THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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not lie founded outside our self in the other world and in church norms, but in man and this world of his. Genius preaches against virginity and sodomy, threatens with
hell all those who do not heed the dictates of nature and of love, promises the faithful life without end in an efficient Mohammedan Zion, irradiated by Jesus and the
loveliest women. Encouraged by the words of Genius and protected by Venus, the platoon of love invades the garden, on towards the hidden virgin, who ‘is more
perfect than the statue of Pygmalion’; Jealousy, Shame, Fear and other allegories of emotion put countless obstacles in the way, but Courteousness, Frankness,
Kindness, and above all Bel­Accueil again (the son of Courtoisie) liberate the rose of love from its fortress, and entrust it to the lover. ‘Ci est le roman de la Rose/où
l'art d'amors est tote enclose’;* the vaginal allegory of the rose forms the ground of utopian pleasure in the Gothic Cythera. Digressions on the duty of man to propagate
himself are scattered throughout, together with rich satire, astronomy, nominalist philosophy of nature, geographical fairytales, theories about money and the circulation
of money, about classical heroes, about the origin of subservience, about communist utopias. ‘Chascune por chascun commune/Et chascun commun por chascune’:†
the social unrest of the fourteenth century casts its light ahead of it. Especially in that part of the poem which Jean de Meung already wrote for the rising bourgeoisie,
with ruthless questioning, and turning to nature. A Rousseau of the Middle Ages speaks out in the midst of the feudal ars amandi, advocates the original state of things
through the metaphors of free love. So far did Cythera extend in a work of literature, so frivolously and subversively, so learnedly and with such cryptic elegance —
Cupid at the end of the world.
There is distance everywhere here, but a distance still tenderly veiled for us. When it appears for itself, it becomes very great foreignness, now dawning in itself. Its form
is then fictional perspective, in the south, and all the more so in the north. The oceanic feeling is part of it, as one of boundless expanse and as a Yes within it flowing
through everything. When mists fall, the expanse appears as an Ossianic landscape, as that which in its intensified form has been called the utopia of Thule. And yet
which is again by no means merely northern, as noted above, but strongly fragrant, full of veils, half­open doors, oriental smoke. Jean Paul, outside his idyll of
permanent, now subterranean now far­reaching wishful perspectives and changing panoramas, though he sees even Italy in a smoky light, even the azure sky and
especially
* ‘This is the romance of the Rose/where the art of love is all enclosed.’
† ‘Every woman in common for every man/And every man in common for every woman.’