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But even if this had not been so, Marie’s work had served its purpose, and of necessity passed into the crucible of human thought and expression, to be resolved into matter suited to other needs and conditions. As has been well said, “les siècles se succèdent, et chacun porte son fruit, qui n’est pas celui du siècle précédent: les livres sont les fruits des mœurs.”
Queen Marie’s acknowledgment of the Divine Message stands as the first fruits of the vision which Bahá’u’lláh had seen long before in His captivity, and had announced in His Kitáb-i-Aqdas. “How great,” He wrote, “the blessedness that awaits the King who will arise to aid My Cause in My Kingdom, who will detach himself from all else but Me!... All must glorify his name, must reverence his station, and aid him to unlock the cities with the keys of My Name, the Omnipotent Protector of all that inhabit the visible and invisible kingdoms.
Heroes had been glorified till they had almost become deified, and something more personal, more individual, was wanted. By the side of modern romance, where the most sacred and secret intricacies of human nature are, as it were, displayed under the microscope, Marie’s narrations may seem somewhat artless.
Macbeth. Marie’s readers and hearers were naturally to be found amongst castle-folk. That these were many we may conclude from the fact that the number of castles had already come to be regarded as a menace to the central government, and a royal command had gone forth for the demolition of many of them.
Marie’s lays are stories of deep meaning, which each reader must interpret for himself. Warnke. Die lais der Marie de France, p. lxiii. It is impossible to do more here than just touch upon Marie’s ideal conception of love, for to realise it fully it is necessary to read the stories themselves.
The writers of those times troubled as little about moral, as the early painters did about physical, anatomy. Still, in spite of this indifference to what has become almost a craze in our own day, Marie’s lays are so full of charming detail, deftly handled, that they give much the same sense of delight as do delicate ivories or dainty embroidery.
Many a one must have read or listened to Marie’s love idylls, and longed, and perhaps even hoped, as in the story of “Yonec,” that a fair and gentle knight, in the form of some beautiful bird, might fly in at her window and bring her some diversion from the outside world.
Of Marie’s work that has come down to us we have The Fables, already mentioned, dedicated to Count William, surnamed Longsword, and son of Henry the Second and Fair Rosamond; The Lays, dedicated to the king, Henry the Second, and doubtless read by Fair Rosamond in her retreat at Woodstock; and The Purgatory of St. Patrick, translated from the Latin at the request of an anonymous benefactor.
As the Jason will not be ready for two months I can grant you six weeks leave.” No sooner was this matter settled than Will took the coach to Fairham. Thence he drove to the village of Porchester, where Marie’s fiancé was confined. Here he put up at a little inn.
Such is the vital note struck amid the artificial and soul-enfeebling atmosphere of mediæval love-poetry! This is the note which Marie set ringing down the centuries whilst her manuscripts lay unused on library shelves. This is Marie’s gift to the world, and this it is that gives her stories immortality.
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