The medieval romantic tradition has come down to us so laden with beauty and mystery that we are apt to think, as we see it melt away, that human achievements are being permanently depreciated. That illusion occurs in every age of transition. It was notably so in the eighteenth century, which represented a highly important stage in the emancipation of women. To some that century seems to have been given up to empty gallantry and facile pleasure. Yet it was not only the age in which women for the first time succeeded in openly attaining their supreme social influence, 17 it was an age of romantic love, and the noble or poignant love-stories which have reached us from the records of that period surpass those of any other age.
If we believe with Goethe that the religion of the future consists in a triple reverence—the reverence for what is above us, the reverence for what is below us, and the reverence for our equals 18—we need not grieve overmuch if one form of this reverence, the first, and that which Goethe regarded as the earliest and crudest,
has lost its exclusive claim. Reverence is essential to all romantic love. To bring down the Madonna and the Virgin from their pedestals to share with men the common responsibilities and duties of life is not to divest them of the claim to reverence. It is merely the sign of a change in the form of that reverence, a change which heralds a new romantic love.
It would be premature to attempt to define the exact outline of the new forms of romantic love, or the precise lineaments of the beings who will most ardently evoke that love. In literature, indeed, the ideals of life cast their shadow before, and we may surely trace a change in the erotic ideals mirrored in literature. The woman whom Dickens idealized in David Copperfield is unlike indeed to the series of women of a new type introduced by George Meredith, and the modern heroine generally exhibits more of the robust, open-eyed and spontaneous qualities of that later type than the blind and clinging nature of the amiable simpletons of