The first manifestation of overwhelming personality appears in Jesus, and he created the religion of love.  In him personality and love were convertible forces, one might even say they were identical.  He, first of all, revealed their mysterious intimate connection, and clearly showed that love can only be experienced by a distinct personality, because it is an emanation of the soul and not a natural instinct.

It was, again, personality which, in the twelfth century, produced a new force:  spiritual love projected not only on God and nature, but also on woman.  Now only had personality acquired its true significance; it no longer meant—­as it did in the mature Greek world—­the individual separated from his environment, the individual with a conscious beginning and a conscious end, but the principle of the synthesis, a higher entity above the mere individual, the source of all values and virtue.

Personality is the self-conscious, individual soul, producing out of its own wealth the universal ideal values, and re-absorbing and assimilating these ideal values in their higher form.  It admits of the fusion of the subjective with the universal and eternal, with the religious and artistic, the moral and scientific values of civilisation.  “Personality is the blending of the universal and the individual,” said Kierkegaard, expressing, if not exactly my meaning, something very near it.

I shall endeavour to depict the spiritual love of man for woman—­the position cannot be reversed—­from its inception to its climax.  I shall submit abundant evidence to make the great unbroken stream of emotion clearly apparent, and indicate all its tributaries.  I do not pretend that I have exhausted the subject—­that would be impossible.  The works from which I have drawn may be safely regarded as the direct outpouring of emotion; those purely lyric poets were entirely subjective and ever intent upon their own feelings; there hardly exists one Provencal, old-Italian, or mediaeval love-song without the “I.”

Spiritual love first appeared as a naive sentiment—­unconscious of its own peculiar characteristics—­in the poems of the earlier troubadours of Provence.  There is a poem in which the Provencals claim the fathership of the cult of woman; their opponents do not deny it, but add that it was an invention which “could fill no man’s stomach.”  These words express the great and insurmountable barrier between pure spiritual love and pleasure.  The Christian dualism:  soul-body, spirit-matter, had invaded the domain of love.

Spontaneous, genuine love, untainted by speculations and metaphysics, is found in the songs of the earlier troubadours.  The greatest among all of them, Bernart of Ventadour, was the first to praise chaste love.  If any champion of civilisation deserves a monument, it is this poet.

     Dead is the man who knows not love,
     A sweet tremor in the heart.

     Love’s rapture fills my heart
     With laughter and sighs. 
     Grief slays me a hundred times,
     Joy bids me rise.