Of course among the golden threads some very black ones are interwoven: traits of horrible treachery and barbarity standing out violently amidst the texture of beauty that the finer spirits were weaving for the ennobling of all human life; but these traits were survivals of a former set of traditions and of the instincts which these had created.
"Quand l'Auroro, fourrado en raubo di sati
Desparvonillo, san brut, las portos del mati."[9]
These lines might well describe the historical moment of the new birth. Love was then held to be "the ultimate and highest principle of all virtue, of all moral merit, of all glory," and it produced—that is when it was of the genuine kind demanded by chivalry—a state of "happy exaltation of the sentiment and charm of life." This age seems to have invented—or reinvented—the "joie de vivre" and the "joy of love." It is remarkable that the language of the troubadours had two forms of the word joy: joi and joia; joi being used for an expansive and energetic state of happiness, joia for the passive, reposeful form of the sentiment.
While the troubadours were carrying everything before them in Provence and Italy, the minnesingers were plying their romantic trade in Germany; that is late in the twelfth century; but the Gay Science had spread from Provence to the other countries, the troubadours visiting foreign Courts and giving lessons in their art.
This outburst of poetry is described by M. Fauriel as
"the result of a general or energetic movement in favour of social restoration, of an intense enthusiasm of humanity reacting on every side against the oppression and the barbarity of the epoch. The same sentiment ... impelled them to seek and to find a new type and new effects in the other arts, particularly in architecture. Thence arose palaces and churches...."
It is not a little strange and satisfying to realise that the strong wave of sentiment of which one is conscious in all great architecture was in the Middle Ages the same that produced the magnificent flight heavenwards of the human imagination in all that regarded life, its problems and its relationships. M. Fauriel, on the subject of the freedom of chivalrous love, writes:—
"The exaltation of desire, of hope, of self-sacrifice by which love manifests itself and in which it principally consists, could not have any moral merit nor could it become a real incentive to noble actions except on certain conditions. It was to be perfectly spontaneous, receive no law except its own, and could only exist for a single object."
"A woman," he continues, "could only feel her ascendancy and dignity, as a moral being, in relations where everything on her part was a gift, a voluntary favour, and not in relations where she had nothing to refuse."