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Studies in Mediaeval Life and Literature, by

Edward Tompkins McLaughlin

Title: Studies in Mediaeval Life and Literature

Author: Edward Tompkins McLaughlin

Release Date: October 27, 2011 [EBook #37865] Language: English

*** STUDIES IN MEDIAEVAL LIFE AND ***

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STUDIES IN MEDIAEVAL LIFE AND LITERATURE BY

EDWARD TOMPKINS McLAUGHLIN

PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND BELLES-LETTRES IN YALE UNIVERSITY

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

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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 [v]

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[vi]

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 sum-mer 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[vii] 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

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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 es-says 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[viii] 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. Profes-

sor 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[ix] 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[x] 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.[xi]

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

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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.

[1]

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[2] 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 [3]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 ethi-

cal 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,

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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[4] 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."

[5]

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 Mar-tigny 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[6] 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

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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[7] 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 mi-nor 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[8] 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 [9] 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

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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[10] 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 sough-

ing 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[11] 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."

[12]

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.

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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[13] 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 neces-

sary 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:[14]

"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[15] 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,

8

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 [16]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[17] 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 cas-tel 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,[18] 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,

9

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. [19]

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[20] 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 po-

ets[21] 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

10

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[22] 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: [23]

'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[24] 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,

11

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. [25]

"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 ac-curacy, 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 poeti-

cal 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[26] 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;[27]

And underneath a love-purse hung, By bloomy pendants featly strung,

12

A gift of love.

3.

Upon a mule the lady rode,

The which with silver shoes was shode; Saddle gold-red;

And behind rosebushes 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[28] "rosebushes 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[29] 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,

13

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[30] 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,[31] 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[32] 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 interpre-

tations 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.

14

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.[33]

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.

[34]

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[35] 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.[36]

But, to waive the question of its origin, we find its main expression in the old society, in that protracted and conventional woo-ing which, we should remember, was not usually directed toward marriage. As gentlemen grew hyperbolical and fantastic in their

15

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.'"[37]

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[38] 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 appreci-ably 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[39] 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

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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,[40] 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[41] 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.