No one can separate the thought and feeling in this verse. But they were not always fused. The mediaeval fancy sported with this love; the mediaeval mind delighted in it as a theme of argument. And the fancy might be as fantastic as the reasoning was finely spun.
The literature of this love draws no sharp lines between love as resistless passion and love as enabling virtue; yet these two aspects are distinguishable. The first was less an original creation of the Middle Ages than the second. Antiquity had known the passion which overwhelmed the stricken mortal, and had treated it as something put upon the man and woman, a convulsive joy, also a bane. Antiquity had analyzed it too, and had shown its effects, especially its physical symptoms. Much had been written of its fatal nature; songs had sung how it overthrew the strong and brought men and women to their death. Looking upon this love as something put on man and woman, antiquity pictured it mainly as an insanity cast like a spell upon some one who otherwise would have been sane. But the Middle Ages saw love transformed into the man and woman, saw it constitute their will as well as passion, and perceived that it was their being. If the lover could not avoid or resist it, the reason was because it was his mightiest self, and not because it was a compulsion from without; it was his nature, not his disease.
The nature, ways, and laws of this high and ennobling love were much pondered on and talked of. They were expounded in pedantic treatises, as well as set forth in tales which sometimes have the breath of universal life. Ovid's Ars amatoria furnished the idea that love was an art to be learned and practised. Mediaeval clerks and rhymers took his light art seriously, and certain of them made manuals of the rules and precepts of love, devised by themselves and others interested in such fancies. An example is the Flos amoris or Ars amatoria of Andrew the Chaplain, who compiled his book not far from the year 1200.[1] He wrote with his obsequious head filled with a sense of the authority
- ↑ On this work see Gaston Paris, Romania, xii. 524 sqq. (1883); id. in Journal des savants, 1888, pp. 664 sqq. and 727 sqq.; also (for extracts) Raynouard, Choix des poésies des Troubadours, ii. lxxx. sqq.
