Civilisation

I'm in the Gothic world.

The world of chivalry, courtesy and romance.

A world in which serious things were done with a sense of play.

Where even war and theology could become a sort of game.

And when architecture reached a point of extravagance

unequaled in history.

After all the great unifying convictions of the 12th century,

high Gothic art can look fantastic and luxurious;

what Marxists call "conspicuous waste".

And yet, these centuries produced

some of the greatest spirits in the whole history of man,

amongst them St Francis of Assisi and Dante.

Behind all the fantasies of Gothic imagination,

there remained, on two different planes, a sharp sense of reality.

Medieval man could see things very clearly.

But he believed that these appearances should be considered

as nothing more than symbols or tokens of an ideal order,

which was the only true reality.

The fantasy strikes us first.

A charming example is this series of tapestries

known as the "Lady With The Unicorn",

one of the last and most seductive examples of the Gothic spirit.

It is poetical, fanciful and profane.

Its ostensible subject is the four senses,

but its real subject is the power of love,

which can enlist and subdue all the forces of nature,

including these two emblems of lust and ferocity,

the unicorn and the lion.

They kneel before this embodiment of chastity,

and even hold up the corners of her tent.

These fierce beasts have become,

in the heraldic sense, her supporters.

And all round this allegorical scene, is what

the scholastic medieval philosophers used to call

"nature naturing", "natura naturans".

Birds, trees,

flowers, leaves galore.

And those rather obvious symbols of nature naturing... rabbits.

There is even nature domesticated, sitting on a cushion.

What an image of worldly happiness at its most refined,

what the French call the "douceur de vivre",

which is often confused with civilisation.

We've come a long way from the powerful convictions

that induced knights and ladies to draw carts of stone up the hill

for the building of Chartres Cathedral.

And yet, the notion of ideal love,

and the irresistible power of gentleness and beauty,

which is emblematically conveyed by the homage of these fierce beasts,

can be traced back for three centuries, and we may even

begin to look for it in the north portal of Chartres.

This portal, the north portal, was decorated about the year 1220.

It seems to have been commissioned by that formidable lady,

Blanche of Castile, the mother of St Louis.

Perhaps, for that reason, or perhaps simply because it was

dedicated to the Virgin Mary, many of the figures are of women.

And several of the stories on the arches concern

Old Testament heroines.

And at the corner is one of the first

consciously graceful women in Western art.

Only a very few years before, women were thought of as like this.

And those were the women who accompanied the Norsemen to Iceland.

Now, look at this embodiment of chastity,

lifting her mantle, raising her hand, turning her head,

with rhythms of self-conscious refinement

that were to become mannered, but here are genuinely modest.

In fact, she represents a saint called Saint Modeste.

But she might be Dante's Beatrice.

Of the two or three faculties added to the European mind

since the civilisation of Greece and Rome,

none seems to me stranger and more inexplicable

than the sentiment of ideal or courtly love.

This was entirely unknown in antiquity.

Passion, yes. Desire, yes, of course.

Steady affection, yes.

But this state of utter subjection

to the will of some almost unapproachable woman.

This belief that no sacrifice was too great,

a whole lifetime might properly be spent in paying court

to a disdainful lady,

or suffering on her behalf.

This would have seemed to the Romans, or to the Vikings,

not only absurd, but unbelievable.

And yet for hundreds of years it passed unquestioned.

It inspired a vast literature, from Chretien de Troyes to Shelley,

most of which I find completely unreadable.

And even up to 1945, we still retained

a number of chivalrous gestures. We raised our hats to ladies

and let them pass first through doors,

and in America, pushed in their seats at table.

We still subscribed to the fantasy

that they were chaste and pure beings, in whose presence

we couldn't tell certain stories or pronounce certain words.

Well, that's all over now.

But it had a long run, and there was much to be said for it.

How did it begin? The truth is that nobody knows.

Most people think that, like the pointed arch, it came from the East.

That pilgrims and Crusaders found in the Muslim world

a tradition of Persian literature, in which women

were the subject of extravagant compliment and devotion.

I don't know enough about Persian literature to say if this is true.

But I do think that the Crusades had another, less-direct influence

on the concept of courtly love.

The lady of a castle must always have had a peculiar position.

Cooped up with so many unoccupied young men,

who couldn't spend all their time fighting.

And when the lord was away for a year or two,

the lady was left in charge.

She took on his functions, and received the kind of homage

that was accepted in a feudal society.

And the wandering knight who visited her, did so

with the mixture of deference and hope

that one gets in the troubadour poems.

In support of this theory is the subject of the siege of the Castle of Love,

which appears on mirror cases and caskets

and other domestic objects of the 14th century.

I ought perhaps to add that the idea of marriage

doesn't come into the question at all.

Medieval marriages were entirely a matter of property.

Well, as everybody knows,

marriage without love means love without marriage.

And then, I suppose, one must admit

that the cult of the Virgin had something to do with it.

In this context, it sounds rather blasphemous.

But the fact remains, that one often hardly knows

if a medieval love lyric is addressed to the poet's mistress

or to the Virgin Mary.

The greatest of all writings about ideal love,

Dante's "Vita Nuova" "the New Life"

is a quasi-religious work.

And in the end, it is Beatrice who introduces Dante to paradise.

So, for all these reasons, I think one can associate

the cult of ideal love with the ravishing beauty and delicacy

that one finds in the Madonnas of the late 13th century.

Courtly love was not only the subject of lyrics,

but of long, very long, stories in prose and verse.

And this reminds me of something else that the Gothic centuries

added to the European consciousness,

that cluster of ideas and sentiments

which surrounds the words "romantic" and "romance".

One can't really say that romance was a Gothic invention.

I suppose that, as the word suggests, it was Romanesque,

and grew up in those southern districts of France

where the memories of Roman civilisation

had not been quite obliterated when they were overlaid

by the more fantastic imagery of the Saracens.

But the chivalrous romance of the Gothic time,

from Chretien de Troyes of the 13th century to Mallory in the 15th,

with their allegories and personifications,

their endless journeys, night-long vigils, their spells and mysteries,

had a special appeal to the medieval mind.

For two hundred years, the "Roman De La Rose"

was probably the most read book in Europe...

..except for Boethius and the Bible.

Well, it's not much read today, except in order to pass examinations.

But the effect of these romances on 19th century literature

was decisive, whether as a quarry

or as an imaginative escape, especially in England.

"The Eve of St Agnes", "La Belle Dame sans Merci",

"The Idylls of the King", to say nothing of that

crucial masterpiece of the late 19th century,

Wagner's "Tristan And Isolde".

One can't say that Gothic romance hasn't played a part

in our experience, if only at second-hand.

The summit of court civilisation was reached

in the late 14th century, in France,

under the patronage of the Duc de Berry.

He built a series of fabulous filigree castles, of which

the painter de Limbourg has left us an apparently accurate record.

He filled them with jewels and jewelled contraptions,

paintings and tapestries.

This warlike scene is only a tapestry.

The Duke wasn't fond of war.

The Duke's artists have given us a vivid account of his court.

Here he is giving a grand dinner to celebrate the New Year.

There are no ladies present, which is curious because the Duc

who was an amiably self-indulgent man, is reported to have said of women:

"The more the merrier, and never tell the truth."

But we can see some of his famous collection of 1500 dogs.

Which is too many even for me.

They seem to have had the run of the table.

Behind him is his chamberlain, saying to some bashful suitor,

"Approche, approche."

And his courtiers, including a cardinal,

are raising their hands in astonishment at such condescension.

The castles, pictures, tapestries have vanished with the dogs.

But a few of the treasures remain.

This gold cup is one, which seems to have been owned by the Duke,

and one of the few objects from which one can still catch

the flavour of this fanciful, luxurious world.

And this, nominally a reliquary, but actually

an extravagant, but charming, toy.

It's supposed to have held a thorn from Christ's crown at the Crucifixion.

There were many patrons of art and collectors at that time,

but the Duke was peculiar in that the arts were his whole life.

And to pay for his collections, he taxed his subjects mercilessly,

and they wouldn't have agreed with this miniature where St Peter

seem to admit him to heaven, without the usual formalities.

It was a colder world for peasants.

The manuscripts illustrate another capacity of

the human mind, which had grown up in the preceding century,