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 hymn-
writers, 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.
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