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Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
trade in Germany; that is late in the twelfth century; but the Gay
Science had spread from Provence to the other countries, the
troubadours visiting foreign Courts and giving lessons in their art.
This outburst of poetry is described by M. Fauriel as
"the result of a general or energetic movement in favour of social
restoration, of an intense enthusiasm of humanity reacting on every
side against the oppression and the barbarity of the epoch. The same
sentiment ... impelled them to seek and to find a new type and new
effects in the other arts, particularly in architecture. Thence arose
palaces and churches...."

It is not a little strange and satisfying to realise that the strong wave
of sentiment of which one is conscious in all great architecture was
in the Middle Ages the same that produced the magnificent flight
heavenwards of the human imagination in all that regarded life, its
problems and its relationships. M. Fauriel, on the subject of the
freedom of chivalrous love, writes:—
"The exaltation of desire, of hope, of self-sacrifice by which love
manifests itself and in which it principally consists, could not have any
moral merit nor could it become a real incentive to noble actions
except on certain conditions. It was to be perfectly spontaneous,
receive no law except its own, and could only exist for a single
object."

"A woman," he continues, "could only feel her ascendancy and

dignity, as a moral being, in relations where everything on her part
was a gift, a voluntary favour, and not in relations where she had
nothing to refuse."
As an example of the darker threads we may take the career of
Guilhelm de Cabestaing, the unfortunate author of the famous
canzo, a fragment of which is printed at the head of the chapter. He
is one of the most prominent figures in troubadour history. He
celebrated the charms of Berengaria des Baux, but his real love was
for the wife of the Count of Rousillon, a ferocious person who
suspected the troubadour's passion and set to work to entrap him by
questions as to the state of his heart. Guilhelm, seeing his danger,
admitted that he was seriously in love, but with the wife of another
seigneur.
"Ah!" said the Count, pretending great sympathy, "I will help you in
your suit; we will go at once to the castle of the fair lady."
Guilhelm had reluctantly to go, dreading the worst; but the lady,
realising the situation, played up to the part, acknowledging her love
for Guilhelm, and the Count's suspicions were thus allayed, but only
to be aroused again by the canzo ("lou douz cossire") which
Sermonda asked her lover to write to assure her that his
faithlessness was only apparent. The gruesome end of the story, the
treacherous slaying of the troubadour, the serving up of the heart at
table to the wife, and her suicide on hearing the ghastly truth,
illustrates too well the darker side of the life of the epoch.

FARM IN PROVENCE.
By Joseph Pennell.
Pons de Chapteuil was a troubadour whose story greatly interested
us, partly because of the romantic idea of the two mountain-set
castles, one the home of Pons, at Chapteuil, near Le Puy, the other
that of Alazais of Mercoeur, about twenty-five miles distant, "as one
would measure across the mountains of Auvergne," says Justin
Smith in his charming account of the story.
"Really it seems a little strange and eerie," he exclaims, "the
romance between these two castles in the sky—a little like a love-
affair between the Jungfrau and the Finsteraarhorn."
The story was tender and bright and sad, as love-stories are apt to
be, and very characteristic of the time. First the admiration and
sympathy and the necessary adoration, then the taking fire of two
generous natures; for this time the hero of romance is one to claim
our admiration as a noble follower of the laws of chivalry.
"It was his pleasure to defend the weak of every sort, to be brave,
true, faithful, liberal, and always to stand for the right."

Alazais had been married, probably by her father or her feudal over-
lord, to Count Ozil de Mercoeur, for whom she made no pretence of
any feeling, not even of esteem. It was evidently a mariage de
convenance, as most marriages were in those days, and the love of
the Countess of Ozil for her neighbour across the mountains at least
did not rob the Count of her affections, since he had never
possessed or apparently desired them.
"In essential womanliness," says Justin Smith, "and in the graceful
arts of social intercourse, we may think of her as the equal of any
lady we have met.... Courtliness was her abiding principle, the true
courtliness which consisted in ... graceful speech, in avoiding all that
could annoy others, and in doing and saying everything that could
make one loved." The mutual attraction of these two, the same
writer continues, "penetrated by the fire of two ardent natures,
came to be love, as the rich flow of the grape, changing its quality
insensibly, acquires in time the sparkle, the bouquet, and the
passion that make it wine."
Taking into consideration the times in which they lived, one would
suppose that fortune favoured these two, and that for once one
should have a nice cheerful story to console us for the many sad
ones.
But no; Pons must needs harbour doubts of the sincerity of Alazais,
and so he determined to test her by the time-honoured device of
exciting jealousy. He therefore proceeded to devote himself
ostentatiously to another lady, expecting a "burst of passionate
anger" from Alazais. But that lady, one is glad to learn, disdained
reproaches and kept a dignified silence. After all, she seems to have
argued, Pons was not bound to devote himself to her or to continue
to do so if he were tired of it.
So Pons, much astonished and chagrined, "became uneasy," as we
are told, "quitted the lady of Roussillon, and returned to pray for
pardon." But Alazais apparently thought that trying experiments
upon a person one professes to love was somewhat inconsequent,
and she intimated that she preferred not to receive Pons. He sent
her a song, explaining his conduct.
"Ah, if you ask what urged me to depart," it begins (although, in
fact, Alazais had never asked anything of the kind, much to the
troubadour's annoyance)—

"'Twas not inconstancy nor fickleness;

It was a wish conceived of love's excess,
To try the test of absence on your heart.
How grieved I, how regretted, when to me
That you were touched nor word nor token proved!
But think not that you're free although unmov'd:
From you I cannot, will not severed be!"

But Alazais replied never a word. His influence over her seemed to
have been entirely lost. Pons then "employed three ladies to plead
his cause," and they entered so warmly into the undertaking that
finally they succeeded. So Pons made another song, very joyous this
time, swearing that "henceforth he will keep strictly to the path of
love, without deviating a hair's-breadth."
But in the midst of this new-found happiness Alazais falls ill and dies.
Barbara was much aggrieved. I scarcely liked to read her the end:
how Pons wrote a piercing lament, saying he would close his heart
and rend his strings, and
 "Die tuneless and alone,"

a resolve which he actually carried out. He became a member of one

of the military brotherhoods of the day, and died fighting in the Third
Crusade.
This story, however, sad as it is, is among the most attractive of the
troubadour romances, because the characters of Pons and Alazais
were, on the whole, a near approach to the chivalric standard for
men and women.
"When Pons" (to quote Justin Smith once more) "rode out of the
lists, bearing his lady's glove in triumph, he felt a joy quite fresh in
the experience of mankind."
This is, after all, a big fact, and it disposes once and for ever of the
depressing doctrine that there is nothing new under the sun. If the
twelfth century produced a new and beautiful fact in human history,
so can the twentieth.
 CHAPTER VIII
ORANGE AND MARTIGUES
"Beauty gives men the best hint of ultimate good which their
experience as yet can offer."

"The Life of Reason"—George Santayana.

CHAPTER VIII
ORANGE AND MARTIGUES
Every one who has travelled in mountain regions has been puzzled
by the curious fact that the more peaks his journeyings reveal to him
the more there are to reveal. The number of the mountains seems
to increase in geometrical proportion and the traveller has presently
to learn that, in spite of all appearances, the last towering summit
that moves into view will presently become the platform from which
he must crane his neck to contemplate a still more towering wooer
of the clouds and a still grander scene of desolation and primæval
silence.
The traveller in Provence receives a similar impression in relation not
to material but to historical immensities. No sooner has one spot
been explored, than another mountain-peak of tradition comes into
sight, luring ever farther afield.
This is one of the pains of the ardent traveller, and it forms a curious
analogy with the life-journey itself, in which renunciation after
renunciation has to be made, not merely of things far distant and
beautiful, but of things beautiful and near, which only need the
stretch of the hand to touch, but yet are farther from reach than the
Pole-star itself. Among the serious renunciations that had to be
made during our Provençal visit must be counted Courthéson, where
one of our favourite troubadours, Raimbaut de Vacquciras, spent so
many of his early days at the Court of Guilhelm des Baux (of whom
more hereafter). Then there was Ventadour—not exactly near, but
still within hail—once so brilliant a centre of learning and song; and
Salon, the reputed scene of Mary Magdalene's later life. Of this
bright little prosperous city, famous for its oil trade, with its dripping
fountain and grey donjon, we did catch an early morning glimpse en
route for an inexorable train. Rocamadour, full of romantic beauty;
Le Puy, strangest of rock-set cities; ill-fated Béziers, of the
Albigensian wars; Dragignan, and a hundred others were one and all
alluring and unattainable.

ROMAN GATEWAY AT ORANGE (ON THE

LYONS ROAD).
A few hours between trains By Joseph Pennell.
permitted a visit to Orange and its great theatre and triumphal arch,
which redeem the place from a somewhat featureless commonplace.

LOOKING DOWN THE GRANDE RUE,

MARTIGUES.
By Joseph Pennell.
We had to ask our way to the theatre, unluckily of some perfidious
inhabitant whose misdirection would have landed us in the suburbs,
had not Fortune, in the shape of a dapper youth in the first rosy
flush of a dawning moustache, come to the rescue.
In the pursuit of his father's trade as a corn-dealer, he had travelled
and learnt English together with a becoming admiration for the
British nation, his enlightenment being assisted by an English
mother. It seemed strange to think of an Englishwoman settled
down in this little French provincial town, but as our guide chattered
on, unconsciously revealing the life of the place, it was clear that
French provincial human nature is much the same as any other.
Heartburning, gossip, jealousies, stupendous proprieties,
"convenances" of the most all-shadowing and abstruse kind made up
the dreary existence of the inhabitants. Wretched "jeunes filles"
unable to cross a street unattended, mothers on the prowl for
husbands for the "jeunes filles" (our young friend intimated
delicately that he had a perilous time of it among enterprising
parents); the men intent on business and the recreations of the café
and so forth—it all sounded disheartening enough, and the
hopelessness of it seemed to settle on the spirit like a blight.
Our guide regarded his native town with disdain. Its narrow streets
and dingy aspect he pointed out with ironical pomp.
"This, you see, is our main street. Magnificent you cannot deny!"
Had he not travelled and seen better things?
But the great monuments?
The youth shrugged his shoulders.
For those who liked that sort of thing——!
 ON THE GRAND CANAL, MARTIGUES.
By Joseph Pennell.
From behind blinds of discreet windows inquiring heads might often
be seen peering out at our quaint procession of three, and our guide
would then pull himself up and step out with a brisk experienced
stride, as of one who has relations with a world that is not Orange!
But those faces dimly seen behind blinds—one smiled, but they
brought a shiver at the same time.
"English tourists often come to have a look at the monuments, and
then I always try to act as guide. I like to talk to them—I get so tired
of living here. It is terrible!"
 CHURCH AT MARTIGUES.
By Joseph Pennell.
Poor budding, ambitious youth!
The great Roman theatre stands apart from the rest of the buildings,
a vast, blank surface of masonry forming the façade. Inside are the
circular tiers of seats, and up these we clambered to the top, looking
down into the silent stage and feeling that familiar, bootless longing
of the traveller for a glimpse of the scene in the days of its glory.
The Roman arch is at the farther end of the town, standing apart in
its majesty, a grand forlorn monument of that wonderful people.

It was hard sometimes to steer among so many possibilities of

adventure. It behoved us to choose wisely since time and tide were
hastening. But perhaps it was we, not time and tide, that were really
hastening. These do not hasten; it is only their unhappy victims who
are never ready for their coming. To the truly wise and
understanding mind, doubtless, haste would be a thing unknown. Its
possessor would be able to meditate serenely between trains at
Clapham Junction.
 BOATS, MARTIGUES.
By Joseph Pennell.
But for less accomplished mortals the sense of limited time with
otherwise unlimited opportunity, tends to a certain breathlessness
which, however, in our case, gradually gave way before the
influences of the country.
 THE PORTAL OF THE CHURCH,
MARTIGUES.
By Joseph Pennell.
One of the places that we had to renounce, might, from all accounts,
have been a sort of Finishing School for students of Serenity. This
was Martigues, the little town on the Etang de Berre, where all good
painters go when they die. They also wisely go there in swarms
before they die. They place here, in opposition to orthodox
scholarship, the site of the Garden of Eden. And judging by their
records, this, if mistaken, is not surprising. The place induces on a
suitable temperament a sort of sketching debauch:—Martigues from
the Lagoon; Old Houses, Martigues; Churches, Martigues; Groups of
Boats, Martigues; Nooks and Corners, Martigues; the Harbour,
Martigues; Sailors and Fishermen, Martigues; Martigues in the
Morning; Martigues at Noon; Martigues at Night; Martigues ad
infinitum.
Quiet waterways among the mellowest of old houses, churches
keeping tranquil guard above the ripple of the lagoon; the silence of
the sunny port cheerily broken by cries of sailors and bargemen, by
the drowsy life of the place; lights and shadows, colour in every
tone, form in a thousand avatars; creepers clambering over decaying
walls, flowers in odd crannies; all this offers infinitely more attraction
to the artist than all our Horticultural-Gardens-of-Paradise put
together. So it is not to Heaven that he goes, if he can help it; he
goes to Martigues.
He is never tired of it, as his numerous sketches show.
Not to have seen Martigues is a precious privilege in its way: it is a
life-long safeguard against satiety; for then, whatever comes, one
unfulfilled desire at least remains: to see Martigues—and sketch!
 CHAPTER IX
ROMANTIC LOVE
1. Marriage cannot be pleaded as an excuse for refusing to love.
2. A person who cannot keep a secret can never be a lover.
3. No one can really love two people at the same time.
4. Love never stands still; it always increases—or diminishes.
5. Favours which are yielded unwillingly are tasteless.
6. A person of the male sex cannot be considered a lover until
he has passed out of boyhood.
7. If one of two lovers dies, love must be foresworn for two
years by the survivor.
8. No one can love unless the soft persuasion of love itself
compel him.
11. It is not becoming to love those ladies who only love with a
view to marriage.
13. A love that has once been rendered common and
commonplace never, as a rule, endures very long.
14. Too easy possession renders love contemptible.
15. Every lover is accustomed to grow pale at the sight of his
lady-love.
16. At the sudden and unexpected prospect of his lady-love, the
heart of the true lover invariably palpitates.
18. If love once begins to diminish, it quickly fades away and
rarely recovers itself.
20. Every action of a lover terminates with the thought of the
loved one.
 The Laws of Love accepted by Courts of Love. (As given by
Rowbotham.)

A SQUARE AT NIMES.
By Joseph Pennell.

CHAPTER IX
ROMANTIC LOVE
Criticise and condemn as we may the conceptions of the time, the
institution of chivalry accomplished a marvellous work of
regeneration wherever it was able to establish itself.
One can but turn with emotion and gratitude to the land where it
has blossomed into some of its most beautiful forms, where the
warm blood of the South took fire and impelled to the following of
noble ideals with the ardour of heroes and the steadfastness of
saints.
Greek, Celtic, Phœnìcian, Iberian, Ligurian, Saracen blood flows in
the veins of the people; and in looking at their faces one can
understand why the troubadours sang such sweet and merry songs,
and why the country to this day may be called the land

"Of joy, young-heartedness, and love...."

It was the Duke of Acquitaine, himself a troubadour, who gave us

those words so descriptive of Southern France, in the gay little
verse,—

"A song I'll make you worthy to recall,

With ample folly and with sense but small,
Of joy, young-heartedness, and love will I compound it all."

In truth it was a wonderful time, full of colour and passion in which

there was the shadow of tragedy, but seldom the grey and dust-
colour of the sordid and the mean.
For women it was literally a coming-of-age. A modern author speaks
about the "advent of woman in man's world," when she "became for
the first time something more than a link between two generations."
Love, as a romantic sentiment, became possible between men and
women, because the woman's individuality as a human being was
recognised, and with it her right to give or to withhold her love. True
love and true friendship, as we moderns understand them, may
almost claim to take their rise in the age of chivalry.
Fraternity of arms constituted an honoured tie among knights. They
received the Sacrament together, exchanged armour, and from that
time forth supported one another wherever they went, and at all
hazards.
 "From this day forward ever more
Neither fail, either for weal or wo,
To help other at need.
Brother be now true to me,
And I shall be as true to thee."

This brotherhood in arms, however, should perhaps be described as

a revival of an ancient idea, whereas love, as it developed under the
laws of chivalry, was a thing hitherto unknown to mankind.
Doubtless there had been obscure precursors of the ideal, for many
times must a new thought be uttered before the air vibrates with
sufficient strength to awake answering movements in other minds.
The first to think and feel a new world into existence—which is the
ultimate mission of thinking and feeling—often leaves nothing but
that new world behind him; neither name, nor fame, nor fortune.
And so we shall never know in what noble hearts the true romantic
love between man and woman first sprang into being.
The new mode of thought kindled generous impulses. Often
fantastic, not to say ridiculous, they were always graceful and full of
the flavour of romance.
"Many a knight," we are told, "would sally forth from a besieged
town during a suspension of hostilities and demand whether there
was any cavalier of the opposite host who, for love of his lady bright,
would do any deed of arms."
"Now let us see if there be any amorous among you," was the usual
conclusion of such a challenge. And out would come prancing some
armoured knight from the gates of the city, and the two, with much
ceremony of salutation, would fall to and hack each other to pieces
with the utmost courtesy and mutual respect.
"The air was rent with names of ladies" in the big tournaments of
the day. "On, valiant knights, fair eyes behold you!"
The proclamation of the beauty of his lady, as all romances of that
day remind us, was one of the serious duties of the knight, and
Cervantes only slightly caricatures the custom when he makes Don
Quixote "station himself in the middle of a high road and refuse to
let the merchants of Toledo pass unless they acknowledged there
was not in the universe a more beautiful damsel than the peerless
Dulcinea del Toboso."
There was also a sort of official post or title, Poursuivant d'Amour,
the knight dedicating himself to love as to a religion with solemn
fervour. The Duke of Lancaster, says Froissart, "possessed, as part of
his inheritance in Champagne, the Castle of Beaufort, of which an
English Knight called Poursuivant d'Amour was Captain." It appears
that this was a title which knights used to give themselves on
account of wearing the portraits or colours of their mistress and
challenging each other to fight in her honour.
To be in love was a social necessity. It was hopelessly "bad form" to
be otherwise.
"A knight without love is an ear of wheat without grain," says some
authority of the day.
It certainly was a lovelorn time! "Love was everything," says Justin
Smith, an author whose two large volumes on the troubadours
testify to wide study of the subject, "and we cannot wonder that
much was made of it. Its hopes and fears were the drama of that
day. Sweet and passionate thoughts were the concert and the opera.
Tales of successful and unsuccessful wooing were the novels....
Love, as we are to learn, was the shoot of modern culture, and the
tree that now overspreads us with its boughs bloomed, even in their
time, into a poetry as unsurpassed and as unsurpassable after its
kind as the epics of Homer."

But this immense change in the attitude of mind towards life and
towards women naturally could not take place without producing a
universal upheaval of the current morality: a thorough upsetting of
the doctrines upon which the husband had hitherto founded an
authority practically limitless.

IN THE CAMARGUE, FROM THE RAILWAY.

By E. M. Synge.
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.
It set vielles lightly tinkling and lutes twanging, but it also took
possession of great hearts and minds and ruled them for a lifetime.
Love was sometimes a "lord of terrible aspect," as Dante has
represented him. As women developed personality and individual
qualities in their new freedom, the grande passion became for the
first time really possible. And their mental and spiritual development
tended to promote the growth of the character of men in the same
direction.
There seemed a sort of expectation running through the society of
that time that a new source of joy had been found, a force that was
to redeem and beautify life.
The author of "The Women of the Renaissance" represents the men
of this later age—which, however, was still inspired by the chivalric
outburst—asking themselves what was the good of learning, money,
labour, or even semblances of joy if their hearts were empty.
"The heart," they complain, "makes itself felt above the claims of
work, above the intellect, demanding for life a recompense, a goal.
We perish for lack of something to love; out of mere self-pity we
ought to bestow on ourselves the alms of life, which is love. All is
vanity save this vanity, for before our birth, until our death,
throughout our whole existence it bears in front of us the torch of
life."

Looking back from this point to the Griselda-epoch, we have

travelled far indeed!
With such aspirations, such ideas in the air (whether or not they
were expressed in a definite way), marriage, which carried Griselda-
associations with it, was naturally looked upon as altogether outside
the realm of romance or happiness.
"To mingle it with love, the absolute, great enthusiasms of heart or
intellect, was to lay up for oneself disasters, or at least certain
disappointment," says M. de Maulde de La Clavière, and he instances
as the object of ridicule in that era a lady who speaks with a sigh of
the "unaccustomed pleasure" of loving the man she married. He
defines the Renaissance view of wedlock as "the modest squat
suburban villa in which you eat and sleep: passion is a church spire
piercing the sky...."
That being the general consensus of opinion on the subject, it is not
surprising that nearly all the love-stories of that day are entirely
disconnected with the idea of marriage. The holy estate itself was
defined as "the suburbs of hell." Marriages were "unions of policy
and position." And almost without exception they were arranged by
the parents, in accordance with material considerations, the old
feudal idea lingering on in this department of life and the daughter
being handed over by the father to a suitable (or unsuitable)
husband, without his ever dreaming of consulting her views in the
matter. She was generally too inexperienced to have any views of
importance, and even had she been consulted probably would not,
at that time, have been able to make a much better choice than her
father made for her.
But clearly if that was the order of things, love and romance must
establish their kingdom outside of marriage, and this was exactly
what occurred.
"Since love is, by the nature of things, free and spontaneous, rebellion
and revolution were inevitable unless womankind were to become
something else than human."

The point of view becomes clearer in the light of some of the

decisions and rules of the Courts of Love; for even if, as so many
writers insist, these tribunals never really existed, the quoted rules
and judgments must at any rate represent the ideas that swayed the
society of the day.
 OLD BRIDGE AT ST. GILLES IN THE
CAMARGUE.
By E. M. Synge.
These courts were said to be held under the presidency of some
great lady of the district, assisted by a council of ladies and knights.
One of the questions submitted to the Court of the Comtesse de
Champagne was: "Can true love exist between two persons who are
married?"
And the Countess, aided by her councillors, pronounced as follows:—
"Therefore, having examined the said arguments by the aid of sound
science, we proceed hereby to enact that love cannot extend his laws
over husband and wife, since the gifts of love are voluntary, and
husband and wife are the servants of duty. Also between the married
can there be in our opinion no jealousy, since between them there can
be no love.... This is our decision, formed with much deliberation and
with the approval of many dames; and we decree that it be held firm
and inviolable."
This decree proved a serious stumbling-block to one betrothed lady
who had promised a cavalier that if ever she should find herself at
liberty, she would accept his devotion. "Presently she married the
lover to whom she was plighted, whereupon the second knight
resumed his suit, conceiving—according to the ideas of the day—
that the lady was now fully at liberty. She, however, could not be
persuaded against the evidence of her feelings, ... and the matter
was referred to the queen, Eleanor, wife of Henry II. of England. Her
award could not run counter to that of the Countess of Champagne,
who has pronounced that love cannot exist between husband and
wife. It is our decree, therefore, that the dame aforesaid keep faith
with her cavalier."
The only means of evading this decree was for the lady to declare
that henceforth she intended to abandon love altogether, but if she
did that she was obliged to make up her mind to endure social
ostracism, for then "she was sure to be shunned by the gay ladies
and gentlemen who then formed the vast majority of the fashionable
world." We are not told what the lady decided to do in this most
trying dilemma.
Altogether the state of society under the sway of the Courts of Love
—or of the sentiment they represent—seems like that of some
strange fairy-tale. Nothing could have been more fantastic or
romantic; but however ridiculous they may seem to the critical mind,
there was always a strain that one can only call noble running
through it all. It might be dangerous, impracticable, subversive,
"immoral," if one will, but it was never paltry or base.
In their own fashion the reputed Courts of Love upheld a very high
ideal. They insisted upon the absolute sacredness of a promise and
of the word of honour, which a knight or a lady must keep to the
death. They demanded fidelity between lovers, for that was
considered "to be the essence of high-toned gallantry."
All this is our own inheritance of to-day. As regards the etiquette of
love-making the Court instituted what were called the four degrees
of love: "hesitating," "praying," "listening," and "drurerie." "When
the lady consented to enter this last stage, she granted the
gentleman his first kiss ... after which there could be no withdrawal
from the engagement."
The lady was often unwilling to give it, and there are many stories of
troubadours who try to obtain it by fraud or artifice. It seems
strange that, in that case, in a society with a high sense of honour, it
should have possessed any binding value, but apparently it had
something of the quality of the marriage ceremony, and therefore,
perhaps, something of the idea of a tie which might be enforced
against the will of the person concerned.
It is difficult, perhaps impossible, for the modern eye to see this era
exactly as it was. Writers represent it as corrupt and unlovely or as
romantic and noble according to their own particular bias. The
former attitude is perhaps largely determined by a leaning towards
the older order of thought which the advent of chivalry challenged;
while the less severe view is apt to accompany sympathy with the
newer doctrine, which establishes the woman as an independent
being, for good or for evil, and refuses to regard her as the property
in any sense whatever—whether by gift or by "contract"—of another
person. As this latter ideal is in its infancy even yet, the majority of
writers see little in the troubadour epoch but hopeless licence. It is
to them merely an outbreak of "immortality," and neither the
passionate rebellion against an old and degrading system nor the
enthusiastic reaching out towards something better saves it from
their severe condemnation. But we have all of us good reason to be
thankful for this stage of social upheaval through which our spiritual
ancestors passed, and it ill becomes us to cast reproaches at those
who have brought us, in one great burst of inspiration, so much
farther on our way.
 CHAPTER X
ARLES
"The name of Arles has raised great discussions.... Some see in it a
Greek origin, Agns, others regard it as Latin, Ara lata (raised altar),
because the Romans there found an altar consecrated to Diana of the
Ephesians by the Phoceans of Marseilles: ... others as Celtic Ar-lath,
moist place, on account of its marshes.... It is sufficiently evident that
the name Arelate has not a physiognomy either Greek or Roman; and
the radical Ar which is found ... in the name of the Arekomique
Volcians ... the Arnnematici, the Arandunici ... permits one to affirm
that this city was contemporary with those ancient peoples, and
existed in the fifth century before our era.... Placed between its river
and its inland sea, Arles had in fact two ports as she had two cities:
on the left bank of the Rhone was the Patrician town, with its
temples, its amphitheatre, its theatre, its forum, the baths, triumphal
arches, statues.... On the right bank ... was the city of business men,
sailors, and the people. Larger in those days than the Patrician city,
Trinquetailles is nothing to-day but the maritime suburb of the
modern town. A bridge of boats connected the two towns, and
Constantine substituted for it a bridge of masonry of which one can
still see the remains on the quays of the Rhone."
Translation from Charles Lenthéric.
 ST. TROPHIME, ARLES.
By Joseph Pennell.

CHAPTER X
ARLES
A few more turns of the kaleidoscope of life, and we find ourselves
sitting in a Roman amphitheatre among a crowd of spectators.
That odious descendant of the Roman games, the bullfight, does, at
certain times, carry on in a far milder form the ancient tale of agony
in this very arena, but the present performance given by a troup of
Laplanders is of quite another character.
The people of Arles had come in considerable crowds to see them,
but what interested us was the spectators, not the Laplanders. It
was Sunday, and many of the women had on their famous costume:
a black skirt, white muslin or tarlatan fichu, a picturesque white cap
with a band of embossed black velvet round it, which hangs
gracefully at one side. The Arlésiennes are beautiful, and carry
themselves perfectly.
A picturesque costume is popularly said to "make people look
handsome;" as if the dress created a beauty that was not really
there!
At Arles, by comparing the faces of those who wear the costume
with those who have abandoned it for modern garb, one can clearly
realise that beauty—which consists in relations of line and tint—is
not made but revealed by its setting. One sees, too, how, on the
other hand, it can, by the same means, be disguised and hidden,
just as it would be easy to disguise the symmetry of some fine
freehand design by tacking on to its outline a random selection of
octahedrons or oblate spheroids. This, be it added, is too often the
sort of process pursued by the designer of modern costume.
The beauty of the Arlésiennes is attributed to their Greek descent
from the original founders of the city. Judging by appearance, one
would say there was a strong touch of Saracen blood mingling with
the clearer current of the classic.
The hair is generally black, the eyes dark, the features regular and
often noble in character.
Arles is a place of narrow streets, of ruins, of tombs. It stands in a
wilderness of vast lagoons at the mouths of the Rhone, and in
ancient times it could only be reached by water, for the land was all
covered with these meres to the foot of the Alpilles. In the time of
the Romans and during the Middle Ages these great waters were
navigated by the utriculares, or raftsmen, whose flat craft were
made of extended skins.
Merchandise from Central Gaul had to come to Arles to be
transshipped on its way to the East or elsewhere, viâ the
Mediterranean. The raftsmen carried it over the shallow water round
the city, and plied a roaring local trade as well.
At Arles all interested in architecture will be apt to linger before the
very remarkable church of St. Trophime.
The interest lies in the characteristic Provençal blending of the pure
Roman style with its offshoot, the Romanesque, an architecture
which forms a curious analogue to the Romance languages, formed
during the same period when things Roman were falling to pieces,
yet were still the only standards and models, the type of all possible
achievements in human life and art.
The Romanesque is the patois of the classic architecture (with a
history singularly analogous to that of the language), developing
finally into the eloquent Gothic of our great cathedrals. But it was in
the north, not in the south—just as in the language—that the more
evolved form established itself. That leaves to the southern speech
and architecture a primitive charm all their own.
Of the porch of St. Trophime the engaged pillars are classic as to
their capitals, Romanesque in the half barbaric carving of their
bases. The figures in the niches formed by the pillars are Roman in
general type, yet with a touch of Byzantine, which may be described
as the architectural Romance dialect of the East.
The interior was a surprise. The half-barbaric richness of the porch
had disappeared. The choir had something of the northern Gothic,
but the nave was severe, and indeed rigid in character, yet with
none of the massiveness that makes the Norman version of
Romanesque so fine. In another country one would have concluded
that the interior was of earlier date than the highly decorated porch;
but in Provence this rigid manner belongs to the second period of
architecture, when the Cistercians—afraid, apparently, lest
imaginative decoration might make things too pleasant and beautiful
for sinful mortals—introduced a new style in which such irrelevancies
were sternly banished: hence even the piers of the nave are merely
square blocks of masonry. One must hope that the worshippers of
St. Trophime received commensurate spiritual benefit for the
deprivation thus imposed upon them.
The church gives one a sense of chill, of hardness; an atmosphere
from which all the inspiration and intuition of religious feeling has
been driven out, and only the intolerance and cold-blooded pieties
remain.
It is exceedingly interesting none the less, for it is so fine an
example of the emotionless Cistercian style of the twelfth century—
the twelfth century, strange to relate, when the troubadours were
singing their loudest and best, when the great castles were
overflowing with gaiety, and all the land was full of dance and song.
The cloisters belong to the earlier and richer period, the pillars being
carved with real Romanesque beasts and birds of the most
aggrieved and untamed character, with vigorous foliage and volutes,
and every variety of ornament; yet all balanced with that perfect
instinct of the mediæval carver, never afraid to let himself go, to
plunge into a profusion almost riotous, while always some sane inner
guidance builds up the richness into a beautiful whole, wherein the
quality of reserve which seemed so recklessly broken down in the
spendthrift detail reappears as by miracle to bind all into one. There
is no lack of emotion here. It informs every rampant beast and
indignant bird, every living curve of leaf and swirl of volute; but it is
like the clamour of tumultuous music, all welded together into
harmony.

In this city of the lagoons there are endless associations of Roman

days and of days far earlier, as well as tangible relics of those dim
ages that, at best, remain so profound a mystery even to the most
learned. Of the Greek colony a few marbles remain, and a few
words. The Provençal herdsmen in the mountains call their bread
arto, from the Greek αρτος. The sea also is pelagre (πελαγος), and
there are a few more as obviously or more indirectly derived.
It was to Arles, among other Provençal places, that St. Martha came
to convert the people to Christianity. With a little company of saints,
she arrived one day in the gay pagan city just when they were all
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