Was romantic love, as popularized by the troubadours, a reaction against Christianity, which frowned on eroticism? Was hopeless adoration of woman the result of excessive worship of virginity? Was the cult a literary fashion which came to be taken too seriously? Was it no more than the adulterous art of Ovid adapted to castle society a thousand years later? Why should lustful adventurers-accustomed to taking what they wanted-have allowed this conception of courtly love to be imposed on them by poets and women? Why should they have succumbed, themselves, into writing verses? Why did they permit imperious women to order them to Jerusalem? Why did they allow the manly sport of knocking each other off horses to be turned into a vying for ladies' favours, with themselves being robed and led into the lists by women, whose gloves and even underclothing they sported as favours? Was it because they recognized in courtly love a useful cover for lust, as they recognized in chivalry a cover for violence?
Questions like these may be asked endlessly; for each there are many different answers. Denis de Rougemont in his Passion and Society thinks that the natural seeds of this new passion were there all along, and that in the twelfth century they began to be watered, instead of wasted. In The Allegory of Love C. S. Lewis says: 'Real changes in human sentiment are very rare-there are perhaps three or four of them on record-but I believe that they occur and that this is one of them.'
It was, of course, only the highest feudal society which professed to look on love as an art. Yet it is worth noting that one of the classic love affairs of history occurred early this century, outside the sphere of castle society. In Paris the brilliant teacher-philosopher Abelard seduced his seventeen-year-old pupil Heloise and eloped with her, only to be pursued and castrated by her uncle's hirelings. He became a monk, she a nun. The story of their dire passion, so savagely frustrated, was quick to pass from mouth to mouth, from land to land.
The notion of passionate love was coloured by, and lent colour to, old myths out of the Celtic and Teutonic dark. Tales of King Arthur's court, as rediscovered and embroidered by Geoffrey of Monmouth, spread on the lips of Crusaders and others to the susceptible courts of Troyes and Poitiers, where they underwent a form of processing and emerged as literature. The processing was entrusted to the literary courtiers of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine (granddaughter of the first troubadour, mother of Richard Coeur de Lion) and of her daughter Marie, Countess of Champagne. Eleanor left Languedoc, trailing her troubadours, to marry King Louis VII of France; that marriage was dissolved, and in 1152 she married Prince Henry, who became Henry II of England. She and her daughter are supposed to have held 'courts of love' (probably informal discussions) at which problems of passion and chivalry were resolved, either by direct ruling of Eleanor or Marie, or by a vote of ladies. Under Queen Eleanor's direction was written a version of Tristan and Isolde, the Celtic legend which already contained all the elements of high, frustrated passion. Under Marie, an obscure and possibly apocryphal Arthurian knight called Lancelot, against whose character nothing was known, found himself cast as the hero of an adulterous liaison with Arthur's queen, Guenevere, who according to some accounts was no better than she should have been. For love and honour, he was called on to perform a variety of difficult feats, mostly foolish. At his lady's whim he played the coward in the lists. On hearing of her death he tried to hang himself. His state of mind was such that he could faint at the sight of a comb containing wisps of his lady's hair. The author of the Lancelot story was Chretien de Troyes, significantly enough a translator of Ovid. The Countess of Champagne no doubt contributed ideas of her own, with which Chretien may or may not have agreed. But, for the purpose of this book, the most notable work written under the influence of the Countess of Champagne was the treatise on courtly love, Liber de Arte Honeste Amandi, written by Andre le Chapelain (Andreas Capellanus). His work crystallizes the fashionable attitude to courtly love displayed in the Court of Troyes in the latter part of the twelfth century. Andre was a worldly priest, and like Chretien probably wrote with his tongue firmly in his cheek. They were a strange trio: the wilful, talented countess, a married woman pronouncing on the incompatibility of love and marriage, and her two cynical courtiers, tackling the self-imposed task of regulating love, of re-writing ancient tales in a new romantic idiom, with as little conscience as a team of film script-writers falsifying the Old Testament.
Andre defines love as a species of agony caused by excessive meditation upon a member of the opposite sex. Most of his book consists of imaginary dialogues between men and women of varying social grades, down to the middle class. Those below the middle class are dismissed with contempt.
It is wrong, says Andre, for a man to begin talking of love to a woman as soon as he meets her, though the direct approach is good enough for concubines. The middle-class man addressing a middle-class woman (some years his junior) opens his suit by suggesting that her beauty is divinely perfect in all but one respect-that she has inspired and enriched no one else by her love. The woman wittily retorts that if she is as noble as all this she ought to wed a noble; then adds, unkindly, that she hates the idea of being wooed by an old man. Bridling, the suitor expresses regret that he was unable to arrange with the Almighty to be born later than he was. He thinks that the many courtesies he has achieved over the years are deserving of recognition.
When the middle-class man seeks the hand of a noblewoman his difficulties increase. Over-praise of the lady's qualities will make her think that he is deficient in the niceties of conversation. The noblewoman is prepared to be reasonably magnanimous, but she takes offence at his tradesman's notion of love. What greater insolence can there be, she asks, than for a man to spend six days pursuing his business and leave Love to the seventh day? Miserably, the middle-class man says that if he did not apply himself to his business he would fall into wretched poverty and be unable to attempt noble deeds. He suggests that the excellent character he has been at pains to cultivate qualifies him to aspire to nobility, but the lady still thinks it an unseemly thing for him to talk of love when his mind is preoccupied by business.
This insensitive, and unsnubbable, man of the middle class now addresses a woman of the higher nobility. This, as he recognizes, is the most difficult proposition of all, for a lady leaning so far down from her social station is likely to be accused by the world of cherishing an unseemly passion. Rashly, the merchant boasts of his military prowess, which gives her the opportunity to point out that soldiers' calves are slender and their feet of modest dimensions, whereas his calves are fat and his feet so flat that they are as broad as they are long. The suitor complains that this, apart from being ungenerous, is a criticism of divine nature.
Andre now starts a new range of dialogues. A nobleman pays his addresses to a middle-class woman, a condescension which permits him to sit down beside her without first asking permission. But it is when he approaches a woman of simple nobility that he encounters his first big shock: the woman objects to his advances on the grounds that she is married, and has scruples about violating a happy bed. The nobleman concedes that husband and wife may feel deep affection for each other, but how absurd to mistake this for love! Love is secret, love is furtive, and therefore cannot exist in conjugal embraces. But the lady is unconvinced. She says that the love of which he talks so freely appears to be a consuming desire for carnal enjoyment, and she sees no reason why such satisfaction cannot be found in marriage. Ignoring this heresy, the higher nobleman continues to ply his partner with the rulings of the Countess of Champagne.
The higher nobleman meets his match again when he courts a higher noblewoman. She asks his advice on a problem propounded to her by a lady of excellent character, who was in the position of having to reject one of her two suitors, and who had invited each to say whether, if she were divided in two, he would prefer the top half or the bottom half. The higher nobleman, doubtless suspecting that whatever choice he recommends will be wrong, says that obviously the man who chose the upper half was the one to be preferred; anyone who preferred the lower portion should be hounded out of decent society. According to the noblewoman, this shows the most fundamental misconception. Who would want even the most beautiful woman in the world if she was unfitted for the purposes of Venus? Love's whole object was to obtain the solaces of the lower part, in which alone was fulfilment to be found. Therefore the man who chose the half which offered fruition was obviously more worthy than the one who contented himself with the half which offered only the preliminary joys. The noblewoman contends, too, that the foundations of a building are more important than the upper storeys, but the suitor (reflecting, no doubt, that you never know where you are with these high-born women) counters with the plea that trees are praised for their upper parts. This idiotic argument goes on a long time without either side scoring a clear advantage.
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