Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/138

116 illusion, seeing the misery and the falsehood of it, we must begin with those practical and frigid minds which were, so to say, opposed to it by temperament. Such were Philippe de Commines and his master, Louis XI. In describing the battle of Montlhéry, Commines abstains from all heroic fiction: no fine exploits, no dramatic turns; he only gives us a realistic picture of comings and goings, of hesitations and fears. He takes pleasure in telling of flights and noting how courage returned with security. He rejects all chivalrous terminology and scarcely mentions honour, which he treats almost as an inevitable evil.

The ideal of chivalry tallies with the spirit of a primitive age, susceptible of gross delusion and little accessible to the corrections of experience. Sooner or later intellectual progress demands a revision of this ideal. It does not disappear, however, it only sheds its too fantastic tendencies. Chivalry, far from being completely disavowed, drops its affectation of a quasi-religious perfection, and will be henceforth only a model of social life. The knight is transformed into the cavalier, who, though still keeping up a very severe code of honour and of glory, will no longer claim to be a defender of the Faith or a protector of the oppressed. The modern gentleman is still ideally linked with the medieval conception of chivalry.

The requirements of moral, æsthetic and social perfection weighed too heavily on the knight. This highly praised chivalry, considered from any point of view whatever, could not conceal its inherent falsity. It was a ridiculous anachronism, a piece of factitious making up. No social utility, no moral value, everywhere vanity and sin. Even as an æsthetic game, the courtly life ended by boring the players. So they turn to another ideal, that of simplicity and of repose. Does this mean that the disillusioned nobles turned to a spiritual life? Sometimes they did. At all times the lives of many courtiers and soldiers have ended in renunciation of the world. More often, however, they are content themselves to seek elsewhere the sublime life which chivalry failed to give. From the days of antiquity a promise had been held out of an earthly felicity to be found in rural life. Here true peace seemed attainable without strife, simply by flight. Here was a sure refuge from envy and hatred, from the