You are to give my titular makeshift, then, a wide interpretation; and are always to remember that in the bleak, florid age these tales commemorate this Chivalry was much the rarelier significant of any personal trait than of a worldwide code in consonance with which all estimable people lived and died. Its root was the assumption (uncontested then) that a gentleman will always serve his God, his honor and his lady without any reservation; nor did the many emanating bylaws ever deal with special cases as concerns this triple, fixed, and fundamental homage.
Such is the trinity served hereinafter. Now about lady-service, or domnei, I have written elsewhere. Elsewhere also I find it recorded that “the cornerstone of Chivalry is the idea of vicarship: for the chivalrous person is, in his own eyes at least, the child of God, and goes about this world as his Father’s representative in an alien country.”
I believe the definition holds: it certainly tends to explain the otherwise puzzling pertinacity with which the characters in these tales talk about God and act upon an assured knowledge as to Heaven’s private intentions and preferences. These people are the members of one family engrossed, as all of us are apt to be when in the society of our kin, by family matters and traditions and bywords. It is not merely that they are all large children consciously dependent in all things upon a not foolishly indulgent Father, Who keeps an interested eye upon the least of their doings, and punishes at need—not merely that they know themselves to act under surveillance and to speak within earshot of a divine eavesdropper. The point is, rather, that they know this observation to be as tender, the punishment to be as unwilling, as that which they themselves extend to their own children’s pranks and misdemeanors. The point is that to them Heaven is a place as actual and tangible as we consider Alaska or Algiers to be, and that their living is a conscious journeying toward this actual place. The point is that the Father is a real father, and not a word spelt with capital letters in the Church Service; not an abstraction, not a sort of a something vaguely describable as “the Life Force,” but a very famous kinsman, of whom one is naively proud, and whom one is on the way to visit. … The point, in brief, is that His honor and yours are inextricably blended, and are both implicated in your behavior on the journey.
We nowadays can just cloudily imagine this viewing of life as a sort of boarding-school from which one eventually goes home, with an official report as to progress and deportment: and in retaliation for being debarred from the comforts of this view, the psychoanalysts have no doubt invented for it some opprobrious explanation. At all events, this Chivalry was a pragmatic hypothesis: it “worked,” and served society for a long while, not faultlessly of course, but by creating, like all the other codes of human conduct which men have yet tried, a tragicomic melee wherein contended “courtesy and humanity, friendliness, hardihood, love and friendship, and murder, hate, and virtue, and sin.”