Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 1.djvu/579

CHAP XXII frightful ruin. All is not as in the opening of the story, which was so fascinating, so knightly and almost as purely adventurous as the Arthurian romances—only that there was less love of ladies and a disturbing dearth of forests perilous, and enchanted castles. It was then that the reader had ever and anon to remind himself that Froissart is not romance or legend, but a contemporary chronicle; and that in spite of heightened colours and expanded (if not invented) dialogues, his narrative does not belong to the imaginative or fictitious side of chivalry, but to its actualities.

Froissart's pictures of the depravity and devastation caused by the wars of England and France, disclose the unhappy actuality in which chivalry might move and have its being. And the knights were part of the cruelty, treachery, and lust. One may remark besides in Froissart a certain shallowness, a certain emptying, of the spirit of chivalry. One phase of this lay in the expansion of form and ceremony, while life was departing;—as, for example, in the hypertrophe of heraldry, and in the pageantry of the later tournaments, where such care was taken to prevent injury to the combatants. A subtler phase of chivalry's emptying lay in its preciosity and in the excessive growth of fantasy and utter romance—of which enough will be said in the next chapter.