Studies in Mediaeval Life and Literature Part 12

Her letters evidently moved the monk, for his replies were full of good advice, and under the surface gave some indications of tender regard.

But the affection that we find is colorless and formal. No word of a husband's gentleness, nor warmth of phrase, not a hint that he cherishes happy memories of the old days of their union. They are the letters of an old man, absorbed in himself, worn by the world, who has no capacity for anything deeper than kind feeling. He calls her his sister, once dear in the world, now dearer in Christ, begs her prayers for him living and dead, and entreats that whenever he may die she will have his body carried to her abbey, that the constant sight of his grave may move her and her spiritual daughters to pray for his salvation. He gulps down the _Lachrima Christi_ of her exquisite love as if it were the small beer of pietistic commonplace, and then looks disappointed to find that it was not. For he ignores the soul of her letters, and composes complacent treatises of twelfth-century ecclesiastical discipline designed to subject her to a mechanical and lifeless asceticism.

Heloise in answer reproaches him for his talk of death, like a brave heart bidding him not by antic.i.p.ation suffer before his time. The knowledge of her husband's unhappiness is a renewed affliction, and she owns that there is nothing but sorrow in her life. Like a daring t.i.taness, she exclaims against G.o.d's administration of his world:

"While we lived in sin, he indulged us; when we married, he forced us to separate. Let his other creatures rejoice and count themselves safe from the inclement clemency of the G.o.d whom I almost dare to call cruel to me in every way. They are safe, for upon me he has used up all the weapons of his wrath, so that he has none with which to rage at others; nor, if any remained, could he find a place in me wherein to strike them."

After sixteen years' silence, this woman has broken into speech, and unmasked confessions of her inner spirit will no longer be restrained.

She goes on as if carried by cyclone winds; she tells her far-off lover what few nuns under terror of eternal death can ever have brought themselves to confide to their confessors in scarcely audible whisper.

She calls up the scenes of their union; she confesses that visions of that life are with her constantly: she bemoans the thoughts which "haunt me sometimes, even at the holy ma.s.s." She was no calm northern woman; she had nothing of the temperament that Shakespeare compared to an icicle

"That's curdied by the frost from purest snow, And hangs on Dian's temple";

she was made to walk with love, under summer moonlight,--no sister of Percivale, to forget thwarted desire in prayer beneath the frosty stars of winter.

"Help me," cries this victim of a gloomy religion, "for I do not find how by penance to appease G.o.d, whom I still accuse of the greatest cruelty. It is easy to confess and to torture the body; it is hard to tear the soul from its desires. My mind keeps the same wish for sin; so sweet was our happiness that I cannot be sorry for it. Most wretched life, if I have endured so much in vain, destined to have no recompense hereafter."

Thus Heloise the woman and Heloise the abbess fight out the old problem whether the training of life is by the use of its gifts, or by the rejection of them; shall we play the full organ, or only the harsh reed stops? The church taught her to condemn what nature taught her to justify. The religious authority of all the dark ages confronted this woman's instincts of life, and--to her honor--it could not quell them.

Yet conceive her wretchedness and the anguish of her mental struggle, living as she did in the middle of Catholic mediaevalism. When, after a scanty rest, she left her cell at midnight, this artificial conscience attended her to the long chapel service that followed, pointed at the austere pages over which she bent in the study when the service was over, kept calling her hypocrite as she chided and instructed the nuns whom she is said to have ruled so wisely, s.n.a.t.c.hed food and wine from her hungry lips, with fast, pitiless lashing wielded the whip of penance, haunted her sleep with its stern face. Yet the pleasures of time were still honorable to her; the world _was_ good; her love _had_ been beautiful; if her conscience prayed forgiveness for it, her heart sang, because she had known it.

To hear this bewildered voice crying to Abelard for his prayers because in spite of the world's praise of her virtue she thinks herself a hypocrite,--Oh, my only one, pray for me, for I cannot be sorry that we loved--to hear this makes one glad that the time has pa.s.sed for identifying the devil with the world's laughter, and G.o.d with its sobbing.

She lived on as abbess of the Paraclete for twenty-one years after she buried her husband. We cannot believe that as one set of feelings cooled with age, her spiritual emotions grew more impulsive. In the twenty-eight years which followed her last letter to Abelard, she no doubt more and more mechanically went through the life of monastic duty, her intellectual accord with the church leading her to an increasingly calm performance of routine piety, her heart more and more silent--but never dead. We fancy its main utterance an antic.i.p.ation of that cry of Clough's--"Submit, submit." Thus kindling with no spiritual ardor--(she once confessed that her religious ambition did not rise so high as to wish a crown of victory, or to have G.o.d's strength made perfect in her weakness), she lived out her faithful and successful life as abbess of the Paraclete, comforted--we may hope--by a continuance of the intellectual consolations of her youth, and honored, as we know, by church and world. If imaginary biography is ever safe we may employ it here, and fancy that when she came to die she repeated what she had said years before, that she should be quite content to be given just a corner in heaven. I think as she lay waiting to be received there, she dreamed of looking up from it, not at the ineffable glory, but at one human face stationed highest among the masters in divine philosophy. Highest among the masters! Less than a hundred and fifty years later, the great poem of mediaevalism forgot to give Abelard a place even among the penitents of purgatory, and to-day except by special students he is remembered only as Heloise's unworthy lover.

[Decoration]

FOOTNOTES:

[13] _Petri Abaelardi Historia Calamitatum. Petri Abaelardi et Heloissae Epistolae._

[14] _Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit_, iii., 14-34.

[Decoration]

APPENDIX.

At the suggestion of the publishers the following brief notices of some of the works and authors mentioned in these essays are added for convenience of reference.

aeTHIOPICA, the oldest and most famous of the Greek romances. It narrates the loves of Theagenes and Charicleia, and was written in his youth by Heliodorus of Emesa, who flourished about the end of the fourth century, and died as Bishop of Tricca in Thessaly.

ALEXANDER, or as he is termed in some MSS. the Wild Alexander. A South-German poet of the thirteenth century. Of his life scarcely anything is known.

CHRESTIEN DE TROYES, a French trouvere, who flourished in the second half of the twelfth century. He may be regarded as the popularizer in the French form of the cycle of tales that centre about the Round Table.

The most important of his poems is the one bearing the t.i.tle, _Perceval le Gallois_ or _Li Contes del Graal_.

COMTE DE CHAMPAGNE.--See Thibaut.

ARNAUD DANIEL, a Provencal poet, who died about 1189. He was distinguished for the complicated character of his versification, and in particular was the inventor of the verse called the _sestine_. He lived for some time at the court of Richard I. of England. Dante in the twenty-sixth canto of the _Purgatory_ puts him at the head of all the Provencal poets. He was also highly praised by Petrarch.

DAPHNIS AND CHLOE, a Greek pastoral romance, the prototype of all the pastoral romances which have been written in various languages. Its composition is usually ascribed to a certain Longus, a Greek sophist, who flourished about the beginning of the fifth century.

FREIDANK, the composer of a Middle High German didactic poem, which belongs to the first half of the thirteenth century. The name has been considered by some to be merely allegorical. His work, which was ent.i.tled _Bescheidenheit_, consists of over four thousand verses and discusses religious, political and social questions. It was an exceedingly popular work during the Middle Ages.

GACES BRULLES, a French trouvere of the early part of the thirteenth century. He was born in Champagne, but spent a portion of his life in Brittany. About seventy of his _chansons_ are extant.

GOTTFRIED VON STRa.s.sBURG, a German poet who flourished at the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century. His great work was the epic ent.i.tled _Tristan und Isolde_, continued by others after his death. This took place somewhere between 1210 and 1220. Gottfried wrote also many lyric poems.

GUILLAUME DE BALAUN (or BALAZUN), a Provencal poet of the twelfth century. He was the lover of the lady of Joviac, in the Gevaudan.

Alienation having sprung up between them upon account of his a.s.sumed or real indifference, his mistress would not restore him to favor unless he should agree to extract the nail of the longest finger of his right hand, and should come and present it to her with a poem composed expressly for the occasion. The condition was fulfilled.

JOHANN HADLAUB, a German poet, who flourished at the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century. His life was spent mainly in Zurich. His compositions were princ.i.p.ally love-songs and popular songs dealing with the pleasures of autumn and harvest. A statue was erected to him in Zurich in 1885.

HARTMANN VON AUE, a Middle High German, belonging by birth to a n.o.ble Swabian family, was born about 1170, and died between 1210 and 1220. He wrote _Erec and Enide_, basing it upon the French poem with the same t.i.tle of Chrestien de Troyes. Another poem of his belonging also to the Arthurian cycle is _Iwein_. The most popular of his works with modern students is _Der arme Heinrich_. The details of its story have been made known to English readers by Longfellow's _Golden Legend_, which is founded upon it. Another work of his is ent.i.tled _Gregorius vom Stein_.

HEINRICH VON MORUNGEN, a German minnesinger, a knight of Thuringia, who flourished at the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century. His last years were spent at the court of Meissen. He wrote many love-songs, many of which owe their existence to those of the troubadours.

HEINRICH VON VELDEKE, a German poet of the twelfth century, who was of a n.o.ble family settled near Maastricht, on the lower Rhine. Besides the love-songs and other pieces he wrote, he was the composer of the epic of the _Eneide_, the first poem of the Middle High German epic poetry, which reached its highest development in the writings of Hartmann von Aue, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and Gottfried von Stra.s.sburg.

HUGO VON TRIMBERG, a German poet, who flourished at the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century. From 1260 to 1309 he was rector of the collegiate school in the Theuerstadt, a suburb of Bamberg. He is known as the composer of the _Renner_, a didactic poem, in which the manners and customs of the time are largely depicted, and the prevailing vices severely censured.

JACOPO DA TODI, or JACOPONE, an Italian poet, born about the middle of the thirteenth century at Todi, in the duchy of Spoleto. He belonged to the n.o.ble family of the Benedetti, began life as an advocate, but, on account of the sudden accidental death of his wife, devoted himself to a religious life and entered the order of Franciscans. He wrote many religious poems in Italian, and also in Latin. To him in particular is ascribed the composition of the famous _Stabat Mater Dolorosa_.

NEIDHART VON REUENTHAL, a German lyric poet of the thirteenth century.

He was of a n.o.ble Bavarian family, but spent part of his life in Austria. His poems were written between 1210 and 1240, and are of special interest for the descriptions they give of the customs of the times.

THIBAUT, COUNT OF CHAMPAGNE AND KING OF NAVARRE. He was born at Troyes in 1201, and died in 1253. He is one of the most noted of the early French poets.