Page:Studies on the legend of the Holy Grail.djvu/258

232 for much that is otherwise inexplicable to us in the mediæval presentment of the sex-feelings and sex-relations.

The love of man, and immortal, or, if mortal, semi-divine maid is a "constant" of heroic tradition. Teuton and Celt have handled this theme, however, in a very different spirit. In the legends of the former the man plays the chief part; he woos, sometimes he forces the fairy maiden to become the mistress of his hearth. As a rule, overmastered by the prowess and beauty of the hero, she is nothing loth. But sometimes, as does Brunhild, she feels the change a degradation and resents it. It is otherwise with the fairy mistresses of the Celtic hero; they abide in their own place, and they allure or compel the mortal lover to resort to them. Connla and Bran and Oisin must all leave this earth and sail across ocean or lake before they can rejoin their lady love; even Cuchullain, mightiest of all the heroes, is constrained, struggle as he may, to go and dwell with the fairy queen Fand, who has woed [sic] him. Throughout, the immortal mistress retains her superiority; when the mortal tires and returns to earth she remains, ever wise and fair, ready to welcome and enchant a new generation of heroes. She chooses whom she will, and is no man's slave; herself she offers freely, but she abandons neither her liberty nor her divine nature. This type of womanhood, capricious, independent, severed from ordinary domestic life, is assuredly the original of the Vivians, the Orgueilleuses, the Ladies of the Fountain of the romances; it is also one which must have commended itself to the knightly devotees of mediæval romantic love. Their "dame d'amour" was, as a rule, another man's wife; she raised in their minds no thought of home or child. In the tone of their feelings towards her, in the character of their intercourse with her, they were closer akin to Oisin and Neave, to Cuchullain and Fand, than to Siegfried and Brunhild, or to Roland and Aude. Even where the love-story passes wholly among mortals, the woman's rôle is more accentuated than in the Teutonic sagas. She is no mere lay-figure upon a fire-bound rock like Brunhild or Menglad, ready, when the destined hero appears, to fall straightway into his arms. Emer, the one maiden of Erinn whom Cuchullain condescends to woo, is eager to show herself in all