died, like Tannhauser, he was on his way to Rome. What might
have happened had he reached his journey's end is uncertain; and
it is in this uncertain twilight that his relation to the general
beliefs of his age has always remained. In this, as in other things,
he prefigures the character of the Renaissance, that movement in
[7] which, in various ways, the human mind wins for itself a new
kingdom of feeling and sensation and thought, not opposed to but
only beyond and independent of the spiritual system then actually
realised. The opposition into which Abelard is thrown, which
gives its colour to his career, which breaks his soul to pieces, is a
no less subtle opposition than that between the merely
professional, official, hireling ministers of that system, with their
ignorant worship of system for its own sake, and the true child of
light, the humanist, with reason and heart and senses quick, while
theirs were almost dead. He reaches out towards, he attains,
modes of ideal living, beyond the prescribed limits of that
system, though in essential germ, it may be, contained within it.
As always happens, the adherents of the poorer and narrower
culture had no sympathy with, because no understanding of, a
culture richer and more ample than their own. After the
discovery of wheat they would still live upon acorns--apres
l'invention du ble ils voulaient encore vivre du gland; and would
hear of no service to the higher needs of humanity with
instruments not of their forging.

But the human spirit, bold through those needs, was too strong
for them. Abelard and Heloise write their letters--letters with a
wonderful outpouring of soul--in medieval Latin; and Abelard,
though he composes songs in the vulgar tongue, writes also in
Latin those [8] treatises in which he tries to find a ground of