young men of the district, for we find him addressing in amicable terms
even Engelmar, who later became his worst enemy, complimenting him upon
his room, in a song apparently designed for a dance at his house. But it
is difficult to believe that his critical genius would have gone long
without expression, and he presently began amusing himself, and courting
the admirations of others, by original snatches of songs that were
imitated from the _trutzstrophen_ of humorous, rustic, and often roughly
personal verses, that were evidently in vogue among the country people
before Neidhart's day. Such jeering, gibing bits of peasant fun-making
would grow out of the custom of songs at these rural gatherings, like
the parallel practice sometimes found with us of country
valentine-parties, where personalities are touched off with the freedom
of anonymous and privileged license. We can readily imagine him
beginning with hits at one and another, that contained no deeper offence
than an inevitable tone of his amused sense of the ridiculous. But the
country gallants, already jealous of their elegant rival, whose
gentlemanly prestige and courtly accomplishments would naturally make
him attractive to their sweethearts, would be quick to take umbrage, and
boorishly ready to manifest their displeasure. Neidhart certainly
enjoyed at least as much of the poetic dower as "the hate of hate, the
scorn of scorn," and must have answered their sullenness and rudeness
with the contempt that falls with such a sting from gentility. Then
stung himself by their bad manners, he naturally composed sharper and
more direct stanzas, holding those who had offended him up to the
laughter of other men, and of the tittering damsels. It does not seem
probable that the most cutting and individualized of these attacks were
written to be sung at dances where the victims of the satire were
present. When we consider the violence and recklessness that
historically marked this whole class in the thirteenth century, we are
sure that the poet would hardly have survived some of the recitations.
Many of them he probably composed to gratify his possibly irritated
mood; for, as we shall presently see, his displeasure was deeper than
the vexation of wounded social pride. But they strayed easily to the
objects of their ridicule. As he strolled along the street, carrying his
fiddle, and stopping to amuse himself at one house or another with any
of the pretty girls whom he found idle like himself, he may have played
and sung the piece over which he had just been working, or the minor
singers who must have haunted him as he grew better known, would catch
up and repeat far and wide the witty verses. The piece at which he was
working, I said, for in an important sense the poems were professional
labor. The natural comparison of the minnesinger on his farm to Ovid
among the Goths, loses most of its force when we reflect that Neidhart's
absences from his various little Romes were in some sense at his own
pleasure, and that he must have kept riding about from castle to castle,
and have made frequent sojourns at his patron's court, in the exercise
of his now established musical vocation. The better his songs, the surer
his hold on the Duke's favor, and as his prestige might rise throughout
the country, the more cordial his greeting would be, and the more
generous his dismission whenever he chose to go. These mediaeval poets
were more than careless rhymsters: painstaking labor was assumed as
necessary for success. Their poetry was as subtle and difficult as the
schoolmen's philosophy; though we may not care much for either, we at
least respect the skill with which they mastered self-enforced technical
difficulties. Arnaut Daniel's contest for a wager with another
troubadour (King Richard was to decide which produced the cleverer
poem), illustrates the statement that time was thought necessary for
composition. The Provencal biography tells us that the contestants were
shut up in separate rooms, and only ten days were allowed each for
preparing his song. In Neidhart's seclusion on his fief, then, he would
naturally make studies for his more important literary appearances,
studies in subject-matter, as well as in verse and music. And a large
number of his poems, at least considered in their entirety, must be
thought of as compositions intended for courtly audiences.
It is to be presumed that Neidhart began by writing in the conventional
style of the love-singers. But his sense of humor and his originality
were too vigorous to allow him to continue in the polished and
monotonous manners of the school that reached its acme in Reinmar. He
possessed the creative faculty, and the rude village lyrics were a
sufficient suggestion of the new departure that he at once instituted
and consummated. He put in the place of lyrical elegies, lyrical
snatches of epic; and instead of gathering his epic materials from the
already familiar, even if not hackneyed, cycles of chivalry, he took
them from the real life, and that a growing life, of the German
villagers of his time. Their boorish manners and arrogant social
pretensions, their vulgar assumptions of elegance, and their jealous,
recklessly brutal tempers, he sketches vividly. His touch is not to be
called magical, there are no imaginative hauntings about the poems,
there is little fascination of subtle poetry in his expression or his
melodies. But his rude subjects are by no means treated rudely; he shows
excellent technique in those elaborately built stanzas; his tone rather
deepens than shrills in excited movements: in his dash and energy of
feeling, he retains artistic self-possession; while he is such an
iconoclast of sentimental poetry, that some have thought that Walther
had him in mind in his complaint of the new school. He invariably shows
sentiment for nature in his preludes, as well as sympathetic tones for
character, especially in what we may call his personal confessions. It
is indeed by virtue of this combination of qualities, as well as by his
novelty of subject, that he caught the approval of his age. Romantic
idealism was dying out, and a long period of coarse sensibility was
drawing on; while there was yet still some feeling for sentiment, and an
intellectual appreciation of artistic performance was, as usual, lapping
over the first stages of literary decadence. If we accept the view which
I have suggested, that at least as wholes many of Neidhart's songs were
intended only for the gentry, we may find it easier to meet the question
of their autobiographic and actual significance.
It is possible to be unduly literal and too credulous of the historic
reality of whatever is found in an old literature. Especially in the
works of the minnesingers, some modern Germans appear unconscious that a
poet may relate fictitious experiences and sensations. As I have
remarked in an earlier essay, Cowley's love-poems had many mediaeval
prototypes, and there seems no necessity for assuming a fact behind each
of Neidhart's statements. Why is it not reasonable to suppose that
having once made what we call a "strike" with some of his village
characters, he occasionally invented continuations or parallels? We may
go so far as to assert the possibility that the continual reappearances
of Engelmar, Neidhart's most recurrent character, who is always
associated with the beginning of his disasters, is due quite as much to
the fact that his early treatment of the famous snatching of a girl's
mirror proved, by virtue of the topic, or the melody, or both, a great
favorite, as to the incident in itself having been of the fateful
influence upon his life that is implied. In other cases, as in what we
may term the episode of the ginger-root, Neidhart certainly seems to be
referring to some of his most popular earlier songs, for no other reason
than that the reference would be agreeable to his audience and give a
sort of continuity to his work. One of these instances is almost
pathetic. The poet is old and song comes hard to him. After several
stanzas of unusually serious tone, he says that people ask him why he
does not sing as they are told he once did: they keep wondering what has
become of the peasants who used to be on Tulnaere-field. So he attempts
to conclude with a strain of his old satirical gaiety. "I'll tell of the
bold free ways of Limizun, who is yet worse than our friend who took
Friderun's mirror, or those who bought mail awhile ago at Vienna," as if
by the mention of these popular achievements of his younger wit he could
hide his dull present mood.
So, too, as it appears to me, we may explain the recurrent complaints of
his unhappy loves and of his desires frustrated by one and another of
the boors. These lover's sorrows are just what we should expect from a
poet in Neidhart's relation to the fashionable love lyrics; he retains
something of the tone of despondent yearning that was deemed requisite
by all his predecessors, yet he gives it a piquant novelty by
substituting irony and class animosities for vague and impersonal
wailings, and the sense of humor in these courtly woes in behalf of mere
peasant maidens would be a livelier attraction to the knights and ladies
of his polite circles than we might suppose. Surely Neidhart was the
victim of no deep passion for his rustic heroines. He may have been
amused by them, or even have liked them, and he certainly was enraged at
being interfered with or baffled by middle-class rivals; but his role is
more a Lothario's than a true lass-lorn wooer's. Imagine a peasant
farm-house with a large main apartment, such as Neidhart had in mind in
one of his earliest winter songs: "Engelmar, thy room is good; chill is
it in the dales: winter is hateful." The young farmers and the girls
come trooping in by pairs and little groups, dressed in their best,
smiling and gay: no better aid to imagining the scene could be desired
than Defregger's genial picture of a modern Tyrolese peasant party. It
is a change from the summer dances: "Winter, thy might will drive us
indoors from the broad linden. Thy winds are cold. Lark, quit thy
singing: both frost and snow have said thee nay; alas, for the green
clover. May, to thee I am loyal; winter is my bane." "Winter gives joy
to none but such as love the chimney-corner." They all think of the
change from their summer gatherings, and the singer strums his fiddle
and strikes into the nature prelude of his lyric, as they prepare to
begin the dance. Here is another opening, translated in the stanza
system of the original:
The green grass and the flowers
Both are gone;
Before the sun the linden gives no shade;
Those happy hours
On shady lawn
Of various joys are over; where we played,
None may play;
No paths stray
Where we went together;
Joy fled away at the winter weather,
And hearts are sad which once were gay.
We are reminded again of Herrick in his lines to the meadows:
"Ye have been fresh and green,
Ye have been fill'd with flowers;
And ye the walks have been,
Where maids have spent their hours."
The dance is under way now; if, as sometimes happened, they paid a
surprise visit, the guests have taken hold and made the room ready:
Clear out the benches and stools;
Set in the middle
The trestles, then fiddle;
We'll dance till we're tired, merry fools.
Throw open the windows for air,
That the breeze
Softly please
The throat of each child debonair.
When the leaders grow weary to sing,
We'll all say,
"Fiddler, play
Us the tune for a stylish court-fling."
(They apparently piled the table-frames in the middle of the room in
place of the linden, about which they danced on the lawn.)
The singer goes on to remind them of the preparation for the party:
"I advise my friends to consult where the children shall have their
fun. Megenwart has a large room: if it like you all, we will have the
holiday party there. His daughter wishes us to come. All of you tell the
rest. Engelmar shall lead a dance around the table."
Again: "Let Kunegunde know; we shall be blamed if no one tells her about
it, and don't forget Hedwig." Once more: "Come along, children, to the
farm-house at Hademuot's; Engelbrecht, Adelmar, Friderich, Tuoze, Guote,
Wentel, and her sisters all three; Hildeburg, pretty child; Jiutel and
her cousin Ermelint."
Still again, in one of the cheerful early songs, before Neidhart's
bitter tone came in:
"Now for the children who've been asked to the party. Jiutel
shall tell them all, that they are to step after the fiddle
with Hilde. 'Twill be a great dance. Diemuot, Gisel, are
going together; Wendel, too, Engelmuot, for Heaven's sake! go
out and call Kuenze to come.
"Tell her the man is here; if she cares to see him, as she
has all the time been wishing to, let her put on a little
jacket and her cloak; I should prefer to have her come here,
than to have him find her there at home in her every day
clothes.
"Kuenze tarried then no longer, but came, as Engelmuot bade
her. She was in a hurry; quickly she dressed. Both sides of
her gown were red silk. The finest of girls! No one could
discover through the country, one I should be so glad to give
my dear mother for a daughter.
"Haha! How she pleased me, when I saw what she was; such
hair, and red lips. Then I asked her to sit by me, but she
said: 'I don't dare; I've been told not to talk with you, or
even sit by you. Go and ask Heilke over there by Vriderune!'"
"I hear dancing in the room," he sings at another time; "a crowd of
village women are there; two fiddles; when they pause, gay outbreak of
talking and laughing. Through the window goes the hubbub. Adelber never
dances but between two girls." Sometimes the knightly guest entered into
the gay interlude of conversation, entertaining a merry screaming group.
But when his moody vein, or vexation at some common man's successful
rivalry, dulled his social spirits, he would stand apart, or go to one
side with one of the peasant maids, and satirically note the men
scattered over the room. The young farmer's assumption of the dress and
manners of gentility, carrying arms, discarding rustic fashions,
affecting polite speech ("_Mit siner rede er vlaemet_," Neidhart says of
one of them,--he talks like a fine gentleman from abroad),--all this was
ridiculous to the courtly poet, and his sense of the humor of it was
associated with the bitterness of social contempt. "Look at Engelmar,
how high he holds his head. What elegant style he has, at the dance,
with his showy sword; something different from his father Batze. His son
is a poor gawk, with his rough head. He puffs himself out like a stuffed
pigeon, that sits crop-full on a corn-chest." And again: "Did you ever
see so gay a peasant as he is? Good Lord! he is first of all in the
dance. His sword-band is two hands broad. Proud enough he, of his new
jacket; it has four and twenty small pieces of cloth in it, and the
sleeves come down over his hand."[8] "There are two peasants wearing
coats in the court style, of Austrian cloth. Uoze never cut them."
Then he goes on to say:
"Perhaps you would like to hear how the rustics are dressed.
Their clothes are above their place. Small coats they wear,
and small cloaks; red hoods, shoes with buckles, and black
hose. They have on silk pouch-bags, and in them they carry
pieces of ginger, to make themselves agreeable to the girls.
They wear their hair long, a privilege of good birth. They
put on gloves that come up to their elbows. One appears in a
fustian jacket green as grass. Another flaunts it in red.
Another carries a sword long as a hemp flail, wherever he
goes; the knob of its hilt has a mirror, that he makes the
girls look at themselves in. Poor clumsy louts, how can the
girls endure them? One of them tears his partner's veil,
another sticks his sword hilt through her gown, as they are
dancing, and more than once, enthusiastically dancing and
excited by the music, their awkward feet tread on the girls'
skirts and even drag them off. But they are more than clumsy,
they have an offensive horse-play kind of pleasantry that is
nothing less than insult. They put their hands in wrong
places, and one of them tries to get a maiden's ring, and
actually wrenches it from her finger as she is treading the
bending _reie_.
"Why should I not be angry at his insolence? Yet I would not
mind the ring so much, if he had not hurt her hand."
And just so, Engelmar snatched her mirror from Neidhart's darling
Vriderune.
This last, as has been said, is the most famous incident in the Neidhart
story. From it he dates all his misfortunes, and he reverts to it, over
and over, with bitterness that can hardly be regarded as merely ironical
humor. Yet numerous as the references are, there is a mystery about the
affair that has not been cleared up. It has been suggested that
Vriderune's way of taking the rudeness made it clear to Neidhart that it
was her peasant lover, and not himself, whom she really liked, but it
would seem more natural to associate the occurrence with something
violent. Possibly the poet's indignation at the boorish familiarity led
him to a personal attack, just as in another connection he threatens to
strike an obnoxious fellow, and the resulting quarrel may have been
taken up by friends of both, with such serious consequences that various
annoyances followed on their part, which he could only return by
insulting hits in his songs. The chances are all in favor of the poet's
having been a slighter man physically than these farm-workers, at one of
whom he sneers for the sacks that ride on his neck, and there are
suggestions in the pseudo-Neidhart poetry of his having had helpers to a
revenge. In one of these imitations it is said that through Neidhart's
injury thirty-two had their left legs cut off, an evident exaggeration
of an earlier imitation, where the writer reminds his hearers of what
happened to Engelmar for taking Vriderune's mirror, that he lost his
left leg and had to go on crutches. Such violent fights are
authentically reported at merrymakings of the time, and as the
aristocratic leader of such a brawl, Neidhart no doubt would find his
subsequent residence among the peasants uncongenial. Yet why should he
manifest such reserve, at the same time that he mentions the subject so
constantly, referring to it long after he has left Bavaria? Is it
possible that his jealousy and hot blood drove him to some underhanded
attack in some such way as that in which a brilliant restoration poet
tried to punish a supposed injury? This ill reputation as an aristocrat
equally insolent and treacherous, might follow him to Austria; he would
hardly be pleased to acknowledge in his poem what he had done, while the
constant references to his injury in the insult of Vriderune, and the
misfortunes to himself which it caused may be regarded as half defensive
attempts to excite sympathy instead of disapproval. So much for
possible explanations of this curious literary enigma, out of which we
may make too much; for, as I have already suggested, Neidhart may only
be doing what novelists sometimes do when they repeat a popular hit in
characterization. At any rate, Vriderune seems to have been lost to her
upper-class lover, "and ever from that time I have had some new
heart-sorrow."
Neidhart constantly reverts to the peasants' brutality and eagerness to
fight. "Look out for a brutish fellow named Ber. He is tall and
broad-shouldered; he scarcely can get in at the door. Fie, who brought
him here? He is the nephew of Hildebolt of Bern, who was pounded by
Williher." Lanze, again, "had got himself up for a champion, and thought
nothing could resist him. He put underneath a coat of mail. Snarling
like a bear he goes; so ugly is he, one were a child who withstood him."
And of another: "He wears a sword that cuts like shears, and a good
safety hat. Whoever you are, you may well keep out of his way.
Villagers, look out for him; his sword is poisoned. It's a well-tempered
Waidover, that sword of his."
With such village-warriors, no wonder that the parties did not always
end cheerfully. With a resemblance to modern slang Neidhart tells how
they threaten to put sunshine through each other. The lively episode of
a quarrel over a rural gallant's presenting a young lady with a piece of
ginger, Neidhart says he cannot describe in full, for he came away. But
"each began screaming to his friends; one called loudly: 'Help, gossip
Wezerant.' He must have been in great difficulty to scream so for help.
I heard Hildebolt's sister shriek: 'Oh, my brother, my brother!'"
Another dance ends with a milder disagreement. "Ruoprecht found an
egg--'I ween the devil gave it to him'--and threatened to throw it. Eppe
got mad, and dared him. Ruoprecht threw it at the top of his head, and
it trickled down over him." Sometimes, evidently, peacemakers
interfered, as they did in Frideliep's and Engelmar's disagreement about
Gotelint, so that the rivals did not fight, though "just like two silly
geese they went toward each other, all the rest of the day."
Like all of those poets, Neidhart, though he says "I" very often, lets
us become but indifferent acquaintances. We read some of the mediaeval
lyrists without feeling sure that we detect a single genuine personal
note; they had little of our modern sense of individuality. With
Neidhart we fare better than with most; yet, after all, we are hardly
sure that some of his personal confessions are not formally or
humorously assumed. Yet of one trait we are left in no doubt, his strong
German sense for the fatherland. With many other Bavarians, he went to
Syria and Damietta on the crusade of 1217-1219, led by Leopold VII. of
Austria, and he has left us two songs which, though certainly different
enough from the deep religious feeling of such crusade lyrics as
Hartmann's or Walther's, are unmistakably sincere. The first opens with
the minnesinger's usual spring and love-lorn stanzas, but Neidhart soon
drops conventionality with the exclamation, "For my song the foreign
folk here do not care: ah, blessings on thee, Germany!" It reminds us of
Walther: nothing is like the German home. He thinks of sending a
messenger, not we notice, to some town or castle, but to that village
where he left the loving heart from which his constancy never wavers,
and to the dear friends over-sea.
"Tell them from us all that they should quickly see us there,
joyous enough, except for these wide waves. Bear my glad
service to my mistress, dear to me before all ladies, and say
to friends and kinsmen that I am well. If they inquire how
things are going with us pilgrims, tell them, dear boy, what
ill these foreign folk have wrought us. Haste thee, be swift;
after thee assuredly shall I follow, quick as ever I may. God
grant we may live to see the happy day of going home."
"We are all scarcely alive," he goes on; "the army is more than half
dead. Ah, were I there! By my beloved gladly would I rest, in mine own
place." "If I may only grow old with her!" he cries, and he breaks out
impatiently against those who keep delaying through August, instead of
moving westward. "Nowhere could a man be better off than at home, in his
own parish."
At last the expedition, dissatisfied and worn, as the returning
crusaders always were, are on the confines of the longed-for country. We
can imagine the straggling company making their way along, their
minstrel riding among them, fingering the old violin that he has carried
over his shoulders all the two years, and thinking out a new song. He is
still a young man, or at least only approaching middle age, and thoughts
of home, friendship, love, and the spring gaiety of the village life,
crowd upon him with buoyant thrills; he strikes the strings more firmly,
and his voice rings out a home-coming lyric, full of life and feeling.
"The long bright days are come again, and with them the birds; it is a
long time since they sang so well. The winter-weary are gayer than they
have been for thirty years. Maidens, ye children, fine people all, let
your hearts be free to the summer joy, spring quickly in the carols."
Dear herald, homeward go;
'Tis over, all my woe;
We're near the Rhine!
Neidhart's poems are readily classified in two divisions, his songs for
summer and for winter. Both were probably sung as an accompaniment to
the dances, either of the peasants or of the upper class, though there
may be some doubt whether this is true of all the winter songs. Almost
invariably he opens with a nature-prelude, often an elaborate one, and
the temper of the songs is always congenial to the season, gay for
summer, and gloomy or critical for winter.
There is no evidence that the difficulty with Engelmar was the occasion
of the poet's leaving Bavaria, but his unpopularity with the peasants
seems to have had something to do with the loss of his fief. He was cast
down at the thought of parting with Reuenthal, and said that he would
sing no longer, since the name under which his merry lines had been
known was taken from him; and with a play on the word, "I am put out
undeservedly, my friends; now leave me free of the name!" But after he
was settled by Frederich on an Austrian fief, he adapted himself
cheerfully to his new home. "Here I am at Medelicke, in spite of them
all. I am not sorry that I sang so much of Eppe and of Gumpe at
Reuenthal."
The Duke gave him money and a house, in response to musical
solicitations, and Neidhart appealed for exemption from his heavy taxes,
that threatened to consume what his children needed. With our modern
ideas this system of literary patronage upon which mediaeval poets
depended, and which usually required direct and even pressing
solicitation, seems painful to self-respect; we forget how lately it
flourished. In those days when princely giving was an established
custom, and differed from a system of salaries mainly in being a less
regularly appointed income, a poet's request for a gift was scarcely
more than a modern author's reminder of an unpaid claim; there is
nothing of the unmanly dependence of Coleridge in these earlier
suppliants for aid. None of them asked more gracefully--even Chaucer is
not more delicately suggestive--than Neidhart in such lines as these:
"Whoever had a bird who satisfied him with song through the
year, he would occasionally look to his bird-cage, and give
him good food. Then the bird could go on singing sweet
melodies. If he always sang well to meet the May, he should
be well cared for, summer and winter. Even the birds
appreciate kind treatment."