In the fourteenth century something of this romantic tyranny survived. We find Chaucer, for instance, in one of his early poems, mentioning in praise of his heroine that she did not impose dangerous expeditions to distant countries, or extravagant exploits upon her lover:
"And saye, 'Sir, be now ryght ware
That I may of you here seyn
Worshippe, or that ye come agayn.'"
Extended probations, courtships long enough to satisfy Ruskin, were an established convention. Wolfram von Eschenbach, in the seventh book of Parzival, represents Obie as indignantly telling her royal lover, who has asked her to marry him after what seems to him a reasonable love-making, that if he had spent his days for five years, in hard service, under full armor, with distinction, and she had then said "Yes" to his desire, she would be yielding too soon.
Jane Austen, in the novel to which Trollope gave the palm of English fiction before Henry Esmond, has expressed in Mr. Collins's address to Elizabeth exactly the notion of the significance in a rejection, held by well-bred gentlemen six centuries earlier:
"'I am not now to learn,' replied Mr. Collins, with a formal wave of the hand, 'that it is usual with young ladies to reject the addresses of the man whom they secretly mean to accept, when he first applies for their favor; and that sometimes the refusal is repeated a second or even a third time. I am therefore by no means discouraged by what you have just said, and shall hope to lead you to the altar ere long.'"
But these exercises, as was suggested, were not usually directed toward the altar. A characteristic of the age is the relation, less or more sentimental, between a married knight and a lady not his wife; a relation rather expected of the former, and countenanced in the latter. This peculiar dual system of domestic and knightly love may be ascribed to various influences, such as the prosaic influence of early and dowered marriages, subject to parental arrangement, or the feudal life which for considerable periods kept gentlemen away from their own homes in residence in the larger castles, or the idleness of such a society, or again the popularity of love-lyrics and romance-recitals, which would tend to sentimentalize their audience. At any rate, it came to be a fashionable idea that the highest love was independent of marriage, and the most poetically inclined,—the troubadours and the minnesingers—were famous for their impassioned and submissive service of married ladies. It is from these poets' accounts of their own love-trials that we learn most about this phase of mediævalism, and in their contented sufferings we see once more that the joy of all romantic love is in the lover.
Although there is danger of generalizing too widely from literary indications, we may believe that chivalric society was appreciably marked by formal amatory disciplines. Was it all for nothing these ceremonial disciplines? Can it be that these Don Quixote prototypes, who trifled away their frivolous days in lady-worship so trivial, did anything to help the Prince to take Cinderella from the ashes? The ashes, then the fairy coach; first the drudge, then the sentimental plaything, then at last the friend. In those days, as perhaps always, the lover objectified himself in his love, to the extent of finding in her his own ideal feminine. The very fact that this self, which he probably called into conscious life only as he created it in another, represented the most refined side of his thought, as is shown in the old poets' recurrent epithets of "constant, chaste, good," etc., made the devotion a refining and dignifying experience, especially for the days when men and women had less in common than they have now. These lady-services, where the lover often was denied intimacy for a considerable time, kept up the illusion which the devotee himself may have half felt was sentimental and artificial. We may reply to little Peterkin that some good did come of it at last, even for the more commonplace of these servants of abstract womanhood. Even if the "visionary gleam" left no permanent illumination, the men were better for seeing it brightening through their darkness now and then. At its best, lady-loving gave the mediæval knights consideration for women and a measure of gentleness. If it only stimulated some to fight hard, they would have fought anyway, and the motive was a shade less brutal than a directly selfish one.
But such an eccentric social idea, especially when the poetic exhilaration of its earlier hours has passed by, was sure to bring out extravagant sentimentalists, whose romantic sensibility with no check from practical judgment, ran wild steeplechases of nonsense. Such, for example, was the Provençal poet, Peter Vidal, one of the most famous troubadours, who carried his romantic infatuations so far that he became crack-brained. The name of one of his ladies was Lupa, Mistress Wolf; and if he had contented himself with assuming a wolfish device for his coat-of-arms, as he did, and having himself called Mr. Wolf, he would have done nothing very peculiar, for that age. But it occurred to him that it would be a graceful symbol to wear a wolf's skin, and after he had procured one which quite covered him, he got down on all-fours, and trotted through the street; and all went charmingly until one day, while he was exhibiting himself in this fashion about his lady's estate, a pack of dogs was deceived by the metaphor, and the allegorical lover was badly bitten before rescue arrived.
But the most detailed example of mediæval gallantry is that presented in the work already mentioned, the autobiography of the thirteenth-century minnesinger, Ulrich von Liechtenstein. The poem is a prolix narrative of his amatory religion, extending through some sixteen thousand lines, and containing a large number of lyrics composed in the wooing of two ladies to whom he consecrated his literary and romantic life. We utterly tire of the commonplaces in which he praises them. We reflect that not a single specific incident is ever introduced to illustrate the inner character of either; the descriptions have no color, except in the heartlessness of the first beloved, whose virtue and humor alike Ulrich apparently misses. Yet this presumably undesigned caricature of the more poetic twelfth-century chivalric love gives important suggestions of the times, and Ulrich himself is a knight and a poet worth knowing.
The impression that his romance makes upon a modern reader is something like that of a beetle hovering above a lily. He played zany to the gentlemen of an early generation who had amused their leisurely lives by courtly lady-service; as he emulated their feats of sentimental gallantry, he stumbled and fell. The odd thing is that after each fall he called for his tables: "Meet it is I set it down." Undoubtedly many marvelled and admired, as they looked on: others marvelled and laughed. Perhaps he mistook the laughter for applause. It may be that the sound was lost in the applause of his own simple-minded complacency. But yet, though this gallant was born to a foolish horoscope, his life gained a good fortune denied multitudes who lived sensibly,—he saw the stars of his destiny, and he loved them. Their combination caused a silly career, yet individually they were admirable,—simplicity of nature, theoretical reverence for womanhood, patient love, regard for stately old usages. If defective eyesight makes a man fancy a burdock a rosebush, and if he tends and cherishes the absurd idealization,—at least, the man has a sentiment for roses.