OF SIX MEDLEVAL WOMEN 



its parchment pages. How strange a feeling 

 possesses us as we turn over its leaves, leaves 

 across which the shadows of readers of bygone 

 days still seem to flit ! Could these pages speak, 

 of what would they tell ? Of desires that die 

 not, of longings that are immortal, of love en- 

 throned. 



When first read, these stories, so simply are 

 they told, may seem somewhat slight and super- 

 ficial. But this is the general characteristic of 

 mediaeval literature, which, for the most part, 

 recognised things in outline only, and sought, 

 and perhaps possessed, but little knowledge of 

 the hidden springs of motive. The writers of 

 those times troubled as little about moral, as 

 the early painters did about physical, anatomy. 

 Still, in spite of this indifference to what has 

 become almost a craze in our own day, Marie's 

 lays are so full of charming detail, deftly handled, 

 that they give much the same sense of delight as 

 do delicate ivories or dainty embroidery. Some- 

 times, it is true, she scarcely, despite all this 

 outward charm, seems to touch the world of 

 fact. Yet in this ideal atmosphere which she so 

 essentially made her own, she contrives to con- 

 vey such a sense of reality, that for the moment 

 we are wholly possessed by it and carried away, 

 without questioning, into her fairyland. And a 

 beautiful fairyland it is, where love triumphs for 

 the most part, not in heedless ecstasy along 

 flower-bestrewn ways, but through self-sacrifice 

 and suffering mutually accepted and mutually 



