Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/64

44 has its finely made up forms. Two friends dress in the same way, share the same room, or the same bed, and call one another by the name of “mignon.” It is good form for the prince to have his minion. We must not let the well-known case of Henry III of France affect for us the ordinary acceptance of the word “mignon” in the fifteenth century. There have been princes and favourites in the Middle Ages too who were accused of culpable relations—Richard I of England and Robert de Vere, for instance—but minions would not have been spoken of so freely, if we had to regard this institution as: connoting anything but sentimental friendship. It was a distinction of which the friends boasted in public. On the occasion of solemn receptions the prince leans on the shoulder of the minion, as Charles V at his abdication leaned on William of Orange. To understand the duke’s sentiment towards Cesario in Twelfth Night, we must recall this form of sentimental friendship, which maintained itself as a formal institution till the days of James I and George Villiers.

The complex of all these fine forms, veiling cruel reality under apparent harmony, made life an art. This art leaves no traces, and it is for this reason that its cultural importance has been noticed too little. The tenderness of compliments, the charming fiction of modesty and altruism, the hieratic pomp of ceremonies, the pageant of marriage, all this is ephemeral and may seem culturally sterile. That which gives them their style and expression is fashion, not art, and fashion leaves no monuments behind.

And yet, at the close of the Middle Ages, the connections between art and fashion were closer than at present. Art had not yet fled to transcendental heights; it formed an integral part of social life. In the domain of costume art and fashion were still inextricably blended, style in dress stood nearer to artistic style than later, and the function of costume in social life, that of accentuating the strict order of society itself, almost partook of the liturgic. The amazing extravagance of dress during the last centuries of the Middle Ages was, as it were, the expression of an overflowing æsthetic craving, which art alone did not suffice to satisfy.

All relations, all dignities, all actions, all sentiments, had