Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic | Page 5

taste the subtle luxury of chastisement, of
reconciliation--the
religious spirit, too, knows that, and meets just there, as in Rousseau,
the delicacies of the earthly love. Here, under this strange complex of
conditions, as in some medicated air, exotic flowers of sentiment
expand, among people of a remote and unaccustomed beauty,
somnambulistic, frail, androgynous, the light almost shining through
them. Surely, such loves were too fragile and adventurous to last more
than for a moment.
That monastic religion of the Middle Age was, in fact, in many of its
bearings, like a beautiful disease or disorder of the senses: and a
religion which is a disorder of the senses must always be subject to
illusions. Reverie, illusion, delirium: they are the three stages of a fatal
descent both in the religion and the loves of the Middle Age. Nowhere
has the impression of this delirium been conveyed as by Victor Hugo in
Notre Dame de Paris. The [218] strangest creations of sleep seem here,
by some appalling licence, to cross the limit of the dawn. The English
poet too has learned the secret. He has diffused through King Arthur's
Tomb the maddening white glare of the sun, and tyranny of the moon,
not tender and far-off, but close down--the sorcerer's moon, large and
feverish. The colouring is intricate and delirious, as of "scarlet lilies."
The influence of summer is like a poison in one's blood, with a sudden
bewildered sickening of life and all things. In Galahad: a Mystery, the
frost of Christmas night on the chapel stones acts as a strong narcotic: a
sudden shrill ringing pierces through the numbness: a voice proclaims
that the Grail has gone forth through the great forest. It is in the Blue
Closet that this delirium reaches its height with a singular beauty,
reserved perhaps for the enjoyment of the few.

A passion of which the outlets are sealed, begets a tension of nerve, in
which the sensible world comes to one with a reinforced brilliancy and
relief--all redness is turned into blood, all water into tears. Hence a wild,
convulsed sensuousness in the poetry of the Middle Age, in which the
things of nature begin to play a strange delirious part. Of the things of
nature the medieval mind had a deep sense; but its sense of them was
not objective, no real escape [219] to the world without us. The aspects
and motions of nature only reinforced its prevailing mood, and were in
conspiracy with one's own brain against one. A single sentiment
invaded the world: everything was infused with a motive drawn from
the soul. The amorous poetry of Provence, making the starling and the
swallow its messengers, illustrates the whole attitude of nature in this
electric atmosphere, bent as by miracle or magic to the service of
human passion.
The most popular and gracious form of Provencal poetry was the
nocturn, sung by the lover at night at the door or under the window of
his mistress. These songs were of different kinds, according to the hour
at which they were intended to be sung. Some were to be sung at
midnight--songs inviting to sleep, the serena, or serenade; others at
break of day--waking songs, the aube or aubade.* This waking-song is
put sometimes into the mouth of a comrade of the lover, who plays
sentinel during the night, to watch for and announce the dawn:
sometimes into the mouth of one of the lovers, who are about to
separate. A modification of it is familiar to us all in Romeo and Juliet,
where the lovers debate whether the song they hear is of the nightingale
or the lark; the aubade, with the two other great forms of love-poetry
then floating in the world, the sonnet and the [220] epithalamium,
being here refined, heightened, and inwoven into the structure of the
play. Those, in whom what Rousseau calls les frayeurs nocturnes are
constitutional, know what splendour they give to the things of the
morning; and how there comes something of relief from physical pain
with the first white film in the sky. The Middle Age knew those terrors
in all their forms; and these songs of the morning win hence a strange
tenderness and effect. The crown of the English poet's book is one of
these appreciations of the dawn:--

"Pray but one prayer for me 'twixt thy closed lips,
Think but one thought of me up in the stars,
The summer-night
waneth, the morning light slips,
Faint and gray 'twixt the leaves of the aspen,
betwixt the cloud-bars,
That are patiently waiting there for the dawn:
Patient and colourless, though Heaven's gold
Waits to float through
them along with the sun.
Far out in the meadows, above the young
corn,
The heavy elms wait, and restless and cold
The uneasy wind rises; the
roses are dun;
Through