CONCLUSION

The connection between the image of the chivalrous knight and that of the courtier should now be apparent, and the broad cultural scope of these images should also be obvious. Toward the end of the Renaissance there came a literary genius who provided the best testimony to the power and pervasiveness of the courtly ideology, since his works were undoubtedly the most penetrating representation of the world of court. It is a paradox of literary history that this man, William Shakespeare, left no record of his exposure to the world that inspired him so deeply and so creatively.^[1]

The alliance of knightly and courtly mentality, with the occasional Tassoesque drift (which we observed in the Astrée ) toward the Arcadian never-never land of noble shepherds as transparent disguises of the nostalgic lower nobility, has continued in shifting forms, down to our own day. The individualistic streak of chivalrous culture survived the centralization of state authority and the shift in military techniques, including a heavier emphasis on well-armed infantry as well as the replacement of knights with trained professional officers (who often were members of the nobility of knightly rank in different dress but similar spirit).^[2] At home that individualistic streak of chivalry sustained the spirit of independence, resistance, and occasionally rebellion in the various frondes to the very threshold of the French Revolution. The same chivalric individualism contributed to the adventurous urge that drove legions of Europeans into the “errantry” of exploration and conquest in the eras of discovery and colonization. Colonization, a strictly Euro-

pean phenomenon (adopted by Japan as part of its westernization), can be regarded as an extension of the chivalric tradition. “The legacy of the cult of errantry in the age of chivalry” survived in individual “odysseys” that kept driving new adventurers abroad, in quest of gain and honor (vide, e.g., Lope de Aguirre's mas valer in Peru), in a mixture of ruthless rapacity with the noble cause of carrying “faith, civilization, and the flag of loyalty” to faraway lands and peoples (M. Keen 1984, 250). Dress changed more than the underlying spirit.^[3]

This lingering of the chivalric heritage is Maurice Keen's conclusion (1984) as well as my own. Where I part ways with him is in stressing different outcomes. Whereas Keen sees the enduring vitality of chivalry in the notion that the memory of ancestral achievement carries the high educational worth of personal example, my coupling of chivalry with courtesy and courtliness lays stress on the close connection between chivalry and a universal behavioral model to be admired and imitated by all members of society who aspired to acceptance, respect, and success. This remained operative until the great behavioral changes that have occurred in our own century.

If a detailed survey beyond 1625 were desired, for its Italian section it would have to make appropriate room for the discovery of the heroic ethic in Giambattista Vico's (1668–1744) Scienza Nuova (1725, definitive version 1744). Cultural historians have analyzed the way Italians perceived the historical role of Germanic customs, leading to Vico's doctrine of the Germanic Middle Ages as a type of heroic culture. The evidence shows a rather surprising gap in the knowledge of German literature even while historical material pertaining to German and Scandinavian lands was being evaluated from the Renaissance on by such erudite archeologists as Scipione Maffei and Ludovico A. Muratori. In this sense Maffei's Della scienza chiamata cavalleresca was typical of the Enlightenment: Germanic behavior was regarded as based on sheer force, as opposed to the southern peoples' reliance on a sense of reason and justice.^[4] Had Vico been familiar with the Germanic heroic literature from the Hildebrantslied to the Nibelungenlied, he would have found there the most fitting confirmation of his theory that Achilles' murderously resentful wrath was also in keeping with the morality of the feudal age. Vico's concomitant theory of history's cyclic courses and recourses would have found solid ground there for the assimilation of the Middle Ages to the Homeric age. For the Neapolitan philosopher was well aware of the “universal nature” of feudal forms of social organization (the “natura eterna de' feudi”). He clearly saw the underlying psycho-

logical connection between the forms of feudalism that still dominated in Naples as well as in other European regions and the ancient structures of clientele, through the medieval institutions of vassalage. He envisaged all such phenomena as cases of “ricorsi,” postulating a correlation between conscious, high-level ideas and collective mentalities on the deep, dark level of popular beliefs.^[5]

One of our themes has been the way the ideology of the aristocracy operated at court and generated a school of high manners there. The literature of French Classicism brought that refinement of manners to fruition within the court, radiating out from it through the upper layers of the surrounding society. But the ideology underlying that social paradigm had been changing, as exemplified by the tragic genre. The avowed intent of French tragedy was to restore the classical coordinates of this high genre, signally the sense of fate and of loyalty to family and country. Yet these very coordinates had been replaced by the typically courtly ones of a code of honor founded on loyalty to the king. The stage was no longer occupied by the ancient conflicts between moral duty toward religious laws or the family and the will of the lord—the conflicts that one saw at work, say, in the myth of Antigone and Orestes in opposition to Creon and Aegysthus—but by the sort of feudal conflicts that a Corneille could borrow from the medieval opposition of the knightly Cid to his king.^[6] Orestes and Electra had killed the usurper Aegysthus and their own mother, Clytemnestra, to revenge their father Agamemnon; feudal heroes like the Cid, instead, protested the sovereign's violation of their rights. To eighteenth-century audiences, however, especially in Italy, even these more “modern” standards had lost much of their meaning.^[7] Active chivalry had been pushed to a marginal position, and on the level of consciousness its days were numbered. The mockheroic and the burlesque had driven out the heroic, the martial, and the chivalrous. After trying his hand in the Henriade (1723/28), Voltaire could conclude—oblivious to the Chanson de Roland —that “les Français n'ont pas la tête épique”—and he turned to La Pucelle d'Orléans.

As centralized absolutism was taming knights and courtiers, the idea of nobility was also being weakened, sapped at the very roots of its actual or perceived functionality. Noblemen began to be seen as parasites without sufficient objective merits to support their privileges. In 1710 the polymath Scipione Maffei from Verona, himself a marquis, published a scathing attack on the ideas of chivalry and nobility in his satirical Della scienza chiamata cavalleresca.^[8] Savagely ridiculing the most esteemed authorities on duels, from Paride dal Pozzo to Girolamo

Muzio, Sebastiano Fausto da Longiano, and Camillo Baldi (see chap. 10 above), Maffei proposed that the laughable modern punctilio on knightly honor, which he traced to the Longobards' barbarous custom of private vendetta (faida ), be replaced with a newly classical sense of true human virtues, which he wanted to see grounded on a philologically correct knowledge of antiquity.^[9] This new classicism would act as a corrective to false notions of nobility and reveal where human greatness truly lay. The nobles could once again become honorable by turning to useful functions instead of vegetating as expensive parasites who spurned on principle all productive activity. Maffei was thus closing the circle of the history of courtliness, which had started out with the Ottonian thrust toward education with a social content. His attack was to be echoed in a vast literature in the Age of Reason, of which it should suffice to mention, for Italy, Giuseppe Parini's (1729–1799) spirited and radical Dialogo sopra la nobiltà (1757, published posthumously 1801), in addition to his better known satirical poem, Il giorno.^[10] The leaders of the Risorgimento, who numbered many noblemen, placed among their heroes both Parini and, even more, Vittorio Alfieri, who, not content with the clamorous antiestablishment statement of renouncing his Savoy countship, went around European courts refusing to bow before kings.

Despite such ominous forebodings of changes to come, the ethos of chivalry continued unabated on the level of daily practice. The novel/memoir by Giacomo Casanova, Il duello ovvero saggio della vita di G. C. Veneziano (1780), is a picturesque example of the power of the mental image of a noble character who asserts his right to be a leader by fighting a dangerous duel for honor's sake.^[11] When, in Warsaw in 1766, the powerful royal courtier Francis Xavier Branicki insulted Ca sanova, the protagonist felt compelled to challenge Branicki to a duel. Though both men came out of the fight badly mangled, both behaved according to the most exquisite chivalric rules before, during, and after the duel. It was a telling case of risking everything—not only one's life but condemnation by laws and authorities, since duels were illegal—for the sake of proving to oneself—hence, implicitly, to society—that the man of high status deserved his position because he possessed personal qualities that distinguished him from the populace. To Branicki, this evidence was worth risking his career as one of the most powerful men of the kingdom; to Casanova it was a way to assert himself as a worthy member of the élite.

The Romantic revolt was an attempt to transcend what had been

a court-oriented aristocratic culture. In the introductory discourse to her 1810 De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales, Madame de Staël, a forerunner of sociological criticism, aroused Napoleon's ire and the ensuing censorship of her work by upholding the exemplary value of German literature over the French partly on the ground that the latter had succumbed to the domination of an aristocratic élite, thus producing an art that “consisted essentially in the fostering of good manners.”^[12]

Yet, both the French Revolution and the Romantic movement fell far short of obliterating the aristocratic tradition and in particular chivalry, which, aside from its continuous impact on personal behavior among the nobility and others imitating its ways, enjoyed a broad cultural revival in the nineteenth century. Mark Girouard (1981) has written an elegant study of the way the two codes of chivalry and courtliness continued to affect both the public image and the personal behavior of gentlemen in Victorian and Edwardian England. His prefatory remarks point out that an equally productive study could be made for Germany and even America in the same period.^[13] In America the idea was strong enough to provoke Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, that “by no means light-hearted piece of fooling” in which he “attacked mediaeval knights as superstitious, snobbish and ignorant exploiters of the rest of society” (i–ii).^[14] The revival of chivalry that enjoyed such a fashion between the end of the eighteenth century and 1918 produced, before 1900, a model of the gentleman in which chivalry was superimposed on earlier traditions. The romantic gentleman became a chivalrous figure who was brave, honorable, frank, true to his word, loyal to country, monarch, and friends, ready to defend women, children, and the downtrodden. He was worthy of ruling the country in all honorable employments not because of wealth or social position, but because of moral superiority. He was well removed from the eighteenth-century gentleman, essentially a privileged man of landed property. Furthermore, his sexual attitudes bore the mark of a new courtly lover, pure as Galahad while absolutely devoted to his wife, whom he had married for love.

To return to our starting point in order to sum up the trajectory we have covered, we can agree with C. S. Jaeger (6) that, rather than arising from a change within the French lay nobility, “courtesy and ‘chivalric’ ideals were nurtured in the conditions of court life.” This was also N. Elias's thesis, although the two historians part ways where Elias seeks the roots of the changes in the collective needs of courtly life, whereas

Jaeger points to individuals and their ideas. My own focus has been on the special needs and feelings of a rather restricted category of people (like Duby's and Köhler's poor knights) within and around the courts—these needs having first been voiced by clerical members of the same groups. More particularly, the foregoing analysis of apparently disparate expressive forms has stressed an underlying common theme that ties together social needs, ideological attitudes, and imaginative narratives. We have seen knight/courtiers constantly operating under the creative stress of a need to justify their social function by serving the power structures at the same time that they were seeking their own personal ennoblement by rising to a privileged status of free, refined agents. The knight, etymologically a servant, became the most exalted model figure of his society. The courtier saw himself not only as a knight but also as a paragon of human perfection and the aesthetic ornament of his society, sitting on top of a decorative power structure. Words, concepts, and institutions have thus shown their close mutual ties even while they contained insoluble contradictions. The knight in Charlemagne's army and the knight/courtier at Arthur's court or, later, at the court of Urbino, were torn between their sense of individual worth, dignity, and freedom, on the one hand, and, on the other, their function as loyal servants to a lord or collective order—a state. This existential dialectical ambiguity characterizes the history of western civilization.

Of that dialectical ambiguity we have seen a growing awareness in literature, and the story of our manifold subject matter should have contributed to the discovery of an intriguing yet disturbing aspect of public life: that what succeeds is not necessarily truthfulness, righteousness, and goodness, but rather a persuasive agreeableness, grazia perhaps. It is necessary to hide one's feelings and smile in the face of adversity, be respectful and kindly toward our enemies even at the moment of confronting them, be calculating and diplomatic, even to be or to seem to be hypocrites in order to survive and perhaps, in the end, to win in the real world. The patterns of public behavior rest on an inherent duplicity, and virtues are at times indistinguishable from vices. To start from the tail end of my story, the history of the reception of the Cortegiano, including Guazzo's landmark work, shows the problematic nature of this literature, which earnestly attempted to face the question of whether the public man can be inherently honest or only superficially so. The virtues of the curialis and then of the loving chivalrous knight were similarly ambiguous. This discovery goes beyond political obser-

vation, since it invests the general question of the nature of the psyche, of society, and of values.

The historically trained reader may feel that the enduring quality of the ideological nomenclature has masked or distorted the uniqueness of each historical experience, or at best failed to recognize it and valorize it. This lies within the nature of ideologies, which, just the same, are real conditioners of human behavior. To close this summary defense of the surface continuity we have been following, I quote a pithy definition recently given by a sagacious observer of this type of mental and cultural phenomena. Human culture, says Virgil Nemoianu, “is single-minded and exclusionary. Power, growth and progress, creativity and control, economic interest and ideological vision, complex as they may be, take monolithic shapes and foster streamlined uniformities . . . . They all concentrate on the principal or the main, they all confer a decisive priority on what is central over what is marginal.” The themes we have encountered kept being reiterated despite the hidden differences because they were part of the main rather than the marginal.^[15]

Circumstantial differences may be what some historians most care about, but the episodes I have extracted from the flow of time illustrate the persistence of a characteristic phenomenon that modern man is hard put to appreciate, namely the puzzling insistence on a seemingly contradictory code of conduct that made men both worship and despise women, and left women teetering on the precarious and dangerous tightrope of flirtation and wiles. Setting different genres alongside one another has shown an enduring correspondence between woman as object of a sublime devotion, mixing sexual desire and Platonic renunciation, and the image of the woman of court as the bearer of aristocratic blood, hence necessarily chaste even while she served as a stimulus to other men's bravery and eloquence. The knight fights bravely and the courtier speaks artfully for the sake of the chaste and unattainable woman they faithfully yet hopelessly love. This predicament combines the ethic of knighthood and the ethic of courtliness even while it shows us the relationship between the conduct of courtiers and the code of the romances.^[16]

The knight, radically yet typically, always moved in a fairyland, isolated from the world of the “rustics,” the “real” world. At the same time, Tristan and Lancelot could not survive because they could not help but be disloyal to their king in the closest quarters of their private and public lives. Perhaps one way to appreciate the special contribution

of chivalry to western culture is to realize that it enabled the sharpest representation of something literature and art represent inherently by their own constant nature: the divergence between the outside world and our inner world, between objective reality and our perception of it, between the given and the desired. Art always holds up a mental image and a dream even while it exposes both its outer and inner tensions, namely the tensions between the dream and the outside reality on the one hand and, on the other, the dream's incoherence with its own operational rules.