What kind of men do we think the mediaeval knights really were? I have
always seen them in a romantic light, finer than human. Tennyson gave me
that apple, and I confess I did eat, and I have lived on the wrong diet
ever since. Malory was almost as misleading. My net impression was that
there were a few wicked, villainous knights, who committed crimes such
as not trusting other knights or saying mean things, but that even they
were subject to shame when found out and rebuked, and that all the rest
were a fine, earnest Y. M. C. A. crowd, with the noblest ideals.
But only the poets hold this view of knights, not the scholars. Here,
for example, is a cold-hearted scholar, Monsieur Albert Guerard. He has
been digging into the old mediaeval records with an unromantic eye, hang
him; and he has emerged with his hands full of facts which prove the
knights were quite different. They did have some good qualities. When
invaders came around the knights fought them off as nobly as possible;
and they often went away and fought Saracens or ogres or such, and when
thus engaged they gave little trouble to the good folk at home. But in
between wars, not being educated, they couldn't sit still and be quiet.
It was dull in the house. They liked action. So they rode around the
streets in a pugnacious, wild-western manner, despising anyone who could
read and often knocking him down; and making free with the personal
property of merchants and peasants, who they thought had no special
right to property or even to life. Knights who felt rough behaved as
such, and the injuries they inflicted were often fatal.
They must have been terrors. Think of being a merchant or cleric without
any armor, and meeting a gang of ironclads, with the nearest police
court centuries off! Why, they might do anything, and whatever they did
to a merchant, they thought was a joke. Whenever they weren't beating
you up they fought with one another like demons--I don't mean just in
tournaments, which were for practice, but in small, private wars. And to
every war, public or private, citizens had to contribute; and instead of
being thanked for it, they were treated with the utmost contempt.
Suppose a handsome young citizen, seeing this and feeling ambitious,
tried to join the gang and become a knight himself. Would they let him?
No! At first, if he were a powerful fighter, he did have a small chance,
but as time went on and the knights got to feeling more noble than
ever, being not only knights but the sons of knights, they wouldn't let
in a new man. The mere idea made them so indignant they wanted to lynch
him. "Their loathing for the people seemed almost akin in its intensity
to color prejudice."
[Illustration]
They were also extravagant and improvident and never made money, so the
more they spent the more they had to demand from the people. When every
one had been squeezed dry for miles around, and had been thumped to make
sure, the knights cursed horribly and borrowed from the Church, whether
the Church would or no, or got hold of some money-lender and pulled his
beard and never paid interest.
The Church tried to make them religious and partly succeeded; there were
some Christian knights who were soldierly and courtly, of course. But,
allowing for this (and for my exaggerating their bad side, for the
moment), they certainly were not the kind of men Tennyson led me to
think.
I do not blame Tennyson. He had a perfect right to romanticize. He may
have known what toughs the knights were as well as anybody, but loved
their noble side, too, and dreamed about it until he had made it for the
moment seem real to him, and then hurried up and written his idyls
before the dream cracked. He may never have intended me or any of us to
swallow it whole. "It's not a dashed bible; it's a book of verse," I can
imagine him saying, "so don't be an idiot; don't forget to read your
encyclopedia, too."
But verse is mightier than any encyclopedia. At least it prevails.
That's because the human race is emotional and goes by its feelings. Why
haven't encyclopedists considered this? They are the men I should blame.
What is the use of embodying the truth about everything in a precise
condensed style which, even if we read it, we can't remember, since it
does not stir our feelings? The encyclopedists should write their books
over again, in passionate verse. What we need in an encyclopedia is
lyrical fervor, not mere completeness--Idyls of Economic Jurisprudence,
Songs of the Nitrates. Our present compendiums are meant for scholars
rather than people.
Well, the knights are gone and only their armor and weapons remain; and
our rich merchants who no longer are under-dogs, collect these as
curios. They present them with a magnificent gesture to local museums.
The metal suit which old Sir Percy Mortimer wore, when riding down
merchants, is now in the Briggsville Academy, which never heard of Sir
Percy, and his armor is a memorial to Samuel Briggs of the Briggs
Tailoring Company. In Europe a few ancient families, in financial decay,
are guarding their ancestors' clothing as well as they can, but sooner
or later they will be driven to sell it, to live. And they won't live
much longer at that. The race will soon be extinct.
[Illustration]
Last year I got a bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art about
armor. It described how an American collector saw a fine set in Paris.
"A single view was quite enough to enable him to decide that the armor
was too important to remain in private hands." And that settled it.
These collectors are determined fellows and must have their own
way--like the knights.
But there were difficulties this time. They couldn't at first get this
set. The knightly owner of the armor, "in whose family it was an
heirloom, was, from our point of view, singularly unreasonable: he ...
was unwilling to part with it; the psychological crisis when he would
allow it to pass out of his hands must, therefore, be awaited." For
there comes "a propitious moment in cases of this kind," adds the
bulletin.
Yes, "in cases of this kind" collectors comfortably wait for that crisis
when the silent old knightly owner finally has to give in. They leave
agents to watch him while he struggles between want and pride, agents
who will snap him up if a day comes when the old man is weak. These
agents must be persistent and shrewd, and must present tactful
arguments, and must shoo away other agents, if possible, so as to keep
down the price. When the "propitious" time comes they must act quickly,
lest the knight's weakness pass, or lest some other knight send him help
and thus make them wait longer. And, having got the armor, they hurry
it off, give a dinner, and other merchants come to view it and measure
it and count up the pieces.
This sort of thing has been happening over and over in Europe--the
closing scenes of the order of knighthood, not foreseen at gay
tournaments! They were lucky in those days not to be able to look into
the future. Are _we_ lucky to be blind, at Mount Vernon or on some old
campus? The new times to come may be better--that always is
possible--but they won't be the kind we are building, and they may scrap
our shrines.
Some day when our modern types of capitalists are extinct, in their
turn, will future poets sing of their fine deeds and make young readers
dream? Our capitalists are not popular in these days, but the knights
weren't in theirs, and whenever abuse grows extreme a reaction will
follow. Our critics and reformers think _they_ will be the heroes of
song, but do we sing of critics who lived in the ages of chivalry? There
must have been reformers then who pleaded the cause of down-trodden
citizens, and denounced and exposed cruel knights, but we don't know
their names. It is the knights we remember and idealize, even old
Front-de-Boeuf. They were doers--and the men of the future will
idealize ours. Our predatory interests will seem to them gallant and
strong. When a new Tennyson appears, he will never look up the things
in our newspapers; he won't even read the encyclopedia--Tennysons don't.
He will get his conception of capitalists out of his heart. Mighty men
who built towers to work in, and fought with one another, and engaged in
great capitalist wars, and stood high above labor. King Carnegie and his
round directors' table of barons of steel. Armour, Hill and Stillman,
Jay Gould--musical names, fit for poems.
The men of the future will read, and disparage their era, and wish they
had lived in the wild clashing times we have now. They will try to
enliven the commonplaceness of their tame daily lives by getting up
memorial pageants where they can dress up as capitalists--some with high
hats and umbrellas (borrowed from the museums), some as golfers or polo
players, carrying the queer ancient implements. Beautiful girls will
happily unbuckle their communist suits and dress up in old silken
low-necks, hired from a costumer. Little boys will look on with awe as
the procession goes by, and then hurry off to the back yard and play
they are great financiers. And if some essay, like this, says the
capitalists were not all noble, but a mixed human lot like the knights,
many with selfish, harsh ways, the reader will turn from it restlessly.
We need these illusions.
Ah, well, if we must romanticize something, it had best be the past.