Romantic Cities of Provence

by Mona Caird

For women obedience and morality had been synonyms. The wife was "good" in proportion as she acknowledged by word and deed her husband's "rights" over her, as over any other of his possessions. Conduct implying independence, an infringement on these "rights," was the acme of wickedness. To act as if she belonged to herself was a sort of embezzlement, and of course this was the case still more unpardonably if she made so free as to bestow her heart on some other man; then they both became involved in the sin of purloining that which belonged to another. To flirt was a sort of petty peculation. It was because she so belonged to him, as real property, that the husband thought his "honour" injured by his wife's conduct, quite irrespective of any wound to his affections. If a man fails to keep a possession, given securely into his hands by law and custom and universal sentiment, he must indeed be a sorry sort of lord and master! Such was the popular view of the case, and the coarser and more brutal the society the more violent was this feeling of wounded vanity or "honour," as it was pompously called. But suddenly—or at least without traceable gradations—this bulwark of marital sovereignty was rent as by an earthquake, and the idea began to get abroad that the woman somewhat belonged to herself; no longer entirely to her feudal or to her domestic lord. Had this new idea taken complete and undisturbed possession, it would have worked out a modern society very different from the society that now exists. But it did not obtain such mastery. It only shared the field with its predecessor. The confusion of standard was therefore extreme, for nobody paused to separate and choose between the two ideals; they were held simultaneously, nor is it only in the time of the troubadours that men and women hold beliefs about social matters that are mutually destructive.

So the old rights of property in the wife continued to hold sway even while she began dimly to feel and inwardly to claim the right to herself, with the resulting right to bestow her love where she pleased, or where she needs must. And that wrought wonderful changes.

One must approach this imaginative, passionate world, if we desire to understand it, with a spirit swift to detect differences and shades of feeling, to muster all the local conditions before the imagination; and one must banish scrupulously all ready-made maxims belonging to our own day, for these at once place us outside the epoch that we are trying to enter. It is this difficulty, this subtlety in the subject, which makes the study of that age and country so keenly interesting to all who are curious of the movements of human thought as it grows and changes under the pressure of its varying destinies.

These new ideals were now universal among kings and princes and all who had any pretensions to cultivation and good breeding. Love-affairs of which a married woman was the heroine were looked upon as essentially belonging to the chivalric order of things.

"These Courts of Love laid down rules for love," says Baring-Gould; "they allowed married women to receive the homage of lovers, and even nicely directed all the symptoms they were to exhibit.... There is the case of Dante and Beatrice, and of Wolfram von Eschenbach, one of the noblest and purest of singers, who idealised the Lady Elizabeth of Harlenstein.... It is precisely this unreal love, or playing at love-making, that is scoffed at by Cervantes in Don Quixote and the peerless Dulcinea del Toboso."

Of course, in this state of things there was much that seemed disorderly and was disorderly if the older view is to remain, in any sense, as a standard. Indeed it was, in some respects, perhaps, disorderly from any point of view, as was inevitable during so vast an upheaval of social conditions. It was a battle of good and evil, but infinitely in advance of the previous state, when there was no battle, because evil was securely enjoying uncontested possession. From that enthroned and law-supported wrong there seemed no escape except through the "moral chaos"—if so it really was—of the troubadour era. Certainly the men and women of that time treated life very boldly and frankly, and they talked more about sentiment and the joy of life than about morality; but the atmosphere which lingers around them, as one feels it in their songs and stories, in all the delicate courtesy of their manners, the dignity and fineness of their sentiments, makes it impossible to think of them as essentially base or unlovable, whatever condemnation their departure from ancient standards may induce moralists to pronounce upon them.

Their ideals may have been false; that is a matter of individual opinion; but they lived in devotion to those ideals with an enthusiasm that has never been surpassed.

Perhaps the long repression, the second-hand vicarious existence suffered for so many ages by women, had made them almost intoxicated with this new experience, this coming of age as human beings, this entering into possession of themselves.

It was like a re-birth, and tempted to all sorts of wild adventures. Rebellion was in the air, and especially was it rife on all questions of love. As a recent writer remarks, men and women began to love each other because they should not have done so.

But love was treated very seriously as well as very fancifully. There was no aspect in which it did not play an important rôle in this extraordinary age.