Among the scant certainties vouchsafed us is that every age lives by its
special catchwords. Whether from rebellion against the irking monotony
of its inherited creeds or from compulsions generated by its own
complexities, each age develops its code of convenient illusions which
minimize cerebration in dilemmas of conduct by postulating an
unequivocal cleavage between the current right and the current wrong. It
works until men tire of it or challenge the cleavage, or until
conditions render the code obsolete. It has in it, happily, a certain
poetic merit always; it presents an ideal to be lived up to; it gives
direction to the uncertain, stray impulses of life.
The Chivalric code is no worse than most and certainly it is prettier
than some. It is a code peculiar to an age, or at least it flourishes
best in an age wherein sentiment and the stuff of dreams are easily
translatable into action. Its requirements are less of the intellect
than of the heart. It puts God, honor, and mistress above all else, and
stipulates that a knight shall serve these three without any
reservation. It requires of its secular practitioners the holy virtues
of an active piety, a modified chastity, and an unqualified obedience,
at all events, to the categorical imperative. The obligation of poverty
it omits, for the code arose at a time when the spiritual snobbery of
the meek and lowly was not pressing the simile about the camel and the
eye of the needle. It leads to charming manners and to delicate
amenities. It is the opposite of the code of Gallantry, for while the
code of Chivalry takes everything with a becoming seriousness, the code
of Gallantry takes everything with a wink. If one should stoop to pick
flaws with the Chivalric ideal, it would be to point out a certain
priggishness and intolerance. For, while it is all very well for one to
cherish the delusion that he is God's vicar on earth and to go about his
Father's business armed with a shining rectitude, yet the unhallowed may
be moved to deprecate the enterprise when they recall, with discomfort,
the zealous vicarship of, say, the late Anthony J. Comstock.
But here I blunder into Mr. Cabell's province. For he has joined many
graceful words in delectable and poignant proof of just that lamentable
tendency of man to make a mess of even his most immaculate conceivings.
When he wrote _Chivalry_, Mr. Cabell was yet young enough to view the
code less with the appraising eye of a pawnbroker than with the ardent
eye of an amateur. He knew its value, but he did not know its price. So
he made of it the thesis for a dizain of beautiful happenings that are
almost flawless in their verbal beauty.