Think upon that. Think on the wasted treasure of loving-kindness of which that monk and the thousands he represents cheated his fellow-men. O love of human creatures, of man for woman, parents and children, of brethren, love of friends; fuel and food, which keeps the soul alive, balm curing its wounds, or, if they be incurable, helps the poor dying thing to die at last in peace--this was those early saints' notion of thee!
To refuse thus to love is to refuse not merely the highest usefulness, but to refuse also the best kind of justice. Here again, nay, here more than ever, we may learn from those wonderful letters. They constitute, indeed, a document of the human soul to which, in my recollection, one other only, Benjamin Constant's _Adolphe_, can be compared. But in these letters,--hers of grief, humiliation, hopelessness, making her malign her noble self; and his, bitter, self-righteous, crammed with theological moralisings--we see not merely the dual drama of two ill-assorted creatures, but the much more terrible tragedy, superadded by the presence, looming, impassive, as of Cypris in Euripides' Hippolytus, of a third all-powerful and superhuman entity: the spirit of monasticism. The unequal misery, the martyrdom of Héloïse arises herefrom, that she rebels against this _Deus ex machina_; that this nun of the eleventh century is a strong warm-hearted modern woman, fit for Browning. While Abélard is her whole life, the intimate companion of her highest thoughts, she is only a toy to him, and a toy which his theologian's pride, his monkish self-debasement, makes him afraid and ashamed of. Abélard has been for her, and ever remains, something like Brahma to Goethe's Bayadere; her love, her love above all for his intrepid intellect, has raised him to a sacredness so great, that his whim, his fame, his peace, his very petulance can be refused nothing; and that, on the other hand, any concession taken from him seems positive sacrilege. Hence her refusal of marriage, her answer, "that she would be prouder as his mistress--the Latin word is harlot--than as the wife of Cæsar." Fifty years later, in the kind, passionate, poetical days of St. Francis, Héloïse might have given this loving fervour to Christ, and been a happy, if a deluded, woman; but in those frigid monkish days, there was no one for her to love, save this frigid monkish Abélard. As it is, therefore, she loves Christ and God in obedience to Abélard; she passionately cons the fathers, the Scriptures, merely because, so to speak, the hand of Abélard has lain on the page, the eyes of Abélard have followed the characters; and finally, after all her vain entreaties for (she scarce knows what!) love, sympathy, one personal word, she feeds her starving heart on the only answer to her supplications--the dialectic exercises, metaphysical treatises, and theological sermons (containing even the forms applicable only to a congregation) which he doles out to her. Thankful for anything which comes _from_ him, however little it comes _to_ her.