Part 11 (1/2)
The sight was rare. The charm of Scheherazade and Chain-of-Hearts prevailed. The Muslim might dissever heads as carelessly as he plucked an orange, they were those of unbelievers, not of girls. Among the peris of his earthly paradise he was pa.s.sionate and gallant. It is generally in this aspect that he appears in the _Thousand and One Nights_, which, like the _Thousand and One Days_, originally Persian in design, had been done over into arabesques that, while intertwisting fable and fact, none the less displayed the manners of a nation. Some of the stories are as knightly as romaunts, others as delicate as lays; all were the unconsidered trifles of a people who, when the Saxons were living in huts, had developed the most poetic civilization the world has known, a social order which, with religion and might for basis, had a superstructure of art and of love.
It was this that louts in rusty mail went forth to destroy. But though they could not conquer Islam, the chivalry of the Muslim taught them how to conquer themselves. From the victory contemporaneous civilization proceeds.
With the louts were women. An army of Amazons set out for the Cross where they found liberty, new horizons, larger life, and, in contact with the most gallant race on earth, found also theories of love unimagined. In the second crusade Eleanor, then Queen of France, afterward Queen of England, alternated between clashes and amours with emirs. The example of a lady so exalted set a fas.h.i.+on which would have been adopted any way, so irresistible were the Saracens.[36]
It was therefore first in Byzance and then in Islam that the Normans and Anglo-Normans who in the initial crusade went forth to fight went literally to school. They had gone on to sweep from existence inept bands of pecculant Bedouins and discovered that the inept.i.ty was wholly their own. They had thought that there might be a few pretty women in the way, only to find their own women falling in love with the foe. They had thought Tours and Poictiers were to be repeated.
It was in those battles that Europe first encountered Islam. Had not the defeat of the latter resulted, the world might have become Muhammadan, or, as Gibbon declared, Oxford might to-day be expounding the Koran. But though the Moors, who otherwise would have been masters of Europe, retreated, it is possible that they left a manual of chivalry behind. Even had the attention been overlooked, already from Andalusia the code was filtering up through Provence. Devised by a people who of all others have been most chivalrous in their wors.h.i.+p of women it surprised and then appealed. Adopted by the Church, it became the sacrament of the preux chevalier who swore that everywhere and always he would be the champion of women, of justice and of right.
The oath was taken at an hour when justice was not even in the dictionaries--there were none--at an epoch when every man who was not marauding was maimed or a monk. At that hour, the blackest of all, there was proposed to the c.r.a.pulous barons an ideal. Thereafter, little by little, in lieu of the boor came the knight, occasionally the paladin of whom Roland was the type.
Roland, a legend says, died of love before a cloister of nuns. Roland himself was legendary. But in the _Chanson de Roland_ which is the right legend, he died embracing his sole mistress, his sword. Afterward a girl asked concerning him of Charlemagne, saying that she was to be his wife.
The emperor, after telling of his death, offered the girl his son. The girl refused. She declined even to survive. In the story of Roland that is the one occasion in which love appeared. It but came and vanished with a hero whose name history has mentioned but once and then only in a monkish screed,[37] yet whose prowess romance ceaselessly celebrated, inverting chronology in his behalf, enlarging for his grandiose figure the limits of time and s.p.a.ce, lifting his epic memories to the skies.
What Jason had been in mythology, Roland became in legend, the first Occidental custodian of chivalry's golden fleece, which, he gone, was found reducible to just four words--Death rather than dishonor.
Dishonor meant to be last in the field and first in the retreat. Honor meant courage and courtesy, the reverencing of all women for the love of one. It meant bravery and good manners. It meant something else. To be first in the field and last in the retreat was necessary not merely for valor's sake, but because courage was the surest token to a lady's favor, which favor fidelity could alone retain. Hitherto men had been bold, chivalry made them true. It made them constant for constancy's sake, because inconstancy meant forfeiture of honor and any forfeiture degradation.
When that occurred the spurs of the knight were hacked from his heels, a ceremony overwhelming in the simplicity with which it proclaimed him unfit to ride and therefore for chivalry.
Yet though a man might not be false to any one, to some one he must be true. If he knew how to break a lance but not how to win a lady he was less a knight than a churl. ”A knight,” said Sir Tristram, ”can never be of prowess unless he be a lover.” ”Why,” said the belle Isaud to Sir Dinadan, ”are you a knight and not a lover? You cannot be a goodly knight except you are?” ”Jesu merci,” Sir Dinadan replied. ”Pleasure of love lasts but a moment, pain of love endures alway.”
Sir Dinadan was right, but so was Sir Tristram, so was the belle Isaud. A knight had to be brave, he had to be loyal and courteous in war, as in peace. But he had to be also a lover and as a lover he had to be true.
”L'ordre demande nette vie Chastete et curtesye.”
The demand was new to the world. Intertwisting with the silver thread which chivalry drew in and in throughout the Middle Ages, it became the basis of whatever is n.o.ble in love to-day. The sheen of that thread, otherwise dazzling, s.h.i.+nes still in Froissart and in Monstrelet, as it must have shone in the tournaments, where, in glittering mail, men dashed in the lists while the air was rent with women's names and, at each achievement, the heralds shouted ”Loyaute aux Dames,” who, in their tapestried galleries, were judges of the jousts.
Dazzling there it must have been entrancing in the halls and courts of the great keeps where knights and ladies, pages and girls, going up and down, talked but of arms and amours, or at table sat together, two by two, in hundreds, with one trencher to each couple, feasting to the high flourishes of trumpets and later knelt while she who for the occasion had been chosen Royne de la Beaulte et des Amours, awarded the prizes of the tourney, falcons, girdles or girls.
Life then was sufficiently stirring. But the feudal system was not devised for the purposes of love, and matrimony, while not inherently prejudicial to them, omitted, as an inst.i.tution, to consider love at all. Love was not regarded as compatible with marriage and a lady married to one man was openly adored by another, whom she honored at least with her colors, which he wore quite as openly in war and in war's splendid image which the tournament was.
In circ.u.mstances such as these and in spite of ideals and injunctions, it becomes obvious if only from the _Chansons de geste_, which are replete with lovers' inconstancies, that the hacking of spurs could not have continued except at the expense of the entire caste. The ceremony was one that hardly survived the early invest.i.tures of the men-at-arms of G.o.d. It was too significant in beauty.
The fault lay not with chivalry but with the thousand-floored prison that feudalism was. In it a lady's affections were administered for her.
Marriage she might not conclude as she liked. If she were an heiress it was arranged not in accordance with her choice but her suzerain's wishes and in no circ.u.mstances could it be contracted without his consent. Under the feudal system land was held subject to military service and in the event of the pa.s.sing of a fief to a girl, the overlord, whose chief concern was the number of his retainers, could not, should war occur, look to her for aid. The result being that whatever va.s.sal he thought could serve him best, he promptly gratified with the land and the lady, who of the two counted least.[38]
The proceeding, if summary, was not necessarily disagreeable. Girls whose accomplishments were limited to the singing of a lai or the longer romaunt and who perhaps could also strum a harp, were less fastidious than they have since become. Advanced they may have been in manners but in delicacy they were not. Their conversation as reported in the fabliaux and novelle was disquietingly frank. When, as occasionally occurred, the overlord omitted to provide a husband, not infrequently they demanded that he should. As with girls, so with widows. Usually they were remarried at once to men who had lost the right to kill them but who might beat them reasonably in accordance with the law.[39]
The law was that of the Church who, in authorizing a reasonable beating, may have had in view the lady's age, which sometimes was tender. Legally a girl could not be married until she was twelve. But feudalism had evasions which the Church could not always prevent. Sovereign though she were over villeins and va.s.sals and suzerains as well, yet the high lords, sovereign too, married when and whom they liked, children if it suited them and there was a fief to be obtained.
They married the more frequently in that marriage was easily annulled.
Even the primitive Church permitted divorce. ”Fabiola,” said a saint, ”divorced her husband because he was vicious and married again.”[40] In the later Church matrimony was prohibited within the seventh degree of consanguinity in which the nominal relations.h.i.+p of G.o.dfather and G.o.dmother counted equally with ties of blood and created artificial sets of brothers, sisters, cousins and remoter relatives, all of whom stood within the prohibited degrees. Relations.h.i.+p of some kind it was therefore possible to discover and also to invent, or, that failing, there was yet another way. A condition precedent to matrimony was the consent, actual or a.s.sumed, of the contracting parties. But as in the upper cla.s.ses it was customary to betroth children still in the cradle, absence of consent could readily be alleged. As a consequence any husband that wished to be off with the old wife in order to be on with the new, might, failing relations.h.i.+p on his part, advance absence of consent on hers, the result being that the chivalric injunction to honor all women for the love of one, continued to be observed since one was so easily multiplied.[41]
Thereafter began the subsidence of the order which at the time represented what heroism had in the past, with the difference, however, that chivalry lifted sentiment to heights which antiquity never attained. The heights were perhaps themselves too high. On them was the exaltation of whatever is lofty--honor, courage, courtesy and love. It was the exaltation of love that made Don Quixote station himself in the high road and prevent the merchants from pa.s.sing until they acknowledged that in all the universe there was no one so beautiful as the peerless Dulcinea del Toboso. But it was the exaltation of humor that made him answer a natural inquiry of the merchants in regard to the lady by exclaiming: ”Had I shown her to you what wonder would it be to acknowledge so notorious a truth? The importance of the thing lies in compelling you to believe it, confess it, swear it, and maintain it without seeing her at all.”
Exaltation lifted to a pitch so high could but squeak. The world laughed.