Henry Osborn Taylor

“ From the beginning Lancelot’s love is worship, it is holy; and almost from the beginning it is unholy. From the beginning, too, it is the man’s inspiration, it is his strength; it makes him the peerless knight, peerless in courtesy, peerless in emprise; this love gives him the single eye, the unswerving heart, the resistless valour to accomplish those adventures wherein all other knights had found their shame—they were not perfect lovers! Only through his perfect love could Lancelot have accomplished that greatest adventure of the Val des faux amants;—Val sans retour for all other knights. ”

“ Black-coloured the unsteadfast comrade; white the man whose thoughts keep troth. False comradeship is fit for hell fire. Likewise let women heed whither they carry their honour, and on whom they bestow their love, that they may not rue their troth. Before God, I counsel good women to observe right measure. Their fortress is shame: I cannot wish them better weal. The false one gains false reward; her praise vanishes. Wide is the fame of many a fair; but if her heart be counterfeit, ’tis a false gem set in gold. The woman true to womanhood, be hers the praise—not lessened by her outside hue. ”

“ When the Weaver of wiles failed to cause me utterly to despair, he tried with other arguments of guile to lead me to blaspheme the divine justice, suggesting thoughts, as if condoling with my misery: ‘O most unhappy youth, whose grief no man deigns to consider—but men are not to blame, for they do not know your trouble. God alone knows, and since He can do all things, why does He not aid you in tribulation, when for love of Him you have surrendered the world and now endure this agony? ”

“ Thou shalt be the Grail’s lord; with thee thy wife Condwiramurs, and thy sons Lohengrin and Kardeiz, whom she bore to thee after thy going. Thy mouth shall question Anfortas—unto his joy. Now the planets favour thee; thy grief is spent. The Grail and the Grail’s power shall let thee have no part in evil. When young, thou didst get thee sorrow, which betrayed thy joy as it came;—thou hast won thy soul’s peace, and in sorrow thou hast endured unto thy life’s joy. ”

“ A city boy indeed, and what a full personality! He was to be a man of human curiosity, a tireless sight-seer. His interest is universal; his human love quick enough—for those he loved; for he was no saint, although a Minorite. His detestation is vivid, illuminating; it brings the hated man before us. And Salimbene’s wide-open eyes are his own. He sees with a fresh vision; he is himself; a man of temperament, which lends its colours to the panorama. ”

“ But the Soul feeling its nature and its affinity with God, through love, makes answer boldly: “The fish cannot drown in the water, nor the bird sink in the air, nor gold perish in the flame, where it gains its bright clarity and colour. God has granted to all creatures to follow their natures; how can I withstand mine? To God will I go, who is my Father by nature, my Brother through His humility, my Bridegroom through love, and I am His forever.” ”

“ I have read that God is love; not that He is honour, or dignity. God indeed demands to be feared as Lord, to be honoured as Father, and as Bridegroom to be loved. Which excels the rest? Love, surely. Without it, fear is penal, and honour graceless. Fear is slavish till manumitted by love; and the honour which does not rise from love is adulation. To God alone belong honour and glory; but He will accept neither unless it is flavoured with love’s honey.
“Love asks neither cause nor fruit beyond itself. I love because I love; I love that I may love. A great thing is love. ”

“ There lay their romance, thither pointed their veriest thinking, thither drew their utter yearning.
Is it possible that the Middle Ages should speak to us, as through a common humanity? Their mask is by no means dumb: in full voice speaks the noble beauty of Chartres Cathedral. Such mediaeval product, we hope, is of the universal human, and therefore of us as well as of the bygone craftsmen. Why it moves us, we are not certain, being ignorant, perhaps, of the building’s formative and earnestly intended meaning. ”

“ Lord, where shall I lay it?”
“Thou shalt lay thy heart’s desire nowhere else than in my divine heart and on my human breast. There only wilt thou be comforted and kissed with my spirit.”
Love casts out fear and difference, and lifts the Soul to equality with the divine Lover. Through the passion of love the Soul may pass into the Beloved’s being, and become one with Him: “He, thy life, died from love for thy sake; now love Him so that thou mayest long to die for His sake. ”

“ They are rich, and possess a good land, with honour. They can guard their own; what people is their equal in battle? Diligent are they also in the Word of God. Otfrid is quite moving in his sympathetic sense of the sorrow of the Last Judgment, when the mother from child shall be parted, the father from son, the lord from his faithful thane, friend from friend—all human kind. Deep is the mystic love and yearning with which he realizes Heaven as one’s own land: there is life without death, light without darkness, the angels and eternal bliss. ”

“ In a forest one day he rode up to a hut, where Sigune was living as a recluse, feeding her soul with thoughts of her dead lover, barring all fancies that might disunite her from the dead whom she still held as her husband. Parzival recognized her, and she him, when he removed his helm: “You are Sir Parzival—tell me, how is it with the Grail?”
“It has given me sorrow enough; I left a land where I was king, a loving wife, fairest of women; I suffer anguish for her love, and more because of that high goal of Munsalvaesch which is not reached. ”

“ In that age, the hopes and fears and wonderment of men looked to the recluse as the perfected saint. No wonder that those Italian lands, so blithely sinful and so grievously penitent, were moved by this volcanic tempest of a man, fierce, merciless to the flesh, convulsed with scorching tears, famed for austerities and miracles. He lashed men from their sins; men feared before one whose presence was a threat of hell. Said the Marquis of Tuscany: “Not the emperor nor any mortal man, can put such fear in me as Romuald’s look. ”

“ Rightly renouncing all other affections, the Bride reposes on love alone, and returns a love reciprocal. And when she has poured her whole self out in love, what is that compared with the perennial flood of that fountain? Not equals in abundance are this loving one and Love, the soul and the Word, the Bride and Bridegroom, creature and Creator—no more than thirst equals the fount. ”

“ The pure in heart He chooses. Woe to the man who harbours evil. What help is there in human craft for him whose deeds put God to shame? You are lost if you act in His despite, who is prepared for either love or hate. Now change your heart; with goodness earn His thanks.”
“Sir,” says Parzival, “I am glad to be taught by you of Him who does not fail to reward both crime and virtue. With pain and struggle I have so borne my young life to this day that through keeping troth I have got sorrow.” ”

“ It is temperament that makes the recluse; his reasons are but his justification. In solitude he lives the reaches of his life; from solitude he draws his utmost bliss. To leave it involves the torture of separation, and then all the petty pains of unhappy labour and distasteful intercourse with men. “Whoever would reach the summit of perfection should keep within the cloister of his seclusion, cherish spiritual leisure, and shudder at traversing the world, as if he were about to plunge into a sea of blood. ”

“ The mediaeval fancy sported with this love; the mediaeval mind delighted in it as a theme of argument. And the fancy might be as fantastic as the reasoning was finely spun.
The literature of this love draws no sharp lines between love as resistless passion and love as enabling virtue; yet these two aspects are distinguishable. The first was less an original creation of the Middle Ages than the second. Antiquity had known the passion which overwhelmed the stricken mortal, and had treated it as something put upon the man and woman, a convulsive joy, also a bane. ”

“ To do right, to imitate Christ and obey and love Him, is a privilege. Can it be other than a joy? Indeed, this following of Christ is so blessed, that not to rejoice continually in it, betokens some failure in obedience and love. Many have approved this Christian logic; but to realize it in one’s heart and manifest it in one’s life, was the more singular grace of Francis of Assisi. His heart sang always unto the Lord; his love flowed out in gladness to his fellows; his enchanted spirit rejoiced in every creature. The gospel of this new evangelist awoke the hearts of men to love and joy. ”

“ With Adam’s seed came sorrow and joy; through him our lineage is from God, but through him, too, we carry sin, for which God took man’s image, and so suffered, battling with troth against untroth. Turn to Him if you would not be lost. Plato, Sibyl the prophetess, foretold Him. With divine love His mighty hand plucked us from hell. The joyful news they tell of Him the True Lover is this: He is radiant light, and wavers not in His love. Men may have either His love or hate. The unrepentant sinner flees the divine faithfulness; he who does penance wins His clemency. ”

“ Love is such a blessed thing, such a blessed striving, that no one without its teaching has worth or honour. These lovers died long ago; yet their love and troth, their life, their death, will still give troth and honour to seekers after these. Their death lives and is ever new, as we listen to the tale. Evidently, in Gottfried’s mind the Tristan tale of love’s almighty passion carried the thought of love as the inspiration of a noble life. Yet that thought was not native to the legend, and finds scant exemplification in Gottfried’s poem. ”

“ So this impetuous life passes before our eyes filled with adventure, touched with romance, its colours heightened through tradition. As it draws to its close the love in it seems to exceed the wrath; and thus it ends: as the old man was resting himself the day before his death, seated by the barn of the monastery, the white work-horse came and laid its head against his breast. Late the same night, reclining on his stone bed he spoke his last words, enjoining peace and charity among the monks. ”

“ These represented a side of human growth not unrelated to the supreme mediaeval achievement, the vital appropriation and emotional humanizing of patristic Christianity. For that carried an impassioning of its teachings with love and tears, a fostering of them with devotion, an adorning of them with quivering fantasies, a translation of them into art, into poetry, into romance. With what wealth of love and terror, with what grandeur of imagination, with what power of mystery and symbolism, did the Middle Ages glorify their heritage, turning its precepts into spirit. ”

“ As wide apart as life will be the phases of its manifestations. The tears of Peter Damiani are not like the love of the God-man in St. Bernard; St. Francis’s love of Christ and love of man is again different and new; and the mystic thought-shot visions of a Hildegard of Bingen are as blue to crimson when compared with the sense-passion for the Bridegroom of a Mechthild of Magdeburg. ”

“ But still the women feel most; the men strike, or are struck. Hard and cold grey, with hidden fire, was the temper of these people. Their love was not over-tender, and yet stronger than death: cries Brynhild’s ghost riding hellward, “Men and women will always be born to live in woe. We two, Sigurd and I, shall never part again.” And the power of such love speaks in the deed and word of Sigrun, who answers the ghostly call of slain Helgi from his barrow, and enters it to cast her arms about him there: “I am as glad to meet thee as are the greedy hawks of Odin when they scent the slain. ”

“ The fearful Iseult plotted to murder the true Brangaene, who alone knew. After a while Mark’s suspicion is aroused, to be lulled by guile. Plot and counterplot go on; the lovers win and win again; truth and honour, everything save love’s joy and fear and all-sufficiency, are cast to the winds. Even the “Judgment of God” is tricked; the hot iron does not burn Iseult swearing her false oath, literally true. Many a time Mark’s jealousy has been fiercely stirred, only to be tricked to sleep again. Yet he knows that Tristan and Iseult are lovers. ”