Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/121

Rh Or, lamenting his dead love, he says:

All the effects of a sweet and melancholy burlesque are found together in that very tender and pure poem of the end of the century called L’Amant rendu Cordelier de l’Observance d’Amour, which describes the reception of an inconsolable lover in the convent of amorous martyrs. It is as though erotic poetry even in this perverse way strove to recover that primitive connection with sacred matters of which the Christian religion had bereft it.

French authors like to oppose “l’esprit gaulois” to the conventions of courtly love, as the natural conception and expression opposed to the artificial. Now the former is no less a fiction than the latter. Erotic thought never acquires literary value save by some process of transfiguration of complex and painful reality into illusionary forms. The whole genre of Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles and the loose song, with its wilful neglect of all the natural and social complications of love, with its indulgence towards the lies and egotism of sexual life, and its vision of a never-ending lust, implies, no less than the screwed-up system of courtly love, an attempt to substitute for reality the dream of a happier life. It is once more the aspiration towards the life sublime, but this time viewed from the animal side. It is an ideal all the same, even though it be that of unchastity. Reality at all times has been worse and more brutal than the refined æstheticism of courtesy would have it be, but also more chaste than it is represented to be by the vulgar genre which is wrongly regarded as realism.

As an element of literary culture the “genre gaulois” could