was there, still in his habit of a mere secular priest, there to make
sure that Heloise's impulses should not burst out again, and cast her
back into the world's sunshine. The bishop, attended by his priests,
stands at the altar: upon it lies a newly consecrated veil. The nuns,
kneeling in their accustomed places, are praying. All wait for the
votaress, but she is detained by a crowd of friends. There were many of
them there, as Abelard has told us, and they could not endure that this
girl, personally so charming, perhaps the most accomplished
intellectually of all the women of France, should consummate the
sacrifice that she had already in such large measure made. They knew her
love for the bright things of life, her beautiful zest for the joyous
and sympathetic, her eagerness in study, the grace of her strong, sweet
seriousness. Such a nature might be for a time bewildered at the loss of
the love of one of the most famous men living, yet if for a little while
they could keep her face unhidden by the veil, she might forget. So they
delay her outside the chapel, pleading with a heart that has made the
same pleas for itself before. Presently the door is pushed open and she
enters the oratory, her friends still about her. Even in the sacred
place they continue their entreaties, and Abelard's glance is anxiously
upon her; but her eyes are downcast. "How they pitied her!" he has told
us; "they kept trying to hold back her youth from the yoke of monastic
rule, as from punishment intolerable." The bishop seems half pitiful,
half impatient; the nuns look up from their praying. Has the world
renewed its hold upon her? Will she snatch herself from God? Does he no
longer attract her? At this last moment is she hesitating?
She was hesitating; the world did have a hold upon her. God? God had
never attracted her.
In all the ceremonials of the Catholic Church, there can have been none
which has so combined sacrilege with loftiness of feeling as did the
scene which followed. From the silent, even wistful hearing that she has
been giving to her friends, Heloise suddenly starts away, and, as if
waking from a reverie, she moves with dreamy gesture toward her husband.
Her lips part, and what will be her last words as a lady of the world?
Some scriptural exhortation to her friends to follow her as she follows
Christ? A cry of exultant renunciation of the wilds of life's ocean, and
of contentment at the holy calm in the bosom of the church?
The girl is weeping, and as she tries to control herself to speak, her
misery overcomes her, and she bursts into loud sobs. But it must have
been surprising to the listening ecclesiastics to hear the words which
at last got expression. It is probably the only time in the church's
history that a novice has taken her last vows with the prelude of a
quotation from a love speech in a pagan poem, directing it not to the
bleeding effigy of her present and eternal Master hanging above the
altar, but to a human lover at her side. Heloise "broke out as she could
between her tears and sobs," in a passage from one of the later books of
Lucan's _Pharsalia_: surely as she spoke the lines, her voice grew
steady, and her eyes looked bravely through the tears:
"Husband and lord, too worthy for my bed,
Can Fortune thus cast down so dear a head?
Fated to make thee wretched, why did I
Become thy wife? Accept the penalty;
I will endure it gladly."
I fancy that Abelard was quite as much impressed by the brilliant young
mind that could make so apt and scholarly a quotation from the Roman
classics, as by the heart which dared on the very margin of the altar to
fling back to the world and up to God this protestation of its
unfaltering human love, which took the vows of religion from no other
motive than to impose torture upon itself--an offering not to God, but
to Abelard.
As she spoke the verses, she hurried to the altar. _Accipe poenas, quas
sponte luam_,--her voice died away, the bishop received her, and covered
her forever with the veil.
Heloise was only eighteen.
* * * * *
The convent gates shut in all sight of her for the next ten or eleven
years. But in 1130, the nunnery over which she had become prioress was
broken up by the unfavorable decision of a suit for the land and
buildings which it occupied. This decade had brought abundant misery to
Abelard. His heresies in theology had been exposed, and he had been
compelled to burn a treasured book in which they were expounded, a
council had imprisoned him in an abbey where it was boasted that his
haughtiness was tamed by a course of vigorous whipping administered
under the abbot's supervision. There is something pitiful in the
thought of such physical and mental pride being under the control of
fanatical monks, ignorant and coarse, from whom he was glad to escape to
a desert east of Troyes, as a hermit. He had taught at intervals during
these years, and once for a season with a notable renewal of his early
success. Near Troyes, where he had built his hermit-shelter out of reeds
and stubble, in a desolate region infested by wild animals and a covert
for robbers, some vagrant student found the intellectual champion, and
reported at Paris his discovery. The news spread, and soon the desert
was populous. The students built a house for the master, apparently a
commodious one, and about it they made more temporary structures for
their own shelter. Not only the younger class of scholars besieged him
for instruction; older men, ecclesiastics who, as we are told, were wont
to grasp instead of giving, paid generously toward constructing a home
for the great philosopher. But he was world-weary, and soon retired
again to a bleak monastery on the Atlantic, in the lower part of
Brittany, where he became abbot of a set of half-barbarous monks, who
resented his austere rule and, so he tells us, tried repeatedly to
poison him because he interfered with their profligacy. While there he
had learned of Heloise's loss of her nunnery, and had established her
and her religious sisters in the buildings in Champagne that had been
standing unoccupied since he broke up that last school. "The Paraclete,"
he had called the home, as a special invocation to the Holy Spirit and
as a tribute for the temporary comfort that he received there. Possibly
he himself conducted his wife thither, but it is equally likely that he
did not see her after he forced her into the church.
For ten years he appears to have struggled on in Brittany, with no
intellectual associations, none of the notoriety with which he had been
so long pampered, in terror for his life, yet still working at his
philosophy of religion. At last he was impelled to talk of what he had
endured and was still enduring; to speak in the bitterness of his soul,
and get, perhaps, the consolation of pity. He composed a long and
immensely interesting autobiography, telling the whole story of his
youth, his later triumphs, his logical acumen, his love, his disgrace,
the injustice of his condemnation by the conservative church, the tumult
of his experiences in the lonely monastery of St. Gildas. The creditable
pages are calmly written, the shameful unflinchingly. He tells how
tremendous had been his love for Heloise, but he says nothing of loving
her still. The narrative reveals an egotist, but it reveals as certainly
one of the most striking characters of the Middle Ages.
* * * * *
We find ourselves inevitably speculating upon the life of Heloise during
the sixteen or more years whose only recorded event is her removal from
Argenteuil to the Paraclete. It might be that a reaction in her love
would follow, when the grim captivity that she had dreaded so became yet
more hateful in its realization; she might lose her old gentleness; it
might become hopeless for her to try to adjust her spirit to its new
conditions and to devote herself to even a submissive piety. From
contemporary testimony we are sure that some of these possibilities did
not come true. She won respect and even devotion as an abbess, her house
prospered financially to her husband's undisguised surprise and
admiration, her life was pure from the least fleck of reproach, or
criticism in any quarter. May we go farther, and say that her spirit did
adjust itself to its new conditions, and lose its pain in a submissive
piety? For such a result we should find many parallels in mediaeval
religion; numerous accounts not to be cavilled at as legendary prove
that in these monasteries souls which had suffered found peace. Nay,
many a nun among these most refined groups of mediaeval women, driven in
one way or another to forsake the hope of love and earthly happiness,
secured delight of heart in a sort of spiritual romance. As their
emotion grew more subtilized, as asceticism burned away material
impulse, some of the gentlest and most poetically endowed of these
religious recluses acquired a mystical compensation for their loneliest
sacrifice of life,--a divinely idealized personal love, too magical for
friendship, too impassioned and mutual for worship, where, the sexes
mysteriously spiritualized, translated womanhood should rest at last on
the breast of Christ. The final vow of religious consecration was the
nun's betrothal to the divine man; to make herself beautiful for his
bride she wasted her body by fasting and scarred it with the scourge;
the rough lath cross on the wall of her cell was his love token; love
messages came from him in her dreams; prostrated on the chapel flagging
she indited to him prayers that scarcely needed verse to become lyrics.
And when to such a mystic's contemplation the cloister sanctity seemed
too worldly, when her exhausted body found the walk from cell to chapel
too long a journey and she was compelled to stay in the coffin that for
years of nights had sweetly reminded her of the sure untwining of soul
and sense, when she could hear only faintly her sisters' thin chanting
of the hours, and felt her spirit quivering with new sensations, vague,
awed, and eager, she understood that the waiting time was over, and her
espousal at hand. Her failing eyes see white processionals that come to
lead her to the banqueting house where the banner of His love shall be
over her; the music, which the dying so often hear, for her is a
marriage melody ringing from angelic harps and dulcimers; with new-born
strength and grace, mantled in new raiment, she floats upward to her
desire. And when space has been traversed the immortal vision bursts
upon her, a great poet has put in words her last thought this side
heaven:
"He lifts me to the golden doors,
The flashes come and go;
All heaven bursts her starry floors,
And strows her light below,
And deepens on and up! the gates
Roll back, and far within
For me the Heavenly Bridegroom waits,
To make me pure of sin.
The sabbaths of Eternity,
One sabbath deep and wide,--
A light upon the shining sea,
The Bridegroom with his bride."
But for Heloise there was no such resource. It is to natures more
ethereal and constitutionally religious that such fancies and dreams
appeal. The main feature of the matured Heloise is sanity and balanced
womanhood; she was too strong and intense to be a sentimentalist. Could
the nature which had once been caught into the clouds by the whirlwind
of love, beguile itself from the memory of that storm of rapture by a
visionary tempest raised with a fan? And yet there would be some
satisfaction if we could conceive her adjusting herself to the spiritual
life with closer accord, and passing even through the gates of
superstitious hallucination from the harsh religion of her day into the
inner sanctuary whose "solemn shadow is better than the sun," finding an
outlet for her quick emotions in this personal love for her new Master.
* * * * *
Heloise had been a nun some sixteen years when some one showed her
Abelard's so-called _Historia Calamitatum_. Apparently her husband had
forbidden her to write to him; but though she had kept a long silence,
she was a lover until death. This account of Abelard's sufferings and
perils broke her constraint; she could not help writing to comfort him
and to beg for news of his safety. What other love-letters equal the
intensity, the tenderness, the womanliness of these final appeals for
the broken love? Through their nervous pliancy one may learn as nowhere
else the reality of Browning's
"Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn."
In them appears also her strength of nature; they are the love-calls of
a woman who knows that the man she continues to set far above all the
rest of humanity is wronging her. She chides him for this long and
complete neglect, but there is a marvellous sweetness in her caressing
reproaches. She tells him to remember under what peculiar bonds she
holds him,--what sacred obligation of marriage, of love, and of devotion
he owes to her; she gave her honor to please him, not herself; she
sacrificed her tender age to the harshness of a monastic life not from
piety, but only in submission to his desire. "There was a time," she
writes, "when people doubted whether in our amour I yielded to love or
to passion. But the end shows how I began; to please you, I have denied
myself all pleasures." She points out to him how differently the end
interprets his feeling for her. "It is common talk," she says, "that you
felt only gross emotions toward me, and when there was a stop to their
indulgence, your so-called love vanished. My dearest one, would that
this appeared to me only, and not to every one; would that I might be
soothed by hearing others excuse you, or that I could myself devise
excuses."
She appears to entertain no hope that he will visit her, though she
hints longingly at the possibility; but he can at least do as much for
her as he does for others under obligations so far slighter, as much as
the example of the church fathers regarding the women of their flocks
teaches him to do,--he can write and tell her how he is, he can comfort
her love: or (and she appeals to the monk who may listen, even if the
old-time lover will not) he can send spiritual admonition to uphold her
slipping soul. Her heart put at rest, she can be so much freer for the
divine service. "When you wooed me for the pleasures of earth," she
reminds him, "you sent me letter after letter; with many songs you put
your Heloise in the speech of all, so that every street and house echoed
with me. How much more ought you now to excite toward God the one whom
then you aroused to sin."
She tells him again of her complete absorption in him: "You are the only
one who can make me either sad or happy; you only can be my comforter.
The whole world knows how much I loved you," and she turns with a
half-shuddering reminiscence to the day she became a nun. "It was for
you, not for God--that sacrifice. From God I can look for no reward;
consider, then, how vain my trial, if by it I win nothing from you"; and
the woman for sixteen years a nun calls God--and remember that hers was
the God of mediaeval superstition--to witness that she would have
followed Abelard, or gone before him, if she had seen him hastening to
hell.
Her letters evidently moved the monk, for his replies were full of good
advice, and under the surface gave some indications of tender regard.
But the affection that we find is colorless and formal. No word of a
husband's gentleness, nor warmth of phrase, not a hint that he cherishes
happy memories of the old days of their union. They are the letters of
an old man, absorbed in himself, worn by the world, who has no capacity
for anything deeper than kind feeling. He calls her his sister, once
dear in the world, now dearer in Christ, begs her prayers for him living
and dead, and entreats that whenever he may die she will have his body
carried to her abbey, that the constant sight of his grave may move her
and her spiritual daughters to pray for his salvation. He gulps down the
_Lachrima Christi_ of her exquisite love as if it were the small beer of
pietistic commonplace, and then looks disappointed to find that it was
not. For he ignores the soul of her letters, and composes complacent
treatises of twelfth-century ecclesiastical discipline designed to
subject her to a mechanical and lifeless asceticism.
Heloise in answer reproaches him for his talk of death, like a brave
heart bidding him not by anticipation suffer before his time. The
knowledge of her husband's unhappiness is a renewed affliction, and she
owns that there is nothing but sorrow in her life. Like a daring
Titaness, she exclaims against God's administration of his world:
"While we lived in sin, he indulged us; when we married, he
forced us to separate. Let his other creatures rejoice and
count themselves safe from the inclement clemency of the God
whom I almost dare to call cruel to me in every way. They are
safe, for upon me he has used up all the weapons of his
wrath, so that he has none with which to rage at others; nor,
if any remained, could he find a place in me wherein to
strike them."
After sixteen years' silence, this woman has broken into speech, and
unmasked confessions of her inner spirit will no longer be restrained.
She goes on as if carried by cyclone winds; she tells her far-off lover
what few nuns under terror of eternal death can ever have brought
themselves to confide to their confessors in scarcely audible whisper.
She calls up the scenes of their union; she confesses that visions of
that life are with her constantly: she bemoans the thoughts which "haunt
me sometimes, even at the holy mass." She was no calm northern woman;
she had nothing of the temperament that Shakespeare compared to an
icicle
"That's curdied by the frost from purest snow,
And hangs on Dian's temple";
she was made to walk with love, under summer moonlight,--no sister of
Percivale, to forget thwarted desire in prayer beneath the frosty stars
of winter.
"Help me," cries this victim of a gloomy religion, "for I do not find
how by penance to appease God, whom I still accuse of the greatest
cruelty. It is easy to confess and to torture the body; it is hard to
tear the soul from its desires. My mind keeps the same wish for sin; so
sweet was our happiness that I cannot be sorry for it. Most wretched
life, if I have endured so much in vain, destined to have no recompense
hereafter."
Thus Heloise the woman and Heloise the abbess fight out the old problem
whether the training of life is by the use of its gifts, or by the
rejection of them; shall we play the full organ, or only the harsh reed
stops? The church taught her to condemn what nature taught her to
justify. The religious authority of all the dark ages confronted this
woman's instincts of life, and--to her honor--it could not quell them.
Yet conceive her wretchedness and the anguish of her mental struggle,
living as she did in the middle of Catholic mediaevalism. When, after a
scanty rest, she left her cell at midnight, this artificial conscience
attended her to the long chapel service that followed, pointed at the
austere pages over which she bent in the study when the service was
over, kept calling her hypocrite as she chided and instructed the nuns
whom she is said to have ruled so wisely, snatched food and wine from
her hungry lips, with fast, pitiless lashing wielded the whip of
penance, haunted her sleep with its stern face. Yet the pleasures of
time were still honorable to her; the world _was_ good; her love _had_
been beautiful; if her conscience prayed forgiveness for it, her heart
sang, because she had known it.
To hear this bewildered voice crying to Abelard for his prayers because
in spite of the world's praise of her virtue she thinks herself a
hypocrite,--Oh, my only one, pray for me, for I cannot be sorry that we
loved--to hear this makes one glad that the time has passed for
identifying the devil with the world's laughter, and God with its
sobbing.
She lived on as abbess of the Paraclete for twenty-one years after she
buried her husband. We cannot believe that as one set of feelings cooled
with age, her spiritual emotions grew more impulsive. In the
twenty-eight years which followed her last letter to Abelard, she no
doubt more and more mechanically went through the life of monastic duty,
her intellectual accord with the church leading her to an increasingly
calm performance of routine piety, her heart more and more silent--but
never dead. We fancy its main utterance an anticipation of that cry of
Clough's--"Submit, submit." Thus kindling with no spiritual ardor--(she
once confessed that her religious ambition did not rise so high as to
wish a crown of victory, or to have God's strength made perfect in her
weakness), she lived out her faithful and successful life as abbess of
the Paraclete, comforted--we may hope--by a continuance of the
intellectual consolations of her youth, and honored, as we know, by
church and world. If imaginary biography is ever safe we may employ it
here, and fancy that when she came to die she repeated what she had said
years before, that she should be quite content to be given just a corner
in heaven. I think as she lay waiting to be received there, she dreamed
of looking up from it, not at the ineffable glory, but at one human face
stationed highest among the masters in divine philosophy. Highest among
the masters! Less than a hundred and fifty years later, the great poem
of mediaevalism forgot to give Abelard a place even among the penitents
of purgatory, and to-day except by special students he is remembered
only as Heloise's unworthy lover.
[Decoration]
FOOTNOTES:
[13] _Petri Abaelardi Historia Calamitatum. Petri Abaelardi et Heloissae
Epistolae._
[14] _Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit_, iii., 14-34.
[Decoration]
APPENDIX.
At the suggestion of the publishers the following brief notices of some
of the works and authors mentioned in these essays are added for
convenience of reference.
AETHIOPICA, the oldest and most famous of the Greek romances. It narrates
the loves of Theagenes and Charicleia, and was written in his youth by
Heliodorus of Emesa, who flourished about the end of the fourth century,
and died as Bishop of Tricca in Thessaly.
ALEXANDER, or as he is termed in some MSS. the Wild Alexander. A
South-German poet of the thirteenth century. Of his life scarcely
anything is known.
CHRESTIEN DE TROYES, a French trouvere, who flourished in the second
half of the twelfth century. He may be regarded as the popularizer in
the French form of the cycle of tales that centre about the Round Table.
The most important of his poems is the one bearing the title, _Perceval
le Gallois_ or _Li Contes del Graal_.
COMTE DE CHAMPAGNE.--See Thibaut.
ARNAUD DANIEL, a Provencal poet, who died about 1189. He was
distinguished for the complicated character of his versification, and in
particular was the inventor of the verse called the _sestine_. He lived
for some time at the court of Richard I. of England. Dante in the
twenty-sixth canto of the _Purgatory_ puts him at the head of all the
Provencal poets. He was also highly praised by Petrarch.
DAPHNIS AND CHLOE, a Greek pastoral romance, the prototype of all the
pastoral romances which have been written in various languages. Its
composition is usually ascribed to a certain Longus, a Greek sophist,
who flourished about the beginning of the fifth century.
FREIDANK, the composer of a Middle High German didactic poem, which
belongs to the first half of the thirteenth century. The name has been
considered by some to be merely allegorical. His work, which was
entitled _Bescheidenheit_, consists of over four thousand verses and
discusses religious, political and social questions. It was an
exceedingly popular work during the Middle Ages.
GACES BRULLES, a French trouvere of the early part of the thirteenth
century. He was born in Champagne, but spent a portion of his life in
Brittany. About seventy of his _chansons_ are extant.
GOTTFRIED VON STRASSBURG, a German poet who flourished at the end of the
twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century. His great work was
the epic entitled _Tristan und Isolde_, continued by others after his
death. This took place somewhere between 1210 and 1220. Gottfried wrote
also many lyric poems.
GUILLAUME DE BALAUN (or BALAZUN), a Provencal poet of the twelfth
century. He was the lover of the lady of Joviac, in the Gevaudan.
Alienation having sprung up between them upon account of his assumed or
real indifference, his mistress would not restore him to favor unless he
should agree to extract the nail of the longest finger of his right
hand, and should come and present it to her with a poem composed
expressly for the occasion. The condition was fulfilled.
JOHANN HADLAUB, a German poet, who flourished at the end of the
thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century. His life was
spent mainly in Zurich. His compositions were principally love-songs and
popular songs dealing with the pleasures of autumn and harvest. A statue
was erected to him in Zurich in 1885.