I have now fulfilled the purpose which I had in view when I began this
study of the _Carmina Vagorum_, and have reproduced in English verse
what seemed to me the most characteristic specimens of that
literature, in so far as it may be considered precursory of the
Renaissance.
In spite of novelty, in spite of historical interest, in spite of a
certain literary charm, it is not an edifying product of medieval art
with which I have been dealing. When I look back upon my own work, and
formulate the impression left upon my mind by familiarity with the
songs I have translated, the doubt occurs whether some apology be not
required for having dragged these forth from antiquarian obscurity.
The truth is that there is very little that is elevated in the lyrics
of the Goliardi. They are almost wholly destitute of domestic piety,
of patriotism, of virtuous impulse, of heroic resolve. The greatness
of an epoch which throbbed with the enthusiasms of the Crusades, which
gave birth to a Francis and a Dominic, which witnessed the manly
resistance offered by the Lombard burghs to the Teutonic Emperor, the
formation of Northern France into a solid monarchy, and the victorious
struggle of the Papacy against the Empire, finds but rare expression
in this poetry. From the _Carmina Burana_ we cull one chant indeed on
Saladin, one spirited lament for Richard Coeur de Lion; but their
general tone is egotistic.
Even the satires, so remarkable for boldness, are directed against
those ecclesiastical abuses which touched the interests of the clerkly
classes--against simony, avarice, venality in the Roman Curia, against
the ambition of prelates and the effort to make princely benefices
hereditary, rather than against the real sins of the Church--her
wilful solidification of popular superstitions for the purposes of
self-aggrandisement, her cruel persecution of free thought, and her
deflection from the spirit of her Founder.
With regard to women, abundant examples have been adduced to
illustrate the sensual and unromantic spirit of these lettered lovers.
A note of undisguised materialism sounds throughout the large majority
of their erotic songs. Tenderness of feeling is rarely present. The
passion is one-sided, recognised as ephemeral, without a vista on the
sanctities of life in common with the beloved object. Notable
exceptions to the general rule are the lyrics I have printed above on
pp. 75-78. But it would have been easier to confirm the impression of
licentiousness than to multiply specimens of delicate sentiment, had I
chosen to ransack the whole stores of the _Carmina Burana_.
It is not necessary to censure their lack of so-called chivalrous
woman-worship. That artificial mood of emotion, though glorified by
the literary art of greatest poets, has something pitiably unreal,
incurably morbid, in its mysticism. But, putting this aside, we are
still bound to notice the absence of that far more human self-devotion
of man to woman which forms a conspicuous element in the Arthurian
romances. The love of Tristram for Iseult, of Lancelot for Guinevere,
of Beaumains for his lady, is alien to the Goliardic conception of
intersexual relations. Nowhere do we find a trace of Arthur's vow
imposed upon his knights: "never to do outrage,... and alway to do
ladies, damosels, and gentlewomen succour upon pain of death." This
manly respect for women, which was, if not precisely the purest, yet
certainly the most fruitful social impulse of the Middle Ages,
receives no expression in the _Carmina Vagorum_.
The reason is not far to seek. The Clerici were a class debarred from
domesticity, devoted in theory to celibacy, in practice incapable of
marriage. They were not so much unsocial or anti-social as
extra-social; and while they gave a loose rein to their appetites,
they respected none of those ties, anticipated none of those home
pleasures, which consecrate the animal desires in everyday existence
as we know it. One of their most popular poems is a brutal monastic
diatribe on matrimony, fouler in its stupid abuse of women, more
unmanly in its sordid imputations, than any satire which emanated from
the corruption of Imperial Rome.[35] The cynicism of this exhortation
against marriage forms a proper supplement to the other kind of
cynicism which emerges in the lyrics of triumphant seducers and light
lovers.
But why then have I taken the trouble to translate these songs, and
to present them in such profusion to a modern audience? It is because,
after making all allowances for their want of great or noble feeling,
due to the peculiar medium from which they sprang, they are in many
ways realistically beautiful and in a strict sense true to vulgar
human nature. They are the spontaneous expression of careless, wanton,
unreflective youth. And all this they were, too, in an age which we
are apt to regard as incapable of these very qualities.
The defects I have been at pains to indicate render the Goliardic
poems remarkable as documents for the right understanding of the
brilliant Renaissance epoch which was destined to close the Middle
Ages. To the best of them we may with certainty assign the
seventy-five years between 1150 and 1225. In that period, so fruitful
of great efforts and of great results in the fields of politics and
thought and literature, efforts and results foredoomed to partial
frustration and to perverse misapplication--in that potent space of
time, so varied in its intellectual and social manifestations, so
pregnant with good and evil, so rapid in mutations, so indeterminate
between advance and retrogression--this Goliardic poetry stands
alone. It occupies a position of unique and isolated, if limited,
interest; because it was no outcome of feudalism or ecclesiasticism;
because it has no tincture of chivalrous or mystic piety; because it
implies no metaphysical determination; because it is pagan in the
sense of being natural; because it is devoid of allegory, and,
finally, because it is emphatically humanistic.
In these respects it detaches itself from the artistic and literary
phenomena of the century which gave it birth. In these respects it
anticipates the real eventual Renaissance.
There are, indeed, points of contact between the Students' Songs and
other products of the Middle Ages. Scholastic quibblings upon words;
reiterated commonplaces about spring; the brutal contempt for
villeins; the frequent employment of hymn-rhythms and preoccupation
with liturgical phrases--these show that the Wandering Scholars were
creatures of their age. But the qualities which this lyrical
literature shares with that of the court, the temple, or the schools
are mainly superficial; whereas the vital inspiration, the specific
flavour, which render it noteworthy, are distinct and self-evolved. It
is a premature, an unconscious effort made by a limited class to
achieve _per saltum_ what was slowly and laboriously wrought out by
whole nations in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Too
precocious, too complete within too narrow limits, it was doomed to
sterility. Not the least singular fact about it is that though the
_Carmina Vagorum_ continued to be appreciated, they were neither
imitated nor developed to any definite extent after the period which I
have indicated. They fell still-born upon the unreceptive soil of
European culture at that epoch. Yet they foreshadowed the mental and
moral attitude which Europe was destined to assume when Italy through
humanism gave its tone to the Renaissance.
The Renaissance, in Italy as elsewhere, had far more serious aims and
enthusiasms in the direction of science, refined self-culture,
discoveries, analysis of man and nature, than have always been
ascribed to it. The men of that epoch did more hard work for the
world, conferred more sterling benefits on their posterity, than those
who study it chiefly from the point of view of art are ready to admit.
But the mental atmosphere in which those heroes lived and wrought was
one of carelessness with regard to moral duties and religious
aspirations, of exuberant delight in pleasure as an object of
existence. The glorification of the body and the senses, the
repudiation of an ascetic tyranny which had long in theory imposed
impossible abstentions on the carnal man, was a marked feature in
their conception of the world; and connected with this was a return in
no merely superficial spirit to the antique paganism of Greece and
Rome.
These characteristics of the Renaissance we find already outlined with
surprising definiteness, and at the same time with an almost childlike
naivete, a careless, mirth-provoking nonchalance, in the _Carmina
Vagorum_. They remind us of the Italian lyrics which Lorenzo de'
Medici and Poliziano wrote for the Florentine populace; and though in
form and artistic intention they differ from the Latin verse of that
period, their view of life is not dissimilar to that of a Pontano or a
Beccadelli.
Some folk may regard the things I have presented to their view as ugly
or insignificant, because they lack the higher qualities of sentiment;
others may over-value them for precisely the same reason. They seem to
me noteworthy as the first unmistakable sign of a change in modern
Europe which was inevitable and predestined, as the first literary
effort to restore the moral attitude of antiquity which had been
displaced by medieval Christianity. I also feel the special relation
which they bear to English poetry of the Etizabethan age--a relation
that has facilitated their conversion into our language.
That Wandering Students of the twelfth century should have transcended
the limitations of their age; that they should have absorbed so many
elements of life into their scheme of natural enjoyment as the artists
and scholars of the fifteenth; that they should have theorised their
appetites and impulses with Valla, have produced masterpieces of
poetry to rival Ariosto's, or criticisms of society in the style of
Rabelais, was not to be expected. What their lyrics prove by
anticipation is the sincerity of the so-called paganism of the
Renaissance. When we read them, we perceive that that quality was
substantially independent of the classical revival; though the
influences of antique literature were eagerly seized upon as useful
means for strengthening and giving tone to an already potent revolt of
nature against hypocritical and palsy-stricken forms of spiritual
despotism.