Such is the trinity served hereinafter. Now about lady-service, or_domnei_, I have written elsewhere. Elsewhere also I find it recordedthat "the cornerstone of Chivalry is the idea of vicarship: for thechivalrous person is, in his own eyes at least, the child of God, andgoes about this world as his Father's representative in an aliencountry."
I believe the definition holds: it certainly tends to explain theotherwise puzzling pertinacity with which the characters in these talestalk about God and act upon an assured knowledge as to Heaven's privateintentions and preferences. These people are the members of one familyengrossed, as all of us are apt to be when in the society of our kin, byfamily matters and traditions and by-words. It is not merely that theyare all large children consciously dependent in all things upon a notfoolishly indulgent Father, Who keeps an interested eye upon the leastof their doings, and punishes at need,--not merely that they knowthemselves to act under surveillance and to speak within ear-shot of adivine eavesdropper. The point is, rather, that they know thisobservation to be as tender, the punishment to be as unwilling, as thatwhich they themselves extend to their own children's pranks andmisdemeanors. The point is that to them Heaven is a place as actual andtangible as we consider Alaska or Algiers to be, and that their livingis a conscious journeying toward this actual place. The point is thatthe Father is a real father, and not a word spelt with capital lettersin the Church Service; not an abstraction, not a sort of a somethingvaguely describable as "the Life Force," but a very famous kinsman, ofwhom one is naively proud, and whom one is on the way to visit.... Thepoint, in brief, is that His honor and yours are inextricably blended,and are both implicated in your behavior on the journey.
We nowadays can just cloudily imagine this viewing of life as a sort ofboarding-school from which one eventually goes home, with an officialreport as to progress and deportment: and in retaliation for beingdebarred from the comforts of this view, the psychoanalysts have nodoubt invented for it some opprobrious explanation. At all events, thisChivalry was a pragmatic hypothesis: it "worked," and served society fora long while, not faultlessly of course, but by creating, like all theother codes of human conduct which men have yet tried, a tragi-comicmelee wherein contended "courtesy and humanity, friendliness, hardihood,love and friendship, and murder, hate, and virtue, and sin."
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For the rest, since good wine needs no bush, and an inferior beverage isnot likely to be bettered by arboreal adornment, I elect to piece outmy exordium (however lamely) with "The Printer's Preface." And it runsin this fashion:
"Here begins the volume called and entitled the Dizain of Queens,composed and extracted from divers chronicles and other sources ofinformation, by that extremely venerable person and worshipful man,Messire Nicolas de Caen, priest and chaplain to the right noble,glorious and mighty prince in his time, Philippe, Duke of Burgundy, ofBrabant, etc., in the year of the Incarnation of our Lord God a thousandfour hundred and seventy: and imprinted by me, Colard Mansion, atBruges, in the year of our said Lord God a thousand four hundred andseventy-one; at the commandment of the right high, mighty and virtuousPrincess, my redoubted Lady, Isabella of Portugal, by the grace of GodDuchess of Burgundy and Lotharingia, of Brabant and Limbourg, ofLuxembourg and of Gueldres, Countess of Flanders, of Artois, and ofBurgundy, Palatine of Hainault, of Holland, of Zealand and of Namur,Marquesse of the Holy Empire, and Lady of Frisia, of Salins and ofMechlin; whom I beseech Almighty God less to increase than to continuein her virtuous disposition in this world, and after our poor fleetexistence to receive eternally. Amen."