one feature, though, of this romance demands particular comment. the happenings of the melicent-episode pivot remarkably upon domnei—upon chivalric love, upon the frowendienst of the minnesingers, or upon "woman-worship," as we might bunglingly translate a word for which in english there is no precisely equivalent synonym. therefore this english version of the melicent-episode has been called domnei, at whatever price of unintelligibility.
for there is really no other word or combination of words which seems quite to sum up, or even indicate this precise attitude toward life. domnei was less a preference for one especial woman than a code of philosophy. "the complication of opinions and ideas, of affections and habits," writes charles claude fauriel,[1: histoire de la littérature provençale, p. 330 (adler's translation, new york, 1860)] "which prompted the chevalier to devote himself to the service of a lady, and by which he strove to prove to her his love and to merit hers in return, was expressed by the single word domnei."
and this, of course, is true enough. yet domnei was even more than a complication of opinions and affections and habits: it was also a malady and a religion quite incommunicably blended.
thus you will find that dante—to cite only the most readily accessible of mediaeval amorists—enlarges as to domnei in both these last-named aspects impartially. domnei suspends all his senses save that of sight, makes him turn pale, causes tremors in his left side, and sends him to bed "like a little beaten child, in tears"; throughout you have the manifestations of domnei described in terms befitting the symptoms of a physical disease: but as concerns the other aspect, dante never wearies of reiterating that it is domnei which has turned his thoughts toward god; and with terrible sincerity he beholds in beatrice de'bardi the highest illumination which divine grace may permit to humankind. "this is no woman; rather it is one of heaven's most radiant angels," he says with terrible sincerity.
with terrible sincerity, let it be repeated: for the service of domnei was never, as some would affect to interpret it, a modish and ordered affectation; the histories of peire de maënzac, of guillaume de caibestaing, of geoffrey rudel, of ulrich von liechtenstein, of the monk of pucibot, of pons de capdueilh, and even of peire vidal and guillaume de balaun, survive to prove it was a serious thing, a stark and life-disposing reality. en cor gentil domnei per mort no passa, as nicolas himself declares. the service of domnei involved, it in fact invited, anguish; it was a martyrdom whereby the lover was uplifted to saintship and the lady to little less than, if anything less than, godhead. for it was a canon of domnei, it was the very essence of domnei, that the woman one loves is providentially set between her lover's apprehension, and god, as the mobile and vital image and corporeal reminder of heaven, as a quick symbol of beauty and holiness, of purity and perfection. in her the lover views—embodied, apparent to human sense, and even accessible to human enterprise—all qualities of god which can be comprehended by merely human faculties. it is precisely as such an intermediary that melicent figures toward perion, and, in a somewhat different degree, toward ahasuerus—since ahasuerus is of necessity apart in all things from the run of humanity.
yet instances were not lacking in the service of domnei where worship of the symbol developed into a religion sufficing in itself, and became competitor with worship of what the symbol primarily represented—such instances as have their analogues in the legend of ritter tannhäuser, or in aucassin's resolve in the romance to go down into hell with "his sweet mistress whom he so much loves," or (here perhaps most perfectly exampled) in arnaud de merveil's naïve declaration that whatever portion of his heart belongs to god heaven holds in vassalage to adelaide de beziers. it is upon this darker and rebellious side of domnei, of a religion pathetically dragged dustward by the luxuriance and efflorescence of over-passionate service, that nicolas has touched in depicting demetrios.
