the altar. A characteristic of the age is the relation, less or more
sentimental, between a married knight and a lady not his wife; a
relation rather expected of the former, and countenanced in the latter.
This peculiar dual system of domestic and knightly love may be ascribed
to various influences, such as the prosaic influence of early and
dowered marriages, subject to parental arrangement, or the feudal life
which for considerable periods kept gentlemen away from their own homes
in residence in the larger castles, or the idleness of such a society,
or again the popularity of love-lyrics and romance-recitals, which
would tend to sentimentalize their audience. At any rate, it came to be
a fashionable idea that the highest love was independent of marriage,
and the most poetically inclined,--the troubadours and the
minnesingers--were famous for their impassioned and submissive service
of married ladies. It is from these poets' accounts of their own
love-trials that we learn most about this phase of mediaevalism, and in
their contented sufferings we see once more that the joy of all romantic
love is in the lover.
Although there is danger of generalizing too widely from literary
indications, we may believe that chivalric society was appreciably
marked by formal amatory disciplines. Was it all for nothing these
ceremonial disciplines? Can it be that these Don Quixote prototypes, who
trifled away their frivolous days in lady-worship so trivial, did
anything to help the Prince to take Cinderella from the ashes? The
ashes, then the fairy coach; first the drudge, then the sentimental
plaything, then at last the friend. In those days, as perhaps always,
the lover objectified himself in his love, to the extent of finding in
her his own _ideal feminine_. The very fact that this self, which he
probably called into conscious life only as he created it in another,
represented the most refined side of his thought, as is shown in the old
poets' recurrent epithets of "constant, chaste, good," etc., made the
devotion a refining and dignifying experience, especially for the days
when men and women had less in common than they have now. These
lady-services, where the lover often was denied intimacy for a
considerable time, kept up the illusion which the devotee himself may
have half felt was sentimental and artificial. We may reply to little
Peterkin that some good did come of it at last, even for the more
commonplace of these servants of abstract womanhood. Even if the
"visionary gleam" left no permanent illumination, the men were better
for seeing it brightening through their darkness now and then. At its
best, lady-loving gave the mediaeval knights consideration for women and
a measure of gentleness. If it only stimulated some to fight hard, they
would have fought anyway, and the motive was a shade less brutal than a
directly selfish one.
But such an eccentric social idea, especially when the poetic
exhilaration of its earlier hours has passed by, was sure to bring out
extravagant sentimentalists, whose romantic sensibility with no check
from practical judgment, ran wild steeplechases of nonsense. Such, for
example, was the Provencal poet, Peter Vidal, one of the most famous
troubadours, who carried his romantic infatuations so far that he became
crack-brained. The name of one of his ladies was Lupa, Mistress Wolf;
and if he had contented himself with assuming a wolfish device for his
coat-of-arms, as he did, and having himself called Mr. Wolf, he would
have done nothing very peculiar, for that age. But it occurred to him
that it would be a graceful symbol to wear a wolf's skin, and after he
had procured one which quite covered him, he got down on all-fours, and
trotted through the street; and all went charmingly until one day, while
he was exhibiting himself in this fashion about his lady's estate, a
pack of dogs was deceived by the metaphor, and the allegorical lover was
badly bitten before rescue arrived.
But the most detailed example of mediaeval gallantry is that presented in
the work already mentioned, the autobiography of the thirteenth-century
minnesinger, Ulrich von Liechtenstein. The poem is a prolix narrative
of his amatory religion, extending through some sixteen thousand lines,
and containing a large number of lyrics composed in the wooing of two
ladies to whom he consecrated his literary and romantic life. We utterly
tire of the commonplaces in which he praises them. We reflect that not a
single specific incident is ever introduced to illustrate the inner
character of either; the descriptions have no color, except in the
heartlessness of the first beloved, whose virtue and humor alike Ulrich
apparently misses. Yet this presumably undesigned caricature of the more
poetic twelfth-century chivalric love gives important suggestions of the
times, and Ulrich himself is a knight and a poet worth knowing.
The impression that his romance makes upon a modern reader is something
like that of a beetle hovering above a lily. He played zany to the
gentlemen of an early generation who had amused their leisurely lives by
courtly lady-service; as he emulated their feats of sentimental
gallantry, he stumbled and fell. The odd thing is that after each fall
he called for his tables: "Meet it is I set it down." Undoubtedly many
marvelled and admired, as they looked on: others marvelled and laughed.
Perhaps he mistook the laughter for applause. It may be that the sound
was lost in the applause of his own simple-minded complacency. But yet,
though this gallant was born to a foolish horoscope, his life gained a
good fortune denied multitudes who lived sensibly,--he saw the stars of
his destiny, and he loved them. Their combination caused a silly career,
yet individually they were admirable,--simplicity of nature, theoretical
reverence for womanhood, patient love, regard for stately old usages.
If defective eyesight makes a man fancy a burdock a rosebush, and if he
tends and cherishes the absurd idealization,--at least, the man has a
sentiment for roses.
The earliest fact which Ulrich has confided to us, is that in his
childhood he used to ride about on sticks, in imitation of the knights,
and while in that simple age he noticed that the poetry which people
read, and the conversation of wise men which he overheard, kept
declaring that no one could become a worthy man without serving
unwaveringly good ladies, and that "no one was right happy unless he
loved as dearly as his own life some one whose virtue made her fitly
called a woman." Whereupon, he thought in his simplicity that since pure
sweet women so ennoble men's lives, he, whatever happened, would always
serve ladies. In such thoughts he grew up until his twelfth year, when
he began a four or five years' term as page to a lady who was good,
chaste, and gentle, complete in virtues, beautiful, and of high rank.
She was destined to give Ulrich much trouble, and the lover's sweet
solicitude began at once, as he started in his teens. For his constant
attention found nothing in her but what was good and charming, and he
feared--this boy of thirteen--that she might not care for him. His ups
and downs of fortune are reported for us in the popular mediaeval form
(used for example by Map, and one as late as by Villon), of a dialogue
between his heart and his body. Heart is hopeful, but Body has the
better wit. Yet even if she is too high-born to notice him, he will
always serve her late and early, and in the interim between his childish
page-waiting, and the bold knighthood to be his when he grows up, he
gathers pretty summer flowers, and carries them to her. When she took
them in her white hand, he was happy.
As the time came near for him to leave her household, the youth grew
emotional: when at table water was poured over those lovely white hands,
he transformed her finger-glass into a tumbler. A German dry-as-dust has
laughed at Ulrich for this.
But the tender little Teutonic blossom could unfold its youth no longer
in the sunshine of its lady-desire. The stern father appeared, and
transferred the lover, his "grief showing well the power of love," to
the service of an Austrian Margrave. "My body departed, but my heart
remained"; and Ulrich pauses for a moment to point out the strangeness
of the paradox. "Whenever I rode or walked, my heart never left her; it
saw her at all times, night and day."
His new master was a knightly gentleman, professedly a lady-servant, and
the lessons that Ulrich had caught as a child from the conversation in
his father's hall were reinforced by this Margrave Henry. He was taught
the best style of riding, the refinements of address to ladies, and
poetical composition, and assured that whoever would live worthily must
be a lady's true subject. "It adorns a youth--sweet speech to women....
To succeed well with them, have sweet words with true deeds."
After four years of such instruction, his father's death called him home
to inherit his property, and he spent the three years that followed by
tourneying in the noviciate of knighthood. At Vienna, in 1222, during
the great festival in celebration of the marriage of Leopold's daughter,
where five thousand knights were present, and tourneying and other
entertainments of chivalry were mingled with much dancing, Ulrich made
one of the two hundred and fifty squires who received their spurs. But
the occasion was otherwise memorable to him, for here he saw his lady
again. She recognized him, and told one of his friends of her pleasure
at seeing become a knight one who had been her page when a little
fellow. The mere simple foolish thought that she would perhaps have him
for her own knight, as he tells us, was sweet and good, and put him in
high spirits. Indeed this was all the contentment which the blushing
young knight desired:
"Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in
dreams?"
Ulrich did not wake from his to do anything so practical as to speak
face to face with her, but gaily rode off to a summer of adventure in
twelve tournaments, wherein he invariably fared well, thanks to his
devotion.
German sentiment has always shown a butterfly's sensibility to winter
and rough weather, and with the last of autumn, Ulrich's spirit grows
heavy. He longs to see his lady, he knows that now he would speak to
her. There are no tourneys to distract him, and in care of heart he
rose, lay down, sat, and walked. As it chanced, a cousin of his knew
this only lovely one, and the taxing office of a lover's confidante fell
heavily upon her, and remained for some years. After beating about the
bush with her for a while, he confessed the truth, only to receive
point-blank advice to give up so hopeless an aspiration. Never! on the
contrary she must help him in his perseverance by visiting the lady and
presenting her with a copy of the verses which Ulrich has been composing
for her as a confession of his love. His cousin consented, but her
mission resulted in a scornful rejection of the suit, softened by
compliments upon the poem. He was advised to abandon his quest, for the
lady seriously objected to his mouth. "Nothing but grim death can drive
me from her; I will serve her all my life," he exclaimed. But he felt
that the criticism upon his mouth was a fair one, and he determined to
pay attention to it.
Poor Ulrich, with so much sentiment, yet with such physical
deficiencies; with such correct perception of the use of lips, yet
having such uninviting ones of his own. In one of his songs he tells us:
When a lady on her lover
Looks and smiles, and for a kiss
Shapes her lips, he can discover
Never joy so great; his bliss
Transcends measure:
O'er all pleasures is his pleasure.
But until he was quite in his twenties, his experience of this
blessedness must have been of those
"By hopeless fancy feigned
On lips that are for others";
for Ulrich confesses to the deformity of what he calls three lips; that
is, a bad hare-lip.
But this protagonist of mediaeval Quixotism has energy and nerve, as well
as sentiment. In spite of his cousin's dissuasions (this plain-minded
lady tells him to take the body God has given him, instead of arrogantly
improving upon his creation), Ulrich rides off to find the best surgeon
in the country, and submit to an operation. But the doctor decides that
the time of year is unsuitable; he must wait until winter is past, keep
his three lips until May.
At last spring comes and Ulrich returns to the doctor. Upon the way he
meets a page of his lady's, to whom he confides the purpose of his
journey, and whose presence he secures as a witness. Early one Monday
morning the surgeon received his patient, laid out his instruments
before him, and produced several straps. At sight of the latter, martial
dignity recoiled, and Ulrich refused to allow himself to be bound. It
was to no purpose that he was told of the danger involved in even a
twitch; he said with spirit that he came of his own will, and if
anything happened amiss he alone would be to blame. Whereupon he sat
calmly upon a bench, and without a tremor allowed the surgeon to "cut
his mouth above his teeth and farther up. He cut like a master, I
endured like a man."
Ulrich describes the discomfort which he experienced during the healing
of the wound, in details which give an unpleasant notion of the methods
of mediaeval surgery. As he was able to eat and drink scarcely anything,
he wasted in flesh, and his only comfort was the thought of her for whom
he had suffered. During the confinement, he composed another dancing
song in her honor, which, after his recovery he entrusted to his cousin,
who forwarded it with a letter of her own. Presently an answer came. The
lady is to spend the next Monday night near by, in the course of a
journey, and she will be very happy to see her friend's relative, and
learn from himself how things are. Time changes the significance of
letters, among other things. This lady-like note, which gave such a
heart-leap to Ulrich's sentimental hope, interests scholars to-day as
being the earliest prose letter in German.
On Tuesday morning, when Ulrich appeared at the chapel where the lady's
chaplain was singing mass before her, she bowed without speaking. After
the service she rode off, and Ulrich had found no chance to meet her.
His cousin, however, told him that everything was favorable, and that
the lady would allow him to ride with her that day. So he galloped off
in gay spirits, and soon overtook the cavalcade. But alas for his
self-possession; when he reaches her his head drops and he cannot find a
single word. Another knight was riding with her. Ulrich's heart makes a
speech to his body, reproaching it for cowardice; "If you go on without
speaking to her now, she will never be good to you again." So he rides
up to her and gets a sweet glance, but still he cannot speak. Heart
nudges Body and whispers: "Speak now, speak now, speak now!" All through
the day Body tries, he tries over and over, but he cannot. Alas, as a
poet of his own day said:
"Mit gedanken wirt erworben niemer wibes kint:
. . . . . . .
Des enkan si wizzen niht."[5]
When they reach their lodging-place for the night, he wishes to assist
the only one in dismounting, but she is not sufficiently flattered by
his attentions to accept them; she says that he is sick and useless, and
not strong enough to help her down. The attending gentlemen laugh
merrily at that, and the ever sweet, constant, good, and so forth, as
she slides from her horse, catches hold of Ulrich's hair, without any
one's noticing it (however that can have been done), and pulls a lock
out by the roots. "Take this for being afraid," she whispers; "I have
been deceived by other accounts of you." Reproaching himself, and
wishing God to take his life, he stood gawkily where she left him,
absorbed in remorse for his awkwardness, until a knight admonished him
to step aside and allow the ladies to go by to their rooms. Whereupon he
rode off to his inn, and swore that he was ill.
As he tossed restlessly through the night, he talked with himself as
usual, lamenting his birth, and assuring himself that should he live a
thousand years he could never again be happy. "Not to speak one word to
her! My worthlessness has lost my lady." But in the morning he rode up
to her on the street. No silence this time: "Thy grace, gracious lady!
Graciously be gracious to me. Thou art my joy's abiding place, the
festival of my joys." Like many shy people, Ulrich talked fluently
enough when he was once started, and he was only in the midst of his
protestations when the lady interrupted him. "Hush, you are too young;
ride on before me. Talking may hurt you, it never can help you. It would
be amiss for others to hear what you are saying. Leave me in peace; you
grow troublesome." Then she beckoned to another knight, and directed
that she should never again be attended by less than two gentlemen.
It was in the book of lady-service that no repulse was a discouragement.
"This morning," says the heroine in Bret Harte's parody of _Jane Eyre_,
"this morning he flung his boot at me! Now I know he loves me." Ulrich
rode off, thinking that he had met with good success in telling her a
part of his love, before the interruption.
Another summer passed in tourneying, and during another winter he tried
to amuse himself by making poetry for his lady. This time he sent her a
more pretentious tribute, his first "Buechlein," a poem of some four
hundred lines. Like most of its kind, it is formal, sentimentally
prolix, and supplicatory, yet not without a certain pleasant interest.
He begs her from the wealth of her loveliness to grant him some trifling
favor which she never can miss:
What is worse the bloomy heath,
If a few flowers for the sake
Of a garland some one break?
He wishes it were himself that the messenger is about to deliver to her:
Little book, I fain would be,
When thou comest, changed to thee.
When her fair white hand receives
Thine assemblement of leaves,
And her glances, shyly playing,
Thee so happy are surveying.
And her red mouth comes close by,
I would steal a kiss, or die.
But the unsatisfactory manuscripts were returned at once. The lady told
the bearer that she recognized the merit of the poetry, but she would
have nothing to do with it. Like many poets of those days when monks and
ladies constituted the educated classes, like his predecessor, the great
master of high mediaeval romance, Ulrich could neither read nor write,
and for such delicate personal affairs as correspondence with his lady
he depended upon his confidential clerk. This confidant of his passion
was absent when the "Buechlein" came back, but the eager eyes of the poet
looked through the pages over which they had evidently wandered before
he dismissed his labors to their fate, repeating the lines from memory
as he looked over the characters which should interpret his loving
patience to the lady who would not let him speak it to her; and as he
looked, he detected an addition to what he had sent, an appendix of ten
lines. The slighted letter found a home in his bosom, and for ten days
he awaited his secretary's return. His happy hopes--those ten days were
so cheerful. But when the little response was at last interpreted, away
with hopes and cheerfulness. To make plainness trebly plain, his cruel
correspondent had copied out three times the sentiment: "Whoever desires
what he should not, has refused himself."
Summer again, and the lover has diversion in the sports of chivalry. Any
one interested in the details of mediaeval tournaments will find in
Ulrich's narrative a valuable and lively record of the tourney held at
Friesach in 1224. His sense for material splendor is well shown by his
full accounts of the costuming and tent equipments. The trustworthiness
of the minor points may be questioned when we recall that the
_Frauendienst_ was composed more than thirty years later, but as a
sketch of thirteenth-century chivalry, no doubt it is accurate. The
heralds running hither and thither, and shouting as they arranged for
the contests, with their cries to "good gallant knights to risk honor,
goods, and life for true women"; the squires crowding the ways, loud
noise of drums, flute-playing, blowing of horns, great trumpeting,--we
have the old picture, made vivid in English by Chaucer in the _Knight's
Tale_, and by Tennyson.
Ulrich rode in disguise, prompted by the sentimentalist's
self-consciousness, always delighted in attracting attention and making
himself talked of. According to his own account, he did good hearty
tourneying, breaking ten spears with one antagonist, seven with
another, five with a third, six with a fourth, in a single day. The
meeting continued for ten days, and Ulrich grows prolix in his
particulars, though he is modest enough about his own exploits,
pronouncing himself neither the best nor the worst of the participants.
The accidents of jousting, through which many were left at Friesach with
broken limbs and other injuries, and the misfortunes which compelled
others to have recourse to the Jews for loans, did not disturb the
musical contestant. At the end he rode cheerfully off to his cousin with
another song for the same inattentive ear. She promised to report, as
she sent it, that no one in the great tourney had excelled him.
This lyric is the poem by which modern German students of their old
literature have been best pleased, and we shall hardly dissent from
Scherer's commendation. For it is both a typical minnesong, in its
treatment of nature and love, and also fortunate in its union of
sentiment, force, finish, and a ring of personal meaning. Omitting two
of its stanzas, it goes as follows:
Now the little birds are singing
In the wood their darling lay;
In the meadow flowers are springing,
Confident in sunny May.
So my heart's bright spirits seem
Flowers her goodness doth embolden;
For in her my life grows golden,
As the poor man's in his dream.
Ah, her sweetness! Free from turning
Is her true and constant heart;
Till possession banish yearning,
Let my dear hope not depart.
Only this her grace I'll pray:
Wake me from my tears, and after
Sighs let comfort come and laughter;
Let my joy not slip away.
Blissful May, the whole world's anguish
Finds in thee its single weal;
Yet the pain whereof I languish,
Thou, nor all the world, canst heal.
What least joy may ye impart,
She so dear and good denied me?
In her comforts ever hide me,
All my life her loving heart.
But elegant and tender as in the original these verses are, their object
returned a slighting answer, and added that the messenger must not be
sent again. People would come to have suspicions. Ulrich made another
set of verses, and went off to another joust. There one of his fingers
was seriously wounded, and in his anxiety to save it he offered a
surgeon a thousand pounds for a cure. The treatment was unsuccessful,
and, after showing a good deal of temper, he went to a new surgeon, on
the way beguiling himself of his pain by composing another poem upon the
old theme. But a shock was at hand; a friend divulged to him his closely
kept secret. "This lady [still unnamed to us] is the May-time of your
heart." What though this friend believed that the lady cared for him?
"My head sank down, my heart sighed, my mouth was dumb," in terror lest
it might be through his fault that the object of his devotion had been
discovered. For secrecy was the first of a chivalric lover's virtues,
even about the object of his passion. Yet the pain was not without
compensation, inasmuch as this gentleman, who declared that he had
already kept the secret for two years and a half, volunteered to make
another appeal. So off to the home of the inexorable went anew the
story of unflinching devotion, the loss of a finger in a tournament for
her glory not unmentioned. Ulrich's cause was pleaded with fervor, and
in winning style. The lover was praised and prayed for. The song he had
sent was even sung, instead of being formally delivered. A faithful and
versatile legate was this proxy wooer, but it was all to no purpose. The
lady declared that she would grow old in entire ignorance of any love
but her husband's. She warned the messenger that Ulrich would find
himself in trouble if he should persist in annoying her with such
sentimental folly; she would not receive such attentions from the
highest-born--not even from a king.
The news saddened, but did not cast down. "What if she refuses me?"
cried Ulrich; "that shall not disturb me. If she hates me to-day, I will
serve her so that later she shall like me. Were I to give up for a cold
greeting, could a little word drive me away from my high hope, I should
have no sound mind or manly mood. Whatever the true, sweet one does to
me, for that I must be grateful." But now another summer was over, and
he diverted himself by a pilgrimage to Rome. After Easter he returned,
on his way composing this sweetly conceived and rather pretty lyric:
Ah, see, the touch of spring
Hath graced the wood with green;
And see, o'er the wide plain
Sweet flowers on every spray.
The birds in rapture sing;
Such joy was never seen:
Departed all their pain,
Comfort has come with May.