Studies in Mediaeval Life and Literature Part 10

This love between boy and girl was attractive to the old narrative poets. The greatest of them all touched the soul of young romance when he said of Sigune and Schionatulander, "Alas, they are still too young for such pain, yet 'tis the love of youth which lasts." Wolfram gives us pretty touches of childhood as far back as the nursery; like that of a mother and her ladies playing over the new-born baby, or of children learning to stand by taking hold of chairs, and creeping over the floor to reach them, or of Sigune's care to take her box of dolls with her when she went away. "Whoever saw this little girl thought her a glimpse of May among the dewy flowers." As she grew older, too, he describes her, a.s.suming the airs of a young lady. "When her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were rounding and her light wavy hair began to turn dark, she grew more proud and dignified, though always keeping her womanlike sweetness." The story of her love with Schionatulander has delightful stanzas; their long love-pleading dialogue is much truer than most of the minnesingers' work in its restraint and in the girl's coy sweetness. She is an earlier Dorigen as she watches for the beloved who does not come, wasting many an evening at the window gazing over the fields, or climbing to the housetop to look. But what distinguishes the author of the _t.i.turel_ above his fellow-poets is his sentiment for something more than romance.

Children are dear to him, and the wife is dearer. His idea of love consists no more in Dante's platonic mysticism than in pa.s.sion and inconstancy. Without transcendentalism its dominant tone is spiritual.

Compare an earlier lover's cry in the loveliest of French romances: "What is there in heaven for me? I will never go there without Nicolette, my sweet darling, whom I love so much. It is to h.e.l.l that fine gentlemen go and pretty, well-bred ladies who love." Compare that Parisian type of feeling with this of Wolfram: "Love between man and woman has its house on earth, and its pure guidance leads us to G.o.d and heaven. This love is everywhere save in h.e.l.l!" To such a poet we naturally turn for the deepest mediaeval note in the treatment of childhood, and we do not listen in vain.

"What a difference there is between women," Wolfram exclaims. It seems to him the way of modern womanhood to be disloyal, worldly, selfish, like men: but in the days of which he writes in his chief poem there was a lady Herzeloide, to whom after her husband's death in the wars, the sun was a cloud, the world's joy lost, night and day alike, who for heavenly riches chose earthly poverty, and leaving her estates went with her retainers far into the unreclaimed forest to bring up her infant safe from the strife and wiles of men. This only heritage of her lost lord was the boy Parzival. She trusted that by hiding him away from all knowledge of the world, she might always keep him her own. She exacted an oath from her servants that they would never let him hear of knights and knighthood, and while they cleared farming land in the heart of the woods, she cared for the child. It was a desolate place, but she was not looking for meadows and flowers; she gave no thought to wreaths, whether red or yellow.[11]

The child grew into boyhood, and was indulged in making bows and arrows.

As he played in the woods, he shot some of the birds. But after he saw them dead, he remembered how they had sung, and he cried. Every morning he went to a stream to bathe. There was nothing to trouble him, except the singing of the birds over his head: but that was so sweet that his breast grew strained with feeling; and he ran to his mother in tears.

She asked what ailed him, but "like children even now it may be," he could not tell her. But she kept the riddle in her heart, and one day she found him gazing up at the trees listening to the birds, and she saw how his breast heaved as they sang. It seemed to her that she hated them, she did not know why. She wanted to stop their singing, and bade her farm hands snare and kill them. But the birds were too quick; most of them remained and kept on singing. The boy asked his mother what harm the birds did, and if the war upon them might not cease. She kissed his lips:

"Why am I opposing highest G.o.d? Shall the birds lose their happiness because of me?"

"Nay, mother, what is G.o.d?"

"My son, He is brighter than the day; He took upon himself the likeness of man. When trouble comes upon thee, pray to him: his faithfulness upholds the world. The Devil is darkness; turn thy thoughts from him, and from unbelief."

This pa.s.sage is Wolfram's invention; the brilliant Gallic poet whose romance he followed could not have contrived it. This sympathy with nature belongs to our later era; it seems less strange to meet it in Keats, when the boy Apollo wanders out alone in the morning twilight:

"The nightingale had ceased, and a few stars Were lingering in the heavens, while the thrush Began calm-throated. Throughout all the isle There was no covert, no retired cave Unhaunted by the murmurous noise of waves.

Though scarcely heard in many a green recess, He listened and he wept, and his bright tears Went trickling down the golden bow he held."

One recalls nothing in the two centuries which Wolfram touches that equals this picture of the mother watching her child's baptism with the sad and precious gift of soul, as he stands gazing upward in his forest trance, or listening to his dawning perplexities, or teaching him his first religious lesson, or jealous of the birds, because his dreamy love for them dimly warned her of a mysterious growing soul that would not remain within her simple call. Those lines in the _Princess_ of the faith in womankind and the trust in all things high, that come easy to the son of a good mother, certainly are appropriate to Parzival, whose faith held true and simple through his whole career as the foremost knight of chivalric legend, living for a spiritual ideal, unseduced by beauty and the ways of courts from loyalty to his first wedlock:

"True to the kindred points of heaven and home."

The description of Parzival's meeting with the knights, his mistaking them in their bright armor for angels, and his eagerness to make his way to Arthur's court are narrated by Chrestien with his own excellent vivacity, and here Wolfram only follows.

The Welsh version of the story in the _Mabinogi_ of Peredur, though disappointing, contains a nave sketch of the boy's rustic attempt to imitate the knight's trappings. But for the full tenderness of his mother's parting as he goes out from home to the fierce world we must turn again to the German.[12]

She kisses him, and as he rides away "runs a few steps after him" till he has galloped out of sight and then she closes forever the eyes whose light of motherhood shone like a star above the sea, over those tumultuous years.

All through these centuries there are poems to the Virgin, especially in Latin, which manifest similar sensibility to infancy and motherhood.

One of the most pleasing belongs to England, and is written in the commixture of Latin and the modern tongue, which occasionally produces quaintly pretty effects. The glorified Christ summons his mother, by the memory of their kisses when she calmed him in sweet song, to come and be crowned. "Pulcra ut luna"--lovely as moonlight--"veni coronaberis."

But perhaps the most delicate of all such sketches comes from an unexpected source. A young lawyer in the town of Todi, whose early life had combined pleasure with sufficient study to gain the doctorate, was turned aside from a prosperous public career by the tragical loss of his bride. Matthew Arnold has given a symbolism to the story of her death in the sonnet beginning:

"That son of Italy who tried to blow 'Ere Dante came, the trump of sacred song."

The sorrow struck deep, even to the point of partial mania; the gay young man forsook the world and devoted years to seclusion and religious culture. Later in 1278, he entered the order of the Minorites, and ranks as one of their delirious enthusiasts, a mystic poet, a reckless satirist of evils in high places. His fanatic asceticism made him glory in bodily torments and the world's scorn. The nickname, Jacapone, he carried proudly, and even the harshness of Boniface VIII. could not quell his zest for martyrdom. We should scarcely look to him for sympathy with the sweet gaieties of the nursery, yet this little sketch of the Virgin's life with Christ, the child, came from the same hand that wrote the sorrows of the _Stabat Mater_.

Ah sweet, how sweet, the love within thy heart, When on thy breast the nursing infant lay: What gentle actions, sweetly loving play, Thine, with thy holy child apart.

When for a little while he sometimes slept, Thou eager to awake thy paradise, Soft, soft, so that he could not hear thee, crept, And laidest thy lips close to his eyes, Then, with the smile maternal calling, "Nay, 'Twere naughty to sleep longer, wake, I say!"

The almost incoherent repet.i.tion of the word "Love," in one of his poems, is suggestive of the man; despair for human love led to his half-crazed absorption in the divine. Very sweetly sounds this sacred meditation's echo of his recollection of the nights of his own childhood, of which he has told, when his mother, as she waked, would make a light and come and lean over his bed, till sometimes his eyes would open to see her watching him there. His father did not spare the rod for the careless boy, nor in later years did the father of his soul; but the divine motherhood of memory and of present faith bent with yearning eyes, we may be sure, over his anxious sleep in prison or in the ascetic cell.

But it was only the greatest of all these poets who could leave us the lovely image of the new-born soul that comes forth in its simplicity from the hand that loves it before its birth, playing like a young girl who weeps and smiles. Yet Dante's princ.i.p.al sensation about childhood is its helplessness, and the mother's eyes, which throw its aureole about infancy, do not seem to have held their tenderest meaning for him. He would never have gone beyond the original ten lines of

"She was a phantom of delight."

But he gives beauty to the child's frightened eyes when they meet its mother's, and certainly the vision, whether real or imagined, toward the close of the _Vita Nuova_ will please forever. This straying love is recalled to its old faithfulness by "the strong imagination" of a little figure that is habited in red, just as it had appeared to him when, perhaps in Folco's Florentine garden, the boy not quite nine fell in love with the girl of eight.

Perhaps Boccaccio's story of the falcon is too familiar to quote, though it ill.u.s.trates domestic love too well to be unmentioned. One hardly can choose the best of its touches--the bright account of the boy running over the fields with his mother's old-time lover, as he hawked, always eying with a boy's eagerness for ownership the famous falcon, the only remnant of Frederick's gay and wealthy life, which he had lost for the unsuccessful love; or the picture of the mother again and again begging the child, as he lay ill, to tell her something which he desired, so that she might obtain it for him; until his feverish imagination persuaded him that to have the wonderful falcon would make him well again; or our thought of the impoverished gentleman, whose devotion had lasted under the years of exile on his little farm, his hope departed, who when suddenly visited by his widowed love, and finding nothing in the larder, nor money, nor even anything valuable enough for a pledge to secure some entertainment for her, desperately wrung the neck of his precious bird; or the delicate hesitation and awkwardness of the lady when she came to explain her errand, and the struggle, before love for her child bent both pride and pity; or the lover's broken heart when he found that his excess of devotion had cost him his only opportunity of pleasing her. The whole may be read in a little play of Tennyson's later years, or among the _Tales of a Wayside Inn_; but it is much better to read it in the narrative of the Certaldesian. Tuscany has sent us down no tenderer story.

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FOOTNOTES:

[10] I will not quote Goethe's famous disparagement of the _Divina Commedia_, for the context indicates that it was uttered petulantly.

Still, he certainly did not care for Dante, or appreciate him, though he recognized his eminence.

[11] It may be worth noting that Wolfram subst.i.tutes for the French original's usual conventionality of a pretty watered meadow, this harder and more appropriate setting.

[12] Tennyson might suitably enough have had the marriage of Parzival and Condiuiramur in mind when writing the Prince's aspiration. "Then reign the world's great bridals chaste and calm." Such pa.s.sages in Wolfram's poem as Book iv. from line 666 and Book v. 676-682 may be commended to the critics who see nothing in mediaeval love that is pure or faithful in the modern sense of marriage.

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A MEDIaeVAL WOMAN.[13]

When Heloise was born, just after the twelfth century opened, Abelard, through whom she was to experience the deepest ecstacies and the most poignant distress, and by whose union with her life she was to become the most famous mediaeval woman, was a young man of twenty-two. He came of a rather high-bred family in Brittany; his father, though an active soldier, was interested in letters and took pains to have his children instructed in the ornaments as well as the defence of life. This eldest son, so attracted by his early lessons that he determined to sacrifice his rights of primogeniture, and to renounce the distinction of a knightly career for the life of study, while yet a youth started out as a student-tramp, one of a mult.i.tude who wandered from town to town to hear lectures on the seven topics that made up the educational curriculum of the age. Through this entire epoch, for generation after generation, this practice of student vagrancy continued: now the intellectual centre was England, now France, now Germany; sometimes two or three teachers would draw crowds to the exclusion of all other schools, sometimes the numbers would divide up among scores of masters.

Poor, rich, coa.r.s.e, refined, hard-working, indolent, quick-witted, stupid, scholars, impostors,--these student crowds were an extraordinary medley. To realize the irregularity and the strangeness of their lives we have to read such a story as Freytag quotes[14] from Thomas Platter, a wandering scholar of the fifteenth century. Such German students were perhaps of a lower grade than the young men who travelled through France three hundred years before, and the standard of scholarship may have been inferior, but their general experiences must have been similar, and most of Abelard's companions no doubt were mentally crude, arrogant, superst.i.tious; many dissipated and even brutal. Yet some were touched by the love of truth, and had vigorous minds, well trained by application.

The majority of these better men were of course hedged in by the palisades of Catholic tradition, and sought knowledge from the past, rather than from independent present thought: but there were some whose ideas were bolder, and who kept proposing questions which their teachers did not answer.

The deferential attention with which Roscellinus and William of Champeaux were listened to, was broken in upon when the handsome youth Abelard appeared at the schools of these leaders of European thought.

The strength of each was in dialectics, the topic which then held intellectual interest to the practical disregard of almost every other subject except the theology into which it played, and they took opposite sides on the absorbing problem of general terms. In the school of each, Abelard rose as a disputant; he challenged his teacher to argue with him as an equal until he triumphed in turn over the extreme Nominalist and the extreme Realist. Then he set up schools of his own, which he moved from place to place, as the intolerant hostility of his vanquished chiefs and their upholders required. His reputation steadily rose, and he drew the largest and most enthusiastic following, for the keenest young thought of the generation recognized in him its natural leader.

All independence and liberality of mind must be estimated relatively to the age concerned. From our outlook Abelard seems a narrow and constrained thinker, but to the churchman of the opening of the twelfth century he was a rationalist, a daring explorer into the sacred mysteries that must be accepted by the sealed eye of Faith. How absurd, he exclaims, to teach what you cannot give reasons for believing. So he tried to make belief a matter for intellectual comprehension; he argued where others a.s.serted, and made bold to modify current opinions which his ingenuity, often childishly simple, could not explain. He had a n.o.ble grasp upon some conceptions far beyond the reach of his antagonists. He independently developed the ethical doctrine that the value of conduct is in motive, not in act; he taught that the main worth of the incarnation was to present the model of a perfect life; that the man Christ Jesus was not a member of the Trinity; that the love of G.o.d is as freely bestowed on sinner as on saint; that G.o.d could not prevent evil, or he would have done so. For the sufferings that he endured in teaching his pupils to use not credulity but unflinching independent thought in their reflections even on theology, he deserves our grateful admiration.

When Abelard was thirty-eight years old he was at the height of his reputation. Technical and abstruse as his intellectual interests were, he appears to have been anything but a dry-as-dust. Though as a logician he had trained himself severely in precision of speech, the hesitating and half-frozen way of talking that most exact thinkers fall into, he seems to have escaped. We have a letter written about this time by a canon named Fulcus, who, dwelling on Abelard's intellectual cleverness, his power and subtlety of expression, makes special mention of the sweetness of his eloquence; _limpidissimus philosophiae fons_, he calls him, too--philosophy's very clearest fountain. He was not only an easy and agreeable speaker, he had also the advantages of an attractive presence; he was a fine-looking man, in the prime of life.

Now for about twenty years he had been a hero of the schools. The philosophic and theological leaders of the age he had overthrown and trampled on; the audiences that he had been at the first successful in drawing had steadily increased. Established in Paris without controversy, a canon of the church, in the chair of Notre-Dame, the philosophical throne of France, he lectured to the best pupils of Europe. Fulcus, in his letter to Abelard, described the geographical extent of his influence thus:

"Rome sent her sons to be taught by you, the former teacher of all arts confessing herself not so wise as you. No distance, no height of mountains, no depth of valleys, no road hard to travel or perilous with robbers, hindered scholars from hastening to you. The English students were not frightened by the tempestuous waves of the sea between; every peril was despised as soon as your name was known. The remote Britons, the Angevins, the Picts, the Gascons, the Spaniards, the people of Normandy and Flanders, the Teutons, and the Suevi, all about Paris and through France, near and remote, thirsted to be taught by you, as if they could learn nowhere else."

Such eminence had not come to him without effort. He had been a close worker, secluding himself from society. "The a.s.siduity of my application to study," he says, "prevented my a.s.sociating with refined ladies, and I had hardly any acquaintance with women outside of the church." The purity of his morals was only less famous than his intellect; he says that the notion of a.s.sociating, as many churchmen of the time did, with coa.r.s.e women was odious to him.

But suddenly over this man already middle-aged, and, as one might suppose, established in self-control mentally and physically, there came a reaction. Reputation had become an old story, his enthusiasm for philosophy seemed to dwindle when he believed himself the first philosopher of the world; no doubt, too, the intellectual pressure of his work had so worn upon him as to make a change of interests impulsive. So Abelard turned to divert himself with immoral indulgences, and at thirty-eight began the life of pa.s.sion.

Several years before this, a story had begun to circulate that another canon of Notre-Dame, Fulbert by name, had a remarkable niece. She was then only a little girl in a nunnery at Argenteuil, but year by year the accounts of her precocity grew more astonishing, and by the time she was sixteen we are told that she was talked about through the whole kingdom.

This was Heloise, and her uncle--people did not know whether he was prouder or fonder of her. He brought her back to his own house near the cathedral, and Abelard met her to find the reports of her learning had not been exaggerated, and--something more interesting--to find that she was not merely a scholar, that she was a genius. The modern accounts of this famous story that I have seen (most of them mere imitations of one or two authors who really have taken the trouble to study the originals) declare that Heloise was uncommonly beautiful, but there seems to be no authority for this. Abelard says only, "_per faciem non infirma_"--"not lowest in beauty, but in literary culture highest." Making allowance for his rhetorical contrast, we may say, without intensives, that she was attractive as well as brilliant.

We should have to read a good many indecent chronicles, and get thoroughly familiar with Don Juan prototypes, to find as cold-blooded a story of seduction as this that follows. We have it from Abelard's own pen, told in perfectly calm language, a clear-cut narrative without the slightest tremor of confession about it. He was delighted with her loveliness, her youth and innocence, her fame, and most of all with her brilliancy. He says that he believed no woman whom he might honor with his regard could resist the combination of his personal qualities and his reputation. But he wished cultivated, congenial companionship in his amours, and deliberately resolved to betray this girl of sixteen under the disguise of her teacher. At his own application, Fulbert received him as a lodger, the board to be paid by private instruction of his niece. "He gave the lamb to me, a wolf"--such is Abelard's well-chosen metaphor. She was to be taught at any hours, day or night, that her tutor found convenient. She was to obey him in everything, and if he thought fit it was enjoined upon him to discipline her with the rod. "To such an extent," Abelard remarks, "was he blinded by his trust in his niece, and by my reputation for strict morality."

Nothing could be more repulsive than the coldly deliberate wickedness of Abelard's plan, and it would be time thrown away to attempt any extenuation of it. But the crime once committed, it is a relief to find something in addition to brute pa.s.sion present in the unscrupulous seducer. The girl who had fascinated him, won from him as complete love as his nature was capable of giving. Week by week he resigned himself more and more to his happiness, he neglected the school, his lectures were only the repet.i.tion of formerly acquired views, and he wooed philosophy for no new truths. Even the perfunctory teaching that he did grew irksome to him, and his knowledge of the great sadness, groans, and lamentations that he tells arose among his followers, was powerless to break the spell. For it was only a spell: he was pre-eminently an intellectual man with superficial affections; his heart was given to philosophy, and the only permanent pa.s.sion of his life was ambition. But little as the praise is, to that little extent it is to his credit that where he had planned for himself a holiday from mental and moral severity, in which he was to enjoy relaxation selfishly and viciously at Heloise's undivided cost, he found his better nature captured by this loveliest representative of womanhood in its fullest and most exceptional combination of elements that mediaeval history has made known to us. After all, Abelard was not wholly dest.i.tute of the moral sensibilities: I believe no narrator of this story has called attention to his love for his old home in Brittany, or to his family's devotion to him and reliance on his guidance, or to the tenderness with which he mentions his mother. In spite of all the viciousness in his early and the hardness in his later treatment of Heloise, we may credit him with real affection for her, from the early days of his crime.

For a man of Abelard's force and finish of mind, such a refined companionship must have been the first of pleasures. There are traditions, not to be accepted too credulously, that Heloise was a larger scholar than her lover, and could read Hebrew and Greek--those rarest accomplishments of mediaeval learning. That at least she knew Latin literature well, we have abundant evidence, and the most positive proof that her scholarship was refined and appreciative, that she felt poetry as well as understood it. Her mind responded also to the theological interests of the thinkers of the age, she was at home in the church fathers, and learned from Abelard the main principles of his philosophical doctrine. In trying to conceive a character when information is so fragmentary as ours here, we are no doubt in some danger of making fanciful biography. Three letters of her own, several of Abelard's to her, and his autobiography, a few slight contemporary hints--these materials leave some important points of her character undeveloped. But given certain suggestions, our imaginative instincts cannot go far wrong, provided the inferences of sympathetic interpretation are held in check by judgment. These guides teach us to see in the girl Heloise an extraordinary combination of thoughtfulness and bright temper, active thinking and religious deference, accurate scholarship (after the fashion of mediaeval schools) and aesthetic sensibility, pa.s.sion and maidenly delicacy. To this last quality Abelard has borne complete testimony, and her own letters supply any evidence needed. Absorbed though her whole nature was in her love, her lover himself has let us know that her modesty had to be conquered more than once by blows.