in, and remission of taxes, could not keep the poet gay as he passed
into later life. He composed penitential lyrics, after orthodox
precedents, of the love-singers, for they almost always grew old
seriously. On these we need not linger, though there seems a cry fuller
than the echo-note in his farewell to Lady Earth, and appeal for pardon
for some of his foolish songs: "Lord God of Heaven, give me thy
guidance; Might of all Might, now strengthen my heart, that I may win
soul's health, and partake ever-enduring joy, through thy sweet will."
But the wail of all of the thirteenth-century's serious minds, that
things were going "ever the lenger the wers" in Christendom, comes out
nowhere more deeply than in Neidhart's allegorical love-song to Joy of
the World, chiding her for her change of character during his long,
unrequited service:
"False, shameless folk nowadays people her court, and her old
household, truth, chastity, good manners, none find these any
longer. My lady's honor is lame all over. She is fallen so
that none can rescue her. She lies in such a pool that only
God can make her clean. Men of wise mind be on your guard
before her, in church or on street: women of worth keep far
away."
Eighty new melodies he has sung in her service; this is the last, and
not the most joyous.
To this closing period we may refer a few summer songs that are an
exception to the usually light-hearted verses of that form. Their
seriousness is all the more noticeable from their fair-weather setting;
for once, the spring is not a panacea. "A delightful May has come, but
alas, neither priest nor layman rejoices in its arrival. Were it the
Emperor who had come, we might rejoice. Trouble and sorrow dwell in
Austria." There is something here besides a sense that the joyousness of
simple free-living and the loyalty of love-service are passing away; he
attributes much of the social decline to national confusion and the
political unrestraint. Yet controversial as he is in social relations,
he has little of Walther von der Vogelweide's thoughtfulness and energy
in patriotic polemics. He drifts down the stream with a sigh.
In the poem which Meyer's elaborate study of the order of his work
places last, though only conjecturally, he again considers his friends'
entreaty for more songs. The world goes too sadly, he says; as he had
said before that they must ask Troestelin to sing; he himself had no
longer a heart for poetry. Yet there is one pleasant story that he can
tell them: "to break down troubles comes one worthy to be praised; 'tis
May, with all his might." There is something pathetic in such songs,
that try to assume the cheerful strain in which the poet, now grown
gloomy, wrote while he was young. They remind us of the stray leaves
that we sometimes see caught up to their old home among the branches by
a sudden March gust; the brown leaves that will never again uncrumple
their green infancies, hover for a moment, then sink hesitatingly back
to the ground. In this one song, the nature stanzas are transferred from
the place of prelude to the conclusion. "May has conquered; wood and
heath have adorned themselves with their lovely attire; blue flowers are
here and the roses," and he ends with the old thought, that joyousness
and virtuous honor go together. As an idle fancy it is "pleasant if one
consider it," to regard these as the final words of this knightly singer
of mediaeval country scenes, the last of the great figures of that old
German group, a parting reminder of the philosophy of a happy life which
mediaeval lyrists often maintained so earnestly,--that the secret of good
living is blitheness of heart, and out-of-door life in spring and
summer. For many of these old poets the two terms were convertible;
their creed was surely a simple one.
[Decoration]
FOOTNOTE:
[8] We must remember that the unwillingness of the upper grade of
society to have peasants assume its styles of dress, went so far that
ducal edicts were issued forbidding them to use coats of mail and
helmets, or to carry any weapons. Bitter complaints were made of their
wearing any stuffs so fine as silk, and clothes stylishly cut.
[Decoration]
MEIER HELMBRECHT,
A GERMAN FARMER OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY.
The usual conception of the middle ages seems to consist of a few facts
and theories about the feudal system and the crusades, the names with
possibly some traits of a few eminent public figures and a general
impression of confusion and obscurity. Supplementing this central idea,
one usually sees a panel picture on either side. One, sunshine flashing
from the spears and armor of knights tilting in tournaments, and watched
by dimly beautiful women; in the distance a solitary knight pricking
over a plain, or, guided by the wail of an unseen and lovely captive,
making his way through forest haunts of giants and gnomes. The other, a
lowering twilight overhanging gloomy monastery walls, the shelter of
melancholy, hypocrisy, manuscript illuminations, and a barren, difficult
philosophy. Sunshine and twilight on either hand, and in the background
an impenetrable mist concealing the great masses of humanity, as well as
all concrete actual lives even of the great. A little information and a
little romance are unsatisfactory artists for a sketch of mediaevalism.
We soon discover that there is a great deal behind such a picture of
soldiers living in wars, and in the tourneying pretence of war; or
schoolmen contending in brilliant logical panoply within and without
spectral philosophic fastnesses; or hermits, nuns, and monks fighting
against God's present that they might win His future; or marauders
beating down helplessness and innocence.
Yet we may study the middle ages laboriously, and find ourselves still
confronted by the mist that hangs over the rank and file. Our curiosity
about these forgotten multitudes teases us. "How is it that you lived,
and what is it that you did?" we ask these distant prototypes of
Wordsworth's peasant. We come to discover that there is much behind our
slight old notion of chivalry and monasticism; though seven hundred
years have changed its conditions, life then and now is yet less
different than we had thought. But we find it difficult to acquire much
information about those social substrata on which the learned and the
polite classes rested. Clio is the most aristocratic of the ladies nine,
and that instinct of vitality whereby we count fame for ourselves
something desirable, makes us think with a certain compassion of great
armies of those generations filing sullenly on, not only as individuals,
but as whole masses, to the grave of oblivion. The little that we know
makes us sure only that they were wretched, their lives the most gloomy
of all the lives of gloomy ages.
We may read thousands of pages of the literature of those days with
scarcely any addition to our knowledge of the work-a-day world, for most
of the poetry is romantic, and in its imitative phases mainly a
reflection of courtly customs and character. The middle ages in Germany
and France were anything but uncivilized, and the poetry of secondary
cultivation is, as was said in the last essay, likely to prefer
idealistic interpretation of its finest development to democratic
realism. Yet the student finds from time to time interesting material
for an account of the average life, and in the poet whom this essay is
designed to introduce to a modern audience, we obtain an extended study
in this side field of literary interpretation. He wrote not of high life
but of the middle classes, not in romance but in a literal yet at the
same time artistic manner that we may call a heightened realism. He
appears to have been himself one of the people, a poet who possibly made
his living by reciting poems of incident, and by singing at their
merrymakings, though of this there is no evidence. It has been thought
by some German scholars that he may have been a monk, but the
indications make rather against than for this view. We know in fact
nothing whatever about him except for one single line, in which he tells
us that his name is Wernher the Gardener.
As was said, his poem is remarkable as being the heightened treatment
of a plain story of the peasant classes a little before 1250; it is
remarkable, too, for the liveliness and simple force of his
treatment. He is an artist--though he works in chalks instead of
water-colors;--unornamented, unassuming, he produces an impression of
personal power, moral seriousness, a clear eye for what he saw, and
the power to state it directly, one of the marks of a later and more
developed age. He has no little dramatic liveliness, a sense of
humor, and the pleasantest love for the plain beauties of character
and home-life.
He tells the story of a farmer, Helmbrecht, and his wayward son. The boy
has been the admiration of his peasant family as the oldest child,
notable for his splendid yellow hair, and full of life and spirit. At
the time the poem opens he has grown to early manhood, dissatisfied with
the hidden and laborious life of tiller of the soil, vain of his
appearance, fond of fine dress, and ambitious to live easily and be
admired. He is petted and indulged by his mother and his sister
Gotelint, and when he desires a hood--a part of masculine costume much
affected by gallant youths--they provide him with one so fine that it
becomes famous far and near. Embroidery, as every one knows who is
acquainted with the mediaeval arts, was the most artistic accomplishment
of the period. Ladies learned to embroider and weave the most
complicated and elaborate devices; handicraftsmen of all sorts put on
their work representations so copious that one sometimes wonders whether
the literary descriptions of them are not exaggerations. Can the
frequency and detail of these passages, we wonder, be a faintly
remembered tradition of the devices put by Homer on the shield of
Achilles, or by Vergil on the gates of the rising Carthage? At any rate,
tapestries, cloths, and garments, to say nothing of saddles and the
like, were covered by picture after picture, in almost every important
poem of the age. This young peasant Helmbrecht's hood was embroidered,
not, of course, by the rude country fingers of his mother and sister,
but by a clever nun, who had run away from her nunnery to enjoy the
pleasures of a lively youth. Many were the wages of farm-produce by
which she was persuaded to fit out the young man. The hood was covered
with birds, parrots, and doves; on one side were representations of the
siege of Troy and the escape of AEneas; on the other, the stout deeds of
Charlemagne, Roland, and Oliver, in their wars against the heathen
Moors. Behind, adventures of old German legendary heroes, in the cycle
of Dietrich of Bern. In front, dances of knights, ladies, and of maidens
and young esquires--the favorite and mediaeval dance, where the gentleman
stood between two ladies, holding the hand of each.
After this acquisition the boy became ambitious for still more finery,
and was indulged in an elaborate costume that need not be described.
Such white linen, such a splendid blue coat, all covered with buttons,
gilded ones in double rows down the back, around the collar, and in
front of silver. About the shoulders little bells were hung, that rang
merrily when he sprang in the _reie_. Ah, very love-lorn were the
glances cast on him by women and girls at the dance.
At last he is fully equipped by the love and sacrifice of his family,
and they are happy in his elegance, and contented with themselves
because the self-willed and capricious boy is pleased; when suddenly the
simple household is thrown into grief and anxiety by his announcement
that he is going to leave home. He must have a horse--there was none on
the farm--to complete his outfit as a gentleman, and then he will ride
away to some court and seek his fortune. In vain they remonstrate.
"'My dear father, help me on. My mother and sister have
helped me so that I shall love them all my life.'
"His father was troubled to hear that he was resolved to go,
but he said to him: 'I'll give you a fast horse for your
outfit, good at hedges and ditches, for you to have there at
court. I'll buy him for you willingly, if I can find one for
sale. But, my dear son, now give up going to court. The ways
there are hard for those who have not been used to them from
the time they were children. My dear son, now drive team for
me, or if you'd rather, hold the plough, and I'll drive for
you, and let us till the farm, so you'll come to your grave
full of honors like me; at least I hope to, for I surely am
honest and loyal, and every year I pay my tithes. I have
lived my life without hate and without envy.'
"But the son replied: 'My dear father, keep quiet and stop
talking; there's only one way about it, I'm going to find out
how things smack there at court. Your sacks sha'n't load my
back any longer. I won't load any more manure on your wagon,
and God hate me if I ever yoke oxen for you again, and sow
your oats. That's not the thing for my long yellow hair and
my curly locks, and my close-fitting coat, and my fine hood,
and the silk doves the women worked on it. I won't help you
farm any longer.'
"'Dear son, stay with me. I am certain that farmer Ruoprecht
will give you his daughter, with lots of sheep and swine, and
ten cattle, old and young. At court you'll be hungry, you'll
have to lie hard, and give up all comforts. Now take my
advice, and it will be to your interests and credit. It very
seldom happens that a man gets along well who rebels against
his own station. Your station is the plough. My son, I swear
to you that the genuine court-people will make fun of you, my
dear child. Do as I say, and give it up.'
"'Father, if I only have a horse I shall get on as well in
the court ways as those who were born there. Any one who saw
that hood on my head would swear a thousand oaths that I
never worked for you, or drove a plough through a furrow.
Whenever I put on the clothes my mother and my sister gave me
yesterday, I sha'n't look much as if I ever took a flail to
thresh wheat on the barn floor, or as if I ever drove stakes.
When I get my legs and my feet in the hose and cordovan
boots, nobody'll know that I ever made fence for you or any
one else. Let me have a horse, and farmer Ruoprecht may go
without me for a son-in-law. I'll not give up my future for a
wife.'"
The father goes on pleading with the boy to take advice and keep out of
the disorderly life he is likely to get into about a court. By the
silent assumption that his new master and his people will pillage from
the peasantry, we get a suggestion of the lawlessness of the
country--which had grown worse during the long absenteeism of Frederic
II. But if the peasants catch you, he tells his son with energy, you
will fare much worse than one of the gentlemen would. They will take the
quickest revenge, and think that they are doing God service when they
find one of their own kind stealing.
But the son only goes on to repeat that he will leave the farm. He talks
just as an ambitious country fellow will talk to-day about the slow life
and small profits. He becomes bolder and more insolent. If it were not
for that wretched horse he would be riding with the rest across fields
and dragging peasants through the hedges; the cattle would be lowing as
he drove them off. He says he can endure poverty no longer;--raising a
colt or an ox for three years, and then selling them for just nothing.
So his father traded a large piece of homespun, four good cows, two
oxen, three steers, and four bushels of wheat,--all worth about ten
pounds,--for a horse that could not have been sold for three ("alas for
the wasted seven!"), and the young man put on his finery, tossed his
head, and, looking around, jauntily declared that he could "bite through
a stone, or eat iron, he felt so fierce." If he could catch the Emperor
or the Duke, there would be some money coming in. "'Father, you could
manage a Saxon easier than me.'"
When he calls upon his father to release him from the family control,
the latter assents, though with all his old reluctance. Indeed he cannot
let him go without one more appeal:
"'I give you your liberty, my son. But take care that no one
yonder hurts your hood and its silk doves, or viciously tears
your long yellow hair. And I am afraid that at the end you
will be following a staff, or some little boy will be
leading you.'"
Then once more, after a pause, comes the abrupt:
"'My son, my own dear boy, give up going. You shall live on
what I live, and on what your mother gives you. Drink water,
my dear son, before you steal to buy wine. Austrian pie, any
one, fool or wise man, will tell you, is food fit for
gentlemen. Eat that, dear child, instead of giving an ox you
have stolen to some inn-keeper for a chicken. Your mother can
cook good broth; eat that, instead of giving a stolen horse
for a goose. My son, mix rye with oats sooner than eat fish
in a dishonored life. If you will not obey me, go. But though
you win wealth and great honors, never will I share them with
you. And misfortune--have that alone too.'
"'You drink water, father, but I'll drink wine. Eat your
mush, but I'll eat what they call fricasseed chicken there
and white wheat bread; oats will do for you. They say at Rome
that a child takes after his godfather, and mine was a
knight. Thank God for giving me such high and noble ideas.'"
But the old farmer replied that he liked much better a man who did right
and remained constant to it.
"Even though his birth might be rather humble, he would
please the world better than a king's son without virtue and
honor. An honest man of lowly rank, and a nobleman who was
not courteous and honorable,--let the two come to a land
where neither is known, and the child of lowly birth will
outrank the high-born. My son, if you will be noble, on my
word I counsel you, do noble deeds. Good life is a crown
above all nobility."
There is the old thought, so common in literature from ancient authors
down to the poet of Lady Clara Vere de Vere, and especially a favorite
with writers of the middle age. Possibly some of them caught it from
Boethius, who expressed it more than once in the testament of wise and
generous character that he left to the world from his confinement at
Pavia, and that proved so singularly congenial to the mediaeval mind; but
we need certainly not require the aid of origins to account for its
frequency. Aristocratic as many phases of the times were, there were a
number of important evening influences, conspicuously two: the church,
in whose monastery cloisters the rich and poor met together as brothers
of one impartial discipline, and from whose ranks members of low birth
might rise to be the peers of dukes; and the orders of chivalry, which
received approved squires from the middle class. Thus, in addition to
aristocracy of birth, there was a conditional gentility to which those
who had the claim of merit might aspire. But though the thought that
desert, and not descent, is the test for nobility, is so obvious in the
days when position carried with it so strong a connotation of power, and
when the upper strata of society bore down so hard and haughtily upon
the lower, we always feel satisfaction in coming upon a trim statement
of the fine old commonplace whose best mediaeval expression we can quote
from a poet of our own language:
"Look, who that is moost vertuous alway,
Pryvee and apert, and moost entendeth ay
To do the gentil dedes that he kan,
Taak hym for the grettest gentil man."
"'Alas, that your mother bore you!'" the farmer exclaimed, when the
boy's only answer to his appeal was to declare his hair and hood better
fitted for a dance than for the plough or the harrow. "'Thou wilt leave
the best and do the worst'"; and he goes on to contrast the man who
lives against God and the good of others, followed by every one's
curses, with the man who helps the world along, trying night and day to
do good by his life, and thereby honors God. This one, wherever he may
turn, has the love of God and all the world.
"'Dear son,' he says, 'that man you might be, if you would
yield to me. Till with the plough, and plenty of people will
be the better for your life, poor and rich; nay, even wolf
and eagle, and everything that lives on earth. Many a woman
must be made more beautiful through the farmer, many a king
must be crowned through the produce of the farm. Indeed,
there is no one so noble that his pride would not be a very
small thing, except for the farmer.'"
How natural all this sounds,--agriculture the basis of society, tillage
of the soil alike useful and honorable. With what quiet manliness this
old German talks of the dignity of labor, with no touch of the modern
arrogance and discontent with the existing social condition. He will
keep to his rank in life, and be loyal to his station, yet, though he
looks up with a simple-hearted interest and wonder to the great world
above him, he reflects as he follows his plough that without him that
great world's pride "would be a very small thing." But there is a
quality here that is still finer: the undercurrent perception of "the
gospel of service." It is not only that honesty is the best policy,
though the peasant is shrewd, and appreciates the practical side too;
his conversation with the boy breathes the best nineteenth-century
spirit of the duty of making one's life valuable to others. That
sentence about working night and day to be useful, and thereby honoring
God, is no commonplace for our century, to say nothing of the
thirteenth. There is something pretty, too, in the touch of sympathy
with the animal world; in some way, he feels that even the birds and
beasts must be better off for a good farmer.
These times seem often savage in their cruelties and recklessness of
giving pain, but they have a gentle side as well, as may be seen in the
tales cited by Montalembert of friendly relations between monks and wild
beasts, and in examples collected by Uhland in his essay on the old
German animal literature. It is pleasant in connection with such
barbarities as we shall presently be reminded of in this very poem to
recall the myth versified by Longfellow, of the great minnesinger's
legacy to the monastery, conditioned on the brethren's every day placing
grain and water for the birds upon his grave; and more than one
authentic story is told like that of the Abbot of Hirsan, who, when snow
was deep in winter, would take oats from his barn to feed the birds.
After the young Helmbrecht has begged God to release him soon from his
father's preaching,--"if you only had been a real preacher you might
have got up a whole army with your sermons for a crusade,"--and has
explained that instead of keeping on ploughing, he is resolved to have
white hands, and no longer need to feel mortified whenever he holds
ladies' hands at a dance, his father resorts to his last resource--an
appeal to superstition, that he has been keeping in reserve. He tells
him what he has been dreaming--three dreams that he interprets as
ominous of the loss of sight, feet, and arms, and worst of all, a final
dream of one of those sights so common for many centuries before and
after, but made no less dreadful by familiarity.
"'You were hanging on a tree. Your feet were a fathom from
the ground. Above your head on a bough sat a raven, by its
side a crow. Your hair was all tangled. On the right hand the
raven combed your head for you, on the left the crow.'"
But the hopeful rode gaily off through the bars, and came to a castle
where a warlike lord was glad to receive any addition to his force.
There he stayed for a year, leading the extreme bandit life of whose
outrages and oppressions we read so much during this troubled period. He
quickly obtained reputation as daring and merciless:
"Into his sack he stuffed everything; it was all one to him.
Nothing was too small, nothing too great. Helmbrecht took it
all, rough and smooth, crooked and straight. He took horses,
cattle, jacket, sword, cloak, coat, goats, sheep. From women
he stripped everything, and well enough his ship went that
first year, 'its sails full.' But after a while, as people
are wont to think of going home, he took leave of the court,
and commended them to the good God."