Wine, Women, and Song Part 22

The truth is that there is very little that is elevated in the lyrics of the Goliardi. They are almost wholly dest.i.tute of domestic piety, of patriotism, of virtuous impulse, of heroic resolve. The greatness of an epoch which throbbed with the enthusiasms of the Crusades, which gave birth to a Francis and a Dominic, which witnessed the manly resistance offered by the Lombard burghs to the Teutonic Emperor, the formation of Northern France into a solid monarchy, and the victorious struggle of the Papacy against the Empire, finds but rare expression in this poetry. From the _Carmina Burana_ we cull one chant indeed on Saladin, one spirited lament for Richard Coeur de Lion; but their general tone is egotistic.

Even the satires, so remarkable for boldness, are directed against those ecclesiastical abuses which touched the interests of the clerkly cla.s.ses--against simony, avarice, venality in the Roman Curia, against the ambition of prelates and the effort to make princely benefices hereditary, rather than against the real sins of the Church--her wilful solidification of popular superst.i.tions for the purposes of self-aggrandis.e.m.e.nt, her cruel persecution of free thought, and her deflection from the spirit of her Founder.

With regard to women, abundant examples have been adduced to ill.u.s.trate the sensual and unromantic spirit of these lettered lovers.

A note of undisguised materialism sounds throughout the large majority of their erotic songs. Tenderness of feeling is rarely present. The pa.s.sion is one-sided, recognised as ephemeral, without a vista on the sanct.i.ties of life in common with the beloved object. Notable exceptions to the general rule are the lyrics I have printed above on pp. 75-78. But it would have been easier to confirm the impression of licentiousness than to multiply specimens of delicate sentiment, had I chosen to ransack the whole stores of the _Carmina Burana_.

It is not necessary to censure their lack of so-called chivalrous woman-worship. That artificial mood of emotion, though glorified by the literary art of greatest poets, has something pitiably unreal, incurably morbid, in its mysticism. But, putting this aside, we are still bound to notice the absence of that far more human self-devotion of man to woman which forms a conspicuous element in the Arthurian romances. The love of Tristram for Iseult, of Lancelot for Guinevere, of Beaumains for his lady, is alien to the Goliardic conception of inters.e.xual relations. Nowhere do we find a trace of Arthur's vow imposed upon his knights: "never to do outrage,... and alway to do ladies, damosels, and gentlewomen succour upon pain of death." This manly respect for women, which was, if not precisely the purest, yet certainly the most fruitful social impulse of the Middle Ages, receives no expression in the _Carmina Vagorum_.

The reason is not far to seek. The Clerici were a cla.s.s debarred from domesticity, devoted in theory to celibacy, in practice incapable of marriage. They were not so much unsocial or anti-social as extra-social; and while they gave a loose rein to their appet.i.tes, they respected none of those ties, antic.i.p.ated none of those home pleasures, which consecrate the animal desires in everyday existence as we know it. One of their most popular poems is a brutal monastic diatribe on matrimony, fouler in its stupid abuse of women, more unmanly in its sordid imputations, than any satire which emanated from the corruption of Imperial Rome.[35] The cynicism of this exhortation against marriage forms a proper supplement to the other kind of cynicism which emerges in the lyrics of triumphant seducers and light lovers.

But why then have I taken the trouble to translate these songs, and to present them in such profusion to a modern audience? It is because, after making all allowances for their want of great or n.o.ble feeling, due to the peculiar medium from which they sprang, they are in many ways realistically beautiful and in a strict sense true to vulgar human nature. They are the spontaneous expression of careless, wanton, unreflective youth. And all this they were, too, in an age which we are apt to regard as incapable of these very qualities.

The defects I have been at pains to indicate render the Goliardic poems remarkable as doc.u.ments for the right understanding of the brilliant Renaissance epoch which was destined to close the Middle Ages. To the best of them we may with certainty a.s.sign the seventy-five years between 1150 and 1225. In that period, so fruitful of great efforts and of great results in the fields of politics and thought and literature, efforts and results foredoomed to partial frustration and to perverse misapplication--in that potent s.p.a.ce of time, so varied in its intellectual and social manifestations, so pregnant with good and evil, so rapid in mutations, so indeterminate between advance and retrogression--this Goliardic poetry stands alone. It occupies a position of unique and isolated, if limited, interest; because it was no outcome of feudalism or ecclesiasticism; because it has no tincture of chivalrous or mystic piety; because it implies no metaphysical determination; because it is pagan in the sense of being natural; because it is devoid of allegory, and, finally, because it is emphatically humanistic.

In these respects it detaches itself from the artistic and literary phenomena of the century which gave it birth. In these respects it antic.i.p.ates the real eventual Renaissance.

There are, indeed, points of contact between the Students' Songs and other products of the Middle Ages. Scholastic quibblings upon words; reiterated commonplaces about spring; the brutal contempt for villeins; the frequent employment of hymn-rhythms and preoccupation with liturgical phrases--these show that the Wandering Scholars were creatures of their age. But the qualities which this lyrical literature shares with that of the court, the temple, or the schools are mainly superficial; whereas the vital inspiration, the specific flavour, which render it noteworthy, are distinct and self-evolved. It is a premature, an unconscious effort made by a limited cla.s.s to achieve _per saltum_ what was slowly and laboriously wrought out by whole nations in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Too precocious, too complete within too narrow limits, it was doomed to sterility. Not the least singular fact about it is that though the _Carmina Vagorum_ continued to be appreciated, they were neither imitated nor developed to any definite extent after the period which I have indicated. They fell still-born upon the unreceptive soil of European culture at that epoch. Yet they foreshadowed the mental and moral att.i.tude which Europe was destined to a.s.sume when Italy through humanism gave its tone to the Renaissance.

The Renaissance, in Italy as elsewhere, had far more serious aims and enthusiasms in the direction of science, refined self-culture, discoveries, a.n.a.lysis of man and nature, than have always been ascribed to it. The men of that epoch did more hard work for the world, conferred more sterling benefits on their posterity, than those who study it chiefly from the point of view of art are ready to admit.

But the mental atmosphere in which those heroes lived and wrought was one of carelessness with regard to moral duties and religious aspirations, of exuberant delight in pleasure as an object of existence. The glorification of the body and the senses, the repudiation of an ascetic tyranny which had long in theory imposed impossible abstentions on the carnal man, was a marked feature in their conception of the world; and connected with this was a return in no merely superficial spirit to the antique paganism of Greece and Rome.

These characteristics of the Renaissance we find already outlined with surprising definiteness, and at the same time with an almost childlike navete, a careless, mirth-provoking nonchalance, in the _Carmina Vagorum_. They remind us of the Italian lyrics which Lorenzo de'

Medici and Poliziano wrote for the Florentine populace; and though in form and artistic intention they differ from the Latin verse of that period, their view of life is not dissimilar to that of a Pontano or a Beccadelli.

Some folk may regard the things I have presented to their view as ugly or insignificant, because they lack the higher qualities of sentiment; others may over-value them for precisely the same reason. They seem to me noteworthy as the first unmistakable sign of a change in modern Europe which was inevitable and predestined, as the first literary effort to restore the moral att.i.tude of antiquity which had been displaced by medieval Christianity. I also feel the special relation which they bear to English poetry of the Etizabethan age--a relation that has facilitated their conversion into our language.

That Wandering Students of the twelfth century should have transcended the limitations of their age; that they should have absorbed so many elements of life into their scheme of natural enjoyment as the artists and scholars of the fifteenth; that they should have theorised their appet.i.tes and impulses with Valla, have produced masterpieces of poetry to rival Ariosto's, or criticisms of society in the style of Rabelais, was not to be expected. What their lyrics prove by antic.i.p.ation is the sincerity of the so-called paganism of the Renaissance. When we read them, we perceive that that quality was substantially independent of the cla.s.sical revival; though the influences of antique literature were eagerly seized upon as useful means for strengthening and giving tone to an already potent revolt of nature against hypocritical and palsy-stricken forms of spiritual despotism.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 35: _Golias de Conjuge non ducenda_, Wright's _Mapes_, p.

77.]

APPENDIX.

NOTE ON THE "ORDO VAGORUM" AND THE "ARCHIPOETA."

_See Section vii. pp. 16-23, above._

It seems desirable that I should enlarge upon some topics which I treated somewhat summarily in Section vii. I a.s.sumed that the Wandering Scholars regarded themselves as a kind of Guild or Order; and for this a.s.sumption the Songs Nos. 1, 2, 3, translated in Section xiii. are a sufficient warrant. Yet the case might be considerably strengthened. In the _Sequentia falsi evangelii secundum marcam argenti_[36] we read of the _Gens Lusorum_ or Tribe of Gamesters, which corresponds to the _Secta Decii_,[37] the _Ordo Vagorum_, and the _Familia Goliae_. Again, in Wright's _Walter Mapes_[38] there is an epistle written from England by one Richardus Goliardus to _Omnibus in Gallia Goliae discipulis_, introducing a friend, asking for information _ordo vester qualis est_, and giving for the reason of this request _ne magis in ordine indiscrete vivam_. He addresses his French comrades as _pueri Goliae_, and winds up with good wishes for the _socios sanctae confratriae_. Proofs might be multiplied that the Wandering Students in Germany also regarded themselves as a confraternity, with special rules and ordinances. Of this, the curious parody of an episcopal letter, issued in 1209 by _Suria.n.u.s, Praesul et Archiprimas_, to the _vagi clerici_ of Austria, Styria, Bavaria, and Moravia is a notable example.[39]

I have treated Golias as the eponymous hero of this tribe, the chief of this confraternity. But it ought to be said that the name Golias occurs princ.i.p.ally in English MSS., where the Goliardic poems are ascribed to _Golias Episcopus._ Elsewhere the same personage is spoken of as _Primas_, which is a t.i.tle of dignity applying to a prelate with jurisdiction superior even to that of an archbishop. Grimm[40] quotes this phrase from a German chronicle: _Primas vagus multos versus edidit magistrates_. In the _Sequentia falsi evangelii_[41] we find twice repeated _Primas autem qui dicitur vilissimus_. The Venetian codex from which Grimm drew some of his texts[42] attributes the _Dispute of Thetis and Lyaeus_ and the _Advice against Matrimony_, both of which pa.s.sed in England under the name of Golias and afterwards of Walter Map, to _Primas Presbyter_.

With regard to this Primas, it is important to mention that Fra Salimbene in his Chronicle[43] gives a succinct account of him under the date 1233. It runs as follows: _Fuit his temporibus Primas canonicus eoloniensis, magnus trutannus et magnus trufator, et maximus versificator et velox, qui, si dedisset cor suum ad diligendum Deum, magnus in litteratura divina fuisset, et utilis valde_ _Ecclesiae Dei. Cujus Apocalypsim, quam fecerat, vidi, et alia scripta plura_.

After this pa.s.sage follow some anecdotes, with quotations of verses extemporised by Primas, and lastly the whole of the Confession, translated by me at p. 55 above. Thus Salimbene, who was almost a contemporary author, attributes to Primas two of the most important poems which pa.s.sed in England under the name of Golias, while the Venetian MS. ascribes two others of the same cla.s.s to Primas Presbyter. It is also very noteworthy that Salimbene expressly calls this Primas a Canon of Cologne.

That this poet, whoever he was, had attained to celebrity in Italy (as well as in Germany) under the t.i.tle of Primas, appears also from the following pa.s.sage of a treatise by Thomas of Capua[44] on the Art of Writing: _Dictaminum vero tria sunt genera auctoribus diffinita, prosaic.u.m scilicet, metric.u.m et rithmic.u.m; prosaic.u.m ut Ca.s.siodori, metric.u.m ut Virgilii, rithmic.u.m ut Primatis_. Boccaccio was in all probability referring to the same Primas in the tale he told about _Prima.s.so_,[45] who is described as a man of European reputation, and a great and rapid versifier. It is curious that just as Giraldus seems to have accepted _Golias_ as the real name of this poet,[46] so Fra Salimbene, Thomas of Capua, and Boccaccio appear to use _Primas_ as a Christian name.

The matter becomes still more complicated when we find, as we do, some of the same poems attributed in France to Walter of Lille, in England to Walter Map, and further current under yet another t.i.tle of dignity, that of _Archipoeta_.[47]

We can hardly avoid the conclusion that by Golias Episcopus, Primas, and Archipoeta one and the same person, occupying a prominent post in the Order, was denoted. He was the head of the Goliardic family, the Primate of the Wandering Students' Order, the Archpoet of these lettered minstrels. The rare excellence of the compositions ascribed to him caused them to be spread abroad, multiplied, and imitated in such fashion that it is now impossible to feel any certainty about the personality which underlay these t.i.tles.

Though we seem frequently upon the point of touching the real man, he constantly eludes our grasp. Who he was, whether he was one or many, remains a mystery. Whether the poems which bear one or other of his changing t.i.tles were really the work of a single writer, is also a matter for fruitless conjecture. We may take it for granted that he was not Walter Map; for Map was not a Canon of Cologne, not a follower of Reinald von Da.s.sel, not a mark for the severe scorn of Giraldus.

Similar reasoning renders it more than improbable that the Golias of Giraldus, the Primas of Salimbene, and the pet.i.tioner to Reinald should have been Walter of Lille.[48]

At the same time it is singular that the name of Walter should twice occur in Goliardic poems of a good period. One of these is the famous and beautiful lament:--

"Versa est in luctum--eithara Waltheri."

This exists in the MS. of the _Carmina Burana_, but not in the Paris MS. of Walter's poems edited by Muldner.

It contains allusions to the poet's ejection from his place in the Church--a misfortune which actually befell Walter of Lille. Grimm has printed another poem, _Saepe de miseria,_ in which the name of Walter occurs.[49] It is introduced thus:

"Hoc Gualtherus sub-prior Jubet in decretis."

Are we to infer from the designation _Sub-prior_ that the Walter of this poem held a post in the Order inferior to that of the Primas?

It is of importance in this connection to bear in mind that five of the poems attributed in English MSS. to Golias and Walter Map, namely, _Missus sum in vineam_, _Multiformis hominum_, _Fallax est et mobilis_, _A tauro torrida_, _Heliconis rivulo_, _Tanto viro locuturi_, among which is the famous Apocalypse ascribed by Salimbene to Primas, are given to Walter of Lille in the Paris MS. edited by Muldner.[50] They are distinguished by a marked unity of style; and what is also significant, a lyric in this Paris MS., _Dum Gualterus aegrotaret_, introduces the poet's name in the same way as the _Versa est in luctum_ of the _Carmina Burana_. Therefore, without identifying Walter of Lille with the Primas, Archipoeta, and Golias, we must allow that his place in Goliardic literature is very considerable. But I am inclined to think that the weight of evidence favours chiefly the ascription of serious and satiric pieces to his pen. It is probable that the Archipoeta, the follower of Reinald von Da.s.sel, the man who composed the most vigorous Goliardic poem we possess, and gave the impulse of his genius to that style of writing, was not the Walter of the _Versa est in luctum_ or of _Dum Gualterus aegrotaret_. That Walter must have been somewhat his junior; and it is not unreasonable to a.s.sume that he was Walter of Lille, who may perhaps be further identified with the _Gualtherus sub-prior_ of the poem on the author's poverty. This Walter's Latin designation, _Gualtherus de Insula_, helps, as I have observed above,[51] to explain the attribution of the Goliardic poems in general to Walter Map by English scribes of the fifteenth century.

After all, it is safer to indulge in no constructive speculations where the matter of inquiry is both vague and meagre. One thing appears tolerably manifest; that many hands of very various dexterity contributed to form the whole body of songs which we call Goliardic.

It is also clear that the Clerici Vagi considered themselves a confraternity, and that they burlesqued the inst.i.tutions of a religious order, pretending to honour and obey a primate or bishop, to whom the nickname of Golias was given at the period in which they flourished most. Viewed in his literary capacity, this chief was further designated as the Archpoet. Of his personality we know as little as we do of that of Homer.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 36: Grimm's _Gedichte des Mittelalters_, p. 232.]

[Footnote 37: _Carm. Bur._, p. 254.]

[Footnote 38: Page 69.]

[Footnote 39: Giesebrecht in _Allg. Monatschrift_. Jan. 1853. p. 35.]

[Footnote 40: Op. cit., p. 182.]

[Footnote 41: Ib., p. 232.]

[Footnote 42: Ib., pp. 238, 239.]

[Footnote 43: Published at Parma, 1857.]

[Footnote 44: See Novati, _Carmina Medii Aevi_, p. 8, note.]

[Footnote 45: _Decameron_, i, 7.]