CHIVALRY AND PLATONIC LOVE 67 



beautiful being supposed to have some affinity to the 

 godhead of the Church. 



Chivalry was platonism applied to the conditions 

 of mediaeval life. Plato took passion as one of the 

 degrees in his ascending scale of the love of the beau- 

 tiful. He started with woman in order to conduct 

 us to an abstract idea. Chivalry accompanied him 

 half-way; it rose to the conception of womanhood 

 as an object of veneration, and there stopped. By 

 and by chivalry, as an institution, fell to pieces, but 

 its spirit survived in the poetry of Dante and Petrarch, 

 and is traceable throughout the fabric of modern 

 society. When those writers were born the last 

 strains of the troubadours were dying away, but they 

 took up the burden of the troubadour poesy, each in 

 his own key, and gave expression to what was really 

 vital and enduring in the system of chivalry as dis- 

 tinguished from its metaphysical nonsense. 



Platonic love as now understood dates from the 

 raptures of Dante and Petrarch over the ideal Beatrix 

 and the still more ideal Laura. Both poets take a 

 woman as their text, and both lose themselves in 

 adoration of what Goethe calls das ewig Weihliche. 

 The power of beauty and the ideas of happiness and 

 virtue associated with it in noble minds are the 



