It is dear to the modern mind because it is depressing; but it does not happen to be true.
Nothing emerges more clearly from a study that is truly realistic, than the curious fact that romantic people were really romantic.
It is rather the historical novels that will lead a modern man vaguely to expect to find the leader of the new knights, Godfrey de Bouillon, to have been merely a brutal baron.
The historical facts are all in favour of his having been much more like a knight of the Round Table.

In fact he was a far better man than most of the knights of the Round Table, in whose characters the fabulist, knowing that he was writing a fable, was tactful enough to introduce a larger admixture of vice.

Truth is not only stranger than fiction, but often saintlier than fiction.
For truth is real, while fiction is bound to be realistic.
Curiously enough Godfrey seems to have been heroic even in those admirable accidents which are generally and perhaps rightly regarded as the trappings of fiction.

Thus he was of heroic stature, a handsome red-bearded man of great personal strength and daring; and he was himself the first man over the wall of Jerusalem, like any boy hero in a boy's adventure story.

But he was also, the realist will be surprised to hear, a perfectly honest man, and a perfectly genuine practiser of the theoretical magnanimity of knighthood.