"T. H. White - The Once and Future King" - читать интересную книгу автора (White T.H)

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ways, for practice. Louis the Eleventh, another of the fictional kings, had kept obnoxious bishops in
rather expensive cages. The Duke Robert had been surnamed "the Magnificent" by his noblesтАФbut "the
Devil" by his parishioners. And all the while, before Arthur came, the common peopleтАФof whom
fourteen were eaten by wolves out of one town in a single week, of whom one third were to die in the
Black Death, of whom the corpses had been packed in pits "like bacon," for whom the refuges at
evening had often been forests and marshes and caves, for whom, in seventy years, there had been
known to be forty-eight of famineтАФthese people had looked up at the feudal nobility who were termed
the "lords of sky and earth," andтАФthemselves battered by bishops who, because they were not allowed
to shed blood, went for them with iron clubsтАФhad cried aloud that Christ and his saints were sleeping.
"Pourquoi," the poor wretches had sung in their misery:
"Pourquoi nous laisser faire dommage?
Nous sommes hommes comme Us sont."
Such had been the surprisingly modern civilization which Arthur had inherited. But it was not the
civilization over which the lovers looked out. Now, safe in the apple-green sunset before them, there
stretched the fabled Merry England of the Middle Ages, when they were not so dark. Lancelot and
Guenever were gazing on the Age of Individuals.
What an amazing time the age of chivalry was! Everybody was essentially himselfтАФwas riotously busy
fulfilling the vagaries of human nature. There was such a gusto about the landscape which stretched
before their window, such a riot of unexpected people and things, that you hardly knew how to begin
describing it.
The Dark and Middle Ages! The Nineteenth Century had an impudent way with its labels. For there,
under the window in Arthur's Gramarye, the sun's rays flamed from a hundred jewels of stained glass in
monasteries and convents, or danced from the pinnacles of cathedrals and castles, which their builders
had actually loved. Architecture, in those dark ages of theirs, was such a light-giving passion of the heart
that men gave love-names to their fortresses. Lancelot's Joyous Gard was not a singularity in an age
which has left us Beaute, Plaisance, or MalvoisinтАФthe bad neighbour to its enemiesтАФan age in which
even an oaf like the imaginary Richard Coeur de Lion, who suffered from boils, could call his castle
"Gaillard," and speak of it as "my beautiful one-year-old daughter." Even that legendary scoundrel
William the Conqueror had a second nickname: "the Great Builder." Think of the glass itself, with its
five grand colours stained right through. It was rougher than ours, thicker, fitted in smaller pieces. They
loved it with the same fury as they gave to their castles, and Villars de Honnecourt, struck by a
particularly beautiful specimen, stopped to draw it on his journeys, with the explanation that "I was on

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my way to obey a call to the land of Hungary when I drew this window because it pleased me best of all
windows." Picture the insides of those ancient churchesтАФ not the grey and gutted interiors to which we
are accustomed тАФbut insides blazing with colour, plastered with frescoes in which all the figures stood
on tip-toe, fluttering with tapestry or with brocades from Bagdad. Picture also the interiors of such
castles as were visible from Guenever's window. These were no longer the grim keeps of Arthur's
accession. Now they were filling with furniture made by the joiner, instead of the carpenter; now their
walls rippled doorless with the flexible gaieties of Arras, tapestries like that of the Jousts of St. Denis
which, although covering more than four hundred square yards, had been woven in less than three years,
such was the ardour of its creation. If you look closely in a ruined castle even nowadays, you can
sometimes find the hooks from which these flashing tapestries were hung. Remember, too, the