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You acted very nobly in the whole affair, Rudolph. I wish I could do things like that. As it is, of course, I shall always detest you for having been able to do it." Charteris said, thereafter: "I shall always envy you, though, Rudolph. No other man I know has ever attained the good old troubadourish ideal of domnei that love which rather abhors than otherwise the notion of possessing its object.
For there is really no other word or combination of words which seems quite to sum up, or even indicate this precise attitude toward life. Domnei was less a preference for one especial woman than a code of philosophy. And this, of course, is true enough.
Yet domnei was even more than a complication of opinions and affections and habits: it was also a malady and a religion quite incommunicably blended. Thus you will find that Dante to cite only the most readily accessible of mediaeval amorists enlarges as to domnei in both these last-named aspects impartially.
For it was a canon of domnei, it was the very essence of domnei, that the woman one loves is providentially set between her lover's apprehension, and God, as the mobile and vital image and corporeal reminder of heaven, as a quick symbol of beauty and holiness, of purity and perfection.
With terrible sincerity, let it be repeated: for the service of domnei was never, as some would affect to interpret it, a modish and ordered affectation; the histories of Peire de Maenzac, of Guillaume de Caibestaing, of Geoffrey Rudel, of Ulrich von Liechtenstein, of the Monk of Pucibot, of Pons de Capdueilh, and even of Peire Vidal and Guillaume de Balaun, survive to prove it was a serious thing, a stark and life-disposing reality.
En cor gentil domnei per mort no passa, as Nicolas himself declares. The service of domnei involved, it in fact invited, anguish; it was a martyrdom whereby the lover was uplifted to saintship and the lady to little less than, if anything less than, godhead.
En cor gentil domnei per mort no passa, as they sing in your native country.... Ey, how indomitably I lied, what pains I took, lest you should ever know of this! And now it does not seem to matter any more.... The love this man bears for you," snarled Demetrios, "is sprung of the High God whom we diversely worship. The love I bear you is human, since I, too, am only human." And Demetrios chuckled.
The happenings of the Melicent-episode pivot remarkably upon domnei upon chivalric love, upon the Frowendienst of the minnesingers, or upon "woman-worship," as we might bunglingly translate a word for which in English there is no precisely equivalent synonym. Therefore this English version of the Melicent-episode has been called Domnei, at whatever price of unintelligibility.
Of the two aspects of love which especially attract Mr. This supernal folly reaches its apogee in Domnei, in the careers of Perion and Melicent who are so uplifted by ineffable desire that their souls ceaselessly reach out to each other though obstacles large as continents intervene.
Domnei suspends all his senses save that of sight, makes him turn pale, causes tremors in his left side, and sends him to bed "like a little beaten child, in tears"; throughout you have the manifestations of domnei described in terms befitting the symptoms of a physical disease: but as concerns the other aspect, Dante never wearies of reiterating that it is domnei which has turned his thoughts toward God; and with terrible sincerity he beholds in Beatrice de'Bardi the highest illumination which Divine Grace may permit to humankind.
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