delight; they who wished to rob me found not their gain; here were three drops of blood that adorned the white snow; as I gazed, it seemed to me I beheld the fresh color on the face of my fair friend." This mystical, worshiping, contemplative love had its source in part, no doubt, in the social circumstances already mentioned; and because of a inore quickly developing culture and perhaps of warmer blood, or even perhaps of contact with Arabian literature, it arose first in southern France, whence it spread to northern France, England, Italy, and Germany. But besides the social conditions, there are three cultural elements which enter into mediæval chivalric love as it has been preserved in the ro mances. The tendency to an idealistic, fanciful love which social conditions encouraged found ample and adaptable material in Celtic story. The French came in contact with the Celts both in England and in Brittany, and the result of this contact was the infusion of a great mass of Celtic story into French literature. Coming first in the form of short narrative poems, its influence spread until almost all romance was colored by it, and the Arthurian legend, with its boundless wealth of story and elusive charm, was fully developed. Celtic stories were strangely fantastic, fanciful, remote; they were full of the supernatural, making communication between this world and other worlds easy, and recognizing love relations between mortals and fairies. They were full of color, of action, of magic, of weirdness, and of poetic charm. Of course they were pagan. In spite of the fact that the church was not always friendly to this Arthurian material, in one respect this importation was too nearly akin to mediæval ideals not to be of literary use. In a world which believed so intensely in an unseen reality more real than the visible world, and which recognized influences from one to the other to be frequent and potent in affairs, the easy communication of mortal and immortal in Celtic fairy-lore furnished the best of material for religious elaboration. The consequence was the development of the legends of Perceval, Galahad, and the Grail, full of strange, Celtic, yet Christian yearning and beauty; the ideal lover of woman became the ideal lover of good; and the quester for the sake of a beloved mistress became the loyal quester for a romantic, ideal goal, the essence of which was probably a religious emotion, for the sake of God. In a precisely parallel manner Celtic lore contributed to the literature of medieval love. The love which found in woman the goal of a strange, mystical, hopeless yearning found nourishment in the lore which showed best how the remote could be vested with the greatest mystical charm. It furnished material in the stories of the strange, dangerous, and ever-fascinating love of mortal for immortal, with which to picture ideally the love of mortal for mortal, and consequently the great mediæval love stories, rising to the loves of Tristram and Iseult, of Lancelot and Guinevere, are Celtic in origin. Another element, not less potent, probably, was Platonism. Platonic influence has been so much associated with the Renaissance that we sometimes forget that it was very powerful through the entire Middle Ages. Not directly, of course; but indirectly through Neo-Platonism, the church fathers, the early medieval philosophers, and the earlier and later mystics. In the early Middle Ages, in fact, it was the Platonic, not the Aristotelian, strain of culture which prevailed. And long after the Aristotelian philosophers had replaced the Platonic, the influence of Platonism and its Neo-Platonic offspring was evident in the spiritual life of the intelligent world. The universality of the influence of The Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius would alone go far toward accounting for the continued vogue of this mystical philosophy; and Dionysius the Areopagite, St. Augustine, Scotus Erigena, and many others also carried on the tradition. Platonism reenforced the tendency of the Middle Ages to regard the unseen as of supreme importance in comparison with the world of sense. To put the meaning of mediæval Platonism as simply as possible, it was that whatever of good there is in the world is good because it partakes of divine good; that whatever there is of evil is evil because it lacks this divine character, that is, is purely earthly. Thus, as brought out by Plato himself and the Platonists of the Renaissance, earthly beauty is a kind of reflection of the divine or perfect beauty, and love of earthly beauty in woman may be an education which will enable the lover eventually to see beyond the earthly to the divine and perfect beauty." But more important than any theory of relation between human and divine love was the character of the love of the divine. For the divine perfection could be known truly only by mystic contemplation and love. As we have already seen, this love of the unseen, imaginatively realized in Christ or Mary or some one of the saints, assumed the character of human love of the higher type. The two kinds of love being thus related in quality, it is not strange that love of woman should assume, in literature at least, something of the quality which seems peculiar to love of the divine. The lady becomes a being to be worshipped. The lover does not realize her human imperfections; she seems rather a perfect being created by love and meaningless apart from love. She becomes real only by falling below the ideal of this love, as does Guinevere. But in chivalric love at its best the physical element is absolutely subject to the spiritual. Platonism has evidently contributed to this ethereal human love as it has contributed to many other elements of mediæval life. This statement, of course, does not imply that the writers of romance were conscious Platonists. The third element to which I referred cannot be separated entirely from the second, to which and to related tendencies it owes its existence. I mean the cult of the Virgin Mary. The adoration of the Virgin owed something in turn to chivalric love, but the greater debt, if dates are an indication, was the other way. Just as chivalric love elevated its object toward the divine, so mystical love brought the divine down more nearly to the human in the woman Mary. The universality of this worship, combined with the remarkable parallelism in the symbolism of J. B. Fletcher's Religion of Beauty in Woman analyzes thoroughly Platonic love in the period of the Renaissance. While there is little Platonic theory of love in the Middle Ages, there is a good deal of Platonic feeling— in literature at least; so that the Renaissance does not represent an entirely new attitude toward woman. Therefore Mr. Fletcher's statement that "the Middle Ages, the age of Aristotle, had called woman confusio hominis, the 'confusion of man""; while "the Renaissance, the age of Plato, now hailed her in effect as illuminatio Dei, 'the illumination of God,"" cannot be regarded as absolutely accurate. human and divine love as revealed in the love-literature, compels us to believe that the influence on chivalric love was vital. Every beloved woman, to the truly chivalrous lover, had something of the Mary in her-her beauty, her calm perfection, her unapproachableness, and, less frequently, her kindness. But the mistress of mediæval romance is not always kind, even to the perfect lover; and this fact suggests another element, important, but not distinctive enough to be classed with those already discussed. The Middle Ages inherited classical mythology; they knew Ovid. Haughty Venus and capricious Cupid are everywhere in medieval literature, and the stream of tendency which they embody or represent entered into chivalric romance, contributing to the perversity of the mistress and encouraging less elevated emotions to become part of chivalric love. The Ovidian tradition, like Neo-Platonism, powerfully affected love allegory. The Platonic and Ovidian elements may be found together, but usually more or less hostile, through the Middle Ages. The Ovidian element, however, is less characteristic. As stated, chivalric love developed out of medieval conditions, but love to-day has probably been more profoundly influenced by chivalric ideals than was the love of man and woman in the days of chivalry. The age of chivalry has by no means perpetuated itself; we belong to a period which prides itself on seeing things as they are, and chivalry does not aid us in doing this. Yet in an age of realism the romantic quest is still a vital part of the lives of many men. The love of man for woman is still a quest for an unattainable and ideal end. Its chief beauty depends on this fact. And the nature of this quest has nowhere been presented more clearly than in mediæval romance. H. L. CREEK. University of Illinois. MORALS OF THE RESTORATION The averted face of the public seems to be turning for the present to Restoration comedy. Professor Nettleton's English Drama of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century devotes to it some three or four chapters, in which he boldly stands up and says to all the world, "This is a native English product." Mr. John Palmer is bolder still. In his study entitled The Comedy of Manners he stoutly maintains that the leading Restoration comedy writers were not only English but the most moral writers of their time. And he proves it to his own glee by declaring that all their immorality was the clear and unsullied reflection of the ideals that governed their associates, a faithful transcript can never be immoral. To him Wycherley's Country Wife is "the most perfect farce in English dramatic literature." To Professor Nettleton it reveals "the depth of his [Wycherley's] moral degradation." That these two students agree in the opinion that the comedies of that generation represented the tastes and the conditions of the courtly circle and its would-be imitators is significant. That they take divergent and indeed opposite views of the morality of the period indicates some misapprehension of the purposes of those writers of comedy and of their attitude toward the life about them. I Yet all authorities agree that the peculiar distinction of Wycherley and Congreve is the brilliancy of their wit. Everyone quotes the words of Hazlitt praising Congreve's style as "the highest model of comic dialogue." Evelyn at the time pointed out the superiority of Wycherley's wit: As long as men are false and women vain, In 1675 Rochester wrote of Sir George Etheredge: Now Apollo had got gentle George in his eye, |