It remains to speak of chivalry, that
peculiar and often fantastic code of etiquette and morals which was grafted
upon feudalism in the eleventh and succeeding centuries. The practical
influence of chivalry has been exaggerated. Chivalrous ethics were in great
measure the natural product of a militarist age. Bravery and patriotism,
loyalty and truthfulness, liberality and courtesy and magnanimity - these are
qualities which the soldier, even in a semi-civilised society, discovers for
himself. The higher demands of chivalric morality were as habitually
disregarded as the fundamental precepts of the Christian faith. The chivalric
statesmen of the Middle Ages, from Godfrey of Bouillon to Edward III and the
Black Prince, appear, under the searchlight of historical criticism, not less calculating
than Renaissance despots or the disciples of Frederic the Great of Prussia.
But
something less than justice has been rendered to the chivalric ideal. The
ethics which it embodied were arbitrary and one-sided; but they represent a
genuine endeavour to construct, if only for one class, a practicable code of
conduct at a time when religion too often gloried in demanding the impossible.
Chivalry degenerated into extravagance and conventional hyperbole; but at the
worst it had the merit of investing human relationships and human occupations
with an ideal significance. In particular it gave to women a more honourable position
than they had occupied in any social system of antiquity. It rediscovered one
half of human nature. But for chivalry the Beatrice of Dante, the Laura of
Petrarch, Shakespeare's Miranda and Goethe's Marguerite, could not have been
created, much less comprehended.
