mediaeval love. This song comes from the triumphantly reorganized portion
of society, not from the part which is slowly working its way to
reorganization; not from the timidly encroaching burghers, but from the
nobles. The reign of town poetry, of fabliaux and meistersang, comes
later; the poets of the early Middle Ages, trouveres, troubadours, and
minnesingers are, with barely one or two exceptions, all knights. And
their song comes from the castle. Now, in order to understand mediaeval
love, we must reflect for a moment upon this feudal castle, and upon the
kind of life which the love poets of the late twelfth and early
thirteenth century--whether lords like Bertram de Born, and Guillaume de
Poitiers, among the troubadours; the Vidame de Chartres, Meurisses de
Craon, and the Duke of Brabant among the trouveres of Northern France;
like Ulrich von Liechtenstein among the minnesingers; or retainers and
hangers-on like Bernard de Ventadour and Armand de Mareulh, like
Chrestiens de Troyes, Gaisses Brulez, or Quienes de Bethune, like
Walther, Wolfram, and Tannhaeuser--great or small, good or bad, saw
before them and mixed with in that castle. The castle of a great
feudatory of the early Middle Ages, whether north or south of the Loire,
in Austria or in Franconia, is like a miniature copy of some garrison
town in barbarous countries: there is an enormous numerical
preponderance of men over women; for only the chiefs in command, the
overlord, and perhaps one or two of his principal kinsmen or adjutants,
are permitted the luxury of a wife; the rest of the gentlemen are
subalterns, younger sons without means, youths sent to learn their
military duty and the ways of the world: a whole pack of men without
wives, without homes, and usually without fortune. High above all this
deferential male crowd, moves the lady of the castle: highborn, proud,
having brought her husband a dower of fiefs often equal to his own, and
of vassals devoted to her race. About her she has no equals; her
daughters, scarcely out of the nurse's hands, are given away in
marriage; and her companions, if companions they may be called, are the
waiting ladies, poor gentlewomen situated between the maid of honour and
the ladies' maid, like that Brangwaine whom Yseult sacrifices to her
intrigue with Tristram, or those damsels whom Flamenca gives over to the
squires of her lover Guillems; at best, the wife of one of her husband's
subalterns, or some sister or aunt or widow kept by charity. Round this
lady--the stately, proud lady perpetually described by mediaeval
poets--flutters the swarm of young men, all day long, in her path:
serving her at meals, guarding her apartments, nay, as pages, admitted
even into her most secret chamber; meeting her for ever in the
narrowness of that castle life, where every unnecessary woman is a
burden usurping the place of a soldier, and, if possible, replaced by a
man. Servants, lacqueys, and enjoying the privileges of ubiquity of
lacqueys, yet, at the same time, men of good birth and high breeding,
good at the sword and at the lute; bound to amuse this highborn woman,
fading away in the monotony of feudal life, with few books to read or
unable to read them, and far above all the household concerns which
devolve on the butler, the cellarer, the steward, the gentleman,
honourably employed as a servant. To them, to these young men, with few
or no young women of their own age to associate, and absolutely no
unmarried girls who could be a desirable match, the lady of the castle
speedily becomes a goddess, the impersonation at once of that feudal
superiority before which they bow, of that social perfection which they
are commanded to seek, and of that womankind of which the castle affords
so few examples. To please her, this lazy, bored, highbred woman, with
all the squeamishness and caprice of high birth and laziness about her,
becomes their ideal; to be favourably noticed, their highest glory; to
be loved, these wretched mortals, by this divinity--that thought must
often pass through their brain and terrify them with its delicious
audacity; oh no, such a thing is not possible. But it is. The lady at
first, perhaps most often, singles out as a pastime some young knight,
some squire, some page; and, in a half-queenly, half-motherly way,
corrects, rebukes his deficiencies, undertakes to teach him his duty as
a servant. The romance of the "Petit Jehan de Saintre," written in the
fifteenth century, but telling, with a delicacy of cynicism worthy of
Balzac, what must have been the old, old story of the whole feudal
Middle Ages, shows the manner in which, while feeling that he is being
trained to knightly courtesy and honour, the young man in the service of
a great feudal lady is gradually taught dissimulation, lying, intrigue;
is initiated by the woman who looms above him like a saint into all the
foulness of adultery. Adultery; a very ugly word, which must strike
almost like a handful of mud in the face whosoever has approached this
subject of mediaeval love in admiration of its strange delicacy and
enthusiasm. Yet it is a word which must be spoken, for in it is the
explanation of the whole origin and character of this passion which
burst into song in the early Middle Ages. This almost religious love,
this love which conceives no higher honour than the service of the
beloved, no higher virtue than eternal fidelity--this love is the love
for another man's wife. Between unmarried young men and young women,
kept carefully apart by the system which gives away a girl without her
consent and only to a rich suitor, there is no possibility of love in
these early feudal courts; the amours, however licentious, between
kings' daughters and brave knights, of the Carolingian tales, belong to
a different rank of society, to the prose romances made up in the
fourteenth century for the burgesses of cities; the intrigues, ending in
marriage, of the princes and princesses of the cycle of Amadis, belong
to a different period, to the fifteenth century, and to courts where
feudal society scarcely exists; the squires, the young knights who hang
about a great baronial establishment of the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, have still to make their fortune, and do not dream of
marriage. The husband, on the other hand, the great lord or successful
knightly adventurer, married late in life, and married from the
necessity, for ever pressing upon the feudal proprietor, of adding on
new fiefs and new immunities, of increasing his importance and
independence in proportion to the hourly increasing strength and claims
of the overlord, the king, who casts covetous eyes upon him--the husband
has not married for love; he has had his love affairs with the wives of
other men in his day, or may still have them; this lady is a mere feudal
necessity, she is required to give him a dower and give him an heir,
that is all. If the husband does not love, how much less can the wife;
married, as she is, scarce knowing what marriage is, to a man much older
than herself, whom most probably she has never seen, to whom she is a
mere investment. Nay, there is not even the after-marriage love of the
ancients: this wife is not the housekeeper, the woman who works that the
man's house may be rich and decorous; not even the nurse of his
children, for the children are speedily given over to the squires and
duennas; she is the woman of another family who has come into his, the
stranger who must be respected (as that most typical mediaeval wife,
Eleanor of Guienne, was respected by her husbands) on account of her
fiefs, her vassals, her kinsfolk; but who cannot be loved. Can there be
love between man and wife? There cannot be love between man and wife.
This is no answer of mine, fantastically deduced from mediaeval poetry.
It is the answer solemnly made to the solemnly asked question by the
Court of Love held by the Countess of Champagne in 1174, and registered
by Master Andrew the King of France's chaplain: "Dicimus enim et
stabilito tenore firmamus amorem non posse inter duos jugales suas
extendere vires." And the reason alleged for this judgment brings us
back to the whole conception of mediaeval love as a respectful service
humbly waiting for a reward: "For," pursues the decision published by
Andre le Chapelain, "whereas lovers grant to each other favours freely
and from no legal necessity, married people have the duty of obeying
each other's wishes and of refusing nothing to one another." "No love is
possible between man and wife," repeat the Courts of Love which,
consisting of all the highborn ladies of the province and presided by
some mighty queen or princess, represent the social opinions of the day.
"But this lady," says a knight (Miles) before the love tribunal of Queen
Eleanor, "promised to me that if ever she should lose the love of her
lover, she would take me in his place. She has wedded the man who was
her lover, and I have come to claim fulfilment of her promise." The
court discusses for awhile. "We cannot," answers Queen Eleanor, "go
against the Countess of Champagne's decision that love cannot exist
between man and wife. We therefore desire this lady to fulfil her
promise and give you her love." Again, there come to the Court of Love
of the Viscountess of Narbonne a knight and a lady, who desire to know
whether, having been once married, but since divorced, a love engagement
between them would be honourable. The viscountess decides that "Love
between those who have been married together, but who have since been
divorced from one another, is not to be deemed reprehensible; nay, that
it is to be considered as honourable." And these Courts of Love, be it
remarked, were frequently held on occasion of the marriage of great
personages; as, for instance, of that between Louis VII. and Eleanor of
Poitiers in 1137. The poetry of the early Middle Ages follows implicitly
the decisions of these tribunals, which reveal a state of society to
which the nearest modern approach is that of Italy in the eighteenth
century, when, as Goldoni and Parini show us, as Stendhal (whose "De
l'Amour" may be taken as the modern "Breviari d'Amor") expounds, there
was no impropriety possible as long as a lady was beloved by any one
except her own husband. No love, therefore, between unmarried people
(the cyclical romances, as before stated, and the Amadises, belong to
another time of social condition, and the only real exception to my rule
of which I can think is the lovely French tale of "Aucassin et
Nicolette"); and no love between man and wife. But love there must be;
and love there consequently is; love for the married woman from the man
who is not her husband. The feudal lady, married without being consulted
and without having had a chance of knowing what love is, yet lives to
know love; lives to be taught it by one of these many bachelors bound to
flutter about her in military service or social duty; lives to teach it
herself. And she is too powerful in her fiefs and kinsmen, too powerful
in the public opinion which approves and supports her, to be hampered by
her husband. The husband, indeed, has grown up in the same habits, has
known, before marrying, the customs sanctioned by the Courts of Love; he
has been the knight of some other man's wife in his day, what right has
he to object? As in the days of Italian _cecisbei_, the early mediaeval
lover might say with Goldoni's Don Alfonso or Don Roberto, "I _serve_
your wife--such or such another serves mine, what harm can there be in
it?" ("Io servo vostra moglie, Don Eugenio favorisce la mia; che male c'
e?" I am quoting from memory.) And as a fact, we hear little of
jealousy; the amusement of En Barral when Peire Vidal came in and kissed
his sleeping wife; and the indignation of all Provence for the murder of
Guillems de Cabestanh (buried in the same tomb with the lady who had
been made to eat of his heart)--showing from opposite sides how the
society accustomed to Courts of Love looked upon the duties of husbands.
Such was the social life in those feudal courts whence first arises the
song of mediaeval love, and that this is the case is proved by the whole
huge body of early mediaeval poetry. We must not judge, as I have said,
either by poems of much earlier date, like the Nibelungen and the
Carolingian _chansons de geste_, which merely received a new form in the
early Middle Ages; still less from the prose romances of Melusine,
Milles et Amys, Palemon and Arcite, and a host of others which were
elaborated only later and under the influence of the quite unfeudal
habits of the great cities; and least of all from that strange late
southern cycle of the Amadises, from which, odd as it seems, many of our
notions of chivalric love have, through our ancestors, through the
satirists or burlesque poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
been inherited. We must look at the tales which, as we are constantly
being told by trouveres, troubadours, and minnesingers, were the
fashionable reading of the feudal classes of the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries: the tales best known to us in the colourless respectability
of the collection made in the reign of Edward IV. by Sir Thomas Malory,
and called by him the "Morte d'Arthur"--of the ladies and knights of
Arthur's court; of the quest of the Grail by spotless knights who were
bastards and fathers of bastards; of the intrigues of Tristram of
Lyoness and Queen Yseult; of Launcelot and Guenevere; the tales which
Francesca and Paolo read together. We must look, above all, at the lyric
poetry of France, Provence, Germany, and Sicily in the early Middle
Ages.
Vos qui tres bien ameis i petit mentendeis
Por l'amor de Ihesu les pucelles ameis.
Nos trouvons en escris de sainte auctoriteis
Ke pucelle est la fleur de loyaulment ameir.
This strange entreaty to love the maidens for the sake of Christ's love,
this protest of a nameless northern French poet (Wackernagel,
Altfranzoesische Lieder and Leiche IX.) against the adulterous passion of
his contemporaries, comes to us, pathetically enough, solitary, faint,
unnoticed in the vast chorus, boundless like the spring song of birds or
the sound of the waves, of poets singing the love of other men's wives.
But, it may be objected--how can we tell that these love songs, so
carefully avoiding all mention of names, are not addressed to the
desired bride, to the legitimate wife of the poet? For several reasons;
and mainly, for the crushing evidence of an undefinable something which
tells us that they are not. The other reasons are easily stated. We know
that feudal habits would never have allowed to unmarried women (and
women were married when scarcely out of their childhood) the
opportunities for the relations which obviously exist between the poet
and his lady; and that, if by some accident a young knight might fall in
love with a girl, he would address not her but her parents, since the
Middle Ages, who were indifferent to adultery, were, like the southern
nations among whom the married woman is not expected to be virtuous,
extreme sticklers for the purity of their unmarried womankind. Further,
we have no instance of an unmarried woman being ever addressed during
the early Middle Ages, in those terms of social respect--_madame,
domna, frowe, madonna_--which essentially belong to the mistress of a
household; nor do these stately names fit in with any theory which would
make us believe that the lady addressed by the poet is the jealously
guarded daughter of the house with whom he is plotting a secret
marriage, or an elopement to end off in marriage. This is not the way
that Romeo speaks to Juliet, nor even that the princesses in the
cyclical romances and in the Amadises are wooed by their bridegrooms.
This is not the language of a lover who is broaching his love, and who
hopes, however timidly, to consummate it before all the world by
marriage. It is obviously the language of a man either towards a woman
who is taking a pleasure in keeping him dangling without favours which
she has implicitly or explicitly promised; or towards a woman who is
momentarily withholding favours which her lover has habitually enjoyed.
And in a large proportion of cases the poems of trouveres, troubadours,
and minnesingers are the expression of fortunate love, the fond
recollection or eager expectation of meetings with the beloved. All this
can evidently not be connected with the wooing, however stealthy,
however Romeo-and-Juliet-like of a bride; still less can it be explained
in reference to love within wedlock. A man does not, however loving,
worship his wife as his social superior; he does not address her in
titles of stiff respect; he does not sigh and weep and supplicate for
love which is his due, and remind his wife that she owes it him in
return for loyal, humble, discreet service. Above all, a man (except in
some absurd comedy perhaps, where the husband, in an age of _cicisbeos_,
is in love with his own wife and dares not admit it before the society
which holds "that there can be no love between married folk ")--a
husband, I repeat, does not beg for, arrange, look forward to, and
recall with triumph or sadness, secret meetings with his own wife. Now
the secret meeting is, in nearly every aristocratic poet of the early
poetry, the inevitable result of the humble praises and humble requests
for kindness; it is, most obviously, _the_ reward for which the poet is
always importuning. Mediaeval love poetry, compared with the love poetry
of Antiquity and the love poetry of the revival of letters, is, in its
lyric form, decidedly chaste; but it is perfectly explicit; and, for all
its metaphysical tendencies and its absence of clearly painted pictures,
the furthest possible removed from being Platonic. One of the most
important, characteristic, and artistically charming categories of
mediaeval love lyrics is that comprising the Provencal _serena_ and
_alba,_ with their counterparts in the _langue d'oil_, and the so-called
_Wachtlieder_ of the minnesingers; and this category of love poetry may
be defined as the drama, in four acts, of illicit love. The faithful
lover has received from his lady an answer to his love, the place and
hour are appointed; all the day of which the evening is to bring him
this honour, he goes heavy hearted and sighing: "Day, much do you grow
for my grief, and the evening, the evening and the long hope kills me."
Thus far the _serena_, the evening song, of Guiraut Riquier. A lovely
anonymous _alba,_ whose refrain, "Oi deus, oi deus; de l' alba, tan tost
ve!" is familiar to every smatterer of Provencal, shows us the lady and
her knight in an orchard beneath the hawthorn, giving and taking the
last kisses while the birds sing and the sky whitens with dawn. "The
lady is gracious and pleasant, and many look upon her for her beauty,
and her heart Is all in loving loyally; alas, alas, the dawn! how soon
it: comes!--" "Oi deus, oi deus; de l'alba, tan tost ve!" The real _alba_
is the same as the German _Wachtlieder,_ the song of the squire or
friend posted at the garden gate or outside the castle wall, warning the
lovers to separate. "Fair comrade (Bel Companho), I call to you singing.
'Sleep no more, for I hear the birds announcing the day in the trees,
and I fear that the jealous one may find you;' and in a moment it will
be day, 'Bel Companho, come to the window and look at the signs in the
sky! you will know me a faithful messenger; if you do it not, it will be
to your harm" and in a moment it will be dawn (et ades sera l' alba)...
Bel Companho, since I left you I have not slept nor raised myself from
my knees; for I have prayed to God the Son of Saint Mary, that he should
send me: back my faithful comrade, and in a moment it will be dawn In
this _alba_ of Guiraut de Borneulh, the lover comes at last to the
window, and cries to his watching comrade that he is too happy to care
either for the dawn or for the jealous one. The German _Wachtlieder_ are
even more explicit. "He must away at once and without delay," sings the
watchman in a poem of Wolfram, the austere singer of Parzifal and the
Grail Quest; "let him go, sweet lady; let him away from thy love so that
he keep his honour and life. He trusted himself to me that I should
bring him safely hence; it is day ..." "Sing what thou wilt, watchman,"
answers the lady, "but leave him here." In a far superior, but also far
less chaste poem of Heinrich von Morungen, the lady, alone and
melancholy, wakes up remembering the sad white light of morning, the sad
cry of the watchman, which separated her from her knight. Still more
frankly, and in a poem which is one of the few real masterpieces of
Minnesang, the lady in Walther von der Vogelweide's "Under der linden an
der Heide" narrates a meeting in the wood. "What passed between us shall
never be known by any! never by any, save him and me--yes, and by the
little nightingale that sang _Tandaradei_! The little bird will surely
be discreet."
The songs of light love for another's wife of troubadour, trouvere, and
minnesinger, seem to have been squeezed together, so that all their
sweet and acrid perfume is, so to speak, sublimated, in the recently
discovered early Provencal narrative poem called "Flamenca." Like the
"Tristram" of Gottfried von Strassburg, like all these light mediaeval
love _lyrics,_ of which I have been speaking, the rhymed story of
"Flamenca," a pale and simple, but perfect petalled daisy, has come up
in a sort of moral and intellectual dell in the winter of the Middle
Ages--a dell such as you meet in hollows of even the most wind-swept
southern hills, where, while all round the earth is frozen and the short
grass nibbled away by the frost, may be found even at Christmas a bright
sheen of budding wheat beneath the olives on the slope, a yellow haze of
sun upon the grass in which the little aromatic shoots of fennel and
mint and marigold pattern with greenness the sere brown, the
frost-burnt; where the very leafless fruit trees have a spring-like rosy
tinge against the blue sky, and the tufted little osiers flame a joyous
orange against the greenness of the hill.
Such spots there are--and many--in the winter of the Middle Ages; though
it is not in them, but where the rain beats, and the snow and the wind
tugs, that grow, struggling with bitterness, the great things of the
day: the philosophy of Abelard, the love of man of St. Francis, the
patriotism of the Lombard communes; nor that lie dormant, fertilized in
the cold earth, the great things of art and thought, the great things to
come. But in them arise the delicate winter flowers which we prize:
tender, pale things, without much life, things either come too soon or
stayed too late, among which is "Flamenca;" one of those roses, nipped
and wrinkled, but stained a brighter red by the frost, which we pluck in
December or in March; beautiful, bright, scentless roses, which, scarce
in bud, already fall to pieces in our hand. "Flamenca" is simply the
narrative of the loves of the beautiful wife of the bearish and jealous
Count Archambautz, and of Guillems de Nevers, a brilliant young knight
who hears of the lady's sore captivity, is enamoured before he sees her,
dresses up as the priest's clerk, and speaks one word with her while
presenting the mass book to be kissed, every holiday; and finally
deceives the vigilance of the husband by means of a subterranean
corridor, which he gets built between his inn and the bath-room of the
lady at the famous waters of Bourbon-les-Bains. In this world of
"Flamenca," which is in truth the same world as that of the "Romaunt of
the Rose," the "Morte d'Arthur," and of the love poets of early France
and Germany, conjugal morality and responsibility simply do not exist.
It seems an unreal pleasure-garden, with a shadowy guardian--impalpable
to us gross moderns--called Honour, but where, as it seems, Love only
reigns. Love, not the mystic and melancholy god of the "Vita Nuova," but
a foppish young deity, sentimental at once and sensual, of fashionable
feudal life: the god of people with no apparent duties towards others,
unconscious of any restraints save those of this vague thing called
honour; whose highest mission for the knight, as put in our English
"Romaunt of the Rose" is to--
Set thy might and alle thy witte
Wymmen and ladies for to plese,
And to do thyng that may hem ese;