impression of modernness which we receive from Gottfried's poem, we
recognize that it is due to something far more important than the mere
precocious psychological interest; nay, rather, that this psychological
interest is itself dependent upon the fact which makes "Tristan und
Isolde," so modern to our feelings. This fact is simply that the poem of
Gottfried is the earliest, and yet perhaps almost the completest,
example of a literary anomaly which Antiquity, for all its abominations,
did not know: the glorification of fidelity in adultery, the
glorification of excellence within the compass of guilt. Older times
--more distant from our own in spirit, though not necessarily in
years--have presented us with many themes of guilt: the guilt which
exists according to our own moral standard, but not according to that of
the narrator, as the magnificently tragic Icelandic incest story of
Sigmund and Signy; the guilt which has come about no one well knows how,
an unfortunate circumstance leaving the sinner virtually stainless, in
his or her own eyes and the eyes of others, like the Homeric Helen; the
heroic guilt, where the very heroism seems due to the self-sacrifice of
the sinner's innocence, of Judith; the struggling, remorseful guilt,
hopelessly overcome by fate and nature, of Phaedra; the dull and dogged
guilt, making the sinner scarce more than a mere physical
stumbling-block for others, of the murderer Hagen in the Nibelungenlied;
and, finally, the perverse guilt, delighting in the consciousness of
itself, of demons like Richard and Iago, of libidinous furies like the
heroines of Tourneur and Marston. The guilt theme of "Tristan und
Isolde" falls into none of these special categories. This theme,
unguessed even by Shakespeare, is that of the virtuous behaviour towards
one another of two individuals united in sinning against every one else.
Gottfried von Strassburg narrates with the greatest detail how Tristram
leads to the unsuspecting king the unblushing, unremorseful woman
polluted by his own embraces; how Yseult substitutes on the wedding
night her spotless damsel Brangwaine for her own sullied self; then,
terrified lest the poor victim of her dishonour should ever reveal it,
attempts to have her barbarously murdered, and, finally, seeing that
nothing can shake the heroic creature's faith, admits her once more to
be the remorseful go-between in her amours. He narrates how Tristram
dresses as a pilgrim and carries the queen from a ship to the shore, in
order that Yseult may call on Christ to bear witness by a miracle that
she is innocent of adultery, never having been touched save by that
pilgrim and her own husband; and how, when the followers of King Mark
have surrounded the grotto in the wood, Tristram places the drawn sword
between himself and the sleeping queen, as a symbol of their chastity
which the king is too honest to suspect. He draws, with a psychological
power truly extraordinary in the beginning of the thirteenth century,
the two other figures in this love drama: King Mark, cheated,
dishonoured, oscillating between horrible doubt, ignominious suspicion
and more ignominious credulity, his love for his wife, his trust in his
nephew, his incapacity for conceiving ill-faith and fraud, the very
gentleness and generosity of his nature, made the pander of guilt in
which he cannot believe; and, on the other side, Brangwaine, the
melancholy, mute victim of her fidelity to Yseult, the weak, heroic
soul, rewarded only with cruel ingratitude, and condemned to screen and
help the sin which she loathes and for which she assumes the awful
responsibility. All this does Gottfried do, yet without ever seeming to
perceive the baseness and wickedness of this tissue of lies,
equivocations, and perjuries in which his lovers hide their passion;
without ever seeming to guess at the pathos and nobility of the man and
the woman who are the mere trumpery obstacles or trumpery aids to their
amours. He heaps upon Tristram and Yseult the most extravagant praises:
he is the flower of all knighthood, and she, the kindest, gentlest,
purest, and noblest of women; he insists upon the wickedness of the
world which is for ever waging war upon their passion, and holds up to
execration all those who seek to spy out their secret. Gottfried is most
genuinely overcome by the ideal beauty of this inextinguishable
devotion, by the sublimity of this love which holds the whole world as
dross; the crimes of the lovers are for him the mere culminating point
of their moral grandeur, which has ceased to know any guilt save
absence of love, any virtue save loving. And so serene is the old
minnesinger's persuasion, that it obscures the judgment and troubles the
heart even of his reader; and we are tempted to ask ourselves, on laying
down the book, whether indeed this could have been sinful, this love of
Tristram and Yseult which triumphed over everything in the world, and
could be quenched only by death. That circle of hell where all those who
had sinfully loved were whirled incessantly in the perse, dark, stormy
air, appeared in the eyes even of Dante as a place less of punishment
than of glory; and, especially since the Middle Ages, all mankind looks
upon that particular hell-pit with admiration rather than with loathing.
And herein consists, more even than in any deceptions practised upon
King Mark or any ingratitude manifested towards Brangwaine, the
sinfulness of Tristram and Yseult: sinfulness which is not finite like
the individual lives which it offends, but infinite and immortal as the
heart and the judgment which it perverts. For such a tale, and so told,
as the tale of Gottfried von Strassburg, makes us sympathize with this
fidelity and devotion of a man and woman who care for nothing in the
world save for each other, who are dragged and glued together by the
desire and habit of mutual pleasure; it makes us admire their readiness
to die rather than be parted, when their whole life is concentrated in
their reciprocal sin, when their miserable natures enjoy, care for,
know, only this miserable love. It makes us wink with leniency at the
dishonour, the baseness, the cruelty, to which all this easy virtue is
due. And such sympathy, such admiration, such leniency, for howsoever
short a time they may remain in our soul, leave it, if they ever leave
it completely and utterly less strong, less clean than it was before. We
have all of us a lazy tendency to approve of the virtue which costs no
trouble; to contemplate in ourselves or others, with a spurious moral
satisfaction, the development of this or that virtuous quality in souls
which are deteriorating in undoubted criminal self-indulgence. We have
all of us, at the bottom of our hearts, a fellow feeling for all human
affection; and the sinfulness of sinners like Tristram and Yseult lies
largely in the fact that they pervert this legitimate and holy sympathy
into a dangerous leniency for any strong and consistent love, into a
morbid admiration for any irresistible mutual passion, making us forget
that love has in itself no moral value, and that while self-indulgence
may often be innocent, only self-abnegation can ever be holy.
The great mediaeval German poem of Tristram and Yseult remained for
centuries a unique phenomenon; only John Ford perhaps, that grander and
darker twin spirit of Gottfried von Strassburg, reviving, even among the
morbidly psychological and crime-fascinated followers of Shakespeare,
that new theme of evil--the heroism of unlawful love. But Gottfried had
merely manipulated with precocious analytical power a mode of feeling
and thinking which was universal in the feudal Middle Ages; the great
epic of adultery was forgotten, but the sympathetic and admiring
interest in illegitimate passion remained; and was transmitted, wherever
the Renaissance or the Reformation did not break through such
transmission of mediaeval habits, as an almost inborn instinct from
father to son, from mother to daughter. And we may doubt whether the
important class of men and women who write and read the novels of
illicit love, could ever have existed, had not the psychological artists
of modern times, from Rousseau to George Sand, and from Stendhal to
Octave Feuillet, found ready prepared for them in the countries not
re-tempered by Protestantism, an assoiation of romance, heroism, and
ideality with mere adulterous passion, which was unknown to the
corruption of Antiquity and to the lawlessness of the Dark Ages, and
which remained as a fatal alloy to that legacy of mere spiritual love
which was left to the world by the love poets of early feudalism.
II.
The love of the troubadours and minnesingers, of the Arthurian tales,
which show that love in narrative form, was, as we have seen, polluted
by the selfishness, the deceitfulness, the many unclean necessities of
adulterous passion. Elevated and exquisite though it was, it could not
really purify the relations of man and woman, since it was impure. Nay,
we see that through its influence the grave and simple married love of
the earlier tales of chivalry, the love of Siegfried for Chriemhilt, of
Roland for his bride Belle Aude, of Renaud for his wife Clarisse, is
gradually replaced in later fiction by the irregular love-makings of
Huon of Bordeaux, Ogier the Dane, and Artus of Brittany; until we come
at last to the extraordinary series of the Amadis romances, where every
hero without exception is the bastard of virtuous parents, who
subsequently marry and discover their foundling: a state of things
which, even in the corrupt Renaissance, Boiardo and Ariosto found it
necessary to reform in their romantic poems. With idealizing refinement,
the chivalric love of the French, Provencal, and German poets brings
also a kind of demoralization which, from one point of view, makes the
spotless songs of Bernard de Ventadour and Armaud de Mareulh, of Ulrich
von Liechtenstein and Frauenlob, less pure than the licentious poems
addressed by the Greeks and Romans to women who, at least, were not the
wives of other men.
Shall all this idealizing refinement, this almost religious fervour,
this new poetic element of chivalric love remain useless; or serve only
to subtly pollute while pretending to purify the great singing passion?
Not so. But to prevent such waste of what in itself is pure and
precious, is the mission of another country, of another civilization; of
a wholly different cycle of poets who, receiving the new element of
mediaeval love after it has passed through and been sifted by a number
of hands, shall cleanse and recreate it in the fire of intellectual and
almost abstract passion, producing that wonderful essence of love which,
as the juices squeezed by alchemists out of jewels purified the body
from all its ills, shall purify away all the diseases of the human soul.
While the troubadours and minnesingers had been singing at the courts of
Angevine kings and Hohenstauffen emperors, of counts of Toulouse and
dukes of Austria; a new civilization, a new political and social system,
had gradually been developing in the free burghs of Italy; a new life
entirely the reverse of the life of feudal countries. The Italian cities
were communities of manufacturers and merchants, into which only
gradually, and at the sacrifice of every aristocratic privilege and
habit, a certain number of originally foreign feudatories were gradually
absorbed. Each community consisted of a number of mercantile families,
equal before the law, and illustrious or obscure according to their
talents or riches, whose members, instead of being scattered over a wide
area like the members of the feudal nobility, were most often gathered
together under one roof--sons, brothers, nephews, daughters, sisters and
daughters-in-law, forming a hierarchy attending to the business of
factory or counting-house under the orders of the father of the family,
and to the economy of the house-under the superintendence of the mother;
a manner of living at once business-like and patriarchal, expounded
pounded by the interlocutors in Alberti's "Governo della Famiglia," and
which lasted until the dissolution of the commonwealths and almost to
our own times. Such habits imply a social organization, an intercourse
between men and women, and a code of domestic morality the exact
opposite to those of feudal countries. Here, in the Italian cities,
there are no young men bound to loiter, far from their homes, round the
wife of a military superior, to whom her rank and her isolation from all
neighbours give idleness and solitude. The young men are all of them in
business, usually with their own kinsfolk; not in their employer's
house, but in his office; they have no opportunity of seeing a woman
from dawn till sunset. The women, on their side, are mainly employed at
home: the whole domestic arrangement depends upon them, and keeps their
hands constantly full; working, and working in the company of their
female relatives and friends. Men and women are free comparatively
little, and then they are free all together in the same places; hence no
opportunities for _tete-a-tete_. Early Italian poetry is fond of showing
us the young poet reading his verses or explaining his passion to those
gentle, compassionate women learned in love, of whom we meet a troop,
beautiful, vague, half-arch, half-melancholy faces, consoling Dante in
the "Vita Nuova," and reminding Guido Cavalcanti of his lady far off at
Toulouse. But such women almost invariably form a group; they cannot be
approached singly. Such a state of society inevitably produces a high
and strict morality. In these early Italian cities a case of in'
fidelity is punished ruthlessly; the lover banished or killed; the wife
for ever lost to the world, perhaps condemned to solitude and a
lingering death in the fever tracts, like Pia dei Tolomei. A complacent
deceived husband is even more ridiculous (the deceived husband is
notoriously the chief laughing stock of all mediaeval free towns) than is
a jealous husband among the authorized and recognized _cicisbeos_ of a
feudal court. Indeed the respect for marriage vows inevitable in this
busy democratic mediaeval life is so strong, that long after the
commonwealths have turned into despotisms, and every social tie has been
dissolved in the Renaissance, the wives and daughters of men stained
with every libidinous vice, nay, of the very despots themselves
--Tiberiuses and Neros on a smaller scale--remain spotless in the midst
of evil; and authorized adultery begins in Italy only under the Spanish
rule in the late sixteenth century.
Such were the manners and morals of the Italian commonwealths when,
about the middle of the thirteenth century, the men of Tuscany, now free
and prosperous, suddenly awoke to the consciousness that they had a soul
which desired song, and a language which was spontaneously singing. It
was the moment when painting was beginning to claim for the figures of
real men and women the walls and vaulted spaces whence had hitherto
glowered, with vacant faces and huge ghostlike eyes, mosaic figures,
from their shimmering golden ground; the moment when the Pisan artists
had sculptured solemnly draped madonnas and kings not quite unworthy of
the carved sarcophagi which stood around them; the moment when, merging
together old Byzantine traditions and Northern examples, the architects
of Florence, Siena, and Orvieto conceived a style which made cathedrals
into marvellous and huge reliquaries of marble, jasper, alabaster, and
mosaics. The mediaeval flowering time had come late, very late, in Italy;
but the atmosphere was only the warmer, the soil the richer, and Italy
put forth a succession of exquisite and superb immortal flowers of art
when the artistic sap of other countries had begun to be exhausted. But
the Italians, the Tuscans, audacious in the other arts, were diffident
of themselves with regard to poetry. Architecture, painting, sculpture,
had been the undisputed field for plebeian craftsmen, belonging
exclusively to the free burghs and disdained by the feudal castles; but
poetry was essentially the aristocratic, the feudal art, cultivated by
knights and cultivated for kings and barons. It was probably an unspoken
sense of this fact which caused the early Tuscan poets to misgive their
own powers and to turn wistfully and shyly towards the poets of Provence
and of Sicily. There, beyond the seas, under the last lords of Toulouse
and the brilliant mongrel Hohenstauffen princes, were courts, knights,
and ladies; there was the tradition of this courtly art of poetry; and
there only could the sons of Florentine or Sienese merchants,
clodhoppers in gallantry and song, hope to learn the correct style of
thing. Hence the history of the Italian lyric before Dante is the
history of a series of transformations which connect a style of poetry
absolutely feudal and feudally immoral, with the hitherto unheard-of
platonic love subtleties of the "Vita Nuova." And it is curious, in
looking over the collections of early Italian lyrists, to note the
alteration in tone as Sicily and the feudal courts are left further and
further behind. Ciullo d' Alcamo, flourishing about 1190, is the only
Italian-writing poet absolutely contemporaneous with the earlier and
better trouveres, troubadours, and minnesingers; and he is also the only
one who resembles them very closely. His famous _tenso_, beginning "Rosa
fresca aulentissima" (a tolerably faithful translation heads the
beautiful collection of the late Mr. D.G. Rossetti), is indeed more
explicitly gross and immoral than the majority of Provencal and German
love-songs: loose as are many of the _albas, serenas, wachtlieder_, and
even many of the less special forms of German and Provencal poetry, I am
acquainted with none of them which comes up to this singular dialogue,
in which a man, refusing to marry a woman, little by little wins her
over to his wishes and makes her brazenly invite him to her dishonour.
Between Ciullo d' Alcamo and his successors there is some gap of time,
and a corresponding want of gradation. Yet the Sicilian poets of the
courts of Hohenstauffen and Anjou, recognizable by their name or the
name of their town, Inghilfredi, Manfredi, Ranieri and Ruggierone da
Palermo, Tommaso and Matteo da Messina, Guglielmotto d' Otranto, Rinaldo
d'Aquino, Peir delle Vigne, either maintain altogether unchanged the
tone of the troubadours, or only gradually, as in the remarkable case of
the Notary of Lentino, approximate to the platonic poets of Tuscany. The
songs of the archetype of Sicilian singers, the Emperor Frederick II.,
are completely Provencal in feeling as in form, though infinitely
inferior in execution. With him it is always the pleasure which he hopes
from his lady, or the pleasure which he has had--"Quando ambidue stavamo
in allegranza alla dolce fera;" "Pregovi donna mia--Per vostra
cortesia--E pregovi che sia--Quello che lo core disia." Again: "Sospiro
e sto in rancura--Ch' io son si disioso--E pauroso--Mi fate penare--Ma
tanto m' assicura--Lo suo viso amoroso--E lo gioioso--Riso e lo
sguardare--E lo parlare--Di questa criatura--Che per paura--Mi fate
penare--E di morare--Tant' e fina e pura--Tanto e saggia e cortese--Non
credo che pensasse--Ne distornasse--Di cio he m' impromise." It is, this
earliest Italian poetry, like the more refined poetry of troubadours and
minnesingers, eminently an importuning of highborn but loosely living
women. From Sicily and Apulia poetry goes first, as might be expected
(and as probably sculpture went) to the seaport Pisa, thence to the
neighbouring Lucca, considerably before reaching Florence. And as it
becomes more Italian and urban, it becomes also, under the strict
vigilance of burgher husbands, considerably more platonic. In Bologna,
the city of jurists, it acquires (the remark is not mine merely, but
belongs also to Carducci) the very strong flavour of legal quibbling
which distinguishes the otherwise charming Guido Guinicelli; and once in
Florence, among the most subtle of all subtle Tuscans, it becomes at
once what it remained even for Dante, saturated with metaphysics: the
woman is no longer paramount, she is subordinated to Love himself; to
that personified abstraction Amor, the serious and melancholy son of
pagan philosophy and Christian mysticism. The Tuscans had imported from
Provence and Sicily the new element of mediaeval love, of life devotion,
soul absorption in loving; if they would sing, they must sing of this;
any other kind of love, at a time when Italy still read and relished her
would-be Provencals, Lanfranc Cicala and Sordel of Mantua, would have
been unfashionable and unendurable. But in these Italian commonwealths,
as we have seen, poets are forced, nilly-willy, to be platonic; an
importuning poem found in her work-basket may send a Tuscan lady into a
convent, or, like Pia, into the Maremma; an _alba_ or a _serena_
interrupted by a wool-weaver of Calimara or a silk spinner of Lucca, may
mean that the imprudent poet be found weltering in blood under some
archway the next morning. The chivalric sentimentality of feudalism must
be restrained; and little by little, under the pressure of such very
different social habits, it grows into a veritable platonic passion.
Poets must sing, and in order that they sing, they must adore; so men
actually begin to seek out, and adore and make themselves happy and
wretched about women from whom they can hope only social distinctions;
and this purely aesthetic passion goes on by the side nay, rather on the
top, of their humdrum, conjugal life or loosest libertinage. Petrarch's
bastards were born during the reign of Madonna Laura; and that they
should have been, was no more a slight or infidelity to her than to the
other Madonna, the one in heaven. Laura had a right to only ideal
sentiments ideal relations; the poet was at liberty to carry more
material preferences elsewhere.
But could such love as this exist, could it be genuine? To my mind,
indubitably. For there is, in all our perceptions and desires of
physical and moral beauty, an element of passion which is akin to love;
and there is, in all love that is not mere lust, a perception of, a
craving for, beauty, real or imaginary which is identical with our
merely aesthetic perceptions and cravings; hence the possibility, once
the wish for such a passion present, of a kind of love which is mainly
aesthetic, which views the beloved as gratifying merely to the wish for
physical or spiritual loveliness, and concentrates upon one exquisite
reality all dreams of ideal perfection. Moreover there comes, to all
nobler natures, a love dawning: a brightening and delicate flushing of
the soul before the actual appearance of the beloved one above the
horizon, which is as beautiful and fascinating in its very clearness,
pallor, and coldness, as the unearthly purity of the pale amber and
green and ashy rose which streaks the heavens before sunrise. The love
of the early Tuscan poets (for we must count Guinicelli, in virtue of
his language, as a Tuscan) had been restrained, by social necessities
first, then by habit and deliberate aesthetic choice, within the limits
of this dawning state; and in this state, it had fed itself off mere
spiritual food, and acquired the strange intensity of mere intellectual
passions. We give excessive weight, in our days, to spontaneity in all
things, apt to think that only the accidental, the unsought, can be
vital; but it is true in many things, and truest in all matters of the
imagination and the heart, that the desire to experience any sentiment
will powerfully conduce to its production, and even give it a strength
due to the long incubation of the wish. Thus the ideal love of the
Tuscan poets was probably none the weaker, but rather the stronger, for
the desire which they felt to sing such passion; nay, rather to hear it
singing in themselves. The love of man and wife, of bride and
bridegroom, was still of the domain of prose; adulterous love forbidden;
and the tradition of, the fervent wish for, the romantic passion of the
troubadours consumed them as a strong artistic craving. Platonic love
was possible, doubly possible in souls tense with poetic wants; it
became a reality through the strength of the wish for it.
Nor was this all. In all imaginative passions, intellectual motives are
so much fuel; and in this case the necessity of logically explaining the
bodiless passion for a platonic lady, of understanding why they felt in
a manner so hitherto unknown to gross mankind, tended greatly to
increase the love of these Tuscans, and to bring it in its chastity to
the pitch of fervour of more fleshly passions, by mingling with the
aesthetic emotions already in their souls the mystical theorizings of
transcendental metaphysics, and the half-human, half-supernatural
ecstasy of mediaeval religion. For we must remember that Italy was a
country not merely of manufacturers and bankers, but of philosophers
also and of saints.