idolatrous. The cult of the Virgin, while doing honour to the new
conception of womanhood, was also a protest against a secular
romanticism. Here and there a Wolfram von Eschenbach essays the feat of
reconciling poetry with religion in the picture of the perfect knight.
But the school of _courtoisie_ prevailed; the most celebrated of
the troubadours are mundane, not to say profane; Walther von der
Vogelweide, with his bitter attacks upon the Papacy, is more typical of
his class than Wolfram with his allegory of Parsifal and the Sangraal.
It was in Provence, on the eve of the Albigensian Crusade, in the
society which was most indifferent to official Christianity and most
hostile to the clergy, that chivalry was most sedulously preached and
developed in the most curious detail. In the hands of the troubadours it
became a gospel of pageantry and fanfaron, of artificial sentiments and
artificial heroisms, cloaking the materialism, the sensuality and the
inordinate ostentation of a theatrical and frivolous society,
intoxicated with the pride of life.




V

THE PAPACY BEFORE GREGORY VII


An institution is not necessarily discredited when we discover that it
has grown from small beginnings, has been applied under new conditions
to new purposes, and in the course of a long history has been defended
by arguments which are demonstrably false. The child, no doubt, is
father of the man; but the man is something different from, and may well