This circumstance constitutes the beauty of the ages of chivalry, and gives them a superiority over the heroic as well as over modern times.

If you undertake to delineate the early ages of Greece, you will be as much shocked by their rudeness of character as you will be pleased with the simplicity of their manners. Polytheism furnishes no means of correcting barbarous nature and supplying the deficiencies of the primitive virtues.

If, on the other hand, you wish to sketch a modern age, you will be obliged to banish all truth from your work, and to adopt both the beautiful moral ideal and the beautiful physical ideal. Too remote from nature and from religion in every respect, you could not faithfully depict the interior of our families, and still less the secret of our hearts.

Chivalry alone presents the charming mixture of truth and fiction.

In the first place, you may exhibit a picture of manners accurately copied from nature. An ancient castle, a spacious hall, a blazing fire, jousts, tournaments, hunting parties, the sound of the horn, and the clangor of arms, have nothing that offends against taste, nothing that ought to be either selected or concealed.

In the next place, the Christian poet, more fortunate than Homer, is not compelled to tarnish his picture by introducing into it the barbarous or the natural man; Christianity offers him the perfect hero.

Thus, while we see Tasso merged in nature for the description of physical objects, he rises above nature for the perfection of those in the moral order.

Now, nature and the ideal are the two great sources of all poetic interest-the pathetic and the marvellous.

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CHAPTER XII.

THE WARRIOR, (CONTINUED.)

WE shall now show that the virtues of the knights which exalt their character to the beautiful ideal are truly Christian virtues.

If they were but mere moral virtues, invented by the poet, they would have neither action nor elasticity. We have an instance of this kind in Æneas, whom Virgil has made a philosophic hero.

The purely moral virtues are essentially frigid; they imply not something added to the soul, but something retrenched from it; it is the absence of vice rather than the presence of virtue.1

The religious virtues have wings; they are highly impassioned. Not content with abstaining from evil, they are anxious to do good. They possess the activity of love; they reside in a superior. region, the objects in which appear somewhat magnified. Such were the virtues of chivalry.

Faith or fidelity was the first virtue of the knights; faith is, in like manner, the first virtue of Christianity.

The knight never told a lie. Here is the Christian.

The knight was poor, and the most disinterested of men. Here you see the disciple of the gospel.

The knight travelled through the world, assisting the widow and the orphan. Here you behold the charity of Jesus Christ.

The knight possessed sensibility and delicacy. What could have given him these amiable qualities but a humane religion which invariably inculcates respect for the weak? With what benignity does Christ himself address the women in the gospel!

Agamemnon brutally declares that he loves Briseïs as dearly as his wife, because she is not less skilful in ornamental works. Such is not the language of a knight.

Finally, Christianity has produced that valor of modern heroes which is so far superior to that of the heroes of antiquity.

1 The distinction between moral and religious virtues is not exact. The author would have written more correctly on this point by using the word natural instead of moral. T.

The true religion teaches us that the merit of a man should be measured not by bodily strength, but by greatness of soul. Hence the weakest of the knights never quakes in presence of an enemy; and, though certain to meet death, he has not even a thought of flight.

This exalted valor is become so common that the lowest of our private soldiers is more courageous than an Ajax, who fled before Hector, who in his turn ran away from Achilles. As to the clemency of the Christian knight toward the vanquished, who can deny that it springs from Christianity?

Modern poets have borrowed a multitude of new characters from the chivalrous age. In tragedy, it will be sufficient to mention Tancred, Nemours, Couci, and that Nerestan who brings the ransom of his brethren in arms at a moment when all hope of his return has fled, and surrenders himself a prisoner because he cannot pay the sum required for his own redemption. How beautiful these Christian morals! Let it not be said that this is a purely poetical invention; there are a hundred instances of Christians who have resigned themselves into the hands of infidels, either to deliver other Christians, or because they were unable to raise the sum which they had promised.

Everybody knows how favorable chivalry is to the epic poem. How admirable are all the knights of the Jerusalem Delivered! Rinaldo so brilliant, Tancred so generous, the venerable Raymond de Toulouse, always dejected and always cheered again! You are among them beneath the walls of Solyma; you hear the young Bouillon, speaking of Armida, exclaim, "What will they say at the court of France when it is known that we have refused our aid to beauty?" To be convinced at once of the immense difference between Homer's heroes and those of Tasso, cast your eyes upon Godfrey's camp and the ramparts of Jerusalem. Here are the knights, there the heroes of antiquity. Solyman himself appears to advantage only because the poet has given him some traits of the generosity of the chevalier; so that even the principal hero of the infidels borrows his majesty from Christianity.

But in Godfrey we admire the perfection of the heroic character. When Æneas would escape the seduction of a female, he fixed his eyes on the ground, immota tenebat lumina; he concealed his agitation, and gave vague replies: "O queen, I deny

not thy favors; I shall ever remember Elisa." Not thus does the Christian chieftain listen to the addresses of Armida. He resists, for too well is he acquainted with the frail allurements of this world; he pursues his flight toward heaven, like the glutted bird, heedless of the specious food which invites him.

Qual saturo augel, che non si cali,

Ove il cibo mostrando, altri l'invita.

In combat, in deliberation, in appeasing a sedition, in every situation, Bouillon is great, is august. Ulysses strikes Thersites with his sceptre, and stops the Greeks when running to their ships. This is natural and picturesque. But behold Godfrey singly showing himself to an enraged army, which accuses him of having caused the assassination of a hero! What noble and impressive beauty in the prayer of this captain, so proudly conscious of his virtue! and how this prayer afterward heightens the intrepidity of the warrior, who, unarmed and bareheaded, meets a mutinous soldiery!

In battle, a sacred and majestic valor, unknown to the warriors of Homer and Virgil, animates the Christian hero. Æneas, protected by his divine armor, and standing on the stern of his galley as it approaches the Rutulian shore, is in a fine epic attitude; Agamemnon, like the thundering Jupiter, displays an image replete with grandeur; but in the last canto of the Jerusalem, Godfrey is described in a manner not inferior either to the progenitor of the Cæsars or to the leader of the Atrides.

The sun has just risen, and the armies have taken their position. The banners wave in the wind, the plumes float on the helmets; the rich caparisons of the horses, and the steel and gold armor of the knights, glisten in the first rays of the orb of day. Mounted on a swift charger, Godfrey rides through the ranks of his army; he harangues his followers, and his address. is a model of military eloquence. A glory surrounds his head; his face beams with unusual splendor; the angel of victory covers him with his wings. Profound silence ensues. The prostrate legions adore that Almighty who caused the great Goliah to fall by the hand of a youthful shepherd. The trumpets suddenly sound the charge; the Christian soldiers rise, and, invigorated by the strength of the God of Hosts, rush, undaunted, and confident of victory, upon the hostile battalions of the Saracens.

BOOK III.

OF POETRY CONSIDERED IN ITS RELATIONS TO MANTHE SUBJECT CONTINUED.

The Passions.

CHAPTER I.

CHRISTIANITY HAS CHANGED THE RELATIONS OF THE PASSIONS, BY CHANGING THE BASIS OF VICE AND VIRTUE.

FROM the examination of characters, we come to that of the passions. It is obvious that in treating of the former it was impossible to avoid touching a little upon the latter, but here we purpose to enter more largely into the subject. If there existed a religion whose essential quality it was to oppose a barrier to the passions of man, it would of necessity increase the operation of those passions in the drama and the epopee; it would, from its very nature, be more favorable to the delineation of sentiment than any other religious institution, which, unacquainted with the errors of the heart, would act upon us only by means of external objects. Now, here lies the great advantage which Christianity possesses over the religions of antiquity: it is a heavenly wind which fills the sails of virtue and multiplies the storms of conscience in opposition to vice.

Since the proclamation of the gospel, the foundations of morals have changed among men, at least among Christians. Among the ancients, for example, humility was considered as meanness and pride as magnanimity; among Christians, on the contrary, pride is the first of vices and humility the chief of virtues. This single change of principles displays human nature in a new light, and we cannot help discovering in the passions shades that were not perceived in them by the ancients.

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