told as fact or as old romance, are one of the saddest issues of its
universal tyranny—a tyranny of parent over child, of man over woman,
of lord over serf, of king over lord, of emperor over king, of pope
over emperor—a tyranny of crazy conventions and mistaken ideals over
all, with mortifications of spirit a thousand times harsher than those
of the flesh, which made life hideous even to its ideals.
“Analyze the great love story of that era and you find rather a tragedy
of tyranny. It runs thus: About the close of the Dark Ages the parents
of Pierre Abelard decided, for the future repose of their souls,
to repress all their natural desires and shift all mundane duties.
Accordingly they retired to separate convents, leaving their son free
to follow his natural bent. Argument being his ruling passion, he
wandered through France challenging the local theologians in debate,
always drawing a following, always making powerful enemies, and,
doubtless, very much enjoying the life. At Laon he tackled the great
Anselm, and finding him a man ‘of mean genius and great fluency of
words without sense,’ Abelard conceived the idea of reading the Bible
for himself. Then he made his way to Paris to break a lance with
the great Canon Fulbert, where he met the Canon’s niece, Heloise.
A love story ensued, like other love stories in many ways, except
that Heloise, against all self-interest, physical, social, spiritual,
refused to marry her lover, entreat as he might; she would do anything
else for him, except state her true reason—but yet a woman. We have it
finally in her correspondence, ‘What an injury shall I do the Church if
I rob it of such a man!’
“Is it a sacrifice on the altar of the Church on her part, or is it a
woman’s sacrifice for the interests of the man she loves better than
herself? Had her mother made a like renunciation? No mother appears in
the story of this adopted niece of an ecclesiastic. Here is Heloise’s
position. In her time the only opening for a clever man was the Church
with its conditions; a loving woman should not hamper an ambitious
man; she should remember she cannot be to him what he is to her, which
is a law of life known to woman, that we find holds true here. Having
first given her all to the Church, she enters a convent at Abelard’s
suggestion. But in the twelfth century, or any other, the hope of youth
dies hard. Heloise does not take the black veil. She cannot burn her
ships.
“Thereafter this truly fair woman of Romance figures as a stern
disciplinarian reporting the weaker sisters. But she is severe upon
herself as well, and confesses having unlawfully opened a letter in
which she was sure there was news of her Abelard; though, when in after
years Abelard wished to correspond with her, she begged him not. This
is the tragedy of Heloise.
“Abelard also entered a convent, but there, as elsewhere, he had a
wonderful faculty for carrying his point, and probably led, on the
whole, a very congenial life. However, he once overstepped himself, and
was summoned to appear before the Council of Soissons and commanded to
burn his own book with his own hands. He ungallantly admitted that this
was the saddest moment of his life. Here is Abelard’s tragedy. He felt
that all was lost. But it was Abelard that the world needed, not his
book.
“Brave as Socrates, Abelard returned to the Abbey of Saint Denis, there
to raise the first historic doubt. He did not think Saint Denis was the
Areopagite of the Scriptures, nor did he believe the saint was ever in
Paris. The horrified Abbot accordingly gave Abelard over to the civil
authorities ‘for reflections upon the kingdom and the crown.’
“Driven from Paris, he retired to a cloistered order at Troyes, where
he built a church and had the pleasure of dedicating it to the Holy
Ghost (there being a law against dedicating a temple to the Paraclete).
Arguing to the last, Abelard passed away, and while his body was
mouldering in the ground, his soul went arguing on in his intellectual
descendants, the mediæval schoolmen who, in their poor way, managed
to awaken the mind of Europe, if only to lead it by labyrinths into a
cul-de-sac.
“I wonder if Heloise was able to follow her true love’s valiant career
without earthly pride? Or by some strange austere resolve did she deny
herself that gentle pleasure? For Heloise belongs to the species,
omnipotent woman, who carries out her decisions by hook or by crook
for the benefit of self and others, never hampered by a doubt of the
ultimate excellence of her arrangements.
“Did she do well not to rob the Church of Abelard? Perhaps she builded
better than she knew, or she may have made a sad mistake, but God
knows, she did her best. That was eight hundred years ago, but her
story is tragic today. As to Abelard’s, it is really very interesting.
“And,” continues History, “the favorite romance of this sadly
submissive age was ‘The Patient Griselda.’ It was an old, old tale
when Boccaccio told it, but, thank fortune, it is dead at last, for we
cannot now conceive of the excellence of the heroine.
“A marquis, whose only love is the chase, is forced by his subjects
to marry. He compromises on a little country girl, and requires her
to promise ‘to study to please him and not to be uneasy at anything
whatever he may do or say.’ (A man’s requirements, only this marquis
wasn’t a gentleman.) To test her patience, he amuses himself by taking
her children from her, one by one, and leading her to suppose that they
have been killed, because his people objected to the descendants of
a peasant. Griselda blesses her children as she delivers them to his
servitor, saying:
“‘Take them; do what my lord and thine has commanded; but, prithee,
leave them not to be devoured by fowls or wild beasts unless that be
his will.’
“Then the marquis tells her he must annul their marriage.
“She replies, ‘For what I have been I hold myself indebted to
Providence and you. I consider it a favor lent me,’ and she
acquiescingly returns to the house of her father, who has prudently
saved her old garments, never supposing the marquis would ‘keep her
long as wife.’ In good time the marquis summons her to prepare his home
for a new wife. She affectionately complies. The new wife proves to be
herself, the marquis being quite persuaded that her patience ‘proceeds
from no want of understanding in her.’ Her children are restored. She
weeps for joy, and they all live happily ever after.”
Romance replies, “The chivalry in your instances is confined to
the women, which is always pathetic. As to the actual Griselda of
Aquitaine, whose name and story grew into the heart of an age, she
lived just before the days of chivalry. Indeed, Shades of women like
Griselda and Heloise may have inspired the chivalrous attitude toward
women.
“One should read Griselda’s story in Chaucer, not in shallow-hearted
Boccaccio, even though it was the purest and most popular of his tales.
Chaucer would make you feel her kinship with women now, who make
sacrifices for love less open and rude but not so different from hers.
“Listen, History,” continues Romance, “to Chaucer’s tale: You have
commended bloodier deeds than Griselda’s. The marquis says to Griselda,
when he demands the child, ‘In great lordship there is great servitude.
I may not do as every ploughman may,’ and Griselda, like a mother,
whose son is demanded as a sacrifice on the altar of her country, first
consecrates him to God. She is as tender to her child as she is loyal
to her husband, but I will say no more; no one but Chaucer should touch
that scene.
“I have always suspected that the real marquis in question intended to
kill the child for exactly the reasons he stated, and the gentleness of
the mother, who could not possibly protect the child, saved it. Life
was held very loosely then. You see, History, I tell more truth than
I am supposed to and you tell less, my idea being to appear fanciful,
yours, to appear truthful. We are all poor sinners. However,” continues
Romance, “a sweeter day was dawning. Out of the effort of the soldier
to protect the pilgrim grew the Holy Wars, wherein the ideal that the
strong should serve the weak was born, and I nursed it into chivalry.”
“And a hideous and lawless state of things you brought forth,” remarked
History; for Romance and History, like other old friends that have
separated and come together again, cannot collate long in accord.
“In some cases I taught men not to need the law’s control,” retorted
Romance. “To make men gentle one must teach them gently, so I sent
my troubadours through the land as trusty messengers of chivalry and
bid them sing the new ideal into the very heart of the realm. And in
song they contended as lustily for the point of honor as ever knight
contended with his lance.
“To these simple troubadours that love which is not physical, which
begs to serve, not to be served, and poetry, itself, were one, and
known by one term alone,—Love. But disputes arose regarding this term
for an ideal new under the sun,—disinterested love in its highest and
its fullest. Therefore, where the shades of classic refinement lingered
latest, in fair Provence, I instituted tribunals before which my
troubadours might plead their subtle causes in song, and styled them
Courts of Love. My judges were the gentlest of ladies and poets bowed
before them, saying:
‘For all my words here and every part
I speak them all under correction
Of you that feeling have in love’s art,
And put it all in your discretion.’”
History interrupts: “Among my humoresques, I happen to have a literal
account of one of those old Courts of Love. It was convened by the
Countess of Champagne; she had fifteen more women on the bench with
her, all decked out in green and gold. Monkey-fashion, those scented
ladies (_precieuses ridicules_) of old had the proceedings of their toy
court solemnly recorded. André, their scribe, adds that the perfumes
on the fair judges kept him sneezing continually while he was taking
testimony. At that time chivalry had most absurdly exalted ‘my ladye,’
also the ‘beautiful unseen,’ styled the ‘beautiful unknown,’ and see
the things men were expected to do!”
“Yes, and what is more, they did them,” retorted Romance, “and at the
bidding of woman without other coercion, and the spirit of her law
still rules.”
“I am confining myself to documentary evidence,” says History tartly.
“This Chief Justice of Love, Maria of Champagne, was the daughter of
that Queen Eleanor of France, who would go on the Second Crusade.
Had she only behaved herself in the East, she might have figured as
the first New Woman. However, that was not to be. Formal action was
brought before the Court of the Chief Justice of Love in the Province
of Beauty by plaintiff, a servitor of love, against defendant, a Fair
Lady—likewise a married one. Plaintiff had agreed to walk twice a week
past defendant’s door, for which service defendant agreed to throw
him a bunch of violets. As the weather was cold and the road muddy,
plaintiff tired of the job and claimed in legal phraseology, as he did
not always get his violets, that breach of contract should release him
from further obligation.
“Defendant pleads ecstasy of love and anguish of mind. She said that
because of Danger (Court term for husband) she could not always perform
her contract, since she frequently had to profess that she was asleep,
although she was awake; that it was highly ungallant in defendant to
complain of snow and mire. Love should render him invulnerable. She
also added that the man had the best of it, for he might repeat his
hours and orisons while he was walking up and down before her door;
also, he had the privilege of kissing her latch as he passed, whereas
(feminine economy) she was obliged to purchase thread to tie up his
violets.
[Illustration: _Head of Justice, from Fiore’s Group. This Old Venetian
Figure of Justice Still Presides Over the Gallery of Early Painters at
Venice. Technically she is in advance of the Madonnas of Her Period._]
“Judgment in favor of the lady.
“Among the celebrated cases recorded in this court are two every-day
disagreements between man and woman. A gentleman complains of the
refusal of a lady to dance with him, which rendered him ridiculous. The
court commanded the lady to dance with him.
“Action was brought by a wife against her husband for restraining her
from wearing a hat of the newest fashion.
“Judgment for the lady.
“I will close,” continues History, “by citing a few of the thirty-one
rulings of this Court of Maria of Champagne:
“1. Love and economy do not agree.
“2. Without good reason no one can be forbidden to love.
“3. Love is not stationary. If it does not diminish,
it will increase.
“4. It is not loving to kiss and tell.
“5. No man can love two women at the same time.
“6. A woman should persist in her choice till all hope be abandoned;
like persistence cannot be demanded from man.”
“Maria de Champagne was a profound jurist, but I doubt if she was a
truly romantic woman,” replies Romance. “Were I not too chivalrous to
expose to your commonplace laughter the gentlest yearning of a rude
age, their uncertain groping for a vague ideal too noble for their
actual conception, I could a sweeter tale unfold of Courts of Love of
old.
“But if you will laugh at ideals of romantic love, laugh kindly with me
over its merriest comedy, written by the saddest and most chivalrous
lover of them all.
“Take down your files, Dame History, and find, if you can, another
servitor of love as chivalrous to his lady as Molière was to his wife,
a woman belonging to other men; Molière’s patience, like Griselda’s,
‘proceeded from no lack of understanding.’”
“You have wandered far from the romance of the days of chivalry for
your chivalrous instance,” sneers History.
“I was following up the seed that chivalry sowed, the idea of the
self-effacement of the strong in favor of the weak. But let us turn
from the dramatist to the comedy, and by a short consideration of ‘_Les
Precieuses Ridicules_,’ I may be able to make your point for you, ‘that
the actual present is as romantic as the romance of the past.’
“At the beginning of this play, Georgebus, a provincial gentleman, has
made arrangements with two satisfactory persons to marry respectively
his daughter and niece. The girls are brought to Paris, where the
candidates for their hands and hearts appear and come to the point at
once. It seems the girls have been reading the romances of Mlle. de
Scudéry, who has given them the idea that a lover should fall in love
at sight, seek out his lady, woo her, and after gallantly surmounting
many obstacles, win her. Georgebus perceives that the men depart in
displeasure and investigates. He has observed that the girls are aping
the manners of the ladies of the Court, which in Molière’s time were
very affected. Georgebus’ daughter states her platform. It is rather
romantic, but there are lovers nowadays that might fill the bill. She
closes by saying, ‘But to plunge headlong into a proposal of marriage,
to make love and marriage settlements go hand in hand, is to begin
the romance at the wrong end. Once more, father, there is nothing
more shopkeeper-like than such proceedings.’ Georgebus is unable ‘to
make out the meaning of her jargon,’ while his niece adds that those
gentlemen ‘have never seen the map of the Country of Tenderness.’ She
is also dissatisfied with their dress.
“Certainly, Molière did know what young girls crave, which Georgebus
was unable to understand.
“In the meantime the disconcerted lovers have dressed their valets up
and bidden them address the ladies in the most exaggerated fashion.
The young girls are completely taken in, as girls often are by pseudo
noblemen. The comedy runs high. Finally the masters appear, strip their
valets of their finery, whip them and send them home.
“The bottom falls out of everything. Georgebus cries, ‘Hide yourselves,
you idiots, hide yourselves forever,’ and after the girls’ exit, adds,
‘The cause of all the trouble lies in romances, verses, songs, sonnets
and lays.’
“But in the long run, romances, verses and songs have won. Twentieth
century sentiment goes with the girls though they were fooled once in
the days of their youth. Nowadays, my courts sit in secret session. The
novel is their organ, but, History, your crude Courts of Love died out
six hundred years ago.”
[Illustration: _An Ideal of the Gracious Republic of Venice, Attended
by Justice and Peace, Expressed by Paul Veronese, Sixteenth Century._]
“Never have I called you into my councils that I have not been
belittled,” observes History. “My romance is democracy not courtship
and it commenced with the inspiration of the Greeks. My first votary
taught that ‘it is clear not in one thing alone, but wherever you
test it, what a good thing is equality among men.’ He adds, ‘A tyrant
disturbs ancient laws, violates women, kills men without trial. But a
people ruling: first, the very name of it is so beautiful—_Isonomiê_;
and secondly, a people does none of these things.’
“And this beautiful ‘equality among men’ I have followed in its ideal,
in its fruition and alas, sometimes, in its debasement throughout the
ages. I watched its short and glorious days in Greece, its orderly
development in Rome, its splendid resurrection in Venice, which led the
line of free cities of the Middle Ages that handed it down. I watched
the American and the French Republics rise in the eighteenth century,
the French to totter, but to rise again, the American to live to fight
another chivalrous war for human rights; and, the justice of republics
proven, the twentieth century built one in a day. Then the distant
continent, that drained the bravest blood of Portugal in the sixteenth
century, wiped out its debt with the ‘fruits of the spirit,’ the
romantic spirit of the twentieth century.
“Herodotus placed his faith in the people long ago, probably on
more evidence than he reported in support of what to him seemed
self-evident. Were he to come back to his native town now he would find
his beautiful city of Halicarnassus replaced by a mean Turkish village,
but through it are ringing the words ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,’
and the Father of History might be less surprised than men of today by
the revolution that has suddenly established a constitution in Turkey.
Indeed, nowhere has the very name of equality proved more beautiful.
Since July 25, 1908, the lion and the lamb have actually lain down
together on the once bloody fields of the Turk. Over a little Turkish
shop two inscriptions appeared, side by side, above the three beautiful
words: ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’ and ‘The
beginning is from God; so victory is sure.’
[Illustration: _A Mediæval Expression of Justice, Attended by
Archangels, by Fiore. Michael, the Angel of Good Counsel and Patron
of All Souls, in Her Honor, has Added a Pair of Scales to His Usual
Emblems. Gabriel, With His Lily and Scroll, the Angel Who Announces
Things High and Holy, is Pointing Directly to Her._]
“And if the great traveler of old were to push on westward across
Europe, westward across the Atlantic, he might bequeath his visions
to earth, and bidding us hope on, go back well pleased to the Courts
of the Dead, his simple thesis proved—‘A people does none of these
things.’”
Romance aside, “In her self-satisfaction she has forgotten all about
the Golden Age. It never was hers. It is mine, and I will recast it
safely in the future. There will I hold Courts of Love to define
all new ideals, my pleaders shall be poets and their words shall be
spoken under correction of those that have feeling in the art of this
broader love, and my good knights shall swear ‘To defy power that seems
omnipotent, to love and bear, to hope till Hope creates from its own
wreck the thing it contemplates.’”
Thus does the romantic twentieth century realize the fruition of the
ideals of democrats of the past.
_A Word Regarding Bibliography_
The original documents[6] consulted for this book have been the works
of art of which it treats. In the case of old books, I have also
availed myself of facsimiles, which have this advantage over originals,
they may be freely handled. Most interesting among them are THE BOOK OF
KELLS, notes from copy of plates, with remarks by Westwood and Digby
Watts; and ILLUMINATED BOOKS OF THE MIDDLE AGES, by Humphrey Jones. The
authorities on Gothic architecture, which I have accepted as final,
are Viollet-le-Duc and Corroyer. I have drawn much of my material from
modern technical periodicals, most useful of which have been LES ARTS,
REVUE ARCHEOLOGIQUE, REVUE DES QUESTIONS HISTORIQUES and the AMERICAN
HISTORICAL REVIEW. Though I have had recourse to general historians who
treat of the Middle Ages,—Duruy, Gibbon, Guizot, Kitchin, Saint Martin,
etc.; to guide books of accepted accuracy,—Baedeker, Guerber, Guides
Joanne, and Dent’s Mediæval Town Series; to encyclopedias, English and
French,—to the appended list of authorities I acknowledge especial
indebtedness. Even when I have not borrowed statements from them I have
been influenced by them in my interpretations of the Middle Ages:
Blades, Wm., Books in Chains.
Boulting, Wm., Torquato Tasso and His Times.
Bruun, J. A., An Inquiry into the Arts of the Middle Ages.
Bryce, James, Holy Roman Empire.
Chéreul, Dictionnaire des Institutions Françaises.
Clerval, A., Guide Chartrain (Docteur es-Lettres, Lauréat
de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres
et Membre de la Société Nationale des Antiquaires).
Cutts, Edward Lewes, Scenes and Characters of the Middle Ages.
Dill, Samuel, Roman Society in the Last Century of the
Western Empire.
Fletcher (Prof. Bannister and Bannister F. Fletcher),
History of Architecture on the Comparative Method.
Gray, Geo. Zabriskie, The Children’s Crusade.
Gould, Sabine Baring-, Myths of the Middle Ages.
Hawkins, John Sidney, History of the Origin and Establishment of
Gothic Architecture.
Hay, John, Castilian Days.
Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris.
Ivo, Letters of Ivo (reprint of original documents).
Jusserand, J. J., La Vie Nomade.
Lacroix, Paul, Military and Religious Life in the Middle Ages.
Lang, Andrew, Books and Bookmen.
Lecoy-de-la Manche, Richard Albert: France under St. Louis and
Philip le Hardi; Les Manuscripts et la Miniature;
Le Troisième Siècle Artistique; Suger.
Mabillon (edited by), Life of Bishop Arnold of Le Mans.
Maitland, Samuel Roffey, The Dark Ages.
Mandan, Books in Manuscript.
Matthews, Story of Architecture.
Merlet, Eugene, Bulletin Monumental, Number 67, of 1903.
Norton, Chas. Eliot, Church Building in the Middle Ages.
Reber, Dr. Franz von, History of Mediæval Art.
Reinach, Salomon, Apollo.
Rennert, Hugo Albert, Life of Lope de Vega.
Rowbotham, J. F., Troubadours and Courts of Love.
Stetson, F. M., William the Conqueror.
Ticknor, Geo., History of Spanish Literature.
Trumble, Alfred, Sword and Scimitar.
Vasari, Giorgio, Lives of the Painters (Blashfield’s edition).
Wiseman, Preface to Cardinal Wiseman’s novel, Fabiola.
_Index_
Abbey aux Dames, 79.
Abbey aux Hommes, 79.
Abelard, 121.
Ambrose, 18.
Amiens, viii.
Amiens Copy, 107.
Angelo, xii, 102.
Bayeux, viii.
Beauvais, viii.
Bernard, Saint, 47.
Bibliotheque Nationale, 116.
Bologne sur Mer, viii.
Bouillon, Godfrey de, 45.
Bourg, viii.
Browning, 113.
Brunelleschi, 33.
Caen, viii, 73.
Calderon, 90.
Carpio (see de Vega), 88.
Cassiodorus, 105.
Charlemagne, 106.
Charles le Bel, 56.
Charles the Bald, 55.
Charles the Wise, 116.
Chartres, viii, 51.
Chaucer, xiii, 126.
Cherbourg, viii.
Cicely, 79.
Clovis, 26, 27, 28, 52, 55.
Cnut, 62.
Coutances, viii.
Corday, 97.
Court of Love, 129.
Crusade of Children, xv.
Denis, Abbey de Saint, 38.
Denis, Saint, 40.
Dieppe, viii.
Dinan, ix, 85.
Dinard, ix.
Dols, ix.
Dürer, xiv.
Durrow, 106.
Ebbon, 29, 30.
Eleanor, Queen, 129.
Eloi, Saint, 40.
Francis, xvi.
Fulbert, 62, 121.
Fulda, Abbot of, 107.
Georgebus, 133.
Ghiberti, 102.
Gibbon, 55.
Glass, 44, 69.
Gothic, 9, 12, 43.
Gothic, viii, 76.
Gothic, 69.
Gregory, 19, 22.
Grey, Lady Jane, 111.
Griselda, 125.
Guibert, 64.
Haimon, Abbé, 67.
Halicarnassus, 136.
Harold, 82.
Heloise, 121.
Henry of Navarre, 56.
Herodotus, 136.
Hildebrand, 77.
Hugh of Rouen, 67.
_Imagier_, 34, 43, 47, 69.
Iona, 103.
Ivo, Saint, 63, 77.
Jerome, Saint, 50, 104.
Keats, 72.
Kells, Book of, 100.
Lactance, 50.
Laon, viii, 6, 121.
Lanfranc, 74.
Le Mans, viii, 78.
Louis VI, 39.
Louis VII, 39.
Louis the Pious, 29, 30, 107.
Louis, Saint, 10, 56, 115.
Love, Court of, 129.
Lowell, 72.
Lubin, Well of Saint, 58.