The Lady of the Castle

CHRÉTIEN DE TROYES.

I

THE lady’s life and even her character are always sensibly modified by the house she lives in, and the house represents the social or economic requirements of the man of her class. The man shapes the house, and the house shapes the lady. The Roman villa, ample, luxurious, and open, built to house a complicated social life, began to disappear in Europe together with the pax Romana, and the restriction of space set in that necessarily accompanies fortification.

In forming a picture of the mediæval castle, we must banish the vision of the coquettish château of the Renaissance, the fortified manor like Azay-le-Rideau, and the fortified palace like Chambord. Many a good knight in the twelfth century housed his family, his servants, and his men-at-arms, under the single roof of his donjon. All castles agreed in certain features. They were surrounded by a strong wall, punctuated by towers and by a great gate flanked with towers, and equipped with drawbridge and portcullis. The gate gave access to the lower court. The inner court was in its turn inclosed by a fortified wall; in the inner court stood the heart of the castle, the donjon; and within the donjon dwelt the lady.

Windows and doors were eschewed in castle architecture. The ground floor of the donjon had no opening of any kind, the entrance being invariably on the first floor, and reached by a gently inclined bridge, which was removed or destroyed in case of siege. The whole of the first floor was occupied by a single room, the famous 1 hall ’ of ballad and history. This room was round, square, or polygonal, according to the shape of the tower. It was lighted grudgingly by a narrow window here and there, set at the end of a sort of tunnel bored through a wall eight or ten feet thick, and it was warmed by open fires of logs. In the English manor there prevailed until the sixteenth and even the seventeenth century the Homeric custom of the central hearth without a chimney. The smoke made its more or less leisurely way out of a hole in the roof directly over the hearth. But in France the Roman chimney, never altogether abandoned, was in common use from the eleventh century onward, and developed early its characteristic conical hood.

The hall was often paved with tiles of white stone incrusted with black mastic, and on this flooring were spread thick rugs. If the company sat freely on the floor, it was not because there were no chairs, though they were not as numerous as in the Homeric house. But a row of coffers often stood against the walls, and sometimes also there were massive forms with backs, divided like choir-stalls, and sometimes there were lighter benches, easily moved about. Kings and great lords had faldstools, but it was not every simple castellan who owned one. The asperities of all these somewhat unconciliating seats were tempered by rugs and cushions, but a study of them explains why the persons of the romances so frequently sat upon the bed. In the first place, the bed of the lord and the lady stood as often as not in the hall, opposite the fireplace. It was large and monumental; the frame was gilded, carved, inlaid with ivory. Cords stretched on the frame held a featherbed which was covered with sheets of linen or silk. During the day the bed was shrouded with a rich spread of fur or silk or cloth of gold. It was surrounded by curtains which made it a room within a room. Herrad shows us Solomon sleeping in all the glory of the twelfth century, with a night-light, and as easy a posture as can be assumed by a sleeper who wears a crown.

With all its splendor, the presence of the bed in the hall is symbolic of the change wrought in manners by lack of space. Privacy was gone. The lord and the lady slept in the hall. On the floor above lay their children and their guests, often enough in but two rooms, the women in one, and the men in the other. At the head of each bed was a bar on which the occupant hung his clothes. In the morning he could reach them from where he lay and dress himself behind his curtains before getting out of bed. Outside his curtains was the public. It is often lamented by critics of mediæval morals that young men had apparently free access to the bedrooms of young women, and that they so often sat down to talk upon a lit paré. It must be remembered in this connection that the mediæval bedroom offered hardly more privacy than the American sleeping-car.

If the lady’s house, in order to keep her safe, was obliged to contract the space at her disposal, she found expansion and light and air in the garden. Without the wall, at the foot of the castle hall, approached often by a postern of its own, lay her open-air drawing-room. The garden of the Middle Age was strictly architectural. Its symmetrical plan, with orderly subdivisions, the presence of seats of stone or turf, sculptured fountains and plants in tubs, gave it the air of a house without a roof. It was planted with regard to the bird’s-eye view from above, and as seen from the castle, must have looked like a carpet or a tiled pavement. The labyrinth and other familiar motives of floor-decoration are found in garden plans. An important feature is always the fountain. Even in Paradise, as figured in Jean de Berri’s Book of Hours, a beautiful Gothic fountain refreshed our first parents. Trees were clipped to shape, artificial mounds were raised, stiff hedges divided one room, so to speak, from another. In this charming setting many and many a scene of the romances is enacted. The frowning donjon by itself would leave the feudal lady only half explained; it is in the garden that we must look for the expansion of some of her most characteristic traits.

The lady’s own outward appearance is almost as well known to us as that of her house and garden. It is not necessary to believe that she was as uniformly blond as the romances assert; they prove only that the favorite type was gray-eyed, fair-haired, whiteskinned, with rosy cheeks and scarlet lips.

Whatever her complexion, the lady’s costume consisted of three main items. Next her body she wore a chemise of fine linen, ‘white as a meadow-flower.’ This garment had sleeves and covered the wearer from chin to foot. Sometimes the collar and cuffs were embroidered with gold and were allowed to show. Over the chemise she put on the pelisson, a garment made of fur but covered within with linen and without with silk. The pelisson was indispensable in winter, indoors as well as out; but in summer it would be excessive, and there is reason to believe that the fur substrate was then withdrawn, leaving the border as before. Over the pelisson the lady wore the famous bliaut, the dress of half the saints in Christendom as we see them in sculpture or in stained glass. The bliaut was sometimes straight and simple, giving the wearer the same apparent diameter at shoulder, waist, and knee. Sometimes it was confined by a broad cuirass that outlined the breast and hips.

For material the lady might choose among a variety of woolen stuffs or among silks of great beauty, ranging in weight from samite to crêpe de Chine. In purple and scarlet, green and blue, the lady dressed, with often a thread of gold interwoven, and with fringes and braids of gold in plenty. The climax of her costume was the girdle, fastened loosely about the waist and falling to the bottom of the bliaut. Gold and jewels often went to make it; their brilliancy accented the lines of the lady’s body, and called attention to every movement as she walked. Her hair was woven, with ribbons, into two long braids, which she pulled forward and allowed to hang in front. Out of doors she wore a mantle which might open either in front or at the side, and was capable of highly effective draping. It could be arranged to show as much or as little as the wearer desired of the costume beneath. Both sexes covered the head out of doors with the chaperon, a sort of peaked hood with a cape. And both sexes wore pointed heelless shoes of stuff or leather, often elaborately ornamented.

Such in appearance were the castle and the lady. Doubtless it would be absurd to represent the social status of the lady as the direct outcome of the architecture of her home, since both were, in fact, the outcome in expression of the life of the man of her class and time. But it is certain that the castle was the primary condition of that life, and that where its interests clashed with those of the lady, hers had to give way. In her everyday life she perhaps gained as much from its limitations as she lost. Though the lady had no privacy, she suffered no isolation. Her place was in the hall, and in the hall the life of the house was transacted. Whatever interested her husband was discussed in her presence. The life of her time was an open book before her; she was free to form her opinion of men and things, and to make her personality count for what it was worth.

But the really sinister effect of the castle and its lands upon the lady was one that resulted from their meaning, rather than from their physical characteristics. They were held by the knight from his overlord on condition of the payment of rental in the form of military service. Every acre of ground was valued in terms of fighting men, and only the knight in person could be sure of rallying the quota and producing them when required. If the knight died, in harness or in his bed, and left a widow with young children or a daughter as his sole heir, there was a good chance that the rent would not be paid. The overlord had the right to see that a fief should not be without a master; in other words, to marry as soon as might be the widow or the daughter of the deceased to some stout knight who was willing to take the woman for the sake of the fief. ‘One of these days,’ says the king in Charroi de Nîmes to a baron who is threatening him, ‘one of these days one of my peers will die; I will give you his fief and his wife if you will take her.’ In fact, it could be said of the lady as truly as of the serf that she ‘went with the land.’ She knew this full well herself.

Hardy younger sons might win castle and lands by recommending themselves through feats of arms to fathers of daughters. Thus the aged Aimeri, in the Enfans Aimeri, wished to provide for his sons by marriage. To Garin he said, ‘Go to Bavaria and bid the Duke Naimes to give you his daughter, with the city of Anseiine, its harbors and shores. It is true this land is at the moment in the hands of the Saracens, but you have only to take it from them.’ Garin makes his way to Bavaria and explains his idea to the duke. ‘You are of high race,’ answers the duke, ‘and I will give you my daughter of the fair face.’ He called for her forthwith. ‘ Belle,’ said he, ‘ I have given you a husband.’ ‘Blessed be God,’ said the damsel.

In one aspect or another the identification of the fief and the lady provides the motive of a hundred chansons. It is the basis of her social importance, superseding the production of legitimate offspring which was the basis of her social importance in Greece and, theoretically at any rate, in Rome. It is far from paradoxical to say that as a sort of indemnification for the iron hand laid upon her destiny by the system of land-tenure in the Middle Age, the lady achieved a new measure of personal liberty. She might within reason philander where she would, provided she married where she was bid.

The lady’s education was probably, on the academic side at least, considerably better than her husband’s. Very likely she could more often read and write than he. But, as in Homeric days, the want of reading was supplied for man and woman alike by the accomplishments of the rhapsode, who is now called a jongleur.

Not only in literary taste, but in practical matters, the daughter of the castle would receive much the same education as Helen of Troy. She would be a famous spinster and needlewoman, able to make a shirt or an altar-cloth. She would sit by the hour among her damsels in hall or in garden, developing stitch by stitch that incredible faculty of patience which alone has enabled the lady of all times to live with health, and without too much analysis, her life of constant suspension on the acts of another. All household work was familiar to her. Life was full of emergencies, and she was ready for them. Often she was a skillful leech, unafraid of blood, trained to succor the men on whose lives her life depended. The tradition of the ‘wise woman’ still hung about her, and she had secret recipes for medicines that could cure almost any ill. In religion she learned the Pater Noster, the Ave, and the Credo. She could read her book of hours and follow the Mass.

It is necessary for our purpose to try to form a notion what occupation the lady found for the greater number of the days, hours, and instants of her life. The romantic vision, that sees her dividing her time between awarding the prize at the tourney and presiding at the Court of Love, may be abandoned at once. In its place there rises almost inevitably a picture somewhat nearer the truth, but drawn also from the romances and founded on the conditions of life at the courts of kings and great lords. It is the métier of the romance to deal with action, and from it we receive inevitably the impression of a stirring, animated life. In so far as the house of the great lord is concerned, this impression may be measurably true, though even there we must remember that winter came round at suitable intervals. But in the castle of the simple knight, life, as far as we are able to reconstitute it, must have passed with a monotony before which the modern mind quails. When Gautier, an enthusiast for the Middle Age, enumerates the winter occupations of the castellan, he is obliged to include sitting at the window and watching the snow fall.

The lady of the castle was vigorous, and loved to be out of doors. She rode, seated either astride or on what seems to us the wrong side of the horse. She hunted with the hawk and angled in the streams. She was a strong walker, and lover of animals, showing her love as most animal-lovers do by petting within doors and killing without. High physical courage was esteemed a virtue in her as in her lord, for it is only in secure and peaceful societies that the timid lady survives to transmit her qualities. High physical courage should ideally beget tenderness for suffering, but the lady of the romances was sometimes a little inaccessible on the sympathetic side. As her knight fought for her honor she preferred him to incur danger rather than defeat; wounds and broken bones were, so to speak, all in the day’s work. And when the day was won, she succored him tenderly.

But after the fullest allowance has been made for these pursuits, many empty hours remain unaccounted for. Life for the lady in the small castle must have had some similarity to life for women on the remote ranch to-day, if we eliminate the postal service and the library, and if we imagine that the ranchman is away from home as often as he can manage it, rounding up wild cattle, fighting Indians, trailing horsethieves, or otherwise pleasurably endangering his life. His wife will probably learn to ride and shoot; she will busy herself with housekeeping, with her children, or with her garden. But after all she can always read. The newspapers and the magazines find her out. She will keep herself supplied with books. And if the worst comes to the worst, she will write a novel. The aspect of life that comes to the modern woman under the guise of literature had a different expression, though largely literary too, in the existence of the lonely châtelaine. In her case it came to be a reflection of the social development for which the age is noted, a specific and original contribution to the history of the lady, — I mean of course the theory and practice of courteous love.

In looking closely at this institution, it must be borne in mind that in the age of chivalry the wedded relation was not a romantic one. The husband was allowed by law to beat his wife for certain offenses, and it is likely that he did not always wait to consult the code. The law, it is true, specified that he was to beat her ‘reasonably,’ and insisted that he must stop short of maiming her; he must not, for instance, destroy an eye or break a bone. Her marriage had been contracted without any necessary reference to inclination, and her relations with her husband were simply such as she was personally able to make them. With him her sole source of strength was her power to please, and that was naturally, as always, largely a matter of accident. He was under no manner of compulsion to try to please her. The fact, however, that she was his wife gave her importance with the rest of the world in proportion to his own, and from the standing-ground of this external importance she applied her lever to society.

The lady of the castle was virtually the only woman in a society consisting of men generally younger than herself, who were socially her husband’s inferiors and who therefore paid court to her. If she had any personal force or charm, these circumstances were highly favorable to its exertion. Her sphere of influence would vary, with her husband’s importance, from a single squire to a whole train of knights-vassal, but her position would tend to stereotype itself; so that the success of a great baron’s wife in modifying the manners and the ideas of her husband’s court would work to the advantage of the lonely châtelaine in the simple donjon. From the great centres would spread a theory of the lady’s position and the duty to her of every gentleman not her husband.

Such a theory was developed and perfected in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and came by degrees to color the whole of literature. The brutality of the old romances faded out, and an extraordinary code of manners came into fashion, based on a new theory of feminism and largely due to the initiative of influential women themselves. How far this theory actually modified life, we are not in a position to say. It is certain, however, that every lady who listened to troubadour or jongleur, or who read for herself the new love-songs and romances, was furnished with the material for constructing a fresh estimate of her own importance.

II

It is at the court of Henry the First of England that scholars find the first development of ‘courtesy.’ This prince anticipated Fontainebleau and Versailles by the fêtes he arranged at his castles, and the attention he gave to the organization of bisexual society. But if we may believe that the theory of courtesy, formulated in England, spread from this source into France, it is certain that it there encountered an independent development, sprung from the south, less warlike and more feminine in form, which was destined to prevail and give tone to the whole movement, not only in France, north and south, but throughout Europe.

South of the Loire the Roman law had always maintained a thread of continuity, though often obscured by usages springing directly from altered ways of living. By the Justinian Code, sons and daughters alike shared the inheritance of their father’s estate, and this rule was taken over by the Gothic law of southern France. But under the strain of the centuries that kept society perpetually on a war-footing, the tendency prevailed even here to hold lands and houses in the strong hand. For her own safety the daughter was subordinated to the son.

Many are the beautiful names of ladies who ruled in their own person: Adelaide, Countess of Carcassonne; Ermengarde, Viscountess of Béziers; Guillemette, Viscountess of Nîmes ; and the great Eleanor of Poitou, granddaughter of the first of the troubadours, Queen first of France and then of England, and always in her own right Duchess of Aquitaine. These ladies were almost by accident furnished with great power by a system devised for a society of a different character altogether. And the most surprising thing of all is that the women in whose hands power was thus placed proved to be able to use it. Instead of showing as the atrophied remnant of a suppressed class, ready to govern in name, but in reality to be governed by the nearest man and to carry on a society and a culture imitative of that erected by men everywhere about them, they proved to be themselves personages, capable of forming reasoned designs and making them prevail, and they effected changes in society and culture that have become a permanent part of the life of Europe.

It has often been pointed out that there are certain analogies between the period of the Crusades and the nineteenth century in the United States in respect of the distribution of culture between the sexes. In Greece and in Rome of old, as in Germany in the last century, and in general at times and in places where men have leisure for culture, it is believed to belong more or less exclusively to the male type. It is felt at such times to be unsuitable for women. The learned or thoughtful woman is rather ridiculous and certainly a bore. Probably she neglects her children. On the other hand, when men are as a class engaged in the subjugation of the natural world or in struggles with each other, the arts of peace naturally fall into the hands of non-combatants and are then believed to belong more or less exclusively to the female type. As under the other conditions culture is felt to be unbecoming in a woman, it is now felt to be unbecoming in a man. A fighting knight who found his squire reading the Ars Amatoria would feel the same amused contempt as a stockbroker who should find his clerk secreting a copy of Keats behind the ticker. To the mind of each, such interests would be suitable only to women and to certain men — ‘ priests ’ the crusader would have called them, ‘college-professors’ the broker. In both periods the lady has been the depository and guardian of culture. What she has made of her position in modern times must be reserved for later discussion. Her achievements in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are matter of record, and we must now examine them.

It is obvious that the automatic result of making a lady the head of the state will be to furnish her court with persons whose recommendations to favor will differ from those offered to a male superior. It will of course be to her interest to employ and attach to herself a body of strong fighting men, but she will not be interested in personally observing their readiness for combat and their power to drink without drunkenness. To be pleasant to his lady a servant must develop other gifts. In the technical language of the time, courtesy must accompany prowess. Grafted upon the fundamental point of view of the fighting knight, and in many respects opposed to it, was a secondary set of ideas, which by the transforming power of literature has become to us the strongest element of the whole.

By chivalry we mean to-day, not the strong, hard framework of military society which prevailed for centuries in Europe, unregardful of women, if not cruel to them; but we mean the brief and local phase, confined chiefly to the great courts, which by passing into literature has forever clothed the knight with virtues and sentiments not (if all had their rights) his own. The constraint that was put upon the man who looked for preferment in a lady’s service, to be clean and civil, pleasant to look at and pleasant to hear, and an ardent advocate of the intellectual and moral supremacy of women, was but a small and ephemeral result of her power. The real result was attained when the men of genius had constructed and won acceptance everywhere for a whole theory of life based upon a superiority of the lady.

At all times, everywhere, and by all ladies, love is admitted to be the most acceptable of gifts. With tact, the humblest may offer it without offense, the highest without conferring obligation. The lady’s power to excite love was to her what the lord’s prowess in battle was to him. The new theory of life was, therefore, based upon a new theory of love, and into this new theory were worked up a number of old elements that would have seemed, singly, rather unpromising material.

One of the fundamental principles of the doctrine of courteous love was its incompatibility with marriage. It is true that no age of men had imagined that love and marriage were ever, except by accident, coincident. Since marriage is primarily founded on economic considerations, the continued effort of mankind to make its sentimental aspects prevail involves a paradox. The Athenians looked not to their wives for love’s delight. The Romans were not authorities on love, but what they knew by that name was not a domestic sentiment. Early Christianity also considered marriage as a duty rather than as a pleasure. But these different societies had felt the irksomeness of the bond from the man’s point of view; it was in conflict with one of the characteristics that had been most serviceable in helping him along in the world, — his unquenchable desire for novelty.

Courtesy, on the other hand, objected to marriage from the point of view of the wife. Courtesy maintained that a lady’s love should be free. The mere fact that in marriage she was bound by law to yield her favors, destroyed their value and her dignity. Even if she married her lover, she thereby extinguished love. Amour de grâce and amour de dette were discriminated by the doctors, who held the first only to be worthy of the name of love. No true lover would accept love save as a gift of free will. The lady might withhold her favor with reason or without; treason to love consisted in bestowing it for any reason save love alone.

But it was not as a pretext for frequent change that the lady exalted love at the expense of marriage. On the contrary, it behooved her to choose her lover with far greater care than her husband (says Sordello, in his Ensenhamen d’Onor), because love is ‘ plus fort establit.’

If we were to represent the history of marriage graphically by a straight line, and the history of love by a curve approaching marriage more or less closely, we should find the lady’s theory of love soaring as far above marriage toward the ideal as Ovid’s theory falls below it toward the beast. His criticism of marriage was that it was too good; hers that it was not good enough. The striking modernism of this view is more apparent than real. The lady dreamed of no reconstruction of society; marriage was her portion, and she accepted it. Love did not interfere with it, did not, in fact, lie in the same plane. Her criticism of marriage was suggested and enforced by a number of circumstances besides her own personal revolt from it. The poets who embodied her ideas were generally of a class below her own, and under chivalry there was no marriage possible between classes. The singer who offered homage to his lady must find some footing on which he could address her without too servile an acknowledgment of inferiority. Nothing could have served his purpose so well as the theory that love is the great leveler, but that every lover is his lady’s servant. Besides the barriers to marriage, erected by feudal society, the Cluniac reform was insisting on the celibacy of the clergy, but many a troubadour was either monk or priest. For him also it was valuable that love should keep clear of marriage.

The old May-songs, celebrating springtime and the naïve mating impulse, had come down without a break from immemorial heathendom, from the dim time when mating was coterminous with desire. And these Maysongs, with the necessary transformations, were taken up into the song of the troubadour.

Charmed at first with what he has taken to be evidence of the poet’s communion with nature, the reader is soon driven to recognize a pure convention. The natural world has little to say to the troubadour. His world is within, and if he had not needed the eroticism of the May-song, he would have given scant heed to the nightingale. From the May-song he drew the ‘joy’ that gave a name to his science and a crude literal view of the delight of love. But the joy came gradually to have a more spiritual content. What a lady demanded was to be loved for her soul. As the type reached perfection, the May-song element dissolved into the mysticism that was to culminate in Dante’s love for Beatrice.

III

The tendency of the Middle Age toward the neat, the systematic, and the encyclopædic, which made it so easy a prey to Aristotle, had the oddest results when directed toward the passion of love. Ovid’s jeu d’esprit, the Ars Amatoria, was playfully set in a framework of Alexandrian didacticism. It was mildly amusing in his day to assume that rules could be laid down, by the use of which any one could become ‘a master of the art of love,’ to use the phrase of Diotima in Plato’s Symposium. This work was well known to clerks in its Latin form, and when love became a matter of general theoretical interest, it was rendered into French and became the textbook of the subject. Thanks to its method, love became a department of scholasticism, a matter of definition and rule.

In the complete absence of the historic sense, which left the mediæval mind with no more perspective than the paintings on a castle wall, Ovid’s badinage became matter for debate. The social conditions assumed in every line of his work were unnoticed. He wrote of and for the sophisticated dwellers in a great town, for the members of a cosmopolitan society whose intercourse was unrestrained, for a cultivated public well used to literary allusion and to the appreciation of the half-word, for life, in a word, as we know it to-day and as the Romans knew it two thousand years ago. But the knight and the lady of the castle knew no such life. Their days were spent in a simple round among a small number of people, all ignorant and all literal-minded. Their irruptions into the world, whether for war or for gayety, were infrequent, and for specific purposes. They were utterly without the daily contact with many minds which was the postulate of Ovid’s psychology.

It is touching to see the steps by which under these conditions the doctors of courteous love proceeded to Christianize and feudalize their great Latin authority. When Ovid advises the enterprising young man to frequent the theatres, whither the ladies go both to see the show and to show themselves, Maître Elies can find no modern parallel but the churches. Thither the ladies all go, some to pray to God, but the greater number to see and to be seen. Ovid suggests to the Roman to seat himself at the circus close to the lady he wishes to charm, and give her tips on the horses. Maître Elies sends his pupil to a miracle-play and bids him ask the lady questions about the cast.

In some cases the imitator ventures to differ from the original. Thus the author of the Key to Love says, ‘Ovid will have us believe that it is better to have an old woman for one’s love than a young one, but with all respect I cannot agree with him. Ovid, I imagine, needed money; what he feels is avarice, not love. The love that joins gentle hearts goes straight on its way without simony.’ The whole process by which a theology of love grew up, nourished by the thoughts and language of the church, is foreshadowed by this unknown clerk to whom venal love is ‘simony.’ Some items of advice are put into the Roman author’s mouth that would have surprised him; for instance: ‘Be sure there are no wrinkles in your stockings; this is Ovid’s express command.’

When Eleanor of Aquitaine, her daughter Marie of Champagne, and the other précieuses, had arrived through much discussion at a fairly clear idea of what they wanted, the work of compiling their canon law was confided to the author of the Art of Honorable Love, probably Andreas Capellanus, who was at once the Gerson and the Aquinas of the passion. No more amusing game was ever invented for the entertainment of polite society than the methodical discussion of love. It contained something for every one. Under cover of its high moral pretensions and scientific aims, anything could be said. The earnest and the frivolous, the amorous and the cool, the devout and the careless, all were furnished with a decorous means of approach to the most fascinating topic in the world. Two standards are visible in the Chaplain’s work: the first, shorter and more famous code of law embodies a higher ideal of the subject in hand than the longer one. Concessions are made to the natural man. But on the whole, Ovid’s metamorphosis is complete.

According to the Chaplain, one of the signs of a true lover is his physical disturbance in the presence of the beloved. It is an axiom of the science that the sudden sight of the lady alters the lover’s circulation. The words are the words of Ovid; and the emotion is not just that of Sappho. Nevertheless, if a little good-will went to produce the vaso-motor disturbance which was the sign of love, it was applied with the intent, not to deceive the lady, but to play the game. The spirit of the code can be gathered from a few examples.

1. Marriage is not a valid excuse for love.

13. Common love seldom endures.

15. Every lover is wont to grow pale at sight of the beloved.

18. Virtue alone makes one worthy of love.

23. The thought of love makes a man sleep less and eat less.

24. Every action of the lover ends in thoughts of the beloved.

25. The true lover cares for nothing save what he deems pleasant to the beloved.

30. The true lover is forever and without interruption occupied by the image of the beloved.

Among the theses often debated by the learned in love were those that dealt with the relative desirability of a knight or a clerk as a lover; and as the clerks controlled the records they have, as far as literature goes, the best of it.

The debate was one of the most congenial exercises of the Middle Age. To defend a thesis was in some sort to ride a tilt. During the long centuries when the church was occupied with the ‘chimæra bombinans in vacuo,’ society dealt with questions of greater interest. A lady grieves for a lover taken in battle; a squire cannot cease to love a lady who despises him; which is the more worthy of pity? A fair lady, deserted by her first love, bestows her affections on a second; is she perjured?

The actual songs themselves of the troubadours and minnesingers, oddest of love-lyrics, are full of the spirit of scholasticism. Instead of the personal cry, they give an argument on the general case. Absorbed in a technical discussion of the nature of love, the poet sometimes forgot altogether to explain his personal interest in the subject. In many a song he lectured to his beloved on the psychology and ethics of their common experience. From the body he had worked his way up to the mind; before the movement was spent and the Middle Age disintegrated, he had reached the soul.

The prevalence of formal discussion, the immense allegorical literature of the Courts of Love, and certain notices of the decisions of great ladies made arbiters in real cases, gave rise at one time to the notion that the Court of Love was an actual institution whose action was binding on lovers in its jurisdiction. It is generally admitted today, however, that the evidence never supported such a theory, and that therefore its intrinsic improbability is conclusive against it. Secrecy in love was among the lover’s first duties. Loyalty, secrecy, and diligence are often given as his cardinal virtues. It is manifestly absurd to suppose that a sentiment which depended on concealment for its existence should be amenable to public inquiry.

IV

The professional troubadour might be attached to a court for a short time only, and without payment of any kind. The prizes of life consisted, for him, in permanent awards of land or office, and later of money. The commonest fate was half-way between these situations: he lived at court as an enlivener of society, and was furnished with bed and board, and in favorable cases with arms and clothing. The songs are full of prayers for the opportunity of service, and for the substantial reward of service. The pretty language of feudal relations, easily sliding into allegory even then, gives romance to-day to the singer’s cry. Not only to ladies, but to lords, he offers true and loyal service. Walther von der Vogelweide advertises that he is ready to serve any gentleman or lady who will reward him.

On the other hand, there was nothing in the relation of servant and mistress to prevent a lady from retaining several singers at once. It is somewhat more singular that the singer was able to consecrate his genius to more than one lady at a time. He accomplished this logically by saying to each that her virtues ennobled her whole sex, so that all ladies were revered by him. The love of the professional troubadour was official. His business was to glorify his lady. It was his song that she wanted and rewarded, not his passion. Personally he was probably of no great importance to her. That is what he means by saying that timidity prevents him from declaring his love otherwise than in song. Often the singer felt obliged to assure the world that his lady was cruel and his wishes unfulfilled. Particularly in Germany, where manners were strict, the poet was careful not to be misunderstood. Only thus can we explain the fact that a literature by definition ‘gay,’ explicitly devised for the entertainment of a light-hearted society, should be filled with the pain of disappointed love.

Every singer makes the same protestations and complaints. It is his rhyme that he is thinking of. Every singer declares that all the others are making believe, he alone is serious. There are many traces of jealousy of the amateur, the lordly troubadour who may approach the lady in daily life, thus gaining a great advantage over his lowly competitor, and who sings for nothing. Generally the lady is named or identified. When a feigned name is used, it has the air of being as well known as the real one. It is unthinkable that a favored lover should thus compromise a great lady. Sometimes a song was addressed to a lady and her husband, to a lady and her brother, to a lady and her nephews! It is not maintained that the troubadour never felt love, nor is it likely that he could constantly handle fire without a scorch. But it is very likely that too sincere a feeling was disadvantageous to him. The précieuse did not wish to command the whirlwind. Mezura — moderation — was one of the qualities required of the courteous lover.

V

If minnesong had consisted simply of the crude sensualism of the Maysong, the gallantry of Ovid, and the compliments of a court-singer, it would not have survived to have a lasting effect on the literature of Europe. But a man did not live in the eleventh century or the twelfth for nothing: whether he were clerk or layman, he submitted to the feeling of the time that the ‘eye of the heart’ could see realities that the bodily eye could never find. St. Bernard and Bernard of Ventadorn were at one on this point. The thirtieth rule of Andreas Capellanus rested on it. The beautiful word Minne itself illustrates the history of the idea. The earliest singers of Germany do not use it; Friuntschaft and Liebe are their words for love. The root-meaning of minnen is to think of. Its gradual prevalence accompanies the transfer of sexual love into the spiritual life. The love of a lady whom the lover has never seen occurs in romantic literature everywhere, from the Arabian Nights to the Nibelungenlied. In courteous love it became classic.

The dream was a glimpse of reality in the Middle Age. Monk or nun dreamed of salvation, often with an erotic tinge. Love in a dream was the lover’s solace. The misery of waking life was felt alike by saint and by lover. The thought of death was familiar, and not unwelcome to both. Ovid had spoken in sheer rhetoric of dying for love; the mediæval lover was ready to die in earnest. The love of a dead lady was often sung, with a cast forward to Beatrice. Tears are an innovation of the courteous lover. They are shed not at all in Beowulf, but sparingly in the Nibelungenlied, and hardly oftener in the chansons and early epics. But St. Bernard and the troubadour weep freely. The mystic, whether in love or in religion, was subject to ecstasy. The Lancelot of Chrétien de Troyes was twice in great bodily peril because the sudden sight of his lady bereft him of attention to the rest of his environment. The way is being prepared for Dante’s swoon at the marriage-feast. In a word, the mysticism of the troubadour, passing into Italy and there modified, was adopted by the dolce stil nuovo and reached its climax in the work of the great poet of the Middle Age.