CHAPTER IV
CHIVALRY AND ROMANCE
'Mekely, lordynges gentyll and fre,
Lysten awhile and herken to me.'
Hue de Rotelande.
nce upon a time, long long before the Venerable Bede had completed that famous last chapter in his cell at Jarrow, there lived in the ancient capital of Sampsiceramus, a holy man named Heliodorus. Now in his youth Heliodorus (as is not uncommon with the young) had turned his thoughts to worldly things; and being of a romantic nature, wearied by the eternal sameness of the books available to him, had conceived the extraordinary notion of writing an untrue book, a book that should never instruct or point a moral or show you where you are wrong, but should be all joyousness and enchantment. Possessed with this great idea, timidly yet sure of himself, he set to work.
The very first thing he did was sufficiently startling for those days. Instead of selecting some great man for his central figure and putting his dialogue into the mouths of learned men, fathers of the church, philosophers, orators, or famous poets, he chose deliberately a young and handsome man of no particular learning, and—a woman! It was unheard of! A book, a voluminous roll closely written, containing nothing but the adventures of a pair of lovers! Monstrous! Yet it was done at last, and the roll, finding favour in the eyes of a bosom friend, was quickly passed from hand to hand. All were entranced by it. Here was a book that had characters one could understand, for whom one could even feel affection. The loves of dashing young Theagenes and his dear Chariclea found an echo in many a youthful breast.
Meanwhile Heliodorus disappears from view, and for many years we hear nothing of him until suddenly he reappears as a bishop in Thessaly! Now comes the sequel to his audacious design, but for which it is doubtful if we should ever have heard of him. A synod was convened, and Heliodorus was condemned because in his youth he had written a novel. He was given his choice between bishopric and book, to retain the one he must destroy the other by word as well as by deed.
At first sight the choice appears not difficult to make, for although so laical and original a work had proved to be popular, yet such popularity was hardly of a nature to appeal to so devout a Christian as one who had already attained episcopal rank. But to Heliodorus his work (which may well have been the employment of some years) stood for all that he held most dear. It was his conception of the ideal in worldly—as opposed to spiritual—life. Less austere, perhaps, than many of the fathers of the early Church whose works had seemed so tedious to him in his youth, his devoutness was tempered largely with a charity and forgiveness that were not unworthy of his creed. It was impossible to deny those principles of chivalric virtue and chastity which his novel preached, so he chose to stand by his book rather than by his benefice, and quitted Thessaly.