Where the moon is leading thee.
Nicolette is with thee there,
My darling with the golden hair;
God would have her, I believe,
To make beautiful the eve.'"
Yet even here there is nothing of the deeper sensibility to midnight
sky, common alike to ancient and modern seriousness. Yet we find notes
also of this. It is hard, for example, to think of giving up the
genuineness of Dante's letter refusing to return to Florence, if only
for the rare touch of everywhere seeing the sun and the stars (_nonne
solis astrorumque specula ubique conspiciam?_), that bears out such
evidences as the last word of each of the divine canticles and other
fine proofs that he felt the high wonder and peace of the stars at
night. Who can doubt that he did--that every deep nature always has? Yet
the poetical evidence for it is curiously scanty throughout these
centuries. It is a surprise to come upon such an exclamation as this of
Freidank's: "The constellations sweep through heaven as if they were
alive,--sun, moon, the bright stars,--there is nothing so wonderful!"
Indeed, I can recall no writer to whom the material world seems to
suggest such inner sensations as he who called himself Freidank, the
German free-thinker. He was not much of a poet, so far as his verses go,
but his soul knew life as mystery. He also made one of the band of
reformers three centuries before Luther. He saw the corruption of the
Church, yet he revered the sacred institution; in spite of his faith, he
was a Christian rationalist. Some of his sentences almost startle us, as
words before their season: "If the Pope can forgive sins by indulgence,
without repentance, people ought to stone him if he allows any one to go
to hell." "God is constantly shaping new souls, which he gives to
men--to be lost. How does the soul deserve God's wrath before it is
born?" He is haunted by the secret of life: "How is the soul made? No
one tells me that. If all souls could be in a hand, none could see or
grasp their glory." "Earth and heaven are full of the Godhead. Hell
would be empty, were God not there." "Whatever the sun touches, the
sunlight keeps pure. However the priest may be, the mass is still pure.
The mass and the sunshine will always be pure." "I never cease wondering
how the soul is made. Whence it came, and whither it fares--the path is
hidden. Nay, I know not who I am myself.[4] Lord God, grant me that I
may know thee, and also myself." So when Freidank hears the roar of the
wind, its invisible might reminds his skepticism that the soul may well
be great, though none can see it: while he watches the wide mist which
no hand can seize upon, a symbolism of the soul comes to him again. He
is oppressed by the restless energy of being: "Our hearts beat
unceasingly, our breaths are seldom still:--and then, our thoughts and
dreams!" As he rides through spring, he observes the infinite diversity
of nature:
Many hundred flowers,
Alike none ever grew;
Mark it well, no leaf of green
Is just another's hue.
"Many a man looks out at the stars, and tells what wonders take place
there. Let him tell me now (something closer at hand), what is the weed
in the garden. If he tells me that truly, I shall be more ready to
believe the other." It is the germ of Tennyson's _Flower in the Crannied
Wall_. Nature's commonplaces hold the heavenly mystery in a common bond
with their own. Such subtle blendings of the outward and inward vision
could come only from a refined and pensive spirit--such as his who sums
up thus the discipline of life: "Many a time the lips must smile when
the heart weeps."
One of the marked deficiencies of all these descriptions of nature is in
the indefiniteness of the terms employed. In minute accuracy, Dante, to
be sure, is one of the world's greatest masters; but elsewhere it is
rarely that we come upon anything concrete or specific. It is not until
centuries later, indeed, that, so far as nature goes, we find habitual
composition "with the eye upon the object," but, as it seems, most
mediaeval poets never carried their observation beyond the barest general
impressions. We do not expect Tennyson's "More black than ashbuds in the
front of March," or Browning's eye for the fact that when "the leaf-buds
on the vine are woolly," the red is about to turn gray. The outer
world's "open secret" is not open enough to make us demand minute
attention. But it is surprising that they did not more frequently record
easy impressions, and in their inventions introduce definite details.
The poetical effect of even apparently prosaic precision is at times
imaginative, but the art of this was kept for the later romanticists.
There is a lyric, however (belonging, I believe, to the twelfth
century), by a poet of northern France, and written as a satire on the
love-romance literature of the age, which contains one or two happy
instances of just this missing trait. So charming it is in itself that I
have translated it as a whole, though it belongs to an essay on the
lyrical romances, instead of on nature. What a light touch the unknown
writer shows, what dainty fancy! Sir Thopas is hardly a parallel to this
blending of poetry with humor, a humor too gracious to be derisive,
whose genial satire sparkles and dances to meet its sister wave of
sentiment and beauty, till they ripple together, and each seems to have
absorbed the other. The opening stanza is the poet's introduction of
himself, and from the olive we may draw an inference respecting his
local associations:
Will ye attend me, while I sing
A song of love,--a pretty thing,
Not made on farms:--
Nay, by a gentle knight 'twas made
Who lay beneath an olive's shade
In his love's arms.
1.
A linen undergown she wore,
And a white ermine mantle, o'er
A silken coat;
With flowers of May to keep her feet,
And round her ankles leggings neat,
From lands remote.
2.
Her girdle was of leafage green;
Spring foliage, with a fringing sheen
Of gold above;
And underneath a love-purse hung,
By bloomy pendants featly strung,
A gift of love.
3.
Upon a mule the lady rode,
The which with silver shoes was shode;
Saddle gold-red;
And behind rose-bushes three
She had set up a canopy
To shield her head.
4.
As so she passed adown the meads,
A gentle childe in knightly weeds
Cried: "Fair one, wait!
What region is thy heritance?"
And she replied: "I am of France,
Of high estate.
5.
"My father is the nightingale,
Who high within the bosky pale,
On branches sings;
My mother's the canary; she
Sings on the high banks where the sea
Its salt spray flings."
6.
"Fair lady, excellent thy birth;
Thou comest from the chief of earth,
Of high estate:
Ah, God our Father, that to me
Thou hadst been given, fair ladye,
My wedded mate!"
Everything here is definite and concrete, and how delightful the picture
all is. Such plastic art as the "rose-bushes three" is not unworthy of
the great modern poets of whom its magic and romantic definiteness
reminds us,--as the "five miles meandering of Alph, the sacred river,"
or the "kisses four" with which the pale loiterer shut the eyes of La
Belle Dame sans Merci. The description of the nightingale on its high
branches, too, is a noticeably accurate touch, as we compare it, for
example, with Coleridge's nightingale descriptions.
The explanation for the usual vague and indefinite description is not
found in saying that they could not describe minutely. We meet with
abundant details of such material interests as embroideries or armor.
There is artistic emotion in Villehardouin's account of the glorious
sight of Constantinople, as it rose before the crusaders, just as
distinctly as in Lord Byron's letter. But, to their simple eyes, nature
not only failed to suggest associated fancies, like Shakespeare's
"Wrinkled pebbles in the brook,"
or Wordsworth's ash,
"A soft eye-music of slow waving boughs,"
but they see natural objects as units, without lingering upon their
parts. When we find, for example, a line that marks the jerky flight of
a swallow, we are surprised at the specific touch; we look almost in
vain for such landscape details as the colors of autumn. Neidhart von
Reuenthal is marking his originality, when he speaks of the red
tree-tops, falling down yellow.
The want of observation and the shallow sympathy with nature shown by
most poets before Dante are much more surprising than their preference
for placid effects. It is unusual, for instance, to meet such a
suggestive note of association as in the stanza by the Frenchman Gaces
Brulles:
The birds of my own land
In Brittany I hear,
And seem to understand
The distant in the near;
In sweet Champagne I stand,
No longer here.
This paraphrase, indeed, is unworthy of the charming simplicity of the
original. Surely, when Matthew Arnold made his sweeping characterization
of mediaeval poetry as grotesque, he forgot what a straightforward
evolution of narrative or of quiet sentiment, and what a transparent
expression, we find in some of these minor poets. They are as direct and
unadorned, as they are graceful. It is almost impossible to translate
them without substituting for the fresh and delicate touch, some
metaphysical warping of the idea, or some rhetorical consciousness in
words. What for instance could be more elegantly remote from the
grotesque than this literal translation of Brulles' expression of his
sensibility to the song-birds of his home: "The birds of my country I
have heard in Brittany; by their song I know well that in sweet
Champagne I heard them of old."
* * * * *
We may sum up these outline statements to this effect.
The northern poets described storm, winter, the ocean, and kindred
subjects, with considerable force and fulness. In the cultivated
literatures to the south, natural description was mainly confined to the
agreeable forms of beauty; the grand, awesome, and inspiring were
scarcely felt, and the literal fact of their physical expression was
hardly ever noticed. The exterior world was not made a subject of close
observation, nor was its poetic availability realized as a setting for
action, or as an interpreter of emotion.
The people of the north, through being habituated to severer weather,
not merely as a fact of climate, but from their rougher, less politely
organized habits of living, [we should especially observe their activity
on the sea,] regarded the violent seasons and aspects of nature with the
sympathetic acquiescence of custom. Moreover, this influence tended to
develop sturdier and more rugged character, race-temperament obviously
being in part a geographical result, which acts with the forces of
social organization, especially those that affect the moral qualities,
such as rude or luxurious living. This vigorous character was more
susceptible to impressions of native power, as well as from association
more interested in recalling them. Accordingly, we find the early
northern poetry an anticipation of the seriousness of modern English
literature, and, as well, of its unequalled recognition of physical
symbolisms of the sublime. Where the northern force blended with more
southern lightness and elegance, as it did in the _Mabinogion_, we find
a deeper poetic sentiment; where it coincides with moral earnestness, we
find such nature sensation as in the poetry of _Sir Gawayn_. But the
literature of the Germans and their romance originals, aim at courtly
levities; they artificialize sentiment and thought, as well as manner.
The deeper and more spiritually sympathetic minds did not as a rule
devote themselves to _belles-lettres_. The Church drew them into her
sober service, and even though they wrote, the close theological faith
was not favorable to their poetic expansion. Most of all, there was but
little individualism, and any artistic sensation of our modern complex
inner consciousness was still crude, even when it existed at all.
One point, however, should be observed in any inquiry into the reasons
for the inadequateness of these ages' feeling for nature; that many
latent sympathies may never have found a voice. Many through the
centuries before our later ease of publication, may have felt the modern
sensations, without ever thinking of putting them into words. In any new
movement, of art as of practice, a great leader of expression is needed.
Men are sheep to their leaders in various admirations, and many genuine
aesthetic tastes are acquired, through stages of more or less unconscious
imitation. Browning puts this in an acute sentence where Fra Lippo Lippi
explains his usefulness as a painter:
". . . We're made so that we love,
First when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times, nor cared to see."
There were few new departures, there was little originality, in the
methods of mediaeval literature. Descriptions of the physical world as a
field of power and sublimity would have fallen dead on the ears of a
public who had never dreamed that storm and cliffs were beautiful. What
if Wordsworth had tried to support himself and win fame by singing at
castles? Nor is it easy, though the taste has been established, to
describe a sunset, or the sublimity of the Alps. We say to each other
"How beautiful!" "How grand!" seldom more. Rare imagination and the tact
of genius are necessary to tell what we really need to show. The sense
of physical sublimity is complex. Its distinctive element is moral or
spiritual emotion. For a full delineation it requires a more subtle,
verbal repertory than those popular poets usually possessed. Yet these
modifications no longer apply when we come to Dante, and superior as his
interpretations are to his predecessors' we miss even in him, as we miss
in the great poets for four hundred years afterwards, appreciation of
the material world's sublimity.
Macaulay and others have said that it was not until man had become the
master of nature that he learned to love its stern and violent aspects.
But thunder storms, for example, are as dangerous now as they ever were,
at least to a traveller. Still, Byron wrote of them with raptures amid
the Pindus mountains as his predecessors did not.
Winter was scarcely colder or bleaker for mediaeval poets than for
Scottish peasants a century ago, yet Burns would sing as they could not:
"E'en winter bleak has charms for me,
When winds rave through the naked tree."
Others have accounted for this change by the era of science, with its
close scrutiny of the world, and its enthusiasm for physical knowledge.
But the scientist masters the world as a reality where the poet sees it
as a symbol. The two modern tendencies may be the result of a common
cause--that recognition of complexity, and disposition to observe, which
is a main fact in man's expansion.
A better explanation may be found, I believe, in modern refinement and
ethical sensitiveness.
Side by side with the new appreciation of nature may be observed a
steady growth in sensibility. Our modern moods of inward
contemplation--we are famous for them--our modern zeal for humanity down
to its lowest grades; nay, even our tenderness for the brutes, have been
distinguishing marks of the poet guides under whom we have learned to
appreciate our new physical symbolisms of human emotion. Modern
melancholy, as well, a melancholy more subtle and thoughtful, more
poetical too, than that of mediaevalism, has touched men with its pensive
fascination. Philosophical pantheism such as Wordsworth's or Tennyson's,
feels deity in nature; the new Christianity incarnates divinity in
universal man. Man is more than he used to be, his moods are deeper, his
thought freer. He seeks more ardently than of old, because with less
constraint, the mystery in whom he lives and moves and has his being. He
no longer quails before the majesty and awe of its forever elusive
presence. For he knows that though he cannot find it, it enfolds him
with love and beauty, it cries back to his passion and pain in winter
and storm; from the solemn mountains it reminds him of himself, an
unconquerable partner of its own eternity.
[Decoration]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _Lit. Fam._, iv., 1.
[2] Since this passage was written, I have met with the following
extract from a letter of Tennyson's, dated in 1874, though with no
direct reference to the experience being associated with nature: "All at
once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of
individuality, the individuality itself has seemed to dissolve and to
fade away into boundless being; and this not a confused state, but the
clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond
words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of
personality (if so it were), seeming no extinction, but the only true
life."
[3] Any student of Dante, who recalls his lovely early sonnet, _Guido,
vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io_, and compares it with Shelley's almost
parallel conception of lovers sailing away in indivisible companionship,
in the latter part of _Epipsychidion_, will obtain an excellent
illustration of this same difference of feeling about the natural
setting for a happy love. In Dante the sentiment is vague, and only what
is peaceful, while Shelley's ideal haunt of lovers admits owls and bats
with the ring-dove, an "old cavern hoar" left unadorned, mossy
mountains, and quivering waves.
[4] We recall his great countryman's modern cry: "Wohin es geht, wer
weiss es? Erinnert er sich doch kaum, woher er kam."
[Decoration]
ULRICH VON LIECHTENSTEIN.
THE MEMOIRS OF AN OLD GERMAN GALLANT.
Any one who has read Freytag's excellent studies of German social life
will recall a curious illustration in his first volume of the lawless
violence of thirteenth-century knighthood, in the imprisonment of Ulrich
von Liechtenstein by his liegeman Pilgerin. The account not only proves
the author's point, but it goes on to suggest a good deal besides. For
the victim's unsophisticated and plaintive manner under his misfortune,
the fashion in which he relates what he suffered, his allusions to his
own life and character, and most of all to the consolations of his love,
are all stimulating to one's curiosity about the writer. When we go to
the mediaeval shelves of a German library we find this curiosity
satisfied in a long poem by the unfortunate Ulrich, and immediately we
are in that chivalric age which wins most of its romantic lustre from
its devotion to womanhood.
If our guesses at a truth beneath the stories of widowed ladies rescued
from bandits of the forest and recreant knights, or of lovely ladies
rescued from worse than death by the capture of castles through the
prowess of generous champions--stories which every one knows and
incredulously likes--send us to a study of the times when they were
composed, we find that the age, when stripped of romantic
embellishments, in its actual life felt a sentiment for women unequalled
by earlier times. We wonder what caused it. Can it have been the
increase in the culture of the Virgin, that beautiful and beneficent
phase of mediaeval religion? In its larger development, this appears
rather the parallel expression of some common influence, these
adorations of the divine and human conceptions of woman seeming to be
mutually impulsive, and drawn alike from some undetermined tendency of
social and spiritual refinement. Or was it the Crusades? For a German
essayist has suggested that we may count this increase of sentimentalism
among their many influences upon western Europe; the beauty of the women
and the more luxurious habits of the East, its more effeminate
emotionalism, finding impressionable subjects in the hearts of those
stranger knights lying, wakeful for home, beneath southern stars.
Perhaps the conjecture is equally reasonable that the influence came
from French poets who, as they travelled with the early Christian
armies, caught such suggestions from snatches of oriental poetry. Yet it
seems more natural to regard the growth of knightly sentiment toward
ladies as the more delicate manifestation of a spontaneous increase of
social personality, which was stimulated by that general motion in mind
and heart which we observe in the progress of chivalric and crusadal
life, and based, as we must not forget, upon that Teutonic character,
whose ancient deference to woman is recorded by Tacitus side by side
with his account of knighting youthful soldiers with spear and shield.
But, to waive the question of its origin, we find its main expression in
the old society, in that protracted and conventional wooing which, we
should remember, was not usually directed toward marriage. As gentlemen
grew hyperbolical and fantastic in their professions of regard and
devotion, feminine coquettishness and love of admiration naturally
became fastidious and exacting. Ladies grew arbitrary and capricious,
and began to demand substantial proofs of their lovers' concern for
them. It became a trait of elegant culture for a lady to pose as
inexorable, while still retaining her control over the wooer; while he,
complaisant to the sentimental fashion, sighed in a cheerful melancholy,
obeyed, adored, and waited. The mistress set tasks, often no trifles,
which the loyal subject must perform--hard feats of arms, long and
perilous journeys, abnegations of pride or comfort. When these were
accomplished, he sometimes returned to receive a new test, involving a
continued delay of his reward. These mediaeval ladies were as pitiless as
the mystic spiritual dictatress of Browning's _Numpholeptos_, to their
devotees:
"Seeking love
At end of toil, and finding calm above
Their passion, the old statuesque regard."
In the fourteenth century something of this romantic tyranny survived.
We find Chaucer, for instance, in one of his early poems, mentioning in
praise of his heroine that she did not impose dangerous expeditions to
distant countries, or extravagant exploits upon her lover:
"And saye, 'Sir, be now ryght ware
That I may of you here seyn
Worshippe, or that ye come agayn.'"
Extended probations, courtships long enough to satisfy Ruskin, were an
established convention. Wolfram von Eschenbach, in the seventh book of
_Parzival_, represents Obie as indignantly telling her royal lover, who
has asked her to marry him after what seems to him a reasonable
love-making, that if he had spent his days for five years, in hard
service, under full armor, with distinction, and she had then said "Yes"
to his desire, she would be yielding too soon.
Jane Austen, in the novel to which Trollope gave the palm of English
fiction before _Henry Esmond_, has expressed in Mr. Collins's address to
Elizabeth exactly the notion of the significance in a rejection, held by
well-bred gentlemen six centuries earlier:
"'I am not now to learn,' replied Mr. Collins, with a formal
wave of the hand, 'that it is usual with young ladies to
reject the addresses of the man whom they secretly mean to
accept, when he first applies for their favor; and that
sometimes the refusal is repeated a second or even a third
time. I am therefore by no means discouraged by what you have
just said, and shall hope to lead you to the altar ere
long.'"