CHAPTER XVII

THE GAY SCIENCE

"Madamë, whilom I was one That to my father had a king; But I was slow, and for nothing Me listë not to Love obey; And that I now full sore abey.... Among the gentle nation Love is an occupation Which, for to keep his lustës save, Should every gentle heartë have." GOWER, "Confessio Amantis," Bk. IV

The facts given in the foregoing chapter may explain a good deal in the Wife of Bath's Prologue that might otherwise be ascribed to wide poetical licence; but they may seem strangely at variance with the "Knight's Tale" or the "Book of the Duchess." The contradiction, however, lies only on the surface. Neither flesh nor spirit can suffer extreme starvation. When the facts of life are particularly sordid, then that "large and liberal discontent," which is more or less rooted in every human breast, builds itself an ideal world out of those very materials which are most conspicuously and most painfully lacking in the ungrateful reality. The conventional platonism and self-sacrifice of love, according to the knightly theory, was in strict proportion to its rarity in knightly practice. We must, of course, beware of the facile assumption that these medieval _mariages de convenance_ were so much less happy than ours; nothing in human nature is more marvellous than its adaptability; and Richard II., for instance, seems to have bought himself with hard cash as great a treasure as that which Tennyson's Lord of Burleigh won with more subtle discrimination. But at least the conditions of actual marriage were generally far less romantic then than now; and, at a time when the supposed formal judgment of a Court of Love, "that no married pair can really be in love with each other," was accepted even as _ben trovato_, it was natural that highly imaginative pictures of love _par amours_ should be extremely popular.

Let us consider again for a moment the conditions of life in a medieval castle. In spite of a good deal of ceremonial which has long gone out of fashion, the actual daily intercourse between man and woman was closer there than at present, in proportion as artificial distances were greater. The lady might stand as high above the squire as the heaven is in comparison with the earth; but she had scarcely more privacy than on board a modern ship. They were constantly in each other's sight, yet could never by any possibility exchange a couple of confidential sentences except by a secret and dangerous rendezvous in some private room, or by such stray chances as some meeting on the stairs, some accident which dispersed the hunting-party and left them alone in the forest, or similar incidents consecrated to romance. The three great excitements of man's life--war, physical exercise, and carousing--touched the ladies far less nearly, and left them ordinarily to a life which their modern sisters would condemn as hopelessly dull. The daily-suppressed craving for excitement, the nervous irritability generated by artificial constraint, explain many contrasts which are conspicuous in medieval manners. Moreover, there were men always at hand, and always on the watch to seize the smallest chance. The Knight of La Tour Landry is not the only medieval writer who describes his own society in very much the same downright words as the Prophet Jeremiah (ch. v., v. 8). The very _raison d'être_ of his book was the recollection how, in younger days, "my fellows communed with ladies and gentlewomen, the which [fellows] prayed them of love; for there was none of them that they might find, lady or gentlewoman, but they would pray her; and if that one would not intend to that, other would anon pray. And whether they had good answer or evil, they recked never, for they had in them no shame nor dread by the cause that they were so used. And thereto they had fair language and words; for in every place they would have had their sports and their might. And so they did both deceive ladies and gentlewomen, and bear forth divers languages on them, some true and some false, of the which there came to divers great defames and slanders without cause and reason.... And I asked them why they foreswore them, saying that they loved every woman best that they spake to: for I said unto them, 'Sirs, ye should love nor be about to have but one.' But what I said unto them, it was never the better. And therefore because I saw at that time the governance of them, the which I doubted that time yet reigneth, and there be such fellows now or worse, and therefore I purposed to make a little book ... to the intent that my daughters should take ensample of fair continuance and good manners." The tenor of the whole book more than bears out the promise of this introduction: and the good knight significantly recommends his daughters to fast thrice a week as a sovereign specific against such dangers (pp. 2, 10, 14).

We have seen how often women were forbidden attendance at all sorts of public dances, and even weddings; and how demurely they were bidden to pace the streets. The accompanying illustration from a 15th-century miniature given by Thomas Wright ("Womankind in Western Europe," p. 157) shows on the one hand the formal way in which girls were expected to cross their hands on their laps as they sat, and on the other hand the licence which naturally followed by reaction from so much formality. Both sides come out fully in the Knight's book. We see a girl losing a husband through a freedom of speech with her prospective fiancé which seems to us most natural and innocent; while the coarsest words and actions were permitted to patterns of chivalry in the presence of ladies. A stifling conventionality oppressed the model young lady, while the less wise virgin rushed into the other extreme of "rere-suppers" after bedtime with like-minded companions of both sexes, and other liberties more startling still.[216] In every generation moralists noted with pain the gradual emancipation of ladies from a restraint which had always been excessive, and had often been merely theoretical, though those who regretted this most bitterly in their own time believed also most implicitly in the strict virtues of a golden past. Guibert of Nogent contrasts the charming picture of his own chaste mother with what he sees (or thinks he sees) around him in St. Bernard's days. "Lord, thou knowest how hardly--nay, almost how impossibly--that virtue [of chastity] is kept by women of our time: whereas of old there was such modesty that scarce any marriage was branded even by common gossip! Alas, how miserably, between those days and ours, maidenly modesty and honour have fallen off, and the mother's guardianship has decayed both in appearance and in fact; so that in all their behaviour nothing can be noted but unseemly mirth, wherein are no sounds but of jest, with winking eyes and babbling tongues, and wanton gait.... Each thinks that she has touched the lowest step of misery if she lack the regard of lovers; and she measures her glory of nobility and courtliness by the ampler numbers of such suitors." Men were more modest of old than women are now: the present man can talk of nothing but his _bonnes fortunes_. "By these modern fashions, and others like them, this age of ours is corrupted and spreads further corruption." In short, it is the familiar philippic of well-meaning orators in every age against the sins of society, and the familiar regret of the good old times. The Knight of La Tour Landry, again, would place the age of real modesty about the time of his own and Chaucer's father, a date by which, according to Guibert's calculations, the growing shamelessness of the world ought long ago to have worn God's patience threadbare.

Each was of course so far right that he lived (as we all do) in a time of transition, and that he saw, as we too see, much that might certainly be changed for the better. These things were even more glaring in the Middle Ages than now. We must not look for too much refinement of outward manners at this early date; but even in essential morality the girl-heroines of medieval romance must be placed, on the whole, even below those of the average French novel.[217] In both cases we must, of course, make the same allowance; it would be equally unfair to judge Chaucer's contemporaries and modern Parisian society strictly according to the novelist's or the poet's pictures. But in either case the popularity of the type points to a real underlying truth; and we should err less in taking the early romances literally than in accepting Ivanhoe, for instance, as a typical picture of medieval love. No one poet represents that love so fully as Chaucer, in both its aspects. I say in _both_, and not in _all_, for such love as lent itself to picturesque treatment had then practically only two aspects, the most ideal and the most material. The maiden whose purity of heart and freedom of manners are equally natural was not only non-existent at that stage of society, but inconceivable. Emelye is, within her limits, as beautiful and touching a figure as any in poetry; but her limits are those of a figure in a stained-glass window compared with a portrait of Titian's. Chaucer himself could not have made her a Die Vernon or an Ethel Newcome; with fuller modelling and more freedom of action in the story, she could at best have become a sort of Beatrix Esmond. But of heavenly love and earthly love, as they were understood in his time, our poet gives us ample choice. It has long ago been noted how large a proportion of his whole work turns on this one passion.[218] As he said of himself, he had "told of lovers up and down more than Ovid maketh of mention": he was "Love's clerk." His earthly love we may here neglect, only remembering that it is never merely wicked, but always relieved by wit and humour--indeed, by wit and humour of his very best. But his heavenly love, the ideal service of chivalry, deserves looking into more closely; the more so as his notions are so exactly those of his time, except so far as they are chastened by his rare sense of humour.

_Amor, che al gentil cuor ratto s'apprende_--so sings Francesca in Dante's "Inferno." Love is to every "gentle" heart--to any one who has not a mere money-bag or clod of clay in his breast--not only an unavoidable fate but a paramount duty. As Chaucer's Arcite says, "A man must needës love, maugre his head; he may not flee it, though he should be dead." Troilus, again, who had come to years of discretion, and earned great distinction in war without ever having felt the tender passion, is so far justly treated as a heathen and a publican even by the frivolous Pandarus, who welcomes his conversion as unctuously as Mr. Stiggins might have accepted Mr. Weller's--

Love, of his goodness, Hath thee converted out of wickedness.

But perhaps the best instance is that afforded by the famous medieval romance of "Petit Jean de Saintré" (chaps, i.-iv.). Jean, at the age of thirteen, became page to the chivalrous King John of France; as nearly as possible at the same time as Chaucer was serving the Duchess of Clarence in the same capacity. One of the ladies-in-waiting at the same Court was a young widow, who for her own amusement brought Petit Jean formally into her room. "Madame, seated at the foot of the little bed, made him stand between her and her women, and then laid it on his faith to tell her the truth of whatsoever she should ask. The poor boy, who little guessed her drift, gave the promise, thinking 'Alas, what have I done? what can this mean?' And while he thus wondered, Madame said, smiling upon her women, 'Tell me, master, upon the faith which you have pledged me; tell me first of all how long it is since you saw your lady _par amours_?' So when he heard speech of _lady par amours_, as one who had never thought thereon, the tears came to his eyes, and his heart beat and his face grew pale, for he knew not how to speak a single word.... And they pressed him so hard that he said, 'Madam, I have none.' 'What, you have none!' said the lady: 'ha! how happy would she be who had such a lover! It may well be that you have none, and well I believe it; but tell me, how long is it since you saw her whom you most love, and would fain have for your lady?'" The poor boy could say nothing, but knelt there twisting the end of his belt between his fingers until the waiting-women pitied him and advised him to answer the lady's question. "'Tell without more ado' (said they), 'whom you love best.' 'Whom I love best?' (said he), 'that is my lady mother, and then my sister Jacqueline.' Then said the lady, 'Sir boy, I intend not of your mother or sister, for the love of mother and sister and kinsfolk is utterly different from that of lady _par amours_; but I ask you of such ladies as are none of your kin.' 'Of them?' (said he), 'by my faith, lady, I love none.' Then said the lady, 'What! you love none? Ha! craven gentleman, you say that you love none? Thereby know I well that you will never be worth a straw.... Whence came the great valiance and exploits of Lancelot, Gawayne, Tristram, Biron the Courteous, and other Champions of the Round Table?...'" The sermon was unmercifully long, and it left the culprit in helpless tears; at the women's intercession, he was granted another day's respite. Boylike, he succeeded in shirking day after day until he hoped he was forgotten. But the inexorable lady caught him soon after, and tormented him until "as he thought within himself whom he should name, then (as nature desires and attracts like to like), he bethought himself of a little maiden of the court who was ten years of age. Then he said, 'Lady, it is Matheline de Coucy.' And when the lady heard this name, she thought well that this was but childish fondness and ignorance; yet she made more ado than before, and said, 'Now I see well that you are a most craven squire to have chosen Matheline for your service; not but that she is a most comely maiden, and of good house and better lineage than your own; but what good, what profit, what honour, what gain, what advantage, what comfort, what help, and what counsel can come therefrom to your own person, to make you a valiant man? What are the advantages which you can draw from Matheline, who is yet but a child? Sir, you should choose a Lady who....'" In short, the lady whom she finally commends to his notice is her own self. Little by little she teaches the stripling all that she knows of love; and later on, when she is cloyed with possession and weary of his absence at the wars, much that he had never guessed before of falsehood. The story is an admirable commentary on the well-known lines in Chaucer's "Book of the Duchess," where the Black Knight says of himself--

... since first I couth Have any manner wit from youth Or kindëly understanding [natural To comprehend in any thing What love was in mine ownë wit, Dreadëless I have ever yet [certainly Been tributary and given rent To love, wholly with good intent, And through pleasaunce become his thrall With good will--body, heart, and all. All this I put in his servage As to my lord, and did homage, And full devoutly prayed him-to, He should beset mine heartë so That it plesaunce to him were, And worship to my lady dear. And this was long, and many a year Ere that mine heart was set aught-where, That I did thus, and knew not why; I trow, it came me kindëly.

If death comes at this moment, then "J'aurai passé par la terre, n'ayant rien aimé que l'amour." But instead of death comes something not less sudden and overmastering. To the Black Knight, as to Dante, the Lady of his Life is revealed between two throbs of the heart--

It happed that I came on a day Into a placë where I say [saw Truly the fairest company Of ladies, that ever man with eye Had seen together in one place ... Sooth to sayen, I saw one That was like none of the rout ... I saw her dance so comelily, Carol and sing so sweetëly, Laugh and play so womanly, And look so debonairëly, So goodly speak, and so friendly, That certes, I trow that nevermore Was seen so blissful a tresore.

Here at last the goddess of his hopes is revealed in the flesh; no longer the vague _Not Impossible She_, but henceforward _She of the Golden Hair_. The revelation commands the gratitude of a lifetime. Having crystallized upon herself his fluid and floating worship, she is henceforth conventionally divine; he demands no more than to be allowed to gaze on her, and in gazing he swoons.

As yet, then, she is his idol, his goddess, on an unapproachable pedestal. She may be pretty patently the work of his own hands--he has gone about dreaming of love until his dreams have taken sufficient consistency to be visible and tangible--but as yet his worship must be as far-off as Pygmalion's, and he thirsts in vain for a word or a look. Then comes the second clause of Francesca's creed--_Amor, che a nullo amato amar perdona_: true love must needs beget love in return. The statue warms to life; the goddess steps down from her pedestal; the lover forgets now that he had meant to subsist for life on half a dozen kind looks and kind words; and at this point the matter would end nowadays--or at least would have ended a generation ago--in mere prosaic marriage. But here, in the Middle Ages, it is fifty to one that the fortunes of the pair are not exactly suitable; or he, or she, or both may be married already. Then comes the final clause: _Amor condusse noi ad una morte_. Seldom indeed could the course of true love run smooth in an age of business-marriages; and the poet found his grandest material in the wreckage of tender passions and high hopes upon that iron-bound shore.

The large majority of medieval romances, as has long ago been noted, celebrate illicit love. Therefore the first commandment of the code is secrecy, absolute secrecy; and in the songs of the Troubadors and Minnesingers, a personage almost as prominent as the two lovers themselves, is the "envious," the "spier"--the person from whom it is impossible to escape for more than a minute at a time, amid the cheek-by-jowl of castle intercourse--a disappointed rival perhaps, or a mere malicious busybody, but, in any case, a perpetual skeleton at the feast. "Troilus and Criseyde," for instance, is full of such allusions, and perhaps no poem exemplifies more clearly the common divorce between romantic love and marriage in medieval literature. It is a comparatively small thing that the first three books of the poem should contain no hint of matrimony, though Criseyde is a widow, and of noble blood. It would, after all, have been less of a _mésalliance_ than John of Gaunt's marriage; but of course it was perfectly natural for Chaucer to take the line of least poetical resistance, and make Troilus enjoy her love in secret, without thought of consecration by the rites of the Church. So far, the poem runs parallel with Goethe's "Faust." But when we come to the last two books, the behaviour of the pair is absolutely inexplicable to any one who has not realized the usual conventions of medieval romance. The Trojan prince Antenor is taken prisoner by the Greeks, who offer to exchange him against Criseyde--a fighting man against a mere woman. Hector does indeed protest in open Parliament--

But on my part ye may eft-soon them tell We usen here no women for to sell.

But the political utility of the exchange is so obvious that Parliament determines to send the unwilling Criseyde away. What, it may be asked, is Troilus doing all this time? As Priam's son, he would have had a voice in the council second only to Hector's, and he "well-nigh died" to hear the proposition. Yet all through this critical discussion he kept silence, "lest men should his affection espy!" The separation, he knows, will kill him; but among all the measures he debates with Criseyde or Pandarus--even among the desperate acts which he threatens to commit--nothing so desperate as plain marriage seems to occur to any of the three. The first thought of Troilus is "how to save her honour," but only in the technical sense of medieval chivalry, by feigning indifference to her. He sheds floods of tears; he tells Fortune that if only he may keep his lady, he is reckless of all else in the world; but, when for a moment he thinks of begging Criseyde's freedom from the King his father, it is only to thrust the thought aside at once. The step would be not only useless, but necessarily involve "slander to her name."[219] And all this was written for readers who knew very well that the parties had only to swear, first that they had plighted troth before witnesses, and secondly, that they had lived together as man and wife, in order to prove an indissoluble marriage contract. Nor can we ascribe this to any failure in Chaucer's art. In the delineation of feelings, their natural development and their finer shades, he is second to no medieval poet, and these qualities come out especially in the "Troilus." But, while he boldly changed so much in Boccaccio's conception of the poem, he saw no reason to change this particular point, for it was thoroughly in accord with those conventions of his time for which he kept some respect even through his frequent irony.

To show clearly how the fault here is not in the poet but in the false _point d'honneur_ of the chivalric love-code, let us compare it with a romance in real life from the "Paston Letters." Sir John Paston's steward, Richard Calle, fell in love with his master's sister Margery. The Pastons, who not only were great gentlefolk in a small way, but were struggling hard also to become great gentlefolk in a big way, took up the natural position that "he should never have my good will for to make my sister sell candle and mustard in Framlingham." But the pair had already plighted their mutual troth; and, therefore, though not yet absolutely married, they were so far engaged that neither could marry any one else without a Papal dispensation. Calle urged Margery to acknowledge this openly to her family: "I suppose, an ye tell them sadly the truth, they would not damn their souls for us." She at last confessed, and the matter came up before the Bishop of Norwich for judgment. In spite of all the bullying of the family, and the flagrant partiality of the Bishop, the girl's mother has to write and tell Sir John how "Your sister ... rehearsed what she had said [when she plighted her troth to Calle], and said, if those words made it not sure, she said boldly that she would make that surer ere that she went thence, for she said she thought in her conscience she was bound, whatsoever the words weren. These lewd words grieved me and her grandam as much as all the remnant." The Bishop still delayed judgment on the chance of finding "other things against [Calle] that might cause the letting thereof;" and meanwhile the mother turned Margery out into the street; so that the Bishop himself had to find her a decent lodging while he kept her waiting for his decision. But to annul this plain contract needed grosser methods of injustice than the Pastons had influence to compass, and Calle not only got his wife at last, but was taken back into the family service.[220] Troilus and Criseyde, having political forces arrayed against them, might indeed have failed tragically of their marriage in the end; but there was at least no reason why they should not fight for it as stoutly as the prosaic Norfolk bailiff did--if only the idea had ever entered into one or other of their heads!

Another tacit assumption of the chivalric love-code comes out clearly in the Knight's Tale, and even goes some way to explain the Franklin's; though this latter evidently recounts an old Breton lay in which the perspective is as frankly fantastic as the landscape of a miniature. The honest commentator Benvenuto da Imola is at great pains to assure us that Dante's _amor, che a nullo amato amar perdona_ was not an exhaustive statement of actual fact; and that even the kindest ladies sometimes remained obdurate to the prayers of the most meritorious suitors. What is to happen, then? The hero may, of course, sometimes die; but not always; that would be too monotonous. The solution here, as in so many other cases, lies in a poetic paraphrase of too prosaic facts. The Duc de Berri, who was a great connoisseur and a man of the most refined tastes, bought at an immense sacrifice of money the most delicate little countess in the market: she, of course, had no choice at all in the matter. At an equal sacrifice of blood, first Arcite and then Palamon won the equally passive Emelye, who, when Theseus had set her up as a prize to the better fighter, could only pray that she might either avoid them both, or at least fall to him who loved her best in his inmost heart. At a cost of equal suffering, though in a different way, Aurelius won the unwilling Dorigen--for his subsequent generosity is beside the present purpose. The reader's sympathy, in medieval romance, is nearly always enlisted for the pursuing man. If only he can show sufficient valour, or suffer long enough, he must have the prize, and the lady is sure to shake down comfortably enough sooner or later.[221] The idea is not, of course, peculiar to medieval poetry, but the frequency with which it there occurs supplies another answer to the main question of this chapter. Why, if medieval marriages were really so business-like, is medieval love-poetry so transcendental? It is not, in fact, by any means so transcendental as it seems on the surface; neither Palamon nor Arcite, at the bottom of all his extravagant protestations of humble worship, feels the least scruple in making Emelye the prize of a series of swashing blows at best, and possibly of a single lucky prod. The chance of Shakespeare's caskets does at least give Portia to the man whom her heart had already chosen; but the similar chances and counter-chances of the Knight's Tale simply play shuttlecock with a helpless and unwilling girl. Under the spell of Chaucer's art, we know quite well that Palamon and Emelye lived very happily ever afterwards; but the Knight's Tale gives us no reason to doubt the overwhelming evidence that, while heroes in poetry conquered their wives with their right arm, plain men in prose openly bargained for them.