All this is good chivalry as well as proper feudalism. And there are other instances of genuine feudalism in these Romances. Such is the scene between the good knight Pharien and the bad king Claudas, where the former renounces his allegiance to the latter (je declare renoncer a vostre fief) and then declares himself to be Claudas’s enemy, and claims the right to fight or slay him; since Claudas has not kept troth with him.[705]

There is perhaps nothing lovelier in all these Romances than the story of the young Lancelot, reared by the tender care of the Lady of the Lake. His training supplements the genial instincts of his nature, and the result is the mirror of all knighthood’s qualities. He is noble, he is true, he is perfect in bravery, in courtesy, in modesty, the Lady imparting the precepts of these virtues to his ready spirit.[706] There is no knightly virtue that is not perfect in this peerless youth, as he sets forth to Arthur’s Court, there to receive knighthood and prove himself the peerless knight and perfect lover. In this Old French prose his career is set forth most completely, and most correctly, so to speak. One or two points may be adverted to.

Lancelot is not strictly Arthur’s knight. Originally he owed no fealty to him; and he avoided receiving his sword from the king, in order that he might receive it from Guinever, as he did. And so, from the first, Lancelot was Guinever’s knight, as he was afterwards her accepted lover. Consequently his relations to her broke no fealty of his to Arthur.

Again, one notices that the absolute character of Lancelot’s love and troth to Guinever is paralleled by the friendship of the high prince Galahaut to him. That has the same précieuse logic; it is absolute. No act or thought of Galahaut infringes friendship’s least conceived requirement; while conversely that marvellous high prince leaves undone no act, however extreme, which can carry out the logic of this absolute single-souled devotion. At last he dies on thinking that Lancelot is dead; just as the latter could not have survived the death of Guinever. In spite of the beauty of Galahaut’s devotion, its logic and preciosity scarcely throb with manhood’s blood. It will not cause our eyes to swell with human tears, as did the blind blow and the true words which passed between Oliver and Roland at Roncesvalles.[707]

Chivalry—the institution and the whole knightly character—began in the rough and veritable, and progressed to courtlier idealizations. Likewise that knightly virtue, love of woman, displays a parallel evolution, being part of the chivalric whole. Beginning in natural qualities, its progress is romantic, logical, fantastic, even mystical.

Feudal life in the earlier mediaeval centuries did not foster tender sentiments between betrothed or wedded couples. The chief object of every landholder was by force or policy to secure his own safety and increase his retainers and possessions. A ready means was for him to marry lands and serfs in the robust person of the daughter, or widow, of some other baron. The marriage was prefaced by scant courtship; and little love was likely to ensue between the rough-handed husband and high-tempered wife. Such conditions, whether in Languedoc, Aquitaine, or Champagne, made it likely that high-blooded men and women would satisfy their amorous cravings outside the bonds of matrimony. For these reasons, among others, the Provençal and Old French literature, which was the medium of development for the sentiment of love, did not commonly concern itself with bringing lovers to the altar.

In literature, as in life, marriage is usually the goal of bliss and silence for love-song and love-story: attainment quells the fictile elements of fear and hope. Entire classes of mediaeval poetry like the aube (dawn) and the pastorelle had no thought of marriage. The former genre of Provençal and Old French, as well as Old German, poetry, is a lyric dialogue wherein the sentiments of lover and mistress become more tender with the approach of the envious dawn.[708] The latter is the song of the merry encounter of some clerk or cavalier with a mocking or complaisant shepherdess. Yet one must beware of speaking too categorically. For in mediaeval love-literature, marriage is looked forward to or excluded according to circumstances; and there are instances of romantic love where the lovers are blessed securely by the priest at the beginning of their adventures. But whether the lover look to wed his lady, or whether he have wedded her, or whether she be but his paramour, is all a thing of incident, dependent on the traditional or devised plot of the story.[709]

Like all other periods that have been articulate in literature—and those that have not been, so far as one may guess—the Middle Ages experienced and expressed the usual ways of love. These need not detain us. For they were included as elements within those interesting forms of romantic love, which were presented in the lyrics of the Troubadours and their more or less conscious imitators, and in the romantic narratives of chivalry. This literature elaborately expresses mediaeval sentiments and also love’s passion. Its ideals drew inspiration from Christianity and many a suggestion from the antique. More especially, in its growth, at last two currents seem to meet. The one sprang from the fashions of Languedoc and the courtly centres of the north; the other was the strain of fantasy and passion constituting the matière de Bretagne.

Languedoc had been Romanized before the Christian era, and thereafter did not cease to be the home of the surviving Latin culture. By the eleventh century, castles and towns held a gay and aristocratic society, on which Christianity, honeycombed with heresy, sat lightly, or at least joyfully. This society was inclined to luxury, and the gentle relationships between men and women interested it exceedingly. Out of it as the eleventh century closes, songs of the Troubadours begin to rise and give utterance to thoughts and feelings of chivalric love. These songs flourished during the whole of the twelfth century, and then their notes were crushed by the Albigensian Crusade, which destroyed the pretty life from which they sprang.

She whom such songs were meant to adulate or win, frequently was the wife of the Troubadour’s lord. The song might intend nothing beyond such worship as the lady’s spouse would sanction; or it might give subtle voice to a real passion, which offered and sought all. To separate the sincere and passionate from the fanciful in such songs is neither easy nor apt, since fancy may enhance the expression of passion, or present a pleasing substitute. At all events, in this very personal poetry, passion and imaginative enhancings blended in verses that might move a lady’s heart or vanity.

Love, with the Troubadours and their ladies, was a source of joy. Its commands and exigencies made life’s supreme law. Love was knighthood’s service; it was loyalty and devotion; it was the noblest human giving. It was also the spring of excellence, the inspiration of high deeds. This love was courteous, delicately ceremonial, precise, and on the lady’s part exacting and whimsical. A moderate knowledge of the poems and lives of the Troubadours and their ladies will show that love with its joys and pains, its passion, its fancies and subtle conclusions, made the life and business of these men and dames.[710]

In culture and the love of pleasure the great feudal courts of Aquitaine, Champagne, and even Flanders, were scarcely behind the society of Languedoc. And at these courts, rather than in Languedoc, courtly love encountered a new passionate current, and found the tales which were to form its chief vehicle. These were the lays and stories, as of Tristan and of Arthur and his knights, which from Great Britain had come to Brittany and Normandy. They were now attracting many listeners who had no part with Arthur or Tristan, save the love of love and adventure. Marie de France had put certain Breton lays into Old French verse. And one or two decades later, a request from the great Countess Marie de Champagne led Chrétien de Troies, as we have seen, to recast other Breton tales in a manner somewhat transformed with thoughts of courtly love. These northern poems of love and chivalry were written to please the taste of high-born dames, just as the Troubadours had sung and still were singing to please their sisters in the south. The southern poems may have influenced the northern.[711]

In the courtly society of Champagne and Aquitaine diverse racial elements had long been blending, and acquirements, once foreign, had turned into personal qualities. Views of life had been evolved, along with faculties to express them. Likewise modes of feeling had developed. This society had become what it was within the influence of Christianity and the antique educational tradition. It knew the Song of Songs, as well as Ovid’s stories, and likewise his Ars amatoria, which Chrétien was the first to translate into Old French. Possibly its Christianity had learned of a boundless love of God, and its mortal nature might feel mortal loves equally resistless. And now, in the early twelfth century, there came from lands which were or had been Breton, an abundance of moving and catching stories of adventure and of passion which broke through restraint, or knew none. Dames and knights and their rhymers would eagerly receive such tales, and not as barren vessels; for they refashioned and reinspired them with their own thoughts of the joy of life and love, and with thoughts of love’s high service and its uplifting virtue for the lover, and again of its ways and the laws which should direct and guide, but never stem, it.

Thus it came that French trouvères enlarged the matter of these Breton lays. Their romances reflected the loftiest thoughts and the most eloquent emotion pertaining to the earthly side of mediaeval life. In these rhyming and prose compositions, love was resistless in power; it absorbed the lover’s nature; it became his sole source of joy and pain. So it sought nothing but its own fulfilment; it knew no honour save its own demands. It was unimpeachable, for in ecstasy and grief it was accountable to no law except that of its being. This resistless love was also life’s highest worth, and the spring of inspiration and strength for doing valorously and living nobly. The trouvère of the twelfth century created new conceptions of love’s service, and therewith the impassioned thought that beyond what men might do in the hope of love’s fruition or at the dictates of its affection, love was itself a power strengthening and ennobling him who loved. Thought and feeling joined in this conviction, each helping the other on, in interchanging rôles of inspirer and inspired. And finally the two are one:

No one can separate the thought and feeling in this verse. But they were not always fused. The mediaeval fancy sported with this love; the mediaeval mind delighted in it as a theme of argument. And the fancy might be as fantastic as the reasoning was finely spun.

The literature of this love draws no sharp lines between love as resistless passion and love as enabling virtue; yet these two aspects are distinguishable. The first was less an original creation of the Middle Ages than the second. Antiquity had known the passion which overwhelmed the stricken mortal, and had treated it as something put upon the man and woman, a convulsive joy, also a bane. Antiquity had analyzed it too, and had shown its effects, especially its physical symptoms. Much had been written of its fatal nature; songs had sung how it overthrew the strong and brought men and women to their death. Looking upon this love as something put on man and woman, antiquity pictured it mainly as an insanity cast like a spell upon some one who otherwise would have been sane. But the Middle Ages saw love transformed into the man and woman, saw it constitute their will as well as passion, and perceived that it was their being. If the lover could not avoid or resist it, the reason was because it was his mightiest self, and not because it was a compulsion from without; it was his nature, not his disease.

The nature, ways, and laws of this high and ennobling love were much pondered on and talked of. They were expounded in pedantic treatises, as well as set forth in tales which sometimes have the breath of universal life. Ovid’s Ars amatoria furnished the idea that love was an art to be learned and practised. Mediaeval clerks and rhymers took his light art seriously, and certain of them made manuals of the rules and precepts of love, devised by themselves and others interested in such fancies. An example is the Flos amoris or Ars amatoria of Andrew the Chaplain, who compiled his book not far from the year 1200.[712] He wrote with his obsequious head filled with a sense of the authority in love matters of Marie de Champagne, and other great ladies. His book contains a number of curious questions which had been laid before one or the other of those reigning dames, and which they solved boldly in love’s favour. Thus on solicitation Countess Marie decided that there could be no true love between a husband and wife; and that the possession of an honoured husband or beautiful wife did not bar the proffer or acceptance of love from another. The living literature of love was never constrained by the foolishness of the first proposition, but was freely to exemplify the further conclusion which others besides the countess drew.

Andrew gives a code of love’s rules. He would have no one think that he composed them; but that he saw them written on a parchment attached to the hawk’s perch, and won at Arthur’s Court by the valour of a certain Breton knight. They read like proverbs, and undoubtedly represent the ideas of courtly society upon courtly love. There are thirty-one of them—for example:

These rules were exemplified in the imaginative literature of courtly love. Such love and the feats inspired by it made the chief matter of the Arthurian romances, which became the literary property of western Europe; and the supreme examples of their darling theme are the careers and fortunes of the two most famous pairs of lovers in all this gallant cycle, Tristan and Iseult, Lancelot and Guinevere. In the former story love is resistless passion; in the latter its virtue- and valour-bestowing qualities appear. In both, the laws forbidding its fruition are shattered: in the Tristan story blindly, madly, without further thought; while in the tale of Lancelot this conflict sometimes rises to consciousness even in the lovers’ hearts. How chivalric love may reach accord with Christian precept will be shown hereafter in the progress of the white and scarlet soul of Parzival, the brave man proving himself slowly wise.

Probably there never was a better version of the story of Tristan and Iseult than that of Gottfried of Strassburg, who transformed French originals into his Middle High German poem about the year 1210.[713] The poet-adapter sets forth his ideas of love in an elaborate prologue. Very antithetically he shows its bitter sweet, its dear sorrow, its yearning need; indeed to love is to yearn—an idea not strange to Plato—and Gottfried uses the words sene, senelîch, senedaere (all of which are related to sehnsucht, which is yearning) to signify love, a lover, and his pain. His poem shall be of two noble lovers:

The more love’s fire burns the heart, the more one loves; this pain is full of love, an ill so good for the heart that no noble nature once roused by it would wish to lose part therein. Who never felt love’s pain has never felt love:

It is good for men to hear a tale of noble love, yes, a deep good. It sweetens love and raises the hearer’s mood; it strengthens troth, enriches life. Love, troth, a constant spirit, honour, and whatever else is good, are never so precious as when set in a tale of love’s joy and pain. Love is such a blessed thing, such a blessed striving, that no one without its teaching has worth or honour. These lovers died long ago; yet their love and troth, their life, their death, will still give troth and honour to seekers after these. Their death lives and is ever new, as we listen to the tale. Evidently, in Gottfried’s mind the Tristan tale of love’s almighty passion carried the thought of love as the inspiration of a noble life. Yet that thought was not native to the legend, and finds scant exemplification in Gottfried’s poem.

The tragic passion of the main narrative is presaged by the story of Tristan’s parents. His mother was Blancheflur, King Mark’s sister, and his father Prince Riwalin. She saw him in the May-Court tourney held near Tintajoel. She took him into her thoughts; he entered her heart, and there wore crown and sceptre.

She greeted him; he her. She bashfully began: “My lord, may God enrich your heart and courage; but I harbour something against you.”

“Sweet one, what have I done?”

“You have done violence to my best friend”—it was her heart, she meant.

“Beauty, bear me no hate for that; command, and I will do your bidding.”

“Then I will not hate you bitterly. I will see what atonement you will make.”

He bowed, and carried with him her image. Love’s will mastered his heart, as he thought of Blancheflur, of her hair, her brow, her cheek, her mouth, her chin, and the glad Easter day that smiling lay in her eyes. Love the heartburner set his heart aflame, and lo! he entered upon another life; purpose and habit changed, he was another man.

Sad is the short tale of these lovers. Riwalin is killed in battle, and at the news of his death Blancheflur expires, giving birth to a son. Rual the Faithful names the child Tristan, to symbolize the sorrow of its birth.

The story of Tristan’s early years draws the reader to the accomplished, happy youth. He is the delight of all; for his young manhood is courtliness itself, and valour and generosity. He is loved, and afterwards recognized and knighted, by his uncle Mark. Then he sets out and avenges his father’s death; after which he returns to Mark’s Court, and vanquishes the Irish champion Morold. A fragment of Tristan’s sword remained in Morold’s head; Tristan himself received a poisoned wound, which could be healed, as the dying Morold told him, only by Ireland’s queen, Iseult. Very charming is the story of Tristan’s first visit to Ireland, disguised as a harper, under the name of Tantris. The queen hearing of his skill, has him brought to the palace, where she heals him, and he in return becomes the teacher of her daughter, the younger Iseult, whom he instructs in letters, music and singing, French and Latin, ethics, courtly arts and manners, till the girl became as accomplished as she was beautiful, and could write and read, and compose and sing pastorelles and rondeaux and other songs.

On his return to Cornwall he told Mark of the young Iseult, and then, at Mark’s request, set forth again to woo her for him. The Irish king has promised his daughter to whoever shall slay the dragon. Tristan does the deed, cuts out the dragon’s tongue as proof, and then falls overcome and fainting. The king’s cupbearer comes by, breaks his lance on the dead dragon, and, riding on, announces that he has slain the monster; he has the great head brought to the Court upon a wagon. Iseult is in despair at the thought of marrying the cupbearer; her mother doubts his story, and bids Iseult ride out and search for the real slayer. The ladies discover Tristan, with him the dragon’s tongue. They carry him to the palace to heal him, and the young Iseult recognizes him as the harper Tantris, and redoubles her kind care. But after a while she noticed the notch in his sword, and saw that it fitted the fragment found in Morold’s head—and is not Tantris just Tristan reversed? This is the man who slew Morold, her mother’s brother! She seizes the sword and rushes in to kill him in his bath. Her mother checks her, and at last she is appeased, Tristan letting them see that an important mission has brought him to Ireland. There is truce between them, and Tristan goes to the king with Mark’s demand for Iseult’s hand. Then the cupbearer is discomfited, peace is made between the Irish king and Mark, and the young Iseult, with Brangaene her cousin, makes ready to sail with Tristan. The queen secretly gave a love-drink into Brangaene’s care, which Iseult and Mark should drink together. The people followed down to the haven, and all wept and lamented that with fair Iseult the sunshine had left Ireland.

Iseult is sad. She cannot forget that it is Tristan who slew her uncle and is now taking her from her home. Tristan fails to comfort her. They see land. Tristan calls for wine to pledge Iseult. A little maid brings—the love-drink! They drink together, not wine but that endless heart’s pain which shall be their common death. Too late, Brangaene with a cry throws the goblet into the sea. Love stole into both their hearts; gone was Iseult’s hate. They were no longer two, but one; the sinner, love, had done it. They were each other’s joy and pain; doubt and shame seized them. Tristan bethought him of his loyalty and honour, struggling against love vainly. Iseult was like a bird caught with the fowler’s lime; shame drove her eyes away from him; but love drew her heart. She gave over the contest as she looked on him, and he also began to yield. They thought each other fairer than before; love was conquering.

The ship sails on. Love’s need conquered. They talk together of the past, how he had once come in a little boat, and of the lessons: “Fair Iseult, what is troubling you?”

“What I know, that troubles me; what I see, the heaven and sea, that weighs on me; body and life are heavy.”

They leaned toward each other; bright eyes began to fill from the heart’s spring; her head sank, his arm sustained her;—“Ah! sweet, tell me, what is it?”

Answered love’s feather-play, Iseult: “Love is my need, love is my pain.”

He answered painfully: “Fair Iseult, it is the rude wind and sea.”

“No, no, it is not wind or sea; love is my pain.”

“Beauty, so with me! Love and you make my need. Heart’s lady, dear Iseult, you and the love of you have seized me. I am dazed. I cannot find myself. All the world has become naught, save thee alone.”

“Sir, so is it with me.”

They loved, and in each other saw one mind, one heart, one will. Their silent kiss was long. In the night, love the physician brought their only balm. Sweet had the voyage become; alas! that it must end.

With their landing begins the trickery and falsehood compelled by the situation. The fearful Iseult plotted to murder the true Brangaene, who alone knew. After a while Mark’s suspicion is aroused, to be lulled by guile. Plot and counterplot go on; the lovers win and win again; truth and honour, everything save love’s joy and fear and all-sufficiency, are cast to the winds. Even the “Judgment of God” is tricked; the hot iron does not burn Iseult swearing her false oath, literally true. Many a time Mark’s jealousy has been fiercely stirred, only to be tricked to sleep again. Yet he knows that Tristan and Iseult are lovers. He calls them to him; he tells them he will not avenge himself, they are too dear to him. But let them take each other by the hand and leave him. So, together, they disappear in the forest.

Then comes the wonderful, beautiful story of the love-grotto and the lovers’ forest-life; they had the forest and they had themselves, and needed no more. One morning they arose to the sweet birds’ song of greeting; but they heard a horn; Mark must be hunting near. So they were very careful, and again prepared deception. Mark has been told of the love-grotto in the wood. In the night he came and found it, looked through its little rustic window as the day began to dawn. There lay the lovers, apart, a naked sword between them. A sunbeam, stealing through the window, touches Iseult’s cheek, touches her sweet mouth. Mark loves her anew. Then fearful lest the sunlight should disturb her, he covered the window with grass and leaves and flowers, blessed her, and went away in tears. The lovers waken. They had no need to fear. The lie of the naked sword again had won. Mark sends and invites them to return.

Insatiable love knew no surcease or pause. The German poet is driven to a few reflections on the deceits of Eve’s daughters, the anxieties of forbidden love, and the crown of worth and joy that a true woman’s love may be. At last the lovers are betrayed—in each other’s arms. They know that Mark has seen them.

“Heart’s lady, fair Iseult, now we must part. Let me not pass from your heart. Iseult must ever be in Tristan’s heart. Forget me not.”

Says Iseult: “Our hearts have been too long one ever to know forgetting. Whether you are near or far, nothing but Tristan enters mine. See to it that no other woman parts us. Take this ring and think of me. Iseult with Tristan has been ever one heart, one troth, one body, one life. Think of me as your life—Iseult.”

The fateful turning of the story is not far off: Tristan has met the other Iseult, her of the white hands. The poet Gottfried did not complete his work. He died, leaving Tristan’s heart struggling between the old love and the new—the new and weaker love, but the more present offering to pain. The story was variously concluded by different rhymers, in Gottfried’s time and after. The best ending is the extant fragment of the Tristan by Thomas of Brittany, the master whom Gottfried followed. In it, the wounded Tristan dies at the false news of the black sails—the treachery of Iseult of the white hands. The true Iseult finds him dead; kisses him, takes him in her arms, and dies.

From the time when on the ship Tristan and Iseult cast shame and honour to the winds, the story tells of a love which knows no law except itself, a love which is not hindered or made to hesitate and doubt by any command of righteousness or honour. Love is the theme; the tale has no sympathy or understanding for anything else. It is therefore free from the consciously realized inconsistencies present at least in some versions of the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. In them two laws of life seem on the verge of conflict. On the one—the feebler—side, honour, troth to marriage vows, some sense of right and wrong; on the other, passionate love, which is law and right unto itself, having its own commands and prohibitions; a love which is also an inspiration and uplifting power unto the lover; a love holy in itself and yet because of its high nature the more fatally impeached by truth and honour trampled on. In the conflict between the two laws of life in the Lancelot story, the rights and needs and power of love maintain themselves; yet the end must come, and the lovers live out love’s palinode in separate convents. For this love to be made perfect, must be crowned with repentance.

Who first created Lancelot, and who first made the peerless knight love Arthur’s queen? This question has not yet been answered.[714] Chrétien de Troies’ poem, Le Conte de la charrette, has for its subject an episode in Lancelot’s long love of Guinevere.[715] Here, as in his other poems, Chrétien is a facile narrator, with little sense of the significance that might be given to the stories which he received and cleverly remade. But their significance is shown in the Old French prose Lancelot, probably composed two or three decades after Chrétien wrote. It contains the lovely story of Lancelot’s rearing, by the Lady of the Lake, and of his glorious youth. It brings him to the Court of Arthur, and tells how he was made a knight—it was the queen and not the king from whom he received his sword. And he loves her—loves her and her only from the first until his death. He has no thought of serving any other mistress. And he is aided in his love by the “haute prince Galehaut,” the most high-hearted friend that ever gave himself to his friend’s weal.

From the beginning Lancelot’s love is worship, it is holy; and almost from the beginning it is unholy. From the beginning, too, it is the man’s inspiration, it is his strength; it makes him the peerless knight, peerless in courtesy, peerless in emprise; this love gives him the single eye, the unswerving heart, the resistless valour to accomplish those adventures wherein all other knights had found their shame—they were not perfect lovers! Only through his perfect love could Lancelot have accomplished that greatest adventure of the Val des faux amants;—Val sans retour for all other knights.[716] Lancelot alone had always been, and to his death remained, a lover absolutely true in act and word and thought; incomparably more chastely loyal to Guinevere than her kingly spouse. Against the singleness of this perfect love enchantments fail, and swords and lances break. Yet this love, fraught with untruth and dishonour, must conceal itself from that king who, while breaking his own marriage vows as passion led him, trusted and honoured above all men the peerless knight whose peerlessness was rooted in his unholy holy love for Arthur’s queen.

The first full sin between Lancelot and Guinevere was committed when Arthur was absent on a love-adventure, which brought him to a shameful prison. He was delivered by Lancelot, and recognizing his deliverer, he said in royal gratitude: “I yield you my land, my honour, and myself.” Lancelot blushes! Thereafter, as towards Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere are forced into stratagems almost as ignoble as those by which King Mark was tricked. And Guinevere—she too is peerless among women; perfect in beauty, perfect in courtliness, perfect in dutifulness to her husband—saving her love for Lancelot! Guinevere’s dutifulness to Arthur is not shaken by his outrageous treatment of her because of the “false Guinevere,” when he cast off and sought to burn his queen. She will continue to obey him though he has dishonoured her—and all the time, unknown to her outrageous, unjustly accusing lord, how had she cast her and his honour down with Lancelot! Only while she is put away from her lord, and under Lancelot’s guard, for that time she will be true to marriage vows; and Lancelot assents.[717]

The latter part of the story, when asceticism enters with Galahad,[718] suggests that the peerless knight of “les temps adventureux” was sinful. But the main body of the tale put no reproach on Lancelot for his great love. It told of a love as perfect and as absolute as the author or compiler could conceive; and the conduct of Lancelot was intended to be that of a perfect lover, whose sentiments and actions should accord with the idea of courtly love and exemplify its rules. Their underlying principle was that love should always be absolute, and that the lover’s every thought and act should on all occasions correspond with the most extreme feelings or sentiments or fancies possible for a lover. In the prose narrative, for example, Lancelot goes mad three times because of his mistress’s cruelty, a cruelty which may seem to us absurd, but which represents the adored lady’s insistence, under all circumstances, upon the most unhesitating and utter devotion from her lover.

Chrétien’s Conte de la charrette is a clear rendering of the idea that love shall be absolute, and hesitate at nothing; it is an example of courtly love carried to its furthest imagined conclusions. It displays all the rules of Andrew the Chaplain in operation. In it Lancelot will do anything for Guinevere, will show himself a coward knight at her command, or perform feats of arms; he will desire the least little bit of her—a tress of hair—more than all else which is not she; he will throw himself from the window to be near her; engaged in deadly combat, the sight of her makes him forget his enemy; at the news of her death he seeks at once to die. Of course his heart loathes the thought of infringing this great love by the slightest fancy for another woman. On the other hand, when by marvels of valour Lancelot rescues Guinevere from captivity, she will not speak to him because for a single instant he had hesitated to mount a charrette, in which no knight was carried save one who was felon and condemned to death. This was logical on Guinevere’s part; Lancelot’s love should always have been so absolute as never for one instant to hesitate. Much of this is extreme, and yet hardly unreal. Heloïse’s love for Abaelard never hesitated.

Such love, imperious and absolute, shuts out all laws and exigencies save its own;[719] it must be virtue and honour unto itself; it is careless of what ill it may do so long as that ill does not infringe love’s laws. Evidently before it the bonds of marriage break, or pale to insignificance. It is its own sanction, nor needs the faint blessing of the priest. The poet—as the actual lover likewise—may even deem that love can best show itself to be the principle of its own honour when unsustained by wedlock; thus unsustained and unobscured it stands alone, fairer, clearer, more interesting and romantic. Again, since mediaeval marriage in high life was more often a joining of fiefs than a union of hearts, there would be high-born dames and courtly poets to declare that love could only exist between knight and mistress, and not between husband and wife. Marriage shuts out love’s doubts and fears; there is no need of further knightly services; and husband and wife by law are bound to render to each other what between lovers is gracious favour; this was the opinion of Marie de Champagne, it also was the opinion of Heloïse. In chivalric poetry the lovers, when at last duly married, may continue to call each other ami et amie rather than wife and lord;[720] or a knight may shun marriage lest he settle down and lose worship, doing no more adventurous feats of arms, like Chrétien’s Erec, till his wife Enide stung him by her speech.[721] Some centuries later Malory has Lancelot utter a like sentiment: “But to be a wedded man I think never to be, for if I were, then should I be bound to tarry with my wife, and leave arms and tournaments, battles and adventures.”

If allowance be made for the difference in topic and treatment between the Arthurian romances and Guillaume de Lorris’s portion of the Roman de la rose, the latter will be seen to illustrate similar love principles. De Lorris’s poem is fancy playing with thoughts of love which had inspired these tales of chivalry. Every one knows its gentle idyllic character;—how charming, for instance, is the conflict between the Lover-to-be and Love, who quickly overcomes the ready yielder. So he surrenders unconditionally, gives himself over; Love may slay him or gladden him—“le cuers est vostre, non pas miens,” says the lover to Love, and you shall do with it as you will. Then Love sweetly takes his little golden key, and locks the lover’s heart, after which he safely may impart his rules and counsels: the lover must abjure vilanie, and foul and slanderous speech—the opposite of courtesy. Pride also (orgoil) must be abandoned. He should attire himself seemingly, and show cheerfulness; he must be niggardly in nothing; his heart must be given utterly to one; he shall undergo toils and endure griefs without complaint; in absence he will always think of the beloved, sighing for her, keeping his love aflame; he will be shameful, confused and changing colour in her presence; at night he will toss and weep for love of her, and dream dreams of passionate delight; then wakeful, he will rise and wander near her dwelling, but will not be seen—nor will he forget to be generous to her waiting-maid. All of this will make the lover pale and lean. To aid him to endure these agonies, will come Hope with her gentle healings, and Fond-thought, and Sweet-speech of the beloved with a wise confidant, and Sweet-sight of her dwelling, maybe of herself. The Roman de la rose is fancy, and the Arthurian romances are fiction. In the one or the other, imagination may take the place of passion, and the contents of the poem or romance afford a type and presentation of the theory of love.

CHAPTER XXIV

Among the romances presumably having a remote Breton origin, and somehow connected with the Court of Arthur, was the tale of Parzival, the princely youth reared in foolish ignorance of life, who learned all knighthood’s lessons in the end, and became a perfect worshipful knight. This tale was told and retold. The adventures of another knight, Gawain, were interwoven in it. Possibly the French poet, Chrétien de Troies, about the year 1170, in his retelling, first brought into the story the conception of that thing, that magic dish, which in the course of its retellings became the Holy Grail. Chrétien did not finish his poem, and after him others completed or retold the story. Among them there was one who lacked the smooth facility of the French Trouvère, yet surpassed him and all others in thoughtfulness and dramatic power. This was the Bavarian, Wolfram von Eschenbach. He was a knight, and wandered from castle to castle and from court to court, and saw men. His generous patron was Hermann, Landgraf of Thüringen, who held court on the Wartburg, near Eisenach. There Wolfram may have composed his great poem in the opening years of the thirteenth century. He was no clerk, and had no clerkly education. Probably he could neither read nor write. But he lived during the best period of mediaeval German poetry, and the Wartburg was the centre of gay and literary life. Walther von der Vogelweide was one of Wolfram’s familiars in its halls.

Wolfram knew and disapproved of Chrétien’s version of the Perceval; and said the story had been far better told by a certain Kyot, a singer of Provence.[722] Nothing is known of the latter beyond Wolfram’s praise. Perhaps he was an invention of Wolfram’s; not infrequently mediaeval poets referred to fictitious sources. At all events, Wolfram’s sources were French or Provençal. In large measure the best German mediaeval poetry was an adaptation of the French; a fact which did not prevent the German adaptations from occasionally surpassing the French works they were drawn from. In the instance of Wolfram’s Parzival, as in that of Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan, the German poems were the great renderings of these tales.

As our author was a thoughtful German, his style is difficult and involved. Yet he had imagination, and his poem is great in the climaxes of the story. It is a poem of the hero’s development, his spiritual progress. Apparently it was Wolfram who first realized the profound significance of the Parzival legend. Both the choice of subject and the contents of the poem reflect his temperament and opinions. Wolfram was a knight, and chose a knightly tale; for him knightly victories were the natural symbols of a man’s progress. He was also one living in the world, prizing its gifts, and entertaining merely a perfunctory approval of ascetic renunciation. The loyal love between man and woman was to him earth’s greatest good, and wedlock did not yield to celibacy in righteousness.[723] Let fame and power and the glory of this world be striven for and won in loyalty and steadfastness and truth, in service of those who need aid, in mercy to the vanquished and in humility before God, with assurance that He is truth and loyalty and power, and never fails those who obey and serve Him.