was still uninterrupted. It was a wonder to see how each of
the two studied for each; neither learned anything without
straightway telling the other. At nature's earliest, all
their concern was love; they were quick in learning and well
they remembered. Pagan books that spake of love they read
together with delight; these hastened them along in the
understanding and joy of love. On their way home from school,
they would put their arms about each other, and kiss. In the
King's garden, bright with all plants and flowers of various
hues, they went to play every morning, and to eat their
dinner; and after they had eaten, they listened to the birds
singing in the trees above them, and then they went their way
back to school, and a happy walk they found it. When they
were again at school they took their ivory tablets, and you
might have seen them writing letters and verses of love, in
the wax. Deftly with their gold and silver styles they made
letters and greeting of love, of the songs of birds and of
flowers. This was all they cared for. In five years and
fifteen days, they both had learned to write neatly on
parchment, and to talk in Latin so well that no one could
understand."
When we follow the poem along, we find in the different versions many
familiar romance expedients, conventional incidents of the pathetic,
exciting, and marvellous, but the charm is in the unwavering love of
these twins, who from the hour of birth breathed together, even in their
sleep, yet no kin to each other, and blending brotherhood and sisterhood
with the other love of man and woman in perfection, since for neither
they knew the beginning. In this way the mediaeval romance is even more
ideal than Beaumont's _Triumph of Love_, where Gerard and Violante
passed from the sentiment of childhood "as innocently as the first
lovers ere they fell."
"Gerard's and my affection began," the heroine tells Ferdinand,
"In infancy: my uncle brought him oft
In long clothes hither; you were such another.
The little boy would kiss me, being a child,
And say he loved me: give me all his toys,
Bracelets, rings, sweetmeats, all his rosy smiles;
I then would stand and stare upon his eyes,
Play with his locks, and swear I loved him too.
For sure, methought he was a little Love,
He wooed so prettily in innocence
That then he warmed my fancy; for I felt
A glimmering beam of love kindle my blood
Both which time since hath made a flame and flood."
In the early stages of Fleur's love-trials his parents attempted to
persuade him that Blanchefleur was dead, and to give confirmation to
their assertions they caused a superb tomb to be constructed, in a style
that is of considerable interest in the study of literary origins from
its obviously Oriental tone. Without delaying for its rich and curious
Eastern details, we may yet notice the sentiment in the figures of the
boy and girl that were placed upon it. "Never were seen images of fairer
children, or more like to the lovers. The image of Blanchefleur holds a
flower before Fleur, before her lover holds the fair one a rose of fine
bright gold; and before her, Fleur holds a blanched golden fleur-de-lis.
Close by each other they sit, a sweet look on their faces." A mechanical
device is so contrived that when the wind blew and touched the children
they embraced and kissed, and by necromancy they spoke to each other as
in their childhood, and thus said Fleur to Blanchefleur: "Kiss me,
sweet," and kissing him, she replied: "I love you more than all the
world."
The story of Fleur and Blanchefleur was so popular that they became
identified with the characters of another romance, and were sung of as
the parents of Berte-as-graus-pies, the heroine of an attractive
legend, and the mythical mother of Charlemagne. In the poem that relates
her misfortunes after she has been sent from Hungary to France as the
wife of Pepin, we find a suggestion of the depth of sentiment that was
always associated with her legendary parents. She has been in France
almost nine years without their having heard from her, and Blanchefleur
determines to undertake a journey to see her child again before she
dies. The King, without opposing her desire, expresses a half
remonstrance that we may add to the other proofs in mediaeval poetry,
that true love in our modern sense was familiar throughout those eras:
"Oh, my lady, how shall we be able to live so long without each other?"
Let us believe that in the Utopia where these lovers who loved from
their birth resided, they found, after their own sharp trials and the
trials of their daughter were safely over, a serene old age, out of
which they passed unconsciously some night, sleeping themselves away in
each other's arms.
This love between boy and girl was attractive to the old narrative
poets. The greatest of them all touched the soul of young romance when
he said of Sigune and Schionatulander, "Alas, they are still too young
for such pain, yet 'tis the love of youth which lasts." Wolfram gives us
pretty touches of childhood as far back as the nursery; like that of a
mother and her ladies playing over the new-born baby, or of children
learning to stand by taking hold of chairs, and creeping over the floor
to reach them, or of Sigune's care to take her box of dolls with her
when she went away. "Whoever saw this little girl thought her a glimpse
of May among the dewy flowers." As she grew older, too, he describes
her, assuming the airs of a young lady. "When her breasts were rounding
and her light wavy hair began to turn dark, she grew more proud and
dignified, though always keeping her womanlike sweetness." The story of
her love with Schionatulander has delightful stanzas; their long
love-pleading dialogue is much truer than most of the minnesingers' work
in its restraint and in the girl's coy sweetness. She is an earlier
Dorigen as she watches for the beloved who does not come, wasting many
an evening at the window gazing over the fields, or climbing to the
housetop to look. But what distinguishes the author of the _Titurel_
above his fellow-poets is his sentiment for something more than romance.
Children are dear to him, and the wife is dearer. His idea of love
consists no more in Dante's platonic mysticism than in passion and
inconstancy. Without transcendentalism its dominant tone is spiritual.
Compare an earlier lover's cry in the loveliest of French romances:
"What is there in heaven for me? I will never go there without
Nicolette, my sweet darling, whom I love so much. It is to hell that
fine gentlemen go and pretty, well-bred ladies who love." Compare that
Parisian type of feeling with this of Wolfram: "Love between man and
woman has its house on earth, and its pure guidance leads us to God and
heaven. This love is everywhere save in hell!" To such a poet we
naturally turn for the deepest mediaeval note in the treatment of
childhood, and we do not listen in vain.
"What a difference there is between women," Wolfram exclaims. It seems
to him the way of modern womanhood to be disloyal, worldly, selfish,
like men: but in the days of which he writes in his chief poem there was
a lady Herzeloide, to whom after her husband's death in the wars, the
sun was a cloud, the world's joy lost, night and day alike, who for
heavenly riches chose earthly poverty, and leaving her estates went with
her retainers far into the unreclaimed forest to bring up her infant
safe from the strife and wiles of men. This only heritage of her lost
lord was the boy Parzival. She trusted that by hiding him away from all
knowledge of the world, she might always keep him her own. She exacted
an oath from her servants that they would never let him hear of knights
and knighthood, and while they cleared farming land in the heart of the
woods, she cared for the child. It was a desolate place, but she was not
looking for meadows and flowers; she gave no thought to wreaths, whether
red or yellow.[11]
The child grew into boyhood, and was indulged in making bows and arrows.
As he played in the woods, he shot some of the birds. But after he saw
them dead, he remembered how they had sung, and he cried. Every morning
he went to a stream to bathe. There was nothing to trouble him, except
the singing of the birds over his head: but that was so sweet that his
breast grew strained with feeling; and he ran to his mother in tears.
She asked what ailed him, but "like children even now it may be," he
could not tell her. But she kept the riddle in her heart, and one day
she found him gazing up at the trees listening to the birds, and she saw
how his breast heaved as they sang. It seemed to her that she hated
them, she did not know why. She wanted to stop their singing, and bade
her farm hands snare and kill them. But the birds were too quick; most
of them remained and kept on singing. The boy asked his mother what harm
the birds did, and if the war upon them might not cease. She kissed his
lips:
"Why am I opposing highest God? Shall the birds lose their
happiness because of me?"
"Nay, mother, what is God?"
"My son, He is brighter than the day; He took upon himself
the likeness of man. When trouble comes upon thee, pray to
him: his faithfulness upholds the world. The Devil is
darkness; turn thy thoughts from him, and from unbelief."
This passage is Wolfram's invention; the brilliant Gallic poet whose
romance he followed could not have contrived it. This sympathy with
nature belongs to our later era; it seems less strange to meet it in
Keats, when the boy Apollo wanders out alone in the morning twilight:
"The nightingale had ceased, and a few stars
Were lingering in the heavens, while the thrush
Began calm-throated. Throughout all the isle
There was no covert, no retired cave
Unhaunted by the murmurous noise of waves.
Though scarcely heard in many a green recess,
He listened and he wept, and his bright tears
Went trickling down the golden bow he held."
One recalls nothing in the two centuries which Wolfram touches that
equals this picture of the mother watching her child's baptism with the
sad and precious gift of soul, as he stands gazing upward in his forest
trance, or listening to his dawning perplexities, or teaching him his
first religious lesson, or jealous of the birds, because his dreamy love
for them dimly warned her of a mysterious growing soul that would not
remain within her simple call. Those lines in the _Princess_ of the
faith in womankind and the trust in all things high, that come easy to
the son of a good mother, certainly are appropriate to Parzival, whose
faith held true and simple through his whole career as the foremost
knight of chivalric legend, living for a spiritual ideal, unseduced by
beauty and the ways of courts from loyalty to his first wedlock:
"True to the kindred points of heaven and home."
The description of Parzival's meeting with the knights, his mistaking
them in their bright armor for angels, and his eagerness to make his way
to Arthur's court are narrated by Chrestien with his own excellent
vivacity, and here Wolfram only follows.
The Welsh version of the story in the _Mabinogi_ of Peredur, though
disappointing, contains a naive sketch of the boy's rustic attempt to
imitate the knight's trappings. But for the full tenderness of his
mother's parting as he goes out from home to the fierce world we must
turn again to the German.[12]
She kisses him, and as he rides away "runs a few steps after him" till
he has galloped out of sight and then she closes forever the eyes whose
light of motherhood shone like a star above the sea, over those
tumultuous years.
All through these centuries there are poems to the Virgin, especially
in Latin, which manifest similar sensibility to infancy and motherhood.
One of the most pleasing belongs to England, and is written in the
commixture of Latin and the modern tongue, which occasionally produces
quaintly pretty effects. The glorified Christ summons his mother, by the
memory of their kisses when she calmed him in sweet song, to come and be
crowned. "Pulcra ut luna"--lovely as moonlight--"veni coronaberis."
But perhaps the most delicate of all such sketches comes from an
unexpected source. A young lawyer in the town of Todi, whose early life
had combined pleasure with sufficient study to gain the doctorate, was
turned aside from a prosperous public career by the tragical loss of his
bride. Matthew Arnold has given a symbolism to the story of her death in
the sonnet beginning:
"That son of Italy who tried to blow
'Ere Dante came, the trump of sacred song."
The sorrow struck deep, even to the point of partial mania; the gay
young man forsook the world and devoted years to seclusion and religious
culture. Later in 1278, he entered the order of the Minorites, and ranks
as one of their delirious enthusiasts, a mystic poet, a reckless
satirist of evils in high places. His fanatic asceticism made him glory
in bodily torments and the world's scorn. The nickname, Jacapone, he
carried proudly, and even the harshness of Boniface VIII. could not
quell his zest for martyrdom. We should scarcely look to him for
sympathy with the sweet gaieties of the nursery, yet this little sketch
of the Virgin's life with Christ, the child, came from the same hand
that wrote the sorrows of the _Stabat Mater_.
Ah sweet, how sweet, the love within thy heart,
When on thy breast the nursing infant lay:
What gentle actions, sweetly loving play,
Thine, with thy holy child apart.
When for a little while he sometimes slept,
Thou eager to awake thy paradise,
Soft, soft, so that he could not hear thee, crept,
And laidest thy lips close to his eyes,
Then, with the smile maternal calling, "Nay,
'Twere naughty to sleep longer, wake, I say!"
The almost incoherent repetition of the word "Love," in one of his
poems, is suggestive of the man; despair for human love led to his
half-crazed absorption in the divine. Very sweetly sounds this sacred
meditation's echo of his recollection of the nights of his own
childhood, of which he has told, when his mother, as she waked, would
make a light and come and lean over his bed, till sometimes his eyes
would open to see her watching him there. His father did not spare the
rod for the careless boy, nor in later years did the father of his soul;
but the divine motherhood of memory and of present faith bent with
yearning eyes, we may be sure, over his anxious sleep in prison or in
the ascetic cell.
But it was only the greatest of all these poets who could leave us the
lovely image of the new-born soul that comes forth in its simplicity
from the hand that loves it before its birth, playing like a young girl
who weeps and smiles. Yet Dante's principal sensation about childhood is
its helplessness, and the mother's eyes, which throw its aureole about
infancy, do not seem to have held their tenderest meaning for him. He
would never have gone beyond the original ten lines of
"She was a phantom of delight."
But he gives beauty to the child's frightened eyes when they meet its
mother's, and certainly the vision, whether real or imagined, toward the
close of the _Vita Nuova_ will please forever. This straying love is
recalled to its old faithfulness by "the strong imagination" of a little
figure that is habited in red, just as it had appeared to him when,
perhaps in Folco's Florentine garden, the boy not quite nine fell in
love with the girl of eight.
Perhaps Boccaccio's story of the falcon is too familiar to quote, though
it illustrates domestic love too well to be unmentioned. One hardly can
choose the best of its touches--the bright account of the boy running
over the fields with his mother's old-time lover, as he hawked, always
eying with a boy's eagerness for ownership the famous falcon, the only
remnant of Frederick's gay and wealthy life, which he had lost for the
unsuccessful love; or the picture of the mother again and again begging
the child, as he lay ill, to tell her something which he desired, so
that she might obtain it for him; until his feverish imagination
persuaded him that to have the wonderful falcon would make him well
again; or our thought of the impoverished gentleman, whose devotion had
lasted under the years of exile on his little farm, his hope departed,
who when suddenly visited by his widowed love, and finding nothing in
the larder, nor money, nor even anything valuable enough for a pledge to
secure some entertainment for her, desperately wrung the neck of his
precious bird; or the delicate hesitation and awkwardness of the lady
when she came to explain her errand, and the struggle, before love for
her child bent both pride and pity; or the lover's broken heart when he
found that his excess of devotion had cost him his only opportunity of
pleasing her. The whole may be read in a little play of Tennyson's later
years, or among the _Tales of a Wayside Inn_; but it is much better to
read it in the narrative of the Certaldesian. Tuscany has sent us down
no tenderer story.
[Decoration]
FOOTNOTES:
[10] I will not quote Goethe's famous disparagement of the _Divina
Commedia_, for the context indicates that it was uttered petulantly.
Still, he certainly did not care for Dante, or appreciate him, though he
recognized his eminence.
[11] It may be worth noting that Wolfram substitutes for the French
original's usual conventionality of a pretty watered meadow, this harder
and more appropriate setting.
[12] Tennyson might suitably enough have had the marriage of Parzival
and Condiuiramur in mind when writing the Prince's aspiration. "Then
reign the world's great bridals chaste and calm." Such passages in
Wolfram's poem as Book iv. from line 666 and Book v. 676-682 may be
commended to the critics who see nothing in mediaeval love that is pure
or faithful in the modern sense of marriage.
[Decoration]
A MEDIAEVAL WOMAN.[13]
When Heloise was born, just after the twelfth century opened, Abelard,
through whom she was to experience the deepest ecstacies and the most
poignant distress, and by whose union with her life she was to become
the most famous mediaeval woman, was a young man of twenty-two. He came
of a rather high-bred family in Brittany; his father, though an active
soldier, was interested in letters and took pains to have his children
instructed in the ornaments as well as the defence of life. This eldest
son, so attracted by his early lessons that he determined to sacrifice
his rights of primogeniture, and to renounce the distinction of a
knightly career for the life of study, while yet a youth started out as
a student-tramp, one of a multitude who wandered from town to town to
hear lectures on the seven topics that made up the educational
curriculum of the age. Through this entire epoch, for generation after
generation, this practice of student vagrancy continued: now the
intellectual centre was England, now France, now Germany; sometimes two
or three teachers would draw crowds to the exclusion of all other
schools, sometimes the numbers would divide up among scores of masters.
Poor, rich, coarse, refined, hard-working, indolent, quick-witted,
stupid, scholars, impostors,--these student crowds were an extraordinary
medley. To realize the irregularity and the strangeness of their lives
we have to read such a story as Freytag quotes[14] from Thomas Platter,
a wandering scholar of the fifteenth century. Such German students were
perhaps of a lower grade than the young men who travelled through France
three hundred years before, and the standard of scholarship may have
been inferior, but their general experiences must have been similar, and
most of Abelard's companions no doubt were mentally crude, arrogant,
superstitious; many dissipated and even brutal. Yet some were touched by
the love of truth, and had vigorous minds, well trained by application.
The majority of these better men were of course hedged in by the
palisades of Catholic tradition, and sought knowledge from the past,
rather than from independent present thought: but there were some whose
ideas were bolder, and who kept proposing questions which their teachers
did not answer.
The deferential attention with which Roscellinus and William of
Champeaux were listened to, was broken in upon when the handsome youth
Abelard appeared at the schools of these leaders of European thought.
The strength of each was in dialectics, the topic which then held
intellectual interest to the practical disregard of almost every other
subject except the theology into which it played, and they took opposite
sides on the absorbing problem of general terms. In the school of each,
Abelard rose as a disputant; he challenged his teacher to argue with him
as an equal until he triumphed in turn over the extreme Nominalist and
the extreme Realist. Then he set up schools of his own, which he moved
from place to place, as the intolerant hostility of his vanquished
chiefs and their upholders required. His reputation steadily rose, and
he drew the largest and most enthusiastic following, for the keenest
young thought of the generation recognized in him its natural leader.
All independence and liberality of mind must be estimated relatively to
the age concerned. From our outlook Abelard seems a narrow and
constrained thinker, but to the churchman of the opening of the twelfth
century he was a rationalist, a daring explorer into the sacred
mysteries that must be accepted by the sealed eye of Faith. How absurd,
he exclaims, to teach what you cannot give reasons for believing. So he
tried to make belief a matter for intellectual comprehension; he argued
where others asserted, and made bold to modify current opinions which
his ingenuity, often childishly simple, could not explain. He had a
noble grasp upon some conceptions far beyond the reach of his
antagonists. He independently developed the ethical doctrine that the
value of conduct is in motive, not in act; he taught that the main worth
of the incarnation was to present the model of a perfect life; that the
man Christ Jesus was not a member of the Trinity; that the love of God
is as freely bestowed on sinner as on saint; that God could not prevent
evil, or he would have done so. For the sufferings that he endured in
teaching his pupils to use not credulity but unflinching independent
thought in their reflections even on theology, he deserves our grateful
admiration.
When Abelard was thirty-eight years old he was at the height of his
reputation. Technical and abstruse as his intellectual interests were,
he appears to have been anything but a dry-as-dust. Though as a logician
he had trained himself severely in precision of speech, the hesitating
and half-frozen way of talking that most exact thinkers fall into, he
seems to have escaped. We have a letter written about this time by a
canon named Fulcus, who, dwelling on Abelard's intellectual cleverness,
his power and subtlety of expression, makes special mention of the
sweetness of his eloquence; _limpidissimus philosophiae fons_, he calls
him, too--philosophy's very clearest fountain. He was not only an easy
and agreeable speaker, he had also the advantages of an attractive
presence; he was a fine-looking man, in the prime of life.
Now for about twenty years he had been a hero of the schools. The
philosophic and theological leaders of the age he had overthrown and
trampled on; the audiences that he had been at the first successful in
drawing had steadily increased. Established in Paris without
controversy, a canon of the church, in the chair of Notre-Dame, the
philosophical throne of France, he lectured to the best pupils of
Europe. Fulcus, in his letter to Abelard, described the geographical
extent of his influence thus:
"Rome sent her sons to be taught by you, the former teacher
of all arts confessing herself not so wise as you. No
distance, no height of mountains, no depth of valleys, no
road hard to travel or perilous with robbers, hindered
scholars from hastening to you. The English students were not
frightened by the tempestuous waves of the sea between; every
peril was despised as soon as your name was known. The remote
Britons, the Angevins, the Picts, the Gascons, the Spaniards,
the people of Normandy and Flanders, the Teutons, and the
Suevi, all about Paris and through France, near and remote,
thirsted to be taught by you, as if they could learn nowhere
else."