← catalogue

Studies in Mediæval Life and Literature

by Edward T. McLaughlin · English · Gutenberg #37865 · 346,583 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Studies in Mediæval Life and Literature
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Studies in Mediæval Life and Literature

Author: Edward T. McLaughlin


        
Release date: October 27, 2011 [eBook #37865]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37865

Credits: Produced by Barbara Tozier, JoAnn Greenwood, Bill Tozier
        and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
        http://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STUDIES IN MEDIÆVAL LIFE AND LITERATURE ***




Produced by Barbara Tozier, JoAnn Greenwood, Bill Tozier
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net









    STUDIES IN MEDIAEVAL LIFE
    AND LITERATURE

    BY

    EDWARD TOMPKINS MCLAUGHLIN

    PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND BELLES-LETTRES
    IN YALE UNIVERSITY


    [Decoration]


    G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS

    NEW YORK                         LONDON
    27 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET      24 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND

    The Knickerbocker Press

    1894




    COPYRIGHT, 1894
    BY
    SARAH B. MCLAUGHLIN

    _Entered at Stationers' Hall, London_
    BY G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS


    Electrotyped, Printed and Bound by
    The Knickerbocker Press, New York
    G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS




[Decoration]

    CONTENTS.


                                                   PAGE

    INTRODUCTION                                      v

    THE MEDIAEVAL FEELING FOR NATURE                   1

    ULRICH VON LIECHTENSTEIN: THE MEMOIRS OF AN
        OLD GERMAN GALLANT                           34

    NEIDHART VON REUENTHAL AND HIS BAVARIAN
        PEASANTS                                     71

    MEIER HELMBRECHT: A GERMAN FARMER OF THE
        THIRTEENTH CENTURY                          100

    CHILDHOOD IN MEDIAEVAL LITERATURE                123

    A MEDIAEVAL WOMAN                                152

    APPENDIX                                        183

[Decoration]




[Decoration]

INTRODUCTION.


Edward Tompkins McLaughlin, the writer of the essays contained in this
volume, was born at Sharon, Connecticut, on May 28, 1860. He was the son
of the Reverend D. D. T. McLaughlin, a graduate of Yale College of the
class of 1834. His mother's maiden name was Mary Whittlesey Brownell.
She was the daughter of the Reverend Grove L. Brownell, who was settled
for many years over the Congregational church of Cromwell, Connecticut.
Thus it will be seen that the author of this work belonged on both sides
to what Oliver Wendell Holmes has aptly called the Brahman caste of New
England.

At the time of his birth his father was pastor of the Congregational
church of Sharon, Connecticut, but in 1866 left that place for Morris in
the same county. There he remained until 1872 when he gave up parish
duties entirely, and retired to Litchfield, which he thenceforward made
his permanent home.

With the exception of a short time spent in the Litchfield Academy, the
son was fitted for college almost wholly by his father, who was himself
a finished scholar in Latin and Greek. He entered Yale in the autumn of
1879, and received the degree of A.B. in 1883. From the very beginning
of his university life he was distinguished for his interest in English
literature, and during the entire course of it displayed remarkable
proficiency in the pursuit of that study. To him, before his graduation,
fell the highest honors which the college has to bestow in that
department.

After receiving his bachelor's degree he remained another year in New
Haven as a graduate student. During that time he devoted himself with
increased ardor to the special branches of study in which from the
outset he had been interested. In the following year he was made tutor
in English. This position he held until 1890, when he was appointed
assistant professor of the same subject. At the meeting of the
Corporation of the University in May, 1893, he was elected by it to the
chair of Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres. Happily married to a wife of
congenial tastes, who speedily learned to sympathize with him in the
studies which he had made peculiarly his own, he had every reason to
expect a long career of usefulness, which would be attended with
distinction to himself and would confer distinction upon the institution
with which he was connected. But his health had never been vigorous, and
in the very summer vacation following his appointment a fever, which
came upon him almost without warning, and which seemed at first of
slight importance, carried him off after an illness that lasted little
more than a week. He died on the 25th of July, 1893, at the age of
thirty-three. He lies buried at Litchfield.

Such is a brief sketch of the life of the author of this volume. He had
at the time of his death many projects on hand, some partly carried out,
some only in contemplation. In 1893 he had edited a volume of
selections from English writers under the title of _Literary Criticism
for Students_; and since his death a school-edition of Marlowe's _Edward
II._, prepared by him, but left mainly in manuscript, has come from the
press. But these were in a measure tasks imposed upon him by the needs
of students, and not those undertaken in consequence of his own
inclinations. During the last year of his life, however, he had been
devoting himself to the preparation for publication of the following
essays. He had long been a student of mediaeval literature, not merely of
that found in the English tongue, but of the much fuller and more varied
work that had been produced at an early period on the continent. The
writers of France, of Germany, and of Italy, belonging to that period,
were in truth so familiar to him that he was sometimes disposed to
assume that general acquaintance with them on the part of others which
it is the fortune of but few to possess. Some results of this study he
now set about putting into permanent form. The first rough draft of the
essays here printed had been finished when the fatal illness fell upon
him that carried him away.

There is no intention of apologizing either for the matter or the manner
of the pieces contained in this volume. They are in no need of it, and
in any event what is published must stand or fall upon its own merits.
Yet it is the barest justice to the author of these essays to state that
not in a single instance do they represent the final form they would
have assumed, had he lived to review and revise the first sketches he
made. In the case of two of them, which were nearest to the condition in
which they were ultimately to appear, evidences of their incompleteness
in his own eyes are plainly seen in the manuscripts. Against particular
passages and sometimes whole paragraphs there were marginal notes,
indicating that the expression was to undergo alteration of various
kinds. In several instances a place was marked for the insertion of a
transition paragraph which had apparently never been written out, though
its character was suggested. These, of course, had all to be
disregarded. The condition of things, furthermore, was much worse with
the four which had not been so fully completed as the two just
mentioned. In the case of these the matter had to be collected and
pieced together, at no slight expenditure of time and trouble, from
scattered leaves of manuscript, in which it was not always easy to trace
out the exact order.

Unfortunately, one essay, intended to be the longest and most important
of all, could not be included in this volume. Professor McLaughlin had
been for many years an ardent admirer of Dante. To a study of the early
life of the great Italian poet he had devoted years of patient research.
It was the one subject in which he had the deepest interest, and upon
which he had expended the most labor, and he purposed to make the essay
dealing with it the principal piece in the work he was preparing. But,
as was not unnatural, it was the one essay which needed most the
revising hand of its composer. The gaps in it were too numerous and
important to justify its insertion in the unfinished condition in which
it existed, and this particular piece, upon which the author himself set
most store, has been reluctantly laid aside.

But while it is simple justice to state the facts just given, it must
not be inferred that these essays, unfinished and even fragmentary as
they might have seemed to the writer, will so appear to the reader. Few
there will be who will detect that any part of them has failed to
receive the full attention to which it is entitled. Nor is it likely,
indeed, that the sentiments expressed in these essays would have
undergone any material modification, whatever changes might have been
made in the manner in which they were set forth. Doubtless some of the
points now found in them would have been amplified, others would have
been retrenched. Other views again, to which no allusion is made here,
would have been introduced. Still, so complete in themselves are the
essays in most particulars, that no thought of their incompleteness
would have arrested the attention of any save the smallest possible
number of readers, had not the condition in which they were left been
mentioned in this introduction.

But even had these essays needed much more than they do the revising
hand of the author, none the less cordially would they have been
received by those who were familiar with his personal presence.
Especially is this true of students possessed of literary taste, who
have been under his instruction, and it is largely in compliance with
their wishes that the publication of this volume was determined upon.
For as a teacher Professor McLaughlin, though still young, had attained
eminence. He had in particular the rare quality of inspiring those under
him with the same zeal for learning and the same love of literature that
animated himself.

The teacher of English, it must be confessed, has set before him a task
of special difficulty. In the case of other tongues the business of
translation, with the verbal and grammatical investigation implied by
it, must always constitute the principal part of the work of preparation
for the class-room; and the skill and knowledge with which it is
performed will of necessity be the main element in testing the
proficiency and success of the student. But in the case of English this
main part of the usual preparation has been reduced to a minimum. The
business has already been done at the pupil's hands. He knows, at least
after a fashion, the meaning of the words, even if he does not always
comprehend the meaning of the phrase or sentence as a whole in which
they are found. The hard task is, therefore, given the teacher of
English of starting in his instruction at the point where the teacher of
other languages ends. He is, furthermore, to make his subject one of
pleasure and profit to that select body of students, who are eager to
gain from the pursuit of it all the benefit possible. He is at the same
time expected to exact some degree of labor from those who, whether by
their own fault or the fault of others, have no interest in this
particular subject, if indeed they have interest in any subject
whatever. The temptation naturally presents itself to sacrifice the
former class to the latter. Especially does this appeal to instructors
who are deficient in the literary sense, or who possessing it, lack the
ability to arouse it in those under them. The easy process is resorted
to of turning the study into one of a purely linguistic character, in
which the discussion of words will take the place of the discussion of
literature. This is a cheap though convenient method for the teacher to
evade the real work he is called upon to perform, and while it may be
followed by some incidental advantages, it is almost in the nature of a
crime against letters to associate in the minds of young men, at the
most impressionable period of their lives, the writings of a great
author with a drill that is mainly verbal or philological.

It was the rare fortune of Professor McLaughlin that he solved this
problem, presented to every instructor in English, with a felicity that
does not fall often to the lot of those engaged in the same occupation.
It was not so much in imparting knowledge that his peculiar distinction
lay; it was in his success in inspiring interest in the subject and zeal
for its prosecution. It is, therefore, more especially to those who have
been under his teaching that this little volume is addressed as a
memorial of one to whom many will acknowledge is due the first bent
their minds received to the study and appreciation of what is best and
highest in literature. What its author would have accomplished with his
remarkable powers of acquisition and assimilation, had he lived to carry
out and perfect plans which he had in contemplation, it is idle to
conjecture; and the world, which cares but little for what is actually
done in the field in which he was largely working, cannot be expected to
concern itself with that which was never more than projected. But there
are some to whom the result of his labors, shown in this volume, will
prove of interest for what it is; while to those who have known him
personally, it will, even in its comparatively imperfect state, furnish
a suggestive intimation of what might have been.

                                            T. R. LOUNSBURY

    YALE UNIVERSITY,
    March 22, 1894.

[Decoration]




MEDIAEVAL
LIFE AND LITERATURE




THE MEDIAEVAL FEELING FOR NATURE.


On the 26th April, 1335, Mt. Ventoux, near Avignon, was the scene of a
remarkable occurrence. Petrarch was the hero, and on the evening of that
day, while the impression was yet strong upon him, he wrote an account
of it to a friend. The incident was nothing less than climbing a
mountain for aesthetic gratification. That he cared to do it showed that
Petrarch was on the outskirts of mediaevalism.

The narrative is so interesting that I may translate a part of it; for
the great humanist's letters are inaccessible to general readers. He
says that he had thought of climbing the mountain for many years, since
he had known the country from early boyhood, and the great mass of rocky
cliff, entirely rugged and almost inaccessible, was constantly and
everywhere visible. He took with him his brother and two servants. As
they were starting on the ascent, they fell in with an aged shepherd,
who tried to dissuade them. Fifty years before he had climbed to the
summit, moved by a boyish impulse--and he supposed himself the only one
who had ever done it; his recollections were full of awe and terror.
But the poet pressed on, beguiling the weariness, which at times
amounted almost to exhaustion, by moralizing on the labor as a type of
spiritual attainments. At the summit of the highest peak, "moved deeply
at first by that vast spectacle, and affected by the unusual lightness
of the air, I stood as if overwhelmed. I looked, and under my feet I saw
the clouds." His thoughts turned to the classical myths, and the history
of his beloved Italy. He recalled that ten years before, on that same
day, he had left Bologna and his studies. How many changes in his ways.
His wrong loves--he loved them no longer, or rather he no longer liked
to love them. He thought of his future.

     "Thus rejoicing in what I had gained, regretful of my
     weakness, and pitying the common instability of human
     affections, I seemed to forget where I was and why I had
     come. At last I turned to the occasion of my expedition. The
     sinking sun and lengthening shadows admonished me that the
     hour of departure was at hand, and, as if started from sleep,
     I turned around and looked to the west. The Pyrenees--the eye
     could not reach so far, but I saw the mountains of Lyonnais
     distinctly, and the sea by Marseilles; the Rhone, too, was
     there before me. Observing these closely, now thinking on the
     things of earth, and again, as if I had done with the body,
     lifting my mind on high, it occurred to me to take out the
     copy of St. Augustine's _Confessions_ that I always kept with
     me; a little volume, but of unlimited value and charm. And I
     call God to witness that the first words on which I cast mine
     eyes were these: 'Men go to wonder at the heights of
     mountains, the ocean floods, rivers' long courses, ocean's
     immensity, the revolutions of the stars,--and of themselves
     they have no care!' My brother asked me what was the matter.
     I bade him not disturb me. I closed the book, angry with
     myself for not ceasing to admire things of earth, instead of
     remembering that the human soul is beyond comparison the
     subject for admiration. Once and again, as I descended, I
     gazed back, and the lofty summit of the mountain seemed to me
     scarcely a cubit high, compared with the sublime dignity of
     man."[1]

In these sentences we find the new life and the old in the same mind.
Such an action would have been impossible for a genuine son of the
middle ages, but could Petrarch stand on a mountain top to-day, such an
outcome of it would be equally impossible. His feeling for nature was
intense even to a sense of the charm of ruggedness in hills, as
Burckhardt, who refers to this letter in his work on _The Italian
Renaissance_, shows by ample quotations; but the intense lover of nature
in the nineteenth century, though his ethical sense be as deep as
Wordsworth's, finds a different influence in such a scene. Indeed, read
in Wordsworth himself, the modern contrast:

    "Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth
    And ocean's liquid mass, in gladness lay
    Beneath him; far and wide the clouds were touched,
    And in their silent faces could he read
    Unutterable love. Sound needed none,
    Nor any voice of joy; his spirit drank
    The spectacle; sensation, soul, and form,
    All melted into him; they swallowed up
    His animal being, in them did he live,
    And by them did he live: they were his life.
    In such access of mind, in such high hour
    Of visitation from the living God,
    Thought was not; in enjoyment it expired.
    No thanks he breathed, he proffered no request,
    Rapt into still communion, that transcends
    The imperfect offices of prayer and praise."

How far apart is the piety of the two poets, how different their
absorption. This identification of the human mood with Nature, and the
spiritual elation that arises from the union, is thoroughly
characteristic of the present century. Wordsworth's peculiar beauty, as
Hartley Coleridge told Caroline Fox, "consisted in viewing things as
amongst them, mixing himself up in everything that he mentions, so that
you admire the man in the thing, the involved man." And Hartley's
inspired father uttered a great criticism on the modern feeling for
nature, when in the _Ode on Dejection_ he cried,

    "Oh, lady, we receive but what we give,
    And in our life alone doth nature live."

No literary contemporaries were ever more apart than Wordsworth and
Byron, yet _Childe Harold_ has the same note:

    "I live not in myself, but I become
    Portion of that around me; and to me
    _High mountains are a feeling_.
     .   .   .   .  the soul can flee
    And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain
    Of ocean, or the stars, mingle and not in vain."

We discover the same sentiment, more delicately held, in Keats, as in
some of his sayings about flowers, and Shelley, speaking of the longing
for a response to one's own nature, says:

     "The discovery of its antitype, this is the invisible and
     unattainable point to which love tends.... Hence in solitude,
     or in that state when we are surrounded by human beings, and
     yet they sympathize not with us, we love the flowers, and the
     grass, and the waters, and the sky. In the motions of the
     very leaves of spring, in the blue air, there is found a
     secret correspondence with our heart, that awakens the
     spirits to a dance of breathless rapture, and brings tears of
     mysterious tenderness to the eyes, like the enthusiasm of
     patriotic rapture, or the voice of one beloved singing to you
     alone."

Yet this spirit, with which our later poetry is almost everywhere
touched, "this mysterious analogy between human emotions and the
phenomena of the world without us," as von Humboldt expresses it, in its
present comprehensiveness is new to literature. To feel for mountains,
forests, or the ocean, with mingled awe, love, and ecstasy, seems so
natural to us, that we can hardly realize that Gray was striking a novel
and significant chord when he wrote at the Grande Chartreuse, "One of
the most solemn, the most romantic, and the most astonishing scenes....
Not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with
religion and poetry."

In Petrarch's letter we observe the deficiency in absorbing enthusiasm
for the grander forms of nature, as well as his sense of the isolation
of such sentiment from true spiritual life. Yet this letter is the most
significant indication which we possess from the middle ages of a
capacity for enjoying the sublimity of heights. In _Praeterita_, Ruskin,
while describing his eagerness at the first sight of the Alps, as a boy,
has written two or three sentences that we may employ to illustrate the
contrast between Petrarch and his predecessors:

     "Till Rousseau's time there had been no 'sentimental' love of
     nature ... St. Bernard of La Fontaine, looking out to Mont
     Blanc with his child's eyes, sees above Mont Blanc the
     Madonna; St. Bernard of Talloires, not the Lake of Annecy,
     but the dead between Martigny and Aosta. But for me, the Alps
     and their people were alike beautiful in their snow, and
     their humanity; and I wanted, neither for them nor myself,
     sight of any thrones in heaven but the rocks, or of any
     spirits in heaven but the clouds."

Others, beside the Bernards, men from whose culture and intelligence we
should expect fine appreciation, felt nothing august or inspiring in the
material world. So far as we have any record, the fourteenth-century
laureate was the first of the moderns to climb a mountain for the
aesthetic pleasure of the view. Burckhardt's suggestion that this honor
belongs to Dante, on the strength of a passage in the fourth canto of
the _Purgatory_, is surely not tenable; for the top of Bismantova
possessed a citadel in Dante's time to which business may easily have
called him. All through the middle ages, the lofty elevations between
central Europe and Italy were constantly being crossed. The most
cultivated men were going back and forth as couriers on business of the
Church, and the political relations, especially between Italy and
Germany, kept up a continual stream of travel. Yet one recalls no lines
in any mediaeval poem that describe or express sensations of the least
interest concerning the sights that have bowed the strongest souls of
our era, that have been felt by thousands, and put into words by so many
poets.

There is, indeed, in the beginning of a passage from a famous scholar,
John of Salisbury, an apparent exception to this strange indifference;
but a few clauses correct the hasty judgment. Writing from Lombardy, he
explained why he could not send a letter from the Great St. Bernard: "I
have been on the mount of Jove: on the one hand looking up to the heaven
of the mountains; on the other, shuddering at the hell of the valleys;
feeling myself so much nearer to heaven that I was more sure that my
prayer would be heard." Yet this was due to no rapture of soul,
for--"Lord, I said, restore me to my brethren, that they come not into
this place of torment." He goes on to specify the perils of ice,
precipice, and cold, and nothing disturbs him so much as that his ink
was frozen. But there is not a suggestion of anything worth looking at.
Even Caesar, as von Humboldt reminds us, composed a rhetorical treatise
while crossing the Alps. But the poet of Vaucluse did climb a mountain
for the love of the view, and the very fact that his aesthetic attention
was distracted by ethical introspection is an indication of that serious
sensibility which was destined to become such an essential element in
our feeling for nature; what for every Wordsworthian is summed up in the
second mood of _Tintern Abbey_.

This incapacity for appreciating mountainous sublimity involved a
blindness to the rugged and picturesque on smaller scales. In minor
chords, and in combinations of tone superficially discordant, we have
learned to recognize some of nature's richest harmonies; this is one of
our marks of development. Closely linked, too, with this first of modern
passions for nature, indeed unified with it by the qualities of strength
and massiveness, is our feeling for the ocean and great woods.

    "There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
    There is a rapture on the lonely shore:
    There is society where none intrudes,
    By the deep sea, and music in its roar."

Even deeper than the idea of companionship here is the mystical sense of
absorption into that physical world which seems the very dwelling-place
of the infinite soul, which finds one of its most remarkable
manifestations in an intense and almost defiant sensation of human
transitoriness and unimportance, and which is frequently blended with
very exultation in the reflection that presently we ourselves shall be
unified forever with the unconscious life that stretches out before us:

    "Rolled round in earth's diurnal course
    With rocks, and stones, and trees."

There is a strange fascination to the modern mind, in presence of the
majesties of nature, in this thought of humanity's return to the
earth-mother. Innumerable generations have come home to her, as many or
more are to be born that they may follow them, and she remains. Perhaps
we are never so serenely conscious of self, as in these rare moments
when we bear without a pang the thought of losing personal identity.
There is something more here than the certainty of at least
materialistic immortality, and the impression of infinite repose and
beauty.

The projection of our immediate sensation into the long future silence
suffuses nature with pantheistic life, until the eager and buoyant
thrills of spiritual realization render one grateful to have been
permitted to gain such a sensation at what seems the trivial cost of
feeling oneself the mere creature of a day. Such a mood as this
certainly comes but seldom, but probably every one who has ever
experienced any imaginative sensibility to a grand landscape will recall
a heightened sensation that is beyond description.[2]

But still stranger than the failure to catch the finer suggestions in
the more strenuous forms of nature, is the way in which such sights are
ignored. In southern Europe, mountains, storms, rocks, the ocean, are
scarcely ever described, even as objects of awe or terror. When in the
course of a story they have to be mentioned, the treatment is brief and
matter of fact. Heinrich von Veldeke in his famous epic, makes nothing
of his necessary introduction of a storm at sea, nor does Gottfried, or
indeed any one of this whole period.

_Gudrun_, that epic of the people which deserves to stand near the more
famous _Niebelungen Lied_, treats constantly of the ocean, yet never
with any feeling except dread of shipwreck. This poem, however, shows a
more northern tone in one or two descriptions of winter, that are at
least elaborated. In the scene, for instance, when Herwig and Ortwin
arrive at the shore where Hildeburg and Gudrun, almost naked, are
washing the clothes for their cruel mistress, we find some realistic
touches, such as their trembling before the March wind, in which their
hair was streaming as they toiled on the beach, while before them the
sea was full of cakes of ice that had broken up under the early spring.
In another connection, too, the poet compares something to a thick
snowstorm, driven by mountain winds. The sense of fitness in a
sympathetic natural environment for the human action, that has been so
generally regarded in literature, as by Shakespeare, is indeed
occasionally found in mediaeval poetry; so in an interesting French
romance that relates the trials of a heroine who barely escapes with her
life, after the loss of everything dear: "The lady is in the wood and
bitterly she wails. She hears the wolves howl, and the screech-owls cry;
it lightens terribly, and the thunder is heavy, rain, hail, and
wind--'tis wild for a lady all alone."

Exceptions occur now and then. Dante, for example, was impressed by the
mountains; no readers of the _Purgatory_ need to be reminded of his
experience in climbing them. The setting for a mood of unrealized love
in one of his lyrics is in winter, among the whitened hills: "He wooed
the lady in a lovely grassy meadow, surrounded by lofty hills." But the
arbitrary verbal repetitions of the _sestina_ modify the original face
of the image of the mountains towering about the lover's plain, and the
pensive beauty of the whole poem may be connected with an allegory. But
I believe that even in Dante we never catch the sense of exultation in
the earth's power and majesty.

Our modern feeling for forests is not only at times sombre and
oppressive; we also derive a sense of sublime composure from them. This
latter sentiment was hardly shared by the mediaevals. Dante was only
following earlier poets when he located the opening of Hell by a gloomy
wood, and his repeated metaphor of life as a forest, "confusing,"
"gloomy," and "dark," accords with the feeling of his age. He would not
have appreciated Chateaubriand. He has left us, however, a rare and
interesting reference to the soughing in the pines on the Adriatic,
which shows how well his ear could interpret its solemn beauty. The
mystical apple-tree, moreover, near the close of the _Purgatory_, whose
blossoms are so exquisitely defined, indirectly reminds us how
exceptional is a mention of fruit trees in flower. Yet the Provencal,
French, and German lyrics constantly begin with the joyousness of
spring, and the happy contrast from the season that destroys flowers and
foliage. Nothing is more conventional than these nature preludes. Over
and over, till we close our books impatiently, we hear reiterations of
the charm of spring and summer. There is a slender kind of grace and
sincerity that would lend interest to many of these, if they had come
down by themselves; but they lie together in books in wearisome
uniformity. A dandelion in April is much prettier than the dandelions in
June. These preludes are usually in keeping with the love-phrases that
follow, cold and imitative. For poets thought and felt in exterior
generalities, rather than in detachment and inner consciousness. Their
typical landscape may be seen in a passage from Gottfried von
Strassburg,--one of Germany's most brilliant poets--where Tristan and
Isolde have fled to the forest grotto, in fear of King Mark. The grotto
is fitted up luxuriously, in keeping with the temper of the entire poem,
but since it is in the wilderness, far away from roads or paths, in a
description of its surroundings we might certainly look for a sense of
the picturesque. But so far from caring for the wild and rugged,
Gottfried does not even like a quiet woodland simplicity.

     "Above the entrance stood three broad lindens, no more; but
     below, stretching down the slope, were innumerable trees that
     hid the retreat. On one side was a level stretch where a
     fountain flowed, a fresh, cool stream, clearer than the sun.
     Above it, too, stood three beautiful shady lindens that
     shielded the spring from rain and the sun. Bright blossoms
     and green grass struggled with each other sweetly on the
     field. One caught also the delightful songs of birds which
     sang more delightfully there than anywhere else. Eye and ear
     each had its pleasure, there was shade and sun, air and
     breezes soft and pleasing."

He goes on to describe the lovers, in a passage from which I translate
the opening:

    When they waked and when they slept,
    Side by side they ever kept.
    In the morning o'er the dew
    Softly to the field they drew,
    Where, beside the little pool,
    Flowers and grass were dewy cool.
    And the cool fields pleased them well,
    Pleased them, too, their love to tell,
    Straying idly thro' the glade,
    Hearing music, as they strayed.
    Sweetly sang the birds, and then
    In their walk they turned again
    Where the cool brook rippled by,
    Listening to the melody,
    As it flowed and as it went:
    Where across the field it bent,
    There they sat them down to hear,
    Resting there, its murmur clear.
    And until the sunshine blazed,
    In the rivulet they gazed.

These lines are characteristic of Gottfried, even to the lingering
verbal repetition, and the picture certainly is pretty, as is the whole
account of the lovers' life that follows. Nothing in early German
literature comes closer to refined modern sensuousness than Gottfried's
best passages; there is a dreamy passion in them, and sometimes they
flash. His rich voluptuous strain has more of the poet than the
free-liver, and his general tone is curiously modern. It would be a
showy phrase to call his _Tristan_ the _Don Juan_ of the middle ages,
for the poems are very dissimilar, yet it is safe to say that we think
of Byron as we read him. Contrast these representative poets of the
thirteenth and nineteenth centuries in this matter of their feeling for
nature. For once among German settings we have a wild scene. But we
observe how studiously it is modified into the conventional meadow, with
trees in uniform little groups, a grassy field is sprinkled with
flowers, there is a spring, and the little stream that escapes from it
instead of tumbling down over a rocky bed into a glen, flows across the
field. Gottfried mentions mountains and rocks that lie round about, only
to point out that they are types of the difficulties and perils to be
undergone before reaching love's shrine. The almost inaccessible retreat
was necessary as a shelter for the fugitives from Mark's court; the poet
has done his best to obliterate the reality. If we turn to Byron, and
look for instance at that incomparable passage in which he relates the
early love of Juan and Haidee, we observe where he voluntarily places
his lovers:

    "It was a wild and breaker-beaten coast,
    With cliffs above and a broad sandy shore;
    Guarded by shoals and rocks as by a host,
    With here and there a creek, whose aspect wore
    A better welcome to the tempest-tost;
    And rarely ceased the haughty billows' roar."

    "And thus they wandered forth, and hand in hand,
    Over the shining pebbles and the shells,
    Glided along the smooth and hardened sand,
    And in the worn and wild receptacles
    Worked by the storms, yet worked as it were planned,
    In hollow halls, with sparry roofs and cells,
    They turned to rest; and each clasped by an arm,
    Yielded to the deep twilight's purple charm."

And, to pass over the description of sky, sea, moon, and starlight, that
follows, as elements in the nature-setting, notice the scene where Juan
is sleeping:

    "The lady watched her lover, and that hour
    Of Love's, and Night's, and Ocean's solitude,
    O'erflowed her soul with their united power,
    Amid the barren sand and rocks so rude,
    She and her wave-worn love had made their bower."

It would be easy to parallel these two situations; the older by no means
ends with the middle ages, for Eden's "blissful bower" is no exception
in modern poetry before the romantic age: while in our own century
counterparts to this conception of untrained and strenuous natural
surroundings for even the happiest of emotions will occur to every
one.[3] The idle triteness in those inevitable scenes of spring, was
manifest to some of the poets themselves. So the Comte de Champagne
declares foliage and flowers of no service to poets, except for rhyming
and to amuse commonplace people. The great Wolfram himself derides the
conventionality of all romance narratives falling in spring and early
summer:

    Arthur is the man of May;
    Each event in every lay,
    Happened or at Whitsuntide
    Or when the May was blooming wide.

And Uhland cites from the lives of the troubadours the contemporaneous
criticism upon a minor poet of the twelfth century, who wrote in the
old style about leaves, and flowers, and the song of birds,--nothing of
any account. We may recollect that such criticisms go far back of the
middle ages: Horace glances at his contemporaries' conventional
descriptions of a stream hastening through pleasant fields.

In the widely popular romances of Enid we find illustrations of Welsh,
French, and German treatment in the hands of leading authors, and there
is one point in the narrative where we may compare their feeling for the
natural environment. Readers of Tennyson will recall the passage in the
wandering, where, after one of Geraint's struggles with bandits, he
comes upon a lad carrying provisions. Chrestien's treatment of the
episode is clear and straightforward; the youth and two comrades are
taking cheese, cakes, and wine to the count's meadows for the haymakers.
The young man notices the travellers' worn appearance, and invites them
to sit down "in this fair meadow, under these ironwood trees," to rest
and eat.

Hartmann von Aue (whose paraphrase of the French poem is, by the way,
far from the merit of his _Iwein_) narrates the incident in the same
manner, omitting the poetically specific touches of the haymaking, and
the shady spot in the field; but characteristically inserting some
courteous concern on the part of the young man, for the comfort of Enid.
But if we turn to the _Mabinogion_ we come upon something very
different:

     "And early in the day they left the wood, and they came to an
     open country, with meadows on one hand, and mowers mowing the
     meadows; and there was a river before them, and the horses
     bent down and drank the water. And they went up out of the
     river by a lofty steep, and there they met a slender
     stripling with a satchel about his neck, and they saw that
     there was something in the satchel, but they knew not what
     it was. And he had a small blue pitcher in his hand, and a
     bowl on the mouth of the pitcher."

How charming it is, even to the lovely touch of color. We know here that
the unremembered writer saw nature and cared for it as we do. Indeed,
this mediaeval Welshman satisfies us quite as well as does even
Tennyson's transcript:

    "So through the green gloom of the wood they passed,
    And issuing under open heavens beheld
    A little town with towers, upon a rock:
    And close beneath, a meadow gemlike chased
    In the brown wild, and mowers mowing in it:
    And down a rocky pathway from the place
    There came a fair-hair'd youth, that in his hand
    Bare victual for the mowers."

There we have a simplicity treated with Tennysonian artifice, which
"victual" does not succeed in correcting; beautiful in its way, though
its way is perhaps not so fine as the prose. Yet we notice the modern
spirit in the appreciation of the "brown wild" as well as the meadow,
and out of the more general and evasive "steep" is developed the
picturesque "rocky pathway."

Except for the interest in establishing these forms of
nature-appreciation from such older and more original sources, we might
have satisfied ourselves with illustrations of them from Chaucer's early
poems, where his descriptions are almost wholly derivative. His feeling
for "the smale, softe, swote gras," that was sweetly embroidered with
flowers; the earth's joyous oblivion of the cold, in her enthusiasm of
May; his constant delight in the "smale foules," and the like, are
purely conventional, though the unction with which he writes shows his
real enjoyment. There are touches in Chaucer, however, that we miss in
his romance predecessors, such as his eye for delicate effects--most
interesting as marking the growth of accurate observation and sensitive
rendering, like the description of twilight in _Troylus and Creyseyde_,
when

    "White thynges wexen dymme and donne
    For lakke of lyght,"

or the graceful illustration in the same poem of a sudden troubling of
one's mood:

    "But right as when the sonne shyneth brighte
    In March that chaungeth ofte tyme his face,
    And that a cloude is put with wynde to flyght,
    Which overspret the sonne, as for a space,
    A cloudy thought gan through his soule pace."

Such a touch makes us feel how modern he is. Yet he does not love the
picturesque. Under the influence of a Breton lay, he writes in the
loveliest of all his tales, of the rugged sea-coast on whose high bank
Dorigen and her friends used to walk (since "stood hire castel faste by
the see") and look down upon "the grisly rokkes blake," which, in her
apprehension for her lord's safe return, she would call "these grisly,
feendly rokkes blake." But we feel that even had Arviragus been at her
side she would never have regarded the coast as we should regard it.
Still we observe the advance in observation and literary expression. In
the _Knight's Tale_, the wild picturesque is employed again to connote
the terrible, but no poet, from Statius to Boccaccio, his guides in the
passage, had written such lines as his setting for the temple of the
God of War:

    "First on the wal was peynted a forest
    In which there dwelleth neither man nor best,
    With knotty, knarry, bareyne trees olde
    Of stubbes sharpe and hidous to biholde,
    In which ther ran a rumbel and a swough,
    As though a storm sholde bresten every bough."

Nothing even in _Childe Roland_ sketches desolating natural effects with
more power. Yet Chaucer had a superior, in the sympathetic eye and
adequate expression for the stern and stormy phases of nature, in a
countryman of whom perhaps he never heard. We do not know the name of
the author of _Sir Gawayn and the Grene Knyght_. But the poem marks on
the whole the noblest conception in our literature before Spenser. It
possesses moral dignity, romantic interest, simplicity, and directness,
united with deep seriousness of style, creative imagination in dealing
both with character and with nature. Chaucer wrote nothing so spiritual,
though much of course more artistic and poetically valuable. In regard
to this one matter of the interpretation of nature, it would be
difficult to point out passages in the whole range of mediaeval
literature so fine and so remarkable as such descriptions as follow, of
the northern winter scenes through which Gawayn passed on his weird
mission.

    A forest full deep, and wild to a wonder,
    High hills on each side, and crowded woods under,
    Of oaks hoar and huge, a hundred together.
    The hazel and hawthorne were grown altogether
    Everywhere coated by moss ragged, rough;
    Many birds on bare branches, unhappy enough;
    That piteously piped there, for pain of the cold.

    Wondrous fair was the earth, for the frost lay thereby;
    On the mist ruddy gleams the sun cast, as on high
    He coasted full clearly the clouds of the sky.

    They beat along banks where the branches are bare,
    They climbed along cliffs where clingeth the cold,
    The clouds yet held up, but 'twas ugly beneath.
    Mist lowered on the moor, dissolved on the mountains.
    Each hill had a hat, a huge misty cloak.
    Brooks boiling and breaking dashed on the banks,
    Shattered brightly on shore.

That is what we find in the North, and such English feeling for the
sublime is nothing new; it goes far back beyond these lines into the
generations that seem misty as the air which their poets are wont to
describe. Mr. Stopford Brooke's recent volume on Anglo-Saxon poetry
makes it unnecessary to enter into the subject of old England's eye and
ear for nature. Its accounts of the sympathy for the bold and fierce
bear out what one might guess without knowledge--that the stern northern
climate and familiarity with ocean life found large poetical expression.
Luxury, southern artifice of sentiment and literary manner, had not
invaded the rugged men of the North; they delight in describing
elemental conflicts, and sometimes with studied elaboration. But if the
pictures of the German and French poets are uniform in their mildness,
those of these Anglo-Saxons are marked by their stormy aspect. We
exchange spring for winter.

The same contrast holds true when we take up the Scandinavian poets;
they show much feeling and power, but little susceptibility to the
beauty of gentleness and grace. Mr. Brooke has remarked upon a
similarity between the _Tempest_ of Cynewulf and Shelley's _Ode to the
West Wind_. A closer parallel may be observed in the _Lines Among the
Euganean Hills_ and the so-called Helgi poet; where we find a curiously
identical image of rooks and hawks flying into the early morning with
wings sparkling from the mists through which they have passed. The Norse
poems are fond of screaming eagles, and ravens on the high branches.

That weird northern imagination too has vivid pictures, as the shields
of the night-warriors shining in the waning moon. Nature also
occasionally speaks to their personal moods, both by harmony and
contrast. A poet's boat is swept fiercely by the tempest, as he dies
with thoughts of his "linen-clad lady" in his heart. Another watches the
sea dashing against the steep cliff, and thinks of his far-away love, in
the control of his rival. Like the early English, they feel exultation
in sea and storm. They know them intimately and their descriptions are
spirited and faithful. They love them, but they love fiercely, terribly,
as they do their women. Yet even as in their human passions, there are
tranquillities. "They rode their steeds through dewy dales and dusky
glens: the air, a sea of mist, shook as they passed by." We linger
behind the storming horsemen for a moment, to look back as the silence
steals in again through those dusky glens.

But to return to what is our real subject, the sentiment for nature in
what we may term the polite literatures of mediaevalism.

The reason for their feeling about winter is summed up in one of the
Latin student songs, "the cold icy harshness of winter, its fierceness,
and dull, miserable inactivity." It kept them within, when their
interests and concerns were so mainly out-of-door. The poets are for
ever singing in praise of spring, not so much because they loved it for
itself, as because it brought them a life that was gay and easy. They
seldom introduce touches of appreciation in their descriptions of the
wintry season. Snow may have appeared lovely to them, but we observe
Dante as doing something singular when he compares the talking of
ladies, which was mingled with sighs and tears, to raindrops
interspersed with beautiful snowflakes (_cp._ _Inf._, 14, 30; 24, 5),
and one of the most memorable lines in his friend Guido Cavalcanti's
poems is the one which mentions the dreamy sinking down of snow, falling
when the air is windless. The old-time gentlemen apparently hugged the
fire and drank of "their bugle-horn the wyn," and ate "brawn of the
tusked swyn," when winter came, instead of watching the snow, through
their little windows.

There are many phases of nature which it seems to us impossible not to
notice and enjoy, of which we seldom find a trace. We should expect them
in the large body of lyrical verse, and still more in the copious
romance literature, which corresponds to the modern novel, both in
incident and in the invitation to bits of passing local color. Clouds,
for instance, aside from their glory of line and mass, and the grace and
loveliness of their lighter forms, are curious and oddly suggestive, as
Antony reminds Eros, and they are constantly before the eye; yet let any
reader of mediaeval poetry recall how imperceptible a part they play in
it, even as plain facts of description. A line in one of the Latin songs
expresses the feeling: their thought of clouds is, how delightful not to
see them. Moonlight, too, is seldom dwelt on as poetical; the most
romantic touch that comes to my mind in connection with it, is in
Chrestien de Troyes, where it shines over the reconciliation of
estranged lovers. Just as we find little notice of sunrise, sunset,
clouds, and moon, we find little feeling for the stars. They are
mentioned occasionally in a facile way, though scarcely ever with
manifest sentiment. There are two or three passages, however, in
_Aucassin et Nicolette_, that show the daintiest sort of sentiment for
moonlight and stars. Here, for instance, where the lovers are confined
for the sake of thwarting their love:

     "'Twas in summer time, in the month of May, when the days are
     warm, long, and clear and the nights calm and cloudless.
     Nicolette was lying one night in her bed, and she saw the
     moon clearly shining through a window, and she heard the
     nightingale singing in the garden and she thought of Aucassin
     her lover, whom she loved so much."

So making a rope of the bedclothes she lets herself down into the
garden.

     "Then she caught her gown by one hand in front and by the
     other behind, and tucked it up on account of the dew which
     she saw was heavy on the grass, and she went down through the
     garden.... And the daisy-blossoms that she broke with the
     toes of her feet, that lay over on the small of her foot,
     were even black, by her feet and legs, so very white was the
     dear little girl. Along the streets she passed in the shadow,
     for the moon shone very clear, and she went on till she came
     to the tower where her lover was."

And again when the lover is in pursuit of her, after she had built
herself a lodge in what she thought a safe retreat; he does not know
where she is, and his thoughts are so absorbed that he falls and puts
out his shoulder, and then creeps into her vacant shelter:

     "And he looked through a break in the lodge and saw the stars
     in the sky, and he saw one brighter than the rest, and he
     began to say:

      'Pretty little star, I see
      Where the moon is leading thee.
      Nicolette is with thee there,
      My darling with the golden hair;
      God would have her, I believe,
      To make beautiful the eve.'"

Yet even here there is nothing of the deeper sensibility to midnight
sky, common alike to ancient and modern seriousness. Yet we find notes
also of this. It is hard, for example, to think of giving up the
genuineness of Dante's letter refusing to return to Florence, if only
for the rare touch of everywhere seeing the sun and the stars (_nonne
solis astrorumque specula ubique conspiciam?_), that bears out such
evidences as the last word of each of the divine canticles and other
fine proofs that he felt the high wonder and peace of the stars at
night. Who can doubt that he did--that every deep nature always has? Yet
the poetical evidence for it is curiously scanty throughout these
centuries. It is a surprise to come upon such an exclamation as this of
Freidank's: "The constellations sweep through heaven as if they were
alive,--sun, moon, the bright stars,--there is nothing so wonderful!"

Indeed, I can recall no writer to whom the material world seems to
suggest such inner sensations as he who called himself Freidank, the
German free-thinker. He was not much of a poet, so far as his verses go,
but his soul knew life as mystery. He also made one of the band of
reformers three centuries before Luther. He saw the corruption of the
Church, yet he revered the sacred institution; in spite of his faith, he
was a Christian rationalist. Some of his sentences almost startle us, as
words before their season: "If the Pope can forgive sins by indulgence,
without repentance, people ought to stone him if he allows any one to go
to hell." "God is constantly shaping new souls, which he gives to
men--to be lost. How does the soul deserve God's wrath before it is
born?" He is haunted by the secret of life: "How is the soul made? No
one tells me that. If all souls could be in a hand, none could see or
grasp their glory." "Earth and heaven are full of the Godhead. Hell
would be empty, were God not there." "Whatever the sun touches, the
sunlight keeps pure. However the priest may be, the mass is still pure.
The mass and the sunshine will always be pure." "I never cease wondering
how the soul is made. Whence it came, and whither it fares--the path is
hidden. Nay, I know not who I am myself.[4] Lord God, grant me that I
may know thee, and also myself." So when Freidank hears the roar of the
wind, its invisible might reminds his skepticism that the soul may well
be great, though none can see it: while he watches the wide mist which
no hand can seize upon, a symbolism of the soul comes to him again. He
is oppressed by the restless energy of being: "Our hearts beat
unceasingly, our breaths are seldom still:--and then, our thoughts and
dreams!" As he rides through spring, he observes the infinite diversity
of nature:

    Many hundred flowers,
    Alike none ever grew;
    Mark it well, no leaf of green
    Is just another's hue.

"Many a man looks out at the stars, and tells what wonders take place
there. Let him tell me now (something closer at hand), what is the weed
in the garden. If he tells me that truly, I shall be more ready to
believe the other." It is the germ of Tennyson's _Flower in the Crannied
Wall_. Nature's commonplaces hold the heavenly mystery in a common bond
with their own. Such subtle blendings of the outward and inward vision
could come only from a refined and pensive spirit--such as his who sums
up thus the discipline of life: "Many a time the lips must smile when
the heart weeps."

One of the marked deficiencies of all these descriptions of nature is in
the indefiniteness of the terms employed. In minute accuracy, Dante, to
be sure, is one of the world's greatest masters; but elsewhere it is
rarely that we come upon anything concrete or specific. It is not until
centuries later, indeed, that, so far as nature goes, we find habitual
composition "with the eye upon the object," but, as it seems, most
mediaeval poets never carried their observation beyond the barest general
impressions. We do not expect Tennyson's "More black than ashbuds in the
front of March," or Browning's eye for the fact that when "the leaf-buds
on the vine are woolly," the red is about to turn gray. The outer
world's "open secret" is not open enough to make us demand minute
attention. But it is surprising that they did not more frequently record
easy impressions, and in their inventions introduce definite details.
The poetical effect of even apparently prosaic precision is at times
imaginative, but the art of this was kept for the later romanticists.

There is a lyric, however (belonging, I believe, to the twelfth
century), by a poet of northern France, and written as a satire on the
love-romance literature of the age, which contains one or two happy
instances of just this missing trait. So charming it is in itself that I
have translated it as a whole, though it belongs to an essay on the
lyrical romances, instead of on nature. What a light touch the unknown
writer shows, what dainty fancy! Sir Thopas is hardly a parallel to this
blending of poetry with humor, a humor too gracious to be derisive,
whose genial satire sparkles and dances to meet its sister wave of
sentiment and beauty, till they ripple together, and each seems to have
absorbed the other. The opening stanza is the poet's introduction of
himself, and from the olive we may draw an inference respecting his
local associations:

    Will ye attend me, while I sing
    A song of love,--a pretty thing,
        Not made on farms:--
    Nay, by a gentle knight 'twas made
    Who lay beneath an olive's shade
        In his love's arms.

    1.

    A linen undergown she wore,
    And a white ermine mantle, o'er
        A silken coat;
    With flowers of May to keep her feet,
    And round her ankles leggings neat,
        From lands remote.

    2.

    Her girdle was of leafage green;
    Spring foliage, with a fringing sheen
        Of gold above;
    And underneath a love-purse hung,
    By bloomy pendants featly strung,
        A gift of love.

    3.

    Upon a mule the lady rode,
    The which with silver shoes was shode;
        Saddle gold-red;
    And behind rose-bushes three
    She had set up a canopy
        To shield her head.

    4.

    As so she passed adown the meads,
    A gentle childe in knightly weeds
        Cried: "Fair one, wait!
    What region is thy heritance?"
    And she replied: "I am of France,
        Of high estate.

    5.

    "My father is the nightingale,
    Who high within the bosky pale,
        On branches sings;
    My mother's the canary; she
    Sings on the high banks where the sea
        Its salt spray flings."

    6.

    "Fair lady, excellent thy birth;
    Thou comest from the chief of earth,
        Of high estate:
    Ah, God our Father, that to me
    Thou hadst been given, fair ladye,
        My wedded mate!"

Everything here is definite and concrete, and how delightful the picture
all is. Such plastic art as the "rose-bushes three" is not unworthy of
the great modern poets of whom its magic and romantic definiteness
reminds us,--as the "five miles meandering of Alph, the sacred river,"
or the "kisses four" with which the pale loiterer shut the eyes of La
Belle Dame sans Merci. The description of the nightingale on its high
branches, too, is a noticeably accurate touch, as we compare it, for
example, with Coleridge's nightingale descriptions.

The explanation for the usual vague and indefinite description is not
found in saying that they could not describe minutely. We meet with
abundant details of such material interests as embroideries or armor.
There is artistic emotion in Villehardouin's account of the glorious
sight of Constantinople, as it rose before the crusaders, just as
distinctly as in Lord Byron's letter. But, to their simple eyes, nature
not only failed to suggest associated fancies, like Shakespeare's

     "Wrinkled pebbles in the brook,"

or Wordsworth's ash,

     "A soft eye-music of slow waving boughs,"

but they see natural objects as units, without lingering upon their
parts. When we find, for example, a line that marks the jerky flight of
a swallow, we are surprised at the specific touch; we look almost in
vain for such landscape details as the colors of autumn. Neidhart von
Reuenthal is marking his originality, when he speaks of the red
tree-tops, falling down yellow.

The want of observation and the shallow sympathy with nature shown by
most poets before Dante are much more surprising than their preference
for placid effects. It is unusual, for instance, to meet such a
suggestive note of association as in the stanza by the Frenchman Gaces
Brulles:

    The birds of my own land
      In Brittany I hear,
    And seem to understand
      The distant in the near;
    In sweet Champagne I stand,
      No longer here.

This paraphrase, indeed, is unworthy of the charming simplicity of the
original. Surely, when Matthew Arnold made his sweeping characterization
of mediaeval poetry as grotesque, he forgot what a straightforward
evolution of narrative or of quiet sentiment, and what a transparent
expression, we find in some of these minor poets. They are as direct and
unadorned, as they are graceful. It is almost impossible to translate
them without substituting for the fresh and delicate touch, some
metaphysical warping of the idea, or some rhetorical consciousness in
words. What for instance could be more elegantly remote from the
grotesque than this literal translation of Brulles' expression of his
sensibility to the song-birds of his home: "The birds of my country I
have heard in Brittany; by their song I know well that in sweet
Champagne I heard them of old."

       *       *       *       *       *

We may sum up these outline statements to this effect.

The northern poets described storm, winter, the ocean, and kindred
subjects, with considerable force and fulness. In the cultivated
literatures to the south, natural description was mainly confined to the
agreeable forms of beauty; the grand, awesome, and inspiring were
scarcely felt, and the literal fact of their physical expression was
hardly ever noticed. The exterior world was not made a subject of close
observation, nor was its poetic availability realized as a setting for
action, or as an interpreter of emotion.

The people of the north, through being habituated to severer weather,
not merely as a fact of climate, but from their rougher, less politely
organized habits of living, [we should especially observe their activity
on the sea,] regarded the violent seasons and aspects of nature with the
sympathetic acquiescence of custom. Moreover, this influence tended to
develop sturdier and more rugged character, race-temperament obviously
being in part a geographical result, which acts with the forces of
social organization, especially those that affect the moral qualities,
such as rude or luxurious living. This vigorous character was more
susceptible to impressions of native power, as well as from association
more interested in recalling them. Accordingly, we find the early
northern poetry an anticipation of the seriousness of modern English
literature, and, as well, of its unequalled recognition of physical
symbolisms of the sublime. Where the northern force blended with more
southern lightness and elegance, as it did in the _Mabinogion_, we find
a deeper poetic sentiment; where it coincides with moral earnestness, we
find such nature sensation as in the poetry of _Sir Gawayn_. But the
literature of the Germans and their romance originals, aim at courtly
levities; they artificialize sentiment and thought, as well as manner.
The deeper and more spiritually sympathetic minds did not as a rule
devote themselves to _belles-lettres_. The Church drew them into her
sober service, and even though they wrote, the close theological faith
was not favorable to their poetic expansion. Most of all, there was but
little individualism, and any artistic sensation of our modern complex
inner consciousness was still crude, even when it existed at all.

One point, however, should be observed in any inquiry into the reasons
for the inadequateness of these ages' feeling for nature; that many
latent sympathies may never have found a voice. Many through the
centuries before our later ease of publication, may have felt the modern
sensations, without ever thinking of putting them into words. In any new
movement, of art as of practice, a great leader of expression is needed.
Men are sheep to their leaders in various admirations, and many genuine
aesthetic tastes are acquired, through stages of more or less unconscious
imitation. Browning puts this in an acute sentence where Fra Lippo Lippi
explains his usefulness as a painter:

    ".  .  . We're made so that we love,
    First when we see them painted, things we have passed
    Perhaps a hundred times, nor cared to see."

There were few new departures, there was little originality, in the
methods of mediaeval literature. Descriptions of the physical world as a
field of power and sublimity would have fallen dead on the ears of a
public who had never dreamed that storm and cliffs were beautiful. What
if Wordsworth had tried to support himself and win fame by singing at
castles? Nor is it easy, though the taste has been established, to
describe a sunset, or the sublimity of the Alps. We say to each other
"How beautiful!" "How grand!" seldom more. Rare imagination and the tact
of genius are necessary to tell what we really need to show. The sense
of physical sublimity is complex. Its distinctive element is moral or
spiritual emotion. For a full delineation it requires a more subtle,
verbal repertory than those popular poets usually possessed. Yet these
modifications no longer apply when we come to Dante, and superior as his
interpretations are to his predecessors' we miss even in him, as we miss
in the great poets for four hundred years afterwards, appreciation of
the material world's sublimity.

Macaulay and others have said that it was not until man had become the
master of nature that he learned to love its stern and violent aspects.
But thunder storms, for example, are as dangerous now as they ever were,
at least to a traveller. Still, Byron wrote of them with raptures amid
the Pindus mountains as his predecessors did not.

Winter was scarcely colder or bleaker for mediaeval poets than for
Scottish peasants a century ago, yet Burns would sing as they could not:

    "E'en winter bleak has charms for me,
    When winds rave through the naked tree."

Others have accounted for this change by the era of science, with its
close scrutiny of the world, and its enthusiasm for physical knowledge.
But the scientist masters the world as a reality where the poet sees it
as a symbol. The two modern tendencies may be the result of a common
cause--that recognition of complexity, and disposition to observe, which
is a main fact in man's expansion.

A better explanation may be found, I believe, in modern refinement and
ethical sensitiveness.

Side by side with the new appreciation of nature may be observed a
steady growth in sensibility. Our modern moods of inward
contemplation--we are famous for them--our modern zeal for humanity down
to its lowest grades; nay, even our tenderness for the brutes, have been
distinguishing marks of the poet guides under whom we have learned to
appreciate our new physical symbolisms of human emotion. Modern
melancholy, as well, a melancholy more subtle and thoughtful, more
poetical too, than that of mediaevalism, has touched men with its pensive
fascination. Philosophical pantheism such as Wordsworth's or Tennyson's,
feels deity in nature; the new Christianity incarnates divinity in
universal man. Man is more than he used to be, his moods are deeper, his
thought freer. He seeks more ardently than of old, because with less
constraint, the mystery in whom he lives and moves and has his being. He
no longer quails before the majesty and awe of its forever elusive
presence. For he knows that though he cannot find it, it enfolds him
with love and beauty, it cries back to his passion and pain in winter
and storm; from the solemn mountains it reminds him of himself, an
unconquerable partner of its own eternity.

[Decoration]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Lit. Fam._, iv., 1.

[2] Since this passage was written, I have met with the following
extract from a letter of Tennyson's, dated in 1874, though with no
direct reference to the experience being associated with nature: "All at
once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of
individuality, the individuality itself has seemed to dissolve and to
fade away into boundless being; and this not a confused state, but the
clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond
words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of
personality (if so it were), seeming no extinction, but the only true
life."

[3] Any student of Dante, who recalls his lovely early sonnet, _Guido,
vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io_, and compares it with Shelley's almost
parallel conception of lovers sailing away in indivisible companionship,
in the latter part of _Epipsychidion_, will obtain an excellent
illustration of this same difference of feeling about the natural
setting for a happy love. In Dante the sentiment is vague, and only what
is peaceful, while Shelley's ideal haunt of lovers admits owls and bats
with the ring-dove, an "old cavern hoar" left unadorned, mossy
mountains, and quivering waves.

[4] We recall his great countryman's modern cry: "Wohin es geht, wer
weiss es? Erinnert er sich doch kaum, woher er kam."




[Decoration]

ULRICH VON LIECHTENSTEIN.

THE MEMOIRS OF AN OLD GERMAN GALLANT.


Any one who has read Freytag's excellent studies of German social life
will recall a curious illustration in his first volume of the lawless
violence of thirteenth-century knighthood, in the imprisonment of Ulrich
von Liechtenstein by his liegeman Pilgerin. The account not only proves
the author's point, but it goes on to suggest a good deal besides. For
the victim's unsophisticated and plaintive manner under his misfortune,
the fashion in which he relates what he suffered, his allusions to his
own life and character, and most of all to the consolations of his love,
are all stimulating to one's curiosity about the writer. When we go to
the mediaeval shelves of a German library we find this curiosity
satisfied in a long poem by the unfortunate Ulrich, and immediately we
are in that chivalric age which wins most of its romantic lustre from
its devotion to womanhood.

If our guesses at a truth beneath the stories of widowed ladies rescued
from bandits of the forest and recreant knights, or of lovely ladies
rescued from worse than death by the capture of castles through the
prowess of generous champions--stories which every one knows and
incredulously likes--send us to a study of the times when they were
composed, we find that the age, when stripped of romantic
embellishments, in its actual life felt a sentiment for women unequalled
by earlier times. We wonder what caused it. Can it have been the
increase in the culture of the Virgin, that beautiful and beneficent
phase of mediaeval religion? In its larger development, this appears
rather the parallel expression of some common influence, these
adorations of the divine and human conceptions of woman seeming to be
mutually impulsive, and drawn alike from some undetermined tendency of
social and spiritual refinement. Or was it the Crusades? For a German
essayist has suggested that we may count this increase of sentimentalism
among their many influences upon western Europe; the beauty of the women
and the more luxurious habits of the East, its more effeminate
emotionalism, finding impressionable subjects in the hearts of those
stranger knights lying, wakeful for home, beneath southern stars.
Perhaps the conjecture is equally reasonable that the influence came
from French poets who, as they travelled with the early Christian
armies, caught such suggestions from snatches of oriental poetry. Yet it
seems more natural to regard the growth of knightly sentiment toward
ladies as the more delicate manifestation of a spontaneous increase of
social personality, which was stimulated by that general motion in mind
and heart which we observe in the progress of chivalric and crusadal
life, and based, as we must not forget, upon that Teutonic character,
whose ancient deference to woman is recorded by Tacitus side by side
with his account of knighting youthful soldiers with spear and shield.

But, to waive the question of its origin, we find its main expression in
the old society, in that protracted and conventional wooing which, we
should remember, was not usually directed toward marriage. As gentlemen
grew hyperbolical and fantastic in their professions of regard and
devotion, feminine coquettishness and love of admiration naturally
became fastidious and exacting. Ladies grew arbitrary and capricious,
and began to demand substantial proofs of their lovers' concern for
them. It became a trait of elegant culture for a lady to pose as
inexorable, while still retaining her control over the wooer; while he,
complaisant to the sentimental fashion, sighed in a cheerful melancholy,
obeyed, adored, and waited. The mistress set tasks, often no trifles,
which the loyal subject must perform--hard feats of arms, long and
perilous journeys, abnegations of pride or comfort. When these were
accomplished, he sometimes returned to receive a new test, involving a
continued delay of his reward. These mediaeval ladies were as pitiless as
the mystic spiritual dictatress of Browning's _Numpholeptos_, to their
devotees:

                       "Seeking love
    At end of toil, and finding calm above
    Their passion, the old statuesque regard."

In the fourteenth century something of this romantic tyranny survived.
We find Chaucer, for instance, in one of his early poems, mentioning in
praise of his heroine that she did not impose dangerous expeditions to
distant countries, or extravagant exploits upon her lover:

    "And saye, 'Sir, be now ryght ware
    That I may of you here seyn
    Worshippe, or that ye come agayn.'"

Extended probations, courtships long enough to satisfy Ruskin, were an
established convention. Wolfram von Eschenbach, in the seventh book of
_Parzival_, represents Obie as indignantly telling her royal lover, who
has asked her to marry him after what seems to him a reasonable
love-making, that if he had spent his days for five years, in hard
service, under full armor, with distinction, and she had then said "Yes"
to his desire, she would be yielding too soon.

Jane Austen, in the novel to which Trollope gave the palm of English
fiction before _Henry Esmond_, has expressed in Mr. Collins's address to
Elizabeth exactly the notion of the significance in a rejection, held by
well-bred gentlemen six centuries earlier:

     "'I am not now to learn,' replied Mr. Collins, with a formal
     wave of the hand, 'that it is usual with young ladies to
     reject the addresses of the man whom they secretly mean to
     accept, when he first applies for their favor; and that
     sometimes the refusal is repeated a second or even a third
     time. I am therefore by no means discouraged by what you have
     just said, and shall hope to lead you to the altar ere
     long.'"

But these exercises, as was suggested, were not usually directed toward
the altar. A characteristic of the age is the relation, less or more
sentimental, between a married knight and a lady not his wife; a
relation rather expected of the former, and countenanced in the latter.
This peculiar dual system of domestic and knightly love may be ascribed
to various influences, such as the prosaic influence of early and
dowered marriages, subject to parental arrangement, or the feudal life
which for considerable periods kept gentlemen away from their own homes
in residence in the larger castles, or the idleness of such a society,
or again the popularity of love-lyrics and romance-recitals, which
would tend to sentimentalize their audience. At any rate, it came to be
a fashionable idea that the highest love was independent of marriage,
and the most poetically inclined,--the troubadours and the
minnesingers--were famous for their impassioned and submissive service
of married ladies. It is from these poets' accounts of their own
love-trials that we learn most about this phase of mediaevalism, and in
their contented sufferings we see once more that the joy of all romantic
love is in the lover.

Although there is danger of generalizing too widely from literary
indications, we may believe that chivalric society was appreciably
marked by formal amatory disciplines. Was it all for nothing these
ceremonial disciplines? Can it be that these Don Quixote prototypes, who
trifled away their frivolous days in lady-worship so trivial, did
anything to help the Prince to take Cinderella from the ashes? The
ashes, then the fairy coach; first the drudge, then the sentimental
plaything, then at last the friend. In those days, as perhaps always,
the lover objectified himself in his love, to the extent of finding in
her his own _ideal feminine_. The very fact that this self, which he
probably called into conscious life only as he created it in another,
represented the most refined side of his thought, as is shown in the old
poets' recurrent epithets of "constant, chaste, good," etc., made the
devotion a refining and dignifying experience, especially for the days
when men and women had less in common than they have now. These
lady-services, where the lover often was denied intimacy for a
considerable time, kept up the illusion which the devotee himself may
have half felt was sentimental and artificial. We may reply to little
Peterkin that some good did come of it at last, even for the more
commonplace of these servants of abstract womanhood. Even if the
"visionary gleam" left no permanent illumination, the men were better
for seeing it brightening through their darkness now and then. At its
best, lady-loving gave the mediaeval knights consideration for women and
a measure of gentleness. If it only stimulated some to fight hard, they
would have fought anyway, and the motive was a shade less brutal than a
directly selfish one.

But such an eccentric social idea, especially when the poetic
exhilaration of its earlier hours has passed by, was sure to bring out
extravagant sentimentalists, whose romantic sensibility with no check
from practical judgment, ran wild steeplechases of nonsense. Such, for
example, was the Provencal poet, Peter Vidal, one of the most famous
troubadours, who carried his romantic infatuations so far that he became
crack-brained. The name of one of his ladies was Lupa, Mistress Wolf;
and if he had contented himself with assuming a wolfish device for his
coat-of-arms, as he did, and having himself called Mr. Wolf, he would
have done nothing very peculiar, for that age. But it occurred to him
that it would be a graceful symbol to wear a wolf's skin, and after he
had procured one which quite covered him, he got down on all-fours, and
trotted through the street; and all went charmingly until one day, while
he was exhibiting himself in this fashion about his lady's estate, a
pack of dogs was deceived by the metaphor, and the allegorical lover was
badly bitten before rescue arrived.

But the most detailed example of mediaeval gallantry is that presented in
the work already mentioned, the autobiography of the thirteenth-century
minnesinger, Ulrich von Liechtenstein. The poem is a prolix narrative
of his amatory religion, extending through some sixteen thousand lines,
and containing a large number of lyrics composed in the wooing of two
ladies to whom he consecrated his literary and romantic life. We utterly
tire of the commonplaces in which he praises them. We reflect that not a
single specific incident is ever introduced to illustrate the inner
character of either; the descriptions have no color, except in the
heartlessness of the first beloved, whose virtue and humor alike Ulrich
apparently misses. Yet this presumably undesigned caricature of the more
poetic twelfth-century chivalric love gives important suggestions of the
times, and Ulrich himself is a knight and a poet worth knowing.

The impression that his romance makes upon a modern reader is something
like that of a beetle hovering above a lily. He played zany to the
gentlemen of an early generation who had amused their leisurely lives by
courtly lady-service; as he emulated their feats of sentimental
gallantry, he stumbled and fell. The odd thing is that after each fall
he called for his tables: "Meet it is I set it down." Undoubtedly many
marvelled and admired, as they looked on: others marvelled and laughed.
Perhaps he mistook the laughter for applause. It may be that the sound
was lost in the applause of his own simple-minded complacency. But yet,
though this gallant was born to a foolish horoscope, his life gained a
good fortune denied multitudes who lived sensibly,--he saw the stars of
his destiny, and he loved them. Their combination caused a silly career,
yet individually they were admirable,--simplicity of nature, theoretical
reverence for womanhood, patient love, regard for stately old usages.
If defective eyesight makes a man fancy a burdock a rosebush, and if he
tends and cherishes the absurd idealization,--at least, the man has a
sentiment for roses.

The earliest fact which Ulrich has confided to us, is that in his
childhood he used to ride about on sticks, in imitation of the knights,
and while in that simple age he noticed that the poetry which people
read, and the conversation of wise men which he overheard, kept
declaring that no one could become a worthy man without serving
unwaveringly good ladies, and that "no one was right happy unless he
loved as dearly as his own life some one whose virtue made her fitly
called a woman." Whereupon, he thought in his simplicity that since pure
sweet women so ennoble men's lives, he, whatever happened, would always
serve ladies. In such thoughts he grew up until his twelfth year, when
he began a four or five years' term as page to a lady who was good,
chaste, and gentle, complete in virtues, beautiful, and of high rank.
She was destined to give Ulrich much trouble, and the lover's sweet
solicitude began at once, as he started in his teens. For his constant
attention found nothing in her but what was good and charming, and he
feared--this boy of thirteen--that she might not care for him. His ups
and downs of fortune are reported for us in the popular mediaeval form
(used for example by Map, and one as late as by Villon), of a dialogue
between his heart and his body. Heart is hopeful, but Body has the
better wit. Yet even if she is too high-born to notice him, he will
always serve her late and early, and in the interim between his childish
page-waiting, and the bold knighthood to be his when he grows up, he
gathers pretty summer flowers, and carries them to her. When she took
them in her white hand, he was happy.

As the time came near for him to leave her household, the youth grew
emotional: when at table water was poured over those lovely white hands,
he transformed her finger-glass into a tumbler. A German dry-as-dust has
laughed at Ulrich for this.

But the tender little Teutonic blossom could unfold its youth no longer
in the sunshine of its lady-desire. The stern father appeared, and
transferred the lover, his "grief showing well the power of love," to
the service of an Austrian Margrave. "My body departed, but my heart
remained"; and Ulrich pauses for a moment to point out the strangeness
of the paradox. "Whenever I rode or walked, my heart never left her; it
saw her at all times, night and day."

His new master was a knightly gentleman, professedly a lady-servant, and
the lessons that Ulrich had caught as a child from the conversation in
his father's hall were reinforced by this Margrave Henry. He was taught
the best style of riding, the refinements of address to ladies, and
poetical composition, and assured that whoever would live worthily must
be a lady's true subject. "It adorns a youth--sweet speech to women....
To succeed well with them, have sweet words with true deeds."

After four years of such instruction, his father's death called him home
to inherit his property, and he spent the three years that followed by
tourneying in the noviciate of knighthood. At Vienna, in 1222, during
the great festival in celebration of the marriage of Leopold's daughter,
where five thousand knights were present, and tourneying and other
entertainments of chivalry were mingled with much dancing, Ulrich made
one of the two hundred and fifty squires who received their spurs. But
the occasion was otherwise memorable to him, for here he saw his lady
again. She recognized him, and told one of his friends of her pleasure
at seeing become a knight one who had been her page when a little
fellow. The mere simple foolish thought that she would perhaps have him
for her own knight, as he tells us, was sweet and good, and put him in
high spirits. Indeed this was all the contentment which the blushing
young knight desired:

     "Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in
     dreams?"

Ulrich did not wake from his to do anything so practical as to speak
face to face with her, but gaily rode off to a summer of adventure in
twelve tournaments, wherein he invariably fared well, thanks to his
devotion.

German sentiment has always shown a butterfly's sensibility to winter
and rough weather, and with the last of autumn, Ulrich's spirit grows
heavy. He longs to see his lady, he knows that now he would speak to
her. There are no tourneys to distract him, and in care of heart he
rose, lay down, sat, and walked. As it chanced, a cousin of his knew
this only lovely one, and the taxing office of a lover's confidante fell
heavily upon her, and remained for some years. After beating about the
bush with her for a while, he confessed the truth, only to receive
point-blank advice to give up so hopeless an aspiration. Never! on the
contrary she must help him in his perseverance by visiting the lady and
presenting her with a copy of the verses which Ulrich has been composing
for her as a confession of his love. His cousin consented, but her
mission resulted in a scornful rejection of the suit, softened by
compliments upon the poem. He was advised to abandon his quest, for the
lady seriously objected to his mouth. "Nothing but grim death can drive
me from her; I will serve her all my life," he exclaimed. But he felt
that the criticism upon his mouth was a fair one, and he determined to
pay attention to it.

Poor Ulrich, with so much sentiment, yet with such physical
deficiencies; with such correct perception of the use of lips, yet
having such uninviting ones of his own. In one of his songs he tells us:

    When a lady on her lover
      Looks and smiles, and for a kiss
    Shapes her lips, he can discover
      Never joy so great; his bliss
          Transcends measure:
    O'er all pleasures is his pleasure.

But until he was quite in his twenties, his experience of this
blessedness must have been of those

                   "By hopeless fancy feigned
    On lips that are for others";

for Ulrich confesses to the deformity of what he calls three lips; that
is, a bad hare-lip.

But this protagonist of mediaeval Quixotism has energy and nerve, as well
as sentiment. In spite of his cousin's dissuasions (this plain-minded
lady tells him to take the body God has given him, instead of arrogantly
improving upon his creation), Ulrich rides off to find the best surgeon
in the country, and submit to an operation. But the doctor decides that
the time of year is unsuitable; he must wait until winter is past, keep
his three lips until May.

At last spring comes and Ulrich returns to the doctor. Upon the way he
meets a page of his lady's, to whom he confides the purpose of his
journey, and whose presence he secures as a witness. Early one Monday
morning the surgeon received his patient, laid out his instruments
before him, and produced several straps. At sight of the latter, martial
dignity recoiled, and Ulrich refused to allow himself to be bound. It
was to no purpose that he was told of the danger involved in even a
twitch; he said with spirit that he came of his own will, and if
anything happened amiss he alone would be to blame. Whereupon he sat
calmly upon a bench, and without a tremor allowed the surgeon to "cut
his mouth above his teeth and farther up. He cut like a master, I
endured like a man."

Ulrich describes the discomfort which he experienced during the healing
of the wound, in details which give an unpleasant notion of the methods
of mediaeval surgery. As he was able to eat and drink scarcely anything,
he wasted in flesh, and his only comfort was the thought of her for whom
he had suffered. During the confinement, he composed another dancing
song in her honor, which, after his recovery he entrusted to his cousin,
who forwarded it with a letter of her own. Presently an answer came. The
lady is to spend the next Monday night near by, in the course of a
journey, and she will be very happy to see her friend's relative, and
learn from himself how things are. Time changes the significance of
letters, among other things. This lady-like note, which gave such a
heart-leap to Ulrich's sentimental hope, interests scholars to-day as
being the earliest prose letter in German.

On Tuesday morning, when Ulrich appeared at the chapel where the lady's
chaplain was singing mass before her, she bowed without speaking. After
the service she rode off, and Ulrich had found no chance to meet her.
His cousin, however, told him that everything was favorable, and that
the lady would allow him to ride with her that day. So he galloped off
in gay spirits, and soon overtook the cavalcade. But alas for his
self-possession; when he reaches her his head drops and he cannot find a
single word. Another knight was riding with her. Ulrich's heart makes a
speech to his body, reproaching it for cowardice; "If you go on without
speaking to her now, she will never be good to you again." So he rides
up to her and gets a sweet glance, but still he cannot speak. Heart
nudges Body and whispers: "Speak now, speak now, speak now!" All through
the day Body tries, he tries over and over, but he cannot. Alas, as a
poet of his own day said:

    "Mit gedanken wirt erworben niemer wibes kint:
        .     .     .     .     .     .     .
    Des enkan si wizzen niht."[5]

When they reach their lodging-place for the night, he wishes to assist
the only one in dismounting, but she is not sufficiently flattered by
his attentions to accept them; she says that he is sick and useless, and
not strong enough to help her down. The attending gentlemen laugh
merrily at that, and the ever sweet, constant, good, and so forth, as
she slides from her horse, catches hold of Ulrich's hair, without any
one's noticing it (however that can have been done), and pulls a lock
out by the roots. "Take this for being afraid," she whispers; "I have
been deceived by other accounts of you." Reproaching himself, and
wishing God to take his life, he stood gawkily where she left him,
absorbed in remorse for his awkwardness, until a knight admonished him
to step aside and allow the ladies to go by to their rooms. Whereupon he
rode off to his inn, and swore that he was ill.

As he tossed restlessly through the night, he talked with himself as
usual, lamenting his birth, and assuring himself that should he live a
thousand years he could never again be happy. "Not to speak one word to
her! My worthlessness has lost my lady." But in the morning he rode up
to her on the street. No silence this time: "Thy grace, gracious lady!
Graciously be gracious to me. Thou art my joy's abiding place, the
festival of my joys." Like many shy people, Ulrich talked fluently
enough when he was once started, and he was only in the midst of his
protestations when the lady interrupted him. "Hush, you are too young;
ride on before me. Talking may hurt you, it never can help you. It would
be amiss for others to hear what you are saying. Leave me in peace; you
grow troublesome." Then she beckoned to another knight, and directed
that she should never again be attended by less than two gentlemen.

It was in the book of lady-service that no repulse was a discouragement.
"This morning," says the heroine in Bret Harte's parody of _Jane Eyre_,
"this morning he flung his boot at me! Now I know he loves me." Ulrich
rode off, thinking that he had met with good success in telling her a
part of his love, before the interruption.

Another summer passed in tourneying, and during another winter he tried
to amuse himself by making poetry for his lady. This time he sent her a
more pretentious tribute, his first "Buechlein," a poem of some four
hundred lines. Like most of its kind, it is formal, sentimentally
prolix, and supplicatory, yet not without a certain pleasant interest.
He begs her from the wealth of her loveliness to grant him some trifling
favor which she never can miss:

    What is worse the bloomy heath,
    If a few flowers for the sake
    Of a garland some one break?

He wishes it were himself that the messenger is about to deliver to her:

    Little book, I fain would be,
    When thou comest, changed to thee.
    When her fair white hand receives
    Thine assemblement of leaves,
    And her glances, shyly playing,
    Thee so happy are surveying.
    And her red mouth comes close by,
    I would steal a kiss, or die.

But the unsatisfactory manuscripts were returned at once. The lady told
the bearer that she recognized the merit of the poetry, but she would
have nothing to do with it. Like many poets of those days when monks and
ladies constituted the educated classes, like his predecessor, the great
master of high mediaeval romance, Ulrich could neither read nor write,
and for such delicate personal affairs as correspondence with his lady
he depended upon his confidential clerk. This confidant of his passion
was absent when the "Buechlein" came back, but the eager eyes of the poet
looked through the pages over which they had evidently wandered before
he dismissed his labors to their fate, repeating the lines from memory
as he looked over the characters which should interpret his loving
patience to the lady who would not let him speak it to her; and as he
looked, he detected an addition to what he had sent, an appendix of ten
lines. The slighted letter found a home in his bosom, and for ten days
he awaited his secretary's return. His happy hopes--those ten days were
so cheerful. But when the little response was at last interpreted, away
with hopes and cheerfulness. To make plainness trebly plain, his cruel
correspondent had copied out three times the sentiment: "Whoever desires
what he should not, has refused himself."

Summer again, and the lover has diversion in the sports of chivalry. Any
one interested in the details of mediaeval tournaments will find in
Ulrich's narrative a valuable and lively record of the tourney held at
Friesach in 1224. His sense for material splendor is well shown by his
full accounts of the costuming and tent equipments. The trustworthiness
of the minor points may be questioned when we recall that the
_Frauendienst_ was composed more than thirty years later, but as a
sketch of thirteenth-century chivalry, no doubt it is accurate. The
heralds running hither and thither, and shouting as they arranged for
the contests, with their cries to "good gallant knights to risk honor,
goods, and life for true women"; the squires crowding the ways, loud
noise of drums, flute-playing, blowing of horns, great trumpeting,--we
have the old picture, made vivid in English by Chaucer in the _Knight's
Tale_, and by Tennyson.

Ulrich rode in disguise, prompted by the sentimentalist's
self-consciousness, always delighted in attracting attention and making
himself talked of. According to his own account, he did good hearty
tourneying, breaking ten spears with one antagonist, seven with
another, five with a third, six with a fourth, in a single day. The
meeting continued for ten days, and Ulrich grows prolix in his
particulars, though he is modest enough about his own exploits,
pronouncing himself neither the best nor the worst of the participants.
The accidents of jousting, through which many were left at Friesach with
broken limbs and other injuries, and the misfortunes which compelled
others to have recourse to the Jews for loans, did not disturb the
musical contestant. At the end he rode cheerfully off to his cousin with
another song for the same inattentive ear. She promised to report, as
she sent it, that no one in the great tourney had excelled him.

This lyric is the poem by which modern German students of their old
literature have been best pleased, and we shall hardly dissent from
Scherer's commendation. For it is both a typical minnesong, in its
treatment of nature and love, and also fortunate in its union of
sentiment, force, finish, and a ring of personal meaning. Omitting two
of its stanzas, it goes as follows:

    Now the little birds are singing
      In the wood their darling lay;
    In the meadow flowers are springing,
      Confident in sunny May.
    So my heart's bright spirits seem
      Flowers her goodness doth embolden;
      For in her my life grows golden,
    As the poor man's in his dream.

    Ah, her sweetness! Free from turning
      Is her true and constant heart;
    Till possession banish yearning,
      Let my dear hope not depart.
    Only this her grace I'll pray:
      Wake me from my tears, and after
      Sighs let comfort come and laughter;
    Let my joy not slip away.

    Blissful May, the whole world's anguish
      Finds in thee its single weal;
    Yet the pain whereof I languish,
      Thou, nor all the world, canst heal.
    What least joy may ye impart,
      She so dear and good denied me?
      In her comforts ever hide me,
    All my life her loving heart.

But elegant and tender as in the original these verses are, their object
returned a slighting answer, and added that the messenger must not be
sent again. People would come to have suspicions. Ulrich made another
set of verses, and went off to another joust. There one of his fingers
was seriously wounded, and in his anxiety to save it he offered a
surgeon a thousand pounds for a cure. The treatment was unsuccessful,
and, after showing a good deal of temper, he went to a new surgeon, on
the way beguiling himself of his pain by composing another poem upon the
old theme. But a shock was at hand; a friend divulged to him his closely
kept secret. "This lady [still unnamed to us] is the May-time of your
heart." What though this friend believed that the lady cared for him?
"My head sank down, my heart sighed, my mouth was dumb," in terror lest
it might be through his fault that the object of his devotion had been
discovered. For secrecy was the first of a chivalric lover's virtues,
even about the object of his passion. Yet the pain was not without
compensation, inasmuch as this gentleman, who declared that he had
already kept the secret for two years and a half, volunteered to make
another appeal. So off to the home of the inexorable went anew the
story of unflinching devotion, the loss of a finger in a tournament for
her glory not unmentioned. Ulrich's cause was pleaded with fervor, and
in winning style. The lover was praised and prayed for. The song he had
sent was even sung, instead of being formally delivered. A faithful and
versatile legate was this proxy wooer, but it was all to no purpose. The
lady declared that she would grow old in entire ignorance of any love
but her husband's. She warned the messenger that Ulrich would find
himself in trouble if he should persist in annoying her with such
sentimental folly; she would not receive such attentions from the
highest-born--not even from a king.

The news saddened, but did not cast down. "What if she refuses me?"
cried Ulrich; "that shall not disturb me. If she hates me to-day, I will
serve her so that later she shall like me. Were I to give up for a cold
greeting, could a little word drive me away from my high hope, I should
have no sound mind or manly mood. Whatever the true, sweet one does to
me, for that I must be grateful." But now another summer was over, and
he diverted himself by a pilgrimage to Rome. After Easter he returned,
on his way composing this sweetly conceived and rather pretty lyric:

    Ah, see, the touch of spring
    Hath graced the wood with green;
    And see, o'er the wide plain
    Sweet flowers on every spray.
    The birds in rapture sing;
    Such joy was never seen:
    Departed all their pain,
    Comfort has come with May.

    May comforts all that lives,
    Except me, love-sick man;
    Love-stricken is my heart,
    This drives all joys away.
    When life some pleasure gives,
    In tears my heart will scan
    My face, and tell its smart;
    How then can pleasure stay?

    Vowed constantly to woo
    High love am I; that good
    While I pursue, I see
    No promise of success.
    Pure lady, constant, true,
    The crown of womanhood,
    Think graciously of me,
    Through thy high worthiness.

The knight passed his summer in Steierland under arms, and after
pleasant experiences he sent his messenger again, only to have his suit
repelled with the same coldness and decision as before. The report was
even more discouraging, for the lady, who had been told of his losing a
finger in her service, had now learned that he still had it; nor was she
moved by the assurance that it was almost useless. The desire to keep
the wounded member had led him to large expense of money and time, but
he cared for it no longer. He set about the composition of another long
elegy, which explains how his heart loves her, and weeps for her favor,
as a poor and orphaned child weeps after comfort; so ardently he loves
her, that he gladly sacrifices anything, and as a pledge of his constant
fidelity, he sends her one of his fingers, lost in that service for
which it was born.

After the poem was ready, he directed a goldsmith to make a fine case,
in which he enclosed it. But he put in something more; he had the
convalescent finger amputated, and sent it to the chiding critic as a
proof that he had not lied in saying that he had lost it for her. Yet
even this failed to please so unsympathetic a mistress. She said she
wondered how any one could be so foolish as to cut off his finger: he
would have been able to serve ladies better by keeping it. However, she
would retain the token of his consideration, but a thousand years of his
service would be lost on her. Ulrich was jubilant, for he was confident
that with this memento, she would always think of him.[6]

Now a large idea visits this sanguine gentleman. Gone to Rome on a
pilgrimage, that is what he will pretend; he rigs himself out with a
wallet and staff which he obtains from a priest, and trudges off. But
something more novel and magnificent is haunting his ingenious mind. It
is to Venice that he goes--cautiously, so as not to be observed. Upon
his arrival, he takes lodgings in an out-of-the-way inn, so that no one
may hear of him. There he spends the winter, making a liberal
expenditure for costumes for himself and a retinue. He dresses himself
as Queen Venus, in complete feminine attire, even to the long braids of
hair which figure so prominently in the descriptions of the ladies of
that age.

When spring came, he sent a courier over the route that he intended to
take on his journey homeward, with a circular-letter that contained a
list of thirty places at which Lady Venus would appear, and joust with
all contestants. A ring which makes beautiful and keeps true love, was
offered to whoever might break a spear against her. If she should cast a
knight down, he should become a loyal knight to women everywhere; if he
were to overthrow her, she would give him her horse. But to no one would
she show her face or hand.

Thirty days later he started on his disguised errantry. His retinue
consisted of a marshal, a cook, a banner-bearer, two trumpeters, three
boys to take charge of three sumpters, three squires for the three
war-steeds, four finely dressed squires, each holding three spears, two
maids--good-looking, he tells us,--and two fiddlers.

    Who raised my spirits, fiddling loud
    A marching tune, which made me proud.

Behind these he rode himself, dressed, like the entire cavalcade,
entirely in white,--cape, hood, shirt, coat reaching to his feet,
embroidered silk gloves, and those hair-braids hanging to his waist. "In
my love-longing heart, I rejoiced thus to serve my lady."

The narrative of this "Venus-journey" is prolonged, detailed, and
tedious, and only two or three episodes need be mentioned. At Treviso, a
crowd of women are gathered about his lodging, when he comes out on his
way to early mass, and he takes comfort in thinking how well-dressed he
is. In the church, a countess suggests kissing him, conformably to the
kiss of peace custom; the attraction is stronger than the desire for
disguise, and he lifts his veil. She sees that Lady Venus is a man, but
she kisses him nevertheless. "That raised my spirits," Ulrich confides
to us, "for a lady's kiss is delightful"; and he goes on to say that
"every one who ever kissed a lady's mouth knows that nothing is so sweet
as the kiss of a noble lady. A high-born true woman who has a red mouth
and a fair body, whenever she kisses a man he can judge of a lady's
kiss, and of it he is ever glad. A lady's kiss is still better than
good, and it fills a heart with joy." No wonder that many ladies
collected at his inn, to bid so sentimental a knight God-speed. From
their prayers he assures us that he gained good fortune, "for God cannot
slight ladies' petitions," an imputation of gallantry to God, for which
we find curious mediaeval parallels.

Wherever the knight goes, numerous contestants are awaiting him, in this
idle age when no one had anything to do. Some of these, also, assume
disguises, one as a monk, another in female costume, his shield and
spear aesthetic with flowers. But the travelling combatant is always the
winner. At one point during the journey he steals off for a couple of
days to a place which he has never mentioned previously: namely, to his
home. The love-stricken lady-servant speaks with the most unaffected
simplicity of the joy with which he rode away to see his wife:

     "Who was just as dear to me as she could be.... The good
     woman received me just as a lady should receive her very dear
     husband. I had made her happy by my visit. My arrival had
     taken away her sadness. She was glad to see me, and I was
     glad to see her; with kisses the good woman received me. The
     true woman was glad to see me, and joyously I took my ease
     and pleasure there two days."

This appears tautological, but it also seems sincere.

But a wound was in store for his sensibility. One day he had gone to a
retired place for a bath, and his attendant had gone to bring a suit.
While thus left quite alone and unprotected, a lady sent by her servant
a suit of female garments, a piece of tapestry, a coat, a girdle, a
fine buckle, a garland, a ring with a ruby red as a lady's sweet mouth,
and a letter. To receive such a gift from a lady not one's love was
treason. He bade the page take the things away, but he would not; nay,
he presently returned with two others, carrying fresh beautiful roses,
which they strewed all about Ulrich in the bath, while he raged and
fumed to think of the insult offered to his unprotected condition. To
think of receiving a gift from any but his own lady! And, of all gifts,
a ring!

The next present that came was received very differently. After all
these years of neglect, the mistress of his life sent Ulrich an
affectionate message, and a ring which her white hand had worn for ten
years, as a token that she took part in the honors which he was gaining,
and rejoiced in his worthiness. Possibly the knight's name was gaining
currency as genuinely valorous. But fancy his ecstasy! "This little ring
shall ever lift up my heart. Well for me that I was born, and that I
found a lady so true, sweet, blissful, lady of all my joys, brightness
of my heart's joys," and so forth. He was informed that many knights
were waiting to contest with him at Vienna. "What harm can happen to me,
since my lady is gracious? If for every knight there were three, I could
master them all."

Outside of amorous and knightly themes, Ulrich's mind is not active, but
he occasionally shows a philosophical observation on social topics, as
in the present context, where he comments on female vanity in dress:

     "Woman's nature, young and old, likes many clothes. Even if
     she does not wear them all, she is pleased to have them, so
     that she can say, 'an if I liked, I could be better dressed
     than other people.' Good clothes are becoming to beautiful
     women, and my foolish masculine opinion is that a man should
     take pleasure in dressing them well, since he should hold his
     wife as his own body."

Certainly Ulrich took pleasure in dressing himself well.

The Venus-journey ended, and Ulrich counted up the results. Two hundred
and seventy-one of his spears had been broken, and he had broken three
hundred and seven; he had brought honor upon his lady by his loyalty and
valor; and had shown her constant devotion, even though he had
momentarily fallen in love with a bewitching woman at one of his
stopping-places, and taken advantage of his disguise to kiss various
fair ones at mass. Is it possible that the anonymous heroine heard of
such trivial infidelities? At any rate, the next visit of the messenger
brought a bitter dismissal, with cruel charges of inconstancy. She would
always hate him, and never hold him dear; she was angry with herself for
giving him a ring; she bade him return it at once. Alas, poor Ulrich!
Never had he entertained a false thought; if he had ever been guilty of
one, he would in no wise have survived it. "I sat weeping like a child;
from weeping I was almost blind. I wrung my hands pitilessly; in my
distress my limbs cracked as one snaps dry wood." Well may the poet
declare that exhibition of grief no child's play. As the lover and his
bosom friend sat weeping together, Ulrich's brother-in-law admonished
him that such behavior disgraced the name of knight; moreover, there was
no reason for melancholy now, when the champion ought to be happy in the
fine reputation just made. "If women hear how you are behaving, they
will always hate you for this weak mood." Ulrich tried to tell about his
grief for the lady whom he had served so long, but the strain was too
great: "The blood in truth burst out from my mouth and my nose, so that
I was all blood." It was perhaps natural for his friend to thank God
that "before his death he had been permitted to see one man who truly
loves." Yet he bade him be courageous. "Nothing helps so much with
ladies as good courage. Melancholy doesn't succeed with them at all.
Joyousness always has served well with women."

Water is stable compared with Ulrich's temperament. Close upon the
anguish of this renewed rejection he goes home for a ten-days' visit
with his wife,--"my dear wife, who could not be dearer to me even though
I had another woman for the lady of my life." Within eight lines this
mercurial poet speaks of his comfort with his wife, and of the suffering
of his love-languishing heart.

Another message from his dream brought a renewed expression of coldness.
She felt kindly to him, but she never would grant favor to any one. But
another song and messenger secure at last the promise of an interview.
Yet notice the conditions. Evidently this lady was a humorist, to whom
her former page was amusing when her less complaisant mood did not find
him tiresome. And perhaps she thought that he could not accept her
terms. She says she will see him if he will come the next Sunday morning
before breakfast, dressed in poor clothes, and in company with a squad
of lepers who have a camp near her castle. But even then he is to
indulge in no hope of her love. The distance is so great that he thinks
he will be unable to cover it in time; but he is told that he must, for
"women are very strange; they wish men constantly to carry out their
desires, and to any one who fails to do so they are not well disposed."
On Saturday he rode thirty-six miles, lost two horses by the forced
journey, very likely over rough country, and was wearied by the exertion
of so hard an effort. But he succeeded, and as soon as they reach the
neighborhood of the castle, he and his two companions put on poor
clothes--the shabbiest they could procure,--and with leper cups and long
knives for their safety among such outcasts of society, they go to the
spot where thirty lepers are huddled together. Mediaeval charity and
religion are illustrated by this incident; the miserable beggars explain
that a lady of the castle is ill, and therefore they often receive food
and money in recompense for their prayers for her recovery. Beating his
clapper like one of them, he goes toward the castle gate, and meets an
envoy maid who bids him beware of failing to obey every command
literally, and adds that her mistress will not see him yet awhile. That
personal vanity which always marked him had submitted to stains of herbs
to disguise his face, as well as to miserable and ragged dress, and off
he went, in the servitude of love, and sat among the lepers, ate and
drank among them--nay, even went about begging for scraps, which,
however, he threw under a bush. The foul odors and the filthiness of the
wretches about him made the day almost insufferable, but at last night
came, and he hid himself in a field of grain, getting well stung by
insects and drenched in a cold storm. But he told himself that "whoever
has in his troubles sweet anticipation, he can endure them." In the
morning he went to the castle again, and was encouraged to believe that
he would be received that evening. So he returned and ate with the
beggars; then he escaped to a wood, and with true old German
nature-sentiment, he sat down where the sun fell through the trees and
listened to the birds--many were singing--and forgot the cold.

Toward evening he secured another interview with the maid, and received
directions for the night. He and his companion hid in the ditch before
the castle, skulking from the observation of the patrol, until well
after dark; then when the signal light appeared at a certain window he
went beneath it, and found a rope made of clothes hanging down. In this
he fastened himself, and hands above began to raise him, but when he was
half way up they could raise him no farther, and he was let down to the
ground. This happened three times; and yet, guileless Ulrich, you had no
glimmering that perhaps it was a joke? The companion was lighter than
his lord, and it occurred to the two that they had better change places.
So they did, and the substitute was lifted into the window by the
waiting ladies above, and then Ulrich himself arrived there. He was
given a coat (an accident below had compelled him to leave his on the
ground), and, blissful moment, he was ushered into the presence of the
woman whom he had so long served without even a glimpse. It was a
brilliant social scene which broke upon those enamoured eyes, indeed too
brilliant and too social to correspond with a lover's sentiment for
"dual solitude." His soul's desire, richly dressed, sat upon a couch,
surrounded by a bevy of ladies. Her husband, it is true, was not
present, but with an absence of tact (as it must have seemed to Ulrich)
she fell to talking about him and her complete happiness in his love.
Their mutual confidence is so strong that he is quite willing to have
her receive any visitors whom she pleases, and she added that her true
mind served him better than any safeguard which he could put upon her.
Awkward as such a line of conversation made it, Ulrich began to tell the
story of his heart, and entreats her to respond to his devotion. She
assured him that she had no thought of ever loving him; she had
consented to this interview only to assure him of her kindly feeling,
and satisfy him from her own lips that he must cherish no romantic hope.
If he continued to ask her to love him, he should lose her favor. "I was
horrified," he declares, "and started up at the threat."

At this point in the interview he withdraws to talk to his cousin, who
was with other ladies in an adjoining apartment, and who advised him to
return and plead again. But an abrupt dismissal sends him into a moody
reflection, which culminates in a desperate resolve. Now or never; he
sends her word of his determination, and then rushes in and tells her
that if she will not say she loves him, he will kill himself then and
there. The lady sees that such a suicide would be compromising, and
tries to persuade him that perhaps she may some time. Ah, no such
coyness; she must confess her love to-night. Finally, as a last
resource, she thinks of employing the usual right of a courted
woman--putting her lover to a test of his devotion. He has already given
her so many that a trifling, a merely formal one will serve now. Let him
just get into the clothes-rope again and be lowered part way down, and
pulled back; then she will say she loves him. A glimmer of suspicion
flits over his mind, but she gives him her hand as a pledge, and he gets
into the rope. Now he is hanging outside the window, still holding the
dear hand, and such sweet things as she whispers, as she leans out--no
knight was ever so dear to her; now comes his contentment, all his
troubles are past now! She even coddles his chin with her disengaged
hand, and bids him kiss her. Kiss her! In his joy he lets go the hand he
was holding, to throw both arms about her neck, when suddenly he is
dropped to the ground so swiftly "that he ran great peril of his
life."[7]

In the rooms above a score of voices ringing with laughter, on the
ground a too credulous child of Mars and Venus, cursing his day. Ulrich
spies a deep pool and is about to drown himself, when his companion
arrives with a little present sent by the lady. She promises--(the
gentleman afterward confesses that this is a falsehood of his own to
preserve Ulrich from despair)--that if he will return in three weeks,
she will assure him of her real affection. But now it is near day, and
they must hasten off; providentially there is a tournament awaiting
them, which will distract his attention. But he sends his friend back to
have a talk with the lady, who is in a rather humorous mood, and says
that Ulrich made so much noise when he fell that one of the guard
thought it was the Devil. But though she laughs, she evidently has had
enough of such fun, for she tells the messenger that if his lord wishes
her favor he must make the journey over-sea. Ulrich agrees to go, but he
is warned against the almost hopeless dangers of that most formidable of
pilgrimages; he is reminded that no one ever took such a perilous
journey except for God, and that he would surely sacrifice his soul, if
he lost his life thus for a woman.

But one grows tired of the story, which runs on with ups and downs, over
the long thirteen years through which Ulrich served this lady. Toward
the end of the period he was plainly growing impatient. He wrote more
lyrics, which suggest here and there that devotion without love in
return is foolish, and that he is contemplating a change. Finally he
conceived himself treated shamefully (we are not told what the
discourtesy was which he could not idealize), and he made a final break
with his old worship. But now the time passed wearily, and he felt that
he must still have a lady to serve. "How joyfully once the days went by;
alas, no longer have I any service to render. How happy ladies' service
makes one." But the knight has learned the lesson of his trials, and
this time he arranges for a judicious passion. He runs over all his
female acquaintance, to see which of them he had best select. Finally he
fixes upon one who, of course, is beautiful and good, and wholly free
from change; who has finished manners and gentle ways, chastity and
force of character, and to her he offers his service, which she accepts.

From this point in Ulrich's memoirs we have an increasing number of
lyrics; he likes them all, but complains that one or two were not
appreciated by the public, though whoever was clever enough to
understand his poetry, he tells us, did appreciate it. Perhaps we are
not clever enough to understand it all; but some of the songs, as he
himself says, "are good for dancing and very cheerful; the martial ones
were gladly sung when in the jousts fire sprung from helmets," and more
than one of his poems is a contribution to the graceful though minor
work of the later minnesingers. For example:

    Summer-hued,
    Is the wood,
    Heath and field; debonair
    Now is seen
    White, brown, green,
    Blue, red, yellow, everywhere.
    Everything
    You see spring
    Joyously, in full delight;
    He whose pains
    Dear love deigns
    With her favor to requite--
    Ah, happy wight.

    Whosoe'er
    Knows love's care,
    Free from care well may be;
    Year by year
    Brightness clear
    Of the May shall he see.
    Blithe and gay
    All the play
    Of glad love shall he fulfil;
    Joyous living
    Is in the giving
    Of high love to whom she will,
    Rich in joys still.

    He's a churl
    Whom a girl
    Lovingly shall embrace,
    Who'll not cry
    "Blest am I"--
    Let none such show his face.
    This will cure you
    (I assure you)
    Of all sorrows, all alarms;
    What alloy
    In his joy
    On whom white and pretty arms
    Bestow their charms?

And again:

    Sweet, in whom all things behooving,
    Virtue, brightness, beauty, meet,
    Little troubles thee this loving,
    Thou art safe above it, sweet.
    My love-trials couldst thou feel
    From thy dainty lips should steal
    Sighs like mine, as deep and real.

    Sir, what is love? Prithee, answer;
    Is it maid or is it man?
    And explain, too, if you can, sir,
    How it looks; though I began
    Long ago, I ask in vain;
    Everything you know explain,
    That I may avoid its pain.

    Sweet, love is so strong and mighty
    That all countries own her sway;
    Who can speak her power rightly?
    Yet I'll tell thee what I may.
    She is good and she is bad;
    Makes us happy, makes us sad;
    Such moods love always had.

    Sir, can love from care beguile us
    And our sorrowing distress?
    With fair living reconcile us,
    Gaiety and worthiness?
    If her power hath controlled
    Everything as I've just told,
    Sure her grace is manifold.

    Sweet, of love there's more to tell thee;
    Service she with rapture pays;
    With her joys and honors dwell; we
    Learn from her dear virtue's ways.
    Mirth of heart and bliss of eye
    Whom she loves shall satisfy;
    Nor will she higher good deny.

    Sir, I fain would win her wages,
    Her approval I would seek;
    Yet distress my mind presages;
    Ah, for that I am too weak.
    Pain I never can sustain.
    How may I her favors gain?
    Sir, the way you must explain.

    Sweet, I love thee; be not cruel;
    Thou to love again must try.
    Make a unit of our dual,
    That we both become an "I."
    Be thou mine and I'll be thine.
    "Sir, not so; the hope resign.
    Be your own, and I'll be mine."

The latter part of this prolix autobiography is occupied by a detailed
account of a long tourneying trip, which he contrived as a parallel to
his Venus-journey, this time under the disguise of King Arthur. But the
narration of that ends at last, and Ulrich becomes reflective upon the
seasons and his lady. "Whoever sorrows at winter, and is made glad by
summer, lives like the bird which rejoices in sunny May. How distressing
is bad weather! Yet whatever the weather, her goodness gives me joy
which storms cannot disturb." Presently he tells us his feelings about
the life around him, for the social critics of mediaevalism felt the
inequalities of fortune and happiness quite as strongly as do the
social critics of to-day. Some time earlier Ulrich, in criticising a
number of knights whom he met, showed a noteworthily refined feeling for
generous qualities, and resistance against hardness and selfish aims. In
spite of this love-singer's belief in cheerfulness ("no one does well to
be sad except about sins," he wrote), the roughness of the age troubled
him, as it had troubled earlier and greater authors of his nation.
"Instead of being good, the rich work one another harm; the only
profession is that of plundering, the service of ladies is forsaken. The
young men are spendthrifts, and with pillaging consume their youth."
Indeed, the golden hour of chivalry had struck when Ulrich wrote, in his
later life, just past the middle of the thirteenth century. But this
sentimental absurdity, whose fanciful devotion and melodramatic moonings
we find so preposterous, kept a strain of the higher manhood. He was
good-hearted; he believed in the refined side of life, so far as he knew
it; in a rough time and place he loved gentleness; though born with a
large streak of the fool, he had also a pleasant element of the
simple-minded gentleman; and as he grew old amid fading ideals, over
which he had hung with effeminately romantic faith, the brutal and
joyless hardness of men perplexed and saddened him. Yet his simplicity
was his trouble's best physician; nature, the beauty and goodness of
true womanhood, his sense of inner virtue as opposed to worldly
estimates, and his poetry--in these he found comfort.

"Whatever people have done, I have been happy and sung of my love."

After Ulrich has told the story of his worldly and sentimental career,
he stops to think over the cause to which that career has been
consecrated. Has he made a mistake? Never! "When beauty and goodness
unite in woman, she is admirable; one whose goodness is clothed with a
noble spirit wears the best of garments. Even though a woman has little
beauty, if she has the raiment of goodness, men yet call her fair. Be
sure that no clothes better become a lady than goodness--it is better
than beauty, though that is excellent. By goodness a poor woman will
become truly a lady, and this the rich cannot be without it; nay,
shapely and noble though she may be, without this she is still no
womanly woman." ...

"Whoever loves the sight of pretty women," he goes on, "and will not
notice their goodness but only their bright charm, is like one who
gathers pretty flowers for their bright beauty's sake, and twines them
into a garland; then, finding that they are not fragrant, he is sorry
that he gathered them. But whoever understands plants, lets those grow
which have no sweet odor, and breaks off fragrant flowers."

For over thirty years he has served ladies, and he knows no truth so
certain as this, that nothing equals the mutual happiness of a true
woman and a loving man.

Yet sentiment can play only a minor part in life, after all. There are
four main objects of exertion, and upon these, as he ends his book, the
poet stops to reflect: The grace of God, honor, ease, and wealth. Some
strive for one, some for another, while others aim ineffectively at all,
win none, and hate themselves.

And what has this old German gallant to say of himself? In all these
revelations of his life, we catch no suggestions of selfishness or
meanness, but while fancying himself enacting high chivalric drama, he
has been wearing cap, and bells, and motley, lance in his left hand, a
bauble in his right. Then, too, he has been so self-satisfied with his
role. Well, the play is finished now, and Ulrich is sitting in the
green-room, thinking. His coat is flung aside, with one last jingle the
bells fall to the floor, he has dropped his bauble, and as he bows his
head and in his musing runs his fingers through his hair, the coxcomb
falls too. It is here in the green-room that he speaks his epilogue:

     "Of this last class am I; I have lived my life trying not to
     give up the three for any one. I desired and even hoped that
     I might obtain all the four. This hope has still deceived me,
     and I am made a fool by it. One day I will serve Him who has
     given me soul, life, thought, whatever I have; the next as a
     man I will strive for honor; then for wealth; on the fourth
     day I am for ease. Thus inconstant, I have passed my entire
     life."

Nothing accomplished--nothing even steadily aimed at. Nothing? With
characteristic buoyancy the gray-haired poet puts aside this sombre mood
of dissatisfaction with his fifty odd years. For in one point, at least,
he has been true. In this book, written only because his lady commanded,
he has spoken very many sweet words for worthy women, and throughout his
life he has been faithful to his love. "And I do believe that the very
true sweet God, through his very high goodness, will think on my
fidelity to her, and my constant service."

[Decoration]

FOOTNOTES:

[5]
    "A woman is never won by what is in one's thoughts:
        .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .
    Of that she can know nothing."

[6] With this extravagant but probably veracious incident, one naturally
compares the sacrifice of Guillem de Balaun's finger nail.

[7] These poet lovers seem to have been frequently laughed at. For
instance, Pierre Vidal was promised in their amusement anything by the
ladies whom he loved. Na Alazais was so indignant when he took
encouragement to steal his one kiss, that he was compelled to flee, and
go with Richard to the East.




[Decoration]

NEIDHART VON REUENTHAL, AND HIS BAVARIAN PEASANTS.


Our liveliest pictures of old German peasantry come, as we should
expect, from a singer of the knightly class. The masses had fewer and of
course less accomplished poets, and these would be most likely to please
their audiences by touching with the glamour of fashionable life such
work as they cared to make contemporary and imitative. Realistic social
transcripts usually come from culture. It may be that Neidhart von
Reuenthal had been brought up at the ducal court or in a castle, but
there is as good reason for conjecturing that his origin was among the
scenes of country life that he describes. Most of the courtly poets
belonged to the lower class of knights, and between this and the better
order of peasants there was no wide dividing line; indeed, a farmer with
a little land of his own and four free ancestors ("von allen vieren anen
ein gebure," as Neidhart says bitterly of his enemy the swaggering Ber),
by the old Saxon law stood higher than a knight not of free blood. The
agricultural class in the thirteenth century was becoming more impatient
of the costly conflicts of their military superiors and was also
suffering severely from the pillaging domestic raids of lawless knights,
who, as they grew bolder, established centres of reckless free-booting
to which they attracted wayward youth of the middle classes. Cities were
also getting larger, and the tradesmen joined with the established
gentry in thinking slightingly of the farming population. Accordingly
there was jealousy on one side and arrogance on the other, yet there was
still a meeting-place between the two classes. Depleted nobles would
marry daughters of wealthy peasants, and a gentleman whose fief lay
among well-to-do farmers might easily meet them in social relations.

A grant from the Bavarian Duke evidently isolated Neidhart from his own
companions, and he appears to have mingled freely with the peasantry,
though we cannot determine how early the contact began. He was born in
the latter part of the twelfth century, we may say about 1185, perhaps,
and with the exception of absence on Leopold VII's crusade of 1217-1219,
he apparently kept his home in his native Bavaria until about 1230, when
he lost the Duke's favor and turned as a homeless wanderer to Austria,
where he received welcome and another fief. The last date inferred from
his songs is 1236, in connection with the Emperor's coming, and he was
dead before the composition of Meier Helmbrecht, which is earlier than
1250.

So far as imitations prove popularity, he was one of the most popular of
mediaeval poets. It is easy to understand the pleasure that his verses
must have given, striking as they did into a new field, and executed
with literary skill, full of verve and humor, and appealing to strong
class prejudice. We must think of him as a gentleman fond of society, of
refined courtly habits, with an aristocratic contempt for pinchbeck
upstarts, yet not unwilling now and then to play the good-natured
acquaintance with middle-class people.

Though he ranks as a knight, his tastes were not military. He was
lively, quick-witted, and satirical; clever at musical invention;
genuinely interested in poetry. Moreover, he gave early evidence of an
independent literary taste, that dared to yawn at the methods practised
by the great minnesingers of his youth. By his singing he had obtained
sufficient favor with the Duke to receive a fief though away among the
peasantry; yet rather than relinquish a home of his own, that constant
dream of his profession, he made the merriest and the best of the time
he needed to spend on his estate.

The feeling for spring is largely an animal sensation, as the lambs in
the pasture, or dogs on the green, or little children remind us. The
comparison of loving something "as goats love the spring," goes back to
Greek literature. It has also been habitually associated with physical
sentiment, as the splendid proemium of Lucretius suggests. With this
buoyancy of spirits and emotional susceptibility, serious minds touched
with poetry have associated various deep and beautiful moods. But the
moral element that enters into such spring poems as Wordsworth's, is not
present in mediaeval literature. There we find poets feeling spring as
animals, as children, as lovers. Those were out-of-door generations;
hunting, riding, fighting, and enjoying themselves beneath the open sky,
were their chief employments. They found winter travel hard, for they
had no beaten roads; it caused a dreary interruption to their principal
engagements, and to a large extent confined them in narrow quarters, not
too comfortably warmed. In spite of all the amusements that could be
provided, the time must have dragged. If Romans could cry out as Ovid
did at the significance of spring, what must the season have meant to
the castled sons of central Europe. It is not strange then that their
nature-worship instituted in early times a festival to the genial
conqueror of frost and snow, and that this ceremony, as the old
superstitions died away, was continued in graceful traditions of village
customs. The first flowers or the earliest boughs in leaf served as the
signal for the ceremonial welcome of April or May. With widely varying
details, the youth of the parish would stream out to the fields or
woods, and come back singing spring catches, and dancing that long,
skipping forward step which they practised out-of-doors, carrying with
them trophies of the season. Sometimes they fastened the first violet to
a pole, and setting it up danced around it; sometimes they danced about
the first linden that appeared in leaf. It is the linden that the poets
are continually mentioning, whether in the centre of the courtyard or in
the field, and the tree suggests the social life of the old times as
happily as the pine under which Charlemagne sat, in the great chanson,
suggests the imperial master.

Customs related in Herrick's _Going a-Maying_, such as the decoration of
the houses of favorites with early greenery and the processions of girls
and young men to the woods and fields, were familiar in Germany long
before. Exercises to welcome spring became not only a social but
even--so far as the rude country songs went--a literary habit. The
earlier ritual dance around some altar or symbol of the summer deity
grew into an entertainment from which all sense of its original
significance had passed away. These celebrations became the main social
feature of the warm months. At one time partners appear to have been
taken for the year (a passage in _Wilhelm Meister_ reminds us of this
usage), but not in the period before us. A summons to a holiday dance
(and the large number of church festivals made holidays frequent) was
usually given by a musician playing or singing through the street. The
young men and women, and not infrequently their elders, came to the
customary field, dressed for the gaiety; as they went along, tossing and
catching bright-colored balls. This favorite ball-playing, mentioned by
more than one poet of the age as a sign of spring, and especially
entered into by girls, often formed a prelude to the dance. For one
thing it gave the girls a way of choosing their partners, for the man
who caught the ball tossed by a girl, according to some usages, could
claim the right to dance with her. An anonymous poet of the thirteenth
century gives a lively picture of one of these scenes.

     "All the time the young people are passing ball on the
     street. This is the earliest sport of summer, and as they
     play they scream. What if the rustic lad gives me a shove?
     How rude he is as he darts here and there, flying and chasing
     and playing tricks with the ball. Then two by two they have a
     hoppaldy dance about the fiddle, as if they wanted to fly."

As one of the fellows holds the ball,

     "What pretty speeches the girls make him, how they shriek,
     how wild they get. While he's hesitating to whom he'll throw,
     they stretch out their hands; now you're my friend
     (geveterlin),--throw it down here to me ... Jiutelin and
     Elsemuot hurry after it. Whoever gets it is the best one.
     Krumpolt ran, and cried, 'Throw it to me, and I'll throw it
     back.' In the scrimmage some of the girls get pushed down,
     and an accident happens to Eppe, the prettiest one in the
     field. But she picks herself up, and tosses the ball into the
     air. All scream, 'Catch it! catch it!' No girl can play
     better than she does; she judges the ball so well, and is
     such a sure catch."

Another way of choosing partners was by presenting garlands, and one of
the prettiest of the spring customs was the walk to the fields and woods
after flowers for wreaths, either to give away or to wear. So one of the
Latin songs describes young people going out,--

    "Juvenes ut flores accipiant
    Et se per odores reficiant
    Virgines assumant alacriter,
    Et eant in prata floribus ornata, communiter."

It certainly is a genial phase of those old times, this out-of-door
companionship of lads and lassies, gathering flowers and "dancing in the
chequered shade." The custom has in a manner survived to our own day; in
England, for example, Mr. Thomas Hardy has introduced such scenes very
pleasantly in some of his novels, but the zest and universality of it
have not descended. Even in Elizabeth's England the hobby-horse was
forgot; and back in the thirteenth century the May-time amusements were
being frowned away. For preachers and moralists saw much evil in these
summer gaieties. It is the old story: Nature is such a puritanical
stage-manager that she likes to bring on a tragedy for the after-piece
to her pleasant comedy, and she is best satisfied when we take warning
from the practice and stay away from the play.

The insane frenzies into which meadow dancing was carried on some
occasions, especially at the riotous midsummer festival, do not belong
to our subject. Neidhart assumes a flippant tone about matters of
conduct, but his treatment of the summer merrymakings is usually
innocent and agreeable. He comes as an artist, to the rude material
provided in the traditional village songs for these occasions, and
transfers to the polished verse of Germany's already highly trained
lyrical school, that fresh and gay subject-matter that is so remote from
the formal phrases of most of his courtly predecessors. His songs are
lyric in their introduction, but almost invariably epic or dramatic in
the later stanzas, scarcely ever overstepping closely drawn lines.
Whereas, Walther von der Vogelweide's work in the popular poetry retains
the lyrical mood throughout, and is far less realistic, never, I
believe, treating a peasant element as such. Those lyrical preludes
attest Neidhart's deep sentiment for nature; we feel that, in spite of
the conventionality in them. He has the rare merit of an occasional
specific note, and he touches even the hackneyed expressions about birds
and flowers with a contagious buoyancy. Look at a few of these
introductions:

     "Hedges green as gold; the heath dressed in bright roses.
     Come on, you fine girls: May is in the land. The linden is
     well hung with rich attire; now hearken, how the nightingale
     draws near."

     "The time is here: for many a year I have not seen a fairer.
     The cold winter is over, and many hearts rejoice that felt
     its chill. The woods are in leaf. Come then with me to the
     linden, dear."

     "Summer, a thousand welcomes! Whatever heart was wounded by
     the long winter is healed, its pain all gone. Thou comest
     welcome to the world in all lands. Through thee, rich and
     poor lose their sorrows, when winter has to go."

And another, which loses its effect if we neglect the long, swinging
metre:

    The forest for new foliage its grey dress has forsaken;
    And therefore now full many hearts to pleasure must awaken.
    The birds to whom the winter brought dismay,
    Have never sung so well as now the praises of the May.

    The winter from the lovely heath at last has turned aside,
    And there the blossoms stand, arrayed in colors gaily pied.
    Above them May's sweet dews are lightly shed;
    Ah, how I wish I had a wreath, dear friend, a lady said.

This stanza moves more quickly:

    Forth from your houses, children fair!
    Out to the street! No wind is there,
    Sharp wind, cold snow.
    The birds were dreary,
    They're singing cheerily;
    Forth to the woodland go.

After such opening stanzas comes the action of the song, almost always
an expression of a girl's longing to go to the dance, and her mother's
unwillingness. The burden of the remonstrances is that of the song in
_Much Ado_, "Men were deceivers ever"; and though some of the
conversations are amiable, often the two come to high words, and even to
blows. The girl cannot think of going without her best costume, and
this, in the prudent old domestic management, was always carefully
folded up, and kept under lock and key. "Who gave you the right to lock
up my gown?" a daughter demands. "You did not spin a thread of it.
Where's the key? now open the room for me." Finally, she obtained it by
stealth. "She took from the chest the gown that was laid in many small
folds. To the knight of Reuenthal she threw her colored ball." But
Neidhart grimly brings in her mother at the close.

Another cries: "Bring me my fine gown. The gentleman from Reuenthal has
sung us a new song. I hear him singing there to the children. I must
dance with him at the linden." Her mother warns her of what happened to
her playmate Jiute last year, "just as her mother said." But the
gentleman had sent her a lovely garland of roses, and had brought her a
pair of red stockings from over the Rhine, which she was wearing then;
and she had promised to let him teach her the dance. Another song
represents two girls talking of the same knight from Reuenthal: "All
know him, and his songs are heard everywhere. He loves me, and to please
him I will lace myself trimly, and go."

Some of the mothers do more than remonstrate: "The wood is well in leaf,
but my mother will not let me go. She has tied my feet with a rope. But
all the same, I must go with the children to the linden in the field."
Her mother overheard and threatened to punish her. "You little
grasshopper, whither wilt thou hop away from the nest? Sit and sew in
the sleeve for me." The girl is impudent, and the poem ends with a
lively contest.

Love is too strong. "He kissed me," one of them says, "and he had some
root in his mouth, so that I lost all my senses." Perhaps the high-born
poet bewitched these peasant-girls; he often assures us of it. One of
them is plighted to a farmer, and whenever he expects to find her at
home to entertain him, she joins the dancers, as toward evening "they
bend their way down the street," and throws her ball to the knightly
singer. Even the mothers themselves are sometimes caught by the desire
to dance with him, or at least with some of the men at the linden, and
in two or three of Neidhart's sprightliest songs the tables are turned,
and the daughter tries to keep her mother from the gaieties that her
years have outgrown. I have translated two of these summer dance songs
in their exact rhythms, and so literally as to make them appear almost
bald. In the first the nature opening may be omitted.

        "Mother, do not deny me,--
      Forth to the field I'll hie me,
        And dance the merry spring;
      'Tis ages since I heard the crowd
        Any new carols sing."

        "Nay, daughter, nay, mine own,
      Thee I have all alone
        Upon my bosom carried;
      Now yield thee to thy mother's will,
        And seek not to be married."

        "If I could only show him!
      Why, mother dear, you know him,
        And to him I will haste;
      Ah, 'tis the knight of Reuenthal,
        And he shall be embraced.

        "Such green the branches bending!
      The leafy weight seems rending
        The trees so thickly clad:
      Now be assured, dear mother mine,
        I'll take the worthy lad.

        "Dear mother, with such burning
      After my love he's yearning,
        Ungrateful can I be?
      He says that I'm the prettiest
        From France to Germany."

    Bare we saw the fields, but that is over;
    Now the flowers are crowding thro' the clover;
    At length the season that we love is here:
    As last year,
    All the heath is caught and held by roses;
    To roses summer brings good cheer.

    Thrushes, nightingales, we hear them singing;
    With their loud music mount and dale are ringing:
    For the dear summer is their jubilee:
    To you and me,
    It brings bright sights and pleasures without number;
    The heath is a fair thing to see.

    "Dewy grow the meadows," cried a maiden,
    "Branches lately bare are greenly laden:
    Listen! how the birds are crowning May:
    Come and play,
    For, Wierat, the leaves are on the linden;
    Winter, I ween, has gone away.

    "This year, too, we'll dance till twilight closes;
    Near the wood is a great mass of roses,
    I'll have a garland of them, trimly made;
    Come, you jade,
    Hand in hand with a fine knight you'll see me
    Dance in the linden shade."

    "Little daughter, heed not his advances;
    If thou press among the knights at dances,
    Something not befitting such as we
    There will be
    Trouble coming to thee, little daughter--
    And the young farmer thinks of thee."

    "Nay, I trust to rule a knight in armor;
    How then should I listen to a farmer?
    What! you think I'd be a peasant's bride!"
    She replied:
    "He could never woo me to my liking,
    He'll never marry me," she cried.

At first Neidhart seems to have maintained friendly relations with the
young men of the district, for we find him addressing in amicable terms
even Engelmar, who later became his worst enemy, complimenting him upon
his room, in a song apparently designed for a dance at his house. But it
is difficult to believe that his critical genius would have gone long
without expression, and he presently began amusing himself, and courting
the admirations of others, by original snatches of songs that were
imitated from the _trutzstrophen_ of humorous, rustic, and often roughly
personal verses, that were evidently in vogue among the country people
before Neidhart's day. Such jeering, gibing bits of peasant fun-making
would grow out of the custom of songs at these rural gatherings, like
the parallel practice sometimes found with us of country
valentine-parties, where personalities are touched off with the freedom
of anonymous and privileged license. We can readily imagine him
beginning with hits at one and another, that contained no deeper offence
than an inevitable tone of his amused sense of the ridiculous. But the
country gallants, already jealous of their elegant rival, whose
gentlemanly prestige and courtly accomplishments would naturally make
him attractive to their sweethearts, would be quick to take umbrage, and
boorishly ready to manifest their displeasure. Neidhart certainly
enjoyed at least as much of the poetic dower as "the hate of hate, the
scorn of scorn," and must have answered their sullenness and rudeness
with the contempt that falls with such a sting from gentility. Then
stung himself by their bad manners, he naturally composed sharper and
more direct stanzas, holding those who had offended him up to the
laughter of other men, and of the tittering damsels. It does not seem
probable that the most cutting and individualized of these attacks were
written to be sung at dances where the victims of the satire were
present. When we consider the violence and recklessness that
historically marked this whole class in the thirteenth century, we are
sure that the poet would hardly have survived some of the recitations.
Many of them he probably composed to gratify his possibly irritated
mood; for, as we shall presently see, his displeasure was deeper than
the vexation of wounded social pride. But they strayed easily to the
objects of their ridicule. As he strolled along the street, carrying his
fiddle, and stopping to amuse himself at one house or another with any
of the pretty girls whom he found idle like himself, he may have played
and sung the piece over which he had just been working, or the minor
singers who must have haunted him as he grew better known, would catch
up and repeat far and wide the witty verses. The piece at which he was
working, I said, for in an important sense the poems were professional
labor. The natural comparison of the minnesinger on his farm to Ovid
among the Goths, loses most of its force when we reflect that Neidhart's
absences from his various little Romes were in some sense at his own
pleasure, and that he must have kept riding about from castle to castle,
and have made frequent sojourns at his patron's court, in the exercise
of his now established musical vocation. The better his songs, the surer
his hold on the Duke's favor, and as his prestige might rise throughout
the country, the more cordial his greeting would be, and the more
generous his dismission whenever he chose to go. These mediaeval poets
were more than careless rhymsters: painstaking labor was assumed as
necessary for success. Their poetry was as subtle and difficult as the
schoolmen's philosophy; though we may not care much for either, we at
least respect the skill with which they mastered self-enforced technical
difficulties. Arnaut Daniel's contest for a wager with another
troubadour (King Richard was to decide which produced the cleverer
poem), illustrates the statement that time was thought necessary for
composition. The Provencal biography tells us that the contestants were
shut up in separate rooms, and only ten days were allowed each for
preparing his song. In Neidhart's seclusion on his fief, then, he would
naturally make studies for his more important literary appearances,
studies in subject-matter, as well as in verse and music. And a large
number of his poems, at least considered in their entirety, must be
thought of as compositions intended for courtly audiences.

It is to be presumed that Neidhart began by writing in the conventional
style of the love-singers. But his sense of humor and his originality
were too vigorous to allow him to continue in the polished and
monotonous manners of the school that reached its acme in Reinmar. He
possessed the creative faculty, and the rude village lyrics were a
sufficient suggestion of the new departure that he at once instituted
and consummated. He put in the place of lyrical elegies, lyrical
snatches of epic; and instead of gathering his epic materials from the
already familiar, even if not hackneyed, cycles of chivalry, he took
them from the real life, and that a growing life, of the German
villagers of his time. Their boorish manners and arrogant social
pretensions, their vulgar assumptions of elegance, and their jealous,
recklessly brutal tempers, he sketches vividly. His touch is not to be
called magical, there are no imaginative hauntings about the poems,
there is little fascination of subtle poetry in his expression or his
melodies. But his rude subjects are by no means treated rudely; he shows
excellent technique in those elaborately built stanzas; his tone rather
deepens than shrills in excited movements: in his dash and energy of
feeling, he retains artistic self-possession; while he is such an
iconoclast of sentimental poetry, that some have thought that Walther
had him in mind in his complaint of the new school. He invariably shows
sentiment for nature in his preludes, as well as sympathetic tones for
character, especially in what we may call his personal confessions. It
is indeed by virtue of this combination of qualities, as well as by his
novelty of subject, that he caught the approval of his age. Romantic
idealism was dying out, and a long period of coarse sensibility was
drawing on; while there was yet still some feeling for sentiment, and an
intellectual appreciation of artistic performance was, as usual, lapping
over the first stages of literary decadence. If we accept the view which
I have suggested, that at least as wholes many of Neidhart's songs were
intended only for the gentry, we may find it easier to meet the question
of their autobiographic and actual significance.

It is possible to be unduly literal and too credulous of the historic
reality of whatever is found in an old literature. Especially in the
works of the minnesingers, some modern Germans appear unconscious that a
poet may relate fictitious experiences and sensations. As I have
remarked in an earlier essay, Cowley's love-poems had many mediaeval
prototypes, and there seems no necessity for assuming a fact behind each
of Neidhart's statements. Why is it not reasonable to suppose that
having once made what we call a "strike" with some of his village
characters, he occasionally invented continuations or parallels? We may
go so far as to assert the possibility that the continual reappearances
of Engelmar, Neidhart's most recurrent character, who is always
associated with the beginning of his disasters, is due quite as much to
the fact that his early treatment of the famous snatching of a girl's
mirror proved, by virtue of the topic, or the melody, or both, a great
favorite, as to the incident in itself having been of the fateful
influence upon his life that is implied. In other cases, as in what we
may term the episode of the ginger-root, Neidhart certainly seems to be
referring to some of his most popular earlier songs, for no other reason
than that the reference would be agreeable to his audience and give a
sort of continuity to his work. One of these instances is almost
pathetic. The poet is old and song comes hard to him. After several
stanzas of unusually serious tone, he says that people ask him why he
does not sing as they are told he once did: they keep wondering what has
become of the peasants who used to be on Tulnaere-field. So he attempts
to conclude with a strain of his old satirical gaiety. "I'll tell of the
bold free ways of Limizun, who is yet worse than our friend who took
Friderun's mirror, or those who bought mail awhile ago at Vienna," as if
by the mention of these popular achievements of his younger wit he could
hide his dull present mood.

So, too, as it appears to me, we may explain the recurrent complaints of
his unhappy loves and of his desires frustrated by one and another of
the boors. These lover's sorrows are just what we should expect from a
poet in Neidhart's relation to the fashionable love lyrics; he retains
something of the tone of despondent yearning that was deemed requisite
by all his predecessors, yet he gives it a piquant novelty by
substituting irony and class animosities for vague and impersonal
wailings, and the sense of humor in these courtly woes in behalf of mere
peasant maidens would be a livelier attraction to the knights and ladies
of his polite circles than we might suppose. Surely Neidhart was the
victim of no deep passion for his rustic heroines. He may have been
amused by them, or even have liked them, and he certainly was enraged at
being interfered with or baffled by middle-class rivals; but his role is
more a Lothario's than a true lass-lorn wooer's. Imagine a peasant
farm-house with a large main apartment, such as Neidhart had in mind in
one of his earliest winter songs: "Engelmar, thy room is good; chill is
it in the dales: winter is hateful." The young farmers and the girls
come trooping in by pairs and little groups, dressed in their best,
smiling and gay: no better aid to imagining the scene could be desired
than Defregger's genial picture of a modern Tyrolese peasant party. It
is a change from the summer dances: "Winter, thy might will drive us
indoors from the broad linden. Thy winds are cold. Lark, quit thy
singing: both frost and snow have said thee nay; alas, for the green
clover. May, to thee I am loyal; winter is my bane." "Winter gives joy
to none but such as love the chimney-corner." They all think of the
change from their summer gatherings, and the singer strums his fiddle
and strikes into the nature prelude of his lyric, as they prepare to
begin the dance. Here is another opening, translated in the stanza
system of the original:

    The green grass and the flowers
        Both are gone;
    Before the sun the linden gives no shade;
        Those happy hours
        On shady lawn
    Of various joys are over; where we played,
        None may play;
        No paths stray
    Where we went together;
    Joy fled away at the winter weather,
    And hearts are sad which once were gay.

We are reminded again of Herrick in his lines to the meadows:

    "Ye have been fresh and green,
      Ye have been fill'd with flowers;
    And ye the walks have been,
      Where maids have spent their hours."

The dance is under way now; if, as sometimes happened, they paid a
surprise visit, the guests have taken hold and made the room ready:

    Clear out the benches and stools;
        Set in the middle
        The trestles, then fiddle;
    We'll dance till we're tired, merry fools.
    Throw open the windows for air,
        That the breeze
        Softly please
    The throat of each child debonair.
    When the leaders grow weary to sing,
        We'll all say,
        "Fiddler, play
    Us the tune for a stylish court-fling."

(They apparently piled the table-frames in the middle of the room in
place of the linden, about which they danced on the lawn.)

The singer goes on to remind them of the preparation for the party:

"I advise my friends to consult where the children shall have their
fun. Megenwart has a large room: if it like you all, we will have the
holiday party there. His daughter wishes us to come. All of you tell the
rest. Engelmar shall lead a dance around the table."

Again: "Let Kunegunde know; we shall be blamed if no one tells her about
it, and don't forget Hedwig." Once more: "Come along, children, to the
farm-house at Hademuot's; Engelbrecht, Adelmar, Friderich, Tuoze, Guote,
Wentel, and her sisters all three; Hildeburg, pretty child; Jiutel and
her cousin Ermelint."

Still again, in one of the cheerful early songs, before Neidhart's
bitter tone came in:

     "Now for the children who've been asked to the party. Jiutel
     shall tell them all, that they are to step after the fiddle
     with Hilde. 'Twill be a great dance. Diemuot, Gisel, are
     going together; Wendel, too, Engelmuot, for Heaven's sake! go
     out and call Kuenze to come.

     "Tell her the man is here; if she cares to see him, as she
     has all the time been wishing to, let her put on a little
     jacket and her cloak; I should prefer to have her come here,
     than to have him find her there at home in her every day
     clothes.

     "Kuenze tarried then no longer, but came, as Engelmuot bade
     her. She was in a hurry; quickly she dressed. Both sides of
     her gown were red silk. The finest of girls! No one could
     discover through the country, one I should be so glad to give
     my dear mother for a daughter.

     "Haha! How she pleased me, when I saw what she was; such
     hair, and red lips. Then I asked her to sit by me, but she
     said: 'I don't dare; I've been told not to talk with you, or
     even sit by you. Go and ask Heilke over there by Vriderune!'"

"I hear dancing in the room," he sings at another time; "a crowd of
village women are there; two fiddles; when they pause, gay outbreak of
talking and laughing. Through the window goes the hubbub. Adelber never
dances but between two girls." Sometimes the knightly guest entered into
the gay interlude of conversation, entertaining a merry screaming group.
But when his moody vein, or vexation at some common man's successful
rivalry, dulled his social spirits, he would stand apart, or go to one
side with one of the peasant maids, and satirically note the men
scattered over the room. The young farmer's assumption of the dress and
manners of gentility, carrying arms, discarding rustic fashions,
affecting polite speech ("_Mit siner rede er vlaemet_," Neidhart says of
one of them,--he talks like a fine gentleman from abroad),--all this was
ridiculous to the courtly poet, and his sense of the humor of it was
associated with the bitterness of social contempt. "Look at Engelmar,
how high he holds his head. What elegant style he has, at the dance,
with his showy sword; something different from his father Batze. His son
is a poor gawk, with his rough head. He puffs himself out like a stuffed
pigeon, that sits crop-full on a corn-chest." And again: "Did you ever
see so gay a peasant as he is? Good Lord! he is first of all in the
dance. His sword-band is two hands broad. Proud enough he, of his new
jacket; it has four and twenty small pieces of cloth in it, and the
sleeves come down over his hand."[8] "There are two peasants wearing
coats in the court style, of Austrian cloth. Uoze never cut them."

Then he goes on to say:

     "Perhaps you would like to hear how the rustics are dressed.
     Their clothes are above their place. Small coats they wear,
     and small cloaks; red hoods, shoes with buckles, and black
     hose. They have on silk pouch-bags, and in them they carry
     pieces of ginger, to make themselves agreeable to the girls.
     They wear their hair long, a privilege of good birth. They
     put on gloves that come up to their elbows. One appears in a
     fustian jacket green as grass. Another flaunts it in red.
     Another carries a sword long as a hemp flail, wherever he
     goes; the knob of its hilt has a mirror, that he makes the
     girls look at themselves in. Poor clumsy louts, how can the
     girls endure them? One of them tears his partner's veil,
     another sticks his sword hilt through her gown, as they are
     dancing, and more than once, enthusiastically dancing and
     excited by the music, their awkward feet tread on the girls'
     skirts and even drag them off. But they are more than clumsy,
     they have an offensive horse-play kind of pleasantry that is
     nothing less than insult. They put their hands in wrong
     places, and one of them tries to get a maiden's ring, and
     actually wrenches it from her finger as she is treading the
     bending _reie_.

     "Why should I not be angry at his insolence? Yet I would not
     mind the ring so much, if he had not hurt her hand."

And just so, Engelmar snatched her mirror from Neidhart's darling
Vriderune.

This last, as has been said, is the most famous incident in the Neidhart
story. From it he dates all his misfortunes, and he reverts to it, over
and over, with bitterness that can hardly be regarded as merely ironical
humor. Yet numerous as the references are, there is a mystery about the
affair that has not been cleared up. It has been suggested that
Vriderune's way of taking the rudeness made it clear to Neidhart that it
was her peasant lover, and not himself, whom she really liked, but it
would seem more natural to associate the occurrence with something
violent. Possibly the poet's indignation at the boorish familiarity led
him to a personal attack, just as in another connection he threatens to
strike an obnoxious fellow, and the resulting quarrel may have been
taken up by friends of both, with such serious consequences that various
annoyances followed on their part, which he could only return by
insulting hits in his songs. The chances are all in favor of the poet's
having been a slighter man physically than these farm-workers, at one of
whom he sneers for the sacks that ride on his neck, and there are
suggestions in the pseudo-Neidhart poetry of his having had helpers to a
revenge. In one of these imitations it is said that through Neidhart's
injury thirty-two had their left legs cut off, an evident exaggeration
of an earlier imitation, where the writer reminds his hearers of what
happened to Engelmar for taking Vriderune's mirror, that he lost his
left leg and had to go on crutches. Such violent fights are
authentically reported at merrymakings of the time, and as the
aristocratic leader of such a brawl, Neidhart no doubt would find his
subsequent residence among the peasants uncongenial. Yet why should he
manifest such reserve, at the same time that he mentions the subject so
constantly, referring to it long after he has left Bavaria? Is it
possible that his jealousy and hot blood drove him to some underhanded
attack in some such way as that in which a brilliant restoration poet
tried to punish a supposed injury? This ill reputation as an aristocrat
equally insolent and treacherous, might follow him to Austria; he would
hardly be pleased to acknowledge in his poem what he had done, while the
constant references to his injury in the insult of Vriderune, and the
misfortunes to himself which it caused may be regarded as half defensive
attempts to excite sympathy instead of disapproval. So much for
possible explanations of this curious literary enigma, out of which we
may make too much; for, as I have already suggested, Neidhart may only
be doing what novelists sometimes do when they repeat a popular hit in
characterization. At any rate, Vriderune seems to have been lost to her
upper-class lover, "and ever from that time I have had some new
heart-sorrow."

Neidhart constantly reverts to the peasants' brutality and eagerness to
fight. "Look out for a brutish fellow named Ber. He is tall and
broad-shouldered; he scarcely can get in at the door. Fie, who brought
him here? He is the nephew of Hildebolt of Bern, who was pounded by
Williher." Lanze, again, "had got himself up for a champion, and thought
nothing could resist him. He put underneath a coat of mail. Snarling
like a bear he goes; so ugly is he, one were a child who withstood him."
And of another: "He wears a sword that cuts like shears, and a good
safety hat. Whoever you are, you may well keep out of his way.
Villagers, look out for him; his sword is poisoned. It's a well-tempered
Waidover, that sword of his."

With such village-warriors, no wonder that the parties did not always
end cheerfully. With a resemblance to modern slang Neidhart tells how
they threaten to put sunshine through each other. The lively episode of
a quarrel over a rural gallant's presenting a young lady with a piece of
ginger, Neidhart says he cannot describe in full, for he came away. But
"each began screaming to his friends; one called loudly: 'Help, gossip
Wezerant.' He must have been in great difficulty to scream so for help.
I heard Hildebolt's sister shriek: 'Oh, my brother, my brother!'"
Another dance ends with a milder disagreement. "Ruoprecht found an
egg--'I ween the devil gave it to him'--and threatened to throw it. Eppe
got mad, and dared him. Ruoprecht threw it at the top of his head, and
it trickled down over him." Sometimes, evidently, peacemakers
interfered, as they did in Frideliep's and Engelmar's disagreement about
Gotelint, so that the rivals did not fight, though "just like two silly
geese they went toward each other, all the rest of the day."

Like all of those poets, Neidhart, though he says "I" very often, lets
us become but indifferent acquaintances. We read some of the mediaeval
lyrists without feeling sure that we detect a single genuine personal
note; they had little of our modern sense of individuality. With
Neidhart we fare better than with most; yet, after all, we are hardly
sure that some of his personal confessions are not formally or
humorously assumed. Yet of one trait we are left in no doubt, his strong
German sense for the fatherland. With many other Bavarians, he went to
Syria and Damietta on the crusade of 1217-1219, led by Leopold VII. of
Austria, and he has left us two songs which, though certainly different
enough from the deep religious feeling of such crusade lyrics as
Hartmann's or Walther's, are unmistakably sincere. The first opens with
the minnesinger's usual spring and love-lorn stanzas, but Neidhart soon
drops conventionality with the exclamation, "For my song the foreign
folk here do not care: ah, blessings on thee, Germany!" It reminds us of
Walther: nothing is like the German home. He thinks of sending a
messenger, not we notice, to some town or castle, but to that village
where he left the loving heart from which his constancy never wavers,
and to the dear friends over-sea.

     "Tell them from us all that they should quickly see us there,
     joyous enough, except for these wide waves. Bear my glad
     service to my mistress, dear to me before all ladies, and say
     to friends and kinsmen that I am well. If they inquire how
     things are going with us pilgrims, tell them, dear boy, what
     ill these foreign folk have wrought us. Haste thee, be swift;
     after thee assuredly shall I follow, quick as ever I may. God
     grant we may live to see the happy day of going home."

"We are all scarcely alive," he goes on; "the army is more than half
dead. Ah, were I there! By my beloved gladly would I rest, in mine own
place." "If I may only grow old with her!" he cries, and he breaks out
impatiently against those who keep delaying through August, instead of
moving westward. "Nowhere could a man be better off than at home, in his
own parish."

At last the expedition, dissatisfied and worn, as the returning
crusaders always were, are on the confines of the longed-for country. We
can imagine the straggling company making their way along, their
minstrel riding among them, fingering the old violin that he has carried
over his shoulders all the two years, and thinking out a new song. He is
still a young man, or at least only approaching middle age, and thoughts
of home, friendship, love, and the spring gaiety of the village life,
crowd upon him with buoyant thrills; he strikes the strings more firmly,
and his voice rings out a home-coming lyric, full of life and feeling.
"The long bright days are come again, and with them the birds; it is a
long time since they sang so well. The winter-weary are gayer than they
have been for thirty years. Maidens, ye children, fine people all, let
your hearts be free to the summer joy, spring quickly in the carols."

    Dear herald, homeward go;
    'Tis over, all my woe;
    We're near the Rhine!

Neidhart's poems are readily classified in two divisions, his songs for
summer and for winter. Both were probably sung as an accompaniment to
the dances, either of the peasants or of the upper class, though there
may be some doubt whether this is true of all the winter songs. Almost
invariably he opens with a nature-prelude, often an elaborate one, and
the temper of the songs is always congenial to the season, gay for
summer, and gloomy or critical for winter.

There is no evidence that the difficulty with Engelmar was the occasion
of the poet's leaving Bavaria, but his unpopularity with the peasants
seems to have had something to do with the loss of his fief. He was cast
down at the thought of parting with Reuenthal, and said that he would
sing no longer, since the name under which his merry lines had been
known was taken from him; and with a play on the word, "I am put out
undeservedly, my friends; now leave me free of the name!" But after he
was settled by Frederich on an Austrian fief, he adapted himself
cheerfully to his new home. "Here I am at Medelicke, in spite of them
all. I am not sorry that I sang so much of Eppe and of Gumpe at
Reuenthal."

The Duke gave him money and a house, in response to musical
solicitations, and Neidhart appealed for exemption from his heavy taxes,
that threatened to consume what his children needed. With our modern
ideas this system of literary patronage upon which mediaeval poets
depended, and which usually required direct and even pressing
solicitation, seems painful to self-respect; we forget how lately it
flourished. In those days when princely giving was an established
custom, and differed from a system of salaries mainly in being a less
regularly appointed income, a poet's request for a gift was scarcely
more than a modern author's reminder of an unpaid claim; there is
nothing of the unmanly dependence of Coleridge in these earlier
suppliants for aid. None of them asked more gracefully--even Chaucer is
not more delicately suggestive--than Neidhart in such lines as these:

     "Whoever had a bird who satisfied him with song through the
     year, he would occasionally look to his bird-cage, and give
     him good food. Then the bird could go on singing sweet
     melodies. If he always sang well to meet the May, he should
     be well cared for, summer and winter. Even the birds
     appreciate kind treatment."

But the times were bad, and even a box of silver, and a house to put it
in, and remission of taxes, could not keep the poet gay as he passed
into later life. He composed penitential lyrics, after orthodox
precedents, of the love-singers, for they almost always grew old
seriously. On these we need not linger, though there seems a cry fuller
than the echo-note in his farewell to Lady Earth, and appeal for pardon
for some of his foolish songs: "Lord God of Heaven, give me thy
guidance; Might of all Might, now strengthen my heart, that I may win
soul's health, and partake ever-enduring joy, through thy sweet will."
But the wail of all of the thirteenth-century's serious minds, that
things were going "ever the lenger the wers" in Christendom, comes out
nowhere more deeply than in Neidhart's allegorical love-song to Joy of
the World, chiding her for her change of character during his long,
unrequited service:

     "False, shameless folk nowadays people her court, and her old
     household, truth, chastity, good manners, none find these any
     longer. My lady's honor is lame all over. She is fallen so
     that none can rescue her. She lies in such a pool that only
     God can make her clean. Men of wise mind be on your guard
     before her, in church or on street: women of worth keep far
     away."

Eighty new melodies he has sung in her service; this is the last, and
not the most joyous.

To this closing period we may refer a few summer songs that are an
exception to the usually light-hearted verses of that form. Their
seriousness is all the more noticeable from their fair-weather setting;
for once, the spring is not a panacea. "A delightful May has come, but
alas, neither priest nor layman rejoices in its arrival. Were it the
Emperor who had come, we might rejoice. Trouble and sorrow dwell in
Austria." There is something here besides a sense that the joyousness of
simple free-living and the loyalty of love-service are passing away; he
attributes much of the social decline to national confusion and the
political unrestraint. Yet controversial as he is in social relations,
he has little of Walther von der Vogelweide's thoughtfulness and energy
in patriotic polemics. He drifts down the stream with a sigh.

In the poem which Meyer's elaborate study of the order of his work
places last, though only conjecturally, he again considers his friends'
entreaty for more songs. The world goes too sadly, he says; as he had
said before that they must ask Troestelin to sing; he himself had no
longer a heart for poetry. Yet there is one pleasant story that he can
tell them: "to break down troubles comes one worthy to be praised; 'tis
May, with all his might." There is something pathetic in such songs,
that try to assume the cheerful strain in which the poet, now grown
gloomy, wrote while he was young. They remind us of the stray leaves
that we sometimes see caught up to their old home among the branches by
a sudden March gust; the brown leaves that will never again uncrumple
their green infancies, hover for a moment, then sink hesitatingly back
to the ground. In this one song, the nature stanzas are transferred from
the place of prelude to the conclusion. "May has conquered; wood and
heath have adorned themselves with their lovely attire; blue flowers are
here and the roses," and he ends with the old thought, that joyousness
and virtuous honor go together. As an idle fancy it is "pleasant if one
consider it," to regard these as the final words of this knightly singer
of mediaeval country scenes, the last of the great figures of that old
German group, a parting reminder of the philosophy of a happy life which
mediaeval lyrists often maintained so earnestly,--that the secret of good
living is blitheness of heart, and out-of-door life in spring and
summer. For many of these old poets the two terms were convertible;
their creed was surely a simple one.

[Decoration]

FOOTNOTE:

[8] We must remember that the unwillingness of the upper grade of
society to have peasants assume its styles of dress, went so far that
ducal edicts were issued forbidding them to use coats of mail and
helmets, or to carry any weapons. Bitter complaints were made of their
wearing any stuffs so fine as silk, and clothes stylishly cut.




[Decoration]

MEIER HELMBRECHT,

A GERMAN FARMER OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY.


The usual conception of the middle ages seems to consist of a few facts
and theories about the feudal system and the crusades, the names with
possibly some traits of a few eminent public figures and a general
impression of confusion and obscurity. Supplementing this central idea,
one usually sees a panel picture on either side. One, sunshine flashing
from the spears and armor of knights tilting in tournaments, and watched
by dimly beautiful women; in the distance a solitary knight pricking
over a plain, or, guided by the wail of an unseen and lovely captive,
making his way through forest haunts of giants and gnomes. The other, a
lowering twilight overhanging gloomy monastery walls, the shelter of
melancholy, hypocrisy, manuscript illuminations, and a barren, difficult
philosophy. Sunshine and twilight on either hand, and in the background
an impenetrable mist concealing the great masses of humanity, as well as
all concrete actual lives even of the great. A little information and a
little romance are unsatisfactory artists for a sketch of mediaevalism.
We soon discover that there is a great deal behind such a picture of
soldiers living in wars, and in the tourneying pretence of war; or
schoolmen contending in brilliant logical panoply within and without
spectral philosophic fastnesses; or hermits, nuns, and monks fighting
against God's present that they might win His future; or marauders
beating down helplessness and innocence.

Yet we may study the middle ages laboriously, and find ourselves still
confronted by the mist that hangs over the rank and file. Our curiosity
about these forgotten multitudes teases us. "How is it that you lived,
and what is it that you did?" we ask these distant prototypes of
Wordsworth's peasant. We come to discover that there is much behind our
slight old notion of chivalry and monasticism; though seven hundred
years have changed its conditions, life then and now is yet less
different than we had thought. But we find it difficult to acquire much
information about those social substrata on which the learned and the
polite classes rested. Clio is the most aristocratic of the ladies nine,
and that instinct of vitality whereby we count fame for ourselves
something desirable, makes us think with a certain compassion of great
armies of those generations filing sullenly on, not only as individuals,
but as whole masses, to the grave of oblivion. The little that we know
makes us sure only that they were wretched, their lives the most gloomy
of all the lives of gloomy ages.

We may read thousands of pages of the literature of those days with
scarcely any addition to our knowledge of the work-a-day world, for most
of the poetry is romantic, and in its imitative phases mainly a
reflection of courtly customs and character. The middle ages in Germany
and France were anything but uncivilized, and the poetry of secondary
cultivation is, as was said in the last essay, likely to prefer
idealistic interpretation of its finest development to democratic
realism. Yet the student finds from time to time interesting material
for an account of the average life, and in the poet whom this essay is
designed to introduce to a modern audience, we obtain an extended study
in this side field of literary interpretation. He wrote not of high life
but of the middle classes, not in romance but in a literal yet at the
same time artistic manner that we may call a heightened realism. He
appears to have been himself one of the people, a poet who possibly made
his living by reciting poems of incident, and by singing at their
merrymakings, though of this there is no evidence. It has been thought
by some German scholars that he may have been a monk, but the
indications make rather against than for this view. We know in fact
nothing whatever about him except for one single line, in which he tells
us that his name is Wernher the Gardener.

As was said, his poem is remarkable as being the heightened treatment
of a plain story of the peasant classes a little before 1250; it is
remarkable, too, for the liveliness and simple force of his
treatment. He is an artist--though he works in chalks instead of
water-colors;--unornamented, unassuming, he produces an impression of
personal power, moral seriousness, a clear eye for what he saw, and
the power to state it directly, one of the marks of a later and more
developed age. He has no little dramatic liveliness, a sense of
humor, and the pleasantest love for the plain beauties of character
and home-life.

He tells the story of a farmer, Helmbrecht, and his wayward son. The boy
has been the admiration of his peasant family as the oldest child,
notable for his splendid yellow hair, and full of life and spirit. At
the time the poem opens he has grown to early manhood, dissatisfied with
the hidden and laborious life of tiller of the soil, vain of his
appearance, fond of fine dress, and ambitious to live easily and be
admired. He is petted and indulged by his mother and his sister
Gotelint, and when he desires a hood--a part of masculine costume much
affected by gallant youths--they provide him with one so fine that it
becomes famous far and near. Embroidery, as every one knows who is
acquainted with the mediaeval arts, was the most artistic accomplishment
of the period. Ladies learned to embroider and weave the most
complicated and elaborate devices; handicraftsmen of all sorts put on
their work representations so copious that one sometimes wonders whether
the literary descriptions of them are not exaggerations. Can the
frequency and detail of these passages, we wonder, be a faintly
remembered tradition of the devices put by Homer on the shield of
Achilles, or by Vergil on the gates of the rising Carthage? At any rate,
tapestries, cloths, and garments, to say nothing of saddles and the
like, were covered by picture after picture, in almost every important
poem of the age. This young peasant Helmbrecht's hood was embroidered,
not, of course, by the rude country fingers of his mother and sister,
but by a clever nun, who had run away from her nunnery to enjoy the
pleasures of a lively youth. Many were the wages of farm-produce by
which she was persuaded to fit out the young man. The hood was covered
with birds, parrots, and doves; on one side were representations of the
siege of Troy and the escape of AEneas; on the other, the stout deeds of
Charlemagne, Roland, and Oliver, in their wars against the heathen
Moors. Behind, adventures of old German legendary heroes, in the cycle
of Dietrich of Bern. In front, dances of knights, ladies, and of maidens
and young esquires--the favorite and mediaeval dance, where the gentleman
stood between two ladies, holding the hand of each.

After this acquisition the boy became ambitious for still more finery,
and was indulged in an elaborate costume that need not be described.
Such white linen, such a splendid blue coat, all covered with buttons,
gilded ones in double rows down the back, around the collar, and in
front of silver. About the shoulders little bells were hung, that rang
merrily when he sprang in the _reie_. Ah, very love-lorn were the
glances cast on him by women and girls at the dance.

At last he is fully equipped by the love and sacrifice of his family,
and they are happy in his elegance, and contented with themselves
because the self-willed and capricious boy is pleased; when suddenly the
simple household is thrown into grief and anxiety by his announcement
that he is going to leave home. He must have a horse--there was none on
the farm--to complete his outfit as a gentleman, and then he will ride
away to some court and seek his fortune. In vain they remonstrate.

     "'My dear father, help me on. My mother and sister have
     helped me so that I shall love them all my life.'

     "His father was troubled to hear that he was resolved to go,
     but he said to him: 'I'll give you a fast horse for your
     outfit, good at hedges and ditches, for you to have there at
     court. I'll buy him for you willingly, if I can find one for
     sale. But, my dear son, now give up going to court. The ways
     there are hard for those who have not been used to them from
     the time they were children. My dear son, now drive team for
     me, or if you'd rather, hold the plough, and I'll drive for
     you, and let us till the farm, so you'll come to your grave
     full of honors like me; at least I hope to, for I surely am
     honest and loyal, and every year I pay my tithes. I have
     lived my life without hate and without envy.'

     "But the son replied: 'My dear father, keep quiet and stop
     talking; there's only one way about it, I'm going to find out
     how things smack there at court. Your sacks sha'n't load my
     back any longer. I won't load any more manure on your wagon,
     and God hate me if I ever yoke oxen for you again, and sow
     your oats. That's not the thing for my long yellow hair and
     my curly locks, and my close-fitting coat, and my fine hood,
     and the silk doves the women worked on it. I won't help you
     farm any longer.'

     "'Dear son, stay with me. I am certain that farmer Ruoprecht
     will give you his daughter, with lots of sheep and swine, and
     ten cattle, old and young. At court you'll be hungry, you'll
     have to lie hard, and give up all comforts. Now take my
     advice, and it will be to your interests and credit. It very
     seldom happens that a man gets along well who rebels against
     his own station. Your station is the plough. My son, I swear
     to you that the genuine court-people will make fun of you, my
     dear child. Do as I say, and give it up.'

     "'Father, if I only have a horse I shall get on as well in
     the court ways as those who were born there. Any one who saw
     that hood on my head would swear a thousand oaths that I
     never worked for you, or drove a plough through a furrow.
     Whenever I put on the clothes my mother and my sister gave me
     yesterday, I sha'n't look much as if I ever took a flail to
     thresh wheat on the barn floor, or as if I ever drove stakes.
     When I get my legs and my feet in the hose and cordovan
     boots, nobody'll know that I ever made fence for you or any
     one else. Let me have a horse, and farmer Ruoprecht may go
     without me for a son-in-law. I'll not give up my future for a
     wife.'"

The father goes on pleading with the boy to take advice and keep out of
the disorderly life he is likely to get into about a court. By the
silent assumption that his new master and his people will pillage from
the peasantry, we get a suggestion of the lawlessness of the
country--which had grown worse during the long absenteeism of Frederic
II. But if the peasants catch you, he tells his son with energy, you
will fare much worse than one of the gentlemen would. They will take the
quickest revenge, and think that they are doing God service when they
find one of their own kind stealing.

But the son only goes on to repeat that he will leave the farm. He talks
just as an ambitious country fellow will talk to-day about the slow life
and small profits. He becomes bolder and more insolent. If it were not
for that wretched horse he would be riding with the rest across fields
and dragging peasants through the hedges; the cattle would be lowing as
he drove them off. He says he can endure poverty no longer;--raising a
colt or an ox for three years, and then selling them for just nothing.
So his father traded a large piece of homespun, four good cows, two
oxen, three steers, and four bushels of wheat,--all worth about ten
pounds,--for a horse that could not have been sold for three ("alas for
the wasted seven!"), and the young man put on his finery, tossed his
head, and, looking around, jauntily declared that he could "bite through
a stone, or eat iron, he felt so fierce." If he could catch the Emperor
or the Duke, there would be some money coming in. "'Father, you could
manage a Saxon easier than me.'"

When he calls upon his father to release him from the family control,
the latter assents, though with all his old reluctance. Indeed he cannot
let him go without one more appeal:

     "'I give you your liberty, my son. But take care that no one
     yonder hurts your hood and its silk doves, or viciously tears
     your long yellow hair. And I am afraid that at the end you
     will be following a staff, or some little boy will be
     leading you.'"

Then once more, after a pause, comes the abrupt:

     "'My son, my own dear boy, give up going. You shall live on
     what I live, and on what your mother gives you. Drink water,
     my dear son, before you steal to buy wine. Austrian pie, any
     one, fool or wise man, will tell you, is food fit for
     gentlemen. Eat that, dear child, instead of giving an ox you
     have stolen to some inn-keeper for a chicken. Your mother can
     cook good broth; eat that, instead of giving a stolen horse
     for a goose. My son, mix rye with oats sooner than eat fish
     in a dishonored life. If you will not obey me, go. But though
     you win wealth and great honors, never will I share them with
     you. And misfortune--have that alone too.'

     "'You drink water, father, but I'll drink wine. Eat your
     mush, but I'll eat what they call fricasseed chicken there
     and white wheat bread; oats will do for you. They say at Rome
     that a child takes after his godfather, and mine was a
     knight. Thank God for giving me such high and noble ideas.'"

But the old farmer replied that he liked much better a man who did right
and remained constant to it.

     "Even though his birth might be rather humble, he would
     please the world better than a king's son without virtue and
     honor. An honest man of lowly rank, and a nobleman who was
     not courteous and honorable,--let the two come to a land
     where neither is known, and the child of lowly birth will
     outrank the high-born. My son, if you will be noble, on my
     word I counsel you, do noble deeds. Good life is a crown
     above all nobility."

There is the old thought, so common in literature from ancient authors
down to the poet of Lady Clara Vere de Vere, and especially a favorite
with writers of the middle age. Possibly some of them caught it from
Boethius, who expressed it more than once in the testament of wise and
generous character that he left to the world from his confinement at
Pavia, and that proved so singularly congenial to the mediaeval mind; but
we need certainly not require the aid of origins to account for its
frequency. Aristocratic as many phases of the times were, there were a
number of important evening influences, conspicuously two: the church,
in whose monastery cloisters the rich and poor met together as brothers
of one impartial discipline, and from whose ranks members of low birth
might rise to be the peers of dukes; and the orders of chivalry, which
received approved squires from the middle class. Thus, in addition to
aristocracy of birth, there was a conditional gentility to which those
who had the claim of merit might aspire. But though the thought that
desert, and not descent, is the test for nobility, is so obvious in the
days when position carried with it so strong a connotation of power, and
when the upper strata of society bore down so hard and haughtily upon
the lower, we always feel satisfaction in coming upon a trim statement
of the fine old commonplace whose best mediaeval expression we can quote
from a poet of our own language:

    "Look, who that is moost vertuous alway,
    Pryvee and apert, and moost entendeth ay
    To do the gentil dedes that he kan,
    Taak hym for the grettest gentil man."

"'Alas, that your mother bore you!'" the farmer exclaimed, when the
boy's only answer to his appeal was to declare his hair and hood better
fitted for a dance than for the plough or the harrow. "'Thou wilt leave
the best and do the worst'"; and he goes on to contrast the man who
lives against God and the good of others, followed by every one's
curses, with the man who helps the world along, trying night and day to
do good by his life, and thereby honors God. This one, wherever he may
turn, has the love of God and all the world.

     "'Dear son,' he says, 'that man you might be, if you would
     yield to me. Till with the plough, and plenty of people will
     be the better for your life, poor and rich; nay, even wolf
     and eagle, and everything that lives on earth. Many a woman
     must be made more beautiful through the farmer, many a king
     must be crowned through the produce of the farm. Indeed,
     there is no one so noble that his pride would not be a very
     small thing, except for the farmer.'"

How natural all this sounds,--agriculture the basis of society, tillage
of the soil alike useful and honorable. With what quiet manliness this
old German talks of the dignity of labor, with no touch of the modern
arrogance and discontent with the existing social condition. He will
keep to his rank in life, and be loyal to his station, yet, though he
looks up with a simple-hearted interest and wonder to the great world
above him, he reflects as he follows his plough that without him that
great world's pride "would be a very small thing." But there is a
quality here that is still finer: the undercurrent perception of "the
gospel of service." It is not only that honesty is the best policy,
though the peasant is shrewd, and appreciates the practical side too;
his conversation with the boy breathes the best nineteenth-century
spirit of the duty of making one's life valuable to others. That
sentence about working night and day to be useful, and thereby honoring
God, is no commonplace for our century, to say nothing of the
thirteenth. There is something pretty, too, in the touch of sympathy
with the animal world; in some way, he feels that even the birds and
beasts must be better off for a good farmer.

These times seem often savage in their cruelties and recklessness of
giving pain, but they have a gentle side as well, as may be seen in the
tales cited by Montalembert of friendly relations between monks and wild
beasts, and in examples collected by Uhland in his essay on the old
German animal literature. It is pleasant in connection with such
barbarities as we shall presently be reminded of in this very poem to
recall the myth versified by Longfellow, of the great minnesinger's
legacy to the monastery, conditioned on the brethren's every day placing
grain and water for the birds upon his grave; and more than one
authentic story is told like that of the Abbot of Hirsan, who, when snow
was deep in winter, would take oats from his barn to feed the birds.

After the young Helmbrecht has begged God to release him soon from his
father's preaching,--"if you only had been a real preacher you might
have got up a whole army with your sermons for a crusade,"--and has
explained that instead of keeping on ploughing, he is resolved to have
white hands, and no longer need to feel mortified whenever he holds
ladies' hands at a dance, his father resorts to his last resource--an
appeal to superstition, that he has been keeping in reserve. He tells
him what he has been dreaming--three dreams that he interprets as
ominous of the loss of sight, feet, and arms, and worst of all, a final
dream of one of those sights so common for many centuries before and
after, but made no less dreadful by familiarity.

     "'You were hanging on a tree. Your feet were a fathom from
     the ground. Above your head on a bough sat a raven, by its
     side a crow. Your hair was all tangled. On the right hand the
     raven combed your head for you, on the left the crow.'"

But the hopeful rode gaily off through the bars, and came to a castle
where a warlike lord was glad to receive any addition to his force.
There he stayed for a year, leading the extreme bandit life of whose
outrages and oppressions we read so much during this troubled period. He
quickly obtained reputation as daring and merciless:

     "Into his sack he stuffed everything; it was all one to him.
     Nothing was too small, nothing too great. Helmbrecht took it
     all, rough and smooth, crooked and straight. He took horses,
     cattle, jacket, sword, cloak, coat, goats, sheep. From women
     he stripped everything, and well enough his ship went that
     first year, 'its sails full.' But after a while, as people
     are wont to think of going home, he took leave of the court,
     and commended them to the good God."

They heard at the farm that he was coming on for a visit, and in
accordance with the ancient custom of giving a present to the bearer of
good news, the messenger received a shirt and pair of hose. But when the
young man himself arrived, "how he was received! Did they step forward
to meet him? Nay, they ran, all together; one crowded past another;
father and mother sprang as if they had never had a care." It is
touching to notice the suggestiveness of a single line in the poet's
description of the scene. The plain people understood that their son was
no longer one of them, and they knew how his earlier false pride must
have grown in this year's absence in the outer world. So in their
anxiety that everything should gratify this brilliant, wayward eldest
son of their admiration and hope, and that nothing should interfere
with his being pleased and gracious to their yearning, timid love, and
knowing how in the homely heartiness of their joy at seeing their young
master again the two servants would treat him at once in the old
familiar way of peasant-farm equality, they instructed their man and
their woman in what they thought to be 

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/37865