P ROFESSOR C. S. LEWIS, in writing of the growth of courtly
love poetry in his Allegory of Love, claims that 'French poets in
the 11th century discovered, or invented, or were the first to
express, that romantic species of passion which English poets were
still writing about in the 19th. They effected', he continues, 'a change
which has left no corner of our daily life untouched, and they erected
impassable barriers between us and the classical past or the Oriental
present. Compared with this revolution, the Renaissance is a mere
ripple on the surface of literature.' If the history of painting were
primarily under consideration, the critical change -- the change
between medieval and modern -- would, I suppose, have to be put
not earlier than the 14th century. But it is arguable that with sculpture
a vital change took place nearly two hundred years earlier. Consider,
by way of example, the small relief representing Adam and Eve,
from the south porch at Rheims (I34a). Its date may be about 1240.
They are as alive and as human as a Greek god and a Greek goddess.
The relief carries us forward to the Adam and Eve of Dürer, leaving
the withered Adam and Eve of the Hildesheim bronze doors (134b)
in the archaic past. Was this work on the Rheims porch only what
Dr. Bolgar called (in the phrase we examined in our last lecture, in
relation to the history of learning), simply a false start? Or is this, as
with literature, though somewhat later in time, one of those 'real
changes in human sentiment' of which Professor C. S. Lewis speaks,
holding that 'there are perhaps three or four on record' and that the
awakening of an interest in courtly love is one of them? Paradoxically
the very change Professor Lewis is discussing might itself be regarded
from some points of view as a 'false start'. We might isolate that
stereotyping of forms which takes place in some of the courtly litera-
ture, and call its later phases mere convention. We might claim that
a fresh beginning had to be made with Chaucer, and yet another
with Sidney and with Shakespeare. Yet in sculpture, particularly in
France, there was, I think, a 'clear-cut line of development'. The

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