Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/104

 In tracing the picture of the declining Middle Ages, the scholars of our days, generally speaking, take little account of the surviving chivalrous ideas. They are regarded by common consent as a more or less artificial revival of ideas, whose real value had long since disappeared. They would seem to be an ornament of society and no more. The men who made the history of those times, princes, nobles, prelates, or burghers, were no romantic dreamers, but dealt in solid facts. Still, nearly all paid homage to the chivalrous bias, and it remains to consider to what extent this bias modified the course of events. For the history of civilization the perennial dream of a sublime life has the value of a very important reality. And even political history itself, under penalty of neglecting actual facts, is bound to take illusions, vanities, follies, into account. There is not a more dangerous tendency in history than that of representing the past, as if it were a rational whole and dictated by clearly defined interests.

We have, therefore, to estimate the influence of chivalrous ideas on politics and on war at the close of the Middle Ages. Were the rules of chivalry taken into account in the councils of kings and in those of war? Were resolutions sometimes inspired by the chivalrous point of view? Without any doubt. If medieval politics were not governed for the better by the idea of chivalry, surely they were so sometimes for the worse. Chivalry during the Middle Ages was, on the one hand, the great source of tragic political errors, exactly as are nationalism and racial pride at the present day. On the other, it tended to disguise well-adjusted calculations under the appearance of generous aspirations. The gravest political error which France could commit was the creation of a quasi-independent Bur-