eauty were added to those
ideas and terms, however applied, and also that many emotions were thus
cultivated which became capable of re-inforcing earthly human love. In
this way it happened that, though Christianity rejected the ideal of
romantic love in its natural associations, it indirectly prepared the
way for a loftier and deeper realization of that love.

There can be no doubt that the emotional training and refining of the
fleshly instincts by Christianity was the chief cause of the rise of
that conception of romantic love which we associate with the institution
of chivalry. Exalted and sanctified by contact with the central dogmas
of religion, the emotion of love was brought down from this spiritual
atmosphere by the knightly lover, with something of its ethereal halo
still clinging to it, and directed towards an earthly mistress. The most
extravagant phase of romantic love which has ever been seen was then
brought about, and in many cases, certainly, it was a real erotomania
which passed beyond the bounds of sanity.[75] In its extreme forms,
however, this romantic love was a rare, localized, and short-lived
manifestation. The dominant attitude of the chivalrous age towards
women, as Leon Gautier has shown in his monumental work on chivalry, was
one of indifference, or even contempt. The knight's thoughts were more
of war than of women, and he cherished his horse more than his
mistress.[76]

But women, above all in France, reacted against this attitude, and with
splendid success. Their husbands treated them with indifference or left
them at home while they sought adventure in the world. The neglected
wives proceeded to lay down the laws of society, and took upon
themselves the part of rulers in the domain of morals. In the eleventh,
the twelfth, the thirteenth centuries, says Meray in a charming book on
life in the days of the Courts of Love, we find women "with infinite
skill and an adorable refinement seizing the moral direction of French
society." They did so, he remarks, in a spirit so Utopian, so ideally
poetic, that historians have hesitated to take them seriously. The laws
of the Courts of Love[77] may sometimes seem to us immoral and
licentious, but in reality they served to restrain the worst
immoralities and licences of the time. They banished violence, they
allowed no venality, and they inculcated moderation in passion. The task
of the Courts of Love was facilitated by the relative degree of peace
w