CHAPTER IX

ROMANTIC LOVE

Criticise and condemn as we may the conceptions of the time, the institution of chivalry accomplished a marvellous work of regeneration wherever it was able to establish itself.

One can but turn with emotion and gratitude to the land where it has blossomed into some of its most beautiful forms, where the warm blood of the South took fire and impelled to the following of noble ideals with the ardour of heroes and the steadfastness of saints.

Greek, Celtic, PhoenÌcian, Iberian, Ligurian, Saracen blood flows in the veins of the people; and in looking at their faces one can understand why the troubadours sang such sweet and merry songs, and why the country to this day may be called the land

It was the Duke of Acquitaine, himself a troubadour, who gave us those words so descriptive of Southern France, in the gay little verse,—

In truth it was a wonderful time, full of colour and passion in which there was the shadow of tragedy, but seldom the grey and dust-colour of the sordid and the mean.

For women it was literally a coming-of-age. A modern author speaks about the "advent of woman in man's world," when she "became for the first time something more than a link between two generations."

Love, as a romantic sentiment, became possible between men and women, because the woman's individuality as a human being was recognised, and with it her right to give or to withhold her love. True love and true friendship, as we moderns understand them, may almost claim to take their rise in the age of chivalry.

Fraternity of arms constituted an honoured tie among knights. They received the Sacrament together, exchanged armour, and from that time forth supported one another wherever they went, and at all hazards.

This brotherhood in arms, however, should perhaps be described as a revival of an ancient idea, whereas love, as it developed under the laws of chivalry, was a thing hitherto unknown to mankind. Doubtless there had been obscure precursors of the ideal, for many times must a new thought be uttered before the air vibrates with sufficient strength to awake answering movements in other minds. The first to think and feel a new world into existence—which is the ultimate mission of thinking and feeling—often leaves nothing but that new world behind him; neither name, nor fame, nor fortune. And so we shall never know in what noble hearts the true romantic love between man and woman first sprang into being.

The new mode of thought kindled generous impulses. Often fantastic, not to say ridiculous, they were always graceful and full of the flavour of romance.

"Many a knight," we are told, "would sally forth from a besieged town during a suspension of hostilities and demand whether there was any cavalier of the opposite host who, for love of his lady bright, would do any deed of arms."

"Now let us see if there be any amorous among you," was the usual conclusion of such a challenge. And out would come prancing some armoured knight from the gates of the city, and the two, with much ceremony of salutation, would fall to and hack each other to pieces with the utmost courtesy and mutual respect.

"The air was rent with names of ladies" in the big tournaments of the day. "On, valiant knights, fair eyes behold you!"

The proclamation of the beauty of his lady, as all romances of that day remind us, was one of the serious duties of the knight, and Cervantes only slightly caricatures the custom when he makes Don Quixote "station himself in the middle of a high road and refuse to let the merchants of Toledo pass unless they acknowledged there was not in the universe a more beautiful damsel than the peerless Dulcinea del Toboso."

There was also a sort of official post or title, Poursuivant d'Amour, the knight dedicating himself to love as to a religion with solemn fervour. The Duke of Lancaster, says Froissart, "possessed, as part of his inheritance in Champagne, the Castle of Beaufort, of which an English Knight called Poursuivant d'Amour was Captain." It appears that this was a title which knights used to give themselves on account of wearing the portraits or colours of their mistress and challenging each other to fight in her honour.

To be in love was a social necessity. It was hopelessly "bad form" to be otherwise.

"A knight without love is an ear of wheat without grain," says some authority of the day.

It certainly was a lovelorn time! "Love was everything," says Justin Smith, an author whose two large volumes on the troubadours testify to wide study of the subject, "and we cannot wonder that much was made of it. Its hopes and fears were the drama of that day. Sweet and passionate thoughts were the concert and the opera. Tales of successful and unsuccessful wooing were the novels.... Love, as we are to learn, was the shoot of modern culture, and the tree that now overspreads us with its boughs bloomed, even in their time, into a poetry as unsurpassed and as unsurpassable after its kind as the epics of Homer."

But this immense change in the attitude of mind towards life and towards women naturally could not take place without producing a universal upheaval of the current morality: a thorough upsetting of the doctrines upon which the husband had hitherto founded an authority practically limitless.

For women obedience and morality had been synonyms. The wife was "good" in proportion as she acknowledged by word and deed her husband's "rights" over her, as over any other of his possessions. Conduct implying independence, an infringement on these "rights," was the acme of wickedness. To act as if she belonged to herself was a sort of embezzlement, and of course this was the case still more unpardonably if she made so free as to bestow her heart on some other man; then they both became involved in the sin of purloining that which belonged to another. To flirt was a sort of petty peculation. It was because she so belonged to him, as real property, that the husband thought his "honour" injured by his wife's conduct, quite irrespective of any wound to his affections. If a man fails to keep a possession, given securely into his hands by law and custom and universal sentiment, he must indeed be a sorry sort of lord and master! Such was the popular view of the case, and the coarser and more brutal the society the more violent was this feeling of wounded vanity or "honour," as it was pompously called. But suddenly—or at least without traceable gradations—this bulwark of marital sovereignty was rent as by an earthquake, and the idea began to get abroad that the woman somewhat belonged to herself; no longer entirely to her feudal or to her domestic lord. Had this new idea taken complete and undisturbed possession, it would have worked out a modern society very different from the society that now exists. But it did not obtain such mastery. It only shared the field with its predecessor. The confusion of standard was therefore extreme, for nobody paused to separate and choose between the two ideals; they were held simultaneously, nor is it only in the time of the troubadours that men and women hold beliefs about social matters that are mutually destructive.

So the old rights of property in the wife continued to hold sway even while she began dimly to feel and inwardly to claim the right to herself, with the resulting right to bestow her love where she pleased, or where she needs must. And that wrought wonderful changes.

One must approach this imaginative, passionate world, if we desire to understand it, with a spirit swift to detect differences and shades of feeling, to muster all the local conditions before the imagination; and one must banish scrupulously all ready-made maxims belonging to our own day, for these at once place us outside the epoch that we are trying to enter. It is this difficulty, this subtlety in the subject, which makes the study of that age and country so keenly interesting to all who are curious of the movements of human thought as it grows and changes under the pressure of its varying destinies.

These new ideals were now universal among kings and princes and all who had any pretensions to cultivation and good breeding. Love-affairs of which a married woman was the heroine were looked upon as essentially belonging to the chivalric order of things.

Of course, in this state of things there was much that seemed disorderly and was disorderly if the older view is to remain, in any sense, as a standard. Indeed it was, in some respects, perhaps, disorderly from any point of view, as was inevitable during so vast an upheaval of social conditions. It was a battle of good and evil, but infinitely in advance of the previous state, when there was no battle, because evil was securely enjoying uncontested possession. From that enthroned and law-supported wrong there seemed no escape except through the "moral chaos"—if so it really was—of the troubadour era. Certainly the men and women of that time treated life very boldly and frankly, and they talked more about sentiment and the joy of life than about morality; but the atmosphere which lingers around them, as one feels it in their songs and stories, in all the delicate courtesy of their manners, the dignity and fineness of their sentiments, makes it impossible to think of them as essentially base or unlovable, whatever condemnation their departure from ancient standards may induce moralists to pronounce upon them.

Their ideals may have been false; that is a matter of individual opinion; but they lived in devotion to those ideals with an enthusiasm that has never been surpassed.

Perhaps the long repression, the second-hand vicarious existence suffered for so many ages by women, had made them almost intoxicated with this new experience, this coming of age as human beings, this entering into possession of themselves.

It was like a re-birth, and tempted to all sorts of wild adventures. Rebellion was in the air, and especially was it rife on all questions of love. As a recent writer remarks, men and women began to love each other because they should not have done so.

But love was treated very seriously as well as very fancifully. There was no aspect in which it did not play an important rÔle in this extraordinary age.

It set vielles lightly tinkling and lutes twanging, but it also took possession of great hearts and minds and ruled them for a lifetime. Love was sometimes a "lord of terrible aspect," as Dante has represented him. As women developed personality and individual qualities in their new freedom, the grande passion became for the first time really possible. And their mental and spiritual development tended to promote the growth of the character of men in the same direction.

There seemed a sort of expectation running through the society of that time that a new source of joy had been found, a force that was to redeem and beautify life.

The author of "The Women of the Renaissance" represents the men of this later age—which, however, was still inspired by the chivalric outburst—asking themselves what was the good of learning, money, labour, or even semblances of joy if their hearts were empty.

Looking back from this point to the Griselda-epoch, we have travelled far indeed!

With such aspirations, such ideas in the air (whether or not they were expressed in a definite way), marriage, which carried Griselda-associations with it, was naturally looked upon as altogether outside the realm of romance or happiness.

"To mingle it with love, the absolute, great enthusiasms of heart or intellect, was to lay up for oneself disasters, or at least certain disappointment," says M. de Maulde de La ClaviÈre, and he instances as the object of ridicule in that era a lady who speaks with a sigh of the "unaccustomed pleasure" of loving the man she married. He defines the Renaissance view of wedlock as "the modest squat suburban villa in which you eat and sleep: passion is a church spire piercing the sky...."

That being the general consensus of opinion on the subject, it is not surprising that nearly all the love-stories of that day are entirely disconnected with the idea of marriage. The holy estate itself was defined as "the suburbs of hell." Marriages were "unions of policy and position." And almost without exception they were arranged by the parents, in accordance with material considerations, the old feudal idea lingering on in this department of life and the daughter being handed over by the father to a suitable (or unsuitable) husband, without his ever dreaming of consulting her views in the matter. She was generally too inexperienced to have any views of importance, and even had she been consulted probably would not, at that time, have been able to make a much better choice than her father made for her.

But clearly if that was the order of things, love and romance must establish their kingdom outside of marriage, and this was exactly what occurred.

The point of view becomes clearer in the light of some of the decisions and rules of the Courts of Love; for even if, as so many writers insist, these tribunals never really existed, the quoted rules and judgments must at any rate represent the ideas that swayed the society of the day.

These courts were said to be held under the presidency of some great lady of the district, assisted by a council of ladies and knights.

One of the questions submitted to the Court of the Comtesse de Champagne was: "Can true love exist between two persons who are married?"

And the Countess, aided by her councillors, pronounced as follows:—

This decree proved a serious stumbling-block to one betrothed lady who had promised a cavalier that if ever she should find herself at liberty, she would accept his devotion. "Presently she married the lover to whom she was plighted, whereupon the second knight resumed his suit, conceiving—according to the ideas of the day—that the lady was now fully at liberty. She, however, could not be persuaded against the evidence of her feelings, ... and the matter was referred to the queen, Eleanor, wife of Henry II. of England. Her award could not run counter to that of the Countess of Champagne, who has pronounced that love cannot exist between husband and wife. It is our decree, therefore, that the dame aforesaid keep faith with her cavalier."

The only means of evading this decree was for the lady to declare that henceforth she intended to abandon love altogether, but if she did that she was obliged to make up her mind to endure social ostracism, for then "she was sure to be shunned by the gay ladies and gentlemen who then formed the vast majority of the fashionable world." We are not told what the lady decided to do in this most trying dilemma.

Altogether the state of society under the sway of the Courts of Love—or of the sentiment they represent—seems like that of some strange fairy-tale. Nothing could have been more fantastic or romantic; but however ridiculous they may seem to the critical mind, there was always a strain that one can only call noble running through it all. It might be dangerous, impracticable, subversive, "immoral," if one will, but it was never paltry or base.

In their own fashion the reputed Courts of Love upheld a very high ideal. They insisted upon the absolute sacredness of a promise and of the word of honour, which a knight or a lady must keep to the death. They demanded fidelity between lovers, for that was considered "to be the essence of high-toned gallantry."

All this is our own inheritance of to-day. As regards the etiquette of love-making the Court instituted what were called the four degrees of love: "hesitating," "praying," "listening," and "drurerie." "When the lady consented to enter this last stage, she granted the gentleman his first kiss ... after which there could be no withdrawal from the engagement."

The lady was often unwilling to give it, and there are many stories of troubadours who try to obtain it by fraud or artifice. It seems strange that, in that case, in a society with a high sense of honour, it should have possessed any binding value, but apparently it had something of the quality of the marriage ceremony, and therefore, perhaps, something of the idea of a tie which might be enforced against the will of the person concerned.

It is difficult, perhaps impossible, for the modern eye to see this era exactly as it was. Writers represent it as corrupt and unlovely or as romantic and noble according to their own particular bias. The former attitude is perhaps largely determined by a leaning towards the older order of thought which the advent of chivalry challenged; while the less severe view is apt to accompany sympathy with the newer doctrine, which establishes the woman as an independent being, for good or for evil, and refuses to regard her as the property in any sense whatever—whether by gift or by "contract"—of another person. As this latter ideal is in its infancy even yet, the majority of writers see little in the troubadour epoch but hopeless licence. It is to them merely an outbreak of "immortality," and neither the passionate rebellion against an old and degrading system nor the enthusiastic reaching out towards something better saves it from their severe condemnation. But we have all of us good reason to be thankful for this stage of social upheaval through which our spiritual ancestors passed, and it ill becomes us to cast reproaches at those who have brought us, in one great burst of inspiration, so much farther on our way.