When we come to look more closely at the ethics of love at the time of the Renaissance, we are struck by a remarkable Contrast.The novelists and comic poets give us to understand that love consists only in sensual enjoyment, and that to win this, all means, tragic or comic, are not only permitted, but are interesting in proportion to their audacity and unscrupulousness.But if we turn to the best of the lyric poets and writers of dialogues, we find in them a deep and spiritual passion of the noblest kind, whose last and highest expression is a revival of the ancient belief in an original unity of souls in the Divine Being.And both modes of feeling were then genuine, and could co-exist in the same individual.It is not exactly a matter of glory, but it is a fact, that, in the cultivated man of modern times, this sentiment can be not merely unconsciously present in both its highest and lowest stages, but may also manifest itself openly, and even artistically.The modern man, like the man of antiquity, is in this respect too a microcosm, which the medieval man was not and could not be.
To begin with the morality of the novelists.They treat chiefly, as we have said, of married women, and consequently of adultery.