d but squeak. The world laughed.
Chivalry outfaced by ridicule succumbed. It had become but a great piece
of empty armor that needed but a shove to topple. In the levelling
democracy of fire-arms it fell, pierced by the first bullet, yet surviving
itself in the elements of which the gentleman is made and in whatever in
love is noble.

III

THE PARLIAMENTS OF JOY

The decalogue of the Zend-Avesta mentions many strange sins. The strangest
among them is sorrow. The Persian abhorred it. His Muhammadan victor, who
had learned from him much, learned also its avoidance. If it ever
perturbed the Moors, by the time Andalusia was theirs it had vanished. Joy
was a creed with them. Their poets made it the cardinal virtue. The
Aragonese and Provencals, whom they indoctrinated, made it the basis of
the _gaya cienca_--the gay science of love, and chivalry the parure of the
knight.

Before chivalry departed and very shortly after it appeared, that joy,
lifted into joie d'amour, glowed like a rose in the gloom of the world. It
humanized very notably. It dismissed much that was dark. It brought graces
hitherto unknown. It inspired loyalty, fealty and parage--the nobility of
noble pride--but particularly the worship of woman.

In the East, woman had also been worshipped. But not as she was in Europe
at this period. At no epoch since has she been as sovereign. Set
figuratively with the high virtues in high figurative spheres, she ruled
on earth only less fully than she reigned in heaven. The cultus,
instituted first by the troubadours, then adopted by royals, connected
consequently with pride of place, became fashionable among an aristocracy
for whose convenience the rest of humanity labored. Too elevating for the
materialism of the age that had gone and too elevated for the democracy of
the age that followed, it was comparable to a precipitate of the chemistry
of the soul projected into the heart of a life splendid and impermanent, a
form of existence impossible before, impossible since, a social order very
valiant, very courteous, to which the sense of rectitude had not come but
in which joy, unparalleled in history, really, if unequally, abounded.
Never more obvious, never either was it more obscure. It was abstruse. It
had its laws, its jurists, its tribunals and its code.

Chivalry required of the novice various proofs and preliminaries before
admitting him to knighthood. The gay science had also its requirements,
prepa