# The Waning of the Middle Ages/Chapter 2

CHAPTER II
PESSIMISM AND THE IDEAL OF THE SUBLIME LIFE
At the close of the Middle Ages, a sombre melancholy weighs on people's souls. Whether we read a chronicle, a poem, a sermon, a legal document even, the same impression of immense sadness is produced by them all. It would sometimes seem as if this period had been particularly unhappy, as if it had left behind only the memory of violence, of covetousness and mortal hatred, as if it had known no other enjoyment but that of intemperance, of pride and of cruelty.
Now in the records of all periods misfortune has left more traces than happiness. Great evils form the groundwork of history. We are perhaps inclined to assume without much evidence that, roughly speaking, and notwithstanding all calamities, the sum of happiness can have hardly changed from one period to another. But in the fifteenth century, as in the epoch of romanticism, it was, so to say, bad form to praise the world and life openly. It was fashionable to see only its suffering and misery, to discover everywhere signs of decadence and of the near end—in short, to condemn the times or to despise them.
We look in vain in the French literature of the beginning of the fifteenth century for the vigorous optimism which will spring up at the Renaissance—though, by the way, the optimist tendency of the Renaissance is sometimes exaggerated. The exulting exclamation of Ulrich von Hutten, which has become trite from much quoting, "O saeculum, O literae! juvat vivere!" expresses the enthusiasm of the scholar rather than that of the man. With the humanists optimism is still tempered by the ancient contempt, both Christian and ​Stoic, for the world. A passage extracted from a letter written by Erasmus in 1518, may serve better than Hutten's exclamation to show the average valuation put upon life by a humanist. "I am not so greatly attached to life; having entered upon my fifty-first year, I judge I have lived long enough; and on the other hand, I see in this life nothing so excellent or agreeable that a man might wish for it, on whom the Christian creed has conferred the hope of a much happier life, in store for those who have attached themselves closely to piety. Nevertheless, at present, I could almost wish to be rejuvenated for a few years, for this only reason that I believe I see a golden age dawning in the near future." He then describes the concord reigning among the princes of Christendom and their inclination to peace—which was so dear to him personally—then he continues: "Everything confirms my hope that not only good morals and Christian piety will be reborn and flourish, but also pure and true literature and good learning." Thanks to the protection of princes, be it understood. "It is to their pious feelings that we are indebted for seeing everywhere, as at a given signal, illustrious spirits awakening and conspiring to restore good learning."
In short, the appreciation of the joys of life, which Erasmus manifests, is fairly cool; moreover, he soon changed his mood of hopeful expectation, never to find it again. However, compared with current feeling in the preceding century, except in Italy, Erasmus's appreciation might rather be called warm. The men of letters at the court of Charles VII, or at that of Philip the Good, never tire of inveighing against life and the age. The note of despair and profound dejection is predominantly sounded not by ascetic monks, but by the court poets and the chroniclers—laymen, living in aristocratic circles and amid aristocratic ideas. Possessing only a slight intellectual and moral culture, being for the most part strangers to study and learning, and of only a feebly religious temper, they were incapable of finding consolation or hope in the spectacle of universal misery and decay, and could only bewail the decline of the world and despair of justice and of peace.
“Temps de doleur et de temptacion, Aages de plour, d’envie et de tourment, Temps de langour et de dampnacion, Aages meneur près du definement, Temps plains d’orreur qui tout fait faussement, Aage menteur, plain d’orgueil et d’envie, Temps sanz honeur et sanz vray jugement, Aage en tristesse qui abrege la vie.”
The ballads he has composed in this spirit may be counted by the dozen: monotonous and gloomy variations of the same dismal theme. There must have prevailed among the nobility a general disposition to melancholy; otherwise we could not account for the manifest popularity of these poems.
“Toute léesse deffaut, Tous cueurs ont prins par assaut Tristesse et merencolie.”
Towards the end of the fifteenth century, the tone is still unchanged; Jean Meschinot sighs as did Deschamps.
“O miserable et très dolente vie!… La guerre avons, mortalité, famine; Le froid, le chaud, le jour, la nuit nous mine; Puces, cirons et tant d’autre vermine Nous guerroyent. Bref, miserere domine Noz meschans corps, dont le vivre est très court.”
"Et je, le pouvre escrivain, Au cueur triste, faible et vain, Voyant de chascun le deuil, Soucy me tient en sa main; Toujours les larmes à l'œil, Rien fore mourir je ne vueil."
All that we get to know of the moral state of the nobles points to a sentimental need of enrobing their souls with the garb of woe. There is hardly one who does not come forward to affirm that he has seen nothing but misery during his life and expects only worse things from the future. Georges Chastellain, the historiographer of the dukes of Burgundy and chief of the Burgundian rhetorical school, speaks thus of himself in the prologue to his chronicle: "I, man of sadness, born in an eclipse of darkness, and thick fogs of lamentation." His successor, Olivier de la Marche, chooses for his device the lament, "tant a souffert La Marche." It would be interesting to study from the point of view of physiognomy the portraits of that time, which for the most part strike us by their sad expression.
It is curious to notice the variation of meaning which the word melancholy shows in the fourteenth century. The ideas of sadness, of reflection, and of fancy, are blended in the term. For example, in speaking of Philip of Artevelde, lost in thought, in consequence of a message he had just received, Froissart expresses himself thus: "Quant il eut merancoliet une espasse, il's'avisa que il rescriproit aus commissaires dou roi de France." Deschamps says of something that is uglier than could be imagined: no artist is "merencolieux" enough to be able to paint it. The change of meaning evidently shows a tendency to identify all serious occupation of the mind with sadness.
The poetry of Eustache Deschamps is full of petty reviling of life and its inevitable troubles. Happy is he who has no children, for babies mean nothing but crying and stench; ​they give only trouble and anxiety; they have to be clothed, shod, fed; they are always in danger of falling and hurting themselves; they contract some illness and die. When they grow up, they may go to the bad and be put in prison. Nothing but cares and sorrows; no happiness compensates us for our anxiety, for the trouble and expenses of their education. Is there a greater evil than to have deformed children? The poet has no word of pity for their misfortune; he holds
“Que homs de membre contrefais Est en sa pensée meffais,— Plains de pechiez et plains de vices.”
Happy are bachelors, for a man who has an evil wife has a bad time of it, and he who has a good one always fears to lose her. In other words, happiness is feared together with misfortune. In old age the poet sees only evil and disgust, a lamentable decline of the body and the mind, ridicule and insipidity. It comes soon, at thirty for a woman, at fifty for a man, and neither lives beyond sixty, for the most part. It is a far cry to the serene ideality of Dante’s conception of noble old age in the Convivio!
The world, says Deschamps, is like an old man fallen into dotage. He has begun by being innocent, then he has been wise for a long time, just, virtuous and strong:
“Or est laches, chetis et molz, Vieulx, convoiteux et mal parlant: Je ne voy que foles et folz…. La fin s’approche, en vérité…. Tout va mal.”
In another place he laments:
“Pour quoy est si obscurs le temps, Que li uns l’autre ne cognoist, Mais muent les gouvernements De mal en pis, si comme on voit?
Le temps passé trop mieulx valoit. Qui règne? Tristesse et Ennuy; Il ne court justice ne droit; Je ne scé mais desquelz je suy.”
And again:
“Se ce temps tient, je deviendray hermite, Car je n’i voys fors que dueil et tourment.”
Pessimism of this kind has hardly anything to do with religion. Deschamps only gives an off-hand pious purport to his reflections. Despondency and spleen are at the bottom of them, not piety. A contempt of the world, which is dominated by fear of weariness and of sorrow, of disease and of old age, is but an asceticism of the blasé, born of disillusion and of satiety. It has nothing in common with religion but its terminology.
Even in ascetic utterances of a purer and loftier kind such fear of life, such recoiling before its inevitable sorrows, is not seldom mingled. The series of arguments which Jean Gerson propounds in his Discours de l’excellence de Virginité, written for his sisters, with a view to keep them from marrying, does not essentially differ from Deschamps’ gloomy lamentations. All the evils attaching to wedlock are found there. The husband may be a drunkard, a spendthrift, a miser. If he be honest and good, bad harvests, death of cattle, a shipwreck may occur, robbing him of all he possesses. What misery it is to be pregnant! How many women die in childbed. The woman who suckles her baby knows neither rest nor pleasure. Children may be deformed or disobedient; the husband may die, and leave his widow behind in care and poverty.
Thus, always and everywhere in the literature of the age, we find a confessed pessimism. As soon as the soul of these men has passed from childlike mirth and unreasoning ​enjoyment to reflection, deep dejection about all earthly misery takes their place and they see only the woe of life. Still this very pessimism is the ground whence their soul will soar up to the aspiration of a life of beauty and serenity. For at all times the vision of a sublime life has haunted the souls of men, and the gloomier the present is, the more strongly this aspiration will make itself felt.
Three different paths, at all times, have seemed to lead to the ideal life. Firstly, that of forsaking the world. The perfection of life here seems only to be reached beyond the domain of earthly labour and delight, by a loosening of all ties. The second path conducts to amelioration of the world itself, by consciously improving political, social and moral institutions and conditions. Now, in the Middle Ages, Christian faith had so strongly implanted in all minds the ideal of renunciation as the base of all personal and social perfection, that there was scarcely any room left for entering upon this path of material and political progress. The idea of a purposed and continual reform and improvement of society did not exist. Institutions in general are considered as good or as bad as they can be; having been ordained by God, they are intrinsically good, only the sins of men pervert them. What therefore is in need of remedy is the individual soul. Legislation in the Middle Ages never aims consciously and avowedly at creating a new organism; professedly it is always opportunistic, it only restores good old law (or at least thinks it does no more) or mends special abuses. It looks more towards an ideal past than towards an earthly future. For the true future is the Last Judgment, and that is near at hand.
It goes without saying that this mental disposition must have greatly contributed to the general pessimism. If in all that regards the things of this world there is no hope of improvement and of progress, however slow, those who love the world too much to give up its delights, and who nevertheless cannot help aspiring to a better order of things, see nothing before them but a gulf. We will have to wait till the eighteenth century—for even the Renaissance does not truly bring the idea of progress—before men resolutely enter the path of social optimism;—only then the perfectibility of man and society is raised to the rank of a central dogma, and the next ​century will only lose the naïveté of this belief, but not the courage and optimism which it inspired.
It would be a mistake to think that the medieval mind, lacking the ideas of progress and conscious reform, had only known the religious form of the aspiration to ideal life. For there is a third path to a world more beautiful, trodden in all ages and civilizations, the easiest and also the most fallacious of all, that of the dream. A promise of escape from the gloomy actual is held out to all; we have only to colour life with fancy, to enter upon the quest of oblivion, sought in the delusion of ideal harmony. After the religious and the social solution we here have the poetical.
A simple tune suffices for the enrapturing fugue to develop itself; an outlook on the heroism, the virtue or the happiness of an ideal past is all that is wanted. The themes are few in number, and have hardly changed since antiquity; we may call them the heroic and the bucolic theme. Nearly all the literary culture of later ages has been built upon them.
But was it only a question of literature, this third path to the sublime life, this flight from harsh reality into illusion? Surely it has been more. History pays too little attention to the influence of these dreams of a sublime life on civilization itself and on the forms of social life. The content of the ideal is a desire to return to the perfection of an imaginary past. All aspiration to raise life to that level, be it in poetry only or in fact, is an imitation. The essence of chivalry is the imitation of the ideal hero, just as the imitation of the ancient sage is the essence of humanism. Strongest and most lasting of all is the illusion of a return to nature and its innocent charms by an imitation of the shepherd's life. Since Theocritus it has never lost its hold upon civilized society.
Now, the more primitive a society is, the more the need of conforming real life to an ideal standard overflows beyond literature into the sphere of the actual. Modern man is a worker. To work is his ideal. The modern male costume since the end of the eighteenth century is essentially a workman's dress. Since political progress and social perfection have stood foremost in general appreciation, and the ideal itself is sought in the highest production and most equitable distribution of goods, there is no longer any need for playing ​the hero or the sage. The ideal itself has become democratic. In aristocratic periods, on the other hand, to be representative of true culture means to produce by conduct, by customs, by manners, by costume, by deportment, the illusion of a heroic being, full of dignity and honour, of wisdom and, at all events, of courtesy. This seems possible by the aforesaid imitation of an ideal past. The dream of past perfection ennobles life and its forms, fills them with beauty and fashions them anew as forms of art. Life is regulated like a noble game. Only a small aristocratic group can come up to the standard of this artistic game. To imitate the hero and the sage is not everybody's business. Without leisure or wealth one does not succeed in giving life an epic or idyllic colour. The aspiration to realize a dream of beauty in the forms of social life bears a vitium originis the stamp of aristocratic exclusiveness.
Here, then, we have attained a point of view from which we can consider the lay culture of the waning Middle Ages: aristocratic life decorated by ideal forms, gilded by chivalrous romanticism, a world disguised in the fantastic gear of the Round Table.
The quest of the life beautiful is much older than the Italian quattrocento. Here, as elsewhere, the line of demarcation between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance has been too much insisted upon. Florence had but to adopt and develop ancient motifs which the Middle Ages had known. In spite of the æsthetic distance separating the Giostre of the Medici from the barbarous pageantry of the dukes of Burgundy, the inspiration is the same. Italy, indeed, discovered new worlds of beauty, and tuned life to a new tone; but the impulse itself to force it up to a thing of art, generally taken as typical of the Renaissance, was not its invention.
CHARLES THE BOLD AND HIS COURT. From a MS. in the British Museum.
It was here that the path of fancy proved its civilizing value. All aristocratic life in the later Middle Ages is a wholesale attempt to act the vision of a dream. In cloaking itself in the fanciful brilliance of the heroism and probity of a past age, the life of the nobles elevated itself towards the sublime. By this trait the Renaissance is linked to the times of feudalism.
The need of high culture found its most direct expression in all that constitutes ceremonial and etiquette. The actions of princes, even daily and common actions, all assume a quasi-symbolic form and tend to raise themselves to the rank of mysteries. Births, marriages, deaths, are framed in an apparatus of solemn and sublime formalities. The emotions which accompany them are dramatized and amplified. Byzantinism is nothing but the expression of the same tendency, and to realize that it survived the Middle Ages, it is sufficient to remember the Roi-Soleil.
The court was pre-eminently the field where this æstheticism flourished. Nowhere did it attain to greater development than at the court of the dukes of Burgundy, which was more pompous and better arranged than that of the kings of France. It is well known how much importance the dukes attached to the magnificence of their household. A splendid court could, better than anything else, convince rivals of the high rank the dukes claimed to occupy among the princes of Europe. "After the deeds and exploits of war, which are claims to glory," says Chastellain, "the household is the first thing that strikes the eye, and which it is, therefore, most necessary to conduct and arrange well." It was boasted that the Burgundian court was the richest and best regulated of all. Charles the Bold, especially, had the passion of magnificence. The archaic and idyllic function of justice administered by the prince in person, even to the humblest of his subjects, was practised by the duke, who was in the habit of sitting in audience with great solemnity two or three times a week, ​when every one might tender his petition. He would deliver judgment in the presence of all the noblemen of his household, seated on a “hautdos” covered with gold-cloth, and assisted by two “maitres des requêtes,” the warrant-officer and the clerk kneeling before him. The noblemen were a good deal bored, but there was no help for it, says Chastellain, who expresses some doubt as to the use of these audiences. “It seemed to be a magnificent and very praiseworthy thing, whatever fruit it might bear. But I have neither heard nor seen such a thing done in my time by a prince or a king.”
For amusements, too, Charles felt the need of solemn and showy forms. “He was in the habit of devoting part of his day to serious occupations, and, with games and laughter mixed, pleased himself with fine speeches and with exhorting his nobles, like an orator, to practise virtue. And in this regard he was often seen sitting in a chair of state, with his nobles before him, remonstrating with them according to time and circumstances. And always, as the prince and chief of all, he was richly and magnificently dressed, more so than all the others.”
This “haute magnificence de cœur pour estre vu et regardé en singulières choses,” is it not altogether according to the spirit of the Renaissance, in spite of its naïve and somewhat stiff outward appearance?
The meals of the duke were ceremonies of a dignity that was almost liturgic. The descriptions by the master of ceremonies, Olivier de la Marche, are well worth reading. His treatise, L'Etat de la Maison du duc Charles de Bourgogne, composed at the request of the king of England, Edward IV, to serve him for a model, expounds the complicated service of breadmasters, carvers, cup-bearers, cooks, and the ordered course of the banquet, which was crowned by all the noblemen filing past the duke, who was still seated at table, “pour lui donner gloire.”
The kitchen regulations are truly Pantagruelistic. We may picture them in operation in the kitchen of heroic dimensions, with its seven gigantic chimneys, which can still be seen in the ducal palace of Dijon. The chief cook is seated on a ​raised chair, overlooking the whole apartment; "and he must hold in his hand a big wooden ladle which serves him for a double purpose: on the one hand to taste soup and broth, on the other to chase the scullions from the kitchen to their work, and to strike them, if need be."
La Marche speaks of the ceremonies which he describes, in as respectful and quasi-scholastic a tone as if he were treating of sacred mysteries. He submits to his readers grave questions of precedence and of service, and answers them most knowingly.—Why is the chief-cook present at the meals of his lord and not the "écuyer de la cuisine"? How does one proceed to nominate the chief-cook? To which he replies in his wisdom: When the office of chief-cook falls vacant at the court of the prince, the "maîtres d'hôtel" call the "écuyers" and all the kitchen servants to them one by one. Each one solemnly gives his vote, attested by an oath, and in this way the chief-cook is elected.—Who is to take the chief-cook's place in case he is absent: the "spit-master," or the "soup-master"?—Answer: Neither; the substitute will be designated by election.—Why do the "panetiers" and cup-bearers form the first and second ranks, above the carvers and cooks?—Because they are in charge of bread and wine, to which the sanctity of the sacrament gives a holy character.
The extreme importance which attaches to questions of precedence and etiquette can only be explained by the almost religious significance ascribed to them wherever tradition is strong, and where a primitive spirit still prevails. They contain, so to say, a ritualistic element. All forms of etiquette are elaborated so as to constitute a noble game, which, although artificial, has not yet degenerated altogether into a vain parade. Sometimes the polite form takes such an importance that the gravity of the matter in hand is lost sight of.
Before the battle of Crécy, four French knights returned from reconnoitring the English lines. The incident is told by Froissart. Impatient to hear the news they bring, the king rides forward to meet them and stops as soon as he sees them. They force their way through the ranks of the men-at-arms and reach the king. "What news, my lords?" asks the king. Then they look at each other without speaking a word, for not one is willing to speak before his companions. And one said ​to the other: “Lord, do you say it, speak to the king. I shall not speak before you.” So, for a time they were debating, as none would begin to speak “par honneur.” Till at last the king ordered Sir Monne de Basele to tell what he knew.
Messire Gaultier Rallart, “chevalier du guet” at Paris, in 1418, was in the habit of never going his rounds without being preceded “by three or four musicians playing brass instruments, which appeared a strange thing to the people, for they said that it seemed that he said to malefactors: ‘Get away, for I am coming.’” This case, reported by the Burgher of Paris, of a chief of police warning malefactors of his approach, is not an isolated one. Jean de Roye tells the same thing of Jean Balue, bishop of Evreux in 1465. At night he went his rounds, “with clarions, trumpets and other instruments of music, through the streets and on the walls, which was not a customary thing to do for men of the watch.”
Even on the scaffold the honours due to rank are strictly observed. Thus the scaffold mounted by the Constable of Saint Pol is richly shrouded with black velvet strewn with fleurs-de-lis; the cloth with which his eyes are bandaged, the cushion on which he kneels, are of crimson velvet, and the hangman is a fellow who has never yet executed a single criminal—rather a doubtful privilege for the noble victim.
The struggles of politeness, which some forty years ago were still characteristic of lower-middle-class etiquette, were extraordinarily developed in the court life of the fifteenth century. A person of fashion would have considered himself dishonoured by not according to a superior the place which belonged to him. The dukes of Burgundy give precedence scrupulously to their royal relations of France. Jean sans Peur never fails to show exaggerated respect to his daughter-in-law, the young princess Michelle of France; he calls her Madame; he bends his knee to the earth before her and at table always tries to help her, which she will not suffer him to do. When Philip the Good learns that his cousin, the dauphin, in consequence of a quarrel with his father, has removed to Brabant, he at once raises the siege of Deventer, which formed the first step to his very important scheme of conquering Friesland. He travels in hot haste to Brussels, there to receive his royal guest. As the moment of the ​meeting approaches, there follows a veritable race to be the first in doing homage to the other. At the news that the dauphin is coming to meet him, the old duke is extremely vexed; he sends him “three, four messages, one after the other, to tell him, that if he should ride forward to meet him, he had taken an oath, he would quickly return to where he came from, and would retire before him so quickly and so far, that the other would not find him for a whole year, nor would see him, whatever he did; for, he said, it would mean to him, the duke, ridicule and shame, which would never cease, but be imputed to him throughout the world, to all eternity as a great outrage and a foolish thing; which he was very anxious to avoid.” Out of reverence for the blood of France, the duke, although in the territory of the Empire, prohibits his sword to be carried before him, on entering Brussels; before reaching the palace, he hastily alights from his horse, enters the court and passes on quickly on perceiving the king’s son, “who has come down from his apartment, holding the duchess by the hand, and rapidly goes to him in the inner court with wide-open arms.” At once the old duke bares his head, kneels down for a moment and passes on quickly. The duchess holds the dauphin to prevent his advancing a step, the dauphin vainly seizes the duke to prevent him from kneeling, and makes a fruitless attempt to make him rise. Both cried with emotion, says Chastellain, and so did all the spectators.
In the royal receptions of modern times we undoubtedly find ceremonies bordering on the ludicrous, but we shall look in vain for this passionate anxiety about formalities, which attests that towards the close of the Middle Ages a moral significance still attached to them.
After the young count of Charolais, out of modesty, has obstinately refused to use the wash-basin before a meal at the same time with the queen of England, the court talks the whole day of the incident; the duke, to whom the case is submitted, charges two noblemen to argue the case on both sides. Humble refusals to take precedence of another last upwards of a quarter of an hour; the longer one resists, the more one is praised. People hide their hands to avoid the honour of a hand-kiss; the queen of Spain does so on meeting the young archduke Philippe le Beau; the latter waits patiently, ​for a moment of inattentiveness on the part of the queen, to seize her hand and kiss it. For once Spanish gravity was at fault; the court laughed.
All the trifling amenities of social intercourse are minutely regulated. Etiquette not only prescribes which ladies of the court may hold each other by the hand, but also which lady is entitled to encourage others to this mark of intimacy, by beckoning them. This right of beckoning, “hucher,” is a technical question for the old court lady Aliénor de Poitiers, who has described the ceremonial of the court of Burgundy. The departure of a guest is opposed with troublesome insistence. Philip the Good refuses to let the queen of France go on the day fixed by the king, in spite of the fear which the poor queen and her train felt for the anger of Louis XI.
Goethe has said that there is not an outward sign of politeness which has not a profound moral foundation, and Emerson expresses almost the same thought when calling politeness “virtue gone to seed.” It would, perhaps, be an exaggeration to say that at the end of the Middle Ages people were still fully conscious of the ethical value of politeness; but surely people still felt its æsthetic value, which marks the transition of these forms from sincere professions of affection to arid formalities of civility.
It is obvious that this rich adornment of life flourished nowhere so much as at the court of princes, where people could devote time to it and had room for it. This same cult of forms, however, spread downwards from the nobility to the middle classes, where they lingered on, after having become obsolete in higher circles. Customs such as that of urging a guest to have another helping of a dish, or to prolong his visit, of refusing to take precedence, now hardly fashionable, were in full bloom in the fifteenth century, scrupulously observed, though at the same time an object of satire.
Above all, public worship offered ample occasion for lengthy displays of civility. In the first place, there is the “offrande”; no one is willing to be the first to place his alms on the altar:
“Passez.—Non feray.—Or avant! Certes si ferez, ma cousine. —Non feray.—Huchez no voisine, Qu’elle doit mieux devant offrir.
—Vous ne le devriez souffrir.” Dist la voisine; “n’appartient A moy; offrez, qu’a vous ne tient Que li prestres ne se delivre.”
When at last the person of highest rank has led the way, the same debate will be repeated in connection with the “pax,” a disc of wood, silver or ivory, that was kissed after the Agnus Dei. Amid polite refusals to kiss first, the “pax” went from hand to hand among the notabilities, with the result of a prolonged interruption of the service.
“Respondre doit la juene fame: —Prenez, je ne prendray pas, dame. —Si ferez, prenez, douce amie. —Certes, je ne le prandray mie; L’en me tendroit pour une sote. —Baillez, damoiselle Marote. —Non feray, Jhesucrist m’en gart! Portez a ma dame Ermagart. —Dame, prenez.—Saincte Marie, Portez la paix a la baillie —Non, mais a la gouverneresse.”
Even a holy man like François de Paule thought it his duty to take part in these childish observances; the witnesses in the process for his canonization considered this behaviour s mark of great humility and merit, which shows that satire can have hardly exaggerated and that the ethical idea of these forms had not completely disappeared.
With all this business of compliments, attending public worship became almost like dancing a minuet. For on leaving the church similar scenes are enacted, in getting a superior to walk on the right hand, or to be the first to cross a plank-bridge or enter a narrow lane. Arrived at home, the whole company has to be invited to enter and drink some wine ​(as Spanish courtesy demands to this day). The company excuse themselves politely, upon which it becomes requisite to accompany them part of the way, in spite of their repeated protestations.
These futile forms become touching, and their moral and civilizing value is better understood, on remembering they emanated from the passionate soul of a savage race, struggling to tame its pride and its anger. Quarrels and acts of violence go hand in hand with the ceremonious abdication of all pride, of which they are the reverse. Noble families disputed fiercely for that same precedence in church by which they courteously pretended to set little store.
Often enough native rudeness pierces through the thin veneer of politeness. Duke John of Bavaria, the elect of Liège, is a guest at Paris. At the festivities given in his honour by the great nobles, he wins all their money from them in gaming. One of the princes cannot restrain himself any longer, and exclaims: “What devil of a priest have we got here?” (It is the chronicler of Liège, Jean de Stavelot, who reports the fact.) “What, is he to win all our money? Whereupon my lord of Liège rose from the table and said angrily: I am not a priest and I do not want your money. And he took it and threw it all about the room; and many marvelled greatly at his liberality.”
The magnificent order maintained at the court of Burgundy, praised by Christine de Pisan, by Chastellain, and by the Bohemian nobleman Leon of Rozmital, acquires its full significance only when compared with the disorder which reigned at the court of France, Burgundy’s older and more illustrious model. In a number of his ballads Eustache Deschamps complains of the misery at court, and these complaints are not merely variations on the familiar theme of disparagement of court life. Bad fare and poor lodgings; continual noise and disorder; swearing and quarrels; jealousies and injuries; in short, the court is an abyss of sins, the gate of hell.
Neither the sacred respect for royalty, nor the almost sacramental value attaching to ceremonies, could prevent decorum from being occasionally ignominiously thrust aside on the most solemn occasions. At the coronation banquet of Charles VI, in 1380, the duke of Burgundy seeks, by force, ​to take the place to which he is entitled, as doyen of the peers, between the king and the duke of Anjou. Already the train of the duke begins to thrust aside their opponents; threatening cries arise, a scuffle is breaking out when the king prevents it, by doing justice to the claims of the duke of Burgundy.
Even the infractions of solemn forms tended to become forms themselves. It seems that it was more or less a custom for the funeral of a king of France to be interrupted by a quarrel, of which the object was the possession of the utensils of the ceremony. In 1422 the corporation of the “henouars,” or salt-weighers, of Paris, whose privilege it was to carry the king’s corpse to Saint-Denis, came to blows with the monks of the abbey, as both parties claimed the pall covering the bier of Charles VI.
An analogous case occurred in 1461, at the funeral of Charles VII. In consequence of an altercation with the monks, the “henouars” put down the coffin when they have come halfway and refuse to carry it any further, unless they are paid ten pounds Paris. The Lord Grand Master of the Horse quiete them by promising to pay them out of his own pocket, but the delay had been so long that the cortège arrives at Saint-Denis only towards eight at night. After the interment, a new conflict arises with regard to the pall of gold-cloth, between the monks and the Grand Master of the Horse himself.
The great publicity which it was customary to give to all important events in the life of a king, and which survived to the times of Louis XIV, sometimes led to a pitiable breakdown of discipline on the most solemn occasions. At the coronation banquet of 1380, the throng of spectators, guests and servants was such that the constable and the marshal of Sancerre had to serve up the dishes on horseback. At the coronation of Henry VI of England at Paris, in 1431, the people force their way at daybreak into the great hall where the feast was to take place, “some to look on, others to regale themselves, others to pilfer or to steal victuals or other things.” The members of the Parlement and of the University, the provost of the merchants and the aldermen, after having succeeded with great difficulty in entering the hall, find the tables assigned to them occupied by all sorts of artisans. An attempt is made to remove them, “but when they had ​succeeded in driving away one or two, six or eight sat down on the other side.” At the inauguration of Louis XI, in 1461, the precaution had been taken of closing the doors of the cathedral of Reims early and placing a guard there, so that not more persons should enter the church than the choir could hold. Nevertheless, the spectators so pressed round the altar where the king was anointed, that the prelates assisting the archbishop could scarcely move, and the princes of the blood were nearly squeezed to death in their seats of honour.
The passionate and violent soul of the age, always vacillating between tearful piety and frigid cruelty, between respect and insolence, between despondency and wantonness, could not dispense with the severest rules and the strictest formalism. All emotions required a rigid system of conventional forms, for without them passion and ferocity would have made havoc of life. By this sublimating faculty each event became a spectacle for others; mirth and sorrow were artificially and theatrically made up. For want of the faculty to express emotions in a simple and natural way, recourse must needs be had to æsthetic representations of sorrow and of joy.
The ceremonies accompanying birth, marriage and death fully assumed this character of spectacles. Æsthetic values have here taken the place of their old religious (pagan for the most part) or magic signification.
Nowhere does the formalizing of the emotions assume a more suggestive appearance than in the sphere of mourning rites. There is a tendency in primitive times to exaggerate the expression of grief, like that of joy. Pompous mourning is the counterpart of immoderate rejoicings and of insane luxury. At the death of Jean sans Peur the mourning is organized with incomparable magnificence, in which there was, no doubt, also a political by-purpose. The retinue escorting Philip of Burgundy, who went out to meet the kings of France and of England, carry two thousand black vanes, to say nothing of the standards and banners seven yards long, of the same colour. The carriage of the duke and also the state seats have been painted black for the occasion. At the meeting of Troyes, Philip wears a mantle of black velvet ​which is so long as to hang down from his horse to the ground. For a long time afterwards he and his court only show themselves dressed in black.
Amidst the general black of court mourning the red worn only by the king of France (not even by the queen) must have made a most startling contrast. In 1393 the Parisians had the surprise of a pompous funeral all in white: that of the king of Armenia, Léon de Lusignan, who died in exile.
The manifestations of sorrow at the death of a prince, if at times purposely exaggerated, undoubtedly often enfolded a deep and unfeigned grief. The general instability of the soul, the extreme horror of death, the fervour of family attachment and loyalty, all contributed to make the decease of a king or a prince an afflicting event. A savage exuberance of grief breaks out when the news is brought to Ghent of the murder of Jean sans Peur. All chronicles confirm it; Chastellain is diffuse on the subject. His heavy and trailing style is wonderfully well adapted for reporting the long harangue of the bishop of Tournay to prepare the young duke for the awful tidings, as well as for the majestic lamentations of Philip and of Michelle of France, his consort. Half a century later we see Charles the Bold, at the death-bed of his father, weeping, crying out, wringing his hands, falling on the ground, “so as to make every one wonder at his unmeasured grief.”
Whatever may be the share of the court style in these narratives, what they tell us fits in too well with the over-strung sensibility of the epoch, and at the same time with the craving for clamorous mourning as an edifying thing, not to be substantially true. Primitive custom demanding that the dead should be publicly and loudly lamented still survived in considerable strength in the fifteenth century. Noisy manifestations of sorrow were thought fine and becoming, and all things connected with a deceased person had to bear witness to unmeasured grief.
The extreme fear of announcing a death likewise bears testimony to the same intermingling of primitive ritual and passionate emotionalism. The death of her father is kept a secret from the countess of Charolais, who is pregnant. During an illness of Philip the Good, the court does not dare to announce to him a single death touching him at all nearly; ​Adolphus of Cleves is forbidden to go into mourning for his wife, out of consideration for the duke, who is ill. The chancellor Nicolas Rolin dies: the duke is left in ignorance of his decease. Yet he begins to suspect it and asks the bishop of Tournay, who has come to visit him, to tell him the truth. “My liege, says the bishop—in sooth, he is dead, indeed, for he is old and broken, and cannot live long.—Déa! says the duke, I do not ask that. I ask if he is truly dead and gone.— Hà! my liege—the bishop retorts, he is not dead, but paralysed on one side, and therefore practically dead.—The duke grows angry.—Vechy merveilles! Tell me clearly, now, whether he is dead. Only then says the bishop: Yes, truly, my liege, he is really dead.”
Does not this curious way of announcing a death suggest some trace of ancient superstition, more even than the wish to spare a sick man? The anxiety to exclude systematically the thought of death denotes a state of mind analogous to that of Louis XI, who would never again wear the dress he had on, nor use the horse he was riding at the moment when evil tidings were announced to him, and who even had a of the forest of Loches cut down where the tidings of the death of a new-born son were brought to him. “Monsieur the Chancellor,” the king writes on May 25, 1483, “I thank you for the letters etc., but I beg you to send me no more by him who brought them, for I found his face terribly changed since I last saw him, and I tell you on my word that he made me much afraid, and farewell.”
The cultural value of mourning is that it gives grief its form and rhythm. It transfers actual life to the sphere of the drama. It shoes it with the cothurnus. Mourning at the court of France or of Burgundy, at the time with which we are concerned, has to be regarded as a sort of acted elegy. Funeral ceremonial and funeral poetry, which in primitive civilizations are still undistinguished (in Ireland, for instance), had not yet been completely separated. Mourning still continued a remnant of its poetical functions. It dramatized the effects of grief.
The nobler the deceased and the survivors are, the more heroic the mourning. For a whole year the queen of France may not leave the room in which the death of her consort was ​announced to her. For the princesses the seclusion lasts six weeks. During all the time that Madame de Charolais is in mourning for her father, she remains in bed, propped up by cushions and dressed in bands, coif and mantle. The rooms are upholstered in black; the floor is covered with a large black cloth. Aliénor de Poitiers has described for us all the gradations of the ceremonial, varying according to rank.
Under this fine outward show the feelings which are thus exhibited and formalized often tend to disappear. The pathetic posture belies itself behind the scenes. “State” and real life are clearly and naïvely distinguished. Aliénor, having described the sumptuous mourning of the countess of Charolais, adds: “When Madame was ‘en son particulier’ she by no means always lay in bed, nor confined herself to one room.”
Next to mourning, the lying-in chamber affords ample opportunity for fine ceremonial and differentiation according to rank. The colours and materials of coverings and clothes all have a meaning. Green is the privilege of queens and of princesses, whereas it was white in preceding ages. “La chambre verde” was forbidden even to countesses. During the lying-in of Isabelle de Bourbon, mother of Mary of Burgundy, five large state beds, all draped with an artful fabric of green curtain, remain empty, like state coaches at funerals, only to serve for ceremonious use at the baptism, while the mother reposes on a low couch near the fire. The blinds are kept closed all the time, and the room is lighted by candles.
Through all the ranks of society a severe hierarchy of material and colour kept classes apart, and gave to each estate or rank an outward distinction, which preserved and exalted the feeling of dignity.
Moreover, outside the sphere of birth, marriage and death, a strongly felt æsthetic need tends to create a solemn and decorous form for every event and every notable deed. A sinner who humbles himself, a condemned prisoner who repents, a holy person sacrificing himself, all afford a kind of public spectacle. Public life in this way almost presents the appearance of a perpetual “morale en action.”
Even intimate relations in medieval society are rather paraded than kept secret. Not only love, but friendship too, ​has its finely made up forms. Two friends dress in the same way, share the same room, or the same bed, and call one another by the name of “mignon.” It is good form for the prince to have his minion. We must not let the well-known case of Henry III of France affect for us the ordinary acceptance of the word “mignon” in the fifteenth century. There have been princes and favourites in the Middle Ages too who were accused of culpable relations—Richard I of England and Robert de Vere, for instance—but minions would not have been spoken of so freely, if we had to regard this institution as: connoting anything but sentimental friendship. It was a distinction of which the friends boasted in public. On the occasion of solemn receptions the prince leans on the shoulder of the minion, as Charles V at his abdication leaned on William of Orange. To understand the duke’s sentiment towards Cesario in Twelfth Night, we must recall this form of sentimental friendship, which maintained itself as a formal institution till the days of James I and George Villiers.
The complex of all these fine forms, veiling cruel reality under apparent harmony, made life an art. This art leaves no traces, and it is for this reason that its cultural importance has been noticed too little. The tenderness of compliments, the charming fiction of modesty and altruism, the hieratic pomp of ceremonies, the pageant of marriage, all this is ephemeral and may seem culturally sterile. That which gives them their style and expression is fashion, not art, and fashion leaves no monuments behind.
And yet, at the close of the Middle Ages, the connections between art and fashion were closer than at present. Art had not yet fled to transcendental heights; it formed an integral part of social life. In the domain of costume art and fashion were still inextricably blended, style in dress stood nearer to artistic style than later, and the function of costume in social life, that of accentuating the strict order of society itself, almost partook of the liturgic. The amazing extravagance of dress during the last centuries of the Middle Ages was, as it were, the expression of an overflowing æsthetic craving, which art alone did not suffice to satisfy.
All relations, all dignities, all actions, all sentiments, had ​found their style. The higher the moral value of a social function, the nearer its form of expression approached to pure art. Whereas ceremony and courtesy have no other expression than conversation and luxury, and pass away without visible residue, the rites of mourning do not exhaust themselves in funeral pomp and fictions of etiquette, but leave a durable and artistic expression in the sepulchral monument. As in the case of marriage and baptism, the link of mourning with religion heightens its cultural value.
Still, the richest flower of beautiful forms was reserved for three other elements of life—courage, honour and love.
* ↑ "O world, O letters, it is a delight to live!"
* ↑ Time of mourning and of temptation, Age of tears, of envy and of torment, Time of languor and of damnation, Age of decline nigh to the end, Time full of horror which does all things falsely, Lying age, full of pride and of envy, Time without honour and without true judgment, Age of sadness which shortens life.
* ↑ All mirth is lost, All hearts have been taken by storm By sadness and melancholy.
* ↑ O miserable and very sad life!… We suffer from warfare, death and famine; Cold and heat, day and night, sap our strength; Fleas, scab-mites and so much other vermin Make war upon us. In short, have mercy, Lord, upon our wicked persons, whose life is very short.
* ↑ And I, poor writer, With the sad, feeble and vain heart, When I see every one mourning, Then Affliction holds me in her hand; I have always tears in my eye, I wish for nothing but to die.
* ↑ So much has La Marche suffered.
* ↑ When he had reflected for a space, he resolved to answer the emissaries of the king of France.
* ↑ That a man with deformed limbs Is misshapen of mind,—Full of sins and full of vices.
* ↑ Now the world is cowardly, decayed and weak, Old, covetous, confused of speech: I see only female and male fools…. The end approaches, in sooth…. All goes badly.
* ↑ Why are the times so dark That men do not know each other, But governments move From bad to worse, as we see? The past was much better. Who reigns? Affliction and annoyance; Justice nor law are current; I know no more where I belong.
* ↑ If the times remain so, I shall become a hermit, For I see nothing but grief and torment.
* ↑ High magnificence of heart to be seen and regarded in extraordinary things.
* ↑ “Go on—I shall not—Come forward! Certainly, you will do so, cousin—I shall not—Call to our neighbour, That she should offer before you—You should not suffer it,” the neighbour says: “it does not belong To me; offer, only for you The priest has to wait.”
* ↑ The young woman should answer, Take it, I shall not, lady—Yes, do, take it, dear friend—I shall certainly not take it, dear; People would take me for a fool—Pass it, miss Marote—I shall not, Jesus Christ forbid! Take it to the lady Ermagart—Lady, take it—Holy Mary, Take the pax to the bailiffs wife—No, but to the governor’s wife.