It might perhaps be shown how in more important artistic efforts than fashions of dress this age displayed its aversion from simplicity and moderation. At all events, the love of the florid and overloaded declares itself in what we know concerning the social life of the nobility, as, for instance, we find that life reflected in the pages of Froissart, whose counts and lords seem neither to clothe themselves nor to feed themselves, nor to talk, pray, or swear like ordinary mortals. The "Vows of the Heron," a poem of the earlier part of King Edward III's reign, contains a choice collection of strenuous knightly oaths; and in a humbler way the rest of the population very naturally imitated the parlance of their rulers, and in the words of the "Parson's Tale," "dismembered Christ by soul, heart, bones, and body."But there is one very much more important feature to be noticed in the social life of the nobility, for whom Chaucer's poetry must have largely replaced the French verse in which they had formerly delighted. The relation between knight and lady plays a great part in the history as well as in the literature of the later Plantagenet period; and incontestably its conceptions of this relation still retained much of the pure sentiment belonging to the best and most fervent times of Christian chivalry. The highest religious expression which has ever been given to man's sense of woman's mission, as his life's comfort and crown, was still a universally dominant belief. To the Blessed Virgin, King Edward III dedicated his principal religious foundation; and Chaucer, to whatever extent his opinions or sentiments may have been in accordance with ideas of ecclesiastical reform, displays a pious devotion towards the foremost Saint of the Church. The lyric entitled the "Praise of Women," in which she is enthusiastically recognized as the representative of the whole of her sex, is generally rejected as not Chaucer's; but the elaborate "Orison to the Holy Virgin," beginning Mother of God, and Virgin undefiled, seems to be correctly described as "Oratio Gallfridi Chaucer"; and in "Chaucers A. B. C., Called La Priere de Notre Dame," a translation by him from a French original, we have a long address to the Blessed Virgin in twenty-three stanzas, each of which begins with one of the letters of the alphabet arranged in proper succession. Nor, apart from this religious sentiment, had men yet altogether lost sight of the ideal of true knightly love, destined though this ideal was to be obscured in the course of time, until at last the "Mort d'Arthure" was the favourite literary nourishment of the minions and mistresses of Edward IV's degenerate days. In his "Book of the Duchess" Chaucer has left us a picture of true knightly love, together with one of true maiden purity. The lady celebrated in this poem was loth, merely for the sake of coquetting with their exploits, to send her knights upon errands of chivalry--into Walachy, To Prussia, and to Tartary, To Alexandria or Turkey.
And doubtless there was many a gentle knight or squire to whom might have been applied the description given by the heroine of Chaucer's "Troilus and Cressid" of her lover, and of that which attracted her in him:--For trust ye well that your estate royal, Nor vain delight, nor only worthiness Of you in war or tourney martial, Nor pomp, array, nobility, riches, Of these none made me rue on your distress, BUT MORAL VIRTUE, GROUNDED UPON TRUTH, THAT WAS THE CAUSE I FIRST HAD ON YOU RUTH.
And gentle heart, and manhood that ye had, And that ye had (as methought) in despite Everything that tended unto bad, As rudeness, and as popular appetite, And that your reason bridled your delight, 'Twas these did make 'bove every creature, That I was yours, and shall while I may 'dure.
And if true affection under the law still secured the sympathy of the better-balanced part of society, so the vice of those who made war upon female virtue, or the insolence of those who falsely boasted of their conquests, still incurred its resentment. Among the companies which in the "House of Fame" sought the favour of its mistress, Chaucer vigorously satirises the would-be-lady-killers, who were content with the REPUTATIONof accomplished seducers; and in "Troilus and Cressid" a shrewd observer exclaims with the utmost vivacity against Such sort of folk,--what shall I clepe them? what?
That vaunt themselves of women, and by name, That yet to them ne'er promised this or that, Nor knew them more, in sooth, than mine old hat.
The same easy but sagacious philosopher (Pandarus) observes, that the harm which is in this world springs as often from folly as from malice. But a deeper feeling animates the lament of the "good Alceste," in the Prologue to the "Legend of Good Women," that among men the betrayal of women is now "held a game." So indisputably it was already often esteemed, in too close an accordance with examples set in the highest places in the land.
