Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/136

114 unfold freely in aristocratic conversation, they could offer a literary amusement or a charming game, but no more. The ideal of love, such as it was, could not be lived up to, except in a fashion inherently false.

Cruel reality constantly gave the lie to it. At the bottom of the intoxicating cup of the Roman de la Rose the moralist exposed the bitter dregs. From the side of religion maledictions were poured upon love in all its aspects, as the sin by which the world is being ruined. Whence, exclaims Gerson, come the bastards, the infanticides, the abortions, whence hatred, whence poisonings?—Woman joins her voice to that from the pulpit: all the conventions of love are the work of men: even when it dons an idealistic guise, erotic culture is altogether saturated by male egotism: and what else is the cause of the endlessly repeated insults to matrimony, to woman and her feebleness, but the need of masking this egotism? One word suffices, says Christine de Pisan, to answer all these infamies: it is not the women who have written the books.

Indeed, medieval literature shows little true pity for woman, little compassion for her weakness and the dangers and pains which love has in store for her. Pity took on a stereotyped and factitious form, in the sentimental fiction of the knight delivering the virgin. The author of the Quinze Joyes de Marvage, after having mocked at all the faults of women, undertakes to describe also the wrongs they have to suffer. So far as is known, he never performed this task.

Civilization always needs to wrap up the idea of love in veils of fancy, to exalt and refine it, and thereby to forget cruel reality. The solemn or graceful game of the faithful knight or the amorous shepherd, the fine imagery of courtly allegories, however brutally life belied them, never lost their charm nor all their moral value. The human mind needs these forms, and they always remain essentially the same.