classes, to become absolute
monarchies; princes who had been mere generals became stay-at-home
diplomatists, studious of taxation and intrigue, surrounded no longer by
armed vassals, but by an essentially urban court, in constant
communication with the money-making burghers. Religion, also, instead of
being a matter of fighting with infidel invaders, turned to fantastic
sectarianism and emotional mysticism. With the sense of futility, of
disappointment, attendant on the later Crusades, came also a habit of
roaming in strange countries, of isolated adventure in search of wealth
or information, a love of the distant, the half-understood, the
equivocal; perhaps even a hankering after a mysterious compromise
between the religion of Europe and the religions of the East, such as
appears to have existed among the Templars and other Franks settled in
Asia.

There was, throughout feudal society, a sort of enervated languor, a
morbid longing for something new, now that the old had ceased to be
possible or had proved futile; after the great excitement of the
Crusades it was impossible to be either sedately idle or quietly active,
even as it is with all of us during the days of weariness and
restlessness after some long journey. To such a society the strongly
realistic Carolingian epic had ceased to appeal: the tales of the Welsh
and Breton bards, repeated by trouvere and jongleur, troubadour and
minnesinger, came as a revelation. The fatigued, disappointed, morbid,
imaginative society of the later Crusades recognized in this fairyland
epic of a long refined, long idle, nay, effete race, the realization of
their own ideal: of activity unhampered by aim or organization, of
sentiment and emotion and action quite useless and unnecessary, purely
subservient to imaginative gratification. These Arthurs, Launcelots,
Tristrams, Kays, and Gawains, fantastic phantoms, were also far more
artistically malleable than the iron Rolands, Olivers, and Renauds of
earlier days; that unknown kingdom of Britain could much more easily be
made the impossible ideal, in longing for which squeamish and lazy minds
might refuse all coarser reality. Moreover, those who listened to the
tales of chivalry were different from those who had listened to the
Carolingian stories; and, therefore, required something different. They
were courtiers, and one half of them were women. Now the Carolingian
tales, originally battle-songs, sung in camps and castles to mere
sold