The oath was taken at an hour when justice was not even in the dictionaries—there were none—at an epoch when every man who was not marauding was maimed or a monk. At that hour, the blackest of all, there was proposed to the crapulous barons an ideal. Thereafter, little by little, in lieu of the boor came the knight, occasionally the paladin of whom Roland was the type.
Roland, a legend says, died of love before a cloister of nuns. Roland himself was legendary. But in the Chanson de Roland which is the right legend, he died embracing his sole mistress, his sword. Afterward a girl asked concerning him of Charlemagne, saying that she was to be his wife. The emperor, after telling of his death, offered the girl his son. The girl refused. She declined even to survive. In the story of Roland that is the one occasion in which love appeared. It but came and vanished with a hero whose name history has mentioned but once and then only in a monkish screed,[37] yet whose prowess romance ceaselessly celebrated, inverting chronology in his behalf, enlarging for his grandiose figure the limits of time and space, lifting his epic memories to the skies.
What Jason had been in mythology, Roland became in legend, the first Occidental custodian of chivalry’s golden fleece, which, he gone, was found reducible to just four words—Death rather than dishonor.
Dishonor meant to be last in the field and first in the retreat. Honor meant courage and courtesy, the reverencing of all women for the love of one. It meant bravery and good manners. It meant something else. To be first in the field and last in the retreat was necessary not merely for valor’s sake, but because courage was the surest token to a lady’s favor, which favor fidelity could alone retain. Hitherto men had been bold, chivalry made them true. It made them constant for constancy’s sake, because inconstancy meant forfeiture of honor and any forfeiture degradation.
When that occurred the spurs of the knight were hacked from his heels, a ceremony overwhelming in the simplicity with which it proclaimed him unfit to ride and therefore for chivalry.
Yet though a man might not be false to any one, to some one he must be true. If he knew how to break a lance but not how to win a lady he was less a knight than a churl. “A knight,” said Sir Tristram, “can never be of prowess unless he be a lover.” “Why,” said the belle Isaud to Sir Dinadan, “are you a knight and not a lover? You cannot be a goodly knight except you are?” “Jesu merci,” Sir Dinadan replied. “Pleasure of love lasts but a moment, pain of love endures alway.”
Sir Dinadan was right, but so was Sir Tristram, so was the belle Isaud. A knight had to be brave, he had to be loyal and courteous in war, as in peace. But he had to be also a lover and as a lover he had to be true.
“L’ordre demande nette vie
Chasteté et curtesye.”
The demand was new to the world. Intertwisting with the silver thread which chivalry drew in and in throughout the Middle Ages, it became the basis of whatever is noble in love to-day. The sheen of that thread, otherwise dazzling, shines still in Froissart and in Monstrelet, as it must have shone in the tournaments, where, in glittering mail, men dashed in the lists while the air was rent with women’s names and, at each achievement, the heralds shouted “Loyauté aux Dames,” who, in their tapestried galleries, were judges of the jousts.
Dazzling there it must have been entrancing in the halls and courts of the great keeps where knights and ladies, pages and girls, going up and down, talked but of arms and amours, or at table sat together, two by two, in hundreds, with one trencher to each couple, feasting to the high flourishes of trumpets and later knelt while she who for the occasion had been chosen Royne de la Beaulté et des Amours, awarded the prizes of the tourney, falcons, girdles or girls.