Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic | Page 4

date, it renews on a more delicate type the poetry of a past age, but
must not be confounded with it. The secret of the enjoyment of it is that
inversion of home-sickness known to some, that incurable thirst for the
sense of escape, which no actual form of life [214] satisfies, no poetry
even, if it be merely simple and spontaneous.
The writings of the "romantic school," of which the aesthetic poetry is
an afterthought, mark a transition not so much from the pagan to the
medieval ideal, as from a lower to a higher degree of passion in
literature. The end of the eighteenth century, swept by vast disturbing
currents, experienced an excitement of spirit of which one note was a
reaction against an outworn classicism severed not more from nature
than from the genuine motives of ancient art; and a return to true
Hellenism was as much a part of this reaction as the sudden
preoccupation with things medieval. The medieval tendency is in
Goethe's Goetz von Berlichingen, the Hellenic in his Iphigenie. At first
this medievalism was superficial, or at least external. Adventure,
romance in the frankest sense, grotesque individualism-- that is one
element in medieval poetry, and with it alone Scott and Goethe dealt.
Beyond them were the two other elements of the medieval spirit: its
mystic religion at its apex in Dante and Saint Louis, and its mystic
passion, passing here and there into the great romantic loves of
rebellious flesh, of Lancelot and Abelard. That stricter, imaginative
medievalism which re-creates the mind of the Middle Age, so that the
form, the presentment grows outward [215] from within, came later
with Victor Hugo in France, with Heine in Germany.

In the Defence of Guenevere: and Other Poems, published by Mr.
William Morris now many years ago, the first typical specimen of
aesthetic poetry, we have a refinement upon this later, profounder
medievalism. The poem which gives its name to the volume is a thing
tormented and awry with passion, like the body of Guenevere
defending herself from the charge of adultery, and the accent falls in
strange, unwonted places with the effect of a great cry. In truth these
Arthurian legends, in their origin prior to Christianity, yield all their
sweetness only in a Christian atmosphere. What is
characteristic in
them is the strange suggestion of a deliberate choice between Christ
and a rival lover. That religion, monastic religion at any rate, has its
sensuous side, a dangerously sensuous side, has been often seen: it is
the experience of Rousseau as well as of the Christian mystics. The
Christianity of the Middle Age made way among a people whose loss
was in the life of the senses partly by its aesthetic beauty, a thing so
profoundly felt by the Latin hymnwriters, who for one moral or
spiritual sentiment have a hundred
sensuous images. And so in those
imaginative loves, in their highest expression, the Provencal poetry, it
is a rival religion with a [216] new rival cultus that we see. Coloured
through and through with Christian sentiment, they are rebels against it.
The rejection of one worship for another is never lost sight of. The
jealousy of that other lover, for whom these words and images and
refined ways of sentiment were first devised, is the secret here of a
borrowed, perhaps factitious colour and heat. It is the mood of the
cloister taking a new direction, and winning so a later space of life it
never anticipated.
Hereon, as before in the cloister, so now in the chateau, the reign of
reverie set in. The devotion of the cloister knew that mood thoroughly,
and had sounded all its stops. For the object of this devotion was absent
or veiled, not limited to one supreme plastic form like Zeus at Olympia
or Athena in the Acropolis, but distracted, as in a fever dream, into a
thousand symbols and reflections. But then, the Church, that new Sibyl,
had a thousand secrets to make the absent near. Into this kingdom of
reverie, and with it into a paradise of ambitious refinements, the earthly
love enters, and becomes a prolonged somnambulism. Of religion it
learns the art of directing towards an unseen object sentiments whose

natural direction is towards objects of sense. Hence a love defined by
the absence of the beloved, choosing to be without hope, protesting
[217] against all lower uses of love, barren, extravagant, antinomian. It
is the love which is incompatible with marriage, for the chevalier who
never comes, of the serf for the chatelaine, of the rose for the

nightingale, of Rudel for the Lady of Tripoli. Another element of
extravagance came in with the feudal spirit: Provencal love is full of
the very forms of vassalage. To be the servant of love, to have offended,
to