We note that Poe owed to the North his industry in literature. But the day has come when Southern writers are finding both inspiration and industry in their own Southland. It took the great upheaval of the Civil War to bring about this change in their attitude toward literature. In the decades preceding the war the North was in the midst of a great transcendental movement, its long period of industry of thought and deed was flowering into a wonderful literature that embodied its emotions and ideas. There was among men the divine discontent and inspired dissatisfaction that had been voiced by Carlyle and echoed by Emerson. But the South remained passive and contented, uttering its few charming melodies, until suddenly came the overwhelming shock of the war, sweeping away forever the past pleasant quiescence, shattering the old ideals, laying the land low under its horrors, but clearing the air for the inrush of new and invigorating ideas and the tonic force of industrialism. And with it came a new literature. At first, the new note of sincerity became evident in the poetry of Timrod and Hayne. The new regard for industry in art showed itself strikingly in Sidney Lanier, in whose works emotional sentiment and strength of purpose unite to produce a rare perfection. Gone is the desultory indifference of the old South when one of its poets, too weak to feed himself-dying-can utter a song like the following:

"In my sleep I was fain of their fellowship, fain

Of the live-oak, the marsh, and the main.

The little green leaves would not let me alone in my sleep;

Up-breathed from the marshes, a message of range and of sweep
Interwoven with waftures and of wild sea-liberties, drifting,

Came through the lapped leaves sifting, sifting,

Came to the gates of sleep.

Then my thoughts, in the dark of the dungeon-keep
Of the Castle of Captives hid in the City of Sleep,
Upstarted, by twos and by threes assembling :

The gates of sleep fell a-trembling

Like as the lips of a lady that forth falter yes,
Shaken with happiness:

The gates of sleep stood wide.”

Truly in Lanier conscience came into Southern literature.

In 1870, with the advent of industrialism into the South, began also industry in literature. There has arisen a generation of

authors who, like the earlier Southern writers, are finding their inspiration in their own surroundings. And to them literature has become a life-profession. They are earnest, serious, and sincere. They are true artists in their devotion to literature and the skill with which they are handling their chosen themes. They are giving a new and dominant tone to American letters. Gone is the apathy. Close at hand are various quaint and interesting people. The land glows with a verdant, inspiring beauty. Out of the past steal forth romantic figures of Cavaliers and soldiers. Grimly and overshadowing all stalks the epic spectre of the Civil War and "literature loves a lost cause." It seems safe to predict that America's purest literature is to come out of the Southland.

Philadelphia, Pa.

A. M. CONWAY.

Now of wemen this I say for me,

Of erthly thingis nane may bettir be;
They suld haif wirschep and grit honoring
Off men, aboif all vthir erthly thing.

These words of the Scottish poet Dunbar, written at the close of the Middle Ages, express the cult of woman-worship which the chivalry of the Middle Ages had developed and which through the medium of romantic love in novel, poem, and romance has meant so much to the life of our own time. For however fundamental and unchanging the love of the sexes may be, there surely is no doubt that it is colored and even modified by ideals that are in the atmosphere, that its manner of expression in outward life is affected by them, and that poetry and story have really changed men's ways of thinking of love and even of loving. Of the various tendencies which combine in modern love-literature, mediæval chivalry is one of the most important, and I shall point out a few of the characteristics of chivalric love as revealed in the romances of the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries.

It is to France that we owe our greatest debt-France the centre of medieval culture, combining many complex elements from Latin and Celtic and Germanic worlds in ways yet mysterious to the historian, evolving from these combinations new products and new types in literature and in thought, and passing them on to other countries, especially to England and Germany, to aid in the growth of culture there. This explanation is made so that the reader will understand that the romantic material with which I am dealing is international, with France as the centre, although I shall refer chiefly to the imitative literature of England.

It must be made clear first of all, however, that in mediæval literature there are as many ways of treating love as in modern literature, and that even in romantic literature there are great differences. The meaning of chivalric love will be somewhat plainer if the other types are explained. It should be borne in mind, moreover, that the writer does not claim a very close

relation between the type of love found in literature and the love in the actual life of the Middle Ages. Here we are dealing chiefly with love in literature, and references to life will be made to interpret so far as possible the literary material. Three distinct ways of treating love may be found, each of them strikingly interesting, and each of them belonging to a more or less distinct type of literature. I shall begin with the lower type of love and proceed to the higher rather than attempt the more difficult task of taking up the literary types in the doubtful order of their appearance.

First of all is the love of the fabliau. To the reader unfamiliar with mediæval literature it should be explained that the fabliau is an amusing story in metrical form, usually coarse in content, resembling not a little the anecdotes which form a staple part of the conversation of groups of men in the country store, in the harvest field during the rest period, and in a thousand other places where men find themselves in companies. This kind of vulgarity in the Middle Ages found its way into literature and furnished material for Boccaccio and Chaucer. In the fabliau woman is the daughter of Eve, the source of most of the mischief in the world, loquacious, meddling, faithless, sensual. Desire is the nearest approach to love. Many of the fabliaux are satirical, with a purpose more or less moral. According to them, to quote from Chauntecleer,—

In principio

Mulier est hominis confusio.

The Host of the Canterbury Tales draws a characteristic moral after hearing the Merchant tell the fabliau of January and May:Lo, whiche sleightes and subtiltees

In wommen been! for ay as bisy as bees
Been they us sely men for to deceyve.

In the tale of The Dumb Wife, in which a dumb woman gains the power of speech at the desire of her husband, is one of the mildest of the jests characteristic of the fabliau:

The leist deuill that is in hell

Can gif ane wyf his toung;
The grittest, I you tell,
Cannot do mak hir dum.

In the fabliau, then, we have the lowest possible type of lovesensuality mingled with contempt.

As we shall see farther on, chivalric love owes a great deal to the church. Strangely enough, the fabliau attitude toward women also received a great deal of encouragement from the ascetic element in Mediæval Catholicism, which distrusted women and held them to be the main source of all evil. Mediæval ecclesiastical writers who saw no kinship between human and divine love and were acquainted with the evil physical consequences of violent passion even went so far as to regard love of woman as a disease. To a certain extent Oriental contempt for women may be another influence, since some of the stories satirizing women (in the Seven Sages, for instance) are certainly Oriental. But the supposition that all fabliaux came from India or other parts of the Orient seems effectually disproved. Historically, of course, asceticism owes a great deal to the East, and tendencies to scorn the weaker sex no doubt received encouragement from the Orient in various ways, but the fabliau attitude is too nearly universal to be regarded as either Oriental or Occidental. However, the character of the fabliau owes a great deal to the audience which listened to them. They were primarily masculine and bourgeois. No doubt many knights in hours of relaxation were entertained by the stories of the bourgeois classes, for the differences in culture were not necessarily very great; but the fabliau was not recognized as a literary form of any dignity, and it was not meant to appeal to the courtly classes.

A brief statement of the content of one of the most famous of the fabliaux-the Lai d'Aristote-will emphasize these characteristics. Alexander of Greece, after subjugating India, neglected to pursue his conquests because of his love for a beautiful captive. Aristotle, his teacher, a bald old philosopher, reproved him, and the king promised amendment. But the mistress noticed the sadness in the king's manner, and extracted from him the secret of it. She vowed vengeance on the old philosopher. At dawn she placed Alexander before a window in a tower overlooking the garden. A seductive song touched the master's heart and brought him to the coquettishly attired