ROMANTIC LOVE
1. Marriage cannot be pleaded as an excuse for refusing to love.
2. A person who cannot keep a secret can never be a lover.
3. No one can really love two people at the same time.
4. Love never stands still; it always increases--or diminishes.
5. Favours which are yielded unwillingly are tasteless.
6. A person of the male sex cannot be considered a lover until
he has passed out of boyhood.
7. If one of two lovers dies, love must be foresworn for two
years by the survivor.
8. No one can love unless the soft persuasion of love itself
compel him.
11. It is not becoming to love those ladies who only love with
a view to marriage.
13. A love that has once been rendered common and commonplace
never, as a rule, endures very long.
14. Too easy possession renders love contemptible.
15. Every lover is accustomed to grow pale at the sight of
his lady-love.
16. At the sudden and unexpected prospect of his lady-love,
the heart of the true lover invariably palpitates.
18. If love once begins to diminish, it quickly fades away
and rarely recovers itself.
20. Every action of a lover terminates with the thought of
the loved one.
_The Laws of Love accepted by Courts of Love._
(As given by Rowbotham.)
[Illustration: A SQUARE AT NIMES.
_By Joseph Pennell._]
Criticise and condemn as we may the conceptions of the time, the
institution of chivalry accomplished a marvellous work of regeneration
wherever it was able to establish itself.
One can but turn with emotion and gratitude to the land where it has
blossomed into some of its most beautiful forms, where the warm blood of
the South took fire and impelled to the following of noble ideals with
the ardour of heroes and the steadfastness of saints.
Greek, Celtic, Phœnìcian, Iberian, Ligurian, Saracen blood flows in the
veins of the people; and in looking at their faces one can understand
why the troubadours sang such sweet and merry songs, and why the country
to this day may be called the land
"Of joy, young-heartedness, and love...."
It was the Duke of Acquitaine, himself a troubadour, who gave us those
words so descriptive of Southern France, in the gay little verse,--
"A song I'll make you worthy to recall,
With ample folly and with sense but small,
Of joy, young-heartedness, and love will I compound it all."
In truth it was a wonderful time, full of colour and passion in which
there was the shadow of tragedy, but seldom the grey and dust-colour of
the sordid and the mean.
For women it was literally a coming-of-age. A modern author speaks about
the "advent of woman in man's world," when she "became for the first
time something more than a link between two generations."
Love, as a romantic sentiment, became possible between men and women,
because the woman's individuality as a human being was recognised, and
with it her right to give or to withhold her love. True love and true
friendship, as we moderns understand them, may almost claim to take
their rise in the age of chivalry.
Fraternity of arms constituted an honoured tie among knights. They
received the Sacrament together, exchanged armour, and from that time
forth supported one another wherever they went, and at all hazards.
"From this day forward ever more
Neither fail, either for weal or wo,
To help other at need.
Brother be now true to me,
And I shall be as true to thee."
This brotherhood in arms, however, should perhaps be described as a
revival of an ancient idea, whereas love, as it developed under the laws
of chivalry, was a thing hitherto unknown to mankind. Doubtless there
had been obscure precursors of the ideal, for many times must a new
thought be uttered before the air vibrates with sufficient strength to
awake answering movements in other minds. The first to think and feel a
new world into existence--which is the ultimate mission of thinking and
feeling--often leaves nothing but that new world behind him; neither
name, nor fame, nor fortune. And so we shall never know in what noble
hearts the true romantic love between man and woman first sprang into
being.
The new mode of thought kindled generous impulses. Often fantastic, not
to say ridiculous, they were always graceful and full of the flavour of
romance.
"Many a knight," we are told, "would sally forth from a besieged town
during a suspension of hostilities and demand whether there was any
cavalier of the opposite host who, for love of his lady bright, would
do any deed of arms."
"Now let us see if there be any amorous among you," was the usual
conclusion of such a challenge. And out would come prancing some armoured
knight from the gates of the city, and the two, with much ceremony of
salutation, would fall to and hack each other to pieces with the utmost
courtesy and mutual respect.
"The air was rent with names of ladies" in the big tournaments of the
day. "On, valiant knights, fair eyes behold you!"
The proclamation of the beauty of his lady, as all romances of that day
remind us, was one of the serious duties of the knight, and Cervantes
only slightly caricatures the custom when he makes Don Quixote "station
himself in the middle of a high road and refuse to let the merchants
of Toledo pass unless they acknowledged there was not in the universe
a more beautiful damsel than the peerless Dulcinea del Toboso."
There was also a sort of official post or title, _Poursuivant d'Amour_,
the knight dedicating himself to love as to a religion with solemn
fervour. The Duke of Lancaster, says Froissart, "possessed, as part of
his inheritance in Champagne, the Castle of Beaufort, of which an English
Knight called Poursuivant d'Amour was Captain." It appears that this
was a title which knights used to give themselves on account of wearing
the portraits or colours of their mistress and challenging each other
to fight in her honour.
To be in love was a social necessity. It was hopelessly "bad form" to
be otherwise.
"A knight without love is an ear of wheat without grain," says some
authority of the day.
It certainly was a lovelorn time! "Love was everything," says Justin
Smith, an author whose two large volumes on the troubadours testify to
wide study of the subject, "and we cannot wonder that much was made of
it. Its hopes and fears were the drama of that day. Sweet and passionate
thoughts were the concert and the opera. Tales of successful and
unsuccessful wooing were the novels.... Love, as we are to learn, was
the shoot of modern culture, and the tree that now overspreads us with
its boughs bloomed, even in their time, into a poetry as unsurpassed
and as unsurpassable after its kind as the epics of Homer."
* * * * *
But this immense change in the attitude of mind towards life and towards
women naturally could not take place without producing a universal
upheaval of the current morality: a thorough upsetting of the doctrines
upon which the husband had hitherto founded an authority practically
limitless.
[Illustration: IN THE CAMARGUE, FROM THE RAILWAY.
_By E. M. Synge._]
For women obedience and morality had been synonyms. The wife was "good"
in proportion as she acknowledged by word and deed her husband's
"rights" over her, as over any other of his possessions. Conduct
implying independence, an infringement on these "rights," was the
acme of wickedness. To act as if she belonged to herself was a sort of
embezzlement, and of course this was the case still more unpardonably
if she made so free as to bestow her heart on some other man; then they
both became involved in the sin of purloining that which belonged to
another. To flirt was a sort of petty peculation. It was because she so
belonged to him, as real property, that the husband thought his "honour"
injured by his wife's conduct, quite irrespective of any wound to his
affections. If a man fails to keep a possession, given securely into
his hands by law and custom and universal sentiment, he must indeed be
a sorry sort of lord and master! Such was the popular view of the case,
and the coarser and more brutal the society the more violent was this
feeling of wounded vanity or "honour," as it was pompously called. But
suddenly--or at least without traceable gradations--this bulwark of
marital sovereignty was rent as by an earthquake, and the idea began
to get abroad that the woman somewhat _belonged to herself_; no longer
entirely to her feudal or to her domestic lord. Had this new idea taken
complete and undisturbed possession, it would have worked out a modern
society very different from the society that now exists. But it did not
obtain such mastery. It only shared the field with its predecessor. The
confusion of standard was therefore extreme, for nobody paused to separate
and choose between the two ideals; they were held simultaneously, nor is
it only in the time of the troubadours that men and women hold beliefs
about social matters that are mutually destructive.
So the old rights of property in the wife continued to hold sway even
while she began dimly to feel and inwardly to claim the right to herself,
with the resulting right to bestow her love where she pleased, or where
she needs must. And that wrought wonderful changes.
One must approach this imaginative, passionate world, if we desire to
understand it, with a spirit swift to detect differences and shades of
feeling, to muster all the local conditions before the imagination; and
one must banish scrupulously all ready-made maxims belonging to our own
day, for these at once place us outside the epoch that we are trying to
enter. It is this difficulty, this subtlety in the subject, which makes
the study of that age and country so keenly interesting to all who are
curious of the movements of human thought as it grows and changes under
the pressure of its varying destinies.
These new ideals were now universal among kings and princes and all who
had any pretensions to cultivation and good breeding. Love-affairs of
which a married woman was the heroine were looked upon as essentially
belonging to the chivalric order of things.
"These Courts of Love laid down rules for love," says
Baring-Gould; "they allowed married women to receive the homage
of lovers, and even nicely directed all the symptoms they were
to exhibit.... There is the case of Dante and Beatrice, and
of Wolfram von Eschenbach, one of the noblest and purest of
singers, who idealised the Lady Elizabeth of Harlenstein....
It is precisely this unreal love, or playing at love-making,
that is scoffed at by Cervantes in Don Quixote and the peerless
Dulcinea del Toboso."
Of course, in this state of things there was much that seemed disorderly
and was disorderly if the older view is to remain, in any sense, as
a standard. Indeed it was, in some respects, perhaps, disorderly from
_any_ point of view, as was inevitable during so vast an upheaval of
social conditions. It was a battle of good and evil, but infinitely in
advance of the previous state, when there was no battle, because evil
was securely enjoying uncontested possession. From that enthroned and
law-supported wrong there seemed no escape except through the "moral
chaos"--if so it really was--of the troubadour era. Certainly the men
and women of that time treated life very boldly and frankly, and they
talked more about sentiment and the joy of life than about morality;
but the atmosphere which lingers around them, as one feels it in their
songs and stories, in all the delicate courtesy of their manners, the
dignity and fineness of their sentiments, makes it impossible to think
of them as essentially base or unlovable, whatever condemnation their
departure from ancient standards may induce moralists to pronounce upon
them.
Their ideals may have been false; that is a matter of individual opinion;
but they lived in devotion to those ideals with an enthusiasm that has
never been surpassed.
Perhaps the long repression, the second-hand vicarious existence suffered
for so many ages by women, had made them almost intoxicated with this
new experience, this coming of age as human beings, this entering into
possession of themselves.
It was like a re-birth, and tempted to all sorts of wild adventures.
Rebellion was in the air, and especially was it rife on all questions
of love. As a recent writer remarks, men and women began to love each
other because they should not have done so.
But love was treated very seriously as well as very fancifully. There
was no aspect in which it did not play an important _rôle_ in this
extraordinary age.
It set vielles lightly tinkling and lutes twanging, but it also took
possession of great hearts and minds and ruled them for a lifetime. Love
was sometimes a "lord of terrible aspect," as Dante has represented him.
As women developed personality and individual qualities in their new
freedom, the _grande passion_ became for the first time really possible.
And their mental and spiritual development tended to promote the growth
of the character of men in the same direction.
There seemed a sort of expectation running through the society of that
time that a new source of joy had been found, a force that was to redeem
and beautify life.
The author of "The Women of the Renaissance" represents the men of
this later age--which, however, was still inspired by the chivalric
outburst--asking themselves what was the good of learning, money, labour,
or even semblances of joy if their hearts were empty.
"The heart," they complain, "makes itself felt above the claims
of work, above the intellect, demanding for life a recompense,
a goal. We perish for lack of something to love; out of mere
self-pity we ought to bestow on ourselves the alms of life,
which is love. All is vanity save this vanity, for before
our birth, until our death, throughout our whole existence it
bears in front of us the torch of life."
Looking back from this point to the Griselda-epoch, we have travelled
far indeed!
With such aspirations, such ideas in the air (whether or not
they were expressed in a definite way), marriage, which carried
Griselda-associations with it, was naturally looked upon as altogether
outside the realm of romance or happiness.
"To mingle it with love, the absolute, great enthusiasms of heart or
intellect, was to lay up for oneself disasters, or at least certain
disappointment," says M. de Maulde de La Clavière, and he instances as
the object of ridicule in that era a lady who speaks with a sigh of the
"unaccustomed pleasure" of loving the man she married. He defines the
Renaissance view of wedlock as "the modest squat suburban villa in which
you eat and sleep: passion is a church spire piercing the sky...."
That being the general consensus of opinion on the subject, it is not
surprising that nearly all the love-stories of that day are entirely
disconnected with the idea of marriage. The holy estate itself was
defined as "the suburbs of hell." Marriages were "unions of policy
and position." And almost without exception they were arranged by the
parents, in accordance with material considerations, the old feudal idea
lingering on in this department of life and the daughter being handed
over by the father to a suitable (or unsuitable) husband, without his
ever dreaming of consulting her views in the matter. She was generally
too inexperienced to have any views of importance, and even had she been
consulted probably would not, at that time, have been able to make a
much better choice than her father made for her.
But clearly if that was the order of things, love and romance must
establish their kingdom outside of marriage, and this was exactly what
occurred.
"Since love is, by the nature of things, free and spontaneous,
rebellion and revolution were inevitable unless womankind were
to become something else than human."
The point of view becomes clearer in the light of some of the decisions
and rules of the Courts of Love; for even if, as so many writers insist,
these tribunals never really existed, the quoted rules and judgments
must at any rate represent the ideas that swayed the society of the day.
[Illustration: OLD BRIDGE AT ST. GILLES IN THE CAMARGUE.
_By E. M. Synge._]
These courts were said to be held under the presidency of some great
lady of the district, assisted by a council of ladies and knights.
One of the questions submitted to the Court of the Comtesse de Champagne
was: "Can true love exist between two persons who are married?"
And the Countess, aided by her councillors, pronounced as follows:--
"Therefore, having examined the said arguments by the aid of
sound science, we proceed hereby to enact that love cannot
extend his laws over husband and wife, since the gifts of
love are voluntary, and husband and wife are the servants of
duty. Also between the married can there be in our opinion no
jealousy, since between them there can be no love.... This
is our decision, formed with much deliberation and with the
approval of many dames; and we decree that it be held firm
and inviolable."
This decree proved a serious stumbling-block to one betrothed lady who
had promised a cavalier that if ever she should find herself at liberty,
she would accept his devotion. "Presently she married the lover to
whom she was plighted, whereupon the second knight resumed his suit,
conceiving--according to the ideas of the day--that the lady was now fully
at liberty. She, however, could not be persuaded against the evidence
of her feelings, ... and the matter was referred to the queen, Eleanor,
wife of Henry II. of England. Her award could not run counter to that
of the Countess of Champagne, who has pronounced that love cannot exist
between husband and wife. It is our decree, therefore, that the dame
aforesaid keep faith with her cavalier."
The only means of evading this decree was for the lady to declare that
henceforth she intended to abandon love altogether, but if she did that
she was obliged to make up her mind to endure social ostracism, for then
"she was sure to be shunned by the gay ladies and gentlemen who then
formed the vast majority of the fashionable world." We are not told what
the lady decided to do in this most trying dilemma.
Altogether the state of society under the sway of the Courts of Love--or
of the sentiment they represent--seems like that of some strange
fairy-tale. Nothing could have been more fantastic or romantic; but
however ridiculous they may seem to the critical mind, there was always
a strain that one can only call noble running through it all. It might
be dangerous, impracticable, subversive, "immoral," if one will, but it
was never paltry or base.
In their own fashion the reputed Courts of Love upheld a very high ideal.
They insisted upon the absolute sacredness of a promise and of the word
of honour, which a knight or a lady must keep to the death. They demanded
fidelity between lovers, for that was considered "to be the essence of
high-toned gallantry."
All this is our own inheritance of to-day. As regards the etiquette
of love-making the Court instituted what were called the four degrees
of love: "hesitating," "praying," "listening," and "drurerie." "When
the lady consented to enter this last stage, she granted the gentleman
his first kiss ... after which there could be no withdrawal from the
engagement."
The lady was often unwilling to give it, and there are many stories of
troubadours who try to obtain it by fraud or artifice. It seems strange
that, in that case, in a society with a high sense of honour, it should
have possessed any binding value, but apparently it had something of the
quality of the marriage ceremony, and therefore, perhaps, something of
the idea of a tie which might be enforced against the will of the person
concerned.
It is difficult, perhaps impossible, for the modern eye to see this era
exactly as it was. Writers represent it as corrupt and unlovely or as
romantic and noble according to their own particular bias. The former
attitude is perhaps largely determined by a leaning towards the older
order of thought which the advent of chivalry challenged; while the less
severe view is apt to accompany sympathy with the newer doctrine, which
establishes the woman as an independent being, for good or for evil, and
refuses to regard her as the property in any sense whatever--whether
by gift or by "contract"--of another person. As this latter ideal is
in its infancy even yet, the majority of writers see little in the
troubadour epoch but hopeless licence. It is to them merely an outbreak
of "immortality," and neither the passionate rebellion against an old
and degrading system nor the enthusiastic reaching out towards something
better saves it from their severe condemnation. But we have all of us
good reason to be thankful for this stage of social upheaval through which
our spiritual ancestors passed, and it ill becomes us to cast reproaches
at those who have brought us, in one great burst of inspiration, so much
farther on our way.