I sometimes see Sir Frank Dicksee’s painting La Belle Dame Sans Merci offered as a celebration of knightly love, of chivalry. A knight in shining armor, a beautiful lady on horseback, all sorts of romantic energy—this is textbook chivalry, right?
No, it is emphatically not! Dicksee’s painting is not a celebration of chivalry, nor is it a celebration at all. It is a warning.
La Belle Dame Sans Merci presents the opportunity to address an important issue: the conflation of chivalry and simping in the contemporary mind, or the suspicion that chivalry prepares a man for simping, as the Redpill Bros suggest. Simping, for those who have never been on Twitter, is what happens when a man surrenders his dignity in pursuit of a woman’s favor, volunteering himself for disgrace.
We can distinguish the two by looking more closely at Dicksee’s painting and contrasting it with a depiction of true chivalry, St. George killing the dragon.
One of the Enemy’s most effective strategies against human flourishing is to confuse our language, so that excellent and high ideals (like chivalry) get easily mistaken for less impressive concepts (like simping). You can see this again and again, as we lose the older and more powerful understanding of things like love, liberty, courage, prudence, meekness, temperance, and so on, replacing those terms with mediocre, uninspiring counterfeits. This destroys moral aspirations. Thus work must be done at restoration.
La Belle Dame Sans Merci
It becomes immediately apparent that Dicksee’s paining is a warning when one notices the title—French for the beautiful woman without mercy, which was borrowed from a poem by John Keats of a dark and disturbing nature.
“O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms / Alone and palely loitering?” Keats begins. From the very beginning, the knight is shown to be in trouble. He is “haggard” and “woe-begone” and wandering without purpose across a desolate landscape. In response to the inquiry, the knight tells a story of falling in love with a beautiful faery, only to be put into a deep sleep, from which he awakens to his current dismay. The painting depicts only the beginning of the knight’s experience, the cozy and falsely romantic part which precedes the cold wasteland.
Even without knowing a word of French or having access to a search engine, the viewer can see that all is not right in Dicksee’s painting. Just look closely. Though the trouble hasn’t yet commenced, the knight is jeopardized; he is asking for it. His exceptionally clean-shaven baby face should raise some questions, as should his decorative and form-fitting armor, which appears more useful in courtship than in battle. Tellingly it is the lady in the saddle, stooping down to bestow a kiss or simply teasing him.
The larger problem is that the knight has been turned into an effeminate ballerina. His arms flare out, suggesting that he is dancing or even floating—unmanned by his infatuation, no longer a hardy knight with self-possession but instead a ridiculous loverboy under a spell. Little good can come of this.
Dicksee’s painting is thus a warning about the wages of simping. A man compromises himself and is left to wander bleak landscapes, alone. Romantic aspiration turns to nightmare when one surrenders his dignity.
If that’s not chivalry, what is?
An excellent contrast to this is the depiction of St. George and the dragon. Love might be hinted at in this scene, but it is not primary. Conflict is. Duty is. The princess and the romantic possibilities occupy the background. This is because chivalry—true chivalry—is a martial code, not a romantic code. In the words of Leon Gautier, “Chivalry is the Christian form of the military profession: the knight is the Christian soldier.” St. George has a dragon to fight.
For those unfamiliar with the legend, it goes something like this. Many centuries ago, a dragon was terrorizing a town near Libya; more specifically, it had “envenomed” the townspeople, which suggests a larger spiritual crisis in addition to the physical threat. At first, they were able to appease the beast by feeding it sheep, but after a while human sacrifices were required, so lots were drawn to determine the unlucky victims. This came to a crisis when the king’s daughter was chosen to be the next sacrifice. But George happened upon the scene at just the right moment.
Ever the chivalrous knight, George’s eyes are fixed on the demands of the moment. He knows from the start what he must do and he is perfectly willing to defy the princess’ stated wish that he leave her to die. She orders him to depart, but George will instead do what’s right. So goes their exchange in The Golden Legend:
She said, “Go your way, fair young man, lest you perish as well.”
Then he said, “Tell me why you are weeping.”
When she saw that he insisted on knowing, she told him how she had been delivered to the dragon.
Then Saint George said, “Fair daughter, doubt not, for I shall help you in the name of Jesus Christ.”
She said, “For God’s sake, good knight, go your way, for you cannot save me.”
Just then the dragon appears and George runs a lance through its heart.
What’s crucial is that after having performed this great deed George declines the rewards of his heroism. When the grateful king offers George half of the realm (and presumably his daughter’s hand in marriage too), George instead requests that the king build a church and tend to the poor. He has other adventures to ride off to. The emphasis is unmistakable: his great deed was not done to impress the princess, or to impress anyone for that matter. The cavalier is his own man. Whereas the simp is directed by the woman, for the purpose of winning her favor, George serves God, he protects those who need him, and he kills dragons.
St. George, by the way, is the patron saint of chivalry—a code for the man who uses his strength to give others a chance at life, even at risk to his own, because he does what is right, not because he wants a reward.
Conclusion
Put another way, the simp approaches romance transactionally. He has reduced the higher things in life to petty exchanges. The knight’s behavior, by contrast, is not so easily explained by economists and psychologists and other theorists. He is a simply higher form of a man, motivated by excellent ideals, inexplicable by contemporary standards.
And, in case it’s not already clear, criticism of simping does not necessitate a dismissal of romantic love altogether. Certain hardcore Redpillers encourage a needlessly combative approach to the fairer sex, as though all women were tyrants "without mercy” like Dicksee’s faery, needing to be put in their place. This is not chivalrous. Chivalry is not about romance essentially, but it does carry implications for romance. And that is a topic for an upcoming essay.
Beautifully written. Thank you!