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STUDIES IN MEDIAEVAL LIFE
AND LITERATURE
BY
EDWARD TOMPKINS MCLAUGHLIN
PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND BELLES-LETTRES
IN YALE UNIVERSITY
[Decoration]
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
[Decoration]
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
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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 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 summer 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
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 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 essays 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
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. Professor 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 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 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.
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 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.
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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 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 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 ethical 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,
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 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."
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 Martigny 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 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 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 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 minor
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 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 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 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 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 soughing 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 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."
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.
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 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 necessary 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:
"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 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, 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 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 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 castel 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, 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,
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.
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 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 poets 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 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 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: