The Renaissance | Page 5

wood of a staff
which the Pope had carried in his hand was covered with leaves and
flowers. So, in the cloister of Godstow, a petrified tree was shown of
which the nuns told that the fair Rosamond, who had died among them,
had declared that, the tree being then alive and green, it would be
changed into stone at the hour of her salvation. When Abelard died,
like Tannhäuser, he was on his way to Rome. What might have

happened had he reached his journey's end is uncertain; and it is in this
uncertain twilight that his relation to the general beliefs of his age has
always remained. In this, as in other things, he prefigures the character
of the Renaissance, that movement in [7] which, in various ways, the
human mind wins for itself a new kingdom of feeling and sensation and
thought, not opposed to but only beyond and independent of the
spiritual system then actually realised. The opposition into which
Abelard is thrown, which gives its colour to his career, which breaks
his soul to pieces, is a no less subtle opposition than that between the
merely professional, official, hireling ministers of that system, with
their ignorant worship of system for its own sake, and the true child of
light, the humanist, with reason and heart and senses quick, while theirs
were almost dead. He reaches out towards, he attains, modes of ideal
living, beyond the prescribed limits of that system, though in essential
germ, it may be, contained within it. As always happens, the adherents
of the poorer and narrower culture had no sympathy with, because no
understanding of, a culture richer and more ample than their own. After
the discovery of wheat they would still live upon acorns--après
l'invention du blé ils voulaient encore vivre du gland; and would hear
of no service to the higher needs of humanity with instruments not of
their forging.
But the human spirit, bold through those needs, was too strong for them.
Abelard and Heloïse write their letters--letters with a wonderful
outpouring of soul--in medieval Latin; and Abelard, though he
composes songs in the vulgar tongue, writes also in Latin those [8]
treatises in which he tries to find a ground of reality below the
abstractions of philosophy, as one bent on trying all things by their
congruity with human experience, who had felt the hand of Heloïse,
and looked into her eyes, and tested the resources of humanity in her
great and energetic nature. Yet it is only a little later, early in the
thirteenth century, that French prose romance begins; and in one of the
pretty volumes of the Bibliothèque Elzevirienne some of the most
striking fragments of it may be found, edited with much intelligence. In
one of these thirteenth-century stories, Li Amitiez de Ami et Amile,
that free play of human affection, of the claims of which Abelard's
story is an assertion, makes itself felt in the incidents of a great

friendship, a friendship pure and generous, pushed to a sort of
passionate exaltation, and more than faithful unto death. Such
comradeship, though instances of it are to be found everywhere, is still
especially a classical motive; Chaucer expressing the sentiment of it so
strongly in an antique tale, that one knows not whether the love of both
Palamon and Arcite for Emelya, or of those two for each other, is the
chiefer subject of the Knight's Tale--
He cast his eyen upon Emelya, And therewithal he bleynte and cried,
ah! As that he stongen were unto the herte.
What reader does not refer something of the [9] bitterness of that cry to
the spoiling, already foreseen, of the fair friendship, which had made
the prison of the two lads sweet hitherto with its daily offices?
The friendship of Amis and Amile is deepened by the romantic
circumstance of an entire personal resemblance between the two heroes,
through which they pass for each other again and again, and thereby
into many strange adventures; that curious interest of the Doppelgänger,
which begins among the stars with the Dioscuri, being entwined in and
out through all the incidents of the story, like an outward token of the
inward similitude of their souls. With this, again, is connected, like a
second reflection of that inward similitude, the conceit of two
marvellously beautiful cups, also exactly like each other--children's
cups, of wood, but adorned with gold and precious stones. These two
cups, which by their resemblance help to bring the friends together at
critical moments, were given to them by the Pope, when he baptized
them at Rome, whither the parents had taken them for that purpose, in
gratitude for their birth. They cross and recross very strangely in the
narrative, serving the two heroes almost like living things, and