Farewell to victory, To warlike glory and to knightly play. Ah, wherefore should I live to weep and sigh? Far greater honour would it be to die!
With kindly death my wretchedness shall cease, And from my torments shall I find release. Love will be unremembered in the shade, The deep unkindness of a cruel maid, Who in her pride hath slain not me alone, But all the deeds for glory I have done! [40]
At this time the lady Corisanda, who loved Florestan, chanced to visit the Poor Rock, and her damsels heard the story of Amadis, who told them that his name was Beltenebros, but that the song had been made by one Amadis, whom he had known. On her return to the British Court, Corisanda's maidens sang the song to Oriana as the composition of Amadis. And she knew that Amadis and Beltenebros were one and the same.
Now the Damsel of Denmark, who had been sent to search for Amadis, was driven by tempest to the foot of the Poor Rock. [41] Landing with Durin and an attendant, Enil, she found Amadis praying in the chapel, and when he beheld the Damsel's face he fainted away.
This extreme sensitiveness to love is characteristic of the late Middle Ages, however absurd and overdrawn it may appear to us. That Amadis fainted at the mere sight of one who had served his lady seems to us ridiculous, and that he should imprison himself upon a barren rock for the remainder of his life because she had been unkind to him is to the modern reader more than a little grotesque.
Shall I, wasting in despair, Die because a woman's fair?
But we must deal gently with the ideas of the past, as with one of those faded samplers of our great-grandmothers, which, if we handle it carelessly, is apt to fall to pieces. When we think of the manner in which Dante and Petrarch had established the worship of woman, and how the Courts of Love had completed the work they had begun, can we wonder that men bred in this creed, and regarding the worship of womankind as second to that of God alone, were apt to become disconsolate and despairing if the object of their devotion condemned or deserted them? Again, exalted and sensitive minds in all ages have been peculiarly amenable to feminine criticism, as we can see in perusing the biographies of such men as Goethe. Genius, too, which itself nearly always abundantly partakes of the nature of the feminine, is prone to adopt this ultra-reverent attitude, as the sonnets of Shakespeare and the poems of Lovelace and many another singer show. The rough, manly common sense of the average male is too often denied it, and, man and woman in itself, it must suffer the emotions of both sexes.