CHAPTER X
THE IDYLLIC VISION OF LIFE
The lasting vogue of the pastoral genre towards the end of the Middle Ages implies a reaction against the ideal of courtesy. Weary of the complicated formalism of chivalrous love, the aristocratic soul renounces the overstrung pretension of heroism in love, and praises rural life as the escape from it. The new, or rather revived, bucolic ideal remains essentially an erotic one. Still there is a strain of bucolic sentiment, the inspiration of which is rather ethical than erotic. We may perhaps distinguish it from the pastoral proper by calling it the idea of the simple life, or of aurea mediocritas. It is continually merging into the other.
The negation of the chivalric ideal arises among the nobles themselves. It is in court literature that sarcastic or sentimental criticism of it springs up. The burghers, on the other hand, are always striving to imitate the forms of the noble life. Nothing could be falser than to picture the third estate in the Middle Ages as animated by class hatred, or scorning chivalry. On the contrary, the splendour of the life of the nobility dazzles and seduces them. The rich burghers take pains to adopt the forms and the tone of the nobility. Philip of Artevelde, the leader of the Flemish insurgents, whom one would like to picture as a simple, sober revolutionary, kept state like a prince’s. His going in to dinner is announced by music. His meals are served up on silver plate like that of a count of Flanders; he goes about dressed in scarlet and miniver, preceded by his unfurled pennon showing a sable scutcheon with three silver hats. The great financier, Jacques Cœur, whom one instinctively thinks of as a modern, took a lively interest, according to Jacques de Lalaing’s biographer, in the fantastic and useless projects of that anachronistic knight-errant.
Among those who freed themselves from the chivalric
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