Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/124

102 personifications were indispensable for expressing the finer shades of sentiments. Erotic terminology, to be understood, could not dispense with these graceful puppets. People used these figures of Danger, Evil Mouth, etc., as the accepted terms of a scientific psychology. The passionate character of the central motif prevented tediousness and pedantry.

In theory, the Roman de la Rose does not deny the ideal of courtesy. The garden of delights is inaccessible except to the elect, regenerated by love. He who wants to enter must be free from all hatred, felony, villainy, avarice, envy, sadness, hypocrisy, poverty and old age. But the positive qualities he has to oppose to these are no longer ethical, as in the system of courtly love, but simply of an aristocratic character. They are leisure, pleasure, gaiety, love, beauty, wealth, liberality, frankness and courteousness. They are no longer so many perfections brought about by the sacredness of love, but simply the proper means to conquer the object desired. For the veneration of idealized womanhood, Jean Chopinel substituted cruel contempt for its feebleness.

Now, whatever influence the Roman de la Rose may have exercised on the minds of men, it did not succeed in completely destroying the older conception of love. Side by side with the glorification of seduction professed by the Rose, the glorification of the pure and faithful love of the knight maintained its ground, both in lyrical poetry and in the romance of chivalry, not to speak of the fantasy of tournaments and passages of arms. Towards the end of the fourteenth century the question which of the two conceptions of love should be held by the perfect nobleman provoked a literary dispute such as French taste loved in later centuries also. The noble Boucicaut had made himself the champion of true courtesy by composing with his travelling companions the Livre des Cent Ballades, in which he called on the wits of the court to decide between the honest and self-denying service of a single lady, and fashionable flirtation. Knights or poets who, like Boucicaut, honoured the old ideal of courtesy, were vaunted as models, Othe de Granson and Louis de Sancerre among others. Christine de Pisan took part in the dispute by posing as the intrepid advocate of female honour. Her Episire au Dieu d’Amours formulated the complaints of women about