Evening Republican, Volume 18, Number 273, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 November 1914 — WORLD MISSION OF CHIVALRY [ARTICLE]

WORLD MISSION OF CHIVALRY

or Much Worth If Only to Croat, th. Useful Romance of Action. Chivalry served to draw out and de-' velop those free, bold spirits whose talents could not have been evoked by the disputations of the schoolmen nor the mortifications of the religious zealots, says the Engineering Magazine. It created a romance of action to match the. saint’s moral paradise and evoked poetry and the arts to celebrate its charms. The love of the beautiful which it begot caused a hospitable reception to be given in Europe to the refinements brought from the East by the returning crusaders, which caused the first slight stirring of international trade. The enthusiasm which the manysided ideal of chivalry evoked with its galaxy of virtues, may be seen, in literature, in the unfolding of the themes of the simple Aryan folk tales, and the prose romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, into the sensuous beauty of Provencal poetry and the delicacy and pathos of Plutarch and Dante. Chivalry embellished with romance the lives of its half-legendary founders, Charlemagne, Siegfried and Arthur. It supplied the conception of virtue sung in Chaucer’s Pilgrimage, Malory's "Morte D’Arthur” and Spenser's "Faerie Queene.” In the world of action chivalry animated the crusades, dispensed justice throughout Europe tor 400 years, purified court life and made much of the warfare of the middle ages peculiarly humane and noble. Its enthusiasm burned into brilliancy in such characters as Richardand Blondel, the Black Priu;e and his father, Tanered, Godfrey of Bouillon, Gaston de Foix, Bayard and Warwick, and in a thousand forgotten commanders of the Templars, the Knights of St John and the Teutonic Knights.