It
appears that he composed many verses in the vulgar tongue:
already the young men sang them on the quay below the house.
Those songs, says M. de Remusat, [5] were probably in the taste
of the Trouveres, "of whom he was one of the first in date, or, so
to speak, the predecessor." It is the same spirit which has
moulded the famous "letters," written in the quaint Latin of the
middle age.
At the foot of that early Gothic tower, which the next generation
raised to grace the precincts of Abelard's school, on the
"Mountain of Saint Genevieve," the historian Michelet sees in
thought "a terrible assembly; not the hearers of Abelard alone,
fifty bishops, twenty cardinals, two popes, the whole body of
scholastic philosophy; not only the learned Heloise, the teaching
of languages, and the Renaissance; but Arnold of Brescia--that is
to say, the revolution." And so from the rooms of this shadowy
house by the Seine side we see that spirit going abroad, with its
qualities already well defined, its intimacy, its languid sweetness,
its rebellion, its subtle skill in dividing the elements of human
passion, its care for physical beauty, its worship of the body,
which penetrated the early literature of Italy, and finds an echo
even in Dante.
That Abelard is not mentioned in the Divine Comedy may appear
a singular omission to the reader of Dante, who seems to have
inwoven into the texture of his work whatever had impressed him
as either effective in colour or spiritually significant among the
recorded incidents of actual life.
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