self-sufficingness, detached from the body,
antagonistic to the body, had been divinised by Christianity. Woman,
regarded as a virgin and at the same time a mother, the maiden-mother of
God made man, had been exalted to the throne of heaven. The worship of
woman became, by a natural and logical process, the correlative in
actual human life for that worship of the incarnate Deity which was the
essence of religion. A remarkable point in mediaeval love is that the
sensual appetites were, theoretically at least, excluded from the homage
paid to woman. It was not the wife or the mistress, but the lady, who
inspired the knight. Dante had children by Gemma, Petrarch had children
by an unknown concubine, but it was the sainted Beatrice, it was the
unattainable Laura, who received the homage of Dante and of Petrarch.

In like manner, the sensual appetites were, theoretically at least,
excluded from Platonic paiderastia. It was the divine in human
flesh--"the radiant sight of the beloved," to quote from Plato; "the
fairest and most intellectual of earthly bodies," to borrow a phrase
from Maximus Tyrius--it was this which stimulated the Greek lover, just
as a similar incarnation of divinity inspired the chivalrous lover. Thus
we might argue that the Platonic conception of paiderastia furnishes a
close analogue to the chivalrous devotion to women, due regard being
paid to the differences which existed between the plastic ideal of Greek
religion and the romantic ideal of mediaeval Christianity. The one veiled
sodomy, the other adultery. That in both cases the conception was rarely
realised in actual life only completes the parallel.

To pursue this inquiry further is, however, alien to my task. It is
enough to have indicated the psychological agreement in respect of
purified affection which underlay two such apparently antagonistic
ideals of passion. Few modern writers, when they speak with admiration
or contempt of Platonic love, reflect that in its origin t