Marie De France: Psychologist of Courtly Love

Abstract

If One wishes to bother, one may divide mankind into two classes: those who judge their fellows by predetermined laws of conduct, and those who merely observe their fellows for what they are. Bunyan and Tolstoy are typical of the former class; Shakspere and Jane Austen of the second.Marie de France was a sort of mediaeval Jane Austen. Both women knew their set, they knew their sex, and they knew little more of life. But that little they knew well, and of that little they wrote well, for both had the knack of story-telling. Both steered a sure course between sentimentality and cynicism; their writings reveal a general deftness, a perfect tact—“restraint,” as it is sometimes called—and a nice analysis of motives, from which spring plots that fit the characters as inseparably and yet as flexibly as the skin fits the hand. Jane is dryer, and more steadily ironical, though Chaitivel indicates that Marie could also be ironical; indeed, we might label their chief spiritual difference by saying that Jane is British through and through, but Marie is French.