THE COLLEGE ARGUS.
rapacious conquerer would be satisfied with nothing less than
the possession of the town and castle of Chaumont. The required concession was at length extorted from the agonized
captive, though too late to save his life. If a lord was put to
such torments, we may judge what must have been the treatment of the mere knight., and still more that of the burgess
and the slave.
Loyalty is defined by Mr. Hallam to be " fidelity to engagements." Now for a few examples of this" fidelity." King John of
France, one of the shining specimens of loyal chevaliers, talked
in magnificent terms of justice and good faith, and testified to his
sincerity by soliciting and obtaining from the pope the pivilege
of violating all vows made and to be made, all oaths taken and
to be taken, whenever he should not find it exactly convenient
to keep such vows and oaths. Richard Coeur de Lion is often
held up as a mirror of the loyal spirit of chivalry. This
model knight is first introduced to us in the character of a
rebellious and treacherous son, then as a conniving and deceitful party leader, then as a jealous and vindictive monarch,
and finally as a fanatic and barbarous crusader. Amalric, viscount of Narbonne, who lived in the halcyon days of chivalric
loyalty, showed his contempt for the sovereign he had sworn
to defend and obey, by putting to death his own vassals in
direct defiance of the royal mandate. These are a few of the
illustrious examples of chivalric faith. There can be little
doubt that these examples were faithfully followed by the
lower order of knights.
The last feature of the chivalrous charaOter which we shall
notice, and the one which is especially dwelt upon by the
romancers, is its supposed gallantry. This characteristic of
the chivalric hero has formed the groundwork of innumerable
trashy novels. It has been portrayed by sentimental authors
as the crowning virtue of the very virtuous knight. It has
been paraded by itinerating reformers as postive proof of the
superior position of women in the middle ages. It has been
eulogized by devoted admirers of knighthood as the one redeeming feature that should move us to overlook such petty
misdemeanors as highway robbery and murder, and the other
little eccentricities to which the otherwise perfect knight was
occasionally subject. For this doubtful virtue, we are asked
to forget his insatiable avarice and detestable cruelty and
enshrine the lazy knight-errant of fiction among the true heroes
of history. Practically, we suppose that knight-errantry never
had a reality. Even Mr. Hallam admits the fictitious character
of those persons who traveled about liberating captives and
redressing wrongs. But a romance must have a hero, and a
hero must be a character to be admired. Let us examine this
noble hero a little further. We have said that gallantry was
supposed to be a prominent trait of his character. If, by
gallantry, our courtly romancers mean that sickly sentimentality that caused the hero to make vows to his lady-love that
he would wear a scarf over one eye until he had signalized
her charms by some exploit or if they have in mind that
polite ruffianism that moved the warrior to leave his place in
the ranks and challenge his rival to mortal combat, in order to
determine which the most adored their beautiful mistress if
they mean either of these things, then we admit that the
middle ages did indeed furnish abundant examples of note-
125
worthy gallantry. But if they define gallantly to be that high
regard for the fine sensibilities of woman, that true bravery
that would shield from abuse the lowest as well as the noblest
of her sex, that rare nobility of soul that would prompt a man
to suffer death rather than offer an insult to the weakest peasant woman that walks the city streets ; if they define gallantry
thus, we most emphatically deny that the chivalric age was an
age of gallantry. The women were not well treated. If a
woman of rank was worshipped as an idol, and displayed as a
trinket, before marriage, she was certain to be despised as a
drudge and beaten as a slave, after marriage. If she did not
chance to be a woman of rank, her position was little better
than that of her master's cattle. The daughter of a vassal
was as much in the power of the baron as any of his barn
stock, and was commonly treated with little more respect.
And this is the noble gallantry of the chivalric age, which
poets sing and fiction writers praise, a gallantry that displayed
itself in absurd fopperies and bloody quarrels in behalf of the
love of a few beautiful women, while it left the large and unattractive • majority to the tender mercies of licentiods lords
and their brutal hirelings.
ORIGINALITY IN HUMORISTS,
OETS are born, not made, says the old adage. This is
Pequally
true of the race of humorists. A man cannot be
very funny at the option of his will. He must be filled with
a keen sense of the ludicrous, and, in the characteristic phrase
of Josh Billings, " so bit ing over with fun that he can't keep it
to himself." Nor can humorous writing be made an object of
profitable study, with a view to the cultivation of that most
rare quality. The closest attention to the principles of humor
would hardly enable a writer to bring another Sam Weller
upon the witness stand. After all his painstaking the witness
would talk very much like other people. The difficulty is in
climinating, the circumstances which make this like a thousand
other court scenes, and in holding up prominently the features
in which it differs from all others, a task which Dickens' keen
observation of .the oddities and frailties of human nature well
qualified him to perform.
Irving's humor appears to be not so much the result of a
close observation of men and manners, as the production of a
soul overflowing with geniality and good-will. Chaucer's is a
mingling of both these. The secret of Lamb's mirth lay in
his ability to fasten upon and weave together those little odds
and ends which everybody else overlooked. Wordsworth's
smile is that of an innocent, laughing girl. He was too full of
simplicity and charity to see the crooked, ugly side of his
neighbors, but blundered awkwardly right into their affections.
And thus, if we call up before us a whole circle- of droll
faces, we shall find them not alike. No one of them can be.
called an imitation of another. Each bears the stamp of
originality, and although each may occasionally have borrowed, yet the culled matter has been so transformed by the
new cast of mind through which it has passed that it bears
the impress of a new genius.