The Prior enumerates his new duties to him, warning him never to listen to the nightingale's song, never to sleep under "eglantine and mayflower," and, above all, never to look a woman in the eyes. The exhortation ends in a long string of eight-lined stanzas, being variations to the theme "Sweet eyes."
"Doux yeulx qui tousjours vont et viennent;
Doux yeulx eschauffans le plisson,
De ceulx qui amoureux deviennent. . . .
"Doux yeulx a cler esperlissans,
Qui dient: C'est fait quant tu vouldras,
A ceulx qu'ils sentent bien puissans. . . ."[1]
Towards the middle of the fifteenth century all the conventional genres of erotic poetry are of a languishing tenor, and bear the stamp of resigned melancholy. Even cynical contempt of woman grows refined. In the Quinze Joyes de Mariage the mischievous and gross purpose is tempered by wistful sentimentality. By its sober realism, by the elegance of its form and the subtlety of its psychology, this work is a precursor of the "novel of manners" of modern times.
In all that concerns the expression of love, literature profited by the models and the experience of a long series of past centuries. Masters of such diversity of spirit as Plato and Ovid, the troubadours and the wandering students, Dante and Jean de Meun, had bequeathed to it a perfected instrument. Pictorial art, on the contrary, having neither models nor tradition, was primitive in the strict sense of the word, in respect of erotic expression. Not till the eighteenth century was painting to overtake literature in point of delicate expression of love. The artist of the fifteenth century had not yet learned to be frivolous or sentimental. In the miniatures of that time the posture of lovers embracing remains hieratic and solemn. A portrait of a Dutch gentlewoman, Lysbet of Duvenvoorde, by an unknown master before 1430, shows a figure of such severe dignity that a modern scholar has taken
- ↑ Sweet eyes that always come and go; Sweet eyes heating the fur coat Of those who fall in love. . . .
Sweet eyes of pearly clearness, That say: I am ready when you please, To those whom they feel to be powerful.
Of which they often turned the leaves As a sign of devotion; But their sorrow and tears Clearly showed their emotion.
