Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 1.djvu/595

CHAP XXIII source of joy. Its commands and exigencies made life's supreme law. Love was knighthood's service; it was loyalty and devotion; it was the noblest human giving. It was also the spring of excellence, the inspiration of high deeds. This love was courteous, delicately ceremonial, precise, and on the lady's part exacting and whimsical. A moderate knowledge of the poems and lives of the Troubadours and their ladies will show that love with its joys and pains, its passion, its fancies and subtle conclusions, made the life and business of these men and dames.

In culture and the love of pleasure the great feudal courts of Aquitaine, Champagne, and even Flanders, were scarcely behind the society of Languedoc. And at these courts, rather than in Languedoc, courtly love encountered a new passionate current, and found the tales which were to form its chief vehicle. These were the lays and stories, as of Tristan and of Arthur and his knights, which from Great Britain had come to Brittany and Normandy. They were now attracting many listeners who had no part with Arthur or Tristan, save the love of love and adventure. Marie de France had put certain Breton lays into Old French verse. And one or two decades later, a request from the great Countess Marie de Champagne led Chrétien de Troies, as we have seen, to recast other Breton tales in a manner somewhat transformed with thoughts of courtly love. These northern poems of love and chivalry were written to please the taste of high-born dames, just as the Troubadours had sung and still were singing to please their sisters in the south. The southern poems may have influenced the northern.

In the courtly society of Champagne and Aquitaine diverse racial elements had long been blending, and acquirements, once foreign, had turned into personal qualities. Views of life had been evolved, along with faculties to