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 by-words.  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 ear-shot 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 tragi-comic melee wherein contended “courtesy and humanity, friendliness, hardihood, love and friendship, and murder, hate, and virtue, and sin.”

3

For the rest, since good wine needs no bush, and an inferior beverage is not likely to be bettered by arboreal adornment, I elect to piece out my exordium (however lamely) with “The Printer’s Preface.”  And it runs in this fashion: 

“Here begins the volume called and entitled the Dizain of Queens, composed and extracted from divers chronicles and other sources of information, by that extremely venerable person and worshipful man, Messire Nicolas de Caen, priest and chaplain to the right noble, glorious and mighty prince in his time, Philippe, Duke of Burgundy, of Brabant, etc., in the year of the Incarnation of our Lord God a thousand four hundred and seventy:  and imprinted by me, Colard Mansion, at Bruges, in the year of our said