Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 1.djvu/592

570 of Galahaut infringes friendship's least conceived requirement; while conversely that marvellous high prince leaves undone no act, however extreme, which can carry out the logic of this absolute single-souled devotion. At last he dies on thinking that Lancelot is dead; just as the latter could not have survived the death of Guinever. In spite of the beauty of Galahaut's devotion, its logic and preciosity scarcely throb with manhood's blood. It will not cause our eyes to swell with human tears, as did the blind blow and the true words which passed between Oliver and Roland at Roncesvalles. It would be easy to go on drawing illustrations of the actual and imaginative elements in chivalry, until this chapter should grow into an encyclopedia. They could so easily be taken from many kinds of mediaeval literature in all the mediaeval tongues. The French has barely been touched upon. It affords an exhaustless store. Then in the German we might draw upon the courtly epics, Gottfried of Strassburg's Tristan or the Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach; or on the Nibelungenlied, wherein Siegfried is a very knight. Or we might draw upon the knightly precepts (the Ritterlehre) of the Winsbeke and the Winsbekin (printed in Hildebrand's Didaktik aus der Zeit der Kreuzzüge, Deutsche Nat. Litt. ). And we might delve in the great store of Latin Chronicles which relate the mediaeval history of German kings and nobles. In Spanish, there would be the Cid, and how much more besides. In Italian we should have latter-day romantic chivalry; Pulci's Rotta di Roncisvalle; Boiardo's Orlando innamorato; Ariosto's Orlando furioso; still later, Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata, which takes us well out of the Middle Ages. And in English there is much Arthurian romance; there is Chevy Chace; and we may come down through Chaucer's Knight's Tale, to the sunset beauty of Spenser's Fairie Queen. This glorious poem should serve to fix in our minds the principle that chivalry, knighthood, was not merely a material fact, a ceremony and an institution; but that it also was that ultra-reality, a spirit. And this spirit's ideal creations the ideal creations of the many phases of this spirit accorded with actual deeds which may be read of in the old Chronicles. For final exemplification of the actual and the ideally real in chivalry, the reader may look within himself, and observe the inextricable mingling of the imaginative and the real. He will recognize that what at one time seems part of his imagination, at another will prove itself the veriest reality of his life. Even such wavering verity of spirit was chivalry.

Chivalry—the institution and the whole knightly character—began in the rough and veritable, and progressed to courtlier idealizations. Likewise that knightly virtue, love of woman, displays a parallel evolution, being part of the chivalric whole. Beginning in natural qualities, its progress is romantic, logical, fantastic, even mystical.

Feudal life in the earlier mediaeval centuries did not foster tender sentiments between betrothed or wedded couples. The chief object of every landholder was by