shamelessness by Flamenca herself to her damsels, teaching them that the
woman must yield to the pleasure of her lover. Now love, when young,
when, so to speak, but just born and able to feed (as a newborn child on
milk, without hungering for more solid food) on looks and words and
sighs; love thus young, is a fair-seeming godhead, and the devotion to
him a pretty and delicate piece of aestheticism. And such it is here in
"Flamenca," where there certainly exists neither God nor Christ, both
complete absentees, whose priest becomes a courteous lover's valet,
whose church the place for amorous rendezvous, whose sacrifice of mass
and prayer becomes a means of amorous correspondence: Cupid, in the
shape of his slave Guillems de Nevers--become _patarin_(zealot) for
love--peeping with shaven golden head from behind the missal, touching
the lady's hand and whispering with the words of spiritual peace the
declaration of love, the appointment for meeting. God and Christ, I
repeat, are absentees. Where they are I know not; perhaps over the Rhine
with the Lollards in their weavers' dens, or over the Alps in the cell
of St. Francis; not here, certainly, or if here, themselves become the
mere slaves of love. But this King Love, as long as a mere infant, is a
sweet and gracious divinity, surrounded by somewhat of the freshness and
hawthorn sweetness of spring which seem to accompany his favourite
Guillems. Guillems de Nevers, "who could still grow," this brilliant
knight and troubadour, in his white silken and crimson and purple
garments and soundless shoes embroidered with flowers, this prince of
tournaments and _tensos_, who hearing the sorrows of the beautiful
Flamenca, loves her unseen, sits sighing in sight of her prison bower,
and faints like a hero of the Arabian Nights at her name, and has
visions of her as St. Francis has of Christ; this younger and brighter
Sir Launcelot, is an ideal little figure, whom you might mistake for
Love himself as described in the "Romaunt of the Rose;" Love's avatar or
incarnation, on whose appearance the year blooms into spring, the fruit
trees blossom, the birds sing, the girls dance at eve round the
maypoles; behind whom, while reading this poem, we seem to see the corn
shine green beneath the olives, the white-blossomed branches slant
across the blue sky. For is he not the very incarnation of chivalry, of
beauty, and of love? So much for this King Love while but quite young.
Unfortunately he is speedily weaned of his baby food of mere blushing
glances and sighed-out names; and then his aspect, his kingdom's aspect,
the aspect of his votaries, undergoes a change. The profane but charming
game of the loving clerk and the missal is exchanged for the more
coarse hide-and-seek of hidden causeways and tightened bolts, with
jealous husbands guarding the useless door; Guillems becomes but an
ordinary Don Juan or Lovelace, Flamenca but a sorry, sneaking
adulteress, and the gracious damsels mere common sluts, curtseying at
the loan (during the interview of nobler folk) of the gallant's squires.
For the scent of May, of fresh leaves and fallen blossoms, we get the
nauseous vapours of the bath-room; and, alas, King Love has lost his
aureole and his wings and turned keeper of the hot springs, sought out
by the gouty and lepers, of Bourbon-les-Bains; and in closing this book,
so delightfully begun, we sicken at the whiff of hot and fetid moral air
as we should sicken in passing over the outlet of the polluted hot
water.
"But where is the use of telling us all this?" the reader will ask;
"every one knows that illicit passion existed and exists, and has its
chroniclers, its singers in prose and in verse. But what has all this
poetry of common adultery to do with a book like the 'Vita Nuova,' with
that strange new thing, that lifelong worship of a woman, which you call
mediaeval love?" This much: that out of this illicit love, and out of it,
gross as it looks, alone arises the possibility of the "Vita Nuova;"
arises the possibility of the romantic and semi-religious love of the
Middle Ages. Or, rather, let us say that this mere loose love of the
_albas_ and _Wachtlieder_ and "Flamenca," is the substratum, nay, is the
very flesh and blood, of the spiritual passion to which, in later days,
we owe the book of Beatrice.
It is a harsh thing to say, but one which all sociology teaches us, that
as there exists no sensual relation which cannot produce for its
ennoblement a certain amount of passion, so also does there exist no
passion (and Phaedrus is there to prove it) so vile and loathsome as to
be unable to weave about itself a glamour of ideal sentiment. The poets
of the Middle Ages strove after the criminal possession of another man's
wife. This, however veiled with fine and delicate poetic expressions, is
the thing for which they wait and sigh and implore; this is the reward,
the supremely honouring and almost sanctifying reward which the lady
cannot refuse to the knight who has faithfully and humbly served her.
The whole bulk of the love lyrics of the early Middle Ages are there to
prove it; and if the allusions in them are not sufficiently clear, those
who would be enlightened may study the discussions of the allegorical
persons even in the English (and later) version of Guillaume de Lorris'
"Roman de la Rose;" and turn to what, were it in _langue d'oc_, we
should call a _tenso_ of Guillaume li Viniers among Maetzner's
"Altfranzoesische Lieder-dichter." The catastrophe of Ulrich von
Liechtenstein's "Frowendienst," where the lady, the "virtuous," the
"pure," as he is pleased to call her, after making him cut off his
finger, dress in leper's clothes, chop off part of his upper lip, and go
through the most marvellous Quixotic antics dressed in satin and pearls
and false hair as Queen Venus, and jousting in this costume with every
knight between Venice and Styria, all for her honour and glory; pulls
the gallant in a basket up to her window, and then lets him drop down
into the moat which is no better than a sewer; this grotesque and
tragically resented end of Ulrich's first _love service_ speaks volumes
on the point. The stones in Nostradamus' "Lives of the Troubadours," the
incidents in Gottfried's "Tristan und Isolde," nay, the adventures even
in our expunged English "Morte d'Arthur," relating to the birth of Sir
Galahad, are as explicit as anything in Brantome or the Queen of
Navarre; the most delicate love songs of Provence and Germany are
cobwebs spun round Decameronian situations. And all this is permitted,
admitted, sanctioned by feudal society even as the _cecisbeos_ of the
noble Italian ladies were sanctioned by the society of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. In the mediaeval castle, where, as we have
seen, the lady, separated from her own sex, is surrounded by a swarm of
young men without a chance of marriage, and bound to make themselves
agreeable to the wife of a military superior; the woman soon ceases to
be the exclusive property of her husband, and the husband speedily
discovers that the majority, hence public ridicule, are against any
attempt at monopolizing her. Thus adultery becomes, as we have seen,
accepted as an institution under the name of _service_; and, like all
other social institutions, developes a morality of its own--a morality
within immorality, of faithfulness within infidelity. The lady must be
true to her knight, and the knight must be true to his lady: the Courts
of Love solemnly banish from society any woman who is known to have more
than one lover. Faithfulness is the first and most essential virtue of
mediaeval love; a virtue unknown to the erotic poets of Antiquity, and
which modern times have inherited from the Middle Ages as a requisite,
even (as the reproaches of poets of the Alfred de Musset school teach
us) in the most completely illicit love. Tristram and Launcelot, the two
paragons of knighthood, are inviolably constant to their mistress: the
husband may and must be deceived, but not the wife who helps to deceive
him. Yseult of Brittany and Elaine, the mother of Galahad, do not
succeed in breaking the vows made to Yseult the Fair and to Queen
Guenevere. The beautiful lady in the hawthorn _alba_ "a son cor en amar
lejalmens." But this loyal loving is for the knight who is warned to
depart, certainly not for the husband, the _gilos_, in whose despite
("Bels dous amios, baizem nos eu e vos--Aval els pratzon chantols
auzellos--_Tot O fassam en despeit del gilos_") they are meeting. The
ladies of the minnesingers are "pure," "good," "faithful" (and each and
all are pure, good, and faithful, as long as they do not resist) from
the point of view of the lover, not of the husband, if indeed a husband
be permitted to have any point of view at all. And as fidelity is the
essential virtue in these adulterous connections, so infidelity is the
greatest crime that a woman (and even a man) can commit, the greatest
misfortune which fate can send to an unhappy knight. That he leaves a
faithful mistress behind him is the one hope of the knight who, taking
the cross, departs to meet the scimitars of Saladin's followers, the
fevers, the plagues, the many miserable deaths of the unknown East. "If
any lady be unfaithful," says Quienes de Bethune, "she will have to be
unfaithful with some base wretch."
Et les dames ki castement vivront
Se loiaute font a ceus qui iront;
Et seles font par mal conseil folaje,
A lasques gens et mauvais le feront,
Car tout li bon iront en cest voiage.
"I have taken the cross on account of my sins," sings Albrecht von
Johansdorf, one of the most earnest of the minnesingers; "now let God
help, till my return, the woman who has great sorrow on my account, in
order that I may find her possessed of her honour; let Him grant me this
prayer. But if she change her life (_i.e_., take to bad courses), then
may God forbid my ever returning." The lady is bound (the Courts of Love
decide this point of honour) to reward her faithful lover. "A knight,"
says a lady, in an anonymous German song published by Bartsch, "has
served me according to my will. Before too much time elapse, I must
reward him; nay, if all the world were to object, he must have his way
with me" ("und waerez al der Werlte leit, so muoz sin wille an mir
ergaen"). But, on the other hand, the favoured knight is bound to protect
his lady's good fame.
Se jai mamie en tel point mis,
Que tout motroit (m'octroit) sans esformer,
Tant doi je miex sonnor gaiter--
thus one of the interlocutors in a French _jeu-parti_, published by
Maetzner; a rule which, if we may judge from the behaviour of Tristram
and Launcelot, and from the last remnants of mediaeval love lore in
modern French novels, means simply that the more completely a man has
induced a woman to deceive her husband, the more stoutly is he bound to
deny, with lies, rows, and blows, that she has ever done anything of the
sort. Here, then, we find established, as a very fundamental necessity
of this socially recognized adultery, a reciprocity of fidelity between
lover and mistress which Antiquity never dreamed of even between husband
and wife (Agamemnon has a perfect right to Briseis or Chryseis, but
Clytaemnestra has no right to Aegisthus); and which indeed could scarcely
arise as a moral obligation except where the woman was not bound to love
the man (which the wife is) and where her behaviour towards him depended
wholly upon her pleasure, that is to say, upon her satisfaction with his
behaviour towards her. This, which seems to us so obvious, and of which
every day furnishes us an example in the relations of the modern suitor
and his hoped-for wife, could not, at a time when women were married by
family arrangement, arise except as a result of illegitimate love.
Horrible as it seems, the more we examine into this subject of mediaeval
love, the more shall we see that our whole code of Grandisonian chivalry
between lovers who intend marriage is derived from the practice of the
Launcelots and Gueneveres, not from that of the married people (we may
remember the manner in which Gunther woos his wife Brunhilt in the
Nibelungenlied) of former ages; nay, the more we shall have to recognize
that the very feeling which constitutes the virtuous love of modern
poets is derived from the illegitimate loves of the Middle Ages.
Let us examine what are the habits of feeling and thinking which grow
out of this reciprocal fidelity due to the absence of all one-sided
legal pressure in this illegitimate, but socially legitimated, love of
the early Middle Ages; which are added on to it by the very necessities
of illicit connection. The lover, having no right to the favours of his
mistress, is obliged, in order to win and to keep them, to please her by
humility, fidelity, and such knightly qualities as are the ideal plumage
of a man: he must bring home to her, by showing the world her colours
victorious in serious warfare, in the scarcely less dangerous play of
tournaments, and by making her beauty and virtues more illustrious in
his song than are those of other women in the songs of their lovers--he
must bring home to her that she has a more worthy servant than her
rivals; he must determine her to select him and to adhere to her
selection. Now mediaeval husbands select their wives, instead of being
selected; and once the woman and the dowry are in their hands, trouble
themselves but little whether they are approved of or not. On the other
hand, the mistress appears to her lover invested with imaginative, ideal
advantages such as cannot surround her in the eyes of her husband: she
is, in nearly every case, his superior in station and the desired of
many beholders; she is bound to him by no tie which may grow prosaic and
wearisome; she appears to him in no domestic capacity, can never descend
to be the female drudge; her possession is prevented from growing stale,
her personality from becoming commonplace, by the difficulty, rareness,
mystery, adventure, danger, which even in the days of Courts of Love
attach to illicit amours; above all, being for this man neither the
housewife nor the mother, she remains essentially and continually the
mistress, the beloved. Similarly the relations between the knight and
the lady, untroubled by domestic worries, pecuniary difficulties, and
squabbles about children, remain, exist merely as love relations,
relations of people whose highest and sole desire is to please one
another. Moreover, and this is an important consideration, the lady, who
is a mere inexperienced, immature girl when she first meets her husband,
is a mature woman, with character and passions developed by the
independence of conjugal and social life. When she meets her lover,
whatever power or dignity of character she may possess is ripe; whatever
intensity of aspiration and passion may be latent is ready to come
forth; for the first time there is equality in love. Equality? Ah, no.
This woman who is the wife of his feudal superior, this woman surrounded
by all the state of feudal sovereignty, this woman who, however young,
has already known so much of life, this woman whose love is a free, gift
of grace to the obscure, trembling vassal who has a right not even to be
noticed; this lady of mediaeval love must always remain immeasurably
above her lover. And, in the long day-dreams while watching her, as he
thinks unseen, while singing of her, as he thinks unheard, there cluster
round her figure, mistily seen in his fancy, those vague and-mystic
splendours which surround the new sovereign of the Middle Ages, the
Queen of Heaven; there mingles in the half-terrified raptures of the
first kind glance, the first encouraging word, the ineffable passion
stored up in the Christian's heart for the immortal beings who, in the
days of Bernard and Francis, descend cloud-like on earth and fill the
cells of the saints with unendurable glory.
And thus, out of the baseness of habitual adultery, arises incense-like,
in the early mediaeval poetry, a new kind of love--subtler, more
imaginative, more passionate, a love of the fancy and the heart, a love
stimulating to the perfection of the individual as is any religion;
nay, a religion, and one appealing more completely to the complete man,
flesh and soul, than even the mystical beliefs of the Middle Ages. And
as, in the fantastic song of Ritter Tannhaeuser, whose liege lady, so
legend tells, was Dame Venus herself, the lady bids the knight go forth
and fetch her green water which has washed the setting sun, salamanders
snatched from the flame, the stars out of heaven; so would it seem as if
this new power in the world, this poetically worshipped woman, had sent
forth mankind to seek wonderful new virtues, never before seen on earth.
Nay, rather, as the snowflakes became green leaves, the frost blossoms
red and blue flowers, the winter wind a spring-scented breeze, when
Bernard de Ventadorn was greeted by his mistress; so also does it seem
as if, at the first greeting of the world by this new love, the mediaeval
winter had turned to summer, and there had budded forth and flowered a
new ideal of manly virtue, a new ideal of womanly grace.
But evil is evil, and evil is its fruit. Out of circumstances hitherto
unknown, circumstances come about for the first time owing to the
necessities of illegitimate passion, have arisen certain new and nobler
characters of sexual love, certain new and beautiful conceptions of
manly and womanly nature. The circumstances to which these are owed are
pure in themselves, they are circumstances which in more modern times
have characterized the perfectly legitimate passion of lovers held
asunder by no social law, but by mere accidental barriers--from Romeo
and Juliet to the Master of Ravenswood and Lucy Ashton; and pure so far
have been the spiritual results. But these circumstances were due, in
the early Middle Ages, to the fact of adultery; and to the new ideal of
love has clung, even in its purity, in its superior nobility, an element
of corruption as unknown to gross and corrupt Antiquity as was the
delicacy and nobility of mediaeval love. The most poetical and pathetic
of all mediaeval love stories, the very incarnation of all that is most
lyric at once and most tragic in the new kind of passion, is the story,
told and retold by a score of poets and prose writers, of the loves of
Yseult of Ireland and of Sir Tristram who, as the knight was bringing
the princess to his uncle and her affianced, King Mark of Cornwall drank
together by a fatal mistake a philter which made all such as partook of
it in common inseparable lovers even unto death. Every one knows the
result r: how Yseult came to her husband already the paramour of
Tristram; how Brangwaine, her damsel, feeling that this unhallowed
passion was due to her having left-within reach the potion intended for
the King and Queen of Cornwall, devoted herself, at the price of her
maidenhood, to connive in the amours of the lovers whom she had made;
how King Mark was deceived, and doubted, and was deceived again; how
Tristram fled to Brittany, but how, despite his seeming marriage with
another and equally lovely Yseult, he remained faithful to the Queen of
Cornwall. One version tells that Mark slew his nephew while he sat
harping to Queen Yseult; another that Tristram died of grief because his
scorned though wedded wife told him that the white-sailed ship, bearing
his mistress to meet him, bore the black sail which meant that she was
not on board; but all versions, I think, agree in ending with the fact,
that the briar-rose growing on the tomb of the one, slowly trailed its
flowers and thorns along till it had reached also the grave of the
other, and knit together, as love had knit together with its sweet
blossoms and sharp spines, the two fated lovers. The Middle Ages were
enthralled by this tale; but they were also, occasionally, a little
shocked by it. Poets and prose writers tampered every now and then with
incidents and characters, seeking to make it appear that, owing to the
substitution of the waiting-maid, and the neglect of the wedded princess
of Brittany, Yseult had never belonged to any man save Tristram, nor
Tristram to any woman save Yseult; or that King Mark had sent his nephew
to woo the Irish queen's daughter merely in hopes of his perishing in
the attempt, and that his whole subsequent conduct was due to a mere
unnatural hatred of a better knight than himself; touching up here and
there with a view to justifying and excusing to some degree the long
series of deceits which constituted the whole story. Thus the more timid
and less gifted. But when, in the very first years (1210) of the
thirteenth century, the greatest mediaeval poet that preceded Dante, the
greatest German poet that preceded Goethe, Meister Gottfried von
Strassburg, took in hand the old threadbare story of "Tristan und
Isolde," he despised all alterations of this sort, and accepted the
original tale in its complete crudeness.
For, consciously or unconsciously, Gottfried had conceived this story as
a thing wholly unknown in his time, and no longer subject to any of
those necessities of constant rearrangement which tormented mediaeval
poets: he had conceived it not as a tale, but as a novel. Gottfried
himself was probably but little aware of what he was doing; the poem
that he was writing probably fell for him into the very same category as
the poems of other men; but to us, with our experience of so many
different forms of narrative, it must be evident that "Tristan und
Isolde" is a new departure, inasmuch as it is not the story of deeds and
the people who did them, like the true epic from Homer to the
Nibelungen; nor the story of people and the adventures which happened to
them, like all romance poetry from "Palemon and Arcite," to the "Orlando
Furioso;" but, on the contrary, the story of the psychological
relations, the gradual metamorphosis of soul by soul, between two
persons. The long introductory story of Tristram's youth must not
mislead us, nor all the minute narrations of the killing of dragons and
the drinking of love philters: Gottfried, we must remember, was
certainly no deliberate innovator, and these thing's are the mere
inevitable externalities of mediaeval poetry, preserved with dull slavish
care by the re-writer of a well-known tale, but enclosing in reality
something essentially and startlingly modern: the history of a passion
and of the spiritual changes which it brings about in those who are its
victims.
To meet again this purely psychological interest we must skip the whole
rest of the Middle Ages, nay, skip even the great period of dramatic
literature, not stopping till we come to the end of the seventeenth and
beginning of the eighteenth century, to the "Princesse de Cleves," to
"Clarissa Harlowe," nay, really, to "The Nouvelle Heloise." For even in
Shakespeare there is always interest and importance in the action and
reaction of subsidiary characters, in the event, in the accidental;
there is intrigue, chance, misunderstanding, fate--active agencies of
which Othello and Hamlet, King Lear and Romeo, are helpless victims;
there is, even in this psychological English drama of the Elizabethans,
fate in the shape of Iago, in the shape of the Ghost, in the shape of
the brothers of Webster's duchess; fate in the shape of a ring, a
letter, a drug, but fate always. And in this "Tristan und Isolde" of
Gottfried von Strassburg is there not fate also in the love potion
intended for King Mark, and given by the mistake of Brangwaine to Mark's
bride and his nephew? To this objection, which will naturally occur to
any reader who is not acquainted with the poem of Gottfried, I simply
answer, there is not. The love potion there is, but it does not play the
same part as do, for instance, the drugs of Friar Laurence and his
intercepted letter. Suppose the friar's narcotic to have been less
enduring in its action, or his message to have reached in safety, why
then Juliet would have been awake instead of asleep, or Romeo would not
have supposed her to be dead, and instead of the suicide of the two
lovers, we should have had the successful carying off of Juliet by
Romeo. Not so with Gottfried. The philter is there, and a great deal is
talked about it; but it is merely one of the old, threadbare trappings
of the original story, which he has been too lazy to suppress; it is
merely, for the reader, the allegorical signal for an outburst of
passion which all our subsequent knowledge of Tristram and Yseult shows
us to be absolutely inevitable. In Gottfried's poem, the drinking of the
potion signifies merely that all the rambling, mediaeval prelude, not to
be distinguished from the stories of "Morte d'Arthur," and of half the
romances of the Middle Ages, has come to a close and may be forgotten;
and that the real work of the great poet, the real, matchless tragedy of
the four actors--Tristram, Yseult, Mark, and Brangwaine--has begun.