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In this world of "Flamenca," which is in truth the same world as that of the "Romaunt of the Rose," the "Morte d'Arthur," and of the love poets of early France and Germany, conjugal morality and responsibility simply do not exist. It seems an unreal pleasure-garden, with a shadowy guardian impalpable to us gross moderns called Honour, but where, as it seems, Love only reigns.
"Flamenca" I have read in Professor Paul Meyer's beautiful edition, text and translation; "Aucassin et Nicolette," in an edition published, if I remember rightly, by Janet; and also in a very happy translation contained in Delvau's huge collection of "Romans de Chevalerie," which contains, unfortunately sometimes garbled, as many of the prose stories of the Carolingian and Amadis cycle as I, at all events, could endure to read.
Indeed, the presence of whole classes of writings, of which such things as Boccaccio's Tales, "The Wife of Bath," and Villon's "Ballades," on the one hand, and the songs of the troubadours, the poem of Gottfried, and the romance or rather novel of "Flamenca," are respectively but the most conspicuous examples, ought to prove only too clearly that the Middle Ages, for all their asceticism, were both as gross and as æsthetic in sensualism as antiquity had been before them.
The bull-fighter dresses peculiarly and the gente flamenca, imitates him so far as its means allow. A famous matador is as well paid as in England a Cabinet Minister or a music-hall artiste. This is his costume: a broad-brimmed hat with a low crown, which is something like a topper absurdly flattened down, with brims preposterously broadened out.
Noticiero! Vendors of lottery-tickets wander up and down, audaciously offering the first prize: 'Quien quiere el premio gardo? Beggars follow you with piteous tales of fasts improbably extended. But most striking is the gente flamenca, the bull-fighter, with his numerous hangers-on.
Like the "Tristram" of Gottfried von Strassburg, like all these light mediæval love lyrics, of which I have been speaking, the rhymed story of "Flamenca," a pale and simple, but perfect petalled daisy, has come up in a sort of moral and intellectual dell in the winter of the Middle Ages a dell such as you meet in hollows of even the most wind-swept southern hills, where, while all round the earth is frozen and the short grass nibbled away by the frost, may be found even at Christmas a bright sheen of budding wheat beneath the olives on the slope, a yellow haze of sun upon the grass in which the little aromatic shoots of fennel and mint and marigold pattern with greenness the sere brown, the frost-burnt; where the very leafless fruit trees have a spring-like rosy tinge against the blue sky, and the tufted little osiers flame a joyous orange against the greenness of the hill.
The songs of light love for another's wife of troubadour, trouvère, and minnesinger, seem to have been squeezed together, so that all their sweet and acrid perfume is, so to speak, sublimated, in the recently discovered early Provençal narrative poem called "Flamenca."
Set thy might and alle thy witte Wymmen and ladies for to plese, And to do thyng that may hem ese; while, for the lady, it is expressed with perfect simplicity of shamelessness by Flamenca herself to her damsels, teaching them that the woman must yield to the pleasure of her lover. God and Christ, I repeat, are absentees.
About her she has no equals; her daughters, scarcely out of the nurse's hands, are given away in marriage; and her companions, if companions they may be called, are the waiting ladies, poor gentlewomen situated between the maid of honour and the ladies' maid, like that Brangwaine whom Yseult sacrifices to her intrigue with Tristram, or those damsels whom Flamenca gives over to the squires of her lover Guillems; at best, the wife of one of her husband's subalterns, or some sister or aunt or widow kept by charity.
Is it possible that strong men have wept and fainted at a mere woman's name, like the Count of Nevers in "Flamenca," or that their mind has swooned away in months of reverie like that of Parzifal in Eschenbach's poem; that worldly wise and witty men have shipped off and died on sea for love of an unseen woman like Jaufre Rudel; or dressed in wolf's hide and lurked and fled before the huntsmen-like Peire Vidal; or mangled their face and cut off their finger, and, clothing themselves in rags more frightful than Nessus' robe, mixed in the untouchable band of lepers like Ulrich von Liechtenstein?
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