The Unnamed Knight

Mark Twain blamed Chivalry for the American Civil War.  He thought that southern gentlemanly values had its roots in Sir Walter Scott,

“But for the Sir Walter disease, the character of the Southerner-- or Southron, according to Sir Walter`s starchier way of phrasing it-- would be wholly modern, in place of modern and medieval mixed, and the South would be fully a generation further advanced than it is. It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them. Enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creations and contributions of Sir Walter.”

Really?  Were Ivanhoe, the Waverly novels and Sir Walter Scott’s fictive conception of Chivalry responsible the socio-economic structure of the south and the religious institutions that rationalized and supported it?

In any case, there can be no doubt that there’s a strong current of anti-chivalric sentiment in English and American letters from the mid-nineteen century onwards.  The lost generation found the sentiment particularly appealing.  The irony, of course, is that American letters, even Twain and later Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Mamet never eschewed chivalry they just portrayed it (unnamed but rightly) as something that can exist independent of class, caste, ethnicity or sex.  (That’s also not new, Thomas Malory portrayed Sir Palomides as an African after all.)  And even Huck Finn as well as Bayard Sartoris were guilty of behavior that can only be called chivalrous.

I bring this up in the context of the horrific murders of the two journalists, James Foley and Steven Sotloff, at the hands of the of the self-proclaimed “Islamic State.”  The black ninja-dressed executioner was of British origin and apparently there are numerous benighted Americans among their ranks as well.  We wonder why.  Perhaps, partly, it is a grotesquely corrupted but natural urge to serve a greater good in the absence of any humane “chivalric” values that could serve to direct that will to power to more virtuous ends.

Picasso loved knights, the symbolism, the ironies, the allusions.

"Be without fear in the face of your enemies. Be brave and upright that God may love thee. Speak the truth always, even if it leads to your death. Safeguard the helpless and do no wrong. That is your oath.  Rise a knight."  - William Monahan ("Kingdom of Heaven")