accordance with the ancient custom of giving a present to the bearer of
good news, the messenger received a shirt and pair of hose. But when the
young man himself arrived, "how he was received! Did they step forward
to meet him? Nay, they ran, all together; one crowded past another;
father and mother sprang as if they had never had a care." It is
touching to notice the suggestiveness of a single line in the poet's
description of the scene. The plain people understood that their son was
no longer one of them, and they knew how his earlier false pride must
have grown in this year's absence in the outer world. So in their
anxiety that everything should gratify this brilliant, wayward eldest
son of their admiration and hope, and that nothing should interfere
with his being pleased and gracious to their yearning, timid love, and
knowing how in the homely heartiness of their joy at seeing their young
master again the two servants would treat him at once in the old
familiar way of peasant-farm equality, they instructed their man and
their woman in what they thought to be polite salutation. So when the
guest appeared, "Did the woman and the man cry 'Welcome back,
Helmbrecht'? Nay, they did not; they had been told not to. They said:
'Master, in God's name be you welcome.'" There is a touch of humor in
their rushing forward and being the first to greet him, in their rude
good-feeling; but we also get a sense of tenderness from seeing the
father and mother keeping in the background, behind their daughter
Gotelint.
Little education as there was in the middle ages, people fully
appreciated the elegance as well as the utility of a knowledge of
foreign languages, and no accomplishment was held more desirable.
Especially the Germans, representing an outlying civilization, would
send their sons, while still boys, to some French court to serve as
pages and acquire especially the language as well as other branches of
knightly culture. The praises of various heroes of French as well as
German romances, give to linguistic attainments a high place; Gottfried,
for example, in his account of the training of Tristan, who was the
typical gentleman of the romances, says that from the age of seven until
he was fourteen he was studying languages under the care of a tutor, by
travelling through different lands. Since this was the fashion,
imitations were sure to become popular, and a thin veneering of foreign
speech became the mark of a pinchbeck culture, just as it has been so
frequently since. Accordingly, after the servants have cried out their
"Master, in God's name be you welcome," and Gotelint has thrown her arms
about her brother, the young gallant calls her his dear little sister in
a phrase of salutation touched with Low Dutch, which he follows by the
elegant "gratia vester." Then the younger children ran up, and last of
all the farmer and his wife, who greeted him over and over. He addressed
his father in French: "Deu sal"; his mother in Bohemian: "Dobraytra."
They looked at each other; four strange languages all together--there
must be some mistake.
"The housewife said: 'My dear, this is not our son. This is a
Bohemian or a Slav.' Her husband replied: 'It is a Frenchman.
My son whom I commended to God, certainly this is not he, and
yet he looks like him.' And Gotelint suggested: 'He answered
me in Latin; may be he is a priest.' 'Faith,' put in the
hired man, who had caught the phrase in dialect, 'he has
lived in Saxony or Brabant, for he said, "liebe
susterkindekin"; he must be a Saxon.'"
The old peasant was devoted and loving, but he had resolution and
self-respect under it all. He told the accomplished youth that before he
would take him for his son he must talk German. If he would do that and
declare himself Helmbrecht, well and good. He should have a chicken
boiled, and another roasted, and his horse should be well cared for. But
a Bohemian, or a Slav, or a Saxon, or a Brabanter, or a Frenchman, or a
priest, should be given nothing. The youth began to reflect. It was
getting late, there was no place near by where he could go; so he
concluded to waive his elegant manners, and speak in the old style. But
the shrewd peasant feigns incredulity, and decides to test his son a
little further. In vain the young man protests himself Helmbrecht. His
gentility must stoop to vulgar peasant identification, and tell what he
knows about the oxen on the farm. He rattles over all four of them,
Grazer, Black-spot, Rascal, and White-star, with a little praise for
two, and the reconciliation is accomplished. Thereupon the repressed
fondness and devotion obtain free expression. The father hurried out to
attend to the horse, the mother sent her daughter for a pillow and
cushion--"Run, now, and don't walk for it"--and makes a couch for him on
the bench close to the stove, so that he may have a nap while she is
preparing his dinner. When the boy woke the meal was ready, and Wernher
assures us that any gentleman might have enjoyed it. After washing his
hands, the usual first step in a meal, a dish of fine-cut sauer-kraut
was put before him, by it bacon, both fat and lean, and a rich mellow
cheese. Then there was as fat a goose as ever roasted on a spit--and
with what good-will they provided that extraordinary peasant luxury--a
roasted and a boiled chicken. A knight out hunting, and happening on
such a meal, would like it well. For besides this they had managed to
get delicacies in which peasants never think of indulging. "'If I had
any wine you should be drunk to-night,'" the farmer said; and he
added--with such a noble union of dignity, simplicity, and sentiment for
the plain homely blessings which he had appreciated and loved all his
life: "'My dear son, now take a drink of water from the best spring that
ever came out of earth. I know no spring fit to be compared with it,
except the one at Wankhusen.'"
"'Tell me, son,'" he continued, as they went on with their dinner, for
he could not wait to ask him, "'tell me how about the court fashions,
and then I will tell you how they used to be when I was young.'" But
the son was too busy eating to stop to talk then, and he allowed his
father to relate his early reminiscences.
"'When I was a boy,' he began 'and your grandfather
Helmbrecht had sent me to court with cheese and eggs, just as
a farmer does to-day, I took note of the knights, and marked
their ways. They were courteous and cheerful and had no
rascality about them in those days, such as many men and
women too have now. The knights had a custom, to make
themselves pleasing to the ladies, that was called jousting.
A man of the court explained it to me when I asked him what
they called it. Two companies would come together from
opposite directions, riding as if they were mad, and they
would drive against each other, as if their spears must
pierce through. There's nothing in these days like what I saw
then. After that they had a dance, and while dancing they
sang lively songs, that made the time go quickly. Presently a
playman came forward and struck in with his fiddle; at that
the ladies jumped up, and the knights went to meet them, and
they took hold of hands. That was a pleasant sight--the
overflowing delight of ladies and gentlemen, dancing so
gaily, poor and rich. When that was over a man came out and
read about some one called Ernest. Each could do whatever he
liked. Some took their bows and shot at a target; others went
hunting: there was no end to the kinds of pleasure. The worst
off there would be the best off with us now. Those were the
times before false and vicious people could turn the right
about with their tricks. Nowadays the wise man is the one who
can cheat and lie; he has position and money and honor at
court, much more than the man who lives justly and strives
after God's grace.'"
We find here as in so many other places in thirteenth century poetry,
that the serious-minded were already looking back. Just as we have seen
Walther and Ulrich bewailing the lost sunshine of chivalry, Wernher
laments that the old-time honesty has gone, and with it the knightly
light-hearted honorable joys. Already, before 1250, there was a halo
about the chivalric court; ladies were honored, knights tourneyed for
their pleasure; dancing with them attracted gentlemen quite beyond
drinking bouts; the poet's narratives of old German heroes were yet in
fashion.
All this seems amusing to the young man; what sappy and goody-goody
fashions those were. He thinks it manly to swagger about the new ways,
and tell how the fashionable cry is "Trinka, herre, trinka trinc!" It
used to be good breeding to dangle about pretty ladies, but the correct
thing now is just to drink. "'This is the kind of love-letters we have:
"You dear little bar-maid, fill up our cups. What a fool a man is who
wastes his life for women, instead of good wine." It's a genteel thing
to be sharp with your tongue, and get the best of people, and tell
clever lies.'"
The old man hears, and with a sigh wishes back the day when gentlemen
shouted "Hey[=a], ritter, wis et fro!" in the tourneys, instead of these
new cries of riotry and pillage. The son would tell him more, but he has
ridden far and wishes to go to sleep. There were no linen sheets in that
farm-house, but Gotelint spread a newly washed shirt on his bed, and he
slept until high day. The next morning he displayed the gifts he had
brought: for his father, a whetstone, scythe, and axe; for his mother, a
fox-skin; for Gotelint, a head-dress with a band of silk and gold,
better fitted for a nobleman's child than for her; shoes with straps for
the farm-hand; and for his wife, a cloth to cover her hair, and a red
ribband. He remained at home for a week, and then he became restless to
return. His father again took up his entreaties, begging him in the
tenderest tones to stay from the bitter and sour life he has been
leading. As long as he lives he will share what he has with him, even
if the young man will do nothing but sit still and wash his hands. Only
he must not go back.
What, not go back with so much to do? Has not a rich man ridden over the
field of his god-father? Has not another rich man eaten bread with
crullers? And still a third, while eating at a bishop's table, loosened
his girdle? Each one must be taught better manners through wholesale
plunder of cattle, sheep, and swine, to say nothing of a boor who blew
the foam off his beer. He and some friends will give them a good
training, and he runs over the list of his bandit companions with the
cant names borne by each, such as Lambswallow, Hellbag, Bolt-the-sheep,
Coweater, Wolfthroat, and at last his own name, Swallow-the-land.
We may pass by the exploits of which he boasts--the children of the
peasants near him eat water-gruel, their father's eyes he puts out,
their beards he draws with pincers, he binds them in ant-hills, or
smokes them in the chimney, and so forth, through a revolting list of
barbarities.
The youth uncloaks himself as a full-fledged desperado, and his father's
short, stern warning in God's name of vengeance only throws him into a
passion, and he declares that, though hitherto on their raids he has
kept off his companions from the farm, instead of doing so longer, he
will give up his father and mother to their will. He reveals what had
been a main motive in his visit, an arrangement he had made with his
comrade Lambswallow to let him marry Gotelint. But of that brilliant
match her father's conduct has deprived the girl; also she will never
find another man who can give her such luxuries of dress and fare.
Moreover, his sister was worthy of such a husband, and he stops to
repeat the tribute he had paid to her while discussing the alliance with
his friend. The lines bring before us a weird mediaeval scene, to which
these reckless free-livers looked forward as their assured end, and
which they dreaded most from the lurid light thrown by superstition upon
the picture. The ghastly swinging of their corpses on the gibbet ("The
rain has drenched and washed us," Villon says two hundred years later,
"and the sun dried and blackened us. Magpies and crows have hollowed out
our eyes, and plucked away our beards and eyebrows."[9]) troubled them
less than the thought that their falling bones must lie unburied, and
their lives be followed by no religious rites to mitigate the eternal
justice. French poetry has interpreted this phase of crime and misery in
Villon's _Epitaphe_; in English it has been interpreted by Tennyson in
_Rizpah_, at once the most intense and the most piteous of all his
poems, as free from self-consciousness as an early ballad, the most
pathetic expression in all literature of a mother's love, and kept out
of the category of the very greatest poems only by the intolerable
anguish of its emotion. In this old German story we find an
interpretation of it too; the briefest and much the simplest, yet not
without an unobtrusive power. Young Helmbrecht declares that he told his
comrade that he might trust Gotelint never to make him repent his
choice.
"I know her," he represents himself as saying, "to be so
loyal--on this you may count--that she never will leave you
hanging long; she will cut you down with her own hands, and
carry you to your grave at the cross-roads, with incense and
myrrh--of this you can be sure. Nightly for a whole year she
will go about you. Or if, less fortunate, you are blinded or
crippled by the loss of hands or feet, the good, pure girl
will guide you with her own hand over all the paths of every
land; every morning she will bring your crutches to your bed,
or cut for you, even till you die, your bread and meat."
From the first, Gotelint has been under the fascination of her brother,
and as she hears his long account of the life the wife of Lambswallow
must live, she calls young Helmbrecht aside, and arranges to run away
from home and marry his friend. So at the appointed time she does, and a
great wedding feast, provided at the cost of many widows and orphans,
follows the curious mediaeval marriage ceremony. In the midst of it a
strange foreshadowing of evil comes over her; she wishes herself back at
her father's simple fare; his cabbage was better than the luxury of
Lambswallow's fish. She tells her bridegroom that she is afraid
strangers are at hand to harm them, and even as the players are
receiving their gifts, the sheriff and his force break in upon the
revellers. All meet quick justice; nine are hung; Helmbrecht, the tenth,
is sent off blind, and with only one foot and one hand. "What the
forsaken bride suffered" let him tell who saw.
The story works to its conclusion in a temper better fitted to the
thirteenth century than to ours. The poet feels no complaisance for an
obstinate wrong-doer. He says: "God is a worker of wonders, and this is
the proper lot of a youth who called his father an old peasant and his
mother a worthless woman." Nor does he stop with his own exclamation; he
tells in detail how the blind and maimed fellow is brought by a boy to
the farm, only to receive his father's taunts and mocking. Brutal and
distressing as the passage seems, it is true to the age and to the
character of the sturdy old farmer. While there was hope he had borne
every insult; he had pleaded persistently, tenderly, and to every limit
of generosity and devotion. But when the youth had proved himself
susceptible to no claims of virtue or humanity, and, as a last stroke of
evil, had seduced his sister from an honorable life, further pity seems
sentimentalism. Before the boy's first departure his father had warned
him that he would take no part in any ill-won prosperity, and if
misfortunes came, they, too, must be borne alone. The foreign phrases
are on the father's lips this time, as the sightless cripple creeps up
to the farm-house door. He runs over the proud speeches that have thus
ended in shame and misery; nor will he listen to the entreaties for
shelter, even as a beggar, for a single night. "'Every one, the country
round, is cruel to me; alas! so you are now. In God's name give me the
charity you would give a poor sick man!'" But the farmer "laughed
scoffingly, even though it broke his heart, for this was his own flesh,
his child, who stood there before him blind." He struck the boy who was
leading the wretch, and drove them off. "Yet as they went away his
mother put a loaf of bread in his hand, as if he were a child." For a
year he crawled about, skulking in the woods and living on what he
might. Then one day, having wandered to the scene of some of his worst
crimes, a set of peasants catch sight of him, and recount to one another
what their farms, their babes, their daughters, had suffered from this
outlaw and his band. As they talk they tremble with hate and rage, and,
catching up a rope, they fulfil the last of the dreams that tormented
the anxious night of the father just before his son rode out, with his
rich clothes and fine horse and wonderful hood covering that long,
beautiful hair, to seek his fortune in a court.
Why is it worth while to introduce to English readers this peasant tale
of the middle ages? Not on account of its antiquarian value, though it
is full of interesting suggestions of old manners. Nor primarily on
account of its literary significance, notwithstanding the tact and
nervous directness of Wernher's style, and the heightened realism of
treatment that gives him distinction beside the romanticists of the
time. Its main importance for us lies in that sense of the human unity
which we derive from such a story of a time so remote from our own, and
in most of its aspects so different. Many of the influences that render
man's life desirable--organized society, with respect for property and
personal safety, ease of living, humanitarian sensibility even to the
guiltiest suffering--we miss, and missing them we rejoice in the
progress of our age toward the light. But the traits whereby life in all
ages becomes estimable--simplicity of character, contentment with the
station of one's birth, if only one can live there with dignity and
usefulness; frugality, integrity, natural love which grows most tender
and yearning when the kinship of moral worthiness seems in danger of
dissolution--are our own best possession, and this identity of manhood
then and now makes us feel less strange among those distant and dimly
remembered generations. Thus serious writers offer to our study many
notable and interesting thoughts, and in their courtly poets we find
scores of delightful pictures of gracious and noble dames and knights
moving through the pleasures and pains of an ideal world. It is also
pleasant to listen to a poet from among the people, and to touch the
rough hand of an old German farmer, whose most brilliant recollection
was of the time when, as a boy, he carried eggs and cheese to one of the
courts of old-fashioned chivalry; whose virtue cast in a decadent era
had looked at life sternly, yet whose austerity was softened by a homely
simplicity through whose grace he grew old, with his heart true to his
plain home life and his family, even to the assurance that no drink
could be more refreshing than water from the spring on his own farm.
[Decoration]
FOOTNOTE:
[9]
"La pluye nous a debuez et lavez,
Et le soleil dessechez et noirciz;
Pies, corbeaulx, nous ont les yeux cavez,
Et arrachez la barbe et les sourcilz."
[Decoration]
CHILDHOOD IN MEDIAEVAL LITERATURE.
When Homer described the pretty fright of Astyanax in his nurse's arms,
amid the parting of Hector and Andromache; when Vergil made Damon recall
the day when, as a little boy just able to reach up to the branches, he
saw his mother and the child who was to be his fate gathering
apples--the hyacinths of Theocritus were daintier--they struck two
chords of feeling, one charming, the other deeper and richer, which have
started vibrations whenever they have met a sympathetic reader ever
since. Because we are susceptible to the poetry of childhood we are
pleased to find that these ancient poets also cared for it. It adds a
personal touch to our feeling for them. It gives us a thrill of the
immortality of heart and its simplest, purest sentiment. There may be an
element of the fictitious in our feeling about childhood. Heaven may not
be about our infancy, those "sweet early days" may not have been "as
long as twenty days are now"; and they may not have been the types of
innocence, simplicity, the loveliness of the race taken at first hand
from nature, which we fancy them. But there is something beyond a
fallacy in this sentiment; it is in our purer and more refined moods
that we are sensitive to it. Like a whiff of spring smoke, or woodsy
odors, a reminder of our early life will sometimes throw us into a
revery which is more than recollection. No one can write well about
children without sensibility to youthful emotion and some love for
family life. Whoever looks back with genial wistfulness upon his own
early days, and enjoys renewing them in the playthings of his fancy, can
hardly be without a vein of quiet refinement. When an age listens with
pleasure to such sketches, it is not barren of the homely affections,
nor uniformly given over to restless and unlawful passions. As one
wanders through the poetry of the middle ages, one observes the
frequency with which it mentions children.
These passages, judged absolutely, may not be remarkable for insight or
tenderness, but in those days all emotional subjects were treated
crudely. Yet they are often interesting for themselves, and they show a
fact which many seem to question that the sentiments of simple family
life were felt by poets and people. So much has been written by critics
upon the worse side of the society of chivalry, that it is well to
recognize this other aspect of its affections. The public has frequently
been assured that those days knew nothing of true family sentiment. How
much truth there is in the statement that fashionable love disregarded
marriage, has been shown in a preceding essay. But on _a priori_ grounds
we should disbelieve that general society was permeated by artificial
gallantry. Even were the testimony of lyrical lovers uniform, we must
recollect how conventional all their love-poetry was; most poets
composed on formal lines impersonally, in spite of their pronouns. One
of the troubadours, indeed, denied that this was possible when the
husband of his theme challenged him, in the lonely place where he was
hunting, by his liege truth to tell him whether he had a lady love.
"Sire," he replied, "how could I sing unless I loved?" But in most poems
there was more business, or ambitious art, than nature. A large number
of these poets impress us as having just as little emotional veracity in
writing as had Cowley in _The Mistress_. Moreover, even if a school of
poetry, not conventionalized, should treat romantic and sensational
sentiment to the exclusion of domestic, it would prove nothing. What if
cynical critics some centuries hence should give Mr. Coventry Patmore a
place in their encyclopedias, simply on the ground that he was an
exception to the nineteenth-century belief that love ended at the bridal
altar? Possibly by that time love, poetry, and fiction may deal mainly
with domestic emotions after marriage, and then our own romances will
very likely appear strange.
From one point of view those centuries were too akin to undeveloped life
to be prepared to represent it. Europe seven hundred years ago seems
like a vast nursery abandoned by its governess. The people are like
children of various ages and sizes, degrees of education, and innate
sense of right and wrong. Children are impulsive, passionate, selfish,
brutally inconsiderate; they are sometimes religious too. We find
apparently sporadic susceptibility to isolation and prayer. They cry at
trifles, and while their cheeks are still wet, they are smiling. Bright
and simple things please them; they are fickle and impatient; they love
lively music; when they are tired playing, nothing pleases them like a
story--they listen intently, credulously. When spring comes they can no
more help running and dancing over the grass, than sunbeams on a brook.
The gentler sit in the meadow making posies, while the rougher are
setting traps, and racing, and fighting: but sometimes the rough boys
will come and play in the meadow, and be pleasant to the girls. All
these traits of children apply to the mediaeval character, their
barbarisms, their ethical inconsistencies, their delight in stories (no
age has ever cared more for story telling), their love of play, their
passion for spring, and the rest.