Full well I know that right and good Is all I do for love of her.
The man who loves not is not noble-minded, For love is fruit and blossom of the highest.
Thus love transfigures ev'ry deed we do, And love gives everything a deeper sense. Love is the teaching of all genuine worth. So base is no man's heart on this wide earth, Love could not guide it to great excellence.
Giraut of Calenso said of the City of Love that no base or ignorant man could enter it, and the Italian Lapo Gianni sang:
The youthful maiden who appeared to me So filled my soul with pure and lofty thoughts, That henceforth all ignoble things I scorn.
Dante in the _Vita Nuova_ calls Beatrice "the destroyer of all evil and the queen of all virtues."
The very thought of the beloved makes a good man of the lover:
"I cannot sin when I am in her thoughts."
asserts the sincere Guirot Riquier, and he prays Christ to teach him the true love of woman.
While it was a generally accepted theory that love was the source of man's perfection, I know of only one passage (by Raimon of Miraval) contending that woman, also, was perfected by love; everywhere else we meet the universal and silently accepted opinion that the essence of womanhood is something unearthly, unfathomable and divine. Perhaps the most classical formulation of the new doctrine, to wit, that spiritual love is the begetter of all virtue and the mother of chastity, outside which there is nothing divine, is to be found in the poems of the somewhat pedantic Montanhagol:
The lover who loves not the highest love, Is like a fool polluting precious wine. Let loftiest love alone within thee move, And purity and virtue will be thine.
Guirot Riquier expressed a similar sentiment:
For chaste and pure my love has always been, From my "sweet bliss" I've never asked a boon; If I may humbly serve her night and noon, My life be her inalienable lien.
Walter von der Vogelweide says: "Love is a treasure heaped up of all virtues."
As time went on the barrier erected between true spiritual love and insidious sensuality became more and more clearly defined; the former pervaded the erotic emotion of the whole period. Parallel with chaste love, sensuality continued to exist as something contemptible, unworthy of a noble mind; and it must be admitted that according to the contemporary "Fabliaux," later German comedies and Italian and French novels, the sexual manifestations of the period, were of incredible coarseness. As against these, spiritual love was not merely an artistic and theoretic concept, but the profound emotion of the cultured minds, and remained a powerful and creative force even in later centuries. Spiritual love and sexuality were irreconcilable contradistinctions; the man who thought otherwise was looked upon as a libertine. The following passages from the poems of the troubadours and their heirs, the Italian poets of the _dolce stil nuovo_, will prove the historical reality of this relationship, the ideal of the declining Middle Ages. We need take no account of the German minnesingers, for although they shared the same ideal, they did not influence principle in the same way as the neo-Latin poets.