force or policy to secure his own safety and increase his retainers and possessions. A ready means was for him to marry lands and serfs in the robust person of the daughter, or widow, of some other baron. The marriage was prefaced by scant courtship; and little love was likely to ensue between the rough-handed husband and high-tempered wife. Such conditions, whether in Languedoc, Aquitaine, or Champagne, made it likely that high-blooded men and women would satisfy their amorous cravings outside the bonds of matrimony. For these reasons, among others, the Provençal and Old French literature, which was the medium of development for the sentiment of love, did not commonly concern itself with bringing lovers to the altar.
In literature, as in life, marriage is usually the goal of bliss and silence for love-song and love-story: attainment quells the fictile elements of fear and hope. Entire classes of mediaeval poetry like the aube (dawn) and the pastorelle had no thought of marriage. The former genre of Provençal and Old French, as well as Old German, poetry, is a lyric dialogue wherein the sentiments of lover and mistress become more tender with the approach of the envious dawn.[1] The latter is the song of the merry encounter of some clerk or cavalier with a mocking or complaisant shepherdess. Yet one must beware of speaking too categorically. For in mediaeval love-literature, marriage is looked forward to or excluded according to circumstances; and there are instances of romantic love where the lovers are blessed securely by the priest at the beginning of their adventures. But whether the lover look to wed his lady, or whether he have wedded her, or whether she be but his paramour, is all a thing of incident, dependent on the traditional or devised plot of the story.[2]
- ↑ See Gaston Paris in Journal des servants, 1892, pp. 161-163. Of course the English reader cannot but think of the brief secret marriage between Romeo and Juliet.
- ↑ Marriage or no marriage depends on the plot; but occasionally a certain respect for marriage is shown, as in the Eliduc of Marie de France, and of course far more strongly in Wolfram's Parzival. In Chrétien's Ivain the hero marries early in the story; and thereafter his wife acts towards him with the haughty caprice of an amie; Ivain, at her displeasure, goes mad, like an ami. The romans d'aventure afford other instances of this courtly love, sometimes illicit, sometimes looking to marriage. See Langlois, La Société française au XIIIᵉ siècle d'après dix romans d'aventure.
