etween the middle age and
the Renaissance which has so often been exaggerated. But it is not so
much the ecclesiastical art of the middle age, its sculpture and
painting--work certainly done in a great measure for pleasure's sake, in
which even a secular, a rebellious spirit often betrays itself--but
rather the profane poetry of the middle age, the poetry of Provence, and
the magnificent after-growth of that poetry in Italy and France, which
those French writers have in view, when they speak of this Renaissance
within the middle age. In that poetry, earthly passion, with its
intimacy, its freedom, its variety--the liberty of the heart--makes
itself felt; and the name of Abelard, the great clerk and the great
lover, connects the expression of this liberty of heart with the free
play of human intelligence around all subjects presented to it, with the
liberty of the intellect, as that age understood it. Every one knows the
legend of Abelard, a legend hardly less passionate, certainly not less
characteristic of the middle age, than the legend of Tannhaeuser; how
the famous and comely clerk, in whom Wisdom herself, self-possessed,
pleasant, and discreet, seemed to sit enthroned, came to live in the
house of a canon of the church of Notre-Dame, where dwelt a girl
Heloise, believed to be the old priest's orphan niece, his love for whom
he had testified by giving her an education then unrivalled, so that
rumour even asserted that, through the knowledge of languages, enabling
her to penetrate into the mysteries of the older world, she had become a
sorceress, like the Celtic druidesses; and how as Abelard and Heloise
sat together at home there, to refine a little further on the nature of
abstract ideas, "Love made himself of the party with them." You conceive
the temptations of the scholar, who, in such dreamy tranquillity, amid
the bright and busy spectacle of the "Island," lived in a world of
something like shadows; and that for one who knew so well how to assign
its exact value to every abstract idea, those restraints which lie on
the consciences of other men had been relaxed. It appears that he
composed many verses in the vulgar tongue: already the young men sang
them on the quay below the house. Those songs, says M. de Remusat, were
probably in the taste of the Trouveres, of whom he was one of the first
in date, or, so to speak, the predecessor. It is the same spirit which
has moulded the famous "letters," written in the quain